Cry of Despair in Afghanistan's Downfall

The United States Army is embarking on a significant transformation, focusing on a modernization and future vision of landpower known as Multi-Domain Operations (MDO). This strategy, outlined in the series "Compete and Win: Envisioning a Competitive Strategy for the Twenty-First Century" by the US Army War College, is geared towards large-scale combat operations nested within great power competition.

However, the Army recognizes that conventional power may not always guarantee success, especially in low-intensity conflicts. The strategic failure in Afghanistan has underscored the ineffectiveness of large-scale conventional landpower in such situations. To address this, the Army is seeking to repurpose certain conventional capabilities for soft power and irregular warfare purposes.

Adversaries, both state and non-state actors, are aware that war can be prolonged to achieve political success through the physical and moral exhaustion of opponents. Conventional power can produce local military tactical wins, but it fails to deliver broader strategic victory. Therefore, the Army is striving to create capabilities that are scalable, agile, rapidly deployable, and efficiently sustainable, capable of executing a combination of lethal and non-lethal activities.

These units will be trained and educated to recognize cultural and political implications, proficient in tactics, and enabled with advanced technology. Irregular warfare will be taught at all levels of professional military education to facilitate leaders bringing the mindset to units and preparing the Army for long-term engagement in strategic competition.

The Army should also be prepared for deep battles in the gray zone, a realm below the threshold of war, where adversaries will employ asymmetric actions to deny decisive battle. The Army should create capabilities that can campaign in the gray zone to counter proxy and cyber threats.

The Army's past failures in low-intensity conflicts like Afghanistan highlight the need for self-reflection. The Army must confront its hard history of past failures for answers to the future. The series is part of the Competition in Cyberspace Project (C2P), a joint initiative by the Army Cyber Institute and the US Army War College's website.

The project, initiated by the National Security Commission on Artificial Intelligence (NSCAI), emphasizes the risk of not winning across the entire spectrum of conflict, which could lead to a gradual exhaustion and an eventual political defeat. The Army must learn from its failures in low-intensity conflicts and develop capabilities that are just as successful in low-intensity war as extant capabilities are in high-intensity war.

In conclusion, the US Army's shift towards Multi-Domain Operations is a strategic response to the evolving nature of warfare in the 21st century. The Army must be prepared for both conventional large-scale combat and low-intensity conflict, recognizing that the latter will be a fixture of modern war.