"The Army of 2025 and Beyond will effectively employ lethal and nonlethal overmatch against any adversary to prevent, shape and win conflicts and achieve national interests." -- The Army Vision, July 2015
SHAPING THE STRATEGY
Over the last year, the Army began the process of understanding, visualizing and describing the ideas framed by the Army Operating Concept, or AOC. As discussed in numerous engagements, "Win in a Complex World" serves as the foundational concept to build our future Army. As we begin to implement the ideas from the AOC, the Army is developing the modernization strategy to deliver national power as the foundation for the joint force to deal with an unknown, unknowable and constantly changing world.
Relying on a strategy to resource and shape the Army is not new. What has changed, beginning with the Army's senior leaders, is how the Army looks at the relationship of ends, ways and means. For many years, the Army focused on buying and fielding "things." These things were related to individual warfighting functions and overly tied to budget cycles and program managers. The focus seemed to be more on identifying ways to get resources for an individual project as opposed to working collaboratively with internal or joint partners to build a capability.
The big change is the Army's focus on the ends, or the must-have capabilities the Army provides to the nation to deliver national power. The priority of senior leaders is identifying the ends broad enough to empower the Army to meet the unknown challenges of the future. Leaders must ensure the force is able to prevent, shape or deter globally. Those capabilities will be the foundation for the future force. The key to this end state is enhancing leader development, building a culture of innovation and implementing a clear modernization strategy. The AOC provides guidelines for developing the future force, and we are beginning the process of implementing the strategy that will shape the Army for the future.
FORCE 2025 AND BEYOND
We are leveraging a variety of approaches and analytical tools to shape the future force while incorporating the change we need today. These approaches and tools are framed in Force 2025 and Beyond, the comprehensive strategy to map out transformation for the future. Force 2025 and Beyond is the all-inclusive effort for changing the Army and improving landpower capabilities for the joint force. It is designed to synchronize the processes and products from concepts to capabilities that implement change. Force 2025 and Beyond efforts produce recommendations that help Army leaders direct modernization efforts and force development.
F2025B is a strategy to explore, develop, build, deliver and sustain landpower capabilities. It incorporates concept development, simulations, experimentation, research and evaluation along with innovative approaches to create executable options for the Army. Options designed to identify solutions that impact doctrine, organizations, training, material, leadership, and education, and personnel and facilities. F2025B incorporates the total force by using operational deployments, scheduled exercises and home-station training as venues to develop ideas and options to find solutions needed to win in a complex world.
Throughout the last year, the Army has made strides in two key areas that support the F2025B strategy: transitioning the institute to enhance leader development and developing and acquiring solutions that enhance the capability of the future force.
TRANSITION THE INSTITUTE: ARMY UNIVERSITY
Developing adaptive and innovative leaders is one of the key focus areas of F2025B and a top priority for senior Army leaders. Today's Soldiers are the most lethal asymmetrical advantage we have over any enemy because they can thrive in chaotic conditions, and they are comfortable operating in complex and constantly changing environments.
The Army knows what makes a good leader and prides itself in the quality of Soldiers and leaders it produces. The professionalism and expertise of the Army team is demonstrated each day in operations and exercises in more than 150 countries across the globe. But that is today; what about building our leaders in the future? Are we training our leaders to identify the position of relative advantage? Are they critical thinkers? How do we maintain our asymmetrical advantage in the human dimension?
The development of the Army University, or Army U, is our first step in reshaping leader development and the institution by identifying talent, integrating best practices across our education system, and preparing Soldiers to succeed in the classroom and battlefield. Army U reorganizes the Army's education enterprise into a university structure that maximizes educational opportunities for Soldiers by providing valid academic credit for education and experience.
Army U encompasses all U.S. Army Training and Doctrine Command schools and incorporates best practices of renowned academic institutions, such as partnership programs and interactive e-learning methods, and will use cutting-edge curriculum models and living doctrine. The idea pulls Army learning and educational development into the 21st century, sustaining our professional military education as a competitive learning institution. The Army University is a tangible commitment, confirming that education is the most strategic investment the Army can make in the future force.
The second area of progress is in developing a means to exercise and train combined ideas through collaboration with industry, labs and Army Soldiers. These efforts will focus on efficiencies in the process that develops, acquires and fields concepts from requirements to implementation.
FORCE 2025 MANEUVERS
The Force 2025 Maneuvers provides the means to develop and evaluate proposed concepts and solutions. This is executed through physical (experimentation, evaluations, exercises, modeling, simulation and war games) and intellectual (studies, analysis, concept and capabilities development) events that help leaders integrate future capabilities and develop interim solutions to warfighting challenges. Force 2025 Maneuvers incorporates existing venues, such as combined training center rotations, mission command training programs, warfighter exercises or home-station training, to provide observations, DOTMLPF implications and recommendations across the near-, mid-, and far-term developmental horizons. As the Army gathers input, our centers of excellence incorporate these outcomes into their interim solutions strategies to focus development and resource allocation for the future.
An innovated subset of Force 2025 Maneuvers is the Army Warfighting Assessment. Beginning in fiscal year 2016, the Army will conduct one Network Integration Evaluation and one Army Warfightng Assessment annually.
The Network Integration Evaluation, or NIE, is the Army's existing evaluation exercise to further integrate and rapidly improve the Army's tactical communications network through Soldier-led evaluations. NIEs, however, are predicated on testing evaluation criteria, which can limit the scope to explore new concepts and capabilities. To address the constraints the NIE requirements places on operators and evaluators, the Army removed one of two annual NIE exercises and implemented a less constrained exercise, the Army Warfighting Assessment.
The Army Warfighting Assessment, or AWA, is the Army's capstone Force 2025 Maneuvers exercise. The AWA is designed to assess operational and organizational concepts for expeditionary maneuver and enable the development of expeditionary capabilities through a mix of live, virtual and constructive exercises while maintaining joint and multinational participation. The AWA improves the capability process by developing and refining requirements, improving engineering, providing Soldier feedback early and often and accelerating capability delivery to the force.
The AWA becomes a proving ground for warfighting concepts and interim solutions and also serves as a complimentary platform for building readiness. The assessments become a part of an enduring joint and multinational exercise to increase innovation, improve interoperability, enhance readiness and heighten military-to-industry collaboration. To focus resources that support Force 2025 Maneuvers, we identified 20 enduring first-order challenges to explore, develop and deliver the future force.
ARMY WARFIGHTING CHALLENGES
The Army Warfighting Challenges, or AWfC, outlined in the AOC, are 20 enduring first-order problems; the solutions to which improve combat effectiveness of the current and future force. The AOC emphasizes the development of capabilities that are integrated across warfighting functions, collaborated with key stakeholders and incorporated in learning activities. The AWfCs, which drive modernization and shape future force design, are intended as a lens to recognize how the warfighting functions work together. Understanding the linkage between the two will help solve these problems and result in increased collaboration and integrated systems.
The warfighting challenges help the Army develop and refine the needed capabilities from the concepts outlined in the AOC. They provide the analytical framework that sustains collaboration across the community of practice for concept and capability development. These challenges, such as developing situational understanding, conducting entry operations, or combined arms maneuver, are enduring due to the velocity of change in a world that is increasingly complex.
CONCLUSION
It takes considerable effort, focus, diligence, and vision to change the Army. Setting the framework for transformation is the keystone for change. That foundation is what the AOC accomplished. Recalling the positive impact Air Land Battle had on the Army, from redefining Army service as a profession to fielding the most dominate landpower in history, shows the long-term impact of identifying and solving the right problem. The framework of the future force the Army adheres to now will shape, mold and form our force for the next 40 years. That framework is evident today as Soldiers begin to talk, train and execute the language outlined in the AOC.
We are beginning to leverage the ideas that will enable us to win in a complex world. We have asked the right big questions and now it is our job to provide the answers through a clear, resourced modernization strategy and the continued development of our greatest assets, our Soldiers and leaders. The Army is, and continues to be, the most dominate force on land, a tool for national power and the foundation for the joint force.
This We'll Defend!
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