The Army Azimuth: True Bearing for Land Dominance

Introduction: The Next Link in the Strategic Chain

This article continues my examination of the 2025 National Security Strategy and the 2026 National Defense Strategy by focusing on the United States Army. The first document establishes the nation’s security interests and political priorities. The second translates those interests into defense objectives and lines of effort for the Joint Force. The Army Azimuth, issued by Gen. Christopher C. LaNeve, the 40th Vice Chief of Staff of the Army, carries that logic one level further. It explains how the Army must organize, prepare, posture, and fight to turn national direction into credible land power.

Read together, the three documents form a connected hierarchy of ends, ways, and means. The National Security Strategy describes the ends the United States seeks: protection of the American people, security of the homeland and Western Hemisphere, economic strength, favorable balances of power, and focused engagement abroad. The National Defense Strategy identifies the military ways required to support those ends: defend the homeland, deter China in the Indo-Pacific, increase allied burden-sharing, and strengthen the defense industrial base. The Army Azimuth then concentrates on the Army’s contribution to those efforts through three strategic directions: defend the homeland, warfighting, and project power on and from the land.

The Army Azimuth is not a separate Army vision competing with the two higher-level strategies. It is their landpower expression. Its importance lies in converting broad strategic priorities into demands on formations, leaders, Soldiers, training, posture, logistics, and modernization. The document also exposes the central tension the Army must manage: it must prioritize the homeland and the Indo-Pacific without becoming a narrowly regional force, and it must adopt emerging technology without weakening the human discipline on which land warfare still depends.

A Clear Line from National Purpose to Army Mission

The continuity begins with homeland defense. The National Security Strategy places renewed emphasis on protecting the United States and preserving American preeminence in the Western Hemisphere. The National Defense Strategy makes defense of the homeland its first line of effort, including border security, air and missile defense, counter-unmanned systems, cyber defense, and the protection of access to key terrain in the hemisphere. The Army Azimuth answers with an equally direct statement: securing the nation’s borders, protecting the American people against attack, and responding to domestic crises are among the Army’s most sacred duties.

Homeland defense is not presented as a mission that begins only after an overseas threat reaches American soil. The Azimuth states that a secure Western Hemisphere is a prerequisite for joint power projection. In other words, homeland defense and forward operations are mutually supporting. Installations, transportation networks, ports, airfields, communications systems, depots, the organic industrial base, and mobilization infrastructure inside the United States enable every operation conducted abroad. The Army’s domestic responsibilities therefore extend beyond visible crisis response. They include protecting the systems that generate readiness, move forces, sustain campaigns, and allow the Joint Force to operate at distance.

In the Indo-Pacific, the National Defense Strategy calls for deterring China through strength rather than confrontation and for establishing a denial defense along the First Island Chain. Although the region is often described in maritime and air terms, the Army contributes capabilities that make joint operations possible: long-range fires, integrated air and missile defense, theater logistics, command and control, cyber and electronic warfare, intelligence, engineering, protection, and land-based networks connecting allies and partners. The Azimuth’s insistence that the Army project power both on and from the land is therefore more than institutional advocacy. It describes how land forces can create access, impose dilemmas across domains, protect the Joint Force, and sustain a campaign in a distributed theater.

The National Security Strategy favors focused engagement that advances concrete American interests, while the National Defense Strategy calls on allies to assume greater responsibility for their own defense. The Army Azimuth translates burden-sharing into practical military activity: strengthening partner capacity, improving interoperability, campaigning with regional land forces, forward positioning units and supplies, and maintaining formations able to respond quickly. Because most allied militaries are organized predominantly around land forces, the Army remains one of the United States’ most persistent instruments for building partner capability. Burden-sharing becomes credible only when allies possess trained formations, interoperable systems, resilient sustainment, and the ability to operate together under pressure.

The Army as the Foundation of the Joint Force

The Azimuth’s description of the Army as the foundation of the Joint Force is best understood through the functions the Army provides rather than through service size. Joint operations depend on land-based command and control, protection, intelligence, communications, logistics, air and missile defense, engineering, medical support, transportation, and theater opening. These capabilities create endurance: the capacity to continue operating after initial strikes, under persistent surveillance, and across contested lines of communication.

The document organizes the Army’s operational contribution around convergence, strike, close battle, and endurance. Convergence integrates effects across domains to create windows of advantage. Strike allows land forces to attack critical targets at operational depth and contribute to sea denial. Close battle remains necessary because wars ultimately involve control of people, terrain, infrastructure, and political objectives. Endurance connects all three by ensuring that forces can absorb losses, regenerate combat power, and sustain operations over time. Together, these elements provide a useful correction to technology-centered views of future war. Precision fires and autonomous systems may shape the battlefield, but they do not eliminate the requirement to seize, hold, protect, and sustain.

Drones, commercial imagery, electronic sensing, cyber tools, and long-range precision weapons make concentration more dangerous and logistics more vulnerable. Army units will have to disperse, conceal, deceive, move frequently, defend against unmanned systems, and operate through disrupted communications. At the same time, dispersed forces consume supplies and require maintenance, medical evacuation, replacement personnel, and reliable command relationships. The Army’s contribution to joint campaigning will therefore be measured not only by what it can destroy, but by whether it can keep the Joint Force operating in a contested theater.

Modernization Must Produce Operational Advantage

The Army Azimuth acknowledges substantial institutional change. The Army has moved from brigade modularity toward formations designed for multidomain operations at multiple echelons. It has fielded longer-range precision fires, expanded air defense, upgraded theater logistics, strengthened terrestrial intelligence, and created organizations that integrate space, cyber, electronic warfare, and artificial intelligence into command and control. These changes reflect the National Defense Strategy’s requirement for a force capable of denying aggression, particularly in the Indo-Pacific, while retaining options for crises elsewhere.

Yet modernization cannot be judged by the number of new systems fielded or organizations created. It must be judged by whether it improves the Army’s ability to find, understand, decide, move, strike, protect, and sustain faster than an adversary. The Azimuth’s call to outpace opponents correctly joins technology with human ingenuity and judgment. Artificial intelligence, autonomy, robotics, and improved sensing can accelerate decisions and reduce risk, but they can also create new dependencies, signatures, vulnerabilities, and training burdens. A system that performs well in a controlled demonstration but cannot survive electronic attack, operate with limited bandwidth, or be maintained by Soldiers in austere conditions does not create durable advantage.

The same standard should guide force design. New formations and capabilities must be tested in realistic conditions, integrated into doctrine, supported by the right personnel, and sustained at scale. Professional military education and combat training centers have a critical role because they expose the gap between a promising concept and a combat-ready capability. Experimentation produces value when lessons are captured honestly, unsuccessful assumptions are discarded, and leaders are held accountable for adapting. The Azimuth’s linkage of experience, reflection, and accountability is therefore one of its most important statements. It makes learning a warfighting requirement rather than an administrative exercise.

The Human Dimension Remains Decisive

Although The Army Azimuth addresses advanced technology and multidomain operations, its center of gravity is the Soldier. It calls for a warrior mindset, adherence to high standards, continuous development, mission-essential training, and renewed attention to the fundamentals of Soldiering. This emphasis is not nostalgia. It recognizes that the most advanced force can still fail through weak discipline, poor leadership, inadequate maintenance, or an inability to perform basic tasks under stress.

Future battlefields will place extraordinary demands on small units. Persistent observation and long-range fires may isolate formations and force junior leaders to act with limited guidance. Communications will be degraded. Casualties and equipment losses may be significant. Units will need to reorganize rapidly, protect themselves in every direction, and continue the mission while physically and mentally exhausted. In such conditions, centralized control becomes less reliable and trust becomes operationally valuable. Competence, disciplined initiative, and shared understanding allow units to function when technology or higher headquarters cannot provide an immediate answer.

The Azimuth’s warning that shortcuts in training and lapses in discipline will be paid for in blood should be read as a leadership obligation. Readiness reports, qualification percentages, and exercise results matter only if they reflect real capability. Leaders must resist the pressure to report success that has not been earned. They must build training that is demanding enough to reveal failure, create time to correct deficiencies, and enforce standards consistently. Modernization may change how the Army fights, but responsibility for preparing Soldiers remains personal and immediate.

Gaining Positional Advantage Before Crisis

The Army cannot wait for conflict to begin before establishing access and sustainment. The Azimuth describes positional advantage broadly: forward basing, campaigning, stockpiling, reinforcing forward areas, hardening lines of communication, and exploiting opportunities. This directly supports the National Defense Strategy’s focus on deterrence by denial. An adversary is less likely to act when American and allied forces are already postured to prevent a quick victory and when reinforcements can arrive before a fait accompli becomes a political reality.

For the Army, positional advantage is physical, relational, and informational. Physical advantage includes forces, equipment, munitions, fuel, air defense, transportation, and infrastructure positioned where they can influence events. Relational advantage comes from habitual cooperation with allies, established access agreements, common procedures, and trust built through repeated exercises and deployments. Informational advantage requires understanding terrain, adversary systems, civilian infrastructure, partner capabilities, and the signatures created by friendly operations.

Forward posture can deter, but it can also become vulnerable if it is predictable, concentrated, or dependent on fragile supply routes. The Army must balance presence with survivability. Stockpiles must be protected and dispersed. Routes must have alternatives. Command nodes must be mobile and redundant. Partners must be able to continue operating when U.S. support is constrained. Positional advantage is not simply being present; it is being present in a manner that preserves options and complicates an adversary’s plan.

The Army’s Strategic Test

The Army’s greatest institutional challenge will be translating this direction into priorities under limited time, personnel, and resources. The National Defense Strategy demands focus, yet the Army remains globally employed. It must support homeland missions, deter in the Indo-Pacific, reassure allies, maintain commitments in Europe and Korea, respond to crises, and preserve the ability to fight a large-scale land war. The resulting pressure can encourage a force to claim it can do everything without clearly identifying risk.

The Azimuth provides a compass but not a detailed resourcing plan. That is appropriate for a concise statement of direction, but it means the difficult work follows: deciding which formations receive new capabilities first, which legacy systems are reduced, how munitions and spare parts are stockpiled, how installations and depots are protected, and how training time is preserved. The Army must also reconcile rapid adaptation with the scale of institutional change. Moving quickly is essential, but change that outruns doctrine, maintenance, training, or sustainment can produce a force that is modern on paper and brittle in practice.

Success should therefore be measured through a small set of operational questions. Can Army formations deploy fast enough to affect a crisis? Can they operate under persistent surveillance and electronic attack? Can they protect the Joint Force from missiles and unmanned systems? Can the theater sustainment network continue after ports, airfields, and communications are disrupted? Can allies operate alongside U.S. formations and carry a larger share of the mission? Can junior leaders act effectively when isolated?

Conclusion: Turning Direction into Readiness

The National Security Strategy identifies what the United States seeks to protect and the international conditions it intends to shape. The National Defense Strategy determines how military power will support those goals. The Army Azimuth completes the chain by defining the landpower responsibilities necessary to make the strategy credible. Its message is direct: defend the homeland, prepare to fight and win, project power on and from the land, strengthen the Joint Force, outlearn adversaries, gain positional advantage, and maintain the warrior discipline required for land combat.

The Azimuth embraces artificial intelligence, autonomy, multidomain formations, precision fires, and new command-and-control capabilities, while insisting that Soldiers, standards, training, and leadership remain decisive. It recognizes that the next war will look different without assuming that technology has erased the timeless demands of war. The Army will still have to endure hardship, close with the enemy, control terrain, sustain formations, and accomplish political objectives at human cost.

As a continuation of the National Security Strategy and National Defense Strategy, The Army Azimuth moves the discussion from policy to preparation. The strategies above it can establish priorities, but only trained Soldiers, ready formations, resilient installations, credible posture, and sustained joint operations can turn those priorities into deterrence. For the Army, the measure of strategic alignment will not be how closely its language mirrors national guidance. It will be whether the force is ready, disciplined, lethal, adaptable, and relentless when the nation calls.

References

The Army Azimuth, by Gen. Christopher C. LaNeve (U.S. Army), Aug. 19, 2026.

National Security Strategy of the United States of America, by the White House (The White House), December 2025.

2026 National Defense Strategy, by the U.S. Department of War (U.S. Department of War), January 2026.

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Daniel Dodds is a retired Military Police senior noncommissioned officer who served as the director of operations sergeant major for the United States Disciplinary Barracks, the Department of Defense’s only Level III maximum-security prison. He has served in leadership roles from patrolman to battalion command sergeant major and retired as the G3 Sergeant Major for Army Corrections Command. He holds an associate degree from Excelsior University and a bachelor’s degree in leadership and workforce development from the Army Command and General Staff College. For The Havok Journal, he writes primarily on military leadership, military history, national security, and issues related to military corrections and discipline.

As the Voice of the Veteran Community, The Havok Journal seeks to publish a variety of perspectives on a number of sensitive subjects. Unless specifically noted otherwise, nothing we publish is an official point of view of The Havok Journal or any part of the U.S. government.please scrub