More recently, while commentators proclaiming the need for the Army to adopt massed unmanned aircraft systems (UAS) use have not been shy in citing the more advanced capabilities of various nations including rivals such as Russia and China, these arguments sidestep the reality that any such US adoption would not automatically cause a corresponding decrease in the capability of any adversarial military. An admittedly incomplete survey of multiple force design proposals, new warfighting concepts, and field reports (including our own) on continuing experimentation with UAS reveals a disturbing tendency to ignore or minimize the degree to which an opposing adversary strike system must be initially and continuously challenged and defeated. Authors instead focus on the potential for new US Army strike complexes combined with increased layered protection schemes to drive an inexorable massing of kinetic and nonkinetic fires in support of traditional ground combat elements to restore maneuver to the battlefield.

…

The true dead zone is therefore a mutually contested area ranging deep behind each belligerent’s forward lines in which combat power must be deliberately committed, lest it be destroyed. Even more critically, although the term had been borrowed from Ukrainians’ descriptions of their own mutually contested frontline battlespace, the emergence of similar conditions in the Mojave had occurred without the presence of thickly layered obstacle belts and fortifications to constrain maneuver and reinforce attrition. Combined with the preceding brief historical survey, this suggests a dead or contested zone of mutual attrition and degradation is merely the logical outcome of expanded mutually opposing tactical reconnaissance-strike regimes and not something the Army can choose to easily wish away.

…

When combined with the immutable physical limits on the amount of battlespace that exists for a dispersed formation to occupy, and the amount of dispersion a formation can achieve before rendering it unable to fight as a coherent body to achieve an assigned tactical task, it became apparent to Blackhorse leaders that while still useful, dispersion had likely passed its point of maximum utility as a measure of force protection. The amount of sensors and massed precision weaponry on the battlefield confirms the endurance, in enhanced form, of General William DePuy’s Cold War observation that what could be seen could be hit. At the National Training Center, this is forcing Blackhorse to develop more comprehensive schemes of protection to include multilayered and multiechelon countertargeting, counterreconnaissance, and active air defense measures. It should encourage the Army as a whole to adopt a similar focus or risk battlefield destruction commensurate with the simulated destruction on display in the Mojave.