Robotics, artificial intelligence and advanced manufacturing offer the warfighter new dimensions of survivability and lethality

From The Army Acquisition Executive
Steffanie B. Easter

In the future, our Army will transcend an ever-expanding range of battlefield domains where Soldiers will face new, complex and constantly evolving threats. With technology becoming ever more dynamic, we are in a race with our adversaries to harness and field the best military applications of product innovation. Our need to access technology and talent drives the pursuit of collaborative human-machine battle networks through robotics, artificial intelligence and advanced manufacturing. This edition of Army AL&T explores our progress.

Throughout the history of warfare, Soldiers come face to face with the enemy, exposing themselves to the high risks associated with combat. Over time, advances in robotics and other technologies have put distance between our Soldiers and potential threats, increasing survivability and improving success on the battlefield. As we continue to exploit emerging technologies with robotics and artificial intelligence (AI), we increase our ability to take Soldiers out of harm’s way while simultaneously increasing their lethality. Our intent is to achieve and maintain total combat superiority by leveraging autonomy and AI; expanding manned-unmanned combat teaming; and amplifying our advantage in munitions and equipment manufacturing.

WIRED TO SUPPORT THE SOLDIER
This platform, built by researchers at the U.S. Army Research Laboratory in Adelphi, Maryland, will enable the Army to test a greater degree of onboard perception and processing in robots, with the goal of enabling their use in a wider variety of mission scenarios, enhancing their robustness and equipping them to gather real-time intelligence. (Photo by C. Todd Lopez, ARNEWS)

ROBOTICS AND AI—WHERE THE ARMY IS NOW
With a growing industry developing unmanned capabilities, the Army is constantly exploring new ways to use these technologies. In order to keep up with emerging threats on the multidomain battlefield—land, air, sea, space, cyberspace and the electromagnetic spectrum—the Army is supporting work in autonomous, self-learning technologies that can anticipate commander’s intent and inform decision-making during missions.

Army labs are working, for example, on mission command systems that would require minimal human input to guide unmanned systems to execute missions, as computers learn the intent of commanders. These promising new initiatives cover a broad spectrum of applicability in maneuvers: from fires, logistics and intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance, to data aggregation and filtering, the purpose in each case being to present the right information to the right person at the right time for the right decision.

Our overarching goal is to take the Soldier out of harm’s way. Robotics have been instrumental in the recent combat missions in Iraq and Afghanistan against improvised explosive devices (IEDs). The capability to remotely search for and detect IEDs enables us to avoid putting Soldiers at risk. We are enhancing and using semiautonomous ground vehicles to put distance between the operator and potential threats as the robot navigates through dangerous terrain during interrogation and neutralization of explosive hazards. Additionally, we continue to push the envelope by experimenting with autonomous ground systems to strengthen our force protection capabilities and improve logistics efficiencies in theater, especially in supply and maintenance operations.

FLYING TOWARD AUTOPILOT
Spc. Edwin Polio, unmanned aircraft systems operator with the 3rd Brigade Combat Team of the 25th Infantry Division (ID), flies a simulated unmanned aerial vehicle in September 2016 at the Virtual Battlespace 3 in the Mission Training Complex on Schofield Barracks, Hawaii. The future of Army mission command promises unmanned systems that will require minimal human input to guide them while they develop decision-making capabilities that reflect the intent of commanders. (U.S. Army photo by Staff Sgt. Armando R. Limon, 3rd Brigade Public Affairs, 25th ID)

COLLABORATION AND CROSS-FUNCTIONALITY
In Army acquisition, we recognize the importance of working more closely with other Army agencies and our sister services to facilitate effective, cooperative defenses in the cyber domain and to keep pace with real-world threats. Through collaboration, our robust robotics and AI applications undergo research, development, production and testing to ensure that the technologies we field have the efficacy and cross-functionality required to address threats across the multidomain battlefield.

Further, it is well understood that collaboration among organizations drives innovative thinking. The Army Rapid Capabilities Office, for example, draws on best practices from other organizations, such as the Office of the Secretary of Defense’s Strategic Capabilities Office, the Defense Innovation Unit Experimental (DIUx), and other services’ rapid capabilities offices, to engage with traditional and nontraditional developers and use creative contracting and collaboration mechanisms to encourage breakthroughs from the commercial sector.

ADVANCED AND ADDITIVE MANUFACTURING
The Army’s industrial base must develop and refine advanced manufacturing processes in order to provide higher-performance technologies to the Soldier. The Manufacturing Technology Program (ManTech) exists to improve production processes for critical technologies and to mitigate risks to schedule, budget and performance. One of the primary focuses of ManTech is to carefully invest in advanced manufacturing initiatives to develop critical capabilities that align with the Army science and technology strategy, which will benefit the entire enterprise.

MANNED – UNMANNED TEAMING
Soldiers of the 25th Infantry Division employed this Multipurpose Unmanned Tactical Transport, armed with an M2 .50-caliber machine gun, during the Pacific Manned Unmanned – Initiative at Marine Corps Training Area Bellows in July 2016. (Photo by Kimberly Bratic, TARDEC Public Affairs)

Exploiting advanced equipment, processes and additive techniques such as 3-D printers can optimize the production of end items, allowing faster processes with higher quality. Critical resources and research in advanced and additive manufacturing are leading to faster fielding of ammunition, drones and other protective equipment to the warfighter at lower costs.

CONCLUSION
Advances in modernization that benefit the American Soldier are possible, in large measure, because of the efforts of our Army Acquisition Workforce. Working closely with our counterparts in the industrial base, your efforts to find more ways to take the Soldier out of harm’s way while increasing the Soldier’s lethality and efficacy against current and evolving threats are more important now than ever.

Our Army acquisition team is moving forward to provide the current and future readiness needed to ensure undisputed dominance in every domain of modern and future warfare. Innovation, commitment to the mission and fearless pursuit of excellence are the drivers of our future force on the multidomain battlefield, and lie at the heart of our responsibilities for the Soldier’s welfare. With every innovation we explore and technological advance we achieve today, we boldly move forward to meet and defeat the threats of tomorrow.

HEADY POSSIBILITIES
This virtual reality dome at the Natick Soldier Research, Development and Engineering Center (NSRDEC) allows researchers to assess environmental and equipment impacts on Soldier cognition, including decision-making, spatial memory and finding their way. The research is part of the broader mission of the Center for Applied Brain and Cognitive Sciences, created jointly by NSRDEC and the Tufts University School of Engineering, which will examine Soldier interactions with autonomous robotic platforms to augment and optimize human cognition, mood and physical capabilities. (Photo by David Kamm, U.S. Army Research, Development and Engineering Command)

This article is published in the April – June issue of Army AL&T Magazine.

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

RELATED LINKS

Association of the United States Army Dwight D. Eisenhower Luncheon, including keynote speech by U.S. Army Chief of Staff Gen. Mark A. Milley speech, Oct. 4, 2016

“Milley Lays Out Vision for Army of the Future,” National Defense magazine, Oct. 4, 2016

The Senior Rater Potential Evaluation is key to identifying the AAW’s civilian future leaders.

Perspective from the
USAASC Director Craig Spisak

Nothing that I or any other leader within the Army Acquisition Workforce (AAW) does is more important than identifying and developing the AAW’s talent. The Senior Rater Potential Evaluation (SRPE) is one of our best tools for identifying individuals with future leadership potential and documenting that potential. The SRPE provides our civilian acquisition professionals with a view of where opportunities may lie from their senior rater—someone higher up than the person who supervises them on a day-to-day basis. Yes, doing the evaluations is more work for supervisors. But taking care of their people is the crux of what leaders do.

Years ago, the acquisition community recognized the need for professionals, both civilian and military, to perform certain functions. And so we created best-qualified boards, originally for the program management community, whereby military and civilian acquisition professionals compete for leadership positions. We knew we’d need civilian program managers in the future because we wouldn’t have enough military personnel to go around.

One of the earliest challenges we recognized was that officer evaluations had always been forward-looking, but civilian evaluations backward-looking. In the military, the officer evaluation has a senior rater section, which is widely recognized as the most important part, assessing not whether the officer has done a good job but whether he or she has developed the skills and the potential to do a good job at the next level. It’s really the best way the Army can identify future talent as well as an individual’s potential for increased responsibility.

If I’m trying to pick somebody for the next level of responsibility, a backward-looking evaluation might not give me enough information to decide whether someone has the skills to take on this more complex role. Regulations govern the content and execution of civilian performance appraisals and prohibit the assessment of potential in addition to performance. The answer to this dilemma was to create the SRPE to measure civilian acquisition professionals’ potential.

WHAT IT IS AND ISN’T
Over the years, we’ve modified the SRPE to mirror the evolving officer evaluation system. In July 2015, the director of the Army Acquisition Corps signed a policy mandating SRPEs for all GS-12 through GS-15 (or payband equivalent) civilian acquisition professionals. This mandate took an iterative approach. For FY15, it required GS-14 civilian acquisition professionals to have a completed SRPE. In October 2016, the mandate expanded to include GS-13s and their payband equivalents. In October 2017, the requirement for a SRPE will expand to GS-12s, and in October 2018 to GS-15s. By 2018, all civilian acquisition professionals from GS-12 to GS-15 will have one or more completed SRPE.

Remember: The SRPE and the annual civilian performance evaluation reports are not the same and are not linked to each other. The SRPE is a talent management tool to evaluate the potential of civilian acquisition professionals at designated points in their careers, to perform in positions or opportunities of increased responsibility. The various performance management systems evaluate the employee’s performance in his or her current duties and contributions to the mission, as measured against the employee’s performance standards for a given annual rating cycle.

SRPEs, like officer evaluations, are what we call “managed profiles.” Less than half of the population profile can receive the top block of excellence. SRPEs are not used to determine tenure, plan reductions in force, make selections for awards or anything of that nature. The SRPE requires the senior rater to distinguish who the top acquisition professionals with potential are compared with their peers, which then allows selection boards to find civilians ready for the next level of responsibility.

A major initiative within the AAW Human Capital Strategic Plan, under the goal of leader development, is use of the SRPE. This focus on talent management will ensure that as we grow, develop and groom civilian acquisition professionals, we consider opportunities to broaden their leadership skills at every level of their careers. Just as the individual development plan is a good tool for a first-line supervisor to discuss with an acquisition professional all career development goals and planned initiatives, the SRPE is a good tool for a senior rater to discuss leadership potential with acquisition professionals, then coach and mentor them as they move forward.

HONESTY IS CONSTRUCTIVE
Not everyone can be the best. Having candid conversations about talent and potential is not easy work, but it needs to be done. In my experience, civilian supervisors have not done a great job of conducting frank and honest conversations about performance and potential. There has been a tendency just to tell everybody they’re doing well, and unfortunately the data exist to back that up when most people are rated in the very top block of excellence.

Anyone who understands data and statistics at all knows full well that the “best” of a group cannot be a majority. We need more distinction. Additionally, not all who perform well in a job have the desire or potential to perform well at higher-level positions or opportunities with greater responsibility.

However, if you want people to grow, develop skills and be able to take on new, more complex responsibilities to lead and manage people in the future, you have to be able to identify their strengths as well as their weaknesses and have honest, constructive conversations with them: “You’re really good at this, but you need some work at that. You’re great at what you do, but maybe you’re not cut out to be the next ACAT I project manager.” And that’s OK. There are 36,000-plus civilian professionals in the AAW. Not every one of them is going to be a Senior Executive Service member. Only a small percentage are.

In the past, SRPEs were required only for civilian acquisition candidates before a selection board. But if a candidate with just one SRPE goes before a board along with other candidates who have multiple SRPEs, that’s a big disadvantage. Someone evaluating the group of candidates is going to have greater confidence in a group of data points on one candidate’s potential versus just one data point for another candidate. And military acquisition professionals have many years of senior rater potential blocks on their evaluations. In a best-qualified board, a history of SRPEs can make or break a selection.

With SRPEs instituted across the whole acquisition community, civilians who decide they want to pursue a more challenging position will have a history of these documents on potential as well. They’ll have multiple opportunities for someone to have said, “Hey, I think Jane walks on water, and here’s why. She’s ready for the next opportunity.”

CONCLUSION
With this new talent management tool come challenges for senior raters. It forces them to have tough, honest yet positive conversations to articulate to an individual their strengths and weaknesses. That senior rater will have to be able to say, for example, “Look, first of all, this has no negative impact on your career. I’m not saying that you’re not doing a good job today. And if you don’t aspire to something bigger, then this document will never really even be used. But if you do aspire to something bigger and better or more complex, here’s why I said where your strengths were and what you’re suited for. This is where I think you need to work and develop your skills so that the next time we do one of these, you might be ranked higher compared with your peers.”

Although these conversations will be difficult at times, at the end of the day, you’ll help your people much more effectively than those raters who just give everybody the same pat on the back and say, “You’re doing a good job, keep going.” I don’t know how we as a community get better if we don’t truly make an attempt to use an analytical tool that enables us to provide constructive criticism.

We recently concluded our second iterations of SRPEs for the AAW, and I’m eager to see the positive impact on our upcoming best-qualified boards. I anticipate that we will continue to see a larger percentage of civilians with exceptional or high-potential ratings on their SRPEs—the acquisition community’s “best and brightest”—selected in head-to-head competitions for high-level career positions and leader developmental assignments. And I expect to see an increased interest in the centralized acquisition education, training and leadership development opportunities managed by the Army DACM Office.

I understand the concept of rating civilian potential is a culture change. It will take time for our acquisition community to realize the SRPE’s full and positive impact on the talent management of our civilians. It is an exciting opportunity for the civilian acquisition professionals of the AAW, as there is now a mandatory tool to ensure that senior raters are taking the time to have those discussions that are so important in developing our professionals to their full capacity.

Senior leaders can and should impart their wisdom and guidance to the next generation of senior leaders. Although it may create extra work in the interim, over the next several years it will become part of our culture and ultimately support Army readiness, as those of us in leadership positions groom the next set of acquisition leaders. We should always strive to leave the acquisition community in a better place than we found it. SRPE is one initiative to ensure that we do.

This article is published in the April – June issue of Army AL&T Magazine.

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

Ex-Army Ranger Paul Scharre, formerly in OSD and now with the Center for a New American Security, fears DOD bureaucratic resistance could the pump brakes on progress in machine intelligence.

by Ms. Margaret C. Roth

Paul Scharre

It couldn’t be a much bigger leap from Southwest Asia to downtown Washington yet, for Paul Scharre, the two hardly could be more closely connected. What Scharre experienced as an Army Ranger deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan—his first look at how robots could mitigate the huge toll that improvised explosive devices (IEDs) were taking on Soldiers—led him directly to what he’s doing now as a civilian: senior fellow and director of the Future of Warfare Initiative at the Center for a New American Security.

In just 10 years, Scharre (rhymes with “sorry” but with “sh” instead of “s”) has seen warfare from three distinct vantage points: the battlefield, as a graduate of the Army’s Airborne, Ranger and Sniper schools and honor graduate of the 75th Ranger Regiment’s Ranger Indoctrination Program; the bureaucracy (the Office of the Secretary of Defense (OSD) from 2008 to 2013); and now the more bookish community of analysts in Washington that aim to make sense of the big picture and influence defense policy. At OSD, he played a leading role in establishing policies on unmanned and autonomous systems and emerging weapons technologies, heading the working group that drafted DOD Directive 3000.09, which established policies on autonomy in weapon systems. Scharre also led DOD efforts to establish policies on intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance (ISR) programs and directed energy technologies.

With an M.A. in political economy and public policy and a B.S. in physics, Scharre is wholly engrossed in how new technologies translate to warfighting doctrine and acquisition—and he is passionately aware of how long that can take.

With the increased freedom he now has as a former DOD insider looking more broadly at the defense establishment from the outside, Scharre talked with Army AL&T magazine in February about what the Pentagon needs to do to take appropriate advantage of the rapid advances in robotics, artificial intelligence (AI) and autonomous weapon systems. As he perhaps understated it, “I’m just saying, as an observer here, these might be things that the U.S. military can do to be more effective and stay competitive.”

Army AL&T: We were intrigued by your operational background and the amount of thought you’ve given to the topic of robotics and artificial intelligence. How did you get from there to here?

Scharre: When I was in the Army, I saw how decisions in Washington and the Pentagon really affected people downrange. When I first came to the Pentagon, we were working on a suite of different capabilities to try to make the Pentagon’s sluggish bureaucracy more responsive to the warfighters in the field. Things like intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance were huge issues at the time, and unmanned vehicles are a part of that.

But over time, robotics became a bigger and bigger issue. I think the people inside DOD began to realize the potential of what I would describe as kind of an accidental robotics revolution that happened—the Predator [unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV)] and Gray Eagle, and then large numbers of smaller unmanned aircraft or drones, like the Wasp and Raven, thousands of those things that gave troops the ability to look over hills and around corners. I worked on the receiving end of this [demand], and there was just this tremendous appetite for more ISR, what Secretary Gates [Dr. Robert M. Gates, secretary of defense from December 2006 to July 2011] described as this “insatiable demand.”

And what I saw—which was really disheartening but also educational for me—was the immense resistance within the bureaucracy to respond to the needs of the warfighter on this issue. Secretary Gates had to direct a standalone ISR task force to respond to the needs.

The needs from the COCOMs [combatant commands] were massive and just swamped the ability of the bureaucracy to understand. And rather than try to say, OK, here’s a legitimate need by warfighters for emerging technology that’s really valuable, and you know our current processes don’t really make it possible, feasible or affordable to respond to these needs, so we need to find better ways of doing business (which there are lots of opportunities to do, because it’s a new technology). Instead the response of the bureaucracy was basically to reject the warfighters’ needs, to just say no. And it was really only because Secretary Gates forced it on the U.S. Air Force that the Air Force grew the number of Predator or Reaper air patrols from initial small numbers like 12 up to 50 and 60, 65 and 70 [24/7 orbits] over time.

IN IT TO WIN IT
Then-Staff Sgt. Paul Scharre poses with Iraqi children in Diyala province, Iraq, as part of the opening of an elementary sch9oool in Baqubah in 2008. (Photo courtesy of Paul Scharre)

As soon as Gates left, there was pushback within the bureaucracy. The Air Force in particular was taking its foot off the pedal and doing less. And I think it’s an indictment of the bureaucracy that we’ve [also] seen across other areas like MRAPs [Mine Resistant Ambush Protected vehicles].The Air Force is not unique in this. I think the Army’s failure to respond in a timely fashion on MRAPs is just unconscionable and a disgrace.

I think this is a continual problem that the bureaucracy has. The system is designed to think long term about what the future force might need in some unknown, nebulous time frame. When there are immediate needs today, people in the bureaucracy—it’s not that they don’t care; they don’t think that it’s their job to respond to those needs. And the system is so slow that it’s not easy to [respond]. So I’m getting off the topic of robotics, but it’s something that I’m passionate about.

I think speed is really fundamental in this type of international environment we’re living in today. We have a very different military than we had almost 30 years ago at the end of the Cold War, but we’re dealing with bureaucracies that are an outgrowth of institutions that we created in the Cold War. Today we have a wider set of possible challenges. We’re competing against actors like terrorist groups that don’t have the kinds of bureaucracies we have.

That’s going to be a challenge in future wars as well. Whether it’s a big war or small war, whether it’s a war against a terrorist group or another nation-state, you’ve got to be constantly adapting and evolving.

And that’s a really vital lesson that we need to be imparting in our institutions: that the types of threats that we face in the future will be different, and the types of adaptations will be different, and we’ll need the ability to have institutions that can rapidly adapt to whatever those things are. That’s really fundamental, particularly for technologies like robotics that are moving so rapidly. The progress in machine intelligence driven by deep learning and neural networks is just mind-blowing. These deep-learning neural networks are solving problems that have been bedeviled the AI researchers for decades, things that people just had no idea how to solve.

And so we’re at the beginning of an explosion in machine intelligence that’s likely to unfold. It’s really hard for the U.S. to stay competitive in that environment, in part because things are moving quickly and in part because a lot of the innovation of robotics is outside of traditional defense actors. It’s coming from Google and IBM and Microsoft and Facebook and Apple, and they don’t want to work with DOD. It’s not worth the headache. I’ve heard from people in venture capital firms, “I won’t let my companies work with the U.S. military,” because they’re just going to bog you down into a lengthy multiyear process of futzing around with requirements. They’re going to try to over-specify what they need, they’re going to give you a bunch of government red tape. And at the end of the day, the profit margins aren’t even going to be there.

LET ME GET THAT FOR YOU
A remotely-piloted explosive ordnance disposal (EOD) robot hefts a 150-pound package during the May 2016 Raven’s Challenge exercise held at the New York State Preparedness Training Center in Oriskany, New York. The author’s experience with a similar EOD robot crystallized his thinking that the Army could do more to use robots, as well as AI and other intelligent machines, to do some of the dangerous and difficult work that often falls to Soldiers. (U.S. Army National Guard photo by Sgt. J.P. Lawrence)

And so what we’re seeing is, there’s this model where DOD uses tools like DARPA [the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency] and the Office of Naval Research [ONR] to fund basic innovation in various technologies, and the concept is that they take this stuff to a commercial market and they mature these technologies, and then they spin back in to the defense sector. That’s a great model, [but] I’m not sure how much things are actually coming back in.

Army AL&T: You mean what they call transitioning?

Scharre: Well, there’s two different kinds of concepts. One is, you have a place like DARPA develop something that’s a really appealing proof of concept. And then they throw it over the transom or use some means that’s supposed to cross the “valley of death” that people describe to get into a program of record. And that often fails. There isn’t necessarily an institution of bureaucracy that is designed to grab ahold of those things and then transition them.

Army AL&T: I think the new Army Rapid Capabilities Office has that intent.

Scharre: Yeah, the Rapid Capabilities Office seems exactly like the kind of thing the Army should be doing, and it has a lot of potential. The Army needs that kind of capability from a bureaucratic standpoint. I think it remains to be seen if they’re going to have the bureaucratic clout and the funding and the autonomy to do what they need to do.

And then there’s this smaller issue, that there are some technologies that aren’t even right for transitioning yet. So DOD makes a fundamental investment, and it’s just not mature enough to be really transitioned to a military application, and the company takes it to market in the commercial side and they might mature it. And you hope that over time, that [technology] comes back in.

People are trying to create ad hoc processes to do that, and we need more of those kinds of things. It’s especially vital for technologies like robotics and automation, where they’re moving rapidly and so much of the innovation is happening out in the commercial sector.

I will say I’ve seen tremendous interest in the last several years—and not just concepts about human-machine teaming in physical ways and cognitive ways, but also people really thinking hard about, OK, what does it mean to be innovative? How do we find ways of increasing experimentation and war gaming and competition of ideas so that we’re meeting at the forefront of new operational concepts in relation to adversaries?

WATSON, CAN YOU HEAR ME?
IBM’s Watson for Cyber Security uses cognitive capabilities to improve cyber security investigations. Scharre notes that many of the developments in AI come from the private sector, which is often reluctant to work with the government. However, he also notes that many AI tools are open source and therefore publicly available. (Photo by John Mottern/Feature Photo Service for IBM)

Now the Army has the opportunity to take basically a cadre of leaders—junior and midgrade officers and NCOs who’ve been able to have that freedom to be innovative out in the field and have autonomy—and say, OK, we want you to take the sort of intellectual capital you had and the skill set of problem-solving and apply it to new problems: How will we fight a war against Russia? How will we project power in the Pacific? How will we respond to adversaries’ challenges in cyberspace and electronic warfare and other things?

The way those wars were fought, particularly in Afghanistan, where the geography and people are so dispersed, we gave a lot of autonomy to junior leaders, and brigades and divisions were in support of people at lower levels. That’s just incredibly good in terms of maturing our leaders in their critical thinking. One of the challenges the Army has going forward is, for people who grew up in that environment, how do you continue that in garrison? So you get the squad leader engaged in finding solutions. You can’t do those things from the headquarters.

Read the full article in the April-June issue of Army AL&T magazine.

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

ONLINE EXTRAS

“Why Poker Is a Big Deal for Artificial Intelligence,” MIT Technology Review, Jan. 23, 2017

“Perspectives on Research in Artificial Intelligence and Artificial General Intelligence Relevant to DoD,” MITRE Corp., January 2017

“US Air Force F/A-18 released 103 Perdix micro drones” video, Jan. 9, 2017

“Special Ops’ ‘Iron Man’ Suit on Track for 2018,” National Defense magazine, May 2016

“Directed-Energy Weapons: Promise and Prospects,” report for Center for a New American Security, April 7, 2015

Our interview for the April – June Critical Thinking with Paul Scharre—he’s a Ranger vet who did tours in Iraq and Afghanistan who is now a robotics expert at the Center for a New American Security—covered so much good material, but we didn’t want to leave it on the cutting room floor. Here’s Scharre on DOD’s history of adapting.

Army AL&T: What lessons can we draw from DOD’s history of adapting—or not—to new technologies and new ways of fighting?

Scharre: It’s a problem for any kind of technology that’s rapidly moving. When we think about the context of acquisition reform, it’s like multiple different pieces. One [piece] is cost issues. And I think that Undersecretary Kendall [Frank Kendall, former undersecretary of defense for acquisition, technology and logistics] did quite a number of things to try to move the department to the point of paying what it should be paying, toward controlling costs.

But then there’s a question: Are we building the right things, and are we being innovative? And there’s another question of speed. And it was fine, when you were competing against the Soviet Union, to have slow, cumbersome bureaucracies, because no matter how slow and dumb we were, [the Soviets] were going to be worse. I mean, anybody who was involved in the IED [improvised explosive device] fight over the last 15 years has lived this problem day in and day out, where we try to work to develop countermeasures and then, within days or a few weeks, insurgents and terrorists have come up with some clever way to get around those or defeat those. And so speed was really of the essence.

Look at World War II: It’s not like countries showed up and they had a military and then they fought with it, right? Rumsfeld [Donald H. Rumsfeld, secretary of defense from January 2001 to December 2006] famously made this dismissive comment, “You go to war with the Army you have.” That’s true on day one, but if you stay at war with the Army you have, you’re going to lose.

Read the full article at http://usaasc.armyalt.com/#folio=90.

LEARNING DOWN THE LINE
Soldiers with the 77th Armored Regiment, 3rd Brigade, 1st Armored Division load onto a UH-60 Black Hawk helicopter after completing a live-fire exercise in November 2016 at Udari Range near Camp Buehring, Kuwait. The Army’s history of adapting to new technologies and new ways of fighting holds lessons for future conflicts. (U.S. Army photo by Sgt. Angela Lorden)

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Rapid and evolutionary acquisition bring some change to OT, but some things will remain constant—like surprises.

by John T. Dillard, Col., USA (Ret.)

Many years ago, Dr. Philip E. Coyle III, the long-experienced, former DOD director of operational test and evaluation, cautioned program managers (PMs) about program risk in the new era of evolutionary acquisition, fielding capabilities in sequential increments.

MISSILE MISSION
The Arkansas Army National Guard’s 1st Battalion, 142nd Field Artillery team fires an ATACMS at White Sands Missile Range in July 2015. The system saw combat service in the Persian Gulf War, Iraq and Afghanistan and is still in production. (Photo courtesy of Arkansas Army National Guard)

What he suggested back then was that even with evolutionary acquisition, we would likely be fully testing each of the system capability blocks individually. In that vein, he presented some salient points about past programs’ readiness for what he called the binary or pass/fail environment of operational testing, and how PMs often “rush to failure.”

In the November – December 2000 issue of Program Manager magazine, Coyle wrote: “Over the past three years or so, the Army has seen that 80 percent of their systems have not met 50 percent of their reliability requirements in operational tests. In the Air Force, AFOTEC [Air Force Operational Test and Evaluation Center] has had to stop two-thirds of their operational tests because the systems were not ready.”

Sadly for all of us, the numbers have not improved much in the past decade or two. Coyle’s principal advice to program managers—paraphrased and reduced to its simplest terms here—was to:

1. Reschedule program test events as the program schedule slips to avoid being ill-prepared and being poorly positioned for an adverse event.

2. Test every operational environment in advance of OT via developmental testing (DT).

3. Fully load systems in DT, especially interoperable automated systems.

4. As they become clearly defined, plan on fully testing each of the program’s evolutionary requirements as time-phased capability increments.

5. Don’t skimp on DT.

6. Use modeling and simulation correctly: to interpolate, versus extrapolate, results.

7. Coordinate with operational testers early to address all needs and avoid conflict.

Most PMs know that much if not all of this advice is easier said than done. However, with a DOD 5000.02 framework that specifies an operational assessment (OA) before milestone C, followed soon after by an initial operational test and evaluation (IOT&E) in the production and deployment phase and perhaps even a follow-on operational test and evaluation, there should be ample opportunity to exercise Coyle’s advice. Thus we facilitate our own learning and confirm system performance while accomplishing our shared test objectives.

Fortunately, despite differing programs and technologies, requirements, etc., we can often learn from the experience of others. The difficulty, of course, is in being able to share knowledge that is sufficiently useful across unique acquisitions. Following are some useful examples of what Coyle was cautioning PMs about as he prepared to leave office in January 2001, from the perspective of a PM going through operational testing of a major weapon system.

INCREMENT BY INCREMENT
The Army Tactical Missile System (ATACMS) is probably one of the most distinct major-system examples of an incremental development process. Born in 1986 from a Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) project called Assault Breaker, the missile was an extended-range weapon to be fired from an existing vehicular platform, a Multiple Launch Rocket System. It would initially deliver about 1,000 M74 anti-personnel bomblets per missile, with preplanned incremental upgrades to eventually enable precision anti-armor submunitions. Thus, while a desired end-state capability was identified early on, all of the system requirements were not. Future increments would depend upon threat changes, technology maturation and user experience with the initial increments.

More than a program with preplanned product improvements, ATACMS was ahead of its time in current policy terms. Initially fielded just in time for the first Gulf War, the system continued in its evolutionary development through the 1990s, went to war again in Iraq and Afghanistan and is still in production today. The program gave rise to several advanced and unplanned variants, with capability increments managed and operationally tested as unique acquisitions. There were many operational realizations about ATACMS’ advancing capabilities along the way, not the least being a necessary clarification of joint service roles and missions as the Army extended ATACMS’ battlefield reach into U.S. Air Force mission areas.

On the tactical level, what we in the PM office found out about our own system’s Block I during IOT&E was quite surprising.

We tested the first incremental block operationally in spring 1990 in a three-month series of ground and flight exercises at White Sands Missile Range, New Mexico, with an entire field artillery battalion as the test unit, the 6th Battalion, 27th Field Artillery Regiment. The battalion became the first unit equipped and subsequently the first to use ATACMS in combat operations during Operation Desert Storm. This IOT&E of a major defense acquisition program was one of the most successful ever but still managed to provide the program management office (PMO) with plenty of surprises.

Our lessons learned from an extensive IOT&E were many and as relevant today as then. I’ll frame them in parallel with Coyle’s advice to PMs.

Rescheduling test events when necessary—Our PMO actually had to slip IOT&E for six months within a 48-month advanced development program that was being executed on a firm fixed-price contract. Driven by both DT missile reliability failures and subcomponent hardware availability, the delay did not cause an acquisition program baseline breach, but neither was it inconsequential.

ROAD TEST, PASSED
A Heavy Expanded Mobility Tactical Truck loaded with four missiles conducts mobility road testing and cargo handling on dirt roads at White Sands Missile Range in March 1990. Unlike with other elements of stress testing, the IOT&E for ATACMS marked the first time that the PMO transported the missiles on the truck, their designated prime mover, across rough terrain. However, DT environmental stress testing had been so rigorous that no related problems surfaced in IOT&E. (Photo by Tom Moore)

We were at the very end of the contract performance period. Our periodic operational test readiness reviews (OTRRs), which began about a year before the original start date, did not predict the slip as an eventual imperative. No one wants to slip IOT&E until it is fully necessary, given the many organizations disrupted (i.e., test unit, range personnel, OT agencies, user representatives, contractor, etc.). The PMO had proposed a three-month delay to allow for completion of DT, but in fact we needed the entire six-month delay that the operational testers from the Army Operational Test Agency and DOD’s director of operational test and evaluation (DOT&E) “gave” us.

The lesson learned was that once a PMO has exceeded the allotted time, it might no longer be able to prescribe program events. It was also our first solid realization of the OT paradigm: The PM is no longer doing the testing. The PM’s system is being tested. That’s a big shift in both thinking and authority that affects approaching activities.

Test all operational environments in DT—It’s still impossible to schedule rain at White Sands Missile Range. Actually, given the sum of various range safety and availability constraints for a major range and test facility base, it can be difficult to schedule anything. We had launched only 27 missiles in DT, with just 15 more planned for IOT&E. At that point we had fired only in good weather. In fact, we had fired only on an azimuth of true north—i.e., in one direction—because of constraints at the firing range.

For environmental stress testing, we used various test chambers to the fullest extent possible to simulate heat, cold, fog, rain, vibration, etc., for weeks, but until IOT&E we had never actually transported the missiles on their designated prime mover, a Heavy Expanded Mobility Tactical Truck, across rough terrain. Fortunately, our DT environmental stress testing had been so rigorous that we had no related problems in IOT&E. We’ll probably never completely cover all of the operational variables in DT, but we have to try to minimize discovery in IOT&E by thinking critically about the spectrum of future environments and trying to include them.

Fully load the system in DT—Throughout DT, we sought to minimize variability in testing with fully charged batteries and comprehensive commercial equipment for circuit testing. Little did we suspect that run-down batteries would cause “ghost prompts” and other strange electrical phenomena, or that the simpler unit-level test, measurement and diagnostic equipment for missile testing would be a reliability and maintenance problem all through IOT&E. Nor did we fully consider tactical unit misfire procedures in a combat situation, having long been used to a tightly controlled DT range safety countdown sequence.

INSTRUMENTATION = COMPLICATION
Contractor support personnel from SAIC install instrumentation and wiring on a Multiple Launch Rocket System launcher, the vehicular platform for the ATACMS, at White Sands Missile Range in March 1990. There were nine of the platforms to be used during the system’s IOT&E. Instrumentation delayed the start of testing because of concerns about uncertified hardware being placed on the system. Lesson learned: Instrumentation was the single most important consideration that the Block I ATACMS program had neglected in development. PMs must plan for it well in advance to prevent testing delays. (Photo by Kenneth G. Schoultz)

Further, we were unable to fully load our computing hardware and software components until a few months before the test, a situation complicated by successive software releases all the way up to the final OTRR’s certification of readiness. We just ran out of time. A conscious effort to assemble an all-inclusive system-support package to accompany the test articles thus is another essential.

We got bitten by another foul-up, as well. For any spare “black boxes” that have had upgrades in the system, the package of spares sent out for OT must also have those upgrades. So one of our black boxes that hadn’t been upgraded with a circuit card modification was hastily swapped out as a field repair.

Test to the full requirements of each increment—A capability increment to be fielded to end users requires thorough verification and validation before handoff. To get the maximum benefit from DT and OT requires involving all stakeholders in joint test planning: users, PMs, DT and OT testers, system analysts and reliability specialists, contractors and others. This includes construction of the test matrix and laying down the ground rules to incorporate evolving configurations and various test scenarios.

There seems to be an inherent obstacle to learning everything about the systems we manage, even during DT—an aversion to “discovering” system failure. We don’t want to fail, so sometimes we intentionally don’t push the system, certainly not beyond what we know it will do or has to do. A target beyond estimated maximum range, for example, will not be attempted to ascertain system margin, because any miss will likely be scored a miss. The same pitfall exists for other areas of testing, such as vulnerability or survivability.

Don’t skimp on DT—As the variability of events increases in OT, you will inevitably begin to discover new things about your own system, despite years of experience in its development.

Once, IOT&E presented us with an abnormally large area target—one desirable for firing multiple rockets, the platform’s initial and primary munition, but not individual missiles. So our system used a software algorithm to automatically shift the missile aim point to obtain a better sheaf (coverage) effect, one appropriate to the outsize target. We’d overlooked the existence of this “Fendrikov algorithm” within fire control system software during the entire development effort. Fortunately we got permission to negate this in follow-on operational test launches, after negotiation with the operational testers.

PERFORMANCE NOT AS EXPECTED
A Soldier from the 6th Battalion, 27th Field Artillery Regiment, the test unit for the ATACMS’ IOT&E, operates the missile monitor test device, with which the ATACMS was supposed to be interoperable. However, not having received sufficient emphasis before OT, the device surprised the PMO by testing good missiles to be bad and bad missiles to be good. (Photo courtesy of the author)

During another launch, we experienced a safety delay because of animals in the impact area. The missile already had been initialized, and it remained activated and elevated in the launch position, which affected the missile’s inertial guidance set, causing it to degrade slightly. It was just another thing that hadn’t happened in over two years of DT and went beyond our system specification.

Being placed in a situation beyond any operational scenario we’d anticipated—one that limited us to only a few minutes in the firing position—showed us something new, however, albeit at the cost of an accuracy loss. Once again, we changed the ground rules for the rest of OT to re-initialize missiles if such a delay occurred.

Use modeling and simulation—Our investment in developmental hardware-in-the-loop simulation not only reduced the requisite sample size of live missiles, enabling a full-rate production decision based upon only 42 flights, but it actually served us in anomaly discovery. That brought home to a lot of us just how important our modeling and simulation investment was. The closer the model is to reality, the more we could actually learn about our own invention.

When missiles didn’t fly according to their predicted operational profile, even if they succeeded against the targets, we knew to investigate for a cause that might cascade or proliferate. (Of course, the model must not be of such high resolution that it actually incorporates the fault or deficiency!) Other unanticipated factors crept in, as well. The most interesting discovery of accuracy loss was the result of an operational stack-up from the use of three different mappings of the Earth, called World Geodetic Survey spheroids, for three different elements of testing: target coordinates, firing point benchmark and onboard navigation system software.

Coordinate with operational evaluators early—Instrumentation is the single most important consideration that our Block I program had neglected in development. The thirst for system data is unfortunately huge, and we collected more than anyone needed or analyzed.

However, in the minds of many, the need still exists to answer all possible questions that could arise from an OT. Conflict with operational testers can occur when they seek to capture previously captured developmental or technical data. Stakeholders have to draw the line somewhere. We felt we lost (broke) at least one missile because of dozens of firing circuitry interruptions to analyze a system subcomponent during OT—steps inappropriately seeking technical specification-compliant data, DT-style, rather than seeking to prove whether the system works in an operational environment.

The best way to ensure that instrumentation is reliable, does not interfere with the system’s operation, and yields valid data from the system is to “require” it in the specifications derived from the capability development document and capability production document.

The PM most likely will want to assign responsibility for this vital effort to the system contractor during development, lest the contractor later try to blame a system failure on nonsanctioned or uncertified hardware added to the product. Instrumentation must not corrupt the data as it flows through the system.

THE ULTIMATE TEST
One of the last of 15 ATACMS tested during IOT&E heads skyward at White Sands Missile Range on May 24, 1990. (Photo by George Baird)

Even the earliest coordination with other OT stakeholders still may leave some issues unresolved until testing begins. Selection of other-than-planned live-fire targets, additionally imposed target location errors and other late-breaking “requirements” should not come as surprises, but as the predictable result of players changing in the long life of a developing system. PMs don’t have to accept employment of the system outside the bounds of its expected operational use. But they should be ready for the “surprise” requests to do so, and anticipate how to handle them.

Case in point: DOT&E asked us to fire ATACMS off the side of the launcher instead of its prescribed operational mode, firing directly over the crew cab. It had never been done in DT, and the user community had no desire to do so, but the demand still came. We resolved the issue by promising to demonstrate the possibility and safety of this new mode after the IOT&E and to render a technical report once we had conducted our own pretest analysis of the factors involved.

The simple fact is, you—the PM and PMO—are the ones who care most about the outcome of OT and must resolve the anomalies that occur as the test incident reports are written. The tester simply wants to find and score the anomalies and move on.

Plan for the statutorily restricted roles of system and supporting contractor during IOT&E. We cordoned ours off into a marked, private area, even requiring that they wear red baseball caps, which alerted troops to stay away from them. They kept a “hot mockup,” a spare MLRS launcher, in their area, which helped greatly to resolve anomalies; we could easily replicate the anomalies on the spot and feed information back to the PMO over the many days of testing. A daily journal and after-action review are good ways, not only for the executors of the OT but also for the PM representative to the PMO, to recap what has happened and what is planned next.

CONCLUSION
Coyle’s advice to PMs still holds true, if we can just frame in our own minds how to apply it. The lessons we learned back then during the ATACMS tests are also timeless, as I have heard over the years from PMs for systems as diverse as underwater robotics, communications gear and ground vehicles. They have described their experiences with the OT community relationship, test range constraints, instrumentation demands, late-breaking ideas for testing changes, technical “discoveries” and the like.

Today’s PMs, take note, if an operational test is going to occur in your program in the next several years: It’s always best to learn such lessons without the accompanying penalty of failure.

JOHN T. DILLARD, COL., USA (RET.) is the academic associate for systems acquisition management at the Graduate School of Business and Public Policy, Naval Postgraduate School (NPS) in Monterey, California. He began his Army service as a Ranger-qualified infantryman and master parachutist, serving in the 1st Infantry and 82nd Airborne divisions, and joined the NPS faculty in 2001 upon retiring from the Army after 26 years of service. He spent 16 of those years in acquisition, most recently as commander of the Defense Contract Management Agency, Long Island, New York. He has also served on the faculty of the U.S. Army War College and as an adjunct professor of project management for the University of California, Santa Cruz. He holds an M.S. in systems management from the University of Southern California and is a distinguished military graduate of the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga with a B.A. in biological sciences.

This article was originally published in the April – June issue Army AL&T magazine.

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

Our interview for the April – June Critical Thinking with Paul Scharre—he’s a Ranger vet who did tours in Iraq and Afghanistan who is now a robotics expert at the Center for a New American Security—covered so much good material, but we didn’t want to leave it on the cutting room floor. Here’s Scharre on challenges to automation and artificial intelligence (AI).

Army AL&T: If the Army’s main challenge is finding the right places to use robots, automation and AI … what are those places?

Scharre: The fundamental problem with automation is that it’s brittle. You can design really specific machine intelligence tools to solve very specific problems, like playing chess or playing Go. Playing poker is something that AI’s defeated humans at just recently—the latest in a series of things that people said machines can’t do that now machines can do better than humans. But all those things are very narrow. So the poker AI that can beat any human in the world can’t go into a person’s house and make a pot of coffee, which we wouldn’t think of as a particularly complicated cognitive task, but it is. It just happens to be one that is so easy for us because of the way our brains are developed.

But a lot of things in war depend upon context, and a machine just can’t do that today. So machines could identify things, like is this person carrying an AK47, or does he have a shovel in his hand? We could probably do that with a machine better than a person. But trying to look at someone approaching you and saying, is this person hostile? What’s in their mind? What are their intentions? It’s hard for people, and it’s really hard for machines. It’s taking the next level—to try to intuit intent—they can’t do that right now. Maybe that will change in the next five to 10 years. It’s hard to say, but they certainly can’t do that right now. The problem with self-driving cars [is], you put a self-driving car on the road, but we don’t control the environment and you don’t get to decide what situations it might encounter. You can drive it for hundreds of thousands of miles, and there might still be situations that you could never imagine it would find itself in.

A human in those situations can be flexible. You can give people broad guidance. You can tell people things like, we’re here to win hearts and minds. That’s kind of ambiguous: You can always use force to defend yourself, but we’re not here to kill people, we’re here to win over these villagers. People actually understand that. People can actually make sense of those things, even though it’s super ambiguous. You can’t program that into a machine, right?

That’s not to say that means that machines are not invaluable. It’s just that we need to think very carefully about how we apply them into what kinds of problems. They’re better in different ways and for different kinds of tasks. And the hard thing is that that line is shifting.

Read the full article at http://usaasc.armyalt.com/#folio=90.

THE VIEW FROM HERE
Soldiers with the 25th Infantry Division follow a load-bearing squad multipurpose equipment transport surrogate during the Pacific Manned Unmanned – Initiative at Marine Corps Training Area – Bellows, Hawaii, in July 2016. Manned-unmanned teaming and other automation and AI advancements will require greater analysis to determine how best to incorporate them into the Army’s future force. (Photo by Kimberly Bratic, U.S. Army Tank Automotive Research, Development and Engineering Center Public Affairs)

This article was originally published in the April – June issue Army AL&T magazine.

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

POSITION AND OFFICIAL TITLE: DA Systems Coordinator (DASC) for Defensive Cyber Operations; Handheld, Manpack and Small Form Fit; and the Joint Tactical Networking Center
YEARS OF SERVICE IN WORKFORCE: 7
YEARS OF MILITARY SERVICE: 23
DAWIA CERTIFICATIONS: Level III in program management
EDUCATION: M.A. in procurement and acquisition management, Webster University; master of communications technology, National Radio Examiners; B.S in psychology and political science, Campbell University
AWARDS: Bronze Star (3), Meritorious Service Medal (4), Army Commendation Medal (2), Joint Service Achievement Medal, Afghanistan Campaign Medal (1 campaign star), Iraq Campaign Medal (3 campaign stars), Combat Action Badge, Master Parachutist Badge, Air Assault Badge, Army Staff Identification Badge

Capitalizing on a fresh start

By Susan L. Follett

Lt. Col. James Howell is the first to admit he wasn’t what you’d consider a poster Soldier when he enlisted nearly 25 years ago. “As a young man, I got into some trouble and I wasn’t doing well in school prior to enlisting in the Army. So I am eternally grateful to our nation and our Army for this opportunity.”

He has made very good use of his chances, starting as a radio, satellite, networking and communications security equipment repairman and eventually becoming a signal officer and an acquisition officer. He’s currently a DA systems coordinator (DASC), advising leadership for the assistant secretary of the Army for acquisition, logistics and technology on the cost, schedule, performance, risk, political and economic issues affecting successful program execution for defensive cyber operations, the Handheld, Manpack and Small Form Fit tactical radio program within the Program Executive Office for Command, Control and Communications – Tactical (PEO C3T) and the Joint Tactical Networking Center.

Howell coordinates and briefs all proposed Army positions with the associated PEO and program manager, the Army Budget Office, G-8, G-3, G-6, the Office of General Counsel, congressional liaisons and staffers and joint staff. He also prepares senior leadership for congressional testimony, and reviews and staffs all programmatic documentation, including procurement and research and development forms, requirements documents, weapon system handbooks and U.S. Government Accountability Office reports.

“A DASC must understand and remain focused on our strategic, operational and tactical goals,” he said. “Our capabilities must fit in our echelons and enable mission accomplishment in a coalition, joint or Army environment.” Staying informed and coordinating across all of the organizations he’s involved with are the biggest challenges he faces, Howell said, which he addresses with good planning and a strong backbone: “Having the moral courage to disagree with anyone, regardless of rank or position, who is moving us away from the chief of staff of the Army’s No. 1 priority, which is readiness of the Total Army.” Asking a lot of questions and inviting himself to every meeting has also been important. “If you smile, you can usually stay in the room for those meetings you’re not invited to,” he added.

Howell joined the Army Acquisition Corps in 2010, following stints as a signal officer and electronics repair technician. Before becoming a signal officer in 2001, he earned some electrical engineering and networking certifications that introduced him to the development, production and maintenance of communications networks. He spent a lot of his time as a signal officer supporting tactical special operations units and light infantry units in deployments to Iraq or Afghanistan.

Over the course of his career, Howell has picked up a range of tools and experiences that he now applies to his work in acquisition. The three years he spent in Iraq and Afghanistan “have proved the most powerful and influential in my career,” he said, and the memories of those years remind him of his responsibility to all of his fellow Soldiers, “from our newest private to our chief of staff.” His Lean Six Sigma Black Belt certification showed him that everything can be made more efficient, and attending the Captain’s Career Course at the Marine Expeditionary Warfare School taught him the importance of joint coordination with our sister services. “The Marines do a great job of joint integration planning in preparation for combat operations,” he noted.

But it was a recent tour as executive officer (XO) for PEO C3T that he found had the biggest impact on his career. “As the XO, I was able to serve the program executive officer, Maj. Gen. Daniel Hughes, and the great people of the organization. Maj. Gen. Hughes did an amazing job of connecting with everyone and showing his appreciation for the work they were doing, and instilled confidence throughout the organization that they were making a difference for our Soldiers.”

Hughes is one of a handful of people who Howell noted had an impact on his career. He and Col. Greg Coile, project manager for Warfighter Information Network – Tactical at PEO C3T, “taught me the importance of building simplicity into our capabilities and building effective teams,” he said. “Both of these great officers taught me to aggressively look at ways we can make our capabilities simpler, more intuitive and easier to employ, integrate and maintain on the battlefield.”

Howell’s acquisition career began in the U.S. Army Special Operations Command (USASOC) under Patrick O’Brien, chief of the USASOC Combat Developments Division, and he credits O’Brien with teaching him the importance of focusing on the Soldier and understanding how a capability supports Soldiers in an operational environment. “He showed me that my most valuable asset is my combat experience, taught me how to look for and understand our Soldiers’ needs and demonstrated how our capabilities enhance mission success.”

His DASC leadership—Col. Mark Evans, director of Mission Command, and Dan Joyce, deputy director of Mission Command—have helped with information coordination and synchronization. “Both of these great leaders helped me understand the art and science and the importance of coordination of our Army positions through integrated product teams, coordination meetings and our necessary formal actions—Configuration Steering Boards, Defense Acquisition Boards, etc. Stakeholder coordination and integration is a critical element in a successful program’s execution and integration,” Howell said.

Late last year, Howell received honorable mention in the future operations category of the Maj. Gen. Harold J. “Harry” Greene Awards for Acquisition Writing. Howell had previously had the opportunity to meet Greene, who was close friends with Maj. Gen. Hughes. “Maj. Gen. Greene always made sure we remember our link to the battlefield,” Howell said, and his entry in the writing contest was “actually a letter to our leaders to continue to analyze and care for our Forced Entry units. It’s my attempt to leave a legacy that reminds us that our call is constant, urgent and sobering.” Greene was killed on Aug. 5, 2014, while serving as the deputy commanding general of the Combined Security Transition Command – Afghanistan.

Howell will finish his work as a DASC over the next few months before moving to a leadership role with a classified program in U.S. Special Operations Command. He urged those interested in a similar career “to remember that you—as a Soldier, civilian or contractor—represent the warfighter in every meeting, in every discussion, in every forum or exchange of information. All of our competence, or lack of it, will manifest itself on the battlefield. Be the acquisition expert our Army needs. Our career field is complicated, our tasks are not easy and our future challenges will increase on today’s battlefield. Master your craft.”

This article was originally published in the April – June issue Army AL&T magazine.

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

A good jungle boot is one of a Soldier’s bare necessities—and the system for providing those necessities would make Mowgli’s head spin. Mowgli had to deal with jungle cats; he never had to deal with an ACAT III. Unfortunately, Soldiers do.

by Donald Schlomer, Lt. Col., USA (Ret.)

Mowgli, the hero of Rudyard Kipling’s 1894 classic “The Jungle Book,” did perfectly well without boots or even shoes. U.S. Soldiers, however, have different needs. Soldiers in the U.S. Army have not had a new jungle boot since the Vietnam era, and with the request for a new jungle boot—well, therein lies a tale, but a tale far less straightforward than Kipling’s famous collection of fables about the “man-cub” Mowgli, who lived in a jungle protected by a bear and a panther.

Indeed, the story of the jungle boot may be a cautionary fable about how good intentions can go systematically wrong. Mowgli had to deal with all manner of animals, including one very unpleasant cat. Shere Khan was all speed and stealth. The same cannot be said of the cat that haunts Soldiers: ACAT III, the acquisition category into which any procurement under $835 million falls. An ACAT III acquisition is clumsy and slow, utterly lacking in speed or stealth and with enough bureaucratic red tape to overwhelm even the toughest of Soldiers.

Almost anyone in the developed world can acquire a pair of boots at a brick-and-mortar retailer or from an online source within a few days. For a Soldier, such a simple acquisition might take more than two and a half years. The 25th Infantry Division, it was recently announced, will begin receiving jungle boots to use and test through a “rapid acquisition” by personnel within product manager for Soldier Clothing and Individual Equipment in the Program Executive Office for Soldier. The rapid acquisition was used to acquire a product for a specific unit to achieve a specific mission. In this case, test the boot for three months. The jungle boot they receive will not be the Jungle Boot. The rest of the Army and other services will have to wait. Because of this testing, they may even have to wait longer.

Why? The answer, simply, is the mandatory use of the Defense Acquisition System (DAS). The basic timeline within the system for delivery of an ACAT III need is 926 days. The Joint Capabilities Integrated Development System (JCIDS) approval process is approximately 506 days. (See Table 1.0.) Funding, contracting and delivering the boot takes approximately 420 days. To understand why obtaining such a simple item takes so long through the DAS, we begin the journey after the Army has realized Soldiers do not have a jungle boot.

The JCIDS process started in 2003 to address the buying of products that did not interoperate between the different branches of the military. The JCIDS manual in 2003 was 91 pages long; today, after seven iterations through which the Army leadership attempted to simplify the process, the manual is more than 420 pages.

Today, JCIDS processes apply to every product the Army buys, in all acquisition categories, which are classified by the total procurement cost of the system or product. So everything from a state-of-the-art battle system with expensive hardware and millions of lines of code (ACAT I) to a simple item such as a jungle boot (ACAT III) requires the same amount of paperwork, oversight and layers of bureaucracy to approve the acquisition, defying simple logic. There are approximately 79 ACAT I programs. These are major defense acquisition programs for items costing at least $2.79 billion per year to acquire. More than a hundred ACAT II programs exist, ranging in cost from $835 million to $2.74 billion per year. More than a 1,000 ACAT III programs exist that cost less than $835 million a year to purchase.

STEPS TO A NEW BOOT
Army leadership assigned the development of the new jungle boot to the U.S. Army Maneuver Center of Excellence (MCOE) at Fort Benning, Georgia, during the fourth quarter of 2013. The first step for an assigned document writer at the MCOE is to generate a cost-benefit analysis (C-BA). The document writer completed this in the second quarter of 2014. The purpose of the C-BA is to identify the total quantity and cost of the jungle boot. The C-BA may take up to three months to complete.

Following the C-BA approval, the next step is to create a capabilities development document (CDD) for approval by Army leadership. The CDD defines who, what, where, when, why and how the jungle boot is needed, which would likely be obvious if logic were a part of the process. The document writer at the MCOE is usually the subject matter expert (SME) on the ACAT III need (in our case, the jungle boot). In research for my doctoral study, I found that an SME might understand operational use but generally is not a good writer. Writing quality is important, because on many occasions, CDD approval is delayed because the writing does not capture the explanation necessary for Army approval. Thus, the document writer should create an integrated process team (IPT) to help in developing the CDD from the beginning. How many people does it take to write a CDD on a jungle boot? The average number of IPT members ranges from five to 15.The more people on the team, the more opinions, which means the document may take more than a year to complete.

A CDD is typically about 45 pages. It identifies the complete specifications needed for the boot, including the color, height, material, water resistance, traction, speed of drying, protection from the environment for the Soldier, and any other requirements you would want from a boot. A CDD also addresses all the doctrine, organizational, training, material, leadership, personnel, facilities and policy (DOTMLPF-P) changes required for a new jungle boot. Why would there be any changes to DOTMLPF-P areas for a jungle boot?

Contrast the CDD to an operational needs statement (ONS), used by troops in the field to request an existing commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) product. It’s five pages long. An ONS also defines the who, what, when, where, why and how of a need. But it does not address DOTMLPF-P concerns or the complete life cycle of the boot, including disposal once the boot does not meet the established standards. (And that’s not when the boot owner disposes of it; that’s when the Army decides to go through this exercise again and develop a new boot.) Separately, the Army will develop an online maintenance handbook based on the CDD to inform the Soldier of the care and cleaning of the jungle boot. But the Army does not maintain a boot. The Army supply personnel do what everyone else does—throw them away and ask for a new pair.

In case you’ve lost track, we are now at more than 360 days since the initial request for a boot.

Once the CDD is in draft form, the document writer posts it in an online portal to allow units around the globe to comment on it, hence the name of this next stage: worldwide staffing. The Army Capabilities Integration Center (ARCIC) gatekeeper, the person responsible for moving the document through the JCIDS process, provides the document writer the initial list of units. The document writer will add to that list based on his or her experience . Once the document is posted, each unit usually has 30 days to comment. However, 30 days is an arbitrary number and could increase based on requests from the specific units. The document writer must adjudicate all the comments before the approval process can begin. The adjudication process could take a month, depending on the number and complexity of the comments. We are now at approximately 390 days.

THE SAWTOOTH EFFECT
Mowgli avoided being eaten by Shere Khan, a tiger. Unfortunately, the JCIDS process has been overcome by a sawtooth approval process. Once the CDD is signed by the MCOE commander (a two-star general), the CDD is sent to the ARCIC gatekeeper (a colonel) for validation and processing through multiple layers of approval. (See Figure 1.) The Army Requirements Oversight Council (AROC) approves the CDD only after the Army Working Group (AWG), Army Review Board (ARB) and Army Control Board (ACB) approve. If multiple branches of the military (Air Force, Navy, Marines) will use the CDD, an additional Joint Requirements Oversight Council (JROC), with similar prior approvals, is required. Army personnel call bouncing between these different levels of approval “the saw-tooth effect,” because the graphic representation of the document moving between the different levels looks like a sawtooth blade.

All of these levels of approval take approximately 90 to 140 days. (See Table 1.0.) If any group at any level has questions, waiting for answers can delay or stop the CDD approval. If an answer to a question is critical in nature, the ARCIC gatekeeper may send the CDD back to the beginning of the approval process. Once approved at the AROC and JROC levels, the ARCIC gatekeeper sends the CDD to the chief of staff of the Army for final approval.

HURRY UP AND WAIT
Once the approval of the boot is completed, the funding and contracting efforts begin. The average time to develop a contract for the boot through competition is 240 days. The development of a Federal Acquisition Requirements-compliant contract includes requests for information, the approval to distribute the contract, the distribution of the contract to all vendors for competition, the receipt of the proposal from all the vendors, assessment of all the proposals, and then the contract award.

The assessment is an objective review of the proposals to determine which vendor is awarded the contract, while attempting to avoid a protest by one of the other vendors. Any vendor can protest for any reason, and a protest can delay award from 100 days to a year or more. The vendor then has 180 days or more to manufacture and deliver the boot based upon the awarded contract that has specifications written two or more years earlier.

SLOW PROCESS LEADS TO OUTDATED TECH
According to Moore’s Law, which holds that the pace of technological innovation accelerates exponentially, technology changes every 420 to 540 days. The vendor is responsible for delivering the boot based on the contract award, regardless of the status of current technology. Based on the contract, the vendor may use material that at best is not current and in some cases is obsolete. The vendor must request permission to use material not identified in the contract or request compensation for using non-current material. To substitute the material or find the non-current material, the vendor’s cost may escalate along with the increased delivery time.

Once the jungle boot arrives at an Army distribution warehouse, the warehouse ships the boot based on a Soldier’s request received through the normal supply requisition system. Depending on the unit’s mission priority, the boots may arrive anywhere from two to 30 days later. Now, more than two and a half years after the original request, the Soldier has jungle boots: a bare necessity to complete the mission.

CONCLUSION
We all might agree that this is a ridiculous tale and an unreasonable timeline to supply jungle boots. Congress agreed, and because of the unusual amount of time to obtain an ACAT III need, the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2016 mandated that the secretary of defense develop a strategy to streamline the JCIDS approval process. The purpose of my doctoral study was to explore strategies that senior U.S. Army commanders might use to reduce the approval time of the JCIDS process for an ACAT III need document. Based on analysis of my research, I developed four recommendations:

1. Identify an objective goal for streamlining the JCIDS process. Without a goal, how do you know when the JCIDS process is streamlined? The goal should include the desired reduction in time for each level.

2. Develop a strategy to determine what person or office should approve an ACAT III need. The strategy should research the ability of the chief of staff of the Army to delegate to a person or office the responsibility to approve an ACAT III need. The strategy should include the reduction of the number of levels of approval. Army leadership should avoid the sawtooth effect for an ACAT III need, and the strategy should include a process to avoid multiple approvals within a level. Why are AWG, AR2B and ACB approvals needed before AROC approval?

3. Use worldwide staffing better. The units identified in worldwide staffing should be limited to IPT members and specific units.

4. Develop a strategy to enhance training for document writers. With enhanced document writing skills, imagine how much faster the ACAT III document would be to write, approve, fund, contract and deliver.

Because of the above-described multiple layers of approval and numerous reviews, it currently takes approximately 506 days to write and approve an ACAT III need document. Additionally, it takes another 420 days to fund, contract, manufacture and deliver. Thus, the total time to deliver a jungle boot to a Soldier is 926 days. Given the rapid pace of technological change, the Soldier seldom receives a product that uses current technology. This length of time for approval is an issue with all ACAT III need developments. Imagine a Soldier needing something more important than a simple bare necessity of life.

For more information, contact Don Schlomer at donschlomer@gmail.com.

A TOUGH SLOG
A combat engineer assigned to the 10th Engineer Battalion maneuvers through a marsh as his team prepares to breach an obstacle during their Gunnery Table XII engagement in December 2016 at Fort Stewart, Georgia. The Army has not developed a new jungle boot since the Vietnam War era. (Photo by Spc. Ryan Tatum, 1st Armor Brigade Combat Team, 3rd Infantry Division)

DONALD SCHLOMER, Lt. Col., USA (Ret.), is an acquisition specialist at U.S. Special Operations Command. He is a doctoral candidate at Walden University. He holds an MBA in finance from Clemson University and a B.B.A. in information systems from the University of Georgia, and is a graduate of the Quartermaster Officer Advanced Course. He has 15 years of JCIDS acquisition experience and was an instructor of the JCIDS process for the Army Command and General Staff College. He is Level II certified in program management.

This article was originally published in the April – June issue Army AL&T magazine.

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Our interview for the April – June Critical Thinking with Paul Scharre—he’s a Ranger vet who did tours in Iraq and Afghanistan who is now a robotics expert at the Center for a New American Security—covered so much good material, but we didn’t want to leave it on the cutting room floor. Here’s Scharre on how DOD should pick which advances in robotics and artificial intelligence (AI) to pursue.

Army AL&T: It’s a high-stakes game of predicting the future, better testing and lower barriers to entry and innovation for the work of research labs and outside industry.

Scharre: It’s just so hard to predict what technologies are going to matter. The most important thing, if you want to think about maintaining advantage, is to create bureaucratic structures and organizations that allow the Army to rapidly innovate—so units that go out in the field and do experiments, demonstration, processes of competitive doctrine development and concept of operations development. The more the Army can foster these various models of innovation—the more different, diverse processes you have, a diverse group of ideas and people together—the better in terms of connecting warfighters and engineers and really hard problems. And then shaking the box, and encouraging creativity and outside-the-box thinking and new solutions. That’s what we’re going to need if the United States is going to stay competitive in the long run.

RISK, MEET REWARD
Determining which advances in robotics and AI to pursue is a high-stakes game of predicting the future, improving testing and reducing barriers to entry and innovation. (Image by (USAASC/DigtialStorm/iStock)

So, for example, you look at the DARPA Grand Challenge [in 2007] with automobiles. [For more on historic military experimentation with driverless vehicles, go to “Nobody, Take the Wheel!”] It wasn’t really good enough that you could transition any of it to military stuff, but initial competitors in the Grand Challenge went on to work in Google and places in the automobile industry where they’re now maturing those technologies. Eventually they might be good enough that the military says, OK, I want to take those autonomous vehicles and apply them to military settings, which will be different. We won’t have mapped the environment—we might be in a GPS-degraded or denied environment—and it’s going to be more challenging. So we want to apply those [technologies].

But the problem is that DOD has erected barriers to that happening. There are barriers within DOD for a research lab transitioning into a program of record; there are even larger barriers going from commercial innovations into DOD. And a number of smart folks in the acquisition community are trying to find ways around those barriers.

Army AL&T: The Army could be doing more in terms of thinking long-term about how robotics might shape the battlefield, what would conflict look like if militaries moved heavily into robotics and automation and AI.

Scharre: That’s a place where we’re sort of sketching out the hazy contours of the future, but the more we can expand our primer and start thinking about new ways of use, the better. If you look at the interwar period, there were people in the U.S. Navy who dismissed the potential for aircraft to be used as a decisive advantage to sink battleships into Pearl Harbor. We don’t want to be there. We don’t want that to be our wake-up moment of wow, this technology is transformative, and then we have a Pearl Harbor moment.

You know what I want to see? I want to see a new Louisiana Maneuvers for robotics and automation and human-machine teaming: Do a series of exercises where we go into the field and we experiment and we break things and try new ideas, and we keep doing it. You know, the first DARPA Grand Challenge [in 2004] was a miserable thing. The robot didn’t go anywhere. And they came back the next year, and then they were able to drive it across the desert. And it’s only through that iterative process of really hard problems and trying to solve them that we can come up with solutions.

Read the full interview at http://usaasc.armyalt.com/#folio=90.

This article was originally published in the April – June issue Army AL&T magazine.

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

Our interview for the April – June Critical Thinking with Paul Scharre—he’s a Ranger vet who did tours in Iraq and Afghanistan who is now a robotics expert at the Center for a New American Security—covered so much good material, but we didn’t want to leave it on the cutting room floor. Here’s Scharre on humans out-of-the-loop.

Army AL&T: What work is being done on armed unmanned systems (without a human in the loop)?

Scharre: There’s a very robust discussion going on internationally and within certain sectors of the U.S. defense community, particularly among lawyers, about this idea of autonomous weapons that would do targeting on their own and are programmed by people but would be released into some area, like a mobile mine that hunts targets on its own. It raises a lot of very difficult legal issues, some ethical challenges and some very practical operational considerations about things like risk and fratricide and, in some cases, strategic stability in crises.

I’m writing a book on this, actually. It’s a very interesting topic.

Army AL&T: Is there anyone out there who’s really doing well at getting a handle on these questions? Does the Pentagon have a good grasp on it?

Scharre: I think the people in the Pentagon are thinking about the issue. A number of … senior leaders have spoken about this publicly. Deputy Secretary of Defense Bob Work has talked about it. Vice Chairman Gen. Selva [Air Force Gen. Paul J. Selva, vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff] has spoken about this publicly. Right now our vision is that humans are going to be in the loop. But we acknowledge that technology might take us to a place down the road where particularly pressures of speed may push us to confront some of these difficult questions, especially if our adversaries show less restraint.

We already have modes on air and missile and rocket defenses today that allow autonomous reactions of the incoming threats, whether it’s an air defense system or an Aegis weapon system on a ship or active protection systems for vehicles. We have things where there’s a mode where you turn it on and a person’s supervising it and can turn it off. But the speed and pace of threats are such that you have to automate the reaction. I would submit that that is extremely different when you start thinking about a robotic system and it’s offensive, hunting for targets on its own with no person there to supervise it and turn it off in real time.

The magnitude of risk there is vastly different. Well, people say we already have this. We already have this with an Aegis. No, we don’t, because what we’re talking about is taking an Aegis weapon system on a ship, turning it to full auto-special, turning the ship toward enemy terrain and having everybody get off the ship—and just saying, well, let’s cross our fingers and hope everything goes fine. That is a very different world from what we have lived in for the last several decades. And sometimes that is underappreciated in the community that thinks about these issues. People say, well, we’ve done full auto before, what’s the big deal?

It’s very different when we’re talking about a world where we don’t have real-time human supervision, we don’t have positive control. You get something like a Patriot or an Aegis. They’re not flawless. We’ve had accidents, but people have very direct, immediately ability to reassert control over these weapon systems if there are accidents. And you would not have that with a fully autonomous robotic weapon that’s going out and hunting targets.

That doesn’t mean it’s inherently illegal, but it does mean that we would want to think really hard about risk. But that conversation is starting—mostly it’s in the legal space. Thinking from a military operational standpoint, it’s less mature. Why would I want to do this? This isn’t a good idea. Never mind is it legal, it’s not illegal to make a hand grenade with a half-second fuze. It’s just a bad idea. Is that level of autonomy a good idea in the first place? I think that’s a good starting point.

Read the full interview at http://usaasc.armyalt.com/#folio=90

GO FOR FULL AUTO?
An unmanned boat operates autonomously during an Office of Naval Research-sponsored demonstration of swarm-boat technology at Joint Expeditionary Base Little Creek-Fort Story, Virginia, in September 2016. While autonomous operation holds much promise, Scharre noted that several thorny issues—legal questions, ethical challenges and operational considerations—must first be addressed. (U.S. Navy photo by John F. Williams/Released)

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COMMAND/ORGANIZATION: U.S. Army Engineering and Support Center, Huntsville, Alabama
TITLE: Ballistic missile defense project manager
YEARS OF SERVICE IN WORKFORCE: 14
DAWIA CERTIFICATIONS: Level III in facilities engineering
EDUCATION: MBA, The Citadel; B.S. in mechanical engineering, Geneva College; Professional Engineer – Pennsylvania and certified Project Manager Professional
AWARDS: Huntsville Center Project Manager of the Year; Achievement Medal for Civilian Service; Europe District Hero of the Battle; Certificate of Achievement, NATO Special Operations Headquarters Project Delivery Team; Certificate of Achievement, Interagency and International Services Project Delivery Team; Certificate of Achievement, Phased Adaptive Approach Romanian Planning Charrette

A CAREER MARKED BY BIG TRANSITIONS

By Susan Follett

In her 14 years of working for the federal government, Tara Clark’s career has taken her from one service to another, across Europe and back to Alabama. Along the way, she’s learned about the challenges of working overseas, the benefits of professional certification and the importance of learning from one’s mistakes.

She started her career with the Naval Facilities Engineering Command (NAVFAC) in 2002, and developed a solid footing in both engineering and acquisition. “NAVFAC pushed hard to make sure I achieved each facilities engineering certification level as it became available,” said Clark. While with NAVFAC she also obtained her professional engineer certification and earned an MBA. “I think it was critical that I had a good foundation in my mechanical discipline before jumping over to the program and project management side,” she said.

In early 2009, she was offered two positions outside the continental United States (OCONUS), one with NAVFAC Europe Africa Southwest Asia in Naples, Italy, and one with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers’ Europe District in Wiesbaden, Germany. The Europe District offer was as the mechanical engineer for the Missile Defense Agency (MDA) European Interceptor Site, “an exciting and groundbreaking project,” Clark noted. After careful consideration, she took the Europe District job, spending five years there as a mechanical engineer on Army, Air Force, humanitarian aid and other foreign projects.

“One of my most interesting mechanical projects was preparing the planning and design RFP (request for proposal) for telemedicine centers in Albania,” she said. “Linking rural facilities to the main hospital in Tirana as well as stateside facilities gave rural doctors a chance to consult with specialists to solve challenging cases.”

In early 2011, she transitioned to a project manager (PM) post in the Missile Defense Branch. “At that time, we were just beginning work on the presidentially mandated European Phased Adaptive Approach (EPAA), designed to deal with the threat posed by Iranian short- and intermediate-range ballistic missiles to U.S. assets, personnel and allies in Europe,” she said.

Tara Clark, project manager for the Ballistic Missile Defense Branch, receives the Project Manager of the Year Award from Col. Robert J. Ruch, then commander at the Huntsville Center, at an award ceremony in June 2016. (Photo by Rusty Torbett, Visual Information Specialist, U.S. Army Corps of Engineers.)

Clark was the PM for the Phase I implementation of the EPAA program, a radar component of the land-based Aegis Ashore Ballistic Missile Defense (BMD) System, which was successfully brought on line in December 2011. The Aegis Ashore BMD System is the first operational land-based version of the Aegis Combat System, which combines phased-array radars, fire control directors, computers and missiles.

She considers the position an important one in her career development: “It was a unique opportunity that allowed me to work at an extreme pace on a very unusual project with a presidential mandate.” She worked on a handful of different projects for the program until 2014, when she accepted a job offer at Huntsville Center, Alabama.

Now, as a ballistic missile defense PM, she manages MDA-authorized projects from cradle to grave and leads product delivery teams in developing solutions to provide the MDA with facilities and infrastructure that meets its needs. “The systems are constantly being improved to better protect the U.S. homeland, its territories and allies,” she said. “The projects I work on are vital to the protection of our nation, and in my little way I am making a difference.” At Huntsville Center, with prior agreement by the host USACE district, she has been overseeing small MDA construction and repair projects at Vandenberg Air Force Base, California; Clear Air Force Base, Alaska; and some other locations.

“As a PM, I’m a facilitator, translator and link,” said Clark. “A PM needs to be able to listen and translate unusual customer needs into something that can be accomplished through your program office.” A positive attitude helps with the challenges that the position presents, she said. “I try to look for the positive, and challenges are just opportunities to exceed expectations,” she said. “Since Huntsville Center can only take projects that have been turned down by the geographical district, we always are given projects that give us opportunities to exceed expectations.”

Looking back on her career, Clark noted that she has had some exceptional supervisors and mentors. “An early PM supervisor at NAVFAC Mid-Atlantic had so much faith in my ability that he tasked me with repairing the fractured relationship between Marine Corps Air Station Cherry Point [North Carolina] and my branch. I was so successful that I was named the PM lead for this base,” she said. “When I was in Europe, my supervisor pretty much let me handle the work and trusted that I would brief him as needed. And Huntsville Center gave me the opportunity to temporarily act as program manager over the BMD program when the program manager had to take off for emergency medical leave.”

Those experiences have taught her wisdom she offers as advice for others: “Learn your strengths and maximize these areas. Understand and forgive your weaknesses. Take training when it is offered and participate in the classes. And if you make a mistake, learn from it and move on.”

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

This article was originally published in the April – June issue Army AL&T magazine.

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

ARL intelligent systems S&T is leading to a tactical offset strategy for operations in a range of challenging settings.

by Dr. Brian M. Sadler

The desire for a third offset strategy has been a major focus of DOD science and technology (S&T) discussion for the past few years. While the Navy and Air Force primarily face issues related to large-scale, extended-range operations, the Army must address a different set of long-term challenges in complex operational scenarios. These notably include megacities and other perplexing domains such as subterranean and jungle environments. It is not difficult to envision a megacity in a developing nation facing a quicksand of natural disaster, failing infrastructure, tribal conflict and fast-spreading disease, and the subsequent call for Army operations. Other potential scenarios may prove equally challenging, complex and risky. These expeditionary Army operations likely will entail high-risk and slow operational tempo (OPTEMPO), be manpower intensive and require difficult large-scale logistic deployment.

The application of man-unmanned machine teaming (MUM-T) and autonomous systems is a potential offset strategy. Many recent studies and workshops (e.g., the Defense Science Board, the National Academies, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, the Army Science Board and the U.S. Army Research Laboratory (ARL)) have reinforced the operational and technological potential of MUM-T. It is clear that if successfully developed, autonomy offers leap-ahead capability and the potential for a third offset in sea and air operations. Distributed collaborative autonomous systems, teamed with Soldiers, offers a tactical offset strategy; a means to operate in complex urban and other domains at high tempo, with significantly reduced risk, and with fewer Soldiers.

Army application of collaborative intelligence
At ARL, our tactical offset vision is to develop the underpinning S&T for highly distributed and collaborative intelligent systems, consisting of air and ground robotic and manned platforms, high-performance tactical computing, knowledge bases and sensors, all connected to local and remote Soldiers via a self-healing network. The heterogeneous, interconnected mix of large and small platforms provides a rich potential to exploit autonomy for situational awareness, protection and networking. Examples include using autonomy for rapid intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance ahead of and around dismounts, emplacing fixed or mobile sensor networks, providing a bubble of protection around moving Soldiers, and deploying swarms of small autonomous aerial vehicles moving at up to ballistic rates.

TEAM BUILDING
Teaming Soldiers with distributed collaborative autonomous systems offers a means to operate in complex urban and other domains at high tempo and with significantly reduced risk. (ARL Public Affairs)

ARL’s goal in developing the S&T behind intelligent systems is to enable man-machine teaming to provide tactical offset by:

• Providing large networks of heterogeneous intelligent agents that can coordinate and rapidly distribute themselves based on commander’s intent.
• Extending reach and vision into large, complex environments beyond the limits of national assets.
• Collaboratively perceiving the environment and providing situational awareness against dynamic threats.
• Analyzing information to enable rapid human/intelligent system decision-making and adaptable mission profiles.
• Strategically assessing risk and directing intelligent and efficient use of force against dynamic threats.

Axes of complexity
Several key factors dictate the difficulty of the Army problem and limit the operational capability of any given state-of-the-art autonomy technology suite:

• Complexity of the operational environment. Megacities are an extreme example of a complex environment. It is far easier to navigate an autonomous vehicle in open air or water than into buildings or tunnels.
• Available infrastructure. Prior knowledge of the environment, massive networking and power sources are generally available for commercial applications, but not in Army scenarios.
• Operational tempo. Artificial intelligence algorithms are often so complex they are beyond our current ability to implement them for real-time operation in small platforms that cannot rely on extensive infrastructure.

There is also the complexity of system design, which increases with the number of agents; the variety of agent types; agent complexity and adaptability; and the degree of interaction and communication needed among the agents (for both machine and human interaction). Tactical application is reliant on heterogeneous architectures across Army platforms, networks, sensors and processors, which also raises questions of logistics and sustainability. However, we currently do not have a full understanding of how to design a system consisting of hardware and software modules that can be composed and assembled, and that map to efficient hardware.

WHAT WILL THE NEXT MISSION LOOK LIKE?
The Army faces long-term challenges in complex operational scenarios. A system that works in an urban environment might not be adaptable to a megacity, jungles, caves or a subterranean environment. (ARL Public Affairs)

Autonomous networking
The tactical offset strategy inherently relies on communications among autonomous nodes, sensors, knowledge bases and humans. Recent ARL research has definitively shown that viewing networking as a separate add-on component leads to distinctly suboptimal results. For example, when autonomous agents collaborate to explore and map a building, the task can be much more efficiently accomplished when the agents account for radio connectivity and plan for information sharing and exchange.

The design of collaborative intelligent systems to meet the tactical offset vision must include networking as an integrated component. This will take advantage of large air and ground platforms with less restrictive power and computation requirements, and exploit cognitive radio techniques to efficiently manage spectrum usage and network capacity. The resulting system will be resilient, using autonomous nodes to self-heal the network, reconfiguring depending on the task, and adapting to threats.

Advances in autonomy and artificial intelligence
Implementing the tactical offset vision hinges on successful ongoing research and development that seeks to accelerate and merge advances in cognition and artificial intelligence (AI) with advances in collaborative robotics and cognitive networking. Technology convergence continues to unite networking, processing, sensing and control onto small, mobile air and ground platforms. This follows large commercial investment and mass production trends in cellular, robotic and sensor technologies.

INTELLIGENT SYSTEM COMPONENTS
A tactical offset strategy—a means to operate in complex urban and other domains at high tempo, with significantly reduced risk and with fewer Soldiers—relies on communications among autonomous nodes, sensors, knowledge bases and humans. (ARL Public Affairs)

With a decade of Army basic research 6.1 investment in programs such as the ARL Micro Autonomous Systems and Technology Collaborative Technology Alliance, new small-scale mechanical platforms (e.g., quadrotors) are now a commercial commodity, and algorithms for autonomous control, sensing, navigation and mapping have been demonstrated.

Artificial neural networks (ANNs) have exploded into a variety of commercial applications since 2010. While the basic ANN technology dates to the 1990s, two trends have enabled their recent emergence. First, digital processing technology has continued its rapid advancement as predicted by Moore’s Law, such that these algorithms from the 90’s can now be computed in reasonable time on laptop quality processors. Second, it is now technically feasible to collect and use training data sets at the very large scale needed to ensure good statistical performance with brute-force learning algorithms. Through trial and error, it became apparent that the best performance could require millions of training examples. While it is time consuming to collect such large validated data sets, digital hardware advances have made it possible to use them to train ANNs.

Embraced by large U.S. commercial enterprises such as Google and Facebook, ANNs have been successfully applied in such areas as image processing and vision, natural language processing, robotics and multi-agent systems. They have displaced decades-old technologies in image and speech processing. ANNs are now better than humans on some kinds of visual object and word recognition, not to mention gaming. The use of ANNs has enabled driverless cars, whose development is limited only by cost, legal regulation and reliance on fixed infrastructure such as maps, roadside electronic aids, signs, road markings and networking.

ANNs typically process one input and one output at a time, such as detecting objects in an image. An ANN variant called a recursive neural network (RNN), also dating to the 1990s, enables sequence processing, such as entire spoken sentences or a sequence of video frames. Other ANN variants combine the above to build a system that allows a user to verbally ask a question about an image, for example, with the system responding verbally with an answer.

CONNECTING THE DOTS
Rapid querying and information retrieval have been made possible by parallel advances in mining big data to produce knowledge bases and systematic methods for the storage, assimilation and association of data. (Shutterstock image by agsandrew)

Parallel advances in mining big data to produce knowledge bases has produced systematic methods for the storage, assimilation and association of data, enabling rapid querying and information retrieval. Knowledge bases form the memory of intelligent systems like IBM’s Watson (famous for its performance against human experts in the TV game Jeopardy), computer game-playing architectures and numerous other applications. Machine learning can be thought of in this vein, exploiting data to learn and specify models that can make predictions.

Conclusion
ANN, knowledge base and machine learning technologies have advanced rapidly in this decade. Combining these with recent progress in robotics and autonomy, the Army is poised to develop the underpinning S&T for highly distributed and collaborative intelligent systems that can provide a tactical offset strategy for envisioned operations in megacities and other challenging scenarios.

For more information, go to http://www.arl.army.mil/www/default.cfm?page=2637.

DR. BRIAN M. SADLER is the Army senior scientist for intelligent systems at ARL. He has a Ph.D. from the University of Virginia, and an M.S. and B.S. from the University of Maryland, all in electrical engineering. He is a Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers and ARL.

This article was originally published in the April – June issue Army AL&T magazine.

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

ONLINE EXTRAS

• “A Review of 40 Years of Cognitive Architecture Research: Focus on Perception, Attention, Learning and Applications,” October 2016
• “Research and vision for intelligent systems for 2025 and beyond,” Small Wars Journal, April 2016.
• “Deep Learning,” MIT Press Book, 2016
• “Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments,” by Robert Martinage, October 2014
• “Megacities and the United States Army: Preparing for a Complex and Uncertain Future,” Chief of Staff of the Army, Strategic Studies Group, June 2014

Our interview for the April – June Critical Thinking with Paul Scharre—he’s a Ranger vet who did tours in Iraq and Afghanistan who is now a robotics expert at the Center for a New American Security—covered so much good material, but we didn’t want to leave it on the cutting room floor. Here’s Scharre on how to manage a swarm.

Scharre: [You could see] area coverage in this way where there are super rules—like don’t get too close or too far away from other agents. And that uses a swarm of agents to cover an area. Those sort of work for all sorts of military problems, whether it’s reconnaissance or logistics or building an adaptive and resilient communications networks. And all of those things allow you to then do those tasks with very minimal human supervision. So someone is tasking the swarm to go do some mission or some task, but someone’s there micromanaging, which is where you want to go. You can have people flying vehicles or directing vehicles.

And there is a lot of really neat stuff happening inside companies, people doing experiments in DOD labs and in academic labs at universities, doing basic research in swarming. I just think this is an area of tremendous growth potential in both the military and the commercial sector for things like robot warehouse management or delivery or logistics. There’s a lot of potential here to harness some of this collective intelligence.

UNMANNED DISRUPTION
Small, expendable robots scattered behind enemy lines—like these off-the-shelf drones launch from White Sands Missile Range in September 2015, in preparation for Network Integration Evaluation 16.1—can be really disruptive to the enemy, according to Paul Scharre, a Ranger veteran who’s now a robotics expert at the Center for a New American Security. (Photo by John Hamilton)

Thirty years from now, that’s something where we know we can build autonomous systems, whether it’s an airplane or a ground vehicle, that can control the vehicle better than a human. It’s not possible today, but it’s going to be possible in the coming years. We want people to be at the mission level thinking about accomplishing the mission and then using robots to go out and perform discrete tasks in pursuit of that mission.

Army AL&T: Is there any particular reasoning or formula for how many different robots in a swarm that one person should have to control?

Scharre: That’s a very good question. It depends upon what tasking the person has to do, how much the swarm needs to report in. I want to differentiate between two paradigms: One is if you have a person directing the vehicles, so if you have something like a Global Hawk aircraft today, tell the aircraft where to go, and then it goes and then it waits for me to give it another task. So think of them checking in periodically for a person. Well, there are limits to how much you can scale that up. A person can only handle single-digit groups of individual elements.

And that’s not fundamentally much different than it is with people, like a fire team leader can manage three people underneath him or her, but can’t manage 20. You have to break that down into more subgroups. But if you send 15, the swarm as a single element, now that’s quite different, right? Then you can imagine you task a swarm and you don’t task individual elements. You tell a swarm of 50 or 100 or 1,000 elements, go forth and do this, and you’re just interfacing with the swarm as whole. You’re not tasking individual swarms. That’s the big paradigm shift.

And then it’s basically limitless [as to] how big it gets, because it doesn’t matter from the user perspective—you’re just dealing with the group, the same way you might think about little kids playing soccer. The ball goes over here, the mob follows the ball, a gaggle of little kids. It doesn’t really change the equation, right?

Army AL&T: Right, so it’s one unit of multiple parts. But they’re all similarly directed.

Scharre: That’s right. So when you think about that, like when you look at what the Air Force did with these air launch swarms, you’re not telling each drone where to go. You’re just telling the group where to go perform a task; you just tell the group, go over here and do this, do that.

So the enemy doesn’t know which robot has good communications with humans. And so think about the concept of the little groups of paratroopers in Normandy on D-Day running around behind enemy lines. Doing something like that with robotics—small, expendable robots scattered behind enemy lines, running around wreaking havoc like that—can be really disruptive to the enemy, because if they run across a robot scout they have to assume that they’ve been spotted. They need to kill the robot scout and they need to displace. There are concepts of operations that I think have some appeal that we ought to be experimenting with.

Read the full interview at http://usaasc.armyalt.com/#folio=90.

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Command/organization: Aircraft Survivability Equipment Project Management Office, Program Executive Office for Intelligence, Electronic Warfare and Sensors
Title: Lead systems engineer
Years of service in workforce: 10
Years of military service: 3
DAWIA certifications: Level III in systems engineering; Level II in program management
Education: Completing a dual MBA and master’s degree in industrial and systems engineering, Auburn University (expected December); B.S. in physics, Baylor University

Seeking heat at the ACAT I level

by Ms. Mary Kate Aylward

Clinton E. Spratley spent three years on active duty with the Air Force before lending his engineering background to the Army’s efforts to improve aircraft survivability. After leaving the Air Force, he joined the Army Acquisition Workforce, first as a contractor and then as a civilian employee of the Program Executive Office for Intelligence, Electronic Warfare and Sensors (PEO IEW&S) in Huntsville, Alabama.

Spratley is lead systems engineer for the Infrared Countermeasures (IRCM) Product Office within the Aircraft Survivability Equipment Project Management Office, working on systems that protect aircraft from infrared homing (heat-seeking) missiles by confusing the missiles’ ability to read or lock on to the aircraft’s infrared signature. “The IRCM family of systems are important to the warfighter because they provide protection from heat-seeking surface-to-air and air-to-air missiles,” Spratley noted. “I always go home knowing that we are making a real difference in protecting our Soldiers’ lives and are one step closer to bringing our troops home alive.”

Spratley supports two systems: the Acquisition Category (ACAT) I-C Advanced Threat (AT) IRCM system and the ACAT I-D Common IRCM system. ATIRCM is currently fielded to a limited subset of aircraft that provide laser-based countermeasure protection to Army air crews. Common Infrared Countermeasures (CIRCM), now in the engineering and manufacturing development phase, is the next-generation laser-based countermeasure system for DOD’s rotary-wing, tilt-rotor and slow-moving fixed-wing fleet.

“I have had the opportunity to support an ACAT I-D program through two major phases of the acquisition life cycle as it moved from the competitive prototyping stage, past milestone [MS] A into the technology development phase, and past MS B into the engineering and manufacturing development phase,” Spratley said. He credits his leadership, both uniformed and civilian, with giving him this opportunity, which he calls a high point of his career. “I have been very fortunate with the leadership I have served under. The most valuable mentor that I have had is my current supervisor, Jason Matheney, deputy product manager (PM) for infrared countermeasures. He has assigned me tasks that allowed me to stretch beyond my comfort zone while consistently being held to a high standard of quality on my products. I attribute much of my success so far to his mentorship.”

As CIRCM moves from the lab to the airfield, Spratley has helped with the creation of two sets of milestone decision documents, two separate contract requirement packages, two source selection evaluation boards and three major program milestones (MS A, Pre-Request for Proposal Release Decision Point and MS B). Working on a major, high-dollar program with oversight from the Office of the Secretary of Defense as it moves through the decision-making process gave Spratley an appreciation for “the vast complexity of the acquisition process … and the non-technical activities,” he noted.

Being involved with the aspects of programs that aren’t related to engineering “has made me a better systems engineer,” he said, and he recommends pursuing any chance to step outside one’s immediate job description through classes or developmental assignments. “It is too easy to get caught up with just getting our daily job completed, but then we don’t leave time for ourselves to grow. When your workload slows down, look for an opportunity outside your immediate comfort zone to temporarily help out.”

While in the Air Force, Spratley served as acquisition officer at the Air Force Research Laboratory in the Space Vehicles Directorate at Kirtland Air Force Base, New Mexico. After leaving the Air Force, Spratley knew he wanted to join the Army Acquisition Workforce “to have a greater influence on programs to make a lasting impact in warfighter survivability.”

His transition to Army acquisition required a shift in mindset. “My Air Force experience was vastly different than the work I am doing now with Army aviation,” he said. Working in an Army countermeasures office focuses on responding to adversaries’ capabilities and responding directly to operational threats, Spratley explained. “This focus means having to understand how the Army fights, which is significantly different than Air Force operations—especially space-based operations.” In transitioning to Army acquisition, he had to learn about Army tactics, aircraft capabilities, command, control and communications systems, and other Army weapons systems. “Ultimately the acquisition structure is the same, with some slight variants in terminology, but how Army aviation programs move through the Pentagon for review and approval is different than space-based systems with more focus on production, operations and sustainment costs,” he said.

Feedback from Soldiers in the field validates his decision to switch. “Working on these systems brings me great pride because we work with Army aviators who have been in harm’s way and benefitted from the protections that our systems provide.”

TEAM ACCOMPLISHMENT
Maj. Gen. Kirk Vollmecke, second from left, program executive officer for IEW&S, presents a certificate of appreciation in February to the PM IRCM Team. From left Col. Jong Lee, project manager for aircraft survivability equipment; Lt. Col Rodney Turner, product manager IRCM; Jason Matheny, deputy product manager IRCM; and Spratley. (U.S. Army photo by Sherry Dorner, PM ASE)

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

This article was originally published in the April – June issue Army AL&T magazine.

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ONLINE EXTRAS

Project Management Office Aircraft Survivability Equipment

Program managers need the right mix of character and action to build a foundation of trust.

by Col. Joel D. Babbitt

Credibility gives authority and brings trust; it is the reward of good decisions, the product of consistent results and the currency that every leader deals in. If a program manager (PM) has credibility, people trust them to do what they say and then give the time, resources and the leadership support to do it. The opposite is also true. Indeed, as now-retired Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal noted, “Credibility equals freedom of action.”

Credibility is especially key in the world of acquisition, where trust equals money, and a breach of trust can send an effort spiraling into a morass of bureaucratic red tape. Once a PM establishes credibility, oversight and controls will begin to loosen. The PM will begin breezing through potentially contentious briefings, will get calls in September at the end of the fiscal year asking if the PM can use a few million residual dollars, and overall more work will flow in their direction. These are just some of the positive effects of credibility. So how does a PM establish and maintain credibility? It’s a mix of character and action. When building your project plan, some actions produce far more credibility than others.

ACCURACY IS FINAL
A credible PM must deliver what the user needs.

Wyatt Earp once said, “Fast is fine, but accuracy is final.” In other words, it’s great to be fast, but if you do not hit the target, speed doesn’t matter. Applied to acquisition, that means that the PM must build the right thing, and building the right thing is not as easy as it sounds—it takes the ability to see what right is (vision), then adjust to get it right (execution).

Are your users complaining about the size of the vehicle your system is mounted on? Then change it. Is your system too complex for the average 19-year-old recruit? Then do the no-kidding hard work of simplifying it. Are your users leaving your system in the conex, or shipping container, because it’s too big and bulky? Then get innovative and shrink it. Is your material solution, or product, outdated, or maybe your users are buying something better off the shelf and turning your stuff in? Then it’s time to change your material solution. There are many structures in Army bureaucracy that are meant to make change difficult, but it can be done. In the end, it’s better for the Soldier, for the taxpayer and for your credibility to make the hard right choice than the easy wrong choice.

BACKYARD TESTING
To be a credible PM, you have to pass your tests.

Seth Smith, a retired warrant officer, once said, “Don’t ever try anything in your front yard that you haven’t tried in your backyard twice.” In other words, to avoid unpleasant surprises in their public demonstrations and record tests, be sure to vet the capability thoroughly. In general, if your product is made for Soldiers by a lab full of engineers, you can expect that it will not survive first contact with a unit of Soldiers. So, it’s important to set up a number of informal events (backyard events) where Soldiers get to test the new capability before going to a record or otherwise high-visibility test event (front yard event).

START SMALL
The author, right, and a communications sergeant from 2nd Brigade Combat Team, 1st Armored Division discuss updates to the Warfighter Information Network – Tactical Increment 1 during NIE 15.2 on Fort Bliss, Texas, in May 2015. A PM can improve the odds of success—and his credibility—by testing new systems on a smaller scale before taking part in larger, higher-profile demonstrations. (Photo Credit: Amy Walker, PEO C3T)

After completing extensive lab testing and in preparation for a very high-visibility network integration evaluation (NIE) demonstration event, the Warfighter Information Network -Tactical Increment 1 Product Office set up a number of backyard test events with the Delaware Army National Guard’s 198th Expeditionary Signal Battalion and invited vendors along. Secure Wi-Fi for command posts, tactical microwave radios, 4G tactical cellular infrastructure and other components were put through their paces. The feedback that guard Soldiers gave helped the vendor tweak its product and helped the product office tweak the manuals and employment concepts. Overall, these backyard events were key to these products’ subsequent success at NIE.

Combat Soldiers, from standard infantry up to special forces, do not just roll up and start shooting at the enemy. Rather, they do rock, or rehearsal-of-concept, drills, rehearsals and practice actions on the objective before taking direct action on an enemy objective. Treat your tests the same way; they are no-fail events. Follow their lead and test before the test. Your users will thank you and your credibility will increase.

ZEROING IN FOR THE WIN
Back shop efforts, studies and prototyping.

Every program office should have a number of back shop efforts ongoing. These are the things that your engineers play and tinker with; things like vendor-provided equipment acquired via purchase or no-cost loan agreements and things from other services or program offices that might meet a need in your program office. You should have a bench of back shop efforts; it shows that your engineers are curious enough to guide your program past the potential dead ends and to the right solution. Also, if you have a bench of back shop efforts churning along, you will capture the intellectual high ground in meetings with your customers and suppliers. You will not end up just going with whatever the vendors or your requirements people tell you. You will have credibility.

Studies are the secret weapon of the credible PM. They are the ultimate way for the PM to capture the intellectual high ground in their industry or area of expertise and carry a huge amount of credibility with them. Commissioning a study shows that a PM has the foresight to bring in an expert to examine the alternatives and to determine the strengths and weaknesses of each potential course of action. In short, doing a study means you did your homework. Very few things will zero you in for the win like a righteous study.

Prototyping is about a lot more than just trying out different potential solutions. Building prototypes actually does a number of things for the PM. The word “prototype” lowers everyone’s expectations, so if it flops, no harm, no foul—it was just a prototype. However, if it’s a home run, a prototype gives the PM a jump on production. Additionally, prototyping also gives the PM office time to get a jump start on the paperwork required to field and to eventually get to a full materiel release.

Also, doing more than one or two prototypes gives the vendor the opportunity to shake out the production process. Finally, prototyping allows the PM to declare the core of the product as solid, while working through the little details to reach a production model. It’s the ultimate soft start before Milestone C and low-rate initial production.

PUTTING IT ALL TOGETHER
U.S. Special Operations Command (USSOCOM) needed to put high bandwidth communications for passengers on U.S. Air Force C-17 aircraft. The prevailing wisdom was to add more international maritime satellite (INMARSAT) channels on the plane. Rather than charging forward with an INMARSAT upgrade, however, the J-6 (communications directorate) acquisition and technical leads conducted a network study. During the course of that study, they determined that more INMARSAT was a dead end. That was because INMARSAT satellites, for the foreseeable future, could not support the number of channels needed.

UNRISKY BUSINESS
When the U.S. Special Operations Command wanted to improve communications equipment on C-17 aircraft, they followed the path outlined here, including prototyping, proofing and vendor visits. Risk declined with each step toward full rate production. (Image courtesy of the author and U.S. Army Acquisition Support Center)

After laying out all the options, they determined the solution was to install a Ku-band high-bandwidth antenna on a number of C-17s. Not an easy task, but by doing the network study up front, the J-6 had a plan for an appropriate network it could use—one that has proven to be the right solution for the better part of a decade.

The J-6 technical lead had been putting other antennas on smaller aircraft for some time, but to get it right, a request for information, several vendor visits and an antenna study were used. Through this process they discovered the only viable solution that was also sufficiently low-risk. There were many opportunities to pick an answer that looked right before finding the ultimate solution, but after closer inspection they would have cost far more and taken far longer than the budget allowed.

BEGIN BOX RISK=COST
It’s important to understand that risk equals cost. Failure to wring out risk before launching a project will show in the costs. Why is that? Because unknowns have to be planned for, and unknowns are expensive. The more variables a contractor must build into its budget, the higher the overall cost will be. Risk increases cost exponentially.

END BOX
After the network study and the antenna study, when the J-6 acquisition lead approached the Air Force program office about it, the estimate was six years and more than $50 million to modify 15 aircraft. Why? The answer was in the project framing. The proposed program structure from the Air Force program office was to hire a prime contractor, go through a traditional engineering and manufacturing development phase, then enter production. This left all the risk in the initial project plan, even after two studies. The J-6 counterproposal was to work out the risk by taking it one step at a time. First, an antenna placement study to determine where on the aircraft the antenna should be located to minimize technical risk and, therefore, cost. Second, a prototype effort that modified three aircraft. Third, a kit-proof effort, which is the Air Force equivalent of low-rate initial production. Finally, the full production run. The approach was most aptly summed up by the deputy J-6 as “going slow to go fast.”

The cost of the first planes modified under the prototype effort were $2.5 million each. The cost of the kit-proof modifications were $2 million each. That brought the cost of the production run down to $1.2 million per plane. By breaking the effort down into three phases, reducing the risk as the effort progressed, the cost of the production run was cut in half. In the end, the original estimate of six years and $50 million-plus was reduced to three years and just under $25 million. Effectively, both the budget and schedule were cut in half. The users were happy with their new capability, and the Army leveraged the USSOCOM effort to produce its Enroute Mission Command Capability for the XVIII Airborne Corps’ Global Response Force.

ADDING BANDWIDTH
Paul Goetz, an electrician at Tobyhanna Army Depot in Pennsylvania, holds a guy line as communications equipment is positioned on a Wideband Enterprise Terminal at Offutt Air Force Base, Nebraska, one of more than 80 joint systems used worldwide. A plan to add bandwidth to joint systems adopted a “go slow to go fast” approach that saved money and reduced risk. (Photo by Jacqueline Boucher, Tobyhanna Army Depot)

CONCLUSION
Credibility cannot be built overnight, although it certainly may be lost with such speed. A successful foundation of credibility requires building trust—trust built by consistently producing what you said you would produce, in the time you said you would do it and within the budget you were given. Cost, performance, schedule: It’s more than a mantra, it’s your path to credibility.

For more information, read “The 4 Disciplines of Execution” by Chris McChesney, Sean Covey and Jim Huling, or contact the author at 703-806-0583 or joel.d.babbitt.mil@mail.mil.

COL. JOEL D. BABBITT is the product lead for Wideband Enterprise Satellite Systems within the Program Executive Office for Enterprise Information Systems at Fort Belvoir, Virginia. He previously served as the product manager for Warfighter Information Network – Tactical Increment 1 and the product manager for command, control, communications, computing and intelligence for a unit under the U.S. Special Operations Command at Fort Bragg, North Carolina. He holds a master’s degree in computer science from the Naval Postgraduate School and a bachelor’s degree in psychology from Brigham Young University, and is a graduate of the Command and General Staff College in Fort Lee, Virginia, and Austin, Texas. He is Level III certified in program management and Level II certified in engineering and in information technology. He holds Project Management Professional certification and is a member of the Army Space Cadre and the Army Acquisition Corps.

This article is scheduled to be published in the July-September 2017 issue of Army AL&T Magazine.

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Lessons in working with what you have and building what you don’t

by Kevin Guite

The past several years have been a tricky time for hiring, developing and retaining good people. With less money to spend, less leeway to hire and yet urgent needs for specific knowledge, Army acquisition program managers have had to think creatively to train their workforces, leverage existing expertise across organizations and compete for the brightest young minds. It is those bright minds, after all, who keep the programs running effectively and on schedule to deliver products on time and within budget to the Soldiers who need them as fast as possible. The Army Acquisition Lessons Learned Portal (ALLP) offers some clues to overcoming these challenges in talent management, with a variety of real-world lessons and best practices. Some of the following lessons from the ALLP are about training proactively, for example, plus capitalizing on resources available from aligned organizations. On the downside, other lessons illustrate how programs can suffer when they lack personnel with the necessary expertise.

TRAIN FOR THE FUTURE

LL_642: The execution of an internal program to train and develop interns will significantly enhance the overall effectiveness of the command, as well as build future workforce expertise.

Background

For five years starting in 2008, the Program Executive Office for Simulation, Training and Instrumentation (PEO STRI) operated an Acquisition Academy to grow its own talent as a solution to the paucity of available contracting personnel. The 11-week, multidisciplinary, immersive program interns’ knowledge and skills in preparation to join the workforce with a better understanding of the Army, the PEO’s mission and what the systems it produces mean to the Soldier. The academy, supported in part by the Defense Acquisition Workforce Development Fund (Section 852), was the first stage of each intern’s two- or three-year development program. A single academy class was conducted each year from 2008 through 2013, with two sessions offered in 2009. An average of 17 interns were enrolled per class over the years, with the initial session in 2008 having the highest attendance at 21 interns. With more than , the academy of 93 percent, providing the PEO with newly hired journeymen employees. The academy was popular with participants, and that reputation led to academy graduates representing 14 percent of the PEO’s workforce following their transition as journeymen employees.

The first academy class consisted solely of contract specialists, with a curriculum focused heavily on those skills. Subsequent classes had a broader focus, mirroring the workings of an integrated product team (IPT), which allowed the interns to work together in their functional training and gain insight into all acquisition disciplines. Thus they could appreciate the complexity of each discipline and become critical thinkers and effective communicators and problem-solvers in an IPT.

The benefits of such a program are not just the intensive intern training. The PEO’s senior engineers, contracting officers, project directors, financial analysts and logisticians delivered much of the training, requiring them to brush up on the latest policies and to develop briefings for the interns. This knowledge refresher further enhanced their skill sets and those of their team members.

PEO STRI postponed additional academy classes in 2014, but it has recently kicked off discussions to reinstitute the program in FY18 to fill functional shortages and gaps in the workforce. The next class will be conducted on a smaller scale, with eight interns, and will once again leverage Section 852 funds to cover salaries for the new employees in its critical functional areas.

Recommendation

The acquisition academy all about growing the acquisition workforce, developing leaders and providing the best products and tools to the warfighter. Any PEO could use such a program to help ensure an adequately staffed, high-quality, educated and motivated workforce.

KEEPING THE SIGNAL STRONG
Soldiers from the 82nd Airborne Division use the Warfighter Information Network-Tactical (WIN-T) Joint Network Node (JNN), left, and Satellite Transportable Terminal (STT), right, during an expeditionary network demonstration in March 2016 at Fort Bragg, North Carolina. Despite staffing shortages, the rapid acquisition JNN-N delivered greatly enhanced beyond-line-of-sight communications capabilities to the warfighter in less than a year. (U.S. Army photo by Amy Walker, PEO C3T Public Affairs)

LEVERAGE OTHER ORGANIZATIONS’ SKILLS

LL_772: To overcome the challenges of staffing a program office for rapid acquisition, outsource activities to related organizations when additional help is needed. (SOURCE: Army-contracted RAND Corp. study, “Rapid Acquisition of Army Command and Control Systems,” June 2014)

Background

The Joint Network Node – Network (JNN-N), which provided a communications transport capability based on commercial off-the-shelf equipment and commercial satellites, has earned a reputation as a successful rapid acquisition. Less than a year after the submission of an operational needs statement in 2004, the JNN-N delivered greatly enhanced beyond-line-of-sight communications capabilities to the warfighter. Furthermore, the capability was fielded to almost the entire Army within five years.

The rapid acquisition of JNN-N occurred despite a number of challenges, including staffing. Initially the JNN-N program office had a team of only five or six people, which could not generate the many layers of required documentation and perform other critical duties, such as securing releases, which a traditional acquisition program demands. So the staff outsourced some of these activities to other organizations, such as the U.S. Army Communications-Electronics Research, Development and Engineering Center, when necessary.

This initial supplementation of staff allowed the program office to grow over time as JNN-N increased in scale and moved toward becoming a program of record, Warfighter Information Network – Tactical (WIN-T) Increment 1. By late 2009, the WIN-T Increment 1 product office employed over 200 staff members directly and about 125 contractors and “fielders” supporting the product office’s work.

Recommendation

Program managers (PMs) planning for a rapid acquisition can and should anticipate possible staffing challenges. To prepare for likely staff shortages in particular areas of expertise, the PMs can identify affiliated organizations that could fill the gaps and explore ways to “borrow” staff for the rapid acquisition. By outsourcing, the PM can prevent problems that otherwise would halt a program schedule.

KEEPING THE SIGNAL STRONG
Lt. Col. Mark Henderson, product manager for WIN-T Increment 1, thanks Soldiers from the 82nd Airborne Division in March 2016 for their support with the operational proof-of-concept expeditionary signal modernization capability demonstration at Fort Bragg. PMs can “borrow” staff to fill likely staff shortages in particular areas of expertise. (U.S. Army photo by Amy Walker, PEO C3T Public Affairs)

LL_415: International acquisition teams should be trained and equipped with the cultural skills relevant to their program. DOD resources are available to help develop cross-cultural acumen. (Source: “Are You Ready for an International Program?” Defense AT&L, Jul-Aug 2013)

Background

Cross-cultural acumen— the ability to understand and effectively engage with people from cultures different than our own— is vital to most international programs. Without accounting for cultural differences, it is difficult to establish the trust and credibility to build international relationships.

International partners might not understand U.S. Army processes, regulations, policies and laws and how they often constrain acquisition professionals’ choices. Likewise, Americans often don’t understand some of the national constraints our overseas partners have. The different lens through which each of the partners views the acquisition program has significant implications for the content of acquisition products.

A good example is the design of an operator training program for a Middle Eastern country’s air force. The American model for training U.S. Air Force operators typically would involve a highly structured course with a linear sequence of instruction that allots little or no time to building personal relationships. On the other hand, a Middle Eastern country’s preferred might focus more on how its culture interacts and learns in a group setting. In fact, relationship building should come before conducting any serious business. In one case, cultural ignorance of the importance of these relationships caused such an erosion of trust that it essentially halted a pretty large program for a few years. Regaining this trust and credibility is not easy.

The U.S. Air Force Special Operations School at Hurlburt Field, Florida, teaches cross-cultural communications courses and has proved to be a valuable tool in helping prepare for international interactions. Training like this would be a useful part of the orientation for new hires.

Recommendation

Like the operational community, international acquisition teams should be trained and equipped to appreciate and respect cultural differences that they might encounter in their programs. Many resources are available within the DOD that teams can use, including courses, research papers, briefings and subject matter experts, among other tools. Air University devotes a website (http://www.au.af.mil/culture/usgov.htm) to cross-cultural understanding that includes links to sociocultural and language resources maintained by other services, DOD and other federal agencies such as the U.S. Department of State and the Peace Corps.

Another helpful tool, at the beginning of an international acquisition program, is a formal stakeholder analysis to provide insights into what interests the key partners in the program and what drives them. The tool can capture the future plans and priorities of each participating nation and highlight areas where there is potential alignment to pursue a cooperative or collaborative effort. Don’t assume that newcomers to the international partners program will have the same interests and motivations as their predecessors. The country desk officer at DOD’s in-country Security Cooperation Office, which typically works closely with host nation officials and their staffs, can help acquisition professionals get to know the foreign partner and understand its processes, needs and priorities. Another valuable resource is each service’s international program office.

PUT THE RIGHT PEOPLE IN PLACE

LL_879: PMs who need more Level III-certified personnel with practical experience working the entire acquisition process would benefit from a structured development program.

Background

A constant challenge for Army acquisition PMs is having sufficient personnel who are Level III certified in the acquisition career fields. It is critical that the PM’s staff have applied, not just scholastic, . A former hiring and development process within one program executive office brought people into the PM at an entry-level pay grade (GS-3) and promoted them (typically through GS-11) as they demonstrated ability and gained practical experience in varying roles. The PMs would assign new hires first to acquisition category (ACAT) III projects and later permit them to work on ACAT I programs as they developed in experience and expertise. The PM placed great value on logistics experience and knowledge because many issues in the acquisition process continued from cradle to grave. Developing people using this approach nurtured awareness of what “logistics” really entails.

Recommendation

If you can’t find people with Level III certification and applied knowledge, begin to develop them yourselves. Program offices should welcome the addition of less experienced members of the workforce and nurture their development through assignments on different aspects of Army acquisition programs. Allow these new team members to advance as they add to their expertise through work on a variety of tasks throughout the program management office. Starting a pipeline of home-grown talent will ultimately serve many programs within the Army.

DEVELOPING LEADERS
Top-performing military leaders from 18 organizations across the Pacific Theater gather in January 2016 aboard the USS Missouri at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, for graduation from the Young Alaka’i leader development program. Appreciating and respecting cultural differences that they might encounter in their programs is crucial for international acquisition teams. (U.S. Army photo by Master Sgt. Mary E. Ferguson)

LL_1078: Having the appropriate personnel in the program management office (PMO), functional proponency office and contract support is key for program success.

Background

Personnel challenges affecting management at multiple levels within an Army PMO and its functional proponent caused poor coordination across the program, making it hard to create a collaborative and productive work environment. Some leaders lacked appropriate skills, such as expertise in enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems, ACAT I programs and information technology (IT) systems, while others had poor management skills. Management was seen as micromanaging, unable to organize the workforce needed to accomplish the tasks, and unwilling to take risks. The perception was that it did not plan well for the future of the program and that it sent representatives to meetings without delegating the appropriate authority to them.

When the program began, the personnel on board did not have experience with ERP programs and did not look to other ERP programs for guidance. There was no plan for acquiring the necessary personnel for the PMO, and only 14 of 33 Table of Distribution and Allowances spots were filled as DOD hiring and grade freezes and sequestration prevented the PM from hiring, moving or promoting personnel for several years. Program challenges during that time frame included development and testing of initial system increments, source selection for a follow-on increment and the compilation of 20 acquisition documents to support the upcoming milestone B decision. Most of the PMO staff were supporting all three of these actions in parallel.

Once hiring could take place, the PMO hired several research and development personnel contracted earlier using federal funds, and transitioned systems engineering and technical assistance contractors to government civilian employees. Hiring practices, such as veterans’ preference, caused delays as the PMO had to go through the difficult process of denying veterans who applied for the jobs but were not necessarily qualified.

The PMO also had trouble getting appropriately experienced personnel from the functional proponent. The PMO needed technical subject matter experts from the legacy systems who understood how to generate, manage and store the data. However, the functional proponent provided end users who could interface with the source systems and had an operational perspective on their use but did not understand the underlying structure and processes. As a result, the program needed the reach-back capabilities of legacy contractors, who usually have no incentive to support the new program. Fortunately, some legacy system personnel relocated to the PMO and were able to reach back to the legacy contractor to acquire required information.

Recommendation

Acquisition programs need to have the right people in the right places, including leaders with the appropriate personality traits and management skills (collaborative, communicative, willing to delegate authority). Programs need a plan for acquiring qualified personnel with the appropriate expertise. Since it can be challenging to induce qualified personnel to relocate to join new programs, it may be necessary to allow personnel to work remotely. In addition, the PMO needs to tackle cultural issues among program personnel at the beginning of the program’s life cycle.

After more than three years as a regular feature in Army AL&T magazine, this “Ground Truth” column of Army acquisition lessons learned concludes the series. “Ground Truth” first appeared in April – June 2014 to offer our readers lessons learned that the Army had collected via its Acquisition Lessons Learned Portal (ALLP). Since then, it has proved a popular feature. Based on readers’ nominations, “Ground Truth” was the runner-up for the magazine’s 2015 ALTies Award for best article. (See “Ground Truth: Harnessing lessons learned through Better Buying Power initiatives,” April – June 2015.) The Center for Army Acquisition Lessons Learned in the Acquisition Support Branch of the U.S. Army Materiel Systems Analysis Activity, which launched the ALLP in October 2012, is relinquishing the mission of analyzing acquisition lesson submissions as the Office of the Assistant Secretary of the Army for Acquisition, Logistics and Technology re-evaluates its processes for gathering and applying lessons learned. Possible capabilities to replace the ALLP are currently under discussion.

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

This article is scheduled to be published in the July-September 2017 issue of Army AL&T Magazine.

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

ONLINE EXTRAS

Synopsis of “Rapid Acquisition of Army Command and Control Systems,” RAND Corp., June 2014

“Are You Ready for an International Program?” Defense AT&L, Jul-Aug 2013:

COMMAND/ORGANIZATION: Unmanned Aircraft Systems Project Office, Program Executive Office for Aviation
TITLE: Chief, Acquisition Management Branch; Supervisory Procurement Analyst, Business Management Division
YEARS OF SERVICE IN WORKFORCE: 12
YEARS OF SERVICE IN MILITARY: 15
DAWIA CERTIFICATIONS: Level III in contracting
EDUCATION: Master of public administration, Troy University; B.S. in business and communication, West Texas A&M University
AWARDS: Superior Civilian Service Award; David Packard Excellence in Acquisition Award as a member of the Defense Energy Support Center’s Operation Iraqi Freedom Bulk Helium Support Team; Defense Meritorious Service Medal; Air Force Meritorious Service Medals; Air Force Commendation Medals; Air Force Achievement Medals

MAXIMIZING CAREER OPPORTUNITIES

by Ms. Susan Follett

Stefanie A. “Alix” Gayton really got a lot out of the Senior Service College Fellowship (SSCF) program. In addition to honing skills that help with leadership, planning and decision-making, the program helped her find her current position: chief of the Acquisition Management Branch for the Unmanned Aircraft Systems (UAS) Project Office within the Program Executive Office for Aviation and supervisory procurement analyst in the Business Management Division.

SSCF coursework included actual acquisition cases, including sessions on UAS. SSCF Director Diane Whitmore “said that previous fellows would ‘leap tall buildings’ for an opportunity to work for the UAS program office,” said Gayton. So when a job there opened up, Gayton grabbed it. PM UAS is “the eyes of the Army,” she said, “and as a career acquisition workforce member, it just doesn’t get better.”

PM UAS supports five unmanned platforms, each with variants, as well as supporting system equipment, including Gray Eagle, Hunter, Warrior Alpha/Gray Eagle, Shadow, Raven and Puma as well as the One System Remote Video Terminal, the Tactical Open Government Architecture Controller and the Universal Ground Control Station. Gayton leads a team that coordinates contract requirement packages and critical components of contract packages for more than 90 PM UAS requirements for seven products across five product offices. Those contracting requirements support research, development, test and life cycle efforts for the UAS family of systems, which totals approximately 8,200 unmanned aircraft.

For Gayton, Soldier feedback is a vital part of her team’s success—even if that feedback is collected in some unlikely places. Gayton was on hand recently when Jason Lucas, chief engineer for the Shadow UAS Product Office, demonstrated a Shadow Tactical UAS to visiting grade-schoolers. As the Shadow launched and circled the area, Lucas explained the latest set of technical upgrades that Gayton and her team are working to place on contract and eventually field to the Soldier. “I could see through the demo how technical enhancements make a difference to those deployed in a war zone,” she said.

She also had the chance to gather Soldier feedback during an event commemorating the 2 millionth flight hour for the Hunter UAS. The Hunter has been used by Soldiers for more than 21 years, and although it’s old compared to other UAVs, feedback indicates that Hunters are accessible, reliable and well-supported by the Army contractors deployed downrange. “I spoke with one Soldier who said that his unit could not get enough Hunters and Hunter flying hours,” said Gayton. “Connecting my place in the mission and my team’s contributions to the Soldier brings clarity to the choices we make, the passion we bring to the job and the focus we maintain toward achieving objectives.”

Gayton got her start in military acquisition with the Air Force. Joining in 1984, her initial assignment was buying B-52 spares as a contracting officer with the Oklahoma Air Logistics Center at Tinker Air Force Base, Oklahoma. She served for 15 years, with her Air Force service culminating in a post as the base contracting officer for Ellsworth Air Force Base, South Dakota, during the B-1B bomber bed-down, the stand-up of the Strategic Warfare Center Bomb Scoring Range and the decommissioning of the Minuteman Missile Wing. She transferred to the Air Force Medical Service Corps in 1990, working as a hospital resource manager, medical logistician and patient administration officer as well as awarding and improving the performance of medical contracts.

She retired from the Air Force as a major in 1999 and accepted her first civil service position as the deputy director for acquisition management at the Defense Health Agency in 2000. She moved to Army acquisition in 2009, starting as a procurement analyst for the Mission and Installation Contracting Command (MICC) at Fort Sam Houston, Texas, and chief of staff for MICC Director Dr. Carol Lowman. “When I first interviewed at MICC, I was incredibly impressed by Dr. Lowman’s vision for the MICC as a learning organization. She described her goal to create a future where every workforce member is a leader; every leader continually expands their capacity to create the results they desire; and where people are continually learning to see the whole picture together.”

For Gayton, SSCF participation was a “fantastic opportunity” for developing her career. “Our SSCF advisers told my class that the coursework and introspection the class provides is intended to ‘open the aperture’ of the leaders who complete the process. It worked—I loved the program.” She noted that her career also benefitted from positions to which she was assigned—positions she refers to as “not volunteered but volun-told.” Most required her to backfill an unexpected retirement or vacancy and took her outside of her comfort zone. “I’ve grown more than I ever imagined” from those spots, she said. “It’s a scary ride, but has always been well worth it.”

She’s quick to note that mentors have also had a big role in her career development, including Maj. Gen. Kirk Vollmecke, MICC commander who nominated Gayton for the SSCF, and SSCF coaches and mentors Whitmore, Marian Guidry and Dr. Jerry Davis. “My current supervisor, David Lancaster, drives the PM UAS Business Management Division to take ‘what is’ and make it better,” she said. She also noted the impact of Col. Courtney Cote, project manager for the UAS Project Office. “His philosophy is servant leadership, and he demonstrates it in his investment in long-term acquisition solutions, leader development and his mantra: ‘Let’s go do it for the Soldier.’ ”

She added, “One of my early mentors told my team that if we couldn’t describe what we did to make a Soldier’s life a little better every day, then we haven’t earned our pay. For me, this is what leading and serving is all about.”

Gayton meets with members of her team at in the UAS Project Office. From left, David Beddingfield, Lady Pollard, Gayton, Rebekah Massey and Sheila Triplett-Howard. (Photo by Bill Stern, PM UAS)

This article is scheduled to be published in the July-September 2017 issue of Army AL&T Magazine.

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

RDECOM’s STEM outreach program targets students from kindergarten to college

by Ms. Argie Sarantinos-Perrin

Knocking down a stack of blocks, then backing up to switch directions, a robot effortlessly moves around a local school as a group of children watch and wait for their turn to operate the remote control. The children marvel at the hodgepodge of whirring motors, nuts and bolts, the culmination of their hard work in a science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) robotics competition.

Through STEM experiences, competitions and research apprenticeships, the Army Educational Outreach Program (AEOP)—managed by the U.S. Army Research, Development and Engineering Command (RDECOM) on behalf of the assistant secretary of the Army for acquisition, logistics and technology—offers an array of educational opportunities for children from kindergarten through college. As a major subordinate command of the U.S. Army Materiel Command, RDECOM is working with AEOP and its academic and industry partners to develop the workforce of the future.

“Even if students don’t go into a traditional science or mathematics field, formal and informal STEM education helps children develop problem solving and critical thinking skills that will help them in any career field,” said Louie Lopez, chief of RDECOM human capital planning and development and STEM education outreach. “One of our goals is to get children excited about math and science, beginning in kindergarten, so that it will hopefully carry through high school and into college.”

SPLASH, ZOOM
Alfredo Ramirez, a volunteer from the U.S. Army Test and Evaluation Command, helps Ayrika Anderson from White Station Middle School, Memphis, Tennessee, at a recent eCybermission event. Army volunteers are key to the success of the AEOP—in 2016, more than 800 helped mentor competitors and judge solutions to community problems in the “world’s largest online science fair.” (Photo by Conrad Johnson, RDECOM)

According to the 2015 results of the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA), students in the United States scored 496 in science literacy—lower than 18 education systems worldwide. Students in Singapore had the highest score, 556, and the Dominican Republic the lowest, 332.

The PISA, which is administered to 15-year-old students every three years, evaluates education systems worldwide in science, mathematics, reading, collaborative problem solving and financial literacy. More than a half-million students in 72 countries took the two-hour test in 2015. The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, which promotes economic growth, prosperity and sustainable development, sponsors PISA.

Mathematics literacy is even lower for students in the United States. Students scored 470, placing them squarely in the middle, below 36 other education systems. Students in Singapore again earned the highest score, 564, and students in the Dominican Republic again had the lowest, 328.

The Army has supported STEM educational opportunities for more than 50 years. While previous efforts were funded through grants and contracts, AEOP, which was formed in 2004, awarded a cooperative agreement award in 2010 to ensure a cohesive and collaborative approach to its programming, leveraging expertise from academia, industry and nonprofit organizations. In 2015, AEOP re-competed the cooperative agreement. The new cooperative agreement was awarded to Battelle and its consortium partners from academia, industry and non-profit organizations. RDECOM represents the Army science and technology community on the AEOP consortium on behalf of the deputy assistant secretary of the Army for research and technology.

“One of my first events was a STEM night in Cecil County, Maryland, where I saw folks from across the command giving a demo with a hands-on experiment,” said Juju Hewitt, former RDECOM executive deputy to the commanding general. “To see and feel that energy is so uplifting, and these one-day STEM events are key to promoting a more sustained STEM engagement such as AEOP.” Hewitt, who recently retired from government service after 38 years, had oversight of the Army STEM program when he joined RDECOM in 2013.

HAPPENING NOW: SCIENCE
A student conducts an experiment at a 2016 STEM Expo held at Aberdeen Proving Ground (APG), Maryland. The Army’s efforts to encourage STEM literacy are multipronged, including one-day events like the expo along with ongoing mentorship. Numerous organizations in the APG community meet to collaborate, discuss upcoming events and share best practices in STEM outreach and education. (Photo by Conrad Johnson, RDECOM)

AEOP activities rely on adult participation, including Army scientists and engineers who serve as mentors, judges, presenters and teachers. In 2016, these mentors worked in STEM events with almost 31,000 AEOP students in the U.S., Europe, Asia, Australia, American Samoa, Guam and the Virgin Islands, as well as military dependents from DOD Educational Activity international schools, which are run by or sponsored by the DOD, based on the number of military dependents who attend those schools.

“Engaging world-class scientists and engineers who work in our state-of-the-art research laboratories and engineering centers to mentor AEOP activities is a unique aspect that the Army offers to STEM education,” said Lopez. Students often work alongside Army engineers and scientists in labs on research projects. Many of the 135 universities and colleges that partner with AEOP offer research apprenticeships that expose students to unique STEM learning experiences.

RDECOM, based at Aberdeen Proving Ground (APG), Maryland, also collaborates with local STEM efforts like the Defense Threat Reduction Agency’s Joint Science and Technology Institute, a two-week residential research program that enables high school students and select teachers to work in world-class labs at APG. The Communications-Electronics Research, Development and Engineering Center at APG offers real-world paid internships in science and engineering for students who are 16 or older. At the end of their internship, the students, who work with professional engineers and scientists, present their research to APG leadership and local industry partners.

In addition to educating students about fundamental STEM skills, there are other benefits to mentoring, including teaching children about the science culture and the importance of honesty, integrity and objectivity in scientific research. It also teaches children how to compete; many of the programs, such as AEOP’s eCybermission competition, are competed at state, regional and national levels.

THE VICTORIOUS CHICAS
From left to right, Jyuji Hewitt, Frank Bohn, Ingrid Rapatz-Roettger, Janat Khan, Luz Figueroa-Rodriguez, Janeliz Guzman Acevedo, Bria Roettger, Sgt. 1st Class Jose Roldan, Command Sgt. Maj. James Snyder and Sgt. 1st Class Ernest Robledo. Khan, Figueroa-Rodriguez, Acevedo and Roettger, sixth-graders from Puerto Rico, make up Team Las Chicas and won the eCybermission national competition in 2016 for their work on an interactive website that serves as a warning system for people in their community who suffer with respiratory issues from the effects of Saharan dust. (U.S. Army photo)

ECybermission, a web-based STEM competition for students in grades six through nine, is one of the AEOP’s largest efforts. Dubbed the “world’s largest online science fair,” the program, which is in its 14th year, involved 20,607 students and 802 team advisers in 2016. Using either a scientific method or the engineering design process, teams of three or four students propose a solution to a real problem in their communities and compete for state, regional and national awards and recognition.

In 2016, a team of sixth-graders from Puerto Rico won the eCybermission national competition for their work on an interactive website that serves as a warning system for people in their community who suffer with respiratory issues from the effects of Saharan dust. (Trade winds blow dust from the Sahara Desert approximately 7,000 miles to Puerto Rico and other areas, carrying fungi and other particles that affect people with respiratory issues like asthma.) The four-girl team worked with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration to observe and analyze the current Saharan dust levels through satellite data or imagery. They used the information to create graphs, essays and surveys, which were shared online with their local community.

ECybermission is administered by the National Science Teachers Association (NSTA), which is a member of the AEOP consortium. The NSTA works with science teachers to define the next generation of each state’s math and science standards and mission objectives, as well as common core standards that outline what students should know and be able to do at the end of each grade in mathematics and language arts.

SCOUTS DO STEM
At APG’s annual STEM in Scouting Day, scouts have an opportunity to earn merit badges in various STEM categories. APG volunteers, including scientists, engineers and chemists, work with the scouts to cultivate critical thinking skills that will enable them to be more competitive in the workforce. (Photo by Tom Faulkner, RDECOM)

At the conclusion of eCybermission 2016, Purdue University, which conducts AEOP evaluations year-round, issued a report that addressed questions related to the program’s strengths and challenges, benefits to participants and the overall effectiveness in meeting AEOP objectives. The report was compiled using student and team adviser questionnaires, student and team adviser focus groups, observations of the national judging and educational event and the eCybermission annual report.

Purdue is also conducting a longitudinal study to evaluate the impact of AEOP on participants’ professional careers, as well as their career path over five to seven years. According to this year’s report, 97 percent of AEOP alumni are interested in pursuing STEM careers, and 52 percent remain connected with their mentor after their AEOP experience has ended.

Students are also measured on their knowledge of Army and DOD STEM careers. “Students often believe that they need to join the Army and become a Soldier to have a government career, so part of the outreach involves educating the general public about the various student opportunities in STEM, the great work that our civilian scientists and engineers do in support of our Soldiers and our nation, and the various government career paths and job opportunities,” said Lopez.

CONCLUSION
While the Army has responded to the critical need for an agile and resilient STEM workforce, diversity remains an issue. According to the Purdue 2016 eCybermission report, gender distribution was balanced—40 percent of participants were male and 51 percent were female. Ethnicity, however, was unbalanced—49 percent of the participating students were white, 18 percent were Latino and 8 percent were African-American.

HANDS-ON LEARNING
Boy Scouts from Maryland and surrounding states participate in the October 2016 STEM in Scouting Day at Aberdeen Proving Ground, the largest scouting STEM event of its kind in the nation held on a military installation. Even if event participants don’t go on to careers in STEM or with the military, AEOP’s outreach helps build literacy in science and math, where U.S. students trail their peers in other countries. (Photo by Tom Faulkner, RDECOM)

The Army is working to close the minority gap with events such as the annual Black Engineer of the Year Awards (BEYA) and the Hispanic Engineer National Achievement Awards Corp. During the 2017 BEYA, more than 100 scientists and engineers from DOD received awards and special recognition honors. The BEYA conference also teaches students about STEM careers in all service branches and encourages young professionals who attend the event to network with recruiters.

Networking may be key to hiring professionals with strong STEM skills to fill vacancies that may occur in the next five years, when close to 40 percent of the RDECOM workforce is eligible to retire. “We need to be heavily invested in building the future talent to allow the Army, the Department of Defense and the defense industrial base to have enduring access to homegrown U.S. talent,” said Lopez.

For more information, go to www.usaeop.com.

MS. ARGIE SARANTINOS-PERRIN, a public affairs specialist for Huntington Ingalls Industries – Technical Solutions Division, provides contract support to RDECOM. She holds an M.S. in professional writing and a B.A. in mass communications from Towson University. She has 11 years of public affairs experience supporting DOD.

This article is scheduled to be published in the July-September 2017 issue of Army AL&T Magazine.

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

The Army’s new director of operations at the Rapid Capabilities Office arrived at his post from the Army’s Talent Management Task Force. He discusses how the Army views, gets and keeps the talent it needs.

by Ms. Nancy Jones-Bonbrest

Maj. Gen. Wilson “Al” Shoffner Jr.

After spearheading the Army’s Talent Management Task Force since May 2016, Maj. Gen. Wilson “Al” Shoffner Jr. joined the Army Rapid Capabilities Office (RCO) as director of operations in April. At first glance, there may not seem to be an obvious link between his former assignment and his new one. After all, one is focused on maximizing individual capability to meet Army personnel needs, while the other is focused on expediting critical technologies to the field to counter urgent and emerging threats. Yet a closer look suggests comparisons. Both entities were launched to provide a “bridge” between what is existing and what is needed so that the Army can meet the nation’s current and future security demands.

For the Army’s Talent Management Task Force, this work centers on integrating and synchronizing efforts to create a more deliberate talent management system. The task force knows that the Army must evolve rapidly from an industrial-age personnel system to keep pace with today’s best practices.

In much the same way, the RCO rejects a one-size-fits-all approach to modernization. Recognizing that today’s threats are evolving faster than the traditional acquisition process can often support, the RCO is tailoring solutions and delivering prototypes to the field. By using prototypes, the Army can focus capabilities as small-scale, threat-driven projects that it can deliver to Soldiers for rapid deterrence and feedback. Maybe the capability helps evolve a program of record for the full Army, or maybe the Army moves on to a newer, better technology. Either way, it knows quickly in which direction to move, and it can move faster.

With only a few days in as RCO director of operations, we asked Maj. Gen. Shoffner if he would be willing to share his insight into talent management as well as his expectations for the RCO. Without hesitation, he took the opportunity to bridge the two communities and introduce himself to the world of acquisition.

Nancy Jones-Bonbrest: You came to the Army Rapid Capabilities Office after serving as director of the Army’s Talent Management Task Force, and as part of a long operational career. How has your previous experience shaped your view of Army acquisition?

Shoffner: I’ll answer that question in two parts. For the first, I’ll reflect back on some of my operational experiences in both Iraq and Afghanistan. I think it is becoming increasingly obvious that over the past 15 years, we as an Army have been focused on winning the current fight, and during that period of time our [traditional] adversaries [e.g., Russia, China] have taken advantage of our focus being elsewhere. They have started to develop capabilities that really get at our core strengths.

Also, over the past couple of decades, the rate of change for technology has increased. It’s not just Moore’s Law, where every 18 months the processing power doubles—it’s even faster than that. And so if you think about those two factors taken together, that’s what has resulted in us being in the situation we are in now, where there are some gaps between what we need to be able to do and what our adversaries are able to do. So the Rapid Capabilities Office has been established to help mitigate those gaps. We also have to do more than that; just closing those gaps is not enough. We’ve got to make sure we don’t find ourselves in this position five, 10, 20 years from now.

Fundamentally, on talent management, what we are trying to do is move from an industrial-age system where we looked at people as interchangeable parts to a modern, 21st-century system where we are managing individual talent. One of our strengths as a nation for so long has been our ability to innovate and innovate faster. So as it relates to the acquisition community, we are looking to people who have that innovative spirit and who can help us figure out how to close those gaps in short order without having to wait seven to 10 years to field a new system. That’s why, with the Rapid Capabilities Office, what we are looking to do is to prototype systems to get them out there very quickly, to get them out to exercises and learn from those experiences so we can make adjustments and field the systems as quickly as possible.

RIGHT SOLDIER, RIGHT JOB, RIGHT TIME
Shoffner’s experience leading the Army Talent Management Task Force informs his approach to the challenge of getting Soldiers what they need quickly. Just as the Army’s talent management strategy aims to identify, attract and keep people who are innovative and can help the Army close capability gaps sooner rather than later, the RCO seeks to prototype systems and quickly test them in operational exercises and then adjust the systems accordingly before fielding them to Soldiers. (Image courtesy of Army Talent Management)

Jones-Bonbrest: What did you learn at the Army’s Talent Management Task Force that can be applied to the Army Acquisition Workforce?

Shoffner: I’ll start with how we define talent in the Army. We don’t see talent as one single thing that you can put your finger on. It’s the combination of a lot of things—it fundamentally is the combination of an individual’s knowledge, skills and behaviors. Key to this, though, is that these are shaped over a lifetime. It does include experiences people have in the military, but also includes all the experiences they have outside the military: where they went to school, where they grew up. It’s what their hobbies are, what they are passionate about, how they think. The thinking part is really, really important. Obviously we can measure cognitive ability. We have tests, assessments that get after noncognitive ability, but what we are really looking for are people who are critical thinkers, people who are innovators and people who have nonlinear problem-solving skills.

As you think about the acquisition workforce, we know those skills and talents are out there. In some cases, it may not be someone who is a DA civilian, it may not be somebody wearing a uniform—it may be talent in industry that we are trying to seek and trying to leverage. Part of the challenge with that is, with all our databases and all of our systems, we don’t directly see the talent that is in industry, but that’s why industry partnerships are so critical. And not just with the big defense companies, either—smaller companies also have a role. And sometimes the smaller companies could offer a capability faster than some of the larger ones can.

There is a caution there as well. We don’t want to blindly mimic practices in civilian organizations or in private practice that may not fit the Army’s unique cultural requirements. That is again one of the things the Rapid Capabilities Office is going to help to do, be that bridge with industry and the operational part of the Army.

Jones-Bonbrest: How is Army talent management changing? What were some of the new approaches the task force tried?

Shoffner: The Talent Management Task Force has existed for about 18 months now, and we were starting to pilot a few of the initiatives. One example is a pilot we are about to begin for the cyber workforce. We are actually looking to do a pilot for direct commissioning and bring folks on wearing a uniform to work in our cyber force. This may be folks who are just a few years out of college who already have some experience, and it may be folks who are toward an end of a civilian career. We want to be able to leverage the talent that’s out there throughout the range of experiences. We also want to be able to compensate them appropriately. This direct commissioning authority that was given to us in the last National Defense Authorization Act gives us that for the first time. We are really excited about it, and we’re going to push this pretty aggressively. The goal is to find those folks, to select and hire them, and get them into the training base sometime later this year.

We also tried something fairly innovative where we took a Soldier who was separating at the end of the first term of enlistment, and we brought him on as a DA civilian, a GS-13. Why? We did this because the Soldier wanted to continue to serve, he loved what he was doing and he didn’t want to re-enlist, but he did want to continue to serve and help the team. By bringing him on as a GS-13, we were able to pay him reasonably well and ideally keep him for a career, not just the next term of enlistment. So to me that’s a win in the long term—Soldiers no longer wearing a uniform but still on the Army team.

LOOKING OVER THE HORIZON
Soldiers assigned to 1st Brigade Combat Team, 1st Armored Division scan for potential enemies during Decisive Action Rotation 17-02 at the National Training Center on Fort Irwin, California in November 2016. (Photo by Spc. Michael Crews, National Training Center Operations Group)

Jones-Bonbrest: Do these initiatives apply to the civilian workforce as well, especially in today’s uncertain global security environment when the Army can’t afford to lose top talent?

Shoffner: Some of the things we are learning in other career fields—for example, in cyber—we’ll look for applicability across the workforce. The Acquisition Corps has one of the largest civilian workforces across the Army, and it’s critical we get this right. Looking at talent management across the Army, we’re a little bit ahead on the military side compared to the civilian side. There are some legislative proposals that may come through that would change that somewhat, but whether or not those legislative changes occur, we still have to figure out how to better manage our civilian workforce. I know the assistant secretary of the Army for manpower & reserve affairs looks very closely at this; they started a civilian workforce transformation effort. We’re looking at some other cohorts across the Army to see what best practices we might be able to adapt.

One of the ideas we embrace is this idea of timeline flexibility. We do have the law on the military side, the Defense Officer Personnel Management Act. Obviously many laws govern our civilian workforce, but for both military and civilians, we are trying to figure out how we can allow for some more flexibility. That might be things like allowing folks greater flexibility for education, allowing them time to take a break and do something different, then come back to the workforce. Similarly, some of our former military who are now in the civilian workforce, we’ll look to bring them back—and it could be bringing them back wearing a uniform or bringing them back as a DA civilian. That ties into the whole “Soldier For Life” idea, that we want this interconnected network of current and former Soldiers who all talk to one another, they talk to industry, they are all sharing ideas and thoughts and looking for opportunities to help one another.

Jones-Bonbrest: What are the next steps for the Talent Management Task Force, now that you have moved on to a new assignment?

 Shoffner: Another big milestone for us will be the implementation of the Integrated Personnel and Pay System – Army (IPPS-A), which will actually be fielded first with the Pennsylvania Army National Guard in the summer of 2018. We’ll have a full capability there by 2021. IPPS-A is really important. It does three things for us: It’s a total Army approach with active, National Guard and Reserve; it gives us that talent management capability; and it also gives us auditability. IPPS-A combines 30 different stand-alone data systems, and if you think of what just happened with [the pay controversy at] the California Army National Guard, I think that’s a great example of something we can’t afford to have fail.

Jones-Bonbrest: The Rapid Capabilities Office is still fairly new, having been stood up less than a year ago to rapidly deliver prototype capabilities to counter urgent and emerging threats. What are your goals for the office?

Shoffner: Looking forward, we’re going to leverage currently planned exercises—the Network Integration Evaluation (NIE) 17.2 at Fort Bliss, Texas, this summer will be a big one for us—to get Soldier feedback on urgently needed capabilities. We’ll also be looking at exercises in Europe as opportunities to get some of the prototypes out, especially with regard to electronic warfare. Positioning, navigation and timing (PNT) will be another one that we will put a lot of emphasis on between now and the spring of 2018. Those operational assessments and rapid fieldings are the methods we’ll use to accelerate these prototypes to parts of the world and units out there where we can close those gaps and ultimately deliver overmatch. The other parallel effort is the Emerging Technologies Office, which is within the Rapid Capabilities Office and specifically focused on emerging technologies. They look to find those potential gaps and stop them from forming, so we make sure we are not surprised in the future.

Jones-Bonbrest: Is there anything about Army talent management that surprised you the most when you first got there, or that most people don’t know?

Shoffner: Yes. I think most people think of it as military-officer effort only. It’s not. It’s military and civilian. It is officers, warrant officers and Soldiers. Some people think it’s really about taking care of your best, and that’s talent management. It does include that, but it’s truly much more than that. It’s about maximizing the ability of everyone to contribute in a meaningful fashion. So if I had a bumper sticker it would be: “Right Soldier, Right Job, Right Time.”

Jones-Bonbrest: What’s the bumper sticker for the Rapid Capabilities Office?

Shoffner: Bringing technology to bear before you know you need it.

For more information, go to http://rapidcapabilitiesoffice.army.mil or email the Rapid Capabilities Office at rapidcapabilitiesoffice@mail.mil. For more information on the Army Talent Management Task Force, go to https://www.ipps-a.army.mil/army-talent-management-task-force/.

MANAGING CAPABILITY AND TALENT
Soldiers from Field Artillery Squadron, 2nd Cavalry Regiment conduct new equipment training on the Counter – Unmanned Aircraft System (C-UAS) Mobile Integrated Capability at Grafenwoehr Training Area, Germany. The training, conducted in February and March, put rapidly produced prototypes into the field to close capability gaps of the kind targeted by the Army RCO. (Photo by Sgt. Devon Bistarkey, 2nd Cavalry Regiment Public Affairs)

NANCY JONES-BONBREST is a staff writer for Data Systems Analysts Inc., providing contract support to the Army Rapid Capabilities Office. She holds a B.S. in journalism from the University of Maryland, College Park. She has covered Army modernization for several years, including multiple training and testing events.

This article is scheduled to be published in the July-September 2017 issue of Army AL&T Magazine.

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

Logistics demonstrations ready a suite of tools to improve the Army’s tactical network by inviting Soldiers to test the supporting documents in the fielding package.

by Lt. Col. Mark Henderson

Have you ever gotten frustrated trying to follow inaccurate or confusing directions while troubleshooting your home network? You may feel like tossing the directions and your computer right out the window. Now imagine troubleshooting with ambiguous directions under enemy fire, with your commander standing over your shoulder impatiently waiting for you to get his critical network connection up and running. On the battlefield, clear and accurate technical manuals can be just as important as the capabilities they support.

The Army conducts logistics demonstrations (“log demos”) in part to prevent stressful scenarios like this one. Log demos evaluate and validate the adequacy of system support packages, including training and technical manuals, as part of the acquisition sequence of events when fielding a new capability, or when an existing capability has been significantly enhanced. Log demos reduce fielding risk and Soldier burden by ensuring that units have the logistical capability needed to successfully operate, maintain and troubleshoot the system in the field. Operational readiness is one of the Army’s top priorities, and strong sustainment packages directly support this critical goal.

Additionally, as the Army continues to reduce reliance on contracted field service representative (FSR) support to improve efficiencies, strong system support packages become increasingly important to help fill that void. FSRs troubleshoot, mentor and provide training in both training and field environments, but the Army is moving away from this expensive external support toward a model defined by more organic unit accountability for system sustainment.

SECURING WI-FI
A Delaware Army National Guard 198th ESB Soldier begins tearing down the network stacks used to support secure Wi-Fi capability inside a command post during the WIN-T log demo in February at APG. After the log demo, technical writers updated user manuals with the Soldiers’ feedback and will continue updating them throughout the life cycle of the product. (U.S. Army photo by Amy Walker, PEO C3T Public Affairs)

Project Manager for Warfighter Information Network – Tactical (PM WIN-T), the Army’s tactical network program office assigned to the Program Executive Office for Command, Control and Communications – Tactical (PEO C3T), conducted a successful Soldier-supported log demo for several expeditionary network signal modernization (SigMod) capabilities that are not programs of record at Aberdeen Proving Ground (APG), Maryland, in February. These new tactical network transport systems provide high- bandwidth network connections in small, easy-to-deploy packages. Soldier feedback and results from the log demo will support pilots and material release requirements and will provide additional confidence in the subsequent fielding of these expeditionary network systems.

“Never underestimate the complexity of simplicity,” said Sgt. Lawrence Seeman, who operates and maintains WIN-T Satellite Transportable Terminals for the Delaware Army National Guard’s 198th Expeditionary Signal Battalion (ESB), which supported the SigMod log demo. “It’s the little things, the simple things, that can create a more complicated problem. We are helping to point out any deficiencies in the technical manual so [PEO C3T] can make it more streamlined, functional and easy to follow.”

NETWORKING AN AGILE FORCE

PM WIN-T delivers a powerful “tool kit” of expeditionary line-of-sight and beyond-line-of-sight network capabilities to every echelon and at every stage of operations. In addition, the PM will soon field six SigMod capabilities to augment and expand the transport capability of the tactical network. These capabilities will deliver expeditionary network communication for early-entry units and units at the farthest tactical edge of the battlefield, while reducing size, weight and power needs for increased agility.

The SigMod log demo included four specific SigMod capabilities: Commercial Coalition Equipment (CCE); the Modular Communications Node-Advanced Enclave (MCN-AE); Secure 4G LTE and Secure tactical Wi-Fi. These expeditionary network technologies modernize and extend the Army’s tactical network. Once fielded, they will provide significantly increased capability in small deployable packages that Soldiers can set up and tear down rapidly for improved unit agility, enabling units to apply this new technology where the enemy will least expect it.

The SigMod tool suite includes the versatile CCE, which is packed in an easy-to-deploy, suitcase-sized transit case. The CCE provides secure expeditionary network connectivity for coalition, non-secure internet protocol router, secure internet protocol router and commercial networks. It can be reconfigured rapidly to provide secure tactical access to the coalition or commercial network to support both civil and military operations. Additionally, CCE provides a radio bridging voice cross-banding capability that enables radios on different frequencies, or different equipment like radios or cellphones, to connect seamlessly to one another. This is essential in domestic humanitarian disaster response or coalition operations where countries and organizational entities each use different equipment.

BREAKING IT DOWN, FAST
A Soldier from the Delaware Army National Guard’s 198th ESB breaks down commercial coalition equipment during a PM WIN-T logistics demonstration in February 2017 at APG. The expeditionary tactical network technologies at the center of the log demo are designed to provide significantly more capability in small packages that Soldiers can set up and tear down rapidly. (U.S. Army photo by Amy Walker, PEO C3T Public Affairs).

The MCN-AE uses the same network-agnostic hardware as the CCE, reconfigured to enable intelligence users to connect to all the same resources they would typically expect when using the Army’s separate intelligence network, in this case using a unit’s organic WIN-T tactical network equipment instead. The MCN-AE is significantly smaller than the tactical elements of the Army’s separate Trojan SPIRIT intelligence system (a large truck and trailer) and can be used to augment the intelligence community in areas where the standard equipment is not available.

Secure Wi-Fi uses National Security Agency-approved “commercial solutions for classified” capability to provide secure classified and unclassified Wi-Fi inside the command post. Going wireless can reduce command post setup and teardown times by hours and reduce the amount of cable with protective flooring that needs to be transported from location to location. It can also untethered Soldiers from their workstations for improved collaboration. Most importantly, it reduces network downtime significantly. Units can turn on their Wi-Fi hotspot and see the network come up first instead of last, in minutes instead of hours. Soldiers can stay connected longer when relocating their command post.

The secure 4G LTE capability will support a larger footprint surrounding the command post. This technology will extend the communications flexibility and reduce the weight Soldiers carry as they transition from bulky radios to smartphones.

The WIN-T SigMod tool suite also includes the easy-to-deploy, high-bandwidth terrestrial transmission line-of-sight radio and the range-extending troposcatter transmission capability, each of which will have separate log demos.

All of the SigMod capabilities are designed for simplicity, to make it easier for Soldiers to set up, operate, troubleshoot and maintain. As the Army continues to shrink the number of FSRs in the field, reducing system complexity is key to enabling units to support their own network systems.

THE HUMAN FACTOR

PM WIN-T specifically chose Soldiers from the 198th ESB to support the SigMod log demo in February not only because of the unit’s close proximity to APG, but more importantly, its previous exposure to the SigMod systems as part of a Disaster Incident Response Emergency Communications Terminal (DIRECT) risk reduction event in August 2016. DIRECT leverages the National Guard’s organic WIN-T tactical network equipment together with some of the new SigMod capabilities to link first responders and emergency managers with state and federal authorities during natural disaster, emergency and civil support operations. PM WIN-T will field DIRECT to all states and territories with a National Guard presence. The capability is expected to be fully fielded by 2025, and pilots are underway. The SigMod log demo supports the Army National Guard DIRECT fieldings as well as SigMod fieldings to active Army units in support of military contingencies and humanitarian efforts around the world.

MAKING CONNECTIONS
Soldiers from the 1st Brigade Combat Team, 3rd Infantry Division support a secure Wi-Fi pilot during their National Training Center rotation at Fort Irwin, California, in April. Log demos ensure that units have the logistics capability they need to operate the system successfully in the field. (U.S. Army photo by Amy Walker, PEO C3T Public Affairs)

U.S. Army Training and Doctrine Command capability managers also supported the log demo to ensure that the training and technical manuals provide optimal support to units in the field. Providing solid new equipment training and ensuring that Soldiers remain well-trained throughout a product’s life cycle are vital to the success of any system, and the new expeditionary SigMod capabilities are no exception. The log demo team also included representatives from the U.S. Army Communications-Electronics Command’s Directorate for Safety, who provided system safety releases. Safety requirements and specifications are critical elements of quality assurance both for the execution of the log demo and to ensure proper operation of the capability in the field.

Additionally, since these are commercial off-the-shelf products, industry was on site during the log demo to provide support and insight, as were Army technical writers to help make corrections to the technical manuals and ensure clarity and functionality in the language and graphics.

SETTING THE STAGE FOR FIELDING SUCCESS

In September 2016, months before the log demo, the deputy assistant secretary of the Army for acquisition policy and logistics hosted the operational sustainment review (OSR) for PM WIN-T’s Increment 1 product manager, which manages the SigMod capabilities. Preparation for this intensive logistical review took approximately nine months. The information learned before, during and throughout the OSR helped to reinforce and shape improvements to the sustainment strategy and acquisition approach.

As part of the SigMod log demo, Soldiers received refresher training on the various capabilities to ensure their optimal participation and feedback during the event. Next, they relied on the training and technical manuals to set up the equipment, link to the satellites, and to operate, troubleshoot and tear down each of the systems. Along the way, the Soldiers provided feedback to clarify and correct discrepancies in the technical manuals and ensure that they were functional.

The PM WIN-T log demo team purposely introduced faults into the system, at varying levels of difficulty. The Soldiers were able to follow the troubleshooting guide in the manuals to fix the issues successfully while offering feedback on how to improve or simplify the steps, language, flow charts and graphics.

The trained Soldiers pointed out discrepancies in the technical manuals that could trip up a busy user in the field, such as an instance in the troubleshooting flow chart that pointed the user to the wrong place. Another discrepancy was caught in the technical manual of the 4G LTE system when the team inserted a fault into the system that required a system restart. The technical manual did not state that after fixing the fault, users should wait 10 minutes before restarting—allowing the host server to communicate to the other server any changes to the hard drive to ensure that all the information is saved properly.

ENABLING MISSION COMMAND
The Army’s tactical network leverages WIN-T equipment to enable mission command, situational awareness and secure reliable voice, video and data communications, both on the move in tactical vehicles or inside a command post such as this brigade command at Army Warfighting Assessment 17.1 at Fort Bliss, Texas, in October 2016. (U.S. Army photo by Amy Walker, PEO C3T Public Affairs)

The log demo team was also able to provide information on setup and teardown times, and how fast Soldiers were able to identify and correct issues.

Going through the technical manuals sentence by sentence, word by word, may seem like a lot of extra work, but it can make the difference between a successfully supported system and one that is not.

“It is important that we test the systems thoroughly so the technical manual works the way it’s supposed to work, and if capability does break in the field and Soldiers have to use the technical manual to troubleshoot it, they can get it to work without any problems,” said Sgt. Justin Diamond, senior WIN-T Joint Network Node operator for A Company, 198th ESB.

After the actual log demo event, technical writers updated the manuals with the Soldiers’ feedback. After fielding the capabilities, PM WIN-T will continue to update the manuals throughout each product’s life cycle. Soldiers can request changes or email questions to the PM on items they think may need clarification. Units will have digital access to the manuals, which is more secure and efficient than fielding hard copies and will enable the PM to provide continual updates to the manuals.

CONCLUSION

Log demos may not sound very glamorous, but they play a critical role in the acquisition process and the successful fielding and support of Army capabilities. They reduce fielding risk, increase efficiencies and provide confidence in capability support packages.

The expeditionary SigMod suite of equipment will modernize the network and significantly increase operational flexibility. The WIN-T SigMod log demo reinforced the fact that, having fielded these agile network capabilities, the Army will be able to maintain and support them using the established support package.

“Having us go through the equipment, the training manual and the troubleshooting definitely helps, because Soldiers are the ones using this equipment, so it should be based on our input and not [solely] on that of engineers,” said Sgt. Gina Mazzola, network operator for the 198th ESB. “I appreciate that we had a say in the improvement of these capabilities, especially since it supports our brothers and sisters in arms.”

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

COL. MARK HENDERSON is the product manager for WIN-T Increment 1. He holds an executive MBA with emphasis in information systems management and a master of education with emphasis in counseling and psychology, both from Troy University; and a B.S. in political science and government from Kennesaw State University. He is Level III certified in program management, with master’s certificates in lean six sigma, negotiations, expert selling, applied program management and advanced program management. He is a member of the Army Acquisition Corps.

This article is scheduled to be published in the July-September 2017 issue of Army AL&T Magazine.

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