During his short time as Army Secretary, Eric Fanning has established closer ties with the commercial technology sector but will likely leave the bridges he built since confirmation in May unfinished.
“There is more work to be done” Fanning said Thursday at the Defense One conference in Washington, D.C.
Fanning in August initiated the launch of the Rapid Capabilities Office (RCO), which will seek commercially available solutions to the Army’s most pressing equipment needs, purchase and field them within one to five years. The RCO is focused on electronic warfare, offensive and defensive cyber and precision navigation and timing, among other capability sets.
Both the Army and the Pentagon writ large have made overtures to the commercial technology sector in recent months in an effort to speed the acquisition of cutting edge equipment and systems. That the Army has more work to do to solidify relations with the commercial world was laid bare when it recently lost a court case to a company whose commercial data management software was passed over for a costlier design developed on the government’s dime.
Palantir argued successfully that the Army did not sufficiently consider commercial options for its Distributed Common Ground System (DCGS) and effectively reopened the competition. Fanning declined to comment on the particular case, but said the service would look more kindly on commercial alternatives in the future.
“I hope to use it and all other cases as a learning opportunity for how can we do things differently because I do think in some ways we are speaking different languages right now and we need to figure out how to collaborate better,” he said.
Fanning likely will be out of a job when a new administration takes office in January. He promised to work closely with the incoming Trump administration to make a smooth transition but told them the same thing he and his fellow service secretaries have raised to the sitting Congress and White House: budget instability is the biggest threat to the Army and to national security.
With more than 100,000 soldiers stationed overseas in 150-plus countries, the Army has mortgaged its future modernization to pay for current operations, Fanning said.
The service has “stripped a lot of investment out of the future [and] even a lot of intellectual thinking about the future.”
Much hand-wringing in Congress and elsewhere has been done over the size of the Army rather than the capability of the funded force, Fanning said. It is critical that future leaders consider not just the number of troops the Army counts, but the force’s ability to fight and win wars.
The service is set to shrink to 450,000 active-duty troops, “but the number, by itself doesn’t really tell you a lot,” Fanning said. “There is a lot of analysis behind the number, but there is not precision behind this because it is all about risk.”
“Whether the number is 450- or 480- or 520-[thousand], you could end up creating more imbalances because those people cost something,” he said. “We have to have the money to train and equip them. … You have to plan for modernization of a larger force.”