ASSOCIATION OF THE UNITED STATES ARMY

There is an African proverb that states, “It takes a village ...” This maxim also holds true for the holistic approach required for soldiers who are ready, lethal and able to meet the Army’s needs.

Initiatives from the Army’s SHARP, Ready and Resilient Directorate; the U.S. Army Training and Doctrine Command’s Holistic Health and Fitness Program; and the U.S. Army Futures Command’s Soldier Lethality Cross-Functional Team recognize the importance of a holistic approach to soldier lethality. The emphasis is on building the physical supremacy, cognitive dominance and emotional resilience required...

There is an African proverb that states, “It takes a village ...” This maxim also holds true for the holistic approach required for soldiers who are ready, lethal and able to meet the Army’s needs.

Initiatives from the Army’s SHARP, Ready and Resilient Directorate; the U.S. Army Training and Doctrine Command’s Holistic Health and Fitness Program; and the U.S. Army Futures Command’s Soldier Lethality Cross-Functional Team recognize the importance of a holistic approach to soldier lethality. The emphasis is on building the physical supremacy, cognitive dominance and emotional resilience required...

Hard Climb for Original Mountain Soldiers

The Winter Army: The World War II Odyssey of the 10th Mountain Division, America’s Elite Alpine Warriors. Maurice Isserman. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. 336 pages. $28

By Lt. Gen. Walter Piatt

In The Winter Army: The World War II Odyssey of the 10th Mountain Division, America’s Elite Alpine Warriors, author Maurice Isserman masterfully lets us listen in as the original mountain soldiers tell their stories of acting as America’s elite alpine troops. His well-researched reliance on firsthand accounts adds a much-needed new chapter to the rich history of the...

A significant aspect of the enduring trust the American people have in their military is an expectation of mission accomplishment while “doing the right thing”—acting ethically. This expectation is not new. While there have been challenges throughout history—My Lai in Vietnam and Abu Ghraib in Iraq most notably—for the most part, our military continues to be one of the most trusted and ethical organizations in the world.

The Army accomplishes this by being a values-based organization, with a strong professional ethic, a robust recruiting and education system, and strong ethical leadership...

The Army’s new leaders feel momentum is on their side as America’s foundational force shifts from 18 years of counterinsurgency operations to preparing to face large and growing global threats by creating revolutionary new capabilities.

Secretary of the Army Ryan McCarthy and Chief of Staff Gen. James McConville also expressed a sense of urgency as they guide a transformational change across the force. They see a narrow window to create a new Army intended to leave no doubt that the U.S. Army is the world’s most capable and powerful land force and set the next generation of soldiers on a solid...

Two generations ago, as the Vietnam War drew to a close, the U.S. Army faced daunting challenges. Although it had painfully learned the hard lessons of counterinsurgency, those lessons came too late to maintain the support of the American public for a long-term commitment to secure South Vietnam against continuing North Vietnamese aggression. The Army’s modernization programs had been sacrificed to the demands of the long war in Vietnam, and the Army faced the additional challenge of moving away from the draft to an all-volunteer force.

The Army met the challenge. An important step was the...

Just months into his appointment as the 40th Army chief of staff, Gen. James McConville, right, has fully embraced people not just as the “top priority” military leaders often espouse, but as a valuable resource to be carefully nurtured.

The 60-year-old master aviator who served as deputy chief of staff for personnel and as vice chief has unveiled “our very first Army People Strategy,” fully embraced the deliberative talent management concept of not treating soldiers as replaceable cogs in the machine but as individuals, and unveiled “quality of service” initiatives aimed at helping soldiers...

Robots and autonomous systems. Artificial intelligence and machine learning. Quantum computing and big data.

We treat these as inevitable features of the modern battlefield, and for good reason. The rapid pace of technological development and advances in an array of technologies are changing the way we live and work, and it would be foolish to expect the way we fight will not also be affected. The nature of war will remain the same: Armed actors will employ military force in pursuit of political objectives and to force their enemies to fulfill their wills. But the character of warfare, already...

In the complex world of government contracting, it is important to ensure that all processes and practices meet standards for transparency and appropriate use of resources and funds. One of the largest projects in modern history for the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers is utilizing a unique process to not only ensure compliance and transparency, but also to reduce the time required for completion of a national priority.

Task Force Barrier is utilizing a unique contracting solution to meet an aggressive timeline to upgrade the U.S. border barrier system. Beginning this past April, the Corps directed...

How Army Doctrine Got Us Here From There

Military Realism: The Logic and Limits of Force and Innovation in the US Army. Peter Campbell. University of Missouri Press. 390 pages. $50

By Lt. Col. Jessica Grassetti

In Military Realism: The Logic and Limits of Force and Innovation in the US Army, Peter Campbell introduces a theory that tells the story of the Army’s evolution through its doctrine from 1960 to 2008. His multidisciplinary academic background allows for a thorough and thought-provoking analysis of key historical time periods and key leaders that helped mold today’s Army.

Although Army...

V for Victory. Seventy-five years ago, at the height of World War II, Americans knew the gesture well. Hold up two fingers, in the style of pugnacious British Prime Minister Winston Churchill. Send it by Morse code—dot-dot-dot-dash—which just happens to match the stirring first notes of Beethoven’s famous Fifth Symphony. Chalk a big bold V on a wall, as resistance fighters did in German-occupied France. Stark Vs graced wartime posters, movie newsreels and patriotic advertisements. That V meant one thing to Americans: total victory over Fascist Italy, Imperial Japan and Nazi Germany.

Those...

The interwar years between the Great War and World War II were a precarious period when industrialized military powers struggled to innovate with doctrine and tactics even as they incorporated emerging technologies.

Though Britain, France, Italy and the U.S. claimed victory in the most costly confrontation in European history, each power failed to fully leverage the multiplicity of combined arms and joint concepts initiated—yet never fully matured—between 1914 and 1918. The failure to realize this latent potential would exact a heavy price just two decades later when the stagnant democracies...

The interwar years between the Great War and World War II were a precarious period when industrialized military powers struggled to innovate with doctrine and tactics even as they incorporated emerging technologies.

Though Britain, France, Italy and the U.S. claimed victory in the most costly confrontation in European history, each power failed to fully leverage the multiplicity of combined arms and joint concepts initiated—yet never fully matured—between 1914 and 1918. The failure to realize this latent potential would exact a heavy price just two decades later when the stagnant democracies...

“What are we waiting for?” a Ranger student stutters to his squad leader.

“The RTO is still getting comms. We’ll push forward in just a second,” the squad leader responds. Their radio telephone operator has been trying to gain communication, or comms, with higher headquarters for less than three minutes. Each minute feels more agonizing than the next, however, to the cold and weary Ranger students at the river crossing site in the dark swamp.

The students had walked several hundred meters through waist-deep water before hitting their objective on Whitmier Island in the middle of the swamp on...

U.S. Army Col. Daniel Rice, the command inspector general of the Georgia National Guard, summed up his team’s success in assisting the former Soviet republic of Georgia in building its own inspector general capabilities.

“This is how we train an IG.”

The Georgia Guard’s relationship with the Georgian Ministry of  Defense dates to the 1990s, but progress developing a viable inspector general system has come in the past several years, starting with Rice’s predecessor.

Upon assuming the state IG position in July 2017, “I immediately recognized a need for [the Georgian Ministry of Defense] to see a...