Drones helping artillery locate targets.

A battlefield so flooded with sensors that it’s impossible to stay hidden for long.

Since Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022, the Army has carefully taken note of these trends. Now those changes are reshaping the service’s plans from acquisition to how to approach formations to reimagining logistics. Already, the Army has rethought its plans to modernize tanks and altering its strategies with drones.

“The character of war is changing,” Army Chief of Staff Gen. Randy George told Defense News in an interview ahead of the Association of the U.S. Army’s annual conference. “It’s changed more in the last couple of years because of the war in Ukraine. And I think it will continue to change at a very rapid pace and we have to have the mindset to change with it.”

Gen. James Rainey, who leads Army Futures Command, the service’s organization in charge of modernizing the force, said the service needs to adapt its artillery strategy based on both “what’s happening in Ukraine” as well as what U.S. Army Pacific requires from conventional fires.

“Everything we’re seeing in Ukraine [is] about the relevance of precision fires, all the emerging technology, but the big killer on the battlefield is conventional artillery, high-explosive artillery,” he said.

The U.S. Army plans to issue a new conventional fires strategy by the end of the year, he added.

Ukraine and Russia are locked in daily heavy artillery battles. The U.S. and its partners and allies have sent a wide variety of artillery weapons, including the High Mobility Artillery Rocket System, or HIMARS, and millions of rounds of ammunition to counter Russia’s firepower.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has credited HIMARS with making a “huge difference” in liberating critical areas of the country under Russian occupation.

The war in Ukraine has also made clear artillery is still critical, said retired Lt. Gen. Ben Hodges, who previously led U.S. Army Europe. A layered approach to artillery in formations — meaning using towed or mobile systems with different types of munitions that achieve different ranges — is required, he said.

The new artillery strategy will determine both the existing capability and capacity while also detailing future needs, Rainey said. The strategy will also consider new technology to enhance conventional fires on the battlefield, such as advances in propellant allowing midrange cannons to shoot as far as longer-range systems.

The document will also address the role of robotics, such as autoloaders for munitions. The Army has experimented with technology like autoloaders, which take a burden off of artillery operators and improve firing rates.

Army acquisition chief Doug Bush told Defense News in September the fires strategy will drive key decisions within his portfolio, including how to pursue the Extended Range Cannon Artillery requirement.

“The strategy is looking at a combination of factors,” Bush said. “Where do you need towed artillery versus perhaps tracked versus perhaps wheeled? What can you do with munitions to get range versus building new cannons?”

The Army is developing an Extended Range Cannon Artillery system that uses a service-built 58-caliber gun tube mounted on the chassis of a BAE Systems-made Paladin Integrated Management howitzer.

But the service in 2020 also assessed available 155mm mobile howitzers seeking improvements in range, rate of fire, and mobility over the artillery systems used within Stryker brigade combat teams. The Army evaluated at least four foreign companies’ offerings in a shoot-off, but ultimately did not move forward with a new capability.

A new artillery strategy could renew the push for rapid procurement of a field-proven 155mm mobile howitzer.

“Some of our NATO allies have some really good kit [and] capability that we’re interested in,” Rainey noted.

Bush recently visited 18th Airborne Corps, which consist of very light units and they “still value towed artillery, because they can move it around with helicopters. … But other parts of the Army might want something different,” he said.

Taking a new look at an off-the-shelf mobile howitzer is a part of the strategy’s purview, he noted. “From an acquisition standpoint, if I get a requirement, we’ve got some options to go pretty fast, if it is acceptable, for example, to take a foreign system rather than building a new one from scratch,” Bush said.

“The broad lesson is that you still need artillery. It is the No. 1 killer on the battlefield, still in this conflict [in Ukraine],” he said.

A fresh take on tanks

The Army in September, after watching loitering munitions destroy tanks in Ukraine and observing both sides struggle to maneuver tanks on the battlefield, opted to scrap its upgrade plan for the M1 Abrams tank and instead pursue a new variant: the M1E3.

The Abrams tank “can no longer grow its capabilities without adding weight, and we need to reduce its logistical footprint,” Maj. Gen. Glenn Dean, the Army’s program executive officer for ground combat systems, said in a statement at the time. “The war in Ukraine has highlighted a critical need for integrated protection for soldiers, built from within instead of adding on.”

The Abrams tank “with all its hood ornaments is already too heavy,” Hodges told Defense News. “Getting heavier is not the answer.”

Part of the new effort will take weight off the tank, increasing its mobility and sustainability. Today, if a tank breaks or gets hit in combat, it requires two recovery vehicles to pull it out of the fight. Reducing the tank’s weight would help, Dean said.

The new design is also intended to integrate active protection capability, including protection from attacks to the roof from loitering munitions and drones.

Dean told Defense News in a recent interview the new design will consider how to reduce the supply chain and make it easier to maintain the vehicle while on the battlefield. It will also improve reliability.

Ukraine has begun to receive its 31 M1 Abrams tanks from the U.S. military, and the U.S. Army is likely to soon learn more about how the tank holds up against the Russians, Dean said.

The tank “remains very, very relevant,” Army Secretary Christine Wormuth said at a recent think tank event. “The claims that we’re seeing the end of the value of tanks were a little bit premature.”

According to reports, in the first two months of the war, Russia lost well over 400 tanks, spurring a debate over whether tanks were too cumbersome for the modern battlefield.

Wormuth acknowledged munitions that can hit the top of armored vehicles and tanks remain a challenge and said “we are working to develop capabilities to defend against that.”

Dean, noting he could not discuss details, said the Army is working extensively on how to protect tanks and combat vehicles from loitering munitions. Loitering munitions regularly destroy tanks and combat vehicles on both the Ukrainian and Russian sides.

“We have got to get better at top-attack inbound defeat,” Rainey said at the AUSA Warfighter Summit in July. “It’s solvable.”

While the service has long focused on protecting combat vehicles from the side and has integrated Rafael’s Trophy active protection system on the M1 Abrams tank, the protection has decreased the tank’s mobility. The same problem applies to the APS kits, which provide protection from anti-tank weapons. The service has yet to field APS on either the Stryker combat vehicle or the Bradley infantry fighting vehicle.

Moving in minutes

The Army has long set up elaborate command posts on the battlefield, putting up climate-controlled tents equipped with generators. The service has said these tactical operations centers must get smaller, both in size and in electromagnetic signature.

But the war in Ukraine has put more pressure on the service to act.

“Gone are the days where you’re setting up a whole [tactical operations center]. And two hours is too much time,” George said. “We need to be able to move in minutes. We need to be able to command and control on the move.”

He noted the war has also proven the need for open architecture that is mobile and can be rapidly updated.

The Army “has to fix what it has and then pivot to what the C2 architecture is going to be in the future,” George added.

He told Defense News he was struck recently by watching a unit going through a large exercise and only relying on five Stryker combat vehicles and 35 people to provide command-and-control for the entire brigade combat team. The Strykers, equipped with commercial, off-the-shelf laptops, tablets and radios, never had to be together physically as they were connected through a network operating as one node, George said.

Wormuth also recalled a similar visit to a training rotation at Fort Johnson where a unit had designed its TOC to be “much more mobile” and could break down and set up within two hours.

“That’s definitely something that we’re going to be spending time on, developing the capabilities to do that,” she said.

Ukraine has taught the Army it is going to have to learn how to “fight under constant observation of commercially available space, the electromagnetic spectrum, social media,” Rainey said. “We are going to have to figure out how to fight when the enemy’s going to know where we are or prevent him; so concealment, deception, camouflage, constantly good tactics.”

Wormuth also noted the Army must be able to operate even if command posts are cut off due to failed signals or enemy jamming. The Army is experimenting in this type of environment regularly during events like Project Convergence, a large exercise focused on developing a modernized force.

Remote logistics

The U.S. quickly faced a challenge early in the war in Ukraine. It was sending complex equipment to Ukraine — but without the experienced maintainers to fix it.

From a parking lot in Poland just months after the war began, the U.S. Army started answering the call for help, offering remote maintenance support. Army maintainers virtually demonstrated maintenance to their Ukrainian counterparts.

Since then, the Army has expanded its use of remote maintenance support to nearly every platform sent to Ukraine, including those of allies and partners. The service built a facility and a repair parts warehouse in Poland and began offering expertise through text message, prerecorded video or live stream.

This effort is now providing a road map for future logistics. George said at a recent event Ukraine is changing how the service “is looking at things on the logistics side,” citing virtual maintenance and 3D printing of parts.

The Army now weighing how to apply tele-maintenance to the Indo-Pacific region, George told Defense News.

Additionally, the Army, watching Ukraine, is preparing for what it calls contested logistics, meaning its logistical efforts would be under constant attack.

“There’s been a theoretical recognition that logistics were going to be contested, but the Ukraine conflict, I think, has really made that very real to all of us,” Wormuth said at a recent event.

The Army has established a new cross-functional team for contested logistics under Army Futures Command focused on this challenge.

Preparing for the future

The war in Ukraine has, according to service leaders, validated many of the Army’s modernization priorities, laid out a little over five years ago.

The Army was already focused on countering unmanned aircraft systems because of operations in the Middle East and had set up a joint office at the Pentagon. The use of drones on the battlefield in Ukraine has accelerated efforts to come up with a layered approach to defeating the systems, both big and small.

“The scale of [drones on the battlefield] has been sort of astonishing and it has reinvigorated this focus on the lowest sort of short-range air defenses that would be needed for that,” Stacie Pettyjohn, a defense analyst at the Center for a New American Security, told Defense News.

And not all technology used to defeat drones needs to be exquisite. While the Army is working on directed-energy and high power microwave capabilities to defend against drone swarms, “you’re seeing that the Ukrainians need things like a smart shooter, a sight that they can put on a rifle that allows them to use [artificial intelligence]. It’s still pretty advanced, but it’s this tech that improves existing guns and allow them to take out some of the smallest quadcopters,” Pettyjohn said.

Formations may also need to change, Wormuth said. The Army “need[s] to probably have organic air defense with our fires in our maneuver units so that they can protect against drones.”

Air and missile defense for threats beyond drones is also receiving new attention. Russia has shown it will use multimillion dollar rockets and missiles against apartment buildings, Hodges said.

Wormuth said the Army is beginning to grow the air and missile defense force. The service is in the process of building an additional Patriot battalion, but it’s not dedicated to a specific combatant command yet. The Army also wants to grow additional Indirect Fire Protection Capability units as well, she noted.

These new units will be able to defend against cruise missiles and drones along with rockets, artillery and mortars at fixed and semi-fixed sites. The Army is still developing prototypes.

Having the ability to see or sense as much as possible at all times, is another way the Army is changing because of Ukraine. “There’s a lot of interest in drones to be able to provide us with [persistent sensing],” Wormuth told Defense News. “But we’re going to have a layered approach to that … we’re investing in the [High Accuracy Detection and Exploitation System], fixed-wing platform. … I think you’ll see aerostats.”

Drawing from Ukraine, “there’s no shortage of observations that we should think about,” Rainey said. And the Army is “committed to turning those observations genuinely into lessons learned.”

In its simplest iteration, digital engineering moves the design process from 2D blueprints to 3D virtual models, which can then be plugged into realistic simulations to test performance.

At the Association of the U.S. Army’s annual conference on Oct. 12, Army officials said they plan to use a digital engineering approach to develop the OMFV, which is being designed to replace the Bradley Infantry Fighting Vehicle.

“We intend to use digital engineering in a model-based environment, and that is in the next phase, phase 3, where we’re going to award those contracts to design vehicles. We’re currently working through exactly what that looks like, but we want to get to a cloud-based tech stack so we have the ability to get in there and take a look at the designs as they evolve in real time, and then take those designs and the data that comes with them and plug them into models and simulations so that we can run them while they’re still digital, and we can use that technique to avoid costly failures on a test range,” said James Schirmer, deputy director of the Program Executive Office for Ground Combat Systems.

While physical testing can’t be entirely eliminated, he added, digital testing can greatly reduce risk throughout the development process.

The Army is still working out how it will implement digital engineering. The service is looking at what cloud environment it will use, whether it wants the model to be hosted by the contractor or the Army, and what sort of contract language it will use.

“There are some hard questions that the Army has to decide early,” Schirmer said.

A draft request for proposals outlining the Army’s digital approach for the OMFV will be issued early next year.

While Schirmer said the third phase will mark the beginning of the service’s digital engineering efforts with the OMFV, the Army’s acquisition plan already uses digital concepts.

First, the Next Generation Combat Vehicle Cross-Functional Team backed off of its highly restrictive and specific requirements for the platform, replacing it with a far more flexible “characteristic of needs.” That enabled the five teams on contract — Point Blank Enterprises, Oshkosh Defense, BAE Systems, General Dynamics Land Systems and American Rheinmetall Vehicles — to innovate in developing products that will meet the Army’s needs.

“We just received concept deliveries from the five industry teams that are on contract. We’re taking the data from those, plugging them into models, and running them through some simulations to kind of see how they’re performance would be and what impact that would have on the battlefield,” Schirmer said.

Feedback from those simulations will enable the Army to refine requirements, setting up a full and open competition to select three contractors that will build actual prototypes.

“That’s different. That’s not the way we’ve done things in the past,” Schirmer said.

Maj. Gen. Ross Coffman, director of the Next Generation Combat Vehicle Cross-Functional Team, said that contracting with five teams to produce digital designs has allowed the Army to work more closely with the teams building out their designs than in some previous projects.

“Because they’ve been selected, we can have open, candid and honest one-on-one conversations. We can look them in the eye and say: ‘Hey, let’s explore this trade and see what that does to your vehicle design.’ ” Coffman explained.

If the current design phase was a competition, the Army would have to ensure its communications were uniform and universally shared, Coffman added.

Michael Cadieux, director of the Ground Vehicle Systems Center, said the Army also wants to use digital engineering to develop its robotic combat vehicle. Specifically, he said the service is looking at virtual environments to test and change the robotic system to ensure it works and meets the Army’s needs.

The Army isn’t the only Defense Department organization to embrace digital engineering, an approach that has seen various levels of adoption in the commercial world. In his 2020 digital engineering manifesto, former assistant secretary of the Air Force for acquisition, technology and logistics, Will Roper. said that only three programs within the military were fully digital: the T-7A Red Hawk aircraft, the Ground Based Strategic Deterrent weapon system and the Next Generation Air Dominance fighter.

In the year since, however, there’s been a massive uptick in the number of Pentagon-run digital engineering initiatives. While individual programs like the Missile Defense Agency’s Hypersonic and Ballistic Tracking Space Sensor have used digital engineering features, there have also been substantial servicewide efforts to push digital engineering throughout acquisitions. Specifically, the Space Force stated earlier this year that it wants to be the world’s first fully digital service, and it has begun to implement that vision.

Schirmer said the Army looked to the Air Force’s major digital engineering efforts to develop its own approach. That tour is helping the service determine issues like how big of a team it needs to implement a model-based systems engineering program.

The Army likely won’t get it exactly right on the first try, admitted Schirmer, but it would use contractors to fill gaps and adapt its processes over time.

“Senior leaders need to embrace that public-communication warfare is important, and then have the policies that provide the resources to equip our words warriors and our soldiers with what they need,” he said during a virtual presentation Oct. 15 as part of the Association of the U.S. Army’s annual meeting.

To quickly thwart and defeat adversarial messages and campaigns in the information space — which includes social media and, more broadly, the internet — the Defense Department must invest in its information professionals and their tools just as it does in updating its tanks and planes, the officer argued.

Caggins recently concluded a tour in the Middle East serving as the spokesman for the global coalition combating the Islamic Statet group in Iraq and Syria. At the AUSA event, he shared lessons learned about fighting in the information environment, which includes a host of both state and nonstate actors.

A video from his presentation pointed to Russia, which is involved in the Syrian conflict, as an example of a country that conducts maneuvers in the physical space to achieve goals in the information environment. He cited Russia’s seemingly adept assault on a U.S. base in Syria, which was abandoned the day prior. The assault was filmed and broadcast.

On the modern internet, messages — true or false — can rapidly spread across the globe, and once a narrative is established, countering it can be a challenge. U.S. officials have described how American adversaries are winning the propaganda battle for hearts and minds by making false or misleading claims, such as large-scale civilian casualties during U.S. airstrikes. By the time the U.S. military conducts a full-scale assessment of these incidents, the narrative has taken hold.

The video from Caggins’ presentation also said the coalition fighting ISIS competed in this dynamic information environment in several ways: It created a mindset to domination the information environment with weaponized truth; it used an audience-centric approach to reach the people of Iraq and northeastern Syria in their natural language and on regional networks; it built relationships with representatives from partner forces and with regional journalists to fight misinformation; and it talked to the public though the press and embedded media.

While the U.S. military has struggled adapting to this fast-paced, modern information space, one of the tactics that emerged from its efforts involves disclosing adversarial activity.

Caggins said in his experience, social media is the fastest way to distribute messages, but the most effective route to the general public is through the press.

“As the tweeter in chief for the coalition, I had around 100,000 followers who were built up over the years. It would reach regional audiences, but most importantly I was trying to reach the journalists who would follow me so they could share the information, reach their audiences, hundreds of millions, hypothetically, billions of people from those tweets,” he said.

As the U.S. military reorganizes and reorients to fight the information war, top officials have talked at length about the importance public affairs plays in the landscape aside other military capabilities like cyber, electronic warfare and intelligence.

Caggins agrees that public affairs activities should be more encouraged.

The Marine Corps, in its operating concepts for the information space, has purposely eschewed the term “information warfare,” opting for operations in the information environment. This is because the service wants to think more about the strategic communications aspect of it.

Caggins explained that soldiers on a patrol with cameras are essentially sensors, and that they should be allowed to post what they’re seeing — after a quick public affairs sanitation for operational security — because adversaries like Russia film everything they do.

“The Russians and other adversaries are filming everything that they do because they can’t afford some of the big-ticket programs and military items that we have. They know that information is much more influential often than large-scale military operations, kinetic activity, and they frequently don’t even have the capability to match us,” he said.

Caggins, also said the military has to give everyday foot soldiers and especially public affairs personnel the tools to upload content faster to compete in this environment.

“I’d like it if we, as an institution, as the government, formally amplified some of the social media that’s being done by our service members,” he said, adding that there should be more trust so military members can tell their stories.

He contrasted this approach with that of what the military traditionally does: spend billions of dollars on platforms and conduct operations to deter actions. “But how about we do simple things like just taking pictures of what we do and, more importantly, having our own service members and civilians tell their own story,” Caggins said.

Providing soldiers with the right camera gear and amplifying their messages is far less costly, he argued, and that can have a large impact. For example, Caggins said, following the Iranian missile attacks on U.S. bases in Iraq in January, combat camera soldiers took pictures of the damage that made it to Washington, impacting decisions made by top national leadership.

“Having a combat camera soldier there at Al Asad [Air Base] — even in a period where we’re reducing the number of U.S. troops on the ground — was essential,” he said.

The next step, according to Caggins, would be better Wi-Fi capabilities so troops can more quickly upload images, as there are areas where signals are limited or using the internet requires forces to pay out of pocket.

“We need to enable our words warriors to fight and win on the battlefield. No different than every few years the military will relook the rifles that our soldiers have, the optics that they have, will upgrade our tanks and helicopters,” Caggins said. “They need to be able to upload imagery anywhere in the world.”

“We have to have coders at the edge,” Brig. Gen. Ross Coffman, who led the Project Convergence campaign of learning over a six-week period from August into September, said Oct. 15. Coffman spoke as part of a C4ISRNET webcast at the Association of the U.S. Army’s conference.

“One of the success stories of Project Convergence was whenever we identified a problem with the code, a problem with an algorithm, we had — we called them the Pep Boys — and the Pep Boys were there coding into the night to fix problems every day,” Coffman said.

These coders at Yuma sat in 120 degree heat, with nothing more than a laptop and fan, he said.

“They were able to solve problems in hours because the engineers, scientists and soldiers were all together working on the same problem,” Coffman said. “We have to have that going forward.”

Tech-savvy soldiers will be critical on the future battlefield. “Now you hear ‘field-craft’ for soldiers out in the field, they really understand how to operate. You hear about tradecraft, a tanker on their tank, they really understand their tank,” Col. Rob Ryan, the deputy director in charge of Army network modernization, said during the same event. “We’ve got to incorporate into the lexicon the tech-craft piece as we modernize this Army.”

But what does having coders on the battlefield look like?

“We have mechanics across the battlefield at echelon,” Coffman said. “Do we want a coder with the forward line of troops? Probably not. But not far back from that. We need to understand so that we don’t have the burden of this long misunderstood problem that we’re trying to solve.”

Whether that is at the battalion, brigade or division level is “yet to be determined,” he said, adding: “At a minimum, division-level and below, should have coders there in uniform, not contractors, fixing the computer problems that we have, the computing problems that we have, the communication problems that we have, the aided target recognition problems that we have because the enemy will evolve, they will change and if we don’t have the rapid capability to correct or to counteract what the enemy’s trying to do to us, well, then they’re going to be able to make decisions faster than us and that is totally unacceptable.”

When dealing with a “living, breathing, thinking threat, we have to provide capability that can be able to adjust on-the-fly at that pace,” Brig. Gen. Rob Collins, the Army’s program executive officer for command, control, communications – tactical, said at the event.

But having coders on the battlefield isn’t simple because networks have to be configured so they are secure and such a possibility will still require a hard look at tactics, techniques and procedures.

“There are things that we can do with open systems architecture,” which means the government needs to own the data, he said. “Often what folks get focused in on is the intellectual property and as long as we control the interfaces, we can provide things like a ‘Pep Boys toolkit’ so that soldiers out on the edge can have a developer’s kit,” he suggested.

Then as the threat, information and sensors change, “whatever the process may be, they can tailor that based on their mission without having to go all the way back to the factory of the industrial original equipment manufacturer to make that change,” Collins said.

Having such a capability is “well within the art of the possible,” he said, adding, “We have to think through the configuration management just to make sure that we continue to keep our systems cyber-hardened on the battlespace.”

The Army isn’t just demonstrating the need for these types of technical experts out at Project Convergence, but have been doing so around the world, Col. Stephanie Ahern, Army Futures Command’s chief of concepts, said.

And so the Army has already been working within its new talent-management effort to get the right types of people for these jobs. Some of those processes, which AFC is leading, include standing up of the Army’s new software factory in Austin, Texas, and its partnership working on artificial intelligence with Carnegie Mellon. They are helping to develop experts that could enter the force, according to Ahern.

Some have argued it’s hard to convince software engineers, coders or even hackers that their place is with the U.S. Army due to perceived culture clash, but for Coffman, it’s a fit.

“If you know coders, you’re not doing it for the money,” he said. “Most of them, they’re in it because they want to solve extremely hard problems and the United States Army, that’s what we deal with is extremely hard problems on the edge of the battlefield while people are shooting at us in 100-degree heat. These women and men that have this talent … we need to retain them and we retain them by giving them really tough things to solve.”

The Army’s tactical network team ran the test during a massive sensor-to-shooter experiment in Arizona last month. The capability, dubbed a common data fabric, will help the service develop a common operating environment that would allow users across the battlefield to share a view of the threat.

The service plans to field the common data fabric as part of Capability Set ’23, the next iteration of new network tools set to be delivered to soldiers in fiscal 2023.

At Yuma Proving Ground in the Arizona desert, the Network Cross-Functional Team experimented with its current architecture, made up of a combination of commercial off-the-shelf systems and tools the Army developed itself. Portia Crowe, the chief data officer of the Network CFT, said that during the experiment the team looked at how best to ingest data from disparate sources and then synchronize, correlate and distribute that data “more timely and more effectively than we do today.”

“We were able to tweak both on in a scenario where we could throttle back the bandwidth and really see how the common data fabric works in a disconnected, intermittent … environment,” Crowe said on an Oct. 13 webinar hosted by C4ISRNET during the Association of the U.S. Army’s annual meeting.

It also evaluated data packet loss — or when data packets don’t reach their final destination — and latency in a harsh environment.

“Part of that is really making sure that we get richer, contextualized data so that we can [run artificial intelligence] off of that data,” Crowe said.

The Network CFT also wanted to know what is simple and intuitive for soldiers, as the team moves toward fielding tools to soldiers. Soldier feedback is a critical part of the capability set process, and Army leaders recently found that while the new network tools they are delivering to soldiers work well, the training regime for the technology must improve.

The recent experiment is another step forward for the common data fabric efforts before preliminary design review for Capability Set ’23, set for April next year. Capability Set ’23, on which the Network CFT works alongside Program Executive Office Command, Control, Communications-Tactical, is focused on increasing capacity and resiliency of the Army’s tactical network.

The Network CFT now plans to continue using other transaction authorities to involve vendors and to experiment with their products in the service’s labs, she said. She added that the next steps include ensuring the fabric has the correct combination of commercial and government off-the-shelf products, as well as the right acquisition plans as the team looks to field these tools to soldiers.

“After we’re done … doing the experimentations, this moves over to PEO C3T, who’s our acquisition partner in this and, and they’ve got to do the harder part, which is really, you know, making sure we have the right investments in the architecture and then fielding that out,” Crowe said.

At the virtual Association of the U.S. Army conference this week, officials emphasized that in order to get sensor data to weapons systems even faster, they need to push computing to the edge. And to hit deep-lying, protected targets, the Army needs to see farther to sense potential threats, create targeting data and send a solution to the best fires system for rapid response.

The concept is more frequently referred to as the sensor-to-shooter timeline, and the Army is putting vast amounts of effort into shortening that timeline as much as possible so it can respond to threats effectively. Part of that effort will involve shifting the processing step from the command post to the sensor, Army officials said.

This is known as edge processing.

“Edge processing is something that we’re very interested in for a number of reasons. And what I mean by that is having smart sensors that can not only detect the enemy, [but] identify, characterize and locate, and do all those tasks at the sensor processing,” said John Strycula, the director of the Army’s task force focused on intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance.

Processing at the sensor provides two major benefits. First, artificial intelligence will process that data faster than a human could. Second, if data is processed at the edge, the sensor doesn’t have to take up massive bandwidth to send all of the raw data it’s collecting back through the network; it just needs to send its final product.

“If I only have to send back a simple message from the sensor that says the target is here ― here’s the location and here’s what I saw and here’s my percent confidence ― versus sending back the whole image across the network, it reduces those bandwidth requirements,” Strycula said.

“We are trading network for compute in a lot of areas, and what I mean by that is we are adding compute to places it was never meant to be ― never envisioned to be ― such as on the sensor itself or on the platform co-located with the sensor,” said Alexander Miller, senior G-2 science and technology adviser. “By trading that compute for the networking time, we don’t have to leverage so much of the network to move those data.”

But that trade-off involves risk, Miller noted. Commanders and operators won’t get the full picture they might receive from more raw data. That means they will need to trust the AI systems to send them the accurate data they need.

The Army was able to demonstrate some of those burgeoning artificial intelligence capabilities at Project Convergence, the service’s campaign of learning to integrate new AI, sensing and network capabilities, in September.

Take the Dead Center payload, for example. Once installed on a Gray Eagle drone, the AI system processed all of the sensor data collected by the drone. Rather than having the Gray Eagle send that raw data to a command post for processing, only to send it back to the drone, Dead Center was able to automatically detect threats and create targeting data.

“One of the key takeaways [of Project Convergence] is we need to get out of the business of just pushing data,” said Douglas Matty, director of AI capabilities at Army Futures Command.

The Tactical Intelligence Targeting Access Node, or TITAN — a new scalable, portable ground station under development — and its AI counterpart, Prometheus, are being built to perform a similar task. At Project Convergence, a TITAN surrogate was able to take imagery from satellites, turn it into targeting data and then send that solution over satellite communications to operators. That process drastically reduced the amount of bandwidth used in the sensor-to-shooter chain.

Using AI at Project Convergence, the Army was able to reduce the sensor-to-shooter timeline from 20 minutes to 20 seconds.

“What we realized there is that with the advances in what some call algorithmic warfare, you no longer have to push all of the data to all of the nodes,” Matty explained. “You can process and have requisite compute and storage at location to handle the data at point of need, and then share that information to facilitate the collaboration.”

These ideas may seem like science fiction, but they are potential future capabilities under consideration by a relatively new program at the U.S. Army’s Combat Capabilities Development Command, called Team Ignite. The team, which has been operational for about a year, operates as a middleman between the the Army’s Futures and Concepts Center and the service’s operational community.

The Army began this effort because it wants technology that will give the war fighter a competitive edge on the battlefield of 2035.

Team Ignite hosts technology deep dives with Army employees across the future concepts community and operational community. According to Maj. Gen. John George, commanding general of the CCDC, the team has hosted 17 technological deep dives since its inception.

“Those ideas get embedded in the way that the functional concepts are written to help drive future priorities for the Army,” Jean Vettel, chief scientist for the Futures and Concepts Center at CCDC, said on an Oct. 14 call with reporters during the Association of the U.S. Army’s annual meeting.

During these deep dives, which include representatives from other military services, science and technology leaders discuss novel technologies and what the technological maturity of that capability is now, as well as what it will be in the medium and long term. They also discuss the state of technological development within the Army or industry.

“That gives us a better idea of where we’ve got to be investing in, or areas we’ve got to be following and then adopting as we go forward,” George told reporters.

In the upcoming year, Vettel said, Team Ignite will focus on areas dictated to them by the head of Army Futures Command, Gen. John Murray. The top priorities for the upcoming year are artificial intelligence, robotics and autonomy, which are all underpinned by the network and data, though the team is not limited to those areas.

The team is currently working on using drones or robots to get ground-based soldiers over rivers in a combat zone. Users from the Futures and Concepts Center and the 101st Airborne Division collaborated on a list of potential technologies and attributes that deserve more research and development.

“When you’re trying to get units over rivers or wet areas … it’s an extremely dangerous operation because you’re exposed,” said Col. Stephanie Ahern, director of concepts at the center.

Ahern added that there are ongoing projects that have incorporated some of the capabilities the team came up with. Vettel told reporters that the team is exploring ways to move the Army entirely off of using fossil fuels, a shift from previous efforts by the service that focused on just reducing fossil fuel consumption.

Another “hot topic” for Team Ignite, Vettel said, is network deception capabilities to protect artificial intelligence algorithms that process sensor data from adversaries.

George told reporters that Team Ignite is still working to involve industry, but he added that having businesses attend every Team Ignite event would be “overwhelming.” Though he did say cooperative research and development agreements, which allow federal agencies to work with industry on technology development without spending federal funds, is the best way for “one-on-one” collaboration.

“We ultimately want this Team Ignite to become the way we do business,” he added. “It’s increased collaboration with the right partners and the right events.”

The RFI, released by Program Executive Office Command, Control, Communications-Tactical, will give the Army tactical network team an improved understanding of existing industry best practices, technological advancements and innovative business models for commercially managed satellites that could replace the operating design of its logistics network, known as the sustainment tactical network.

“We are looking to our industry partners to provide us with inventive approaches to meet our logistics transport capabilities needs,” said Col. Shane Taylor, the Army’s project manager for Tactical Network (PM TN), in a press release. “This includes both end item material solutions, as well as what corresponding leasing cost models could look like to enable the Army to maximize capabilities while balancing long-term affordability.”

Commercially managed SATCOM would be an improvement over the standard SATCOM capabilities because currently the Army must purchase all the hardware, software, maintenance and sustainment needs, along with other related capabilities, on independent, standalone contracts, the press release said. With SATCOM as a service, the PEO C3T will procure all the capabilities under a single contract, paying for each leased Very Small Aperture Terminal (VSAT) ground satellite terminal.

“We want to deliver the right STN SATCOM capability at the right price, while keeping current with technology and ahead of obsolescence,” said Lt. Col. Natashia Coleman, product lead for Unified Network Capabilities and Integration. “To do that we need to better understand how and what industry can provide, what their different managed services models would look like, how they could each best support our hardware and support services requirements, and then compare that to the more traditional way we are providing the capability now and determine which would work best.

“Whatever the outcome, taking the time upfront to review all of the options will enable us to deliver the best solution for the Army,” she sadded.

According to Paul Mehney, communications director for PEO C3T, the program office expects industry to demonstrate their SATCOM as a service capabilities for engineer and operational assessment. Mehney said that the office will consider the companies’ ability to provide and maintain terminals, obtain host nation agreements for use of bandwidth, provide a help desk to address network access issues, and technical support to users and VSAT systems.

Mehney also said that the logistics network modernization efforts aligns with increased capacity, resiliency and convergence goals of Capability Set ’23, the next iteration of new network tools set to be delivered in fiscal 2023.

“We are looking to incorporate STN design goals as part of CS23 and beyond; providing initial STN elements for CS23 (such as modernized VSAT and Local Transport capabilities) to support CS priorities over time,” Mehney said.

Responses are due Nov. 6.