Although the Army’s main fighting formation was brigades for the last 20 years of the global war on terror, it’s now shifting to division as the unit of action, and corps will also be a critical echelon that must relearn old lessons regarding how to mobilize in a new era where counterterrorism and counterinsurgency are no longer the service’s main focus.

Corps is an important echelon as many authorities are held at this level and it acts as the bridge between tactical Army forces and joint task forces across an assigned theater with other services.

As officials seeks to determine how to deploy, corps leaders understand that much like subordinate units, they must have mobile and survivable command posts. As part of that, they must figure out what’s needed for the right mix of cloud-based access and edge computing.

“How do we build resilient, survivable, adaptable command posts? Some of that involves things like, do we build out an edge capability? We have our first edge nodes that we’re playing with out at [Project Convergence] Capstone,” Col. Edwin Mathias, the corps’ chief of staff, said in an interview.  

The Army as a whole is looking at the mix of edge and cloud. Forces are beginning to understand that the complex operating environment of the future will present communications and network challenges by adversaries, what the military calls DDIL or “denied, degraded, intermittent and limited.”

Access to the cloud could be limited or disrupted, necessitating a local edge capability until those connections can be reestablished.

At XVIII Airborne Corps’ warfighter exercise last August, a large command post exercise, one of the biggest lessons was the need for an edge capability when cloud access was lost.

“Everything that we do now is cloud-based at the corps level. When we lost communications for the network — and that was basically because we had so much data going out that the network was not in a position to handle it — we didn’t have any connectivity to the systems that we needed to have connection to, which drove our focus to really get after the edge capability,” Col. Nicole Vinson, the corps’ chief communications officer, said in an interview. “The edge capability, technically, we’re looking at, is how do you do it? But then once we get something at the edge, which we have now at PC, you can start driving the conversation of what information do you need to have access to at the edge, what applications do you need to continue to operate at the edge? We can change the conversation from the technology knowing that we need it, but now starting to figure out what capabilities and what mission sets do you need to be able to continue to operate when in any kind of disconnected environment?”

The XVIII Airborne Corps is looking to test two different edge node versions, with one being a cloud-to-edge capability that will be tested for the first time. The corps created a tactical cloud to take capabilities from the cloud and deploy what they need at the edge, which will allow them to change depending on the mission set.

The goal is to try to get away from the stovepiped edge capabilities of the past and move to a more dynamic and flexible environment.

“We’ve always fought against different stovepipes. What we’re really trying to get after with our command post is to be lighter, faster, more mobile. The more we deliver these stovepiped edge capabilities, we’re not really accomplishing what we set out to achieve,” Vinson said. “The way we want to be able to operate is to be able to come together as a command post but then push the different groups out.”

The corps wants to look at four different groups to operate independent of each other and then determine what edge capability needs to be with each group.

This goes back to the need for survivable, adaptable and resilient command posts, based on observations from Ukraine and the recognition that larger and static command posts are juicy targets.

“Our ability to disaggregate the staffs into multiple nodes and reduce our signature is important,” Mathias said. “Those edge nodes, those independent transport capabilities would allow us to operate our current operations for one location, our fusion cell with our intel and fires team in another location, our administrative logistics component in another location, and then our network and G-6 team in yet another.”

Moreover, Project Convergence is allowing the corps to determine what mission sets need to come up to that level, now that the Army is shifting to division as the unit of action instead of brigade.

As division has become the main fighting unit, the Army has sought to move much of the network complexity out of brigades to the division level to enable those smaller units to focus on their fights as opposed to grappling with the network.

“One of the key elements that we have to be very cautious of is with the brigades and the division going to [secure but unclassified-encrypted] is how do we as a corps continue to be able to tie into those organizations without having so much burden on the division? There’s a lot of work going on at Project Convergence with the cross-domain solutions until we can get to a true zero-trust capability,” Vinson said.

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One such capability is edge computing and cloud. Once a prominent fixture for buzzword bingo, where government and industry types opined on deploying, the service is beginning to take a slightly different view on who will need these technologies and how feasible it will be to deliver them given the speed of war in the future.

“Somebody asked me the other day about ‘we need to scale this cloud thing all the way at the tactical edge.’ I was like, ‘to do what?’ … That’s not how the Army fights,” Leonel Garciga, Army chief information officer, said Friday at AFCEA’s Northern Virginia Chapter Army IT Day. “If we’re learning anything in Ukraine is these micro things that are happening, you’re not going to be doing that in the cloud, you’re not going to be scaling all these services. I think we really need to start focusing on building that [concept of operation] of how we’ve got to fight, so it can drive the right capabilities at echelon.”

Garciga added that the Defense Department needs to understand how it’s going to fight in the future and build capabilities that are needed at echelon and at the tactical edge. That also means determining what the edge is, which will vary across theaters, units, services and agencies.

“Broader, across the department, the Navy is going to look a little different, that’s a thing. Air Force is going to look a little different. Combat support agencies [are] going to look a little different. I think at echelon, what we call ‘edge’ matters,” he said.

Using the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency as an example of a combat support agency, Garciga noted that NGA’s edge is a region.

The Army has been trying to simplify its network and remove complexity from smaller units so they can be unburdened to focus on fighting rather than running the network.

Saddling them with more edge capabilities could run counter to that initiative.

“We need to be very, very, very careful in this space to not do the opposite of what we’re trying to do as an Army, which is reduce complexity at the tactical” level, Garciga said. “It’s like somebody came here, they said, ‘oh we got to do this at BCT, or we got to push this data all the way down to the platoon.’ I’m like, ‘isn’t that the opposite of where we’re going as an Army?’ We have made a conscious decision to reduce complexity, why are we bringing complexity back down?”

Other officials explained how the Army is working to define what the edge is, who needs what capabilities, and what their roles are.

“I think it depends on your role. Like maybe future ops, current ops in the brigade or in a company, if that’s their role, maybe they need edge compute. We’ve got to stop thinking of the Army as everybody has. It’s what is your role — and then you get that on-demand capability. I think that’s what we’ve got to experiment with,” Mark Kitz, program executive officer for command, control, communications and network, told DefenseScoop on the sidelines of the event. “If you’re a battalion commander and you have a company of small form factor [unmanned aerial systems] that’s collecting data, they may need edge compute in order to collect and process that data — whereas the other companies may be running patrol or perimeter security, they may not necessarily need edge compute. Thinking about roles in a tactical formation may help us get to some of these decisions about edge compute and what the edge compute means operationally.”

Kitz said the Army will be experimenting with what edge compute could look like at the Project Convergence Capstone 5 event later this year. Questions officials will be seeking to answer include: what data would soldiers have access to and how is it secured it?

Those questions and answers will factor into the ongoing development of one of the service’s top initiatives, Next Generation Command and Control, a completely new approach to how the Army plans to operate on the battlefield that aims to provide commanders and units with a better path to information, data and command and control through agile and software-based architectures.

According to Kitz, as that effort rolls out, the next questions will be: what can the Army put at the platoon level or the company level and beyond, to determine at what echelons would small form factor compute look like and what transport can be taken advantage of?

Officials conducting NGC2 experimentation efforts have stated that they are defining the platoon level as the tactical edge.

“We can’t go back to the cloud for everything that we’re going to do. It won’t be available. We started thinking through all right, what are we going to need to be able to process at the tactical edge, once again, defining the platoon as that tactical edge?” Col. Mike Kaloostian, chief digital and artificial intelligence officer at Army Futures Command, said at the Army’s Technical Exchange Meeting last month. “What can we do? What new edge compute capabilities, what low [size, weight and power], high-capacity edge compute capabilities exist so we can experiment and just learn from right now, and we can deploy those micro services to the edge? We can host and process certain data flows and data sets at the edge and see, and just ensure that we are not always going back to the cloud for everything and further driving down the latency.”

As part of the experimentation efforts, Kitz reiterated that the Army will embark upon exploring what the edge looks like, because “I don’t know that we know the answer to that.”

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Consequently, the need for localized, high-speed connectivity capable of securely integrating voice, video, surveillance, sensor and GPS data on the ground plus a high-capacity back-haul to command centers has never been more critical, says Troy Mitchell, a former U.S. Marine Corps intelligence officer with special ops experience, in a new report.

“The clock is against you,” says Mitchell, now a client partner for government at Verizon. That’s where a new generation of lightweight, high-capacity communications equipment, capable of creating a 7-kilometer-wide, high-speed 5G network footprint on the ground — combined with high through-put satellite feeds — promises to add a new dimension of capability for special forces working in remote and austere environments.

Mitchell outlines those capabilities in a new report produced by Scoop News Group for FedScoop and sponsored by Verizon. The report highlights how “multi-access edge computing” or MEC, combined with portable 5G wireless and satellite communications gear, now going through military demonstration tests, is poised to give special operations teams greater speed, agility and capabilities.

“5G combined with low orbital satellite connectivity makes it possible to erect secure virtual bridges from the edge to the cloud, giving decision makers a superior common operating picture that can literally save lives,” explains Bryan Schromsky, managing partner, 5G Public Sector, Verizon in the report.

“With 5G, it’s now feasible to inject cloud computing and AI capabilities into the decision-making process on the battlefield and give commanders a competitive advantage,” says Schromsky.

The report also highlights how 5G can give special ops teams the ability to create customized logical networks and partitions or network slices. This allows special operations units to establish secure, end-to-end network connections tailored to environmental spectrum and security requirements, including the potential transport of secret and classified data.

Read the report “Enhanced special operations communications in austere environments.”

This article was produced by Scoop News Group for FedScoop and DefenseScoop and sponsored by Verizon.

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