BYLINE: David Nelson, Director, Mixed Reality Lab (MxR), Project Leader, Leaders Enhanced & Applied Doctrine System (LEADS), and David Cobbins, Creative Producer; Co-Lead, LEADS
Major Daniel Ortiz sat hunched over his desk, the green-glow of his desk lamp pooling across his copy of FM 3-0. His highlighter was dry. His coffee was colder than a January morning in Kansas City, and his brain was just as cloudy.
Decision dominance. Convergence. Dispersed formations. He understood the words. But somehow, the new multi-domain concepts just didn’t click. Not in the way he needed them to, not with the final exam looming next week. This wasn’t just about passing a test. Dan had been a solid officer, but with his next assignment riding on his performance in the Commanders Career Course, he needed to prove he could think and lead at the next echelon. But the coursework felt dry, static diagrams, dense paragraphs, no time to ask “what if” or to see the ideas applied across terrain, no chance to fail forward, to learn, and reset.
That night, after everyone else in the house had gone to bed, Dan sat back in his chair, opened his laptop, and logged into LEADS, the Leaders Enhanced & Applied Doctrine System application.
He’d heard about it during an optional session earlier in the course, something about interactive scenarios and narrative-driven doctrinal training. Until now, he hadn’t had the time, or maybe he hadn’t had the nerves to put his knowledge to the test.
The application was clean and intuitive. One click, and he found himself in the role supporting a fictional brigade commander participating in Large-Scale Combat Operations (LSCO) against a near-peer enemy The interface was simple, but the choices weren’t. The virtual characters, the commander, the staff officers, the Operation Order, and the briefs felt real. The dilemmas were complex, and every decision point was a test, not of memorization, but of understanding.
He clicked through, receiving text messages from his commander, discussing options with the virtual staff, the intel officer, fires, signal, one decision after another, watching his suggestions inform the decisions that would ripple across a simulated battlefield. Some calls were spot-on. Others… not so much.
But when he failed, the system showed him why. The area of operations map would animate, highlighting the results. A staff officer would debrief him. A doctrine excerpt would appear, not as a blunt block of text, but as a thread woven through the consequences of his own actions. He kept going.
In one scenario, a Division Commander challenged him to select a Course of Action balancing fires, maneuver, and information advantage. In another, he had to advise on integrating space and cyber capabilities into a shaping operation, something he’d only skimmed in the manual before. This time, he got it. In the end the system recommended a video, an overview of a historic battle strategically chosen to echo the tactical dilemma he’d just faced. The app didn’t just teach doctrine; it connected him to the decisions of legendary commanders, inviting him to study their choices, their mistakes, and the outcomes that still echoed through modern operations.
The next morning, Dan was different. Confident. Not because he had everything memorized, but because he had practiced applying the doctrine in context. LEADS hadn’t just taught him what FM 3-0 said. It had shown him why it mattered, and what it looked like when done right… or wrong.
By the time test day rolled around, Dan didn’t just pass, he crushed it. When his instructor asked him to justify one of his answers, Dan didn’t blink. “Sir,” he began, flipping open his notebook, “in the LEADS scenario last week, we tried something similar, and it didn’t work. We underestimated how terrain would affect the sensor-to-shooter chain across domains. I don’t want to make that same mistake in a real-world operation.”
The instructor nodded. Slowly. “Smart application, Major.”
After the course ended, Dan found himself logging into LEADS again, this time not out of fear, but curiosity. What new scenarios might get added next? Could this be something his unit could use for pre-deployment? For the first time in a long time, doctrine didn’t feel like something to survive. It felt like something to master, and it all started one night, when a Major who thought he was falling behind… decided to LEAD instead.
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