This is part two of a two-part series on the Army’s Ivy Sting events, in which the service is working to scale up the Next Generation Command and Control prototype to the division level. Check out part one here.

FORT CARSON, Colo. — Brig. Gen. Michael Kaloostian wasn’t subtle about the impact he thinks the service’s Next Generation Command and Control (NGC2) initiative will have: “The expectation is this is going to entirely change the way the Army is going to fight.

“It’s going to change the way the Army is organized … . It’s going to change MOSs [military occupational specialties],” he said in an exclusive interview with Breaking Defense at Fort Carson in Colorado. “Things are going to change.”

For now NGC2 is in the prototype stage, albeit being used by units, and here the 4th Infantry Division is the frontline of the data management revolution, as Kaloostian and other Army officials described it during a mid-September visit to Fort Carson for the first of several Ivy Sting command and control exercises.

Following what the Army deemed a successful demonstration for a “proof of principle” prototype at the battalion level last year, the next step to maturing its modernized network is to scale it to a division holistically. The Army has less than a year to do so, following a July award of nearly $100 million to Anduril and a team of vendors to develop a division-level NGC2 prototype, if it hopes to have the tech ready for Project Convergence Capstone 6 this summer.

NGC2 is the service’s number one modernization priority and is meant to provide commanders and units a new approach to manage information, data, and command and control with agile and software-based architectures. But as Kaloostian said, to make way for NGC2, the Army has already had to make its own tempo and organizational changes.

“I was doing this for a year and got the chance to watch us, and knew, okay, if we don’t start going relatively quickly, we’re going to be challenged. What we did is: PCC6 is in July, we started doing our own analysis here and realized, look, we need these events, these routinized touch points,” Maj. Gen. Patrick Ellis, commander of 4th ID, told reporters.

Ellis previously served as the director of the C2 Cross Functional Team for Army Futures Command and was charged with overseeing the development of the prototype last year at Project Convergence Capstone 5.

The answer is serialized events dubbed the Ivy Sting series in which every six weeks or so, the division will incrementally add new capabilities, culminating in a division-wide event called Ivy Mass that will transition into Project Convergence.

Ivy Sting 1 took place the week of September 15 and focused on a very narrow fires thread to validate data could be passed over the NGC2 ecosystem using a beta version of the Artillery Execution Suite (AXS) software.

Ellis and the division realized that with the Ivy Sting set of events, there needed to be an internal organization focused solely on integrating the new gear and coordinating with the vendors and other elements of the Army enterprise.

As a result, 4th ID created the C2 Support Element, an organization under the division’s chief of staff and will serve as the overall lead synchronizing NGC2 for the division by integrating the technical expertise into a support entity. The element owns the integration, data, and application layers while the division’s G6 owns the transport layer.

In addition to the experimentation at Fort Carson with the Sting series, all the units across the division will have to receive, train and integrate new NGC2 capabilities. The division has several brigades that are deployed, with some in Korea, the southern border and in the Middle East. They have begun receiving equipment and logins to start playing around with the capabilities, even getting real world data to start training the system.

“I have division elements that are spread all over the place, so we’ll get the chance to bump this in multiple theaters. The Korea guys are going to start using it there and with another division,” Ellis said. “2nd Brigade, 2/4, is down at the southwest border right now. We’re looking to pull in some of the operational once we get all this stuff sorted out. Their operational data threads to pull that into the Next Gen C2 architecture. I can use that to train some of my AI models. I can use that to help with some of the aided target recognition stuff and to use the operational experience they’re getting down there.”

The Army and 4th ID also established an integration lab at Fort Carson, which will house all the industry engineers to work on the technology. The lab provides ability is to test NGC2 with the unit on ground, iterate and modernize the division outside of traditional ways for test and evaluation and conduct risk reduction.

“In a way, we are co-engineering with the customer and so that is occurring every day and then we’re just bringing that functionality forward,” Tom Keane, senior vice president of engineering at Anduril, said in an interview. “When you look at what we’re doing here, we’re talking to systems that we weren’t talking to at PCC5 because now we’re talking to real weapons. We’re bringing in more real-world data. We’re in an exercise setting here, but there’s a lot more data. Then, of course, we’re running in a more production setting. Regardless of whether the award says production or prototype, we are treating this as a production system.”

The integration lab also includes acquisition professionals, requirements professionals and doctrine writers in order to tackle and coordinate NGC2 holistically across the service, known under the tongue-twisting moniker of DOTMLPF or doctrine, organization, training, materiel, leadership and education, personnel and facilities.

Col. Chris Anderson, program manager for NGC2 with program executive office for command, control, communications-tactical, said such Ivy Sting “sequential events with new learning demands for each one is a giant pressurization of the system.

“Human nature would be, ‘okay your contract awarded, let’s focus on PCC6 next summer and we don’t need to do anything between now and then,'” he said. “This is forcing Army, big A acquisition from the PM, industry team, the unit, the requirements community, the doctrine community, everybody has to revisit this every six weeks and these events are a great forcing function for that.”

The overall goal of the Sting events is not only to add more capability, but ensure the formations are getting better at using them and ensuring they work. Additionally, the Army believes these events in concert with NGC2 could prompt those major changes for the service long term that Kaloostian described.

“The formation is learning how to use that capability and use it effectively every single Ivy Sting exercise. This is not just about the tech. This is a complete DOTMLPF crosswalk. We’re thinking through organizational structure. We’re thinking through the training that’s going to be required. We’re thinking through the personnel and how we reorganize,” he added.

There has been cooperation across other units as the Army is looking at getting feedback on multiple systems, vendors, formations and even regions. The Army has said it won’t be “pure fleeting” systems in the future, meaning the same gear will not be fielded to the entire Army. Instead, it will look to tailor certain equipment to certain units based on the priority, mission and theater.

Anduril’s NGC2 prototype isn’t the only one in the works. Lockheed Martin and its team of vendors were awarded a contract recently to work an integrated data layer for 25th Infantry Division under the NGC2 portfolio. But officials said it’s more of a complimentary effort than a competing one.

“It’s not a apples to oranges exactly. It’s two different units, two different missions, different industry teams,” Anderson said. “Competition is always good. Having two really solid teams just makes everybody better. I think one of the big hopes is if we develop AXS in partnership with 4ID, then we lift and shift that over to 25th ID. Meanwhile, we’re doing something with 25th that will lift and shift over to 4th ID. It’s not duplicating investments, but cross pollinating between the divisions.”

Officials from 25th ID were in attendance at Ivy Sting 1 to learn lessons and share their experience as well.

The Army will be evaluating the after-action reviews from Ivy Sting 1. Officials said they already know the stretch goals for Ivy Sting 2, which is five weeks out from the conclusion of Ivy Sting 1, and may seek to adjust those based on what they fine from the first iteration, possibly adding in more.

Ellis explained Ivy Sting 2 won’t just be fires, but will include airspace management and command and control elements of the headquarters.

Future iterations will also include more contested and congested environments such as jamming, a feature that was absent at Project Convergence last year for the prototype.

“The way that we need to train is we’re going to fight, we’re going to have EW assets are going to contest EMS [electromagnetic spectrum] and we’ll really learn how resilient our network is at that time,” Kaloostian said.

Following Project Convergence 6, the Army will be working on what specific systems it wants to purchase and for what unit. It will also be looking at what the official data layer is and what software components are in that initial mix.

The goal is to have decisions ready to go to be able to begin buying and fielding to units across the Army following the demonstration of the prototype with 4th ID. And then, if Kaloostian is right, bigger service changes are sure to follow.