Tat was really unfortunate,” Miller said. Similar legal concerns—some of them unfounded, DOD acquisition leaders have stressed—have discouraged Army officials from sharing information on program plans with industry in the past.
“Te Army leadership and the Army law- yers really need to break the code on that,” Miller said.
CONCLUSION Still,
in the ongoing development of
acquisition as a team sport, both the roster and the rules show distinct improvement, and nowhere is this more evident than in the process of generating requirements. It is not the only arena in which the rules of the game are changing, but it is arguably the most closely watched—by the Army’s combat and requirement developers, their partners in industry and academia and, most important, the Soldiers and their leaders who will take the products of those requirements into battle. “We do want to innovate faster, and we do want to provide capabilities to Soldiers and units more quickly,” Dyess said.
“Tis maturing process that we’ve gone through as a team between industry and the Army is starting to make [the require- ments process] better,” Miller said. “I would call it changing. It’s been getting better for five or six years, and it’s still evolving. Tere’s still room for us to get better.”
Te testing framework itself is changing as well. While AWFCs continue to steer the prioritization of capabilities, the AWA and NIE events will continue to inform not only the warfighting requirements, but the requirements-generating process.
Te Soldier-led AWA, the first of which took place in October 2016 at Fort Bliss, Texas, has become the Army’s pri- mary means of identifying and assessing
interim solutions to meet the AFWCs, focusing on concepts
and capabilities
in a rigorous and realistic operational environment without the formal testing constraints of the now-complementary NIEs.
Te AWAs and NIEs are both annual events designed to generate Soldier and leader feedback on concepts and capabili- ties that will improve system performance. Both actively involve industry to encour- age private-sector innovation and early collaboration on potential new capabili- ties. Te AWA, however, will maximize collective training resources, joint and multinational interoperability and future force development.
In the end, the principle of rigor behind the requirements-generation process remains the same, Dyess said, because the requirements serve the Soldier: “You have to determine your required capabili- ties, and then from where you are now to where you want to go, those are the gaps. And then you make recommendations on what solutions you can bring to the force in a time period in order to meet those gaps so that we have both overmatch and to not make it a fair fight, because we don’t want a fair fight. We want to have all the advantages to ourselves.”
For more information on ARCIC, the Army’s capability and research and devel- opment needs and its ongoing initiatives to improve requirements generation, go to
http://arcic.army.mil/.
MR. STEVE STARK is senior editor of Army AL&T magazine. He holds an M.A. in creative writing from Hollins University and a B.A. in English from George Mason University. In addition to more than two decades of editing and writing about the military, science and technology, he is, as
EYEING CAPABILITIES
A surveillance system scans for possible enemy aircraft during a training exercise as part of NIE 16.2. Results from the exercise will inform capability and doctrinal enhancements to achieve a less complex and more agile expeditionary mission command network. (U.S. Army photo by Sgt. Jarred Woods, 16th Mobile Public Affairs Detachment)
Stephen Stark, the best-selling ghostwriter of several consumer health-oriented books and an award-winning novelist.
MS. MARGARET C. ROTH is an edi- tor of Army AL&T magazine. She has more than a decade of experience in writ- ing about the Army and more than three decades’ experience in journalism and pub- lic relations. Roth is a MG Keith L. Ware Public Affairs Award winner and a co- author of the book “Operation Just Cause: Te Storming of Panama.” She holds a B.A. in Russian language and linguistics from the University of Virginia.
+
ASC.ARMY.MIL 33
ACQUISITION
Page 1 |
Page 2 |
Page 3 |
Page 4 |
Page 5 |
Page 6 |
Page 7 |
Page 8 |
Page 9 |
Page 10 |
Page 11 |
Page 12 |
Page 13 |
Page 14 |
Page 15 |
Page 16 |
Page 17 |
Page 18 |
Page 19 |
Page 20 |
Page 21 |
Page 22 |
Page 23 |
Page 24 |
Page 25 |
Page 26 |
Page 27 |
Page 28 |
Page 29 |
Page 30 |
Page 31 |
Page 32 |
Page 33 |
Page 34 |
Page 35 |
Page 36 |
Page 37 |
Page 38 |
Page 39 |
Page 40 |
Page 41 |
Page 42 |
Page 43 |
Page 44 |
Page 45 |
Page 46 |
Page 47 |
Page 48 |
Page 49 |
Page 50 |
Page 51 |
Page 52 |
Page 53 |
Page 54 |
Page 55 |
Page 56 |
Page 57 |
Page 58 |
Page 59 |
Page 60 |
Page 61 |
Page 62 |
Page 63 |
Page 64 |
Page 65 |
Page 66 |
Page 67 |
Page 68 |
Page 69 |
Page 70 |
Page 71 |
Page 72 |
Page 73 |
Page 74 |
Page 75 |
Page 76 |
Page 77 |
Page 78 |
Page 79 |
Page 80 |
Page 81 |
Page 82 |
Page 83 |
Page 84 |
Page 85 |
Page 86 |
Page 87 |
Page 88 |
Page 89 |
Page 90 |
Page 91 |
Page 92 |
Page 93 |
Page 94 |
Page 95 |
Page 96 |
Page 97 |
Page 98 |
Page 99 |
Page 100 |
Page 101 |
Page 102 |
Page 103 |
Page 104 |
Page 105 |
Page 106 |
Page 107 |
Page 108 |
Page 109 |
Page 110 |
Page 111 |
Page 112 |
Page 113 |
Page 114 |
Page 115 |
Page 116 |
Page 117 |
Page 118 |
Page 119 |
Page 120 |
Page 121 |
Page 122 |
Page 123 |
Page 124 |
Page 125 |
Page 126 |
Page 127 |
Page 128 |
Page 129 |
Page 130 |
Page 131 |
Page 132 |
Page 133 |
Page 134 |
Page 135 |
Page 136 |
Page 137 |
Page 138 |
Page 139 |
Page 140 |
Page 141 |
Page 142 |
Page 143 |
Page 144 |
Page 145 |
Page 146 |
Page 147 |
Page 148 |
Page 149 |
Page 150 |
Page 151 |
Page 152 |
Page 153 |
Page 154 |
Page 155 |
Page 156 |
Page 157 |
Page 158 |
Page 159 |
Page 160 |
Page 161 |
Page 162 |
Page 163 |
Page 164 |
Page 165 |
Page 166 |
Page 167 |
Page 168 |
Page 169 |
Page 170 |
Page 171 |
Page 172 |
Page 173 |
Page 174 |
Page 175 |
Page 176
