As new technology and emerging security threats intersect, United States Army leaders are developing what they call a “new triad” to enhance integration and operational capability across all domains. The goal is to deploy critical capabilities from the U.S. Army Space and Missile Defense Command (SMDC), Army Cyber Command (ARCYBER) and Army Special Operations Command (USASOC) for a more agile response to threats. U.S. military leaders say the new triad augments — but does not replace — the traditional nuclear triad and takes advantage of emerging technology brought to bear by the different commands to ensure effective integrated deterrence.
The U.S. Department of Defense (DOD) combatant commands have embraced the new triad concept, first introduced in 2022. The goal is to provide the force with enhanced capabilities to see, sense, stimulate, strike and assess across spectrums of conflict.
The U.S. and its Allies and Partners face daily threats from adversaries that occur in the gray zone below the threshold of armed conflict, including influence and misinformation and disinformation operations, cyberattacks and economic coercion. China, North Korea and Russia, as well as nonstate actors, conduct cyberattacks and disinformation campaigns seeking to gain advantages and destabilize the stable and open international system without provoking a conventional military response. In addition to supporting Soldiers in the battlefield, technologies developed within the new triad can protect against these gray-zone threats.
“The triad in essence is multidomain operations in action,” Col. Pete Atkinson, Space Division Chief, Department of the Army headquarters, said in an interview with Government Executive magazine. Atkinson is the lead for planning and programming of cross-functional capabilities supporting new triad development. “It’s leveraging the best of all three components that make it unique. What you’re seeing is a convergence of capabilities to support multidomain operations. The triad is really an incubator of ideas,” he said.
U.S. forces and Allies and Partners must stay ahead of adversaries in an evolving landscape, Lt. Gen. Jonathan Braga, commanding general of USASOC, said at the October 2023 Association of the U.S. Army conference in Washington, D.C.
“The character of war is changing. I would also say the nature of deterrence is changing,” Braga noted. “The tools that the adversary is using are changing, and we need to stay ahead of the adversaries by converging these three disciplines right here for a larger holistic asymmetric advantage against our adversaries. You better believe our adversaries are investing in these types of capabilities.”
Atkinson highlighted several concerns with the implementation, however.
“We’ve been working the triad concept for many years,” Atkinson said. “How do we integrate capabilities? How does Special Operations use its axis of placement to leverage cyber? How do we integrate space to deny adversary use of space for hostile purposes? How do we ensure space to the joint warfighter?”
Integrated deterrence “is a cornerstone of our national defense strategy. It’s whole of government plus Allies and Partners,” he said. “When you look at deterrence, how do you prevent the transition from competition to conflict? We do that from a position of strength, relative advantage.”
New Threats, New Solutions
For 65 years, the U.S military’s nuclear triad has provided an umbrella of protection from aggression to the U.S. and its Allies and Partners. During the 1960s, the buildup of intercontinental ballistic missiles, ballistic missile submarines and bombers was intended to prevent a first strike from the Soviet Union by making the potential response to a first strike sufficiently severe to deter an attack.
The new triad incorporates and develops technology not imagined when the original nuclear triad was formed. New sensor technology can enhance situational awareness for troops on the ground, track enemy targets and position strategic assets. Data transmission enables real-time communications across forces and domains. Artificial intelligence and machine learning can significantly shorten decision-making time in the field. Due to the rise of electronic and social media, disinformation campaigns can spread around the world at lightning speed.
CARRIE DAVID CAMPBELL/U.S. ARMY
To counter these threats, the joint force must pull together and maximize its greatest capabilities for strategic deterrence, Army leaders said during a panel at the SMDC conference.
USASOC and ARCYBER collaborate to counter misinformation campaigns. While USASOC conducts psychological and information operations, ARCYBER can help reveal the source of threats and messages. Enhanced capabilities include data transport and analytics and integration of those tools to support the joint forces.
ARCYBER also is working on new tools to use in electronic warfare (EW), said Aaron Pearce, ARCYBER’s director for information warfare. “We’re also working across the Army to develop an electromagnetic countermeasure enterprise that hasn’t existed for quite some time in the Army like it has in some of the other services,” Pearce said. “We’re looking at ways that we can rapidly develop, field and deploy EW effects against an ever-changing number of [threats] on the battlefield from our adversaries.”
The command is moving new tools from experimentation to operations with the command’s 11th Cyber Battalion, Pearce added. “Over the next year, what we anticipate doing is actually beginning to prove the concept in real-world operations in support of our geographic combatant commands, as well as U.S. Special Operations Command, to really get after some of the types of effects that we’ve demonstrated in experimentation exercises, so we’re looking forward to it,” he said.
Increasing reliance on satellite-enabled communication places assets launched by the U.S. and its Allies and Partners at risk of attack, whether a kinetic attack or EW, that can disrupt or disable those assets. SMDC is developing and testing space-based tools that assure positioning, timing and navigation to troops and equipment on the ground, Col. Mark Cobos, commander, 1st Space Brigade, SMDC, said at the August 2024 Space and Missile Defense Symposium in Huntsville, Alabama. These tools also will conduct reconnaissance that supports EW defense so that communication on the battlefield isn’t lost, Cobos said. “Army space operations now and in the future must be small, fast and able to keep pace with the Army corps on the attack when conducting forcible entry operations,” he said. “We have made important progress within the Army’s triad as we pursue operations to take advantage of the unique placement provided by [Special Operations] that allows us in turn to conduct close space support in coordination with our cyber counterparts in positions of advantage across the battlefield.”
ALEX SOLIDAY/U.S. ARMY
Allies and Partners play a vital role in the new triad, Cobos said. “We share a vision of expeditionary space operations,” he said. “Our warfighting imperative is to fight and conduct effective space operations in the close, deep and extended deep parts of the battlefield. We are moving in that direction with a clear sense of urgency and sense of purpose, knowing that our Army and joint forces in battlefields around the world require close space support to fight and win on land, from, through and into space.”
Wing Cmdr. Gareth Jones, United Kingdom Space Command, concurred.
“The triad is fundamental to our ability to warfight at scale and win in the future. Triad members must understand that using each other’s strengths does not just mean doing everything in the same way at the same time together,” he said. “It’s about believing in each other’s strengths and weaknesses to make sure that we are effective as possible. … It’s fundamental to our ability to fight at scale.”
Capabilities Converge
Merging capabilities from the cyber, space and special forces worlds delivers more options for commanders to strengthen integrated deterrence, but these capabilities must be proven to integrate and operate accurately and effectively. Project Convergence combines a series of annual exercises and experiments designed to test new technology and integrate capabilities into multidomain operations. The first exercises were held over six weeks in mid-2020 at Yuma Proving Ground, Arizona, and combined developmental and operational testing on autonomous vehicles and launched effects (small drones launched from aircraft or ground vehicles). Around 900 visiting support personnel participated in the exercises.
Project Convergence has since expanded to include all U.S. armed forces and international partners Australia, Canada, France, Japan, New Zealand and the United Kingdom. The campaign’s Capstone 4 (PC-C4) exercise, held in February and March 2024 at Camp Pendleton, California, included more than 4,000 service members and civilians. PC-C4 teams tested ground-based rockets and missiles and counteruncrewed aircraft systems, experimenting with the capabilities of joint and multinational layered air and missile defense systems.
“Layered defense means we will see different weapons against targets from the defended area,” said Air Force Maj. Morgan Huttes, director of operations from the 134th Air Control Squadron, according to a news release. “This way, the coalition can increase the probability of kill while maximizing our weapons efficiency.”
“The more we do this together, the easier it becomes in reality, and the more agile we become — not just as institutions in our own right [or] as nations in our own right, but as a partnership of institutions and nations,” said British Army Lt. Col. Callum Lane, the U.K. exchange officer within the U.S. Army Joint Modernization Command.
PC-C4 also experimented with emerging technology to develop human-machine integrated formations, which bring robotics and autonomous vehicles into fighting formations with the goal of keeping soldiers out of harm’s way.
“This is one of our major efforts inside the Army,” Gen. James E. Rainey, commanding general of Army Futures Command, said at the March 2024 U.S. Army Global Force Symposium in Huntsville, Alabama. “It’s going very well and is full of opportunities to go to the next level. We’re never going to replace humans with machines; it’s about optimizing them.”
Troops have conducted other Project Convergence exercises in the Indo-Pacific and Europe.
New triad capabilities will support Joint All-Domain Command and Control (JADC2), the U.S. Defense Department’s effort to keep pace with the volume and complexity of data in modern warfare by facilitating data sharing with Allies and Partners across domains and forces.
“Command and Control in an increasingly information-focused warfighting environment have never been more critical,” then-U.S. Deputy Defense Secretary Kathleen Hicks said in a 2022 statement. “JADC2 will enable the DOD to act at the speed of relevance to improve U.S. national security. JADC2 is delivering capabilities beginning now, and it will continue to be funded in the coming years.”
Atkinson concurred.
“Never before has something in orbit been able to affect the Army more than it has today — and will increasingly be able to affect the Army in the future,” he said. “How do we take those concepts that are happening across the services and how does that tie into JADC2, a more broad concept across the DOD and the joint staff when they look at leveraging multiple services? That’s really the convergence piece that we’re talking about. The way the joint force has been operating will be fundamentally different than before.”
The top challenge, Atkinson explained, remains equipping forces with the right balance of hardware versus services such as software support, leveraging industry without buying hardware that will be obsolete when Soldiers deploy it.
“When we look at what the triad brings, it’s those formations together that provide exquisite capability at the time of need and it really casts doubt in our adversaries that they have an advantage, whether it be technological or any other matter — whether it be formations on the battlefield,” Atkinson said. “So really, it is casting doubt and showcasing the U.S. from a position of strength to deter aggression, to keep us in a point of competition and prevent us from transitioning to a point of conflict.”