The Army’s annual exercise focused on refining its Positioning, Navigation and Timing capabilities, called PNTAX, will widen its aperture in future years, the Army’s new All-Domain Sensing Cross Functional Team lead told Defense News.
The new All-Domain Sensing CFT is now fully established, following the announcement in March it would become Army Futures Command’s latest office to focus on modernization efforts.
The team, created to develop capabilities that will allow the service to understand battlespace goings-on, will initially work toward creating an architecture of sensors as well as processing and disseminating the enormous amount of data collected from those sensors.
The team grew out of the former Assured Positioning, Navigation and Timing/Space CFT and took its current staff and director, Michael Monteleone, and expanded the mission to focus on broad deep-sensing capabilities.
PNTAX stands for PNT Assessment Exercise, but may evolve in both name and scope, according to Monteleone.
There were over 600 participants in the event, including joint partners, combatant commands, and all of the Five Eyes partners Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and the United Kingdom. Over 150 technologies were assessed, and over 130 organizations total were on the ground over the three-week evaluation.
While the experimentation effort will evolve to encompass new focus areas within the All-Domain Sensing CFT, the team is not finished working on PNT capabilities even though it has seen successful fielding of a mounted and dismounted PNT system and the CFT has closed up shop.
“It’s really focused on what’s next in PNT and also focused on how to leverage exquisite PNT as a system of systems enabler to provide advantage,” Monteleone said.
