Prologue: The Division Arrives Light
MoD Bunker, Warsaw
Day -6
1300L
Commanders from across NATO had already been gathered in Warsaw for the Future Land Forces Conference when the intelligence arrived: Russian formations in Belarus had begun shifting west, beyond their exercise corridors. The alert had not caught them off guard; it triggered a process long rehearsed. United States Army Europe and Africa (USAREUR-AF), working in close coordination with Joint Force Command Brunssum, had moved immediately to synchronize force posture and logistics while the Polish Ministry of Defense had identified a secure bunker beneath the city for military leaders to finalize war plans execution. Leaders across the alliance now turned quietly toward their purpose: to defend every inch of allied territory.
The bunker felt closed and airless, the sound of filtration steady under the briefers’ voices. A map of northeastern Europe filled the wall display, the Suwałki corridor marked in red and blue. Major General Jonathan Keller, commander of the 4th Infantry Division, stood with a notebook at his side as Joint Force Command Brunssum set the priority of effort for NATO’s Regional Plan Center.
United States Army Europe and Africa, as the Multinational Corps Land Component Command, tasked V Corps to hold a theater reserve for a counterattack and directed 4th Infantry Division to secure the corridor. The order carried no surprise. The corridor was the seam, and seams had to hold.
4th Infantry Division was not at full strength. Rotations had not aligned. One brigade was still in reception near Poznań, while another remained with V Corps along the Vistula River. The division would deploy as a composite force drawn from what was already forward: 2-66 Armor, 3-61 Cavalry, 4-42 Field Artillery, and sustainers from 64th Brigade Support Battalion, reinforced by Polish, British, and Lithuanian liaison teams.
Those three combat battalions had been reactivated to serve as NATO battle groups under division control, each configured as a battalion-plus formation with armor, infantry, and enablers to support NATO’s war plans. They were lean, connected to allied partners, and prepared to expand to brigade size at the time of need.
The design came from USAREUR-AF and V Corps. The heavier forces stayed pooled for the reserve. 4th Infantry Division would enter light by intent, tasked to fight with what the theater could spare and to test how well a headquarters could synchronize coalition partners under pressure.
Keller studied the map. There was little depth to trade, only time to gain. He underlined two words in his notes—“hold fast”—then folded a page and slid it beneath his watchband.
Around him, officers gathered their cables and tablets. The map dimmed to a standby glow, leaving the bunker gray and silent. Above, Warsaw moved in its evening rhythm, lights changing over traffic and shopfronts. Keller stepped into the stairwell and felt the air grow colder as he climbed.
Six days to move. A light division built for a heavy task. The decision was made.
Chapter 1: Notification and Preparation
Camp Boles, Bolesławiec
Day -4
1815L.
“The line we drew, the war we inherited.”
Keller stood in his operations center in Camp Boles while his staff briefed the plan for the division’s role in the Eastern Flank Deterrence Line (EFDL).Red threads from Kaliningrad wrapped Vilnius, Riga, and the Suwałki corridor; blue US battalions and green Baltic, Polish, German, and British formations interlocked along NATO’s eastern flank; translucent arrows showed reinforcement routes. Keller scribbled a note on a torn map margin—“make it real.” He folded it twice, and when the Polish liaison said “4th Infantry Division is the tempo setter, and if this breaks open you are the decisive point,” he circled the seams where coalition command and control would shear first.
He marked the finish on the corridor’s ridge. He framed the supporting efforts: counterbattery massed as the deep shaping effort, interdiction against crossings, deception signatures to draw sensors, and counterreconnaissance forward of the close area. He told sustainers to treat the support and consolidation areas as contested ground: dispersion, local security, displacement drills, short-range air defense, and C-UAS (counter-uncrewed aircraft systems) over every logistics node.
For the air picture he assumed the system would bend. The staff prebuilt lanes and time windows any headquarters could use if the polished plan cracked: airspace boxes for unmanned aircraft, short windows for time on target, and a conservative air order that could collapse to timed blocks when the sky turned noisy.
Two days later a secure burst from USAREUR-AF put the division in a heightened posture with four days to move and tightened emissions control. Keller’s critical information requirements fit on a card under his watchband.
* * *
Suwałki Ridge, South Approaches
Day -2
0930L
Air planners filed simple boxes over the ridge, an emergency high‑density zone for close air support if needed, and two deep corridors (North Ladder and Fox Line) for larger unmanned systems to range forward for targets and radar cues. Small drones stayed in local, low-altitude bands behind friendly lines. If jamming came, traffic would internally auto-sort based on time and altitude; updates to the air plan would ride on the half hour.
Captain Felix Márquez led the forward command-and-control team into Vilnius with a mix of old and new gear. Some sets rode the division’s mobile mesh network; others kept classic voice and satellite links alive. End‑user devices ran a common situational awareness app familiar to squads and scouts. The near‑term job was easy to say and hard to do: Link into Lithuania’s digital fires network without choking intelligence feeds, tie Polish logistics nodes into NATO reporting, and publish a communications plan with real fallbacks so one dead app didn’t take the whole picture down.
Orders from USAREUR-AF were straightforward: 4ID assumes Multinational Deterrent Sector 2, synchronizes with Poland’s 18th Mechanized Division and the British 3rd Division (UK 3 Div), ties to 1st German-Netherlands Corps, and anchors defense across Suwałki. Russian commercial-look satellites kept time like metronomes; swarms rehearsed from Kaliningrad; and offensive cyberspace operations probed US and NATO networks looking for weaknesses to exploit.
Márquez kept a laminated card in his left shoulder pocket and touched it when the room went loud. Two paths make one, one path makes none. He did not fear the enemy as much as the single point of failure that lives in peacetime networks.
Keller gave his orders: Isolate the approach corridors with countermobility and fires; dislocate armor with the Hill 47 attack and rapid repositioning; disintegrate enemy command and control by cutting spectrum and forcing procedural control; destroy units that remain in the registered kill areas. He told his division they “must move like a division, think like a joint headquarters, speak like a coalition node, and survive like a platoon in contact.”
Lieutenant Colonel Linda Martin, the division signal officer, sat with a Lithuanian cyber officer over spectrum plots and interface matrices. Lithuanian quadcopters rode C-band with LoRa wireless communication fallbacks; Polish Warmate loitering munition teams commanded through Poland’s TOPAZ fire control system; British command posts still pushed voice and data on the Bowman tactical communications system with Link-16 tactical data link gateways at division; US battalions were running an Integrated Tactical Network with tablets at the edge.
When Márquez called from a Polish tent that TOPAZ would not handshake with US Advanced Field Artillery Tactical Data System (AFATDS) unless they eased the Cross-Domain Solution (CDS) policy and normalized grids, Martin said they either trust and log the risk or shoot nothing. With two Polish and two US sergeants, they brought the Artillery Systems Cooperation Activities (ASCA) bridge up, patched the CDS rule to pass vetted fires metadata only, and hard-forced eight-digit grid precision regardless of sender.
At division fires, a beta Artillery Execution Suite (AXS) node ran beside AFATDS. AXS built targets fast and clean and pushed them across ASCA, while AFATDS remained the certified channel to the launchers. If AXS hiccuped, the team fell back to AFATDS; if AFATDS lagged, AXS prepared the thread and passed the data in one cut.
The plan assumed a shared NATO logistics map, a single picture fed by the alliance’s Mission Partner Environment and its logistics tool, LOGFAS. The ground said otherwise. Estonia did not feed a live system; a staff officer emailed a daily spreadsheet that served as the logistics report. Germany tracked trucks and pallets inside its national system, and its data would not line up with the US Army’s own tracker. Movement control posted the same convoy in two different deployment databases and the entries rarely landed in the same hour.
The systems were named differently in every headquarters, but the effect was the same: Clocks drifted, fields did not match, and no one source could be trusted on its own. Fuel and ammunition moved while the picture lagged by hours. Escorts waited for convoys that existed twice on a screen and once on a road. Medical resupply missed a window because one feed showed the route green and another showed it blocked. Planners added buffers and reconciled by hand before a truck rolled.
USAREUR-AF asked for forecasts with decimals; Keller’s support brigade sent fuel by jerry can, rounds by crate, and casualties by blood bag. When a depot near Druskininkai was burned by a Russian reconnaissance quadcopter, they ghosted it, spun a heat-signature decoy with diesel drums and dead servers, and rerouted on paper because, as a Lithuanian captain said while tucking Keller’s handwritten intent under his plate, “When the network falters, paper travels farther than packets.”
Airspace for evacuation stayed simple: The medical lane was published every hour; if radios died, flares opened the sky and gunners held fire on a single code word.
That one rule kept a Role 2 medical facility alive. A blood resupply convoy slid through the hour and a surgeon who had been awake for twenty-three hours kept a Lithuanian crew chief on the table long enough for the bird to lift. Nobody wrote that into the plan. They kept the lane amber and it mattered.
A midnight ambush cut a UK–Lithuanian convoy and drew a hive of first‑person‑view (FPV) drones. The joint fires net blinked and then went dark. Keller woke fires, signals, and the land component. “Synchronize under doubt,” he wrote. “It’s safer than waiting for perfect.” He pushed intent on paper: Keep moving; act on commander’s intent; if cut off, defer to the adjacent unit; execute sector tasks through the next twelve hours of darkness. He penciled air rules in the margin: Big drones stay on the corridors even if the common picture dies; small drones at company and battalion levels roam under local control to blunt the assault; the evacuation lane is amber; ground‑based air defense fights with optics unless the air picture is clean. The runner grinned without humor. The sky already sounded wrong.
Chapter 2: Deployment and Contact
Suwałki Corridor, Central Sector
Day 3
0312L
“Friction has a pulse. And it speaks Russian.”
West of Hill 47, the day opened over a torn tree line. Russia’s 20th Combined Arms Army drove with drone-directed artillery, armor under canopy, and layered swarms. Poland’s 18th Mechanized Division and UK 3 Div held the flanks; Keller’s center took the weight. The division pushed deep effects: counterbattery against rocket footprints; interdiction at bridgeheads; deception heat blooms over empty lots; corridors for larger drones tightened to keep flight paths predictable for air defense and fires; small drones kept free inside local altitude slices where companies could steer them without a master map. For twelve hours, higher saw blur. On the ground, tasks stayed small and exact.
At 0312, the network blinked and lied. A forged login whispered reset to friendly radios, screens went blank, ASCA queues stalled, enemy armor appeared where they were not, and blue icons vanished where people bled. Martin told her team the spectrum is ground and said they would fight for it like a bridge.
Fallbacks took over. The plan was simple to remember under stress. First, the handheld mesh that let squads talk. If that died, short satellite bursts that could sneak through the noise. If that failed, old voice nets that hopped across frequencies. If even that failed, long-range HF and runners with folded cards. Everyone knew the sequence and nobody waited for perfection.
At division, the big machines still mattered. The common operational picture that higher headquarters used to synchronize fires and airspace limped along in guarded rooms that passed only what was essential. At the edge, brigades and companies did what worked without a clean map. An air sentry, a cheap quadcopter hovering at treetop over the point man, watched for the shimmer that gives FPV teams away when hot exhaust and moving glass disturb the foreground. Mobile counterdrone crews circled casualty sites and gun lines with a rhythm they could keep in their heads—jam, pause, kill.
Air rules went to paper. Close air support slid west behind an emergency box. The two named corridors for the larger drones, Fox Line and North Ladder, were kept alive with printed bird tables, simple altitude and time gates pinned to maps so units could fly without a digital plot. Ground air defense switched to optics unless the picture was clean by voice. A short fragment went out on the net so nobody guessed. No drones over food and water convoys. No close air support in sector. The medical lane is amber.
At company level, the drone fight stayed plain. FPV teams launched from culverts and hedges. Some carried formed charges for engine decks. Some flew empty to burn down enemy jammers. Pocket repeaters the size of a palm lifted the swarm over dead ground. When the interference dipped, small fixed-wing drones ferried printed cards that told who was where and what needed to be hit. It was not pretty, and it was not silent, yet it kept the line from coming apart.
Keller displaced the command post three times in six hours. A loitering munition took out the deputy operations officer; the fires planner lost a leg; and the signals intelligence chief arrived bandaged. With four of ten senior staff down and a third of battalion commanders off net, Keller’s FRAGO (fragmentary order) went paper and voice: decentralized execution; fires on positive identification; protect the line and civilians; kill what you can see. A one-line report rode any live path to Wiesbaden: sector under full assault; signal denied; decentralized fires; buying time, not terrain.
Airspace fell to simple rules: five‑minute clear‑sky windows for evacuation; then altitude slices; larger drones on corridors for sensing and strike, small drones free under company bands with local checks to prevent friendly fire. It was risky but better than grounded assets. Casualties spiked; the medical facility overflowed; the evacuation box stayed open on flares and code words.
UK 3 Div tried to pass a strike through the common-launcher pilot. The message died on a grid mismatch between British and American fire control systems. A Polish fire support officer, flank compressing, fired locally; the round fell short into a US cavalry screen. Keller cut off blame: Fix doctrine later, figure out how to survive now.
Under the canopy east of Hill 47, the fires cell ran the AXS and AFATDS side by side. AXS threaded the mission fast, cleaned the metadata, and passed it over ASCA; AFATDS verified, certified, and sent the launch message. When the net lied again, AFATDS held the floor while AXS cached targets and routes for the next window.
Martin pushed Márquez forward with a rugged tablet, two radios, three batteries, and laminated fire cards. Márquez forced grid normalization, translated Polish TOPAZ to AFATDS over ASCA, and used a Norwegian Teledyne FLIR Black Hornet nano-UAS checksum with one blink meaning good. The chain shrank to three humans and a drone, and rounds started hitting their targets.
Air control stayed procedural: A single named box reopened for timed stacks; drones flowed one‑way on Fox Line; air defenses got printed bird tables. If it wasn’t on the card, you didn’t fly or fire.
Martin collapsed remaining satellite traffic to one masked node in a farm tower near Alytus dressed like a civilian cell phone tower. Fires moved as short, staggered bursts. Every byte a bullet; every burst bought relative advantage. A Polish HIMARS (high-mobility artillery rocket system) volley launched off a US tablet with a Polish overlay and a Norwegian confirm; an enemy column folded on the approach. A guided bomb killed the tower the next day. It had purchased sixteen hours. Sixteen hours changed the battlefield geometry.
With the common operational picture gone, Keller pinned a paper map to a folding table and wrote eight‑digit grids in pencil, question marks on assumptions, and Xs on targets. “This is a thinking fight,” he said. “We’ll think faster.” He pushed 2‑66 Armor to retake Hill 47 overlooking the approach and delegated fire approval to platoon leaders with one guardrail: positive identification. Deconfliction became time slices and altitude gates. UAS relayed and struck—larger ones stayed on the corridors, smaller ones served as local couriers and knives when the target was clean. Close air support came when weather or windows allowed, not on demand.
A MEDEVAC (medical evacuation) bird lost a rotor to fragmentation and taxied across stubble while FPVs hunted heat. A British section hauled a Lithuanian crew from a burning track into a Polish ambulance without a shared word. A US mortar line pushed illumination into a low ceiling that returned light like a rebuke. The Role 2 medical facility shifted triage twice in an hour; urgent surgical bled into priority and back. Keller slid a creased intent to a lieutenant whose hands shook. Paper steadied them both.
Keller read every name on the casualty list. Names are not numbers. Every name is a decision he still owed them.
By evening on day 4, the enemy salient was deep but thin. Martin pointed to a gap in the jamming. There it is—a window. Lithuanian decoys lit the west to pull enemy eyes; British guns stacked time‑on‑target on Polish grids Márquez had validated; a French recon troop pushed a live correction through a coalition suite into the mission‑partner feed; U.S. FPV strike cells flew engine deck to engine deck while sacrificial drones climbed to soak jammer cycles. In that shaped ten‑minute quiet, 2‑66 Armor took Hill 47 and registered the road beneath it. A three‑dimensional fires box snapped on for ten minutes; aircraft slid in dry while artillery owned the stack; the corridor narrowed to two‑ship chains; one in, one out.
The counterattack formed as parts that found one another. Polish tanks from the south; British artillery stacked time on target across the center; a French quick reaction force cut the seam; Lithuanian scouts marked egress; US cavalry screened the far slope and killed the first three counterpushes. The common launcher behaved after the ASCA fix and CDS patch; it didn’t look like the PowerPoint slide he saw at the Polish MoD, just professionals solving the same problem with different approaches. The sky’s noise thinned. A lane opened. Martin shoved a fires burst through it. For the first time in forty-eight hours, more blue call signs checked in than MEDEVAC nine-lines.
Day 5 began in hard rain; enemy swarms flew lower to keep link. The division used the weather to its advantage. FPV strike cells hunted under cloud; counterswarm teams used directional emitters and shotguns to quiet city blocks of air; the mesh ladder climbed tree lines one hop at a time. Keller sent a quadcopter with a printed SITREP (situation report) to 1st German-Netherlands Corps headquarters: still fighting; southern ridge held; immediate reinforcement required. Eleven hours later, French and Polish quick reactions surged the seam. The salient kinked, then broke. Armor tried to exfil on roads British guns had preregistered; a Norwegian drone walked the last adjustments. Trucks moved; field hospitals breathed; the sky sounded like wind again. Air control shifted back to positive steps; evacuation widened; and managed corridors reopened for larger drones while small ones stayed under local bands to keep air defenses safe.
In a barn missing a wall, Keller wrote that what remained of the division was decisions, not systems. The division had kept the fight when it tried to slide away; it was enough. He unfolded the first scrap that said “make it real” and added transitions on a new card: defense → counterattack without pause; digital → paper without losing the ground picture; dispersed → massed effects → dispersed again before retaliation. He folded both under his watchband.
Review teams found not a flawless overlay but adaptation. Fires coordinated by intent. Sustainment moved by runners and memory when the Mission Partner Environment wasn’t accessible. Decentralized decisions at platoon and company levels matched the commander’s intent. Drones served as intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance, relays, decoys, and strikes. Counterspoofing restored trust to the air picture. Adjustments captured three truths: command through collapse; signal is terrain; trust over network traffic.
Next-generation command and control was refit to fail gracefully: radios autoshifted based on enemy activity in the electromagnetic spectrum; coalition CDS policies were written for operators under fire; a common data model was enforced at the edge to kill grid errors. Martin’s notes became habits: Build for fragility; fight for spectrum; teach redundancy as muscle memory; make intent the currency; and remember that when the network fails, paper goes where packets cannot.
Chapter 3: Adaptation and Lessons
Kaunas Rail Yard
Day 6
1100L
“We didn’t win with better tools. We won with better decisions.”
Units reassembled in pieces. The sustainment brigade returned as trucks, fragments, and operators who could identify jammer types by ear. In Kaunas, Keller told the staff the war gave no time to be right, only time to act. A Lithuanian runner held up the creased intent page that had crossed three pockets and a boot.
In Wiesbaden, asked whether he had authorized a French drone team to mark targets without the joint fires net, Keller said the net was gone, a Polish battalion was about to be flanked, and the only eyes he trusted in that minute were over the field. He would do it again if winning remained the task. People who had been in mud and noise let out a breath that meant recognition more than agreement.
Windows appeared when routines were stressed: A nine-minute jamming lull became a four-minute mesh build; a twenty-minute deception heat bloom created a twelve-minute fires window; a drying road gave sustainment an hour on paper while feeds caught up. Radios shifted modes without heroics; a common data model let a British grid ride a Polish tablet into a US mission; an attritable fixed-wing courier carried a printed card because nobody trusted a single perfect picture.
The runner had not learned English beyond maps and numbers. He did not need more. He felt the paper warm in his fist as he ran the ditch west of the rail yard and thought that paper communicates when radios cannot.
Interoperability had been the rehearsal word; interdependence described contact. British guns adjusted to Polish targets on US eyes. A Norwegian drone dropped a packet on a Lithuanian hood. French and Polish quick reactions moved on a US division’s paper SITREP because when the network ends, intent doesn’t. Regional plans absorbed phrases that sound like lived experience: intent-defined synchronization, trust-based delegation, counterreconnaissance by swarm, deception by heat, communications by air sentry.
Martin wrote out five lessons learned to command and control on the modern battlefield. Connectivity is battlespace and must be fought like ground. Mission command is the default, not the exception. Redundancy is survival—two paths make one; one path makes none. Bandwidth is not assurance—shared intent is. Build systems that function when broken and train people who function alone. Two implementation notes stuck: Publish coalition CDS policies operators can use under fire and enforce a common standard sector-wide to kill silent grid errors.
The formal end state read clean: The 20th Combined Arms Army broke contact west of the ridge; the corridor reopened; Lithuanian units rejoined; French and Polish quick reactions consolidated gains; British guns raked exits. On the ground it looked like unescorted trucks, quieter triage tents, and a morning when the sky’s sound finally thinned. The line held. The corridor stayed open. The allies won. Keller set the first folded scrap beside the last, smoothed both with his palm, and slid them under his watchband.
Author’s note: Sample products from the story can be found by clicking on the following links.
Fragmentary Order (FRAGO) 02 to Operations Order (OPORD) 25-06 (Multinational Deterrent Sector 2)
PACE Communications Card (MDS2)
Coalition Fires Quick-Reference (AXS/ASCA/CDS)
Lieutenant Colonel James J. Torrence, US Army, is the commander of the 39th Strategic Signal Battalion in Chièvres, Belgium. He holds an MS in strategic design and management, an MS in cybersecurity, a master of military art and science, and a doctorate in strategic security. Torrence is a LTG (Ret) James M. Dubik Writing Fellow. He has deployed twice to Afghanistan as a battalion communications officer and has served in various military leadership positions in the United States, Germany, Belgium, Korea, and Israel.
The views expressed are those of the author and do not reflect the official position of the United States Military Academy, Department of the Army, or Department of Defense.
Image credit: Sgt. Collin Mackall, US Army