Picking up the PACE: EW battlefield demands updated contingency planning

WASHINGTON and AUGUSTA, Ga. — The Army is toying with new ways to deal with communication disruptions on the battlefield by trading the linear, step-by-step contingency plans soldiers once followed for mutually reinforced layers that look more like “electromagnetic camouflage,” I Corps commander Lt. Gen. Matthew McFarlane said today.

“Our traditional PACE plans — primary, alternate, contingency, emergency — ways to [communicate] are dead. A sequential PACE plan, predicated on responding to failure with manual, step-by-step user actions is useless against concurrent multi-band jamming,” McFarlane told an audience at the annual TechNet Augusta conference.

A boilerplate PACE plan that any soldier could expect briefed at a field exercise might look something like this: The primary method to communicate is over secure FM radio; the alternate method is through satellite calls; the contingency is HF radio; and the emergency is an IR strobe light, or maybe a message delivered via runner.

But those methods don’t work when any “emission” on the battlefield can be sniffed out by peer adversaries with high-tech electronic warfare equipment of their own.

“Emissions equals target. Emissions put a bullseye on wherever you are, or wherever that emission is detected,” McFarlane said.

“The new paradigm,” he added, involves fragmenting and intelligently wrapping data across “across polymorphic C2 mesh to eradicate single points of failure.”

That’s general officer and industry speak for command and control that is far more robust and diversified. New methods include decentralized tactical radios, using commercial infrastructure to mask network traffic, tapping into Low-Earth Orbit (LEO) constellations like Starlink, and leveraging low-power mobile ad-hoc networks and mesh networks.

“Traditional C2 nodes follow a linear sequential PACE plan. Polymorphic C2 mesh is hyper-diversified, decentralized, and dynamically changing,” McFarlane said. “Polymorphic C2 mesh autonomously fragments, encrypts and routes data across multiple different physical mediums simultaneously.”

The new method keeps command and control posts connected without fixed infrastructure, McFarlane said.

“In terms of ground bounce,” he added, “we’re diversifying our data and transit paths, ensuring we’re not overly reliant on any single physical or geographic chokehold.”