Modular Army

Background

Between World War II and the 1990s, the army expected fixed-structure divisions to participate as key parts of large land forces operating in Cold War campaigns, mostly in Europe or Asia. These campaigns envisioned large forward-deployed forces in well-established theaters having significant nondivisional units providing support at specific echelons. By the 1990s, this organization made it difficult to deploy units apart from their divisional base and keep the rest of the division ready for other missions. Post–Cold War, the army needed to rapidly employ land forces at the outset of a contingency, resulting in deploying parts of divisions for specific missions. Force tailoring frequently rendered the residual portion of the parent unit incapable of continuing its full range of missions due to loss of key personnel or equipment. Consequently, the army wanted to reorganize around smaller, more versatile formations to ease deployment.

In January 1995, the army issued a “Concept for Modularity” that called for responding to an increasing array of potential deployments with more efficient packaging of forces. That concept defined modularity as a force design methodology that established a means of providing force elements that are interchangeable, expandable, and tailorable to meet the changing needs of the army at echelons above division level. In the mid-1990s, some serving army officers, such as Douglas Macgregor, also recommended reorganizing divisions of the army on a brigade basis.

Operations in Afghanistan and Iraq finally convinced the army to consider extending modularity to the division level. The nature of modern land operations had become increasingly distributed in space while more simultaneous in time. At the tactical and operational levels, army subordinate units routinely operated in noncontiguous areas. This contrasted sharply with the contiguous and hierarchical arrangement of land forces prevalent in the past. In addition, the army increasingly provided the majority of land component command and task force headquarters for joint and multinational contingency operations. More agile forces, improvements in command and control, proliferation of satellite-based communications, and continuing integration of joint capabilities at lower echelons all contributed to the necessity for change.

Implementation

Shortly after becoming army chief of staff in 2003, General Schoomaker created 16 focus groups to make up Task Force Modularity. He charged the task force with redesigning the army from a division-based to a modular brigade-based force to achieve three primary

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