“Our own Army career engagement survey shows that most officers leaving the service today are seeking more stability, predictability and a better family life,” Wormuth said in her Monday address.

“I am not suggesting that we telework to war. Don’t misunderstand me,” she said. Nor, she said, is she suggesting the British model of the regimental army, where a soldier stays with one unit for the entire career.

However, Wormuth shared some ideas on what possible changes might look like.

“Should we restructure the force to reduce [permanent change of station] moves to every five years instead of every three years? Should we modify officer career timelines and promotion criteria to give more flexibility for broadening assignments while ensuring we’re still selecting the right officers for command?” she asked.

Other ideas Wormuth floated included increasing the options for military occupational specialty transfers within the Army to make it easier to pursue a new career path without leaving the service and finding ways to better match financial compensation with responsibilities, qualifications and job performance rather than strictly basing it on rank and time in grade.

“Standing here, I don’t have the answers,” Wormuth said, noting many of these changes would be complex and require additional resources and cooperation from Congress. “But if the Army doesn’t seriously explore these questions soon, I worry that in 10 to 15 years, we could see our recruiting challenges deepen and our historically high retention rates start dropping, placing the viability of the all-volunteer force under threat, during a time when our nation can least afford it.”

The lifestyle the Army offers hasn’t changed much since before the invention of the internet, she said.

“We still expect our soldiers to move every two to three years, uprooting children from schools and friends and upending the aspirations of spouses who want careers of their own.

“We continue to rely on our spouses and partners as a de facto, unpaid Army labor force, available to organize PCS moves and lead soldier family readiness groups, but often at the expense of work outside the home and the earnings that come with it,” she said.

For years, some have questioned if it’s necessary for military families to move so much, as a number of problems they face can be traced to moving. While many military families manage to thrive in the moving process, it often brings difficulties in finding affordable housing, affordable and good-quality child care and jobs for spouses.

Pentagon officials have discussed the challenges of frequent military moves, which are costly for both the Defense Department and families, at different times over the years.

The most recent examination of PCS moves was in a June report from the Military Family Advisory Network, in which a 2023 survey found that frequent PCS moves can make families vulnerable to a variety of difficulties.

The organization’s 109-page report questioned whether changing the frequent shuffle between bases — which military officials argue is necessary to meet operational requirements and fill empty jobs — could affect recurring issues related to financial stability, such as military spouse unemployment, and other concerns such as children’s education.

During a health care panel at the AUSA conference, a family member asked about the frequency of moves, inquiring about the best way for families to receive continuity of health care when they move every one to three years. Furthermore, military medical providers are also being transferred every few years.

Lt. Gen. Mary Krueger Izaguirre, the Army surgeon general, said the question is also being raised within the service’s medical workforce about the thought process when making decisions about moving people.

“Does it make sense for you to move, or does it make sense for us to provide you some stability?” she said.

Soldiers should have honest conversations with their leaders about whether there’s a way to make a decision that’s appropriate for both the Army mission and their families, she said.

Izaguirre shared that a few years ago, she had a conversation with the surgeon general at the time about stabilizing her own family because of her oldest son’s health care needs.

She stayed in that job for a few years, she said, and that’s a reason she is where she is today.

American Rheinmetall Vehicles and General Dynamics Land Systems were chosen from a pool of bidders in June 2023 to continue into a detailed design phase of the XM30 Mechanized Infantry Combat Vehicle.

Both teams are designing a hybrid vehicle featuring a suite of lethal capabilities to include a 50mm cannon, a remote turret, anti-tank guided missiles, machine guns employed through an advanced third-generation, forward-looking infrared sensor, an integrated protection suite, kitted armor, and signature management capabilities as well as intelligent fire control, according to Army officials.

The total value of both contracts is approximately $1.6 billion; the overall program is expected to be worth about $45 billion, according to the Army.

The last preliminary design review wrapped up in August, and the service will have a quick turnaround to complete critical design reviews in order to begin building physical prototypes, Dean said in an interview ahead of the Association of the U.S. Army’s annual conference this week.

Here’s who will move forward in the Bradley replacement competition

“At that point [when] the design is final, all of the elements and parts are defined, and at that point the contractor is ordering all their material to build prototypes,” Dean said.

Prototypes will take 18 to 20 months to construct after the critical design reviews wrap up. Once prototypes are delivered, the Army will move into a test and evaluation phase with both competitors before deciding on a winner in fiscal 2027. The first vehicles are expected to be fielded in fiscal 2029.

The Army is moving on an aggressive schedule between completion of a preliminary design review and a critical design review, Dean said.

Such a schedule is possible because of the designs taking place in a digital engineering environment and frequent soldier touch points in physical and virtual mockups, Col. Kevin Bradley, who is in charge of combat vehicle modernization within Army Futures Command, said in the same interview.

“Having soldiers get in and actually see what the seating in the back looked like, how their evacuation drills would go, definitely was beneficial to both vendors in giving them feedback to help adjust designs to better suit what we were looking for in the requirements,” he said.

“I would say we’ve had everything from small user interface changes up to, in one case, at least a fairly significant structural change to the base design,” Dean said. “There are some fairly dramatic shifts, and this is the time to do them.”

American Rheinmetall Defense’s team includes Textron Systems, RTX, L3Harris Technologies and Allison Transmission as well as artificial intelligence-focused company Anduril Technologies.

GDLS is teamed up with GM Defense; Applied Intuition, a specialist in modeling and simulating autonomy for the automobile industry; and AeroVironment, which is providing its Switchblade loitering munitions for integration into the design. GDLS also continues to work with General Dynamics Mission Systems to incorporate networks, radio gear and cyber capabilities.

Over the past year, new programs and updates to existing training have flowed across the force.

Army Times spoke with Gen. Gary Brito, head of Training and Doctrine Command, about some of these areas and what they mean for new and career soldiers. Brito took over his current command in 2022 after serving as the Army’s deputy chief of staff over personnel.

The four-star has a deep, personal history within Army training, having served as commander over the Joint Readiness Training Center at Fort Johnson, Louisiana, and twice serving at the National Training Center at Fort Irwin, California, earlier in his career, according to his official biography.

This Q&A has been edited for length and clarity.

What are some additions or changes to Army training from this past year that readers might not have encountered?

Gen. Gary Brito: Over the past year, we’ve made significant improvements to our initial entry training and professional military education. Some of the programs include the quick-fire observation portal that was created by the Center for Army Lessons Learned.

The portal is a web and mobile application that allows users to submit observations. We’ve added foundational skills development to our curriculum. This training promotes skill-specific proficiency, cohesion among soldiers and camaraderie while also aiming to lower harmful behaviors.

The foundational skills include such areas as life skills, from financial planning and time management to suicide prevention and resilience training.

We’ve updated how we consider the operational environment in all that we do to plan for potential large-scale combat.

That document was released earlier this year and explains the current operational environment considerations all soldiers should understand. We’ve also expanded basic combat training, adding more training companies to Fort Leonard Wood, Missouri, and Fort Sill, Oklahoma.

Senior leaders gauge readiness by how units perform at combat training centers. What’s going on to prepare for and take home lessons from a center rotation?

Our mission command training program and warfighter exercises give corps and divisions a chance to conduct collective training, at scale, with multinational partners.

The mission command program specifically focuses on leader development by advising, observing and consulting commanders on how they run their units and how to improve. We also host a quarterly general officer steering committee meeting.

That Army Lessons Learned Forum captures gaps, issues and lessons learned from commanders in various theaters. That forum generates a list of recommended solutions to tactical and operational level concerns that’s disseminated across Army leadership.

How is the Army modernizing its force while still training new and experienced soldiers on evolving doctrine, new equipment and fundamental soldiering?

We are making changes to our program of instruction to accelerate training development. Across our centers of excellence, we incorporate observations and lessons learned to adjust curriculum, training events and cadre and faculty development.

We’re introducing tools and practices such as artificial intelligence, machine learning and human-machine integration. For example, at the Maneuver Center of Excellence at Fort Moore, Georgia, the center has developed and updated various Army training publications to address the use of small drones, counter-drone and aspects of electromagnetic warfare into our courses.

An MCOE team, partnered with Army Futures Command, is experimenting with robotic-enabled maneuver, introducing air and ground robots into live, virtual and constructive training across the spectrum of our courses, from basic training to the captain’s career course.

What are some programs or initiatives you can highlight in Army training for the coming year?

TRADOC is integrating data literacy into Army professional military education. New data literacy curriculums are being developed for the Basic Officer Leader Course, Warrant Office Candidate Course, Basic Leader Course and Advanced Leader Course.

The Cyber Center of Excellence initiated a proof of concept for CamoGPT, a generative AI application that improves productivity and operational readiness at all echelons.

Like ChatGPT, the CamoGPT uses a large language model to incorporate data from joint and Army doctrine, lessons learned, best practices [and] TRADOC content, among other sources.

The Reconfigurable Virtual Collective Trainer is being delivered to the force. It is a hardware system that connects to the Army’s Synthetic Training Environment.

Users can access collective, mixed-reality training scenarios. It has a heads-up display, high-resolution monitor and controllers.

This gives soldiers, squads, platoons and companies the ability to navigate exercises using real and computer-generated movements.

The trainers, which have been installed at Fort Moore, Georgia, and Fort Cavazos, Texas, will allow for collective training with the Abrams tank, Bradley infantry fighting vehicle, Stryker and dismounted troops.

We’re also working to add future vehicle variants and their capabilities, such as the M1256/A1 Infantry Carrier Vehicle Stryker and Maneuver-Short Range Air Defense systems.

The new All-Domain Sensing CFT is now fully established, following the announcement in March it would become Army Futures Command’s latest office to focus on modernization efforts.

The team, created to develop capabilities that will allow the service to understand battlespace goings-on, will initially work toward creating an architecture of sensors as well as processing and disseminating the enormous amount of data collected from those sensors.

The team grew out of the former Assured Positioning, Navigation and Timing/Space CFT and took its current staff and director, Michael Monteleone, and expanded the mission to focus on broad deep-sensing capabilities.

“I think you’re going to see an evolution of PNTAX probably both in name and also in scope,” Monteleone told Defense News ahead of the U.S. Army’s annual conference. PNTAX stands for PNT Assessment Exercise.

While he said he could not yet divulge details on exactly how the exercise would be evolving, Monteleone said: “It’ll be something different. As we go more and more towards the resilient architectures from space to ground, both in transport and in data, then also as we start augmenting our formations with the human-machine integrated side of it, as we bring more robots, more [unmanned aircraft systems] capability into that architecture, we have to evaluate that in that denied environment.”

PNTAX will also likely be federated into other experiments and activities across the Army as well, Monteleone noted.

The Army just wrapped up its sixth PNTAX at the end of last month. The experiment “continues to deliver more and more value,” Monteleone said, because it offers a realistic threat environment that is “unique.”

There were were over 600 participants in the event, to include joint partners, combatant commands and all of the Five Eyes partners Australia, Canada, New Zealand and the United Kingdom, Monteleone said. Over 150 technologies were assessed and over 130 organizations total were on the ground over the three-week evaluation.

While the experimentation effort will evolve to encompass new focus areas within the All-Domain Sensing CFT, the team is not finished working on PNT capabilities even though it has seen successful fielding of a mounted and dismounted PNT system and the CFT has closed up shop.

“There is still a lot of work to be done in PNT,” Monteleone said.

“It’s really focused on what’s next in PNT and also focused on how to leverage exquisite PNT as a system of systems enabler to provide advantage,” he said. “Think of it from the perspective of being able to couple that with communications systems, electronic warfare systems, sensing systems and being able to outmaneuver adversaries, essentially, because I now have the ability to trust my timing source.”

Over the past year, Program Executive Office-Soldier added medical devices to its portfolio of all things soldier, which includes clothing, weapons, body armor and a host of other items.

The 1945th Medical Detachment is slated to stand up in late 2025 and will hold three Prolonged Care Augmentation Detachments, or PCADs, officials said.

Early work on the PCADs began as all U.S. service branches acknowledged that large-scale combat operations would mean wounded soldiers might have to wait longer for care. The commonly referred to “golden hour” of getting a wounded individual to higher-level medical care now might look more like the “golden day.”

Future Army medics will lean hard on new tech to help mass casualties

“We got spoiled in [the Global War on Terror] where nobody was more than an hour away from a surgeon,” said Sgt. 1st Class Andrew Proctor, senior enlisted advisor for Project Manager Soldier Medical Devices.

That means medical personnel from field surgeons to medics will need to keep soldiers alive longer with what they have on hand as compared to flying them off the battlefield for care at a full-fledged hospital.

With PCADs, the aim is to push more advanced care options, training and equipment down lower in the chain of care.

Army medical personnel put care into three main categories: Roles I, II and III.

Role I care covers treatment between the time a soldier is injured to when the soldier arrives at a forward aid station — combat medics keeping a soldier stable, for example.

Role II care is typically delivered by an area support medical company — usually part of the soldier’s higher command. This is the first time during the chain of care that a soldier might receive surgery.

Meanwhile, Role III care is a full field hospital, formerly called a combat support hospital. The PCAD concept allows commanders to expand or shrink the footprint of their field hospitals.

The “modular” setup of the detachments allows them to start with as few as 32 hospital beds and expand up to 248 beds, said Maj. Felicia Williams, a nurse consultant for the assistant program manager of hospitalization.

“This allows commanders to make decision on how large of a footprint do I need,” Proctor said.

Another piece of gear that will ease the strain on critical care is the 2.6-pound Sparrow Respirator. The respirator keeps a patient breathing instead of tying up an individual while manually using a pump to inflate the patient’s lungs. The service plans to field 6,900 respirators beginning in mid-2025.

“That’s a huge win for us, anybody who’s had to sit there and squeeze a bag for hours will tell you patient care has improved,” Proctor said.

The service is also working on new blood storage refrigerators for the field. The devices it’s now testing can hold up to 40 standard bags of blood and keep it viable for up to 78 hours, officials said.

The “Muddy Boots” initiative recently launched as a dedicated section of the NCO Journal, with the backing of Sergeant Major of the Army Michael Weimer.

The section seeks to capture the insights of nominative command sergeants major across the force.

“We believe that experience gained and not shared is experience lost,” Weimer told Army Times. “The most valuable lessons come from the mud, from the field, and from the boots that have been on the ground.”

Army fellowship offers paid degree, editor jobs to revitalize journals

Weimer and other senior leaders want soldiers of all ranks to take note of what their comrades can teach them, but also to offer their own experiences as a guide.

The writing project seeks input, writing and discussion on key Army topics in the service’s journals and online platforms.

The contributing sergeants major bring with them upwards of thirty years’ worth of experience, Weimer noted. That “experience is a gift that should be shared, not hoarded,” Weimer said.

The effort aligns with the Army’s broader Harding Project and a series of efforts to rekindle professional military reading, writing and feedback from troops. The Harding Project, which launched last year, selected a group of fellows for journalism training and assignment at their respective branch journals, such as “Infantry” and “Armor” magazines.

Weimer, along with Army Chief of Staff Gen. Randy George and Training and Doctrine Command head Gen. Gary Brito, co-authored an article published on the Modern War Institute website when they unveiled the Harding Project, noting the Army needs diverse dialogue in the historic interwar period it currently faces.

The interwar period references the namesake of the project, Maj. Edwin “Forrest” Harding, who assumed the helm of the Infantry Journal in the interwar period leading up to World War II.

Harding doubled the magazine’s circulation in four years by pushing “critical debates over changing tactics and technology before America joined World War II,” Zachary Griffiths and Theo Lipsky wrote in an article on the Modern War Institute website.

While the Harding fellowships are reserved for captains, master sergeants and senior warrant officers focused on branch-specific or operational matters, Muddy Boots seeks to share the lived wisdom from senior noncommissioned officers.

The NCO Journal has long featured career guidance from soldiers. For example, current articles exhort NCOs to analyze their own critical thinking when leading soldiers, monitor behavioral health among troops as a function of readiness and explain the revised enlisted promotion process.

A featured article published by the journal in May even explained why NCOs should write in the first place.

The “Regaining Relevance Through Effective Writing” article by Sgt. Maj. David Cyr encourages budding military writers to start by answering the professional journals’ call for submissions on a specific topic. He then advises soldiers to work with a battle buddy on their topic and drafting of the article.

Above all, and maybe the most difficult, Cyr tells soldiers to “risk rejection.” Not all submissions will be published. But he wants them to keep at it, regardless.

“Remember, failure is not measured by the number of rejections but by when you give up,” Cyr wrote.

In March, the service launched “Forge 2.5,” another update to “The Forge,” which began as a concept in 2016 with a 96-hour field exercise for week-seven trainees. The Forge has been in place since 2018 as a regular feature of basic training.

The event closely mirrors “The Crucible,” which the Marine Corps instituted in its recruit training in the 1990s. The field endurance test puts recruits in a patrol base, and they run through a variety of combat and logistical scenarios over the course of the four-day stretch.

The Army has graduated 25,000 soldiers through pre-basic prep course

Forge 2.5 ratchets up recruit learning by running large-scale combat operation scenarios, all while involving drill sergeants and company command teams as leaders within the trainee teams.

This structure gives young soldiers firsthand field experience while keeping drill sergeants sharp on basic soldiering and leadership skills, said Gen. Gary Brito, head of the Army’s Training and Doctrine Command.

“What this is meant to do — part one is now immersing soldiers with threat actors from the moment they arrive in the reception company,” Brito said.

Part two of Forge 2.5, which rolled out this year, puts drill sergeants in squad leader positions.

As recently as three years ago, new soldiers conducted events in a fashion resembling a round robin, where individual soldiers would rotate between tasks. Now, every event is collective, and soldiers are always working with and leading small teams, Brito said.

In doing so, recruits are learning more than marching or basic rifle marksmanship, with many completing tasks they would not have encountered until pinning on an NCO rank.

From digital tool signature management to mission planning and order development, the drill sergeants are exposing the new soldiers to more complex considerations as they train, Brito said.

“The trainees are the ones actually executing casualty evaluation, gathering and sending reports, and the drill sergeants are leading them through all those different things they’ve learned so far in the basic combat training portion of [initial training],” said Capt. Julio Sanchez, commander of Company A, 31st Engineer Battalion out of Fort Leonard Wood, Missouri.

Sanchez’s unit conducted a pilot version of the Forge 2.5 format this year at the home of basic training for most of the Army’s non-combat arms jobs.

And that, Brito said, is why Army leaders must be at the top of their game for when these new soldiers arrive.

“You all will be charged in leading cohesive teams,” Brito said. “Privates will be introduced to why we need to be cohesive and the importance of the battle buddy.”

Brito tied that soldier development back to how the Army is expecting more of lower level tactical leaders, who will have high-level assets such as satellite feeds, drone-based fire support and other tools that soldiers previously never needed to consider.

The new training structure has been implemented at Fort Moore, Georgia; Fort Jackson, South Carolina and Fort Leonard Wood, Missouri.

Beyond the Forge 2.5 implementation, another program recently surpassed a milestone. The Future Solder Prep course has seen 25,000 soldiers complete entry-level training and join Army units as of this year, Army Times previously reported.

The pre-basic training program began in 2022 to take prospective recruits who did not meet minimum physical or academic standards and give them up to 90 days to reach those standards with the help of Army training staff.

CORRECTION: This article has been corrected to include accurate references to geographic locations for Army installations and the type of training being adjusted.

“We were seeing a lot of these power systems emerge that were different pieces of a microgrid, but right now, all of the microgrids that are out there use proprietary interfaces to talk,” Cory Goetz, who is the technical management division chief for the Army’s Expeditionary and Sustainment Systems program manager’s office, told Defense News shortly before the Association of the U.S. Army’s annual conference.

In order to develop the capability to get all of these systems to communicate, Goetz said, the Army decided to develop what it calls the Tactical Microgrid Standard, or TMS, in partnership with industry.

The standard was published officially in 2023, allowing for an open architecture for competitive procurement of power systems that can tie into an expeditionary microgrid architecture, Goetz explained.

“It allows us not to have to pure-fleet everything in the Department of Defense with tactical power. If someone has a good system, say it’s an energy storage system, if they make it with TMS, we can incorporate it into what we do after, of course, verifying it’s compliant,” he added.

The standards initiative is the basis of an effort called the Small Tactical Expeditionary Power, or STEP, project, which consists of small systems with hybrid capability that soldiers can operate quietly, toggling between fuel-burning energy production and batteries, Goetz said.

Then the Army is working on a Universal Power Gateway capability on the TMS basis. Its idea is to tie any power source or power storage capability into the service’s Advanced Medium Mobile Power Source (AMMPS) generator, made by Cummins.

“The UPG, that’s an emerging requirement that we see pointing to a program of record,” Goetz said. “It allows us to tie into those vehicles that will be exporting power in the future, and then be able to hybridize our generators for resilience and efficiency.”

As result, hybrid-electric vehicles would become nodes bundling what are now individual power connections to generators.

The program office is also working to push the microgrid standard to industry “in a more wholesale way, in a more organized way,” Goetz said.

Officials have created a user group, currently counting 40 companies, that they hope will draw relevant companies into a conversation of adopting and advancing the standard.

The program office hopes to field the STEP capability in fiscal year 2028, with the UPG initiative following a year later, though early variants of either project could be ready sooner.

Launched Effects, or LE, is the service’s term of art for an envisioned unmanned segment among its aerial platforms, capable of delivering a wide range of capabilities such as targeting, reconnaissance, surveillance, network extension or kinetic strike. Launched Effects can be deployed from both air and ground vehicles.

The effort represents a new direction in the Army’s aviation portfolio, which prioritizes drones and the more loosely defined category of LE platforms as the tip of the spear in enemy contact.

“We were able to accelerate the long-range efforts by about a year,” Brig. Gen. David Phillips told Defense News in an interview before the Association of the U.S. Army’s annual conference.

This means the Army will likely put out a request for proposals for what is considered more of a Corps-level asset in the third quarter of fiscal 2026. The service was originally looking at focusing on small and medium launched effects first and had yet to secure funding for the long-range version.

At the same time, the Army is making sure it is collaborating with the joint force to ensure it is not duplicating efforts.

“We have been paying close attention to the maturity of longer-range capability,” Phillips said.

The Army also continues to mature its medium-range capability which is in a prototyping effort well underway using Anduril Industries’ Altius 700 aircraft. Collins Aerospace, a Raytheon Technologies company, is the mission system provider, and Aurora Flight Sciences is the system integrator. Technology Service Corp. and Northrop Grumman Information Systems are providing modular payloads.

“We completed some additional flight testing off of an MH-60 Black Hawk helicopter at Dugway Proving Ground, Utah, last month and we’re looking at a way to deliver that capability faster,” Phillips said.

The medium-range LE will also be developed in conjunction with Program Executive Office Missiles & Space to fill its requirement for a helicopter-fired Long-Range Precision Munition.

The service was debating whether it made sense to pursue a separate LRPM program through PEO M&S or if the capability essentially could be classified as an LE and was therefore a redundant effort.

The Army’s ruling is that “it is a Launched Effects Medium Range. It’s captured in that requirement and that’s [how] we’re going to go about the acquisition process,” Lt. Gen. Karl Gingrich, who overseas the programs and resources division of the Army staff at the Pentagon, told Defense News.

As part of the requirement, the Army is looking at ways to accelerate the lethal version of the medium-range LE to meet the service’s need for an air-launched precision munition.

“We’re being more efficient and effective that way,” Phillips said.

The Army has already issued a request for white papers for a short-range LE.

“We’re squarely in the evaluation space,” Phillips said.

The service plans to launch an effort late this year or early next year that will lead to a user demonstration aimed at getting feedback from the force.

The method is similar to what the service has done with other small, unmanned aircraft systems efforts. “That may sound familiar, that model, but it’s working for us in the small UAS space,” Phillips said.

The 2nd Mobile Brigade Combat Team, or MBCT, with 101st Airborne Division carried out their rotation at the Joint Readiness Training Center in August, the culmination of months of planning, new equipment training and restructuring.

The brigade is one of three selected by the Army chief of staff to be the focus of his “Transformation in Contact” initiative, which seeks to deliver new equipment to units as they increase their readiness and prepare for deployments.

This exercise is shaping the long-term future of Army brigades

Even MBCT’s designator is new to the Army, which has operated under the brigade combat team construct since the early 2000s. However, those teams have been equipment-focused with Stryker Brigade Combat Teams, Armored Brigade Combat Teams and Infantry Brigade Combat Teams.

The “mobile” in MBCT is mostly about giving soldiers smaller off-road capabilities, such as the Infantry Squad Vehicle, to move soldiers faster with a smaller footprint.

And moving fast with a smaller footprint is the sole purpose of the MBCT’s newest creation: the Multifunctional Reconnaissance Company, or MFRC. The recon company combines existing soldier specialties with new equipment to detect and destroy enemy threats using small, mobile teams.

Capt. Charlie O’Hagan led the 2nd MBCT’s recon company during the recent rotation. They built three “hunter killer platoons” that can break into smaller reconnaissance nodes and augmented the teams with small drones and added an electromagnetic warfare specialist to each team within the company.

The purpose is clear — save lives.

“We’re using drones and sensing to increase standoff, that’s how we’re leveraging all this equipment to limit bloodshed,” O’Hagan said.

The company saw huge gains when they were able to shrink their command footprint by using commercial satellites such as StarShield instead of larger, trailer-hauled legacy military satellites.

Capt. Cory Mullikin, a brigade data systems engineer, said the entire command post could be set up or torn down in 10 to 20 minutes compared to 45 minutes with the old gear.

“I pick a location when we come; I know exactly where to set up, pull it out and plug it in,” Mullikin said. “Everything is pretty much dashboard in there, our only time constraint is running the fiber.”

The dashboard capabilities meant a four-Humvee detachment could hold the entire brigade command post. The recon teams could then move in even smaller Infantry Squad Vehicle formations.

With less equipment and fewer personnel, the recon company was able to remain in the field without a resupply for more than nine days. That’s two to three times longer than a unit of that size could typically operate without needing water and fuel.

The origins for the multifunctional recon company come from the 75th Ranger Regiment, which developed a similar concept on a team level.

Capt. Jonathan Paul leads Delta Company, 1st Battalion, 75th Ranger Regiment. His company has been organized around the multifunctional concept — taking infantry soldiers, snipers, scouts and electronic warfare soldiers and merging them into one unit that can collect data, sense enemy activity and call in fires rapidly.

In early 2023, the company saw small recon elements from the regiment get behind enemy lines during force-on-force exercises at the National Training Center, Fort Irwin, California, Paul said. In one example, the unit was able to disrupt the entire enemy brigade by using two 12-soldier teams and a single 81mm mortar attachment, Paul said.

That’s two dozen soldiers stalling an enemy force of 3,000 to 4,000 soldiers. Usually, such a feat would require a battalion’s worth of soldiers, according to Paul.

Reconfiguring job skills within a multifunctional company for the 101st Airborne saw quick success.

Maj. Gen. Brett Sylvia, 101st Airborne Division commander, told reporters at the JRTC event that 101st Airborne recon company soldiers were able to use an artificial intelligence application known as “Shrike,” developed by the Army’s Artificial Intelligence Center, to speed up their fires missions.

Shrike was installed on unit drones using a small circuit board. Soldiers then flew the drone over the enemy’s motor pool, allowing the device to scan vehicles and identify them in the field.

With this app, soldiers could identify and generate an automated call for fire mission in less than a minute. By comparison, the Army standard is five to eight minutes, with some leaders admitting it can take a team up to 15 minutes.

The app also conducts an immediate battle damage assessment and then generates additional call for fire missions to take out any missed or still functioning targets.

Soldiers in the recon company also used the electromagnetic spectrum to exhaust the enemy’s shooters.

The brigade brought 250 homemade electronic decoys, programmed to appear as sensors much like a command post would look on the battlefield. They’d drop these sensors in the woods, creating clusters for the enemy units to target — and they did.

“The enemy spent 50% of their artillery against the dirt where we had those decoys,” Col. James Stultz, 2nd MBCT commander, said of one such engagement.

A year ago, the Army selected McQ, Textron Systems, General Dynamics Land Systems and Oshkosh Defense to design and build prototypes for the system.

The Army decided then to adjust its pursuit of three robotic combat vehicles of different sizes, moving forward instead with a single size that can keep up with crewed combat vehicles, Dean said at the time. And then the Army would equip the platform with different mission payloads to fill specific battlefield roles.

Each vendor delivered two prototypes in August, and all of the prototypes are now at Aberdeen Proving Ground, Maryland, Dean said.

“We’re on track to down-select in about the March timeframe from those four vendors to one and that’ll give us the base platform,” Dean said.

The chosen vendor will deliver eight prototypes for the next phase. “Then once we have that, that vendor will actually do another prototype spin. … We’ve tiered the requirements so they’re going to add some new requirements when they go into the second prototypes.”

While Dean said he prefers to keep as many vendors in a development effort as long as possible, funding is always a consideration. “It does come down to money. There’s a profile that we have to stay within. Unfortunately, the profile that we have really almost only allowed us to retain one. We looked at at least two and then that was still outside what we were able to afford.”

Who’s in control?

The Army has also settled on the Armored Multipurpose Vehicle, or AMPV, as the designated control vehicle for the robots, chosen because the control vehicle needs to keep up with the first unit designated to receive the robots, which will be a platoon in an Armored Brigade Combat Team, according to Col. Kevin Bradley, who is in charge of next-generation combat vehicle modernization within Army Futures Command.

The service looked at a number of concepts for a control vehicle from Bradley Infantry Fighting Vehicles to Stryker combat vehicles to even a truck-based one, but “the user community gelled on what they wanted,” Dean said.

A unit that has been working through how to operate and fight with RCVs at the National Training Center, for one, said using a control vehicle that was different from anything else in the formation became “very easy to target,” and the opposing force in a recent training event would go after the control vehicle easily to take the robots, according to Bradley.

The RCV’s first fielding is expected in fiscal 2028, which means the control vehicle will need to go under contract in FY25 because the AMPV has a two-year production lead time. Then from FY27 to FY28, the integration work to make it a control vehicle will occur, Dean detailed.

Tough road

While the RCV base platform prototyping and the control vehicle effort is moving forward smoothly, the Army’s work to develop off-road autonomy software is proving more difficult.

In June the Army conducted an off-road autonomy software assessment. “The good news is we are moving forward in that area. The bad news is industry is nowhere near where people think in terms of off-road autonomy. There’s still a lot of development to do,” Dean said.

The Army plans to hold another evaluation in December which will become routine in order to continue software development.

Three companies are working directly with the Bradley’s Next-Generation Combat Vehicle Cross Functional Team and PEO GCS on autonomy capability – Forterra, Kodiak Robotics and Overland AI.

So far the evaluations for autonomous behavior haven’t even been truly off-road, Dean said. “We’re talking trails and unimproved road conditions. Building an autonomy algorithm that can identify the entire range of things it might encounter is challenging because you have a pretty big data set.”

The evaluation in June took place at Fort Cavazos, Texas, and in one instance the robot needed to cross a creek at the bottom of a hill and would need to navigate a series of switchbacks to get down. “It couldn’t navigate the switchbacks,” Dean said.

“We are still working through the negative obstacle problem. You see a dip ahead of you. It could be a puddle, I can drive right through it, or it could be a cliff, and the sensors sometimes have difficulty evaluating what’s safe to navigate,” he said.

The evaluation in June involved too much human intervention, Dean said, but it’s still better than having to tele-operate a system continuously and deal with latency issues at certain ranges and speeds.

Overall, based off a major training event at Fort Irwin, California, this summer “we saw that robots provided benefits to the organization particularly in the reconnaissance and security role for long-duration observation and security posts,” Bradley said.

But the service is still working through tradeoffs with power, range and the ability to make decisions at a distance and the desired level of control, he added.

“That was really what we were trying to tease out, that math problem of you want to be able to see 4K video to make decisions of shoot, don’t shoot, to maintain that kind of ethical high ground, then that requires a certain amount of bandwidth that’s impacting how far you can go, also impacts how much control you have,” Bradley said.

“Our focus is an ecosystem looking at how we improve the supply chain, but also ensuring that we could keep that supply chain in motion — given a peer adversary like China — [when] we’re not able to [establish] fixed sites and keep them there for long periods of time,” Brig. Gen. Shane Upton, the Contested Logistics Cross Functional Team lead within Army Futures Command, told Defense News.

“Quite frankly, the lessons we’ve seen in Ukraine, the lessons we’re seeing recently in the Middle East — if it’s static for too long, especially resupply or logistics nodes, it becomes a target,” he said.

Upton’s team soon plans to take an abbreviated capabilities document on requirements for autonomous watercraft to the Pentagon for approval.

Smaller, autonomous watercraft, particularly in the Pacific, present a dilemma to adversaries “if there’s enough of them out there,” Upton said.

“You really don’t know which one to target,” he added. “Also, unmanned air systems that move cargo off those systems onto land — or even to a point of need directly to widely, distributed forces — [are] a focus area.”

The other near-term pursuit for using autonomous systems to distribute supplies will be larger cargo drones with greater range, he added. The team is writing a capabilities document to define those characteristics as well.

The Army demonstrated cargo drones at Project Convergence, the service’s periodic effort to experiment with future concepts and capabilities.

“We’ve rapidly seen the need that we absolutely want to use [unmanned aircraft systems] in supply and distribution, but it has to have more capacity and range than some of the smaller ones,” Upton said. “The smaller [craft] are very purpose built and very effective for [intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance], lethal effects. They’re low cost. They can be attritable. When we’re talking about moving [supplies], we need a greater capacity for lift and they’ve got to go longer ranges.”

Upton attended an industry meeting just prior to the Association of the U.S. Army’s annual conference with an eye on larger cargo option developments as his team works to design an ecosystem of autonomous supply delivery.

Watercraft systems were already taking a huge step forward through extensive development work by the U.S. Navy and Marine Corps prior to the establishment of the Army’s Contested Logistics CFT, which was almost two years ago.

The industry for small, autonomous watercraft is growing, Upton added, and there are several companies that have gone from creation to having boats in the water in less than a year.

After one particular company stood up, less than six months elapsed before it was conducting experiments with the Navy in the Atlantic Ocean. The organization now has the ability to make several hundred boats a month, Upton said.

Another consideration with cheap autonomous vessels is the possibility of using them as decoys. The Navy and Marine Corps are also looking into the possibility of adding lethal effects to some of the watercraft, Upton said.

Advancements in larger cargo drones and faster craft are coming as well, he noted following a recent meeting with industry developing systems in the commercial space.

Upton cited additional emerging tech features, such as hydrogen-powered drones that can travel 1,000 miles and carry 1,000 pounds, as promising developments.

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.

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.

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.”

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.

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.

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.

“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.

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.”

The Integrated Visual Augmentation System, or IVAS, is a $22 billion program on which the Army has worked closely with Microsoft since 2018. The military system was built on the commercially available Microsoft HoloLens device.

Maj. John Thomas, assistant program manager for IVAS Development at Program Executive Office-Soldier, told Army Times that as they work through the upcoming events, the next focus is on “extensibility” of the device.

Apps to drive how soldiers use Army's 'mixed reality' device

That entails using the capabilities of IVAS to control other devices, such as the soldier-borne sensor, a microdrone currently in use by soldiers.

The Army is working on the third of five prototypes of the device since the program began. The current version, IVAS 1.2, is the second engineering validation build, Thomas said. This includes some design changes that must be implemented in the next prototype as the service continues gathering troop feedback.

The following updates are in the works for IVAS 1.2:

• A low-light camera with increased sensitivity
• Improved low-light focus mechanism, especially when wearing gloves
• More robust bumpers, cables, bungees and tethered solar caps
• Hinge improvements for usability, display clarity and durability
• Improved transport case and mission bag for better storage and protection
• Minor visor and display improvements for greater clarity and durability
• Software improvements

As engineers work through those updates, soldiers with the 101st Airborne Division at Fort Campbell, Kentucky, are slated in January to run a user assessment.

But following that test will be the largest event so far with the device. Next spring, soldiers with the 4th Infantry Division, out of Fort Carson, Colorado, will conduct an operational demonstration, handing the IVAS to a battalion of soldiers for a field exercise.

For now, the Army has IVAS sets on loan to the Maneuver Center of Excellence at Fort Moore, Georgia, 10th Mountain Division at Fort Drum, New York, and III Corps headquarters at Fort Cavazos, Texas, officials said.

Once the IVAS 1.2 engineering changes are made and the Army completes the battalion operational assessment — and any additional testing — the service will be ready to award a production contract, officials said.

PEO Soldier and Microsoft have made significant changes to the device since the program’s inception.

The Army presented the early HoloLens-based iteration of IVAS in March 2019. That was followed by ruggedized, military versions through 2022.

The device transitioned from a helmet- or no-helmet goggle option, with a chest-mounted controller and thick cabling, to a helmet-mounted flip-up visor-like version. The controller also moved to the rib cage, opening more room on the user’s chest for other gear.

Developers reached the limits of what they could do with the analog night vision technology, built over 70 years of research and development.

Maj. Gen. Christopher Schneider, PEO Soldier commander, told Army Times that the legacy analog night vision had problems incorporating augmented reality, a key feature of how IVAS is expected to be used.

The development team fixed early problems with moisture in the device, dizziness reported by users and display glitches, officials said.

One Army division is finding ways to practice the Army’s newest multidomain doctrine with partners, at home station and using space assets to test the mettle of its company and battalion commanders.

Soldiers with the 4th Infantry Division at Fort Carson, Colorado, recently conducted the first division-level command post exercise as they prepare for their warfighter exercise in 2025.

Army lays out its vision for space in future operations

The division planned a year ahead of this summer’s events, all to tie together Army National Guard, Marine Reserve, Air Force, Space Force, special operations forces and conventional units in a series of fast-paced fire missions.

Exercise Lethal Ivy ran for a week at the end of August at Fort Carson and the Pinon Canyon Maneuver Site, about a two-hour drive away from the installation.

The exercise saw 1,000 4th ID soldiers in the field working remotely and virtually with various joint units to coordinate simulated fire missions in Colorado, Kentucky and New Jersey, simulating the distances they’d likely face in Europe or corners of the Pacific.

Participating units put the Army’s multidomain operations doctrine, or MDO, which seeks to sense and strike, linking any shooting platform, Army or other military branch or ally, to the test. They configured ways to communicate quickly and rapidly converge windows to take out “enemy” assets and strike precisely.

But in the years since the service announced MDO and built its multidomain task forces to work with operational units in theater, units not aligned specifically to those regions are working out how they can execute these multiprong attacks that MDO requires.

Brig. Gen. Eugene “Buddy” Ferris, 4th ID deputy commanding general-maneuver, shared some insights from the effort while at the Maneuver Warfighter Conference at Fort Moore, Georgia, in September.

Much of the event’s audience was made up of captains, most attending the mandatory captains career course at the installation.

“This is a future concept, but right now it’s just a manual, it’s just an idea,” Ferris said.

Ferris first highlighted the real-world demands of practicing the new doctrine, pointing to the Russia-Ukraine war as an example.

Ferris noted intelligence is showing that Russian troops are firing up to 40,000 rounds daily and some days forces on either side are taking up to 1,000 casualties.

“Think about that, a battalion plus off the battlefield,” Ferris said.

But much of the talk about MDO sits at the division and corps level, right?

Wrong.

“Seventy-five percent of my audience right now is captain and below, and you’re like, ‘What does this matter to me?’” Ferris said. “You’re the one who’s going to allocate that tool.”

The general pointed to the companies and battalions needing to be at their appointed battlefield location on time and ready to execute their tasks; otherwise, it will hurt their comrades.

Even though connecting the unit took a lot of work, Ferris said some of the basic soldier tasks caused the most friction.

“Talking, supplying, resupplying and then coordinating and planning — that is where we learned we need to keep getting better,” Ferris said.

During the exercise, one of the units, which Ferris did not name, wasn’t at the line of departure — where units coordinate and begin an attack — on time.

Another unit had taken out enemy radars and artillery to open a window for the unit to move. But when the timing was off, the unit took 1,000 virtual casualties in the combined live and simulated exercise, Ferris said.

“I can only keep a convergence point open for so long,” Ferris said.

This is part of the adjustment, Ferris said, of the Army’s move from counterinsurgency operations, mostly happening at the company or platoon level, to MDO, which is moving brigades around the battlefield under division and corps support.

“You’ve got to recognize that you’re part of a bigger fight,” Ferris said.

In the lead up to the August event, 4th ID had to align their communications equipment and practices with Air Force, Army Guard and Marine Reserve units.

That effort alone required a lot of troubleshooting.

“How do you talk to the Air Force? How do you talk to a Marine Reserve unit, never mind an Army Reserve unit; you think an Army Reserve unit has stuff that’s old, wait until you see the Marines,” Ferris said.

Once they’re connected, Ferris said the subordinate units still set up their command posts like they would for a counterinsurgency operation where there wasn’t an aerial threat or enemy sensing.

“In our efforts to shrink a command post, we have forgotten the function of a command post,” Ferris said.

He saw well-developed brigade and division command posts, slimmed down with less personnel and gear, hiding effectively and running missions.

However, the battalions often simply set up four to five company command posts as they traditionally would, which makes those posts easy targets.

“I will tell you the whole team learned and we learned a lot,” Ferris said. “Did we get everything right? No. But I think the more we push the system and accept the fact that we may fail, we will get better.”

Lt. Gen. Robert Harter, chief of the Army Reserve, wants the service to have its own data-centric approach to identifying individuals who may offer the Army a longer commitment if they can do that job in the Reserve.

The active Army met its recruiting mission this past fiscal year for the first time in two years, bringing 55,000 new soldiers into the ranks. Next year’s goal is 61,000 new troops, Army Secretary Christine Wormuth announced Monday.

Training changes ahead for Army Guardsmen

The Guard plans to add 1,000 soldiers to its end strength mission annually from fiscal 2026 to fiscal 2029, said Lt. Gen. Jonathan Stubbs, Army National Guard director, at the Association of the U.S. Army’s annual conference Tuesday. If successful, that will bring Guard end strength up from its current 325,000 soldiers to 329,000 soldiers over the next five years.

Meanwhile, as the Reserve aims to improve recruiting and retention, it is also seeking out more direct commissions for civilians with critical skills. The Reserve holds much of the strategic capacity that the Army is going to lean on should it face large-scale combat.

Some of those positions, such as medical doctors, chaplains, experts in artificial intelligence or big data and machine learning, fit niche but crucial roles for the service as it supports the active force’s global mission.

The command’s personnel experts have been looking at ways to speed up the commissioning process for potential soldiers with such skills, said Brig. Gen. Kelly Dickerson, Army Reserve deputy chief of staff for strategic operations.

Much of that is simply filling gaps.

“What Army schools do they need?” Dickerson noted. Once those areas are covered, a direct commission soldier can plug right into a Reserve unit and start contributing.

Those specialties, whether from civilian experience or through Army training, are necessary for the Reserve to achieve its mission of providing the bulk of major combat operations support to the active duty Army.

Nearly 100% of the Army’s theater opening capability, from bulk fuel to theater engineers and theater tactical signal brigades, reside in the Reserve, Harter said.

Between 70% and 80% of the Army’s medical, water purification and interrogation capabilities are also in the Reserve.

For reservists, this means that if the active Army is going somewhere in bulk, they are as well.

“You go, we go,” Harter said.

An active duty counterpart on the same AUSA panel Tuesday shared the perspective from his end.

“We want all of that, because we don’t have all of that forward,” Maj. Gen. Gavin Gardner, commander of 8th Theater Sustainment Command, said of Reserve-specific capabilities.

And the reservists that do join or stay in uniform will have more chances to work with the active duty.

One example comes from U.S. Army Pacific, which is where Gardner’s unit, the 8th TSC, resides. Nearly 4,000 Army reservists deployed this past fiscal year across 26 exercises in the Pacific supporting active units, he said.

That figure is expected to rise to 5,000 forward-deployed reservists in 25 Pacific exercises this fiscal year, Gardner said.

“We have to buy smart and fast,” George said in a speech at the annual Eisenhower luncheon. “Our budget is tight, our numbers are lean and that requires us to prioritize and make informed investments.”

When George became Army chief a year ago, he announced he would focus on using units in the field to transform the service “in contact,” putting capability into the hands of soldiers in realistic operational environments to advance things that work and scrap what doesn’t.

George said there are four major areas where “we will step on the gas” to continue the momentum established over the past year through a collection of initiatives to move faster, from working to obtain more flexible funding for specific capabilities to getting equipment into soldiers’ hands rapidly.

“First, our formations are going to dramatically improve their ability to counter enemy uncrewed systems,” George said. But this means ensuring a close alignment with the service’s effort to fix its current network and command-and-control capabilities.

How the US Army is helping Ukraine with front line repairs

“We have to give every formation the right systems to sense, seek, and defeat enemy UAS to enhance their protection and security,” George said.

The second area will focus on scaling the transforming in contact initiative to include using two Armored Brigade Combat Teams, two Stryker BCTs and additional Guard and Reserves formations for additional transformation in contact experimentation.

“At the end of [fiscal 20]25, every warfighting function – including protection and sustainment - will be part of our transformation efforts,” George said. “The technologies we will infuse in our formations are not years away – they are available now.”

The Army will also “double-down” on operational transformation, George said.

“This means expanding the range and improving the accuracy of long-range precision fires. We will continue to demonstrate the lethality and impact of land-based fires on all domains of combat,” he said.

Multi-domain task forces, which bring long-range precision fires capability, will be integrated into operational-level commands, according to George.

“Intelligence will play a critical role in this transformation – both in guiding our warfighting concept and in protecting our soldiers from fort to port to foxhole, securing our installations, and defending our modernization and research institutions from exploitation by our adversaries,” he said.

Lastly, the Army will continue to modernize and strengthen its industrial base.

“Enhanced production capacity with the corresponding concentration of stockpiles at the most likely points of need to ensure the delivery of ready combat formations,” George said. “We can buy the best weapons in the world, but they will be useless to us if we can’t scale the production of the ammunition we need for today’s battlefield.”

Already the Army is working to shore up its industrial base, moving away from single sources, upgrading old infrastructure and growing its magazine depth after sending millions of rounds to Ukraine.

The Army has gone from producing 14,000 155mm rounds to nearly 50,000 a month. The service is aiming to expand capacity to 100,000 rounds.

“But improving 155 rounds is not enough,” George said. “We must invest across all of our critical munitions inventories.”

America’s adversaries are working together more so than ever, he warned.

“Russia, China, Iran, and North Korea represent an ‘Axis of Upheaval’ that is increasingly collaborating and conspiring to undermine democratic values and drive a wedge between us and our allies and partners,” George said. “Everything we do is about building lethality and cohesive teams, and given our current operating environment, we have to do it as fast as we can.”

Col. Brandon Teague, commander of the 5th Security Force Assistance Brigade, or SFAB, at Joint Base Lewis-McChord, or JBLM, Washington, spoke with Army Times on Monday at the Association of the U.S. Army’s Annual Meeting and Exposition about the brigade’s work in the Pacific and how it’s growing the Army’s capacity to operate in the region.

For instance, the Thai military has been working in recent years with the SFAB on training and maintaining its Stryker units through an SFAB partnership using a specially trained team of Stryker advisors from the 7th Infantry Division, also at JBLM, and a unit from the Washington Army National Guard, Teague said.

The SFAB growth continues in 2022 as commander pushes more partnerships

The first SFAB units were formed in 2017 to fill a conventional military partner training force mission, first in Afghanistan. The brigades tailor their deployments down to the small-unit level, dispatching teams of no more than a dozen soldiers led by a captain to just about every combatant command across the globe.

“Even though we’re helping the partner, it’s mutual,” Teague said.

The arrangement came about because the combatant commanders across the globe, but especially in the Pacific, have requested more SFAB personnel across their areas as the brigades have grown, the colonel said.

While the work is keeping the Thai Stryker units moving, having a solid system for obtaining parts and conducting maintenance on the crucial vehicle also helps U.S. soldiers, Teague said.

That’s because should there be a ground fight in the region involving U.S. Strykers, they’ll likely need parts.

Early partnership and coordination ensures that should the Army need to lean on a partner, it can, Teague said.

In even more foundational areas, the SFAB’s work is building out a knowledge base that could save soldiers’ lives.

“The first line of care is buddy aid, the person on your left and right,” Teague said. “And the people in 5th SFAB’s left and right are our partners that we’re partnered with.”

For the first time, the Army sent a maneuver advisor team to Mongolia this year, which is assisting the nation’s military in preparing a platoon of Mongolian soldiers for a February rotation at the Joint Pacific Multinational Readiness Center in Alaska, Teague said.

That follows years of training the next-door neighbor of China’s military in leadership fundamentals. One of the first requests from Mongolian military officials to the Army was to help them set up a noncommissioned officers academy, which the Mongolian military now runs.

The major focus areas for the SFABs, Teague said, involve aligning the people, technical aspects and procedures between the U.S. and partner units.

For example, during the current Joint Pacific Multinational Readiness Center rotation that the unit is conducting with the 25th Infantry Division in Hawaii this month, the SFAB is working with the Japanese Self-Defense Force. The partnership works on the same kind of communication gear and communication protocols.

So, even though the brigade’s team might meet up with a different unit within the Japanese military than in a previous encounter, they’ll already be coordinated on their communications.

Those same communications challenges are being worked through with each of brigade’s partners, such as the Philippines, Mongolia, Thailand and other Pacific nations.