The Army’s dream of vastly simplified networking is starting to come true

Upgrades are making the Army’s battle network easier for soldiers to use, but it’s still not exactly what they’re asking for.

“It's really good, but it is extremely complicated and…it's better than what we had before,” Col. James Stultz, who leads the 2nd Brigade Combat Team, 101st Airborne Division, said of the nascent Integrated Tactical Network. “I'm not complaining, but it's a waypoint, it's not the end state.”

Today, the Army uses a myriad of means to transmit and receive voice calls and other data in the field: radios, satellite terminals, cell phones, and more. The ITN is an effort to combine the service’s existing gear with off-the-shelf products to improve connectivity and mission command.

Service leaders have been working to make that web more reliable, secure, and capable. Radio mesh networks, which are foundational to ITN, are good for calls or texts, and sending location data from Android Tactical Assault Kit, or ATAK. Satellite networks can handle large amounts of data, like a drone’s video feed, and are often used when a military unit is not in range of a cell tower. But threading it all together is tricky, so the Army selected units to test out network upgrades. 

The 101st Airborne Division, 82nd Airborne Division, and all of the Army’s Security Force Assistance Brigades are testing out the new tactical network to see how it improves command and control, or C2. As part of its unified network plan, the Army has a two-pronged approach to C2: one to improve existing gear that can be used today and another that looks at long-term next-generation solutions. 

“There's a lot of people that want it that don't have it…so we're in a have/have-not world in terms of ITN,” Stultz said. “I'm a big fan, but it's not a field-and-immediately-execute” type of capability. 

To fulfill their missions, units must be able to establish network connectivity in minutes and dismantle it just as fast. That’s especially true as front-line units lean more on drones and commercial technologies.

While the ITN is quicker to set up and improves communications, it requires commanders to develop technical expertise, Stultz said: “We have to understand where all the switches go and plug...We gotta get out of that.”

That learning curve is less than ideal, said Col. Joshua Glonek, who leads 10th Mountain Division’s 3rd Brigade Combat Team.

“We’re early in the fielding of it; we just got it. It has greatly increased our capability to communicate, but it does come with a significant amount of leader education to understand the integrated portion of the network. There's many different radios and components, and when configured appropriately, it allows you to do things like...dynamically adjust the waveforms you're communicating on,” such as switching between satellite communications to radios, Glonek said. “But you've got to be very smart and proficient on how to do that on the battlefield. I'd love to get to the point where we just pick up one device and we can do all that without having to, as commanders and staff, understand the intricacies of how to adjust the waveforms and the different parts of the network.”

Glonek and Stultz’s brigades are participating in the Army’s “transformation in contact” approach to test and field new technologies and used ITN in recent exercises

A win is a win

For years, the Army has sought to improve its networks so that brigade, corps, and division command posts can outsource heavy computing to somewhere else. Now the 101st’s work with ITN is proving out the concept, according to the Army’s program executive officer for command, control, communications, and networks.

“We walked into that unit eight months ago, they were purely secret, they were running compute in their brigades” with very large, conspicuous command posts, Mark Kitz told reporters on Monday. 

By replacing “secret”-level networking gear with “secure-but-unclassified-encrypted,” or SBU-E equipment, the 101st shrank its brigade command posts to just three vehicles that can be set up in about 20 minutes, Kitz said. Intelligence and sustainment work gets sent to division-level command posts, or even all the way back home to Fort Campbell, Kentucky. The concepts were tried out in recent exercises at the Joint Readiness Training Center in Louisiana.

The Army plans to build on those developments with the 25th Infantry Division in Hawaii, looking particularly at “digital fires,” or the software-based systems used for targeting, and improving networking with foreign militaries. Exercises in October should produce about nine things to improve and test in March, said Maj. Gen. Patrick Ellis, who leads the Army’s Network Cross Functional Team.

“Where the 101st left it is where the 25th started. So all the lessons we learned out of the Joint Readiness Training Center, they became the baseline,” Ellis said. “I think we're going to learn a lot out of the 25th’s rotation in the Pacific Theater: very heavily focused on mission partner environments, how do we incorporate allies and partners. They're making some huge gains in that space.” 

Ellis said the 25th is working through problems, such as transporting secure-but-unclassified-encrypted network traffic, but that solutions were on the horizon.

“There were a couple things there that weren't quite exactly the way we would have wanted them. And now it looks like that's been fixed and prepared. Cross-domain solutions are able to move that up and down so we can run the fires down into the SBUE architecture and run them back up. I think those are just small examples of it's not just the same-old, same-old,” he said.

Tech dreams v. reality

Is it even possible to realize Stultz’s dream of having the same simple device connectivity at home on a command post? 

Yes, it’s technologically possible to make “one magical radio that does it all…but you don't want to pay the price,” said Mike Sheehan, CEO of the defense and security division of Thales, a major supplier of military radios. “So instead of doing that, we've got a kit. It's a little Pelican box, and it's got in there five, six different types of radio: it's SATCOM, it's got lower frequency…you name it. And from there, you know, I'm a user, and I just say, ‘Send Message.’”

It’s also possible to bring your own network, said Rob Spalding, Sempre AI’s CEO and former special assistant to the U.S. Air Force vice chief of staff.

This week, Sempre AI unveiled its SEMPRE T Tactical Edge Node, which combines a data center and 5G network in a wheel-barrowable 300-pound box that can withstand electromagnetic pulse attacks and has a three-mile connection radius.  

The tech, which has caught the eye of Air Force Global Strike Command, took about six years to develop; shrinking down a 5G network was difficult, Spalding said. 

“A lot of people brought smartphones to Afghanistan and Iraq, but they didn't really work because they didn't connect to anything,” he said. 

The box can enable units to run Android Team Awareness Kit, or ATAK, locally without external network connection, like to a satellite, or use facial recognition software, mimicking the tech user experience “in a developed society…but bring it on the battlefield or bring it to the disconnected side.” 

But there’s concern the Army may not stick to its unified network vision.

“Everything you want to do in the network…you need a communication fabric. Otherwise it all breaks down. So the Army is about a third of the way through populating that. I hope they continue, because history shows that [the] next new thing comes up, we stop this, and we start looking at this. And that's what's happened for 40 years,” said Thales’ Sheehan. “Is there some technology that's going to pop up that might be superior? Yeah, maybe. But then you innovate it in.” 

Help Desk loading

One strand of the Army’s effort to streamline its communications is reducing the number of physical networks and centralizing their management. Three years ago, the service began working to collapse 42 networks into one by 2027; the service is currently down to about 14. A key part of that is getting everyone on the same “base services” and applications, Lt. Gen. John Morrison, deputy chief of staff for G-6, told reporters at the Association of the U.S. Army’s annual conference on Monday. 

“One is all of our office collaboration capabilities. We call it Army 365, everybody's going to use that environment. Endpoint security. So the security that you put on your phone or your PC, that's going to be centrally provided, the ability to connect to the network is going to be centrally provided. And by using those pillars, we'll call them, that makes network convergence that much easier, because now you have discrete capabilities that you can now align to,” Morrison said. 

Next year, the Army plans to consolidate all of its IT network management under Army Network Enterprise Technology Command, or NETCOM, making the Fort Huachuca, Arizona-based command a one-stop shop for all of the Army's network needs.

Doing that will allow units to go directly to Army Cyber Command and NETCOM when they have bad service while Army headquarters can “hold those units accountable for divesting of their legacy capabilities,” Morrison said.

So in the coming year, NETCOM will focus on endpoint device security, identity and access management, and expanding virtual desktop access, said Maj. Gen. Jacqueline McPhail, who leads the command. It will also work to improve its Army Enterprise Service Management Platform, a help desk that allows users to call or chat with a service provider.

McPhail said the command is also working with the program executive offices to make sure the technology soldiers use at the edge is compatible with enterprise networks, starting with security. 

“What we're doing with the security, incident, and event-management monitoring, we actually picked it up from the edge. We looked at what [program executive office command, control, communications and network] was rolling out, and we adopted their solution, and then worked it back to an enterprise. And that's a big shift culturally, and how we're delivering a capability,” she said. 

At the end of the day, the network has made progress, according to Morrison, the deputy chief of staff, G6. 

“When we talked last year this time, there was still that false divide between what we did at the strategic and operational levels and what we did at the tactical level. It was jerry-rigged at very, very, very best, and it was even worse, because inside our divisions, we had fragmented brigade networks,” he said. 

“What do you have today? You have one full division, now two, that are now capable of being able to put in a divisional architecture that seamlessly connects back to the operational strategic level that allows for the enablement of those cloud capabilities. Picture this on a JRTC rotation with an opposing force that is contesting you and the brigade commander is using the same system he uses in his office, and he was being contested. That never would have happened a year ago.”