The newly confirmed Army secretary is determined to shorten the time it takes to develop and field new technologies to soldiers.

Mark Esper intends to shrink the time it takes to develop requirements for a weapon system from an average five years to just 12 months, he told the Senate Armed Services Committee Dec. 7.

Secretary of the Army Mark T. Esper.
Secretary of the Army Mark T. Esper.

“The Army is executing eight directives intended to improve our capability and material development process by refining how we generate requirements, improving how we educate the acquisition enterprise, simplifying our contracting and sustainment processes, and evaluating our progress through metrics to enable our ability to deliver capabilities to soldiers faster and more efficiently,” Esper said.

“We intend to reduce the requirements development process from up to 60 months to 12 months or less. This requires Army leadership to be directly involved in making tough choices to divest inefficiencies and reinvest in priorities, which we are committed to doing.”

Several efforts are underway to reform the Army’s acquisition apparatus, including one of the largest organizational shifts in its modern history.

Esper will oversee the creation, already begun, of an Army Futures Command that will consolidate the service’s modernization enterprise under one three-star command. The command will draw from and possibly absorb many of the Army’s current science, technology, research and development organizations.

The new command should be established and running by summer 2018. Within that structure will be six cross-functional teams, each one laser-focused on solving one of the Army’s modernization priorities: long-range precision fires, next-generation combat vehicles, future vertical lift, battlefield networks, air and missile defense and soldier lethality.

To achieve solutions for those capability needs, rapid prototyping and careful investment is key, Esper said. The Army is aligning 80 percent of its $2.4 billion science and technology budget to those six modernization priorities and that funding will be “protected” from cuts, Esper said.

“Improved science and technology governance, and revised transition agreements with material developers, will ensure that we are judicious with taxpayer dollars,” he said. “We have completed science and technology reviews that identified programs to divest, enabling us to realign $1.1 billion in science and technology funding toward the Army priorities.”