The Army’s Next Generation Command and Control (NGC2) initiative aims to build a unified data infrastructure that can speed up data collection, management, analysis and decision-making not only for its commanders and troops in the field, but also with partners, allies and other branches of the US military.
Breaking Defense spoke with Josh Wallin, Defense Program fellow at the Center for a New American Security, on what needs NGC2 will meet, the data infrastructure necessary to implement NGC2 and how it will help speed up the response to constantly changing threats on the battlefield.
Breaking Defense: What is the threat scenario driving the need for NGC2?
Wallin: There are a few different pieces of this. One is the recognition of just how important the EM spectrum is, how important emissions are and the degree to which we’re seeing jamming and interference and tracking emissions in Ukraine by the Russians.
Another is recognizing the fact that when we’re going against a more capable adversary. In an Indo-Pacific scenario, there’s just a much greater concern about what they can do to mess with communications, mess with data links between forces in the Army specifically.
Another piece is thinking about the distances that you’re dealing with. In the GWOT (Global War on Terror) era, certainly in Iran now or even in Ukraine, we haven’t faced the potential distances we would in the Pacific, and recognizing that you’re trying to connect a bunch of systems that may be located potentially thousands of miles apart from each other.
If we look at how the Army has to operate in the Pacific, it’s not just a distance issue. It’s also a network infrastructure issue.
It’s certainly an infrastructure issue. For at least the last few decades we haven’t really come in direct contact with an adversary that’s going to be targeting the spectrum quite so much. That’s important to be preparing for.
On the infrastructure piece, yes, there is commercial infrastructure that can support things. It’s not that that infrastructure doesn’t necessarily exist at all in the Pacific. I’m not an expert on how all of the Starlink satellites, as an example, have been distributed, but if you had terminals in the Pacific, my presumption is that you would probably still have connectivity in that way. Obviously you’re going to be less able to rely on commercial cellular infrastructure if that’s something you want to be using.
A big component of that is going to also end up being bandwidth. One of the things that the Army is seeing in Ukraine right now is the volume of data, of transmissions that are going out, and especially with all of these distributed operating concepts that the Army, Navy, Air Force are all looking at. There’s a recognition of the fact that you’re going to have to constantly be passing data between a bunch of different nodes to keep them synchronized. So a bunch of different deployed forces, to keep them in sync, you’re going to have less of this concept of centralization or mass in particular locations where it may be much easier to pass information.
What will NGC2 change for the Army at the mission level?
The cross-functional piece that I was alluding to before, to this idea that we should be able to connect systems across different functions with a recognition that data from one – what would have been stovepiped – may be valuable to another one.
There’s a recognition, in Ukraine as an example, that the targeting cycle is very fast. We might be talking on the order of minutes from acquisition to servicing a target. One goal is speeding things up, having that cross functional data that you can take advantage of.
Another piece is even more basic than that when you’re talking within particular functions. For air defense, when we look at systems like Patriot and THAAD, it’s a recent development that those systems are able to talk to and cue each other, that a THAAD radar is able to control a Patriot interceptor.
There is a general recognition of the fact that if we’re going to look at these layered defense concepts, you can’t have stovepiped systems that are acting completely on their own. It’s, one, super inefficient. Two, given the volume of threats we may be facing, it simply may lead to cases in which you can’t match the incoming threat because you’re not able to move information quickly enough and coordinate across units.
We have seen new threats emerging and changing rapidly. How will NGC2 help the Army adapt to that?
NGC2 seems focused on trying to modularize things as much as possible, trying to separate out those hardware pieces. How do we actually have data links? What cable is connected to what radio which is transmitting to which satellite? Separating that from the actual compute infrastructure you need, separating that from the data infrastructure you need.
They’re trying to separate out the software that manages all of your data. An application layer is going to sit on top of that, which is what soldiers are actually tapping into for their particular roles. The idea is if an adversary has adapted a novel way to jam or target or track some of your infrastructure, such as terminals for satellites, you would be able to quickly swap that out for some less vulnerable piece of hardware without having to change all of the things that sit above that.
There are staggering amounts of data being collected. How can that data be managed and used effectively?
The Army is pushing for this centralization of data across functions. Previously we had stovepiped systems where air-defense defense systems may have their own data and communication infrastructure. Logistics might have a separate one. Fires might have a separate one. The idea is that if we can unify all of that data, maybe we can usefully look at correlation across different data sources for different concerns.
If we think about something like logistics, we’re having all these conversations about just-in-time logistics and being able to manage distributed operations. You may want information about ongoing operations and the threat picture. You might want to be connected into intelligence directly. Unifying the data is one piece of that, being able to draw interesting conclusions from how data for different functions might relate to each other.
On the analytical piece, the buzzword continues to be artificial intelligence (AI), the hope that you’ll be able to automatically analyze portions of this data to present it usefully and quickly to operators. A part of that is being able to automate what processes you can, such as using AI or other data analysis techniques to speed up some of the tasks that might be highly manual right now or be able to get a 60 percent solution on something that was 100 percent manual before, and then freeing up more operators’ time.
As NGC2 is built and implemented, how can the Army ensure that it meets not only today’s needs but future needs?
From a hardware perspective, because of the proliferation of larger amounts of compute, there’s a bit more wiggle room in terms of systems being able to do things long term. Because compute is shrinking so much, because it’s becoming more widespread, that gives a nice runway for long-term applications. Maybe compute won’t go as stale quite so quickly for the things that we’re talking about.
The other piece is the Army is very aware and they seem to be really focusing on this idea that they’re not acquiring software solutions or hardware solutions for decades. They’re not expecting that they’re going to be using these same systems 60 years from now. They are really trying to be able to adapt quickly.
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