‘WIN IN A COMPLEX WORLD’—BUT HOW?


A QUESTION OF RISK


SGT Brandon Jackson, right, mail transport NCO, and SPC Erik Townsend, mail transport driver, both of the 10th Special Troops Battalion, secure a load of mail May 11, 2014, at Bagram Airfield, Afghanistan. Mail is one of the many commodities distributed to units in theater via ground convoy, which raises strategic risk. The AOC looks at capabilities that would allow the Army to simultaneously reduce tactical and strategic risk, such as in autonomous operations. (Photo by SGT Michael Selvage, 10th Sustainment Brigade Public Affairs)


program of record, which is focusing on filling this gap, and exploit


this oppor-


tunity—because if I change my concept and do business this way, I don’t have to worry about the gap.


I come from an armored cavalry back- ground, and at one point we had a lot of blacksmiths in the cavalry back then, and you could say maybe a gap analy- sis then was that


the horseshoes were


wearing out too quickly, we need new horseshoe technology. And so we have a program of record on new horseshoes. We’re working on it, we’re training the blacksmiths to be better at putting nails


112 Army AL&T Magazine


in and shoeing the horses, but then all of a sudden there’s this new technology called the internal combustion engine, and now is the opportunity to exploit [it]. But I don’t have the internal com- bustion engine in the POM, I have this gap in horseshoes, and until I fill this gap in horseshoes I don’t have money to put into internal combustion engines. Whereas, when the internal combustion engine comes on the horizon, maybe I say, “Te program of record on horse- shoes, I just need to kill that program and start focusing on the internal com- bustion engine.” Tat is very difficult to do. We don’t have an institutionalized


January–March 2015


way to look at opportunities, and we def- initely don’t have a way to exploit them.


ARMY AL&T: How do the capabilities of the future force translate into reform- ing, or better managing, the bureaucracy, so that the Army can really innovate and drive change based on the AOC?


PERKINS: Te Army is a big bureau- cracy. TRADOC is a big bureaucracy, the Acquisition Corps is a big bureau- cracy. I tell folks if you want to change things, one of the most important things is, you have to pay attention to what metrics you use. I find metrics


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