US Army punches the gas on Next-Gen Command-and-Control

Coming out of an entire career in the operational Army, Maj. Gen. Patrick Ellis, now the director of the Army’s command-and-control modernization, said it hasn’t been uncommon in the field to see critical data jotted down on a piece of cardboard in the back of a platoon sergeant’s tank.

“There’s probably a headquarter somewhere today at an exercise where an intel officer is going to write everything down on a piece of sticky note that came out of his intel system, walk across the [Tactical Operations Center], hand it over to the fires guy who has to type it into the fires system to make it work,” he said in a Monday press briefing at the Pentagon. “We realize this is just not the approach to speed that we need in the United States Army.”