Braxton Taylor
The latest iteration of the Army’s Project Convergence imagined that the National Training Center at Fort Irwin, Calif., had been captured by an enemy force, with the Army, Navy, Marine Corps, Air Force, and Space Force joining to take it back.
Unmanned boats swarmed enemy ships off San Diego. Unmanned and manned aircraft blew up enemy air-defense positions. U.S. satellites used electromagnetic attacks to scramble enemy satellites. Long-range missiles hit enemy positions on the base itself just before troops dropped in from helicopters and rolled in with ground vehicles, under cover of attack helicopters. Then forces had to turn around and defend the base.
Project Convergence – Capstone 5, which took place over March and April, was the first time the Army’s main network-warfare development effort had focused all its forces on a single scenario, Lt. Gen. David Hodne, deputy commander of Army Futures Command, told reporters on Friday.
Last year, Project Convergence divided different capabilities into different events, Hodne said.
“But what we needed to do this year, and why it felt a little different for the folks that were participating in it, we integrated it all into one coherent warfighting framework,” he said. “So from the National Training Center, north of it to the Nellis test training facility, south of it to Coronado, to [Camp] Pendleton on the coast of California – we integrated all those capabilities in support of a joint task force executing actual missions,” he said.
To coordinate this mission, across not only Army units but across services and with international partners, the service has been working to string together all of its communications and data-sharing gear into one display that every command center can see simultaneously.
“We collect a lot of data. It’s not always in the right spot … or the right format. That’s been our problem: we’ve had boxes that talk to boxes that talk to other boxes,” said Maj. Gen. Patrick Ellis, head of the Command and Control Cross-Functional Team at Army Futures Command. “And if you want to interact with that data, you’ve got to pull it out of the box, manipulate it, translate it, use it, put it back in, re-translate it.”
Ellis said the Army has been working with industry to build software that will network everything together, and Capstone 5 was their opportunity to prove they could knit all of that data into a visual picture that individual commanders can interact with.
The exercise also featured a second joint mission in the Indo-Pacific: networking an operation from Hawaii to Japan to the Philippines, French Polynesia and Australia and transmitting data to British, French, and Japanese partners.
“PC-C5 showed us that all the data that we’re going after all the systems we’re testing and learning, we’re going down the right path,” said Lt. Gen. J.B. Vowell, U.S. Army Pacific’s deputy commander. “We’ve just got to go faster.”
There are a few other capabilities the Army might need to do these missions well, ideas they can send down to their Transformation-in-Contact units to start developing with defense contractors.
“We think there’s a need for us to combine offensive and defensive fires capabilities,” Vowell said. “Think the offensive missile systems that we have – think HIMARS – versus the defensive missile systems we have – think Patriot.”
The Patriot system is designed to shoot down an incoming missile, while HIMARS can target a tank battalion, but in a scenario where a division might need to knock out targets, take terrain and then defend it, a single system would come in handy.
“That’s not going to happen this year, but keep experimenting and keep testing and keep innovating,” Vowell said. “I think we’re going to get there.”
The Fort Irwin scenario included robotic ground vehicles leading the charge onto the base once enemy defenses had gone down. The Army doesn’t have those yet, but they are becoming a higher priority.
“I think in every case, we find more use cases for robots,” Hodne said. “So I would just tell you that there’s not a pivot as much as there’s an expansion of all possibilities. We’ve just got to figure out which … ones are the best return on investment.”
Project Convergence – Capstone 6 is set to kick off in August.
Read the full article here