Redefining Operational Maneuver with the Future Combat System (FCS)

Why did seven German panzer divisions slicing through the Ardennes in 1940 succeed where a far larger force foundered in Russia a year later, and what could that contrast teach an American army betting its future on a radically lighter armored vehicle? That is the question at the heart of Redefining Operational Maneuver with the Future Combat System (FCS), a School of Advanced Military Studies monograph by Major Michael J. Rosamond of the United States Army, completed at the Command and General Staff College, Fort Leavenworth, with a report date of 26 May 2004. SAMS monographs are the capstone product of the Army's elite second-year staff college, applying rigorous historical and doctrinal study to a live operational problem, and this one was approved for public release.

Rosamond wrote at the peak of the Army's Transformation initiative. His thesis is direct: the Army can redefine operational maneuver with the Future Combat System while fighting in a joint environment. He frames the shift from the Cold War's threat-based model, embodied in the Army's big five systems, the Abrams, Paladin, Multiple Launch Rocket System, Bradley, and Apache, toward the capabilities-based vision of the Objective Force. The core problem he names is weight: heavy mechanized forces cannot deploy fast enough, narrowing a President's options. The argument is steeped in the experience of 2003, especially Turkey's refusal to let a heavy armored force open a northern front in Iraq, which Rosamond reads through Huntington's clash-of-civilizations thesis to argue that the United States can no longer assume permissive entry.

The analytical spine is a comparative study of German maneuver warfare. Drawing on Guderian's Achtung-Panzer, Rosamond extracts three prerequisites for successful panzer attacks, suitable terrain, surprise, and concentration, plus four supporting arms that must dominate: reconnaissance, artillery, aircraft, and signals. He grounds the lineage in J.F.C. Fuller's armored idea and traces how Germany kept its skills alive under the Versailles Treaty through mock-ups, secret cooperation with Russia, and glider clubs. France 1940 is his model of success: concentration through terrain the French thought impassable, strategic and tactical surprise, the Luftwaffe as flying artillery at the Meuse, and a decisive radio advantage. Operation Barbarossa 1941 is his model of failure: panzers split across three army groups, tanks per division falling from 300 to 199, and an overstretched Luftwaffe unable to mass. The lesson he draws is that a tactical system, the panzer then and the FCS now, yields operational and strategic success only when its prerequisites are met and its supporting arms, today the Joint Force, dominate.

Rosamond then translates the lesson into Transformation vocabulary, distinguishing the Unit of Employment from the Unit of Action, detailing enabling systems such as TES, ASAS, and AFATDS, and proposing a new Air Ground Expeditionary Force pairing the Air Force's aerospace expeditionary force with a Unit of Action, even while a GAO study he cites shows that lifting a Stryker Brigade within 96 hours would consume up to 30 percent of inter-theater airlift and still take five days. Because the FCS program was later restructured and ultimately cancelled, the monograph stands as a faithful record of the ambitions and assumptions of its moment.

This Nimble Books edition reproduces the monograph faithfully and adds a full editorial apparatus prepared for this volume: an original Historical Context essay; two complementary plain-language abstracts, an accessible summary and an advanced analytical reading; a Glossary of doctrinal terms; Indexes of persons, places, and concepts; and an original computational RKHS knowledge-graph analysis placing the work among related studies of doctrine and acquisition. It serves military professionals, historians, students, and librarians.