The Caiman mine resistant ambush protected tent-based company command post a Caiman vehicle equipped with mission command capabilities for use on the move or, with the supplied tent, at a halt was reviewed last fall at Network Integration Evaluation (NIE) 12.1 at White Sands Missile Range, N.M. Several company command post variants, which allow company commanders to use mission command applications previously available only at the battalion level and above, were evaluated at NIE 12.1. 60 ARMY March 2012
By Scott R. Gourley t seems pretty basic: A command post is an organizational hub where a commander and his primary staff will normally execute current operations and plan future operations. There has been a change, however, in the Scott Gourley nature of current operations and the increasing responsibilities assigned to lower-echelon units that have not been formally equipped or U.S. Army/Claire Schwerin staffed for the command aspects of those responsibilities. In the old conventional days it was like an upside-down pyramid, where the guy at the bottom knew less about what was happening than the guy at the top, explained LTC Matthew Fath, commander, 1st Battalion, 35th Armored Regiment, 2nd Brigade Combat Team, 1st Armored Division. He fought for his own reconnaissance, for example, while the guy on the top got all of the JSTARS [Joint Surveillance Target Attack Radar System] feeds. There was no good way to get that information down to the company commander, but in a March 2012 ARMY 61
U.S. Army A company command post was set up inside the Army s Network Modernization display at the 2011 Association of the U.S. Army Annual Meeting and Exposition in Washington, D.C., last October. counterinsurgency that pyramid is flipped. The guy at the bottom knows more than anybody else above him. Therefore, his command post has to be responsive to his needs. So there is a lot of intelligence analysis and databasing that happens at the company level that needs to be resourced in a company command post. In a counterinsurgency fight the company command post provides an absolutely critical function, he said. In a counterinsurgency fight I refer to the company commander as the Prince of Counterinsurgency. In a counterinsurgency environment everyone else exists to support the company commander. He is the number-one guy who has daily contact with the population in his battlespace. So a lot of the functions that a battalion tactical operations center and higher formerly performed have now filtered down to the company commander. That mainly has to do with intelligence. A company commander knows his area of operations in a counterinsurgency better than anybody else in that theater because that s what we hold him responsible for knowing, but for years and years we didn t [provide the] resources for him to do that function. In recognition of that gap, the Army has undertaken a new company command post initiative process, which features extensive cooperation among organizations like the LandWarNet division in G-3/5/7 at Headquarters, Department of the Army; the Program Executive Office for Command, Control, Communications-Tactical (PEO C3T); Scott R. Gourley, a freelance writer, is a contributing editor to ARMY. and units on the ground at the semiannual Network Integration Evaluation (NIE) events. According to representatives in the office of U.S. Army product manager for Command Post Systems & Integration (CPS&I), assigned to PEO C3T, the company command post initiative began to take shape a couple of years ago when theater lessons learned included the fact that forward-deployed company commanders lacked organic capabilities to reach back to battalion to keep them informed and to enhance their own understanding of the battlespace. Because the commander has to have communications with his superiors at the battalion and the brigade levels, and because companies operate more decentralized in the theater of operations, that company commander has to be more situationally aware, explained LTC Carl J. Hollister, product manager for CPS&I. The way we provide that situational awareness is through mission command capabilities, [which] not only enable that company commander s situational awareness but also keep him tied to his superiors through data or voice communications as integral parts of the network. The initiative emerged with a set of directed requirements that included: Transmit and receive voice, data and imagery (line of sight and beyond line of sight); automatically transmit own position location information (PLI) and receive and display autotransmitted friendly PLI; collaborate via voice, chat and whiteboard with higher, adjacent and subordinate units; display and manipulate the common operational picture; access unclassified, classified and coalition networks; incorporate rehearsal and training 62 ARMY March 2012
U.S. Army U.S. Army/Claire Schwerin tools; conduct all source intelligence analysis and operations; and plan and execute fires. At company you have a command post and at battalion you have a tactical operations center, noted LTC Fath, whose battalion has been the focus of early company command post field evaluations during the last two NIEs. It s not a new capability, but one of the things we ve been trying to figure out is what should become the Army s baseline on both equipment and on personnel in a company command post. Everybody has command post equipment and personnel according to their table of organization and equipment, he said. What we have learned during the past 10 years at war is that we do a lot of ad hoc stuff to build the Above, a company command post prototype was displayed in the Army s Network Modernization booth at the 2011 LandWar- Net Conference in Tampa, Fla. Featuring technologies shown in the first NIE last summer, the booth demonstrated how the Army is using networked capability to empower units down to the company and platoon level. Left, inside a prototype company command post at the 2011 LandWarNet Conference, MG John McGee and LTC Jon Ellis discuss its capabilities, among them sending and receiving text messages and emails, utilizing ground tactical data reporting systems and collaborative environments such as Command Post of the Future, and planning fire support missions with the Advanced Field Artillery Tactical Data System. company command post to where it provides something to a company commander. Most of that we have built, either in Iraq or Afghanistan, from theater-provided equipment, which is not on your table of organization and equipment. So one of the things we have been tasked to do is establish what we think should be the command post with soldiers, leaders and equipment, he added. So it s not new. What we are really trying to do is take lessons learned from the past 10 years and get them into Army doctrine, then into Army equipment and personnel manning documents for the company command post. We are trying to right-size that, said LTC Hollister. That s the purpose of our initiative participation in the NIE process. We don t want to give the companies too March 2012 ARMY 65
The role of company command posts in mission command on the move and the extension of the network to the individual soldier were key priorities evaluated during NIE 12.1. much capability, because then it becomes difficult to sort through all the information that is being provided to them in terms of information and the transport mechanisms. It also includes mission command enablers software applications that provide different levels of knowledge management and information management. LTC Fath offered the company intelligence support team as an example of one of the personnel manning issues being explored. Right now in our table of organization and equipment that just changed last October every company is authorized an intel sergeant and an intel soldier at the company level to do intelligence work, and I will tell you that it doesn t matter if you are in a counterinsurgency or wide-area security or combined arms maneuver. You still need those intelligence guys at the company level, he said. One important aspect has been staffing, whether we need two operations sergeants or just one to run the ops side of the house. Another critical point we are finding as we evaluate the network involves signal personnel, LTC Fath explained. Right now you are authorized one signal sergeant at the company level and he s a 25 Uniform, which is an FM [frequency modulation] commo guy. Now you are asking him to do things closer to what a 25 Bravo a network guy does. Then if you get an augmentation or some type of satellite comms for your data path now you are talking about a 25 Quebec. So we have to take a look at the Signal MOSs [military occupational specialties] and see what that soldier either needs to be trained to do or possibly assign additional personnel in the company command post to run all those systems. In parallel with the company command post, the NIE has also been exploring the mandates of mission (battle) command on the move. One of the things we are trying to do is bridge those two concepts, LTC Fath observed. Ideally it should be modular, based on the tempo of the fight. If you re in combined arms maneuver and you have a high-tempo operation, the commander is fighting from his vehicle or he is on the ground if he s a light infantryman, but for my battalion we were an MRAP-based [mine resistant ambush protected], motorized, combined arms battalion. So the company commanders fought either on the ground or in their M-ATV [MRAP All-Terrain Vehicle] most of the time on the ground. During the most recent NIE, company commanders in LTC Fath s battalion also pooled a number of new Caiman MRAP command post prototypes, resulting in both stationary (tent) and mobile (Caiman) mission command assets. What we have looked at and taken to the Mission Command Center of Excellence is that ideally if you were in a high-tempo, combined-arms-maneuver fight, your command post would be that Caiman command post at least the way my battalion was based, LTC Fath explained. At certain times the tempo slows down let s say you move from combined arms maneuver to wide-area security and that s when a tent-based command post comes in. Then you just basically boot the Caiman into the back of a tent-based command post and remote all the systems out of the Caiman and into the command post, and obviously you may have to have a generator and ECU [environmental control unit]. So for us it was a DRASH [deployable rapid assembly shelter] tent, an ECU, plus the Caiman command post vehicle that composed the company command post. The Caiman command post prototypes actually emerged before NIE 11.2 in spring 2011, when LTC Fath and some of his company commanders met with Jerry Tyree, who had a System of Systems Integration Directorate rapid prototype facility at White Sands, N.M. You had the company commanders sitting with the engineers and actually designing the Caiman command post with the systems in there, he said. And we improved upon that between NIEs 11.2 and 12.1. That was a great methodology of putting the commanders the guys who need it and know what they want in there with the systems engineers building and designing the Caiman. When asked about how a company command post changes things from his battalion command perspective, U.S. Army 66 ARMY March 2012
Three primary variants of the company command post were evaluated at NIE 12.1. NIE 12.2 will evaluate two new variants of the command post. LTC Fath said, When we get the transport layers and data paths right, when we get the data paths working reliably and effectively, think of the power of being able to send data from a tactical operations center or my TAC, which is a Caiman command post down to a company command post. That s powerful stuff, because before that we were operating off of FM. We were the operating voice, and we were trying to paint a picture to a guy over FM. That s an art. It takes experience to be able to use voice to paint a visual picture in the commander s mind of what is happening. Referring to his own previous experience as an observer controller (OC) at the National Training Center, he recalled, Most wrong decisions were made not because commanders were ignorant. It was that they made the best decision based on the information that they had at the time. That will never change. But now think about the company commander being able to get better information, better intelligence and having the ability for an intel guy to do that analysis at his level. Looking toward the upcoming NIE 12.2, LTC Fath said, By the end of January we have to send up what we think the command posts are going to look like for 12.2. From my understanding they are then going to try to baseline a couple to really see if that s the right answer. That s kind of the goal for 12.2, to have the baseline company command posts and then provide more feedback at the end of that NIE. LTC Fath offered two takeaway points on the process. One is an overall observation of what the 2/1 AD is doing and what the Iron Knights [1-35 Armor] are doing right now, he began. And the first thing I would observe is that this is really nothing new to the U.S. Army. If you look at the years between World War I and World War II, at Fort Knox, Ky., they had the Experimental Mech[anized] Force where they were trying to understand not only the equipment but the warfighting of a motorized/mechanized force. During Vietnam you had LTC Hal Moore s Air Cav concept that he was testing at Fort Benning, Ga., and then they took that unit to war in Vietnam. It s kind of the same concept at NIE, except that we re focused on things like the network; we re focused on company command post; we re focused on mission command on the move; and we are starting to connect to the individual soldier through concepts like Connecting Soldiers to Digital Applications. We re trying to push a lot of capabilities from the battalion [tactical operations center] down to the company command post and then to push some of those capabilities not all but some of them down to the individual soldier on the ground. He continued, The second piece of that is what a great job the soldiers and leaders of our battalion and our brigade are doing. We fight against an adaptable, thinking enemy, and our soldiers are giving really great, detailed and candid feedback. They tell it like it is, and it is a continuous source of pride when you sit in the after action reviews and hear them talk, not only about the tactical issues, but also: Here s what the system is supposed to do, here is what it actually did and here is how I think the system should be fixed in order to give it the capabilities I need it to have. As I tell the battalion: This battalion succeeds from the hard work of everyone from private to lieutenant colonel. They do an absolutely great job. The Army is trying to enable mission success, summarized LTC Hollister. We don t add technologies to the battlefield unless they are going to provide us with a tactical advantage and a technology advantage over our adversaries. We have to right-size the software and the hardware that go into a company command post in order to do that, but at the end of the day it s about mission success. He concluded, The NIE is a very special evaluation in that we have very focused soldiers and leaders who are giving us the best feedback possible without placing soldiers in harm s way. It s a great training platform for the Army, and it s a great evaluation platform for the Army. U.S. Army 68 ARMY March 2012