Life as a staff lieutenant has many demands. As the battle captain, you will be responsible for managing all of the information coming in and out of the Main Command Post (MCP) and control all current operations. Your command team, staffs, and company leadership will lean on you heavily for an updated status of the operation. You will have minimal guidance and instruction yet will be expected to perform at the level of a career course-qualified Captain. Too easy, right?
As 1LT Norwood put it in Lessons Learned from NTC; “…everyone else will be so busy trying to figure out what they are supposed to do that part of your job description might get missed.” This was my experience as a battle captain in a light infantry battalion at JRTC. Despite the initial challenges, you have the opportunity to be a significant force multiplier and an asset to those around you.
The key aspect to your success as an inexperienced yet motivated staff lieutenant is to take initiative and make yourself useful in the absence of direct guidance; you will take many messages to Garcia, so to speak. However – as always – disciplined initiative should be your focus, as you risk ending up causing more problems than you solve; in other words, “industrious but stupid”.
From my limited experience, I offer the following three pieces of advice:
- “Paint the Picture”
- Communicate and Saturate
- Build a Cohesive Team
“Paint the Picture”
The battle captain’s primary task is to “paint the picture” for the command team, staffs, and company leadership. In doctrinal terms, your job is to receive, analyze, and distribute information. In regular English, this means you must know the status of your operation and be able to communicate it succinctly to the commander and staffs when prompted. My entire shift as a battle captain was spent manning our communication systems (receive), determining what information merited further action (analyze), and updating our common operating picture (COP)/briefing appropriate leaders (distribute).
To this effect, your efficacy as a battle captain will largely revolve around the currency of your COP. Whenever we would brief the Battalion Commander (BC) or company commanders, the staffs would depict their information on the COP and use it as a “terrain model” to assist their brief. Ideally, anyone could walk up to the COP and determine the status of the operation.
As such, you should heavily invest in the design and layout of the COP In the months leading up to JRTC. Though we had a CPSOP, it quickly lost its currency as we adapted to the operational environment in the box. Furthermore, the staff officer who generated our CPSOP was tasked out elsewhere. As is often the case, I was responsible for executing a plan I had no part in generating. Had I been a part of the planning process, I would have not only better understood the design of the MCP but could have added my own input or even assumed control of the project entirely. In the box, this lack of ownership necessitated the creation of a “field-expedient” COP when it should have been a validated product.
Communicate and Saturate
Your ability to receive information and update your COP is entirely contingent on your communications systems functioning. Whatever systems and equipment you have available, you must learn quickly how to best employ, operate, and troubleshoot them. When (not if) your communication systems go down, you are the first line of response. Regardless of who is responsible, degraded comms are your problem; your COP becomes quickly irrelevant if you can’t receive reports. During my rotation, I learned how to set up and troubleshoot both the hardware and software of JBCP, FM radios, TACSAT, HF radio, CPOF, and SVOIP (with varying degrees of success). Though the S6 ultimately owns communications, you can significantly reduce friction by handling simple issues. Nothing makes a MCP more ineffective than constantly fighting with communications systems.
This will require you to reach out to other staff sections and SMEs – particularly S6 – to learn operation and basic troubleshooting. Thankfully, I attended JBCP classes both at IBOLC and my home unit. Though I became proficient at operating a perfectly functioning JBCP – even tracing and distributing the battalion’s route plan for our infiltration – I was not good at troubleshooting hardware or setting up the system. A few hasty MCP jumps in the box quickly caught me up to speed.
Keeping your communications architecture working is challenge #1. Can you talk? If yes, then you regularly send and receive relevant information from/to subordinate, superior, and sister/adjacent headquarters to synchronize operations. Ask yourself, who else needs to know what I know now?
It’s your responsibility to establish communication with the Brigade MCP. And while it’s the companies’ responsibility to maintain communications with battalion – you should help them. This means constantly working through your P.A.C.E (primary, alternate, contingency, and emergency communications plan). It also means working with the battalion executive officer, operations sergeant major, and S6 when selecting the location for MCP. Selecting an MCP that supports good line of site and beyond line of site communications is critical.
It is also your job to communicate across the CP without leaving your station. Splitting time between updating the COP, manning the radios, and running around the CP made me highly inefficient at all three. Ideally, you should be able to push and request information without leaving the MCP. I suggest establishing a CP internal radio net, organizing the MCP so that key leaders are always within earshot, or assigning a soldier to act as a runner.
Build a Cohesive Team
It is not your job to know everything about everyone all the time. However, it is your job to leverage assets to provide the commander, staffs, and company leadership the answers they need. As such, your ability to communicate will determine the success of the MCP and thus your success. Our MCP had representatives from S1, S2, S4, S6, a FUOPS planning cell, battalion fires, at least one of the top 3, as well as engineer, JTAC, PSYOP, SFAB, MP, and even United Arab Emirate Ground Force enablers. These teams have their own communications infrastructures that can fill gaps in your understanding, if you can leverage them.
The first step is building trust and credibility with key leaders. If you can provide them information that helps them achieve mission success, they will do the same. If they learn that they cannot rely on you, they will seek other means. I suggest incorporating regular check-ins as a part of your battle rhythm. Walk a lap around the CP and discuss prior, current, and future operations with leaders and enablers before your shift. This is an informal means of receiving updates. But, it does not replace a formal battle handover between you and the previous battle captain.
Conducting a 2-minute drill at battle hand over is another good way of ensuring continuity. This is particularly important to do with your planning cell, as they will get you up to speed on what is supposed to occur on your shift. Knowing the plan will help you forecast reporting requirements and anticipate periods of increased activity.
Of particular focus should be building trust with company leadership. Degraded/poorly employed comms became a source of constant friction that placed undue stress on unit cohesion during my rotation. I suggest meeting with company leadership in advance of the exercise. Discuss communications systems, reporting requirements, and mutual expectations. Naturally, you are in no position to tell a commander, XO, or 1SG what to do. But receive their input. You might be able to incorporate their suggestions into the design of the MCP. This builds trust and shows you are invested in their success. Additionally, your performance as battle captain might dictate their opinion of you when it comes time to assign platoon leaders.
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It is ultimately up to your unit to determine where you fit in your CP as the battle captain. Some units have the personnel and experience to run a highly efficient command post. They are able to provide you the resources and training to succeed well in advance of the operation. Other units lean more heavily on your initiative to perform. Either way, you owe it to the soldiers of your unit to be as effective as possible. Lean into the role as early as possible. Problems only become harder to solve once you are in the field. Your inexperience might betray you. You might be corrected or even reprimanded. But you will never be faulted for taking disciplined initiative to build trust across your formation and leverage your assets to achieve mission success.
With the advent of Drone technology and its remote (decentralized) control or harmony, there is no room for TOCs anymore. They are just big targets. We need to use technology to remote and decentralize physical locations while staff sections can update the commander without being in the same physical location. We can use individual headsets to update the commander, while operating dispersed.
Mission Command is more important than ever before, but the culture of the US Military and US Society will block its implementation.
This equally tracks for a Lieutenant Colonel in the Pentagon….
Well done.