This exercise will test our headquarters as a Theater Army with three major command posts (or CPs for short) to control operations. You may be thinking what in the world is a Theater Army?  Well it’s a big organization with many headquarters – each with its own purpose, but all linked together so their actions are synchronized.  We have people who control all units across our area (about 50% of the world’s surface – lots of water, but it’s all surrounded by land (the main CP), one which looks at the current war (an operational CP in military-ese) and one part of the operational CP which can get on a plane and be anywhere in the Pacific in a matter of hours (we call that one the ‘early entry’ CP).  This all may seem like a lot of people telling a small group of Soldiers what to do, but it’s all about stuff and information.  Who has it; who needs it; and how can we get it there.  We also have units that control all the logistics (supplies and stuff), military intelligence (to see what the bad guys are doing or going to do), air defense (so we can fly our planes and not let them fly theirs, also shoot down any missiles destined to blow us up), communication (they are our AT&T, Time Warner, and Dish Network all rollup into one, telephone, computer and video – all where you want it, when you want it – and secure), medical (the folks who plan to get our docs where they need to be to treat our Soldiers with all the stuff they need to do it – and move them out of the area quickly so we can save lives).

 So you want to know what a simulated war looks like?   It’s not like an Xbox or GameCube, it’s Soldiers working on computers in various locations, planning and telling simulated forces what to do.  Then a really complex computer makes the calculations on what might have happened during an actual combat and sends the adjustments into the system so the Soldiers see realistic data.  This is large units, not individual Soldiers.  It kinda looks like moving boxes around on a digital map, but all those boxes have very complex meanings – say you have a tank unit – you have to feed, fuel and arm it with all the stuff a normal unit would need.  When something breaks or gets blown up, you have to order the parts to fix it.  They then make plans on what to do next, and recommend their best plan to the leaders.  Then they tell all the units what to do next.  This happens for every unit in the simulation.  The CPs get consolidated information from all the units and have to make decisions on changing the plan or fixing something in the system that isn’t working right.  This happens all over the world in all different time zones – in this case we have people at computers linked together in Japan, Korea, Hawaii and the mainland US.  All of this is secured on special networks so we can talk about classified stuff without worrying if our plans get out and put our Soldiers in danger because the enemy knows what we’re going to do.

COL Wayne S