As the Army prepares to merge its Futures Command (AFC) with Training and Doctrine Command (TRADOC) into a new “Training and Transformation Command,” AFC officials are working closely with the acquisition community to ensure the command’s internal structures are aligned with any changes to the Program Executive Office structure.

“It’s premature to really comment on anything associated with acquisition reform, but what I would say is that we are watching that very closely to make sure that particularly our labs are very closely aligned to the new PEO structure, whatever that might end up being,” Brig. Gen. Anthony Gibbs, Army Futures Command’s director of integration, said during the Association of the U.S. Army event Tuesday.

As part of its sweeping Army Transformation Initiative announced in May, the service continues to weigh in a broader restructuring of its acquisition enterprise, including a potential consolidation of its 12 current Program Executive Offices (PEOs) to seven Capability Executive Offices (CEOs). While those changes were not included in the public ATI directive, they are under active internal review, and some lawmakers are already pushing back on the idea. 

While acquisition reform remains in flux, Gibbs said AFC is actively updating how the Army defines and manages requirements.

Last year, Danielle Moyer, who leads the Army’s Digital Capabilities Contracting Center of Excellence at Aberdeen Proving Ground, said the Army was working to reduce the contract awarding process from the nearly two-year cycle to less than six months. And one of the ways the service has been trying to achieve that is by moving away from overly prescriptive contract requirements to a more flexible approach that focuses on providing “characteristics of need” early during its experimentation phases under Army Futures Command and allowing contractors to propose innovative solutions in return. 

“We’re using a new mechanism called the characteristics of needs statement to define broad problem areas, to generate that discussion with industry, and then within that, what we see in the future is moving towards directed requirements, [capability development documents] or annexes to refine those requirements that spin out of those prototyping efforts,” Gibbs said. 

While the approach the service is adopting has attracted interest from nontraditional vendors, it has also revealed a structural hurdle — many of the proposed solutions fall outside the service’s existing requirements and acquisition categories.

“We’re pretty excited about this approach. The challenge, however, is when we issue broad problem statements, what we tend to get is solutions that don’t neatly fit into the existing requirements or categories of things that we expect to buy. And so that’s one of the challenges that we’re working through is how do we open up the requirements trade space so that we can better consider these really innovative solutions that new companies are bringing to the table,” Gibbs said. 

The command is also implementing a process called Continuous Objectives Requirement Analysis, or CORA. The process, which Gibbs described as requirements analysis in reverse, takes a bottom-up approach to determining Army needs. 

To support CORA, AFC built an analytics tool over the past year that allows officials to search and evaluate all Army requirements using a large language model. The tool links each requirement to specific funding categories within the Army’s equipping, sustaining, and training budget categories, which allows the service to identify redundancies and areas where resources can be reallocated.

“In fact, we’re working through a task from the Secretary of the Army right now to review all army requirements, with that goal, looking at what we can invalidate to free up resources. So that’s one of the big things that we’re doing,” Gibbs said. 

AFC is also leaning more on directed requirements to rapidly respond to emerging needs. 

“Really, over the past three years, we’ve been doing this. Finding the resources is always the challenge in the year of execution. But this allows us to at least get the requirements in place, to go leverage commercial tech that is available now and get that in formations,” Gibbs said.

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