While largely expressing support for the initiative, lawmakers said they need more info.

“Unfortunately, we still have not received any real information on the Army’s budget request, nor have we received any detailed information on the Army’s Transformation Initiative, or ATI, the secretary and the chief announced over a month ago,” Rep. Mike Rogers, R-Ala., chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, said. “I believe I speak for most of the members of this committee when I say that we share the goal of developing a more modern, agile and well-equipped Army.”

At the end of April, the service announced what it dubbed Army Transformation Initiative, seeking to shrink its headquarters elements, become leaner, cut programs that aren’t efficient and change how it spends, following a directive from Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth for sweeping changes to the service.

Rogers told Army Chief of Staff Gen. Randy George and Secretary of the Army Daniel Driscoll at Wednesday’s HASC hearing that the committee wants to see the service’s “homework” given the significance of what leaders are trying to do.

“We need to see your homework. An overhaul this significant should be based on a thorough assessment of requirements. And it should include a detailed blueprint of the specific changes being proposed and how the Army plans to implement them. We need to see those assessments and blueprints,” he said. “We also need you to provide us a timeline for implementing ATI. These details will help Congress understand, evaluate, and ultimately fund, your transformation efforts.”

That concern was shared by other top members of the committee as well.

“I want to applaud both of you publicly for diving into that very difficult subject. It needs to be done. Now, the chairman is right, the details need to be worked out, but there is no question that the nature of warfare is changing dramatically. How do we adjust our force to meet those challenges?” Rep. Adam Smith, D-Wash., the panel’s ranking member, said. “Your efforts in that are broadly supported by this committee. Devil’s in the details, but you’re headed in the right direction and we look forward to working with you to make some of those changes.”

Others expressed dismay regarding how the Army has presented the reform effort and requested more details from leadership.

“Like many of my colleagues, I am frustrated by how the Army has decided to roll out this Army Transformation Initiative. It doesn’t matter which side of the aisle that we’re on here, we all want to make sure that the Army is lethal, it is ready to meet the challenges of today and tomorrow,” Rep. Eric Sorensen, D-Ill., said. “However, you chose to give us a plan with few details, with no budgeting and a failure to answer a lot of our questions. Now we’re hearing about how this plan will be implemented from my own constituents, not from leadership. The Army and Congress have always had a better relationship than that.”

When service leaders announced their intentions for reforms, they stated that they were aimed at better posturing the service to deter China in the Pacific theater. But some on the Hill want them to be more forthcoming.

“The Army Transformation Initiative has generated more questions than answers in the department’s attempt to deliver critical warfighting capabilities, optimize our force structure and eliminate waste and obsolete programs,” Rep. Derek Tran, D-Calif., said. “In particular, I am concerned with how the ATI positions the Army to better counter a near-peer adversary like the People’s Republic of China. China’s ability to rapidly field new capabilities can be attributed to its centralized political and military decision-making, state-directed industrial base, incremental fielding of new systems and their blatant theft of foreign intellectual property, all with little to no public oversight.”

When asked for a timeline for details of what the service is proposing, Army Secretary Dan Driscoll told the committee that the transformation will be an iterative process and that there won’t be a single date for everything in the initial batch of transformation.

“We will be hopefully doing what the best companies in America do and learning as we go,” Driscoll said, noting some efforts are in progress. He promised to share details as soon as “reasonable drafts” are in place.

He said many of the cuts to obsolete programs will be reflected in the forthcoming fiscal 2026 budget.

“We’re obviously continuing with FY25 [spending] because that’s what we were directed to do with our budget,” George said, adding that they’re canceling Humvees and haven’t asked to purchase new ones.

HASC members said they wanted to ensure that the Army was making transformation choices based on real policy decisions that will help the service counter battlefield threats more effectively rather than being purely rooted in budgetary constraints.

“If budget is driving policy, you’re going to have a problem by this committee. If policy is being driven first and budget is a consequence, then we’re going to be open ears,” Rogers said. “But you can’t just try to make your policy or your construct fit a number that’s arbitrary. We need you to let us know what you need and then let us worry about funding it, because that’s what we’re here for. Just know that there’s other people that see this same way you do, which is why we need a budget so we can talk about these things. But I can’t overstate, we are not going to be hostile to dramatic changes if it’s being driven by the need for change and not just to meet some budget number that somebody’s handed to you.”

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For starters, leaders believe it is a validation of some of the radical change the service is seeking in how to procure and manage capabilities differently in the future.

“Yesterday was a really good example of just how quickly technology is changing the battlefield. We’ve seen this over the last couple of years that everybody talks about [Program Objective Memorandum] cycles and everybody talks about program of record. I think that’s just old thinking,” Gen. Randy George, chief of staff of the Army, said Monday during the Exchange, an AI conference hosted by the Special Competitive Studies Project.

POM cycles refer to the five-year planning process for programs and capabilities in the Pentagon.

George noted that technology is changing too rapidly on the modern battlefield to be wedded to these large procurement programs that historically have taken years to develop and once fielded, can be largely obsolete.

He wants to shrink the timeline it takes to develop systems and get them in the hands of soldiers, especially given much of these capabilities, such as drones, communications gear and electronic warfare tools, are increasingly available on the commercial market.

“What we got to do is make sure that we’re aligned and that’s what we’re trying to do, changing the processes up here to make sure that we’re getting them the equipment, the war-winning capabilities that they know they need,” he said. “We’re going to have to be more agile. Drones are going to constantly change. We’re going to be trying to play the cat-and-mouse game with counter-UAS, so we’re going to have to work through that to make sure that we’re buying systems. We’re going to need a lot more agility in how we buy things.”

The Army has been experimenting with this approach through what it calls transforming-in-contact, which aims to speed up how the service buys technologies and designs its forces by injecting emerging capabilities into units and letting them experiment with them during exercises and deployments.

George said one of the Army’s units that just went to the Joint Readiness Training Center at Fort Johnson, Louisiana — which provides the most realistic combat scenarios the Army can create for units to train where forces simulate a battle campaign against an active enemy — had close to 400 drones in it. That is substantially higher than the number of drones other formations have had recently, with 3rd Brigade, 10th Mountain Division possessing over 200 during a January rotation in Europe, previously the most to date.

The Army doesn’t want to field the same systems like that for years because the technology changes so rapidly.

“We’re constantly updating those. I think that that’s how we have to be focused moving forward,” George said.

He also noted that Ukraine’s drone attack over the weekend flips the cost curve. Kyiv used relatively cheap systems to destroy millions to billions of dollars worth of Russian combat power.

“Look at how cheap those systems were compared to what they took out. We have to be thinking about that [with] everything we’re doing,” George said.

The attack, furthermore, exemplified how transparent battlefields are becoming, meaning there is nowhere to hide.

“We talk a lot about you can’t really hide anymore on the modern battlefield. You’re going to have to be dispersed, lower signature, all of those things, which we talk a lot about with our troops and with our commanders,” George said.

Moreover, the attack was videoed and viewed around the world hours later. The increasingly open-source nature of information about military activities around the world has implications for how the Army will operate in the future.

“We all knew about that within a matter of minutes. Everything was out there on open source,” George said.

The high-profile Ukrainian assault against Russian bombers came as the U.S. Army is in the midst of a major transformation effort. At the end of April, the service announced what it dubbed Army Transformation Initiative, where it seeks to shrink its headquarters elements, become leaner and change how it spends.

As part of that effort, Secretary Dan Driscoll said his service pitched itself to President Donald Trump and Pentagon leadership as the “innovation engine” for the Department of Defense by plucking the best ideas and technologies from the commercial sector and testing them out in the Army.

“We fundamentally believe the Army should be the innovation engine of the Pentagon … but we have to earn that right,” Driscoll said alongside George at Monday’s AI conference. “We basically said, hey, we will earn the right to do this by — we’ll cut ourselves. For ATI, the other thing … is it’s $3 billion dollars of cuts, and that’s a lot of money that people want to go to other programs. We’ve made the cuts, we’re recycling it to buy the things we want and need. We’re going to continue to run that engine and innovate.”

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The traditional acquisition system can take years from initial requirements to fielding meaning that by the time units received it, the capability could be outdated or didn’t work as intended.

“The American politicians over 30 years have harmed the American soldier, not necessarily intentionally in all instances, but they have let rational decision-making decay. They have a lot of calcified bureaucracy get in the way of doing what’s right,” Secretary Daniel Driscoll told reporters Thursday at the Pentagon. “We are changing that. From this moment forward, we are going to make every decision, and the only thing we are going to weigh is this good for the American soldier, does this make them more lethal, when we send them around the world to fight and kill on our behalf, does this increase the odds of them succeeding at that mission and coming home to their community safely?”

This comes on the heels of a memo signed Wednesday by Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth charging Driscoll to transform the Army by making it leaner through combining and slashing certain headquarters elements and changing how the service purchases capabilities, all in the name of prioritizing homeland defense and deterring China in the Indo-Pacific.

Driscoll noted that the Army going forward will eliminate obsolete equipment that continued to show up in motor pools despite soldiers wanting to get rid of them.

“All of these parochial interests and all of these lobbyists that crawl around this building and crawl around Congress, they have succeeded for far too long. The first thing is, we are going to start to cut the things we don’t want or need,” he said.

Gen. Randy George, chief of staff, noted how the Army last year canceled the RQ-7 Shadow drone program, a capability he said wasn’t very good when he was a brigade commander in Afghanistan in 2009.

“We just have to stop spending our money on things that we know are not going to make us more lethal,” George said.

Key to that effort is modular and open systems, something George has been pushing for the last year-plus. Officials didn’t outline any specific metrics they’d use to evaluate whether a program wasn’t meeting lethality standards, but they stressed they want to rely on commercially available, dual-use systems to get out of the game of custom-built systems as much as they can.

A prime example is the GM Defense-designed Infantry Squad Vehicle, an expeditionary vehicle based off a Chevy Colorado, with a special off-road kit that enhances capability across complex terrain.

“It’s already got consumer buy-in, it’s got a consumer demand signal that the company can build out manufacturing. It can model out what it needs. In the years where the United States Army has funding constraints or when it gets caught up in Congress, they’re not relying on us to keep their lights on,” Driscoll said. “That is the perfect kind of model for most. And much of our equipment should be these dual-use purposed vehicles and assets so that we’re capable of being a better partner. The things we’re going to try to avoid is being the sole customer of a business, because it’s not fair to us and it’s not fair to the business.”

George said officials want systems that can be easily modified and upgraded. The ISV provides a template to mount different sensors and systems that aren’t produced by GM Defense, a key aspect going forward for modularity.

He said any vehicle, for example, will need an active protection system, but some companies will be better at building them than others. The platform builder doesn’t have to be the one to develop the active protection system as well.

“We should be looking at acquisition in terms of what we can adopt. You have a program manager that says, ‘okay, I can adopt this technology because it’s out there and it’s dual use,’” George said. “There’s others that you could modify. ISV is an example. It’s dual use, but you can modify it.”

Driscoll pointed to the startup and venture capital world, which has in the last few years come booming into the defense sector. Many top officials in the Trump administration have private equity and venture capital backgrounds, so it’s no surprise the military would be looking to prioritize those types of avenues.

Notably, Secretary Hegseth early in his tenure signed a memo directing components to leverage the software acquisition pathway. In his memo last night, he directed the Army to expanded use of other transaction agreements. The Army has typically been the service with the most OTA use in the past.

“Startups in the venture capital community have solved this for a very long time. You create a minimum viable product, you get it into the hand of your customers, and you get market feedback, and you tweak and pivot,” Driscoll said. “We, the Army, can and should, and we are doing that now too, to hold ourselves accountable and tighten the feedback loop in our manufacturing process.”

He cited an example from an unmanned company that makes autonomous software for commercial cars, or what Driscoll called the “brains” of commercial vehicles. While that company had never worked with the military before, the Army provided them with an ISV and Humvee and gave them 10 days to see what they could do.

According to Driscoll, the technology allowed the vehicles to be controlled autonomously and synchronize with drones, among other things. The Army sent those vehicles to soldiers to play with in the field to figure out what worked and what didn’t.

While Driscoll said he’s not sure if the Army will work with that company again, he cited that as a key example of how the service wants to operate in the future.

“This would have taken five-to-eight years in any other instance. And we’ve done it in under three weeks so far,” he said.

George also noted that much of this modularity begins with the network. In order to be able to share information and move data rapidly, there needs to be a robust communications backbone.

Much of these lessons have been and will continue to be learned through the service’s transforming-in-contact effort, which aims to speed up how the Army buys capabilities and designs its forces by injecting emerging capabilities into units and letting them experiment with them during exercises and deployments.

“The drones that we had for the second brigade were different than the first, so on and so forth,” George said of transforming-in-contact. “It’s the bottom-up feedback. That’s what we need to continue to do for everything we have.”

Editor’s Note: This story was updated May 5 with clarifying information from GM Defense, the contractor for the Infantry Squad Vehicle.

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In an April 30 memo to the secretary of the Army, Hegseth ordered a vast set of alterations to the service aimed at building a leaner and more lethal force that prioritizes defending the homeland and deterring China in the Indo-Pacific.

The administration has made homeland defense — to include securing the southern border and building the “Golden Dome” missile defense system — as well as deterring China, top priorities. The latter includes shifting resources to the Pacific at the potential expense of other theaters, according to press reports. 

Some of the changes pushed by Hegseth in his directive — such as consolidated budget lines in unmanned systems, counter-drone systems and electronic warfare, force structure changes and expanded use of other transaction agreements — are already being pursued.

The memo, however, directs much deeper change to include consolidating certain headquarters elements and changes to how the Army contracts, some of which were reported earlier this week by Breaking Defense.

“[T]he Army must prioritize investments in accordance with the Administration’s strategy, ensuring existing resources are prioritized to improve long-range precision fires, air and missile defense including through the Golden Dome for America, cyber, electronic warfare, and counter-space capabilities,” Hegseth wrote. “I am directing the Secretary of the Army to implement a comprehensive transformation strategy, streamline its force structure, eliminate wasteful spending, reform the acquisition process, modernize inefficient defense contracts, and overcome parochial interests to rebuild our Army, restore the warrior ethos, and reestablish deterrence.”

Among some of the biggest changes, the memo directs the secretary of the Army to downsize or close redundant headquarters. That includes merging Army Futures Command — responsible for developing requirements and experimentation for future capabilities — and Training and Doctrine Command, both four-star organizations, and merging four-star headquarters Forces Command with Army North and Army South into a single headquarters focused on homeland defense.

It also calls for restructuring the Army’s sustainment organizations to realign elements within the four-star Army Materiel Command including the integration of Joint Munitions Command and Army Sustainment Command to optimize operational efficiency.

Other force structure changes Hegseth called for include merging headquarters of organizations to generate combat power capable of synchronizing kinetic and non-kinetic effects, spaced-based capabilities and unmanned systems, reducing and restructuring manned attack helicopter formations, and augmenting the force with drone swarms and divesting of “outdated” formations, such as select armor and aviation units across the total Army, though those select units were not named in the directive.

Chief of Staff Gen. Randy George told reporters later Thursday that the Army is converting some armor brigade combat teams in the National Guard to mobile brigade combat teams, which he said will make them much more nimble for the missions that they need to do, whether it’s stateside or abroad.

Some initiatives require fielding certain capabilities or meeting other objectives by a set time — mostly either by 2026 or 2027 — such as achieving “electromagnetic and air-littoral dominance by 2027.”

The Army must field unmanned systems and ground- and air-launched effects in every division and extend advanced manufacturing such as 3D printing to operational units by 2026. The service must also improve counter-drone systems and integrate capabilities into platoons by 2026 and companies by 2027, and enable AI-driven command and control at theater, corps and division headquarters by 2027, according to Hegseth.

On the procurement side, the memo directs ending procurement of obsolete systems as well as canceling or scaling back ineffective or redundant programs such as manned aircraft, excess ground and outdated drones, eliminating “wasteful” contracts and “excess” travel funding and expanding multi-year procurement agreements when it’s cost-effective.

“What we’ve learned in the last couple of years in the conflict in Ukraine is that the old way of doing war will no longer suffice,” Army Secretary Daniel Driscoll said Thursday morning in an appearance on Fox and Friends alongside George.

“Under the leadership for President Trump and Secretary of Defense Hegseth, they basically have empowered the United States Army to go make the hard decisions and the hard changes to reallocate our dollars to best position our soldiers to be the most lethal that they can be,” Driscoll said. “These are hard decisions. These are legacy systems that have been around for a long time. There’s a lot of momentum. There’s a lot of lobbyists around them. but with the leadership of those gentlemen and our chain of command, we have been empowered to go do what’s right.”

George noted that there isn’t necessarily a problem with innovation as soldiers have been innovating the last few years, particularly under one of his keystone efforts dubbed transforming-in-contact since early 2024. The initiative aims to speed up how the Army buys capabilities and designs its forces by injecting emerging capabilities into units and letting them experiment with them during exercises and deployments.

Three brigades transformed into either mobile or light brigade combat teams over the last year as part of transformating-in-contact 1.0. Now, the service is pushing the initiative to the next level and focusing on armor formations and divisions as a whole, to include enabling units, National Guard units and multi-domain task forces, as well as technologies such as autonomy.

“We don’t have a challenge with the innovation. The innovation’s happening down with our soldiers. We’re changing formations right now,” George said alongside Driscoll. “We had an exercise [where] we had more than 200 drones in a brigade combat team. We’re watching what’s happening. We know we need to change and … we just can’t go fast enough, we got to speed that change.”

George was referencing the last transforming-in-contact brigade, 3^rd Brigade, 10^th Mountain Division’s culminating exercise in January where they used more drones than had ever previously been used.

Regarding the change to formations, the Army’s number two officer last week said the service is planning to approve force design updates on what those mobile and light brigades will look like going forward based on the transforming-in-contact effort. Those changes are expected to be made soon and released in October.

Officials have stressed more experimentation is to come as they don’t necessarily know the right mix of certain capabilities such as drones at echelon. More experimentation is needed to better understand what forces might need in the future.

This story has been updated with comments from Chief of Staff Randy George regarding armored units being converted.

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Three brigades conducted their capstone training events during that period, testing how new technology and concepts can make them more lethal. The effort was part of Chief of Staff Gen. Randy George’s so-called transforming-in-contact initiative, which aims to use 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. The effort is initially focused on unmanned aerial systems, counter-UAS and electronic warfare.

Each unit experimented in different geographic regions with different terrain and weather conditions that ranged from wooded swamps to the humid archipelagos of the Pacific to the freezing sprawl of European hills.

As a result, the Army will be making decisions on how these units will be organized going forward.

“We’re exploring how we’re organized to make sure that we can maximize these capabilities. But environment is a big part of it, as you know, where different things do different things. What we’re getting after, after this third one is we are going to make some decisions on how the Army is organized in our brigade combat teams,” George said during a pre-record discussion with Defense One that aired Thursday — a talk that likely took place in February based on his reference to upcoming events. “We’ve had these three experiments in three different areas. Next month, they’re going to come back to me and Secretary of the Army with … the new force design update and here’s how we want to change the formation. We will look at that and we will broadly have the same formations, but we will have some flexibility based on what environments they go to.”

Each brigade during the experiments created new elements that sought to do roughly the same thing but varied a bit in terms of numbers and makeup, with some calling them multifunction reconnaissance companies and others calling them strike companies. The three units have already begun to transform with 2nd Brigade, 101st Airborne Division as the first mobile brigade combat team and 2nd Brigade, 25th Infantry Division and 3rd Brigade, 10th Mountain Division transitioning to light brigade combat teams.

New technology allowed these units to be nimbler and more mobile on the battlefield, presenting unique problems to the resident opposing force that fights several Army brigades each year.

The experimentation is helping officials determine how units are organized and what types of skills personnel need such as master drone operators at the company level or tech integrators at battalion, George said.

To become faster on the battlefield, the Army is also examining how to eliminate excess within formations. George noted that advancements to the network have replaced large static legacy server stacks that were clunky to lug around and difficult to set up with software defined radios and tablets.

Those reductions are not only making units more mobile, they’re also making their electromagnetic signatures smaller. And the funds that went to those legacy capabilities can be reinvested toward other “war winning” capabilities that are needed, George said.

The Army is continuing its transforming-in-contact experimentation with the next phase, dubbed 2.0, which will begin to pull in full divisions as well as armored and Stryker brigades and Multi-Domain Task Forces.

Transforming-in-contact 2.0 will further help determine formation types as the Army continues to experiment with fuel consumption and supply lines that are enabled by 3D printing on the battlefield.

“If you’re reducing the fuel, you’re reducing the supply lines that we have. Your formations are a little more leaner. I think that all that will help,” George said. “Then the other thing is looking at reducing the complexity of our formation so we just don’t have the number of parts and the things that we have inside of our formation. We’re looking at this from every angle. I think … transforming-in-contact 2.0 will help inform that quite a bit.”

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The next stage of the Army’s experimental effort to inform how it procures equipment and organizes formations will focus more on robotics and autonomy.

Transforming-in-contact, as the initiative is known, is a top priority for Army and Chief of Staff Gen. Randy George that aims to change the way the service buys, trains and employs technology, focusing on commercial-off-the-shelf gear.

For iteration 1.0, 3rd Brigade, 10th Mountain Division was the last of three light infantry brigades to test the gear during various combat training center rotations — the most realistic combat scenarios the Army can create for units to train — in the swamps of Louisiana, the dense foliage archipelagos of Hawaii and frigid European climates.

Transforming-in-contact 2.0 was announced last October but few details were provided regarding what specific units would be involved, just that it would scale up to divisions and expand to Stryker and armored brigades. When it comes to tech, officials explained that it would likely begin to focus more on autonomy.

“As we were looking at the drones, what we realized with both 2nd Brigade, 101st and 2nd Brigade, 25th ID was we need to get away from a one-to-one from operator to machine,” Alex Miller, the chief technology officer for the chief of staff of the Army, told reporters this week. “With the engineers, it’s not just replacing breaching vehicles, it’s how do you displace the capability and maybe use machines to do it. It’s flexibility on those types of things as well.”

Others noted that with armored units being brought into the fold, robotics will likely be a bigger focus.

“As you get an armor brigade combat team involved, there’s potential maybe to interject a little bit more on the robotics piece. The ground platforms, more than just the [Squad Multipurpose Equipment Transport] and things that you see right now with the light infantry brigade using. I think you might see some of that,” Lt. Gen. Charles Costanza, commander of V Corps, said in an interview. Then “the ground-launched effects capabilities on a platform that we’re trying to see if we can incorporate into both formations.”

Some things will be different with new units and echelons, but the overall concept will remain.

“It won’t be exactly the same, but it will be the same kind of bottom-up feedback that will inform us what kind of systems they need, what kind of problems they’re solving,” George said.

Officials have named 25th Infantry Division and 101st Airborne Division as the two divisions focused on transforming-in-contact 2.0 along with 2nd Cavalry Regiment — a Stryker unit, which is based in Europe — and 1st Brigade, 3rd Infantry Division as one of the two armored brigades and National Guard units.

Given 2CR’s location, officials explained they have some ideas already of how to incorporate lessons from Ukraine’s war with Russia to the transforming-in-contact concept.

At the division level, some of the experimentation will take place through joint warfighting assessments and warfighter exercises, command post-related events and simulations.

As the Army expands transforming-in-contact, it wants to look at a variety of echelons and all warfighting functions, George said, such as aviation and logistics.

“We know that logistics is going to have to be more dispersed. What do we have to do to make adjustments to that? What level of technology needs to be infused in our logistics formation is another example, so that they can protect or detect and do the things that they need to do with drones,” he said. “How are we going to do 3D printing through that at echelon, and not just at the brigade level, but that we can support that, because now you have a sustainment brigade? How does all of this interact with an aviation brigade and how do you do airspace control and how does that work together?”

Lessons from the first iteration will factor into what’s next and how the Army could alter its formations going forward.

“We’re taking all of these lessons and we are in the process right now of a force design update to decide, how [are] these formations … going to look, what do we need to do differently with that. We’ll come out with that and that will be how we’re deciding our organization,” George told reporters this week.

He explained that with the first three brigades having done their combat training center rotations, this is not the end point. The Army is taking the feedback and will continue to make modifications.

With heavier units comes platform integration and larger footprints.

Costanza said the Army will look to how the lighter units in 1.0 took drones and fires to organize into strike or multifunction reconnaissance companies, which were equipped with drones, loitering munitions, mortars and other equipment to shorten the sensor-to-shooter chain to degrade enemy formations sooner before they come in range of more traditional friendly units.

“It’s how you take the UAS, counter-UAS capabilities with the [electronic warfare] capabilities, again, little bit bigger, because now you got platform-mounted capabilities, not just [Infantry Squad Vehicles], but tanks, Bradleys, Strykers. I think that gives you a little bit more capability,” he said. “The other thing, too, is scope and scale. Light infantry brigades, especially when you talk about command posts, they already start out pretty small. [The Integrated Tactical Network] is giving them the ability to spread out even more and be even more disaggregated.”

While network technology allowed the lighter units to disperse more and lower their signatures, their command posts were already much smaller than heavier units. But, Costanza said, 2nd Cavalry Regiment has already been fielded much of those systems and had time to take advantage of them and learn how to disperse and reduce their signature.

The unit is also taking lessons from the strike companies that were just tested with 3rd Brigade, 10th Mountain in Europe.

“2nd Cavalry Regiment is watching this intently because their whole purpose in life was reconnaissance security, expanding the reaction time and maneuver space for the corps. Under future Army construct, we know that 2nd Cavalry is going to have to condense. Their ability to do this kind of shaping operation with a well-enabled strike company that 3/10 is experimenting with, again, will inform how they shape their redesign going forward with future technology and reachback enablers to the theater-level enablers,” Col. Aaron Dixon, deputy chief of staff for operations, plans and training, G3, at V Corps, said in an interview. “Being able to see some of those lessons learned from this rotation at the end will help shape TiC 2.0 that we have lined up with 2nd Cavalry.”

Larger echelons are also looking at the lessons from 1.0 and determining what that means for force design changes, new formations and how to fight.

“It’s been fascinating because the way we’re building these transformation-in-contact formation, starting with the infantry and then moving on to the other brigade combat teams, we’re getting a large set of data from multiple soldiers, multiple units and that’s immediately going to feed into that force design update,” Lt. Col. Donald Hackett, chief of force management at V Corps, said in an interview. “It’s all being fed from the soldier up. And then as the brigade combat teams built, we’re going to adjust … how the corps operate, how the divisions operate. And you’re going to see a transformation-in-contact 2.0 where they start building that out to the divisions. They’re doing experimentations with the corps. It’s just a whole new approach to how we get after designing units.”

The Army is trying to determine how some of the new technologies and equipment, which make brigades more effective at longer ranges, affects the overall battlefield geometry, to include for higher echelon units.

While the brigade was the primary unit of action during the Global War on Terror, the Army is moving that up to division in anticipation of potential large-scale combat operations against sophisticated adversaries such as Russia and China.

“As we see these capabilities at the brigade level and just the increased range that you have for both the kinetic and non-kinetic effects, but the sensors, and now you add that to the division level and then potentially, down the road, we’re not talking corps is part of TiC, but how does that change fundamentally maybe the way you think about and fight at echelon,” Costanza said. “These brigades have capability that can actually affect the division deep area and vice versa. The divisions are going to have capabilities that potentially can affect the corps deep area. Then let’s just talk about airspace management and everything else [that] is going on. It’s a fundamental shift, I think, in the way we got to think about the battlefield framework and how we fight at echelon.”

Others explained how these new capabilities that enabled the strike companies affect how corps thinks about fighting.

“It’s shaping how the corps is trying to gather information from how this brigade sees themselves operating to how that might change how the division sees its battlefield geometry and structure on how they fight for information,” Dixon said. “Then all the way up at the corps level, if I have a fully enabled brigade causing a more-enabled division, how does that change how the corps sees its shaping fight versus its close fight in the future? If you add that early reconnaissance capability proliferated all the way down to the lowest level and say I’m also increasing their reach with things like one-way drones, … how does that change how the corps sees the full battlefield geometry?”

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Pulling on lessons from Ukraine, an Army unit testing an experimental concept recently employed the most drones it’s ever used in an exercise of its kind, to great effect against the enemy, according to officials.

3rd Brigade, 10th Mountain Division was the third and final unit to participate in a large training exercise as part of the first iteration of what the Army is calling “transforming-in-contact.” A top priority for the chief of staff of the Army, the concept envisions 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. It has initially focused on three main areas where officials say the Army needs to be faster and more adaptable when it comes to delivering equipment to forces, due to how challenging the threat environment is and the cat-and-mouse aspect of countering opponents’ moves: unmanned aerial systems, counter-UAS and electronic warfare.

The unit just completed its combat training center rotation — the most realistic combat scenarios the Army can create for units to train — in Germany, which was also folded into Combined Resolve, a recurring multi-partner exercise. This was the first transforming-in-contact rotation to take place overseas.

Given the unit has been deployed near Ukraine, lessons from that conflict with Russia featured prominently during the rotation, to include providing the first real template for how the concept could work in the future as envisioned in combat.

“I think we gave the Army a really good look at what it would mean if we had to do something like this in a scenario where we were at war, getting ready to go to war very rapidly, and for us, it’s just been a great opportunity,” Col. Joshua Glonek, commander of 3rd Brigade, 10th Mountain Division, said in an interview, noting that his unit has been deployed since July. “For us the ‘in contact’ part of it was really exemplified by the fact during a real deployment with an operational mission.”

Officials noted that given the proximity to Ukraine, one of the major lessons planners took for the exercise was the use of unmanned aerial assets.

“The big difference capability-wise, for our rotation, was the density of drones that we had fielded and trained with. We had more drones that we employed in this rotation that have ever been brought to a combat training center before,” Glonek said, distinguishing between the first two transforming-in-contact rotations.

Officials said there were over 200 UAS of different sizes during the rotation.

Glonek noted that the unit was able to keep a variety of drones up against the opposing force, continuously serving as the primary means to identify them and call for fire, which was used to great affect.

This rotation was the first instance where the opposing force’s zone for expected visual contact by the rotational unit was shrunk considerably, due to the drones.

Maj. Mark Matthey is serving as the executive officer of 1st Battalion, 4th Infantry Regiment, the opposing force at the Joint Multinational Readiness Center in Hohenfels, Germany, which goes against all the rotating brigades. He noted that in his seven rotations with the opposing force — which generally tries to replicate Russian threats — the mass of UAS posed challenges for his unit that he’d never encountered against a rotating unit before.

He explained that the longer-range capabilities forced his unit to do two things. First, the opposing force had to lengthen their defensive posture time and do it farther away from the area they planned to defend given the constant threat of being seen overhead. Second, if they saw the smaller UAS, they had to constantly move.

“They had such a mass of them that it was completely different [from] anything we’ve done,” Matthey said in an interview.

Moreover, while the unit wasn’t great at the beginning of the rotation, by the final days 3rd Brigade was extremely effective at coordinating artillery with its reconnaissance drones, a key lesson from the war in Ukraine.

Officials also noted the ease of use for these systems. A key tenet of transforming-in-contact is leveraging commercial technology that can be fielded rapidly and don’t require a lot of training — as opposed to traditional weapon systems that involve weeks at a school house for soldiers to become proficient with them.

“It’s not like most equipment I’ve been fielded throughout my career. It doesn’t take long to get a soldier trained on these new drones. It’s a matter of hours, as opposed to weeks in terms of what we used to see for other systems,” Glonek said. “The controller that they’ve been using for their entire life, frankly, and they’re just now applying it to fly a drone instead of playing a video game.”

With these new reconnaissance capabilities, the brigade reorganized some of its subordinate units into what it dubbed strike companies, similar to the multifunction reconnaissance companies the other two transforming-in-contact brigades created.

Those units — equipped with drones, loitering munitions, mortars and other equipment to shorten the sensor-to-shooter chain — can now begin to degrade enemy formations sooner before they come in range of more traditional friendly units.

This allows them to not have to call through multiple echelons for support since they possess all the capability they need organically, a critical enabler for surviving on modern, fast-paced battlefields.

There are also broader, joint applications for UAS assets in a theater-wide fight against a sophisticated adversary. If smaller units are able to extend their reach and view of the battlefield, the Army and joint force are examining what that means for higher echelons from a battlefield geometry perspective.

Officials from V Corps, which is permanently deployed in Europe, have held conversations with the Air Force regarding how these smaller systems can open accesses for larger air platforms.

“When we start talking about getting in through past anti-access, area-denial capabilities [of] the enemy, what kind of anti-air defense problem sets need to be solved early in order to get Air Force assets in?” Col. Aaron Dixon, deputy chief of staff for operations, plans and training, G3 at V Corps, said in an interview. Air Force officials “answer back to us with some of this technology for you being able to sense and reach at the lower ground level, actually assists the Air Force in ways that we hadn’t really thought of before. You can do a launch and recovery much closer to the target with these smaller ground assets that may mitigate some of that anti-air capability that the enemy has on the other side.”

He added that the information gathered at these types of rotations informs how the Army and joint force shape themselves up all echelons.  

Informing Big Army

The big idea behind the transformation-in-contact concept is to test equipment in high-tempo scenarios, learn from them and then apply those lessons at the department level to inform procurement, equipping or training changes in the future.

“Transformation-in-contact, I mean, it’s just all about getting equipment that is available right now in the hands of soldiers so they can experiment with it, figure out what works, what doesn’t work, and then maybe we can shorten a little bit of the procurement and acquisition timelines that we have to get things that are available now out to the force quicker,” Lt. Gen. Charles Costanza, commander of V Corps, said in an interview.

A key aspect to that is to test capabilities in different climates to see how they perform. The Army has decided it will no longer be pure-fleeting capabilities, meaning the entire Army won’t get all the same gear. Rather, it will look to tranche systems to priority units and base those capabilities on where they expect to fight.

2nd Brigade, 25th Infantry Division tested systems in the humid archipelagos and dense foliage of the Pacific and 2nd Brigade, 101st Airborne Division in the swamps of Louisiana. Those conditions are in large contrast to the frigid mountains of Europe for 3rd Brigade, 10th Mountain Division.

The feedback between each of the previous two brigades was key for 3rd Brigade, 10th Mountain.

“That was actually one of the most important parts of our preparation, was ensuring that we learned the lessons that the previous TiC units had discovered during their rotations,” Glonek said. “Because as much as this is a great training for us, more importantly, it’s part of a big learning campaign for the Army.”

This was a key point for Army Chief of Staff Gen. Randy George to ensure the Army tests out.

“That’s exactly what we wanted to do. We wanted to exercise things in all different types of terrain,” George told reporters at the Pentagon on Wednesday.

Weather, as well as the mountainous terrain, played a significant factor in the employment of the drones in Europe.

3rd Brigade faced near freezing temperature most of the time, affecting the battery life of many systems.

Short-range reconnaissance drones were reduced significantly in their battery lives, for example. The battery life, in some cases, was cut in half, meaning they couldn’t fly as long or be as effective. In one example, drones that could fly in Louisiana with the 101st Airborne Division for 20 minutes were only able to fly for four to five in Germany with 10th Mountain Division.

“What we ended up noticing was shorter distances than we would have expected out of the flight distance of a drone and then shorter time while it was up, because they’re just not lasting as long when the weather’s 20 to 30 degrees,” Matthey said. “Charging it is hard. You got to have a warm place to charge it or the charge is slow. The same amount of time that it’s going to take to charge it fully, you’re going to get 60 to 70 percent of it in the weather that we had. It was just a delay. It just was a slower fight in that sense.”

Glonek also noted that certain mobility platforms being tested also became challenging due to the cold, and everything becomes more brittle and fragile in those conditions.

The terrain was different than other venues such as the Joint Readiness Training Center in Louisiana for the first transforming-in-contact rotation and the Joint Pacific Multinational Readiness Center in Hawaii. Hohenfels is much more wooded with rolling terrain.

“What nobody, us included, took into account was the terrain. All of these systems are limited by the radio frequency transmission at line of sight,” Matthey said. “If you don’t have some other capability to extend that, you become really limited in the terrain that we have. Weather plays a part in that as well. The differences that we’re seeing in just geographic location between what can a system do in one environment and not do in another, that was really surprising.”

The terrain presented some limitations in deploying the drones.

Given the overall successful employment of UAS during the rotation and what officials are seeing in Ukraine, the Army must get faster at equipping soldiers with these assets.

“The number one piece [from Ukraine] that is obvious is the proliferation [of] those small UAS, and I think the way that we’ve got to get faster at producing those UAS,” Costanza said in an interview. “Things change so quickly. The way we’ve done things in the past with these big, exquisite, expensive UAS, I just think that’s not going to be effective.”

Moreover, the Army is now trying to shift its thinking to view these platforms as expendable — meaning it’s not as much of a concern if they’re lost or crashed — a change from when these systems were part of a unit’s official accounting for equipment, with burdensome paperwork required if unaccounted for.

“We just got to change our mindset on that stuff where it’s expendable. It’s just an expendable piece of property, so when it crashes, it’s no big deal, hey that’s just how it works,” Costanza said. “It’s a drone, it’s a little bitty, small UAS, so if you lose it, it doesn’t really matter. You got more coming or you can print more.”

He noted that some units have begun experimenting with 3D printing systems in the field as a means of producing them more rapidly.

George stressed the importance of testing different equipment with each unit as well, including giving more drones to 3rd Brigade, 10th Mountain, to see how they use the gear and how it affects how they operate.

“This particular brigade actually had different systems than when any of you would have seen down at JRTC. I always tell everybody, we know that the drone technology and some of these technologies are moving very rapidly. The drones that they had were different,” he said. “As an example, there was one system that was the medium-range reconnaissance drone. Longer range, a little easier to operate, cheaper, those kinds of things. That’s what we’re looking for and I think that that’s kind of the path that we’re going to be on.”

George and the top civilian Army leadership during the Biden administration sought to secure flexible funding from Congress for drones, counter-drone tools and electronic warfare in order to stay ahead of the rapid commercial tech curve.

“What we’re looking at doing is, again, buying capabilities, so having money set aside that says, hey, we can buy the best drones that are on the market, modular open system architecture,” he said.

Not securing those flexible funds will prevent the Army from being able to scale the initiative, George explained.

He noted that the feedback from Congress has been positive overall, especially considering the Army has sought to just focus on those three areas where technology is moving so rapidly.

“For years, I have called for the Department of Defense to be more efficient and go faster when it comes to the critical weapons platforms that our men and women in uniform need. I support the Army’s efforts to pursue flexible funding for drones, counter-drone solutions, and electronic warfare capabilities,” Rep. Rob Wittman, R, Va., vice chairman of the House Armed Services Committee and chairman of the panel’s Tactical Air and Land Forces Subcommittee, said. “This effort will allow the Army rapidly adopt critical technologies that are shaping the modern battlefield without needlessly wasting time with misaligned dollars. I look forward to working with the administration and our new Secretary of Defense to ensure our warfighters have all the tools they need to keep Americans safe.”

Allies and partners

Officials lauded the importance of conducting this rotation abroad, alongside partners, exactly the way the military expects to fight a future conflict.

While 2nd Brigade, 25th’s rotation included partners from Pacific nations, this last rotation upped the number of partners and integration.

“The biggest difference, I would submit, is the context in which it’s happening. We’re doing it in a foreign country, with a host nation, partners and allies. And I don’t know if other than trying to replicate some of that, the previous rotations didn’t really happen in that context,” Col. Matt Davis, cyber and electromagnetic chief and transformation chief for V Corps, said in an interview regarding the difference between this transforming-in-contact rotation and others.

While that poses some challenges, officials noted it provides a good venue to work out kinks before crises or conflicts break out.

One of those issues involves spectrum and frequency management. Each nation has different rules and requirements to how different bands of the finite electromagnetic spectrum are allocated — for military, commercial and other use.

“When you go to a host nation, you’ve got to work through their process. Equipment that might work in the [United] States, that could be emergency broadcast system for the host nation. Those frequencies might be reserved just for them. Working through those processes and getting the approvals, that’s a challenge that we’re working through,” Col. Jonathan Gendron, the communications officer for V Corps, said in an interview.

Moreover, as the Army is seeking to field newer equipment and integrate with partners and allies, working with them now helps assuage those integration challenges.

In “our transformation-in-contact experience … we’ve had our allies embedded from the get-go. It helps with interoperability, understanding how these systems work with NATO partners and others,” Glonek said. “But it also helps to bring them along as well because as they’re seeing what we’re doing, all of the military partners that I’ve had are incredibly enthusiastic and interested in moving that same direction on their own. It helps stimulate good ideas and thinking for our allies who similarly see a sense of urgency about why they need to modernize their formations.”

Part two of this series will focus on how new networking and communications equipment has allowed the unit to operate more dispersed and reduce its footprint within the electromagnetic spectrum.

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Transforming-in-contact, a key initiative championed by Chief of Staff Gen. Randy George, envisions 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. It has initially focused on three main areas where officials say the Army needs to be faster and more adaptable when it comes to delivering equipment to forces, due to how challenging the threat environment is and the cat-and-mouse aspect of countering opponents’ moves: unmanned aerial systems, counter-UAS and electronic warfare.

So far, the experimental units include 2nd Brigade, 101st Airborne Division — the first mobile brigade combat team — 2nd Brigade, 25th Infantry Division — experimenting as the light brigade combat team — and 3rd Brigade, 10th Mountain Division.  

To date, the experimental units have been infantry, which are typically easier to set as a baseline and integrate capabilities and technologies, as opposed to Stryker and armored units that require more challenging platform integration. The effort has also only included brigades as opposed to full divisions, which the Army is moving to be the unit of action to be able to operate across vaster distances against sophisticated nation-state adversaries.

Now, the Army is progressing toward what George has coined transforming-in-contact 2.0, which will include two armored brigade combat teams, two Stryker brigade combat teams, additional formations in the National Guard and Reserves and two divisions, for the first time.

At the end of fiscal 2025, every warfighting function, to include protection and sustainment, will be part of the transformation efforts, George noted on Tuesday at the annual AUSA conference.

The Army hasn’t announced what units will be part of the next go-round, as that is still being determined, but it will likely be units in the process of beginning the service’s readiness cycle, dubbed Regionally Aligned Readiness and Modernization Model (ReARMM).

As units come back from either the Pacific, Europe or the Middle East, they’ll get new equipment immediately. The goal is to give them these capabilities at the beginning of their ReARMM cycles because this allows new members and commanders to come into a unit, train on the new capability and validate it at a major exercise — all as a cohesive organization.

Those eventual Stryker and armored units, which will look different from the infantry units, will be given things similar to what the first three brigades received, such as C2 Fix capabilities, mission command systems and unmanned equipment, Command Sgt. Maj. T.J. Holland, the senior enlisted leader at Forces Command, said in an interview.

“What we’re looking at specifically is what divisions are also going to be there with their brigades. Because it takes a division to enable a brigade to become a TIC,” he said. “What you need is that division commander back on home station, the mission command, that division, so that brigade can be enabled. Because it takes a lot, if you’ve heard back from the [after-action reviews] from 101st, it truly does. That’s what we’re looking at right now, is line up in the ReARMM cycle to make sure we got a division headquarters with the right brigades in place and they’re set up in a right training glide path, so we can get them the equipment early before they begin their home station training and get to the [combat training centers].”

The 2nd Brigade, 101st was doing a home station training – Operation Lethal Eagle — while the division headquarters was in a warfighter exercise, all leading up to the recent deployment to the Joint Readiness Training Center at Fort Johnson, Lousiana. But when other enabling units across the division — or even those at the combat training centers – don’t have the latest and greatest, it can create compatibility issues within the division where some units are still operating off legacy equipment.

That was one of the key lessons when a brigade of the 82nd Airborne Division received new networking gear, according to Holland. When the rest of the division began to get filled out with that equipment, the original brigade couldn’t talk to the new sets.

“We don’t want that to happen as we continue to fill this out and we piecemeal it. We want to do complete fielding cycles with all our divisions,” he said.

In the meantime, the 101st will continue to start fielding new equipment throughout the entire division, as will the 25th ID.

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During a recent area defense operation, an Army unit had two possible paths it needed to take. With the opposition force closely following, the unit deployed around 50 decoys — commercial raspberry pi’s available for hobbyists on Amazon with SSID cards. The technology allowed the unit to load electronic signatures for anything from the brigade’s command post to a commander’s cell phone and mount it on small drones with a power supply, in an attempt to draw away the adversary.

As a result, the enemy spent about 50 percent of its artillery targeting what it thought was the Army unit, but in fact, was just dirt, making the foe not only easier to find for the Army forces given it exposed its position with its artillery, but it expended valuable munitions for naught.  

While the Army has an annual procurement budget that exceeds $20 billion, it was this type of jerry-rigged tech that created a tactical advantage on the battlefield, much to the surprise of senior commanders.

“The thing that surprised me was actually the effectiveness of the decoys that were put out … I underestimated, personally, the effectiveness that we would see out there. It really did create some real dilemmas for [the enemy] during this fight,” Maj. Gen. Brett Sylvia, commander of the 101st Airbourne Division, told reporters during a trip to the Joint Readiness Training Center at Fort Johnson, Louisiana. “A tactical advantage there, because he has to unmask his guns in order to be able to execute that fire mission.”

What made this such an impressive feat was that it was done successfully at a combat training center rotation — the most realistic combat scenarios the Army can create for units to train — against 1st Battalion, 509th Infantry Regiment, know as “Geronimo” and serving as a highly capable opponent for units rotating into these centers, rather than just a home-station training event.

This type of bottom-up innovation is exactly what Chief of Staff Gen. Randy George is trying to foster with the so-called transforming-in-contact concept, where the service plans to use 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.

According to George, there are three areas where the Army needs to be faster and more adaptable when it comes to delivering equipment to forces, due to how challenging the threat environment is and the cat-and-mouse aspect of countering opponents’ moves: unmanned aerial systems, counter-UAS and electronic warfare.

The concept has roots in the Middle East where troops weren’t getting the latest and greatest equipment, due to pre-determined unit fielding decisions. The thinking was, if a unit is deploying to a high-risk theater, they should be getting new equipment. Moreover, lessons from the war in Ukraine have demonstrated that the constant action-counteraction between both sides means forces must be more adaptable in contact with the enemy to innovate, especially given the rate of development of commercial technology.  

The transforming-in-contact units include: 2nd Brigade, 101st Airborne Division — the first mobile brigade combat team — 3rd Brigade, 10th Mountain Division and 2nd Brigade, 25th Infantry Division.

The concept was put to one of its biggest tests this month where 2nd Brigade, 101st conducted a rotation at JRTC. George called this transforming-in-contact 1.0, with 2nd Brigade, 25th Infantry Division having a planned rotation in October in Hawaii and 3rd Brigade, 10th Mountain Division having a planned rotation in January in Europe.

The goal is to continue to foster innovation from soldiers while testing equipment in different environments to ensure they work. George noted that technology the Army sent to the Middle East didn’t perform as well in the Philippines due to the high humidity in that region.  

Senior Army leadership is flipping the script and allowing bottom-up innovation to help drive change and traditional processes such as capability requirements and acquisition of new systems that to date have mostly been top-down.

Former officials explained that there was constant innovation during the wars of Iraq and Afghanistan because the terrain or the tactics the enemy was using would adapt rapidly. The Army is now allowing division commanders to let their units tailor themselves how they need to in order to prosecute the fight, either by creating new organizations, purchasing low-cost equipment to employ in new and creative ways or using different tactics.  

Officials explained that in the past, units would generate a requirement based on a gap, send that to the enterprise, which would work that in a lab and undergo a rigorous design-and-testing process before getting it back to the unit. Now, the Army is trying to take capabilities before full maturity, let soldiers use them and provide more accurate feedback regarding how it could be used or identify additional, better-informed gaps that need to be addressed.

“I’ve called it in the past a quiet revolution that we don’t have to field the same capabilities to every unit and that we can upgrade in different portfolios over time. Transformation-in-contact is designed to help us serve as a pathfinder to get there. It is giving us an opportunity to take a handful of operational units and experiment really with how they will use the new tech, whether it’s tactical UAVs, ground robots, other EW systems in an operational environment and what works, what doesn’t work,” Gabe Camarillo, undersecretary of the Army, told reporters in early August. That will help inform development of tactics, techniques, procedures, concepts of operation, requirements, solicitations and acquisition strategies, he added.

Camarillo noted that intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance is a good example of that because it traditionally required a lot of specialized training, but operations in Ukraine have demonstrated the ease of ubiquitous ISR with low-cost and low-training systems like small drones.

As technology evolves to become more intuitive and easy to use, the Army is finding that it doesn’t need to give soldiers new gear months in advance to test and train on it. Instead, they can give it to troops weeks ahead and let them innovate with it.

For example, new electronic warfare systems — namely the Terrestrial Layer System Manpack, the first official program in decades for a dismounted electronic attack capability that soldiers can use to conduct jamming on-the-move as well as direction and signal finding with limited signals intelligence capabilities — was given to soldiers about two weeks before JRTC, whereas in the past, those systems would require specialized training and take soldiers away from their units.

The same goes for newer network and communications equipment where more intuitive systems means the program office can give kit to units on a tighter timeline, whereas historically, they would have to provide a longer lead time so the units could train on it and get used to it before using it in an exercise.

The Army is also gaining valuable lessons from Geronimo, the opposing force at JRTC, as well as other similar units at other combat training centers. That organization is constantly sharing information back and forth to help the Army evolve, with one prominent example being the raspberry pi’s mounted to drones to serve as decoys and surveil electronic signatures in the battlespace.

“We get to do this every month. We get to do a rotation against the best free-thinking enemy in the world every month, the United States Army, against our own RTU teammates,” Lt. Col. Mason Thornal, commander of 1st Battalion, 509th Infantry Regiment, said. “We get to implement capabilities and we get to develop tactics, techniques and procedures for new capabilities that are coming out in the Army. And we’re trying to share these things that we’re learning with our rotational unit teammates as we go along.”

He noted that his unit has had to make adjustments on the battlefield relative to 2nd Brigade, 101st and the new equipment they have as part of the transforming-in-contact concept.

For example, he said the unit now has a lot more sensing capability, meaning his opposing force had to serialize their movements on the battlefield so that it would be harder to identify its main efforts. This has made them slower and as a result, they missed some opportunities to isolate and destroy a battalion that they identified.

500-mile air assault

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 Louisiana to start the exercise.

During that effort, it had upgraded communications equipment — part of the Army’s integrated tactical network, a combination of program-of-record systems and commercial off-the-shelf tools.

That included putting HMS manpack radios — the same that are used by dismounted soldiers — into helicopters, providing MUOS beyond-line-of-sight satellite communications. 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 entry into JRTC.

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 transforming-in-contact is striving for, with one official saying they are “very comfortable” with this tight linkage and feedback mechanism.

Throughout this years-long process, modernized equipment has significantly shrunk the size of command posts. A key lesson from Ukraine is the need to have smaller, more mobile command posts to avoid being targeted.

2nd Brigade’s command post was significantly smaller than those of the past with just a couple of trucks — instead of large, sprawling, and often relatively static outposts. The Army shrunk the number of people from about 30 in previous rotations — and in some cases 60 to 70 — to around eight people.

It also had a much smaller electromagnetic signature, near zero, thanks to the “antenna farm” that produced all the communications for the brigade command post and 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.

The foe was not 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 on a smaller echelon. They’re looking for bigger payoffs like a brigade or division command post.

“The bottom line is, you put that antenna farm … well away from the actual command post and so then you are, if you’re disciplined with WiFi pucks and phones and watches and all that kind of stuff, then truly, that place where the — where all the humans are sitting is nearly undetectable when you have the snipers up above,” Sylvia said.

In fact, feedback that made its way to Army Cyber Command head Lt. Gen. Maria Barrett was that the brigade’s signature was the best seen in 38 rotations, she said at the TechNet Augusta conference in Georgia Aug. 22.

One of the key examples for commanders enabling subordinate soldiers to tailor to how they need to is the multifunctional reconnaissance company, or MFRC. It’s a prototype formation that grew out of both cooperation with Geronimo — which has a similar unit — as well as lessons from the Ranger Regiment. With the Army’s changes in force structure released in February, certain capabilities are being moved up to division. This unit is meant to retain some of those capabilities resident within the brigade.

It has “the task of being painfully light and disproportionately lethal in order to sense, kill and protect on behalf of the brigade. How we’re getting after those three lines effort: traditional reconnaissance, emerging technology, and then some homegrown EW capabilities,” Capt. Charles O’Hagan, the company’s commander, said.

Officials said the unit is a bit of back-to-the-future regarding how the Army used to do long-range reconnaissance, operating stealthily on the battlefield and acting as scouts to find enemy positions.

“The fact that the opposition force knew that they were out there and couldn’t find them, created some dilemmas for him in terms of his ability to be as aggressive as he would have liked. He had to be a little more timid, a little bit more deliberate and introduce his forces,” Sylvia said.

Making lasting change

Transforming-in-contact, while it has demonstrated many successes to date, still faces challenges given the Army is large and change takes time.

Top officials have explained the need for flexible funding authorities in order to purchase these lower-cost, smaller and more attritable systems.

“What I mean by agile funding is that we don’t have to buy one system. I talked about program of record. What we don’t want is to buy something and then say we’re going to have it for the next 20 years, because when I asked that question this morning they said, ‘Yeah, we got a new UAS this year because it’s better, more modular, longer endurance,’” George told reporters.

He noted that officials don’t want to always worry about quantities and they desire the ability to buy something new when it’s available.

George also addressed issues of scaling this across the entire force. Scaling these technologies and concepts will be much harder, to include how to do home-station training, because some capabilities will be challenged at home station to fully train with.

“We have to figure out how we’re going to train all of these systems at home station. We’re going to have to figure out how we can put UAS up and do all the things that we need to do to adapt,” he said.

George dismissed major concerns related to integration of these technologies, saying soldiers are innovators and will be able to figure out that part.

“This isn’t about just the tech. This is about the formations. This is about the people,” he told reporters. “Do we have the right people at the right locations, with the right skills?”

The Army wants to ensure the right expertise is resident in each unit and formation to enable the types of coding, quick fixes and technical innovation to instill the lessons being drawn out by these experimental units in the future.

Other key questions the Army is trying to answer related to scaling is what is the official number of low-cost technology — from small drones to even raspberry pi’s — that a unit requires and is authorized, something referred to in military parlance as Modified Table of Organization and Equipment, or MTOE.

“We need to have the flexibility of units [where] you have a certain number of UAS. That’s why we’re talking about low cost to be able to train. That’s why we’re talking about modular. It gets added and making those adjustments,” George said.

The ultimate goal is to become more modular in which sensors and systems can be taken off a piece of hardware and placed on another if there’s an advancement or a new platform is a better host for technology, with George offering the analogy to rails on an M4 rifle.

“We’ll have to be nimble. I think we can use tech to actually do that. I always think about Walmart that can inventory a huge, large, passively, that system that we can do that … You can train with a lot of this stuff and then have some of the higher-end stuff that you saw with what’s available,” he said.

Officials also need to ensure the lessons are captured for doctrine and training given this will have wide-sweeping implications for how capabilities are employed and how units operate on the battlefield.

“We had our G3 down here, G8 and everybody else is that we understand process-wise, in the building, what the frictions are at every level and everybody’s doing their piece to understand,” George said. “How is this going to impact this level of formation in the field — not what’s best for the program or all those other things or what’s easiest or what is going to make the biggest difference at this level. That’s our culture that we have to change here to match this culture down there.”

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This journey began around six years ago to provide units with modernized kit on a predictable two-year cycle, and in the last three years the service sought to unify the tactical and enterprise networks into a single, global unified network.

Observations in Ukraine are forcing changes all across the Army to include the network, such as smaller and more mobile systems to allow forces to move faster on the battlefield. However, as the service marched down its modernization path, there became haves and have-nots. Some units were equipped with newer gear, with the intent to tier fielding of better equipment to the whole Army at some point down the line.

These two-year capability sets — each building upon the previous delivery for the integrated tactical network made up of commercial off-the-shelf and program-of-record equipment — are going away in favor of a more iterative process to update certain capabilities when technology matures. But in the interim, the Army has sought a more holistic approach to modernizing the total active force with equipment that makes it more lethal on the battlefield.

To get to the next generation of command and control, the Army is first embarking on what it dubs “C2 fix,” which involves essentially taking the entirety of the network portfolio and distilling it to the basics of what a maneuver commander needs.

“The primary goal of C2 fix was how do we simplify the infrastructure that’s already in these formations so that they could better operate their network and better rely on some of the staff functions that are network enabled — think sustainment, intelligence, fires — how those network enabled functions are task organized or organically employed within the formation,” Mark Kitz, program executive officer for Command, Control, Communications-Tactical, said in an interview at the Army’s Technical Exchange Meeting in Philadelphia this week. “Really simplifying the formation, which then led to a much more simple implementation of the network, how they employ [primary, alternate, contingency and emergency communications], how they get after their command post … how they were able to get a much more lightweight and mobile capability by moving a lot of those functions to the division and then building a network then to enable the division.”

During the counterinsurgency fight of the last 20 years, the brigade was the primary unit of action. Now, as the Army plans for large-scale combat operations against sophisticated nation-states, the division must now be that main unit of action given the vast distances of operations and complex problems those actors will pose.

The integrated tactical network was very brigade focused and thus forced the Army to adjust its approach. Given that a large portion of the Army does not have updated, modernized  ITN gear as it only comprises about 15 percent of the service, C2 fix begins to look at ITN and non-ITN units and how they all will command and control on the battlefield.

C2 fix is “also giving commanders flexibility, division commanders, flexibility to employ a much more robust capability, rather than organically employ it at every brigade,” Kitz said.

Divisions have several enabling units from intelligence to sustainment that will be essential in large-scale combat operations, but weren’t necessarily the focus of the ITN build and thus also require modernized kit.

Recently, 2nd Brigade of the 101st Airborne Division participated in a home-station training event dubbed Operation Lethal Eagle, a large-scale air assault that provided the opportunity to test new technologies, prototype reorganized structures and employ multi-domain fires.

“We have a lot of lessons learned and I think you heard some of the positives today: mobile command posts, lightweight, much more simple to employ,” Kitz said. “I think some of the other areas where we have to improve is how is the division then employed to support the brigade? How does a division employ to support disparate brigades? How does an armored unit that’s maybe not ITN enabled interoperate with a C2 fix or an updated C2 formation?”

That event is part of Chief of Staff Gen. Randy George’s concept known as “transforming in contact,” which sees the Army using deployments and troop rotations to test new equipment — mainly commercial off-the-shelf gear — to allow units to be more responsive on a dynamic battlefield. The 2nd Brigade of the 101st Airborne Division is the first mobile brigade combat team in the Army, serving as a test unit for transforming in contact.

“We are learning new fires architectures, we’re learning how intel data can support the commander, we’re learning how we can employ PACE in a much more simple, much more lightweight way. I think we’re really, no kidding, doing this transforming in contact as we go through this [Joint Readiness Training Center] rotation,” Kitz said.

C2 next

While the force is focusing on C2 fix for the near term, the Army is also looking further down the road at next-generation capabilities dubbed “C2 next.”

This week, George signed out a “characterization of needs” for C2 next.

As the Army continues to modernize, he said it is going to look at requirements differently and buy differently.

“We’re not going to buy the same equipment. We may buy something for this brigade, it’s going to be modular, open system architecture … [1st Brigade, 25th Infantry Division] might get something or [3rd Brigade, 25th Infantry Division] might get something completely different the next year. It’ll be compatible, it’ll be open system architecture, but it’s going to be the best thing that’s on the market. That’s what we owe our troops,” he said at the Technical Exchange Meeting.

The Army wants to change its contracting process, looking for more flexible mechanisms to buy the latest and greatest when it’s available and quickly insert it into units.

“Even if we build something brand new today, even the chief just talked about C2 next, today’s version of C2 next is not what we’re going to fight with three years from now. Iterating our requirements and getting much more volatile in how we get after capability is critical to the programmatics,” Kitz told conference attendees. “One of the fallacies I think in the past is we’ve bought serial number number one, serial number number 100, and they were the same thing and nine years elapsed. We need to get out of that type of business. We’ve got to iterate more volatile and with a requirement process that’s integrated between Army Futures Command and the ASAALT community.” ASAALT is an acronym that refers to the office of the assistant secretary of the Army for acquisition, logistics and technology.

George envisions an end state in which units are using tablets as mission command platforms rather than the legacy vehicle-based systems that require large trucks for multiple battlefield functions.

“One of the things that I challenged everybody a year ago, and especially AFC, was saying ‘Hey, I want to be able to be on the network and I want us to be able to operate with tablets, phones, software defined radios, very simple architecture,’” he said.

While visiting units at Project Convergence in March, George said he witnessed a platoon leader talking to a company commander, talking to a battalion commander, talking to a brigade commander — all on tablets.

“All those big systems that we used to have, [Advanced Field Artillery Tactical Data System] is one of them, can be an app and it can be on that tablet. So rather than having a truck or two trucks and 10 people, you have an application,” he said.

This is all about making formations more capable and lethal.

“I asked a question to the battalion commander, and he said ‘I want this right now. This makes me more lethal, survivable on the battlefield and that tech exists,’” George said. “Every time that we do something, is this something that the warfighter needs, is this something that’s going to make a company commander, a first sergeant, whoever it is, better to be more lethal on the battlefield? And that’s what we got to be focused on to do it.”

During Project Convergence, 1st Squadron , 4th Cavalry Regiment was provided a set of next-generation capabilities, which provided to be much superior to its existing systems.

As an armored brigade, it had a lot of systems that still date back to the post-9/11 counterinsurgency fight and the legacy Warfighter Information Network-Tactical network.

The new C2 equipment, with very limited training, was intuitive for the soldiers to use, which went all the way down to the private first class level. Troops were able to call for fires and see friendly and enemy forces.

Most importantly, the new capability leveled situational awareness across echelons, said Lt. Col. Michael “Pat” Stallings, commander of 1st Squadron, 4th Cavalry Regiment, meaning all echelons had the same common operational picture.

“What next-generation C2 did really was it leveled the bubbles on that. It allowed the troop and the platoon to see exactly what I was seeing when I was seeing it, to see if there was a collection asset flying, to pull the feeds from that collection asset very easily and intuitively to then use that information to make decisions on what they’re going to do about it. And it was very, very powerful,” he said.

Following the characteristics of need, which is essentially an aim point for industry to focus on, contractors will begin to propose capabilities around a next-generation C2 system.

“I think the biggest area that we talked about today is how do we marry a much more volatile, much more rapid requirement process with our acquisition infrastructure?” Kitz said. “I think in the past, we went after these monolithic software applications or monolithic capabilities that we tried to meld and mold to do things that maybe they weren’t designed to do from the beginning, and now decomposing it and getting after a much more rapid requirement process that allows us to have a much more flexible infrastructure.”

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