In the east we fight. Putin's special military operation is a war-torn conflict with broad political and military implications. And it is incontrovertible: a new era of opposition has opened and, for now only metaphorically, a new iron curtain marks the eastern border of Europe. The question therefore arises spontaneously - and necessary - whether Italy and NATO are ready to face the security challenges of this new era, so harbinger of conflict.
Many commentators have recently argued that Putin, with his assertiveness, has revitalized the Atlantic Alliance. And therefore, now, member countries must possess the military capabilities necessary in a hypothetical high-intensity, symmetrical conflict; but this happens after years of peace and operations peacekeeping and, as we know, in the absence of manifest threats to security, the military apparatuses tend to carry out the tasks more suited to peacetime.
Italy, convincedly western, has always contributed to dissuading NATO with its own armed forces. And in the last thirty years, similarly to its partners, it has also oriented its land military instrument to the needs of operations of peacekeeping. Now, the recent concept paper of the Chief of Staff of the Army, Army 4.0, indicates the evolutionary lines to face the risks that are emerging in terms of security in the East - and beyond -. The set of actions budgeted for in this document has a value greater than the sum of the single parts because they are conceived to generate a system and produce a qualitative leap based on emerging technologies, some of which are "disruptive". Therefore, the various modernization and renewal programs, if achieved individually and partially, will not produce the innovation that is being aimed for.
Therefore, the anticipated innovation, summarily traced in the format of a popular dossier, is presumable that it also contains numerous concurrent actions needed to support the main effort along the time frame of the realizations. Thus the complexity of the project suggests the need to resort to ad hoc laws, if not one special Army law, with which to allocate financial resources with an overview. To this special law no mention is made and it is not clear whether it will ever be promulgated.
At the time of the Cold War, the Army fielded one board command to defend the Northeast, three corps commands, division commands, and up to twenty-five multi-service, multi-service brigades. Then the field army was integrated into the territorial organization made up of territorial military commands and logistics divided into four levels, or functional rings. But computers didn't exist yet, or at least, computing wasn't distributed and integrated, and it didn't pervade command and control processes.
Another difference is that the collapse of the Warsaw Pact, and the Partnership for Peace in the years that followed, he promoted the strategic depth of the operational theater: the Gorizia Threshold is no longer the place where the main threat could manifest itself. A fact that Putin does not like, whose rhetoric places NATO's expansion to the East in the foreground, underlining that it is the Eastern countries that wanted to become NATO, moving towards the West by free choice.
Therefore, if this strategic depth protects us from the Russian armies, instead the conflict has taken on hybrid forms that oblige us to radically review strategic concepts and, more broadly, defense policies.
The land military instrument that can be glimpsed in the concept paper Army 4.0 is powerful, maneuverable across all domains, and resilient. Each of these adjectives: powerful, manoeuvrable and resilient, is the leader of an extensive category of operational capabilities, some of which need to be created from scratch, others need to be maintained or developed because they are now in an embryonic state.
There are five evolutionary guidelines: maneuver in contact, maneuver without contact and in depth, maneuver from the third dimension, integrated defense and distributed logistics. The reader who wants to deepen can read these concepts in the text available with the third number of the Military magazine.
The set of modernization and renewal programs implied in the concept paper, for their implementation, as mentioned above, would require an ad hoc regulation or special law, for a radical revision on the model of the one that restructured the Army in the 70s of the last century and made it suitable to face the threat in the following years, until the collapse of the USSR.
If the special law is not fully discussed, it is clearly expressed however that the modernization and renewal will be entrusted to the national industry. The reasons for this choice are well argued: possession of the technology will enable us to manage the evolution on our own, to logistically support the instrument and to generate wealth for the country.
It is taken for granted that the national industry is endowed with adequate research and development capabilities and that it will be able to set up the production lines in suitable times. And above all this, that we will be able to bear the costs.
The modernization of the land military instrument in the 4.0 sense, if you want to represent it graphically, promises to be a large project matrix. The nodes are the different platforms and the different systems to be created. Each item is connected to the others and projects that are so large and interconnected in a matrix require management that clearly sees, moment by moment, the state of the art of the individual programs and at the same time manages to monitor them as a whole; and a punctual management, firm in coordinating the evolution of the entire system within the pre-established times.
The time factor is essential and for this reason procedures and techniques capable of phasing the evolution are used, for example the PERT methodology (Project Evauation Review Technique). But the chronicle of supplies for the Army is full of examples of staggering and delays, which have punctually translated into a reduction in the operational capabilities of the units. This figure should indicate to program managers the need to plan and schedule with a realistic vision and careful to contain delays, which are inevitable in such complex processes. And the lack of one special law it would not help in this work of coordination and constant timing.
A powerful, manoeuvrable and resilient terrestrial tool, as mentioned above. If the adjective "powerful" brings together a very extensive area of capabilities, such as maneuvering fire in depth, up to 150 kilometers or defense against attacks from the third dimension (Counter Unmanned Aerial System), the vision of the Chief of Staff of the Army places the emphasis on the ability to maneuver: “manoeuvrist approach”.
Contact maneuvering is a strong point of Western armies, which over time have researched and implemented specific aptitudes both in terms of personnel and in terms of technologies.
But let's take a cue from what we're seeing on the battlefield in Ukraine. It doesn't look like the Russian units are maneuvering much there. The tactics adopted would appear to be very similar to that of the Soviet army, with similar use of fire and mechanized and armored units. If there has been any technological evolution on the Russian side, it can be seen in the artillery and cruise missiles, ballistic or hyper-fast, in the aircraft unmanned, but less in technical-tactical procedures. Probably, now as then, the philosophy of mission commander (read article "Mission Command: a crucial aspect of the Art of Command") is not privileged by Russian commanders in the field and they don't even have adequately automated command and control systems (C4ISTAR, wanting to enclose in an acronym all the necessary leadership capabilities on the battlefield, which are now based on Information Technologies) .
Conversely, innovation 4.0 Army finds a strength in distributed, integrated and resilient computing, i.e. the ability to spread intelligence on the battlefield, even with sensors unmanned capable of acquiring information and collection and processing nodes of the same capable of keeping the picture of the situation updated in real time.
The two main platforms, on which tools capable of doing this would be implemented, are the tank Ram (MBT) and the futuristic Armored Infantry Combat System (AICS), or armored and armed troop transport, super technological, equipped with devices unmanned and also capable of constituting a node in the field network. If the chariot Ram, now being modernized for a number of specimens, always arouses perplexity, being a wagon of outdated conception, the strong point of the system is the future infantry vehicle. Vehicle also conceived as an open platform, which suggests the creation of derivatives to be used for combat support and logistics tasks. Moreover, even the latter is briefly mentioned in the document, where an automation pushed to the "last mile" is envisaged, with the use of terrestrial drones for home delivery of supplies, piloted via a field computer network.
There is no doubt that technology is ripe for this kind of prediction. Then entrusting everything to the national industry is a certainly virtuous choice of field, due to the repercussions on the national economy, nonetheless a challenge to its capabilities. In summary, the bet inherent in the concept paper it is twofold: management of the project matrix in compliance with times that are appropriate to the emergency of the conflict now manifested in our world; availability of financial resources for the investment, without neglecting the ordinary, because in the meantime the reality, in terms of Operation, continues.
Upstream of all this, however, there is a military policy which over the years has shown inattention to the real needs of the Army, not only financially, but also in terms of personnel and in the protection of the most significant values of military organizational culture.
More specifically, critical fronts are those of the Defense budget established annually with the stability law, in particular for the Financial Year, and, in particular, for Operations. The Operation, for fifteen years, has been underfunded. Training, maintenance and maintenance of infrastructures are historically suffering.
It is as if the strategic decision-maker considers training an irrelevant parameter for armed forces based on professional soldiers. Which is not, because - as is well known - it is with the training of the units that operational readiness and deterrence capacity are produced. In this perspective, the reduced availability of training areas and technological systems for "real training" also appears as a further critical area that deserves attention.
An open chapter would remain, that of Personnel, of age-related physical fitness, on which adjustments are also underway and where the political decision-maker should focus attention, carefully considering the peculiarities of the military condition. And why not also review the scope of mobilization for the achievement of personnel congruous with real war, the symmetrical one, which has now become a possible option again?
The conclusion of this argument is that the valuable conception of 4.0 Army, in the opinion of the writer, should be framed in one Army Law, on the model of Naval Law; and that the modernization and renewal of the entire land military instrument must not take away care from the other critical fronts which have always been the Exercise item of the annual ordinary budget and Personnel policies, in the particular perspective of Recruitment. The historical moment requires all of this.
gen. ca (ris) Antonio Venci
Photo: Italian Army / Presidency of the Council of Ministers
