Army weaves robo-boats, drones, balloons and C2 tech into multi-continent Arcane Thunder exercise

The Army’s recently completed Arcane Thunder 25 exercise incorporated uncrewed surface vessels, unmanned aerial systems, high-altitude balloons and data-sharing capabilities to test out deep sensing and multi-domain operations.

The live-fire event, which took place in Poland, Germany and Arizona on May 11-27, was led by the 2nd Multi-Domain Task Force under 56th Artillery Command and included international allies.

Maj. Gen. John Rafferty, commanding general of 56th Artillery Command, called it a “premier training event” that tested the task force’s ability to operate across all domains, find targets “at depth” and strike those targets with kinetic and non-kinetic effects.

In U.S. military parlance, the term “kinetic effects” generally refers to munitions or other projectiles, while non-kinetic effects include things like electronic warfare, directed energy and cyber capabilities.

The Multi-Domain Task Force is “improving and refining the technology and the tactics, techniques and procedures. Our soldiers, our sergeants and our lieutenants are the ones who have their hands on this equipment, who are determining the best way to employ it, to get the effects and find the targets that we’re asking them to. And we are putting that feedback right back into the system to improve the capability and optimize not just the equipment that we have, but the way that in which we’re employing it,” Rafferty told reporters Friday during a teleconference.

The results of the exercise are also setting the conditions for the evolution of Rafferty’s command into a multi-domain command in Europe that’s going to take place over the next few months, he noted.

Unmanned systems of various types were key components of the latest iteration of Arcane Thunder, part of an effort to demonstrate the ability to “fight with live data” across a large-scale combat theater.

The Army teamed up with the Navy in the employment of unmanned surface vessels to test out the multi-domain ops concept — which fits in with the Pentagon’s vision for Combined Joint All-Domain Command and Control (CJADC2) to better connect the sensors, shooters and information networks of the U.S. military services and allies and partners.

“It’s really trying to perfect the ability to transition from the littoral domain to the land domain, and … how does the MDTF, as part of the joint force, gather data from our joint partners and also share data with our joint partners,” Col. Patrick Moffett, commander of the 2nd Multi-Domain Task Force, told reporters about the use of unmanned surface vessels during Arcane Thunder. “Working with the USVs, we worked the joint kill chain where the Navy vessels would identify a target, that target would get passed to the second MDTF all-domain operations center, and then we would pass that target to really, for this exercise, to our Polish partners. So that was the tie-in.”

As a land-based force, the Army’s understanding of littorals is often limited, but those USVs gave the task force the ability to better understand what was going on in the sea domain, he noted.

The robo-boats were also used to haul Army equipment in a contested logistics scenario, where the military might need to push that type of gear forward to “isolated elements,” Moffett explained.

But USVs weren’t the only uncrewed systems involved in Arcane Thunder. Drones, high-altitude balloons (HAB) and unattended ground sensors were also part of the mix.

Lt. Col. Aaron Ritzema, commander of the 2nd Multi-Domain Effects Battalion, noted that soldiers used sensor data to inform the employment of so-called “launched effects” — such as loitering munitions — to strike targets.

“For us, as we kind of, you know, fought through the scenario-based portion of this exercise, it was using … the micro HAB to provide that geolocation. And then that would trigger battalion- and company-level decision points on if and when … we launched the launched effect to actually close the kill chain on that,” he told reporters.

Stitching together the different technologies involved in the exercise and enabling interoperability between platforms and payloads were some of the biggest challenges the Army had to tackle, he noted.

Rafferty emphasized the importance of being able to pass live data through mission command systems — which in the case of Arcane Thunder, involved forces in both Europe and the continental United States.

He noted that the 2nd Multi-Domain Task Force under Moffett’s command demonstrated the ability “to make sense of the information and generate enough fidelity to produce targets that then, in some cases, were passed back to the 56th multi-domain headquarters … to work through the process of assigning, you know, the right shooter to those particular targets. So there was a whole range of possibilities and scenarios there.”

Rafferty added: “Really the breakthrough, like I said, was getting that data in virtually real-time from a micro HAB, refined by another platform, made sense of by [Moffett’s team in Poland] and Aaron Ritzema’s soldiers at Fort Huachuca [in Arizona] … and then, in seconds, back here to Wiesbaden and Mainz-Kastel in Germany for, you know, additional analysis and assigning to the right shooter. So really taking that kill chain and taking what was once, you know, hours to really into minutes, essentially … That live data part is probably the biggest breakthrough for us, from my standpoint.”