HUNTSVILLE, Ala. — The U.S. Army is revamping how it conducts experimentation events, shifting from isolated events focused on individual warfighting functions to more integrated concept-focused designs in fiscal 2026, according to Lt. Gen. David Hodne, the director of the Army’s Futures and Concepts Center.
The Army’s massive experimentation event, Project Convergence, is not going away. The service’s capstone event will happen in the summer of 2026, but leading up to that, a series of experimentation events will integrate warfighting functions in new ways to address how the service will fight in the future, Hodne said Tuesday at the Association of the U.S. Army’s Global Force Symposium in Huntsville, Alabama.
The Army has long held experimentation efforts within its Centers of Excellence, such as the Maneuver Fires Integrated Experiment, or MFIX, at Fort Sill, Oklahoma, and the Vanguard exercise primarily focused on intelligence capability, among others.
“We’ve reorganized how we’re going to do those experiments,” Hodne said.
The Army will first conduct its annual Title 10 war game in November 2025 and then move into a command-and-control, or C2, experiment in the early spring that will test the full range of C2 and counter-C2 capabilities and will be organized to test capability from the theater to brigade level, Hodne said.
Next, the service will conduct a cross-domain fires experiment at Fort Sill that will include “all manners of fires, launched effects, rockets, cannons” in both live and simulated environments.
The last integrated experiment will focus on expanded maneuver at Fort Benning, Georgia, also in the spring, according to Hodne.
“That will include expanded launched effects, autonomous systems, human-machine integrated formations and layered on top of all of them will be formation-based layered protection,” Hodne said. This would involve air defense systems and survivability systems from higher echelons to the brigade and below.
The Army also plans to conduct two Future Studies Programs that will incorporate all of the learning from the three concept-focused experiments.
The service then plans to conduct its capstone Project Convergence event in the summer.
Overall, the effort offers “a more coherent approach to our experimentation,” Hodne noted.
The new designs for experimentation events will also help industry partners understand how to support them because they will be more focused, according to Brig. Gen. Zachary Miller, Army Joint Modernization Command commander.
Additionally, the Army is looking to help industry by consolidating its call for proposals to participate in experimentation efforts which are currently posted “all over the place,” Miller noted.
“I think that’s going to be a lot more coherent starting in FY26 and that those events then will help us inform what we’re going to do in the big capstone in July and make sure that we’ve got the capabilities that are really helping us meet those needs,” Miller said.
Jen Judson is an award-winning journalist covering land warfare for Defense News. She has also worked for Politico and Inside Defense. She holds a Master of Science degree in journalism from Boston University and a Bachelor of Arts degree from Kenyon College.
