As the Army examines its armor formations, it wants to avoid placing them in a potential stalemate, similar to what is being seen in the Russia-Ukraine War.
To avoid that fate, armor brigades are receiving new equipment and experimenting with different formations as part of the service’s “Transforming in Contact” initiative, first launched in 2024 with infantry brigades.
The Army’s “Transforming in Contact,” or TIC, concept seeks to deliver new equipment — such as Infantry Squad Vehicles, drones, counter-drone equipment and increased electromagnetic warfare capabilities — to operational units as they prepare for major training events and deployments.
Under TIC 2.0, the Army is shifting its focus to Armor Brigade Combat Teams and division-level assets.
“Ukraine has us going back to first principles, such as, ”Why do we need armor?’” said Maj. Gen. Curtis Taylor, head of the 1st Armored Division.
Armor remains vital on the battlefield because it provides mobile protected firepower to penetrate prepared defenses, seize and hold ground, and dislocate enemy combined arms, Curtis said at September’s Maneuver Warfighter Conference at Fort Benning, Georgia.
New areas to adapt include robotics and drones.
That includes sensing and striking at the company level using first-person-view drones under armor, layered drone countermeasures, embedded electronic warfare and robotic breaching.
Maj. Gen. Thomas Feltey leads the 1st Cavalry Division, which has two brigades in the TIC initiative.
The 2nd Armored Brigade Combat Team is scheduled to go to the National Training Center at Fort Irwin, California, in November. There, soldiers will test the new equipment and formations they’ve been experimenting with, Feltey told Army Times in an interview.
Lessons from that rotation will fuel the development of another brigade, the 2nd ABCT, 3rd Infantry Division, which will then pass along its lessons learned to 1st ABCT, 1st Cavalry Division, for a rotation at the NTC in 2027.
Like the infantry units that previously underwent the “Transforming in Contact” process, each brigade will have a Multifunctional Reconnaissance Company and a Multipurpose Company added to the formation.
They’ll also change up formations, running a separate 12-tank company and a 14-tank company, as well as two different configurations of mechanized infantry companies, Feltey said.
The task is daunting. In training, the aim is to fight three enemy brigades, which translates to killing 224 tanks, 224 tracked vehicles, 168 wheeled vehicles, 56 mobile guns, 392 squads and 900 unmanned aerial systems in a 24- to 48-hour period, said Col. Alexis Perez, head of 2nd ABCT, 3rd ID, at the Maneuver Warfighter Conference.
To achieve those effects, the brigade will need to lean on its division assets.
Feltey sees division artillery as providing some of that firepower.
Division artillery now has a rocket battalion, three direct support battalions with two cannon artillery batteries each and a third, a composite High Mobility Artillery Rocket System, or HIMARs.
They’ll also have the Air Cavalry Brigade at the division level to parse out to brigades when needed, according to Feltey.
All of these moves are to restore fires and maneuver, Feltey said.
“What we’re seeing in Ukraine and in World War I after the front froze, we lost our ability to conduct fires and maneuver. … It stalled our offense,” he said.
Officials have created a “wave-based approach” to accomplish fires and maneuver, Feltey said. The first wave is to detect, followed by suppressing enemy forces and bringing in finishing fires before maneuvering to close with and destroy the enemy.
New tools such as drones, one-way attack munitions and sensors are opening up new ways to accomplish this.
For example, Col. Brian Frizzelle, head of 1st ABCT, 1st Armored Division, noted how his team did the first live kamikaze first-person-view drone strikes at NTC. Soldiers used those and assets from the Multifunctional Reconnaissance Company, electronic warfare tools, small drones and mortars to create a point of penetration that allowed the armored formations to envelop, exploit and pursue, breaking the will of the simulated enemy forces.
This work has meant more time in the field. Perez noted that preparations included a 30-day stint in the field at a home station, followed by a 45-day field exercise to experiment with the fundamentals of the new formations, communications and other assets.
Feltey said they’ve built in an extended preparation period at NTC for the brigades to finalize their familiarization with equipment and new formations.
The 1st Cavalry Division is also bringing all the major assets of its division headquarters to NTC with the brigades to fully operate as part of the fight.
“We have a very important role to set the conditions of the brigades to get their battalions on the objective,” Feltey said.
That will mean pushing detect and strike functions all the way down to the company level, he said.
The sheer size of the ABCT presents both advantages and disadvantages. With all of its vehicles, the unit can generate a significant amount of electrical power to charge devices, which is becoming more important as more devices are added to the toolkit.
But more vehicles mean more maintenance and sustainment. And those maintenance and sustainment nodes are more vulnerable on the transparent battlefield than they have been in the past.
Which means maintainers and logisticians must be better trained and prepared for their part of the fight, Frizzelle said.
“Maintenance is training,” Frizzelle said. “How do we break less of our own stuff as we train, as we do gunnery and maneuver?”
To further shrink that footprint, leaders at the Maneuver Warfighter Conference repeatedly mentioned the need to scale back command posts, which can be easily detected and destroyed by the enemy.
That means both high-tech and low-tech solutions.
Maj. Gen. Charles Lombardo, head of the 2nd Infantry Division, said commanders need to be prepared to 3D-print hundreds, if not thousands, of drones to better protect their formations.
“I think we’ll start to see drone-on-drone battles before the indirect fight,” Frizzelle said.
Taylor noted that if a soldier could throw a football from one vehicle to the next, then they were too close together and needed to disperse farther apart.
With the proliferation of sensors and data, some worry about the overburdening of the cognitive load on soldiers in such formations.
Ways to reduce that load are critical, even something as simple as removing some of what an individual soldier at the tactical level might see on their screen could help, officials said.
Todd South has written about crime, courts, government and the military for multiple publications since 2004 and was named a 2014 Pulitzer finalist for a co-written project on witness intimidation. Todd is a Marine veteran of the Iraq War.
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