When high-tech enemies hack and jam communications, “small units need to be able to operate on their own,” the Army Chief of Staff said. “If they are not masters of their craft, they are not going to be able to do that.”
A new training network will simulate the effects of weapons — from mortars and grenades to, potentially, germ warfare — and tell troops if they’re “killed” or “wounded,” then play the whole exercise back for AI analysis. One Army engineer told us: “We’ve never been able to train this stuff, never.”
The network transport architecture for NGC2 could be a hybrid approach that combines high assurance communications with 5G, WiFi, and multi-orbit satellites.
The best way to show US troops the power of new technology like artificial intelligence, one general said, is to let them suffer defeat at its hands — in training exercises.
Some 19 brigades will hold wargames at the CTCs in 2021. That’s shy of the pre-COVID peak of 21 last year, but above the average for 2015-2019.
Gen. Michael Garrett said computer simulations and other technical means can be used for some of the Army's higher echelon training. The focus must, he said, stay on the men and women who fight the last 100 yards as they close with the enemy.
While Combat Training Center wargames will still work out full brigades, training at home base will emphasize small-unit teambuilding over big events.
The GPS network continues to prove its unmatched reliability, and it’s only getting stronger.
A Washington state National Guard brigade will stay home to help the governor with coronavirus response, while the Army Reserve has halted monthly “battle assemblies.”
M1 tank at the National Training Center in Fort Irwin, California. AUSA: How will the US fight the next war? Today, the Army’s top general declared that the military means “to shift from battles of attrition to battles of cognition, where we think, direct, and act at speeds the enemy cannot match in order to […]
AUSA: In February 2014, when Russian troops seized Crimea, almost no one in the US Army had trained for great power war. But since then, the head of Forces Command told me, every active-duty combat brigade has gone through at least one high-intensity wargame at the famed Combat Training Centers on Fort Irwin, Calif. and […]
ARLINGTON: The Army is reinforcing its combat brigades with cyber soldiers. In 18 months of wargames with a wide range of units — tanks, Strykers, infantry, Airborne, Rangers — Army Cyber Command troops have brought hacking and jamming to bear on the (simulated) battlefield alongside guns and bombs. The exercises have already revealed cybersecurity shortfalls […]
Reducing cognitive overload on warfighters while improving “time to trust” for autonomous systems is a matter of design.
HUNTSVILLE, ALA.: After two decades of largely ignoring the danger, the Army is seriously training for a scary scenario: What if GPS, our satellite communications and our wireless networks go down? It’s hardly a hypothetical threat. Russian electronic warfare units locate Ukrainian troops by their transmissions and jam their radios so they can’t call for help, setting them […]
ARLINGTON: Pop culture pictures hackers in clean, air-conditioned rooms, working global network magic from a desk. For the Army, though, that’s not enough. If American troops are to prevail against inventive foes in high-tech, close-quarters fights, the hacker elite have to get their boots muddy with the regular grunts. So now the Army’s sending cyber soldiers to […]
WASHINGTON: The powerful National Guard Association of the US spent a year and a half battling the last Army Chief of Staff, Gen. Ray Odierno, over everything from Apache gunships to readiness. NGAUS president Gus Hargett has a very different take on Gen. Mark Milley, who replaced Odierno August 14. “I found him to be […]
ARLINGTON: No one knows what the 2016 budget is really going to be. In fact, no one can even plan properly for what it might be, the highest-ranking budgeteer in Army uniform made clear this morning. The uncertainty is coming at the Pentagon from two sides at the same time. On the demand side, there’s […]