America’s military is preparing for a various kind of war. After 2 years in Iraq and Afghanistan battling insurgents and terrorist groups who utilized guerrilla-style techniques, the UnitedStates armed forces have a brand-new focus: “peer-to-peer battle.” War inbetween fantastic countries with big armedforces. War—hypothetically—with Russia or with China. Combat of the sort America hasn’t engaged in because Korea. As worrying as it might sound, every branch of the Defense Department is presently goingthrough a significant restructuring, reviewing teaching, weaponry, strategies, and training to prepare for simply this kind of war. After a current journey to Washington, DC—to assistance armedforce specialists workshop peer-to-peer war—Austrian army officer Franz-Stefan Gady, an accessory senior fellow at the Center for a New American Security, informed me that this brand-new cultural and tactical pivot amongst the world’s significant powers “could be as huge of a modification as going from frontier soldiers chasing Comanches to the Civil War.”
As a result, Peter van Agtmael’s pictures on these pages, proving current workouts by the 101st Airborne’s Second Brigade Combat Team, puton’t simply file training for air attacks and ambushes (a method when memorably specified by Lieutenant Colonel Charles Armstrong as an “act of premeditated murder and terrorism versus completestrangers”). At Fort Campbell, Kentucky (and lateron at Fort Johnson, Louisiana—formerly Fort Polk—which van Agtmael likewise recorded), soldiers of the brigade discovered to battle at night versus electronic warfare jamming, versus unmanned aerial systems and counterfire radars. They discovered to breach complex mine and wire challenges, to defeat opponent motorized counterattacks. “Even priorto the Russian intrusion of Ukraine, we oriented on high-end fight versus a peer risk,” described Colonel Ed Matthaidess, the brigade’s leader. Peers, of course, are America’s fellow superpowers.
In practice, that suggests thousands of soldiers operating in synchronicity to provide frustrating firepower. And in an age of drones and othe