Ch. 2 Multidomain Operations and Intelligence

Multidomain Operations and Intelligence

• Multidomain operations are a crucial concept for intelligence professionals, as presented in FM 3-0.
• Army operations are viewed within a joint strategic context, highlighting challenges and strategic environments, including peer threats.
• Understanding the operational environment (OE) is essential to supporting Army units' specific missions.
• Key operational concepts include Army operations, multidomain operations, large-scale combat operations, combined arms, and combat power.
• Peer threats employ various methods like preclusion, isolation, information warfare, and sanctuary systems warfare.
• The U.S. joint force handles these threats using unified action, with the Army's contribution through multidomain operations.
• Multidomain operations span five domains (land, maritime, air, space, and cyberspace) and three dimensions (physical, information, and human).

Army Strategic Challenges

• The joint force discourages adversaries from direct confrontation, leading to indirect aggression through malign activities.
• Adversaries seek to avoid direct conflict with the U.S. using various strategies, including subversive tactics, establishing physical presence, coercive economics, supporting proxy forces, and spreading misinformation.
• However, adversaries may engage in armed conflict under certain conditions.
• Adversaries use all instruments of national power, including network-enabled sensors and long-range fires, to diminish access and challenge friendly forces. This includes counteracting U.S. space, air, and naval advantages.
• These actions increase the risk of U.S. military response, but the threshold for provoking a military response is an important consideration.

Intelligence (Multidomain and Multidimension)

• Army intelligence activities consider various domains and dimensions, including information collection, analysis, and production.
• Army intelligence tasks encompass pre-mission analysis, intelligence preparation of the operational environment (IPOE), situation development, and targeting support.
• These tasks align with the doctrinal concepts in FM 2-0, encompassing all domains and dimensions.

Strategic Environment

• The central challenge to U.S. security is great power competition with China and Russia.
• China aims to reshape the Indo-Pacific region through aggressive military modernization and the Belt and Road Initiative.
• Russia exerts influence in its near abroad, including conflicts and economic manipulation.
• Other states, like North Korea and Iran, pose additional threats with varying capabilities and goals.
• Nonstate actors also threaten the strategic environment with increasingly sophisticated capabilities.

Threat Methods

• Peer threats utilize methods beyond direct conflict, including information warfare, systems warfare, preclusion, area denial, and isolation.
• They employ information warfare through orchestrated use of various tools like (EW, cyberspace operations, and psychological operations).
• Systems warfare targets critical subsystems or components to degrade an opponent's system.
• Preclusion and area denial actions prevent enemy force access to operational areas.
• Isolation separates forces from support and limits freedom of action.
• Sanctuary aims to protect critical capabilities from attack, possibly in multiple domains.

Army Strategic Contexts

• The strategic environment is described as a competition continuum, with cooperation, competition below armed conflict, and armed conflict as key stages.
• Army operations frequently occur within a defined strategic context.

Operational Environment

• The operational environment (OE) comprises conditions, circumstances, and influences affecting operations, encompassing the five domains (land, maritime, air, space, and cyberspace) and three dimensions.
• This framework enables a holistic view of the operational setting for Commanders and staffs.

Operational and Mission Variables

• Operational variables (political, military, economic, social, information, infrastructure, physical environment, and time) and mission variables (mission, enemy, terrain, and weather, troops and support available, time available, and civil considerations) are critical for situational understanding.

Multidomain Task Force

• The Multidomain Task Force (MDTF) is a brigade-sized task force to synchronize and employ cross-domain fires for neutralizing adversary A2/AD strategies within joint force operations.

Warfighting Functions

• Warfighting functions, including intelligence, movement and maneuver, fires, protection, and sustainment, provide the essential elements for generating combat power.

Tenets of Operations

• The tenets of operations, including agility, convergence, endurance, and depth, guide operations and decision-making processes, ensuring success in achieving objectives.

Imperatives of Operations

• Imperatives, which involve seeing the enemy and the OE, creating and exploiting advantages, making initial contact, imposing dilemmas, and consolidating gains, form necessary criteria for success. Units constantly review and modify their approaches to maintain an effective position of relative advantage.

Operational Approach and Operational Framework

• The operational approach describes how tactical tasks achieve overall objectives; the framework visually organizes operations across domains.
• The operational framework is broken into three elements and includes the assigned operational area, extended deep area, and strategic support area.