The Army is taking another swing at slashing its sometimes decades-long procurement cycle by gathering up the many offices that weigh in on requirements and stacking them under a new program office structure.
The six Portfolio Acquisition Executives will compress the previous 12 Program Executive Offices, with the new Transformation and Training Command in the overseeing uniformed position, and the assistant secretary for acquisition, logistics and technology as the civilian boss.
“So we had, arguably, an alphabet soup of requirements folks across both [Army Futures Command] and [Training and Doctrine Command],” Gen. David Hodne, who leads the newly merged Transformation and Training Command, told reporters Wednesday. “So generally, you had…I’ll just say over 40 agencies that could either vote on or veto requirements.”
Now, they’ll all report to the PAE, which will make one determination that goes up to the four-star level. The Army unveiled the move Wednesday to Breaking Defense, just a few days after Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth issued orders to revamp the PEO system amid a larger reform of the defense acquisition process.
Each PAE will own one of the six “capability areas”: Fires; Maneuver Ground; Maneuver Air; Command and Control and Counter Command and Control; Agile Sustainment and Ammo; and Layered Protection and Chemical, Biology, Radiological and Nuclear Defense.
“Under the current fragmented process, accountability is distributed across multiple organizations and functions, creating misalignment between critical stakeholders,” Brent Ingraham, the civilian oversight official for the PAEs, said in a release. “Aligning this reform with operational concepts better postures the Army to deliver capabilities our [soldiers need] without delay.”
Now the old PEO structures and Centers of Excellence will be nested under the PAE, rather than being their own co-equal organizations. On the Maneuver Ground team, Hodne said, you’ll have the Maneuver CoE commander as the director, with the former PEO Soldier director as his deputy, as an example.
‘Conned the American people’
The PEO revamp is a concrete change, but the service is hoping it’s part of a bigger overall shift. Hegseth’s acquisitions changes do away with a requirements process notorious for taking so long and being so rigid in its output that by the time a program was ready to be fielded, it was a mere irrelevant shell of its initial concept.
The Army is also hoping that a new approach to requirements will allow acquisitions teams to go with the best commercially available options for some systems in the short term, while continuously looking for better solutions. That philosophy is in stark contrast to the way the Army has done business for the last half-century or so, working with one or two vendors to compete to build a new, customized system from the ground up.
“It used to be 90 percent of things we bought were purpose-built for the military or the Army, and 10 percent were off the shelf,” Army Secretary Dan Driscoll said Wednesday. “This is what I would say is, that the defense industrial base broadly, and the primes in particular, conned the American people in the Pentagon and the Army into thinking that it needed military-specific solutions, when in reality, a lot of these commercial solutions are equal to or better. And we’ve actually harmed ourselves with that mentality.”
Driscoll said he would like to see those ratios flip.
“Because when you actually start to think about what large-scale conflict looks like, you cannot scale one-off solutions as quickly and easily as you can scale commercially available things,” he said. “And we are, in every decision, thinking when we buy this thing, we go to conflict, how many of them can we get, and how long will it take to hit peak scale?”
Pressed on his characterization of prime contractors as con artists, Driscoll conceded that the Army has often been the one driving the requirement for bespoke equipment.
“I think their incentive structure has been to make things seem harder, to build more exquisite and more expensive,” he said. “I regularly, when I meet with them, highlight how bad of a customer we have been and the characteristics that they have today, we created and incentivized over a long period of time, and I appreciate that it’s so difficult to build against our demand signal, and it requires such balance sheet to outlast all of our insane processes, that I can appreciate that from their perspective, by the time we actually start to buy a thing, they have to lock in some number of those to make back their expenses that we laid onto them.”
Now, the Army will be doing more dynamic decision-making about how much a system fulfills a requirement, how quickly they can field it and how much it will cost, the Army chief of staff said Wednesday.
“So if you have a requirement, and somebody says it needs to weigh a certain amount, and it has to go 100 miles an hour, and then somebody comes back to you and says, ‘Hey, it can go 90 miles an hour and weigh just a little bit differently, but you can get it for half the cost in half the amount of time — I mean, that’s what we’re after,” Gen. Randy George said.
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