In an unclassified memo viewed by DefenseScoop this week, the Navy’s Chief Information Officer Jane Rathbun unveiled this policy change and overarching plan to overhaul networks and their respective infrastructure into an integrated system that leverages enterprise IT services. 

“All shore legacy and excepted networks must transition to designated enterprise networks no later than December 31, 2027,” she wrote.

In response to questions Thursday, Rathbun said her team decided to set an absolute deadline in that timeframe because they recognize that migration can be hard, but they’re “looking for mavericks to figure out a better way to approved paths like Naval Enterprise Network (NEN) and Marine Corps Enterprise Network (MCEN) soonest.”

The CIO will process waivers on a case-by-case basis for the networks that officials determine cannot move into a designated enterprise environment due to their unique mission requirements. 

“Change is hard and not everyone will be happy that we are turning off their legacy and exception-based networks, but operational resilience is better, it’s more secure, more adaptable and users are happier and more effective — it’s time to move,” she said.

To enable the transition, network owners are directed in the memo to carry out a list of activities, including but not limited to: reviewing and updating the Pentagon’s Information Technology Portfolio Repository for the Department of the Navy’s registered networks to reflect those documented in this revamp process; completing a network assessment to map network requirements to the enterprise IT services catalog; developing a transition plan and timeline for transitioning legacy assets; and supplying a detailed breakdown for funding and resourcing their elements of the consolidation effort.

Resource-informed transition proposals for each legacy network will be evaluated by senior officials in the Navy and Marine Corps’ CIO offices to determine resource adequacy and certify the DON IT and Cyber Activity (IT/CA) budget for fiscal 2027.

“Failure to submit an executable transition plan with documentation of resources per above will result in decertification of the IT/CA budget under the cognizance of the applicable Budget Submitting Office,” Rathbun wrote in the memo.

This new policy builds on some modernization initiatives launched by the Navy during the Biden administration, and also aligns with President Donald Trump’s key priorities in his second term associated with eliminating government waste and accelerating tech-driven innovation. 

“One of the benefits of making use of world class commercial capabilities, is that we don’t need to carry around hundreds of inferior capabilities that were developed before the enterprise service existed,” Rathbun said Thursday.

She pointed to the Navy’s cloud-based office suite of tools known as FlankSpeed, and the Marine Corps’ unclassified M365 cloud environment called Hyperion, which were both recently designated as official DON enterprise IT services for messaging and collaboration.

After that, “the doors for divestment have swung wide open,” she explained.

“We now have an award-winning capability that Sailors and Marines tell us is better than their out-of-work experience for the first time in their careers. Our warfighters deserve this and more — it’s so good that they want it,” Rathbun said. “And with that, the other side of the coin is that there are a lot of old or bespoke networks that have to go.”

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Network modernization is a top priority for service leadership. The deputy chief of staff, G-6, trumpeted the unveiling of Army Unified Network Plan 2.0 in a LinkedIn post Tuesday.

“AUNP 2.0 is new guidance on how the warfighter actually approaches, accelerates and operationalizes the unified network across the board,” Lt. Gen. Jeth Rey said in a statement. “It’s going to enable multi-domain operations and chart the roadmap of where we’re going for the unified network by 2027. It also talks about the critical enablers required to achieve a multi-domain operational Army by 2030.”

The first iteration of the unified network plan was released in 2021.

“Since then, a confluence of emerging technologies and events has transformed the world into a multidomain, persistently contested information environment that demands a far more data-centric approach to harness the power of the Army Network to fight and win,” officials wrote in version 2.0.

Integrating zero trust — a cybersecurity framework that assumes adversaries are already moving through information technology networks and therefore requires organizations to continuously monitor and validate users and their devices as they move through the network — is a key element of the second iteration. It’s also a top IT modernization priority for the Defense Department writ large. The DOD’s goal is for all components to achieve “target levels” of zero trust by the end of fiscal 2027.

The Army’s new document is “a strategic guide to operationalize the Unified Network through a focus on ZT principles that improve how the Army’s network moves and secures data,” officials wrote. “The plan incorporates observations and lessons learned from ongoing operations around the globe, as well as best practices for security. Static command posts are no longer uncontested in combat operations; neither are our data or network. As with command posts, the network and data must be agile, adaptable, and able to rapidly move to the point of need even in a denied, disrupted, intermittent, and limited bandwidth (DDIL) environment. Whereas past network strategies homed in on perimeter defense and hardware, the AUNP 2.0 is focused on common principles and standards to centrally deliver and manage the network and data.”

Other key principles include reducing or eliminating information technology complexity at the tactical edge; centralizing IT service delivery and resourcing; establishing and employing common standards, processes and systems; pursuing priorities for command and control in support of multi-domain operations; enabling faster, secure data-sharing across security domains and with allies and partners; and developing concepts of operation and “validated operational requirements at echelon.”

In the near term, the Army is focused on efforts to “operationalize” the unified network, including by completing the operations construct for the Army’s portion of the Department of Defense Information Network with supporting force structure; implementing a hybrid compute capability in support of tactical formations operating in denied, disrupted, intermittent and limited bandwidth environments; and establishing a “persistent” Mission Partner Environment and funding strategy, inclusive of “all hardware, software, infrastructure, sustainment, and people” from the tactical edge to the enterprise level, among other initiatives.

“This phase ends with the establishment of a Unified Network based on Zero Trust principles, enabling the seamless transfer of data across all echelons, postured to support” multi-domain operations, according to officials.

For the next phase beginning in 2027, the focus will be on additional modernization and transformation, such as final integration of the zero-trust architecture and continued integration with the other services and mission partners.

Emerging technologies that are expected to play a key role in that effort include dynamic and diverse transport, robust computing and edge sensors; data-centric data management technologies and platforms with tagging and labeling at the source; robotics and autonomous operations; quantum-resistant encryption and technologies; and AI and machine learning models and capabilities, among others, according to the Army.

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

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

The concept aims to use deployments and troop rotations to test new equipment — mainly commercial off-the-shelf gear — that could allow units to be more responsive on a dynamic battlefield. It’s focused initially on unmanned aerial systems, counter-UAS and electronic warfare.

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

“We had a really hard time figuring out the networking capability,” Maj. Mark Matthey, executive officer of 1st Battalion, 4th Infantry Regiment, the opposing force at the Joint Multinational Readiness Center in Hohenfels, Germany, which goes against all the rotating brigades, said in an interview.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Command post dispersion

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Matthey chalked this up to old habits dying hard.

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

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

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

Electronic decoys

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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The review will launch as the Pentagon is moving to modernize its communications and data transport capabilities and implement warfighting concepts like Combined Joint All-Domain Command and Control.

“We’re kicking off a study soon on non-terrestrial networking protocol. And I think that’s going to really allow us to take the scalability, the network management agility of 5G and really push that across a lot of our communications architecture,” Mike Dean, director for C3 infrastructure in the office of the DOD Chief Information Officer, said Thursday during a panel at the Potomac Officers Club’s annual Defense R&D Summit in Northern Virginia.

The NTN examination, which is slated to begin in a few weeks, will include officials from across the department as well as engagement with industry, according to Dean.

“It’s a kind of an internal look in the DOD, across the DoD, [with] a lot of stakeholders. And it’s both with industry and our DOD mil [departments] and agencies,” he told DefenseScoop at the conference. “We’re just trying to get a sense of where they are and where they’re headed, so we can set policy and resources.”

The Pentagon is pursuing new satellite systems, drones and other airborne platforms to help move data and better link U.S. military forces and key allies and partners.

The plan for the upcoming study is to “do industry engagement, bring those folks in, start saying, ‘What kind of capabilities do you have? What are you working on?’ So that we can look long term and say, ‘How do I set the requirements, how do I set the resources, and how do I set the architecture and policy?’” Dean remarked. “Because what we don’t want to do is be in a situation where we have Tetris, we have all these solutions coming in, and now we’re trying to mix and match. And having that framework in place allows us to do it quicker.”

DOD has a variety of initiatives underway that are expected to boost non-terrestrial networking. For example, the Space Development Agency is moving forward with plans to build out a massive constellation of hundreds of satellites in low-Earth orbit known as the Proliferated Warfighter Space Architecture for data transport and missile tracking.

The Pentagon is also working to onboard new wireless tech with 5G and “FutureG” initiatives.

These efforts are intended to help the military communicate faster and manage data more effectively.

“One of the things we’re excited about when you look at taking satellite communications from [geostationary orbit] all the way down to LEO and not GEO, [is] you’re able to … decrease latency, increase throughput. And that’s the kind of advantage you [also] get from 5G. So we think if you pair those two, that’s going to be pretty powerful, particularly as you’re trying to track” forces that are forward deployed and keep up with “the pace of battle,” Dean said.

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The CCA drones are expected to fly alongside the Air Force’s manned aircraft, including the forthcoming Next-Generation Air Dominance fighter jet and other manned platforms. The service is planning for a fleet of 1,000 modular drones, with a goal to begin fielding them by the end of the decade.

In the meantime, Brig. Gen. Luke Cropsey, integrating program executive officer for the Air Force’s command, control, communications and battle management (C3BM) enterprise, is taking the lead on addressing the complexity that CCAs will bring to the service’s future aerial network architecture — an area he told DefenseScoop gets into “some really wicked-hard physics” and is imperative to get right.

“This is a part that’s one of those fixed costs in the systems and we can’t afford to screw it up, so we’re going through a very deliberate engineering analysis right now that’s with [Air Force], Navy — we’re pulling in everybody that has a piece to this conversation,” Cropsey said Tuesday in an interview on the sidelines of Air Force Life Cycle Industry Days in Dayton, Ohio. 

Once the analysis is finished, the Air Force hopes to release an “integrated aerial network roadmap” sometime this fall that outlines how it will execute that connectivity, Cropsey said.

As the Air Force marches forward with CCA research and development, the Navy is pursuing its own next-generation drones for future carrier air wings — which are expected to be more than 50% uncrewed — and new unmanned controls stations for the systems.

Both services have indicated the desire to be able to pass off control of each other’s combat drones, and there has been a lot of collaboration between the Air Force and the Navy’s Air Warfare Division, N98, Maj. Gen. Anthony Genatempo, PEO for the Air Force’s command, control, communication, intelligence and networks portfolio, told reporters during a media roundtable Monday. 

“I think the Navy is especially going to bring a lot to bear, but we’ll also be utilizing a lot of what [Cropsey] produces,” Genatempo said. While Cropsey is leading the effort in articulating the entire end-to-end network architecture for CCAs, Genatempo’s program office includes the Air Force’s aerial networks division.

Genetempo pointed to the Navy’s Tactical Targeting Network Technology (TTNT) and Network Tactical Common Data Link (NTCDL) efforts as some key modernization efforts that could be leveraged. However, more universal tactical data links like Link-16 shouldn’t be ignored, he said. 

“That is all going to flow to how we can command and control and send information through the network to the forward edge that CCAs are most likely going to be,” Genetempo said.

Some of the conversations within the Air Force have been focused on nailing down the right hardware — especially networking nodes — for both the CCAs and the manned aircraft they’ll fly with, as well as how the signals are going to be received and transmitted, he noted. 

“Understanding what those requirements are, and then being able to say, ‘This is the hardware, this is the software that’s going to need to be implemented’ — that will then basically give me the marching orders of what I’m going to go out to provide,” Genetempo said.

At the same time, the Air Force is also focusing on keeping CCAs platform-agnostic so that any type of manned aircraft can leverage the drones, according Brig. Gen. Dale White, program executive officer for fighters and advanced aircraft, which is overseeing the overall CCA acquisition program. 

Collaborative combat aircrft are part of the Air Force’s larger NGAD family-of-systems. But because autonomous technology is already being developed in both the Pentagon’s research-and-development cadres and in the commercial sector, the service wants to field the CCA drones with aircraft already in its fleet before the sixth-generation manned fighter is ready to field.

White told DefenseScoop during a media roundtable Tuesday that officials have tried to simplify the platform integration challenge in order to field the CCA drones faster and broaden how many manned platforms can use them. That doesn’t just mean the Air Force’s aircraft, but the other service’s aircraft as well, he added.

“We need to have some interoperable nature of what these capabilities are, because we’re not the only service pursuing this capability,” White said.

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“Everyone understands” the need to leverage AI for military applications, Army Chief of Staff Gen. James McConville told DefenseScoop on Friday during a media teleconference from the sidelines of the annual Conference of European Armies that’s being held in Germany this week.

“There’s a lot of things that it can do for us. It can do predictive maintenance, it can help us with targeting, it can help us with robotic vehicles, both air and ground. And so those are, you know, things that we take a look at. But the technology itself, and what most we’re interested in … as we modernize our command-and-control systems, [is] that we can continue to conduct those to pass data at the speed of relevance and make sure we don’t move ahead of each other. And … as we have our modernization priorities, for most of the leaders over here [in Europe], they are very interested in ensuring that we can do command-and-control operations together and that we can pass data so we can take advantage of the sensors and shooters that we have in theater,” McConville said.

Army forces on the continent have been conducting exercises with international partners, including earlier this month, to test C2 capabilities.

British troops were also involved in last year’s Project Convergence experiments, which were part of an ongoing campaign of learning that’s part of the U.S. Army’s contribution to JADC2. Additional international partners are expected to be part of next year’s Project Convergence capstone event.

“We talk about convergence, which is the ability to take multiple sensors and bring them into an integrated battle command system, and then use artificial intelligence to quickly pass that data and those targets to the appropriate arrows,” McConville explained.

Counter-drone efforts are an example of an area where the concept and related technologies could be employed.

In such a scenario, the Army would want to make sure its forces and those of its allies are employing “the right weapons systems” together to defeat adversaries’ unmanned platforms. “And that can run anywhere from lasers to high-powered microwaves to … THAAD type, Patriot-type systems. And we see that as the future. And so they are very, very interested in working with us as we move forward in those endeavors,” he said.

McConville has been a proponent of “combined” joint all-domain command and control, or what he calls CJADC2, to include international partners. However, there are challenges associated with that.

“What it comes to is the ability to pass data. And, you know, we all have our command-and-control systems and we’re not going to replace them all to do that. So how do you do that? And how do you do it in a contested environment?” he said.

“You want to have a resilient [communications] path. You know, we talked about data fabrics and data networks, vice [traditional C2] chains, is really what we’re trying to get to. So we want to have the ability to tie together, you know, current systems, the new systems and systems that all our partners have. And that’s the challenge. And then you’ve got to be able to do it in an environment that is going to be contested. And that’s why we’re testing and that’s why we’re developing these systems to make that happen,” he added.

Gen. Darryl Williams, commanding general of U.S. Army Europe and Africa, noted that the head of U.S. Army Futures Command attended this year’s iteration of the Conference of European Armies. AFC is helping spearhead the service’s modernization efforts.

“One of the great things about this conference which is different from the past, is that the chief tasked Gen. Jim Rainey to be here. He’s our futures commander, as you know. And he helped reimagine and helped our partners think through the things that you’re talking about,” Williams told DefenseScoop during Friday’s teleconference. “We want to be able to fight and win our nations’ wars, all of our chiefs want to do that. And as … my chief talked about fighting in a multi-domain operation, this is part of that as we go in the future. So, we’re excited about the opportunities to work with our partners and our allies as we go forward in this space.”

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The highly secretive Project Overmatch is the Navy’s contribution to the Defense Department’s Joint All-Domain Command and Control (JADC2) initiative — a multi-billion-dollar effort to better connect the U.S. military’s many sensors, shooters and networks across the services. Gilday has said Project Overmatch will be the “bedrock for the joint tactical network of the future.”

The Navy is investing $226 million into the effort in fiscal 2023 and it’s requesting $192 million for fiscal 2024.

“What we wanted to try and do with this project is be able to take any data, containerize it and send it over any network. So instead of building a whole new operational infrastructure, [the aim] is to basically leverage what we have, primarily leveraging commercial technology, right, and just pivoting it to a military use,” Gilday explained at a Brookings Institution event Wednesday.

The initiative includes software-defined networking, he noted, “prioritizing what data is most important, and where it ends up and by what path.”

The sea service has had “great success” leveraging industry-provided technology, and it’s also been working with its allies and partners including the U.K., France and Australia, Gilday noted, adding that he expects that type of cooperation to expand over time.

The Carl Vinson carrier strike group has been putting the technology through its paces off the West Coast in the 3^rd Fleet area of operations.

“We’re now experimenting with a carrier strike group. So think about eight ships, across many different networks, for many types of data …. It is a DevOps kind of environment, so we’re learning as we’re doing,” Gilday said.

DefenseScoop asked Gilday about next steps and the Navy’s plans to roll out Project Overmatch capabilities more broadly across the force.

“I think it will likely focus in the Pacific first and then expand globally into our other fleets,” he told DefenseScoop at the Brookings event. He confirmed that 7th Fleet, which is headquartered in Japan and operates in the Western Pacific, will be receiving the capabilities.

Gilday later told DefenseScoop that the Navy hasn’t nailed down a timeline for when that rollout to 7th Fleet will happen, saying he wants to see the final results from the Vinson experiments before service leaders make a decision about that.

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Officials for years have been discussing that forces have to move much faster on the battlefield against more sophisticated nation state enemies — and even more recently, articulating that establishing communications at-the-halt may not be viable for most Army formations.

“Two new focus areas going forward and you’ll hear throughout the conversation that we’ll have here … Number one, we’re going to focus on C2 on the move — not at the halt. We’re going to focus in and drill in on C2 on the move,” Maj. Gen. Jeth Rey, director of the Army network cross-functional team, told member of industry on Wednesday as he opened the Army’s Technical Exchange Meeting in Philadelphia.

“Commanders understand that they need to continue to move and command [and] control … We need industry partners to come on board to help us figure that out,” he said.

Officials have explained that adversaries such as Russia and China will be able to locate U.S. military units much faster, meaning they can’t stop to set up the large sprawling command posts seen during the counterterrorism and counterinsurgency conflicts in the Middle East.

Part of that could be providing greater Wi-Fi capability on the move.

“Some recommendations — and these are merely just recommendations from things that we’ve seen at the National Training Center — that may be beneficial for some of the team that’s here … [include] a secure Wi- Fi on-the-move type of capability,” Col. Terry Tillis, commander of the operations group at the National Training Center told the conference. The NTC provides some of the Army’s most grueling tests that simulate campaigns of conflict in a matter of weeks to test and stress units.

“We’ve talked about the on-the-move piece of it, but it’s something that we’ve seen work, we’ve seen certain units do it and it’s something we could get for all the [Stryker brigade combat teams], [armored brigade combat teams] — are things to think about that might be helpful,” Tillis added.

Some top Army personnel have also explained smaller units might only be afforded minutes to stop, which means they probably won’t even be operating with command posts.

“I’m not sure that there is such a thing as a command post battalion and below. I talked about turrets and tablets. We’re going to have to be able to fight our formations out of our combat systems, out of rucksacks … That’s a big change,” Gen. James Rainey, commander of Army Futures Command, told the conference. “At brigade level, I think we’re going to need to have redundant command posts, but they’re going to have to be really small, they’re going to have to be able to hide in the electromagnetic spectrum, they’re going to need to be able to hide physically and they’re going to have to move constantly.”

Additionally, units will have to scale down in size and numbers. Tillis said one of the lessons from units in Europe — which are paying attention to what’s happening in the Ukraine-Russia war — is they must be more survivable.

“The one word that came out of Europe, and I’ll just leave it at [a reference to] Europe, is ‘survivable.’ What that meant to the ground maneuver force was well, we have to get survivable. Everybody started showing up at the National Training Center and I would say also the Joint Readiness Training Center trying to get survivable, which meant they were down to one or two vehicles and then they called it a command post,” Tillis said. “We can’t be as large as we’ve been, 180 vehicles, some places you’ll see others that are about 180 personnel down to like 70 to 80 vehicles.”

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Quantum information science (QIS) is an emerging and potentially disruptive field that encompasses the investigation and application of complex phenomena happening at atomic and subatomic levels to process and move information. 

Ahead of releasing an anticipated broad agency announcement, DARPA is hosting an in-person, unclassified proposers day for its envisioned Quantum Augmented Network — or QuANET — program on May 11. 

“The QuANET program seeks to augment existing software infrastructure and network protocols with quantum properties to mitigate some of the attack vectors that are pervasive on classical (non-quantum) networks. The program will achieve this goal by blending existing ‘best-of’ quantum communications capabilities into networks operating today in military and critical infrastructure,” DARPA officials wrote in a new proposers day announcement.

Those interested in participating can register online. The registration deadline is May 5.

“Hybrid quantum-classical network infrastructure will allow a wide range of networking and communication experts to develop additional applications for the technology,” the announcement states.

“QuANET seeks to build an environmentally hardened, configurable network interface card that directly connects quantum links with classical computing nodes. This hardware design should extend capabilities already available in classical networks,” officials wrote.

At the upcoming event at the DARPA facility in Arlington, Virginia, agency officials will discuss the technical goals and challenges associated with the new pursuit — and the proposal requirements of an impending broad agency announcement that will support the overarching program.

The meeting will not be open to the general public or members of the media.

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In response to Air Force Secretary Frank Kendall’s urging for making cyber a priority – one of the his seven operational priorities, which list top modernization efforts for the service – officials created Task Force Sentinel Stand, which took a hard look at how military networks would stand up to China in a fight.

“My team stood up Task Force Sentinel Stand in partner with the 16th Air Force to be able to address the [Indo-Pacific Command] region looking at [Pacific Air Forces] in what we needed to know if we’re able to survive, if we go into contact with China,” Wanda Jones-Heath, principal cyber advisor for the Air Force, said during a panel presentation at the Joint Service Academy Cybersecurity Summit that took place at West Point April 4-5. The video from the presentation was provided to DefenseScoop Thursday night ahead of its public release.

That review found some gaps.

“The thing that we found was we had some serious issues. We had not invested in our infrastructure in a very long time. We didn’t really know the critical mission thread that we needed to make sure that critical assets were protected and even know how we would survive if needed,” Jones-Heath said.

“Another issue was, we found out that a lot of our systems had vulnerabilities that we had not taken care of. Cyber hygiene was the thing that we wanted to focus on and started to do that. Then we didn’t have our [command and control] piece down quite,” she added. “It took us four months to come together and be able to provide the secretary, no kidding, ‘Here’s where we need to invest and we need to invest quickly in these areas.’”

The review directly informed the Air Force’s planned investments for the fiscal 2024 budgeting cycle, she said.

Jones-Heath added that this was the first time in her 33-year government career that the cyber community came together holistically — to include IT, crypto modernization, technical debt examinations and critical infrastructure — to look at the corporate process and advise the secretary to make concrete investments.

Now, she said, they’re doing the same thing for the fiscal 2025 budgeting process so they can influence future investment decisions.

She also attributes this push to Kendall’s prioritization of cyber.

“When Honorable Kendall came in, he quickly recognized that we had a huge problem: cyber was not valued from a warfighter perspective. And that mindset is certainly changed,” Jones-Heath said. “He’s given us a lot of leeway, and he’s very interested and truly understands that cyber and cybersecurity is part of the success that we’ll be able to” achieve.

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