An antenna farm is set up away from soldiers inside the command post. (Breaking Defense/ Ashley Roque)

WASHINGTON — The Army’s Command and Control Cross Functional Team will be coming out with a new requirement for modular command posts as part of the service’s Mission Command on the Move project.

The requirement aligns with the service’s Command and Control Fix, or C2 Fix, plan — the Army’s strategy to make its current network operations more efficient so they can “fight tonight.” It also aligns with the service’s push to move from large command posts with bulky equipment — that can take hours to set up and look like juicy targets to enemy long-range fires — to smaller, more mobile posts that can better survive the modern battlefield.

“It’s putting tools in the hands of the commanders that allow them to kind of scale up and scale down, reconfigure their command post as they need to, based on the mission, but really also based on how the commander chooses to command. It’s something we were able to observe, watching the conflict in Europe,” Gen. Patrick Ellis, director of the C2 CFT said Monday during a panel at the Association of the US Army’s annual conference. The C2 CFT was previously known as the Network Cross Functional Team until a recent name change.

“The command posts are constantly changing as a result of the battlefield. So instead of building something from the beginning, that’s one big thing, and that our soldiers are just going to take winches to and take apart anyway, this allows us to build something that’s a little bit more modular,” he added. 

The Mission Command on the Move project has long been on the Army’s to-do list. The service first tried out the idea with the Army’s 101st Airborne Division back in August and is currently testing it with the 25th infantry division in Hawaii. 

Related: Army using ‘transformation in contact’ to make case for new weapons, formation decisions

“I think this shapes a lot of what we’re doing in the future,” Mark Kitz, program executive officer of the Army’s Command, Control Communications-Network Office said during the panel. “How do we configure our command posts? Both the 101st and now the 25th are two units that are enabling C2 Fix are really doing it in a way that’s way more mobile and diverse and dispersed than ever before, and that is ripe for technology innovation that’s ripe for Army innovation. How we employ our network is so much of how we employ our command posts, and that’s going to underpin a lot of what we do in the future.”

When asked when the requirement will come out of his office, Ellis said he “won’t put a timeline on it” but it’s expected “relatively quickly.” Industry players are already lining themselves up to aid the push. General Dynamics Land Systems told Breaking Defense in a recent interview that they’re building a sort of systems-of-systems for command posts that the company says will help soldiers stay hidden in contested spaces. 

Scott Taylor, director of business development for the Army and Special Operations Command at General Dynamics Land Systems, said that his team is working on a concept that “fuses human, machine integrated capabilities for command post.”

“So what you see is the M10 Booker Combat Vehicle at the centerpiece of that linked with our proven robotic combat vehicle technology that provides a TRX [which stands for Tracked Robot, 10-ton] that can serve as both air and ground defense or protection, but also linked to a smaller robot that can provide deception that confuses and obfuscates the footprint for the command post and makes it harder for the enemy to find those command posts.”

Taylor said it’s been “painfully clear” that in an age of “persistent observation,” including satellite imagery and electromagnetic scanning, that current command posts are “extremely vulnerable, too stationary … too large and, frankly, they’re too easy to find and kill.

To fix the problem, Ellis said during the media roundtable that there’s an existing framework that the new requirement will be based on. However, he said, there will be specific cases where he will need to add “annex” sections to the requirements so they meet the varying needs of different units. 

Kitz echoed this statement, saying it may be too early to try to gauge the specific requirements because it’s ultimately up to needs of the warfighter’s particular command post. 

“One of the lessons learned of our [command post] configurations is that we have very different demands in different environments, and we can’t predict what exactly these commanders are going to need or what exactly the prescribed requirements are going to be,” Kitz said during a media roundtable Monday.  

Ashley Roque contributed to this report.