The service issued a request for information Wednesday to help the program executive office for intelligence, electronic warfare and sensors and the program manager for Next Generation Command and Control (NGC2) get feedback from industry and identify potential solutions.

The Army wants to mitigate the cognitive burden for commanders and boost their situational awareness.

“As the Army continues to integrate advanced technologies and expand its use of unmanned aerial systems (UAS), rotary-wing, fixed-wing, and emerging platforms, traditional airspace management methods are being challenged by the growing scale, speed, and complexity of operations,” officials wrote in the RFI.

“Traditional airspace management systems often struggle to process and respond to the vast amounts of data generated during operations, limiting their ability to provide actionable insights in real time,” they added.

The proliferation of drones will make airspace management even more complicated. The Army and the other services are under pressure from Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth to quickly integrate more small unmanned aerial systems across the force. Hegseth issued a directive earlier this month with the aim of accelerating that process.

Meanwhile, the Pentagon is also pursuing new counter-drone tools, air-and-missile defense systems, and command-and-control tech to address growing threats.

The expanding use of UAS, loitering munitions and autonomous platforms will have to be taken into account by the U.S. military’s airspace management frameworks, which must also be able to deal with the presence of large numbers of friendly, neutral and enemy players — as well as other weapon systems and adversaries’ electronic warfare capabilities, the RFI noted.

“Army airspace management must adapt to rapidly changing mission requirements, including the need for real-time deconfliction, airspace prioritization, and coordination with joint and coalition forces,” officials wrote. “Effective airspace management must account for the coordination of indirect fires, air defense systems, and other effects to ensure mission success while minimizing risk to friendly forces.”

The Army is hoping artificial intelligence tools can lend a helping hand.

“AI-enabled airspace management solutions have the potential to address these challenges by leveraging machine learning, predictive analytics, and automation to enhance situational awareness, optimize airspace allocation, and enable rapid decision-making. Such systems can analyze real-time data from multiple sources, predict airspace usage patterns, and recommend proactive measures to improve safety, efficiency, and mission effectiveness,” per the RFI.

Responses to the RFI are due Aug. 29.

The service is looking to put vendors’ technologies through their paces later this year at a Joint Pacific Multinational Readiness Center event.

“The Army is seeking interested industry partners to deliver a minimum viable product (MVP) for an AI-enabled airspace management solution that enhances UAS operations during JPMRC Exercise 26-01,” officials wrote. “The MVP must be operationally ready for deployment to the 25th Infantry Division by November 2025 and capable of addressing some of the unique challenges of UAS management in contested and congested environments.”

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Ellis began his role as director of the network cross-functional team in July, having most recently been deputy chief of staff, G-3, for Army Europe-Africa. He also previously served with the 7th Infantry Division in the Pacific and I Corps. He took over for Maj. Gen. Jeth Rey, who was nominated for a third star and to be the next deputy chief of staff, G6, of the Army.

This operational experience has provided Ellis a unique view of the issues facing commanders and units now that he is charged with helping drive future requirements for the network.

“I moved straight over to Europe and got to really watch firsthand the Ukrainians and the Russians and how that conflict was unfolding,” he said in an interview. “The way that we enable commanders and the way that we’re going to have to fight our command post in the future, I think I have a little bit more of an opinion about that now that I’m hopeful I can share with the team here on the acquisition side too. It’s not that folks don’t have the perspective, it’s just been a little bit more recent.”

The Army has been on a multi-year journey dating back to 2017 and 2018 to devise a more flexible and operationally relevant network.

One of the key technologies Ellis wants to focus on is the predictive piece of data for building operational models.

He explained that when organizations conduct war games or plan for future courses of action, much of that is still reliant on Cold War-era tools such as wooden blocks and spreadsheets. But now, with modern tech, the data being collected can provide much more accurate models to run these assessments at a faster pace.

“You don’t have to have guys making multiple decisions and take three days to run a wargame that you can run in a simulation or a gaming-style engine that you can run in a couple of hours,” Ellis said. “I think that’ll help some of our commanders. It’s not going to replace them. It’s going to help our commanders make more facts-based, informed decisions. I’m excited about that technology. As we get data organized, I think that’s going to be absolutely a powerful tool that we’re going to get in the hands … of our commanders in the near future.”

The Army has been moving to become more data centric, now one of the secretary’s top objectives and a big focus for Ellis’ predecessor.

He also noted he wants to ensure requirements for the network aren’t too prescriptive, which can box-in the eventual solution such that it ends up being too limited to provide soldiers what they need on a highly dynamic battlefield.

“It’s about keeping the requirements general enough so that we can basically almost like Lego blocks, like mission command blocks, that we can give organizations the structure,” he said. “There’s enough flexibility in the requirements documents where you can give a commander a set of mission command Lego blocks and he can build what he wants out of that. He can structure it the way that makes sense to him and to his formation at that particular time, because all of our divisions are different.”

While officials want to allow units enough flexibility to make systems work to their own operational concepts, schemes of maneuver or environment they’re operating in, the tools still must be interoperable so one slice of the Army’s systems can still talk with everything else in the service as well as joint and foreign partners.

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With aims to “embrace the challenge of contested logistics,” Wormuth said Monday at the Association of the United States Army’s annual convention in Washington, the command will soon leverage experimentation, war games, and exercises in new ways. 

“This effort will bring together our logistics community with the commercial sector to look at our requirements and focus on the opportunities presented by autonomous distribution, energy-efficient combat systems, and predictive data analytics,” she explained. 

Wormuth’s comments Monday came as the Army recently announced big plans to become a more data-centric force operationally by the end of the decade. 

Some progress has been made in prototyping and building new technologies with military and commercial partners over the last year, in particular, according to the secretary. She noted that her team is “already signing contracts to begin low rates of initial production” on some emerging technologies associated with logistics. 

During a media briefing after her keynote, Wormuth provided reporters with more details on this new command-led work. 

The Indo-Pacific “is the most demanding theater” for the military currently, she noted, “because of the distances involved, and all of the, you know, obvious reasons,” she said, likely referring to the evolving conflict landscape and tensions with China. She sees room for better collaboration with industry and a need to explore how automation and predictive analytics can support such logistics and sustainment operations. 

“We are doing more and more every day to use data more effectively,” Wormuth told DefenseScoop during the briefing — but she confirmed that she is not yet satisfied with how the service is using data as a strategic asset.

“I see it in all sorts of ways. Army Materiel Command, I think, has done a tremendous job to really improve our ability to see our inventory of infrastructure, for example, using data. I was just over in Germany with the 18th Airborne Corps, and the way that we’re using data and [artificial intelligence] there is tremendous,” she noted. “But, you know, we have so much more to do, especially when you compare us to the private sector.” 

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