Allied Land Command Heralds Mutual Training Support Concept
Since its activation last year, NATO’s new land component headquarters, Allied Land Command – or LANDCOM – has looked for innovative ways to apply the lessons learned predominantly from recent experiences in Afghanistan where NATO began leading the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) in 2003.
Beginning 2015, NATO’s Allied Command for Operations (ACO) will transition from a deployed, operational force structure to a ready, contingency-based posture. Inherently that will require NATO nations to maintain forces that are ready to respond to every imaginable crisis anywhere in the world once the Alliance agrees it is critical to its own geographic security and strategic interests.
Every seasoned military leader and tactician would agree that the ideal conditions for them in peacetime is to have the time and means to train their forces as they would actually fight and sustain the next campaign. But what if time and economic realities did not allow defence planners to bring coalitions together to prepare for and execute a hypothetical deployment?
While today’s technology has the ability to connect people and organizations from across the globe, communicate in real time, locate remote resources, and move assets, the defence community across the Alliance has different priorities, protocols or policies that have sometimes stymied or limited how NATO forces interoperate.
LANDCOM’s commander, U.S. Army Lt. Gen. Frederick “Ben” Hodges, has visited nearly every NATO and national land force headquarters and training center since taking the helm in August 2012. Hodges and his staff want to institute a fundamental change to the way NATO conducts its exercises, using their own headquarters as a test bed vehicle to demonstrate to the entire Alliance what it will take for land forces to achieve enhanced operational readiness in the future.
LANDCOM activated December 1, 2012, in Izmir, Turkey, a city that has hosted a NATO headquarters since Turkey was inducted into the Alliance in 1952. The headquarters is staffed by military and civilian employees from 23 of the 28 NATO member nations. As part of the host nation’s responsibilities, the Turkish Armed Forces supply a generous portion of the headquarters staffing, led by a Turkish Army 2-star general as the Chief of Staff. Turks are represented in nearly every staff division of the headquarters, most notably in key leadership positions within the Training and Exercise Division (G7) and Base Support Group (BSG). In addition, the Host Nation Support Group has been providing mission-critical security and life support for the base’s operation in the absence of a signed Garrison Support Agreement from NATO headquarters.
One of the requirements the Supreme Allied Commander Europe (SACEUR) mandated to Hodges when he assumed command was to prepare his staff to serve as the core of a deployable land component command (LCC) headquarters by the end of 2014, timed with the conclusion of the ISAF mission. Given the enormity of having to establish a new headquarters from the ground up and now develop a deployment capability in only two years’ time, the leaders at LANDCOM personally made numerous appeals to the contributing nations. What they inherently knew was they had to quickly staff key positions with highly experienced and qualified officers and Noncommissioned Officers to reach 75% personnel strength in order to achieve initial operational capability (IOC), which they did nearly two months ahead of schedule on October 21, 2013.
But achieving full operational capability (FOC) required time to bring their multinational and multi-service staff together as a team to create standardized processes, train, and rehearse the essential tasks needed to deploy, conduct staff planning, command and control, and sustain a major joint operation with sequels (MJO+). After a thorough review of training facilities across Europe, Hodges made the decision to conduct LANDCOM’s certification exercise, called Exercise Trident Lance, at the U.S. military’s Joint Multinational Training Center (JMTC) based in Grafenwhoer, Germany, December 2014. The JMTC, however, is not a NATO training facility, but was chosen by Hodges because it was best-suited to provide the simulation his staff required to replicate the operational conditions were it to actually deploy.
Conceptually, Trident Lance will fundamentally change the way NATO does exercises. It is set to be a multiple-level and distributed exercise involving LANDCOM as the LCC under one of NATO’s Joint Forces Command headquarters. It will be the first single service component exercise under the new NCS that will include a training audience of multiple land force corps since, perhaps, the end of the Cold War.
Mutual Training Support explained
As LANDCOM has grown in capacity, they have increasingly served as the “connective tissue” between the NATO Command Structure (NCS), the NATO Force Structure (NFS), national armies, as well as with NATO Centres of Excellence (COEs), training centers and schools. This is how LANDCOM is implementing the Secretary General’s Connected Forces Initiative (CFI) within the land force domain. Mutual Training Support (MTS) is LANDCOM’s methodology to link the entire NATO land force community in the most practical, cost-effective way for future joint multinational and multi-echelon training and exercises.
Lt. Col. James McDonough, a U.S. officer assigned to LANDCOM’s Training and Exercise Division (G7), explains that Trident Lance will put Hodges’ MTS concept to the test by serving as the umbrella exercise for two or more of the nine Graduated Readiness Forces for Land (GRF-L) within the NFS.
NATO’s Joint Forces Training Centre in Bydgoszcz, Poland, will control the exercise with support from the JMTC in Grafenwoehr. If LANDCOM can successfully accomplish Trident Lance, they believe it will encourage such pooling of NATO and national resources to be replicated by other NATO headquarters in the future.
By expanding the training scenario that was used for next year’s NATO Response Force (NRF) exercise, Trident Juncture 2014, multiple training audiences within the NFS would be able to participate remotely, which in turn fulfills NATO’s requirement to train and evaluate the combat readiness (CREVAL) of the GRF-Ls. Up to four of the GRF-Ls corps or division-level headquarters, including NATO Rapid Deployment Corps-Turkey based in Istanbul, will serve as subordinate elements to LANDCOM, making Trident Lance “a watershed event,” according to McDonough. The NFS headquarters or land force elements based in Greece, Italy, and Poland will also participate.
“[Training and certification of GRF-Ls] will always be LANDCOM’s main effort,” Hodges insists, “but since my headquarters is expected to reach FOC by the end of 2014, our exercise can benefit others by connecting some of the corps to our FOC exercise. That way they – particularly the smaller corps – will not have to wait on NATO’s approved Long Range Training Plan (LRTP) schedule to get trained.”
“The framework nations should be confident in what their corps can do,” he continued. “The MTS effort would help lift everybody up, but we will safeguard against anything that would threaten to degrade [the training of] any corps.”
Improving military effectiveness in the era of defence budget cuts
One major obstacle is finding the common funding to upgrade NATO’s Communications Information Systems (CIS) infrastructure to realize the full potential of the Secretary General’s Connected Forces Initiative (CFI).
“The Alliance has said that the current CIS is 10 years behind,” he said.
Hodges asserts that to use any non-NATO training site costs upwards of about 100K Euro to deploy, install, and maintain a NATO-accredited CIS node for a year’s-worth of exercises (estimating a two-week exercise per annual quarter). The current capacity of the NATO joint training centers under Allied Command Transformation (ACT) limits the availability and scale of the multinational, joint exercises the SACEUR envisages.
“Every major national training center and garrison headquarters in NATO should have a permanent point of presence,” said Hodges, in order to achieve the SACEUR’s intent, offer flexibility to NFS commanders, and recoup the initial investment over time when compared to the occasional operating costs that would be defrayed in part by the NFS headquarters or nation being trained.
Expanding NATO networks to grow the training and operational footprint
LANDCOM’s deputy G6 (CIS), U.S. Army Lt. Col. Eric Shaw, says that network compatibility and capacity gaps still exist and currently prevent NATO from fully implementing CFI.
While the NFS has “to” connectivity with the NCS and across the GRF-L community, “through” connectivity remains elusive.
According to Shaw, all nine corps would require a common Land Command and Control Information Services (LC2IS) or a nationally-provided system that is compatible with the types NATO uses for exercises and deployments in order to connect their garrison headquarters with the NCS and NATO training centers under ACT.
The other – and perhaps bigger – issue is finding the common funding to bring the idea to fruition. NATO funds the minimum military requirements while the host or framework nation resources the bulk of the respective headquarters’ operating costs. The GRF-Ls would contend that a NATO requirement should not constitute an additional financial burden for any one nation but rather be the Alliance’s to absorb.
“In this new era, we need to change the paradigm by which we currently operate so that we work, train, and fight using the same CIS,” says Lt. Gen. Gordon K. Messenger, LANDCOM’s deputy commander and Royal Marine from the United Kingdom.
