The Latest Battlefield Essential for U.S. Soldiers: Smartphones

BATURAJA, Indonesia—Marching down a dusty trail lined with elephant grass, First Lt. Diego Gonzalez was geared up for modern battle.

Strapped to his chest was a smartphone showing the real-time locations of him and his unit. The soldiers carried Wi-Fi-capable radios that linked together to form a mobile network, converting their voices into digital signals so they could communicate through headsets much like on a Zoom call. Earlier, the troops had flown a drone over the area to get a better look at the terrain.

But as troops in Gonzalez’s unit sprinted past razor wire to breach an enemy trench, he had a problem. As bullets whizzed nearby, his commander couldn’t hear him on the radio. Gonzalez restarted his device and, until it booted up again, relied on nearby troops to relay his messages up the chain.

The outage occurred “right as we were going through the breach, which is a pretty crucial time,” said Capt. Johnathon Muraski, Gonzalez’s commander in the U.S. Army live-fire drill on the Indonesian island of Sumatra. “If I’m not hearing from him, maybe he went down or something.”

The gear Gonzalez and his troops used that day is one small part of a gargantuan effort by the Army to bring its battlefield command and control into the modern era. The program, called Next Generation Command and Control, or NGC2, was designed to give troops the latest communication, mapping and artificial intelligence tools coming out of Silicon Valley.

In Indonesia, soldiers had their first opportunity to test a complete gear package in hot, humid jungle conditions similar to terrain they could encounter if there is a conflict with China over Taiwan or elsewhere in the Pacific.

Army leaders have said NGC2 is crucial in an age of cheap drones and precision missiles, which make large, static formations of troops and equipment easy targets. The aim is to allow units to communicate reliably while spread out and on the move and give commanders an instant, real-time view of the battlefield so they can make decisions quickly and hit targets faster.

More than 80 companies are contributing technology to NGC2, ranging from satellite internet terminals installed on armored vehicles to the behind-the-scenes data layer needed to allow previously separate weapons systems and sensors to share information seamlessly. The technology promises to cut the time between a forward-deployed infantry unit spotting a target and an artillery unit in the rear being ready to fire on it from hours to minutes, Army officials and defense contractors say.

But rolling out NGC2 across the Army, which has about 450,000 active-duty troops, is technically challenging and, according to Army officials, will take until 2032.

There have been concerns among some analysts and officials in Washington about the speed and cost of the program. In August, the Government Accountability Office, the nonpartisan congressional watchdog, said the Army hadn’t developed a detailed schedule that identifies which units will get the new capabilities and when. It also said the Army had limited visibility into long-term costs of the program.

In a response, the Army said it had since developed detailed plans on how and when it will roll out NGC2, as well as projected costs. But it didn’t provide a specific dollar number for the full program. In its budget request for the 2027 fiscal year, the Army is asking for about $3.8 billion for NGC2, according to Army officials.

John Ferrari, a retired Army major general who is now with the American Enterprise Institute think tank, said it would be better if the Army could move faster and with more money.

“Six years is forever in tech world,” he said. “With AI moving at incredible speed, whatever you field today will likely be obsolete in a few years.”

Some defense contractors involved in NGC2 said the Army has moved relatively quickly, reflecting an urgency to adapt as drones in Ukraine and the Middle East rapidly reshape modern warfare. Initial testing for the NGC2 concept began in 2024, and officials say the Army is now starting to scale the technology across the force.

Dan Driscoll, who until recently served as Army secretary, has cited Ukraine’s success in developing its own command and control system optimized for drone warfare. “It fully integrates every single drone, every sensor and every shooting platform into just one single network,” he told a congressional committee earlier this year. “Ours does not,” he added, an apparent reference to the Army’s pre-NGC2 systems.

At the trench assault in Indonesia, soldiers said their Stryker armored vehicle had been outfitted with a Starshield terminal—SpaceX’s military version of its Starlink satellite internet service—just days before departing for the drills.

The satellite connectivity keeps the unit in touch with rear command posts via the cloud. From miles away, a commander in the rear tracking the assault can view the exact same battlefield map with real-time location data as the troops in the field.

Brig. Gen. Ed Matthaidess, the overall Army forces commander for the exercise, said main U.S. command posts used to be 250-to-300-person tent structures that took hours to set up and relied on trailer-sized satellite dishes with slow connections.

Now, Matthaidess said, the functions of a main command post can be distributed across several smaller, mobile nodes, anchored by a Stryker or other vehicle connected to the cloud. If one node gets hit, the others pick up the slack.

The new satellite setup provides the bandwidth and speed needed to push reams of data to AI tools. These tools can help commanders by automatically identifying enemy vehicles from drone feeds or tracking ammunition expenditure to predict resupply needs, Matthaidess said.

“I’m never going to have as many missiles as China. I’m never going to have as many people as China,” he said. “But if I can find the targets that matter faster…I can make every shot count that much more.”

There were still kinks to work out. With the temperature around 90 degrees Fahrenheit, an NGC2 smartphone issued to a Wall Street Journal reporter who attended the drills overheated, rendering it unusable until it cooled down. And some real-time location data was slightly off—at times incorrectly showing one person ahead of another when he or she was actually behind.

Troops had mixed feelings about the technology, with some noting it isn’t always practical to look at a screen in the middle of a firefight. Others worried they wouldn’t be able to fix the new gear on their own.

But for Sgt. First Class James Luce, who was positioned near machine guns and mortars a short distance from the enemy trench, the digital battlefield map proved essential. During the drill, he heard through his headset that two soldiers had taken simulated gunshot wounds.

Unable to see the area through the tall grass, Luce looked at the map on his smartphone to find a suitable landing zone for a medevac helicopter. Previously, he would have had to fumble with a paper map that risked deteriorating in the jungle humidity.

He said it took about 30 seconds in the drill, versus a couple of minutes the old way. “But a couple minutes, that could be life or death,” he said.

It wasn’t clear to the troops what caused the radio outage during the trench assault, which could have stemmed from a hardware or software issue. But they said it was relatively easy to keep communication going, partly because radios were more widely distributed across the unit than in the past.

In the end, they were still able to take the enemy trench.

“In any combat situation, you’re going to run into issues,” said Gonzalez, the lieutenant. “The point with that is learning how to work through those issues and how to correct them on the spot.”