Joint Readiness Training Center Case Study

“To win in a complex world as part of joint, interorganizational and multinational effort, Army forces must have the capability and capacity to accomplish assigned missions while confronting increasingly dangerous threats in complex operational environments”. The way we fight must “evolve based upon assigned missions, the operational environment, emerging technologies and changes in enemy capabilities, objectives, and will”.

In order to fight and win at the Joint Readiness Training Center (JRTC), the Warrior Brigade calibrated our approach and assessment of the enemy to a near-peer threat in a Direct Action Training Environment (DATE). Our analysis of the enemy threat, capability and will indicated that our Mission Command nodes were a high priority target and that a concentrated MAIN CP inevitably becomes a Target Reference Point (TRP) for an enemy force fighting with home field advantage. In order to Mission Command the BDE in direct action fight against a near-peer threat, our MAIN CP configuration had to evolve. Doctrinally, a command post’s configuration boils down to two opposing forces: Survivability versus Efficiency. A command post’s survivability is vital to mission success; however, command posts often gain survivability at the price of effectiveness. When concentrated, the enemy can easily acquire and target most command posts.

Acknowledging that survival was a nonnegotiable, we challenged the notion that a terrain based MAIN CP configuration would cost our staff effectiveness and synchronization. The Warrior Brigade devised a three phase approach to evolve our staff from our current state to our desired endstate. In Phase one, we planned to tear down our current conceptions of a staff, in phase two we would rebuild a staff team and in our final phase we would build a Team of Teams capable of operating in terrain based MAIN CP configuration as a coordinated