Decisive Point Podcast – Ep 4-19 – Katie Crombe and John A. Nagl – A Call to Action: Lessons from Ukraine for the Future Force

Fifty years ago, the US Army faced a strategic inflection point after a failed counterinsurgency effort in Vietnam. In response to lessons learned from the Yom Kippur War, the United States Army Training and Doctrine Command was created to reorient thinking and doctrine around the conventional Soviet threat. Today’s Army must embrace the Russo-Ukrainian conflict as an opportunity to reorient the force into one as forward-thinking and formidable as the Army that won Operation Desert Storm. This episode suggests changes the Army should make to enable success in multidomain large-scale combat operations at today’s strategic inflection point.

Read the article here: https://press.armywarcollege.edu/parameters/vol53/iss3/10/

Read the episode transcript below.

Email usarmy.carlisle.awc.mbx.parameters@army.mil to give feedback on this podcast or the genesis article.

Keywords: strategic inflection point, Ukraine, multidomain operations (MDO), mission command, large-scale combat operations (LSCO)

Episode Transcript

Stephanie Crider (Host)

You're listening to Decisive Point.

The views and opinions expressed in this podcast are those of the authors and are not necessarily those of the Department of the Army, the US Army War College, or any other agency of the US government.

I'm talking with Lieutenant Colonel Katie Crombe and Dr. John A. Nagl today, authors of “A Call to Action: Lessons from Ukraine for the Future Force,” which was published in the autumn 2023 issue of Parameters. (https://press.armywarcollege.edu/parameters/vol53/iss3/10/)

Crombe is an Army strategist currently assigned to the joint staff. She was the chief of staff of an integrated research project commissioned by TRADOC (Training and Doctrine Command) during academic year 2023 at the US Army War College.

Nagl is a professor of war fighting studies at the US Army War College and was the director of an integrated research project commissioned by TRADOC during academic year 2023.

Welcome to Decisive Point, Katie and John.

John A. Nagl

Thanks, Stephanie, it's good to be here.

Katie Crombe

Thanks, Stephanie.

Host

Katie, please give our audience some background and tell us about the establishment of TRADOC (Training and Doctrine Command).

Katie Crombe

During this study, we went back to the last strategic inflection point that we saw the Army go through. And we recognized that as 1973, following the Yom Kippur War. And so, we began digging a little bit deeper on why that was such an important point for the US Army.

What we realized was not only the Secretary of Defense, but the Chief of Staff of the Army at the time, Creighton Abrams, had a revolutionary and evolutionary leader in a guy named General William E. DePuy, who was a combat leader in World War II but also known for being a deep and thoughtful intellectual. They knew that the Army needed to change. They knew that the Army needed to rise to the occasion of the conventional Soviet threat, and they figured that the training and education that the Army had established was not going to get us there.

So, they had General DePuy stand up something called Training and Doctrine Command in 1973. And what he did right at the beginning was do a deep study on the 1973 Yom Kippur War through a couple of lenses, both his intellectual lens—you know, he was just deeply interested in that as a curious man— and also, his combat lens, as he lost 100 percent of his battalion in World War II. That deeply affected him, and he wanted to ensure that the US Army never faced this again. So, when he established Training and Doctrine Command, his concept was really to lead training and education and do this through a series of exercises, different ways to train, and also the development of new fighting manuals that the Army would read at echelon. Everyone from the lowest in the squad up to the division commander really could understand how and why people were fighting. And so, we really used that as the genesis.

Over the years, TRADOC—as we all know it by now—I think that it's a little bit of a culture thing, but we think of it as more the doctrine side rather than the training side. We don't think of it as a revolutionary kind of think tank–type of organization. And we know now what's going on with Russia and Ukraine and what will (or could, eventually) go on with China, that we need TRADOC to go back to its revolutionary roots and really start thinking about the future. And we think that they have infrastructure and the people and the leadership to do it. It's just that they need to be the drivers of change for the future.

Host

John, what else can you tell us about the study that this article is based on?

Nagl

So, this study began when General Funk (Paul E. Funk II), then the commander of Training and Doctrine Command, asked the Army War College, about a year ago, to look at this ongoing war between the Russians and the Ukrainians, the biggest war in Europe since 1945. And General Funk believed, as I do, that the lessons available to us from this rare, horrifying event were so important that we would be sadly remiss if we didn't learn from them. And I was privileged to be able to pull together a team of what ended up being 18 students from the Army War College class of 2023 (and) half a dozen faculty members. The leader of the students was Katie, and we looked across the Army's warfighting functions. But even more broadly, we looked at medical lessons we could learn from this war. We looked at airpower and seapower lessons we could derive, and we came up with a, I think, a pretty extraordinary list of ideas that the Army, we believe, can benefit from as it prepares to deter war with China and as it prepares for whatever other fights it may have to engage in in the years and decades to come.

Host

Katie, you argue that TRADOC “can lead the Army back to the basics of education, training, and doctrine development at the pace that was founded, a pace that drove ruthless prioritization and reassessment.” Please expand on this idea.

Crombe

What we were driving toward in that is when General DePuy created TRADOC, he was really trying to bring training out of these abstract and ambiguous threats and more into a real-time training that focused on imminent threats of the day. The Ukraine War is posing such a real-life experimentation lab for us that we can put into training now as we speak. We can put these young soldiers into learning how to move combat outposts, to be more ambiguous in, you know, hiding from the enemy. And we can take so many lessons right now. We do not need to wait for 10 years to compile these lessons, you know, in the back of a library, eventually put them in a SCIF (sensitive compartmented information facility) and then transfer them to some kind of training manual, eventually put them into doctrine, and then 10 years from now, we're actually exercising or rehearsing on these lessons learned.

Our priority is to make sure that we get these out there in the unclassified environment as the fight is evolving and let units train to the standard that they will need to hold against a similar enemy, whether it be Russia or China, in the future. Another thing that he was really, really focused on, he being General DePuy, was carefully selecting and training soldiers and leaders and them doing this training together. It's not just sending someone out to a national training center one month a year and grading them on a scenario that they know is coming and that they've rehearsed all year. It's putting them in something that is changing by the minute, by the hour, by the day, and putting these leaders and soldiers together to learn to trust each other at echelon; to know that the person above them and below them is going to make the right decision, regardless of how dispersed or distributed they may be; and really build this trust that they'll need to conduct the kind of large-scale combat operation that we see in our future.

Host

TRADOC was established to transform the Army into the best-trained, -equipped, -led, and -organized land power in the world. What possibilities do you see for this organization going forward?

Nagl

I think it still has all those same responsibilities, Stephanie, and what we are doing is calling the organization back to its roots. So, in 1973, the United States Army was coming off of 20 years of not completely successful counterinsurgency campaigns in Asia, and suddenly proxy force for the United States, using American equipment to American doctrine, found itself challenged by the Soviet Union. TRADOC was created in response to that wake-up call, and we think there's a similar wake-up call today in a very similar historic situation in which the United States is again ending, at least for now, 20 years of counterinsurgency efforts in greater Asia. Thinking anew about large scale combat operations, we think TRADOC has the responsibility to learn those lessons, but we have another organization that's being created in the Army, just in the past five years or so.

General (Mark A.) Milley, when he was Chief of Staff of the Army, created something called Futures Command. I'm actually just back from a session at Futures Command. General Jim Rainey (James E. Rainey) and his team are very interested in this study that we've been doing and in what it says about what the Army should look like in 2040. We've been sharing these lessons with him, with Futures Command, and thinking hard about how the Army adapts to this new era of what appears to be persistent surveillance, Katie talked about that a little bit, and increasingly, the artificial intelligence, robotics, human-machine pairing. Those are some of the t...