Combined arms

Infantry, armor, and aerial units of the United States Army together as part of Operation Inherent Resolve during the Syrian civil war

Combined arms is an approach to warfare that seeks to integrate different combat arms of a military to achieve mutually complementary effects—for example, using infantry and armour in an urban environment in which each supports the other.[1]

According to the strategist William S. Lind, combined arms can be distinguished from the concept of "supporting arms" as follows:

Combined arms hits the enemy with two or more arms simultaneously in such a manner that the actions he must take to defend himself from one make him more vulnerable to another. In contrast, supporting arms is hitting the enemy with two or more arms in sequence, or if simultaneously, then in such combination that the actions the enemy must take to defend himself from one also defends himself from the other(s).[2]

Though the lower-echelon units of a combined arms team may be of similar types, a balanced mixture of such units are combined into an effective higher-echelon unit, whether formally in a table of organization or informally in an ad hoc solution to a battlefield problem. For example, an armoured division, the modern paragon of combined arms doctrine, consists of a mixture of infantry, tank, artillery, reconnaissance, and helicopter units, all of which are co-ordinated and directed by a unified command structure.[3]

Also, most modern military units can, if the situation requires it, call on yet more branches of the military, such as infantry requesting bombing or shelling by military aircraft or naval forces to augment their ground offensive or protect their land forces. The mixing of arms is sometimes pushed down below the level at which homogeneity ordinarily prevails, such as by temporarily attaching a tank company to an infantry battalion.

  1. ^ ADRP 3-0: Unified Land Operations (PDF). Department of the Army. 16 May 2012. pp. 1–14. Archived from the original (PDF) on 22 March 2016. Retrieved 29 September 2014.
  2. ^ Lind, William S. (1985). Maneuver Warfare Handbook. Westview Press. p. 12. ISBN 9780813346298.
  3. ^ Combined Arms Breach (video). OEC G&V. c. 2015. This visualization was developed for the Maneuver Center of Excellence and is closely based upon the National Training Center Breach and Assault exercise executed circa 1990. This visualization demonstrates viable TTPs as discussed in ATTP 3-90-4 for the conduct of the combined arms breach against a hypothetical enemy.