One major Army initiative that’s expected to pick up speed in 2026 is its Next Generation Command and Control (NGC2) effort, specifically through a series of experiments designed to slowly expand the scope of the new tech before a single culminating exercise.
Two of the goals for 2026: kick off smaller-scale experiments for one NGC2 prototype, and expand experiments of another prototype to test it with an entire division in 2026, since going forward the division will be the unit of action for the Army.
Described as a clean-slate approach, for NGC2 the service wants to essentially start from scratch and develop a holistic architecture for how soldiers and commanders ingest, visualize and share battlefield information, all with the goal of providing decision advantage and being faster than the adversary on a dynamic battlefield.
[This article is one of many in a series in which Breaking Defense reporters look back on the most significant (and entertaining) news stories of 2025 and look forward to what 2026 may hold.]
This year the Army awarded separate contracts to Anduril and Lockheed Martin, both with a team of other vendors, to further develop prototypes and scale them.
Team Anduril and the Army’s 4th Infantry Division have been testing capabilities through a series of events called the Ivy Sting series, a set of serialized events approximately every six weeks where the division will incrementally add new capabilities.
With three Ivy Stings in the books, 4th ID will look toward three more events next year leading to a division-wide event called Ivy Mass that will transition into the service-wide high-tech sandbox that is Project Convergence.
One of the big tests for the series and the NGC2 architecture next year will be seeing how it does in a contested environment. While the 1s and 0s were stressed during a risk reduction event in 2024, the NGC2 architecture has not been stressed in an electromagnetic environment with solider maneuvering in a scenario-based event to date.
“In [Ivy Sting] 3 and [Ivy Sting] 4, we’re going to bring red teams in to contest us, to check our electromagnetic signatures, to test us on the spectrum, to see how we’re performing and see if we’re targetable, not targetable and so that we can make those adjustments to ensure the survivability of not just this division,” 4th ID Commander Maj. Gen. Patrick Ellis told reporters in November.
Meanwhile, a parallel effort is occurring at 25th Infantry Division in which the Lockheed Martin-led team will provide an integrated data layer. Their serialized series is called Lightning Strike and is slated to kick off early 2026.
The Army has maintained it wants to inject a diverse set of capabilities and vendors to prototype and inform what the eventual NGC2 ecosystem will look like.
Brig. Gen. Shane Taylor, capability program executive (formerly program executive officer) for command, control, communications and networks told Breaking Defense at the annual AUSA conference in October that the Army will likely make purchasing decisions on the architecture prior to Project Convergence based on the experimentation.
However, while Project Convergence is the culminating event, Army officials said they don’t want to wait if they feel confident about a particular technology or capability.
The ultimate goal is to provide baseline capabilities for division commanders to choose what works best for them based on their formations and how they fight.
“What do we learn out of PCC6, we will come out of PCC6 with, like, a system of systems architecture of what that division wants to look like and how they want to fight and I would say we would use that architecture to inform the follow on divisions and use that information to baseline them. But again, each division is going to be different,” Taylor said. “We’ll have that baseline architecture that we’ll manage, our engineering team will manage the uniqueness is we’ll go as a starting point with that next one and then iterate with them based off what we learned both from 25th and 4th and then what that division commander, whoever that is, how they want to fight, what lessons that we learned from 4ID and 25th ID that we can share and then use that to develop really what their density and distribution of capabilities will be.”