Over the past six months, the 1st MDTF deployed 16 cells across 10 time zones to support five named joint or bilateral exercises, said Brig. Gen. Bernard Harrington, 1st MDTF commander. The cells are task-organized and can be as small as a three-soldier team and as large as a company or battery.

The 1st MDTF saw its first major use during the naval exercise Rim of the Pacific in 2018. Since then, they’ve added capabilities, personnel and equipment to play a role in Orient Shield and Talisman Saber in 2019.

Early exercises put into practice what had previously been merely concepts, Harrington told an audience on Wednesday at the annual Association of the U.S. Army conference.

What that work has accomplished already is a way for the Army to establish its own “interior lines,” or forward presence, near China to push back against their protective anti-access/area denial bubble.

But they’re not doing that by massing tanks on warships along the coasts. Instead, they’re using a variety of measures — radios, radar, cyber and old-fashioned missiles — to highlight the reach of the Army and its partner forces.

Harrington noted that China has its advantages on its own turf. It has all its forces available and a deep magazine to fire offensively or in defense.

“It’s very hard to close that gap with mass and magazine depth,” he said.

In the old days, Harrington added, a unit would work up to a partner exercise, conduct the exercise and go home and wait for the next exercise. But new practices make a persistent forward presence the norm.

That presence helps build those interior lines and extend them over time.

Newly appointed commander of the 3rd MDTF, formed in September, Col. David Zinn, made a clear distinction between the MDTFs now versus the early years of their inception.

“We are not an experimental formation, we are an operational formation,” Zinn said.

Experimentation will still continue, as it did in Forager 2021, also a Pacific military exercise. That exercise saw the first synchronization of all assets — land, air, maritime, cyber, space and electronic warfare.

Then, at RIMPAC 2022 the task force fused the four things it must do to be successful — sink ships, shoot down missiles, neutralize satellites and jam an enemy’s command and control.

The force set its sights on a vessel off the coast of Hawaii during a joint ship sinking event.

Soldiers coordinated near simultaneous effects, using space assets, to shut down satellites. They used live electronic warfare attacks to jam communications. A cyber team isolated the vessel’s connection to headquarters. And then a long-range strike was launched, Harrington said.

And while they conducted that attack, a Mississippi Army National Guard unit ran air defense for the task force.

The Army has slated 1st and 3rd MDTFs for more than 15 exercises in eight countries with plans to add more than 1,400 personnel from 39 Army branches over the next year, Harrington added.

Those exercises include Project Convergence-Pacific, Northern Edge, Orient Shield, Yudh Abhyas, Tiger Balm, Balikatan and Talisman Sabre.

Also, next year, 3rd MDTF is expected to reach initial operational capability and the Army expects to field both its mid-range, 1,000 kilometer strike capability and a long-range hypersonic weapon in the region, Harrington said.

Those 5,000 goggles are part of a not-yet-released Army fielding plan for the Integrated Visual Augmentation System, which is a combined night vision and thermal device with the ability to feed navigation, position, weapon’s sight views and an array of other data to the user.

Brig. Gen. Christopher Schneider, commander of Program Executive Office-Soldier, told Army Times that the device will help the Army get to the tactical edge of computing and situational awareness at the branch’s lowest echelons.

The $22 billion program has had its delays. And a Defense Department Inspector General audit released in April recommended more soldier input into the device’s development.

Schneider’s predecessor, Maj. Gen. Anthony Potts, told Army Times last year that testing had shown some software reliability problems, image distortion and humidity issues within the device.

Through the end of 2021 and through 2022, PEO-Soldier and other Army entities reworked the device to resolve those problems.

The Army accepted delivery of the ruggedized version of the device in August. The original fielding date had been planned for late 2021. A new fielding date has not yet been announced, as of early October.

IVAS’ foundational technology starts with gaming. The Microsoft HoloLens, an augmented reality goggle, is the basic platform. The company has collaborated with the Army since at least 2018 as it adjusts the technology to military needs, adding new cameras and sensors and integrating the device with existing Army tech.

Pre-existing Army technology includes the Heads-Up Display, or HUD. That’s an effort to get soldiers looking out on the battlefield and not requiring them to look down at a smartphone, tablet or other type of device, a current problem for those using the Nett Warrior and Army Tactical Awareness Kit, or ATAK.

In line with the HUD development is the Family of Weapons Sights-Individual, or FWS-I. That technology started with cabling and has now gone wireless. It allows the user to flip between a goggle view, weapon sight view or a picture-in-picture option to see both while using a rifle or carbine.

It lets soldiers poke a weapon around a corner or over a bunker to see what they are shooting at. It can even let soldiers literally shoot from the hip while seeing their target in their goggle view.

By using those pieces of Army tech combined with a low-light sensor and thermal vision, soldiers can see both at night and through obscurants such as dust, smoke and fog.

Both HUD and FWS-I were developed at the Night Vision Labs at Fort Belvoir, Virginia, also home to PEO-Soldier.

And both technologies are incorporated into the most recently fielded night vision device, the Enhanced Night Vision Device-Binocular.

The ENVG-B has fielded 9,500 systems of its original order for 10,262 systems back in 2019, Maj. Bobby Lee, ENVG-B assistant product manager told Army Times.

While the IVAS has struggled to perform in the night vision category due to a new approach to digital-based night vision versus the legacy analog tech, the goggle has added a host of other options for users that go far beyond night vision.

These options include mission planning and rehearsal. Users can 3D scan an area, mapping the spot to then run simulated drills through. PEO-Soldier demonstrated this to Army Times at Fort Belvoir in 2020.

During field tests in 2019, soldiers at Fort Pickett, Virginia, used micro-drone footage fed to the goggle to conduct reconnaissance on a trench line to defeat an enemy opposition force in the training event.

In January, soldiers with the 1st Armored Brigade Combat Team, 3rd Infantry Division, out of Fort Stewart, Georgia, used the IVAS inside Bradley Fighting Vehicles to see outside the vehicle, using the Bradley’s cameras.

In August, soldiers did a similar experiment with Strykers and were able to perform the same tasks.

Brig. Gen. Larry Burris, the commandant of the Infantry School and director of the Army’s Cross-Functional Team-Soldier Lethality, told Army Times that they had recently experimented with putting wireless routers in helicopters and were able to have soldiers share data with each other, the crew and other aircraft.