Learning To Speak Maneuver

I am not what you would consider to be a “car person” which means that I usually pay for maintenance and don’t look under the hood unless I see smoke.

- Capt. Joshua Urness

Sometimes when car people tell me about some new upgrade they made to their car, I act like I understand, but my eyes glaze over because I have no comprehension of what they are saying. When I arrived at my first Patriot unit, I felt exactly the same way.

I had spent the first several years of my career at an Avenger/Stinger unit, and to be honest, we didn’t do a whole lot of Avenger/Stinger things. In fact, not too long after I left the Basic Officer Leaders Course at Fort Bliss, Texas, we deployed to Afghanistan where I conducted convoy security missions in support of NATO.

Reading Brig. Gen. Randall McIntire’s “Short Range Air Defense (SHORAD) Vision,” in the November-December, 2017 issue of the “Fires Bulletin,” brought back to life the complexities of cross-branch integration that I experienced transitioning from SHORAD to Patriot. McIntire, the U.S. Army Air Defense Artillery School commandant, used his SHORAD vision as a conduit to describe how the world had changed, so the Army must also change. He explained that the Army divested divisional air defense capabilities during the Global War on Terror, but since the rise of peer adversaries, increased use of drones and greater threats to U.S. maneuver forces, SHORAD is needed now more than ever. In summary, air defense will reintegrate with maneuver units in an effort that began last summer and continues over the next several years.

I think that one of the first and central challenges the air defense branch will face in the early stages of maneuver integration is what I described earlier as the “car person” dilemma.