GRAFENWOEHR, Germany — The U.S. Army in Europe used the new and complex joint warfighting assessment as one of the earliest opportunities to taking multidomain battle from a paper concept to the battlefield in order to better understand how the service and its joint partners and allies will fight together in the future.

But the need to fully exercise and experiment with the multidomain battle concept is also teaching the Army that it needs to transform how it conducts exercises in the future, acknowledging that emerging concepts and capabilities and even emerging threats have to be integrated into operational training early.

This helps the Army to understand what future concepts and capabilities will actually work on the battlefield as evaluated by the current force.

The Army tested the multidomain operations concept as well as its new Field Manual 3.0 in Germany through the JWA and in conjunction with the Air Force’s Blue Flag exercise and Combined Resolve X in late April and early May that included 161 contributing organizations and over 25 different countries.

The exercise didn’t just address current readiness, but took a hard look at how the future force will be postured to fight and that meant applying a concept to the exercise called operational experimentation.

Operational experimentation will likely become a crux of many future exercises, Brig. Gen. Joel Tyler, the Army’s Joint Modernization Command commander, told Defense News at the JWA in Germany in early May.

Gone are the days of keeping a test unit available to assess emerging programs of record as the Army did at its Network Integration Evaluations held at Fort Bliss, Texas.

And it’s possible the Army will move farther away from capability assessments that are conducted in a vacuum through small exercises.

With the JWA, the Army, for the first time, took an exercise meant for experimentation normally held in a controlled training site stateside and brought it to a complex, operationally relevant environment, and since the U.S. will never fight alone, made the assessment both joint and multinational.

“You get some young hooah soldiers out there that are well trained in their battle drills and tasks and you give them a concept and capability that enhances their state of training, I think that helps everybody,” Tyler said, adding those soldiers provide invaluable input when experimenting with new or improved capabilities.

“I think there is enormous benefit both to the development communities, the requirements communities, the concept communities and the training communities on using operational units, aligning operational units with modernization opportunities,” he said.

The JWA will show how effective aligning training with modernization really is, but for Tyler, the concept holds promise and teaches units how to be creative and innovative on the battlefield.

In the first JWA, the Army assessed 16 capabilities, mostly at Hohenfels and Grafenwoehr training sites, from water purification capabilities to an unmanned aerial vehicle called V-Bat to defensive cyber operations.

The Army’s directed energy weapon on a Stryker was present as well as a few electronic warfare capabilities that the service is currently attempting to refine through rigorous unit tests in Europe.

The Army also assessed 11 concepts from a robotic complex breach to Infantry Brigade Combat Team mounted maneuver that included concepts for the Ground Mobility Vehicle, the Light Reconnaissance Vehicle and the Mobile Protected Firepower capability all in development or being assessed now by the Army.

The concept of a multinational network was also assessed at the exercise that will lead to more cohesive multinational commands in the future.

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And the division assigned to lead the exercise – the 1st Infantry Division – took a hard look at, for instance, the integration of an air defense artillery battalion into a division, according to Tyler.

All of emerging capabilities assessed at the JWA were done against a backdrop of a future multidomain battle concept that takes into account big picture operational evaluations such as how a division should be organized to defining mission command requirements to how to achieve better interoperability with joint partners from networks to logistics and sustainment, according to Col. Jim Van Atta, the chief of training and evaluation at the U.S. Army’s JMC.

In Europe, Tyler envisions the potential of the JWA expanding even farther to include allies and partners bringing their own concepts and capabilities that they would like to submit for assessment, which could bring more innovation across a multinational force.

JWA is unique exercise that is a “harbinger for the future,” Tyler said, “because, again, we try to design it with three objectives in mind: training, interoperability and the future force and being able to influence and inform every one of those is really key to the success of this.”