Major Lawrence Shepherd, battle captain and later battle major for the Third Army, served as a ground operations officer with Combined Forces Land Component Command (CFLCC) during his deployment in Kuwait (from October 2003 to April 2004) and Iraq (from April to July 2004). His specific job was to maintain and synchronize the composition of friendly units on the battlefield. To aid planning, Shepherd did a Third Army exercise called "Lucky Warrior" that incorporated all operational staff and personnel from Great Britain and Canada and later U.S. Central Command. "The first Lucky Warrior that we did had a lot of problems in the sense that organization was put together very quickly. But what it did allow for us to do was to find out what we needed to do to be successful for the ground war." In the exercise, he learned the value of the Command and Control Personal Computer (C2PC), a Blue Force Tracking type of system developed by the Marines. Professionally rewarding for Shepherd was being in charge of the Early Entry Command Post and being a war fighter and going to a support operational headquarters at Kuwait’s Camp Arifjan. “I learned more in that six-month period,” he said, “than I probably have in any other period in my military career.”

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