How the Army built Next-Gen Command and Control

This is part one of a two-part series examining how the Army is building its Next Generation Command and Control capability. It is based on several interviews at various locations – to include Austin, Texas, Savannah, Georgia, Aberdeen Proving Ground, Maryland, and Fort Irwin, California – over the course of several months.

A year in the making, the Army recently tested its prototype for how soldiers will conduct command and control. Next year, an entire division will get the capability.

What began as a proof of concept at Project Convergence Capstone 4 in March 2024 with a rudimentary demo — passing data — has culminated at Capstone 5 in March 2025 with what officials call a proof of principle.

The Army has been seeking to completely revamp the way it conducts command and control — meaning, the way troops communicate on the battlefield, pass information, coordinate effects and conduct operations.

Officials have explained that the systems the service has used in the past will not be adequate to win in the future against sophisticated adversaries given the vast amounts of data that exist now and how quickly that information must be passed.

“We will never achieve our warfighting effectiveness if we don’t have a command-and-control network that enables our commanders to execute mission command at the point of need on the battlefield. Period, full stop,” Lt. Gen. Karl Gingrich, deputy chief of staff, G-8, said March 18 at the annual McAleese Defense Programs Conference. “The network is incredibly important, probably [the] number one priority for the United States Army for modernization.”

When the U.S. military went from the analog world — think pins on cork boards to track troops and plan operations — to the digital world, each individual community developed their own systems. This led to stovepipes where information and data based on warfighting function, such as fires or intelligence, couldn’t be transferred effectively because they were bespoke.

Once the Army decided that this arrangement was no longer suitable, however, a new approach required the big lift of standardizing the data streams and developing the robust network transport to allow data to flow.

Enter Next Generation Command and Control, an experimentation effort run by Army Futures Command that will soon transition to a program of record. The initiative aims to provide commanders and units with a new approach to information, data, and command and control through agile and software-based architectures. Futures Command has been running the experimentation for the system while the acquisition community, in parallel, is in charge of the eventual program of record, issuing requests to industry to be able to award contracts shortly after Project Convergence.

“NGC2 exists today. It’s not theoretical. It’s not pretend,” Maj. Gen. Patrick Ellis, director of the C2 cross functional team at Army Futures Command, said in an interview at Project Convergence at Fort Irwin in March.

Officials explained that testing how to fight in an attack scenario exclusively using the NGC2 architecture is the number one objective for the Army at Project Convergence. The ultimate aim was to make sure the service can get the applications that are corps- and division-centric onto a Bradley vehicle or a tank to work on the tactical transport.

Soldiers at 2nd Battalion, 37th Armor Regiment are testing out the architecture at Capstone 5, along with a brigade command post on top of that and XVIII Airborne Corps headquarters. 

At the time DefenseScoop observed equipment and spoke with soldiers from the unit on the ground at Project Convergence at Fort Irwin, California, they had not yet put the system through its paces or gone through the scenario yet — and thus offered their thoughts based on initial familiarity with the system prior to execution.

The Army developed a horizontal 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. This involved the difficult task of working with companies to standardize all the data from each of the warfighting functions and collapsing those functions into applications on a common operating picture.

Officials noted that the system is hardware agnostic, and soldiers and commanders can choose which dashboard they prefer, built by different companies, based on their need.

When a soldier logs into their NGC2 splash page, they are met with a series of applications they can click such as intelligence, maneuver, fires, protection, sustainment, C2 and information advantage — as well as an operational modeling tool to provide courses of actions using machine learning capabilities based on the available data in the system. The data that a unit, such as a division, consumes and generates flows into one integration layer where ML tools curate it before users interact with it.

Moreover, there is a common operational picture with map overlays that forces can see.

“Today, they’re pulling from several different sources and as you go up classification, that database is really not the same database that you’re using at the lower level. We’ve broken that paradigm and we’re using a single data layer, single map service to provide across different platforms, software platforms,” Chad Nash project lead for NGC2 with the Army Combat Capabilities Development Command C5ISR Center, told DefenseScoop in an interview at Aberdeen Proving Ground in February. “For our common operating picture at that application layer, we’re sending the same information across those applications and it means the same thing to the other applications.”

By shrinking this down and distilling it to an application layer, soldiers now all have access to the same data. This means operations can be distributed much more — because staff sections can be dispersed given they all have the same access and don’t need to be co-located in a command post to share information — and information about threats can be shared much faster.

Soldiers indicated that the typical game of “Telephone” on the battlefield has the potential to be eliminated. For example, in some cases, drone feeds were siloed within the intelligence personnel on staff who then had to pass that information to the maneuver personnel either digitally or over radio. But now, that information can be readily available to all.

NGC2 “reduces the stovepipes or the silos of information flow. It’s giving all warfighting functions the same access to the data so that we can contribute to the operation with a fight in the same sense. It’s enabled our ability to communicate at echelons and across warfighting functions,” Capt. Nate Kraemer, operations officer for 1st Brigade, 1st Armored Division and the lead planner for the brigade for Capstone 5, said in an interview at Fort Irwin. “The biggest thing is that data flow across warfighting function. That’s going to cut down on a lot of processing times, informational delays, so that everyone in real time has the same picture and can make the most informed decision about the operation.”

For the battalion commander, who will be putting the system through its paces, command and control on the battlefield is essential for him to be able to perform his tasks.

“The C2 node is extremely important. Command and control of the force on the battlefield, what that requires, though, is information delivered quickly enough so I can make a good decision or the best decision that I can make based on the information,” Lt. Col. Tad Coleman, commander 2nd Battalion, 37th Armor Regiment, said at Fort Irwin. “As I’ve been messing with the Next Gen C2, I’ve actually been quite impressed with how light it is and still being able to have all the information, which creates an easier redundancy for us in a cab on the move, compared to what we would usually have.”

The system will likely be able to provide him greater on-the-move capability, negating the need to stop on the battlefield to establish communications and gain updates. It will have the ability to disperse his staff sections and vehicles, which will ultimately make his formation more survivable and harder to target by the enemy given they won’t all be bunched together like they were prior to NGC2.

The tool will also enable better and faster decision-making because access to more data in real time will allow for changes in courses of action.

“The fact that I’m getting similar information and I’ve got layers that people are building, I can make decisions faster. But not just faster decisions, because not all fast decisions are good, I can [also] make better decisions because I’m actually getting the information that I need across the different type of warfighting functions,” he said.

Ellis also noted that logistics personnel are now able to monitor munitions stocks in real time of forces in contact and have a much more realistic view of what their levels are and what needs to be replenished and where.

“With the future potential to integrate it with the systems on the tank, so that in real time it could track the ammunition that I’ve expended and automatically report that from a tank crew level to a company level, and aggregate that data and pass it to our higher headquarters to both inform their ability to make decisions on how much combat power we have remaining,” Capt. Adam Emerson, A Company commander, 2nd Battalion, 37th Armor Regiment, said in an interview. “That also helps us predict when we need to conduct resupply and when we can expect to receive resupply. With that potential, it could go a long way for managing.”

Ellis noted that the Army has been thinking about how it will manage that architecture and infrastructure — such as the operating system and the applications that go into it through a military-like app store, though exactly how is still being determined.

“That governance is getting written now. We absolutely acknowledge that that’s a piece of this. You got to build out the ecosystem. Industry could probably help us do that, but we’re going to have to run the governance over top of that to make sure that we don’t just turn it into a free for all,” he said.

Additionally, the architecture provides wireless transport local to vehicles such as tanks and Bradleys for augmented reality goggles for commanders at echelon to have greater situational awareness of the battlespace. When they open their hatch to look out, the goggles allow them to see position location information data on their headsets.

The idea is typically, tankers don’t always know where their friendly forces are located or where the enemy is. The AR goggles quickly determine where everybody is and allow for rapid actions such as call for fires and maneuver with a function to point and draw on the system.

The architecture also attempts to realize Chief of Staff Gen. Randy George’s vision of tablets, which, if fully realized, will replace and combine mounted and dismounted systems. The intent was for soldiers to have a tablet in their vehicles for their mission command with the ability to take it out when at the halt.

The way forces currently conduct mission command is there’s a variety of different platforms that are in vehicles and soldiers have dismounted, meaning everyone has a different view. Now, they can put their tablet in the vehicle and take it off when the vehicle stops, providing the same picture to anyone and allowing them to drill down into more specific information or maps if needed.

This will give units the ability to move faster because they can take their tablets out, move them to the command post for a couple of minutes and then put them back in their vehicles to move again.  

To make the Project Convergence experimentation happen, DEVCOM had to fabricate cables and racks that were 3D printed to mount all the antennas and communications equipment to the battalion’s vehicles.

The hired guns

Gen. James Rainey, commander of Army Futures Command, sought to improve how the service conducts command and control, and he tasked two individuals to “fix the network.”

Enter the “hired guns”: Col. Michael Kaloostian, chief digital and artificial intelligence officer at Futures Command and Col. Matt Skaggs, director of tactical applications and architecture at Futures Command.

Their two-part plan involved getting each warfighting function off their individual box and then getting rid of everyone’s individual data models.

“We want to have a cloud native, software first, hardware-agnostic ecosystem that everybody sees the same data at the same time,” Skaggs said at the Army Vertex conference in November of the overall goal.

Despite having no formal acquisition or technical background, both colonels have been users of these types of systems in both the conventional and special operations communities.

“I was part of the [Distributed Common Ground System] wars. I went in and out of developing that program and then helped some of it [with] the follow-on program … I learned a lot of lessons on both how and how not to interact with industry and how you should build a system,” Skaggs said.

To get to this prototype, the Army began at Project Convergence Capstone 4 last year with a demonstration that sought to showcase data being passed. That demo provided the initial proof of concept for what NGC2 could become, leading the Army to build that out over the course of the next year.

“If we didn’t show the capability and what was possible at PCC4, during that S&T phase, we’re not having this conversation right now. Next Gen C2 never happens,” Kaloostian said.

Throughout that next year, Futures Command and subordinate organizations built upon the notion at various stages. At the NetModX venue in September, which is a field-based experimentation event, the NGC2 architecture had its first experiment with a degraded environment. The Army sought to test how transport modalities would work if the network was strained, examining a robust network, resilient network and an intelligent, threat-informed network.

The Army 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.”

“Now what we are working on is, how do we link this all together, how do we transport that data to the point of need, how do we do it in a DDIL environment if we are disconnected, but then re-sync at that point, so that we can marshal national and reach-back capabilities all the way to the tactical edge?” Gingrich said.

That process sought to get it in line for Project Convergence Capstone 5, where the architecture ran classified information for the first time at scale, on a real tactical network at echelon.

Ellis noted that at Capstone 4, it was mostly pretend with notional nodes. Between then and all the additional events, the Army worked with most of the same vendors to shrink the development loop and get faster results.

“We went from pretend stuff and say this is a pretend node, to today, which is there is a real armored platoon leader and a real armored battalion commander that has taken real vehicles, real tanks, real soldiers out in the field,” he said.

The Army took the architecture to the Combined Joint Systems Integration Laboratory for a validation event for about a month to work out the kinks prior to Capstone 5. That facility allows the service to completely replicate the tactical network and environment in a lab prior to getting systems on the ground in order to run tests and diagnostics to mitigate technical glitches on day one of an exercise.

“One of our challenges or opportunities was replicating a lab-based environment and not having them go to a demo site to perform an experiment and then collect all the data and come back. We’re able to do that here in a lab environment with the engineers to do a technical evaluation,” Nash said. “In terms of functionality, capability providing us the transport and network capabilities here in the CJSIL has been essential and instrumental for us moving forward because it really set the stage and allowed us to work through any of the kinks here. We’re able to test capabilities, see the functionality and replicate challenges or replicate failures, if you will, and mitigate those significant” problems.

Scaling to division

Following this year’s Capstone event, the Army will be taking all the equipment off the vehicles and bringing it to 4th Infantry Division.

Additional experimentation will be undertaken by 4th ID — along with a brigade from 25th ID — while the program office works the acquisition component. Officials noted that what comes out of Project Convergence won’t be the final solution and more refinement needs to be done.

It’s important to begin division experimentation as the Army is moving to make the division the primary unit of action instead of brigade.

In the past, light infantry units have been chosen as the first to experiment with new network capabilities because they are easier to integrate with given their lighter footprint and fewer vehicles. The Army wanted to start with the most difficult formation — armored — for NGC2 as a means of working those kinks out early and level setting the Army as a whole.

There was some thought internally that if those lighter units continued to get the latest and greatest, the disparity between formations within the Army would become even greater as heavies would be even farther behind.

“The intent here is to flip that entire model and start with the most difficult divisions first. Then work the light divisions [that] are easy,” Kaloostian said.

The Army is expecting a contract for the official program to be awarded in May, followed by more experimentation and fielding.

Part 2 of this series will focus on acquisition and how officials believe NGC2 will succeed where other efforts in the past have not.