The Army Is ‘Transforming in Contact.’ Here’s How.

We are putting soldiers and their needs at the forefront—not requirements.

Dr. Alex Miller is the Chief Technology Officer of the United States Army.

In August 2023, I attended my first meeting of the Army Requirements Oversight Council (AROC) while working for the Vice Chief of Staff of the Army. On the agenda was an Operational Needs Statement (ONS) generated by Task Force Dragon in Europe. TF Dragon was asking for a system to visualize all the data it was using to support the mission and our partners in Europe during the rapidly changing war in Ukraine. Fundamentally, it needed an enterprise data platform that would allow it to share intelligence and operations data and that was accessible from anywhere. The ONS recommended adopting a system that soldiers were actively using—and that worked—instead of the system that had the Army’s blessing as a program of record (POR).

I had ghost-written the ONS and shepherded it through the byzantine requirements process, hacking my way through bureaucracy. My prior experience designing the Army’s intelligence enterprise helped avoid some of the process black holes that new ideas often fall into. However, it had already been a long road; it took a year to get through all of the people who couldn’t say yes, but felt empowered to say no.

At the meeting, the Program Executive Officer proclaimed that they could start working to address requirements outlined in the ONS in 2029.

2029.

That was six years away! For a system the Army was already using, but that wasn’t an approved POR.

The problem was that there was no incentive to address emergent requirements in any relevant timeline because user adoption was not being measured. A requirement had come in from the field rather than from the traditional institution and that meant it needed to be examined, studied, decomposed, and fully surrounded rather than actually addressed. The requirement needed to be broken up into such small chunks that it could be reasonably hidden within the existing plan and the existing programs rather than acknowledging the plan itself might be flawed. That way, a POR could maintain its golden triad of cost, schedule, and performance while claiming that it was including requirements from the field when they emerged.

Decades of cultural inertia and misaligned incentives had metastasized into a potent combination of policy archeology and learned helplessness. The process had done exactly what it does best—perpetuate itself.

In that instant, it was clear to me that the acquisitions process was fundamentally broken and could not deliver the necessary capabilities that Soldiers need today and will need tomorrow—or in 2029, for that matter. Things had to change, and thankfully they did.

This was an inflection point for the Army because General George, the Vice, who was chairing his first AROC, did not accept the status quo. Instead, the Army set out on a path of continuous and deliberate transformation. A major part of this change is Transforming in Contact (TiC), where we allow Commanders to organize their formations and capabilities to match their missions, rather than following the cookie-cutter approach for emerging technology that is still the ‘way things are done,’ despite largely being sidestepped during the Global War on Terror (GWoT). The Army has the smallest of any military department’s budget, but the most dynamic mission set. We simply don’t have the luxury of buying the same, obsolete equipment for over 50 Brigades, 11 divisions, and 4 Corps.

As we implement the Army Transformation Initiative (ATI) announced by the Secretary of Defense in late April, the changes that started with TiC to address the decades-old gap between what our Soldiers’ need and what we buy must be institutionalized.

‘Transforming in Contact’ Explained

Our goal with TiC is to kill the old model and build something better by centering all change around feedback from the field—from users in contact. This requires us to institutionalize listening to the field instead of intermediaries. The steps we’re taking in TiC are fundamentally about changing behaviors and incentives within the ‘process.’ This change will require continuously working backwards from a desired outcome and being ruthless about cutting both unnecessary actions and innovation theater.

Part of this is balancing linear thinking about what is possible right now and what could be possible given how fast technology is evolving. Linear thinking only looks at the series of steps that must be completed rather than continuously iterating and making changes along the way. On the other hand, traditionally, the people who come up with concepts and requirements for the future are disconnected from the current battlefield and lessons. We must avoid falling victim to either extreme and find ways to buy the available tools while developing what’s necessary for the next fight. It’s not easy, but we tend to make it harder than it needs to be.

Culture is the easy ‘big bad’ when it comes to reforms within large organizations and it has always been easy to point at acquisition, the acquisition corps, and ‘the primes’ as the bad guys. However, culture emerges from actions that are accepted.

Our goal with TiC is changing behaviors. The Army leadership team today, from the Army Senior Leaders to acquisition leadership, is incredibly flexible in their thinking and willingness to change processes. We’ve implemented the following changes to empower Soldiers and enable constant delivery:

Characterization of Needs: To give users a seat at the table, we had to start with the requirements process. During the GWoT, requirements for counter-IED capabilities came straight from the people in the fight—the Brigades. We spent billions on the latest and greatest tech and improvised new processes to get around the normal acquisition bureaucracy, as the rapid acquisition of Mine-Resistant Ambush Protected (MRAP) vehicles demonstrated. The Army Rapid Equipping Forces (REF) and the Joint IED Defeat Organization (JIEDDO) helped us move quickly, delivered for troops, and saved lives. 10-line capability gap statements (10-liners) became the norm, rather than multi-hundred-page requirements.

Unfortunately, we didn’t institutionalize any of the lessons learned. The REF and the JIEDDO were treated as stop-gap measures needed in war time, but they lost their ability to respond rapidly and fell out of favor as time went on and they became more bloated. Big Bureaucracy reared its head to reassert control with long requirements documents and linear processes that prioritized risk reduction on paper over capability delivery on the battlefield.

Historically, the Army had user representatives through Training and Doctrine Command’s Capability Managers and Army Capability Managers. These dedicated personnel were meant to look at the full scope of new requirements and needs and assess their implications in areas like organization, leadership, and training. The problem is that the requirements personnel were disconnected from units, turning them into collectors of outdated information rather than advocates capable of expressing constantly evolving needs and updating requirements or doctrine.

The best user representatives are users. This is the core tenant of TiC: let users tell us directly what works and what doesn’t. This isn’t about just chasing bright shiny objects and ignoring things like doctrine or the ability to scale and sustain. It’s fundamentally about going after the right things.

TiC started in parallel with the command and control (C2) ‘fix’ effort, where we would identify failures in the current network and C2 architecture and fix them with units in the field. What we realized quickly was that the only way to adjudicate whether something was changing was to have units use the new architecture in practice, rather than in PowerPoint or even a test environment. TiC quickly wrapped around the C2 fix effort and grew to both support it and expand to other critical technologies like drones, electromagnetic warfare, mobile vehicles, and counter-drone capabilities.

We started TiC with three brigades, each operating in different parts of the world with different environments, partners, and demands. The Army has shifted toward characterizing needs rather than over-specifying and gold-plating requirements. For example, the Characterization of Needs for Next Generation Command and Control (NGC2) is about three and a half pages. The follow-on capability needs statements are three to five pages each. Traditional requirements for capabilities like the next generation of air and missile defense radars or next generation constructive training systems have benefited from this radical change. Shorter requirements documents, complemented by technology roadmaps, agile acquisition, smarter contract types, and persistent feedback from users, are enabling the Army to get capability faster. The risk of trying to future-proof a requirement is mitigated by a Chief who is willing to iterate on requirements and put a ‘shot clock’ on them, rather than firing and forgetting for half a decade.

Implementing a Trail Boss: The Army has hundreds of program managers and product managers. Each one manages a discrete program or part of a program. For example, while the Blackhawk may have one overall program manager, each variant of the Blackhawk has its own product manager or assistant program manager. Within the Army’s network there are PMs for tactical radios, command post computing, mounted computing, space-based communications, support communications—you name it. Each one of those systems is supposed to contribute to the unified network that Commanders use to command and control their units and that Soldiers use to fight. While these PMs and their programs are all directionally aligned, in so much as they know they have to work together, there is an incentive for each PM and program to be self-sufficient, self-perpetuating, and ultimately disconnected from the mission.

What we did with TiC was put one person in charge of the entire network architecture. The Trail Boss, a Colonel and PM, has unilateral control of his peers and their subordinates to make sure that everyone is directionally, technically, and tactically aligned to solve problems for our TiC units.

The relationship between Trail Bosses and PMs in the Army is similar to that between product owners and project managers in industry. The Trail Boss is the de facto PM. He oversees execution while the other Army PMs and APMs act like product owners, defining scope and taking direction. This is how we have been able to shift so many programs to leverage the Tactical Assault Kit (TAK) so quickly. This also provides a front door for industry while closing some of the gaps and seams between different product offices that have led to redundancies and, frankly, broken connectivity. It’s not a perfect analogy, but it’s superior to the legacy business model.

Flexible Funding: For years, technologists in and around government have complained about the rules that constrain what we can buy. The most prominent complaint is that the people buying technology aren’t familiar with technology. Just as bad: the people most exposed to technology don’t understand the authorities available to buy technology, and the most stringent zealots for process seem to rarely have read the documents (e.g., The Financial Management Regulations, DoDI 5000.87, etc..) that guide their decision making.

While true, these are symptoms of the problem rather than the root. The root of the problem stems from the lack of flexibility, which creates a perverse incentive to focus on iron-clad contracts and very detailed justifications that are transmitted to Congress to ensure funding. The stricter the justification and the greater the number of line items, the less flexibility it leaves for our users to influence what we buy. Worse, it creates a mechanism for the wrong capabilities to be justified in writing, which makes them much harder to kill (e.g. the RQ-7 Shadow, which was difficult to maintain and didn’t provide the best utility for cost) or replace over time (e.g. HMMWV, which served well for 40 years but does not deliver the mobility the Army needs today).

The problem (lack of flexibility) was easy enough to identify; the solutions were harder. Given 20 years of quick reaction capabilities during the GWoT, I thought surely there would be a corpus of ready-made recommendations and changes on hand. The reality was that when I engaged with the technologist community, there wasn’t much more than ‘we need to do better’ or ‘we need to throw out the FAR.’ Again, almost no one other than a few Jedis sprinkled throughout the Empire actually knew our real limitations and how to attack them.

Starting almost from scratch, we went to work to find the exact changes we needed. We asked for exceptions to policy in discrete areas to show both Congress and OSD that we weren’t just seeking a slush fund of money, but rather flexibility to respond to threat changes and fund what is necessary.

First, we asked for an exception to consolidate the Budget Activity 6 lines within the Army’s budget. Budget Activity 6 is for Research Development, Test, and Evaluation (RDT&E) and it is split into seven bins, from basic research through operational prototyping. But these bins are generally established by policy and regulation (which we control inside the DoD), not by law (which Congress sets). On paper this is about managing funds and oversight. In practice, it’s about control. Those regulations didn’t (and still don’t) give us any flexibility to close the Valley of Death between science and technology maturation and prototyping, which in a software-driven world means projects just burned cash with no real hope of being useful.

Second, we asked for flexible funding and budget line item consolidation in three function areas: Counter-Unmanned Aerial Systems (C-UAS), Unmanned Aerial Systems (UAS), and Electromagnetic Warfare (EW). From the start of the Cold War until today, budget line items— which we use to account for money like you would entertainment, rent, and groceries—in the Army’s budget have increased 10-fold. This would be like having different accounts for movies, sports, Netflix, Hulu, and travel instead of one single, broad entertainment budget. Generally, these new line items are added to ensure that programs are protected, even if they aren’t necessary. These line items are where lobbyists and parochial interests clash with mission needs and pragmatism. UAS, C-UAS, and EW lines only represent 5% of the Army’s total budget, but they are the fastest changing battlefield enablers and therefore the right signal to OSD and the Hill about what needs to change. Focusing on those functions shows that the Army is capable of consolidating and being more efficient.

Finally, we asked for changes to a mechanism available to the Department to move money around called below threshold reprogramming (BTR). This is an internal mechanism that allows the military departments to move amounts below $15 million between programs unilaterally. Moving higher amounts requires permission and support from Congress. We asked to increase the BTR threshold to $50M to create breathing room to move funds between programs in those three specific mission areas: UAS, C-UAS, and EW.

Deliberate Experimentation: Experimentation without a real enemy leaves too much room to “fake the funk” in assessing a technology or capability on merit. It also creates a perverse incentive to never take things to the field where they could potentially fare poorly. Previously, too many lab engineers were focused on getting their tech to Project Convergence—a high-visibility series of Army exercises—instead of getting it to units to solve a problem.

TiC flips this paradigm on its head. It forces technology and technology providers, regardless if they are industry, programs, or labs, to actually get their projects into the fight and engage with real users. Soldiers at all levels get to integrate capabilities into their formation instantly and assess them based on mission needs and the environment.

The first TiC formation, which went to our training center in Southern Louisiana in summer, had about 100 drones. The third, in Germany, had more than double that, and we learned that the harsh winter crushed batteries and comms. As our fourth TiC Brigade entered its rotation back in Louisiana at JRTC about a year after we started the TiC journey, it had almost three times the number of drones the first unit had, and it continued to provide real-time feedback about the operational environment. Deliberately putting technology into the hands of soldiers with TiC formations provides more immediate feedback and utility than any test and evaluation event ever could—and stops special interests from pulling technology through the process without user buy-in (e.g. the M-10 Booker).

Tranche Buys: When the Army plans to buy things, it plans to buy them for the entire Army. That might take 10 to 20 years, but to get through all of the human-centric process steps, a cost estimate must be generated for the entire life of the program. There’s a logic behind this in terms of understanding the total cost of ownership of a new capability. However, it becomes a double-edged sword when you’re trying to predict the future decades in advance. If any part of the process happens earlier or later than anticipated, money can be taken for being either ‘early to need’ or ‘late to need.’ If the very specific science project for brand-new military technology doesn’t go exactly according to plan, the entire program's funding is at risk because of the expansive budget lines and lack of flexibility in funding. As such, program managers, labs, and funding decision makers craft their milestones to align perfectly with the plan that was created years (or decades) prior.

We’re countering this by buying capabilities in tranches. It forces a different buying model for end items like drones, EW kit, C-UAS sensors, and missiles. Rather than trying to orchestrate a buy for 50+ brigades over five to 10 years, we buy for a few brigades at a time, allowing units to provide feedback and allowing industry to continuously compete for the next purchase window. For example, the short-range reconnaissance drones that the first and second TiC units received were different because we only bought a few brigades’ worth and forced industry to compete rather than buying the entire Army’s worth all at once. Similarly, the latest EW manpacks (which have been in the SOF community for years) are bought a few brigades at a time to ensure that the industry partner continues to refine the software and signal of interest libraries.

Continuous competition keeps the vendors hungry to provide better capability at a lower cost, and allows industry to get direct feedback on their products. This new approach is an antidote to complacency. No one can afford to rest on their laurels.

What now?

It is shockingly difficult to optimize for multiple variables, especially when you’re a person rather than a computer, and so our entire system has been browbeaten to optimize for one variable: requirements. Requirements are the single keystone in the capability bridge; therefore they are over-engineered, over-examined, and used as the excuse when things go wrong. Rather than accepting that the situation has changed, the ‘frozen middle’ is stuck on the notion that if you just get the requirements right, regardless of how long it takes to do that, everything else will fall into place.

We know this isn’t true. We are in an era of technological non-linearity. There is no possible way to build requirements that have both a high level of fidelity and longevity. They will either be highly specific and decay quickly, or abstract with some level of future proofing. We know that requirements wind and flow like rivers, and the buying models and incentive structures that built ‘the Big Five’ weapon systems of the last generation (Apache, Blackhack, Abrams, Bradley, and the Patriot) are fundamentally broken for today’s technology ecosystem. This is why we started TiC: to put Soldiers and their needs at the forefront, not requirements.

The uphill battle the Army faces is institutionalizing these radical changes. TiC 2.0 focuses on Divisions and includes new types of units like Armored and Stryker Brigades, expanding our ability to experiment with robotics platforms and autonomous formations. To our leadership, this is simply the new normal. Flexible funding is part of the Army’s budget documents. Tranche buys for TiC units are part of the fielding plan and how PMs have started to publish their requests for proposals and statements of work. The trail boss concept has proven to be a force multiplier for how we buy, try, and decide on new technology to solve known problems. This method solves the fundamental problem of addressing user needs immediately and helps identify tech and organizational debt that has slowly crept into our command and control architecture over two decades of GWoT.

Our next challenge will be scaling both the changes in process and the right capabilities we are fielding as part of TiC. We know we will need thousands of drones, but we cannot afford to just buy them at 10 or 100 times the cost of our adversaries. We also know we’ll need lower cost sensors, lower signature communications devices, lighter power management solutions, and smaller soldier-borne mission command solutions. We’ll have to make deliberate choices between variety and volume in some areas and ensure principles like adaptability and adherence to a modular open systems architecture persist.

The Army is in a position now to tackle these hard problems. As TiC has been implemented in the field, our Secretary, Chief, and Acquisition leadership have been empowering the right professionals at every level who want to do the right thing—from Captains to Lieutenant Generals to Senior Executives. We will continue to incentivize speed, flexibility, and lethality as we implement the Army Transformation Initiative.