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SINCE ITS genesis over three years ago, the Army After Next (AAN) project has provided valuable information concerning land power's future requirements. Most important, it has helped us develop an AAN vision, the Army of 2025. Our future Army will be a fully integrated, multicomponent force capable of rapidly deploying and fighting as a vital joint-team member. It will also be a hybrid Army, like its predecessors, with a mixture of special operations, light mechanized and strike and battle forces. Our vision has since been conveyed to the concept development community so that it can begin the difficult task of turning AAN into reality.
In the meantime, a key challenge we must face is how to describe the AAN. The journey toward the Army of 2025 is still too new to discuss specific systems or organizational size and structure. These will undoubtedly change as we move forward. Instead, the best way to describe AAN is in terms of the principles that underpin it-knowledge, speed and power.
Knowledge
We are now moving at "warp speed" in that everaccelerating transition from the Industrial Age to the information age. That means leveraging the tremendous capabilities available through information-age technology. These capabilities will enable us to revolutionize the way we control our forces on the battlefield-the warfighter's oldest and most difficult problem. At this revolution's heart are three questions:
* Where am I?
* Where are my buddies?
* Where is the enemy?
We want to be able to answer these questions successfully anywhere, anytime. That has been the goal of our advanced warfighting experiments (AWEs) since 1994. Increasing our battlefield knowledge has also served as the basis for our initial work on the division redesign and will continue to provide the key to further advances.
Knowledge means embracing information-age technology in peacetime. It is simply training the way we fight. We want an Army of soldiers and leaders for whom information technology is second nature. That is why we have begun to focus the Army on the advantages of using the Internet for career field designation and for many of our day-to-day operations. That is also the reason we have invested in Total Asset Visibility. Knowing where our parts are at all times enables us to improve our...