Army tests smartphone command system in Indonesia live-fire drill

GAO said in August Army lacked detailed NGC2 rollout schedule

The U.S. Army tested its Next Generation Command and Control program, called NGC2, during a live-fire drill in Indonesia, putting smartphones, software-defined radios, and satellite-linked vehicles in the hands of soldiers attempting to breach an enemy trench in conditions meant to approximate the kind of jungle warfare the service could face in a conflict with China over Taiwan or elsewhere in the Pacific.

The exercise on the Indonesian island of Sumatra marked the Army’s first opportunity to evaluate a complete NGC2 gear package in hot, humid terrain, and surfaced both the program’s potential to compress the time between spotting a target and firing on it, and the technical kinks that remain before the system can be fielded across the force.

During the trench assault, troops sprinted past razor wire while bullets whizzed nearby, and First Lt. Diego Gonzalez’s radio lost connection to his commander. Gonzalez restarted his device and, until it booted up again, relied on nearby troops to relay his messages up the chain. The outage occurred “right as we were going through the breach, which is a pretty crucial time,” said Capt. Johnathon Muraski, Gonzalez’s commander. “If I’m not hearing from him, maybe he went down or something.”

It wasn’t clear to the troops what caused the outage, which could have stemmed from a hardware or software issue. But they said it was relatively easy to keep communication going, partly because radios were more widely distributed across the unit than in the past. In the end, they took the enemy trench. “In any combat situation, you’re going to run into issues,” Gonzalez said. “The point with that is learning how to work through those issues and how to correct them on the spot.”

The gear the soldiers carried was one small part of a broader effort by the Army to bring its battlefield command and control into the modern era. Strapped to their chests, soldiers wore smartphones showing the real-time locations of everyone in their unit. The Wi-Fi-capable radios they carried linked together to form a mobile network that converted their voices into digital signals so they could communicate through headsets. Earlier, troops had flown a drone over the area to map the terrain. A Stryker armored vehicle in the unit had been outfitted with a Starshield terminal, SpaceX’s military version of its Starlink satellite internet service, installed just days before the exercise, keeping the unit in touch with rear command posts via the cloud.

More than 80 companies are contributing technology to NGC2, ranging from satellite internet terminals to the behind-the-scenes data layer needed to allow previously separate weapons systems and sensors to share information seamlessly. The technology promises to cut the time between a forward-deployed infantry unit spotting a target and an artillery unit in the rear being ready to fire on it from hours to minutes, according to Army officials and defense contractors involved in the program. Initial testing for the NGC2 concept began in 2024, and officials say the Army is now starting to scale the technology across the force.

Brig. Gen. Ed Matthaidess, the overall Army forces commander for the exercise, said main U.S. command posts used to be 250-to-300-person tent structures that took hours to set up and relied on trailer-sized satellite dishes with slow connections. Now, he said, the functions of a main command post can be distributed across several smaller, mobile nodes, anchored by a Stryker or other vehicle connected to the cloud. If one node gets hit, the others pick up the slack.

The new satellite setup provides the bandwidth and speed needed to push reams of data to AI tools that can help commanders by automatically identifying enemy vehicles from drone feeds or tracking ammunition expenditure to predict resupply needs, Matthaidess said. “I’m never going to have as many missiles as China. I’m never going to have as many people as China,” he said. “But if I can find the targets that matter faster…I can make every shot count that much more.”

For Sgt. First Class James Luce, positioned near machine guns and mortars a short distance from the enemy trench, the digital battlefield map proved essential. During the drill, he heard through his headset that two soldiers had taken simulated gunshot wounds. Unable to see the area through the tall grass, Luce looked at the map on his smartphone to find a suitable landing zone for a medevac helicopter. Previously, he would have had to fumble with a paper map that risked deteriorating in the jungle humidity. He said it took about 30 seconds in the drill, versus a couple of minutes the old way. “But a couple minutes, that could be life or death,” Luce said.

Other kinks surfaced as well. With the temperature around 90 degrees Fahrenheit, a smartphone issued to a journalist present at the drills overheated, rendering it unusable until it cooled down. Some real-time location data was slightly off, at times incorrectly showing one person ahead of another when he or she was actually behind. Troops also had mixed feelings about the technology, with some noting it isn’t always practical to look at a screen in the middle of a firefight and others worried they wouldn’t be able to fix the new gear on their own.

Rolling out NGC2 across the Army, which has about 450,000 active-duty troops, is technically challenging and, according to Army officials, will take until 2032. The Army’s fiscal 2027 budget request includes about $3.8 billion for the program, according to Army officials.

The timeline has drawn scrutiny. In August, the Government Accountability Office, the nonpartisan congressional watchdog, said the Army hadn’t developed a detailed schedule that identifies which units will get the new capabilities and when. It also said the Army had limited visibility into long-term costs of the program. In a response, the Army said it had since developed detailed plans on how and when it will roll out NGC2, as well as projected costs, but it didn’t provide a specific dollar number for the full program.

John Ferrari, a retired Army major general who is now with the American Enterprise Institute think tank, said it would be better if the Army could move faster and with more money. “Six years is forever in tech world,” he said. “With AI moving at incredible speed, whatever you field today will likely be obsolete in a few years.”

Some defense contractors involved in NGC2 said the Army has moved relatively quickly, reflecting an urgency to adapt as drones in Ukraine and the Middle East rapidly reshape modern warfare. Dan Driscoll, who until recently served as Army secretary, has cited Ukraine’s success in developing its own command and control system optimized for drone warfare. “It fully integrates every single drone, every sensor and every shooting platform into just one single network,” Driscoll told a congressional committee earlier this year. “Ours does not,” he added, an apparent reference to the Army’s pre-NGC2 systems.