The brigade is participating in the Joint Pacific Multinational Readiness Center Exportable exercise in the Philippines with that nation’s 7th and 5th Infantry Divisions and an Australian infantry element. The unit was one of the first three brigades to participate in the first iteration of the Army’s so-called transforming-in-contact initiative, which aims to speed up how the service buys technologies and designs its forces by injecting emerging capabilities into units and letting them experiment with them during exercises and deployments.

TiC 1.0 was centered around light units. But now, TiC 2.0 is focusing on divisions as a whole, to include enabling units such as artillery and air cavalry brigades, as well as Multi-Domain Task Forces, some Army special operations units, National Guard units and armored formations.

Experimenting with 3D printing assets forward in theater is providing not only valuable lessons, but increasing the combat capability for 2nd Brigade and the 25th ID as a whole.

“The closer we can get that capability to the edge or that capability as close as we can to the soldiers that are employing it and realizing where adjustments need to be made, the quicker we can innovate and improve overall lethality,” Maj. Gen. Marcus Evans, commander of 25th Infantry Division, said in an interview Tuesday.

In one example, Evans said soldiers provided a recommendation for modifying a piece of equipment that the 3D printing was able to repair and make the modifications. He added while that was just one small example, the possibilities are endless.

This was a lesson directly from the European theater and Ukraine’s war with Russia. The Ukrainian army is providing, in many instances, a bevy of case studies for how future conflict will be fought and how tactical victories can be achieved.

By some estimates, there are thousands of drones flying on the battlefield, either for reconnaissance or as one-way attack weapons. The ability to rapidly repair or build new devices at the pace of operations has been critical.

Such a capability will also be needed in the Pacific theater, given the complex environment of various islands that forces will need to operate from, across vast distances. Forward-placed 3D printers will enable forces to maintain capabilities without long supply lines.

“It provides agility, it provides redundancy, and allows us to diversify our supply lines. From a commander perspective, all of those increase the ability to protect ourselves and project lethal formations and sustain lethal formations without always having to rely on an elongated supply line, which, as you’re aware, is very [susceptible] to interdiction to various kinds of attacks,” Evans said. “Now you’ve essentially moved a sustainment capability as far forward as possible and placed it organic to a formation that is doing the majority of the training and the focusing on lethality.”

The division is in the early stages of figuring out how to employ such a capability, to include how to maneuver it and protect it from being targeted by the enemy.

“A consideration is we know that that capability will be targeted. We have to understand how we move it, we have to understand how we protect it, how we get it into positions where it can hide in plain sight and continue to support soldiers,” Evans said.

On the flip side, he said they’re maturing counter-drone capabilities as well. While the Army has been experimenting a lot with commercial unmanned aerial systems, counter-UAS poses much more significant challenges given there aren’t many advanced commercial solutions available.

2nd Brigade improved its ability to detect and defend itself from incoming drones from its combat training center rotation in October in Hawaii.

For example, in one instance, a multi-domain reconnaissance team had activated a counter-UAS sensor notifying them of incoming drones approximately 15 minutes out. They were able to adjust their camouflage, preventing the enemy UAS from finding them.

Roughly 24 hours later, the unit was able to passively defeat another incoming drone, returning it to its control station.

“That is one small example of something we were not as proficient at in October, but we’ve certainly seen an increase in the use capability and understanding of employing that counter-UAS mechanism,” Evans said.

The division is also working on improving how it sees itself within the electromagnetic spectrum. There continues to be increased requirements for electronic warfare and counter-drone capabilities, Evans noted.

“The ability to scale and provide as many command posts and units in the field coverage, both from in the electromagnetic spectrum and also from the counter-UAS capability,” is important, he said. Since last October, “we have received additional equipment in terms of electronic warfare and in terms of counter-UAS equipment, which we have been able to employ here, generally, pretty effectively.”

EW tools can also be used in the counter-drone realm to jam signals.

Moreover, understanding a unit’s signature will allow it to be more nimble against enemies and make better decisions regarding how it maneuvers on the battlefield or deceives adversaries.

“All of this comes back to being able to gain positions of advantage, both tactically and operationally, to gain the benefits of employing those assets, whether it’s conduct electronic warfare in an attack mode or being able to see yourself so you can take actions to protect yourself and your formations. Those actions could be passive camouflage or they could be active deception measures,” Evans said.

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For starters, leaders believe it is a validation of some of the radical change the service is seeking in how to procure and manage capabilities differently in the future.

“Yesterday was a really good example of just how quickly technology is changing the battlefield. We’ve seen this over the last couple of years that everybody talks about [Program Objective Memorandum] cycles and everybody talks about program of record. I think that’s just old thinking,” Gen. Randy George, chief of staff of the Army, said Monday during the Exchange, an AI conference hosted by the Special Competitive Studies Project.

POM cycles refer to the five-year planning process for programs and capabilities in the Pentagon.

George noted that technology is changing too rapidly on the modern battlefield to be wedded to these large procurement programs that historically have taken years to develop and once fielded, can be largely obsolete.

He wants to shrink the timeline it takes to develop systems and get them in the hands of soldiers, especially given much of these capabilities, such as drones, communications gear and electronic warfare tools, are increasingly available on the commercial market.

“What we got to do is make sure that we’re aligned and that’s what we’re trying to do, changing the processes up here to make sure that we’re getting them the equipment, the war-winning capabilities that they know they need,” he said. “We’re going to have to be more agile. Drones are going to constantly change. We’re going to be trying to play the cat-and-mouse game with counter-UAS, so we’re going to have to work through that to make sure that we’re buying systems. We’re going to need a lot more agility in how we buy things.”

The Army has been experimenting with this approach through what it calls transforming-in-contact, which aims to speed up how the service buys technologies and designs its forces by injecting emerging capabilities into units and letting them experiment with them during exercises and deployments.

George said one of the Army’s units that just went to the Joint Readiness Training Center at Fort Johnson, Louisiana — which provides the most realistic combat scenarios the Army can create for units to train where forces simulate a battle campaign against an active enemy — had close to 400 drones in it. That is substantially higher than the number of drones other formations have had recently, with 3rd Brigade, 10th Mountain Division possessing over 200 during a January rotation in Europe, previously the most to date.

The Army doesn’t want to field the same systems like that for years because the technology changes so rapidly.

“We’re constantly updating those. I think that that’s how we have to be focused moving forward,” George said.

He also noted that Ukraine’s drone attack over the weekend flips the cost curve. Kyiv used relatively cheap systems to destroy millions to billions of dollars worth of Russian combat power.

“Look at how cheap those systems were compared to what they took out. We have to be thinking about that [with] everything we’re doing,” George said.

The attack, furthermore, exemplified how transparent battlefields are becoming, meaning there is nowhere to hide.

“We talk a lot about you can’t really hide anymore on the modern battlefield. You’re going to have to be dispersed, lower signature, all of those things, which we talk a lot about with our troops and with our commanders,” George said.

Moreover, the attack was videoed and viewed around the world hours later. The increasingly open-source nature of information about military activities around the world has implications for how the Army will operate in the future.

“We all knew about that within a matter of minutes. Everything was out there on open source,” George said.

The high-profile Ukrainian assault against Russian bombers came as the U.S. Army is in the midst of a major transformation effort. At the end of April, the service announced what it dubbed Army Transformation Initiative, where it seeks to shrink its headquarters elements, become leaner and change how it spends.

As part of that effort, Secretary Dan Driscoll said his service pitched itself to President Donald Trump and Pentagon leadership as the “innovation engine” for the Department of Defense by plucking the best ideas and technologies from the commercial sector and testing them out in the Army.

“We fundamentally believe the Army should be the innovation engine of the Pentagon … but we have to earn that right,” Driscoll said alongside George at Monday’s AI conference. “We basically said, hey, we will earn the right to do this by — we’ll cut ourselves. For ATI, the other thing … is it’s $3 billion dollars of cuts, and that’s a lot of money that people want to go to other programs. We’ve made the cuts, we’re recycling it to buy the things we want and need. We’re going to continue to run that engine and innovate.”

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1st Armored Brigade, 3rd Infantry Division is in Hohenfels, Germany, as part of Combined Resolve 25-02, a U.S., NATO and multi-partner exercise focusing on interoperability, that’s slated to take place from May to June. That unit has been designated as a so-called “transforming-in-contact” unit. That Army concept aims to speed up how the service buys technologies and designs its forces by injecting emerging capabilities into units and letting them experiment with them during exercises and deployments.

The unit has conducted four transforming-in-contact events to date — to include activities at home station and a rotation at the National Training Center at Fort Irwin, California, last year where they encounter a full force-on-force conflict against an opposing enemy.

During that event, 1st Brigade began testing out tactics and technologies for electromagnetic deception to trick the enemy into thinking its forces were in one place, even though they were actually in another location. They recorded what the electronic emissions of their command posts looked like and played those recordings back on the battlefield for the opposing force.

“Our first iteration with the deception command post out here at NTC we had great effects, where the OPFOR attacked it. At NTC, I did not have to move my brigade command post once because of enemy indirect fire, enemy contact,” Col. Jim Armstrong, 1st Armored Brigade Combat Team, 3rd Infantry Division commander, told reporters this week.

The unit placed those signatures in locations where personnel thought the enemy would look for a command post, played the signatures and put the real command posts somewhere else.

The opposing force attacked the fake command post, revealing its own position and making it vulnerable to attack.

One of the biggest lessons from Russia’s incursions into Ukraine — from 2014 to its latest invasion — is how units can be located and targeted with kinetic munitions solely based on their emissions within the electromagnetic spectrum.

In addition to pushing units to reduce their overall signatures, the Army is pursing technologies that will allow them to deceive the enemy and even hide in plain sight.

“Commanders must be able to see themselves to control their emissions and defeat the enemy’s ability to sense, identify, locate, and target them. This is critically important when observations from current conflicts around the world show there are eight minutes from identification in the EMS to artillery impacting on the detected location of said emission,” the Army’s Multidomain Operations Range Guide states.

That effort is a partnership between the Cyber Center of Excellence and Intelligence Center of Excellence to inform how units conduct electromagnetic spectrum training at combat training centers and home stations.

In many cases, it is back to the future for the Army in electromagnetic spectrum operations as a whole — having divested much of its gear and tactics following the Cold War — and decoys especially. The service is looking to regrow that tradecraft and expertise as adversaries view electronic warfare as an essential tool for gaining and maintaining information superiority.

“Our adversaries employ world-class EW forces that support denial and deception operations and allow identification, interception, disruption, and, in combination with traditional fires, destruction of adversary command, control, communications, and intelligence capabilities,” the Multidomain Operations Range Guide states. “Near peers have fielded a wide range of ground-based EW systems to counter GPS, tactical communications, satellite communications, and radars. Additionally, their EW fuse with cyber operations enables their forces to corrupt and disable computers and networked systems as well as disrupt use of the EMS. Our adversaries aspire to develop and field a full spectrum of EW capabilities to counter Western Command, Control, Communications, Computers Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance (C4ISR) and weapons guidance systems.”

The Army has tested other systems in the past capable of replicating the service’s assets — such as company to division level radio frequency signatures — to confuse and deceive enemy signals collection.

Those tools were able to collect the signals and signature profile of a command post — or anything that emits — and copy it to rebroadcast as a decoy. Some of the systems can be deployed to mimic a command post so the enemy doesn’t know exactly where the command post is or which one is the real command post.

Other units around the Army and as part of their transforming-in-contact rotations have sought to use electromagnetic deception, albeit in different ways depending on the enemy they faced or the terrain they were in.

2nd Brigade, 101st Airborne Division last year strapped $30 raspberry pi’s to small drones and used them as electronic decoys against its enemy, to great effect, according to after-action briefs.

However, that wasn’t necessarily a tactic that would work for 3rd Brigade, 10th Mountain Division, which conducted its rotation in January at Hohenfels as part of the last Combined Resolve event. The opposing force it faced would typically 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 interest was discovered the opposing force 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.

Following its National Training Center rotation, 1st Brigade, as well as 3rd Infantry Division as a whole, will be using its rotation in Hohenfels and Combined Resolve to build on operations using electronic deception designed to replicate EMS emissions, according to a spokesperson.

1st Brigade will be the first armored transforming-in-contact unit to participate in Combined Resolve.

The first iteration of transforming-in-contact, TiC 1.0, featured three light brigades. TiC 2.0 is focused on armored formations and divisions as a whole — to include enabling units such as artillery and air cavalry brigades as well as Multi-Domain Task Forces, some Army special operations units and National Guard units.

The division spokesperson declined to provide specific details regarding the deception capability for security reasons, but noted the decoy command post has both a physical and an electromagnetic spectrum component.

“There are 9 doctrinal forms of contact (visual, direct, indirect, non-hostile, obstacles, aircraft, [Chemical, Biological, Radiological, and Nuclear], and electronic) and the deception command post is designed to mimic as many of them as possible,” they said.

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Transforming-in-contact, a top priority of the Army spearheaded by Chief of Staff Gen. Randy George, aims to speed up how the service buys technologies and designs its forces by injecting emerging capabilities into units and letting them experiment with them during exercises and deployments. The first iteration, TiC 1.0, featured three light brigades. TiC 2.0 is focused on armored formations and divisions as a whole — to include enabling units such as artillery and air cavalry brigades as well as Multi-Domain Task Forces, some Army Special Operations units and National Guard units.

The prototypes that will be tested are part of the Terrestrial Layer System-Echelons Above Brigade (TLS-EAB) program. That capability was initially designed as an integrated EW and signals intelligence system primarily for divisions, corps and Multi-Domain Task Forces to sense across greater ranges. It was originally slated for the Family of Medium Tactical Vehicles, but that plan has been altered. Following experimentation and lessons learned from Europe, the Army has decided to split up the SIGINT and electronic warfare functions, like it has for its smaller, brigade counterpart known as TLS-Brigade Combat Team.

The EAB technology, which is being built by Lockheed Martin, was less mature than the BCT variant at the time the decision to split the functions was made. Officials have said EAB will be the main component for defining and demonstrating an initial EW architecture and publishing the requests for information concerning the architecture that will eventually deliver it back to the BCT version for integration.

The Army will test two prototype configurations of the TLS-EAB in fiscal 2025 and 2026, according to a spokesperson from program executive office for intelligence, electronic warfare and sensors. They will include one made by Lockheed and a variant developed as a pre-prototype that was tested at Project Convergence in March called the Transformation-in-Contact Mobile Node-Terrestrial (TMNT) system.

TMNT was developed by the Army Combat Capabilities Development Command and Project Manager Electronic Warfare and Cyber from IEW&S, as a proof of concept based on requirements from TLS-EAB. While not a fully realized system — demonstrating signals intelligence and electronic warfare capabilities as a modular, scalable platform — it provided the Army certain insights at Project Convergence to help refine the eventual solution. The spokesperson noted that further refinement will be needed in operational packaging to accommodate various unit types to include light and heavy.

During Project Convergence, the system provided intelligence, supported commanders’ priority information requirements and integrated with other sensors while demonstrating the performance, modularity and potential to fill intelligence gaps across all echelons, according to an Army news release.

The apparent success of TMNT at Project Convergence has accelerated the fielding of TLS-EAB systems to transforming-in-contact units.

“Lockheed Martin’s TLS-EAB prototype was developed as part of a modular, fully open architecture approach, which enables form-factor flexibility across multiple platforms as well as rapid integration of third party software and hardware,” a company spokesperson said. “It was specifically developed to support long-range, cross platform collaboration to provide optimized and integrated signals intelligence (SIGINT), support to electronic warfare (EW), and cyberspace support operations at the Corps, Multi-Domain Task Forces for Joint All Domain Operational (JADO) operations.”

The Army plans to keep iterating with transforming-in-contact units. Previously, the service sent other electronic warfare gear to units such as the Terrestrial Layer System-Brigade Combat Team Manpack system — the first official program in decades for a dismounted electronic attack capability that soldiers can use to conduct jamming on-the-move as well as direction and signal finding with limited signals intelligence capabilities — and the Tactical Electronic Warfare System-Infantry (TEWS-I), a quick-reaction capability built a few years ago by General Dynamics, serving as a smaller system designed for infantry vehicles.

TMNT is a prime example of the Army using transforming-in-contact to focus on near-term solutions to threats, the IEW&S spokesperson said, enabling units to rapidly test organizational changes while integrating emerging technology.

The service will be exploring how to best tailor configurations to meet specific mission needs, they added, with further refinement throughout FY26 to identify key capabilities for different combatant commands, echelons and threats.

The Army has outlined a theater– and echelon-based approach to capabilities such as electronic warfare. Officials have said the service won’t provide every unit across its million-man force the same gear, but rather tranche capabilities. This will allow the latest and greatest to get out to units when developed, but also enable the Army to tailor to specific needs in theater.

Each region, based on its geography and how adversaries in that area employ capabilities, requires somewhat unique systems. For example, the dense foliage in the Asia-Pacific affects the way signals are propagated differently than the mountainous terrain in Europe.

The Army’s Spectrum Situational Awareness System (S2AS) — which is intended to provide sensing and visualization of what units look like in the spectrum and allow commanders to be able to sense and report in real-time their command post signatures — will also be given to units to test out as a part of transforming-in-contact in the future.

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1^st Brigade, 1st Cavalry Division, or Iron Horse, has been designated as one of the next so-called “transforming-in-contact” brigades, a top initiative for Chief of Staff Gen. Randy George. The effort aims to speed up how the Army buys capabilities and designs its forces by injecting emerging capabilities into units and letting them experiment with them during exercises and deployments.

The first iteration, TiC 1.0, featured light infantry units and saw them transition to either mobile or light brigades. TiC 2.0 now is turning its attention to armored formations — which have typically been left out given integrating capabilities on their platforms is difficult — along with divisions as a whole to include enabling units such as artillery and air cavalry brigades.

1st Cav’s experimentation efforts will be nestled under what it calls Pegasus Charge, which kicked off last week.

“Everything that we’re going to do across the transformation-in-contact effort lines will be under Pegasus Charge,” Maj. Gen. Thomas Feltey, commander of 1st Cavalry Division, said in an interview. “We’re not just looking at it from a purely organizational and material solution, whereas that’s part of it, [but] we’re looking at it more comprehensively across the” doctrine, organization, training, materiel, leadership and education, personnel, facilities and policy aspects.

Pegasus Charge started with a deep dive on what an armored brigade should look like in the future.

That will evolve as the unit receives new gear and gets to test it, but that transformation is pivotal to the TiC effort.

Unlike the lighter units, which have been evolving for many years, Feltey noted that armored units have been relatively unchanged since the early 2000s.

“We’re developing options for battalions, for our armored cavalry squadron. We’re going to change the way our cavalry fights and then we’re also going to change the way that our brigades fight with the divisions,’ he said.

As the Army moves from the brigade as the main fighting unit to division, Feltey noted that brigades will need to rely more on division assets. His division through TiC is seeking to inform what that will look like in the future.

1st Cavalry Division headquarters recently came back from Europe, where it served as the higher echelon over the last TiC 1.0 unit, 3rd Brigade, 10th Mountain Division.

Feltey said he learned a lot of lessons as that unit tested new capabilities — namely, that his units will need longer-range drones. While 3rd Brigade, 10th Mountain Division had the Short Range Reconnaissance unmanned aerial system, Feltey said his units will need the Medium Range Reconnaissance UAS and Long Range Reconnaissance UAS.

“We’re more interested in the MRR that can see beyond line of sight and beyond the direct fire range of our tanks and our Bradleys,” he said.

Similarly, Feltey also noted that 3rd Brigade, 10th Mountain was able to see farther than it could deliver effects on the battlefield, he said. In other words, the brigade did not possess the capabilities to strike some of the targets it saw with either direct or indirect fires. A main reason for that was the towed artillery platforms that unit had.

By contrast, 1st Brigade, 1st Cavalry Division will be getting the upgraded Paladin M109A7 artillery system, which can mass fires more quickly than the towed artillery 3rd Brigade had.

This was an observation that 1st Cav is trying to get ahead of as it begins its TiC journey.

“We can shoot and move, shoot and move. We’ll have be able to have an increased volume of fire. And that increased volume of fire will allow us to suppress and deliver fires more effectively across the brigades’ area of operations. When we see something in our brigades, we’re going to be able to hit them. We’re going to be able to strike them,” Feltey said. “Then systematically, our forward observers, like our artillery, should have MRR or LRR UASs. They’re the contemporary forward observers, so our artillery can be out there, hunting both key enemy weapon systems, but also identifying those important places where we need to deliver suppressive effects to let our forces move forward. Again, organizationally, this will be something we look at DIVARTY, how do we shorten that kill chain to get those effective fires, massing those fires in the time and place that we need them to advance our forces on the battlefield?”

On the communications front, Feltey noted his units are likely slated to get upgraded network gear as well, to include Starshield, MUOS, and technologies associated with the integrated tactical network. The Army’s network portfolio has largely focused on light infantry units given the ease of integration. It is now beginning to turn its attention to the heavier units to enable them to perform functions on the move as opposed to at the halt, a critical enabler in future warfare as units can’t afford to stop for long periods of time.

In fact, the Army tested its prototype for Next Generation Command and Control with an armored unit at Project Convergence in March in order to start with the most difficult type of unit.

Getting new kit

1st Brigade will also be receiving new equipment in the way of the latest and greatest Army capabilities. Those include the aforementioned upgraded Paladin M109A7 artillery system, M2A4 Bradley Fighting Vehicle, Armored Multi-Purpose Vehicle and the Low Altitude Stalking and Strike Ordnance.

Along with that new equipment, the unit will also seek to reorganize similar to how the first TiC units created new company units designed to make them more lethal by combining drones, loitering munitions, mortars and other equipment to shorten the sensor-to-shooter chain.

However, unlike those units, 1st Cav already had brigade cavalry squadrons for reconnaissance whereas the lighter units had to create those formations.

The armored units will seek to enhance the cavalry squadron’s ability to conduct reconnaissance through technical means by looking to integrate human-machine interface platoons such as autonomous robots, sensors and UAS.

“Organizationally, we’re trying to figure out what’s the best way to harness those formations to give us increased lethality — or not only increased lethality, but also increased understanding of the battlefield that allows the commander to make decisions, whether those are decisions to kill the enemy or decisions to move the enemy in a place where the enemy doesn’t expect it,” Feltey said. 

1st Cav’s timeline for when its activities will take place will be slightly longer than the units in the first iteration of transforming-in-contact.

The culminating combat training center rotation for 1st Brigade, the most realistic combat scenarios the Army can create for units to train, won’t be until 2027. However, there are several other events before then. Small unit fielding and training of new systems will occur by the turn of calendar year 2026.

The big step between now and the combat training center rotation will be a warfighter exercise next summer. Unlike some events that are mostly tabletop or command post exercises, this one will be a blend of live and constructive training, which Feltey called a “dirt fighter.”

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Three brigades conducted their capstone training events during that period, testing how new technology and concepts can make them more lethal. The effort was part of Chief of Staff Gen. Randy George’s so-called transforming-in-contact initiative, which 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. The effort is initially focused on unmanned aerial systems, counter-UAS and electronic warfare.

Each unit experimented in different geographic regions with different terrain and weather conditions that ranged from wooded swamps to the humid archipelagos of the Pacific to the freezing sprawl of European hills.

As a result, the Army will be making decisions on how these units will be organized going forward.

“We’re exploring how we’re organized to make sure that we can maximize these capabilities. But environment is a big part of it, as you know, where different things do different things. What we’re getting after, after this third one is we are going to make some decisions on how the Army is organized in our brigade combat teams,” George said during a pre-record discussion with Defense One that aired Thursday — a talk that likely took place in February based on his reference to upcoming events. “We’ve had these three experiments in three different areas. Next month, they’re going to come back to me and Secretary of the Army with … the new force design update and here’s how we want to change the formation. We will look at that and we will broadly have the same formations, but we will have some flexibility based on what environments they go to.”

Each brigade during the experiments created new elements that sought to do roughly the same thing but varied a bit in terms of numbers and makeup, with some calling them multifunction reconnaissance companies and others calling them strike companies. The three units have already begun to transform with 2nd Brigade, 101st Airborne Division as the first mobile brigade combat team and 2nd Brigade, 25th Infantry Division and 3rd Brigade, 10th Mountain Division transitioning to light brigade combat teams.

New technology allowed these units to be nimbler and more mobile on the battlefield, presenting unique problems to the resident opposing force that fights several Army brigades each year.

The experimentation is helping officials determine how units are organized and what types of skills personnel need such as master drone operators at the company level or tech integrators at battalion, George said.

To become faster on the battlefield, the Army is also examining how to eliminate excess within formations. George noted that advancements to the network have replaced large static legacy server stacks that were clunky to lug around and difficult to set up with software defined radios and tablets.

Those reductions are not only making units more mobile, they’re also making their electromagnetic signatures smaller. And the funds that went to those legacy capabilities can be reinvested toward other “war winning” capabilities that are needed, George said.

The Army is continuing its transforming-in-contact experimentation with the next phase, dubbed 2.0, which will begin to pull in full divisions as well as armored and Stryker brigades and Multi-Domain Task Forces.

Transforming-in-contact 2.0 will further help determine formation types as the Army continues to experiment with fuel consumption and supply lines that are enabled by 3D printing on the battlefield.

“If you’re reducing the fuel, you’re reducing the supply lines that we have. Your formations are a little more leaner. I think that all that will help,” George said. “Then the other thing is looking at reducing the complexity of our formation so we just don’t have the number of parts and the things that we have inside of our formation. We’re looking at this from every angle. I think … transforming-in-contact 2.0 will help inform that quite a bit.”

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The service is drawing key lessons from Ukraine, where unmanned aerial systems have been ubiquitous on the battlefield. The Army is now looking for more expendable platforms, a marked change from the past where soldiers were disciplined for losing assets that were allotted to units at specific and known quantities.

“Based off of the fact that we still don’t necessarily have a budget, we’ve been operating under a continuing resolution [since the beginning of fiscal 2025] and there are some fiscal constraints associated what we’ve been doing now, we’ve been trying to figure out what are all the things that we can do a little bit more innovative, a little bit smaller scale. [We] haven’t necessarily gotten any more money to buy any UASs … The team went back and said, OK, well, if we can’t buy anymore, let’s start making our own,” Maj. Gen. Brett Sylvia, commander of the 101st Airborne Division, told reporters during a visit to the unit’s home at Fort Campbell, Kentucky, Feb. 26.

Now, the Army is taking a somewhat different approach than it has in the past.

Sylvia noted that the division spent “a bunch of money” last year to purchase roughly 20 unmanned systems, which included systems from Skydio, for its 2nd Brigade’s culminating training exercise. He declined to say exactly how much. But more recently, with the unit’s own money — and at a much lower cost, albeit acquiring motors, propellers and controllers — it has been able to 3D print more than 100 small drones.

This approach mirrors where the Army as a whole wants to go, taking key lessons from Ukraine, where units are able to 3D print parts and systems on the battlefield to keep up with the pace of war. Getting systems to the field on a consistent basis will be challenging given the strain on logistics tails that officials anticipate in future conflicts.

The 3D printing of drones is part of a larger Army initiative known as transforming-in-contact, which 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. The effort is initially focused on UAS, counter-UAS and electronic warfare.

Officials believe that the number of drones employed by units must grow exponentially in the future. Sylvia noted that one of his brigades conducted an exercise at Fort Campbell in February had 100 drones, but now they want 300 UAS available to them.

Today, troops can print one drone in about 18 hours, according to Sylvia, but the Army is working on speeding up this process.

“Instead of in years, we’re doing it in weeks and months in order to be able to get after the innovation,” Sylvia said. “We actually believe that this is the future. We believe that instead of going back to the enterprise and buying some of these other higher-end UASs that we’ll be able to print these ones ,and that that should be the method that we move to in the future.”

Sylvia said the transforming-in-contact effort is the most significant modernization process he’s seen in his 30-year career. That’s partly because it is user driven and not lab driven.

Under the traditional acquisition model, a requirement would be generated based on a particular need, a system would be developed, it would be tested and then fielded. This process oftentimes was so lengthy that by the time the solution got to the field, it wouldn’t be relevant anymore.

The transforming-in-contact initiative is trying to tighten up that requirements-generation process and allow soldiers to innovate on the battlefield to drive solutions faster.

“What works in a lab with a very technical expert may not necessarily work with a 19-year-old soldier who’s out there in the rain and the mud. We got to figure out how do we do that. We got to get it out there quicker,” Sylvia said.

Program of record or soldier built

While the Army still has program-of-record drones, ranging from the large MQ-1C Gray Eagle that is a division and corps asset to small, medium and long-range reconnaissance systems, lower echelons will need small, attritable systems to conduct line-of-sight reconnaissance and even decoy and deception operations.

The service wants a layered approach, targeting drones that fly at 200 feet and below with a range of 1-10 kilometers for 3D-printed systems.

“I think they also complement each other. As we look at what capability gaps we have as an organization, we can look across and be like, is there a program of record that already exists for us to use this or is this something that we need to look across industry to find a solution to do that? We can do those a lot of times to complement current program record items that already exist in the Army,” Maj. Joshua Kellbach, executive officer for 2nd Battalion, 506th Infantry Regiment of the 101st, told reporters on the sidelines of Operation Lethal Eagle, a training event.

Others described how innovation from soldiers can build on programs of record in the field if needed for urgent operations.

2nd Battalion, 506th Infantry Regiment was in Europe last year helping to train Ukrainian soldiers. One thing they learned from the Ukrainians was how to build a 3D-printed apparatus for the bottom of a drone to rig a grenade that could be dropped on enemies from above.

“We had a couple of smart guys, one of them happened to be an intelligence lieutenant, one was an engineer, but they just happened to be really smart technical folks and they just figured out how to do it by working out watching YouTube videos,” Lt. Col. Reed Markham, commander of 2nd Battalion, 506th Infantry Regiment, said. “I think that those efforts can complement each other when you got smart soldiers that are just being innovative and coming up with cool ideas and it matches up with new tech.”

Every Soldier a drone operator

Soldiers at Operation Lethal Eagle were conducting drone operator training on a variety of systems.

One such platform was the Black Hornet Soldier Born System, a micro drone program of record used for very short-range ops to see around corners of buildings.

The other was a 3D-printed quadcopter called the Eagle Mav that was just fielded the week prior. It is a company and platoon asset for short-range reconnaissance to make contact with the enemy before soldiers do.

Leaders of the 101st Airborne Division believe that each of its soldiers must be proficient in flying drones, similar to how each member, regardless of military occupational specialty, is trained and proficient on firearms.

“I think of it as like a machine gun … I think of the drones the same way,” Markham said.

“You have people that are your machine gunners, they train with that tool all the time, that weapon all the time, and they’re qualified and they do that. But worst case, every soldier knows how to use a machine gun, so if something happens to that machine gunner, you would still put a different soldier that knows how to use that weapon system on it,” he added. “You’ve got dedicated drone operators that build up the hours and really get good at it, and they’re the person that’s doing the planning and all that kind of stuff and with the leaders to employ it. But then you have other people that are ready to go.”

Officials say the ability to fly drones should be “job agnostic.” As such, they need to be easy to use. The Army doesn’t want to “over-technicalize” these tools, so that forces can quickly learn how to operate them.

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“I’ll be very upfront with you, the counter-UAS piece is moving very slowly. That portion of it is one that has the chief of staff and the Army’s attention, and he is very aggressively getting after that,” Maj. Gen. Brett Sylvia told reporters during a visit to the division’s home at Fort Campbell, Kentucky, Feb. 26. “I think that there are things that will come soon, but as it stands right now, that was something that just hasn’t been as robust as some of the others.”

Counter-drone technology is one of three primary focus areas for Chief of Staff Gen. Randy George’s “transforming-in-contact” initiative, which 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. The effort is also focused on UAS and electronic warfare.

The 101st Airborne Division’s 2nd Brigade was the first unit to go through its capstone training exercise with new tech as part of transforming-in-contact. As the Army shifts to the next iteration of the effort, the 101st is one of two full divisions that will be participating.

As such, the unit has been significantly involved in testing these technologies — with 2nd Brigade conducting its capstone event last summer — giving it important insight into these challenges.

The strategic landscape has changed significantly in the last few years, especially exemplified by the Ukraine-Russia war, highlighting the need to rapidly adopt new capabilities such as drones and counter-drone systems.

“If you look at what’s happening over there in Ukraine, [there are] tens of thousands of uncrewed systems that are flying every single day,” Sylvia said. “This idea of being able to hide out there on the battlefield through just standard camouflage is becoming much more difficult.”

Sylvia explained that part of the challenge of countering drones is dealing with the complex airspace where those systems are flying around, presenting unique command-and-control problems.

“If you look at what’s happening in Ukraine, they are literally shooting down thousands of their own drones every day because it is so difficult for them to be able to identify friend or foe,” he said.

While there are several concepts to defeat these systems — such as kinetic, non-kinetic and even drone-on-drone attacks — the Army needs an effective C2 tool to manage all those platforms.

Sylvia alluded to the fact the service is taking a look at some of these technologies and moving aggressively toward a desired capability.

In fact, Army officials explained that they are working with the Defense Innovation Unit for forthcoming awards for a command-and-control system to replace the Forward Area Air Defense Command and Control, a tool that integrates a variety of sensors and capabilities to shoot down airborne threats. DIU last year issued solicitations for what it’s calling the Forward Counter Unmanned Aircraft Systems Command and Control System.

“The entire point there is we want to be able to bring in acoustic sensors and small radars, we want to actually do formation-based defense,” Alex Miller, chief technology officer to the chief of staff, told reporters last month. “How do you take a platoon, rather than just thinking about point defense and bases in the National Capital Region, and how do you let them do self-defense automatically with any sensor, any effector?”

Sylvia noted that while there are interceptors that currently exist, it’s important to win the cost-curve battle when it comes to defeating UAS — not expending costly munitions to defeat hundred-dollar drones — while also enabling smaller units to defend themselves.

“Counter-UAS is a very difficult problem because it requires this very layered approach … It’s a hundred-to-one ratio in terms of what you spend … on a missile to take something down versus what it costs to develop that drone,” he said. “You’ve got to have small systems in order to be able to take care of small threats. But you still have to have high-end systems to take care of high-end threats. How do you do all of that at echelon in order to be able to provide the support that you need at each one of these?”

One reason why counter-UAS systems are much slower for the military to field than UAS, according to Sylvia, is that there isn’t as large of a commercial market that officials can access.

“On the UAS side, there’s a tremendous commercial capability that already exists out there. There’s already a ton of innovation and things that are taking place commercially that then you can tap into for military application. The same does not exist on the counter-UAS side,” Sylvia said. “There wasn’t this huge fora of counter-UAS developers that we could easily tap into. I think it was always going to be a much greater challenge because it’s a smaller ecosystem than the other one.”

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Spectrum Situational Awareness System, or S2AS, is envisioned to be a commercial off-the-shelf solution that will provide sensing and visualization of what units look like in the spectrum and allow commanders to be able to sense and report in real-time their command post signatures, sources of electromagnetic interference — either from coalition partners or the enemy — and threat emissions. Army officials see this as an important capability for operations in a complex future environment where forces will have to adeptly maneuver within the invisible electromagnetic spectrum.

According to an Army spokesperson, the service has identified a mature commercial-off-the-shelf product to satisfy the requirements of the program.

Moreover, the Army intends for that system to participate in a unit exercise in the fourth quarter of fiscal 2025 as part of the service’s transforming-in-contact initiative, one of its top priorities to inform how it purchases and employs new capabilities that will also provide insights for force structure changes.

The first iteration of the concept just concluded with the last of the three light infantry brigades wrapping up their capstone exercises. The initiative is expected to now focus on Stryker and armor brigades as well as division headquarters.

Throughout the first three rotations, brigades noted the importance of being able to manage their signatures and sense the environment.

S2AS is envisioned to support all Army command post operations with the ability to sense, detect and report friendly electromagnetic spectrum signatures as well as sources of electromagnetic interference, according to the spokesperson.

The transforming-in-contact units have been prioritized for planned demonstrations and initial equipment delivery. So far, the Army has publicly announced that the 25th Infantry Division and 101st Airborne Division will be the two divisions with 2nd Cavalry Regiment and 1st Brigade, 3rd Infantry Division as two heavy brigades for the next iteration.   

The final procurement quantities and equipping distributions for S2AS will be informed by the planned demonstration and testing events. 

An operational demonstration test event is planned for the first quarter of fiscal 2026, which will support a potential rapid fielding decision in the second quarter of that fiscal year.

Efforts in fiscal 2025 for S2AS include initial delivery of prototype systems, vehicle and network integration, cybersecurity accreditation, testing and logistical support.

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The next stage of the Army’s experimental effort to inform how it procures equipment and organizes formations will focus more on robotics and autonomy.

Transforming-in-contact, as the initiative is known, is a top priority for Army and Chief of Staff Gen. Randy George that aims to change the way the service buys, trains and employs technology, focusing on commercial-off-the-shelf gear.

For iteration 1.0, 3rd Brigade, 10th Mountain Division was the last of three light infantry brigades to test the gear during various combat training center rotations — the most realistic combat scenarios the Army can create for units to train — in the swamps of Louisiana, the dense foliage archipelagos of Hawaii and frigid European climates.

Transforming-in-contact 2.0 was announced last October but few details were provided regarding what specific units would be involved, just that it would scale up to divisions and expand to Stryker and armored brigades. When it comes to tech, officials explained that it would likely begin to focus more on autonomy.

“As we were looking at the drones, what we realized with both 2nd Brigade, 101st and 2nd Brigade, 25th ID was we need to get away from a one-to-one from operator to machine,” Alex Miller, the chief technology officer for the chief of staff of the Army, told reporters this week. “With the engineers, it’s not just replacing breaching vehicles, it’s how do you displace the capability and maybe use machines to do it. It’s flexibility on those types of things as well.”

Others noted that with armored units being brought into the fold, robotics will likely be a bigger focus.

“As you get an armor brigade combat team involved, there’s potential maybe to interject a little bit more on the robotics piece. The ground platforms, more than just the [Squad Multipurpose Equipment Transport] and things that you see right now with the light infantry brigade using. I think you might see some of that,” Lt. Gen. Charles Costanza, commander of V Corps, said in an interview. Then “the ground-launched effects capabilities on a platform that we’re trying to see if we can incorporate into both formations.”

Some things will be different with new units and echelons, but the overall concept will remain.

“It won’t be exactly the same, but it will be the same kind of bottom-up feedback that will inform us what kind of systems they need, what kind of problems they’re solving,” George said.

Officials have named 25th Infantry Division and 101st Airborne Division as the two divisions focused on transforming-in-contact 2.0 along with 2nd Cavalry Regiment — a Stryker unit, which is based in Europe — and 1st Brigade, 3rd Infantry Division as one of the two armored brigades and National Guard units.

Given 2CR’s location, officials explained they have some ideas already of how to incorporate lessons from Ukraine’s war with Russia to the transforming-in-contact concept.

At the division level, some of the experimentation will take place through joint warfighting assessments and warfighter exercises, command post-related events and simulations.

As the Army expands transforming-in-contact, it wants to look at a variety of echelons and all warfighting functions, George said, such as aviation and logistics.

“We know that logistics is going to have to be more dispersed. What do we have to do to make adjustments to that? What level of technology needs to be infused in our logistics formation is another example, so that they can protect or detect and do the things that they need to do with drones,” he said. “How are we going to do 3D printing through that at echelon, and not just at the brigade level, but that we can support that, because now you have a sustainment brigade? How does all of this interact with an aviation brigade and how do you do airspace control and how does that work together?”

Lessons from the first iteration will factor into what’s next and how the Army could alter its formations going forward.

“We’re taking all of these lessons and we are in the process right now of a force design update to decide, how [are] these formations … going to look, what do we need to do differently with that. We’ll come out with that and that will be how we’re deciding our organization,” George told reporters this week.

He explained that with the first three brigades having done their combat training center rotations, this is not the end point. The Army is taking the feedback and will continue to make modifications.

With heavier units comes platform integration and larger footprints.

Costanza said the Army will look to how the lighter units in 1.0 took drones and fires to organize into strike or multifunction reconnaissance companies, which were equipped with drones, loitering munitions, mortars and other equipment to shorten the sensor-to-shooter chain to degrade enemy formations sooner before they come in range of more traditional friendly units.

“It’s how you take the UAS, counter-UAS capabilities with the [electronic warfare] capabilities, again, little bit bigger, because now you got platform-mounted capabilities, not just [Infantry Squad Vehicles], but tanks, Bradleys, Strykers. I think that gives you a little bit more capability,” he said. “The other thing, too, is scope and scale. Light infantry brigades, especially when you talk about command posts, they already start out pretty small. [The Integrated Tactical Network] is giving them the ability to spread out even more and be even more disaggregated.”

While network technology allowed the lighter units to disperse more and lower their signatures, their command posts were already much smaller than heavier units. But, Costanza said, 2nd Cavalry Regiment has already been fielded much of those systems and had time to take advantage of them and learn how to disperse and reduce their signature.

The unit is also taking lessons from the strike companies that were just tested with 3rd Brigade, 10th Mountain in Europe.

“2nd Cavalry Regiment is watching this intently because their whole purpose in life was reconnaissance security, expanding the reaction time and maneuver space for the corps. Under future Army construct, we know that 2nd Cavalry is going to have to condense. Their ability to do this kind of shaping operation with a well-enabled strike company that 3/10 is experimenting with, again, will inform how they shape their redesign going forward with future technology and reachback enablers to the theater-level enablers,” Col. Aaron Dixon, deputy chief of staff for operations, plans and training, G3, at V Corps, said in an interview. “Being able to see some of those lessons learned from this rotation at the end will help shape TiC 2.0 that we have lined up with 2nd Cavalry.”

Larger echelons are also looking at the lessons from 1.0 and determining what that means for force design changes, new formations and how to fight.

“It’s been fascinating because the way we’re building these transformation-in-contact formation, starting with the infantry and then moving on to the other brigade combat teams, we’re getting a large set of data from multiple soldiers, multiple units and that’s immediately going to feed into that force design update,” Lt. Col. Donald Hackett, chief of force management at V Corps, said in an interview. “It’s all being fed from the soldier up. And then as the brigade combat teams built, we’re going to adjust … how the corps operate, how the divisions operate. And you’re going to see a transformation-in-contact 2.0 where they start building that out to the divisions. They’re doing experimentations with the corps. It’s just a whole new approach to how we get after designing units.”

The Army is trying to determine how some of the new technologies and equipment, which make brigades more effective at longer ranges, affects the overall battlefield geometry, to include for higher echelon units.

While the brigade was the primary unit of action during the Global War on Terror, the Army is moving that up to division in anticipation of potential large-scale combat operations against sophisticated adversaries such as Russia and China.

“As we see these capabilities at the brigade level and just the increased range that you have for both the kinetic and non-kinetic effects, but the sensors, and now you add that to the division level and then potentially, down the road, we’re not talking corps is part of TiC, but how does that change fundamentally maybe the way you think about and fight at echelon,” Costanza said. “These brigades have capability that can actually affect the division deep area and vice versa. The divisions are going to have capabilities that potentially can affect the corps deep area. Then let’s just talk about airspace management and everything else [that] is going on. It’s a fundamental shift, I think, in the way we got to think about the battlefield framework and how we fight at echelon.”

Others explained how these new capabilities that enabled the strike companies affect how corps thinks about fighting.

“It’s shaping how the corps is trying to gather information from how this brigade sees themselves operating to how that might change how the division sees its battlefield geometry and structure on how they fight for information,” Dixon said. “Then all the way up at the corps level, if I have a fully enabled brigade causing a more-enabled division, how does that change how the corps sees its shaping fight versus its close fight in the future? If you add that early reconnaissance capability proliferated all the way down to the lowest level and say I’m also increasing their reach with things like one-way drones, … how does that change how the corps sees the full battlefield geometry?”

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