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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“This progress moves us closer to bi-directional, real-time data flow between the tactical edge and operational and strategic decision-makers,” CDAO officials wrote.

In response to questions about the document’s contents, a defense official confirmed on Wednesday that the office, in partnership with the joint force, recently closed out the thirteenth iteration of its Global Information Dominance Experiment (GIDE) series, which unfolded in conjunction with the Army’s Project Convergence Capstone 5 (PC-C5) event.

GIDE is rooted in the Defense Department’s aims to get new technologies and equipment into the hands of warfighters for iterative testing and refinement through distributed, digital experiments, sprints and military service-led exercises like PC-C5.

Early versions of the GIDE series launched in 2020 and were facilitated by U.S. Northern Command. But in 2022, Pentagon leadership under the Biden administration tasked the CDAO with revamping the effort to strategically enable capabilities that could help realize the U.S. military’s Combined Joint All-Domain Command and Control warfighting construct. 

Since then, GIDE experiments have generally run approximately every 90 days.

In the CDAO document summarizing multiple takeaways from GIDE 13, officials wrote that PC-C5 “served as the first major exercise venue to demonstrate” the EDM line of effort, which the office awarded a production other transaction agreement for in fall 2024.

“EDM is a government-owned technology stack that enables tactical-level data distribution in disadvantaged, disconnected, intermittent and limited — or DDIL — communications environments through a resilient nodal architecture,” they wrote.

A defense official told DefenseScoop that the CDAO is deploying EDM nodes to tactical users and other key locations to ultimately assess the fusion of operational and tactical data and C2 capabilities.

In the EDM context, nodes essentially refer to physical points within the network that are typically near end users or information sources, where data is captured, processed, or stored. This allows for distributed, decentralized data transmission that could underpin future edge computing missions.

“Edge Data Mesh enables data integration and exchange across multiple networks and data formats, including in denied and degraded communications environments,” the defense official said.

“Core to this effort is the commitment to interoperability using Open DAGIR principles and deployed architectures. The government-owned software development kit allows rapid integration of mature and emerging systems and applications with the EDM architecture,” they added. 

Project Convergence is an Army-led experimentation venue that enables personnel from across the U.S. military services and key allies to train together and collaboratively work out various concepts for integration. Army officials have been transparent about their aims to see new capabilities stay with commands for continued use after Capstone 5. 

In the CDAO document, officials stated that the “Scenario B” portion of PC-C5 provided participants with “a critical opportunity to test and develop EDM interoperability with other mission command platforms in field conditions — which remained behind following the exercise’s completion and will continue to provide resilient tactical data transport in the [area of responsibility].”

Activities associated with that scenario were conducted in the U.S. Indo-Pacific Command area of responsibility. They involved tech experiments with all of the service components at the combatant command level.

“We continue to demonstrate that one of the most effective ways to advance modern [command and control, or C2] capability is to exercise and experiment how we fight — on live networks, with live data, with daily users — and leaving behind capability after every exercise,” CDAO officials wrote.

Some of the other “wins” from GIDE 13 listed in the document include demonstrating the integration of third-party software into DOD’s data infrastructure, and integrating multiple third-party generative AI capabilities into existing operational contexts. 

“This significantly accelerates warfighters’ ability to process complex information, especially across maneuver, intelligence, fires, and logistics workflows, shortening decision-loops and ensuring we achieve decision advantage,” the document states.

The defense official did not answer DefenseScoop’s questions regarding the makers and use cases of those genAI assets that were tested in the GIDE 13 and PC-C5 experiments last month.

“GIDE events have incorporated GenAI capabilities supporting a variety of workflows. These capabilities are a subset of GIDE’s mission command software suite, supporting [combatant commands] outside GIDE experimentation, so operators can continue to refine how they use them without waiting for the next experiment,” the defense official said.

They confirmed that GIDE 14 will take place during the upcoming iteration of Pacific Sentry and “Joint Exercise SoCal in Indo-Pacom.”

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A recent test of the technology came at the Army’s Project Convergence Capstone 5 event in March at Fort Irwin, California, a joint experimentation venue for the services to test concepts for interoperability in the vein of the Pentagon’s Combined Joint All-Domain Command and Control concept, which envisions how systems across the entire battlespace could be more effectively and holistically networked to provide the right data to commanders, faster. The word “combined” in the parlance of the framework, refers to bringing foreign partners into the mix.

The Marine Corps Software Factory, located in Austin, Texas with the Army’s Software Factory, developed what it dubbed Crusader software to see if it was a viable alternative to the current commercial middleware used by a lot of units to control these radars, such as Furuno and eventually Simrad, which was not tested at Project Convergence.

While the government and Department of Defense have been pushing the use of commercial-off-the-shelf capabilities as much as possible, the Corps noted several benefits of developing government-built software in this context.

First, radar systems can be complicated and not necessarily geared toward the way troops must employ them. By developing their own software, the Marines at the Software Factory can build tools specifically for Marines at the tactical edge and more easily interface with them as well as other joint service members.

Second, creating government-off-the-shelf software can be cheaper than relying on commercial products.

“It doesn’t cost the government anything more than our salaries to develop it. Whether I develop eight applications in a year or one, we pay you the same,” Capt. Brian Atkinson, a full-stack engineer at the factory, said in an interview.

Moreover, that means there aren’t licensing fees associated with the software, which can not only be costly, but if not managed properly, can expire at the worst possible times.

Atkinson noted he’s experienced licenses expiring in the middle of exercises and been unable to reach out to the vendor to renew it — an untenable situation in real-world operations. Solely relying on vendor support while troops are forward-deployed isn’t always the best option.

The Crusader software, which has been in development for about four months, was an improvement to the existing system, officials said, noting the old software was difficult to use and didn’t fit the plans the Marine Corps had.

The concept behind the new software is that stand-in forces — units based in close proximity to the enemy — need to be able to remote into commercial radar systems such as the Furuno. Those capabilities provide sonar, collision detection and navigation, which overall will give those stand-in forces the ability to extend maritime domain awareness.

Those commercially available radars fit well into the commandant’s Force Design vision because the radars are relatively inexpensive and readily available when compared to traditionally fielded systems, Sgt. Max Idler, a coder and developer, said. Thus, they provide an attractive option when the service can rapidly procure a capability and repurpose it for the joint fight.   

At Project Convergence, categorized as a big success, Crusader and the radars it controlled provided the maritime situational awareness data for the Southern California area for the experiment, which benefited all the joint partners participating. Officials said they processed Furuno radar data, produced tracks and targets off of it, and fed that data through the Secure But Unclassified-Encrypted network.

Officials noted there were tweaks that they needed to make in order for the software to be more user friendly.

Following Project Convergence and working with the Naval Information Warfare Center Atlantic, the Marines plan to include Crusader on a commercial-off-the-shelf radar kit that will be distributed to the Fleet Marine Force sometime in the next year. If that field user evaluation goes well, Crusader will be the centerpiece of radar processing software on the kit.

The Software Factory is also discovering that there is wider interest and larger demand for Crusader. Given it is government developed, it can be applicable to all elements of the joint team members and potentially coalition partners that wish to use commercial-off-the-shelf radars for situational awareness.

The demand comes from wider DOD interest in using different maritime surveillance capabilities for various mission sets, such as special operations forces.

Officials from Marine Forces Special Operations Command have voiced their desire to use Crusader given it doesn’t require licensing to the radars themselves.

“That is a strategic add to how MARSOC likes to operate,” Idler said, noting they’re looking to test Crusader with them off a tech stack they developed using Raspberry Pi’s.

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A venue for the Army to test emerging concepts along with other services, Project Convergence Capstone 5 served as a “critical test bed” for the service’s in-development electronic warfare capabilities, according to a spokesperson from Army Cyber Command. During the event, the Army sought to not only focus on rapid generation and deployment of effects in contested environments, but also streamline the process of target identification, develop countermeasures to adversary capabilities and deliver them across multiple electronic warfare systems at speeds required for large-scale combat operations.

The advanced modern state of electronic warfare involves a constant cat-and-mouse game between friendly forces and adversaries. Each side aims to jam or deny the other’s access to spectrum for communications or other systems, while also seeking to geolocate forces based on electronic emissions and enable freedom of maneuver for themselves.

The Army, along with the other services, has been preparing for large-scale combat operations of the future that take place over greater distances with sophisticated adversaries, a departure from the war on terrorism that was more regionally focused and fought against technologically inferior enemies.

As such, the Army and its counterparts have sought to rebuild much of their electronic warfare prowess they divested after the Cold War. The Army has been on a decade-plus journey to reinvigorate electronic warfare and build out an arsenal of capabilities.

While that effort has seen fits and starts, the Army is currently prioritizing a new EW architecture to allow for the rapid collection, dissemination and reprogramming of signals in the field at the speed of war.  

ARCYBER’s participation in Project Convergence consisted of several partner and subordinate organizations, such as the Army Cyber Technology Innovation Center Lab, where ARCYBER tests new technologies; the 11th Cyber Battalion, which conducts tactical, on-the-ground cyber operations (mostly through radio-frequency effects), electronic warfare and information operations; the Army Cyber Center of Excellence; the Army Reprogramming Analysis Team; Project Manager Electronic Warfare and Cyber; Project Manager Cyber and Space; the Army Cyber Institute; the C5ISR Center’s Research and Technology Integration Directorate; and the All-Domain Sensing Cross-Functional Team.

The experiment primarily focused on electromagnetic support activities, like sensing the environment to detect and intercept signals, specifically by refining data flows, processes and standards for EW systems. It sought to improve electromagnetic support characterization through detector modifications.

Forces used the Terrestrial Layer System Manpack, the first official program in decades to provide a dismounted electronic attack capability that soldiers can use to conduct direction finding with limited jamming on-the-move, as well as a commercial system and modified commercial software-defined radios.

While the primary focus was on electromagnetic support, Project Convergence aimed to refine processes and standards that support the other main EW domains: electronic attack, primarily through jamming, and electronic protection efforts aimed at safeguarding against jamming. Units also tested the process of requesting, developing, and deploying electronic attack payloads, achieving a turnaround time of less than 24 hours.

Central to the experimentation and continued building out of EW capabilities is the development and implementation of what the Army calls modular mission payloads and a responsive EW reprogramming ecosystem. These modular mission payloads are a different approach to capabilities, moving from platform-centric to payload-centric, meaning effects can be employed over multiple platforms with little to no integration by operators.

The ecosystem will provide rapid generation and deployment of modular mission payloads across several platforms for precise and timely non-kinetic effects, according to the ARCYBER spokesperson.

Enhancing the responsiveness of electromagnetic spectrum systems and using modular mission payloads, the Army seeks to achieve rapid effects generation and delivery at scale, which will significantly improve its ability to dominate the electromagnetic spectrum and achieve operational objectives in dynamic environments, they added.

ARCYBER also sought to demonstrate the end-to-end process of developing and deploying electronic warfare effects from a central repository to units at the frontlines using a common framework to interface with multiple EW systems to deliver targeted electronic fires.

The Army also sought to further test out processes within its Radio Frequency Data Pilot, an effort to determine what it needs to be able to rapidly reprogram systems on the battlefield.

The RF Data Pilot team successfully demonstrated the ability to rapidly sense EW targets on the battlefield, share the data with the Army Warfighting Mission Area System, and pass the information to the Rapid Effects Generation Enterprise.

The Rapid Effects Generation Enterprise developed a new modular technique in a few days that was loaded on multiple EW systems, equipping them with a new capability to automatically characterize and classify an anomalous signal they didn’t possess previously.

When a signal is discovered that isn’t in a unit’s library of known capabilities, it previously could take several months to process and classify it to develop a countermeasure. The U.S. military is seeking a reprogramming enterprise that can do that work in hours and, some cases, at the tip of the spear on the battlefield as opposed to sending the signal back to a static, remote location.

“The RF Data Pilot program has provided valuable insights and data, further solidifying the direction of our non-kinetic effects development. We’ve gained a clearer understanding of the necessary data standards and identified potential policy recommendations to enhance these capabilities,” Lt. Gen. Maria Barrett, commander of Army Cyber Command, said in a statement. “This progress allows us to move forward with confidence and refine our approach to achieving the speed and scale required for [large scale combat operations]. The pilot program’s findings affirm our trajectory and provide a strong foundation for continued development and implementation.”

The experimentation at Project Convergence demonstrating the speed of integration and technique generation is a significant milestone in the Army’s ability to build greater situational awareness in the electromagnetic spectrum, according to the spokesperson.

Following the event over the next several months, the pilot team will continue to build on the successes demonstrated.

The Army will also continue refining the electronic warfare reprogramming ecosystem and integrating the modular mission payload framework.

Cyber Quest 25 will be the next big opportunity for industry to demonstrate capabilities to rapidly assess, develop, and deliver EW effects to multiple systems in a realistic operational environment.

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The pair of firsts was conducted as part of Project Convergence Capstone 5, the latest in an annual experimentation event hosted by the Army to test emerging concepts, largely in line with the Pentagon’s Combined Joint All-Domain Command and Control.

CJADC2, as it’s known, envisions how systems across the entire battlespace could be more effectively and holistically networked to provide the right data to commanders, faster. The word “combined” in the parlance of the framework refers to bringing foreign partners into the mix.

Marines placed commercial maritime radars, such as those that can be purchased at fishing or boating stores, at San Clemente Island off the coast of San Diego and integrated them into the Army’s Sensitive But Unclassified-Encrypted (SBU-E) architecture.

As the radar data was integrated into the unclassified network, Marines sent maritime tracks to the National Training Center at Fort Irwin, California, to ingest as part of its maritime domain awareness. Located nearby in Barstow, the Army then leveraged a cross-domain solution to bring those tracks up in classification to the secret network and then sent them back to the Marine Corps Tactical Systems Support Activity near San Diego to control a notional shooter simulating a Tomahawk strike on an adversary ship.

“We were able to validate that we can see the vessels out around San Clemente Island, pass that unclassified track data to Fort Irwin, get that up class to [SIPRNet] and then send it back to use it,” Maj. Anthony Johnson, an operations officer within Marine Air Control Group 38, said in an interview. “It demonstrated that if we were able to give these commercial sensors to a coalition partner or even if the military were to use these coalition sensors on this network, we can use that in tandem with our military sensors to contribute to maritime domain awareness for the component commander, being the joint maritime component commander.”

The demonstration gets to the heart of what the Pentagon desires to achieve with its CJADC2 initiative by not only integrating into a multiservice common operational picture, but also proving that commercial, non-U.S. military sensors can be integrated into operations. Oftentimes, coalition communications and equipment aren’t compatible with Department of Defense architectures (not to mention interservice compatibility issues), slowing down multination operations.

That coalition integration is one of the main draws for the Army’s SBU-E architecture. Officials have described that it has significantly sped up coalition operations because it negates the need for liaisons in formations communicating directions back and forth on multiple radio systems because the partners aren’t authorized to use classified communications or equipment.

The thought behind it is that tactical wartime information is so perishable — meaning it is acted upon and expires so quickly that even if the enemy were to discover plans, it would be too late — it does not need to be classified, increasing the speed of operations.

“It was demonstrating that we can have a common operational picture, a common tactical picture-like capability on the SBU network. It was cool to see how our commercial sensors can contribute to that common tactical picture that the Army’s Joint Modernization Command was monitoring over at Fort Irwin,” Johnson said.

The experimentation effort was also part of a small unit concept that the control group and communications squadron were testing out.

Johnson explained that the control group consisted of a detachment with a mix of Marines from Marine Air Support Squadron 3, 3^rd Low Altitude Air Defense Battalion and Communications Squadron 38 forming a communication-sensor integration team. The concept, which doesn’t currently exist within the Corps, sought to pair communications Marines with air defenders and tactical data link maintainers to integrate commercial sensors and augment the Corps with ground-based maritime sensors in addition to what the unit already has.

Planning for the concept began in October after Project Convergence last year, where the unit realized that they always have to integrate radars into their network. But, taking it a step further, they wanted to prove they could integrate commercial sensors.

“In our minds for comm squadrons, well, we’re already doing military sensors, now we’re being presented an opportunity to do commercial sensors, so why don’t we start making a team that specializes in understanding how radars work and how to integrate them into military networks,” Johnson said. “For our occupational field, so for the communications MOSs, it validated that we can have small-scale teams that can perform this function of integrating commercial capability.”

More broadly, the concept, if fully realized, will enable the Corps to send small, task-organized teams out to multiple locations to contribute to maritime domain awareness, which could be critical in a Pacific theater fight given the various islands there, not to mention that smaller teams are more difficult to target.

“Right now, we have the TPS-80 radar and a couple other sensors that are not in the 3^rd Marine Aircraft Wing, but those are few and far between, just due to the limited quantity of military equipment we have,” Johnson said. “Now that we’ve demonstrated this capability, now we can have more nodes, if you will, spread about multiple islands. So we can increase the sensor coverage in Indo-Pacom.”

Lessons from Project Convergence

While broadly a success, Johnson noted there were some coordination challenges during the event involving passing track data back and forth with the Army at Fort Irwin through the service’s cross-domain solution. However, once the requirements were understood between both organizations, it was a quick turnaround to instantly pass track data through SBU-E to the secret network.

Following Project Convergence, Johnson said his unit is looking to get the devices necessary to enable them to access the SBU-E environment, given that’s not a capability the Corps possesses currently. They’re hoping to integrate the architecture into squadron internal events such as an 18.6-mile foot march in early May, where Marines will ruck with 25 pounds.

They plan to integrate SBU-E with the Tactical Assault Kit to be able to see and track participants as they conduct the march.

The experimentation also showed that with commercial sensor integration, the Corps could potentially look to COTS capabilities to supplant more exquisite, military-built systems that can be more costly and time-consuming to acquire.

“Why we use it in a Marine Corps blend scenario, like we talked about how coalition partners can also have these as well, but this also gives the Marine Corps more capability with something that’s significantly cheaper than a programmatic solution that takes upwards to a decade to field, as well as to refurbish and update,” Johnson said. “Perishable commercial equipment, if it’s attritted or if it’s broken for whatever reason, it’s easily replaceable [rather] than having to wait with long lead times.”

Given the success of the communication-sensor integration team concept, Johnson said his organization will be entering a working group with the other communications squadrons across the Corps in early May to add the concept as an advanced mission essential task they are all required to perform.

“The task would be to integrate organic and non-organic sensors into Marine Corps networks. Since we realize that this is a continuous task that our Marines are having to perform, we want to register that as a requirement, where we’re actually appropriately evaluated on the ability to be able to do this,” he said. “That way, we can signal to headquarters Marine Corps that when the exercise presents itself, that we’ve actually done that task, instead of it just being for the sake of experimentation.”

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While the Army has previously attempted to improve its command and control, leaning on advancements in commercial technology, officials say this time is different given senior leader buy-in and recent technological developments.

As the Army is pursuing what it calls Next Generation Command and Control — which aims to provide commanders and units a new approach to information, data and C2 through agile and software-based architectures — officials have said it’s a clean slate and a fresh start that’s not trying to build upon existing efforts.

“The chance to have the unfettered access we have with industry, but then have the clean-sheet approach … that really allowed us to get into place where we are now. We’re hitting the targets that the seniors want us to hit [and] getting away from the old way of doing things. I think it’s a combination of those two things,” Col. Matthew Skaggs, director of tactical applications and architecture at Army Futures Command, one of two officials leading the experimentation effort, said in an interview at Project Convergence at Fort Irwin, California, in March. “The way we started was we were pointing more so at mid-level, non-traditionals and startups. I think what we’ve found is those guys are super hungry to do whatever it is we need to do.”

Officials have said there is buy-in from senior Army leadership from the initial demonstration of NGC2 at Project Convergence Capstone 4 last year.

A big difference is how the requirements and acquisition are being approached. Officials said the service is trying to de-link from the old requirements documents of the past and provide more distilled needs in the form of what Futures Command calls a characteristics of need statement.

Initially released last May, this statement serves as an acknowledgement of a complex problem set and provides industry with areas the Army wants to solve. It’s seen as a living document that will be updated every 90 days or so and is not a hard-and-fast requirements document.

It will also be updated following the experimentation at Project Convergence Capstone 5 that took place in March and put NGC2 in a real tactical environment for the first time.

“We’ve gone about this in an unconventional way in terms of entering requirements and then sending out the RFPs and the RFIs later in the process and we just wait to see what industry comes up with. Our ability to iterate with these guys and say we wanted to do this instead of that, I want the graphics to look a certain way, we want certain form factor on the transport side and the edge server side, has allowed us to iterate and get it down to the form factor that [Chief of Staff] Gen. [Randy] George gave us with his vision,” Skaggs said.

Skaggs and his counterpart — Col. Michael Kaloostian, chief digital and artificial intelligence officer at Futures Command — noted that since industry and senior leaders have now seen that this can work, there is “irreversible momentum.”

Officials have explained that going forward, Futures Command will own the requirements for NGC2, with the Army implementing a product owner and product manager relationship. The command will run the increment planning and set priorities while the program manager in the program office will deliver the system.

Capstone 5 will provide the baseline capability for the NGC2 prototype as the program office looks to award contracts for the official program. Moreover, there will be continued experimentation to refine that effort and work to scale it to a division level.

“You got to break the mold of thinking of a traditional program where you’re going to go through the lockstep, sequential process. That’s not happening here. I think we’re trying to figure out what’s the minimal viable product, get that out the door, continue to iterate, to learn and as technology improves, S&T comes to the table [and] then we can integrate that and then we continue to evolve,” Brig. Gen. Kevin Chaney, deputy program executive officer for command, control, communications and network, said in an interview at Aberdeen Proving Ground, Maryland, in February. “But that’s one of the things I really had to focus on — break that traditional mindset of an acquisition approach, going through the wall chart and stuff like that. That’s not going to work here.”

Because of that approach, officials believe there will be no valley of death with NGC2. The term “valley of death” in Defense Department acquisition parlance, refers to the failure to move promising technologies out of research and development and into procurement and production.

Contracting strategy

The Army has also sought an unconventional contracting approach to NGC2 to enable multiple iterative and competitive opportunities for contractors to provide technology. The service notes that no one company can provide a total solution for the initiative, and thus it will need to onboard vendor teams for additional components and layers available after the initial prototyping awards.

There have been several engagements with vendors, to include industry days and one-on-ones, to understand how to scope the contract, what it should include and how to incentivize certain members of the industrial base, according to officials.

This ongoing collaboration — both with industry and Futures Command on the prototype — is what officials have said will allow them to go fast and rapidly issue contracts by the May timeframe, not long after Capstone 5.

“It really came down to working, collaborating with the teams the whole time, and really getting the feedback from industry of what can we do to streamline, what are the true discriminators and how fast can you move through the selection to do that? Because we started so early, we’re working through this as the experimentation was going on,” Danielle Moyer, executive director for Army Contracting Command, said in an interview at Aberdeen Proving Ground.

DefenseScoop reached out to a variety of companies involved in experimentation and looking to bid on contracts for the eventual program of record. Most declined to offer information on the process even on the condition of anonymity.  

One firm, L3Harris, through a spokesperson noted that the overall process has gone well and the program office has been transparent on timeline and requirements.

The Army wants flexibility so it can on-ramp or off-ramp capabilities and even contractors that aren’t performing.

“We’re really trying to scope that base contract to be really flexible, so that we can figure out what we’re missing to be able to on-ramp capabilities upfront. That’s one of the things that we’re looking for in these draft solicitation documents from industry and make sure we capture everything and make sure it’s in scope, so that we can add capabilities when needed very quickly,” Moyer said. “There’s language that we sent out … to look at one, ramping and off-ramping new entrance and capabilities, how to incentivize that, to have certain roles in how vendors have teams or subcontracts and things like that. Very flexible, because I think what we want is we want to constantly have the best thing.”

The Army wants to enable more flexibility than the prior capability set paradigm of the integrated tactical network, where incremental advances in the network were built out and delivered over two-year cycles. In those cycles, the Army focused on certain capabilities, allowing some flexibility to insert new ones as technology advanced, but ultimately locked the architecture in place at a point before delivery.

“I think what we’ve seen since the days where we were considering capability set fielding is it’s a couple different things. One is, the pace of technological change has picked up. We’re not always in an era where it’s rapidly accelerating to the degree it is, but it’s happened in the past. We’re in one of those phases now where it’s extremely rapid,” Joseph Welch, deputy to the commander of Futures Command, who was involved in the capability set development, said in an interview at Aberdeen Proving Ground. “The challenge we had on capability set is there’s only so much of the Army that you can modernize at any pace, given the resources that we had. We’re always in a resource-constrained environment. We’re taking a particular look at how we integrate resourcing within the Army across all the different ways with bucket money toward this problem set. I think that’s going to help. But that was an inherent issue with capability set, is that we weren’t able to do it at the pace to get capability widely out to the Army quickly.”

Moyer noted that officials want to create an ecosystem of capabilities, equating it to an umbrella where the middle is the core foundation of NGC2 and then poles of different layers are built in and added to the core middle.

Moyer declined to say how many contracts will be associated with NGC2, noting that it will be dependent on how many responses the service gets from requests to industry. 

With numerous contracts expected covering a variety of aspects, the Army has been trying to work to determine what incentivizes certain companies to make contracts worthwhile.

“There’s things that incentivize different vendors. Some vendors are incentivized by more time. Some vendors are incentivized by more money. Some vendors are just purely incentivized by having competition. Well, how do you balance all that?” Moyer said. “Maybe it’s based on who wins. If you deliver this capability that exceeds whatever requirement, you get an additional X profit or you get an additional X set of months or whatever — whatever makes sense. It was really listening to what will incentivize them to help us get the best capability and holding them accountable.”

What’s less clear is what will be awarded post-Capstone 5 or how much of the prototype will move into the acquisition effort.

A former acquisition official noted that NGC2 is at a critical inflection point, moving from what amounted to a research-and-development effort to having to field and scale it to units. What industry might have difficulty with is understanding the boundaries of what the Army wants.

“What you’re seeing, I think, is a difficulty in first scoping it. I think industry has struggled to figure out the boundaries of what they’re buying. Is it mission command software, and if so, for what employment? Is it to replace the mounted system, the command post system, the dismounted system? It seems like it’s command post systems. [Does] it also include transport? Is this going to replace the radio programs or the broadband SATCOM programs?” they said. “There’s all these open questions about what it is. I think that’s probably the first big question the Army needs to answer is to better define the boundaries of what will be part of the program of record for Next Gen C2.”

It’s fine to leave some of those questions open-ended in a science-and-technology effort, but the Army will have to define those further as it seeks to scope out a program, they added. 

Many of the same contractors have been involved from the beginning of the prototyping process. This has allowed the Army to iterate on the prototype much faster. But, if the program office seeks to onboard many of those companies following a successful demonstration of the prototype — which can easily be done given the nature of how they were awarded for the prototype — it might raise questions about fair and open competition.

“If we want to capitalize on … faster deliveries, I think that we need a very clear answer on whether competition in the prototyping phase is sufficient to support moving quickly without more competition and into production,” the former official said. 

It’s also not clear who will serve as the integrator for the entire effort — a company, a group of companies or the Army.

“The integrator model is not good, it’s not good for the Army … We lose too much agency in downstream selection with the integrated approach. The Army has famously tried to serve as the integrator itself. In the interest of humility, that doesn’t work either,” Gen. James Rainey, commander of Futures Command, said March 18 at the annual McAleese Defense Programs Conference, speaking generally about service programs and not specifically on NGC2. “What we’re really looking at is for industry teams to self-organize around problems and requirements, just like you would self-organize if you were solving any other problems. We’re real interested in companies that can pull together a competitive team of the best across specific parts of industry and make offerings that way.”

Also less clear is the funding streams for the effort. Program executive office for command, control, communications and network, said the budgeting process is pre-decisional.

“The Army is reviewing how to adapt current and future investments to fund NGC2. C2 Fix is also a down payment on NGC2 by accelerating the transformation of the network transport layer,” the office said in a statement, referencing the parallel effort to NGC2, C2 Fix, which is essentially providing units with current and existing capabilities, but envisions employment differently and acting as the bridge to NGC2.  

“As part of the NGC2 strategy, the Army plans to collapse and replace/displace legacy systems and components as we move to this newer, more intuitive, commercial-based capability. The specific investment and divestment strategies will be based upon feedback from market research, Project Convergence activities, and continuous user feedback,” the office added.

Lt. Gen. Karl Gingrich, deputy chief of Staff, G-8, said at the McAleese Defense Programs Conference that funds for NGC2 will start showing up in fiscal 2026.

An industry source noted the Army must strike a careful balance of collapsing certain existing funding lines with modernization efforts, noting funding sources have not yet been cleared to industry.

“There is, however, concern that the department may shift funding from procurement efforts that are supporting current fielding initiatives and providing much-needed technology to operational forces to fund NGC2 efforts,” they said. “Any shift in programmatic resourcing should involve a robust discussion with the industrial base to ensure the industrial base understands emerging requirements and can dedicate innovation to those efforts.”  

Gingrich noted that the Army has gone back into its requirements documents to look at how to off-ramp money that was allocated to outdated efforts.

“What we have done is gone back into our requirements documents and said ‘hey, what of this was mission command or command and control-related?’ OK, here’s the money that was associated with that, we are now off-ramping that money and we will bring it into Next Gen C2 in the future, so that we ensure that there’s no money out there going towards legacy systems,” he said.

Integration and fielding

As NGC2 scales, the Army will have to work on integrating the technology with platforms, a delicate dance that involves fitting gear into tight spaces on platforms and understanding how to use that vehicle’s power to run them.

This is perhaps one of the biggest lessons from the C2 Fix effort, is the so-called “trail boss” concept that officials believe will have to continue through NGC2.

That concept is the recognition that the entire acquisition community needed to be integrated together with the network and closely tied with others in the platform world to streamline integration of new kit and capabilities, and lead the enterprise between eight program executive offices and 24 program managers to serve as the focal point of integration.

“I think that’ll go a long way for Next Gen C2 because you are talking about a very highly integrated set of solutions that spans … software, but it could also be the radios or networks that have anything to do with C2, and that could be any of the warfighting functions that are part of that spread across many different PMs, PEOs,” Welch said. “That trial boss concept, that mechanism of bringing that all together, is just going to become increasingly important because of the interdependence of all of these capabilities.”

When it comes to fielding the equipment, officials don’t anticipate the traditional process of going from select unit to select unit. Each one might be a little bit different and unique based on what the commander needs.

“We’ll be responsive to that and then we will continue to move on and then check back with them as we go forward,” Chaney said.

The integrated tactical network primarily focused on brigades for most of its existence prior to the Army making the division the main unit of action. Officials have said NGC2 fielding will likely be a little of both in the short term — fielding to brigades and divisions holistically.

“The ITN is already out there to the light units, about to go out to the heavy units. That momentum and that progress is going to continue. I think that highlights the complexity challenge of our network,” Mark Kitz, program executive officer for C3N, said at the Army’s technical exchange meeting in Savannah, Georgia, in December 2024. “We’ve been doing the ITN for six years. We fielded 15 percent of the Army. This idea that Next Gen C2 is just going to transform and change the Army next year — sorry, that’s not what’s going to happen.”

Other officials noted that the software aspect of NGC2 will make fielding to divisions easier while the hardware components are scoped out.

“The software components can switch in and out much more rapidly. That gives us some trade space … on what it looks like,” Alex Miller, chief technology officer for the chief of staff, said at the same conference. “If we go, hey, there’s a lot more flexibility in treating most of this like software, division fieldings become a lot easier because we can take some of the new radio, which, some of the secret sauce here is the C2 Fix comms infrastructure is giving us a real good look at what we can actually transition over.”

This will allow the Army flexibility to determine the right mix of proliferated low-Earth orbit space-related capabilities, cloud and other architectures.

The post What will the Army’s Next-Gen C2 contract look like? appeared first on DefenseScoop.

A year in the making, the Army recently tested its prototype for how soldiers will conduct command and control. Next year, an entire division will get the capability.

What began as a proof of concept at Project Convergence Capstone 4 in March 2024 with a rudimentary demo — passing data — has culminated at Capstone 5 in March 2025 with what officials call a proof of principle.

The Army has been seeking to completely revamp the way it conducts command and control — meaning, the way troops communicate on the battlefield, pass information, coordinate effects and conduct operations.

Officials have explained that the systems the service has used in the past will not be adequate to win in the future against sophisticated adversaries given the vast amounts of data that exist now and how quickly that information must be passed.

“We will never achieve our warfighting effectiveness if we don’t have a command-and-control network that enables our commanders to execute mission command at the point of need on the battlefield. Period, full stop,” Lt. Gen. Karl Gingrich, deputy chief of staff, G-8, said March 18 at the annual McAleese Defense Programs Conference. “The network is incredibly important, probably [the] number one priority for the United States Army for modernization.”

When the U.S. military went from the analog world — think pins on cork boards to track troops and plan operations — to the digital world, each individual community developed their own systems. This led to stovepipes where information and data based on warfighting function, such as fires or intelligence, couldn’t be transferred effectively because they were bespoke.

Once the Army decided that this arrangement was no longer suitable, however, a new approach required the big lift of standardizing the data streams and developing the robust network transport to allow data to flow.

Enter Next Generation Command and Control, an experimentation effort run by Army Futures Command that will soon transition to a program of record. The initiative aims to provide commanders and units with a new approach to information, data, and command and control through agile and software-based architectures. Futures Command has been running the experimentation for the system while the acquisition community, in parallel, is in charge of the eventual program of record, issuing requests to industry to be able to award contracts shortly after Project Convergence.

“NGC2 exists today. It’s not theoretical. It’s not pretend,” Maj. Gen. Patrick Ellis, director of the C2 cross functional team at Army Futures Command, said in an interview at Project Convergence at Fort Irwin in March.

Officials explained that testing how to fight in an attack scenario exclusively using the NGC2 architecture is the number one objective for the Army at Project Convergence. The ultimate aim was to make sure the service can get the applications that are corps- and division-centric onto a Bradley vehicle or a tank to work on the tactical transport.

Soldiers at 2nd Battalion, 37th Armor Regiment are testing out the architecture at Capstone 5, along with a brigade command post on top of that and XVIII Airborne Corps headquarters. 

At the time DefenseScoop observed equipment and spoke with soldiers from the unit on the ground at Project Convergence at Fort Irwin, California, they had not yet put the system through its paces or gone through the scenario yet — and thus offered their thoughts based on initial familiarity with the system prior to execution.

The Army developed a horizontal technology stack that goes from a transport layer to an integration layer to a data layer to an application layer, which is where soldiers interact with it. This involved the difficult task of working with companies to standardize all the data from each of the warfighting functions and collapsing those functions into applications on a common operating picture.

Officials noted that the system is hardware agnostic, and soldiers and commanders can choose which dashboard they prefer, built by different companies, based on their need.

When a soldier logs into their NGC2 splash page, they are met with a series of applications they can click such as intelligence, maneuver, fires, protection, sustainment, C2 and information advantage — as well as an operational modeling tool to provide courses of actions using machine learning capabilities based on the available data in the system. The data that a unit, such as a division, consumes and generates flows into one integration layer where ML tools curate it before users interact with it.

Moreover, there is a common operational picture with map overlays that forces can see.

“Today, they’re pulling from several different sources and as you go up classification, that database is really not the same database that you’re using at the lower level. We’ve broken that paradigm and we’re using a single data layer, single map service to provide across different platforms, software platforms,” Chad Nash project lead for NGC2 with the Army Combat Capabilities Development Command C5ISR Center, told DefenseScoop in an interview at Aberdeen Proving Ground in February. “For our common operating picture at that application layer, we’re sending the same information across those applications and it means the same thing to the other applications.”

By shrinking this down and distilling it to an application layer, soldiers now all have access to the same data. This means operations can be distributed much more — because staff sections can be dispersed given they all have the same access and don’t need to be co-located in a command post to share information — and information about threats can be shared much faster.

Soldiers indicated that the typical game of “Telephone” on the battlefield has the potential to be eliminated. For example, in some cases, drone feeds were siloed within the intelligence personnel on staff who then had to pass that information to the maneuver personnel either digitally or over radio. But now, that information can be readily available to all.

NGC2 “reduces the stovepipes or the silos of information flow. It’s giving all warfighting functions the same access to the data so that we can contribute to the operation with a fight in the same sense. It’s enabled our ability to communicate at echelons and across warfighting functions,” Capt. Nate Kraemer, operations officer for 1st Brigade, 1st Armored Division and the lead planner for the brigade for Capstone 5, said in an interview at Fort Irwin. “The biggest thing is that data flow across warfighting function. That’s going to cut down on a lot of processing times, informational delays, so that everyone in real time has the same picture and can make the most informed decision about the operation.”

For the battalion commander, who will be putting the system through its paces, command and control on the battlefield is essential for him to be able to perform his tasks.

“The C2 node is extremely important. Command and control of the force on the battlefield, what that requires, though, is information delivered quickly enough so I can make a good decision or the best decision that I can make based on the information,” Lt. Col. Tad Coleman, commander 2nd Battalion, 37th Armor Regiment, said at Fort Irwin. “As I’ve been messing with the Next Gen C2, I’ve actually been quite impressed with how light it is and still being able to have all the information, which creates an easier redundancy for us in a cab on the move, compared to what we would usually have.”

The system will likely be able to provide him greater on-the-move capability, negating the need to stop on the battlefield to establish communications and gain updates. It will have the ability to disperse his staff sections and vehicles, which will ultimately make his formation more survivable and harder to target by the enemy given they won’t all be bunched together like they were prior to NGC2.

The tool will also enable better and faster decision-making because access to more data in real time will allow for changes in courses of action.

“The fact that I’m getting similar information and I’ve got layers that people are building, I can make decisions faster. But not just faster decisions, because not all fast decisions are good, I can [also] make better decisions because I’m actually getting the information that I need across the different type of warfighting functions,” he said.

Ellis also noted that logistics personnel are now able to monitor munitions stocks in real time of forces in contact and have a much more realistic view of what their levels are and what needs to be replenished and where.

“With the future potential to integrate it with the systems on the tank, so that in real time it could track the ammunition that I’ve expended and automatically report that from a tank crew level to a company level, and aggregate that data and pass it to our higher headquarters to both inform their ability to make decisions on how much combat power we have remaining,” Capt. Adam Emerson, A Company commander, 2nd Battalion, 37th Armor Regiment, said in an interview. “That also helps us predict when we need to conduct resupply and when we can expect to receive resupply. With that potential, it could go a long way for managing.”

Ellis noted that the Army has been thinking about how it will manage that architecture and infrastructure — such as the operating system and the applications that go into it through a military-like app store, though exactly how is still being determined.

“That governance is getting written now. We absolutely acknowledge that that’s a piece of this. You got to build out the ecosystem. Industry could probably help us do that, but we’re going to have to run the governance over top of that to make sure that we don’t just turn it into a free for all,” he said.

Additionally, the architecture provides wireless transport local to vehicles such as tanks and Bradleys for augmented reality goggles for commanders at echelon to have greater situational awareness of the battlespace. When they open their hatch to look out, the goggles allow them to see position location information data on their headsets.

The idea is typically, tankers don’t always know where their friendly forces are located or where the enemy is. The AR goggles quickly determine where everybody is and allow for rapid actions such as call for fires and maneuver with a function to point and draw on the system.

The architecture also attempts to realize Chief of Staff Gen. Randy George’s vision of tablets, which, if fully realized, will replace and combine mounted and dismounted systems. The intent was for soldiers to have a tablet in their vehicles for their mission command with the ability to take it out when at the halt.

The way forces currently conduct mission command is there’s a variety of different platforms that are in vehicles and soldiers have dismounted, meaning everyone has a different view. Now, they can put their tablet in the vehicle and take it off when the vehicle stops, providing the same picture to anyone and allowing them to drill down into more specific information or maps if needed.

This will give units the ability to move faster because they can take their tablets out, move them to the command post for a couple of minutes and then put them back in their vehicles to move again.  

To make the Project Convergence experimentation happen, DEVCOM had to fabricate cables and racks that were 3D printed to mount all the antennas and communications equipment to the battalion’s vehicles.

The hired guns

Gen. James Rainey, commander of Army Futures Command, sought to improve how the service conducts command and control, and he tasked two individuals to “fix the network.”

Enter the “hired guns”: Col. Michael Kaloostian, chief digital and artificial intelligence officer at Futures Command and Col. Matt Skaggs, director of tactical applications and architecture at Futures Command.

Their two-part plan involved getting each warfighting function off their individual box and then getting rid of everyone’s individual data models.

“We want to have a cloud native, software first, hardware-agnostic ecosystem that everybody sees the same data at the same time,” Skaggs said at the Army Vertex conference in November of the overall goal.

Despite having no formal acquisition or technical background, both colonels have been users of these types of systems in both the conventional and special operations communities.

“I was part of the [Distributed Common Ground System] wars. I went in and out of developing that program and then helped some of it [with] the follow-on program … I learned a lot of lessons on both how and how not to interact with industry and how you should build a system,” Skaggs said.

To get to this prototype, the Army began at Project Convergence Capstone 4 last year with a demonstration that sought to showcase data being passed. That demo provided the initial proof of concept for what NGC2 could become, leading the Army to build that out over the course of the next year.

“If we didn’t show the capability and what was possible at PCC4, during that S&T phase, we’re not having this conversation right now. Next Gen C2 never happens,” Kaloostian said.

Throughout that next year, Futures Command and subordinate organizations built upon the notion at various stages. At the NetModX venue in September, which is a field-based experimentation event, the NGC2 architecture had its first experiment with a degraded environment. The Army sought to test how transport modalities would work if the network was strained, examining a robust network, resilient network and an intelligent, threat-informed network.

The Army is looking at the mix of edge and cloud. Forces are beginning to understand that the complex operating environment of the future will present communications and network challenges by adversaries, what the military calls DDIL or “denied, degraded, intermittent and limited.”

“Now what we are working on is, how do we link this all together, how do we transport that data to the point of need, how do we do it in a DDIL environment if we are disconnected, but then re-sync at that point, so that we can marshal national and reach-back capabilities all the way to the tactical edge?” Gingrich said.

That process sought to get it in line for Project Convergence Capstone 5, where the architecture ran classified information for the first time at scale, on a real tactical network at echelon.

Ellis noted that at Capstone 4, it was mostly pretend with notional nodes. Between then and all the additional events, the Army worked with most of the same vendors to shrink the development loop and get faster results.

“We went from pretend stuff and say this is a pretend node, to today, which is there is a real armored platoon leader and a real armored battalion commander that has taken real vehicles, real tanks, real soldiers out in the field,” he said.

The Army took the architecture to the Combined Joint Systems Integration Laboratory for a validation event for about a month to work out the kinks prior to Capstone 5. That facility allows the service to completely replicate the tactical network and environment in a lab prior to getting systems on the ground in order to run tests and diagnostics to mitigate technical glitches on day one of an exercise.

“One of our challenges or opportunities was replicating a lab-based environment and not having them go to a demo site to perform an experiment and then collect all the data and come back. We’re able to do that here in a lab environment with the engineers to do a technical evaluation,” Nash said. “In terms of functionality, capability providing us the transport and network capabilities here in the CJSIL has been essential and instrumental for us moving forward because it really set the stage and allowed us to work through any of the kinks here. We’re able to test capabilities, see the functionality and replicate challenges or replicate failures, if you will, and mitigate those significant” problems.

Scaling to division

Following this year’s Capstone event, the Army will be taking all the equipment off the vehicles and bringing it to 4th Infantry Division.

Additional experimentation will be undertaken by 4th ID — along with a brigade from 25th ID — while the program office works the acquisition component. Officials noted that what comes out of Project Convergence won’t be the final solution and more refinement needs to be done.

It’s important to begin division experimentation as the Army is moving to make the division the primary unit of action instead of brigade.

In the past, light infantry units have been chosen as the first to experiment with new network capabilities because they are easier to integrate with given their lighter footprint and fewer vehicles. The Army wanted to start with the most difficult formation — armored — for NGC2 as a means of working those kinks out early and level setting the Army as a whole.

There was some thought internally that if those lighter units continued to get the latest and greatest, the disparity between formations within the Army would become even greater as heavies would be even farther behind.

“The intent here is to flip that entire model and start with the most difficult divisions first. Then work the light divisions [that] are easy,” Kaloostian said.

The Army is expecting a contract for the official program to be awarded in May, followed by more experimentation and fielding.

Part two of this series will focus on acquisition and how officials believe NGC2 will succeed where other efforts in the past have not. Part two can be found here.

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Although the Army’s main fighting formation was brigades for the last 20 years of the global war on terror, it’s now shifting to division as the unit of action, and corps will also be a critical echelon that must relearn old lessons regarding how to mobilize in a new era where counterterrorism and counterinsurgency are no longer the service’s main focus.

Corps is an important echelon as many authorities are held at this level and it acts as the bridge between tactical Army forces and joint task forces across an assigned theater with other services.

As officials seeks to determine how to deploy, corps leaders understand that much like subordinate units, they must have mobile and survivable command posts. As part of that, they must figure out what’s needed for the right mix of cloud-based access and edge computing.

“How do we build resilient, survivable, adaptable command posts? Some of that involves things like, do we build out an edge capability? We have our first edge nodes that we’re playing with out at [Project Convergence] Capstone,” Col. Edwin Mathias, the corps’ chief of staff, said in an interview.  

The Army as a whole is looking at the mix of edge and cloud. Forces are beginning to understand that the complex operating environment of the future will present communications and network challenges by adversaries, what the military calls DDIL or “denied, degraded, intermittent and limited.”

Access to the cloud could be limited or disrupted, necessitating a local edge capability until those connections can be reestablished.

At XVIII Airborne Corps’ warfighter exercise last August, a large command post exercise, one of the biggest lessons was the need for an edge capability when cloud access was lost.

“Everything that we do now is cloud-based at the corps level. When we lost communications for the network — and that was basically because we had so much data going out that the network was not in a position to handle it — we didn’t have any connectivity to the systems that we needed to have connection to, which drove our focus to really get after the edge capability,” Col. Nicole Vinson, the corps’ chief communications officer, said in an interview. “The edge capability, technically, we’re looking at, is how do you do it? But then once we get something at the edge, which we have now at PC, you can start driving the conversation of what information do you need to have access to at the edge, what applications do you need to continue to operate at the edge? We can change the conversation from the technology knowing that we need it, but now starting to figure out what capabilities and what mission sets do you need to be able to continue to operate when in any kind of disconnected environment?”

The XVIII Airborne Corps is looking to test two different edge node versions, with one being a cloud-to-edge capability that will be tested for the first time. The corps created a tactical cloud to take capabilities from the cloud and deploy what they need at the edge, which will allow them to change depending on the mission set.

The goal is to try to get away from the stovepiped edge capabilities of the past and move to a more dynamic and flexible environment.

“We’ve always fought against different stovepipes. What we’re really trying to get after with our command post is to be lighter, faster, more mobile. The more we deliver these stovepiped edge capabilities, we’re not really accomplishing what we set out to achieve,” Vinson said. “The way we want to be able to operate is to be able to come together as a command post but then push the different groups out.”

The corps wants to look at four different groups to operate independent of each other and then determine what edge capability needs to be with each group.

This goes back to the need for survivable, adaptable and resilient command posts, based on observations from Ukraine and the recognition that larger and static command posts are juicy targets.

“Our ability to disaggregate the staffs into multiple nodes and reduce our signature is important,” Mathias said. “Those edge nodes, those independent transport capabilities would allow us to operate our current operations for one location, our fusion cell with our intel and fires team in another location, our administrative logistics component in another location, and then our network and G-6 team in yet another.”

Moreover, Project Convergence is allowing the corps to determine what mission sets need to come up to that level, now that the Army is shifting to division as the unit of action instead of brigade.

As division has become the main fighting unit, the Army has sought to move much of the network complexity out of brigades to the division level to enable those smaller units to focus on their fights as opposed to grappling with the network.

“One of the key elements that we have to be very cautious of is with the brigades and the division going to [secure but unclassified-encrypted] is how do we as a corps continue to be able to tie into those organizations without having so much burden on the division? There’s a lot of work going on at Project Convergence with the cross-domain solutions until we can get to a true zero-trust capability,” Vinson said.

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Project Convergence Capstone 5, hosted by the Army, is an experimentation venue for all the U.S. military services and key allies to train alongside each other and test concepts for integration. This is in line with one of the Pentagon’s top priorities called Combined Joint All-Domain Command and Control, or CJADC2, which envisions how systems across the entire battlespace could be more effectively and holistically networked to provide the right data to commanders, faster. The word “combined” in the parlance of CJADC2, refers to bringing foreign partners into the mix.

This year’s event will expand upon previous iterations, taking place in two scenarios: one in March at the National Training Center at Fort Irwin, California, focused on enabling operations at the corps and below level along with joint and international partners, and the other in April along with U.S. Indo-Pacific Command to exercise at the combatant command level with all service components.

The Indo-Pacific portion will be much more expansive than what the military did as part of last year’s Project Convergence capstone event.

“Last year, I said we had fake Guam, we had a simulation built that we had something we were defending and all the things that went along with it. This year, we’re taking all that stuff we did in tents at Camp Pendleton [in California] and we’re going to the Pacific. We’ll be operating out of Hawaii, Guam, the Philippines, Japan and Australia,” Brig. Gen. Zachary Miller, commander of Joint Modernization Command, said in an interview. “We’ll be doing the same type of things, but it’ll be at actual operational distances across the International Date Line, using the actual live networks. We’ll have all the live intelligence data, plus the simulation wrap that we put on it to do all the key activities, defense of Guam, offensive and defensive activities, etc.”

Miller said the Pacific portion is focused on transitioning from crisis to conflict — using a familiar real-world scenario of defending of U.S. and coalition territory, a nod to China’s ambitions to take Taiwan — involving theater-level offensive activity, such as strikes on maritime targets and land targets, while forces are continuing to try to gain intelligence and information about the enemy and defend themselves from adversary volleys.

At Fort Irwin, the exercise will be focused on more tactical operations that go beyond the day-one portion of conflict at the theater level once land, air, sea and special ops forces are introduced. This could be a Pacific or European scenario, Miller noted, as the technology the military is testing will be agnostic to theater.

As part of the exercise, there will be what Miller described as “leave behind” capabilities.

“When we’re done with this … everything from cross-combatant command coordination to target effector pairing at lower echelons, they will have capabilities they will keep that they will be able to fight with on the Indo-Pacom warfighting network. That’s a big deal,” Miller said.

Those leave-behind capabilities fall into two broad categories. The first is related to the minimum viable CJADC2 product that deals with cross-combatant command coordination and collaboration. This is focused on how forces make rapid decisions and understand resources across all the combatant commands in conjunction with the Joint Staff and senior policymakers in the nation’s capital.

This coordination across combat commands is another key difference in this year’s Project Convergence. It’s not just Indo-Pacom, but there will be a total of six combatant commands that are at some point touching the exercise. Officials recognize that a war in one combatant command’s area of responsibility will likely have global implications.

Those collaboration tools span around six or seven workflows, Miller said, which include the Maven Smart System as well as asset visibility and intelligence. There are also machine learning models that are built-in to help provide coordination and situational awareness across the various geographic regions.

The capability provides “the connective tissue so that we don’t have, when something happens, four different combatant commands producing PowerPoint presentations about what their recommendations are, that then the Joint Staff or somebody else has to somehow try to put together,” Miller said. “That’s a time-consuming process and the information gets stale in a hurry.”

The second set of capabilities is focused on the ability to conduct offensive actions from across all the services and coalition partners using any sensor available.

Most importantly, this capability is looking at how to strike heavily protected formations and targets.

“We have to understand, again, what are the totality of the effects we need? Some of it is we need this types of missiles or we this types of subsurface things,” Miller said. “Another part of it is things like how do we bring an enemy out of [emissions control] so we can make sure we know where they are for sure, [and] how we fuse different forms of intelligence rapidly.”

Officials are using the actual maritime strike concept from Indo-Pacom for the scenario.

Army objectives

When it comes to testing out Army-specific objectives for Project Convergence, Miller said the entire basis for the event is built around the forthcoming Army warfighting concept. The event will be based on a much more coherent scenario for how senior leaders think the Army will fight in the 2030 to 2040 timeframe.

Miller outlined four primary warfighting notions they’ll seek to explore during Capstone 5. The first is expanded maneuver aimed at how the joint force is thinking about time and space in all domains. Second is cross-domain fires, involving how to shoot and create effects across all domains of warfare. Third is formation-based layered protection, which is the idea of how to protect units in all domains, such as the electromagnetic spectrum, dispersion of command posts and countering unmanned aerial systems. Last is command and control and counter-C2, or preventing the adversary from being able to command their forces.

To test this out, the Army is looking at a battlefield framework that goes from corps all the way down to the platoon level.

The initiative will provide a unique opportunity to test an operational concept at the corps level in ways the Army typically hasn’t before.

Corps exercises are traditionally done at the command post level and are simulated. However, Project Convergence is providing a holistic training opportunity at all echelons similar to a combat training center rotation. Those events are typically focused on brigades and are the most realistic combat scenarios the Army can create for units to train. Project Convergence will essentially be a combat training center rotation for corps and below as opposed to last year’s event, which saw independent pockets of experimentation — such as medical — separate from other operations.

The Army will also be looking at how to do maneuver in a multi-dimensional aspect, to include within the electromagnetic spectrum.

While the Army can’t replicate all these dimensions and capabilities at the National Training Center, it has built a robust simulation environment intended to overwhelm participants with what they might expect during large-scale combat against a sophisticated nation-state adversary.

“If you’re in a command post, what you’re going to have in front of you is a very, very detailed, hectic, confusing picture of what is going on in the air and on the ground for any friendly and enemy UAS systems. Everybody’s trying to jam everybody else. One-way attack munitions. All the same time we’re trying to fire rockets and cannons through that space. We’re trying to fly manned [and] unmanned rotary-wing aircraft. We’re trying to resupply. All of the stuff that has to happen to do an operation,” Miller said. “How we think about planning and operating in that space is huge. We have technologies that are brought in to help us make sense of all that. We’re very focused on making sure commanders and staffs understand what they look like in the electromagnetic spectrum and what their vulnerabilities are [and] at the same time what the enemy’s vulnerabilities are. That’s a big focus.”

They’ll also be focusing on robotics and human-robot formations, particularly for breaching, to ensure human soldiers aren’t the first forces in contact with the adversary.

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The effectiveness of this working toward and eventually achieving true integration was recently examined during Project Convergence Capstone 4 (PCC4), which took place over several weeks spanning February and March 2024. Hosted by the U.S. Army, PCC4 acts as an experimentation venue for joint services and multinational partners to test capabilities and concepts associated with CJADC2. This year’s exercise achieved a higher level of integration between mission partners than has even been achieved in previous CJADC2 experimentation — by, with and through experimental software that the U.K. largely championed to speed up the notoriously manual workflows around a coalition’s command and control of targeting.

While the inevitable “scripting” of outcomes for higher visibility of course took place, PCC4 served as a prime model for some key areas of defense-industry partnership that should be replicated in future exercises, experiments and actual missions to bring our allies closer together. Capstone is just one example of how the right technology and industry partner matched with the right government sponsors can generate mission-critical digital integration.

The success of Capstone yielded three major takeaways on government-industry partnerships:

Lesson learned #1: Warfighter input is critical

Continuous warfighter input and corresponding agile development are critical in identifying rapidly achievable software improvements. At Capstone, industry operational and technical expertise listened to and understood the sponsor’s operational needs and employed an agile development process to ensure rapid and responsive software updates were conducted successfully throughout the event. Some software even required 10 instances of produced and deployed code on a single day PCC4 execution. This model demonstrated the powerful impact of agile development with warfighter input, specifically the speed and accuracy with which software can be modified and improved to align with warfighter needs. It also hit home the fact that this model will need to occur in conflict, not just experimentation. Industry will need to be at the edges of warfare, right alongside the users of their capabilities.

In preparation for future experiments, DOD leaders should establish structured and ongoing processes to gather continuous warfighter feedback. This feedback should be gathered from various operations and echelons of the chain of command to ensure all experiences are accounted for.

Lesson learned #2: Interoperability and security come first

Capstone specifically leveraged mature prototypes with proven data-centric security models, along with identity, credentialing, and access management (ICAM) capabilities, allowing partnerships to establish a zero-trust environment that empowered the secure sharing of data across the U.K. and the U.S. The real challenge wasn’t actually the interoperability between allies but between industry organizations. Without the U.S. Army (or anyone else) clearly defining and mandating a set of standards to govern data sharing, it was left entirely to industry to determine if they were willing to share, and why. Needless to say, allowing business calculus to impact experimentation outcomes was a losing battle.

For future exercises, defense and industry leaders should collaborate on best practices to make more standardized protocols or guidelines for data sharing and handling, making a certain standard for interoperability and security a necessity.

Lesson learned #3: Avoid vendor lock-in

Many forget that experimentations like Capstone, by its nature, involve trial and error. This requires removing the layer of vendor preference that is ever-present at these events. Government and industry need to fully embrace experiments as a space to fail safely and explore new methods for testing integration capabilities — as well as to entertain other capabilities and industry partners to fill gaps. This approach underscores the importance of the DOD remaining flexible and agile, avoiding reliance on a single vendor for an entire problem area, especially in the software space, where any proficient software capability can become any solution with enough money and time. Additionally, to promote ongoing innovation, the DOD must continue to foster an environment where increasing competition ensures that the “best solution” is based strictly on performance, not just preference. 

At Capstone, many can agree that U.K. participants were successful in part due to their openness to collaborating with a diverse range of vendors that were focused on a single problem (as in, not just a diverse range of problems each with a single vendor), as well as bringing their own solutions to bear. The U.S. should aim to convey this same openness within future experiments. This entails limiting pre-ordained outcomes and fully embracing a variety of software vendors, technologies and approaches.

PCC4 represented a golden opportunity for government-industry collaboration on real operational problems, leveraging emerging technology and capturing feedback to rapidly improve the technology to meet warfighter requirements. As CJADC2 continues to mature and improve, we must continue to reflect on our past successes and identify new opportunities to advance integration.

Nick Woodruff is the chief strategy officer at Research Innovations Inc. (RII). He’s responsible for the development of partnerships, both domestic and internationally, and the leadership of select strategic initiatives in pursuit of global impact. He previously served in uniform for 14 years in organizations within U.S. Special Operations Command, including as a professional in information and unconventional warfare.

Chris Compton is the senior capture manager at Research Innovations Inc. (RII). He’s responsible for driving strategy and development of RII’s Joint Targeting Platform, a suite of software capabilities designed to enable joint targeting and employment of all-domain fires and effects. He previously served in the U.S. Army for more than 26 years, which included an assignment as chief of concepts development at the Fires Center of Excellence.

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