Army ALT Magazine

Flexibility in contracting and scheduling delivers capability to warfighter in the optimal time―not necessarily the shortest time.

by Robert F. Mortlock, Ph.D., Col., USA (Ret.)

“Schedule-driven programs usually fail,” a seasoned acquisition professional and mentor cautioned me as he prepared to retire after a long, successful program management career. I was an inexperienced but highly trained and motivated new acquisition professional working on the program schedule for an urgently needed warfighter capability to detect biological warfare agents.

In the late 1990s and early 2000s, the possible use of biological weapons on the battlefield was a real threat, driving the need for a biological standoff detection system. The warfighters needed the system as soon as possible, and my acquisition team planned a development, testing and procurement strategy that met the warfighter’s need on the battlefield. Despite the urgency, the desire for a responsive acquisition approach, and available resources and funding, the underlying laser technologies did not work reliably outside of a controlled laboratory environment. The program proceeded anyway, but languished in the “valley of death” and never led to a fielded, militarily useful product. The valley of death refers to the gap that often occurs between technologies that work in a controlled laboratory environment on a small scale in prototypes, and technologies that work for warfighters in a combat environment on a large scale in manufactured products. Even now, decades later, the technologies that might enable use of lasers to detect and identify biological agents at a distance can’t be relied on to alert Soldiers to potential danger.

The program was schedule-driven based on the urgency of need—the threat that biological agents would be used on the battlefields in the Middle East against American service members. But in the end, it failed to deliver the capability to the warfighter. No amount of money or demand could whip a not-ready-for-prime-time technology into shape (possibly in defiance of the laws of physics) to meet the need. The capability required more time for research and development, a hard pill to swallow for senior leaders in the past and today as the pressure mounts to fix the slow, unresponsive defense acquisition system.

ACQUISITION REFORM―GO FASTER!

Resources (i.e., funding) can also drive the need for a schedule-driven program. The program’s planned research, development, test and evaluation; procurement and operations and support funding (generally referred to as the colors of money); and the planning, programming, budgeting and execution system force each program, in fact, to be schedule-driven―incorporating an inherent risk for failure.

This is the dilemma facing program managers (PMs) and acquisition professionals: The pressure to close an urgent capability gap and plan the proper color of money continues at the same time that the push for acquisition reform intensifies. Go faster is the message that comes across loud and clear. Well, senior leaders, be careful what you ask for―it may be a rush to failure and unnecessarily increasing the risk of not delivering capability to warfighters.

Acquisition programs can go fast, as evidenced by the numerous successful rapid acquisition efforts over the last two decades to support combat operations in Iraq and Afghanistan, like the Mine Resistant Ambush Protected (MRAP) vehicle program. Given unlimited funding, a priority of effort and reliance on mature commercial technologies, the MRAP program is an acquisition success story―delivering capability to the warfighter in record time for an acquisition of this magnitude, over a $30 billion program.

In 2005, during my time in the Army’s Rapid Equipping Force, I was a team member in numerous successful rapid (albeit lower dollar) acquisition efforts that delivered capability to warfighters within six months of identifying a requirement. On a much larger scale (on the order of hundreds of millions of dollars per year), as a colonel-level project manager, my project management office successfully ran the Army’s Rapid Fielding Initiative, which provided deploying Soldiers state-of-the-art individual clothing and equipment—first aid kits, ear plugs, flashlights, flame-resistant clothing—based on items available from the commercial marketplace.

TRIPLE CONSTRAINT

However, the pressure to go faster within defense acquisition does not alter the fundamental principles of the PM’s triple constraint—cost, schedule and performance—which limits optimal solutions. Wanting a capability fast involves sacrificing performance and possibly accepting increased costs. Senior leaders fool themselves if they believe that things are somehow magically different with each reform initiative. My wife reminds me of this frequently: “Just saying it more emphatically won’t make it come true.”

Recent acquisition reform initiatives have emphasized the value of prototyping, experimentation, commercial technology, incentives for innovative, partnering with nontraditional defense contractors, and faster contracting approaches. These initiatives can and do have a positive impact for acquisition professionals. Although far from original (each of these practices has been around for decades), focusing on them allows PMs to use these tools more routinely and innovatively with less need for justification. Prototyping and experimentation enable the acquisition enterprise to mature technology, as well as refine requirements and concepts of employment. This enables the delivery of limited capability to the warfighter as early as possible and sets up future programs of record for long-term success because the requirements, technology and funding are on firm footing.

FLEXIBILITY AND EMPOWERMENT―NOT MANDATES

Unfortunately, new initiatives often come with unintended pressure for PMs and often counterproductively limit flexibility and constrain empowerment. As outlined in “DOD Directive 5000.01, The Defense Acquisition System,” PMs need the flexibility to tailor acquisition strategies appropriately depending on urgency of need, technology maturity and availability of resources and funding. An important element of the acquisition strategy is the contracting approach―the selection of the proper contract process and type.

For example, after the cancellation of the Army’s Future Combat Systems in 2009, the Army began the Ground Combat Vehicle program and awarded firm-fixed-price research and development (R&D) contracts to BAE Systems and General Dynamics for designs and prototypes. The new vehicle’s requirements called for a heavy reliance on mature technologies. Firm requirements, commercial technologies and BBP pressure all equated to firm-fixed-price R&D contracts.

However, the government underestimated the difficulty of integrating the components to achieve the desired requirements. The result was the program’s cancellation in 2014 after spending nearly $1.2 billion for designs, with no prototypes delivered and no capability fielded to warfighters. The inappropriate choice of contract type for the program contributed to higher than necessary program risk. In retrospect, a cost-reimbursement contract would have been more appropriate to advance the state of the technology, but the pressure to act in accordance with the BBP initiative was too intense to overcome.

Program managers felt similar pressure to use fixed-price R&D contracts for the Army’s Soldier Protection System. The system consisted of five coordinated efforts to update Soldiers’ equipment, including helmets, ballistic vests, hard armor plates, combat eyewear and an integrated Soldier sensor system. It was the first time the Army attempted to coordinate the improvements in protective equipment so that the systems would be fully integrated―resulting in a modular, scalable, mission-tailorable warfighter capability and achieving a 10 percent reduction in weight.

Each of the five components resulted in the award of up to three competing firm-fixed-price contracts for the delivery of prototypes for testing, demonstration and user field trials. What were the results? The helmet, ballistic vest and hard armor plate efforts each failed to produce products that satisfied the capability the warfighter needed―meeting the minimum ballistic protection requirements with the desired weight savings.

The updated combat eyewear, featuring a lens that could transition from light to dark within a second, could not withstand Soldier field trials―they were fragile and broke too easily. The integrated Soldier sensor system also failed user testing―there were too many wires, and it was too complex for Soldiers to operate. For each of these efforts, the contractors delivered prototypes for testing in accordance with the contract requirements. In each case, the individual technologies within each system were mature. However, when these mature technologies were integrated into a military product and operated by Soldiers in a realistic combat environment, the system was deemed operationally unsuitable―not ready for prime time.

Cost-reimbursable contracts might have created incentives for the contractors to make progress in “ruggedizing” a militarily useful product, rather than incentivizing scheduled delivery for payment.

IT’S ALL IN THE EXECUTION

A poor plan executed vigorously is better than a good plan executed poorly: It’s a very common theme in operational warfighting units. But does it really apply to defense acquisition? In defense acquisition, a poor plan vigorously executed equates to no capability delivery and wasted resources. Similarly, a poorly executed good plan equates to the same. What we need in defense acquisition is good planning and vigorous execution.

A good plan incorporates lessons learned, has flexible on- and off-ramps and delivers capability to the warfighter using an incremental development and procurement approach. The recent acquisition reform initiatives emphasizing the use of other transaction authority (OTA) are a step in the right direction for streamlining acquisition efforts. Contracts based on the Federal Acquisition Regulation remain a barrier to entry into defense contracts for many of today’s most innovative and technologically savvy firms. It is critical to leverage OTA to break down those barriers to entry.

However, OTAs are simply vehicles to speed up the contracting process―ways to avoid cost accounting standards, earned value reporting and the mandatory use of small, disadvantaged, minority-owned and veteran-owned businesses. OTAs avoid these national policy objectives that are part of the FAR.

But speed to contract award should not be the goal―the goal is speed to deliver warfighter capability.

CONCLUSION

Acquisition reform initiatives continue to make a difference, many resulting in delivering capability to the warfighter as quickly as possible. The key to success in acquisition reform is empowering PMs to tailor acquisition strategies based on the urgency of need, technology maturity and available resources.

Just going fast―or increasing the speed of the program―is not the answer. Speed often increases risk in acquisition, resulting in a higher percentage of failed efforts. Speed to contract award, for example through an OTA, has little correlation to fielding militarily useful and suitable products to the warfighter quickly―in fact, it may have the opposite effect. Selecting the proper contracting type and approach results in improved operational warfighter capability in the optimal time, balancing cost, schedule and performance.

A commitment to the education and training of acquisition professionals, as well as the follow-on empowerment of these professionals to do their jobs, promises the best return on investment in helping to speed up defense acquisition. Continued training and education as well as leader development will help solidify the bonds of mutual trust and respect between the acquisition and warfighter communities.

For more information, contact the author at rfmortlo@nps.edu.

ROBERT F. MORTLOCK, PH.D., COL., USA (Ret.), managed defense systems development and acquisition efforts for the last 15 of his 27 years in the U.S. Army, culminating in his assignment as the project manager for Soldier Protection and Individual Equipment in the Program Executive Office for Soldier. He retired in September 2015 and now teaches defense acquisition and program management in the Graduate School of Business and Public Policy at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, California. He holds a Ph.D. in chemical engineering from the University of California, Berkeley, an MBA from Webster University, an M.S. in national resource strategy from the Industrial College of the Armed Forces and a B.S. in chemical engineering from Lehigh University. He is also a recent graduate from the Post-Doctoral Bridge Program of the University of Florida’s Hough Graduate School of Business, with a management specialization. He holds DAWIA Level III certifications in program management, test & evaluation (T&E), and systems planning, research, development & engineering.

Related Links

Current Soldier Protection System page: https://asc.army.mil/web/portfolio-item/soldier-protection-system-sps/

This article is published in the April-May 2019 issue of Army AL&T magazine.

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Maj. Wayne A. Dunlap

COMMAND/ORGANIZATION: Product Manager for Network Modernization; Project Manager for Tactical Network, Program Executive Office for Command, Control and Communications – Tactical
POSITION AND OFFICIAL TITLE: Assistant product manager
YEARS OF SERVICE IN WORKFORCE: 5
YEARS OF MILITARY SERVICE: 14
DAWIA CERTIFICATIONS: Level II in program management
EDUCATION: M.A. in business and organizational management, Webster University; B.A. in computer technology, Purdue University
AWARDS: Bronze Star, Meritorious Service Medal, Army Commendation Medal (three oak leaf clusters), Army Achievement Medal, Iraqi Campaign Medal (two campaigns), Global War on Terrorism Service Medal, Army Service Ribbon, Overseas Service Ribbon with Numeral 2, Gold German Armed Forces Badge for Military Proficiency

by Susan L. Follett

Everyone likes to start off on the right foot in a new position. For uniformed members of the Army Acquisition Workforce, that challenge is a little more urgent. “As military members of the workforce, we’re in our positions from one to three years, while our civilian counterparts can be in the same position for as long as 20 years. That means we have to learn quickly, and it also highlights the importance of showing people you’re invested in the work you’re doing,” said Maj. Wayne Dunlap, assistant product manager with the Program Executive Office for Command, Control and Communications – Tactical (PEO C3T). “Getting to know who you’re working with is a big part of that. Whenever possible, I opt for face-to-face communication over email, and when we field new systems, I’m out there, too, meeting with engineers and commanders and interacting with the Soldiers to get their feedback.”

As assistant product manager for Network Modernization within the Project Manager for Tactical Network, Dunlap manages the Army’s Signal Modernization product line and the Disaster Incident Response Emergency Communications Terminal. Both efforts provide modernized network communications and connectivity to Army, Army Reserve and Army National Guard units.

Dunlap is responsible for the cost, schedule, performance and life cycle management support of six rapid acquisition programs: the Modular Communications Node – Advanced Enclave; Commercial Coalition Equipment; secure 4G LTE; secure tactical Wi-Fi; the Terrestrial Line of Sight Radio; and the Troposcatter system. “These are line-of-sight and beyond-line-of-sight tactical network transport systems that improve the expeditionary nature of today’s forces and increase unit mobility,” he said. “They also increase operational flexibility and harden the network by providing commanders signal path diversity in contested network environments.”

Additionally, he leads a team of 80 people in synchronizing and integrating production and fielding activities for those systems. “Ensuring that we have the right network design to enable synchronization of signal modernization capability with a unit’s existing network is critical to ensuring unit readiness and preventing problems from manifesting themselves in the field,” said Dunlap, who has been with PEO C3T since 2016.

“What I like most about my job is knowing that our team is working hard to improve the way the Army conducts mission command and exchanges voice, video and data on the battlefield. We are reducing the size, weight and power of our tactical network transport systems while making them easier for Soldiers to operate, train on and maintain,” he said. “We are rapidly delivering commercial off-the-shelf systems that Soldiers can count on in their time of need. Our products enable commanders at all echelons to conduct expeditionary mission command at every phase of operations, keeping Soldiers connected and informed in the face of increasingly capable adversaries.”

Dunlap served with the Military Police before joining the acquisition workforce. “I was serving my second company command at the Midwest Joint Regional Correctional Facility at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, when I realized that I wanted to transfer to a functional branch. After conducting research and talking to my professional mentors, I concluded that the FA51 [Army Acquisition officer] was the best choice for my career and could help me acquire valuable skills for a future transition to civilian life.” His first acquisition position was with the Mission and Installation Contracting Command (MICC) Fort Leavenworth, where he served as contract management officer. “I really enjoyed working for MICC,” he said. “It provided me the opportunity to work with several customers on the installation by awarding contracts with a realized savings to the taxpayer.”

The switch from MICC to PEO C3T moved Dunlap from contracting to program management, a transition that was smoothed in part by the Project Management Professional (PMP) credential he earned from the Project Management Institute. Earning the certification requires a significant time investment for studying and test preparation, and culminates in a 200-question, four-hour exam. “I’m grateful that my leadership at the time was supportive of me earning the PMP credential and was very flexible in letting me adjust my schedule to prepare for the exam,” Dunlap said, noting that he has paid that forward by helping others prepare for and earn the PMP credential.

“The certification framework is very similar to the certifications we’re required to have for the Army Acquisition Workforce,” Dunlap noted. “To maintain my credential, I have to earn professional development units during designated reporting cycles. That’s similar to the continuous learning points and the DAWIA certification requirements in the Acquisition Corps. Both requirements help me stay relevant in my profession.”

Dunlap’s other career and personal development activities include volunteering at the Baltimore chapter for the Project Management Institute and participating in his local Toastmasters chapter. “As officers, we’re expected to do a lot of public speaking—talking with those in our unit, for example, or briefing senior leadership. I realized that I needed to be better at that, and Toastmasters has really helped me become more confident in my public speaking skills.”

When he’s not at work, you might find him running: He has completed more than 20 marathons, half-marathons and shorter races, and is training for the Army 10-Miler in October. “The most important thing I’ve learned is to have a great work-life balance. I make sure to leave all the stress of work in the office and not bring it home to my family. I apply this same principle with my team. I let them know that work will always be there and they should take care of themselves and their loved ones first.”

“Faces of the Force” is an online series highlighting members of the Army Acquisition Workforce through the power of individual stories. Profiles are produced by the U.S. Army Acquisition Support Center Communication and Support Branch, working closely with public affairs officers to feature Soldiers and civilians serving in various AL&T disciplines. For more information, or to nominate someone, please contact 703-664-5635.

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Sarah Mullins

COMMAND/ORGANIZATION: Product Office for Command Centers, Installation Information Infrastructure Modernization Program, Project Manager for Defense Communications and Army Transmission Systems, Program Executive Office for Enterprise Information Systems
TITLE: Deputy product officer
YEARS OF SERVICE IN WORKFORCE: 7
YEARS OF MILITARY SERVICE: 11
DAWIA CERTIFICATIONS: Level III in program management and Level I in information technology; Army Acquisition Corps member
EDUCATION: Master of public administration in homeland security, Clemson University (expected August 2019); B.S. in criminology, Florida State University
AWARDS: Bronze Star Medal, Meritorious Service Medal, four Army Commendation Medals, three Army Achievement Medals, Valorous Unit Award, National Defense Service Medal, Afghanistan Campaign Medal, two Iraq Campaign Medals, Global War on Terrorism Expeditionary Medal, Global War on Terrorism Service Medal, Army Service Medal, three Overseas Ribbons, NATO Medal

By Susan L. Follett

Sarah Mullins has seen acquisition from a lot of different perspectives: During more than 11 years on active duty, she spent nearly eight years in the Signal Corps and then four years in the Acquisition Corps. She left active duty as a captain and returned to acquisition as an Army civilian. She now serves as deputy product officer for the Installation Information Infrastructure Modernization Program’s Product Office for Command Centers, within the Program Executive Office for Enterprise Information Systems (PEO EIS). Her husband, Maj. Jason Mullins, is also part of the acquisition workforce, and began his acquisition career as assistant product manager for Nett Warrior at PEO Soldier.

From those experiences, she has learned two things. First, it’s important to remain open to change, to rapidly adapt to new information and conditions. Second, Soldiers and civilians could stand to learn a little bit more about each other. “Soldiers don’t understand why it takes so long to get what they need. They don’t realize that everything they see is the product of the acquisition process, and they’re not familiar with the checks and balances of the system,” said Mullins.

“I’ve encountered many civilians in acquisition who don’t understand how the Army functions at lower echelons,” she added. “The Civilian Education System is a good start, but not enough. Acquisition civilians need to leave their desks and see how their work directly impacts the Soldier. I know that not everyone can travel internationally, but you don’t need to go overseas to see that—in many cases, you can visit an Army base in the U.S. and learn how the Army operates at the division and below.”

Now in her fourth year as an acquisition civilian, Mullins leads global supply chain and materials acquisition operations and spearheads development and implementation of acquisition strategies, spending plans and process engineering strategies. On the surface, her work is about using technology to connect the Army. “In truth, much of my time is spent on developing networks between diverse groups of subject matter experts to build coalitions,” she said. “By encouraging collaboration and building strategic relationships, we are able to accomplish the Army’s mission.”

Most people don’t know the scale of the work that goes into building the Army a modernized network infrastructure for global connectivity and critical cybersecurity, Mullins said. “They’re surprised at the number of teams of software and network engineers, program managers, logisticians, IT [information technology] specialists and cyber security experts working behind the scenes for the Soldier to connect the Army.”

Among the biggest projects in Mullins’ career is a tech refresh for the Strategic Command Center at the U.S. Southern Command (SOUTHCOM) headquarters in Miami, which was completed in August 2018. She managed the design, engineering, installation, test and delivery of an information infrastructure system tailored specifically for SOUTHCOM. The new system provides IT solutions to support DOD’s Global Command and Control System – Joint, which provides the communications, computing and data infrastructure that integrates and presents combat support information to the warfighter on a single computer using the Common Operational Picture – Combat Support Environment. “We were able to see combatant commanders use the system in an exercise with deployed forces—that kind of firsthand experience is invaluable for our team,” she said.

Mullins noted that her outgoing personality facilitates cooperation and motivates team members. But it wasn’t always the case, she said. “When I first joined PEO EIS as a Soldier, I asked people a lot of questions about what they were doing, and some people were a little defensive. They thought I was trying to take their job, when in reality I was trying to understand how all the pieces fit together.” PEO EIS’s structure helped with that, she said, noting that the organization has G-1, -2 and -3 sections similar to an Army unit. She also learned that working with civilians necessitates a different style of communication. “In an Army line unit, you might have disagreements with your fellow Soldiers but we all understand that we have each other’s backs. In an acquisition organization that’s mostly civilians, it takes longer to build trust. I’ve learned how to be a better communicator and the importance of developing relationships.”

Her work requires her to identify the factors impacting the project and to act quickly to gain cooperation and build consensus, she explained, as well as creative tension and the free expression of different opinions. “But as a leader, I need to anticipate when to take steps to prevent counterproductive confrontations in order to manage and resolve conflicts constructively.” A little humor helps, she found. “I use humor to help others to remain resilient, so they can recover quickly from setbacks and remain optimistic and persistent, even under the adversity of continuously changing environments.”

For Mullins, being part of the Army Acquisition Workforce “requires an entrepreneurial spirit. The Army’s combat readiness depends on us to identify new opportunities to develop or improving products or services. We need to rapidly identify and analyze problems, weigh the relevancy and accuracy of all available information, and then take the necessary calculated risks to accomplish the Army’s mission.”

Accomplishing that mission requires the ability to understand and apply Army acquisition principles, procedures, requirements and policies, she said, “to develop new insights into unique situations. You will need to question conventional approaches and encourage your teams to seek out innovative solutions to implement.”

This article is published in the April-June 2019 issue of Army AL&T magazine.

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The Army needs vehicles to be robotic ready for the future force.

by Bryan J. McVeigh and Mark Mazzara

Robotic mules that follow Soldiers to carry and charge their gear. Remotely piloted aircraft giving Soldiers real-time intelligence. Standoff systems to let Soldiers investigate and neutralize explosives from the safety of an MRAP. Not too long ago such capabilities were the stuff of movies, but that future is here today—and shifts in the character of warfare could revolutionize the future for tomorrow’s Soldiers in ways we can hardly imagine. Army leaders describe a future environment marked by great power competition, rapid technological evolution, incredible speed and the advent of autonomy-enabled technologies. In some ways, that era—for ourselves, our allies and our adversaries—has already arrived, and we have to plan now so that our programs are prepared for a future, highly robotic battlefield.

In fact, over the last 40 years, the prevalence of software and digital controls in commercial cars, trucks, construction and mining vehicles and recreational vehicles has greatly increased. This has improved the functionality and features of those base systems. Along the way, commercial investment drove down the cost of many technologies—making them relatively easy and cost-effective to apply to military systems and enable the growth of modern robotic systems. While this transformation has taken place largely in the commercial sphere, the Army has not been able to take full advantage of these commercial trends—primarily because of the long life cycles of its systems. It usually takes the Army a lot longer to field a new truck, for example, than consumer-focused companies. By the time the new Army truck hits the field, its onboard electronics may already be out of date, and that makes it hard to add the latest technology—which today means robotics. That reality must change, and it is clear that change is on the way.

APPLIED ROBOTICS

Making our systems “robotic ready” begins by ensuring the Army acquisition community and stakeholders understand design considerations for manned systems to support subsequent robotics and autonomous applique kits or technologies. An applique kit is a package that can be added to an existing system to provide additional capability. Armor applique kits, for example, provide Army vehicles with a higher level of protection. Autonomous applique kits provide advanced behavior, such as unmanned navigation and mobility. The possibilities range from managing data to augment a Soldier’s cognitive capability, to increasing system safety, to more fully autonomous mission applications in bridging, breaching and other activities. Whatever the system, with the right effort, the Army can tangibly improve its ability to integrate robotic and autonomous capabilities into existing equipment and future systems and save money in the process—if program managers include the appropriate “hooks” early in the design process.

Fortunately, the hooks we need are widely available today on commercial cars and trucks. They include digital backbones, by-wire steering and braking, electronically controlled transmissions, digital controls of key actuators, telematics and active safety systems. (“By-wire” means electronically controlled—by-wire braking is controlled by a vehicle’s onboard computers, for example, as opposed to physical brakes pushed by a human.) Industry has paved the way, and the Army can capitalize with its own investment if it carefully plans for integration now, as opposed to waiting until later and incurring higher costs because of a more complex integration. Including autonomy-enabling technologies up front in either new procurements or service-life extension programs will allow for the integration of unmanned technologies into a system (whether it’s a truck, plane or boat) in a more efficient and cost-effective manner, while also offering immediate advantages to the system’s maintenance and sustainment.

Small- and medium-sized teleoperated ground robots, like the PackBot and Talon families of robots, and large teleoperated mine flails are now commonplace in the Army. Robotic mules and semiautonomous trucks are on track to be in formations within a few years. Moving forward, as the Army accelerates the fielding of robotics and autonomous system capabilities across a variety of formations and demonstrates their real value, it is easy to see how they can increase their range of mission applications. Army technologists envision the same types of technology applied to a variety of existing systems—from construction vehicles to material handling equipment; from mine-protected vehicles to tactical trucks; and from armored combat systems to watercraft.

The Army’s Route Clearance Interrogation System (RCIS) Type I is a good example of adding robotic capabilities to an existing system—enabling the unmanned operation of the existing High-Mobility Engineering Excavator Type I (HMEE-I). The HMEE-I operates using manual hydraulic controls and some limited drive-by-wire controls. In 2017, the Army prepared to seek bids for a technology applique kit to turn the manned excavator into one that could be robotically operated. First, it converted the hydraulic controls of the HMEE into digital controls. Then it converted the remaining automotive functions to become drive-by-wire rather than manually activated. This conversion—which took more than five years and cost nearly $8 million—resulted in a new variant of the HMEE-I called the Delta HMEE, or D-HMEE. There are numerous other examples of digitization and drive-by-wire conversions: The Combat Capabilities Development Command’s Ground Vehicle Systems Center (part of Army Futures Command) worked with Torc Robotics to convert a 120M Motor Grader to autonomous control, while Caterpillar has developed teleoperation conversion kits for its D7R-II bulldozer. While a project manager can develop these retrofit kits after the fact, it is far more efficient to integrate applique kits and technologies if the underlying digital controls are already in place on the base platform.

The Route Clearance Interrogation System (RCIS) Type I is an optionally manned or unmanned High Mobility Engineering Excavator (HMEE) capable of enabling Soldiers to semi-autonomously interrogate, excavate, and classify deep buried explosive hazards, IEDs, and caches. The RCIS capability provides an applique suite of hardware and software identified as a Semi-Autonomous Control kit to the HMEE and the Buffalo vehicles. This enables unmanned control of the HMEE from the Buffalo. It also provides for a dismounted capability for the Soldier located outside the Buffalo. (Graphic courtesy of PEO Combat Support & Combat Service Support.)

ADDING AUTONOMY

For new programs and service-life extension programs, combat developers and program managers (PMs) should consider designing their systems to be “autonomy ready” from the beginning. By including relatively low-cost by-wire technologies in the base configuration, PMs will make it vastly easier and cheaper to add autonomous capabilities later. So what do they need to include?

Serial data bus and commercial safety technologies. A serial data bus is a medium that enables the transfer of a sequence of information one bit at a time; this is a simple thing to include in performance specifications up front to make adding autonomy easier down the road. A serial data bus can enable the implementation of various robotic functions and can be built upon later to provide enhanced capability. Another quick-win requirement to include in performance specifications is commercially available active-safety technology. Technologies like anti-lock braking systems, electronic stability control, collision mitigation braking, automatic lane detection and warning, blind spot warning, reverse cameras and path displays and others are widely available—most cars today carry some or all of these. They provide significant safety performance enhancements and set the foundation for adding active safety, unmanned or autonomous capabilities in the future.

Digitization or drive-by-wire. PMs should include by-wire specific requirements in the development process based on the abilities of the vehicle and expected uses. Selection of by-wire components are heavily dependent on the particular base vehicle, and do not usually make sense as “bolt-on” kits if fully unmanned functionality is required. For example, if acquiring a dump truck, the Army should consider not only by-wire control of the system’s steering, braking and transmission but also by-wire control of the dumping system actuators.

Interoperability compliance. Platforms with a high likelihood of someday needing to provide unmanned or optionally manned functionality should consider requiring that interfaces be compliant with the Robotics and Autonomous Systems, Ground Interoperability Profile. The Army developed the profile with its industry partners to provide known interfaces for interoperating with robotic and autonomous systems. Acquiring a system that already complies with the interoperability profile will allow significant ease in adding autonomous capability.

Physical interfaces. Systems engineers should consider using commercial standards such as the Society of Automotive Engineers and the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers to define physical interfaces for applique kit integration. They should also leave enough physical space for the later inclusion of applique hardware such as radios, computers, and associated electrical wiring and connections.

On-board diagnostics. PMs should require that on-board diagnostics systems come with the base configuration. This has the direct advantage of improving maintenance, sustainment and safety. The indirect advantage is that the sensors and data needed for diagnostics offer a foundation for providing unmanned capabilities to the system in the future.

Of course, integrating so many new technologies can affect other operations and functions of a system and does require some additional considerations. PMs should ensure that systems are built to the most rigorous standards available. Have the manufacturer run extra fault-injection tests, and make sure the contractor supplies data from those tests, plus safety artifacts such as failure mode diagrams.

The Leader Follower capability is a suite of robotic applique sensors and vehicle by-wire and active safety upgrades to provide an unmanned capability to the Palletized Load System A1 Fleet of vehicles for future convoy operations. It aims to reduce the number of Soldiers required to operate a convoy, thereby decreasing the number exposed to risk of injury from attack. (U.S. Army photos.)

COUNTING THE COST

One of the great benefits of leveraging advancements in commercial technology is that market forces and industrial investment have already driven down the cost of of many—but not all—technologies. Requirements developers and PMs should conduct market research to determine what the cost implications are of including robotics-ready technologies in their base configurations. The D-HMEE development effort cost the Army roughly $8 million in research, development, test and evaluation over about five years. In hindsight, that total funding amount could have been reduced based on lessons learned throughout the development, but the level of effort to convert any non-digital systems into unmanned systems is significant and makes funding hard to predict. The product cost of converting a base HMEE Type I to a D-HMEE configuration is approximately $75, 000. The government estimates that if the D-HMEEs had been produced as new production systems, the per-system cost would be around $25, 000 higher than the HMEE Type I. Which is to say that in this case the total cost of getting an unmanned system by building a basic system first then modifying it is considerably lower than building an unmanned system from scratch.

Taking into account safety, some analysts believe that the drive-by-wire and active safety systems would provide a return on investment by themselves by preventing accidents and the associated costs. These analysts believe that safety systems built into the original product by its manufacturer, as opposed to add-on by-wire, have the ability to be more reliable (directly controlling braking without needing to add hardware), are less obtrusive to humans (no protruding hardware in the human compartment), and are more capable (some vehicle actions are difficult to control after the fact).

Finally, by-wire systems may also substantially reduce overall operation and sustainment costs. Digitization can posture programs better for condition-based maintenance and the integration of multifunctional video displays, not to mention a reduction in total system part counts. Condition-based maintenance (also known as vehicle telematics) provide prognostics that tell users ahead of time if maintenance or replacement will be needed. This is only possible with modern components, i.e. those part of by-wire systems.

CONCLUSION

Planning and designing Army systems for future by-wire technologies holds a wide range of potential value in enhanced capability and reduced costs. Opportunities abound to use current technology—in addition to thoughtful design for the future—to capitalize on our ability to accelerate more effective capabilities to the force. Analysts anticipate industry will offer digitization on a continually higher percentage of systems on the market, and as Army acquisition professionals, we play an important role in informing programs and shaping the future force. While robotic and autonomous capability additions may incur some costs, the long-term advantages may warrant consideration of including the technologies in the near-term—even if they are not an explicit operational requirement.

For more information, please visit www.peocscss.army.mil

BRYAN J. MCVEIGH is the project manager for Force Projection within Program Executive Office (PEO) Combat Support & Combat Service Support (CS&CSS). A retired Army colonel, he holds a master’s degree in systems acquisition management from the Naval Postgraduate School and is Level III certified in program management. He also is certified as a Project Management Professional by the Program Management Institute.

MARK MAZZARA is the interoperability lead for robotics within PM Force Projection, PEO CS&CSS. He has previously held a variety of systems engineering positions in the Tank and Automotive Research Development and Engineering Center, PEO Ground Combat Systems and PEO CS&CSS, and he served in 2014 as the Department of the Army systems coordinator for robotics in the Pentagon. He holds an M.S. in systems engineering and a B.S. in mechanical engineering, both from Oakland University, and is Level III certified in systems engineering and in program management.

This article is published in the April-June 2019 issue of Army AL&T magazine.

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FORT BELVOIR, Va. (March 25, 2019)—Army AL&T, the award-winning magazine of the assistant secretary of the Army for acquisition, logistics and technology, announced today the winners of its annual “ALTies,” honoring the best article, commentary, graphic, ad and photograph that appeared in the magazine in 2018.

The Readers’ Choice Award, given to Army AL&T’s most-read article, goes to Col. Joe Capobianco and Col. David Phillips for their commentary “Aggressive. Innovative. Fast.” Their article, submitted by the Army’s Rapid Capabilities and Critical Technologies Office (RCCTO) and Special Operations Forces Acquisition, Technology and Logistics (SOF AT&L), examined the strengths and limitations of the Special Operations Command acquisition model, and captured 1,000 more reads than any other of the magazine’s 2018 articles.

Just as in 2017, the Program Executive Office (PEO) for Command, Control and Communications – Tactical (C3T) was the only multiple winner, nabbing two ALTies. Lt. Col. Mark Henderson won his second ALTie in two years, this time for Best Commentary for “From Idea to Front Line in Record Time” in the April– June 2018 issue. PEO C3T’s Bridget Lynch was the runner-up in Best Commentary, for “PM Perspective: Want Faster Acquisition?”, while PEO C3T’s Amy Walker won Best Photo for “Thank you for your input,” in “Fortified by Feedback” in the April – June 2018 issue.

The winner for Best Article was “Analytical Framework: A Space for Trading,” by Gail Cayce-Adams and Michael Kierzewski of the Joint PEO for Chemical, Biological, Radiological and Nuclear Defense (JPEO-CBRND). Their article describes the analytical framework created by JPEO-CBRND to better manage its portfolio of products. The Best Graphic was “All Hands,” an image created by Scott Sundsvold of PEO Enterprise Information Systems (EIS) that appeared in the April – June 2018 issue.

While a number of Army AL&T’s articles are written by magazine staff, most come from the experts of the Army Acquisition Workforce. These are articles that were eligible for the ALTies.

“We get overall thematic guidance from the Army acquisition executive and the Editorial Advisory Board for each issue, but it’s the subject-matter experts who actually do the work and write the articles that make Army AL&T a superb magazine,” said Nelson McCouch, editor in chief of Army AL&T. “Seeing acquisition from their perspective turns dry doctrine and policy into insightful, useful storytelling.

“I started the ALTies back in 2012 as a way to recognize these contributors who put in the extra time and effort to keep us updated on what is going on in acquisition, and I’m proud to say the contributions have only gotten better over time.”

Want to see your name on next year’s ALTies list? Write an article or commentary, or design an ad for your organization, and send it to us at https://asc.army.mil/web/publications/army-alt-submissions/. Not only will you boost the profile of your organization, and share lessons with the community, but you could wind up with a new award to display.

The nominees for the 2018 awards were selected based on traffic to the e-magazine, Army.mil and the Army AL&T News blog. Voting was conducted online. To read the e-magazine, subscribe, or download the mobile app, go to https://asc.army.mil/web/publications/army-alt-magazine/.

By the way, Army AL&T is rolling out a new platform for the Army AL&T e-magazine. The new site makes it easier to read, share and save the commentary, analyses and workforce development news you rely on—and contribute. In addition to making Army AL&T easy to navigate on a desktop computer, the new platform uses a mobile-friendly format to make the magazine just as easy to read on a smartphone or tablet. The January – March 2019 issue is now available in this new format: https://asc.army.mil/armyalt/January-March2019/. Starting April 1, links from usaasc.armyalt.com will redirect readers to the main magazine page on asc.army.mil: https://asc.army.mil/web/publications/army-alt-magazine/.

Here’s the complete list of ALTies winners for 2018:

READER’S CHOICE

Winner: “Aggressive. Innovative. Fast.,” Col. Joe Capobianco and Col. David Phillips, Army Rapid Capabilities and Critical Technologies Office and Special Operations Forces Acquisition, Technology and Logistics, July – September 2018

BEST ARTICLE

Winner: “Analytical Framework: A Space for Trading,” Gail Cayce-Adams and Michael Kierzewski, JPEO-CBRND, July – September 2018

Runner-up: “The ‘Armyzon’ Equation,” Lt. Col. Rachael Hoagland, Training With Industry Fellow, April – June 2018

Runner-up: “World-Class Tech, According to Plan,” Argie Sarantinos-Perrin, U.S. Army Combat Capabilities Development Command, January – March 2018

BEST COMMENTARY

Winner: “From Idea to Front Line in Record Time,” Lt. Col. Mark P. Henderson, PEO C3T, April – June 2018

Runner-up: “PM Perspective: Want Faster Acquisition?,” Bridget Lynch, PEO C3T, July – September 2018

BEST GRAPHIC

Winner: “All Hands,” in “Lessons Learned in Modernization,” Scott Sundsvold, PEO EIS, April – June 2018

Runner-up: “A one-stop shop for all of your acquisition career needs,” Contributing organization: U.S. Army Director, Acquisition Career Management Office, October – December 2018

BEST PHOTO

Winner: “Thank you for your input,” in “Fortified by Feedback,” Photographer: Amy Walker, PEO C3T, April – June 2018

Runner-up: “Fog of War,” in “Radical Futures,” Photographer: Robert DeMarco, U.S. Army Armament Research, Development and Engineering Center, July – September 2018

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Antoinette J. Freeland

COMMAND/ORGANIZATION: Product Manager for Installation Information Infrastructure Modernization, Project Manager for Defense Communications and Army Transmission Systems, Program Executive Office for Enterprise Information Systems
TITLE: Product officer
YEARS OF SERVICE IN WORKFORCE: 20
DAWIA CERTIFICATIONS: Level III in program management and in test and evaluation; Level I in information technology; member of the Army Acquisition Corps
EDUCATION: B.A. in psychology, Marymount University
AWARDS: Army Superior Civilian Service Award

by Susan L. Follett

Interested in being a product officer? Here’s what it takes: “If I were hiring someone for my job, I’d look for someone with a variety of acquisition experience, good attention to detail and strong communication and problem-solving skills. Communication is a big part of the job, but often a skill that people overlook,” said Antoinette “Toni” Freeland, a product director for the Program Executive Office for Enterprise Information Systems (PEO EIS). “The biggest challenge I face is bringing together the different organizations from different backgrounds and getting them to understand and work toward a common goal—serving as a mediator to ensure that all of a project’s stakeholders, including the product office team, are speaking a common language and working toward the schedule with the same urgency.”

Freeland and her team are assigned to the Product Manager for the Installation Information Infrastructure Modernization Program (I3MP) under the Project Manager for Defense Communications and Army Transmission Systems. Their job is to support joint warfighters and mission command centers with emerging information technology (IT) and secure infrastructure systems through life cycle management, supporting Army and joint networks. “A Soldier’s ability to shoot, move and communicate depends on a reliable, unified network, and mission success depends on coordinated communications to ensure that the right level of combat power is at the right place, at the right time,” she said. “All this communication is transported over the Army’s network—nothing works without it.”

When she tells people what she does for a living, Freeland noted, “People are often surprised by how driven the Army acquisition staff is to own and get after problems. For some people, it is a change in mindset from top-down, stovepipe-driven directives to creative, outside-the-foxhole thinking that produces results for our Soldiers. I always remind people that it’s Soldiers who we’re working for.”

She has been with PEO EIS for almost five years, starting as chief of the Acquisition Management Division. Her introduction to defense acquisition came 15 years before that, when a contractor hired her as a software test analyst supporting the Joint Interoperability Test Command’s work on the Global Command and Control System – Joint. “I was fascinated by the processes that took a military need from the requirements phase through development into testing, and then deployment to the Soldier,” she said. “The realization that I could be part of the process that helped Soldiers do their jobs more effectively while also ensuring their safety while they executed their mission was important to me, and it was something I wanted to contribute to.”

In looking back over those two decades, she noted that the biggest change she has seen is one of perspective. “More people are recognizing that IT programs are not like traditional acquisition programs and do not progress the same way through conventional acquisition processes. As a result, you’re also starting to see new processes for addressing that difference.”

Freeland served as product officer for the Product Office for Command Centers during the late 2018 installation of the mission command information infrastructure at the 82nd Airborne Division Headquarters at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, the first headquarters in the Army at that level to receive the new system. The 82nd Airborne received a command center that will enable it to conduct expeditionary, uninterrupted mission command during all operational phases.

Freeland led a team that included software and network engineers, program managers, logisticians, IT specialists and cybersecurity experts from I3MP, the U.S. Army Information Systems Engineering Command, Tobyhanna Army Depot and industry integrators. She called the project—her first as a product officer—one of the most important of her career.

“Executing mission command from home station is a new capability that the Army is delivering for a more powerful and reliable capability than those of any opposing force to date. The 82nd is part of the Global Response Force, which means that it must have a battalion ready at all times to deploy anywhere in the world within 18 hours,” she explained. “The capability that we were able to give them directly supports that mission, and it was the first time I had been part of providing a program that directly supported readiness and our country’s safety.”

Her career has also given her the opportunity to mentor and advise junior acquisition professionals. “My advice is to take individual responsibility to develop your technical and acquisition skills in different areas of expertise. You will need a variety of skills to get after the solutions to sustain our networks and our business systems to support Soldiers wherever they operate,” she said.

“The Army places the right people in the right place at the right time to execute its mission. Those missions create opportunities for professional and personal growth. If you’re given an opportunity to take on a developmental assignments to increase your breadth of experience, embrace it and you will be better for it.”

It’s also important to know what you don’t know, she added. “What I’ve learned over the past 20 years is that you do not need to know everything there is to know about an acquisition position at the start. What you need to know is how to access and learn the information you need to do the job at hand. No two acquisition programs are the same, so no two sets of experiences will be the same.”

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Information is just a click away on DAU website with acquisition digital prototypes and Other Transactions Guide.

by Michael Bold

You’re a program or project manager facing myriad choices when it comes to the acquisition process. Should you use a traditional Federal Acquisition Regulation-based model? Or perhaps an other transaction authority? A rapid prototyping-rapid fielding approach? Which type of contracting strategy should you use—a task order/delivery order? A blanket purchase agreement?

Finding the best approach is now a little less murky thanks to a set of acquisition digital prototypes produced by the Office of the Undersecretary of Defense for Acquisition and Sustainment (OUSD(A&S)) and MITRE Corp. and hosted on the Defense Acquisition University (DAU) website.

The acquisition digital prototypes—the Adaptive Acquisition Framework and the Contracting Cone, as well as an Other Transactions (OT) Guide—were rolled out in late 2018, and are easy-to-use, interactive tools.

The Adaptive Acquisition Framework shows the many different paths an acquisition program can follow and lets users click through the details for each path. Additional pathways, tailored models and new content will be added over time.

The Contracting Cone outlines the full spectrum of Federal Acquisition Regulation (FAR) and non-FAR contract strategies, and supporting materials provide details about each strategy. The goal of the tool is to provide visibility into new or lesser-known strategies and ensure that the full range of contract strategies is considered. Eventually, “our hope is that every part of the cone will be clickable,” said Samuel N. Parks, communications and program analyst at DAU.

The Other Transactions (OT) Guide provides an overview of OTs—legal acquisition instruments other than contracts, grants or cooperative agreements that offer a streamlined method for carrying out prototype projects and transitioning successes into follow-on production—in addition to real-world examples. The guide also includes 10 “myth busters” that debunk some of the most common misconceptions about OTs.

Also available on the DAU website is a 10-episode “Other Transaction Mythbusting Video Series” by DAU Professor Diane Sidebottom, who came to DAU from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) and was involved in writing the OT Guide. Congress first authorized the use of OTs in 1958, with the legislation that created NASA. Congress allowed DARPA to use OTs in 1989, and their use was extended to the military services in 1996.

Feedback on the prototypes has been “really positive,” said Parks. Nearly 20,000 users have visited the website since it went live in December, he said, and several users across DOD plan to incorporate the tools into contracting and acquisition training programs.

IT’S ALL ABOUT OPTIONS

The acquisition digital prototype was driven by Ben FitzGerald and others in the OUSD(A&S). (FitzGerald has since left the Pentagon for a private business opportunity.) FitzGerald is a former senior fellow at the Center for a New American Security and Senate Armed Services Committee staffer who was brought to the Pentagon in December 2017 by the Hon. Ellen M. Lord, the USD(A&S), to oversee the splitting of the Office of the Undersecretary of Defense for Acquisition, Technology and Logistics into the USD(A&S) and the USD for Research and Engineering. As a Senate staffer, FitzGerald helped write a requirement in the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) for Fiscal Year 2017 for “digitized acquisition policy.” The prototype on the DAU website is an outgrowth of that policy.

“One of the things that we are attempting to do as we implement acquisition reforms is to provide a more flexible acquisition framework, which is where we’ve come up with this concept of an adaptive acquisition framework that allows programs to apply the right tools, the right acquisition policy, the right contracting tool, to the program that they are running. Because we recognize that there’s a wide variety of programs and multiple valid ways to deliver those programs,” FitzGerald told Army AL&T in December. “So in seeking to do that in terms of seeking to provide more options, we needed to find ways to communicate those options in a way that is hopefully easily understood and easy to share and communicate.”

Spurred by acquisition reforms built into the NDAAs passed by Congress from FY16 through FY19—“There is a historic quantity of acquisition reform in those NDAAs,” FitzGerald said—the USD(A&S) “wanted to focus on being a data-driven policy and governance organization. And we saw, as we shifted to that, we felt the need to have ways to communicate our policy in more flexible ways and in ways that allowed us to do easier analysis of the policy itself.”

More online tools are on the way, beginning with one on middle-tier acquisition, although the timing is uncertain.

The focus from the get-go was collaboration and simplification, FitzGerald said. “When we did the OT guide, we intentionally brought in representatives from DARPA, from the Defense Innovation Unit, from DASA(P) [Deputy Assistant Secretary of the Army for Procurement] within the Army, equivalent organizations in the Air Force and Navy, from DAU, to make sure that we were writing a product that was optimized for the users … you know, the people who were actually going to be agreements officers, or who were in industry trying to understand how the agreements will get put together, those types of things.”

DAU’s role as a “central hub for acquisition knowledge” was particularly important, FitzGerald said. “We want to make sure that they are involved in all of that policy development so that they can inform us, as the policy writers, on what they’re learning from students, what students are saying, and those types of things. And so that they understand from the outset how we were thinking about developing the policy, so they can communicate that back to their students, almost in real time.”

CONCLUSION

In the end, though, it’s the acquisition workforce that will decide the future of such prototyping efforts. “So what we’re seeking to learn over the course of this year is how much does the acquisition workforce value these types of tools?” FitzGerald said. “Because if we want to do that on an ongoing basis, it’s going to require a lot of effort to make sure that everything is up to date and consistent and internally linked and all of that.

“So we’re putting it out there as a prototype and if the acquisition workforce really values it, then we’ll be able to make an argument for further investment in it. But if the acquisition workforce is fine with PDFs, then we can keep doing that, too.”

For more information, go to the DAU website at https://www.dau.mil/.

MICHAEL BOLD provides contract support to the U.S. Army Acquisition Support Center. He is a writer/editor for Network Runners Inc., with more than 30 years of editing experience at newspapers, including the McClatchy Washington Bureau, The Sacramento Bee, the San Jose Mercury News, the Dallas Morning News and the Fort Worth Star-Telegram. He holds a Bachelor of Journalism from the University of Missouri.

This article is published in the April-June 2019 issue of Army AL&T magazine.

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THEN & NOW

1981 and 2018

Next generation on track

Bradley replacement promises to take a technological leap into the future fight.

By Margaret C. Roth and Jacqueline M. Hames

The Bradley Fighting Vehicle of the past nearly 40 years, which, with the M1 Abrams tank, spearheaded the coalition victory over Iraq in Operation Desert Storm, is destined to be a part of history before long. In its place will be a member of the Next Generation Combat Vehicle (NGCV) family, a work in progress at the top of the list for the Army’s high-priority, multipart combat vehicle modernization initiative.

The Bradley has undergone four major upgrades since its introduction in 1981, said Brig. Gen. Ross Coffman, “and what we’ve seen to date is that the Bradley has been upgraded really to its limit.” Coffman, director of the Next Generation Combat Vehicle Cross-Functional Team for the U.S. Army Futures Command, spoke with Army AL&T on Feb. 7. “Those were extremely effective and really have served the Army in a great, great way in every battlefield I’ve been on,” he said. “But we can’t look backward, we’ve got to look forward.”

The armored personnel carrier of the future, officially being developed as the Optionally Manned Fighting Vehicle, will be stealthy, adaptable and able to defeat enemy fire, as Coffman described it. Perhaps most important, it will be easy to upgrade. “ ‘Upgradability’ is king,” he said.

Upgradability will be important for the other four elements of the new ground combat vehicle, as well: the Armored Multipurpose Vehicle, replacing the M113 Armored Personnel Carrier, which also cannot accommodate any more upgrades; the Mobile Protected Firepower light tank; the Robotic Combat Vehicle; and the Optionally Manned Tank.

GETTING AHEAD OF THE FUTURE

The Bradley M2 and M3 Infantry and Cavalry Fighting Vehicles, respectively, were not quite in production when the Army began laying the groundwork for the generation to follow. An article in the May-June 1981 edition of Army RD&A, the predecessor to Army AL&T, described efforts by the U.S. Army Tank-Automotive Command (TACOM) to explore with Soldiers and industry the technological capabilities that Army combat vehicles would need on the future battlefield … of the mid-1990s.

In “Fighting Vehicles: The Next Generation,” Clifford D. Bradley, then-chief of the Exploratory Development Division of TACOM’s Tank-Automotive Concepts Laboratory, described a May 21, 1980, all-day presolicitation conference that his laboratory hosted to discuss future close-combat vehicles with some 220 representatives from industry and government. “The objective of the conference was to bring the best ‘brains’ of industry together for the specific purpose of inviting them to look at the challenge of the follow-on vehicles,” the aptly named Bradley wrote.

The conference kicked off a competition to identify and develop “the best concept or concepts to fill the future role of the follow-on Ml, M2 and M3.” The Army chose four industry teams to evaluate technologies and trade-offs and produce detailed designs of the selected concepts. Also taking on the challenge was an in-house team.

A year later and after several in-progress reviews, the industry and in-house teams would present their final concepts of next-generation combat vehicles to TACOM for review. A team of experts from the U.S. Army Training and Doctrine Command and the Army Materiel Development and Readiness Command, the predecessor to U.S. Army Materiel Command, would then evaluate and rate the concepts.

The most promising of them would provide the framework for technology test beds with the objective of resolving “critical issues in components, subsystems and total system concepts,” Bradley wrote. “Results of these test-bed evaluations and other supporting technologies will then form the technical basis for the specifications for the next family of future close-combat vehicles.”

If the process has a familiar ring to it, there’s a reason. Nearly 40 years later, the Army is emphasizing collaboration with industry and across the doctrinal, combat development, test and evaluation and Soldier-user communities as it modernizes at unprecedented speed.

ON TO THE NEXT GENERATION

Back to the present: The Bradley’s 2026 replacement will not only have to dominate against enemy anti-access and area denial strategies, likely in an urban setting, but also defend itself against enemy attack. Gone are the days when the United States could count on neutralizing enemy forces with airstrikes to clear the way for ground troops to enter a relatively uncontested battlespace on open ground.

Weapon systems on the next generation of combat vehicles will have to aim higher and lower than present combat vehicle-mounted guns—a characteristic known as elevate and depress—“so that you can fight the enemy in tall buildings or in basements,” said Coffman, whose first operational assignment was as an armored cavalry platoon leader in Operations Desert Shield and Desert Storm; one of his most recent was as a heavy infantry battalion commander in Operation Iraqi Freedom. “Our legacy fleet was designed to fight in Eastern Europe against a known enemy in known terrain. The elevation and depression was not as important,” he said.

Enemy capabilities will have matured, Coffman noted. “While we’ve been fighting wars over the last decade and a half, our potential adversaries have begun to modernize their equipment. And we must again not settle for parity, but seek overmatch. That’s why this modernization effort is so important.”

The Bradley replacement will be capable of “an increased degree of engagement, as well as increasing effectiveness of munitions that [can] not just glance on buildings, but actually can engage and destroy the enemy … in these tall buildings,” Coffman said. “So if the enemy fires something at a vehicle, the vehicle has a response that destroys that before it strikes the vehicle.”

Combat vehicles also must protect the Soldiers riding in them, as the U.S. military’s experiences in Iraq and Afghanistan have shown. The rampant threat of improvised explosive devices and mines, for example, drove key innovations, including the double-V hull introduced in 2011 for the Stryker fleet. The double-V hull deflects blasts away from the vehicle and the Soldiers inside. Rocket-propelled grenades and Russian RKG3 parachute-equipped hand grenades are just a couple of the enemy weapons that the Army’s future combat vehicles will need to defend Soldiers against.

ESSENTIAL CAPABILITIES

The Army is not starting from scratch in developing the Next Generation Combat Vehicle family. It will feature a number of combat-tested capabilities introduced to the current fleet through incremental upgrades, including the double-V hull, Coffman said.

Another technology that holds promise for future combat vehicles is the Stryker urban kit, basically a large cage on the vehicle designed to keep rocket-propelled grenades and thrown explosive devices from hitting the vehicle itself. Additional battle-tested technologies include see-through armor; jamming technologies to defeat enemy radio capabilities used to detonate bombs; and bomb-removal systems.

Size, weight and power are perennial concerns for combat vehicles. Current issues include:

The engine must not only generate enough power for what the first model will do, but have sufficient excess capacity to allow the Army to add requirements as technology advances. Ditto for space in the vehicle. The reason the present-day Bradley cannot accommodate any more upgrades is that there is no reserve space, weight and power capacity left.
The vehicles cannot run continuously on the battlefield, for reasons of stealth and fuel efficiency. The Bradley replacement, as well as other combat vehicles, will need to have a silent capability in its power source, a battery backup allowing the crew to operate without running the engine.
The vehicle’s power supply must fit the Army’s logistical needs. The Army is looking at a variety of power sources, including hybrids, pure hydrogen and pure electric. “What we really have to decide as an Army is which technology provides the logistics at range and the ready-now capability for our Soldiers that we want on the next battlefield,” Coffman said. “For instance, if you went totally electric, it takes time to recharge a battery. It takes about seven minutes to refuel a tank. So if you can’t recharge the battery in under seven minutes, I’m not sure that’s a technology that is going to make us better on the battlefield.”

Brand new double-V hull Strykers are neatly arranged in the 2nd Squadron, 1st Cavalry Regiment, 1st Stryker Brigade Combat Team, 4th Infantry Division, motorpool, April 29, 2014. First SBCT is the first brigade to field the double-V hull Stryker and will be equipped with a total of 336 Strykers in seven different variations once the conversion is complete.

PLAN NOW TO UPGRADE LATER

Incremental upgrades are an established concept in combat vehicle development. The Next Generation Combat Vehicle initiative is just taking it to a new level of planning.

“Now we’re going into it with a set plan, with both schedule and monies allocated,” Coffman said. “Rather than seeking everything that we desire on the first increment that is fielded to the force, through prototypes and incremental upgrades we’re able to identify those technologies that aren’t quite mature yet. We now have a plan to upgrade the systems through time to maintain pace with technology and outpace our adversaries. And that is a new thing for the Army.”

Through the five-year program objective memorandum, Army Futures Command can estimate spending for future upgrades. “So we understand what the costs are, and if that funding remains as predicted, we absolutely have a plan to spend it. We also understand that things change … and we lay that out over time.”

The Army is working with industry to plan ahead for upgrades in the design and development of the next generation of combat vehicles, Coffman said. “We need not only our [vehicles] capable of handling increased weights, but we need electrical upgradability. As technologies advance and we want to put additional systems onto an existing vehicle, we have to have the reserve power onboard to be able to handle multiple electrical requirements from these systems.”

Also necessary is “sufficient space to handle increased technologies, because while we expect that as technology advances it becomes smaller, you still only have so much room in a vehicle. And so you have to have a certain percentage of space available, so you’re not having to over-engineer something to make it fit into a very, very tight space.”

This degree of planning would not be possible without what Coffman sees as “an unprecedented level of communication with industry.”

“We are sending out draft products, letters to industry; we’re meeting with them for up to three hours at a time,” he said. “It’s really an attempt to overcome the pitfalls that the Army experienced in the previous [combat vehicle] programs”—Future Combat Systems, canceled in 2009, including the Manned Ground Vehicle; and the Ground Combat Vehicle, canceled in 2014—“where a requirement was not informed by the realm of the possible.”

Army senior leaders, including Gen. John M. Murray, commanding general of Army Futures Command, and the command’s cross-functional teams charged with the individual modernization priorities “have gone to school on the past, and we’re applying those lessons … to make sure that we don’t fall into the same mistakes that have occurred.”

CONCLUSION

The five vehicles in the Next Generation Combat Vehicle initiative are moving forward at varying paces. The Optionally Manned Fighting Vehicle initiative to replace the Bradley began about a year ago, with 2026 the anticipated date for the first unit to be equipped.

Army Futures Command published the draft request for proposal in January to get industry feedback, followed by the final request for proposal in March. Next March, the command expects to award contracts to two vendors for the engineering and manufacturing development phase. FY23 is the target for a milestone C decision.

Its combat vehicle family is something that the Army has attempted to modernize for years. Now Army Futures Command and the cross-functional teams “have dedicated themselves and ourselves to doing things differently,” Coffman said. “We are, through conversations with industry and academia, able to identify what is possible on a schedule that we have set for ourselves to get this in the hands of Soldiers.”

Related Links

Brig. Gen. Ross Coffman at AUSA Annual Meeting & Exposition: https://www.dvidshub.net/video/631579/ausa-2018-warriors-corner-7-next-generation-combat-vehicle-cross-functional-team-update

https://www.army.mil/article/212190/next_generation_combat_vehicles_to_replace_bradley_starting_fiscal_year_2026

https://www.army.mil/article/211236/preparing_for_future_battlefields_the_next_generation_combat_vehicle

“RDECOM’s Road Map to Modernizing the Army: Next Generation Combat Vehicle,” army AL&T, January-March 2019: https://asc.army.mil/web/news-alt-jfm19-rdecoms-road-map-to-modernizing-the-army-next-generation-combat-vehicle/

This article is published in the April-June 2019 issue of Army AL&T magazine.

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Step inside the least understood of the warfighting domains, cyber, where digital detectives analyze data to solve crime, and similar tools and techniques are used to defend against cyberattacks.

by Mary Kate Aylward

In 2015, the U.S. Office of Personnel Management revealed that two major breaches affecting at least 22 million people had occurred the previous year, in which the assailants made off with personnel records and data on SF-86 forms—on which federal employees and contractors applying for security clearances report their addresses and employment history for the last 10 years, overseas travel, contact information for family members and friends, and much more in response to the 127-page questionnaire. One goal of the background investigations the SF-86 collects data for is to determine whether a candidate could be vulnerable to blackmail, and so it asks for the kinds of information that give blackmailers leverage. Candidates report debts, whether they have ever sought psychological counseling or treatment for alcohol abuse, or whether they’ve been arrested or charged with a crime or used drugs. That information is now in the hands of hackers.

Apart from the damage to individuals—an SF-86 form provides enough information for a criminal to steal someone’s identity, empty bank accounts, ruin credit—there’s the risk to national security. The data theft could make it possible for hostile foreign governments to unmask spies or track down relatives of U.S.-based emigres.

Digital or cyber forensics is the process used to figure out which actors are behind a hack like this, and how they did it. U.S. officials speaking privately said that China had stolen logins and passwords to perpetrate the hack, though the Obama administration did not formally accuse China.

Considering that data theft on this scale occurs during peacetime, the ability to protect the cyber space where digital data lives, and to analyze attempts to manipulate or steal it, is probably one of the least understood but most necessary components of any future defense strategy.

“When I started, digital forensics was just about looking at hard drives on computers. Now it’s everything you touch,” said Special Agent Patrick Eller, lead digital forensics examiner with the Army’s Criminal Investigation Command, in an interview with Army AL&T. Digital forensics examiners can piece together the movements of persons of interest, place them in a particular location at a particular time, and gather evidence about feelings, motives and more with the aid of powerful software. “Watches, FitBits, phones, tablets, computers, all the way down to the programs on them: the chat applications, like SnapChat, Facebook, WhatsApp”—the universe of data sources is vast, Eller said.

Special agents from the command (known as CID), like Eller, collect, preserve and analyze data from digital devices to “build digital timelines, which is what supports the whole case.” Digital forensics examiners don’t usually go to the crime scene. Instead, Eller and several other examiners train the CID agents who work the crime scene. “We teach [agents] to identify and collect digital evidence,” such as any phones or other devices present, Eller said.

THE SCENE OF THE CRIME

A crime scene can be crawling with digital data that’s not immediately visible, because of the proliferation of internet-connected devices and how frequently we interact with them. “Think about what’s called the ‘internet of things,’ everything in your house being connected to the internet,” Eller said. ”I can turn on lights in my house, I can open my garage, I can start appliances, I can lock doors from my phone.

“For us as examiners, it’s a challenge because we have to figure out how to get the data out of these devices in a forensically sound manner,” he said. After the agents on scene c ollect all the sources of digital information, they apply for search authorization, and send the device and a specific request for evidence to the digital forensics examiner.

The laws and precedents covering what digital forensics examiners can look for, and what permissions they need to do so, were established before many of the current tools and techniques became available. But the process still begins with an authorization to search, either a warrant issued by a magistrate or a consent to search given by the device’s owner. The authorization generally specifies what can be looked for, as a warrant for a physical search does: It’s usually not blanket permission to rifle through a house (or read all the texts on an iPhone) at random, but permission to look for things that might be relevant to a case.

IT’S META, MAN

Detectives in the non-digital realm look for strands of hair, tire tracks or weapons. Digital forensics investigators look for digital data—files, images, video—and metadata. Metadata is information about data, such as when it was created, if it was modified and by whom. The length of a phone call, for instance, is metadata that can be useful even if investigators can’t get or can’t use the contents of the conversation.

Finding links among the many pieces of data is a key contribution of digital forensics tools. Analyzing those connections can open up new leads to investigate. If an investigator notices that each of the three phones sent to a lab connected to the wireless network at McDonald’s on Main Street, that’s a new lead: It could place the suspects together in one location, and the agents working the case could try to interview the McDonald’s employees working on that day.

IN THE LAB

Army CID now uses upward of 20 forensic tools, each fairly specialized, to investigate and analyze digital devices, according to Eller. Twenty years ago, a case might involve a few hard drives from the suspect’s laptop, and one kind of software could do all the necessary analysis. Nowadays investigators might need to search a smartphone, an Amazon Alexa, a tablet and the onboard computers from a suspect’s car. The tools available to access and search computing devices for evidence have likewise grown in number and power.

Digital forensics tools on the market include EnCase, the granddaddy of digital forensics. It has been in use since 1998, when it was used primarily to search and analyze hard drives seized during criminal investigations. Now it’s a suite of tools that law enforcement can use to search digital devices linked to a possible crime, and that organizations can use to defend against cyberattacks or to collect information about the attacks.

Access Data’s Forensic Toolkit can scan a device for “text strings”—groupings of characters—and use those to build a dictionary to decrypt emails or other data that has been encrypted. It can also scan for malware and then analyze what the malicious code could be designed to do, where the infection could have come from, and if the malware is communicating with an outside server or website.

But before forensics examiners can analyze data, they need to be able to see it. Most devices now offer the option of encryption with a passcode, and so there’s another set of digital forensics tools that specialize in breaking that encryption.

This write blocker, hooked up to a hard drive, lets a digital forensic investigator copy and read the contents of a hard drive without altering or risking damage to any of the original data—an important feature to preserve digital evidence in its original state. (Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons user ErrantX)

THE CASE OF THE GRAY KEY

In March 2018, an anonymous source alerted the cybersecurity community to the existence of a gray box, four inches square, that could unlock any iPhone and extract every piece of data from it. Plug an iPhone into the “GrayKey,” and anywhere from a few hours later (if the phone is protected by a four-digit passcode) to three days (for a six-digit passcode), the passcode surfaces and the device downloads all the phone’s data for investigators to analyze.

The device’s maker, a small Atlanta-based company called Grayshift, did not say by what means its device evaded the security features on the phone, which usually erase the phone’s data after 10 failed attempts to enter the passcode. Outside security experts said it’s “almost certainly” the case that Grayshift found a weak spot in the iPhone’s software that lets the GrayKey guess hundreds of passcodes per minute.

By October 2018, Apple had apparently found and fixed the weak spot, and GrayKey devices could no longer break into newer iPhones. (They could still do a “partial extraction” on some older iPhones.)

“Mobile forensics is really taking over the majority of the forensic work we’re doing, and it’s also one of the largest challenges to overcome security-wise,” Eller said. “It’s a constant challenge for the companies that make the hardware and software we use to search—it’s a cat-and-mouse game” between the forensic software companies and Apple and makers of Android devices.

That game focuses on the security measures that prevent anyone other than a phone’s owner from unlocking it. Thousands of devices are in law enforcement custody, locked and unsearchable, because tech companies so far have declined to provide software to override the passcode or fingerprint security, or to leave a “back door” in their products through which digital investigators could get access to the phone’s data. The tech companies argue that this would weaken security for all users.

Even so, as GrayKey showed, smartphones aren’t impervious to the powers of cash and the smarts of computer engineers. There’s a market for phone-cracking hardware and software, and U.S. law enforcement and government agencies are among the customers paying forensic firms anywhere from $5,000 to $30,000 to break into passcode-protected devices.

After the 2015 shooting in San Bernardino, California, that killed 14 and left the shooter dead, the FBI wanted access to the shooter’s iPhone. It asked Apple to create a version of the iPhone’s operating system without the “auto-erase” security function. Apple refused, and the FBI paid an outside vendor reportedly close to $1 million to break into the phone. The vendor was believed to be Cellebrite, an Israeli cybersecurity firm.

CONCLUSION

At a demonstration of the iPhone-unlocking GrayKey, before Apple’s security updates partially defeated it, an armed guard stood watch over the company’s booth. “It’s an arms race,” Grayshift CEO David Miles said of the struggle between security features and hackers and purveyors of forensic and decryption technology.

The comparison to armed conflict is apt. Digital forensics of the kind Army CID engages in is about building a case to prosecute crimes. But the tools and skills that digital investigators use—not to mention the knowledge required to understand them—overlap with those used in the cyber domain to spot attempts to infiltrate U.S. government computer systems, and to trace and block them. Whether it’s a “gray war” or “multidomain battle,” or the continuing struggle for information superiority, hacks, malware, cyberattacks and other attempts to compromise an enemy’s ability to communicate are part of the picture.

A Soldier needs tools—sensors, binoculars—to see who’s firing at him, and with what kind of weapon. Information systems need cyber forensics tools for the same reason: It’s hard to defend against an attack you don’t understand, and digital forensics tools can help Soldiers and analysts see the cyber battlefield and what weapons are being deployed there. As the degree to which our lives are online increases, so, too, does the amount of conflict and crime that occurs in cyberspace. Digital forensics is likely to grow even more relevant, as is the smart acquisition of forensics tools and the training and hiring of people skilled in their use.

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 is published in the April-June 2019 issue of Army AL&T magazine.

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Maj. Daniel brown

COMMAND/ORGANIZATION: Aircraft Survivability Equipment Testing Division, Aviation Flight Test Directorate, U.S. Army Redstone Test Center, U.S. Army Test and Evaluation Command
TITLE: Experimental test pilot and division chief
YEARS OF SERVICE IN WORKFORCE: 4
YEARS OF MILITARY SERVICE: 12
DAWIA CERTIFICATIONS: Level III in test and evaluation
EDUCATION: M.S. in aerospace engineering, University of Maryland, College Park; B.S. in mechanical engineering, United States Military Academy at West Point
AWARDS: Bronze Star Medal; Army Senior Aviator Badge; U.S. Cavalry Order of the Spur (Gold, Silver); Army Aviation Association of America Honorable Order of St. Michael (Bronze); Military Outstanding Volunteer Service Medal

by Susan L. Follett

Maj. Daniel Brown just wants to make things a little better for the next guy. “Getting deployed Soldiers the capabilities they need to do their difficult job and then return home is always the goal, and I remind myself of that every day. I have been that deployed warfighter, and I want to make sure our current and future Soldiers have better lethality, capability and survivability than I did.”

Brown is an Army experimental test pilot (XP) with the Aviation Flight Test Directorate at U.S. Army Redstone Test Center, Alabama, part of the U.S. Army Test and Evaluation Command. As chief of the Aircraft Survivability Equipment Testing Division, he manages and executes engineering and developmental flight tests of various aircraft components and systems, mainly survivability systems incorporated into rotary-wing and fixed-wing Army aircraft. “These technologies aid the warfighter’s threat awareness in flight and greatly increase their chances of avoiding—and even defeating—complex radar, infrared and laser-based threats,” said Brown.

Brown was an aviation officer before coming to the Army Acquisition Workforce and completed two tours in Iraq with the 1st Combat Aviation Brigade, 1st Infantry Division. After finishing graduate school in 2014 through the Advanced Civil Schooling program, he spent two years teaching in the Department of Civil and Mechanical Engineering at the United States Military Academy at West Point.

While teaching, he applied to be an Army XP. “I thought it was the best way for me to align my personal passion—aviation—with my professional Army aviation experience and my educational background,” he said. Teaching at West Point “was great preparation for test pilot school,” he noted. “Three or four times a year, we took cadets up in Cessnas and Lakotas to gather data for the lab portion of our aerospace engineering courses. Addressing engineering topics while in flight, collecting data and flying within tight parameters—those skills are a big part of learning to be a test pilot.”

The XP application process included being accepted into the Acquisition Corps as a functional area 51A (program management) officer while also completing the multistage selection process to be an XP candidate. “While fundamentally 51As, XPs are branded 51Ts [test and evaluation officers] as well,” Brown explained, “and we must first serve in a 51T position and meet the associated requirements, including Level II certification in T&E [test and evaluation] in two years,” he explained. Brown attended the yearlong U.S. Naval Test Pilot School at Naval Air Station Patuxent River in Maryland. Graduating from that school incurred him a T&E officer utilization tour requirement but also counted toward many of his T&E certification requirements.

“Since 51T isn’t currently a primary acquisition career field, we also need to get 51A key developmental experience after serving the 51T utilization tour,” Brown said. “Most Army XPs serve 51A time as an assistant product manager after their initial XP utilization, usually in the Program Executive Office for Aviation or Intelligence, Electronic Warfare and Sensors. Having to complete two separate key developmental positions back-to-back is challenging in its own right.”

Brown, who’s currently serving in his 51T key developmental position, noted that his work puts him in contact with multiple programs and reinforces the acquisition fundamentals he learned in his courses. “These programs are all different acquisition categories and types: programs of record, QRCs, JUONS, etc. They’re also at different stages in the acquisition life cycle. As a result, I’m getting a very broad look at the acquisition process as a whole—something you might not initially expect from a highly technical XP specialization.” (QRCs are quick reaction capabilities; JUONS are joint urgent operational needs statements.)

The biggest challenge he faces is managing aircraft schedules. “The average battalion might have 24 aircraft, all of which are the same. So if, for example, one Black Hawk isn’t ready, a flight crew can just move to the predesignated identical spare and complete its mission for the day,” Brown said. “But in a testing facility, we might have just a fraction of that number of aircraft of a single type, for example, and none is the same. They’re all in different stages of testing, outfitted with different prototypes or modifications, and have different test instrumentation equipment installed.

“We also have to operate them within the parameters granted by the organizations we’re testing them for. So we use detailed tracking and weekly deconfliction meetings to make sure that if something comes up and one test flight changes, we can minimize the negative effects to any other test programs that are slotted to test using a singular, unique aircraft.”

Brown noted that the most valuable training he has received so far in his career came from his assignment at the Naval Test Pilot School. The yearlong school incorporates more than 100 hours of flight training in rotary-wing and fixed-wing platforms, covering more than 15 aircraft types. “It starts with first principles on aircraft performance, aircraft handling qualities and aircraft systems, then builds over multiple exercises and test reports toward a monthlong, comprehensive evaluation of an aircraft for a specified mission,” he explained.

The final report requires students to combine their aviation expertise with what they’ve learned in training to assess the suitability of an aircraft for warfighters’ needs. “The school teaches us to be a bridge between the tactical and the technical communities, which is right where the Army Acquisition Workforce operates,” Brown said.

Now out of training and part of the acquisition workforce, Brown sees firsthand the importance of serving as that bridge. “The more the acquisition community understands the warfighter’s mission and exactly what’s needed for that mission, the better the product will be. The uniformed acquisition officer is the link to help facilitate that understanding.”

He noted a couple of things Soldiers don’t often think about when it comes to acquisition. “Most Soldiers don’t know that there’s a huge workforce behind them that they’ll never meet. They should take comfort in knowing that these people go to work every day dedicated to giving them what they need,” he said. “And most don’t realize how much never gets to them—that the new capabilities they receive are the culmination of a lot of things that didn’t work. When the system works the way it should, the warfighter doesn’t get something that doesn’t work, and we haven’t spent a lot of taxpayer dollars unnecessarily. Success shouldn’t be measured only by what makes it to the warfighters.”

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A collaborative approach to systems biology may hold the key to breakthroughs from pain management and treatment of chronic eye injury to precision medicine—and wise use of funding.

by Dr. Valerie T. DiVito and Dr. Jessica M. Calzola

Nearly 100 of the brightest minds from DOD came together at Fort Detrick, Maryland, for the Integrative and Collaborative Biomedical Research for the 21st Century Workshop on Nov. 29-30. The U.S. Army Medical Research and Materiel Command’s (USAMRMC) Systems Biology Collaboration Center sponsored the workshop.

The two-day event was a venue for experts across the Army, Air Force and Navy, as well as other DOD and federal organizations, to discuss technological innovations, capabilities and mutual topics of interest, as well as current and future collaborations.

Representatives from all levels of research within DOD, including lab technicians, research scientists, program managers and directors, came together to develop a shared understanding of the newest system and integrative biological analytical capabilities and to identify opportunities to leverage the technologies for near- and far-term practical applications.

The workshop featured presentations by representatives from 12 organizations, including USAMRMC subordinate commands and others within DOD.

Traditional research methods focus on understanding individual components within a system. But systems and integrative biology approaches take a holistic look to understand the system as a whole through analysis of the networks that make up living organisms. This methodology enables researchers to better understand the whole system (e.g., the whole body) and shows promise to aid researchers in tackling the complexity of warfighter health and performance.

Dr. Marti Jett, Army chief scientist for systems biology, presented the keynote address, “Evolution of Systems Biology within USAMRMC.” Jett discussed the importance of systems biology and collaborative science as a research approach and recalled challenges of past projects, including the inability to share up-to-date files. “With systems biology, that is one thing that is terribly important—to give each other the information as it’s happening,” she said. Additionally, Jett noted that collaborative cross-functional research teams have been instrumental to maximizing value from multiple molecular data sets and generating biomarker panels for diagnosing complex diseases such as post-traumatic stress disorder and blood-clotting disorders in combat settings.

Presentations spanned the breadth of complex biomedical issues, from pain management and chronic eye injury to precision medicine and human-agent teaming (i.e., the interaction of the warfighter and intelligence agents). There was an additional focus on how these topics were tackled using integrative and collaborative methodologies. Speakers highlighted projects that use these approaches, as well as core infrastructure and capabilities within their respective organizations and successful principles that have guided collaborations.

For example, Dr. Phil Karl, research dietician with the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Environmental Medicine (USARIEM), described examples of collaborative research efforts among USARIEM, the U.S. Army Center for Environmental Health, the Air Force Research Laboratory and the U.S. Army Natick Soldier Research, Development and Engineering Center that used big data and bioinformatics to translate research into novel solutions for the warfighter.

Efforts that analyzed warfighter performance under operational stress (e.g., high altitude, extreme temperature) used integrated data from several genetic disciplines as well as clinical information, such as body temperature and blood pressure, to demonstrate that the microbiome’s metabolic byproducts influence performance. The microbiome comprises the diverse populations of bacteria, viruses and fungi that occupy the human body. Future efforts will focus on assessing dietary supplements, which could help warfighters by improving digestion. That could reduce the occurrence of issues like acute mountain sickness and possibly improve cognition.

Dr. Clifton Dalgard, Core director for the American Genome Center of the Collaborative Health Initiative Research Program, hosted at the Uniformed Services University, highlighted the center’s whole-genome sample processing and computational capabilities, which are unparalleled within DOD. Currently, the center has 18 genetic sequencers that include state-of-the-art technology. With more than 80 ongoing projects across DOD and collaborations at the National Institutes of Health, the center is helping to assess genetic risks for illnesses like cardiovascular disease and cancer to improve diagnosis and treatment.

In a time when doing more with less is the mantra and fiscal responsibility is more important than ever, this inclusive meeting was pivotal for bringing together those with shared interests and, more importantly, shared goals. It also served as a jumping-off point to ensure continued efficiency by identifying gaps and barriers across the myriad integrative biology research efforts.

One outcome of the meeting was to initiate collaborations that will lead to expedited delivery of tools and solutions. Further, it is anticipated that biomedical research study designs will be more comprehensive as a result of the accessibility and knowledge of supporting research and engineering capabilities across DOD.

Workshop attendees were impressed to learn about the breadth of work and technologies throughout the enterprise. Attendees appreciated the opportunity to see how computational analysis is being applied across a wide range of DOD biomedical research. Additionally, they benefited from seeing targeted, multidimensional studies that integrate several approaches focused on medical application.

In fact, in a survey of workshop attendees, 68 percent of respondents indicated they learned about a new technology, data type or methodology during the workshop. From the Biotechnology High Performance Computing Software Applications Institute’s capabilities in the development of machine-learning based algorithms, to the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases’ rapid genomic sequencing for disease surveillance, the diversity of possibilities encouraged participants to pursue collaborations.

HANDS-ON TECH

Scientific capabilities developed to promote data collection and collaboration were on display during the working lunch on Nov. 29. Attendees participated in product demonstrations and learned more about how USAMRMC capabilities could improve the efficiency of current and future research efforts. These capability demonstrations included:

USAMRMC’s SysBioCube, which functions as an integrated biomedical research data access, management and analysis platform for biomedical research of military relevance. It serves as a central portal for data collection, harmonization, mining and file sharing, and is accessible to all members of the DOD research community, including extramural partners.
2B-Alert, developed by the Biotechnology High Performance Computing Software Applications Institute. It is a smartphone app that uses sleep-wake and caffeine schedules and measurements of past performance (including results from the psychomotor vigilance test) to predict alertness and cognitive performance. The system allows users to input additional data parameters, and lets users or commanders view predicted cognitive performance levels at desired times.
PanoramiX, a platform developed by the Integrative Systems Biology Program at the U.S. Army Center for Environmental Health Research that enables researchers to visualize the interconnectedness of tailored genome assays with pathological networks and phenotypes for cells or organisms in a data-agnostic manner. This tool allows researchers to easily explore genomic data sets, which tend to be large and difficult to manage, in order to identify interactive networks.
Functional Heatmap, made by the same group that developed PanoramiX. It is an automated and interactive tool enabling pattern recognition in time-series data, providing a means for researchers to identify trends driven by functional changes. This tool translates numerical data, generally from data sets that are very large and cumbersome to manually evaluate, into color-defined visualizations, allowing researchers to more easily identify patterns.

DISCUSSING THE WAY FORWARD

The workshop closed with a panel discussion driven by questions that arose during the two-day event. The group discussed the greatest opportunities for integrative biomedical research as well as the potential to develop disruptive medical capabilities that could change the landscape of force readiness by improving warfighter lethality.

Participants also discussed the extensive bureaucratic inhibitors that delay the establishment of collaborations as well as barriers that prevent effective data sharing, such as concerns about intellectual property and data rights. There was unquestionable agreement that collaboration is essential to avoid duplication of efforts. Leadership echoed the need for a team approach in support of the warfighter. “We are all working on the same puzzle,” said Dr. Ben Petro, acting director of the Office of the Undersecretary of Defense for Research and Engineering. “But you all are working on a puzzle that has millions of pieces. If we are working on the same puzzle, how should we organize ourselves strategically?”

Petro continued, “Reach out to others working on a puzzle and figure out how the piece I’m working on provides [clues] to the larger puzzle. As we find pieces that can help other people, we are sharing. The puzzle is a holistic view of the warfighter across all activities and all health states. The opportunity I see here is convergence.”

Dr. William Mattes, director of the Division of Systems Biology at the U.S. Food and Drug Administration’s National Center for Toxicological Research, discussed the topic of standardization. “When I think of integrative biomedical research, one of the things that catapulted the genomic field was standardizing the data files,” he said. “We need to force some standardization, and there are so many opportunities there. It makes it more efficient. Then you aren’t duplicating efforts, you are synergizing efforts.”

Efficiency is extremely important, said Maj. Jonathan Stallings, acting director of USAMRMC’s Office of Regulated Activities. “We should talk about standardization up front,” he said. “Collectively, we need to pull minds together and decide what standardization looks like. This would allow us to deliver efficiency in a time when money is precious.”

Working together will allow teams to bring ideas to fruition more quickly, according to Dr. George Ludwig, principal assistant for research and technology at USAMRMC. “What can we produce quickly to bring us up to parity with our potential adversaries?” asked Ludwig. “It is not what we can do as individuals, but what we could do collectively to make that actually happen.”

Ludwig also mentioned that shared data can be beneficial to peers working on seemingly unrelated projects. “This integrative approach to biomedical research provides us an opportunity to get to a level of complexity that we have never been able to get to before,” he said.

CONCLUSION

The two-day workshop demonstrated the current breadth of collaborative and integrative efforts across the enterprise, but also served as a catalyst for future collaborations by bringing researchers together to stimulate discussion and social interaction. Participants surveyed after the workshop indicated in an overwhelming majority—83 percent—that they anticipate starting new collaborations as a result of the networking conducted during the workshop.

“I think it is a fantastic activity, bringing people across departments together to share different approaches to take and different problems to solve,” said Petro. “The mission we have here is critical, and no one else can do it.”

For more information, contact Dr. Valerie T. DiVito at valerie.t.divito.civ@mail.mil.

Dr. Valerie T. DiVito is currently acting director of the USAMRMC Systems Biology Collaboration Center and director of the Environmental Health Program at the U.S. Army Center for Environmental Health Research. She received a doctorate from Georgetown University and a B.S. from Dickinson College, both in biochemistry and molecular and cellular biology. She is a member of the U.S. Army Acquisition Corps and holds Level III certification in science and technology management as well as Level I certification in program management. She is also a 2017 graduate of the Naval Postgraduate School Advanced Acquisition Program.

Dr. Jessica M. Calzola is a program analyst with Leidos, providing program management support to the USAMRMC Systems Biology Collaboration Center. She received a doctorate in microbiology and molecular genetics from Rutgers University and a B.S. in biochemistry from Juniata College. She is also a certified Project Management Professional.

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This article is published in the April-June 2019 issue of Army AL&T magazine.

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The CAS2Net 2.0 upgrade took 20 years, but it got a brain transplant for its 20th anniversary.

by Steve Stark

The AcqDemo Program Office’s rollout of CAS2Net 2.0 may not exactly be cause to break out a $200-plus bottle of Cristal champagne, but for those in the AcqDemo system, the midyear review season provides reason to celebrate. The long overdue update brings many eagerly awaited changes and a much more robust system.

For those wondering why it took so long, the fact is that it almost didn’t happen. How it did is almost a shaggy dog tale. More about that in a moment.

For those familiar with CAS2Net 1.0, the new version will look a great deal like the old one, which is a good thing because it means no one needs to learn a whole new system.

HOW OLD?

CAS2Net 1.0 software is—there’s no way around it—old. How old? Older than Windows XP. Older than CD burners standard on personal computers. A kid born when CAS2Net 1.0 debuted could be a sophomore in college today.

For many, the old CAS2Net could be frustrating, non-intuitive and time-consuming. Forget to hit the save button and everything you entered could disappear. It also could require a lot of cutting and pasting but if, for example, you put in a bulleted list, pasting didn’t bring formatting along with it.

The old version is a bit like a forgetful, disheveled colleague who, one day, is replaced by his brother. The brother is sharper, never forgets anything, and gets the job done with efficiency and a dash of style. He may look like his predecessor in superficial ways, but no one is going to miss the original. That’s CAS2Net 2.0.

On the surface, the site appears to have had a top-notch facelift, but it’s much more like a brain transplant. The Program Executive Office for Enterprise Information Systems’ Acquisition Logistics and Technology Enterprise Systems and Services (ALTESS) modernized the software behind the site for the Office of the Secretary of Defense’s Human Capital Initiatives (HCI) program.

A SERIOUS IMPROVEMENT

From a user perspective, the new version looks similar to the original but feels better, said Chad Vance, who has managed the sustainment of CAS2Net 1.0 since 2015, as part of his portfolio as Application Services Division chief at ALTESS. But what’s really important is that “some of the stuff that’s going on in the back end [of CAS2Net 2.0] is a lot more robust. The database was optimized. It’s more efficient, it can handle more users, and it’s definitely more reliable. There was a lot of work—probably a lot more work—that went in on the back end of it,” Vance said.

“We also wanted to make it more user-intuitive, and easier to manage so that you didn’t need subject matter experts on site for the rest of its life” to manage issues with the software, he said. With the new version, an administrator can take care of the system. “The goal was just to make it a little more current and make it so it can scale for a growing user base.”

Its ability to scale as its user base expands is a major concern for AcqDemo, which now has more than 40,000 participants.

According to Vance, one of the most frequently requested improvements to CAS2Net was, ” ‘Can’t you make it more like Word?’ So we found an interface that looked more like [Microsoft] Word.” The new version also autosaves, another much-requested improvement. But all of the new improvements came close to never happening.

A NEAR-DEATH EXPERIENCE

CAS2Net 1.0 launched alongside AcqDemo (the DOD Civilian Acquisition Workforce Demonstration Project) in 1999. (See related articles, “Contribution!” Army AL&T, July-September 2017, Page 112, and “Celebrating 20 Years of AcqDemo” in Defense Acquisition magazine, March-April 2019.) Unlike the General Schedule (GS) system, with its salary steps, AcqDemo is a performance- or contribution-based management system, with “broad band” salary levels that are much wider than the GS steps but correspond to GS pay levels. The AcqDemo system, which was developed in an effort to further professionalize the acquisition workforce, offers more flexibility for movement from level to level within pay bands, and the potential for annual awards or bonuses, among many other things.

Always in search of ways to make the defense acquisition system better, Congress created the National Security Personnel System (NSPS), which DOD implemented in 2006.

Among the intended consequences of NSPS was that AcqDemo would go away. And it might have, had it not been for collective bargaining agreements between DOD and about 3,500 unionized employees. To make AcqDemo go away, DOD would have had to renegotiate those labor agreements to move those employees onto NSPS, said Sandy Brock, Army AcqDemo program director. DOD didn’t do that, but all other employees migrated to NSPS. That period saw the lowest enrollment of employees in AcqDemo—and improvements to CAS2Net were hardly a priority.

Then, in October 2009, following criticism that NSPS was unfair, the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2010 included a provision to unwind NSPS by 2012, returning participants to their previous pay systems. So, while many former NSPS employees returned to AcqDemo, its survival still was not a foregone conclusion. Meanwhile, CAS2Net just kept getting older.

Today, even with NSPS gone, AcqDemo is not the only demonstration contribution-based system. “There are 15 others that we track,” Brock said.

PROGRESS BEGINS BY COINCIDENCE

Regardless of whether you identify AcqDemo’s birth year as 1996, when it was conceived, or 1999, when it was implemented, 20 or 24 years is an almost inconceivably long time for software to go without a significant upgrade. ALTESS may be an unlikely savior and software developer for CAS2Net, but that’s essentially the case.

A couple of coincidences cemented that mutually beneficial relationship.

The first coincidence was that ALTESS took over the sustainment of CAS2Net in 2015. The second was the designation in December 2016 by then-Secretary of the Army Eric K. Fanning—who was impatient with the pace at which the Army was consolidating legacy data centers—of ALTESS as a “modernization hub” in a directive. And while that directive says, “The ALTESS Data Center (RFAA_VA_ALT_01) is designated as a modernization hub for Army commands and is available to facilitate Army application modernization support,” it doesn’t define what it means for ALTESS to be a modernization hub or what modernization support means.

ALTESS Product Director Tim Hale said that ALTESS as a modernization hub has evolved into both an application modernization shop and “the Army’s commercial cloud broker, assisting application owners in the migration to the commercial cloud and providing sustainment and cybersecurity services to those applications once they do migrate.”

For Vance’s shop specifically working on application modernization, that means two different avenues of work. The first is what Vance described as “the minimum support needed to bring software up to Army cybersecurity and regulatory standards.” The second is what he called “strategic modernization,” of which CAS2Net is the most recent example. For Vance and his team, that means working with DOD customers to develop software upgrades quickly, with more flexibility than a traditional contractor would be able to bring to the table.

TIMING IS EVERYTHING

The final, and perhaps most interesting, coincidence was the pivotal role of Tony Parton in shepherding CAS2Net to its renaissance.

Parton is the deputy program manager for AcqDemo in the Human Capital Initiatives (HCI) program at Defense Acquisition University at Fort Belvoir, Virginia. HCI owns CAS2Net and AcqDemo, and Parton’s office at AcqDemo is a few doors down from Army AL&T.

Before that, however, he worked at ALTESS on Vance’s team. During his 15 years of Army service, Parton found that he was good at fixing things, especially electronics. He leveraged that ability and earned a degree in software development from the College of Brockport, within the State University of New York system, in 2002. That eventually led to his job at ALTESS, managing the Army Budget Office’s P&R [Procurement and RDT&E, or research, development, test and evaluation] Forms software. Along with CAS2Net, P&R Forms is the best-known of the software packages that ALTESS has modernized.

ANOTHER COINCIDENCE

It was almost a coincidence that the CAS2Net project came to ALTESS, Vance said. It happened that one of the people at the HCI office had served with Parton in the Army. (Parton exited the Army as a staff sergeant in 2002.). A fellow service member, Steve Edsall, worked at AcqDemo and the two got to talking. When Parton heard that AcqDemo was looking to upgrade CAS2Net, he saw an opportunity. He knew that ALTESS could do the work.

With improvements desperately needed and a substantial number of new employees coming into the AcqDemo system, HCI was on the verge of hiring the original contractor to improve the system, Vance and Parton said. However, Parton came to Fort Belvoir in about June 2017 to brief the HCI team on ALTESS’s capabilities and its ability to replace “CAS2Net 1.0 with a new, modernized system that would be more appropriate for the growing user population, and that would be able to support that growth over the next five to 10 years,” Parton said.

HCI “called a timeout” on bidding out the work, Vance said. From their sustainment work, it was clear to Vance and Parton “that the code base was limited and not very scalable” and would need to be rebuilt.

According to Brock, the old system was so slow it could take all night for the Army AcqDemo office to run a report. As a result, she said, the office could never get real-time data.

That mirrors something that Vance said about the P&R system. The Army Budget Office has reports that it must get to Congress. With the old version of P&R that ALTESS upgraded, Vance said, generating that report could take six to eight hours. The system that ALTESS upgraded enabled the Defense Technical Information Center to run the reports in seconds.

Parton’s pitch to HCI was a hit. And because the relationship between ALTESS and HCI was government-to-government, ALTESS could be more flexible than an outside contractor could. If HCI wanted to update requirements after reaching an agreement with a contractor, it could mean more money and a contract modification, which could slow work. With ALTESS, that wouldn’t be necessary.

AGILE IS THE TICKET

“We had our initial requirements-gathering session around August 2017” with HCI, Parton said. The development of the revamped CAS2Net took approximately a year, speed that Vance and Parton attributed to ALTESS’s Agile development approach.

“I worked for Chad [Vance] and his division managing software projects,” Parton said. “Really, what it boils down to with [developing a] user interface is that a lot of times a user has a very hard time expressing their requirements in such a way that the software engineer knows exactly what they want. It’s almost like the software engineer needs to do mindreading in order to understand exactly what the user wants.” Going to work with the HCI team, Parton said, “I was able to help some in that role to communicate between the business side and the technical side. But, really, what enables the user interface to be better is that we went through an Agile process.”

Vance said that his team would take each requirement and code it in one- or two-week sprints, and then deliver that code for testing when the sprint was done. If new requirements came up, he said, they could work the code into the sprint schedule depending on its urgency.

“Basically,” Parton said, “Chad and his team worked with the program office to define what would go into each sprint. That was completed, finalized and delivered by the end of each two-week sprint, and then it went into testing mode. The user population, mostly component-level users across the Army, Air Force, Marines and Navy, went in and looked at the system and said, ‘Yeah, that’s not exactly what I meant,’ and so we were able to improve the user interface through that constant feedback loop.”

CONCLUSION

According to Vance, Parton and others that Army AL&T spoke to, the HCI office saved a good deal of money and gained considerable flexibility by working with ALTESS on the CAS2Net project. For Vance, the project was part of ALTESS’s dual role as both a data facilitator and a software development shop, within its larger role as a modernization hub. In addition, Hale said, ALTESS has positioned itself as an information technology (IT) managed-service provider for applications required to migrate to the cloud, which means that ALTESS can assist Army and DOD application owners not only with modernizing applications, but also with cybersecurity services, system engineering support and a host of managed services necessary to make them cloud-ready.

On the one hand, ALTESS can lead government customers through the process of getting their data into compliance with DOD standards, which involves more than 290 different application compliance standards. On the other, it has a stable of software engineers that are fully capable of quickly modernizing software for government customers.

“We were very fortunate that we built a whole application sustainment program that just happened to partner with a data center,” Vance said.

For more information on ALTESS’s cloud or software modernization and sustainment capabilities, contact Chad Vance at william.c.vance1.civ@mail.mil. For more information on CAS2Net2, version 2.0, contact Tony Parton at Anthony.Parton@dau.mil.

STEVE STARK is senior editor of Army AL&T magazine. He holds an M.A. in creative writing from Hollins University and a B.A. in English from George Mason University. In addition to more than two decades of editing and writing about the military and S&T, he is the best-selling ghostwriter of several consumer-health oriented books and an award-winning novelist. He is Level II certified in program management.

This article is published in the April-June 2019 issue of Army AL&T magazine.

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Rapid acquisition of electronic warfare capabilities served an urgent need, and in the process set an award-winning example of phased prototyping, experimentation and fielding with creative resourcing.

by Nancy Jones-Bonbrest, John Higgins and Claire Heininger

In March 2014, before the rest of the world could react, Russia invaded Crimea, then annexed the region, a peninsula at the southern end of Ukraine. Russia’s subsequent actions in Ukraine revealed electronic warfare (EW) capabilities that not only overwhelmed Ukraine but could rival those of the United States. The U.S. Army Europe (USAREUR) commanding general at the time, Lt. Gen. Ben Hodges, determined that electronic warfare was a critical strategic gap and pushed an operational needs statement to the Pentagon for quick action.

In response, the Army moved electronic warfare to the top of its list for rapid acquisition and endorsed a new approach—phased prototyping, experimentation and fielding—that would incorporate Soldier feedback throughout, infuse new technology as it became available and quickly deliver incremental upgrades to reduce operational risk while informing program-of-record (POR) capabilities currently under development but not yet ready for fielding. This strategy required a creative resourcing approach that combined existing funds, reprogramming actions and a new rapid prototyping program, and ultimately entailed more than 100 separate contract actions.

To formulate and execute the plan, the secretary and chief of staff of the Army tapped the then-newly formed Rapid Capabilities Office (now the Rapid Capabilities and Critical Technologies Office, or RCCTO) and the Project Manager for Electronic Warfare and Cyber (PM EW&C), part of the Program Executive Office for Intelligence, Electronic Warfare and Sensors (PEO IEW&S), to lead the execution of the project, working directly with operational units such as the 2nd Cavalry Regiment in Europe. Less than a year after the project’s approval, the Army fielded new electronic warfare prototypes to select units in Europe, giving Soldiers the ability to implement electronic protection for their own formations, detect and understand enemy activity in the electromagnetic spectrum, and disrupt adversaries through electronic attack effects.

For their efforts in addressing this urgent operational need, the RCCTO and PM EW&C received the 2018 David Packard Excellence in Acquisition Award. The Packard is DOD’s most prestigious acquisition team award. It is given annually to a few select recipients across the armed services and defense agencies for significant contributions demonstrating exemplary innovation and best acquisition practices.

The award-winning effort required teamwork, innovation, a user-centric attitude and a willingness to accept that the prototypes being fielded were just that. They were not completely perfect solutions, but instead incremental advances, with the capability improving at each step as the effort progressed.

In this post, you’ll read about several of the key players who made the Army’s electronic warfare project a Packard Award-winning reality. However, they are only several of many. Scores of people within the organizations contributed to the success of the project, as did many other individuals and organizations across and outside DOD who were brought in to find new ways to successfully expedite the traditional acquisition process. From EW officers to Army headquarters staff, from cybersecurity experts within the Office of the Assistant Secretary of the Army for Acquisition, Logistics and Technology (ASA(ALT)) to the U.S. Army Test and Evaluation Command, from the Army’s Rapid Equipping Force to industry partners and many others, the achievements leading to the Packard were a team effort that reflects the best of what the Army can do when the stakes are high. Here is a look behind the curtain.

The Director: Doug Wiltsie

“The big thing for us was speed. Where we had the opportunity to take risks, we did. It started with our board of directors [BOD], which at the time comprised the secretary of the Army, chief of staff of the Army and Army acquisition executive. We briefed the BOD, but there was no requirement to brief anyone else, due to the RCO’s unique charter. So the approval cycle was significantly shorter. The power of the BOD was it allowed us to bring in a broad end-to-end solution for the type of capability we needed to provide. And then, working with the unit, we developed what the specific requirements would be for mounted, dismounted, and planning and management systems. We developed an incremental strategy that increased the capability performance over time. We got prototypes into the hands of the users, who got to train on the equipment and give us continuous feedback on the performance and how to improve it. With this strategy, we fielded the first increment in one year, which was very impressive.”

The power of teamwork: “The user was actually in the lead of this project the entire time. From the delivery of the concept of operations to the performance of the system they wanted, the Soldiers and the EWOs [electronic warfare officers] in those brigades really helped shape how the system was going to operate. They were committed to the incremental strategy, where we put elementary pieces of equipment into their hands first, knowing that the capability was going to get better over time. PM EW&C was the other critical element to this project. The Rapid Capabilities Office had unique authorities but limited people to put on this project, so we partnered with PM EW&C to develop the solutions, prioritize the increments, develop the sustainment process, then together work on a funding strategy for every increment. It was a great partnership.”

Advice for rapid prototyping: “It starts with the user. The rapid approach is really a team sport, and the users are the critical piece on that team.”

The Project Manager Then: Col. Marty Hagenston (USA, Ret.)

“Commanders are severely limited in what they can bring to the electromagnetic spectrum fight. These limitations and lack of options are driving the operational need for EW capabilities.” The operational needs statement (ONS) from U.S. Army Europe “became part of the larger materiel development strategy by design. It provided a mechanism from which to rapidly equip forward presence and rotational forces with initial capabilities, then iterate those based on direct user feedback.

“The ONS provided a superb venue for risk reduction for projected programs, some of which were years away from starting. Not only did the Army benefit from a materiel standpoint, but the effort also drove doctrine, training, organizational design, and tactics, techniques and procedures.” The entire spectrum of doctrine, organization, training, materiel, leadership and education, personnel, facilities and policy benefited, Hagenston said. Likewise, the ONS greatly benefited from programs of record that were underway. These included the Electronic Warfare Planning and Management Tool; Prophet Enhanced; Duke; and Versatile Radio Observation and Direction Modular Adaptive Transmitter, developed by the Intelligence and Information Warfare Directorate of what is now the U.S. Army Combat Capabilities Development Command’s C5ISR (Command, Control, Communications, Computers, Combat Systems, Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance) Center. “The team was able to leverage these programs, which helped our velocity by providing a critical foundation for the ONS.”

The key to success: “The real force behind the success of this effort was the teamwork, leadership support, stable resources and direct access to the customer. The approach itself was simple. First, we took what we had and adapted it to the operational problem. This served as Phase 1, or the minimum viable product. Once we deployed Phase 1, 12 months from receiving resources, we were able to take the direct user feedback and prototype something closer to what the units wanted. This served as Phase 2. Through all of the phases, the capabilities evolved based on direct user feedback. Our team carefully listened to the feedback and worked in those changes. In many cases it was done on the spot, while other changes were saved to the next logical insertion point.”

Advice for rapid prototyping: “First, get intimate with the operational problem. Second, get the minimum viable product out quickly and really listen to the direct user feedback. Finally, iterate as fast as possible based on the direct user feedback. Velocity is the real advantage.”

The Project Manager Now: Col. Kevin Finch

“Rapid prototyping will have a very positive effect on the long-term POR. It also shows us the current state of industry. Specifically, in the EW specialty, rapid prototyping coupled with quick reaction capabilities [QRCs] has effectively informed the community on possible innovative solutions that help the U.S. pace the threat. The QRCs we are currently fielding to the force have enabled the program office to determine if innovative solutions are viable for long-term PORs. In FY20, PM EW&C will use the lessons learned from the QRC and rapid prototypes to inform the development of the long-term Terrestrial Layer System.”

What are the next steps for the effort? “The ONS for Europe maintains the ongoing effort until the POR comes on board. We have already provided an initial capability and are on schedule to provide a Phase 2 capability in FY19. This new capability will provide a significant improvement over Phase 1 while informing both the development of the POR and the Army’s decision-making on fielding quantities and timelines.

Also, with “The U.S. Army in Multi-Domain Operations, 2028” concept published, capabilities in the electromagnetic spectrum [EMS], cyber and space will become better integrated into operations. Niche systems will no longer operate in stovepipes, but will become integrated and synchronized with operations occurring in all the domains: land, air, sea, cyber and space. Systems such as the [Electronic Warfare Planning and Management Tool], which links and synchronizes the EMS to the tactical commander, will become increasingly important.”

Advice for rapid prototyping: “Implementing a rapid approach has to be a collaborative team process built on the adaptation of lessons learned and best practices. As PM EW&C moves into the second iteration of our rapid processes, hard timelines closely linked to the operational force’s needs will drive timely and responsive decision-making. Ultimately, the success of a rapid approach is highly dependent on buy-in from all the team members, including industry partners and external stakeholders.”

Soldiers from the 2nd Cavalry Regiment (2CR) tested several electronic warfare prototypes, including the Counter-Unmanned Aircraft System Mobile Integrated Capability, a mounted system that combines electronic warfare, radar and optic capabilities to detect, identify and defeat unmanned aerial threats.
(U.S. Army photo)

The Product Manager: Lt. Col. Eric Bowen

“This is the outcome of a Soldier-inclusive, Soldier-driven endeavor. Their feedback laid the blueprint that guided our multiphased approach, serving as our engine of innovation. We had continuous engagements with Soldiers who received the equipment, including from Stryker, armor and airborne infantry brigades. Although the initial phase repurposed existing equipment, the feedback identified additional enhancements needed, such as how information was presented to the operator, how it was reported to higher headquarters and how it should be installed in the vehicles for optimal use. This feedback also identified a need for additional vehicle platforms that would support light, expeditionary operations, as well as for sensors that Soldiers could easily carry and operate during dismounted operations. These capabilities, which we didn’t address initially, were prioritized for the follow-on delivery phases.”

The toughest challenge? “The ‘horizontal’ or system-of-systems integration and end-to-end engineering, because various sensors needed to function as a networked set. To make it all work, we needed to stitch together existing sensors that existed as both PORs and QRCs, in order to provide a common operating picture to our EW planning and management tool.”

Advice for rapid prototyping: “Keep priority on delivering the product on time. You are subject to the tyranny of time, and the solution delivered will not be perfect. It never will be. There are no more ‘drive-by fieldings,’ so forge a solid commitment with the user, who will shape development before delivery—and cultivate that relationship to fix, improve and maintain the equipment to ensure mission success. You are delivering more than just materiel; these capabilities will influence doctrine, change organizations and challenge policy to enable commanders and higher Army echelons to respond to rapidly evolving worldwide threats.”

The Money: Sonja Holzinger (PM EW&C) and Vanessa Pittman (RCCTO)

“This rapid prototyping approach dictated an agile, adaptive business model. That meant the two business teams had to come together and determine how much the effort would cost, what type of funding was needed, what contract vehicles should be used and what resources were available.

“Early on, as the acquisition strategy and technical requirements were being refined, we implemented a tailored work breakdown structure into all cost estimating efforts. This enabled the teams to accurately account for all costs associated with rapid prototyping and develop a cost estimate, which was later used as the basis for the spend plans. Throughout the whole process, strong collaboration and daily communication was the key. PM EW&C Business Management Division was heavily engaged in identifying what funds were needed and where they should be sent. The RCCTO Business Management Division was responsible for ensuring funds were provided on time and in the amount needed. The two teams worked as one toward accomplishing the same goal. The USAREUR ONS was executed almost 100 percent within the cost estimate, on time and without any unfunded requirements.”

What contracting mechanisms were used? “The business teams worked together to develop a funding strategy to ensure the effort was fully funded. Initially we reallocated existing funds for this effort. We also utilized mechanisms such as below-threshold and above-threshold reprogramming actions. We successfully applied for and received funding from the Office of the Secretary of Defense Rapid Prototyping Program. To meet a very tight timeline for delivery, we also worked closely with [the U.S.] Army Contracting Command, as well as the Navy and Air Force contracting commands, for select contracting actions.

“We coordinated execution of more than 100 contract actions, including contract modifications, task orders and delivery orders. In some instances, because of the urgency of the requirement and the government’s interest to start contract work early, we used un-definitized contract actions.”

Advice for rapid prototyping: “This is a great approach to quickly provide needed capabilities to our warfighters. Constant collaboration and communication with the project manager, contracting team, business team and all stakeholders involved in your program is a must. This allows you to identify and address any risks or issues early.”

The Engineer: Brandon Little-Darku

“As the project lead and lead systems engineer on EW for the RCCTO, I worked in close partnership with the PM EW&C team and my counterpart there, Lt. Col. Bowen, to develop and deliver this capability. Having a strategic focus and directing this capability not to the entire Army, but to brigade-and-below operations within the European theater, proved a key to our success. Focusing on the units aligned to USAREUR and understanding their concept of operations helped to scope not only the capabilities required of the various systems, but also how they needed to be integrated into the formations and the tactical mission command network. That, paired with early and continuous engagement with the brigade combat teams aligned to USAREUR, helped scope the effort and shape the overall phased approach for addressing the operational requirements.”

The toughest challenge? “Making sure we met all the requirements possible, which included establishing a networked EW capability that could interoperate with Army mission command systems, while also meeting our delivery timeline. The team included a great set of dedicated professionals within the RCCTO and the PM, and across our partners throughout the Army, that made this unprecedented effort a success.”

Advice for rapid prototyping: “Perfection is the enemy of ‘good enough’ when building your acquisition strategy and scoping out the phases of the capability. Time will always be one of the critical measures of success, and the burdens associated with the endless pursuit of perfection will always be a hindrance to getting the required capabilities to the end user. Working directly with the users early in the process, and then continuing to receive their input and operational feedback throughout the process, proved key to making sure we developed and delivered what they needed to meet their mission.”

The User: Capt. Sean Lynch, 2nd Cavalry Regiment, Cyber and Electromagnetic Activities Planner

“This equipment provides additional sensors that units can leverage to help build a common operating picture and drive the targeting process. It provides commanders with additional options to more effectively shape their areas of responsibility, while also addressing theaterwide challenges from near-peer competitors and NATO adversaries. These assets can be seamlessly integrated within a Stryker formation, require no reliance on joint air platforms, and can provide immediate direction finding or geolocating capability of enemy emitters to maneuver commanders at the lowest levels. The Army can continue to build on this momentum by solidifying what the primary mission or role of ground-based electronic warfare is and how the Army feels it should be equipped to accomplish it.”

How did partnering with the acquisition team early work for your unit? “Exceedingly well. Our team was fortunate to be able to participate in multiple Network Integration Evaluations, simulation exercises, and testing events both pre- and post-fielding. This gave our regimental planning team and tactical operators several instances to provide direct, candid feedback to the engineers, acquisition team and decision-makers involved in the project. We were able to see our ideas and feedback incorporated almost immediately, and knew with high confidence what we were receiving as the end user. This also served to get Soldier buy-in at the lowest levels, and they became more vested in providing comprehensive and meaningful feedback. It also removed a lot of unnecessary guesswork and ensured all parties had a shared understanding and shared expectations of the scope of the fielding.”

Advice for rapid prototyping: “Partner early and consistently with the acquisition team before, during and after equipment fielding. Know those aspects of the equipment that are more important to you and your Soldiers, and be prepared to communicate those requirements clearly. It’s also important to build a plan on how to go about stressing new systems, capturing relevant information, and how you envision the systems or equipment will be employed.”

Delivery and training for an integrated package of mounted, dismounted, and command-and-control electronic warfare systems began in January 2018, and Soldiers from the 173rd Airborne Brigade and the 2nd Armored Brigade Combat Team, 1st Infantry Division were the first to receive the new electronic warfare prototypes. (U.S. Army photo)

For more information on the Army RCCTO, go to https://rapidcapabilitiesoffice.army.mil/. For more information on PEO IEW&S and PM EW&C, go to https://peoiews.army.mil/

NANCY JONES-BONBREST is a public communications specialist for RCCTO. She 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.

JOHN HIGGINS is a public affairs writer for PEO IEW&S. He is an Iraq War veteran and former public affairs Soldier. He holds a B.A. in film production from Towson University.

CLAIRE HEININGER is the public communications lead for RCCTO and has written extensively about Army acquisition topics. She holds a B.A. in American Studies from the University of Notre Dame and is a former politics and government reporter for The Star-Ledger, New Jersey’s largest newspaper. She is Level II certified in program management.

This article is published in the April-June 2019 issue of Army AL&T magazine.

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DOD is fusing new authorities to upend a moribund acquisition status quo.

by Col. Joel D. Babbitt and Dr. Donald Schlomer

The case for change in peacetime has rarely been made as succinctly as the last two National Defense Strategies. For 17 years, the U.S. military has focused on low-intensity conflicts, bending all of our resources and attention toward defeating the terrorist threat in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria and Africa. However, with Russia’s annexation of Crimea, the debut of Russia’s New Generation Warfare using robots in eastern Ukraine, and China’s rapid maturation of its navy, rocket forces and military in general, it has become obvious that a new era of peer competition has arrived.

But large enterprises don’t change on a dime. It took us 17 years of focus on counterterrorism rather than on near-peer competitors to get to where we are—outranged by Russian artillery, lacking in air defense and discovering that our technological lead has eroded in several other areas as well. To regain our edge in these areas—quickly—is and will be a daunting challenge.

To meet this challenge, Gen. Mark A. Milley, Army chief of staff, is driving structural changes, and Congress is providing the top cover, through the development of a new four-star headquarters, the U.S. Army Futures Command. The Army Futures Command is breaking organizational friction by prioritizing the Army’s research and development, promoting an open dialogue through its cross-functional teams and championing the use of new authorities to break through calcified acquisition processes, thereby ushering in a new era of Army acquisition.

All of this has created quite a bit of buzz in the program offices and in the cube farms of the Pentagon. The need is clear: Army acquisition must no longer be process-oriented, time-consuming and risk-averse, taking years to deliver a product.

Enter the dynamic duo of middle-tier acquisition and other transaction authorities.

So, what is middle-tier acquisition authority? It was introduced under Section 804 of the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2016, Public Law 114-92. This authority provides program managers (PMs) a means to use an existing need to rapidly assess advanced technological prototypes without the bureaucracy and restrictions of new requirements approval, or to rapidly field mature systems based on existing requirements of any form. While it doesn’t throw out DOD Instruction 5000.02, “Operation of the Defense Acquisition System,” it encourages a minimalist approach to program structure and oversight.

Mid-tier acquisition is a powerful mechanism because it allows you to “soft-start” a new program or rapidly advance an existing one by initiating a rapid prototyping effort. A program manager (PM) can acquire several prototypes for user assessment during the requirements development and maturation process, essentially allowing the users to “buy, try and then decide.” The obvious advantages of prototyping early in the process, before a requirement is finalized, are many:

The user community can see what the actual state of industry is, not just what is stated by our congressional leaders in Washington.

Users can begin to make mission trade-offs and evaluate the relative priority of each aspect of a capability.

Industry partners can receive essential feedback much earlier in the process—when the cost of changes is much lower.

If the prototype does not meet the user’s need, the PM can scrap it and try another one. Through testing and evaluating prototype alternatives, the PM can ensure that the user is not forced to take something that does not meet the need, as sometimes happens under today’s bureaucratic, momentum-based systems—for example, a Navy work uniform that’s not designed for use aboard ships.

All you need to use middle-tier acquisition authority is a service acquisition executive’s delegation of the authority for either rapid prototyping or rapid fielding. Both authorities are delegated based on any type of need or justification or requirement, be it a capabilities development document, a joint urgent operational needs statement, an operational need statement, an urgent need statement or a directed requirement. The ability to address one of these documents and bypass the need to get a requirement approved through the Joint Capabilities Integration and Development System, paired with the exceptionally slim documentation required for program structure, is the essence and value of middle-tier acquisition.

An important component of middle-tier acquisition is the early coordination and robust involvement of a cross-functional team. These teams are constructed such that each member represents a different function of the acquisition effort and is empowered to address a vital function in acquiring a capability. Each function is necessary for the identification, funding, acquisition and user assessment of a prototype capability. The team includes the person refining the requirement, another developing the test plan, someone capturing the funding required, another determining if current technology exists to achieve the desired capability, and a person writing the request for proposal. Not to mention having the user determining if the capability of the prototype has value.

Having a small, empowered team is the best method to fulfill the purpose of a mid-tier acquisition, allowing for rapid decision-making and delivery of a new capability to the warfighter. The U.S. Special Operations Command (SOCOM) has used a “buy-try-decide” model of acquisition for decades—buying a product or prototype, trying it to see if it meets the need and deciding whether to keep it or buy something else. Currently, SOCOM is buying a prototype personal defense weapon—a weapon halfway between pistol and rifle—to assess its capability through a combat evaluation. Thus, warfighters will use the prototype weapon and undergo an eight- to 12-month in-the-field user assessment. After the evaluation, the milestone decision authority for the weapon will make a decision to either field or scrap the weapon prototype.

A MASSIVE LITTLE EXCLUSION

But what about contracting, you ask? Certainly if we speed up program timelines, traditional contracting will keep the overall process slow, right? Enter other transaction authority, which gives the contracting officer the capacity to enter into an “other transaction agreement”—acquisition-speak for a legally binding contract directed to a specific vendor for the purchase of a prototype. These specific vendors are normally not traditional defense contractors. Their purpose is to show how DOD could use current technology. Such a contract must be for $100 million or less, which means that it’s designed for smaller acquisition category (II, III or IV) programs.

Other transaction agreements are nonstandard procurement contracts, and thus not subject to the Federal Acquisition Regulation (FAR). That little exclusion actually has a huge impact and completely reshapes the playing field for DOD contracting. This exclusion could decrease the amount of time to award a contract by 12 months. Other transaction agreements provide small, innovative companies an easier way of contracting with DOD.

The mid-tier acquisition process, teamed with an other transaction agreement for contracting prototypes, provides small vendors the ability to directly compete their prototypes against established DOD vendors—thus allowing the PM to contract directly with the small vendor to acquire those prototypes for user assessment. However, if the prototype meets the user’s needs, a contracting officer should issue a request for proposal to all industry partners, using the specifications of the prototype, for a larger contract for full Army fielding.

This follow-on contract award enables the Army to engage competition to obtain the best value in acquiring the new capability in greater numbers. It may not seem fair: Little company develops a great new product that the Army needs, but it’s not large enough to produce that product in the quantities and at the price demanded by the Army. The Army isn’t being ruthless here, but it is positioning DOD to gain a lot more involvement from small, innovative businesses that don’t traditionally sell to DOD. How? Even if the Army pays a small company to develop a breakthrough product but goes on to hire a big company to produce it in the necessary quantities, that’s still important business for that small company. And the taxpayer is reaping the benefit.

NOT SO FAST

It’s important to understand the limitations of an other transaction authority. Congress’ intent, made clear in Section 812 of the National Defense Authorization Act of Fiscal Year 2016 and by the $100 million authorization ceiling, was that the mechanism be used for prototyping efforts. Therefore, it’s not the tool to contract for full Army fielding. So this kind of agreement is not a cure-all for anyone’s contracting woes. Once the user and the acquisition program manager agree to a capability after assessments of multiple prototypes, the PM can proceed with a standard FAR-based contract for full Army fielding of that capability. Thus, a PM will need to find a contracting officer who can do both.

ADDING IT UP

Let’s put it all together. What do you get when you mix middle-tier acquisition and other transaction agreements? Speed, plain and simple.

Here’s a good example. The Defense Technical Information Center (DTIC) used the middle-tier acquisition process with an other transaction agreement to develop prototypes to mitigate the current threat of shoulder-launched missiles with infrared seekers. DTIC worked with the National Security Technology Accelerator, an organization that searches the world to find companies with capabilities that can directly support the warfighter, and awarded an other transaction agreement for $15.2 million to Photo-Sonics Inc., a small company, to acquire prototypes that may have a capability. Under the mid-tier acquisition authority, Photo-Sonics won a DOD contract in 2018 to pursue this new capability.

Another example is the U.S. Army Missile Research, Development and Engineering Center using an other transaction agreement to engage the Defense Ordnance Technology Consortium, a large group of small, innovative companies, to develop that prototype personal defense weapon, which is lighter, more accurate, more lethal and quieter than existing weapons.

CONCLUSION

The need for speed is being driven by the exponential progression of technology and the rise of near-peer competitors. Russia, for example, has developed weapons that last longer, shoot farther and are more accurate than the Army’s standard weapons. It is critically important that all of the Army, through the establishment of cross-functional teams, use the middle-tier acquisition process.

Using the mid-tier acquisition authority with the other transaction authority, PMs can rapidly reach out to traditional and nontraditional DOD vendors to close the gap with our adversaries. Working together through these new arrangements, we can quickly and more accurately meet the warfighter’s needs.

For more information, contact Dr. Donald Schlomer at Donald.Schlomer@Socom.mil or 813-826-1353.

COL. JOEL D. BABBITT is the program executive officer for Special Operations Forces Warrior Systems within the U.S. Special Operations Command at MacDill Air Force Base, Florida. He previously served as the product manager for three product offices: Wideband Enterprise Satellite Systems within the Program Executive Office (PEO) for Enterprise Information Systems; Warfighter Information Network – Tactical Increment 1 within the PEO for Command, Control and Communications – Tactical; and Command, Control, Communications, Computing and Intelligence for a unit under the U.S. Special Operations Command. He holds an M.S. in computer science from the Naval Postgraduate School and a B.S. in psychology from Brigham Young University, and is a graduate of the U.S. Army Command and General Staff College. He is Level III certified in program management and Level II certified in engineering and in information technology. He holds the Project Management Professional certification and is a member of the Army Space Cadre and the Army Acquisition Corps.

DONALD SCHLOMER, LT. COL., USA (RET.), is a government civilian acquisition program manager within the PEO for Special Operations Forces Warrior Systems. He holds a doctorate in business administration from Walden University, specializing in Acquisition Category III requirements generation and in project management; an MBA in finance from Clemson University; and a BBA in information systems from the University of Georgia. He is a graduate of the Quartermaster Officer Advanced Course, and is the 2017 Frank Dilly Award winner for best doctoral dissertation. Schlomer is a retired Signal officer who deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan in support of Operations Iraqi Freedom and Enduring Freedom, respectively. He is Level II certified in program management.

This article is published in the April-June 2019 issue of Army AL&T magazine.

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By Michael Bold

FORT BELVOIR, Va. (April 24, 2019)—“Building the Acquisition Team”—creating the best possible workforce to supply our warfighters with the best possible capabilities—is the theme of the Spring 2019 issue of Army AL&T magazine. In it, read about:

How Dr. Bruce D. Jette, the assistant secretary of the Army for acquisition, logistics and technology (ASA(ALT)) and the Army acquisition executive, sees this critical time of Army modernization as an opportunity to modernize the acquisition enterprise and effect the changes that will ensure not only that we build the best acquisition team to meet the needs of future warfighters, but also meet the challenges of the marketplace, in “BUILDING THE ARMY ACQUISITION TEAM.”

The Army Rapid Capabilities Office (now the Rapid Capabilities and Critical Technologies Office, or RCCTO) and the Project Manager for Electronic Warfare and Cyber teamed up to address an urgent need for U.S. Army Europe and, in the process, set an award-winning example of phased prototyping, experimentation and fielding with creative resourcing, in “THE MAKING OF A PACKARD.”

The need is clear: Army acquisition must no longer be process-oriented, time-consuming and risk-averse, taking years to deliver a product. Enter the dynamic duo of middle-tier acquisition and other transaction authorities, in “THE NEED FOR SPEED.”

The Program Executive Office for Command, Control and Communications – Tactical, the first in a series of profiles of ASA(ALT) organizations, in “ASA(ALT) AT WORK.”

When supplying partner nations through foreign military sales, the best possible equipment may not always be the best possible solution, in “RADIO ANASOC.”

Dr. John P. Kotter, who first as a Harvard Business School professor and now as a consultant, has become the go-to authority on leadership and organizational change, in “CHANGE AGENT.”

How the Combat Casualty Care Research Program of the U.S. Army Medical Research and Materiel Command is working to make its “Stop the Bleed” campaign—training to treat traumatic hemorrhage—as ubiquitous as CPR training, in “‘STOP THE BLEED’: The Simple Art of Saving Lives.”

Be sure to check out our new platform for the Army AL&T e-magazine, at https://asc.army.mil/web/publications/army-alt-magazine/. It’s the same great publication but on a spiffed-up site that makes it easier to read, share and save the commentary, analyses and workforce development news you rely on and contribute. In addition to making Army AL&T easy to navigate on a desktop computer, the new platform uses a mobile-friendly format to make the magazine just as easy to read on a smartphone or tablet.

Also, remember that Army AL&T is built on contributions from you, the Army Acquisition Workforce. For more information on how to publish an article in Army AL&T magazine or a Faces of the Force submission, visit http://asc.army.mil/web/publications/ to see our writers guidelines, upcoming deadlines and themes.

Don’t forget to check out ASA(ALT) for news and information at the acquisition leadership level!

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When supplying partner nations through FMS, the best possible equipment may not always be the best possible solution.

by Benjamin Posil

Providing the best (i.e., most capable) equipment is not always the most successful foreign military sales (FMS) solution. In many cases the optimal solution means providing a less capable piece of equipment that better aligns with the recipient’s ability to implement, maintain and sustain it with minimal external support. An examination of the Afghan National Army Special Operations Command’s (ANASOC) radio network highlights how ineffectual capacity-building efforts can be when they do not reflect a thorough understanding of a partner’s capabilities. Ultimately, the U.S. security cooperation program is more powerful in building military capacity when FMS deliverables are synchronized with a partner’s organic capabilities.

In few places is the influence of the FMS program more profoundly felt than Afghanistan, where virtually all defense-related procurements are underwritten by the U.S. government. The impact is magnified within ANASOC, the Afghan National Army’s most capable combat force. Despite having only 14,000 troops (roughly 5 percent of total ANA forces), ANASOC is credited with conducting nearly 85 percent of ongoing combat operations throughout Afghanistan. As a result, the U.S. government has spent a disproportionate amount of funding to equip ANASOC with kit similar to that used by U.S. special operations units. Unlike with many other partners, the funding made available by the U.S. government to develop ANASOC and the larger Afghan National Army has been momentous in scale.

What is no different for Afghanistan than for other countries with militaries on the lower end of the capability spectrum, however, is that simply buying more capability does not mean the partner will use it the same way that U.S. forces do. As is the case with Harris radios for ANASOC, a partner’s capacity will not be enhanced when the selection of FMS equipment is based on what matches equivalent U.S. units instead of what aligns with the partner’s organic capabilities.

LIMITED PARTNERSHIP

The FMS program historically has been predicated on an assumed correlation between delivery of capability and increased military capacity; the more capability the U.S. provides to a partner, the stronger its capacity will become. There are numerous instances, however, where a partner’s capability limitations were not considered during FMS case development and ultimately undermined the opportunity for capacity enhancement. Specific examples range from multibillion-dollar equipment fielding programs for Afghanistan and Iraq to the delivery of basic watercraft to the most impoverished African countries.

Any time there is a gap between the sustainment requirements for a new capability delivered through the FMS program and a partner nation’s sustainment capacity, there is increased programmatic risk. Left unaddressed, this risk leads to inefficiently utilized funding and an adverse impact on U.S. security cooperation efforts. An example of a dramatic disparity between a capability provided and actual capacity generated is the tactical radio architecture established for ANASOC.

The U.S. government has spent the last 15-plus years equipping, training and mentoring ANASOC soldiers, as it has done for numerous other Afghan institutions. The vehicle for delivering nearly all new equipment for ANASOC (as well as the larger Afghan National Army) is the Building Partnership Capacity (BPC) program. The U.S. government’s focus on Afghan security has been so important that the Afghan Security Forces Fund, a specific “pot” of BPC funding, was established for the sole purpose of enabling the Afghan government to enhance its defense capacity. In 2017 alone, Congress appropriated over $4.2 billion for the fund.

Included in the effort to improve ANASOC’s ability to “shoot, move and communicate” has been the investment of hundreds of millions of dollars in tactical radios. While several brands of radios have been provided, the most prominent one by far is Harris.

TOP OF THE LINE

Harris radios are a staple of the U.S. Special Operations Command’s (SOCOM) inventory because of their advanced capabilities in propagating voice and data over a broad range of the radio frequency spectrum. Sgt. 1st Class Nicholas Pitz, a former ANASOC mentor, summed up Harris’ reputation within the special operations community: “Harris is often considered the gold standard for radios because of the heightened level of capabilities they possess.” At least in part because of its prominent role in the special operations community, Harris became the preferred radio solution for outfitting ANASOC.

A long-range high-frequency communication network was established for ANASOC that enables the transmission of encrypted voice and data traffic (including photos and video) over hundreds of miles from radios easily transported in a rucksack or on a vehicle. The U.S. government invested in hardware, training and an army of field service representatives to ensure functionality. While the capability mirrors networks used by special ops units across the globe, there is one conspicuous difference in ANASOC’s case: SOCOM units rely heavily on this network at the operational level, while ANASOC units rarely use it at all. A recent survey conducted by the ANASOC – Special Operations Advisory Group staff found that at best, the Harris network has been dramatically underused when compared with its capabilities; at worst, it is universally ignored by ANASOC soldiers.

This is in no way a negative reflection of Harris products. ANASOC’s network includes top-of-the-line equipment with tremendous capabilities that rival those used by elite forces worldwide. Instead, the underuse is a byproduct of U.S. strategy that for years provided ANASOC the most capable radio equipment without taking into account the indisputable realities on the ground. Planners failed to realize or acknowledge that because ANASOC does not have the requisite organizational sophistication, the Harris radios would have minimal positive impact on ANASOC’s operational capacity.

The reasons for this ineffectiveness are numerous. From a technical standpoint, the infrastructure to support a radio that requires regular software updates, proprietary parts and highly skilled radio operators is simply nonexistent in Afghanistan. Access to the internet is limited, even within ANASOC, so the ability to disseminate updates and to independently pursue training does not exist organically; nor do troubleshooting procedures. The resulting inability to update and distribute encryption has a particularly strong impact. Additionally, ANASOC has no practical mechanism to purchase its own spare parts, so its ability to replace broken components depends entirely on the FMS process and the Afghan military’s supply system.

ENABLING SELF-RELIANCE

Harris has filled the gap in part by establishing a network of field service representatives across Afghanistan. The Harris logo is ubiquitous; it can be found at virtually any camp where ANASOC soldiers operate. While this meets the immediate need of on-site subject matter expertise, it does little to build ANASOC’s organic capacity. If the ultimate U.S. strategic goal is enabling ANASOC’s self-reliance, the dependence on Harris field service representatives to ensure the functionality of ANASOC’s tactical radio network is a liability, not an asset.

Even if the previously outlined challenges can be overcome, there are fundamental cultural considerations that simply cannot be ignored when implementing a system like Harris radios. At the most basic level, a large percentage of ANASOC soldiers are functionally illiterate even in their native Dari; English reading comprehension is virtually nonexistent. Harris radios are operated through a series of digital menus in English, and since ANASOC Soldiers’ English comprehension is negligible, successful operation becomes an exercise of memorizing an extended sequence of words in a language they are unfamiliar with. Even if some percentage of the Soldiers can gain operational proficiency in a classroom setting through rote memorization, the likelihood of replicating this process in a field environment or in combat drops significantly.

Another consideration is that unlike U.S. special operations teams, for whom universal proficiency and empowerment are trademarks of “team” culture, Afghan military culture is defined by consolidation of power at the command level. What this means for communications is that access to more capable radios is far more restricted than in a comparable U.S. unit, with ANASOC commanders often the only ones allowed access. As a result, basic very-high-frequency “walkie-talkies” or cellphones become the primary methods of communication for much of the front-line forces.

What is especially troubling in the case of Afghanistan is that unlike with most FMS partners, the United States has been working directly with its military, at an operational level on a daily basis, for 15 years. The depth of anecdotal evidence highlighting the realities on the ground in Afghanistan far exceeds the depth of information available for most other partners. The preponderance of evidence confirms that while the Harris radios are an incredibly capable product, they are so dramatically underused by ANASOC that the radios do little to build actual operational capacity. The time and money dedicated to their inclusion in ANASOC’s “Tashkils” (Afghan documents that are similar to the U.S. Army’s modified tables of organization and equipment and reflect a unit’s assigned manning and equipment levels) could far more effectively be used elsewhere.

CONCLUSION

There are numerous reasons for ANASOC’s underuse of tactical communication systems, including the lack of a forcing function, challenges with English comprehension, maintenance issues and equipment complexity. It is highly unlikely that the U.S. will be able to change this paradigm, no matter how much money it spends to do so.

The U.S. procurement system is predicated on the concept of pursuing “best value” for the end user. While this same mandate applies to FMS cases, the “best” solution does not always correspond to the most capable product. The analog option is a far better match for many partner nations’ capabilities than the latest digital solutions that the U.S. military uses. The more basic solution is easier and more affordable to learn, operate, maintain and sustain than more complex alternatives. Moreover, the functionality is easier to integrate with the partner’s overall military capacity.

The same disconnect that results in hundreds of millions of wasted U.S. taxpayer dollars in Afghanistan can be equally impactful, albeit on a lesser scale, in even the smallest FMS cases. While the scope and scale of the examples vary greatly, the resulting waste of taxpayer money and erosion of U.S. influence with partner nations have the same effect. To most efficiently employ the FMS program—and the BPC program in particular—the U.S. needs to accurately assess what capability partner militaries can support and effectively supplement in a way that will enhance their long-term capacity development. On its face, providing U.S. partners with older, and ostensibly inferior, technology may seem counterintuitive. But the result will be more capable and self-reliant partners and a more effective security cooperation program.

For more information, contact the Maryland National Guard Public Affairs Office at 410-576-6179.

BENJAMIN POSIL is a security cooperation professional with over 10 years’ experience in the field. He is a lieutenant colonel in the Maryland Army National Guard, where he recently completed a 10-month deployment to Afghanistan. He has earned MBAs from the University of South Carolina and Wirtschaftuniversität Wien in Vienna, Austria, and an M.S. in international relations from Troy State University. He also has a B.A. in international relations and Latin American studies from the University of Delaware. He is an Acquisition Corps member and a certified program manager through both the Defense Acquisition Workforce Improvement Act (Level II) and the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (Level III).

The author would like to express his appreciation to Lt. Col. Glenn Deetman, Maj. Adam Kavalsky, Sgt. 1st Class Nicholas Pitz and Sgt. 1st Class Sherwein “Joey” Asuncion. Their wisdom, assistance and technical expertise were essential in the development of this article.

This article is published in the April-June 2019 issue of Army AL&T magazine.

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FROM THE ARMY ACQUISITION EXECUTIVE

BRUCE D. JETTE

Building the army acquisition team

Materiel isn’t the only thing in need of modernizing. The acquisition enterprise is taking a new approach, too.

During this critical time of sweeping change in the Army, as modernizing Army materiel gains traction and speed, the acquisition enterprise must also take the opportunity to modernize itself. This historic moment requires us to effect the changes that will ensure not only that we build the best acquisition team to meet the needs of future warfighters, but also meet the challenges of the marketplace.

In the same way that the decisions we make today with our military will shape the fighting force of tomorrow, so, too, will the decisions we make with respect to the acquisition workforce shape the materiel that the future force will have at its disposal.

One thing is clear: With either civilian or military Army Acquisition Workforce members, we cannot build the Army acquisition team the way that industry does. That does not mean we cannot emulate industry methods in the best way we can.

Think about it: Today, when a contractor comes to the table to negotiate the contract they’ve just won a bid on, they bring their A-Team. Let’s say it’s a major contract, and they’ve already spent as much as or more than $1 million on their capture effort. There is nothing wrong with that—it’s a matter of them surviving and prospering. But right now, when the Army is negotiating that contract, we most likely would have a Defense Acquisition Workforce Improvement Act (DAWIA) Level III certified contracting officer with about six months of formal training and at least four years of contracting experience, potentially sitting across the table from a team of Wharton-educated MBAs and Harvard-educated lawyers. That’s not a level playing field.

We are not going to level that playing field overnight. The new talent management strategy that the Army is developing, along with our own corresponding acquisition talent management plan—the Human Capital Strategic Plan—is the beginning of a long march to building the right team. We will accomplish this by wisely using all of the people, data and technology available to us to help us speed acquisition, improve the quality of our products, help make our efforts vastly more cost-effective and meet our solemn commitment to our Soldiers.

That commitment is represented in the Army’s six modernization priorities: We will execute requirements as rapidly as feasibly possible, as efficiently as possible and at the best price possible to bring the Army’s future equipment and weapon systems from design to delivery. Our challenge is that we have an industrial-age acquisition system with an industrial-age culture and mindset. We cannot fully achieve our modernization goals and regain our historic overmatch capabilities without dragging this system, along with how we organize talent, into the digital age.

A TALENT STRATEGY

Last year, Secretary of the Army Dr. Mark T. Esper launched the Army Talent Management Task Force. That task force is at the vanguard of a new, Army view on talent and provides the basis for a new, Armywide talent management strategy that, in the near term, is focused primarily on the military side of the workforce.

To be sure, Army talent management writ large is different from acquisition workforce talent management. The new Army Talent Management Strategy is designed to acquire, develop, employ and retain the best officers—including future acquisition officers—and will act as the blueprint for the total Army.

As the secretary has said, talent management should be a deliberate, data-driven approach to the processes and systems that enable the Army to better manage its officer corps. Before we acquire talent, however, we must understand what we want these new acquisition officers to do. When we understand that, we can better understand the mix of knowledge, skills, behaviors and preferences that we want to look for in accessions to acquisition.

This is critical to the Army because there is considerable competition for the top talent in America today. This is not, as Dr. E. Casey Wardynski, the assistant secretary of the Army for manpower and reserve affairs, said recently, a “come as you are” Army. We need people who not only are technologically adept, resilient and problem-solving, but also who reflect and share the values of our nation.

In Army acquisition, our job is to get those talented people to join our ranks. Unlike industry, which can pull in talent wherever it needs the talent and from wherever it can find it, the Army has no “lateral entry,” as Wardynski noted. Officer or enlisted, people in the current system generally start at the bottom and work their way up. That means it’s considerably harder for us because we have to start developing our military acquisition talent at the bottom, too, and make acquisition attractive to the people with the skills, knowledge, behaviors and preferences that the Army acquisition enterprise needs.

In many areas on the civilian side of the acquisition workforce, that is also often true. In some fields, such as contracting, the way the Army does business is so different from the way industry does—starting as an intern is often the way people find their way into acquisition. Even civilians who come “laterally” into acquisition—after retiring from military service or from industry—still have to learn how the Army does business.

NEW TOOLS, OLD CHALLENGES

The Army Talent Management Strategy will provide the tools to create a bridge between the current and future systems. With the rollout of the Integrated Personnel and Pay System – Army (IPPS-A) to the regular Army, we will at last have a tool that will help us gather the detailed data we need to identify and recruit the talent we need for the future.

This will help us develop the talent marketplace that Esper has spoken of in recent months—transparent, data-rich, and governed by business rules that will help match officers’ talents to assignments and engender trust among commanders, officers and the Army. When IPPS-A rolls out to the civilian workforce, we can further develop our knowledge of who our people are and what we need them to do.

The challenges are manifold, and the challenge of changing the culture in the Army is central among them. The current system for officer assignments was created in 1980 with the enactment of the Defense Officer Personnel Management Act. It is a rigid, conveyor-belt system that’s highly centralized and often based too much on an officer’s time in service. With assignments managed from the top, all officers follow what is essentially a standard career path. They often have little choice in where they go and what they do.

Basing assignments on talents, knowledge, skills, behavior and preferences makes much more sense. “Talent-based branching” began at West Point in 2012 and gathered detailed insight into the unique talents each new officer has. Not only that, it also gathered the unique demands of each Army basic branch. That, along with technology, has enabled the development of the talent marketplace.

Using the talent marketplace, the Army will place officers in the assignments in which they are most likely to be engaged, productive and satisfied—and engaged, productive and satisfied is a great way to retain talent. The Army’s new Assignment Interactive Module 2.0, which facilitates the assignment marketplace, will help officers find their own sweet spot. We have to make every effort for acquisition to be that.

But, of course, it’s not just about officers picking and choosing where they want to go. It’s about where they’re needed. It’s also about officers having the training and education they need to succeed at acquisition. At my direction, the Army Director for Acquisition Career Management (DACM) Office has launched the Functional Area (FA) 51 (acquisition) Officer Advanced Education Implementation Plan.

Recent history shows that the vast majority of officers, when they access into FA 51, do not have an acquisition-relevant degree. Approximately 75 percent of officers do not have a business degree relevant to acquisition. Only 15-20 percent of officers have a graduate degree with sufficient business credits. Of those with a relevant graduate degree, 6-10 percent will require a business certificate program to go along with the DAWIA training they will receive at the Army Acquisition Center of Excellence in Huntsville, Alabama. The new authorities that the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) for Fiscal Year 2019 gave us will help to do some of that. Much of what we must do will require cultural change—and everyone understands that’s difficult. We must also work to make acquisition careers highly rewarding and therefore sought after by top Army talent.

Among other things, NDAA loosened some of that rigidity in the current system and gave the Army some flexibility to determine the characteristics of our future, talent-based system.

Authorities enacted in the 2019 NDAA that apply to the acquisition workforce, and that we are studying and looking to leverage, are:

Direct commission up to O-6 (colonel): The Army can access private sector expertise up to the rank of colonel to both the active and reserve components.
Opting out of a promotion board: An officer can opt out of a promotion board—or get off the conveyor belt temporarily—to avoid the career impact of seeking advanced education, broadening assignments or assignments of significant value that affect the competitiveness for promotion.

We are looking at both of these (and more) to help us acquire and develop the talent we need. Let’s take the second one first. Opting out of a promotion board would mean that an officer wouldn’t get “punished” for taking the opportunity to get, for example, a doctoral degree, and miss out on future promotions because he or she is no longer on that conveyor belt. It would also mean that we could hand-pick talent to pursue such studies to the considerable advantage of Army acquisition and then retain that talent. We don’t want to pay for someone to get a Ph.D. and then force them out of the Army.

Few other Army organizations absolutely need people with doctoral degrees in the way that the Army Acquisition Workforce does.

As to the direct-commission authority, it would mean that, should the Army decide it needs a particular expertise, it could hire an expert and bring that person into our ranks. Such assignments, however, would be temporary. There are contrary perspectives on this. Some think that bringing someone with needed expertise into the Army temporarily at the O-6 level could greatly benefit the Army. Others believe putting such individuals in uniform could endanger the legitimacy of the very important operational perspective of acquisition officers who came into the Army Acquisition Corps the old-fashioned way.

ON THE CIVILIAN SIDE

Other than potentially making civilians temporary Soldiers, what about the civilian side of acquisition? At my direction, the DACM office is pursuing a number of initiatives in that realm, such as an acquisition-focused recruiting cell, college scholarships and pay, just to name a few.

Secretary Esper has a vision that we would all do well to understand. He is fully aware that he has three distinct populations who serve the Army: officers, noncommissioned officers and civilians. The Army will pilot its Talent Management Strategy first with officers. When it has gathered sufficient data and developed an understanding of how the talent marketplace works, it will continue that pilot by including noncommissioned officers.

Only when those much smaller cohorts have helped us iron out any issues with the implementation of the strategy will we to begin to roll it out to civilians. As you are probably aware, civilian acquisition members make up approximately 96 percent of the workforce, and their jobs are governed by a much different set of regulations. It’s a harder nut to crack and vital to get it right.

There is no question that there is much work to be done and we cannot do it all at once, but in the very near future, when we meet contractors at the table to negotiate a contract, we will be on a level playing field.

This article is published in the April-June 2019 issue of Army AL&T magazine.

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PEO C3T is all about how Soldiers communicate—the satellite terminals that send internet and phone signals to the command post, radios, the network that Soldiers connect to in the field, mission command software and apps. PEO C3T’s goal is to deliver a network that lets Soldiers dominate across all domains. The work’s already in progress, with a target end date in 2028.

But the “win in 2028” network isn’t in a lab somewhere under development. Pieces of it are in the field already, being tested and used. The approach is incremental: add something new, let Soldiers test it (the 1-508th Parachute Regiment of the 82nd Airborne just tested a new combination of network components, some commercial, some government), fix, repeat.

“In contrast to other Army programs, where somebody that we’re not even interacting with decides what we need and pushes it down, the ability to work closely with the developers of the software and hardware has been great,” said Capt. Matthew Risenmay, higher headquarters company commander for the 1-508th Parachute Infantry Regiment, 82nd Airborne Division. “If you don’t have contact with the people that are developing it, you run into problems and you have to deal with the problems for a long time.”

Q: What should we know about PEO C3T?

PEO C3T is building a network that is…

Expeditionary, to allow commanders to promptly deploy anywhere and conduct operations upon arrival.
Mobile, so that commanders can command from the plane, from the tactical operations center, or while fighting alongside their troops.
Hardened by cyber and electronic warfare capabilities and by offering multiple communications pathways to make it harder for adversaries to identify how Soldiers are sharing data.
Simple, so that any Soldier, not just network experts, can communicate using radios and other devices.

Q: Where does PEO C3T fit into the bigger picture?

The Army Network Cross-Functional Team identifies capability gaps—what Soldiers need from the Army network—and then conducts assessments, user experimentations and technical demonstrations to find potential ways to fill them. Maj. Gen. Peter A. Gallagher, director of the Army Network Cross-Functional Team, described the work: “The overall network strategy is to have a network that’s flat, fast, mobile and protected.”

Then PEO C3T runs the baton from “idea” to “product in the field”: it takes that list of potential solutions, and partners with research and development (like the U.S. Army Communications-Electronics Research, Development and Engineering Center) and testing (the U.S. Army Test and Evaluation Command) organizations to develop and acquire the ones that work best.

Q: What have you fielded lately?

Security force assistance brigades in Afghanistan recently got PEO C3T’s newest effort, which is being called the Integrated Tactical Network: not a new product, but a new combination of the Army’s current tactical network environment (radios, applications, devices and network transport) with new commercial components (radios, gateways, applications and cellular services) and transport capabilities so Soldiers can communicate in areas with limited or disabled bandwidth.

The other key ingredient: It’s unclassified. Most Soldiers conducting operations in tactical settings aren’t talking about classified information. But until now, the networks they used to communicate had to be able to handle classified material—which meant more regulatory boxes to check and more security training. The Integrated Tactical Network drops those requirements.

“This isn’t a new network. We’re not replacing anything. What we’re doing is we’re basically taking a program of record and we’re looking at injecting commercial off-the-shelf items to see where we can enhance or improve our capabilities,” said Lt. Col. Brandon Baer, product manager for Helicopter and Multi Mission Radios.

Q: What’s been the PEO’s biggest success?

Integrating commercial off-the-shelf products into the Army’s network. “It gives us an opportunity to keep up with industry and tweak things as we go, with user feedback, and also inject capabilities depending on what the unit has [and] what the unit’s missions are,” according to Lt. Col. Brandon Baer.

Q: Biggest challenge? “Finding ways to make the network more flexible to meet current and future operations. We are currently examining how we can manage the boundaries within our secure network to give us more flexibility at the tactical edge. We’re also looking at advanced networking waveforms, which will allow us to conduct a mobile ad-hoc network for our battalion formations that will operate in a variety of situations,” said Kathryn Bailey, PEO C3T Public Affairs.

For more information, contact the PEO C3T Public Affairs Office at https://peoc3t.army.mil/c3t/contact-us.php.

This article is published in the April-June 2019 issue of Army AL&T magazine.

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FROM THE DIRECTOR OF

ACQUISITION CAREER MANAGEMENT

CRAIG A. SPISAK

Lining Up Your Goals

Syncing up DAWDF funding and Human Capital Strategic Plan objectives will lead to an enhanced process and more transparency.

You can throw all the money you want at an acquisition effort, but if the people doing the work don’t know how to prioritize it and make sure it’s doing what it’s supposed to do, achieving your goals is going to be difficult.

All acquisition programs have at least three things in common: the work, the people doing it and the financial resources to support the work. Successful programs tend also to share an alignment of goals and objectives with the people doing the work.

We can’t just expect all of that to come together automatically. Successful efforts tend to provide adequate resources to the people doing the work—the education, training and all the other necessary elements that help align our mission with our priorities.

The Army acquisition community must not only determine how best to deploy our resources, but also how we use the Army Acquisition Workforce Human Capital Strategic Plan (HCSP) to ensure that the people who have to obligate that money are prepared to do so in the most effective and efficient manner.

We launched the HCSP in October 2016. It’s our “business plan” for developing the best possible acquisition workforce for the Army. To meet that objective, we must make sure that we focus our resources on our most important priorities. But we also need buy-in from the acquisition community on our major goals and objectives. Those will be inextricably linked to the HCSP and the specific goals and objectives that we have there.

FULFILLING THE PLAN

The HCSP has five goals:

Workforce planning.
Professional development.
Leadership development.
Employee engagement.
Communications and collaboration.

Let’s focus on the first two goals, workforce planning and professional development.

One of the ways we improve workforce planning and professional development is with the Defense Acquisition Workforce Development Fund (DAWDF). Congress enacted DAWDF with the FY08 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), then made it permanent in the FY16 NDAA. This fund permits DOD to recruit and hire, develop and train, and retain its acquisition workforce. In FY18, DAWDF provided $86 million in funding to the Army Acquisition Workforce, which led to 322 quality initiatives, 183 new hires and training for 19,364 members of the workforce.

DAWDF REVIEW

For FY20, we have an enhanced structure that we’re putting in place for DAWDF funding for Army organizations, to make sure that our prioritization makes sense.

Every request for DAWDF funding must align with one of the five HSCP goals.
Every request will be reviewed by a council-of-colonels board.
Every organization requesting DAWDF funding will brief acquisition leaders on its plan for using the funds.
Every plan will be documented on a database to ensure transparency.

The U.S. Army Director for Acquisition Career Management (DACM) Office has always brought in people from the field and incorporated subject matter expertise to review DAWDF proposals. We are modifying this approach slightly— using the existing process and getting a greater degree of input from more of the stakeholders. There has always been a tremendous amount of rigor in DAWDF funding, and this is the next evolution of rigor to ensure that our stakeholders’ input is more broadly reflected.

THINK METRICS

All of those activities and efforts, specifically the initiatives, need to have concrete metrics associated with them. It’s way too easy, sometimes, for people to find what they believe to be a competency gap and think that there’s a way to train it away. Unless you understand the baseline competency and what we think we can accomplish through training before you start that training, then you may spend all sorts of money to develop a program or course that doesn’t exactly address the true gap and may never attain the desired result.

Let’s say you see a problem with how a product is being developed. You decide we have a gap in understanding a particular part of the process. You train against that part of the process. And yet you don’t see a change in the results.

Why? Because either, a) we haven’t really defined the requirement and recognized what the core problem is, or b) we haven’t used metrics to understand whether what we say we’re trying to solve actually gets solved. Metrics are important, and so is understanding the core problem.

When every initiative has very specific metrics associated with its objectives, you can actually know whether or not you’ve accomplished what you set out to do in the first place.

At the end of the day, it really is about professionalizing the acquisition workforce and ensuring that it has all the skills, tools and competencies needed so that we are world-class stewards of the taxpayers’ dollars. Developing acquisition professionals goes hand in hand with developing the best products, which requires special people doing very specialized work. We can’t afford in today’s environment to be just OK, we have to be exceptional!

This article is published in the April-June 2019 issue of Army AL&T magazine.

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How a demonstration of translating targeting data between the Army and the Air Force confirmed a prototype for long-range precision fires in multidomain operations.

by Maj. Isaac Lewellen, Chief Warrant Officer 3 James Patrick and Larry Jennings

All parties were on standby, eager to take the next step toward operationalizing a prototype capability in software translation and demonstrating its utility over active military networks.

As part of a two-week plan, the team conducted initial connectivity and quickly identified network and configuration issues. They immediately began to work through the hurdles, and after a few days of additional testing and development, addressed the technical issues. The team was ready to launch the exercise.

This time they were on familiar ground, initiating communications from the Air Force’s Common Mission Control Center (CMCC) at Beale Air Force Base in Yuba County, California, to the 101st Airborne Division Artillery at Fort Campbell, Kentucky.

The goal was to provide insights and help prove a critical new capability in software translation: converting, in real time and strictly from machine to machine, an Air Force Universal Command and Control Initiative message to the Army’s Variable Message Format. A message from one service’s message system had been converted to another service’s messaging format in a lab many times; this would be the first such conversion in an operational setting. It would show an initial sensor-to-shooter capability that could pass targeting data between services to the Army’s fire control system.

Here’s why this message conversion is necessary. Today, communicating between these Army and Air Force systems requires Soldiers and Airmen to monitor or scan a multitude of internet relay chat windows, or other communications, and then manually transfer and input data into their respective systems. This can lead to time delays and possible human errors. A conversion is required in order to allow these two systems to communicate machine-to-machine.

Unfortunately, this is not as simple as just converting messages on a one-for-one basis. In some cases it takes multiple messages from one format to create a single message in the converted format. When conversion is successful it allows the Army access to Air Force intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance assets, and the Air Force access to Army fires units without having to go through layers of organizations, thereby speeding up the kill chain process and reducing the chance of targeting errors.

Back to the test meant to solve this problem: At the helm were the Army Rapid Capabilities and Critical Technologies Office (RCCTO), the Air Force Rapid Capabilities Office (RCO) and the 101st Airborne Division Artillery. To launch the demonstration, the Air Force RCO selected a critical target within an area of responsibility outside the range of Army sensors and initiated a call for fires from the Common Missile Control Center. This initial sensor message was downlinked to the control center and initiated the call for fires, which was seamlessly translated from the Air Force Command and Control Initiative standard to the Army Variable Message Format standard, and delivered to the 101st at Fort Campbell.

Despite the different systems it only took minutes to complete the machine-to-machine transfer. In doing so the services can begin to move from a linear, static and stove-piped “kill chain” to one where the kill chains overlap and all the domains of war are interconnected into one network to create a “kill web” with multiple paths. Using the machine-to-machine translation reduced the chance for human error, while significantly decreasing the time traditional dynamic targeting takes to execute. The process demonstrated the value of leveraging sensors that are not organic to the Army—such as Air Force sensors—while opening up the strike options for the Air Force. The adapter enabled more timely prosecution of critical targets in the conduct of multidomain operations.

INFORMATION AT THE NEEDED SPEED
In a complex fight in an anti-access and area denial environment, the time it takes to deliver information from sensor to shooter is critical. Recognizing the need to speed up long-range fires communication and execution among the services, the chiefs of staff of the Army and Air Force directed that an Army-Air Force summit be held. At the summit, in August 2018, the two services focused on applying and integrating their open-architecture technologies and approaches to boost speed, precision and agility on the battlefield. The sensor-to-shooter demo, executed on April 5, was one outcome of this summit.

The purpose of the sensor-to-shooter prototype was to demonstrate the technical feasibility of a machine-to-machine data flow for targeting that would allow Air Force sensors to direct Army fires. Although multiple processes and associated methods are available to execute cross-domain dynamic targeting, the RCCTO solution is unique in leveraging an existing Air Force sensor platform and applying limited software development to translate message formats in near-real time for consumption by Army firing platforms.

As an initial proof of concept, the prototype showed the integration power of Air Force intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance systems in passing targeting data, machine to machine, to Army fires in an operational scenario. It leveraged modular open-systems approaches to sensor and weapon integration, in which information sharing in real time is key to neutralizing the threat.

Doing so leaves the door open for new, and ever-evolving, ways to sense and identify targets and establishes the ability to neutralize the target with a new or updated weapons package without having to re-implement the solution. Achieving rapid machine-to-machine information sharing requires common standards and well-defined system interfaces.

LESSONS LEARNED
In preparation for the live demonstration, the RCCTO partnered with the Systems Integration Lab of the U.S. Army Combat Capabilities Development Command’s C5ISR [Command, Control, Computers, Communications, Cyber, Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance] Center at Aberdeen Proving Ground, Maryland, to create a development environment. This consisted of computers hosting “virtual machines” of the Air Force CMCC software, the message translation software and the Army Advanced Field Artillery Tactical Data System application—that is, the sensor that would detect a target, the software that would translate the message generated by the sensor, and the artillery that would fire on the target. The early testing enabled proper translation and formatting of the critical message traffic.

Both the lab testing and the demonstration highlighted the need for more standard workflows for fires units when passing messages to joint forces, including observer mission updates. Additionally, capabilities for sharing situational awareness could be enhanced to streamline the air and ground fires clearance processes while minimizing the potential for friendly fire or fratricide.

Additional analysis will be necessary to move toward greater use of common standards. On a modern battlefield, with multiple units and multiple services, this becomes a much more complex idea that will require the application of advanced machine learning and artificial intelligence. One of the key assumptions behind the April demonstration vignette is that the sensor detects an unplanned target as a “Joint Force Commander Critical Target” as described in the multiservice tactics, techniques and procedures publication for dynamic targeting. These particular targets typically represent a very small portion of the total and in most cases require an immediate response because of the potential danger to friendly forces.

CONCLUSION
The sensor-to-shooter team successfully demonstrated the technical feasibility of machine–to-machine connectivity facilitating Air Force and Army bidirectional message passing. Next, the RCCTO team is planning to conduct a possible end-to-end test of the entire sensor-to-shooter kill chain. This expanded chain will yield additional lessons learned and insights into machine-to-machine execution and the time to completion of complex kill chains. Additional development could explore an early discussion on hosting the adapter software at an Army unit, creating a more direct link from an Air Force platform to an Army fires unit. Collaboration with United States Army Europe continues, with G-3 Fires and G-6 providing input and expertise for continued development of a direct link test and network connectivity for the current software.

Ultimately, the Army will need to conduct further exercises to evaluate message flows in disparate geographic locations to further operationalize the technology. One of many sensor-to-shooter efforts, this will be an important step in creating a better integrated and more lethal joint team to defeat anti-access and area denial measures.

For more information, go to the RCCTO website, https://rapidcapabilitiesoffice.army.mil/.

MAJ. (P) ISAAC LEWELLEN is the RCCTO Sensor to Shooter Joint Project lead. He is an air defense officer with Patriot and indirect fire protection capability battalion experience. He holds a B.S. in psychology from the University of Oregon.

CHIEF WARRANT OFFICER 3 JAMES PATRICK is a network management technician for the RCCTO Sensor to Shooter project. He is a signal warrant officer with experience in communications and acquisitions.

LARRY JENNINGS is the MITRE Corp. project lead across various RCCTO initiatives. He has specialized in advanced concepts development and agile acquisition over the last several years. He holds a M.S. in management information systems from Bowie State University and a B.S. in business administration from the University of Montana.

This article is published in the Summer 2019 issue of Army AL&T magazine.

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