Seductive Effect of an Expeditionary Mindset

The U.S. Army is in the midst of undergoing a radical transformation, adopting a "capabilities-based" and "modular-type" force structure, to combat "full spectrum" conflict for future threats. The premise behind restructuring all U.S. Army forces in this manner is that threats will be ambiguous and they will no longer present a situation where US military forces would necessarily fight a single opponent in a conventional manner at a known location. Although there is no clear agreement about the likelihood of any specific threat, most experts agree that the United States must transition from the focused strategy of containing a single statecentric threat to a broad, effective strategy able to confront a wide range of potential conflicts, from low to high intensity, anywhere in the world. U.S. strategy has deliberately made a trade-off between considering where and who a specific threat may be to considering and classifying the various types of threats the United States may face. In order to create the appropriate force structure in the U.S. Army, military planners have "forecasted" the common features of the full-spectrum of conflict and have proposed the development of various "expeditionary" capabilities that address future threats. Many contend that mobility is now the key ingredient in transitioning to this new capabilities-based strategy. Consequently, U.S. Army planners have recently begun to focus on the common aspects of how U.S. forces will confront a wide variety of future threats and have identified specific equipment and procedures that will facilitate "shaping and entry operations," "operating and maneuvering from strategic distances," and "intra-theater operational maneuver." This monograph will analyze three mobility technologies that address "expeditionary" goals and assess their contributions to "worse case" security issues and the "most likely" security issues. The specific technologies addresses in this paper are; the Future Combat System (FCS), t