NGC2 is one of the Army’s highest priorities. Service officials have said it will be a “clean slate” from legacy capabilities and architectures encompassing a full stack approach, meaning it will focus on everything from transport to data to applications to cybersecurity.

The Army is looking to pick up the momentum following what it says was a successful demonstration of a NGC2 prototype “proof of principle” at the Project Convergence Capstone 5 event at the National Training Center at Fort Irwin, California, in March. That event saw a battalion operating in a scenario against a live opposing force using technologies associated with NGC2.

As that prototype is matured going forward and the program office seeks to make awards as part of the official program of record, officials have said Project Convergence Capstone 6, slated for the summer of 2026, will likely be when the Army starts to transition from legacy capabilities to beginning to make decisions and field NGC2 systems.

“Post PCC6, we’re going to reassess ourselves. We’re going to see … what’s the right composition looks like, what’s the right contracting approach. Then at the end, as we go forward, we’d like to establish pools that allow truly best-of-breed technologies to work their way into this formation … Think of a transport pool, infrastructure pool, a data layer and apps,” Brig. Gen. Kevin Chaney, acting program executive officer for command, control, communications and network, said at the 14th Technical Exchange Meeting at Aberdeen Proving Ground, Maryland, on May 30.

These events gather members of industry, the Army acquisition community, Army Futures Command and operational units to outline priorities and capabilities to modernize the service’s tactical network. They have occurred twice a year. The most recent iteration was initially slated to take place in Dallas, but due to travel restrictions imposed by the Department of Defense, the event was moved closer to the National Capital Region and lasted one day instead of two.

In parallel to NGC2, the Army has been executing what it calls C2 Fix, which seeks to use what the service already has, along with commercial off-the-shelf technology, to enhance the network tools for soldiers’ so-called “fight tonight” capability. That effort is already in its seventh iteration. While initially focused on the near term, it has evolved into somewhat of a bridge capability between legacy systems and NGC2, with officials calling it a down payment on the next-generation tech.

Chaney said that eventually, the Army needs to take a “leap of faith” to when that C2 Fix bridge transitions to NGC2.

“At the end of the day, we’re going to have to pick a point in time and make that leap of faith. I think we see 4th [Infantry Division] and PCC6 as that line where we have to make that leap of faith,” he said in an interview, adding that officials must begin the backwards planning now to be better aligned in the future.

The Army chose 4th Infantry Division to be the test unit to continue to refine the NGC2 prototype. They’ll also work to scale the capability up to division level, to include the headquarters and the enabling units, as the Army is pushing complexity out of brigades and into divisions to be the primary units of action.

While 4th ID will be the main entity testing out and refining the prototype, officials will be asking other units if they’d like to participate as well.

“We’re also asking what are the other divisions that would like to play? We’ve got 25th [Infantry Division] that’s already said we would like to be an experimental unit for another one of those Next Gen C2 solutions,” Chaney said. “We’ve already had discussions with a couple other division commanders, and they’re ready to support.”

They’ll be looking at what the right mix is going forward for what units will be demonstrating, and it might not be the full stack. It could be just the transport and the application layer, for example.

This approach will afford the Army flexibility and allow it to understand how to outfit units that have and haven’t been C2 Fix-enabled.

The prototype and eventual program-of-record equipment will not undergo the traditional developmental and operational tests of programs of the past. Chaney said the test community has been a part of the effort the entire way, having seen the experimentation events.

“They know what we’re doing. And we try to set up realistic scenarios, and they’re trying to get all the data off there they can to make sure that they understand effective, suitable and survivable. We can look at those things as we go forward [and] make more informed decisions,” Chaney said. “It’s also a risk-based approach. At the end of the day, we’re willing to accept some failure because we’re not going to go out there and just pure fleet everybody. It’s going to be an iterative thing. 4th ID will get a Next Gen C2 version. The next division may get a slightly different and better version of it. Then, as we continue to evolve, then I think we’ll work through all the, I would say, traditional programmatic documentation pieces that we have to do.”

Contracting approach

The Army has sought to approach NGC2 differently than other programs in the past.

Officials have described a hybrid contracting approach to NGC2 so as to reduce risk and keep competition open.

The Army received over 80 white papers from industry in response to its commercial solutions offering that closed June 2, according to service officials, including team lead and component submissions.

That commercial solutions offering was left “wide open,” according to officials, so as to not prescribe what the Army wants out of industry.

“I’m excited to see what comes back. I’m also excited to see the feedback, if we are doing this right or if we’re doing it wrong and how we can improve going forward,” Chaney said.

The Army expects contracts to be awarded later this year.

Chaney noted that there will also be other contracts out there to see who has best-of-breed capability as they go forward. Army Contracting Command has an open commercial solutions offering available that won’t close, so companies can continue to offer good ideas that could be onboarded.

The Army has requested self-organized teams of industry to bid either on slices of the program — such as applications or data layer or transport — or the full stack if they think they can do it.

“Even the big, giant companies I don’t think could do all of this. They couldn’t do it in the time frame that we’re looking for,” Chaney said. “If you’re truly trying to get an open system architecture, you’re going to need other people to come in there and start integrating different companies.”

It’ll be up to the industry teams to determine what slices of the NGC2 stack they want to compete for. Some may think they can do the whole thing, which the Army will evaluate.

“We might have a team that says, ‘I can give you everything.’ We’ll look at the risk and see if that makes sense or not. Our market research — and we’ve done a lot of it — has said there’s no one company out there that can do all of this. Teaming up gives us that flexibility going forward of figuring out who’s best of breed,” Chaney said.

He expects to see a wide range of responses to the commercial solutions offering with teams saying they can do certain portions well.

Scaling to division

Officials have acknowledged the complexity in moving NGC2 up to the division level, especially considering the prototype was kitted to mainly the battalion level at the National Training Center.

Network modernization efforts of the past have largely focused on the brigade level. But as the Army seeks to move complexity up and fight as a division, enabling brigades — such as sustainment, aviation, artillery and intelligence — must be equipped with comms gear as well.

As the Army scales to division, these enablers will now begin to be a top focus.

“The chief was really directive with us from the very beginning of this is, as we scale to a division prototype, the division headquarters and enablers, first focus and then trickle down the brigades … Under no circumstances are we going to cut the enablers, because we tend to reverse-engineer our way into that,” Maj. Gen. Patrick Ellis said at the Technical Exchange Meeting on his last day as director of the C2 Cross Functional Team for Army Futures Command.

“This is actually next gen, different than the way we’ve done in the past. It’s not going to solve the BCT problem and then figure out how to reverse-engineer that into an aviation unit or a sustainment unit, this division sustainment brigade or division combat aviation brigade. It’s actually — that’s going to be part of the solution,” he added.

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In the past, the service had outlined a fielding strategy that sought to equip certain priority brigades within divisions with the integrated tactical network, a combination of program-of-record systems and commercial off-the-shelf tools. This meant that other brigades and enabling units — such as sustainment, intelligence, logistics and engineering brigades — would still be operating on legacy equipment.

Now, as the Army is shifting to division as the main unit of action, it’s important to ensure all units can be compatible with modernized gear.

“Since we’re going to a more large-scale combat operation and division as a unit of action focus for the Army of 2030 construct, it’s imperative that we get all enablers and supporting units to be on the same exact [command-and-control] architecture as their supported brigades,” Maj. AJ Mangosing, assistant project manager for Program Manager Tactical Radios at program executive office for command, control, communications and network, said in an interview. “What that does is that improves the robustness of the PACE plan — the primary, alternate, contingency and emergency communications plan — and improves the overall lethality and survivability of the unit.”

The Army began to test this concept as part of Operation Lethal Eagle, an exercise with the 101st Airborne Division at Fort Campbell, Kentucky. This year’s exercise sought to pull in the entire division, as opposed to just brigades, to test how a division as a whole would fight.

Officials said that last year, as part of events that lead up to 2nd Brigade, 101st Airborne Division’s capstone training event, which included Operation Lethal Eagle, very few enabling units had the latest networking kit due to limited inventory.

“Now that the inventory has increased, we are now fielding to division enablers at scale. And we are now rolling that out during Operation Lethal Eagle to observe the enablers in action,” Mangosing said.

As the Army is looking toward developing a next-generation command and control capability in the future, it has begun fielding what it calls the C2 Fix architecture in the interim. C2 Fix seeks to use what the Army already has, along with commercial off-the-shelf technology, to enhance the network tools for soldiers’ so-called “fight tonight” capability.

Last year’s Operation Lethal Eagle validated the need for enabling units, officials said. It showcased how the Army can’t just be focused on maneuver elements, and there has to be unified communications across the division.

“The concept of C2 Fix works. Now we’re starting to enhance this with how the division fights,” said Lt. Col. Anthony Cato, the top communications and signal officer for 101st Airborne Division.

The exercise, and fielding to the entirety of the division, allows the organization to figure out how it will fight in the future enabled by new capabilities across all its units.

“We’re focusing on how does the division change along with the changes of its subordinate units … We have the responsibility to give feedback up to big Army in terms of the capabilities they’re asking us to either validate or just straight up critique,” Lt. Col. Paul Charters, chief of knowledge management and senior simulations officer at 101st Airborne Division, said on the sidelines of Operation Lethal Eagle. “That’s the other piece is we have to adapt as a division headquarters to a changing world in terms of technologies, in terms of challenges. As we identify how our brigade structure has to change and how to adapt how we manage the enablers, we’re also learning a whole lot about ourselves as a division headquarters. How can we better align ourselves to provide those capabilities to our division, make ourselves more survivable so we can do those things and also integrate new technologies that help us ideally be more efficient?”

Testing and validating new technology in the architecture

The Army has explained that it wants its future communications architecture to be open so it can import new capabilities rapidly as they become available without issue.

Across the service, units are looking for some level of customization and tailoring of network capabilities based on how they fight. Flexibility has been one of the bumper stickers for the integrated tactical network, providing baseline capability that allows units to tailor to what they need.

One example is how 3rd Brigade, 10th Mountain Division at its capstone training event in Germany in January sought to test the commercial encrypted application Wickr to pass data, enabled by the internet connection from low-Earth orbit satellite constellations.

That was because they had a mixed formation of ITN and non-ITN units, opting to use Wickr as a primary collaboration tool. The 101st used that application to a lesser extent during Operation Lethal Eagle, instead, using other government and commercial products to experiment with.

“That’s why we’re at OLE because we’re trying to learn about these things. As units identify things or they have software built, we bring it in to test it in the architecture, see how it works, see what doesn’t work and we continue to iterate from there,” Maj. Timothy Ray, assistant product manager for Project Manager Mission Command at PEO C3N, said in an interview.

One such technology is a lightweight mesh device made by goTenna.

At a fraction of the size and weight of traditional multi-channel radios, the goTenna solution provides a mesh networking capability that enables chat functions. It’s especially useful for scout teams that want to conduct reconnaissance and be as light as possible.

Moreover, since it’s only producing smaller chat and text format messages as opposed to voice, it has a smaller electromagnetic signature than traditional radios, making it harder for the enemy to spot — revealing the scout’s position — and jam.

“What we’re working towards with this in particular, is pairing this small mesh network to something that is beyond line-of-sight communication, like a Garman inReach or something as small as that. We’ve worked it, we’ve used it with our HF radio, high-frequency radios that have big jumps,” said Lt. Col. Reed Markham, commander of 2nd Battalion, 506th Infantry Regiment.

Another technology the Army has begun integrating more is the Instant Connect Enterprise, or ICE, essentially a voice-over-Internet Protocol capability that ingests radio signals and waveforms. So long as they’re connected via Wi-Fi or cellular, anyone with an end user device — essentially a military version of an Android phone — can push the radio button and talk over the radio network using any of the waveforms, serving as a many-channel radio wherever they go.

This means there’s now less hardware at the edge because it’s leveraging cloud services and applications, smaller dislocated footprints, and improved reach-back support and access to services. It also increases the number of users that can talk on the network without muddying it.

“It increases the maneuverability and our speed because you have access to a device where we’re connecting that software where you can access multiple bands. I think it increases awareness, it increases mobility because now you have the opportunity where an on-the-move soldier is not carrying around 15 batteries for X amount of radios, and so forth,” Cato said. “From a command post perspective, it allows us to increase our survivability as we can offset. So, you’ve heard the term ‘our antenna farms.’ It allows us to decentralize our signature and then to be able to manage that to manage multiple nets within a command post.”

The tech also has a language translation capability where one force can talk through using their native language, and it will spit out the native language of a partner military on the other end. This came about when 2nd Brigade, 25th Infantry Division was conducting its capstone training event in Hawaii last October with partner forces. It was integral they communicate with the Japanese army, Philippines army and others.

The tool also aided the 187th Airborne Infantry Regiment of 101st Airborne Division when they were in Europe helping to train Ukrainians.

The ICE capability also allows for greater integration of legacy, non-ITN or C2 Fix capabilities into the architecture.

“It allows us to incorporate legacy systems. We have new technologies on a new C2 Fix network or architecture, and we’re able to bring in some of our legacy beyond line-of-sight capabilities so it streamlines and simplifies at the on-the-move or at-the-halt at a command post perspective, where we have access and we can very quickly and easily integrate C2 Fix units and non-C2 Fix units,” Cato said. “What’s important is how do we integrate them into how we fight? It’s not about I have or I don’t have a piece of kit, because it’s not about the kit. It’s about how are we fighting as a division. And we’re fighting not just with our maneuver elements, it’s also with our enablers.”

To close that gap, the Army has also developed what it’s calling flyaway kits, including capabilities and personnel that accompany a unit to communicate with non-ITN units.

They were initially needed as part of 3rd Brigade, 10th Mountain Division’s capstone exercise given they were an ITN-enabled brigade with a non-ITN-enabled division and they needed a solution to connect the two.

The goal is to ensure higher commands have the same capabilities to reach down to other units to maintain the C2 Fix architecture.

Overall, the C2 Fix architecture has allowed the division to see itself better and more holistically across the battlefield, officials said. But, where they need improvements are the ability for nodes to aggregate data at the right place and right time in a digestible way.

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Modernized network capabilities tested during a recent exercise in Europe allowed U.S. military forces to operate more dispersed with lower electronic footprints — making them hard for the enemy to discover.

That unit, 3rd Brigade, 10th Mountain Division, was the last of three experimental brigades testing the first iteration of a concept dubbed transforming-in-contact, a top priority for the Army that aims to change the way the service buys, trains and employs equipment.

The concept 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. It’s focused initially on unmanned aerial systems, counter-UAS and electronic warfare.

The brigade was fielded some newer networking equipment for communication and command and control. While not the full kit that other units across the Army have received, the Command and Control Fix architecture, as it’s known, proved dividends. It’s focused on bolstering soldiers’ so-called “fight tonight” ability with existing technology until a permanent solution is developed.

“We had a really hard time figuring out the networking capability,” Maj. Mark Matthey, 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, said in an interview.

“What we struggled to do on this one was we weren’t picking up much of their signals,” he added. “What we were able to do is we were able to fly our own [intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance platforms] against them and see that they were dispersed.”

In some regards, 3rd Brigade, 10th Mountain had the advantage of taking lessons from the first two units that already conducted their transforming-in-contact rotations and applying those to their operations.

“The things in particular that we took from 2nd Brigade, 101st and 2nd Brigade, 25th really revolved around how they were employing some of these new capabilities on what we’re preparing for in the modern battlefield,” Col. Joshua Glonek, commander of 3rd Brigade, 10th Mountain, said in an interview. “In talking about use cases and what worked well, what didn’t work well … we fielded the new C2 Fix communications architecture, talking about how to employ the communications network to the greatest extent: where to place your, what are called variable height antennas — basically drone retrains — other drones, how to communicate over the Starshield for transport, how to use new applications, new software that allows for, you know, communications to happen over chat, essentially, rather than just doing voice communications for everything. Those were a lot of the things that we took from their rotations and applied to our own and tried to move to the next level of employment in a lot of different ways.”

3rd Brigade, however, received some different capabilities from those units and employed some of them a bit differently due to the terrain and opposing force it was facing — a key tenet of the transforming-in-contact concept to test what works and what doesn’t for all types of units around the globe.

The technology allowed soldiers to disperse effectively across the battlespace, which not only made them hard to find physically, but it significantly reduced their electromagnetic signatures.

Russia has demonstrated to great effect — both in its current war with Ukraine and its 2014 inclusion there as well — that it can detect units’ locations based solely on their electromagnetic emissions and fire upon them.

“Keeping a low electromagnetic signature was incredibly important. We learned how the other brigades had disaggregated their command posts, displaced their antennas away from their command posts, broken them up into smaller pieces and spread them out around the battlefield. We replicated that same type of CP setup in order to do that and to stay hidden from the adversary,” Glonek said.

Matthey explained that his forces had a difficult time locating the unit within the spectrum, in large part due to the variety of communications paths and capabilities 3rd Brigade was using, not just relying on the very well know signature of FM radios.

Commercial satellite constellations such as Starlink and Starshield proved effective as well as using commercial encrypted applications such as Wickr to pass data, enabled by the internet provide by those constellations.

“It provides a lower signature because the enemy is usually out there detecting for radio signals, but information that’s being transported up to satellites and back down, you’re a little less vulnerable,” Glonek said of Wickr.

Command post dispersion

Glonek noted that he was able to split his brigade command post into three different nodes: a main command post, a tactical command post, and a support command post that housed a lot of administrative and logistical functions further from the front lines for more protection.

Starlink and Starshield allowed them to be more mobile and access communications much faster. The tactical command post used the Next Generation Tactical Vehicle, a prototype that is a souped-up Chevy Silverado. The truck has a diesel engine powered with batteries that drive the vehicle, meaning it is silent when in motion.

Those batteries provide a significant amount of onboard power where radios and Starshield can be plugged into. And since this is a highly mobile truck, it can hide in the woods, be functional for 15 minutes with all the communications gear and then move.

Officials have learned that on the modern battlefield, units must rapidly move or risk being discovered, either by their electronic signatures or from the myriad drones flooding the environment and providing unrelenting surveillance. This means they need communications capabilities that can enable quick set up or even on the move, a departure from the past where these capabilities, in some cases, took over an hour to establish comms.

However, although 3rd Brigade was successful at overall dispersion and creating dilemmas for the opposing force, the unit still struggled at lower echelons.

“In talking to a couple of their units in the [after action reviews], I let them know like, ‘Hey, dispersion was great at your level, at the battalion commanders level, it was great. It was terrible at the company and platoon level,’” Matthey said. “That’s our assessment of it was like we just didn’t see the platoon level using it, and we saw the company levels trying, and then the battalion and brigade obviously doing a pretty good job of it.”

Those smaller units were not far enough apart when the opposing force was conducting reconnaissance, meaning they were able to locate all of its subordinate units because they were too close together.

Matthey chalked this up to old habits dying hard.

“I think it was just not normal for them,” he said. “It comes back to, at the end of the day, the skill level and the proficiency of using the new equipment is the most important thing.”

Overall, officials lauded the level of flexibility the new communications gear provided. As the Army has been on a multiyear journey to modernize its network, a key tenet program officials have expressed is the ability for units and commanders to tailor the equipment to their specific needs. This ultimately means each unit in the Army will look slightly different and the technology is enabling that level of customization.

“One of the strengths [is] that more modular nature allows the brigade commander and his signal corps component to structure the network and their mission command system in a way that meets their mission and how they want to operate,” Col. Matt Davis, cyber and electromagnetic chief and transformation chief for V Corps, said in an interview. “Having that kind of flexibility … when we started that’s, I think, pretty new for us as an Army, having the ability to adapt your mission command system on the go to the needs of the mission. That’s a flexibility that hasn’t existed before.”

Electronic decoys

The Army — along with the rest of the military — got away from advanced electronic warfare techniques after the end of the Cold War, and now the service is having to reinvest in capabilities and tactics.

The Army in 2023 awarded the first program-of-record jammer in decades — a portable backpack capability that conducts sensing with limited jamming. The service is still is evaluating an approach for more powerful platform-based jamming following the decision to move away from one of its programs last year.

As officials noted, they need to exercise how to sense the environment for signals and understand how to conduct those maneuvers in order to be effective at jamming.

3rd Brigade, 10th Mountain didn’t test any electronic jamming capabilities. Instead it sought to improve how it senses the environment. It did, however, test electromagnetic decoys against the opposing force, a key capability for deceiving enemies on the modern battlefield.

While 2nd Brigade, 101st tested decoys to great effect — deploying the devices that displayed signatures of entire units to entice the enemy to waste artillery firing upon them —3rd Brigade, 10th Mountain knew that technique wouldn’t work against its opposing force.

The opposing force in Germany would always confirm electromagnetic detection with visual confirmation. That meant that in contrast to the setup for the 101st, where the enemy would simply detect the signal and fire upon it, if a signal of interested was discovered 1st Battalion, 4th Infantry Regiment would have to send a scout or a drone to validate that there were physical assets there.

Understanding that, 3rd Brigade paired inflatable M777 howitzers with its decoys, providing the physical evidence needed to deceive the enemy.

“We put those howitzers out with the electromagnetic decoy as part of a deception effort and we placed these at night near our normal artillery positions. And by the next morning the enemy had detected the signature of that deception kit that did confirm its presence through scouts and actually got eyes on and believed that they were viewing real artillery cannons,” Glonek said. “Then they shot a fire mission at it, which is exactly what we wanted them to do… [and] allowed us to immediately counter-fire and then destroy their real artillery. That was something that we put a lot of thought into to see if we could make that work. Within the first day we put it out, within six hours that happened and we were able to destroy their artillery with it.”

Part three of this series will examine what is to come with transforming-in-contact 2.0.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Characteristics of need

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

C2 Fix and the bridge

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

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

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

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

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

Getting to the next generation

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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FORT JOHNSON, La. — The Army has been on a dual-track effort to improve command, control and communications capabilities in the near term, while devising a more long-term, materiel vision with new solutions.

The former — dubbed C2 Fix — is aimed at bolstering soldiers’ so-called “fight tonight” ability.

“Fix is we have a system, but it’s not acceptable that we’re just going to wait for the next thing,” Brig. Gen. Bryan Babich, director of the Mission Command Center of Excellence, told reporters during a recent visit to the Joint Readiness Training Center at Fort Johnson, Louisiana. “This right here is how we, in an integrated way, across the entire Army enterprise, focus on problems to deliver a C2 system that we could, God forbid, if we have to go out for the next fight in the near future.”

By contrast, Army Futures Command — along with program executive office for command, control, communications-tactical (PEO C3T) — is pursing a conception of what the future of command and control will be by breaking down silos between warfighting functions to provide commanders better situational awareness.

Previously, senior Army members outlined the inflection point the service finds itself in now where it’s seeking to alter the modernization effort it undertook roughly six years ago and move network complexity up to the division level and higher echelons.

Officials explained that the legacy capabilities and structures were too big and clunky to be successful on a future battlefield where formations will have to move rapidly or risk being targeted and killed.

“As we’re looking at C2 Fix, there are really three components that … we’re focused on for this. Number one, fixing the network. Number two, making our command post smaller and more survivable, though just as capable. Then third, moving simplicity to the edge,” Maj. Gen. Brett Sylvia, commander of the 101st Airborne Division, told reporters. “When you look at this configuration of this brigade command post with the large tents, multiple vehicles inside, you’ve got all these server stacks — and what that was a result of was that we had many systems that, in many cases, were stovepipes. You had an intel system that talked to itself, you had a fire system that talked to itself, you had a current ops system that was talking to itself, attempted to integrate these. The way that we overcame that was by making these large command posts with a lot of people inside them.”

To begin the “fix” initiative, the Army started with an ongoing assessment of the network. The Mission Command Center of Excellence established a team for field assessments of C2 systems that has been underway for roughly 15 months. The aim is to complete that work in the fiscal 2026-2027 time frame.

Part of this effort was spurred on by the determination by Lt. Gen. Xavier Brunson, commander of I Corps, that the current C2 system isn’t survivable and will put victory into question against an advanced adversary, according to officials.

The JRTC rotation of 2nd Brigade, 101st Airborne Division — a key modernization unit that’s testing new concepts for the Army — is part of that series of assessments. A previous one was Operation Lethal Eagle, a large-scale air assault that provided the opportunity to test new technologies, prototype reorganized structures and employ multi-domain fires, in April.

Now, the acquisition and operational community are working collaboratively together to drive solutions.

Such an integrated approach with operators is not new territory for the Army’s network community. Over the last six years as it sought to develop a modernized approach dubbed “capability sets” — a two-year process where each set builds upon the previous delivery for the Integrated Tactical Network made up of commercial off-the-shelf and program-of-record equipment — its program managers worked side-by-side with the operational community to test new capabilities and gain rapid feedback from soldiers to improve the delivery of new technology.

However, as the Army mapped out a more modernized approach, it realized the entire acquisition community needed to be integrated together — something the network team had also begun given the cross-cutting nature of the network and the need to be closely tied with others in the platform world to streamline integration of new kit and capabilities.

As a result, one person — Col. Shermoan Daiyaan, project manager for mission command at PEO C3T — is now in charge for leading the enterprise between eight program executive offices and 24 program managers to serve as the focal point of integration, something officials described as “fundamentally different.”

“It’s something that I’ve never seen in my career and it takes a level of cooperation,” Babich said of this integration across the Army.

As part of developing a “fix,” the service has created what it calls the “scroll,” a diagram rolled out across a series of tables measuring more than 10-feet long that details the traffic flow for any message that goes over the current architecture by echelon. The goal is to be able to visualize where the problems and gaps exist, isolate exactly what the Army wants to fix and provide a visualization for challenges and prioritization — because ultimately, officials don’t know what they don’t know.

This will allow the Army to be able to baseline the architecture for how units communicate and articulate to Army senior leadership where they might need to prioritize, because C2 Fix is about the near term and prioritizing the things that warfighters need in that time frame.

During experimentation and when upgrading these messaging and communications functions, officials can use the scroll for digital modeling and begin to take things out or add them without degrading the network before making the fixes.

The visualization also helps to transfer lessons across the rest of the Army, especially as other units are modernizing. The ambition is to take everything learned over the last four-to-five months with the 101st, render what that network looks like and pass on C2 Fix capabilities to other divisions. It provides the architecture the network team lands on and creates efficiencies so they don’t have several divisions in the Army trying to solve the problems individually in their own ways.

C2 Fix is serving as the bridge or “highway” for the next generation of command and control.

“C2 Fix is building the highway that will support next-gen C2,” Lt. Gen. John Morrison, deputy chief of staff, G6, said at the Defense News Conference Sept. 4. “The way I generally describe it is C2 Fix is getting after that network resiliency that will allow us to operate in a contested and congested environment, so that we can take a modern C2 apparatus that from the very basis that it’s been built has data integration built in, so we can operate at speed and at distance and make decisions faster than our adversaries — and putting that over this new, improved, resilient highway.”

He noted that C2 Next — the Army’s name for its next-generation capabilities — will be an integrated command-and-control apparatus that combines all the warfighting functions focused on data centricity, so commanders can have the information they need, when and where they need it, to act faster than their adversaries.

For C2 Next, the Army is working on developing an integrated data layer to connect all the systems for functions such as intelligence, fires, command and control, so it can be composed in a single place — which is a challenge because currently, many of these siloed functions are not connected to each other.

Officials want to pull in all the sensor data and information coming off of various platforms and put it on one screen.

The Army seeks to enable commanders to customize their dashboards, since every commander likes their own view and has different preferences.

Officials used the analogy of a smartphone where out of the box there are some stock applications but the user can download more apps that they want and customize their interfaces.

This, however, will be challenging under the developmental approach the Army is pursuing where it’s experimenting with three different vendors — Anduril, Palantir and Google — to build these dashboards that will display position and location information and provide much greater levels of situational awareness for commanders. Officials noted they are developing a governance structure to deal with the potential program management issues surrounding having more than one vendor from which commanders can choose custom dashboards.

“One of the things that we’re putting together in-flight is a governance system,” Col. Matthew Skaggs, director of tactical applications and architecture at Army Futures Command, said. “The difference between what we’re going to do now and how we’ve done it in the past as a federation of people that bring in different requirements, and it’s like a pyramid architecture … Setting the level playing field for what things look like, so then that’s getting kicked out [to] the industry and anybody can build to those specifications we’re welcoming.”

Officials noted the common data layer will provide the foundation for vendors that have cutting-edge technologies or solutions to pop them into the architecture — whereas now, there is no technical avenue to add new vendor capabilities to systems.

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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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