How the Army is securing its AI battlefield future

Driving the news: The Army invited a small group of reporters to the National Training Center at Fort Irwin for Project Convergence, its annual technology testing simulation, where soldiers spent days using its new Next Generation Command and Control (NGC2) platform during staged combat.

The big picture: NGC2 brings together more than 40 applications from over 60 vendors in a single battlefield interface, built around Anduril's Lattice software. It is designed to pull information from disparate military systems into one operational picture.

• The applications support tasks ranging from radio communications and electromagnetic warfare to military planning, drone operations and battlefield tracking.
• Army leaders say cybersecurity shaped the platform from the beginning, even determining which vendors are allowed into the ecosystem and excluding vendors that couldn't meet security requirements.

Threat level: Data delays, cyberattacks and inaccurate AI outputs could all have deadly consequences in combat.

• The Army has to keep battlefield software simple enough for soldiers under fire while continuously shipping updates and security patches.
• "Could you imagine if we built this really complicated ecosystem of stuff you've seen here, and then said, 'OK, now it's time to take it all apart and do all the cybersecurity scans'?" Maj. Gen. Patrick Ellis, commander of the Army's 4th Infantry Division, one of the formations testing NGC2, told reporters. "It would take forever."

Instead, cybersecurity teams are continuously scanning new software as it's integrated and throughout its use, said Lt. Gen. Jeth Rey, the Army's deputy chief of staff for command, control, communications, cyber operations and networks.

• Joe Welch, the Army official overseeing command-and-control modernization, said every application undergoes code scans, risk assessments and technical reviews before entering the operational environment.
• Army Cyber Command has also conducted cyber defense assessments alongside NGC2 testing over the past year, feeding security findings directly into the platform's development, Lt. Gen. Christopher Eubank, head of the command, told Axios in a statement.

Zoom in: Army officials say the platform is designed to quickly isolate suspicious software before it spreads.

• During recent testing, monitoring tools detected unusual behavior from one application and automatically quarantined it while investigators determined whether it had been compromised, Lt. Col. Ruben Rangel, deputy chief of staff for the 4th Infantry Division's command and control support element, told Axios.

Inside the battlefield: The Army's 4th Infantry Division spent the week before the media visit using NGC2 in a simulated battle across Fort Irwin's 1,000-square-mile training arena in the Mojave Desert.

• Soldiers carried tablets displaying friendly forces, vehicles and buildings in real time while commanders used the platform to coordinate operations.
• Tankers, Strykers, snipers — each firing blanks — were all in play.

Yes, but: Not everything worked perfectly.

• During the experiment, some soldiers temporarily lost access to parts of the platform because of connectivity issues. Others kept analog whiteboard maps as backups for their new tablets because they were still learning to use them.

Between the lines: Ellis said an earlier version of the tablet software required troops to repeatedly enter long, complex passwords while wearing combat gloves inside moving vehicles.

• Commanders pushed vendors to redesign the authentication process so soldiers could log in once while maintaining layered security controls in the background.

What's next: The Army has requested $4 billion for fiscal 2027 to continue testing and building out NGC2.

• "From my position, it's ready but not done. We're proving that we can fight with this," Ellis said. "It's never going to be done, but I think the vast majority of the tools that we have are ready to go."