WASHINGTON — After more than a year of experimentation, the Army is on track to provide the first operational version of its ambitious Next Generation Command and Control hardware and software to the I Corps, starting with choosing which software applications to move forward.
“The reality is, some of the principal apps of Next Generation Command and Control, we’ve already incorporated into our operations as we provided some C2 oversight for both 4th Infantry Division and 25th,” I Corps commander Lt. Gen. Matthew McFarlane told Breaking Defense.
The 4th and 25th ID have been the principal testers for NGC2 prototypes for months, culminating in NGC2 experiments at the Army’s Project Convergence Capstone 6 event, which began in late July.
I Corps will be the first to receive what Army officials described as the locked-in architecture: a combination of new, commercial gear as well as reggeized, bespoke military systems. NGC2, billed by senior leaders as a ground up rebuild of communications networks to enable everything from passing and receiving data to intelligence information, is planned to eventually be fielded to the entire service.
But going from the division level to the corps level is expected to come with its own challenges, McFarlane said in the Aug. 24 interview. In this case, the I Corps is made up of several Army units, to include four divisions — typically between 12,000-16,000 people — across the massive Pacific theater.
