Moderator: Thank you for joining us for today's 4th Infantry Division's Ivy Sting 2 Media Roundtable. Before we get started, just a quick reminder on the ground rules pertaining to this afternoon's discussion. I'm Major Sean Minton from Army Communications and Outreach. This roundtable will cover the Division's Ivy Sting 2 demonstration for the Army's Next Generation Command and Control, or NGC2, program.
Our panel members include Mr. Joseph Welch, the Executive Deputy Commanding General, Transformation and Training Command, T2COM, who is the Executive Lead for NGC2; Major General Patrick Ellis, Commanding General of the 4th Infantry Division; Brigadier General Michael Kaloostian, Director of Command and Control, Future Capability Directorate; Lieutenant Colonel Dana Lafarier, Battalion Commander of the 2nd Battalion, 77th Artillery Regiment, Division Artillery.
I'd ask that you please keep your questions focused accordingly. As always, should you have questions beyond the scope of today's Ivy Sting NGC2 discussion, ACO and the 4th ID Public Affairs Team are happy to follow up after the roundtable. We are on the record today with comments attributable to our briefers by name. Feel free to record this discussion, and a transcript will be made available to you upon request. Following opening remarks, I will be moderating questions and follow-on discussions. Please keep your phone on mute until called upon. With that said, I will turn it over to Mr. Welch, followed by General Ellis, for opening remarks. Gentlemen, over to you.
Mr. Joseph Welch: Okay. Thanks, Sean. Just making sure you can still hear us okay?
Moderator: Loud and clear, sir.
JW: Okay. Well, that's good to know, because we're coming to you from the back of one of General Ellis's Strikers here out at Ivy Sting 2 at 4th ID at Fort Carson. So, just great time to talk to everybody. I think I know everybody. And thanks for helping get the progress we're making, get that story out there. I'll be brief, and I know you guys want to hear from everybody who's actually executing this exercise.
So, I would just open by saying that I think that Ivy Sting 2 is continuing to validate the plan that the Army had put in place in terms of how we were going to do Next Generation Command and Control and ensure that we were doing it in a way that would be as agile and adaptive, rapidly delivering, totally different relationship with industry than what we have previously been doing within our historic acquisitions. And we're seeing the fruits of that labor across the Army industry team here out at Fort Carson this week. So, Ivy Sting 2 is really showing how the teams are starting to work together in a much more dynamic way. Some of that wasn't necessarily anticipated at the initial outset of this prototyping effort. And to me, that's really what we're here evaluating. Yes, it’s about how the technology can get integrated and how soldiers can provide real-time feedback to make it better and developer teams can kind of run that overnight very rapidly.
But also, our whole relationship with industry and how we enable them to partner together, create the conditions so that we can take what's really a lot of commercially-driven innovation that everybody's familiar with as consumers of technology products and put that together very rapidly for our Army units. So, we're going to focus here today on what we're doing with 4th ID. But I just want to remind everyone, we also have another industry team lead effort that's focused out with 25th ID in Hawaii. I'll be traveling out there at the end of this week. I'm setting the groundwork for another partnering mechanism that I think between these two efforts, the 4th ID and 25th ID, over this next year, we're going to learn a lot about how to manage these relationships long-term so that we are continuously able to integrate new technology, unwrap new capabilities, do it in a very seamless way, and not be burdened by a lot of the challenges that we've faced in the past with very purpose-built specific system-type acquisitions. So, that's one point I wanted to make.
The only other really is just how the work that the Army is doing with NGC2 is really changing how the institutional Army behaves. I think it's showing how we can move not just in acquisition more quickly, but in all the aspects of what we do. So, as an example, our approach to how we rapidly evaluate our cybersecurity posture is something that we've absolutely improved upon from an institutional perspective that we're now at a point when General Ellis or his team, or through our industry partners, are able to identify new capabilities out there, the speed at which we're able to on-ramp them into our accredited environment is measured in days at this point, in a process that normally would take nearly up to a year. So, I think that's one.
The other is our understandings around data operations. We're developing a much more mature understanding of the power of data and how it is accessed, how it's connected, how it's utilized, how we send demand signals back into, you know, our Army enterprise and be able to make changes there that can be effective really at all echelons. We're really breaking down the historic barriers between the concepts of tactical data and enterprise data. It's all just Army data, and it's accessible now at every echelon. So, those are a couple of institutional processes that I think the NGC2 effort has really accelerated changes to in the way that the Army organizes and operates even at an institutional level. So, I'll turn it over to General Ellis to talk more specifically about what we're doing out here at Ivy Sting 2.
Major General Patrick Ellis: Thanks, Joe. So, to kind of catch you up to where we are, really, this division has been tasked to provide the prototype for the Army. So, we're the next Next Gen C2 prototype on the whole stack approach. Our brothers and sisters at the 25th Infantry Division are working on a software-only approach out there, which is a little bit different from where we're going. We've been tasked to deliver this prototype. As we look at the roadmap, the validation this prototype we’ll have is Project Capstone Convergence 6, which will be in July of next year.
We've basically mapped out a roadmap where every other month we're hosting a pretty major event that's going from moderate complexity to increasing complexity as we go on the path to PCC6. So, where we are now is we're at Ivy Sting 2. For those who are familiar with where we were with Ivy Sting I, which was an early fires thread, some basics, some kind of rudimentary communications architecture, now we've increased the complexity for Ivy Sting 2, and we're running more than one artillery piece at a time. We've got more data threads. And at the division level, we've heavily focused on how do we reorganize ourselves? How do we use this new technology to employ our command and control nodes in a different way? We've been able to spread them out, to de-aggregate them, to build out new form factors, is what I would call it, which vehicle people are in or what kind of tent configuration. That's allowed us to really to expand how we fight using this new technology.
So, the goal in the division is not to just optimize the way we were already organized with new technology. It's to actually use this technology in a fundamentally different way. So, this is Sting 2. We'll do Sting 3 in December and so on, all the way to a large division exercise in May where we're going to take as much of this capability as we can out to the field. But as we focus on the blue side, on the friendly side of this, we're also not losing sight of what does the adversary see. So, there's--at different stages of this event, we're a little bit in Sting 2, but more importantly in 3 and 4, we're going to bring red teams in to contest us, to check our electromagnetic signatures, to test us in the spectrum, to see how we're performing and see if we're targetable or not targetable and so that we can make those adjustments to ensure the survivability of not just this division, but as the Army's making procurement decisions for the future, to make sure that we're making the right decisions for the future. So, we're on track for division level prototype by PCC6.
And then, in kind of a unique case, this division started as the first digital division of the United States Army in 2003 and now we've been tasked again to provide the same capability 22 years later. We will continue this through PCC 6 and then we're also the unit that will be responsible for going to PCC7. So, we've got two real years to work through this entire path with the leaders we've got in place, with the technology, with the equipment we've got in place and I think that's going to allow us to continue to make this better and better. And we feel a sense of personal obligation to make sure that we provide the right feedback back to the Army so that our brothers and sisters across the Army get the right tools in their kit bag when they have to deploy.
Interesting thing, too, is the soldiers here in the 4th Infantry Division are really excited about this. It's an opportunity for them to shape the future of the Army. We've had a couple folks pull back retirement packets, folks that have re-enlisted to stay here because they're so excited about the task that they're getting a chance to do here and they realize the importance of this and shaping this for the future of the Army. So, with that, we'll stand by for any questions.
Moderator: Thank you gentlemen. I will now call on our media colleagues one at a time. We'll do two rounds of one question and one follow-up and then pending time, I'll open it up for any last remaining questions. To start us off, Mark Pomerleau with Breaking Defense.
Report 1: Hi, can y’all hear me?
MGPE: Loud and clear, Mark.
Reporter 1: Super. Thanks so much for doing this, everyone. I'm curious at what point you start to maybe add more units, guns, capabilities on the ground and forces. I guess, put another way, how much back-end work really has to be done or validated before you can start building more of this out from an operational perspective, I suppose?
MGPE: Hey, Mark, I appreciate the question here on this side. And I'll tell you, as we build up complexity, I'll let the battalion commander kind of talk you through it. But the last time you were out here, we had one gun. Now we have three guns. And we're also now adding more edge compute nodes. So we're continuing to build on that complexity across the division. Because it's not just a fires tool, right? So now we've got six command and control nodes that are out there with different edge nodes. So we're building that complexity. And the complexity and the number of users that you see in 2 is a fraction of what you'll see in 3. So we're going to continue to build exponentially. Danny, do you want to talk about it from an artillery perspective?
Lieutenant Colonel Dana Lafarier: Yes, sir. I think from where we started to where we're at now, the tools that we have been given for Next Gen C2 have just made us faster from speed, survivability, and lethality. So, what you saw previously, Mark, with that one single gun, you know, fire mission processing down from the mission training complex down to the gun, although exciting for the first time, it's getting better. And it is better now because we're moving away from that legacy federated equipment to these cloud-based artillery pieces. So, speed is definitely key for an artillery event. And, Mark, so we've got a platoon of three guns laying in that takes roughly about 10 minutes or less. And as you saw before with that data mesh network radio system, by the time that PL jumps out on the ground, they are automatically connected to the other nodes in that net system. And then lethality from AXS, we are currently using a new engineer release, engineer release number eight moving on to number nine. But engineer release eight is providing us with more capabilities to fire more fire missions. And by the time you get engineer release number nine at the end of November, we’ll be able to fire all needed and necessary fire missions that a field artillery unit would need to use not only to certify and qualify, but then to fight into action.
And the interface that we've been dealing with as far as AXS goes, we've been changing and manipulating it for the end user, for that person sitting at the box as you saw before, to make it more easy and user-friendly. And then lastly, again, from a survivability right now, Mark, we have our guns separate by about 100 meters each and we’re going to further disperse them for survivability, not only in training, but in real world conflict to then hide in the noise with what we're projecting out as far as EMS signature goes. And again, all of this, like I had said before, reduces the soldier's cognitive load. So they're not thinking about how to set up and/or troubleshoot legacy equipment. They're actually thinking about their job and task at hand.
MGPE: So, yeah, that's good. Thank you.
Moderator: Mark, do you have a follow-up?
MP: Yeah, just quickly. I'm curious the interplay between the results from Sting 1 and how that may or may not have affected what you did here. And similarly, depending on the success or possible failure at Sting 2, like how that affects where you go from here and how that continues to build in successive events, if that makes sense.
MGPE: It does, Mark. I got it. This is General Ellis again. What I'll tell you is what you saw out here and what we did in Sting 1, an observer on the hill, digital mission back through to fire one gun, one round. Where we are today, we have an observer on the hill. We're also flying a UAS. So we've got an observer that is now in the air that's not just assessing the target, but it's also assessing battle damage assessment or pulling battle damage assessments. But the interesting thing is as that feed comes back through, we're using the aided target recognition to identify that. So, the complexity there now, we have an observer on the ground. We've got stuff in the air. We're using the aided target recognition capability that we've built out to say that's a tank. We spent the last week training the AI models to recognize what we would call hulks out in the impact area, old vehicles that we shoot at and we’re training that thing to think that’s a tank, so now it identifies that as a tank, which generates the fire mission.
So, the complexity has continued to grow. We've added more resources on top of this. The next turn is we're going to work some airspace clearance pieces in a little bit more meaningful way. This is our range, right? We own the training area. We own the airspace. But now we're going to work the deconfliction of airspace in Sting 3, which is a really complicated problem. So, we're continuing to add all that complexity on top of that. And then like I said before, we’re adding more nodes, which is also stressing the network and it’s gonna help us determine do we have the right mix of transport capability or compute and store capability, and where does that mix end up? So, the complexity continues to grow, and I think will throughout the next iteration. We think we're going to shoot what we'd call Table 6 as part of Sting 3, which is going to give us, that's a battery-sized mission where we're going to run through and qualify those batteries. So, we're going to go from three guns from a platoon to a battery.
Moderator: Thank you, sir. Thanks, Mark. So, I’ll be turning it over to Mike Stone from Reuters.
Reporter 2: Thanks a lot. So just to step all the way back, in June next year, that's when you think you'll have like a full-blown, this thing is supposed to be working and we can plug it into the real world? Is that what I heard?
JW: Mike, yeah, this is Joe Welch. So no, I think General Ellis is referring to Project Convergence Capstone 6 when he's largely taking the majority of his division into NTC to execute. It would look a lot more like a CTC rotation than an experiment, right? We don't anticipate it taking that long for things to be working. Things are working right now. Really what the team has been working through these progressive Ivy Stings is we have some high-level prioritization, right? So, improving our digital fires, General Ellis mentioned, airspace management and deconfliction, that's incredibly important increasingly now with all of the proliferation of UAS, right? And like our current tools are just not really up to speed to be able to deconflict that as quickly as we need to. Integrating more AI processes into what are human-driven cycles right now, very manually intensive. Again, that costs time, right? So, we're seeing progress on all that. That's all working.
There'll be some progressive exercises between now and next summer that'll continue to prove this out. We're going to have, for example, contested electromagnetic environments coming in early next year. So that's, I think the right way to think about it, I'll defer to General Ellis but like for that rotation in the summer is really more about working in a sense of like a full-on or nearly full-on division rotation at a combat training center as opposed to what is kind of like a one-off experiment. That's all going to be behind this team by the time they get into NTC next year.
MGPE: Yeah, I think that’s right, Joe. We’re building the prototype along the way, and I really intend to at PCC6 to validate the prototype. That's a chance to really run it, to stretch the legs, to go to a big maneuver space.
JW: Bring out the OPFOR.
MGPE: That's right, bring out the real OPFOR and run that. So, we think that's a great opportunity to fully validate it. That'll be in July of next year, but really the roadmap there, every day we grow more and more capable.
Reporter 2: And secondarily, you mentioned you're going to see--you're going to red team your electromagnetic signature. So, I'm hearing that that has not been tested yet. You don’t know what you’re throwing off right now and you're going to look at that. And then what's the solution if it's bad?
Brigadier General Michael Kaloostian: This is Mike Kaloostian, and I can answer that. So we've actually done a red team in the past. There's an exercise that DEVCOM C5ISR conducts every year called NetModX. And during the experimentation phase last year at NetModX, the network that we are using today, the radio architecture and the network or the satellite infrastructure, we were using the same, basically the same network during that event, and we did red team it. We had the right tools out there to understand our signature. So, we understood what we look like. We also had the tools from an EW perspective to put stress and rigor on the network to see how resilient it actually was, how the software was going to perform. And we learned a lot. We carried those lessons learned into Project Convergence Capstone 5 last year. And now we've taken those lessons and brought it into the network that General Ellis is using. With that being said, we know we need to get back after this again. So General Ellis mentioned the Ivy sting events leading up into Project Convergence Capstone 6.
The exercise before, the division-level exercise here in Colorado before PCC6 is called Ivy Mass. During Ivy Mass, we are actually going to have a full cyber network and EW red team that is going to contest the entire division, and we're replicating the capabilities of our enemy in doing so. And so I can't get into the details about how we're going to do that, but we have forces arrayed that are going to perform that function, and we'll have a full readout for how it performs at that time.
MGPE: And Mike, as from a commander perspective, I don't think it's a good idea to talk about electromagnetic spectrum in terms of good and bad. That's not how it should be. I don't think thought of. The way I think about it here is I want tools and capabilities that are in our kit bags so that commanders can decide how much risk they're willing to assume and how much emission they're willing to put off. So, we've got to make commander-informed decisions. We used to talk about being transport agnostic. Now we talk about transport diversity. I just want to have multiple ways to move the data so that I can continue to accomplish the mission. In some cases, we may want to assume more risk and emit a little bit more. In other cases, we may want to throttle it back. So, we're working through that. Mike did a great job at NetModX last year of validating the initial concept, and now what we’re doing is setting up small numbers of nodes. We're going to have nodes spread all across the real battlefield with real units, and we're going to test it again to make sure that our assumptions were true.
Moderator: Thank you, sir. Thanks, Mike. Now I'll turn it over to Colin Demarest at Axios for a question and follow-up.
Reporter 3: Hey, all. I'm curious about how all this sort of sizes up from Ivy Sting 1 with like one gun, one observer, now multiple and an observer and a drone. And then what does that look like in three and four and then Ivy Mass and kind of, I guess, some color on the different ratcheting off at each one?
MGPE: Yeah, so it's not just a--I appreciate the question. So, it's not just a fires exercise in a lot of senses, right? So, yeah, one gun, one observer. Now we're going to go to we've got three guns, multiple observers. I think I may have said it wrong before, but for Sting 3, the Table 6 that we'll shoot will be three guns, multiple observers. Using the technology to overlay some of the different styles of detection, some of the different styles of battle damage assessment. But we're also, like today, we've got the command post nodes. They're all located in our training complex here. They're all right next to each other. We're going to roll those out to the field to increase that complexity and to spread them out. And then continue to run operations and missions, airspace clearance and deconfliction, more UASs flying into space, one-way attack drones. We're looking to field all of that stuff as we go through Stings 4 and 5, really on our way to what we call Ivy Mass. That's going to be a big exercise in May.
So, the complexity is we're going to go from basically a single thread, is what I would call it. It's kind of what we ran last time was really one thread, which was the one-gun thread. We're running four threads today, which is different capabilities, resupply thread. We've got all these other threads. I think by Sting 5, the number's up to 12 or 13 threads that we're going to run. So, as we move through this, we're going to continue to add those kinds of things inside of this. So, a logistics thread, a resupply thread, a casualty evacuation thread. So we're adding all that complexity on top of this. So, by the time we hit Ivy Mass, it feels like a division fighting, and then we're going to use the technology to enable that division.
JW: Colin, just to add, so, yes. I think you'll see increasing levels of integration as well, right? So, at Ivy Sting 2 here, we just went through some demonstrations of a, you know, I talked about the aerospace deconfliction challenge earlier, right? So, we think we've got a collection of solutions that when we put these vendors together, they're going to be able to rapidly demonstrate capability, right? They're not tied into AXS yet, but they're going to need to be, because aerospace deconfliction needs to be, you know, fires is a part of that as well. So, I think you'll see some of the things that may be single-threaded, to General Ellis' point, if it's the first Ivy Sting that they are single-threaded at, by the next one, we're anticipating that they're going to be integrated into the culmination of the pulling those elements together, if that helps.
Moderator: Colin, are you good? Any follow-up?
Reporter 3: I'm good. I appreciate y'all.
Moderator: All right. Thanks. All right. I'll turn it over now to Greg Jaffe from New York Times. Do you have a question, Greg?
Reporter 4: Yeah. I was going to ask about the AI target recognition model, and I was wondering how much faster that makes you censor your shooter and how effective has it been in terms of identifying the fire missions that you wanted to identify?
MGPE: Yeah. Thanks, Greg. It's Pat Ellis again. Yeah. What we found is it does make us faster. I don't know that I've got the measurable, the quantity of how much faster. What it's doing is we've proved the concept now, but it's really focused on against one target, right? So, we kind of know where that target is, and the machine is saying, hey, look, I think that's a tank because I've trained the AI models. We're looking forward to adding more targets to the complexity question. We're looking to add more targets in the future and actually have the AI logic help us differentiate between that. So, what we're finding is we've got to spend a lot of energy making sure that we train our models adequately, that’s a huge piece of what we're going to do, but also as we employ those things, is there's pieces of it that get kicked out for a human to decide on, and there's cases where the machine can say, look, I'm very highly confident that this is a tank, and then the human looks at that and we can work the targeting threads.
But I think that there's a lot of potential there. I think we've seen it. We've worked very closely with some pretty powerful AI companies here, and the team that's on the ground here is helping us think through these problems and helping us train the models adequately.
JW: Hey Greg, it’s Joe. And to add to what General Ellis said and to your question about AI model, so it's definitely not a singular thing. It's AI models. This is such a rapidly moving space that the construct we're setting up within NextGen C2 is being able to rapidly integrate new models. So, like everything else, we start with some foundational capabilities, but then there's a lot of terrain dependent, environment dependent, things like that, and foundational models continue to get better as well. So, we're also looking at what's the right way of fine-tuning these capabilities, right? We don't anticipate, for example, soldiers doing a lot of human model training, kind of like manually intensive, but the actions that they take based on what is being recommended is in itself a form of reinforcement training.
And so we're looking to really provide for an ecosystem so that model developers, and we have the capability to fine-tune models at the edge. Our soldiers can do that through their tools or through a pipeline that industry can work through when we present a specific problem. When we say that the Army has specific model gaps that we need addressed, a pipeline to very rapidly move that through. There's no doubt that there's a time improvement on that. I think it's hard to nail it down exactly because it depends on exactly the target, the conditions, et cetera. But by and large, the detections are enabling much faster operations. And even if they are false targets, our soldiers are able to much more rapidly move through those. They can quickly reject them because they've been recommended already. They're not searching everywhere. There's already fields that they're able to take a look at and kind of focus their attention on.
A lot of what we're looking to provide here is a reduction in the cognitive burden that comes with the use of a lot of digital tools as well. And I think that's what--not just AI target recognition, but AI-enabled capabilities in general are going to help lower that cognitive burden so that our soldiers can focus on their core tasks and not be fiddling with a bunch of, you know, managing a bunch of digital capability.
Reporter 4: Great. One quick follow-up I had is we're still at a stage where humans always have eyes on the target, I'm assuming from what you're saying, before the fire decision is made?
MGPE: Yep. Today we're still early on. So, it's an ISR feed that comes back, and the AI model is helping comb through that. I think what will happen is as the volume of the feeds that are coming in, it's going to help us prioritize and triage those feeds and the machines are going to help us go faster that way. And as Joe said, it's decreasing the cognitive load on the human beings who are trying to monitor a lot of things and who get tired. So, this is going to help flag things for them to enable the targeting process to go more quickly.
GJ: Terrific. Thank you.
Moderator: Thanks, Greg. Next will be Courtney McBride from Bloomberg.
Reporter 5: Thanks. Mr. Welch, you talked a little bit about the shift in the relationships between the Army and industry and then also the teaming setup. And I'm just wondering whether you or any of the others can speak a little bit to the ways and the levels at which the Army is engaging with the industry teams as part of this, whether it's happening as part of Ivy Stings or sort of on the front or the back end. You know, as you, certainly things that you learn or discover during Ivy Stings may need to be integrated, but is there a real-time integration or communication as well?
JW: Yeah, Courtney, we're kind of doing that everywhere, right? We are continuing to keep our aperture open in terms of solutions that can come into the environment. So, this deviates from a more standard acquisition in that the team we start with, we knew up front, is not the team we're going to end with. And there is really no end. This is a continual process of identifying capabilities out there that look like they can add value, doing a rapid onboarding into the prototyping effort so that they can continue to demonstrate value, seeing how they interact with other teams. Some of the challenges is that when we want to base ourselves on commercial products, there can be an overlap in different vendors and the technologies that they provide. And we don't need multiple overlapping solutions. Our message many times is that we need our industry partners to focus on what they're very good at, right? A lot of times I think there's a perspective that they can meet any of the Army's requirements potentially, but we have so many great tech companies out there that are extremely good at kind of their core competency.
And I think where we found success is in kind of recalibrating our partners back to, like, what is that unique thing that they bring in? Not the thing that everybody can do or that we may have already purchased. The Army has been leaning more into enterprise agreements for things that we're commonly using in a lot of different applications. So, we don't want to reinvent the wheel on that. We are developing sort of a architecture triage process as we continue to mature out what this looks like architecturally that can better assist industry in understanding where gaps still remain, where there may be competitions or opportunities to collaborate. In the meantime, we're just trying to stay very transparent, right? We had an entire panel on this for an hour and a half back at AUSA Annual out here at 4th ID. There are solution summits that General Ellis and his team run to integrate new technology, potential technology solutions providers. So, just maintaining that ongoing dialogue and not treating this effort as if it's a competition that was competed, won, and we are kind of leaving it static until it's the next time to compete has been very effective.
And the industry partners that we've been working with are all on board with this. I think they appreciate the dynamic environment and the opportunity to show value right away with soldiers and not through a bunch of PowerPoints and other document-based deliverables from the government program office. And, of course, they all have eyes on our, you know, eventual production of capability when we kind of go into scale. But, I think getting in the environment early is a great kind of evaluation mechanism to know what's real, what really looks like it's going to add value, where might we want more opportunities in production, structuring our ongoing onboarding and competition efforts around that.
Reporter 5: Okay. And just, I mean, to be clear then, I mean, is there a concern or that there is not a desired end state given that you're doing a continuous evaluation or that, you know, that this is ultimately, I know you're adding levels of complexity, you're adding, you know, an OPFOR and really, you know, increasing the challenge for the systems under evaluation, but that there is no sort of end point?
JW: Yeah, to clarify, when I say no end point, it's like saying there's no end point to the cell phone you have in your pocket or something, right? It might not be the same one five or 10 years from now, but we're still going to need technology. It's going to continue at its pace. We need to make sure the Army doesn't fall behind the commercial tech refresh cycle, or we'll be one-off unique customers that are going to pay a lot for the privilege of using old technology. We don't want to be in that ridiculous state. But in terms of the vendors that we're working with, what's motivating them is the opportunity to have a long-term relationship with the Army and getting to agreement on what production pricing would look like for a period that could be up to five years, up to 10 years. It could be with annual options. As long as everybody's happy, we just exercise an option and go on. We've got known pricing that reduces risk for both parties.
I mean, we absolutely intend to have, as we understand what's working best and can run competitions in different spaces to be locking in those long-term relationships. That's not quite now because prototyping, we're intentionally keeping ourselves very open, but all the companies we're working with, that's what their eye is on, and we want to get there too. It's just we don't want to do that so soon that we are closing ourselves off to everything else we should be working with now. So, even though it's always going to be like we're always going to want new things and better things and tech refresh and things like that, I absolutely anticipate that there will be many vendors that are providing stable capabilities that we know we're going to want or expect we're going to want. We'll have long-term agreements. They'll have options, we'll have potential off-ramps if things significantly change, but as long as they keep innovating, delivering, I think we'll have long-term stable opportunities for these companies.
Reporter 5: Thank you.
Moderator: Thanks, sir. Thanks, Courtney. Next one will be Chris Panella from Business Insider.
Reporter 6: Hey. I'm wondering if you guys can talk a little bit more about using UAS in this exercise, specifically any challenges getting the feed into the AI model. Was there something that it, you know, it provided something, a different perspective that you guys were looking for? What types of UAS you're looking to use here? Just really any information you can give on that.
MGPE: Sure, yes. Once again, what we're running here is what we'd kind of call a medium reconnaissance capability, so it's a mid-range UAS. You know, at sea level, I think the average, you know, time that it can fly would probably be about an hour. What we're finding here is we're almost 6000 feet, got frequent winds, we're getting a little bit less usable time out of the airplane, so between 30 and 40 minutes is kind of what we're averaging right now. Getting the feedback, though, has not been a problem, so the Next Generation Command and Control transport architecture is pretty robust, and we've been able to move those feeds back pretty easily, and once it hits a transit point, we move it up into the cloud, and then the folks that are using the AI models are able to pull it down from the cloud, so from our perspective, that's been a huge success story here. We're looking to increase the volume and the range at which some of these are moving to kind of stress the systems a little bit more, but the UASs we've had on hand have been very capable, and they've actually really enabled us to kind of adjust our targeting process a little bit. As you're, I'm sure, aware, is that the Army divested the Shadow Program a couple years ago, so this is filling a similar role for us. As we're used to looking at the UAS feeds, this just now gives us the tools back in the kit bag.
MGPE: Chris, do you have a follow-up?
Reporter 6: Yeah. I guess when you guys were speaking about clearing airspace being a challenge, going for Ivy Sting 3, can you talk a little bit more about that and just kind of how you anticipate to address those challenges?
MGPE: Absolutely. So, the Army has existing programs and tools that we use to deconflict airspace, so there are several tools and several applications that exist, and some of those exist inside of a little bit of a stovepipe. I wish you could be here with us and actually see what we would call the Joint Air-Ground Integration Cell, the JAGIC, which has Air Force members in it and has folks that are talented at reading radar feeds. It has folks that are in there that do airspace deconfliction for fires. They all kind of sit in one cell in there, and each one of them has a tool, a box, that talks to another box that makes that happen. Our goal is to collapse all of that capability into one system because the key to Next Generation Command and Control is a unified data layer, so if that data exists in one place, anybody can use that wherever they are on the battlefield.
I think that allows us to be a little bit more diverse in our ability to actually do the airspace deconfliction because we're not tied to a specific function on a specific machine that only one person knows how to operate, so our expectation is we collapse these functions down into one device and then that device actually is application-based. Specifically, it's going to be device agnostic, so you can use whichever computer we need to to perform that task in an application-based way as opposed to today, which is an entire systems approach.
Reporter 6: Great. Thanks, guys.
Moderator: Great. Thanks, sir. Thanks, Chris. Based on our time, I think for our second round, we're just going to go through if anyone had a second question, and then based on that, if we have time left, we'll open it up, but I think we might be getting close, so we'll just stick with just the one question for our second round. Mark, do you have a second question?
Reporter 1: Yeah, I guess, what are you all hoping to learn or get out of Ivy Sting 2?
MGPE: That's a good question. It's really not that each event is the thing that we've got to make a gain out of, so what I would argue is the approach we're taking is this is actually a training event, right? So, last week, we started setting up the communication systems, and then this week is a training event. Today's obviously Wednesday, and we're going to continue through the end of the week. I think some of my things that I'm looking for at the division level, we've validated the fires chain here. We know that's working. What I'm really excited to get out of Ivy Sting 2, though, is the Command and Control node disaggregation approach that we've taken. So, what we're doing is we're actually running what we would call battle rhythm events, normal boards and procedures that we would run in an exercise, and we're running those in a much more distributed way. The ones I sat in on Monday were way different than the ones I sat in today, and we're continuing to get better every time. So, I think what we're going to walk away with, Mark, is how do we employ this new technology in a way? How can we change our operational approach to embrace the new technology, not necessarily take the new technology and just optimize the way that we've always done things? So, from my perspective for Sting 2, that's what I'm really excited to get out of it.
Moderator: Thanks, Sir. Thanks, Mark. Do you have a second question, Mike?
Reporter 2: It's real quick. I know that this is three guns and a bunch of nodes and a bunch of observers. On a scale of 1 to 10, and this is in a wartime environment where there's actual, you know, loaded kinetics. Where are you on transport now rated 1 to 10? Where are you on compute now rated 1 to 10? And I expect you to say 1, but up to you.
MGPE: I think that's an interesting question. I don't know that I would say 1. I'm not sure this is a 1 to 10 thing. Actually, I hate to do that to you, but it's a little bit more of a kind of it depends thing, right? So I've only fielded this to a small percentage of the division. I've only got a small number of these nodes here. The ones that we're seeing here are super, super capable. So when you talk about warfighting kinetic capability, the tools that we have today are significantly better than the tools that I had yesterday and than the ones last week. So, what I would say is it's a continual process, and as we onboard the technology, you know, there's a little bit of--last week, we did some engineering work. The industry partners were kind of working through how to build out the edge node as well. Now they know how to do that. There's eight more nodes that are going to come for Sting 3 in 13 days or 15 days from today that they're building out now, so we're going to increase that complexity as we go. So it's not a binary scale where you go 1 to 10. It's a lot more of, hey, look, we're getting additional capability every day, and we're making that capability better. So my goal is to be better than we were yesterday, and I think that certainly would be true, and I hope tomorrow we're better than we are today, so we're continuing to build through this.
I would say on the transport side, that's not a problem that we would ever say, you know, spike the football and say that we have solved, but what I would say is my ability to move data today is significantly better than it was six months ago, right? So, at the battalion level, we would have a small tactical terminal that has an 8-megabyte series of pipes, right? We have that capability with some of the proliferated low-Earth-orbit satellite receivers that we have. We have that ability to spread that out much farther. So those nodes that I was talking about for the command and control for the division, each one of those used to have to be co-located because they were sharing that transport. Well, now I can put the transport on that vehicle and disaggregate them and spread them around. So, I don't know that it's a scale kind of thing as much as, hey, look, we have it now at the division level or at the division headquarters level. We're looking to continue to spread that throughout the formation as we move through the Sting series.
Moderator: Thank you, sir. Thank you, Mike. Do you have another question, Colin?
Reporter 3: Yeah, I'm curious how Ivy Sting and the 4th ID might be feeding Lightning Strike in the 25th, what your conversations might be like, how you guys are trading info back and forth, just kind of that relationship with that dialogue.
MGPE: I think it's a great question. So for Ivy Sting 1, the deputy committee general for the 25th Infantry Division came out here and participated with us. We know them. We're teammates. We've all served together in the past, so they came out and actually brought a whole bunch of folks out to observe. Our timing wasn't great for Sting 2. There's not as many 25th guys out here now because they're in the middle of one of their own exercises that they're building out in Hawaii. So the crosstalk, though, is continual, and as we have multiple touch points now where we provide feedback into their staffs and they're providing feedback into ours, and as we move through this process together, we're looking for the opportunity to kind of look into the architecture. And Mr. Welch could talk about it, but the way that some of this stuff has been developed is if there's an app that's working in the 25th Infantry Division, we have the ability to pull that into our ecosystem here and vice versa. They can see stuff that's working here and pull that into what they're doing so that it's not a binary competition in that sense. We see this more as a cooperation between our two divisions to continue to build out the products that our Army and our soldiers need.
JW: Yeah, it’s Joe. I would just add that one thing that we'll learn between these two divisions is what makes sense to be very common and what makes sense to be kind of division or unit specific because there's not going to be a one-size-fits-all I don't think when you look at the NGC 2 tech stack, but there are some elements that are going to make sense to be common or be as common building blocks. So, that's as much of what we're prototyping between the two as the individual technologies. And as I mentioned earlier, working with two different team leads, one a nontraditional, one a traditional, and their ability to quickly assemble and dynamically reassemble teams and teams of teams bringing in technology solutions. I mean, it's just a wealth of learning that we're going to accomplish through these two. But we are not handling them independently in any way, shape, or form. We're expecting the vendors to be talking to each other. General Ellis already mentioned that kind of the crosstalk between the division commanders and their staffs, and we absolutely expect that to continue.
Reporter 3: Thanks, guys.
Moderator: Thanks, Colin. Thanks, sir. Courtney, you have a second question?
Reporter 5: I do, and forgive me if it's not part of the Ivy Sting process, but I'm curious about Soldier Borne Mission Command and whether or how it's going to be linked into NGC2 if that's part of your evaluation, General Ellis, and if so, you know, when we might expect it in this series of Ivy Stings or PCC6, whatever it may be.
JW: Yeah, Courtney, it’s Joe. I'll talk about how it relates to NGC2 in the first place. General Ellis can talk about the timing and things like that. So, Next Gen C2, the way I think about it is, that's kind of our core, right? That is the foundation of our ability to provide command and control capability digitally enabled and at the speed and pace of modern commercial technology, right, across all of our formations, all of our compos. There are pretty large themes and things that depend upon that, and it's sort of like where you draw the line. Is it part of NGC2? Is it not? I think there are a lot of things that are very closely aligned, but that also have their place in other areas. So, Soldier Borne Mission Command, a lot of common elements with what we're looking to achieve through NGC2, but they also bring in some very specific dismount aspects with regard to night vision and other optic and sensor capabilities, right?
Sensor platforms, in general, you could extend that, too. There's a large overlap between what needs to be provided into an integrated command and control environment and the freedom that they're going to need to go with the best, most modern sensors, sensor packages, things like that. I'll mention our IBCS systems and our counter UAS capabilities and anything that's really tied to a rapid-fire control system where life and safety is absolutely paramount and the ability to integrate into an overall command and control system is important, but we need to keep our priorities on life and safety. There'll be interfaces to that as well, and the fortunate thing is that we've got so much momentum on NGC2 right now, including the vendor momentum, the development of the architecture, et cetera, that these other programs, including SBMC, they've got something to latch onto, and I can tell you, within the rest of the Army, we're very much trying to get as much of that emergent capability that isn't completely within the scope of NGC2 proper into 4th Infantry Division, into 25th Infantry Division as rapidly as possible so we can take the experiences that we're going through in these Ivy Stings and our exercises in the Pacific and address exactly what you're talking about, so that we have these opportunities. It's been great to see the forcing function that Ivy Sting really represents out here, and I think for those other very adjacent efforts and programs, it's a priority to get those out here. Pat, I don't know if you know the specific timeline. I know we've got it coming, but --
MGPE: We do, Joe, and we actually have a company's worth of the Soldier Borne Mission Command at the southern border inside of one of my brigades today, they're down there using it and providing feedback, and I think what we're seeing is as that continues to mature, like you said, the Next Generation Command and Control transport architecture certainly at the company level and below will be a really useful way to move the data that that will require, so we're looking forward to treating this as a holistic approach.
Moderator: Thank you, gentlemen. Thank you, Courtney. And I'll turn it over to Greg--you have a second question, Greg?
Reporter 4: Yeah, I was just going to ask about some of the organizational changes you're making to optimize the capabilities that you're getting from NGC2.
MGPE: So early on, Greg--thanks for the question. Early on, we decided really what I kind of determined from watching this, right, I was at the command and control CFD for a year and had a chance to kind of watch technology advancements. One of the first things we did in 4ID is built out what we call the command and control support element, so it's basically a very talented former battalion commander, lieutenant colonel, who works as a special staff member inside of our division staff, and underneath him, we organized our operations, research systems, analysis folks, guys that handle data, our knowledge managers, some of our software factory, you know, things that would be called operational data teams. We put all that stuff into one entity there, and that entity has been responsible for a lot of the interface. So the soldiers are the ones that do, that are using the technology, but specifically, I've asked him to keep an eye on what's going on at the application layer, at the data aggregation layer, and what that's done is that's freed up our division signal officer, to focus on the radio fielding, the new technology that's coming in, so I kind of split up that effort there. That is a new piece of structure that doesn't exist in the Army. I don't know if that would continue forever in the 4th Infantry Division, but I know that it's certainly critical now. I think it's been one of the keys to allowing us to go as fast as we are.
On the other side of this, too, is we look to reconfigure the command and control nodes. We haven't made any permanent changes yet, but I can tell you that over the span of the last three days, division staff members are coming back and saying, look, I don't know that I need to take as many people with me forward now because I have this technology or I have this ability to talk to them if they're in a different location from me, and I don't want to take as many people in this command post node, so we're looking at how we're going to approach that. We haven't solved it yet. We're kind of at the crawl stage of that, but we're going to work through the walk and the run over the next couple of months.
JW: Greg, it's Joe. I would just add, from the T2COM perspective, responsibility for force design, force development, force generation, we're absolutely looking at 4ID as it's prototyping in many ways, and one of the ways it is, specifically to your question, is in our future force design. We have the organizational structure we have today. It was built around concepts of operation, doctrine, but also the limitations on technological solutions, and what we're seeing is that new technology solutions can change some of those assumptions about the mix and makeup of our force structure that can feed back into what we're driving from a force design perspective and can feed even all the way back into our recruiting. The recruiting successes that we've been enjoying lately is wonderful, and some of this forward-looking in terms of the types of skill sets that we're going to need based on what we're observing out here, being able to feed that into our process is going to continue to pay dividends for the Army for many years.
Moderator: Thanks, gentlemen. Thanks, Greg. Chris, do you have a second question?
Reporter 6: Yeah, I'm kind of curious when we talk about how major of a transformation this new command and control structure and system is from what was previously had. Can you talk about kind of like any growing pains that come from doing something of this level and engaging with something that is really requiring complex work over a series of exercises and learning as you're doing?
MGPE: Yeah, thanks, Chris. I think as we talk about kind of where, you know, there's a level of complexity that comes with doing this, but what I'm finding is the soldiers are super interested in participating in the process. So, I don't know that in some cases folks may believe this new technology shows up, and now it's just another chore or another thing I've got to do on top of my day job. What I found is almost the opposite to be true is soldiers are massively excited about the new technology, and I don't overstate that, and that's not hyperbole. I'll say that if you were here, I could walk you over to the gun chief that's out there, the staff sergeant that's out there that's running one of the pieces that's out here shot the first round that went downrange with AXS a month ago, and his excitement about being part of that, his excitement about using that new technology to fire a round downrange, and the first one for the Army is palpable, and what's happening is that is infecting the entire unit in a healthy way, so everyone's really excited about the opportunity.
There's a lot of opinions. There's a lot of discussion about this stuff, and these are the kind of conversations that are happening in the hallways now about how it is that we can leverage this new technology. We're still early in the process, and today is not the Super Bowl. It's just another game in a long season to get us out to PCC6 and on to PCC7, so the fact that we're going to be the consumers of this technology, we're not just a touch point where a bunch of vendors show up, we work with it for a while, and then leave. We're owning this all the way through the process. I think it's massively powerful, and our soldiers are excited to be part of that process. I wasn't exaggerating either. We had a sergeant major who pulled back his retirement packet because he wanted to continue to work on this. So he says, if I can continue to do this, I want to stay here for two more years, so he's extended for two more years. That kind of stuff, I don't know how to describe it any other way, is that that stuff is what makes me want to make sure we're providing them the opportunity to help develop this, we're providing them the access.
What the soldiers are really enjoying is having the ability to talk to the developers. The industry teammates really like it, but I can tell you what, the soldiers really like it because it's not a case of I've offered my opinion, and six months later, another engineering release comes out. It's much more a case of I've offered my opinion, and tomorrow, what I asked you to fix has now been fixed, and I can tell you that happened with AXS, and we're seeing that happen with some of the other applications as well. The soldiers want to be heard, and because they are being heard, they're really excited about this, so I think it gives us an opportunity here to really accelerate this. This new way of doing it, and allowing us to kind of be the guys that run this through the tape, I think is a really useful tool.
Moderator: Thank you, sir. Thank you, Chris. So, I think we've kind of just reached a point in our time limit here, and we're just about out of time, but I wanted to make sure we offered Mr. Welch and General Ellis an opportunity to provide any closing comments, so I'll turn it over to you, gentlemen, if you want to provide any last feedback, insights.
LTCDL: Thank you, sir. This is Lieutenant Colonel Dana Lafarier. I'll just kind of echo what General Ellis had just mentioned, that Next Gen C2 is a tool, but the soldiers are the decisive weapon that is going to lead this Army in transformation, and we here are part of a broader plan for the DIVARTY and the 4th ID to be their killing machine, if need be. So, I can't stress that enough.
MGPE: Yeah, thanks, Dan. And what I'd like to pile on with is the conversations we're having in the 4th Infantry Division. We talked a lot about technology today, and one of the conversations that we have here inside the division is, at the end of the day, all this technology is going to enable us to be faster and to shape better in front of the formations, but at the end of the day, there's still going to be a rifle squad that has to go on the objective and complete the task, and they're going to fold up their end-user devices, they're going to set aside all the technology, they're going to have to be good at their jobs, and that's the one thing that we've continued to reinforce here is that our lethality is not going to be based on the technology. The technology is going to enable our lethality and it's going to make our soldiers more successful on the battlefield. So, in the midst of all of this technology and all of the new training that we're doing, we are continuing to make sure that we have a trained, ready, and lethal formation.
JW: Hi. So, this is Joe. Just to wrap it up, I would just encourage, I don't want to confuse the ends with the means to the end, right? So, we're talking about Ivy Stings, we're talking about Project Convergence. These are all activities that I think are getting us on the right path, but I can tell you that we know that we need to move with a speed of urgency. It is not up to us the time, the location, the nature of future conflict that could occur at any time. And so, it's our responsibility to make sure that our Army is ready. And knowing the state of our currently fielded technology and the possibilities that are enabled with modern commercial technology that our vendor partners are working with our soldiers here and in 25th ID every day. The faster that we can make that go, you know, the faster we will. We know we've got to get this across the Army. We think this deliberate approach is the way to get the dials tuned just about right so that we can start scaling this out. And then we're going to move as quickly as we can to ensure that our entire force remains ready. So, thanks for all your time and great questions. And it's great to talk with you.
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