Like the US Navy and the US Air Force, the US Army simultaneously develops several hundred Research and Development programs with often very disparate ambitions and schedules. And like its counterparts, it must validate its cooperative capabilities in application of the new Joint All-Domain Command and Control, or JADC2, doctrine, which frames the strategic and tactical evolution of US military operations in the years and decades to come. For this, it organizes since last year every autumn a major exercise, called "Convergence Project", intended precisely to validate the cooperative capacities of some of its programs, as well as to assess their operational added value on the battlefield.
The first installment, Convergence 2020, took place from August 11 to September 1, 2020 in Yuma, Arizona, and had only limited ambitions, in part due to the health crisis linked to Covid19 which was hitting the United States hard. United. 500 soldiers and civilians evaluated 3 weeks during the cooperation capacities of certain key systems, such as drones, new artillery systems, robotic reconnaissance, or the use of artificial intelligence. The results, which ranged from clear success to blatant failure depending on the area, were analyzed for a year by engineers and technicians of the US Army and its industrial service providers, in order to resolve the difficulties encountered, but also to allow an extension of the scale of the tests during the second iteration, Convergence 2021.
This will take place from October 12 to November 10, 2021, and will be spread over several sites, and not just one. In addition, beyond the several thousand soldiers and the 107 technological programs of the US Army who will participate in the exercise, personnel and equipment from the US Air Force, the US Navy, the US Marines Corps and the US Space Force will also participate in the trials, in a first attempt to flesh out the JADC2 doctrine, albeit in a limited way. A total of 7.000 staff will participate in the exercise, including 900 dedicated solely to collecting information, 10 times more than in the previous version. In addition, it will be much more ambitious, not being limited only to the simple experiment of connecting systems, by applying a large number of these new collaborative technologies to answer to 7 different scenarios, compared to only 3 in 2020.
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