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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The live-fire event, which took place in Poland, Germany and Arizona on May 11-27, was led by the 2nd Multi-Domain Task Force under 56th Artillery Command and included international allies.

Maj. Gen. John Rafferty, commanding general of 56th Artillery Command, called it a “premier training event” that tested the task force’s ability to operate across all domains, find targets “at depth” and strike those targets with kinetic and non-kinetic effects.

In U.S. military parlance, the term “kinetic effects” generally refers to munitions or other projectiles, while non-kinetic effects include things like electronic warfare, directed energy and cyber capabilities.

The Multi-Domain Task Force is “improving and refining the technology and the tactics, techniques and procedures. Our soldiers, our sergeants and our lieutenants are the ones who have their hands on this equipment, who are determining the best way to employ it, to get the effects and find the targets that we’re asking them to. And we are putting that feedback right back into the system to improve the capability and optimize not just the equipment that we have, but the way that in which we’re employing it,” Rafferty told reporters Friday during a teleconference.

The results of the exercise are also setting the conditions for the evolution of Rafferty’s command into a multi-domain command in Europe that’s going to take place over the next few months, he noted.

Unmanned systems of various types were key components of the latest iteration of Arcane Thunder, part of an effort to demonstrate the ability to “fight with live data” across a large-scale combat theater.

The Army teamed up with the Navy in the employment of unmanned surface vessels to test out the multi-domain ops concept — which fits in with the Pentagon’s vision for Combined Joint All-Domain Command and Control (CJADC2) to better connect the sensors, shooters and information networks of the U.S. military services and allies and partners.

“It’s really trying to perfect the ability to transition from the littoral domain to the land domain, and … how does the MDTF, as part of the joint force, gather data from our joint partners and also share data with our joint partners,” Col. Patrick Moffett, commander of the 2nd Multi-Domain Task Force, told reporters about the use of unmanned surface vessels during Arcane Thunder. “Working with the USVs, we worked the joint kill chain where the Navy vessels would identify a target, that target would get passed to the second MDTF all-domain operations center, and then we would pass that target to really, for this exercise, to our Polish partners. So that was the tie-in.”

As a land-based force, the Army’s understanding of littorals is often limited, but those USVs gave the task force the ability to better understand what was going on in the sea domain, he noted.

The robo-boats were also used to haul Army equipment in a contested logistics scenario, where the military might need to push that type of gear forward to “isolated elements,” Moffett explained.

But USVs weren’t the only uncrewed systems involved in Arcane Thunder. Drones, high-altitude balloons (HAB) and unattended ground sensors were also part of the mix.

Lt. Col. Aaron Ritzema, commander of the 2nd Multi-Domain Effects Battalion, noted that soldiers used sensor data to inform the employment of so-called “launched effects” — such as loitering munitions — to strike targets.

“For us, as we kind of, you know, fought through the scenario-based portion of this exercise, it was using … the micro HAB to provide that geolocation. And then that would trigger battalion- and company-level decision points on if and when … we launched the launched effect to actually close the kill chain on that,” he told reporters.

Stitching together the different technologies involved in the exercise and enabling interoperability between platforms and payloads were some of the biggest challenges the Army had to tackle, he noted.

Rafferty emphasized the importance of being able to pass live data through mission command systems — which in the case of Arcane Thunder, involved forces in both Europe and the continental United States.

He noted that the 2nd Multi-Domain Task Force under Moffett’s command demonstrated the ability “to make sense of the information and generate enough fidelity to produce targets that then, in some cases, were passed back to the 56th multi-domain headquarters … to work through the process of assigning, you know, the right shooter to those particular targets. So there was a whole range of possibilities and scenarios there.”

Rafferty added: “Really the breakthrough, like I said, was getting that data in virtually real-time from a micro HAB, refined by another platform, made sense of by [Moffett’s team in Poland] and Aaron Ritzema’s soldiers at Fort Huachuca [in Arizona] … and then, in seconds, back here to Wiesbaden and Mainz-Kastel in Germany for, you know, additional analysis and assigning to the right shooter. So really taking that kill chain and taking what was once, you know, hours to really into minutes, essentially … That live data part is probably the biggest breakthrough for us, from my standpoint.”

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In other words, whereas the Corps historically has delivered specific systems — such as a radio or radar — it wants to begin combining several systems in order to produce more integrated capability packages that are the sum of their parts rather than one-off systems.

Last year, the service combined at least 15 different systems into an integrated command and control portfolio. Much of that was driven from the ongoing force design updates that come directly from the commandant of the Marine Corps.

“Part of that is we lack the established multi-domain organizations or agencies to execute and facilitate task force target engagement. We lack a common unified [Marine Air-Ground Task Force] C2 system … and we lack a C2 framework that is unbound by unique warfighting domains and restricted classification bureaucracy on top of how we fight as a MAGTF,” Col. Jeffery Van Bourgondien, MAGTF C2 Program Manager, said during a presentation at the Modern Day Marine expo Wednesday. “The charge was to develop a portfolio that is going to deliver capabilities — not systems — deliver capabilities that are going to do multi-domain or all-domain situational awareness and multi-domain command and control.”

Through a series of mission assessments over the last year, the Corps determined that it has stovepiped systems, requirements and funds, all of which limits its ability to maneuver through the acquisition space. That provided the impetus for more of a capability portfolio management approach.

In fiscal 2027, the Corps will be breaking down all of its program elements within each color of money in the budget so there will be one element in research and development, procurement, and operations and maintenance.

“That allows me to move money across my entire profile and solve gaps for various capabilities even in stride and during the current year of execution without having to do any type of below threshold reprogramming and get that authorization from higher headquarters,” Van Bourgondien said.

Additionally, the Corps identified two target priorities to start looking at to answer the commandant’s charge: establishing joint kill chains or kill webs and what the Marines are calling command and control at echelon.

The latter seeks to ensure forces have the right command and control capabilities to survive in a contested battlespace at echelon and allow them to close kill chains.

“Since we have ended the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, our transition to this C2 at echelon capability set is something simply we need to accelerate,” Maj. Gen. Farrell Sullivan, director of the Capabilities Development Directorate, said at the Modern Day Marine conference.

More specifically, the effort aims to marry mission-essential tasks of each unit at echelon to the information that they need to exchange at various echelons within a fighting formation and better equip them with assets and information technology to process, analyze and then make decisions based on their authorities they’ve been given, Van Bourgondien told DefenseScoop following his presentation.

He said he’s applying a Lego block concept where common parts of the command and control ecosystem can be plugged and played to scale up or down and retrofit for a particular mission.

“Right now, with my stovepipe systems, I don’t have the flexibility to do that,” he said. “I’m re-engineering in order to break down the stovepipes between systems. I need to create a multi-faceted system of systems, gain efficiencies where I can with common hardware, common software, data processing tools … [and] focus in on the unit commander to make those decisions, [which] comes down to their own mission analysis.”

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The chief of naval operations, Adm. Lisa Franchetti, in her Navigation Plan released late last year outlined that the MOC will be the “center” to how the Navy fights in a distributed manner. She noted that they must be capable of integrating with the joint force and partner nations to link fleet commanders to sensors and shooters across the battlefield. The CNO tasked all fleet headquarters, beginning with Pacific Fleet, to have MOCs certified and proficient in command and control, information, intelligence, fires, movement and maneuver, protection, and sustainment functions by 2027.

The change has been necessitated by the larger distances — namely in the Pacific — that the Navy must be ready to fight across. Forces will be distributed and must command and control their assets while passing critical data back and forth — a task too great for carrier strike groups to do alone.

The Navy’s initiative, and the reasoning behind it, is similar to others made across the other services, such as the Army moving the main unit of action up from brigade to division.

“This battlespace is just bigger and bigger across a larger amount of sea space,” Vice Adm. Karl Thomas, deputy chief of naval operations for information warfare and director of naval intelligence, said at the annual WEST conference this week, equating fighting from the MOC to being able to achieve decision advantage over the adversary.

He noted that as he and his organization are thinking about fighting from the MOC, information has to be be parsed and synthesized at machine speed across the vast battlespace.

“Decision superiority is going to be predicated on our ability to have the right information at the right time to the right warrior at the right classification level. And it’s got to support the seven joint warfighting functions,” he said.

Naval Information Forces (NAVIFOR) was recently named as the type command for the MOCs, charging it with training forces to operate them.

“The MOC TYCOM is not just an IW mission, but a whole of Navy platform that aligns the primary processes for Navy and Joint Force maritime component command C2 and decision-making. Our responsibilities as MOC TYCOM provide unique and challenging opportunities to drive success at the operational level of war across nine MOCs and every number fleet and fleet headquarters in the world,” Vice Adm. Michael Vernazza, NAVIFOR commander, said at the conference.

Vernazza told reporters that one of the things he wants to make significant progress on this year is readiness to fight from the maritime operations centers.

“Fight from the MOC, that also means that we have developed a well-trained and efficient MOC team that is able to execute the seven joint functions,” he said.

As he’s looking to build that capability out, Vernazza wants tools for faster decision-making such as artificial intelligence to fuse data.

“I’d say decision-making would be certainly an area, probably in terms of fires as well, and taking what we know will be a very complex and dynamic battlespace and creating a way to understand how the fires piece can work more effectively and more efficiently,” he said. “One area that can help in that is probably in the area of decision-making, in terms of whether it be AI or some other way of creating an advantage for the commander in terms of that OODA loop that [Pacific Fleet Commander] Adm. [Stephen] Koehler referred to, where we take all this tremendous amounts of data that we have and are able to fuse it quickly into a coherent picture that matches the commander’s timing and tempo and sequencing of events that needs to occur as he or she makes those decisions.”

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The service is currently undergoing parallel tracks to improve how forces perform command and control on the battlefield in the future. The first, named C2 Fix, is aimed at bolstering soldiers’ so-called “fight tonight” ability. That effort is expected to serve as a bridge to a longer-term solution, dubbed Next Gen C2.

Next Gen C2 is the Army’s top priority, from the chief of staff to the commander of Futures Command. As the service transitions from over 20 years of operations against technologically inferior enemies to large-scale combat operations across vast distances against sophisticated adversatives, the current systems and architectures for command and control are not suitable for success, top officials contend.

Next Gen C2 “is intended to be a different approach — and a different approach in order to ensure that the Army is able to take advantage of data centricity Army-wide to transform to take advantage of that, so that our commanders can make more decisions and they can make them faster and they can make them better than the adversary,” Joe Welch, deputy to the commander of Futures Command, said at the Army’s Technical Exchange Meeting in Savannah last week. “The design principle of NGC2 from the beginning was clean sheet, unconstrained.”

The Army is taking a completely clean-slate approach by trying to start fresh as opposed to keeping on with full legacy systems, architectures and concepts, though officials acknowledge, given budget and fielding constraints across a million-person Army, some legacy systems will still have to be involved.

The C2 Fix effort — which is essentially just providing units with current and existing capabilities, but envisions employment differently — will serve as the bridge to next-gen technologies by providing units enhanced capability if they need to be deployed. It’s also providing some lessons for the eventual NGC2 effort, which is currently in the experimental phase with ongoing source selection for the eventual first awards as part of the official program of record.

“My anticipation is that there will be elements of C2 Fix, if you start looking at the boxes or the things that are part of it, that will find their way into” Next Gen C2, Welch said. “These aren’t independent activities. They’re more framed in time and decision constraint. But one theme that I think we’re going to continue throughout, one of the things C2 Fix [can do to aid] it really well is the ability to iterate with commanders and their brigades, and understand at a very detailed level how well this mix of equipment is working. I mean, if we maintain that philosophy going forward into NGC2, I think we’re going to be really well served.”

One of the areas that most exemplifies the need for a clean-slate approach is the data commanders are expected to be pushing down to their tactical units in future fights. The current architecture is not designed for what experts anticipate will be required going forward.

“In our experimentation up to date, what we’ve realized [is] we will push more data. What we are doing and what Next Gen C2 is going to be is entirely different than C2 Fix or anything we’ve done at this point,” Col. Michael Kaloostian, chief digital and artificial intelligence officer at Army Futures Command, said at the Technical Exchange Meeting. “C2 Fix scratches the surface of the amount of data that we push the edge in the future in Next Gen C2. If we’re not developing the network architecture to support that, we’re going to get it wrong. We have to really think about that. This is not C2 Fix, this is not an evolution of C2 Fix. This will be entirely different.”

Characteristics of need

When the Army began to chart down the effort of creating an entirely new construct for command and control, it sought to release what it called a “characteristics of need” document to industry.

Initially released last May, this document serves as “an acknowledgement of a complex problem space” and “an acknowledgement of one that we don’t feel like we know enough about necessarily, or are not in a position to be prescribing solutions,” Welch said, noting this is the first type of characteristics of need the Army has done for anything.

The characteristics are not a requirements document or something that is part of Army regulations. Rather, it sought to help industry define the problem and solution alongside the Army, with some officials referring to it as the “North Star” for Next Gen C2 development. Welch said it’s intended to be a starting point and facilitate a dialogue before beginning the requirements and acquisition process right away.

The intent for the document is that it will be updated approximately every 90 days as the Army continues to learn through experimentation efforts.

“The part that I would want to amplify is that it is not a static document. We are out of the business of requirements community handing a [program executive office] a document, turning around and going to work on the next document. That is the business that we need to get out of,” Mark Kitz, PEO for command, control, communications and network, said at the Technical Exchange Meeting. “The operating environment changes way too dynamically for us to think that we’re going to document every requirement in a static time.”

This will allow the command-and-control cross-functional team from Futures Command to evolve their requirements to design towards over time, allow industry to tweak their offerings and enable the program office to provide better opportunities for network improvements.

As an example, the most recent characteristics of need was released last week and made adjustments based on what the Army learned in September at Network Modernization Experiment, or NetModX, an annual experiment where officials put experimental Next Gen C2 capabilities through a more realistic battlefield network scenario and in a denied, disrupted, intermittent, and limited comms environment.

One of the biggest realizations coming out of NetModX was ensuing solutions for Next Gen C2 are integrated across the technology stack. As a result, this technology stack was added to the updated characteristics of need.

The stack consists of four layers from top to bottom: apps, operating system, compute and transport.

The apps portion is envisioned as an app store of sorts, with integrated warfighting systems that soldiers interface with. This is the most tangible part of Next Gen C2 that soldiers themselves will actually experience and interact with, which will collapse the warfighting functions into apps. This is currently the only interface the Army is anticipating, Welch said.

To enable that, he said, it has to be supported by an integrated data layer to build the apps upon, based on data coming in from sensors.

The data layer doesn’t work unless there’s infrastructure to support it, with the first level of infrastructure being a computing environment.

At the lowest level, soldiers need a way to move data across the battlespace via communications devices, be they 5G phones, Wi-Fi, radios, mesh networks or even proliferated low-Earth orbit satellite constellations.

“If these things don’t work, if any part of them don’t work, then NGC2 doesn’t work,” Welch said. “That was really why we included the technology stack within the characterization of needs to drive home the importance that we have all of this in place. And we may not have all of it horizontally to start. You’ll hear … some more detailed discussions about what’s going to take place over the next 12-18 months.”

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The efforts surround what the Army calls “Next Gen C2,” a top priority of the service’s highest leadership to include the chief of staff and Futures Command.

Officials have stated that current capabilities are not adequate to dominate on the modern battlefield against a sophisticated adversary. Thus, the service is attempting to overhaul how its systems are architected to improve data sharing and communications.

The organization held an industry day for Next Gen C2 on Sept. 16 and released a request for information Sept. 30 for input on the acquisition approach, contracting strategy and possible scope for a minimum viable product. The feedback from the RFI is expected to shape a draft request for proposals that the Army hopes to have ready by mid-November.

Both officials and industry sources have indicated they want to have an open dialogue to inform what the future capability looks like.

To set the foundation of Next Gen C2, the Army is initially focusing on a data layer.

“We think that’s centered around a data architecture, a data layer. We think that the initial foray into that would be some applications around fires and collaboration and some common services across the data layer for chat, for PLI, for graphics,” Mark Kitz, the program executive officer for command, control, communications and networks, said in an interview. “These are really just some initial ideas that we’re exploring with industry, but we really want this to be informed by industry.”

One of the challenges that Futures Command and the acquisition teams are trying to solve is that currently, data and applications aren’t standardized. They’re also siloed and can’t necessarily share seamlessly.

“What we don’t want to have happen is every different specialty in the Army has their own box and they’re trying to make the boxes communicate,” Col. Matt Skaggs, director of tactical applications and architecture at Army Futures Command, said in an interview.

Capabilities such as the Advanced Field Artillery Tactical Data System and the Army Intelligence Data Platform, along with others, don’t necessarily talk seamlessly to one another, Skaggs said, adding: “What we want to build is with the integrated data layer, applications that have all those warfighting function workflows baked in, so we don’t have to have boxes talking to boxes, and all of those applications that I mentioned before are converged onto one user interface.”

In trying to do things differently this time around, the Army is taking lessons from its Command Post Computing Environment (CPCE), a program that began around seven years ago. It’s a web-enabled capability that sought to consolidate mission systems and programs into a single user interface at command posts to provide a common operational picture.

Officials and industry sources noted that with CPCE, the Army tried to do too much and the technology was not mature enough yet. While successful at delivering a C2 situational awareness tool, the infrastructure was not built in a way to share data across different functions such as intelligence, fires, electronic warfare and sustainment, among others.

“The technology of today will allow us to more robustly build a data layer that our applications then can sit on without us molding into one data model and molding into one application or one commercial infrastructure,” Kitz said. “One of the big lessons learned here is ensuring that these applications, these disparate capabilities, these warfighting functions can innovate within their domain area, but sharing data across a common layer, across a common data mesh … We’re doing this very differently by stimulating a dialogue with industry and using their input along with experimentation, along with the lessons learned of CPCE, and really more smartly looking at Next Gen C2 in terms of what is the art of today and the art of the possible.”

Officials noted that the CPCE architecture had to have a data translation device in the middle of all functions to make sure data models could talk to other data models — a cumbersome and unreliable process.

“That’s fundamentally what we’re trying to solve with our integrated base data layer,” Skaggs said. “There’s no more data translation. We have integrated data ingest point where all the data is coming to one place. It’s being curated, normalized, correlated and then pushed up to the applications equally. Then those applications equally feed that data layer, so everyone’s talking to one another.”

Also, as part of the effort, the Army is working on mitigating dependencies on the cloud.

“From the network perspective is edge compute, placing a lot of emphasis on how do we and the vendors that we’ve worked with there … best process data at the edge so we’re minimizing the amount of data that needs to reach back to the cloud,” Col. Mike Kaloostian, director of transportation and network security for Army Futures Command, said. “It’s like our transition from being completely dependent on the cloud to being too enabled by the cloud. Just once again, understanding if an adversary takes our connectivity or at least reduces our connectivity to the cloud at a certain phase of an operation, per se, and we’re still going to be able to process the data that we’re going to need, our commanders will still be able to see and visualize and collaborate with his or her teams and subordinate units, so we can still do that. That’s been really our focus is thinking about that a little bit differently than the Army has done in the past.”

The service wants the Next Gen C2 efforts to have open competition from the beginning and through the lifecycle of the program.

As part of that approach, there will be multiple contract efforts, vehicles and portfolios as opposed to a single, monolithic award.

“This is going to be a portfolio of contracts, SBIRs, whatever we determined for this limited prototyping. But we are going to absolutely look at all of the tools available to us in terms of contracting,” Kitz said. “We see this very much as a multiple award. At industry day, we made it very clear, even in the limited prototyping, we expect to award to two or three vendors so that all three of those vendors have opportunities with units to deliver capability and prove that they can get after this data layer with a diverse application set sitting on top of it. We anticipate, even in the very early stages, of carrying multiple vendors. And we hope that we get proposed very different approaches to how they would solve the problem, so that we can learn about it and as we go to minimum viable capabilities with units, we can learn and iterate over time.”

C2 Fix and the bridge

As it eyes next-generation command and control, the Army is also pursing an effort dubbed C2 Fix, which focuses on so-called “fight tonight” capabilities, essentially improving the current systems in preparation for a more permanent next-generation capability.

This initiative will serve as a solutions bridge until future capabilities are developed and fielded to soldiers.

A key aspect of both efforts relates to transport, according to officials. That includes things like proliferated low-Earth orbit transport for satellite communications, latency requirements and how to obfuscate in the spectrum.

“We need to understand, and our commanders need to understand, what his or her signature looks like. That’s a survivability thing, so it’s important … that they understand what they look like. We give them the capability to understand what they look like from a spectrum standpoint, the EMS. But how you obfuscate, how you use decoys to be able to fool an enemy [is important] as well,” Kaloostian said. “To me, it’s related to Next Gen C2. It’s not at the data layer and all the stuff that Matt’s working on to make this really a data-centric C2 capability, but it is helping us think through areas that we’re making gains as an Army right now, what needs to carry over in the future, just knowing what the future fights could potentially look like.”

C2 Fix is also providing critical lessons for disaggregating forces and command posts across the battlespace to make them more mobile, and thus harder for enemies to target.

Getting to the next generation

While the Army has begun the process of reaching out to industry to set up an acquisition approach, it has also done much experimentation and science-and-technology efforts.

These activities have sought to define what the art of the possible is while developing ideas for what an architecture could look like or is needed.

The service has contracted out to a few companies such as Anduril, Palantir and Google to test multiple different options for mission command applications and provide commanders options for different viewpoints of data.

The recent NetModX experiment at Fort Dix, New Jersey, in September allowed the Army to test tenets of the network in a contested environment.

“At NetModX, we took the real network and contested that environment, … put that architecture in a much more scaled version of it that put that architecture on the real networks, and then jammed and pushed off waveforms and learned a whole bunch about what was working and not working,” Maj. Gen Patrick Ellis, director of the network cross-functional team, said. “I think industry, our industry partners are learning a ton as well because they got to see that this is what happens on an unstable network and things that just is not part of the normal business development process.”

The next step will be putting these Next Gen C2 concepts to the test at the Army’s Project Convergence Capstone 5 experiment in March 2025.

“That’s the proof of principle event. This is our Super Bowl from an experimentation standpoint. This is where everything’s going to come together,” Kaloostian said. “We will push more data than we have to this point and we will go through a more realistic scenario than we have done to this point. We will be contested in the spectrum as well. It is going to be very complicated. But the intent or what [AFC commander] Gen. [James] Rainey and [Chief of Staff] Gen. [Randy] George — the intent here is, when we get done with this proof of principle, that it validates that we’re at that prototype level, that minimum viable product. That’s where … Mr. Kitz and the team takes over.”

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FORT JOHNSON, La. — Networking capability upgrades are allowing Army units to fight in a more dispersed manner and at lower levels of classification.

A key tenet of future combat will be the need to move faster and scatter on the battlefield to avoid being targeted. Lessons from both Russia’s incursion into Ukraine in 2014 and Moscow’s full-scale invasion of its neighbor in 2022, have indicated conflicts will be much faster paced and the large static command posts that were used by the U.S. military during its recent counterinsurgency fights won’t be suitable. American forces must be more nimble to prevent adversaries from locating and attacking them.

The Army’s network team has been on a multiyear journey to modernize tactical communications and make units lighter, faster, smaller and able to pass and share more information. Those efforts were ahead of their time in many instances as they employed the rapid feedback loop that the so-called “transforming-in-contact” concept is striving for, with one official saying they are “very comfortable” with this tight linkage and feedback mechanism.

Capabilities for command, control and communication have allowed units to operate in much smaller command posts and even split their staff sections by function rather than all having to be in one command center that could be targeted and take them all out.

This was the case for both 2nd Brigade, 101st Airborne Division and 1st Battalion, 509th Infantry Regiment during a recent rotation at the Joint Readiness Training Center at Fort Johnson, Louisiana. The later unit is known as “Geronimo” and serves as a highly capable opponent for units rotating into these centers.

“It’s the ability to do this app-based and a true common operating picture, because you can seamlessly move between applications,” Col. Matthew Hardman, commander of the operations group at JRTC that runs the opposing force, said during a recent visit to the base to observe 2nd Brigade’s rotation, a key unit as part of the Army’s transforming-in-contact concept. That vision calls for using deployments and troop rotations to test new equipment — mainly commercial off-the-shelf gear — that could allow units to be more responsive on a dynamic battlefield.

Hardman noted that the footprint of Geronimo’s command post is very small, using the Integrated Tactical Network to build out capabilities and applications.

Throughout the Army’s years-long process to upgrade its network, modernized equipment has significantly shrunk the size of command posts. Smaller, more mobile command posts pose more challenging targeting problems for adversaries.

One of the innovations that allows for that shrinkage — just a couple of trucks instead of instead of large, sprawling, and often relatively static outposts — and reduced electronic emissions, is what the Army is dubbing antenna farms. During the recent exercise at Fort Johnson, those so-called farms produced all the communications for the brigade command post, which was dispersed physically from the main command post, whereas before it was co-located.

While the farm did have a signature, communications capabilities such as directional radios and proliferated low-Earth orbit satellites made it difficult for the adversary to discover it in the spectrum, unlike other capabilities such as WiFi or high-frequency systems.

During the exercise, the opposing force wasn’t able to distinguish if this was a brigade command post or a lower echelon given the small footprint and lower electromagnetic signature. Now, the enemy has to be more discretionary in terms of deciding what to hit because they don’t want to waste artillery or give away their position to attack a smaller echelon. They’re looking for bigger payoffs like a brigade or division command post.

The antenna farm is much quicker to set up and take down than previous communications setups. Officials at JRTC noted that in the past it could take 30 to 45 minutes with no troubleshooting issues to establish the network. Now, it takes close to 10 minutes, with officials saying they are waiting on the brigade command post to plug their network in or drive away, a huge distinction from the past.

Officials also explained that command, control and communications capabilities have allowed the staff sections within the brigade to disperse even more. Historically, staff for current operations, intelligence, fires and many other functions, would all be housed within the sprawling command post to run operations for the fight. This contributed to the large size.

Now, those staff sections can be separated, resulting in smaller command posts that might resemble something like a company or battalion.

Crosstalk within the command post “was very human-based, very human-centric, using our various warfighting function capabilities and bringing those together,” Maj. Gen. Brett Sylvia, commander of the 101st Airborne Division, said. “Instead of that massive humanity and all those computers … it’s a much more simple setup and a simple system, though just as capable as the one that it had, as we are integrating many of our network systems.”

While the technology is allowing that disaggregation, network officials have explained that it’s creating human problems because commanders now have to get used to communicating to all their staff sections dispersed on the battlefield as opposed to just walking up to them in the command post.

Moreover, as part of its rotation at JRTC, 2nd Brigade, 101st Airborne conducted a roughly 500-mile air assault from its home at Fort Campbell, Kentucky, to Fort Johnson in Louisiana to start the exercise.

During that effort, it had upgraded communications equipment that is part of the integrated tactical network, to include putting HMS manpack radios — the same that are used by dismounted soldiers — into helicopters, providing MUOS beyond-line-of-sight satellite comms. Previously, those aircraft only had chat functions and could only send position location information.

Those capabilities provided continuous and more robust communications tools to the unit for the entire 500-mile journey and entry into JRTC.

“If you were at JRTC, you would have seen for the first time both voice and data integration between our aerial platforms and our ground formations. And it was powerful. No more having to pick up a handset and say, ‘This is where I’m at,’” Lt. Gen. John Morrison, deputy chief of staff, G6, said at the Defense News Conference Sept. 4. “Everybody having common [situational awareness] of what is happening, whether you’re in the air or on the ground.”  

Network officials noted that with the commercialization and intuitiveness of tools now, there is less time needed to get equipment to units to become familiar with and train. Previously, with new capabilities or upgrades, the program office would have to give the technology to the unit ahead of exercises or events to allow them to familiarize themselves. That timeline is becoming shorter and shorter.

One of the other major changes for this exercise rotation was that most of the data used was unclassified. The Army has been on a push to lower the classification of communications and data on the battlefield to increase speed. Classification is often a barrier to sharing with international partners and slows down operations. But, by developing an unclassified-encrypted capability, or SBU-E, where perishable data can be lowered, network complexity is reduced.

The Army is simultaneously pursing a dual effort to provide improved capabilities to help soldiers be ready to “fight tonight” in the near term, while looking toward a future permanent solution. Those projects have been dubbed C2 Fix and C2 Next, respectively.

“One of the key tenets of both C2 Fix and next-gen C2 is this notion of using commercial encryption to provide sensitive but unclassified-encrypted communications. I will submit, as we fully implement that, that will be a game-changer for coalition interoperability, especially at the edge,” Morrison said. “The days of having to send a radio telephone operator over to an allied partner’s command post so that they can use your radio to talk back to you, will be a thing in the past. We are aggressively implementing that as a part of C2 Fix.”

Part two of this series will delve deeper into the C2 Fix and C2 Next initiatives.

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Valiant Shield, which occurred in mid-June, is a biennial exercise focused on integration between the services in a multi-domain environment in the Pacific region. This year’s exercise, the tenth such event, involved multinational partners for the first time. It allowed American forces and foreign militaries — including participation from U.S. Space Command and U.S. Transportation Command — to focus on real-world events while testing concepts such as Combined Joint All-Domain Command and Control (CJADC2), which envisions how systems across the entire battlespace from all the services and key international partners could be more effectively and holistically networked to provide the right data to commanders, faster.

“Valiant Shield gave us a great opportunity for us to work as a joint force to conduct command and control of joint forces and joint capabilities from multiple axes, across multiple domains and integrating in allies and partners down to the tactical level,” Rear Adm. Joaquin J. Martinez de Pinillos, vice commander of 7th Fleet, said in an interview. “We really had a great opportunity to really work things both at the operational level and all the way down to the tactical level and work through both the communications, command and control, how do we share information, how do we all see the same battlespace? All those things across the joint force, which are not easy to do, we were able to exercise with great success during Valiant Shield.”

Martinez de Pinillos was not able to offer many specifics on the exercise, such as what was tested or the scenarios due to classification and sensitivities, but did note that broadly, they sought for higher headquarters — specifically the joint task force commander — to pass instructions, coordinate and synchronize joint effects from their level down to tactical units across all domains.

The key challenge they sought to address was getting all units across the joint force to be able to have the same battlefield picture and synchronize effects in space and time faster than the adversary. In fact, they conducted a series of tactical engagements in simulated environments and a live fire to demonstrate that they were able to clearly understand what the joint task force commander had in mind and then show him on the field what it would look like and how they can bring all those capabilities together.

“The things I think that we have to do is if you take a look at Ukraine and you see some of the things that the Houthis [are doing in the Middle East] and all of that, I think what you’re seeing is a speed of warfare that is incredibly fast. I think the thing that we’re going to continue to work on is just our ability to just rapidly plan faster than the enemy can, faster than they can react to us, so that we’re always causing dilemmas for the enemy as we go forward,” he explained. “I think that speed that we’re going to get with these systems, because it gives us an ability to communicate so effectively across the joint force, we’re going to continue to work on that.”

Command and control

At the heart of being able to act faster than the adversary is the ability to conduct command and control: being able to sense the environment and deliver the necessary effects against a target in the right domain by the right system operated by the right military service or international partner.

This is challenging currently as each service operates its own siloed systems that don’t necessarily plug into or talk to other systems from other services — or in some cases, its own service — much less international partners.

In a future fight, a four-star combatant commander in charge of conducting warfare and coordinating effects over an entire region must be able to pick the right capabilities based on the target set. In order to do that effectively and at the speed of conflict, they must have the ability to see each service’s capabilities and coordinate them efficiently, which is at the heart of CJADC2.

“What we were working on the JFN and the CJADC2 is, we want to make sure that everybody has that same operational picture of the battlefield,” Martinez de Pinillos said, describing the Joint Fires Network, a prototyping effort serving as a battle management platform and displaying real-time, fused, actionable threat information to joint and partner forces.

Valiant Shield was the first test of the initial prototype, which will allow geographically dispersed commanders to simultaneously plan and execute with a shared common understanding of the battlespace based on sensors from any platform to provide targeting guidance to any weapon systems, according to Lockheed Martin.

“Everybody understands, when I say the words ‘track 1,2,3,’ that that is track 1,2,3 and that is the exact same thing that everybody understands the track 1,2,3,” he added. “Sounds like a very simple thing, but it is actually a very complicated thing to actually do in execution. That’s an example of something we were able to do.”

To help test these concepts for command and control and interoperability, several defense contractors participated in Valiant Shield bringing their capabilities to play in the exercise.

“For us, the Joint All-Domain Command and Control, the JADC2 objective is fundamentally to integrate stovepiped legacy systems into a digital environment that provides a mission engine that allows for a comprehensive understanding of command and control across any domain, any service, any network,” Tom Keane, senior vice president of engineering at Anduril, said in an interview.

He said they provided capabilities for the joint force to detect, locate, track and engage across domains in response to a variety of different missions geographically deployed across the Indo-Pacom region. They provided software and hardware to help warfighters ingest data at scale, do correlation of data, provide a common operating picture and then do machine-to-machine tasking.

Anduril brought its Lattice capability to the exercise, it’s software fabric that serves as a command-and-control platform ingesting data that can then automate C2 functions resulting in a scalable battle network. The company also brought its Menace family of systems, a command and control as well as compute and communications capability.

Keane noted that Menace provided communications to support denied, degraded, intermittent and limited connectivity (DDIL), which U.S. forces will face increasingly against sophisticated adversaries that will seek to deny friendly forces.

“As you think about any large operating area, especially Indo-Pacom, supporting understanding and being able to operate in denied and degraded connectivity scenarios, is incredibly valuable,” he said.

Software company Palantir also contributed to the exercise. And while it was limited in what it could say, the company noted it provided capabilities to track and engage with targets.

“Palantir software was deployed in part to help deliver the end-to-end joint force capability of detecting, locating, tracking, and engaging units across domains and mission areas. More specifically, Palantir’s software served as the digital foundation for a common data picture that enabled users from all echelons to communicate on the same basis,” Shannon Clark, head of defense growth at Palantir Technologies, said in a statement to DefenseScoop.

“The Indo-Pacific is a uniquely complex operational environment where the software systems that give America its deterrent and defensive edge must be deployed in extreme conditions. These denied, disrupted, and limited environments are precisely the conditions that industry providers build for, and it is why we actively participate in exercises like Valiant Shield — both to ensure the defense community is proficient in the advanced technologies at their disposal, and to ensure that our software solutions are tailored to meet real-world mission needs,” Clark added.

Coordinating and shifting fires

Once targets are identified, command-and-control capabilities must assist in coordinating what service or platform will actually fire upon the target, another key pillar of CJADC2.

During the exercise, planners experimented shifting fires to different commanders and services, Martinez de Pinillos said.

“Sometimes the fires would be led by the Army, and sometimes it’d be led by the Navy, and sometimes they would be led by the Marine Corps, and sometimes they’d be led by the Air Force,” he said. “We demonstrated resiliency and flexibility in our ability to shift command and control around as the problem evolved and as the conditions in the environment and the battlefield drove us that way.”

This was also demonstrated across multiple domains, synchronizing fires from subsurface, surface, into the air and space, he added.

“That allows us to do some very, very complex operations, which is something that we practice at very hard because we know as a joint force, that is the only way that we’re going to engage in combat,” he said. “Having everybody inside that JFN single network on their own systems that they’re used to working with, but then being able to link in to that Joint Fires Network so that we’re all kind of dealing with the same piece of paper, in a virtual sense, and we’re all working off at the same piece — I think was a big piece of that and really helped us coordinate and synchronize as a joint force.”

For its part, Lockheed Martin provided live theater-level operational planning for Valiant Shield, it said in a release.

“The exercise showcased the seamless integration of Lockheed Martin’s advanced command and control functions, employing Operational Planning to coordinate real-time decision-making across the theater of operations, with all the Services and operational domains. This approach enhanced the agility and responsiveness of joint operations, using live real-time data, and producing joint tasking orders in an operationally relevant environment,” the company said.

Martinez de Pinillos explained that Valiant Shield demonstrated the ability of the joint force to understand what each other’s capabilities were.

“I think all that information sharing that was going on and how we were able to rapidly communicate that through tools like JFN, through tools like Maven [Smart System], those things really helped bring and synchronize that together because everybody was working off the same sheet of paper and working together as a team and really able to maximize their contribution, because it was easy to understand what the capabilities and limitations were of whatever piece of the puzzle that they brought to it,” he said. “That allowed us to very rapidly and seamlessly bring those things together so that we were able to commensurate those effects very, very rapidly.”

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