In its process of weeding through nearly 2,000 weapons requirements documents amassed over decades within the U.S. Army, the service has removed over 400 outdated requirements to free up funds and clean up its books, said Lt. Gen. Karl Gingrich, the Army’s deputy chief of staff G-8.
The Army embarked on an effort last year to weed through its mountain of formal requirements for any equipment or resources, from networks to weapons, that it might want to discard due to their stale or outdated nature.
Requirements describe desired capabilities that the military wants to have. There’s a sizable bureaucracy in the armed forces devoted to creating and refining requirements, passing them to acquisition specialists as the basis for eventual programs. Lousy requirements have led to billions of dollars wasted in the Army and elsewhere in the U.S. military.
The service’s new process is essentially an Army Requirements Oversight Council, or AROC, event — but in reverse. Instead of approving new requirements, as the panel usually does, the service approves their removal. The Army is calling it CORA, which is coincidentally a backwards “AROC,” but stands for Continuous Objectives Requirements Analysis.
“What we are doing is we are actually using some automated tools to go back and take a look and see what’s still relevant with all these requirements documents,” Gingrich said at the McAleese Defense Programs conference in Arlington, Virginia. “Often, old requirements are still associated with some operations and sustainment funding, which can be allocated elsewhere.”
As the Army validates new requirements coming online, the service is looking to identify requirements on the books that are rendered invalid as a result of new or changing requirements, Gingrich explained.
“We are becoming more sophisticated,” Gingrich noted. The service is now able to — when writing new requirements — dive into old requirements using the CORA process and align resources from old requirements that are tied to new ones.
For instance, the Army is working to completely overhaul its command and control architecture through an effort called Next-Generation Command-and-Control. The previous capability consisted of a variety of essentially disparate systems. The Army was able to identify old requirements that established those “vertical systems” and off-ramped the money applied to those requirements.
“We will bring it into Next-Gen C2 in the future so that we ensure there’s no money out there going toward legacy systems,” Gingrich said.
Jen Judson is an award-winning journalist covering land warfare for Defense News. She has also worked for Politico and Inside Defense. She holds a Master of Science degree in journalism from Boston University and a Bachelor of Arts degree from Kenyon College.
