Army’s next-gen command and control program will be a ‘clean slate’

SAVANNAH, Ga. — The Army’s effort to overhaul how it conducts command and control will begin with a completely clean slate, according to officials.

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.”