Army to create central acquisition organization

Under pressure to bring more engineering expertise back in-house after years of ceding such capability to contractors, the Army has begun standing up a centralized staff of systems engineers with the skill and judgment to broadly examine and improve the service's acquisition programs.

The awkwardly named System-of-Systems Systems Engineering organization -- SoS SE in Army parlance -- is intended to bring a level of engineering oversight to Army weapons programs now lacking.

"We realized there was nobody [with systems engineering expertise] looking across all of our programs," said Ross Guckert, assistant deputy for acquisition and systems integration at the Office of the Assistant Secretary of the Army for Acquisition, Logistics and Technology.

That deficiency was made clear last summer when the Army discovered it had 16 different battle command systems on record, plus a number of others that had crept into use on the battlefield outside of the conventional acquisition process. Battle command systems are the technology troops use to communicate on the battlefield.

Implementing a unified battle command system will be the new organization's first pilot program. It will be a "painful" process for those units that have to adapt to a new system, Guckert conceded, but will benefit the Army as a whole.

Eventually, all 303 of the Army's brigades in active and reserve units will be able to share critical information across formations on the battlefield. And the unified battle command will eliminate redundant investments and streamline training, Guckert said.

Army procurement is organized into 12 program executive offices focused on related programs, such as ground combat systems or aviation. While there are several hundred systems engineers in those offices, they are not looking at the integration of programs across the service. As such, the SoS SE will be organized as a brigade to look holistically at programs and integrate functions at the brigade level.

The systems engineers hired for the new organization will serve at the GS-15 level, Guckert said.