Command Post Exercise #2

Back in December, just before the Christmas break, my unit took part in a command post exercise (#1). These "CPXs" force us to get out of the office and practice what the Army calls "field craft." Generals like them for two reasons: 1) they show readiness and 2) they don't like their staffs to get too used to the regular routine of office work.

Unfortunately, the office work doesn't just stop because we're in the field, so these "CPXs" are often not as successful as they could be. Everyone's distracted by the umpteen gazillion things to do all the way up to the last minute, so there's very little focus on making sure things go well. Problems that could have been mitigated by dedicated planning and coordination are ignored in favor of a more "balanced" approach, but what this really results in is a focus on the quantity of activities rather than the quality. "Good enough" is the name of the game.

This month's CPX (the second in a 4-part series) is a prime example of this. First, there's the concept of what we're trying to do. In this case, we're trying to see how well the headquarters can handle being spread out across three different sites -- the main headquarters, a tactical forward headquarters, and a support area command post (SACP). While the official answer is "Sure! We can make anything happen!" the truth is closer to "We have no idea how we would really make this work." That's not to say we couldn't -- we just don't know how, given that everybody's still doing their "day job" and this is truthfully more of a distraction than the main focus. And with the Army's fiscal year 2018 "blueprint" (MTOE) for our unit calling for a massive drop in manning, any solutions we come up with will be unfeasible within a few months.

Second, there are problems associated with the "train as your fight" principle at this level. While realistic training is always better than nothing, there's simply no way we're going to get the Air Force and Navy to play along in our game, and we're playing with only notional subordinate units. The National Guard and Reserve forces that would normally be present simply don't exist, and without them, we're not playing with a full chess board. As a result, we tend to assume that all battlefield problems require strictly Army solutions. While true that this is just an exercise for a single command post, we have so many people who've been on so many deployments (and seen how things really work) that the scenario is hard to take seriously.

Related to this is a figurative "loss of resolution" the deeper you look into an issue, particularly with logistics. For example, you may have a unit that's at 70 percent of its combat strength, and you want to know when it will be back up to 90 percent. In the real world, you could find out how many are unrepairable, how many have repairable battle damage, and how many have simple maintenance problems. You could look at parts on order, maintenance allocation charts, and personnel manning percentages to generate an estimate. With some in-theater historical data, you could make a pretty good guess. In the simulation, though, there's simply no way of knowing. At best, the answer is "tomorrow," after the simulation does its daily reconciliations, but that's of little help to commanders engaged in the fight today. Finally -- and this is a huge problem with many Army exercises -- we don't do "Phase IV." In other words, we gloss over deterrence, go into the tactical battle, and then stop when the bad guys are defeated. We never reach Phase IV, when the military begins to hand over control to civilian authorities. As Thomas Ricks pointed out in his book Fiasco, this became a problem during the Iraq War. Everyone automatically assumes things will be fine, but we're never able to get a coherent plan for the transition. While I recognize that Phase IV can be a real drag when compared to the battlefield glory of Phase III, this is why America can't win asymmetric campaigns. This is why we can win battle after battle, but somehow pull defeat from the jaws of victory. It's a shame, because we're bound to repeat the mistake we spend years learning -- that Phase IV is what wins wars.