With the company speech from a few days ago, the Chief of Staff of the Army, General Carmine Masiello, has outlined a fundamental picture of the prospects of the land component of the Italian Armed Forces. The general said that in today's wars “There is a mix of ancient warfare - the trenches that we had completely forgotten, the minefields, the rolls of barbed wire, the mud - and then there is the future, cyber warfare, space warfare: there are drones and all their variants, there is disinformation, the war of the minds”.
To respond to today's challenges and the rapid evolution of war tactics and strategies, the Italian Army must be placed at the same technological level as the Navy and Air Force; an aspect summarized by General Masiello, who explained that "the operational output of Defense is the product of the factors of the different Armed Forces. And if one of the factors tends to 0, the product tends to 0, so all must be technological" but, above all, accept to start a process of rapid and no longer postponable "revolution in military affairs" which influences its external and internal posture.
Should a broader interpretation be needed, the clear words of General Masiello serve to explain that for the Italian Army and, more generally, for Defence, the time of the post-historical “pause” and orientation towards peacekeeping, fruits of the geostrategic “reflux” of Italy at the beginning of the 90s, is over.
To make a historical comparison, Masiello seems to fit into the current of Italian military thought that at the end of the 800th century expressed the most convinced supporters of the "offensivist" theories (among the leading names are Luigi Mezzacapo, Emilio Ferrero, Luigi Pelloux and Coriolano Ponza di San Martino), supporters of the function of the Army as an "instrument of foreign policy", of the technological strengthening of the military instrument, of a closer collaboration with the Navy and with the national industry, of the "strategic power" and of the increase in spending on Defense.
In particular, if at the end of the 19th century it was the strengthening of "special weapons" (artillery and cavalry) that constituted the natural counterweight to the "numericist" tendencies of those who identified the organic increase of infantry alone as the solution to the operational problem of the Army; today it is in the race to the technologization of the Italian Army (which derives from the analysis that General Masiello made of the evolution of conflicts) that one can identify theories similar to the old offensive school.
General Masiello explained that the Army "is either technological or it is not", which also means highlighting the need to adopt a doctrinal and operational approach that is open to the most innovative trends. An aspect that also emerges from the latest training commitments, such as the "Alpine Star" exercise, which had the function of "synthesising" the various capacity areas of the Army and which highlighted the enormous progress made by the terrestrial component in the defense capabilities of the electromagnetic spectrum and in the use of increasingly integrated and multi-domain technologies.
Photo: Leonardo
