Major Bradley Young

In the middle of an emergency operations center exercise, all the landline telephones stopped working. The entire base staff immediately stopped being able to coordinate response actions. My cellphone rang, and I learned that the main telephone switch had lost power. My Marines did not know if the switch would survive the power loss. We waited as the switch began to reboot, with non-operational telephones and the exercise in shambles. In this moment, I found myself unable to lead.

By Major Bradley Young and Major Jonathan Wood, U.S. Army The U.S. Army information operations (IO) community faces an identity crisis. Army IO officers, known by their career field designation of Functional Area 30 (FA30), are the “staff focal point for IO,” and perform a vital function to synchronize, coordinate, and integrate information effects into unit operations.