But soldiers today need vast stores of power just to manage daily operations, from the batteries that power the Samsung-based Nett Warrior system that connects soldiers to the electricity that keeps command posts and operations centers running.

Those needs are set to grow within the next decade as the Army moves toward using electric vehicles on the battlefield and weighs a variety of power sources for its facilities and bases. After all, the Army’s new climate strategy imagines a battlefield that depends less on fuel and more on electricity.

It envisions the service fielding hybrid electric tactical vehicles by 2035 and moving to all-electric tactical vehicles by 2050.

To get there, the Army is preparing its first-ever operational energy strategy, which is expected by the end of the year.

The plan focuses on preparing the service to use a range of energy sources, from renewables to fossil fuels to electricity from host nation power grids — changes that could herald dramatic shifts in how the Army spends its multibillion-dollar procurement and research budgets.

In other words, the service wants to map out how it manages and distributes power in operations across the battlefield and is considering a variety of technology that could strengthen that logistics tail — from longer-lasting, lighter batteries to trailer-sized chargers to microgrids.

Army Secretary Christine Wormuth told Defense News that as the service focuses on its ambitious modernization efforts and moves to implement its climate strategy, the logistics and sustainment piece “is often under attended to.”

There is a “strong impetus,” she said, to “put a lot of the resources toward the pointy end of the spear and forget what it takes to feed all of that.”

Energy sources

The operational energy strategy is meant to assess both the individual soldier and energy users ranging from weapons to field kitchens.

To help build the needed infrastructure, the Army is rapidly developing technology that would work toward a widely electrified battlefield.

The service is already fielding generators that provide better fuel efficiency, system reliability and parts interoperability as compared to diesel generators, according to Elise Joseph, who focuses on energy at Army Futures Command.

In its climate strategy, the Army calls for the creation of a more flexible power source by deploying generators with mobile microgrid systems paired with battery storage. The service wants to make this capability usable on the battlefield, Joseph said.

The Army’s C5ISR Center is also working on mobile microgrids, including turning a vehicle into its own microgrid that can then charge soldier batteries in the field. The center is developing “on-soldier power infrastructure” as well as experimenting with wearable solar panels and portable fuel cells. It also entertained the concept of a backpack that harnesses energy from the bouncing created by a moving soldier wearing it. These advances would create new, mobile power sources on the battlefield.

Another area of focus is battery standardization, as the abundance of batteries creates a significant logistics issue, Joseph told Defense News.

“There are so many different kinds of batteries, and so you need individual chargers for each of those, and you’ve got soldiers carrying around all these batteries,” she said. “We are considering that in development and trying to push toward some standard form factors.”

The directorate hopes to make batteries quicker to recharge and longer lasting between charges, she said.

The Army Applications Laboratory, which falls under the purview of Army Futures Command, is wrapping up an eight-week effort with industry focused on sustainment technologies for expeditionary power, according to Lt. Col. Brian Cook, the lab’s network lead.

The program specifically examined how to get power to a soldier in an austere environment from four different angles: power management, distribution, generation and sustainment.

More than 70 companies applied, and the Army selected four to participate: Epirus, Resonant Link, Spark Thermionics and Xerion Advanced Battery. Those four worked with Army officials and soldiers to discuss the service’s needs for the future battlefield and to develop ways to solve those power challenges.

A similar program last year produced a tactical battlefield recharging concept from a Colorado-based company, Cook noted. The recharger was the size of a shipping container, which roughly equates to a small room that can fit on the back of a semitrailer truck.

“We’re trying to get that down into smaller form factors so that you can attach it to different ground-based platforms,” he said.

Powering the soldier

The service also wants to ensure soldiers have the power to run key systems. Col. Denny Dresch, the product manager for ground soldier systems at Program Executive Office Soldier, said troops need reliable power to use existing equipment like the Nett Warrior as well as forthcoming systems like the Integrated Visual Augmentation System, considered a next-generation situational awareness tool.

“We’ve seen the demands on the soldier [are] just going to continue in the future,” he told Defense News.

Nett Warrior, for instance, relies on battery power either through the radio battery into which it plugs or an external battery called the conformal wearable battery. The CWB gives a soldier 18-24 hours of power, according to Dresch. That’s much more than the six to eight hours provided on the radio battery.

The batteries are the size of a small notebook and weigh about 2.5 pounds.

“As you look at the battlefield of tomorrow and you look at what’s going on [with] the soldier, there’s going to be more computational power, there’s going to be more devices that we plug into him or her, and all that’s going to require more power,” Dresch said.

His team is considering how to improve lithium ion-based batteries; one option is using silicon anode technology, a move now under evaluation within the Army’s science and technology branch, he said.

The Army has also developed a universal battery charger, mounted and integrated within a vehicle’s power system so CWBs can charge on the go, Dresch said.

He’s also pursuing the Power on the Move program, meant to equip troop compartments in Bradley Infantry Fighting Vehicles or Stryker combat vehicles with charging stations. The capability was evaluated on a Bradley at California’s Camp Roberts in September; the Army plans to try it with a Stryker in August at Joint Base Lewis-McChord in Washington state.

Dresch said the Army is asking industry, when developing systems, to focus on products that use less energy.

“We are going to run into a problem eventually where physics, science and math can only go so far in terms of how good the battery technologies are at this time and place,” he said. “It’s on our industry partners that are bringing those capabilities to our warfighters to also be very conscious of the energy draw that they’re placing on us.”

The role of industry

With the Army’s climate plan now public, the defense and energy sectors are seeking business opportunities.

Oshkosh recently announced it developed a hybrid version of the Joint Light Tactical Vehicle. And companies developing microgrids — like Schneider Electric, which built one that powers Marine Corps Air Station Miramar — are showing interest in the Army’s push to use the technology at installations and in the field.

Plasan North America has been pitching an All-Terrain Electric Mission Module — or ATeMM — which John Cavedo, its president, says is a single platform that solves a variety of power capability and logistics issues.

The capability looks like a trailer, but instead of sucking power from the vehicle towing it, the module provides power, essentially converting the attached vehicle into a hybrid one. The system can also supplement generator power at command posts and act as a mass mobile charging station for conformal wearable batteries.

The Army invited Plasan to demonstrate the ATeMM as a platoon battery recharger at the Army Expeditionary Warrior Experiment at Fort Benning, Georgia, which wrapped up in March.

But without an Army document that addresses the logistics of operational energy and provides clear direction for industry, the path forward for the technology is murky, Cavedo said. The Army hasn’t “conceived of taking all these different capabilities and putting them into one package because of the way that it writes requirements,” he argued.

Some industry executives in recent years have expressed concern the Army is unprepared to depend on electric power without more extensive infrastructure.

Sharon Burke, who served in the Obama administration as assistant secretary of defense for operational energy and is now president of consultancy Ecospherics, said she’s seeing evidence that industry recognizes the Army’s interest in different energy options. At the Association of the U.S. Army’s annual conference last year, she noticed lithium-ion batteries throughout the exhibit floor.

“You wouldn’t have seen that kind of equipment at AUSA if those vendors didn’t think that there was an interest,” Burke said. “You definitely see things that people are prospecting, and they’re just wrong. But in this case, I don’t think they’re wrong.”

The Army is also weighing whether commercial technology provides a path forward. Several years ago, the service’s Combat Capabilities Development Command’s Ground Vehicle Systems Center watched as commercial carmakers began investing in electrification.

The command’s power and energy team set up a series of electrification forums across the United States, asking companies whether they were focused on how to recharge in an austere environment, said Michael Cadieux, the center’s director.

“Industry didn’t raise their hand. They weren’t saying, ‘I’m thinking about it,’ ” he told Defense News in a recent interview. But “roughly over the last nine months, we’ve seen a significant shift.”

Industry is “coming to the table and engaging with us, saying … they have something that [they] think is a unique product or capability and it starts to address or get at tactical recharging.”

Cadieux said the shift is likely a result of increasing interest in and sales of electric vehicles in the United States. At the same time, more companies are working on battery chemistry and density, he noted, which will affect how vehicles charge.

The Army is already incorporating anti-idle capability, Cadieux said, which saves power on the battlefield and enables vehicles to run systems like communications equipment without burning fuel.

Ground Vehicle Systems Center this month demonstrated its Tactical Vehicle Electrification Kit on a Joint Light Tactical Vehicle, aiming to generate 20% fuel savings with a 50% reduced engine run time. According to a recent statement by the center, the kit allows the vehicle to run vital systems without the engine.

But battery energy density and tactical recharging remain challenging when it comes to moving toward electric vehicles for the service.

“When you get to certain hybrid configurations, you don’t have to solve that gap,” Cadieux said. “Or it’s not as big of a gap.”

At Project Convergence this fall, the Army’s annual exercise for experimenting with emerging and future capabilities, hybrid power prototypes for ground vehicles will likely attend. Also likely to make an appearance are hybrid generators that can go into quiet mode as well as different battery solutions.

Burke acknowledged there is already equipment in the field that uses electric power, but “it does require a larger concept of operations” to broadly adopt this kind of technology.

“When you are talking about the vision that’s in the Army climate strategy, that’s a very different kind of battlefield in 20 years or 30 years now,” she said. “They are not there yet.”

“As we enter into this fiscal year, it’s probably one of the few times that we’ve had four capability sets kind of going on in parallel,” Program Executive Officer for Command, Control and Communications-Tactical Army Maj. Gen. Robert Collins said at an event March 10.

The first capability set — compounding technological improvements implemented every two years — is already about 50% fielded, and will only progress from there, according to Collins.

“That’s everything from kit that goes down to the brigade combat teams that we’ve done there,” the major general said. “And that does include capability we put out to the 82nd Airborne, that did deploy.”

Capability Set ‘21 focused on infantry brigades, making the network more intuitive and making communications gear smaller, lighter and faster.

A critical design review for Capability Set ‘23, with an eye on Strykers and boosted bandwidth, is planned for April. The upcoming evaluation will really get the ball rolling on procurement — “lock the design and move into the production phase,” said Collins.

“For Capability Set ‘23, we’ve been doing a lot of experimentation and prototyping as we get ready,” he said. “We had the preliminary design we did last year, we’ve got our critical design that’s coming up.”

Beyond that, a technical meeting for Capability Sets ‘25 and ‘27 is planned May 9-10. The Program Executive Office for Command, Control and Communications-Tactical announced the meeting on social media March 8, billing it as a means to help industry shape its research-and-development efforts.

“User experiences and current operational environments have shown that capability set efforts should be transport agnostic, data centric and offer security architecture approaches and standards to provide interoperability, data accessibility and identity management,” reads a public notice for the future get-together in Philadelphia. “As the Army shifts to a division-centric unit of action environment, capability sets will take into account data and connectivity needs at division level and supporting elements.”

Collins in 2020 told C4ISRNET that dialogue with industry and other partners is critical to getting things right.

“The other thing I’ll underscore is we do this with continuous industry feedback and involvement,” he said at the time. “And when I say industry, I’m talking more than just your traditional, your nontraditional. And so we do a continuous outreach with industry, and I’m very proud of that.”

Capability Set ‘25 will build on the two before it and will focus on automation and network protection. By Capability Set ‘27, documents show, the Army’s insertion of commercial capabilities will be “fully institutionalized,” enabling more-secure wireless connectivity, significant cyber improvements and better use of artificial intelligence.

“On the far righthand side, when we start talking about Capability Set ‘25, we start looking at how do we go from dismounted to mounted?” Collins said March 10. “How do we how do we start to go at echelon?”

Much of what the Army is seeking in the upcoming detailed design phase for the optionally manned fighting vehicle, or OMFV, was not made public on the U.S. government’s contracting website sam.gov, with documents marked as “controlled unclassified information” in previous draft RFPs.

These “controlled unclassified information” documents contain performance specifications that will define the vehicle, Brig. Gen. Glenn Dean, the Army’s program executive officer for ground combat vehicles, told Defense News in an interview. The specifications, he explained, include the Army’s integrated architecture — dubbed Modular Open Systems Approach — which will underpin designs.

Industry and the Army have worked on the open architecture while five teams participated in the current phase of competition to come up with design approaches rather than actual designs. The five teams selected to compete for the OMFV program were Point Blank Enterprises, Oshkosh Defense, BAE Systems, General Dynamics Land Systems and American Rheinmetall Vehicles.

Two years ago, the Army, in its first attempt to hold a competition to replace the Bradley, received just one physical bid sample — from GDLS — by an October 2019 deadline. Instead of moving forward, the Army canceled the competition and produced a new plan meant to generate robust competition and give industry a chance to tell the service what is possible. That plan laid out a five-phase effort.

The first phase, now in full swing, is for an initial design. Next is a full and open competition for a detailed design phase, executed over fiscal 2023 and fiscal 2024. Awards for up to three contractors are expected in the second quarter of FY23.

The prototyping phase will begin in FY25, and the Army is expected to select in the fourth quarter of FY27 one company to build low-rate production vehicles. Full-rate production is expected to begin in FY30.

The RFP, when complete, should give industry “a good idea of what scope to bid to, how to begin to further adjust requirements and then where do we need to focus on the next iteration,” Dean said.

“What’s really different about the RFP is the way the scope is written,” he added. “We’re heavily focused on this use of model-based systems engineering, digital engineering. So it’s built a little more flexibly than our traditional development programs would be.”

The digital engineering used in the program has “never been done before in ground combat vehicles,” Maj. Gen. Ross Coffman, who is in charge of combat vehicle modernization, said in the same interview.

“You don’t set a requirement upfront until you have to, [that’s] never been done,” he added. “The modular, open-system architecture [we] have come up with, [it’s never been done. … We’ve had standards in the past … but this is revolutionary and transformational, and the effect it will have long term as we upgrade vehicles in the future — it’s going to save taxpayers a ton of money.”

Some requirements must be set upfront because of the nature of the system. For example, every offering must be a vehicle, Coffman explained. But for some specs, the Army let industry “fill in the blank,” Coffman added. “You tell us what your design is capable of.”

As the Army works with industry, it will likely release one more draft RFP ahead of the RFP’s release in June, Coffman noted. “We are iterating as fast as possible on this so that we can inform the final requirements and get a decision from the chief of staff of the Army and the secretary on the requirements and on the schedule.”

On the materiel development side, Dean said the Army may have a good sense of what individual requirements are feasible right now; but as designers consider ways to combine the service’s needs, the question is: “Do they remain feasible?”

The Army will simultaneously release the RFPs for the detailed design phase and for the prototyping phase.

“That’s principally a schedule concern,” Dean said. If we were to pause in between and compete, you’re going to lose some time. You can do some of that work in parallel.”

The strategy to move out with the prototyping phase RFP helps avoid that pause, but also helps contractors with long-lead items. For instance, if a contractor decided early in design that it was going with a specific engine, the approach would allow the team time to order engines for prototypes while still completing the detailed design, shoring up some time at the end.

“There’s some advantages to having that separation, but given the current schedule, it’s better to put those two activities together when it’s kind of natural,” Dean said.

WASHINGTON — The U.S. Army expects to award the next phase of competitive prototyping awards by the end of June for the second phase of its next-generation ground system development effort.

The service awarded contracts to Raytheon and Palantir in January 2021 to mature designs for its Tactical Intelligence Targeting Access Node, which is being developed to help connect sensors with users in the field in order to support beyond-line-of-sight targeting.

That ability to connect deep-sensing data across domains is an important component of the Department of Defense’s Joint All-Domain Command and Control concept and is a major focus for the Army’s portion of that effort, officials have said.

Army spokesman Brandon Pollachek told C4ISRNET the two companies have completed the ground station modernization phase — which included four “soldier touch points,” two design reviews and two technical demonstrations — and the service is on track to award Phase II contracts in the third quarter of fiscal 2022.

Raytheon and Palantir both received 12-month other transaction agreements worth $8.5 million each for their Phase I work. Phase II, a 14-month effort, will focus on complete system prototyping of the contractors’ designs and will conclude with a down-select to a single provider. During Phase III, the selected company will refine its prototype and in the fourth phase, the vendor will prepare the system to integrate sensors and future technology advancements.

As the Army prepares for the Phase II contracts, the Defense Innovation Unit and the Army Tactical Exploitation of National Capabilities office are working with Northrop Grumman to develop two “pre-prototype” ground stations for the program that will demonstrate some of the capabilities the Army wants from TITAN.

Pollachek said the Army expects those prototypes to be delivered in late fiscal 2022 and plans to begin using them in demonstrations later this year.

“Numerous soldier touchpoints and assessments will be used to refine future requirements and fielding plans,” he said.

The Army has used TITAN surrogates in the past to test its vision for reducing the sensor-to-shooter timeline and providing a level of sensing capability that improves the effectiveness of precision fires. In March 2020, the service conducted a live-fire exercise in Germany where a TITAN surrogate ground station delivered satellite sensor data to shooters.

The MASTR-E, or Measuring and Advancing Soldier Tactical Readiness and Effectiveness, is a program aimed at using a host of information to make troops healthier and better at everything from running to shooting to thinking in the midst of combat.

The kit used to track all of this data includes an Oura Ring to monitor sleep, a RediBand to monitor recovery and a Polar Grit X smartwatch to monitor exertion.

Army Times spoke recently with George Matook, program manager, and Tad Brunye, senior cognitive scientist at the Army’s Combat Capabilities Development Command to catch up on the program.

The program has been put through the paces at 10th Mountain Division.

While they’ve been running soldiers through separate physical and cognitive lab-based stress tests over the winter, April will see new field studies at Fort Campbell, Kentucky, and Fort Devens, Massachusetts.

Data is collected during field exercises, range live fires and while soldiers sleep.

More tests are in store, but ultimately, the research team aims to pull together all the data, algorithms, studies and systems to pass the system off for development in 2024. Fielding could begin shortly afterward.

A few weeks ago, the program concluded a physical stress test portion that had soldiers strap on a rucksack with the equivalent of half their body weight and march up an incline treadmill for two hours.

Brunye said the physical stress test data will now be used to look at the participants’ physiology, including brain activity and cognitive outcomes.

All soldiers who participated in testing were volunteers.

They’re going to analyze at the soldiers’ biochemical responses such as levels of cortisol, lactate, creatinine, neopterin, carnitine and other markers for how well their body was adjusting to performing under stress.

The idea is to then feed that data into statistical analyses that will help researchers identify what links they can find between a soldier’s physical and genetic attributes and their performance.

A similar stress test involved soldiers being put into “be on the lookout” scenarios in high-fidelity simulations and receiving a shock for some sessions when they made errors and no shock in other sessions.

The shocks were used to further stress the situation, helping researchers gather data on cognitive processes happening with soldiers in those situations.

So far, approximately 100 soldiers have provided about 1,000 hours of test data through the stress tests. They ran through the vignettes at a virtual reality lab called the Soldier and Small Unit Ambulatory Virtual Environments, or SUAVE Lab at Tufts University, Middlesex County, Massachusetts.

The same data gathering, analysis and modeling will be used for the team’s research.

In June 2021 the researchers finished a test-run, that measured a range of outputs from soldiers during a 72-hour field study involving 75 soldiers from the 1-325th Airborne Infantry Regiment, 82nd Airborne Division, at Fort Devens.

Back in 2016 then-Army Chief of Staff Gen. Mark Milley often reminded his service that future battles will likely take place in cities swelling with growing populations.

While Army units continue basic room-clearing types of training, operational and strategic-level thinking about cities hasn’t necessarily found a home yet.

But the California Army National Guard’s 40th Infantry Division has picked up the guidon in that effort, holding its own “urban planner’s conference” in fall 2021 with another scheduled for July. They’ve partnered with the National Training Center at Fort Irwin, California, to further analyze up-to-date urban offensive and defensive training.

Some of that is playing itself out on social media posts from Ukraine.

Col. John Spencer serves as the director of urban warfare training for the 40th ID and spoke with Army Times about ongoing urban-focused efforts across the service. Spencer retired from active duty as an Army major. He fought in Sadr City during the height of the Iraq War and spent time working on the issues of urban warfare for West Point’s Modern War Institute.

Spencer, who has beaten the social media drum for years on urban challenges, said he’s hearing from Army generals interested in applying urban problems to their areas.

That signals to him that there may be a shift in the thinking, which, until now, was mostly to ignore the urban challenge, seeing cities as either an obstacle to avoid or sectors to destroy.

“It’s like everybody knows it’s an issue,” Spencer said.

He compared what 40th ID is doing now to when the 25th Infantry Division almost single-handedly restarted the Jungle Warfare Training Center — they just knew that it was important.

Maj. Gen. Laura Yeager, 40th ID commander, is looking to collect the urban knowledge across the force and create a kind of “gray book” for urban operations similar to the air assault operations “Gold Book.”

Yeager laid out her plan in the annual Maneuver Warfighter Conference this February, which was put on by the Maneuver Center of Excellence at Fort Benning, Georgia.

“I think the ‘Gray Book’ will leave a mark,” Spencer said.

But beyond a conference and book, the active role 40th ID is playing with NTC “is huge,” he said.

“It’s a commitment. Some of that is to keep the relevancy close to what we do,” Spencer said. “This is the Guard and the Army’s premier training center.”

For example, past city iterations might only take the force “in the box” at NTC a few hours to negotiate. But the opposition force is now employing more hard-hitting tactics, not letting up on the unit. That’s dragging out scenarios, creating more realistic situations, Spencer said.

“You can get bogged down for multiple days even in a city fight,” he said.

While Spencer said he was encourage by the 40th IDs work and the calls he’s getting, there’s still a long way to go.

For instance, a few months ago he traveled to the United Kingdom to observe one of their live-virtual-constructed training events with a heavy urban focus.

“I saw some of the most impressive simulations I’ve ever seen,” he said.

But so far, there’s not been the same level of focus on the American side. Spencer estimated that half of U.K. training is urban-focused, compared to only about 20% in the past, which is where most U.S. forces are now.

The scene devolved into a shootout. And the entire episode was over in about 10 minutes.

That was just one of a range of events that planners with the Army’s Maneuver Center of Excellence at Fort Benning, Georgia, saw unfold as part of the service’s annual Army Expeditionary Warrior Experiment this past year.

From these live, force-on-force, unscripted exercises, Harry Lubin, chief of the Maneuver Battle Lab’s live experimentation branch, shared one key lesson.

“Bottom line: it is getting harder and harder to hide on the current battlefield,” Lubin said.

That previous blue force and opposition force clash unfolded into a savage shootout because soldiers didn’t have a clear way to counter opposition drones or mask themselves effectively on the battlefield.

On Tuesday, MCOE highlighted a batch of the technologies and capabilities they’ve been working with alongside government and industry entities to get after tactical, small unit and soldier problems.

Those problems need fixing to ready soldiers for what looks to be a faster, deadlier and more challenging future battlespace.

Lubin laid out some of the technologies they’ve seen in this year’s AEWE.

The presentation included everything from soldier-borne power generators that run off windshield wiper fluid to an extremely precise way to destroy an entrenched enemy with a fraction of the firepower that would typically require a mortar section.

All of the items shared are still in phases of experimentation or development. A few have cycled through AEWE in the past and been used in the Army’s big-ticket event, Project Convergence. Others recently came into the AEWE aperture and will require more work before handing it off to an Army program.

The AEWE has been running in one form or another for at least the past 15 years. In recent years, Army leaders focus the experiments on cross-domain maneuver for tactical-level units. That means synchronizing forces and capabilities in multiple domains.

So, it’s more than better bullets and new drones.

To meet that challenge, AEWE has seen artificial intelligence-driven sensors faster-firing weaponry help units step out of the shadows to fire on the enemy and then fade quickly back into the blind.

One such innovation are Ground Launch Effects, or GLE, made by Raytheon. Those are tube-launched, optically-tracked, wire-guided missiles that can loiter, providing intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance, before striking.

More importantly, the weapon allowed units to target forces on the fly and hit a “high payoff” target list without revealing their division-level fires units, Lubin said. That small-unit ability allowed division cavalry to run screen and zone reconnaissance quickly.

While steel on target is the money-maker for maneuver forces in combat, units can’t get in the fight if they’re destroyed once their systems go live. To meet that vulnerability, the exercise used a system called “Cyberboss” to simulate electronic warfare attacks in their experiments.

Cyberboss gives soldiers a real feel for what it will take to mask themselves in the electromagnetic spectrum and also use their own EW assets against the enemy.

Back on fires, a fire-control system dubbed “Firestorm” managed sensors and shooters to hit a variety of targets from a range of platforms, Lubin said.

But to the mortar-loving soldier, one of the coolest add-ons is “Spike Firefly,” a mini-loitering drone system capable of entering doorways and windows and able to pack a warhead with the equivalent firepower of a 60mm mortar.

For perspective, Lubin noted that the standard Army tactical manual estimates that 60mm mortar rounds are needed to neutralize a platoon-sized enemy force in an entrenched position.

The Spike Firefly-warhead combo did the same task with six shots.

That falls in with the battle lab’s Squad 10X project, which aims to make an individual nine-soldier squad 10 times more lethal through added technology.

Another mortar system ratchets up larger mortar fire rates, too.

The ALAKRAN light mortar carrier lets a crew emplace, aim and shoot eight mortar rounds in less than 90 seconds, Lubin said. That’s part of its “shoot and scoot” capabilities.

A “soldier favorite” Lubin said was the new Modular Advanced Weapon Laser, which allows for infrared and visible green laser aiming and illumination for both individual and crew-served weapons. It could replace the AN/PEQ-15 if adopted and is already in use by special operators.

Connecting many of these fires and sensors and moving a small unit around a cluttered and dangerous battlespace are Robotic Autonomous Systems platoons and companies, central to humans running all of this gear.

They are constructed, systems-focused units, with standard infantry roles but enabled by robotics and sensors to do more tasks with fewer soldiers.

Those platoons are not going to be filled with highly specialized long-schooled techie soldiers. The Army aims to have these platoons filled and run by about any MOS. Right now, infantry soldiers or supply specialists with a dozen hours of training can run the autonomous resupply that keeps the unit in the fight.

But the tech at AEWE isn’t all about hitting targets or reconnoitering the area.

Soldier health is key to keeping troops going. And soldiers in some of this past year’s experiments wore a slender, adhesive sensor on their skin, about the length of a cigarette and thinner than a credit card.

That sensor allowed medics and commanders to see their heart rate, core temperature, activity level, heat strain index and breathing rate.

Leaders could track performance over time and, Lubin said, they already see potential for tracking casualty location and vital biometric data en route during a medical evacuation.

Oh, and CASEVACs are getting an upgrade if these experiments prove fruitful.

Soldiers flew a 70-pound mannequin from a wooded area over 4km in under four minutes in a test phase.

They also flew loads of gear weighing as much as 326 pounds more than 3km at speeds up to 92mph.

Experimenters didn’t forget they’ve got to fuel and power all these platforms.

A cargo trailer tinkered with during the experiments can recharge batteries, run a tethered drone and offload AC/DC power. Another individual vehicle can carry soldiers and equipment with a quiet-running, all-electric motor.

Last but not least is the “honey badger,” a windshield-wiper fluid-fueled, single-soldier wearable power generator and battery charger.

That system has been improved over at the Army’s Combat Capabilities Development Command with added venting to reduce noise and thermal signature.

Every close-combat squad will have a sniper-like capability in its soldiers’ hands by late 2023, when the last of the 6,000 squad designated marksman rifles are delivered.

The SDMR gives squad-level fires a chance to reach out and touch a target at the 600-meter range with precision for combat engineers, scouts, and of course, infantry units.

The M1101A1 is a semi-automatic, 7.62mm rifle. It is based on the Heckler & Koch G28/HK417 system, according to a company release and Army officials.

Capt. David Stephens, assistant product manager for SDMR, recently told Army Times that the systems were likely to complete fielding within the next 18 months.

The SDMR was adopted under the Compact Semi-Automatic Sniper System, or CSASS, which kicked off back in 2008 with the Knight’s Armament Company SR-25.

The lower-recoil M1101A1 SDMR winner was announced nearly five years ago but had to undergo testing and evaluation before it began fielding in 2020.

Army officials previously told Army Times that the SDMR was designed to be smaller, lighter and more ergonomic. The 82nd Airborne Division tested it in parachute operations back in 2019.

The shorter barrel — 16.5 inches, compared to most sniper systems with 20-inch barrels — and sound suppressors came in handy for airborne training, snipers said in an Army statement.

Part of the ergonomic differences include an adjustable stock both for transport and ease of use, experts said. That’s helpful when dismounting vehicles, whether a Joint Light Tactical Vehicle, Humvee or Stryker.

The new rifle can also fire a more punishing round — the M80A1 Enhanced Performance Round and the XM1158 Advanced Armor Piercing Round — that might damage weapons not designed for higher velocity rounds.

The package weighs in at about 10 pounds

During the 2019 testing, Spc. William Holland, a sniper with the 508th Parachute Infantry Regiment, said the compact design made the weapon more manageable, especially for post-drop operations.

The weapon’s “zero” also maintained itself, soldiers found after jumping and then moving to shoot on nearby ranges. The scope that held that zero is another new feature for squad shooters.

In 2018, the Army selected the Sig Sauer TANGO6 as the rifle’s scope. A variant of the 1-6×24 Riflescope is a “second focal plane” scope that was chosen by U.S. Special Operations Command in 2019.

According to Sig Sauer, the optic has the following features:

• Flat, dark earth anodized aircraft-grade aluminum main tube.
• An M855A1 bullet drop compensation illuminated reticle with holds for close-quarters to medium range engagements.
• An ultra-bright red Hellfire fiber optic illumination system for fast daylight target acquisition.
• A locking illumination dial.
• A power selector ring throw lever.
• A laser-marked scope level indicator for intuitive mount installation.

Another new optic, made by Vortex Optics with their subsidiary Sheltered Wings, could swap on and off of the rifle easily. The Next Generation Squad Weapon-Fire Control was selected by the Army in January. It’s slated to sit atop the new NGSW, which will fire a 6.8mm round.

The fire control is practically platform agnostic, Army officials told Army Times in January, and it has ballistic tables for nearly all individual small arms in the Army inventory.

The service has already outfitted a platoon within the 5th Battalion, 4th Air Defense Artillery Regiment, in Europe with the interim Stryker-based SHORAD systems, but is now fulfilling its full fielding plans beginning in the fourth quarter of fiscal 2022 and wrapping up in the first quarter of FY23, Maj. Gen. Robert Rasch, the Army’s Program Executive Officer for Missiles and Space, said in a recent interview. The moves will be “based upon all the production time,” he added.

The first platoon of the Maneuver-Short-Range Air Defense System has been in Europe for nearly a year in response to an urgent capability gap former U.S. Army Europe Commander Gen. Ben Hodges identified in 2016.

The M-SHORAD is a Stryker A1 combat vehicle-based system that includes a mission equipment package designed by Leonardo DRS. That package includes Raytheon’s Stinger vehicle missile launcher.

General Dynamics Land Systems is the lead integrator and received a $1.2 billion contract to build and deliver the system in October 2020.

The system was developed in record time. The service received the requirement to build the system in February 2018. It took just 19 months from the time the service generated the requirement to the delivery of prototypes for testing in the first quarter of 2020.

“It continues to be a relatively new thing for the hands of air defenders and for our Army and they’ve road-marched it all over Europe and put this into play and they continue to learn with it,” Maj. Gen. Brian Gibson, who is in charge of the Army’s air and missile defense modernization, told Defense News in the same interview. “They’ve live-fired the weapon system, both the gun and the Stinger [missile] and they’ve had good success with those.”

While Rasch and Gibson did not want to pinpoint where the M-SHORAD platoon was in Europe at the time of the interview, it did participate in Saber Strike, a U.S. Army exercise, at Bemowo Piskie Training Area, Poland, in late February.

In a publicly released video from the 118th Mobile Public Affairs Detachment, a vehicle commander described the system as much easier to use than the Avenger SHORAD system, previously used by the U.S. military in the 1990s, but maintained in the National Guard.

Reaching full-battalion strength, Gibson said, “really gives you a lot of capability to use it and train and exercise with maneuver partners in Europe and to do a follow-on assessment in theater, in Europe, later next year. That’s sort of the big path.”

Nothing in feedback so far from soldiers has altered that path, he added, nor required significant redesign.

By the time the platoon was fielded in Europe, the Army had already gathered “a lot of feedback” through the operational assessment conducted stateside, Rasch noted.

New equipment training that took place in Germany was based on the feedback from the operational assessment. The Army also added some software improvements and some hardware modifications based on that feedback, Rasch added.

“Since that time we actually completed another government software verification test on another set of improvements,” he said. The improvements mostly consist of “interface things,” Rasch said, such as “how to get control and how many button clicks on the interface does it take to get to a particular screen, really kind of tailoring it around that soldier input.”

The Army will field 144 systems to four battalions, followed by an enduring capability for additional battalions.

Future variants of the system will include other kinetic interceptors and a directed-energy weapons that will not only defend against unmanned aircraft systems and manned aircraft but also rockets, artillery and mortars.

The current contract will allow the Army to continue to make improvements over time on the current system, Rasch stressed, “as well as trying to maintain flexibility with the overall design as the Army has new requirements based upon new and evolving threats.”

At the same time, prospective paratroopers will see a new chute on their training tower that more closely mimics the actual way they’ll drop from an aircraft.

Maj. Jeffery Timmick assistant product manager for air soldier systems and Capt. John Waters, APM for personnel airdrop, both spoke recently with Army Times about the new gear hitting the aircrew and airborne soldiers.

Currently, aircrews have separate flexible body armor, combat equipment with onboard tethers, a built-in flotation device and survival gear.

Work being done at Air Warrior, the program that runs acquisition for all things aircrew, aims to cut the 30-pound load carrier and body armor devices by as much as 10 pounds while reducing the bulk by about 15%, Timmick said.

The major told Army Times that, currently, soldiers use body armor with no load carriage and on top of the armor, as well as a carrier with a harness system for extraction of downed crew members.

The new system will use the same inserts as the Modular Scalable Vest fielded in recent years to some Army units.

The devices will be a bit easier to put on since the load carrier and body armor will be combined into one system.

An updated quick-release tether system is also being redesigned for use with the total package.

A still in-the-works design will also move the current flotation system from inflating under the soldier’s head and instead go buoyant across the chest removing field of view and head movement issues with the current system.

Timmick said that the program plans to conduct operational tests with 25th Combat Aviation Brigade in the latter part of 2023.

For future paratroopers, a decades-old training parachute is leaping into the 21st Century when the 250-foot drop tower at Fort Benning, Georgia’s Airborne School gets the new J3 parachute system.

That’s where airborne-in-training soldiers conduct their “parachute landing fall” under canopy similar to what they’ll face when falling from an airplane later in training.

Upgrades to the static line parachutes over the years have outpaced the ability of the legacy training parachute.

Waters told Army Times that the J3 uses newer materials but has the same design and circular shape.

The difference might sound small but the T11 parachute falls at a rate of about 18.5 feet per second. The training chutes can take as long as 24 seconds. Those 5.5 seconds mean a bit of a different experience under canopy.

“For that fall rate we wanted to mimic what (the trainee) is currently seeing,” Waters said.

Paratroopers will also see an updated flotation device. Exact fielding dates were not immediately available.

The device will still be CO2-cartridge-based and require jumpers to manually initiate the device.

But the design, which previously only kept the head above water will also now include two bladders beneath the user’s armpits to elevate their bodies further out of the water, Waters said.