I’M VERY PLEASED AND VERY PROUD OF THE COMMUNITY AND OF ALL THE PEOPLE WHO REALLY WORKED THEIR TAILS OFF TO MAKE THIS CHANGE HAPPEN. IT’S A BIG CULTURE CHANGE.
I’M VERY, VERY PLEASED WITH LEADERSHIP SUPPORT. THE LEADERSHIP SAID, ‘WE’RE WITH
YOU … AND WE THINK THAT S&T IS IMPORTANT.’
threats, including small arms, indirect fires, air-delivered weapons, and chem-bio effects in austere and restricted terrains.
“We know that it takes 60 to 90 days to set up a combat post or patrol base for a small unit or a company. And for that amount of time, 70 percent of the Sol- diers in the unit or squad or company are involved in that process, which means only 30 percent are doing the mission,” Freeman noted.
“By FY17, the objective is to increase Soldier availability for the mission tasks, versus setup and security tasks to 50 per- cent. … I want a program that does that.” The program’s metrics will be how much time setup and security take, how much manpower they require, and the protec- tion capability, Freeman said.
AFFORDABILITY Every one of the challenges identified for Army S&T is achievable, Freeman said. Whether they are all affordable will depend on the programs developed to achieve them.
In the case of force protection, “the technical people who put the program together … may come back and say, ‘You know, as hard as we try, we can’t get [the setup time] down to 30 days; we can get it to 45. We can’t get [the percentage of
Soldiers involved] down to 50 percent; we can get it down to 60.’
“From a leadership perspective, is that enough of an improvement to spend money on? My guess is, the answer to a lot of these questions would be yes. But our question back to the people pro- posing the programs is, ‘Why can’t you get it to 30 days? What’s keeping you, what’s the technical barrier?’ That will help focus our 6.2 resources as we work through this process.”
Or the barrier could be a lack of resources—people and time.
Freeman said that she has committed to the four-star Army S&T Advisory Group that the Army S&T budget will fund at least the top five challenges, more if pos- sible. The two-star Army S&T Working Group will play a key role in making deci- sions about possible trade-offs, she said.
It is also possible, for the first time, that Army S&T can propose unfunded but validated priorities in the POM process, she said.
Manpower cuts, however, could jeop- ardize action on the high-priority S&T challenges, Freeman said. “In order to bring these things to fruition, you have to have the scientists and engineers
”
with the experience across the disci- plines, and working with Soldiers and in the laboratories.”
S&T programs and organizations tend to be an easy target for budget-cutters, Free- man noted, “because they are considered farther-term things,” not for their impact in solving near-term problems.
Freeman is determined to change that way of thinking. “Somebody said, ‘You know, what you’re really proposing is to go back to where we were before and around World War II, when the science and technology community was highly respected as being the problem solvers for the country.’
“That’s what I want to do. That’s what our value is, not just in doing activity and spending money, but solving prob- lems—solving them in the near term, then solving them in the mid-term, and then setting the conditions in the far term for the capabilities we as a Nation want to have. That’s the excitement of doing S&T. That’s what makes it fun; that’s what makes it matter.”
PARTNERSHIPS In addition to technology and resources, an essential precursor to achieving the challenges will be collaboration, Freeman said. “And it may or may not be tradi- tional linkages.”
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SCIENCE & TECHNOLOGY
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