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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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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.

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Chief Pentagon spokesman Sean Parnell and Lt. Gen. Alex Grynkewich, director of operations at the Joint Staff, supplied new details about those airstrikes and the broader operational vision at the Defense Department’s first on-camera press briefing under the new Trump administration. 

“The initial wave of strikes hit over 30 targets at multiple locations, degrading a variety of Houthi capabilities. These included terrorist training sites, unmanned aerial vehicle infrastructure, weapons manufacturing capabilities and weapon storage facilities. It also included a number of command-and-control centers, including a terrorist compound where we know several senior unmanned aerial vehicle experts were located,” Grynkewich said.

“On Sunday, strike operations continued against additional headquarters locations, weapon storage facilities, as well as detection capabilities that have been used to threaten maritime shipping in the past,” he noted. 

Officials emphasized that this operation will continue into the coming days and until President Donald Trump’s demands are met. They didn’t explicitly clarify all of the commander-in-chief’s expectations, but Parnell suggested that they’d begin with a pledge from the Houthis to stop all attacks against American ships. 

“We will use overwhelming lethal force until we have achieved our objective. With that said, and this is a very important point, this is also not an endless offensive. This is not about regime change in the Middle East — this is about putting American interests first,” Parnell said. 

A series of Houthi-led UAV and missile attacks against military and commercial ships intensified in and around the Red Sea under the Biden administration, partially as a response to America’s support for Israel’s military actions in Gaza.

According to Parnell, the Houthis have launched one-way attack drones and missiles at U.S. warships more than 170 times, and at commercial vessels around 145 times, since 2023.

In response to reporters’ questions, the official did not specify what provoked this new wave of strikes. However, Grynkewich said that the U.S. is able to take action against a “much broader set of targets” due to support from Trump.    

“The other key differences are the delegation of authorities from the president through [Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth] down to the operational commander. So, that allows us to achieve a tempo of operations where we can react to opportunities that we see on the battlefield in order to continue to put pressure on the Houthis,” Grynkewich noted.

The military is conducting battle damage assessments.

In terms of early estimates, Grynkewich suggested there were “dozens of military casualties so far” in this series of attacks — and despite the Houthis’ accusations, he said he’s seen no credible indications that any civilians were killed.

“There was an unmanned aerial vehicle facility that was struck with several key leaders. Those are key individuals who led their unmanned aerial vehicle enterprise and were some of the technical experts in there. So think of those types of individuals that we might be targeting as part of the command and control,” he said.

“We have destroyed command-and-control facilities, weapons manufacturing facilities and advanced weapons storage locations. But again, this campaign is ongoing. It’s difficult to talk about all this stuff from the [Pentagon briefing room] podium, and we’re not going to say anything from the podium until we’re sure that we have it right,” Parnell added.

The officials declined to share whether the U.S. is looking at plans to send ground troops to Yemen or the surrounding areas at this time, or to go after targets associated with Iran.

“I certainly don’t want to get out in front of the commander-in-chief and the secretary as it pertains to clearance of strikes and who we’ll be targeting. But I think the president’s made very clear that all options are on the table,” Parnell told reporters.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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“We were able to exercise the Corps and our subordinate divisions to conduct large-scale combat operations in the fictional locations that we had,” Lt. Gen. Matthew McFarlane, commander of I Corps, said in a call with reporters Thursday. “Non-contiguous outside of Japan, extending the area of operations to really test what the Corps needs to be able to do in the fight, which includes the key ones the Corps are driving: the communications, the sustainment, the logistics, getting the logistics to the different islands in the Pacific environment, the protection across all of those locations, as well as the long-range fires, intel sensors and gathering information so we can operate and then also we can share that with our multinational partners that we’re operating with.”

Yama Sakura, which took place Dec. 7, is an annual command post exercise focused on the defense of Japan. This year, it included the U.S. and Australia. The Warfighter Exercise is the premier corps and division-level command post engagement to train forces on mission command concepts and capabilities.  

Bringing the Warfighter to run concurrently with Yama Sakura allowed the Army to set up its distributed command and control nodes and replicate and extend the lines of communication between mission command nodes while allowing I Corps to conduct operations across noncontiguous locations outside of Japan, from a Yama Sakura perspective.

The concurrent and simultaneous efforts allow the Army to test new concepts for itself while working to integrate and pass data with international partners.

The concurrent exercises informed “how we organize within our mission command cells or our command posts and the tools we have across our network, if you will, to make sure we can do it quickly, and we can pass live data quickly without having to use, for instance, swivel chairs or data liaison detachments, but our systems can connect and we can integrate and leverage technology to help us fight at the speed of war,” McFarlane said.

Both events sought to inject real and simulated capabilities, taking lessons from the conflict in Ukraine to ensure forces are staying up to date with the latest battlefield advances. That included electronic warfare, unmanned aerial systems and other unspecified “multidomain” capabilities.

“We did integrate a large amount of what we’re seeing in the Ukraine and other places into this to make sure we’re ready. We did experiment with quite a few things as we looked at our ability to ensure we could mitigate effects from threat systems and optimize our capabilities to enable the subordinate divisions we had,” McFarlane said. “As we do these trilateral exercises, we continue to focus and build our ability to pass information, to address the different threats that are out there and optimize our capability from the Multidomain Task Force, the EW capabilities inherent into what we have in the Corps.”

Moreover, I Corps sought to experiment with how to integrate new formations, capabilities and concepts within current structures.

That included introducing UAS, which was tested with 2^nd Brigade, 25^th Infantry Division, one of the first three so-called transforming-in-contact units. Transforming-in-contact is an ongoing effort within the Army that uses deployments and troop rotations to test new equipment and concepts — mainly commercial off-the-shelf gear that currently focuses on unmanned aerial systems, counter-UAS and electronic warfare — that could allow units to be more responsive on a dynamic battlefield.

McFarlane stated the I Corps wanted to see what those capabilities look like when moved up to the division level to better understand how to optimize those new capabilities as they look at employing them.

The exercise also established a multidomain effects cell within the main division command post to ensure forces could plan and integrate, over time, the effects and optimize where those effects were going to enable outcomes.

“The multidomain effect cell was, I think, the biggest one we did as the convergence happens at the corps level, with our doctrine. With the Multidomain Task Forces working at the theater level, how do we integrate their effects, how do we integrate space, cyber,” McFarlane said. “It extended our operational reach, if you will, as we also work to ensure, as we work with partner countries, that we could help them benefit from the effects the Multidomain Task Forces bring to the fight.”

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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 Defense Department unveiled its Replicator 2 effort in September, with a goal of accelerating high-volume production of technologies designed to detect, track and destroy unmanned aerial threats.

Shortly after signing off on a classified counter-uncrewed systems strategy last week, Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin jetted off to DIU’s Silicon Valley headquarters to meet with companies developing these types of solutions.

The organization is playing a key role in bringing vendors and enabling technologies into the fold for Replicator.

The unit needs to “start early on the hardest problems, which in many cases are the software problems. And so for Replicator 1 [uncrewed platforms], we’re doing a whole host of things related to collaborative autonomy and command and control … For Replicator 2, we have a similar challenge with command and control across these systems, so we’re starting that now,” Aditi Kumar, deputy director of DIU, said Thursday during an event at the Hudson Institute.

While Replicator 1 is focused on accelerating and fielding thousands of uncrewed systems to counter China’s military buildup in the Indo-Pacific, Replicator 2 is also searching for tools to protect sites in the continental United States.

Lawmakers and other observers outside DOD are also concerned about these types of threats. For example, the compromise version of the fiscal 2025 National Defense Authorization Act, which was released over the weekend, would require the secretary of defense to create a “C-UAS Task Force” and for the director of the Pentagon’s All-Domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO) — which investigates reports of “unidentified anomalous phenomena” (UAP) — to designate liaisons to parter with that organization.

In recent days, sightings of mysterious drones in New Jersey have made headlines and raised alarm. And just last month, U.S. and U.K. military personnel were actively monitoring installations around and airspace over Royal Air Force Lakenheath, RAF Mildenhall, RAF Feltwell and RAF Fairford for mysterious small drones that have been repeatedly spotted near those bases.

Operating counter-UAS platforms in the homeland presents some different challenges than deploying these types of capabilities in war zones overseas, Kumar noted Thursday.

For example, one of the risks of firing off anti-drone weapons — be they kinetic interceptors like missiles or electronic warfare tools — in the United States is the possibility that such weapons could harm friendly aircraft and other civilian infrastructure, unintentionally.

“Even though we are designing some conceptual operations that are focused on the Indo-Pacom theater, I think similarly for Replicator 2 we had a chance to talk to some of our commercial partners about this, where there is the homeland defense challenge and then there is the OCONUS challenge. But even overseas, there are restricted environments, dense environments, populated environments that look very similar. We would think about them very similarly to environments in the homeland. And then, of course, there are, you know, conflict zones, and those are different types of solutions that we need to field. And so as we think about them, I think, you know, the homeland defense challenge is going to be probably the biggest one that we need to tackle, and as we think about the types of solutions that we can apply there, we can think about how broadly applicable they are to those other environments so that we can field something more broadly,” Kumar said.

“Even in the way that we selected Replicator 2 locations, Replicator 2 is focused on, you know, protecting our installations and force concentrations. The way that we selected those sites where we would field this capability was very deliberate because we wanted a sample set that is representative of the global footprint. And so as we field to those sites, we will then be able to draw lessons on how we can proliferate those technologies across the globe,” she added. “I think we start with the most limited environments, and then we go out from there.”

She noted that her organization recently released a solicitation via its commercial solutions opening for a “Forward Counter Unmanned Aircraft Systems Command and Control System,” or FCUAS C2.

The document states that critical infrastructure and force concentrations are increasingly at risk from the growing threat of adversary drones.

“Current command and control (C2) systems are not optimized to address the speed at which kill chain decisions (detect, track, identify/ assess, defeat) must occur to counter unmanned systems. As the UAS threat increases, a single operator conducting air defense operations may be overwhelmed,” officials wrote.

To address this problem, the Pentagon “seeks a tactical edge based C2 system that enables a single operator to manage multiple targets and is capable of fire control providing the ability to rapidly adapt to counter swarms of unmanned systems along with other potential manned or unmanned system threats. The solution should reduce operator cognitive load and accelerate the decision process to conduct multiple simultaneous kinetic and/or non-kinetic engagements, be easy to operate and can quickly integrate additional data sources, capabilities, sensors, and effectors and be able to operate autonomously if needed,” per the solicitation.

Some of the “primary attributes” that DIU is looking for when it comes to industry solutions include the ability to operate solely on a laptop, tablet or other portable system as a single piece of hardware; utilize or ingest sensor data for detection, tracking and identification; and “be capable of automated creation of engagement plans and providing fire control for various systems to include effectors such as kinetic, directed energy (DE), and electronic warfare, and attack UAS (interceptors).”

The unit also wants tools that support automated identification and classification of targets, weapons pairing, “prosecution of target,” and assistance with linking “the best sensor with the best effector option” for defeating threats.

Such a capability would fit in with the department’s concept for Combined Joint-All-Domain Command and Control (CJADC2), which aims to better connect the sensors, platforms, data streams and commanders of the U.S. military services and key allies and partners.

Vendor software needs to be able to support a minimum of 2,000 tracks at 4Hz; help with fratricide avoidance and airspace deconfliction; mitigate interference of electronic warfare systems; and support track cueing and track forwarding, according to the solicitation.

“This prototype will require several field exercises and will include integrating with existing sensor and effector systems and executing a full kill chain in a live fire CUAS test event projected for the summer of 2025,” officials wrote.

They noted that prototype other transaction agreements that are awarded may lead to awards of follow-on production contracts or transactions without the use of further competitive procedures.

“The follow-on production contract or transaction will be available for use by one or more organizations in the Department of Defense and, as a result, the magnitude of the follow-on production contract or agreement could be significantly larger than that of the prototype OT,” according to the solicitation.

Industry responses are due Dec. 23.

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Those bilateral engagements followed stops earlier that day at both U.S. Forces Japan headquarters at Yokota Air Base, and separately the Yokohama North Docks, where Austin heard directly from military personnel about maturing efforts to modernize the alliance’s command-and-control capabilities.

They also came as the two allies work on refining requirements to reconstitute USFJ into a joint force headquarters.

“As the security situation in the region is increasingly severe, I would like to continue to move forward with important initiatives of the alliance and cooperating our efforts to strengthen alliance capabilities to deter and respond, as well as to mitigate the impacts on local communities,” Japanese Defense Minister Gen Nakatani told Austin and his team during the open-press portion of their bilateral meeting.

Austin also emphasized how the two nations are operating in a clear-eyed manner regarding the challenges to peace and stability in the Indo-Pacific region and other areas of the world.

“That includes coercive behavior by the People’s Republic of China in the East China Sea and the South China Sea, and elsewhere in a region. It includes Russia’s reckless war of choice in Ukraine, and it includes [North Korea’s] support for Moscow’s war, as well as its other destabilizing and provocative activities,” he said. “But we’re meeting these challenges with confidence and resolve, and we remain committed to advancing our historic trilateral cooperation with [the] Republic of Korea.”

As the defense leaders alluded to, their meetings this week unfolded as Syria continues to erupt in political chaos, South Korea confronts backlash and works to recuperate from its president’s recent, temporary declaration of martial law, and conflicts continue to play out both in Ukraine and around Israel.

While the main portions of the Pentagon chief’s engagements were closed to the press on Tuesday, senior U.S. defense officials briefed a small group of journalists traveling in Austin’s delegation on the progress and implications of the deepening U.S.-Japan military partnership.

“The department has been working to realize the vision that Secretary Austin outlined in July” at a 2+2 dialogue in Tokyo, one senior official said.

There, American and Japanese national security officials solidified a plan to revamp their alliance’s command and control — or C2 — capabilities, including by enabling more collaboration on next-generation technologies within their defense industries and by expanding joint, cross-domain missions.

“The United States and Japan are on track to deliver that vision, as [U.S. Indo-Pacific Command] continues to convene working groups with Japanese counterparts to build out alliance coordination procedures and other operational measures for enhanced bilateral cooperation. There have been several such working groups so far,” the senior defense official said.

They added that, at the same time, America is also moving to reshape USFJ into a joint force headquarters by revamping its resources and facilities to expand and enable more cooperative missions and responsibilities.

“We are in a good position to implement these requirements in the months ahead, ensuring that the JFHQ is in a strong position to operate effectively with Japan and that the alliance can respond in peacetime and contingencies,” according to the senior defense official.

In their view, “Japan has been investing more than ever in its own capabilities.”

They pointed to how, in particular, the island nation has been moving to take on more roles and missions in the alliance and the broader region — including by standing up its own joint operations and command center that should open up sometime early next spring.

“And in the context of that, we made an alliance decision to upgrade U.S. Forces Japan, which has largely been in the business of managing the alliance itself, but not an operational command,” the senior U.S. defense official said.

They committed to sharing more information on the technical aspects of this pivot in the near future.

“But currently, the U.S. Forces Japan commander is dual-hatted as the 5th Air Force commander — and the decision that Secretary Austin made this summer as an alliance decision is to split those and to have a standalone [USFJ] commander that would be in command of this upgraded command, and one of the principal responsibilities of that will to be linking up with Japan’s new joint operational command in a way that we have not done before in the U.S.-Japan alliance,” the official said.

Additionally, they pointed out that the original language lawmakers proposed for the fiscal 2025 National Defense Authorization Act (the House-Senate negotiated version of the NDAA was released Saturday) incorporates a reporting requirement that if passed would mandate Defense Department personnel to inform Congress members about the progress that’s been made since the nations first agreed to boost their military partnerships.

“That’s just another sign and symbol of the bipartisan congressional interest and support that we see on this issue,” the senior defense official said.

During the official bilateral dialogues with Nakatani and Japan’s new Prime Minister Shigeru Ishiba on Tuesday, Austin repeatedly emphasized that — despite intensifying warfare in multiple regions around the world — he believes that the U.S.-Japan alliance is presently stronger than ever.

“We share a vision for a free and open Indo-Pacific, and I’m proud of how much we’ve accomplished over the past four years. We’ve announced major improvements to our force posture, advanced groundbreaking defense industrial agreements and taken steps to upgrade our command and control, and we’ve worked more closely than ever with our partners across this region in support of stability, deterrence and peace,” the Pentagon chief said.

In his opening remarks with Austin, which reporters were permitted to observe ahead of the closed-door meeting, Ishiba said the global conflict landscape is changing “very quickly, on a weekly basis” — and that current events now playing out in Syria and South Korea were difficult to imagine or predict not that long ago.

“A century from now, we will consider what’s happening in 2024 as something historic. So, we need to be accountable for today’s world, as well as the world of tomorrow’s generations,” he said.

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Here, he’ll spend the next three days engaging with U.S. troops and Japanese leaders about ongoing joint command-and-control upgrades the two militaries are pursuing, as well as a range of other nascent cooperative efforts designed to expand and modernize their shared arsenals of warfighting assets.

During an 11-hour flight overseas from California, a senior U.S. defense official traveling in Austin’s delegation briefed a small group of reporters on the demonstrations and activities the secretary and his team are set to observe and participate in at multiple military installations around the island nation.

“Throughout the next three days, we’re going to see a lot of ‘firsts’ in Japan,” the senior defense official said.

It might be his last visit to the close U.S. treaty ally as secretary, but this trip also marks Austin’s fourth official time in Japan while steering DOD.

In the senior defense official’s view, “it’s fitting that the secretary would travel again to Japan at the end of this year because his first overseas trip as secretary in March 2021 was to the Indo-Pacific — and his first foreign stop on that trip was Japan.”

On Monday, Austin will head to Yokosuka Naval Base and tour the USS George Washington, which has been docked there since last month and is the only forward-deployed U.S. aircraft carrier worldwide at this time.

According to the senior official, it’s also the first time, in this context, that the Navy’s forward-deployed carrier air wing includes fifth-generation aircraft, the stealthy F-35C.

“So, this really marks a very significant milestone for our force posture efforts in Japan. And importantly, it showcases just how we are continuously modernizing the alliance’s capabilities, especially since we’ve started in 2021,” they said.

Next up, on Tuesday, the secretary will head to Yokota Air Base, where U.S. Forces Japan is now headquartered.  

“He’s actually going to get a progress report on how we are doing on command and control, or C2, and the upgrades that they’re actually making underway,” the senior defense official explained.

At a 2+2 dialogue in Tokyo this summer, top U.S. and Japanese national security officials solidified a plan to strategically update their alliance’s C2 capabilities, largely by deepening defense industry and advanced technology cooperation, and enhancing cross-domain operations.

“We have to get this right — but we also have to do it the right way. So, I think Tuesday’s briefing is going to give [Austin] a chance to really take stock on what’s been happening, what’s progressed today, what’s expected of this ongoing effort,” the senior defense official said.

Further, Japan is currently developing its military’s own, first-ever Joint Operations Center, with aims to officially stand it up in March 2025. Austin and his counterparts are looking to discuss changes America is making to U.S. Forces Japan to ensure they can eventually link up with that new joint operational command in a way that they have not been able to before.

From there, Austin and the team will head to Yokohama North Dock to meet directly with the U.S. Army’s 5th Composite Watercraft Company.

“This is significant because this company was actually activated in February of this year. It’s not only the first time this is deployed — now, it’s the first time [any of the] companies deployed outside the United States,” the senior defense official told reporters.

And then to close out Tuesday’s packed schedule of events, Austin is set to attend an office call with Japan’s Prime Minister Shigeru Ishiba, and then a working dinner with Minister of Defense Gen Nakatani.

“These engagements are going to give the secretary the opportunity to really take stock of the progress that we’ve made together over the years, thank the two of them, really, for the partnership, and underscore the importance of the alliance as a cornerstone of peace and stability in the Indo-Pacific,” the official noted.

They and others have suggested to DefenseScoop that China’s intensifying employment of political, economic and military coercion to essentially reshape the international order in the Indo-Pacific — for its own benefit — is considered a major motivation for the U.S. and Japan’s steadily strengthening alliance in the region.

Finally, on Wednesday, Austin will conclude the trip after traveling to Camp Asaka to observe the multi-day military exercise Yama Sakura unfolding in real-time.

“This exercise has taken place every year since 1982, but this is the first time that we’re actually incorporating more and formal Australian participation, which is something that Secretary Austin and his counterparts in Australia and Japan announced a few weeks ago in Darwin,” the senior defense official said.

Over recent months, leaders within the trilateral security alliance between Australia, the U.S. and the U.K. have been hosting nascent discussions with their Japanese counterparts about cooperating on a project-by-project basis under AUKUS Pillar 2, which entails the co-development of disruptive warfighting technologies across six focus areas.

In response to questions from DefenseScoop on Sunday regarding what capability areas may be prioritized first with Japan, the senior defense official confirmed consultations are ongoing, but declined to identify the specific technologies in question for nearest-term acceleration.

They committed to sharing more information after the trip to Tokyo ends.

“Importantly, we continue to work with Japan on deepening our trilateral and multilateral security partnerships — whether that’s with the Republic of Korea, Australia, the Philippines and others,” the senior defense official repeatedly emphasized during the briefing.

Notably, ahead of departing for this trip, DOD planners told reporters who were invited that there was a possibility that the secretary and his crew would also visit South Korea along the way. That changed after South Korea‘s President Yoon Suk Yeol declared martial law on Dec. 3 — and subsequently lifted it hours later after massive public outcry and lawmakers unanimously rejected the decree.

“When Secretary Austin meets with his counterparts, they often spend a good deal of time comparing assessments of major events in the region. And the trilateral relationship between the United States, Japan and the Republic of Korea has been a top tier priority for the Biden administration from the very start,” the senior defense official said in response to questions from DefenseScoop about whether the secretary planned to discuss the chaos and still-unfolding fallout in South Korea with his Japanese partners.

“And I think there is every reason to expect that all parties involved will remain quite committed — and certainly between Washington and Tokyo — quite committed to carrying on that progress,” they said.

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The recently completed Ramstein Flag 2024 and the ongoing and more secretive Neptune Eagle, among a variety of other related exercises and activities, are paving new means to combat anti-access/area-denial (A2/AD) capabilities that could affect who can enter critical real-world operating environments. They’re also enabling deeper interoperability, according to service members steering and participating in these future-focused events.

On Wednesday, a defense official who spoke to DefenseScoop on the condition of anonymity said that participation in such counter-A2/AD exercises ensures that “NATO can gain air superiority in future contested scenarios, alongside allies and partners.”

“That’s what it’s all designed to do,” the official said.

For instance, they pointed to the first-ever Ramstein Flag exercise, which unfolded in Greece earlier this month. Upwards of 130 military aircraft from 12 nations flew in the large-scale training and capability showcase.

Roots of Ramstein Flag trace back to a first-ever NATO weapons and tactics forum that Gen. James Hecker, who leads U.S. Air Forces in Europe-Air Forces Africa and Allied Air Command, hosted a year-and-a-half ago. A major aim was to develop new and timely concepts and approaches with tactical experts from across the alliance.

“We do this on the U.S. side of the house all the time. But [Hecker] did this for the first time with NATO allies. And then that kind of drove smaller exercises — command post exercises and part task training with smaller groups, which evolved into a larger Ramstein Flag 2024 live-flying exercise with more than 100 NATO aircraft operating from eleven different locations,” the official told DefenseScoop.

Those involved are planning for the next Ramstein Flag iteration to take place in the Netherlands sometime around spring 2025.

During a virtual media roundtable held on the sidelines of the annual AUSA conference last week, senior Army officials leading the force’s hubs across Europe and Africa spotlighted different exercises and events their teams engaged in so far this year that are broadly helping NATO rapidly experiment and modernize for the “future fight.” Notably, the events are informed by real-world warfare between Russia and Ukraine, and elsewhere. 

The Army’s 2nd Cavalry Regiment is the “rapid response force that’s nested and partnered with NATO, allies and partners across the European theater,” Command Sgt. Maj. Dennis Doyle told reporters — therefore operating “with the enemy at the doorstep.”

He spotlighted how the unit is adopting new “mission partner kits.”

“It’s like the big talking point for us on the NATO alliance, because what this has done is a piece of equipment that allows our partners and allies to quickly integrate en route to any conflict,” Doyle explained.

The kits enable users to transmit voice communication that he said is secure with translation capabilities. Among other features, the tools also help the international militaries tapping into them synchronize on-the-ground efforts and share a bird’s eye view of the battlefield. 

“And, we can all do that en route. An example of that just recently,” Doyle said, “is Saber Strike from back in April.”

That multilateral NATO exercise spanned nearly that entire month and concentrated a bit on enabling distributed command and control between the countries involved. 

“[We] conducted one of the largest tactical road marches in Europe since World War II,” Doyle told reporters.

With the mission partner kits, he added, the team was able to successfully expand the NATO battle group to a brigade-size element for the second time in a row. They were also able to “synchronize live-fire operations while executing command and control over three areas — from Lithuania, the Suwałki Gap with the Territorial Defense Forces, and then [the Bemowo Piskie Training Area in Poland] — all simultaneous on the same timeframe, while under one command,” according to Doyle. 

“And what that did at the end of the day, it gave us the capacity to demonstrate to our partners and allies that [U.S. Army Europe and Africa, or USAREUR-AF], V Corps and the NATO alliance are primed and ready to fight now and win as a joint force against anything if we’re called to action,” he added.

During the media roundtable, commanding general of the Army’s V Corps Lt. Gen. Charles Costanza and commanding general of 56th Artillery Command Maj. Gen. John Rafferty additionally pointed to the Avenger Triad 24 exercise that was held for two weeks in September.  

The event — led by USAREUR-AF — connected thousands of military personnel from more than 10 participating nations, including some that border Russia.

“Avenger Triad was an opportunity for us — really, for the first time — to take these effects from different domains and converge them against multiple sets of targets. Our mission during that was kind of multifaceted. In one case, part of the reason for our existence is because of the anti-access/area-denial threat that exists in Europe. So, that’s a big responsibility for us is to open up windows of opportunity for the joint force,” Rafferty said. 

He also referenced the recent U.S.-led Arcane Thunder exercise that was designed to demonstrate theater-wide synchronization and multi-domain operations in Germany and Morocco. 

“The Moroccans are great partners. They’re so easy to train with, and important and valuable partners in the region, but also provided a really unique and permissive training environment that allowed us to really get after some deep-sensing experimentation from high-altitude sensors, and then really work … on our targeting and long-haul comms,” Rafferty told reporters. 

He noted that his command’s “training continues.” Without naming it, Rafferty mentioned an in-progress exercise the Army is conducting with the Air Force, which he said is “focused primarily on A2/AD.”

In response to multiple inquiries from DefenseScoop, Army spokespersons confirmed that Rafferty was referring to the Neptune Eagle exercise, but they declined to provide any more information.

Besides that it seeks to advance kill-chains and battle management tasks and is planned for Oct. 16-24, the majority of details about Neptune Eagle are classified or protected from wide dissemination for what the Pentagon considers security purposes.

In a statement on Wednesday, a spokesperson from U.S. Air Forces in Europe and Africa told DefenseScoop: “The Neptune series of events are joint air interoperability exercises designed to maintain readiness and evaluate employment capabilities in a realistic training environment. The exercises consist of U.S. personnel from across the services.”

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