Guided by the Army’s focus on convergence and modernization, as outlined in the recently published “How the Army Fights” warfighting guidance, nearly 100 personnel from the U.S. Army Joint Modernization Command conducted Joint Warfighting Assessment 26, looking for warfighting gaps and experimenting with how the Army will fight in the future.
JWA 26 was part of the Avenger Triad 26 exercise, which brought together 2,000 U.S. service members and another 2,000 multinational personnel operating from command posts across France, Germany, the Netherlands and Poland. The exercise, led by U.S. Army Europe and Africa and NATO allies, simulated large-scale, multidomain combat operations across Europe.
The JMC assessment team used the exercise to focus on warfighting gaps that modernization can fill. For JWA 26, much of that focus was on assessing the Army’s ability to create positions of advantage through all-domain effects at the corps and theater level.
“Joint Modernization Command is working alongside Army organizations and joint partners to identify, assess, and help close critical warfighting gaps, ensuring formations are better prepared, more integrated, and ready to succeed against future threats,” said Brig. Gen. Jennifer Mykins, commander of JMC.
With the Multi-Domain Command-Europe created by the Army at the beginning of 2026, the Joint Warfighting Assessment offered an opportunity to see how the formation, along with formations like the Theater Strike Effects Group and the Theater Information Advantage Detachment, can converge all-domain effects in future warfighting, said Maj. Javoria Collier, JMC experimentation planner.
“We looked at how do these formations, concepts, and capabilities tie to our warfighting gaps, looking to inform the Army on how a particular formation, utilizing a particular technology, can achieve command and control overmatch and give us an advantage against the enemy,” Collier said.
During JWA 26, the team beta-tested an upgraded experiment assessment dashboard that allows for a continuity of effort, linking multiple experiments together, said Lt. Col. Zachary Quintana, the assessment team lead. The new dashboard is being created by JMC’s Data Science Solutions Team, along with the Operations Research / Systems Analysis team.
“It’s enabled by Super Intelligence, and it offers our commander and other senior leaders an opportunity, live during experimentation, to be able to scrape and see different aspects of what’s happening within our experiment to keep them informed in real time,” Quintana said. “I think has been a tremendous lift.”
Out of JWA 26 comes a number of insights that can now be shared with the Army Modernization Enterprise and be incorporated into ongoing persistent experimentation events.
“I’d say the majority of our insights addressed command and control overmatch,” Quintana said. “That is a well-defined gap. So, a lot of what we’re doing is, looking at electronic warfare and space capabilities, and a lot of protection capabilities, especially in countering unmanned aerial systems. We’re certainly drawing upon lessons learned from the CENTCOM theater and what's going on with Epic Fury in Iran, as well as in the Russia-Ukraine conflict.”
With the assessments and lessons learned during JWA 26, Army experimentation will continue with a focus on the operational challenges presented in “How The Army Fights.”
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