ACQUISITION PLAYBOOK
Industry plays a key role in this climate of collaboration, Shyu said. “We’re try- ing to communicate more—be a lot more transparent and open with industry—to understand what we can do better.”
During the modernization and other AUSA forums, senior leaders looked at where the Army will be focusing its acquisition efforts, as budgets are cut across the board.
ESTABLISHING PRIORITIES For the Army, the $450 billion in antici- pated DoD-wide spending reductions over 10 years mean cuts of $12 to 14 bil- lion per year, said LTG Robert P. Lennox, Deputy Chief of Staff, G-8. “You can’t draw down your end strength fast enough to offset those cuts. So the brunt of those cuts will come in modernization and training accounts,” he said.
“It’s just math. It’s not scientific. It’s not something we want to do. It’s something, given the numbers, that will likely hap- pen,” Lennox said. At the same time, “We can’t forget that we have Soldiers in combat today. … We have to equip them for the current fight, and we have to make sure they have the best equipment in the world. And as a team, I think we have done a magnificent job of that. We can’t stop.”
The service will be guided in its spend- ing by the Army Modernization Plan 2012 (online at
https://www.g8.army.mil), and by what Lennox called his “seven commandments of a budget-constrained environment” for the Army:
1. Set priorities and stick to them, applying funding cuts first to lower priorities.
2. Revalidate and adjust requirements as needed, and avoid requirements creep.
3. Ensure that affordable requirements are examined at the portfolio level and prioritize within portfolios, a
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team effort of U.S. Training and Doctrine Command (TRADOC) and ASAALT.
4. Use affordability as an independent variable; understand how a program fits in the overall portfolio of Army programs, and make sure costs are constrained.
5. Eliminate redundancies and inefficiencies.
6. Leverage mature technologies and commercial-off-the-shelf products.
7. Manage procurement quantities to the pace of modernization; field the latest technology and capability sets that can be modernized and built while fielding the systems over time.
The Army has intensified its efforts to make S&T investments responsive to the current fight with a new, collaborative pro- cess of identifying high-priority problems on which S&T needs to focus. “Where we really need to apply that is at the small- unit Soldiers, the boots-on-the-ground level,” said Dr. Marilyn M. Freeman, Deputy Assistant Secretary of the Army for Research and Technology. Freeman said that in her 32 years in the S&T arena,
“every time I’ve seen money go down, the first billpayer has always tended to be S&T. And we know that that’s probably not the right answer in this environment.”
Army S&T, with the support of senior leadership, has established a set of seven “Big Army” problems, with 24 specific challenges they pose (online at https://
www.alt.army.mil/portal/page/portal/ oasaalt/SAAL-ZT.) “We know we can’t solve these problems all by ourselves in S&T,” Freeman said, but rather in part- nership with TRADOC and the G-8, among other organizations.
Freeman has committed to identifying funding to address the biggest challenges. The Army laboratories and centers “have
to make decisions within their existing budgets,” she said. “Now that we have S&T priorities, we can go back and we can have a standard to ask ourselves, ‘Is this investment really important?’ … This is a process that we will do every year.”
RESPONSIVE REQUIREMENTS The requirements community, similarly, has adjusted its priorities to make product development more flexible and responsive to Soldiers’ needs, and continues to do so.
“We’ve been changing as we go,” said LTG Keith C. Walker, Deputy Com- manding General, Futures and Director, Army Capabilities Integration Center in TRADOC. “We now write concepts every two years to try to adjust for the changing environment that we face. … We’ve started the effort of not being so over-prescriptive, not boxing ourselves in the corner—to establish requirements that have open architectures, so that you can purchase a first increment of a particular capability and have room to improve that over time.
“If it’s robotics or it’s something that’s high-tech, a network item, if you tried to buy for the whole Army, by the time you did, it would be obsolete before you got 10 brigades fielded,” Walker said. So, in concert with U.S. Army Test and Evaluation Command and the System of Systems Integration Directorate, TRA- DOC takes an incremental approach, “to purchase those most essential capabilities in the priority of those units that need it, and then, for the next brigades that deploy in ARFORGEN [the Army Force Generation process], to get them the next best solution.”
“The most important lesson I think I’ve learned is, the faster you get a capability in the hands of a Soldier in the field, in an operational environment—along with the engineer that developed that capability,
Army AL&T Magazine
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