As the Army moves out on its Next Generation Command and Control (NGC2) modernization initiative, a senior official said Tuesday he believes the service can scale the new architecture across the entire Army “in a very short period of time.”
“This is not going to be a production challenge. It’ll be a money challenge [and] we are going to find a way to do that. We believe we can literally do the entire Army in a very short period of time,” Gen. James Mingus, the Army vice chief of staff, said during an Association of the U.S. Army event.
The Army has previously detailed a vision for NGC2 to provide “commanders and units at echelon an open and modular C2 ecosystem across hardware, software and applications with access to a common and integrated data layer,” and has described it as a “fundamental change in how the U.S. Army conducts digital mission command.”
Network modernization, with NGC2 now as the leading initiative, has taken over as the Army’s top modernization priority, Mingus and officials have said.
“The Army’s investment into Next Generation Command and Control sets the baseline for operating on today’s modern battlefield, and more importantly, this investment sets conditions for future command and control. This is one of our most important investments, it sets the conditions for AI-enabled, data-centric and software-defined warfare,” Gen. Randy George, the Army chief of staff, has said previously.
Army officials in late March said contract awards are expected “imminently” to begin ramping up NGC2, with an aim to scale up the effort over the next year and outfit a division with new capability (Defense Daily, March 31).
“We’re going to be able to put some stuff out for [soldiers] to be able to use in a fraction of the time, within the fiscal year, to at least start to be able to start to [build] on [NGC2]. And we’re going to do, in parallel, the scaling of what we already have and then also have other opportunities for folks to come in,” Lt. Gen. Rob Collins, military deputy in the office of the assistant secretary of the Army for acquisition, logistics and technology, told reporters at the time.
Mingus noted the Army “successfully prototyped” the vision for NGC2 at this spring’s Project Convergence experiment, and said the Army will next outfit the 4th Infantry Division with “an entire set” of equipment to support further prototyping efforts.
“We’re going to make sure that underneath a division load, an entire division formation, that this is going to prove out,” Mingus said.
NGC2 may also reduce the amount of network-related equipment troops have to carry, Mingus said, with the vice chief citing modularity and interoperability as a key aspect of the future architecture.
“Because it is a modular open systems architecture, because it is naturally designed to be ‘plug and play’…the interoperability components of it are baked in from the beginning instead of having to be [added] in there after the fact,” Mingus said.
Joe Welch, deputy to the commander of Army Futures Command, has said previously that with NGC2 the Army aims to change its relationship with industry, to include a focus on shifting from “this concept of an industry integrator into more a team of teams [approach].”
“Instead of telling [industry] what we need them to deliver, we’re presenting them with a problem statement and asking for their help. And we’re working with the best tech companies in the world, American companies that are absolutely positioned to deliver capability to the U.S. Army, both large and small companies,” Welch has said. “This is a very software-driven capability. We’re talking about the ‘app store,’ the integrated data layer, AI marketplaces, cloud computing, local computing, mesh network, satellites, all of this working together. There’s a piece for everybody in here.”
Mingus during the discussion also said the Army’s push for more flexible funding authority should eventually cover all technology that advances faster than the standard budget cycle (Defense Daily, April 22).