Army Multi-Domain Wargame Reveals C2 Shortfalls

Robotic mini-tanks. High-speed scout aircraft. High-powered jammers. Long-range artillery. More than 16,000 simulated troops and 13 locations. Last month’s Unified Challenge wargame modeled a host of current future Army weapons, but the 400 human players found one thing painfully lacking: a real-time digital picture that could track their fast-moving, far-flung forces over the land, air, cyberspace, and the airwaves.

As the Army hastens to turn its nascent concept for future conflict, Multi-Domain Operations, into a real-life way of war, it urgently needs a command system that can keep up with the complexity. It was actually the Air Force that figured this out first: They’ve been focused on Multi-Domain Command & Control (MDC2) as the critical piece of the problem from the start. But the two services are collaborating closely — there was a sizable Air Force contingent playing in Unified Challenge — and the Army is increasingly convinced MDC2 is critical.

The problem is that Multi-Domain Command & Control isn’t even a formal development program yet, let alone a working system you can try out in an exercise. That means, so far, “we’re using current mission command systems for future weapons systems,” said Chris Willis, modeling and simulations chief for the Maneuver Battle Lab at Fort Benning, Ga. What the Army needs, he told reporters, is a more sophisticated and powerful Common Operational Picture (COP) that can show commanders and their staffs what’s happening in real time over longer distances, at a faster pace, and in more domains.