READY FOR TODAY – EVOLVING FOR TOMORROW
ON CORE
Major Charlie Sprake, British Army
This article considers the Allied Rapid Reaction Corps’s (ARRC) journey through
‘Corps Recalibration’, ‘Survive to Command’ and ‘Survive to Control’. Its purpose is to
encourage thought, discussion and debate.
The Context
Tomorrow’s adversaries are becoming
more unpredictable in nature as
technology allows them to resource
deception in innovative ways. To
compound this problem, 15 years of
counter insurgency (COIN) campaigning
has fertilised the wrong seeds in the
thinking of many western countries. Our
doctrine and capabilities tend to have
a distinct, sandy colour and we have
gown fat where we need to be agile and
dexterous (Command and Control (C2)),
and thin where we need muscle and sinew
(Manoeuvre and Command Support).
Like many militaries, the British Army has
been finding ways to reduce the scale
of its force while retaining ‘seed corn’
capabilities in order to regrow as the threat
increases. Driven by financial recession
and the resulting polarisation of values
and ethics, our assumption of long-term
stability is being undermined. Unexpected
threat and opportunity vectors emerge
ever more rapidly through the proliferation
of disruptive technologies. The Allied
Rapid Reaction Corps (ARRC) has not
been impervious to this.
“No matter how clearly one thinks, it is
impossible to anticipate precisely the character
of future conflict. The key is not to be so far off
the mark that it becomes impossible to adjust
once that character is revealed”. 1
The Question
The moment of epiphany for the ARRC
occurred during Exercise TRIDENT
JUNCTURE 2016. It was here that
we realised our main headquarters
(MAIN) was in superb shape to conduct
operations as a Land Component
Command (LCC) headquarters, with
all our functional branches, firing like
the pistons of a well-oiled machine and
churning though complicated tasks safe
under the umbrella of theatre ballistic
missile protection (TBM(P)). 2 Justifiably,
we congratulated ourselves for a job
well done and staff officers, connecting
with their colleagues around them from
the comfort of their desk, couldn’t see it -
they were ‘standing too close to the wall’.
Approaching the headquarters from
the outside, a fresh set of eyes could
immediately identify the problem; we
had become too big. The question was
simple: How long will the ARRC survive if
TBM(P) is removed?
The answer to this problem has been
a journey of discovery and mostly
rediscovery. Principles, processes and
procedures that were disregarded as
being outdated in the 1990s are being
resurrected and incorporated with cutting
edge technologies (and in some cases,
well established CIS) under what has
been termed ‘Corps Recalibration’.
The Journey
Corps Recalibration is a methodical,
four-year return to corps warfighting, one
we are all now familiar with. Survivability
is the guiding principle upon which
a C2 estimate was conducted in late
2016. In November 2016 the Principle
Planning Group (PPG) were presented
1 Future Character of Conflict (FCOC), DCDC 2018.
2 Complicated. Difficult to analyse, understand and explain.
ALLIED RAPID REACTION CORPS
7