The Jack Voltaic series, developed by the Army Cyber Institute at the U.S. Military Academy to game out the state of cybersecurity at local ports, kicks off its next conference Feb. 24 at The Citadel military college in Charleston, South Carolina.

The exercise has thus far focused on defending critical infrastructure across two cities — Charleston and Savannah, Georgia — allowing them to gain a better understand of incident management if a cyber disruption occurs.

Army Cyber Command, as well as the Guard and Reserves, have cyber protection teams that hunt actors on Defense Department networks and eradicate threats. This exercise could provide insights as to how to better use and deploy those teams.

“Are there places where it would be appropriate to apply those capabilities, and then where are the mechanisms to do that,” Lt. Gen. Stephen Fogarty, chief of Army Cyber Command, told C4ISRNET, regarding lessons he hopes to get out of the event. Fogarty is providing the opening conference keynote.

One mechanism he suggested is “Defense Support of Civil Authorities,” the process for which the U.S. military can assist state and local entities.

From the Army’s perspective, it has to deploy from ports. If those areas, which are under the control of state and local governments, succumb to cyberattacks, it hinders the Army’s ability to deploy. Thus, it is in the best interest of the Army and the rest of the services to lend a hand in aiding localities in improving their cyber defense, which leads to better national cybersecurity.

“We require strategic mobility. Again, we don’t want to be fighting on our shores; we want to keep that offshore. We have to be able to get to the fight,” Fogarty said. “For us, it’s making sure there’s clear understanding by civil authorities what our requirements are, what our expectations are, and then what we can [do] to assist them and protect that strategic capability for the nation.”

After Jack Voltaic 3.0 in September 2020, officials realized there was a need to keep the conversation going regarding critical infrastructure resiliency.

“It’s too important to conduct once, write down some lessons and then move on,” said Col. Jeffrey Erickson, director of the Army Cyber Institute. “Rather, we wanted to continue to foster an ecosystem of information and knowledge exchange through a series of conferences with Norwich University Applied Research Institutes, the Georgia Cyber Center, The Citadel and the Critical Infrastructure Resilience Institute at the University of Illinois.”

Events such as Jack Voltic also help the Army better tune to certain threats, Fogarty said, noting that partnerships with industry and academia help alert the service to different types of challenges, and vice versa for local governments.

There’s “an array of threats that local authorities — they’re going to be the principal responders to. Their ability to identify these [threats] — essentially to rehearse what their responses are, understand what their capabilities are, where their limitations may be, where they make investments — that’s, really what they principally get out of this,” Fogarty said. “For the Army, what I want to do is I want to worry about getting the people, the material that we require to conduct operations there.”

Officials believe success equates to increased awareness across all sectors.

“Success this week looks like increased awareness in the community, new (and greater) connections between public and private sectors, and potential new critical infrastructure resiliency events in the future. Only through more sets and reps can we continue to increase resiliency at all levels,” Erickson said.

“We know on the future battlefield, you got to fight dispersed and distributed,” Maj. Gen. Charles Costanza, commander of 3rd Infantry Division, told reporters at a media day at Fort Stewart, Georgia. He went on, adding that command posts at the brigade and division level are “just too big” and “not survivable.”

Armored formations must move rapidly on the battlefield, but their current communications architecture doesn’t allow them to do what they need at the right speed or range. The Army is working to change that. Between January and February, the service conducted a pilot aimed at better understanding the needs and design for modernizing the network for armored formations.

As part of the Army’s modernized network approach, it is providing “capability sets” to units every two years, each building upon the previous delivery and adding in new technologies. The first of these, Capability Set ‘21, was designed for infantry brigades. The next two focused on Stryker brigades and armored brigades, respectively.

The three-week pilot, which took place at Fort Stewart with 2nd Armored Brigade Combat Team, 3rd Infantry Division, sought to help establish Capability Set ‘25 design goals and inform concepts, requirements and technology maturity from division to battalion.

The soldier feedback gathered during the effort — especially so far in advance, given a preliminary design review isn’t scheduled until around April 2023 — is essential for providing units the capabilities they need to succeed. Officials hoped to understand how the capabilities were deployed, whether the right equipment was put in the right place in the right formation and did the technology support or hinder the mission.

To get that feedback and test new equipment in an operational context, the pilot outfitted three battalions with three different network configurations called equipment sets. One included line-of-sight and satellite communications; one was primarily satellite communications; and one was line-of-sight heavy.

Early feedback from soldiers indicated that the new equipment significantly improved units’ ability to move and communicate quicker, although some equipment might not be in the right formations.

“The general feedback we’ve received so far is it’s easy to use, it’s expeditionary in mindset and allows us … [to] keep a much smaller command post signature, which will help us increase our survivability,” said Col. Terry Tillis, commander of 2nd Armored Brigade Combat Team, 3rd Infantry Division.

From the division’s perspective, the new gear is poised to improve operations.

“This capability would allow us, enable us to fight a little bit more distributed and dispersed,” Costanza said. “I think this is really going to improve our ability to fight and survive on the future battlefield.”

In many cases, set up and tear down for command posts and communications was over an hour. Additionally, sometimes in the field, units would have to stop their vehicles to establish communications. However, soldiers said communications that would take much longer could now be communicated seamlessly in minutes with the new equipment, while also being more dispersed.

The ability to communicate faster and more efficiently in the future will invariably change the way the Army operates and fights, said Tillis.

“It is going to change because it adjusts the tempo and we’re going to be able to move faster … what changes for us is the ability to move when we need to move,” Tillis said. “The increase in technology is going to change fundamentally how we would fight. That’s something that we’ve got to learn at our level. How do we become expert coaches? How do we work distributed [command and control] in each of these command posts?”

For example, operators explained that one of the tenets of maneuver warfare is if formations outrun their communications, they have to stop. But what if they don’t have to stop and can maintain those links of communication, asked one battalion commander. New technology tested in the pilot could enable that, but armored formations come with their own challenges.

Armor formations and vehicles are one of the most difficult formations to outfit from a networking perspective given the confined space on the platforms. While this current pilot effort took place on surrogate vehicles — Vietnam-era tracked vehicles — discussions are ongoing across the acquisition community to outfit communications gear on forthcoming replacements. The Army’s Program Executive Office for Command, Control, Communications-Tactical (PEO C3T) is working hand in hand with PEO Ground Combat Systems, which has provided drawings for new vehicles such as the Joint Light Tactical Vehicle and the Armored Multi-Purpose Vehicle.

“As we start making some of these decisions coming out of this [pilot], then the next phase will be working with the identified vendors as we move forward on what that next step of integration going forward is,” Col. Shane Taylor, program manager for tactical networks at PEO C3T, said.

Once it’s determined which vehicles receive which equipment, based in part on feedback from the pilot, “we’ll be concurrently providing that information to the ground combat folks and then we’ll start working with them much tighter on the integration kits,” Taylor said.

Another integration aspect officials described is how the new experimental equipment works with the current network.

“The Army’s a big army. There’s a lot of kit already out there. We’re [not] going to throw everything away and start over,” Taylor said. “The Army is just too big to do that. Therefore, we need to make sure that what we carry forward out of this interoperates with the existing solutions that we have until we can replace it.”

The distributed denial of service (DDoS) incidents — which essentially flood internet sites with an unusually high amount of web traffic, rendering them useless — hit at least 10 Ukrainian websites, including those of the Defense Ministry, Foreign Ministry, Culture Ministry and Ukraine’s two largest state banks. Denial of service attacks don’t require the incredible sophistication or painstaking access to networks needed for most data theft or deleterious cyberattacks, making them a common tactic among criminal organizations.

Ukrainian Information Ministry’s Center for Strategic Communications and Information Security suggested Russia could be behind the Feb. 15 incident, but didn’t provide details.

“It is possible that the aggressor resorted to tactics of petty mischief, because his aggressive plans aren’t working overall,” the statement said.

The Pentagon and U.S. Cyber Command deferred comment on the cyberattack to the National Security Council, which did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Despite these incidents not yet being attributed to an actor, experts are worried they could signal an uptick in activity in eastern Europe amid the Russian troop buildup.

“Overall, this is telling us that more is starting to go down in Ukraine. I think this may very well signal the beginning of a Russian attack on Ukraine,” Tatyana Bolton, policy director of the Cybersecurity & Emerging Threats team at the R Street Institute think tank, told C4ISRNET. Bolton is also the former director of the Cyberspace Solarium Commission, a a bipartisan organization created in the 2019 defense policy bill to develop a multipronged U.S. cyber strategy.

Bolton noted there’s no direct indication Russian entities are responsible. However, the targets affected are what one might see during the beginning of a coordinated military campaign, she said.

Timothy Jones, vice president of systems engineering at Forescout, an enterprise defense company, cautioned that while the initial DDoS incident may not seem sophisticated, it could get worse and more complex.

With denial of service attacks, “sometimes the full extent isn’t really seen right away. We’re just starting to get some of the reports out,” said Jones. “Maybe they’re doing stuff in the background that we’re not necessarily looking at yet, or hasn’t really been felt.”

Using denial of service indicates some level of restraint, which Bolton described as a bit atypical for Russia.

“Usually, [DDoS] doesn’t take you offline for more than a day,” she said. “It can be more serious, but it’s not like encrypting all their files or deleting all their files. Those would have really been significant attacks. But the concern is also, what’s next? Is this a smokescreen for a larger incident or attack?”

The critical infrastructure sector — such as energy companies — were not targeted, which could signal that if Russia was behind the incident, they either view the banking sector as more critical or they are following general rules of warfare by not knocking out power to the civilian sector in the dead of winter, Bolton added.

DDoS is a tactic the Russians have been accused of using previously.

In mid-January, Ukraine blamed Russia for a cyberattack that temporarily disabled about 70 Ukrainian government websites simultaneously. During last month’s attack, an announcement posted stated that Ukrainians should “be afraid and expect the worst.”

Russia launched one of the most devastating cyberattacks ever on Ukraine in 2017 with the NotPetya virus, causing over $10 billion in damage worldwide. The virus, also disguised as ransomware, was a so-called “wiper” that scrubbed entire networks.

Cristin Monahan of the George Washington University’s National Security Archive’s Cyber Vault pointed out the Russians hit Estonia with a series of DDoS incidents in 2007 over Estonia’s decision to relocate a Soviet war monument, something of a watershed moment in the modern cyberwarfare era.

“The Russians made the point that even without direct military intervention, or even cyber interventions with kinetic effects, they can exert significant pressure on nations in their crosshairs, and Ukraine has received the same message for a number of years,” she said.

Monahan added that DDoS incidents rarely result in military intervention, implying the U.S. is not likely to physically engage with Russia over the loss of banking services.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.

Following the release of its digital transformation strategy last fall, the Army plans to start building out a variety of efforts to catapult the service into a digital native organization.

“As we start to do more exercises this year, we’re going to start to integrate more and more of the cloud capability and the capacity,” Army CIO Raj Iyer said during a Jan. 13 virtual presentation hosted by AFCEA’s Northern Virginia chapter.

Iyer said the Army is looking to springboard cloud efforts in 2022 to make the Army more expeditionary. One such effort is through the Command Post Computing Environment, a web-enabled system that will consolidate current mission systems and programs into a single-user interface. The goal, ultimately, is to be able to bring in large volumes of data from multiple classification levels into a single common operating picture. The Army has efforts underway to develop that through the cloud while modernizing the interface and data platform, said Iyer.

Army officials explained the key role certain units are playing in this experimentation to help shape how it will deploy and develop these technologies across the world for all formations.

“We are now actively working with units where we are allowing them to now experiment mission threats and operational scenarios using the capacity in the cloud and on the platforms that we have established,” Iyer said, noting that the aim is for the CIO and technical organizations to hash out the technological problems, freeing up units to focus on operational use cases.

Maj. Gen. Robert Collins, who leads the Program Executive Office for Command, Control, Communications-Tactical, added that his office has worked with the CIO, the XVIII Airborne Corps, the 101st Airborne Division and the 82nd Airborne Division to migrate some capabilities to the cloud. He added that these types of technologies de-burden tactical formations and allow them more operational flexibility.

Collins also stressed the importance of having a true data fabric that is flexible and can push information from the enterprise level to the tactical level and vice versa. There also needs to be a balance between what data soldiers have access to when fully connected and how much they can access offline.

“You may need to at certain conditions deploy with a certain set of data so that when you become disconnected from the enterprise, you can continue to operate,” he said.

However, this data fabric isn’t a single monolith, but rather, a federated system.

“We’re not laser focused on a particular data fabric,” said Brig. Gen. Jeth Rey, director of the Network Cross-Functional Team. “We’re thinking that they’re going to be more globally. There will be multiple types of data fabric. We need those data fabrics to be, again, open source, where they can actually collaborate with one another and provide that machine learning and AI that we need in order to aggregate those sensors and all the structured and unstructured data that’s going to be passing through that particular data fabric in order to create an informed decision for our commanders to execute on.”

Iyer noted the service is well on its way to implementing the Army’s first cloud outside of the U.S. in the Indo-Pacific region working with Army Pacific, the I Corps and the Multi-domain Task Force. This will allow the Army to integrate cloud in all aspects of experimentation and establish an edge computing cloud in the Pacific theater. Army officials have previously stated the Multi-domain Task Force is a main pilot effort for emerging data and cloud initiatives.

Bulky, angular and slow, they’re not terribly impressive to watch. But U.S. Army leaders see these robots as a vision of the future: part of a new pipeline to put better, more reliable technology into the hands of soldiers faster than ever before.

A year earlier, at the first-ever Project Convergence, held in 2020 at Yuma Proving Ground, users had to tell the robot to go from point A to point B to point C to conduct a reconnaissance mission. For the 2021 event, users simply gave the robots a designated area for the same task, and the system turned to artificial intelligence to determine the best path.

The robots demonstrated how they could keep soldiers out of harm’s way, allow for sensors in new positions that were previously impractical and present new data to commanders.

But even as the service makes these strides, it’s unclear whether the 2021 demonstration marks a substantial technological advancement, or simply minute progression.

The question of whether the robots are ready for the battlefield is emblematic of a long-term issue, as the Army has struggled for decades to get its modernization programs from promising technology to fieldable equipment. Over the past four years, the service has implemented a new strategy to solve its development woes. Events like Project Convergence have stressed the importance of experimentation and prototyping to accelerate modernization, but next year the Army plans to get more than two-thirds of its signature systems to soldiers.

Experts say the service is on track, but they warn that leadership changes, potential budget cuts, and several contracting and technological hiccups could jeopardize those efforts. But for Bradley Bowman of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, a Washington-based think tank, the real question is whether the U.S. is building world-class capabilities faster than its adversaries.

“When the history books are written about Army Futures Command, did they do that or not? And, boy, that’s quite an expectation, isn’t it?” Bowman told Defense News. “That’s war and peace; life and death; ‘mission accomplished or not’-type stuff there.”

Enter Army Futures Command

Just over four years ago, Gen. Mike Murray was plucked from the halls of the Pentagon and dropped into a few empty floors of an office building in Austin, Texas.

Murray was hand-picked to open a new four-star command tasked with modernizing the Army’s technologies for a future fight.

Army Futures Command wasn’t charged with simply updating the service’s technologies. After all, the Army has been updating its technologies and replacing legacy systems with new ones for decades. Instead, AFC was established to reform what many have described as a broken acquisition pipeline — one that takes too long and ultimately produces the wrong items.

Army Futures Command and its flagship demonstration, Project Convergence, emphasize a new, more flexible developmental approach than the Pentagon’s traditional buying process. Instead of selecting a single provider from the outset, the Army now wants to use more flexible contracts that task multiple vendors with quickly building prototypes; this way, the service can find out what works and what doesn’t before moving forward.

The approach is meant to reduce risk early in the process, increase competition and ultimately give the Army more pathways to successful technological development. Whereas technology failures are the bane of the traditional process, one goal of Project Convergence is to fail early, understand those challenges and address them.

“To the degree that Army Futures Command is succeeding, I think the prototyping process — we get things in the hands of soldiers sooner rather than later, and it’s an iterative feedback loop — is really, really positive,” Bowman said.

The command also emphasizes the importance of soldier touchpoints, where those who will use the technology can try out prototypes early. That enables the Army to incorporate soldier feedback into the end design.

Other AFC initiatives, such as the Army Applications Laboratory, have also born fruit. That lab has been successful in using Small Business Innovation Research dollars, forming cohorts and starting with problems upfront. This is counter to taking a solution and figuring out how to fit it into operations.

In an interview last year, Murray told Defense News the command is headed in the right direction with experimentation and prototyping. And perhaps more importantly, he said, Congress accepted the process for those experiments and gave the command the acquisition authorities it needs.

Many of the systems AFC chose as priority modernization efforts, such as the Precision Strike Missile, are expected to reach initial fielding in a few short years. By then, the Army expects there to be even more working prototypes, such as the future vertical lift aircraft and new unmanned vehicles.

Roughly four years after Murray’s tenure began, analysts say Army Futures Command has a mixed record. On the plus side, it’s on track to deliver new capabilities at breakneck speeds for the Defense Department. While major acquisition programs have historically taken up to 14 years to field, some of the command’s programs are expected to take four years.

For example, the Extended Range Cannon Artillery system hit a 70-kilometer range goal in tests over the past two years, and the Army has already accepted two systems. The service also awarded Northrop Grumman a contract last month to produce the Integrated Air and Missile Defense Battle Command System, which will serve as the command-and-control platform for a variety of sensors and shooters.

Also last year, the service fielded the first maneuver battalion of the Short-Range Air Defense system.

Still, the Army has faced setbacks.

Thomas Spoehr, director of the Heritage Foundation’s Center for National Defense and a retired Army lieutenant general, pointed to three programs that have suffered from high-profile delays: the Integrated Visual Augmentation System, the Armored Multi-Purpose Vehicle and the Optionally Manned Fighting Vehicle.

“I gave the Army a B-minus, which is higher than I thought it was going to be when I started this,” Spoehr said of the command’s performance.

Bowman said it may take a few more years to determine whether the service is succeeding, but he noted several positive developments so far.

“The good news is that we have seen that clear guidance and support from Army leaders,” he said. “Also, one of the great benefits that we’ve seen in the establishment and initial performance of Army Futures Command is kind of clearer lines of accountability, a real sense of urgency and an improved perspective on the role of risk and failure.”

The learning curve

Army officials also say the new path should lead to smoother upgrade processes and more affordable technology.

That’s because the Army is focused on avoiding the stovepiped status quo of the past, where a single contractor would build a system rife with proprietary technologies. All too frequently, that left the military stuck with that same contractor for upgrades. Instead, the Army has shifted its focus toward modular systems with open standards, allowing the service to hold competitions for upgrades instead of returning to the same vendor — often at a premium.

“We designed in [2021] around a modular concept. I have a capability gap. I don’t care when a vendor solution shows up to the table: They’re all going to be evaluated against each other in a competitive fashion, and the best of breed gets plugged in and integrated,” Col. Garth Winterle, project manager for tactical radios under Program Executive Office Command, Control, Communications-Tactical, said of Army networks.

“In a year from now, [there’s] a different capability [that] is either cheaper, better, ‘fill in the blank.’ Most of these things can be reprogrammed and integrated in a modular fashion fairly quickly,” he added.

One analogy officials like to use is how people buy smartphones: Consumers will typically purchase a new one every two years or so, but they won’t purchase a new car on that same timeline. Similarly, if the Army needs to upgrade its communications capabilities, it’s much easier to have a standard port for an upgraded terminal, rather than reconfiguring the entire vehicle.

Of course, Army Futures Command’s path hasn’t been perfectly smooth. The Optionally Manned Fighting Vehicle — a planned replacement for the long-serving Bradley Infantry Fighting Vehicle — is a poster child for the organization’s early growing pains.

When it started the OMFV competition in 2019, the Army asked contractors to submit physical prototypes to potentially advance in the competition. But only one team delivered a sample before the deadline eight months later, marking an embarrassing early stumble.

The Army had two choices: It could proceed with one company into a prototyping effort that could lead to a lucrative production contract, or it could revamp the competition process and timeline.

Army Futures Command chose the latter and committed more fully to its principles of maintaining flexibility throughout development.

The problem with the initial competition, according to service officials, was the Army’s overly restrictive list of requirements for OMFV. For the new competition, the service provided a more flexible list of what the vehicle needs to do, giving contractors freedom to innovate.

And instead of requiring physical prototypes up front, the service is using digital engineering for its design process. In October, officials said the five teams it selected had already submitted digital designs that will be run through virtual simulations. Those simulations will refine the Army’s requirements ahead of a downselect to three contractors, who will then build physical prototypes.

Officials are confident the new path is an improvement, but the program’s initial public misstep left it vulnerable. If budgets continue to decline, analysts and Army leadership have warned the service will likely need to begin slicing from previously untouchable modernization programs.

Even without additional budget cuts, Spoehr said, the program’s delay may prove problematic.

“Its opportunity has come and gone. And so now with the revised schedule, when they start to need the big money, the big money’s not going to be there for OMFV,” he said. “That is my fear.”

Congress wants to keep a closer eye on OMFV, according to the recently released fiscal 2022 National Defense Authorization Act. The legislation would prohibit the Army from entering into a contract to develop a physical prototype for OMFV until the Army secretary submits a detailed report on how the service determined its requirements.

The problem of measuring progress

So how much did reworking the OMFV competition delay production? It’s impossible to say, and that’s one of the issues with a development pipeline reliant on other transaction authorities — a flexible contract designed for rapid prototyping and experimentation that avoids the stringent reporting requirements and lengthy timetables of traditional federal acquisition regulations.

While Army officials see those features as an obvious boon, they also make it difficult to compare these programs to development under traditional DoD contracts. Even the Government Accountability Office said it has a tougher time tracking and assessing programs developed under OTAs.

Which goes back to the robots shuffling around in the desert.

Army officials are quick to highlight the advances they’ve made since Project Convergence in 2020, but they are hesitant to say how close the service has come to fielding an actual capability.

On the one hand, what may seem like minute advances can involve very difficult challenges. While artificial intelligence is currently able to detect potential threats — i.e., enemy tanks — it has difficulty tracking their movements. That difference may seem small, but following a moving object is far more complex than sensing and identifying an inert object. To get there, the Army needs to feed its machine-learning AI massive amounts of training data and build more intricate algorithms.

“Leadership wants advances in capability, and that’s … completely reasonable. But as you might expect, that requires more complexity and algorithms and software development,” said Eric Stirs, a senior data engineer with the Army’s Artificial Intelligence Integration Center.

A third way: Incremental developments

Perhaps the Army’s network team can offer a middle path, one that emphasizes experimentation while setting hard deadlines for deliverables.

About four years ago the Army conducted a series of reviews that found its network was unprepared for a sophisticated threat. In response, the service embarked on a multiyear path to modernize key pieces of its network with a focus on combining new technologies with legacy systems, hosting soldier touchpoints and experiments, and seeking modular solutions.

The Army’s network team has adopted an incremental approach that sees new technologies delivered to soldiers in two-year blocks, each building on the last. Under this strategy, the service outlined technologies it wants fielded every two years by placing them in so-called capability sets. Those capability sets go through cycles of experimentation, procurement and fielding.

The plan also allows for rapid insertion of technology if it becomes available, as well as mechanisms to move tech to a future capability set if it isn’t mature enough.

Throughout this process, the Army is balancing concurrent efforts of fielding gear associated with Capability Set ‘21, experimenting for Capability Set ‘23 and building design goals for Capability Set ‘25.

While the two-year incremental approach to tech delivery may seem aggressive, officials argue it’s necessary to match the pace of cyberthreats and other developments.

“That process that the team applied to this is necessitated by the fact that our kit only lasts so long based on obsolescence and things like near-peer cyber opportunities,” Col. Shane Taylor, project manager for the tactical network within PEO C3T, said on the sidelines of an industry engagement in Nashville, Tennessee, on Dec. 2. “I think it lends itself to this kind of construct to begin with, or else you end up with systems in the field long beyond their effectiveness.”

Officials say units are eager to participate in this modernization process.

“We constantly get requests from units like: ‘When can I get it next?’ ” said Matthew Maier, project manager for interoperability, integration and services under PEO C3T. “There’s a handful of units that were selected by [Army headquarters] to get [Capability Set] ‘21, and now other units have come to the table and want their priority pushed up so that they can get some stuff.”

The future of Futures Command

What remains to be seen is whether current Army leadership, especially the new service secretary, buys into the construct, said Todd Harrison, a defense budget expert with the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

The command’s founding fathers are then-Army Secretary Mark Esper, who went on to serve as defense secretary; then-Army Chief of Staff Gen. Mark Milley, who later became chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff; then-Vice Chief of Staff Gen. James McConville; and then-Army Under Secretary Ryan McCarthy.

Much of that initial cohort left when the Trump administration exited. McConville has remained as the Army chief, but there is a new Army secretary, Christine Wormuth.

“She’s not really deeply rooted in the Army,” Michael O’Hanlon, senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, told Defense News. “I think that Esper and McCarthy, given their backgrounds, they had street cred. I do think the onus is on [Wormuth] to develop a vision for the Army that’s not just rooted in sort of generalities about defense priorities, [but] that speaks specifically to where ground force technology offers opportunities, where Army innovation really is poised to make breakthroughs.”

Murray retired as the first AFC commander in December, long after his initial retirement plans were to go into effect. There is no named successor, but an acting AFC commander was selected in the meantime.

The leadership shakeup leaves Spoehr “mildly worried” the future of Army modernization could be recast through a different viewpoint.

But perhaps a larger issue is whether the Army will have enough funding to complete its priority programs. Spoehr said the Pentagon’s top-line FY23 budget request is expected to be significantly lower than the last.

Paired with inflation, “there’s a real potential that [the Office of the Secretary of Defense] and, by proxy, the Army’s going to get hit with a giant bill in 2023.”

And 2023 is a critical year for Army Futures Command: The Army plans to begin fielding its Extended Range Cannon Artillery system, while prototypes for the future attack reconnaissance aircraft are expected to fly. Plus, the Lower Tier Air and Missile Defense Sensor — which will replace the Patriot air defense system’s radar — will be fielded by the end of FY23.

Indeed, McConville has said the Army will get 24 of the 35 signature systems in its modernization portfolio into soldiers’ hands by FY23.

At Project Convergence 21, officials told the media the annual “campaign of learning” would continue for years to come.

“This is not a one-year — and now it’s two years — and-we’re-done kind of thing. Our leadership says they see this will probably be a decade-long endeavor,” said Col. Andre’ Abadie, special adviser to the deputy commanding general at AFC and co-lead for the command’s Project Convergence Operational Planning Team.

Following Wormuth’s visit to Yuma Proving Ground, she said the experiments convinced her of the importance of modernizing the network for the entire Army enterprise. She said Project Convergence will help the Army determine what direction to go with acquisitions.

The Army is currently gearing up for its third Project Convergence. This year, the Army wants to see if its robots can do the same missions at night.

Now it’s Washington’s turn to get serious about the “gray zone,” especially when it comes to cyber and information warfare, says a new report from the Atlantic Council. The term is used to describe competitive actions that occur below the threshold of conflict.

The think tank’s recommendations come as the Biden administration finishes its National Security Strategy and National Defense Strategy, which are expected to be published within weeks and address gray-zone or hybrid warfare.

“The DoD needs to compete now and engage in offensive hybrid warfare actions. The United States must respond where competition with China and Russia is taking place today, primarily by playing an enhanced role in gray-zone competition,” read the report, which was led by the Atlantic Council’s Clementine Starling, Air Force Lt. Col. Tyson Wetzel and Christian Trotti ― with former Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel.

The report called for new strategic competition coordinators on the National Security Council with direct access to the president, as well as a new whole-of-government messaging strategy aimed at countering anti-American narratives and reinforcing the rules-based international order. The Pentagon would play a supporting role, “executing offensive and defensive hybrid warfare activities that comport with U.S. values.”

Already, Colin Kahl, the undersecretary of defense for policy, said last month that the Defense Department’s overarching “integrated deterrence” concept ― a key part of the forthcoming National Defense Strategy ― expands “across the spectrum of conflict from high-intensity warfare to the gray zone.” That includes other instruments of national power: intelligence, economic, financial, technological and alliances, Kahl has said.

That mission is going to become more important as nations hostile to U.S. interests increasingly operate below the threshold of traditional conflict to challenge international rules and norms, particularly at flashpoints in the Taiwan Strait and Ukraine, the authors argued. The DoD has taken significant steps to compete in the gray zone, but the authors called for “a departmental paradigm shift” and for the military to go on the offense.

“The department has begun to focus more on countering our strategic competitors’ hybrid warfare efforts, but what I also see is an inherent conflict between competing now and the sexier thing, which is buying new equipment, getting ready to fight the war of the future; and sometimes, under the weight of that effort, competing today loses out a little bit,” Wetzel, who is also a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council, told Defense News.

“Everybody agrees we need to defend in the gray zone, but we really wanted to focus on the fact that we can take the offense as well,” he added.

For instance, as Russian President Vladimir Putin masses troops along Ukraine’s border and claims Ukraine and the West are the aggressors, the U.S. government ― under a more proactive approach to gray zone warfare ― would communicate more consistently and more often that Putin is the sole antagonist.

“Just on the information domain, we need to control the narrative, we need to counter false narratives a lot clearer,” Wetzel said.

The broader Atlantic Council report, drafted with expert input over the last year, made recommendations aimed at deterring or winning a conventional conflict as well as gray zone activities. Among the report’s other conclusions:

• The DoD needs guiding principles for hybrid warfare. The department should be part of unified interagency efforts, invest in “below-threshold” capabilities and training, engage only where strategically important, go on the offense to reinforce the international rules-based order, use strategic messaging, and stick to American ideals.
• Washington needs a hybrid warfare toolkit. That means establishing diplomatic norms as well as naming, shaming and sanctioning bad actors ― all the while, the DoD can show presence, launch distributed denial-of-service attacks, and conduct kinetic or non-kinetic actions against proxy or mercenary forces.
• Hybrid operations can improve conventional deterrence. Adversaries will use hybrid warfare until they can acquire a coercive deterrent against the U.S. and its allies. Containing engagement with China and Russia to cooperation and competition for as long as possible is in America’s interest ― but the U.S. “must get better at proactively engaging in and shaping the gray zone.”
• The State Department’s Global Engagement Center needs a funding boost and authorities to “lead whole-of-government strategic messaging and offensive information operations campaigns, and it needs to lead whole-of-nation efforts to engage with social media companies, and with allies and partners to create a coherent and effective campaign for countering mis- and disinformation.”

Investing in gray zone competition could mean acquiring more cyber tools as well as building an organization for “information operators,” who would quickly attribute and respond to misinformation or disinformation, said Trotti, assistant director of the Atlantic Council’s Forward Defense project.

“What they would ask for in terms of capabilities they need, I don’t know, but we do think there needs to be a focus, and a unit or units, that are really focused in that area,” Trotti said. “They would start to develop the tactics, techniques and procedures that will be used in gray zone operations or hybrid warfare operations.”

To compete with adversaries who already see conflict as part of a continuum (as opposed to binary war and peace), the DoD and its armed services have sought to embrace the tenets of information warfare by competing daily below the threshold of armed conflict.

Waiting to respond to an event after it occurs is too late, officials and experts have asserted over the last few years. Forces must be constantly engaged in the region and against malicious actors to contest their activity and collect the proper intelligence and access needed in case circumstances escalate.

The DoD and the armed services have also reorganized themselves to better align and integrate those various disciplines; they are currently developing new doctrine along this vein.

If the National Defense Strategy does prioritize gray zone conflict, it wouldn’t be the first time. In 2019, the DoD created an amendment to the National Defense Strategy focused on irregular warfare, with one of the five core themes of the annex aimed at operations in the information environment.

In the most recent defense policy bill, signed into law Dec. 27, Congress asked the DoD for a report on the implementation of the irregular warfare strategy. Some members of Congress have also expressed skepticism regarding progress in the information warfare sphere, questioning who is in charge of certain areas and how the department will oversee activities to ensure success.

“I am concerned the department leadership has been slow to adapt to the changing nature of warfare in this domain,” Rep. Jim Langevin, D-R.I., who chairs the House Subcommittee on Cyber, Innovative Technologies, and Information Systems, said during an April 30 hearing.

“Too often, it appears the department’s information-related capabilities are stovepiped centers of excellence with varied management and leadership structures, which makes critical coordination more difficult. Further, the Pentagon has made limited progress implementing its 2016 Operations in the Information Environment Strategy, which raises questions about the department’s information operations leadership structure.”

Though Congress directed the creation of a principal information operations adviser in 2020, some in Congress are worried it isn’t materializing as intended.

“Unfortunately, this position was layered below the undersecretary of defense for policy, contrary to congressional intent. This position was not created as another bureaucratic layer, but as an agile, single role with the mandate to guide each service’s efforts,” Rep. Elise Stefanik, R-New York, said during the same hearing.

Other outside experts worry the DoD is not doing enough to compete and win on a daily basis against sophisticated adversaries.

“Where we’ve fallen short is accounting for the risk that China and Russia will conduct hybrid warfare-style operations against the United States itself,” Paul Stockton, former assistant secretary of defense for homeland defense, told Defense News. “I’m not talking about little green men pouring across our borders — that’ll never happen — but the use of combined information and cyberattacks to disrupt U.S. defense operations at home.”

Stockton, who recently authored a paper titled “Defeating Coercive Information Operations in Future Crises,” did note that the DoD has made progress in collaborating with NATO allies and partners in Asia to be prepared to counter gray zone threats.

However, he added, the U.S. must strengthen its deterrence by developing information operations response options that would credibly threaten Russia and China if they conduct such operations as part of a gray-zone or hybrid warfare approach.

The Army, for its part, is moving toward a multidomain-capable force, which envisions the seamless integration of forces and capabilities across all spheres of warfare; air, land, sea, space and cyber, as well as the information dimension.

Part of realizing a multidomain force is meeting the need for tactical cyber and information capabilities outside of U.S. Cyber Command. Following a series of exercises and experimental units, the Army activated the 915th Cyber Warfare Battalion in 2019.

This first-of-its-kind unit is designed to provide non-lethal capabilities such as cyber, electronic warfare and information operations in support of Army Service Component Commands and their subordinate elements.

“What we are is a new organization that’s helping define what it means to do multidomain operations from an information advantage standpoint and then through our innovation and experimentation, that’s what’s ultimately going to get recorded in doctrine,” Lt. Col. Benjamin Klimkowski, commander of the 915th, said. “The doctrine writers have never done this before. They need our input to help shape that. It’s our experimentation and our operations that pushes that piece.”

The vision is by 2026 the 915th will consist of 12 expeditionary cyber and electromagnetic activities teams (ECTs), each capable of providing cyber, electronic-warfare and information operations. Currently, there are three companies within the battalion with two ECTs under a separate company, consisting of a total of over 200 personnel. The third ECT is slated to be created at the end of fiscal year 2022.

Moreover, the goal is that each ECT will be aligned to specific geographic theaters.

However, much is still uncertain between then and now as the force is being built. For example, initial and full operating capability criteria for teams are still in the works, officials explained.

The information space changes so rapidly that tactics, techniques, procedures and capabilities will likely need to evolve on a constant basis. The unit is concurrently trying to validate its teams — for which training goals are still being developed on the fly – as well as working on concepts.

“The challenge and growing the cyber force is that it takes time,” Klimkowski, said.

Innovation shaping the future of tactical cyber

Despite nearly ten years of cyber operations within the military, there was little to go on for tactical, on-the-ground cyber operations for conventional forces outside the special operations community.

“On the doctrine side, it hasn’t been a struggle, it’s been an evolution. From the strategic operations to the tactical level, the requirements and the threats that are out there constantly make it evolve,” battalion Sgt. Maj. Marlene Harshman said. “Doctrine, if you will, is, ‘This is how you can do it.’ Well, but what happens if this is how you can do it today but not how you do it tomorrow?”

From the beginning, the battalion and its higher headquarters were given a lot of latitude to innovate and develop the concepts it would need to shape what tactical cyber means.

“Experimentation was key and it was something that 780th [Military Intelligence Brigade] and [Army Cyber Command] said, ‘Hey, you’re a new unit. Take these soldiers and allow them to innovate, allow them to experiment, you got a lot of talent and utilize that these first couple of years.’ We’re not done with that phase. We always want our soldiers to innovate. That will continue through the life of our unit,” Maj. Richard Byrne, the battalion’s operations and training officer, said.

“It’s pretty impressive to take a unit that was largely ideas, concepts, a lot of guidance from higher and take it to where we are now where we’re starting to create a unit that’s steady-state, a little bit more defined and preparing for support to our theaters.”

In fact, they are continuing to evolve training objectives and concepts. During an experiment last year, the unit worked to define key mission essential tasks and objectives needed to validate itself as a ready unit.

“One of the big changes between this year and last year, … the [qualification requirements] that we’ve created weren’t around last year and a lot of experience from the [combat training center] rotations and the experienced soldiers that we’ve got on this unit, a lot of experience went into those and what our training objectives should be, are and will be,” Capt. Gabriel Akonom, an officer with the battalion, said.

What will they do?

As the Army moves to become what it calls multidomain-capable by 2028, the 915th will play a key role in the increasingly important competition — or gray zone — sphere below the threshold of armed conflict.

The battalion is currently aligned with Army-owned component commands at the theater level and will support lower-echelon units as needed. It’s not organic to these units — like military intelligence or military police units — meaning a unit must request assistance from the 915th in a certain scenario based on the mission.

Specifically, its soldiers assist in targeting and providing non-lethal effects while also helping to characterize enemy networks through intelligence and reconnaissance.

“The 915th CWB’s unique close-access and proximal tactical capabilities will be critical” in penetrating enemy defenses, Akonom wrote in The Byte, an online publication published by the 780th Military Intelligence Brigade.

Near-peer adversaries will have very complex systems, necessitating the need to be constantly in contact with them during combat.

Meanwhile, officials said the exact relationship to Cyber Command, which can provide unique remote cyber support to a theater, and the unit is still being determined.

“In each theater it’s going to look different because the [geographic combatant command] and then, by extension, the executive agent for that respective joint force headquarters for cyber is going to employ their forces differently,” Klimkowski said, referencing the Joint Force Headquarters-Cyber structure in which a specific service employs cyber capabilities for geographic combatant commands on behalf of Cyber Command.

“We know INDOPACOM is very different than EUCOM and so it’s going to look different. We’re still working through the nuances of every GCC, but it’s just different.”

As a support element to Army Service Component Commands, the 915th will work very closely with the Multidomain Task Forces, which were designed to be in constant contact with adversaries during the so-called competition phase of conflict. Those units possess a specific battalion that focuses on cyber, electronic warfare, space and information.

One of the key differences between the two, however, is the 915th has the authority to conduct offensive operations.

Officials stressed that in this dynamic domain of cyberspace and information, the unit must maintain its edge to be flexible and innovative, all while continuing to grow and shift with the Army as it builds toward multidomain operations.

“We were designed during the global war on terrorism, but as the Army started thinking critically about large-scale combat operations, we too have essentially have shifted our focus on that as well,” Klimkowski said. “We’re evolving with you and that’s driven some of our thought processes and what’s most critical and what we need to focus on. We’ve had to adapt some of the things that we were previously doing now for a completely new context and situation.”

The U.S. Army’s Joint Systems Integration Laboratory, created in October 2020, is the next iteration of the Command, Control, Communications, Computers, Cyber, Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance Center’s efforts to perform lab-based risk reduction on communications and technical gear before it goes out to the field for training. Typically, the Army wants to ensure such systems work from a technical perspective before soldiers use them.

The communications exercise risk-reduction leading up to a major Army exercise last year, Project Convergence 20, took six weeks. Now the lab is able to fulfil that same need for this year’s Project Convergence in 10 days.

“We were able to cut back on a heck of a lot of time, travel and work that went on out in the dirt down there,” Kimberly Moeltner, JSIL lead, told C4SIRNET in a Nov. 2 interview. “That’s where you see the bang for the buck.”

The 20,000-square-foot facility is able to trim the timeline because it can replicate operational environments. For example, officials said, if a radio needs to be tweaked, someone needs to physically drive onto the range, which is both time-consuming and difficult because of ongoing live-fire exercises. Instead, the lab can replicate distances and, to some degree, threats to provide a baseline prior to fielding tech. That helps the service understand how systems of systems integrate with each other over various networks — a complex task.

The systems won’t always work in the field exactly as they did in the lab, but the JSIL’s modeling and simulation cuts down on tweaks needed during an exercise.

“If we can do it here, it doesn’t mean it will work right off the bat out in a real operational scenario, but it does mean that we know in the controlled environment these are the pieces that did work, and so it’s got to be something else that lets us target where those challenges may be,” said Joseph Welch, director of the C5ISR Center. “It’s a very larger area, and there’s a lot of potential for things to go wrong [while] understanding what your baseline looks like. The JSIL is able to do all of that so that we know when these systems start performing out there, if they’ve got issues or challenges, we know what the baseline looks like and we also have this capability that’s back here that’s able to troubleshoot in parallel to make [Project Convergence] as successful as we can.”

Moreover, experts can remotely participate with the lab, which widens the pool of those able to contribute to JSIL’s efforts.

Another difference between previous risk-reduction efforts and JSIL’s current approach is the inclusion of joint partners. As the Defense Department charts toward its new operating concept — Joint All-Domain Command and Control — the armed services will need to coordinate more on systems. Ahead of this year’s Project Convergence, there were 13 external organizations, including joint partners, that joined the lab’s efforts. That complemented the actual exercise, which saw a significant increase in joint participation.

Welch said there were representatives from all the services at the communications exercises ahead of Project Convergence, and he found it interesting to see how all the systems behaved in real life.

Next year, officials hope to bring in coalition partners.

Looking at the smaller picture

Officials also said JSIL can help smaller and informal communications exercises more frequently to improve the fidelity of systems.

It could also be leveraged by joint partners in conjunction with their labs or by companies to improve systems and help transition programs from the research and development community.

Additionally, given all the data the facility provides, officials said they are working with the Army’s testing community to reuse some of that data to feed into developmental tests for programs.

“You want to learn as much as you can before you have to get out in the operational environment where it’s costly and it can be very complex to understand the variables because the dynamics of that environment, understand as much as you can in the lab,” Welch said. “I would foresee the JSIL being utilized potentially reaching developmental test objectives.”

Combined with the C5ISR Center’s DevSecOps effort, dubbed Orion Forge, the lab could also support operations rather than just operational exercises.

“You could envision where we’ve got a product that’s deployed, it’s been fielded, it’s managed by a [project or program manager] and there’s some real-time feedback because of a situation that wasn’t anticipated where we need to bring this in or we need to make this change to the software,” Welch said. “The Orion Forge implementation — it provides the environment for that to be received, built and then redeployed very rapidly to be able to adjust those needs quickly.”

The sustainment community wants to embed itself in the requirements process for new systems to get ahead of timelines, said Maj. Gen. Robert Edmonson, who leads Communications-Electronics Command, which is charged with sustaining command, control, computers, communications, cyber, intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance systems.

“What we’re doing is we’re embedding ourselves further left in the process. We’re getting engaged in the Army Requirement Oversight Council, Army capabilities boards and many others, and we are ensuring that our capabilities and our requirements are clearly understood and codified early so that we can plan appropriately to deliver that capability at the point of need,” he said in a Nov. 2 interview. “That’s not a conversation that begins the day in which you realize that you have a need. That’s a conversation that begins many years in advance.”

During the last 20 years, as America’s forces focused on counterterrorism, the sustainment of systems was often an afterthought. Early engagement, however, allows the sustainment community to better prioritize capabilities, Edmonson said.

He noted that under the Army’s new readiness model — Regionally Aligned Readiness and Modernization Model, or ReARMM — there are certain resourcing decisions that must be made.

“We have decisions to make under ReARMM. We have deliberate decisions to make with regard to units that are modernizing inside of a certain window and units that are deploying inside of a certain window,” he said. “That’s going to allow us inside of CECOM to target our efforts to program our resources to be much more deliberate and precise in the readiness that we’re providing to units.

“Not all units will be in the same cycle in the same window at the same time. From a CECOM perspective, what that means for us is we’ll able to see when units are most available for sustainment, what units are maybe not as available for certain levels of sustainment at a certain time. But really it’s going to be much more dynamic of a process than previous[ly].”

Moreover, he said, ReARMM allows CECOM to look at today’s maintenance requirements and modernization priorities under a single model to make informed decisions about what to divest, adding it is critical for the multiyear budgeting cycle.

As the Army tries to improve its sustainment capability, Edmonson said he is challenging the community to examine how it might sustain commercial off-the-shelf equipment differently than is currently does.

“We need to understand more of that commercial off-the-shelf capability, and we need to be able to build ourselves into what we’re going to want to look like tomorrow,” he said, noting these capabilities will increasingly factor in the Army’s capability arsenal of the future.

“As the network and cybersecurity are major pillars within the National Security and National Defense strategies, Tobyhanna Army Depot is improving its organic industrial base to provide world-class C5ISR depot-level support to the Army’s 31+4 signature modernization efforts and joint weapons systems,” he said. “As the Army and other services adopt agile acquisition strategies for network-enabled weapon systems, Tobyhanna Army Depot remains linked to the program offices, Army Futures Command and [Department of Defense] materiel developers to obtain common or standardized technical capabilities necessary to develop infrastructure investment strategies to support those future, enduring requirements.”

Officials did not answer questions regarding the scope of the outage or number of users affected.

“The Army was experiencing problems with some emails being sent to and from unclassified [Department of Defense] DoD and external systems. Our DoD partners have since resolved this issue,” Bruce Anderson, Army spokesman, said in a statement.

The Defense Information Systems Agency, which runs the Pentagon’s global IT infrastructure, said it was first notified of a problem Wednesday.

“On Wednesday afternoon, DISA was notified of widespread DoD365-J and Army 365 email queuing. DISA worked tirelessly to quickly resolve these issues and as of this morning, normal operations have been restored and all emails have been delivered.” a DISA spokesperson said.

The outage came amid the service’s transition from Defense Information Systems Agency webmail to a newly-licensed Microsoft Office 365 mail client as part of a wider adoption of web-based Microsoft products sparked by the Covid pandemic.

Many Army users took to social media to vent their frustrations about the outage.

A message sent out to some affected users Thursday said that “all external email flow to both [Army] 365 and [DoD] 365 tenants are down,” including mail forwarding between the old mail.mil email servers and the new ones.

Not all of the Army’s email tenants were affected, though, including the specialized platform used for U.S. Special Operations Command-aligned units.

Previously, the Army had announced the movement toward what it is calling Army365, which pushes the service onto a more permanent footing from the measures taken at the outset of the Covid pandemic allowing greater access to network services for remote work.

Set to replace the Commercial Virtual Remote (CVR)/Microsoft Teams capability, which was mandated to end by June 15, A365 relies on Microsoft 365 and aims to improve operational effectiveness, increase cybersecurity and provide the opportunity to eliminate other collaboration capabilities, according to an Army information sheet on the effort.

Broadly, the new system will provide video and voice teleconferencing, email, instant messaging and access to shared drives.

A365 will occur in three phases: Phase 1, which is the Teams migration and begins with an entire Army-wide transition; Phase 2, which is the email migration and will move the Defense Enterprise Email system A365 beginning in fourth quarter of Fiscal Year 2021; and Phase 3, which is the SharePoint migration and is expected to finish during fiscal 2022.