Army navigation drill to incorporate new sensors in coming years

The Army’s annual exercise focused on refining its Positioning, Navigation and Timing capabilities, called PNTAX, will widen its aperture in future years, the Army’s new All-Domain Sensing Cross Functional Team lead told Defense News.

The new All-Domain Sensing CFT is now fully established, following the announcement in March it would become Army Futures Command’s latest office to focus on modernization efforts.

The team, created to develop capabilities that will allow the service to understand battlespace goings-on, will initially work toward creating an architecture of sensors as well as processing and disseminating the enormous amount of data collected from those sensors.

The team grew out of the former Assured Positioning, Navigation and Timing/Space CFT and took its current staff and director, Michael Monteleone, and expanded the mission to focus on broad deep-sensing capabilities.

“I think you’re going to see an evolution of PNTAX probably both in name and also in scope,” Monteleone told Defense News ahead of the U.S. Army’s annual conference. PNTAX stands for PNT Assessment Exercise.

While he said he could not yet divulge details on exactly how the exercise would be evolving, Monteleone said: “It’ll be something different. As we go more and more towards the resilient architectures from space to ground, both in transport and in data, then also as we start augmenting our formations with the human-machine integrated side of it, as we bring more robots, more [unmanned aircraft systems] capability into that architecture, we have to evaluate that in that denied environment.”

PNTAX will also likely be federated into other experiments and activities across the Army as well, Monteleone noted.

The Army just wrapped up its sixth PNTAX at the end of last month. The experiment “continues to deliver more and more value,” Monteleone said, because it offers a realistic threat environment that is “unique.”

There were were over 600 participants in the event, to include joint partners, combatant commands and all of the Five Eyes partners Australia, Canada, New Zealand and the United Kingdom, Monteleone said. Over 150 technologies were assessed and over 130 organizations total were on the ground over the three-week evaluation.

While the experimentation effort will evolve to encompass new focus areas within the All-Domain Sensing CFT, the team is not finished working on PNT capabilities even though it has seen successful fielding of a mounted and dismounted PNT system and the CFT has closed up shop.

“There is still a lot of work to be done in PNT,” Monteleone said.

“It’s really focused on what’s next in PNT and also focused on how to leverage exquisite PNT as a system of systems enabler to provide advantage,” he said. “Think of it from the perspective of being able to couple that with communications systems, electronic warfare systems, sensing systems and being able to outmaneuver adversaries, essentially, because I now have the ability to trust my timing source.”