Col. Nicholas Dvonch, division artillery commander, and Chief Warrant Officer 2 Trenton Huntsinger spoke with Army Times recently about the progress of the division’s experiment.

The soldiers have taken passive sensors — the size of a baseball home plate — and mounted them on armored vehicles to detect enemy drones and pass that information back to their air defense element.

That’s created an air picture 3.5 kilometers in front of them, giving the vehicles about a 45-second warning for their airspace, Huntsinger said.

“I see every implement you’re going to fly at me,” Huntsinger said. “Creating a 45-second buffer, directed energy, microwave, lead in the air — whatever we need to shoot those down.”

The move is restoring fires and maneuver on the offense, Dvonch said.

Now they’re figuring out the data transport problem, bringing the information into a command-and-control system not only to detect but to also engage any objects in the airspace as they move, Dvonch said.

“When you can see all enemy air tracks at the same time to create a common air picture, adjacent units can see what’s happening to your left and right,” Dvonch said.

The next steps will include linking kinetic and nonkinetic systems to the loop to strike those enemy drones.

Soldiers will test radio frequency detection to drive systems on the M1 Abrams to turn on other systems, activating sensors for 15 seconds at a time. But it will be autonomous, with no human needing to touch the system, according to Huntsinger.

“Once this is successful, we’ll do the same thing with a camera,” Huntsinger said. “An infrared camera on the move to lock on. If I can do that, then I can get a kinetic weapon system to lock on.”

The goal is to engage any threat up to one kilometer away.

“If you’re a tank crew and we’ve done our job, then you have a method to detect and defend against group I drones,” Dvonch said, referring to the military’s grouping of the smallest drones.

The M7 and M250, both of which fire a new 6.8mm-caliber round, are the Army’s replacements for the M4 and M249 Squad Automatic Weapon, respectively, among the close combat force.

Col. Jason Bohannon, program manager for soldier lethality at Program Executive Office Soldier, told Army Times in a recent interview that in addition to ongoing fielding of the weapons systems, some are already having upgrades applied.

The platforms will soon field a new suppressor, for example, that comes equipped with a heat shield. Additionally, improved slings and a new buttstock are on the way, each item developed based on soldier feedback.

Also under development is a carbine version of the M7, which weighs about the same as its M4 predecessor — just over 6 pounds.

So far, more than 2,000 M7 rifles and over 900 M250 automatic rifles have been fielded to units.

One unit to recently field the new weapons was the Minnesota Army National Guard’s 34th Infantry Division, which received some of the first M250s ever issued to the Guard.

Col. John McRae, who oversees training statewide for the Guard, told Army Times that the fielding was a notable example of the total force working together.

“The squad is now a more lethal organization because they have the M250,” McRae said. “They can multiply the effects of the squad on the battlefield, engage high-value targets and at a greater range than before.”

The Army Marksmanship Unit’s Instructor Training Group conducted the new equipment training for soldiers, emphasizing fundamental marksmanship but also guiding users on the new optic.

“The optic ensures every soldier has the capability to make first-round hits at distance, whether in single shot or burst,” Sgt. 1st Class Chuck Riegel, ITG’s primary instructor said in a release. “And the cartridge’s terminal performance is incredible — it will defeat pretty much anything they come across.”

Program Manager Soldier Lethality also joined Guard personnel in the fielding.

Sgt. 1st Class Karl Nelson fired the weapon as part of the fielding and said it was a far superior system when comparing it to the M249.

“It just shows that the Minnesota Guard is at the forefront of the Army force, not just the Guard,” Nelson said.

Having the new M250 automatic rifle, meanwhile, helps soldiers continue to maintain overmatch at all levels, McRae said, adding that getting a new weapon such as the M250 ahead of even active duty units was a big shot in the arm for soldier morale.

The move shows that expectations meet reality for guardsmen who join to deploy and conduct real-world training and missions, he noted.

“The first shots will be fired in the cyber domain,” said Maj. Gen. Jake Kwon, director of strategic operations for the Army’s Office of the Deputy Chief of Staff. “The Army has to think differently, and we have to fight faster.”

Kwon spoke Tuesday alongside Lt. Gen. Jeth Rey, deputy chief of staff G-6, and Brandon Pugh, principal cyber advisor to the secretary of the Army, at the annual Association of the U.S. Army conference in Washington.

To move faster on cyber, Kwon said several initiatives must be met. First on the list is artificial intelligence-driven mission command, with the top goal to achieve decision dominance.

Using AI will be critical to operate at the speed needed to react to cyber threats, Kwon said.

Next is pushing commanders to see a data-centric Army, treating data as a strategic asset. Kwon likened data to the new ammunition, both critical pieces of the larger warfighting puzzle.

Third is that training must evolve beyond linear scenarios and move into a contested environment, and leaders must push units to outpace the enemy in their battlefield actions.

Lastly, Kwon noted that with the division as the new unit of action in the Army’s plans for large-scale combat operations, much experimenting will happen at that level. As a division goes into the dirt at one of the combat training centers, cyber work will feature prominently in what leaders will learn from each rotation.

Pugh warned that commanders can’t see cyber as an isolated capability performed by certain cyber commands or units. Division and corps commanders have access to these tools and must use them in conjunction with other assets, such as electronic warfare, he said.

Rey tied together the non-kinetic nature of the fight, noting that units must be able to fight from their forts to their ports, all of which will require resilient cyber capabilities and practices.

However, the Naval Systems Command, or NAVSEA, strategy states the Navy must stay on schedule with maintenance to keep the service’s vessels seaworthy and combat-ready.

The new strategy, released Jan. 13, is key to Chief of Naval Operations Adm. Lisa Franchetti’s ambitious goal of having 80% of the fleet ready to deploy at any given time by 2027.

On average, Navy ships remain in dry dock for up to one year, said Vice Adm. Jim Downey, NAVSEA commander, in a Jan. 16 panel at the Surface Navy Association’s symposium near Washington, Defense One reported.

If the new strategy is effective, that yearlong wait could be cut by two-thirds or more, meaning a 100- to 150-day wait for ship repairs, according to Downey, who guided the plan’s development.

That’ll mean extensive planning for work scope, what materials are available and ready for use and building a ready workforce at the same time, said George Whittier, CEO of ship engine company Fairbanks Morse, said on the panel, according to Defense One.

The NAVSEA “Enterprise Strategy” will address five core “lines of effort,” according to the service’s release:

• Accelerate force generation to deliver ships and combat systems.
• Generate readiness to maintain, modernize and sustain platforms.
• Generate, capture and use data to drive innovation.
• Strengthen the Navy team by attracting, retaining and growing the NAVSEA workforce.
• Strengthen the foundation, enhancing NAVSEA critical infrastructure.

“CNO depends on the NAVSEA enterprise to get the Navy’s ships, and their warfighting systems designed, delivered, maintained, and sustained to meet global national security requirements,” Downey said in the release. “So, NAVSEA is accelerating efforts to put more players on the field — that is, platforms, ready with the right capabilities, weapons, and sustainment support.”

The Navy has faced years of maintenance backlogs and ship shortages. In December, the Government Accountability Office found that a shortage of amphibious warfare ships has hindered various Marine deployment and training plans, Marine Corps Times previously reported. From 2011 to 2020, only 46% of the Navy’s amphibious class of ships were available at any given time, according to the government watchdog.

GAO recommended the Navy refine ship availability, build a joint-service plan, update the service’s ship maintenance policies and establish performance goals for implementing the amphibious readiness review recommendations GAO provided.

“Nothing was off the table when we started this process last May,” Downey said of the Navy’s five-part plan.

Downey, who took command of NAVSEA in January 2024, formed a Commander’s Action Group and a Force Improvement Office to have closer management of command priorities and enhance personnel skills and capabilities. The command also restructured its operational centers, according to the release.

In another organizational move, the command “decoupled” positions for its Supervisor of Shipbuilding, Conversion and Repair, or SUPSHIP, and its Industrial Operations, or SEA 04, according to the release. That allows the individual heads of the two areas for a more focused approach to their core duties.

“With more than 90 ships under contract, SUPSHIP has an expansive level of responsibility,” said Downey. “This new realignment puts SUPSHIP in a better position to oversee and administer the Navy’s new construction programs across the directorate.”

The Terrestrial Layer System-Brigade Combat Team Manpack, or TLS BCT, is being fielded to the service’s three “Transformation in Contact” brigades. The Army selected the brigades to receive new commercial equipment, expert training and a series of experiments while preparing for operational deployments.

But soldiers shouldn’t worry — every brigade will receive the TLS BCT.

“The system is going to be deployed to every brigade combat unit in the Army,” said Ken Strayer, program manager for Electronic Warfare and Cyber in an Army release.

Officials intend to field the TLS BCT Manpack to up to two brigade combat teams a month over the next three years, according to the release.

TLS BCT is a configurable radio system that can survey radio frequencies, collect signals, perform direction-finding operations, detect electromagnetic attacks and visualize electromagnetic spectrum (EMS) data.

The Army awarded a nearly $100 million contract to Mastodon Design, a CACI subsidiary, to build, field and train soldiers on the system in July, according to an Army release.

Brig. Gen. Ed Barker, head of Program Executive Office-Intelligence, Electronic Warfare and Sensors, laid out some ways in which commanders might use electronic warfare equipment on a panel at the annual Association of Old Crows Annual Symposium in National Harbor, Maryland, on Thursday.

“To help that commander see what they look like within the [electromagnetic spectrum],” Barker said. “What do they need to control?”

Barker also discussed the suite of electronic warfare capabilities in his PEO portfolio, including the recently fielded TLS BCT and the future TLS Echelons Above Brigade, or TLS EAB, under development.

The systems will allow soldiers to conduct both signals intelligence and electronic detection and attack in one package.

“It’s providing them the ability to understand and affect in the [electromagnetic spectrum] environment,” Barker said.

In an Army release, Col. Leslie Gorman, Army Capability Manager — Electronic Warfare director, described the TLS BCT as a smaller and lighter version of a similar device first used by Army special operations forces.

The three “Transformation in Contact” brigades now putting TLS BCT through its paces are the 2nd Light Brigade Combat Team, 25th Infantry Division in Hawaii; the 2nd Brigade, 10th Mountain Division at Fort Drum, New York; and the 2nd Brigade, 101st Airborne Division at Fort Campbell, Kentucky.

Traditionally, the military often withdraws units from operations to field, test and implement new equipment and tactics. The “Transformation in Contact” approach seeks to continuously improve equipment fielding and adoption as the modern battlefield rapidly transforms.

The 101st Brigade conducted their rotation at the Joint Readiness Training Center, Fort Johnson, in late August. In October, the Hawaii brigade did its Joint Pacific Multinational Readiness Center at home.

The 10th Mountain brigade is slated for an overseas rotation next year in which its members will use the TLS BCT.

Two of the brigades already have the gear, according to the release, with the third to receive it soon. Officials did not specify which brigades had the equipment.

All three will provide feedback from experiences “in the box” at the combat training center rotations and on real-world deployments back to the developers. That feedback is expected to help improve the equipment as the service upgrades it and fields new versions continually across the Army.

The 3rd Infantry Division’s network operations and security cell remained at Fort Stewart, Georgia, in July, covering the first 1st Armored Brigade Combat Team’s cyber 6 as the Raider Brigade conducted a two-week rotation at the National Training Center, Fort Irwin, California.

Army officials believe that such remote cyber protection will be critical to units using cloud-dependent systems on missions, systems increasingly being fielded to the force.

The division cell’s oversight of Internet firewalls, sensors and scanners for a unit more than 2,300 miles away occurred during one of the brigade’s most demanding rotations to date.

Brigade soldiers fought across 120 miles during their time at the center, Maj. Gen. Chris Norrie, 3rd ID commander, said Wednesday at the Maneuver Warfighter Conference at Fort Moore, Georgia.

The brigade conducted five force-on-force operations, a full live-fire attack into a hasty defense and seized 20 objectives, Norrie said.

“That’s a really demanding pace and scale for an armor brigade, but it is consistent with what we might expect if we had to go fight large-scale ground formations,” Norrie said.

The cyber soldiers back in Georgia detected 17 million digital threats and manually investigated more than 3,000 alerts as they supported the brigade, according to a division statement.

“We took a capability that was being underutilized at the brigade level and brought up the ability to provide a cyber defense to any of our units,” said Chief Warrant Officer 2 Gregory Hazard, who heads the unit’s Cybersecurity Operations Center.

Hazard stressed that the remote cell was still in the “proof of concept stage” but the division has already heard from other divisions interested in how they can replicate the concept.

Brigade commander Col. Jim Armstrong spoke Thursday at the conference, noting how current adversary threats in cyber and other areas are forcing units to adapt.

“We must not cede this freedom of maneuver,” Armstrong said in a statement to Army Times. “We must re-create maneuver space in multiple domains to maintain our capacity to kill the enemy.”

The division was the first in the Army to receive a slew of upgrades in 2022, including new Joint Light Tactical Vehicles, new maintenance and diagnostic tools, the M109A7 Paladin howitzer, the M2A4 Bradley Fighting Vehicles and the M1A2 Sepv3 Abrams tank.

At the time, the division also tested the new Armored Multi-Purpose Vehicle, which it has since fielded and it was the first brigade to deploy a full complement to the training center, Armstrong said.

Armstrong shared other highlights from the rotation.

The division conducted the first heavy Immediate Response Package since 2003, a scalable, combat-ready force ready for short or no-notice deployment, Armstrong said.

That package includes a company’s worth of Bradleys, JLTVs, tracked maintenance vehicles, fuelers, cargo trucks and about 60 soldiers.

Deploying the response package required C-17 Globemaster plane transports that landed at airstrips meant to replicate real-world remote locations rather than a standard airport.

The combination of new equipment and cyber protection helped the brigade conduct the first successful armored brigade combined arms breach of an urban site at nighttime in more than 20 years, Armstrong said.

This brave new world in Army electronic warfare was on display recently during the 2nd Brigade, 101st Airborne Division’s rotation this month at the Joint Readiness Training Center.

The U.S. military in general, from the Pentagon to each service branch, is prioritizing such capabilities, both how to use artificial intelligence and drones and how to defend against an enemy using the same technology.

During the 101′s recent rotation, soldiers used a new app called “Shrike,” which identifies targets with minimal information and spits out a ready-to-go, call-for-fire mission.

The app is the brainchild of Army Futures Command, featuring software that uses an artificial intelligence capability mounted on any fielded drone. Each drone’s small circuit board draws on a large-language model backbone.

Soldiers flew the drone with the attached device and software over their enemy’s motor pool to scan their adversary’s vehicles.

Once data has been processed, a subsequent flight can identify a netted and camouflaged vehicle from an exposed wheel, bumper or part of a windshield and recognize what kind of vehicle it is, said Maj. Gen. Brett Sylvia, 101st Airborne Division commander.

The program then generates a call-for-fire mission automatically for the human user to approve or disapprove.

But the application has another layer.

Once the fire mission is complete, the drone can scan the area immediately, conduct a battle damage assessment and generate another fire mission to destroy the target, Sylvia said.

The Army standard is five to eight minutes to identify and get rounds on target in a traditional fire mission, though some take as long as 15 minutes, the two-star said, but 101st soldiers using this software have done so in less than a minute.

More tech tricks are in the toolkit of soldiers headed to training and deployment as part of the Army’s Transformation in Contact, an effort focused on injecting five years’ worth of modernization into three separate brigade combat teams, including brigades from the 101st, the 25th Infantry Division and the 10th Mountain Division.

The Army’s professional opposition force, or “enemy” troops, in combat training center rotations such as the one here use homemade sensors to detect an electromagnetic “reading” or “snapshot” of the Army units they fight.

During this August rotation, the 101st took some notes and brought their own sensors, drones and even homemade decoys. Soldiers took $30 circuit boards and used them as decoys to mimic electronic signatures with fake names such as “command post laptop” or “Garmin smartwatch,” tricking the adversary into thinking that what they’re scanning is an actual headquarters.

In one of the first fights, soldiers mimicked the electronic signature of their own command post using these decoys and placed the decoys in the opposite direction of their actual command post.

The trick worked.

“The enemy spent 50% of their artillery against the dirt, where we had those decoys,” 2nd Brigade commander Col. James Stultz told reporters here.

The brigade brought 250 such decoys with it on its 500-mile air assault from Fort Campbell, Kentucky, down to Louisiana for the training, he said.

And even in new-era training, the enemy learns too, pushing the soldiers to play a kind of cat-and-mouse game with the enemy’s reconnaissance drones.

During the first week of the exercise, an enemy drone locked onto the brigade’s mobile, Humvee-based command post.

Soldiers with the brigade set up a kind of invisible “net” of counter-drone defense gear and tried to lure the enemy drone into the “net” using their command post as bait.

The colonel said they didn’t trap the drone, but the soldiers did manage to shake the drone off the Humvee’s tail and avoid a strike that would have taken out the headquarters.

In early August, the 2nd Brigade, 101st Airborne Division out of Fort Campbell, Kentucky, conducted a 500-mile air assault from their home station to the Joint Readiness Training Center. On Aug. 22, the brigade launched a large-scale combat maneuver using novel approaches, homegrown technology and smaller headquarters.

The brigade is one of three currently experimenting with various tech, from electromagnetic spectrum tools and hide, decoy or detect signatures to counter-drone capabilities and nimble, small-footprint command posts running operations — which once took 60 troops — with only eight soldiers.

The two additional brigades, the Hawaii-stationed 2nd Brigade, 25th Infantry Division and the Fort Drum, New York-based 3rd Brigade, 10th Mountain Division are in earlier stages of developing such tech, with combat training center rotations planned for later this year and early 2025.

By this time next year, other brigades within these brigades’ divisions could see formations transform, with new tech at their fingertips for a “fight tonight” scenario, Army Chief of Staff Gen. Randy George said.

The Army’s efforts to transform the entire combat force over the next five years are expected to yield tangible results in the next year among those three brigades, added Maj. Gen. Brett Sylvia, commander of the 101st Airborne Division.

It’s all part of a larger initiative, announced in 2023, called “Transformation in Contact.” The effort puts soldiers at the center of solving tactical problems at the brigade level and below.

Many assets formerly part of the brigade-centric fight are now going to be the division level, which Army leaders say will lighten the operational burden on brigades, freeing them to do what brigades are supposed to do: destroy things.

The 101st is working with the Mobile Brigade Combat Team concept, which centers mobility around the infantry squad vehicle, said Capt. Charles O’Hagan, company commander for the brigades recon company.

That simple adjustment allowed a newly formed brigade reconnaissance company to go into the wood line Aug. 14 and work through Aug. 23 without the need for resupply, O’Hagan said. A dismounted company would require resupply in half that time.

In recent years, the Army has sought to shrink command posts for brigades and divisions, getting away from bulky, multivehicle convoys with massive radar dishes, antenna farms and tents that took hours to set up.

Army leaders point to Ukraine as a real-world example. Russian forces got bogged down early in the war and saw hundreds of operational commanders killed as Ukrainian troops employed simple signals intelligence detection and strike methods with drones and other cheap devices.

But even getting to the fight requires reconfiguring the way brigades have approached maneuver for more than 20 years.

A Global War on Terror-era brigade would hold about 4,300 soldiers. That number now sits at 3,000.

Sylvia said the division command elements of the Fort Campbell brigade performed mobile strike missions requiring 76 aircraft to haul more than 2,000 soldiers and 252 pieces of equipment across more than 500 miles on two avenues of approach. That maneuver necessitated at least two refueling points before troops hit the ground at 14 different landing zones.

Another 700 soldiers were needed to manage the forward area refueling points along the route from Fort Campbell to Fort Johnson, he said.

The 500-mile mark is key, Sylvia added. If the Army can strike from that distance, they can strike nearly any important feature of Russia, China, Iran or North Korea from regional installations.

The division practiced this sort of long-range assault in January using legacy gear and approaches, the two-star said.

“What we found was a huge disconnect between the brigade and its ability to communicate, and between the division and the brigades to be able to control those formations,” Sylvia said.

In their follow-up exercise, the brigade was able to use commercial tech, two avenues of approach and refueling points to better manage movement, Sylvia said.

“Our forward area refueling points are the lifeblood of this division,” Sylvia said.

Combat aviation brigade must be available to each brigade commander but coordinated by the division to be effective in moving all elements.

Moving assets to the division has streamlined the brigade, reducing time for many functions and allowing more creative tactics in combat training.

Soldiers now operate from four Humvees, one infantry squad vehicle and a 200-square-foot command post with smaller, distant antenna cluster. This replaces the previous 600-square-foot command post with an antenna farm and eight-plus vehicles and trailers.

Chief Warrant Officer 2 Vidal Perez, who works communication for 2nd Brigade’s command post, said setup and teardown used to take 30 to 45 minutes, which often meant colocating antennas with the command post — a setup that emitted a large signal for anyone looking to strike the brigade’s headquarters.

Now, with everything running on a cloud network and using commercial satellite technology, setup and teardown take just 10 to 20 minutes, Perez said.

Perez’s team have even set up “decoy” command posts by using commercially purchased circuit cards and power supplies, labeling them as 2nd Brigade Command Post and other names and dumping them in clusters in the woods for the opposition to detect and strike.

And when they strike, they reveal their positions for a counterattack.

In October, the 2nd Brigade, 25th Infantry Division is slated for its own test with a rotation through the Joint Pacific Multinational Readiness Center in Hawaii.

That validation event will provide lessons for the future brigades. The 3rd Brigade, 10th Mountain Division is set for a combat training center rotation in 2025.

As the three brigades share lessons from their experiments, Army senior leaders will evaluate their adjustments over the coming year. Successful outcomes are expected to spread across other brigades within their respective divisions, George said.

How Army unit composition has evolved

Looking at the differences between the Army’s pre-2004 division-centric setup, its post-GWOT brigade-centric construction and its 2030 construct, unit composition looks like the following:

Pre-2004 division-centric

• Three infantry brigades
• Two combat aviation brigades
• Sustainment brigade
• Artillery brigade
• Support command
• Signal battalion
• Air defense artillery battalion
• Military intelligence battalion
• Engineer battalion

GWOT brigade-centric

• Four infantry brigades
• Two combat aviation brigades
• Division sustainment brigade
• Division artillery brigade
• Special troops battalion

New division 2030 working construct

• Three mobile brigade combat teams
• One combat aviation brigade
• Division sustainment brigade
• Division artillery brigade
• Signal battalion
• Military intelligence battalion
• Engineer battalion
• Mobile protected firepower battalion
• Counter drone battery

CORRECTION: This article has been updated to correctly identify the brigade from 10th Mountain Division that is participating in the Army’s Transforming in Contact experiments.

The XVIII Airborne Corps, which commands the 82nd Airborne Division, 10th Mountain Division, 101st Airborne Division and 3rd Infantry Division, along with other subordinate units, kicked off the targeting system experiments, dubbed Scarlet Dragon, in late 2020, Army Times previously reported.

Since going through at least 10 iterations, with more planned in the coming months and years, the command has developed the Maven Smart System, a combination of sensors and software that allows users to quickly assess a battlespace, gather reams of data and analyze that data using artificial intelligence and machine learning to identify targets and strike.

The evolution of that system was laid out Wednesday at the Armed Forces Communications and Electronics Association TechNet event in Augusta, Georgia.

“What we’re doing is different,” said Brig. Gen. John Cogbill, the deputy commanding general of the XVIII Airborne Corps at Fort Liberty, North Carolina. “This is a tool that we can ‘fight tonight’ with.”

In its first iteration in late 2020, the Scarlet Dragon experiment teamed soldiers from the XVIII Airborne Corps with Marines from II Marine Expeditionary Force. In the training, teams used commercial satellite imagery and an algorithm to identify an inflatable tank in the open on Fort Liberty. The system then passed that data to a Marine missile system, which struck the target.

The “digital target pass” took 743 minutes, or more than 12 hours, Cogbill said.

But in the ensuing years, and with additional tinkering, that target pass can now be completed in under one minute, he said.

The Scarlet Dragon and other technology initiatives began under former XVIII Airborne Corps commander Gen. Michael Kurilla, who went on to take charge of U.S. Central Command.

Cogbill said that back in 2020, Kurilla told his staff he wanted the first “AI-enabled Corps” in the Army. Once Kurilla transferred to lead CENTCOM, he installed a data-centric command approach that included using elements of the Maven system, Cogbill said.

An analysis report released this month by the nonprofit Center for Security and Emerging Technology highlighted some of Maven’s development as well as its use by operational units.

“The ultimate goal is for the system and soldiers to be able to help a commander process 1,000 tactical decisions an hour,” according to the CSET report.

Without Maven, “the firing process is manual and riddled with inefficiencies and the potential for errors,” the report’s authors wrote, “from collecting the data to processing it, seeking permission, matching munitions, and granting permission.”

The XVIII Airborne Corps managed to match the targeting prowess of the time-critical target cell used during Operation Iraqi Freedom, “widely viewed as the most efficient in U.S. military history,” the authors wrote.

But while the OIF targeting cell used more than 2,000 staffers to cover a wide area and numerous targets during the 2003 invasion, the current demonstration managed the same workload with 20 soldiers, the report said.

Experts within the XVIII Airborne Corps are exploring whether the AI and machine learning approach can also help other unit commanders better “see” and “sense” logistics needs, Cogbill said.

That effort would entail providing commanders with a global picture of their supply chains and ways to run scenarios that help them decide how logistics will affect operations.

Scarlet Dragon efforts continue, meanwhile, with an experiment scheduled for next month and a series of events throughout 2025, Cogbill said.

The system is expected make its large-scale Pacific debut during the Yama Sakura training exercise in late 2026, a U.S.-Japanese military command post exercise.

Deployed brigades will need to establish their networks quickly, work seamlessly with partner or ally networks and toggle between multiple options — from 5G to low-earth-orbit satellites — to maintain connectivity, officials said.

Some of that is already being done with the rotation of 2nd Brigade, 101st Airborne Division, at the Joint Readiness Training Center, or JRTC, at Fort Johnson, Louisiana.

Maj. Gen. Patrick Ellis, director of the Army Futures Command Cross Functional Team-Network, and Mark Kitz, program executive officer for the Army’s command, control and communications-tactical at Aberdeen Proving Ground, laid out work on both the current and future tactical communications network Wednesday at the Armed Forces Communications and Electronics Association TechNet event in Augusta, Georgia.

Ellis noted the four priorities for the Army’s network — survivability, interoperability, data-enabled and modular — are reflected in current training and experimentation.

The two-star observed this firsthand as deputy chief of staff for U.S. Army Europe and Africa. During his tenure, eight division staffs rotated through the theater to support operations in Ukraine, each bringing their own equipment and communications and configurations and quickly learning what worked.

As conditions changed, so did their approaches.

For example, early in the war, any use of a mobile phone would get the user killed. But now, mobile phones on the correct networks are the only way to “hide” in the electromagnetic spectrum, Ellis said. If a user keys up on any military network, the Russian military will strike nearly instantaneously.

A tool developed through network experimentation in Europe is now being used across the globe, Ellis said. Using radio data over an Internet protocol-style tool built by the 2nd Cavalry Regiment allowed users to speak English into the radio and have it translated to text in the target language on the other end.

Another change, Ellis noted, is that allies are investing in their own networks, defensive communications and protocols. So, instead of allies simply showing up with a device and jacking into the U.S. network, many now want to use their own networks, which requires further coordination.

“We’ve not been able to solve that yet,” Ellis said.

The Army’s C2 Fix program focuses on the current state of Army command and control systems. The Next Generation C2 may modify aspects of future communications architecture, Ellis and Kitz said.

Kitz said the Army expects the industry to have the opportunity to compete for the Next Generation C2 program by early 2026.

The 2nd Brigade rotation involved an air assault from Fort Campbell, Kentucky, to Fort Johnson, Louisiana, across nearly 500 miles, Kitz said. The unit maintained constant connectivity by using a combination of 5G commercial technology, satellite communication and tactical radios.

Beyond maintaining continuity, commanders are now able to leverage the vast troves of data the C2 program is putting at their fingertips, Kitz said.

This capability allows commanders to pull in live data from their own units along with adversary location, terrain, environment, weather history and doctrinal approach to query data.

“If I commit the reserve, what does this do to me three days from now?” Kitz said as an example. “If I move my fire support coordination line back, what does that do to my consumption rates?”

By running operational models quickly, a commander can more effectively evaluate an approach to mission sets or tactical problems, Kitz said.

“This allows the commander to look at this in real time,” Kitz said.

A basic awareness of the communications landscape is influencing commanders’ decisions, he said. For example, the brigade commander at JRTC brought a “whole bunch of (radio frequency) decoys” to conceal his command post.