WASHINGTON — After more than a year of experimentation, the Army is on track to provide the first operational version of its ambitious Next Generation Command and Control hardware and software to the I Corps, starting with choosing which software applications to move forward.
“The reality is, some of the principal apps of Next Generation Command and Control, we’ve already incorporated into our operations as we provided some C2 oversight for both 4th Infantry Division and 25th,” I Corps commander Lt. Gen. Matthew McFarlane told Breaking Defense.
The 4th and 25th ID have been the principal testers for NGC2 prototypes for months, culminating in NGC2 experiments at the Army’s Project Convergence Capstone 6 event, which began in late July.
I Corps will be the first to receive what Army officials described as the locked-in architecture: a combination of new, commercial gear as well as reggeized, bespoke military systems. NGC2, billed by senior leaders as a ground up rebuild of communications networks to enable everything from passing and receiving data to intelligence information, is planned to eventually be fielded to the entire service.
But going from the division level to the corps level is expected to come with its own challenges, McFarlane said in the Aug. 24 interview. In this case, the I Corps is made up of several Army units, to include four divisions — typically between 12,000-16,000 people — across the massive Pacific theater.
“Corps echelons do not fight localized tactical engagements. My job, the Corps’ job, is to shape operational battlespaces, allocate theater-level resources, and orchestrate complex multi-domain campaigns across vast maritime distances,” he said.
Before the tech gets to I Corps, the first order of business, NGC2 program officials said, is slimming down the software footprint. The 4ID had 45 apps during Project Convergence in July, but the final baseline will be significantly less than that, broken down into core and common services. Common services are things like map capabilities while core apps serve particular warfighting functions such as airspace deconfliction, sustainment and spectrum management. While not specifying exactly what those applications are, McFarlane said they include logistics.
Three exercises that pushed counter–UAS from prototype to proven
Architecture that linked sensors, C2, RF effects, and lasers into a distributed c-UAS kill chain.
Army program officials explained the biggest requirement in shifting the NGC2 architecture to the corps level is ensuring interoperability with other joint and multinational partners.
“In the Pacific, I Corps acts as a joint multinational data router. By scaling [NGC2’s] open architecture, we are securely federating real-time sensor-shooter data from joint services and our partners and allies to achieve true decision dominance. We’re nesting this transition directly with our active training tempo starting in earnest with a software rollout in October, followed by upcoming exercises,” McFarlane said.
To that end, the Army is making big bets on how that software flexibility will enable “fight tonight” capabilities, tools McFarlane can employ immediately into battle, if needed, as a senior operational commander in the Pacific.
Joseph Welch, portfolio acquisition executive for command and control and counter-command and control, told Breaking Defense at the TechNet conference in Augusta, Ga., “that’s really where my focus is going to be as we move into I Corps. We want to be able to get them to achieve fight tonight capability with these new tools as quickly as possible.”
“The fight tonight challenge … is we need to be able to get this capability to the point where we can do that handoff, we can make that transition from the legacy C2 system that the modern software based capability we’re providing as part of NGC2 is able to pick that up and go,” he said.
Those apps and features have to integrate with others across the board.
“Key is … interoperability with our joint partners and allies as we’re equipping with these new systems and these apps, making sure we can connect with everybody on the battlefield, even if they have historical or their host nation systems, but we can connect with them and have the ability to gain the decision dominance,” McFarlane said.
To test that kind of interoperability among the US services, 4ID is currently participating in Garuda Shield with the Indonesian Army using its NGC2 architecture for planning enroute to the region aboard joint platforms and as part of the exercise.
For that exercise, Brig. Gen Edwin Matthaidess, deputy commanding general for maneuver for 4ID, told Breaking Defense the command picked two “stretch goals.”
“We said we wanted to do enroute mission command while flying. And then when we got out here, we know there’s some naval components to Super Garuda Shield, [so] we said, hey, we want to put it on a boat,” Matthaidess said in an interview. “We’re going to be operating in in the littorals. We’re going to be operating in the archipelagic region, how do we get it afloat?”
Enroute communications, he said, allow for battle planning, updating air tasking orders, targeting and overall command and control before even touching on the ground. He said he was able to take all his normal meetings he had at home in his Stryker 30,000 feet in the air abord a C-17 on the way to Indonesia.
But it required C2 links between services to keep the info flowing back and forth — in this case the Army used new proliferated-Low Earth Orbit-equipped C-17s from the Air National Guard that allowed high transport bandwidth.
When it comes to afloat capabilities, Matthaidess said they know they’re going to be part of a joint plan and that will most likely involve operations on ships and waterways.
The destroyer that the Navy had in the region they planned to plug into was pulled away, he said, but 4th ID was able to integrate two different NGC2 kits to Coast Guard fast response cutters, courtesy of Pacific Fleet, to try two different forms of integration.
It’s “not truly plug and play yet, but easily integrated and in a matter of minutes, we’re up and running on comms, talking … [while] we’re sitting in Jakarta on another island across the strait on a vessel that we hadn’t seen 24 hours before,” he said.
Moving down the ladder, the corps is responsible for coordinating the capabilities of all its subordinate units and divisions.
“As we apply the [NGC2] ecosystem to my command and control the fight, I’ll enable subordinate divisions and brigades freedom of action through decentralized mission command-driven data architecture,” McFarlane said.
He added that, in his view, the architecture provides a significant amount of tailorability for each subordinate unit to customize as they need to fit their unique requirements.
“The tailorable aspect is key, [and] especially will be important at the operation level for some of considerations that I have across the theater and wherever I’m operating, versus what a division has that’s focused on a smaller area for their tactical operations,” he said.
And even though I Corps will be getting an operational NGC2 architecture, the service plans to keep adapting the tech.
James Craven, Program Manager for NGC2 for Anduril, which was recently selected to lead the common data layer baseline, said in an early August interview that over the next six months, industry and the Army will be working to figure out what can be incorporated from existing architectures and what changes need to be made to the data layer to get the right information to the right place without overloading units.