WASHINGTON: Marines, turn off your iPhone and dig yourself a foxhole. That’s the Commandant’s message to young Marines, based on embarrassing experiences in recent exercises. As cheap drones and other surveillance technologies spread worldwide, said Gen. Robert Neller, US forces must re-learn how to hide — both physically and electronically — from increasingly tech-savvy adversaries.
“We’ve got to change the way we’re thinking….An adversary can see us just as we see them,” said Gen. Neller. “If you can be seen, you will be attacked.”
In particular, US field HQs have grown into notoriously large targets. In one exercise, Neller said, a Marine Expeditionary Force headquarters did almost everything right. They covered everything in camouflage netting — a largely lost art since 9/11 — and set up their radio antennas at a distance so a strike homing in on them wouldn’t hit the HQ itself. But old counterinsurgency habits die hard, and the Marines also put concertina wire around a key location. Seen from the air, the barbed wire glinted in the sun and made a shining circle, like a bull’s eye, around what it was supposed to protect.
“That was where the intel people where,” Neller said to laughter.
Watching Russian operations in Ukraine tells us that forces are increasingly vulnerable to targeting by non-traditional means, such as cheap drones and tracking personal electronics. And when targeted, those forces can quickly come under stupendous artillery storms.
Ukraine lost the better part of two tank battalions in 2014 when they massed for an attack. As soon as they were concentrated, the Russians simply pounded them into the dirt with a 10 minute barrage of tube and rocket artillery.
That type of threat is one US forces will increasingly face, either from Russian forces, or from the large number of countries that use Russian weapons and doctrine.
XBradTC 
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