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24 October 2024

The Army’s dream of vastly simplified networking is starting to come true

LAUREN C. WILLIAMS

Upgrades are making the Army’s battle network easier for soldiers to use, but it’s still not exactly what they’re asking for.

“It's really good, but it is extremely complicated and…it's better than what we had before,” Col. James Stultz, who leads the 2nd Brigade Combat Team, 101st Airborne Division, said of the nascent Integrated Tactical Network. “I'm not complaining, but it's a waypoint, it's not the end state.”

Today, the Army uses a myriad of means to transmit and receive voice calls and other data in the field: radios, satellite terminals, cell phones, and more. The ITN is an effort to combine the service’s existing gear with off-the-shelf products to improve connectivity and mission command.

Service leaders have been working to make that web more reliable, secure, and capable. Radio mesh networks, which are foundational to ITN, are good for calls or texts, and sending location data from Android Tactical Assault Kit, or ATAK. Satellite networks can handle large amounts of data, like a drone’s video feed, and are often used when a military unit is not in range of a cell tower. But threading it all together is tricky, so the Army selected units to test out network upgrades.

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