ADELPHI, Md. - From April 8-12, 2024, the Army Research Laboratory, Adelphi, MD, hosted the Futures and Concepts Center’s (FCC) offsite. Lt. Gen. David Hodne, FCC director, led the offsite, with senior leaders from across FCC and Army organizations that work modernization efforts, to provide a collaborative forum for the concept and capability developers and as well as key stakeholders from across the Army modernization enterprise to better understand the Army of 2040, and what the Army needs to accomplish to transform the force from the Army of 2030 to the 2040 force.
Key participants at the offsite included senior leaders from FCC headquarters staff, directorates, and Capability Development and Integration Directorates (CDIDs), U.S. Army Combat Capabilities Development Command (DEVCOM) engineers and scientists working science and technology (S&T) solutions, Army Futures Command (AFC) representatives, and The Research and Analysis Center operations research systems analysts.
Continuous Transformation
The Army is currently undergoing a once in a lifetime transformation to meet the evolving threat, ensuring our adversaries cannot outrange or outpace us on the battlefield. This continuous transformation is the way the Army will remain dominant against evolving and emerging threats in the era of rapid changes in the character of war. Continuous transformation provides a framework for thinking in time across three concurrently executed time-horizons: transform in contact, deliberate transformation, and concept-drive transformation. FCC, as the Army’s leader for developing the Army Warfighting Concept (AWC) 2030-2040, has a key role in shaping and designing the Army of 2040, and informing Army decisions across the deliberate transformation and concept-driven transformation time-horizons.
Army of 2040 and the Modernization Roadmap
Hodne, recognizing that the window of time to influence the Army of 2040 is now, directed the FCC offsite to develop the initial FCC Army 2030-2040 Modernization Roadmap, a tool, approach, and integration methodology that lays out a plan to design and develop the Army of 2040 from now across the time-horizons to 2040. “The gaps between 2030 and 2040 is huge and a risk for the Army, and the data in the roadmap needs to communicate the scale of the risk” said Hodne in the weeks leading up to the offsite.
Hodne, FCC director, plans to use the Modernization Roadmap to update AFC and Army senior leaders of critical Army 2040 solutions, decision points, technologies, and friction points with Army of 2030 developments, and to inform Department of the Army (DA) processes such as the Strategic Portfolio Analysis Review (SPAR), Program Objective Memorandum, and Total Army Analysis.
“At the offsite we will write the plan that will yield the Army of 2040, give the Army a north star to orient our efforts, and inform the Chief of Staff of the Army of the risk with technology development,” said Hodne.
Hodne acknowledges that the offsite will result in an imperfect and hasty Roadmap; however, he also understands it’s a necessary start point and will use the initial output of the offsite and the Modernization Roadmap to show the upcoming SPAR.
Key inputs to the offsite included the draft AWC 2030-2040 and supporting Concept Required Capabilities (CRCs). The AWC explains how we are going to fight in the future, based on a future threat, and the CRCs describe what capabilities the Army must possess to enable the concept. They are the start-point to the force design process and are also critical input to other FCC processes used to inform both AFC and DA processes. Other inputs to the offsite included S&T solutions and the Army of 2030 work from the US Army Combined Arms Center.
At Hodne’s direction, FCC organized the offsite by CRCs, with the goal of developing individual roadmaps for each.
“We have to determine what goes into delivering each CRC, and how far along we are in delivering each CRC,” Hodne told his workforce.
FCC conducted breakout sessions for each of the 21 CRCs led by a senior leader from the FCC CDIDs and included representatives from the FCC Staff and Directorates, CDIDs, and DEVCOM S&T community. During the breakout sessions, the collaborative force of concept and capability developers, engineers, scientists, and analysts worked together to identify the initial roadmap to 2040 for each CRC. Each roadmap included critical tasks, decisions, experiments, technologies, and solution sets to achieve the CRC. The breakouts used the Modernization Roadmap tool, a Microsoft Power App built by FCC’s Data Scientists, to facilitate data collection, compilation, and analysis.
By collecting detailed information built upon the CRCs, the tool then organizes the information and provides information in a standardized format. Users follow a series of input criteria that forces backwards planning from 2040, across doctrine, organization, training, materiel, leadership and education, personnel, and facilities (DOTMLPF-P), to design the Army in 2040 through concept-driven transformation. At the end of the week, each breakout session lead briefed the results of their breakout sessions, receiving guidance and feedback from Hodne to further refine the individual roadmaps.
There is still much work to be done in the Modernization Roadmap, and FCC, under Hodne’s leadership, will continue to refine and update it based on continued refinement of the AWC and CRCs, experimentation, and identification of Army of 2040 capability gaps. Hodne expects to conduct another offsite around the same time in 2025, establishing an annual collaborative forum bringing together key stakeholders to continue to refine and update the Modernization Roadmap.
Eclipse
Lastly, Hodne “forged” the name “Eclipse” in the FCC vernacular in recognition of the April 8, 2024, total solar eclipse that occurred during the first day of the FCC offsite. Henceforth, FCC will call future iterations of the offsite Eclipse. The Eclipse and the Modernization Roadmap will lead us to the Army of 2040. Forge the Future, Bring the Hammer.
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