FORT CARSON, Colorado — The U.S. Army is moving toward the adoption of a revolutionary new warfare communications system by engaging in futuristic field testing with private companies that are tweaking the platform in nearly unprecedented fashion based on feedback from American soldiers.
Threat Status at The Washington Times was recently given an exclusive look inside the “prototyping” of the Next Generation Command and Control (NG2C) system during tests by the Army’s 4th Infantry Division at Fort Carson, Colorado, where commanders pushed the system to perform what they described as “massively aspirational” battlefield tasks.
The goal for the new NGC2 system, which is being built with inputs and designs from nearly a dozen advanced technology defense companies — Anduril, L3Harris Technologies and Palantir, to name a few — is to soak up and combine all data available on a given battlefield and make it instantaneously accessible to commanders.
It sounds simple, but it’s a daunting task.
Where current Army platforms struggle with limited data digestion capabilities and face breakdowns when synthesizing communications between older hardware and next-generation weaponry, the new NGC2 system combines futuristic software and new hardware while integrating artificial intelligence to manage a vast ocean of data. It does it all in a hyper-secure cyber environment that can’t be penetrated by adversary intelligence operatives.
The 4th Infantry Division’s testing in December — called “Ivy Sting 3” — set out specifically to empower a small unit of towed artillery cannons known as a “gun line” to operate while on the move, receiving orders at the platoon level from division headquarters for shooting missions through the new NGC2 system.
The operation, called a “Table XII,” worked. Sort of.
The cannons fired and many orders for more basic actions were successful. But one system wasn’t able to work for a number of the shooting orders, which were apparently too specific for a component of the NGC2 system to manage.
Amazing as the software sets out to be, it was simply “not quite ready” for the complexity of the operation, Maj. Gen. Patrick J. Ellis, the commander of the 4th Infantry Division, said after the testing.
Maj. Gen. Ellis told a reporter sitting with him inside a Stryker Armored Fighting vehicle at the testing site that he was optimistic because the successful part of the test showed that the system is technically ahead of schedule.
“We wanted to shoot Table XII, massively aspirational,” said the general, a decorated infantry officer with more than 30 years of service. “Software not quite ready, but if you think about what was supposed to happen with that particular piece of code, it wasn’t supposed to be ready until January.”
Overall, the division achieved 11 of 13 critical objectives for Ivy Sting 3.
“This week went exactly the way I thought it was going to go, but that doesn’t mean it was perfect,” said Gen. Ellis, who said that the NGC2 system is “continuing to get better” and described the overall testing as “massively successful.”
Faster and more nimble
Development of the NGC2 system represents the culmination of a years-long collaboration by several defense contractors.
Rather than having a single large contractor build the system, the Army is requiring it to be constructed with open architecture, allowing future upgrades to hardware and software to come from any supplier.
It’s a flexible approach that officials say the Army and the broader Defense Department are now taking toward procurement. It fits within what Gen. Randy George, the chief of staff of the Army, has described as “transformation in contact” — a whole-of-army approach to modernizing the force.
The concept started in earnest last year and has continued on as the Army Transformation Initiative, a more overarching approach supported by Secretary of the Army Daniel P. Driscoll.
In a letter to the Army in May 2025, Mr. Driscoll and Gen. George stressed that updates to warfighting systems have become a “requirement for survival.”
Mr. Driscoll stressed that “command and control nodes will integrate artificial intelligence,” asserting that the Army’s new approach would shift to “agile funding” and “capability-based portfolios.”
The 4th Infantry Division — known as the Ivy Division — is now leading the development of the NGC2 prototype for the entire Army.
The division carried out “Ivy Sting 1” testing in September and “Ivy Sting 2” in November. And the speed of the testing has been accelerated by Gen. Ellis’ team’s willingness to quickly shift resources under the new funding model.
Currently, an Anduril-led contract group working on NGC2 involves several self-described “technology-first” entrants to the defense industry space. Colorado-based Palantir and Virginia-based Govini were both on-site at Fort Carson alongside Anduril personnel for Ivy Sting 3 in December.
Amazon, Microsoft, Florida-based L3Harris Technologies and others are also part of what the Army calls “Team A” for NGC2 to avoid appearing preferential to any one of them.
The testing gives U.S. troops a chance to engage directly with the contractors to provide feedback in real time on how to continue improving the system.
“What I’m most proud of is the technical fluency and data literacy that we’re seeing across the division,” said Gen. Ellis. “It’s allowing the team to go, ‘Here’s where we should go, here’s where we can go, here’s where we’re not going to get there today, but we know what the fix is to get there for the future.’”
The system, he said, will essentially “put the commander back in command and control,” rather than having a large footprint of staff, both physically on the battlefield and as layers in a commander’s process, making wartime decisions.
The biggest upgrades thus far have come in the form of infrastructure that carries the data from across the battlefield, and software that makes it available for planning.
Decisions to strike a target on the battlefield — something that previously could take as long as 20 minutes to ensure airspace, soldiers on the ground, and the system to destroy it were each ready — take a fraction of the time with NGC2.
“We’ve gone from minutes to, right now, seconds,” Maj. Walt Ange, the Joint Air Ground Integration Cell chief for 4th Infantry Division, told The Times.
It’s a reality that has created serious buzz among the service members. Gen. Ellis told The Times that some have literally “torn up their retirement paperwork” to stay in 4th Infantry Division so they can continue working on developing NGC2.
“As we start talking about readiness, long-term readiness, this is the tool we’re going to use,” the general said.
Inside the ‘data layer’
One of the new software products directly tied to the NGC2, the Artillery Execution Suite (AXS), was a key sticking point in the Ivy Sting 3 testing. The system, known by soldiers as “Axe,” isn’t yet able to calculate all of the missions required.
As a result, the testing and live fire demonstration fell into what one soldier described as an “admin shoot” — military slang for an exercise that fulfills an administrative requirement, as opposed to actual and intense tactical field training.
The AXS was initially coded to fire rocket missions in July. Coding for additional systems and munition types was added throughout the summer and fall, with both the complexity of the software and the number of subcontracts tied to it growing as its objectives outstripped its original scope.
Even as that has happened, the software still relies on some older technology. Detailed weather information needed for cannons, for example, still comes from a system that is over 15 years old and is difficult to ingest securely into NGC2.
Anduril’s General Manager of Mission Control, Zach Kramer, who was on site for Ivy Sting 3, told The Times that “our first foremost prioritization, actually, is ‘How do we get stable infrastructure that is able to actually digitize the things that they are doing?’”
Prior to the NGC2, a cannon’s gun chief would write on a paper form to record how many rounds were left before running out of ammunition. With NGC2, soldiers use an iPad-style device to track the number of rounds they have, feeding the data into the system.
“We’re experimenting here. We don’t have the right answer, we’re playing with it,” said Lt. Col. Nate Platz, the deputy chief of staff for the command and control support element of 4th Infantry Division. “As stuff comes off the assembly line, we’re bringing it here, and we’re putting it into production for testing.”
The current system uses an architecture designed by Palantir to support all of the data going into a digital cloud that different applications can then pull from. Much of the data is routed through computers and devices designed, built or put in place by Anduril.
Andruil is also responsible for much of the coding of legacy devices to ensure they’re able to take advantage of the data that’s available, feeding the system everything from the level of a digital fuel gauge on a vehicle to the GPS target from an autonomous drone.
All of that information feeds what many soldiers refer to as the “data layer,” so that it can then be used by any of the computers across the division and provide information to commanders.
“Our foundational position for Next Gen C2 is that everything goes into the data layer,” Gen. Ellis said.
It’s a challenge that has proven tricky because soldiers and equipment need to be outfitted with devices capable of ingesting the data.
Gen. Ellis noted that Army commanders often don’t know where data is coming from. He pointed to a scrap of cardboard on the wall of the Stryker vehicle he was riding in during his interview with The Times.
“In the first sergeant’s vehicle, the log stat — the status of everything in that unit — is just written on a piece of MRE cardboard behind that radio sled,” he said.
Expedient methods of storing information for later, especially by leaders in the middle of dealing with action right in front of them, commonly take such an approach. If tech doesn’t work, there isn’t time to fix it. It gets abandoned. A simple, fool-proof solution then takes its place, like using wet-erase markers on the window of a vehicle instead of high-tech systems to keep track of grid coordinates.
It’s the kind of ingenuity that makes the American soldier so hard to fight. But now it is creating a challenge for NGC2.
Anduril is focused on building infrastructure to collect all the data first, then deliver a smart command and control tool.
“If the data is locked up on a piece of paper in a soldier’s vest, you can’t do it,” said Mr. Kramer. “So what do we focus on? How do I get the data out, how do I integrate systems, how do I bring the data in, and then how do I free up software engineers to go do interesting problems?”
Major test coming in 2026
The open architecture design has proven critical to accelerating system development, according to Gen. Ellis, who says it’s why he’s confident NGC2 will be ready for much more complex levels of testing in the coming months.
“It’s not perfect, but we’re moving at light speed,” he said, adding that he is committed to using NGC2 as the main structure he trains and fights off of for the foreseeable future.
Part of the 4th Infantry Division’s mission is to be ready for the Army’s Project Convergence Capstone (PCC) in July 2026, when the NGC2 system will be tested in a large-scale combat operation with a human training enemy.
Gen. Ellis said he won’t be taking other legacy systems with him into the PCC, which takes place in the California desert.
“We’ve got the support of the Army to get this right, and we take that obligation very, very personally,” he said. “We have scaled this from the battalion level to the division level in less than 18 months. The Army just doesn’t move like that.”
He added that he’s trying to develop NGC2 in a “resource-informed” way, using what’s available in the Army inventory and having contractors design software to run on current Army systems or bolt-on hardware adjustments.
However, new radios at the soldier level have been a must. Radios that “weigh the same as what their grandfather carried in Vietnam” were being carried by young officers in charge of formations,” Gen. Ellis said. “I am not OK with that.”
New radios now mean digital-first infrastructure, as well as a lighter physical footprint on the battlefield.
Other NGC2 gains involve removing large components and adding smaller computers and devices along communication lines. Systems found on most Army vehicles, whether communications infrastructure, electrical support structures, or the computer units themselves, are also getting software upgrades.
Gen. Ellis said that in one instance, “guys wrote some code, they hacked a few things,” and a computer system already installed on the Stryker vehicle the general was sitting in was made NGC2 capable.
The result was a major upgrade without having to buy new, more expensive products.
“I try to help make resource-informed decisions,” said Gen. Ellis. “It’s not resource-constrained or resource-unlimited. It’s much more about being a good steward of the government’s money and a good steward of the Army’s money.”
“Next-gen C2 is not a pile of kit, it’s a concept,” the general said. “So if I can increase the stuff I already have to access the data layer, I’m good.”
“The way we’re fundamentally changing our access to data threads,” he said, “I think it’s going to allow the Army to get smaller, leaner — really what the end-state of all of this is — to enable our commanders to make more, better, and faster decisions than the enemy.”
