A special unit in Afghanistan has been testing out new technologies associated with the Army’s network modernization efforts, but more work, namely scalability, still needs to be done, according to a top official.
The Army’s network cross-functional team, an entity stood up to help the service innovate faster, is using the Security Force Assistance Brigade, or SFAB, in Afghanistan as a test case for adapting commercial technologies to address some near-term capability gaps while it works out a longer-term equipping strategy.
RELATED
“With the SFABs, we moved pretty quickly to get them a new technology … that we hadn’t really rolled out to a unit to scale before,” Maj. Gen. Pete Gallagher, network cross-functional team lead, told C4ISRNET following a keynote presentation at an AFCEA Northern Virginia chapter event June 21.
“We’re getting really good feedback from [1st SFAB commander] Col. [Scott] Jackson and his team on some of the simple things, like how do we address ancillary devices, how do we optimize them from on the ground versus in a helicopter and other things like that,” Gallagher continued.
“We’re working between PEO Soldier and PEO C3T together to deliver this. Working with the vendors to make the immediate corrections. Assess that and adjust that as we go forward. It’s really been useful.”
However, Gallagher noted, they haven’t been able to test if the kit they fielded to the SFAB can scale to a full brigade yet. The SFAB, which only numbers around 800 (as opposed to over 3,000 in a traditional Army brigade), operates more distributed than a traditional brigade.
“We really want to do that with an infantry brigade combat team in a [combat training center] rotation and expand the scalability,” Gallagher said, indicating the next step is to take these technologies through a combat training center rotation with a traditional brigade. “Right now we’ve really only experimented with this at about the battalion-sized formation.”
The plan is also to take the technologies through some of the Army’s labs, as well as the Network Integration Evaluation to be held at Fort Bliss in September, in order to perform scalability, cyber and electromagnetic assessments.
Mark Pomerleau is a reporter for C4ISRNET, covering information warfare and cyberspace.
