U.S. Army’s nearly $4 billion battlefield communications bet to face its toughest test yet

The U.S. Army’s fiscal year budget request, released Tuesday, confirms the Next Generation Command and Control system is its biggest modernization project and a $4 billion bet on becoming the new communications platform for the military’s largest force.

The 4th Infantry Division will start the most demanding test yet of the new system next month at Fort Carson, Colorado, as the gloves come off. The exercise will span across southeastern Colorado as soldiers from multiple units are pitted against one another in an attempt to train with and stress the new technology, including using electronic warfare and cyberattacks.

Soldiers will run the system largely on their own in a fight against a thinking enemy — each other — without the defense contractors alongside them who spent the last year building the new communications and battle information platform.

“The Army doesn’t operate in perfect conditions. They’re operating in denied and degraded and intermittent communications scenarios,” Tom Keane, a senior vice president at Anduril Industries, told The Washington Times in an exclusive interview. “They’re able to operate disconnected and still be effective and still be in the fight.”

The training exercise, named Ivy Mass, will test exactly that. Mr. Keane said the California-based defense technology company is helping the Army leverage artificial intelligence down to the soldier level. Anduril leads a growing team of defense industry contractors building out the new capabilities.

“What this means is that warfighters are getting access to more data than they’ve ever had before,” he said. “What we’re doing as part of this large team that Anduril is leading is leveraging AI to make sense of this and to surface the most relevant information.”

This year’s budget request for the prototype program sits at $3.78 billion across multiple budget lines. The entire effort is meant to replace older communications platforms currently used by the Army. The new system integrates artificial intelligence tools and new data collection to move the military into a modern era of warfare.

The new digital communications backbone for warfare replaces or upgrades everything from soldiers’ radios to vehicle computers and logistics planning. The goal, according to the Army, is for the Next Generation Command and Control system, or NGC2, to combine all data available on a battlefield and make it accessible to commanders.

The Colorado exercise is meant to be a final test before shipping both the unit and the technology to California for what industry experts said is expected to be one of the largest exercises since World War II, Project Convergence Capstone 6.

“Ivy Mass is almost PCC6, the scale is just going to be larger,” Mr. Keane said. “We’ve got dozens more sensors coming in. We’ve got new unmanned systems platforms. We have a large number of new applications.”

Watching the war in Ukraine has driven a sense of urgency within the department, as U.S. defense planners saw Ukraine command posts become targets. Hierarchy-based radio systems — where traffic flows up to a large headquarters element — created identifiable signals on the battlefield. Russia exploited and targeted those signals.

Jon Patrick, vice president of business development at Persistent Systems, said the lesson shaped how his company designed and developed equipment that’s now part of NGC2.

“The command truck looks exactly like the gun,” Mr. Patrick told The Times, noting that holds true both physically and for the electronic signature of their radios. “It looks exactly like the soldiers that’s somewhere else. You can’t tell the difference.”

Persistent Systems, a New York-based defense technology firm, won an $87.5 million contract in February for those radio systems, bringing their total contract to $121.5 million to support NGC2.

The design is built around a mesh network — peer-to-peer communications that more closely resemble, and in some cases even use, commercial cell phone technology — where every point on the battlefield looks identical to an adversary scanning signals or looking at antennas.

Mr. Patrick’s team designed it to be what he called “a needle in a stack of needles,” taking away the ability to focus on eliminating headquarters and command posts based solely on signals analysis.

NGC2 is attempting to replace a patchwork of legacy systems — in some cases from soldiers using hardware that Gen. Patrick Ellis, the 4th Infantry Division commanding general, described as similar to “what their grandfather carried in Vietnam,” during a testing event in December.

Now, the new system is integrating everything from Starlink satellites in low earth orbit and new soldier-level radios into a unified, digital backbone.

“We’re ensuring that data-driven decision-making tools are in the right place at the right time from the command centers all the way down to the edge, to the soldiers,” Mr. Patrick said.

The new MPU5 radio sends data, voice transmissions and video over the same device, reducing the number of communications platforms on the battlefield for the Army.

But, the Army’s top modernization program hasn’t been without challenges.

“What we’ve learned is that the data is in many different places, so it’s not like we’re connecting to a singular system,” Mr. Keane said. “And then the consumers of that data are everywhere.”

Mr. Keane said part of creating NGC2 was just making the basic building blocks to ensure proper data communication between all of the different equipment the Army uses.

Much of the challenge over the past few months was taking older vehicle computers and monitors already inside Army equipment and shifting them to modern software.

During the last exercise to test NGC2, the program “tripled the size of the infrastructure that we were working on,” according to Mr. Keane. “The size has just become immense,” he said.

The program also replaced the Army’s artillery system, which was designed and developed in the 1980s.

The mesh design solves another problem: it allows one area to lose communication without sacrificing connections necessary for the operation.

In a recent test, the Army disconnected a company of rocket artillery from the rest of the formation. Separated from their higher headquarters, a group of HIMARS — High Mobility Artillery Rocket Systems — would normally go quiet.

“We said ‘All right, you need to do a HIMARS fire mission with the data that you have,’ ” Mr. Keane said. “They were able to share data with each other without it flowing up.”

Reaching this point required a year of development that looked nothing like traditional defense contracting. Engineers from a host of companies worked down with soldiers, sitting in Abrams tanks, next to howitzers, and training soldiers on their systems as they were being built.

“Our teams are there seven days a week with the soldiers iterating on these workflows,” Tara Dougherty, the CEO of Govini, told the Threat Status weekly podcast in an interview for a forthcoming episode. The company’s Ark program is being integrated into NGC2 as well, letting military planners make predictive requests for resources before conditions change. Ms. Dougherty called it “connecting the factory to the fight.”

“This is literally replacing whiteboards and cardboard in the back of the truck…moving to lightning speed models and AI planning,” she said.

Govini, Microsoft, Palantir, Shift5 and other software firms that are in the defense tech space are all part of “Team Anduril” to get these systems operational. Stepping away from the traditional single contractor product and development models was, according to the companies involved that The Times spoke to, critical.

“NextGen C2 would not be where it is if it were not for unbelievable Army leadership saying ‘We are going to break down the bureaucratic barriers that exist to data access and data sharing,” Ms. Dougherty said.

Along the way in testing and development, the Army has wanted to take more operational control. Each exercise has had less and less involvement by Team Anduril personnel, according to Mr. Keane, as they’ve trained different soldiers to be experts on the technology.

“It has to be the Army that’s running it,” Mr. Keane said. “That’s been our goal from the beginning.”

Next month’s test will be the first full opportunity to see if that holds true. The $3.78 billion budget revealed this week would fund two fully fielded divisions sometime in 2027. Whether that timeline holds up depends in part on what breaks next month in Colorado — and whether the soldiers running it can fix it themselves.