Revolution will dramatically increase the lethality and reach of defensive fires. Unless the means for offensive maneuver adapt to overcome the greatly enhanced power of the defense, future soldiers will face stalemate and indecision much like their forefathers confronted in 1914.As the world's leading economic and military power, the United States has both the resources and the incentive to sustain its ability to conduct rapid, decisive land combat. As airmechanization's theorists and the Army After Next Project have shown, the key lies in creating air-mechanized Precision Maneuver forces that profit from the synergy created by digitization, precision firepower, and vertical envelopment.This monograph argues that there exists sufficient means and technology to create an initial Precision Maneuver rapid reaction corps before 2010. It would behoove the Army to embark on this project immediately. The nation's security demands the Army act now to build a new force, one that leads the next revolution in war by redressing the growing imbalance between fire and maneuver, one with the speed, reach, and precision required for rapid, decisive, land campaigns in the Information Age.

Tactical Alchemy: Heavy Division Tactical Maneuver Planning Guides and the Army's Neglect of the Science of War. In the wake of the Cold War, the U.S. Army increasingly finds its institutional focus shifting away from preparing for sustained mechanized land combat. This trend serves the Army's immediate operational needs and addresses its perceived need to demonstrate relevancy, but it also raises an important question. How can the Army preserve for future use its hard won expertise in combined arms mechanized warfare? The art of these operations is well documented in doctrine, tactics, techniques, and procedures, but the science of time, space, and combat power in heavy division operations is not. In effect, the Army is already lapsing into what J.F.C. Fuller described as "military alchemy," denying the science of war in favor of theorizing on its art. The generation of officers raised during the Cold War and tested in battle in the Gulf is fading away taking with it the Army's practical expertise in the physics of combined arms mechanized warfare. This knowledge is largely unrecorded in doctrine and has long been absent from the core course tactics instruction at the Command and General Staff College. If the Army is to preserve its institutional expertise in mechanized warfare, it must undertake to document, analyze, and codify this missing science. Failure to do so would place the Army at risk of being dangerously unprepared for the challenges posed by close combat with peer and near-peer competitors in the new century. iii