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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

C2 next

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This is all about making formations more capable and lethal.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The post Army developing next generation of command and control for all units, echelons appeared first on DefenseScoop.

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.”

The post Software will be ‘most critical capability’ in future fights against advanced foes: senior Army official appeared first on DefenseScoop.

The Army has been on a years’ long journey to modernize its tactical network with new gear making it easier for soldiers to establish communications and talk in a highly dynamic environment. In a future conflict against a peer adversary, officials say soldiers will have to move much faster across the battlefield than they did previously.

The Army has adopted a multiyear strategy involving the incremental development and delivery of new capabilities to its integrated tactical network, which involves 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 beginning with capability set 21 for 2021.

While the modernization efforts began about four years ago, in 2019, to provide a baseline level of capability, senior leaders have long been discussing that they need to get complexity out of brigade and below formations.

“As we shift towards the division as the unit of action, we’re really focused on where does complexity need to be to conduct [Department of Defense Information Network] ops and quite frankly, as we move towards a data-centric Army to really do data engineering and all the components that go into making sure that data is available to the right commander at the right echelon, we’re going to really take a hard look at where that complexity is today,” Lt. Gen. John Morrison, the Army’s deputy chief of staff, G6, told DefenseScoop in an October interview.

The 3^rd Brigade, 101^st Airborne Division is the first unit to be fielded capability set 23, and it conducted a validation of the kit at Fort Campbell, Kentucky, in March. The Army plans to field it to around four brigades this year.

Soldiers from 3/101 explained that some of the complexity issues stem from just never having the equipment before and taking time to learn it. The program office is working to provide better training materials. Officials from the program office noted that as more soldiers and units get their hands on the equipment across the Army, that will build proficiency, which takes a long time. Some soldiers who have bounced around to different units that have been exposed to integrated tactical network equipment have expressed some level of comfort with it, according to officials, and that proficiency is already being proliferated.

Simultaneous to the fielding of capability set 23, the Army is readying for a preliminary design review for its next iteration, capability set 25, which essentially locks in the technology for experimentation.

Capability set 25 will be designed for the division holistically and its enabling units for the first time versus the brigade, which will really tackle the issue of reducing the complexity at the brigade level and below while bringing it up to division and corps levels where they have the appropriate staff to manage it.

“Where the brigades were so independent and now they’re not, in some cases, the brigades are doing the same things that the division is doing,” Col. Shermoan Daiyaan, project manager for tactical radios at Program Executive Office Command, Control, Communications-Tactical, told reporters attending the validation event at Fort Campbell. “We all looked at each other and said, ‘Ooh, let’s pay attention to how do we simplify that, how do we make that easy.’ And that’s the things that we’re focusing on division as a unit of action.’”

The Army will be providing capability set 23 gear that is brigade focused and then fit that capability into the capability set 25 design — working backwards from the division to other fighting formations, officials said, adding that they’ll be examining and identifying the “choke points” of complexity.

In the meantime, the Army has been taking lessons learned from 3/101 — as well as prior deployments and experimentation — to begin to reduce some of the complexity at their level.

One of the critical ways it’s doing this is by beginning to institutionalize a secure but unclassified (SBU) mentality, which is still underpinned by encrypted communications, but not to the highest levels that can sometimes bog down operations and information sharing with partner nations.

This concept was baked into the network architecture from the beginning and through capability set 21, and fielding to security force assistance brigades was validated as a viable notion.

Now, the Army is in discussions about the echelons where this capability should exist, an issue which ultimately boils down to policy. Much of the information at the tactical edge is perishable and doesn’t need to be as protected as information at higher headquarters.

The SBU capability reduces the complexity at lower levels that comes with a classified network and will likely become even more prevalent as the Army moves to capability set 25.

In fact, one of the key lessons learned from exercises in February with 2^nd Cavalry Regiment, which served as the experimentation unit for capability set 23, was that it allowed troops to move faster, reduced complexity and increased combat power by being able to share with partners.

“We just talked with a brigade commander who reaffirms another case for less complexity at echelon, SBU being more of the bulk of the battalion and below network,” Daiyaan said. “From talking with the brigade commander [at 2nd Cavalry Regiment], the biggest thing I saw was the speed in which he could integrate with partners. Coming out of [NSA] type 1 encryption just allows them to integrate with partners so much faster because all the protections that are properly in place, but connecting with partners … they’re able to do that faster and more seamlessly with the SBU architecture. It’s not unprotected, but it does speed coalition interoperability.”

Daiyaan noted that combat power, especially at the company and platoon levels, is increased with partner nations through this capability, calling it a game changer, because units don’t have to exchange personnel to get around classification and sharing.

“Otherwise what they end up doing is you send me a guy and I send you a guy, and those are two trigger pullers that you don’t have, or that’s somebody not studying a map” or doing other important tasks, he said.

Through experimentation and deployments, the Army learned that from capability set 21 to 23, they could cut some of their radio requirements almost in half, again, reducing complexity.

Previously, team leaders received a two-channel radio that was NSA type 1 encrypted. However, the feedback they received indicated only the squad leader and above needed those radios and junior leaders received single-channel radios, which ties into the SBU capability. This vastly reduces the number of radios, officials noted.

Changing policy and doctrine

As the Army is transitioning to multi-domain operations and the division as the main unit of action — vice the brigade — moving complexity to higher headquarters presents not just technical concerns, but policy and doctrine as well, especially as the kit allows units to do things faster and differently than before.

Officials have explained that preliminary design review for capability set 25 will look a bit different compared to previous capability sets for a couple of reasons. First, capability set 25 is the first designed for the division holistically and its enabling units as opposed to the brigade, which the prior two were designed for.

Second, the Army is beginning to grapple with doctrinal questions associated with modernized capability. The Army is adopting new technology to enable units to maneuver faster, move data quicker and travel with less equipment, all of which will alter aspects of how units conduct operations from a doctrinal perspective.

Removing complexity comes with key doctrinal questions. For example, the Army is still determining at what levels to institutionalize SBU capability, though officials have suggested it’ll likely be battalion and below.

Additionally, officials described challenges managing and simplifying data at certain echelons.

“My challenge is managing the polarity between protecting data and sharing data,” Col. Matthew Paul, project manager for mission command at PEO C3T, said. “There’s a community that’s going to want to share everything because it’s easy and it’s simple, but then there’s another camp that says, ‘Well, wait a minute, there’s the data in there that you got to protect.’ By protecting that data, that adds complexity.”

Enabling a unit, such as battalion, to fight largely in an unclassified manner has implications across warfighting functions, he said, and there are tradeoffs that need to be considered.

“It’s more than just the materiel, more than just the stuff that we provide. It’s the doctrine, the organizational structures that need to be optimized. It’s the tactics, techniques and procedures,” he explained. “All of that needs to be brought into the conversation in order for us to deliver a better capability.”

Officials noted that much of the discussion around capability set 25 is actually policy focused, not necessarily technology focused.

“The focus right now is on looking at different courses of action to reduce that complexity … at the brigade and below levels,” Matt Maier, project manager for interoperability, integration and services at PEO C3T, said regarding the preliminary design review process.

For example, if policy is changed to allow mission partner data to be exchanged on an SBU encrypted enclave, that could reduce complexity given fewer domains. Or, if fires missions could be conducted at different classifications other than secret, that adds complexity to the network.

“There’s probably some decisions needed for the senior leaders in the Army to decide, ‘OK, if you want the network to be easier or simpler to use or easier to deploy, then maybe we could change these policies to make that happen,’” Maier said.

The post Army working to reduce network complexity for brigades and lower level formations appeared first on DefenseScoop.

Officially on October 1, the Integrated Enterprise Network portfolio from PEO Enterprise Information Systems will transition to PEO Command, Control, Communications-Tactical, that office’s leader announced Wednesday.

The move is designed to create greater optimization in line with the Army’s vision for a unified network. Historically, the Army has siloed its network from enterprise and tactical and across each theater, which has limited its ability to share information and conduct operations, as evidenced when the 82nd Airborne Division deployed to Afghanistan to deal with the U.S. troop withdrawal.

“[Doug] Bush [the Army’s acquisition executive] has decided that all network, all of this, all network communications needs to be under one PEO. It is going to be under this PEO,” Maj. Gen. Anthony Potts, PEO for C3T, said at the SATELLITE conference in Washginton on Wednesday. “Our goal right now is October 1. Everything that resides in PEO EIS that is network will come to us. Yes, we will have to change our name, we can’t be PEO C3T.”

PEO C3T currently handles all the tactical communications and gear for troops on the battlefield. It, along with the Network Cross Functional Team, has pioneered a paradigm shift in what it has called the integrated tactical network, through which it provides incremental development and delivery of new capabilities 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.

PEO EIS is in charge of mostly enterprise systems that are largely static. Integrated Enterprise Network focuses on networks for all the posts and camps stations, as well as Secure Internet Protocol Router Network (SIPRNet) modernization and the routers and switches. That office had been working on what was called the integrated enterprise network at the installation level. The main goal recently of that office, provided by the deputy chief of staff, G-6, had been SIPRNet modernization.

The consolidation was just finalized and the Army is currently in the process of working on the integration.

Officials have been teasing for some time the need for a single network PEO to help consolidate efforts and funding, especially since the release of the Army’s unified network plan in October 2021.

The post The Army is consolidating all network activity into a single program executive office appeared first on DefenseScoop.

The build, slated for 2025, will be the first to focus on the division holistically as the Army sets its sights on nation-states and shifts to the division as the main unit of action rather than the brigade, as it was during the global war on terrorism.

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.

Fiscal 2023 is the first year of design for Capability Set 25 with a preliminary design review set for the April or May timeframe, which locks in the experimentation architecture, Matt Maier, project manager for interoperability, integration and services at Program Executive Office Command, Control, Communications-Tactical, told DefenseScoop in an interview.

“If the Army is moving toward reinforced armored divisions as their unit of action for the Army of 2030 and we have to make sure that the [capability set] that we have easily translates to those types of units and the types of missions that they have,” Maier said. “Our focus right now is not only reducing the complexity at the brigade and below level, but also maybe migrating some of those functions that exist currently at the brigade level up to the division level so they can do more unit of action work at their main attack and rear type units. I think you’re going to see some shifting in the architecture as a result of that as we move towards the Army of 2030.”

The Army has been prepping for some time for this, figuring out what needs to be scaled and what information a division commander needs. Specifically, it is looking at what the division commander needs to command and control all the forces below, how to integrate on different platforms – such as armored vehicles, which pose significant integration challenges – and how to architect secure but unclassified communications at which echelon within the division.

“When you’re talking the division as the unit of action, what you’re really asking yourself is what does the division commander need to C2 his entire division? That’s really a game changer and a shift back to the future for commanders to command their entire division and what does that network need to look like,” Col. Shermoan Daiyaan, project manager for tactical radios at PEO C3T, told DefenseScoop.

Work has already begun on integration to armored platforms. Daiyaan said at Project Convergence 22, the Army integrated HMS Manpack radios onto Abrams tanks learning how to integrate them and get them wired.

When it comes to the secure but unclassified capability, Daiyaan said the Army is determining what radios and capabilities no longer need to be at the battalion or brigade level and can be moved up and simplified.

The Army, when initially designing the integrated tactical network, implemented a secure but unclassified capability, which is underpinned by encryption, as a means of allowing soldiers to move faster on the battlefield and share with partners easier. Oftentimes, classification can bog down partner sharing and operations. But the Army determined that much of the tactical information is perishable and thus, doesn’t need the same rigorous classification to guard it in real-time.

Daiyaan said they’re expecting to have the first exercise for the division as the unit of action with ITN equipment in the April timeframe at the Joint Readiness Training Center with the 82^nd Airborne division. The network team has provided them what they think the division as the unit of action needs from an ITN standpoint.

The post Army looking at what a division commander needs for next iterative tactical network build appeared first on DefenseScoop.

Last month, the 2^nd Cavalry Regiment conducted its capstone training event at Joint Multinational Readiness Center in Hohenfels, Germany. It is the first unit in the Army to get the next batch of tactical network equipment, serving as the experimentation unit to game out what technologies work and what don’t. The Army’s network team used this exercise as its phase II operations demo for the gear following phase I last year.

The equipment is part of what the Army calls Capability Set 23. 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.

During this two-year process, there are a series of lab-based tests and risk reduction as well as field-based tests with a unit working from smaller formations and culminating in a brigade-sized exercise where they get to see how it all works together in a realistic setting. For Capability Set 23, the Army conducted around 20 different test events.

“This ops demo phase II was really focused on unit readiness and unit use of the kit in a live fire environment,” Matt Maier, project manager for interoperability, integration and services at Program Executive Office Command, Control, Communications-Tactical, told DefenseScoop in an interview. “It was the culminating event for our Capability Set 23 activities.”

For the first time, the unit and the network team were able to test the gear in all weather conditions, day and night operations, mounted and dismounted configurations, and move around with it all in a real operational scenario against an opposing force.

While the 3rd Brigade Combat Team, 101st Airborne Division is currently being fielded with Capability Set 23 equipment, the operations demonstration sought to evaluate how the equipment performed to inform a final fielding decision in the next few months. Based on the results of the operations demo, the PEO will make a fielding decision to solidify Capability Set 23 systems, basis of issue, and how they’re trained and used going forward.

“Because 2CR was our first unit equipped, this was their first experience using some of the new [commercial off the shelf] components that we fielded in cap set 23. They were able to see how they apply to make the mission better for either dismounted soldiers or when it comes to be able to get a position location information in their command post or down to their mounted formation vehicles,” Maier said.

Officials said the feedback overall was positive, though not without some growing pains, which is normal for a unit testing and using equipment for the first time.

But, officials acknowledged that the learning curve was shorter for soldiers this time around than in 2021 when the 1st Brigade Combat Team, 82nd Airborne Division tested gear for Capability Set 21, which was the first time any unit received integrated tactical network (ITN) capabilities.

“One thing we learned is, and this is a kind of a side lesson, is that the more reps and sets that leaders out in the field get with ITN and the new capabilities, the better and more comfortable they are,” Col. Shermoan Daiyaan, project manager for tactical radios at PEO C3T, said. “That seems intuitive, I know. But what we’re seeing is brigade commanders who were battalion commanders, who had Capability Set 21 are now brigade commanders, who are having Capability Set 21 [and] 23, who are much more adept at employing the capability.”

The commander for 2^nd Cavalry Regiment was one of the early adopters of the Capability Set and ITN, Daiyaan said, adding he was a battalion commander with ITN capability previously. Now, his unit in 2CR is moving faster with the gear and the learning curve is shorter.

Additionally, the unit used all the capabilities at its disposal such as working through what’s known as its PACE plan, or primary, alternate, contingency and emergency communications, which Diayann called important for the Army given top defense officials anticipate units will be challenged with their communications by adversaries.

One of the more important aspects of the operations demonstration was assessing the non-program of record commercial off-the-shelf equipment. It was the first time the demonstration focused on collecting data about the non-program of record equipment given they were procured using unique acquisition authorities.

Now the Army has to make decisions about what stays and what goes, and this data will help shape future capability design goals such as Capability Set 25.

The post Army concludes capstone event for next iteration of network equipment appeared first on DefenseScoop.

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, whereas Capability Set 23 is focused on Stryker brigades and Capability Set 25 is focused on armored brigades.

However, Capability Set 25 will also focus on the division holistically for the first time.

“The focus of [Capability Set] 25 as we go into the preliminary design review will be the division as the unit of action,” Maj. Gen. Anthony Potts, program executive officer for Command, Control, Communications-Tactical, said at AFCEA’s Northern Virginia’s Army IT Day on Thursday. Preliminary design review refers to the stage in the program for which the Army locks in a design architecture for experimentation as opposed to critical design review, which locks in the architecture for fielding. The preliminary design review is slated for the spring of this year.

To date, these capability sets have mostly been focused on brigade.

As the Army – and Department of Defense – turns its focus on nation-states, the service is transitioning to the division as the unit of action rather than the brigade as it was during the global war on terrorism.

“Like all things, we change, right? We change, we adapt, based on what our adversaries are doing, based on the environment around us. For many, many years now, we’ve been in a brigade-centric Army. As I’m sure everybody in this room is aware, we are now going back to the division as the unit of action,” Potts said.

Capability Set 21 was initially focused on connectivity for brigade-and-below units to set the foundation for the integrated tactical network and successive capability sets to build upon. Capability Set 23 expands on that, providing increased command post capabilities to enhance on-the-move operations, improved command and control and situational awareness on mounted platforms, and battalion-wide voice and data network capabilities while also providing capabilities to infantry division headquarters.

With Capability Set 23, the Army for the first time will field its integrated tactical network equipment to a division headquarters as well as enabler units, creating a communication bridge from maneuver brigade combat teams, to their support elements, to the division headquarters. It will be fielded to the 82^nd Airborne Division in Fiscal Year 2023.

Capability Set 25 will continue to build on the foundation looking at automated communications options when one form is jammed or not working, tools for network operations, enhanced planning capabilities and command post management, and reduction capabilities, among other items.

It also now focuses on armored formations, the most difficult to integrate given the nature of the vehicles – for which space and power are constrained – and how they fight.

The Army is using a series of pilot efforts in 2023 and 2024 to help inform this effort, as well as a series of one-off technology integration efforts at Project Convergence in September 2022 for proof of concept for how to integrate technologies on platforms, such as Abrams tanks.

The post Army network design for 2025 to focus on division level for first time appeared first on DefenseScoop.

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.

The post Iterative development paradigm shift to fielding network equipment is paying dividends for Army appeared first on DefenseScoop.

The review is aimed at evaluating requirements.

“The vice and I are leading a capability portfolio review of the entire Army network. That’s looking at everything from our requirements for unified network operations, to cybersecurity, to transport — both enterprise and tactical — and looking at cloud adoption and data analytics,” Gabe Camarillo, undersecretary of the Army, told reporters during a visit to Aberdeen Proving Ground, Maryland, Aug. 23 to assess the tactical network portfolio. “We’re looking at it systematically to try to [see] how do we rationalize those requirements, rationalize our investment and spend?”

The Army is undertaking a multi-year effort to deliver a next-generation network, one that unifies its enterprise systems and the systems delivered to tactical environments where troops communicate and transmit battlefield data.

Officials have noted issues in transitioning data and operations from the strategic to tactical networks especially when moving from theater to theater. Some have previously cited issues in which units were not able to join the network immediately upon entering a theater — most recently during the withdrawal operations in Afghanistan — which creates big problems for the Army as it is trying to be more expeditionary.

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.

“If you think about our spend on everything network, from enterprise to tactical, it was in a lot of different organizations. Within the Army, it was in a lot of PEGs, or Program Evaluation Groups, which are the way we segment our [project objective memorandum], our budgets,” Camarillo told reporters Aug. 24 following remarks at the Potomac Officers Club Army Summit. “The idea was to get our arms wrapped around all of it in one place and look at it comprehensively so that we can make sure that we’re making the most effective use of our resources and reprioritizing where needed.”

The review is slated to wrap up this fall.

As the Army’s tactical network team is working to deliver incremental capability advancements to its integrated tactical network through two-year capability sets, Camarillo has charged them with identifying “big bets,” which will also align with the service’s goal of realizing Joint All-Domain Command and Control (JADC2), a top priority for the Pentagon.

“The reason we talked about big bets is in order for the Army to enable JADC2, which is the transport of critical data on the battlefield, which is absolutely critical to the joint force’s success, we have to be able to make the right investments, define the right requirements and to orient our programs to what is going to help us achieve that next-generation level of capability,” Camarillo told reporters.

“I’ve challenged the team here today [about] what can we do in terms of looking at next-generation requirements, big bets, whether it’s in the transport layer, all of our tactical radios, what do we need to do to get at the next generation of evolution? … As we look ahead to the next five years, where do we want to be?” he added.

Officials said these big bets aren’t all about equipment or programs, but processes as well.  

“What are those processes that [the undersecretary] can assist us with and potentially getting us across the finish line and moving technology a little faster through the cycle for the … acquisition cycle. [Camarillo] wants to understand what he can help us with when it comes to that,” Brig. Gen. Jeth Rey, director of the Army’s network cross-functional team, told reporters at Aberdeen.

Rey said service leaders asked for a broad set of areas the network team can identify as aim points. The team then identified areas they were working on for the future but used Camarillo’s visit to Aberdeen as a way to assess if everyone was on the same page with these big bets.

These big bets include areas such as virtualization, auto-primary, alternate, contingency and emergency communications, data security, data fabrics and network resiliency, among others.

“From an enabler, looking at things like JADC2 he asked us about transport and bandwidth — are those things that we want to make a big bet on in order to get that particular capability moving from an Army perspective?” Rey said. “He wants us to also look at our data fabric — how does that play into a capability that we can use across all services?”

In fact, the Army has already been able to pull a lot of capability surrounding a data fabric — which is not a single solution, but rather, a federated environment that allows information-sharing among various forces and echelons — forward through experimentation.

“We didn’t really have a tactical data fabric per se in [capability set] 21 but … there was a lot of effort in the S&T community and industry around the data fabric. We took it to [Project Convergence] 21. We got a lot of really good feedback from PC 21 and other events,” Nicholaus Saacks, deputy program executive officer in Program Executive Office Command, Control, Communications-Tactical, told reporters. “We’re getting ready now to field it now as part of Cap Set 23 and the way we’re building it is open enough that come Cap Set 25, if there’s new technologies available or new ways to do it, we can insert those in there.”

The office of the assistant secretary of the Army for acquisition, logistics and technology (ASAALT) is also working on developing a data mesh that will federate the various data fabrics.

“We’re actually making very rapid progress on that data mesh reference architecture. And our intent is to build it [and] give it to industry to give us feedback because we want to make sure that we’re not missing big things, or if we are, we want that feedback to be built into the final version of the reference architecture,” Jennifer Swanson, chief systems engineer in ASAALT, said at the Army Summit.

“We’ve been talking about standards for a long time. We need to now give you what those standards are. And I think that really opens up the playing field for industry because our intent is to allow the industry to plug into that data mesh … We need you to bring your black boxes, but we want to be able to own not just the data, but also all the things that happen to the data over time so that it is really an even playing field and not [have the Army in a position where it’s not] able to compete the next contract because we don’t have all intellectual property that we need with data.”

Rey said the team needs to provide recommendations to top Army leadership about different ways to acquire IT equipment than the current process.

“Is there something that [they] can help with to put that particular technology into the hands of the user a little bit faster?” Rey said. “I think we all come back to [them] on what part of the process needs to be adjusted or something new introduced. I think that’s what we owe them.”

Others said they owe the Army more insights from a threat perspective.

“Part of it is getting to a shared understanding of what’s next from a threat perspective, from an operational concept perspective, from a technology perspective, both where we see commercial technology evolving and that’s particularly applicable within this C5ISR area, but also, where we may have some unique needs that are going to hinder our ability to take advantage of it fully without some modification,” Joseph Welch, director of the C5ISR Center, said. “From an experimentation perspective, where do we see that moving forward in our ability to better understand the warfighting systems we’ll develop before we can deploy them.”

The post Army leaders reviewing network portfolio, looking to place ‘big bets’ on new tech appeared first on DefenseScoop.

Soldiers with 3rd Squadron, 2nd Cavalry Regiment recently conducted a live-fire event in Germany where they tested forthcoming gear.

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.

Capability Set 23 passed critical design review in April, essentially locking in a set of technologies. Early in the capability set process, the Army experiments with a wide range of kits and systems as a means of gauging which combination of tools are the most effective.

Following that critical design review, the next step towards procurement and eventually fielding is beginning a series of operational demonstrations to ensure the kit works with soldiers’ platforms and the tactics they use to fight.

“The goal is really to make sure that the kit that we have designed for Cap Set 23 will actually work in an operational context and it supports and meets the soldiers’ needs in that operational context,” Matt Maier, project manager for interoperability, integration and services at Program Executive Office Command, Control, Communications-Tactical, told reporters June 23. “The idea is to gather that feedback and see if there’s any additional design changes that we need.”

Phase 1 of the operations demonstration — which included troop and battalion-level life fires — is smaller in scale than what’s planned for phase 2 early next year.

Personnel from the program executive office weren’t exactly concerned with stressing the network, which will come at later Army demonstrations. Rather, they were focused on taking the hardware and software that was locked in from critical design reviews and integrating them to ensure they are configured properly with the equipment from 3rd Squadron, 2nd Cavalry Regiment.

The feedback they garner from events like this helps them continue to make tweaks to the network equipment and kit they will ultimately deliver to soldiers ahead of the fielding decision.

“It’s possible that the feedback is, there’s some things they’d like to change about the network and it’s probably not, ‘I don’t want this kit.’ It’s probably things like, ‘We could use a configuration update of this software, or maybe if you can make the cable runs a little longer, or the power train, you could get a little bit more power on the vehicle,’” Maier said. “Those kinds of things are the feedback that we’re looking for now. We’re refining the design of all the critical capabilities going into Cap Set 23.”

One key issue discovered was power constraints associated with the Stryker vehicles. The unit said there wasn’t enough power on the platform with the added network equipment, meaning they couldn’t do certain things in their required mission set.

“That’s just like one example of something that we’re learning from this small exercise and addressing it now so that way, when the unit has the full kit fielded and ready to go for their [combat training center] exercise, that they’re good,” Lt. Col. Jonathan Judy, product manager for capability set development at PEO C3T, said.

They’ll begin working with Program Executive Office Ground Combat Systems on a potential fix for this, with officials noting there might already be a fix in the works given the Strykers that participated in the demonstration are older variants and newer ones might not be as constrained when it comes to size, wight and power.

Officials said this approach validates the incremental strategy developed at the outset of the integrated tactical network in 2018, especially as they have to work across other program executive offices to ensure the network equipment fits into the contours of the various ground vehicles such as Strykers or tanks.

Events and feedback like this also have reverberations beyond just the Capability Set 23 build. Officials said they are taking some of the lessons from platform integration with Strykers and applying it forward to the Capability Set 25 process, which is focused on armored formations as they continue to design it.

Given the first capability set in 2021 was focused on light infantry dismounted units, this is the first time the Army is working with platform and mounted integration.

The Army must take into consideration how these units fight with their platforms as they’re working with them and the other program executive offices to integrate equipment.

For armored units, “their vehicles are much more constrained than the Strykers,” Mindy Gabbert, project lead for the integrated tactical network with in project manager tactical radios at C3T, said. That situation is “more than likely going to drive us towards slightly different materiel solutions that are just lighter, faster, maybe similarly capable, but really looking at what features are absolutely needed in those vehicles and giving them something that’s going to both fit in the vehicle and fit within the power constraints,” Gabbert said.

“They have slightly different mission sets. The Strykers, they’re in their vehicles and then they dismount their vehicles to fight, and so that’s a critical part of the way that they run their missions. The armor [units], they stay in the vehicle, so they just need slightly different sets of capability among each of the formations. There’s really no one size fits all for every different formation out there,” she added.

This first phase also acts as a risk-reduction effort to address concerns ahead of larger exercises such as phase 2 or combat training center rotations.

“If there are some issues that we’re seeing that we need to address now or that we start working towards so that as the next brigades get fielded, the cap set that we’ve worked out some of those issues,” Judy said. “We may get two to three battalion-sized elements in this field exercise, which is good … One of the challenges that we always have is actually operational test to scale because it’s hard to get an entire brigade out in the field at one time with the entire kit doing exercises to see actually how the network performs.”

In addition to seeing if the gear is useful in an actual operational context, the Army is also looking to improve the way it tests and instruments tools.

“The other thing that’s really important for us is making sure that the phase 2 of the operations demonstration is instrumented. We want to make sure that we have good qualitative … [and] quantitative instrumented data to be able to analyze that’s going to help us make a good fielding decision based off what we see coming out of that exercise,” Judy said.

This includes figuring out where to put taps into the network to measure traffic and bandwidth as well as testing cyber and electronic warfare vulnerabilities.

The post Army live-fire exercise helps refine forthcoming tactical network equipment appeared first on DefenseScoop.