Gen. Christopher Cavoli, commanding general of U.S. Army Europe and Africa, said the service branch needs a multidomain task force in the European theater, Defense News reported Wednesday. The Army established an MDTF unit at Joint Base Lewis-McChord in Washington state with plans to form a second unit in the Pacific region within fiscal year 2021.
“The capabilities that the multidomain task force are going to bring and help us integrate, the expertise that it will bring, are going to be very, very important to updating the way we plan to operate on the European continent,” Cavoli said at an Association of the U.S. Army virtual event Wednesday. “And we will be able to extend that to the African continent as well when we get those capabilities.”
Cavoli said recent exercises highlighted the significance of an MDTF unit in theater operations and one of those exercises – Defender Europe – tried to plan “against the hypothetical scenario of large-scale combat operations” in 2035.
He also cited the need for increased fires capability in the European theater and discussed the Theater Fires Command concept.
“We’re also excited about proposals for something called a ‘Theater Fires Command,’ which would develop and curate, hold custody of targets during the competitive phase, and then execute during a potential conflict,” he said.
“That Theater Fires Command will also bring enormous capability with it, and it will put us into — it will help us, as MDO promises, to push away out of a close fight and be able to fight a little bit more at a standoff so that we, when we do engage in a close fight, it would be under much more advantageous circumstances.”
