Soldiers could see a brand new PT gear design by next year

Soldiers will soon sport a new physical training uniform as the Army looks to conduct another redesign on the gear soldiers sweat in daily.

Details are scant as the service is currently developing the new design and features of the standard PT gear.

But a new uniform is on its way, said Sergeant Major of the Army Michael Weimer on Tuesday at the Association of the U.S. Army’s Annual Meeting and Exposition.

Army wants all troops on new fitness program by 2032. How’s it going?

“We’re redesigning the Army PTs,” Weimer said. “We’re not going to get locked into the same T-shirt, [where] everybody is just going out and buying a new T-shirt anyway for their unit.”

While the design details aren’t yet available, the arrival time sounds clear.

Weimer said the new design will roll out in 2025.

The top enlisted soldier sees the gear as essential to the warrior ethos he and senior Army leaders are trying to instill.

The current gear doesn’t “represent who we are as warfighters,” Weimer said.

The Army, primarily through Program Executive Office-Soldier, is testing new gear in the coming months as it finalizes the new design.

The new gear dovetails with the service’s new emphasis on total health through it’s Holistic Health and Fitness program.

The H2F program was initially aimed at bringing an expert team in physical, mental, spiritual, sleep and nutrition help to the 111 select brigades by 2030.

“If we’re going to be fit, then we’re also going to look good at the same time and rep the Army brand,” Weimer said.

But Army Chief of Staff Gen. Randy George sped up that delivery up to reach the same number of brigades sooner and to expand the program to all Army brigades by Fiscal Year 2032.

The Army last redesigned its PT gear in 2017, when it switched from the yearslong black and gray uniforms to a black and gold scheme soldiers currently use.

What the Army is planning for its vehicle-protection push

The U.S. Army wants to pursue a more layered approach to protecting combat vehicles and formations, a step away from the singular push over the last decade to outfit them with active protection systems, Army officials in charge of ground combat modernization told Defense News.

Army Futures Command has been working on a Formation Layered Protection requirement and is releasing what it calls a “characteristics of need” statement to industry, Col. Kevin Bradley, the Next-Generation Combat Vehicle Cross-Functional Team lead within AFC, said in an interview ahead of the Association of the U.S. Army’s annual conference this week.

Bradley’s team, along with Program Executive Office Ground Combat Systems, is using the AUSA forum to discuss the needs statement with industry and seek feedback.

The Army is looking for ways to protect dismounted soldiers, vehicles and full formations from a variety of threats. Potential approaches include masking vehicles or hardening them with both active and passive protection tactics. And the service will determine what is “the optimal mix for a formation to protect itself and those around it,” Bradley said.

The service has been focused on chasing after interim active protection systems with varied success. The Army outfitted some M1 Abrams tanks with Rafael’s Trophy APS and sent them to Europe. While the capability — which has been in theater over the past four years — does offer protection, there are tradeoffs like the extra weight of the system.

The Army had a tougher time finding an APS that would work on Stryker combat vehicles or Bradley Infantry Fighting Vehicles. Artis, a Virginia-based company, developed Iron Curtain, which was the first system considered a candidate for the Stryker. But the Army decided in 2018 it would take too much time and money to mature it.

Artis came out earlier this year with a new APS called Sentinel that the firm said is able to defeat top-attack threats, a growing challenge as forces face skies saturated with loitering munitions and other armed drones.

After Israeli firm Elbit Systems redesigned Iron Fist APS into a version called Iron Fist Light Decoupled, it is now on contract to be installed on the Bradley’s M2A4E1 configuration, Maj. Gen. Glenn Dean, program executive officer for ground combat systems, said.

“All of the APS systems we have today are really point defense to a specific vehicle,” Dean said. The Army wants to figure out “how can that be expanded so that [it] can protect multiple vehicles with one system and might reside some place differently.”

For example, perhaps a robotic vehicle could help protect a group of platforms for a unit, meaning that not every vehicle would need a heavy countermeasures installation, Dean said.

The Army needs to figure out “which capabilities do I apportion to an individual platform, which ones do I apportion to the formation? That’s the hard conceptual work that Futures Command has to do,” Dean said.

Some solutions don’t necessarily have to be kinetic, he added. The 3rd Infantry Division, for example, recently used decoys to better hide command posts during a National Training Center rotation.

Masking capabilities is one area that the Army would like to investigate further, Bradley said. “We haven’t seen a whole lot of great solutions on the industry side. I’m really interested to see what, when they look at that problem set, what are some of those low-cost options that can be fielded largely to the force.”

One of the biggest concerns, he noted, is that current APS countermeasures are routinely more expensive than an incoming projectile. “I think there’s a lot of space there to really reduce the shot cost.”

Several vendors at the AUSA exposition unveiled new technologies showing how the protection market is changing.

Leonardo DRS is featuring a kit designed to augment force protection from top attack and loitering munitions threats. The effort is based on data from the company’s own systems in Ukraine as well as the conflict in Gaza, according to company vice president Charlene Caputo.

The system is able to effectively discriminate between things like birds and drones, a challenge many companies are trying to tackle. The radar kit can sit on any vehicle, she noted.

General Dynamics Land Systems, as part of a “mission command on the move” concept, banks on reducing the electromagnetic signature of a hybrid-electric drive Stryker, pairing it with an APS suite. The company is also presenting a robotic vehicle with spoofing technology meant to confuse enemies over the actual whereabouts of a mobile command post.

How an experiment in New Jersey could shape the Army’s future network

Last spring at the Army’s fourth Project Convergence capstone event, the service and its partners proved they could integrate data from multiple web-based applications into a common user environment.

The event — one of the Army’s premier experimentation series — brought together the U.S. military services and international partners like Australia and the United Kingdom to test new software, connectivity tools and user interfaces.

The results were unprecedented, according to Army officials, who said the experiment demonstrated the ability to share vast amounts of data at previously unheard-of rates.

But for all its success, the exercise lacked an important dose of realism: a degraded network.

“We ran it on a network that was essentially pristine and was not representative of what would maybe be in the field, an austere environment,” Joseph Welch, acting deputy to the commanding general of Army Futures Command, told Defense News in a recent interview.

Through a series of experiments this summer and fall known as NetModX, the Army sought to wring out some of those capabilities in conditions that posed a greater challenge to its network operations. This year’s exercise was hosted at Joint Base McGuire-Dix-Lakehurst near New Jersey’s Pine Barrens, where connectivity is easily thwarted by rolling hills and thick tree lines.

Starting in July, the Army’s C5ISR Center — short for command, control, communications, computers, cyber and intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance — posted up at the base for more than three months. Leading up to the event, the center invited scientists, engineers and industry to propose lab-developed capabilities that they wanted to test in a real-world environment.

Seth Spoenlein, assistant director for systems integration at the C5ISR Center, told Defense News during a visit to NetModX in late September that the experiment has two broad goals: to mature technology — or as he said, “kick the tires” — and see how it performs when integrated with other capabilities. This year, the event featured about 100 technologies from more than 50 organizations, with projects ranging from science and technology efforts that hadn’t seen the outside of a lab to more field-ready systems.

Throughout the demonstrations, Army officials and program managers had a chance to observe the capabilities in action and collect data to inform future requirements and acquisition decisions.

This year’s event showcased technology that could inform the Army’s strategy for Next-Generation Command and Control, or NGC2, one of Army Chief of Staff Gen. Randy George’s top modernization priorities, Welch said. The service’s fiscal 2025 budget included $2.7 billion for the effort.

The vision for NGC2 is to upgrade everything from user devices and applications to computing infrastructure to the underlying network. Whereas Project Convergence tested the data integration and application layers, Welch said, the experimentation at NetModX focused on how the network and compute aspects support those higher-level functions. It’s also exploring how the entire NGC2 tech stack works together.

“What I see as an outcome of this is, now we are better understanding where those technical challenges are,” he said. “They’re solving some of them right here in the field, but we’re also learning about things we may need to require.”

Network experimentation

During the event, soldiers and representatives from a slew of commercial companies spread out across the base’s Range 86 to experiment with technologies that could allow the Army to shrink the size of its command posts, better manage electronic signatures and navigate its network in less-than-ideal conditions.

In one area, a team from Virginia-based Research Innovations, Inc., served as a red cell, using an advanced edge computing sensor to continuously map electronic signatures, challenging nearby units to reduce their footprint or try to confuse the simulated adversary.

That experimentation could feed into the Army’s Mobile and Survivable Command Post program, or MASCP. The service plans to launch a pilot program in 2025, but for now, it’s using events like NetModX to figure out what user devices, computing infrastructure, software and signature management tools could help make its command posts more nimble.

A team led by RJ Regars, the Army’s project lead for MASCP, installed 22 different technologies into command post vehicles during NetModX — the most it’s integrated to date by far, Regars said.

“Leading up to this, there’s been a lot of work identifying technologies, working with those technologies in the lab, working with these technologies in a standalone fashion with the end goal of getting them all into vehicles and interoperating with them,” he said. “Not everything worked, but a lot did work, and we definitely had a great learning experience from it.”

Elsewhere on Range 86, vehicles equipped with satellite terminals from several different providers allowed the service to see how the network adapts when a connection is interrupted or broken.

The service has struggled with how to move and reroute data within different echelons of its communications, or transport, architecture, said Col. Matt Skaggs, director of tactical application and architecture development for Army Futures Command. At NetModX, the command experimented with capabilities that bring redundancy into its network, allowing it to do that more seamlessly.

“It’s a reactive and redundant network,” he said in an interview. “We call it comms agnostic. If one pathway is blocked, that system will automatically find another pathway.”

Along with testing out the transport architecture, the experiment also helped identify which “bespoke” applications put too much strain on the network.

“We learned that we had to dial back the resource requirements on these web applications and make it thinner so they work on the tactical network,” Skaggs said. “If we hadn’t had this experimentation event, we would have been way further down the acquisition pipeline before we learned these kinds of lessons.”

Building a network baseline

The Army’s experimentation at NetModX is just one piece of its broader NGC2 effort. The service has been on a path toward modernizing its network for the last six years, narrowing its focus last year on an acquisition approach that delivers capabilities iteratively rather than aiming to field a complete package of upgrades all at once.

Skaggs likened the Army’s strategy for NGC2 to laying a new foundation for integrating data. Once that foundation is set, the service can then bring on new applications and tools that build on it.

“We push out a baseline product, the soldiers touch it and use it in their mission command application and we’ll continually modify it,” he said. “So, it’s constantly evolving and constantly getting updated.”

In May, the Army signed off on a “characteristics of need” for NGC2 and on Oct. 1 it issued a request for information to industry. The service plans to feed its learnings from NetModX into its next Project Convergence capstone, which is slated for March 2025. A minimum viable product should be finalized later that year and the service could start fielding NGC2 capabilities as soon as 2026.

An experiment like NetModX is crucial in that process because it puts NGC2 technology in context, allowing the service to consider “the art of the possible” as it writes requirements and issues acquisition plans, Welch said.

“There are a lot of products out there — brochures, slick sheets, endorsements, what have you,” he said. “We’re separating out what really works and what doesn’t.”

When will the Army embrace hybrid-electric vehicles?

The Army has long tinkered with the idea of making some of its vehicles electric or hybrid, and while the technology has become commonplace in the commercial vehicle industry, the service has yet to jump on the bandwagon.

As officials hedge their bets, companies have continued to put technology in front of the service in order to show the purported benefits, arguing that the technology is ready for prime time in the Army’s modernization plans.

MACK Defense has brought a commercial, fully electric, medium-duty truck to the Association of the U.S. Army’s annual conference this week to keep the conversation about hybrid capabilities with the service going, the company’s CEO David Hartzell told Defense News.

Bringing the truck represents MACK’s overall push to prove that hybrid technology is ready for military prime time, Hartzell said. The company is participating in the U.S. Army’s competition for a new Common Tactical Truck and, while it is not a requirement for the CTT to have hybrid power, it is the only competitor to build hybrid prototypes for evaluation.

“This is a vehicle customers can come and buy today. They’re operating on streets around the country today,” Hartzell said.

General Dynamics Land Systems again has brought a hybrid-electric Stryker combat vehicle to the show designed to be a command post where silent watch is a critical component achieved by turning off the engine but still powering communications equipment.

GM Defense is featuring a diesel-powered, electric Next Generation Tactical Vehicle at AUSA as well.

“GM has invested billions into battery technology, battery plants to drive the cost of batteries down, to drive the size of batteries smaller, lighter and the power up,” JD Johnson, GM Defense vice president of business development, told Defense News during a trip to Milford Proving Ground, Michigan.

Defense News drove the new tactical vehicle, which uses the Chevy Silverado truck with the same Duramax engine in the U.S. Army’s Infantry Squad Vehicle, paired with an electric battery capable of producing roughly 300 kilowatt hours of power output with a 15-gallon fuel tank. The vehicle still takes JP-8, the fuel choice of comfort for the U.S. Army.

GM Defense had wanted to compete in an Army competition to build an Electric Light Reconnaissance Vehicle. The Army said it was ready to start a prototyping program last fall, but that program was abruptly canceled.

“I think one of the challenges out there is there is still not a lot of understanding and knowledge in this space,” said Pete Johnson, GM Defense vice president of business development for integrated vehicles.

Company executives hope the Next-Generation Tactical Vehicle prototype can help address lingering concerns.

The Army has evaluated the possibility of converting even combat vehicles like the Bradley Infantry Fighting Vehicle for hybrid propulsion, an effort led by the service’s Rapid Capabilities and Critical Technologies Office.

Industry teams now designing a Bradley replacement, dubbed the XM30 Mechanized Infantry Combat Vehicle, bank on hybrid capability in their proposals, though nothing is expected to come to fruition until the 2030s.

Money and priorities

The Army maintains that just because it hasn’t fully committed to hybrid capabilities in tactical or combat vehicles doesn’t mean the service is disinterested.

“It’s not a hard sell to anyone in the Army,” Army acquisition chief Doug Bush told Defense News. “I think wheeled vehicles is our biggest opportunity. It’s the same exact tech that’s all over the commercial sector now. A lot of people drive these cars. It’s becoming kind of normal.”

The Army is “just working on carving out the money to do it,” Bush said. “Wheeled vehicles is a thing that we’ve been challenged to maintain really high production rates on, and it’s just competing with a lot of other needs in the Army,” he said.

While the investment is significant up front, “the long-term payoff, even a 10-15% fuel reduction, multiplied times a bazillion vehicles, is huge,” Bush said. “If we do this right, it’ll free up money down the road because we’re being more efficient with the vehicles.”

The capabilities a hybrid vehicle would bring are also becoming increasingly important in the modern battlefield where silent watch and silent drive help U.S. troops evade detection by increasingly sophisticated sensors.

“Industry is doing so much good research in this area, we don’t have to develop it,” Bush said. “We just need to make sure it’s safe.”

But introducing the technology to the Army’s vast inventory of ground vehicles still comes with challenges, according to Maj. Gen. Glenn Dean, program executive officer for ground combat systems.

“Hybrid brings a bunch of things: extended range from the same amount of fuel, silent drive, the ability to export power or to use generated power differently to provide more mission capability,” Dean said.

“The challenge going back to the current fleet is it’s very expensive to do the equivalent of a heart transplant on a combat vehicle like that,” Dean said. For the Stryker program, for example, it cost $450 million and took eight years just to upgrade an engine and power train.

“And that’s a much simpler problem than converting a vehicle from purely internal combustion to hybrid-electric,” Dean explained.

“I would love to have hybrid-electric projects on all of our combat platforms, but the reality is we probably can’t afford to do that, so we have to be very pointed in where we apply it,” he said.

Army budget leaders talk spending smarter, audit pressure

The Army has faced flat budgets for several years, making it harder to invest in modernizing the force while paying for equipment maintenance and personnel bills. Now, the rising cost of living in the United States is exacerbating the challenge for the 2026 budget cycle, officials have said.

The service last year ditched underperforming or unpromising programs, including a future aircraft and a long-range cannon, as budgets remain tight and global conflicts spiral. Additional decisions are expected as the service scrambles to balance its books.

Defense News sat down with Caral Spangler, the Army’s comptroller, and Lt. Gen. Paul Chamberlain, the military deputy in the service’s budget office, to talk about the challenges of crafting budgets that square the eternal circle of paying today’s bills while anticipating the warfare needs of tomorrow.

What challenges exist in this cycle that you are working through now?

Spangler: As we built the five-year plan, we had a lot of discussions about what the soldiers needs were, including installations and housing requirements. Our perpetual thing that we talk about in the Army is balancing modernization and readiness. We have to align that with our military personnel accounts because that really is our biggest, single program.

Then, what are the economic factors? We don’t have the new economic assumptions yet from the Office of the Secretary of Defense. It’s always a concern for us, including what is the pay raise going to be? Do we pay for that ourselves, or will we get a top line increase? That affects the Army significantly.

The Army has about $40 billion in discretionary spending in its roughly $186 billion budget. In your view, is this discretionary spending pool getting more shallow?

Chamberlain: We can assume that the Army’s probably going to be in that $185.5 billion to $186 billion range. For the last two years, we only had a $200 million — $300 million top line increase. It’s tiny, around 0.2% of our discretionary spending pot, not factoring in inflation.

That is squeezing all of our ability to go after some of the modernization accounts or support the modernization that the Army wants to do.

Our senior leaders historically have said that we probably need between 3% and 5% real growth. Not the negative purchasing power that we’ve experienced the last couple of years, but real growth to affect the modernization that we need to do. Forty billion is a big number, but it continues to get squeezed. We’ll continue to try to find ways to give ourselves an advantage, whether that’s flexible funding.

We’ll continue to look for efficiencies. And we’ll continue to do what the chief has got us doing now, which is how do we transform in contact? How do we take some of the new kit or using some of the old kit in different ways in order to enhance our ability to conduct operations and provide that overmatch to our forces?

Spangler: Harken back, last February or thereabouts, to the Army making hard choices when it needs to make hard choices. We canceled the Future Attack Reconnaissance Aircraft program to invest in things that we need. So we are demonstrating that we are mindful of some of those challenges and doing what’s appropriate.

What efficiencies are you finding that could help during this budget cycle?

Chamberlain: A lot of that will be down at the command as we’re working with them, to continue to do some consolidation of efforts that we’re seeing there. How do we make certain decisions as we’re doing either some of our construction or sustainment that will ensure that we have better and perhaps cheaper maintenance sustainment costs in the future? Those are sort of the things that we’re looking at.

Last year you felt positive about certain aspects of the Army’s ability to pass an audit. So how are you feeling one year later about the possibility of the Army passing a full audit by the deadline of FY28?

Spangler: The auditors are not finished with their work yet for this year, either. It’s a little bit of an unknown where we are today, but we have good confidence that we are going to see some more material weaknesses get retired this year, which is a measure of progress. And we have also made some great progress in getting more whole Army participation and awareness and knowledge of the audit, and so I think that’s very helpful.

We’ve had some conversations with some of the senior leaders throughout the Army, at the different commands and stuff. So they are now turning focus.

Having the different elements of the Army, the logistics community, the sustainment community, the manpower guys, being under that audit scrutiny gives them an opportunity to streamline things and figure out what improvements can be made. We are seeing that happening as well.

The Pentagon is living under its annual three-month continuing resolution. What are some of the effects for the Army?

Spangler: Before we started with getting this relatively clean CR, there was a lot of discussion about it being a six-month CR instead. So we had done quite a bit of work to think about what government programs and what things were going to be impacted by a six-month CR. The really interesting dynamic for the Army, in particular, is the fact that under a CR you’re cash-flowing so many significant bills with last year’s resources.

And since we haven’t had much growth in our budget, regular things like the pay raises and the cost of living adjustments and housing and subsistence and all those things, if the CR continues we have to pay those at the higher rates. So that puts pressure there.

You have things going on in the real world that we’re having to cash-flow, some of the Ukraine operations, things that we’re doing to support the theater in Central Command, all those things. We’re having to bear the cost of the operations on the Southwest border until we get money in for those things. And sometimes people don’t give us those reimbursements until kind of late in the fiscal year.

Chamberlain: In fact the reimbursement for some of the support that we provided really didn’t come until the middle of September. So 11-and-a-half months. We’re doing all the base requirements, plus the additional operations or missions that come in. And we’re doing that within the funding that we have.

That does create a lot of rework for the commands, as well as our analysts here in the Pentagon, in the Army budget office. The level of work that we have to do to move money around and then get the money back into the right account when we do get the reimbursement – the team is great, they do it, they’re awesome at it because they’re practiced at it – but it does create a lot of rework for everyone across the Army.

Soldiers want more out of the Army’s new Infantry Squad Vehicles

Army infantry units have recognized the utility of the Infantry Squad Vehicle beyond its core task of carrying troops into battle, leading the service to consider additional configurations of the ride, according to a senior service official.

“We have a nine-seat variant,” Lt. Gen. Karl Gingrich, of the Army G-8 staff, told Defense News in an interview at the Pentagon. “We know that’s not the right configuration or the only configuration.”

The GM Defense-built ISV is in the inventory of three Brigade Combat Teams, where soldiers have put the vehicles to the test in large-scale training rotations. Earlier this year, the Army shipped several vehicles to remote islands in the Pacific where Defense News observed one being driven onto a CH-47 Chinook helicopter during an exfiltration mission.

The Army’s Maneuver Center of Excellence is now compiling lessons learned. “We are looking at what do we need. A five-seater for a kind of reconnaissance version? Do we need some sort of weapons carrier? I know eventually we’re probably going to get into some launched effects capabilities on there. I’m assuming that’s the direction we’re going.”

GM Defense won the contract to build ISV in June 2020. The program was approved for full-rate production in April 2023 and the Army currently plans to buy a total of 2,593 ISVs over the course of the program. Many of the vehicles have been delivered to the 82nd and 101st Airborne Divisions.

While the Army has only purchased the troop carrier variant, the Canadian Army is a customer of the utility version that allows for flexible space in the back to add various weapon systems. Ottawa has purchased 100 of the vehicles to take on deployment to Europe as part of the country’s NATO mission, JD Johnson, GM Defense vice president of business development, said last month.

Canada is the lead nation in Latvia for an alliance troop presence there aimed at deterring a Russian attack.

“We built a version of the ISV that is a utility vehicle because what we found out really quickly, and we knew that the troops would, is their soldiers all jump into ISVs and take off and, guess what, their mortars or counter-[unmanned aircraft systems], that stuff can’t keep up with them,” JD Johnson said.

GM Defense officials said they were confident the Army would similarly find the utility variant useful as part of the program of record, or the overall buy. “That’s very clear. They’ve signaled that strongly. Now they just have to get through their bureaucratic humps to get there,” Pete Johnson, vice president of business development for integrated vehicles, said.

The company is also seeing a growing international interest. GM Defense is planning to enter the ISV in a U.K. competition centered on land mobility. The British Army has already test-driven the vehicles at the National Training Center at the beginning of the year, according to JD Johnson.

The United Arab Emirates also wants to buy them, JD Johnson said. “We have a tender from them right now. Angola wants to buy them. We have a tender from them right now. There are countries that are struggling with their own capacity as everybody is upgrading their militaries. You see this as a way for contributing to Ukraine,” he added. “We’ve had inquiries from a couple different countries saying, ‘If we could buy 100 or so vehicles, how quickly could we get them?’”

The ISV, which is produced in Concord, North Carolina, was built with plenty of room to grow, JD Johnson noted. “If you were to go to Concord right now, you’d see in the neighborhood of 60 of these vehicles there waiting to be delivered to a customer.”

The other services are also considering the ISV for things like base defense, in the case of the Air Force, and for other things like rescue missions, Pete Johnson said.

At the Association of the U.S. Army, GM Defense is showing the ISV’s potential role in the Army’s push to establish human-machine integrated formations. The ISV on the exposition floor will be set up as a control vehicle for a robotics and autonomy platoon that is towing a Small Multipurpose Equipment Transport robot and hauling a Silent Tactical Energy Enhanced Dismount military cart, or STEED.

‘Game changing’: Navy reloads cruiser’s missiles at sea for first time

The Navy resupplied a warship’s weapons at sea for the first time last week – providing what Navy Secretary Carlos Del Toro called a “game changing” update in combat readiness for the surface fleet.

The cruiser Chosin and its sailors employed the Transferrable Reload At-sea Method device, known as TRAM, to load the ship’s MK 41 Vertical Launching System off the coast of San Diego on Friday.

The TRAM prototype allows warships to rearm during the underway replenishment process when supply ships deliver fuel, food, and other critical supplies. This ability to reload at sea, rather than at shore, saves time for combatant ships and keeps them in the fight, instead of having to go into port to reload, according to the service.

For the at-sea demonstration, the Chosin teamed up with the Military Sealift Command dry cargo and ammunition ship Washington Chambers to connect and transfer the missile canister to the cruiser. The team then utilized TRAM to transport the missile canister along rails connected to the cruiser’s VLS modules to successfully place it into a VLS cell, the Navy said.

The Navy plans to field TRAM in the next two to three years.

“Today, we proved just how game-changing TRAM truly is — and what a powerful deterrent it will be to our competitors,” Del Toro said in a statement. “This demonstration marks a key milestone on the path to perfecting this capability and fielding it for sustained operations at sea.”

He first outlined TRAM as one of his top priorities in 2022 during a speech at Columbia University, calling it a “sustained, persistent forward-strike capacity during wartime.”

The Navy previously tested a land-based demonstration of TRAM in July at the Naval Surface Warfare Center, Port Hueneme Division in California.

How saving soldiers’ lives influenced the Army’s new kit options

While new night vision and advanced drones often attract a lot of attention, soldiers know that much of their comfort and survival in training and combat often depends on what they wear.

Everything from boots and weapons to first aid pouches, new bomb suits for explosives specialists and even cold weather gear comes out of Program Executive Office-Soldier.

Such items — whether it’s the Army’s rollout in recent years of its new Greens uniform, a better hot-weather boot, poncho or the beloved “woobie,” a light, nylon blanket that’s provided relief on many an exhausting field exercise — are all part of what soldiers wear.

Army Times spoke with gear experts at PEO Soldier ahead of the Association of the U.S. Army’s Annual Meeting and Exposition about some of the items soldiers wear that are being fielded, developed or improved.

Next Generation Advanced Bomb Suit

The Next Generation Advanced Bomb Suit is the first purpose-built bomb suit built for military explosives ordnance disposal, or EOD, personnel, according to Lt. Col. Ken Elgort, product manager for soldier protective equipment.

The suit not only provides explosion protection but also integrates the Modular Scalable Vest, the service’s newest addition to the body armor inventory, adding ballistic protection from small arms fire and fragmentation munitions such as hand grenades.

Adding body armor and integrating combat helmet protection into the suit increases survivability by 72% for all threats, Elgort said. The suit is also 5% lighter than the previous version.

The new suit allows users to turn around. Previously, due to suit vulnerabilities, technicians had to back away from a device to maintain protection.

The Army completed first article testing this past summer and is under initial testing for production, Elgort said. Production is slated for early 2025 with a tentative fielding of late 2025 to EOD units.

Beyond the protection aspects, bomb techs will also have built-in sensors and daylight, lowlight and thermal cameras. The cameras can fuse their images together in the user’s view, allowing them to see what they’re facing in detail.

With those views, technicians have more flexibility to work on explosive threats in the dark, Elgort said. The recording ability allows soldiers to bring back visual details of a potential threat and have other technicians help troubleshoot how to neutralize it.

Experts did not specify how many suits the Army expects to deliver.

Modular Scalable Vest

The Army has fielded 80,000 Modular Scalable Vests, or MSVs, in recent years and expects to continue fielding this new body armor through mid-fiscal 2028, officials said.

The vest’s scalable aspects emerged from lessons learned in Afghanistan, Elgort said. The new system allows commanders to assess the threat level in their area and either add protection or responsibly lower the number of items needed.

The entire system includes body armor, vest, ballistic combat shirt, helmet, pelvic protector and eyewear.

The vest and carrier alone weigh 25 pounds, which is 5 pounds lighter than its predecessor in the same configuration, the Improved Outer Tactical Vest, Elgort said.

The MSV added three sizes to the existing five options at the time, providing a better fit for smaller-framed male and female soldiers who previously had to adjust ill-fitting body armor. Some of the features specific to female soldiers include better side chest protection and a notch cut in the collar to accommodate longer hair.

The initial fielding focused on close combat forces such as infantry, engineers, combat vehicle crewmen, field artillery, armor, military police, medics and soldiers in Army Special Operations Command and Security Force Assistance Brigades.

Last year, PEO Soldier began fielding the MSV Generation II to military police. The second-generation version further lightened the body armor, and the carrier is colored black instead of camouflage.

Next Generation Integrated Head Protection System

Earlier this year, the service began fielding the Next Generation Integrated Head Protection System, or IHPS, which offers more protection at the same weight as the original IHPS.

Paratroopers with the 82nd Airborne Division out of Fort Liberty, North Carolina, were the first to receive the 3.27-pound helmet.

The older version of IHPS began fielding in 2018 to replace the Advanced Combat Helmet and the Enhanced Combat Helmet for close combat units, Army Times previously reported.

The improved protection comes from new materials used in making the helmet shell. The previous version required soldiers to add an applique, a kind of bolt-on extra layer of protection. However, while the applique increased the types of threats the helmet could withstand from small arms to rifle rounds, it also added 2.5 pounds.

Maj. Matthew Carter, assistant program manager-head protection, said the focus now is testing a variety of pads for the helmet’s interior in an effort to improve both comfort and protection. Soldiers are more likely to wear their gear when it fits well — and wearing that gear correctly helps them stay protected.

Once testing concludes, the Army plans to offer two different pad options for soldiers to choose from when assembling their helmet, Carter said.

First aid kit pouch and grenade launcher holster

In one example of how changing one part of kit can affect the entire setup, the Army is reconfiguring necessary combat accessories for soldiers who carry its newest rifle or machine gun.

PEO Soldier has redesigned the Individual First Aid Kit, or IFAK, pouch to a more vertical, slimmer design. The Next Generation Squad Weapon XM 7 rifle and XM250 automatic rifle both fire the 6.8mm round, a new caliber not used before in U.S. military units. The different ammo pouches mean there’s less space to store kit.

The Army is fielding the new IFAK carrier along with the NGSW weapons; that effort began in March and so far, has seen 1,478 narrow IFAKs fielded, officials said. All close combat forces will receive the narrow IFAK in future deliveries, officials said.

Further, more soldiers now carry the M320 grenade launcher, rather than the previous M203, which was attached under the barrel of the M16.

The standalone 40mm grenade launcher needs to go somewhere — that somewhere is a new holster that grenadiers can affix to their gear and store the weapon for quick retrieval.

The holster is being fielded with the M320 grenade launchers to close combat units. So far, 162 holsters have reached soldiers. The Army expects to field 14,617 holsters.

Parachutes

The Army currently has a variety of parachutes for its airborne soldiers, with the T-11, MC-6 static line and RA-1 free fall parachutes among the common options.

While the Ram Air-1, or RA-1, began fielding in 2015 and has seen more than 4,000 sent to soldiers, the life cycle replacement begins in fiscal 2026, said Maj. Ryan Cermely, assistant program manager for the personnel airdrop team.

But the Army’s also doing something different with the free fall chute: It’s giving jumpmasters and riggers the option to have it for static line use and free fall.

“This provides a larger standoff for infiltration to their insertion point,” Cermely said.

The service is improving the RA-1 as it replaces the aging chutes in the life cycle plan, including additional canopy lines for better control.

Developers are also working to improve the canopy. Those adjustments will give users a much more precise glide ratio, which is used to determine the distance a paratrooper will fall in relation to how far forward they’re moving.

Current glide ratios are 4:1, which means that for every 4 meters a paratrooper goes forward, they fall 1 meter.

But the new design expects to achieve a 1.5:1 ratio. That would mean for every 1.5 meters a paratrooper goes forward, they would fall 1 meter, Cermely said.

This allows paratroopers to form tighter “stacks” as they descend and land closer together on the ground, cutting down the dangerous period of time when paratroopers are gathering their gear and rallying as a unit following a drop.

Air crew safety

The Army is upgrading aviation crews’ survival gear to keep them safe on flights, as the service expects its aviation crews to fly farther and more often in any future battle scenario.

The new Air Crew Combat Equipment, or ACE, vest integrates the MSV body armor soft and hard plates into the crew equipment vest.

Developers trimmed nearly 10 pounds from the 30-pound load carrier and reduced the overall system’s bulk by 15%.

The vest system also comes with several tether straps for users to attach themselves to the inside of a helicopter.

They’ve lightened the carabiners and built in a 10,000-pound rated capacity for the straps that users use to attach the devices, officials said.

A new life preserver is also part of the system. It’s been moved from under the head in the old system to under the armpits in an effort to keep more of the soldier above water should the aircraft have a water landing.

Last year, PEO Soldier fielded 150 ACE vests with the new life preservers to the 25th Combat Aviation Brigade in Hawaii. Plans call for another 18,000 vests to go to the other 11 combat aviation brigades in the Army over the next eight years.

Army to award Master Combat Badge to expert, combat-tested soldiers

Soldiers who’ve both served in combat and mastered their job skills will soon earn a new badge recognizing both achievements.

The Master Combat Badge indicates that the soldier wearing the new device has had both a combat award and achieved expert qualification in their military occupational specialty, Sergeant Major of the Army Michael Weimer during a panel Tuesday at the Association of the U.S. Army’s Annual Meeting and Exposition.

A distinct feature of the new badge is a gold wreath, instead of silver.

Currently, soldiers may not wear both their combat badge and their expert badge for their job field at the same time on their uniform. They had to choose.

But with the combined device, both efforts are recognized.

Soldiers may soon have 2-3 chances for infantry, soldier and field medical badges

For example, the Combat Infantry Badge is awarded to infantry soldiers and Army Special Forces who’ve experienced direct action against an enemy. While the Expert Infantry Badge is awarded after a soldier passes a litany of tests that measure their effectiveness in infantry skills.

The service also awards expert badges to medics and the expert soldier badge to non-infantry soldiers.

The Army plans to award the Master Combat Infantryman Badge, the Master Combat Medical Badge and the Master Combat Action Badge.

Weimer also said that the service is redesigning a Mountaineering Badge that will no longer feature the ram’s head image that the old badge used.

The top enlisted soldier also said he recommended the Mariner’s Badge for approval for Army mariners, such as those who manned the floating pier off the coast of Gaza this past year.

Fighting ‘dirty’ — The Army’s plan to survive, and win, a doomsday war

Daring moves by U.S. adversaries foreshadow the return of sinister nuclear, chemical or biological weapons as technological advances promise to bring new tools of destruction to strike soldiers on future battlefields.

A soldier’s new best friend may not be a rifle, or altogether new weapons, but instead a gas mask, gloves and a protective suit.

In May, Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered his forces to rehearse deploying tactical nuclear weapons in response to what he alleges are “threats” from the West in response to the war in Ukraine.

Chinese President Xi Jinping has pursued a nuclear buildup to accumulate 1,000 nuclear warheads by 2030, up from about 200 in 2019, according to Pentagon estimates.

North Korean leader Kim Jong Un’s military has stockpiled between 2,500 and 5,000 tons of chemical weapons and an undetermined number of biological weapons, according to 2022 assessment by the Asan Institute for Policy Studies, as the nation continues its nuclear weapons programs and provocative long-range missile tests in the region.

As the Army pivots to battle peers, chemical, biological threats loom

As these developments have emerged, the Pentagon, and specifically the Army is reimagining how units may have to fight large-scale combat in deadly, contaminated environments.

But experts in Chemical, Biological, Radiological and Nuclear (CBRN) defense, must also fight complacency that’s existed for generations and bureaucratic red tape.

“There’s this assumption that this threat will never come, that we will never have to fight in this type of environment,” said Col. Tina Schoenberger, director of the Army’s Nuclear and Countering WMD Agency.

And Schoenberger and her colleagues don’t want the first time a commander is thinking about such dangers to be in battle.

The Army recently finished a proof of concept that tests how brigades will fare against a foe willing to bring weapons of mass destruction to bear on the battlefield.

A follow-on, pilot program that is part of a seven-year effort to ready operational units for such an event, will see 2nd Brigade, 25th Infantry Division face a live, simulated nuclear event in their culminating training event in October at the Joint Pacific Multinational Training Center in Hawaii.

The challenges range from enemy rockets or landmines filled with toxic chemicals that blister or suffocate their victims to contagious, debilitating and lethal smallpox, anthrax and newly developed superbugs. Other hurdles include rolling into a recently radiated area following a strike on a nuclear facility or a purposeful nuclear weapons attack.

All impede operations, terrorize and complicate the already fear-inducing prospect of large-scale combat.

Not Cold War 2.0

As the Army focused on terrorists for the past two decades, the service saw its CBRN skills atrophy.

Robert Peters, a nuclear deterrence expert at The Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank, painted a picture of how priorities changed post-Cold War and what it means to rebuild CBRN expertise across the force.

At that time, large combatant commands such as in Europe, might have had 50 planners dedicated solely to anticipating the Soviet Union’s nuclear capabilities, and any potential chemical or biological scenarios, and prepping commanders for war in the shadows of mushroom clouds or fighting through gas attacks.

Once the Soviet Union fell, nuclear experts in those commands were slowly replaced by terrorism experts, causing a “brain drain” among planners and commanders, Peters said.

Leading up to the 1990 Persian Gulf War, planners suspected that Iraq’s leader Saddam Hussein might use stockpiles of chemical weapons as he had in the Iran-Iraq War.

The Pentagon deployed more than 4,000 CBRN specialists to the region. While coalition troops did not face such attacks, post-conflict reports showed a severe lack of training, equipping and preparation that was only resolved by the six-month buildup before combat.

In 1993, Congress created a defense-wide chemical and biological defense program. A decade later, when the U.S.-led coalition invaded Iraq, troops again prepared hastily for a potential chemical attack as the stated objective of the operation was to remove alleged weapons of mass destruction from Iraq’s arsenal.

Many were ordered to take the Anthrax vaccine before deployment and frontline units carried protective gear and experienced multiple false alarms for chemical attacks in the early weeks of the war. Again, U.S. troops did not face such attacks and inspectors did not find the alleged WMDs.

But, in the coming years, technological advances have brought about more ways to use nukes, such as low-yield, tactical nuclear weapons. Such devices can devastate a small area without the larger fallout of multi-kiloton warheads.

Yet, they still carry the terrible aspects of nuclear attack and contaminate locations, causing devastating consequences locally.

That means planners must account for these threats and train troops accordingly, Peters said.

“Maybe what you need to do is button down your Stryker and roll through this area,” Peters said. “And you’re airtight in there for X number of hours. At the end of that you put on your [protective gear] and you need to [decontaminate] your Stryker because you need to get to the front within 36 hours.”

Those are the scenarios that service leaders must now consider.

Fighting ‘dirty’

In recent years, the Army has been rebuilding and reprioritizing CBRN units and training as leaders eye the growing threat.

Advances in technology have cut costs for developing new biological and chemical agents that militaries can’t counter. The internet has opened previously hard-to-acquire information for rogue states and terror groups who want to build and use such weapons.

At the same time, new sensors, materials, computing and automation are bringing tools to bear that will detect threats, model and simulate their effects and give commanders options without endangering troops.

But all those advances will take time. And the arms race that defined the nuclear age continues as those tech advances help weapons developers find gaps and outmaneuver protective measures.

All this has led to a new way of thinking about contamination threats.

Previously commanders thought that any level of contamination meant the gear, personnel or an area was “dirty,” and must be completely cleansed.

That’s not feasible and with new equipment, it’s also not effective.

“We are reframing the way we look at risk for CBRN writ large,” said Lt. Col. Dan Meany, director of full dimensional protection for the Army’s programming office. “We are trying to move away from thinking about CBRN as a binary threat, a binary hazard: ‘I am 100% clean. I am 100% dirty.’”

Speaking at the National Defense Industrial Association annual CBRN conference in June, Meany said the new approach is to get commanders to accept risk and then have CBRN soldiers determine how much they can reduce risk for operations.

That will mean using more uncrewed systems and relying on single pieces of equipment that can detect more contaminants, and finding ways to automate decontamination, especially of combat vehicles.

Army Futures Command has developed concepts for how to run automated decon sites, though there is not yet a program for it, he said.

Steady shifts mean big changes

Over the past decade, the Pentagon has updated its strategy to counter WMDs to incorporate new threats and the office has renewed its nuclear posture review and, in 2023, completed a first-of-its-kind biological defense posture review.

Chief Warrant Officer 3 Victoria RamageGarcia took over as the 20th CBRNE Command chief warrant officer in July and has spent the past 20 years in this work. Early in her career, units focused mostly on evacuating contaminated casualties and working with other agencies for homeland defense.

There wasn’t much integration with operational units. But in the past decade and even more over the past five years, she’s seen CBRN experts brought into all aspects of unit planning.

“I am only as great of an asset to you as you allow me to be,” RamageGarcia said.

Working through potential CBRN attacks can’t be an afterthought. Without preparation, such an attack can devastate a unit and render it inoperable, stalling the larger fight.

If experts such as RamageGarcia understand the commander’s mission and goals, they can keep the unit fighting, regardless of what it encounters.

In 2019 the Joint Chiefs of Staff published an updated nuclear operations manual, which lays out how unit commanders will fight through nuclear attacks.

The manual also details how U.S. commanders might use their own tactical nukes offensively. The document calls for combatant commanders to create priority target lists for nuclear strikes in their regions.

“Commanders should know how nuclear weapon effects can affect personnel, equipment, and the dynamics of combat power. They should train for and implement survivability measures and techniques,” according to the doctrine.

Also in 2019, the 1st Armored Division conducted a Warfighter Exercise, which focused on command post operations, almost entirely in CBRN protective gear.

Post-training observations published by the Combined Arms Center identified shortcomings.

“Units have not prepared adequately at home station to conduct [protective gear] exchange within six hours of being contaminated,” according to the report.

The units also tended to “stumble” on selective unmasking required after conditions began to clear. And they were not proficient with their decontamination system.

By early 2020, soldiers with the 2nd Infantry Brigade Combat Team, 25th Infantry Division, were establishing a standard certification process for CBRN recon platoons.

Early the next year, the Army updated technical guidance to its CBRN platoons and a few months later soldiers with the 1st Armored Brigade Combat Team, 1st Armored Division were part of the largest CBRN-focused rotation at the National Training Center since 1985.

The unit faced an “unprecedented amount” of CBRN munition attacks during their training cycle, Maj. Chris Chavis, the 2nd Chemical Battalion operations officer, said at the time.

The Army 2030 campaign plan updated its CBRN approach across the force, which includes a seven-year effort to prove new concepts for maneuver units operating in CBRN during large-scale combat.

The first major step happened last year, at the National Training Center, Fort Irwin, California, when the 2nd Armored Brigade Combat Team, 3rd Infantry Division served as a “proof of concept” team for CBRN.

Using information from that rotation, Lt. Col. Sean Carmody, countering WMD readiness integrator at Army headquarters told Army Times, they began a pilot program this year with 2nd Brigade, 25th Infantry Division, which will culminate in the brigade facing a simulated nuclear attack during their October rotation at the Joint Pacific Multinational Training Center, Hawaii.

If successful, the CBRN plan will integrate new methods across operational units by 2030.

Officials have also designed a new heavy decontamination reconnaissance company, to bring large units into areas to clean themselves and their equipment or prepare to head into danger areas, said Brig. Gen. W Bochat, former commandant of the Army’s CBRN School who took over 20th CBRN Command in August.

At the same time, leaders have added education at nearly all levels for individual soldiers and commanders, said Col. Schoenberger, Countering WMD Agency director.

Since 2022, Army recruits now face CBRN scenarios at boot camp and combat training. Enlisted and officers must pass CBRN requirements in their professional courses. The CBRN School teamed up with their engineer and military police counterparts and CBRN officers now run a tabletop exercise with senior advisors during their captain’s course.

Diverse threats call for new gear

These new threats have led to renewed efforts to counter them, and their effects.

Decades-old equipment won’t work in today’s CBRN landscape, experts said.

In 2022, Deborah Rosenblum, the assistant secretary of defense over CBRN Defense called for a “radical transformation” in equipping the services for combatting the “vastly more difficult” and “rapidly changing” threats.

At the time, the Pentagon had just increased its annual spending on CBRN by $300 million and sought an additional $1.2 billion over the next five years.

In the most recent budget request for the upcoming fiscal year, the Pentagon seeks $1.7 billion for CBRN research and development.

The funding aims to improve soldier protection, detection and threat reporting and add remote-controlled or autonomous methods to do the most dangerous work.

Robots are more than a safety concern because there are not enough CBRN professionals to go around. As of 2021, the Army, the largest service with the most CBRN troops, had nearly 6,000 enlisted specialists and slightly more than 300 officers.

By comparison, there were more than 52,000 infantry soldiers and 7,300 officers.

And many of those CBRN capabilities rest with the Guard and Reserve components whose missions vary from the active-duty.

The Reserve has two brigades dedicated to CBRN.

The Guard has its own, focused primarily on homeland defense.

The active Army has only one brigade to cover ongoing training and global operations.

In the coming years, the Army is scheduled to bring new decontamination systems, collective protection gear, individual masks and suits into operation, according to Army auisition data.

The service is replacing its legacy biological equipment with the joint biological tactical detection system, which will give biodefense platoons near real-time detection of airborne biological agents, Bochat said.

Perhaps the centerpiece of equipment efforts is the Nuclear, Biological, Chemical Reconnaissance Vehicle Sensor Suite Upgrade, which offers crews protection and sensors for their immediate area and the ability to launch drones from their vehicles so they can gauge the dangers outside.

To give soldiers less exposure, the service issued a new man-transportable robot, to CBRN and explosives disposal teams that can be outfitted with sensors.

Autonomous efforts are taking longer.

An autonomous decon system, a key development that could save manpower and reduce exposure remains in early testing until at least fiscal year 2027. Additionally, a wearable compact detector has been in development since 2014 and has yet to reach later testing stages.

An autonomous vapor chemical detector is expected to see initial operational capability in fiscal year 2027 but won’t be fully operational until fiscal year 2032.

As changes in doctrine, training and equipment converge in the coming years, soldiers across the force in operational and support units will see more time spent donning gas masks, stocking up on protective gear, planning for the nefarious “what ifs” of a chemical, biological or nuclear attack.

“I think things are better, but they’ve frankly got about three decades worth of lost knowledge that they’re trying to rebuild in real time,” said Peters, the Heritage Foundation nuclear expert. “[Ground commanders] are not really thinking about, oh God, if Putin or Xi Jinping or Kim Jong Un makes a decision to employ these things, there could actually be a number of these things that we have to fight our way through.”