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| High Mobility Artillery Rocket System (HiMARS) |
By: Jen Judson
WASHINGTON — Unlike the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, where the Army's capability dominated the enemy's, the service will be fighting in domains that are hotly contested from the start, which means it will have to refocus on capabilities that previously were on the back-burner.
Long-Range Precision Fires (LRPF) is high on the Army’s list.
The Army is emphasizing a new multi-domain battle concept, which assumes all domains are contested in a way the service hasn’t seen in a long time, the Army’s Capabilities Integration Center director, Lt. Gen. H.R. McMaster, said in a teleconference with reporters ahead of the Association of the US Army’s annual conference.
“If all domains are contested, what that means is the Army can no longer rely on other service capabilities to do things that we assumed that they would be able to do,” he said. During the peace dividend following the Cold War, the Army cut way back on certain capabilities like electronic warfare and long-range fires, assuming it could rely on another service to fill the gap, according to McMaster.
That thinking greatly reduce the Army’s capability in long-range fires capacity, he noted.
“What we are endeavoring to do is to build capabilities into the Army to allow the Army what it used to do, and always has been able to do, which is defeat enemy forces on land, secure terrain to deny its use to the enemy, protect populations, consolidate military gains, but, increasingly, to project power outward from land into ... aerospace, maritime or cyber space and across the electromagnetic spectrum,” McMaster said.
This means the Army needs cross-domain fires and artillery batteries to deliver surface-to-surface, surface-to-air and shore-to-ship capabilities, according to McMaster.
Read the full story at DefenseNews