There’s a new kind of war coming, one where almost everything soldiers do or say on the battlefield will be visible, identifiable and trackable by the enemy or the public.

With technology evolving at lightning speed, much of it available commercially, new threats have proliferated rapidly, and soldiers training at the U.S. Army’s combat training centers are learning how to outsmart an agile adversary with access to technology almost on par with theirs.

No longer will U.S. ground troops have many of the advantages they had in Iraq and Afghanistan, including air superiority, the relative safety of fortified outposts, massive logistics bases, garrison-style division headquarters or hot meals served in air-conditioned chow halls.

Instead, war on a transparent battlefield will be marked by high technology and old-school austerity, at once a futuristic game of eluding the big eye in the sky and a throwback to the days of digging fighting positions.

“What we recognize today is that an adversary can see, identify and track its opponent at distance virtually throughout the battle space, and that that information is available in a variety of means of acquisition, in a variety of spectrums,” said Maj. Gen. Curtis Taylor, commander of the National Training Center and Fort Irwin, California.

Training for large-scale combat operations against a near-peer competitor has been an operational centerpiece at the National Training Center for about a decade, since the end of major operations in Iraq. But what’s new and expanding, Taylor said, is the understanding of modern conflict through observing the war in Ukraine, now in its third year, and studying the years-old Nagorno-Karabakh conflict between Armenia and Azerbaijan.

In those conflicts, the battle space is made transparent through drones, interconnected civilians, the electromagnetic spectrum and commercial satellite technology that provides “freely available imagery that would have been at the top-secret level as recently as 10 years ago,” Taylor said.

“Everything that happens in public space now is subject to immediately being tweeted out to a global audience,” Taylor said, referring to the social media platform now known as X. “For those who know how to use those tools to acquire information, it’s an exceptional source of real-time tactical information about enemy activity. The transparent battlefield changes the way you fight.”

Bigger Exercises

Taylor and his counterpart, Maj. Gen. David Gardner, commander of the Joint Readiness Training Center and Fort Johnson, Louisiana, lead the Army’s two full-spectrum combat training centers, where in recent years there has been a return to division-level exercises.

While the two combat training centers are different in size, topography and weather, valuable lessons learned from overseas wars are shared and utilized by the two centers’ opposing forces, and the innovative ways that training units are adapting to the transparent battlefield also are shared with units up for rotations through the centers.

Gardner, who previously commanded the Joint Readiness Training Center’s operations group, which provides opposing or “enemy” forces for rotating training units to face off against, said leaders from units with upcoming rotations have always made visits to the training center to observe “enemy” tactics.

But in the two years he’s been the installation’s commander, he’s seen “double or triple the number of future battalion and brigade commanders” come on prerotation visits and, likewise, his opposing forces are augmented by “guest” observer controllers from those units.

“I think people are embracing that as an opportunity to learn more, … taking advantage of that as a training opportunity,” Gardner said. “We, even in the last year, allowed a sister battalion commander of one of the brigades [in] training to command the [opposing force] battalion during an attack.”

The ability to observe war in real time, Gardner said, enables a deeper understanding of the dilemmas that will dominate the next battlefield and produces the ability to replicate realistic threat scenarios for training units.

“Our job at the combat training centers is to make units do the hard things and to give them the positive reinforcement that doing those hard things pays dividends,” Gardner said. “Today, we find ourselves completely focused on large-scale combat operations against an adversary that’s a peer threat and almost always in the European or Pacific Theater.”

Minimizing Presence

Working with the concept of a transparent battlefield, division-level exercises have engendered innovation at every echelon as commanders and troops adapt and implement new ways to communicate, maneuver and minimize their physical and electronic footprints.

They are learning to minimize their visible, thermal and electromagnetic signatures and their social media presence, the four elements that “combine to create this holistic picture about your unit and activity that can be exploited by the enemy,” Taylor said.

Similarly, adversary information also is visible in much greater detail, not by soldiers at the tactical edge, but at a strategic distance, Taylor said.

Unlike information-gathering during counterinsurgency operations, which was gleaned by soldiers on combat patrols in Iraq and Afghanistan, and sent up to battalion-, brigade- and division-level analysts, Taylor said the flow of battlefield intelligence “has been inverted now by the transparent battlefield.”

“What that means is, I may be sitting in a windowless room in Virginia, and through either open-source collection of social media, through signals collection or through satellite collection, I may be able to answer a question as specific as how many tanks have crossed the bridge,” Taylor said. “That has been a real transition out here at the National Training Center; that’s how we’re learning to fight on the transparent battlefield.”

Another important insight about the transparent battlefield, Taylor said, is that in the desert, “you can’t be invisible, but you can look unimportant.”

Hiding in the open desert is nearly impossible, but formations can be designed to make it difficult for an enemy to discern who’s who and who’s doing what, Taylor said. This includes dispersing activities over distance, shrinking the size of command posts, limiting the electromagnetic footprint and placing planning, intelligence and analysis capabilities in a remote node beyond the range of enemy artillery.

At the National Training Center, training divisions are subject to up to 100 artillery strikes a day, creating a constant artillery threat that affects not only tanks and battle positions, but also the brigade support areas where “every node is subject to being struck by artillery,” Taylor said.

Dispersing and Digging

Soldiers also are learning to operate differently by dispersing their formations without relying on a forward operating base.

When operations are concentrated in one place with people packed inside, everyone is vulnerable to being taken out by one artillery round. Instead, soldiers are learning to dig trenches and fighting positions as soon as they occupy a new position, a lesson learned by observing Ukrainian soldiers’ tactics.

“Camouflage and survivability have been important for ages, and the discipline to start digging fighting positions whenever you stop is a key to surviving indirect fire and small-arms fire,” Gardner said, explaining that’s why the Army issues soldiers a folding portable shovel. “It’s a basic principle and something we’re seeing units return to, as well as camouflaging their positions so they’re harder to spot.”

Gardner acknowledged that soldiers have grumbled about performing arduous physical labor, but they are coming to understand the value of the protection a well-built fighting position can offer.

“It’s soldiers being made to eat their vegetables,” Gardner said, adding that he believes as soldiers “grow, mature and gain experience … I think they learn to appreciate why they’re doing it. It doesn’t mean they won’t complain about it, but soldiers love complaining.”

More Rotations

Gen. Andrew Poppas, commander of U.S. Army Forces Command, said the Army plans to complete two division rotations a year to get soldiers and leaders into a mindset of conducting large-scale combat operations.

“We’ve started incorporating divisions in the dirt, two divisions a year, to force them to do those divisional tasks under the duress of a dirt environment,” Poppas said, explaining that these divisions complete a warfighter exercise so their “staff level is up to the highest proficiency, then you induce the friction of the desert. That’s where the learning really accelerates.”

Last year, the 3rd Infantry Division headquarters was first to complete a rotation at the National Training Center, followed by the 1st Armored Division. The 101st Airborne Division (Air Assault) is on track to do a rotation at the Joint Readiness Training Center in August.

As he’s visited the two combat training centers, Poppas said he’s made note of the tactics and strategies implemented by the divisions.

“We learned some great lessons about how long it takes to establish our headquarters and the [tactical operations center] footprint is often too big,” Poppas said. “It’s very hard to hide. You can’t have a large headquarters as we had previously. You have to be mobile. You have to be masking yourself in terrain, in urban terrain, in cities.”

Units also learn that “whether it’s an individual soldier or a whole division,” the friction of being out in the environment remains, whether it’s the effects of harsh weather or making sure logistics plans are in place, he said.

He cited as an example an artillery unit that didn’t submit an accurate logistics report, and, as a result, soldiers ran out of water and the unit called for emergency resupply. “In a simulation, it’s easy, but not when you actually have soldiers who are thirsty,” he said.

The unit was challenged again when the trucks for emergency resupply needed maintenance because of dust storms. “Even though they got the water, they couldn’t move it to the formation,” Poppas said, pointing out that communication “is a lot more difficult when you’re out in the middle of the desert.”