all right so we made a couple changes to the operational framework this time around in 2017 it was deep close consolidation and support areas we're now deep close rear and support areas however that fits into a bigger picture right and that has not changed the bigger picture is this idea of a strategic support area a joint security area so strategic support areas continental United States and the Strategic lines of communication over the over the oceans The Joint security area is inside the theater but generally out of the range of the majority of the enemy's weapon systems then we have our assigned operational errors for the Army echelons inside that and then this idea of an extended deep area that entities like strategic command or U.S cyber command would be primarily interested in or perhaps components of the other services right so that's our area of Interest we're still worried about what's out there because there's things out there that can hurt us in our assigned areas we have to be aware of those that's part of that multi-domain understanding of that operational environment but we are given missions formations at Echelon and we're assigned areas and so for echelons above Brigade we use this operational framework deep close rear and support areas this is a general doctoral template what we did a couple years ago is we went back because the Army hadn't done this for about 30 years and so we had some folks get together with the centers of excellence and say what are in a general sense with modern weapon systems fielded by the United States Army now and in the very near term what would the frontages and depths of our echelons look like and more importantly what's the relative relationship with the most likely threats in terms of the capabilities that they can bring to bear so when we talk about things like deep close rear and support our Point of Departure is really the operations you want to conduct right the areas fall out based on how we out we Echelon forces in time and space and we Echelon forces in time and space based on the capabilities that you can bring to bear so we use fires capability here but you could use ISR or other capabilities as well in terms of friendly capabilities unclassified hostile capabilities unclassified you start to see this correlation between our rear areas and the enemies deep the enemy's rear area and are deep right and so there's this yin and yang that that tends to shift as our forward line of troops moves forward or back all right so there's a correlation there the other thing that we think is important uh you see the diagrams there in in terms of what the rear areas look like for a division or a core and during the conduct of offensive operations those areas can grow very quickly right and there's a real command and control challenge for divisions and cores and that's what rear command posts are focused on uh and so they have got to manage to rain and they've got to manage movement they've got to manage priorities in terms of capabilities they may not even directly control but because they own the area they are responsible for positioning those capabilities which is a quite a daunting task given the the size of those areas the last thing that I would leave in terms of this General doctoral template is it's a template all right so these numbers would look very different on the Korean Peninsula than they would in the Iraq desert right they look very different in a non-contiguous area of operations characterized by small land masses or operations in coastal areas in some place like Indo paycom or the Arctic right and so all they are is a general [Music] guide in terms of thinking about the employment of capabilities in time and space all right so let's talk about this idea of mutual support because one of the things that those templates don't necessarily make clear is that the operations we conduct within I say a set of operational Graphics that are on a map which are inherently linear is this idea that the forces themselves our forces themselves are not contiguous inside those areas of operation right they never have been certainly not for a hundred years and even when you show lines on a map in a theater like Afghanistan or Iraq which we we all you know experienced the operations we conducted within those assigned areas even though they were fixed and they were our responsibility they were never contiguous right you've got patrols out in all kinds of different places and one of the planning factors in terms of assuming risk was always what can I get support to those folks if they get into trouble right if I have troops in contact do I have something in supporting range to provide support can I maneuver quickly enough to get there to to relieve them or reinforce them if they got into a fight a bigger fight than they could handle well when you blow this up to large-scale combat operations and you think about some of these imperatives like accounting for the fact that you're under continuous observation where you're going to have a core that has different divisions moving along different axes right the higher echelons got to assume risk in terms of what degree of mutual support is possible uh do I have folks in supporting range and you can mitigate that right with joint capabilities right the Air Force or the Navy perhaps however in large scale combat operations you got to have that situation awareness about what's actually available to do that you cannot just make an assumption that air power is going to mitigate the risk but between two divisions moving on separate axes because that U.S Air Force the air component may be involved in a very heavy defensive counter air fight right because these threats have air forces as well so that's that Dynamic that shifts in terms of large-scale combat operations because all of the service components are going to be very busy and their number one job may not be supporting us on the ground all right so now we're going to get into the context what we expect army forces to do chapters so when we talk about competition you see the the definition we talk about the roles of theater armies which during competition command and control army forces in any particular theater and what are they doing well there's usually a theater campaign plan it's generally oriented on particular adversaries and you're seeking to accrue advantages that contribute to that convert additional deterrence prior to a fight how do you do that well the first thing you do is prepare for that fight in a demonstrable manner because again we're under continuous observation right so we're under continuous observation that means we're on stage and we're being assessed and so those theater exercises those Combat Training Center rotations they're all being observed and we're being assessed so the degree to which we show ourselves capable competent and having the willpower to exercise those capabilities with allies and partners goes a long way towards again creating that level of conventional deterrence so that's our number one job related to that is setting the theater right and we're setting those theaters uh so that we accrue relative advantages in terms of the threat so when deterrence fails we're not coming off our back feet right we're we're ready uh and up on the balls of our feet when indications and warnings say hey a conflict may be intimate so crisis we've had army forces dealing with crisis uh in Eastern Europe since probably December or January of this year right uh we've got two cores and some divisions over there dealing with the crisis in Ukraine and so crisis again is a context what do we expect army forces to do in this chapter this is where we spend a lot of time talking about Force projection the deployment of forces in an expeditionary manner from the continental United States into a particular theater right because it makes sense to talk about it in this context when there's a crisis when there's indications and warnings that a conflict may be intimate what are we expecting army forces to do we expect them to show up ready to fight right because the conditions will change or it could change between home station uh point of Port of embarkation and then the ports of departation across the oceans and so when we say we're responding to crisis the Assumption going in is that we're going into a fight because again being under continuous observation right the threats are making assessments and if we operate effectively more times than not we're likely to affect threats risk calculus and have them back down but that's never a given because they get a vote on that right which is why we say when we respond to crisis we're responding because we're expecting to get into a fight we also talk about the fact that that those deployments will be contested and we've got an appendix at the end of this thing that we'll talk about contested deployments in the continental United States all right so armed conflict the previous two chapters were all about getting ready for armed conflicts when we talked uh the chapter on armed conflict we're talking about the execution okay you see the quote from General Grant on the bottom things haven't really much changed uh in 160 years the fourth bullet down talks about the reason why we have an army okay we conduct offensive and defensive operations to close with and Destroy enemy forces promptly during sustained land combat okay we talk about the rules of echelons in a general sense they set conditions uh for their subordinate echelons they employed the defeat mechanisms and they fight their subordinate echelons to execute those defeat mechanisms why do we do it well we do it to enable that transition uh to the end of armed conflict because we've achieved our objectives and you can have a political settlement because the security conditions are relatively durable because we consolidate gains as we went along we talk about this idea of assuming risk um to create opportunities it gets back into the principles of War it gets into this idea of keep the main thing what's the main effort that's related to objective right if I've got a main thing then everything else is supporting so this idea of economies of force and so forth when you're against that evenly matched enemy creating those favorable correlations of forces requires you to assume risk in other areas to do so and we do that not just with army forces but in combination with the overall Joint Force that we're fighting with so integrating echelons again the the safety message for this chart is we're talking about primary focus right so you can see how these echelons the echelons fit in and we go down to Brigade level that close operations close fight they're focused on enemy maneuver uh formations primarily right working from the bottom up uh divisions can look a little bit deeper in terms of time and space cores even more deeply than that we're not saying that Brigade combat teams only look at the land obviously there's a uas threat red air and so forth but their objectives are physical and based on the land right that's what we assign bcts to do divisions employ the other enabling brigades the functional and multifunctional brigades and other capabilities to enable that to happen whereas cores are set in conditions for divisions they're fighting those divisions uh in such a way setting conditions in time and space looking a little bit deeper and a little bit broader and that continues when you get up to the land component command and the core level uh in terms of army echelons each one of them becomes more multi-domain the further up they go because they have access to capabilities to employ to enable that close combat and the seizure of objectives