Author: chloe_habelreeh

The Army’s prepositioned gear allows troops to respond quickly in times of crisis.

By Caitlin M. Kenney of Defense One

February 2, 2022

American troops heading to Europe due to the Russia-Ukraine crisis will be able to take advantage of the Army’s prepositioned stock of equipment to rapidly deploy to the region, a former commander of U.S. soldiers in Europe said.

Troops dispatched by Wednesday’s deployment order will be taking some equipment from warehouses in Europe, but it’s unclear which units and what type of equipment they will be withdrawing, said Ben Hodges, who led U.S. Army Europe from 2014 to 2017. But, he wrote in an email, “This is why we have [Army Prepositioned Stock] and what I always expected” when he was the commanding general.

The Army’s prepositioned stock for Europe, called APS-2, include vehicles and weapons in Belgium, Netherlands, Germany, and Poland that U.S. troops can use without waiting weeks for their home-based equipment to arrive on ships.

The previous day, Gen. Edward Daly, who leads U.S. Army Materiel Command, was asked about the prepositioned stocks that it manages around the globe.

Daly said the stock includes “combat systems,” like tanks, trucks and weapons.

“They're ready to be issued and they're ready to respond to crisis and conflict,” he said during a Defense Writers Group call with reporters Tuesday.

The Pentagon announced Wednesday that about 1,700 soldiers from an infantry brigade combat team of the 82nd Airborne Division at Fort Bragg, North Carolina would soon be deploying to Poland, as well as 300 soldiers from the 18th Airborne Corps to Germany as part of a headquarters unit.

Additionally, about 1,000 soldiers from a Germany-based Stryker squadron will head to Romania.  

These newly announced troops are separate from the 8,500 the Pentagon previously announced were put on ready to deploy orders.

“These movements are unmistakable signals to the world that we stand ready to reassure our NATO allies and to deter and defend against any aggression,” Pentagon Spokesman John Kirby said Wednesday.

Daly said Tuesday the command has not sent additional equipment to preposition for a possible future deployment of additional troops, like the 8,500 on alert. These prepositioned stocks are also separate from weapons and materiel going to Ukraine, he said.

Prepositioning military equipment overseas is not new, going back to the Cold War, said Mark Cancian, a senior advisor of the International Security Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

“So for a long time, the idea has been that you could position the equipment where you think the conflict is going to be, and then you can move the troops in when there's a crisis or an actual conflict,” Cancian said.

The Army has seven prepositioned stock locations, from Europe to the Indo-Pacific in Japan and South Korea, as well as on ships at Diego Garcia, an island in the Indian Ocean. The other military services also have prepositioned stocks located around the world.

The Army’s stocks have gone through an overhaul in the past few years due to a new strategy. About a decade ago, the equipment was dated and was more for use in an emergency, Daly said. Now, these stocks have the most up-to-date equipment and supplies and are used regularly through exercises, such as the recent DEFENDER-Europe 21.

“We want to use it during exercises because that creates a muscle memory and now it allows speed of issue if we would have to do it under duress or under contested conditions,” he said.

For 2022, the Defense Department requested $1.19 billion for prepositioned stocks as part of the European Deterrence Initiative, less than the $1.94 billion it had received the year before, according to a Congressional Research Service report.

If troops need to move the equipment from one country to another, that is where things can get bogged down in bureaucracy with regulations and requirements that were designed for commercial activities having to be applied to a military convoy, Cancian said.  

“Apparently that's been a huge problem, because at least the peacetime regulations are quite onerous about crossing borders and the other requirements for shipping ammunition or tanks, you know, big things like that. They've had delays of many weeks in connection with trying to move equipment,” he said.

Others:

https://www.defenseone.com/threats/2022/02/us-military-equipment-ready-europe-deploying-forces/361530/

https://fuentitech.com/weapons-and-supplies-command-is-looking-to-advanced-manufacturing-to-improve-readiness/496486/

https://breakingdefense.com/2022/02/organic-industrial-base-modernization-plan-to-be-briefed-to-senior-army-leaders/

https://www.ausa.org/news/industrial-base-threatened-funding-woes

https://fcw.com/defense/2022/02/army-materiel-command-looks-advanced-manufacturing-improve-readiness/361465/

https://fuentitech.com/u-s-military-presents-strategy-to-modernize-organic-industrial-base/494444/

https://news.yahoo.com/us-army-present-strategy-modernizing-202231684.html

https://www.nationaldefensemagazine.org/articles/2022/2/1/army-aims-to-break-chinese-chokehold-on-microchips-and-rare-earth

https://www.fedscoop.com/army-seeking-to-add-3d-printing-to-programming-efforts-over-next-5-to-7-years/

https://www.govexec.com/technology/2022/02/army-materiel-command-looks-advanced-manufacturing-improve-readiness/361481/

https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/policy/defense-national-security/now-or-never-for-return-to-2015-iran-nuclear-deal

Heidi Shyu says lawmakers are eager to fund Pentagon’s tech priorities.

By Patrick Tucker of Defense One

January 13, 2022

Next year’s Defense Department request for research and engineering funds will likely top this year’s record $112 billion appropriation, thanks to lawmakers who say they’re on board with Pentagon tech priorities, the defense undersecretary for research and engineering said Thursday.

“In December, 15 members of Congress came over to the Pentagon and I was able to give them a briefing on what [Research and Engineering] is doing. And they were thrilled,” Heidi Shyu said during a Defense Writers’ Group event. At one point, she said, lawmakers simply asked, “How much money do you need?…There's a lot of enthusiasm for the stuff I'm doing.”

Congress displayed that enthusiasm in recent months by adding $24 billion to the Pentagon’s request in the 2022 National Defense Authorization Act.

In October, Shyu told Defense One that she had expected to trim the Pentagon’s 2018 list of tech priorities, but instead added to them. For 2023, she said, she has her eye on 32 key experiments in a variety of areas. Those projects fall “in the classified [realm] all the way to secret to top secret to special access. So, by and large, I can't talk about it too much,” she said.

Shyu said progress would be demonstrated next month in an area of particular emphasis: joint all-domain command and control, or JADC2, the linking together of weapons, vehicles, satellites and troops across the services and across the domains of air, land, sea, space and cyberspace.

“In February, there's going to be a demonstration in which we literally stitch together Army, Navy and Air Forces. So I'm pretty thrilled,” she said. She didn’t specify where it would take place or any other details.

Shyu, who has criticized the Pentagon’s hypersonics efforts, said she will continue to push for costs to come down, particularly for the Army’s Long-Range Hypersonic Weapon. But she said that the Defense Department is already building an asymmetric way to counter China’s and Russia’s relatively advanced hypersonic weapons. She said funding for that will be part of the coming budget request She declined to go into further details, again citing classification.

Others:

https://asianpolyglotview.com/2022/01/bitter-public-squabbling-keep-house-democrats-and-republicans-from-agreement-on-2022-defense-budget.html

https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/policy/defense-national-security/bitter-public-squabbling-keep-house-democrats-and-republicans-from-agreement-on-2022-defense-budget

https://www.nationaldefensemagazine.org/articles/2022/1/13/pentagon-re-chief-to-prioritize-microelectronics-ai

https://www.defenseone.com/technology/2022/01/impressed-2022s-record-research-budget-wait-til-next-year-dod-undersecretary-says/360754/

https://breakingdefense.com/2022/01/pentagon-re-chief-pushes-new-tech-initiatives-expects-bump-in-funding/

https://www.defense.gov/News/News-Stories/Article/Article/2900731/dod-technology-chief-emphasizes-people-teamwork/

https://exbulletin.com/tech/1410094/

https://americanmilitarynews.com/2022/01/impressed-by-2022s-record-research-budget-wait-til-next-year-dod-undersecretary-says/

By Ryan Lovelace of The Washington Times

January 5, 2022

The American government must have successful relationships with academia and the business sector in order to win the ongoing data competition with China, according to David Spirk, the Department of Defense‘s chief data officer.

Both the U.S.government and the Chinese government scoop up all kinds of data, from publicly accessible information to knowledge gathered from satellites and electronic signals. But China has access to data generated by its commercial sector because of policies that remove barriers between businesses and the country’s communist rulers.

America’s government and business sectors are independent, though the Biden administration has sought new partnerships between companies and government to bolster U.S. cyber defenses.

Mr. Spirk told reporters at George Washington University’s Project for Media and National Security on Wednesday that America is not losing its competition with China — yet.

“I don’t necessarily see China having an advantage over us,” Mr. Spirk said. “But I do understand that if we don’t continue to partner with our commercial sector, with some of what I view [as] our lead cloud vendors, and see them as national security treasures in addition to some of our just academic powerhouses, if we don’t continue to grow those partnerships and leverage those capabilities, then I think we’ll find ourselves falling off pace.”

Mr. Spirk said the U.S. is focused on the speed and accuracy of its decisions because it is aware that authoritarian rule gives China the ability to leverage data taken from its large population in a way that is unacceptable in a free society like the U.S.

Mr. Spirk took over as the Defense Department‘s chief data officer in 2020 and he said the government is making a transition toward focusing on data quality, as opposed to simply collection, in order to give the U.S. a larger advantage.

“I think when I look at our adversaries, they now have the same ability that the commercial sector has to harness massive amounts of data and generate decision-advantage with them,” Mr. Spirk said. “If we don’t conduct that same activity, and we have been for some time, then we will lag behind and just like industry, we’ll see ourselves being eclipsed from a capability standpoint because others do create that decision-advantage.”

Others within the Department of Defense have sounded far more pessimistic about America’s tech competition with China. Former Air Force Chief Software Officer Nicolas Chaillan left the government in September and publicly warned that America was losing the artificial intelligence and cyber race but he stressed that time remained to turn things around.

Mr. Chaillan faulted the American tech sector’s reluctance to work with the U.S. government as a problem that has given China a competitive edge.

Under the Biden administration, the federal government has taken steps to thaw the government’s icy relationships with tech companies — relationships that chilled when former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden shared government secrets about American surveillance efforts leveraging the private sector.

The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency took a lead role last year in establishing the Joint Cyber Defense Collaborative to enable government agencies to work with tech companies against hackers and cyberattackers.

The Department of Defense and several other national security and law enforcement agencies teamed with a slew of companies including Amazon Web Services and Google Cloud in the new partnership.

Some of the federal government’s courtship of the tech sector predates President Biden but the relationship has grown more formal since Mr. Biden took office.

Ahead of the 2020 election, U.S. law enforcement and intelligence agency officials met with tech executives from companies such as Facebook, Google and Microsoft to coordinate efforts to combat foreign influence.

Last year, the Department of Defense‘s research and development arm announced plans to spend $59.5 million in the coming four years on researchers refining the algorithms used to gather and evaluate content such as tweets, memes, and blog posts, all as part of an effort to better detect “early warning” signs of foreign influence.

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency’s “Influence Campaign Awareness and Sensemaking” program has enlisted an array of companies, labs and institutions, including researchers from the Universities of Illinois and Southern California.

In a competition pitting American innovation against Chinese authoritarian control, Mr. Spirk is betting on America to win.

“If we continue and accelerate on this data journey, I don’t see any reason that we won’t stay the pacing threat for the rest of the world,” Mr. Spirk said.

By Patricia Kime of Military.com

October 10, 2021

A military of "climate literate" troops and bases powered by microgrids, that's the future envisioned by the Pentagon.

Its new climate change plan, ordered by President Joe Biden and released Thursday, would affect every level of command. It seeks to counter the damaging effects of a warming world by educating troops on the potential peril and hardening installations.

Rising sea levels, extreme heat, more severe hurricanes and wildfires are all hitting the military, either by threatening bases and hampering training or by fueling global instability.

"It's real, and no one in the department denies it, particularly the new people, the younger folks," Richard Kidd, deputy assistant secretary of defense for environment and energy resilience, said during a press conference Friday. "This is part of their life, and they're driving it. They're a force for change."

The Pentagon has factored the weather changes into strategic planning for years. But the new public fervor is part of the administration's wider push on climate change, and the DoD's plan was submitted this week, along with proposals from 22 other federal agencies following an executive order.

The new DoD Climate Adaptation Plan will broaden its efforts.

"We intend to adapt the entire department -- our decision-making processes, our training, our equipment, our supply chain, and our partnerships with others," Kidd said at the event hosted by George Washington University's Project for Media and National Security.

Troops will be educated to improve their "climate literacy," according to the report. The topic should be taught to all during professional development training and at advanced courses, it said.

"In order to properly respond, we need to have the knowledge, the tools and the ability to make climate-informed decisions at all echelons," Kidd said.

Climate change has been a political lightning rod in Washington, D.C., for decades. The Trump administration and other Republican administrations have largely ignored or downplayed the problem, arguing that increases seen in global temperatures are the result of a naturally occurring cycle.

But Biden, a Democrat, has made it a top priority for his administration. The Pentagon has experienced the likely consequences of climate change firsthand in recent years.

Offutt Air Force Base in Nebraska was hit by unprecedented flooding in 2019, and Tyndall Air Force Base in Florida suffered $3 billion in hurricane damage in 2018. California military bases face an increasing threat from wildfires.

The DoD's plan aims to defend installations against such devastation, partly by making them energy self-sufficient.

"We will be building and fielding microgrids with onsite power management, energy generation onsite and power storage," Kidd said. "Our intent over time is to reduce the fossil fuel component, and get to the point that we can operate independently off the grid for 14 days."

He said there also may come a time to "ask some hard questions" and consider whether some military installations are no longer viable for training or operations.

The Defense Department consumes roughly 80% of the federal government's energy, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration, and is a significant global contributor to greenhouse gas emissions.

But the report does not include specifics on reductions. Those targets will be set by a forthcoming White House executive order, Kidd said. A separate plan and report will follow that will spell out the department's proposals for slashing its own emissions.

"The science is very clear: We have to reduce our greenhouse gas emissions to zero, and we have to do it before 2050 if we want to avoid the most pronounced effects of climate change," he said.

Others:

https://www.globalsecurity.org/military/library/news/2021/10/mil-211008-dodnews02.htm

https://ritzherald.com/u-s-department-of-defense-must-pivot-to-counter-climate-change-official-says/ 

https://www.defense.gov/News/News-Stories/Article/Article/2805945/dod-must-pivot-to-counter-climate-change-official-says/

By Abraham Mahshie of Air Force Magazine

October 8, 2021

U.S. Transportation Command is already conducting an after-action report of the Noncombatant Evacuation Operation that flew more than 124,000 Afghan refugees, third-country nationals, and Americans from Kabul to safety in August to identify lessons learned, said the command’s director of operations, Maj. Gen. Corey J. Martin, who offered a preview to journalists Oct. 7.

“A larger after-action report activity is underway,” Martin promised on a call with the Defense Writers Group.

Martin revealed that he was not satisfied with the processes for TRANSCOM to scale to the demand of the airlift operation from Hamid Karzai International Airport (HKIA) over 17 days in August.

“In the early days of where there was that urgency to go, we realized that we were changing processes,” he said.

Martin said that as director of operations, he wanted a scalable process at his fingertips.

“What I would like to do is just be able to have your, what we call our normal battle rhythm, our normal processes, be able to be scaled to any operation,” he said. “And I did not see that that was the case.”

Martin also said there needs to be less of a focus on the number of aircraft in the operation.

“There’s a feeling sometimes that it’s all about the aircraft and how many aircraft that you can have,” he said.

At the peak of the Afghanistan NEO, TRANSCOM had 60 C-17s focused on the U.S. Central Command area of responsibility. On a typical day such as Oct. 7, about 60 C-17s were on missions around the world. During the NEO, C-5s flew more to keep up with the global missions that C-17s were called away from.

“You have this idea that sometimes aircraft is all it takes to make an operation go,” he said. “I think one of the lessons that started to emerge early is that it’s more than just aircraft—you need places to put the aircraft.”

At one point in the operation, flights out of HKIA were paused for several hours until intermediate locations could flow people out and open capacity.

Martin described the concept of “nodes,” including basing and overflight access from allies and partners.

“It’s the ability to have the throughput of the flow of personnel,” he said. “Early on, we knew there had to be more places as we extracted people from HKIA at the greatest velocity possible because of the timeline and because of the threat—you then needed to have enough places to put them as they flow through the system back to the United States.”

Martin also previewed an information technology lesson learned, but he emphasized that it did not affect the operational capacity of the airlift.

“This operation would speak to the utility of a joint all-domain command and control system that has more wide sensors and a greater sharing of information,” he said. “There was time still spent on point-to-point communications to discuss individual data points.”

A joint all-domain command and control system, he said, would involve “authoritative data that is shared more quickly at different echelons.”

“It highlights, I think, areas that if we were going to take an operation like this, scale it to a larger exercise, you would want to have that type of interoperability without human interface needed to accelerate operations,” he said.

Others:

https://insidedefense.com/daily-news/transcom-kabul-evacuation-highlighted-need-jadc2-improved-it-systems

https://www.armytimes.com/news/your-air-force/2021/10/08/military-reviewing-lessons-of-afghanistan-evacuation-as-thousands-more-seek-refuge/

https://www.afcea.org/content/call-nimble-it

By Joseph Lacdan, Army News Service

October 1, 2021

WASHINGTON -- Despite the impacts of COVID-19, the Army successfully met all its mission requirements in fiscal year 2021 including a no-notice deployment of the 82nd Airborne Division to Afghanistan in August, the service’s top enlisted leader said Thursday.

Sgt. Maj. of the Army Michael A. Grinston considers that no small feat. He said the Army’s success can largely be credited to the service’s People Strategy, which prioritizes optimizing the talents and abilities of Soldiers while building unit cohesion to boost mission readiness.

“We’ve missed no deployments,” Grinston said during a virtual Defense Writers Group discussion. “And we’re more ready than we’ve ever been. We did focus on our readiness, and then we've supported everything and every requirement that the Army or the nation has asked us to do in the last year.”

The Army completed all deployments in fiscal 2020 and 2021, he said, as well as 37 combat readiness training center rotations and exercises such as Project Convergence last summer and the Army-led multinational exercise, Defender Europe, in the spring.

Grinston said that the Army boosts readiness by prioritizing Soldiers first while continuing to focus on the service’s other obligations such as modernization.

“If our people aren't ready, I don't understand how we can be a ready Army,” he said.

“It's not people first versus readiness; it’s people first that equals readiness in the Army. If I'm more fit, I'm a better [rifleman]; that's about me as a person. If I'm not fit and I can't shoot my weapon, I'm not very lethal.”

Assessment programs

The Army has also moved closer to fully implementing its talent management assessments for sergeants major and first sergeants, a process designed to better assess Soldiers for key leadership positions.

Grinston said that the brigade-level Sergeant Major Assessment Program will become the standard evaluation for promotion beginning in November. He added that the service will begin a battalion-level evaluation at the Sergeants Major Academy at Fort Bliss, Texas, early next year.

Among the changes to the brigade-level evaluation will be removing time in service as a variable to compete for promotion, he said. Testing for the assessment began in November 2020 with the evaluation of about 30 brigade-level sergeants major at Fort Knox, Kentucky.

“If you're fit, disciplined, highly trained, and you know you can do more … we're not going to limit you by time in service to be a brigade CSM,” Grinston said. “In November, if you pass that assessment and you've made the list and we need you, then you get to be a brigade [command] sergeant major.”

The Army recently completed the pilot phase of its First Sergeant Talent Alignment Assessment and has taken the next step in its evaluation process at Fort Carson, Colorado. The assessment examines master sergeants on their cognitive, leadership and decision-making abilities.

Grinston said soon Soldiers who do not meet desired standards of the assessment will not qualify to be selected as first sergeants. He said that he expects the assessment to become a requirement by October 2022.

The first pilot evaluated 13 master sergeants at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, late last year, followed by assessments with the 10th Mountain Division at Fort Drum, New York, and locations in Alaska earlier this year.

“We want to be able to pick a more lethal, competent first sergeant of character,” Grinston said.

Others:

https://tass.ru/mezhdunarodnaya-panorama/12550205