ARDEC test beds are laying the foundation for the future of the Soldier, one behavioral experiment at a time.

by Dr. Elizabeth Mezzacappa

The use of increasingly sophisticated tools over time is one of the defining characteristics of humankind. This trend’s potential has been imagined in literature, often through fictional inventors such as Marvel Comics’ Shuri (from “Black Panther,” 2005) and Tony Stark (“The Invincible Iron Man,” 1963), Ian Fleming’s Q (James Bond series, 1958) and even Isaac Asimov’s Susan Calvin (“I, Robot” series, 1945). These illustrate humans teamed with devices that are more than merely tools, but are engineered “entities”—robots, drones, swarms and other tools that their human creators have endowed with very human capabilities. Which means that humans will adapt quickly to these tools—and the better they are designed, the more quickly humans will adopt and evolve them.

From cybernetic enhancements to artificial intelligences based on human neuroscience, these technological developments require a merging of engineering and psychology. It is one thing to create the tools we need today. It is entirely another to envision the future and create the tools we will need then.

We know the future means humans even more closely teamed with their tools. A significant question for the engineers, scientists and psychologists who are developing future tools is, which fantastical elements invented by Q, Stark, Calvin or Shuri can (and should) be engineered in our real universe, with our real physics, and real flesh-and-blood Soldiers?

Combat occurs increasingly in complex urban centers and among noncombatant populations, so engineers must develop armaments and protection optimized for these settings. Most difficult is “engineering” the human psyche and human flesh into these created machines and integrating so seamlessly that the technological “magic” becomes mundane, as easy as putting on pants.

Engineers tend to lack a background in people sciences like psychology, so how do engineers generate the data about humans needed to create systems of human-machine symbionts ready for war in unfamiliar territories? Tactical behavior research is one way, an approach that looks to understand and improve human and machine performance in tactical, combat situations through close collaboration between human behavioral scientists and materiel developers who build armaments and other tools for Soldiers. Since 2004, the Tactical Behavior Research Laboratory (TBRL), of the U.S. Army Research, Development and Engineering Command (RDECOM) Armament Research, Development and Engineering Center (ARDEC), has conducted human tactical behavior research.

The laboratory’s research looks at humans at both ends of the barrel. Focus areas include:

• Effectiveness of lasers, noncoherent light and windshield obscurants on stopping shooters and vehicles at a checkpoint under daytime and nighttime conditions.
• Soldier-system lethality analyses of different configurations of the Objective Gunner Protection Kit.
• Effectiveness of flash-bang grenades and other pyrotechnics on target suppression.
• Electrophysiology and decision-making during weapon operation (in consultation with the U.S. Army Natick Soldier Research, Development and Engineering Center and the U.S. Army Research Laboratory’s Human Research and Engineering Directorate).
• Pain and motivational processes relative to blunt-impact weapons (all performed under protocols approved by research ethics boards and safety offices).
• Biomechanical analyses of forces needed to knock down a person.
• Indoor and outdoor studies of aggressive acts, and crowd (up to 89 people) behavior for modeling and simulation.
• Law enforcement officer and squad performance.

A description of the laboratory’s development serves as an example of how other research, development and engineering centers might configure their own capability of tactical behavior research for their product domain, especially in support of the Army’s modernization priorities.

Fog generators, together with ductwork and fans, produce obscuration at a simulated minefield test bed at the TBRL. Researchers were seeking to measure how long a person could be delayed from finding mines by obscuring the minefield, as well as how long a delay varying amounts of fog would produce. (U.S. Army photo by Robert DeMarco, RDECOM ARDEC)

HIGH-FIDELITY LABS AND TEST BEDS

For a Soldier standing watch, the minivan barreling down on the checkpoint is a life-or-death situation in which the Soldier has seconds to decide whether to open fire. Soldiers in a convoy of Army trucks facing a crowd of angry townspeople—blocking a road, chanting and throwing rocks—have to disperse the gathering of civilian men, women, elders and children to complete the mission.

The human science—the psychology of the Soldiers in these scenarios—is critical to understand. This can’t be done by conducting research in the typical one-room psychology laboratory of a university or research institute testing undergraduate student subjects, or even the researcher’s own co-workers.

To understand that psychology, we need research conditions that mimic these settings. That’s what distinguishes tactical behavior research from typical psychology experiments. Behavioral science theories are used to guide the engineering of the test beds to create the appropriate psychological (perceptual, motivational, social) conditions for the experiment and to capture the appropriate data.

TBRL has created a number of indoor and outdoor laboratory conditions that simulate real-world tactical scenarios at its facility at Picatinny Arsenal, New Jersey. A sample of the test beds includes:

• Targeting and shooting facilities (including an arms room and explosives storage).
• Simulated minefields with controllable levels of visual obscuration (fog).
• A gas-vented range to test flash-bangs.
• A 1.5-mile-long convoy protection and aggressive acts test bed.
• Indoor and outdoor crowd test beds with motion capture (a way to digitally record human movements).
• Vehicles and tracks that automatically record driver behavior.
• “In vivo” testing in public locations such as theaters, religious buildings, schools, city subways and sports stadiums.

The largest test bed, the Squad Performance Test Bed, consists of both a large outdoor area of 700 by 500 meters (about eight football fields) and an indoor test bed. The outdoor area has instruments to capture behaviors of fire teams, squads, platoons or other groups during outdoor warfighter battle drills. Instrumentation includes video cameras and motion-capture sensors to record Soldier responses in a react-to-contact battle drill. The indoor structures were custom-built for room-entry testing and are modifiable to be center- or side-fed rooms, since door location determines where the Soldier points the gun.

REAL SCIENCE, VIRTUAL TEST BEDS

One might ask: If test conditions are supposed to be close to combat conditions, how can TBRL test for urban or subterranean settings that don’t exist near rural New Jersey? New levels of both realism and experimental control are now achievable with immersive virtual-, mixed- and augmented-reality laboratories. TBRL’s first virtual-reality laboratory was built in 2010. Now in its third iteration, the testing facilities include multiple 360-degree mixed and augmented virtual-reality simulators in 30-by-30-foot octagons. In addition, TBRL has integrated a virtual-reality headset system that fully immerses viewers into the scenario. The virtual environments are developed in-house by ARDEC’s Gaming and Interactive Technology and Media group, which allows researchers access to all aspects of the system to modify and extend their capabilities for experimentation.

One extended capability is achieved through combining the virtual environment methods with motion capture abilities—avatars. That is, the test bed virtual environment is brought to life by incorporating a wide range of avatar behaviors within the computerized scenery. Computer-generated characters and avatars greatly extend the capabilities for social-psychological experimentation into human-human or human-entity teaming. In the golden age of group dynamics studies, “stooges” (i.e., research actors with scripts) were used, unbeknown to subjects. These stooges acted to create a controlled social situation (think of the famous Milgram conformity experiment, in which the stooge was instructed to yell in pain when subjects turned up a knob that looked like it was delivering electrical shock, in order to test the subjects’ obedience to authority figures).

In place of stooges, characters and avatars can be programmed to behave in any manner and take on any appearance that artists can render in programming. With avatars, we can, for example, conduct a Soldier-robot interaction experiment without the time and expense of building a real functioning robot. Artists could render a humanoid-looking metal entity that moves and speaks through a researcher’s movements and speech. In the virtual environment, then, Soldiers are led to act as if they were interacting with robots. Researchers could learn about how best to build robots so that Soldiers will work with them, through observing these virtual interactions and providing data to inform robot design requirements.

In a similar way, experimentation with weapons that do not exist is made possible by research in a simulator. Through software, programmers can create future weapons in the simulators, then operators use these devices within combat scenarios. For example, testing might examine the effect of increasing weapon range versus area covered for use in an urban environment, where distances are more limited than in open fields. Virtual experimentation with simulated weapons allows designers to gather lethality and other performance data and feedback from operators before bending metal. Human experimentation in the virtual environment allows materiel developers to verify and validate novel concepts of armaments such as swarms of drones or directed energy weapons, as well as to identify performance requirements, especially lethality, in advance. In this way, researchers can chart the progress toward future weapons with more certainty.

Researchers install cables for transmission of motion-capture and video recording throughout a section of a subway platform and on several train cars at a transit station in a major U.S. city. TBRL conducts “in vivo” testing in public locations such as theaters, religious buildings, schools, subways and sports stadiums. (U.S. Army photo by Charles Sheridan, RDECOM ARDEC)

A RADICAL DEPARTURE

A reading of any behavioral science journal article reveals quickly that typical psychological research is simply not configured to answer engineering questions. Research psychologists strive to reveal universal precepts of human behavior. Materiel developers yearn for characterization of a specific device. Tactical behavior experimentation must bend psychological science in service to engineering, and adopt the mindset and constructs of acquisition science, such as metrics of lethality, verification and validation, cost and capability trade-offs, analyses of alternatives, benchmarking and comparative testing of specific devices.

For example, one experiment planned by TBRL will research the relationships among Soldier cognitive fatigue, number of drones controlled and number of targets destroyed over a simulated mission to develop an algorithm that explains the connections among those variables. With this type of data, analysts can conduct trade-off analyses—for example, balancing the cost of building the optimal number of drones and Soldier-drone interfaces versus the lethality of the drone swarm versus the cognitive demands and stress on the operator.

Current regulations require that human-factors professionals—who primarily assess designs for ergonomic flaws and related Soldier performance concerns—be consulted at all developmental research and operational testing phases of the acquisition cycle. Based on our experience at TBRL, we propose a more radical solution—that each of the research engineering centers establish its own dedicated behavioral scientist laboratory to conduct the relevant engineering-focused human science experimentation. This early collaboration would then complement the independent, third-party role of evaluation later provided by the human-factors specialist. By “embedding” behavioral science laboratories in all Army research, development and engineering centers, the right human research is done effectively to support the development of equipment for Soldiers. However, a required precursor for engineering-focused human research is perhaps the most challenging aspect—joint experimentation efforts between engineers and psychologists.

DIFFICULT QUESTIONS

In the last few years, TBRL’s capabilities have come to the attention of the larger RDECOM ARDEC engineering community. Armament engineers have questions that require behavioral science methods and research designs and analysis. Behavioral scientists begin by working with materiel developers on articulating the knowledge gap, then translating the knowledge gap into a behavioral science research question. More discussions follow, resulting in designing the experiment and analyses to generate human data that is needed to answer the question, describe the requirement or guide design. Engineers assist in the actual running of the study as well.

Materiel developers now come to the laboratory with questions that can be answered only through human-subject research, which requires experimentation that is approved and overseen by boards that ensure ethical conduct of research. Behavioral scientists are well-trained in the principles of the ethical conduct of human-subjects research, a topic possibly quite foreign to engineers. Therefore, in preparation for running human experimentation, engineers also take the required human-research ethics training.

There are many benefits to collaborations. Joint research between engineers and psychologists aligns with the cross-functional teaming principles outlined in the Army’s modernization priorities. Moreover, the close collaboration of engineers and psychologists in tactical behavior research addresses transition problems identified in the 2015 publication “Soldier Squad Performance Optimization.” This report cited the challenges of bringing behavioral science data to customers—both to Soldiers and to engineers who build Soldier equipment. At least the second challenge can be resolved when materiel developers pose the engineering research questions and work with behavioral science on the experimentation to answer them. Joint research also mitigates the risk that promising technologies won’t make it to Soldiers, a risk cited by the Army Science Board 2017 study “Improving Transition of Laboratory Programs into Warfighting Capabilities Through Experimentation.”

Test subjects in this test bed would stand in place of the dummy and shoot themselves with a paint gun. The research sought to address the possible associations among personality, pain tolerance, paintball velocity, injury severity and motivation. Researchers wanted to see how much pain was needed on the first shot to make a person decide not to take a second shot. Most subjects took the second shot, even though they got paid the same amount of money if they didn’t. (U.S. Army photo by Kenneth Short, RDECOM ARDEC)

CONCLUSION

How engineers and psychologists engage in joint research is demonstrated in the current laboratory efforts in the Armament Virtual Collaboratory Environment project. The work is a collaboration with the ARDEC Operational Analysis Branch to collect human performance and psychophysiological data in the virtual environment to support development of artificial intelligence that could aid the dismounted Soldier. That is, the experiment gathers detailed information on how someone is doing while performing a task, not only physically but also psychologically. In turn, those data are submitted to machine-learning analysis to inform the development of devices that are trained to “think” the way the gunner thinks.

Specifically, engineers approached the Gaming and Interactive Technology and Media group and TBRL to design and demonstrate a behavioral experiment to identify characteristics of potential targets that lead to Soldiers’ decisions in the battle. The intended long-term outcome of the work will be a Soldier-armament interface with advanced fire controls, including optics and displays that enhance system lethality. This is the research we need to get to Jarvis, Tony Stark’s machine assistant, and the target acquisition schematic he projects onto Iron Man’s visor.

These data and other results must be gathered to answer fundamental questions for future warfare. What new structures of command and control must be configured between human and engineered entities? How should the labor be divided between them? Do we enhance the human brain and muscle or juice up the hard drive and armature? Or: Who (or what) pulls the trigger? Only research with both human behavioral and engineering considerations can answer these questions.

The successful blending of engineered entities and human entities is achievable only through collaborative science and experimentation between engineers and psychologists. Those robots won’t build themselves. Not yet.

For more information, contact the author at elizabeth.s.mezzacappa.civ@mail.mil, or go to https://www.milsuite.mil/wiki/Target_Behavioral_Response_Laboratory.

ELIZABETH MEZZACAPPA is the human research lead at RDECOM ARDEC’s Tactical Behavior Research Laboratory, where she has worked since 2007. She also is an assistant professor at the Army’s Armament Graduate School. She holds a Ph.D. in medical psychology from the Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences and B.A. degrees in psychology and biology from the University of Pennsylvania.

by Dr. Gordon Cooke 

Science fiction becomes science fact.

To build and buy the right things for the future, the Army’s developers and planners need to be able to envision it. Science fiction or what’s sometimes called speculative fiction can be a useful jumping-off point. Below, a few sketches of what warfare could look like in the future, from a researcher at the Tactical Behavior Research Laboratory. 

2023

A Soldier is on a foot patrol during an advise-and-assistance mission in a Middle Eastern nation. The trail ahead explodes in a brown blast of dirt and machine-gun fire opens up. He drops to the ground and looks through the S.M.A.R.T. sight on his rifle. Ahead is a wall of brown dust, but his sight overlays blue boxes showing the locations of the four allied soldiers in front of him on the trail. He doesn’t need the red arrow on the left edge of the screen to tell him which side the machine-gun fire is coming from. On orders from his sergeant, the Soldier takes a position up the hill to lay down support fire. He counts five white boxes in his viewer, likely enemy locations, based on imagery analysis and acoustic signature of the enemy weapons. The boxes quickly turn yellow as the data confidence increases. He knows not to worry about all of the targets and focuses on the one flashing box. That’s his priority target as his rifle coordinates with the rest of the squad to distribute targets in the most efficient way. Suddenly, Sparky, the squad’s mechanical pack dog, runs over and drops a stack of fresh magazines on the ground. The Soldier looks at the counter on the side of his rifle; he hadn’t noticed how low on ammo he was.

2034

A first lieutenant is on her first deployment as a cavalry platoon leader in a troubled North African nation. On the radio, her platoon sergeant calls, “Blue 6, this is Blue 7. Net sensors are detecting a lot of movement along the three-seven grid line.” She launches a hawk, a small aerial drone, and can hear the tight whine of the motor as it takes off. The sound fades as the drone climbs higher and speeds forward. Soon the first lieutenant has a video feed as the hawk circles over the target area. Twenty or 30 Chinese-made enemy robotic tanks speed across the desert. Her platoon only has two Odierno manned battle tanks, one armored command vehicle and 12 semi-autonomous robotic battle tanks. They’re outnumbered, but the American-built robots are faster and better armed. The first lieutenant taps the screen to direct her robots to initiate movement toward the approaching column and turns to the crew in the command vehicle. She orders her platoon sergeant to start entering targets from the hawk feed so that the computer can start analyzing and prioritizing indirect fires. As soon as the tanks make contact, they will require permission for lethal fires.

2056

The colonel entered the military way back when the “synths,” or synthetic entities, required human permission to do anything of serious consequence. Especially in a military context. When he was a boy, his father would repair machines by trying to re-create a reported problem—back then, if a machine made an error and you gave it the same set of inputs, it would actually repeat the same error over again. All that’s changed. The United Nations treaty banning fully autonomous military synths had to be scrapped after terrorists in Africa were able to mass-manufacture them by hacking civilian synths with custom code and bolting on rifles. Fact was, training that kind of artificial intelligence software was so basic that any high school kid could have done it. Those first killer synths didn’t care if they killed civilians and were so effective that human soldiers couldn’t put them down. They were too fast. The only way to stop the genocide was to give military synths full autonomy. So here the colonel stands with his staff of coalition planners from the host nations in this region of Asia, ready to give a mission briefing to 800 synths. They’ve already got the battle plans loaded in memory, but his oral brief (the parts he includes in the brief and the inflection of his voice) will influence the synths’ weighting of the instructions. It’s their final programming to help them make sense of ambiguous situations they might encounter or to decide on changes to the plan once they deploy over the border. So the colonel spends about five paragraphs telling them the situation, his intent, the expected outcomes and the goals for each company. He makes sure to emphasize avoiding human deaths. These days, civilian casualties are extremely rare anyway, but best to emphasize the point. He wishes them luck and dismisses them to get on the trucks.

The Tactical Behavior Research Laboratory looks to understand and improve human and machine performance in combat situations through close collaboration between human behavioral scientists and engineers and developers who build armaments and other tools for Soldiers. The lab is part of the U.S. Army Research, Development and Engineering Command’s Armament Research, Development and Engineering Center (ARDEC), and has operated since 2004.

Related links:

“Radical Futures,” Mezzacappa, JAS18.

Read more than 100 short science-fiction stories submitted to the Mad Scientist Science Fiction Writing Contest held by the U.S. Army Training and Doctrine Command in 2017: https://community.apan.org/wg/tradoc-g2/mad-scientist/m/science-fiction-writing-contest-documents/200204

Experiments to test incremental solutions that will give joint forces more warning of chemical, biological, radiological and nuclear weapons on an accelerated timeline.

by Mr. Richard Newton

In an unpredictable location, which could be an urban center in Syria or a semirural suburb like Salisbury, England, a chemical, biological, radiological or nuclear (CBRN) event will happen, again. Such an event could mean devastating losses for U.S. forces if they have no warning or protection from weapons of mass destruction.

That is why the Joint Program Executive Office for Chemical, Biological, Radiological and Nuclear Defense (JPEO-CBRND) established an Experimentation Directorate in 2017—to improve the acquisition cycle and free DOD to counter threats, quickly. Advances in technology have made it easier for state actors to develop and employ weapons of mass destruction (WMD) and other CBRN threats. Now DOD is reforming bureaucratic policies that have impeded the United States’ own technological advances to prevent and protect against such threats.

JPEO-CBRND’s Experimentation Directorate seeks to improve joint force capabilities to defend against WMD threats, using incremental or evolutionary solutions. Experimentation—whether in the laboratory or field-testing new equipment with joint forces—is a faster way to establish how best to use technologies to counter WMD threats than the traditional cycle of development, testing and, ultimately, deployment. Experimentation will help DOD get ahead of the threat rather than reacting after a WMD event by managing the consequences.

For JPEO-CBRND, it is a vital step toward providing early warning, situational awareness and understanding of asymmetric and unpredictable threats to the nation’s security. Experimentation offers a structured approach to improve tools, adopt new processes, and assess and deliver available technologies to joint forces on the multidomain battlefield.

In remarks Oct. 10 at the annual meeting of the Association of the United States Army, Gen. Mark A. Milley, Army chief of staff, described this “significant streamlining of processes” as a “shift to a U.S. Special Operations Command-like model of buy, try, decide and acquire.” Both the National Defense Strategy and the JPEO-CBRND’s strategic guidance on acquisition call for streamlining rapid iterative approaches to reduce risk and cost. This includes championing prototyping and experimentation before refining requirements. That is the Experimentation Directorate’s mission.

The Joint Effects Model, DOD’s primary web-based system for modeling the effects of CBRN weapon strikes and toxic incidents, shows the areas of contamination in colored graphics, not unlike what JPEO-CBRND hopes to do in its experiments. Reporting and tracking, using integrated software solutions, are key to providing coordinated early warning. (DOD photo by Joint Project Manager for Information Systems)

JOINT, INTEGRATED PICTURE

The new directorate is managing an enhanced capability demonstration as part of the JPEO’s larger integrated situational-understanding campaign. The objective of the campaign is to develop an integrated chemical and biological early warning capability using mostly nonmateriel and a few materiel solutions. These solutions combine existing sensor technologies, information threads and advanced algorithms from multiple battlefield domains into a novel decision management framework for operational use. Never before have disparate information threads come together to provide courses of action to joint forces confronting WMD threats.

The intent is to give joint forces more warning time and more options in the event of a chemical or biological attack. Increased warning time allows them to don their protective masks and consider options such as moving upwind or around the attack, thus maintaining their freedom to act, move and maneuver while accomplishing the mission.

A successful integrated situational-understanding campaign requires three improvements to the existing decision-making infrastructure, and the development and fielding of a fourth piece:

1. More timely delivery of CBRN information to the joint forces. Seconds count in warning of an attack; it takes at least 10 seconds to put on a protective mask, for example.
2. A more robust information network drawing from a wider variety of sources, such as non-CBRN counterbattery radar sensors, to warn commanders of incoming rounds before they explode and disseminate chemical agents.
3. A more robust way to disseminate information to and from commanders.
4. Development of an automated decision tree that provides actionable outputs for commanders.

The integrated situational-understanding campaign will collect CBRN-related information threads, distribute the threads in a common operating environment among the joint forces and develop an analytical engine to weave the threads into an informative fabric, offering commanders choices of action and informing logistical considerations. The actions could include changing the joint forces’ Mission Oriented Protective Posture levels, altering battlefield routes of ingress and egress, and suggesting decontamination options.

The Joint Service General Purpose Mask is one element of Soldiers’ training for integrated CBRN readiness. Experimentation will provide the early warning that Soldiers need to don personal protective equipment. (U.S. Army Reserve photo by Spc. Torrance Saunders, 982nd Combat Camera Company Airborne)

OBJECTIVE: EARLIER DETECTION

The enhanced capability demonstration, led by Experimentation Director George “Ed” Lawson, includes two experiments in FY18, with the objective to reduce risk and enable commanders to survive an event involving WMD. One experiment, which is exclusive to the demonstration, will analyze the value of real-time, radar-based information threads. In the other, the demonstration will enlist the Defense Threat Reduction Agency to study the connectivity and continuity of the common operating environment and its interfaces.

The experiment examining real-time information threads will look for CBRN information of value in existing radar-based data, such as that gathered using the fielded AN/TPQ-50 and AN/TPQ-53 counterbattery radar systems. This experiment is designed to determine if the systems can detect ordnance filled with chemical or biological weapons or material in flight or upon detonation. For joint forces, this capability could mean more warning time.

Additionally, chemical sensors deployed right of boom—just after detonation of the chemical-biological round—could be directed by radar data to stare at the point of impact to detect chemical-biological threats, rather than scanning the entire battlefield. This could also yield additional warning time.

This experiment, to be performed at the U.S. Army Yuma Proving Ground in Arizona, will use 155 mm rounds, some with conventional solid fills and some with liquid fills. (Liquid fills are characteristic of chemical-biological munitions.) The fills include triethyl phosphate (liquid), polyethylene glycol (liquid), conventional high explosives (solid) and blanks. The 155 mm rounds will be detonated in ground and air bursts to replicate possible scenarios. Among the differences to be captured from the variously filled rounds are their trajectory, wobble and post-detonation fragmentation patterns.

Contrasting the rounds’ radar signatures could identify the fill as chemical-biological (liquid) or non-chemical-biological (solid). An analysis of differences in the data should illuminate the possibilities of using radar-based information threads for early warning of a chemical-biological attack.

In the other FY18 experiment, the JPEO will join the Defense Threat Reduction Agency in Perceptive Dragon II. This exercise evolved from the even more obscurely named experiments called the Sophos Kydoimos Challenge. Blithely translated from Greek, it generated the oblique phrase, “Wisdom over the din of battle.” As that is hardly a fear-inducing battle cry, it became known colloquially as the SK Challenge. That, in turn, quickly became the Esskay or Bacon Challenge, after the meat processing company in Baltimore.

Perceptive Dragon II will take place at Marine Corps Base Quantico, Virginia, and will examine the connectivity and continuity of interfaces in the common operating environments of the Army and Marine Corps. The field demonstration, using Army and Marine personnel and equipment, will assess the feasibility and utility of passing CBRN tactical voice and data communications between the two services for common battlefield awareness and understanding.

The connectivity and continuity of existing interfaces control the flow of data between the Army and Marines. In the Perceptive Dragon II experiment, the two services will exchange simulated radar data such as point of origin, point of impact and in-flight characteristics of suspected CBRN rounds. Knowing the point of impact allows CBRN detectors to stop scanning a wide area and focus on a single point, thus reducing the time it takes to identify a CBRN threat.

Successful interservice exchange of CBRN data will demonstrate the capability to enhance awareness and understanding, thus shortening a commander’s decision cycle—the time from awareness to understanding to decision to action. Using the Army and Marines is just a start; ultimately, the development of a truly joint common operating environment will require additional experimentation involving the Navy and Air Force as well.

Another element of the experiment is to determine the feasibility of incorporating a CBRN logistics management system into the integrated situational-understanding campaign. There is no current system to record and track the amounts of contaminated classes of supply that need to be reconstituted beyond local standard operating procedures. Improved management of CBRN logistics information could improve the management of equipment by quickly answering the question: Do we have the CBRN equipment that joint forces need when they need it? The benefit to the joint forces would be to more reliably identify areas needing resupply and better understand the mission impacts.

The Perceptive Dragon II experiment also will examine a radiological and nuclear sensor interface in the legacy integrated sensor architecture, to gauge the feasibility of harvesting and distributing radiological and nuclear data between services. This will increase awareness, understanding and options for commanders’ actions.

The AN/TPQ-50 counterbattery radar plays a key part in a JPEO-CBRND experiment at Yuma Proving Ground, providing radar data in which the experiment will look for information on CBRN threats. The experiment’s aim is to determine whether radar systems like the AN/TPQ-50 and AN/TPQ-53 can detect ordnance filled with chemical or biological weapons or materiel, either in flight or upon detonation. (U.S. Army photo)

CONCLUSION

This fall, the Experimentation Directorate will analyze the data inputs, outputs and joint force evaluations. If the experiments prove successful in harvesting real-time CBRN-related information threads and distributing them among the joint forces’ common operating environment, then the enhanced capability demonstration will have contributed substantially toward early warning. A successful demonstration will bring about the combination of awareness, understanding and confidence that facilitates effective, timely decision-making so the joint force can continue military operations in a CBRN environment.

Conducting experiments to establish information threads and connectivity to and from the joint forces’ operating environments is a start. Additional experiments are planned for each year in FY19-21 on the decision-support tool that produces courses of action for joint forces commanders. Once the experiments have established the utility of data from counterbattery radar and radiological detectors, along with connectivity among commanders, those information threads can feed into the decision-support tool.

Future experiments will incorporate additional threads, and the decision-support tool will continue weaving the threads into an informative fabric to increase awareness and understanding and provide commanders with courses of action. Other future experiments will examine the operational relevance of these courses of action to the joint forces.

For more information, contact George “Ed” Lawson at George.e.lawson.civ@mail.mil or 410-436-8476.

RICHARD NEWTON is a chemist in JPEO-CBRND’s Experimentation Directorate at Aberdeen Proving Ground, Maryland. He has an M.S. in systems management from the Florida Institute of Technology and a B.A. in chemistry from McDaniel College. He is Level III certified in engineering and in science and technology management.

By Dr. Bruce D. Jette, Army Acquisition Executive

 The Army is joining forces with industry to achieve land power dominance through science and technology.

The future Army must be ready to deploy, fight and win decisively against any adversary, anytime and anywhere, as well as to operate in a joint, multidomain, high-intensity conflict, while simultaneously deterring others and maintaining agility to conduct irregular warfare. While the Army has been at war, the world witnessed the value and impact that technology brings to the battlefield and how capabilities, enabled by such technology innovations, are critical to the success of our Soldiers.

Similarly, our adversaries studied the Army’s successes and challenges, then mimicked many of those successes and hence avoided many pitfalls in an attempt to bring themselves to near-peer status. However, they will not succeed in their efforts, because when it comes to creating and deploying cutting-edge technology, the keystone is research and development, empowered by the scientific workforce and how it views and solves problems.

Researchers from the U.S. Army Research Laboratory and the U.S. Army Tank Automotive Research, Development and Engineering Center make use of innovations from industry partner Diversified Technical Systems Inc. (DTS), which developed these Gen 1 ATDs—anthropomorphic test devices. (Photo courtesy of DTS)

Articles in this special edition highlight several Army modernization research activities designed for the Army to fight tomorrow’s wars with the right equipment. The Army’s science and technology (S&T) mission is to enable Soldiers to dominate the battlefield, both today and in the future. Research and development is a key part of the Army’s modernization strategy. It focuses on maturing technology, reducing program risk, developing technology demonstrators and experimental prototypes to better define affordable and achievable requirements, and conducting experimentation with Soldiers to refine new operational concepts.

S&T is an investment in the Army’s future, whereby we nurture innovation and drive toward new leap-ahead technologies with game-changing potential, evaluate technology and system vulnerabilities, and address issues such as affordability, sustainability, reliability and manufacturability early on during a system’s design phase.

The Army’s S&T enterprise comprises more than 25,000 scientists and engineers, including civilians and on-site contractors, who are essential to developing near-term fixes for our Soldiers’ urgent needs. The Army’s scientist and engineer network operationalized and delivered numerous capabilities to support Operation Iraqi Freedom and Operation Enduring Freedom during the better part of the last few decades. The understanding of Army operations forms the foundation of innovative mid- and far-term capabilities being developed for the Army of tomorrow.

The Army’s long-range precision fires priority seeks to restore Army dominance in range, lethality, mobility, precision and target acquisition. The Extended Range Cannon Artillery project at U.S. Army Yuma Proving Ground in Arizona includes the XM1113 projectile, which surpassed 60 kilometers in May, and the Hyper Velocity Projectile, which has exceeded Yuma’s testing space. (U.S. Army photo)

A FOCUSED EFFORT

The S&T enterprise is dedicated to continuously meeting the needs of the Soldier, but we compete with the private sector and academia for critical technology and technical talent. We must execute faster and with higher impact to address current capability shortfalls, outpace anticipated threats and defeat technology solutions being adopted by our adversaries.

Technology is global, and the Army competes for the highest-caliber technology and talent. To retain overmatch in an open and pervasive technological environment, we must apply our resources thoughtfully to develop and employ the technologies that will provide the greatest military advantage.

The secretary of the Army and the chief of staff of the Army have identified six modernization priorities that address our most pressing operational needs to ensure overmatch against potential near-peer competitors. Army research and development programs and resourcing have been realigned to focus on developing the six priority areas:

• Long-range precision fires—Platforms, capabilities, munitions and formations that restore Army dominance in range, lethality, mobility, precision and target acquisition.
• Next Generation Combat Vehicles—Combat vehicles that integrate other close combat capabilities in manned, unmanned and optionally manned teaming. These vehicles will leverage semi-autonomous and autonomous platforms in conjunction with the most modern firepower, protection, mobility and power generation capabilities necessary for our future combat formations to fight and win against any foe in any environment.
• Future Vertical Lift—A set of manned, unmanned and optionally manned platforms that can execute attack, lift and reconnaissance missions on the modern and future battlefield at greater range, altitude, lethality and payload.
• Network and command, control, communications and intelligence—An integrated system of hardware, software and infrastructure that is sufficiently mobile, reliable, user-friendly, discreet in signature and expeditionary to enable Soldiers to fight effectively in any environment where the electromagnetic spectrum is denied or degraded.
• Air and missile defense—A series of mobile integrated platforms, capabilities, munitions and formations that ensure that our future combat formations are lethal while remaining protected from modern and advanced air- and missile-delivered fires, including drones.
• Soldier lethality—A holistic series of capabilities, equipment, training and enhancements that span all fundamentals of combat, including shooting, moving, communicating, protecting and sustaining, to make our Soldiers more lethal and less vulnerable on the modern battlefield. This will include not only next-generation individual and squad weapons but also improved body armor, sensors, radios and load-bearing exoskeletons in concert with optimized human performance and decision-making.

The Heavy Expanded Mobility Tactical Truck A4 is one of the vehicles that will be used to demonstrate the Tactical Vehicle Electrification Kit, which aims to improve vehicle operational energy, range and future electrical systems. The kit reflects the Army priority to deliver Next Generation Combat Vehicles with the most modern firepower, protection, mobility and power generation capabilities. (Photo courtesy of Oshkosh Defense)

IN SEARCH OF INNOVATION

Innovation is an important part of the Army’s strategy to provide the right capability to the Soldier at the right time. The Army makes use of innovations from industry and other partners whenever possible, and we encourage industry to bring innovative technologies and solutions forward to explore the full ideation space and the art of the possible.

With approximately 23 million companies in the United States, the Army only does business with about 5,000 of them. Having recently come from industry and knowing the challenges associated with entering “the process” of defense acquisition, I submit that the Army must engage proactively and aggressively with all innovators to see what new ideas, concepts, systems and subsystem components they can demonstrate.

Private sector innovation, especially from nontraditional sources, is critical to the Army’s future. I have embarked on a new strategy for soliciting innovative, paradigm-breaking technologies from the startup and nontraditional community to support the Army’s modernization priorities. The first engagement within the new innovation strategy began in June 2018 with the launch of the Expeditionary Technology Search (xTechSearch). It serves as a catalyst for the Army to engage with the nontraditional business sector, driving American innovation to meet Army challenges and spurring economic growth.

Aimed at attracting game-changing innovation, xTechSearch will provide access and venues to pitch novel technology solutions directly to Army leadership. So far, xTechSearch has hosted several outreach events across the country to engage with American innovators and spark the development of leap-ahead technologies for the future Army. The Army will provide non-dilutive seed prizes—money that doesn’t require giving up shares of their businesses—for companies to demonstrate proof of concept for their technology solutions.

Strategic land power dominance is critical to the Army for prompt, sustained and synchronized operations with a force customized to the mission and poised to win in all domains. For the imaginable future, the nation’s land power dominance will continue to rely on significant S&T advances to ensure a competitive advantage.

We will look everywhere for opportunities to accelerate innovation and to deliver advanced technologies that enable our Soldiers to win decisively.

This article is published in the DASA(R&T) Special Edition of Army AL&T Magazine.

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In the complex, digitally connected battlespace of the future, situational awareness will be the difference between victory and defeat. By optimizing current capabilities, developing new sensors and harnessing the power of data analytics, engineers and scientists will help commanders gain a better understanding of cyberspace and the electromagnetic spectrum.

by Mr. Giorgio Bertoli, Ms. Danielle Duff, Ms. Courtney Coulter and Mr. Keith Riser

At the 2017 Association of the U.S. Army (AUSA) annual conference, Chief of Staff of the Army Gen. Mark A Milley said that “the conflict of the future will almost certainly be in dense urban terrain.” The United Nations projects that nearly 70 percent of the world’s population in 2050 will live in cities. During the same period, the number of internet-connected devices (including computers, smartphones, home electronics, personal gadgets and even people) is expected to increase dramatically to more than 600 billion, based on current rates of growth in ownership. Current military capabilities will not be able to deal with the complexities and sheer density of signals in such an environment, while robust communications links and extensive infrastructure will provide many advantages to an entrenched adversary.

To understand what a future conflict, even one just a decade or so into the future, might look like in an urban environment, imagine it’s 2030. U.S. armed forces have a mission to liberate and then provide security for a city occupied by a hostile force. The enemy is dispersed throughout the city in small operational groups, using an extensive digital mission-command infrastructure to coordinate its activities. To avoid detection, adversary troops are augmenting their military command-and-control equipment by using the communication infrastructure available within this urban environment. The commercial communication standard is now 6G. (Back in 2018, most smartphones ran on a 3G network.) Along with providing extremely robust communications and internet access to the local population, this cutting-edge digital infrastructure also supports the machine-to-machine communications necessary for the internet of things and automation capabilities that are now omnipresent in a typical smart city.

Within this operational environment, friendly forces must be able to identify adversary actions across both physical and virtual boundaries. They will need to rapidly understand the local cyber and electromagnetic environment and identify how an adversary may use cyberspace to cause disruptions that undermine U.S. activities (e.g., cut off power and services, impede traffic flow, conduct targeted propaganda campaigns).

Obtaining situational awareness in such a scenario will be extremely difficult. The nearly uncountable number of devices, the complexity of modern communication waveforms, and the ubiquity of available communication modes are but a few of the major technical barriers that will need to be overcome. To address this new challenge, the military must re-evaluate how its systems can be tasked to do more than just their intended function. It must develop new and novel sensors, and find new and novel ways of using existing sensors, that can acquire and discern signals of interest within such dense information environments. And, it must use innovative data-processing techniques, such as machine learning, to help make sense of all this information.

Figure 1: Commercial communications are growing in complexity with multiple improvements anticipated over the next decade. Coupled with congested and contested environments, this type of environment will challenge the Army’s ability to operate on the electromagnetic spectrum, and in real time. (Graphic by U.S. Army CERDEC)

A SPECTRUM OF CHALLENGES

To support mission planning and execution, commanders will need situational understanding of both the physical and cyberspace domains. For instance, what adversaries exist in the area and how are they communicating? Are they using the available local infrastructure? What applications are they using to communicate and share information—are they using Gmail; are they chatting on Telegram or Snapchat? What radio frequency spectrum do they use? Where are they? To help answer these and other questions, the U.S. Army’s research and development community is investigating innovative approaches to identifying signals of interest from such future multifaceted and signal-rich environments. (See Figure 1.)

To obtain situational awareness of the electromagnetic spectrum, the Army currently uses large, dedicated electronic support and intelligence collection systems, mostly mounted on aircraft. Such assets are relatively few in number, overtasked and, if air superiority is not assured, must be situated a considerable distance behind friendly lines to maintain freedom of maneuver. In the electronically dense battlefields of the future, this traditional approach of using a few large and expensive systems at a considerable standoff will not be sufficient to collect and sift through the vast assortment of signals in the environment.

To combat these technical challenges, the U.S. Army Communications-Electronics Research, Development and Engineering Center (CERDEC), a subordinate organization of the Research, Development and Engineering Command and soon to be part of the new Army Futures Command, has established the Every Receiver a Sensor (ERASE) program. This endeavor comprises at least six related science and technology research efforts managed under one umbrella. Each effort is a distinct building block that, when combined, will create a holistic approach to significantly broaden and expand the Army’s tactical sensing capabilities.

ERASE is founded on four core principles:

• Broaden the Army’s cyber and electromagnetic sensor aperture by leveraging all available tactical receivers, regardless of their primary design function, as potential sensors of opportunity.
• Extend sensor reach by developing novel sensor and system concepts.
• Leverage all available data by exposing, aggregating and correlating data that is currently hidden within system internals or ignored.
• Speed commanders’ decision-making by developing supporting data management, analytics, visualization and command-and-control tools.

Figure 2:
SCATTERING SENSORS
Under the Every Receiver a Sensor program, CERDEC plans to experiment with distributing a very large number of very small, inexpensive and disposable sensors throughout a contested or congested operational zone to acquire specific signals of interest—gathering, for instance, seismic data, or radio frequency information. (Graphic by U.S. Army CERDEC)

BROADENING THE SENSOR APERTURE

Each U.S. Army brigade combat team has thousands of tactical receivers on the battlefield. These resources (including radios, platform protection systems, radars) each have distinct and specific functions. When idle, or potentially in conjunction with their normal operation, these devices can also serve as sensors. Today, most communications equipment is based on standard, generic hardware, with software providing the specialized functionality. As a result, these systems have the technical flexibility to be used in multiple different ways.

The ERASE program will build on previous capabilities, such as the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency’s RadioMap program, which demonstrated how tactical radios (e.g., the 117G) can be used as radio frequency sensors. While each of these systems will be limited in performance when compared to dedicated spectrum-sensing capabilities, their sheer quantity and proximity to potential signals of interest throughout the battlespace should allow for the acquisition of valuable new data. Furthermore, this approach to broadening the Army cyber and electromagnetic aperture provides new capabilities without adding additional maintenance and sustainment costs for new equipment.

EXTENDING SENSOR REACH

When operating in contested environments, within which vehicles, planes and helicopters will be restricted in their maneuver, the Army still must have the capability to acquire the information it requires to understand the battlespace. Extending sensor reach to such denied zones can be accomplished in part by leveraging emerging new platforms such as high-altitude balloons and small, unmanned aerial vehicles. These technologies have matured significantly over the past several years and have been demonstrated to be capable of providing data and voice service to hurricane-affected areas.

This technology is being used today to provide wireless services to Puerto Rico as it continues to recover from Hurricane Maria, the Category 4 storm that struck the U.S. territory in September 2017. Additionally, under the ERASE portfolio, CERDEC is investigating the efficacy of using a very large number of very small and inexpensive sensors—like radio frequency sensors, or seismic sensors, for example—that can be distributed in mass quantity over a region of interest to acquire specific insights into the local environment. (See Figure 2.)

LEVERAGE ALL AVAILABLE DATA

Our tactical systems already collect a large amount of information as part of their normal operation. However, this data is internally hidden within the device and is often not available to external systems for further processing. For example, practically all modern fielded communication systems monitor their own performance to help maintain quality of service. The system does this by measuring quantities such as received signal power levels and bit error rates. Most of this monitoring, and any remediating action taken by the device, are invisible to the operator.

For the user, such information will most often be superfluous. However, if this currently invisible data was made visible and then correlated across a large number of systems, it might provide near-real-time warnings of events within the electromagnetic environment. One radio experiencing a high error rate is, in itself, not very consequential. A couple dozen radios all reporting higher than normal error rates within close proximity of each other could, however, be an indication of adversary electronic attack activity.

SPEED COMMANDERS’ DECISIONS

Data acquisition is only the first step in situational understanding. Once obtained, data must be ingested, aggregated and analyzed in various ways to derive meaning. For instance, simply collecting the total number of automobile accidents that have occurred over a period of time is not by itself very useful. However, correlating this data with other factors such as location, weather conditions and time of day, could enable the identification of hazardous roadways and intersection that could then be remedied.

Future operational environments will necessitate the collection of extremely large and diverse data sets that humans will not be able to process using traditional software approaches. To overcome this, CERDEC will employ novel big-data processing and machine-learning techniques to reduce the time it takes to process such vast amounts of information.

Furthermore, such data sets will need to be stored as part of a distributed data-management system that will allow processing to occur at points close to the tactical edge; the ideal scenario is for data to be processed at the lowest level possible, as close to where it was collected as possible, so that resources aren’t wasted sending large amounts of data back to higher headquarters. This will ensure that we do not overburden our tactical networks by attempting to move data across tactical communication links, and that relevant insights are made more expediently at the levels where they are most beneficial. In such an architecture, insights derived from data held at lower levels can be condensed and reported up the chain, where it can be further aggregated and analyzed to derive broader insights.

An adversary dug in to a dense urban environment, using robust communications links and taking advantage of extensive local infrastructure, would have an advantage over U.S. troops trying to decipher the sheer complexity of digital signals—unless military procedures change and allow units to exploit all possible sources of data, including sensors primarily designed for something else. (U.S. Army photo)

CONCLUSION

It’s the year 2030. U.S. armed forces have been ordered to liberate and provide security for a city that is occupied by a hostile force. Upon initial entry, they use all available dedicated and opportunistic sensors at their disposal to validate and enrich previously known intelligence. Based on this new data, advanced analytics calculate that the adversary is operating within a small section of the city that is currently inaccessible to U.S. forces. New sensor platforms that can safely access these zones are tactically deployed for final confirmation. Machine learning and advanced analytics subsequently suggest various course of action for the commander, who then takes decisive action.

The Every Receiver as a Sensor program is but a first step to realizing this new capability. By leveraging and expanding upon commercial technological advancements to broaden and extend Army tactical sensing capabilities, the program is working to revolutionize how the Army uses all its available tactical resources to sense the cyber-electromagnetic environment and derive meaning from this information that the tactical commander can use.

For more information please contact Edric Thompson (edric.v.thompson.civ@mail.mil), Public Affairs Officer, CERDEC.

GIORGIO BERTOLI works for Intelligence and Information Warfare Directorate (I2WD), CERDEC, where he serves as senior scientific technology manager of offensive cyber technologies. He holds M.S. degrees in electrical engineering and computer science and has more than 25 years of experience in the areas of cyber, electronic warfare and military tactics, both as a civilian and as a former active-duty enlisted Soldier. He is Level III certified in engineering and is a member of the Army Acquisition Corps (AAC).

DANIELLE DUFF is a senior engineer who oversees the research portfolio for I2WD, CERDEC, Intelligence Systems and Processing Division. She holds a Master’s of Electrical Engineering from the University of Delaware and a B.S. in electrical engineering from Virginia Tech. She is Level III certified in engineering and test and evaluation and is a member of the AAC.

COURTNEY COULTER is team lead for site exploitation of the Identity Intelligence Branch and manages a portfolio aimed at providing backend systems and Soldier interfaces used to identify, collect, process and exploit information on the battlefield, quicker and more effectively using automated tools. A computer engineering graduate of Bethune-Cookman University, she attended Texas A&M – Texarkana to receive an M.S. in business administration and later Stevens Institute of Technology, receiving a Master of Engineering in system engineering. She is Level III certified in systems engineering, holds a Project Management Professional certification and is a member of the AAC.

KEITH RISER works for the U.S. Army Intelligence Systems and Processing Division, I2WD, CERDEC, as a team lead for identity intelligence. He holds an M.S. in software engineering from Monmouth University and a B.S. in computer science from Rutgers University. He is Level III certified in engineering.

RELATED LINK:

U.S. Army Communications-Electronics Research, Development and Engineering Center: https://www.cerdec.army.mil/

This article will be published in the October – December 2018 issue of Army AL&T magazine.

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What are hypersonic weapons, why does the Army want them, and are they as revolutionary as they sound?

by Ms. Mary Kate Aylward

1998: U.S. intelligence locates Osama bin Laden at an al Qaeda camp in Afghanistan. Navy ships in the Arabian Sea launch cruise missiles, which take two hours to reach the target 1,100 miles away. The camp is destroyed but bin Laden survives: He had left less than an hour earlier.

2003: DOD requests funding for the Conventional Prompt Global Strike program, citing the need to be able to hit “fleeting targets.”

2011: After several failures, DOD’s first successful test of a hypersonic weapon occurs: The Army launches a missile from Hawaii that lands 30 minutes later in the Marshall Islands, approximately 2,000 nautical miles (or 2,300 standard miles) away.

2013: The Chinese military’s “Science of Military Strategy” (an authoritative study of China’s strategic position) notes: “The United States is in the process of implementing a conventional ‘Prompt Global Strike’ plan. Once it has functional capabilities, it will be used to implement conventional strikes against our nuclear missile forces and will force us into a disadvantaged, passive position.”

2014: China conducts the first of at least seven tests of a hypersonic weapon.

March 2018: Russian President Vladimir Putin claims to have finished testing an “invincible” Mach 10 hypersonic cruise missile that “can also maneuver at all phases of its flight trajectory, which also allows it to overcome all existing and, I think, prospective anti-aircraft and anti-missile defense systems, delivering nuclear and conventional warheads,” according to translations provided by the Russian government.

This illustration depicts the Defense Advanced Research Products Agency’s (DARPA) Falcon Hypersonic Test Vehicle (HTV) as it emerges from its rocket nose cone and prepares to re-enter the Earth’s atmosphere. DARPA has conducted two test flights of the HTV; in the second, in 2011, the HTV reached a speed of Mach 20 before losing control. (Image courtesy of DARPA)

HYPER VS. SUPERSONIC

“Hypersonic” describes any speed faster than five times the speed of sound, which is roughly 760 miles per hour at sea level. Multiply that by five and you have a weapon that travels at least 3,800 miles per hour or more. But is speed enough to change the game? Does a missile flying at Mach 7 outperform one at Mach 3 on metrics other than speed? Apart from flying very fast, what does DOD—and what do our adversaries—think hypersonic weapons can accomplish?

“It’s really meant to kick the door open,” said Bob Strider, hypersonics chief at the U.S. Army Space and Missile Defense Command, “and then allow other assets to come in.” (The door, in this analogy, is closed by the anti-access and area denial measures a country could deploy to prevent others from entering or passing through a given area of land, air or sea.) Strider oversees the Army’s contributions to the Conventional Prompt Global Strike technology demonstration program, to support the building of a ground-launched hypersonic weapon. The Army conducted two technology demonstration flights of the Advanced Hypersonic Weapon—one successful, in 2011, and one aborted in 2014 after testers detected an anomaly with the booster seconds into the flight.

The Army, specifically, is after a long-range missile that redefines long range—Chief of Staff Gen. Mark A. Milley has stressed that he wants to see “10x” improvements. “We, the Army, have as our number one priority for modernization long-range precision fires; a subset of that is the hypersonic piece to it,” Milley said March 15 in testimony before the House Appropriations Subcommittee on Defense. What’s publicly known about DOD hypersonic progress suggests that hypersonics offer that kind of range. Less has been said about their precision, though Strider said the Army’s Advanced Hypersonic Weapon “is showing a lot of capability to be able to get where it’s supposed to get and hit with a lot of energy. … In our upcoming tests we’ll be testing those bounds more and looking at what the vehicle really is capable of as far as maneuverability.”

Some defense analysts are unconvinced that the United States needs a hypersonic strike and are skeptical of some technical claims made about hypersonic weapons, pointing out that there are other ways to hit fleeting targets, get into denied areas or strike a rogue nuclear facility—ways that cost less, and risk less.

NASA’s X-43A hypersonic research aircraft and its modified Pegasus booster rocket spiral into the Pacific Ocean off the California coast in June 2001. After being released from NASA’s NB-52B carrier aircraft, the X-43A and the Pegasus booster, which was supposed to accelerate the X-43A to Mach 7, lost control about eight seconds after ignition of the Pegasus rocket motor. Explosive charges were triggered to terminate the flight, which was part of NASA’s research into alternative uses for hypersonic flight. (Photo by Jim Ross/NASA via Getty Images)

WHY GO HYPERSONIC?

Research on hypersonic flight goes back to the 1960s, but it has been technically challenging to achieve. At hypersonic speeds, the air molecules around the flight vehicle start to change, breaking apart or gaining a charge in a process called ionization. This subjects the hypersonic vehicle to tremendous stresses. Spacecraft, and ballistic missiles, spend most of their flight out of the atmosphere, free of the heat, pressure and friction, while hypersonic vehicles have to push through the atmosphere. “The thermal protection system for the hypersonic weapon is one of the key, very key, technologies that have to be in place because the hypersonic weapon is pretty much in the atmosphere through its flight; it gets temperatures in excess of 2,000 degrees for quite a few minutes,” said Strider.

Hypersonic flight has several applications. A reusable hypersonic airplane (of the “two hours from Beijing to London” variety) is the most distant, though NASA and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency have both explored preliminary steps; it’s weapons that are capable of hypersonic speeds that DOD is actively pursuing. These come in several varieties, including hypersonic cruise missiles and boost-glide vehicles. The former are powered during their flight by an attached engine; the latter are unpowered after launch and, as the name suggests, glide to their destination.

The U.S. military began pursuing hypersonic weapons in earnest under the Conventional Prompt Global Strike program in 2007. The program sought to achieve a non-nuclear strike anywhere around the globe within an hour. Now, a prompt global strike also appears useful as part of a package of options to counter anti-access and area denial measures. As concern grows about China’s efforts to close off what it considers its part of the Pacific, a weapon that could fly undetected into the denied area while the launch platform stays well outside becomes more attractive to U.S. military planners.

The Army’s Advanced Hypersonic Weapon demonstrator, tested in 2011 and 2014, relied on boost-glide technology. Rockets launch—boost—the glide vehicle to a high altitude, giving it enough speed and energy to reach its target. The glide vehicle then curves back toward the Earth’s surface, and glides or skips along the atmosphere without power for the remainder of its trajectory. (Though “glide” might suggest gentle motion, the vehicle is tearing through the atmosphere at Mach 5 or faster.)

The U.S. Army Aviation and Missile Research, Development and Engineering Center, in Huntsville, Alabama, developed the thermal protection system. The Army team collaborated with a number of national laboratories on the launcher and glide vehicle design, and refined it in wind tunnels where vehicle forces were measured at hypersonic speeds.

CHANGING THE GAME?

Hypersonics have been spoken of as game-changers (whether because of their speed or their radar-evading low flight profile), though opinions vary across the defense community as to whether current hypersonic technology is advanced enough to be revolutionary. In the “yes” column is Strider. “I see it as a game changer. I’d say there’s very few mechanisms today that could stop a hypersonic weapon.”

Whether they change the game or are an incremental shift is, to some extent, a moot point by now: China is testing hypersonics, so is Russia, and therefore, so is the United States. “I do think for better or for worse hypersonic weapons are likely to become a significant feature of the international landscape and could have quite significant strategic implications. I think we’re kind of feeling our way through what those implications could be,” said James Acton, a theoretical nuclear physicist with the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, in a September 2017 interview with Army AL&T.

A Sabre short-range ballistic missile launches in June 2017 at White Sands Missile Range, New Mexico, for a test of the Patriot Advanced Capability-3 (PAC-3) Missile Segment Enhancement, an advanced missile defense system. Hypersonic missiles might be able to penetrate PAC-3 and similar systems. (U.S. Army photo by U.S. Army Space and Missile Defense Command/Army Forces Strategic Command)

WHAT’S ON THAT WARHEAD?

Blundering into a nuclear exchange is one such possible implication that concerns defense analysts, and it has occasionally concerned Congress since the advent of the Prompt Global Strike program in the early 2000s. Congress has generally supported the program, but it has withheld funds for some requests from DOD, citing concerns about the possibility of accidental nuclear war. “Radars would provide much less warning time of a boost-glide weapon attack than a ballistic missile attack,” Acton wrote in his 2013 study “Silver Bullet?” If a targeted country does not know whether the weapon due to arrive in minutes is carrying a conventional or a nuclear warhead, would it take the risk of leaving what could be a nuclear strike unchallenged?

Acton is not convinced that DOD has made a serious case “that the strategic benefits [of having hypersonic weapons] outweigh the strategic risks of escalation with Russia and China.” Others worry about the wider risk of arms-racing and missile proliferation. Air Force Lt. Col. Jeff Schreiner wrote in a 2014 Stars and Stripes op-ed calling for a hypersonic test ban: “The tactical planner in me sees countless uses for hypersonic delivery platforms against a range of target sets. The strategic planner sees the ability to help offset other nations’ strategic assets with a conventional versus nuclear strike. The pessimist in me sees a technology that has the potential to spiral out of control in many nations into deadly new nuclear delivery platforms.”

MACH 10 NOT ENOUGH

One benefit that could counterbalance the risks of inadvertent escalation would be the ability to get around an adversary’s missile defense systems. Right now missile defenses are designed with a ballistic missile’s flight path, altitude and speed in mind, but whether that means hypersonic weapons will be able to easily break through them is unknown.

“Systems like THAAD, PAC-3, Aegis, are actually pretty good at intercepting ballistic missiles now of medium range, they’ve now been tested against intermediate-range ballistic missiles,” Acton said, referring to the Terminal High Altitude Area Defense system and the Patriot Advanced Capability 3 missile. “Those things are moving faster than many hypersonic weapons.” Apart from speed, what should set hypersonic weapons apart from ballistic missiles is the ability to maneuver, rather than fly in a straight line, as the weapon approaches the target. “The real issue is the extent to which these things can execute very rapid terminal maneuvering, in terms of their ability to penetrate missile defenses, and we haven’t seen that demonstrated yet,” Acton said. “… These very breathless technical claims about hypersonic weapons being these silver bullets, without the question mark, that can do everything—at the very least the jury is still out.” Little data has been released after DOD’s hypersonic tests—and verifiable data about the accuracy of Russian and Chinese missiles is also scarce—so not much information is publicly available about how well current prototypes maneuver or how accurate they are.

U.S. and South Korean warships escort the aircraft carrier USS Carl Vinson in the western Pacific Ocean. After years of research and tests, including the Army’s tests of the AHW, the Office of the Secretary of Defense has determined that the best option for a conventional prompt strike is a sea-launched hypersonic weapon. (U.S. Navy photo by Mass Communication Specialist 2nd Class Sean M. Castellano)

MAKING MOVES: KEY, VERY DIFFICULT

The dynamics of hypersonic flight make it hard for a speeding missile to make rapid evasive maneuvers shortly before target impact. Think of trying to make a quick, precise turn while driving: It’s easier at 35 miles an hour, harder at 70, and much harder at 7,000 miles an hour. Strider said the Advanced Hypersonic Weapon has overcome some of the challenges. “Maneuverability is a key aspect to its military utility. … Once it’s gliding, it’s able to fly cross-range, left or right in its flight path.”

Researchers have a math problem: how much energy to put into the weapon at launch—essentially, how much of a boost to give it—to make sure it hits its target with enough force. Engineers add up the energy required to lift the vehicle above the atmosphere, the distance it needs to cover, how much time it will spend fighting the atmosphere’s drag when it re-enters, and how many deviations from a straight trajectory it needs to make.

“It’s just like you throw a paper airplane: The harder you throw it, the farther it’s going to go,” Strider explained. “Same thing here. We’ve got to put enough energy into something that weighs quite a few pounds to throw it several hundred miles. Any maneuvers you make bleed off energy because you’re not powering it [at that point in its trajectory], so you have to be careful how many maneuvers you make so you can manage the energy that’s in it to make sure you can get to the target you want to.”

The U.S. Air Force is set to demonstrate the hypersonic X-51A Waverider, which is designed to ride on its own shock wave and accelerate to about Mach 6. Hypersonics will “revolutionize military affairs in the same fashion that stealth did a generation ago, and the turbojet engine did a generation before,” according to an Air Force study. (U.S. Air Force image)

WHAT’S NEXT

Whether the Advanced Hypersonic Weapon or any land-based hypersonic vehicle will be fielded is still an open question, though Strider and others believe the United States needs to field something quickly to counter Russia’s and China’s progress. “Currently they’re due to have some operational capability in the near future, and the U.S. needs a similar capability to be able to show them we’ve got one, too,” Strider said. “And so that’s what we’re shooting to do.” Funds from the Conventional Prompt Global Strike program will shift to the Navy, which is working on a sub- or ship-launched hypersonic glide vehicle, in 2020.

At this stage, Strider’s office does not plan further tests of the Advanced Hypersonic Weapon—he is now coordinating the planned flight tests of the Navy’s developing hypersonic capability, which is similar to the Army’s in design and build—until Army leadership makes policy and budgeting decisions. The ball is in the court of the cross-functional team dedicated to long-range precision fires, headed by Brig. Gen. Stephen J. Maranian. “Gen. Maranian at Fort Sill [Oklahoma] has the responsibility to bring the best concept forward to Gen. Milley” after examining all the options to improve the Army’s long-range precision strike ability, Strider said. “And because the hypersonic weapon that we have developed through OSD sponsorship is the only flight-proven hypersonic weapon, we think we’ve got a front seat in being the best concept to take forward.”

MARY KATE AYLWARD provides contract support to the U.S. Army Acquisition Support Center. She holds a B.A. in international relations from the College of William & Mary and has nine years’ experience writing and editing on foreign policy, political and military topics.

This article will be published in the October – December 2018 issue of Army AL&T magazine.

Subscribe to Army AL&T News, the premier online news source for the Acquisition, Logistics, and Technology (AL&T) Workforce.

Ground Combat Systems’ Common Infrastructure Architecture integrates multiple systems and eliminates redundancies in fighting vehicles by using open architecture. Soldiers have an easier-to-use interface that the Army can reuse across combat platforms, and vehicles can be easily refreshed as new technologies or new requirements arise.

by Dr. Macam S. Dattathreya, Maj. Gen. Brian P. Cummings and Mr. Fasi Sharafi

In March 2014, the Program Executive Office for Ground Combat Systems (PEO GCS) launched a successful open systems software and hardware architecture solution now referred to as GCS Common Infrastructure Architecture (GCIA). Using the GCIA solution, PEO GCS spearheaded an Army combat vehicle program into a new paradigm with a more efficient, faster and interoperable platform for integrating warfighter capabilities into GCS vehicles. Within two years of GCIA inception, one of the GCS programs successfully implemented the GCIA solution in one of their vehicles. (The Ground Combat Systems portfolio includes the Abrams tank, the Stryker combat vehicle and the Bradley fighting vehicle.)

Figure 1
PRINCIPLES OF OPEN VEHICLE SYSTEMS
The Common Infrastructure Architecture, the key points of which are shown here, stresses common hardware and software that can be reused across platforms and that makes it easier for different combat platforms to communicate. (Graphic by U.S. Army Acquisition Support Center and PEO GCS)

The nature of warfare is changing, and combat vehicles must support new technologies quickly, with the promise that they’ll perform reliably and interoperate with related warfighter capabilities. An open systems architecture makes it much easier for Army program managers to rapidly deliver to the warfighter new capabilities that are critical on the battlefield of the future. “Open systems architecture” is a technical approach that enables systems’ implementation using widely supported, consensus-based standards that are published and maintained by a recognized industry consortium supporting a modular, loosely coupled and highly cohesive system structure that includes publishing of key interfaces within the system and full design disclosure. A system is modular when it is decomposed into multiple components that may be easily rearranged, replaced or interchanged in various configurations. A loosely coupled system has no or minimal dependency on components of other systems to carry out its functions, and changing one system will not impact other systems. A cohesive system carries out a single, well-defined function and contains only the parts that are required to carry out that single function. The GCIA exhibits all the characteristics of an open systems architecture. GCIA creates a common approach across all combat vehicle platforms to support new innovations and technologies, promote competition, decrease costs and shorten integration timelines.

The GCIA uses open standard specifications developed by PEO GCS for integrating C4ISR (command, control, computers, communications and intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance) and electronic warfare devices. The specifications are known as VICTORY—Vehicular Integration for C4ISR/EW Interoperability. Different vendors can add, modify, replace, remove or support warfighter capabilities through the GCIA’s standardized interfaces throughout the life cycle of a vehicle platform.

The reusable artifacts of the GCIA, such as government-owned software, specifications and implementation guides, can add value to other Army vehicle programs for developing or enhancing their information technology capabilities with lower cost and low-risk options.

Army fighting vehicles like this Stryker combat vehicle must integrate new technologies quickly and interoperate with other combat platforms to perform reliably on the future battlefield. Using open systems in the vehicles’ onboard computers is a step in that direction. (Photo by PEO GCS)

KEY TENETS, BENEFITS AND USES
Prior to GCIA, for combat vehicle programs such as Stryker, Bradley or a tank, each warfighter capability would provide its own specific infrastructure functions with proprietary interfaces for a military vehicle integration. These unique functions increase the integration complexity, and they also add a significant amount of integration and testing time to the acquisition program. This would impact budgets and schedules for Army acquisition programs. However, the GCIA provides common system-level infrastructure capabilities such as shared display and computing resources, data sharing, common fault handling, software configuration management and a common data-communication network that all the warfighter capabilities can use instead of having their own specific infrastructure capabilities. The infrastructure is analogous to a robust highway with strategically placed standard services such as rest areas, gas stations, exits and toll booths where they are needed.

Expected capabilities of today’s combat vehicles require the integration of sophisticated technologies within the constraints of a vehicle platform, such as the cost, size, weight, power and cooling requirements. Reusability was a reason for developing the GCIA—but not the only one. Moreover, the other drivers or GCIA tenets, as depicted in Figure 1, facilitate letting multiple competing vendors develop innovative solutions, rather than locking the PEO in to one supplier for the life of the product.

• GCIA’s common infrastructure solution, which works on any vehicle, allows for increased reuse across multiple platforms, reducing development testing costs and schedule, and increasing use of common products, thereby reducing life cycle support costs. Additionally, standard interface specifications in GCIA significantly reduce integration timelines by reducing interoperability-related challenges and issues. Since the infrastructure functions are common, once it is tested in one successful Army program, the testing organizations can leverage the test results for any other programs that use GCIA instead of retesting them. This will drastically reduce the testing time and cost for any new programs that use GCIA.
• Using open standards in GCIA increases opportunities for competition, enabling rapid introduction of innovative solutions at reduced cost instead of proprietary solutions that tend to lock the customer to one supplier for the life of the product.
• Interconnecting multiple system entities within a vehicle network, using common communication protocols and common services for sharing available information in GCIA, give the vehicle crew increased situational awareness while reducing redundant hardware solutions.
• Delivering reliable and alternative mechanisms for resources to operate and communicate effectively with each other in GCIA provides for a robust solution that enables the vehicle systems to continue to operate properly during software failures.

INTEGRATING CAPABILITIES
The GCIA platform provides all the required computing and display resources, network, infrastructure-related common capability services software, commonly used shared data services software, a library for assisting the development of VICTORY-compliant interfaces and an infrastructure for managing the network using open-standard specifications. Capability developers have to develop the drivers, devices and their system-specific software to interface with the GCIA. GCIA allows any VICTORY-compliant systems, such as digital radios, to interoperate with other VICTORY systems, such as computing resources, electronic warfare sensors or ethernet switches, and non-VICTORY-compliant systems, such as fire control or remote weapon systems, on the GCIA platform.

If a combat vehicle’s systems architecture is “open”—using widely supported standards rather than one vendor’s proprietary standards—it’s easier for the Army to update the vehicle to add new capabilities. PEO Ground Combat Systems, which manages the Abrams tank pictured here, introduced an open-systems approach for the fighting vehicles in its portfolio. (Photo by PEO GCS)

CONCLUSION
Future efforts will evolve GCIA incrementally to allow multiple open-systems frameworks, such as the Future Airborne Capability Environment, modular open radio frequency architecture, sensor open systems architecture and open mission systems to work together without any disruptions to the operation of the vehicles. Planned enhancements in the next 12 to 16 months will improve GCIA’s technical maturity in the areas of security, performance and software configuration. The opportunities for reuse of this product go well beyond PEO GCS platforms or programs; it could also be used in High Mobility Multipurpose Wheeled or Mine Resistant Ambush Protected vehicles. With GCIA aboard vehicles on the battlefield, Soldiers will not only have multiple capabilities at their fingertips, but also a distinct advantage over the adversary.

For more information, email macam.s.dattathreya.civ@mail.mil or visit the website (registration is required): https://confluence.di2e.net/display/GCSCIS/PEO+GCS+Common+Infrastructure+Architecture+Home

DR. MACAM S. DATTATHREYA is the chief architect and a scientist for PEO GCS and the U.S. Army Tank Automotive Research, Development and Engineering Center. He holds a Ph.D. in electrical and computer engineering from Wayne State University. Dr. Dattathreya has 24 years of experience in multiple engineering fields (commercial and government sectors). He is a senior member of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers and is Level III certified in systems engineering. He has published several technical research papers in journals and holds nine U.S. patents.

MAJ. GEN. BRIAN P. CUMMINGS is the program executive officer for GCS and responsible for the life cycle management of the U.S. Army’s main battle tank, Bradley fighting vehicles, self-propelled howitzers, the Stryker family of vehicles, combat vehicle recovery systems, the Armored Multi-Purpose Vehicle, and the Mobile Protected Firepower Program. He was previously the program executive officer for Soldier programs at Fort Belvoir, Virginia. He holds a B.S. in biology from Old Dominion University, an M.S. in science and technology commercialization from the University of Texas, and an M.S. from the Industrial College of the Armed Forces.

MR. FASI SHARAFI is the assistant program executive officer for Systems Engineering and Integration. He has over 29 years of Army acquisition experience across multiple system-level efforts that includes serving in the position of chief engineer for 10 years. He holds a B.S. and M.S. in electrical engineering from Rutgers University and New York University, respectively. He is Level III certified in systems engineering and a graduate of Defense Systems Management College.

This article will be published in the October – December 2018 issue of Army AL&T magazine.

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The 25th Transportation Company moved from an “every X months” preventive maintenance schedule to servicing vehicles as needed as part of an AMSAA study. Soldiers strengthened their ability to troubleshoot and repair precise problem areas instead of replacing whole parts, and the unit saved time and money.

by Mr. Kevin Guite

Soldiers performing preventive maintenance on their M4 carbines disassemble, inspect, clean and reassemble the many parts to ensure that their primary weapon will fire properly during close combat operations. Readiness plans for the hundreds of thousands of Army ground vehicles require just as much attention. Yet the process of performing preventive maintenance for Army vehicles is enormously more complex.

Today’s vehicle systems are built with expensive components, electronics and subassemblies that demand properly trained operator and maintenance personnel keenly aware of the performance of their vehicles. However, the man-hours, resources and costs needed to accomplish proper preventive maintenance for Army vehicles have led to concerns among the Army sustainment community over the efficiency of the process. It’s the worst-kept secret in Army maintenance units that the Army has been over-maintaining its equipment and that its processes are not very efficient. However, the Army’s official policy gives little room to sidestep scheduled service responsibilities. Those concerns about inflexible maintenance schedules led the Army G-4 to formally request that the U.S. Army Materiel Systems Analysis Activity (AMSAA) assess Army preventive maintenance policy, methodology and execution. The study, which ended in February 2018, examined traditional scheduled maintenance practices and policies, focusing on current maintenance intervals and prescribed functions, and determined that yes, preventive maintenance policy and execution could be greatly improved. Each of the Army’s more than 400,000 tactical wheeled vehicles has a preventive maintenance requirement, so getting the process correct will pay huge dividends across the Army.

TOO MUCH OF A GOOD THING Key: FMTV… Family of Medium Tactical Vehicles PAM 750-8…Department of the Army Pamphlet 750-8, “The Army Maintenance Management System (TAMMS) Users Manual” Preventive maintenance is good, but AMSAA’s study showed that medium tactical vehicles were being serviced nearly 5,000 miles sooner than they needed it, tying up mechanics and not improving safety in any measurable way. (Graphic by U.S. Army Acquisition Service Center and AMSAA)

CRUNCHING THE DATA

In the study, AMSAA compiled real-world data to quantify the current volume of preventive maintenance actions for the Army’s fleet of wheeled vehicles. Vehicle maintenance data collected through the Army’s Sample Data Collection and Analysis Program from 2014 through 2016 indicated that approximately 97 percent of the tactical wheeled vehicle fleet and 98 percent of the 1,310 instrumented Strykers were being serviced based solely on time rather than actual use. Semiannual, annual and biennial services dictated through Army maintenance policy were being performed to replace fluids and vehicle parts well before their condition would warrant maintenance attention.

For a fleet of vehicles in which approximately 95 percent of equipment is characterized as “low-usage” or driven less than 3,000 miles a year, premature maintenance actions presented an excellent opportunity for potential improvement in the Army’s sustainment strategy.

AMSAA partnered with the U.S. Army Tank-Automotive and Armaments Command (TACOM); the U.S. Army Research, Development and Engineering Command’s Tank-Automotive Research, Development and Engineering Center; the U.S. Army Combined Arms Support Command; the Program Executive Office for Combat Support and Combat Service Support (PEO CS&CSS); and the 25th Transportation Company of the 25th Infantry Division at Schofield Barracks, Hawaii, to conduct the two-year project. The project focused on improving service strategies for wheeled vehicles at field-level maintenance sites. The objectives of the study were to reduce maintenance burdens with no detriment to safety, reliability or readiness; realign resources from activities that don’t add value to those that do; reduce costs; and reduce waste from premature disposal of components that were still functioning properly.

In the initial phase of the study, the semiannual and annual preventive maintenance intervals were extended to 24 months and the impact on safety, repair and maintenance resources was assessed. The extended maintenance interval would allow for additional vehicle usage that would more closely align with the mileage triggers for preventive services. The study mandated 10-mile road exercises every 30 days for vehicles and every 90 days for trailers, to alleviate any perceived risks to vehicle performance due to the extended service intervals. The road exercises mitigated the risk of unexpected component failure by requiring each vehicle and trailer to be run through less time-consuming quality assurance and quality control checks to check for seal deformations, lubricate gaskets, and charge batteries on a regular basis.

In addition, researchers implemented pre-dispatch checklists that required qualified maintenance personnel to lay eyes and hands on key components such as steering linkages, suspensions and fluid systems at least monthly. Operators, supervisors and maintenance technicians all bore responsibility to validate the current state of each piece of equipment.

The extended services strategy led to an annual savings of approximately $69,000 in service parts in the 25th Transportation Company, on such items as engine oil, transmission fluid, filters, seals, wheel bearings, belts and brake shoes. Adopting similar service strategies for the total Army’s fleet of Palletized Load System, Family of Medium Tactical Vehicles (FMTV) and Heavy Expanded Mobility Tactical Truck platforms has the potential to save the Army $47 million annually.

More importantly, 6,100 man-hours were freed within the 25th Transportation Company for unscheduled, deferred and other preventive maintenance necessary to maintain operational readiness of the unit’s equipment. Despite initial concerns from maintenance personnel about not being able to properly maintain their equipment due to the extended service intervals, repair data showed there was no increase in part wear or failure, nor was there any measurable negative impact to safety, readiness, availability or reliability.

Soldiers from 25th Transportation Company receiving vehicle diagnostics training on M1083 FMTV from AMSAA CBM analysts, Schofield Barracks, HI, August 2016. Photo by Mr. Jesse Fields, AMSAA Operational Sustainment Analysis Team.

A NEW APPROACH TO MAINTENANCE

The 25th Transportation Company’s participation in the study presented an excellent opportunity to introduce condition-based maintenance enablers for the unit’s fleet of tactical wheeled vehicles and trailers. Condition-based maintenance monitors vehicle health, maintenance and usage data to provide actionable information to improve maintenance and fleet management decisions. The Army is expected to begin the process of adopting condition-based maintenance for all vehicles in FY19, so AMSAA seized on the opportunity to leverage its time working with the 25th Transportation Company to highlight the use of condition-based maintenance in an operational unit. AMSAA worked directly with the 25th Transportation Company to install digital source collectors on 91 vehicles and hub odometers on 91 trailers to provide vehicle health and usage data. The digital source collector is a device connected to the controller area network of Army tactical wheeled vehicles and Strykers that records more than 80 data elements from various electronic control units on the vehicle. The digital source collectors collect and store fault and performance data from engines, transmissions, starters, engine control modules, transmission control modules, braking systems and tire inflation systems, among others, so it can be downloaded and analyzed. Hub odometers are mounted on trailer axles and use the wheel’s rotation to determine mileage traveled.

AMSAA field analysts and 25th Transportation Company maintenance personnel downloaded the data weekly and used it to assess the condition of the vehicles and prioritize part orders and repairs necessary to return the equipment to mission-capable status. Most of the electronic non-mission-capable fault codes would be invisible to the Army without the data from the digital source collector. Condition-based maintenance makes these fault conditions visible, helping maintenance personnel better understand conditions affecting vehicle operation and focus on specific repair actions instead of costly component replacements. Depleted diagnostic skills within field-level maintenance units over the last 10 to 20 years have produced a culture of remove-and-replace versus troubleshoot-and-repair. Maintenance personnel able to understand and leverage error faults are able to confidently make subassembly repairs instead of simply replacing major subsystems. The 25th Transportation Company has not replaced a single engine since the beginning of the study, thanks to the fault code information gained through condition-based maintenance.

What was quickly evident with the use of condition-based maintenance during the study was the need for additional training for unit maintenance personnel on how to interpret the digital source collector codes. AMSAA provided unit technicians with diagnostic training and technical support needed to configure diagnostic devices as well as troubleshoot and isolate electrical faults coming from the digital source collectors. After a series of classroom lessons and hands-on diagnostic exercises, technicians could understand error fault codes and systematically track the issues to perform the correct repair.

Key: FMTV… Family of Medium Tactical Vehicles HEMTT…Heavy Expanded Mobility Tactical Truck HEMTT A4….Heavy Expanded Mobility Tactical Truck A4 Variant PLS…Palletized Load System PLS A1…Palletized Load System A1 Variant WK…week The results of the project worked well enough for the 25th Transportation Company that the unit petitioned to be able to continue using the trial schedule with its longer service intervals and condition-based maintenance while the Army studies their wider application. (Graphic by U.S. Army Acquisition Support Center and AMSAA)

MAN-HOUR TRADE-OFF

Maintenance personnel with the 25th Transportation Company went from using zero fault codes during vehicle inspections before digital source collectors were added, to up to 70 fault codes a day; diagnostic and component failure information quickly became a valuable maintenance resource that Soldiers never knew existed. Soldiers reported newfound confidence in their ability to correctly diagnose issues and save both time and money in the repair process. However, the increased visibility into vehicle faults also brought an increase in repairs needed to maintain operational readiness. Condition-based maintenance enablers such as the digital source collectors, laptops connected to onboard vehicle networks and diagnostic software products made Soldiers more informed, but they also made them much busier. Maintenance units will desperately need the maintenance man-hours freed through adoption of optimized preventive maintenance as the Army moves to fully implement condition-based maintenance across all its sustainment units. Optimized preventive maintenance greatly benefits the Army without the use of condition-based maintenance enablers, but repairs identified by condition-based maintenance cannot be performed without the resources returned through the optimized (longer) service intervals.

Expanding time and cost savings experienced within the 25th Transportation Company to other Army maintenance units will require a change to official policy that documents the preventive maintenance process and its current timelines. AMSAA materiel systems analysts led the way in the maintenance policy review and documented recommendations in an updated Maintenance of Low-Usage Equipment section of Army Regulation 750-1, “Army Materiel Maintenance Policy.”

AMSAA’s recommendations seek to formalize the extended service intervals, quality control inspections, quality assurance reviews and pre-dispatch checklists for nondeployed, low-usage equipment. AMSAA vetted its final version through TACOM, which concurred with the changes and delivered a final version to the Army G-4 for final approval. Army G-4 is currently reviewing the suggested changes to the policy.

Soldiers from 25th Transportation Company receiving hands-on diagnostics training on M1083 FMTV from AMSAA CBM analysts, Schofield Barracks, HI, August 2016. Photo by Mr. Jesse Fields, AMSAA Operational Sustainment Analysis Team.

EXPANDING THE IMPACT

The benefits highlighted in the extended services study were immediately apparent with the 25th Transportation Company, and continue to generate additional attention across the Army. The 25th Transportation Company petitioned the G-4 to continue its exemption for the use of extended preventive maintenance intervals. The G-4 granted the request, permitting the 25th Transportation Company to continue to operate on the extended services schedule as new policy is being considered.

Additionally, TACOM has engaged the original equipment manufacturer of the FMTV in a review of the preventive maintenance strategy for that platform. The objective is to benchmark the manufacturer’s recommended service schedules and determine changes to the FMTV’s preventive maintenance process to decrease life cycle costs and optimize service intervals. Historical fault codes collected by AMSAA will be combined with operational requirements for the FMTV to produce recommended optimized service intervals. TACOM has also identified the Stryker combat vehicle as a potential beneficiary of the optimized service strategy as well.

AMSAA has since partnered with the Army Study Program Management Office, within HQDA G-8, and the 1st Squadron, 2nd Calvary Regiment headquartered in Vilseck, Germany, to undertake a similar optimized preventive maintenance study focused on its Stryker platforms. The study began in February 2018 and is proceeding through the fall of 2019, following an implementation plan similar to the one used with the 25th Transportation Company.

Initial findings have identified reductions in required services, savings in service parts and an increase in personnel man-hours for unscheduled maintenance actions. Final study findings will be briefed to TACOM and PEO CS&CSS in September 2019 at the conclusion of the two-year study, and will be used to support formal recommendations for updated Army maintenance policy.

Soldiers from 25th Transportation Company utilizing diagnostics tools and software on M1083 FMTV, Schofield Barracks, HI, December 2015. Photo by Mr. Jesse Fields, AMSAA Operational Sustainment Analysis Team.

CONCLUSION

Initial concerns over the efficiency of the Army’s preventive maintenance policy led to a new approach to sustainment operations. Implementing an optimized service strategy that removes the requirement for premature time-based services proved to be a wise, cost-saving approach that also returned valuable man-hours to Army maintenance personnel to support operational readiness repairs.

The new approach is quickly generating additional support throughout the Army sustainment community and, most importantly, with those who set official policy. Data supporting the adoption of updated sustainment processes for today’s complex systems will ultimately prove to benefit tomorrow’s systems and the Soldiers they support. Savings in costs, resources and maintenance man-hours with no change to safety is a winning formula the Army can live with, and fight with into the future.

For more information, contact the author at kevin.m.guite.civ@mail.mil or go to https://osat.amsaa.army.mil.

KEVIN GUITE is a lead operations research analyst with AMSAA at Aberdeen Proving Ground, Maryland. He holds an M.S. in computer science from the University of Maryland Graduate School and a B.S. in computer science from the University of Maryland, Baltimore County. He is Level III certified in engineering and Level I certified in program management. He has been a member of the Army Acquisition Corps since 2008.

RELATED LINKS 

June 26, 2018 Army.mil article:  https://www.army.mil/article/207754/25th_transportation_company_tests_new_cbm

https://www.amsaa.army.mil/home.html

This article will be published in the October – December 2018 issue of Army AL&T magazine.

Subscribe to Army AL&T News, the premier online news source for the Acquisition, Logistics, and Technology (AL&T) Workforce.

The new director of the Army Rapid Capabilities Office discusses her vision for delivering major capabilities fast and helping to shape Army modernization.

 by Ms. Nancy Jones-Bonbrest

Doubling the range of towed cannon artillery in less than two years. Delivering the Army’s first electronic warfare systems for brigade and below. Training artificial intelligence algorithms to detect enemy signals.

The Army Rapid Capabilities Office (RCO) doesn’t do small goals. And that’s why the Army selected Tanya Skeen to lead it.

A 10-year veteran of the Air Force RCO, on which the newer Army version was modeled, Skeen helped the Air Force prove that a small, specialized acquisition shop can deliver major capabilities—even a long-range strike bomber—fast.

Now, Skeen hopes to bring that formula to the Army, by preparing the RCO to partner with the Army Futures Command (AFC) to deliver the Army’s top six modernization priorities: long-range precision fires, Next Generation Combat Vehicle, Future Vertical Lift, the network, air and missile defense, and Soldier lethality.

“We are in a great-power competition, and we cannot afford to be apathetic—we must have the stamina to really see through some of these game-changing capabilities,” Skeen said. “Army Futures Command is looking at how to achieve overmatch against our near-peer competitors. When they identify a need that is a good fit for the RCO to take on, we will leverage our acquisition model to deliver that capability directly, in the near term.”

Skeen, a Tier 3 member of the Senior Executive Service, took the reins of the Army RCO in April and wasted no time putting her experience and vision into action. She aligned the organization’s project teams with the Army’s top six priorities, built its capacity to execute larger and more complex programs, and acquired several new projects, while continuing to develop and deliver capabilities to Soldiers in Europe and the Pacific. She took the authorities in the 2-year-old Army RCO charter—similar to the Air Force RCO version—and brought them to life. She demonstrated the opportunities that rapid acquisition presents for a Futures Command, and an Army, ready to take risks to achieve big things.

“It’s not for every program,” Skeen said. “It’s not really any more technical risk, and it’s not risky, if you will. It really is about, ‘Where are you willing to have less oversight and allow a smaller team to be accountable for something really important?’ ”

Skeen takes a look at a Stryker vehicle integrated with position, navigation and timing (PNT) equipment during a July 25 visit to the U.S. Army Aberdeen Test Center (ATC), Maryland. Skeen, who became director of the Army RCO in April, joining the organization after 10 years with the Air Force RCO, is intent on partnering with the AFC, cross-functional teams and PEOs’ program managers to prototype promising new technologies—in this case mounted PNT and electronic support sensor capability for maneuverability in GPS-challenged environments. (Photo courtesy of ATC)

During an interview on July 25, Skeen discussed the Army RCO, from its processes and partnerships to its potential.

Nancy Jones-Bonbrest: The Army RCO is a relatively new organization, entering its third year. What is your vision moving forward?

Tanya Skeen: The Army RCO is about delivering capabilities faster and better. Acquisition in general is focused on that across the Army. So what makes the Army RCO different is really the authorities in our charter, which is signed by the secretary of the Army, chief of staff of the Army and the Army acquisition executive. The charter gives us the ability to streamline and tailor the processes and policies that are in place for acquisition and how we do business.

We aren’t going against any statutes or doing anything that is not aligned with the law, but it does allow us to take a look at the various processes, approvals and policies in place and evaluate if those are value-added, if they are necessary for this particular effort that we might be doing, and ask if there is another way to accomplish the mission. The programs that are assigned to the RCO are strategic and critically important to the Army, so we should be challenging the norms, challenging those traditional ways and traditional processes to deliver capabilities faster.

Another critical component of the vision is small teams: How do you use a very small team and deliver capabilities that are truly meaningful with fewer people, less time and, frankly, less bureaucracy?

Jones-Bonbrest: You came to the Army in April, after last serving as the Air Force deputy director of test and evaluation, and previously in several senior positions at the Air Force Rapid Capabilities Office. What lessons do you bring from how the Air Force RCO does business?

Skeen: The charter that I mentioned previously is definitely modeled directly from the Air Force RCO. In their 15 years of history, I was there for about 10 years, and we learned a lot of lessons. One is that it really is about high-quality, motivated people, and having them all together working toward a common objective, which is to deliver capability to the field. It’s not about awarding a contract, it’s not about any one functional area—it’s truly about delivering the capability.

The other key lesson learned is having a short, narrow chain of command. The fact that the Army RCO reports directly to a board of directors consisting of the secretary of the Army, chief of the staff of the Army and the Army acquisition executive—having that ability to shorten the decision chain is really vital if you want to go fast. Another lesson learned is that we need to gradually model that rapid behavior for the Army. The Air Force RCO did that. You don’t start out with 100 programs. You start out with a few really important programs, model the behavior that you’re trying to display and build from there. So a key lesson learned is not only what you assign to an RCO to focus on, but also how much. If you give them the world, it will truly fail and collapse under its own weight.

Jones-Bonbrest: With the standup of the AFC and its eight cross-functional teams, the Army is prioritizing modernization. First, how can the RCO support the cross-functional teams?

Skeen: We’re already supporting the AFC and cross-functional teams. I work with Maj. Gen. JamesM. Richardson [the special adviser for program integration in the Office of the Vice Chief of Staff of the Army] often and I’ve met with all the cross-functional team leadership. The cross-functional teams are focused not only on delivering the Army’s six top modernization priorities, but also on getting those requirements right. So the RCO can support the cross-functional teams by helping to refine requirements through prototyping and demonstration, by doing something quicker, smaller and then evaluating those requirements again. Then we feed that information into a more formal program of record.

When the AFC or cross-functional teams identify a need that is a good fit for the RCO to take on, we are recognized as a tool to deliver capability quickly. So when they have a concept, a set of requirements, and the RCO looks to be a good acquisition model for them, we can approach the secretary and the chief with that idea, and if that is directed to come to the RCO, we will leverage our acquisition model to deliver that capability directly.

Jones-Bonbrest: What about other support to the Army Futures Command?

Skeen: One thing that is very important that I bring forward from the Air Force RCO into the Army RCO is this evaluation of the threat, and what is the capability that we need to be successful in the threat environment, whether it be Russia, China, etc. If we develop a capability that is not effective against the threat, it’s not terribly interesting. AFC is looking at how we achieve overmatch against our near-peer competitors. The analysis and the evaluation that the RCO can bring to take a look at a certain capability and how it would be effective against a threat, and then taking that concept and demonstrating it or prototyping it, I think that will truly inform the AFC on the question of, “How do you stitch together the priorities and deliver game-changing overmatch against our adversaries?”

Jones-Bonbrest: With so much attention focused on AFC and cross-functional teams, will the RCO continue to work with PEOs [program executive offices] for some of its projects?

Skeen: Absolutely. We’ve had many great successes in partnering with PEOs, and that’s a very fast way to show a different model, a different acquisition approach. We did that with our electronic warfare project in Europe, and that was a wonderful partnership with PEO IEW&S [Intelligence, Electronic Warfare and Sensors]. With that effort, we got to leverage the RCO charter, the RCO authorities and the excellent engineering and acquisition folks in the PEO to deliver a capability very quickly to the field. That’s another great way to change acquisition and change the culture across the Army.

Jones-Bonbrest: At its founding, the Army RCO was initially assigned to focus on electronic warfare and position, navigation and timing. With the mission growing to include long-range precision fires, active protection systems, artificial intelligence, cyber and other areas, what technology or technologies are you most excited by?

Skeen: When you talk about tech, I like tech that’s fast. What can we deliver that truly is game-changing to the Army, and how do we do it quickly? My inner engineer can get excited about everything from a chip to a rocket to a tank to a long-range cannon. So there isn’t one particular area. It’s really about how we harness these brilliant ideas that are across the country and turn those into capabilities.

Staff Sgt. Kristoffer Perez, part of the Cyber Electromagnetic Activities section within the 1st Armored Brigade Combat Team, 1st Infantry Division (1/1 ABCT), trains, with his section’s new electronic warfare equipment at Fort Riley, Kansas in April. The 1/1 ABCT is the first unit stateside to receive the systems, which were developed by the Army RCO and the Project Manager for Electronic Warfare and Cyber (PM EW&C) within PEO IEW&S and fielded to Europe earlier this year. (U.S. Army photo by Sgt. Michael C. Roach, 19th Public Affairs Detachment)

Jones-Bonbrest: The most recent National Defense Strategy asserts that the U.S. is engaged in a great-power competition with near-peer adversaries, and that DOD is behind in critical modernization areas. Are there threats that keep you up at night?

Skeen: Hypersonics and the investments that our adversaries, particularly China, are making in hypersonics concerns me. Cyber and the focus on offensive cyber capabilities of our adversaries, particularly Russia, concerns me. But the biggest threat that would keep me up at night is apathy. It’s not a technical area, it’s not something that someone is producing. But when I see the investments and focus of our adversaries in certain areas, I get concerned. I get concerned that we will not have the focus and stamina required to deliver the capabilities we need as a nation. We are in a great-power competition and we cannot afford to be apathetic—we must have the stamina to really see through some of these game-changing capabilities.

Jones-Bonbrest: How can the Army RCO positively influence the larger acquisition system and culture?

Skeen: You need to start with a few projects where you demonstrate that you can deliver with fewer people, faster timelines, less oversight and less process. You start small and it grows from there. When we have people who are going to rotate in and out of the organization—particularly the military members of the Acquisition Corps—we will want to harness all of their talent as they learn and contribute to the Army RCO approach. When they transition to their next position of leadership, they can carry forth all of those lessons learned. So it’s not a big bang approach; it’s, “Be really good at what you do first, show and prove that, and then have the folks who are from the organization move out and help spread that culture.”

For more information on the Army RCO, go to http://rapidcapabilitiesoffice.army.mil or follow the RCO on LinkedIn at https://www.linkedin.com/company/us-army-rco/.

NANCY JONES-BONBREST is a public communications specialist for the Army Rapid Capabilities Office and has written extensively about Army modernization and acquisition for several years, including multiple training and testing events. She holds a B.S. in journalism from the University of Maryland, College Park.

This article will be published in the October – December 2018 issue of Army AL&T magazine.

Subscribe to Army AL&T News, the premier online news source for the Acquisition, Logistics, and Technology (AL&T) Workforce.

USAMMDA develops a reputation for growing acquisition workforce leaders.

by Mr. Jeffrey M. Soares

The U.S. Army Medical Materiel Development Activity (USAMMDA) at Fort Detrick, Maryland, is helping to prepare future leaders of the acquisition workforce. USAMMDA cultivates a cadre of acquisition professionals, both military and civilian, who go on to leadership roles in other areas of the Army and DOD. In fact, over the last few years, six former and current members of the USAMMDA team have been chosen from the Army Acquisition Centralized Selection List to serve as leaders in other acquisition commands throughout the country.

“The breadth and depth of our command offer distinct exposure to a wide range of medical materiel solutions,” said Col. Ryan Bailey, USAMMDA commander. “From a military perspective, an assignment at USAMMDA offers an opportunity to be part of an organization that is focused on true acquisition medical product development, beginning at the analysis of alternatives, through the entire life cycle process.

“Understanding the acquisition component—the acquisition and sustainment strategy—while also working with stakeholders and users to understand the particular requirement provides true on-the-job, hands-on experience,” Bailey said. “It’s invaluable.”

USAMMDA_USAMMA AIP graduation: The 2018 graduating class of the joint Program Management–Acquisitions Internship Program of the USAMMDA and the U.S. Army Medical Materiel Agency, Fort Detrick, Maryland. From left to right: Dr. Tyler Bennett, deputy to the commander for acquisition, USAMMA Col. Lynn Marm, USAMMA commander Maj. Janessa R. Moyer Maj. Jeffrey L. Brown Capt. Efther V. Samuel Maj. Amber L. Smith and Col. Ryan Bailey, USAMMDA commander. Capt. Amanda L. Roth was not present for photo. (Photo by Gregory Pugh, USAMMA public affairs) DATE: July 20, 2018

AN ENVIRONMENT UNLIKE OTHERS

As Bailey suggested, a position at USAMMDA provides a unique acquisition experience, primarily because of the organization’s role as a medical product developer. While the Army acquisition system evolved to procure items such as tanks, planes, weapons and other defense equipment, USAMMDA tailors this process to advance military medical products, devices, pharmaceuticals, vaccines and other medical solutions for warfighters. The organization is the Army’s lead resource for the advanced development, licensure and fielding of pharmaceutical products for use by the U.S. military.

Because of that focus, product and project managers at USAMMDA gain in-depth knowledge in regulatory affairs as they work with the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to ensure the safety and efficacy of all pertinent products managed by the command, offering staff members a unique experience within Army medicine.

In this year alone, the command can claim three Army officers chosen to fill leadership roles via the Centralized Selection List process: Lt. Col. Charles Ditusa, Lt. Col. Bryan Gnade and Lt. Col. Kara Schmid. Schmid currently serves USAMMDA as project manager of the Neurotrauma and Psychological Health Project Management Office. Beginning in FY 2019, she will assume the role of joint product manager for Chemical Defense Pharmaceuticals within the Medical Countermeasures Systems Joint Project Management Office at Fort Detrick.

Ditusa recently departed USAMMDA to serve as acting assistant product manager of the Biodefense Therapeutics Antiviral Program under the Joint Program Executive Office for Chemical, Biological, Radiological and Nuclear Defense. As part of his assignment, he is scheduled to assume the role of joint product manager for the Biological Defense Therapeutics office. Gnade, currently chief of the Diagnostics Systems Division of the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases, was selected to serve as program executive officer for Simulation, Training and Instrumentation in Orlando, Florida.

With two Centralized Selection List positions on his own resume, Bailey knows what the committee looks for when evaluating applications. Candidates for acquisition positions should have the pertinent acquisition certifications coupled with related experience, and they should also have successful leadership experience—all of which are available and highly encouraged during an assignment at USAMMDA.

“I would say that my selection for this particular position was based on my experience as a product manager, and then as a project manager, at USAMMDA as a lieutenant colonel,” said Schmid. “These two positions relate closely to what I will be doing as the joint product manager for the Chemical Defense Pharmaceuticals office.”

Over the past 12 years, Schmid considers herself fortunate to have remained involved with the Laboratory Assay for Traumatic Brain Injury (LATBI) acquisition program, which has been a prime focus of Army medicine during the last decade. In 2015, Schmid joined USAMMDA as product manager for Traumatic Brain Injury before being named project manager for Neurotrauma and Psychological Health, overseeing the LATBI program.

Schmid noted that her time at USAMMDA helped to prepare her for her upcoming role. “The entire work of USAMMDA is centered on acquisition,” said Schmid. “Being a product manager here gives you day-to-day acquisition experience in product development—you are directly responsible for the cost, schedule and performance of your program. But I also gained experience as a project manager, where you’re in charge of the oversight and strategic vision of the entire program, much like the joint product manager role that I will be taking on.

“As a project manager at USAMMDA, you’re offered valuable experience in making decisions on a program-wide level,” she said. “Everything you learn on the job, and from other USAMMDA leadership, helps you to understand how to prioritize funding, as well as people and their time, based on the products being developed by the team.”

PHOTO CAPTION #4
LTC Schmid briefs MG Holcomb: Lt. Col. Kara Schmid (center), project manager of USAMMDAs Neurotrauma and Psychological Health Project Management Office, briefs Maj. Gen. Barbara R. Holcomb, USAMRMC and Fort Detrick commander, on the NPH PMO’s products and accomplishments during Holcomb’s tour of USAMMDA. (Photo by Ashley Force, USAMMDA public affairs) DATE: April 23, 2018

LEVERAGING THE USAMMDA EXPERIENCE

Another unique aspect of an assignment at USAMMDA is that the command has medical acquisition-coded billets that allow officers to attend training through Defense Acquisition University (DAU)—a certification that remains critical for career advancement in Army acquisition and membership in the Army Acquisition Corps. Corps membership is mandatory for all Army acquisition, logistics and technology workforce members who hold key leadership positions. While essential requirements for DAU are satisfied through product manager and assistant product manager positions at USAMMDA, Bailey noted that DAU provides the textbook acquisition training while USAMMDA offers the on-the-job experience that links the process together.

Further, these candidates also gain the required experience in working to transition a product from multiple science and technology partners in the U.S. Army Medical Research and Materiel Command (USAMRMC), moving through the product life cycle to fielding, sustainment and modernization. Additionally, they work with contracting agencies to partner with the necessary commercial entities to complete the advanced development of these products. In doing so, they gain valuable knowledge in working within contracting guidelines such as cooperative research and development agreements and other transaction authorities.

Col. Jeanne Norwood currently serves as the joint product manager for the Joint Vaccine Acquisition Program within the Medical Countermeasures Systems Joint Project Management Office, and much like Schmid, her path to this position includes successful work in product development and acquisition at USAMMDA.

As a product manager within the Pharmaceutical Systems Program Management Office, Norwood, then a lieutenant colonel, led critical efforts to develop diagnostics and therapeutics to treat cutaneous leishmaniasis, a skin infection caused by a single-celled parasite that is transmitted by an insect bite. Along with these duties, she served as chair of an integrated product team that was responsible for the development of medical products to protect warfighters from infectious disease threats.

“During my tenure at USAMMDA,” Norwood explained, “I was involved in all phases of the product development process, from supporting early science and technology efforts, to executing Phase III clinical trials, to getting a critical product cleared by the FDA and transitioning it to the U.S. Army Medical Materiel Agency for fielding.”

Echoing Schmid, Norwood agreed that the work and training provided at USAMMDA allowed her to grow in the acquisition and advanced development fields. “My experience at USAMMDA helped me to understand and appreciate the importance of functional teams,” said Norwood. “Although some of my learning may have been trial by fire, because I was new to advanced development at that time, USAMMDA leadership empowered me to lead my team to advance critical products to the warfighter, and that was really encouraging.”

She added that her assignment at USAMMDA “provided my first chance to see a product cross the finish line and go into the hands of the people that really need it. Once you’re part of a success such as that, you want to see it happen again.”

Bailey Berst Parker meeting: USAMMDA commander Col. Ryan Bailey (right) meets with Kathleen Berst, USAMMDA deputy for acquisition (center), and Christine Parker, acting project manager for USAMMDAs Medical Devices–Advanced Development Project Management Office. (Photo by Ashley Force, USAMMDA public affairs) DATE: July 20, 2018.

CONCLUSION

USAMMDA has seen its share of success over the years. From critical vaccines and blood products that help to save lives on and off the battlefield, to medical products, devices and treatments that help restore wounded warfighters returning from battle, USAMMDA’s status as a solid training environment to help prepare future leaders is secure.

“USAMMDA truly is a great organization that helps to build the bench of acquisition leaders,” said Bailey. “People who join our team obtain the education and experience to develop as professionals in the field, and then rotate out to lead in other diverse acquisition environments.”

Schmid and others on the USAMMDA team believe that USAMMDA is one of the most diverse commands under the U.S. Army Medical Command, which supports its status as an effective training environment.

As the USAMRMC is a life cycle management command, USAMMDA has the entire product development mission under one roof. From infectious diseases to operational medicine, and combat casualty care to rehabilitation, the organization is responsible for developing solutions for everything from basic training to return from battle, which also includes non-battle injuries and diseases.

“Our greatest challenge may actually be the breadth of the work we do here at USAMMDA and throughout the USAMRMC,” said Schmid, “but we have all learned to become very efficient at our jobs, and this is something that I truly value from my experience within the command.”

Despite her years of experience and training, or perhaps because of them, Schmid realizes she must continue to develop and grow with each new assignment—including the one fast approaching. “I’m starting to brush up on my knowledge of chemical and biological threats, in between my current responsibilities,” she explained. “In my new position, I almost feel like I’ll be a freshman again. There will be a lot to learn, but I know there’s a very strong team already in place, which will help make the transition much easier.”

For more information on the work and mission of USAMMDA, go to http://www.usammda.army.mil/.

JEFFREY M. SOARES is a senior technical writer and communications specialist with General Dynamics Information Technology, providing contract support as chief writer for the Public Affairs Office and Office of the Commander at USAMMDA. He holds an M.A. in English language and literature from the University of Maryland, College Park, and a B.S. in education with a concentration in English from the University of Scranton.

ADDED RESPONSIBILITIES

The breadth of work at USAMMDA will soon increase as the organization absorbed 27 product development personnel from the U.S. Army Medical Materiel Agency (USAMMA) in July. The transition will add many new medical products to USAMMDA’s portfolio, which Bailey noted will “help to create even more opportunities for product knowledge and acquisition skill development, and build a much stronger USAMMDA workforce.”

With the influx of additional personnel, the need for specialized training will increase as well. Bailey explained that while at USAMMDA, Soldiers may also satisfy their requirements for the Army’s 8X Additional Skill Identifier, which remains on their permanent records to show they have successfully completed additional acquisition skills training for an Army Medical Department acquisition officer. Further, both USAMMDA and USAMMA offer the Program Management – Acquisitions Internship Program, which is designed to recruit junior officers to the field earlier in their careers to begin developing acquisition skills for future positions within the workforce.

Schmid praised the internship program as an effective way of creating a large pool of well-trained officers who could one day fill critical acquisition gaps throughout the Army. “Gaining experience in acquisition while you’re still a captain will really help you to understand how the USAMRMC does business,” she said. “Also, having experiences like this early in your career as an officer will certainly help to prepare you for leadership roles later on.”

This article will be published in the October – December 2018 issue of Army AL&T magazine.

Subscribe to Army AL&T News, the premier online news source for the Acquisition, Logistics, and Technology (AL&T) Workforce.

For better contracts and better support to the warfighter, integrate operational contract support personnel into the same education system that trains the operational personnel.

by Maj. Kasandra B. Tharp

Imagine you’re a contingency contracting specialist supporting an exercise in the Philippines. Having arrived in the country, you receive a list of requirements from the operational units participating in the exercise and have limited time to get vendors on contract. The requirements that vendors will supply range from basic life support to some that are more mission-specific. In any case, you have a strict time limit to make the mission happen.

So, the requirement for 200 portable toilets at a Philippine exercise range doesn’t raise any red flags for you as you execute the process to compete the requirement for quotes. When the unit arrives a week later, however, an issue pops up. These aren’t the typical Western portable toilets U.S. personnel might expect to find at typical U.S. training sites. These are the local version, designed for squatting instead of sitting—clearly a difference between what the planners intended and what the contracting personnel executed.

Over the past decade, with the Army and other service components supporting large-scale contingency operations in Southwest Asia, a distinct disconnect has become evident between operational contract support (OCS) planners and the joint operational planning effort blending contractual support with the services’ built-in logistical capabilities. This disconnect surfaces commonly during joint bilateral exercises, where basic contracting principles like defining requirements—not just any kind of portable toilet—are executed poorly because of the lack of OCS perspective.

Evaluations of contracting over the last 15 years of contingency operations have shown repeated proof of this disconnect. Even up to August 2011, with the release of the final report from the Commission on Wartime Contracting, analysis of contracting operations showed that ill-conceived projects, no matter how well-managed, are wasteful if they do not fit the cultural, political and economic norms of the society they are meant to serve. The report went further, stating that poor planning and oversight repeatedly resulted in costly outcomes and misspent money that could be used for other mission objectives. Clearly, a gap needed to be filled in the contracting efforts for contingency operations, and the contracting community’s answer was OCS.

Since the 2003 invasion of Iraq, and particularly the release of the Gansler Commission report on contracting in October 2007, the Army’s OCS planners have improved their understanding of the joint planning process and their proper roles as an integral part of operational planning for all of the services, such as defining requirements and understanding units’ needs. However, the various military services’ planners have shown no intent to expand the involvement of the operational contracting community in the joint operational planning process, despite the ongoing requirements for contracting support.

The need for contracting support is likely to persist or to grow, given the Army’s current and expanding logistical needs for a wide variety of operations worldwide in different geopolitical environments. For instance, deployed troops continue to receive support through contractual requirements such as the Logistics Civil Augmentation Program (LOGCAP), a program that uses civilian contractors to augment the Army force structure. LOGCAP is currently on its fourth contract, awarded in 2007.

This contracting support is so necessary to operational units that troops actually train to use it. When units go to the National Training Center at Fort Irwin, California, to prepare for a deployment, a LOGCAP contractor is part of the training rotation, replicating the numerous services contractors will provide to the unit in theater. This reliance will continue for as long the military maintains a high operations tempo, allowing little time for planning and increasing the reliance on contractors. This underscores the need to incorporate OCS into the planning community.

An OCS Soldier in civilian clothes provides final payment to a first-time local Philippine vendor. (Photo by the author)

LOGISTICS MULTIPLIER

Military OCS planners are the Army’s best-equipped personnel, based on their training and experience in contracting operations, to identify how to fill gaps between the Army’s logistical requirements for products and services and what its supply system can provide. Consequently, it falls to OCS planners to initiate, coordinate and execute the contracts needed to sustain the warfighter.

Typically, they are integrated with the Army’s traditional logistics personnel and units, working directly with units in the field to help organize and fill logistical requirements through all phases of an operation. Contracting support personnel do not replace logistics planners; rather, their skills are complementary, and OCS personnel help to streamline the procurement of capabilities from outside the military supply system—like the portable toilets for a joint exercise, in the example above. As a part of the acquisition community, OCS planners are well-versed in compliance with the Federal Acquisition Regulation and Defense Federal Acquisition Regulation Supplement regardless of the operational location.

As critical as contracting is to the success of an operation, OCS planners would logically seem to require the same level of training in the art of operational planning as those service members assigned to other operational branches, such as infantry, armor or logistics. But they are not afforded the same level of training as their operational counterparts.

Soldiers prepare locally contracted food for U.S. personnel executing bilateral training overseas. Food preparation is just one of the many services that operational contracting support personnel can procure for troops on deployment or in the field for joint exercises. (Photo by the author)

STOVEPIPED TRAINING

Post-command officers, senior captains and noncommissioned officers E-7 or higher in most of the combat arms and combat support branches have a solid understanding of support to current operations and can identify needs and capabilities based on their experiences. In addition, they receive education to develop their abilities to plan at the operational and strategic levels.

The Army schools that officers attend—the U.S. Army School of Advanced Military Studies, Air University’s School of Advanced Air and Space Studies, and Marine Corps University’s School of Advanced Warfighting, for example—bring together service members from diverse backgrounds within a narrow array of job fields, to provide them with a broad base of planning knowledge, including new processes and how to integrate the perspectives of various military occupational specialties and branches.

The School of Advanced Military Studies, part of the U.S. Army Command and General Staff College at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, provides a 10-month course that prepares officers to lead a plans team. The school aims to build innovative, adaptive leaders who excel at operational art and are willing to experiment and accept risk.

The experience of learning with a diverse group of other Soldiers produces better planners. Thus, a graduate of the school, say, an AH-64 Apache pilot subsequently assigned as a brigade S-3, or overall unit planner, knows how to build an operations plan that incorporates the ground-level perspectives of infantry, armor and artillery units along with Army logisticians’ perspective on when and where they can provide munitions and fuel. In theory, the S-3’s understanding of contracting support comes from having worked and studied with logistics branch officers; in reality, these officers may not possess the contracting knowledge they need to be effective because of a lack of practical experience.

Unfortunately, the School of Advanced Military Studies and similar schools run by other services to develop plans officers are not open to contracting personnel, so contracting personnel may never learn how contract types and requirements can impact operations, positively or negatively, nor appreciate the necessary level of coordination in operational planning.

The only training OCS personnel receive in planning is through the Joint OCS Planning and Execution Course (JOPEC), during which they receive instruction on how to support staff estimates, identify methods to integrate OCS into joint training and exercises, and estimate support requirements to develop plans and orders. Those contracting personnel who receive the JOPEC training are better prepared to participate in joint planning, but they still must rely on the limited operational experience they received before becoming acquisition personnel. Similar to the operational planning community, they are “stovepiped” within their own specialty and are not developing the skills necessary to work with their operational counterparts.

Offering operational contract support personnel training and education similar to the training that their operational counterparts receive would benefit all involved, the author argues: Planners would gain a better understanding of the kind of contract support units will need once on the ground—including how much it will cost and how to write the requirements—and OCS personnel would refine their ability to keep contracting costs down and avoid project missteps. (Photo courtesy of the author)

THE LAST-MINUTE APPROACH

As a practical reality, contracting often ends up being more an instrument to meet last-minute needs for supplies, construction or services than a focus of operations planning. Just as the demand for an item increases its value, this creates problems—inflated prices, unmet requirements, failed projects—in procuring items that are needed immediately. The last-minute approach rarely considers the necessary contract size and scope to fully support an operation.

For example, inadequate planning for equipment—whether light forklifts, heavy cranes or container handlers—to off-load ground vehicles to be used in a mission will likely lead to profound difficulties for the warfighter. By not planning adequately, this materiel may be left sitting on a tarmac, waiting to be moved and essentially useless. In addition, having to hire contractors who are both certified and readily available can exact an unexpectedly high, budget-straining cost.

CONCLUSION

In the end, planners across the force must be in sync in order to provide the most effective efforts. The operational contract support planner needs to understand what the warfighter needs. In turn, the warfighter and those who plan their missions need to understand what it takes to clearly define and execute operational requirements.

Only a fundamental change in the culture of operations planning will be sufficient to fix this disconnect, instilling the need to include the intricacies of contracting in the full spectrum of planning considerations. The goal of this overall culture change should be to create a new generation in the planning community, one prepared to apply a multidisciplinary perspective to the various factors that influence the operational environment.

This cultural transformation can begin with education, specifically at the advanced schools that develop plans personnel. and include contracting as a formal part of the curriculum.

The ultimate objective should be to better integrate OCS personnel into operational environments to implement contracting earlier in the operation, thus avoiding the conflicts arising from last-minute contracting. Finally, advanced military schooling would better prepare operational contracting personnel to provide the services that the planning community requires for the Soldier.

The necessary culture change begins with the education infrastructure that already exists. Attendance at these schools by OCS experienced personnel will be of immense benefit to all students and the planning community at large. If the Army continues its current lack of integration of warfighting and OCS planners, then operational inefficiencies and excessive costs will persist. Proper integration of OCS will result in better-defined requirements, lower costs and improved schedule and performance. Ultimately, enabling the warfighter is why Army contracting exists.

For more information, email the author at kasandra.b.tharp.mil@mail.mil.

MAJ. KASANDRA B. THARP is a procurement officer for the Defense Intelligence Agency’s Missile and Space Intelligence Center, Redstone Arsenal, Alabama. Previously she was a contracting instructor at the Army Acquisition Center of Excellence in Huntsville, Alabama. She holds an M.A. in procurement and acquisition management and an M.A. in business and organizational management from Webster University, and a B.S. in sociology with a concentration in criminology from Kansas State University. She is Level III certified in contracting and is a member of the Army Acquisition Corps.

Related Links

“Joint Publication 4-10: Operational Contract Support”: http://edocs.nps.edu/2014/July/jp4_10.pdf

Commission Final Report to Congress, August 2011: “Transforming Wartime Contracting; Controlling Costs, Reducing Risks”: https://cybercemetery.unt.edu/archive/cwc/20110929213820/http:/www.wartimecontracting.gov/docs/CWC_FinalReport-lowres.pdf

This article will be published in the October – December 2018 issue of Army AL&T magazine.

Subscribe to Army AL&T News, the premier online news source for the Acquisition, Logistics, and Technology (AL&T) Workforce.

Sidebar to Game Changer

As an educational tool, the war game shows how to use business architecture by enabling people to actually experience it. Customization and personalized game play were key to designing the game. Giving players the freedom to make their own decisions motivates them to proceed and persist because the game was progressing according to their choices. My colleague Radhika Patel, a systems engineer at ARDEC, and I spent six months creating the game scenario and all of its components.

COMPETING TEAMS

The game began with two competing teams, the Tiger Team and Skunk Works. Each team comprised six or seven ARDEC government employees, mixed in age and experience, who assumed the role of midlevel managers.

Each team received an email from its respective director, played by the Control Team, that included their competency plan and explained some of the strategic goals they were trying to achieve. Their objective was to develop a budget proposal to be reviewed by the Project Management Team. The director was convinced that the project management office could use their services to help perform threat analysis on potential new projects. Based on this insight, he assembled the Skunk Works team and the Tiger Team to devise strategies to tackle the problem.

Team members got colored tokens to use with the capability map. Each token represented an enabler of a given capability. In our game, capabilities are enabled by four key aspects, including people, process, tools and information. These enablers define how well ARDEC performs a capability.

Players used a maturity rating table that outlined the four enablers and how to measure their ability on a scale of 1 to 5, with 5 being the highest maturity. Every project manager needs to know the level of ability the organization has to perform a job. (In fact, the tool provides that information to anyone—office chief, director, president or anybody else in the organization.)

The game pitted two teams (Skunk Works and Tiger Team) against each other. The Market Team was a third team that role-played as an ARDEC customer: a project management team. The Control Team was made up of the author and Patel, who ran the game and influenced team actions with outside forces. (Graphics courtesy of the author)

For example, if I lack trained and experienced people, the people enabler for the capability in the game will be red. I might have a procedure to follow that is working well, so my process enabler is marked green. That signals to me that I have an issue with my people, but not my process.

Similarly, one of the capabilities in the game had the people enabler marked as red. Determining that they needed to invest in the people enabler of that capability, the teams selected as many green people tokens as they felt necessary. It was important for teams to see that they not only had to pick which capability, but also that there could be different reasons for investment. Do you need to invest in your people? Do you need to develop a process? Those different enablers all have different costs associated with them and require a strategic discussion to determine what’s needed to get the job done.

To make the data more visible, we developed a tool using the measurement criteria from the maturity rating table to automate the effects of investments on the maturity level of each capability. This tool also automatically calculated the cost to the program manager (PM). Since they were competing, there was lots of discussion about how much money they thought the PM would be willing to spend. Teams were aware that they were competing to win a contract; this competition underscored the importance of strategic discussions on what to invest in, and how.

MEANWHILE, ON THE PM TEAM …

Meanwhile, the Market Team—made up of five ARDEC employees acting in the role of a program management office—also received an email from their director, played by the Control Team. A more scenario-driven narrative gave them a sense of urgency. This scenario focused on an anti-access and area denial situation in which adversaries are able to destroy our GPS technology, causing a serious problem with navigation and communication. In the game, participants kept returning to this threat and why it was so important to make certain moves, because ultimately they were keeping our Soldiers safe.

We added another variable to the mix. Changes in resources prompted the director to request the cost to outsource the work to an engineering services group at ARDEC. He assigned the team the task of determining if the value ARDEC could provide was worth the cost.

The PM team knew ARDEC’s capabilities, but had no insight into the ratings of their enablers. Selecting and ranking ARDEC capabilities that they believed needed to be used for a threat analysis provided a basis for comparison with what was in the ARDEC proposals.

To help make a decision, the team created a decision-analysis-and-resolution tool. Decision analysis and resolution is a structured approach to evaluating alternative solutions against established criteria to determine a recommended solution. Some of the criteria the PM team established were correlated to their strategy and whether the capabilities aligned with their capability prioritization.

THREAT ANALYSIS STEPS
In the war game scenario, the project management office sought to outsource work when doing a threat analysis. The two teams evaluated their capabilities to see if they could support the PM and created a proposal that included the cost to the PM to build up capabilities that were not at a sufficient capacity to meet the PMs objective.

THE GAME CONTINUES

The game continued over the course of three days, with two three-hour sessions on days one and two and a one-hour session on day three. The driving motivation came from two main forces built into the game: urgency and competition. In addition to competition, the anti-access and area denial scenario provided a sense of urgency and explained the strategy behind the decisions.

By giving the teams the business architecture artifacts, ARDEC was able to create the right environment for decisions that allow us to align with the future. Teams aligned their decisions with where they wanted to go—our strategy for the future—and their proposals included the business decisions required to back up the technical ones.

KATHLEEN R. WALSH is a business architect at ARDEC. She is a Certified Enterprise Architect from Carnegie Mellon University, and holds a Master of Engineering degree in systems engineering from Stevens Institute of Technology and a B.S. in computer science from Ramapo College of New Jersey. She holds a Certificate in Leadership Dynamics from the University of Pennsylvania; earned certificates in game design, story and narrative development from California Institute of the Arts; received business architecture training from the Business Architecture Institute; and studied filmmaking at the Barrow Group in New York City. She holds professional memberships in the Association of Enterprise Architects, the Business Architecture Guild and the International Institute of Business Analysis (IIBA), and she has spoken at the Business Architecture Guild’s Innovation Summit, the IIBA Building Business Capability, the Twin Cities Business Architecture Summit and the National Defense Industrial Association’s systems engineering conferences.

This article will be published in the October – December 2018 issue of Army AL&T magazine.

Subscribe to Army AL&T News, the premier online news source for the Acquisition, Logistics, and Technology (AL&T) Workforce.