Refreshing such skills is one point of emphasis for the squad initiative. It goes hand in hand with preparing for the different scenarios U.S. troops may face and with the information processing and decision-making small unit leaders will have to undertake.

“That’s kind of the quagmire we’re in,” Peterson said. “We don’t say we’re trying to fix the squad. We’re trying to make it more lethal, mobile, more survivable in this environment that we see as wide-area security. We’re actually using the squad as a kind of filter.

“Before, we were just using the individual soldier, making sure he could survive a gunshot wound, an IED attack. He’s got to be able to detect IEDs, communicate, operate in an urban environment; we just kept giving him more and more equipment. We didn’t look through the formation.

“What’s going to make the squad more capable? What capabilities do we give the forces that stand behind the squad to make it more effective? We’re focused on the network as the enabler. It can allow the squad leader to see what a UAV sees. Maybe not as streaming video, because that takes a lot of bandwidth, but still shots and other intelligence products that allow him to focus his effort.”

The “network” will be key to the squad. The Army wants to extend the robust information network already available to Army platforms from helicopters to tanks to the dismounted soldier. The network as envisioned abets situational awareness, facilitates engagement, and provides force protection regardless of the threat scenario, terrain, or presence of PMs.

“We’ll have squads, platoons, and companies operating over a larger land area,” Peterson said. “The goal is not [to]  have them meandering around looking for the enemy but to give them focus. The network brings that focus so the squad, company, or platoon leader is using less energy to go after that target. He’s got to sustain himself on a 12- or nine-month deployment. That’s a whole lot of patrolling, a whole lot of walking around.”

Squads will need organic capabilities, both analog and digital, to survive and fight. Lighter, adjustably layered body armor is an example of the former, Peterson pointed out. With high- or low-end munitions, extending force protection and strike past small arms range is the network’s forte.

“If a squad leader has [access to] a network and can launch a robot or UAV forward to see what was ahead before going over a pass or into an ambush,” Peterson said, “that is force protection. We don’t want network information to be force-fed to the squad in overwhelming fashion to the point where the leader could become indecisive.

“The network should be [structured] so the squad leader can draw information and do his own analysis. If a company commander knows he’s going to send a squad across a bridge the next morning, he can get a UAV up tonight, see what it looks like and show the patrol before it moves out. There may be a disabled vehicle or a trash can that wasn’t in the picture the night before. Detecting that change just prior to a mission going off allows the squad to ‘get left of the bang.’”

With the digital capability will come human assistance. The Army is advocating the addition of “enablers” to the squad – specialists in aviation, engineering, or intel. The COIST, or Company Intelligence Support Team, is an example, helping the squad or platoon leader interpret data from the network, pass specialized reports, and generally avoid information overload. Such enablers may also be able to provide or pass information when the network goes down.

“We all know that the enemy realizes that United States forces are high tech and the way that they can disrupt us is to disrupt that network first,” Peterson said. “It’s not firing a PGM. That PGM is an electronic attack. If information can’t be pulled [from the network], you still have to do that mission. We should have the ability in our training to turn the systems off.”

On or off, preparing U.S. land forces for an as-yet-unknown, unpredictable, and disjointed environment with high- or low-end precision munitions will require judicious use of America’s limited resources, Braun said.

“In the process of preparing for the hybrid threat, we have to keep in mind the peer competitor, but we’ll be honing many of the same skills and developing many of the same capabilities for one as the other. There may be a capacity issue there, but I think fiscal reality means there’s going to be a capacity issue anyway.”

As for a combat zone devoid of land forces in the face of precision-strike weapons, nearly everyone agrees – there will be no empty battlefield. As the Army Infantry School’s deputy commander said, “I’m on the battlefield because I need to be. I’m not meandering. I go after my target. I separate the target from the [local] people and capitalize on it.”

This article was first published in Defense: Spring 2012 Edition.