From the Green Notebook

By COL Donald Neal, 83rd Commander, 2nd Cavalry Regiment

Just five more minutes of sleep.

In the tranquil pre-dawn hours of Saber Junction 25, I learned a commander’s lesson that no field manual could fully encapsulate. I awoke to the sounds of small arms fire, which I estimated to be within 1000 meters of the place where I had just managed to rest after a grueling 36 hours of preparing for our defensive operation. In that surreal moment, I closed my eyes again, hoping it was just a fleeting dream; however, instinct and responsibility prevailed. 

Hours earlier, I left knowing that we hadn’t completed our combined obstacle plan in the center of the Regimental sector. That sector was particularly vulnerable because two troops from different squadrons had to synchronize obstacles, fires, and direct-fire planning on terrain the enemy had fiercely contested in the previous fight. I assessed the enemy would mass there to break through and we reviewed the Exercise Support Matrix (ESM) and Decision Support Matrix (DSM) to ensure we had the right triggers for committing our counterattack force. Before I laid down to rest, I told the team to wake me if we neared that decision point—knowing it could be the most consequential call of the battle period.

Yet, moments after the gunfire, I found myself standing in the main operations center only to realize that the commitment of the counterattack force had occurred 30 minutes before my arrival. It was too late. Our lines had been penetrated, and the enemy was in our rear area. In the ensuing moments, I was filled with frustration and regret for not being present to make that pivotal call.

But this moment was a harsh realization that I couldn’t be present for every decision. Clearly, our ability to identify the indicators and conditions leading to those decisions wasn’t truly supportive of the decisions that needed to be made—and even a well-staffed DSM doesn’t replace a commander’s fighting instinct.

Waking up to find the enemy within our perimeter didn’t just highlight a tactical gap, it underscored a deeper truth that I want to share with every peer preparing for a combat training center rotation. Sometimes, no matter how straightforward the task, it takes a commander rolling up their sleeves and diving into the basics with their staff. You will be the most experienced staff officer in your formation and rolling up your sleeves is not a sign of micromanaging, it is leadership. The point is to remember that you can’t stay in this space, or you won’t be able to focus on the things that only you can do for your team. This lesson is only one in a series of lessons from our CTC rotation.

My purpose in writing this article is simple: to share our experiences from Saber Junction 25 with transparency—highlighting both failures and successes.  It offers focused observations on what determines success in large-scale combat, starting with the bedrock of small-unit actions—the “Big Three” and vehicle safety—and progressing to headquarters operations, intelligence, and technology integration. It is a collection of lessons on what I personally got right and wrong, and potential pitfalls to avoid as commanders prepare their own formations for Combat Training Center (CTC) rotations.

If you don’t invest in the people who power your mission, don’t be surprised when the mission fails.         – General Stanley McChrystal

by Edward Prueitt

The Army Talent Alignment Process (ATAP) has fundamentally transformed how the Army manages officer assignments. When the first full ATAP marketplace launched in 2020, the Army moved decisively beyond the legacy “faces-to-spaces” model to adopt a decentralized and regulated marketplace approach. Drawing from personal experiences as a recent Human Resources Command (HRC) Career Manager, survey data, and extensive lessons learned across HRC, this article presents three tactics as a proven approach for units, framed through the acronym WIN (Work Early, Invest in Transparency, and Navigate Challenges), to help units succeed in the competitive ATAP marketplace. Success demands more than passive participation. It requires deliberate preparation and proactive engagement to dominate the ATAP marketplace. From inherent complexities to turbulence driven by Army-wide challenges, the WIN framework offers units a disciplined three-tactic approach to dominate the ATAP marketplace.

By Sam Balch

I was serving as a battery commander in the 82nd Airborne Division when our guidon disappeared.

After completing a grueling Joint Readiness Training Center rotation, the battery transitioned to the administrative bivouac area to clean equipment, pack containers, and prepare vehicles for the long movement back to Fort Bragg. My First Sergeant secured a metal barracks building for the battery, marked by our guidon held upright in a rusted pipe mounted to the doorframe. It was not comfortable or impressive, but it met his requirement. Wherever our Paratroopers laid their heads, we would all be there together, from the most junior private to the command team.

The guidon out front did more than mark my location. It declared our home, affirming that this ground belonged to Alpha Battery and the fierce Paratroopers who had fought to claim it. After sixteen brutal days of relentless rain, clinging mud, and bone-deep exhaustion in the JRTC swamps, our Soldiers slept deeply that night, their first true rest in weeks.

The next morning shattered that peace. A section leader shook me awake with the dreaded news: the guidon was stolen, flag, pole, everything gone. My First Sergeant was already stirring, lacing his boots while growling threats for the thief. We formed the battery and stressed that the command team would investigate while everyone else pushed on with prep for home. To me, it was a maddening distraction from the mission. To him, it was a vicious slap against the battery’s soul and every Paratrooper in it but he agreed the priority was getting everyone safely home.

That priority did not last long. Post-breakfast, platoon leadership unleashed Paratroopers in a frantic hunt. Innocent questions turned to accusations; searches grew invasive. Units denying entry faced escalating fury. Shouts became shoves, blame soared unchecked. Junior Troopers stormed adjacent buildings, even battalion command posts, certain the culprit lurked nearby.

When my First Sergeant and I returned to the barracks, the cost was evident. Containers remained unpacked. Weapons still needed cleaning. Vehicles were nowhere near ready for rail. We formed the battery again and made a decision that felt necessary but deeply unpopular. The search had to stop. The priority was preparation and movement.

The disappointment was immediate and unmistakable.

To the Paratroopers standing in formation, it felt as though their command team had given up on them. In their eyes, we had chosen timelines over pride, convenience over principle, and appeasing our higher headquarters over the honor of Alpha Battery. In less than a day, the trust and cohesion we had spent months building began to unravel. Discipline slipped. Suspicion replaced camaraderie. The missing guidon itself was not the cause of that breakdown, but it revealed something uncomfortable about how we understood honor, respect, and loyalty.

I started writing this article in 2022, not long after that JRTC rotation, and then I set it aside. At the time, I told myself it was no longer relevant, or that it was simply a personal frustration I needed to let go of. More honestly, I was not sure it was worth saying out loud. I was not convinced anyone wanted to hear it. 

Last week forced me to revisit that decision. Several troop guidons were stolen across my regiment, and with them I saw the same suspicion and erosion of trust I had experienced as a battery commander nearly five years earlier. As I ran in formation with my current battery the following morning, something else stood out. Troop guidons passed by road guards without salutes. What had once been a cultural expectation now felt optional. That realization bothered me more than the thefts themselves. It made clear this was not an old story or a fading tradition, but a norm quietly eroding in front of us, and one I had been silent about. That silence sent me back to the keyboard, convinced that this was no longer just a personal discomfort, but something I owed the Army to say.

We are starting to lose respect for one of the most important symbols in our Army, and as leaders, we seem to be doing little to stop it. In some cases, our junior leaders are actively encouraging its erosion.

This is not an argument against institutional change or growth. Both are necessary in an Army that must adapt to the values and norms of the society it serves. But there are some things so integral to who we are as an Army that we cannot simply accept their erosion as progress.

By Catherine R. Cline

The United States is unlikely to be surprised in space in the traditional sense. It tracks launches globally, monitors orbital behavior in near–real time, and maintains an unmatched catalog of space objects. If surprise is defined as a failure to see something coming, then U.S. space power appears resilient.

While early warning is indispensable, it alone cannot prevent the most dangerous forms of surprise. The real danger emerges when surprise is not a failure to detect activity, but a failure to recognize when fundamental assumptions have become obsolete. In that case, U.S. space power may be exposed in ways that even superior warning capabilities cannot address. In space, the primary risk is not what goes unnoticed, but what strategic thinking remains unquestioned.

Modern space competition increasingly unfolds through ambiguity, reversibility, and cumulative effects. Here, adversaries do not need to hide their actions to achieve surprise; they only need to act in ways the existing frameworks cannot interpret. When facts do not fit, responses feel mismatched, and familiar tools fail to provide advantage, the problem is not a lack of warning but a deeper failure of understanding.

To understand why this form of surprise is so dangerous, and why space power is particularly vulnerable to it, it is useful to distinguish between two fundamentally different kinds of surprise. 

Situational vs. Fundamental Surprise

Zvi Lanir, an Israeli strategist and theorist of surprise, illustrates his core insight with an anecdote about Noah Webster, the famed lexicographer. One day, Webster returned home unexpectedly and found his wife in an intimate moment with another man. His wife exclaimed, “You surprised me.” Webster replied, “No—you astonished me.” The difference matters.

Webster’s wife was caught off guard by an unexpected event. Had she known her husband would return early, she could have avoided the situation. This was a situational surprise, a failure of warning within an otherwise intact understanding of the world.

Webster’s experience was different. What shocked him was not merely the event itself, but what it revealed: his assumptions about his marriage, his household, and his own understanding of reality were suddenly and decisively wrong. No additional piece of information—no earlier warning—would have prevented that realization. This was a fundamental surprise.

Lanir’s paradox is this: the more sophisticated a system becomes at preventing situational surprise, the more vulnerable it may become to fundamental surprise. Advanced systems excel at detecting anomalies within known frameworks, but struggle to recognize when the framework itself is no longer valid. Modern organizations, especially highly professional, technologically advanced ones, are very good at preventing surprises of the first kind. They are far less capable of recognizing when they are approaching the second. Space power sits squarely in this danger zone.

Modern space operations excel at situational awareness. The United States is exceptionally good at detecting discrete events: launches, maneuvers, interference, debris creation, and system degradation. These observations are processed through intelligence architectures designed to separate signal from noise and deliver timely warning to decision-makers. This model assumes that surprise results from insufficient or misunderstood information. Improve collection, reduce noise, and surprise becomes less likely. This logic has dominated intelligence and military thinking for decades.

Lanir argues that this logic is incomplete. In many historical cases—Pearl Harbor, Sputnik, Vietnam, and the Yom Kippur War—the problem was not a lack of information but an inability to interpret information that contradicted the prevailing paradigm. Analysts correctly observed the facts but misjudged their meaning because they were interpreted through obsolete conceptual frameworks. In Lanir’s terms, situational surprises are failures of detection. Fundamental surprises are failures of self-understanding. Space competition increasingly favors the latter.

By: James J. Torrence

We have an authenticity problem, and everyone knows it. The troops know it. The junior officers know it. The staff officers definitely know it. And deep down, our senior leaders know it too. Everyone sounds the same.

Every inbox across the force is flooded with emails, talking points, op-eds, command messages, and holiday greetings that feel eerily interchangeable. Polished. Safe. Generic. You could strip the signature block and no one would be able to tell who it came from or what echelon wrote it. The reason is obvious. Commanders and staffs are using the same large language models (LLMs) with the same default tone, the same phrasing, and the same cadence.

Troops are not stupid. They know AI when they see it. They know when something was written by a human who cares and when it was generated by a model prompted to sound “professional and inspirational.” Over time, that distinction matters. It creates a credibility gap between senior leaders and the formations they lead.

By: Gustavo Arguello

Let’s be honest: most leaders feel that they are stretched thinner than a supply sergeant’s budget at the end of the fiscal year. Between deployments, training exercises, training meetings, and the endless admin requirements, taking the time for counseling can feel like a task that’s easy to postpone until it becomes a crisis. Like something we’ll get around to “when things slow down.” But here’s a hard truth: things aren’t slowing down. And if we don’t prioritize developing our subordinates now, we’re setting ourselves up for trouble down the road.

We’ve all seen it: the Soldier who’s quietly struggling, the performance issue that festers, the potential leader who never quite reaches their full potential. Often, these issues aren’t about a lack of skill; they’re about a lack of connection, a lack of guidance, a lack of someone simply taking the time to listen. And that, my fellow leaders, is where counseling comes in.

The Army doesn’t leave this to chance. ADP 6-22, Army Leadership, doesn’t just suggest we develop our Soldiers; it demands it. ADP 6-22 frames counseling and coaching as core competencies, essential for building cohesive teams and achieving mission success. Ignoring counseling isn’t just bad leadership; it’s a strategic oversight. We’re not just managing personnel; we’re cultivating a fighting force.

By Lou Crist

Several years ago, during an interview, I was asked, “What is the most important thing an S2 does?” The question took me aback. After some thought, I answered that the S2 should impart their understanding of the enemy to the commander. The interviewer sighed and replied, “No. Your job is to think like a commander.” At the time, I didn’t fully grasp his meaning. Years of experience and reflection have since convinced me that he was right.

A good S2 masters Intelligence Preparation of the Operational Environment (IPOE) and becomes the subject matter expert on the enemy. A great S2 studies friendly maneuver, knowing their unit’s mission, organization, and tactics to make intelligence relevant. An exceptional S2 goes further, becoming the commander’s intellectual partner in defeating the enemy.

The Role of the S2

Military intelligence doctrine is thorough, and IPOE is indispensable for threat analysis. Yet many S2s stop at describing the environment and the enemy. For years, I did the same, assuming that if I filled out the IPOE template and briefed the checklist, the “So What” would reveal itself. It seldom did. As an Observer Coach Trainer, I saw the same pattern: S2s competently outlined the threat but failed to make recommendations that shaped operations. When the analysis lacked relevance, commanders inevitably asked, “Give me the So What.” What they really wanted was a bridge between enemy understanding and friendly action. To achieve that bridge, the S2 must understand friendly maneuver.

Intelligence officers must study their unit’s mission, organization, and doctrine. Understanding what the unit does, and how it fights, is the foundation of relevance. Every branch has distinct intelligence needs. Field artillery units want to know how the enemy detects and targets them: radar coverage, long-range fires, and position areas for artillery. Airborne units care about drop zones, enemy air defense artillery, and counterattack forces. Armor and logistics formations have equally specific priorities. Knowing the unit’s tactics allows the S2 to translate intelligence into operational value. Without that understanding, analysis often remains obscured.