Modern War Institute – The commanding general of US Army Japan recently persuasively argued that as part of the joint force’s “contact layer” on the frontier of the Pacific in the first island chain, Japan is the ideal location to station a US Army multidomain task force.

War Zone – The U.S. Army has an ambitious scheme for a new surveillance aircraft to pick out ground targets at extended ranges.

War on the Rocks – When people look at maps of the Indo-Pacific region, often they see a lot of blue and very little green. They see the massive Pacific Ocean with tiny islands speckled throughout. Closer to the Asian continent, they see archipelagos and island chains with large seas and bays with strategic straits cutting throughout. When national security professionals view the region in this way, they tend to discount landpower in favor of air and sea. While those domains are central to Indo-Pacific security, we see the region through a different lens.

1945 – James Holmes writes that a couple of weeks back the U.S. Army released the latest in the family of strategy documents to issue forth from the armed services, alongside such directives as the U.S. Marines’ Tentative Manual for Expeditionary Advanced Base Operations and the sea services’ Triservice Maritime Strategy. Titled Army Multi-Domain Transformation, this “Chief of Staff Paper” from General James McConville makes it official: the army is back in the sea-power business.

Naval News – Two U.S. Army M142 6×6 High Mobility Artillery Rocket Systems (HIMARS) flew from Ramstein Air Force Base, Germany, on Thursday, November 19, 2020, aboard two U.S. Air Force Special Operations Forces (SOF) Commando II MC-130Js, the stretched version of the venerable C-130, and the HIMARS fired their rockets off the coast of the Black Sea that same day. 

Breaking Defense – Instead of picking a single missile to be its thousand-mile Mid-Range Capability, the Army has chosen to mix two very different Navy weapons together in its prototype MRC unit: the new, supersonic, high-altitude SM-6 and the venerable, subsonic, low-flying Tomahawk.

Naval News – The concept of 155mm tracked Self-Propelled Howitzers (SPHs) acting as mobile coastal artillery isn’t particularly new; however, the reality of implementing this concept recently got much better with new advances in GPS precision-guided rocket-assisted projectiles and Hypervelocity shell technology.

– USNI News – The Army is developing long-range hypersonic and intermediate-range anti-ship weapons as key components of its emerging strategy in the Western Pacific.

– War Zone – The operation saw Air Force C-17s laden with airborne troops fly thousands of miles across the Pacific to raid Andersen AFB.

– New York Times Magazine – C.J. Chivers writes that the Pentagon’s failed campaigns in Iraq and Afghanistan left a generation of soldiers with little to fight for but one another.

– USNI Proceedings – A work of fiction by August Cole on future armored combat.

– Breaking Defense – Russian drones blind US surveillance and Russian malware paralyzes US tanks so Russian robots can blow them up. That’s the lovingly illustrated scenario in a comic book about future warfare published by the Army Cyber Institute at West Point. But is it plausible? Quite possibly, several experts told us — but there are actually worse things the Russians could do to us.

– Breaking Defense – New threats from Russia and China mean the Army must take on new missions — but it’s got almost no new money so the Army is looking at ways to modify existing systems to do some radically new things. So imagine howitzers firing precision-guided cannon shells to shoot cruise missiles out of the sky or to sink ships on the South China Sea.

– New Yorker – Chris Kyle, a decorated sniper, tried to help a troubled veteran. The result was tragic. Another look at the long shadow of post-traumatic stress disorder.

– Wall Street Journal – Many troops have lost a close friend in combat. Travis Williams lost them all. Marine Lance Cpl. Williams is the sole survivor of his 12-man squad. His comrades were wiped out by a roadside bomb in Iraq, leaving him physically unharmed but with psychological wounds that remain unhealed seven years later…Cases like that of Lance Cpl. Williams might constitute a different kind of mental injury from war, some clinicians are concluding, one that falls into less-understood categories of “traumatic loss” and “moral injury.”

– Wall Street Journal – Unconventional wars are our most pressing national security concern. They’re also the most ancient form of war in the world. Max Boot on the lessons of insurgency we seem unable to learn.

– The Atlantic – In the camouflage industry, deception is an artful science. Got an army you need to hide? With more than a million soldiers in a dozen countries wearing his camouflage patterns, Guy Cramer is now hoping to change how the Pentagon dresses. Inside the evolving science of concealment.

– New York Times Magazine – The case against American soldiers accused of murdering Afghan civilians turns on the idea of a rogue unit. But what if the killings are a symptom of a deeper problem?

– Esquire – It is perhaps the most potent question to echo from the cold war: Who lost Vietnam? Well, there were certainly many factors, but an important new book forces us to consider this: For the first time in human history, a poorly trained peasant army humbled a great power with the gun its fighters carried in their hands. This is the story of that gun, and of the scandalous way that Washington responded to it. An exclusive adaptation from CJ Chiver’s new book on the AK-47.

– Foreign Policy – C.J. Chivers talks with Foreign Policy about the Kalashnikov, the world’s real weapon of mass destruction.

Washington Post – Military reckons with the mental wounds of war

Senior commanders have reached a turning point. After nine years of war in Afghanistan and Iraq, they are beginning to recognize age-old legacies of the battlefield – once known as shellshock or battle fatigue – as combat wounds, not signs of weakness.

US Naval Institute Proceedings – Getting Inside their Heads

Mounting psychological and behavioral problems are a growing concern for the military as the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq enter their ninth year.