Lt. Gen. James Richardson, deputy commanding general of Army Futures Command (AFC), said a service-led exercise slated to take place in the fourth quarter will focus on assessing new processes and technology platforms for joint interoperability.

He expects more than 6,000 military personnel and industry representatives to join Project Convergence 21 in October and November to demonstrate sensor-to-shooter systems, Army Futures Command said Friday.

"The end result of Project Convergence really is to inform, and that is to inform the Joint warfighting concept; to inform the four functional concepts; to inform how the Army is going to organize, and how the Army is going to fight,” Richardson told an audience at the 24th Annual Space and Missile Defense Symposium.

The campaign's inaugural series of learning experiments tested military tactics for the Department of Defense's Joint All-Domain Command and Control strategy in a push to meet multidomain operation goals by 2028.

Warfighting technology modernization and C4ISR initiatives were the focal points of Aug. 12 discussions at The Potomac Officers Club's 6th Annual Army Forum. Visit the POC website to rewatch the virtual forum and register for the upcoming event, “Building the Future Battle: The Keys to JADC2.”

The Air Force Research Laboratory will invest $10 million in projects that aim to develop components of high-power microwave weapon systems.

AFRL said Friday it specifically seeks compact, high-gain antennas and solid-state switches for use in effects research and high-repetition-rate pulsed power, respectively.

The laboratory's directed energy directorate announced the funds, which will support awards made under the Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) program. Robert Torres, senior strategist at AFRL, will lead a team of subject matter experts to manage the investment.

“Each topic will consist of 16 Phase I awards of $150,000 each for a nine-month period,” Torres said. He added the team will downselect eight projects for 18-month SBIR Phase II awards worth $1 million each.

“This money is intended to stimulate the defense industrial base for high power microwave electronics,” said Dr. Don Shiffler, the chief scientist of AFRL's directed energy directorate. Shiffler added that they hope businesses from New Mexico will submit proposals for the awards.

AFRL expects SBIR to call for entries in January 2022 and begin issuing the awards in April that same year.

Adm. Charles Richard, head of U.S. Strategic Command, has called for an integrated multi-domain deterrence to avoid being overtaken by modernizing China and Russia, DOD News reported Thursday.

He suggested investing in a secure nuclear architecture, improve conventional forces, field emerging weapons technologies and stand up the Joint All-Domain Command and Control (JADC2) system, the Department of Defense said Thursday.

Speaking at the Space and Missile Defense Symposium in Alabama, the U.S. Navy admiral also stressed the importance of experts’ output, the timely delivery of military capabilities and interoperability with allies and partners in discouraging adversarial threats.

He warned that Russia and China’s efforts, which include the development of hypersonic weapons and the enhancement of nuclear capabilities, would render U.S. strategic deterrence useless.

“And if strategic deterrence, and in particular nuclear deterrence, doesn’t hold, none of our other plans and no other capability that we have is going to work as designed,” explained Richard.

In July, U.S. Northern Command and North American Aerospace Defense Command chief Gen. Glen VanHerck called for Pentagon leaders to use artificial intelligence in developing a comprehensive deterrence strategy.

Three Naval Surface Warfare Center (NSWC) divisions have worked with Lockheed Martin to help the U.S. Navy field a laser control technology the company developed to support the branch's combat identification, threat engagement and battle damage assessment efforts.

The NSWC Crane, Dahlgren and Port Hueneme divisions support initiatives to develop and deploy the High Energy Laser with Integrated Optical-Dazzler and Surveillance (HELIOS) system to the fleet, Naval Sea Systems Command said Thursday.

Lockheed won a $942.8 million contract in January 2018 to provide two HELIOS units to the Navy for testing on a DDG 51 Flight IIA Arleigh Burke-class destroyer ship and at a ground facility.

“A distinguishing factor for HELIOS is it can engage with both a high-energy laser and lower power laser in the same system,” said Tyler Fitzsimmons, an NSWC Crane engineer.

The system is designed to help protect the naval ships from missiles, unmanned air vehicles and intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance sensors.

Crane, Dahlgren shared experiences in low-power and high-energy technology with the project, while Port Hueneme provided test and evaluation management services to the effort.

The U.S. Army Research Laboratory (ARL) has launched a virtual testing ground that supports simultaneous experimentation of emerging technologies across different sites in the U.S.

The facility provides an architecture where personnel can connect to highly distributed testbeds, shortening the duration a research innovation leaves the laboratory for an experiment field from weeks to hours, the Army said Thursday.

The testing ground, a part of ARL's Internet of Battlefield Things Collaborative Research Alliance (IoBT CRA), enables researchers to perform collecting sensing experimentation and other study efforts in a virtual common operating environment without spending money on converged field experiments.

"[It] delivers immediate capabilities to provide a means to stimulate basic research collaborations; reduces the time and cost for integrated distributed experimentation; and gives focus to research artifacts, allowing concepts to become tangible," explained Stephen Russell, manager of IoBT CRA.

To demonstrate the facility's use, Army researchers recently teamed up with counterparts from the Naval Research Laboratory and NATO and connected innovations in various fields together despite their separate geographical locations.

The U.S. Navy is looking to replace its legacy small and medium unmanned underwater vehicles for mine countermeasure missions as early as 2023, Defense News reported Thursday.

Capt. Dan Malatesta, a program manager in the Navy’s Program Executive Office for Unmanned and Small Combatants, said at a Navy League conference that an Expeditionary Mine Countermeasure Company finished a user operational evaluation activity in the small UUV program, dubbed Lionfish.

The branch is eyeing the Iver4 platforn from L3Harris Technologies and the Remus 300 system from Hydroid, a marine robot developer that Huntington Ingalls Industries acquired in March 2020, as potential replacements for the 150-pound Mk 18 Mod 1 Swordfish.

For the medium UUV program, the Navy started its process of identifying potential sources to replace the 600-pound Mk 18 Mod 2 Kingfish.

Malatesta said the branch will merge its Remus 600-based Kingfish and Razorback platforms into one replacement effort, called Viperfish, according to the report.