The Army wanted a command-and-control platform that would sync up its many siloed battlefield data management systems—from intelligence to surveillance to targets to munitions levels—and display it all in one place. Once they had it, soldiers realized they needed a little more control over how much information sat on their screens at one time, so the developers got to work on a fix for that.
This is one example of the way the service’s Transformation-in-Contact model is helping to shape new technology, courtesy of the Hawaii-based 25th Infantry Division and their Lightning Surge series of exercises, the second of which is underway now following a first iteration in January.
“It was somewhere in the thousands of data objects…there wasn’t a way to control the flow from Palantir. You just either got it all or got nothing,” Lt. Col. Adam Brinkman, 25th ID’s head of communications and network, told reporters Wednesday. “So in between Lightning Surge 1 and 2, there was a really, really good link up between Lockheed Martin and Palantir to develop an application within Palantir that allowed us to select specific things and push those to the data layer, as we really needed.”
Coming out of Lightning Surge 2, he added, there will need to be an application that separates and organizes unclassified versus classified data as it gets fed into the system.
“Eliminating that swivel chair is really the key objective that we’ve got to get down,” said Maj. Gen. John Bartholomees, 25th ID’s commander, in a nod to switching back and forth between classified and unclassified computer systems at a desk. “We communicate often and well with the joint force, but it takes hours and energy that should be automated at this point, that we’re having to do manually.”
Speaking of automation, 25th ID is also looking for an automatic way for NGC2 to select which type of satellite it’s using to sync up systems, so soldiers don’t have to manually switch based on whether public or private 5G, for example, has the best connectivity at that moment.
“How to make sure that transport path is going over the best possible route to synchronize data across the entire division,” Brinkman said. “We’ve done some manual changes through Lightning Surge 2. We were able to make it work…just every time we’ve done that so far, it’s been a significant engineering effort to bring that platform asset back up as we’re switching between those transport options. So we definitely need to speed that up. It needs to be self-sensing and then self-determining.”
All of these tweaks and upgrades are meant to push NGC2 to a platform that helps commanders make decisions quickly enough to get ahead of an adversary’s next move.
“One specific in this—we think this is a very achievable goal—is essentially from a time of electronic warfare sensing of an adversary to a round impacting is less than four minutes,” Bartholomees said. “And that’s with an unknown adversary with an unknown location and with a single target.”
The division will take the new updates out for another spin during Lightning Sugar 3 in April.
