America’s military is preparing for a different kind of war. After two decades in Iraq and Afghanistan fighting insurgents and terrorist groups who used guerrilla-style tactics, the US armed forces have a new focus: “peer-to-peer combat.” War between great nations with large militaries. War—hypothetically—with Russia or with China. Combat of the sort America hasn’t engaged in since Korea. As alarming as it may sound, every branch of the Defense Department is currently undergoing a major restructuring, reevaluating doctrine, weaponry, tactics, and training to prepare for just this kind of war. After a recent trip to Washington, DC—to help military experts workshop peer-to-peer war—Austrian army officer Franz-Stefan Gady, an adjunct senior fellow at the Center for a New American Security, told me that this new cultural and tactical pivot among the world’s major powers “could be as big of a change as going from frontier soldiers chasing Comanches to the Civil War.”
As a result, Peter van Agtmael’s photos on these pages, showing recent exercises by the 101st Airborne’s Second Brigade Combat Team, don’t just document training for air assaults and ambushes (a tactic once memorably defined by Lieutenant Colonel Charles Armstrong as an “act of premeditated murder and terrorism against strangers”). At Fort Campbell, Kentucky (and later at Fort Johnson, Louisiana—formerly Fort Polk—which van Agtmael also documented), soldiers of the brigade learned to fight at night against electronic warfare jamming, against unmanned aerial systems and counterfire radars. They learned to breach complex mine and wire obstacles, to defeat enemy motorized counterattacks. “Even before the Russian invasion of Ukraine, we oriented on high-end combat against a peer threat,” explained Colonel Ed Matthaidess, the brigade’s commander. Peers, of course, are America’s fellow superpowers.
In practice, that means thousands of soldiers operating in synchronicity to deliver overwhelming firepower. And in an era of drones and other high-tech surveillance assets to help adversaries deliver fire at long range, soldiers can’t expect to operate out of combat outposts or forward operating bases as they did in Iraq, where they could count on a warm bed and hot food more often than not. In contrast, soldiers can expect extended periods in the field, living out of a rucksack, dispersed and camouflaged in dug-in fighting positions before massing to attack.
The Fort Campbell and Fort Johnson training sessions included a few of their own “key leader engagements,” simulated meetings with military and political leaders, but that wasn’t the emphasis. In van Agtmael’s photos, Humvees and even soldiers’ heads are decorated with leafy branches, their goal to blend not with the local population but with the inhuman landscape. It’s a more natural and even comfortable place for professional soldiers to be—killers in hiding, not junior sociologists strolling through Murderville.
Van Agtmael, who for almost two decades has covered combat, especially the US military at war, has documented units like this before—young kids just out of high school, eager for combat. He’s seen them turn into hardened veterans. He’s seen the bloody tables of trauma hospitals, the postwar struggles of the burned and maimed—along with their triumphs and joys—the whole life cycle of war. Yet here he was, back at the beginning, in a fresh Army unit where only one out of 20 soldiers has been to war and fewer have been in an actual gunfight. “They told me they didn’t care who they fought, Russia or China, they just wanted to fight,” he recounted, clearly disturbed that nothing these young men and women had seen or heard in their lives—lives lived almost entirely during the span of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan—had seemed to have made them skeptical about who might send them to battle and why.
“If China fought it out, it’d be the first war since the Civil War where the US mainland was threatened,” Gady maintained. “America’s wars are never coming home to you. You always have a safe haven, like those Norman Rockwell paintings, where Thanksgiving will always be served. But China will have to hit US critical infrastructure. There’s not going to be a safe haven.”
When he was preparing to fight Russian proxy forces in the Donbas a few years prior to the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the Ukrainian soldier and writer Artem Chekh described the impact of meeting American troops like the ones Matthaidess commands. Chekh looked around at the Ukrainian infantry of which he was a part, a motley group with poor weapons and equipment, resembling, he noted, the “homeless kids of the 1920s.” Chekh himself wasn’t even wearing boots but New Balance sneakers…and he was envied for his footwear. And then there were the Americans, the perfect image of how an Army should be and how it should be equipped. “Look at their Hummers,” he gushed to a fellow Ukrainian, “look at their ammo, look into the eyes of the African American soldier with the high-tech gear.”
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