Scientists, technologists, military members, and Department of Defense civilians attended the first United States Army Pacific Requirements Summit at Schofield Barracks, Hawaii, from March 26 to 28, 2024.
The purpose of the Requirements Summit is to create a unity of effort between operational units, the science and technology community, requirements developers, experimentation planners, and the acquisition community to strengthen United States Army Pacific (USARPAC) capabilities and continue to aid in its mission.
USARPAC holds two-thirds of the largest economies, consists of 36 nations, and houses 60% of the world’s people. It covers vast distances and extreme conditions ranging from Arctic tundra to tropical jungles. Due to its extensive reach, the mission is to provide the Joint Forces with decisive integrated land power to consolidate gains across a joint campaign to deter, transition, and respond to natural and manmade crises and prevail conflict in the most consequential region for America's future.
In an interview with USARPAC’s Director of Concepts and Experimentation, Col. Jonathan Holm, he expressed the importance of the first Requirements Summit.
"What we're trying to accomplish with this summit is help the intuitional Army develop future capabilities that support our mission in this unique theater. We want to help the Army understand our mission out here, our role in the theater as part of the Joint Force, the threat, and the conditions so that they can design future capabilities for future formations that are optimized for our mission in this theater. Culturally and historically, the Army is more focused on and familiar with theaters that are predominantly land theaters like CENTCOM and EUCOM. USARPAC has been under-resourced and under-prioritized."
The summits’ working groups consist of USPARPAC’s theater intelligence, theater sustainment, multi-domain fires, and mission command of joint forces.
These top four workhorses come together to clearly articulate their top five capability gaps and find potential solid solutions, with enterprise partners from Army Futures Command (AFC), Combat Capability Development Command (DEVCOM), and the Assistant Secretary of the Army for Acquisition, Logistics, and Technology (ASA(ALT)). They are also to, validate and refine USARPACS technology focus areas and develop a way ahead for each noted requirement to provide Soldiers throughout the Indo-Pacific with proper equipment to train, deter, and win.
“A lot of army equipment was designed with the Middle East or Europe in mind. Our theater is everything from the artic in Alaska to the jungles in the Philippines and Indonesia. There are large distances that we need to be able to operate across,” stated Col Holm. “Any piece of equipment being a radio or helicopter or drone that was not designed with the needed conditions in mind isn’t going to be able to perform the way our Soldiers need to it. So our ultimate goal is to address that problem”.
The Requirement Summit plans to be an annual occurrence in efforts to strengthen and reshape USARPAC’s capabilities.
“We are trying to focus on solvable problems, I’m looking forward to seeing the fruits of our labor next year, and also learning from the lessons our first summit offered.” Holms.
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