Drone-guided artillery strikes have made Ukraine the graveyard of command posts:
On tomorrow’s battlefield, there’s no safe place for ammo dumps or command posts. Drones will buzz constantly overhead, AI-powered algorithms searching for any sign of life — movement, body heat, wireless signals — that they can target for precision strike. So how can commanders and their staffs survive this new threat, when their very function requires communication?
Ditch that smartphone. Hide in a basement. Turn off every radio you can. Use electronic warfare sensors to scan your own troops for detectable transmissions and shut them off. Offload every function you can to higher headquarters further out of range, transmitting only essential data through an encrypted cloud.
Break up big staffs, like the 200-plus personnel in a divisional Main Command Post, into half a dozen smaller “sub-nodes,” each hiding in a different building or hastily dug bunker, communicating with each other not over Wi-Fi or tactical radio but over ruggedized fiber optic cables a quarter-mile (400 meters) long, unspooled by soldiers through the shelling-shattered windows and rubbled streets.
And every few hours, one of the sub-nodes takes its turn to shut down for a few hours and move a few hundred yards — never too far for those fiber cables — so that, within a day, the entire formation has relocated, slithering undetected across the battlefield like an amoeba.
That’s the prescription from the US Army’s Combined Arms Center at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, helmed by Lt. Gen. Milford Beagle, a South Carolinian who’s served everywhere from Afghanistan and Iraq to South Korea.