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The U.S. Army can no longer count on the unfettered sanctuary of bases inside the United States to project power abroad. Major adversaries such as China and Russia are showing increasing willingness to strike American forces in the homeland.
That was a key message from Army leaders at a recent roundtable with reporters, during which officials cited the growing threat as a driving factor behind the urgency of the Pentagon’s modernization push.
“During the global war on terror, we took a lot of things for granted because we could,” Gen. Christopher LaNeve, the Army’s acting chief of staff, said during the roundtable at the Association of the United States Army’s Oct. 12-14 annual conference.
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“The way I think about sanctuary now, based off these sophisticated adversaries, is we don’t have sanctuary anywhere,” Gen. LaNeve said.
He said the U.S. Army’s development and integration of new technologies, especially command-and-control communications systems, are critical to staying ahead of China’s “pacing threat.”
“If we’re going against a pacing threat, power projection will be contested,” said Gen. LaNeve, whose comments dovetailed with the messaging of the Army’s recently published strategy document, “How the Army Fights,” which he oversaw. The strategy specifically calls out China, saying the U.S. needs to shift its approach to “project from our homeland all the way forward.”
Gen. LaNeve told reporters that the Army will continue to be “a huge piece of the power projection platform,” but soldiers will now engage adversaries before they even leave the U.S. homeland.
“That’s a completely new way to think,” Gen. LaNeve said.
A key aspect of the new thinking centers on staying connected and sharing data across the force, said acting Secretary of the Army Adam Telle, who also participated in the roundtable discussion.
“We like to talk about the devices, right? The edge,” said Mr. Telle. “The magic in the middle, as I say it, is Next Gen C2.”
He was referring specifically to the Army’s fast-evolving AI-integrated communications platform known as Next Generation Command and Control, or NGC2, which was championed by former Army Chief of Staff Randy George and former Army Secretary Dan Driscoll.
Mr. Telle told reporters that the Army’s plan is to lead a Pentagon-wide effort to connect the various command systems across all the services. “We’re investing a lot in Next Gen C2,” he said. “We believe in that magic in the middle.”
Gen. LaNeve described the NGC2 development push as his “No. 1 modernization priority” for operating on a fundamentally changed battlefield.
One major aspect of that change in recent years has been the introduction of autonomous weapons, many of them driven by artificial intelligence.
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth recently announced plans to establish an Autonomous Warfare Command within the Pentagon to bring AI, uncrewed systems and modern computing power more quickly to the battlefield.
The command, which the Pentagon has designated AUTOWARCOM, is targeted for establishment by Oct. 1, 2027, and could be at the center of a modernization push connecting all the AI-enabled weapons of the future. The Army’s component command, FASCOM, will be led by a three-star general.
The model, Mr. Telle and Gen. LaNeve said, is NGC2.
The Army’s recently published strategy document, “How the Army Fights,” emphasizes how modern conflicts — specifically the war in Ukraine — have shown that “the proliferation of sensors challenges a force’s ability to remain concealed.”
Ukrainian soldiers have successfully integrated new technologies with old methods, using encrypted signals to keep communications secure while relying on metal-lined Faraday bags to prevent signals from revealing battlefield positions.
When it comes to addressing the “pacing threat” of the Chinese People’s Liberation Army, the Army strategy document says U.S. forces, along with allies and partners, must “organize, train and equip … with the same institutional focus that the Cold War generations brought to the Soviet Army.”
That means being prepared to be constantly watched by a sophisticated enemy capable of tracking the signals emanating from all the NGC2 equipment being developed by the U.S. military.
The Army’s Combat Capabilities Development Command, known as DEVCOM, has a Command, Control, Communications, Computers, Cyber, Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance Center that is working to solve that challenge.
“You can’t just give up this amazing capability that we have for integration,” Maj. Andrew Durfee, a deputy at the center’s Research and Technology Integration Directorate, told Threat Status.
Maj. Durfee and his colleagues are trying to determine how to ensure that all the Army’s new technologies can still be used during a communications blackout.
“We need to prepare to be in those contested environments,” he said. “If I lose connectivity, I might have a degraded ability, but I still have the capability at the edge.”
Private defense contractors are trying to solve the problem.
The Colorado-based geospatial intelligence company Vantor has developed ways to transmit targeting information to the front line in Ukraine by allowing data to operate without satellite communications or GPS.
The company has developed a 3D spatial intelligence platform called Tensorglobe, which provides precise data for target verification.
A 3D reference of the globe enables “50-centimeter resolution” and provides 3-meter targeting accuracy, said Will Cocos, Vantor’s executive vice president and general manager for U.S. government systems.
“We used to rely on GPS,” Mr. Cocos told Threat Status. “It is completely unavailable in Ukraine. Unavailable in the Middle East right now. So with that being gone, you have to have a way to navigate without GPS.”
Drones that lose signal can still navigate among terrain features — from buildings and power lines to trees — by downloading the latest version of the Vantor map and orienting to a known point. “You don’t need to be connected to anything,” said Mr. Cocos. “So now you’re self-sufficient as long as you have some accurate base layer.”
Army leaders say advanced-tech realities are already at play on the U.S.-Mexico border, where American soldiers have become adept at intercepting drug cartel drones by interfering with or taking control of the drones’ command-and-control systems.
Mr. Telle told reporters that on a recent visit with soldiers conducting operations along the border, he saw three cartel drones taken down in a single day.
The soldiers “all said they were doing real things,” Mr. Telle said of the Army’s use of new communications and drone warfare technologies.
“It’s building unit cohesion,” the acting Army secretary said. “It’s building our understanding. It’s making us more ready as a unit for the next challenge that we have to face.”
“The momentum is real,” Mr. Telle said of the Army’s continued modernization. The challenge, he said, is that “agility and standardization are competing against each other.”
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