The Army needs at least two years to figure out a new, war-ready communications network to replace its current, fragile systems...
The Army is still issuing some units with the
current battlefield network, WIN-T Increment 2, which began fielding in 2012 and still hasn’t reached the entire force. (The Hawaii-based 2nd Brigade, 25th Infantry Division is getting its WIN-T kit right now). But the Warfighter Integrated Network – Tactical program will end next year because it isn’t reliable and resilient enough for fast-moving operations against a sophisticated enemy who can jam or hack it. So after a decade working on WIN-T, the Army will take another two years or more to go back to the drawing board.
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The Army strategy is “halt-fix-pivot,” Gen. Milley and Sec. McCarthy explained:
- immediately halt programs that simply won’t hold up on a mobile battlefield under sophisticated cyber and electronic attack;
- quickly fix systems that can be upgraded to withstand such harsh conditions;
- and ultimately pivot from the current clunky patchwork to a new, coherent network architecture.
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“We learned that a lot of these systems don’t talk to each other, within the army or the joint force,” [the Army Chief of Staff Gen.] Milley said. “We learned that the system is very, very fragile and is probably not going to be robust and resilient enough to operate in a highly dynamic battlefield with lots of ground maneuver and movement. We know that the system is probably vulnerable to sophisticated nation-state countermeasures.”
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Ironically, the program that was supposed to bring order to this chaos was WIN-T. Now the Army is halting WIN-T and, once again, embarking on a multi-year quest for one network to rule them all. In the meantime, once again, the service has to keep kludging together partial solutions. The short-term fix may, once again, make the long-term solution harder.