Signal battalions to be rebuilt for modern combat, Army says

The Army is restructuring its signal battalions as advancements in technology and a laser-focus on its network dovetail with a shift from brigade to division-centric combat plans.

Final details for restructuring the battalions came after years of merging job specialties in signal fields.

Army Lt. Gen. John Morrison, deputy chief of staff for Army G6, which implements command, control, communications and cyber for the force, shared this update Tuesday at the Armed Forces Communications and Electronics Association TechNet event in Augusta, Georgia.

While details of the restructuring are still being reviewed prior to approval, Morrison said the changes will pull resources to the division level to handle network-centered problems. The move is expected to free up signal soldiers for more unit-level work within the brigades.

As the Army focused its deployments on brigades over the past few decades, the headquarters and supporting units for those brigades ballooned. That meant brigades were both running the fight and trying to analyze what would come next in the battle plan.

But senior leaders, Morrison said, expect a large-scale combat operation to move faster than a brigade can analyze.

“We want brigades moving and fighting,” Morrison said.

The Army announced its big-picture force structure transformation in a February white paper, Army Times previously reported. That outline shows reducing authorized troop levels down to 470,000 within the next five years.

The Army is expected to cut positions to reach that lower number; the service previously sought to fill out a 500,000-soldier Army through a challenging recruiting climate.

Coinciding with the Army’s plans to make those cuts, the service also expects to add up to 7,500 new positions — mostly in air defense jobs and other high priority formations.

As far back as 2019, new tools began reshaping the look and feel of signal battalions. The Army used the 35th Theater Tactical Signal Brigade’s 50th Expeditionary Signal Battalion-Enhanced as a prototype unit when it added what was then the new enroute mission command network.

Three years ago, the Army announced its “unified network plan,” which allows users to use either a personal or issued device, such as a smartphone, tablet or laptop, to log into the network anywhere in the world.

Incorporating these developments, Morrison told the audience to envision an entire brigade conducting an air assault to an objective, rolling out a four-vehicle brigade command post, displacing and then reestablishing its communication with a distant headquarters and its local tactical network and then making a call for fire request — all within three minutes.

“That was Saturday at (the Joint Readiness Training Center),” Morrison said.

Under the current signal branch job specialty restructuring, individual core functions — network communications, signal operations support, information technology and satellite communications — will merge into a single job held by a master sergeant by October 2025, the Army said.

In May, Army Chief of Staff Gen. Randy George announced an initiative to lighten and improve the speed of battlefield communications.

Much of those changes would come from what the signal experts in their unit find as they experiment, George said.

“These brigade commanders, battalion commanders, sergeants major, warrant officers that are in the formations, that are technical experts — they are going to have the leeway to decide how we are best organized for the modern battlefield,” George said.

Morrison said that the signal battalions restructuring update will be in the working stage with senior leaders for the next two to three months. He expects an official decision before the end of the calendar year.