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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A request for information, released Monday, seeks vendors’ input that aligns with NGC2 contracting priorities.

NGC2 is a top modernization priority for the Army. As the service transitions from over 20 years of operations against technologically inferior enemies to preparations for large-scale combat operations across vast distances against sophisticated adversaries, the current systems and architectures for command and control are not suitable for success, senior officials contend.

The forthcoming program aims to provide commanders and units a new approach to information, data and command and control through agile and software-based architectures.

Top Army officials have stated they are approaching the program differently than others in the past, looking for a more collaborative process with industry to help guide where to go — an acknowledgement that the government doesn’t always have the right answers and needs help from those at the tip of the latest and greatest tech. The service is also looking to tailor the contracting strategy differently than previous efforts.

“Market research and industry feedback is key to shaping smart contracts,” Danielle Moyer, executive director of Army Contracting Command, said in a statement. “We not only want to make sure we have the appropriate criteria to select the best affordable solutions, but that we are really keying in on post-award. By appropriately aligning incentives and disincentives to drive the right behaviors and competition from the awardees long-term, we’ll ensure that we’re not only getting the best deal, but the best solutions.”

The awards the Army is planning are structured to enable multiple iterative and competitive opportunities for contractors to provide technology to NGC2. The Army 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.

“The government’s actually not really good at building escape hatches into our contracts, and we need to be. As much as we’re talking about bringing on the right players, hey, we’re going to get rid of the wrong players. If we aren’t being good teammates and you aren’t being good teammates, or somebody out there isn’t being a good teammate, we don’t want to team with them,” Alex Miller, chief technology officer for the chief of staff of the Army, said in December at the Army’s Technical Exchange Meeting regarding the approach the service will be taking with industry on NGC2. “There are differences of how we’re approaching this, not only to make sure that taxpayers get the value for their dollar, but also soldiers get what is actually useful to them.”

Officials want industry to weigh in on a draft prototype statement of objectives and a draft indefinite-delivery/indefinite-quantity performance work statement. Draft requests for proposals will follow this RFI, slated for late January, with a final RFP planned tentatively for February.

“Contracting and delivery of Next Generation Command and Control capabilities will be deliberate and iterative, geared toward commander needs and dependent upon the innovation of industry,” said Mark Kitz, program executive officer for command, control, communications and network. “This RFI is another step in continuous iteration with industry and operational users, so that as the Army responds to changing missions, we can rapidly bring in the right capabilities to deliver operationally relevant solutions.”

While the program office will be running the eventual program of record, for which contracts are expected to be awarded by May 2025, the C2 cross-functional team and Army Futures Command have been running prototyping efforts to help inform what’s needed. Those efforts will culminate at the Project Convergence Capstone 5 event later this year.

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The service is currently undergoing parallel tracks to improve how forces perform command and control on the battlefield in the future. The first, named C2 Fix, is aimed at bolstering soldiers’ so-called “fight tonight” ability. That effort is expected to serve as a bridge to a longer-term solution, dubbed Next Gen C2.

Next Gen C2 is the Army’s top priority, from the chief of staff to the commander of Futures Command. As the service transitions from over 20 years of operations against technologically inferior enemies to large-scale combat operations across vast distances against sophisticated adversatives, the current systems and architectures for command and control are not suitable for success, top officials contend.

Next Gen C2 “is intended to be a different approach — and a different approach in order to ensure that the Army is able to take advantage of data centricity Army-wide to transform to take advantage of that, so that our commanders can make more decisions and they can make them faster and they can make them better than the adversary,” Joe Welch, deputy to the commander of Futures Command, said at the Army’s Technical Exchange Meeting in Savannah last week. “The design principle of NGC2 from the beginning was clean sheet, unconstrained.”

The Army is taking a completely clean-slate approach by trying to start fresh as opposed to keeping on with full legacy systems, architectures and concepts, though officials acknowledge, given budget and fielding constraints across a million-person Army, some legacy systems will still have to be involved.

The C2 Fix effort — which is essentially just providing units with current and existing capabilities, but envisions employment differently — will serve as the bridge to next-gen technologies by providing units enhanced capability if they need to be deployed. It’s also providing some lessons for the eventual NGC2 effort, which is currently in the experimental phase with ongoing source selection for the eventual first awards as part of the official program of record.

“My anticipation is that there will be elements of C2 Fix, if you start looking at the boxes or the things that are part of it, that will find their way into” Next Gen C2, Welch said. “These aren’t independent activities. They’re more framed in time and decision constraint. But one theme that I think we’re going to continue throughout, one of the things C2 Fix [can do to aid] it really well is the ability to iterate with commanders and their brigades, and understand at a very detailed level how well this mix of equipment is working. I mean, if we maintain that philosophy going forward into NGC2, I think we’re going to be really well served.”

One of the areas that most exemplifies the need for a clean-slate approach is the data commanders are expected to be pushing down to their tactical units in future fights. The current architecture is not designed for what experts anticipate will be required going forward.

“In our experimentation up to date, what we’ve realized [is] we will push more data. What we are doing and what Next Gen C2 is going to be is entirely different than C2 Fix or anything we’ve done at this point,” Col. Michael Kaloostian, chief digital and artificial intelligence officer at Army Futures Command, said at the Technical Exchange Meeting. “C2 Fix scratches the surface of the amount of data that we push the edge in the future in Next Gen C2. If we’re not developing the network architecture to support that, we’re going to get it wrong. We have to really think about that. This is not C2 Fix, this is not an evolution of C2 Fix. This will be entirely different.”

Characteristics of need

When the Army began to chart down the effort of creating an entirely new construct for command and control, it sought to release what it called a “characteristics of need” document to industry.

Initially released last May, this document serves as “an acknowledgement of a complex problem space” and “an acknowledgement of one that we don’t feel like we know enough about necessarily, or are not in a position to be prescribing solutions,” Welch said, noting this is the first type of characteristics of need the Army has done for anything.

The characteristics are not a requirements document or something that is part of Army regulations. Rather, it sought to help industry define the problem and solution alongside the Army, with some officials referring to it as the “North Star” for Next Gen C2 development. Welch said it’s intended to be a starting point and facilitate a dialogue before beginning the requirements and acquisition process right away.

The intent for the document is that it will be updated approximately every 90 days as the Army continues to learn through experimentation efforts.

“The part that I would want to amplify is that it is not a static document. We are out of the business of requirements community handing a [program executive office] a document, turning around and going to work on the next document. That is the business that we need to get out of,” Mark Kitz, PEO for command, control, communications and network, said at the Technical Exchange Meeting. “The operating environment changes way too dynamically for us to think that we’re going to document every requirement in a static time.”

This will allow the command-and-control cross-functional team from Futures Command to evolve their requirements to design towards over time, allow industry to tweak their offerings and enable the program office to provide better opportunities for network improvements.

As an example, the most recent characteristics of need was released last week and made adjustments based on what the Army learned in September at Network Modernization Experiment, or NetModX, an annual experiment where officials put experimental Next Gen C2 capabilities through a more realistic battlefield network scenario and in a denied, disrupted, intermittent, and limited comms environment.

One of the biggest realizations coming out of NetModX was ensuing solutions for Next Gen C2 are integrated across the technology stack. As a result, this technology stack was added to the updated characteristics of need.

The stack consists of four layers from top to bottom: apps, operating system, compute and transport.

The apps portion is envisioned as an app store of sorts, with integrated warfighting systems that soldiers interface with. This is the most tangible part of Next Gen C2 that soldiers themselves will actually experience and interact with, which will collapse the warfighting functions into apps. This is currently the only interface the Army is anticipating, Welch said.

To enable that, he said, it has to be supported by an integrated data layer to build the apps upon, based on data coming in from sensors.

The data layer doesn’t work unless there’s infrastructure to support it, with the first level of infrastructure being a computing environment.

At the lowest level, soldiers need a way to move data across the battlespace via communications devices, be they 5G phones, Wi-Fi, radios, mesh networks or even proliferated low-Earth orbit satellite constellations.

“If these things don’t work, if any part of them don’t work, then NGC2 doesn’t work,” Welch said. “That was really why we included the technology stack within the characterization of needs to drive home the importance that we have all of this in place. And we may not have all of it horizontally to start. You’ll hear … some more detailed discussions about what’s going to take place over the next 12-18 months.”

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The efforts surround what the Army calls “Next Gen C2,” a top priority of the service’s highest leadership to include the chief of staff and Futures Command.

Officials have stated that current capabilities are not adequate to dominate on the modern battlefield against a sophisticated adversary. Thus, the service is attempting to overhaul how its systems are architected to improve data sharing and communications.

The organization held an industry day for Next Gen C2 on Sept. 16 and released a request for information Sept. 30 for input on the acquisition approach, contracting strategy and possible scope for a minimum viable product. The feedback from the RFI is expected to shape a draft request for proposals that the Army hopes to have ready by mid-November.

Both officials and industry sources have indicated they want to have an open dialogue to inform what the future capability looks like.

To set the foundation of Next Gen C2, the Army is initially focusing on a data layer.

“We think that’s centered around a data architecture, a data layer. We think that the initial foray into that would be some applications around fires and collaboration and some common services across the data layer for chat, for PLI, for graphics,” Mark Kitz, the program executive officer for command, control, communications and networks, said in an interview. “These are really just some initial ideas that we’re exploring with industry, but we really want this to be informed by industry.”

One of the challenges that Futures Command and the acquisition teams are trying to solve is that currently, data and applications aren’t standardized. They’re also siloed and can’t necessarily share seamlessly.

“What we don’t want to have happen is every different specialty in the Army has their own box and they’re trying to make the boxes communicate,” Col. Matt Skaggs, director of tactical applications and architecture at Army Futures Command, said in an interview.

Capabilities such as the Advanced Field Artillery Tactical Data System and the Army Intelligence Data Platform, along with others, don’t necessarily talk seamlessly to one another, Skaggs said, adding: “What we want to build is with the integrated data layer, applications that have all those warfighting function workflows baked in, so we don’t have to have boxes talking to boxes, and all of those applications that I mentioned before are converged onto one user interface.”

In trying to do things differently this time around, the Army is taking lessons from its Command Post Computing Environment (CPCE), a program that began around seven years ago. It’s a web-enabled capability that sought to consolidate mission systems and programs into a single user interface at command posts to provide a common operational picture.

Officials and industry sources noted that with CPCE, the Army tried to do too much and the technology was not mature enough yet. While successful at delivering a C2 situational awareness tool, the infrastructure was not built in a way to share data across different functions such as intelligence, fires, electronic warfare and sustainment, among others.

“The technology of today will allow us to more robustly build a data layer that our applications then can sit on without us molding into one data model and molding into one application or one commercial infrastructure,” Kitz said. “One of the big lessons learned here is ensuring that these applications, these disparate capabilities, these warfighting functions can innovate within their domain area, but sharing data across a common layer, across a common data mesh … We’re doing this very differently by stimulating a dialogue with industry and using their input along with experimentation, along with the lessons learned of CPCE, and really more smartly looking at Next Gen C2 in terms of what is the art of today and the art of the possible.”

Officials noted that the CPCE architecture had to have a data translation device in the middle of all functions to make sure data models could talk to other data models — a cumbersome and unreliable process.

“That’s fundamentally what we’re trying to solve with our integrated base data layer,” Skaggs said. “There’s no more data translation. We have integrated data ingest point where all the data is coming to one place. It’s being curated, normalized, correlated and then pushed up to the applications equally. Then those applications equally feed that data layer, so everyone’s talking to one another.”

Also, as part of the effort, the Army is working on mitigating dependencies on the cloud.

“From the network perspective is edge compute, placing a lot of emphasis on how do we and the vendors that we’ve worked with there … best process data at the edge so we’re minimizing the amount of data that needs to reach back to the cloud,” Col. Mike Kaloostian, director of transportation and network security for Army Futures Command, said. “It’s like our transition from being completely dependent on the cloud to being too enabled by the cloud. Just once again, understanding if an adversary takes our connectivity or at least reduces our connectivity to the cloud at a certain phase of an operation, per se, and we’re still going to be able to process the data that we’re going to need, our commanders will still be able to see and visualize and collaborate with his or her teams and subordinate units, so we can still do that. That’s been really our focus is thinking about that a little bit differently than the Army has done in the past.”

The service wants the Next Gen C2 efforts to have open competition from the beginning and through the lifecycle of the program.

As part of that approach, there will be multiple contract efforts, vehicles and portfolios as opposed to a single, monolithic award.

“This is going to be a portfolio of contracts, SBIRs, whatever we determined for this limited prototyping. But we are going to absolutely look at all of the tools available to us in terms of contracting,” Kitz said. “We see this very much as a multiple award. At industry day, we made it very clear, even in the limited prototyping, we expect to award to two or three vendors so that all three of those vendors have opportunities with units to deliver capability and prove that they can get after this data layer with a diverse application set sitting on top of it. We anticipate, even in the very early stages, of carrying multiple vendors. And we hope that we get proposed very different approaches to how they would solve the problem, so that we can learn about it and as we go to minimum viable capabilities with units, we can learn and iterate over time.”

C2 Fix and the bridge

As it eyes next-generation command and control, the Army is also pursing an effort dubbed C2 Fix, which focuses on so-called “fight tonight” capabilities, essentially improving the current systems in preparation for a more permanent next-generation capability.

This initiative will serve as a solutions bridge until future capabilities are developed and fielded to soldiers.

A key aspect of both efforts relates to transport, according to officials. That includes things like proliferated low-Earth orbit transport for satellite communications, latency requirements and how to obfuscate in the spectrum.

“We need to understand, and our commanders need to understand, what his or her signature looks like. That’s a survivability thing, so it’s important … that they understand what they look like. We give them the capability to understand what they look like from a spectrum standpoint, the EMS. But how you obfuscate, how you use decoys to be able to fool an enemy [is important] as well,” Kaloostian said. “To me, it’s related to Next Gen C2. It’s not at the data layer and all the stuff that Matt’s working on to make this really a data-centric C2 capability, but it is helping us think through areas that we’re making gains as an Army right now, what needs to carry over in the future, just knowing what the future fights could potentially look like.”

C2 Fix is also providing critical lessons for disaggregating forces and command posts across the battlespace to make them more mobile, and thus harder for enemies to target.

Getting to the next generation

While the Army has begun the process of reaching out to industry to set up an acquisition approach, it has also done much experimentation and science-and-technology efforts.

These activities have sought to define what the art of the possible is while developing ideas for what an architecture could look like or is needed.

The service has contracted out to a few companies such as Anduril, Palantir and Google to test multiple different options for mission command applications and provide commanders options for different viewpoints of data.

The recent NetModX experiment at Fort Dix, New Jersey, in September allowed the Army to test tenets of the network in a contested environment.

“At NetModX, we took the real network and contested that environment, … put that architecture in a much more scaled version of it that put that architecture on the real networks, and then jammed and pushed off waveforms and learned a whole bunch about what was working and not working,” Maj. Gen Patrick Ellis, director of the network cross-functional team, said. “I think industry, our industry partners are learning a ton as well because they got to see that this is what happens on an unstable network and things that just is not part of the normal business development process.”

The next step will be putting these Next Gen C2 concepts to the test at the Army’s Project Convergence Capstone 5 experiment in March 2025.

“That’s the proof of principle event. This is our Super Bowl from an experimentation standpoint. This is where everything’s going to come together,” Kaloostian said. “We will push more data than we have to this point and we will go through a more realistic scenario than we have done to this point. We will be contested in the spectrum as well. It is going to be very complicated. But the intent or what [AFC commander] Gen. [James] Rainey and [Chief of Staff] Gen. [Randy] George — the intent here is, when we get done with this proof of principle, that it validates that we’re at that prototype level, that minimum viable product. That’s where … Mr. Kitz and the team takes over.”

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