The Army’s Next Generation Command and Control system promises faster, smarter decisions on the battlefield. At Fort Irwin, soldiers stress-tested the NGC2 system in a mock war against a living, breathing opposing force — linking drones, radar, satellite links and AI into a single battlefield picture. Soldiers have given it a blunter nickname: the ’God Calculator.’
Washington Times Defense and National Security Correspondent John T. Seward takes a deep dive into how the new command system is reshaping how soldiers plan, target and fight.
[SEWARD] Artificial intelligence and mass data are everywhere, except on the front lines of the U.S. Army. But that’s all about to change. Soldiers at Fort Irwin are fighting a high-stakes game of laser tag to stress test an AI system that could transform warfare. Next Generation Command and Control, or NGC2, gathers battlefield information, runs it through AI, and feeds troops real-time tactical data. Soldiers are starting to give it a nickname. They’re calling it the ’God Calculator.’ It could supercharge the U.S. military or cost them their lives.
NGC2 helps us fight more efficiently, more effectively. Now we’re able to go much faster.
The ability to move data up and down the stream is massively powerful.
It is, at the battalion and company level, allowing commanders to make more, better, and faster decisions than the enemy.
[SEWARD] So right now I’m just outside of the main town. It’s back there behind me. I have this mask on because we’re actually seeing the “good guys” use a bunch of smoke to cover up that corner so that they’ll have an advantage. We’re actually seeing the enemy for this scenario is already using a drone to watch over this corner.
In California’s Mojave Desert sits Razish, a sprawling, mock urban city with hundreds of structures, streets, and underground spaces built to create the complexity of modern urban areas. For this fight, Razish is held by the opposing force, or OPFOR, while soldiers from the 4th Infantry Division equipped with the Army’s new NGC2 system are tasked with fighting their way in.
The development of military technology is the stuff of sci-fi legends: exoskeleton suits and heads-up displays that make combat more like a video game. But in reality, most new military technologies go through a long development process. By the time new tech is in the hands of frontline troops, it’s already outdated. This program looked to skip the drawn-out development process, building a system using communications hardware that was mostly already available. Contractors worked directly with U.S. Army soldiers to evolve new capabilities to collect, use, and share information across the battlefield by linking it all together.
All the data is in one location. It’s not existing in a series of stovepipe systems where there’s an artillery system, a maneuver, ground maneuver system, a logistic system. Broke down all those walls and all the data’s in one place.
[SEWARD] So let’s talk about what’s actually being validated here at NGC2. It isn’t just one piece of equipment. It’s four different layers of technology, according to both the Army and their request to Congress.
This first layer here is the transportation layer. It includes mesh radio, satellite communications, and other networks, such as 5G LTE, that move information securely across the battlefield. Then the data layer combines all of the battlefield information in one common place, sort of like cloud storage. Everything from warfighter channels of drones, radar, vehicle stats, soldier locations, to classified intelligence. It also takes things from public sources, classified channels, and even information from international allies, creating a common data layer to provide a continuous operating picture.
This is where artificial intelligence comes in. In the integration layer, they use machine learning and AI algorithms to sort through and reorganize those streams of data, making information usable for soldiers in the field. Finally, soldiers use that mountain of information via the application layer. Applications like the apps you have on your phone, aircraft control, map sharing, fight planning, targeting, predictive logistics, all different apps that can help soldiers accomplish their specific jobs. These apps can be designed and coded to leverage AI.
Soldiers are saying that the speed that the AI-enabled platform and planning tools and targeting is able to respond is mind-bendingly fast compared to where they were with their human staff counterparts. And it even offers analysis and metrics of how well your plan would actually be in the fight.
The models aren’t perfect, but then again, neither were war games in the past where we were using dice and standing around a big map in the dirt, moving wooden blocks around. So it’s helping us think through problems and helping us solve those. We don’t have to all be in the same physical space to do that.
[SEWARD] Now I’ve just pulled off to the side of the road here to show you the welcome sign for Fort Irwin, which is the National Training Center. Usually, the soldiers that live and work here act as teachers and testers; an opposition force called the OP4 is a living, breathing, thinking enemy to train against in what’s essentially the most advanced game of laser tag that you’ve ever heard of. So right now, Army leaders with experience in their assigned jobs are following and taking notes on what the good guys are doing to try to win and to try to teach them how to be better.
This exercise was meant to experiment with the new capabilities and technology for the entire Army, pushing the 4th Infantry Division to use Next Generation Command and Control, or NGC2, in one of the biggest exercises at this post in recent memory. It involves over 9,000 soldiers, more than 40 different experimental technologies, and at the center, a nearly $4 billion attempt to rapidly upgrade the U.S. Army’s communication, targeting, and planning backbone.
I think in the past, what we would have done here at the National Training Center is bringing everybody into one location. Shake hands. OK, who are you? Who are you? This is me. Stand around a sand table, we’ll point around a map and say, hey, how could we do this? I think what’s happening now is we can bring up the common operating picture, give the multinational teammates access to that too. We’re listening, we’re talking, to be able to draw on there. And it’s not like a formal kind of process where someone briefs and then someone else briefs. You can actually collaborate. If you talk to commanders out here, I think you’ll find a lot of them, me certainly, I have not seen all the brigade commanders in one location since this all started, and I won’t until we’re done.
[SEWARD] For the past year, the Army has been actively building two different versions of this idea in two different places. One at Fort Carson in Colorado and one on the other side of the Pacific in Hawaii, betting that soldiers could someday see an entire battlefield through a single shared picture instead of a dozen disconnected systems stitched together under pressure.
What was initially introduced as competing development cycles meant to drive down costs and give the Army and the Pentagon the best of the best equipment is now being combined into a complementary project.
The changes between then and now are extremely fast for a military that usually takes years to develop new technology and equipment. What one leader called literally an act of God. While most of the basic hardware has stayed the same throughout this process, there have been huge software development cycles over the last 10 months. Now commanders are saying it’s ready for the rest of the Army, even if it isn’t perfect.
A lot of that has to do with the fact there’s confidence that I know where my soldiers are, I know they can receive this information from me, I know that they can take action on it, they know that I’m going to be able to support them with fires, and then I’m also pushing things upstream to support them with logistics. It’s not perfect. I think my line would be, it’s ready but not done. I think we are ready to fight with this now, but it’s not totally complete.
The biggest issue we had going into this was, like, Razish is a big city, and you have to have a lot of microdata, and, like, the map is, like, this big. If they didn’t have the map on them, they wouldn’t know where they are, and I couldn’t tell where they were.
As soon as the drone’s overhead, they can see your location. I was like, man, they’re going to call for fire. We got to get in this building quick. That’s the only cover and concealment in the area. He’s got to move.
Even just one UAS platform at the company level buys you three to four kilometers of visibility. That’s about two to three kilometers more than what your own organic assets can see with terrain.
[SEWARD] We’ve been out here trying to understand how soldiers are utilizing the next-generation command and control system. And we had a commander describe what’s called a GRG. It’s a map where each building, like what’s behind me, would have a number, and she said that having her soldiers be able to have what they call the end-user device, this little cell phone-type thing on their chest, and send her messages saying exactly which building they had cleared through was making them be able to move faster and coordinate easier…
…versus like trying to wonder, especially like if you didn’t know exactly what building you’re in. A lot of the conics look exactly the same, but the technology enables them to see exactly where they are.
[SEWARD] They were able to share graphics to say where each unit would be on a map and modify those in real time as they moved along. It meant that one of the commanders in that OP4 unit was having to rapidly adjust his plan to be able to defend that town.
What I did see was an increased level of synchronization that I was not expecting. We effectively had two simultaneous breaches happening at the same time, one happening in the southwest and one happening in the west. Selfishly, I believe that we did a number on the breach assets that were fighting in the west. However, it is absolutely a fact that the enemy imposed multiple dilemmas on us at the same time.
[SEWARD] I just ducked into one of these structures just to get out of the heat. One commander that we met described how some of her troops were carrying extra batteries because the heat was causing their radios to use battery faster.
But the batteries are black and they had been left out in the sun and they effectively became dead weight, because even when they changed to a fresh battery, that was a dead battery when they went to put it in.
Even today, like, we put them on the charger and it used to take like maybe two hours per battery, and yesterday was like six hours, and then some of them just refused to charge. It’s too hot.
The energy demand that comes with NGC2, I think, is something that we can’t overlook, especially when we start meeting austere terrain such as the desert. Overheating of radios and of computers is a real thing, and that disrupts your timetable, and it frustrates at the human dimension leader’s ability to do things.
Some of the soldiers figured out we carry ice sheets here in case casualty. What they do is they dip a brown t-shirt in that ice sheet, laid on top of the antenna, and it would cool down enough for it to function better. The obvious solution is not a very expensive or very technical one, but it’s one the soldiers come up with on their own.
I don’t think it’s without its kinks, but this is the first time, and my unique position is being an Op 4 commander in the defense, watching the story unfold with, you know, a pretty scalable force as a brigade plus. I have significantly more confidence in the NGC2, you know, trajectory, seeing that level of synchronization.
[SEWARD] To do all of this meant connecting all of the different Army equipment and systems into this combined operating picture, what’s known as a COP. The data layer is soaking up all of the information across the battlefield, a huge test of the underlying communication network.
For me right here, I can still talk to my squadron that’s about 10 kilometers over multiple horizons, and I can still talk because the communications network is able to mesh it all the way back.
[SEWARD] It’s pulling from drones and soldiers, following where tanks are on the battlefield and jets or helicopters are in the air. One example that was described to me here was a radar picking up multiple pings of electromagnetic information on the enemy’s side of the board. On the map, it looked like a scatterplot with two main cores. The AI targeting system automatically identified those as clusters of information, determined that it was actually all from the same enemy unit as they moved around to avoid being hit, and cross-referenced it against timing to predict where they would be next. It was right. And the good guys destroyed the enemy unit. There was little human involvement in the entire targeting process. They just had to see it and then approve the mission to shoot it. This is a huge step forward and a main underlying aim of NGC2.
The prototyping effort, the prototyping journey we’ve been on here, we know that a lot of the stuff we’re building out has the potential to be used by the Army for quite some time. The soldiers here are very passionate about making sure that we get the technology right, that we learn the right lessons, we provide the right feedback to make sure that it works as the Army decides, you know, what pieces of it’s going to scale up or scale down. But I can tell you that we’re very happy with where we have hopefully driven the base product to, to provide this prototype to the Army.
[SEWARD] The Army’s budget request for FY2027 keeps going up for the systems tied directly to NGC2. The layers that you just saw in action, infrastructure, transport, data, and applications, combined across purchases and research funding. That’s real money behind this command system that’s being built fast, beating the years-long single-vendor programs that soldiers had gotten used to fielding, waiting a decade after they were initially designed.
Companies like the ones that are involved here built the 4th Infantry Division’s data layer and have spent years telling that same story, that the Pentagon’s traditional prime contractors got too slow and too locked into this decades-long development process that couldn’t keep up with the battlefield.
Now the Army is announcing the next steps for NGC2 and its future. Like General Ellis said, the system is ready, not done. The next challenge the Army will face looks more like a budgetary one than a focus on capability. While there’s been a lot of effort into making sure that soldiers in the 4th Infantry Division have the right equipment, now the Army will have the challenge of maintaining those costs and continuing to avoid the gold plating that their systems have traditionally fallen under as they try to perfect NGC2.
For now, though, they seem to have provided what the modern battlefield needs: a whole new world where the U.S. Army can operate with data as the decisive ammunition for the fight and keep up with the rapidly changing technology that’s quickly dominating warfare.
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