The U.S. Army must change how it thinks about its military installations.
Installations are not sanctuaries; they are vulnerable soft-targets for a grow-
ing host of sophisticated threats seeking to degrade U.S. Army combat ca-
pabilities long before they deploy. Now is the time to act and update U.S.
Army installations or risk stiing current modernization eorts with an In-
dustrial Age past.
With all the recent emphasis placed on modernization, how is it that U.S.
Army installations are not included? If the primary reason installations exist
is to ensure combat readiness, then what good is innovating new capabilities
if they are increasingly vulnerable to future attacks? How eectively can
the U.S. Army project combat power from Industrial Age
1
installations that
are designed more for their functional geography
2
than as the rst skirmish
lines of asymmetric defense?
Industrial Age Installations
The advent of the Industrial Age provided the U.S. Army new means to
more eciently marshal, mobilize and deploy men and materiel across a
sprawling country. The rapid pace of industrialization gave birth to numer-
ous pivotal technologies like the telegraph, locomotives and the internal
combustion engine, which all served to unlock the U.S. Army’s ability to
move further away from water-based garrisons to more remote areas capa-
ble of being supplied by rails and roads.
This new functional geography permitted U.S. Army forts to spread across
expanding frontiers. The forts served as self-contained small cities that
provided Soldiers and their families some of the goods and services they
could not nd in austere local markets. Situated on key terrain, frontier
Modernization for
Industrial Age U.S.
Army Installations
FEBRUARY 2018
ILW SPOTLIGHT 18-1
PUBLISHED BY THE INSTITUTE OF LAND WARFARE
at the association of the united states army
ISSUE
As the U.S. Army pursues a comprehen-
sive modernization strategy to update
and innovate its combat capabilities, it
should also undertake a complementary
effort to modernize its Industrial Age
installations in order to ensure that
future combat capabilities can even get
to the ght.
spotlight SCOPE
• Assesses implications of not mod-
ernizing U.S. Army installations to
address emerging threats.
• Identies imperatives for installation
modernization.
INSIGHTS
• Installations are no longer sanctuar-
ies for U.S. Army forces deploying to
battle; they are the rst skirmish lines
of defense against growing asymmet-
ric threats.
• Today’s installations host the sprawl-
ing information systems, infrastruc-
ture and networks upon which U.S.
Army combat capabilities increasingly
depend.
• Tomorrow’s character of conict will
be increasingly asymmetric and are
likely to take place on American soil.
• Failure to modernize Industrial Age
installations will limit the U.S. Army’s
ability to project multi-domain com-
bat power.
www.ausa.org
by Colonel Patrick M. Duggan, U.S. Army
1
Patrick Tucker, “US Army Chief Announces Major Reorganization For How Army Develops, Buys
Weapons,” DefenseOne, 6 October 2017, accessed 26 December 2017, http://www.defenseone.
com/technology/2017/10/feeling-rivals-heat-us-army-streamlining-and-centralizing-way-it-buys-
weapons/141603.
2
Parag Khanna, Connectography: Mapping the Future of Global Civilization (New York, NY:
Random House, 2016), p. 14.
