Military Police Contributions to the Future of the Protection WFF: Evolving to Enable Formation-Based Layered Protection

Protection—The “no fail” warfighting function. In the 21st century battlespace, if you fail in protecting the force . . . none of the other warfighting functions matter.[1] — Dr. James K. Greer

FBLP OV1 MP Concept Overlay

Editor’s Note: This graphic is published as originally provided by the author. No edits, alterations, or enhancements were made.

The battlefield of the future promises to be more volatile and unpredictable than ever before. Large-scale combat introduces complexity, lethality, ambiguity, and speed to military operations that are uncommon in other contexts.[2] The U.S. Army is entrusted as the contact layer for the joint force to set conditions for successful operations. The U.S. Army faces this critical challenge by securing personnel and protecting assets and operations against a new generation of threats. These threats from our adversaries are generating new forms of mass, such as unmanned systems strategically layered at the tactical edge,[3] that impact populations within an area of operation and drive the need to protect multiple movements of critical assets across formations at echelon. These forms of mass ultimately aim to create temporal dislocation—the ability of mass to appear, disappear, and reappear rapidly across the battlespace.

Formation-based layered protection (FBLP) seeks to revolutionize battlefield protection by integrating it directly into Army formations, from division to individual Soldiers. Recognizing that modern threats demand a unified and adaptable defense, FBLP equips formations with layered defenses, technologies such as artificial intelligence and machine learning, advanced sensors, and networked command structures. At the division level, specialized units provide comprehensive layered defense, while at the brigade level and below, these capabilities are interwoven into existing units. This layered approach creates a protective bubble around formations, enabling them to effectively maneuver, fight, and resupply. By embedding these capabilities within formations, FBLP seeks responsiveness, survivability, and lethality to overcome diverse threats across the modern battlefield.

Military police must evolve to provide essential elements for holistic protection by providing protection functions and tasks at every warfighting echelon, including direct support to close combat forces and Army Protection Program activities within the homeland. Military police are a vital link in the protection chain. The Military Police Corps is currently tasked with leading the protection warfighting function for area security, protected sustainment, and detention and is an integral enabler for mobility and counter-small unmanned aircraft systems (UASs) in the support areas across divisions and corps areas of operation. Military police also perform critical roles as protection chiefs in divisions, corps, and U.S. Army Service Component Commands.

The Evolving Threat: Temporal Dislocation and the Need for Agile Protection

Temporal dislocation seeks to render an enemy force irrelevant by creating a better situational understanding, allowing for faster decisions that, over time, cognitively overcome an opponent.[4] The rise of adversaries capable of temporal dislocation disrupts traditional protection paradigms. No longer confined by linear battlefields or predictable timelines, these threats demand a paradigm shift in how the Military Police Corps Regiment anticipates, deters, and responds. Simultaneously, the need for expanded maneuvers to consolidate gains and to control endurance, agility, and operational reach will be paramount, requiring the ability to project and sustain military power across vast distances.

The Military Police Corps made difficult choices in 2023 regarding how to best optimize the force structure by prioritizing capabilities in each component (COMPO). The Regular Army (COMPO 1) prioritizes modernized, human-machine-integration-enabled battalions and companies ready to deploy to support their local divisions and corps, with low risk to policing and protection at camps, posts, and stations. The U.S. Army National Guard (COMPO 2) comprises the majority of deployable combat support structures that enable the U.S. Army during extended, large-scale combat operations. It also includes a military police command headquarters that supports theater protection synchronization and homeland defense. The U.S. Army Reserve (COMPO 3) focuses on long-term detention operations and homeland defense, providing the military police command headquarters a major general to serve as the commander of detention operations. The solutions outlined in the following paragraphs enable the Military Police Corps to effectively transform and execute its missions, providing robust future protection capabilities that allow the consolidation of gains to extend endurance, agility, and operational reach.

What will not change in the future is the need for reliable sustainment. The Army will always require a resilient and agile sustainment network to avoid culmination. The sustainment network must effectively provide critical classes of supplies (fuel, ammunition), reinforcements, and support for casualty evacuation in the close area to prevent operational culmination. Military police protecting sustainment greatly increase the agility of the system, prevent adversaries from exploiting logistical vulnerabilities and opportunities to temporally dislocate friendly units, and increase the probability of priority supplies reaching Army forces at the tactical echelon. This is required to maintain the heightened tempo of operations needed in multidomain operations. The expansion of threats across all warfighting domains requires an integrated and layered multidomain system to protect the force from adversaries through formation-based integrated protection.[5] While FBLP must be cost-optimized, military police forces are specifically designed, trained, and highly capable of performing this critical role.

The Empowerment of the Military Police Corps Regiment

Meeting these complex challenges requires a multifaceted solution. Beginning with the military police, FBLP is empowered to integrate sensors and information across domains, from the corps to the squad level. The Military Police Corps must be tailored to fulfill its unique roles in leading protection efforts, integrating human-machine protection innovation at speed, restructuring organizational protection, adapting doctrine, and optimizing detention operations for intelligence dominance.

The Human-Machine Collaboration

Harnessing advancements in robotics, artificial intelligence, advanced sensing, cyber intelligence, and autonomous systems can significantly increase the range and speed of localized lethal effects provided by the Military Police Corps. Military police must be able to have real-time sensing (sense), automated decision support (decide), and an integrated range of defeat mechanisms (kinetic and nonkinetic) to provide proactive protection (act). To capitalize on the needed interoperability to sense-decide-act that effectively provides protection, Military Police Corps modernization must keep pace with the Army elements they support to be able to maintain operational tempo in the future fight. Military police must become interoperable to synchronize protection effects that enable endurance and tempo. This preserves combat power and enables tempo, which is required to support the tactical echelon layered protection units and provide brigade-and-below units adequate protection while on the move that can—

• Protect the protector. Deploying robotic platforms for hazardous tasks in the rear areas that protect reliable sustainment networks while providing the capability to disrupt or defeat Level 3 threats helps to ensure the safety of those tasked with protecting others. This enables the required sustainment bandwidth across the security and mobility support spectrum of military police tasks, minimizing risk to personnel, critical assets, and infrastructure.
• Expand protective coverage. In the future operating environment, military police squads must possess capability and reach similar to the military police platoons of today. By utilizing autonomous systems, persistent surveillance and reconnaissance will be achieved, providing early warning and extending the reach of the Military Police Corps across the battlespace. This coverage must integrate with the Next Generation Command and Control (NGC2) architectures.
• Enhance threat recognition. Leveraging artificial-intelligence-powered sensors and data fusion identifies and analyzes potential threats in real time, enabling proactive and predictive protection measures. Using a commander-at-echelon approach, military police integrate into the division and corps protection architecture, providing additional information streams to inform enemy targeting. Effective targeting requires robust sensor and intelligence data to drive NGC2. Military police can fulfill this requirement if they are properly equipped and trained to do so.
• Neutralize small UASs. Military police protect critical sites from small UASs in the homeland across posts, camps, and stations due to their unique law enforcement authorities. Military police of the future will be trained, equipped, and ready to protect seaports of debarkation and airports of debarkation during fort-to-port power projection, and will later be dispersed across the expanded battlefield during large-scale ground combat operations. As military police refine their continental-United-States-based counter-small UAS program, they simultaneously build the expertise required to counter this evolving threat, providing the U.S. Army an organic capability embedded in FBLP to extend operational reach and reduce casualties.

The Restructuring for a Fluid Battlespace

Adapting the structure and organization of the Military Police Corps Regiment is crucial for ensuring responsiveness and effectiveness in a dispersed and fluid battlespace. War remains a human endeavor that requires commanders to concurrently address enemy combatants and noncombatants in population centers. This organizational restructuring capitalizes on the current military police force array across the entire battlespace, from a home station to the forward tactical echelon, and leverages human dimension skills gained in detention and police operations to enable commanders to excel by creating—

• Agile protection companies: Using a force design update to create smaller, highly mobile military police units equipped for independent operations across vast areas, capable of rapidly responding to emerging threats.
• Close area and support area security elements: Adapting military police structure at the battalion level to enable protection from irregular threats while simultaneously creating robust sustainment protection. Military police battalion-and-below levels transform into key formations, providing the sensors and data required to integrate division and corps protection efforts. The COMPO 1 military police brigade structure can be adapted to establish the required command and control structure that enables FBLP (protection brigade, multifunctional brigade, or support area security brigade).
• Protection fusion for intelligence gathering: Integrating protection fusion functions into military police units and equipping them with advanced targeting tools, allowing military police to analyze and disseminate real-time threat information to enable proactive protection measures. This critically informs active collective targeting and provides a connective problem-solving capability at the division to corps levels.
• A military police branch as the protection fusion center: Transforming battalion and brigade headquarters into protection battalions and brigades to create fusion centers that enable military police to focus on identifying, anticipating, and facilitating the targeting of enemy threats to reduce risk to U.S. Army personnel and assets. This new tactical fusion connects to existing division and corps protection staff and increases FBLP effectiveness.

The Doctrinal Adaptation for a Fluid Battlefield

Existing doctrine must evolve to reflect the dynamic nature of future conflict, empowering the Military Police Corps to provide flexible and responsive protection. Human-machine integration in future conflict enables military police to create more effects with fewer personnel. In the future FBLP ecosystem, military police provide the core expertise to synchronize both kinetic and nonkinetic effects. Doctrine must reflect the history of the Military Police Corps as an economy of force element to protect the force and preserve combat power.

• Decentralized command and control: Further empowering junior leaders within the Military Police Corps Regiment, which historically operates at the squad level, with greater autonomy to make rapid decisions in response to immediate threats and opportunities.
• Mission command for protection: Fostering a culture of initiative and adaptability within the Military Police Corps Regiment, enabling commanders at all levels to rapidly tailor protection measures to specific situations in real time.
• Prioritized protection of sustainment: Integrating protection planning into all phases of sustainment planning and execution, focusing on the critical role of the Military Police Corps in enabling the consolidation of gains, agility, endurance, and operational reach.

The Role of Detention Operations in Enabling Intelligence Dominance

Detention operations optimized by detention management tools enable the quick removal of detainees from the battlefield, preventing congested lines of communication and enhancing operational reach. military police provide critical intelligence to disrupt enemy networks and inform the broader operational picture through the exploitation of high-value targets. This capability is constrained by reductions in the military police force structure, which creates a time-delayed reliance on COMPO 2/3 for detention operations above the division level.

• Mobile detention capabilities: Developing rapidly deployable and secure detention capabilities for swift expeditionary detainee backhaul operations across the battlespace, ensuring humane treatment and adherence to legal obligations. An opportunity exists to reduce the effects of the time-delayed reliance by placing COMPO 1 Military Occupational Specialty (MOS) 31E–Corrections and Detention Specialists personnel into security force assistance brigades or by providing a multiCOMPO security-like capability as a part of each theater exercise program to assess host-nation and partner detention capacity (personnel/facilities).
• Specialized training: Providing comprehensive training in detention management tools, intelligence fusion, counter-small UASs, military deception, data-driven analysis, cultural awareness, and legal procedures to streamline removal from the battlefield.
• Human dimension policing skills: Capitalizing on this unique skill gained during home station law enforcement and proactive policing operations. Using this uniquely developed skill (the ‘police lens’) gives commanders a competitive advantage to address human-centered challenges that plague operations in the information domain while enhancing the legitimacy of the U.S. Army.

Conclusion: The Essential Role of the Military Police Corps in FBLP

In the complex and unpredictable battlespace of the future, the role of the Military Police Corps as part of FBLP and its leadership in key areas of the protection warfighting function are essential. By embracing technological advancements, optimizing force design, adopting agile doctrine, and refining detention operations to enable intelligence dominance, the Military Police Corps Regiment can effectively counter the threat of temporal dislocation, secure critical assets, and protect sustainment, allowing operational reach of the U.S. Army in the face of any challenge. The Military Police Corps Regiment of the future will be defined by its adaptability, lethality, and unwavering commitment to protecting and enabling the U.S. Army to achieve decisive victory in any future conflict.