Sun, 07/23/2023 - 7:49pm
Redeveloping Regimental Combat Teams (RCTs) for Large-Scale and Mega-City Combat Operations
By Justin Baumann
Introduction
“As USARPAC [United States Army Pacific] reminds us frequently, is that wars may start at sea, but they finish on the land” [1] – Brigadier General Pat Ellis
In his commencement address to West Point graduates in 2022, describing the battlefield of tomorrow, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Army General Mark Milley stated, “Additionally, the battlefield will be highly complex and almost certainly decisive in urban areas, against elusive ambiguous enemies that combine terrorism and warfare alongside conventional capabilities, all embedded within large civilian populations. In this world, your world, you’re going to have to optimize yourselves for urban combat, not rural combat. That has huge implications for intelligence collection, vehicles, weapons design, development, logistics, commo, and all the other aspects of our profession. The battlefield is going to be non-linear, compartmented, and units are going to have non-contiguous battle space, with significant geographical separation between friendly forces … This type of battlefield is going to place a very high premium on independent, relatively small formations that are highly lethal and linked to very long-range precision fires.” [2]
The main thesis of this article is that the US Army’s force development doctrine for large-scale combat operations reached its culmination near the end of the Korean War and that the lessons learned from that conflict can significantly benefit Army force design into the future. [3] The leaders and Army at that time, especially General Ridgway, were personally familiar with large-scale combat operations across the European and Pacific theatres of WWII, [4] and they incorporated the difficult lessons learned into their force designs when fighting in Korea to great effect, reversing early defeats and turning the Army into a more efficient fighting force before the armistice was signed in 1953. [5] [6]
After Korea, Army doctrine distracted itself by experimenting with the Pentomic Division based on strategic nuclear developments, pivoting to the Vietnam War, adjusting to the Cold War, and finally, designing AirLand Battle with the Big Five as a framework, ending with the Counter Insurgency (COIN) failures in the Middle East. [7] This article seeks to incorporate the knowledge and lessons about large-scale combat operations from these previous doctrine periods into the RCT force design concept presented here, in contrast to the division-centric approach currently favored by the Army, [8] with the intention of creating a more effective and lethal multi-domain land Army spearheading the joint force prepared for positional, maneuver, proxy, and attritional warfare. [9]
https://smallwarsjournal.com/jrnl/art/redeveloping-regimental-combat-teams-rcts-large-scale-and-mega-city-combat-operations
