For decades, the U.S. Army’s advantages in both lethality and protection largely guaranteed overmatch to units conducting counterinsurgency operations. These operations in Iraq and Afghanistan relied on small units, principally at the company level and below, to accomplish tactical, operational and even strategic objectives. Divisions and corps in both theaters relied on these small units for both operational understanding and situational awareness.

Conversely, the success of small units rarely required those higher echelons to mass effects to support their operations. This will change as the Army acknowledges emerging threats posed by peer adversaries and shifts its focus to multidomain operations.

Domain overmatch was a near-universal assumption in counterinsurgency environments. Future battles will require units to fight for overmatch. Overmatch, no longer defined solely by lethality and protection, now includes other factors such as situational awareness, mobility and decision dominance in the chaos and confusion of large-scale combat.

Tomorrow’s battlefield, and the final yards necessary for victory, will be more brutal and dangerous than ever before. While the division will not be able to relieve small units of the requirement to close with and destroy the enemy, the Army’s ability to close those final yards can never be assumed.

Ensuring Success

Recognizing that those final yards are essential to winning the nation’s wars, the division again must perform the vital role of massing fires and effects across all domains to ensure success in large-scale combat.

The division is the Army’s principal tactical warfighting formation and typically is the lowest tactical echelon that can achieve convergence through the synchronization, integration and employment of capabilities from multiple domains.

“Convergence is an outcome created by the concerted employment of capabilities from multiple domains and echelons against combinations of decisive points in any domain to create effects against a system, formation, decision maker, or in a specific geographic area,” according to Field Manual 3-0: Operations, which was updated in October to reflect the Army’s focus on multidomain operations.

Commanders must understand the interdependent relationships among capabilities from different domains and how to combine those capabilities effectively to accrue advantages over time.

The division also sets conditions for subordinate echelons to defeat enemy maneuver formations. Effectively setting these conditions requires a comprehensive approach to training to restore confidence in the Army’s ability to conduct division-centric operations.

Employing the division as the unit of action, applying capabilities across a wide spectrum of assets from space to maritime, is incredibly complex. Live training events incorporating all capabilities involve a great deal of planning and extensive resources.

As a result, these live training events are rarely executed at the division level. Despite this, divisions must create such training opportunities to understand the complexity involved, codify procedures and requirements, and assess a division’s ability to employ those assets in a realistic environment.

Multiple Assets

The 4th Infantry Division headquarters and the 4th Infantry Division Artillery  created Ivy Mass, a live-fire training event focused on how the “Ivy Division” fights within the Army’s multidomain concept.

Ivy Mass, first conducted in June, employed the full spectrum of lethal and nonlethal assets internal to the 4th Infantry Division and from units across the U.S. Army Forces Command and Army service component commands. The weeklong exercise achieved a wide range of objectives, starting with the division staff’s understanding of employing multiple assets under live conditions, to multiple repetitions of fully synchronizing, integrating and converging division capabilities and joint effects.

The exercise incorporated multiple battalions of cannon artillery, attack helicopters, Gray Eagle and Shadow unmanned aircraft systems, ground- and aerial-based cyber and electromagnetic activities, space control electronic warfare, close air support platforms and one platoon of High Mobility Artillery Rocket System launchers. Additionally, target acquisition platforms and observation assets included joint fires observers, joint terminal attack controllers, special operations observers and interagency intelligence capabilities.

The 12 hours of live-fire events ranged from cannon “time-on-target” missions to convergence events synchronizing fixed-wing aircraft; unmanned aircraft systems; Army attack aviation; space disruption; cyber and electromagnetic activities; cannon; and rocket fires. Ivy Mass was part of a series of command post exercises leading up to the division’s warfighter exercise, which took place in October.

Building Proficiency

Planning for this important training event alone yielded proficiency for those involved. Training objectives included employing available organic and joint capabilities as part of the live-fire training; massing cannon, rocket, attack aviation, close air support and nonlethal fires; and validating the division’s ability to execute the Army’s multidomain operations concept in live conditions.

Planners prioritized creating a permissive environment necessary to converge air and ground fires. One factor unique to Ivy Mass was use of the entire maneuver live-fire impact area at Fort Carson, Colorado, home of the 4th Infantry Division, as the “division deep fight.”

Similarly, the “division’s close fight” included all of Fort Carson’s western training areas, with the division’s rear boundary notionally extending 25 miles away to the town of Woodland Park, Colorado.

In addition, the scenario and associated battlefield geometry yielded a detailed unit airspace plan with carefully planned air corridors, airspace coordination areas, unmanned aircraft corridors, low-level transit routes and restricted operating zones.

Whether supporting small-unit action or large-scale combat, this unit airspace plan, synchronized by the division’s Joint Air Ground Integration Cell, is critical to winning at the division level. Winning requires simultaneous safe routing of flights, managing airspace and clearing air and ground fires.

Additionally, at the Mission Training Complex on Fort Carson, the planning team created a real-time simulation in advance of the event to rehearse timing, deconfliction and battlefield geometry.

Lessons to Share

Ivy Mass generated important lessons to share across the Army and joint fires enterprise:

1. Multidomain operations warrant live training. Divisions routinely train in a simulated environment. Competition for time and resources limits live training opportunities, but there simply is no substitute for live-fire training despite the associated complexity and scale. Simulated exercises do validate divisions and corps in their ability to execute mission-essential tasks, but these simulations omit most of the technical execution and coordination necessary to achieve full proficiency in leader and collective tasks at lower echelons.

Exercising the 4th Infantry Division Artillery as the force field artillery headquarters required all echelons, from the firing section all the way to the division staff, to adapt to a complex environment, assess real situations, converge fires and make timely decisions. Among the intangible benefits from live training included inspiring a productive sense of urgency among soldiers operating their assigned weapon systems. Gun crew members knew success or failure could derail other assets. Firing platoon leaders and sergeants similarly performed under pressure to meet time-on-target fire missions essential to the larger division operation. Firing batteries and battalions resolved technical issues while sustaining combat power throughout the 12-hour live-fire exercise. AH-64 Apache helicopter pilots flying under and around gun-target lines maintained necessary awareness of firing unit geometries. The integration of manned and unmanned assets in congested airspace continues to evolve, and rehearsing the scale of this complexity in live conditions inspires confidence.

Even the relatively short 12-hour window of live fires highlighted the importance of disciplined battle rhythm and the challenges of logistics and sustaining fires across the division front. Soldiers and leaders would not have appreciated these lessons to the same degree in simulation.

2. Division live fires are a natural complement to division Mission Command Training Tables. Army division staff Mission Command Training Tables assist commanders in validating staff proficiency through a sequenced and organized training progression. The final table, Mission Command Training Table X, Mission Command Warfighting Function Validation Exercise, is a validation exercise typically executed only in a simulated environment. Again, simulations provide invaluable training repetitions. A live-fire exercise, by contrast, provides fewer repetitions and little room for error. However, this focus encourages precision through deliberate rehearsals and the precise coordination necessary to demonstrate convergence. When executed as part of the same training progression, the simulation provides what the live-fire does not, and vice versa. The 4th Infantry Division conducted Ivy Mass concurrent with a warfighter command post exercise. This live and virtual approach was an integral part of the 4th Infantry Division’s training progression.

3. National intelligence support increases realism. Ivy Mass integrated national intelligence support directly into tactical-level operations. This support to targeting provided more refined and quicker access to data. The regional National Security Agency office provided real-time operational targeting support for almost two dozen enemy systems. This support allowed the Joint Air Ground Integration Cell to process national-level intelligence data for dynamic targeting in real time. The live feeds provided an important training opportunity to employ multiple unique enablers and fully exercise the intelligence and collections sections in a live environment.

4. A detailed 3D digital framework is an essential foundation for multidomain operations. The division operates in all dimensions within its area of operations. Each domain requires a battlefield framework that is part of a consolidated, multidomain, 3D architecture. This 3D architecture is essential to both the commander’s visualization process and shared understanding across echelons and results in a well-integrated, 3D, permissive battlefield for division operations.

During Ivy Mass, manned and unmanned assets and rocket, cannon, cyber and space effects transited the same framework spanning the division deep and close areas. The resulting combination of positive and procedural control measures facilitated massing effects at the desired location with minimal deconfliction. Continued emphasis on design and execution of a permissive framework will be essential to achieving overmatch against a peer threat in large-scale combat operations.

Unit of Action

Ivy Mass demonstrated both the complexity and the power of the division’s role in the deep and close fights. Overmatch resulting from the integration of division and joint assets also illustrated the importance of the division as the unit of action in large-scale combat.

Among the many firsts associated with this exercise, the division synchronized multiple division- and corps-level assets and conducted live convergence in accordance with the Army’s new doctrine. During two convergence events, the division employed every platform, from cannon to space, and conducted synchronized engagements on the same target area. Missions leveraged digital platforms to ensure accuracy while decreasing fire-mission processing time.

As part of the 4th Infantry Division’s preparation for its warfighter exercise, Ivy Mass added realism, perspective and experience. While Ivy Mass required months of preparation, this training path developed leaders and will make tomorrow’s Army better.

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Maj. Gen. David Hodne is commander of the 4th Infantry Division and Fort Carson, Colorado. Previously, he served as the chief of infantry, commandant of the U.S. Army Infantry School and director of the U.S. Army Futures Command’s Soldier Lethality Cross-Functional Team.

Col. G. Damon Wells is commander of the 4th Infantry Division Artillery, Fort Carson. Previously, he served as the fire support coordinator and chief of multidomain effects in Combined Joint Task Force-Operation Inherent Resolve.