FORT LEONARD WOOD, Mo. — Army senior leaders met at Fort Leonard Wood May 13 and 14 to discuss command post survivability during the second annual Protection Senior Leader Forum at Fort Leonard Wood.
While welcoming warfighters to the forum May 13 in Lincoln Hall Auditorium, Col. Mark Glaspell, 1st Engineer Brigade commander, said the Maneuver Support Center of Excellence and Fort Leonard Wood may be the proponent for protection, “but everyone has a role in the protection warfighting function.”
“Last year’s senior leader forum’s theme was operationalizing the protection warfighting function. This year, we want to take advantage of the 2024 Center for Army Lessons Learned handbook, Command Post Survivability,” Glaspell said.
Col. Joe Elsner, Training and Doctrine Command Proponent Office for Protection chief, describes command post survivability as “the quality or capability of military forces that allows them to avoid or withstand enemy actions or environmental conditions while maintaining the ability for the commander to organize and synchronize command and control networks, systems and procedures to assist them in exercising mission command.”
The two-day event provided opportunities for Army senior leaders and subject matter experts to discuss how MSCoE views protection. Panels, with a host of senior leaders across the operational and institutional force, including TRADOC, Combined Arms Center and MSCoE, were also held.
To open the forum, Maj. Gen. Christopher Beck, Fort Leonard Wood and MSCoE commanding general, gave an overview of the training MSCoE provides to Soldiers, Sailors, Airmen and Marines at Fort Leonard Wood.
He then turned his attention to the forum’s theme, asking attendees to challenge the concepts presented during discussions.
“The reality is protection has to start with a mindset. We like to think we don’t own protection here (at Fort Leonard Wood), we synchronize it,” Beck said.
He said warfighters must think about protection from a foundational perspective, so leaders must consider what protection means to them and their formations.
Beck went on to explain that protection is the most important warfighting function based on “recent things we are seeing in the operating environment.”
He presented attendees with questions he wanted them to ask themselves throughout the forum; “how is the enemy fighting; how is the enemy going to put pressure on us; and how are they going to try to kill us?”
He said protection is multi-domain and needs to be integrated and synchronized with all the other warfighting functions.
“Protection has to be throughout the depth and breadth of the battlefield. We use the terms preserve, enable and deny. I want to highlight the deny aspect because what that really means is how we are proactively getting after protection before the enemy can even engage us. How can we deny the enemy the ability to engage us? We have to be proactive with our protection instead of reactive,” Beck said.
Next to address the forum was Gen. Gary Brito, U.S. Army Training and Doctrine Command commanding general.
“We all have skin in the protection game regardless of your branch, military occupational specialty or proponent,” Brito said. “Protection is everyone’s responsibility. You can go to any center of excellence or staff agency in the Army and they will tell you the same.”
He said through training, TRADOC is giving warfighters the foundation they need to implement protection.
“We train Soldiers and develop agile leaders with a skillset that gives a foundation to apply every bit of transformation we have ongoing and coming,” Brito said.
Lt. Gen. Milford Beagle Jr., U.S. Army Combined Arms Center commanding general, also addressed warfighters before attendees broke out into separate groups, encouraging Soldiers to reevaluate the way they think about protection.
“Protection is complex, but we have to be able to explain it very simply,” Beagle said. ‘We have to change our behavior and how we think about protection.”
He described command posts as onion cores, because they are the most inner layer.
“Everything we are trying to do to our enemies they are trying to do to us,” Beagle said. “We must protect ourselves, starting with our most outer layer. We cannot allow ourselves to be understood, because if we are understood we can be detected. We cannot let the enemy penetrate our layers and get down to our core.”
Beagle encouraged attendees to keep studying protection doctrine, share what they have learned and continue to educate themselves after they leave the forum.
Warfighters spent the rest of the day in briefings, listening to keynote speakers and engaging in panel discussions designed to push the protection warfighting function discussion further.
When not attending a forum session, attendees were visiting 75 vendor displays exhibiting emerging battlefield technology in Nutter Field House.
At the end of the day, Soldiers met back at Lincoln Hall Auditorium, where in his closing remarks, Beck urged them to continue the protection conversation.
“This can be a confusing warfighting function or system, but it is also the most basic. So, I challenge all of us to continue this dialogue. We have got to drive this change,” Beck said. “We could go to war tonight, and the reality is we are preparing to successfully implement and execute protection on the battlefield.”
Social Sharing