Drone-shooting helicopters, robot reconnaissance teams, and a lot more people mark Project Convergence’s second year.
YUMA PROVING GROUND, Arizona, Media www.rajawalisiber.com — If last year’s edition of the U.S. Army’s massive connect-everything experiment was a proof of concept, this year’s was a far bigger effort to see just how much those data-sharing concepts might accelerate major military campaigns.
“I’ve seen exponential progress since last year,” said Army Chief of Staff Gen. James McConville at a media roundtable here on Tuesday. “What I’ve seen is the ability to move data. The ability to have speed, range, convergence to get the speed for decision dominance [was] significantly improved.”
In just its second year, Project Convergence has become the U.S. military’s most important experimentation effort for testing out new technologies for joint all-domain command and control, or JADC2. This year’s version featured 110 technologies, triple that of last year. It involved more personnel, including 82nd Airborne Division troops and others from Navy, Marines and Space Force and drew in participants from Fort Bragg, North Carolina, to the White Sands Missile range, and yet it simulated an even larger battleground in the INDOPACOM area of responsibility.
Autonomous robots that can perform reconnaissance missions are cool. But if they rely on the kind of laser-range finding, or LIDAR, technology that today’s self-driving cars use, they’ll be easy targets. The autonomous drones in this exercise needed both LIDAR and GPS. That represents a vulnerability.
“I can’t use LIDAR on the battlefield. It lights me up like a Christmas tree. I’ll die soon,” said Abadie. The Army, he said, is “slowly advancing this idea of off road autonomous vehicles…We have to use alternative ways of sensing.”
DEFENDING AGAINST ELECTROMAGNETIC COUNTERMEASURES
Outside of the Tuesday demonstration, the Army took five days to run through seven scenarios relevant to a war involving China. One of those five days, for each scenario, looked at how well the network performed under attack. Both China and Russia possess sophisticated electronic warfare capabilities.
“Doing those type of experiments out here helped us to understand the tradeoffs involved. If you apply certain techniques to make your mesh wave form more resilient you might take a penalty on the range or the capacity,” said Col. Eric VanDenBosch, the chief of staff of operations for the Army’s Network Crossfunctional Team. An understanding of what those tradeoffs look like will shape future Army exercises and weapons.
INFORMATION SHARING AND SITUATIONAL AWARENESS
While this year’s demonstration showed that the Army, and the military as a whole, has made progress in interconnecting weapons, vehicles, and systems across services, it still represents a carefully planned demonstration. In fact, integrating highly complex jets, drones, ships, and missiles within just one service is incredibly difficult.
“It goes back to: Army built theirs, the Air Force built theirs. Navy built theirs. The new technology is really interesting, but the real challenge is: ‘How do you begin to tie billions of dollars worth of investment together,” Murray said. “So it’s the enduring material that everybody has…how do you begin to bring that together?”
Wormuth offered a sobering take on the road ahead. “We aren’t going to be able to get away from that, maybe not ever. Think of our own reserve components…They are going to have some enduring capabilities while the active Army has some of the signature modernization capabilities so, even inside of our own formations, we will have to think about retroactive, if you will, the ability to remain interoperable. And we will have to do the same with allies and partners. We will never be able to start with a clean sheet of paper.”
That continued challenge is no joke. It’s part of the reason why the Air Force’s Joint All Domain Command and Control experimentation—the Advanced Battle Management System on-ramp experiments—were essentially defunded by Air Force Secretary Frank Kendall this year.
It’s a problem that speaks directly to the very concept of joint-all domain command and control, what it is, and what it would actually look like.
“Each of the services has systems to maintain situational awareness,” Murray said. “Getting them to integrate and talk together and how procedures, policies that different services use, when to display what, that’s a problem. Right now, if we wanted a joint situational awareness picture, you would probably be looking at four different screens… so how do you begin to collapse so that a joint commander has everything he can see across the battlespace, what the joint, situational awareness looks like.”
Further complicating that are the rules surrounding secrecy. One senior Defense official speaking on background said that classification issues were going to be a major focus of the Defense Department in the coming year, precisely because overclassification threatens timely information and data sharing.
Next year’s event will likely feature additional elements and geographic locations, further raising the stakes not only for the Army but for the military’s entire approach to joint all-domain command and control.