The US Military’s Grave New Frontier: Training for Conflict—Theoretically—With Another Superpower

As a result, Peter van Agtmael’s photos on these pages, showing recent exercises by the 101st Airborne’s Second Brigade Combat Team, don’t just document training for air assaults and ambushes (a tactic once memorably defined by Lieutenant Colonel Charles Armstrong as an “act of premeditated murder and terrorism against strangers”). At Fort Campbell, Kentucky (and later at Fort Johnson, Louisiana—formerly Fort Polk—which van Agtmael also documented), soldiers of the brigade learned to fight at night against electronic warfare jamming, against unmanned aerial systems and counterfire radars. They learned to breach complex mine and wire obstacles, to defeat enemy motorized counterattacks. “Even before the Russian invasion of Ukraine, we oriented on high-end combat against a peer threat,” explained Colonel Ed Matthaidess, the brigade’s commander. Peers, of course, are America’s fellow superpowers.

In practice, that means thousands of soldiers operating in synchronicity to deliver overwhelming firepower. And in an era of drones and other high-tech surveillance assets to help adversaries deliver fire at long range, soldiers can’t expect to operate out of combat outposts or forward operating bases as they did in Iraq, where they could count on a warm bed and hot food more often than not. In contrast, soldiers can expect extended periods in the field, living out of a rucksack, dispersed and camouflaged in dug-in fighting positions before massing to attack.