If data is the new ammo, Army may need dedicated data formations: General

WASHINGTON — Controlling and managing the deluge of data in the modern Army could require the service to establish new formations dedicated to the task, according to a key Army officer.

“One of the things that we’re going to look at in there is as [Next Generation Command and Control (NGC2)] and data becomes really our ammunition, the question is, is there an organization designed to oversee data across the United States Army?” Deputy Chief of Staff of the G-6 Lt. Gen. Jeth Rey told Breaking Defense in an interview.

NGC2 is a sprawling effort to replace the Army’s command and control networks and infrastructure in order to pass data more efficiently from sensors to decision-makers to soldiers and everywhere in between. The ability to do so quickly, military leaders have said, will be key to victory — and survival — on the modern, data-soaked battlefield.

As such, Rey said the Army is exploring — but hasn’t decided on — whether it needs a dedicated formation to manage and integrate data across the entire Army, that spans from within the US to outside the nation’s borders, from garrison to the tactical edge. The formation would allow the Army to deliberately focus on standardizing data formats, ensuring interoperability, applying artificial intelligence and machine learning for insights, and ultimately enabling data-centric operations across the force, regardless of location, Rey said.

Information will not only need to be managed by individual units themselves to enable operations, but coordinated and integrated with joint and multinational data that will come together at the theater level for a joint combatant commander.

As for where the formation could fit in with NGC2, Rey said he envisions it as interacting with the application and data layers, where it would “oversee that exchange of data, not only within the Army, but all of the joint services and our coalition partners.” (NGC2 is made up of four layers, the other two being the transport layer, on which data is moved from one location to another, and the integration layer, where data flows from in and out of the unit and is triaged using artificial intelligence.)

Meanwhile, a parallel but similar effort under development involves the alignment of signal brigades and regional cyber centers to be under the operational control of the Army Service Component Commands (ASCC).

This touches not just the data, but is also about ensuring theater commanders have the necessary signal and cyber capabilities already assigned to their area of responsibility and tailored to their specific needs, especially in setting the theater with partners and allies, Rey said. This includes the authorities and relationships that come with the corps alignment directly to the combatant command.

“We are now trying to look at saying how does the signal regiment ensure that we’re transforming to support or enable that ASCC commander,” Rey said. “[We’re] taking a look at our formations in all of our [combatant commands], under all of our ASCCs and seeing where we make adjustments along the way.”

30-Month NGC2 Sprint

A prototype of NGC2 is expected to be run through the ringer at the Army’s Project Convergence Capstone 6 later this year, after which the service will decide how to begin buying and fielding the new tech to units across the service. Rey previously described the task as a 30-month sprint, a large part of which will be replacing legacy equipment to serve NGC2’s newer transport and infrastructure layers.

“Think of us as, like, we’re the road and highway, as we now put the cars on there, which is data and applications that are going to be moving along that highway and taking information to wherever it needs to go. Because data, obviously, is the ammunition that we used to do everything,” he said.

“We must insert into the formations the new transport and infrastructure layers, removing the legacy kit out of the formation. The legacy kit is trucks, it’s base band equipment and we’re talking about nearly 2 million pounds of base band transit cases and inserting that new, lighter and more maneuverable and capable, agile type of equipment into the formation all the way down to the edge.”

That legacy equipment mostly pertains to the remainder of Warfighter Information Network-Tactical (WIN-T) equipment that is still in formations. The Army first began fielding WIN-T more than 20 years ago, and the service determined in 2017 that its configuration was too “fragile” and “vulnerable”, launching a multi-year modernization effort.

While the Army has been providing new capabilities to units since that time, for the most part, only priority units such as light, airborne units for crisis response have received updates, leaving a large portion of the force still operating on legacy equipment.

“This is a deliberate and incredible phase approach. The team of G-3/5/7, the [centers of excellence], the Mission Command Center, here at the G-6 we’re all in concert looking at every division. This is 19 divisions across all compos, compo one, two and three,” Rey said. “We have the units lined up. It’s very deliberate to keep the units still capable of accomplishing their mission as we divest of the equipment and then reinvest in the new capabilities that we’re putting into formation with the training, the sprint training that we’re putting into the formations to get them up to speed on the new kit.”

The newer kits will include embedding transport and infrastructure layers with lighter and smaller equipment such as pLEO terminals to talk to low Earth orbit satellites.