Microsoft Teams is a highly effective command and control system that empowers leaders at echelon to create a collaborative and inclusive environment to share information rapidly, increase understanding, and enable decision making. The Army must maintain this capability to effectively operate in a COVID environment in the 21^st Century and Field Grade leaders must embrace technology that helps us propagate data, information, and knowledge across our formations quickly to enable Mission Command and maintain a competitive edge over our adversaries.

In March 2020, the world and the United States found themselves unprepared as they became entrenched in the COVID-19 pandemic that moved from Asia across the globe in four months. The Army found that many of its systems and processes were unsuitable for the rapid and drastic changes it was forced to implement to protect the force and mitigate the potential for a speedy decline in readiness. Protecting the force became the mission and number one priority.

Society has entered an Information age. Everyone has access to massive amounts of information through the World Wide Web, high powered computers, tablets, smartphones, and cloud technology; and currently, artificial intelligence and machine learning technologies are redefining how and even what decisions are made. Now, more than ever, field grade leaders must embrace technology that helps propagate data, information, and knowledge across our formations quickly to flatten communication, gain efficiency and speed, enable mission command, and for a competitive advantage.

Commanders and staff’s ability to quickly aggregate, analyze, decipher, and disseminate information into missions orders at echelon underpins mission command. Most notably, building cohesive teams through trust, creating a shared understanding, and exercising disciplined initiative (see Figure 1).[1] In fact, this is so important that Army doctrine refers to and encourages units to use parallel planning as much as possible.[2] However, e-mail remains the most prolific digital system across the Army. We all have confidence in our e-mail, but we also learned behaviors that hinder collaboration and inclusiveness. More often than not, e-mails are addressed to a limited audience, and information remains on our hard drives because portals and shared drives have become too cumbersome. While understandable and unintentional, leaders at echelon need to get serious about changing this behavior. Microsoft Teams is a platform that can help leaders reverse these trends and facilitate improved vertical and horizontal collaboration.

Individually, people must get comfortable sharing data and making it accessible and open to outside analysis and perspectives. Furthermore, we have to be comfortable bringing these conversations into more public forums; diverse thinking will increase the breadth and depth of understanding. Data and information accessibility is critical to be more objective and empowering commanders and staff’s to understand, decide, and act decisively. Microsoft Teams is an incredible tool to promote information accessibility and flatten communications.

ADP 6-0, Mission Command, Command and Control of Army Forces describes how the Army employs Command and Control to exercise authority and direction to accomplish a mission.[3] Mission Command, as a warfighting function, exercises command and control (C2) systems comprised of people, processes, networks, and command posts. These systems support commanders’ decision-making by collecting, creating, and maintaining relevant information to enable effective collaboration and communication with Soldiers.[4] Information age C2 systems are collaborative tools to facilitate processes that are effective, efficient, and enable relevant tempo to defeat an adversary. MS Teams is an innovative C2 system DoD fielded to increase distributed mission command under COVID conditions. It is a simple and highly effective capability the U.S. Army must retain and field grader leaders must employ to maintain a competitive edge over our adversaries.

Microsoft Team features include direct messaging, group chats, video teleconference, and file sharing in an intuitive user-interface that is secure, at the unclassified level, and can be used on government-issued systems and personal devices. This powerful change in Army operations has promoted unsurpassed distributed collaboration, inclusiveness, and increased efficiency. At the tactical level, formations have used these features to execute Team Leader Academies, Gunnery Skills Test Training, Mortar Gunnery Skills Training, Leader Development Programs, and full staff MDMP under COVID conditions. Units continued on their pre-COVID training schedule simply by downloading one collaborative app onto each Soldiers’ device.

As units returned to operations under COVID conditions, Soldiers began taking hands-on and written examinations and demonstrated increased scores and individual skill proficiency. An indicator that this generation of Soldiers is comfortable and achieves results sharing and collaborating virtually. The result is an increase in individual and unit lethality and safety for future training.

Staffs became more efficient at MDMP as they had to communicate in both the oral and written form clearly and concisely to overcome not being in the same room. Unit staffs, empowered by MS Teams, easily brought subordinate commanders into planning sessions resulting in synchronized plans.

The layout of MS Teams supported effective knowledge management to increase collaboration, understanding, and decision making. Dissemination of information across a wide audience in a rapid manner ensured consumers received timely information to support operations. For example, one battalion executive officer built a “Maintenance Net” on MS Teams where the ESR, 5988 trackers, services tracker, BN maintenance meeting slides, and BN LOGSYNC slides were updated daily. Company XOs could update products and brief the BN XO during daily sync meetings from their personal device, even when in the field executing gunnery. No longer were company XOs reliant on Ethernet cables or physically driving to and from meetings while their unit was in the field. The BN XO could review the information and drive actions to support a unit in the field in near real-time. Information age leaders are driving powerful cultural changes right now to create formations better manned, trained, and equipped.

MS Teams demonstrates the direction the Army must go to execute operations in the information age as well as in a COVID environment. It is through applications like MS Team, information age leaders at echelon can create a collaborative and inclusive command and control system to enable operations. Field Grade leaders must embrace technology to propagate data, information, and knowledge at relevant speeds across our formations to flatten our communications, enable Mission Command, and maintain our competitive edge over our adversaries.

MAJ Kyle Trottier is the Executive Officer for 1st ABCT 3ID. An Armor Officer he has served in Armor and Infantry Brigade Combat Teams with operational experience in Iraq and Afghanistan. He served as the Battalion Executive Officer for 2-7IN, 1/3ABCT, and the Chief of Future Operations for 3ID.

MAJ William Sitze is the Aide-de-Camp to the Deputy Commanding General, U.S. Army Forces Command. He is an Infantry Officer that has served in Airborne, Infantry, Stryker, and Armored Brigade combat teams with operational experience in Iraq and Afghanistan. He recently served as the Battalion S3 and then Executive Officer for 2-501 PIR, 1/82 IBCT (ABN).

[1] U.S. Army. Mission Command, Command and Control of Army Forces. Department of the Army. ADP 6-0. Washington D.C.: Government Printing Office. 2019. 1-6.

[2] U.S. Army. Commander and Staff Organization and Operations, FM 6-0. Washington D.C.: Government Printing Office.  9-2.

[3] Mission Command. 1-3

[4] Mission Command, 4-1.