As the military continues to face more asymmetric threats, the Department of Defense is looking more and more towards how it can develop and field solutions faster. The Army is the latest defense component joining the club with its Rapid Capabilities Office, geared towards expediting the fielding of critical technologies to counter threats and remain dominant. The threats take advantage of rapidly evolving commercial technologies that outpace the speed of government bureaucracy, making faster military solutions essential.
The Army Rapid Capabilities Office “will expedite the acquisition of select capabilities to meet soldiers immediate and near term needs and serve as a breeding ground for ideas that enable more agile and innovative acquisitions process,” Army Secretary Eric Fanning, said at a Bloomberg Government event August 31. Told the audience that the office will conduct rapid prototyping and initial equipping capabilities in electronic warfare, cyber, survivability and position, navigation and timing.
The office will also consist of a “short chain of command to make it more agile and responsive in meeting operational demands” with a board of directors he will chair that hopes to meet in the next 30 days for the first time.
“While the Army has been engaged in the last 15 years in a certain type of fight in Iraq and Afghanistan, it’s clear as we watch our adversaries that they have studied our capabilities, they’ve looked for vulnerabilities, they’ve embarked on ambitions modernization efforts to narrow the technological gap between our forces,” Fanning said. “For our commanders in the field today, and from exercises I’ve observed in my travels with the Army, it’s clear that where the Army’s overmatching against a potential adversary is not what it once was and it’s not what it needs to be.”
Fanning highlighted the “rapid” and “capabilities” component the new office will embody. “We also mean it when we say rapid. We’re not aiming for the perfect solution that will field to the entire Army 15 or 20 years down the line,” he said. “This office is focused on closing capability gaps where we know there are technologies out there today that can make a difference inside the Army or out. It will be a direct pipeline that our commanders can access quickly to meet a real demand.”
Fanning added that the office is focused on what it says; capabilities, noting the Army does not want to create new systems or platforms, but rather, turn to the office if a particular capability on a platform is no longer sufficient.
“Over the past several years we’ve learned from what we’ve seen from Russia in Ukraine, later in Syria, and from the different capabilities they’ve brought to the battlefield, we’ve seen the combination of unmanned aerial systems and offensive cyber and advanced electronic warfare capabilities and how they provide Russian forces a new degree of sophistication,” he said. “The type of robust anti-access and area denial capabilities that we’ve seen, which include advanced air defense and mobile gun missile systems that range several hundred kilometers have also diminished our air superiority.”
From a non-state actor perspective, Maj Gen Walter Piatt, director of operations for the office of the Assistant Secretary of the Army Acquisition, Logistics and Technology, told the Bloomberg audience that in Iraq and Syria, commercial technology has produced a contested airspace in that region for U.S. forces, something it has not experienced before. “The enemy is able to rapidly produce and field commercial off the shelf technology with small drones and be able to employ them in a military effective way,” he said. “So that is a needs statement that we have not addressed. We have had dominance in that domain for so long and now because of the rapidly developing commercial technology, they’re using it faster than we are. That’s what this office will bring.”
Fanning added that the Army wants to strip the unnecessary bureaucracy surrounding acquisition as to better empower commanders. Similar efforts have been taken by the Navy with its OPNAV N99 devoted to rapidly prototyping and fielding unmanned systems across all domains to the field as well as the Pentagon’s Strategic Capabilities Office. The Army’s top acquisition official said they work extremely closely with SCO and its director William Roper. “About 40 percent of Will’s activities…are actually focused on Army outcomes…I like to think of his money as my money,” Katrina McFarland, acting assistant secretary of the Army Acquisition, Logistics and Technology, said at the event.
At the heart of the Army’s effort, and the defense community writ large, is the need to address capability gaps in a world that is rapidly changing where technology development does not originate in the government anymore. “I think the biggest challenge for national security in the 21st Century as opposed to the 20th Century is that the things that are most likely to affect the future the most are going to be developed outside of the Defense Department,” Roper said at the Defense One Tech Summit in June.
“There are other examples of where our technological gaps have narrowed creating a more threatening environment for our forces and those of our partners and allies. Far beyond one region or one adversary, the speed of innovation is increasing at an unprecedented rate,” Fanning said. “This increase is occurring both commercially and militarily. We have to compete in a dynamic operational environment where the introduction of new capabilities and technologies by military powers and adversaries is continuous.”
Army gets into the rapid development and prototyping game
