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US Army discontinues Rapid Equipping Force
WASHINGTON — The U.S. Army has discontinued its Rapid Equipping Force stood up during the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan to get urgently needed capabilities into the field in 180 days or less.
As the Army shifts from a focus on counterinsurgency operations to going up against near-peer adversaries like Russia and China across air, land, sea, cyberspace and space domains in large-scale operations, the REF's utility and mission has been in question.
The service is also disbanding its Asymmetric Warfare Group.
“As our focus changes to great power competition and large-scale combat operations, Army analysis indicated that the personnel and resources could best be utilized in building the operational fighting force,” an Oct. 2 Army statement read. “To ensure the value of organization's work over the past 14 years is not lost, all lessons learned will be maintained by the U.S. Army Combined Arms Center, via the Center for Army Lessons Learned, Centers of Excellence and other [Training and Doctrine Command] enterprise stakeholders.”
The discontinuation won't happen overnight. Both organizations will be fully deactivated by the end of fiscal 2021 “and will transition the mission of providing immediate support to other organizations,” the statement noted.
Over the past several years, the REF hung on to certain missions and continued to advocate for its relevancy.
A year ago, Defense News sat down with the REF's director in a new, smaller office space at Fort Belvoir, Virginia, in a conference room surrounded by small counter-unmanned aircraft systems that it was rapidly fielded to units and considered one of its success stories.
In 2017, the REF was focused on counter-drone technologies; dismounted electronic warfare equipment; tethered intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance capabilities; and urban operations equipment including up-armored commercial vehicles. But many of those technologies have found other homes within the Army.
As the service stood up its new security force assistance brigades, the REF expected a surge in work to support the needs of those units in the field as they deployed. The REF played a small role at the time, providing the first SFAB with a few items it needed ahead of deployment such as communications gear and an item that assisted the unit with indirect fires.
Last year, the REF was highlighting its nearly 10-year-old Expeditionary Lab, a 3D-printing trailer that can be deployed downrange to solve problems for units operating in austere environments.
Col. Joe Bookard, who is still the REF's director, told Defense News at the time that the REF would continue to fill the niche of urgently supplying soldiers with capabilities to meet immediate needs while they are deployed. He said that, in a way, the REF has been doing what Army Futures Command is doing now, but on a smaller scale: providing capabilities that are rapidly procured to a small number of soldiers for evaluation, and then refining those capabilities as needed.
In 2019, the REF addressed 400 requirements sent from combatant commanders to address operational capability gaps, Bookard said. Among some of the recent success stories is the tiny Black Hornet, an unmanned aircraft system that is now a program of record and was fielded as the Soldier Borne Sensor.
The REF was also working to transition two hand-held counter-UAS capabilities — the DroneBuster and the Drone Defender — to the larger force as official programs.
https://www.defensenews.com/land/2020/10/02/army-discontinues-rapid-equipping-force/
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Transforming battlefield geometry: What’s to come in Project Convergence 2021
Jen Judson WASHINGTON — The U.S. Army's ambitious first Project Convergence, an exercise that measured the progress of the service's modernization strategy within its future operational concept, concluded last month, but the service already has a sense of what it wants to accomplish in 2021. The series of exercises and experiments that made up the Project Convergence “campaign of learning” took place at Yuma Proving Grounds, Arizona. The event, held over a six-week period in the harsh desert at America's southwest border, was deemed the most important Army event outside of global operations, and future annual iterations are expected to continue shaping the future force. “We're going to have even further transformation of the battlefield geometry,” Brig. Gen. Wally Rugen, who is in charge of future vertical lift modernization, told Defense News in an Oct. 6 interview ahead of the Association of the U.S. Army's annual conference. “We want to go deeper. We made it to 61.9 kilometers, across the forward line of troops in the scenario we fought in 2020,” Rugen said. “We will want to go farther than that.” The Army will also join forces with all of the other military services in 2021, according to Gen. John Murray, the head of Army Futures Command. It will be up to those other services the kinds of capabilities and technologies they each bring to the equation, but the intention is to have the Air Force's F-35 fighter jet integrated into the architecture of the operation. Earlier this month, the Army and the Air Force signed a two-year collaboration agreement to develop a concept for Joint All-Domain Command and Control, or JADC2, which carries over the Army's future war-fighting doctrine, “Multi-Domain Operations” — which is still in the concept phase — to the world of joint operations. JADC2 essentially connects sensors to shooters — which was the bread and butter of Project Convergence this year — across the joint force. The exercise involved about 500 people at Yuma; most were data collectors. The event represented a platoon-sized operation. But in 2021, according to Murray, an entire operational headquarters element will be brought in to drive the learning in terms of how “we organize and how we fight the capability in the future.” Additionally, the Army wants to bring in a multidomain task force from Joint Base Lewis-McChord in Washington state, which would likely be the centerpiece of Project Convergence 21, said Brig. Gen. John Rafferty, who leads the Army's long-range precision fires efforts, which is the service's top modernization priority. There will also be other operational units brought in “to help explore and to help test on a larger scale,” Rafferty told Defense News in an interview this month. Starting in 2021, the exercise will have a foreign flavor. The United Kingdom signed on to participate next year, Murray said, and Australia may join. In 2022, the focus of the exercise will build significantly in terms of involving coalition forces. The Army also plans to tie Project Convergence to other exercises happening at roughly the same time. For example, since the event has an objective to operate in denied and degraded environments, the Army's Position Navigation and Timing Assessment Exercise will likely be a part of Project Convergence in 2021. In its first year, the Army had elements from the modernization teams focused on future vertical lift, long-range precision fires, the next-generation combat vehicle, the network, and positioning, navigation and timing. Next year, more teams will join, including those dedicated to air and missile defense, soldier lethality, and the Synthetic Training Environment. The Army also plans to involve its developmental missile, meant to replace the Army Tactical Missile System for a long-range shot. The Precision Strike Missile — a weapon with an expected range of 500 kilometers — will likely have a test shot that aims to surpass that during Project Convergence. The missile has an aggressive test schedule next year. The Extended Range Cannon, or ERCA, which participated this year, will have new technology rolled in by 2021, Rafferty said. The service also plans to demonstrate the Excalibur Hit-to-Kill capability, which is one of the competitors for the Dual-Purpose Improved Conventional Munition replacement effort. “That really is the lethality component of ERCA at extended ranges,” he added. The future vertical lift team will bring its 20mm gun planned for its future attack reconnaissance aircraft to the event as well as its Modular Effects Launcher prototype, which will carry both lethal and nonlethal effects to deploy from the air, Rugen said. The Army has begun firing live rounds from the gun, and will fire roughly 285,000 rounds through it this fiscal year. The Air-Launched Effects, or ALE, capability played a critical role in Project Convergence this year, and is to return with increased capability and improved technology. “The lower tier of the air domain is decisive,” Rugen said. “I think '20 proved that yet again like it did in '19. We need a broader acceptance of that from the joint force and from defensewide. There is a capability to show up at the time and place of our choosing with vertical lift from relative sanctuary and have operational effects, and that's really what we intend to show in '21.” The network underpins everything at Project Convergence, and improvements will continue to be made so the network that shows up in 2021 is more robust and geared beyond what it was originally designed to do, which is to support a tactical brigade. “I think you'll see better discipline on our data management and message traffic, message formats, which, again, is going to help that machine-to-machine targeting,” Rugen said. To further improve the ground and air assets connectivity, there will be a few more waveforms incorporated “to see if they can produce the bandwidth we need.” The Army wants the mesh network established through ALEs to be “more resilient and have greater goals on distance,” he added. FIRESTORM is also expected to return next year. The system uses artificial intelligence to help select the optimal shooter for engagement. Surrogate robotic combat vehicles and an optionally manned fighting vehicle will continue to play a major role as well. The hope is also to bring in the Army's Integrated Air and Missile Defense Battle Command System, known as IBCS, which is currently undergoing development to connect sensors and shooters for the purpose of countering missile threats. The system recently completed a by-and-large successful limited-user test and will head into its initial operational test and evaluation in 2021. Murray noted that if the test and evaluation conflicts with the Army's schedule, the system will not participate in next year's Project Convergence, noting that the evaluation is a top priority for the program to remain on track. The Army is also hoping the Integrated Visual Augmentation System — which will provide soldiers with AI-enhanced goggles that assist with navigation, targeting, and advanced night and thermal vision — will be ready for next year's experimentation. Overall, the Army has collected “70-plus technologies” — to include a few capabilities from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency — that it might incorporate into the event, Murray said, noting not all 70 will end up participating. https://www.defensenews.com/digital-show-dailies/ausa/2020/10/12/transforming-battlefield-geometry-whats-to-come-in-proje