What is ICOS?

This post is for those people who are waiting for their CLC3 date and wondering what the capstone exercise is. Unfortunately, CLC3 is *not* about preparing you for command -- it's about making you a capable logistics *staff officer*.

In the Individual Concept of Support (ICOS), you are a Brigade Support Battalion (BSB) Support Operations Officer (SPO) responsible for sustaining an entire armored brigade combat team. You have to understand what your parent brigade's requirements are in terms of all classes of supply, medical services, and mortuary affairs, and you have to have a coherent plan showing how you provide those services.

You have to create three products:

1. A Microsoft Word-based "logistics estimate," which is a huge, memo-like worksheet showing your calculations on capabilities, requirements, potential shortfalls, and how you plan to mitigate those shortfalls.
   


2. An Excel-based "synchronization matrix," which shows day-by-day or hour-by-hour what you're going to provide, to whom, where, and using what assets. Typically (though there's no official format) the columns are for the time points and the row are for either units or classes of supply.
   


3. A PowerPoint-based presentation that ties everything together and includes some extra "just to check that you got the idea right" slides on what the S-2 (intelligence) and S-3 (operations) would create.

In my opinion, the best experience you could have to prepare you for this would be to have worked in an armored brigade combat team's (ABCT's) BSB SPO shop. Then you've already done most of this. Second best -- if you've worked in a BSB's Alpha company. Then you would have at least seen the battalion level kind of support.

Third would be if you've been in a Forward Support Company (FSC) for some kind of maneuver battalion. You would have been out there as a minion of the SPO shop executing their planning.

On the opposite end, you could be like me -- having worked in a modular sustainment brigade and never having spent a day on battalion staff before coming to CLC3. In you're in that situation, I recommend you talk to as many classmates as you can to find out what you have to do.