What will the Army’s Next-Gen C2 contract look like?

This is part two 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. Part one can be found here.

While the Army has previously attempted to improve its command and control, leaning on advancements in commercial technology, officials say this time is different given senior leader buy-in and recent technological developments.

As the Army is pursuing what it calls Next Generation Command and Control — which aims to provide commanders and units a new approach to information, data and C2 through agile and software-based architectures — officials have said it’s a clean slate and a fresh start that’s not trying to build upon existing efforts.

“The chance to have the unfettered access we have with industry, but then have the clean-sheet approach … that really allowed us to get into place where we are now. We’re hitting the targets that the seniors want us to hit [and] getting away from the old way of doing things. I think it’s a combination of those two things,” Col. Matthew Skaggs, director of tactical applications and architecture at Army Futures Command, one of two officials leading the experimentation effort, said in an interview at Project Convergence at Fort Irwin, California, in March. “The way we started was we were pointing more so at mid-level, non-traditionals and startups. I think what we’ve found is those guys are super hungry to do whatever it is we need to do.”

Officials have said there is buy-in from senior Army leadership from the initial demonstration of NGC2 at Project Convergence Capstone 4 last year.

A big difference is how the requirements and acquisition are being approached. Officials said the service is trying to de-link from the old requirements documents of the past and provide more distilled needs in the form of what Futures Command calls a characteristics of need statement.

Initially released last May, this statement serves as an acknowledgement of a complex problem set and provides industry with areas the Army wants to solve. It’s seen as a living document that will be updated every 90 days or so and is not a hard-and-fast requirements document.

It will also be updated following the experimentation at Project Convergence Capstone 5 that took place in March and put NGC2 in a real tactical environment for the first time.

“We’ve gone about this in an unconventional way in terms of entering requirements and then sending out the RFPs and the RFIs later in the process and we just wait to see what industry comes up with. Our ability to iterate with these guys and say we wanted to do this instead of that, I want the graphics to look a certain way, we want certain form factor on the transport side and the edge server side, has allowed us to iterate and get it down to the form factor that [Chief of Staff] Gen. [Randy] George gave us with his vision,” Skaggs said.

Skaggs and his counterpart — Col. Michael Kaloostian, chief digital and artificial intelligence officer at Futures Command — noted that since industry and senior leaders have now seen that this can work, there is “irreversible momentum.”

Officials have explained that going forward, Futures Command will own the requirements for NGC2, with the Army implementing a product owner and product manager relationship. The command will run the increment planning and set priorities while the program manager in the program office will deliver the system.

Capstone 5 will provide the baseline capability for the NGC2 prototype as the program office looks to award contracts for the official program. Moreover, there will be continued experimentation to refine that effort and work to scale it to a division level.

“You got to break the mold of thinking of a traditional program where you’re going to go through the lockstep, sequential process. That’s not happening here. I think we’re trying to figure out what’s the minimal viable product, get that out the door, continue to iterate, to learn and as technology improves, S&T comes to the table [and] then we can integrate that and then we continue to evolve,” Brig. Gen. Kevin Chaney, deputy program executive officer for command, control, communications and network, said in an interview at Aberdeen Proving Ground, Maryland, in February. “But that’s one of the things I really had to focus on — break that traditional mindset of an acquisition approach, going through the wall chart and stuff like that. That’s not going to work here.”

Because of that approach, officials believe there will be no valley of death with NGC2. The term “valley of death” in Defense Department acquisition parlance, refers to the failure to move promising technologies out of research and development and into procurement and production.

Contracting strategy

The Army has also sought an unconventional contracting approach to NGC2 to enable multiple iterative and competitive opportunities for contractors to provide technology. The service notes that no one company can provide a total solution for the initiative, and thus it will need to onboard vendor teams for additional components and layers available after the initial prototyping awards.

There have been several engagements with vendors, to include industry days and one-on-ones, to understand how to scope the contract, what it should include and how to incentivize certain members of the industrial base, according to officials.

This ongoing collaboration — both with industry and Futures Command on the prototype — is what officials have said will allow them to go fast and rapidly issue contracts by the May timeframe, not long after Capstone 5.

“It really came down to working, collaborating with the teams the whole time, and really getting the feedback from industry of what can we do to streamline, what are the true discriminators and how fast can you move through the selection to do that? Because we started so early, we’re working through this as the experimentation was going on,” Danielle Moyer, executive director for Army Contracting Command, said in an interview at Aberdeen Proving Ground.

DefenseScoop reached out to a variety of companies involved in experimentation and looking to bid on contracts for the eventual program of record. Most declined to offer information on the process even on the condition of anonymity.  

One firm, L3Harris, through a spokesperson noted that the overall process has gone well and the program office has been transparent on timeline and requirements.

The Army wants flexibility so it can on-ramp or off-ramp capabilities and even contractors that aren’t performing.

“We’re really trying to scope that base contract to be really flexible, so that we can figure out what we’re missing to be able to on-ramp capabilities upfront. That’s one of the things that we’re looking for in these draft solicitation documents from industry and make sure we capture everything and make sure it’s in scope, so that we can add capabilities when needed very quickly,” Moyer said. “There’s language that we sent out … to look at one, ramping and off-ramping new entrance and capabilities, how to incentivize that, to have certain roles in how vendors have teams or subcontracts and things like that. Very flexible, because I think what we want is we want to constantly have the best thing.”

The Army wants to enable more flexibility than the prior capability set paradigm of the integrated tactical network, where incremental advances in the network were built out and delivered over two-year cycles. In those cycles, the Army focused on certain capabilities, allowing some flexibility to insert new ones as technology advanced, but ultimately locked the architecture in place at a point before delivery.

“I think what we’ve seen since the days where we were considering capability set fielding is it’s a couple different things. One is, the pace of technological change has picked up. We’re not always in an era where it’s rapidly accelerating to the degree it is, but it’s happened in the past. We’re in one of those phases now where it’s extremely rapid,” Joseph Welch, deputy to the commander of Futures Command, who was involved in the capability set development, said in an interview at Aberdeen Proving Ground. “The challenge we had on capability set is there’s only so much of the Army that you can modernize at any pace, given the resources that we had. We’re always in a resource-constrained environment. We’re taking a particular look at how we integrate resourcing within the Army across all the different ways with bucket money toward this problem set. I think that’s going to help. But that was an inherent issue with capability set, is that we weren’t able to do it at the pace to get capability widely out to the Army quickly.”

Moyer noted that officials want to create an ecosystem of capabilities, equating it to an umbrella where the middle is the core foundation of NGC2 and then poles of different layers are built in and added to the core middle.

Moyer declined to say how many contracts will be associated with NGC2, noting that it will be dependent on how many responses the service gets from requests to industry. 

With numerous contracts expected covering a variety of aspects, the Army has been trying to work to determine what incentivizes certain companies to make contracts worthwhile.

“There’s things that incentivize different vendors. Some vendors are incentivized by more time. Some vendors are incentivized by more money. Some vendors are just purely incentivized by having competition. Well, how do you balance all that?” Moyer said. “Maybe it’s based on who wins. If you deliver this capability that exceeds whatever requirement, you get an additional X profit or you get an additional X set of months or whatever — whatever makes sense. It was really listening to what will incentivize them to help us get the best capability and holding them accountable.”

What’s less clear is what will be awarded post-Capstone 5 or how much of the prototype will move into the acquisition effort.

A former acquisition official noted that NGC2 is at a critical inflection point, moving from what amounted to a research-and-development effort to having to field and scale it to units. What industry might have difficulty with is understanding the boundaries of what the Army wants.

“What you’re seeing, I think, is a difficulty in first scoping it. I think industry has struggled to figure out the boundaries of what they’re buying. Is it mission command software, and if so, for what employment? Is it to replace the mounted system, the command post system, the dismounted system? It seems like it’s command post systems. [Does] it also include transport? Is this going to replace the radio programs or the broadband SATCOM programs?” they said. “There’s all these open questions about what it is. I think that’s probably the first big question the Army needs to answer is to better define the boundaries of what will be part of the program of record for Next Gen C2.”

It’s fine to leave some of those questions open-ended in a science-and-technology effort, but the Army will have to define those further as it seeks to scope out a program, they added. 

Many of the same contractors have been involved from the beginning of the prototyping process. This has allowed the Army to iterate on the prototype much faster. But, if the program office seeks to onboard many of those companies following a successful demonstration of the prototype — which can easily be done given the nature of how they were awarded for the prototype — it might raise questions about fair and open competition.

“If we want to capitalize on … faster deliveries, I think that we need a very clear answer on whether competition in the prototyping phase is sufficient to support moving quickly without more competition and into production,” the former official said. 

It’s also not clear who will serve as the integrator for the entire effort — a company, a group of companies or the Army.

“The integrator model is not good, it’s not good for the Army … We lose too much agency in downstream selection with the integrated approach. The Army has famously tried to serve as the integrator itself. In the interest of humility, that doesn’t work either,” Gen. James Rainey, commander of Futures Command, said March 18 at the annual McAleese Defense Programs Conference, speaking generally about service programs and not specifically on NGC2. “What we’re really looking at is for industry teams to self-organize around problems and requirements, just like you would self-organize if you were solving any other problems. We’re real interested in companies that can pull together a competitive team of the best across specific parts of industry and make offerings that way.”

Also less clear is the funding streams for the effort. Program executive office for command, control, communications and network, said the budgeting process is pre-decisional.

“The Army is reviewing how to adapt current and future investments to fund NGC2. C2 Fix is also a down payment on NGC2 by accelerating the transformation of the network transport layer,” the office said in a statement, referencing the parallel effort to NGC2, C2 Fix, which is essentially providing units with current and existing capabilities, but envisions employment differently and acting as the bridge to NGC2.  

“As part of the NGC2 strategy, the Army plans to collapse and replace/displace legacy systems and components as we move to this newer, more intuitive, commercial-based capability. The specific investment and divestment strategies will be based upon feedback from market research, Project Convergence activities, and continuous user feedback,” the office added.

Lt. Gen. Karl Gingrich, deputy chief of Staff, G-8, said at the McAleese Defense Programs Conference that funds for NGC2 will start showing up in fiscal 2026.

An industry source noted the Army must strike a careful balance of collapsing certain existing funding lines with modernization efforts, noting funding sources have not yet been cleared to industry.

“There is, however, concern that the department may shift funding from procurement efforts that are supporting current fielding initiatives and providing much-needed technology to operational forces to fund NGC2 efforts,” they said. “Any shift in programmatic resourcing should involve a robust discussion with the industrial base to ensure the industrial base understands emerging requirements and can dedicate innovation to those efforts.”  

Gingrich noted that the Army has gone back into its requirements documents to look at how to off-ramp money that was allocated to outdated efforts.

“What we have done is gone back into our requirements documents and said ‘hey, what of this was mission command or command and control-related?’ OK, here’s the money that was associated with that, we are now off-ramping that money and we will bring it into Next Gen C2 in the future, so that we ensure that there’s no money out there going towards legacy systems,” he said.

Integration and fielding

As NGC2 scales, the Army will have to work on integrating the technology with platforms, a delicate dance that involves fitting gear into tight spaces on platforms and understanding how to use that vehicle’s power to run them.

This is perhaps one of the biggest lessons from the C2 Fix effort, is the so-called “trail boss” concept that officials believe will have to continue through NGC2.

That concept is the recognition that the entire acquisition community needed to be integrated together with the network and closely tied with others in the platform world to streamline integration of new kit and capabilities, and lead the enterprise between eight program executive offices and 24 program managers to serve as the focal point of integration.

“I think that’ll go a long way for Next Gen C2 because you are talking about a very highly integrated set of solutions that spans … software, but it could also be the radios or networks that have anything to do with C2, and that could be any of the warfighting functions that are part of that spread across many different PMs, PEOs,” Welch said. “That trial boss concept, that mechanism of bringing that all together, is just going to become increasingly important because of the interdependence of all of these capabilities.”

When it comes to fielding the equipment, officials don’t anticipate the traditional process of going from select unit to select unit. Each one might be a little bit different and unique based on what the commander needs.

“We’ll be responsive to that and then we will continue to move on and then check back with them as we go forward,” Chaney said.

The integrated tactical network primarily focused on brigades for most of its existence prior to the Army making the division the main unit of action. Officials have said NGC2 fielding will likely be a little of both in the short term — fielding to brigades and divisions holistically.

“The ITN is already out there to the light units, about to go out to the heavy units. That momentum and that progress is going to continue. I think that highlights the complexity challenge of our network,” Mark Kitz, program executive officer for C3N, said at the Army’s technical exchange meeting in Savannah, Georgia, in December 2024. “We’ve been doing the ITN for six years. We fielded 15 percent of the Army. This idea that Next Gen C2 is just going to transform and change the Army next year — sorry, that’s not what’s going to happen.”

Other officials noted that the software aspect of NGC2 will make fielding to divisions easier while the hardware components are scoped out.

“The software components can switch in and out much more rapidly. That gives us some trade space … on what it looks like,” Alex Miller, chief technology officer for the chief of staff, said at the same conference. “If we go, hey, there’s a lot more flexibility in treating most of this like software, division fieldings become a lot easier because we can take some of the new radio, which, some of the secret sauce here is the C2 Fix comms infrastructure is giving us a real good look at what we can actually transition over.”

This will allow the Army flexibility to determine the right mix of proliferated low-Earth orbit space-related capabilities, cloud and other architectures.