Reconsidering Division-Cavalry Squadrons

Part IV: the Division-Cavalry Task Force

Since the U.S.Army adopted tactical modularity in 2004, reorganized its final deployable armored-cavalry regiment (ACR) as a Stryker brigade combat team (BCT) in 2011 and, more recently, restructured its battlefield surveillance brigades without cavalry squadrons, it has lacked dedicated and optimized ground formations to conduct forceful information collection (IC) above the brigade level. Thoughintended to produce greater combined-arms versatility at lower tactical levels, modular transformation violated the long-held requirement, as argued by VII Corps after Operation Desert Storm, that ground forces require “armed and armored recce at every level...battalion through corps.”This capabilities gap has consequently impaired division and corps ability to execute informed and dynamic expeditionary operations across theaters featuring challenging area-denial networks.2This deficiency–whichstemmed from episodic understanding of the potential for maneuver warfare between peer and hybrid states–canbe remedied, in part, by extracting insights from the Army’s long record of successfully employing cavalry forces. World WarII, the Korean War, Vietnam War, first Persian Gulf War, Afghanistan Warand second Persian Gulf War each provided testing grounds for combinations of heavy, medium, light and aerial squadrons as higher commands adapted pre-conflict organizations to the realities of complicated settings and adaptive foes. From the jungles of Indochina to the deserts of Mesopotamia, two lessons have emerged with certitude: division cavalry should optimize for high-end combat relative to threatcapabilities, and division cavalrymust also be empowered with enablers to maintain demanding tempos across battlefields of expanded breadth and depth.