PEO C3T leverages rapid acquisition and prototyping to improve network management for new software-defined radios.

by Maj. Nicholas Milano, Keith Whittaker, George Senger and Amy Walker

The Army has been fielding new software-defined radios, such as the 2-Channel Leader Radio, to enable voice and data exchange across U.S. Army, joint and coalition forces on the battlefield, at extended ranges and with greater capability than ever before. However, once deployed, Soldiers began asking for easier and faster ways to perform the initial, labor-intensive networking tasks required to enable these advanced radios to communicate across the battlespace.

To address their request, our team at the Program Executive Office for Command, Control and Communications – Tactical (PEO C3T) leveraged the Army’s rapid acquisition prototyping processes and reduced the time it takes to conduct these networking tasks for a brigade’s worth of radios from four weeks to just minutes. These once labor-intensive tasks include:

• Radio initialization, which prepares the data products needed for the unit to run on the network, including unique identifiers, roles and Internet Protocol addresses, and takes into account a unit’s mission, personnel footprint and mix of networked mission command systems.
• Radio planning, which designs the radio networks and provides needed planning information such as location data, configurations and settings.
• Loading all of the data and software into each radio.

Along with speeding these tasks, the new user-friendly software prototype tools are less complex compared with the Army’s current capability in use today, which means that tasks once performed by advanced signal Soldiers can now be performed by general-purpose users. Additionally, when a commander needs to reassign a unit on the battlefield, the software tool suite makes it easier for signal Soldiers to more rapidly complete the extensive radio networking tasks needed to support such changes, a process known as unit task reorganization.

Taking full advantage of the Army’s acquisition processes for rapid prototyping, which are outlined in Section 804 of the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2016, our team was able to develop these software prototypes in just three months, compared with the 12 to 18 months a traditional, fully custom Army development effort would have taken. By fully adopting rapid acquisition concepts and better business practices, DOD organizations like PEO C3T can deliver new technologies to the field faster and outpace U.S. adversaries in the technology race.

Program Executive Office for Command, Control, Communications – Tactical (PEO C3T) engineers work on software-defined radios during the Integrated Tactical Network (ITN) verification and validation event at the PEO C3T ITN facility on Sept. 11, 2019 at Fort Bragg, North Carolina. The team prepares the expeditionary ITN equipment set for an upcoming pilot that will be supported by the 82nd Airborne Division. (U.S. Army photo by Amy Walker, PM Tactical Network/PEO C3T public affairs)

NEW WAYS TO GO FAST

As part of its acquisition reform, the Army has been implementing new ways to speed acquisition processes to deliver capabilities that will prepare our forces to fight and win a war against any adversary. Among these reforms is the other-transaction authority, which enables program managers of smaller programs to enter into contracts with vendors to prototype new technologies. PEO C3T’s other-transaction authority efforts include the accelerated prototyping of capabilities that incorporate common network planning, configuration, monitoring, provisioning, management and cyber defense. We are using these authorities to prototype solutions, such as our radio management tool suite, to configure and integrate tactical and enterprise networks, enabling the delivery of information and communications among Soldiers at all echelons and using network resources prioritized according to the commander’s intent.

The Army’s Network Cross-Functional Team continues to identify capability gaps and integration challenges across existing network programs. Our team rapidly developed each of the prototype software-defined radio management solutions to address some of these gaps under the Unified Network Operations middle-tier acquisition authority, which was granted by the Army acquisition executive in March 2019, with PEO C3T named as the decision authority and the office of primary responsibility. At the time, it was the eighth middle-tier authority to be approved by the Army. The authority enabled us to prototype industry software to support existing operational needs without formal requirements documentation and to gain Soldier feedback to continue to enhance the capabilities and inform Army fielding decisions.

UNIFIED NETWORK OPERATIONS PROTOTYPES

On the battlefield, communications officers from the tactical edge up through corps use network management software capabilities to plan, configure, manage, monitor, control, secure and defend their network assets—the combination of which is referred to as network operations. The Unified Network Operations middle-tier acquisition authority is helping us to provide a more integrated, standardized and simplified network operations architecture. In one of the first efforts under the agreement, in March 2019 we concentrated on prototyping existing commercial software applications for network planning and management, integrating them into existing government programs of record, and then quickly inserting them into military formations to gain feedback for further enhancements and to support future Army capability decisions.

A TEAM-OF-TEAMS

It was apparent early on that an integrated tool suite would require an integrated team that promoted alignment, collaboration and rapid delivery. From the beginning, we worked closely with Army stakeholders, including the Network Cross-Functional Team, to ensure that our PEO C3T team was synchronized with Army network modernization efforts and requirements. Our team created a methodology to rapidly integrate and align development activities between the offices, implementing software development techniques found in the commercial software development world—including agile software development; a scaled agile software framework, which guided the team in applying lean and agile practices for rapid development and delivery; and a unified team-of-teams that managed a tightly integrated software release cycle, known as an agile release train.

Following middle-tier acquisition authority guidelines, we looked at leveraging commercial technologies, existing Army programs and resources to meet the network operations gaps in support of evolving unit formations, such as the Expeditionary Signal Battalion–Enhanced pilot unit and the security force assistance brigades, and the emerging network operations requirements that support them. We looked at resources that were available within PEO C3T that were already being used in different project offices to satisfy specific needs. We found significant synergies in software-defined radio capability development between Project Lead Network Enablers, Project Manager Tactical Network and Project Manager Tactical Radios, and we knew that combining and integrating efforts would be an exponentially more efficient and effective process.

We created an integrated team of over 20 engineers, including a senior engineer from each of the three project management offices. Instead of each office focusing on its own product, the team worked together to pull the different products together to work as one functional business process. We looked for innovative ways to enhance each other’s separate capabilities, which eventually led to the enhancement of the radio management tool suite as a whole.

We did not build an entirely new Army system or write mountains of new code, but instead used common interfaces and protocols—work that already had been done in commercial industry. We integrated commercial application and tools into our existing systems so they could work in new ways. Within three months of working together, we were able to reduce the process to initialize, plan and load a brigade’s worth of radios from four weeks to just minutes.

A forward observer with the 508th Parachute Infantry Regiment, 82nd Airborne Division uses Integrated Tactical Network components during a live-fire exercise at Camp Atterbury, Indiana in January. (U.S. Army photo by Kathy Bailey, PM Tactical Radios, PEO C3T public affairs)

NONTRADITIONAL VENDORS

As permitted in middle-tier acquisition guidelines, we did not need to wait for formal requirements documents and other time-consuming documentation, enabling our team to quickly perform market research with industry to speed development of the radio network management tool suite. Through requests for information and technical exchange meetings initiated by the Network Cross-Functional Team, where we explained to industry the software capabilities that we were looking for, we were able to determine the best options for integrating existing capabilities with minimum development efforts. Where possible, we created capability that is not vendor specific, to spur innovation and keep costs down through increased competition.

To create the prototype capabilities, the other-transaction authority spurred us, when possible, to contract smaller vendors that traditionally do not support military efforts. Other-transaction authority also enabled us to continually assess experimentation results and Soldier feedback to see how these products could potentially support a more mature system that we could eventually field across the force. If results reveal that a product is not the right fit, we can look for something else that works better, before fielding the capability to numerous units.

We had to bridge language barriers in technology and processes in order to make sure new vendors understood the military requirements, and we had to understand what the proposed commercial off-the-shelf technologies could do for us. In the end, when we applied the nontraditional vendor’s existing technologies to our evolving military systems, the technologies functioned in new ways. The vendors did not need to change their internal business processes to provide their technologies to us, enabling them to enter into an arena once monopolized by larger, more traditional defense contractors.

USE OPEN FRAMEWORKS AND STANDARDS

Adopting an open framework and standards was a key component that enabled us to use nontraditional vendors, and it also provided common network planning, configuration, management and monitoring capabilities. Throughout the process of developing the radio network operations software tool suite, we purposely laid a foundation for an open framework and open standards, including open application programming interfaces that enable applications to “talk” to each other. This open architecture ensures that future DOD software and system development will most effectively share information between systems and more easily and rapidly integrate future systems to improve functionality and capability.

The open construct will be critical to future network modernization endeavors. DOD continues to develop integrated capability, such as its Integrated Tactical Network, which includes multiple vendors, hardware, software, configurations and systems that overarch multiple programs. The Integrated Tactical Network design enables commanders to leverage military and commercially available networks for communication and more easily share information with their coalition mission partners. The commercial off-the-shelf equipment package includes new expeditionary satellite terminals, high-capacity line-of-sight capability, mobile broadband kits, radio waveforms, a 2-Channel Leader Radio, single-channel radios, smartphone end-user devices, network gateways, unified network operations tools and data products.

IMPLEMENT DEVELOPMENTAL OPERATIONS

To get the new prototype software tool suite to the field faster and to continue to improve capability, we are conducting ongoing experiments and using a developmental operations construct that puts developers alongside Soldiers and commanders in operational units. The Soldiers put the capabilities through their paces in training and field exercises, and we incorporate their feedback to continually inform requirements. This incremental development process enables our team to evaluate new technology concepts and potential solutions earlier and more frequently, collect feedback in real time, and rapidly generate new requirements as needed.

Under the developmental operations construct, our engineers implemented Agile release train principles used in the software industry that are designed to bring the team-of-teams together to deliver regular planned upgrades. Continuous exploration and integration fed quarterly software releases that were part of quarterly Soldier touchpoints with various units, including 1st Brigade Combat Team, 82nd Airborne Division; 1st Battalion, 508th Infantry Regiment, 3rd Brigade Combat Team, 82nd Airborne Division; and the 10th Mountain Division. Through these Soldier touchpoints, we are gaining continuous feedback on the prototype software design, which is immediately fed back into the software development sprint cycles, to be refined again as part of the next quarterly release cycle. Using this common cadence, each of the three PEO C3T program offices has dedicated resources to continuously define, build, test and deliver the best possible capability to the Army, prior to fielding it across the force.

CONCLUSION

The Army’s new rapid acquisition processes have empowered our PEO C3T team with new ways to use commercial technologies and synchronize existing resources to effectively meet the Army’s evolving network operations needs. By fueling open relationships with our industry partners; creating open standards and architectures that enable nontraditional vendors to compete; and leveraging prototypes, experimentation and Soldier feedback to continually inform requirements and enhancements, we can arm our Soldiers with the most innovative and relevant network capability possible. To keep ahead of our near-peer adversaries, we have to remain ahead in the technology race.

INTEGRATING ELEMENTS TO EXPAND CAPABILITIES

The Army’s new, user-friendly network operations planning and management software prototype tool suite can initialize, plan and load a brigade’s worth of radios faster than ever before. Each integrated piece of software works in unison in a beginning-to-end network planning and initialization workflow. The software includes several components:

• Integrated Planner is an overarching system that plans and creates network configuration files for numerous network elements, including the software-defined radios supporting the Army’s tactical network. This planner was developed to integrate or replace existing network planners.
• Network Operations Management System is an overarching prototype system used to manage the network and support unclassified, classified and coalition network enclaves with a common look, touch, feel and functionality.
• Initialization Tool Suite enables Soldiers to manage and modify their data products on the ground in theater. Data products provide the information required to enable end-to-end network connectivity and interoperability across the Army’s tactical internet.
• Codex is a database with a common data model and open application programming interfaces (APIs), enabling standard access to the data products. APIs enable applications to “talk” to each other.
• Atom is a simplified radio planner that provides intuitive workflow and an open API that uses the data product network design to provide a radio waveform plan. The Atom prototype will inform enhancements and future capability and fielding decisions on the final solution to support existing and emerging planning requirements, potentially replacing the legacy Joint Enterprise Network Management Capability.
• Black Sails is a simplified radio configuration tool that uses the waveform plan through an open API to configure software-defined lower tactical internet radios. Atom and Black Sails work hand-in-hand: Atom creates the plan and Black Sails generates the configuration files and loads the radios.

As DOD postures itself to retain advantage over near-peer adversaries, these new prototype software tools are expected to dramatically increase unit readiness, data exchange, agility, operational flexibility and network communication range, and to reduce unit burden on the battlefield.

For more information, go to the PEO C3T website at http://peoc3t.army.mil/c3t/ or contact the PEO C3T Public Affairs Office at 443-395-6489 or usarmy.APG.peo-c3t.mbx.pao-peoc3t@mail.mil.

MAJ. NICHOLAS MILANO is a basic branch engineer officer, and he serves as the assistant product manager for the Product Manager for Tactical Cyber and Network Operations (PM TCNO) and the project lead for the Network Manager and Codex efforts. He has a B.A. in computer studies from the University of Maryland and an M.A. in management from American Military University. He has been in the acquisition workforce for two years, is a member of the Army Acquisition Corps (AAC) and is Level II certified in program management.

KEITH WHITTAKER serves as the product lead for network planning in PM TCNO. Over the last five years, he has supported PEO C3T in various capacities, serving as an expert in network operations and software engineering for Army and joint service programs of record. He holds a B.S. in information systems management from Columbia Southern University, and is a member of the AAC. He is Level III certified in information technology and Level II certified in program management.

GEORGE SENGER is a computer scientist serving as the software and services assistant product manager for the Product Manager for Waveforms and the lead engineer for Project Black Sails. Over the past few years, he has supported PEO C3T and the Project Manager for Tactical Radios as a tactical radio and software engineering expert. He has a B.A. in communications from William Patterson College in New Jersey, and an M.S. in computer science from Montclair State University, also in New Jersey. He is a member of the AAC and is Level III certified in systems engineering.

AMY WALKER has been the public affairs lead at the Project Manager for Tactical Network for the last nine years, and was the public affairs lead at PEO C3T for the previous two. She has covered a majority of the Army’s major tactical network transport modernization effort, including Army, joint and coalition fielding and training events worldwide. She holds a B.A. in psychology, with emphasis in marketing and English, from the College of New Jersey.

This article is published in the Winter 2020 issue of Army AL&T magazine.

Subscribe to Army AL&T News – the premier online news source for the Army Acquisition Workforce. 
 Subscribe

OCSE aligns IT standards for Army and joint all-domain command-and-control, and mission partner environments to ensure seamless interoperability of command-and-control systems across all echelons.

by William G. Langston, Frederick J. Fable, Steven G. Drake

The Army is currently undergoing one of the largest technological upgrades in its 244-year history. Major modernization changes to the mission command network and networked systems are in the process of being developed and fielded to Soldiers. The major changes to the network and systems, when implemented, will result in better secure communications in all environments and provide an enhanced common operating picture from the Soldier at “the pointy edge of the spear” to the command posts at corps and above.

The modernization efforts will also provide commonality across applications, graphics and data sets, as well as interoperability within the Army and with our mission partner environments while enabling joint, all domain command-and-control.

Establishing a mission partner environment capability involves aspects of the human, procedural and technical domains that collectively enable the U.S. Army and coalition partners to achieve shared understanding, mutual trust and confidence, and unity of effort in order to seamlessly plan, prepare and conduct unified land and multidomain operations. 

Joint All Domain Command and Control (JADC2) is command and control that connects distributed sensors and data to forces from and in each domain—land, sea, air, space and cyber—at the scale and tempo required to accomplish commander’s intent. JADC2 success is predicated upon ensuring common data standards are implemented to achieve interoperability across the joint partners.

This is a tall order to accomplish and, in the past, the Army has struggled with the complexity of achieving this level of interoperable, networked mission command because while functional requirements were well defined, the system-of-system interoperability requirements were difficult to define. The Army’s previous attempt at such change was Future Combat System (FCS), a program designed to replace all of our network, command-and-control and ground combat platforms. FCS was intended to be interoperable by design because it was developed as a system-of-systems as opposed to separate warfighting functional areas such as maneuver, intelligence, fires, etc., with interoperability often a second design consideration.

Implementing rigorous system-of-systems lessons learned from FCS will be key for the Army to succeed in achieving interoperability. Most important is that networks and systems require the use of an agreed-upon set of information technology data standards. Implementing common data standards allow networks and systems to achieve seamless communication and transfer of information across systems, commands and national boundaries in a timely manner. Secondly, information technology standards must be identified during system development and coordinated among all systems implementing these standards prior to implementation. Based on government and industry best practices, waiting to address data standards until developmental or operational test events is too late. It’s costly and timing consuming to rework the underlying data structures to achieve interoperability once a system has been built.

LINES OF EFFORT
Integrated operational requirements are defined along four standards-based lines of effort (LOE), ending in the delivery of a robust, cloud-enabled common operating environment at all levels that is prepared to support transition to joint all-domain operations. (All images courtesy of the authors and the U.S. Army Acquisition Support Center)

LEGACY VS. FUTURE

Even though interoperability and the use of data standards are mandated by government statutes, policy, regulations, and system key performance parameters, most often these are not the focus of a system development effort. A program manager’s development efforts are driven by Army-approved requirements documents and capability delivery priorities set by the Training and Doctrine Command (TRADOC) capability managers. Therefore, in a fiscally constrained environment, the program manager is often forced to choose between the requirement for system interoperability and the higher-priority requirement for warfighting functionality.

Until last year, legacy systems were developed against specific warfighting function (maneuver, intelligence and fires) requirements documents which rarely contained details on specific information exchanges with other warfighting function systems. There was no overarching system-of-systems view for interoperability or data exchange requirements. Requirements for networks and networked systems were scattered in multiple documents, and written by multiple communities without an overarching view of how all the systems exchange data and interoperate to create a common operational picture. While TRADOC recognized that standards are important to achieve interoperability, they considered the determination of which standards were needed to achieve interoperability to be a decision for the materiel development community and not found in the requirements documents. Instead, the requirements priorities of TRADOC capability managers were focused on capabilities that enhanced the specific warfighting functions that they represented. At times interoperability was addressed but seen as a secondary priority especially when funding cuts were taken by the program during budget cycles.

DATA EXCHANGE
Six computing environments contain 118 systems with 775 unique data exchange interfaces. The goal of OCSE and the common operating environment is to reduce data exchanges among legacy systems.

PATH FORWARD

Recognizing the importance of data standards in achieving interoperability, the chief required that the Army network be based on open-source standards that are inherently interoperable. He required that TRADOC coordinate with the assistant secretary of the Army, acquisition logistics and technology (ASA(ALT)) and the Army’s chief information officer to “refine an integrated set of common operating environment standards requirements based on designated open-source standards methodologies.” The execution order went on to require implementation of policies and standards that would make the Army’s primary tactical operations network one that allows our coalition mission partners to operate on the same network.

In support of the execution order, leadership stakeholders from across the Army signed the Army Mission Command Network Implementation Plan, Volumes 1 and 2. Together, they describe how the Army will modernize the mission command network, including all the warfighting functions, from now and into the future. The intent of these plans is to pivot the Army to a faster modernization path. Foundational to achieving this pivot are integrated operational requirements, and integrated, standards-based architectures that allow “plug and play” of new capabilities.

These integrated operational (warfighting) requirements are defined along four lines of effort. All four efforts are standards-based, culminating in the delivery of a robust, cloud-enabled common operating environment at all echelons prepared to support transition to joint all-domain operations.

Also, based on the chief’s execution order and to accomplish the second line of effort, TRADOC received approval in 2018 for the common operating environment information systems initial capabilities document and subsequent requirements definition packages. These requirements documents, for the first time, were designed to provide an overarching system-of-systems view of the mission command network and systems. They provide a holistic set of requirements for the common operating environment and break down those requirements into the subordinate definition packages that give each computing environment of the common operating environment its portion of Army’s warfighting capability. Currently, TRADOC is writing capability drop documents—documents that prioritize incremental delivery of capabilities within 18 to 24 months—the first of which has been approved.

To support the chief’s modernization vision for mission command network and systems, ASA(ALT) established the Office of the Chief Systems Engineer (OCSE) in March 2019. OCSE’s responsibilities include performing Army-level system-of-systems engineering by maintaining a standards-based Army integrated modernization architecture and communicating the Army data standards to subordinate program managers.

OCSE is also the ASA(ALT) staff lead for overarching governance and management of IT data standards for the common operating environment, including configuration management and promulgating the interoperability standards baseline across the six computing environments, and in coordination with Army, joint and coalition stakeholders.

The six computing environments contain approximately 118 legacy systems, with 775 unique point-to-point data exchange interfaces. The goal of OCSE and the common operating environment is to reduce the number of legacy system data exchanges using message formats by relying on common infrastructures developed by the computing environments. This will allow systems to become applications and services that efficiently leverage the standardized data provided by the infrastructure to achieve warfighter capabilities.

To ensure program managers know which common operating environment data standards to implement, OCSE is working with TRADOC to include a tailored set of key standards within each of the capability drop requirements documents to drive uniform implementation across ASA(ALT) systems and infrastructures. Making standards an inherent part of the program’s approved requirements also greatly benefits program managers by giving them a basis to program for the necessary funding needed for implementation.

For the first time, OCSE and TRADOC are collaborating during development of requirements documents by leveraging a common tool—the Army Capability-Based Architecture Development and Integration Environment (ARCADIE) Magic Draw Teamwork Server—to ensure standards remain consistent across all requirements documents. OCSE is also using the ARCADIE tool to model the interfaces between computing environments that allow efficient integration and facilitates interoperability. The individual system interfaces between two computing environments are consolidated into a single control point that documents the critical information flows and standards and will eventually include critical coalition and joint partner systems. This type of digital engineering allows OCSE and program managers to identify technical risks to interoperability earlier in a program’s development when design mitigations are much less costly to implement versus during developmental and operational testing.

COMMON CAUSE
A common operating environment transforms the Army’s primary tactical operations network into one that allows coalition mission partners to operate on the same network.

CONCLUSION

The Army has set itself on a course to modernize the mission command network and systems to change the way it executes warfighting functions. The four lines of effort are key to modernization success, and the standards are essential to those. By implementing system-of-systems engineering and configuration management rigor to maintain a baseline of commonly implemented standards both within the Army and with our joint and coalition partners, we can achieve needed interoperability to successfully execute mission partner environments and joint all-domain command-and-control warfighting missions. For its part, OCSE will continue to lead the effort to work with the material development community, requirements developers, the Department of the Army staff, and joint and coalition standards bodies to define the standards needed by the Army to successfully execute its mission of winning our nation’s wars.

Establishing a mission partner environment capability involves aspects of the human, procedural and technical domains that collectively enable the Army and coalition partners to achieve shared understanding, mutual trust and confidence, and unity of effort in order to seamlessly plan, prepare and conduct unified land and multidomain operations.

Joint all-domain command and control connects distributed sensors and data to forces from and in each domain—land, sea, air, space and cyber—at the scale and tempo required to accomplish the commander’s intent. Its success is predicated upon ensuring that common data standards are implemented to achieve interoperability across joint partners.

For more information please contact the authors at william.g.langston.civ@mail.mil; steven.g.drake4.ctr@mail.mil; and frederick.j.fable2.ctr@mail.mil.

WILLIAM G. LANGSTON is a deputy director with the Standards & Interoperability Directorate in the Office of the Chief Systems Engineer (OCSE), ASA(ALT). He holds an M.S. in computer information systems from the University of Phoenix and a B.S. in marketing from Arizona State University. He served on active duty for over 6 years with the Army in the military intelligence and military police fields where he earned his Veteran of Foreign Wars and American Legion eligibility. Langston has been working in the information technology industry for the past 25 years; in his current role, he is responsible for cross-portfolio strategic planning, tracking, and management of systems through advanced development, test, evaluation, production, fielding and identifying associated problem issues and risks. He is Level III certified in information technology, an Acquisition Corps member, and has successfully completed the Harvard University Program for Senior Executive Fellows. 

FREDERICK J. FABLE is a senior systems engineer with the Standards & Interoperability Directorate in the Office of the Chief Systems Engineer (OCSE), ASA(ALT). He holds a bachelor of engineering in electrical engineering from Stevens Institute of Technology, Hoboken, New Jersey. He has demonstrated experience in systems engineering and program management with over 37 years of experience within the DOD and commercial sectors. He helped develop MIL-STD-188-220 for Combat Net Radio and the Fires Community as well as Voice Over IP and cell phones for commercial industry. He has performed and executed systems-of-systems engineering, program management, operational analysis, acquisition management, information technology, performance based assessments, interoperability standards assessments and systems integration for the Army and joint communities. 

STEVEN G. DRAKE is a senior network and systems engineer with the Standards & Interoperability Directorate in OCSE. He holds an M.S. in systems acquisition management from the Naval Postgraduate School and B.S. in geophysics from the University of Texas at El Paso. He served on active duty for over 26 years with the Army in the air defense and acquisition fields. His final assignment was as the director for Army Interoperability Certification testing. After leaving active duty, he spent six years as the director for network interoperability, integration and testing for several companies supporting system-of-system integration and testing of command-and-control systems across the Army. He is Level III certified in program management, and Level I certified in contracting.

This article is published in the Winter 2020 issue of Army AL&T magazine.

Subscribe to Army AL&T News – the premier online news source for the Army Acquisition Workforce. 
 Subscribe

Understanding acquisition is hard. Depicting how it works is next to impossible.

by Steve Stark

In attempting to come up with a graphic representation of how acquisition works, Army AL&T reached out to our contributors across the acquisition enterprise and asked how their organizations fit with other organizations. What we found was far more complex than we ever expected.

As an example, one program executive office (PEO), Command, Control and Communications – Tactical, which leads the Army’s network priority, reported that the organization touches nearly 20 others within the enterprise, with 35 programs. Compare that relatively small number with the Joint PEO for Armaments and Ammunition’s more than 417 programs, which touch nearly every major organization within the enterprise, or PEO Soldier’s 383, which easily touch more than a dozen others. Still, the numbers tell only a small part of the story.

One of the things we learned in this undertaking is that depicting acquisition is a numbers game, but different kinds of numbers tell different stories. How it all fits together depends on how you look at it. With the following graphic, we’re only scratching the surface.

In our graphic, there are dozens of programs and offices listed, and while they’re the core of acquisition, they’re hardly all of it. Overall, there are seven major commands and 42 subcommands within the acquisition enterprise, using numbers from the U.S. Army Acquisition Support Center showing where acquisition workforce members work. How you count makes a difference. Most of those commands are not in the graphic.

HOW BIG IS IT?

Inside the acquisition workforce, it can be hard to visualize just how big that workforce is. The scale is mind-boggling. Those who read this magazine may know that Army AL&T often cites the size of the workforce as approximately 40,000. That’s true, but what that means is indicative of just how confusing numbers can get.

The phrase “approximately 40,000” doesn’t mean that only about that number of people work on Army acquisition. That 40,000 includes only federally employed military and civilians whose jobs fall under the Defense Acquisition Workforce Improvement Act (DAWIA). There are other federal jobs that don’t get DAWIA oversight, but they’re much harder to count.

Of course, people whose jobs are governed by DAWIA are not the only ones who work in acquisition. The PEO for Intelligence, Electronic Warfare and Sensors, we learned, has 399 federally employed workers, of whom 75 are military (a comparatively high number). But in total, it has about 1,900 employees when you add in the contractors who help do the work. Similarly, the PEO for Simulation, Training and Instrumentation has 459 federal employees, of whom 29 are military, but, overall, has nearly 1,000 employees, including contractors. In addition, it has employees in 66 countries working on foreign military sales. So, while the size of the acquisition workforce is about 40,000, it’s also two or three times that size.

WHY UNDERSTAND?

Because acquisition is so complex, it’s fair to ask the question: Why bother? For those who work in acquisition, there are probably three salient reasons. First, because we are spending taxpayer money, we have a duty to do so. Second, by understanding how the parts of acquisition fit together, we are more likely to be able to help all of the parts work together better—the parts of the system itself, but also the parts of the materiel systems. Complexity makes acquisition so easy to misunderstand that it’s easy to either make mistakes or fail to take reasonable risks. Finally, and somewhat circularly, understanding acquisition better helps us understand acquisition better.

THE NUTS AND BOLTS

On paper, traditional acquisition appears to be linear. Or it can be made to look linear. It begins with a need and ends with the divesting of the thing that used to be needed. However, it is no more linear than a coastline, nor is it as simple as the graphic that follows would make it appear. It’s virtually impossible to render how it works in its entirety in two dimensions. That doesn’t mean it can’t be understood. Understanding acquisition isn’t about getting every last thing. And sometimes it means oversimplifying.

The nuts and bolts of materiel acquisition in the Army are thus: The field expresses a need for a capability. That need gets developed into requirements by the appropriate cross-functional team within the U.S. Army Futures Command (AFC). AFC works to turn the concept into a technology demonstration and perhaps a prototype. The U.S. Army Training and Doctrine Command (TRADOC) has a hand in all of this because it’s responsible for doctrine and training. Everything that’s acquired has to fit within the Army’s conceptual framework of doctrine, organization, training, materiel, leadership, personnel and facilities (DOTMLPF), and TRADOC owns DOTMLPF. (That TRADOC layer isn’t the only level that’s not in plain sight. More on that in a bit.)

That concept from AFC then gets handed off to a PEO within the Office of the Assistant Secretary of the Army for Acquisition, Logistics and Technology (ASA(ALT)) for development and execution. Once the capability is built, tested and fielded, it’s handed off to the U.S. Army Materiel Command (AMC), more or less, and AMC assumes responsibility for sustainment and logistics and, eventually, divestiture and perhaps demilitarization.

However, those exchanges are much more complex than any graphic can show, and differ from program to program. What appear to be dividing lines between the organizations’ responsibilities aren’t really dividing lines at all, because the organizations and their functions within the acquisition enterprise are so closely intertwined. (Bromides like “acquisition is a team sport” don’t just appear out of thin air.) And the system is sometimes circular, too, as with older programs that are being upgraded and sustained indefinitely.

Understanding Army acquisition is hard. Depicting how it works is next to impossible. (Graphic by Michelle Strother, U.S. Army Acquisition Support Center)

CONCLUSION

As might be clear from the foregoing, the three major organizations that make up the enterprise are AFC, ASA(ALT) and AMC. Other major commands that are involved in the process are the U.S. Army Test and Evaluation Command, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, U.S. Army Forces Command and many others. We didn’t put them in for the sake of simplicity.

Acquisition has layers of complexity that are also not depicted. Looked at one way, the acquisition career fields that DAWIA mandates offer a window into those layers. Contracting, program management, engineering, business financial management, life cycle logistics, and test and evaluation are just a few of the layers, each with different imperatives and different work.

So big is Army acquisition that it begins to resemble an infinite coast in the coastline paradox. That paradox has it that the closer you try to measure a coastline, the longer it gets. A coastline is an obviously finite thing, but just how finite depends on how you look at it. Still, it’s not hard to find the beach.

That’s a lot like Army acquisition—the closer you try to look at it, the harder it gets to understand. But everyone knows where the beach is. And, if it were easy to understand, we wouldn’t need Defense Acquisition University.

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, science and technology, he is, as Stephen Stark, the best-selling ghostwriter of several consumer health-oriented books and an award-winning novelist.

This article is published in the Winter 2020 issue of Army AL&T magazine.

Subscribe to Army AL&T News – the premier online news source for the Army Acquisition Workforce.

 Subscribe

The Next Generation Load Device – Small program used an innovative, tailored acquisition approach to rapidly deliver capability to Soldiers of the U.S. Army Special Operations Command.

by Wayne Rush and Robin Schumacher

Those familiar with the Army acquisition world know firsthand the challenges and complexities in quickly fulfilling Soldier needs. It is an uphill battle that has been put in the spotlight in recent years with the Army Tactical Network Modernization Strategy and the establishment of organizations like the U.S. Army Futures Command. Developing compatible systems and products that use modern technology and can easily and rapidly integrate into the tactical field network is as important as the speed at which we can deliver capability to the field.

Therefore, when the U.S. Army Special Operations Command (SOCOM) identified a requirement for a modern, small, lightweight and easy-to-operate device to load encryption keys onto equipment—a key fill device—the Product Lead for Communications Security (COMSEC), part of the Project Lead for Network Enablers, used innovative acquisition methods and collaborative partnerships to fulfill the requirement in record time with a solution that will provide interoperability across services and with coalition systems.

So, how did we do it? Essentially, we attacked the four longest “tent poles” of the Army acquisition process—funding, requirements, contracting and testing. These components are critical, but traditionally involve lengthy processes. To save time and money, we used allocated program resources for staffing and procurement and achieved an Acquisition Category (ACAT) IV program of record with full-rate production in less than six months.

THE REQUIREMENT

In 2013, a capability production document was developed for the Next Generation Load Device (NGLD) – Small in support of urgent special operations missions. This required a simple, small and light device that could be used in the field to load encryption keys onto equipment. Loading encryption keys onto equipment is how the Army ensures that the communication being transmitted through the equipment is secure—a critical need for us to remain vigilant against our adversaries.

Two products were identified by HQDA G-3/5/7 as potential materiel solutions; however, those devices did not meet all of the requirements specified in the capability production document. One major feature that was missing was the ability to use the new Key Management Infrastructure (KMI)—a National Security Agency (NSA)-developed program that provides a modern, reliable and secure system to handle the generation and use of encryption keys. KMI allows Soldiers to obtain encryption keys over the internet, which limits the requirement for physical products and manual delivery to maintain secure communications.

As an interim solution, Army Special Operations Command used the Really Simple Key Loader, a handheld device for securely receiving, storing and transferring data between equipment, provided by the Project Lead for Network Enablers. However, a replacement capability with more modern technology was still urgently needed.

Fast forward to today. The Army completed the transition to KMI in late fiscal year 2018, which means the technology now exists to validate the requirement in the capability production document for an NSA-certified device that can use KMI. With the technology available, Product Lead COMSEC began looking at government off-the-shelf equipment and researching what the other services were using to meet the need for the Army.

This approach makes achieving interoperability with other systems easier, and it eliminates the legwork and reduces the time and resources needed to develop and test new technology.

The Tactical Key Loader is a minimized, lightweight key loader replacement for legacy key fill devices that delivers next-generation capabilities—including the ability to connect and load keys in seconds. (Photo courtesy of L3Harris Technologies Inc.)

JOINT EFFORT FOR RAPID RESULTS

In early FY19, Product Lead COMSEC researched devices that could fit the requirement for the NGLD-Small, particularly devices that were already fielded to other services. Ultimately, we selected the Tactical Key Loader as the materiel solution for the NGLD-Small. The small, NSA-certified, modern key fill device had been fielded to the U.S. Air Force, the U.S. Navy and the U.S. Marine Corps since 2013. Even better, the Tactical Key Loader was already available through an Air Force production contract awarded by the Air Education and Training Command in the fourth quarter of fiscal year 2018, further shortening the acquisition timeline.

The acquisition process was a united team effort. Product Lead COMSEC, part of the Program Executive Office for Command, Control and Communications – Tactical (PEO C3T), was able to combine multiple documents into a simplified acquisition management plan, leveraging existing documentation, and working with stakeholders at PEO C3T, the U.S. Army Communications-Electronics Command and the U.S. Army Training and Doctrine Command capability manager to quickly solidify program milestones and criteria and then formulate documentation, conduct peer reviews and adjudicate comments in preparation for PEO approvals.

Using the simplified acquisition management plan and the existing production contract between the Air Force and Harris Corp. to procure the NGLD-Small (Tactical Key Loader), we were able to significantly accelerate the program.

TEST TO FIELD

Another long pole in acquisition is the testing that is required for capabilities to be fielded. Typically, this can take 12 to 18 months just to schedule. However, the Tactical Key Loader was NSA-certified Type 1 non-developmental cryptographic materiel, which does not require full operational testing. As a result, the U.S. Army Test and Evaluation Command agreed that a command, control, computers, communications, cyber, intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance (C5ISR) evaluation report could be used in lieu of an operational milestone assessment report from Test and Evaluation Command.

Collaborative partnerships, mentioned earlier, were just as valuable in this acquisition approach as innovation. Most importantly, all parties had to concur on the approach itself—developing the simplified acquisition management plan and performing the testing outside of traditional means. From the start, we shared a vision to get modern technology into Army special operations units in a few short months. Once everyone caught the vision, we were able to streamline the acquisition process to work on behalf of the Soldier.

Product Lead COMSEC took advantage of our relationship with the C5ISR Center Cryptographic Modernization Branch at Aberdeen Proving Ground, Maryland, to perform the evaluation on the Tactical Key Loader. Program officials included the C5ISR Center at the front of the acquisition plan, allowing better understanding of the uniqueness of this effort and the evolution of the requirements that we needed to test against. One of the added benefits of conducting the evaluation in-house and having existing relationships between the C5ISR Center and industry was that we were able to easily and quickly modify the devices to be safe, suitable and effective upgrades for what was being used in the field.

CONCLUSION

While the long poles are often the most important, they can also take the longest time to put up, and can prevent a program from moving forward. However, the Product Lead COMSEC team’s diligence in working the long poles led them to success. On July 31, 2019, PEO C3T approved the materiel development decision for the NGLD-Small, designated the program as an ACAT IV and authorized full-rate production. According to an internal PEO C3T report from August 2019, Product Lead COMSEC has procured 5,000 NGLD-Smalls, and in September the first batch of 200 was delivered to the Tobyhanna Army Depot in Pennsylvania. The acquisition strategy for the NGLD-Small program executed by the Product Lead COMSEC team could be used as an example for future programs looking to expedite the process. As the Army looks to modernize, delivering more rapid, innovative and tailored approaches for getting capabilities into the hands of Soldiers is essential.

For more information, go to the Project Lead Network Enablers website at https://peoc3t.army.mil/nete/.

WAYNE RUSH is the assistant program manager for Product Lead COMSEC. He holds an M.S. in systems engineering from Johns Hopkins University, and an M.A. in military history and a B.S. in economics from Norwich University. He is Level III certified in life cycle logistics and Level II certified in program management. He is a member of the Army Acquisition Corps. 

ROBIN SCHUMACHER is a lead associate with Booz Allen Hamilton providing strategic communications support to Project Lead Network Enablers. She holds a B.A. in English from York College of Pennsylvania.

This article is published in the Winter 2020 issue of Army AL&T magazine.

Subscribe to Army AL&T News – the premier online news source for the Army Acquisition Workforce. 
 Subscribe

After high-publicity failures, defense acquisition experts laud the Army for focusing on products and priorities over process, but bureaucracy remains a threat.

by Michael Bold and Margaret C. Roth

The query to General Micro Systems Inc. (GMS) came in a roundabout way, from a prime defense contractor that had worked with the Rancho Cucamonga, California, company before. The Army had an urgent need for a rugged, rack-mounted server. The prime contractor knew about the TITAN server that GMS planned to unveil at the annual Association of the United States Army (AUSA) meeting in Washington in October.

GMS and the contractor (which for proprietary reasons GMS would not identify) discussed what the Army was looking for, and GMS seemed to have what the Army needed. But they didn’t hear back. “We thought, huh, that’s interesting, wonder how that went,” said Chris Ciufo, chief technical officer at GMS. Then the Army “came roaring back to us,” he said, asking for a proposal within two days. The Army specified exactly what it needed in the system, and GMS provided a formal bid. The Army awarded the contract to GMS and said it needed the servers fast—within six months.

The time from first contact to the award of the contract? Two weeks, said Ciufo.

Welcome to the new era of Army acquisition.

In a remarkably short time, the defense acquisition system and especially the Army, long criticized as slow-moving and bogged down in red tape, are getting new capabilities on contract faster than most would have thought possible five years ago. And other-transaction authorities (OTAs) are the main weapon—although not the only one—in the Army’s push to modernize. OTAs make it possible for the services to acquire new capabilities faster and attract more vendors who traditionally have not engaged with DOD because of the bureaucracy involved, driven by the Federal Acquisition Regulation (FAR) and the Defense Federal Acquisition Regulation Supplement.

The National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2016 provided a major boost to OTAs, highlighting and encouraging their use. “OTAs give us a greater flexibility in our contracting methodology than a pure FAR-based contract,” Dr. Bruce D. Jette, the Army acquisition executive and assistant secretary of the Army for acquisition, logistics and technology, said in an interview for Army AL&T. “That is a significant value that Congress gave us.”

Organizationally, the creation of U.S. Army Futures Command (AFC), which became fully operational in July, is the single largest development in the effort to speed acquisition, bringing requirements writers, combat developers, scientists and engineers, contracting experts and the testing community together in cross-functional teams early in the process to demonstrably speed the delivery of capabilities to Soldiers.

Together, the increased use of OTAs and the advent of AFC have given rise to a cautious optimism that is more optimism than caution, compared with previous attempts at acquisition reform. Those who have been through, participated in or led earlier efforts see a distinctly brighter future for Army acquisition.

“For probably a decade, I’ve felt like we’re right on the cusp of really significant changes, in the pace of change, and in the way the DOD is going to do work,” said Dan Ward, a former Air Force acquisition officer who specialized in leading high-speed, low-cost technology development programs, wrote two books on innovation and is now a senior principle systems engineer at MITRE Corp. “And I feel like we’ve crested that hill.”

Maj. Mark Cleary, U.S. Army Combat Capabilities Development Command Aviation Development Directorate, briefs Dr. Bruce Jette on the Rotorcraft and Aircrew Systems and Concepts Airborne Laboratory in April at Joint Base Langley-Eustis, Virginia. During his visit, Col. Steven Braddom, right, also gave Jette an overview of major ongoing efforts. (U.S. Army photo)

OTAS ON THE RISE

Other-transaction agreements let DOD streamline the bureaucracy of traditional procurement by awarding contracts faster for prototyping and production. From 2012 to 2014, DOD averaged a little over $500 million in obligations on OTAs. That number jumped to over $1.5 billion in 2016 and to over $3.5 billion in 2018, according to Govini, a data and analytics firm. An analysis by Bloomberg Government says the number will top $7 billion in 2019.

The Army has driven the growth in OTA use. In 2012, the Army had approximately 40 OTAs worth less than $500 million. In 2018, it had more than 220 worth more than $2.5 billion. “When we look at the data … the Army has definitely made a calculated decision to use OTA and other middle-tier-of-acquisition approaches, for its modernization today,” said Andrew Hunter, a senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), a Washington think tank.

“The most important thing about the numbers is it’s an indicator that people are getting more comfortable with the application of the OTAs, that they’re finding good applications in those OTAs, and they’re justified in those OTAs,” Jette said in the interview.

While improved, OTAs are not new. Congress first authorized their use in 1958, with the legislation that created NASA. Congress allowed the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency to use “other transactions” in 1989, and their use was extended to the military services in 1996.

“This extension of the authority didn’t come out of nowhere,” said Stan Soloway, president and CEO of Celero Strategies LLC, a business-growth strategy company working with technology and other firms in the government market. Soloway has also served in government, as deputy undersecretary of defense for acquisition reform and director of the Defense Reform Initiative during the Clinton administration. Efforts to get what is known as production authority began about 20 years ago, Soloway said, as it became clear that limiting OTAs to just the prototype phase of acquisition limited their effectiveness.

Soloway sees the growth in OTAs as a reflection of DOD becoming more customer-focused in a customer-centric world, responding to the frustration of its customers—be they industry, academia or Soldiers—about “an acquisition system that they do not believe has been meeting their needs, in terms of either time or capability.”

Other transaction agreements require much less from businesses and from the government, making them a more flexible instrument than contracts based on the FAR. (Image courtesy of the authors)

HOW WE GOT HERE

The impetus for the current wave of change in DOD acquisition started in a big way in 2015, when congressional leaders in military affairs—namely Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., and Rep. Mac Thornberry, R-Texas, chairmen of the Senate and House Armed Services Committees—began to “really start pushing on the system by not only pushing the new [expedited acquisition] authorities, but also pushing at organizational changes,” said Jon Etherton, president of Etherton and Associates Inc., a defense policy and business strategy consulting firm. Etherton is a veteran of the defense legislative process, having served nearly two decades as a senior Senate staffer.

The result was an unprecedented volume of legislation in Title 8, the acquisition policy portion of the National Defense Authorization Act.

Milestone decision-making on major programs shifted unequivocally from DOD back to the services with the elimination of the undersecretary for acquisition, technology and logistics. “You had the creation of all these new authorities like Section 804 and the expansion of the other transaction agreements,” to which DOD has responded with enthusiasm, said Etherton.

“What I’ve really seen is, with the new administration in particular, they really want to grab onto some of these things,” Etherton said. “… And I think the Army has been right in the middle of this, especially at the front end of the decision-making,” to start much more rapidly getting on contract and getting the actual work started, with Army Futures Command putting the major players together at the beginning of the process rather than waiting for each to do its part sequentially.

As a result, “we can really start to figure out what works, what doesn’t work—reduce risk and get a much more accelerated process going for some of these efforts,” Etherton said.

ADDITION BY SUBTRACTION

As Naval Postgraduate School senior lecturer John T. Dillard sees it, the most significant change in acquisition to emerge from the past few years of legislation was the elimination of the defense undersecretary position. “Whatever drove that decision, it has certainly reduced the amount of preparation and documentation that program managers must go through for milestone decisions to proceed, halt or alter the course of their programs,” Dillard said.

Defense Acquisition Board reviews were mandated, highly costly and work-intensive “off-core activities” for any Acquisition Category ID project, said Dillard, who managed major weapons development efforts for most of his 26-year career in the Army and now teaches in the Naval Postgraduate School’s Systems Engineering Department of the Graduate School of Engineering and Applied Sciences. “They were only the tip of the iceberg with regard to preparatory reviews en route, and were a significant distraction to the [program manager] that pulled them away from their primary functions.” Thus, the decision for investment milestones now rests with the component acquisition executive.

“The operational side still drives requirements and resources, while the secretariat side executes the acquisition of capabilities needed,” Dillard noted, but “emphasis on prototyping and rapid production has increased. … Real-world threats are driving a palpable sense of urgency in the Pentagon to acquire capabilities faster.”

ARMY FUTURES COMMAND’S MISSION

Just as OTAs embrace innovation, the Army Futures Command aims to do the same—culturally, procedurally and institutionally. “We are trying very hard to describe what problems we want to solve, and then let industry innovate in terms of how they can possibly solve that problem,” Gen. John M. “Mike” Murray, AFC commanding general, told an AUSA panel in October.

“This is about winning, and this is about looking and doing things differently in moving the Army into the information age,” he said. “Because we will not be successful if we just continue to do the same things we’ve always done in the past.”

As always, requirements are key.

From the Army acquisition executive’s point of view, “AFC fundamentally has changed the front end of the process, which is requirements generation,” Jette said in the interview. “And based upon the guidance of the senior leaders, particularly the secretary, the idea is to find a more intimate way to connect the requirements to the development of the acquisition strategy.”

The results are telling, observers agree.

“IPTs (integrated product or process teams) were among the first acquisition reforms we pressed for in the ’90s, because we knew they could really facilitate program efficiency and effectiveness,” Soloway said. “AFC is really an IPT on steroids, and that’s truly intriguing.”

“What I have seen AFC accomplish thus far is to redirect some existing programs of record to make them oriented nearer-term, the focus being upon early-as-possible capabilities,” Dillard said. “Hopefully, this is not so shortsighted as to throw off the investments in longer-term advancements. All in all, it is safe to say that AFC has inserted itself into the process of both combat and materiel developments, and with the power to ‘move the needle’ that comes with four-star power.”

Gen. John M. Murray talks with Soldiers while being briefed on equipment tested during Joint Warfighting Assessment 19 in May at Yakima Training Center, Washington. Murray is the first commander of the Army Futures Command, which many experts agree is the single largest development in the effort to speed acquisition. (U.S. Army photo by Spc. Audrey Ward, 982nd Combat Camera Company (Airborne))

BEWARE OF BACKSLIDING

Bureaucracy remains an ever-present threat to the Army’s newfound agility, however.

“The folks on the ground tell me that there are several layers between them and our most senior leaders telling us to do things faster,” Dillard said. “Those layers of bureaucrats and processes are still well-entrenched, and I’m not sure we can remove those layers or if things will go any better without them. Institutional knowledge comes at a cost—it often feels like handcuffs to the folks trying to get things done.”

It is noteworthy that there’s a guidebook of only 53 pages on other-transaction authority, whereas the FAR is over 2,000 pages, and the defense supplement almost as large, Dillard said.

In fact, Stuart A. Hazlett, deputy assistant secretary of the Army for procurement, told a panel at AUSA that he feared writing an official policy on OTAs could produce another FAR. “I’ve been reluctant to write policy dealing with OTs in the Army. … What we don’t want to happen is for us to start writing policy and allow this thing to start slipping out of control and, before I know it, I’ve got a FAR-based kind of approach again.”

An acquisition system that in the past has not had much tolerance for cost increases or schedule delays, and which has responded to ambiguities with more time-eating rules and capability requirements, is now being asked to tolerate mistakes and even failures in the interest of trying harder and faster to get state-of-the-art technologies to the warfighter, Etherton said. Right now, the focus is on schedule, but it is inevitable that cost and performance concerns will surface as well at some point, he said.

“I really hope we don’t say, well, now we have to add all these things and make the system the way it used to be,” Etherton said. “We just can’t go back to that. We have to stay the course and really accept the higher risk, accept that there are going to be problems that we will have to address, but that we have to get into some kind of a new model process. … There needs to be a dialogue on how much of this formal certification reporting kind of things do we really need in this process, to satisfy Congress’s oversight concerns but yet not trigger a creation of more bureaucracy.”

Hon. Ellen M. Lord, undersecretary of defense for acquisition and sustainment, meets key staff members of the Combined Joint Task Force – Operation Inherent Resolve in Iraq in November. Joint Task Force Iraq Commander Brig. Gen. William Seely briefs current and future plans in regard to joint operations. (U.S. Army photo by Staff Sgt. Desmond Cassell/Maj. Charles Dietz)

IN SEARCH OF THE NEW NORM

DOD is in the process of addressing such concerns with a rewrite of its “DOD Instruction 5000.02, Operation of the Defense Acquisition System,” which provides the governing policies and principles. “What they’re trying to do is basically take the new authorities, clarify what that process looks like for OTAs and rapid prototyping, rapid fielding kinds of things, and figure out how to integrate that into a process that effectively captures the result and major capabilities,” Etherton said. “I’m not sure that the new 5000 process that the OSD is currently working on is going to do that right at the get-go.

“What I’m concerned about is that handoff process. What does it look like when we get through this initial, quick, first three, four, five years, and then it gets handed off into a more traditional process where you’re basically acquiring a major capability? … I think that’s where the real work is going to have to happen,” Etherton said.

The fundamental principles of sound acquisition, however it may speed up, still need to include “requirements analysis, a proper amount of testing and having an ironclad contract as the basis for dealing with industry,” Dillard said. “Few shortcuts can be taken in these three areas. Unfortunately, all three of these areas had become over-bureaucratized with their voluminous policies, regulations and instructions. Now the pendulum swings the other way.”

Dillard cautioned that “though we have rapidly leaped aboard the OTA bandwagon, … OTAs are still contracts, and they must be put into place by warranted contracting officers. They serve to free us up from lots of unnecessary statutes and regulations, but are no substitute for our doing what is inherently governmental: defining what we expect as deliverables from rigorous requirements analysis and systems engineering.”

“Fundamentally the engineering process does not change,” warned Hunter of CSIS. “Programs that are new-build, complex platforms still have significant engineering challenges.”

Sustainability is another definite concern, Dillard said. “Sustainment is certainly the area that presents risk when doing things on the quick.” It is well-established that long-term sustainment can be the most costly piece of a system life cycle. “Logistic support must be designed in, and that takes a deliberate, iterative effort for suitability and supportability analysis alongside the development, early on and throughout ‘the invention process,’ ” he said.

“Going from prototypes to production-ready systems is a leap that I think is makeable, but the proof’s in the pudding,” said Hunter. “… Before we get too excited about our success, we have to deliver some systems to the warfighter.” 

JCIDS PROCESS ON WAY OUT?

It is by now a given that people really want to move away from the 5000 defense acquisition machinery and start moving much more quickly. “They want to get out from underneath the JCIDS [Joint Capabilities Integration and Development System] process,” Etherton said. The attractiveness of OTAs and other Section 804 authorities, which to some extent were designed deliberately “to get you out from underneath the JCIDS process, to me, that calls the whole JCIDS process into question,” he said.

“Now we have enough information and enough experience [to conclude] that maybe we don’t need a JCIDS process at all, or we need something that is a different approach for what JCIDS tries to accomplish, in a much more agile form,” Etherton said. “And honestly, I think that was the intent by Congress in creating some of these authorities.”

“I don’t think [JCIDS is] going away, I think it is shifting the default,” said Ward, the former Air Force procurement officer. “One of the guiding principles with a lot of this is there’s more than one way to generate a requirement.”

AFC has a leading role to play in the new balancing act of rigor and agility, Dillard said. While the command’s mission extends well beyond experimentation with acquisition approaches other than traditional JCIDS capability-based assessments, Dillard sees AFC—particularly the cross-functional teams of representatives from all the organizations with a stake in the acquisition—as a major influence in speeding up the process. “AFC now is in the mix for coordination all the way up [the chain of command], and hopefully for integration across combat domains and functional areas,” Dillard said. “If it sounds nebulous and ambiguous, I believe it still very much is.”

CONCLUSION

As attractive as OTAs have become, there is concern that they might become an overused, knee-jerk “easy solution,” like new developments in contracting that have preceded them. OTAs are by no means a perfect solution, but they have proved their value as a way to expedite.

“The good part about the OTA is that you essentially get to write nearly a commercial contract, whatever you want,” Jette said in the interview. “The problem in that is it assumes you know how to write a commercial contract.”

“I think there’s always a danger of overcorrecting,” said Ward. “But I think the danger of overcorrecting is a lower risk than of maintaining the status quo. … This is not a zero-risk proposition. But it is a risk improvement strategy. It’s a risk mitigation strategy.”

And so the learning curve continues to take shape. “Are we going to make mistakes? Are we going to misuse [expedited authorities] or use them in areas where we probably shouldn’t? There’s no question in my mind that that will happen,” said Etherton. “But the real issue is, OK, how do we take that information and move forward?”

OTAs currently focus on smaller-scale acquisitions. But in four or five years, with the OTA language that allows for production as part of the agreement, an OTA could very well give rise to an ACAT I program—once the expedited authority has made it past the learning curve, Etherton said.

The learning curve did not start in just the past few years, Dillard noted. For all the seeming novelty of OTAs, he said, “this agreement authority has actually been around since 1958 and is no panacea in itself. OTAs are not always faster and must still include the needed protections for the DOD that FAR-based contracts provide. Let’s not forget that the infamous Future Combat Systems program began with a $240 million OTA way back in 2002.”

Nonetheless, it is clear, Dillard said, that “this time, acquisition reform is working, at least in terms of realizing results sooner. Now those results may not be the 100 percent solution that was initially required or budgeted for. But the user has a bigger vote than ever these days, and it is doing much to steer a very difficult vessel through the ocean of complexity that is acquisition.”

As Soloway sees it, the jury’s still out on whether the Army and the Pentagon are capable of substantive acquisition reform in the next two years. “This is a question that we have been asking for decades. And the answer remains the same: I don’t know.”

“If we can truly modernize the way we develop and train acquisition professionals to align with the historically fast-paced nature of the marketplace and technology,” Soloway said, “what is now considered ‘expedited’ or ‘alternative’ can become part of the normal course of business.”

“If we don’t try some of these things, we’re never going to find out what works and what doesn’t work,” Etherton said. “I want to see people embrace the agility, embrace the speed, and just not have to pay a price for it later on in the process.

“We don’t have a choice,” he said. “We can’t rely on the old system anymore.”

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 degree from the University of Missouri.

MARGARET C. ROTH is an editor of Army AL&T magazine. She has more than a decade of experience in writing about the Army and more than three decades’ experience in journalism and public relations. Roth is a Maj. Gen. Keith L. Ware Public Affairs Award winner and a co-author of the book “Operation Just Cause: The Storming of Panama.” She holds a B.A. in Russian language and linguistics from the University of Virginia.

This article is published in the Winter 2020 issue of Army AL&T magazine.

Subscribe to Army AL&T News – the premier online news source for the Army Acquisition Workforce. 
 Subscribe

Facing extraordinary new technology demands, the Army’s premier software maintenance organization is retraining its workforce on the skills it needs, in house.

by Jacob Kriss

As any engineer will tell you, software is not “fire and forget.” With more and more advanced Army equipment running on software, cyber-hardening and updating platforms against emerging physical and digital threats is critical to protect Soldiers’ lives and ensure mission success. For the command, control, communications, computers, cyber, intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance (C5ISR) community, this job of sustaining software falls to the U.S. Army Communications-Electronics Command Software Engineering Center.

However, within the last several years, the center realized it had a significant challenge. It employed more than 700 people tasked with maintaining dozens of Army C5ISR systems. But by 2025, it was scheduled to begin sustaining 25 additional systems. Many of these platforms required new skill sets the center didn’t have in sufficient quantity, and it needed a better process for the rapid, large-scale introduction of new technologies. At the same time, as the Army returns to near-peer competition against cyber-savvy adversaries, the center faced additional pressures to deliver software updates to Soldiers faster than ever before.

“The reality was, we had to find a way to retrain our existing workforce to get ahead of the scale of these incoming systems and the evolving software maintenance environment,” said Jennifer Zbozny, Software Engineering Center director. “It wasn’t a problem we could just hire our way out of, because that would be hugely expensive and would leave behind so many of our existing employees.”

Rising to the challenge, the center began a revolutionary program to retrain its employees with the skills they will need to meet the center’s needs in 2025 and beyond.

BUILDING THE STRATEGY

In early 2019, the center began creating its new workforce strategy after meeting with private industry partners to learn how they were helping their software maintenance workforce adapt to similar challenges. The strategy had two main components: direct classroom instruction and a secondary on-the-job component for students to apply what they learned. It also was designed to reduce costs by limiting reliance on contractor support while increasing the quality of software deliverables.

“Our first task was to clearly identify and define the key roles and skills we would need more of in order to support these new systems,” said human capital strategist Kim Bowers. These skill sets centered on software development, database administration and cybersecurity, specific to the platforms and languages in which students would need to become proficient.

Next, the center set up targeted training cohorts. At its Army Shared Services Center, which supports enterprise resource planning systems that house Army data, it established a cohort focused on the SAP HANA business data platform. In the Intelligence, Electronic Warfare and Sensors Directorate, it stood up a cohort to learn the VHDL language, which is used to model digital systems in circuits that power advanced hardware. It also created programming cohorts targeting the MSSQL database management system—the JavaScript framework to create responsive, interactive elements for web pages—and the .NET Framework and C# language, which is written in the .NET environment and is used to produce Windows desktop applications. In addition, the center is planning a future cohort on cybersecurity.

“The strategy involved engaging directly with supervisors to assess employees’ skills and determine who was best suited to receive the additional training,” Zbozny said. “It was all about finding the right employees who had already proved themselves in their existing competencies and getting them into the right role for the future.” 

INTO THE CLASSROOM

By summer 2019, the VHDL cohort began full-time classroom instruction, with additional cohort training launching in the fall and on an ongoing basis. Depending on the cohort, classroom instruction can generally last from three to nine months. To create coursework customized to its mission and needs, the center partnered with technical training vendors, such as the University of Maryland Baltimore County Training Centers and Defense Acquisition Support Services.

In total, 97 employees have or are scheduled to participate, but that number will grow as the center conducts more annual trainings. The cohorts are populated with a mix of employees whose supervisors selected them to participate, as well as those who volunteered in order to learn new skills. Participants tend to be in the mid-stages of their careers. For its entry-level employees, the center maintains a complementary job-rotation and training program designed to foster mission buy-in and retention.

In some cases, employees are simply cross-training, rather than being entirely retrained, so they can apply their skills in a wider variety of mission sets. Bowers noted that, in addition to the demands of new systems, the center’s increasing use of automated software testing to improve code quality and reduce errors was driving the need to retrain employees. “Many of our employees specialized in manually testing software, but that need will diminish over time,” she said. 

ON THE JOB

When students complete the classroom training, they move on to the “hands-on” practitioner component of the program, which is expected to last roughly 60 to 120 days. Depending on a student’s progress, he or she may receive additional classroom training or over-the-shoulder instruction with an assigned subject matter expert. Most people “learn by doing,” and the hands-on component of the program is designed to support retention by empowering employees to see their fruits of their labors firsthand.

Within the program, every student is also assigned a learning objectives readiness assessment that tracks their progress, Bowers said. It’s a key system to ensure students are prepared for the rigors of what comes next. Supervisors also work closely with the experts to place employees into permanent positions in which they are most likely to be challenged, grow and thrive.

“It’s not just about the training, it’s about the follow-through,” Bowers said. “We’re giving them the long-term support they need to be successful. It’s about doing things with intention and driving home what they learned.”

CONCLUSION

While the retraining program is still in its early stages of implementation, employee feedback and program uptake thus far have been promising, Zbozny said. As the center’s mission set becomes more complex and diverse, it will evaluate whether new skills gaps are emerging and adjust the program to meet those changes.

Zbozny noted the program aligns perfectly with the No. 1 priority of Gen. James McConville, Army chief of staff: people. When other Army organizations find themselves lacking in needed skill sets for new technologies, she advises them to look inward and consider investing in the potential of their existing workforce.

“The ultimate goal is to create a culture of continuous learning, curiosity and experimentation in which employees find real satisfaction and room to grow,” she said. “On the 21st century battlefield, our Soldiers will only be as effective as the professionals at home who are empowering them with software readiness. This program is a vote of confidence in our people.”

For more information, visit the Software Engineering Center website at https://cecom.army.mil/sec.

JACOB KRISS is a public affairs specialist with the U.S. Army Communications-Electronics Command. He holds an M.S. in public relations from Syracuse University and a B.A. in English from the State University of New York College at Geneseo.

This article is published in the Winter 2020 issue of Army AL&T magazine.

Subscribe to Army AL&T News – the premier online news source for the Army Acquisition Workforce. 
 Subscribe

Seventh in a series of articles on how the Combat Capabilities Development Command is supporting the Army’s “six plus two” modernization priorities.

by Maj. Gen. John A. George

Maj. Gen. John A. George is the commanding general of the U.S. Army Combat Capabilities Development Command.

Training is a way of life for Soldiers. Beginning with initial basic training, Soldiers participate in training throughout their military careers. For most of our history, training occurred in the field or in a classroom. As the Army looks to the future, it is modernizing how it trains Soldiers and units by exploring synthetic training technologies.

The Army’s Synthetic Training Environment (STE) aims to combine the latest advances from the virtual and gaming industries to create complex operational environments for immersive unit training. STE’s terrain tools will enable Soldiers to select any location on a virtual globe and train in an environment that they may encounter in combat.

Nestled under the Army’s Soldier lethality modernization priority, STE is a collaborative effort of the STE Cross-Functional Team, the U.S. Army Combat Capabilities Development Command Soldier Center and the Program Executive Office for Simulation, Training and Instrumentation (PEO STRI). The Soldier Center’s Simulation and Training Technology Center serves as the primary science and technology organization dedicated to providing modeling, simulation and training technology in direct support to the STE Cross-Functional Team and PEO STRI. Located within blocks of one another in Orlando, Florida, all three organizations capitalize on this prime location—at the heart of the Florida high-tech corridor, where more than 170 companies specialize in simulation- and training-related research—to establish critical partnerships across industry, academia, government organizations and international partners in order to develop state-of-the-art training technology. 

KEEPING IT REAL

The STE, which is scheduled for initial operating capability in fourth quarter 2021, will provide a realistic operational environment for training using state-of-the-art mixed-reality technologies. One of STE’s major science and technology focus areas is improving dynamic occlusion, or the capability to “portray” or “hide” computer-generated characters and objects behind real things, and to do so in real time from multiple perspectives as actors, objects and users move around in the environment. The virtual objects and the real scene must be perfectly aligned in order to maintain high levels of realism and enable objects to behave as they would under normal conditions.

For example, the popular mobile device-based game, Pokémon Go, is a virtual example of dynamic occlusion that many people play. Players use their mobile phone or tablet to seek virtual characters that are hidden in the real world. The characters appear as if they were hiding in and between real-world objects. Sometimes, however, players will see a character that appears to be on the far side of a room, but is still visible in front. This technical issue removes aspects of realism, and when used for military training will have an impact on outcomes.

Augmented reality game fans may encounter dynamic occlusion errors when the view within the game is not layered or aligned appropriately with real-world objects, making the experience feel unnatural—an annoyance to the player. In military scenarios, the problem can adversely affect the learning experience and lead to negative habits if, for example, a Soldier can’t realistically take cover or if a vehicle crew can’t accurately aim and fire at an enemy.

Occlusion of live, moving objects is challenging, and doing so at long distances is even more so. Current augmented-reality head-mounted displays restrict Soldier training to small, indoor environments because of hardware limitations. For example today, a squad can execute a close combat urban warfare training event in a room about the size of a basketball court. To work this challenge, the Simulation and Training Technology Center is evaluating several depth sensors and deep-learning algorithms to improve the alignment of the virtual and real objects within the scenario. They have also developed a prototype depth mask using networked depth cameras that achieve greater than 80 percent occlusion accuracy at ranges beyond 30 meters.

Plans for the immediate future include the same occlusion accuracy at ranges greater than 60 meters—still not good enough for our Soldiers. The goal at the Simulation and Training Technology Center is to mature and demonstrate augmented reality algorithms and techniques that occlude dynamic objects in realistic, changing environments with extended ranges that enable the same squad or platoon to train outdoors in all conditions and at the distance of their organic weapon systems. 

BREAKING IT DOWN

The Simulation and Training Technology Center is developing science and technology research that will enhance the realism, effectiveness and usability of the STE. The team is heavily focused on novel automation techniques and emerging state-of-the-art technologies—areas that current vendors and industry partners deem too risky to invest in, do not have the necessary in-house expertise or lack military-specific domain knowledge.

The STE will enable units and Soldiers to conduct realistic, multi-echelon, collective training anywhere in the world. The STE information system, the software backbone of this capability, includes One World Terrain, Training Simulation Software and the Training Management Tool. These three software capabilities will be integrated into the STE information system to manage, conduct and deliver synthetic training to the point of need via a ground vehicle, air vehicle and dismounted Soldier interfaces and simulators. The software operating system will enable “plug and play” components such as Reconfigurable Virtual Collective Trainers and Soldier/Squad Virtual Trainers for unit training while also supporting the future Live Training Environment (force-on-force and force-on-target training) and Next Generation Constructive simulation capabilities (exercises for divisions and above).

The Simulation and Training Technology Center’s One World Terrain research efforts include developing and demonstrating software tools and methods to improve the generation, processing and fidelity of synthetic terrains. This includes representing the complexities of multidomain environments and reducing or eliminating inefficiencies as the synthetic terrains are developed. An important component of achieving a dynamic 3D global terrain is using disparate data sources, which will enable Soldiers to train in a variety of settings, including forested areas, massive urban centers and dense rainforests.

Units currently require subject matter experts and a minimum of six months to manually create synthetic terrains unique to each event. In response, our One World Terrain efforts focus on new methods of using artificial intelligence to decrease the amount of human expertise and time needed to develop, edit and validate terrains used for training, while simultaneously producing them with better accuracy and fidelity.

Training Simulation Software science and technology efforts focus on intelligent character behaviors, scalability and warfare modeling, which are crucial to providing the realism necessary to immerse Soldiers in the training environment. Current military training simulations are based primarily on semi-automated behaviors that are reasonably predictable. The virtual opponent in the STE must have a level of cognition and unpredictability that also adheres to known adversarial doctrines. To achieve this effort, we are leveraging state-of-the-art artificial intelligence to better replicate multidomain operations and realistic environments that will enable units to train how they will fight.

The Training Management Tool component of the STE will focus on automated team assessments, automated feedback, after-action reviews and intelligent adaptive training for teams. Currently, experts need to be present during every key task of a training event to annotate and assess performance in real time. Details are often overlooked or missed entirely during this process. Therefore, we are coupling artificial intelligence with learning science to develop new ways to measure, assess and provide feedback to Soldiers and leadership automatically during and after STE training events. The feedback will also inform subsequent training.

Our research with the Soldier/Squad Virtual Trainers includes developing augmented reality and mixed reality technologies that enable virtual characters, systems and effects to be inserted into a live training environment. Augmented reality and mixed reality is most effective when it is realistic and creates disbelief for the user. Creating a sense of disbelief involves developing synthetic environments, including sensorial stimulants that are indiscernible from real environments. This allows users to virtually “transport” and conduct training operations in any environment without leaving their home station. The sense of disbelief is much easier to create when using virtual reality technologies that fully create the visual experience of the user without concern for the user’s real location. Augmented reality, however, is much more difficult because synthetic objects must seamlessly blend with the user’s real environment so that users cannot distinguish the real from the virtual. Merging real and virtual must be applied to both static objects and dynamic interactions between objects, including real and virtual.

We are also working to improve live training by finding alternatives to the Instrumentable- Multiple Integrated Laser Engagement System, or I-MILES. Built on technologies developed in the 1970s and 1980s, I-MILES is used to support live force-on-force and force-on-target training at Army training centers worldwide. While I-MILES has been enhanced throughout the years, laser-based systems are limited in their ability to realistically represent lethal effects during live exercises. For example, a shrub or cardboard box provides effective cover from a laser hit but would be useless in a firefight. Our team is seeking ways to more accurately depict the effects of direct and indirect fire and facilitate training on more sophisticated or longer-range weapons that can’t easily be integrated into a live training exercise.

Another goal at the Simulation and Training Technology Center is to demonstrate a dual-use eBullet system that will simulate tactical engagements for blue forces (friendly) and opposing forces weapon systems within both live and synthetic training environments. eBullet technologies offer a variety of options for Soldiers. For example, an artillery round would not simply be a hit or miss. Soldiers would be able to determine how accurate the firepower was and if more strikes were needed. Plans for the future include more advanced options with simulated electronic warfare, cyber, chemical and biological attacks. 

SOLDIER TOUCH POINT AND TESTING

Soldiers are key to providing meaningful input for many of our research efforts. We use feedback from the Army Expeditionary Warrior Experiment, which is an annual training event where Soldiers give feedback on technology; the feedback is used to improve products to fit Soldiers’ needs.

We also have existing relationships with customers, such as the Joint Readiness Training Center, which uses our technology during unit training rotations. Technology at the Joint Readiness Training Center is used by thousands of Soldiers who provide direct and indirect feedback.

The STE Cross-Functional Team conducts user and technical assessments, which connect Soldiers with developers and engineers. The Soldier Center Simulation and Training Technology Center supports the STE Cross-Functional Team with these events, which will be scheduled each quarter until initial operating capability, planned for the fourth quarter of 2021. In addition to helping plan these events, our researchers work with vendors and Soldiers to observe how they interact with the systems, and facilitate technical discussion to help refine the direction of our science and technology efforts.

One of the challenges for vendors is the need to test their products on a military network. The Technology Integration Facility in Orlando enables vendors with promising technologies to conduct rigorous testing on a military test network. The Technology Integration Facility serves as a place for the cross-functional team to test the products, provide feedback to vendors, and quickly adopt and refine capabilities that meet STE requirements.

The Team Orlando Integration Lab is co-located with the Technology Integration Facility, offering the modeling and simulation community a place to collaborate on research to advance the development of training aids, devices, simulators and simulations. 

TEAMING AROUND THE WORLD

Our strong partnership with industry is threefold. The first component includes contracts or agreements with industry to develop innovative simulation and training technology. Technology development is limited to problem sets with a military application that the commercial market otherwise would not develop. The second is the transition of technology to industry partners for commercialization, and the third is entering into exchange agreements, including cooperative research and development agreements, to enable research or development efforts with mutual benefits to both parties.

Academic partnerships include the University of Central Florida Institute for Simulation and Training, which supports STE technology development and independent technology assessment; the University of Southern California’s Institute for Creative Technologies University Affiliated Research Center, which supports One World Terrain research; Carnegie Mellon University, which develops artificial intelligence “free-thinking threat” algorithms; and the University of Texas, which develops One World Terrain and Training Simulation Software technologies.

Key partnerships with other government organizations include close relationships with the STE Cross-Functional Team, PEO STRI and the Combined Arms Center – Training. The STE Cross-Functional Team oversees development and sets requirements and priorities for the STE and related activities. PEO STRI is the materiel developer of the STE and primary transition recipient of the newly developed technologies. The U.S. Army Combined Arms Center – Training identifies the mid- and long-term gaps for the Army Simulation and Training Program. Other government partnerships include cross-collaboration within CCDC’s internal centers and labs, and with technical experts at the Engineer Research and Development Center, Army Geospatial Center and National Geospatial Agency.

We also maintain active relationships with international partners, including data and information exchange agreements with seven nations, future project agreements with two nations, one exchange engineer or scientist and participation in international standard activities with NATO and the Technical Cooperation Program. 

CONCLUSION

Current and emerging technologies from the Army’s research centers and the virtual, gaming, data storage and network industries are enabling us to provide more accessible and realistic training for Soldiers. The Army is leveraging these advances in technology, as well as the experience of the warfighter, to provide a training capability that accelerates Soldier and unit readiness to win decisively in multidomain operations.

For more information, go to www.army.mil/ccdc.

MAJ. GEN. JOHN A. GEORGE is the commanding general of CCDC. Before assuming command on Nov. 1, he served as deputy director and chief of staff of the U.S. Army Futures Command Futures and Concepts Center. He graduated from the United States Military Academy at West Point and was commissioned into the Army in 1988. He has an M.S. in social psychology from Penn State University and an M.S. in national resource strategy from the Industrial College of the Armed Forces.

This article is published in the Winter 2020 issue of Army AL&T magazine.

Subscribe to Army AL&T News – the premier online news source for the Army Acquisition Workforce. 
 Subscribe

A prescription for how the Army leaders can demonstrate emotional intelligence and communicate change better during a time of creative destruction, based on the author’s doctoral research and dissertation.

by Dr. Bozena “Bonnie” Berdej

The Army is going through creative destruction now. To respond to future threats, the Army has to change and continue reorganizing. Because of these pressing needs, leaders stand up new organizations to engage creativity and innovation. Policies change frequently to ensure efficiency. Leaders have to work around budget and schedule constraints while keeping their workforce agile and committed.

Creative destruction is necessary. It does not have to be entirely bad, but it comes with risks. Leaders have to clearly communicate their intentions and encourage feedback. Otherwise, creative destruction could potentially cost many millions of dollars in low morale, turnover and low organizational effectiveness, based on my study of the literature surrounding the correlation of creative destruction, leader emotional intelligence, communication and organizational effectiveness.

Let me explain.

Creative destruction is the idea that, to evolve, an organization must shed products and practices that don’t work or have become outdated in favor of newer and more innovative ideas that enable it to become more agile and responsive to the customer. Organizational effectiveness is a combination of five elements: leadership, decision-making, people, culture and commitment. Creative destruction and organizational effectiveness dovetail when leaders and employees learn soft skills—emotional intelligence, and its subset, communication. Emotional intelligence is the ability to master one’s emotions and work with emotions of others to achieve desired outcomes through building effective relationships and clearly communicating.

The Army operates in a multidimensional environment driven by needs, events and calendars. The Army Staff College refers to this as a need, event and calendar-driven multidimensional operational environment. In particular, the three systems driving the Army’s decision-making are the Joint Capabilities Integration and Development System; the planning, programming, budgeting and execution cycle; and the Defense Acquisition System. All three combined are responsible for materiel and capability development, and multi-year planning for resources, manpower and programs.

It is common practice to change policies and guidance several times per year while leaving the acquisition workforce to interpret the intent behind the changes. For example, in January 2020, DOD Instruction (DODI) 5000.02T and DODI 5000.02 were issued in efforts to simplify the existing guidance and to establish a distinction between DOD Direction 5000.01 and DODI 5000.02. To effectively implement these and many other changes, leadership needs to operate in a leader-follower collaborative setting because decision-making is no longer a singular process driven by the command-and-control approach to leadership. In this operational environment, leaders need to seek feedback from the functional working levels before they make decisions promoting innovation or other forms of change.

While creative destruction happens within the Army and often affects the workforce negatively, there are also things done well. When the U.S. Army Futures Command was stood up, Lt. Gen. Paul A. Ostrowski, principal military deputy to the assistant secretary of the Army for acquisition, logistics and technology, announced that the future Army will stand on three pillars:

• Futures and concepts.
• Combat development.
• Combat systems.

Ostrowski took the time to travel and meet with the acquisition workforce to communicate his vision. Change is hard, he said in one interview, and “the key is to understand and be able to move forward in a multidomain fight against a peer or near-peer competitor.”

He continued by emphasizing that the Army needs to empower others to make decisions and take risks. During the standup of the Army Futures Command, leaders effectively delegated authorities to program executive offices (PEOs) and program managers (PMs), enabling them to focus on capability development rather than  getting to a milestone.

This communication and empowerment initiative worked well. It was clearly communicated and executed. What I believe needs to happen next is PEO and PM leaders need to empower their workforce to make decisions and take risks.

This is important because when leaders do not empower others to make decisions and take risks, they develop unreasonable goals, reduce team effectiveness and eliminate brain power. This is because we think outside of the box and meaningfully contribute our knowledge when we know that someone believes in us. For example, readers may remember the 1968 study that identified the Pygmalion effect, which demonstrated that positive expectations influence performance. Similarly, the 1920s Hawthorne experiment showed that paying attention to others improved productivity.

My review of evidence also indicates that decisions made without employees’ contributions can have devastating effects on organizations. Jerald M. Liss, in his 2013 study “Creative Destruction and Globalization: The Rise of Massive Standardized Education Platforms,” argued that creative destruction managed in this way eliminates specialized knowledge responsible for creativity and innovation while focusing on efficiency, and it erodes employee morale or trust in the leadership. For example, had Army leaders listened to their experts in the Bradley Fighting Vehicle program of the 1960s, they could have avoided the staggering cost of redesigns and modifications. Several dedicated leaders left, removing their specialized knowledge from the program. The Bradley was in production for 17 years, costing billions of dollars.

Even more importantly, as I learned during the two and half years of research for my dissertation, leaders play a critical role in eliminating such devastating effects of creative destruction on organizational effectiveness. For example, leaders who do not seek feedback almost always negatively impact all five elements that comprise organizational effectiveness (leadership, decision-making, people, culture and commitment). Employees look to their leaders for wise and transparent decisions, which demonstrate that leaders are vested in the well-being of their organizations as well as their employees. They expect them to share and listen to what is really happening in their organization. What is more, if leaders and followers practice effective two-way communication, it assists leaders in demonstrating good stewardship of taxpayer money. As Frederick Herzberg stated in his 1974 study, “Motivation-Hygiene Profiles,” organizations are only as healthy as their employees.

COMMUNICATING TO BUILD THE FUTURE ARMY

Richard Foster and Sarah Kaplan, in their 2001 book “Creative Destruction,” claim that when communication is lacking, employees change how they perceive their leaders. They don’t view the leaders as worthy of following. Instead, employees see them as task-oriented managers who, by some unexplained chance, became leaders.

As the 2018 Army Strategy states, the Army is responsible for deploying, fighting and winning our nation’s wars. Being responsible for something or someone requires knowledge. Leaders need to understand their employees and their values to appropriately assess how they can make their organizations better. My review of the literature on emotional intelligence and communication can shed some light on this issue. For example, can an organization be effective without communication?

To better understand, let’s talk about the communication systems for a moment. In 1948, Claude Shannon and Warren Weaver proposed the mathematical theory of communication. Their mathematical linear communication model included only phones and tested several communication channels, which were responsible for distorting the original message. The findings showed that there are hidden messages with vital information that never get to the recipient unless they are decoded—e.g., a decoder for this study could be a cellphone turning data into readable messages. Although the study model was called the “mother of all communication” models, it did not provide clear answers regarding how to decode hidden messages. It wasn’t until 1954 when Wilbur Schramm, in his book “The Process and Effects of Mass Communications,” demonstrated that in order to decode hidden messages, there must be a human factor involved. He claimed that emotions are key elements required to discover hidden messages in a conversation. Today, Schramm’s theory is the most commonly used communication theory, showing the impossibility of communicating without involving people. Both leaders and followers are responsible for effective communication. Moreover, you can’t effectively communicate without understanding emotions, which leads us to emotional intelligence.

The clarity of the verbal messages is just as important. It is required to understand the purpose and goals of the message, and to keep the workforce motivated. In my experience, when people do not understand why change needs to happen, they resist it. Schramm’s theory also demonstrated that communication is a critical part of emotional intelligence (See Figure 1).

AREAS OF INTERACTION – Emotional intelligence allows for feedback and establishes clear communication channels—structures that must be in place as the Army undergoes significant changes as its modernization efforts unfold. (Graphic by USAASC and the author)

Communication problems don’t apply to leaders only. There are organizations within Army acquisition in which leaders call employees “leaders” regardless of official positions. Inherent in this idea is that everyone is expected to act like a leader.

Army Futures Command headquarters personnel have to embrace cultural change and adopt a more corporate train of thought. As Sgt. Maj. Michael Crosby, Army Futures Command principal adviser to the commander and staff, said, “Don’t get in the box, don’t even use a box—get rid of the box.” The Army’s modernization goals push many outside their comfort zone. So the responsibility to communicate falls on both formal and informal leaders. During the development of the Bradley program, leaders broke upward and downward communication, causing confusion and resistance. Is there a similar trend happening now in your organization? If there is, what do you do about it?

ADJUSTING PERSONALITIES TO CHANGE ARMY CULTURE

As noted, the Army is in the business of protecting, defending and winning. We work hard, day in and day out, to successfully complete our mission. The environment we are in is complex. Changes happen almost too fast to keep up. To embrace the culture of the future, we need to ensure that we avoid the Bradley mishaps by communicating what is significant upward and downward. Reviewing the literature on emotional intelligence, I found that emotional intelligence has to co-exist with communication. Emotional intelligence ensures that all leaders, formal and informal, take an active role in the well-being of their organizations through effective relationship-building and based on clear communication. More importantly, if the Army is to effectively modernize, leaders must want to improve their own thinking before they can improve their organizations.

Emotional intelligence points to self-awareness as an important element of the self-improvement process. A leader must first become aware of who he is, then reflect on it, and finally apply this knowledge to make the necessary changes. In a 2019 interview, Crosby mentioned that he does not “go to someone who has been in uniform for 20 or 30 years because they think the same.” The Army Futures Command is the biggest organizational revolution since 1973, and so must our thinking be to catch up.

So, is emotional intelligence a key component of organizational effectiveness? No, but it is the key component of leader effectiveness (see Figure 2). In his book “What Makes a Leader,” Daniel Goleman found that almost every effective leader has some level of emotional intelligence. This explains why emotional intelligence is significant when addressing change, which is often necessary, but never easy.

THE TRIFECTA – The components of emotional intelligence fall into three categories: skills, style and relationship. Navigating change requires skills in all three areas and can be the difference between an engaged, motivated workforce and an alienated, under-performing one. (Graphic by USAASC and the author)

Change requires communication skills and empathetic behaviors. Think about change in your family. How would you communicate difficult news? Would you just let it out, or would you look for ways to reduce tension or pain? Once, a leader other than my direct supervisor informed me in a quite emotionless way that I was reassigned to a different project. This had a strong impact on trust: it changed my perception of the leaders in my organization, and made me see what my leaders were lacking.

The 2020 Army People Strategy states that people are the Army’s No. 1 priority. If that’s true, why do people often feel like they are the last priority in their organizations? Leaders talk about open communication channels and open-door policies, but what is the open-door policy? Where is the door? Do you trust your leaders enough to communicate a problem? Do you feel like your leaders have already made a decision before you even knocked on their door? 

HOW TO MOVE FORWARD

How do we tackle these interrelated problems? For starters, I believe that leaders should talk to their followers and understand what is important to them. Then, rotate their employees internally to where they can grow. This way, they can align their organization’s objectives with their employees’ objectives. Put your table of distribution and allowances aside and think “employees.” As a result, people will feel motivated to go above and beyond for their organizations. This is because instead of being stuck in one position, they get the opportunity to prove their skills in other positions within a different branch or division in their organizations. Also by doing so, leaders show that they rely more on discovering their existing assets because they try to minimize the disruptive component of creative destruction. For example, when the Army Futures Command stood up cross-functional teams, leaders suddenly reorganized priorities. What was a top priority before became secondary now. There was chaos. Urgent efforts were no longer urgent and people started to question trust. The hard work of many seemed no longer important. Organizations had to compete for additional funding to support often unreasonable and unachievable goals.

For these reasons, leaders should evaluate whether change is really necessary. It is possible that someone intentionally promotes the development of a new technology to encroach on a competing company’s mission or to give the appearance of innovation. This approach often falsely necessitates hiring outside sources while eliminating internal assets, thus increasing cost. Emotionally intelligent leaders likely will put their people first when new requirements come in and ensure that they recognize their hard work. In case of the Army Futures Command’s requirements, leaders did not always reassign projects effectively and did not communicate the benefits of such reprioritization. Leaders implemented new requirements, removing the human factor from the equation.

In discussing these issues with people I work with, it seems that while experience is important, it cannot be the decisive factor when selecting new leaders. The notion that experience makes a leader could not be further from the truth. I have seen formal leaders who were great in managing tasks but poor at influencing others, and informal leaders who affected change but did not get a promotion because they did not have the requisite experience. Just as our thinking needs to change, our hiring process also needs to work “outside of the box” if we are to embrace the new culture.

DEVELOPING THE FUTURE – The Army needs leader development programs to meet the demands of the new modernization requirements while keeping the acquisition workforce motivated and thinking outside of the box. One such program—Inspiring and Developing Excellence in Acquisition Leaders (IDEAL)— develops skills that facilitate effective communication. Mumbi Thande-Kamiru, center, from the Army Test and Evaluation Command at Aberdeen Proving Ground, Maryland, asks a question during a presentation by Kim Reid, project director for the Rapid Equipping Force, during a January 2020 IDEAL session. Reid discussed leadership and her Army Acquisition leadership experiences. (Photo by Ann Vaughan, U.S. Army Acquisition Support Center (USAASC))

Hiring officials should select leaders on the basis of their ability to work effectively with others, and never based solely on their experience. Choosing leaders based primarily on experience or internal politics can result in the loss of valuable assets as well as organizational stability. If we ought to change the way we think, as Crosby envisioned the innovative Army teams able to meet the requirements of the 2019 Army Modernization Strategy, we need to hire “outside the box” and move away from traditional standards dictating who fits and does not fit leadership roles.

If I wanted to summarize my research in one sentence, it would be, “Be responsible for others.” Whatever we do, there is always someone watching us and learning from us. Whether we are the Army’s leaders, acquisition professionals, or simply someone in a cubicle, we have to take responsibility for others. It is not easy to place someone in front of yourself. However, isn’t that exactly what we do in the Army? Don’t we all work toward the common goal and do the best for the Soldier? Occasionally we may forget how meaningful our jobs are. So, attempting to meet the complex Army modernization requirements, which require fresh and innovative thinking, and keeping the acquisition workforce motivated enough to contribute its ideas, I want to ask you: What kind of a leader are you? Are you making a difference in your organization or are you just managing tasks?

CONCLUSION

Excessive change will continue to happen as the Army continues to modernize. How effectively leaders address change, and guide their organizations through it, depends on leaders’ emotional intelligence. Emotional intelligence allows for feedback and establishes clear communication channels, which improves organizational effectiveness. The five elements of organizational effectiveness require everyone to take responsibility for themselves and others.

I suggest that leaders consider emotional intelligence training to improve the use of creative destruction and optimize its effects on organizational effectiveness. Managers may want to focus more on influencing others to think outside of the box through motivation and inspirations.

Most importantly, to improve organizational effectiveness, leaders should assess the existing leadership positions and make sure that organizational leaders remain properly aligned and focused.

For more information, contact the author at bozena.berdej.civ@mail.mil.

NOTE: This article is based on the author’s approved doctoral research. Her dissertation, “Leader emotional intelligence as a response to creative destruction and its effects on organizational effectiveness,” closely reflects her people-centered leadership values. The author strongly believes that one cannot become an effective leader without having the desire to grow others. Therefore, the concept of emotional intelligence is, in her view, a critical element in effective leadership. Her extensive research delivers evidence that empathy and social skills are two indispensable facets of emotional intelligence required for building effective organizations. 

1. BOZENA “BONNIE” BERDEJ serves as the senior business management specialist supporting the acquisition team at the Joint Program Executive Office for Armaments and Ammunition at Picatinny Arsenal, New Jersey. She began her government career there in 2009 as a procurement analyst in the Project Manager for Close Combat Systems, advancing to become the senior business management specialist in the Project Manager for Conventional Ammunition Systems before assuming her current responsibilities. She holds a in management from University of Maryland University College. A member of the Army Acquisition Corps since 2012, she is Level III certified in program management and in security cooperation, and is Level I certified in business financial management. She holds a Black Belt Six Sigma certification.

KEY TERMS

Creative destruction—A process through which something new brings about the demise of whatever existed before it.
Emotional intelligence—The ability to identify and manage one’s own emotions, as well as the emotions of others.
Organizational effectiveness—The concept of how well an organization achieves the outcomes it intends to produce.

This article is published in the Fall 2020 issue of Army AL&T magazine.

Subscribe to Army AL&T News – the premier online news source for the Army Acquisition Workforce. 
 Subscribe

by Michael Bold

FORT BELVOIR, Va. (April 09, 2020)—Talent management—getting the right person in the right place at the right time—is the theme of the Spring 2020 issue of Army AL&T magazine. “Talent management requires both risk and creativity,” writes Dr. Bruce D. Jette, the Army acquisition executive. “This is just one of the reasons why the Army has taken a number of concrete steps in the right direction with respect to both civilian and uniformed members of the acquisition workforce.” In this issue, read about how:

The Army’s Synthetic Training Environment (STE) aims to combine the latest advances from the virtual and gaming industries to create complex operational environments for immersive unit training, in the latest from the U.S. Army Combat Capabilities Development Command’s series on Army priorities, “CCDC’s ROAD MAP TO MODERNIZING THE ARMY: SYNTHETIC TRAINING ENVIRONMENT.”

The Program Executive Office for Enterprise Information Systems is going back to basics, such as technical training and practical applications, for acquisition talent management, in “TRAIN THE WAY YOU FIGHT.”

Facing extraordinary new technology demands, the Army’s premier software maintenance organization is retraining its workforce on the skills it needs, in house, in “SOFTWARE TALENT GOES TO SCHOOL.”

The xTechSearch competition and the xTech Accelerator program enable the Army to access cutting-edge technology and foster the success of innovative small businesses as it grows its industrial base, in “MENTOR, ACCELERATE, REPEAT.”

New prototype software unifies and simplifies network management ahead of coalition exercises, in “A CLEARER NETWORK PICTURE.”

A prescription for how the Army leaders can demonstrate emotional intelligence and communicate change better during a time of creative destruction, based on the author’s doctoral research and dissertation, in “EMBRACING CREATIVE DESTRUCTION.”

An acquisition professional recounts her eye-opening four-month assignment at the Defense Innovation Unit in California’s Silicon Valley, in “ HACQING’ FOR DEFENSE.”

As always, Army AL&T needs contributions from you—the Army Acquisition Workforce. For more information on how to publish an article in Army AL&T magazine or how to submit a Faces of the Force nomination, go to https://asc.army.mil/web/publications/army-alt-submissions/ to see our writers guidelines, upcoming deadlines and themes.

Spring 2020 Army AL&T

FROM THE AAE

MODERNIZING TALENT MANAGEMENT
The Army’s effort to transition the acquisition workforce is underway

TALENT MANAGEMENT

CCDC’S ROAD MAP TO MODERNIZING THE ARMY: SYNTHETIC TRAINING ENVIRONMENT
A new level of realism to support multidomain warfare

ASA(ALT) AT WORK: RCCTO
A profile of the Army Rapid Capabilities and Critical Technologies Office

FACES OF THE FORCE: GWENDOLYN ‘GWENDI’ MILLER
Delivering the mission

TRAIN THE WAY YOU FIGHT
PEO EIS goes back to basics to manage acquisition workforce talent

SOFTWARE GOES TO SCHOOL
The Army’s Software Engineering Center is retraining its workforce in house

FEATURE ARTICLES

FACES OF THE FORCE: CARL S. POLCYN
The importance of difficult conversations

SCRUB-A-DUB DATA
AMCOM’s data cleansing efforts enable Army readiness.

A CLEARER NETWORK PICTURE
Prototype software simplifies network management

MENTOR, ACCELERATE, REPEAT
The xTechSearch competition and Accelerator program foster the success of small businesses

ON CONTRACTING: THE NOTICE I NEVER KNEW
When is a notice not a notice?

COMMENTARY

EMBRACING CREATIVE DESTRUCTION
A prescription for Army leaders on emotional intelligence and communication

BEEN THERE, DONE THAT: THE PROFESSION OF ACQUISITION
Take the “profession” in “acquisition professional” seriously

WORKFORCE

FROM THE DACM: MODERNIZING THE WORKFORCE
Modernizing the Army means modernizing acquisition

DATA SUPPORTS TRAINING
Army DACM Office uses new data to pinpoint and plan training

‘HACQ’ING FOR DEFENSE
The author’s four-month developmental assignment at DIU

FACES OF THE FORCE: COL. DAVID WARNICK
The squeaky wheel gets the acquisition career

CAREER NAVIGATOR: RIGHT RESOURCES, RIGHT TIME
A one-stop shop to aid supervisors of acquisition professionals

FACES OF THE FORCE: MAJ. EUGENE CHOI
From boss to sponge to award ceremony

ON THE MOVE

THEN AND NOW: QUIZ SHOW

And stay in touch with USAASC for the latest in AL&T news and information!

• Like: www.facebook.com/usaasc
• Follow: www.twitter.com/usaasc
• Connect: https://www.linkedin.com/company/usaasc
• Flickr: http://www.flickr.com/photos/usaasc
• YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/usaasc

Subscribe to Army AL&T News – the premier online news source for the Army Acquisition Workforce. 
 Subscribe

WELCOME TO PEO EIS – Smith, center, and Brendan Burke, center right, deputy PEO, hosted a full-day newcomers orientation on Sept. 15. Smith and her leadership team have taken steps to strengthen the transition for newly hired employees from training for their jobs to doing the job, by reinforcing the fundamentals of acquisition and program management. (U.S. Army photo by Scott Weaver, PEO EIS)

PEO EIS goes back to basics, such as technical training and practical applications, for acquisition talent management.

by Ellen Summey

“Sight the enemy. Duck and cover. Protect your fallen comrade. Provide aid only after you stop taking fire. When we’re training Soldiers and preparing them for battle, it’s all about the basics. Repetition, repetition, repetition.” Chérie Smith routinely refers to those foundational lessons in her role as program executive officer for Enterprise Information Systems (EIS).

“We drill our Soldiers on the fundamentals in the operational side of the Army. We build on those fundamentals, putting our troops in more and more stressful environments, allowing them to apply those basics as individuals, as well as small teams. We send them out to a combat training center, where they learn to work as part of a larger team,” she said.

“We should apply this approach to training our acquisition professionals. Limit critical classroom time on things like earned value management and the ‘Gold Card,’ which many program managers will never use. Remove classes on special interest topics like team personality traits and offer them outside of the core curriculum.”

Since Smith assumed the role of program executive officer in 2018, she and her leadership team have worked to bring those training fundamentals into focus. “We observed that our new folks were coming in directly from training and still didn’t understand how to apply the things they had learned,” Smith explained. “We try to take it to the next level. We use experts from Defense Acquisition University and from our own organization to show them how to apply acquisition principles in the real world management of their respective programs.”

“We’re going back to basics,” she said. “Like [Army Chief of Staff] Gen. [James C.] McConville says, ‘Winning matters.’ We need to be as focused on the outcome as we have been on the process. If our old training process isn’t producing the desired outcome, then we need to change our approach. More and more training is being done online, and we lose the benefit of the interaction we had in the past. The ability to hear how others managed a problem and what worked and what didn’t.”

THE ONLY CONSTANT IS CHANGE

The acquisition world is experiencing seismic shifts, as the Army and DOD focus on rapid fielding, modernization and finding ways to keep pace with technology. Beyond systemic changes and Army policies, Smith believes the workforce needs to have the technical skills to make that happen.

“Our folks need the right balance of hands-on experience and classroom education,” Smith said. “Lt. Gen. Paul Ostrowski [principal military deputy to the assistant secretary of the Army for acquisition, logistics and technology] was able to push through some of those curriculum changes at Naval Postgraduate School (NPS), and I think that’s the smartest thing they could have done.”

In 2019, NPS awarded its first ever master of science degrees in systems engineering management to a class of 30 Army acquisition officers. The new curriculum focuses on advanced technical skills and allows participants to apply their education in hands-on projects during their training. “We desperately need that technical training and practical application,” Smith said, “rather than being so focused on simply obtaining a certification or passing a test.”

“Put the focus back on the total systems engineering process,” Smith said. “Defining and identifying the problem is only the first step. Understanding what to do once you identify the problem is challenging when you understand the differences in software systems versus weapon systems. We’re trying to groom people to take command at that next level, and I think teaching them how to manage technology is much more valuable. They have to know enough technology to be able to manage it.

Smith feels that progression through school should be more thoughtful, with a focus on ensuring the right balance of actual experience in a program office managing cost, schedule and performance. “At NPS, you’re reintroducing them to management of technology and updating their skill sets. I’ve heard from students there who feel it’s really been stretching them, because they hadn’t used their math or engineering skills in years,” Smith said.

ON BOARD AND IN THE KNOW – Brendan Burke, right, deputy program executive officer for EIS, leads a conversation about onboarding with a group of new employees on Nov. 12, 2019. Clear communication and team building are essential tools for PEO EIS in creating common understanding among its 37 program offices and 71 acquisition programs, said Program Executive Officer Chérie Smith. (U.S. Army photo by Laura Edwards, PEO EIS)

BUILDING COHESION

Communication and cohesion can be challenging for any group, much less an organization as large and complex as PEO EIS. With 37 program offices and 71 acquisition programs focused on communications, logistics, medical, finance, personnel, training and procurement systems for all 10 combatant commands, “complex” is an understatement. “We have a very large and diverse portfolio,” Smith said, “but that is not an excuse for poor communication or siloed programs. It means we have to prioritize clarity and be intentional about our messaging and team building.”

To build that sense of cohesion, Smith and her team have focused on developing organizational identity, clarifying priorities and enhancing information sharing. Recently, they decided to try a new approach. “It just so happened that we had several O-6 deputy positions open at the same time, through natural attrition and the timing of career moves. We seized that opportunity to create synergy among the incoming deputies,” she explained. PEO EIS leaders are deliberate about the way they train, develop and integrate those roles, and the deputies help define and implement the EIS training program. “They proactively lead the talent management and training initiatives of the EIS workforce. They are given not just the responsibility, but real authority to make that happen.”

Smith said the result is improved communication and unity among members of the cohort, with a focus on information sharing and lessons learned. “That communication is key, in my mind,” Smith said. “We need to take advantage of the knowledge that already resides in our organization.”

In addition, the PEO EIS leadership team has taken a new approach to the Senior Rater Potential Evaluation. They use the tool to identify top technical experts in each relevant field (cyber, data, cloud computing, etc.), and tie that to relevant training opportunities to refresh their skill sets.

“If you’re at the top of your field in anything, whether it’s technology, program management or finance, then you’re probably the last person anybody wants to see go away to training for 30 days,” explained Deputy Program Executive Officer Brendan Burke. But Burke feels strongly that the organization has to make it possible for those top technical team members to attend more robust training, for the betterment of the workforce. “Letting them go to training should hurt, but we have to be willing to accept the pain of losing a good person for a while, because it’s the right thing to do in the long run.”

NOT ALL SUNSHINE AND RAINBOWS

Anyone who has worked in talent management knows it is more than just promotion and team building. “Talent management is hard work,” Burke said. “Managing the lower-performing members of the team isn’t something that’s fun to talk about, though. Promotions make up about 90 percent of the typical conversation about talent management. And that is important, but that’s only part—and it’s the easy part, at that. The hard part is holding people accountable and identifying who to move.”

Smith agreed that talent management is sometimes difficult, and she feels that supervisors need to provide clear examples and metrics, to take as much emotion out of the discussion as possible. “If you can show metrics and you can give data, people may not like it, but they can’t argue data.” You can’t get stuck in the role of wanting to be the friend, Smith said. “You have the responsibility to make them better—to help them grow. Grow or go.”

“Grow or go” is a very concise but accurate summary of Smith’s no-nonsense approach to aligning talent with the demands of the organization. “When working with someone who is not performing where they should be, or where we know they can be, you have options,” Smith said. “One of those options may be to move that person into a new role, which may stimulate and challenge them, and allow them to blossom. But you have to move them for the right reason. Some individuals just need a change and a new opportunity, while others may be experiencing more challenges or may be unwilling to move.”

Whatever the case, Smith is clear that the change has to be linked to data. “Track their progress even after they move, to evaluate whether it benefited both the organization and the person.” This approach echoes the directive of the Army People Strategy, that leaders “provide Soldiers and Civilians with positions that unleash their passions and talents, maximizing performance and productivity in both the operating and generating forces.”

“Underperforming individuals can really damage morale, because their teammates will pick up the slack,” Smith said. “Those teammates are doing more work and watching someone else get paid for it.” To take care of the team, Smith feels it’s vital to also manage members who simply aren’t performing. “That’s part of that supervisor differential, in my mind. That’s part of what you get paid to do as a supervisor. We must be willing to say, ‘You’re not producing to the level you’re being paid for, or to the level of your potential.’ Provide the opportunity for the person to perform, hold them responsible, and provide frequent feedback.”

THE MAGIC WAND QUESTION

There is no simple solution to the Army’s talent management challenges, but Smith has some ideas about where to start. “If I could wave a magic wand and solve this whole issue, I’d create a new standard for progression,” Smith said, “and a level of training and experience that would be required, almost like prerequisites.” The Army’s current time-in-grade requirements and educational guidelines do not adequately consider real-world experience, in Smith’s estimation.

“Instead of focusing on time in grade, I’d rather look at practical accomplishments,” she said. “Once you’ve demonstrated competence in managing risk and applying corrective actions with follow-up metrics on a program of a certain size, then you can go to the next level. We should be intentionally integrating more real-world application with the traditional training. We need to consider things like what milestone the program is in, what type of program it is (e.g., weapon, software, services) and what role the individual had on the program.”

Smith feels she was very fortunate in this regard, since she came into the original Acquisition Corps with program management experience already under her belt. “I had been doing program management probably 15 years before,” she said. “When they stood up the Acquisition Corps, I already knew how to manage a schedule, I knew how to lay out a work breakdown structure. I had done it the wrong way enough times to know that you have to have a little wiggle room for the unknowns that you will find. There are always going to be a couple of things you just never thought would happen, and you’re going to have to adjust. The experience of finding risks or identifying problems and having an opportunity to see what worked and what didn’t work in different circumstances was the best teacher.”

It’s that kind of experience that Smith wants to see incorporated into the training requirements for new Acquisition Corps members. “That’s the kind of fundamental skill that should be taught and that’s not being taught at all those basic courses now,” she said. “If you live it a few times, you have context. It just makes sense to you.”

CONCLUSION

In many ways, Smith’s approach echoes the Army People Strategy, which was released in October 2019. Talent management has been a challenge not only for PEO EIS, but for the Army in general, and senior leaders recognize the need for an overhaul. The new strategy puts an emphasis on matching people to the right positions and ensuring that experience and expertise are prioritized, which Smith believes will benefit her workforce in software and network program management.

In particular, the strategy seeks to “increase the rigor associated with the training and education of Army professionals, aligning credentialing and certification more closely with demonstrated and measurable expertise rather than time in grade, service or position.” For Smith, this change is a promising sign of things to come. “The Army is focused on modernization, and we see that in the new People Strategy, and the emphasis on the Integrated Personnel and Pay System – Army (IPPS-A) and the Accessions Information Environment (AIE).”

PEO EIS is leading the acquisition efforts for both IPPS-A and AIE, in conjunction with functional partners across the Army. McConville has said these two projects reflect the Army’s recognition that its people are its greatest asset. “No matter how much technology we develop, Soldiers will always remain the centerpiece of our Army,” he said. “We equip people, we don’t man equipment, and that philosophy will not change.”

For more information, contact PEO EIS at usarmy.peoeis@mail.mil.

ELLEN SUMMEY provides contract support to PEO EIS at Fort Belvoir, Virginia, for Bixal Solutions Inc. She holds an M.A. in human relations from the University of Oklahoma and a B.A. in mass communication from Louisiana State University. She has more than a decade of communication experience in both the government and commercial sectors.

This article is published in the Spring 2020 issue of Army AL&T magazine.

Subscribe to Army AL&T News – the premier online news source for the Army Acquisition Workforce. 
 Subscribe

The Army DACM Office’s supervisor competency assessment results help justify targeted training.

by Jacqueline M. Hames

Knowing the capabilities of your workforce is key in managing employee talent—it allows you to see their strengths, as well as areas for improvement, and provides a framework to see what training will be needed in the future. But how do you find out what capabilities your workforce possesses? Through a competency assessment, of course!

The Army Director for Acquisition Career Management (DACM) Office conducted a workforce competency assessment in two parts between 2017 and 2019. The  2017 fiscal year (FY) Acquisition Workforce Career Development Assessment—Part 1—surveyed the entire Army Acquisition Workforce to determine which training would increase the its leadership and technical competencies. The results of Part 1 of the assessment told the DACM Office that, for each of the acquisition career fields, how important skill was to the employee’s position, the amount of time an employee spent developing a skill, and the employee’s understanding of that skill. The DACM Office was then able to compare that information for each career field to the Office of the Secretary of Defense’s Acquisition Workforce Qualification Initiative, a tool that’s used to identify specific gaps in job experience, allow for identification of on-the-job developmental opportunities and capture demonstrated acquisition experience.

Part 2, the FY 2019 Army Acquisition Workforce Competency Assessment – Supervisor Feedback, captured data on workforce competencies as assessed by acquisition employees’ supervisors. The FY19 assessment marked the first time that common AAW technical competencies had been identified and rated.

UNIVERSAL COMPETENCIES

“[In] March of 2019, we started down the path of drafting and conducting a competency assessment for both leadership and functional competencies to validate the competency assessment we did in FY17,” said Jason Pitts, chief of the Acquisition Workforce Proponency Branch. The FY19 assessment surveyed both acquisition and non-acquisition supervisors—about 12,000 people—and asked questions similar to the FY17 assessment on leadership, functional competencies and competencies common among all 14 career fields, he said. Of the 12,000 people surveyed for the FY19 assessment, roughly 3,000, or 24.8 percent of them, responded.

The FY19 assessment’s objectives were to identify the strengths and training needs of the AAW, inform and improve human capital planning initiatives to develop the workforce, and gather information for decision-makers and stakeholders in planning for professional development. The report on the assessment’s results will be shared with supervisors and senior acquisition leaders across the community.

Jerry Baird, an analyst with the Acquisition Workforce Proponency Branch, explained that, before the FY19 assessment was launched, the DACM Office conducted focus groups with various stakeholders from the FY17 assessment. The focus groups helped determine the six universal competencies common among the career fields, which are:

• Critical thinking: The ability to analyze situations and make sound decisions that are most effective.
• Writing and communication: The ability to translate concepts into comprehensive guidance that is actionable and easy to understand.
• Decision-making: The ability to make critical and rapid decisions and to respond in a methodical and effective way when quick action is required.
• Planning and analysis – integration: The ability to understand how product support management activities lead, integrate and impact and trade among other functional activities required for that particular product.
• Risk management: The ability to create and implement risk management plans and apply risk management throughout the total life cycle of a program.
• Acquisition strategy and planning analysis: The ability to collect technical inputs, including cost, schedule and financial information; to identify program problems; and to propose mitigation plans.

“Every competency was rated in two ways: First, how important did they think it was on a scale of one to five? Second, how proficient did they think the people they supervise, specifically their acquisition workforce members, were in that competency?” Baird said. “So, each competency had two lenses: importance and proficiency.” A gap was deemed to exist “if something was important, but the proficiency was lower than the importance rating,” Baird said.

QUANTIFIABLE DATA

Both competency assessments are aligned with the DACM Office’s Human Capital Strategic Plan and the Army’s People Strategy to improve workforce development and further the Army’s goal of talent management. “While talent management is about the entire human resource life cycle—acquire, develop, employ and retain—we feel this effort can help organizational leaders identify leadership- and acquisition-specific developmental focus areas,” Pitts said.

The DACM Office hopes to provide supervisors and senior acquisition leaders better insight into their organizations with the FY19 Supervisor Competency Assessment report. “All we tried to do was arm them with a few leadership and functional competency gaps that are quantified with data,” Pitts said. “This allows them to create strategic IDPs [individual development plans], for example, to target their gaps.”

The assessment also enables the DACM Office, which manages the Defense Acquisition Workforce Development Account (formerly the Defense Acquisition Workforce Development Fund), to prioritize the 1,300 submissions received every fiscal year, he said. It provided quantifiable data to validate both the decisions of senior acquisition leaders across the community and the DACM Office’s priorities, before committing resources to specific submissions.

“If there’s a gap, and it’s important, divisions or commands need to make sure their training opportunities are geared at filling those gaps,” Pitts said.

For more information, go to https://asc.army.mil/web/hcsp/.

JACQUELINE M. HAMES is an editor with Army AL&T magazine. She holds a B.A. in creative writing from Christopher Newport University. She has more than 12 years of experience writing and editing news and feature articles for publication.

This article is published in the Spring 2020 issue of Army AL&T magazine.

Subscribe to Army AL&T News – the premier online news source for the Army Acquisition Workforce. 
 Subscribe

by Mike Bold

FORT BELVOIR, Va. (April 13, 2020)—The editors have voted, the readers have voted, and the results are in.

Army AL&T magazine, the award-winning publication of the Army acquisition executive, announced today the winners of its annual “ALTies,” honoring the best article, commentary, graphic and photograph that appeared in the magazine in 2019.

“The quality of content we receive from the acquisition community continues to amaze me,” said Nelson McCouch III, the editor-in-chief of Army AL&T. “These winners represent the expertise and talent we have across the workforce. I’m proud of their work and continued support for Army AL&T magazine.”

The 2019 ALTies were awarded in two brackets: The Editors’ Pick, selected by Army AL&T’s editors in four categories from everything the magazine published last year, and the Audience Choice, chosen by our readers from a dozen or more nominees in two categories, narrowed down by our editors.

AUDIENCE CHOICE
The winner of the Audience Choice award for best article was “Creating Insight-Driven Decisions,” by Ellen Summey of the Program Executive Office for Enterprise Information Systems (PEO EIS). The article, which appeared in the Summer 2019 issue, explained how PEO EIS developed the Army Leader Dashboard, a secure, web-based application that Army leadership can access from any approved device. The runner-up was “Life as a Ghost,” by Maj. Jonathan Harmeling of the Army Cyber Institute at the United States Military Academy at West Point. In the Fall 2019 issue, he writes about his stint in the Ghost Program of the U.S. Special Operations Command. The winner of the Audience Choice award for best image went to “With Thanks,” by Cecilia Tueros of PEO EIS in the Fall 2019 issue, for her photo that appeared in the article “Forging the Army’s Cyber Defense.”

EDITORS’ PICK
In the Editors’ Pick bracket, the best article award went to “Radio ANASOC,” by Benjamin Posil. His article in the Spring 2019 issue recounted the problems in standing up the Afghan National Army Special Operations Command’s radio network. Runner-up was “An Elemental Issue,” by Russell Parman in the Fall 2019 issue, while honorable mention went to “The Making of a Packard,” by Nancy Jones-Bonbrest, John Higgins and Claire Heininger of the Army Rapid Capabilities and Critical Technologies Office in the Spring 2019 issue.

The best commentary ALTie went to “Magic Bullets,” by Dr. Gordon Cooke of the West Point Simulation Center and an associate professor in West Point’s Department of Military Instruction. His Summer 2019 commentary examined the moral and ethical implications of artificial intelligence on the battlefield. The runner-up choice was “Been There, Done That: An Exercise to Experience,” by Dr. Charles K. Pickar of the Naval Postgraduate School in the Fall 2019 issue. “So Much Data, So Little Time,” by Daniel E. Stimpson of the Army Director for Career Management Office in the Summer 2019 issue, won honorable mention.

In the best photo category, the winner was “Tech Takes Flight,” by Patrick Ferraris of PEO Soldier in the Fall 2019 issue. Runner-up was “Bird in the Hand” by Michelle Miller of PEO Aviation in the Fall 2019 issue.

The ALTie for best graphic goes to “Meet the Forge,” courtesy of PEO EIS in the Fall 2019 issue. Runner-up was “Shaping the Field,” courtesy of the Joint PEO for Armaments and Ammunition in the January 2019 issue. Honorable mention goes to “Tiered Defense,” by the U.S. Army Combat Capabilities Development Command in the Fall 2019 issue.

Your name could be 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/. Your work could very well boost the profile of your organization while sharing valuable lessons with the community—and you could wind up with a new award to display.

Subscribe to Army AL&T News – the premier online news source for the Army Acquisition Workforce. 
 Subscribe