The Army has established a Rapid Capabilities Office with special authority to circumvent the traditional acquisition process to speed needed technologies to soldiers in the field.
Army Secretary Eric Fanning testified to the need for such an office during his confirmation hearing before Congress. He made good on that promise Wednesday during a forum hosted by Bloomberg Government in Washington, D.C.
“The Rapid Capabilities Office is focused on what it says: capabilities,” Fanning said. “We are not embarking on creating new systems or new platforms. We’re not focused, for example, on building a new helicopter. But we would turn to this office if some capability on an existing helicopter is no longer sufficient or if some capability of a future helicopter needs to be iteratively fielded because we need it operationalized faster than the complete platform.”
RCO’s focus will be expediting specific capabilities to the field within five years of identifying a potential solution, Fanning said. That timeline sets it apart from the Rapid Equipping Force (REF), which identifies specific pieces of equipment, builds or acquires them and sends them to deployed soldiers to solve a specific problem.
“They bring a thing and we will be building toward a capability,” Maj. Gen. Walter Piatt, the uniformed head of RCO, said of the difference between the REF and the RCO. “We have these gaps. Our enemy is presenting us multiple dilemmas simultaneously over multiple domains. We can’t just field a thing. It’s got to be able to address those gaps.”
If RCO had existed when the Army identified a requirement for the Mine-Resistant, Ambush-Protected (MRAP) vehicle, it probably would have handled the program until production began in large quantities, Fanning said. The same model would hold true with a future capability, Fanning said, where RCO manages identification and acquisition of the initial capability, then hands it over to a program of record once production begins in earnest.
The office will perform rapid prototyping and initial fielding in the areas of electronic warfare, cyber, survivability and precision navigation and timing. It will use a combination of classic acquisition and contracting processes and special authorities that allow it to tap consortiums and other commercial entities, Fanning said.
“These mechanisms are important when the current acquisitions processes, but not the practice, prevent us from being as agile as necessary to confront emerging threats,” Fanning said. “We must work to get capabilities to the war fighter as rapidly and efficiently as possible. We must find more ways to cut time and money out of our acquisition process to better serve our soldiers and be better stewards of taxpayer dollars.”
Acting Assistant Secretary of the Army for Acquisition, Logistics & Technology Katrina McFarland did not specify what size budget the office would work with, but said it would be up to $99 million for “an immediate start.”
A “short” chain of command headed by Piatt is designed to forestall bureaucratic creep while authorities for acquisition, testing and fielding will rest with a board of directors chaired by the Army secretary, in this case Fanning. Army acquisition executive Katrina McFarland and Chief of Staff of the Army Gen. Mark Milley also will sit on the board. “Whenever necessary,” Undersecretary of Defense for Acquisition, Technology and Logistics Frank Kendall also will sit on the board “because it is important we do this in close concert with” the Office of the Secretary of Defense, Fanning said.
Even the establishment of the RCO is on an abbreviated timeline. Its first board meeting should occur within 30 days, or sometime in mid-September, according to Doug Wiltsie, executive director of the System of Systems Engineering and Integration Directorate and RCO manager. At that meeting, RCO management will take direction on where, specifically, to begin working within the target capability sets, he said.
Within the next 60 days, the RCO should have some official communication to industry in the form of a request for information or some other announcement to include scheduling an industry day. Wiltsie is looking at the Special Operations Command model of acquisition where its budget is partly classified. It also may hold both classified and unclassified industry days, depending on the capability it seeks. Wiltsie also is drawing from the experience of Secretary of Defense Ash Carter’s Defense Innovation Unit-Experimental pet project.
Often industry will be asked to lead the way to finding solutions to Army requirements after engagement at industry days and through solicitations, Fanning said. Within the RCO will be a dedicated cell called the Emerging Technology Office, which will host industry days and serve as an ombudsman directing industry innovation to specific areas of need, he said.
“It is imperative that industry be involved with this office from the outset,” he said.
An impetus for creating RCO is the demonstration of Russian military technologies and tactical acumen in both Ukraine and Syria, Fanning said. While the Army has been laser-focused on fighting counterinsurgency wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, Russia has been taking notes on U.S. capability gaps and vulnerabilities and developing technology to exploit perceived weaknesses.
Advanced air defenses, unmanned aerial vehicles used for targeting indirect fire and mobile sun systems that range hundreds of kilometers are capabilities in which the Army’s traditional technological overmatch is dwindling if not gone, he said.
“I think Russia is a big driver of this,” Fanning said. “As we were focused on Afghanistan and Iraq the last 15 years … they’ve been watching us. They have been learning from us and they have been adapting and they are much more agile in how they fight now than they used to be. … We have to compete in a dynamic operational environment where the introduction of new capabilities and technologies by military powers and adversaries is continuous.”