The Army is standing up a new cross-functional team (CFT) focused on deep sensing, the service’s chief of staff said on Thursday.
Gen. Randy George, the Army chief, declined to provide further specifics on the new Deep Sensing CFT, while he confirmed Gen. James Rainey, head of Army Futures Command, is set to offer more details at the AUSA Global Force symposium in Huntsville, Ala., later this month.
“We want to have a holistic look at what we’re doing in our process, just like we’ve done [with other CFTs]” George told reporters following remarks at the McAleese Conference in Washington, D.C. “I think the big thing we want to show, and the same thing with our Cross-Functional Teams, when we have a need for something, we’re going to stand up a capability, we’re going to take a really hard look at it, figure out what we need.”
Army Futures Command’s CFTs, which include organizations for Future Vertical Lift and Next-Generation Combat Vehicle, bring together officials from different Army organizations to focus on specific modernization initiatives.
The rollout of the Deep Sensing CFT later this month will arrive a year after Rainey announced the establishment of the new Contested Logistics CFT at the last AUSA Global Force conference (Defense Daily, March 29 2023).
In October, Rainey cited space-based deep sensing and human-machine integration as potential areas of interest for new CFTs (Defense Daily, Oct. 13).
Rainey has been conducting a review of the Army’s CFTs as the service looks to the next steps in its modernization initiative and priorities for the “Army of 2040,” which included standing up the Contested Logistics CFT.
“There are some, like the Long-Range [Precision] Fires and Air and Missile Defense [CFTs], that aren’t going away anytime soon,” Rainey told reporters during an Oct. 9 briefing at the Association of the United States Army’s annual conference in Washington, D.C.
For the enduring CFTs, Rainey has said the Army will begin thinking over the next two years on what new initiatives can be added to their portfolios.
The Army in January released a new “space vision” document, which highlighted a need to get after integration of a range of space capabilities to support priorities such as deep sensing as well as improving the ability to “interdict adversary space capabilities by delivering necessary fires and effects at echelon” (Defense Daily, Jan. 8).