"I immediately saw like, oh man, this is going to change everything. This is really big," Maj. Jaysin Williams recalled after attending a 4th Infantry Division briefing on the Army's Next Generation Command and Control effort.
How a chance conversation at Fort Carson sparked SOF interest
The special-operations involvement began by happenstance at Fort Carson, Colo., when a senior Army special forces leader visiting 10th Special Forces Group heard 4th Infantry Division (4th ID) commander Maj. Gen. Patrick Ellis mention work on a prototype of Next Generation Command and Control (NGC2). Word reached Maj. Jaysin Williams, 10th Group’s SOF NGC2 Integration Director, who attended a 4th ID briefing to "figure out what it is" and quickly concluded the system could reshape how Special Operations Forces (SOF) integrate with conventional units.
The Ivy Sting prototyping series and Ivy Mass
In July 2025 the Army awarded Anduril and a team of vendors a contract to prototype scaling NGC2 to a division — in this case the 4th ID — through a series of incremental "sprints" called Ivy Sting. A parallel prototyping effort led by Lockheed Martin is running with the 25th ID. The Sting sprints culminated in Ivy Mass, a force-on-force training event at the Piñon Canyon Maneuver Site, a roughly 238,000‑acre range about 100 miles south of Fort Carson, where the division maneuvered against a live opposing force in a large-scale combat scenario.
10th Special Forces Group’s three focus areas
Williams outlined three objectives as 10th Group engaged in the Sting series. First, the group prioritized sharing position-location information with conventional forces to reduce instances of fratricide between SOF and Army units. Second, Williams sought to digitally inform and evolve the targeting cycle — replacing informal handoffs such as handwritten notes to the Joint Air Ground Integration Cell (JAGIC) with structured data. Third, 10th Group aimed to help shape the applications being developed for NGC2 by testing how those tools support unique SOF mission sets.
Across the Sting events 10th Group participated first as a command-post element and later with ground maneuver forces. During Ivy Mass, an Operational Detachment Alpha from 10th Group conducted special reconnaissance at Piñon Canyon and served as a liaison with the JAGIC.
Digital kill chain demonstrations and technical friction
At Ivy Sting 4 in February, participants demonstrated a kill chain executed in under two minutes: data from a commercial sensor flowed through multiple staff sections from both conventional and SOF components and reached an effector to shoot. Williams said those demonstrations showed that the pieces to form a "digital kill chain" existed on the SOF side, but they were not yet cohered into a single architecture. Ivy Mass provided an opportunity to extend that kill chain and to operate with more tactical ("green") radios, which brought practical friction surrounding waveforms and interoperability that the teams are still working through.
Bringing NGC2 into SOCOM’s information environment
Williams briefed at a SOF-focused technical exchange at Fort Bragg attended by industry engineers, Army team members and the newly established Army Data Operations Center. He said the next step after integration demonstrations is for SOF to "own a data layer." That means pulling the core baseline of NGC2 applications developed by the Army and 4th ID into SOCOM’s information environment and leveraging those tools across the broader SOF enterprise — likely using them "slightly different" because SOF views the fight differently than conventional forces, Williams added.
What this means for SOCOM, the 4th Infantry Division, and Anduril
- SOCOM: 10th Group is "pioneering NGC2" for SOCOM, forcing a reassessment of longstanding practices and pushing toward a coherent SOF digital kill chain and an owned data layer.
- 4th Infantry Division: As the division that hosted the Anduril prototype and led the Ivy Sting sprints, 4th ID’s architecture and demonstrations have become the model SOF is examining for cross-domain integration and rapid kill-chain execution.
- Anduril and vendor teams: Having won the July 2025 contract to prototype division-scale NGC2, Anduril’s work in the Sting series directly influenced joint experimentation and created opportunities for vendors to refine apps and integrations under contested electronic-warfare conditions.
The record from Fort Carson to Piñon Canyon shows a practical, iterative path: a chance briefing led a SOF integration director to join NGC2 prototyping, field demonstrations proved rapid digital kill chains are possible, and Ivy Mass stressed the concept under realistic signal-friction and maneuver conditions. The immediate next step Williams described is technical and organizational — integrating the Army’s NGC2 baseline into SOCOM’s information environment and establishing a SOF-owned data layer — a move he framed as an evolution rather than a reinvention of what 4th ID has built.
