Joe Welch, deputy to the commanding general at Army Futures Command, said the technology stack that will support the U.S. Army’s planned Next-Generation Command and Control, or NGC2, capability, consists of several layers: the application layer, operating systems layer, compute layer and transport layer, Breaking Defense reported Monday.
During a panel at the Army’s Technical Exchange Meeting, Welch described the tech stack’s operating systems layer for the NGC2 program as the “integrated data layer” responsible for “the collection of services, data interfaces and data models that ultimately are supportive of those applications and allow applications to be built without having to rebuild services that other things may already be taking advantage of.”
He cited the challenge associated with the tech stack’s compute layer, which will harness the processing power used to operate the application and operating systems layers.
“It’s a very hard optimization problem, and if it doesn’t work, the applications and the services that I just mentioned, those top two layers, are not going to work either,” he noted.
As for the transport layer, Welch described it as a component responsible for managing the movement of data across the battlespace.
Taking Standardized APIs Into Account
Welch noted that the military branch should consider the standardization of application programming interfaces, or APIs, as it works to find the appropriate tools for the tech stack layers.
“A lot of the challenges we have with our systems today is that there is no standard way of communication between these layers. The layers are built in a disparate fashion, and there’s also no communication between them. So that is a main focus area that we’re going to have. The goal is open and standardized APIs, but the way that we achieve that is going to be very deliberate,” the AFC official commented.
In September, the command issued a request for information as part of its market research for the NGC2 requirement.
Welch will serve as one of the speakers at the Potomac Officers Club’s 2025 Defense R&D Summit on Jan. 23. Register now for this key event.
