Photo By Sgt. Grace Nechanicky | FORT INDIANTOWN GAP, Pa. – U.S. Army Soldiers with the New York National Guard’s...... read more read more
For the past few years, the U.S. Army has transitioned training priorities to focus on large-scale combat operations against what is known as near-peer advisories, a dramatic shift from nearly 20 years of counter-insurgency operations. Large-scale combat operations, or LSCO, now requires division staffs to exercise their ability to lead multiple brigades and thousands of Soldiers simultaneously to meet higher headquarters, allied, and national mission priorities.
The nation has not been truly involved in a LSCO fight since World War II, and the New York National Guard’s 42nd Infantry Division is ensuring it thoroughly prepares leaders and staff for the next fight. They are doing so through realistic, challenging, comprehensive training, as they exhibited during their recent Warfighter 25-3 exercise at Fort Indiantown Gap, Pennsylvania, Jan. 29 to Feb. 6, 2025.
With LSCO, the Rainbow Division has the tremendous responsibility for coordinating the actions of multiple infantry, armor, sustainment, aviation and various other types of brigades in a battle with more than 10,000 Soldiers and billions of dollars worth of equipment over hundreds of miles of terrain. However, placing those assets on the ground just to train the division headquarters is not practical or realistic.
So, the question arises: how can the Army train a division headquarters to lead such a large operation without placing thousands of real Soldiers and billions of dollars worth of equipment in the field? The answer is a highly detailed and realistic virtual war simulator focusing on command and control rather than large numbers of troops training in the field.
The Warfighter simulation evaluates the division staff’s ability to develop plans and proficiency in responding to virtual battlefield scenarios. Carson Davis, the support team manager with the Combined Armed Center’s Mission Command Training Program, explained there are primarily four different simulations taking place at the same time within the WARSIM, and those simulations all get filtered into a single system before going through the mission command adapter that simulates the Army mission command systems.
“It takes all the simulation language, digital language, and it converts it, or translates it, into mission command language,” he said. “So it goes from the simulation, all filters into that one tiny server with mission command, and then it goes to my guys, and that’s what we push out, so (the training audience) can actually see what’s in the simulation.”
Davis explained that the WARSIM is extraordinarily detailed and mimics the real world, down to the terrain features, the types of weapons systems used, their capabilities, and how engagements with the enemy are determined.
“Like (with) a tank, there’s so many things you can (and can’t) do,” he said. “You can make a fighting position for it. If you try to drive it up certain slopes, it won’t go. It does a lot of things a normal tank can and can’t do. There are a lot of things that the war sim does that are very, very accurate. And that accuracy is what makes the Warfighter realistic. The more accurate the simulation is, the more realistic the Warfighter is.”
Reconnaissance also plays a vital role in the WARSIM. If the enemy has not been confirmed by any of the friendly capabilities, whether via drone recon or having eyes on by friendly forces, the division’s mission command system will not visually represent that enemy.
“You can template in (the mission command system) a bad icon where you think the enemy’s at,” Davis said. “But those are just templated, ‘this is where I think they are.’ In the WARSIM, you can dismount a person and put them on top of a hill, and if he sees that enemy tank, it will register as a red icon, so that will be a confirmed enemy location. But you have to see it in the simulation (to be confirmed).”
For the training audience, the information they receive from the simulation is an accurate replication of what they would see during actual combat operations, ensuring the training they conduct on mission command effectively prepares the division staff to deploy and successfully conduct operations when called upon.
“If it were to do this for real in a conflict zone, we would still be in that (command post) environment,” said Col. Andrew Couchman, the division’s operations officer and Brooklyn, New York native. “Even though the people that were commanding the down trace units and the Soldiers, they’ll be out on the on the front lines, but we would still be in that command post environment to have to control such a wide network, wide area of operation that has all these Soldiers under them.”
The WARSIM “does a fairly good job of replicating what it would be like: the science behind the Warfighter,” Couchman added. “Of course, there are the other aspects of it, like the emotion of having real Soldiers die versus ones and zeroes, but generally, it gives you the tools needed to make it realistic in a virtual environment to train as a headquarters.”
The more than week-long exercise put the division’s staff to the test, with weeks of planning ahead of time and thorough coordination amongst the many staff sections across the division and down to the multiple brigade headquarters. The staff conducted their detailed planning no differently than they would have had it been a real-world operation, which has been key to a successful Warfighter.
“It’s pretty amazing to watch a staff that comes from other jobs, civilian jobs, and then put on a uniform, have to quickly transition and become military members and also adapt that kind of really stressful environment,” Couchman said. “Then, of course, the growth is just monumental. Just the transition from that early stage, kind of fumbling around and trying to figure out our way, to an actual staff that’s performing and making each other better. It’s incredible in such a short amount of time.”
On top of the mandated training requirements placed on the division from the Army, the senior leadership also added additional tasks not required by higher but still vital to the division’s success during real-world operations, such as the location of the main command post and conducting a command post “jump,” where the location is rapidly moved from one location to another during operations.
Divisions establish their command posts using locations and facilities that are readily available. During LSCO, this can mean setting up in an abandoned building in the area of operations, using organic equipment such as satellite communications and power generators, and relying on sufficient supply movements to support the division staff. For Warfighter, the division elected to establish their command post at Fort Indiantown Gap’s Combined Arms Collective Training Facility, a 12-building training facility designed to replicate an urban environment.
“There was no requirement we had to do that,” Couchman said. “We could have stayed in a big warehouse with open space comfortably. But we decided to really replicate what it would be like in LSCO, where it is a little more remote, you’re taking over buildings that are in the middle of the countryside, and you’d have to build power, and you might suffer in the cold.”
At the end of the long and demanding mission command exercise, the Troy, New York-based division headquarters succeeded in their final major task prior to their upcoming mobilization later this year. Couchman contributes the division’s success at Warfighter to the staff’s professionalism, experience and ability to work together under periods of high stress.
“It was amazing to see the Rainbow Division come together from all over the place,” he said. “A lot of us have barely known each other for that long, especially when you just look at drill days. We’ve only known each other for a total of 12 days when you look at six drills. When you look at the progress from the train up to where we are now, it’s pretty incredible. And when you compare it to an active-duty division that trains every day, it really shows you the strength of the personnel that we have.”
| Date Taken: | 02.10.2025 |
| Date Posted: | 02.10.2025 12:50 |
| Story ID: | 490451 |
| Location: | FORT INDIANTOWN GAP, PENNSYLVANIA, US |
| Hometown: | BROOKLYN, NEW YORK, US |
| Web Views: | 97 |
| Downloads: | 0 |
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