C. Wayne Culbreth
On the approaches to Pokrovsk in late 2025, the battlefield looked nothing like the doctrinal diagrams in most command-post exercises. Reuters described stretches of eastern Ukraine as a “drone-infested” twenty-kilometer kill zone, where small Russian assault groups creep forward under constant observation from Ukrainian quadcopters and first-person-view strike drones, and any movement risks immediate detection and fire. Inside Pokrovsk itself, Ukrainian defenders told reporters that drones alone could not hold the city: They could see Russian forces infiltrating block by block, but still lacked the infantry and the command bandwidth to turn that visibility into coherent, timely action.
That is the world US Army company commanders are preparing for. At the same time, Army formations, like the 4th Infantry Division through its Ivy Sting exercises, are fielding the Army’s Next Generation Command and Control (NGC2) prototype—a unified data and software ecosystem that ties together fires, intelligence, movement and maneuver, logistics, and airspace management. NGC2 and related efforts like TITAN, data fabrics, and division-wide kill webs are doing exactly what they are supposed to do at the enterprise level: collapsing sensor-to-shooter timelines and giving commanders access to more data than ever before.
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