The material, which can shatter a 7.62mm round on impact with an inch-thick panel, is used on the Army’s High Mobility Artillery Rocket System now and will soon appear on the M270A2 Multiple Launch Rocket System, said Russ Wooddell, business development manager for Saint-Gobain, which makes the Sapphire transparent armor.

The strike face material is extremely hard, resists scratches and abrasion, and cuts weight and thickness by about 50 percent when compared to glass solutions that would be used for similar purposes, Wooddell told Army Times Wednesday at the Association of the United States Army’s annual meeting.

“It’s much easier to handle,” he said. “All other materials that will be around the window won’t scratch it. Even if you took a piece of sandpaper and rubbed it across the surface, it will not scratch.”

HIMARS crews had issues with the mylar on glass windows, he said. It was difficult to see through the windows when they were firing off rockets and contending with debris and dust. Pits, dents and scratches in the window obscured the view.

Sapphire can sustain more wear and tear, and can stop a wide range of munitions, depending on the thickness of the piece, Wooddell said. It can also improve visibility when using infrared, he said.

The clearer picture and ballistic resilience of the transparent armor make it suitable for face shields for soldiers, Wooddell said.

“We’re working on a program for a high-threat protection face shield” made from Sapphire, he said, adding that the company is working with U.S. Army Natick Soldier Systems Center toward a contract for such a project.

The crystal material is customizable in size and shape. While it’s typically flat, a soldier’s face shield would be designed and formed as a curved piece.

“I see that as a roadmap for being able to make a large curved piece such as a windshield,” Wooddell said.

There’s also potential for sensor systems and optics, he said.

“We’re vehicle and platform focused, but I do see a more soldier-centric Sapphire project.”

Click here for more coverage from the 2018 AUSA conference.

The Army is working on how it will train and equip soldiers to deal with an adversary they can’t see, said Maj. Gen. Patricia Frost, who leads the Army Cyber Directorate at the Pentagon. The directorate, which opened last summer, is integrating the Army’s cyber, electronic warfare and information operations.

As the Army builds its organizations and capability in the cyber domain, “where I think we need to go next is the understanding by every soldier,” Frost told Army Times in an Oct. 5 interview at the Pentagon. “Every soldier knows ‘I have to fire my weapon.’ Does every soldier realize that they’re the first line of defense in cyberspace? Between what you have at your work station or your warfighting platform, your iPhone or your Blackberry or all these end-point devices, the adversary only has to have one vector in.”

The Army needs a strong and capable cyber mission force, but responsibility for cyber defense belongs to all soldiers, she said.

“They need to understand what their responsibilities are when they log on,” Frost said. “That can’t just be Army Cyber’s problem. Everyone is a defender in this space.”

Soldiers also need to know how to react when the electromagnetic environment in which they work is compromised, just as they need to know how to fire their weapon when wearing protective gear during a chemical, biological or nuclear event, she said.

“We’re talking about this integration with electronic warfare,” Frost said. “You also need to know how to operate, depending on what your MOS is, in a degraded or denied environment, due to what could happen in an electromagnetic environment.”

The answer is not putting an electronic warfare soldier in every squad.

“You can’t scale that across the Army. That’s not realistic,” she said. “You need to know as a soldier, how do I operate, and you need to understand what vulnerabilities you may open up for your squad, company, battalion, brigade, division or corps, by your cyber hygiene on the network.”

A new type of training

Soldiers may see a change in their training at combat training centers across the Army.

Cyber education and training needs to take place not just at the Cyber Center of Excellence “but at all the centers of excellence to understand how this electromagnetic environment is affecting us and also how the cyber domain impacts us,” Frost said.

“We’re looking at how do we change the training environment within our combat training centers to show the environment we’d like to project,” she said. “We’re working very closely with the Combined Arms Center, with FORSCOM [Army Forces Command], on how do we create the right environment that brings in these different aspects,” Frost said.

A new exercise

In recent weeks the Army has been teaming up with the Marine Corps to look at training in signals, cyber and EW, and now a combined exercise is planned for February at Fort Huachuca, Arizona.

“Because we are all very invested in a land component view, there’s a lot of synergy between us and the Marine Corps and how we want to emulate this type of environment,” Frost said.

FORSCOM will designate which unit will participate in the exercise, Frost said. The soldiers and Marines would interact to share information in a tactical environment so they can understand what’s happening in that space.

The Army in September conducted an exercise called Cyber Blitz at Joint Base McGuire-Dix-Lakehurst, New Jersey. Marines came to observe and industry partners took part to see what’s needed for EW and cyberspace capabilities.

Soldiers from the 25th Infantry Division were there to try out prototypes of tools and also capabilities now available, then gave the industry partners their feedback.

Growing the force

The Army has made a “very significant” investment in its cyber force, and in its manpower, organizational constructs, resourcing and acquisition, Frost said. The Army has achieved more than other services have so far, she said.

“I feel very strongly that the Army is truly leading the way in this space,” Frost said. “I think we’re really seeing that come together now in how we’re equipping the cyber mission force, the operational capabilities we’re putting in our support to our geographic combatant commands we’re aligned to.”

As of Sept. 30, the Army was the first service to deliver all of its 41 active component teams at full operational capability, ahead of the other services and a year ahead of schedule, Frost said. The cyber teams were supposed to be at FOC by the end of 2018, so they were ready a year ahead of schedule, she said.

The Army’s reserve component teams are building up and expected to reach FOC by 2024, she said. Reserve component teams are already supporting critical missions in support of U.S. Cyber Command, under the operational control of Lt. Gen. Paul Nakasone, the commander of Army Cyber Command.

Frost says she sees the progress as “a huge win.”

The Army has opened the Cyber Center of Excellence at Fort Gordon, Georgia, and is growing that center and its manning. The Army also has a cyber brigade at Fort Meade, Maryland.

“Generating an operational force at Fort Gordon is just tremendous, and we hope we are setting the foundation to maybe be that joint service school … not just cyber but electronic warfare as well,” Frost said.

Priorities ahead

One of the priorities for Army cyber now is to assess how secure and resilient its weapons platforms are, Frost said, and the same goes for installations and systems.

“We’re doing a lot of mission analysis of what does the Army need,” she said, including what type of cyber expertise is required at echelon as staff and as operators.

Another priority for the year ahead is supporting Army Cyber Command, the Army’s only operational command in the cyber space, Frost said.

“I want to ensure that Gen. Nakasone is successful in what he is trying to achieve for ’18 and beyond, and we’re helping him achieve that,” she said.

One of his missions is defending the Department of Defense Information Network. The cyber directorate works to ensure his command is resourced and has the capabilities for that mission, which extends across every command to strengthen and secure the DODIN, Frost said.

Warfighting in cyberspace

As soldiers develop and mature in the Army, they should understand “at the base level of their tradecraft” how the different domains — land, air, sea, space and cyber — affect their warfighting function, Frost said, “and how we integrate across all the centers of excellence and how we integrate operationally across the Army,” she said.

Soldiers and commanders need to understand the battle spaces and visualize the invisible ones.

“One of the things we’re working on not just in the cyber domain but in the electromagnetic environment is how do you visualize this space that is not tangible,” Frost said. “We have right now a capability requirement for cyber situational understanding which would provide a visualization tool for commanders all the way down to the brigade combat team.”

Commanders would also have a planning management tool to allow them to see the electromagnetic environment and their own unit’s energy signatures as well as the enemy’s.

The goal is to give the commander tools to achieve mission success, and as the threat evolves, the capabilities evolve as well.

“Everyone says it’s about the technology and the hardware, but the Army is a people-focused service, we’re about our people,” Frost said. “The 8th Infantry Division was my first unit when I came into the Army and ‘Soldiers are our credentials’ was our motto. That truly is how were going to advance in this space.”

The Army’s cyber operators want unit commanders to know they’re ready to bring solutions that can be tailored to the unit, the network and the commanders’ missions — and they’re bringing their servers and sensors with them.

“We’re coming into our own as a brand new brigade, a brand new unit and a brand new domain,” said Maj. Josh Rykowski, a mission team leader with Cyber Protection Brigade.

“We’re trying to develop and get our capabilities out to the customers, network owners to understand what the capabilities are that we can provide,” Rykowski said.

He and other cyber operators met with reporters this week at the Association of the U.S. Army annual meeting in Washington, D.C., to talk about how cyber protection teams do their jobs, what they need to succeed, and how they can support commanders.

As the Army’s newest war-fighting domain grows, it will soon open its own training range, just as more traditional combat arms units have their firing ranges, said Lt. Gen. Paul Nakasone, the commander of Army Cyber Command, who joined the cyber operators at the AUSA event.

The training environment will hone the skills of cyber warriors and the Army’s cyber protection teams, which go out to units to do assessments and use intelligence to find gaps in units’ networks and look for other issues.

The teams then work with the local defender to leave the network more defensible than it was before, Rykowski said.

“My team has had a very high operational tempo,” Rykowski said in response to a question from Army Times. “The adversary is out there, and there is definitely a wide range of missions to conduct.”

The tools

When the cyber protection teams bring their defensive capability to a unit, they arrive equipped with a deployable cyber kit: hardware, servers, software, and sensors to sense a network.

The equipment can be a powerful advantage for commanders, the operators said.

The cyber kit includes a combination of network assessment equipment and forensics equipment, said Capt. Sean Eyre.

“We have server stacks that give rudimentary defense and a substantial amount of storage capacity and a substantial amount of computational power that allows me to flexibly create tools on the fly from my repository of tools,” Eyre said.

And the kits can be protected from what they find, he said.

“We always go on a mission with the mindset that a network has been exploited in some fashion, so it’s not safe to operate on there,” he said. “So, when we connect our kit to the network, we have defenses within the kit, so we ensure we ourselves do not get exploited if the adversary is still in the network.”

New training range

The new Persistent Cyber Training Environment is due to be rolled out at the end of the year, Nakasone said.

The Army has taken the lead in developing the new platform, which is intended to be a joint training capability across the Defense Department.

The virtual environment is intended to fill gaps between the virtual cyber training environments available now, support multiple training events, and boost cyber readiness across the services, Army officials have said.

It will be scalable to train individuals, teams and units, and for large-scale exercises as well as preparing for missions.

Commanders: Plan ahead

As the teams prepare for missions, they have a message for commanders.

Commanders should plan ahead for a cyber team to pay a visit — months ahead, said 1st Lt. Alvaro Luna, a former armor officer who works with cyber support to corps and below to help deliver cyber effects for commanders.

At 180 days before a rotation to the National Training Center, a cyber planner begins integrating with a commander, said Luna, who works on the offense side of the Army’s cyber operations.

His number one challenge, he said, is educating the unit he’s attached to about how cyber support works.

“One thing we found that is critically essential is early integration,” Luna said. “At the first sit-down, they understand what you can do. The second time we go out, we do another exercise with them that’s actually on their territory at their local [field training] event, [and] they can actually see those effects that we planned in the past.”

By the time the unit gets to NTC, “they’re caught up on what we can do. They’re already planning and they understand how we think. It’s really building that early relationship with commanders so that they know how you process information. Showing up at NTC with everything is too late so we integrate extremely early,” he said.

The teams

What characterizes a cyber protection team is that the operators are hunting for adversaries, looking for someone who doesn’t want to be found in a network.

“That is a core skill that we train in our cyber protection teams,” Nakasone said.

Rykowski’s team is one of the Army’s 20 cyber protection teams, the defensive elements, in the Army’s active force, Nakasone said. Another 21 teams are being built in reserve component — 11 in the Army National Guard and 10 in the Army Reserve. Of a team’s 39 personnel, 80 percent are military and 20 percent are civilians.

Each team’s civilians can share their expertise from diverse backgrounds, Nakasone said.

Vincent Walker is one of those. He is former enlisted and a former signals intelligence analyst who has been working with Army cyber for three years.

“We work closely with each other daily,” Walker said. “I can bring partners in from other places and agencies.”

With his background comes a wealth of contacts he can call on, he said.

“The experience of those people coming in and having conversations with them [the team members] helps them a great deal,” he said.

There are four different kinds of teams: national CPTs, Defense Department Information Network CPTs, teams that work directly with combatant commands, and Army service CPTs.

“Being an Army CPT, we receive a broad range of missions, and as we’ve gone out and assisted the network owner, a lot of what we do is educate them in our capabilities and also trying to work toward leaving the network in a much more defensible position,” Rykowski said.

“Nerds want to be nerds, not leaders,” said Chris Lynch, leader of Defense Digital Service.

The military has to let go of the individual contributor model, because for many tech people, “that doesn’t work,” he said.

The Defense Digital Service is a Defense Department agency that hires private-sector employees with cyber skills.

Lynch and leaders of Army cyber and the cyber industry spoke about attracting, keeping and, in some cases, letting cyber talent go during the panel discussion “A New Kind of Force for a New Fighting Domain: Cyber Talent Management” at the AUSA annual meeting in Washington, D.C.

“We’re now competing with a world unlike anything else,” Lynch said, referring to intense competition with tech companies for cyber talent. “We need to be building a place where this kind of work has a home.”

Click here for full coverage from the AUSA annual meeting.

The Army’s cyber force also may want to adapt to letting people go for its own good, panelists said.

“The private sector has advantages you’re not going to have, to hire and fire,” said Guy Filippelli, vice president of Solutions Data and Insider Threat Solutions for Forcepoint and a former military officer who ran software programs on deployments.

Good engineering teams in private industry “might start with 30 people and end up with 20 we really like,” he said. “An interesting learning lesson for the military might be how quickly can you get rid of people.”

The Army should be willing to let cyber personnel leave the military, learn new skills and come back in, said Brig. Gen. Stephen Hager, deputy commander of operations for the Cyber National Mission Force, U.S. Cyber Command. He is a former active-duty officer who went reserve and has run tech companies.

In Silicon Valley, he said, companies may get rid of 50 percent of their tech people a year to get new blood.

“I think competition is good,” Hager said. “We should be willing to let our workforce permeate, go out … and come back. The U.S. military is the greatest one on earth, but that is not the most important thing to the nation. The most important thing is our economic might.”

In the cyber profession, it should be all right for some people to fail the training, said Maj. Gen. John Morrison Jr., commander of the Army Cyber Center of Excellence at Fort Gordon, Georgia.

The mindset that “we have to get everyone through the course” should change, Morrison said. Soldiers aren’t yet a 17 series MOS until the conclusion of the course.

“It’s a different paradigm” in cyber, he said.

There is a pressing need for NATO allies to share intelligence, but many products available to enable that aren’t suitable, Hodges told an audience at a panel Tuesday at the Association of the U.S. Army Annual Meeting & Exposition.

“I have been walking the halls here and looking at exhibits and seeing the incredible products the defense industry produces, but I continue to be disappointed because everything is made for U.S. forces only … and that‘s not how we’re going to fight,” Hodges said. “We’ve got to continue to put the demand on industry, but also get the policies right to allow us to share information and intelligence.”

Without that, the U.S. can’t do digital force missions with its allies, and the NATO countries are impaired in communicating with each other in a secure mode.

“We are taking great risk at our ability to be an effective deterrent, he said.

He emphasized the important of interoperability within NATO countries, and said the U.S. cannot act effectively alone in the region.

“We don’t do anything by ourselves partly because we don’t have the capacity,” Hodges “There is a need for interoperability. We are much more effective and stronger when we have our partners.”

Another factor necessary for deterrence is speed, he said.

The U.S. has to be as fast or faster than Russian forces, he said. U.S. forces have about seven days to get forces to the eastern side of the NATO region, given conditions and EU road laws.

“Speed of assembly is critical,” Hodges said, in case of impending conflict.

The U.S. presence in Europe is enhanced by the rotational heel-to-toe presence of brigade combat teams such as the 3rd Armored Brigade Combat Team, 4th Infantry Division, out of Fort Carson, Colorado, with its approximately 4,000 soldiers that deployed last winter in support of Operation Atlantic Resolve.

The Russians’ huge military exercise in September, called Zapad, meaning “west,” conducted near the Baltics, was a “great example of the Russians‘ attempt to create a false narrative,” Hodges said. The Russians said they had fewer troops, fewer than 13,000, than they apparently had deployed.

There were three main takeaways after Zapad, Hodges said. Within NATO was the best intelligence sharing ever seen, and “all kinds of walls came down, he said. Second was confidence in the Enhanced Forward Presence battle group concept, with battle groups fielded in less than a year.

The third, he said. was “nobody believes anything the Russians say anymore. Everyone knows there were more than 12,700 troops.”

That lack of clarity creates anxiety, he said, and makes people worried about what the exercise is about.

A member of the audience asked if there are enough U.S. troops in Europe to act effectively.

“There are response plans … readiness forces ready to go, corps standing by right now, ready to go,” said Lt. Gen. Darryl Williams, commander of Alllied Land Command, NATO.

A new system the Army is developing would take the burden off medics and provide detailed information to a hospital or clinic, said Lt. Col. Christian Cook, project manager for medevac at the Army Medical Materiel Agency.

The medical data is captured by sensors, stored and sent wirelessly to the medical facility on the ground, Cook said Tuesday at the Association of the U.S. Army’s annual convention.

“A medvac pilot gets called out on an urgent request, we get out there and undoubtedly load up more than one patient, abilateral amputee or a sucking chest wound. How do we let the receivng medical facility know what‘s coming?” he noted.

The system is Medical Hands-free Ultra Wideband Broadcast, or MEDHUB, which captures medical data through a wireless connection and transmits over the Army tactical networks.

It uses devices approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, and the Army is leveraging equipment that already exists, said Jay Wang, product manager for transport telemedicine systems at the Army Medical Materiel Agency.

“This hasn’t been done before,” Wang said.

Retired Sgt. 1st Class Jeffery Jones, who was also participating in the AUSA presentation, added: “From Vietnam to now, things haven’t changed.”

“A paramedic makes the call from the back of a helicopter, sometimes pilots or a crew chief make the call, or you’re task-saturated, and you say we’re three minutes out with three patients,” he said. “I have to retain information from all one to six patients.”

At the end of the day, the medic writes up patient care reports. MEDHUB spares the medic from that task.

“Administration is one of the biggest obnoxious things we have to deal with,” Wang said. The system “takes off the tedious workload medics have.”

At the end of his duty, he can take a tablet device to the hospital and provide the work flow he has done on each patient.

Medics would use a vital signs monitor, pulse oximeter, oxygen monitor, blood pressure cuff and other equipment with the sensor kit, which notes if patients are ambulatory or need emergency treatment.

The system also relieves medics from having to guess a patient’s weight to calculate doses of medication.

Another vital piece of information is the medevac’s estimated time of arrival, based on a blue force tracker and GPS data.

The system is in the final concept stages, then the plan is to take it into test and evalution, Wang said.

In a demonstration Monday at the AUSA show, retired Sgt. 1^st Class Glen Lehman showed how it works. Lehman lost his arm when he was deployed to Iraq in 2008. Now he wears a prosthetic arm equipped with the neural-control technology, and demonstrated six movements he can prompt the arm to do.

The technology is called the Coapt pattern recognition system, developed with support from the U.S. Army Medical Research and Materiel Command.

“Using a prosthetic can be very tiring, like doing Crossfit eight hours a day,” Lehman said during the demonstration.

With the pattern recognition system, as long as you can maintain a pattern of movement, you can train the prosthetic, and that becomes easier for the user, he said.

“I don’t have to constantly readjust my arm, I can retrain it myself. The arm learned me,” said Lehman, who spent six months recovering from his wounds at Walter Reed Medical Center, medically retired from the Army in 2010 and has gone through many prosthetic devices since then.

The Coapt system makes it easier for amputees to be functional with their prosthetic, he said.

“It used to take six months to get used to an arm, now it takes six weeks,” Lehman told an audience at the show. “In half an hour of use, you can almost master it.”

There are other benefits to the technology, he said. It reduces the amount of time an amputee would need to spend with a clinician.

With advanced robotic technology, the challenge is how you make the neural connection to the user, and make it effective, said Blair Lock, CEO of Coapt.

“Our nervous system is an electrical system,” he said. “Muscles in our body can act as amplifiers for the nervous system’s signals.”

A noninvasive array of electrodes decodes the neurological information sent to it to permit prosthetic control, Lock said.

The more the user wears it, the better it gets, Lock said.

It’s an advantage over the incumbent style of prosthetic control, and has a calibration feature not normally found in prosthetics, Lock said. Training is virtual-game based.

The system is sold as an add-on kit that fits into many of the prosthetic devices on the market. It is commercially available, said Jason Ghannadian, science officer at Army Medical Research and Materiel Command and Congressionally Directed Medical Research Programs.

The technology is not new, and the system has been available for about four years, he said.

Those interested in using the system should talk to their clinician, Lehman said.

AUSA Hall B, Innovators Corner, Booth #2361

• “Operation Resume, 4 Battlefield Phases to a Targeted Resume” with Bruce Benedict, a certified resume writer.
• “Develop a Battle Plan for Winning Your Next Great Career Opportunity,” with Greg Altieri, a corporate culture analyst.
• “Planning for Success” with Bill Koch, director of Still Serving Veterans.

Warriors to the Workforce is located at Booth 261 at the AUSA gathering.