 Good morning, and welcome to another presentation at Warrior's Corner, the topic, NATO Convergence and Interoperability in Modernization, presenters Major General Stephen Moranian and Brigadier General John Byram. Okay, well good morning everybody. I am Steve Moranian. I am the commanding general of the 56th Artillery Command stationed in Wiesbaden, Germany. With me today is the Army's newest Brigadier General, John Byram, got promoted yesterday. Let's give him a round of applause. John commands the second multi-domain task force, also stationed in Wiesbaden, Germany, and together our organizations are going to spend the next 30 minutes with you, introducing our commands, talking about where we are in our modernization efforts and our growth to operational capability. We'll then talk a little bit about our interoperability efforts as we modernize in conjunction with our allies and partners in theater, which is a really exciting topic, and I'm thrilled to see so many of our allies sitting in the audience here today. It's going to be a great conversation. So before we get into the meat of it, I'm going to spend just a couple of minutes, if we could go to the second slide please, introducing our formation, and I'll let John do the same for his. So the 56th Artillery Command takes its lineage from the 56th Field Artillery that goes all the way back to World War II, actually, but most notably, it was the Army's only general officer command for a field artillery organization back in the 80s up until 1991, when it performed the mission of being the command and control for the Pershing II missile until the INF Treaty made that obsolete, and it went into an inactive status. The 56th was reborn last October, and it became the Army's first theater fires command, and I will tell you there is no real difficult concept behind what we do at the theater level. We do the same thing for my boss that a division artillery would do for a division commander. We basically serve as the force field artillery headquarters for the senior land component command in theater. We'll talk a little bit more about that in a moment, but that is the gist of it. John's command is a little bit more complex. It's dealing with some more cutting edge new domain activity, and I'm looking forward to talking about that. So let's go to the next one. Just two minutes on what our command has been asked to do. We're a headquarters that comprises a headquarters battery and the second multi-domain task force. So basically John's organization provides us with the meat behind our ability to synchronize and coordinate fires and effects in theater. He'll talk through what they have in their formation on the next slide, but for what I've been asked to do by my commander, it deals with four major categories, and I know there are seven items there, but they've been into four very neat buckets. The first is targeting. It's to grow the targeting enterprise, grow our ability to be effective in seeing things and communicating those back to those who would shoot them. The second deals with doing our doctrinal role of being the senior field artillery headquarters in theater. All of the things that you would think of that a force field artillery headquarters would do from positioning theater level assets to ammunition resupply to weighting the main effort by task organizing for the artillery forces in theater, all of those doctrinal things that we grew up with as artillerists back in the day are part of our portfolio. The third deals with integrating new capabilities, both formations and equipment into the theater and being able to employ them as they come to us as additional capabilities. And the final one, which is where I'm going to bridge and pass it to my partner here, is talking about multinational interoperability. My biggest challenge that I have as I look at our assignment and as our organization grows is how do we grow our interoperability in a positive direction and take advantage of all of the initiative that nations of the NATO Alliance and our future allies in the high north are are growing. If we look at what our capabilities are now and where we will be five, ten years from now, we ought to have a path that goes forward. And I'm spending a lot of time on the road visiting our allies, visiting our future allies and talking with them about what the state of their current organization for fires formations is and where do they aspire to go? Because knowing that will be the key to being able to integrate and create a fires architecture as technology enables us to be able to communicate so that as we fight as an alliance, we have the ability to get the best shooter shooting to any target that's identified from any sensor. So with that, I'm going to pass it to John and look forward to your questions here in a little bit. Good morning, everybody. My name is John Byram. I'm the multi-domain task force commander over in Europe. And if I had a dollar for every time that somebody asks me what the heck is a multi-domain task force and what they do, I would be a very rich man. So that's what I'm going to take this initial time is to explain to you what is in the framework of a multi-domain task force. And then what do I think are the core functions that these multi-domain task forces can actually do with that task organization that we have? So number one, the multi-domain task force has an overall headquarters. And you can see that at the top there in the task organization graphic. That headquarters is very similar to a brigade headquarters, but of note it has a very robust fire section within that. So you're able to either have internal fires capabilities that you can plan and synchronize fires. And when I talk the fires for that, I'm talking the lethal fires, the kinetic fires. And then you have the ability to synchronize that as well. But what I would argue is the bread and butter of the multi-domain task force is the multi-domain effects battalion, that M-DEB they're calling it. What that has that is very unique is internal to it, it has an MI company, a military intelligence company, that I have it focused primarily on the targeting aspect of intelligence. And I'll explain in a second what that feeds into. You also have cyber capability within that in a cyber company that has defensive cyber capability and also analysis and targeting experts within that formation as well. And then you have another intelligence company that allows you to conduct intelligence in the space domain. And then lastly there's a signal company within that that has expeditionary signal capabilities, very agile, very small that allow you to move forward and communicate both network, SACCOM, all the various aspects. So the question for this then becomes, what do you do with this? And before, let me take a step back. The other battalions in the full build for a multi-domain task force are the long range precision fires battalion. And then there is an air defense battalion and a support battalion as well in that. So what can this formation actually do? And this goes down to the means that you see there. Number one, I would argue that it allows you to do multi-domain reconnaissance within this formation and especially within that multi-domain effects battalion. You have the internal capability to be able to do the reconnaissance that you need to do and tie into that military intelligence company and do the intel fusion to be able to answer those reconnaissance objectives in these various domains. That is very powerful. Number two is the multi-domain targeting. And this is where the relationship with the 56 fires command is very complementary with these organizations where we can tie directly into the joint and combined targeting processes that are out there. And for those who don't know, it is it's very complicated targeting in some of these domains, whether they're cyber space, there's there's there's numerous authorities and various aspects to that that you have to maneuver through. And this organization is designed to be able to do that. And it's especially effective with the 56 fires command with me serving under them because they have that expertise at the senior levels in that organization. And then lastly, the third is the multi-domain synchronization. And in these multi-domain task forces, we're building what are called all domain operation centers. So basically picture what you would think of with an operation center, but being at the right classification level to be able to synchronize across all of these domains, many of them, which are very classified depending on whatever country that you're from. So that is what I would call the core functions of this. Something that I've been very involved in is this interoperability with our partners and allies. And what I've been studying and meeting with numbers of folks in those in the various nations over in Europe is understanding what their capabilities are, what are they interested in doing in multi-domain operations, and then how can we interoperate. And I'll tell you that that is not an easy task, but I think it's absolutely pivotal for the future as we look forward and try to understand how can we gain exponential results in this multi-domain fight that we're going into, whether we want to or not. Of note, what I have found is as a general rule, not everybody wants to create what we have, this multi-domain task force. Each nation is approaching this problem set as they see best based on their interests that they're developing. But what is powerful is each of them are making investments in particular aspects of this. And if we all understand what we're doing, that is what I'm really working hard at is trying to understand where those capabilities are and how we can gain the exponential results as we move into the multi-domain fight in the future. So with that being said, I'll turn it back over to General Moranian. Okay, well, thank you. And I hope that that gives you a little bit of meat on the table to stimulate your thoughts. And we're looking forward to answering your questions about our formations and what we're doing currently in Europe and the trajectory of where we're headed. Yes, sir. Thank you, Sebastian Sprenger with Defense News. As you visit the partners in Europe, what state do you find their fires organizations to be in, given that maybe you could make the argument that weapons class sort of fell out of fashion for the Europeans for a while? And then what are some of the obstacles you're finding when it comes to coordinating fires? Is it mostly a technical issue or where do you start there? Thank you. Okay, thank you. So I think it varies. All nations to include the United States after the wall fell in the early 90s took a trajectory with regards to combat forces that was a result of the peace dividend. So several countries did decrease the amount of their artillery forces. And so I think what we're seeing from watching what's happening to our East is seeing that fires formations are very relevant in 2022 and in the future. And every nation that I've engaged has fires formations and they aspire to modernize and grow them just as the United States is as well. With regards to the challenges that we face, you know, we've had exercises, you know, one of the great testimonies of how well our exercise program has been designed over the years is it's rated us for where we are in time and space right now. So for us in Europe, the premier exercise that we run as an artillery formation is called dynamic front. We've done six or seven iterations of that over the last decade and they grow ever more complex and ambitious year in and year out. The last one we did was in July and we had 19 nations participating, had over 2,500 soldiers participating. We for the first time did a proof of principle where in addition to having a U.S. artillery brigade that's stationed at Graf and veered Germany, we put together a multinational fires brigade comprised of 11 different nations that came together as a headquarters under the Allied Rapid Reaction Corps as the command and control and they had multiple different nations that formed firing elements and were able to validate the concept that you could put together formations of smaller donations from countries that don't necessarily have a full battalion or a brigade to give to a formation but can still contribute to the alliance by operating together. So it's an exciting time and things like that as we go forward, as I engage with different allies and partners that what I'm finding is common threads of places where we can pull together capabilities as John mentioned and creating the exponential growth. So as we cluster potentially nations that are geographically close or have cultural commonalities or even weapon systems commonalities, I think that's the way ahead as we look to be able to optimize the artillery that does exist in the alliance as we modernize and make sure that everything is be able to be brought to bear in the fight. So thank you. Hi, Sidney Friedberg from Breaking Defense Generals. Thank you very much and congratulations. Seeking particularly to the MDTF, you mentioned the intelligence capacity is key. Obviously you're not launching your own geostationary satellites and so forth. So how do you plug, what's the combination of the connections to your organic ISR assets but also other army assets, U.S. joint assets and the multinational assets available in the alliance that you can draw on for that intelligence capability within the MDTF? Thanks, Sidney. Good to see you again. Sir, thanks for the question. Okay, so, and this may seem a little elementary and basic thinking, but how I approach that is we, in order to be successful in this multi-domain task force in doing one of the two tasks that the chief of staff of the army gave us, which is to synchronize long range precision effects across multiple domains, the intelligence aspect of that is pivotal. And what I have found is, and I've seen this honestly in all aspects of, in other organizations that I've been involved in, is federating among the intelligence community is absolutely pivotal. And so for us to do that, what I'm doing is investing in understanding all the various intelligence capabilities in all those areas you talked about, whether it be within the army, whether it be within the joint force, whether it be with our multinational partners, is building the framework to be able to maneuver through those various intelligence capabilities and to draw from that to go against our very specific problem set. And I think that's important to understand for the multi-domain task force, where we become effective is we're an entity that can focus very with precision against problem sets that are given to us. And therefore, I can draw from all those various entities that are out there to answer those specific problem sets that I have, and that just goes with good communication. I spend a lot of time on the road talking to various entities, especially in the intelligence communities to make sure they understand the problem sets that I'm interested in and can then help us out with that federation of intelligence. And Sidney, if I could add additionally, we do spend a lot of time working with our joint partners in theater as well. US Air Force is Europe and Africa is a full partner in our federation that John described. So we're looking at this from both an army standpoint but also from a joint and a combined standpoint as well. Sidney, could you say that again into the mic please for the live stream? Sure. How much of that is a people problem, a human dimension problem, in the words of the new doctrine, of getting to know who's who in joint and multinational intelligence? How much of that is a technical problem, a networking problem, of getting the data to flow from different intelligence systems, different databases, different standards, and get it into actionable form that you can pass along to the fires community in the really tight timelines people are envisioning from all the domain fights. John, can I take that? Sure, sir. So that's the big elephant in the room, Sidney. You know, how we're able to in the future be able to leverage the advancement in supercomputing and AI to be able to gather from all sources whether it be national technical means, whether it be an observer on the hill with binoculars and everything in between, from not just the United States, not just the US Army, but our joint and allied partners as well. How do we take all of that data that's gathered, wash it through AI enabled decision making tools that allow commanders to be able to visualize the battlefield in real time and make decisions or affect the decisions that have already been made by passing in real time through a cross-domain solution to the best shooter whether they be an allied high Mars battery or an Air Force squadron or whether they be the organic assets within the multi-domain task force? I think the answer is yes, it's both. There is a human side of things because we're going to have to grow to get comfortable with the direction that we're going to go in the future with AI enabled decision making tools, but it's also a technical challenge that will continue to grow and evolve and things are just going to get faster as we go. So thank you for that. Sir, it's Lieutenant Colonel Skrzyk I'm the Polish army liaison to HQDA. I wanted to ask because we are talking about very sophisticated capabilities here and these are very welcome and some of them are connected directly to forward posturing. And what kind of challenges and what are your expectations? What kind of challenges do you see when dealing with partners at the frontiers of NATO within this forward posturing realm, especially when those allies and partners are not part of the Five Eyes and this is the more challenging. Let me start and then John, please feel free to jump in. So that's an excellent question. And I think in an alliance of 30, we have of course 30 and soon to be 32 national policies on how we share information, what's available, what's not. And so I try to think of it as positive and not a negative. There's an opportunity to get better at sharing information. I think the mission partnered environment initiative that is ongoing in Europe to be able to bring folks into a network that allows us to share information is the key. I think partitioning that to allow each nation to be able to share what they feel comfortable sharing is going to be the way forward. So bringing everyone into a mission partnered environment that can be tailored and managed based on national caveats and national beliefs is the key to how we get around that. I think it's an opportunity as opposed to a challenge. John, if you'd like to jump in. The one thing I would add to that then Sir, just to continue that conversation is the exercises that we're doing with the various nations, allies and partners are absolutely pivotal to working through what you're talking about. We can sit here and think through this all day but until we actually work together in very realistic exercises, whether those, you know, be command post exercises and force ourselves to have to be able to work on that communication, that interoperability. What I've seen is we're able to make significant gains in the areas that you're talking about. When we work together very closely when we actually conduct these exercises and I see it improving dramatically. I've seen it with the various exercise campaigns that we've had and Sir, you might want to mention a few of those. So one of the things that I think is critical as we look at how to optimize the mission partner environment is to make sure that we're not building a structure for an exercise and then tearing it down after the exercise. What we need to do is ensure that we've got a realm NATO environment that is persistent, that exists at all times so that our day in and day out interactions can be conducted via that network. And then, you know, as classifications go up and down based on national policies, then we work through those. But I think if we look at the technology enabling us to be more inclusive as opposed to being more restrictive, it certainly is a trajectory that we want to go. Thank you. I think we have time for a couple more. General, thank you. My name's Mark Sevens. I'm a Colonel in the British Army and the Futures Directorate. Thanks so much for the talk. We're fully on board with the direction of travel. How much are you intending to drive NATO standards into your work? I think that's absolutely critical. The interoperability from a much more than the human interoperability which we practice all the time. The technical and procedural are so much easier when they're driven by stain-ags that we've agreed to. And so as we start breaking new ground into thinking through how we create effects in domains that have not been widely rehearsed and practiced in the past, I think we need to continue to evolve using our time-tested procedures of developing the stain-ags to allow us to understand what the baseline is for interoperability so that we can snap that chalk line and then adjust from there as we need to. Something that we're doing is approaching this problem set differently. We're wanting to start with the NATO structure and then build backwards, which I won't say we always have done well in the past, but I think it's going to be absolutely pivotal because depending on the situation, as various entities participate, if you have that structure built into it that can adapt to various NATO countries involving themselves in an operation or other aspect, it's pivotal to have that. I think it'll speed things up. It'll speed up how fast we can communicate, work together and interoperate. And I would add, in addition to our travels to visit bilaterally with our allies and partners, we've also spent a bit of time traveling to NATO headquarters as well. We're limited, obviously, by the amount of days that we can be out and about, but we have been to NATO Corps, we have been to the JFC, we have been to NATO headquarters at ACO and we continue to have conversations about how we become a combat multiplier for the alliance and not just for the U.S. Army or the U.S. Joint Force in Europe. Sir? Lieutenant Colonel Lakey retiring, the guy who drew this up on a whiteboard for General Brown back many years ago. I don't know if you've ever heard people say bad things about me, but my question is a little bit, how did we see this evolving? Because I've been out of it for a few years and how do you relate, I've got two parts, the other part is how do you think about the difference between a multi-demain task force in Europe and of course, we envisioned a lot of it in the Pacific, so I think that's another key theater and those are two things I just wanted to ask you. Thank you. First, and this is my viewpoint, I think we have it about right in terms of the framework, in terms of the task organization. So if you built that, what I'm seeing is between the first and the second who we communicate very closely with, it's very applicable as a whole to various problem sets, but make no mistake, the different theaters are, you approach them very differently from a multi-domain operational aspect. And some of it is extremely obvious, they're dealing with large oceans in the Pacific and the tyranny of distance in Europe, that is not the worry, they're working at trying to break in, understand the A2AD bubble and how they can penetrate that, whereas in Europe you're basically within that. So you approach the problem set very differently. I think the key difference in this is you're each gonna have different priorities from that combatant commander and the ASCC commander. What I've seen is the difference is those priorities are just different based on the theater on what you're gonna focus on and there's nothing wrong with that. I mean, from the high levels, they gave us full flexibility to approach this multi-domain problem set from to be able to tackle that and figure it out based on the theater. So I've had a lot of flexibility in doing that. I was not caught in having to do it like somebody else. Sir. Well listen, this has been an absolute pleasure. We look forward to continuing the dialogue with you as we walk around throughout the rest of the week here. We are unfortunately out of time, but thank you for your attention. Thank you for your thoughtful questions and have a great day.