From more drones to smaller command posts, Army’s 3rd ID tests out new tactics

WASHINGTON — As the US Army rolls out new weapons and gleans lessons from Ukraine’s battlefield, 3rd Infantry Division soldiers with the newest combat vehicles are taking their turn discovering works and what doesn’t.

“What we’re doing right now is just using what we have better and then experimenting within our units here to kind of evolve with what we have today at the pace with which we’re observing change in the world,” Maj. Gen. Christopher Norrie, the commander of 3rd Infantry Division, told reporters Sept. 20. 

As part of the Army’s plans to field new equipment, the division recently swapped out a glut of legacy equipment for new M1A2 System Enhancement Program version 3 (SEPv3) Abrams main battle tanks, M2A4 Bradley Fighting Vehicles, M109A7 Paladins, Armored Multi-Purpose Vehicle (AMPV) and more.

The 3rd ID trained with the new vehicles before an eight-month deployment to Europe (Poland, Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia), and then continued training at the National Training Center at Fort Irwin in California to continue testing out ways to make the formations more survivable.

“We’ve been transforming at scale both on our recent European deployment and back here in the United States,” the two-star general added.

Soldiers in the 1st ABCT are the first to use the Army’s new tracked combat APMV, designed to replace the M113 family. Norrie and 1st ABCT commander Col. Jim Armstong didn’t go into detail about how the new vehicle might change infantry tactics, but said it has enhanced command and control integration, in part, because the field artillery digital fire system is inside that vehicle.

The unit has also completely changed up how it distributes and hides its command posts across the battlefield. For that training exercise in California, for example, the unit kept the “main” larger servers back at Ft. Stewart, Ga., and soldiers back there conducted defensive cyber operations, Armstrong explained.

Smaller servers were then moved forward, allowing the unit to organize command posts differently. Soldiers out of the range of fire set up a command post focused on intelligence, targeting and logistics. Then smaller, more nimble command posts were then disturbed across the battlefield alongside fake ones, making it more difficult for the opponent — this time played by the 11th Armored Cavalry Regiment, also known as the Blackhorse Cavalry — to find the right “needle” in the haystack to strike, the two-star general said.

“Those efforts were extremely effective at masking our own formations while drawing the enemy out so that they could then be targeted here as well,” Norrie added. “All of that was informed by experiences in Europe.”

RELATED: The cloud, fiber optics and hiding in basements: Army races to adapt to new command post threats

“Just a few years ago, our brigade level command posts took on average 14-plus hours just to tear down. We were issuing lengthy orders just to get our units on the move, we weren’t thinking about drones or kind of the threats in the airspace, and we weren’t considering the electromagnetic spectrum,” Norrie said separately.

As part of the Army’s effort to test the effectiveness of new equipment and operating constructs under the “transformation in contact” initiative, those smaller command posts were designed to be set up and broken down in 15 minutes. As for minimizing their electromagnet signature, the Army has been setting up antenna farms several kilometers away from the smaller command posts and then using a fiber cable to link them to soldiers.

Drones are also playing a more prominent role, with soldiers from the 1st ABCT, 3rd ID showing up in California with 90 platforms, and carrying along systems to shoot the opponents drones down too. The goal?  Find new and innovative ways to organize around those weapons and use them, Armstrong said.

“We had battalions and squads with UAS that had not had them in that volume or at those echelons before,” Armstrong said. “We endeavored to make contact with unmanned systems first, right? That was our goal, to make contact with unmanned systems first, to only aggregate and unmask our indirect fires and put our soldiers in direct-fire contact at times and places of our choosing.”

While Armstong and Norrie didn’t disclose if the ABCT used 3D printing this summer out at the training center, the service is continuing to test out the best way to push the capability forward on the battlefield and into armor formations. Part of the work to get there was tested out at a separate training event, this one with soldiers from the 2nd Brigade, 101st Airborne Division on their recent stint at the Joint Readiness Training where they had a 3D printer on the mock battlefield printing out a small plastic replacement part.

During a Sept. 20 interview with Breaking Defense, the acting commander general for Army Materiel Command, Lt. Gen. Christopher Mohan, explained that his team is taking lessons from that event and attempting to iron out the kinks to make it easier for soldiers to print replacements on the future battlefield.

“Our digital repository is too hard to get to [for that] user in the field because it is something that has been established to operate at the strategic, OIB [organic industrial base] level,” Mohan said. “We have to make it easier for units to access it from the field, and then we have to train the right people to know how to access it.”