https://crsreports.congress.gov
May 8, 2020
The Army’s AimPoint Force Structure Initiative
Background
The 2018 National Military Strategy describes how the U.S.
military is to defend the homeland and retain its
competitive advantage to deter competitors and defeat
adversaries, whether great power competitors like China
and Russia or other security challenges. It is a fundamental
departure from other National Military Strategies post-
September 11
, which focused on counterinsurgency and
defeating violent extremist organizations. In essence, the
2018 National Military Strategy refocuses the Army from
fighting counterinsurgencies and violent extremist
organizations to countering and possibly confronting
Russian and Chinese military forces. The Army’s new
AimPoint initiative is intended to be the means to build the
force structure needed to implement this new focus.
Previous Army Force
Structure Construct
During the Cold War, the U.S. Army was primarily a
division-centric force whereby divisions, consisting of a
mix of specialized brigades, battalions, and companies,
were the primary warfighting organization. Within the
division, the commander controlled a variety of assets such
as artillery, engineers, and logistical units that could be
assigned to subordinate infantry or armored brigades as the
tactical situation required. Divisions were part of corps,
which also had their own organic units such as artillery and
engineers that the corps commander could allocate to
divisions to support operations.
In the early 2000s, as the Army became committed to long-
term counterinsurgency combat operations in Iraq and
Afghanistan, Army units would rotate in and out of these
theaters on an annual basis. Based on observations of how
these rotations affected soldiers and units, Army leadership
determined that the division-centric force was not the best
structure to support a rotational force.
In September 2003, the U.S. Army began converting from
an organization centered on divisions (numbering from
10,000 to 18,000 soldiers) to a force based upon brigade
combat teams (BCTs) of around 4,000 soldiers. This new
brigade-centric force, known as the modular force, assigned
a number of division-level assets to the newly formed
BCTs, thereby lessening the operational and tactical roles
of the division.
Multi-Domain Operations (MDO)
According to the Army, current conventional warfighting
doctrine is still largely based on the Air-Land Battle
concept developed in 1981 to counter Warsaw Pact forces
in Europe. As the name indicates, Air-Land Battle is
primarily based on operations in the air and land domains.
However, competitors now possess increasingly capable
anti-access and area denial strategies, meant to separate the
Joint Force physically and functionally and alliances
politically. Furthermore, near-peer competitors are capable
of securing strategic objectives by means other than armed
conflict with the United States and its allies. More
importantly, the Army can no longer guarantee dominance
over a near-peer threat—an advantage that the United States
has held for decades. Unlike Air-Land Battle, MDO
addresses the notion that competition and conflict occur in
multiple domains (land, air, sea, cyber, and space), and that
there will be multiple threats across the competition
continuum in the future operating environment. As the
MDO concept continues to be refined and updated, it will
likely drive Army modernization and force structure. The
Army aims to achieve a full MDO capability by 2035.
Conceptually, the Army, as an element of the Joint Force,
plans to conduct MDO (not necessarily in every domain at
each moment), primarily by deterrence, in order to prevail
in competition. If deterrence fails, and if it becomes
necessary, Army forces would penetrate and disable enemy
anti-access and area denial (A2/AD) systems and, if
successful, exploit any resulting freedom of maneuver to
achieve strategic objectives and force a return to
competition on favorable terms.
Major Aspects of AimPoint Force
Structure Initiative
The primary means by which the Army intends to build its
MDO capability is through what it calls the AimPoint Force
Structure Initiative. According to the Army, the AimPoint
Force being developed by the Army Futures Command’s
(AFC’s) Army Futures and Concepts Center is to be a
flexible force structure. While little change is expected at
brigade level and below, the Army suggests major changes
will occur at higher echelons—division, corps, and theater
command—that have primarily played a supporting role in
counterinsurgency operations such as in Iraq and
Afghanistan. Under MDO, higher field headquarters will
now be required to take the lead in coordinating large-scale
campaigns against well-armed nation-states such as Russia
and China. The Army also notes that the AimPoint Force
will be resource-informed, meaning it will be subject to
budget constraints and political considerations. Because of
the geographic distinctions between the European and Indo-
Pacific theaters, individual higher-echelon AimPoint
formation force structure will likely differ by theater as
opposed to current one-size-fits-all units.
Major Proposed Force
Structure Initiatives
The following sections provide a description of some of
AimPoint’s major proposed force structure changes.
