XVIII Airborne Corps experimenting with mix of edge and cloud capabilities at Project Convergence
FORT IRWIN, Calif. — This year’s iteration of the Army’s Project Convergence is providing XVIII Airborne Corps the first opportunity to test out how to deploy as a unit while experimenting with critical communications technology.
Although the Army’s main fighting formation was brigades for the last 20 years of the global war on terror, it’s now shifting to division as the unit of action, and corps will also be a critical echelon that must relearn old lessons regarding how to mobilize in a new era where counterterrorism and counterinsurgency are no longer the service’s main focus.
Corps is an important echelon as many authorities are held at this level and it acts as the bridge between tactical Army forces and joint task forces across an assigned theater with other services.
As officials seeks to determine how to deploy, corps leaders understand that much like subordinate units, they must have mobile and survivable command posts. As part of that, they must figure out what’s needed for the right mix of cloud-based access and edge computing.
“How do we build resilient, survivable, adaptable command posts? Some of that involves things like, do we build out an edge capability? We have our first edge nodes that we’re playing with out at [Project Convergence] Capstone,” Col. Edwin Mathias, the corps’ chief of staff, said in an interview.
The Army as a whole is looking at the mix of edge and cloud. Forces are beginning to understand that the complex operating environment of the future will present communications and network challenges by adversaries, what the military calls DDIL or “denied, degraded, intermittent and limited.”
Access to the cloud could be limited or disrupted, necessitating a local edge capability until those connections can be reestablished.
At XVIII Airborne Corps’ warfighter exercise last August, a large command post exercise, one of the biggest lessons was the need for an edge capability when cloud access was lost.
“Everything that we do now is cloud-based at the corps level. When we lost communications for the network — and that was basically because we had so much data going out that the network was not in a position to handle it — we didn’t have any connectivity to the systems that we needed to have connection to, which drove our focus to really get after the edge capability,” Col. Nicole Vinson, the corps’ chief communications officer, said in an interview. “The edge capability, technically, we’re looking at, is how do you do it? But then once we get something at the edge, which we have now at PC, you can start driving the conversation of what information do you need to have access to at the edge, what applications do you need to continue to operate at the edge? We can change the conversation from the technology knowing that we need it, but now starting to figure out what capabilities and what mission sets do you need to be able to continue to operate when in any kind of disconnected environment?”
The XVIII Airborne Corps is looking to test two different edge node versions, with one being a cloud-to-edge capability that will be tested for the first time. The corps created a tactical cloud to take capabilities from the cloud and deploy what they need at the edge, which will allow them to change depending on the mission set.
The goal is to try to get away from the stovepiped edge capabilities of the past and move to a more dynamic and flexible environment.
“We’ve always fought against different stovepipes. What we’re really trying to get after with our command post is to be lighter, faster, more mobile. The more we deliver these stovepiped edge capabilities, we’re not really accomplishing what we set out to achieve,” Vinson said. “The way we want to be able to operate is to be able to come together as a command post but then push the different groups out.”
The corps wants to look at four different groups to operate independent of each other and then determine what edge capability needs to be with each group.
This goes back to the need for survivable, adaptable and resilient command posts, based on observations from Ukraine and the recognition that larger and static command posts are juicy targets.
“Our ability to disaggregate the staffs into multiple nodes and reduce our signature is important,” Mathias said. “Those edge nodes, those independent transport capabilities would allow us to operate our current operations for one location, our fusion cell with our intel and fires team in another location, our administrative logistics component in another location, and then our network and G-6 team in yet another.”
Moreover, Project Convergence is allowing the corps to determine what mission sets need to come up to that level, now that the Army is shifting to division as the unit of action instead of brigade.
As division has become the main fighting unit, the Army has sought to move much of the network complexity out of brigades to the division level to enable those smaller units to focus on their fights as opposed to grappling with the network.
“One of the key elements that we have to be very cautious of is with the brigades and the division going to [secure but unclassified-encrypted] is how do we as a corps continue to be able to tie into those organizations without having so much burden on the division? There’s a lot of work going on at Project Convergence with the cross-domain solutions until we can get to a true zero-trust capability,” Vinson said.
