SCHOFIELD BARRACKS, Hawaii—Inside a mud-splattered tent, the Army’s vice chief and the commander of the 25th Infantry Division watched on two giant TV screens as the division attempted to repel an enemy attack from the sea. Just outside, the service’s first launched-effects battery used an unmanned reconnaissance glider that arrived about a month before to provide a picture of the simulated assault, while the division’s new HIMARS rocket launchers shot down “enemy” drones.
“We have old stuff, we have new stuff, and we’re fighting in a new way,” said Col. Dan Von Benken, the division’s artillery commander.
It was the last day of a two-week Joint Pacific Multinational Readiness Center exercise, and this constructed amphibious battle was the end of a scenario in which the soldiers worked with partner forces to defend an archipelago and take back islands seized by the enemy.
The exercise involved 75 experiments and incorporated every U.S. service branch plus seven partner nations. It kicked off with soldiers from the 11th Airborne Division’s 2nd Infantry Brigade Combat Team flying from Alaska to the island of Hawaii, where they parachuted into a training area with close-air support from the Hawaii Air National Guard. It included a nighttime long-range maritime air assault mission and another mission that flew four HIMARS aboard C-17s from Hawaii to Wake Island, unloaded them for a simulated raid, and then flew them back again.
“We basically create a world in which we’re dealing with not just the land forces that have arrived, but their naval forces that can help support them, and then other long-range fires that they have. Because that’s the reality that we live in, is that the threats that land forces will deal with, just like our naval and our air, are truly multi-domain,” Maj. Gen. Jay Bartholomees, commander of 25th ID, told reporters.
The experimentation is part of the Army’s “transformation in contact” initiative, a rapid modernization effort that started last year with three brigades and has now spread throughout the force. One of those original three brigades is part of the 25th Infantry Division, and after the initial push, the service expanded the effort to every brigade in the division. At the end of the exercise, 25th ID Command Sgt. Maj. Shuan Curry said, “the entire division will have restructured itself.”
Mingus traveled here to see how the exercise was going, to check in on several of the experiments, and to get feedback from soldiers at all ranks about what is working—and what isn’t.
Hours before they watched the simulated enemy attack, Mingus and Bartholomees climbed into a Black Hawk helicopter at Fort Shafter, flying over mountains and pineapple fields to reach the Kahuku training area. There, standing next to a new infantry squad vehicle draped in camouflage netting, a captain in wrap-around sunglasses and a fighting load carrier reported that the vehicle was able to produce enough power to charge multiple laptops, drones, Starlink receivers, and more for two weeks without “any outside sustainment.”
“We’ve been completely self-reliant,” said Capt. Nathan Ley.
Not everything went so smoothly. The effects platoon’s gun trucks have been hard to conceal. New tech has sped up the rate of transmissions about targeting, but a “reluctance to assume risk on fires” has slowed down approval to around an hour in some cases. It’s “a classic example of where we introduced tech, but we didn’t go back and update the process,” Mingus said.
But the point of trying all these new things is to find those problems, so they can be fixed within weeks, instead of years.
On a different training range, the division’s artillery was testing a lot of new things at once—including loitering munitions and the HIMARS. It’s helped the unit shoot farther, sense farther, and strike farther, Von Benken said. And the beauty of the steep learning curve is that “I’m able to fail fast.”
“If you rewind the tape to six months ago, and you look at doctrine, my ability to strike wasn’t matching up with what I was being asked to do,” he said. Now, “I think we’re really hitting our stride in terms of how to fight as a division.”
The days of using only “traditional tubed artillery” in a fight are likely over, Mingus told Defense One. “We don’t know what the exact numbers are, but we know that it’s going to have rockets, traditional artillery, and then…an organization that employs a series of different special effects—launched effects. Loitering munitions, one-way attack drones, spy drones, spoof drones, ones that can do electronic warfare.”
Testing and experimenting with these different systems at JPMRC helps get the Army closer to knowing what the right combination of all of those is, he said.
“We see in Ukraine every day…they’re still pumping four to five thousand rounds of 155 [millimeter artillery shells], and 130 to 150,000 rounds a month. So traditional artillery still has a role, but how much?” Mingus said.
Long-range fires are becoming ever-more important, “especially here in the Indo-Pacific given the ranges,” he added.
While drones and artillery tend to get the headlines, Mingus is also deeply interested in another less-flashy topic: next-generation command and control. The service has been working on it for a few years, he said, but previously had only introduced it during Project Convergence. This year, the Army decided to introduce it in two full infantry divisions: the 25th and the 4th.
“It’s very exciting, because the chief [of staff of the Army, Gen. Randy George] and I both have lived with a network in the Army that hasn’t worked very well.…And we have an opportunity here to really get it right.”
With the old network, he said, “when you would cross the line of departure and go on a mission, everybody would have great shared understanding, but the minute that you move out, that shared understanding starts to come down. Much of that is…because our ability to stay connected has been not where it probably should be.…If we can think faster, shoot faster, trust each other, that we’re doing the right thing, maintain that broad shared understanding across an organization, we will be faster than our adversaries.”
Incorporating so many new technologies is not without its own set of challenges. Speaking to Mingus next to an “ISV-heavy” full of communications systems, 3rd Mobile Brigade commander Col. Adisa King described the “cognitive overload” he’s witnessed.
Though his brigade has a variety of new tech, including electronic-warfare packs, “what I realized real quick, when all the power goes out, I have to reach into here,” he said, reaching into a pocket to pull out a map, “and that’s where I find out what was real.”
Right now, Mingus said, everything is new. But once it all starts to come together, the skills senior leaders have grown up with will start to erode.
“So how do you keep everybody masters of the science, but enabled by technology? I don’t have the answer, but you guys are going to have to figure that out.”
During his day-long tour of the island, Mingus watched a laser kill a drone, visited Indo-Pacific Command’s Forge facility, and spoke to dozens of soldiers about how the exercise and the experiments were going. Shortly before leaving for a meeting of Five Eyes army vice chiefs in Australia, he told Defense One that the 25th ID is unique “because it lives in the very environment that we’re trying to optimize for,” and also has an “amazing innovation culture.”
Transformation in Contact has already radically changed the Army, he said, and has gone from a 1.0 and 2.0 model to “continuous transformation.”
“As we continue to make our Army more modern, more lethal, more agile… having a much faster ability to respond to whatever the nation needs it to do. After 15, 18 years of war, fighting a war that was for all the right reasons, and we had to transform to be able to deal with that environment, we’ve got to unravel a lot of that. And so this journey is long from over. It will never end.”
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