This April marked the beginning of the fourth iteration of Multi-Domain Command – Europe’s premiere exercise, Arcane Thunder, happening simultaneously at Fort Irwin, California, and throughout the European theater. The lessons learned by the Pershing Soldiers in California’s high desert will shape the future of large-scale combat operations.
Multi-Domain Command – Europe is one of three units established within the past five years, charged with combining the five fingers of the Army’s air, land, sea, space, and cyber capabilities into a fist, capable of destroying any target.
“The opening salvo of the next fight will not be something that comes out of an ammunition supply point,” says Maj. Guglielmo, Operations Officer for Multi-Domain Command – Europe and lead planner for Arcane Thunder 26. “It is going to be something more in the domains, literally, that we operate in here.”
The MDC-E’s primary role is creating anti-access and area denial (A2/AD), the strategy by which the U.S. military restricts enemy movement and prevents adversaries from deploying forces into a theater of operations throughout the battlefield. For MDC-E that means supporting U.S. Army European Command in reinforcing NATO’s eastern flank against Russian incursion should the need arise.
What Multi-Domain Command – Europe brings to the fight that a combined arms unit wouldn’t is the capability to sense the enemy at extreme ranges and create opportunities for the unit’s long-range fires battalions to engage those targets. Fixed wing UAVs serve as the unit’s swiss army knife of sensing and detecting, capable of carrying electromagnetic or explosive payloads if necessary, while high-altitude balloons (HABs) capable of floating near the top of the Earth’s exosphere for more than a year at a time monitor signals in the electromagnetic spectrum from hundreds of miles away.
Capabilities within all domains of warfare employed by the MDC-E work in concert to “bring the fight as deep as possible,” says Guglielmo. “The Army wide is trying to make sure that it has as innovative and as advanced technology as possible to provide the warfighter that advantage.”
This year’s Arcane Thunder tests the scale at which those capabilities can be employed through the formation of Multi-Domain Company Teams (MDC-Ts).
“Multi-Domain Company Team is a company size element that combines multiple disciplines outside of its organic structure to create multiple options for a commander to affect things on the battlefield,” says Guglielmo.
“Much like using combined arms to create multiple dilemmas, a MDC-T can do the same thing,” says Guglielmo. “Instead of tanks and artillery, you have an extended range sensing asset, a kinetic element, and a space element all working in concert together to accomplish whatever the combatant commander needs.”
Responsible for testing the employment of the MDC-T concept are the Soldiers of MDC-E’s Extended Range Sensing and Effects (ERSE) Company, commanded by Capt. Garrett Murray. Drone operators, electronic warfare specialists, and tactical space operations specialists merged into one unit to detect targets at extreme ranges and destroy them.
ERSE company and the rest of the MDC-E team have been tasked with answering the question of how to take these capabilities and integrate them with the ground force, says Murray.
“We’re still building the foundations,” says Murray. “Everyone knows the exact roles that we fill. There’s not much question besides how do we change up the tactics.”
“We’re making those steps during this exercise now that we’re coordinating with a long-range fires unit,” says Murray. “The next step, once we continue through experimentation and developing our capabilities is, now we need to start working on synchronizing with the maneuver force.”
Deciding upon what technologies to incorporate into the Army’s warfighting functions is an enduring effort throughout the force known as Transforming in Contact, focused on delivering new technologies into the hands of Soldiers so that they can experiment, innovate, and be ready to fight on a modern battlefield. Leading the charge at Multi-Domain Command – Europe is Maj. Don Duong.
Maj. Duong’s call sign is “CTO”. He’s the Multi-Domain Command’s Chief Technology Officer.
“It’s… new position that’s reflective of where the Army and the military’s been going in terms of the acknowledgement that the pace at which new capabilities and technologies are entering into the marketplace and the warfare domains are quickly outstripping traditional procurement pathways,” said Duong.
“We’re focused on trying to find current emerging and future capabilities aligned against what the MDC concept of employment and mission sets are.”
Arcane Thunder puts that concept into practice. Soldiers operating between Mainz-Kastel, Germany and Fort Irwin, Texas, employ emerging technologies across multiple training scenarios, stress-testing what the industry has to offer.
“What we’re doing with multi-domain reconnaissance is something that’s quite different from how traditional Army reconnaissance has been done at the tactical level,” says Duong. “We’re developing the doctrine, the procedures and the capabilities to execute reconnaissance at extended distances. That hasn’t been considered in the past at the tactical level.”
“Everything we do here will inform the direction that the Army takes with regard to multi-domain reconnaissance and then how we can converge or layer all these different effects together to create an effect or multiple dilemmas on adversary forces,” says Duong.
By MSG John Healy
