The Army earlier this year sent several laser weapons mounted to Stryker combat vehicles to the Middle East. It was unclear at the time exactly where the prototypes were stationed, but the move was in advancement of the service’s short-range air defense goals.

Gen. Michael Kurilla, the CENTCOM boss, on March 21 told Congress he has “three 50-kilowatt lasers that are Stryker-based” inside Iraq “right now.” Experiments are underway, he added, to identify their best application. He did not disclose preliminary results. A request made to the command for additional information was not immediately answered.

High-energy lasers and related high-power microwave weapons are capable of downing incoming threats in unorthodox ways and at a fraction of the cost of traditional munitions. Lasers can fire at the speed of light and burn holes through material, but are susceptible to weather conditions and particles in the air, such as sand. Microwaves can fry electronics en masse, but their efficacy is stunted at greater distances.

Both are considered critical elements of layered defense, or having multiple countermeasures ready to thwart different threats in different situations.

“Directed energy is not the panacea,” Kurilla said at the House Armed Services Committee hearing. “What I tell all the services: Give me systems, we will experiment with them, and we will tell you if it works in a real, live environment.”

The Army is increasingly concerned with overhead threats, including unmanned aerial vehicles that can spy on troops, augment targeting and deliver explosives. A drone attack in late January killed three Americans at Tower 22 in Jordan, near the Syrian border.

U.S. Rep. Doug Lamborn, a Colorado Republican, urged Kurilla during the committee hearing to take advantage of directed energy wherever he can. At least 31 directed-energy initiatives are underway across the military, according to a National Defense Industrial Association study.

“I know it’s not perfected yet, but it has great capabilities against drones and things like that currently,” Lamborn said. “I’d hate to see a repeat of Tower 22, for instance.”

Army Gen. Michael Kurilla told lawmakers on March 7 that he would “love” to have the Navy deploy more directed-energy arms capable of downing drones. Having supplemental directed energy on hand, he added, would also mean expending fewer U.S. missiles, which can cost millions of dollars a pop. Iranian drones being funneled to extremist groups can cost thousands of dollars each.

“The bigger concern is if you start talking about swarms. We need to continue to invest in things like high-power microwave to be able to counter a drone swarm that is coming at you,” Kurilla said during the Senate Armed Services Committee hearing in Washington. “Nothing is 100%. At some point the law of statistics will come up. You have to have a layered defense.”

High-energy lasers and microwave weapons are capable of zapping overhead threats in ways dissimilar to traditional munitions and at a fraction of the cost. Lasers can fire at the speed of light and punch holes through material, while microwaves can fry electronics at a distance, rendering tech obsolete. Both are considered a critical element of layered defense, or having multiple countermeasures ready to thwart different threats in different situations.

The Defense Department has for decades pitched money into directed-energy weapons, an average $1 billion annually in the past three years, according to the Government Accountability Office, a federal watchdog.

At least 31 directed-energy initiatives are underway across the department, with some more mature than others. Among them are Lockheed Martin’s High Energy Laser with Integrated Optical-dazzler and Surveillance, or HELIOS, installed aboard the Navy destroyer Preble in 2022, and Epirus’ Leonidas, delivered to the Army in 2023 in furtherance of its Indirect Fire Protection Capability.

Bringing such systems to fruition — let alone mass production — has proven tricky. Aside from their technological complexity, laser- and microwave-based weaponry demand precious components and materials such as germanium and gallium.

Kurilla on Wednesday said the Army “sent us some directed-energy mobile short-range air defense” that are being experimented with. He provided no details about initial results. The service dispatched four Stryker-mounted 50-kilowatt laser prototypes in February, Breaking Defense reported.

Militants across the Greater Middle East have in recent months conducted more than 175 attacks on U.S. and allied forces. A drone strike in Jordan, at the Tower 22 installation near al-Tanf garrison, killed three troops in January. A Houthi missile attack on a commercial ship in the Gulf of Aden this month killed three crew members, as well, and forced an evacuation of the vessel.

“This is not the same central region as last year,” Kurilla said. “Iran’s expansive network of proxies is equipped with advanced, sophisticated weaponry, and threatens some of the most vital terrain in the world with global and U.S. implications.”

While the department investigates what type of drone slipped past air defenses and hit a desert installation known as Tower 22 near Syria, preliminary evidence suggests the attack was the workings of Kataib Hezbollah, according to Pentagon spokesperson Sabrina Singh. The group emerged in the early 2000s and has since been blamed for violence across Iraq.

“In terms of attribution for the attack, we know this is an [Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps]-backed militia. It has the footprints of Kataib Hezbollah, but not making a final assessment on that,” she said during a Jan. 29 briefing at the Pentagon. “Our teams are continuing to do the analysis, but we know Iran is behind it.”

The Iranian government denied involvement but has long supplied combatants in advancement of its own goals.

Assets from the regime have been used by Houthi rebels in Yemen to harass ships in the Red Sea and Gulf of Aden, deployed by Russian forces in their continued invasion of Ukraine and were reportedly exported to Ethiopia and Sudan.

“There are a whole host of airframes and systems that Iran-backed militias in Iraq have been parading for the past few years that show telltale signs of Iranian support,” Behnam Ben Taleblu, a senior fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies think tank, told C4ISRNET. “Via these parades, we have seen Iran-backed groups tip their hand as to new capabilities made available by their patron in Tehran.”

Such armaments include reusable Mohajer unmanned aerial vehicles capable of dropping bombs and smaller one-way attack drones such as the Shahed series.

The Defense Intelligence Agency, a principal source of foreign intelligence for U.S. military endeavors, in August showed reporters charred remains of Shahed-101 and Shahed-131 drones and at least one defused warhead with a shaped charge, meant to punch through armor, and fragmenting cubes designed to harm personnel. The pieces were recovered from fighting well beyond Iran’s borders and assembled stateside for accountability.

“As has been the case in other theaters, one-way attack UAVs, popularly known as suicide drones, function as the poor man’s cruise missile. This means a lower and slower threat with a different flight profile compared to rockets and missiles that can take various angles of attack,” Taleblu said. “They are also cheaper to produce and exemplify the phrase ‘quantity has a quality of its own.’”

The attack on Tower 22, close to the al-Tanf garrison, is among the latest in a barrage targeting U.S. forces. The Defense Department has since mid-October logged at least 165 attacks in the region, including 66 in Iraq and 98 in Syria.

What casts the Tower 22 bombardment in such sharp relief is the fact that it “was so tragically successful,” according to Jonathan Lord, a senior fellow and director of the Middle East Security Program at the Center for a New American Security think tank. That difference could be seen as a significant escalation in an area already inflamed.

“I think it also foot-stomps the fact that these militias have been trying to kill Americans for months. These aren’t shots across the bow, these aren’t warnings or demonstrations of might. They’re trying to kill people,” Lord said in an interview. “I think what is under debate right now is who’s going to bear the brunt of that response, and where will that be borne.”

The U.S. military has successfully countered overhead threats like rocket fire and explosive unmanned systems for months, including in the Red Sea. The guided-missile destroyer Carney in December batted down 14 drones that U.S. Central Command described as a wave.

In some cases, exemplified by the DIA display, scraps can be retrieved and studied. Engines, exhaust pipes, wing stabilizers, circuitry, landing gear and more can all aid experts in identifying make, model or origin.

“There may be recoverable parts. There could be radar reflections the military has that might give them a better sense. They might have more signature information,” Lord said. “I’m certain that CENTCOM knows, exactly, where this originated.”

The Wall Street Journal reported the drone that hit Tower 22 may have been mistaken for an American drone that was in the air at the same time. Defense officials said the circumstances are under investigation.

“I do not want a from-scratch software development program,” Kitz said Jan. 11 at the Army IT Day conference in Northern Virginia, hosted by the nonprofit Armed Forces Communications and Electronics Association International. “The Army has enough failed software-development programs.”

The Advanced Field Artillery Tactical Data System, or AFATDS, has been used by troops for decades to coordinate mortars, guided missiles and close air support. PEO C3T is pursuing a replacement after considering the system’s age and back-end clunkiness.

But rather than rely on a single contractor to create an original, monolithic program, the office is taking a modular, consortium-based approach that plays off the specialties of each prospective vendor and their existing offerings.

“We want to adapt things that exist today, and we want to be able to iterate and integrate across multiple commercial technologies and government- and industry-developed technologies,” Kitz said.

The service in November posted a request for information for AFATDS and the development of the related Joint Targeting Integrated Command and Coordination Suite, or JTIC2S.

The automated AFATDS program is meant to shrink the window between when information is collected and a shot is fired in response. It fuses situational awareness and targeting data in near-real time. It is also considered a digital cornerstone of several ventures tied to the Long Range Precision Fires Cross-Functional Team, including the Extended Range Cannon Artillery and the Precision Strike Missile endeavor.

“Today, we have a really robust capability to do fires, but it was not built for how we have to share data in the future,” Col. Matt Paul, a project manager at PEO C3T, said in November. “We want to work with industry to modernize our fires capability so that we can robustly share data, enable sensor-to-shooter architectures, and be able to iterate the program over time.”

Leidos in 2017 won a contract worth tens of millions of dollars to work on AFATDS. The Virginia-based company at the time promised to improve functionality, update user interfaces and simplifying training models. The company is the 16th largest contractor in the world when ranked by defense revenue, according to Defense News Top 100 analysis.

The service’s Program Executive Office for Intelligence, Electronic Warfare and Sensors, or PEO IEW&S, on Nov. 29 named Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumman as the winners of other transaction authority deals for a launched-effects program “within the infrared and electronic warfare realms.”

Further details about the planned payloads were not provided.

The initial awards are worth hundreds of thousands of dollars and are aimed at maturing existing technologies, according to the office, which helps develop everything from biometric tools to surveillance aerostats. Tens of millions of dollars are up for grabs in the long run.

The Army is exploring launched effects — previously divided into camps, ground-launched and air-launched — to extend its reach without putting additional lives on the line.

After spending decades in the Middle East waging counterinsurgency campaigns, the U.S. is now focusing on potential large-scale conflicts with Russia and China. The two powers have constructed anti-access and area-denial infrastructure to keep at bay U.S. weapons or forces that could overwhelm.

Launched effects, hurtling outward from tanks or helicopters or something else, are meant to complement existing equipment soldiers rely on to scout, target, jam and kill. The technology is considered a critical part of the Army’s Future Attack Reconnaissance Aircraft and Future Long-Range Assault Aircraft endeavors.

Launched effects have been successfully tested by the Army in the past, including at Project Convergence, its emerging-tech crucible. In January, General Atomics Aeronautical Systems announced its Eaglet launched-effect flew for the first time, dropping off an Army-owned Gray Eagle Extended Range Unmanned Aircraft System during a demonstration in Utah.

Lockheed is the largest contractor in the world when ranked by defense-related revenue, according to Defense News Top 100 analysis. The Maryland-based company earned $63 billion in 2022. Northrop is the third largest contractor by the same measure, reaping $32 billion in same period.

At its inception in the Arizona desert in 2020, the U.S. Army hoped to use the event to evaluate its materiel upgrades, including a potent brew of artificial intelligence, autonomy, robotics and radiating connectivity. The scale at which experimentation took place paled in comparison to the global presence the service touts.

The technology crucible, however, quickly grew.

In 2021, Project Convergence welcomed Air Force and Navy participation, highlighting the military-wide expectations of future fighting. The next year, it added international forces: Australia and the U.K. directly participated, while others, such as Canada, looked on. The endeavor, critical to shaping the Army’s future formations and employment of tech, soon became a breeding ground for Combined Joint All-Domain Command and Control, or CJADC2, the Pentagon’s larger connectedness campaign.

But the blossoming left some in Army leadership with questions. Was there enough time to fully absorb the results? Was there enough time to plan successive events?

“Digesting all of that data and analyzing what it really meant was a major undertaking,” Army Secretary Christine Wormuth told Defense News. “And frankly my concern for Army Futures Command was: ‘Are we rushing through this?’ ”

That organization helps shape Project Convergence year to year as well as bridge the so-called valley of death, the metaphorical chasm between technological development and its purchase and deployment.

The next iteration of Project Convergence — with the suffix “24″ — bucks the annual approach amid greater emphasis on smaller, cumulative demonstrations in the preceding months. When it’s showtime, the project will offer a grander setup, reflecting the Army’s transition to large-scale combat operations and potential international battlefields of the future, both service and defense industry officials told C4ISRNET and Defense News.

“It would be foolish, in my view, to spend the time and resources to do that kind of complex experimentation and not give ourselves the time to get the lessons and the insights out of it,” Wormuth said. “It’s not activity for activity’s sake.”

Californ-AI

Project Convergence 24 will be executed in two phases, from a pair of locations and with previously uninvolved partners.

The first will be at Marine Corps Base Camp Pendleton, California, with eyes locked on the Indo-Pacific. The Biden administration considers the region critical to international stability and trade; it is home to some of the world’s largest militaries, namely China and India, as well as some of its largest ports.

Operations there will concentrate on the air, sea, space and cyberspace domains, as well as focus on interservice cooperation, offensive and defensive fires, and ensuring the right sensors deliver the right information to the right force at the right time, Lt. Gen. Ross Coffman, the deputy chief of Army Futures Command, told Defense News in an interview ahead of the Association of the U.S. Army’s annual conference.

Fort Irwin, California, will serve as the epicenter of the second phase, which will zero in on the land domain and involve foreign troops.

“This is an Army effort, and it’s going to take the entire Army, the joint force and our coalition partners to really learn the lessons that we need to so that we can transform together and win on future battlefields,” Coffman said. “The lessons we learn are applicable globally. They can be applied to Europe. They can be applied to Africa. They can be applied to the Pacific.”

The service is attempting to overhaul its far-shooting weapons, air and missile defense capabilities, aviation fleet, communications systems, and more as relationships with Russia and China ice over. The U.S. Defense Department considers the former a more immediate threat, while the latter poses longer-term hazards.

The service at the same time is trying to revamp the way it develops and procures the latest gear and machinery after a variety of its modernization efforts — the sprawling Future Combat Systems program, centered on a network that connected new vehicles, drones and other technology; the Crusader weapon system, intended to replace aging artillery; and the Comanche helicopter — all foundered.

“The Army is transforming,” Coffman said. “And as we look to the future, as we look out the windshield moving forward, we really are focused on pulling together all of the incredible work by [the office of the assistant secretary of the Army for acquisition, logistics and technology] in the modernization space, and then looking forward, taking into account what’s happening in real time in Ukraine and other places, and anticipating what will come next.”

The ties that bind

Testing in the spring will feature a buffet of the defense industry’s latest developments, including robots paired with soldiers on foot, specialty drones (dubbed launched effects) putting eyes on a target for long-range fires, and a means of managing contested logistics. It will also put the Army’s networks under serious stress.

To outwit, outmaneuver and outshoot tech-savvy adversaries such as Russia and China, the Army and its sister services are betting big on CJADC2. The new era of command and control would see forces and databases across air, land, sea, space and cyberspace seamlessly interlinked, providing the best-positioned or best-equipped unit the chance to strike first and strike hard.

“It’s an incredibly complicated task to take on, to bring all those networks together,” Bob Ashley, a retired Army lieutenant general and former director of the Defense Intelligence Agency, told C4ISRNET. “The key thing is that there’s different kinds of radios that don’t talk to other kinds of radios, and different formats of data, because we never really thought through the full interoperability for all of that stuff.”

The Defense Department requested $1.4 billion in fiscal 2024 for CJADC2. Project Convergence is often regarded as the Army’s contribution to the odyssey. The Air Force, likewise, pitches in its Advanced Battle Management System, and the Navy is workshopping Project Overmatch. Concerns about coordination have cropped up; the Air Force’s principal cyber adviser in July 2022 publicly fretted about disjointedness, and lawmakers that same year sought in annual defense legislation an audit of CJADC2 timelines and spending.

“For all these weapon systems to talk to one another, for all this data to be interoperable, that’s really what CJADC2 is about,” said Ashley, who served as a senior adviser to the Army secretary. “How do we bring all this stuff together?”

In that regard, defense companies are playing a major role. The increasingly intricate webs that need digital weaving — with data flowing from aircraft to soldier, from shore to ship, to and from command posts that quickly break down or bounce between locations — are made possible by their hardware and software.

Project Convergence 22 featured a so-called gateway where firms could test emerging kit in a relevant environment, all without breaking the bank. The initiative proved effective, according to Coffman, and will make return appearances.

“That’s the challenge we’re trying to take on. How do we go make the lightning bolts real in all these pictures that the Department of Defense likes to draw?” Adil Karim, a Northrop Grumman vice president, said in an interview with C4ISRNET. “How do we help the Army and the broader Department of Defense be more like the internet that we have in our personal life?”

Northrop Grumman is one of more than 100 companies that have participated in Project Convergence. The Virginia-based business furnished its Integrated Battle Command System, among other products.

“It’s always useful to have a real warfighter kick the tires on your capability and say, ‘Hey, could this be a circle instead of a square?’ Or, ‘Can we paint it red instead of blue?’ That kind of thing,” Karim said. “That’s always been true in exercises.”

Continued complexity

Coffman, Army Futures Command’s deputy chief, remembers when Project Convergence comprised “two enemy, two sensors, two effectors.” He was in charge of the Next Generation Combat Vehicle Cross-Functional Team. At the time, the service “wanted to prove the tech,” he said, without getting “too complex too early. So we started very small.”

That has changed.

In just three years and as many versions, Project Convergence has become a sculptor of budget blueprints, policymaking and joint force modernization. It has ushered hundreds upon hundreds of pieces of high-tech equipment into the dirt and into the hands of soldiers who may one day rely on them. It has also shed its annual rhythm — a symptom of the data avalanche produced and ultimately parsed.

“We have learned a tremendous amount. It is, I think, the biggest and most successful joint opportunity for experimentation,” Wormuth said at a September event hosted by the Center for Strategic and International Studies think tank.

But Project Convergence can’t just be about a splashy capstone event, the new Army chief of staff, Gen. Randy George, said during the same discussion.

The idea is for Project Convergence to be a hotbed for capability, whether that’s a new weapon, or a novel way to tie sensors together, or how formations might fold in automaton assistance.

Much of what is demonstrated successfully there ends up growing in other exercises and activities in Europe and the Indo-Pacific, where it can then translate to real-world firepower.

The Army is “trying to look at this as continuous transformation,” George said. “What we want to do is tie all the pieces that we’re learning together and make sure we’re doing this in a continuous fashion, and kind of spinning it off.”

Command posts of old were relatively stationary, a bear to construct and then breakdown, and often distinguishable by their heat, noise and electronic signatures. Such recognizable targets will not cut it in a fight against advanced adversaries such as Russia or China, as battlefields teem with advanced sensors, powerful jammers and weapons touting extended ranges, said Mark Kitz, the service’s recently installed leader of Program Executive Office Command, Control and Communications-Tactical.

“We learned a significant lesson in Ukraine, right? You have to move. These lower echelons, below the division, their command posts have to move to be survivable. They have to be dispersed to be survivable,” he said in an interview. “The command posts that we were building and architecting, with the network as an enabler, clearly would not be survivable in a large-scale combat operations fight.”

The Army is investing in several efforts to improve endurance, concealment, and the speed at which commanders can pause, plan and move again. Among them is what’s known as Command Post Integrated Infrastructure, or CPI2, which combines trucks with communication nodes and off-the-shelf commercial technologies.

The CPI2 setup underwent testing in August at Joint Base Lewis-McChord in Washington state. The trials, which came in the wake of four other soldier feedback sessions, featured newly introduced mobile command platforms and command post support vehicles.

Kitz found the exercise “enlightening” and said it demonstrated that flexibility is key to survival and long-term success. He plans to prod industry at the Association of the U.S. Army’s annual convention in early October about what’s feasible.

“Each of these commanders is going to want to tailor their command post,” said Kitz, whose office helps develop and deploy tools troops use to share information, like radios and command-and-control applications. “Some of them are going to be really good with this Family of Medium Tactical Vehicles variant that we gave to the Stryker brigade. Some want to do planning on the move and have their command post be fully on the move.”

“One of the things that we’re embarking on is making sure that our command posts of the future are not one option,” he added, noting such a move would be a change for the Army. “If they want to do it in an FMTV, we can do it like that. If they want to do it in their Joint Light Tactical Vehicle, how can I architect a command post that gives them a JLTV variant?”

A fight with either Russia or China would mean contending with an avalanche of sensors: drones buzzing overhead, as is seen in Ukraine; signals intelligence tools cuing in on communications; and thermal imaging, like forward-looking infrared, zeroing in on heat signatures. It would also demand battlefield hubs be scattered across hundreds of miles, over mountains, between islands and throughout cities, straining the digital tubes that funnel intel to and from the front lines.

That future is radically different compared to the decades the U.S. military spent in the Middle East and elsewhere while attempting to eradicate extremism and topple terrorist cells.

“Most of our commanders have grown up not having to worry about that problem. When you were in a forward-operating base in Iraq and Afghanistan, it wasn’t a challenge,” Ward Roberts, the assistant lead at PEO C3T, previously told C4ISRNET. “We have seen that when you have a highly skilled enemy, you can’t sit there very long. If you do sit there and long, they’re going to find you. If they can find you, they can target you.”

To get it right, PEO C3T is concentrating on factors such as connectivity, camouflage, ergonomics, power management and shelter.

The command post innovation comes as the Army increasingly focuses on the division, not the brigade, as the unit of action. The pivot, alongside an initiative known as the “division as a unit of action network design,” is meant to free up soldiers by elevating burdensome tasks and coordination.

“We want to, or we recognize, that the future fight for the Army will have the division as a linchpin of the network,” Kitz said. “We’ve got to be able to architect our network much more flexibly, we’ve got to be able to architect our command posts much more flexibly if we’re going to operate in Indo-Pacific Command versus what we see in Ukraine. They’re very different environments.”

“That’s one of the things I’m learning in this early C3T journey,” he added. “Each of these commanders wants to employ their network in very different ways. How do we enable that?”

Kitz took the reins of PEO C3T in June. He previously led Program Executive Office Intelligence, Electronic Warfare and Sensors, a one-stop shop for Army spying, jamming and aircraft survivability suites.

The service’s Program Executive Office Command, Control and Communications-Tactical is eyeing the end of the year to publish a request for proposals on batches of the low-cost, single-channel radios. Such user-friendly gear could accelerate training and adoption across the service as well as ease international collaboration, according to Col. Shermoan Daiyaan, a project manager at PEO C3T.

“Some of these radios are down to the size of a cellphone. Some of the radios actually look like cellphones,” Daiyaan told C4ISRNET. “So we’re reducing size, weight and power, and we’re making the radios easier to train.”

“If we have an easier radio to train, and an easier radio to maintain, now we can field faster. If I have to give three days of training and I can get it down to one hour, that’s another unit I can move to quicker as we field the Army,” Daiyaan added.

PEO C3T published an initial request for information for the radios following Technical Exchange Meeting 9, or TEM9, in Nashville, Tennessee, in late 2022. The exchange meetings bring together Army leadership, acquisition officials and hundreds of defense industry players to discuss soldier needs — namely communications kit.

Several companies responded to the posting. Testing followed with the help of the 25th Infantry Division based in Hawaii.

“The first thing we did is we took, I want to say, six companies out to a jungle field training exercise with the 25th. And what we did, to drive home the idea of [simplicity of] use, was we gave them one hour to train the soldiers. No classroom time; they did it right there in the jungle,” Daiyaan said. “Phase two of it was here at Garuda Shield, where we took another subset of those radios and allowed the soldiers to operate them actually in Indonesia, in the jungle exercises.”

The RFP is expected in parallel with TEM11 in Savannah, Georgia, in December. Should things go to plan, Daiyaan said, “we’re going to make an award to buy at scale a larger quantity of these radios to take and allow some soldiers, some units, to field them and to gain feedback on these low-cost, simple-to-use radios in the architecture.”

The opportunities come as the Army prioritizes networking — alongside improved air and missile defense, long-range precision fires, and other areas — in the shadow of potential conflict with Russia and China. The service is also pivoting to the so-called division-as-a-unit-of-action network design, a connectivity scaffold that requires months of real-world experimentation and deliberation among leadership.

PEO C3T and the Network Cross-Functional Team rolled out the initiative earlier this year.

“When we talk about a data-centric environment, the division is a logical area for the network to service out data to brigades and battalions and the units that are operating,” said Mark Kitz, who leads PEO C3T. “What we were unveiling at Fort Myer is our ability to re-architect the network, not sort of some holistic new strategy.”

Kitz took the helm at PEO C3T in June. He previously led Program Executive Office Intelligence, Electronic Warfare and Sensors.

Frederick Douglass Moorefield Jr., a deputy chief information officer for command, control and communications, was one of two men the Justice Department on Oct. 2 said was apprehended following an investigation into the alleged animal abuse and underground gambling. The other was Mario Damon Flythe.

The Washington Post reported the Defense Department was “aware of the criminal complaint” and that Moorefield was “no longer in the workplace,” citing a department spokesperson.

The deputy CIO for command, control and communications lends expertise and guidance on policy and technical issues related to defense connectivity and data-sharing standards. It also plays a role in spectrum-sharing decisions.

Police searched the Maryland homes of Moorefield and Flythe in early September. They rescued 12 dogs, according to the Justice Department, and recovered veterinary steroids, training regimens, a carpet “that appeared to be stained with blood” and a weighted dog vest. An electrical plug and jumper cables — likely used to kill losing dogs — were also found, an affidavit alleges.

Moorefield was released after being arraigned, records show. If convicted, he could face five years in prison.

The five-year contract for M-code GPS modules and related engineering support, announced Sept. 29, gives the service’s positioning, navigation and timing experts direct access to the company’s wares, according to the Program Executive Office for Intelligence, Electronic Warfare and Sensors, or PEO IEW&S.

The cards were previously procured through “various external contracts” and the Defense Logistics Agency, which ran up costs and complicated the buying process, the office said.

M-code is meant to be a stronger, more secure source of situational awareness — where a soldier is, where a soldier is headed and at what pace. It touts increased resistance to jamming and spoofing, a critical consideration for the U.S. as it prepares for potential fighting against Russia and China. Both wield significant electronic warfare arsenals that can make traversal and coordination more difficult.

Michael Trzeciak, a project manager at PEO IEW&S, said the BAE Systems arrangement “made sense” because of compatibility with existing equipment, namely Dismounted Assured Positioning, Navigation and Timing Systems, DAPS, and Mounted Assured Positioning, Navigation and Timing Systems, MAPS.

The Army in April tapped TRX Systems for the former. Collins Aerospace, part of RTX, was selected last year for the latter.

BAE Systems is the seventh largest defense contractor in the world when ranked by defense-related revenue. The company brought in $25.2 billion in 2022 and $25.7 billion in 2021, according to Defense News’ “Top 100″ analysis.