Battlefield Ops: Army Command Post Programs Face Pivotal Year.

• Author: Luckenbaugh, Josh

After years of work to make the Army's mobile command posts more survivable, service leaders say they are on track to field two major updates to their systems during fiscal year 2023.

Army leaders first became concerned about the survivability of command posts operating close to battle zones when Russia invaded Ukraine in 2014. During that conflict, Russian forces were able to quickly find and destroy Ukrainian command posts by using a combination of unmanned aerial vehicles and electronic signature detection.

Since then, the service has focused on two projects to make command posts more mobile and survivable.

The Command Post Computing Environment, or CPCE, aims to modernize the internal computing environment. The first version of the new system is already in a number of soldiers' hands, the Army said.

The second program--Command Post Integrated Infrastructure, or CPI2 --seeks to increase command posts' overall mobility and survivability.

The two programs are among the list of 24 programs Army Chief of Staff Gen. James McConville has pledged to have in the hands of soldiers by fiscal year 2023--either as prototypes or fully-fielded systems.

The key problem with the legacy computing environment is the lack of interconnectivity, Lt. Col. Travis Rudge, Army product manager for tactical mission command, said in an interview.

In the past, applications "were stove-piped to mission command systems that pertained to their own warfighting function, which also meant they had typically their own hardware," Rudge said. "They had different interfaces, so some didn't connect to each other."

As a result, commanders were unable to have "full visualization" of the battlefield, he said, describing someone in a swivel chair having to "move around to different screens to see different stuff, different data."

The goal of the computing environment is to eliminate the swivel and collapse all those applications onto a "single pane of glass," he said.

It "provides an easy-to-use common operational picture... through a single mission command suite operated and maintained by soldiers," an Army fact sheet said. Pulling information from a variety of sources and vantage points, the system can give commanders a more complete, layered visual of the battlespace.

The computing environment is being developed and fielded in different "increments." Increment 1 received full deployment approval December 2021 and has begun fielding to units, an Army press release said.

Increment 1 "marks the first significant convergence of warfighting...