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It’s the fifth year for the Army’s Project Convergence, the service’s annual warfighting experiment that helps inform the Pentagon’s vision Joint All-Domain Command and Control. But this year is a little different: there’s a Part B. In addition to testing new technologies and warfighting concepts in the California desert, the Army is putting them through their paces in the Western Pacific.
The first phase of this year’s Project Convergence — and its capstone event at the National Training Center at Fort Irwin, Calif. — was in many ways similar to previous iterations, with about 6,000 military personnel testing new technology with three different “vignettes” simulating military operations. That portion wrapped up in March.
But Lt. Gen. David Hodne, the director of the Futures and Concepts Center at Army Futures Command, said “Part A” of Project Convergence was just one in a series of experiments that will run through May. Next up is “Part B” in the Pacific theater.
“The difference with what we did with the joint portion of Project Convergence this year is the venue will encompass a geographical region as far west as the Philippines, as far east as Tahiti, as far north as Japan, and as far south as Australia,” he said last week at the Association of the U.S. Army’s annual conference in Huntsville, Alabama. “And then the third component of our experimentation is the Army’s Title 10 war game. It used to be called Unified Quest, now it’s called Future Studies Program. That will take us right to May 21, and the experiments we’re hosting are really important to the future readiness of our Army.”
In both California and the Pacific, the participants include multiple military services from multiple nations, and representatives from U.S. Indo Pacific Command. But the southern California venue doesn’t exactly simulate the distances involved in the Pacific.
“If we had issues in the execution of our command and control, we could walk across the dirt and just talk to each other and ask why the ones and zeros weren’t weren’t passing,” he said. “We’re going to do it across the geographical distances I described. There won’t be any walking across the street from Tahiti to the Philippines. It will be assured data, assured communications with tactical, operational, strategic distances. If we can converge that data centric command and control from the combatant command to the corps and the corps to the squad, we can converge that capability from the squad all the way to the combatant command and we can be far more effective.”
Also involved is the Pentagon’s Chief Data and Artificial Intelligence Office, which runs DoD’s Global Information Dominance Experiment (GIDE) series — another testing ground for JADC2 capabilities.
“GIDE 9 yielded the minimum viable product, and we’re running Part B on that architecture,” Hodne said. “So I’m really excited about Part B and solving those problems.”
Another reason to take the existing exercise to the Pacific theater: that’s exactly the environment JADC2 is meant to work in, and the Army and its sister services will need to solve joint communications problems, said Brig. Gen. Zachary Miller, the commander of the Army’s Joint Modernization Command.
“When I look at, for example, the ability in the Pacific for all the services to be able to put their sensors together, it doesn’t matter who is detecting a threat. The best positioned service or capability will be an effect on that. And in other cases, it takes a combination of effects to get a really tough-to-target enemy force. When we’re doing that, we can’t all go in separate directions,” he said.
Even before taking the experiments to the Pacific, the Army has already learned a lot about their future requirements, based on Part A in California. They’ve determined 35 different formal requirements documents will need to be updated to reflect new uses of technology.
“In some cases, when a unit didn’t necessarily employ the technology in the manner the capability developer envisioned, some of it’s like, ‘Okay, that’s great. We need to write a requirement document or adjust it, because we got some great feedback,’” he said. “But in other cases, we had to make sure we realized the learning demand to test that hypothesis. We can make adjustments. Some things worked exactly as intended. But when we had to do it as an integrated war fighting system and actually have them fight a real opposing force — and when everything was put together in a fight, you realized it might have fallen short.”
Meanwhile, the Army is planning for a different experimentation schedule for 2026. Hodne said the goal is to bring together other Army experiments, like the Army Expeditionary Warrior Experiment, in a more integrated way. That will mean a later-in-the-year Project Convergence capstone event, in the summer of 2026.
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