The drone, an Anduril Industries’ Ghost-X, paused and then rose higher, disappearing into the clouds. Another followed.

Seemingly small and unthreatening, the drones were serving as the eyes of an infantry company concealed by the surrounding mountains and readying to reclaim a village held by the enemy.

And those drones were not alone.

All at once, an overwhelming group of air- and ground-based machine fighters burst onto the scene. An “octocopter” lumbered through the sky with precision munitions and other robots attached to its belly, dropping three 60mm mortar rounds on a roof and other small, hand-held, cylindrical “throwbots” on the ground.

Robotic combat vehicles rolled into view, armed with .50-caliber and M240 machine guns, firing on enemy positions and providing cover for troops maneuvering into the village.

Meanwhile, a four-legged dog robot stepped out from a thick cloud of smoke, giving the soldiers monitoring from afar another view.

The scene was the culmination of a U.S. Army effort to understand how it can use humans and machines together on the battlefield. Service leaders descended on Fort Irwin, California — home to the National Training Center — in March for a large exercise known as Project Convergence.

The demonstration was a glimpse of the Army’s future, according to top officials. Gen. James Rainey, who leads Army Futures Command, expects the service’s future force to be so integrated with machines that humans will face a much lower risk.

“We will never again trade blood for first contact,” he frequently says, promising to deploy robots instead.

But getting these formations right won’t be easy, leaders acknowledge. For human-machine integration to work, a functional and user-friendly network must underpin it, it requires protection from cyberattacks, and the systems must have the right amount of autonomy.

Leaders also say it’s not technology that will prove the most difficult factor, but rather breaking from antiquated acquisition processes that prevent rapid purchases and slow down deliveries to soldiers.

“The pace of the threat and the pace of technology — the evolution is much faster, and there’s no way that we’re going to succeed if we continue to acquire technology or even choose to develop” it at the usual pace, Joseph Welch, the Army’s C5ISR Center director, said at the March event.

Forward progress

The Project Convergence exercise followed months of effort focused on integrating humans and machines into service formations. It was a chance to see what works and what doesn’t as the Army prepares for a fight against adversaries with advanced capabilities.

The service insists it’s now ready to move forward with human-machine integrated formations.

The fiscal 2025 budget request marks the first time the Army has included funding for these formations, also called H-MIF. It’s seeking $33 million for the first step, which provides an initial human-machine integration capability to infantry and armor formations. The Army was experimenting with both at Project Convergence.

The service wants machines in these new formations to “offload risk” and provide soldiers with “additional information for decision making,” according to the service’s budget documents.

The Army’s Rapid Capabilities and Critical Technologies Office is spearheading the effort for Futures Command. The office is creating prototypes using existing air and ground robotic programs and payloads while incorporating common architecture, communications and network capabilities.

The FY25 funding, the Army has said, will fund the movement of concepts through prototyping as well as enable soldiers to evaluate them in exercises and experiments.

At the Project Convergence event, the Army flooded the battlefield with robots, sensors and other machines meant to help soldiers in complex flights. The experiment included air and ground robots with reconfigurable payloads, tethered drones, counter-drone systems, and a ventriloquist decoy emitter that emulates radio frequency traffic to confuse the enemy.

The service used more than 240 pieces of technology, including capabilities from allied militaries in the U.K., Canada, Australia, France and Japan.

The pressure to transform

The decision to rely more on robots isn’t a choice, according to Alexander Miller, who is now serving as chief technology officer to Army Chief of Staff Gen. Randy George.

George and Miller both watched the experiment in March; Miller carried a cellphone with an app demonstrating the Army’s new Tactical Assault Kit. The app superimposes the location of soldiers and robots as well as enemy positions in real time.

The service knows it has to do this, or “we will fall radically behind,” Miller said of human-machine integration. “There are bad people who are willing to use robotics, and if we don’t figure it out we will be behind the curve, we will put men and women in harm’s way.”

Integrating robots into formations is also accelerating because “there has been a cultural shift,” Miller said. “It’s been 12-18 months where we have stopped treating robots as a one-for-one augmentation for soldiers and started saying: ‘What are the dull, dirty, dangerous, disruptive things that robots can really do that are not just combat power? How do we augment them without taking a single rifleman off or multiple riflemen off the line to control a robot?’ ”

At the March experiment, for instance, the Army sent a ground robot with a mine-clearing line charge to deploy along enemy lines. As it fights the Russian invasion, the Ukrainian military is using these to disarm enemy minefields and trenches, but transporting them in crewed vehicles.

At the experiment, the robot shot the line charge out of a small launcher. The line didn’t explode as intended.

Army leaders said glitches are common and making this work would provide a much safer way for soldiers to clear mine fields.

Also enabling new models for human-machine integration is the progress of commercial technology, according to Welch. “That has accelerated tremendously across many different technical domains,” he said.

Artificial intelligence is getting smarter; sensors are getting smaller, lighter and more versatile; connectivity solutions are more abundant; and air-, ground- and space-based capabilities are easier to use.

Obstacles ahead

Army leaders acknowledge there is plenty of work ahead to integrate robots and soldiers on the battlefield. The experiment itself illustrated “just how complicated it’s going to be … where we really proliferate lower-cost, cheaper options and we clutter the environment intentionally,” Miller said.

At one point during Project Convergence, the Army jammed itself, causing a friendly drone swarm to fall out of the sky. The service fixed the problem by turning on a capability allowing smart routing management for its Wi-Fi, Miller said.

Beyond technical challenges, George said, the Army must convince Congress to alter the procurement process so the service can acquire or adapt capabilities within broader funding lines. The goal, he explained, is to be more responsive to what is working for soldiers and to be able to rapidly buy small amounts of that equipment.

He said he’s working with Congress “so that we can move money a little bit.”

“We want and need the oversight, [but] it’s a matter of how we go back to them and tell them, ‘Here’s what we’re going to buy inside that funding line, and here’s how we’re doing it,’ and get feedback,” George added.

Indeed, one focus is on marking sure the Army can change systems without needing reprogramming authorization or new funding.

The technical and operational ways the Army is going to employ human-machine integrated formations today “doesn’t mean that’s how we’re going to employ it two years from now,” said Mark Kitz, the service’s program executive officer for command, control, communications-tactical.

“We don’t historically treat robotics as a software program. It’s really a software program,” Kitz explained. “So how do we use some of our unique acquisition authorities then to build that flexibility upfront?”

Miller said another potential obstacle is ensuring sufficient U.S. production of components.

“We have to have components that are approved and valid and we aren’t scared to employ because they were made by an adversary,” he said. Welch noted the Army is working with U.S. government labs to address some of the component concerns.

The service is also working internally to revamp its approach to finding capabilities.

“There’s a much tighter coupling … not only externally with our industry partners and other key stakeholders, whether it be over on [Capitol] Hill or up in [the Office of the Secretary of Defense], but also internally,” said Lt. Gen. John Morrison, the Army’s deputy chief of staff in charge of command, control, communications, cyber operations and networks. “We’ve got requirements with acquisition, with testers, and they’re all centered around soldiers, getting that direct feedback.”

Benjamin Jensen, a senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies think tank where he focuses on wargaming, said he’s “optimistic” about human-machine integration but that it may take longer than the service expects.

“Most people overestimate the speed at which you can develop new concepts of employment around even proven engineering,” he said. “It often takes years outside of a major war to build entirely new formations and structures.”

The Program Executive Office for Command, Control and Communications-Tactical, or PEO C3T, has in recent months increasingly focused on what is known as Capability Set 25, an expected assemblage of commercial, off-the-shelf technologies and specialized military equipment, all with the Army division, a footprint of 15,000 soldiers and firepower, in mind.

“The day of the Army building its own capabilities only, and deploying them, are gone. It will always be a mix of commercial and military-unique capabilities, and that’s what’s going to make us effective,” Lt. Gen. John Morrison, the service’s top uniformed information-technology official, said last month at the Army IT Day conference, hosted by the Northern Virginia chapter of the communications- and electronics-focused group AFCEA.

“And all of us must be in,” he added, “because, quite frankly, our adversaries are all-in.”

The Army is taking a stepwise approach to improving soldier communications and its own larger networks, the invisible threads that tie together assets on the front lines and back home. The increments are known as capability sets, which, like Apple’s iPhone, build upon the development and distribution cycles of one another.

The venture kicked off in fiscal 2021, with special attention paid to infantry and pragmatic networking tools. Additional batches of tech upgrades are expected in 2023, 2025, 2027 and in the years beyond.

The armor challenge

PEO C3T dispatched an expert team to Project Convergence, the Army’s contribution to the Pentagon’s connect-everything campaign, Joint All-Domain Command and Control, late last year to explore the intersection of modernized radios and armor, including the prized Abrams tank.

The cohort worked closely with the Program Executive Office for Ground Combat Systems, or PEO GCS, whose portfolio includes the main battle tank, the Stryker fleet and the Bradley infantry fighting vehicle.

“Col. Shermoan Daiyaan and the team went down with some of the integrated tactical network,” PEO C3T boss Maj. Gen. Anthony Potts said at the IT Day conference, “and we did some preliminary prototyping onto some of their armored vehicles, onto some of the tanks.”

The experimentation at Project Convergence, which featured other services as well as foreign forces, including from Australia and the U.K., will inform how Capability Set 25 proceeds.

Other trials and pilots, namely in early 2022, at Fort Stewart, Georgia, were designed to better understand the needs of interconnected armored formations, which rumble across the landscape and often can’t afford to stop, but run the risk of disconnecting.

An Army leader previously told C4ISRNET challenges exist simply because of the diversity and needs of the armored fleet; it is, said then-Brig. Gen. Jasper Jeffers, deputy commanding general of maneuver for the 3rd Infantry Division, “massively different in size, scope and the actual physics.” Armor represents some of the Army’s most space-constrained platforms. Working new kit into them can be technically daunting, let alone time consuming.

“That is a long process for us to get through,” Potts said. An inquiry made to PEO GCS on Jan. 24 went unanswered.

A preliminary review of Capability Set 25 is expected in the coming months, in the spring. A critical design review, which will examine technological maturity and cost effectiveness and could crack open the door for procurement, will eventually follow.

Capability Set 23, a predecessor tailored to Strykers, passed its critical review in April and was sent to Europe for additional, live-fire testing. Previously identified issues associated with legacy Strykers and newer communications gear have been solved, the Army said.

Step by step

Network modernization is a top priority for the Army as it shifts to multidomain operations — the ability to deter and defeat an enemy, with help from others, in any location — and wrestles with the challenge of upscaled conflicts and communications environments jeopardized by adversaries such as China and Russia.

Both powers are capable of jumbling, intercepting and shutting down U.S. chatter. And any fight against them, against China in the Indo-Pacific or against Russia in Europe, will require the conquering of massive distances and other geographic hurdles.

“Like all things, we change,” Potts said. “We change, we adapt, based on what our adversaries are doing, based on the environment around us.”

Capability Set 25 is the first batch to inherently focus on the division, a formation capable of sustained fighting and upkeep. Previous capability sets were tied to the brigade, roughly 5,000 soldiers. Such smaller setups were the U.S. military’s mainstay for the war on terror, a global sweep pitched by a previous president as excising “a radical network of terrorists and every government that supports them.”

Things have since changed, with a renewed era of great power competition pushing the spotlight away from the Middle East and militant groups with inferior or outdated equipment.

“For many, many years now, we’ve been in a brigade-centric Army,” Potts said. “As I’m sure everybody in this room is aware, we are now going back to the division as the unit of action.”

Another new element to the U.S. Army’s annual experimentation event is a “gateway” where industry can test emerging technology in a operational environment.

The service had a wide variety of industry partners “knocking on our door to get in” to Project Convergence in 2021, Brig. Gen. Guy Jones, who leads the Army’s Futures and Concepts Center, told Defense News in an interview ahead of the Association of the U.S. Army’s annual conference.

The main portion of Project Convergence kicks off in October and continues into November.

In its third year, Project Convergence will focus on both the Indo-Pacific and European theaters while figuring out ways to fight with capabilities at a larger scale. The experimental event grew from an Army exercise in the desert of Yuma Proving Ground, Arizona, in 2020 to a joint evaluation in 2021; this year, it will incorporate international partners the United Kingdom and Australia.

In many cases last year, industry showed up with new technology too close to the start of the experimentation process, so the Army has partnered with industry and created the “Gateway” experimentation event, Jones said. Participation in the Gateway’s first year is high, with roughly 50 different technologies undergoing assessments in theater-agnostic scenarios.

The Army will provide participating industry with a separate network to plug into, and the event will take place at Yuma Proving Ground during Project Convergence, Jones noted.

“The intent is for industry partners, who have understood and been briefed on some of our challenges that we may have, [to] bring some of the developments and things they’ve been working on,” which would then fully join the next Project Convergence or subsequent versions if successful, Jones said.

“This is how we’re going to continue to generate new and innovative ideas into the overall campaign of learning.”

What else is new this year?

In joint warfighting, one service is often chosen as the lead on a mission while other services are called in as support, Jones noted.

“When we really start looking at [multidomain operations], what everybody has come to realize is that to defeat a near-peer or a peer threat, we can’t do that any longer,” he said. “We have to be able to integrate the Air Force’s aircraft, the Army’s deep sensing and the Navy’s Aegis ships, all collectively against one single objective.”

Project Convergence 22 will attempt to conduct “combined arms as a combined service,” integrating multiple capabilities at a single objective, he added.

Key to enabling this is a joint network focused on integrating sensors, processors, command nodes and effectors in a chain. “We don’t have that today,” Jones said.

It currently takes 10-15 days for the U.S. and its partners to integrate networks ahead of an exercise, Jones said. The U.S. military wants to be able to integrate networks within four to six hours. “I would still think that’s several years away.”

Project Convergence this year has six learning objectives, Jones said. The first is to establish an integrated air and missile defense network. The second is to employ combined arms fires to penetrate and defeat enemy assets in enemy-controlled territory.

The third is to conduct combined joint operations to achieve a position of “relative advantage,” Jones said, which can involve several approaches, such as gaining a physical position, achieving a psychological effect or deceiving an enemy.

The fourth goal is to inform a realistic “Mission Partner Environment” network, which brings together disparate networks of allies and partners that can’t normally communicate, “because we know that we have to fight with partners at every turn,” Jones said.

The fifth objective is for the joint force to sustain itself, “so we try to integrate how do we do that in both a distributed manner and a contested manner,” he said.

The final objective is to identify the authorities and policies that prevent the U.S. armed services from operating together — an important goal, Jones said, because “we’ve made policy decisions under an environment that didn’t envision this joint combined arms application of our capabilities.”

For example, he added, ”to establish the network that we’re getting ready to do, we have nine interservice agreements just to even connect the overarching architecture. I’m not saying pass data, I’m saying the architecture. That’s crazy.”

Project Convergence 22 will take place at some new locations to better reflect distances the joint force would encounter in the Indo-Pacific area of operations. The regional scenario will tie together Joint Base Lewis-McChord in Washington state, Marine Corps Base Camp Pendleton and San Clemente Island in California, as well as a location in Hawaii.

A European theater scenario will play out at the National Training Center at Fort Irwin and the Navy’s electronic warfare range at China Lake — both in California.

Tech headed to the test

Jones said there are more than 200 different technologies undergoing assessments for this year’s event. And he’s reviewing at least 24 different technologies to determine if any existing programs should be adjusted, if requirements should be solidified or if the technology should be divested because it won’t work.

Among the sensors the Army is incorporating into the experiment is the High Altitude Detection and Exploitation System, or HADES. The sensor is currently aboard a manned aircraft, “but that’s probably not where it’ll stay,” Jones said. It will perform some target acquisition and electronic warfare effects.

The service is also using an unnamed system that conducts so-called deep sensing; space sensors will also play a role. However, Jones declined to name the participating systems. A next-generation synthetic aperture radar — a commercial product — will help differentiate threats on the ground.

To process data from sensors, the Army will use a replica of the TITAN ground station — or Tactical Intel Targeting Assessment Node — which is still under development. TITAN ingests data and turns it into actionable information.

The target-pairing system Firestorm will also return for this year’s event, as will SHOT — the Synchronized High Op-tempo Targeting system — which helps generate targeting messages to send out via a command-and-control node.

C2 nodes coming to Project Convergence 22 include the Integrated Battle Command System, which connects sensors and shooters on the battlefield and plays a central role in integrated air and missile defense. Also attending is a solar glider to create an aerial tier network relay for digital messaging.

The Army is bringing back the tactical data fabric, still under development, called Rainmaker. This year, it will combine with LEAP, or Lower Echelon Analytic Platform, which will help move processed data from one node to another to get it to an effector, Jones said.

Effectors in play at the event will include Army Special Operations Command’s Hero-120 loitering precision munition as well as a replica version of the service’s Long-Range Hypersonic Weapon system, still in development.

Robotic combat vehicles will also return as well as several electronic warfare platforms, including the Terrestrial Layer System.

The Army is using a light support vessel — an Army watercraft meant to simulate the future Maneuver Support Vessel (Light), which is not yet built — to assess sustainment capabilities in a Pacific scenario.

And an electric Joint Light Tactical Vehicle will participate in the experiment to help evaluate the Army’s climate strategy goals.

This year’s Project Convergence will also evaluate a new technology for medics in the field called BATDOK — or Battlefield Assisted Trauma Distributed Observation Kit. It’s an app that allows medics to deal with trauma cases before they reach a doctor or surgeon.

A medic can plug in vitals and injury statistics, and the system will generate step-by-step procedures to follow. The app will also track the care already administered so surgeons and doctors are prepared to pick up where care left off in the field.

The Army on June 3 said a communications exercise known as COMMEX 1B was a success, replicating and informing the scale and scenarios of Project Convergence in far-flung laboratory and field settings.

The testing included more than 50 technologies, according to the Army, and stretched from the Combined Joint Systems Integration Laboratory at Aberdeen Proving Ground in Maryland and Fort Bliss in Texas to the U.K. and Australia. Lt. Col. Nate Saul, a Project Convergence planner, in a statement described the testing as “the most distributed COMMEX we’ve done yet.”

This year’s Project Convergence, often referred to as PC 22, will be the first to actively involve international partners; the U.K. and Australia will participate in the grand experiment, while Canada and others observe. Project Convergence is the Army’s contribution to Joint All-Domain Command and Control, or JADC2, the yet-to-be achieved ability of seamless information sharing regardless of service or national affiliation.

“The fourth industrial revolution is changing the nature of warfare, and it will become really well connected, with data flowing across all the different functions,” Brigadier Stefan Crossfield, the British Army’s chief data officer and head of information exploitation, said in a statement. “If we can build up a pervasive network that we can use to fight with, then it opens up all other opportunities. It’s challenging technically, that’s for sure, and this is an example of how we go after that.”

The annual Project Convergence kicked off in 2020 at Yuma Proving Ground in Arizona. It has expanded each year, putting cutting-edge tech to the test and folding in new players. PC 22 will focus on the Indo-Pacific and European theaters, aligning with U.S. perceptions of complex Chinese and Russian threats. Russia began massing materiel on its border with Ukraine as the previous Project Convergence, PC 21, wrapped.

Officials expect PC 22 to generate actionable insights and guidance. Upgrading networks and expanding the reach and resilience of communication is one of six modernization priorities established by Army leadership.

Brig. Gen. Jeth Rey, the director of Army Future Command’s Network Cross-Functional Team, last month said plenty of lessons will be learned, especially when it comes to sharing data with joint and coalition partners.

What exercises with allies and partners have shown over the years is that this type of interoperability remains challenging, but military officials say repetition and practice are key to making strides.

The casualty evacuation mission was “a good example of that progress there,” Brig. Gen. Brandon Tegtmeier, deputy commanding general of the 82nd Airborne Division, told Defense News in an interview following the completion of the exercise known as EDGE 22, which took place at Dugway Proving Ground, Utah, earlier this month.

“That’s just a small thing,” he said. “We have a lot of progress to make still, but again, a really good step forward.”

Additionally, the Army reported a call for fire was achieved through a Dutch-run waveform.

The Army’s EDGE series of exercises began last year and is slated to continue annually in coordination with Project Convergence, a larger event in the fall. EDGE is considered the practice round for the aerial tier of PC. This year, Project Convergence, now in its third iteration, brought in international partners for the first time; EDGE then followed.

Project Convergence examines and tests how the Army plans to fight against near-peer adversaries across all domains using capability slated for fielding in roughly 2030 and beyond.

EDGE, this year, was focused on a European theater scenario centered around a wet gap crossing. The 82nd Airborne and other allied units at the exercise were tasked with defeating an enemy’s integrated air defense systems. That would then lead to the second phase, introducing maneuver forces through air assaults to seize two different pieces of terrain.

Netherlands, Italy and Germany were active participants in the exercise, while Australia, Canada, France and the United Kingdom were observers.

German and Italian forces participated in the combined air assault with the 82nd. The Germans brought their German Future Soldier System, and Italian soldiers brought their Targeting and Communication Command Kit.

The Netherlands contributed its Joint Air Ground Gateway, a command-and-control tactical node, and was able to successfully integrate the node into the Windows Tactical Assault Kit (WINTAK), a map-based application that provide operators position data, a chat function and mission planning capabilities across a shared picture.

The exercise relied on the Variable Message Format communication protocol, understood by all NATO forces, to communicate.

“I think everybody would admit we are not where we need to be with our allies,” Tegtmeier said. “I think having those nations present out at Edge 22 is a huge step forward in terms of fixing that problem.”

Exercises like EDGE, he noted, generate new technology ideas and new possibilities to increase interoperability.

In the scenario, the 82nd’s Tactical Command Post served as a Combined Joint Task Force headquarters. The headquarters was positioned well outside the range of enemy long-range fires that it would not have been able to assume using current fleet capabilities. The Army expects to have vast improvements when it comes to speed and range from its Future Vertical Lift fleet with a planned fielding timeline of 2030.

The work the Army did as a coalition with its allies “really informed our gaps when it comes to cross-domain solutions within the coalition,” Maj. Gen. Wally Rugen, who oversees the Army’s FVL development, told Defense News in a recent interview.

“It went much better than expected,” he added.

The exercise also helped the service and its coalition partners further understand the technical challenge of achieving the ultimate interoperability goal — being able to work from a single screen in the CJTF environment.

The coalition used a cross-domain solution certified waveform to perform a number of vignettes in which sensitive but unclassified data was passed into a secret enclave and then out to an unclassified one.

“The reason that’s important is really being able to go from strategic to tactical, tactical to strategic in a very agile manner,” Rugen said, referring to the way digital data was securely passed between those performing the tactical mission and the headquarters coordinating the mission.

But coalition interoperability remains a challenge, Rugen said, because it’s not yet clear what data should be passed and what the U.S. and its partners should keep to themselves.

“We should have the ability to filter that [data] out but still provide useful information to our coalition partners and vice versa,” Rugen said. “There’s an ability to filter out that metadata and then give useful things to either the tactical edge or the strategic decision makers.”

Findings at EDGE will inform policies going forward, he noted.

Moving forward, the coalition needs to come to a decision on what waveforms and databases are used as a standard of operation and construct a gateway that allows the right data to flow, Rugen said. Then that gateway has to be interoperable within everyone’s network.

In EDGE, the Army used a variety of waveforms including TSM and Link-16.

During the exercise, “we didn’t necessarily care what the parallel network was, if somebody has a different one. … It doesn’t matter what the black box is,” Rugen said. In other words, the exercise proved interoperability as a concept, but the Pentagon and its allies and partners will have to determine what hardware and software will be standard.

The Army, over 19 days at EDGE, said it achieved 67 technical objectives with 34 first-time events using over 17 distinct FVL-related technologies and capabilities.

These included experimentation with an Air-Launched Effects swarm launched by a surrogate aircraft flying as Future Attack Reconnaissance Aircraft. The swarms evaluated at EDGE mark the largest ALE-small swarm to date. The Army deployed about 25 drones in four waves using the service’s “Wolfpack” concept for intelligent swarms, allowing the aircraft to stimulate, hunt, kill and assess threats.

The Army also used two waveforms that allowed the swarm to double ALE range from missions executed last year.

And the service’s Aerial Tier Network (ATN), which provides digital and voice communication, saw further refinement and improvement, according to Rugen.

The Army also evaluated a number of dual-use sensors typically used for protection, but, at EDGE, were used for lethal effects. Radar warning receivers in aircraft cockpits, for example, transferred data of incoming fire through the network to the CJTF to be used for targeting, Rugen said.

“We’re never going to fight as just a joint organization,” Brig. Gen. Jeth Rey, director of the Network Cross-Functional Team, said May 10 on the sidelines of a summit with contractors and potential suppliers. “We’re going to always have our coalition partners. So we want the effects to be: If they’re in the best area to shoot, we want them to shoot.”

Now in its third year, Project Convergence seeks to integrate artificial intelligence, robotics and autonomy to improve battlefield situational awareness, connect sensors with shooters and accelerate decision-making. For the first time this fall, it will involve international participation, with Australia and the U.K. actively taking part while Canada and others observe.

The international collaboration, which may also include New Zealand, comes as the Pentagon pursues what’s known as Joint All-Domain Command and Control, or JADC2, the ability to exchange information across air, land, sea, cyber and space and tie together once-incompatible or siloed systems. The demonstration is a critical next-step, Rey said, and builds upon the successes of previous experimentation and analysis.

“So, we’re going to learn a lot of lessons here,” he said. “And it’s not only just data. We’re talking about sensor data off of our mission systems to ensure we can share it not only with our joint partners, but also share it with our coalition partners.”

Project Convergence is the Army’s contribution to JADC2, like the Air Force’s Advanced Battle Management System and the Navy’s Project Overmatch. This year’s tests will stretch across the U.S., including the National Training Center at Fort Irwin and the Navy’s Electronic Warfare Range at China Lake, both in California.

The upcoming demonstration of cutting-edge tech will focus on both the Indo-Pacific and European theaters. Russian and Chinese threats colored the exercises, Defense News reported in March. Russia began massing materiel on its border with Ukraine as Project Convergence 21 wrapped.

“You’ve got the right sensor through the right command-and-control node getting to the right shooter to be able to facilitate that kill chain, and you’re getting information to decision makers,” said Army Maj. Gen. Robert Collins, the program executive officer for command, control and communications-tactical, at the two-day summit.

A heavy emphasis on data and integration, beyond basic cooperation, already exists heading into Project Convergence 22, Army Chief Information Officer Raj Iyer said May 9.

“We know we have the best weapon system platforms in the world,” he said. “But, truly, for us to establish strategic deterrence in the future, and if we have to win decisively in large-scale combat operations, that’s going to only happen through decision dominance.“

“So for us to achieve decision dominance,” Iyer said, “it’s all about the data.”

Project Convergence grew from just an Army event in the desert of Yuma Proving Ground in Arizona in 2020 to a joint evaluation in 2021.

While the two previous Project Convergence events focused heavily on scenarios that might play out in the Indo-Pacific region, as the joint force continues to work out its roles and responsibilities, “the Army has got to be ready to fight anywhere, just like the rest of the joint force,” Magsig told Defense News in a recent interview. “We’re responsive to what’s going on in the world.”

This time, the United Kingdom, Australia and very likely New Zealand will participate, said Magsig. Canada will observe with plans to participate in a subsequent Project Convergence, he added.

Army Secretary Christine Wormuth had stressed last fall that while the Army is looking heavily toward the Pacific region and its role there, Europe should never be out of focus. Just as Project Convergence 2021 was wrapping up, Russia began massing its forces along the Ukrainian border.

In planning PC22, Magsig said he took the secretary’s recent comments and said “we have to experiment with both in PC22, and unfortunately for the Ukrainian people, we’ve seen that play out with great importance now. But we realized in November-December timeframe that we needed to expand our horizons here at Project Convergence 22.”

Near-peer adversary focus

The exercise will run through two scenarios. The first will be focused on the Indo-Pacific area of operations, where the joint force and its international partners will conduct experimentation in offensive and defensive fires.

The scenario will tie together places relevant to the area of operation, including Joint Base Lewis McChord in Washington State, Camp Pendleton and San Clemente Island in California and Hawaii, according to Magsig.

The second scenario is “focused on what we’re watching playing out in the [U.S. European Command] AOR” and will feature a land-centric fight against the type of “threat the Ukrainians are facing every day now,” Magsig said.

Most of those operations will play out at the National Training Center at Fort Irwin and the Navy’s electronic warfare range at China Lake — both in California.

“When you link those together it’s a pretty large swath of land that has a range of electronic warfare sensors that we can build in a range to look like an adversary’s threat,” he said.

The scenario will experiment with how command and control nodes from all five services can penetrate an integrated air defense system network resembling those currently being used by Russia in Ukraine. Then the joint force will sustain a land campaign against a hybrid threat much like the one “you’re seeing in living color right now in Ukraine,” Magsig said.

That land campaign will be supported through the space and air domains and through fires capability coming from the maritime domain, he noted.

Scaling up

In both scenarios, the Army along with joint and coalition forces have been tasked by the Army secretary and chief to scale capability that performed well in PC21 and increase the complexity “to the point where it’s completely operationally relevant,” Magsig said.

In PC21, the Army used tactical units commanded by one- or two-star-level units, but this time, the event will scale up to three-star-level command and control nodes, according to Magsig.

Last year, the 82nd Airborne Brigade played a major role. This year, the Army will use the 3rd Armored Corps out of Fort Hood, Texas, and the 18th Airborne Corps out of Fort Bragg, North Carolina.

Elements of the Navy’s Third Fleet will also participate, using its “Landlocked Ship One” – essentially a ship sitting in the desert at White Sands Missile Range, New Mexico, with its own Skipper – as part of the exercise.

While PC21 had one element of a Marine Littoral Regiment, the plan is to scale that up to get elements from a Marine Expeditionary Force at Camp Pendleton, California.

The Air Force brought individual fighter and bomber wings to support the exercise last year, but this year the event will include the Shadow Operations Center out of Nellis Air Base, Nevada. The service will use the event to experiment with what its next Air Operations Center might look like.

And while space assets were used in previous Project Convergences, in PC23 Space Command’s two-star level operational headquarters will participate, according to Magsig.

“In PC21, we did things in ones and twos. Some of that is because we wanted to do it both in simulation and do it live and when you are doing things live with million dollar missile shots, there’s a problem in terms of when you want to get at complexity, there’s a thing called cost,” Magsig said.

So in order to scale the exercise effectively and keep the evaluation process affordable, Magsig said PC22 will use validated data from the live exercises last year and will scale capability in simulation.

“The Ukrainians aren’t facing one missile a day. I think the last count I saw was something like 650 different types of missile strikes have impacted inside Ukraine,” Magsig said. So “if we go to war against China, it’s going to be worse. We could get 300 or 600 in the first 24 to 48 hours.”

Magsig stressed this doesn’t turn this into a “theory of war game” because of the live data collected in previous efforts accurately represent capability in a simulated environment through the Joint Systems Integration Laboratory.

“An adversary like Russia or China is going to come at you with a multitude of threats, ballistic missiles, hypersonic missiles, cruise missiles, air breathing threats, and we’ve got to see where the joint force can both thwart the attack across multiple different attack vectors,” he said, “and when you look at what that means, we have to be able to take out the arrows and the archer. We’ve got to be able to destroy those, but then effectively counter attack against the archers that are getting prepared to fire the next salvo.”

The scale is “going to stretch the level of our networks,” Magsig said. Data will pass from WSMR to JBLM to Fort Bragg to Virginia and all the way to the West Coast.

“We’re going to be using simulation to stimulate our mission command systems and our weapon systems, passing fire control quality data across the network and then use that to engage in both offensive and defensive fires across the joint force,” he described.

New focus, new tech

While the exercise will focus on some use cases from the past year – like integrated air and missile defense and joint fires – it will also add at least one: contested logistics.

In PC21, the service experimented with prognostic and preventive maintenance sensors, “basically putting sensors on a range of vehicles and collecting that data, amalgamating it, aggregating the data and then seeing how we can get ahead of maintenance and where that data can allow us to save costs on maintenance and also raise our operational readiness levels,” Magsig said.

This year, the Army is trying to do the same across many more classes of supplies, such as fuel and ammunition. The Army is working to create a dashboard for commanders that show when supplies are running low and when they will run out or when parts require maintenance.

“Our operational commanders, our division and corps commanders are screaming for this capability,” Magsig said. “That’s a big effort and so if we eat half that cookie, I’ll be impressed and proud.”

Contested logistics will be evaluated in both scenarios, Magsig noted. San Clemente Island will be used to test some of the capability and could include the Army’s new Maneuver Support Vessel-Light, a watercraft with flexibility to be used to transport troops and for fire support and supply delivery.

The event will also include some Army Rapid Capabilities and Critical Technologies Office technologies, including offensive drone swarm capability and possibly the Mid-Range Capability missile expected to be fielded in 2023 and tech from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency.

Overall the combined joint force wants to learn how to deal with large-scale complex attacks, how it can employ both lethal and non-lethal effects and “where our systems fail to overmatch our adversaries,” Magsig said.

“There’s a number X out there where our systems, our networks, will break down passing that much data; our systems, our radars get overloaded with tracks and there’s not enough missiles in our arsenals or depth of our magazines is insufficient or a combination of those things that will lead us to fail,” Magsig said. “And we want to know where we’re going to fail in Project Convergence and not on the day that our adversary decides to attack.”

The defense-contracting giant has applied to test its 5G solutions as a part of the U.S. Army’s annual experiment, said David Rohall, a senior program manager on the company’s sensors and global sustainment advanced programs team, and hopes to improve its related capabilities in the near future.

Project Convergence ‘22 — the Army’s contribution to Joint All-Domain Command and Control, a plan to modernize military communications — is set for this fall. It will, for the first time, include international partners.

The first Project Convergence began in 2020. Since then, the series of experiments has put emerging technologies, like networks, artificial intelligence, robotics and autonomy, to the test.

Lockheed last year equipped a pair of Hummers with 5G-capable open architecture processors, and drove them across its electronic testing site near Orlando International Airport.

“We took those two commercial Humvees and connected them through a commercial 5G network on site,” Rohall said. “We took those Humvees and we put them in different scenarios to drive throughout.”

The exercise, completed in November 2021, falls under Lockheed Martin’s 5G.MIL initiative, designed to integrate and upgrade the fifth-generation gear in the military. The company said the Florida expedition will help its engineers explore 5G applications for ground vehicles.

The 5G.MIL program, Rohall said, represents “a large investment in the future for all of our joint warfighters. This technology will advance and bring new capabilities to our airmen, soldiers, Marines and sailors across all the joint domain operations.”

Fifth-generation wireless technology is a marked improvement compared to its predecessors, promising faster speeds and boosted bandwidth. Officials believe it will usher in a new era of connectivity.

“This is an enabling technology to share data securely, resiliently and seamlessly across that battle space,” Rohall said.

Lockheed Martin previously joined forces with Microsoft to work on 5G, and in mid-February announced it won a $19.3 million contract to develop a 5G communications network testbed for the U.S. Marine Corps in California.

The defense contractor has also teamed with Verizon to develop 5G systems for battlefield use.

The Army awarded a $14 million contract to BlueHalo in February to develop the capability over a 30-month period, the company announced in a Feb. 24 statement.

The Army moved out on a plan to prototype and demonstrate an offensive unmanned aircraft systems swarm capability in March 2021, Stan Darbro, the RCCTO’s deputy director, told Defense News in a March 1 statement.

The swarm capability is intended to be low-cost and will have the ability to identify and engage threats with the use of a single controller, he said.

The capability will be demonstrated “as a proof of concept” at Project Convergence 2022, which will take place this fall. Project Convergence is a campaign of learning to evaluate how the Army will fight with modernized equipment and advanced capabilities. The event began in 2020 and has continued on as an annual event at Yuma Proving Ground, Arizona.

“This is a standalone contract with BlueHalo and it is being executed through the RCCTO’s Rapid Acquisition Prototyping Project Office (RAPPO),” Darbro added.

BlueHalo is taking its company-wide expertise and resources to deliver “artificial intelligence [and] machine learning swarm logic capabilities, communications systems and evolving technologies within an operationally driven system-of-systems” to “provide the warfighter with improved mission efficiency, sensor performance and a reduction in cognitive workload,” the company said in a statement.

While the RCCTO effort focuses on offensive use of a drone swarm, the military services and industry are also concentrated on countering swarms of enemy drones.

The Army, for instance, is working on developing and integrating high-power microwave capability to destroy small drone threats, with plans to spend more than $50 million in fiscal 2022 on the effort while also working jointly across the services to establish an enduring architecture of solutions to address the threat.

The Army is also planning to field an HPM capability to destroy drone swarms as part of its Indirect Fires Protection Capability system that will defend fixed sites against drones, cruise missiles, rockets, artillery and mortars. The service is developing the technology with the Air Force, which is in charge of the research and development work. The Army is supplying the funding to build prototypes. Known as THOR — or Tactical High Power Operational Responder — the weapon was demonstrated at Kirtland Air Force Base, New Mexico, in February 2021. The Army plans to conduct field testing as early as FY24.

Industry is also moving out on solutions. For example, General Dynamics Land Systems and venture capital-backed startup Epirus announced they were teaming up to integrate a counter-drone swarm system on combat vehicles in October 2021.

Now, Northrop Grumman, the system’s manufacturer, says recent experimentation at Project Convergence last fall proved IBCS can do what the service requires.

According to Northrop, IBCS showed it can remotely detect and defeat threat targets, using ground, air and space sensors. The system was also able to pass ground target tracking data to a fire control system, helping the Army use it to connect any sensor and shooter on the battlefield.

The testing at Project Convergence demonstrated the system’s “architectural capability to integrate networks, sensors, and effectors across domains for joint operations,” the company said in a Jan. 19 statement.

In fall 2021, the Army completed its second Project Convergence, a campaign of learning held at Yuma Proving Ground, Arizona, to experiment with and evaluate capabilities the Army hopes to deploy for a fully modernized force that can fight across all domains.

IBCS, which has cost the Army about $2.7 billion to date to develop, was cleared for production in January 2021.

The system was demonstrated in one of the seven use case scenarios executed during Project Convergence and also participated in a network and communication exercise as part of the campaign at Yuma Proving Ground, Arizona, in October and November.

During the joint air-and-missile defense use case scenario, IBCS conducted a successful engage-on-remote test, a Northrop spokesperson told Defense News.

Threat targets were launched from White Sands Missile Range, New Mexico. An engagement operations center using IBCS picked up on the threats at Fort Bliss, Texas, and tracked them. Then the system was able to remotely initiate from Fort Bliss the launch of Patriot missiles at White Sands to take out the threat.

Part of the demonstration included using space-based sensors, which Joint Tactical Ground Station operators tapped into through satellite communications to track a missile threat. While ground and airborne sensors have been used in demonstrations involving IBCS, the addition of space sensors shows the system is able to tie into the space capability layer, according to the spokesperson.

During the communications exercise, IBCS was able to obtain information from an F-35 fighter jet tracking a ground target and feed it to the Army’s fire control system — the Advanced Field Artillery Tactical Data System — for the first time. AFATDS then engaged the target.

The demonstration shows IBCS can contribute not just to defensive missions but to precision strike missions as well, the spokesperson said.

“Project Convergence provided us another opportunity to demonstrate our architecture’s ability to deliver joint connectivity across the services,” Christine Harbison, Northrop Grumman’s vice president and general manager for combat systems and mission readiness, said in the company statement. “That open architecture allows utilization of satellite communications to conduct remote engagements of target missiles, demonstrating our ability to connect the battlespace for all-domain operations.”

At Project Convergence 2021, the Army focused heavily on artificial intelligence and machine-learning enabled systems that could contribute to the military-wide Joint All Domain Command and Control (JADC2).

JADC2 is the Pentagon’s major effort to connect all sensors on the battlefield to troops, enabling a speedier transfer of data, information, intelligence and communications across platforms and services. IBCS is seen as the Army’s contribution to JADC2.

Last month, the Army awarded Northrop a $1.4 billion contract for both low-rate initial production and full-rate production of its future battle command system.

The system is currently running through its initial operational test and evaluation and the Army expects to reach a full-rate production decision on IBCS in fiscal 2023.