Battlefield 2030: Army Training Factoring In New Realities.

• Author: Magnuson, Stew

With an updated field manual, an influx of new weapon systems, plus tactics used in Ukraine changing the nature of warfare, Army training is growing more complicated.

The service refined its move toward multi-domain operations and large-scale combat with the release of "Field Manual 3.0 Operations" during the biggest Army conference of the year in Washington, D.C. in October.

It called for multi-domain operations against peer competitors--who can challenge the service in land, sea, air, cyberspace and the electronic spectrum--to be the centerpiece of its warfighting concept through 2030.

Army Chief of Staff Gen. James McConville said in a keynote speech at the conference that the doctrine "recognizes that the Army will be tested in every domain--in air, land, sea, space and cyber--and that the future Army must prepare to fight in multiple domains at once."

Brig. Gen. Thomas Feltey, commandant of the Army Armor School at the Army Maneuver Center of Excellence, said, "There is going to be a cascading effect across all of the institutions as we now have to begin operationalizing this new doctrine."

For those who have been listening to Army leaders over the past five years, the new doctrine should come as no surprise.

"You have an ever-changing operational environment," Feltey said during a panel at the Association of the United States Army's annual conference. "Everyone can see it. If you're reading the news, you see things are changing. Some of the character of war is a little different now than it was, and it's continuing to change."

In addition, with Army Futures Command's push to modernize the service's technology, new weapon systems will be flooding into the forces.

The command has vowed to field 23 new weapon systems by fiscal year 2024.

Items such as the Next Generation Squad Weapon are already in the pipeline and will require updated training, Feltey noted.

Brig. Gen. Curtis Taylor, commanding general of the National Training Center at Fort Irwin, California, said, "We've got to think about how the NTC is changing now in light of the evolving character of war that we're seeing and that are in Ukraine and in Nogorno-Karabakh," he added.

Azerbaijan and Armenia fought over Nogorno-Karabakh in September 2020, and clashes broke out again in September of this year.

The Army's Combined Arms Center at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, is the organization in the service responsible for gathering "lessons learned" from the war in Ukraine and...