The Army yesterday expected to host more than 250 industry representatives at an Industry Day to learn more about Network Integration Evaluation/Agile Acquisition Process at Aberdeen Proving Ground, Md.
Representatives were to hear about the Army’s new way to deliver capability to its soldiers, how equipment is integrated and the testing process supporting the Network Integration Evaluation (NIE). The NIE is a semi-annual event held at Ft. Bliss, Texas, where soldiers put equipment through various scenarios and evaluations.
Particularly, industry personnel could review capability gaps identified by the Army and learn about future NIE participation. The service released a sources sought notice on the Federal Business Opportunities website identifying gaps that need mature industry solutions for the fall NIE 13.1. The notice is the first step in bringing new industry solutions into the agile acquisition process to improve network capability.
Aberdeen Proving Ground was the chosen site to showcase the Army’s laboratory capability that will be used to integrate, evaluate and risk-reduce network capabilities in support of the NIE process.
The Army has fundamentally changed the way it develops, evaluates, tests, and delivers networked capability to its operating forces, and is transforming its current acquisition methods through the Agile Process, officials said.
The objective of the new agile acquisition is to improve efficiency and effectiveness, reducing the amount of time and resources necessary to respond to the rapid changes in soldier requirements associated with current operations, emergent information technology and modifications to the Army force structure, the service said in a statement.
Incremental modernization allows the Army to leverage industry advances and keep up with the pace of changing technology, while providing a means to integrate the latest networked capability and get it to deploying forces quickly. The point is to move away from acquisition that takes a decade or longer to a shorter cycle, pacing 21st century technology change in the commercial world.
The goal of the new approach is to deploy completely integrated network capabilities that will be fielded in two-year increments, closely linked to how deploying brigades train, equip and deploy.
To support this strategy, network acquisition efforts are aimed at facilitating rapid implementation of commercial and government technologies to establish a network baseline, and then build incrementally from it.