The move is significant as 4th ID is slated to be the primary experimental unit for the Army’s Next Generation Command and Control as that system aims to scale up to division level.

NGC2 is one of the the Army’s top modernization priorities. It’s a clean-slate design for how the Army communicates on the battlefield and passes data for operations, providing commanders and units a new approach to information, data and command and control through agile and software-based architectures.

The Army tested a prototype of the system in March at Project Convergence Capstone 5. It was the first experiment on the ground with a unit in the classified network. It was outfitted to a real battalion — an armored formation — as well as higher headquarters elements. The Army sought to use an armored unit rather than the more easy to integrate light units as a means of testing the most difficult formation first and beginning to rightsize the Army, as those lighter units have surpassed many heavier ones in new gear due to the integration challenges associated with platforms.

As part of that effort, the Army developed a horizontal operational design for NGC2 that involved a 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. The application layer is where the Army has broken down the silos of individual warfighting functions — such as intelligence or fires — into applications that ride on the same backbone that is all integrated together.

Ellis comes to 4th ID having just been the director of the C2 Cross Functional Team with Army Futures Command, where he spearheaded the experimental efforts of NGC2 — giving him a unique perch to now serve as the commander of the first division to begin testing it out holistically.

“It’s a great opportunity to work on this, build the relationships over the last year,” he said in a May 30 interview on the sidelines of the Army’s Technical Exchange Meeting at Aberdeen Proving Ground, Maryland, on his last day as the C2 CFT director.

To date, the Army’s experimentation and modernization efforts have focused on brigades. As the division is expected to be the primary action unit in the future, the service is starting to look at how to scale capabilities across the entire 10,000-15,000 soldier unit.

4th ID will continue to iterate on the prototype and make improvements while program executive office for command, control, communications and network runs the program of record. In early April, C3N officially stood up the program office, with Col. Chris Anderson becoming the first program manager. In addition to 4th ID scaling the prototype, 25th ID will also be prototyping elements of NGC2.

As the division commander, Ellis will reap what he helped develop and provide unique insights back to the Army regarding how the system better enables him to command and control his forces.

“You also, as a commander, now can ask the hard questions and say, ‘I don’t think that’s the node that we should take, maybe we could move to this one, or here’s where there’s going to be legitimate friction,’” he said. “I’m really excited about the opportunity to do that and I appreciate the chance that the Army has given me to continue to work on this problem that I’m pretty passionate about. I really enjoy this and I think it’s going to be fun to take this capability now and actually work on the scaling up to an entire 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 Project Convergence. 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. These enabler units will now begin to be a top focus.

Ellis said one of the things he’ll be focusing on early on is continual evolution of the capability with multiple touchpoints with industry, as opposed to more periodic fits and starts.

“I’ve learned we can’t work on a problem and then come back to it three months later in an exercise, and then come back to it three months later, and then three months later we’re at [Project Convergence Capstone 6]. I think there’s going to have to be a continual evolution,” he said. “We don’t need to wait until it’s perfect and then put it in the hands of a soldier. We need to get the 60 percent in their hands and let them help us with that last 40 percent — and that’s going to require some continual interaction with units.”

Filling Ellis’ place will be Col. (P) Michael Kaloostian, who was one of two colonels that were the main architects of the NGC2 experimentation efforts for Futures Command, culminating in the Project Convergence experimentation. This will allow Kaloostain to continue work on the project as the director.

“I didn’t get a chance to pick the guy that was coming after me, but if I did get to pick, it would be the guy who’s coming in after me,” Ellis said about Kaloostian. “He’s been doing this for a year, he’s got all the technical knowledge, and then he brings that capability here. And then for me to move on and keep the relationships and some of the shared experience [is beneficial]. I think part of it is, it’s just the shared history, is now there’s a little bit of a common parlance between us. Then as you get out there you know where the pitfalls are going to be. I think some of the problems are very solvable.”

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In a paradigm shift across several portfolio areas, the service is getting away from so-called pure fleeting, meaning the entire Army won’t get all the same gear. This is necessitated by differences in unit makeup, missions and environments that forces will be operating in.

Such is true for the network as well.

“I think this is just the next step in our journey to continue to iterate and build a really flexible network for our commanders to have options to employ,” Mark Kitz, program executive officer for command, control, communications and networks, said in an interview. “We learned a lot with the 101st [Airborne Division] and we’re going to learn even more with 25th [Infantry Division]. And then we’re going to continue on that journey as we get to new environments.”

The 2nd Brigade, 101st and 2nd Brigade, 25th are two so-called transforming-in-contact units that the Army has designated. This keystone initiative was set forth by Chief of Staff Gen. Randy George, where the service is using deployments and troop rotations to test new equipment — mainly commercial off-the-shelf gear — that could allow units to be more responsive on a dynamic battlefield. It has initially focused on three main areas where officials say the Army needs to be faster and more adaptable when it comes to delivering equipment to forces, due to how challenging the threat environment is and the cat-and-mouse aspect of countering opponents’ moves: unmanned aerial systems, counter-UAS and electronic warfare. .

The concept saw its first major test with 2nd Brigade, 101st conducting a rotation at the Joint Readiness Training Center at Fort Johnson, Louisiana, over the summer. Now, 2nd Brigade, 25th has picked up that baton and is conducting a rotation at the Joint Pacific Multinational Readiness Center in Hawaii.

“I just got back from the Pacific … What I saw in the 25th ID is that where we left the 101st on the backend of that rotation is where we started with the 25th,” said Maj. Gen Patrick Ellis, director of the network cross-functional team within Army Futures Command, adding that the same exercise controllers at Fort Johnson for the 101st and network personnel have gone to JPMRC to help clean up issues and assist in planning to make this current rotation more smooth for a continuous effort.

“I think we’re going to learn some new stuff out there in the Pacific, much more focused on the mission partner environment and how to incorporate allies, which is something that theaters are always very, very concerned about and how to better do that,” Ellis said. “I think we’re going to learn some really good lessons about that. We’re also going to learn a little bit about, I think, how to employ some of our technologies in the jungle.”

He noted that the TSM waveform for software-defined radios doesn’t work in the jungle like it does in more open environments given the dense foliage.

This is just one example for how the Army needs to think about tailoring certain capabilities to units and theaters and providing commanders with flexibility to employ capabilities the way they need.

“One of the great things is experimenting with these capabilities in the environments they’re going to employ them, so that we can iterate and identify what technologies will work versus what technologies still require investment, modernization or commercial industry engagement,” Kitz said. “I would say in terms of acquisition, we are trying to build programs or a portfolio of programs to give commanders options, so it’s not just one waveform in our tactical radio, that they have a portfolio of waveforms that they can employ … The key acquisition tenet is not building specific programs around specific technologies, but building programs around how we can have a portfolio of technologies to enable this option-based network, so that our network can adapt to the different environments that we’re in.”

The Army’s network team within the program executive office and Futures Command are looking at a variety of capabilities and portfolios from transport — such as proliferated low-Earth orbit satellite communications — to radios and waveforms to command-and-control tools.

As part of that, the team needs to understand how units will employ their capabilities and what they need the network to do for them. More challenging now is that the Army is moving to the division as the unit of action, as opposed to the brigade of the last 20 years during the Global War on Terror. In a potential future conflict against more sophisticated adversaries, units will be spread across much larger distances and need more capabilities resident within the division rather than the brigade.

As the Army began modernizing its network and developing things like the integrated tactical network, made up of commercial off-the-shelf and program-of-record equipment, it started with brigades. Now, it has to think about architecting for division and moving complexity out of brigade units.

“We are truly now engaging on a network with the division as the unit of action. How is the division enabling the down trace units in a holistic network? How do we conduct fires? How do we conduct intel operations? How do I ensure that I’m delivering the right equipment or the right material from a sustainment perspective? How do we envision that entire network from a division perspective is relatively new to the network,” Kitz said.

“That’s what we’re learning from engaging initially with the 101st and now at the 25th and really architecting a larger network that identifies that my down-trace units may not be direct report. They may have a different network component. They may require different network components. Building that flexibility from the division down, I think, is something we’re learning is what we need. And trying to apply these acquisition principles of a portfolio of capabilities is what we’ve been working with Gen. Ellis and the team,” he added.

Ellis noted that it’s all about operational employment of capabilities, using command posts and dispersion as an example.

Across the entire Army, units are trying to get smaller and more mobile to avoid being found and targeted by the enemy. But each unit and each theater is different.

“I talked to battalion commanders and brigade commander in the 25th out there. They are looking to get smaller. In most cases, these guys are going to be dismounted, walking into the jungle, so their command posts are naturally going to get very, very small. The smaller we can enable these guys, the better. Really, again, it’s all about options for employment,” Ellis said. “If they’re fighting the jungle, it’s one thing. If it’s large-scale combat operations in a different theater, they want to aggregate a little bit more.”

Newer technologies allowing more and faster data transport, such as Starlink, provide greater ability for units to disperse and get smaller.

Officials haven’t figured out yet how brigades and divisions will all fight, but they are continuing to communicate with them to make things more reconfigurable.

“The stuff we’ve observed from Ukraine is that if you have to have kind of most Lego blocks for command and control … is I just give you the tools and you can arrange them and rebuild them how you need to, based on the circumstances,” Ellis said. “Because it seemed to me that watching the Ukraine fight is that almost every 90 days, the Russians needed to reconfigure the command control because the Ukrainians have figured out the signature. They need to reconfigure. We’re looking to try and build something that’s inherently reconfigurable, as opposed to building a thing that you got to then destroy and take apart because it’s only good at doing one thing.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

C2 Fix and the bridge

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

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

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

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

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

Getting to the next generation

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Ellis began his role as director of the network cross-functional team in July, having most recently been deputy chief of staff, G-3, for Army Europe-Africa. He also previously served with the 7th Infantry Division in the Pacific and I Corps. He took over for Maj. Gen. Jeth Rey, who was nominated for a third star and to be the next deputy chief of staff, G6, of the Army.

This operational experience has provided Ellis a unique view of the issues facing commanders and units now that he is charged with helping drive future requirements for the network.

“I moved straight over to Europe and got to really watch firsthand the Ukrainians and the Russians and how that conflict was unfolding,” he said in an interview. “The way that we enable commanders and the way that we’re going to have to fight our command post in the future, I think I have a little bit more of an opinion about that now that I’m hopeful I can share with the team here on the acquisition side too. It’s not that folks don’t have the perspective, it’s just been a little bit more recent.”

The Army has been on a multi-year journey dating back to 2017 and 2018 to devise a more flexible and operationally relevant network.

One of the key technologies Ellis wants to focus on is the predictive piece of data for building operational models.

He explained that when organizations conduct war games or plan for future courses of action, much of that is still reliant on Cold War-era tools such as wooden blocks and spreadsheets. But now, with modern tech, the data being collected can provide much more accurate models to run these assessments at a faster pace.

“You don’t have to have guys making multiple decisions and take three days to run a wargame that you can run in a simulation or a gaming-style engine that you can run in a couple of hours,” Ellis said. “I think that’ll help some of our commanders. It’s not going to replace them. It’s going to help our commanders make more facts-based, informed decisions. I’m excited about that technology. As we get data organized, I think that’s going to be absolutely a powerful tool that we’re going to get in the hands … of our commanders in the near future.”

The Army has been moving to become more data centric, now one of the secretary’s top objectives and a big focus for Ellis’ predecessor.

He also noted he wants to ensure requirements for the network aren’t too prescriptive, which can box-in the eventual solution such that it ends up being too limited to provide soldiers what they need on a highly dynamic battlefield.

“It’s about keeping the requirements general enough so that we can basically almost like Lego blocks, like mission command blocks, that we can give organizations the structure,” he said. “There’s enough flexibility in the requirements documents where you can give a commander a set of mission command Lego blocks and he can build what he wants out of that. He can structure it the way that makes sense to him and to his formation at that particular time, because all of our divisions are different.”

While officials want to allow units enough flexibility to make systems work to their own operational concepts, schemes of maneuver or environment they’re operating in, the tools still must be interoperable so one slice of the Army’s systems can still talk with everything else in the service as well as joint and foreign partners.

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