By John Spencer
One of the most striking patterns I have observed across recent wars has little to do with drones, artificial intelligence, or precision fires. It has to do with darkness. In three major conflicts involving forces that range from professional to semiprofessional—the 2020 war between Azerbaijan and Armenia, the ongoing Russia-Ukraine war, and Israel’s campaign against Hamas after October 7, 2021—large-scale night operations have been notably rare. Outside of highly specialized units conducting limited raids, most decisive fighting has occurred during daylight. At night, both sides tend to pause, reorganize, and recover. In effect, the night is ceded rather than dominated.
That reality stands in sharp contrast to what the US military demonstrated in Operation Absolute Resolve. US forces executed a complex, high-risk mission deep inside a dense capital city at night. The operation required joint and interagency integration across air, land, sea, and cyber domains and fusing intelligence, special operations forces, and other capabilities. Power was cut. Targets were overwhelmed. The mission concluded with zero American casualties and zero loss of equipment. It was a near-flawless demonstration of a capability that takes decades to build and years to sustain.
That success is even more striking when viewed against earlier US experience. Operation Eagle Claw remains a cautionary case of what happens when night operations exceed institutional readiness. The 1980 hostage rescue attempt in Iran required unprecedented joint coordination and depended on a complex, multiphase plan involving long-range infiltration, helicopters, and clandestine ground movement deep inside hostile territory, much of it planned for execution under conditions of limited illumination and degraded visibility. Mechanical failures, severe dust storms, and navigation challenges reduced the assault force below the minimum required to continue the mission. During the withdrawal from Desert One—a staging area where the mission was aborted—a helicopter operating in degraded visibility collided with a transport aircraft, killing eight US servicemembers. Eagle Claw exposed serious deficiencies in joint planning, rehearsal, and integration. Strategically, it revealed the limits of American power projection in denied environments and directly drove sweeping reforms, including the creation of US Special Operations Command.
A decade later, Operation Just Cause marked significant progress but also underscored how darkness magnifies the challenges of identification, control, and coordination. The 1989 invasion of Panama involved approximately twenty-seven thousand US troops and successfully dismantled the Panamanian Defense Forces within days. The operation deliberately began at night, with major assaults initiated around midnight and continuing through hours of darkness, requiring near-simultaneous airborne and ground attacks against multiple objectives across Panama. During the opening night of the operation, including the seizure of Torrijos-Tocumen International Airport and other key sites, fratricide occurred amid limited visibility, compressed timelines, and the rapid convergence of aircraft and ground forces. The Joint Chiefs of Staff history of the operation highlights the extraordinary command-and-control demands created by this nighttime tempo, illustrating how darkness, density of friendly forces, and speed of execution strained identification and coordination even within an increasingly capable joint force. Just Cause demonstrated growing US proficiency in large-scale night operations, but it also showed that darkness punishes even small lapses in control, communication, and situational awareness.
The difference between those operations and more recent successes was not technology alone. It was mastery earned through relentless training, professionalization, and a force-wide expectation that fighting at night is not exceptional. It is preferred.
That mastery already exists within parts of the US Army. The special operations community has spent decades institutionalizing night operations as a baseline expectation rather than an advanced skill. Units routinely conduct helicopter infiltration, assault, and exfiltration in zero illumination, degraded weather, and complex terrain. Organizations such as 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment have built an entire culture around flying at night under the most demanding conditions imaginable. But this level of proficiency remains unevenly distributed. While special operations forces assume night dominance as a prerequisite for mission success, the same expectation is not consistently applied to brigade- and division-level combined arms formations. Night operations at scale remain something many conventional units prepare for episodically rather than master as a standing, force-wide expectation.
For more than two decades, US conventional forces, especially the Army, operated continuously in Iraq and Afghanistan, including extensive activity at night. But night operations for conventional forces during those wars meant something fundamentally different than they did for special operations forces. Special operations units exploited the night to conduct majority of their assigned missions of the campaign, intelligence-driven kill or capture missions that deliberately used darkness as a tactical advantage. Conventional forces also operated at night, conducting mounted patrols under blackout conditions, base security, and raids and other limited offensive actions. Yet the most important and decisive tasks of stability and counterinsurgency operations occurred overwhelmingly during daylight. Protecting the population, conducting patrols, meeting with local leaders, building infrastructure, and separating insurgents from civilians required persistent daytime presence. This operational reality shaped habits and preferences. Conventional forces could operate at night, but they did so far less frequently because their mission demands emphasized daylight activity. It is therefore unreasonable to expect conventional formations to possess the same instinctive night proficiency as special operations forces when they have not faced the same operational requirements. Large-scale combat operations against a peer enemy will reverse that reality. Future wars will demand that conventional units not only see at night, but fight, maneuver, and command with confidence in darkness, treating night not as a constraint, but as a decisive advantage.
Assessments of peer competitors’ night training and operations suggest significant variation in capability and experience. Russian conventional forces have not demonstrated a systematic ability to exploit night operations in Ukraine, with observable attacks and maneuver still occurring predominantly during daylight hours. Western analyses of Russian training indicate that many units deploy with limited preparation and constrained combined arms proficiency, conditions that directly inhibit their ability to coordinate and sustain operations in darkness. China’s military, by contrast, has placed increasing emphasis on joint and combined arms training, including night activities, as reflected in recent large-scale exercises and doctrinal publications. However, the People’s Liberation Army has not conducted major combat operations since the Sino-Vietnamese War of 1979, meaning its night-fighting proficiency remains largely untested outside exercises and controlled training environments. Taken together, available evidence suggests that while Russia and China are studying night operations and investing in capability, neither has demonstrated the institutional confidence and habitual exploitation of darkness that comes from repeated large-scale combat experience, reinforcing the need for the US Army to deliberately preserve and expand its own night dominance.
Despite the widespread availability of night-vision technology, few militaries have translated access to the equipment into habitual, force-wide proficiency in conducting major ground operations at night. In the 2020 Nagorno-Karabakh War, Azerbaijani forces achieved decisive effects through drones, fires, and mounted and dismounted maneuver, yet their main ground operations largely unfolded during daylight, especially in high-casualty events such as breaching mine-wired obstacles. In Ukraine, despite extensive Western support and adaptation, sustained large-scale night maneuver remains limited, with darkness dominated by reconnaissance, harassment fires, and small-unit actions rather than major offensives. In Gaza, the Israel Defense Forces, among the most technologically advanced militaries in the world, conducted relatively few large-scale ground operations at night for extended periods of the campaign, relying instead on specialized units for nocturnal missions.
This raises an obvious question. If night-vision goggles have existed for decades, and if even basic systems are widely available, why do so few militaries truly operate at night?
The answer is simple and uncomfortable. Night combat is hard. It is hard at the individual level, where soldiers must move, shoot, communicate, and make decisions with limited sensory input. It is hard at the small-unit level, where control measures become fragile and errors multiply. It is exponentially harder at scale, where brigades and divisions must synchronize maneuver, fires, logistics, aviation, and command and control in darkness. Owning the night is not about possessing devices. It is about institutional mastery.
This is where the US Army retains a decisive advantage. It is built on an all-volunteer professional force, sustained by the world’s most capable noncommissioned officer corps, and reinforced by training systems that demand repetition under stress. Night operations cannot be treated as a novelty or a niche skill. They must be embedded across the force, and these factors enable the Army to do so.
For decades, the Army embraced the phrase “own the night.” Early on, that advantage rested in part on exclusive access to military-grade night-vision devices. That monopoly is gone. At the same time, the skills and habits required to conduct large-scale night combat with conventional forces atrophied over years of war in Iraq and Afghanistan, where mission requirements emphasized persistent daytime presence rather than sustained maneuver in darkness. Night-vision technology proliferated, but institutional mastery of its employment in large-scale combat operations did not keep pace. The ability to integrate night systems into brigade- and division-level maneuver, synchronize fires, maintain control, and sustain tempo in darkness requires extensive training, leader development, and repeated collective exercises. These are perishable skills, and without deliberate reinforcement, they erode.
The advantage of the US Army’s dominance during night operations is not guaranteed. It must be deliberately protected and expanded.
Owning the night must be treated as a force-wide requirement, starting at the very beginning of a soldier’s career. Night movement, night marksmanship, night command and control, and night sustainment must be integrated from basic training onward. Advanced individual training, unit collective training, and leader development must reinforce that expectation. At the combat training centers, night should not be an inconvenience or a scheduling constraint. It should be the default.
That expectation should begin before soldiers ever arrive at their first unit. Leader development and training institutions must set this expectation from the very start across basic and advanced individual training, noncommissioned officer education, and officer commissioning sources. At West Point, for example, cadets could be required to demonstrate proficiency in night land navigation under night-vision goggles, qualify with their service rifles at night, and plan and lead squad and platoon operations in darkness across complex terrain. These would not be exotic events reserved for select training blocks, but baseline graduation requirements. A lieutenant who enters the Army having already maneuvered formations, controlled fires, and made decisions under night conditions will not view darkness as a risk to be avoided but as an advantage to be exploited. Over time, this approach would do more than build skill. It would build confidence, instinct, and a cultural preference for operating at night, ensuring that future leaders do not merely tolerate darkness, but actively seek it.
One other simple reform would reveal much. Stop allowing major attacks during training to begin at dawn. At the National Training Center, I have watched dozens of brigade-level urban assaults begin precisely as the sun rises. The breach coincides with daylight. This may be convenient for observation and evaluation, but it trains the wrong instinct. If adversaries prefer to fight in daylight and pause at night, then attacking at dawn meets them on their terms. We should be attacking when visibility is denied, when control of the light spectrum matters, when electricity is cut, smoke is employed, and confusion favors the force that has trained hardest.
This applies especially to the most difficult tasks in urban warfare. Breaching obstacles. Crossing minefields. Seizing dense terrain. Coordinating fires and maneuver amid civilians and complex infrastructure. These are the operations that separate professional militaries from those that rely on mass, brutality, or standoff destruction. If our enemies can fight at dusk, then dusk is not good enough. We must master what they cannot do.
There is also a psychological dimension that technology alone cannot replace. Darkness amplifies fear and uncertainty. For forces that lack training and confidence, night becomes paralyzing. For forces that have mastered it, night becomes a weapon. Dominating the night imposes a constant mental burden on the enemy, eroding rest, cohesion, and morale. It communicates superiority without words.
Technological innovation will continue to matter. Advances in sensors and fused imagery that can see through smoke, weather, and obscurants will expand what is possible. Companies such as Anduril Industries are pushing next-generation vision systems well beyond traditional night-vision goggles by integrating digital night and low-light imaging, augmented reality overlays, and AI-assisted situational awareness into mixed-reality headsets and helmets that enhance detection, identification, and coordination in darkness and complex environments.
But technology is an enabler, not the foundation. The foundation is training. Years of repetition. Institutional commitment. Leaders who demand proficiency in darkness rather than tolerate avoidance.
The United States still possesses one of the most decisive military advantages in the world: a force capable of conducting massive, coordinated, ground-centric operations at night. That advantage has not disappeared, but it will erode if it is not deliberately maintained.
The US Army can still own the night. It must.