Given more time than he likely will have as Army Secretary, Eric Fanning said he would focus on continuing reforms to speed the service’s acquisition process.
“We have made a lot of changes to the acquisition process,” Fanning said during a moderated discussion at the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C. “If I had more time that would be a primary focus to keep working on that. A big part of it is not just changing what we do internally, it is changing how we interact, collaborate, work with those outside the Department of Defense.”
Confirmed in May after a lengthy delay caused by an unrelated political snag, Fanning likely will be out of a job when a new administration takes office in January. Still, Fanning said he would “do this as long as I am needed and then go and catch my breath.”
He is the first Army secretary to serve with expanded acquisition authorities established in the 2016 National Defense Authorization Act and extended also to Chief of Staff Gen. Mark Milley.
Fanning pulled from his experience as undersecretary and acting secretary of the Air Force to establish an Army version of the Rapid Capabilities Office. The RCO is responsible for solutions that can fill identified capability gaps within one to five years.
Fanning admitted that the RCO was jump started after the Russian invasion of Ukraine and the recognition that the U.S. Army was comparatively deficient in areas like counter-unmanned systems, tactical cyber and electronic warfare, among others.
“The Rapid Capabilities Office … really was built on what we were seeing the Russians do with Ukraine and realizing that they had been watching us more closely than maybe we had been watching them, that they had turned into more of a learning organization than they had been during the Cold War and that decisive edge we want in capability maybe wasn’t what we had tracked it to be.”
The RCO will finalize the first round of investments within the next few weeks, Fanning said. They will focus on non-developmental technologies and commercially available alternatives that provide near-term capability improvements for fielded soldiers, he said.
“We’re not going to enlarge the Rapid Capabilities Office to something that can build an entire helicopter,” he said. “But there might be some capability on that helicopter that we need to pull out and accelerate to field it faster for the existing fleet that we’ve got.”
Since his confirmation hearing, Fanning has focused on the capability of the Army as a fighting force rather than the number of soldiers in its ranks. The Army – including the National Guard and Reserve – is on its way to 980,000 soldiers, but that number was decided on before the United States faced the threats now arrayed against it, he said.
“When we targeted this 980,000 total Army, Russia wasn’t being as provocative as it is now,” Fanning said. “China wasn’t flexing the way it is now. ISIL didn’t exist as it does today. And now you have all those requirements levied on top of the force structure we were aiming towards.”
Requirements that the Army fight terrorism while being prepared to fight a near-peer adversary will endure and the Army must adapt, Fanning said. But simply mandating an increase in endstrength – more accurately an arrest of the ongoing reduction in force – as some lawmakers have suggested, would harm the Army without a substantial increase in funding to train those soldiers and provide them with modern equipment, he said.
“A raw number doesn’t necessarily tell what an army is, what capability that army brings to a fight,” he said. “It’s very important that we think in terms of a balanced program. It’s not just people. It’s people that are trained and equipped. If we’re asked to keep more force structure without an increase in the budget in some way then we have more people with less training and less equipment. That could easily become a larger Army that is less effective and less capable than the one we are trying to build now.”