Army could be moving to eliminate radios at the tactical edge

The Army’s vision for its future network architecture likely won’t include radios for communication and data at the tactical level, according to top officials.

Next Generation Command and Control — the state of the Army’s future network and the service’s number one priority for modernization — has been billed as an entirely new way of doing business with a clean-slate approach rather than continuing to either bolt on or work within the confines of existing systems and processes. NGC2 aims to provide commanders and units a new approach to information, data and command and control through agile and software-based architectures.

A prototype of the system was recently tested at Project Convergence at Fort Irwin, California, in March.

As part of that updated network architecture and approach, service leaders are envisioning the elimination of single- and two-channel radios for troops on the ground. In their place will be what the Army calls end user devices, which are Android devices that are strapped to soldiers’ chests and have typically been reserved for team leaders.

These end user devices feature position and location information. They can now also enable communication using emerging voice-over-IP technology.

“The fundamental difference [between the existing network and NGC2] is in that data and transport layer because we are convinced that if we get that part right, there will be a day when our soldiers, instead of carrying … the batteries, the multiple radios that are out there, it’s an end user device at the edge and that is all that they’re going to need for the next fight,” Gen. James Mingus, Army vice chief of staff, said Tuesday at an event hosted by AUSA. “No more radios, no more batteries, because all I’m carrying is an end user device on the edge.”

A separate official clarified that the tactical level, battalion and below, is where the Army envisions eliminating single- and two-channel radios. Higher echelons will still need larger pipes and thus will still require radios.

Mingus explained that while the cloud storage and edge compute and storage is more refined, the terrestrial transport layer for data is something the Army will have to smooth out over the next year.

In the future, instead of using individual radios, forces will move radio frequency signals from point A to point B through “pucks on trucks,” Mingus said.

“Anything that moves, it’s got a puck on it that emits, it’s bringing in the long-haul comms, and then it’s establishing that terrestrial-based mesh through a series of pucks that are on the battlefield that then connects to the end user device,” he said.

The Army has been on a radio journey for many years, trying to determine the right mix, at what echelon certain capabilities are needed and even exploring if an as-a-service model makes sense.

Some in industry have noted that there’s a massive shift going on within the Army from what worked in the recent past to a penchant for something completely new — and it’s not clear to some industry members why that’s the case.

The approach of eliminating radios in favor of voice-over-IP, WiFi or 5G pucks to provide transport is puzzling to some observers. They warn it could put the Army at risk of not having a diverse enough architecture for what officials call PACE, or primary, alternate, contingency and emergency.

In future operating environments against sophisticated adversaries, enemies will seek to jam or deny communications and data access across certain waveforms and parts of the spectrum these systems operate on. Thus, it is important to have a diverse set of transport to where units can fall over to still conduct their missions and pass data if one system fails or is jammed.

“To see such a drastic shift, to say that Next Gen [C2] doesn’t include any forms of radios, I think it puzzles a lot of people … It’s a head scratcher,” an industry source said.

They added that while the networks support the push-to-talk feature that can be enabled through the end user device and voice-over-IP, there needs to be a mix of different capabilities and radios.

“Most of us still believe that you need flexible architectures, which include a mix of radios perhaps,” the industry source said.