The Army has begun weeding through its mountain of formal requirements for any equipment or resources — from networks to weapons — it may look to discard due to their stale or outdated nature, top Army officials told Defense News. Simultaneously, the service is beginning to asses what potential modifications may make other resources worth pursuing.
To streamline the strenuous task of combing through its books, the service is employing automation tools, Army Chief of Staff Gen. Randy George said in a recent interview ahead of the Association of the U.S. Army’s annual conference.
In Pentagon-speak, requirements describe desired capabilities that the military wants to have. There’s a sizable bureaucracy in the armed forces devoted to creating and refining requirements, passing them to acquisition specialists as the basis for eventual programs. Lousy requirements have led to billions of dollars wasted in the Army and elsewhere in the U.S. military.
The service’s new process is essentially an Army Requirements Oversight Council event, but in reverse. Instead of approving new requirements, as the panel usually does, the service approves their removal. The Army is calling it CORA, which is coincidentally a backwards “AROC,” but it stands for Continuous Objectives Requirements Analysis, Lt. Gen. Karl Gingrich, Army deputy chief of staff G-8, told Defense News in a separate interview.
The G-8 staff is in charge of matching up various resources with the Army’s plans and strategies. Part of the G-8′s duties is to conduct the AROC process.
CORA is about taking a look at all of the Army’s existing requirements and gauging where money is spent and whether investment should continue, George said.
“Is it additive capability or is it war-winning capability? We need to focus as much as we can on war-winning capability and that obviously requires tough choices,” he said.
“There will probably be some significant decisions on what it is that we’re going to stop doing,” he said.
Yet there are also requirements that may still be valid, but the Army recognizes it needs to change the approach in fulfilling those requirements, George explained.
For example, he said, there are a number of requirements directly related to the network.
As the service works on modernizing the network and its command-and-control systems, “I think we’re learning that we can probably go pretty quick on this given where technology is,” reducing vehicle-sized server stack of yore to a simple app, for example, George said.
So far, the Army has been able to inactivate 52 legacy requirements documents, including the Desert Mobility Vehicle System, the Advanced Anti-tank Weapon System-Heavy, the Vehicle Magnetic Signature Duplicator and Sense and Destroy Armor Artillery Munitions.
The AROC panel also considered inactivating the Standardized Integrated Command Post System, or SICPS, a legacy post which still costs the Army several hundred million dollars across the next five year plan. The Army is planning to review how it can take SICPS funding for redirection opportunities toward higher-priority Mission Command programs.
The Continuous Objectives Requirements Analysis team is now looking at the Army’s Advanced Field Artillery Tactical Data System, or AFATDS, robotics in support of Human-Machine Integrated Formations, legacy wheeled vehicles, and the effort to “fix” command-and-control systems currently in the inventory, known as C2FIX.
“CORA analysis for these topics includes a review of requirement documents within the topic ‘Battlespace’, a validation of associated resourcing, and identification of associated and related documents and resourcing,” a statement sent to Defense News from the Army G-8 office said.
The Army’s effort to clean house on its requirements would be unwieldy, but it is using automation and artificial intelligence capabilities developed through Army Futures Command to look through everything the service has in every database for every program. The algorithm reveals how much money is being spent on systems in detail, how many people are involved and how much is budgeted in the future, according to George.
“We can basically ask it any question. Some people don’t like some of the questions we ask it because they don’t necessarily like the answers,” George said. But, “this gets back to what we’re trying to do … we’re trying to change really fast.”
Yearly, the Army performs what is called a “divestiture AROC,” Gingrich said, where it takes a look at legacy equipment that is no longer valid but still on a unit’s Modified Table of Organization and Equipment, also known as MTOE.
“That’s part of cleaning up our books on the MTOE side,” he added. By contrast, the CORA process looks at the totality of validated Army requirements, some dating back decades.
The program is able to identify requirements that never received resources or against which nothing was ever fielded. It can also find associations to funding streams that are better directed elsewhere, Gingrich explained.
“All of our documents, you can think of PDFs from back in the 1990s all the way up to PDFs today, are very hard to mine that unless you use something like a native language translator and so you essentially use that tool to go through, highlight what documents to look at, and then the human can focus in on that document and make the final assessment,” he said.
While the automation software is used to determine CORA candidates, the capability is also helping the Army’s Strategic Portfolio Analysis Review process and designing five-year funding plans.
“Across the entire Army, we’re trying to embrace automation,” Gingrich said.
Jen Judson is an award-winning journalist covering land warfare for Defense News. She has also worked for Politico and Inside Defense. She holds a Master of Science degree in journalism from Boston University and a Bachelor of Arts degree from Kenyon College.
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