The acquisition of new equipment should focus on outcomes rather than process and the user, Army soldiers, need greater involvement and to speak with one voice to get what they need, said Lt. Gen. Michael Vane, a deputy commander of the Army Training and Doctrine Command (TRADOC) and director of the Army Capabilities Integration Center (ARCIC).
In an interview, Vane said one question to ask is if the defense industry is motivated by outcomes–getting equipment to soldiers who need it.
For example, it is the outcome that motivates commercial industry: what the customer wants. That’s his assessment after visiting major automotive manufacturing leaders, which led him to urge similar visits by other top Army leaders.
One major car manufacturer gets its product to market in four years starting from design, he said. It’s driven by what customers want. If they don’t get it, they don’t buy the car.
“They achieve a confidence level at what we would describe as Milestone A higher than 80 percent,” Vane, who retired yesterday, said.
Here is part of the reason for the Defense Department’s acquisition issues, he said. Programs are consistently discussed by the defense industry as being possible in seven to 10 years.
For example, Vane said, in the past, the National Defense Authorization Act tried to move DoD to an 80-percent confidence level. The Office of the Secretary of Defense (OSD) countered that it could only get to 50-percent confidence level, and couldn’t get to 80 percent.
“My argument is we have to go to 80 percent confidence level,” Vane said. “Defense doesn’t know how to do it. Because we’re unwilling to use our customer base as the driver.”
Commercial industry essentially says, “ I need a new car out there, the people say they need a new car and they’re not going to keep buying the old one,” so if we don’t get them a new car with XYZ, we’re going out of business,” Vane said.
That’s the motivation for one big car maker. That doesn’t happen in the Defense Department, he said.
“They’ve cut back on the user so much, there are not enough users to go scream [for new equipment] and then everyone questions our motivation so we say we need a new thing by 2017 because of XYZ. Everyone says well, we don’t believe you–from Congress to OSD everyone always says, user guy you don’t really need it,” Vane said. “Then the user guys start arguing with each other, so keeping unity of effort on the user side is difficult.”
The real users, he said, those who use the equipment to fight must tell the other part of the Army: TRADOC, Army Staff, OSD Staff, to get them, say, a new vehicle.
“Well, how long have we been saying we need a new vehicle,” he said. Ten to 15 years. I need a different Humvee, I need a different Bradley, tank, Paladin–how long have we been saying we need a newer Paladin.”
“The TRADOC Capability Manager (TCM) represents the user, but over time the service found it was more important to have a centrally selected colonel to be a brigade commander, but not centrally selected TCMs,” he said. This doesn’t always have a good result.
Additionally, the service has been at war for 10 years, so the measure of success and the time spent by senior leadership is all related to operating and fighting in that environment.
That leads to the question of “how knowledgeable are they [top leaders] of all the wickets on the generating side, the organize, train and equip, Title 10 side,” Vane said. Thus, for many generals, “their first experience of that whole labyrinth of ‘the process’ is when they become three- or four-star general.”
This doesn’t help when they testify before Congress trying to generate support for equipment not for this war, but five years from now. It’s hard for them to make the system, or the process, work for them.
“Nobody wants to build something that only accounts for just what our experience was. You want to figure out how do I want to account for the breadth of experiences we may have in the future,” Vane said.
“The Army’s challenge is so different from the other services though sometimes we’re all lumped into the same solution box,” Vane said. “If it worked for this service and that service, why shouldn’t it work for the Army.”
One of the biggest differences is the number of individual entities. The other services have capital programs, but they are fewer in number and more of their service is oriented on fewer of their numbers of capital programs, he said.
“There are tens of thousands of entities in the Army,” Vane said. “On a battlefield they have to operate in probably hundreds of different kinds of missions against an enemy against a population. For the Army, “the ‘things’ per people ratio is much greater” than in the Air Force or Navy.
The Army, operating on land needs to do everything from nuclear, biological, chemical tasks to intelligence collection and dissemination, and trying to get sensors above and on the surface of the Earth, and then there’s combat, all the different ways to figure out how to get an advantage over the enemy.
“That translates to hundreds of line item numbers of stuff,” Vane said.
Some of this is being institutionalized through soldier evaluators drawn from active duty brigades at ARCIC’s Brigade Modernization Command at Ft. Bliss, Texas. Soldiers are evaluating new equipment to see if it’s technically ready and offers military utility. For the past six weeks, for example, the unit, 2nd Brigade, 1st Armored Division, has examined, tested and evaluated equipment that could lead to a network connecting soldiers horizontally and vertically from the squad to brigade.