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It would be odd to see a TOC Mahal in the Russo-Ukrainian War. Often spotted at U.S. Army Combat Training Center rotations or large home-station exercises, TOC Mahals are sprawling tactical operation centers (TOCs) made from a series of connected tents, vehicles, and generators. They typically have maps posted at entrances to help people find their way through a labyrinth of desks, chairs, television screens, and cables. Most division command posts, many brigade command posts, and truly exceptional battalion command posts meet the criteria of a TOC Mahal. At their best, these behemoths foster collaborative planning by co-locating command teams and staff, encouraging communication and cooperation, and helping form strong teams.
TOC Mahals don’t exist in Ukraine because Russian forces would observe and destroy them before their operators could finish unrolling the communications cable. In fact, the only reason a near-peer adversary would allow the Army to establish today’s typical division or brigade command post would be to ensure key leaders are inside when it is destroyed.
Despite their vulnerability in a real-world conflict, TOC Mahals are commonplace in many major Army training events. While no training environment can fully simulate combat, the underlying reason for the prevalence of TOC Mahals is that most training environments incentivize staff processes over command post survivability. If the Army hopes to establish and maintain command and control in near-peer fights, it needs to incentivize command posts that can survive persistent surveillance and a nearly continuous threat of precision strike. Today’s approaches of minimizing the problem, focusing on mobility, and remote staffing are inadequate. Instead, the Army should create the training infrastructure needed to switch to command posts concealed in urban areas or that are underground.
None of this is new: Since at least 2014, analysts and commanders have warned that the sprawling command posts used in Iraq and Afghanistan would not survive in more contested environments. After-action reviews, operations reports, and years of observations have flagged the vulnerabilities and proposed solutions. This raises an important question: Why hasn’t the Army changed? Why do training exercises still reward command posts that would be destroyed in the opening hours of a peer conflict?
One reason is that commanders must make trade-offs between developing more survivable command posts and staff training. Militaries with effective battalion, brigade, and division staffs are far better prepared to conduct combined arms operations, maneuver battalions and brigades, and resupply forces in the field. Unfortunately, most commanders have few opportunities to train their staff for combat. Instead, staff bandwidth is almost entirely consumed by garrison activities like planning, training, or personnel management. During the rare opportunities to train their staff, most leaders understandably prioritize communication, synchronization, coordinating operations, working through planning cycles, and developing standard operating procedures.
The incentive structures at Combat Training Centers only compound the issue. Commanders and their staffs are primarily evaluated on the quality of their military decision-making process. A centralized, sprawling command post is the most effective environment for this type of highly collaborative planning process. It allows for face-to-face coordination, immediate data sharing, and a shared view of the common operating picture.
An emphasis on command post combat survivability would disrupt many of the opportunities for staff training. A simulated attack on an inadequately concealed or poorly protected command post might result in staff training time lost to treating casualties and relocating the post. The loss of training opportunity would be even greater if command posts were temporarily removed from training, much like many other casualties at Combat Training Center rotations. A brigade staff could spend the majority of a Combat Training Center rotation attempting to recover from attacks rather than staffing the brigade. Faced with that tradeoff, exercise planners, and therefore most commanders, prioritize training the staff.
One could place the onus on commanders to change their priorities, but it is worth noting that they are responding to the Army’s priorities, as shown by the structure of large training exercises. If training centers are reluctant to meaningfully punish exposed command posts while still evaluating planning and coordination, then units have few incentives to change. They will not be penalized for building TOC Mahals, and they’ll be rewarded for what those setups enable: better planning, cleaner communication, and more cohesive staff work. As a result, commanders do what makes sense within the incentive structure they live in: Build large, visible, highly functional command posts that would not survive in combat.
To drive an increased focus on command post survivability, the Army should identify approaches that significantly reduce vulnerability and methods in use today that do not. Once they are known, the military needs to build the infrastructure required to integrate them into training, and both incentivize their use while also heavily disincentivizing the use of ineffective approaches.
The U.S. military has fortified many of its overseas command posts, particularly in the Middle East. Concrete walls, Hesco barriers, and other obstacles can stop most direct fire and shrapnel from ground-based explosions. Unfortunately, as recent attacks on U.S. installations in Iraq and Kuwait have demonstrated, those fortifications do little to defend against drones or top-attack munitions, both of which can quickly bypass walls.
The U.S. Army has attempted to address this vulnerability by making headquarters more mobile and more networked. Training exercises that incorporate survivability concerns typically do so by forcing command posts to relocate, sometimes multiple times during a 14-to-18-day rotation. These efforts have made it easier to maintain a common operating picture and to move quickly when necessary.
Another approach would be to shrink the forward footprint by keeping most of the staff far from the battlefield, placing only a small element near the fight. In this model, a commander and a handful of staff operate from vehicles near the front while the rest of the headquarters participates remotely through video conferences and satellite communications, sometimes from another country or even from home station. Advances in satellite connectivity and the normalization of remote work have made this concept technically feasible in ways that would have been difficult only a decade ago.
Unfortunately, neither approach solves the core problem: Visible headquarters operating in battlefields saturated with sensors and precision munitions. Highly networked and rapidly displacing command posts are extremely vulnerable to detection and destruction, even if their footprint is much smaller than a TOC Mahal. In environments like Ukraine, even a single truck moving near the front line is likely to be detected. Once detected, it becomes a target, especially if it is a military vehicle. While moving vehicles may be difficult to strike with unguided artillery, they are well within the capabilities of the one-way attack drones that now hunt vehicles across the battlefield. Mobility may buy a few minutes but it does not change the outcome: A visible headquarters will eventually be found and struck.
Another increasingly popular approach is masking, a deliberate effort to defeat enemy sensors by shaping both a command post’s signature and its surrounding environment to confuse enemy sensors and disrupt targeting. Low-cost emitters that mimic command post signatures, using commercial networks that already have a high level of activity, or operating in urban areas where the presence of vehicles and personnel would not stand out, can all make detection more difficult.
Masking is important, and almost certainly part of an eventual solution. But without major advances in spoofing or concealment, masking will only be part of the solution. Overall, these solutions only marginally increase the time before a tent or vehicle is discovered, and we have yet to create a vehicle (or tent) that can stand up to a large number of shaped charges. Fortunately, the U.S. Army can draw upon hard-won lessons learned by the Ukrainian military.
One form of concealment is to operate inside repurposed civilian buildings. A great deal of warfare takes place in or near urban areas or near industrial sites. To avoid producing too large an electronic, vehicle, or foot traffic signature, a single command post might be split among several locations but remain connected using commercial networks and tools. Moving inside existing infrastructure reduces many of the problems facing large or mobile designs. Many command post signatures are easier to hide in the background noise of an urban area than on a road or in a tree line and those that are divided among several buildings lose less capability in a successful attack than if they had a consolidated setup.
Dispersion does impose costs. Splitting a headquarters reduces in-person coordination and makes informal collaboration more difficult. Fortunately, modern collaborative tools can mitigate many of the downsides. Shared digital maps, cloud-style data sharing, chat-based coordination platforms, and distributed planning cells allow staffs to coordinate operations without occupying the same room. The U.S. military already possesses many of these tools and others are available in the commercial gaming sector.
Another approach would be to create underground command posts. Militaries as diverse as North Korea, Russia, Ukraine, and Hamas have protected command posts and other facilities by moving them underground. Doing so reduces their electromagnetic signature and dramatically increases their survivability from drone, artillery, and even missile attacks.
These approaches have disadvantages. Fixed facilities are inherently vulnerable to discovery and destruction, particularly in areas where the local population does not support U.S. forces. Underground command posts are usually harder to create and set up than mobile command posts. While these seem like major drawbacks, both methods have been successful in Ukraine.
The prioritization of staff processes over command post survivability actively punishes units that try to remain concealed. The Army needs to realign its training incentives to reflect the threat posed by persistent surveillance and precision strike. The most straightforward way to do so would be to redefine evaluation criteria at major training events to punish easily detectable command posts. The following corrections are needed.
First, simulate attacks against command posts that are not reasonably concealed. If a headquarters is detected by the opposing force that can strike it, it must be evaluated as a failure, regardless of the quality of its products and coordination. Opposing force should be allowed to simulate an attack on the command post and staff should remain casualties just as long as line troops.
Second, implement realistic opposing force collection constraints. Few U.S. training areas have enough buildings and ambient noise to hide command posts and even fewer have large underground facilities. Without guardrails, letting opposing force attack any command post they detect would simply result in poor training. Rather than allowing opposing force to strike known locations by default, they should have to execute a successful and realistic collection plan before being cleared to attack. This better represents the challenges of finding command posts in Ukraine and would reward units that maintain strict signature discipline.
Third, treat displacing a command post as a high-risk choice. Relocating a large asset increases its signature and therefore its risk of detection and destruction. Command post jumps should therefore be viewed as a dangerous maneuver, not a mandatory training requirement. This would shift the training focus from maneuvers that create a false sense of security toward creating the tactics and enforcing the discipline needed to stay hidden in one place.
Finally, build subterranean and urban infrastructure. Major training centers need to construct or improve subterranean training facilities that can be used for command posts. The larger institutional military needs to explore the acquisition of rapid-excavation assets that allow deployed units to create underground facilities at a tactically relevant pace.
If the U.S. Army does not change its path, it will enter its next major war with command posts optimized for training rotations rather than survival. If it does not improve the survivability of its command posts soon, they will be found and destroyed. Leaders cannot assume that they will change their practices when they receive orders to deploy or figure it out once they get in theater. Attempting to do so is asking for unnecessary casualties or even mission failure. If survivability is going to improve, commanders must know during training, in evaluations, and in doctrine that command post security is just as critical as logistics, maneuver, and fires.
Justin Lynch participated in multiple Joint Readiness Training Center rotations and Warfighter exercises while serving as an active-duty soldier and in the Army National Guard. As a civilian, he has served in government, academic, and industry roles in the national security enterprise, and is currently an operations analyst at a stealth mode defense startup and a member of the adjunct faculty at George Washington and Georgetown Universities.
The opinions expressed here are the author’s alone and do not represent those of any organization with which he is associated.
Image: Sgt. Anita VanderMolen via DVIDS
