PROBLEM SET
At the AUSA Annual Meeting, Freeman wants to focus industry’s attention on the top 10 challenges. “I’ve got people building one program for each one of these 10 challenges,” she said. “I’m really interested in the top 10. I want industry to come back and talk to me about what they’re doing in their IRAD [indepen- dent research and development] that can answer these kinds of challenges.
“We can either marry up [the technologies] with the program that has been proposed, or we can use them as a risk mitigation for a technology that we may be pursuing—it may be cheaper or faster—or somebody may come up in the industry and say, ‘I’ve got the IRAD, and I can do the whole challenge.’ In which case, I’m probably not going to invest in it.”
Freeman said that in addition to the Army S&T community and industry, she wants to enlist the potential of small
THE POTENTIAL OF ROBOTICS
CPT Joe Sahl, Special Troops Battalion, 1st Heavy Brigade Combat Team, 1st Armored Division, shakes hands with a robot at the National Training Center, Fort Irwin, CA. (U.S. Army photo by LTC Deanna Bague.)
businesses specifically, using the Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) program and the Rapid Innovation Pro- gram that Congress established in the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2011.
The first S&T programs will be validated at the four-star level in December or January and will then be launched by the laboratories, Freeman said. Collaboration with industry will continue at the proj- ect and product manager level. Industry will have an opportunity to stay abreast of program technology needs through Broad Agency Announcements and such forums as AUSA’s Institute of Land War- fare Winter Symposium and Exposition, Feb. 22-24 in Fort Lauderdale, FL.
FUTURE CHALLENGES Freeman emphasized that “this is not a static set of challenges, and this is not a static set of problems.”
Every year, Army S&T will reevaluate its priorities with guidance from Army leadership, she said. “We are going to be assessing and bringing to leadership the progress against the top 10 of these efforts and each one of those programs. And we’re going to be bringing in the 6.2 things that we found are things we need to work on to do the next round.”
New challenges may arise in the process, Freeman said. “My guess is that the set of seven problems won’t change much over the years, but the challenges might.”
The ultimate test of reinventing Army S&T, Freeman said, “is going to be … actually carrying through, planning the programs, and executing the programs, monitoring the execution and reporting back, and then transitioning them. And I think that there’s a better chance than we’ve ever had before in doing that.
“I’m very pleased and very proud of the community and of all the people who really worked hard 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.’
“To me, what is more important than anything else is the impact of what we do. Not the activity, but the result, and getting those results in the hands of Sol- diers. I’m very, very happy with this first year. It was not easy, but everyone rose to the challenge.”
MARGARET C. ROTH is the Senior Editor of Army AL&T Magazine. She holds a B.A. in Russian language and linguistics from the University of Virginia. Roth has more than a decade of experience in writing about the Army and more than two decades’ experience in journalism and public relations.
80 Army AL&T Magazine
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