The Army spent this summer proving that Next Generation Command and Control is ready to scale. When Project Convergence Capstone 6 wrapped at Fort Irwin in July, service leaders credited commercial first technology and soldier driven design for delivering a division scale prototype in under a year. The direction is set. The harder question is what resiliency actually means when adversaries hunt every publicly exposed node, comms windows open and close without warning, and the tyranny of distance stretches soldiers across the Pacific.
That question anchored the latest GIST 360 webinar, Rethinking C2 at the Tactical Edge where Swish CTO Sean Applegate sat down with Colonel Rett Burroughs of the Army C2 Capabilities Directorate and Ian Kelly, who leads public sector solution engineering at Cloudflare.
PUSH COMPLEXITY UP, NOT DOWN
Burroughs described a fielded C2 kit that takes 15 detailed steps to power on and 13 to power off, or the hard drive breaks. Multiply that across 15 hard drive variants, proprietary cables, and 19 stovepiped mission command systems that needed a translator just to talk to each other, and the problem comes into focus. Soldiers carry complexity that belongs at higher echelons, where technical experts can absorb it. Simplify the edge and soldiers focus on what they do best, which is fighting.
The same logic transforms data. A commander does not need 30,000 UAV feeds streaming to higher headquarters. AI at the edge should decide what a squad leader needs to see, and what small critical fraction of information travels back to inform the common operating picture. When a comms window opens, burst the right data, not all of it.
PATH DIVERSITY BEATS REDUNDANCY
Redundancy that rides the same fiber strand hands a targeter two easy answers. True resiliency means many paths, opportunistic throughput, and traffic that hides in plain sight. Kelly made the industry case plainly. Cloudflare operates one region, Region Earth, with roughly 350 points of presence running identical software, touching a fifth of global internet traffic. When record volumetric attacks arrived at tens of terabits per second, the distributed architecture absorbed them as a nuisance, not an outage. Distribution, it turns out, is the answer to both DDoS and the tyranny of distance.
The quantum clock sharpens the urgency. Kelly, who studied quantum processing at the University of Chicago, put it bluntly. Traffic encrypted today without post quantum cryptography may as well be plain text within five years. Commercial platforms have largely solved this. Embedding it in field devices that cannot be updated for a decade has not. Move that burden off the kit and onto the network.
INNOVATION MOVES AT THE SPEED OF THE ATO
Both speakers see enormous promise in soldiers as citizen developers, iterating in sandboxes with AI tools instead of waiting on programs of record. The constraint is authorization. Burroughs offered industry a standing invitation and a condition. Show up to exercises, listen to soldiers describe their frustrations before pitching anything, and arrive with the answers to the ATO security controls already prepared. Requirements flow from soldier touchpoints, and unprepared vendors add weight to warrant officers and NCOs who have none to spare.
The model works. Applegate pointed to a Swish and Cloudflare engagement with a large civilian agency spanning hundreds of applications. Latency dropped by half, three architectural components consolidated into one globally distributed framework, and the agency saved roughly $13 million over two and a half years through rationalization efforts.
The takeaway for federal technology leaders is direct. Resiliency is an architecture decision, not an equipment purchase, and the architecture that wins is distributed, software defined, and simple at the point of use.
Watch the full conversation on demand to hear the complete discussion, including how commanders own data in denied environments and where coalition partners fit. Then join the GIST 360 community at gist360.com to shape future topics and connect with the Swish team to pressure test C2 resiliency architecture against mission requirements.