Building the 21st-Century Heavy Division

Even the most casual student of military affairs has noticed that the US Army is in the process of changing to meet a new set of challenges. The Cold War's end, the international community's reordering, a bow wave of information-age technologies and military downsizing have provided the opportunity to relook the division as an organizational structure. We have recognized the need to move the Army from a threat-based force to a capabilitiesbased force able to dominate across the spectrum of conflict-either independently or as part of a corps-and seamlessly within a joint or combined environment. As in the past, the goal is a trained and ready force able to serve anywhere when called upon and prepared to fight and win the nation's wars. This article introduces the Army XXI Division to leaders across the government, the Department of Defense (DOD) and the private sector. It represents the hard work of many dedicated professionals over the past five years and is an important and defining product of how our Army will organize and fight as we face 21st-century challenges. This is more than a new division design, because the process is every bit as important as the product. As depicted in Figure 1, spiral development and the Force XXI process have enabled us to determine and apply equipment needs, training requirements and leader development criteria, balancing them against the need to reduce force structure while enhancing capabilities. This represents a new, holistic way of doing business. We will continue on this course as we move closer to the Army After Next (AAN). We will harness the mental agility brought on by the transition to Army XX and merge it with the physical agility we hope to gain through revolutionary developments as we move to the AAN. One might ask, Why change at all? The world has changed, and America's role in it has changed as well. The Army has been in a period of transition since 1989. The Soviet Union's decline as a superpower rival, combined with reductions across the military services and a ground swell of technologies unleashed by the information age have resuited in the Army's restructuring. We are moving from a Cold War, threatbased Army of Excellence (AOE) to a capabilities-based force able to dominate throughout the spectrum of conflict and stability and support operations. The digitized Army XX Division is the backbone of the Army's capabilities-based force. The next version of US Army Field Manual (FM) 100-5, Operations, will codify these capabilities and serve as a guidepost for executing digitized full-dimensional operations by Army XX units. The superior mental agility of Army XXI forces, enhanced by revolutionary developments leading to superior physical agility, will lead us to full spectrum dominance in the AAN. The Division's Evolution In the lexicon of modem military doctrine, the division is the base organization for the conduct of sustained, independent land combat operations. Military history has seen an evolution of military formations capable of conducting such operations for more than 2,000 years. Probably the first real division -like organization on the battlefield was the Roman legion-a 6,000-man organization of combined arms, articulated cohorts and centuries capable of independent operations. Through history, military formations have combined arms, reorganized headquarters, revolutionized tactics and fielded units to operate independently and with others in varied terrain against numerous enemies. Armies, corps, divisions and regiments have served nations as their independent operators on all kinds of battlefields. For most of US military history, the Army's core organization was the regiment-several battalions of the same type, occasionally reinforced with other arms, and tasked to perform missions on the American frontier across the spectrum of conflict. The United States adopted the modem division with the passage of the National Defense Act of June 1916. …