FORT BLISS, Texas - "The greatest threat I face as a brigade commander on the battlefield is not [enemy] tanks, snipers or IEDs," said Col. Chuck Masaracchia. "It's defending the network."
Masaracchia, commander of 2nd Armored Brigade Combat Team, 1st Armored Division, made those remarks prior to the start of Network Integration Evaluation 16.1. The NIE began Sept. 25 and is slated to wrap up Oct. 8.
"I am more than confident of our force's capabilities to destroy any force on the battlefield -- as long as we can provide mission command," he said.
The Army is currently facing potential adversaries who are adept at cyberattack, he continued. That enemy has "every capability we have and he will be attacking us" in any future conflict.
"How we try to defend ourselves and not allow him to corrupt the network" will be crucial to determining the outcome, Masaracchia said.
The colonel gave a tour of the brigade headquarters in a remote area of Fort Bliss. The headquarters included a tactical assembly area, a tactical assault command post, engineer and artillery battalions, a tactical operations center, a large mobile command center and a smaller mobile command center that mirrored the larger one and can be rapidly deployed to a remote location.
The brigade headquarters is "organic to the organization," Masaracchia said. He explained that unlike forward operating bases in Iraq and Afghanistan that employ locals and contractors, Soldiers and Army civilians do everything here, from maintenance and repair to operations.
Masaracchia's brigade is the largest component of NIE 16.1, accounting for more than half of the total 9,000 or so participants spread over an operating area of nearly 19,000 square kilometers of Fort Bliss and its adjacent White Sands Missile Range, N.M.
In addition to training in a combat training center-like environment, the brigade is helping to evaluate new and current network equipment to determine its interoperability with the Army's joint and coalition partners. The Soldiers are doing the user evaluating and providing that feedback to vendors on the ground and Army researchers and developers.
PEEK INSIDE THE HONEYCOMB
Two Warfighter Information Network-Tactical Increment 2, or WIN-T, antennas sprouted from a van surrounded by a honeycomb of air-conditioned tents swarming with cyber warriors, intelligence analysts and an assortment of technicians. The tents were a beehive of activity.
Disturb the hive and you will get stung, was the message Masaracchia delivered.
"I have [an important] guy who keeps the network secure," he disclosed. That person is Chief Warrant Officer 2 Vladimir Leonard, a cybersecurity technician who said he doesn't get much sleep.
"Simply put, we look for the bad stuff in the network, identify it and shoot it up to higher and make sure they're out of the network as fast as possible," Leonard said. He rattled off a list of the acronyms of software and firewall tools he uses to give his cyber counter-punches extra sting.
Leonard talked about identifying patterns in network traffic and spurious or abnormal events that tip off an attack to WIN-T and every system that travels over it. Those systems include the Distributed Common Ground System - Army, blue force tracking tools, and intelligence feeds.
This suite of cyber defense tools is a "capability we didn't have until now," he said.
Masaracchia added that the network includes unclassified, classified and top secret traffic, everything from voice and digital to video and databases, as well as the coalition network, which is the primary means of communications during this NIE.
"That is totally new to us," he said.
"Right now, we've got about a 95 percent confidence level that everything is working as it's supposed to," he said, referring to the coalition network that links the disparate networks of 14 national armies participating in NIE 16.1, either live or virtually.
GOING WIRELESS
While many systems have been wireless for a number of years now, cables are still common to the Army, said Masaracchia.
"Look around here and you'll see that there's a lot of cable wiring everything together," he said.
However, that cabling "is about a third of what we'd normally have, so we're running secure wireless in here and we're going to be growing as we gain fidelity of the system. As we gain confidence in [wireless] ability to hold more systems, we continually add more systems to the wireless, reducing the cable. Hopefully in the future you'll see hardly any wiring in here."
He explained that going wireless doesn't just mean that there are no cables to trip on. Laying cable takes precious time. "It's all about how fast we can set up and how fast we can provide mission command for the force."
The tents also hold stacks of servers -- one tent housed more than a dozen. Masaracchia explained that the tents must be chilled to protect the servers' sensitive electronics, and it takes generators and fuel to do that.
But more and more servers are being mounted in vehicles, he said. "As these servers get switched out to vehicles, the vehicles' own [efficient] onboard power cools them," reducing or eliminating the need for cables and generators.
TROUBLESHOOTING
Capt. Jason Patterson, a technician, said everyone experiences trouble with their home and work computers at some time, and the same thing happens in the field. In the past, when computer trouble plagued a command post in a remote area, it usually meant sending a technician out to fix it.
Now, Patterson said, trouble tickets can be handled by technicians remotely using the Unified Trouble Ticketing System, first demonstrated during NIE 14.1.
The system saves a lot of time and reduces security requirements to protect the technician who is tasked with the trouble ticket, he added.
BAD GUYS OUTNUMBER GOOD
Maj. Robert Richardson is the brigade's intelligence officer. His job is to identify, keep track of, and predict the enemy threat and provide that information to the commander. In NIE 16.1, the enemy is formidable.
"We have a division worth of live and simulated bad guys on the battlespace, which makes this not a 'near peer', but a peer or superior threat," he said, explaining that the enemy has tanks, infantry combat vehicles, modern radios, optics and advanced fire control systems.
The enemy is also equipped with an entire suite of intelligence, reconnaissance and surveillance equipment, including micro unmanned aerial vehicles and one lethal UAV, and has incorporated electronic warfare and threat computer operations.
"They can bring all these systems to bear simultaneously," Richardson said.
Going up against this massive threat is the brigade's battalion and two additional companies, which will go up against the enemy's division, he said.
Some of the battles that are taking place are live, he said, meaning on the ground, and other pieces are virtual, meaning conducted on computers or simulators such as the ones at Fort Bliss's Mission Command Complex.
Richardson said all of that virtual simulation comes back through the network and is visible on the screens in the tactical operations center. For him, the exercise "looks the same as would be seen in a real battle."
LOTS OF STUFF
The "point men" for getting all of this stuff out here -- vehicles, communications equipment, experimental stuff -- are Col. Terrece Harris, director, Capability Package and Kevin Fahey, director, System of Systems Engineering and Integration Directorate.
For this NIE, Harris and his team had to assemble systems that weren't originally designed to do what they're now doing -- communicating across the joint, combined networks on current and prototype communications equipment, Masaracchia said,
An important and complex part of Harris's job was coordinating with all the program executive offices across the Army to physically integrate network components and system platforms so that everything was up and running at the start of the exercise. Harris said planning for that took 16 months and his team is currently planning future NIEs as well as the Army Warfighting Assessment that begins in October 2016.
Another thing Harris said he's tasked with is coordinating with U.S. Army Training and Doctrine Command (TRADOC) to take their concepts and translate those to solutions that satisfy those requirements.
Fahey was responsible for identifying all of the materiel required for NIE 16.1. He said a lot of that work is done at Aberdeen Proving Ground, Md. There, a validation exercise takes place to ensure everything works the way it's supposed to work, before it's brought out to Fort Bliss. The preparation takes from 12 to 18 months.
The other important part Fahey plays in the exercise is getting the funding stream needed for all the materiel.
HIGH OPERATIONS TEMPO
Masaracchia concluded that "this is probably the highest optempo organization in the Army right now. Not only do we have a [U.S. Army Forces Command] mission, which requires we're prepared and ready to go to combat, we also have the TRADOC mission, which is right here.
"It's an incredibly heavy tax on an organization, but it's a tax we're willing to pay. With the fiscal constraints of the Army, we're the only brigade in the Army that gets the equivalent of two to three combat training center rotations a year," he said.
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