ADO: The FEC for the AoT, Part Deux

Vincent J. Curtis

12 July 2020

You’ve been given your assignment.  Develop a capstone concept for “The Army of Tomorrow”, tomorrow being the year 2021.  To recap, it’s 2006.  After a dark decade of underfunding, money will start to flow but you have no idea for how long.  History cautions you to assume the government is faithless in their commitments to the CF.  A battlegroup was committed to Kandahar, and the tactical situation is hazardous.  Casualties will be taken.  The new CDS is Rick Hillier, and the Liberal government that appointed him and made the commitments has fallen.  A new Conservative minority government under Stephen Harper, with MND Gordon O’Connor (a former CF BGen), has taken over.

The current military fashions are: Fourth Generation Warfare, Three Block War, Effects Based Operations, Network Centric Warfare, Full Spectrum of Operations, and, of course, Maneuver Warfare.  You have to come up with a Future Security Environment (FSE), a Force Employment Concept (FEC), and a structure for the AoT, (Hint: It would look weird if you disregarded current theories.)

The document has come across as intellectually impressive.  It has to be general enough to be effectively non-falsifiable.  Since the work is going to be reviewed by committees and senior officers, there is no point in using your secret crystal ball that enabled Billy Mitchell to foresee in 1925 the Japanese attacking Pearl Harbor by air.  You can only extrapolate from what is known.  You can moderate trends in developments, but a dramatic acceleration has to be well justified.  You cannot, for instance, forecast the tank combat of Kursk, 1943, on the basis of the mechanization of 1928.  Your crystal ball’s insights don’t constitute justification, and could get you consigned to a loony bin.

What do you do? (Don’t check you iPhone – it isn’t invented yet!)

You start by writing your exegesis in an elevated, technical, and abstract vocabulary.  You sprinkle acronyms throughout the text.  Conceptually, the document is highly structured, engineered you might say.  You incorporate those diagrams that imply without specifying relationships among its elements. (These diagrams are both fashionable and futuristic looking, so you might as well stick with that program.).  You carefully define each term of the copious technical jargon you employ.  (Any connection between reality and abstract technical jargon is fortuitous.)  Your approach is highly ideological, and you fill up space by describing ideological processes.

You pay tribute to hoary, arcane, idiosyncratic ideas of the past, “The Five Operational Functions” (Command, Sense, Act, Shield, and Sustain), which themselves are the product of undeclared, unexamined ideological commitments.  Being so abstract, they are untouchable, and also much beloved.

For an FEC, you start with Kandahar and begin extrapolating.  The fundamental deployed formation is no longer the brigade group but the battle group, because that’s all Canada has ever committed since Germany.  The FEC style you dub “Adaptive Disperse Operations” (ADO) because Op Medusa has just happened.  The Kandahar battle group had been operating in company-sized roving patrols, but in Medusa a brigade group minus was pulled together that surprised and annihilated a Taliban brigade.  So the FEC is to operate dispersed until a concentration of force is necessary.  In ADO, you concentrate and disperse ‘adaptively,’ FSO in accordance with maneuver warfare, network-centric warfare, and effects based operations theories. ADO is FSO IAW MW, NCW, and EBO.  

Because the Leopard Is have yet to prove the value of tanks in the Afghan theatre, and the expectation is that new tanks will not be purchased for the CF, you go without tanks in your conceptual battlegroup.  Everything is wheeled.

In accordance with 4GW, the FSE enemy will be ‘tech-savvy non-state actors.’ 

Since close air support from the RCAF is unimaginable, you make no provision for ground-air cooperation, such as that managed between a rag-tag Kurdish militia and the USAF, which annihilated the ISIS Caliphate.

The purpose of this exercise is not to ridicule ADO, the AoT, or ABC.  It’s to have fun with the ideological mindset, and to demonstrate the futility of projecting far into the future.

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