The Army kicked off the effort late last year and this spring issued a request for information from industry about the project, which would be a departure from the service’s traditional approach to buying and sustaining radios.

Mark Kitz, the Army’s program executive officer for tactical command, control and communications, said Wednesday the service hasn’t determined how to proceed with the effort.

“I think we’re still struggling with, what are the upfront investments the Army needs to make, and then what’s the return on investment for you, industry, with radio as a service,” he said during a presentation at AFCEA’s TechNet conference in Augusta, Georgia. “I think lukewarm would be my assessment right now.”

The Army initiated the pilot as a cost-effective option for modernizing its hundreds of thousands of radios — an inventory too large to quickly upgrade.

The model would operate like a subscription service in which the Army leases capability when it needs it rather than buying and maintaining radios outright as the service does today.

Vendors would provide a limited number of radios as needed for training and operations and then would upgrade their software to match modernization requirements.

Officials have varying views on the prospects of the program, meanwhile. Army Undersecretary Gabe Camarillo, for example, has said he finds the idea compelling, while Kits said he remains committed to the effort and “believes we’re going to get a strong return on investment.”

“I don’t necessarily see that from the pilot, and so I think that’s going to be a continued conversation with industry,” he said.

Kitz was optimistic, however, about two other “as-a-service” pilots for satellite communications and IT. He said the Army is committed to making the pilot work for SATCOM and expects the service to begin a pilot for IT at the edge over the next 18 months.

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.

Mark Kitz, the Army’s program executive officer for tactical command, control and communications, said Wednesday that the importance of proliferated low Earth orbit satellite networks was on display at the service’s most recent Project Convergence Capstone event, where the Army experiments with multi-domain connectivity concepts.

“I don’t think you could take 10 steps without tripping over a Starshield terminal,” Kitz said at AFCEA’s TechNet conference in Augusta, Georgia. “I would say the Army is very committed to pLEO and Starshield.”

Starshield is SpaceX’s military business unit, which provides access to the company’s Starlink constellation, a fleet of more than 6,000 satellites in LEO, about 1,200 miles above Earth’s surface. The growing network of spacecraft provides internet service for private consumers as well as militaries around the world.

The company has expanded its military space footprint in recent years, providing launch services through its Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy rockets and receiving its first military satellite production contract in 2021 from the Space Development Agency.

The Ukrainian military has relied heavily on Starlink in its war with Russia, and last year the U.S. Space Force awarded the company a contract for the satellite service. Starshield is also building a classified constellation of hundreds of spy satellites for the National Reconnaissance Office, Reuters reported earlier this year.

While Starlink is the dominant player providing space-based communications services, several other companies have plans to join them. Amazon is designing a 3,000-satellite network called Project Kuiper, with its first operational spacecraft slated to launch late this year. U.K.-based OneWeb and Luxembourg’s Intelsat are also developing large SATCOM constellations with slightly different market focuses than SpaceX.

Speaking with Kitz at TechNet, Director of the Army’s Network Cross-Functional Team Maj. Gen. Patrick Ellis said that as these constellations come online, the Army wants to ensure its units have access to multiple connectivity options.

“What we’re really looking for is that diversification of transport, and that is one of the tools we’re looking to give commanders,” Ellis said.

One way the Army is looking to give commanders access to more satellite services is through its Next-Generation Tactical Terminal. The program is designing a capability to leverage constellations based in multiple orbits and frequency bands through a single terminal by building an agnostic radio frequency receiver.

“We want to get out of bringing a new antenna every time we want to change providers,” Kitz said. “If a unit deploys and they want to leverage a Ka-band Kuiper, they have that RF front end. If they want to be leveraging Starshield, we swap modems and we go.”

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.

The Defense Department in 2022 awarded contracts to Amazon Web Services, Microsoft, Oracle and Google to provide cloud computing, storage and other services through the enterprise cloud contract known as JWCC. Under the arrangement, the companies compete for task orders worth up to $9 billion through June 2028.

JWCC is viewed as a key component of the department’s Combined Joint All-Domain Command and Control initiative, with the military services directed to prioritize using the enterprise contract. DISA Director Lt. Gen. Robert Skinner, whose agency manages the effort, said Tuesday that all four services are taking advantage of the program and, to date, the department has awarded $996 million in contracts with another $20 million in the pipeline.

Less than two years into that effort, officials have already begun to plan for the program’s next iteration. Former Pentagon Chief Information Officer John Sherman revealed in December that the work was underway, but offered few details on what changes it could bring.

Speaking at the AFCEA TechNet conference in Augusta, Georgia, Skinner said the planning work for what he called JWCC Next is in its early days, but opportunities have already emerged to improve the capability.

He highlighted three early focus areas for the effort: improving speed to contract, increasing the number of companies and bringing on more capabilities like AI.

Skinner said that while the JWCC process is already moving faster than other traditional programs — awarding contracts within weeks of releasing a task order — DISA is looking at ways to make the process more efficient.

JWCC is the successor to a failed Pentagon cloud effort known as the Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure program. The department canceled the effort in 2021 after allegations of political interference.

Beyond JWCC, Skinner highlighted progress on an effort known as DODNET, a secure network for agencies outside of the military departments, including DISA and the Defense Technical Information Center. The system will replace multiple stovepiped, legacy networks with a more modernized capability.

DISA has onboarded about 32,000 users to DODNET and in October will begin a six- to nine-month push to bring on another 100,000 personnel, Skinner said. Those new users will come from multiple organizations including the Defense Contract Audit Agency, the Defense Contract Management Agency and the Defense Finance and Accounting Service.

The ground control station was part of a multiyear effort that took place aboard Bush during multiple ship maintenance stints and between deployments, Naval Air Systems Command, or NAVAIR, said.

Along with the required software and hardware, the drone nerve center features the first fully operational and integrated unmanned carrier aviation mission control system that the command says is critical to using the Stingray in operations.

Bush will conduct at-sea testing of the center early next year, according to NAVAIR.

The control station is the latest step toward getting the Stingray into the fleet, where it will refuel fighter jets midflight, helping the sea service’s strike arm to stay airborne longer — a capability that would be particularly helpful should war with China break out in the watery expanse of the West Pacific.

Standing up the Bush’s drone control room “lays the foundation” for how the Navy will operate and control unmanned aircraft, Unmanned Carrier Aviation (PMA-268) Program Manager Capt. Daniel Fucito said in a statement.

While such systems will initially support the Stingray, they will also be used for other services’ unmanned systems, such as the Air Force’s collaborative combat aircraft program, which seeks to pair air drones with unmanned aircraft in a so-called “air wing of the future.”

Such systems are also being planned for installation aboard fellow carriers Carl Vinson, Theodore Roosevelt and Ronald Reagan beginning in fiscal 2025, according to NAVAIR.

Final details for restructuring the battalions came after years of merging job specialties in signal fields.

Army Lt. Gen. John Morrison, deputy chief of staff for Army G6, which implements command, control, communications and cyber for the force, shared this update Tuesday at the Armed Forces Communications and Electronics Association TechNet event in Augusta, Georgia.

While details of the restructuring are still being reviewed prior to approval, Morrison said the changes will pull resources to the division level to handle network-centered problems. The move is expected to free up signal soldiers for more unit-level work within the brigades.

As the Army focused its deployments on brigades over the past few decades, the headquarters and supporting units for those brigades ballooned. That meant brigades were both running the fight and trying to analyze what would come next in the battle plan.

But senior leaders, Morrison said, expect a large-scale combat operation to move faster than a brigade can analyze.

“We want brigades moving and fighting,” Morrison said.

The Army announced its big-picture force structure transformation in a February white paper, Army Times previously reported. That outline shows reducing authorized troop levels down to 470,000 within the next five years.

The Army is expected to cut positions to reach that lower number; the service previously sought to fill out a 500,000-soldier Army through a challenging recruiting climate.

Coinciding with the Army’s plans to make those cuts, the service also expects to add up to 7,500 new positions — mostly in air defense jobs and other high priority formations.

As far back as 2019, new tools began reshaping the look and feel of signal battalions. The Army used the 35th Theater Tactical Signal Brigade’s 50th Expeditionary Signal Battalion-Enhanced as a prototype unit when it added what was then the new enroute mission command network.

Three years ago, the Army announced its “unified network plan,” which allows users to use either a personal or issued device, such as a smartphone, tablet or laptop, to log into the network anywhere in the world.

Incorporating these developments, Morrison told the audience to envision an entire brigade conducting an air assault to an objective, rolling out a four-vehicle brigade command post, displacing and then reestablishing its communication with a distant headquarters and its local tactical network and then making a call for fire request — all within three minutes.

“That was Saturday at (the Joint Readiness Training Center),” Morrison said.

Under the current signal branch job specialty restructuring, individual core functions — network communications, signal operations support, information technology and satellite communications — will merge into a single job held by a master sergeant by October 2025, the Army said.

In May, Army Chief of Staff Gen. Randy George announced an initiative to lighten and improve the speed of battlefield communications.

Much of those changes would come from what the signal experts in their unit find as they experiment, George said.

“These brigade commanders, battalion commanders, sergeants major, warrant officers that are in the formations, that are technical experts — they are going to have the leeway to decide how we are best organized for the modern battlefield,” George said.

Morrison said that the signal battalions restructuring update will be in the working stage with senior leaders for the next two to three months. He expects an official decision before the end of the calendar year.

The service in February released its latest software policy, laying out its plan for managing and developing software as part of a broader digital modernization push. Months later, in May, it unveiled plans to award more than $1 billion in software development contracts over the next decade, posting a special notice and a draft solicitation.

Following the announcement, some commercial firms expressed concern that the Army’s contracting strategy for the effort may not work for non-traditional or smaller companies backed by venture capital firms that favor fixed-price deals.

Speaking on a panel this summer at the Aspen Security Forum in Colorado, Tara Murphy Dougherty, CEO of defense software company Govini, said the Army’s approach represents a disconnect between innovation incubators like the Defense Innovation Unit and the Pentagon’s more traditional acquisition offices.

“No venture capital-backed company that DIU and every other part of DOD has worked so hard to get into the system, none of our companies can bid on that,” Dougherty said in July. “Until we get the parts of the department who actually put the billion dollar, 10-year contracts into place to understand what it means to work with companies like ours, this isn’t going to work.”

An Army official said Tuesday at AFCEA’s TechNet conference in Augusta, Georgia, that in response to feedback from non-traditional firms, the service is working to clarify and in some cases rethink the way it buys software through this new contract vehicle.

Jennifer Swanson, deputy assistant secretary of the Army for data, engineering and software, said that while the service isn’t likely to awarded fixed-price contracts for software development projects, it’s looking for other flexible contracting mechanisms that could allow it to work with more commercial firms.

“We want to make sure that non-traditionals, smalls [and] others without certified cost accounting systems have the opportunity to compete,” she said during a panel.

In fact, Swanson added, the Army’s contracting command is considering allowing industry to recommend a contract type that best suits their bid rather than defining that up front in its solicitation.

“If your solution is the one that’s chosen, then that’s the contract type that we use,” she said. “We’re really trying to break a lot of previous rules that we followed in terms of how we’re approaching this and opening up the aperture so that we can cover all bases.”

Another concern non-traditional firms have shared with the Army about the draft software modernization solicitation involves its workforce requirements. The draft solicitation included labor categories that require certain education levels that aren’t applicable to many commercial companies.

Swanson said the inclusion of those requirements was inadvertent and doesn’t reflect the Army’s needs for the program. The service is correcting that portion of the draft and plans to release an update this week, she added.

“That’s a government requirement that we’re removing. And there are a lot of examples that way,” she said.

The discriminating space sensor, or DSS, is a key part of MDA’s vision for a space-based missile-tracking layer, Collins told Defense News in a recent interview. The capability will complement the agency’s hypersonic- and ballistic-tracking space sensor, or HBTSS, which it developed under a partnership with the Space Development Agency, launching its first two satellites in February.

Whereas HBTSS was designed to track dimmer targets than traditional missile-warning sensors, DSS will help the Defense Department distinguish missile targets from enemy countermeasures, which are meant to make their advanced weapons harder to identify.

“We believe we can add a new capability or expand our capability to discriminate in the future with a space-based solution,” he said. “We’re going to be pursuing that DSS prototype next.”

Collins told lawmakers in April that the agency’s DSS had completed ground concept testing and was ready to move into the on-orbit demonstration phase. He told Defense News the plan is to launch the sensor by 2029.

The capabilities provided by DSS and HBTSS are part of a broader network of missile-tracking satellites the Defense Department is fielding to improve its ability to track both traditional ballistic missiles and maneuvering hypersonic weapons, which can travel at speeds above Mach 5. Positioned in a range of orbital regimes, the spacecraft will give the U.S. military a more detailed and holistic picture of potential threats as adversaries like China and Russia demonstrate advanced missile capabilities.

While MDA matured the sensor technology for HBTSS, the Space Development Agency, which is part of the Space Force, fielded the satellites. Collins said there will be a similar relationship between the agencies for DSS.

“We’re going to be pursuing that DSS prototype and then [will] work with the Space Force to transition that to operational use in the future,” he said.

MDA requested funds for DSS in its fiscal 2025 budget, Collins said, but the documents don’t specify how much it asked for.

As the agency progresses on the DSS prototype, it’s also conducting tests to calibrate and demonstrate the capabilities of its first HBTSS satellites on orbit. In June, the spacecraft tracked their first hypersonic launch — a test vehicle built by Kratos to prove the system’s performance. A second vehicle is slated to fly later this year.

Along with testbed tracks, the satellites have also monitored ongoing conflicts in the Middle East and Eastern Europe.

“Every time they fly over Ukraine or Israel, they can pick up whatever happens,” Collins said. “We believe this is the technology that’s the baseline for our ability to hold any hypersonic weapon under custody in the future.”

Defense News reporter Jen Judson contributed to this story.

The Multi-Function Electronic Warfare-Air Large, or MFEW-AL, is part of the Army’s reinvestment in sophisticated electronic warfare technologies after years of neglect. Lockheed Martin is spearheading development of the self-contained pod, which was initially intended for mounting aboard an MQ-1C Gray Eagle drone, made by General Atomics, but is now being considered for wider use.

Brig. Gen. Ed Barker, the program executive officer for intelligence, electronic warfare and sensors, or PEO IEW&S, on Aug. 15 told C4ISRNET a developmental test was conducted at the China Lake weapons range in California and that the service is “getting MFEW in the hands” of troops.

“We’ve had soldiers both at China Lake and then up at 10th Mountain Division,” Barker said in an interview on the sidelines of the AFCEA TechNet Augusta conference in Georgia. “The software and hardware is stable. I think we’re in pretty good shape.”

Electronic warfare is a high-stakes game of cat and mouse tethered to the electromagnetic spectrum. Militaries rely upon the spectrum — and its manipulation — for weapons guidance, navigation and communication, among other vital tasks.

The Army and other services are reprioritizing electronic warfare as the Pentagon prepares for potential conflict with Russia or China. The spectrum would be hotly contested in a fight with either. The targeting of military chatter, networks and drones in Eastern Europe is adding to the urgency.

Barker and others are awaiting formal feedback from the Army Test and Evaluation Command. The info will help “inform the next phase, when it comes to a procurement decision for MFEW,” he said.

Army Undersecretary Gabe Camarillo last year expressed excitement about MFEW-AL after viewing a prototype in the field.

“What concerned me, always, is that we’ve got to keep pace with the threat over time,” Camarillo told reporters at Aberdeen Proving Ground in Maryland, at the time. “I’m really impressed with the MFEW program that the Army has, its different configurations and where it’s going.”