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Army Transformation Wargame (ATWG) Vigilant Warriors 01

Vigilant Warriors 01 was the second iteration of a multi-year wargaming effort designed to permit The Army to explore key operational and organizational concepts and technology enablers for the Objective Force. Through the dynamics of a projected future setting, a compelling scenario, and a diverse team of multiservice, interagency, and multinational players, the wargame portrayed a microcosm of future major theater war. In so doing, the game provided a competitive clash of concepts - Objective Force concepts against sophisticated adversary warfighting concepts and capabilities contrived to offset US technological advantages.

Set in 2015 against a fictional but plausible background of future political and demographic changes, the wargame scenario entailed a major theater war in which friendly forces confronted an aggressive adversarial federation of states threatening regional stability over access to Tigris-Euphrates water rights and motivated by the desire for regional hegemony. The conflict immediately threatened alliances, freedom of navigation in the Persian Gulf and Suez Canal, and western access to oil and free trade.

The opposing force was a free-thinking and technically competent adversary possessing powerful ground forces, able to threaten and conduct out-of-region attacks including the use of weapons of mass effects. It was also capable of conducting complex and innovative offensive and defensive operations employing a variety of conventional and asymmetric means.

Army Transformation Wargame Vigilant Warriors 01, set in the future, explored the challenges of multidimensional operations and operational maneuver from strategic distances. It featured the Army's Objective Force, the other services' projected capabilities, and the capabilities of key allies and adversaries during the same time. It validated the premise that rapidly deployed Army Objective Forces-as part of a joint, multinational force-significantly impacted crisis resolution. It also proved that the immediate and sustained momentum of a land force expands its flexibility to exploit lethal fires, reduces risks, and constrains enemy options. Finally, it concurrently offered a venue to explore the force-projection concepts and technologies necessary to produce a strategically responsive joint force capable of immediate decisive operations.

In its examination of the challenges of operational maneuver from strategic distances, Vigilant Warriors 01 focused on deployment capabilities that can provide assured access, decrease predictability and dwell time, and quickly deliver troops and equipment together in sufficient size to generate immediate combat power. Today's inventory of lift assets cannot provide these capabilities, even when Army Transformation is completed.

Military and commercial airlift provide the necessary speed, but it is a piecemeal delivery system with a small capacity. Sealift has the necessary capacity, but it is slow and requires days to load and unload. Moreover, both sea and air assets are port and airfield dependent, affected by throughput limitations, and susceptible to a foe's antiaccess strategy because of their reliance on predictable entry points. The US and allied forces in Vigilant Warriors 01 employed a mixture of current lift assets and promising future concepts.

Although deprived of freedom of maneuver and external support and sustainment, locally dangerous forces remained scattered throughout the area of operations, most in fortified urban enclaves. While incapable of major offensive operations, these residual forces posed a persistent hazard to Blue's lines of communication, and their elimination or suppression would be a necessary precondition to conflict termination.