ABERDEEN PROVING GROUND, Md. (Feb. 19, 2016) -- The leadership team of the U.S. Army Aviation and Missile Research, Development and Engineering Center visited the Army Research Laboratory Feb. 18-19.
AMRDEC Director James Lackey and members of his staff met with ARL Director Dr. Thomas H. Russell for an overview on the laboratory's Open Campus initiative and the ARL technical campaigns as well as an organizational overview.
"We collaborate on many, many levels much more than I initially appreciated," Lackey said. "It's critical because we live in a complex technological world. Our adversaries are rapidly gaining on us in terms of capability and we are operating under a constrained budget environment. All of these factors drive necessity to pull our collective resources, leverage off each other's excellence, and continually cross communicate to problem solve our strategic and tactical war fighting challenges."
These visits are known as "home-on-home," an opportunity to share success stories between Army organizations.
Russell explained the laboratory's four pillars strategy of People First, Open Campus, Technical Campaigns and Business Acumen.
"I felt that ARL's approach on campaign plans and underlying Initiatives was very useful," Lackey said. "AMRDEC does this on a more localized sub-organization level, but I think there's opportunity to put this kind of application at a larger enterprise level."
Members of the AMRDEC leadership team asked many questions of the ARL leaders during a myriad of briefings.
"The primary purpose for us being here is to find those areas where we can leverage more synergy across the Missile S&T areas," said Dr. Juanita Harris, director of the AMRDEC Weapons Development & Integration Directorate.
Harris said AMRDEC and ARL have a good working relationship with processes in place for collaboration.
"We hope to capitalize on lessons learned and capture better processes," she said. "I think we're doing a lot of these kind of activities, just not to the extent of ARL. There are many areas like cooperative research agreements with international universities in which we're interested."
At APG, the group toured ARL's Weapons and Materials Research Directorate, Vehicle Technology Directorate and Survivability/Lethality Analysis Directorate, as well as the DOD Supercomputing Resource Center. They toured the Adelphi Laboratory Center on day two.
"World-class expertise exists in many areas here at ARL," Lackey said. "I was extremely impressed with the leading edge technologies highlighted during my in-depth briefings and tours. The mission engaged, focused attitude is clearly evident with the various ARL team members I met today."
Collaboration efforts stream both ways. A team of ARL scientists, engineers and senior VTD leaders traveled to Redstone Arsenal, Alabama, Feb. 9 to conduct a mid-year joint review of S&T collaborations in basic research, structural mechanics, reliability and sustainment, aviation power and concept design and analysis.
"We focused on aviation science and technology capabilities and discussed collaborative opportunities to support current and future Army aviation programs," said ARL-VTD Director Dr. Mark Valco.
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The U.S. Army Research Laboratory is part of the U.S. Army Research, Development and Engineering Command, which has the mission to ensure decisive overmatch for unified land operations to empower the Army, the joint warfighter and our nation. RDECOM is a major subordinate command of the U.S. Army Materiel Command.
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