The brigade is participating in the Joint Pacific Multinational Readiness Center Exportable exercise in the Philippines with that nation’s 7th and 5th Infantry Divisions and an Australian infantry element. The unit was one of the first three brigades to participate in the first iteration of the Army’s so-called transforming-in-contact initiative, which aims to speed up how the service buys technologies and designs its forces by injecting emerging capabilities into units and letting them experiment with them during exercises and deployments.

TiC 1.0 was centered around light units. But now, TiC 2.0 is focusing on divisions as a whole, to include enabling units such as artillery and air cavalry brigades, as well as Multi-Domain Task Forces, some Army special operations units, National Guard units and armored formations.

Experimenting with 3D printing assets forward in theater is providing not only valuable lessons, but increasing the combat capability for 2nd Brigade and the 25th ID as a whole.

“The closer we can get that capability to the edge or that capability as close as we can to the soldiers that are employing it and realizing where adjustments need to be made, the quicker we can innovate and improve overall lethality,” Maj. Gen. Marcus Evans, commander of 25th Infantry Division, said in an interview Tuesday.

In one example, Evans said soldiers provided a recommendation for modifying a piece of equipment that the 3D printing was able to repair and make the modifications. He added while that was just one small example, the possibilities are endless.

This was a lesson directly from the European theater and Ukraine’s war with Russia. The Ukrainian army is providing, in many instances, a bevy of case studies for how future conflict will be fought and how tactical victories can be achieved.

By some estimates, there are thousands of drones flying on the battlefield, either for reconnaissance or as one-way attack weapons. The ability to rapidly repair or build new devices at the pace of operations has been critical.

Such a capability will also be needed in the Pacific theater, given the complex environment of various islands that forces will need to operate from, across vast distances. Forward-placed 3D printers will enable forces to maintain capabilities without long supply lines.

“It provides agility, it provides redundancy, and allows us to diversify our supply lines. From a commander perspective, all of those increase the ability to protect ourselves and project lethal formations and sustain lethal formations without always having to rely on an elongated supply line, which, as you’re aware, is very [susceptible] to interdiction to various kinds of attacks,” Evans said. “Now you’ve essentially moved a sustainment capability as far forward as possible and placed it organic to a formation that is doing the majority of the training and the focusing on lethality.”

The division is in the early stages of figuring out how to employ such a capability, to include how to maneuver it and protect it from being targeted by the enemy.

“A consideration is we know that that capability will be targeted. We have to understand how we move it, we have to understand how we protect it, how we get it into positions where it can hide in plain sight and continue to support soldiers,” Evans said.

On the flip side, he said they’re maturing counter-drone capabilities as well. While the Army has been experimenting a lot with commercial unmanned aerial systems, counter-UAS poses much more significant challenges given there aren’t many advanced commercial solutions available.

2nd Brigade improved its ability to detect and defend itself from incoming drones from its combat training center rotation in October in Hawaii.

For example, in one instance, a multi-domain reconnaissance team had activated a counter-UAS sensor notifying them of incoming drones approximately 15 minutes out. They were able to adjust their camouflage, preventing the enemy UAS from finding them.

Roughly 24 hours later, the unit was able to passively defeat another incoming drone, returning it to its control station.

“That is one small example of something we were not as proficient at in October, but we’ve certainly seen an increase in the use capability and understanding of employing that counter-UAS mechanism,” Evans said.

The division is also working on improving how it sees itself within the electromagnetic spectrum. There continues to be increased requirements for electronic warfare and counter-drone capabilities, Evans noted.

“The ability to scale and provide as many command posts and units in the field coverage, both from in the electromagnetic spectrum and also from the counter-UAS capability,” is important, he said. Since last October, “we have received additional equipment in terms of electronic warfare and in terms of counter-UAS equipment, which we have been able to employ here, generally, pretty effectively.”

EW tools can also be used in the counter-drone realm to jam signals.

Moreover, understanding a unit’s signature will allow it to be more nimble against enemies and make better decisions regarding how it maneuvers on the battlefield or deceives adversaries.

“All of this comes back to being able to gain positions of advantage, both tactically and operationally, to gain the benefits of employing those assets, whether it’s conduct electronic warfare in an attack mode or being able to see yourself so you can take actions to protect yourself and your formations. Those actions could be passive camouflage or they could be active deception measures,” Evans said.

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This is one of the lessons distilled halfway through the rotation at the Joint Pacific Multinational Readiness Center in Hawaii with 2nd Brigade, 25th Infantry Division. That unit is one of three so-called transforming-in-contact units that is helping pioneer and innovate new tactics and employment of technology for the Army.

The brainchild of Chief of Staff Gen. Randy George, the concept envisions using deployments and troop rotations to test new equipment — mainly commercial off-the-shelf gear — that could allow units to be more responsive on a dynamic battlefield. It has initially focused on three main areas where officials say the Army needs to be faster and more adaptable when it comes to delivering equipment to forces, due to how challenging the threat environment is and the cat-and-mouse aspect of countering opponents’ moves: unmanned aerial systems, counter-UAS and electronic warfare.

The first major test for the concept was with 2nd Brigade, 101st Airborne Division at the Joint Readiness Training Center at Fort Johnson, Louisiana, over the summer. Now, 2nd Brigade, 25th ID picks up the transforming-in-contact baton from the 101st with JPMRC Rotation 25-01. The Army has noted this is a continuous process, with officials highlighting that the same exercise controllers at Fort Johnson went out and helped with the 25th Infantry Division, building on lessons and providing planning considerations.

Halfway through their rotation, the unit is already taking away some key lessons. Broadly, service members must be more deliberate in deploying certain capabilities given the challenging terrain of jungle environments and archipelagos, such as a 200-mile air assault from Oahu to Pōhakuloa Training Area where dispersed units need support.

“We’ve had the opportunity to take those lessons learned from 2/101 and implement those here at the Army’s Joint Pacific Multinational Readiness Center training rotation,” Maj. Gen. Marcus Evans, commander of 25^th Infantry Division, said in an interview. “I think there’s some other important points to bring up about in terms of what’s different in this training center rotation compared to what 2/101 went through. Number one, the conditions here are different in terms of terrain.”

He noted that there’s much more geographic dispersion there than at Fort Johnson, along with the archipelago environment. That geography makes deploying capabilities more challenging, with Evans adding that until equipment is tested in a tactical scenario and environment, it’s hard to understand exactly how units will fight with it.

“In Hawaii, here where we are, you can’t launch a small unmanned aerial system from anywhere. Oftentimes you’ve got to fight to some high ground so it can get above the canopy. You’ve got to coordinate that … through a mission command system that you need to ensure has the ability to reach back and deconflict airspace,” he said. “The sUAS — we have used these now in the Philippines, here in Hawaii. And the terrain is different in all of those locations, as are the environmental conditions. Depending on what the temperature is, there is less endurance. The hotter it is, the more it drains the batteries and you have to be able to plan around that.”

The division is also learning the importance of battery and power generation. There are many more capabilities now that require batteries, from mission command systems to drones, forcing the unit to think more intentionally about how to plan for battery resupply or recharge the batteries providing the power to these systems. Troops began to experiment with what Evans called a solar stick that can serve as a solar-powered generator instead of driving around with towed generators to juice up the large tactical operation centers, as had been done the past.

Additionally, the makeup of each brigade in the Army is different. The 2nd Brigade, 101st is prototyping the mobile brigade combat team concept and has more Infantry Squad Vehicles than 2nd Brigade, 25th ID, which is prototyping the light brigade combat team concept. But, Evans noted, Infantry Squad Vehicles continue to be an important piece of mobility that provides infantry units the ability to traverse long distances, quickly.

The road terrain, however, is not necessarily conducive for the Infantry Squad Vehicle, forcing units to be more intentional about the routes they plan.

“Probably most important, where are you going to choose to dismount from? Because you can look at the access points in and around the areas in the Pacific in terms of where the roads will go, where they won’t go, and terrain is agnostic to either us or the opposing force,” Evans said. “We have to be able to be very thoughtful in terrain analysis and we’re not able to spread the vehicles out as much as you would be able to … in the area, compared to like Fort Johnson.”

The 2nd Brigade, 25th ID has also started developing more task-organized-for-purpose units and concepts — one being a brigade-level reconnaissance element that can see, sense, strike and execute some of mission command, taken from the development of 2nd Brigade, 101st’s Multifunctional Reconnaissance Company it created.

This new reconnaissance element “can serve far forward. They can see the enemy. They can sense inside the electromagnetic spectrum to enable striking and shaping the fight. We did not plan for that originally,” Evans said. “After the brigade went through a training exercise and then from talking with the 101st, we thought it was a good practice. We did it a little bit differently, just because we don’t have the number of Infantry Squad Vehicles and there’s some less soldiers in the formation, just by the design. But that’s one example, the ability to reorganize — and we call it task-organized for purpose. In this case, it was around the reconnaissance and security fight.”

Soldiers were also innovating with the Silent Tactical Energy Enhanced Dismount, an all-terrain, electric payload mobility platform that is tactically silent with zero emissions and a high load capacity to enhance close combat lethality in dismounted operations, according to the Army.

Evans said soldiers outfitted one to serve as a mission command platform, though not an equipping line product. They developed a form factor that could get onto an aircraft, quickly get off and establish mission command for a battalion commander to work off of.

The network is the number one priority for George, the Army’s top officer. Enabling units to conduct command-and-control and mission command in a dispersed manner across the battlefield while keeping electronic emissions low to avoid detection, will be paramount in future fights against sophisticated adversaries.

“It’s also critically important, a lesson we took from the 101st is you have to be able to hide in plain sight, if you will — the importance of camouflage, but also the importance of deception. Setting up things that look like a mission command post and antennas that give a perception that something is there when it is not, that gets inside of the opposing force or enemies decision calculus and ultimately they have to commit resources, oftentimes to confirm or deny whether or not … that is a mission command post,” Evans said. “That’s one of the lessons learned that [Maj. Gen. Brett Sylvia, commander of the 101st] and I talked about. And certainly, I think they established some best practices that we’ve been able to take on, particularly in deception and agile mission command posts here in the Pacific.”

While units can talk on the move, they must be intentional about when they choose to communicate in order to avoid being detected in the spectrum and targeted with fires.

Multinational

The other distinguishing element for 2nd Brigade, 25th ID’s rotation is the participation of international partners. U.S. Army Pacific has put a premium on boosting partner capacity and interoperability in the Pacific.

In fact, following this current rotation, the brigade will head out to the Philippines to do a rotation with their army in spring 2025.

For the time being, there is a Japanese battalion as part of the training unit with 2nd Brigade and a Malaysian platoon working the sustainment brigade that’s providing logistics. There are also 11 C-17 transport aircraft, one from Australia, as well as British crews providing the ability to project combat power and support units dispersed across the environment.

“One of our goals was to be able to have a mission command network with our multinational partners that we could have a common operating picture in an unclassed [unclassified] environment. By and large, we’ve been able to achieve that,” Evans said. “That’s something we want to continue to iterate on in the Philippines. We did not do that as well as we could have the last time we were in the Philippines. We’re doing it better right now and we still have some room for improvement, but that’s one of our training objectives, not only in this rotation, but particularly when we go back into the Philippines in the springtime period.”

Evans described three types of partner interoperability: personal interoperability solider-to-soldier, procedural interoperability through a combined operations center, and digital interoperability.

While the first two have been demonstrated well, Evans said the third still needs improvement.

“We would like eventually to be at a point where a partner force can observe a threat and they can pass that threat back to, in this example, back to a U.S. operation center and that U.S. operations center will pass it down to another partner nation artillery battery, as an example, to conduct an indirect fire mission,” he said. “Those are the kind of repetitions and training goals that CTC rotations like JPMRC afford us the opportunity to experiment with.”

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As part of a new Army concept, the 25th Infantry Division has been able to test new equipment that its commander said made it more lethal, agile and mobile.

“At a company level or even at a battalion level, they relied on assets predominantly from the brigade or higher level — assets that required sustainment and security,” Maj. Gen. Marcus Evans, commander of 25th ID, told reporters Friday. “Now we have small unmanned aerial systems in the hands of squad leaders that can see three to five kilometers from their current position, which allows them to understand the battlefield better, protect themselves and creates increased lethality from their overall awareness.”

These UAS provide smaller units the ability to project farther and find targets, making them more mobile. A key tenet of future battle is the ability for units to be more dispersed given the advanced technologies potential nation-state adversaries possess to track U.S. forces. Top Army officials have stressed that there is nowhere to hide on the modern battlefield anymore due to overhead imagery and advanced sensors.

“Before we would have to have a forward observer or some kind of higher-level ISR platform that is doing target identification,” Evans said. “Now, with the proliferation of those sUAS elements inside of infantry formations, you’ve expanded the number of potential forward observers to enable an indirect fire solution.”

The testing of these systems is part of the Army’s so-called transforming in contact concept, where more and more units are receiving newer technologies to experiment with. Under that concept, the service plans to use deployments and troop rotations to test new equipment — mainly commercial off-the-shelf gear — that could allow units to be more responsive on a dynamic battlefield.

Within the concept, there are three areas where Chief of Staff Gen. Randy George says the Army needs to be faster and more adaptable when it comes to delivering equipment to forces, due to how dynamic the threat environment is and the cat-and-mouse aspect of countering opponents’ moves: unmanned aerial systems, counter-UAS and electronic warfare.

“We acknowledge that the battlefield has changed, requiring the introduction of new technologies to increase lethality, agility and mobility,” Evans said. “All of the equipment that has come in, equipment that increases mobility and lethality and really allows us the ability to see further, to have better sensing mechanisms, better striking mechanisms, and then to be able to project force and protect the force.”

Units within the division have been receiving new tech and will test them in preparation for two culminating events: an October rotation at the Joint Pacific Multinational Readiness Center in Hawaii, followed by a deployment to Operation Pathways with the Philippines armed forces in spring 2025.

Receiving these capabilities early is critical to allow soldiers to become used to them and adapt them to warfighting.

“Watching them incorporate these new technologies at the earliest phases of training is really changing their mentality to integrate these additional assets to see further, to sense better, to strike further and protect the formation,” Evans said. “I am certain that our soldiers’ innovation and their ability to adapt the equipment to the environment is really going to come to the forefront as we start to enter the next phase of our collective training.”

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