ABERDEEN PROVING GROUND, Md. — In today’s fight, a Soldier’s radio is as critical as their rifle. But what happens when an invisible enemy severs communications at the tactical edge? A team of electronics specialists and computer engineers with the U.S. Army’s Command, Control, Communications, Computers, Cyber, Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance (C5ISR) Center delivered the answer to the 4th Infantry Division at the Ivy Mass large-scale training exercise this past April and May at Fort Carson, Colorado and the nearby Piñon Canyon Maneuver Site.
During a series of vulnerability assessments of the Army’s Next Generation Command and Control network, the team used a ground-breaking technology known as the real-time network effects emulator, or RNEE, to provide simulated electronic warfare effects in denied, degraded, intermittent and limited, DDIL, environments across various communication networks.
These vulnerability assessments are critical to expediting the fielding of NGC2, helping to close capability gaps, ensure the technologies work and adapt effectively to real-world conditions, and validate the architecture against critical operational requirements.
Training against a contested electromagnetic spectrum is usually incredibly difficult, often requiring extensive coordination through local and federal agencies to avoid disrupting civilian infrastructure. Using a small, ruggedized device, RNEE is installed directly in line with key tactical vehicle communications systems — a “bump in the cable” solution — to mimic the effects of radio frequency jamming and simulating contested network conditions without radiating in the spectrum or disrupting live satellite or cellular commercial networks.
Validating the Contested Network
The Ivy Mass training exercise was an ideal venue to operate this technology at scale for the first time. For 4ID Soldiers, RNEE created a challenging and highly realistic problem space. When a network goes down, Soldiers must rapidly determine the cause: is it a broken cable, an organic hardware failure, or an active enemy cyber/electronic warfare attack?
Once communications are disrupted, units must execute their PACE plan, transitioning from primary to alternate, contingency, and emergency systems. During Ivy Mass, this meant Soldiers and their NGC2 systems had to adapt on the fly. RNEE was deployed within 4ID formations to create an embedded “contested transport” layer for the division’s NGC2 ecosystem. This enables assessment of smart routing, transport resilience and mission command continuity under sustained electronic warfare conditions. Currently, RNEE is a method capable of generating a rigorous, repeatable DDIL environment for proliferated low earth orbit satellite communications and 4/5G denial. According to C5ISR Center Director Beth Ferry, this provides a critical advantage to Soldiers.
“RNEE not only builds the unit’s proficiency in command and control within a realistically contested electromagnetic environment but also helps the Army understand NGC2 considerations across contested EW, cyber, and transport environments,” she said.
From Frustration to Trust
Communications disruptions during a major training event simulate the friction of combat operations, serving as a critical evaluation tool. The C5ISR team knew it was their job to rigorously test the network — the better they were at causing disruptions, the more creative Soldiers had to be and the harder they had to work to stay in the fight.
While Soldiers expressed initial frustration at the simulated outages, this facilitated novel electronic warfare defense strategies, with the team members pointing out that in combat, taking out the closest jammer doesn’t stop the problem. Soldiers must assume that the opposing force is going to have many jammers in many places, and after the closest one is taken out, the others will keep jamming, just at a lower intensity.
An important part of the team’s data collection was recording the methods Soldiers were trying to circumvent problems and seeing how successful they were at keeping communications going. That aspect of the team’s work provided invaluable lessons learned.
“No one likes losing their comms connection, especially during major training,” said Ashley Bomboy, a branch chief at C5ISR. “By building a great partnership with the vehicle commanders, the team was able to pinpoint network issues, hand them off to the vendors for fixes, and then thoroughly test those upgrades in our labs before fielding them. It’s a disciplined approach that ensures our Soldiers have communications they can actually rely on.” These testing and expeditionary experimentation capabilities directly benefit industry, enabling real-time fixes that address real-world operational challenges and threats.
James Maxwell, a C5ISR Center team lead, worked with 4ID vehicle commanders to explain exactly what RNEE was doing to their communications.
“What we were able to give the 4ID Soldiers is a new level of understanding of the challenges of an EW or DDIL environment and how they would react while working to complete their mission,” said Maxwell. “Reports that go up the chain of command detailing overcoming communications interference increased from two or three in typical exercises to hundreds in Ivy Mass. That is incredibly valuable information for developing the Army’s future war-winning capabilities.”
The mission is about saving lives.
“At the end of the day, RNEE is about giving Soldiers a chance to fully understand the constraints of a contested network before they have to fight through it for real,” said Riley Gartrell, C5ISR’s lead technology developer for RNEE. “Helping them experience those challenges in the lab or in a training environment before they face them in combat makes this work meaningful.”
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The U.S. Army Command, Control, Communications, Computers, Cyber, Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance Center is the Army’s applied research and advanced technology development center for C5ISR capabilities. As the Army’s primary integrator of C5ISR technologies and systems, DEVCOM C5ISR Center supports our networked Warfighters by identifying, developing, maturing, and rapidly integrating innovative technologies to drive continuous transformation.
DEVCOM C5ISR Center is an asset of the U.S. Army Combat Capabilities Development Command. DEVCOM is the Futures and Concepts Command’s leader and integrator within a global ecosystem of scientific exploration and technological innovation. DEVCOM expertise spans seven major competency areas to provide integrated research, development, analysis and engineering support to the Army and Department of War. From rockets to robots, drones to dozers, and aviation to artillery, DEVCOM innovation is at the core of the combat capabilities American Warfighters need to win on the battlefield of the future. For more information, visit c5isrcenter.devcom.army.mil.
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