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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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This journey began around six years ago to provide units with modernized kit on a predictable two-year cycle, and in the last three years the service sought to unify the tactical and enterprise networks into a single, global unified network.

Observations in Ukraine are forcing changes all across the Army to include the network, such as smaller and more mobile systems to allow forces to move faster on the battlefield. However, as the service marched down its modernization path, there became haves and have-nots. Some units were equipped with newer gear, with the intent to tier fielding of better equipment to the whole Army at some point down the line.

These two-year capability sets — each building upon the previous delivery for the integrated tactical network made up of commercial off-the-shelf and program-of-record equipment — are going away in favor of a more iterative process to update certain capabilities when technology matures. But in the interim, the Army has sought a more holistic approach to modernizing the total active force with equipment that makes it more lethal on the battlefield.

To get to the next generation of command and control, the Army is first embarking on what it dubs “C2 fix,” which involves essentially taking the entirety of the network portfolio and distilling it to the basics of what a maneuver commander needs.

“The primary goal of C2 fix was how do we simplify the infrastructure that’s already in these formations so that they could better operate their network and better rely on some of the staff functions that are network enabled — think sustainment, intelligence, fires — how those network enabled functions are task organized or organically employed within the formation,” Mark Kitz, program executive officer for Command, Control, Communications-Tactical, said in an interview at the Army’s Technical Exchange Meeting in Philadelphia this week. “Really simplifying the formation, which then led to a much more simple implementation of the network, how they employ [primary, alternate, contingency and emergency communications], how they get after their command post … how they were able to get a much more lightweight and mobile capability by moving a lot of those functions to the division and then building a network then to enable the division.”

During the counterinsurgency fight of the last 20 years, the brigade was the primary unit of action. Now, as the Army plans for large-scale combat operations against sophisticated nation-states, the division must now be that main unit of action given the vast distances of operations and complex problems those actors will pose.

The integrated tactical network was very brigade focused and thus forced the Army to adjust its approach. Given that a large portion of the Army does not have updated, modernized  ITN gear as it only comprises about 15 percent of the service, C2 fix begins to look at ITN and non-ITN units and how they all will command and control on the battlefield.

C2 fix is “also giving commanders flexibility, division commanders, flexibility to employ a much more robust capability, rather than organically employ it at every brigade,” Kitz said.

Divisions have several enabling units from intelligence to sustainment that will be essential in large-scale combat operations, but weren’t necessarily the focus of the ITN build and thus also require modernized kit.

Recently, 2nd Brigade of the 101st Airborne Division participated in a home-station training event dubbed Operation Lethal Eagle, a large-scale air assault that provided the opportunity to test new technologies, prototype reorganized structures and employ multi-domain fires.

“We have a lot of lessons learned and I think you heard some of the positives today: mobile command posts, lightweight, much more simple to employ,” Kitz said. “I think some of the other areas where we have to improve is how is the division then employed to support the brigade? How does a division employ to support disparate brigades? How does an armored unit that’s maybe not ITN enabled interoperate with a C2 fix or an updated C2 formation?”

That event is part of Chief of Staff Gen. Randy George’s concept known as “transforming in contact,” which sees the Army using deployments and troop rotations to test new equipment — mainly commercial off-the-shelf gear — to allow units to be more responsive on a dynamic battlefield. The 2nd Brigade of the 101st Airborne Division is the first mobile brigade combat team in the Army, serving as a test unit for transforming in contact.

“We are learning new fires architectures, we’re learning how intel data can support the commander, we’re learning how we can employ PACE in a much more simple, much more lightweight way. I think we’re really, no kidding, doing this transforming in contact as we go through this [Joint Readiness Training Center] rotation,” Kitz said.

C2 next

While the force is focusing on C2 fix for the near term, the Army is also looking further down the road at next-generation capabilities dubbed “C2 next.”

This week, George signed out a “characterization of needs” for C2 next.

As the Army continues to modernize, he said it is going to look at requirements differently and buy differently.

“We’re not going to buy the same equipment. We may buy something for this brigade, it’s going to be modular, open system architecture … [1st Brigade, 25th Infantry Division] might get something or [3rd Brigade, 25th Infantry Division] might get something completely different the next year. It’ll be compatible, it’ll be open system architecture, but it’s going to be the best thing that’s on the market. That’s what we owe our troops,” he said at the Technical Exchange Meeting.

The Army wants to change its contracting process, looking for more flexible mechanisms to buy the latest and greatest when it’s available and quickly insert it into units.

“Even if we build something brand new today, even the chief just talked about C2 next, today’s version of C2 next is not what we’re going to fight with three years from now. Iterating our requirements and getting much more volatile in how we get after capability is critical to the programmatics,” Kitz told conference attendees. “One of the fallacies I think in the past is we’ve bought serial number number one, serial number number 100, and they were the same thing and nine years elapsed. We need to get out of that type of business. We’ve got to iterate more volatile and with a requirement process that’s integrated between Army Futures Command and the ASAALT community.” ASAALT is an acronym that refers to the office of the assistant secretary of the Army for acquisition, logistics and technology.

George envisions an end state in which units are using tablets as mission command platforms rather than the legacy vehicle-based systems that require large trucks for multiple battlefield functions.

“One of the things that I challenged everybody a year ago, and especially AFC, was saying ‘Hey, I want to be able to be on the network and I want us to be able to operate with tablets, phones, software defined radios, very simple architecture,’” he said.

While visiting units at Project Convergence in March, George said he witnessed a platoon leader talking to a company commander, talking to a battalion commander, talking to a brigade commander — all on tablets.

“All those big systems that we used to have, [Advanced Field Artillery Tactical Data System] is one of them, can be an app and it can be on that tablet. So rather than having a truck or two trucks and 10 people, you have an application,” he said.

This is all about making formations more capable and lethal.

“I asked a question to the battalion commander, and he said ‘I want this right now. This makes me more lethal, survivable on the battlefield and that tech exists,’” George said. “Every time that we do something, is this something that the warfighter needs, is this something that’s going to make a company commander, a first sergeant, whoever it is, better to be more lethal on the battlefield? And that’s what we got to be focused on to do it.”

During Project Convergence, 1st Squadron , 4th Cavalry Regiment was provided a set of next-generation capabilities, which provided to be much superior to its existing systems.

As an armored brigade, it had a lot of systems that still date back to the post-9/11 counterinsurgency fight and the legacy Warfighter Information Network-Tactical network.

The new C2 equipment, with very limited training, was intuitive for the soldiers to use, which went all the way down to the private first class level. Troops were able to call for fires and see friendly and enemy forces.

Most importantly, the new capability leveled situational awareness across echelons, said Lt. Col. Michael “Pat” Stallings, commander of 1st Squadron, 4th Cavalry Regiment, meaning all echelons had the same common operational picture.

“What next-generation C2 did really was it leveled the bubbles on that. It allowed the troop and the platoon to see exactly what I was seeing when I was seeing it, to see if there was a collection asset flying, to pull the feeds from that collection asset very easily and intuitively to then use that information to make decisions on what they’re going to do about it. And it was very, very powerful,” he said.

Following the characteristics of need, which is essentially an aim point for industry to focus on, contractors will begin to propose capabilities around a next-generation C2 system.

“I think the biggest area that we talked about today is how do we marry a much more volatile, much more rapid requirement process with our acquisition infrastructure?” Kitz said. “I think in the past, we went after these monolithic software applications or monolithic capabilities that we tried to meld and mold to do things that maybe they weren’t designed to do from the beginning, and now decomposing it and getting after a much more rapid requirement process that allows us to have a much more flexible infrastructure.”

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