Gone are the days of a stately, deliberate, laborious acquisition process in which the Army would plan out the future in detail before going to industry. “We’d almost always guess wrong,” said Maj. Gen. David Bassett. “Eventually we’d deliver yesterday’s technology tomorrow.”

At issue is not just this particular program, but the much wider question of how a Pentagon testing apparatus designed for big industrial age programs can keep up with the much faster and more fluid upgrade cycles of information technology.

Even with Australia, one of our closest allies, it can be hard to share data. And the Army’s future war plans require seamless network coordination with the other US services and foreign allies.

Unlike the Taliban, Russia and China can shoot down our drones, jam our transmissions, and hack our computers. So to prepare to fight them, we need a very different communications network — one the US Army is now studying how to build.

The long-term solution may take “big, leap-ahead technology,” said Maj. Gen. Pete Gallagher, head of the Cross Functional Team leading the network overhaul. But short-term solutions can be as simple as replacing bulky metal antennas with inflatable ones or loading new software on an off-the-shelf Android phone.