If U.S. European Command — where I am the chief of staff — had to fight today, we would risk failing to support our commander in making decisions at the speed and quality necessary to succeed in modern conflict.
In the days following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the United States assembled a coalition to provide urgently needed support to Ukraine. Our planners soon found themselves working around a table with multinational partners looking over each other’s shoulders to synchronize military assistance in the form of equipment and supplies. It quickly became evident that an unclassified but secure communications platform was essential to share information across an impromptu group of 26 partners. Despite the U.S. Air Force leading the development of a network capable of such a requirement since 2018, it could not deliver on the promise of a combined communications environment. In response, the combatant command fielded an expedient solution to perform this critical communication function in crisis.
Though less stark than past failures like Operations Desert One or Urgent Fury, this shortfall highlights a modern failure in the field. When multiplied across the numerous, interdependent, and complex command-and-control systems that connect a commander’s decisions to actions on the ground, this simple example underscores the disconnect between the needs of the field commander and solutions provided by the armed services, undermining combatant command readiness for crisis and conflict.
To compete with and win wars against modern adversaries, combatant commands need to understand the battlefield — our own forces, allies, the enemy, and terrain — and be able to act faster than the adversary across air, land, sea, space, and cyberspace. This military action is managed through command and control, the system through which commanders plan, direct, and coordinate people and things towards the accomplishment of the mission. However, decades of underinvestment in command headquarters and an under-delivery of command-and-control capabilities have left commanders without the proper tools to understand the environment and make decisions at sufficient speed.
Correcting this deficiency primarily requires two changes: Increased resourcing in the form of people and money to improve and modernize command-and-control systems; and greater agency in the development of new capabilities, including an expanded ability to experiment with new capabilities within a commander’s respective theater. Both recommendations, while achievable, will require a deliberate shift in influence away from services and towards operational commanders.
America’s adversaries are rapidly learning and evolving. To ensure commanders can make decisions at the speed of tomorrow’s war, combatant commands can no longer rely on incremental and piecemeal support from the services. The Department of Defense should prioritize the needs of the combatant commands or it will risk the continued delivery of late or incompatible solutions that limit our ability to command and control forces on the battlefield.
Europe’s Transformation in Contact
Command and control is not a single piece of technology. It is a complex system that spans from an organization’s structure and processes to the networks, software, and physical infrastructure that support operations. The make-up of this system, including the size and composition of the staff, the tools they use, and buildings (if any) they occupy, is intricately tied to the environment in which it operates. When that environment changes — whether through the introduction of new technologies, a shift in adversary tactics, or evolving alliance requirements — the system should adapt in response.
U.S. European Command’s current command-and-control system is a product of post-Cold War optimism. Following the Soviet Union’s dissolution, U.S. European Command divested much of its large-scale warfighting capability and shifted its focus to security cooperation, military partnership programs, and supporting the integration of new NATO members.
Since then, Russian aggression has returned and threats have become increasingly interconnected, resulting in an unpredictable and dynamic environment. In turn, U.S. European Command faces increased requirements for interoperability with NATO and growing demands for timely and accurate information, stressing limited resources. The U.S. military’s command-and-control system ought to evolve with these changing demands, or it will risk falling behind. However, U.S. European Command has struggled to keep pace and remains reliant on outdated systems that limit our ability to effectively see ourselves and the enemy, underscoring the requirement for greater agency in resourcing and capability development decisions.
An Unequal Relationship: The Warfighter-Service Disconnect
The armed services are responsible for manning, training, and equipping forces needed in conflict. Almost every piece of equipment, to include our command-and-control systems, is funded and provided by one of the military branches. However, it is the combatant commander who is legally responsible for deterring and defending against our adversaries. Despite this warfighting responsibility, the services retain greater control over capability development and military resources, leaving combatant commands little influence over how command-and-control solutions are designed or tailored to their unique operational needs.
It is here that the disconnect between a capability requirement, service-led command-and-control modernization initiatives, and the actual needs of combatant commands looms large, as demonstrated by the services’ inability to field an interoperable partner network. While developing platform- or domain-specific equipment may be more clear-cut for services to deliver, the complexity of command and control demands solutions that are interoperable across multiple systems, domains, and organizations, a capability gap ill-suited for the services to solve.
Nevertheless, services are moving out in developing their own command-and-control capabilities like Project Convergence, Overmatch, and the Advanced Battle Management System. The result is a series of siloed efforts that fail to deliver capabilities needed to synchronize and execute the joint fight in modern warfare. Each new service-specific solution increases the complexity of command-and-control problems without addressing combatant commands’ needs. This leaves the combatant command with the task of identifying, cataloging, and connecting hundreds of data sources to support the commander’s decision-making sufficiently.
More than any other battlefield capability, command and control cannot be examined and assessed in isolation and should be addressed holistically as a single system. Therefore, the combatant commands, not the services, are best positioned to deliver modernized command and control. To overcome this challenge, modernizing command and control should shift away from service-led efforts in favor of the combatant commander.
The challenge of command-and-control modernization is compounded by the slow and incremental progress of the Department of Defense’s modernization effort, Combined Joint All-Domain Command and Control. The timeliness of service-led capability delivery, including those under this effort, is notoriously slow, often stretching for five to 10 years. By the time a capability is delivered (if ever), it is frequently outdated, ill-suited to the evolving needs of the combatant command, or significantly altered by service equities, demonstrating the fundamental flaw in fulfilling command-and-control needs.
The Chief Digital and Artificial Intelligence Office has begun providing combatant commands with much needed support. However, the services regularly vote against any meaningful resourcing. Of four high-profile command-and-control capabilities — allied and partner network interoperability, data integration, joint fires, and an advanced common operating picture — U.S. European Command has only received the latter. The irony that this capability was delivered through commercial means and not through one of the services is not lost.
Despite years of experimentation and promises, the lack of workable solutions further reinforces the inefficiency and ineffectiveness of the Department of Defense’s current approach within the timelines required by today’s security environment. If we accept Shyam Sankar’s recent argument that “You cannot separate the roles of creating requirements and delivering capabilities,” then combatant commands ought to be provided a greater role in developing and delivering capabilities on the battlefield.
Addressing Combatant Command Modernization Shortfalls
The space between battlefield needs, resourcing, and service solutions leaves U.S. European Command in a difficult position. The requirement for improved command and control exists today, yet the service’s efforts continue to fall short of the immediate needs of the combatant commands. We are doing what we can to address deficiencies across our people, processes, networks and data, and infrastructure within the bounds of current funding. However, without a greater voice in resourcing decisions or capability development, we will remain far behind our modernization needs.
People and Processes
Now in the third year of crisis, staffing across the headquarters and our components remains critically short. While we can improve staff officer proficiency through training and education and can shift personnel within a fixed population, we cannot resolve manpower challenges without the long lead times required by overly bureaucratic processes. For example, the Joint Staff validates our manpower requirements, but they must first be backed by costly, time-consuming, and subjective manpower studies conducted by external agencies.
In the latest study, even our manning requirements for data modernization, a priority for the Department of Defense, were rejected, demonstrating the subjective nature of this process. Even if positions are validated, the command then competes in slow resourcing processes to fund manpower requirements, where combatant commands often lose out again to service preferences. While staffing reqirements will persist in the short term, improvements in command-and-control systems and the digitization and automation of staff processes will reduce the cognitive load on the staff, enabling a significant reduction in manning.
Networks and Data
U.S. European Command’s networks, optimized for peacetime, are also outdated and struggle to meet today’s computing demands. Despite receiving advanced software tools for battle management, its potential remains limited by our hardware and networks. Yet, we currently spend much of our budget on maintaining legacy systems, leaving the command unable to invest in future capabilities central to a modern network such as cloud and zero-trust. To improve our networks, we again rely on the services and other external entities, complicating our efforts to leap the command forward technologically.
Modernizing command and control is not possible without also addressing our data deficiencies. Like other military organizations, our data is dispersed across components, siloed in service, Joint Staff, and national repositories — another consequence of leaving command and control to the services to solve. In 2024, combatant commands still count planes, tanks, and ships by phone call and email because we lack access to data, systems to integrate this information, and urgency from the services. This leaves a substantial gap for operational commanders to see the totality of their forces and make timely decisions on their use on the battlefield.
At the expense of other command priorities, we’ve invested our limited funds in data engineers to directly assist the staff in identifying and prioritizing authoritative data to integrate into our systems. Despite challenges in data interoperability, this initiative is being pursued in close coordination with U.S. Central Command to address operational problems at the seams of conflict, resulting in a joint, cross-combatant command solution capable of addressing increasingly global threats.
Facilities and Infrastructure
U.S. European Command’s headquarters operates from a 90-year-old Panzer regiment mess hall, and our data center resides in a 65-year-old office space, incapable of fully integrating advanced applications like Maven Smart Systems. As a result, senior leaders and the staff rely on analog tools and manual processes, slowing decision-making. Although we own and maintain our physical infrastructure, U.S. European Command competes with other service priorities for restoration money. Here again, the combatant command consistently loses out. To put this in context, a recent estimate to construct a modern headquarters building that would bring U.S. European Command in line with other combatant commands totaled nearly half a billion dollars — a requirement unlikely to ever be funded under the current resourcing framework.
These internal modernization efforts alone cannot deliver the command-and-control system needed in Europe. Although we’ve achieved some success, improving our common operating picture, hiring data engineers, or overhauling staff education is not enough. Command-and-control modernization at scale, including manning, networks, and infrastructure, outpaces our resourcing and capacity. Combatant commands only control around 0.7 percent of the defense budget (about $260 million per command) — the Army, Air Force, and Navy control over 80 percent of the budget. To fix our command-and-control deficiencies and ensure our ability to support the commander’s decision-making in crisis and conflict, this resourcing disparity needs to be reassessed.
One Size Doesn’t Fit All: The Limits of the Single Integrator Solution
Some would prefer the Department of Defense to consolidate all command-and-control modernization resourcing under a single combatant command to solve the problem. By empowering a single integrator, vice the services or Joint Staff, a single command could pull together the various command-and-control modernization efforts more efficiently. Arguably, U.S. Indo-Pacific Command is already performing this function, as demonstrated by its Joint Fires Network effort, and already receives the preponderance of combatant command resourcing based on an outdated National Defense Strategy.
However, this approach overlooks critical differences in operational requirements across commands and would sacrifice effectiveness for efficiency. A command-and-control system ought to be tailored to its environment and the task at hand, which varies significantly based on the adversary, geography, coalition demands, and other factors. In Europe, command and control is uniquely complex because of the interoperability demands in a NATO-led fight. This arrangement requires a level of integration across our plans, systems, networks, data, and processes not needed in the Pacific, dictating a different command-and-control requirement.
A European conflict would also likely be land-centric, contrasting with the Indo-Pacific’s maritime focus, underscoring fundamental differences in distances and domain that impact the design of a command-and-control system. The command-and-control system required for defeating 1000 maritime targets is not the one we need to blunt an armored cross-border attack into the Baltic countries. Likewise, our command-and-control system isn’t the one that U.S. Southern Command or U.S. Africa Command needs. Neither require a capability as robust as the Joint Fires Network. While there are areas where combatant commands can and should support each other’s modernization efforts, each organization’s unique requirements necessitate distinct solutions.
Empowering the Warfighter: Increasing Combatant Command Readiness
The security environment in Europe has fundamentally changed, with Russia emerging as a chronic and increasingly capable threat. This demands that U.S. European Command adapt swiftly to confront the complex challenges of modern warfare, beginning with a modernized command-and-control system to ensure the integration and synchronization of multi-service and multi-domain capabilities. Yet, service-driven command-and-control efforts continue to fall short of the immediate demands of combatant commands, reinforcing the need to reorient around the priorities of the warfighter.
In the aftermath of the military failures that led to the Goldwater-Nichols Act, Lt. Gen. John Cushman wrote, “The Joint Chiefs of Staff have failed to meet field commanders’ needs and allow Services to acquire command and control systems that don’t consider the operational user’s systems holistically.” Despite the defense reforms of the 1980s, the disconnect between the service and user remains.
It’s time to adopt a new approach and equip combatant commands to accomplish their mandated mission by enabling them to experiment with, develop, and field joint capabilities in their theater. This includes directly funding combatant commands to develop their own command-and-control solutions and increasing the Joint Staff’s Combatant Commander’s Initiative Fund to fully resource command-and-control modernization at the scale required for today’s challenges. Further, combatant command agency in capability development and resourcing processes should be strengthened by revising authoritative documents governing these processes. Combined, these changes should elevate and prioritize combatant command needs above the services.
The need for U.S. European Command to rapidly adapt is clear. Yet, we are not resourced sufficiently to do so. Without modernized command and control for the operational commander, forces — even those modernized by the services — cannot be effectively employed on the battlefield. Continuing to rely on service-led solutions, far removed from the areas where conflict and competition occur, risks producing solutions that do not meet the demands of modern warfare, jeopardizing success in future conflicts.
Maj. Gen. Peter B. Andrysiak Jr. is the chief of staff of U.S. European Command. He previously served as the director of operations of U.S. European Command, and deputy commanding general of U.S. Army Europe.
Maj. Bryan J. Quinn is a U.S. Army strategist at U.S. European Command. The views expressed in this article are not those of U.S. European Command, the U.S. Army, the Department of Defense, or any part of the U.S. government.
Image: United States European Command Public Affairs
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