In war, keeping soldiers fighting-ready on the front lines is a difficult challenge. It’s even harder when supply lines are messy and murky.
In a major conflict against a technologically capable adversary, US Army soldiers could find themselves without critical supplies, ammunition, and medical care if enemy jamming, cyberattacks, or long-range fires disrupt the flow of logistics.
That risk is shaping how the Army is modernizing the way it sustains forces under its new Next Generation Command and Control system, or NGC2, an effort to connect data, sensors, and units across the battlefield so commanders can make faster decisions.
The development of NGC2 is driving software advances, including Rune Technologies’ TyrOS, a system that leverages artificial intelligence and machine learning to help logisticians anticipate and prioritize what units will need before shortages occur.
Wars have long shown the importance of stable logistics and supply lines. When those break down, resulting in ammunition shortages or food scarcity, assaults stall, defenses crumble, and battles are lost.
The Army has integrated TyrOS and other applications into NGC2 through a series of exercises in which industry partners and soldiers are working closely on iterative tweaks to the system.
With each exercise, more weapons, data, and sensors are being connected, and the scenarios that NGC2 is being tested against — like whether it’ll work through jamming and electronic warfare — grow in scale and complexity with each new test.
Logistics has been a key part of this. Rune joined NGC2 testing with the Army’s 25th Infantry Division in Hawaii last December, and earlier this year, the 4th Infantry Division at Fort Carson, Colorado, put their software to the test.
Historically, the critical elements of logistics, from inventory levels to spare parts, have been siloed, hindering communication and the speed at which soldiers can get what they need.
A core aspiration with NGC2 is “taking all of those pillars and threading them together so that we can actually enable logisticians and commanders in the military to make fully informed decisions,” David Tuttle, the CEO of Rune, told Business Insider.
The goal is to achieve the same kind of clarity that civilians see every day.
“In the commercial space, you know where your Amazon packages are at any step of the way,” Maj. Gen. Patrick Ellis, the commander of the 4th ID, told reporters earlier this month. “We need that same fidelity,” he added, so that soldiers can focus on fighting and commanders and logisticians can better anticipate what supplies will be needed.
TyrOS combines large volumes of data from sensors and deployed units to effectively track what soldiers will require, who is transporting supplies to those soldiers, how they’re moving them, and inventory statuses in the aftermath.
The technology is designed to work in contested environments by managing how data gets transmitted when communications aren’t working and identifying short windows of connectivity when exchanging the most important information is going to be possible. It also uses AI and real-time data analytics to generate predictions about future needs.
The system could analyze a weapon’s firing rate to predict when a unit will need more ammunition — instead of waiting until the ammo cans run dry. With sensors on vehicles, it could also flag when a Stryker is about to run low on fuel or needs maintenance, prompting logisticians to act before it becomes a problem.
When building TyrOS for NGC2, Rune approached the problem sets by addressing “what we felt military logisticians were lacking today, which was an integrated system to support their warfighting function,” Tuttle said.
An important consideration in the development of new warfighting technologies is that logisticians, as well as commanders, need a system that can operate in an environment with denied communications and connectivity.
That starts with making NGC2 more resilient to issues like jamming. But what happens if soldiers can’t connect to the cloud and can’t relay to logisticians what they need?
One fix is giving commanders and logisticians the same shared view of what’s happening. From there, software can quickly analyze the data and flag what units are likely to need next faster than the Army’s older command and control systems. By anticipating demand instead of waiting for units to ask for help, the Army hopes to avoid supply gaps.
And if connectivity is strained, data that’s deemed more important to specific troops, operations, or sustainment is prioritized.
If a team is only going to have connectivity for a short time period or in a specific place, they need to be able to focus on what’s most important. NGC2 also has several ways of establishing the necessary connectivity, whether through localized links between units or longer-range communications that can reach far beyond the immediate battlefield.
Tuttle said Rune is also thinking about TyrOS as a “single-player mode” system.
“If I’m a logistician using TyrOS, I want TyrOS to be usable, stand-alone as a single player from a predictive standpoint and in a planning standpoint, even if I don’t have connectivity,” he said. Then, when it reconnects, it synchronizes quickly within the network.
With the Army’s NGC2 platform still in development, the Army continues to navigate how best to update the system by implementing feedback from soldiers and other users. Companies like Anduril and Rune have had engineers on the ground during testing phases to do quick turnarounds on refreshes, which Army officials have said represents a different relationship between the defense industry and the service.
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