Army using ‘transformation in contact’ to make case for new weapons, formation decisions

FORT JOHNSON, La. — Following a 500-mile air assault from Ft. Campbell, Ky., down to a heavily wooded training site in Louisiana, soldiers from the 101st Airborne Division spent a chunk of August testing out new tech and formations against an opposing force dubbed Geronimo.

The early verdict: More equipment is needed to prepare for a drone-riddled battlefield, while the division needs to relook its logistics footprint for an island-hopping campaign in the Indo-Pacific.

“We just do not have the density or the quality of our counter-UAS [unmanned aerial systems] that we would really need … for the future fight,” 101st Commanding General Maj. Gen. Brett Sylvia, told reporters Aug 22.

“I believe that we’re moving in the right direction, that the limited capabilities that we’ve gotten are better than they’ve been, but we just don’t have the density … we would want,” he later added.

Likewise, Sylvia said he is walking away from the event knowing that as his division prepares for a long-range air assault in an area like the Indo-Pacific region, it needs to be prepared to better spread out its forward arming and refueling points — more of a training and manning task.

Sylvia’s two initial homework takeaways came nine days into a rotation at the Joint Readiness Training Center, or JRTC. His division’s 2nd Brigade Combat Team is part of the Army’s new “transformation in contact” initiative designed to get soldiers’ feedback on new equipment faster, figure out how formations could use it and help guide leadership decisions. One of those key deciders is Army Chief of Staff Gen. Randy George who hosted nearly a dozen reporters last week on a quick trip down to visit the division towards the tail end of the training event.

“We have to provide the best Army that we [can] with the people we have, with the budget that we have,” George told reporters. “Those will require tough decisions to say what we’re not gonna [do].”

“Our soldiers that are out there employing this are gonna tell us what … [are] not the best systems,” the four-star general added.

While it will take time to collect observations from the JRTC rotations and decide how to proceed, Army officers and soldiers there provided a peek of the new tech and use cases being explored.

On the C-UAS front for example, soldiers with the 101st used tested handheld options including Dronebuster and DroneDefender to attack UAS out to about 750 meters.

“These are … very new capabilities for us that we’re still integrating and learning from and determining how we reorganize ourselves,” Sylvia said. 

And while there remains a dearth of options ready for fielding, Col. Matthew Hardman, the commander for the JRTC operations group, noted that takeaways extend beyond new capabilities and towards concealing soldiers’ locations through dispersion, camouflage, noise and light discipline, and electromagnetic signature discipline.

“There is no silver bullet for counter-UAS,” Sylvia said, adding “We cannot [just] rely on … bring out the laser and it’ll fix it all.”

While the burgeoning UAS threat is a hot topic for the Army, it is also eyeing the electronic warfare threat, and how to make it work to its advantage, sometimes with drones.

Part of that equation revolves around testing out smaller command posts designed to be set up in 15 minutes and torn down in the same amount of time. To minimize or completely eliminate the post’s electromagnet signature, the Army is placing “antenna farms” up to two kilometers away and then tying them together via a fiber cable. If the opposition detects emittance, the idea is that it will strike the antenna farm instead of the soldiers inside the camouflaged command post.

As service leaders like George eye today’s conflicts and future ones, they are rushing to test out offensive and defensive EW capabilities. One cheaper one that showed promise during the recent training is the “raspberry pi” — small single-board computers — that was used as both a decoy to draw the opposing force out of hiding and for offensive operations.

Sylvia explained that after acquiring the commercially available circuit boards, the soldiers formed “a couple dozen” clusters designed to act as command post decoys.

Then when Geronimo, the opposing force, volleyed a large amount of fire at those raspberry pi decoys, it “unmasked” the opposition force’s location in the woods, enabling soldiers from the 101st to target their weapons in that direction.

Soldiers shuffling through the trees and swamp lands also used the raspberry pis for offensive operations. After programming the circuit boards and pairing it with a standard power bank and a 3D-printed carrying case, they attached the case to the bottom of a UAS.

“Then they [flew] over positions in order to be able to identify the electromagnetic signature,” the two-star general said.

“Once you start getting a cluster of those [service set identifier] SSIDs, you would make a good assumption about whether or not you’ve been able to identify a command post or not, and then be able to generate a fire mission,” he added.

Other UAS techniques were also tested out, including a new “artificial intelligence” capability designed to identify enemy vehicles, generate a fire mission and text it back to soldiers who then decide how to proceed. If it’s a go, the UAS can continue observing the target and, if needed, make adjustments to the mission.

While the new weapons and tech were easier for the Army to show off, a centerpiece of this month’s training event revolved around testing out improvements to the network — aptly dubbed C2 Fix — to help shape improvements and tweaks. The service is hoping changes under this initiative will be enough to ensure that soldiers can communicate and fight on today’s battlefield, while it launches forward with a new network under the C2 Next prototyping umbrella.

In addition to ensuring soldiers can communicate, the service is hoping to provide maneuver commanders with what they need, in part, via a common operating picture. And a big part of that is finding ways to integrate new, smaller C-UASs into the C2 architecture, according to Alex Miller, a chief technology officer.

“We’ve been working across [different systems to determine] what does counter UAS mean as part of integrated air and missile defense?” Miller told reporters last week.

“We’ve had [Forward Area Air Defense Command and Control] FAADC2 for 30 years. [The question is] what comes after that to make sure that we can integrate all of our sensors, all of our effectors, so we have that combined offense, defense for fires,” he added.

This story was updated on 8/28 at 12:20 pm to correct Miller’s final quote to replace the word “bad” with “FAAD.”