During the late 1970s, Soviet military leaders began worrying that an impending "military-technical revolution" would render obsolete their strategy of massive tank assault on Western Europe. The Cold War ended at least a decade before the transformation of war that Soviet marshals viewed with such apprehension could be realized, but the underlying trends in military capabilities that they partially foresaw have not ceased. Within two-to-three decades, major leaps in awareness and connectivity, range and endurance, stealth and speed, precision and miniaturization, and automation and simulation will transform not only the conduct of war on land, but war in several other dimensions as well. And while armored forces are unlikely to have disappeared completely from ground force orders of battle by 2020, the era of tank primacy and mass armies will be over.

This impending revolution in warfare will have a major impact on all of the core strategic missions to which land power contributes: deterrence, presence, power projection, decisive battle, land control and homeland defense. Its reach, in contrast with earlier revolutions in war, will extend well beyond state-on-state conflict. And, as has often been the case during periods of revolutionary change, much of the impending transformation of land warfare will stem from developments outside land power’s traditional domain.

Emerging Challenges and Capabilities
Military revolutions are often spawned by larger scientific, economic, and social transformations, and the emerging revolution in land warfare is no exception. A much-commented-upon information revolution is transforming the sources of both wealth and power, but its impact on land forces is only in its early stages. Over the next couple of decades, the ability of military organizations to acquire, process, and move information with great precision over great distances will increase exponentially. Space-based radar constellations and high-altitude, long-endurance unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) will permit tracking of ground moving targets over wide areas. "Micro" UAVs that a soldier can carry in his rucksack, foliage penetrating sensors and "see-through-wall" radars will make the local ground battlespace even more transparent. Armies that lack the full complement of twenty-first century intelligence, reconnaissance and surveillance capabilities will still benefit enormously from the proliferation of high-fidelity, commercial imaging and telecommunications networks.

The information revolution’s impact on land warfare is by no means limited just to the intelligence domain. Space-based precision navigation has become ubiquitous. Advances in communications are spawning network forms of organization. And in a world where being seen will translate quickly into being killed, stealth and other forms of information protection are likely to become increasingly desirable attributes for future ground combat forces.

Once they are deployed in sufficient numbers, the combination of "smart" long-range ballistic and cruise missiles and signature reduction technologies will dramatically increase the reach and tempo of military operations. Initially, missile-based, long-range precision strike capabilities will threaten only large, fixed facilities, such as ports, airfields, headquarters and theater logistics bases, and then, probably only when mated with weapons of mass destruction. As their numbers rise and capabilities improve, however, these systems will not only be able to hold at risk these kinds of fixed facilities with conventional warheads, but will also be increasingly capable of attacking mobile targets (such as armored columns) with an effectiveness approaching that of manned aircraft. The advent of stealthy, loitering, precision-guided munition-capable, uninhabited combat air vehicles (UCAVs) sometime around 2010 will pose additional risks, as well as benefits, for ground combat formations. Perhaps ballistic and cruise missile defenses and counter-stealth systems will prove able to defend against both saturation and surprise attacks, thus forestalling the need for current power projection forces to change, but at present such "silver bullet" solutions do not appear to be in the offing. "Anti-access," or theater denial, strategies, therefore, will likely become the fundamental operational challenge for future power projection forces. If this does in fact become the case, current forms of power projection (e.g., those based on theater-based fighter aircraft and heavy armored forces) could see their effectiveness depreciate very rapidly.

Projecting land power into an anti-access environment will require new capabilities for the delivery, employment and sustainment of ground forces, including new capabilities for conducting operations in urban areas. Ground forces will likely be compelled to become much smaller and stealthier, with much of their combat power "exported" offshore. Such forces will need to enter a theater of operations clandestinely, most likely through some form of stealthy, extended-range airlift or undersea delivery, and will likely be sustained in a similar manner.

Future power projection operations will likely place a premium on speed. Would-be regional hegemons, for example, might employ a new "blitzkrieg" of preemptive, long-range, precision strike, followed by rapid air assault, to conquer their neighbors. Those who would rally to the defense of the targeted state might counter with extended-range, rapid halt capabilities of the own.

In contrast with their Cold War-era forebears, future ground forces will likely fight on a non-linear battlefield (e.g., from non-contiguous positions), with substantially reduced force-to-space ratios. Because of their vulnerability to long-range fires, future ground forces will likely adopt a tactical cycle of hiding, moving, and fighting which minimizes the time that they are exposed. This difficulty of protecting deployed ground forces from attack by long-range strike systems will likely make the occupation of territory substantially more problematic.

Important advances in ground force capabilities over the next couple of decades are likely to be found in the areas hybrid-electric power and electromagnetic gun technology (making possible light and lethal advanced combat vehicles that require much reduced logistical tails), information protection technologies (both false image generation and the application of stealth to ground force insertion and close combat systems), and robotics. The robotics field appears finally to be reaching -- after decades of over-promising – a level of technological maturity that will allow automation to play a far greater role in both the economy and in military affairs. Applications of robotics to land warfare in the next couple of decades could range from:

• Uninhabited combat air vehicles employed in a close air support role;

• Remotely fired, long-range, precision missiles -- "missiles in a box" – that could provide fires overwide areas;

• Uninhabited, ground combat vehicles that operate in concert with manned systems;

• Exoskeletal mobility and protection systems that could give individual soldiers operational range and endurance while also allowing them to carry a larger suite of weapons, sensors,

• communications and information-protection systems; and

• Microrobot and micro unmanned aerial vehicles, the size of birds and insects and smaller, for reconnaissance and warning and, perhaps, the delivery of combat power.

Non-state actors, meanwhile, are likely to become far more formidable. They could see their capabilities bolstered, for example, by increased access to commercial information networks; short-range, stand-off precision strike systems (e.g., precision mortars and man-portable, surface-to-air missiles); night vision devices; micro-robot systems; and computer network attack tools. Their mass destruction capability could be bolstered further by "designer" biological agents that might differentiate among genetic groups and be delivered by micro air vehicles. Such developments would pose significant challenges not only or future foreign stability operations, but for homeland defense as well. Future land forces are thus likely to find themselves in both more demanding "high-end" as well as "low-end" warfare environments.

Future Force Structures and the Atlantic Alliance
What does all this tell us about what armies might actually look like in the decades ahead? Periods of transformational change, after all, produce winners and losers, as branches struggle for primacy within combined arms services. Rising arms would appear to be aviation, missile artillery, infantry, and special operations. New branches could emerge as well, for centralized management of information warriors and robotics specialists, for example. Arms that will likely decline in value in the next two decades – even though they could paradoxically witness substantial improvement in terms of their own capabilities -- are armor and cannon artillery. The shift away from conscript armies and toward professional ones, moreover, will likely only accelerate in coming decades.

There are also several reasons, however, why armies may not look so different after all by 2020. First, the very different kinds of land forces that will likely be required for power projection in an anti-access environment could number as few as 25,000, with perhaps double or triple that number required for readiness purposes. But, while high-end power projection may become far more capital-intensive in the future, lower-end operations, such as foreign stability operations and homeland defense, are likely to remain labor-intensive. Thus, the "low-end" of a future land force could be many times the size, in terms of manpower, of the high-end, a division of labor that could pose significant cultural and institutional challenges for future force managers.

Second, traditional forces will still be quite useful for land warfare scenarios that do not involve formidable anti-access threats, or for those in which intervention by an outside power with new power projection capabilities is not a serious consideration. Third, even in the case where would-be aggressor states pursue some of the new blitzkrieg capabilities of long-range, preemptive, precision strike, followed by rapid air assault, they will still likely hang on to their armored forces as a praetorian guard to maintain their regime’s hold on political power. Fourth, the strategic purposes that land forces serve will likely vary considerably in the decades ahead. In Europe, for example, the principal challenge may be homeland defense. In Asia, power projection may be far more salient.

We are thus likely to see greater asymmetry in the size and composition of land forces in the coming decades than we have in centuries, which will pose a number of problems for coalition operations. During the Cold War, and indeed during the prior two centuries, land power was both symmetrical and cumulative, making alliances not only desirable but essential. These conditions, at least from a land power perspective, are likely to obtain much less often in the future.

Land forces will still combine well for future stability operations, such as those currently underway in the former Yugoslavia, although the increased risk that may be present in such operations may cause more would-be partners to eschew participation in the first place. At the high-end of land combat, however, coalition operations could witness some of the same divisions of labor that could exist between the high-and low-end components of a future, full-spectrum land power. Nations with shared geostrategic interests and similar high-end force postures could, of course, combine their forces in any number of ways, and the substantially reduced quantity of ground forces that will likely be required in future power projection contingencies may make the political decision to commit such forces easier. But it is just as likely that other members of a coalition might restrict their role in distant and dangerous contingencies to a special niche capability, such as providing intelligence and communications, air or sea lift or biological warfare defense. Based on other asymmetries in capabilities, there might also be a "high-low" split, wherein some coalition members provide the early entry, high-end force, and others contribute the "mop-up" force. As was the case during NATO’s first fifty years, it is the politics of coalition warfare that will determine how cumulative future land power will be.

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