Gen. Randy George, Army Chief of Staff, discusses Next Generation Command and Control (C2) system capabilities with a 1st Infantry Division Soldier during an integration demonstration man-machine at Project Convergence – Capstone 4, Fort Irwin, California, March 18. , 2024. PC-C4 is a U.S. Army-hosted joint and multinational experiment integrating modernization capabilities and training through multi-echelon persistent experimentation for the future operating environment that will take place from February 24 to March 20, 2024. (U.S. Army photo by Sgt. Brahim Douglas)
SAVANNAH, Ga. — The U.S. military has made improving its command and control capabilities a priority, but has shared relatively few details about exactly how it is pursuing the sprawling project.
But last week, at the service’s biannual technical exchange meeting, service officials delved deeper into plans for the C2 new generation (NGC2), revealing among other details a multi-tiered “technology stack” on which the capability will be built and how the industry can make it a reality.
“We’re really, no kidding, trying to do this differently than we’ve ever done before, without falling into certain traps.” Marc Kitzprogram manager Command, control, network communications wallet, told Breaking Defense.
The plan may seem a bit complicated, as Army officials acknowledged, so they urged the industry to keep an eye on the program’s constant evolution. characteristics of the need (CON).
“It’s not going to be a single empirical document that guides us,” Gen. Patrick Ellis, director of the Army’s Network Cross-Functional Team, said during a TEM panel. “There’s going to be several in there. As we write these multiple documents, we use them as our North Star to say, “Okay, this is what we’re trying to move towards.” » » (The document, first published in April, was last updated on December 1. 9.)
The document won’t be the only thing that’s constantly evolving. Officials said they try to build as much flexibility into the acquisition process as possible, both to encourage creativity among suppliers and to be able to exclude those who don’t.
“Actually, the government is not really good at building escape hatches into our contracts, and we need to do that,” said Alexander Miller, senior adviser for science and technology and chief technology officer to the Chief of the army staff, during a panel. “As much as we talk about recruiting the right players, we’re going to get rid of the bad players. If we’re not good teammates, and you’re not good teammates, or someone’s not a good teammate, we don’t want to team up with them.
Back to the stack
The technology stack, as described by Army officials and presented in a slide presentation at TEM, was included in the CON document to “drive home the importance of us having all of this in place,” he said. Joe Welch, command deputy. general to Army Futures Commandsaid during a panel.
At the top of the stack is the application layer, which is responsible for user-facing applications such as file transfer systems, web browsing, etc. – think about everything the user can see on the front end.
Below the application layer is the operating systems layer, the software layer that underpins the user interface. Welch called this layer the “integrated data layer” which is responsible for “all of the services, data interfaces, and data models that ultimately support these applications and enable applications to be built without having to rebuild services including other elements could already benefit. »
The third layer is the compute layer, which serves as the infrastructure layer that leverages the processing power used to run the application and the operating systems layer.
This may seem like fairly standard technology, but Welch said the compute layer “is enormously more difficult as we start to get into the tactical operational environment.” Computer resources are not as readily available in the field as in larger command posts or rear guard headquarters.
“It’s a very difficult optimization problem, and if it doesn’t work, the applications and services that I just mentioned, those top two layers, won’t work either,” Welch said.
The transport layer is at the bottom of the technology stack. This layer is responsible for managing data delivery between applications. It’s how data moves across the battlespace, Welch said.
Like Breaking Defense did reportedbattlefield bandwidth has become an obstacle in data-rich and/or electronically contested environments.
“They could be Wi-Fi. They could be radios, they could be mesh networks. They could be pleo (proliferated low Earth orbit satellites). These could be waveforms specifically designed to minimize our electromagnetic signature. It could be all of these, right? So it has to work transparently as well,” he said.
When finding the right tools for layers of the technology stack, Welch said the department needed to maintain standardization of application programming interfaces, or APIs, into account.
“A lot of the challenges we face today with our systems is the lack of a standard way of communicating between these layers. The layers are constructed disparately and there is also no communication between them. So that’s a main focus area that we’re going to have. The goal is to have open, standardized APIs, but how you get there will be very deliberate,” he said.
Stay flexible
However, the technology stack, as described last week, may not be the same as what the Army wants next month or next year. Ultimately, layers could be added as the service and its vendors establish the necessary capabilities and requirements through trial and error, Welch said.
He emphasized that as a result, the service will write less prescriptive requirements, while still giving industry sufficient insight into what the Army needs for NGC2.
“We continue to get better at describing the characteristics of problems in the solution space, but we still can’t get prescriptive in the sense of, ‘This is the technology we need, this is the vendor we need to go to. we have to get it,’ these types of things,” Welch said in an interview on the sidelines of the conference. “It depends even more on the attributes of the solutions than on the solutions themselves. »
In another effort to create more flexibility in the program, the Army will not have a single lead systems integrator for NGC2, but will instead have a few team leaders, Kitz said in an interview.
“Having competition and giving our users the ability to prototype with more than one solution is potentially powerful, and it also drives industry investment because there are more opportunities for the industry.” We certainly want to avoid this burden, don’t we? We don’t want an (integrator) who’s going to run us for the next 10 years, do we? We want constant competition. We constantly want a new team.