By Ann Roosevelt
The new Army Operating Concept (AOC) 2016-2028 makes no specific mention of contractors in the battlespace–but the service is taking an in-depth look, a senior officer said.
“It is clearly part of our sustainment concept,” Lt. Gen. Michael Vane, director of the Army Capabilities Integration Center, part of the Training and Doctrine Command, said in an interview.
The AOC is the foundation for future force development, and the basis for developing the subsequent supporting concepts.
As it calls for the future ground force to effectively respond to national strategic goals across a wide range of operations, it is clear that the ability to support and sustain forces is critical.
“Contracting is a huge part of what we’re doing today, of course, in Iraq and Afghanistan,” Vane said. “What we’re laying out in this (sustainment) concept is how much and when are we reliant on contractors and when can we leverage these contractors–particularly once you get into a country, either through forcible entry or through an expeditionary capability or you’ve been asked to come in by a country.”
For example, the longer the ground force is in a country and the greater the security, “the more we could use contracting and save perhaps retaining large force structure in a standing army to do that, where it makes sense,” he said.
The Army is examining contractors on the battlefield at a level below the AOC, called functional concepts that are linked in parallel with the operating concepts, Vane said. The functional concepts must be turned into concrete recommendations through a variety of processes–the program objective memorandum (POM), concepts based analysis (CBA), and the Total Army Analysis (TAA) to name but a few–to be successful.
The AOC lists nine required capability categories, including sustainment. The sustainment capability is described as requiring a joint deployment and distribution enterprise, decentralized sustainment operations and the ability to deploy the force while overcoming anti-access capabilities.
“All that results in a baseline of capabilities, and then there are future ones (capabilities) that this new concept is driving us toward,” he said.
“We’re doing it all in a very compressed time period of about six months,” Vane said. “We’ll be pretty close to being done in the December time period or at least have a pretty good idea. We’ ve now been taking each one of those six warfighting functional concepts–its baseline–and what the CBA is telling us through a series of presentations and dialogues with the chief of staff of the Army.”
In fact, the sustainment and protection warfighting functions were discussed in mid-September.
Vane has been working to synchronize all the capability development processes to support adaptation, the AOC’s common theme, along with versatility.
The driver is to move concept development to a one-to-two year cycle to match budget and POM decisions and away from the typical five-year cycle. Out of phase processes hold the service back from reaching an optimal force for the provided resources.
Readjusting concept development to the two-year cycle also links to the Army’s Force Generation Model that provides ready, trained units with the best capabilities.
The common theme of all the AOC’s required capabilities is to provide more adaptability and versatility across the force in the uncertain future of armed conflict.
The Army is sorting through the principles, and doctrine already exists “so we’re not starting from scratch,” Vane said.