Unified Land Operations: The Evolution of Army Doctrine for Success in the 21st Century

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] UNITED STATES MILITARY FORCES began the second decade of the 21st century decisively engaged in operations around the world, continuing a trend of prolonged military operations other than war that began in the 1990s in Somalia, Haiti, Bosnia, and Kosovo and continued during the first decade of the 21st century in Iraq and Afghanistan. The U.S. Army faces the challenge of long, repeated deployments against enemy formations that do not lend themselves to straightforward doctrinal definitions and constructs. Army doctrine has evolved to meet the challenges. Doctrine writers have struggled to use clear, concise language that accurately depicts operating concepts. A significant part of this struggle arose after the conflation of doctrinal terms and operational priorities that occurred when the Army made stability operations of equal importance with offensive and defensive operations within full spectrum operations. Despite the Army's long history of fighting small wars against irregular forces, the ascendance of stability operations in the late 1990s and early 2000s ran counter to existing Army beliefs about the appropriate roles and missions of the U.S. Army. The central idea of Army doctrine is to seize, retain, and exploit the initiative to gain and maintain a position of advantage in sustained land operations. A new operating concept, unified land operations, returns this central idea to its proper place, applicable to all Army operations. Seizing, retaining, and exploiting the initiative to gain and maintain a position of advantage provides a battlefield framework and logic that nests unified land operations within the joint operational construct of unified action and provides a structure that allows commanders to effectively and accurately describe their intent in time, space, purpose, and priority. The doctrine allows leaders to integrate diverse tactical tasks, battles, and engagements, over time, to achieve strategic objectives. (1) This article introduces the logic behind the new operating concept by presenting a short history of the evolution of Army doctrine from the advent of AirLand Battle in 1982 to the introduction of Unified Land Operations in 2011. The central idea of unified land operations is rooted in AirLand Battle doctrine and retains many of the key full spectrum operations ideas within an overarching concept that emphasizes lethal capabilities as fundamental to successful Army operations. AirLand Battle (1982-1993) The Army introduced AirLand Battle as its operating concept in 1982 partly as a reaction to the inadequacies of the Army's previous operating concept, Active Defense, which had focused on winning a defensive first battle in central Europe against numerically superior forces from the Soviet Union. (2) More offensively oriented, AirLand Battle introduced the term operational level of war to the Army lexicon and made campaign planning--the integration ofjoint forces in a series of battles and engagements to achieve a strategic purpose--a fundamental requirement. (3) When the Army published the 1986 version of FM 100-5, it preserved and strengthened AirLand Battle's central ideas--the importance of the operational level of warfare, its focus on the seizing and retaining the initiative, and its insistence on the requirement for multi-service cooperation. (4) The lead paragraphs describing AirLand Battle capture these themes explicitly: AirLand Battle doctrine describes the Army's approach to generating and applying combat power at the operational and tactical levels, securing or retaining the initiative and exercising it aggressively to accomplish the mission. The object of all operations is to impose our will upon the enemy--to achieve our purposes. To do this we must throw the enemy off balance with a powerful blow from an unexpected direction, follow up rapidly to prevent his recovery, and continue operations aggressively to achieve the higher commander's goals. …