Meadowlands is a mobile, ground-based offensive counterspace system that uses radio signals to jam adversary satellite communications. Developed by prime contractor L3Harris, the capability provides a significant upgrade to the Space Force’s current platform — the Counter Communications System (CCS) — by adding a software-defined architecture, drastically reducing weapon size and integrating automation.

L3Harris formally passed system verification review for Meadowlands in April. The Space Force then announced that Meadowlands received fielding approval on May 2 to begin training guardians on the system, with next steps being “upgrading the operating system to fulfill remote operations capabilities and multi-system management in the near future,” according to Space Operations Command.

The contractor has already delivered the first two Meadowlands units to the Space Force and the system is now going through government testing, Erik Ballard, L3Harris’s general manager for space antennas, surveillance systems, space and airborne systems, told DefenseScoop in a recent interview. The milestone was completed about six months ahead of schedule, and the company is now on track to deliver even more units through 2025, he added.

“It is more than just a block upgrade, it’s a step-change in capability,” Ballard said.

The first iteration of CCS became operational in 2004 and has received incremental upgrades over the years. L3Harris completed the final upgrade, known as 10.2, in March 2020 after the company received a development contract in 2019 to deliver five Meadowlands systems to the Space Force by December 2025.

L3Harris also received a production contract for Meadowlands in 2021 that includes over 20 additional units, the first of which is expected to be delivered this year, Ballard noted.

“The software-defined architecture … allows us to upgrade it quickly with the changing threat environment much more affordably and much faster,” he said. “I also think that the footprint size — the analogy I like to use … is, for [CCS 10.2], all your equipment fit in a bus and you hooked up an antenna behind it. Now, all that equipment fits in your SUV.”

Meadowlands also adds a significant amount of automation and remote command-and-control capabilities, meaning that a single guardian can do tasks that would have previously required multiple people. 

Col. Bryon McClain, program executive for space domain awareness and combat power at Space System Command, told reporters in April that the automation capabilities of Meadowlands will give the service a significant amount of flexibility.

“Having a system that we can reduce the number of people that are physically sitting by the antenna — turning knobs and pushing buttons — the farther we can separate that,” McClain said during a media roundtable at Space Symposium. “It gives us the ability to centralize how we do business.”

After years of keeping its offensive and defensive counterspace capabilities behind closed doors, the Space Force has recently entered a new era of openly talking about its plans to weaponize the domain against adversaries. In April, the service published a new warfighting framework that outlines three mission areas — orbital, electromagnetic and cyberspace warfare — for counterspace operations.

As the Space Force has conducted operational training on Meadowlands with guardians, Ballard said the process has been “night and day” compared to previous CCS platforms. L3Harris partnered with the Space Force early in the system’s development to ensure military personnel could easily and quickly train on the new Meadowlands platforms, he said.

“Over the last couple of months as we’ve went through government testing, [the training aspect] has really resonated with the users,” Ballard said. “That’s something that’s been in the process for a number of years. And now to hear it in feedback from users — we did the right thing there by starting that earlier.”

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“To make sure there’s no ambiguity: the architecture they are building today to defend their interests is frankly designed to inflict more casualties in the first 30 hours [of a future war] than we’ve seen in the last 30 years in the Middle East,” Kelly said during a media roundtable at the annual AFA Air, Space and Cyber conference. 

He did not provide an exact number for those “first 30 hours” of casualties. However, research from Brown University’s Watson Institute in 2019 suggests more than 7,000 U.S. service members were killed during the post-9/11 wars.

Kelly oversees the management and operation of ACC — the U.S. military’s primary force provider of combat airpower, with more than 1,000 aircraft — and has accrued more than 6,000 flying hours as a pilot, including more than 800 combat hours in fighter aircraft.

At last year’s AFA conference, Kelly detailed why and how the command’s long-term planning priority is to ensure the U.S. military reaches next-generation air dominance before China and other U.S. rivals. 

This year, he shed light on the approach and capabilities the Chinese government and military are pursuing to enhance their firepower.

“As an airman, let’s just say you don’t look at anything that’s really Air Force-related in terms of airplanes. Just look at their surface fleets — their destroyers, [Liaoning aircraft carriers], [Renhai-class cruisers], their surface-to-air missile systems they have on those tier-one, surface action group assets is wicked, wicked, dangerous territory. It’s significantly more dangerous than anything that’s fielded in and around Ukraine,” Kelly told DefenseScoop at the media roundtable on Tuesday.

He added: “If you then look at the fact that they have the same systems up and down the coast, if you look at what they can do in terms of jamming across the electromagnetic spectrum, if you look at their inventory of radar missiles — the list goes on.”

While the U.S. military spent the first two decades of this century primarily focused on a counterinsurgency campaign in the Middle East, Kelly said China has deliberately worked particularly in the last two years to organize, train, equip and field air, space and cyber forces strategically to fight the West.

“And they have done so, and put those chess pieces on the board where they need them. And there is no ambiguity that they’re designed to inflict serious damage on installations, aircraft and airmen and naval assets that are in and around those installations,” he told DefenseScoop.

Kelly also confirmed that he sees how Chinese and Russian military pilots and forces are looking to capitalize on the old age of certain U.S. aircraft and platforms as a weakness in the near term.

After speaking onstage earlier at the conference, he said he was approached by several officials representing U.S. allies and partners.

“They look to us for that beacon of competence and confidence of a military that is hitting on all cylinders, and I would say the current dynamic we’re in right now does not instill” confidence, Kelly told reporters. “Some of them are interested and vexed, some of them are downright concerned. And we try to make sure we allay those concerns as much as possible — but it’s getting more challenging by the day.”

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“Every soldier in the Army has to understand the impacts of EW,” Maj. Gen. Paul Stanton, commander of the Cyber Center of Excellence, told reporters during a media roundtable at the TechNet Augusta conference Thursday.

One of the Army’s guiding principles for its digital transformation is ensuring units maintain a low or reduced signature in the electromagnetic spectrum, which program offices are accomplishing by delivering technologies to help units lessen, manage and obfuscate their signatures.

But more broadly, soldiers must understand the risks. Stanton said the Cyber School is conducting a partnership with the Maneuver Center of Excellence along with the infantry and armor school to expose students to the effects of jamming and geolocation in the electromagnetic spectrum.

The plan is to start with the Maneuver Center and then expand the initiative to the Army’s other centers of excellence.

Additionally, units are being exposed more and more to jamming at their home station training locations as well as when they go to combat training centers for their validation rotations.

Getting soldiers exposed earlier at home stations will allow them to be more prepared when they go to a combat training center. Those rotations are high-stress environments in which entire campaigns are shrunk to two weeks for the purpose of meeting numerous training requirements and validating units. Failing due to a jamming capability would be detrimental to the entire unit’s trajectory in the Army, affecting which units meet certain readiness thresholds.

“We are exposing our forces to the EMS at the training center. That’s not good enough,” Stanton said. “We own large portions of the electromagnetic spectrum for training purposes at Fort Irwin [in California]. Now what we need to do is take those same lessons and bring them back to home station so that the first time that a soldier is exposed to being jammed is not when they’re being graded in their final exercise, or worse yet, in a real-world situation.”

This ends up being more complicated in practice because each Army installation has different regulations regarding what can be done in the spectrum. Turning on jammers requires coordination with other federal agencies so as to not interfere with commercial systems such as airplanes, which limits training and testing.

“We want to standardize the capability of turning on a jammer. However, each individual installation has responsibilities to build the electronic warfare range within their individual footprint,” Stanton said. “The Cyber School … is building out, hey, what do you need in the backwoods of Fort Campbell or at Fort Cavazos or at Fort Moore in order to train not cyber soldiers, but every soldier in the Army. There are a lot of specific regulations that we have to work our way through. The authorities to operate in the EMS at each home station is a little bit different, because many of those are localized. We’re working our way through that process right now.”

Forces at combat training centers, specifically the National Training Center at Fort Irwin, are met with a formidable electronic warfare capability from the opposing force that will jam units and geolocate them based on their signatures. In some cases, more advanced units going through Fort Irwin will use their own EW capabilities against the opposing force, Stanton said.

Another change the Army is making when it comes to home station exposure and training within the spectrum, is putting more focus on counter-electronic warfare.

“The big pivot right now is in emissions control. How do you get left in that kill chain so that they cannot identify you? If they’re identifying you, we’re using other obfuscation means by which they may have identified you, but there are decoys … and then they’re unable to target you,” Todd Boudreau deputy commandant of the Cyber School, told reporters. “A lot of the effort right now is pivoting from reacting to electromagnetic interference or electromagnetic attack to conducting counter-EW measures, which is emissions control.”

For EW-specific forces, Fort Gordon has received approval from the Army to build its own electronic warfare range where soldiers will be able to maneuver with their gear and employ it.

“We move forward with a cyber and EW multipurpose training range on Fort Gordon. It’s about 600 acres right in the middle of Fort Gordon. It has undulating terrain, it has vegetation, the humidity — all that we want. That was approved by the Army and is already in the [program objective memorandum] right now and is being influenced,” Boudreau said. “That will allow us to go from crawling with our students to then engaging the environment, movement and maneuver, light discipline, noise discipline in a combat environment, to be able to set up their height sights, to be able to do their mission to find, fix, finish the adversary and then to be able to move tactically as well.”

Stanton said this is critically important as EW soldiers will be on the front lines and must have that practical maneuver experience to be successful.

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One of the the service’s major takeaways from Russia’s 2014 invasion of Ukraine, was Russian forces’ ability to locate Ukrainian command posts and fire upon them, just based on their electronic signatures.

The Army’s Russia New Generation Warfare study in 2017 spurred several modernization efforts still ongoing today to improve signature management, reduce the size and complexity of command posts, and develop better electronic countermeasures and jamming capabilities.

The service has continued on this modernization effort, renewed by observations in Ukraine’s current conflict with Moscow as well as the sophisticated capabilities of other top competitors such as China.

The goal is to be able to hide in plain sight, leaders have said, which means relying on new technologies and tactics that make units harder to detect in the spectrum, but not hamper their ability to get their jobs done.

“We have got to build a network that is hard to find, that it’s hard to target,” Mark Kitz, program executive officer for command, control, communications-tactical, told DefenseScoop at the TechNet Augusta conference.

The Army wants to tailor certain technological options and concepts based on particular units and the environment they will be operating in. But in order to do that effectively, they must understand what they look like in the spectrum.

“We also have to see ourselves. We also have to understand when we turn on jammers, we have to understand our own network and our own environment,” Kitz said.

A “commander is going to have to make decisions about what parts of the network he’s going to want to enable and what parts of the network he’s going to want to obfuscate,” he added. “Every commander is going to have to make those decisions, because each fight, each snippet of spectrum is going to look so different.”

For example, disaster relief responses will likely be conducted in a more permissive environment allowing commanders to rely on digitally louder technologies such as 5G. However, a GPS-denied environment, Kitz noted, means spectrum will immediately be contested.

“I think the Army has to embrace that each operational environment, the future spectrum is going to potentially look very different,” Kitz said. “Each commander is going to have to make hard decisions about spectrum, signature reduction efforts, and having the thickened capacity that he needs to run his network.”

The signature management issue spans across Army program executive offices. And to allow the Army to see itself in the spectrum, a program will be coming online next year with PEO Intelligence, Electronic Warfare and Sensors called Spectrum Situational Awareness System (S2AS), he noted.

This effort is a commercial-off-the-shelf solution that will provide sensing and visualization of what units look like in the spectrum.

Army units are beginning to baseline their signatures. During a recent operational assessment in Germany, a unit collected what its signature looked like.

Additionally, when units go to the combat training centers for their validation exercises, they’re now starting to ensure some type of baseline as a means of understanding what a normal output might look like to inform their signature management.

“What I’ve seen out of the [combat training centers] is they are starting to collect what the signatures look like of the” command posts, Col. Shermoan Daiyaan, project manager for tactical radios at C3T, told DefenseScoop. “They don’t really have a baseline. I’ve seen some heat maps that showed a signature within CPs from the CTC rotations. We don’t know if it was high or low, or if that’s good or bad. They’re starting to build that type of capability to see themselves, and we got to get there.”

Daiyaan added that commanders are now starting to make decisions on who can talk on a radio because once anyone in a unit pushes that button, they radiate in the spectrum and can be found by the enemy.

“I had one commander would put it to me this way: He says, ‘Shermoan I’m asking myself, who should be authorized to squelch the hand mic on a radio?’ He’s saying, ‘I’m making it an O-6 decision on who should hit a mic on a radio … because I want to hide in plain sight,’” Daiyaan said.

Kitz explained that the program office wants to be able to tailor capabilities to those commanders’ specific needs.

“If a commander is so worried about just keying a mic, that’s a very different operational environment than we encountered in Afghanistan or encounter today,” he said. “I think tailoring that infrastructure is really important, allowing those commanders to understand these are the risks that I’m going to take when I break squelch.”

Ultimately, commanders need those options — and the program office needs to enable their mission, not limit them — because commanders can’t be blindly turning everything on and conversely, can’t turn everything off because the threat of being discovered is so great.

Technology needs

Signature management will be a key area in the Army’s upcoming technical exchange meeting in December, which will be the 11^th iteration. These biannual events gather members of industry, the Army acquisition community, Army Futures Command and the operational community to outline priorities and capabilities to modernize the service’s network.

“I think industry wants to know, hey, this is …a top three thing for [Maj.] Gen. [Jeth] Rey at the network CFT. ‘How do I get in, where can I make an investment to help build out some more of those options?’ I think that’s what we focus on at TEM 11,” Kitz said.

Initiatives come down to “blocking and tackling.”

“Making sure that as we execute radio buys, as we execute SATCOM, across the whole portfolio, that we’re really looking at [low probability of intercept/low probability of detection] and we’re really taking into account what the signature will be,” he said.

On the radio side, Daiyaan explained the Army is looking for capability modes where soldiers can go out and just send enough of a signature to collect packets and position location information.

Others described ongoing science-and-technology efforts involving antenna remoting and obfuscation that puts more signals into the battlespace to be able to hide within the noise.

Other efforts involve ongoing waveform development and modernization.

“We’ve already done piloting of other waveforms … like millimeter wave or free space optics. The signature is like much reduced on those and they’re directional, so unless you’re an enemy right in that line of sight, you’re not going to see the signal either,” Matt Maier, project manager for interoperability, integration and services at C3T, told DefenseScoop.

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The Mounted Assured Position, Navigation and Timing System (MAPS) program provides vehicles with the capability to operate in environments where access to GPS is jammed, spoofed, or otherwise denied. The first iteration, known as GEN I, was a quick reaction capability provided to U.S. forces for anti-jam antenna to ensure GPS accessibility. GEN II provides increased protection with sensor fusion algorithms and non-radio frequency sensors and was awarded to Collins Aerospace.

However, the MAPS program only covers a slice of the totality of Army vehicles.

“We’re aware that the vast majority of warfighters will not be covered by this program of record,” Aaron Mebust, director of GPS Source at General Dynamics Mission Systems, said in an interview.

General Dynamics was the main contractor for MAPS GEN I, which is how the company determined a capabiltiy gap existed.

“We have learned a lot through fielding to those brigade combat teams that were supported through the MAPS GEN I effort,” he said. “We’ve applied a lot of those lessons learned into our tiered product approach and what we have is a low cost, easily installed … family of products that we believe will very elegantly address the threats and the vulnerabilities.”

The tiered system General Dynamics has developed, which is designed to operate alongside the MAPS program, provides capabilities based on how intense the denied environments could be. The most extreme, dubbed Condition 3, involves a highly denied environment. In Condition 2, forces can expect some level of jamming, while Condition 1 involves novel jamming and interruption of GPS.

This threat picture is based upon Army threat data and it would be up to the Army to decide which units or vehicles will get what tier, Mebust said. However, he noted that a general rule of thumb is Condition 1 would be combat service and support vehicles — such as depot level maintenance and larger logistical elements; Condition 2 would be combat support — such as ammunition haulers, fuel haulers and ambulances; and Condition 3 would be ground combat systems.

“Even though 20,000 ground combat systems are going to get MAPS GEN I and MAPS GEN II, there are still a large number of those vehicles that will not get a MAPS solution as part of the program of record. This would be a very good fit for those platforms that are going to be exposed to that very high-energy environment in which GPS will likely be denied,” Mebust said. “We’ve created these systems to make it very easy for the Army to understand that these systems are, number one, available today, number two, are cost effective and number three, very easily defined what the performance criteria of these systems are so they can align the performance of the systems with the mission requirements of those platforms.”

No requirement currently exists for what General Dynamics is proposing, meaning the Army is not funding such an effort or putting it out for contractors to bid — so General Dynamics had to develop the technology on their own dime.

“We know, based off our experience with MAPS GEN I and looking at the MAPS GEN II program of record, we know the Army needs something like this,” Mebust said, noting that this is similar to how the GEN I program came into being.

General Dynamics recognized a need, invested its own money and eventually was funded to provide MAPS GEN I to the force.

“There is general consensus across the board that something needs to be done, that the program of record is insufficient for the entire force. Now, have requirements been written? No. Has money been POMed? No,” Mebust said, referencing the program objective memorandum that budgets out for five years. “But there is the general agreement that something needs to be done and we’re helping spur those discussions as to what does that look like, what are the performance requirements, what are the price points, what are the volumes that we’re talking about.”

General Dynamics has taken its systems out to a variety of government test events to demonstrate its capability and utility in the hopes the Army will soon develop a requirement to get it into the hands of soldiers.

“We have attended these government test sessions. They use threat-relevant emitters to put us in a contested and a challenged environment, and we produce an output with our systems and we share the results with those organizations in the Army so they can see what industry is capable of doing,” Mebust said. “We’ve been informing the Army helping to get to realize that yes, there are options, there are solutions out there, they are readily available, they are worthwhile, it is something that absolutely will increase the resilience of the force when it comes to threats to PNT.”

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“I’m really impressed with the MFEW program that the Army has,” Gabe Camarillo, undersecretary of the Army, told reporters Tuesday at Aberdeen Proving Ground regarding the Multi-Function Electronic Warfare-Air Large program. “I got to see one of the prototypes out in the field today from [Program Executive Office Intelligence, Electronic Warfare and Sensors] and came away really impressed,” he said.

MFEW is a pod capable of serving as the first brigade-organic airborne electronic attack asset and providing limited cyberattack capability. The fiscal 2022 budget saw a cut in what previous budget plans had forecasted would be $12 million in procurement. The Army added back $3 million for MFEW in its fiscal 2023 budget request.

Camarillo was at Aberdeen Proving Ground to witness progress on a variety of network and electronic warfare capabilities the Army is building.

Officials from IEW&S explained to reporters that MFEW had to “prove it” following the loss of procurement funds, but ultimately, through testing, realized incredible return on investment.

“We needed to be able to produce the data, have confidence in the data [and] we got to that point where the milestone decision was covered in the data that we had,” Col. Ed Barker, the deputy program executive officer, said.

The testing allowed the program office to go back to Army officials and articulate what it can do, which in turn, led to the procurement of six pods, William Utroska, deputy project manager for PEO IEW&S, told reporters.

Given the system is now going to be platform agnostic, officials described a wide range of capabilities and uses across the Army depending on the mission set, making it extremely versatile. Provided a platform has an Ethernet port and power, the pod can fly on it, officials said.

“That’s why this is multifunction. Depending on the mission, this can be — if you want something more precise, there are other platforms, but this is multifunction, gives you a range, deep sensing,” Utroska said.

The pod is designed to do electronic attack — jamming, electronic support and sensing — as well as limited cyberattack through radio frequency-delivered effects. The latter also allows the pod to perform military information support operations by delivering information or messaging via radio frequency.

Despite initially being designed to fly on unmanned systems, which against sophisticated adversaries can be vulnerable, officials said the pod itself makes the platforms it is mounted on more survivable in that it can find targets and attack them, which in turn, protects the aircraft.

Officials said it will be tested with the High Accuracy Detection and Exploitation System (HADES) program — a jet that is part of the Army’s overall plan to modernize aerial intelligence systems. In this role, it would primarily be an electronic or communications intelligence (ELINT) asset used for deep sensing. There could be some limited electronic attack, but officials have said that would be more challenging at those higher altitudes.

“Electronic attack, I would say no. I think we’re still in the learning phase and still understanding what type of capability would be effective at that altitude, especially HADES at 40-45,000 feet is a challenge for electronic attack,” Mark Kitz, program executive officer for IEW&S, told FedScoop in an interview at the TechNet Augusta conference last week. “But for detection and ELINT capability, absolutely.”

Officials noted that at those high altitudes, some adjustments might need to be made to the pod given it is meant to fly between 15,000 and 25,000 feet but can go as high as 42,000 feet before needing to do extra cooling.

“We got to figure out where’s the sweet spot,” Barker said.

There has been interest from the Army’s future vertical lift cross-functional team for the pod as well.

“We’re working with the future vertical lift CFT because they have EW requirements and they know we’ve already done a lot of the work upfront,” Utroska said. “We just have to determine what form factor and what [size, weight and power] is required … For other platforms, we can provide a smaller form factor if there’s a requirement.”

The Army is betting MFEW underpins several service priorities.

“The other takeaway here too is between the long-range precision fires, those interdependencies, future vertical lift, across the Army’s priorities — this is one of those enabling functions, enabling capabilities that’s going to allow the Army to address a wide range of our top priorities between long-range precision fires, future vertical lift,” Barker said.

Officials also said the Air Force is interested in the pod, or at least the underlying capability. The service expressed interest in mounting it on A-10s and is working with the Army to buy down risk on requirements development for a new payload system based on open architectures.

The open architecture nature of the pod is its secret sauce, officials said.

“I will say that one of the things that’s great about it is the adoption of modular open system architectures. I think that’s one area where I think the Army is heading in the right direction,” Camarillo said. “Giving us the ability to not just look at sensor payloads and EW payloads, but how they fit in certain components, how we can plug and play over time, to give us an opportunity to do that tech insertion and to stay ahead of what the threat might be and also have the latest generation capabilities. I walked away today very impressed from that perspective.”

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Past efforts have aimed to improve communications between aircraft and ground units. But this time, the service be looking to put waveforms in their ground communications assets on airborne systems to assess ground extension for mesh networking and thickening of the network.

These experiments are part of developing design goals for future communications capability deliveries in 2025 and 2027.

The Army has adopted a multiyear strategy involving the incremental development and delivery of new capabilities to its integrated tactical network, involving a combination of program-of-record systems and commercial off-the-shelf tools. Those “capability sets” now provide technologies to units every two years, each building upon the previous delivery. Capability Set 21 was primarily designed for infantry brigades; Capability Set 23 is focused on Stryker brigades, and Capability Set 25 is focused on armored brigades.

There are initial design goals for this aerial networking tier for Capability Set 25, and officials want to line up requirements with funding in future years for more capabilities related to Capability Set 27.

During this incremental build process, the Army has sought to concurrently field, experiment and build design goals for future capability sets as a means of harnessing the best technologies and getting soldier feedback early in the process.

Army officials briefed their plans earlier this week during the eighth Technical Exchange Meeting in Philadelphia. These events gather members of industry, the Army acquisition community, Army Futures Command and the operational community to outline priorities and capabilities to modernize the service’s tactical network.

The Army is placing two waveforms — TrellisWare’s TSM and Silvus — from its integrated tactical network on airborne assets and will be looking at a variety of things.

“We’ve done this before in the past, but what are we doing that’s different? This go around, we’re looking at the detectability of it, we’re looking at jamming, we’re looking at determining that CONOPs [concept of operation] so that we can go back and eventually get a requirement that we could put down and eventually have this dedicated comms relay asset,” said Scott Newman, project manager for interoperability, integration and services at Program Executive Office Command, Control, Communications-Tactical.

Newman told FedScoop after his remarks that while the Army has had nodes up for some time, they’ve never examined how these systems in the air would respond if attacked or jammed.

Specifically, this year officials are looking at low probability of intercept and low probability of detection, and what the concept of operations would be to respond to potential jamming threats.

“That hasn’t been done before. We’ve always had stuff up in the air that said, ‘Okay, yeah, an aerial node provides range extension and provides connectivity,’ but we never solidified what the CONOPs actually means. That’s what we’re going to do now,” he said. “We just want to see, okay, if the enemy jams us, how is it affected in the air.”

He continued: “We’re going to replay those exact same threats, or the threats that we’ve seen from current activities that are airworthy, I’ll call it, and see how what will happen if we are attacked in the air.”

Moreover, while air-to-ground networking has been done aboard helicopters in the past, this time, the Army wants to experiment using unmanned systems, particularly those that would be organic to units, such as smaller Group 1 or Group 2 drones.

The Army is planning to conduct these experiments in fiscal 2022 and 2023 during NetModX — an annual experiment to test how technologies fare in operatically realistic environments — and Project Convergence, an annual capstone experiment the Army is conducting to test concepts related to the Pentagon’s larger Joint All-Domain Command and Control (JADC2) effort to better connect sensor and shooter data.

Next year, the Army plans to put out a request for information related to size, weight and power (SWaP) considerations for radios and aircraft.

“We’re going to take our lessons learned. We’re going to look at the CONOPs, we’re going to look at what we found from the reports of TSM and … put out an RFI to look at SWaP,” Newman said. “All this is going to be used to inform decisions as part of Cap Set 25 so that we can get a dedicated comms asset out to the field. So, that’s what we’re going to be doing for the next two years.”

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