Soldiers with the 101st Airborne Division’s 2nd Brigade took to the Louisiana woods in August to compete against their most formidable enemy, the 1st Battalion 509th Infantry Regiment dubbed ‘Geronimo,’ with a deception plan in place.
Geronimo, the home team at Fort Johnson, Louisiana, faces off against units year-round at the Joint Readiness Training Center in realistic combat scenarios based on lessons learned in global conflicts. JRTC is designed to take away or add stressors on soldiers as well as hold units accountable with simulated casualties and hits that would take them out of the fight.
The 2nd Brigade came in knowing their enemy had the upper hand on home turf so they had to think ahead. Soldiers decided to use “raspberry pis,” which are single-board computers the size of a credit card that can be bought off Amazon to emulate a computer or show up as some kind of electronic signature to confuse their enemy.
“We came in with a deception plan because we wanted to show the enemy that we were in a place where we weren’t so that he would commit forces into our strongest defenses and not into our weakest,” said Capt. Charlie O’Hagan commander of the 101st’s Multi-Functional Reconnaissance Company. “We created, with those decoys, battalion headquarters, company headquarters, and we put them throughout the southern area.”
O’Hagan said they wanted to make it seem like they had a larger presence in the West so on the first two nights they had a battalion in the south turn on their decoys to make it seem like they were moving west to east using the southern corridor.
The plan worked for one battalion, allowing it to hide for some time, O’Hagan said. He deemed it successful because their deception plan had the opposing force “allocating resources such as [Intelligence, Surveillance, Reconnaissance] and fires to these decoys,” which took away maneuver space and decision-making from the enemy commander.
The decoys not only protected units from detection but revealed where their enemy’s assets were.
“If anyone’s flying over, they’ll see the decoy, they’ll see the antenna farm,” he said. “Ideally, they’ll use something in terms of artillery to destroy the decoy, which means the enemy unmasks his artillery. We can pick up on it, and then we can counter-fire his artillery.”
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The exercise is just one takeaway from the war in Ukraine that the Army is studying to change its tactics and incorporate technology into its formations faster to keep up with the changing face of warfare where sensing capabilities are prolific and unmanned aerial systems, UAS, or drones overhead can easily pinpoint targets.
“Just the detection capabilities of an adversary with modern technology is changing the character of warfare,” said Jack Keane, a retired four-star general who previously served as the Army vice chief of staff and was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2020.
Lt. Col. Mason Thornal, commander for the 1-509th opposition force admitted that sometimes even Geronimo gets it wrong and “we get caught when we don’t get this right.” Their competitive advantage, he said, is that they get to fail fast and practice every month.
During their fight against the 101st, Geronimo units had gotten distracted and found themselves in trouble from staying static for too long.
“We got pulled into the fight. We got busy,” Thornal said. “I was static for too long, and I had a [Multi-Functional Reconnaissance Company], small UAS appear over top of us. We had to displace.”
Thornal also said that the 101st had more sense and strike capabilities than units that the opposing force previously fought so they tried to change their own behavior as well.
“When we were infiltrating the area of operations, we had to use converging routes methods, so using multiple routes to make it harder to identify the main effort,” he said. “We had to serialize our movements so instead of sending eight tanks in at once — two here, two here, two here — it made us much slower.”
The takeaway for both sides, Thornal said, is the importance of concealment, dispersion, camouflage, and displacement. In layman’s terms that means moving quickly and quietly with smaller units to avoid detection by enemy forces via drone or having little to no signature on the electromagnetic spectrum which can be used to determine the size or makeup of a military’s assets like a refueling point or a battalion headquarters.
This also means changing the way soldiers think about how visible they are. At Fort Johnson, Thornal said the opposing force is using all of its sensing technologies to gain and maintain contact with the enemy using indirect fires, attack aviation, and electronic warfare jamming “to enable maneuver to allow our forces to have the advantage.”
The new type of battlefield threats also mean changing the behavior of soldiers. As soldiers were taught to tape down their dog tags during World War II to eliminate noise, now they have to perform pre-combat checks or inspections to make sure Bluetooth or WiFi isn’t being picked up from their personal devices. Even something like an electric shaver must be turned off.
“Treating em-comm [electromagnetic] emissions control like noise and light discipline, those are the best ways to counter it,” Thornal said.
Keane, a Vietnam veteran who once commanded the JRTC said the Geronimo “quite skillfully” replicated how the Russians are fighting in Ukraine where they’ve been hunting each other using soldier cell phone signals for targeting and flying drones attached with payloads to take out opposing units.
“The opposing force had significant surveillance and detection capabilities of both signal communications and detecting communications through electronic warfare. What the blue force had to do was change all their previous habits in terms of moving in large formations, having an electronic signature for something as simple as an iPhone watch,” Keane said.
A new way of waging war
The fight was part of the Army’s most recent JRTC rotation where units tested Army Chief of Staff Gen. Randy George’s so-called “Transformation in Contact,” approach which aims to bring new technology into formations faster with more user feedback.
“We’re taking lessons from everywhere,” George said. “We’re changing how we’re organized because I think that is what the current edition conditions require. We’re changing how we train and operate.”
In the past, units would generate requirements that would go through design and testing by defense contractors and eventually be put into formations. Now, the Army is taking technology before it’s fully mature, putting it into the units’ hands, and then designing the requirements. This means soldiers can test equipment in training to decide on its feasibility and offer feedback early on — something that was long missing from the military’s technology enterprise.
George said the Army is asking for more flexible funding to buy the newest technology.
“What we don’t want is to buy something and then say we’re going to have it for the next 20 years,” he said.
Keane, who was offered the role of Defense Secretary in 2016 by former President Donald Trump and sits on a congressional committee that looks at the National Defense Strategy, said the Army’s culture is changing, but the way the Pentagon buys, develops and incorporates emerging technology is getting in the way of those efforts.
“The threat to the American people’s security is real, and we got a system that will not let this organization, the U.S. Army, the best land force in the world, catch up to the changing character of war,” Keane told a group of reporters who attended JRTC training. “We’re paralyzed. That’s the reality of what we’re facing.”
Over the last few years, the Pentagon implored experts to study how the Army can modernize the way it buys new technology and Congress has given the Department of Defense authorities that give the military services more flexibility to move faster. However, some experts, like Keane, say it’s still not good enough.
“This chief here is going to bang his head up against the wall trying to get these systems in the hands of his soldiers to face the threat that’s out there,” he said, referring to Gen. George.
George agreed with Keane but when talking to reporters, he focused on the parts of the system that he has authority over — like pushing new tech out to units for training like at the JRTC. He also said that the transformation “isn’t about just the tech,” but also the formations and people.
At the August JRTC rotation, the Army saw its first prototype mobile brigade combat teams take center stage to test new technology they had received weeks and sometimes days before as well as concepts that the service wants to make its formations lighter, simpler and more devastating.
Army makes shift to large-scale combat operations
At the JRTC, the Army tested new formations and units amid a greater shift in the type of combat that the Pentagon anticipates the U.S. military may have to face. During Iraq and Afghanistan, U.S. forces were focused on conducting counterterrorism operations but in the future those might look more like large-scale combat operations.
With this type of combat, officials are looking at how to deploy smaller units faster while decreasing vulnerabilities in an environment where sensing technologies make it harder to move assets and personnel undetected.
The commander of the 101st Airborne Division, Maj. Gen. Brett Sylvia, said during one air assault simulation exercise they realized the Army was “extremely vulnerable” anytime it amassed its aircraft, so they needed to figure out how to be more dispersed, meaning “not landing at large airfields” all at once.
Brig. Gen. Bryan Babich, director of the Mission Command Center of Excellence said the emphasis on dispersing units to improve their chance of surviving against a “near-peer adversary” with equivalent capabilities to the U.S. military, will mean a test of soldiers’ stamina.
“Because we’re distributed, we don’t have those big staffs with 24-hour battle rooms. You got to keep moving so it’s the human endurance factor as well,” Babich said. While the changes that the Army is considering mean simplifying the work that the commander and the staff have to do, “that work’s got to go somewhere and now that’s becoming the division.”
The Army that fought in Operation Desert Storm was very division-centric and after 2004, the service moved to a modular construct by “making brigade combat teams as self-sufficient as we possibly could,” said Sylvia. When he deployed as a colonel to Mosul, Iraq for counter-ISIS operations in 2018-2019 with a Brigade Combat Team, the 101st Division staff were back at Fort Campbell, Kentucky, meaning he had to use the brigade’s resources like artillery and engineers with limited modern technology.
Now the Army is looking to strip brigade combat teams of the excess capabilities they built up over time and make them lighter and leaner. In a future fight, the division would deploy with multiple brigades, Sylvia said.
Infantry brigade combat teams are made up of just over 4,300 soldiers but the new design reduces that number to nearly 3,000 soldiers. Although there are fewer soldiers, the Army envisions generating “new forms of mass,” Sylvia said, referring to a greater emphasis on UAS.
“As we transition to a mobile brigade combat team, we take out many of those manned platforms and make them unmanned platforms with new constructs,” Sylvia said. “We’re able to trade steel for blood.”
For command and control, the new concept puts divisions in charge of managing the network to keep brigades focused on tactics — moving faster with less equipment to worry about. Brigades would no longer carry large radios but soldiers would have Android devices they can use with Starlink internet or nearby cell towers.
The Army is working through which devices and apps it wants to use but officials have emphasized the need for software to bring all of the systems together and have a simple user interface that’s intuitive to new users.
“We want to be able to control that drone from our end user device. We want to be able to do everything from one system,” O’Hagan said. “Ideally it’s one [a] stop shop.”
However, ass the Army shifts to becoming more dispersed and mobile or as O’Hagan called it, “painfully light,” soldiers will have to forgo certain comforts they were allotted in bigger battalion formations: air conditioning, food, and water.
The two-week JRTC battle was just a peek at the Army’s plan to bring the U.S. land force into this decade, George said, adding that 20th Engineer Brigade at Fort Liberty, North Carolina are finding new ways to do breaching with robots and the 3rd Infantry Division is exploring new drone tactics. Now the issue is modernizing the Army at scale and doing it faster, he said.
“In the last six months, just with this unit, we did that. We changed and we’ve adapted, and we’ve given them that technology,” George said. “We’re adapting our processes so that we can do that faster in the future.”