NASHVILLE, Tenn. – During the U.S Army’s recent Technical Exchange Meeting 7, the “Spartan Brigade,” 2nd Armored Brigade Combat Team, 3rd Infantry Division – the supporting unit for the Army’s upcoming ABCT On-The-Move network communications pilot – together with 3rd Infantry Division leadership, provided feedback and insight to industry on pilot requirements and desired outcomes.
The ABCT OTM network pilot will be conducted in early calendar year 2022 at Fort Stewart. It will test multiple concepts of employment of current and maturing commercial technologies to garner real-time Soldier feedback that will inform future decisions on the delivery of mobile network communications capability to armored formations.
This seventh TEM, conducted on Dec. 2 in Nashville, Tennessee, was part of the Army’s two-year iterative capability set acquisition and fielding process and focused on the delivery of the Unified Network. The event was open to traditional defense contractors and non-traditional vendors, attending both in person and online.
TEM 7 included a warfighter panel entitled “Warfighter Perspective: Networking to Support the Multi-Domain Operations Concept.” During the panel, Soldiers provided input from an operational perspective to inform industry’s research and development efforts that align with a suite of new network and communications technologies expected to be fielded in 2025.
“[An armored formation] is kind of like a weather system,” said 3rd ID Deputy Commanding General-Maneuver, Brig. Gen. Jasper Jeffers, who chaired the panel. “The 3rd Infantry Division and [its] armored formations pick up, start moving at 35 mph, and they don’t stop. There are challenges with the network, there are challenges with how we communicate, and challenges with how we maintain the speed of decision-making that you just don’t see in other types of formations, and we’re going to have think differently about how we deliver that.”
The ABCT OTM network pilot will inform Army design and fielding decisions to deliver a modernized mobile tactical network to armored brigades as part of Capability Set 25. The Army’s efforts to modernize tactical networks has already manifested in Capability Set 21 for infantry brigades and is being developed in Capability Set 23 for Stryker brigades, with armored brigades to be equipped with modernized network capabilities as part of Capability Set 25.
During the warfighter panel, Maj. Todd Klinzing-Donaldson, the 2nd ABCT’s top network and communications officer, described how OTM network communications increase survivability on today’s battlefield and will be critical in future multi-domain operations.
“If I could leave you with one thing to takeaway, it would be survivability,” Klinzing-Donaldson said. “We have to remain mobile in order to survive.”
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