Ditch that smartphone. Hide in a basement. Turn off every radio you can. Use electronic warfare sensors to scan your own troops for detectable transmissions and shut them off. Offload every function you can to higher headquarters further out of range, transmitting only essential data through an encrypted cloud.<\/p>\n
Break up big staffs, like the 200-plus personnel in a divisional Main Command Post, into half a dozen smaller \u201csub-nodes,\u201d each hiding in a different building or hastily dug bunker, communicating with each other not over\u00a0Wi-Fi\u00a0or tactical radio but over ruggedized fiber optic cables a quarter-mile (400 meters) long, unspooled by soldiers through the shelling-shattered windows and rubbled streets.<\/p>\n
And every few hours, one of the sub-nodes takes its turn to shut down for a few hours and moved a few hundred yards \u2014 never too far for those fiber cables \u2014 so that, within a day, the entire formation has relocated, slithering undetected across the battlefield like an amoeba.<\/p>\n
That\u2019s the prescription from the US Army\u2019s\u00a0Combined Arms Center<\/a>\u00a0at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, helmed by Lt. Gen. Milford Beagle, a South Carolinian who\u2019s served everywhere from Afghanistan and Iraq to South Korea.<\/p>\n \u201cThis is something I think all armies are going to wrestle with,\u201d Beagle told Breaking Defense. \u201cThe US Army certainly has.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cIt is a transparent battlefield,\u201d added Brig. Gen. Jason Slider, who was Beagle\u2019s director of \u201cmission command\u201d until being seconded to the French Army, part of a\u00a0longstanding officer exchange program<\/a>. \u00a0\u201cYou will always be under some type of enemy observation, so deception, decoys, and\u2026 improved command and control on the move will be very important\u2026. We have concepts written out, there\u2019s experimentation ongoing \u2013 [e.g.]\u00a0AFC<\/a>\u00a0Project Convergence<\/a>. We\u2019re figuring out what works, what doesn\u2019t work. We \u2018re keeping our eye on what technology is in the pipeline.\u201d<\/p>\n The good news is that while new gear can help, it doesn\u2019t take a high-tech revolution to develop useful countermeasures to ubiquitous surveillance and precision targeting, the generals and other Combined Arms Center experts say. They can do a lot with just new tactics, organizational tweaks, and some creative use of terrain and technology that\u2019s widely available, like stringing those fiber optic cables between basement hideouts.<\/p>\n \u201cWe can better protect ourselves, reduce risk, even with the technologies that are emerging out there currently,\u201d Beagle said.<\/p>\n Learning Deadly Lessons From\u00a0Russia\u2019s Disasters<\/strong><\/p>\n Earlier this year, Beagle, Slider, and a third Army officer, Lt. Col. Matthew Arrol, co-authored an article, ominously titled \u201cThe Graveyard of Command Posts<\/a>,\u201d in which they outlined key lessons that US ground forces should learn from the heavy losses the Russian officer corps has taken in Ukraine.<\/p>\n It may be comforting for American commanders to blame Moscow\u2019s military mishaps on incompetence and say they could never happen to them.\u00a0Indeed, Beagle and Slider told us in the interview,\u00a0some<\/em>\u00a0of the Russian army\u2019s problems are the result of its overcentralized institutional culture, in which senior commanders must move forward to micromanage overwhelmed subordinates who are routinely punished for showing initiative. At least some of these Russian generals were hit by precision strikes because they were talking on easily traceable\u00a0civilian cellphones<\/a>.<\/p>\n The US has struggled with similar self-owns \u2014 as when\u00a0deployed troops using fitness apps<\/a>\u00a0gave away the location and even exact layout of\u00a0secret bases in Syria<\/a>. But the American culture of initiative and improvisation at all ranks \u201cgives us a bit of an off-ramp,\u201d Slider said, because subordinates can take action without constantly going on the radio to check in. US junior officers are briefed on the overall vision for each operation and trained to take \u201cdisciplined initiative\u201d to achieve their \u201ccommander\u2019s intent\u201d without waiting for new instructions when things change.<\/p>\n \u201cIf all of it were to go south in terms of our ability to communicate,\u201d Beagle said, \u201cthen it\u2019s all about understanding intent and developing that at echelons so subordinate commanders and soldiers clearly understand, if I can only transmit once [or] they\u2019re severed completely, then you can operate given that intent and within the spirit of that intent.\u201d<\/p>\n On the flipside, however, America\u2019s bigger defense budget and love for technology means that US command posts are even more lavishly endowed with radio-wave-emitting gadgetry than their Russian counterparts.\u00a0The\u00a0US Army is also still struggling to break a generation of bad habits acquired in Afghanistan and Iraq.<\/p>\n \u201cThe size, the complexity of our command posts is linked to the past couple decades of fighting a counterinsurgency,\u201d \u201cWe had those luxuries and ability to do it.\u201d<\/p>\n Going On A Data Diet<\/strong><\/p>\n Against guerrilla adversaries with no long range weapons and only a handful of drones, the US could build up huge, static Forward Operating Bases with air-conditioned command posts where officers could watch live, full-color, full-motion video (FMV) from drones. But that requires big buildings, high bandwidth, and tremendous emissions of both radio waves and heat (electronics and generators to power them run hot). All of that is easy prey for drone-equipped artillery units like Russia\u2019s \u2014 or China\u2019s. So those supersized command posts need to slim down, which includes going on a diet when it comes to data.<\/p>\n \u201cWhat is it we really need?\u201d Beagle asked. \u201cThe ultimate goal at the end of the day is to ensure that the commander has the information that he or she needs [to] understand what\u2019s going on, decide what to do about it, tell someone to do something, [and] keep track of the battle\u2026 Everything that does not support that is extraneous.\u201d<\/p>\n The Army\u2019s doing a doctrinal scrub of data requirements at every echelon of the command hierarchy, Slider added, updating what are called Mission Essential Task Lists and deciding the \u201cminimum essential products\u201d for each level from \u201ccorps to platoon.\u201d<\/p>\n After two decades of emphasis on village-by-village counterinsurgency by robustly self-sufficient Brigade Combat Teams,\u00a0which\u00a0comprise\u00a0about 4,000 soldiers commanded by a colonel, the Army believes higher headquarters will play a larger role in large-scale wars against Russia or China, so it\u2019s shifting and centralizing many functions, from\u00a0artillery support<\/a>\u00a0to\u00a0network tech<\/a>, up to division HQs or even corps.<\/p>\n The goal is not to bloat up the division and corps command posts. Indeed, the Army\u2019s acquisition arm is fielding a new\u00a0Command Post Computing Environment<\/a>\u00a0that consolidates multiple pieces of bulky, specialized hardware \u2014 separate \u201ctactical servers\u201d for intelligence, artillery, logistics, and so on \u2014 into a single machine running the different functions as software\u00a0apps. It\u2019s also testing what\u2019s called\u00a0Command Post Integrated Infrastructure<\/a>, which replaces traditional CPs housed in tents with mobile command trucks (\u201cexpando vans<\/a>\u201d) that can unfold their sides to accommodate staff, then fold up and drive away in minutes when danger looms.<\/p>\n Future mobile command posts should be in armored vehicles, Beagle and Slider warn, to survive the shrapnel from no-warning strikes. And at the smallest, most forward units, \u201cbattalion and below,\u201d Slider said, the goal is to put everything a commander needs on a single ruggedized laptop with the ability to \u201creach back\u201d through secure communications to get additional data from a cloud computing center safely out of enemy artillery range.<\/p>\n \u201cThe cloud is very exciting,\u201d Beagle said, \u201cbecause \u00a0\u2026 I don\u2019t need to bring all the sever stacks and servers and everything and the power to generate it.\u201d But, he acknowledges, you won\u2019t always have remote access to that cloud server in a battlefield wracked by jamming, hacking, and physical destruction of relays.\u00a0Rather, he said, at times commanders may decide the risk of detection outweighs the benefit of communication and deliberately turn off some of all of their transmitters, just as submariners sometimes rig for silent running or fighter pilots turn off their radars.<\/p>\n \u201cWe\u2019re going to have to go through that culture shift of, you may not have access to all that information,\u201d Beagle said. \u201c[And] if you lose all connectivity, then where\u2019s your backup?\u2026 Everything that you do digitally, you need to have a way or practice where you can replicate it in an analog sense, [e.g.] your flat map with an\u00a0alcohol marker<\/a>.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cI definitely don\u2019t want anybody in the audience to think that we\u2019re trying to force our formations to fight blind,\u201d he emphasized. \u201cWe\u2019ll fight [equally] with a lot of information, a lot of access, or with very little.\u201d<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.fie.undef.edu.ar\/ceptm\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/08\/russian_soldiers_2-scaled-1024x576-1.webp\")
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