The Army Is Testing How to Survive Its Own Signal Interference

The US Army is intentionally sabotaging its own communications to find the breaking point of its future network architecture. During recent training at Piñon Canyon Maneuver Site, soldiers from the 4th Infantry Division encountered partial jamming designed to mimic an enemy ruse rather than a total blackout inside the Army’s efforts to jam its own forces.

This was not a technical failure, but a controlled stress test for the Next Generation Command and Control (ngc2) initiative. By using partial jamming, the red cell prevented soldiers from immediately deploying counter-jamming gear, forcing them to troubleshoot connectivity and bandwidth issues as if they were facing a sophisticated adversary.

The scale of this assessment is unprecedented for the division. Brig. Gen. Michael Kalootian, director of the Command and Control Future Capability Directorate, noted that many soldiers are facing electromagnetic warfare at this magnitude for the first time in their careers. He stated that in 28 years in the Army, he has never seen a more comprehensive and larger DDL (Denied, Degraded, Intermittent, and Limited) assessment against a division size force.

The Ivy Mass event served as the culmination of several weeks of incremental events, scaling a prototype of the ngc2 initiative to a full division. The Army utilized combined jamming, space, GPS, and cyber threats against the network architecture while units were actively maneuvering. This approach allows leaders to evaluate system resilience under realistic battlefield conditions before making final acquisition and fielding decisions for future units.

The significance lies in the shift from testing hardware in isolation to testing integrated effects in a maneuver environment. Maj. Gen. Patrick Ellis, commander of 4th Infantry Division, described the event as the largest employment of effects in one place in his 31-year career.

For defense planners, the lesson is clear: connectivity issues—whether caused by weather, satellites, or user error—are indistinguishable from enemy interference until a specific threshold of disruption is met. If the Army cannot detect partial jamming during training, it will not survive the first contact in a high-intensity conflict.

The question for the next generation of command and control is whether the software can identify the subtle signature of an adversary before the network becomes unusable.