Military Review English Edition July-August 2014 | Page 22

10 years.2 Cone states that for the last decade, science
and technology efforts have aimed to meet the Army’s
needs in Iraq and Afghanistan—mostly short-term
requirements.3 The result has been a force focused less
on combined arms and more on counterinsurgency and
wide-area security. The battle labs, justifiably, became
Iraq and Afghanistan. As we slowly lost our long-term,
over-the-horizon focus and concentrated on the close
fight, we became less well prepared to meet ongoing
national security requirements.
More recently, the Army has begun to devote significant resources to exercises and experiments designed to determine and understand over-the-horizon
requirements. The Army’s interim solution to meeting
those requirements was known as “Army 2020.” This
concept directed reshaping the current force structure
into a smaller force with balanced capabilities. This
would bring the Army back from a counterinsurgency
force to an Army capable of fighting across the range of
military operations.4

The Force 2025 Concept
The next step must lead the Army further into the
future. The Force 2025 concept answers the call from
U.S. leaders to determine way points, based on strategic landpower requirements, that will guide long-term
development and innovation.5 The Force 2025 concept describes how the Army will implement strategic
landpower, employing a force that can stay regionally
engaged to prevent and shape while maintaining the
capability to win.
Force 2025 integrates two approaches to force
design. The first is outlining future concepts and capability requirements to guide investment in science
and technology. The second is refining ways to test,
evaluate, and field new technologies in order to get
them into use rapidly. Force 2025’s goal is to integrate
developments in science and technology quickly so we
can build a more lethal and agile expeditionary force in
the midterm. This will buy us time for scientific breakthroughs in 2030 and beyond.
The starting point for the application of strategic
landpower and the design of Force 2025 was a prediction of instability in the future global security environment. We must continue trying to anticipate the
capabilities needed in a future force—even though the
Army has a poor record of predicting the next fight.
20

An inclusive picture of the future security environment
does not focus on a single threat but rather on overall
conditions. This broad depiction is guiding developers
to outline capabilities more like a multi-tool than a
single-purpose bayonet. By considering these future
requirements, as well as the capabilities our Army has
retained from conducting unified land operations,
and then taking a detailed look at our experiences and
lessons learned over the last decade, Army leaders are
building a blueprint for the future.6
This blueprint will guide the application of science
and technology in building a leaner and more expeditionary Army. The Force 2025 design will use fewer
resources to get the necessary assets to the fight and keep
them there until the work is complete. It will lead to a
force that is as lethal and protected as our current force
but more mobile and sustainable. The force will need the
network capability for operating in austere and dispersed
environments, and the right leaders and soldiers to bring
these capabilities together.
Once the Force 2025 concepts are refined and put
into a development strategy, we will need a practical
way to transition from concepts to reality. As our
forces draw down, we are losing the “battle labs” of Iraq
and Afghanistan that we have been using for over 10
years. What remains is a limited Army experimentation capability consisting of local testing and fielding
operations, center of excellence battle labs, and exercises known as network integration evaluations.7 “Force
2025 Maneuvers” is the Army’s vehicle for coordinating
the evaluation of new capabilities.8

Force 2025 Maneuvers
Force 2025 Maneuvers provides an operating plan
that directs a series of exercises and experiments
focused on validating capabilities requi