How the Army Fights: US Army Shifts Weight to Corps and Theater Armies

The U.S. Army released How the Army Fights on October 7, 2026, an unclassified 45-page operational warfighting guidance that organizes Army land power around four interdependent elements, Convergence, Strike, Close Battle, and Endurance, and shifts the service’s institutional weight from the brigade toward the corps and theater army. Signed by Gen. Christopher C. LaNeve, the 40th Vice Chief of Staff of the Army, the document directs the force to align training, education, doctrine, and force design with those four elements, with resourcing decisions to follow through a dedicated execute order (EXORD) and the Army Campaign Plan.

The guidance is the operational companion to The Army Azimuth, the strategic direction LaNeve published on August 19, 2026, which set three priorities: defend the Homeland, prepare to fight the pacing challenge, and project power on and from the land. It arrives during an unsettled period for Army leadership. LaNeve has served as acting Chief of Staff since Secretary of War Pete Hegseth removed Gen. Randy George on April 2, 2026, and his path to the permanent post has been held up by reported opposition among Republicans on the Senate Armed Services Committee. Adam Telle, previously the assistant secretary of the Army for civil works, is acting Secretary following Dan Driscoll’s resignation. The framework follows the 2025 Army Transformation Initiative and does not replace Multidomain Operations (MDO), adopted in 2022 and still the Army’s capstone doctrine; it describes how the Army executes MDO at the operational level of war.

How the Army Fights: Four Elements Assigned to Specific Echelons

The guidance compresses its central idea into four sentences: Convergence creates positions of advantage, Strike destroys the enemy at range, Close Battle seizes and holds ground, and Endurance carries the fight across time and distance. What separates How the Army Fights from earlier concept papers is that each element carries a doctrinal definition and an owning echelon.

Convergence, defined as creating and exploiting positions of advantage through the deliberate synchronization of all-domain effects, belongs to theater armies and corps. The document draws a firm line between synchronization, which occurs at every echelon from company to theater army, and Convergence, which only corps and theater armies execute because they hold the authorities and capacity to integrate space, cyberspace, and electromagnetic spectrum effects. The technical requirement is explicit: artificial intelligence (AI)-enabled data fabrics and edge-computing nodes able to pair any sensor with the optimal cross-domain shooter in real time. Annex A adds that theater armies and corps must deliver continuous rather than episodic convergence and be validated as joint task force headquarters. The guidance’s most recent example is Operation Absolute Resolve, the January 3, 2026, capture of Nicolás Maduro in Caracas, where cyber, electronic warfare, and kinetic strikes in an operation involving more than 150 aircraft opened a window for Army rotary-wing assets to insert the ground force; the entire mission concluded in under three hours.

Strike, defined as degrading and destroying enemy systems through lethal and non-lethal fires at range, runs from divisions through theater armies. Its priority target set against a peer adversary is specific: command bunkers, transporter erector launchers (TELs), and integrated air defense radars that anchor anti-access/area denial (A2/AD) networks. The guidance places the full targeting cycle, including the integration of joint enablers, at division level and above.

Close Battle, which closes with, dislocates, destroys, or defeats enemy forces through echeloned combined arms maneuver, belongs to divisions and below, with the division as the primary unit of action. The document calls it the only element that directly defeats the enemy and the one no other service can replicate at scale. Endurance, which postures, protects, and projects combat power through resilient sustainment and force generation, belongs to theater armies, corps, and their enabling commands. Its scope extends well past logistics to Soldier health, transportation, security, counter-unmanned aircraft systems (C-UAS), air and missile defense, cyber defense, force projection, and resilient infrastructure.

The document summarizes the division of labor in one line: Convergence and Endurance set the conditions, while Strike and Close Battle deliver decisive outcomes. Two of the four elements therefore sit primarily above division. After two decades in which the brigade combat team (BCT) was the Army’s basic currency, the most demanding integration tasks now fall to headquarters whose staff capacity, the guidance says, cannot be assembled after the fight begins. The document cites the Pentomic Division of the late 1950s, abandoned after roughly five years, as a warning against designing formations around unproven technology, and holds up AirLand Battle and the Army 86 reorganization as the model to replicate: a threat-driven doctrine that precedes and dictates force structure.

Battlefield Transparency, Strike Depth, and the Case for Close Battle

The guidance rejects the argument, prominent since 2023 in assessments of the Russia-Ukraine war, that persistent observation and long-range strike have made offensive ground maneuver obsolete. Its position is that battlefield transparency is a relative advantage rather than a fixed condition. Transparency emerges when enemy sensing goes uncontested and friendly signatures go unmanaged, and it can be degraded through deception, concealment, dispersion, and aggressive counter-reconnaissance.

The document uses Ukraine on both sides of that argument. It credits High Mobility Artillery Rocket System (HIMARS) strikes on Russian ammunition depots in occupied Donbas with severely weakening Russian offensive fires, while noting that they did not displace Russian forces from occupied territory. It cites the June 2023 attack by Ukraine’s 47th Separate Mechanized Brigade near Mala Tokmachka and Robotyne, where Leopard 2A6 tanks and M2A2 Bradleys stalled in minefields covered by artillery, Ka-52 attack helicopters, and first-person-view (FPV) drones, as the environment Close Battle formations must now overcome. The Kursk incursion of August 6, 2024, serves as the counterexample: operational security, deception, and sensor disruption allowed Ukrainian mobile groups to achieve surprise under persistent observation.

For Strike, the guidance expands the toolset beyond rocket artillery to launched effects, loitering munitions, one-way attack (OWA) unmanned systems, combat aviation brigades, modular launched systems, and affordable medium- to long-range precision fires. The document cites Ukraine’s Operation Spider’s Web of June 1, 2025, in which 117 FPV drones struck five Russian long-range aviation bases up to 4,300 km from the front, with more than 41 strategic aircraft damaged and 13 destroyed. It also cites the Israel Defense Forces’ AI-enabled Tzayad system as compressing fire-support cycles in Gaza from 40 to 50 minutes down to 1 to 7 minutes. Both sets of figures are presented in the document as reported battle outcomes and have not been independently confirmed.

Annex A converts those lessons into requirements. In the Pacific, the Army requires long-range precision fires (LRPF) capacity and munitions volume inside the First Island Chain (FIC) sufficient to interdict adversary launch sites and maritime targets, protection for Strike formations against massed missiles and OWA drones, and proficiency in integrated conventional-nuclear operations. For Close Battle, maneuver platoons and companies require organic lower-tier defensive fires against autonomous threats, which would make counter-drone defense an inherent capability of maneuver units rather than a dedicated air defense enabler attached from higher echelons.

The guidance states that BCTs are converting to brigades of increased capability and tactical mobility, optimized for rapid dispersion, survivability, and massing precision effects, and that Close Battle formations must operate under all nine forms of contact, including aerial, visual, and electromagnetic contact. Annex E adds modeled nuclear scenarios in which trained and warned armored brigades, dispersed at 500 m with hardened equipment, retain 70 to 80 percent effectiveness after tactical nuclear strikes, compared with 40 to 50 percent for untrained and unwarned units.

Endurance Without Sanctuary: Installations, Industrial Base, and Forward Stocks

Endurance receives the most detailed treatment. The guidance states that the Homeland is no longer a sanctuary and expects adversaries to target mobilization through cyber attacks, sabotage, and drone strikes on power projection platforms (PPP) and mobilization force generation installations (MFGI). It directs those installations to become hardened platforms able to generate combat power and shift to a war footing, and describes the strategic support area (SSA) of installations, ports, depots, arsenals, rail networks, and industrial capacity as a warfighting platform.

Annex D lists facts the document treats as hard constraints. The Army is a continental United States (CONUS)-based force without organic strategic deployment capability. Industrial lead times for critical components and sub-assemblies range from months to years. Sustainment distribution capacity inside the FIC is limited and will shrink in conflict. The guidance responds with autonomous ground, aerial, and littoral distribution platforms, expeditionary additive manufacturing backed by right-to-repair authorities, and decentralized supply nodes in place of centralized hubs that pervasive sensing makes easy to target. It also directs the organic industrial base (OIB) of government depots, arsenals, and ammunition plants to move from a one-plant, one-output model toward an agile facilitation construct able to pivot production to emergent demands.

Army Prepositioned Stocks are renamed Total Army Power Projection Equipment (TAP2E), defined as all Army equipment, munitions, and classes of supply postured forward for rotational or deploying forces. In the Pacific, near-term priorities for forward-deployed inside forces include bulk fuel and munitions storage, contingency site improvements, and an enduring command-and-control architecture starting in the FIC, with logistics hardening extending across the Second Island Chain. The document cites Exercise Tenacious Archer 25 in August 2025, when the 94th Army Air and Missile Defense Command deployed Patriot batteries to Palau by C-17, as a model for land-based air defense shielding joint air and naval assets.

The Homeland annex groups responsibilities rarely presented together in an Army warfighting document. U.S. Army Western Hemisphere Command serves as the Army Service Component Command to U.S. Northern Command and U.S. Southern Command and oversees Joint Task Force-Southern Border along 1,954 miles. Arctic-capable formations are tasked to execute sea denial from land at chokepoints such as the Aleutians and the Bering Strait. U.S. Army Space and Missile Defense Command anchors the Army’s contribution to Golden Dome for America and to the defense of Guam.

The posture annex also reallocates effort. In Europe, the Army will retain critical but limited capabilities in support of NATO-led deterrence, with European Allies assuming primary responsibility for conventional ground defense. In the Middle East, it will preserve agile posture and access for contingency operations. In both theaters, the stated aim is to free resources for the Pacific and the Western Hemisphere.

Focused Modernization on a Flat Budget: What Gets Funded First

The resourcing chapter rests on two planning assumptions in Annex D: the Army base budget remains flat in real terms for the foreseeable future, and Total Army end strength holds constant. It cites rising manpower costs, inflation, and unforeseen external requirements as cost pressures, and acknowledges that current funding challenges the Army’s ability to meet competition, conflict, and modernization requirements simultaneously.

Its answer is focused modernization. Rather than equip every unit with every capability, the Army will rapidly procure only its most critical systems, field them to a focused portion of the force through competitive multi-vendor sourcing, and use dedicated research and development funding to advance the next generation for a different portion. Savings from divesting legacy equipment are to be repurposed to warfighting priorities. Modernization dollars are measured against four criteria, each tied to an element: rapid deployability for all four, low-cost optionality for Strike, operational and tactical mobility for Close Battle, and fleet simplification for Endurance. The mobility criterion includes a direct statement that the Army will reject slow, heavy platforms that present static targets for adversary precision fires.

Four capability areas are singled out. Autonomy is treated as an operational reality formations must rapidly adapt to. AI-enabled sensing and decision tools are meant to deliver actionable clarity in seconds and minutes rather than hours. Command and control must become transport-agnostic because the current architecture is overly reliant on vulnerable space-based links, with tactical fiber-optic backbones and other hardened terrestrial infrastructure inside theater. Munitions must balance exquisite precision weapons with lower-cost, scalable rounds, and the document calls magazine depth and sustained production capacity decisive operational requirements.

Annex G lays out the path from concept to budget. The guidance informs a separate How the Army Fights EXORD, which tasks the enterprise to determine force structure changes and sets mid-term objectives for the Army Campaign Plan, which in turn feeds Total Army Analysis and the Program Objective Memorandum (POM). The guidance itself is not a resourcing document; Headquarters, Department of the Army (HQDA) execute orders will drive those decisions.

Some institutional moves already track the framework. On October 1, 2026, Telle signed a memorandum directing the establishment of the U.S. Army Futures and Autonomous Systems Command (FASCOM) and the designation of a Portfolio Acquisition Executive for Autonomy, and calling for the integration of autonomous capabilities into at least six formation areas: aviation, armor, fires, sustainment, engineer, and training formations. The memorandum prioritizes autonomous fires, combat vehicles, watercraft resupply, breaching, reconnaissance, surveillance, and target acquisition, and crewed-uncrewed teaming for acquisition and fielding no later than fiscal year 2028.

Analysis: How the Army Fights is less a new concept than an allocation decision. By assigning Convergence and Endurance to corps and theater armies, it commits the Army to building headquarters with the staff depth, authorities, and networks to integrate joint and multidomain effects continuously, a capacity the brigade-centric modular force of the post-9/11 era did not prioritize. The AirLand Battle precedent it invokes cuts both ways: that doctrine took hold alongside the Army 86 reorganization and a funded generation of new platforms during the defense buildup of the early 1980s. How the Army Fights assumes flat real funding and constant end strength, so growth in corps and theater army capacity, OIB surge, FIC posture, and Homeland hardening must be paid for through divestment and narrower fielding. A second tension will test its credibility. The guidance calls for robotics, autonomy, and counter-unmanned capabilities at scale, yet in August the acting chief ordered the 173rd Airborne Brigade’s roughly 600-soldier Unmanned Assault Battalion, created less than a year earlier to absorb drone lessons from Ukraine, to return to conventional airborne infantry tasks once its final exercises in Germany conclude, according to multiple reports. The FASCOM memorandum indicates the Army intends to institutionalize autonomy through commands and acquisition portfolios rather than dedicated experimental units. Whether that route reaches the platoons and companies where Annex A places the counter-drone requirement faster than the battalion experiment would have is the practical question.

The next milestones are largely internal. The How the Army Fights EXORD had not been published as of October 7, 2026, and the guidance does not specify which corps and theater army headquarters will grow, how many brigades will complete conversion, or which legacy fleets will be divested to fund the shift. FASCOM’s stand-up and its fiscal year 2028 autonomy targets offer the first measurable tests of focused modernization, while combat training center rotations and Pacific exercises will show whether formations can execute the four elements under contested conditions. The framework will also be implemented by an acting Chief of Staff and an acting Secretary, tying the durability of its EXORD and POM choices to pending Senate decisions on both posts.