we've had tenants in our army in our Doctrine for a very long time going back to 1982 depth has been with us the entire time because of that idea of that extended Battlefield and we think about multi-domain operations and the the range constraints or lack of range constraints for things like space and cyberspace depth remains absolutely as important as it always has been we work our way up from the bottom we talk about endurance you talk about endurance because you need endurance to reach the kind of depths that you need to achieve the objectives or defeat enemy forces during conflict endurance is also closely related to the sustainment warfighting function and so when we think about endurance we think about a lot of different factors we think about the impact of operations on units and leaders units and soldiers we think about sustainment in terms of how much op Tempo do we have generated into the plans and so when we think about tenants we really want to think about the way we measure ourselves in terms of course of action development right and so when you do a decision Matrix as we're comparing courses of action you can use the tenants as a way to say does this operation reflect the degree of agility convergence endurance and depth that we're looking for uh and then if not then what do we need to do to do that to achieve the objectives that we've been assigned working our way up to agility I'm saving convergence for last because that's kind of a new idea when we think about agility you have to your Point of Departure needs to think about how army forces actually operate we're formations of people and equipment that move over land and land terrain is not the same as flying an airplane or sailing a ship right you can't just turn a wheel and have the whole thing move and so the components of agility start with training in leader development they start with Sops they start with an understanding of your own Doctrine and then the repetitions necessary to be able to move more quickly relative to the threat but there's other aspects of agility right how fast do we make decisions how fast can we quick uh can we collect information that inform those decisions uh how fast can we move obviously that's that's one part but also things like how fast can we task organize and re-task organized forces across different phases of an operation so there's a lot of components to that and then lastly convergence and that's one of the tenants from the 2018 mdo concept and we Define it as an outcome uh and convergence is really the business of cores and to a lesser extent divisions because large-scale combat operations are in Echelon above Brigade fight and so when we talk about an outcome and we talk about the concerted employment of all available capabilities it drives us back into that discussion we just had about combined arms right and we've extended the idea of combined arms to include those joint capabilities and we do that with the the understanding that we're remembering that land is still a domain right so when you hear multi-domain operations the first thing people want to think about is offensive cyber operations or the employment of space capabilities and that's important right and that is what's new compared to the Past uh in the to the degree that those capabilities can have an impact on Lower tactical formations but it's those echelons above Brigade that have access and and the authorities to employ those capabilities which are inherently scarce right and so the authorities necessary to employ those generally are going to reside at the higher echelons cores and divisions try to establish convergence to create conditions that are exploitable by the lower echelons right and you can think about it in terms of that old 19th century idea of centers of gravity right in the modern world and that systems Warfare approach two opposing forces are complex adaptable systems right and because they're complex adaptable systems there's no one single uh center of gravity they have multiple centers of gravity if you would uh and we want to attack those uh either sequentially or simultaneously in ways that allow us to defeat that threat in detail convergence helps us do that so if tenants really apply uh to how we want to plan and organize ourselves for the conduct of operations and then employ combat power that way imperatives really get to the how right those things that you must do if you want to win an acceptable cost and they're really applicable to every Echelon from Individual soldiers all the way up to theater Army so we're laying component commands and they should be informing how we conduct training in leader development between now and 2030. the first is linked to that description of the operational environment I talked about earlier we've got to see ourselves we got to understand blue we got to understand red we've got to understand the interaction between blue and red in any particular assigned area at any particular Echelon what can the threat do to us what can we do to the threat and what are the other factors in the operational environment around us that may serve as a constraint for the employment of those capabilities the second one is hugely important and we could spend a very long time talking about what it means to account for being under constant observation all right operations in Ukraine since February have made it very clear that the battlefield is increasingly transparent if not absolutely so right so how do we account for that so friendly forces were always under observation in Iraq and Afghanistan right do they knew where the fobs were they kept track of us as we went on and off to conduct patrols and so forth but they couldn't do much about it could they never were we really at risk of having a fob destroyed when you talk about large-scale combat operations a fob is just a big Target right and it's very vulnerable so we can't operate that way that drives us towards thinking in terms of dispersion uh the management of our electromagnetic spectrum footprint things like operation security right noise and white discipline camouflage concealment the employment of obscuration tactical deception military deception at the Joint level all of those things really drive us towards a different cultural approach to the operations we conduct we do movements during periods of limited visibility for example we spread out our March cereals during an approach marches to a tactical assembly area or out of a tactical assembler and so forth the third bullet there gets to what we talked about in forms in terms of the different forms of advantage decision dominance is inherently aspirational we don't know whether we have decision dominance until the after action review or the history of a campaign is written but what we do know is that we need to constantly strive for all three forms of advantage and then exploit those forms of Advantage whenever possible the next bullet talks about making contact with the smallest element possible so we've had to worry about doing those kinds of things at least in the maneuver world for a very long time in the 21st century what's different is we have unmanned systems and we what we say in the doctrine is that when at all possible you want to make contact with unmanned systems first with your robotics with uuas right and there's capabilities coming into the army that will increase our ability to do that but there's real implications in terms of trading and leader development when you talk about simple tactical ideas like moving uh techniques right bounding OverWatch what does bounding OverWatch look for look like for a battalion task force that now has the ability to use uas to make that first Contact right and we've seen what happens when you don't make contact with the smallest Force possible or unmanned systems in Ukraine on both sides of the equation right imposing multiple dilemmas I've talked about that already but the big idea is don't give the enemy one thing to focus on right and we have the ability to do that at every Echelon but the further up we move in our echelons which is why lisco we watch scale comment operations is the national ones above Brigade fight is because the higher the echelon the more tools that are available to create those dilemmas and the lower tactile echelons are the execution arm for creating those dilemmas in real time in the real world transitions there's all kinds of Transitions and I should have said this up front but every one of these bullets has a page or at least multiple paragraphs that describe the different considerations associated with these imperatives transitions is one that we get into all the different types of transitions out there so when you think about transitions again it drives you back to training and leader development what kind of transitions are we talking about we're talking about transitions between competition crisis and conflict we're talking about transitions between phases of an operation we're talking about transitions in terms of task organization we're talking about transitions in terms of new information employing that mission command approach and then deviating from the plan when conditions require us to do that so transitions again it feeds right into that tenet of agility you need agility if you're going to be able to execute transitions quickly or more effectively than the adversary or enemy this idea of keeping the main thing the main thing right designate weight and sustain the main effort in any given time in place there should be a single main effort for a formation it's going to look different for a from a for a platoon than it does for a company perhaps a company to a brigade and Brigade to a core right so what is the main effort in any given time and place it may not be fighting it may be sustainment is the main effort as we're trying to build combat power right that uh enabling operation across the wet Gap may be the main effort for a division operation in a particular phase uh and so keeping the main thing the main thing and making that very clear in terms of priorities of resources uh and how we task organize ourselves is hugely important this idea of consolidating gains continuously now that's not new in terms of what our Doctrine says in 2017 we said that we want to we want to consolidate gains as continuously as possible however because it was the last chapter of the book it always became the final phase of an operation when people will talk about it we're doing a consolidation phase which is exactly the opposite of what we want to do so this time around we talk about consolidating gains throughout the entire publication in each chapter during the operations that we want to conduct all right so to get people to think that in terms of assuming risk you may be assuming an awful lot of risk if you're going to seize all your objectives and not consolidate gains to prevent the enemy from protracting the conflict using some different form of warfare for example transitioning from conventional to irregular warfare you're accepting more risk perhaps if you wait to do that after whereas if you consolidate gains as you go along you plan and resource that you're probably assuming far less risk in terms of the outcome or the the enduring outcomes that you're seeking during that operation that you're conducting and then lastly understanding and managing the effects of operations on units and soldiers so we used to do this a different way as recently as the war in Vietnam right uh in the last 20 years or so how did we manage the effects of operations on units and waders we did it with 9 12 15 month rotations with r r leave and so forth we could do that because very seldom were you engage in sustained land combat for more than a few days at a time right so there was time in the battle Rhythm to recover from that in large-scale combat operations that's not going to be true in a matter of days and certainly in a matter of weeks units become combat ineffective due to the impact of those continuous operations on the units themselves on the equipment but most of all on the people and so even in the war in Ukraine where both sides have kind of put themselves at the limit they still rotate units out of the line to arrest reorganize or reconstitute themselves for future operations and so we published a book on reconstitution last year but that's something that we have to to take into account as we're planning and designing the operations that we want to conduct