Software is “the most critical capability” and an “enhancer to the force when they’re in a fight against a near-peer adversary, and we don’t really 100% know what they have or what’s going to come,” Jennifer Swanson, deputy assistant secretary for data, engineering and software, told members of industry last week at the Army’s technical exchange meeting in Philadelphia. “What we’re trying to do is posture ourselves to be able to deliver those capabilities on-the-fly as needed, quickly.”

In future conflicts, the Army won’t have time to devise new requirements and fixes to technology problems under the old hardware- and platform-centric model of prior decades. Instead, it will need the ability to identify fixes and execute them in the fight in real-time.

“Requirements, test, material release — there’s a lot of things that we have that are antiquated from how we used to do business or how the waterfall process works and impede us in terms of being able to do things in an agile fashion,” Swanson said. “I’m very happy to say we have fixed almost all of it.”

The Army is now looking at a more agile and software-based approach to designing the network architecture as it shifts from a brigade-focused design to a division-focused design.

As a whole, the service is shifting the way it fights and making the division the main unit of action as opposed to the brigade-centric approach of the post-9/11 counterinsurgency wars.

Since 2019, when the Army charted down a different path to modernize its network, it focused on so-called capability sets for its integrated tactical network that sought to incrementally add in new technology every two years building upon previous iterations.

That paradigm is now shifting somewhat as the division becomes the primary focus, which means scaling technology up to a higher echelon. As a result, the Army wants to harness the power of agile design where technology is updated in a more rapid fashion.

“We’ll talk a little bit about this whole ‘how do you do more agile as an enterprise?’ Because there is a difference between the ability to do agile development and do agile delivery. The delivery gets a little bit bigger because it’s an enterprise approach that has to come as all of our partners, all of our test community and everybody else that’s involved. So, even though we might be able to develop very quickly, it’s how quick can we field a capability? We’re going to be starting to focus on that and the agile process with a division designs,” Maj. Gen. Anthony Potts, program executive officer for Command, Control, Communications-Tactical, told conference attendees.

“We’re really not talking about capability sets anymore. What we’re really talking about [is] … the division coming to a [large-scale combat operations] environment to where we’re getting back to the division as a unit of action. Well, that means architecturally we have to change the way that we think. Instead of doing these capability sets, what we’re really focused on we call the division-as-a-unit-of-action network design,” he added.

Potts explained the Army will begin to look at a model where once a baseline is defined, it will go through an agile process of turning out new iterations of software to get to a validation point.

Swanson said that the undersecretary and the vice chief of staff have approved a change across the Army so the service can enable what’s known as continuous integration/continuous delivery.

“We’re modifying our RFPs to ask for not just a solution from industry, but agility from the company. That’s something that’s going to be evaluated in RFPs because that is really what’s going to make or break, in my mind, the next real war that we have with a near-peer adversary — are we going to be able to keep up or not?” she said. “That’s all going to be through software, because we’re not going to have time to go out there with field support and try to do things on the ground. It’s going to be our ability to really deliver new capability for overmatch.”

Going forward, software must be baked into systems from the beginning. As it currently stands, the Army and the other services use a variety of cross-domain solutions to connect systems that aren’t compatible or to fix capabilities designed without the foresight of integration. But senior leaders have warned that this won’t work in the future.

The service needs to move toward “algorithmic warfare,” or a “software-centric … transport agnostic, command-and-control system that would let us generally leverage things like AI and machine learning, large language bots. Because until we do that pivot, we are going to be connecting existing things [and] figured out cross-domain solutions,” Gen. James Rainey, commander of Army Futures Command, said at the conference. “We’ll make it work as part of the fix, but those are all suboptimal solutions, as opposed to moving to a true software-first approach where everybody’s hardware is designed or meets the standards required to be truly integrated in terms of data analytics.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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The Army’s then chief of staff, Gen. Mark Milley, testified to Congress in 2017 that the service’s tactical network as it currently stood — the Warfighter Information Network-Tactical — was too “fragile” and “vulnerable” for future battles against sophisticated adversaries. As a result, Milley ordered an entire review of the network.

Since then, the Army developed a strategy it called halt, fix, pivot: discontinuing capabilities that were not survivable, fixing things that could be useful and pivoting to a new paradigm that was threat informed. That led to a multiyear approach involving the incremental development and delivery of new capabilities to its integrated tactical network, which includes a combination of program-of-record systems and commercial off-the-shelf tools. Those “capability sets” now provide technologies to units every two years, each building upon the previous delivery.

Capability Set 21 was primarily designed for infantry brigades, Capability Set 23 is focused on Stryker brigades, and Capability Set 25 is focused on armored brigades.

Currently, the Army is at an inflection point with several concurrent efforts ongoing: fielding Capability Set 21, conducting testing and experimentation with Capability Set 23, and developing design goals for Capability Sets 25 and 27.

Overall, officials say the paradigm shift has led to success, creating culture change in the acquisition and warfighter community while continuing to get buy-in from senior leadership.

“This process puts capability and warfighting over process,” Col. Shermoan Daiyaan, project manager for tactical radios at program executive office command, control, communications-tactical, told reporters at Aberdeen Proving Ground regarding the new approach. “In five or fewer years a lot has changed. I mean, everything has changed, from the way requirements come in to us, the way we help shape requirements, the way the warfighter is truly shaping requirements.”

Senior leadership wants to field capabilities faster and accept more risk across the entire Army. Gabe Camarillo, the undersecretary of the service, has previously lauded the Army’s embrace of new authorities such as Other Transaction agreements and middle-tier acquisition to accelerate the development of new capabilities.

“This is a marked changing pace for where we were at earlier, and significantly have streamlined to what we call our procurement and acquisition lead time throughout the service,” he said at an August event.

“On the digital transformation side, I talked a little bit about the need to shift culture, approach and emphasis to accelerate what our strategy is to get to a unified network, a hybrid accelerated cloud adoption strategy and then of course, enabling data centric operations,” Camarillo told reporters in August. “What we currently see, especially on the tactical side, is that we’ve made a lot of progress to enable acquisition strategies that will allow rapid adoption of upgraded technology through the capability set fielding process.”

Camarillo, along with the vice chief of staff, have initiated a capability portfolio review of the network “to re-baseline our strategy and how do we assess it against current requirements and emerging requirements so that we could gauge our investments in areas where we might be able to prioritize, accelerate or just simply rationalize our efforts,” Camarillo said.

With a lot of different organizations and pots of money, Camarillo said Army leadership wanted to get their hands around the effort in its entirety.

Fundamentally, senior leadership and the warfighting community are accepting more risk on capabilities to try to avoid taking multiple years to field a single system. The service is looking to leverage commercially available technology along with government science and technology investment to experiment with and deliver capabilities on a much faster timeline while getting solider feedback to improve technology in an ongoing manner.

“This notion of iterative development of capabilities, I think is very, very important, because there’s an element of risk that we’re going to have to assume both from how that capability is going to roll out. Is it going to be 100% capable? 80%? 70%? Well, sometimes 70% of something is way better than what you have,” Lt. Gen. John Morrison, deputy chief of staff, G6, said at an event hosted by Defense News at the annual AUSA conference on Wednesday.

“Instead of an episodic soldier touchpoint, how about a routine sustained soldier touchpoint that will drive requirements, that will drive capability development, it will drive procedures and how we conduct operations in ways we probably haven’t thought of,” he said.

Units are now fine accepting less mature capabilities in favor of getting technology faster, officials say.

“Somewhere along the line, people were okay with us rolling in new kit that was not program of record, that didn’t go into this big long [operational test] and people start letting us bring in things,” Daiyaan said. “We get five years to figure it out before it has to roll into a formal program of record. In the past, it was unheard of. Somebody wanted every little slice of that radio to go under some major OT and one big shebang in a big network. We’re changing the culture of our warfighters as much as they’re changing us.”

The capability set approach has also allowed greater flexibility to insert new technology when it becomes available. While there is a roadmap of targeted technologies for each capability set, the Army recognizes there are developments in the commercial world they aren’t aware of. As industry innovates, the Army wants to capture those advancements as opposed to continuing down the same path of development with possibly inferior technology.

“As that next generation of technology comes available commercially … how do we pivot from the next Cap Set to be able to capture and rapidly integrate?” Col. Shane Taylor, project manager for tactical network at PEO C3T, said. “Near peers — they have the same technologies we have. Our advantage is speed and training. How fast can we inject that into a formation?”

Taylor added that it is a more integrated process of learning, which has increased speed.

“It’s what we learned together. The units are involved. We could go slower, more deliberate and give them a very mature solution five years later that would be three years old, or we could go fast and we learned together,” he said. “That’s been the change in paradigm in the approaches.”

The paradigm shift has also brought more entities together in a more holistic manner, Daiyaan said, noting it “made us start to see inefficiencies.”

“In the past, I would deliver my capability on my schedule, according to where my window was,” he said. “But now when we’re looking at a capability set we have someone in [project manager for interoperability, integration and services] that’s just thinking about making sure it all works together. You get a package. It’s almost like walking into the house and the electric is wired together, everything’s WiFi is already turned on, everything is delivered to you as a package.”

Officials described the capability set process as akin to building roads, but for tactical communications and data transmission.

“As we’re going down the capability set execution between 21, 23, 25, I liken it to building that highway. These capability sets are laying the infrastructure foundation,” Nicholaus Saacks, deputy PEO C3T, said. “We’re improving the tactical network infrastructure in order to give commanders a better way to traverse.”

The capability set process allows the Army to keep improving this infrastructure as big ideas, investments or technologies become available.

“We’re doing it a way that’s open so that when we need to add interchanges or … insert new technology and new capabilities, we’re doing it in a way that we can plug those in, so that it’s open and that we can keep competing [with industry] so that down the road whenever that new technology that’s either nascent right now or we haven’t even thought of yet is available and ready to use,” Saacks added. “We can plug it in. Or as the threat evolves, we can we can react and plug in whether it’s a software or hardware solution that counters that directly can get inserted into the network architecture to make it work.”

Industry buy-in

Almost as necessary as getting senior leadership to buy into this new approach is getting industry – which essentially provides the technology — to buy in as well.

Officials described continued responsiveness from industry with the paradigm shift and pushing their innovation efforts based upon signals the Army is sending.

Despite the fact the Army won’t be awarding a single vendor a large program of record in this space for multiple years as was typical previously and favorable for a particular company that came out on top, this incremental and ongoing developmental approach of continual capability insertion allows for more opportunities for contractors.

“What I talk about with industry and it seems to resonate is when you do the 15 year one-and-done competition, it’s great if you win, not great if you lose,” Saacks said. However, “If we are doing these iterations, we keep doing a pulse check on competition. If you are unfortunate and lost that first competition, you have a chance a couple of years down the road … It’s more bites at the apple.”

Taylor noted that this approach forces industry to innovate and iterate because if companies lose, they’re going to have to come back next time with a better design.

The Army has been clear that it won’t always invest its research and development funds into industry’s products. Industry has to bring technologies that have a good deal of maturity because so they don’t need to go through a five- to 10-year iteration.

However, the Army will help industry along. One such way is through the biannual technical exchange meetings, or TEMs. These events, which started around four years ago, gather members of industry, the Army acquisition community, Army Futures Command and the operational community to outline priorities and capabilities to modernize the tactical network.

They differ from the traditional industry days in that they feature panels with acquisition leaders articulating priorities as well as operators explaining what types of capabilities they need to be successful. They are less prescriptive and more descriptive — creating a more collaborative conversation where the Army is acknowledging where they don’t have solutions and imploring industry to innovate to solve problems. While sometimes the Army might be asking for things, industry is also telling the government they should be looking at certain capabilities, which results in more of a two-way discussion.

About half of the TEMs ask for prototype solicitations while the others are intended to help industry shape internal research and development and offer technology roadmaps for future capability sets. 

On average, most TEMs have brought together around 200 companies with a third of those being small business. Moreover, there are more Silicon Valley tech companies and small startups in niche markets participating — creating a greater cross-pollination between commercial firms and traditional defense contractors.

Several companies have spoken favorably of this shift in approach.

“The collective perspectives of senior leaders, operational users and product managers are things that would not be easily understood were it not for these TEMs,” Portia Crowe, Accenture Federal Services’ chief data strategist, said in an email. “The level of transparency and presence of the government folks participating should be the model for industry and government interactions.”

Contractors welcomed this change in doing business, highlighting both the frequency of these events as well as how they’re able to get all the relevant players and stakeholders in one place.

“Prior to the TEMs, occasionally you would attend some different types of events, whether they be trade shows and you might get little snippets of information out of trade shows, or obviously constant engagement with the customer,” Tom Kirkland, vice president and general manager of U.S Army and SOCOM broadband communications systems at L3Harris, told DefenseScoop.

In the past, companies were “having these one-off conversations, if you will, between PEOs and ASAALT and PM shops, so you’re trying to piece the puzzle together … just a little bit as you’re trying to inform your technology roadmaps,” Kirkland said.”Now with the TEMs, you have everybody in one place every six months. It’s streamlined how we engage with our customers and made it a little bit easier for us to make decisions.”

The events have also differed from industry days in that they’re more collaborative and provide more forward-looking insights to give industry a better idea of where to invest, participants say.

“One of the big things for industry is where do we invest,” Greg Catherine, who is part of General Dynamics’ business development team, told DefenseScoop. “We don’t want to invest in something that’s already done and we don’t want to invest so far out in the future that the problem will change before the Army ever gets there. The TEMs give me a good balance in terms of targeting where … I should be spending money on R&D.”

Another unique aspect to these events is perspectives from the actual operators during panels.

Crowe noted that while senior leader perspectives are important, nothing beats hearing from the operators talk about the issues they face.

“This helps us think about problems differently, gives us inspiration to find ways to action on their pain points, and gives us information on how to provide solutions that won’t waste everyone’s time,” she said.

For Catherine, it’s important to hear how the operators are currently solving the problem in the interim and what they need longer term. It provides an opportunity to get ahead of the requirements and better understand what the Army’s words mean versus trying to interpret them without any user input.

The events aren’t perfect, however, and contractors noted they’d like to see more agile ways to obtain contracting funding faster, more joint input on panels and more time allotted so industry can attend all the sessions.

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Past efforts have aimed to improve communications between aircraft and ground units. But this time, the service be looking to put waveforms in their ground communications assets on airborne systems to assess ground extension for mesh networking and thickening of the network.

These experiments are part of developing design goals for future communications capability deliveries in 2025 and 2027.

The Army has adopted a multiyear strategy involving the incremental development and delivery of new capabilities to its integrated tactical network, involving a combination of program-of-record systems and commercial off-the-shelf tools. Those “capability sets” now provide technologies to units every two years, each building upon the previous delivery. Capability Set 21 was primarily designed for infantry brigades; Capability Set 23 is focused on Stryker brigades, and Capability Set 25 is focused on armored brigades.

There are initial design goals for this aerial networking tier for Capability Set 25, and officials want to line up requirements with funding in future years for more capabilities related to Capability Set 27.

During this incremental build process, the Army has sought to concurrently field, experiment and build design goals for future capability sets as a means of harnessing the best technologies and getting soldier feedback early in the process.

Army officials briefed their plans earlier this week during the eighth Technical Exchange Meeting in Philadelphia. These events gather members of industry, the Army acquisition community, Army Futures Command and the operational community to outline priorities and capabilities to modernize the service’s tactical network.

The Army is placing two waveforms — TrellisWare’s TSM and Silvus — from its integrated tactical network on airborne assets and will be looking at a variety of things.

“We’ve done this before in the past, but what are we doing that’s different? This go around, we’re looking at the detectability of it, we’re looking at jamming, we’re looking at determining that CONOPs [concept of operation] so that we can go back and eventually get a requirement that we could put down and eventually have this dedicated comms relay asset,” said Scott Newman, project manager for interoperability, integration and services at Program Executive Office Command, Control, Communications-Tactical.

Newman told FedScoop after his remarks that while the Army has had nodes up for some time, they’ve never examined how these systems in the air would respond if attacked or jammed.

Specifically, this year officials are looking at low probability of intercept and low probability of detection, and what the concept of operations would be to respond to potential jamming threats.

“That hasn’t been done before. We’ve always had stuff up in the air that said, ‘Okay, yeah, an aerial node provides range extension and provides connectivity,’ but we never solidified what the CONOPs actually means. That’s what we’re going to do now,” he said. “We just want to see, okay, if the enemy jams us, how is it affected in the air.”

He continued: “We’re going to replay those exact same threats, or the threats that we’ve seen from current activities that are airworthy, I’ll call it, and see how what will happen if we are attacked in the air.”

Moreover, while air-to-ground networking has been done aboard helicopters in the past, this time, the Army wants to experiment using unmanned systems, particularly those that would be organic to units, such as smaller Group 1 or Group 2 drones.

The Army is planning to conduct these experiments in fiscal 2022 and 2023 during NetModX — an annual experiment to test how technologies fare in operatically realistic environments — and Project Convergence, an annual capstone experiment the Army is conducting to test concepts related to the Pentagon’s larger Joint All-Domain Command and Control (JADC2) effort to better connect sensor and shooter data.

Next year, the Army plans to put out a request for information related to size, weight and power (SWaP) considerations for radios and aircraft.

“We’re going to take our lessons learned. We’re going to look at the CONOPs, we’re going to look at what we found from the reports of TSM and … put out an RFI to look at SWaP,” Newman said. “All this is going to be used to inform decisions as part of Cap Set 25 so that we can get a dedicated comms asset out to the field. So, that’s what we’re going to be doing for the next two years.”

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