U.S. Army speeds up testing for new command system

The U.S. Army is testing two rival versions of a new digital command network by putting them in the hands of soldiers in two active-duty divisions at once, and the service’s testing command says it can now judge how each performs within one to two weeks of a field exercise ending, down from the months such assessments used to take.

The network is called Next Generation Command and Control, or NGC2. It’s meant to replace the Army’s older, disconnected command systems, the kind that don’t share information well with each other, with a single network built around artificial intelligence tools that let commanders see the battlefield and make decisions faster than an adversary can. The Army approved the program’s formal requirements in May 2024.

Rather than picking one vendor to build NGC2 top to bottom, the Army is running two different approaches side by side. The 4th Infantry Division, based at Fort Carson, Colorado, has been testing a system led by Anduril Industries, working with partners including Palantir and Microsoft under a $99.6 million contract the Army awarded in July 2025. The 25th Infantry Division has separately been testing a competing approach led by Lockheed Martin. Rather than treating the two divisions as rivals, the Army has had them share soldier feedback and technical data from their respective field exercises, called Ivy Sting and Ivy Mass for the 4th Infantry Division and Lightning Surge for the 25th Infantry Division.

In June 2026, the Army said it had settled on a shared data foundation that both vendor teams will build on going forward. Anduril will lead that shared data layer effort while continuing to run the full hardware and software stack for the 4th Infantry Division, and Lockheed Martin will continue leading the full stack for the 25th Infantry Division.

“We are already moving out with the converged data layer architecture,” said Joseph Welch, the Army’s portfolio acquisition executive for command and control.

Testing a system that keeps changing every few months required the Army to change how it tests things. The Army Test and Evaluation Command, known as ATEC, built a cloud-based platform called the ATEC Data Mesh, hosted on Microsoft Azure and cleared to handle data up to the Secret level, that pulls information directly from the radios, software networks and computers already used in the field exercises rather than installing separate monitoring equipment. That let evaluators watch results come in live during an exercise instead of waiting weeks to compile a report afterward.

ATEC also ran what it describes as the first assessment of NGC2’s underlying data layer, a monthslong review from October 2025 to February 2026 conducted at the Combined Joint Systems Integration Laboratory at Aberdeen Proving Ground, Maryland. The review examined how well each vendor’s system kept working when battlefield networks were jammed, cut off or otherwise degraded, conditions the Army says are a routine part of modern combat but not something most commercial technology is built to handle.

Army officials have said the service plans to spend nearly $3 billion on the program in the coming fiscal year alone, with a goal of fielding some version of NGC2 across every Army division within five years. Army Futures Command’s leader, Gen. James Rainey, has described the effort in broader terms, saying it’s “a blueprint for how we’ll deliver future Army systems.”

Neither the Army nor ATEC has said when NGC2 will be judged ready for full-rate fielding beyond the 4th and 25th Infantry Divisions, or which units will receive it next.