Mobile app gives armor soldiers a training simulator in their pockets

A recently launched mobile software application merges virtual armor training with a video game-like experience on a soldier’s smartphone.

The application, called the Standardized Armor Base of Training-Experimental, or SABO-X, has been a featured simulator training system for armor soldiers in an office setup.

But since the mobile app came online in August, leaders are hoping that it will help soldiers practice more of their gunnery skills while also providing detailed feedback to the Army as the service looks to improve its use of firepower by armored formations.

Command Sgt. Maj. Raymond Harris, senior enlisted leader at Training and Doctrine Command, specifically named the application as one that soldiers should be using.

“It’s a virtual, tabletop way to train on the Abrams, Bradley and soon the M10 Booker,” Harris said.

First soldiers pin on the master gunner identification badge

The M10 Booker is the Army’s newest armored fighting vehicle. It is a tracked vehicle that comes equipped with a 12.7mm heavy machine gun, 7.62mm machine gun and 105mm M35 tank gun.

With the mobile app, soldiers don’t have to reserve limited time in an on-post simulator to practice their craft.

“Once you do get those things you’ve got to embrace them and you’ve got to use them,” Harris said.

Tapping away at a smartphone may not closely resemble firing real rounds downrange, but any extra practice could help, he added.

And the Army has been working on improving its gunnery for tanks and Bradleys since at least 2021.

Lt. Col. Chuck Bies and Command Sgt. Maj. John Kurtzhals explained, in detail, a notable increase in qualified tank and Bradley crews in the 1st Battalion, 68th Armor Regiment out of Fort Carson, Colorado.

The pair co-authored an article, “The Gunnery Training Program,” published in Armor magazine’s Winter-Spring edition.

Earlier this year, Bies served as a senior observer at the National Training Center at Fort Irwin, California, and Command Sgt. Maj. John Kurtzhals was assigned as the senior enlisted leader for 3rd Armored Brigade Combat Team, 1st Cavalry Division at Fort Cavazos, Texas.

The duo noted that from 2021 to 2023, the battalion was able to increase its number of qualified tank crews and Bradley crews by 87% and 29%, respectively.

The pair credited skills training, platform preparation and simulator use as factors behind the improvement.

However, soldiers during that time relied on installation-based simulator systems, which required certified simulator operators. The operator’s course for the Abrams platform was no longer supported by the Army.

That meant the battalion master gunners had to develop their own simulator operator training and certification course to effectively use the simulators for their tank simulation training, the pair wrote.

The SABOT-X software collects performance data on how soldiers operate these virtual machines.

The Combined Arms Center then uses trends in the output data to analyze training and determine how gunnery courses for armor soldiers can be improved, said Gen. Gary Brito, TRADOC commander.

SABOT-X is one of about nine TRADOC mobile applications on the Apple App Store. It is the only one currently available that is specific to soldier combat skills.

Why Army divisions must prepare to get dirty

During this past year the Army sent a division headquarters and its enablers into a large-scale, on-the-ground exercise to learn how these personnel groups will approach surviving the next war.

It was the first time in decades that division headquarters and the myriad units it would go into combat with — a combat aviation brigade, sustainment, air defense brigade and division artillery — trained together in person.

But it certainly will not be the last.

The 1st Infantry Division, which is based out of Fort Riley, Kansas, is slated for its headquarters rotation earlier next year at the National Training Center, Fort Irwin, California, as the Army continues its years-long shift from focusing on brigade-level conflict to division-centric fighting.

Army leaders announced the brigade-to-division change — and even corps-level units — as the center of the service’s fight in 2022. Last year Gen. Andrew Poppas, head of Forces Command, unveiled the move to deploying division headquarters to the training centers.

Divisions in the Dirt: The Army’s plan for the next big war

If the 1st Infantry Division has any questions, they’d do well to talk with 1st Armored Division, out of Fort Bliss, Texas.

That is the unit, after all, that was recently digging in, moving, sensing and shooting on the fly in ways that a division headquarters has never done.

Maj. Gen. James Isenhower III commanded the 1st Armored Division during its tour at NTC. The mission involved 3,000 soldiers and 900 vehicles in the execution of a fictitious battle.

But beyond those resources, Isenhower had a total of 70,000 virtual fighters at his fingertips as he mapped out an attack of the opposition force.

The real soldier participants conducted a deep helicopter attack using two dozen Apaches and support aircraft over a distance of 350 miles round trip, Isenhower said.

Often the two-star’s team turned off all their electronic gear and only used commercial satellite gear to communicate, a move Isenhower said decreased the division’s electromagnetic signature by a factor of nine.

“Current communications platforms are targeting beacons,” Isenhower said.

That mattered because to slim down their footprint, the headquarters left a number of elements back at Fort Bliss, which is more than 800 miles away.

“Command post survivability is about looking unimportant,” Isenhower added.

Trimming those command nodes also mattered.

The training center opposition forces simulated 100 artillery strikes each day. With every strike, Isenhower’s soldiers had to conduct maneuvers.

The center staff also sent swarms of 20 drones, sometimes as many as six times a day, to attack visiting units.

While the unit used new technology and slimmed down its formations for a more nimble fighting force, the two-star noted that there were some basic practices that helped the most.

The division headquarters and the supporting brigades must practice fieldcraft at their home station, he said. That means setting up the vehicle, camouflage netting and testing gear in the field before heading to the training center.

The headquarters must practice its targeting and digital gunnery with the subordinate units, Isenhower added, to be successful in the rapid-fire fight that they will face at the center.

From drone swarms to exoskeletons, Army charts path for robotic future

As the Army updates how it uses robots and autonomous systems in the next fiscal year, drone swarms, automated convoy operations and an exoskeleton to lighten the load are on the horizon.

The Army released its Robotics and Autonomous Systems, or RAS, strategy in 2017 with a series of near-, mid- and long-term priorities.

Since the release, the service has met its early goals, which included lightening the load for dismounted soldiers, automating some parts of ground resupply and adding more robots in dangerous jobs such as explosive ordnance disposal.

Stuart Hatfield, a division chief at the Army headquarters soldier resourcing programs, shared current and future projects for the robot-soldier future, spanning from now through 2030.

Is this unit the future of Army combat formations?

“The RAS strategy priorities I don’t think are going to change even as we update our strategy,” Hatfield said at the September National Defense Industrial Association’s annual Future Force Capabilities Conference.

New projects, Hatfield said, include Tethered-Unmanned Aircraft Systems; medium-sized Joint Tactical Autonomous Aerial Resupply System; the Common Robotic System Medium variant; the Dismounted Unit Soldier Transport, or DUST; a first-person-view drone option and an exoskeleton for dismounted soldiers.

While he didn’t share timelines on specific systems, some of the capabilities are expected to arrive in the coming years.

Funding for these programs has increased steadily over the past decade. The Army got its first $7 million from Congress for robot strategy work in fiscal 2015; that grew to $335 million in the fiscal 2021 budget. For fiscal 2025, the current request is for $480 million, according to budget documents.

A version of the DUST device was in use during the recent rotation of the 2nd Brigade, 101st Airborne Division at the Joint Readiness Training Center at Fort Johnson, Louisiana, in August.

During the rotation, soldiers used a kind of motor-assisted wheelbarrow device previously called the Silent Tactical Energy Enhanced Dismount, or STEED, to move gear and role-playing “wounded” soldiers.

It’s a simpler device than some of the more complex technology that the Army is testing in other areas, but it does take a load off the soldier. The STEED can travel 15 to 30 miles on a single battery pack and carry up to 500 pounds, according to manufacturer Hendrick Motorsports.

The Common Robotic System Medium variant — currently under development — is a larger version of the individual model. The individual variant, which has been fielded to some Army units, is a 32-pound tracked robot with multiple cameras and an extendable arm that can fit into a rucksack.

The medium version would be capable of carrying more equipment and a variety of payloads that could include sensing devices or weapons platforms.

As far as robot-driven vehicle convoys, Army Times reported work back in 2021 that had already seen soldiers running 2,000 unmanned miles. The convoys were not entirely “robotic” but instead featured a single, manned vehicle and nine “follower” vehicles.

“We’ve got the robotic applique, which takes robotic technology and applies it to currently manned systems and makes them optionally [manned],” Hatfield said.

The focus in 2021 was to use medium-sized trucks with pallet loads, a typical resupply that soldiers might have experienced during the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Those convoys were often the target of attacks by insurgents and terrorists. The Army and other services are working on a variety of resupply methods, including drones.

But ground vehicles will continue to fit into the work as those platforms can carry more cargo than other options for land-based forces.

A full combat “Iron Man”-style suit has been in some sort of development for decades now. The Tactical Assault Light Operator Suit, or TALOS, was proposed by U.S. Special Operations Command officials in 2013.

But in subsequent efforts, the Pentagon decided to pursue parts of the total-body system instead of a do-it-all suit.

That’s resulted in some simplified attachments that take the strain off heavy loads by supporting a soldier’s hips, lower back and legs.

Army weighing sending missile defense prototypes forward into theater

Tasked by the Army Chief of Staff Gen. Randy George, the service’s missiles and space shop is examining the possibility of sending new air and missile defense capabilities still in the prototype phase into theater, the program executive officer told Defense News.

“The chief has challenged us and has asked us to look at opportunities, present some options, by which we would accelerate [the Integrated Battle Command System] to the field, accelerate [the Lower Tier Air and Missile Defense Sensor] to the field and accelerate some of the [Indirect Fire Protection Capability] capabilities to the field,” Maj. Gen. Frank Lozano said in an interview ahead of the Association of the U.S. Army’s annual conference.

Both the Raytheon-developed LTAMDS and Leidos’ Dynetics-made IFPC have experienced successful test events over the past year.

“We’ve really had some great success on the test range,” Thomas Laliberty, Raytheon’s land and air defense systems president, told Defense News. “We produced six production representative units [and] delivered those probably faster than any radar of that magnitude has ever been produced.”

And while the large live-fire tests get the most attention, “we’ve been doing all the other testing that makes a system like LTAMDS something that you can deploy,” Laliberty said.

The PEO is working to assess courses of action alongside Army staff and the Army Futures Command’s air-and-missile defense cross functional team at Fort Sill, Oklahoma.

The assessment includes the possibility of sending the systems to either U.S. Central Command, U.S. European Command or U.S. Indo-Pacific Command areas of operation in some combined form, according to Lozano.

“There’s a lot of pros and cons with doing that,” he said.

Also included in the assessment will be analyzing how reliable the prototypes might be. IBCS, for instance, has reached full operational capability and is in early fielding, but the LTAMDS radar, which will replace the Patriot air–and-missile defense system, is in prototype testing and evaluation. The IFPC capability is also in early tests.

A major benefit to getting the prototypes out to soldiers in theater is the early real-world feedback the systems would receive, allowing the Army to improve and adapt the systems at a faster pace, Lozano explained.

“We’re looking at where can we put these systems to where, one, it’s most beneficial to the soldiers, because there are soldiers engaged in an active counter-[unmanned aircraft systems] fight in CENTCOM right now.

“We have soldiers forward deployed in Poland operating Patriot systems and we have soldiers in the 94th [Army Air and Missile Defense Command] operating in INDOPACOM with the 1st Multidomain Task Force,” Lozano said.

Poland is signed on to buy LTAMDS and is already incorporating IBCS into its Patriot batteries.

But the service is also looking at where prototypes provide a complementary benefit to the ongoing base program efforts, Lozano added.

“CENTCOM would be a great option relative to providing soldiers capability, but because it’s a very harsh environment and it’s an operational environment the risks are different,” he said.

One issue would be the ability to forward deploy testers and evaluators because the soldiers are in a real conflict zone, and “we don’t want to detract from the mission that’s going on there,” Lozano said.

In EUCOM, there are ongoing operations that would provide the prototypes real world data, but there are a lack of suitable test ranges, Lozano noted.

And one capability might be more suitable for one theater and mission as opposed to another.

“IFPC would look good for CENTCOM employment, but maybe LTAMDS not so much,” Lozano said.

In INDOPACOM, the Army is working with the 94th AAMDC to understand the benefits of a unit receiving LTAMDS or IBCS. One would be that the theater has three major test ranges: the Reagan Test Center at Kwajalein Atoll, the PMRF in Hawaii and the Kodiak Range in Alaska.

Capability in the Pacific could also help “in activities associated with the deterrence of the [China],” Lozano said.

The Army will work on possible plans over the next 90 days, looping in top officials like the Army vice chief of staff and the acquisition chief.

“I would suspect that after the first of the year, we’ll have something nailed down that we would like to execute,” Lozano said. “Every combatant command is important. … Rather than load down one command with all these capabilities, we’re trying to see what would be an equitable spread, but also beneficial to the command, the program office and the Army staff to further the development of the capabilities at a rapid pace.”

Officials move to purge stale weapon requirements from Army books

The Army has begun weeding through its mountain of formal requirements for any equipment or resources — from networks to weapons — it may look to discard due to their stale or outdated nature, top Army officials told Defense News. Simultaneously, the service is beginning to asses what potential modifications may make other resources worth pursuing.

To streamline the strenuous task of combing through its books, the service is employing automation tools, Army Chief of Staff Gen. Randy George said in a recent interview ahead of the Association of the U.S. Army’s annual conference.

In Pentagon-speak, requirements describe desired capabilities that the military wants to have. There’s a sizable bureaucracy in the armed forces devoted to creating and refining requirements, passing them to acquisition specialists as the basis for eventual programs. Lousy requirements have led to billions of dollars wasted in the Army and elsewhere in the U.S. military.

The service’s new process is essentially an Army Requirements Oversight Council event, but in reverse. Instead of approving new requirements, as the panel usually does, the service approves their removal. The Army is calling it CORA, which is coincidentally a backwards “AROC,” but it stands for Continuous Objectives Requirements Analysis, Lt. Gen. Karl Gingrich, Army deputy chief of staff G-8, told Defense News in a separate interview.

The G-8 staff is in charge of matching up various resources with the Army’s plans and strategies. Part of the G-8′s duties is to conduct the AROC process.

CORA is about taking a look at all of the Army’s existing requirements and gauging where money is spent and whether investment should continue, George said.

“Is it additive capability or is it war-winning capability? We need to focus as much as we can on war-winning capability and that obviously requires tough choices,” he said.

“There will probably be some significant decisions on what it is that we’re going to stop doing,” he said.

Yet there are also requirements that may still be valid, but the Army recognizes it needs to change the approach in fulfilling those requirements, George explained.

For example, he said, there are a number of requirements directly related to the network.

As the service works on modernizing the network and its command-and-control systems, “I think we’re learning that we can probably go pretty quick on this given where technology is,” reducing vehicle-sized server stack of yore to a simple app, for example, George said.

So far, the Army has been able to inactivate 52 legacy requirements documents, including the Desert Mobility Vehicle System, the Advanced Anti-tank Weapon System-Heavy, the Vehicle Magnetic Signature Duplicator and Sense and Destroy Armor Artillery Munitions.

The AROC panel also considered inactivating the Standardized Integrated Command Post System, or SICPS, a legacy post which still costs the Army several hundred million dollars across the next five year plan. The Army is planning to review how it can take SICPS funding for redirection opportunities toward higher-priority Mission Command programs.

The Continuous Objectives Requirements Analysis team is now looking at the Army’s Advanced Field Artillery Tactical Data System, or AFATDS, robotics in support of Human-Machine Integrated Formations, legacy wheeled vehicles, and the effort to “fix” command-and-control systems currently in the inventory, known as C2FIX.

“CORA analysis for these topics includes a review of requirement documents within the topic ‘Battlespace’, a validation of associated resourcing, and identification of associated and related documents and resourcing,” a statement sent to Defense News from the Army G-8 office said.

The Army’s effort to clean house on its requirements would be unwieldy, but it is using automation and artificial intelligence capabilities developed through Army Futures Command to look through everything the service has in every database for every program. The algorithm reveals how much money is being spent on systems in detail, how many people are involved and how much is budgeted in the future, according to George.

“We can basically ask it any question. Some people don’t like some of the questions we ask it because they don’t necessarily like the answers,” George said. But, “this gets back to what we’re trying to do … we’re trying to change really fast.”

Yearly, the Army performs what is called a “divestiture AROC,” Gingrich said, where it takes a look at legacy equipment that is no longer valid but still on a unit’s Modified Table of Organization and Equipment, also known as MTOE.

“That’s part of cleaning up our books on the MTOE side,” he added. By contrast, the CORA process looks at the totality of validated Army requirements, some dating back decades.

The program is able to identify requirements that never received resources or against which nothing was ever fielded. It can also find associations to funding streams that are better directed elsewhere, Gingrich explained.

“All of our documents, you can think of PDFs from back in the 1990s all the way up to PDFs today, are very hard to mine that unless you use something like a native language translator and so you essentially use that tool to go through, highlight what documents to look at, and then the human can focus in on that document and make the final assessment,” he said.

While the automation software is used to determine CORA candidates, the capability is also helping the Army’s Strategic Portfolio Analysis Review process and designing five-year funding plans.

“Across the entire Army, we’re trying to embrace automation,” Gingrich said.

Soldiers will get $240 a month for operational deployments

Soldiers deployed for more than 60 days in an Army operation will now receive an extra $240 each month.

For those already deployed, the cash benefit is retroactive to Oct. 1, said Secretary of the Army Christine Wormuth.

Army announces upcoming brigade overseas deployments

The new benefit, dubbed “operational deployment pay,” is specifically for operational deployments and does not cover exercises at the combat training centers, Wormuth said. For example, the pay is intended for brigades and battalions who’ve deployed to Europe for Operation Assurance, she said.

“That is both to recognize the hardship of being away from families but also the rigors of deployment,” Wormuth said.

Wormuth and Army Chief of Staff Gen. Randy George told media about the new initiative during a press conference Monday at the Association of the U.S. Army’s Annual Meeting and Exposition in Washington, D.C.

The pay benefit isn’t a limited-time offer, Wormuth said; instead, it is the new standard for operational deployment pay moving forward for the service.

Soldiers receive the same amount regardless of rank or billet, George said, much like other pay linked to job duties.

“If you get jump pay, jump pay is the same for everybody,” he said.

The new pay is in addition to existing deployment and other duty pay. Some examples include assignment incentive pay, hazardous duty incentive pay and combat zone tax exclusion.

Military.com reported in September on a draft memo the Army had not yet finalized that looked at monthly pay for operational deployments that ranged between $210 and $450. The news outlet reported that original plans would have tied the pay to rank.

Despite the end of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, much of the Army, especially certain job fields such as armor and air defense, are deployed at levels that reach what soldiers saw during the Global War on Terror.

Sensor upgrades next up for the Army’s new rifle and machine gun

The next developments for the Army’s newest rifle and machine gun may have more to do with software than bullets.

The Army fielded its first batch of the Next Generation Squad Weapon, or NGSW, system to soldiers from the 101st Airborne Division earlier this year. Meanwhile, officials overseeing the program recently announced the next dozen units to receive the weapons systems over the coming year, with many of the personnel expected to field the new equipment assigned to Pacific-focused units.

For most of those units, that new arsenal will include the rifle, automatic rifle and the fire control, or weapon’s optic. But beyond the changes to firearms themselves, it’s the fire control, known as the XM157, that’s likely to see the most substantial development in the coming years.

Army finally picks an optic for Next Generation Squad Weapon

The high-tech optic is more than just a simple rifle scope. It contains a ballistics calculator and a built-in range-finding module that help shooters determine their aiming point and adjust their fire as they go.

It also includes an atmospheric sensor, compass and both visible and infrared aiming lasers.

For any personnel other than snipers or special operators, the elaborate optic system has been unavailable until now. And even those troops who have received it have often had to combine multiple devices to access some of those features when shooting.

The fire control also features wireless connectivity, allowing users to potentially work with the Integrated Visual Augmentation System, or IVAS, a helmet-mounted situational awareness and night vision device that’s currently under development as part of a joint venture between the Army and Microsoft.

Weapons developers, however, are looking to the defense industry for more.

“We’re trying to create a market space for sensor development to ‘plug and play’ on top of that,” said Col. Jason Bohannon, head of Program Executive Officer-Soldier Lethality.

Bohannon added that the Army plans to unveil more details of what the service is potentially looking for at upcoming industry events.

The new weapons, meanwhile, pack the punch of an all-new caliber — the Army-designed 6.8mm — which extends the range and power of the individual rifle, the XM7, and automatic rifle, the XM250.

For units receiving them, the XM7 and XM250 are the replacements for the older M4 carbine and M249 Squad Automatic Weapon, respectively, which both chambered 5.56mm ammunition.

The weapons are being fielded first by personnel assigned to close combat units, such as infantry, combat engineers and special operations troops. The rest of the Army will continue to be outfitted with the M4 and M249 for the foreseeable future.

The tech of the fire control is vital in order to take full advantage of the added range and barrier-busting abilities of a round that matches or exceeds the performance of a heavier caliber, the 7.62mm, which is the M240 machine gun’s round size for platoon-level fires, experts said.

To help meet those expectations, the Army in 2022 chose firearms manufacturer Sig Sauer to produce the NGSW and at least some of the new 6.8mm ammo. The initial contract that was awarded featured a 10-year, $20.4 million agreement for the company to produce the first batch of rifles, Army Times previously reported.

The fire control contract, which was also awarded in 2022, went to the Vortex Optics subsidiary Sheltered Wings. The maximum quantity under that contract was set at 250,000 fire control optics systems, which came with a price tag of $2.7 billion, Army Times previously reported.

On the weapon’s side of development, soldiers at Fort Campbell, Kentucky, in October are conducting a user assessment of the systems, Lt. Col. Trond Ruud, PEO Soldier product manager for the Next Generation Squad Weapon and fire control optic, told Army Times.

In 2025, Army personnel are expected to conduct testing on the weapon’s system and fire control in hot weather and tropic settings, Ruud added.

The following units are slated to the receive the weapon next, with rollout of the systems scheduled between October and September 2025, Army Times previously reported:

Army Reserve’s 100th Infantry Battalion, 442nd Infantry Regiment at Fort Shafter, HawaiiElements of the 25th Infantry Division, at Schofield Barracks, HawaiiArmy Ordnance School, at Fort Gregg-Adams, Virginia3rd Brigade, 101st Airborne Division at Fort Campbell, Kentucky2nd Battalion, 75th Ranger Regiment at Joint Base Lewis-McChord, Washington1st Brigade, 1st Armored Division, at Fort Bliss, Texas1st Battalion, 75th Ranger Regiment at Hunter Army Airfield, Savannah, Georgia1st Brigade, 34th Infantry Division, with the Minnesota Army National GuardMultiple 10th Mountain Division battalions, Fort Drum, New York

As the weapons and optics are gradually distributed across the force, Sig Sauer will be busy producing the new 6.8mm round at its facility in Arkansas. The Army is also adding a dedicated line of 6.8mm production at its Lake City Army Ammunition Plant in Independence, Missouri, Bohannon noted.

The 6.8mm munition will be made the standard ball ammunition round, which is the common round used in combat.

Additionally, Joint Program Executive Officer Armaments and Ammunition is now working on a reduced-range 6.8mm round, said Col. Steven Power, program manager for maneuver ammunition systems at JPEO armaments.

The reduced-range round will allow soldiers to test fire the Next Generation Squad Weapon on already established ranges that were designed for 5.56mm weapons systems.

Project Convergence to plant a flag in the Pacific

The military’s massive experimentation event, Project Convergence, will plant a flag in the strategically vital Pacific region next year, the first time that U.S. and allied forces will kick the tires of the Pentagon’s latest warfighting concepts at the edge of America’s sphere of influence.

“Our large experiments need to be concept-informed, and the concepts we’re talking about are the sets of capabilities and relationships that we think we’re going to need to win in the operating environments we are going to face in the future,” said Army Brig. Gen. Zachary Miller, who heads the Joint Modernization Command at Fort Bliss, Texas. “And the priority theater for the Department of Defense is the Pacific.”

The joint force has simulated Pacific scenarios in the United States during previous iterations of the exercise, which began as an Army-only event in 2020 at Yuma Proving Ground, Arizona. But the experimentation campaign has never been held forward in relevant theaters aside from some peripheral activities at the Army Pacific headquarters level earlier this year, Miller said.

Project Pacific

The vast majority of the experimentation at Project Convergence is now slated to take place in Hawaii and Guam, then all the way out along the first island chain from Japan to the Philippines, and down under in Australia over the month of April.

“We are 100% taking what you saw in a bunch of tents next to each other at Camp Pendleton last year and putting it in the Pacific across both sides of the international date line in the headquarters of all the actual operational units,” Miller said.

Japan’s Ground Self Defense Force will be a full participant as well as Australia and the rest of the Five Eyes partners — Canada, New Zealand and the United Kingdom. The Philippines will be considered an observer for this round.

The Army’s 3rd Multidomain Task Force will be in Australia for the event, and the 1st MDTF will be in the Philippines. This summer, Australian officers embedded with the 3rd MDTF, and the 1st MDTF has already participated in exercises in the Philippines, including Balikatan in May.

The campaign is expected to more closely align the Army and the other services with the Air Force’s Agile Combat Employment concept and to work closely with the air service’s Battle Network, Miller said. “We want to bridge air and space with the land and the sea.”

The Air Force’s Agile Combat Employment doctrine prescribes that formations of planes and drones must be prepared to take off and land from dispersed, less-than-ideal runways during a future conflict, especially one involving China. The efforts grew from the expectation that enemies will first target large U.S. air bases hosting concentrated air power if war breaks out, thereby decimating the strategic advantage of aerial overmatch.

At the spring event, the U.S. military services and international partners will try to bring their massive array of sensors across all the different domains into one picture. “We’ve made a lot of strides in that, we want to push forward on how we quickly turn that information into action,” Miller noted.

Going back to Cali

While Project Convergence will feature a complex scenario in the Pacific, officials will still conduct another scenario at the National Training Center at Fort Irwin, California. That vignette is focused on the land domain, but with joint and international participation as well. Other U.S. locations include the Nevada Test and Training Range and San Clemente Island off the shores of Camp Pendleton, California.

“We will have live aircraft doing sensing, shooting live fires,” Miller said, and the Army will have every echelon of the 18th Airborne Corps participating.

A fair amount of experimentation will bleed over into what the Army Chief of Staff Gen. Randy George is calling “transforming in contact.” The initiative gives up-and-coming capabilities to brigade-size units at scale to gauge their expected impact in the field.

Portions of the Army’s initiative to fix the current network and command-and-control capabilities to better fit into a next-generation C2 framework will also be under evaluation.

And the Army will build off its first major attempt in early 2024 to examine how humans and robots will fight together on the battlefield — an effort known as human-machine integration, according to Miller. The experimentation event will use the Army’s Next-Generation C2 capabilities — a pilot program based on a new battlefield network and C2 architecture — to coordinate it all.

Guided by Next-Gen C2 features, the human-machine integration event “is going to lead off with a breaching of a complex obstacle, meaning that’s going to have mines, it’s going to have wire, it’s going to have fires on it from the enemy and it will be done completely autonomously,” Miller said. “Normally you think about people having to drive vehicles up to explosively destroy things or cut wire or whatever and that will be done completely with some pretty novel approaches to it.”

The Army will also focus on bringing in launched effects that can be fired from a wide variety of platforms like helicopters, drones, high-altitude balloons or from the ground, according to Miller. “The air will be contested and congested,” he said. “It will be very hard to distinguish whose thing is there in the air, and it’s going to be hard to control that airspace.”

The Army will also increase its experimentation on maneuvering in the electromagnetic spectrum. As the service crafts its next warfighting concepts, Miller said, one of the emerging ideas calls for effective maneuvering in the electromagnetic spectrum just like the Army conducts ground maneuver. “It is a sea change in how we would operate because we can’t see the electromagnetic spectrum, but we have to protect ourselves. We have to attack the enemy in it. We have to identify, we have to deceive the enemy.”

Army to harvest ‘dogs of the fleet’ in bid to boost weapon readiness

The Army wants to track down maintenance-hogging pieces of weaponry and swap them out for recapitalized versions one-for-one under a pilot program to improve operational readiness, according to Army Materiel Command’s acting commander.

Part of the plan is to identify and harvest what Gen. Christopher Mohan calls “the dogs of the fleet,” using data analytics to determine specific vehicles, for instance, that have been heavily used and consuming the most repair parts.

The Army would, for example, take out the most-used Abrams tanks from a heavy Brigade Combat Team and replace them one-for-one with vehicles that have gone through a depot line in one supply transaction, Mohan told Defense News, “so we don’t create readiness holes.”

Those “dogs of the fleet” will go back to the depot and go into the repair line to support the next unit, he said.

The Army’s new operational readiness program – a pilot kicking off with a designated unit now – seeks to formalize a lot of the work that depot repair teams are doing and add additional layers to it, Mohan said in an interview ahead of the Association of the U.S. Army’s annual conference.

The plan is to send mechanics working with a unit while it is in pre-deployment and during deployment. The Army is initially targeting heavier units like Armored Brigade Combat Teams.

“We’re focusing this on one of our legacy equipped brigades,” Mohan said. “Think of the brigades that are not going to get fully modernized because this is where we see the greatest need.”

Another other piece of the pilot effort is building muscle memory “from a data analytics standpoint so that we can do better analysis and make better predictions about future readiness,” Mohan said.

The pilot will follow the first unit that U.S. Army Forces Command has designated all the way from pre-deployment, through its Combined Training Center rotation, to its overseas rotation, collecting data along the way.

“We’re going to make predictions along the way and then we’re going to grade our paper at the end of it to see how we did,” Mohan said. “It’ll play out over the next eight or nine months and then, look, let’s be honest, we’re not afraid to fail. If this does not [have an] end result in a readiness increase that we think based upon the resources we’re investing, we will take a step back.”

The Army also plans to take its expeditionary capability to places that require episodic maintenance like fleets used for training new Abrams tank or Bradley Infantry Fighting Vehicle crewmen. Those places require workers like heavy diesel mechanics and track mechanics, Mohan said, where the Army is in competition with businesses across the U.S. for that kind of expertise.

“Instead of continuously being challenged by hiring,” he said, “we’ll use expeditionary capability; we’ll use depot capability to actually swap out some of their older vehicles. … Then we will surge a depot team there when they have a cycle break and there’s a training lull to do focused maintenance on their training fleets.”

The service already has an expeditionary organic industrial base; sending out depot-level repair teams overseas to work alongside units to repair systems rather than shipping them back to depots in the United States, Mohan said.

Depot teams are present in places like in Poland, fixing battle damaged radars for a partner nation, Mohan noted, and training Polish mechanics to perform their portion of Army Prepositioned Stock maintenance, for example. A team in Korea is helping repair CH-47 Chinook cargo helicopters, and back in the continental U.S. another team is helping to salvage aircraft damaged during a recent microburst thunderstorm at Fort Carson, Colorado.

Expeditionary depot maintenance saves time and money, Mohan said. The team in Korea, for example, repaired a helicopter in 13 days compared to the 220 days it would take to bring it back to the U.S., fix it and ship it back, which would have cost roughly $1.8 million.

US Army inches closer to 3D-printing spare parts under fire

Army officials are pushing to add new 3D models to a repository of data files that troops can one day use to print spare parts close to the front line, according to a senior service official.

During a recent rotation at the Joint Readiness Training Center at Fort Johnson, Louisiana, a team from the Army’s Tank-Automotive & Armaments Command passed a digital file of a repair part to a team that printed the replacement at the tactical edge.

“That was a heavy lift and we don’t have it right yet,” Lt. Gen. Christopher Mohan, Army Materiel Command’s deputy and acting commander, told Defense News, “but we know that we can do it now.”

The effort was a part of Army Chief of Staff Gen. Randy George’s vision of transforming how the service fights and adapts in the heat of battle.

While the Army has tried 3D printing at the tactical edge, which describes units closest to combat, it has previously come with a large footprint such as an entire trailer.

Officials at Army Materiel Command have started 3D-printing more parts because supply chains are still strained from the coronavirus pandemic, Mohan explained, and because of “exponential growth” of requirements coming primarily out of units in Europe.

AMC has begun using more advanced manufacturing techniques to make widgets that are no longer under contract or which the original contractor no longer stocks. “We’re targeting those parts,” Mohan said. “If we have the tech data, it’s relatively easy to map it and then load it into a digital repository.”

If the Army doesn’t own the data, it has to reverse engineer it and run the part through a first article test just like it would a brand new part, Mohan noted.

The command, back in 2020, came up with an overarching strategy for how it wanted to tackle 3D printing and additive manufacturing across the force, establishing a hub of manufacturing capability at Rock Island Arsenal, Illinois, along with 25 other various depots, plants and arsenals in support.

While the repository is still a nascent capability, the Army has about 1,000 parts mapped and loaded in it and is finding that some of the parts are improvements over what original equipment manufacturers provided.

“The long-term vision is that we have this centralized hub of data and then we map both the [organic industrial base] and other capabilities all the way down to the tactical level and say, ‘Okay, we can see what type of machinery we have at each one of our depots and arsenals and then all the way down to the tactical level,” Mohan said. “And the units at the tactical level will be able to access the data based upon the capability that they have.”

The Army does not want a unit with very nascent 3D printing capability to try to make complex parts, Mohan cautioned, so “we’ve got to get the control measures in place and we’re working on that.”

The Sustainment Center of Excellence is working with AMC to enhance training of the soldiers who are doing advanced manufacturing at the tactical level as well, Mohan noted.

For the fan shroud replacement part printed in the field at Fort Johnson, it was “a very simple part,” Mohan said, but when using titanium, some parts the service wants to print can take roughly four days to complete.

“We don’t expect that capability is going to be down at the tactical level,” he noted.

“We’re having discussions about the future, where [is] that tactical capability best suited for an expeditionary Army? Is it down at the brigade level? Is at the division level or the corps level? I think it depends on what we’re going to try to accomplish from repair parts printing,” Mohan said.

AMC is also making improvements to some of its parts manufacturing processes using additive manufacturing capability at the Joint Manufacturing and Technology Center at Rock Island, Arsenal, according to Mohan.

“We’re using 3D printing and advanced manufacturing techniques to make us faster in forgings and castings,” he said. Casting molds are typically made with sand using a wood mold to shape the sand mold, which can take weeks, Mohan explained. “Now we’re 3D printing molds with an advanced material that’s heat resistant.”

The Army has “shaved weeks off of parts and castings by integrating advanced manufacturing techniques into our existing processes,” he said.