Gen. Randy George, Chief of Staff of the Army, discusses next generation command and control (C2) system capabilities with a 1st Infantry Division Soldier during a human machine Integration demonstration at Project Convergence – Capstone 4, Fort Irwin, Calif., March 18, 2024. PC-C4 is a U.S. Army-hosted Joint and Multinational experiment integrating modernization capabilities and formations through persistent experimentation at multiple echelons for the future operating environment being held from February 24 – March 20, 2024. (U.S. Army photo by Sgt. Brahim Douglas)
SAVANNAH, Ga. — The US Army has made upgrading its command and control capabilities a priority, but has shared relatively few details about how exactly they’re pursuing the sprawling project.
But last week at the service’s biannual Technical Exchange Meeting, service officials dove deeper into plans for the next-generation C2 (NGC2) program, revealing among other details a tiered “technology stack” the capability will be built on, and how industry can make it a reality.
“We’re really, no kidding, trying to do this different[ly] than we’ve ever done it before without falling into some of the traps,” Mark Kitz, program executive officer of the Command, Control Communications-Network portfolio, told Breaking Defense.
The plan can seem a bit complicated, as Army officials acknowledged, so they urged industry to keep an eye on the program’s ever-evolving characteristics of need (CON) document.
“It’s not going to be one empirical document that drives us,” Gen. Patrick Ellis, director of the Army’s network cross-functional team, said on a TEM panel. “There’s going to be multiple in there. As we write those multiple documents, we’re using that as our North Star to say, ‘Okay, this is what we’re trying to design towards.’” (The document, first published in April, was last updated on Dec. 9.)
The document won’t be the only thing that’s ever-evolving. Officials said they’re attempting to build as much flexibility into the acquisition process as possible, both to encourage creativity from vendors and to be able to drop those who aren’t cutting it.
“The government’s actually not really good at building escape hatches into our contracts, and we need to be,” Alexander Miller, the senior advisor for science and technology and the chief technology officer to the Chief of Staff of the Army said during a panel. “As much as we’re talking about bringing on the right players, we’re going to get rid of the wrong players. If we aren’t being good teammates, and you aren’t being good teammates, or somebody out there isn’t being a good teammate, we don’t want to team with them.”
Back To The Stack
The technology stack, as described by Army officials and shown in a slide presentation at the TEM, was included in the CON document in order to “drive home the importance that we have all of this in place,” Joe Welch, deputy to the commanding general at Army Futures Command, said during a panel.
At the top of the stack is the application layer, which is responsible for user-facing applications like file transfer systems, web browsing, etc. — think anything that the user can see on the front end.
Under the application layer is the operating systems layer, the software layer that underpins the user interface. Welch called this layer the “integrated data layer” that’s responsible for “the collection of services, data interfaces and data models that ultimately are supportive of those applications and allow applications to be built without having to rebuild services that other things may already be taking advantage of.”
The third layer is the compute layer, which serves as the infrastructure layer that harnesses the processing power used to run the application and the operating systems layer.
That may sound like fairly standard tech, but Welch said the compute layer “is enormously more challenging when we start getting into the tactical operational environment.” Compute resources are not as readily available out in the field as they are at larger command posts or rearguard headquarters.
“It’s a very hard optimization problem, and if it doesn’t work, the applications and the services that I just mentioned, those top two layers, are not going to work either,” Welch said.
The transport layer is at the bottom of the tech stack. This layer is responsible for managing the delivery of data between applications. It’s the way that data moves across the battle space, Welch said.
As Breaking Defense has reported, battlefield bandwidth has emerged as an obstacle in data-rich and/or electronically contested environments.
“They could be WiFi. They could be radios, mesh networks. They could be pLeo [proliferated low-Earth orbit satellites]. They could be specially designed wave forms to minimize our electromagnetic signature. It could be all of the above, right? So that needs to work seamlessly as well,” he said.
When finding the appropriate tools for the tech stack layers, Welch said the service needs to keep the standardization of application programming interfaces, or APIs, into account.
“A lot of the challenges we have with our systems today is that there is no standard way of communication between these layers. The layers are built in a disparate fashion, and there’s also no communication between them. So that is a main focus area that we’re going to have. The goal is open and standardized APIs, but the way that we achieve that is going to be very deliberate,” he said.
Keeping It Flexible
The tech stack, as described last week, may not be the same one the Army wants next month or next year, however. Down the line, layers might be added as the service and its vendors establish what capabilities and requirements are needed through trial and error, Welch said.
He emphasized that because of this, the service is going to write requirements that are less prescriptive, but still give industry enough of an idea of what the Army needs for NGC2.
“We’re continuing to better describe the problem characteristics of the solution space, but still we are not getting prescriptive in a sense of, ‘This is the technology we need, this is the vendor we need to get it from,’ those types of things,” Welch said during an interview on the sidelines of the conference. “It’s still very much in the attributes of the solutions more so than the solutions themselves.”
In another effort to create more flexibility in the program, the Army will not have one lead systems integrator for NGC2, but instead will have a few team leaders, Kitz said in an interview.
“Having competition and giving our users opportunities to prototype with more than one solution is potentially powerful, and it also stimulates industry investment, because there’s more opportunities for industry. We certainly want to avoid this incumbency, right? We don’t want an [integrator] who’s going to lead us for the next 10 years, right? We want constant competition. We want constant new teaming.”
