Posted on Apr 2, 2015
Army 'warfighting challenges' meant to spur innovation. What do you feel about this?
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http://www.janes.com/article/50395/ausa-global-2015-army-warfighting-challenges-meant-to-spur-innovation
The US Army hopes to spur military innovation less through systems requirements and capability gaps and more through broad 'warfighting challenges' that span various functions, officials said during the Association of the United States Army's Global Force Symposium in Huntsville, Alabama.
Pentagon officials have raised concern about levels of internal research and development (IRAD) funding within the defence industry, but the acquisition process moves slowly and many recent investments the army has asked industry to make - such as systems for Network Integration Evaluations (NIEs) - have not paid off for companies.
Brigadier General John Charlton, head of Brigade Modernization Command, which oversees NIEs, said there is still promise in 'rapid prototyping' efforts like the NIEs because they get equipment into soldier's hands early in a development process, and this allows them to feed back to industry.
Now, this will play out in part through Army Warfighting Assessments (AWAs), annual events at Fort Bliss in Texas that could eventually supplant NIEs. The NIEs sought to be both an innovative technological experiment as well as a rigorous operational test, and were viewed by some in industry and Congress as wasteful for not having resulted in much equipment purchased or deployed.
AWAs are not operational tests and will focus instead on innovation both for equipment and operating concepts, and systems that participate need only to be in line with the army's new 'warfighting challenges' rather than a specific requirement.
Brig Gen Charlton described army warfighting challenges as broad and enduring, and there are no definitive answers to posed questions, but rather the army is looking for interim solutions to those challenges. Although they are broad areas, the army hopes these can focus industry IRAD, rather than just "a requirement for a thing".
The warfighting challenges seek to provide an analytical framework and pull together various military functions and stakeholders in order to formulate training and learning efforts, modernisation plans, and future force structures.
For example, the first warfighting challenge is "situational understanding", which Brig Gen Charlton said an army could never have enough of, but he still wants to build capability in that area. The army defines its situational understanding challenge as "how to develop and sustain a high degree of situational understanding while operating in complex environments against determined, adaptive enemy organisations."
Still, those broad warfighting concepts provide no guarantee that an offered product or solution will lead to procurement.
Brian Keller, army strategic account executive at Leidos, noted that industry expects returns on IRAD, so the "government may want to focus on basic and applied research" and then involve industry more for higher technology readiness levels where contractors can see better return on investments. However, Keller noted that protocols are still lacking to ensure industry's invested intellectual capital is not lost, especially at places such as the NIE.
Industry representatives voiced interest in seeing the army's Long-Range Investment Requirements Analysis (LIRA), a budget planning effort that looks beyond the typical five-year program objective memorandum (POM) and out to 30 years. The LIRA partners acquisition teams with the science and technology community, requirements community, and lifecycle managers because those functions were not communicating enough in the past.
Mary Miller, deputy assistant secretary of the army for research and technology, said the original intent was to publish information from the LIRA, but it was found to be too informative of the budget process and typically budget decisions are not unveiled until after Congress sees it.
Miller said the LIRA process led to terminating the Ground Combat Vehicle (GCV) programme, after its technology development phase, in the fiscal year 2015 budget request because the army determined that it could not afford GCV and its other priorities.
The US Army hopes to spur military innovation less through systems requirements and capability gaps and more through broad 'warfighting challenges' that span various functions, officials said during the Association of the United States Army's Global Force Symposium in Huntsville, Alabama.
Pentagon officials have raised concern about levels of internal research and development (IRAD) funding within the defence industry, but the acquisition process moves slowly and many recent investments the army has asked industry to make - such as systems for Network Integration Evaluations (NIEs) - have not paid off for companies.
Brigadier General John Charlton, head of Brigade Modernization Command, which oversees NIEs, said there is still promise in 'rapid prototyping' efforts like the NIEs because they get equipment into soldier's hands early in a development process, and this allows them to feed back to industry.
Now, this will play out in part through Army Warfighting Assessments (AWAs), annual events at Fort Bliss in Texas that could eventually supplant NIEs. The NIEs sought to be both an innovative technological experiment as well as a rigorous operational test, and were viewed by some in industry and Congress as wasteful for not having resulted in much equipment purchased or deployed.
AWAs are not operational tests and will focus instead on innovation both for equipment and operating concepts, and systems that participate need only to be in line with the army's new 'warfighting challenges' rather than a specific requirement.
Brig Gen Charlton described army warfighting challenges as broad and enduring, and there are no definitive answers to posed questions, but rather the army is looking for interim solutions to those challenges. Although they are broad areas, the army hopes these can focus industry IRAD, rather than just "a requirement for a thing".
The warfighting challenges seek to provide an analytical framework and pull together various military functions and stakeholders in order to formulate training and learning efforts, modernisation plans, and future force structures.
For example, the first warfighting challenge is "situational understanding", which Brig Gen Charlton said an army could never have enough of, but he still wants to build capability in that area. The army defines its situational understanding challenge as "how to develop and sustain a high degree of situational understanding while operating in complex environments against determined, adaptive enemy organisations."
Still, those broad warfighting concepts provide no guarantee that an offered product or solution will lead to procurement.
Brian Keller, army strategic account executive at Leidos, noted that industry expects returns on IRAD, so the "government may want to focus on basic and applied research" and then involve industry more for higher technology readiness levels where contractors can see better return on investments. However, Keller noted that protocols are still lacking to ensure industry's invested intellectual capital is not lost, especially at places such as the NIE.
Industry representatives voiced interest in seeing the army's Long-Range Investment Requirements Analysis (LIRA), a budget planning effort that looks beyond the typical five-year program objective memorandum (POM) and out to 30 years. The LIRA partners acquisition teams with the science and technology community, requirements community, and lifecycle managers because those functions were not communicating enough in the past.
Mary Miller, deputy assistant secretary of the army for research and technology, said the original intent was to publish information from the LIRA, but it was found to be too informative of the budget process and typically budget decisions are not unveiled until after Congress sees it.
Miller said the LIRA process led to terminating the Ground Combat Vehicle (GCV) programme, after its technology development phase, in the fiscal year 2015 budget request because the army determined that it could not afford GCV and its other priorities.
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Catching your opponent off guard and subsequently defeating them works at individual and the national level. One of the historical problems of the acquisition process is the requirement to define your [likely] enemies projected threat and build to protect against and defeat it - this has obvious flaws because likely and unlikely enemies have their own timelines and in some cases buy ready-made and modify. Spiral development with modifiable threat capability definition coupled with a good enough versus perfect requirement fulfillment for materiel solutions is part of a reasonable approach for material which will be produced in hundreds or more but may not work as well for stand-alone solutions. Many defense industries work to meet the needs of their customers - documented and undocumented projections guide where they invest. If DoD will back off from the current acquisition process regulations [laws are more difficult] for selected types of materiel; and then allow industries to streamline the development, test, and production process and allow bounded flexibility in the design specifications this may improve the process for those materiel items. Communication of threat, design requirements, support requirements and projected costs is important. Somebody needs to be informing the designers and supporters about where Defense is going in areas that will or may interact with what is being designed. Unfortunately there are still many stovepipes of funding, information, business intelligence which inhibit sharing of information. If the Budget process were not as competitive information might be shared more readily across agencies, etc. When agencies compete against each other for their share of the budget it isn't very surprising when trust and sharing are not optimum.
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