Gone are the days of a stately, deliberate, laborious acquisition process in which the Army would plan out the future in detail before going to industry. “We’d almost always guess wrong,” said Maj. Gen. David Bassett. “Eventually we’d deliver yesterday’s technology tomorrow.”

Even with Australia, one of our closest allies, it can be hard to share data. And the Army’s future war plans require seamless network coordination with the other US services and foreign allies.

“All the services understand the need to move to Multi-Domain Operations,” Lt. Gen. Wesley said. “Second, we all agree that MDC2 [Multi-Domain Command & Control] is the most important joint problem that we have to solve. After that, the specifics of how you conduct MDO – that’s where the variance is that we’ve got to converge on.”

“We’ve done concepts for many years and, frankly, the Army hasn’t changed much,” admitted the three-star chief of the Army’s in-house think tank on future war. But on Friday, when the Army officially put its futurists under the same roof as its scientists, engineers, and program managers, the notoriously hidebound service aimed to break down the barrier between thinking about the future force and building it.

“When I was here before,” said Lt. Gen. James Pasquarette, who returned to the Pentagon last week for his fifth tour there, “the four-star commanders around the Army had no say, no input. They’re in the room now when the big decisions are made.”

The Army believes it has all the legal authorities it needs to reform. Now it just has to make the reform work.

“Recent guidance from Army senior leadership has us looking at, emphasizing, Bradley replacement,” Miller told reporters in a conference call. “What we have now done is moved to accelerate our optionally manned fighting vehicle, the Bradley replacement, and we want to be able to focus on that.”

  China and Russia are outmaneuvering the US, using aggressive actions that fall short of war, a group of generals and admirals have concluded. To counter them, the US needs new ways to use its military without shooting, concludes a newly released report on the Quantico conclave. The US military will need new legal authorities… Keep reading →

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“There is a good chance… we’d lose the opening stages of this war,” said one speaker. “Parts of the Pacific, parts of Europe are probably going to be overrun before we can gather ourselves.”