Decentralizing the Fight: Re-Imagining the Brigade Combat Team’s Headquarters
John Cogbill and Eli Myers | August 5, 2020
We are going to have to empower [and] decentralize leadership to make decisions and achieve battlefield effects in a widely dispersed environment where subordinate leaders, junior leaders . . . may not be able to communicate to their higher headquarters, even if they wanted to.
— Gen. Mark Milley, 2017
It was “Fight Night†at JRTC—the Joint Readiness Training Center—and like so many rotations before, Geronimo 6, the opposing force commander, watched his troopers confidently mount their vehicles and prepare for the battle ahead. Tonight would be unscripted, but he had fought this fight many times before with devastating effects on his adversaries. His motorized companies would probe for weak spots as quadcopters searched for the ultimate high payoff target—the brigade combat team (BCT) main command post. Once that huge target was located, and it would be located, he would bring down a barrage of long-range precision fires, chemical munitions, and a crippling cyber attack that would crush the BCT’s ability to exercise mission command. The hours that followed would simply consist of mopping up the dazed, uncoordinated infantry battalions before his soldiers could head back to their motor pool and turn in their equipment.
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