A new policy orders organizations across the Army to embrace advanced manufacturing to “fundamentally change” both modernization and readiness.
By Sydney J. Freedberg Jr.Quality control problems at Boeing are just part of wider supply shortfalls that could hamstring Army helicopters in a major war.
By Sydney J. Freedberg Jr.The massive Army Materiel Command needs to get a lot lighter on its feet for future conflicts, its four-star chief says.
By Sydney J. Freedberg Jr.“When I was here before,” said Lt. Gen. James Pasquarette, who returned to the Pentagon last week for his fifth tour there, “the four-star commanders around the Army had no say, no input. They’re in the room now when the big decisions are made.”
By Sydney J. Freedberg Jr.The Army believes it has all the legal authorities it needs to reform. Now it just has to make the reform work.
By Sydney J. Freedberg Jr.Gen. Gus Perna, head of Army Materiel Command, is a brave man. He came to Pacific Command’s AOR and announced he wants the Army to stop building the transport ships and so-called watercraft that could be crucial to any conflict in the Indo-Pacific region.
By Colin Clark“If you start a process with an org chart, you’re toast,” Army Under Secretary Ryan McCarthy said. “Focus on what you want to achieve.”
By Sydney J. Freedberg Jr.WASHINGTON: Army Chief of Staff Gen. Mark Milley says over and over that his top priority to getting the Army ready to “fight tonight.” What does that mean in practice? For Army Materiel Command, which keeps troops supplied, it means literally putting its money where his mouth is. If readiness for major combat operations is really the…
By Sydney J. Freedberg Jr.AUSA: The Army will start buying weapons the way Special Operations does, Army Chief of Staff Mark Milley told reporters here, bringing different specialists together in one streamlined team. The often-insular Army is also studying the other services, Milley said, particularly the rapid development of the nuclear Navy under legendary Adm. Hyman Rickover. A three-star…
By Sydney J. Freedberg Jr.WILLIAMSBURG, Va.: The next time the Army holds a conference on how to improve its relations with industry, it should actually let industry into the most important session, Maj. Gen. Bo Dyess told his four-star superiors at the Army Innovation Summit here. It just has to get around its own lawyers. This week’s conference — the third…
By Sydney J. Freedberg Jr.ARLINGTON: The digital dam has burst. It took the Army three grueling years to set up a new, more secure network at its first site in San Antonio, which went live in fall 2014. Now a dozen more installations have gotten the upgrade, exulted the Army CIO this morning, and another 20 will go live…
By Sydney J. Freedberg Jr.HUNTSVILLE, ALA: The Army plans to stockpile equipment in Vietnam, Cambodia, and other Pacific countries yet unnamed that will allow US forces to deploy there more rapidly, because key supplies and gear will already be in place. The new caches will be well inside what China considers its sphere of influence. Army Materiel Command chief Gen. Dennis Via emphasized…
By Sydney J. Freedberg Jr.AUSA: The Honorable Shyu, as everyone in the military calls the head of Army acquisition, is often bright, humorous and insightful. Today, she got passionate in public, clearly frustrated at the painful limits that the automatic budget cuts known as sequestration have forced her to adopt. American military power has traditionally rested on technological overmatch. We…
By Colin Clark
This is the second op-ed we’ve run by serving Army officials about how and why the service should be restructured so it can build its next generation of weapons and do it effectively. The Army, not known for going public with its internal (sometimes religious) debates, appears to understand that after getting so much wrong…
By Col. Richard Hough