The Army last week began its third Experimental Demonstration Gateway Exercise (EDGE), with this year’s event bringing in more international partners and over 120 technologies to advance capabilities for sharing information and operating in the lower tier of the air domain.
Maj. Gen. Walter Rugen, director of the Future Vertical Lift Cross-Functional Team (FVL CFT), told reporters recently this year’s EDGE 23 experiment will focus on use cases around deep sensing, mission command, operating networks in degraded and denied environments and establishing data fabrics for decision making.
EDGE 23 is taking place at Yuma Proving Ground in Arizona, while Rugen noted the event will tie in with the joint Northern Edge Exercise and include participation from the Army’s Multi-Domain Task Forces at Fort Wainwright in Alaska and Joint Base Lewis-McChord in Washington.
“You’re going to see that battlefield geometry with a deep sense that goes all the way to Alaska,” Rugen told reporters at the recent Army Aviation Mission Solutions Summit in Nashville. “Obviously, we don’t fight alone. And it’s going to take a team of teams to fight. So we want to generate those teams, build those teams and generate the interoperability integration.”
After last year’s EDGE experiment at Dugway Proving Ground in Utah brought in seven international partners, this year’s iteration will have 10 countries at the event. (Defense Daily, May 19 2022).
“This inclusion advances efforts to ensure integration and interoperability among partner nations,” Rugen said in a statement.
Australia, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Netherlands and the United Kingdom will bring technology and participate directly in the experimentation, the Army noted, while three more unnamed international partners will observe the event.
Rugen noted EDGE 23 will focus on working an Indo-Pacific-relevant scenario, and cited the importance of working with international partners on the networking capabilities required to operate over the vast distances in the region.
“Message traffics in our call for fires is going to be very aggressive. We’re hoping to get hundreds, if not thousands, of iterations on machine-to-machine calls for fires,” Rugen told reporters in Nashville. “So I think we might have that solved. If I solve it, I’ll be very, very, very excited. This will be one of the biggest things we’ve done. So if we get up to a thousand reps on that, it’ll be pretty huge.”
EDGE 23 will include contributions from across the Army’s program offices, according to Rugen, as well as Futures Command’s new Contested Logistics CFT.
“We have a number of contested logistics use cases, to include [using] an uncrewed rotorcraft again. We’re working through that concept development and working through that requirements generation,” Rugen said.
Gen. James Rainey, head of Army Futures Command, announced the stand up of the new Huntsville, Alabama-based Contested Logistics CFT in late March (Defense Daily, March 29).
Rugen added EDGE 23 will build off previous EDGE experiment’s work with emerging concepts and capabilities to bolster the lower tier of the air domain’s ability to “close the joint kill chain,” with the Army aiming to move ahead on requirements for its aerial tier network by the end of 2023.