“We know how to manufacture things. There’s not a problem with that, but UAS, they are different,” Lt. Gen. Christopher Mohan, acting commander of Materiel Command, told Defense News in a recent interview. “We can do the wiring harnesses. We could do some of the microelectronics, but either we don’t have the capability, such as the brushless motors, and we have to buy the machinery to do that.”

The Army’s push comes amid lessons from the war in Ukraine, where inexpensive drones and loitering munitions have reshaped the battlefield and overwhelmed conventional forces.

Ukraine and Russia are churning them out.

Catching up

The United States, by contrast, has struggled to scale production, relying on commercial suppliers and small pilot runs. Officials say that gap underscores the need for a domestic, high-volume industrial network capable of rapidly fielding thousands of drones.

This is a challenge the Army’s SkyFoundry is designed to tackle, even as the service confronts technical, bureaucratic and funding hurdles. The effort is turning depots and arsenals that once built tank parts and artillery shells into a distributed network of drone factories.

The goal is to mass-produce small, expendable, unmanned aircraft — the kind flooding battlefields in Ukraine — at a rate of 10,000 systems per month.

The industrial base has struggled to build capability to mass produce drones. Unlike in Ukraine, “We don’t have that existential crisis,” Col. Eloy Martinez, the commander of Rock Island Arsenal in Illinois, told Defense News on a recent visit.

“We have a lot of laws that we have to abide by … it’s the bureaucratic stuff that’s always downhill,” he said. “How do we break these barriers? How do we reduce that time?”

What’s imperative is that the Army figure out how to move as fast as possible now, according to Brig. Gen. Beth Behn, commander of Army Tank-Automotive and Armaments Command, told Defense News at Rock Island.

The general had spent six months with Security Assistance Group-Ukraine in the summer and fall of 2023.

“So I had a front row seat to the conflict, and I came back with my hair on fire,” she said. “We have got to adapt.”

Behn returned from the experience to realize how little the dramatically evolving drone threat had penetrated the thinking within the Army.

“We’re almost two years later, and so now we’ve got drone operator courses and we are doing production, and we’ve fielded capabilities to our [Transformation in Contact] formations, so we are moving with speed,” Behn said. “I do think we’re on the cusp.”

SkyFoundry takes shape

Rock Island is primed to 3D print drones, having invested significantly in building a high-tech advanced manufacturing facility on post. One building is filled with various printers capable of producing a wide array of parts and components in various materials, such as metals and composites.

The arsenal is already producing drone bodies and frames using additive manufacturing, and a variety of different 3D-printed options sat on a display table just outside of a massive room dedicated to printing parts.

Rock Island is eagerly awaiting the arrival of a 3D-printing capability from Impossible Objects that will allow it to print 120,000 drone bodies per year.

“We should be installing that or closing the deal on the contract,” Martinez said. “We’ll have that early part of the spring, late winter time frame.”

Once operational, the printer could produce up to 60 small drones per hour at costs falling below $100 a drone, allowing the Army to create systems that can be expendable in combat.

Tobyhanna Army Depot in Pennsylvania is focusing on wiring harnesses, microelectronics and brushless motors, while Red River Army Depot in Texas will handle battery production and final assembly.

“Rock Island will continue to print bodies. They will continue to print propellers and frames,” Mohan said. “Tobyhanna will do the brushless motors. They will do the wiring harnesses and the microelectronics. Those systems will be shipped to Red River … for final assembly, testing, as well as manufacturing the batteries.”

Mohan emphasized that Skyfoundry is “not a specific location. It’s more of a concept.”

The networked approach is designed to allow each site to specialize in a segment of the manufacturing process while sharing data, digital designs and software updates through a centralized repository.

“We’ve got to have this digital repository,” Mohan said, “so that we can trade not only the electronic files for printing parts, but we have to own the tech data.”

Bluegrass Army Depot in Richmond, Kentucky, is going to serve as the UAS innovation center, he said.

“We already have, we do a lot of really neat stuff with UAS at Bluegrass already, and artificial intelligence enabled security, as well as some stuff for the Special Operations community, and we are gonna merge all of that there,” Mohan added.

The Army is still refining its requirements, Martinez said.

“They want a noun, which is the drone, but they can’t tell us what drone, what type, what their capabilities are,” he said. “So we’re trying to flesh that out.”

The Rock Island team expects to produce drone bodies for the Army’s goal of 1,000 UAS by the end of this fiscal year, with production scaling sharply by 2026, according to Greg Lupton, Rock Island deputy commander.

The initial push to reach production of 10,000 drones per month carries a price tag of roughly $197 million, Mohan said, with $75 million of that going toward brushless motors and wiring capabilities.

“As soon as we get a budget, we will order that machinery,” he said. “It’s about an eight-month lead time.”

The Army plans to spend another $150 million per year over the next three years to sustain and expand the effort.

The modernization push also ties into broader initiatives to reduce reliance on overseas suppliers.

“Ninety percent of UAS parts are coming out of China and Taiwan,” Mohan said. “The systems we’re building, we don’t have Chinese parts in them.”

The drone initiative fits into a broader effort to become less dependent on materials coming from China. AMC is trying to identify where it can set up rare earth mineral processing and lithium production within Army installations and bring manufacturers and mining companies onto those installations.

Red River Army Depot, Mohan noted, sits on top of a large lithium deposit.

“There’s a synergy that we’re trying to aim at there,” he said.

The Army will also need to figure out how to issue and account for the drones, Mohan said.

“The focus right now is to get them at scale to our training centers, so we’ll ship to the National Training Center, JRTC, Joint Readiness Training Center, as well as to those units who have not had the ability to use UAS because they haven’t had the money,” he said.

The first 50 systems will go to I Corps at Joint Base Lewis McChord, Mohan said.

“We are on the cusp of an accelerated sprint on UAS production,” Lupton said. “Once it’s operational, its capacity is significant.”

Sparks cascade as they raise a cauldron of molten metal from the flames along the ceiling to a set of empty molds. They pour the orange liquid into molds, judging the flow by sight and instinct. The scene feels half industrial, half elemental, a craft largely unchanged for well over a hundred years. There’s no trade school for this work; the melters learn by doing, part artisan, part tradesman.

A short drive down the road is Rock Island’s advanced manufacturing center built during World War II. The interior is brightly lit, clean and the only sound is the low hum of 3D printers at work. Robotic arms move with deliberate precision, building metal parts layer by layer.

Despite the differences between a 19th century forge and an advanced manufacturing facility, both serve the same mission: to keep the Army supplied and ready now and in the future.

“You see the past, the present and the future all happening at the same time,” Maj. Gen. Beth Behn, the Army’s Tank-automotive and Armaments Command commander, told Defense News on a recent visit to the arsenal in the middle of the Mississippi.

“Every metaphor you’ve ever heard about this, this is how we forge warriors,” Behn said. “It’s through pressure and heat.”

As the Army races to modernize its organic industrial base, Rock Island is showing how legacy infrastructure can evolve at speed; blending craftsmanship, data, and digital manufacturing to meet readiness demands that didn’t exist even five years ago.

For more than 160 years, Rock Island has built the backbone of America’s ground forces, from Civil War-era saddles to spoons to armored vehicle parts sent to modern battlefields.

But what’s happening here now isn’t just about preserving craftsmanship, it’s about reinventing how the Army sustains itself in a new era of competition and conflict.

The arsenal is one of the Army’s oldest industrial sites, but it’s also becoming a proving ground for advanced manufacturing, additive technologies, and small-batch, rapid production. In the same footprint where molten metal once defined readiness, 3D printers now create drone components and precision parts for vehicles and weapons systems in a fraction of the time.

Rock Island is “the Swiss Army knife of the organic industrial base,” Behn said. Keeping its forge hot is a matter of national insurance but building out its 3D-printing capacity is an investment in speed and survivability, according to Behn.

“I’m losing sleep at night over how we need to go faster and what is every possible way that we can do that,” Behn said.

That mindset is now the centerpiece of the Army’s continuous transformation campaign plan, which calls on every depot, plant, and arsenal to “adapt with urgency,” Behn said. That means shifting the industrial base from a slow, linear supply chain to a distributed network capable of producing new systems, and replacing broken ones, at commercial speed.

Rock Island Arsenal has become one of the most visible testbeds for that effort.

Printing with sand

The foundry at Rock Island remains the Army’s only organic capability of its kind, a national asset that conducts hundreds of pours into molds a year.

While the practice of forging is old, modernization is underway. The arsenal has joined a wider forging and foundry community, sharing best practices with commercial and academic partners.

“We’re part of that community,” Col. Eloy Martinez, Rock Island and Joint Manufacturing and Technology Center commander, said. “We’re exchanging good ideas with other members because there are definitely areas ripe for modernization.”

The Arsenal is experimenting with new alloys and more precise mold techniques. The arsenal recently installed a sand 3D printer that can create intricate casting molds in hours rather than months. Getting a wood mold right could take anywhere between two to five months, according Greg Lupton, Rock Island’s deputy commander.

“With a 3D printed mold, typically, we can print a mold in 24 hours … pour into it the next day,” he said. “You can iterate in days or hours versus months.”

The plan is to acquire a second sand printer, according to Martinez.

The flexibility and speed of 3D printing in forging and casting allows the arsenal to operate like it always has with “a high mix and low volume” of product, Martinez added.

The team has also recently achieved its AS9100 certification; a key step in qualifying parts and processes to aerospace-grade standards.

“It’ll open some doors for aviation parts and we can impact Air Force and Army Aviation readiness,” Lupton said.

While keeping the forge is expensive, Behn said, it’s also an insurance policy the nation can’t afford to lose. “Our nation needs to have it,” Behn said. “The question is, what kind of premium are we willing to pay on that insurance plan and how do we make sure it’s functioning, that we have artisans who know how to operate it, and that we’re looking at modernization?”

Printing the next fight

In Rock Island’s advanced manufacturing center, rows of 3D printers and robotic arms are laying the groundwork for how the Army will fight and resupply in the years ahead.

The Army is focused on solving a major problem: how it can scale production of drones in the U.S. to match potential threats proliferating globally.

“We are on the cusp of an accelerated sprint on UAS production,” Behn said. “[Army Materiel Command], writ large, is going to produce 1,000 UAVs by the end of this fiscal year, and we will have a portion of that production, the drone bodies, produced here at Rock Island.”

The Army’s stretch goal is to reach a production rate of 10,000 drones a month, or 120,000 per year, by leveraging composite-based additive manufacturing — known as C-BAM.

The printing system from company Impossible Objects is scheduled to be installed at Rock Island in early 2026. “We have that printer being installed here starting in, I think, the January–February timeframe,” Behn said. “So, you know, operational late spring of ’26 and once it’s operational, its capacity is significant.”

In parallel, the arsenal is also incorporating subtractive manufacturing techniques that originated as a concept developed through the Army Research Laboratory.

“There’s 14 parts that go on an Armored Multipurpose Vehicle that BAE [Systems] produces,” Lupton said. “These 14 parts are multipiece weldments. Anytime you start welding on ballistic aluminum, the weld joint becomes the weak spot,” he said.

“The other challenge with that much weld and the parts that large are they want to twist, they want to warp, which is causing issues with their assembly line, fitment issues when they were trying to install the parts, lack of reliability,” Lupton said.

So instead of welding parts together, the system at Rock Island is able to take large, single blocks of thick aluminum and run them through an automated saw.

“We’ll take it into the roughing cell, which has two robotic heads, that machines it from both side, 500 cubic inches of material removal rate, essentially, just picture aluminum chips flying everywhere,” Lupton described.

The cut piece then moves into a robotic cell to finish up and then is inspected through built-in equipment so it never has to leave the cell.

“It’s very much a lights-out type of machine … it’s pretty rare that you can see an 80-foot-long machining center that’s going to be operated by two individuals,” Lupton said.

The Army plans to be in low-rate production with the equipment in fiscal 2026 and full-rate by FY27.

Sitting in the back corner of another vast building, is “the unicorn” in additive manufacturing, Martinez said. The machine is called the jointless hull – a printer bed that is 20 feet by 30 feet by 12 feet high. It can take on both additive and subtractive manufacturing techniques.

The massive printer began as a research and development effort but the Army is trying to transition it into a production capability, Lupton said.

“We don’t generate a lot of revenue by doing science experiments, so we want to make parts,” he said. The technology is a game changer in parts production because it would allow forge-like capability made in aluminum in the printer and is even more attractive for small quantity production runs.

“It could be a huge time savings,” Lupton added.

Even so, there is a lot to work through in getting it up and running and since it’s a one-of-a-kind system. It’s not easy to maintain, Lupton said.

One recent policy change is also poised to change the game for Rock Island’s modus operandi, which is to produce small quantities of parts that are needed rapidly.

In July, Army Secretary Dan Driscoll delegated parts qualification authority to the AMC commander, giving officials there the ability to approve parts much faster than the traditional process would allow.

“We’re working right now to figure out the implementation of that authorization,” Behn said.

“The idea is to speed the process by which we’re able to produce a part, test it, and say ‘qualified,’ and then have that become a secondary source of supply. We think organically we have the capability to produce OEM-quality parts, and we certainly know there are industry partners who can do that as well,” she said.

“We have to apply a lens of urgency,” Behn said. “Nobody wants to stamp off on a part that isn’t safe, but we also know we can’t be excessively risk averse. This is about producing at scale, at speed, to meet the mission.”

In 2021 the 1st Multidomain Task Force, 5th Battalion, 3rd Field Artillery Regiment, 17th Field Artillery Brigade at Joint Base Lewis-McChord received all equipment — except for the actual live rounds — for the Long-Range Hypersonic Weapon capability it calls Dark Eagle.

The Washington state-based unit was supposed to get the missiles in fall 2023 but several aborted test events forced the Army to push back its fielding plans.

The first three missiles were distributed to the unit earlier this year, with the last of the munitions arriving in July. The fourth round is currently going through acceptance checkouts at Lockheed Martin’s facility in Cortland, Alabama, Lozano said. The final eight are expected to be delivered “by the end of December,” Lozano said.

The Army is also aiming to conduct a hypersonic missile test around the same time.

“That will complete the basic load for battery one, up at JBLM,” he added. “Then … we’ll start working on Battery Two.”

The fielding of the munitions follows a lengthy delay in the testing process. Several tests of the round were aborted in 2023 due to challenges at the range and the hiccups in the process of firing up the missile for launch.

Testing the all-up round was considered critical to ensure the system was safe, effective and ready for fielding.

The U.S. is presently in a race to field the capability and develop systems to defend against hypersonic weapons, which China and Russia are actively developing and testing.

The Army conducted an end-to-end successful flight test of its hypersonic missile at the Pacific Missile Range Facility in Hawaii in May 2024, which put the initial fielding to the first unit closer on the horizon.

While the process of equipping the Army with the weapon has taken nearly two years longer than planned, service officials have been quick to point out that missile development programs typically take about 10 years. The LRHW program, meanwhile, is only just beyond the five-year mark.

The Army has worked with Leidos’ Dynetics for years to build the industrial base for the Common-Hypersonic Glide Body that will be used by both the ground service and the Navy, as the domestic private sector has never built a hypersonic weapon.

The service also separately produced launchers, trucks, trailers and the battle operations center necessary to put together the first weapon battery.

Lockheed Martin is the weapon system integrator for the Army’s hypersonic capability that will be launched from a mobile truck.

In preparation for receiving the all-up rounds, the Army completed its delivery of the first hypersonic weapon capability — minus the rounds — to the Multi-Domain Task Force unit at JBLM two days ahead of its end-of-fiscal 2021 fielding deadline. The unit has been training on the system since the delivery.

The next phase of production will ramp up quickly once delivery to the first battery is complete.

“The second tranche of production is both Battery Two and the Battery One reload,” Lozano said. “That’s a very complex missile system. Although we’ve gotten through the testing of the system and we’re confident that it works, we’re still working through how to take a prototype system that’s complex and transition it into production, where you have a very repeatable process that drives out quality defects.

“We’re in the middle of that process right now,” Lozano added. “Things that we’re wrestling with every day is we’ll build up part of the missile and we’ll take the boost phase rocket motor and mate it to the missile midsection and then the inspector will come by and we’ll find some defects that we will have to work and address. … We’re learning as we build these missiles.”

Speed, of course, brings added challenges, Lozano acknowledged.

“Just the nature of having gone so fast — if you were doing a typical 10- or 15-year missile program, you drive all this risk out of the program and you’d be delivering on time. You’d just be delivering 10 years from now.”

Yet, “the good news is that we’re making progress now,” he said. “We just have to keep our foot on the gas pedal and continue to push forward and make more progress.”

The LTAMDS is planned to replace the Patriot system, which the company also produces, and is designed to counter such advanced threats as hypersonic weapons. The Army approved the new sensor earlier this year.

Tom Laliberty, Raytheon president of land and air defense systems, recently told Defense News the new $53 million wing is part of an LTAMDS production expansion already exceeding $400 million.

Raytheon has previously invested in software labs, areas for automated subsystem assembly, and an anechoic near-field range for antenna calibration. Laliberty said the new structure, including overhead cranes to move the radar in position, will allow assembly of full radar arrays, integrated with cooling, networking and processing gear.

The company plans to complete the facility by the end of next year, although Laliberty said he hopes the facility will be finished by the end of the year’s third quarter.

The LTAMDS itself has already passed a number of milestones. The Army this year approved the beginning of low-rate initial production for the program, after hundreds of hours of flight tests and radar qualification trials.

Raytheon has already built six prototype units and is now building two improved units incorporating the results of testing and operational evaluation that are expected to be provided to the Army this year for further testing.

Meanwhile, an LTAMDS prototype was sent to Guam for testing and evaluation in an operational environment this year.

Laliberty said Raytheon wants to triple its production rate.

The Army plans to increase builds from six to 12 radars a year under the low-rate initial production contract, but the factory’s planned capacity will be up to 18 radars annually for foreign military sales.

International demand is strong, according to Laliberty.

“There’s been about a dozen formal letters of interest … that ranges from classified briefing, defense design, requests for pricing and availability and then all-up [Letters of Request] for [Letters of Acceptance],” he said.

Poland has committed to buying 12 LTAMDS, along with 48 Patriot launchers as the first foreign customer to buy the new sensor.

“The team intends to present the U.S. Army with the CAESAR Self-Propelled Howitzer, a combat-proven and reliable system that addresses the U.S. Army’s needs for greater range and improved mobility,” the company announced in a statement at the Association of the U.S. Army’s annual conference. “It is a powerful and combat-proven system built for accuracy, adaptability and rapid worldwide deployment.”

Leonardo DRS, with its deep experience in platform integration, will be the prime contractor, and KNDS will provide its mobile artillery systems experience and range of ammunition, the statement notes.

The Army has not been clear about whether it plans to pursue a mobile, long-range artillery capability, but it continues to comb industry worldwide for possible options. It even recently invited companies to submit systems the service could consider providing to soldiers in operational units as a part of ongoing evaluations.

While the service has been slow to move out, the requirement to improve mobile artillery capability in the Army still exists.

“The ability for soldiers to rapidly and reliably put artillery on target is a crucial mission the U.S. Army is addressing, and we are proud to use our deep experience in integrating best-of-breed capabilities to support this future mission,” Aaron Hankins, senior vice president and general manager of the Leonardo DRS Land Systems business unit, said in the statement. “By teaming with KNDS, we are offering the service a mature, accurate, and high-performing solution.”

The CAESAR howitzer is “particularly suited to address the challenges that warfighters will face in the coming decades,” said Olivier Travert, chief sales officer of KNDS France.

The company’s 52-caliber ordnance “has a superb, demonstrated safety record in combat conditions, in all climates, after firing hundreds of thousands of rounds,” Travert added. “The lessons learned in three years of combat in Ukraine — where 120 CAESAR are now deployed, provides us an outstanding position to offer the United States Army a state-of-the-art weapon which can be integrated on a U.S. tactical truck.”

The service has been evaluating options for nearly five years. It held demonstrations for self-propelled howitzers in 2021 at Yuma Proving Ground, Arizona, but decided to prioritize an investment in the development of its Extended Range Cannon Artillery, or ERCA, system, which it canceled in 2024.

The system used a 58-caliber gun tube on an M109 Paladin howitzer chassis, aiming to fire out to 70 kilometers — roughly double current cannon ranges.

When the Army decided to cancel the ERCA program, the Army acknowledged it still had a requirement for a long-range cannon, and so it gave industry the opportunity last fall to show readily available and fielded systems abroad. A team traveled to Germany, South Korea, Sweden and Israel to see those systems in action.

The service planned another Yuma-based demonstration for January 2026, but never pursued it. Instead, the Army recently released a new plan soliciting industry to submit offerings that could be delivered to a Transformation in Contact brigade for experimentation, according to a request for information posted Sept. 30 on Sam.gov, the federal business opportunities website.

“Over the past 8 months, the US Army has been re-evaluating its objectives for modernization and adjusting those objectives to best support the new Army Transformation Initiative strategy,” the RFI states. “Comprehensive analysis has confirmed the importance of 155mm self-propelled artillery systems-of-systems to the Army. Consequently, the US Army is considering opportunities to assist in identifying these opportunities and shape our acquisition strategy.”

Overseeing that effort is Lt. Gen. Matthew McFarlane, under whose command the Corps, through continuous exercise and training, is rethinking itself as both a forward campaign-capable headquarters and a practical force provider for homeland defense.

The Corps has adopted innovation from the top to the bottom, working to modernize networks, integrate long-range precision fires and manage how unmanned systems in formations will transform the force.

Defense News sat down with McFarlane in a recent interview to discuss how the Corps is preparing for various phases of conflict and recap lessons from its expansive training campaign.

Portions of this interview have been edited for clarity.

DN: The Pentagon is placing a greater emphasis on homeland defense but is also focused on China as a pacing threat. I Corps is focused on both. How has this shift in emphasis affected I Corps?

McFarlane: I Corps is undergoing significant transformation, purposely evolving to meet complex challenges of the 21st-century battlefield.

This isn’t simply about adopting new technology. [It’s] fundamentally reshaping how we think, train and operate, building a more agile, resilient and lethal force capable of rapidly responding to a wide spectrum of threats and contingencies across the Indo-Pacific region.

This transformation is driven by clear understanding of the evolving strategic landscape and a commitment to maintaining our competitive edge.

Central to that is a focus on modernizing our capabilities in key areas like network integration, long-range precision fires and unmanned systems. We’re actively experimenting with emerging technologies and integrating them into our formations as we campaign forward in the Indo-Pacific to enhance our situational awareness, decision-making and overall combat effectiveness.

Simultaneously, we’re refining operational concepts to ensure we can effectively employ new capabilities in a joint, combined, all-domain environment. This isn’t a future aspiration. We’re actively integrating advancements in our current training, campaign operations, forward and operational plans.

[U.S. Pacific Command commander] Adm. Paparo recently emphasized a strong connection between the Indo-Pacific and homeland defense. As he spoke earlier in September, the homeland is the Pacific.

How are you developing contested logistics capabilities, distributed operations and access to islands?

I Corps as the operational headquarters [is] very focused on enabling our divisions with command-and-control, fires and sustainment, key aspects of operations in the Pacific.

We’re conscious in ensuring we are rehearsing those activities that are part of that set theater. We’re working closely with Army Material Command and 8th Theater Sustainment Command as they establish Joint Theater Distribution Centers in Japan, Australia, Philippines, Guam and others in development.

They enable us to operate forward, and we’re deliberate about exercising those processes to move supplies from those theater distribution centers to places where we’re exercising.

All of our exercises generate readiness at home station and forward in certain areas during Pathways. … We apply those ready forces forward and establish what we call Joint Interior Lines to make sure we understand how we can sustain forward operations wherever we’re conducting the Pathways event. It is a continual focus.

We continue to refine and validate pre-positioned stocks and systems we need to get what’s in those stocks into soldiers’ hands so they can apply them in whatever manner for the Pathways event.

How is I Corps enabling innovation at small unit levels?

Transformation is a key line of effort for I Corps across all of its down-trace units. All divisions have innovation labs. The key is how we integrate the progress each division is making with less redundancy and an optimized learning from each other.

We’re conscious about integrating [innovation labs] and are being deliberate about sharing lessons with the 25th Infantry Division and 4th Infantry Division as we experiment with everything from unmanned aircraft systems and counter-UAS to next-generation command-and-control.

Through that, we are helping them exercise with new technology in the field. The Pacific is a key aspect of that.

What are some examples of capabilities gaining traction in the wider Army?

3D printing is a big one, UAVs, spare parts, coding different AI aspects.

Just in this headquarters, we coded an ability to ingest subordinate situation reports to create a comprehensive roll-up, highlighting opportunities and risks and recording command updates to provide an [executive summary] that aligns the team. That helps me understand risks and opportunities.

At every echelon we’re doing it and getting better. The key is harnessing all that to make sure we’re efficient.

How are the Pathways exercises in the Pacific evolving?

We’re optimizing what we’re doing with each of our partners based on where they are. Our partners have sovereign defense desires. We’re keen on addressing those as part of the Pathways events.

We have three focus areas: what we’re building in terms of multilateral training tasks with partners participating in that event; building our own readiness for our tactical units and operational tasks; and experimentation to give feedback on new technology.

Across the board, the Philippines are shifting from counter-insurgent to large-scale combat operation focus. They’re reorganizing their army to focus on homeland defense.

We’re helping them do that as they’re looking at some type of land component command, which is the operational level headquarters that we’re working on with the Japanese and the Koreans as well.

In Japan, we continue to do Yamasakura and other events that focus on the defense of Japan. We’ve been really deliberate about focusing on how we integrate networks based on where their military is, so we can communicate and share data. That’s the key aspect.

The integrated command-and-control systems is a focus for us right now as we look at the Indo-Pacific Multinational Network. The development of that system enables us to work with any of our partners, based on where they are, to have a common operational picture, common intelligence picture and common logistics picture.

[It’s] still under development and we’re working hard to iterate and provide feedback, but certainly a focus at echelon is to make sure we can get it and have a C2 network. That’s a mission partner environment ability we all need.

We tested it in a couple exercises … and we’re continuing to refine it. The Indo-Pacific J-6 is the lead for this effort and we’re continuing to work with them as they develop it.

New long-range fires capabilities are taking shape in the Indo-Pacific, with testing of the Precision Strike Missile and the Typhon Mid-Range Capability missile. Now Typhon is in Japan. What recent lessons have you learned in terms of developing long-range fires concepts?

It’s clearly something that the Indo-Pacific commander has mentioned. Land-based, long-range fires is what he sees as the Army’s top contribution to joint forces in the Pacific.

As long-range fires evolve to get precision fires on the land and maritime domain, control of the land is a markedly more important factor.

Think of a strait where you have land-based fires on either side and then long-range fires as we reorganize and put HIMARS in the [division artillery], which we’re doing with 25th Infantry Division. It’s extending our operational reach.

We are continuing to integrate these capabilities into existing exercises and war games to adjust concepts for the fight and what we can provide the joint force.

We’re doing an exercise here in April — Courage Lethality — where we’ll link all of the Corps’ long-range fires assets, Multidomain Task Force assets, some joint force partner assets for sensor-to-shooter integration and validation across the region from Washington state to the first island chain.

What would you say is the biggest thing most allies want you to bring to the table during these exercises?

The UAS, counter-UAS and cyber are the ones all are asking for assistance with, and we’re deliberate about helping.

Others are long-range fires. The Philippines just acquired the self-propelled 155mm ATMOS system. The Japanese just deployed two hypersonic battalions. The technology’s following.

Another one is just ensuring partners are integrated with us and that we’re helping them see what’s happening around them. [We] are conscious about building those types of capabilities for homeland defense and the protection aspect.

Everyone’s watching Ukraine and learning different lessons. Ukraine certainly informs what’s going to happen in the Pacific, but it doesn’t mean what’s happening in Ukraine is exactly what is going to happen in the Pacific. It’s a completely different theater, different environment, different threats.

So, we’re conscious in making sure we’re pulling the applicable lessons to share with partners and integrate training against those tasks during rehearsals.

You talked about how I Corps is adapting to meet emerging needs and threats. Can you provide some examples?

If you don’t adapt, you aren’t going to survive. We’re helping our soldiers understand the reality of the modern battlefield through things, for example, like putting command posts underground.

We’re optimizing our electronic warfare range here at Joint Base Lewis-McChord so we can work through the contested electronic warfare environment. We’re bringing in swarms of UAVs to training events so soldiers understand you are constantly in contact, either from threat satellites or from threat air assets and sometimes low-cost UAVs.

We’re shedding some of the things we did over the last 20 years as we operated with [central command posts and forward operating bases], distributing ourselves across the battlefield in smaller nodes for command posts and encouraging our leaders and units to understand that mindset to operate in a distributed sense.

So they hooked up their M777 to the novel Artillery Execution Suite during an exercise last month and pulled the lanyard.

Users of the legacy software, the Advanced Field Artillery Tactical Data System, had become accustomed to working around problems.

Troubleshooting was just the normal part of operating the system, Maj. Gen. Patrick Ellis, the 4th ID commander, told Defense News in a recent interview.

The new software, AXS, is a module of the overarching Next-Generation Command-and-Control, or NGC2, envisioned to power all Army battlefield operations.

Exercise Ivy Sting, a series meant to help develop a prototype for NGC2, was deemed the perfect opportunity for a trial run for the howitzer crew, and compare it to the old system.

The tests showed that AXS can drastically shorten what artillerists call the “kill chain,” according to Ellis.

The gun was ready to fire even before the unit finished digging in the two titanium spades on the back of the howitzer used to stabilize it in the ground, he said.

“If you talk to these artillery operators, they will tell you that this was a life changing event for them.”

While the first round of Ivy Sting was focused on the fires C2 element, the division is committed to testing the entire NGC2 prototype. That consists of a four-layer stack: the app layer, data layer, infrastructure layer, and transport layer.

When he took over the service two years ago, Army Chief of Staff Gen. Randy George recognized getting command-and-control right was imperative to future battlefield success and decided to embark on a program to fix the service’s C2 capabilities to avoid operational disruption while creating the necessary clean-sheet system from scratch.

At the same time, the Army began a proof-of-concept of a next-gen C2 system that would be a complete departure from using anything the service already had in its inventory, and the plan was to develop it and scale it for division use within just a few years.

“I put out two years ago that we have to fix the network as our number one priority, that we have to be data centric,” George told Defense News in a recent interview. “It really impacts everything that we do across every warfighting function and to be leaner, lower signature and more lethal, we would need to have something like Next-Gen C2,” he said. “It remains a priority for us.”

Getting NGC2 right means faster decisions in the field. “What we do know is that whoever can make decisions and act the fastest will probably win the next conflict and the network is central to all of that,” Army Vice Chief of Staff Gen. James Mingus told Defense News.

“We are convinced that if we get that part right, there will be a day when our soldiers, instead of carrying multiple radios, batteries, and tethered equipment, will only need an end-user device at the edge,” he said. “That will be all they need for the next fight.”

From the ground up

Starting from scratch, the Army put together a proof-of-concept, with companies like Google, Palantir and Anduril, demonstrating how it would share data seamlessly between command posts while reducing the footprint and signature at Project Convergence, a demo event, at the National Training Center at Fort Irwin, California, in March 2024.

That technological foundation behind the effort showcased a static prototype of the network’s data-sharing architecture, Brig. Gen. Michael Kaloostian, who leads the Army’s Next-Generation Command-and-Control cross-functional team, told Defense News in an interview.

By the next round of Project Convergence earlier in 2025, the Army had a proof-of-principle of the entire four-layer tech stack, which was tested in a live environment with an armored battalion and even contested by an opposing force.

When the digital tools were turned off and the battalion reverted to legacy comms, the difference was stark.

“The OPFOR was using traditional comms,” Kaloostian said, “and our forces were using next-gen C2 and they had a decisive advantage,” he said. “When we took all of that stuff away … it was really kind of parity with the opposing force.”

The Army is now scaling the system to the entire 4th ID division, and by next summer, that division will take it to the next Project Convergence. The division will continue in the lead through Project Convergence Capstone 7 in 2027.

To get there, the service awarded contracts in July for an industry team led by Anduril to build a prototype capability leveraging technology already part of the pilot efforts.

The team will work alongside soldiers in the field throughout the effort to refine the capability across aviation, logistics and sustainment formations.

The Anduril team, which was awarded a $99.6 million contract to deliver a prototype in less than a year, has other tech industry heavyweights like Palantir on board.

The prototype architecture will consist of “integrated and scalable” C2 capabilities using hardware, software and applications through a common data layer, the Army stated in a July 18 announcement.

The service is also providing the 25th ID in Hawaii with another prototype capability.

The Army awarded Lockheed Martin Rotary and Mission Systems a contract to lead a team with innovators like Raft and Hypergiant to develop the second NGC2 prototype architecture going to the 25th ID.

Sting and strike

The 4th ID is now embarking on a series of experimentation events with its NGC2 prototype stack called Ivy Sting. These events will occur every month as “a building block” until a culminating event the division is calling Ivy Mass, according to Ellis.

“It’s kind of almost a continual prototyping effort,” Ellis said. “We are not in experimentation anymore. We are the Next-Gen C2 prototype division.”

The Ivy Mass exercise next May will be a large-scale mission rehearsal ahead of Project Convergence at the National Training Center, Ellis noted.

The first round of Ivy Sting last month devoted to fires – connecting sensors to shooters – was the logical place to begin because it forced the Army to integrate every other data source along the way, Ellis said.

“In order to effectively shoot artillery … you have to be able to ingest target data,” he said. “A lot of that comes from the Army Intel Data Platform. You also need to know where all your logistics are, where the artillery rounds are.”

That effort has also given soldiers direct experience shaping the tools they’ll use.

“We didn’t want the perfect product,” Ellis said. “We wanted the product, and now we’re helping make it better.”

Future Ivy Sting events will focus on airspace management, artificial intelligence for targeting, and the integration of operational simulations, which are digital “what-if” tools that let commanders test plans against enemy movement.

“It’s not a video game,” Ellis said, “but … a simulation tool for a commander to use to say, ‘Here’s where all my blue units are. Here’s where I understand the red units to be. What happens if I go left or right?’”

Between each Ivy Sting iteration, soldiers and engineers are also conducting rapid “sprints,” tackling specific digital problems and meeting in what the Army calls solution summits, which are open working sessions where soldiers describe what isn’t working and industry developers push updates back within days or weeks.

“They actually interact with industry partners, and they interact with teammates from across the acquisition community, and they have a back-and-forth,” Ellis said. “What it’s doing is it’s starting to drive two Stings into the future … it’s kind of a roadmap that gets us ready.”

The 25th ID will conduct similar sprints, beginning with one later this fall, called Lightning Strike.

Night and day

The Army is also reworking the typical acquisition system for the effort to support the pace, according to Joe Welch, deputy chief of staff of Army Futures Command.

For one, the Army used a new mechanism it’s calling “fast pass” to get initial requirements for the NGC2 through its oversight paces in order to move quickly to get capability into formations, Lt. Gen. Karl Gingrich, the Army G-8, told Defense News.

Moving quickly to get systems into soldiers’ hands has resulted in rapid improvement. For one, Ivy Sting has shown the vast difference in performance between using a digital fires thread versus legacy capabilities.

“It’s just night and day,” Welch said.

NGC2’s new partnership model pairing government integrators with commercial teams is reshaping how the Army develops software, he stressed.

“What we’ve set out with our acquisition partners on NGC2 is really this industry team lead, partnership model,” Welch said. “We’re really using this period … to look at what is the most effective working relationship, because this is something we really haven’t done before.”

The Army has also had to reorganize how it budgets for C2 capabilities, Welch noted.

“We looked across all of the disparate budget line items in the Army that had something to do with delivery of a C2 capability,” he said. “In the ’26 budget submit … we have done a lot of that framework that would better support the NGC2 concept.”

By consolidating those funds, the Army hopes to move money faster and sustain momentum across its modernization programs.

The program’s rapid evolution has led to some concern that the system is vulnerable and presents security risks.

“I think as part of any network development or integration work, you’re going to have deliberate processes for identifying seams,” Brig. Gen. Shane Taylor, program executive officer for Army Command, Control, Communications and Network, said in a recent interview. “It could be cyber security challenges. Where can we build cyber resiliency into the system?”

The Army is doing that work as part of Ivy Sting, he said. “There are exercises built into that, or learning demands built into that, where we’re going to look at things like spectrum and look at efforts like red teaming, where we can identify cyber challenges.”

External work in a lab is also reducing risk, he noted.

Already after the first iteration of Ivy Sting, the Army has “rapidly burned down those risks to an acceptable level,” Taylor said.

As Army leaders continue to press on to fund and organize the Army’s number one priority, what drives the soldiers in 4th ID is more immediate, the chance to be part of a generational change.

The 4th ID is known as the first digital division, but it was minted as such in 2003, Ellis said. “We’ve been using that same technology since 2003, so the fact that soldiers now get the opportunity to be part of something new, it’s really exciting.”

Leaders across the Army “feel the pressure very personally to get this right for the rest of the Army,” Ellis said. “Our goal is to deliver a quality product … across the Army.”

The new strategy, which has yet to be published publicly, takes “a much more holistic or comprehensive approach to Army watercraft,” Lt. Gen. Karl Gingrich, the Army deputy chief of staff G-8 chief, told Defense News in a recent interview.

The Army “is not going to be able to build watercraft or build ourselves out of this challenge,” Gingrich said. “The time is not there. The resources aren’t there, so … how do we sustain our current fleet and extend the life of it?”

That effort includes service-life extension programs, or SLEPs, for existing vessels. The Army has already made some investments to SLEP watercraft in fiscal 2025 and 2026 “because we knew this was coming, and we knew this was key,” Gingrich said.

The Army will buy some Maneuver Support Vessel Light, or MSV-L, landing crafts but the production numbers have scaled back to five production models. The service is being deliberate about pacing procurement, Gingrich said. When the original prototype is included in the mix, it brings the total to six ships.

“The MSV-Light is actually here in the 8th TSC right now, operating here in Hawaii, and we’re putting it through its paces with the joint force,” Maj. Gen. Gavin Gardner, the 8th Theater Sustainment Command commander, told Defense News. The vessel will participate in the Joint Pacific Multinational Readiness Center rotation in November, he said.

Even so, the Army cannot rely solely on new construction to close gaps, Gingrich said.

“We can’t build our way out of this, so the only way we’re going to be able to do it is to take a look at how do we fill the gaps in capacity and perhaps capability? How do we do that with commercial solutions, or even modified commercial solutions, where we take a commercial vessel that’s several years old, modify it for our needs, and get it out to the force.”

That approach could include soldiers operating government-owned platforms or using contracted crews, according to Gingrich.

The Army has already begun implementing key tenets of the strategy in theater, according to Gardner.

Army leadership has fully supported an effort to “leverage offshore support vessels, OSVs, which is a commercial, contracted shallow-draft watercraft, to help augment our gray-hulled boats,” Gardner said. The vessels’ cranes and “roll-on/roll-off” capabilities also allow the watercraft to access shallow-draft facilities in other countries, he added.

Contracted vessels can offer operational and perceptual benefits, according to Gardner, who described commercial vessels as “a little bit less intrusive.”

“It blends in,” he said. “And quite frankly, … it becomes a challenge for adversaries to find it and target it as well.”

The Army is also deeply interested in pursuing autonomous watercraft, viewing it as a means to transform future sustainment operations.

“We just had some experimental days out here with a couple of vendors … where we have seen what autonomous watercraft can deliver, from a perspective of not only force protection, but what really excites me, for logistics,” Gardner said.

He drew a comparison to World War II–era production, when America mass-produced cargo vessels known as Liberty ships.

“But you were still putting mariners on [Liberty ships] and putting them at risk,” Gardner said. “In the future, if we can develop it appropriately,” the Army could use autonomous watercraft to “create a distribution targeting challenge for any adversary, but also … protect the force,” he added.

Ultimately, the goal is a hybrid fleet that blends crewed and uncrewed platforms, Gardner said.

“We save Army watercraft to do delivery of combat power, while maybe autonomous vessels are delivering that routine sustainment,” he said.

As teaming with humans and robots continues to be developed across the force, “everybody wants to talk about fighter aircraft doing that,” Gardner said. “I want to do that with watercraft and its ability to sustain the Combined Joint Force. I think it’ll be hugely powerful and the Army is moving out that way.”

U.S. Army Europe and Africa commander Gen. Christopher Donahue “wants to go fast on this,” Lt. Gen. Charles Costanza, the Army’s V Corps commander, told Defense News in a recent interview.

“How can you get the capabilities that are available now, get them into the hands of soldiers, to [get a] proof-of-concept and then scope and scale it so we can get what we need.”

The idea for a Eastern Flank Deterrence Line, or EFDL, which was first announced in July at the Association of the U.S. Army’s LandEuro conference in Wiesbaden, Germany, is to focus on enhancing ground-based capabilities and drive military-industrial interoperability across the alliance, Donahue explained there.

As part of the plan to counter Russian threats and enable scalable, global deterrence, the Army and its NATO allies are urgently developing standardized, data-driven systems, common launchers and cloud-based coordination, according to Gen. Donahue.

That is taking shape in the form of amassing counter-drone systems in countries along the Eastern Flank, tying together air defense and defensive fires and sharing data that enables NATO to work together, according to Costanza.

The Army’s V Corps is currently participating in a NATO exercise — called Avenger Triad — that involves five different corps from across the alliance, including Poland. This, Costanza said, will bringing to EFDL closer to reality.

“To help us fight and actually realize the Eastern Flank Deterrence Line — we’ve got a new organization called an Operational Fires Command,” he said, “which will integrate all of our lethal and non-lethal capabilities into one organization to streamline that.”

Avenger Triad is incorporating specific capabilities like Spike Non-Line-of-Sight missiles fired from AH-64 Apache helicopters, which are relatively new assets for Poland.

Also part of the effort, the Army and NATO partners are incorporating Palantir’s Maven Smart System “to use the AI capability to streamline how we use data,” Costanza said.

One of the bigger elements unfolding as part of the EFDL is how the U.S. Army and NATO forces are fielding unmanned systems to take out enemy drones along the Eastern Flank.

The chosen system — the U.S.-based startup Project Eagle’s Merod — is already being proven successful in Ukraine.

“We’re training our Polish partners how to use them,” Costanza said. “Same thing with [our] Romanian partners. We’re now expanding it to Denmark with a view of expanding this capability up and down the Eastern Flank of Europe.”

These developments come at a time when the number of incursions over Eastern Europe airspace is surging.

Taking note, the 10th Army Air and Missile Defense Command is prioritizing contributions to the EFDL concept, and while cruise and ballistic missiles are still a concern, focus is on the sort of one-way attack drones proliferating on Ukraine’s battlefields, according to its commander Brig. Gen. Curtis King.

The counter-drone platform helps address the cost conundrum of using expensive missiles against cheap drones, King noted.

“We’re training on that to understand how to employ capabilities that allow us to, at a lower cost, build capacity that we would need to defeat the amount of one-way attack drones we’ve seen Russia be very successful at launching on a continual basis,” he added.

Another plus is that the Army’s drones can be produced much faster than a traditional missile. Rapidly fielding systems at scale is therefore more feasible, according to King.

“We’re moving as fast as we can,” he said. “We’ve been told to get this to move out as quickly as possible.”

King added that he expects to see each country feature a similar capability within this calendar year, “if not sooner than that.”

The Army is currently assessing drone-on-drone intercept platforms produced by several different companies, to include government organizations, he noted.

The command is also looking at “passive sensors and active sensors [to see how] we enhance sensor coverage to ensure that we have the right detection capability to facilitate detecting those threats and then defeating them,” King said.

Additionally, the command is working on the data integration of all of the sensors through cloud architecture.

This approach helps “to ensure that we can get the data — not just to the normal air defense participants that we would need, but to get this data over to the intelligence organizations and to the fires organizations,” King said, “so that they can [take] action on this data and improve that.”

Focusing on these particular capabilities don’t just address the deterrence line in Europe, but extend to enabling a global deterrent, King acknowledged.

“Those capabilities are many of the same capabilities that our leaders have told us to look to develop for the Golden Dome of America,” he said, “for homeland defense activity as well.”

The service is expecting a production contract for the first increment of PrSM by the end of the month, with Lozano noting, “We will put Lockheed Martin under contract for 400 missiles.”

The Army has been working with Lockheed Martin, the missile’s producer, to increase production capacity in the lead up to the major production deal.

The first set of PrSMs was delivered in December 2023, as the Army began to replace the legacy Army Tactical Missile System (ATACMS).

The missile — which can launch from both the HIMARS and the M270A2 Multiple Launch Rocket System — will be critical to the service as it seeks a deep-strike capability that can counter Russian and Chinese technologies. Both European- and Indo-Pacific-based U.S. commanders have been eager to receive the capability that can hit targets at standoff locations greater than 400 kilometers (249 miles).

Lockheed delivered the first 26 missiles throughout 2024 and the Army is set to receive another 54 this year, totaling 100 missiles.

The PrSM production line will significantly ramp up and the Army expects to see production increase to 400 by the fourth quarter of fiscal 2027 and into 2028, according to Lozano.

“We’ve been very deliberate and aggressive in increasing that capacity very steadily,” Lozano said.

To be able to do that, the Army is focused on phasing out the ATACMs production.

The ATACMS and PrSM production line share the same facility, noted Lozano. “I want to create enough PrSM capacity to be able to address both [foreign military sales] requirements as well as U.S. requirements, so I need to sunset ATACM sales,” he added.

The service is rapidly finalizing plans to implement an exportable version of PrSM Increment 1 to sell on the international market instead of ATACMS.

Lockheed’s current production line for ATACMS is building missiles for Taiwan.

Once ATACMS production closes out in roughly the next 24 months, “I can take over the entirety of the PrSM production facility and we can continue to increase capacity,” Lozano said.

The Army is planning capability improvements in subsequent increments, including an enhanced seeker to better defeat moving targets at sea as well as technology to provide increased lethality and extended range. The priority for the PrSM in the near term is to pursue a maritime, ship-killing capability.

Lockheed, RTX and a Northrop Grumman team will compete to develop a subsequent increment called the Long-Range Maneuverable Fires program, which focuses on dramatically extending the range of the missile, possibly from its planned 499 kilometers (310 miles) to more than double that distance.