Richard Appelhans, Michael Liesmann, B. Clay Jackson, and Mikael Heikkinen
Note from the Editor in Chief
This article inaugurates Parameters Now, a new venue from the US Army War College Press designed to deliver immediately relevant research to senior leaders, practitioners, and policymakers. Whereas Parameters traditionally emphasizes strategic analysis and conceptual scholarship, Parameters Now focuses on urgent national security questions—capturing lessons in real time and translating them into insights usable by today’s force.
In this first edition, Major General Richard Appelhans and his coauthors examine the evolution of the Intelligence and Electronic Warfare Battalion–Next in the context of large-scale combat operations. More operationally focused than most Parameters articles, this piece fills a critical gap in emerging technology and force design research. Drawing on current experimentation, doctrinal adaptation, and lessons from the Russia-Ukraine War, it provides the broader research and policy community with timely insight into how the Army is applying hard-earned lessons to reorganize for intelligence dominance in contested, multidomain conflict.
This article contends the US Army’s proposed intelligence and electronic warfare battalion–next concept constitutes an organizational solution essential for achieving intelligence dominance in large-scale combat operations. Transcending legacy formations that are predicated on specific intelligence disciplines, this innovative design furnishes a functionally oriented, modular, and layered architecture that affords the requisite analytic capabilities, agility, and endurance for the contemporary battlefield. The analysis incorporates lessons extracted from the Russia-Ukraine War, US Army experimental endeavors, assessments of peer threats, and doctrinal evolutions, thereby providing readers of US Army War College Press publications with vital insights into how the Army is adapting to the future of warfare.
Keywords: military intelligence, large-scale combat operations, electronic warfare, war fighting, intelligence and electronic warfare battalion–next