Tag Archive for: US Army

Houthis’ lesson for the US Army: how a land force can fight a maritime war

The US Army should consider borrowing a page from the playbook of Yemen’s Houthi militants.

The character of war is always changing, and the Houthis’ ongoing attacks against shipping in the Red Sea may prove to be one of the more significant inflection points in military history.

The change involves sea control and sea denial through the application of long-range precision missile fire and autonomous drone employment from the shore. The Houthis effectively blend a mix of anti-ship ballistic missiles, cruise missiles and one-way attack drones to contest control over maritime lines of communication in the Red Sea littoral. They have so far damaged at least 30 merchant ships, sunk two and killed or detained several merchant sailors.

The US Army should aim for much the same capability in a contested littoral environment against an adversary such as China. Technically and tactically, the service is moving in this direction, but it needs to fully embrace the strategy to avoid becoming largely irrelevant in the major war in which the US is most likely to become involved. Army heavy formations almost certainly won’t be available in the initial fighting in a Western Pacific war.

The army can draw on efforts that are already underway in the US military. It can, for example, take inspiration from the US Navy’s Distributed Maritime Operations (DMO) concept, in which ships are widely separated but act in unison. Army units might operate similarly in the Western Pacific.

The navy is developing DMO for forces that find themselves in combat against an adversary, such as China, that can detect, track and attack US and allied assets at great distances with a variety of different weapon systems.

The army’s own Typhon or Strategic Mid-Range Fires (SMRF) program, in which it is fielding its Precision Strike Missiles (PrSMs) and navy SM-6 and Tomahawk missiles for strike missions, should contribute, as should research into drone technology by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA).

In a maritime war in the Western Pacific, the army would likely have to operate on distant island bases and attack shipping in much the same way the Houthis are doing from the interior of Yemen. Geographic dispersal will be a vital aspect of survivability in the next war.

The SMRF program is already well adapted for shore-based sea control operations. So is the army’s new Multi-Domain Task Force (MDTF), in which units are tailored to specific theatres for long-range precision effects, including cyber, electromagnetic warfare and precision strike using weapons systems like PrSM and SM-6.

The army should apply the DMO concept to SMRF-equipped MDTFs and deploy them on bases outside the First Island Chain, the string of islands from Japan to Indonesia that hems in China.

This forward presence would contribute to integrated deterrence by forcing the Chinese military to cope with multiple operational dilemmas. It would, for example, have to track multiple distant targets simultaneously and defend against firing batteries distributed across the Western Pacific. Those batteries would demand attention because they’d have the range and lethality to strike and destroy high-value targets throughout the region.

A key aspect of Houthi operations has been the use of one-way attack drones—in effect propellor-driven cruise missiles that are extremely cheap and numerous, presenting unsustainable economic challenge, given the cost of defensive interceptors like SM-2s and SM-6s. Here too, the US Army can learn from the Houthis and adapt to use similar tactics. DARPA’s work, for instance, on offensive swarming drones will be a vital advance in how US thinks about and executes offensive maritime operations and sea control or denial.

To Houthi tactics, add strategic mobility. Here, the utility of the US Air Force’s heavy airlifters comes into play. They can deploy ground units almost anywhere that has even a rough airfield, greatly reinforcing the army’s ability to participate in an island-based maritime war. US and allied exercises should routinely practice rapid loading and unloading of systems such as HIMARS missile launchers on and off C-130 Hercules cargo aircraft.

A valuable effect of such exercises would be honing interoperability between US services and between them and allied militaries. Indeed, highly capable US allies, such as Australia, should play a major role in how the US Army and broader joint forces think about fighting in the Western Pacific.

The US Army and allied forces can achieve a war-altering advantage if they learn from and apply the Houthi tactic of controlling the sea from the shore with inexpensive drones and long-range precision strike weapons and if they blend this technique with air mobility.

The Houthis are unlikely teachers but teachers nonetheless. Houthi operations have demonstrated that shore-based sea control and sea denial can be highly effective. They have shown how the US Army and US partners and allies should incorporate new tactics and weapons systems into their forces before the next war comes.

Wargaming will be a key to strengthening deterrence in the Indo-Pacific

China’s evolving anti-access/area-denial network and Russia’s hybrid warfare approach to conflict present US and allied forces with major new military problems in the 21st century.

Potential remedies to these developments were canvassed in the US National Defense Strategy Commission’s 2018 report on the issues diminishing American military advantages. The commission recommended that the US develop new operational concepts to expand its relative advantages in key warfighting areas such as power projection, air and missile defence, cyber and space operations, anti-surface and anti-submarine warfare, long-range land-based fires and electronic warfare.

Congress has since endeavoured to provide the US military with what it needs to win a war against China. In 2020, the Pacific Deterrence Initiative was established to target new spending on high-priority needs such as linking up a network of training ranges across the Western Pacific. Budget allocations under the initiative are itemised for various exercises, training, experimentation and innovation programs planned by the Department of Defense and US armed forces. Despite this, the initiatives budget was cut by US$1 billion in 2021 and is expected to be reduced by a further 25% (to US$4.4 billion) by 2027.

A lack of funding for training would hamper the US military’s ability to compete in the Indo-Pacific and undermine efforts to reinforce deterrence. This is compounded by the fact that the tyranny of distance reduces opportunities for large multinational exercises to deliver the kind of wargaming experimentation that is urgently needed. Radically different and innovative wargaming exercises are now necessary to support and test joint warfighting concepts in anticipation of a crisis.

Wargames are analytical experiments that simulate aspects of warfare at the strategic, operational or tactical level. They are used to examine warfighting concepts, explore scenarios and assess how force planning and posture choices affect campaign outcomes. Wargames are designed to foster critical thinking and innovation and help prepare commanders and analysts for future challenges.

The US Army’s ‘project convergence’ is described as a campaign of learning designed to evaluate dozens of new and improved weapon systems and other technologies, including autonomous systems and network-focused technologies. Supporting five core elements—soldiers, weapons systems, command and control, information and terrain—the inaugural exercise concentrated on what the army calls the ‘close fight’ by integrating new enabling technologies at the lowest operational level so that tactical networks could facilitate faster decision-making. The second iteration focused on live-fire events and ways to incorporate artificial intelligence, machine learning, autonomy, robotics and common data standards into decision-making processes across multiple domains of operations.

While most associate wargaming with tabletop exercises simulating future conflict, the project convergence exercises incorporate comprehensive boots-on-the-ground activities to test the practical elements of joint operations with the other US services and allied militaries.

In 2022, the US Army hosted what it called ‘all-service events’ to test merging its own capabilities with those of Australia and the UK in a realistic operational context. About 110 Australian Defence Force personnel and 450 British soldiers deployed alongside their US counterparts. Simulating a littoral contest in the Pacific, the trinational collaboration facilitated information-sharing to provide a common operating picture and sensor-to-shooter connectivity. In all, around 300 technologies and new operational concepts were tested during the weeks-long experiment, allowing the US, the UK and Australia to demonstrate how the different services and militaries might fight as a combined force against a technologically competent opponent.

The next iteration of project convergence, in 2024, will look beyond the tactical level to focus on experimentation at the theatre level. According to Lieutenant General Scott McKean, director of the US Army’s Futures and Concepts Center, part of the upcoming evaluation will examine if the joint force is getting closer to achieving what it calls a ‘kill web’. The ideal is a transformative process in which sensor-to shooter ‘kill chains’ are expanded into a comprehensive network of sensors providing options to take out battlefield targets within seconds rather than minutes or hours.

The importance of project convergence cannot be understated. By integrating current US Army mission command capabilities with emerging technologies under development, the exercise builds on the Pentagon’s broader ‘joint all-domain command and control’ (JADC2) effort to connect sensors from all of the services into a single network. The project provides the perfect platform for Australian military modernisation and the ADF to move beyond interoperability to interchangeability with the US.

Whether the ADF should more tightly integrate its capabilities with those of the US in the context of integrated deterrence, however, remains an undeveloped aspect of the broader discussion on the JADC2 concept and military compatibility. As William Leben, a senior research officer at the National Security College, has noted, differing network speeds and bandwidths, excessive data-sharing restrictions and differences of scale and resourcing all militate against opportunities to leverage tactical applications made possible by new technologies. Given these caveats, it would be prudent for the Australian government, in its forthcoming response to the defence strategic review, to consider whether the ADF should plug and play with JADC2.

Either way, Australia’s involvement in project convergence will become more important as the ADF works to be better prepared to lead coalition operations if it is deemed to be in the interests of Australia and the region for it to do so. In the context of integrated deterrence, future iterations of project convergence could serve as a vital testbed for the advanced capabilities brought online under the second pillar of the AUKUS agreement.

The Indo-Pacific will undoubtedly continue to witness a broader array of large-scale multinational joint-action exercises that enhance interoperability, and even integration. The war in Ukraine provides powerful reminders that technology and tactics have changed the character and pace of conflict. It’s been suggested by US researchers that likely lessons from Ukraine for the Chinese military, should Beijing be considering a campaign to capture Taiwan, include a need to reassess the role of ground forces, to have a stronger focus on strategic deception early in the operation, and to prepare for a protracted struggle presupposing staunch resistance in Taiwan amid participation from a larger-than-anticipated set of US allies. How the ADF manages its own capacity to adapt when an Indo-Pacific contingency arises will be a determining factor in the opening stages.

A much more dangerous operating environment requires the US and its key Indo-Pacific allies to evolve their training practices and procedures. Failing to prioritise wargaming experimentation could result in mismatched capabilities and operational concepts with disastrous consequences if they are needed on the battlefield.

US Army Pacific Commander: Next war will be violent, very human, unpredictable and long

Despite a strong focus on air and naval power, the commander of the United States Army in the Pacific says land forces will play a crucial role in any future regional conflict.

And to deter the growing power of China’s armed forces from conflict, the US relies heavily on friends and allies through the region, says General Charles Flynn.

In conversation with ASPI executive director Peter Jennings in Canberra this week, Flynn made clear that such a conflict would be costly in the extreme.

‘Despite any wishful thinking, we can be sure that the next war will be very violent, it will be very human, it will be very unpredictable. And so our Pacific theatre army is preparing for long war because history has proven that wars are often longer than we expect.’

Flynn assumed command of the US Army Pacific in June 2021 with instructions to urgently ‘seize the initiative, to think act and operate differently’.

The US Army, Flynn said, was taking new approaches to create new dilemmas for adversaries and to create new opportunities with allies and partners. That was being done through the cooperative training efforts of the Joint Pacific Multinational Readiness Center in Hawaii and Alaska which were used last year in exercise Garuda Shield in Indonesia. There ‘our forces trained in an environment and in the conditions that we are most likely expected to operate in’.

Such exercises increased the confidence of allies and partners and were and absolute counterweight to destabilising activities going on across the region. ‘And they are our strength being together, elbow to elbow, rifle to rifle, tank to tank, formation to formation.’

Flynn said he had three goals in talks with Australian commanders: expanding the scale and scope of exercises and experiments, tying together Australian and US training centres, and then modernising in a way that made both nations’ forces not just interoperable but almost interchangeable.

Of longstanding exercises with allies in Japan, the Philippines and Thailand, the most significant was Talisman Sabre in Australia, which tested high-end warfighting scenarios. ‘We must continue to grow together in this age of new technology and new threats,’ Flynn said.

‘The future fight will be global, it’ll be multidirectional, it’ll be multidimensional, and it’ll be multi-domain,’ said Flynn. ‘If we fight the next war domain on domain, we may not like the outcome. But if we fight across all domains with our allies and partners, and if we fight as a combined joint force, demonstrating our ability to make that problem more complex and harder every day, that is the core of integrated deterrents, and there is no adversary in a planet that can match that teamwork.’

The Biden administration’s just released Indo-Pacific strategy declares that this is the start of what it calls a decisive decade and says our collective efforts over the next decade will determine whether China succeeds in transforming the rules and norms we’ve benefited from.

Jennings noted that while that focused on the next 10 years, Australia’s plans to re-equip were set to take 20 years or more. So, he asked, what gave the US military its sense of urgency?

Flynn said that urgency flowed from the concerns of the US administration that China was both a now and a future problem.

‘I think having a sense of urgency about the challenges that are in front of us is beneficial to focusing our efforts, particularly in a time when resources for all of us are diminishing in some ways.

‘We have to be much more thoughtful about the actions that we take and the work that we do together. Because again, I think the efforts that the region is taking with like-minded countries to keep it as a free and open Indo-Pacific is the path that we need to continue to follow given the actions by China.’

Jennings noted US Secretary of State Antony Blinken’s observation in Australia recently that China was focused on world domination and asked Flynn if he shared that judgement.

‘I do,’ said Flynn. ‘I think they absolutely have global aspirations. I think their first step is the regional work that they are taking on. And again, I think the things that they’re doing in the region is their effort to then achieve their aspirations globally.’

Flynn said the AUKUS agreement involving the US, Britain and Australia showed how the alliance was developing.

‘I think the benefits of agreements like that, and then the things that we can do together in the region to continue to exercise and conduct operations in support of one another, whether that’s humanitarian assistance and disaster relief to training and experiments that we have shared efforts on is really important.’

The Australian Army’s modernisation efforts were very closely aligned to modernisation of the US Army.

In terms of Flynn’s stated need to shift his army’s mindset, get organised and get into position, the general said the focus was on preparations for the future through training institutions in the region. ‘That’s one effort where we can train in the environment and in the conditions that we’re most likely to operate in in the region. And then we can build that training readiness with our allies and partners.’

That would provide pathways for the US to project ready forces into the region, Flynn said. ‘If the outcome of that is to increase the confidence in our allies and partners as we exercise forward and we enable some of their efforts, then that is another outcome we want.’

The US Army was working closely with the Australian Defence Force.

Changing mindsets among the 107,000 people in the Pacific theatre army meant ensuring that leaders at every level, from headquarters to small formations, provided identity and purpose and mission and drew on lessons from operations going back to the defence of Manilla in 1899 and the massive battles of World War II.

Military diplomacy sees Flynn travelling extensively in the Pacific and elsewhere in Asia meeting counterparts from the armed forces of friendly nations, discussing areas of cooperation such as exercises, and ‘finding out from them what it is that they need, what are their objectives, what is it that they seek from us.

‘And if we can help in some small way or large ways with training or certain expertise that we have, or expertise that they have that they want to help us with, then I think the value of that is much greater than a transactional engagement that others may be having in the region.’

Flynn said that beyond the notion of US and Australian forces being interoperable would be ‘interchangeability’. ‘If you have similar attack aviation, similar lift aviation, similar ground combat vehicles, similar air defence, short-range, long-range, similar fires, networks, then … you’re certainly going to be together.’

All the US services were working on and experimenting with new technology to give them an edge. The goal was to weave such weapons and equipment into exercises taking place in the areas where they might ultimately be deployed in a crisis or conflict. ‘I think there’s great value in that because some of the test locations that we have in the continental US look an awful lot like the Middle East and this region does not look like that.’

His would be the first army to have a hybrid cloud which would go up in the coming year. Further work encouraged under the AUKUS agreement would be in artificial intelligence, quantum physics and cyber. Bringing robotics, artificial intelligence and machine learning into this region could advance work of like-minded partners like Australia. ‘I think we’ll make some real gains by exercising and experimenting all at the same time.’ Platforms included new watercraft. Every exercise had some form of experimentation going on.

Flynn said the US Army had six modernisation priorities—integrated air–missile defence, future vertical lift, long-range precision fires, network modernisation, next-generation combat vehicle and soldier lethality—and created cross-functional teams to develop them. ‘If we are not adapting and changing, then we’re going to fail and we’re going to get behind.’

That work benefited from cooperation with an ally such as Australia.

Asked if the US and its allies could stand up to China’s growing military power, Flynn responded: ‘I don’t think it’s a question of can; I think we must.’ That came down to the strength of alliances across the region.

And how important to the US was an ability to operate from Australia?

‘Rotational and dynamic employment of forces in this region at scale is a really, important strategic deployment undertaking that we have to participate in as a US military, particularly the army,’ said Flynn.

The answer was to ‘have more faces in more places’, he said, ‘constantly rehearsing the ability to take strategic movements and conduct operational manoeuvres using air, sea, land, and shaping with cyberspace.’

Biden’s nod to US forces’ increased presence must be met by accelerated Australian investment

In more normal times, when nuclear-powered submarines and multibillion-dollar contract cancellations didn’t dominate the news, plans to increase the US military presence operating out of Australia would be big news.

It was swamped by the AUKUS announcement, but the annual AUSMIN meeting between Australia’s foreign affairs and defence ministers and their US counterparts in Washington in September did include the clear ambition to increase US forces’ presence at and operation through Australian facilities.

With the release of President Joe Biden’s decision to approve the recommendations made in the global posture review, it’s time to realise the significance of the moves that are likely to be underway in our near future, if the indications from Australian and US political leadership are taken seriously.

The Pentagon’s announcement was short on details, but in its mere two pages of text it found room to say:

It is no surprise that the Indo-Pacific is the priority region for the review, given the secretary’s focus on China as America’s pacing challenge. The review directs additional cooperation with allies and partners to advance initiatives that contribute to regional stability and deter Chinese military aggression and threats from North Korea …

These initiatives include seeking greater regional access for military partnership activities, enhancing infrastructure in Guam and Australia and prioritizing military construction across the Pacific Islands. They also include new US rotational aircraft deployments and logistics cooperation in Australia.

So, the Indo-Pacific and Australia specifically are priorities, although it’s not clear exactly how or when that will be demonstrated. That’s because it’s not in the gift of the Pentagon or the White House to create places where US forces can operate in others’ countries with local partners. This is deep international politics. Access negotiations are among the most difficult areas of military diplomacy, particularly in an environment of great-power competition and tension. US partners have a key role in getting practical outcomes.

US decisions on where in the Indo-Pacific it will disperse its forces—army, navy, air force and marines—will be directly influenced by the political environment in particular places, the geographic advantages of locations, the industrial support available and the partnerships that an increased US force presence will enable. On all these factors, Australia scores highly, with the north of the country providing access to Southeast Asia and the west providing access to the Indian Ocean.

The other critical factor to making this happen rapidly is Australian decision-making and investment to begin to build these expanded facilities to meet the needs of our own forces and those of our partners. This combination of politics, geography, direct military partnership and Australian investment provides all the ingredients to make Australia a ‘deployment and sustainment hub’. Doing this requires Australian money in the order of billions to expand facilities at Stirling naval base in Western Australia and in Darwin harbour, along with associated air facilities in the north and west.

In northern Australia, it probably also means starting something new with the US Army, whose Pacific element is larger than the whole Australian Army and which is seeing its future as dispersing from its long-term primary focuses on Hawaii, South Korea, Alaska and Japan. The US Army has been the forgotten service in force posture initiatives so far, but the AUSMIN communiqué tells us this is changing, referring to ‘enhanced land cooperation by conducting more complex and more integrated exercises and greater combined engagement with Allies and Partners in the region’. Working with the Australian Army and wider joint force on Australian training ranges and exercises areas will look uniquely roomy and valuable in comparison with the many limitations the US Army faces elsewhere.

Waiting for Washington to make all the decisions isn’t the right path and also not the way the Australia–US relationship works, so Australia needs to get ahead of slow processes and let the US know of the decisions and investments Canberra plans to make for joint ends.

There are signs Defence Minister Peter Dutton and the defence organisation may be thinking along these lines. In the press conference after the September AUSMIN meeting, he went further than the language of the formal joint statement, which read like a slow, careful extrapolation of what has been happening for years under the US force posture initiatives signed when Julia Gillard was prime minister.

In the AUSMIN press conference, Dutton talked about an expansion of air, maritime and broader force posture cooperation by saying, ‘[I]f that includes basing and includes the storage of different ordnances, I think that is in Australia’s best interest, our national interest, at this point in time.’ Given the history and politics of the US defence presence in Australia, this mention of basing is remarkable—and the low-key reaction to it back in Australia was perhaps even more remarkable. The result is an expansion in what’s possible, which probably means not US bases but joint Australia–US facilities. That’s a model that works well in the intelligence world; the joint facility at Pine Gap is an example.

This is big news. Expansion of Australian facilities in the north and west for joint use by Australian and US forces—and potentially UK, Japanese and Indian forces through AUKUS and the Quad—would be a further practical step in resetting the military balance in the Indo-Pacific. Building facilities and industrial capacity to sustain nuclear submarines out of Stirling makes sense as part of such a package. So, the facilities aspects of the submarine cooperation are likely to be part of these ‘enhanced force posture’ arrangements, which will increase the ability for UK and US submarines to be operated and sustained in Australia—well before the first Australian nuclear submarine enters service.

It’s time for some high-vis vests and ribbon-cutting ceremonies to be a part of our near future, with open borders that allow our political leaders to turn up in Darwin and Perth. Biden’s global posture review can only bring results for Australian, US and Indo-Pacific security if there are active partners willing to invest to accelerate the review’s outcomes. Let’s demonstrate we understand enough about our own security needs to do so.

Cyber wrap

Last week, attendees at the Australian Information Security Association conference were given a preview of the Australian cyber security strategy by PM&C official Lynwen Connick. Connick noted the importance of cybersecurity to future prosperity and innovation in Australia, and the key role the private sector should play in achieving a more cyber secure country. Australian small businesses remain woefully unprepared for cyber security threats. According to research from the Department of Communications and the Arts, only 25% believe they are at risk from hacking and less than half kept anti-virus programs up to date. One proposal for the strategy appears to be a set of guidelines that any organisation can adopt to improve their cybersecurity practice. However there’s still no news on when the strategy will be released, and it will likely be delayed due to the change in leadership to the tech-focused Malcolm Turnbull.

The Dutch Scientific Council for Government Policy have released the English text of their report on the public core of the internet. The report recommends that the international community establish a norm protecting the main protocols and infrastructure that supports the internet from interference by governments. The report characterises the internet as an ‘extended national interest’ that, due to its value to states with open economies, should be considered a global public good. That’s a slightly different approach to the one advocated by Joseph Nye, who has focused on declaration of vulnerabilities to achieve simultaneous disarmament in cyberspace.

Despite the agreement between Presidents Obama and Xi on cyber theft of intellectual property, Stratfor has reported the unsurprising news that Chinese hacking attempts of commercial entities have continued unabated. The Netherlands Institute for International Relations has suggested new norms that limit national security intelligence collection to reduce the risk of ill-considered retaliation for cyber espionage by the US. The Institute calls on US allies, including Australia, to encourage the US to refrain from any retaliation that would more than likely destabilise the international system and instead work towards a new normative framework on the limits of espionage.

The US Army is reportedly conducting a series of experiments during field training exercises to better integrate cyber operations into its operational activities. Brigade level teams rotating through national training centres will take part in several tests run by US Army Cyber to inform US Army doctrine, organization and training. What isn’t known is whether the recently demonstrated ‘tactical cyber rifle’ has been used. Developed by US Army Cyber Institute at West Point, the device uses US$150 of components, including ‘a Raspberry Pi, WiFi radio, and antenna to take advantage of a known exploit in Parrot quadcopters’, causing it to crash. It was also used to open a bunker door and turn on the lights. While its inventor, Captain Brent Chapman, believes in future small units, leaders will be able to quickly fabricate equipment to take advantage of cyber vulnerabilities in the field, this may be wishful thinking until the US Army can recruit more infantry officers with computer science degrees.

The Indian Army this week announced the establishment of a Defence Cyber Agency as an interim body until a tri-service Cyber Command can be created. India has a keen awareness of cyber threats, with the Deputy Chief of Operations at Indian Defence HQ Vice Admiral Girish Luthra noting at the CyFy conference in New Delhi last week that ‘cyber attacks on critical ICT networks can provide significantly higher military advantages than physical attacks.’ However the Indian military has been slow to respond to this threat. India has just two integrated commands, which exhibits the fragmentation that characterises much of its approach to security issues.

Concerns about cyber war and espionage aren’t new, but continue to grab the attention of commentators around the world. For example, this week at The Washington Post Robert Samuelson warns of the potential effects of a cyber arms race and offensive capabilities that could undermines society by harming vital infrastructure like power grids. However Laura Bate at the Centre for the National Interest believes much of this discussion is carried on using terminology that’s so outdated or vague that meaningful discussion is made difficult, if not impossible. Bate quite rightly points out that words such as cyberattack, cybersecurity and cybercrime can mean different things to different governments, undermining confidence in discussion of agreements and developing international norms. The Australian Cyber Security Centre’s most recent threat report provided a useful glossary that differentiates carefully between actions like cyberattack, espionage, intrusions and incidents.

And finally, for some audible cyber security and policy discussion, check out this Foreign Policy podcast on a few of the challenges facing the US in cyberspace with Rosa Brooks, Kori Schake and David Sanger.

Rethinking hollow point ammunition

With the minimum of fanfare, the US Army has made an announcement that challenges a long-standing prohibition in international humanitarian law: the banning of ‘expanding’ or hollow point ammunition from the battlefield. The announcement came in the context of a presentation on the updated requirements for the next-generation US Army handgun—designated the XM-17—which took place at a Picatinny Arsenal Industry Day last month.

Earlier discussion of the requirements for the XM-17 suggested strongly that the new handgun would need to be at least .40 or .45 calibre to achieve the ballistic effects specified by the US Army solicitation. However in this new statement, the US Army spokesman quietly added another consideration: that the new handgun be compatible with ‘special purpose ammunition’, specifically jacketed hollow point (JHP) ammunition. For those companies planning to submit one or more designs for the XM-17 competition (success in which will result in a massive order of 280,000 handguns at a minimum) this means that handguns chambered for the NATO standard 9mm round are now serious contenders alongside .40 or .45 calibre guns. That’s because JHP ammunition dramatically increases the lethality of ammunition, such that a smaller round like the 9mm can achieve effects similar to significantly heavier bullets like those fired from .40 or .45 calibre pistols.

How does it work? Put simply, hollow points expand on impact. The design of JHP rounds means that the bullet typically turns into a mushroom shape when it hits its target, resulting in a larger wound channel than would be made by an equivalent full metal jacket (FMJ) round. It was precisely this tendency to create more significant wounds that led to the inclusion of clause IV, 3 in the 1899 Hague Declaration, which states that ‘the Contracting Parties agree to abstain from the use of bullets which expand or flatten easily in the human body, such as bullets with a hard envelope which does not entirely cover the core or is pierced with incisions.’

It’s noteworthy that the ‘special purpose ammunition’ announcement by the US Army, though low-key, was accompanied by a presentation by a representative of the Army Judge Advocate General’s Office. While no transcript of that presentation is currently available, at least one firearms focused media outlet reports that the legal justification given is essentially two-fold: first, that the US is not a signatory to declaration IV, 3 of the Hague Conventions and so isn’t bound by its constraints; and second, that hollow point ammunition, because it transfers more of its energy into the target when it impacts, is less likely than FMJ to penetrate through the intended target and continue on, posing a risk of causing harm to non-combatants.

As a military ethicist, I welcome this move. There’s a good reason that police forces almost universally use hollow point rather than FMJ ammunition. The danger of over penetration with FMJ is significant—unacceptably so in a context where there is the real possibility of causing casualties among innocent bystanders. Unlike the situation at the turn of the 20th century when the Hague Conventions came into effect, today’s soldiers find themselves increasingly engaged in conflicts in built-up areas where non-combatants are around every corner. If the principle of discrimination— that which requires that combatants take every reasonable effort to avoid harming non-combatants— is to be taken seriously, then allowing the use of hollow point ammunition seems to be not only ethically acceptable, but under some circumstances ethically mandatory.

The fact that hollow point ammunition creates larger wound channels than FMJ, while obviously a unpleasant thought, doesn’t count against it. JHP doesn’t create superfluous wounds that simply add to the target’s suffering, without any further purpose—that would clearly be unethical. Instead JHP rounds increase the likelihood of killing or disabling one’s opponent, which is an entirely legitimate outcome to seek in a military engagement. In military use handguns are, in most cases, last-ditch weapons, employed in situations of emergency (such as when the soldier’s rifle suffers a stoppage), and having a greater chance of neutralising opposing combatants under such circumstances should be embraced.

The big question, of course, is whether Australia will follow suit.