• New information flows on modern battlefields can be overwhelming for commanders.
• Army leaders warn of "cognitive overload" for commanders on the ground facing new and traditional threats.
• The battlefield is changing dramatically amid new drone and EW threats.

Amid an explosion in new kinds of battlefield tech, from all kinds of drones to the systems and sensors being built to defeat them, commanders at all levels are grappling with the growing challenge of information overload.

As the Army absorbs lessons from Ukraine, "we're seeing a cognitive overload on the ground for commanders who have to fight both the ground fight and the air fight," said Maj. Andrew Kang, the fire support officer for the 2nd Cavalry Regiment, during a media roundtable last week.

The American Stryker unit based in Germany is experimenting with new technologies while training Ukrainian troops on American equipment.

The inundation of information is pushing the Army to rely more heavily on technology to filter and prioritize data before it reaches a commander, Kang said.

As the threat stands today, a web of sensors is critical for combating enemy drones, Kang said. Available sensors include acoustic detectors, electromagnetic spectrum monitoring, live video feeds, and other intelligence inputs flowing in from across the force. Together, they generate a stream of alerts that must be assessed and acted on quickly.

All of it is landing increasingly on officers in the field, who are expected to synchronize artillery, aircraft, and ground maneuver while simultaneously tracking drone threats and managing electronic signatures.

"What allows that decision-making is the input, the ingest of all that data, to optimize the right defeat mechanism against the threat," said Capt. Gabriel Glazer, the 2nd Cavalry Regiment's signal officer.

"This is where I think we keep harping on the network," he said.

The Army has been increasingly looking into solutions for synthesizing large quantities of battlefield data into manageable packages for command and control.

A changing battlefield

It is easy to focus on drones and counter-drone systems as defining features of modern warfare, Kang said, but it's more than that. An equally pressing shift, leaving less time for decision-making and processing, is the operational tempo of fighting, which he described in Ukraine as "almost incomprehensible."

That pace is reshaping not only how units fight, but also how they physically organize themselves.

A growing concern is signature management, Glazer said, a unit's ability to control the electronic and visual signals it emits. In a battlefield saturated with drones and electronic surveillance, large centralized headquarters have become vulnerable.

In the Global War on Terror, planning coordination often unfolded in bustling, centralized command posts where the commander and staff — intelligence, logistics, and operations troops — worked side by side. In new combat environments shaped by drones and electromagnetic spectrum warfare, that model is increasingly untenable.

During the roundtable, 2nd Cavalry Regiment commander Col. Donald Neal recalled serving as a brigade executive officer a decade ago in a sprawling command headquarters, which he likened to a football field.

Today, amid exercises against mock enemy forces capable of wielding drones as readily available reconnaissance tools, and electronic warfare and sensor systems, headquarters must be a fraction of that size, and more dispersed to survive — rather than operate from a single large hub, units now break apart their command posts.

"Instead of having one massive, we had four different ones spread sometimes up to 30 kilometers away from each other to be survivable," he said of recent training.

Glazer said understanding the electromagnetic spectrum can no longer be confined to senior officers. Junior troops — often the most exposed — need to grasp how their radios, emissions, and digital systems can make them targets.

The regiment's experimentation has already changed how soldiers communicate and move, and those adjustments have "seeped into every single echelon of the regiment," he said.