Reality checking industry offerings for C2
Command and Control
C2 systems litter headquarters – some have coalesced into a single machine, others spread across various apps, platforms, and systems. It’s a growing market place and one that can genuinely bamboozle with all the unmoderated lingo that goes with it. Claims that AI, ML, edge, and clould are scattered with wild abandon but lack some of the detail that HQ staff and commanders actually need. And there is something about contemporary combat and warfare here too. The need to rapidly scale access to systems in Ukraine could be equally matched by lessons from Sudan, Yemen or Kashmir. HADR missions...
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C2 for Urban Warfare
Command and Control
Western militaries won’t be able to do C2 in urban warfare scenarios well enough to prevail. So says Professor John Spencer, author, researcher, commentator and veteran of numerous campaigns. Recent lessons from urban fights demand that HQ staffs refocus on things they can control and need to influence (the Info Ops battle, allocation of scarce resources like engineers, as well as critical CIMIC, legal, PAO issues), whilst combat leaders on the ground will need to understand – and exploit – legacy equipment and tools that find utility in complex urban battles; think sound powered...
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Insubordination
Command and Control
Sometimes insubordination within the command chain actually works. Want an example? Take the infamous 1973 Yom Kippur War, when the divisional commander of a reserve formation (Ariel Sharon) circumvented not just his superiors but also the IDF chief in order to get approval for his plan. Gross insubordination….but it worked. History favours Sharon’s own narrative but the command chain had a different perspective. Personalities matter in C2: sometimes the clash of commanders can be detrimental to the campaign. Sometimes insubordination is necessary, but you won’t end up as Prime Minister...
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C2 and Peacekeeping
Command and Control
Peace keeping missions (whether peace enforcement, peace building, peace making, or conflict prevention) are very different to the formatted hierarchy and organisation of set-piece, large-scale military missions which Western allies have been accustomed to over the past decade. Even the experiences of ISAF or Iraq are outliers rather than a standardised format replicable across peace keeping tasks. This is also evident in the C2 of these missions: often more complex, ambiguous, woolly, and confusing than most military officers will be accustomed to. And that’s without bringing in a strategic...
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Professionals Talk Logistics
Command and Control
The key principles of logistics might not have changed (Jomini’s principles remain as valid as ever), but we have been lulled into false sense of adequacy about logistics and war. Steve Leonard and Jon Klug delve into how protracted wars make command conversations about logistics and supply different. The honest advice from the G4 might not always be appreciated but husbanding resources for a long-war is something commanders need to hear, and probably don’t get from elsewhere. War-gaming might help but when these exercises are limited by time and training outcomes, the realities and...
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Ukrainian C2: Adaptation under fire
Command and Control
The announcement in February 2025 of a restructuring of Ukrainian command and control went largely unnoticed in the West. It shouldn’t have: the implications are significant. Mick Ryan provides some much-needed illumination and insight into what this means, why it came about, some of the challenges and opportunities that may result, and whether lessons are immediately transferrable. Training and selecting commanders is a critical enabler to making this all work, and Mick recalls some of the syllabus from his time at the USMC School of Advanced Warfighting to give us a flavour of how...
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CIMIC and C2
Command and Control
Everyone understands that civil agencies and institutions do not operate in the same way as military organisations. The culture, aims, objectives, and funding models are different, as is the way they run activity. So when militaries and these agencies interact, a sense of friction and misunderstanding often emerges. A small group of military staff stand between the behemoths of civil and military leaders – the CIMIC staff; it is their understanding of both sets of cultures that smooths activity in the 97% of military activity that is not combat operations. Kathleen Porath, academic advisor...
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Nuclear Command and Control
Command and Control
It’s not a topic that is spoken about enough in the national security community: Nuclear Command and Control (NC2), and Communications (NC3) is a world apart from C2 for conventional forces: it underpins strategic stability between nuclear armed states. With the emergence of a ‘3-body problem’ in Great Power Competition, there is a risk that Western leaders (political and military) simply try and transpose Cold War theories onto the problems of today, and add some AI/ML to make it look pretty. Professor Andrew Reddie from the Berkeley Goldman School at the University of California,...
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C2, MDO and Synchronisation
Command and Control
Fast reflections of the annual NATO C2 Centre of Excellence (C2COE) conference in the Hague with the centre’s commanding officer, Meitta Groeneveld. The challenging issues of MDO and Synchronisation, and the implications of that doctrine on command and control, were the conference’s planned themes. We ended up in a conversation about the Cross Domain Command Concept, data and the human, the need to share, the lessons from Ukraine on C2 about adaptation of C2, the community of interest (the “we”), the political (and societal) will to change, the journey towards and beyond C2 in MDO, and...
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Horrid Bosses
Command and Control
The military sometimes promote and appoint leaders who are truly terrible. Sometimes this isn’t their fault, they are not always narcissistic or toxic: sometimes they are just not up to the job. But the issue for staffs is how to handle poor leaders. Professor William Scott Jackson from Oxford University is perhaps the foremost researcher in this field, and he brings with him a wealth of experience and lessons from the private and commercial world – much of it translates into the military world without much imagination. In this episode he talks about succession management, micro solutions...
info_outlineC2 systems litter headquarters – some have coalesced into a single machine, others spread across various apps, platforms, and systems. It’s a growing market place and one that can genuinely bamboozle with all the unmoderated lingo that goes with it. Claims that AI, ML, edge, and clould are scattered with wild abandon but lack some of the detail that HQ staff and commanders actually need. And there is something about contemporary combat and warfare here too. The need to rapidly scale access to systems in Ukraine could be equally matched by lessons from Sudan, Yemen or Kashmir. HADR missions work better with C2 systems that have this ability to size up swiftly – as well as working cross multiple domains, actors and security classifications; the requirement to meet the need of NGOs and multiple coalition partners (civil as well as military) is a demand matched in its complexity only by the demands for data and analytics from every level.
To give us some truth rather than wild claims and rhetoric about C2 systems, I asked the show’s sponsor – Systematic – for a brief. Step forward Global VP for BD, Andrew Graham and his team: data scientists and military veterans from around the world, all with a distinct passion for C2.