U.S. Army tests silent power system for its command and control nodes

Two U.S. Army command posts have run for up to eight hours straight on battery power alone, no generator rumbling in the background, no engine noise giving away their position, proving a defense contractor’s hybrid power system can keep a modern battlefield headquarters running dark and quiet.

GM Defense said its EPIQ hybrid power system quietly powered two 4th Infantry Division command nodes from Fort Carson, Colorado during Project Convergence Capstone 6, a large-scale Army experimentation event testing new technology alongside soldiers under realistic field conditions at Fort Irwin, California.

According to GM Defense, the two nodes carried a mission-critical electrical load of 9 to 30 kilowatts, covering everything from division and brigade command and control functions to intelligence, fires, network, and sustainment systems, and ran for roughly three to eight hours at a time without the diesel generator running at all, switching the genset on only to recharge the system’s batteries.

That distinction matters because a traditional military command post typically relies on a diesel generator running continuously to power its computers, radios, and command systems, and a generator running around the clock produces two things an enemy can detect from a distance: engine noise and heat. GM Defense said the EPIQ system’s ability to keep those command nodes fully powered for hours at a stretch without any generator running at all cuts both the acoustic signature, the noise a listening enemy could pick up, and the thermal signature, the heat pattern an infrared sensor or thermal-imaging drone could spot, while also saving fuel and extending the working life of the generator itself by reducing how often it actually has to run.

Project Convergence Capstone 6 served as the latest and largest field test for the Army’s Next Generation Command and Control initiative, known as NGC2, a program the Army formally established as a program of record in April 2025 and describes as fundamentally changing how its maneuver forces conduct command and control on the battlefield. Maj. Gen. Patrick Ellis, commanding general of the 4th Infantry Division, described NGC2 during the Fort Irwin exercise as not simply a piece of technology but a whole stack approach to command and control spanning transport, integration, data, and applications, adding that the 10-day experiment let his team test the entire ecosystem under the harsh terrain and climate conditions at Fort Irwin to gather data informing future Army modernization decisions.

The 4th Infantry Division has served as the Army’s lead unit for NGC2 experimentation over the past year, building on a series of earlier operational events that fed directly into how the system evolved ahead of this latest Capstone exercise. The Army awarded Team Anduril a $99.6 million Other Transaction Authority agreement in July 2025 specifically to deliver a prototype NGC2 architecture to the 4th Infantry Division, with Brig. Gen. Shane Taylor of the Army’s Program Executive Office for Command, Control, Communications and Networks stating at the time that timely, integrated data would prove critical to enabling commanders’ decision-making in future warfare and that NGC2 represents a long-term effort of continuous contracting and investment rather than a single completed contract.

Power sustainment has emerged as its own distinct technical challenge within that broader NGC2 push, since the increasingly sophisticated command and control technology the Army wants fielded, artificial intelligence tools, autonomous systems, expeditionary sensors, all demands dependable, efficient electrical power to actually function in the field. GM Defense was not the only company demonstrating hybrid power solutions at Capstone 6. IDE’s Tactical Hybrid Generator and GENAIRCON vehicle power system were separately embedded with 4th Infantry Division platforms during the same exercise, offering what the company described as assured power sustainment and genuinely silent operation for NGC2 nodes, according to a report published by ASDNews, underscoring how central the power sustainment problem has become across multiple vendors competing to solve it for the Army simultaneously.

GM Defense framed the broader significance of EPIQ’s performance during the exercise in terms that went beyond simple fuel savings.

“Project Convergence / NGC2 is where the US Army is writing the future of command and control, and GM Defense is proving what modern power can do,” GM Defense said.

The company tied that framing directly to what a hybrid system like EPIQ could mean operationally for units fighting in genuinely contested environments, where an enemy actively hunts for exactly the kind of acoustic and thermal signatures a running generator produces.

“The takeaway: a hybrid power solution that keeps C2 online, cuts acoustic and thermal signature, saves fuel and extends generator life. In a contested environment, that’s not just efficiency, that’s combat power,” GM Defense said.