In this episode of Micro Journeys Inside Access, host Daniel Marrujo sits down with Lieutenant Colonel Ramon Leonguerrero, U.S. Army Southern European Task Force, Africa | Advanced Capabilities Directorate at African Lion 2026 in Morocco, to unpack the command and control technology powering the largest exercise AFRICOM hosts on the African continent. The conversation traces how a multilanguage translation tool, moving fluidly between English, Arabic, and French, has compressed a twenty-second communication delay down to just three or four seconds, giving soldiers from more than 40 partner nations the ability to coordinate almost instantly at the tactical edge.
The discussion moves beyond the hardware to the structure behind it: a \"three pillars\" model of military, industry, and academia working in tandem, and a network-first, platform-agnostic approach the Lieutenant Colonel compares to NASCAR, prioritizing the driver over the car. That structure, paired with a top-down culture change from senior leadership, has cut fielding timelines for new capabilities from months or years down to hours or days. But faster fielding and wider international connectivity also raise the stakes on the security side, since more allies sharing data means more surface area for adversaries to target.
The solution the Lieutenant Colonel describes is layered: AI-driven cyber protection tools that monitor, block, and learn from threats in real time, combined with a deliberate effort to keep academia and industry out of the lab and in direct contact with soldiers on the battlefield, so lessons learned translate immediately into usable technology.
What You'll Discover in This Episode: