FORT IRWIN, Calif. - It's 8:15 in the evening at the 1st Cavalry Division Tactical Command Post.
Roughly 20 senior Troopers are in a meeting going over the day's events. They are crowded into a side room of the portable tent system that makes up the DTAC. They have been working since the sun came up.
"What's the status?" asks Lt. Col. Cain Baker of a piece of equipment they need to get up and running.
Baker is the man in charge of the command post's mission at the National Training Center in Fort Irwin, California.
"It will be up tomorrow, sir" comes a reply.
Baker is happy with what he hears during the meeting. The mission is on schedule.
The 100-plus Soldiers of the 1st Cav. Div. DTAC out of Fort Hood, Texas, are at NTC for roughly a month on the first of three upcoming rotations. The mission here is twofold, Baker said.
"The most important thing is helping 2nd Brigade through their (NTC) rotation," said Baker, who while at Fort Hood is the acting 1st Cav. Div. operations chief.
The division's 2nd Armored Brigade Combat Team is at NTC for a training rotation prior to deploying to Korea this summer. The DTAC is providing mission command for, and assistance to, the brigade and its enablers encompassing nearly 6,000 Soldiers.
"We are also training to be able to build mission command in an austere environment and to help synchronize the fight," Baker added.
For the former of the two missions, the DTAC oversees 2nd ABCT bringing more than a thousand pieces of equipment from Fort Hood to California-eight trains worth to be exact. It takes around-the-clock effort for days to get the M1 Abrams Tanks, Bradley Fighting Vehicles, Humvees, artillery pieces and more downloaded and into the training area. The DTAC works with the brigade to help track the equipment and to help resolve any issues that come up during what is known as the RSOI process, or reception, staging and onward integration.
"The brigade is building combat power, and the RSOI process is one of the hardest things to do here," said Maj. Ryan Cripps, DTAC night shift chief of operations. "It's our job to track all that and to keep the commanding general apprised of how operations are progressing."
For the other of the DTAC's twofold charge: mission command occurs through the entirety of the DTAC's and 2nd ABCT's training rotation.
"All the war-fighting functions in the DTAC support the division commander," said the DTAC officer-in-charge, Baker, who is an Apache pilot by trade with 18 years in the Army. "We are able to provide the commanding general the information he needs and provide recommendations, so he can make real-time decisions that impact the battlefield."
The war-fighting functions of which Baker speaks runs the gamut of staff sections: sustainment, personnel, air, intelligence, fires, engineers, communications, maneuver, etc.
Soldiers assigned to the various sections of the DTAC will go through three rotations at NTC over the next nine months. The first rotation, occurring now, started with putting the team together at Fort Hood last fall and validating the DTAC in an exercise at Fort Hood. The three NTC rotations are conducted in the "crawl, walk, run" phases of training.
The DTAC Troopers are currently in the "crawl" phase.
"Our job in the crawl phase is to validate our standard operating procedures and our battle drills," Baker said. "The other piece is to try and increase the responsibility of the DTAC."
Following this rotation, the "walk" phase will see the DTAC setting up its command post for situational training exercises in what is known at Fort Irwin as "The Box," named so for the proverbial sandbox that is the 1,000 square miles of desert training area.
The end state, the "run" phase, sees the DTAC in the fight in the first quarter of 2016. Meaning, the Division Soldiers will be living in the austerity of "The Box" and handling all the associated tasks that come with it.
"We will be fully competitive against the opposing forces to actually fight this thing on the battlefield," Baker said.
The push for training of this type comes as operational environments shifts, Baker said. Over the 10-plus years of operations in Afghanistan and Iraq, the entirety of a division headquarters would deploy and fall-in on existing infrastructure and equipment. The DTAC, with its rapidly deployable tents, generators and network systems, can mission command on a short notice in an austere location devoid of any hard-stand buildings from which to operate.
"This training gets back to Forces Command guidance for divisions to prepare their DTACs to deploy to provide the mission-command node as forces go out," Baker said. "There is an Army-wide focus to ensure divisions are training their DTACs to go forward."
Meanwhile, the training process has forged a team that will last the Army for years, said Sgt. Maj. Kerry Bassett, the DTAC senior enlisted advisor.
"These Soldiers are proud of what they've done, and they are going to take it back and make the Army a better place," Bassett said. "They've made the DTAC a better place already."
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