Fort Carson soldiers test new battlefield communications at Piñon Canyon

Piñon Canyon is doing more than hosting maneuvers outside Trinidad. Fort Carson’s 4th Infantry Division used the Piñon Canyon Maneuver Site northeast of town to test a next-generation battlefield communications network that linked soldiers, vehicles and units in real time, including troops more than 100 miles away at Fort Carson.

The month-long Ivy Mass exercise put the Army’s new command-and-control system into a live field setting in Las Animas County. By May, the network was running across much of the 2nd Stryker Brigade, a formation made up of thousands of soldiers. The goal is to replace slower, more isolated tools with a digital mesh that helps commanders move information faster and make battlefield decisions with more detail and less delay.

The Army has tied that effort to a broader modernization push. It awarded Anduril Industries a $99.6 million Other Transaction Authority agreement over 11 months to develop the Next Generation Command and Control System, or NGC2. The service said the prototype architecture is meant to deliver integrated and scalable command-and-control capabilities through a common data layer, and that scaling the system to division-level experimentation with the 4th Infantry Division is the first step toward broader fielding across the Army.

Piñon Canyon’s role in that work gives Las Animas County a front-row seat in a service-wide experiment. The 25th Infantry Division in Hawaii is also one of two Army divisions selected to test NGC2 capabilities. Lockheed Martin said it demonstrated its first NGC2 prototype at Lightning Surge 1 at Schofield Barracks on Jan. 23, 2026, with Army stakeholders and partners including Raft and Accelint. The Army later said it awarded another competitive OTA to Lockheed Martin Rotary and Mission Systems and its team to advance division-level prototyping for the 25th Infantry Division.

For local residents, the significance is immediate. Piñon Canyon is still a training range where live-fire activity can shape what neighbors hear and see, and a March report said soldiers were expected to fire training artillery there in May amid drought conditions. The site now carries both jobs-and-readiness value and the burden of a larger military footprint, as the county’s open land becomes a proving ground for the Army’s next communications system.