By Ann Roosevelt
FT. LAUDERDALE, Fla.–The Army is examining its testing process as part of the effort to drive efficiency not only into the acquisition process but service wide, officials said.
“Testing is a critical part of every program,” said Lt. Gen. William Phillips, military deputy/director of the Army Acquisition Corps in the Office of the Assistant Secretary of the Army for Acquisition, Logistics and Technology.
It’s a balance, he said at the Association of the United States Army winter symposium roundtable here Feb. 24. Testing must be done to standards. There should not be over- testing or under-testing, but the right test or tests are needed to validate that systems are safe, suitable and something soldiers want and will use.
Phillips said he and Assistant Secretary if the Army for Acquisition Logistics and Technology (ASAALT) Malcolm O’Neill are in close touch with the Office of the Secretary of Defense, the Director of Operational Test and Evaluation, and the director of the Army Test and Evaluation Command (ATEC).
With ATEC Commander Maj. Gen. Genaro Dellarocco, Army acquisition officials are working on test strategies moving forward, Phillips said.
There will be more to come on this, Phillips said.
Lt. Gen. Michael Vane, director of the Army Capabilities Integration Center (ARCIC) at Army Training and Doctrine Command (TRADOC), said users–or soldiers–teaming with ATEC, are critical to identify testing issues much earlier in the acquisition process.
ASAALT and ATEC are working to leverage early testing that industry, the development test programs or labs might do to ensure so some of the needed testing repetitions can be accommodated earlier in the test cycle, he said.
Maj. Gen. Robert Brown, commanding general of the Maneuver Center of Excellence and Ft. Benning, Ga., said it is vital to have soldiers involved early on in the testing process. He’s seen it with soldiers being involved in the early transformation of a Stryker Brigade Combat Team.
Brown said he is closely linked with Maj. Gen. Keith Walker, director of the Brigade Modernization Command (BMC), part of ARCIC and TRADOC, at Ft. Bliss, Texas.
“Some things can be evaluated better there,” Brown said. Other things are better evaluated at the Maneuver Center where they can be put in the hands of brand new lieutenants who have never deployed, or in the hands of those officers who have deployed three or four times.
In a separate panel the same day, Walker said it was important that industry be represented at tests, not only because they will get first hand input from soldiers, but since they developed the product they can explain or fix something right there.
Two different sets of test/evaluations will be conducted at Ft. Bliss, this year, an Integrated Network Baseline Exercise (INBE) this summer and early fall and brigade combat team integration exercises (BCTIE), Paul Mehney, director for public communications for Program Executive Office Integration, told Defense Daily.
The INBE are tests for the record that will influence future capability sets.
The BCTIE effort will see industry, soldiers and evalutators converge to “integrate and evaluate,” not formally test, capabilities that have the potential for follow-on capability sets, Mehney said.