Acting U.S. Army Secretary Ryan McCarthy has said that the Army would take at least two years to identify a new battlefield communications network that will replace the service branch’s existing systems, Breaking Defense reported Friday.
McCarthy told reporters Wednesday that the Army has formed a Cross-Functional Team to reboot its network architecture and provide recommendations in 2019 to influence the 2020 budget request.
He advised the network-focused CFT and seven other CFTs addressing various Army priorities to “take every opportunity” to assess and buy commercial off-the-shelf technologies.
As part of a new strategy, the Army plans to immediately stop programs that would not be able to withstand cyber and electronic attacks on a mobile battlefield as well as fix systems that can be updated to survive such conditions.
The Army ultimately aims to migrate to a coherent network architecture, the report said.
The military branch decided to stop the procurement of its current Warfighter Integrated Network – Tactical program in fiscal year 2018 because the battlefield communications system does not meet future warfighting requirements.