The Army Leader Exchange (ALx) hosted a presentation by Lt. Gen. Michael Lundy, commanding general of the Combined Arms Center and Fort Leavenworth, at the Lewis and Clark Center, February 2. In addition to the live audience of nearly 350 Soldiers and civilians, more than 4,000 people viewed the live stream of Lundy's presentation.
FM 3-0 provides a doctrinal approach for divisions, corps, and armies to address the challenges of shaping operational environments, preventing conflict, prevailing during large-scale ground combat, and consolidating gains to follow through on tactical success.
Lundy said, "When we think about the character of war and our culture and our partner nations, we've been concentrated on the center of the conflict continuum. And that focus has evolved through our doctrine, organizational design, training, leader development, and materiel solutions." Although counterinsurgency and counterterrorism will remain a persistent threat, the character of war continues to evolve.
Ten or 15 years ago we didn't think much about peer threat after the Cold War. However, during that time period, potential adversaries have been developing their capabilities, such as electronic warfare, integrated air defense, and long range fires to counter our strengths.
Today, we have competition with peer nations to be able to maintain positions of strategic advantage; that competition creates the potential for miscalculation, according to Lundy. Because we don't have the forward presence and size we used to have, the collective security interests and multinational interoperability with our partner nations is more critical today than it has ever been.
Our Army has never been better at operating at the squad, platoon, company and even battalion level from a joint and interagency perspective. But, because the scale, tempo and level of chaos will be different in large scale combat operations, FM 3-0 is geared to echelons above brigade warfighting -- division, corps, and theater army level of warfighting. In fact, divisions and corps will be operating as formations, and not just headquarters.
Lundy said, "We made some of this shift and transition in looking at large scale combat operations at the combat training centers over the last couple years. But, we were missing updated doctrine, which is why we wrote FM 3-0." The manual describes how we compete and fight against peer threats.
FM 3-0 is organized around the four strategic and unique contributions the Army makes to the joint force:
1. Shape the security environment - always ongoing and critical because it provides access, resources, credibility, and it drives will.
2. Prevent conflict.
3. Prevail in large scale ground combat - the only way you can successfully shape the environment and prevent conflict is if you can prevail in large scale ground combat.
4. Consolidate gains - be able to make temporary gains permanent. The operational framework in FM 3-0 addresses gaps in being able to consolidate gains. To maintain operational tempo, the theater army commander must plan for consolidating gains and the forces needed to do that.
FM 3-0 is grounded on unified land operations and incorporates some components of the multi-domain concept.
To win, we have to be able to present multiple dilemmas to an adversary across all domains (land, air, maritime, space, cyber and virtual) and be able to get more positions of relative advantage faster. We must identify how to achieve combat power overmatch at the right time and place.
The Army Leader Exchange is managed by the Center for Army Leadership (CAL). CAL's mission is to conduct leadership and leader development research, studies, analysis, assessment and evaluation. It provides Army leadership and leader development doctrine, products and services along with the Army Leader Development Strategy. CAL also manages the Army Leader Development Program.
The Army Leader Exchange is a forum that conducts leadership development conversation among professionals. Unclassified presentations are streamed live on the ALx Facebook page at https://www.facebook.com/armyleaderexchange .
Related Links:
U.S. Army Combined Arms Center (CAC)
Mission Command Center of Excellence MCCoE)
The Center for Army Leadership (CAL)
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