The Army wants a single seamless data system from home base to the front line. That’s even harder than it sounds.

Gone are the days of a stately, deliberate, laborious acquisition process in which the Army would plan out the future in detail before going to industry. “We’d almost always guess wrong,” said Maj. Gen. David Bassett. “Eventually we’d deliver yesterday’s technology tomorrow.”

At issue is not just this particular program, but the much wider question of how a Pentagon testing apparatus designed for big industrial age programs can keep up with the much faster and more fluid upgrade cycles of information technology.

Even with Australia, one of our closest allies, it can be hard to share data. And the Army’s future war plans require seamless network coordination with the other US services and foreign allies.

It’s all part of a wider effort to rebuild the Army’s command, control, and communications (C3) networks for war against a high-tech great power.

It was hard enough keeping the data flowing to the far mountains of Afghanistan, but at least the Taliban didn’t have the technology to attack the network. Russia and China, however, are investing heavily in capabilities to eavesdrop on or jam the radio transmissions and to blind or outright shoot down the satellites.

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