The Army’s annual experimentation campaign that examines various systems for how they could contribute to the joint fight in the coming years has added a new feature this year to better enable large and small companies to have their technologies assessed, Army officials said on Monday.
The addition of Gateway to the Project Conversion effort is based on lessons learned the past few years with the prior iterations of the campaign, namely “the need to maintain an entry point, really a nexus for industry to enter,” Maj. Gen. Edmond “Miles” Brown, commanding general of the Army Combat Capabilities Development Command, said at the annual Association of the U.S. Army conference in Washington, D.C.
Gateway is for prime contractors and small businesses, he said. Gateway is being used as part of Project Convergence 2022, which is occurring at several locations in the U.S. this fall.
Brown said through Gateway the Army has done more than 300 science and technology evaluations on 53 different technologies, some of which are being included in the two experimentation scenarios PC22 is hosting. The first scenario is focused on the Indo-Pacific Command area of operations and the second a land-based operation.
For the Indo-Pacific scenario, which is distributed across islands near California, Hawaii, Japan and elsewhere in the Pacific, the focus is integrated air and missile defense but will also include pulsed operations in a joint fires methodology, the space domain, and sustainment of Army forces in a littoral environment, Brig. Gen. Guy Jones, deputy director and chief of staff of the Futures and Concepts Center of the Army Futures Command, said during the PC22 presentation.
The land-based scenario will also include pulsed operations, deep sensing to include Special Operations Forces to defeat anti-access, aerial denial networks, autonomy, applying distributed logistics in new ways, and again, the space domain, Jones said.
The scenarios will also include forces from Australia and the United Kingdom.
Brown said that the technologies ingested through Gateway have been going through “system and technical experimentation” for concepts of operation, not concepts of employment, at Yuma Proving Ground in Arizona.
“This is more about how something works,” Brown said, adding that he meets with the company officials to “determine what is the success criteria of your technology? What is it that you want it to do or you think it can do?”
Some of the technologies have worked well and others not, he said.
Importantly, the Army has cooperative research and development agreements to push these technologies into the centers and labs of the Combat Capabilities Development Command and other experimentation effort for additional data collection and analysis, Brown said.
The Army is also piloting a rigorous “rubric” to score the technologies against to better understand how the technologies can help the service over the next two decades, he said.