The Joint Cyber Warfighting Architecture, or JCWA, was established in 2019 and has been slowly taking shape. The aim is to consolidate and standardize Cyber Command’s big-data tools that help forces share information and plan missions. The command previously relied on tools, personnel and infrastructure from the National Security Agency.

“I would say it’s moving forward, we are getting momentum,” Nguyen said. The command, through congressionally approved defense policy, has been able to establish a program executive office for the JCWA, for one.

The command and the Office of the Secretary of Defense’s Acquisition & Sustainment office is working to stand up the PEO, he said, and in 2023, the command obtained system engineering and integration authority over the JCWA.

“What that means is we now have the authority to define the interoperability standards between the different components to help better drive better integration and better interoperability between different systems,” Nguyen said.

The JCWA is currently made up of six components: A persistent cyber training environment and the Joint Common Access Platform (JCAP), which are both run by the Army; a Unified Platform to take in, analyze and pass data, and Joint Cyber Command and Control, both under Air Force purview; and portfolios of sensors and tools, managed by Cyber Command.

Next up, as part of the establishment of the PEO JCWA, the command is working to get more acquisition authority over the program management shops that belong to the services, according to Nguyen.

This would mean the command would be able to approve programs of record as well as acquisition and contracting strategies, he explained. “That will give us a much more holistic ability to move everybody forward singularly.”

Additionally, the command has been able to conduct analysis and gain understanding of the different components of the architecture and a better understanding of the capabilities that exist within JCWA. Through that analysis, several initiatives were born to reduce redundancies, Nguyen said.

For example, he said, the programs of record all have their own software factory where software development is conducted. The command is now working to combine some software factories as a result.

“By reducing software factories, one, there’ll be some cost efficiencies,” Nguyen said, “but more importantly if you think of SolarWinds, SolarWinds was an attack on the software factory, so this will ensure we have a much better ability to defend our supply chain and so on from a software development environment perspective.”

The SolarWinds was a cyberattack in 2019 that led to data breaches for at least 200 organizations worldwide. The attackers, believed to be backed by the Russian government, exploited software or credentials at Microsoft, SolarWinds and VMware.

In another effort to reduce redundancy, the command is looking to combine or develop a singular platform to host applications.

The platform would be government furnished equipment that the command would give to all program shops “and say, ‘Hey, this is a common platform, Kubernetes environment, that we’re going to define and you will just deliver your application as containers or as virtual machines onto this common platform,” Nguyen said.

Kubernetes is an automated workload and services management platform that works within a container system. It was originally developed by Google.

The platform, “allows more efficiencies in the applications and then also, importantly, with this common platform we’re able to deploy it in different environments. We can deploy it within the cloud, we can deploy it on an edge processing or our [joint cyber] hunt kit and so on with a common platform,” he said, “and then the variances will be based on the application sets that were delivered on top of that.”

This setting was markedly different from Moscow’s displays at recent defense fairs, where the regime’s state-owned companies came practically empty-handed and kept a relatively low profile.

Banking on the event to market its full range of weapons, including those used in the brutal invasion of Ukraine, Russia’s outdoor setup placed helicopters and air-to-air guided missiles at center stage.

One prominent presence was the KA-52E combat helicopter, of which at least 58 units have reportedly been destroyed or damaged by Ukrainians, according to the Dutch open-source intelligence website Oryx. As part of the Russian helicopter stand, the X-69 precision strike cruise missile, designed to be employed by the Su-57 fifth-generation fighter, was shown for the first time internationally, according to the manufacturer.

A total of five Russian agencies exhibited here, including Almaz-Antey with mockups of its Viking surface-to-air missiles, Rostec with the small-scale Pantsir-S1M self-propelled, anti-aircraft missile system, Roscosmos marketing the Federal Space Program Khrunichev Center, and Rosoboronexport.

Where’s Rosoboronexport’s Argument-2?

Rosoboronexport had planned to unveil its own spin on an anti-drone gun at the airshow. Dubbed the Argument-2, the company markets the weapon as capable of destroying the wildly effective first-person-view (FPV) drones used by Ukrainian forces on the front lines. The drones are named after their modus operandi of a simple, forward-looking video feed that allow operators to fly explosive payloads near targets for detonation.

But as of Tuesday, the new system was nowhere to be seen at the Rosoboronexport stand. Asked about the absence, a company representative at the show declined to comment.

Experts have placed the number of FPV-type drones flying in Ukraine “in the many thousands per month,” Sam Bendett, research analyst at the U.S.-based Center for Naval Analyses, told Defense News.

Ukrainian forces have reportedly used the weapons in the heavy fighting around Avdiivka, a battle that has inflicted the heaviest casualties on Russian invaders in 2023, according to the U.K. Ministry of Defense.

“I think the value for Russia publicizing here is to promote and demonstrate sustainability and self-sufficiency, that it can produce technology like this on its own as the war drags on, whether that capability is accurate or not,” Matt McCrann, chief executive of DroneShield, an Australia-based competitor in the counter-drone market, said.

Throughout the Ukraine war, the United Arab Emirates has walked a fine line by choosing to remain largely neutral, maintaining close ties to Russia while also providing humanitarian aid to Kyiv.

Last March, Emirati presidential adviser Anwar Gargash said in a statement on social media that the Gulf country “believes that taking sides would only lead to more violence” and that the government prioritizes encouraging “all parties to resort to diplomatic action.”

The service is also assessing its stockpile requirements as it works to rapidly replenish supplies in preparation for the possibility of facing more than one major global contingency simultaneously.

Defense News spoke with Doug Bush, the Army acquisition chief, in an interview ahead of the Association of the U.S. Army’s annual conference. He discussed how the service is trying to bolster its industrial base to restore vital stockpiles that would allow it to continue to support partners and allies, as well as how the service is preparing for future warfare.

This interview was edited for length and clarity.

What is the state of the Army’s effort to stand up new production capacity for 155mm ammunition, among other materiel, as it seeks to replenish its stocks?

Over the next year, we’re going to know a lot more about how we’re doing. But the artillery production — in October, we’re going to get to 28,000 a month. That’s double from where we were in January when we first got the money. And then the path — [William] LaPlante, [the undersecretary of defense for acquisition and sustainment], mentioned this, too — is to get to around 60,000 a month in fiscal 2024, and then getting to around 80,000 a month in fiscal 2025. And then in early FY26, the goal is still 100,000 a month.

We still need some additional resources. We’re working on it now internally and with Congress, and feeling pretty good about it. We have a plan, we’re getting the money. The hard part is actually doing it.

But our various industry partners know what they’re doing. We’ve got the right oversight mechanisms in place to make sure we can keep a thumb on things. And we’ll see what Congress says about, for example, the PAC-3 [Missile Segment Enhancement] funding.

How is the building of new facilities coming along that can produce additional 155mm shells for deeper magazines?

The construction activities in Mesquite, Texas, east of Dallas, [are] underway. If you went there now, you would see a lot of construction activity, concrete being poured. So things are on track, but [General Dynamics Ordnance and Tactical Systems is] not producing there yet. Production equipment starts coming later in the year, and production will actually start next year.

It’s a similar story at IMT in Canada. [The company is] still on track to start up initial production early next year.

Those are our two for big metal parts. Really, we only have two facilities now in Pennsylvania to do that. We’re going to add two completely new factories.

Coming along beside that is additional capacity to load the shells with explosives. That’s currently done in Iowa. We’re already on contract to increase that capacity in Kansas and Arkansas, so all those things are moving along rapidly.

In terms of scale, the Texas activity is much larger, but both are important. We need improvements in Pennsylvania, we need the Canada thing and we need Texas to all succeed to hit the ramp we are on.

What other single sources of failure within the industrial base — both organic and across the defense sector — have you worried? What are you doing to resolve any issues?

[In some instances], we don’t have a plan for making sure we have multiple sources. That’s the whole idea behind the additional load and assemble pack capacity. Iowa is very important, and we’re expanding it, but we need redundancy.

The same goes for metal parts. It’s why we were confronted early on with: OK, do we just massively expand the locations we have, or do we place multiple bets in multiple places? And we went with the latter approach. We thought that was lower risk, even if it’s a little more expensive.

On the artillery side, we are very carefully studying that question. As long as resources come through, we have a path to have at least two sources for every part of that operation — [in] some cases more than two.

Cannon tubes are built at one arsenal. Isn’t that a single source of failure?

As of now at Watervliet Arsenal, [New York], our expansion there is proving successful. But if we need to, we have authority from Congress to look at other sources. But for now the focus has been expanding Watervliet and helping it just get production up.

“We’re actually doing some work right now with the third MDTF in Hawaii to create conditions for a combined MDTF,” Gen. Charles Flynn told Defense News on Oct. 9 at the Association of the U.S. Army’s annual conference. “Australia is moving five officers this summer — summer of 2024 — to Hawaii so we can build out a combined element of the multidomain task force”

The service’s first MDTF was experimental, but since then the Army has operationalized its existing units and determined it will grow at least four more. The Army established that initial one at Joint Base Lewis-McChord in Washington state around 2018. U.S. Indo-Pacific Command theater exercises helped inform the Army’s Multi-Domain Operations warfighting concept, which has now evolved into doctrine.

The Army then established another MDTF in Europe in 2021, and another last year in Hawaii.

The units are designed to operate across all domains — land, air, sea, space and cyberspace — and are equipped with the Army’s growing capabilities, including long-range precision fires.

Earlier this year, the now-retired Army Chief of Staff Gen. James McConville made a case to deploy the fourth MDTF in the Indo-Pacific region, bringing the number of MDTFs in that theater to three. Flynn agreed that the fourth MDTF should deploy to the Pacific. For that unit, the Army is still considering specific locations in the region, Flynn explained.

The Army is also considering how it could include Japan in an MDTF, similar to an evaluation for Australia.

Japan’s National Security Strategy and its defense forces’ cross-domain operations doctrine could align well with the intent of multidomain task forces.

“There’s obviously a great deal of synergy in the organizational constructs that they’re trying to create and compare and contrast to what we learned by building the multidomain task force,” Flynn said.

The third MDTF, and the second in the Pacific, just completed a deployment to participate in Talisman Sabre, a large-scale exercise with Australia.

And now the MDTF is working in the Philippines using its Combined Information and Effects Fusion Cell to combine open-source maritime and air applications in a common operational picture so the Philippines’ joint commands “can actually see into the maritime and air littorals, which is out in their exclusion zone, so that they can then track friendly or adversary actions that are happening” in those domains, Flynn explained.

The domain awareness from land, Flynn added, allows military commanders or political leaders to make well-informed decisions.

But the most important part of MDTFs are their multidomain effects battalions, Flynn noted.

“I like to refer to it as sort of the targeting brain that brings together all source information, intelligence, electronic warfare, space and cyber tracks, [as well as command, control, computers, communications, cyber, intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance], but also can conduct counter-C5ISR so that we can provide intel support to joint [targeting],” he said. “It is designed from the land to see, sense and understand into all the domains, and then to be able to share that information with the joint force.”

Canadian Brig. Gen. Mason Stalker, the deputy training commander for Security Assistance Group-Ukraine, stressed Tuesday at the Association of the U.S. Army’s annual conference that dozens of NATO members are contributing to these efforts, even though the future of the United States’ role in the conflict remains unclear.

“We’re not going to comment on bilateral or individual nations’ policy decisions and how they will potentially affect the future,” Mason told Defense News. “But what I can say is that SAG-U has got over 25 nations in it right now. And we are continuing to coordinate the delivery of equipment that’s been donated.”

Speaking alongside Mason, U.S. Army officials described training Ukrainian troops to use armored fighting vehicles, tanks and Patriot missiles as one of the highlights of their careers during a panel titled “As Long as it Takes ― International Efforts to Train Ukraine’s Military.”

There are currently 25 countries training Ukrainian forces amid an influx of NATO equipment Ukraine has received since Russia invaded the country. The equipment is delivered as part of the Security Assistance Group-Ukraine, an initiative U.S. European Command set up in November 2022.

Mason noted that 7,254 Ukrainians are receiving training through Security Assistance Group-Ukraine and that NATO members have trained about 90,000 troops overall at 88 training sites.

The coalition has trained 17 brigades and is currently focused on reconstituting several of them as winter approaches.

Congress passed $113 billion in economic and military support to Ukraine, but failed to pass a fifth aid package earlier this month despite the White House’s request. The Pentagon says it can use roughly $5.5 billion remaining from prior fiscal years to continue transferring weapons to Ukraine, but that’s not expected to last for much more than a couple of months.

Col. Bryan Harris, the commander of the U.S. Army’s 2nd Armored Brigade Combat Team, 1st Infantry Division, recently returned home after deploying to NATO’s eastern front to train Ukrainians on combat maneuvers.

During that time, his unit trained 9,000 Ukrainians to use Bradley fighting vehicles, M1A1 Abrams tanks and M109 Paladin howitzers.

“Up to that point in December 2022, it was all platform training — how to operate this platform, how to operate this weapons system,” Harris said at the panel. “But in January, we started combined arms maneuver training.”

“There were Ukrainian crew members on Paladins supporting Bradley maneuver manned by Ukrainian crew members, and it was a sight to see,” Harris said. “It was a highlight of my 25-year career.”

Lt. Col. Seth Barrett, commander of the U.S. Army’s 3rd Battalion, 6th Air Defense Artillery Regiment, also described his unit’s efforts to train Ukrainians to use the Patriot missile defense system at Fort Sill, Oklahoma.

Barrett noted this took “a herculean effort” by the linguist community, noting that U.S. soldiers with Ukrainian backgrounds reenlisted to help with translation.

Ukrainian trainees were versed in the Soviet-era S-300 missile system, giving them a sense of the fundamentals, but still needed Patriot-specific training.

“Soviet systems tend to be a lot more user-involved,” Barrett said. “An S-300 has 84 different cables that you have to plug in. We have five.”

The goal of Army Futures Command was clear: It needed to disrupt the service’s lengthy record of failure when it came to producing a new modernization program.

Now, the command is starting to see some of its efforts come to fruition; the Army has begun delivering new combat vehicles to soldiers and will soon field longer-range missiles. The service has also selected a contractor to build its long-range assault aircraft.

Over the last year, the command has faced uncertainty. The Army struggled to replace the first commander; from the end of 2021 until October 2022, an acting one filled in. At the same time, Army Secretary Christine Wormuth worked to iron out roles and responsibilities for the new command, which some said stripped the organization of necessary authority.

In the fall of 2022, the service named a new chief, Gen. James Rainey, who has made it a priority to ensure an enduring purpose for the command.

As the Army gets closer to its 2030 goal for fielding those weapons, service leaders say the command is here to stay — but will expand its focus.

“I do not see a diminishing role,” Army Chief of Staff Gen. Randy George told Defense News. “I actually see an increasing role for Army Futures Command.”

He said he has tasked Army Futures Command’s chief with overseeing “continual transformation,” which will become the organization’s mission.

Wormuth said the role will give Army Futures Command a “broader scope,” making it not just an “important player in the acquisition enterprise” but also the service’s leader when it comes to continuous experimentation of new and emerging capabilities as well as future concept work.

“AFC continues to be involved and be a key player in modernization,” she said. “I also think they will continue to play an important role in experimentation.” And the command will lead the effort to design a force structure that can take on the new capabilities in development, readying it for adversaries in 2040 and beyond.

Continual transformation

Army Futures Command in its earliest days zeroed in on improving requirements. Training and Doctrine Command had owned the requirements development process, but top service officials moved it to Army Futures Command, tasking the new organization with ensuring that process was organized, disciplined and consistent.

A new primary focus for Army Futures Command will be weighing how the force can continually transform. For Rainey, that goes beyond simply developing and fielding new equipment; transformation is how the Army will use those new capabilities within formations, and how those formations will look.

The reimagined version of Army Futures Command is expected to work as part of a team with other key commands in charge of training, doctrine, materiel, forces and acquisition.

“Our mission is to transform the Army to ensure future readiness,” Rainey said, noting the command will be designing the force of 2040 and beyond.

Army Futures Command will work with Training and Doctrine Command, Army Materiel Command and Army Forces Command to design formations equipped with modern capabilities, Rainey added. He said one of his most important teammates is the Army’s acquisition branch.

Stacie Pettyjohn, a defense analyst at the Center for a New American Security think tank, said Rainey must work across the service, given “he doesn’t have the authority or ability to enact some of the changes that he would like to see on his own.”

Indeed, Wormuth said, last year she identified “ambiguity” in the direction given to both the command and the service’s acquisition office about roles and responsibilities. She issued a memo voiding previous modernization directives and shifting much of Army Futures Command’s control over funding back to the acquisition branch. She also moved to centralize investment authority in Army headquarters.

Tom Spoehr, a retired Army three-star general and defense expert, said that since then the tension between the Army acquisition office and Army Futures Command “for all intents and purposes appears to have disappeared.”

To bolster the command’s work with the service’s acquisition branch, Rainey established a forward headquarters at the Pentagon where his civilian deputy, Willie Nelson, spends about half of his time.

Rainey also wants the Army to more rapidly bring commercial technology into the force.

“The technological disruption of warfare right now is as great as it has been at least since World War II and maybe in the history of warfare,” he said. “It’s so disruptive, that pace and scale; the change is unprecedented.”

The evolution of cross-functional teams

When the service founded Army Futures Command, it also created cross-functional teams to focus on its modernization priorities. It formed six teams for long-range precision fires; next-generation combat vehicles; future vertical lift aircraft; the network; air and missile defense; and soldier lethality.

There are also two other CFTs that are providing capabilities across all other modernization portfolios: one for positioning, navigation and timing; and the other for the Synthetic Training Environment.

“Cross-functional teams are one of the indisputable things that AFC got right, one of the absolute heroes, heroes of the transformation battle,” Rainey said.

CFTs identify a problem, decide how to address it, bring in experts, resource the effort and take it to senior decision-makers, he explained. “The merger of warfighting expertise, [Training and Doctrine Command] expertise, acquisition expertise — those [are] things that put us in a pretty good place in modernization.”

But, Rainey added, cross-functional teams “weren’t designed to have, like, a 50th anniversary. … It’s obvious that there should be an evolution in those CFTs.”

Wormuth and George agreed. “Some CFTs, once you solve a problem, you have to pull, you should take resources away from that and then you should start to grow in other areas,” George told Defense News.

“The CFTs remain important,” Wormuth said, but “we are going to be sort of evolving CFTs.”

Already, Army Futures Command has established one new team, which addresses contested logistics — a sign the service has acknowledged it will become more difficult to get troops and equipment to the battlefield. As the Army prepares for a potential fight with China, it’s expecting logistics to be arduous.

Rainey said he is considering “three main options” in the evolution of cross-functional teams. One option is to shutter a team.

The Soldier Lethality CFT, for example, “is close [to its goals]. They stood up to solve some hard problems.” The Army has a little more work to do with the Integrated Visual Augmentation System and is fielding the Next-Generation Squad Weapon, which both fall under that team, Rainey added.

Alternatively, the Army could transform a team into another area, Rainey said, such as growing the Assured-Positioning, Navigation and Timing CFT into something that addresses space or deep sensing.

A third option is to inject some teams with new problem sets to solve. Rainey said that, perhaps, in the Long Range Precision Fires CFT, some new problem sets could be in the realm of other fires capability. These could include some of the close-in, conventional fires being used in Ukraine like cannon artillery, mortars, ground-based rockets and loitering munitions.

The Network CFT is one that is never going away, he said. “That’s the holy grail.”

More experimentation

The Army’s Project Convergence experiment began in summer 2020 at Yuma Proving Ground, Arizona, as a way for the services to evaluate the progress of its modernization efforts. The following November, the event became a joint effort as other armed services attempted to connect sensors and shooters for a combined capability to detect, track and defeat threats on the battlefield.

Army Futures Command will continue to “play an important role in experimentation through Project Convergence,” Wormuth said. “They lead the way to make Project Convergence more sophisticated, have more participants; it’s grown increasingly joint over the years, and now we have allies who are participating.”

The latest iteration, held in fall 2022, increased the experimentation scope and scale, and it added the land forces of the United Kingdom and Australia in an effort to improve data sharing.

The U.S. Army aims to conduct its next capstone experiment in the spring of 2024 using Marine Corps Base Camp Pendleton and Fort Irwin in California.

Capabilities that might prove successful in Project Convergence have been and will continue to undergo testing in more challenging, real-world environments at exercises in Europe and the Indo-Pacific region, Lt. Gen. Ross Coffman, Army Futures Command’s deputy chief, told Defense News. Coffman previously directed the Next Generation Combat Vehicle CFT.

Wormuth said the Army is shifting to “treat it more as an ongoing series of experiments as opposed to just the Project Convergence in the fall.”

A role in conceptualizing

The Army last year issued its new doctrine, Multi-Domain Operations, but Army Futures Command is already at work drafting the next warfighting concept.

Rainey told Defense News in an interview this summer he was preparing to release a warfighting concept for operations in 2040. And just weeks before the Association of the U.S. Army’s annual conference, Rainey delivered an initial draft to both Wormuth and George. Both confirmed to Defense News they had the draft in hand.

Wormuth said the draft likely won’t deviate far from the multidomain doctrine, but would contain a “heavy emphasis” on autonomous systems, artificial intelligence and the implications of those capabilities in battle.

“We should anticipate that those kinds of capabilities would be much more prevalent than they are right now,” she added.

Rainey said the new concept will reflect changes to warfare created by changes to the future operating environment. He noted the concept will eventually feed into requirements development for programs of record. The Army will have to begin budgeting for those things within the next five years.

“Indisputably, over the last five years, we’re in a good place,” Rainey said. “We haven’t changed our priorities for modernizing the Army.”

The service sees expanding its pre-positioned equipment in the area as part of its contribution to deterring China.

And the Army made headway this summer when it was permitted to permanently keep three company sets of equipment in Australia following Talisman Sabre, Gen. Charles Hamilton, Army Materiel Command commander, told Defense News in an interview ahead of the Association of the U.S. Army’s annual conference.

The sets are considered pre-positioned stock, which means they consist of equipment kept at a high readiness level so they are ready to go for exercises or operations, he said.

“I would suspect that in the future, as we get more resources, we can get more equipment. That will become something that we can do with other great allies and partners as well,” Hamilton added.

The Army is still using exercises throughout the region to learn more about where it might make sense to leave equipment and what types and how much equipment should be included, he said.

Maj. Gen. Jered Helwig, the Army’s 8th Theater Sustainment Command commander, in an interview during the Talisman Sabre exercise said it the Army was granted approval to leave equipment in Australia around the time the exercise began.

Pre-positioning the equipment there, Helwig said, will “help us develop into Pathways exercises, really look at how you set up the ability to hold that equipment in places like Australia, [including] the maintenance and supply transactions that need to happen, so we can export those lessons learned to other exercises.”

Operation Pathways is a large exercise meant to assess Army capability in the Indo-Pacific region and the service’s connectivity to joint forces and allies and partners.

Talisman Sabre included 13 participating countries and over 35,000 service members, Helwig said. He said it was an unprecedented opportunity to assess large-scale logistics and sustainment capabilities for the U.S. Army.

The exercise included a joint logistics over-the-shore exercise where the Army took 17 M1 Abrams tanks off its Army Pre-positioned Stock Afloat ship and onto watercraft as well as 400 pieces of rolling stock, which had never been exercised at that size in the theater.

And the service built a 3-mile pipeline from the shore to an airfield in less than 48 hours. Setting the conditions to build took about two weeks, Helwig said. The Army pumped water through the system due to Australia’s environmental concerns, but normally in an operation the pipeline would be used to transfer fuel.

Talisman Sabre “gave us an opportunity to see how a joint force works in real time, how they order supplies, how they issue to the different services, etc.,” Hamilton said. “But the process was working very well for the Australian joint force.”

Drones helping artillery locate targets.

A battlefield so flooded with sensors that it’s impossible to stay hidden for long.

Since Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022, the Army has carefully taken note of these trends. Now those changes are reshaping the service’s plans from acquisition to how to approach formations to reimagining logistics. Already, the Army has rethought its plans to modernize tanks and altering its strategies with drones.

“The character of war is changing,” Army Chief of Staff Gen. Randy George told Defense News in an interview ahead of the Association of the U.S. Army’s annual conference. “It’s changed more in the last couple of years because of the war in Ukraine. And I think it will continue to change at a very rapid pace and we have to have the mindset to change with it.”

Gen. James Rainey, who leads Army Futures Command, the service’s organization in charge of modernizing the force, said the service needs to adapt its artillery strategy based on both “what’s happening in Ukraine” as well as what U.S. Army Pacific requires from conventional fires.

“Everything we’re seeing in Ukraine [is] about the relevance of precision fires, all the emerging technology, but the big killer on the battlefield is conventional artillery, high-explosive artillery,” he said.

The U.S. Army plans to issue a new conventional fires strategy by the end of the year, he added.

Ukraine and Russia are locked in daily heavy artillery battles. The U.S. and its partners and allies have sent a wide variety of artillery weapons, including the High Mobility Artillery Rocket System, or HIMARS, and millions of rounds of ammunition to counter Russia’s firepower.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has credited HIMARS with making a “huge difference” in liberating critical areas of the country under Russian occupation.

The war in Ukraine has also made clear artillery is still critical, said retired Lt. Gen. Ben Hodges, who previously led U.S. Army Europe. A layered approach to artillery in formations — meaning using towed or mobile systems with different types of munitions that achieve different ranges — is required, he said.

The new artillery strategy will determine both the existing capability and capacity while also detailing future needs, Rainey said. The strategy will also consider new technology to enhance conventional fires on the battlefield, such as advances in propellant allowing midrange cannons to shoot as far as longer-range systems.

The document will also address the role of robotics, such as autoloaders for munitions. The Army has experimented with technology like autoloaders, which take a burden off of artillery operators and improve firing rates.

Army acquisition chief Doug Bush told Defense News in September the fires strategy will drive key decisions within his portfolio, including how to pursue the Extended Range Cannon Artillery requirement.

“The strategy is looking at a combination of factors,” Bush said. “Where do you need towed artillery versus perhaps tracked versus perhaps wheeled? What can you do with munitions to get range versus building new cannons?”

The Army is developing an Extended Range Cannon Artillery system that uses a service-built 58-caliber gun tube mounted on the chassis of a BAE Systems-made Paladin Integrated Management howitzer.

But the service in 2020 also assessed available 155mm mobile howitzers seeking improvements in range, rate of fire, and mobility over the artillery systems used within Stryker brigade combat teams. The Army evaluated at least four foreign companies’ offerings in a shoot-off, but ultimately did not move forward with a new capability.

A new artillery strategy could renew the push for rapid procurement of a field-proven 155mm mobile howitzer.

“Some of our NATO allies have some really good kit [and] capability that we’re interested in,” Rainey noted.

Bush recently visited 18th Airborne Corps, which consist of very light units and they “still value towed artillery, because they can move it around with helicopters. … But other parts of the Army might want something different,” he said.

Taking a new look at an off-the-shelf mobile howitzer is a part of the strategy’s purview, he noted. “From an acquisition standpoint, if I get a requirement, we’ve got some options to go pretty fast, if it is acceptable, for example, to take a foreign system rather than building a new one from scratch,” Bush said.

“The broad lesson is that you still need artillery. It is the No. 1 killer on the battlefield, still in this conflict [in Ukraine],” he said.

A fresh take on tanks

The Army in September, after watching loitering munitions destroy tanks in Ukraine and observing both sides struggle to maneuver tanks on the battlefield, opted to scrap its upgrade plan for the M1 Abrams tank and instead pursue a new variant: the M1E3.

The Abrams tank “can no longer grow its capabilities without adding weight, and we need to reduce its logistical footprint,” Maj. Gen. Glenn Dean, the Army’s program executive officer for ground combat systems, said in a statement at the time. “The war in Ukraine has highlighted a critical need for integrated protection for soldiers, built from within instead of adding on.”

The Abrams tank “with all its hood ornaments is already too heavy,” Hodges told Defense News. “Getting heavier is not the answer.”

Part of the new effort will take weight off the tank, increasing its mobility and sustainability. Today, if a tank breaks or gets hit in combat, it requires two recovery vehicles to pull it out of the fight. Reducing the tank’s weight would help, Dean said.

The new design is also intended to integrate active protection capability, including protection from attacks to the roof from loitering munitions and drones.

Dean told Defense News in a recent interview the new design will consider how to reduce the supply chain and make it easier to maintain the vehicle while on the battlefield. It will also improve reliability.

Ukraine has begun to receive its 31 M1 Abrams tanks from the U.S. military, and the U.S. Army is likely to soon learn more about how the tank holds up against the Russians, Dean said.

The tank “remains very, very relevant,” Army Secretary Christine Wormuth said at a recent think tank event. “The claims that we’re seeing the end of the value of tanks were a little bit premature.”

According to reports, in the first two months of the war, Russia lost well over 400 tanks, spurring a debate over whether tanks were too cumbersome for the modern battlefield.

Wormuth acknowledged munitions that can hit the top of armored vehicles and tanks remain a challenge and said “we are working to develop capabilities to defend against that.”

Dean, noting he could not discuss details, said the Army is working extensively on how to protect tanks and combat vehicles from loitering munitions. Loitering munitions regularly destroy tanks and combat vehicles on both the Ukrainian and Russian sides.

“We have got to get better at top-attack inbound defeat,” Rainey said at the AUSA Warfighter Summit in July. “It’s solvable.”

While the service has long focused on protecting combat vehicles from the side and has integrated Rafael’s Trophy active protection system on the M1 Abrams tank, the protection has decreased the tank’s mobility. The same problem applies to the APS kits, which provide protection from anti-tank weapons. The service has yet to field APS on either the Stryker combat vehicle or the Bradley infantry fighting vehicle.

Moving in minutes

The Army has long set up elaborate command posts on the battlefield, putting up climate-controlled tents equipped with generators. The service has said these tactical operations centers must get smaller, both in size and in electromagnetic signature.

But the war in Ukraine has put more pressure on the service to act.

“Gone are the days where you’re setting up a whole [tactical operations center]. And two hours is too much time,” George said. “We need to be able to move in minutes. We need to be able to command and control on the move.”

He noted the war has also proven the need for open architecture that is mobile and can be rapidly updated.

The Army “has to fix what it has and then pivot to what the C2 architecture is going to be in the future,” George added.

He told Defense News he was struck recently by watching a unit going through a large exercise and only relying on five Stryker combat vehicles and 35 people to provide command-and-control for the entire brigade combat team. The Strykers, equipped with commercial, off-the-shelf laptops, tablets and radios, never had to be together physically as they were connected through a network operating as one node, George said.

Wormuth also recalled a similar visit to a training rotation at Fort Johnson where a unit had designed its TOC to be “much more mobile” and could break down and set up within two hours.

“That’s definitely something that we’re going to be spending time on, developing the capabilities to do that,” she said.

Ukraine has taught the Army it is going to have to learn how to “fight under constant observation of commercially available space, the electromagnetic spectrum, social media,” Rainey said. “We are going to have to figure out how to fight when the enemy’s going to know where we are or prevent him; so concealment, deception, camouflage, constantly good tactics.”

Wormuth also noted the Army must be able to operate even if command posts are cut off due to failed signals or enemy jamming. The Army is experimenting in this type of environment regularly during events like Project Convergence, a large exercise focused on developing a modernized force.

Remote logistics

The U.S. quickly faced a challenge early in the war in Ukraine. It was sending complex equipment to Ukraine — but without the experienced maintainers to fix it.

From a parking lot in Poland just months after the war began, the U.S. Army started answering the call for help, offering remote maintenance support. Army maintainers virtually demonstrated maintenance to their Ukrainian counterparts.

Since then, the Army has expanded its use of remote maintenance support to nearly every platform sent to Ukraine, including those of allies and partners. The service built a facility and a repair parts warehouse in Poland and began offering expertise through text message, prerecorded video or live stream.

This effort is now providing a road map for future logistics. George said at a recent event Ukraine is changing how the service “is looking at things on the logistics side,” citing virtual maintenance and 3D printing of parts.

The Army now weighing how to apply tele-maintenance to the Indo-Pacific region, George told Defense News.

Additionally, the Army, watching Ukraine, is preparing for what it calls contested logistics, meaning its logistical efforts would be under constant attack.

“There’s been a theoretical recognition that logistics were going to be contested, but the Ukraine conflict, I think, has really made that very real to all of us,” Wormuth said at a recent event.

The Army has established a new cross-functional team for contested logistics under Army Futures Command focused on this challenge.

Preparing for the future

The war in Ukraine has, according to service leaders, validated many of the Army’s modernization priorities, laid out a little over five years ago.

The Army was already focused on countering unmanned aircraft systems because of operations in the Middle East and had set up a joint office at the Pentagon. The use of drones on the battlefield in Ukraine has accelerated efforts to come up with a layered approach to defeating the systems, both big and small.

“The scale of [drones on the battlefield] has been sort of astonishing and it has reinvigorated this focus on the lowest sort of short-range air defenses that would be needed for that,” Stacie Pettyjohn, a defense analyst at the Center for a New American Security, told Defense News.

And not all technology used to defeat drones needs to be exquisite. While the Army is working on directed-energy and high power microwave capabilities to defend against drone swarms, “you’re seeing that the Ukrainians need things like a smart shooter, a sight that they can put on a rifle that allows them to use [artificial intelligence]. It’s still pretty advanced, but it’s this tech that improves existing guns and allow them to take out some of the smallest quadcopters,” Pettyjohn said.

Formations may also need to change, Wormuth said. The Army “need[s] to probably have organic air defense with our fires in our maneuver units so that they can protect against drones.”

Air and missile defense for threats beyond drones is also receiving new attention. Russia has shown it will use multimillion dollar rockets and missiles against apartment buildings, Hodges said.

Wormuth said the Army is beginning to grow the air and missile defense force. The service is in the process of building an additional Patriot battalion, but it’s not dedicated to a specific combatant command yet. The Army also wants to grow additional Indirect Fire Protection Capability units as well, she noted.

These new units will be able to defend against cruise missiles and drones along with rockets, artillery and mortars at fixed and semi-fixed sites. The Army is still developing prototypes.

Having the ability to see or sense as much as possible at all times, is another way the Army is changing because of Ukraine. “There’s a lot of interest in drones to be able to provide us with [persistent sensing],” Wormuth told Defense News. “But we’re going to have a layered approach to that … we’re investing in the [High Accuracy Detection and Exploitation System], fixed-wing platform. … I think you’ll see aerostats.”

Drawing from Ukraine, “there’s no shortage of observations that we should think about,” Rainey said. And the Army is “committed to turning those observations genuinely into lessons learned.”

The National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, along with other government space organizations, is developing what it calls a Lunar Reference Frame — essentially, the mapping infrastructure that would support a GPS-like capability for the moon.

“Today, we’re working NASA, the U.S. Geological Survey, the U.S. Space Force and U.S. Space Command to develop a lunar geodetic system that will guide future visitors around the moon’s surface as accurately and safely as GPS does on Earth,” NGA Director Vice Admiral Frank Whitworth said May 22 at the GEOINT Conference in St. Louis.

The Lunar Reference Frame will serve a similar function as the World Geodetic System, which undergirds navigation capabilities like GPS, providing precise and accurate latitude, longitude and timing data. NGA maintains that system, dubbed WGS 84.

The push to develop a navigation framework comes as the U.S. and other countries — along with commercial companies — plan missions and envision a future economy on the moon.

The U.S. Department of Defense has also made a notable shift in its posture toward operations around the moon, from viewing potential threats in deep space as a far-off future to anticipating that those concerns could present much sooner. In recent years, the Air Force Research Laboratory and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency have initiated a number of programs that explore satellite sensing and logistics in a lunar environment.

Whitworth noted that while the current focus is on a moon-based system, he expects NGA will eventually develop similar navigation frames for other planets and said the agency is building its workforce to support those future needs.

“We’re working on growing and training the next generation of scientists and bringing geodesy and geomatics skill sets back to the U.S.,” he said.

James Griffith, director of the agency’s Source and Operations Management Directorate, told reporters during a May 22 briefing that while the NGA serves as the lead DoD agency for the Lunar Reference Frame, many other organizations have a stake in the effort.

“NGA brings expertise to the community in how to build a reference frame and in the geodetic sciences. Our role is to lead in that regard,” he said. “There are others out there within the department and elsewhere who say, ‘This is what we need the reference frame to do.’”

While the agency has crafted a navigation framework before, the challenge in developing the lunar system will be understanding how to collect data in the moon environment.

“The moon as a planetary object operates very differently than the Earth,” he said. “We know the types of data we need, but we don’t necessarily know how to collect it in that type of an environment because our tools aren’t built for that. And so, we have a lot of exploratory work to do between now and actually developing a final reference frame.”

As for a timeline for delivering the capability, Griffith said NGA is working with its partners to prioritize their needs and set a schedule. He noted that the agency is partnered particularly close with NASA, which plans to launch a crewed test flight to the moon in 2024 in preparation for its next moon mission, Artemis III, in 2025.

“I can’t promise you that we will be in a place where we’re completing the work in time for the Artemis launch,” he said. “We are certainly working very closely with NASA on what the solution looks like and how it will be rolled out.”