Tactics, tech and work of close combat experts is turning warfare ‘upside down’
The Close Combat Lethality Task Force aims to give the squad leader the tools and authorities to dominate their battle-space.
Cool, right?The days are coming when a squad leader on a battlefield, far from headquarters and large supporting units, will pull out something that looks like a smartphone, open an app and push a button and something in front of his squad will explode.
That’s one piece of a large vision that is emerging from work being done by the Pentagon’s Close Combat Lethality Task Force, said one of its originators, retired Army Maj. Gen. Robert Scales.
Read the entire article at the link.“We used to believe that operational art drove tactical art,” Scales said. “We’re seeing now that it’s the opposite.”
The forum is heavy on technical advances both present and future, but the retired two-star shared more notes on how the way the United States and others fight will be “turned upside down” by a combination of technical and tactical.
“It’s not a technical problem, it’s an organizational and bureaucratic problem,” he said. “We have the tech to do what I’m describing with a quadcopter purchased at Walmart. The problem is having it integrated and immediately responsive.”
The smartphone bombing app was one of a number of examples of how small units, the size of either an Army or Marine squad, will influence operational and strategic levels of warfare from the tactical level.