Titolo completo

Taking Multi-domain Operations from Theory to Practice

Multi-domain operations (MDO) originated in the US amid rising concerns that improving precision strike weapons, combined with increasingly capable anti-access/area-denial (A2/AD) capabilities, would make traditional ground manoeuvre warfare obsolete. Since then, US doctrinal and operational developments with regard to MDO have started to take hold at the NATO level, with the Alliance elaborating its own concept and undertaking a process of MDO-oriented transformation. National nuances remain, however. From an Italian perspective, the MDO effort is at its core an attempt to conceptually expand the battlefield. As such, the term ‘multi-domain’ is on the surface self-explanatory but fails to capture the full scope of the concept. Technology will be a fundamental enabler of this process, but a truly multi-domain approach to operations depends first and foremost on the military’s ability to change the way it plans, trains for, and carries out its activities.