After watching Ukraine track down and kill Russian military commanders, the US and its allies are training to avoid the same fate

• Ukrainian attacks on Russian commanders have undermined Russian command-and-control capabilities.
• They have forced Russia’s military and others around the world reconsider how they set up command posts.
• During a major exercise in July, Australian troops showed off some adaptations to that threat.

The Ukrainian military’s success in tracking down and attacking Russian military commanders has been cause for concern in Moscow and among militaries around the world.

The Russian army has adapted by changing where and how it sets up its headquarters, and other armies, including those of the US and its allies, are now thinking about how to keep their command posts from falling victim to the same kind of attacks.

During a sprawling exercise known as Talisman Sabre in Australia last month, US and Australian soldiers worked on methods to disguise their command posts and move them quickly if found out.

“Examples from the conflict in Ukraine have shown that large and static footprints can be targeted and destroyed within minutes of enemy fires unmasking themselves,” Australian army Col. Benjamin McLennan said in a press release.

Command posts are nodes for military officers, intelligence and communications specialists, and other troops directing battlefield operations. They are usually packed with electronic equipment and surrounded by vehicles, giving them a distinct electronic and physical footprint.

“If I see a number of radio stations in the same place, I understand it’s a command post,” Col. Ivan Pavlenko, chief of the Ukrainian General Staff’s electronic and cyber warfare department, told the BBC recently.

The proliferation of intelligence-gathering assets and of precision guided weapons has made it easier to find the distinctive presence of a command post and zero in on it. The command post set up by Australian soldiers last month — which was placed under a canopy of gum trees, shrouded in camouflage netting, and burrowed nearly 10 feet into the ground — reflects new thinking about how to counter those threats.

Its crucifix shape was meant to allow work stations to be emplaced easily and removed quickly, Cpl. Greg McKenzie, an Australian army engineer, said in the release, adding that “the position, or decoys, can be built in a day and be emptied within five minutes — as long as the logistics are in place.”

McLennan, commander of the Australian army’s Combat Training Center, said observations were relayed “straight back into the exercise” through senior leaders. “By having oversight through our reconnaissance assets, we’ve been able to continually assist and give feedback on what the threat force sees as the brigade’s footprint,” McLennan added.

McLennan said Talisman Sabre was “a great opportunity” to work with the US “to test a light and nodal brigade construct — one that can remain undetected and move quickly when targeted, and we immediately saw some great results.”

Ukraine has used precision weapons against an array of Russian targets, but its attacks on command-and-control networks have been some of the most significant, eroding the Russian military’s ability to think and react.

Their impact was illustrated around Chornobaivka, a village near Kherson, where Ukrainian strikes hit the headquarters of several Russian armies and subordinate units more than 22 times, including one that killed the 49th Combined Arms Army’s commander, three US Army officers wrote in a recent essay in Military Review, the Army’s professional journal.

“These attacks significantly degraded the Russians’ ability to plan and conduct coordinated operations on the western side of the Dnieper River,” which sapped Russia’s momentum and ultimately led to its expulsion, wrote the authors, who include Lt. Gen. Milford Beagle Jr., commander of the US Army Combined Arms Center.

“Beyond Kherson, this pattern has been similar if less concentrated. Ukrainian attacks on command posts across the country have led to stunning attrition among senior Russian military leaders,” the authors added.

HIMARS strikes that began in summer 2022 ultimately forced the Russian army to move its headquarters more than 75 miles behind its forward lines, which by that autumn had “imposed significant tactical challenges on Russian forces,” according to a report by the Royal United Services Institute, a British think tank.

By winter, however, Russian forces had overcome that challenge by making their command posts more dispersed, better protected, and connecting them to other CPs by wiring, often taking over Ukrainian telecommunications networks to do so, according to the report.

The US Army now has to move away from the kind of command posts it got used to setting up during wars in the Middle East, where an expanding mission set and lack of threats allowed CPs to become “overpeopled, overprocessed, overnetworked, and understressed,” the authors of the Military Review article wrote.

To be “effective and survivable in large-scale combat operations against a capable enemy,” the authors wrote, future Army command posts will need make better use of data, integrate more closely with friendly forces, be more resilient and protected, and have more operational and physical agility.

A tool that could support that shift was on display during Talisman Sabre, when Australian troops demonstrated Bushmaster vehicles with a built-in satellite communications capability, a project known as “Headquarters on the Move.”

“It really consolidates equipment, making communication highly mobile,” a member of the 1st Combat Signals Regiment said. “It will also eliminate the need for extensive manual labour and setup. It makes us really autonomous and independent.”