- US Army soldiers stress-tested their new software against electronic warfare.
- NGC2 held up under some jamming, and units were able to reconnect quickly when links dropped, officials said.
- The new command-and-control tech is aimed at changing how the Army fights.
Much like the war in Ukraine, future battlefields could be drowning in electronic interference, so the US Army stress-tested new command-and-control tech against that threat.
The need to maintain connections between command and deployed weapons and crews, or reestablish those links when they're lost, is shaping how soldiers train on the service's Next Generation Command and Control, a new software-driven system that's being developed for the Army.
In its most recent NGC2 exercise at Fort Carson, Colorado, the Army's 4th Infantry Division put it to the test against electronic warfare. Stressing the system proved difficult, the Army said, because it would "heal itself." The service said it had to disable certain features to really test it.
Maj. Gen. Patrick Ellis, the commander of the 4th ID, said during a media roundtable that after they activated the jamming, the system rerouted internally to keep functioning. "We had to go back and figure out something else to turn off to actually stress the system to feel that for real," he said.
That further testing saw soldiers in the field lose their connection to satellite services, forcing them to resort to backups like radio for communications while they searched for the source of the jamming.
Once they found it, they eliminated it with a mortar strike and started the reconnection process.
"It was quite seamless," said Lt. Col. Shawn Scott, commander of the 4th Squadron, 10th Cavalry Regiment, 3rd Brigade Combat Team, speaking during the roundtable. He added that troops still had to learn how to manage retransmission in complex terrain — an important step in restoring communications when troops are spread out across a wide area.
The recent exercise put soldiers in a "denied, degraded, intermittent, and limited" environment, Scott said, cutting them off from the division's cloud but still allowing the squadron to track the fight and carry out its mission on its own. Once the simulated jamming was removed, "we were able to reestablish connection back with division and brigade," he said, watching data flow back up the chain and back down again "seamlessly."
Russia's war against Ukraine has shown the US military that consistent jamming of communications, weaponry, and intelligence and surveillance capabilities is something it'll need to be prepared for in a future conflict.
"We don't think the modern battlefield's going to be free of electromagnetic interference," Ellis said.
In this round of testing, the Army fired 155mm rounds from an M777 howitzer at a Marine-provided target. The data from those strikes was then sent back to Marine Corps systems. During the exercise, 20 different types of sensors fed information into NGC2, including drones, electronic warfare systems, and Stryker vehicles.
NGC2 is a major modernization initiative for the Army, changing how soldiers communicate with each other and command, receive intelligence, track locations, and plan warfighting actions like firing artillery or scouting with drones.
Joe Welch, who oversees the Army's command-and-control systems and efforts to counter enemy communications, said that most NGC2 parts are built using off-the-shelf technology and standard commercial software practices, rather than bespoke military-only systems.
Data and artificial intelligence capabilities are giving soldiers real-time information, like how much ammo they have left or whether there are casualties to care for, and predictive simulations for what they'll need should enemy forces attack them. The testing at Fort Carson, led by Anduril and an industry team, is continually bringing in more vendors, capabilities, and functions to broaden what NGC2 can do.
With the new system, the Army is also recognizing what different divisions across the service will need out of it. The process has been driven by implementing soldier feedback quickly, sometimes overnight or within a few days.
In Hawaii, the Army's 25th Infantry Division is working on a data and applications component of NGC2 led by Lockheed Martin and other companies that, once completed, will also be implemented into what the 4th ID is doing.
Future exercises are expected to expand what NGC2 can do. One event in May, for instance, will test it against a simulated enemy.
"We're going to really tests the systems," Ellis said, including against cyber, electronic, and kinetic areas to see what vulnerabilities exist. "We're going to go after all that to learn where we need to make some adjustments."
