When it comes to developing the next generation command and control systems, the Army is taking a different approach to capture those requirements.
The team working on program development issued a characteristics of need late in 2024 that focuses on the end result and not the map for getting there.
Joe Welch, the deputy to the commanding general of the Army Futures Command, said the characteristics of need is a central starting point for the NGC2 program.
“The characteristic of need is really a signal to industry that we have a problem, and we have a problem statement, and we have an idea about what the solution or solutions may be, and then we think they have some characteristics associated with them,” said Welch in an interview with Federal News Network at the recent Army TEM conference in Savannah, Ga. “But it’s really more of a signal that we’re dealing with a complex problem and that we really need to understand industry’s input into our problem statement, not into what we are saying the solution needs to be, but what our problem is. So that’s really what the characteristic of need statement is all about.”
The Army released the characteristics of need for NGC2 in mid-December. It is a precursor to a bigger multi-year effort to update and standardize command and control across the service.
The Army Futures Command is taking on the job to create the requirements documents to meet the end goals defined by Command and Control Cross Functional Team. The futures command then will provide those documents to the Program Executive Office for Command, Control, Communications and Networks (PEO-C3N) for the solutions.
This multi-organization effort is a recognition that building the next generation of command and control is a lot more difficult and complex than previous development efforts.
Welch said with the range of technology solutions available and the idea that needs and technologies will continually evolve, NGC2 must be agile enough to meet the needs of commanders and soldiers as they emerge.
Always incorporating lessons
The Army has been working on NGC2 for much of the past two years, releasing the first version of the characteristics of need in late spring 2024 and then using an exercise called NetModX to help further refine the document.
The current approach to command and control is disparate and lacks interoperability. A common complaint among commanders is they don’t train as they would fight, which means learning new systems and capabilities in theater.
Welch said the characteristics of need is a living document and will continue to evolve as the Army tests out new technologies and processes.
“The single biggest thing that I think that we learned through this experimentation that we did back in the fall called NetModX is if you think about different war fighting functions and the data and information needed to support those and how they come together for a commander, the need to provide more rapid situational understanding to be able to make more rapid decisions,” Welch said on Ask the CIO. “We had some experimentation with that earlier in the year at Project Convergence, Capstone Four, what we hadn’t done yet is put it over what I’ll call a representative network, the type of processing, compute network solutions, radio solutions, the way that we manage those bits and bytes on the battlefield. We really hadn’t kind of coupled those things together yet. We did that at NetModX, and it just drove home the challenges that we saw there.”
The Army Futures Command took those lessons and updated characteristics of need that incorporates the need for a more cohesive technology stack that stretches from the data to the applications to the transport.
Welch said the characteristics of need included a new section to signal the importance of not piecemealing the NGC2 solution together.
Army TEM 14 is coming
When it comes to the NGC2 technology stack, Welch said the application layer has to be focused on the user’s needs.
“One thing that modern applications have in common most of the time is that you don’t really need a whole lot of training in order to get started on it. When you download an app onto your phone, generally, you’re able to start using it even if you haven’t done it before because that’s a very highly specialized skill set in order to make something intuitive right to understand. That has been in the characteristic of need from the first one that we did back in May, the level of intuitiveness,” he said. “If we can get that piece right, then all the other layers below it that help support that.”
With a goal of implementing the initial capabilities of NGC2 by 2026, Welch said much of the next year will focus on piloting and prototyping technologies and processes with a host of vendors.
The Army is hosting Technical Exchange Meeting (TEM) 14 in Grapevine, Texas where it will meet with vendors about the acquisition strategy, the technology roadmap and technology discriminators. The Army released a request for information to help decide which vendors to meet with. Responses are due by March 19.
Welch said the pilots and prototypes are focused both on technology as well as how the Army works with teams of vendors in that space.
“What we’re about to move into with the acquisition team is what they’re what they’re talking about as a prototype. We’re going to be building that to a bit of a larger scale, working with contract processes that are that are that are built to handle that larger scale, keeping our options open to learn from that and iterate,” he said. “We’re trying to move very quickly, but we are also keeping our decision space open, especially in this very important area of how we’re going to continue to contract for this activity, so that we can incorporate the lessons that we have learned when we get to kind of the initial, larger scale capability in 2026 before we start really expanding that out to much more of the Army.”
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