Technologies Rushed to War Face an Uncertain Future

Sponsors

feature article

August 2006

By Sandra I. Erwin

In the scramble to deliver equipment requested by commanders in Iraq and Afghanistan, the Army often bypassed its own procurement bureaucracy.

That is good news for troops in the field. The downside for the Army, however, has been a proliferation of battlefield equipment that lacks the routine logistics support and long-term funding normally allocated to systems bought under the traditional rules of military procurement.

Many of the technologies that were rushed to war — such as bomb sniffing robots, digital radios or handheld computers — are known as “orphan” programs, because they exist outside the regular acquisition lifeline.

A case in point is a piece of command-and-control software developed at one of the Army’s small laboratories in Hunstville, Ala. The technology, called “advanced warfare environment,” links air-defense sensors and weapons so a commander can see, on one single computer screen, what potential threats are in the area and what weapons are available to shoot down those targets.

The Air Force, Army and Marine Corps all have deployed this technology to Iraq and elsewhere, but the project may not have a long-term future because it is not in the Army’s regular budget.

“It’s a little bit difficult for the Army or any service to accept things that are developed by labs or other organizations that are not in the normal train of institutional Army development,” says Larry Burger, director of the future warfare center at the Space and Missile Defense Command.

Some of the military labs create “orphans,” he says. These are programs that are “out there and don’t have the long-term funding and the structure as normal acquisition programs.”

At the organization responsible for weapons requirements, the Army Training and Doctrine Command, officials have been aware of the problem for some time, and are trying to come up with solutions, Burger says.

“The Army has a number of rapid fielding initiatives that are proven, are working, but we have a hard time as an institutional Army figuring out how to generate the program funding, approve the requirements and develop the logistics tail … You also need training,” Burger says.

“The Army has a very deliberate acquisition process for good reason, to make sure that what we are putting into theater is safe and effective. But how to jumpstart that into the acquisition process is a challenge,” he adds. “To be honest, the Army hasn’t figured out a consistent way of doing it. Each one seems to be a little bit unique.”

One example is the current arrangement between the Army Materiel Command and the service’s “rapid equipping force,” which is responsible for buying and deploying technologies needed urgently in the field, says Maj. Gen. Roger Nadeau, head of the Army Research Development and Engineering Command, in Aberdeen, Md.

“The guidance from AMC is that anytime the rapid-equipping force puts something into the field quickly, then AMC figures out how to provide the sustainment and support,” Nadeau says.

That does not mean, however, “that we put a funding stream behind everything,” he says. “Not in the traditional way.” But the Army has made an effort to provide maintenance, repair and spare parts for systems that were rushed to war, Nadeau says. “There’s no sense in giving you something that is not supported by the Army … It’s a valid concern, but we’ve addressed it.”

Under the new AMC guidelines, if a new piece of equipment is introduced anywhere in the theater of operations, one of the commands within AMC is assigned responsibility to figure out how to sustain it.