The service issued a request for information Wednesday to help the program executive office for intelligence, electronic warfare and sensors and the program manager for Next Generation Command and Control (NGC2) get feedback from industry and identify potential solutions.

The Army wants to mitigate the cognitive burden for commanders and boost their situational awareness.

“As the Army continues to integrate advanced technologies and expand its use of unmanned aerial systems (UAS), rotary-wing, fixed-wing, and emerging platforms, traditional airspace management methods are being challenged by the growing scale, speed, and complexity of operations,” officials wrote in the RFI.

“Traditional airspace management systems often struggle to process and respond to the vast amounts of data generated during operations, limiting their ability to provide actionable insights in real time,” they added.

The proliferation of drones will make airspace management even more complicated. The Army and the other services are under pressure from Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth to quickly integrate more small unmanned aerial systems across the force. Hegseth issued a directive earlier this month with the aim of accelerating that process.

Meanwhile, the Pentagon is also pursuing new counter-drone tools, air-and-missile defense systems, and command-and-control tech to address growing threats.

The expanding use of UAS, loitering munitions and autonomous platforms will have to be taken into account by the U.S. military’s airspace management frameworks, which must also be able to deal with the presence of large numbers of friendly, neutral and enemy players — as well as other weapon systems and adversaries’ electronic warfare capabilities, the RFI noted.

“Army airspace management must adapt to rapidly changing mission requirements, including the need for real-time deconfliction, airspace prioritization, and coordination with joint and coalition forces,” officials wrote. “Effective airspace management must account for the coordination of indirect fires, air defense systems, and other effects to ensure mission success while minimizing risk to friendly forces.”

The Army is hoping artificial intelligence tools can lend a helping hand.

“AI-enabled airspace management solutions have the potential to address these challenges by leveraging machine learning, predictive analytics, and automation to enhance situational awareness, optimize airspace allocation, and enable rapid decision-making. Such systems can analyze real-time data from multiple sources, predict airspace usage patterns, and recommend proactive measures to improve safety, efficiency, and mission effectiveness,” per the RFI.

Responses to the RFI are due Aug. 29.

The service is looking to put vendors’ technologies through their paces later this year at a Joint Pacific Multinational Readiness Center event.

“The Army is seeking interested industry partners to deliver a minimum viable product (MVP) for an AI-enabled airspace management solution that enhances UAS operations during JPMRC Exercise 26-01,” officials wrote. “The MVP must be operationally ready for deployment to the 25th Infantry Division by November 2025 and capable of addressing some of the unique challenges of UAS management in contested and congested environments.”

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The effort is part of the service’s sprawling Next Generation Command and Control (NGC2) initiative, one of its top modernization priorities to provide commanders and units a new approach to manage information, data, and command and control with agile and software-based architectures.

Army officials have said NGC2 is composed of a horizontal operational design that involves a technology stack that goes from a transport layer to an integration layer to a data layer to an application layer, which is where soldiers interact with it. That application layer is also where the Army has broken down the silos of individual warfighting functions — such as intelligence or fires — into applications that ride on the same integrated backbone.

A team of vendors led by Anduril was awarded a nearly $100 million contract last week to continue prototyping for NGC2 and scale it to a full division with 4^th Infantry Division.

Despite the award, the Army is pressing on to continue offering industry opportunities to support the program. The Army is planning to continue releasing periodic so-called characteristics of need statements, which initially served as an acknowledgement of a complex problem space, officials said.

In doing so, the service doesn’t seek to prescribe requirements for industry, but rather provide them with a broad set of challenges they could then seek to develop creative solutions against.

The most recent update, which was just recently signed out, targets decision dominance.

“To me, decision dominance is reflective of a concept,” Joseph Welch, deputy to the commanding general at Army Futures Command, told reporters on the sidelines of a daylong conference hosted by AUSA on Tuesday. “The concept of an OODA loop or a killchain has been one that’s been well established for some time and obviously very consequential to the outcome of a military engagement.”

Officials have stated that one of the most important aspects for NGC2 is the data layer. To realize the stated vision for NGC2 — the ability for commanders to do “more, better, faster” — commanders need to make sense of their data quicker than the adversary.

“The biggest thing for us is the data layer and that’s where artificial intelligence and future capabilities like artificial intelligence come in. We have to understand the data and how we integrate data across a different platform. All of our forces need access to that same level of data. For artificial intelligence, for C2, decision dominance is the answer,” Col. (P) Mike Kaloostian, the incoming director of the C2 cross-functional team for Army Futures Command, told the conference. “Whoever is able to sift through the amount of data that’s going to be available on the battlefield of tomorrow, to sort through that and use that information effectively to make decisions that force is going to win war. There’s no doubt about it … AI-enabled decision dominance is where we need to come and what the future is.”

The updated characteristics of need with the new decision dominance focus provides industry with a baseline to work off of.

Officials noted that data has to be in the right place and AI is ineffective if the location of data is unknown or isn’t in a place where it can be analyzed.

As the Army continues to work with industry partners — either working on the prototype or others still vying for future NGC2 efforts — to establish a data integration layer and scale it, there must be a destination for all the data to go.

Industry can help the Army figure out what that data plane looks like and how the service is bringing in data, ingesting it and sorting through it to make it relevant to commanders in real time. Areas the Army is interested in include using capabilities such as edge computing to process data and decisions faster than the adversary in the dirt.

Continuing characteristics of need for industry

When the initial characteristics of need concept was first announced, the plan was to update it every 90 days or so as the Army conducted exercises and experiments to keep industry abreast of the latest observations.

The plan, even after the prototyping contract, is to continue updating it; however, the cadence might shift.

Welch described periodic updates that will be based on lessons learned, which will likely come from home station events with 4^th Infantry Division at Fort Carson.

“We’re focused now on our work with our awarded team. We’re focused on the work that we’ll have upcoming through the” commercial solutions offering, he said, describing an ongoing effort with the program office to evaluate additional vendor teams and capabilities with the vision of adding them on in the future. “We’re focused on 4ID in our first prototyping initiative right now and I think there’s a lot that’ll be coming from that.”

He said the Army needs to continue to convey where opportunities exist for industry, and the characteristics of need aims to lay things out broadly, including for the Army, to understand the scope of what it is looking for.

“We’re going to continue to describe what we know about the capability as we work into prototyping, what we think we have solved and where we still think there are challenges,” Welch said.

The prototyping effort will help the Army discover what the NGC2 architecture looks like.

“We were very resistant to providing an architecture up front for companies to bid on, not because we don’t understand the importance of it, but because we feel it’ll likely be emergent as we work through, continue on with the prototype, with whatever commercial software or sets of commercial software may underpin it. That’s something that will emerge as we continue to work the prototyping effort,” he added. “That may be a level of detail that may not be in the characteristic of need, but will certainly be, I think, very useful to industry in terms of understanding where the opportunities, the base of which to innovate upon, is going to get established.”

Welch noted that within the technology stack, he’s always envisioned sub-problem statements that components of teams can try to help solve.

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NGC2, one of the Army’s top priorities, is a clean-slate design for how the service communicates on the battlefield and passes data for operations, providing commanders and units a new approach to information sharing and C2 through agile and software-based architectures. The Army plans to spend almost $3 billion on the effort over the next fiscal year across procurement and research and development funds.

The $99.6 million other transaction authority agreement will span 11 months and cover Anduril’s work to prototype a system for 4^th Infantry Division, which will scale the capability all the way up to the division level. Prior, it was outfitted to an armored battalion, as well as higher headquarters elements, and tested at Project Convergence Capstone 5 at Fort Irwin, California, in March.

Anduril’s partners on the contract include Palantir, Striveworks, Govini, Instant Connect Enterprise, Research Innovations, Inc., and Microsoft, the company said in a statement Friday.

The OTA requires the team to provide an integrated and scalable suite of command and control warfighting capabilities across hardware, software and applications, all through a common and integrated data layer, the Army said.

The Army has pushed teams of industry partners to work on the NGC2 effort, calling for “self-organized” teams.

Anduril had been working previously on the NGC2 effort to produce a prototype that was tested at Project Convergence, along with other vendors.

The prototype award is not the end of the road for other vendors seeking entry into the NGC2 program. The Army said additional vendors can seek to participate through an open commercial solutions offering with additional OTAs expected to be awarded later in fiscal 2026 for prototyping with other units such as 25^th Infantry Division and III Corps headquarters.

“NGC2 is not a one-and-done contract, but a long-term effort of continuous contracting and investment in the technologies that will deliver needed overmatch for our force,” said Brig. Gen. Shane Taylor, program executive officer for command, control, communications and networks.

Army Futures Command has been in charge of the prototyping effort to date, testing a proof of principle and then a proof of concept to demonstrate what is possible, while the program office has been working on the eventual program of record, devising a contracting strategy and seeking vendors.

Army officials have maintained they want to inject and maintain a high level of competition within the program. If contractors aren’t performing, they will seek to build in mechanisms to offboard them and onboard new vendors.

Similarly, the constant competition is also aimed at avoiding vendor lock-in where one partner holds the bulk of the program for an extended period.

The commercial solutions offering allows the Army to maintain a continuous open solicitation with specific “windows” for decision points, the service said, providing opportunities for industry teams aligning incentives and continuously onboarding new vendors as the capability evolves.

“NGC2 uses a combination of flexible and innovative contracting techniques. This is a completely non-traditional, unbureaucratic way to equip Soldiers with the capabilities they need, using expedited contracting authorities,” said Danielle Moyer, executive director of Army Contracting Command – Aberdeen Proving Ground.  

The prototype OTA will allow the Army to continue its momentum toward delivering a solution for units while the commercial solutions offering enables the service to keep looking for capabilities to add to the NGC2 architecture in the future, the service said.

4^th Infantry Division will take the NGC2 system to Project Convergence Capstone 6 next year to test it out in a division holistically, to include the headquarters and enabling units, which have typically been neglected with communication network upgrades.

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Next Generation Command and Control is a clean-slate design for how the Army communicates on the battlefield and passes data for operations, providing commanders and units a new approach to information sharing and C2 through agile and software-based architectures.

In the past, warfighting functions, such as fires and intelligence, were all separate and distinct silos on the network for those communities, creating stovepipes and challenges for sharing timely battlefield information. Now, the Army is trying to fix that with an integrated architecture that allows data to flow more freely, on-the-move, and enable better and faster decision-making.

The nearly $3 billion funding number is an approximation based on figures provided by the Army for its total portfolio request surrounding NGC2, which added up to about $2.95 billion. The Army’s budget request for its network has always been spread across several funding lines, making it difficult to parse out an exact tally.

This year’s request attempts to move toward a clearer portfolio, as officials aim to improve that in the out years.

“The Army is consolidating C2 resources, requirements and funding lines into a combined capability portfolio of hardware and software supporting NGC2 to provide commanders with increased speed, precision, and adaptability for decision advantage,” a spokesperson from program executive office for command, control, and communications network, said. “This shift is a ‘zero sum’ realignment for the Army that uses existing resources and directs funding toward priority capabilities in order to support NGC2 equipping and experimentation at the Division level, while introducing competition for best of breed commercial capabilities.”

Officials have maintained that the Army would not be asking for extra funds at the moment for the NGC2 effort, but rather, using what was already appropriated and realigning it.

The spokesperson noted that the Army realigned funding corresponding to the NGC2 technology stack layers, which include:

—Transport for moving data across the battlefield.

—Infrastructure or integration, which uses artificial intelligence to triage the data that comes in to lessen the cognitive load for commanders.

—Data that proliferates shared information across warfighting systems.

—Applications that provide software apps for all echelons that will replace the stovepiped systems specific to warfighting functions. For example, the fires community will be able to execute their mission via an app on the system, which takes in all shared battlefield data, as envisioned.

The request includes funding for prototyping and experimentation efforts that will be undertaken by the Command and Control Cross Functional Team under Army Futures Command.

Regarding the transport and infrastructure layer, the fiscal 2026 budget request includes roughly $2.58 billion in procurement funds that would go toward satellite communications, radios and other transport, as well as computing infrastructure, for delivery to operational units, the spokesperson said. On the R&D side, the service is requesting $101.4 million for these layers to continue development based on prototyping and experimentation.

For the applications and data layers, the Army is only requesting R&D money, approximately $344.9 million. This includes funding from several programs that previously provided isolated warfighting function systems but now will transition to integrated software applications and data in the NGC2 program, the spokesperson said.

The Army has sought a faster, agile and software-based approach to NGC2, in the hopes it will be able to not only deliver quicker, but make more timely changes based on battlefield conditions.

The aim is to turn what only a few years ago would have been a decades-long process into a two-and-a-half-year process, based on reinvestment efforts as part of the Army’s Transformation Initiative, Gen. James Mingus, vice chief of staff, said Wednesday at an event co-hosted by AUSA and the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

The Army has said it expects to award initial contracts as part of the official NGC2 program of record — for which PEO C3N stood up the office in April — later this year.

Service officials said they had a successful demonstration of a NGC2 prototype “proof of principle” at the Project Convergence Capstone 5 event at the National Training Center at Fort Irwin, California, in March, that will help inform the program of record.

4th Infantry Division as well as elements from 25th Infantry Division will continue that prototyping effort into this year, working to scale it all the way to division to include all enabler units.

Mingus noted that the prototype is quite mature and will likely help speed the delivery to units going forward.

“We are going to give it to 4ID, starting this summer, they are going to experiment with this — prototype is still what we’re calling it, but I would say it’s an advanced, proven prototype. Once we have shown that this is demonstrated … we think we’ll be able to very quickly scale this across the entire Army,” he said.

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The move is significant as 4th ID is slated to be the primary experimental unit for the Army’s Next Generation Command and Control as that system aims to scale up to division level.

NGC2 is one of the the Army’s top modernization priorities. It’s a clean-slate design for how the Army communicates on the battlefield and passes data for operations, providing commanders and units a new approach to information, data and command and control through agile and software-based architectures.

The Army tested a prototype of the system in March at Project Convergence Capstone 5. It was the first experiment on the ground with a unit in the classified network. It was outfitted to a real battalion — an armored formation — as well as higher headquarters elements. The Army sought to use an armored unit rather than the more easy to integrate light units as a means of testing the most difficult formation first and beginning to rightsize the Army, as those lighter units have surpassed many heavier ones in new gear due to the integration challenges associated with platforms.

As part of that effort, the Army developed a horizontal operational design for NGC2 that involved a technology stack that goes from a transport layer to an integration layer to a data layer to an application layer, which is where soldiers interact with it. The application layer is where the Army has broken down the silos of individual warfighting functions — such as intelligence or fires — into applications that ride on the same backbone that is all integrated together.

Ellis comes to 4th ID having just been the director of the C2 Cross Functional Team with Army Futures Command, where he spearheaded the experimental efforts of NGC2 — giving him a unique perch to now serve as the commander of the first division to begin testing it out holistically.

“It’s a great opportunity to work on this, build the relationships over the last year,” he said in a May 30 interview on the sidelines of the Army’s Technical Exchange Meeting at Aberdeen Proving Ground, Maryland, on his last day as the C2 CFT director.

To date, the Army’s experimentation and modernization efforts have focused on brigades. As the division is expected to be the primary action unit in the future, the service is starting to look at how to scale capabilities across the entire 10,000-15,000 soldier unit.

4th ID will continue to iterate on the prototype and make improvements while program executive office for command, control, communications and network runs the program of record. In early April, C3N officially stood up the program office, with Col. Chris Anderson becoming the first program manager. In addition to 4th ID scaling the prototype, 25th ID will also be prototyping elements of NGC2.

As the division commander, Ellis will reap what he helped develop and provide unique insights back to the Army regarding how the system better enables him to command and control his forces.

“You also, as a commander, now can ask the hard questions and say, ‘I don’t think that’s the node that we should take, maybe we could move to this one, or here’s where there’s going to be legitimate friction,’” he said. “I’m really excited about the opportunity to do that and I appreciate the chance that the Army has given me to continue to work on this problem that I’m pretty passionate about. I really enjoy this and I think it’s going to be fun to take this capability now and actually work on the scaling up to an entire division.”

Officials have acknowledged the complexity in moving NGC2 up to the division level, especially considering the prototype was kitted to mainly the battalion level at Project Convergence. As the Army seeks to move complexity up and fight as a division, enabling brigades — such as sustainment, aviation, artillery and intelligence — must be equipped with comms gear as well. These enabler units will now begin to be a top focus.

Ellis said one of the things he’ll be focusing on early on is continual evolution of the capability with multiple touchpoints with industry, as opposed to more periodic fits and starts.

“I’ve learned we can’t work on a problem and then come back to it three months later in an exercise, and then come back to it three months later, and then three months later we’re at [Project Convergence Capstone 6]. I think there’s going to have to be a continual evolution,” he said. “We don’t need to wait until it’s perfect and then put it in the hands of a soldier. We need to get the 60 percent in their hands and let them help us with that last 40 percent — and that’s going to require some continual interaction with units.”

Filling Ellis’ place will be Col. (P) Michael Kaloostian, who was one of two colonels that were the main architects of the NGC2 experimentation efforts for Futures Command, culminating in the Project Convergence experimentation. This will allow Kaloostain to continue work on the project as the director.

“I didn’t get a chance to pick the guy that was coming after me, but if I did get to pick, it would be the guy who’s coming in after me,” Ellis said about Kaloostian. “He’s been doing this for a year, he’s got all the technical knowledge, and then he brings that capability here. And then for me to move on and keep the relationships and some of the shared experience [is beneficial]. I think part of it is, it’s just the shared history, is now there’s a little bit of a common parlance between us. Then as you get out there you know where the pitfalls are going to be. I think some of the problems are very solvable.”

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Next Generation Command and Control is one of the Army’s highest priorities as it aims to provide commanders and units a new approach to manage information, data, and command and control with agile and software-based architectures.

Army officials have said NGC2 is composed of a horizontal operational design that involves a technology stack that goes from a transport layer to an integration layer to a data layer to an application layer, which is where soldiers interact with it. That application layer is also where the Army has broken down the silos of individual warfighting functions — such as intelligence or fires — into applications that ride on the same integrated backbone.

The integration layer is where streams of information — internal and external to what a unit generates — are fed, using artificial intelligence and machine learning for triage, into a more sanitized data layer.

“The data integration layer is the absolute core of this. That’s what’s going to make this work. We have to be able to integrate that data in a [denied, disrupted, intermittent, and limited], contested environment, against an enemy that’s going to be” sophisticated, Col. (P) Mike Kaloostian, the incoming director of the C2 cross functional team for Army Futures Command, said at the Army Technical Exchange Meeting at Aberdeen Proving Ground on May 30. “That’s the dilemma … If you’re not thinking through as industry partners what’s going on in Ukraine and how quickly they’re having to adapt to be able to try to gain an advantage. Think about where we are just the last 12 months. Start looking at what are they doing now.”

The Army tested what it deemed a successful prototype of the system in March at Project Convergence Capstone 5 at the National Training Center at Fort Irwin, California. It was the first experiment in the dirt with a unit in the classified network and was outfitted to a real battalion as well as higher headquarters elements.

Now, having validated the approach, the Army will continue to refine that prototype, scaling it to the division, while the program office works to award vendors for the official program of record.

Kaloostian added that if that integration layer is the core of NGC2, then the Army has to start thinking about assuring the usability, accessibility and security of that data for commanders.

Low latency and high capacity transport will be needed to assure that, he said.  

“In order for us to be able to get the commercial and the government to synthesize those data feeds, make them so they’re sensible for the commander and usable for the commander immediately at the point of need, that’s going to require a transport that is extremely diverse and able to withstand what the enemy is trying to do to,” Kaloostian said.

The other piece of the data challenge is data ingestion and being able to organize it properly for commanders. Officials have maintained that the key to NGC2 is the ability for commanders to do “more, better, faster.”

“The data ingestion is something that I’m very, very focused on. That’s the secret sauce for Next Gen C2, like we’ve talked about, is how we pull in all of these disparate feeds and then there are different data streams and then [quality control] them and get them organized,” Maj. Gen. Patrick Ellis said at the technical exchange meeting on his last day as director of the C2 team.

The Army has to be able to effectively triage the volume of data units will have coming in or they will risk missing the opportunity to find a necessary valuable data for operations or overwhelm operators with data.

Intelligent and even autonomous networks will also be paramount to withstand the complex environment against sophisticated adversaries to ensure commanders have access to the data and capabilities they require.

That intelligent network must be able to adapt and understand what the enemy is doing, along with what friendly signatures look like.

“Fully autonomous network. That’s what we need to be moving towards: a software-defined network that is fully autonomous … then the ability to quickly process and synthesize data at the edge — edge compute will continue and will always be a part of our ecosystem because we’re going to need it,” Kaloostian said.

Compute and store

Following the Project Convergence experimentation, the Army is going to have to determine how much compute and storage it needs and at what levels.

The Army has shifted its thinking a bit on compute and storage over the last few years. At one point, government and industry leaders opined on deploying edge computing services as the buzzword of the day. Now, the service is beginning to take a slightly different view on who will need these technologies and how feasible it will be to deliver them, given the speed of war in the future.

Part of the reason for that is lessons from Ukraine regarding how contested the information environment is. In a congested and contested electromagnetic spectrum, the flow of data back and forth from the edge to the cloud will be extremely strained and limited. Thus, forces will need to figure out how much computing and data storage they’ll need at their level to be reliant on without having to pull from a central cloud, and then, once connectivity returns, how to plug it back and make sense of it.  

“We’re going to have sensors everywhere in the battlefield. We saw it during NTC because everyone’s bringing their new capabilities out there. They all have sensors, they all have feeds and they all need some place to put their data. That’s Next Gen C2. That’s our data integration. We have to figure out, okay, if all those sensors are out there, how are we going to do it? You’re not bringing that data back to the cloud for analysis. It’s not going to happen,” Kaloostian said. “We need to be able to do that point of need and we need to share that effectively.”

Ellis said he’d like to see exercises where monitors are placed with each staff section’s systems so the Army can have better information on how much and what type of data they all need.

That way, they can say, “in an exercise, this is generally what data is that you’re using, so then that’ll help us understand how much we need to put where,” he said. “Do you need hours worth? Do you need days worth? Do you need lines of code worth? How much of that stuff you put down there? … How much do you really need and how much are commanders comfortable with? How much risk are they willing to assume?”

Then, the next challenge becomes: If forces start using more cloud-based capabilities such as voice-over-IP, and their devices become disconnected, what does the Army do?

“If everyone’s using a smart device and get disconnected, how do you continue to have a voice capability as part of your [primary, alternate, contingency and emergency communications] plan or put a server on the edge. I don’t think we’ve solved those problems yet,” Ellis said. “I think that’s going to be part of the fun as we start to prototype this out.”

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NGC2 is one of the Army’s highest priorities. Service officials have said it will be a “clean slate” from legacy capabilities and architectures encompassing a full stack approach, meaning it will focus on everything from transport to data to applications to cybersecurity.

The Army is looking to pick up the momentum following what it says was a successful demonstration of a NGC2 prototype “proof of principle” at the Project Convergence Capstone 5 event at the National Training Center at Fort Irwin, California, in March. That event saw a battalion operating in a scenario against a live opposing force using technologies associated with NGC2.

As that prototype is matured going forward and the program office seeks to make awards as part of the official program of record, officials have said Project Convergence Capstone 6, slated for the summer of 2026, will likely be when the Army starts to transition from legacy capabilities to beginning to make decisions and field NGC2 systems.

“Post PCC6, we’re going to reassess ourselves. We’re going to see … what’s the right composition looks like, what’s the right contracting approach. Then at the end, as we go forward, we’d like to establish pools that allow truly best-of-breed technologies to work their way into this formation … Think of a transport pool, infrastructure pool, a data layer and apps,” Brig. Gen. Kevin Chaney, acting program executive officer for command, control, communications and network, said at the 14th Technical Exchange Meeting at Aberdeen Proving Ground, Maryland, on May 30.

These events gather members of industry, the Army acquisition community, Army Futures Command and operational units to outline priorities and capabilities to modernize the service’s tactical network. They have occurred twice a year. The most recent iteration was initially slated to take place in Dallas, but due to travel restrictions imposed by the Department of Defense, the event was moved closer to the National Capital Region and lasted one day instead of two.

In parallel to NGC2, the Army has been executing what it calls C2 Fix, which seeks to use what the service already has, along with commercial off-the-shelf technology, to enhance the network tools for soldiers’ so-called “fight tonight” capability. That effort is already in its seventh iteration. While initially focused on the near term, it has evolved into somewhat of a bridge capability between legacy systems and NGC2, with officials calling it a down payment on the next-generation tech.

Chaney said that eventually, the Army needs to take a “leap of faith” to when that C2 Fix bridge transitions to NGC2.

“At the end of the day, we’re going to have to pick a point in time and make that leap of faith. I think we see 4th [Infantry Division] and PCC6 as that line where we have to make that leap of faith,” he said in an interview, adding that officials must begin the backwards planning now to be better aligned in the future.

The Army chose 4th Infantry Division to be the test unit to continue to refine the NGC2 prototype. They’ll also work to scale the capability up to division level, to include the headquarters and the enabling units, as the Army is pushing complexity out of brigades and into divisions to be the primary units of action.

While 4th ID will be the main entity testing out and refining the prototype, officials will be asking other units if they’d like to participate as well.

“We’re also asking what are the other divisions that would like to play? We’ve got 25th [Infantry Division] that’s already said we would like to be an experimental unit for another one of those Next Gen C2 solutions,” Chaney said. “We’ve already had discussions with a couple other division commanders, and they’re ready to support.”

They’ll be looking at what the right mix is going forward for what units will be demonstrating, and it might not be the full stack. It could be just the transport and the application layer, for example.

This approach will afford the Army flexibility and allow it to understand how to outfit units that have and haven’t been C2 Fix-enabled.

The prototype and eventual program-of-record equipment will not undergo the traditional developmental and operational tests of programs of the past. Chaney said the test community has been a part of the effort the entire way, having seen the experimentation events.

“They know what we’re doing. And we try to set up realistic scenarios, and they’re trying to get all the data off there they can to make sure that they understand effective, suitable and survivable. We can look at those things as we go forward [and] make more informed decisions,” Chaney said. “It’s also a risk-based approach. At the end of the day, we’re willing to accept some failure because we’re not going to go out there and just pure fleet everybody. It’s going to be an iterative thing. 4th ID will get a Next Gen C2 version. The next division may get a slightly different and better version of it. Then, as we continue to evolve, then I think we’ll work through all the, I would say, traditional programmatic documentation pieces that we have to do.”

Contracting approach

The Army has sought to approach NGC2 differently than other programs in the past.

Officials have described a hybrid contracting approach to NGC2 so as to reduce risk and keep competition open.

The Army received over 80 white papers from industry in response to its commercial solutions offering that closed June 2, according to service officials, including team lead and component submissions.

That commercial solutions offering was left “wide open,” according to officials, so as to not prescribe what the Army wants out of industry.

“I’m excited to see what comes back. I’m also excited to see the feedback, if we are doing this right or if we’re doing it wrong and how we can improve going forward,” Chaney said.

The Army expects contracts to be awarded later this year.

Chaney noted that there will also be other contracts out there to see who has best-of-breed capability as they go forward. Army Contracting Command has an open commercial solutions offering available that won’t close, so companies can continue to offer good ideas that could be onboarded.

The Army has requested self-organized teams of industry to bid either on slices of the program — such as applications or data layer or transport — or the full stack if they think they can do it.

“Even the big, giant companies I don’t think could do all of this. They couldn’t do it in the time frame that we’re looking for,” Chaney said. “If you’re truly trying to get an open system architecture, you’re going to need other people to come in there and start integrating different companies.”

It’ll be up to the industry teams to determine what slices of the NGC2 stack they want to compete for. Some may think they can do the whole thing, which the Army will evaluate.

“We might have a team that says, ‘I can give you everything.’ We’ll look at the risk and see if that makes sense or not. Our market research — and we’ve done a lot of it — has said there’s no one company out there that can do all of this. Teaming up gives us that flexibility going forward of figuring out who’s best of breed,” Chaney said.

He expects to see a wide range of responses to the commercial solutions offering with teams saying they can do certain portions well.

Scaling to division

Officials have acknowledged the complexity in moving NGC2 up to the division level, especially considering the prototype was kitted to mainly the battalion level at the National Training Center.

Network modernization efforts of the past have largely focused on the brigade level. But as the Army seeks to move complexity up and fight as a division, enabling brigades — such as sustainment, aviation, artillery and intelligence — must be equipped with comms gear as well.

As the Army scales to division, these enablers will now begin to be a top focus.

“The chief was really directive with us from the very beginning of this is, as we scale to a division prototype, the division headquarters and enablers, first focus and then trickle down the brigades … Under no circumstances are we going to cut the enablers, because we tend to reverse-engineer our way into that,” Maj. Gen. Patrick Ellis said at the Technical Exchange Meeting on his last day as director of the C2 Cross Functional Team for Army Futures Command.

“This is actually next gen, different than the way we’ve done in the past. It’s not going to solve the BCT problem and then figure out how to reverse-engineer that into an aviation unit or a sustainment unit, this division sustainment brigade or division combat aviation brigade. It’s actually — that’s going to be part of the solution,” he added.

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Next Generation Command and Control — the state of the Army’s future network and the service’s number one priority for modernization — has been billed as an entirely new way of doing business with a clean-slate approach rather than continuing to either bolt on or work within the confines of existing systems and processes. NGC2 aims to provide commanders and units a new approach to information, data and command and control through agile and software-based architectures.

A prototype of the system was recently tested at Project Convergence at Fort Irwin, California, in March.

As part of that updated network architecture and approach, service leaders are envisioning the elimination of single- and two-channel radios for troops on the ground. In their place will be what the Army calls end user devices, which are Android devices that are strapped to soldiers’ chests and have typically been reserved for team leaders.

These end user devices feature position and location information. They can now also enable communication using emerging voice-over-IP technology.

“The fundamental difference [between the existing network and NGC2] is in that data and transport layer because we are convinced that if we get that part right, there will be a day when our soldiers, instead of carrying … the batteries, the multiple radios that are out there, it’s an end user device at the edge and that is all that they’re going to need for the next fight,” Gen. James Mingus, Army vice chief of staff, said Tuesday at an event hosted by AUSA. “No more radios, no more batteries, because all I’m carrying is an end user device on the edge.”

A separate official clarified that the tactical level, battalion and below, is where the Army envisions eliminating single- and two-channel radios. Higher echelons will still need larger pipes and thus will still require radios.

Mingus explained that while the cloud storage and edge compute and storage is more refined, the terrestrial transport layer for data is something the Army will have to smooth out over the next year.

In the future, instead of using individual radios, forces will move radio frequency signals from point A to point B through “pucks on trucks,” Mingus said.

“Anything that moves, it’s got a puck on it that emits, it’s bringing in the long-haul comms, and then it’s establishing that terrestrial-based mesh through a series of pucks that are on the battlefield that then connects to the end user device,” he said.

The Army has been on a radio journey for many years, trying to determine the right mix, at what echelon certain capabilities are needed and even exploring if an as-a-service model makes sense.

Some in industry have noted that there’s a massive shift going on within the Army from what worked in the recent past to a penchant for something completely new — and it’s not clear to some industry members why that’s the case.

The approach of eliminating radios in favor of voice-over-IP, WiFi or 5G pucks to provide transport is puzzling to some observers. They warn it could put the Army at risk of not having a diverse enough architecture for what officials call PACE, or primary, alternate, contingency and emergency.

In future operating environments against sophisticated adversaries, enemies will seek to jam or deny communications and data access across certain waveforms and parts of the spectrum these systems operate on. Thus, it is important to have a diverse set of transport to where units can fall over to still conduct their missions and pass data if one system fails or is jammed.

“To see such a drastic shift, to say that Next Gen [C2] doesn’t include any forms of radios, I think it puzzles a lot of people … It’s a head scratcher,” an industry source said.

They added that while the networks support the push-to-talk feature that can be enabled through the end user device and voice-over-IP, there needs to be a mix of different capabilities and radios.

“Most of us still believe that you need flexible architectures, which include a mix of radios perhaps,” the industry source said.

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An entirely new way of doing business, officials have noted that Next Gen C2 will be a clean-slate approach rather than continuing to either bolt on or work within the confines of existing systems and processes. NGC2 aims to provide commanders and units a new approach to information, data and command and control through agile and software-based architectures.

Army Futures Command over the last year has been running experimentation to demonstrate a capability for NGC2 while, in tandem, the program office and Army Contracting Command have been working on the acquisition and contracting strategy for the eventual program of record.

As the program moves from prototype to a program of record and awards, the Army wants teams of companies to “self-organize.”

“We’re working with the best tech companies in the world, American companies, that are absolutely positioned to deliver capability to the U.S. Army, both large and small companies. By encouraging them to self-organize and solve the problem for us, to enable them to team with each other instead of us telling them how to do business, we’re largely getting government bureaucracy out of the way and unleashing the talents that already exist in our commercial enterprise within the United States to help us solve this challenge,” Joseph Welch, deputy to the commander of Futures Command, told reporters at the Pentagon Monday.

As part of that initiative, the Army has taken a somewhat hands-off approach to requirements. The service has sought to release a characteristics-of-needs statement — a living document that’s expected to be updated every 90 days or so — that is more descriptive of a problem for industry to solve rather than prescriptive requirements to build around.

The Army is looking for more teams to contribute to the NGC2 effort, with each of them bringing their own unique capabilities rather than relying on a single vendor to do the integration. Previously, according to officials, the single integrator wasn’t always effective because those companies might not have excelled at everything.

“We like to use the analogy Lego blocks. Everyone brings something, because normally we ask a vendor, ‘hey, do all of this,’ even though they’re not good at all of it. They might not be good at any of it, but they’re good at the process,” said Alex Miller, chief technology officer for the chief of staff. “Having the teams in place means that they can actually self-organize and pick the right components.”

The Army is envisioning continual competition with teams of vendors, with the ability to add vendors, remove vendors and ensure the best technologies can be brought in.

“I think there’s an opportunity here where we can have continual competition to make sure we’ve got best of breed across the capability and fundamentally underpinning that new approach on the open systems architecture. I think we can increase the opportunities for traditionals, non-traditionals, you name it,” said Lt. Gen. Robert Collins, military deputy in the office of the assistant secretary of the Army for acquisition, logistics and technology.

Officials maintained they want to be able to hold these vendors accountable throughout the process. Part of that — especially in an environment that is taking a completely clean-slate approach with a different requirements process and now a product owner-product manager perspective — is being a better customer.

“We’re moving away from this concept of an industry integrator into more of a team of teams. But on our side, we need to be a better customer,” Welch said. “It’s not just handing industry a problem statement and then walking away, waiting for them to deliver it, and then maybe holding them accountable if they don’t. That partnership, I think, means that we need to understand where we have shared incentives and where we may have different incentives — and then acknowledging those directly and understanding how to work through that.”

Welch noted the Army is looking at potentially different buying and consumption models, for example, where it pays for services as it uses them or as users continue to iterate on them.

“These are models that may be a little more complex to implement, but would better align our incentives compared to some of the ways we’ve done business with industry in the past,” he said.

The Army also is shifting away from paper demonstrations to forcing companies to actually test their solutions and offerings in live demonstrations.

Officials told reporters that contracts for NGC2 are “imminent,” without elaborating on a timetable. The anticipated timeline given in the past was May for contract awards for the program of record following the proof of principle demonstration of the capability at Project Convergence Capstone 5 in March.

It will be a call to industry following on the lessons from Project Convergence, the officials explained.

In parallel, the prototype with Army Futures Command will continue to iterate as well, allowing the service to learn lessons through additional experimentation. After Project Convergence, the Army will begin outfitting an entire division with the architecture with the plan to test it on the ground at Project Convergence Capstone 6 with the entirety of 4th Infantry Division, to include all enabler units.

Fielding for NGC2 also won’t look the same as the process has for capabilities in the past. While it takes a while to field the entire Army a new system, the cloud-based nature of NGC2 will enable greater access once live.

“I’m confident that when the first division gets the core software and data pieces of this, because they’ll be cloud-based, multiple divisions will be able to log in at the same time and start de-conflicting. It will not just be a vertical stovepipe deployment,” Miller said. “This year, the chief and the secretary have chartered us get a division and a corps squared away. As soon as that’s live, other units will be able to log in.”

Moreover, officials noted they don’t anticipate NGC2 costing any more than what the service currently spends on network and command-and-control systems.

“I said deliberately, we were going to do this in our budget, because there’s no room for things that won’t win. The chief’s been very vocal, as he’s talked about different systems, that some of our systems are actually older than most of us, which that’s not war-winning anymore,” Miller said. “Being able to stop and adjust and use the money that taxpayers gave us more efficiently, that’s the name of the game. That’s how we’re going to pay for Next Gen C2.”

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While the Army has previously attempted to improve its command and control, leaning on advancements in commercial technology, officials say this time is different given senior leader buy-in and recent technological developments.

As the Army is pursuing what it calls Next Generation Command and Control — which aims to provide commanders and units a new approach to information, data and C2 through agile and software-based architectures — officials have said it’s a clean slate and a fresh start that’s not trying to build upon existing efforts.

“The chance to have the unfettered access we have with industry, but then have the clean-sheet approach … that really allowed us to get into place where we are now. We’re hitting the targets that the seniors want us to hit [and] getting away from the old way of doing things. I think it’s a combination of those two things,” Col. Matthew Skaggs, director of tactical applications and architecture at Army Futures Command, one of two officials leading the experimentation effort, said in an interview at Project Convergence at Fort Irwin, California, in March. “The way we started was we were pointing more so at mid-level, non-traditionals and startups. I think what we’ve found is those guys are super hungry to do whatever it is we need to do.”

Officials have said there is buy-in from senior Army leadership from the initial demonstration of NGC2 at Project Convergence Capstone 4 last year.

A big difference is how the requirements and acquisition are being approached. Officials said the service is trying to de-link from the old requirements documents of the past and provide more distilled needs in the form of what Futures Command calls a characteristics of need statement.

Initially released last May, this statement serves as an acknowledgement of a complex problem set and provides industry with areas the Army wants to solve. It’s seen as a living document that will be updated every 90 days or so and is not a hard-and-fast requirements document.

It will also be updated following the experimentation at Project Convergence Capstone 5 that took place in March and put NGC2 in a real tactical environment for the first time.

“We’ve gone about this in an unconventional way in terms of entering requirements and then sending out the RFPs and the RFIs later in the process and we just wait to see what industry comes up with. Our ability to iterate with these guys and say we wanted to do this instead of that, I want the graphics to look a certain way, we want certain form factor on the transport side and the edge server side, has allowed us to iterate and get it down to the form factor that [Chief of Staff] Gen. [Randy] George gave us with his vision,” Skaggs said.

Skaggs and his counterpart — Col. Michael Kaloostian, chief digital and artificial intelligence officer at Futures Command — noted that since industry and senior leaders have now seen that this can work, there is “irreversible momentum.”

Officials have explained that going forward, Futures Command will own the requirements for NGC2, with the Army implementing a product owner and product manager relationship. The command will run the increment planning and set priorities while the program manager in the program office will deliver the system.

Capstone 5 will provide the baseline capability for the NGC2 prototype as the program office looks to award contracts for the official program. Moreover, there will be continued experimentation to refine that effort and work to scale it to a division level.

“You got to break the mold of thinking of a traditional program where you’re going to go through the lockstep, sequential process. That’s not happening here. I think we’re trying to figure out what’s the minimal viable product, get that out the door, continue to iterate, to learn and as technology improves, S&T comes to the table [and] then we can integrate that and then we continue to evolve,” Brig. Gen. Kevin Chaney, deputy program executive officer for command, control, communications and network, said in an interview at Aberdeen Proving Ground, Maryland, in February. “But that’s one of the things I really had to focus on — break that traditional mindset of an acquisition approach, going through the wall chart and stuff like that. That’s not going to work here.”

Because of that approach, officials believe there will be no valley of death with NGC2. The term “valley of death” in Defense Department acquisition parlance, refers to the failure to move promising technologies out of research and development and into procurement and production.

Contracting strategy

The Army has also sought an unconventional contracting approach to NGC2 to enable multiple iterative and competitive opportunities for contractors to provide technology. The service notes that no one company can provide a total solution for the initiative, and thus it will need to onboard vendor teams for additional components and layers available after the initial prototyping awards.

There have been several engagements with vendors, to include industry days and one-on-ones, to understand how to scope the contract, what it should include and how to incentivize certain members of the industrial base, according to officials.

This ongoing collaboration — both with industry and Futures Command on the prototype — is what officials have said will allow them to go fast and rapidly issue contracts by the May timeframe, not long after Capstone 5.

“It really came down to working, collaborating with the teams the whole time, and really getting the feedback from industry of what can we do to streamline, what are the true discriminators and how fast can you move through the selection to do that? Because we started so early, we’re working through this as the experimentation was going on,” Danielle Moyer, executive director for Army Contracting Command, said in an interview at Aberdeen Proving Ground.

DefenseScoop reached out to a variety of companies involved in experimentation and looking to bid on contracts for the eventual program of record. Most declined to offer information on the process even on the condition of anonymity.  

One firm, L3Harris, through a spokesperson noted that the overall process has gone well and the program office has been transparent on timeline and requirements.

The Army wants flexibility so it can on-ramp or off-ramp capabilities and even contractors that aren’t performing.

“We’re really trying to scope that base contract to be really flexible, so that we can figure out what we’re missing to be able to on-ramp capabilities upfront. That’s one of the things that we’re looking for in these draft solicitation documents from industry and make sure we capture everything and make sure it’s in scope, so that we can add capabilities when needed very quickly,” Moyer said. “There’s language that we sent out … to look at one, ramping and off-ramping new entrance and capabilities, how to incentivize that, to have certain roles in how vendors have teams or subcontracts and things like that. Very flexible, because I think what we want is we want to constantly have the best thing.”

The Army wants to enable more flexibility than the prior capability set paradigm of the integrated tactical network, where incremental advances in the network were built out and delivered over two-year cycles. In those cycles, the Army focused on certain capabilities, allowing some flexibility to insert new ones as technology advanced, but ultimately locked the architecture in place at a point before delivery.

“I think what we’ve seen since the days where we were considering capability set fielding is it’s a couple different things. One is, the pace of technological change has picked up. We’re not always in an era where it’s rapidly accelerating to the degree it is, but it’s happened in the past. We’re in one of those phases now where it’s extremely rapid,” Joseph Welch, deputy to the commander of Futures Command, who was involved in the capability set development, said in an interview at Aberdeen Proving Ground. “The challenge we had on capability set is there’s only so much of the Army that you can modernize at any pace, given the resources that we had. We’re always in a resource-constrained environment. We’re taking a particular look at how we integrate resourcing within the Army across all the different ways with bucket money toward this problem set. I think that’s going to help. But that was an inherent issue with capability set, is that we weren’t able to do it at the pace to get capability widely out to the Army quickly.”

Moyer noted that officials want to create an ecosystem of capabilities, equating it to an umbrella where the middle is the core foundation of NGC2 and then poles of different layers are built in and added to the core middle.

Moyer declined to say how many contracts will be associated with NGC2, noting that it will be dependent on how many responses the service gets from requests to industry. 

With numerous contracts expected covering a variety of aspects, the Army has been trying to work to determine what incentivizes certain companies to make contracts worthwhile.

“There’s things that incentivize different vendors. Some vendors are incentivized by more time. Some vendors are incentivized by more money. Some vendors are just purely incentivized by having competition. Well, how do you balance all that?” Moyer said. “Maybe it’s based on who wins. If you deliver this capability that exceeds whatever requirement, you get an additional X profit or you get an additional X set of months or whatever — whatever makes sense. It was really listening to what will incentivize them to help us get the best capability and holding them accountable.”

What’s less clear is what will be awarded post-Capstone 5 or how much of the prototype will move into the acquisition effort.

A former acquisition official noted that NGC2 is at a critical inflection point, moving from what amounted to a research-and-development effort to having to field and scale it to units. What industry might have difficulty with is understanding the boundaries of what the Army wants.

“What you’re seeing, I think, is a difficulty in first scoping it. I think industry has struggled to figure out the boundaries of what they’re buying. Is it mission command software, and if so, for what employment? Is it to replace the mounted system, the command post system, the dismounted system? It seems like it’s command post systems. [Does] it also include transport? Is this going to replace the radio programs or the broadband SATCOM programs?” they said. “There’s all these open questions about what it is. I think that’s probably the first big question the Army needs to answer is to better define the boundaries of what will be part of the program of record for Next Gen C2.”

It’s fine to leave some of those questions open-ended in a science-and-technology effort, but the Army will have to define those further as it seeks to scope out a program, they added. 

Many of the same contractors have been involved from the beginning of the prototyping process. This has allowed the Army to iterate on the prototype much faster. But, if the program office seeks to onboard many of those companies following a successful demonstration of the prototype — which can easily be done given the nature of how they were awarded for the prototype — it might raise questions about fair and open competition.

“If we want to capitalize on … faster deliveries, I think that we need a very clear answer on whether competition in the prototyping phase is sufficient to support moving quickly without more competition and into production,” the former official said. 

It’s also not clear who will serve as the integrator for the entire effort — a company, a group of companies or the Army.

“The integrator model is not good, it’s not good for the Army … We lose too much agency in downstream selection with the integrated approach. The Army has famously tried to serve as the integrator itself. In the interest of humility, that doesn’t work either,” Gen. James Rainey, commander of Futures Command, said March 18 at the annual McAleese Defense Programs Conference, speaking generally about service programs and not specifically on NGC2. “What we’re really looking at is for industry teams to self-organize around problems and requirements, just like you would self-organize if you were solving any other problems. We’re real interested in companies that can pull together a competitive team of the best across specific parts of industry and make offerings that way.”

Also less clear is the funding streams for the effort. Program executive office for command, control, communications and network, said the budgeting process is pre-decisional.

“The Army is reviewing how to adapt current and future investments to fund NGC2. C2 Fix is also a down payment on NGC2 by accelerating the transformation of the network transport layer,” the office said in a statement, referencing the parallel effort to NGC2, C2 Fix, which is essentially providing units with current and existing capabilities, but envisions employment differently and acting as the bridge to NGC2.  

“As part of the NGC2 strategy, the Army plans to collapse and replace/displace legacy systems and components as we move to this newer, more intuitive, commercial-based capability. The specific investment and divestment strategies will be based upon feedback from market research, Project Convergence activities, and continuous user feedback,” the office added.

Lt. Gen. Karl Gingrich, deputy chief of Staff, G-8, said at the McAleese Defense Programs Conference that funds for NGC2 will start showing up in fiscal 2026.

An industry source noted the Army must strike a careful balance of collapsing certain existing funding lines with modernization efforts, noting funding sources have not yet been cleared to industry.

“There is, however, concern that the department may shift funding from procurement efforts that are supporting current fielding initiatives and providing much-needed technology to operational forces to fund NGC2 efforts,” they said. “Any shift in programmatic resourcing should involve a robust discussion with the industrial base to ensure the industrial base understands emerging requirements and can dedicate innovation to those efforts.”  

Gingrich noted that the Army has gone back into its requirements documents to look at how to off-ramp money that was allocated to outdated efforts.

“What we have done is gone back into our requirements documents and said ‘hey, what of this was mission command or command and control-related?’ OK, here’s the money that was associated with that, we are now off-ramping that money and we will bring it into Next Gen C2 in the future, so that we ensure that there’s no money out there going towards legacy systems,” he said.

Integration and fielding

As NGC2 scales, the Army will have to work on integrating the technology with platforms, a delicate dance that involves fitting gear into tight spaces on platforms and understanding how to use that vehicle’s power to run them.

This is perhaps one of the biggest lessons from the C2 Fix effort, is the so-called “trail boss” concept that officials believe will have to continue through NGC2.

That concept is the recognition that the entire acquisition community needed to be integrated together with the network and closely tied with others in the platform world to streamline integration of new kit and capabilities, and lead the enterprise between eight program executive offices and 24 program managers to serve as the focal point of integration.

“I think that’ll go a long way for Next Gen C2 because you are talking about a very highly integrated set of solutions that spans … software, but it could also be the radios or networks that have anything to do with C2, and that could be any of the warfighting functions that are part of that spread across many different PMs, PEOs,” Welch said. “That trial boss concept, that mechanism of bringing that all together, is just going to become increasingly important because of the interdependence of all of these capabilities.”

When it comes to fielding the equipment, officials don’t anticipate the traditional process of going from select unit to select unit. Each one might be a little bit different and unique based on what the commander needs.

“We’ll be responsive to that and then we will continue to move on and then check back with them as we go forward,” Chaney said.

The integrated tactical network primarily focused on brigades for most of its existence prior to the Army making the division the main unit of action. Officials have said NGC2 fielding will likely be a little of both in the short term — fielding to brigades and divisions holistically.

“The ITN is already out there to the light units, about to go out to the heavy units. That momentum and that progress is going to continue. I think that highlights the complexity challenge of our network,” Mark Kitz, program executive officer for C3N, said at the Army’s technical exchange meeting in Savannah, Georgia, in December 2024. “We’ve been doing the ITN for six years. We fielded 15 percent of the Army. This idea that Next Gen C2 is just going to transform and change the Army next year — sorry, that’s not what’s going to happen.”

Other officials noted that the software aspect of NGC2 will make fielding to divisions easier while the hardware components are scoped out.

“The software components can switch in and out much more rapidly. That gives us some trade space … on what it looks like,” Alex Miller, chief technology officer for the chief of staff, said at the same conference. “If we go, hey, there’s a lot more flexibility in treating most of this like software, division fieldings become a lot easier because we can take some of the new radio, which, some of the secret sauce here is the C2 Fix comms infrastructure is giving us a real good look at what we can actually transition over.”

This will allow the Army flexibility to determine the right mix of proliferated low-Earth orbit space-related capabilities, cloud and other architectures.

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