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Beyond the Network

The Army Signal Corps and the Future of Warfare

 

Lt. Col. Jon R. Creel, U.S. Army
Lt. Col. James J. Torrence, U.S. Army

 

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The character of warfare is changing, not slowly or predictably, but with disorienting speed. The domains of conflict (land, air, sea, space, cyber, and the electromagnetic spectrum) are increasingly entangled, contested, and persistently surveilled. Commanders can no longer count on time, sanctuary, or bandwidth. In this environment, the Army’s success hinges not only on the strength of its formations but on its ability to see, decide, and act faster than the enemy. At the core of that capability lies the Signal Corps.

But it’s not just the network that matters, it’s how we train, empower, and fight with our communicators. The U.S. Army Signal Corps is uniquely postured to enable and sustain lethality, not as a passive provider of connectivity, but as a warfighting integrator at the edge of battle.

As the Army continues its acceleration of technological disruption, it must transform in contact, operationalize the Unified Network, train adaptive communicators, and make the Signal Corps the enabler of decision dominance and distributed kill chains. The network is not enough. It is the warfighter-communicator that is trained, empowered, and ready to enable lethality under fire that will make the difference on the modern battlefield.

The Future Battlefield: Transparent, Saturated, and Contested

Combat formations will fight in environments saturated with sensors and defined by persistent surveillance. The result is a battlespace where, as John Antal observes, forces “must either mask or die.”¹ The ability to manage signatures—electromagnetic, physical, and digital—has become as critical as maneuver itself. Field Manual (FM) 3-0, Operations, reinforces this, noting that formations will operate under “persistent electromagnetic contact,” and that spectrum dominance is a requirement for survivability.²

This dynamic has elevated the spectrum to contested terrain. Jack Watling warns that bandwidth has become a resource to be seized and held, and that commanders “must now fight for bandwidth as they once fought for terrain.”³ Modern engagements are defined by kill webs, which are networks of sensors, shooters, and decision-makers connected across domains and optimized by artificial intelligence. Antal argues that the side able to operationalize these AI-enabled kill webs will gain fires dominance and possibly decisive advantage.⁴

Signal soldiers must understand that emissions are operational vulnerabilities. Spectrum agility, emission control, and signature deception must be treated as core maneuver disciplines, not as support considerations.

Transformation in Contact: Adapting While Under Fire

The Army cannot afford to modernize through institutional cycles disconnected from operations. The “transformation in contact” initiative rests on the assumption that change must occur while under pressure (culturally, technically, and operationally).⁵ Command posts will be targeted, connectivity will be degraded, and commanders will need to continue the mission regardless.

Antal captures the stakes clearly when he writes that “destroying command and control [C2] is the essence of 21st century warfare.”⁶ FM 3-0 prepares for this reality by calling for mission command practices designed to operate in degraded and contested environments.⁷ This requires communicators who are trained to lead when the system falters—not to report outages but to fight through them.

Transformation in contact means building a Signal Corps that thrives in uncertainty, adapts to operational risk, and maintains tempo despite disruption. It demands leadership from communicators, not just compliance.

Beyond Hardware: Transforming the Communicator

“The Army Unified Network Plan 2.0” provides a technical roadmap for convergence, Zero Trust implementation, and integrated transport.⁸ But it cannot succeed without a parallel transformation in how communicators are trained and led.

As Antal emphasizes, “Mission Command must be more than an idea, it must be ingrained in the unit’s culture.”⁹ Signal soldiers must internalize that culture and be prepared to assume responsibility for C2 continuity when commanders are cut off or infrastructure is destroyed. This includes knowledge of distributed C2, digital deception, emission masking, and risk-based routing.

Zero Trust and “Identity, Credential, and Access Management (ICAM)” are no longer compliance measures, they are operational imperatives.¹⁰ FM 3-0 describes cyberspace as inherently contested and congested, where trust must be continuously validated, and identity control is critical to protect kill chains.¹¹ In future fights, a failure to secure data is not just a loss of confidentiality, it is a denial of fires, a break in maneuver, and a collapse in initiative.

Signal as the Integrator of C2 and Lethality

In the kill web environment, data is ammunition, and decision cycles are measured in seconds. Antal writes that human cognition alone cannot process the volume and speed of data on the modern battlefield, requiring AI to compress sensor-to-shooter timelines.¹² Communicators do not just transport information, they must fuse effects, synchronize operations, and enable decisions under pressure.

FM 3-0 defines convergence as the synchronization of capabilities to produce “simultaneous, sequential, and enduring effects.”¹³ Signal is the backbone of that convergence. Whether in land, cyber, space, or electromagnetic operations, commanders depend on communicators to enable their reach and shield their risk.

But this requires a cultural shift from support function to operational integrator, from help desk to kill web architect. The Signal Corps must flatten its hierarchy, dissolve artificial distinctions between strategic and tactical communications, and empower leaders at every echelon to solve problems without waiting for guidance from above (waiting for someone else to resolve trouble tickets won’t help us win the next war).

U.S. Army Special Operations Command demonstrates this paradigm shift today through the delivery of Tactical Mission Networks (TMN), which provide global sensitive but unclassified—encrypted cloud-based capability delivering unified voice, common operating picture, and sensor integration to build digital kill webs that allow maneuver units to sense, make sense, and act. The democratization of technology is accelerating adoption and utilization of TMNs in support of experimentation, training, and operations. TMNs do not rely on fixed command posts (CP) or unbroken reach back; rather, they extend the cloud to the edge, enabling the warfighter and allowing signal integrators to provide layered capability through informed agnostic transport options.

While not institutionalized across the Army, the development of TMNs and their demonstrated potential serve as a pathfinder for the Army and signal the art of the possible: a modular and unified network capable of integrating the needs of multiple warfighting functions. In this model, communicators at echelon are not restoring the network in a break-fix manner, they are proactively shaping the fight by giving the warfighter the network they need to accomplish their mission.

From Concept to Contact: Communicators in the Fight

Doctrine provides the framework, but it is in the chaos of combat where transformation proves itself. The following vignettes bring to life what FM 3-0, the Unified Network Plan, and transformation in contact address: a battlefield shaped by contested domains, degraded command structures, and accelerating kill chains. These are not speculative futures. They are logical extensions of today’s trends: sensor saturation, spectrum competition, cyber degradation, and the erosion of sanctuary.

In each scenario, signal leaders are not troubleshooting, they are planning, synchronizing, and leading at the edge. From shaping deception plans to managing bandwidth risk, from rerouting data to enabling fires, communicators are not just present at the table, they help set it. Their role is not passive. It is decisive.

Vignette 1: 173rd Mobile Brigade Combat Team (Airborne), Europe 2027

By dawn, the skies over eastern Latvia buzzed with loitering munitions; intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR drones); and the distant hum of electronic warfare aircraft. Russian forces, rehearsed in hybrid first strikes, had launched precision fires across known U.S. and NATO CP grids, guided by ISR networks that had been mapping emissions for weeks. Fires came not hours into the crisis but minutes after U.S. boots hit the ground.

The 173rd had anticipated this.

In the months before deployment, brigade planners had reshaped their CP design, maneuver plan, and deception strategy with the brigade S-6 (signal) team embedded from the start. Maj. Simone Reyes didn’t bring a list of system specs. She brought enemy spectrum assessments, terrain analysis for TMN dispersal, and detailed masking overlays. Her mission was not to make the network work, it was to make it fight.

But Reyes wasn’t operating in isolation. Linked by preestablished mission command integration channels, she coordinated a daily restructured strategic signal battalion (SSB) that no longer just ran a static network in the rear. The SSB operated a kill web hub across its area of responsibility, continuously adapting data policies, managing identity control, and pushing tailored security updates to Reyes’s edge nodes in response to real-time spectrum threats. The old “back shop” was now forward in function, if not in geography.

During planning, Reyes worked with SSB liaisons to shape how joint ISR feeds would be managed and authenticated in the brigade’s digital common operational picture (COP). When it came time to maneuver, the SSB’s defensive cyber team helped reroute the brigade’s command net through a hardened node in Estonia, temporarily extending the brigade’s reach and masking a critical movement.

At H-hour, the mesh CP concept went live. Displaced transmitters spoofed old CP positions. Tactical TMN devices and edge compute nodes (preloaded with mission partner integration packages) pushed targeting data from Latvian reconnaissance units into a COP stream cross-synced by SSB servers to preserve integrity even under contested latency. When enemy ISR beams swept overhead, they found decoys. The real CP never lit up.

Inside the mobile node, Reyes and her NCOIC, Sgt. 1st Class Darrell Watts, moved through kill web data threads at speed. AI-assisted fire coordination platforms, continuously hardened by SSB zero-trust posture updates, took in drone feeds from Polish unmanned aircraft and fed them into High Mobility Artillery Rocket System (HIMARS) fire missions operating off a split network architecture.

Col. Dawson, the brigade commander, didn’t ask what comms status was. He saw it. Spectrum maneuver, node health, and mission system integrity were visible inside a digital mission-command suite supported jointly by Reyes’s edge team and the SSB back end.

When jamming spiked along the eastern corridor, Reyes triggered a synchronized spectrum maneuver with SSB routing control, shifting brigade data lanes onto a redundant, encrypted mesh link cached weeks earlier. Fires requests never stalled. Decision cycles never collapsed.

When a dismounted battalion lost link during a breach, SSB’s cyber section flagged the signal loss and confirmed via out-of-band telemetry that the node was jammed but not destroyed. Reyes’s team coordinated with SSB to reestablish COP access using a low-profile burst transmitter embedded in a nearby Latvian rail junction. Connectivity returned. The fight continued.

From edge to echelon, front shop to back shop, the unified network wasn’t just preserved, it was maneuvered like a fires plan. Reyes wasn’t just the brigade S-6. She was a battlefield integrator, tied into a strategic kill web and trusted to lead.

Vignette 2: 1st Cavalry Division, Taiwan 2032

The assault on Taipei began before the first breach. People’s Liberation Army (PLA) cyber teams had already infiltrated commercial networks, and the city’s electromagnetic spectrum was flooded with spoofed signatures, misleading comms packets, and high-volume signal noise. From the outside, it looked like the U.S. division was already there; CPs lit up on rooftops, unit traffic bouncing through hijacked civilian routers, command traffic easily triangulated. But none of it was real.

Deep inside the urban sprawl, behind reinforced steel shutters and nested beneath a water purification plant, 1st Cavalry Division’s forward CP hummed in disciplined silence. Lt. Col. Eric Hartman, the division G-6, sat at the center of a convergence planning cell that had spent three weeks choreographing the deception campaign. His signal staff hadn’t just ensured network access, they had defined the operational tempo.

Hartman began months prior by rewriting the division’s understanding of C2. He fused signal, information operations, fires, and cyber planning into one adaptive cell, eliminating the delay of crossfunctional requests and forming what the commanding general called his “kill web core.” From this hub, Hartman directed spectrum maneuver windows, priority bandwidth allocations, and real-time deception layering. He didn’t brief operations. He led them.

The fight began with signal chaos. PLA jammers targeted known U.S. emitters across the city grid, launching preemptive cyber fires to overload routers and drown the spectrum in noise. At first glance, it appeared the U.S. division had been compromised. But as PLA forces struck the false CPs, the real nodes remained masked, maneuvering in silence.

Signal platoons embedded across the brigade-level echelons had rehearsed local decision protocols. Each company had a comms leader not tasked with maintenance but with operational synchronization that included managing bandwidth priorities, COP access, and local emission control decisions. One NCO, Sgt. 1st Class Jordan Kim, operated with an assault company moving through a compromised power corridor. When battalion links went down, Kim activated a presurveyed TMN transmission disguised as a civilian elevator relay. Within ninety seconds, the company regained COP access and pushed ISR packets to division fires cells.

Inside the CP, Hartman’s team identified a PLA armored formation repositioning through an alley grid that was out of sight but broadcasting short-burst signals for internal coordination. Hartman acted. He routed a clearance request through the COP fire protocol, confirmed no fratricide risk, and authorized a fires mission through local AI target recommendation, validated by a special operations forces overwatch team. Fires landed within three minutes. The armored push collapsed.

Meanwhile, the division information operations team, supported by Hartman’s spectrum analysts, flooded digital networks with fake success reports, mimicking PLA channels. Enemy forces responded to battles they hadn’t won, reinforcing the wrong districts. Every deception success was timed with real maneuver. Every emission was operationalized.

When the breach order came for a combined mech and dismounted push into the PLA logistics node, communications were supposed to be degraded. Hartman ensured they weren’t. Division fires, cyber effects, and maneuver moved on a synchronized timeline that had been wargamed, stress tested, and hardened against digital interference.

A company commander later remarked, “It didn’t feel like comms worked, it felt like comms fought with us.”

After the breach, when the city’s spectrum environment collapsed again under electronic overload, Hartman’s signal teams had already begun phase two: jumping COP feeds to an offshore loitering TMN relay node launched from an allied submarine, masked behind civilian traffic. The network flexed, shifted, and kept moving.

The breach wasn’t just physical. It was digital, cognitive, and spectral. And it was enabled by communicators who understood that the network is not a service, it is a weapon.

From Vignette to Reality: The Warfighting Signal Corps

What these vignettes demonstrate is not just what the future could look like, but what the Army must prepare for now. They show that signal professionals are not enablers in the traditional sense. They are integrators of convergence, drivers of tempo, and commanders of digital terrain. They turn disruption into initiative. They enable leaders to make decisions faster, under pressure, and in contact.

Conclusion: The Network Is Not Enough

The Army’s future operating concept demands convergence, speed, and resiliency under contact. FM 3-0 makes clear that mission command and cross-domain operations are inseparable from spectrum and cyber survivability. The Unified Network may be the architecture, but it is the communicator who turns architecture into operational advantage.

Signal must no longer be thought of as a support function. It is an operational force, a maneuver element in the data domain, and the primary enabler of C2 in contact. The battlefield of tomorrow belongs to those who can see, decide, and act first. That only happens when communicators lead from the edge.

 

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Notes

1. John F. Antal, Next War: Reimagining How We Fight (Casemate, 2023), 65.
2. Field Manual (FM) 3-0, Operations (U.S. Government Publishing Office, March 2025), 61, https://armypubs.army.mil/epubs/DR_pubs/DR_a/ARN43326-FM_3-0-000-WEB-1.pdf.
3. Jack Watling, The Arms of the Future: Technology and Close Combat in the Twenty-First Century (Bloomsbury, 2023), 175.
4. Antal, Next War, 149.
5. James E. Rainey, “Continuous Transformation: Transformation in Contact,” Military Review Online Exclusive, 9 August 2024, https://www.armyupress.army.mil/Journals/Military-Review/Online-Exclusive/2024-OLE/Transformation-in-Contact/.
6. Antal, Next War, 275.
7. FM 3-0, Operations, 196.
8. Unified Network Task Force, “The Army Unified Network Plan 2.0” (Headquarters, Department of the U.S. Army, G-6, 2024), 3, https://api.army.mil/e2/c/downloads/2025/03/04/0b7f95c5/army-unified-network-plan-2-0.pdf.
9. Antal, Next War, 170.
10. U.S. Department of Defense, “Identity, Credential, and Access Management (ICAM) Strategy” (U.S. Department of Defense, 30 March 2020), https://dodcio.defense.gov/Portals/0/Documents/Cyber/ICAM_Strategy.pdf.
11. FM 3-0, Operations, 21.
12. Antal, Next War, 147.
13. FM 3-0, Operations, 50.

 

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