WHAT’S COMING NEXT?
A Soldier assigned to the 3rd Cavalry Regiment scans for simulated enemies during Decisive Action Rotation 18-04 at the NTC in February, part of an emphasis on ensuring that warfighters remain ready for current and future contingencies. According to McCarthy, “a critical element to America’s national defense is going to be a modernization program that’s focused against near-peer competitors.” (U.S. Army photo by Spc. Esmeralda Cervantes, NTC Operations Group)
PERMISSION TO INNOVATE
“Te cross-functional team part is easy,” McCarthy said. “You get these subject matter experts from, like, the O-6 [colonel] to O-7 [brigadier general], O-8 [major general] level and they work this, and they perform the rigor and the analytics and they tee up decisions.”
Te challenge, he said, is “upper middle management, senior management—guys like me that … people stay up all night put- ting presentations together for. How do you improve upon that?”
What the Army needs, McCarthy said, is an innovative organi- zation to help “lead weapon systems development, the materiel development and design.”
“Te challenge is, how do you separate concepts from materiel design?” And, “How do you snap-link the big parts of the Army together, or do you take it all out and put it in one place?” Te answer: the Army Futures Command.
RESTRUCTURING, NOT REORGANIZATION Precisely how Army organizations are going to look, or how that snap-linking or putting in one place is going to work, would remain open until announcements were made in Huntsville in March. “Tose are all the things that are being deliberated on right now. We are going to make a decision by the end of February,” McCarthy said in his Jan. 31 interview. “But that’s the hardest part here. If you did nothing at all and you kept
the CFTs [cross-functional teams] today, that’s great, but they report to the vice chief and the undersecretary right now.” Which means that if they do not form the heart of a new Army Futures Command, their authority with all of the other stake- holders is minimal.
McCarthy said that it’s important to get the authorities within each of the disparate commands together to be able to make decisions quickly, which in turn will make modernization hap- pen more quickly.
McCarthy’s background gives him 360-degree perspective and, he said, “helps me to facilitate a good discussion and to ensure that all the stakeholders get to weigh in and make the best- informed decision. But it also helps with the understanding of how to deal with the external stakeholders.” Tat includes not only the bigger, organizational decisions, but the smaller deci- sions on which weapon systems to prioritize. And in that case, there are lots of hoops to pass through.
“We’ve got to get it out of the Army to get it to OSD. We’ve got to get it out of OSD to get it to Congress. We’ve got to negotiate with vendors. I’ve sat at every one of those major angles within the prism, if you will, so that helps a great deal. It helps me be the conductor in the process.”
Tat process now includes shaping how the Army develops the Futures Command. “Normally in government you always hear
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