“We’re 61 days into a major ground combat operation in Europe. It gives us a really unique opportunity to see how ground combat could be fought in the future based on what we’re seeing today,” said Director of Intelligence and Security at Army Futures Command Ed Mornston at the GEOINT Symposium in Denver on April 25. “But it’s really early – in my mind – to say that we have learned anything that we are going to 100% export into future concepts or change the trajectory of our technology investments.”

“We’re learning a lot,” he said, “but I don’t think we’ve slapped the table on anything and say this is what we have ultimately learned.”

AFC, a public-private initiative that runs modernization projects for the Army, is taking notes on what it needs, what it’s doing right and how the service has to move forward to fight on the future battlefield.

Tactical imagery

The conflict in Ukraine is a showcase for what commercial satellite imagery and sensing can bring to the table. Commercial providers supply satellite imagery to the military and the public, documenting the invasion in real time. That’s as companies including Hawkeye 360 detected GPS interference in the region leading up to the conflict.

For Deputy Assistant Secretary of the Army for Research and Technology Willie Nelson, there’s still a ways to go to turn those commercial systems into an effective military capability for the U.S.

The Army needs more persistence from commercial providers, allowing them to revisit a specified area rapidly to take images of an evolving situation, he said, adding that those sensors also need to be better integrated with Army systems, to the point that satellite data can be downlinked directly to the battlefield.

“I’m your biggest fan, we need everything we can get,” Nelson said to commercial providers at the event. “But if you can’t get that down to a tactical user in the field in a format that they can rapidly use, then you’ve got a lot of persistence but no real warfighting capability.”

The Army is making progress toward that end through agreements with the National Reconnaissance Office and National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency to foster rapid prototyping, as well as a memorandum of understanding with the Space Force, he said.

Need for speed

The conflict has also shown the need for faster development of software and technologies, as well as flexible systems that can adapt and continue working in an adversarial environment.

“The situation is extremely dynamic. The intelligence demands are changing and evolving as we watch this conflict,” said Mark Kitz, chief engineer within the Program Executive Office for Intelligence, Electronic Warfare, and Sensors. “We have got to build our systems that can adapt in a dynamic way as the threat elapse[s], as our data demands adapt, as different sensors enter and exit the environment.”

The Army needs an infrastructure that can do those things in an open and adaptable way, so that troops on the ground aren’t waiting three months to a year for new software or a new antenna built for that environment, he said.

Russia’s shortcomings

There are also lessons to be learned from the ways Russia’s efforts have fallen short of the expectations of its government and of outside observers.

“You can really see where they are. Are they really ten feet tall? Sometimes we tend to paint our adversaries as 10 feet tall when maybe they aren’t,” said Major General John Rafferty, director of AFC’s Long-Range Precision Fires Cross-Functional Team.

For AFC officials, Russia’s failure to deliver in the conflict validates the U.S. Army’s entire approach to modernization and training, from doctrine to facilities to combined arms training to leader development.

“It’s a complete validation – at least, in my opinion – of the Army Futures Command and largely the Army’s approach to this, Rafferty said. “The second thing for me it validates is our approach to training and combined arms training. It’s hard. It’s expensive. But you can see what the shortcom[ings] are if you don’t invest in that.”

And for Brigadier General Stephanie Ahern, director of concepts at AFC, the conflict is also a validation that the Army needs to continue developing its multi-domain operations doctrine.

“It also reminds us that countries have very unique ways of approaching warfare, and that our future warfare must remain American to its core,” she said. “But those who we are fighting against probably won’t pursue the same approach and so the ability to have information that we can share very quickly across communities, across countries, across allies is absolutely essential.”

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.

“For a very long time, the Army got comfortable operating with contractors all over the battlefield,” said Lt. Col. Vito Errico, director of the Army Software Factory, at C4ISRNET’s CyberCon event Nov. 10. “It was sort of commonplace in Iraq and Afghanistan to co-locate contractors with servicemembers to do technically oriented things. … That was the way that we were able to fight.”

“But looking ahead, we might not always be able to fight that way. A future enemy might have the ability to deny us the ability to move contractors and civilians around the battlefield, and that burden of technical competence, that last tactical mile of software development or fusing data sets, might fall on the uniformed servicemember,” he explained.

With a relatively informal, less hierarchical structure than a typical military organization, the Army Software Factory’s goal is to grow the number of soldier coders within its ranks. Hosted at Austin Community College in Texas, the first cohort of 25 soldiers launched in January. That cohort will stay at the factory for a three-year rotation, during which time they will take courses and learn software skills.

The nascent software factory operates as a pilot program under Army Futures Command, as the Army assesses whether the factory can be beneficial and whether the service’s approach to software is good enough.

“It’s a nice empirical use case to help inform senior Army officials on where they need to go with policy,” said Errico.

An additional benefit of using soldiers to code is the soldiers are themselves users of the software they’re developing. The factory’s tagline is “By soldiers, for soldiers.”

The approach is already bearing fruit, said Errico. After observing tactical logistics warehouses at Fort Hood, Texas, factory participants were able to develop software that automated some of the ordering processes, giving soldiers time back to spend training on terminals to help reduce waste.

That software gained popularity organically as the various tactical warehouses adopted it. Now it’s being used by the bigger depots, said Errico, and the software is estimated to have saved more than 3,500 soldier hours.

Located just north of Yuma, a quiet little city on the border of Mexico and California, the base isn’t exactly the most welcoming environment. It’s surrounded by sparse vegetation, dry craggy earth and jagged crops of mountains — beautiful, but inhospitable. While the mornings are cool in November, the rising desert sun will quickly bring the temperature up into the eighties. In the summer, it will easily rise to over one hundred degrees.

This is the harsh environment where the Army wants to test its technology — to see what breaks and what is rugged and reliable enough to deploy with its soldiers.

“The idea is the sooner we can bring things out here, get them in the dirt, get them in soldiers’ hands, the sooner we can learn and inform those concepts and we can inform those requirements’ documents,” Col. Andre’ Abadie, special advisor to the deputy commanding general and co-lead for Army Futures Command’s Project Convergence Operational Planning Team told reporters gathered at Yuma Proving Ground. “The idea is to have them out here, have them demonstrated, and then our acquisitions partners can help pull them across that infamous valley of death.”

Project Convergence kicked off in 2020 as the Army’s so-called “campaign of learning.” Project Convergence is a scaled up demonstration of the emerging technologies — experimental networks, artificial intelligence — Army officials say they need to win on the battlefield in the not too distant year of 2030.

Project Convergence is also the Army’s contribution to Joint All-Domain Command and Control, the Department of Defense’s concept to connect sensors from every domain to create a common operating picture that can be used to coordinate responses across the joint force. JADC2, explained Abadie, progresses the discussion from kill chains to kill webs. Instead of having a single, linear pipeline from one sensor to one shooter, the kill web creates a network of pathways that can connect any sensor to the best shooter, regardless of the domain or the service.

In 2020, the Army was able to demonstrate a massive leap forward, using new networks, artificial intelligence, and command-and-control tools to cut down the sensor to shooter timeline — the time from detecting a threat to launching a response — from 20 minutes to just 20 seconds.

With Project Convergence 2021, the Army focused less on further cutting down that timeline and put its resources into expanding the effort on several fronts: scaling up the technology experimentation, using actual soldiers for feedback and testing, and bringing in joint partners from the Air Force, Space Force, Navy and Marine Corps.

Putting the joint in JADC2

The first Project Convergence was largely a solo affair for the Army. Apart from the somewhat spontaneous loan of a U.S. Marine Corps F-35B from a nearby base to the experiment, the first iteration was largely devoid of participation from the other services. In 2021, the Army wanted bring the joint forces in to the experiment.

“Project Convergence ‘21 … could have never happened if it weren’t for the joint partners coming together and truly collaborating, truly buying into this idea of learning, this idea of experimenting,” said Abadie.

Of the seven operational scenarios the Army used to test its technologies, three emphasized the joint force. Those three scenarios focused on the following capabilities:

• Creating a common operations picture and situational awareness
• Engaging in joint air and missile defense
• Conducting joint fires

Including the other services at Project Convergence marks a step forward for JADC2, a concept frequently characterized by its fragmented development. While the Army has Project Convergence, the Air Force has the Advanced Battle Management System and the Navy has Project Overmatch. ABMS has struggled to win support from Congress, undergoing a massive shift after Congress funded the program at only half the requested levels, while Project Overmatch remains a heavily classified effort.

Those implementations of JADC2 have been siloed, with each service developing JADC2 capabilities largely independently. Only recently has the Joint Staff stepped in to begin offering guidance on development. Project Convergence 2021 offered the largest scale effort to tie those disparate efforts together, with teams on the ground working together to make sure data from one service can feed into another and manging the complicated minutia of joint operations in real world demonstrations.

Gen. Mike Murray, the head of Army Futures Command, said he was satisfied with the contributions of the other services to Project Convergence this year. That participation, he added, was made possible by the creation of a three star-level joint board of directors in December 2020 with participation from the Army, Air Force, Navy and Marine Corps. The Space Force joined later on. That board decided what technologies would be brought for experimentation and what operational scenarios would be played out during the nearly two-month event.

Following her visit to Yuma Proving Ground Nov. 9, Army Secretary Christine Wormuth praised the involvement of the other services in Project Convergence.

“I think the thing that I’m most pleased about and maybe most surprised about is the level of joint participation,” she said. “I think what you really saw in Project Convergence today was the services working together against a common challenge.”

While the Army plans to build on that joint cooperation at Project Convergence 2022, Murray said he’d be “thrilled” to participate more in JADC2 efforts hosted by the other services.

“From the Army’s perspective, there is no way we can do this as a single service. We have got to figure out how to do this together,” he said.

Along with the services, Abadie said the event included significant participation from the Joint Staff. The J7, which drives concepts with the Joint Staff, laid out what it wanted to see to the Army, while the J6 “made sure we stayed on path in terms of how we conformed with their efforts and progressed their efforts,” he said. As the military struggled to create a joint common operating picture, the Joint Staff sent a team to Yuma to sit down with operators to understand the challenges of integrating the services’ data.

“As we track the way the Joint Staff is leading that effort and how they are developing and implementing the JADC2 strategy, we’re trying to inform that,” said Abadie.

And finally, Project Convergence 2021 was held with the combatant commanders — the generals who will execute operations with the joint forces — in mind. Specifically, the event tried to simulate the circumstances faced by Indo-Pacific Command, replicating the vast distances forces will face in that region.

Operational scenarios used more than half a dozen locations spread out across the continental United States, said Abadie, including Joint Base Lewis-McChord in Washington State and White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico.

Failure is the goal — kind of

In 2021, the Army brought more than 110 technologies to Arizona for experimentation. They were able to test 27 different combinations of sensors and shooters, using 15 types of sensors and 19 types of shooters. In 2020, the service could only do six meaningful sensor/shooter combinations.

“I’ve seen exponential progress since last year,” said Army Chief of Staff Gen. James McConville.

But Project Convergence isn’t all about success stories. Not everything worked. However, those failures are just as important to the experiment as the successes.

“Did everything work? No, it still didn’t. I mean, it’s the network. It doesn’t work,” said Abadie. “But we had the right leaders out there to drive significant progress for what the network can be.”

The Army had 300 data collectors at Yuma Proving Ground, collecting information on everything — including things that didn’t go as planned.

“I want to break things — to some degree — so I can understand the point of failure,” Abadie said.

Learning what makes a given piece of technology fail in the prototype stage helps engineers address and resolve that problem before it finds its way into the field.

The enemy has a vote, noted Abadie. Near-peer adversaries have technologies that can disrupt the networks U.S. forces rely on or spoof the positioning, navigation and timing signal they need to operate. At Project Convergence 2021, the Army tried to recreate the denied and degraded conditions they will face from enemy forces, allowing soldiers and engineers on the ground learn how their technology will be impacted and how they can make their systems more resilient.

Adding the soldiers’ touch

The first Project Convergence aimed to find out if scientists, engineers and technicians could make it all work. This year, a major focus was the involvement of soldiers so they could get their hands on the technologies and provide feedback.

The 82nd Airborne Division, recently returned from Afghanistan, and a multidomain task force were on hand to ensure devices, vehicles and software had soldier-centric designs. Not only did that mean testing new equipment and platforms, but also offering solutions to make experimental designs more effective. Army officials said soldiers at the event frequently used technology in unexpected and innovative ways, expanding engineers’ understanding of what that technology could do.

“They’re taking the existing technology, and this future technology and they’re bringing it together,. They’re the ones solving the problems,” said Maj. Gen. Christopher Donahue, commander of the 82nd Airborne Division. “They’re the ones creating what they’re going to be fighting with.”

“What our soldiers have conveyed to me is an excitement, because … the young men and women recognize the value of rapid iteration,” said Brig. Gen. Jim Isenhower, who leads the multidomain task force. “They see what we have been able to do with PC21 and also at exercises before — to come in, look at an architecture, figure out how we have to adjust it, have the expertise there to make those changes, and then the positive feedback they get from proposing solutions or identifying requirements and being able to change so quickly — [it] is really valuable,”

By testing systems with soldier feedback before purchasing them, the Army can receive better equipment and get it into the hands of soldiers faster, said McConville. Plus the service already knows the technology will work.

Is there an end in sight?

The experimentation of Project Convergence continues in spirit long past the actual event, with Army Futures Command’s cross-functional teams hosting and participating in more than two dozen events over the course of the year.

Project Convergence itself is expected to continue on an annual basis for several years.

“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,” Abadie said.

Wormuth said the ongoing Project Convergence experiments will likely come to an end, but for now they play an important role in helping the Army determine the direction it must take with future acquisitions, all while cementing the foundational nature of the network to Army operations.

The Army already has big plans for Project Convergence 2022, when it will bring coalition partners into the fold. International participation will likely focus on the military’s Five Eyes partners and expand from there. The members of that intelligence sharing alliance are the U.S., Australia, Canada, New Zealand and the United Kingdom.

Some have suggested Project Convergence could expand beyond America’s shores, with parts of the experiment taking place in theater.

But for the thousands of soldiers, engineers and technicians who’ve spent the last several weeks testing equipment in the hot Arizona sun, there’s no time to rest.

“PC22 starts tomorrow,” Murray said.

With the capital falling under Taliban control on Sunday, Aug. 15, hundreds of people rushed to the airport in hopes of securing a flight out of Afghanistan. Civilians flooded the tarmac, with some reports of deaths as individuals clung to aircraft during takeoff.

New satellite images from commercial provider Maxar Technologies show crowds gathering at the airport at 10:36 a.m. local time on Aug. 16. According to the company, one image shows a Turkish airliner preparing to takeoff while security forces attempt to hold back crowds from the active tarmac, preventing them from blocking flight operations. Other images show traffic jams as people flee to the airport, as well as huge crowds gathered on and around the tarmac.

Imagery company Planet also released two satellite images of the scene in Kabul taken 45 minutes apart, which show crowds arriving at the airport.

The Pentagon acknowledged Monday afternoon that flights out of Kabul had been grounded, as the military worked to clear people from the airstrip.

“We’ve certainly seen all the dramatic video coming from the airport today and we obviously don’t want anyone else to get hurt,” Pentagon spokesman John Kirby told reporters. “So we’re going to work methodically in coming hours to restore a safe and secure environment so that air operations can resume.”

The Army is keen to use the vantage of space to find and target beyond-line-of-sight (BLOS) threats. While satellite imagery has traditionally been a product of the intelligence community, the development of relatively affordable yet highly capable small satellites that can operate in low Earth orbit has convinced military leaders that it can play a tactical role on the battlefield. In a demonstration last fall, the Army was able to show that it could take images from satellites on orbit down to Earth, process them with artificial intelligence to find threats, and deliver targeting data to weapon systems in about 20 seconds. That speed is opening a whole slew of possibilities to commanders, enabling them to “see” further down the battlefield in near real time than ever before.

That demonstration used images from commercial satellite constellations, but now the Army has its own trio of imagery satellites to further develop this capability. The Army’s Gunsmoke-J program has launched three cubesats to use “emerging advanced electronics to allow the use of dedicated intelligence assets to provide tactically actionable targeting data to war fighters on a responsive and persistent timeline,” according to an annual budget proposal. Gunsmoke-J is a Joint Capability Technology Demonstration conducted by the Army Space and Missile Defense Command and Assured Position Navigation and Timing/Space Cross Functional Team.

The program was initially slated to be completed in 2019, but rideshare delays pushed the launch date to this year. While the first satellite in the Gunsmoke-J program was launched and deployed in March by Rocket Lab, the final two cubesats were placed into orbit on June 30. All three took somewhat different paths into space. The second satellite launched aboard a Cygnus cargo resupply mission to the International Space Station back in February. However, the Gunsmoke-J payload wasn’t deployed until shortly after the Cygnus spacecraft departed the station at the end of June.

Meanwhile, the third satellite was launched into space aboard a Virgin Orbit LauncherOne rocket, designed to launch in air off a modified 747 aircraft. The mission departed from the Mojave Air and Space Port in California before flying out over the Pacific Ocean to launch the rocket, which then carried the cubesat to its destination orbit — about 300 miles above the Earth’s surface.

“This deployment and same day launch of two separate Gunsmoke-J satellites is a major step toward demonstrating what we believe will be enabling tactical warfighter capability,” said Wheeler “Chip” Hardy, division chief, USASMDC Technical Center Space Directorate’s Space Applications Division. “We are excited to be at this point after five years of development. This is the culmination of a lot of hard work by a lot of people to get to this point. We look forward to the verifying demonstrations and a possible future transition of the technology to the tactical forces.”

According to the Army’s annual budget request, the satellites will complete a number of on-orbit demonstrations in 2021, culminating in a military utility assessment. Gunsmoke-J will then be transitioned to an Army program of record.

“We are very excited because now we can begin our checkout and mission operations as our work is part of a science and technology demonstration effort,” said Gunsmoke Deputy Program Manager Rebecca Nagurney. “If the Gunsmoke experiments are successful, then this work could lead to future systems, which would enhance long-range precision fires in support of the war fighter.”

The satellite, the first heavy national security payload with a cost-saving reusable booster, had a 12,550-mile journey with an onboard liquid apogee engine to reach its orbit. It will go through two weeks of on-orbit testing and checkout, and is expected to enter operational use in a few months, where it’s advanced capabilities will contribute to the full GPS constellation.

The launch from Cape Canaveral on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket happened only seven months after the last launch of a GPS III satellite, an accelerated timeline that the Space Force said shows its progress in speeding up launches in order to respond to potential threats quickly.

The reusable booster, a first for a National Security Space Launch, saved the government $64.5 million, according to the Space Force.

“Today’s launch culminated our work to use previously-flown hardware for NSSL missions,” said Walter Lauderdale, who leads the Space and Missile Systems Center’s Falcon work. “Our partnership with SpaceX enabled us to complete this huge milestone well in advance of our first Phase 2 NSSL launch, enhancing flexibility and resiliency for National Security Space missions.”

Space Force officials hailed the event as further progress in its ability to quickly launch new satellites into orbit.

“This successful launch occurred just seven months after SV04 and the team worked concurrent operations between both SVs during the dynamic situation presented by COVID-19,” said Cordell DeLaPena Jr., the program executive officer for SMC’s Space Production Corps.

The Lockheed Martin-built GPS III satellites offer advanced capabilities over their predecessors, offering three times as much accuracy and eight times the anti-jamming capability. GPS III satellites can transmit M-code, a more secure anti-jamming positioning signal for military use. The fifth GPS III satellite is the 24th space vehicle in the constellation that is enabled with M-code and the last one needed to achieve full operational capability for the space segment. The military still has work to do to make M-code available through ground systems and other equipment.

The Army Project Director for Sensors — Aerial Intelligence awarded other transaction authority contracts on June 11 to both L-3 Communications Integrated Systems and Raytheon Applied Signal Technology. The OTA agreements, subject to less stringent competitive requirements to speed up prototyping, are valued at $4.37 million over an eight-month period in phase 1, but the overall project could ultimately net the companies $49 million during the life of the project.

With the phase 1 awards, each company will develop, build and integrate a suite of electronic intelligence and communications intelligence sensors for the airborne ISR platform called High Accuracy Detection and Exploitation System, or HADES. While the Army has not settled on what platform will host the sensor system, it is currently envisioned as a manned fixed-wing jet that can operate “at altitudes and ranges beyond those of existing platforms,” including the Enhanced Medium Altitude Reconnaissance and Surveillance System, Guardrail’s King Air, and Airborne Reconnaissance Low DHC-8, according to a spokesperson for the aerial intelligence project director. HADES is a joint effort between that office — which is acquiring the sensors — and Project Manager Fixed Wing, which is developing the aircraft.

“The Army is pursuing HADES to address the demands of future Multi-Domain Operations (MDO) against peer- and near-peer adversaries,” said Project Director Dennis Teefy in a statement. “The goal is to provide deep-sensing intelligence collection of indicators and warnings, electronic order of battle, and patterns of life for target development. This will allow stand-off operations to detect, locate, identify and track critical targets for the ground commander.”

HADES is just one piece of the Army’s Multi-Domain Sensing System program, an effort to fill the Army’s deep sensing requirement with a number of sensors that can work with any platform. The family of systems will include several high altitude platforms, including balloons, solar gliders, small satellites and aircraft. While the sensors in this contract are specifically for HADES, the Army expects that they can be applied to other platforms due to open standards engineering practices, said a PD SAI spokesperson.

Phase 1 of the HADES OTA will include sensor demonstrations under controlled conditions, followed by a down-select to one or two vendors for phase 2, which will include design modifications, upgrades and prototype fabrication. Further phases will finalize prototype design and integrate it onto an aircraft platform selected by PM Fixed Wing.

American war fighters rely on a mix of commercial and government-owned satellites for global communications, but that infrastructure begins to run a bit thin above 65 degrees North. Satellite availability above the 70-degree line is extremely limited, leaving U.S. forces and sensors in the Arctic with far less connectivity than the rest of the military.

But a new generation of low Earth orbit satellites designed to deliver commercial broadband could help fill that gap. Using constellations comprising hundreds of satellites, services like SpaceX’s Starlink and OneWeb are being built out to provide internet access to any location on Earth from orbit.

Last year, NORTHCOM and North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD) asked Congress for $130 million in their unfunded priority list — essentially a wish list of items that didn’t fit into the Pentagon’s annual budget request — to explore using those two constellations for Arctic communications. That funding enabled contract awards to SpaceX and OneWeb for full-scale testing.

Now, NORAD and NORTHCOM Commander Gen. Glen VanHerck requested $79.8 million in his FY22 unfunded priority list obtained by C4ISRNET to continue that effort — that’s about $30 million less than the commands expected to spend in FY22, according to their FY21 request. They would use the funding to test new terminal prototypes that can connect with multiple commercial constellations, a capability laid out in the Space Force’s Fighting SATCOM Vision.

Long term, NORTHCOM suggested that this investment could encourage companies to develop more polar coverage with their communications satellite constellations.

According to the unfunded priority list, SpaceX launched 10 Starlink satellites into polar orbit in January, and plans to launch over a hundred more this summer. OneWeb told C4ISRNET in May that it had launched 182 satellites with plans to deliver Arctic coverage by the end of 2021. That’s in line with VanHerck’s letter, where he said he expects 24/7 Arctic coverage provided by multiple commercial providers around January 2022. The general noted that additional funding will be needed in FY23 and beyond for commercial service contracts and terminals.

Defense News reporter Joe Gould contributed to this report.

The Defense Advanced Research Project Agency is looking to transfer the technology to a program of record through various service acquisitions programs, the office announced June 7.

The Mobile Force Protection program is designed to defeat drone intrusions over military installations and convoys using small unmanned aircraft. Using an X band radar, MFP automatically detects and identifies potential threats, then selects the appropriate interceptor to respond with. The system has a few different small drones it can send out, including rotary and fixed-wing interceptors. The primary interceptor tool is the one that shoots the streamers to gum up the works of other drones.

The entire process is designed to work without operator intervention.

“Because we were focusing on protecting mobile assets, the program emphasized solutions with a small footprint in terms of size, weight, and power,” said MFP program manager Gregory Avicola of DARPA’s Tactical Technology Office. “This also allows for more affordable systems and less operators.”

Dynetics was the primary systems integrator for MFP.

DARPA received $12 million in fiscal 2020 and $4.3 million in fiscal 2021 for the program. The agency is not seeking more funding in FY22, signaling the end of the development project.

The program, which launched four years ago, successfully demonstrated its ability to intercept a drone during recent tests at Eglin Air Force Base, Florida. Watch MFP in action below: