WASHINGTON, D.C. – From a fledgling “interactive” barracks to data-centric stress shooting drills and a rapidly advanced targeting system for immediate deployments, soldiers with the XVIII Airborne Corps at Fort Liberty, North Carolina are seeing a lot of tech in their lives today.
Each piece of it is aimed at one goal — making those immediate response force units more ready for whatever they face at home or overseas.
Lt. Gen. Christopher Donahue talked with Army Times on Monday at the annual Association of the U.S. Army Meeting and Exposition about developments for the corps that includes the 82nd Airborne Division, 3rd Infantry Division, 101st Airborne Division and 10th Mountain Division among other support and enabling brigades.
A centerpiece effort that the corps has been improving in recent years is a real-world experiment focused on rapidly improving the fusion of targeting, data and intelligence collection for units such as the 82nd, which has a global response force mission that might send its units to any spot on the globe on very short notice.
That experiment is the Scarlet Dragon program, which serves as a kind of testbed for the Joint All Domain Command and Control work the Army has pursued in recent years. Tech developments from Army Futures Command paired with Army Forces Command priorities in various combatant command theaters merge when XVIII Airborne Corps units arrive there.
“As we watch conflicts across the globe, what are we learning from that?” Donahue asked.
The three-star couldn’t share specifics of the targeting experimentation due to the classified nature of some aspects of the program. But for soldiers at the small unit level, it means the ability to arrive in theater and immediately pass information all the way up, from the company level on to a joint task force that includes other military services and partners.
“I would say previous deployments were on version 1.0 and I would say we’re now on version 12.0,” Donahue said. “With each iteration, we are continuously adding in more capability and making it faster.”
Army Times has written about previous versions of Scarlet Dragon. A 2021 experiment used artificial intelligence and massive data sets to scan nearly 4,500 miles of area across four states on the U.S. eastern seaboard to identify simulated targets the size of a 10-square-foot box.
That one mission used 20 separate platforms and multiple units from the Army, Navy, Air Force and Marine Corps to conduct live fire strikes.
More recent iterations are actually in theater. Combatant commanders are bringing real-world targeting or communications problems to the corps for them to work on.
The corps units work closely with each of the three multi-domain task forces now in operation across the Army. Two are dedicated to the Indo-Pacific Theater while another focuses on U.S. Army Europe-Africa Command.
And those missions align exactly with what the response force faces — going anywhere they’re needed on short notice and establishing a joint task force.
“At the core level, that is our driving training standard,” Donahue said. “That’s our focus every day.”
That real-world mission, Donahue said, helps keep soldiers focused.
“Wherever I go soldiers always ask me ‘when are we going to deploy? Where are we going to deploy next?’” Donahue said.
He tells them not to worry about that.
“Focus on ‘are you really ready and how are you keeping yourself ready every day so that when you do get the call, and its going to come, you’re ready,’” Donahue said.
And that part can come down to the smallest tasks.
Jock Padgett, chief technology officer for the XVIII Airborne Corps, told Army Times in the same interview that they’re using more data analytics to examine movement patterns among soldiers. With better scanning and sensors they can triage 200 soldiers’ movement patterns in a fraction of the time as using pen and paper checklists.
That triage then helps them identify poor movement that could lead to injury.
At the same time, they’ve established data analysis based on the standard Warrior Skills Program that infantry and paratrooper soldiers go through when they arrive at the unit and throughout their time in training. Specifically on the stress shoot live fire portion, Padgett said.
Now, with data, trainers have a baseline to measure a soldier’s performance and see if they’re improving or if they have weak spots to address.
And while combat tasks drive much of a soldier’s life, that’s not the whole story.
At the XVIII Airborne Corps’ home on Fort Liberty, some barracks have been outfitted with QR codes that serve as check-in points for soldiers on duty.
In Donahue’s example, leaders could put a requirement that a soldier on duty check in at a QR code at 2 a.m., documenting their checks. That same check-in also serves up 10 questions related to the soldier and their quality of life.
The data is processed immediately and then put on display so that soldiers can see trends in reports from the barracks, complaints or concerns that leaders can then address.
Todd South has written about crime, courts, government and the military for multiple publications since 2004 and was named a 2014 Pulitzer finalist for a co-written project on witness intimidation. Todd is a Marine veteran of the Iraq War.
