Through continuous experimentation and close coordination, the Army’s transformation has rapidly evolved, a senior Army leader said.

Using the first Project Convergence experiment in 2020 as an example, Lt. Gen. David Hodne, director of the Futures and Concepts Center at Army Futures Command, said it was clear that the cross-functional teams established to focus on each of the Army’s modernization priorities needed to work together.

“We realized if we didn't coordinate with each other, we would actually potentially go in different directions,” Hodne said March 25 at the Association of the U.S. Army's Global Force Symposium and Exposition in Huntsville, Alabama.

Hodne, a former director of the Soldier Lethality Cross-Functional Team, said the teams determined to “make sure … they could link sensors and shooters with the technology we're pursuing. That’s what converging our capabilities was, where we developed that, it was the first one.”

As the fifth iteration of Project Convergence gets underway, the event will extend across the Indo-Pacific into the Philippines, Tahiti, Japan and Australia, Hodne said. “You can see the evolution” that has taken place each year since the first one, he said.

In the second and third Project Convergence experiments, the Army partnered with Marine Corps and Air Force elements. Subsequent events expanded to include British and Australian partners and U.S. special operations troops, as well as participation from combatant commands, Hodne said.

This year’s Project Convergence, which tests new technologies and capabilities in the dirt, began at the corps level and below. When the second part begins next month, Hodne said, it will be “all the way to the corps [joint task force] level all the way down to the edge, the edge being the rifle squad on point, and we’re going to do it across the geographical distance.”

“There won't be any walking across the street from Tahiti to the Philippines, … so if we can converge that data-centric command-and-control from the combatant command to the corps, and the corps to the squad, we can converge that capability from the squad all the way to the combatant command,” Hodne said. “We can be far more effective.”