RCVs are a key component of the Army’s next-generation combat vehicle portfolio as the service moves to acquire new unmanned systems and create “human-machine integrated formations.” The aim is to make an RCV production decision in fiscal 2027 and field to the first unit in fiscal 2028.

Officials say that the uncrewed platforms will deliver increased situational awareness, lethality and tactical options for Army formations in support of multi-domain operations, including by serving as scouts or escorts for manned fighting vehicles.

Last year, the service tapped four vendors — Textron Systems, Oshkosh Defense, General Dynamics Land Systems and McQ — for a prototyping phase. A couple months ago, each of the companies delivered two prototypes and officials have been putting them through their paces at Aberdeen Proving Ground, Maryland. After reviewing the results, officials plan to downselect to one contractor for the next phase of the initiative.

“It’s been a great competition. And the most important part about that is we’re really happy that all four vendors showed up and they presented us with really great test articles,” Col. Ken Bernier, project manager for future battle platforms, told DefenseScoop during a media roundtable at the annual AUSA conference on Wednesday.

“Right now, fiscally, we only have enough money to have one vendor move forward. We would love to be able to do more. But a lot of that at the higher level, as we start looking at the friction of, how do we want to do our task, be aggressive, working with our user community to say, ‘Okay, what’s the right match of how many vehicles we want to move forward?’ — and to be able to build those test articles to continue to do that,” he added. “Though we look at it as a [single] winner in this first phase, as we look deeper into the RCV program we can see a future as capabilities grow and we evolve that platform that maybe in the near future, where we will go back to industry and say, ‘We love this … platform but now we need more SWaP. We need more size, weight and power, onboard compute — something that will drive us as we work with the user community to say, ‘Okay, we should go back and we’ll compete again.’”

Platforms are just one component of the RCV initiative. The Army has set up a separate software acquisition pathway and is also eyeing various types of payloads that could help the systems accomplish their missions.

The service is trying to cast a wide net for enabling technologies.

To that end, Army Futures Command plans to host what officials are calling a human-machine integration summit Nov. 6-7 at Texas A&M University.

“What we would like to do over those two days is bring in industry folks who are interested in the robotic space that think they have unique solutions to our problems. We will have displays of our current configuration of vehicles, equipment controllers, how we’re looking at common rail approach, too, for attachments and modular payloads. And really I think [AFC commander] Gen. [James] Rainey’s message to industry is: ‘This is what we’re working on, here’s the problems that we’re trying to solve, come back to us in a couple of months and show us how you can do this better, or potentially, you know, ways that we can integrate your great work into the current programs of record to make them so much better,’” Col. Kevin Bradley, director of the next-generation combat vehicles cross-functional team, told reporters.

Additionally, on Nov. 20 in Detroit the Army will be hosting an autonomy industry day.

The service has been experimenting with tele-operated robotic combat vehicles, but officials are hoping to have more autonomous systems in the future.

“Over the past years in the program, we’ve made a significant investment through the software pathway and what is in the realm of feasible in this current state of the art for autonomy. Now, as we’ve taken all those learning, we’re translating that into, ‘Okay, how can we do that?’ — and working closely with the user community and say, ‘Okay, what can you do?’ And what we want to do is we want to lay out the path of, how do we go from today to actually be on the program … on the vehicles at first unit equipped in ’28?” Bernier said.

“That will be a back-and-forth process where we will lay out our strategy and then work with industry to say, ‘Okay, does this make sense?’ — and do a draft solicitation and then actually go into kind of a little bit of longer competition, just because of the timing. Because what we’re doing is we’re focusing on … how do I deliver capability in ’28? We’re already working on the actual platforms, but how do I bring that software pathway and bring it together? And it is an open competition because we’ve seen a lot of robust capability,” he said.

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SDA is charged with deploying the Proliferated Warfighter Space Architecture (PWSA) — envisioned as a constellation of satellites in low-Earth orbit that provide capabilities to U.S. military forces. The architecture represents a pivot at the Defense Department in its space strategy, which has historically relied on a few large, exquisite satellites stationed in high orbits to perform missions like GPS and satcom.

Now, the Pentagon wants to proliferate hundreds of small and inexpensive satellites in LEO to support military operations. But that strategy doesn’t immediately translate to the equipment on the ground that will operate the vehicles, according to Col. Kalliroi Landry, chief of the support cell at the Space Development Agency.

“SDA does not want to build a proliferated ground segment to support a proliferated space segment,” Landry said Tuesday during a luncheon hosted by AFCEA. “I think that’s where one of the best opportunities to tap into commercial services is.”

In 2022, the agency awarded General Dynamics a seven-year contract worth $324.5 million to build and operate a nascent ground infrastructure — including two operations centers and 14 ground stations — for its first operational batch of satellites known as Tranche 1. SDA also awarded General Dynamics another contract in 2023 to mature their Tranche 1 ground components to also be able to support Tranche 2.

One of those operations centers will be located at Redstone Arsenal, Alabama, while the other will be in Grand Forks, North Dakota. Other ground infrastructure will be scattered both in the continental United States and in partner countries, including Norway.

Landry explained that the contract was necessary for the first tranche so the agency could create a “baseline capability.” Moving forward, however, there are a number of commercial companies that could also provide services, ground entry points or command-and-control capabilities for Tranche 2 and beyond, she said.

“As l am looking into Tranche 2, I don’t want to have a whole next round of ground entry points. It’s too much property, it’s too much equipment,” Landry said. “I shouldn’t have to take care of that when there are perfectly capable industry partners out there who are able to do it.”

Meanwhile, the agency is readying a solicitation for the PWSA Futures Program (PFP) Ground Segment Integration (PGI) program. The organization posted a draft solicitation in December for the effort, which aims to provide the “common, enduring ground infrastructure and resources” for the different experimental missions and demonstrations it’s planning for — including Transport Layer Tranche 2 Demonstration and Experimentation System (T2DES) and Fire-control On Orbit-support-to-the-war Fighter (FOO Fighter).

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The contract is for Phase 2 of the Terrestrial Layer System-Echelons Above Brigade, a capability that will be designed for higher echelons — primarily division and corps — that will need to monitor and sense the battlefield across greater distances than lower, more tactically focused echelons. It will be used by the Army’s Multi-Domain Task Force.

The technology comes as advanced adversaries are forcing the Army to operate at greater distances, and therefore, the service needs to be able to sense farther and at higher echelons.

The other transaction authority agreement totals $36.7 million for a 21-month period of performance, the Army announced Tuesday.

Lockheed Martin, in a release, said that in the coming months, it will build a prototype system at its Syracuse, New York facility.

The Army last year awarded Lockheed and General Dynamics an initial contract to develop designs for the system during an 11-month competition period.

The Army had recently altered its approach to TLS-EAB, recognizing that a one-size-fits-all model might not be suitable. For example, a platform in Europe might not be the right tool for the operating environment in Asia.

According to Army budget documents, the service plans to spend $859,000 for procurement in fiscal 2024 for TLS-EAB, which will be a new-start program. It also plans to spend $66.4 million on research-and-development in 2024, which will go toward integration, demonstration, experimentation, prototyping and vendor testing, among other activities. Total R&D funding funding for the effort over the next five years is projected to be $175.8 million.

The Army is using a middle tier acquisition approach for the program “to rapidly deliver an integrated ground intelligence, electronic warfare and cyber capability on multiple platform types to align with maneuver forces,” the budget documents state.

The first unit issued is slated for the third quarter of 2025, with production and fielding expected in 2026 through 2030.

The TLS-EAB award is a big win for Lockheed as that rounds out a series of capabilities the company is providing the Army in the electromagnetic spectrum.

Previously, Lockheed has been awarded contracts for TLS-Brigade Combat Team — the first brigade-organic integrated signals intelligence, electronic warfare and cyber platform — and the Multi-Function Electronic Warfare system, an airborne pod that’s designed as the first brigade-organic airborne electronic attack asset that will also provide limited cyberattack capability.

The Army recently put out a request for proposals for a dismounted capability associated with TLS-BCT.

Additionally, the Army is still bidding out for the next phase of its Electronic Warfare Planning and Management Tool, for which Raytheon has been doing development work. The system is described as the glue holding all EW capabilities on the battlefield together, serving as a command-and-control planning capability that allows forces to visualize the potential effects of these types of weapons and chart courses of action to prevent their forces and systems from being jammed during operations.

“The U.S. Army’s Family of Systems concept is a proven model for developing and delivering converged cyber and electronic warfare technologies into the hands of the warfighter quickly, cost efficiently, with lower risk, and at the speed of relevance,” Deon Viergutz, vice president of Spectrum Convergence at Lockheed Martin, said in a release. “Moving into this next phase, we are going to continue to embrace Soldier Touch Points to drive the design while leveraging a proven DevSecOps pipeline and an open architecture that will enable a highly interoperable, configurable 21st Century Security solution that can be easily tailored for specific mission requirements.” 

The Army has been pursuing a yearslong effort to rebuild its electronic warfare arsenal and architecture for the battlefield. After divesting much of its capability following the Cold War, modern threats have forced the service to develop new, more sophisticated systems.

The military writ large has been vocal about the pitfalls of so-called vendor lock, or relying on a singly company to provide a large majority, if not all the capabilities of a particular system. The Army has worked to institute open systems such as the C5ISR/EW Modular Open Suite of Standards.

Correction: An earlier version misstated the contracting phase awarded.

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The rebranded project is intended to replace the Bradley fighting vehicle and bring “new, transformational capabilities to the fight,” Army acquisition chief Doug Bush told reporters during a roundtable Monday a few hours before the formal announcement of the contract awards, which have a total value of $1.6 billion.

The contracts cover phases 3 and 4 of a five-phase program, according to Maj. Gen. Glenn Dean, program executive officer ground combat systems.

“Phase 3 is the detailed digital design phase. This takes the vehicles from concept to a ready-to-build in the physical world digital model that has been modeled, simulated and tested in a digital environment. We will then transition the program out of our Middle Tier Acquisition authority into a major capability acquisition executing Milestone B and making the decision to enter phase 4,” he told reporters during the roundtable.

For phase 4, each contractor team will build up to 11 prototypes that will support live fire, developmental and limited user testing, leading up to a Milestone C decision in 2027. One of the two contractor teams will then be selected to move into phase 5, which will include the production and fielding of the XM30. First unit equipped is slated for fiscal 2029.

The stakes will be high for the vendors as they square off in a winner-take-all competition for a program that could be worth about $45 billion.

Army officials did not immediately disclose which companies lost out in the competition for the new contracts that were announced Monday.

The XM30, which will have a hybrid electric powertrain, is expected to deliver “next-generation lethality, protection and mobility,” and be able to engage advanced adversaries at greater distances.

The platform will be able to hold up two crew and up to six passengers. It will come equipped with “a powerful lethality suite,” including a new 50-millimeter cannon and remote turret, anti-tank guided missiles and machine guns, all of which are to be employed through advanced third-generation FLIR and intelligent fire control, according to Brig. Gen. Geoff Norman, director of the Army’s next-generation combat vehicle cross-functional team.

“The occupants will benefit from innovative force protection systems that include integrated active protection systems, kitted armor and innovative signature management capabilities from the very beginning,” he told reporters.

Notably though, the platforms aren’t expected to be operated fully unmanned when they’re first fielded, according to officials.

“We anticipate right now that this will not be something you operate entirely unmanned in its initial configuration. The most important thing is that it’s been built drive-by-wire, shoot-by-wire, and has some ability to do optionally manned tasks. The key task in the early phase is to be able to maneuver autonomously through from waypoint to waypoint, which allows a movement from a point of debarkation to an assembly area, potentially uncrewed. But this is not something in 2029 that we anticipate fighting completely without personnel onboard,” Dean told DefenseScoop during the roundtable.

The Army plans to have an open systems architecture and a separate software pathway for the program.

“The combination of the open systems architecture approach we’re taking and our software development approach … to develop software-based capabilities in parallel with the hardware effort that’s going on contract now, gives us the ability to theoretically perform any function autonomously provided the autonomy is mature to that level. Now, we know we’re never going to put lethality fully autonomous without a human being on the loop. So that capability, whether that’s on the platform or tele-operated, I would not describe it as fully autonomous. But the range of capabilities that we could get to — the architecture is gonna allow us to do a pretty broad range,” Dean said.

Bush added: “That’s one reason for the open architectures, because 10 years from now, we assume this tech will have advanced significantly, [and] we want to be able to bring in the best thing that’s available then — not lock ourselves into what is out there today.”

The Army is keen to incorporate artificial intelligence technologies into the XM30. The plan is to continue to leverage soldier assessments from limited user tests, simulation exercises and other virtual to help determine what capabilities are most appropriate to be automated, and which ones the Army still wants to retain “soldiers on the loop” or “in the loop,” Norman noted.

“Ultimately, what we want the AI solutions to do is optimize the performance of the humans. And there are certain tasks that we assess humans are much better at doing — those things that require intuition and certain types of judgment are very much human optimized — whereas other tasks that are currently done by a human can absolutely be done better by AI and other automated functions. Getting that balance right is going to be optimized through the course of the next couple of years of experimentation,” he told DefenseScoop.

Officials at the roundtable declined to offer a timeline for when they expect the AI capabilities to reach high levels of maturity, saying they don’t want to try to predict the future in this regard.

Meanwhile, the Army is currently in the planning phase for the software pathway for the program.

“What we anticipate is … that will have different participants in it — really people who specialize in autonomy-based software,” Dean said. However, “there will obviously be some interface with the designers of the base vehicle, and those vehicle designers will have their own software activities that are embedded in the base vehicle design as well,” he added.

Bush said this type of software acquisition approach has never been done before for a vehicle program as large as the XM30.

The Army is planning to hold industry competitions among software vendors for the program. That acquisition activity will likely begin in late fiscal 2024 or early fiscal 2025, according to Dean.

“That’s really to be timed with the delivery of the base vehicle, right? I can’t add on capabilities with AI to a system that I don’t have. So what we call our minimum viable capability release, the initial drop of additive software, is timed with prototype deliveries of the physical prototypes,” he explained, noting that they’ll also be tested in the Army’s “digital development environment.”

The contractors are expected to begin building their vehicle prototypes in fiscal 2025, Dean said.

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The award is for the Proliferated Warfighter Space Architecture Ground Management and Integration (PWSA GMI) effort, which “will establish a robust, integrated, and extensible enterprise Ground Segment architecture, leveraging commercial cloud infrastructure in alignment with an aggressive launch and capability expansion campaign,” according to a notice posted on Sam.gov on Thursday.

No dollar amount for the award was immediately announced.

The PWSA is an ongoing effort by the Space Development Agency to rapidly acquire and launch hundreds of small satellites carrying critical warfighting capabilities into low-Earth orbit. The agency plans to launch the satellites in batches, known as “tranches.”

The first tranche with accessible warfighting capabilities, Tranche 1, is scheduled to launch in September 2024.

General Dynamics Mission Systems received a $324.5 million contract in 2022 to establish and sustain the ground operations and integration segment of the Tranche 1 satellites. The seven-year contract included a base amount of more than $162.9 million, with more than $161.5 million in options.

The initial contract involved producing a common ground architecture that integrates space- and ground-based segments from the constellation’s multiple vendors in different satellite configurations. According to the latest award notice, the PWSI GMI effort now aims to mature those ground components.

The incumbent will also provide all services required for expanding, integrating, testing and maintaining Tranche 2’s ground infrastructure — such as “ground entry points, operations centers, enterprise test and checkout capabilities and infrastructure management, including all development, systems engineering, integration, testing, maintenance, and site support,” the notice stated.

The announcement said a sole-source award to General Dynamics Mission Systems is justified due to the likelihood that a contract with another contractor would result in “substantial duplication of cost to the Government that is not expected to be recovered through competition and unacceptable delays in fulfilling the agency’s requirements.”

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The Army’s then chief of staff, Gen. Mark Milley, testified to Congress in 2017 that the service’s tactical network as it currently stood — the Warfighter Information Network-Tactical — was too “fragile” and “vulnerable” for future battles against sophisticated adversaries. As a result, Milley ordered an entire review of the network.

Since then, the Army developed a strategy it called halt, fix, pivot: discontinuing capabilities that were not survivable, fixing things that could be useful and pivoting to a new paradigm that was threat informed. That led to a multiyear approach involving the incremental development and delivery of new capabilities to its integrated tactical network, which includes a combination of program-of-record systems and commercial off-the-shelf tools. Those “capability sets” now provide technologies to units every two years, each building upon the previous delivery.

Capability Set 21 was primarily designed for infantry brigades, Capability Set 23 is focused on Stryker brigades, and Capability Set 25 is focused on armored brigades.

Currently, the Army is at an inflection point with several concurrent efforts ongoing: fielding Capability Set 21, conducting testing and experimentation with Capability Set 23, and developing design goals for Capability Sets 25 and 27.

Overall, officials say the paradigm shift has led to success, creating culture change in the acquisition and warfighter community while continuing to get buy-in from senior leadership.

“This process puts capability and warfighting over process,” Col. Shermoan Daiyaan, project manager for tactical radios at program executive office command, control, communications-tactical, told reporters at Aberdeen Proving Ground regarding the new approach. “In five or fewer years a lot has changed. I mean, everything has changed, from the way requirements come in to us, the way we help shape requirements, the way the warfighter is truly shaping requirements.”

Senior leadership wants to field capabilities faster and accept more risk across the entire Army. Gabe Camarillo, the undersecretary of the service, has previously lauded the Army’s embrace of new authorities such as Other Transaction agreements and middle-tier acquisition to accelerate the development of new capabilities.

“This is a marked changing pace for where we were at earlier, and significantly have streamlined to what we call our procurement and acquisition lead time throughout the service,” he said at an August event.

“On the digital transformation side, I talked a little bit about the need to shift culture, approach and emphasis to accelerate what our strategy is to get to a unified network, a hybrid accelerated cloud adoption strategy and then of course, enabling data centric operations,” Camarillo told reporters in August. “What we currently see, especially on the tactical side, is that we’ve made a lot of progress to enable acquisition strategies that will allow rapid adoption of upgraded technology through the capability set fielding process.”

Camarillo, along with the vice chief of staff, have initiated a capability portfolio review of the network “to re-baseline our strategy and how do we assess it against current requirements and emerging requirements so that we could gauge our investments in areas where we might be able to prioritize, accelerate or just simply rationalize our efforts,” Camarillo said.

With a lot of different organizations and pots of money, Camarillo said Army leadership wanted to get their hands around the effort in its entirety.

Fundamentally, senior leadership and the warfighting community are accepting more risk on capabilities to try to avoid taking multiple years to field a single system. The service is looking to leverage commercially available technology along with government science and technology investment to experiment with and deliver capabilities on a much faster timeline while getting solider feedback to improve technology in an ongoing manner.

“This notion of iterative development of capabilities, I think is very, very important, because there’s an element of risk that we’re going to have to assume both from how that capability is going to roll out. Is it going to be 100% capable? 80%? 70%? Well, sometimes 70% of something is way better than what you have,” Lt. Gen. John Morrison, deputy chief of staff, G6, said at an event hosted by Defense News at the annual AUSA conference on Wednesday.

“Instead of an episodic soldier touchpoint, how about a routine sustained soldier touchpoint that will drive requirements, that will drive capability development, it will drive procedures and how we conduct operations in ways we probably haven’t thought of,” he said.

Units are now fine accepting less mature capabilities in favor of getting technology faster, officials say.

“Somewhere along the line, people were okay with us rolling in new kit that was not program of record, that didn’t go into this big long [operational test] and people start letting us bring in things,” Daiyaan said. “We get five years to figure it out before it has to roll into a formal program of record. In the past, it was unheard of. Somebody wanted every little slice of that radio to go under some major OT and one big shebang in a big network. We’re changing the culture of our warfighters as much as they’re changing us.”

The capability set approach has also allowed greater flexibility to insert new technology when it becomes available. While there is a roadmap of targeted technologies for each capability set, the Army recognizes there are developments in the commercial world they aren’t aware of. As industry innovates, the Army wants to capture those advancements as opposed to continuing down the same path of development with possibly inferior technology.

“As that next generation of technology comes available commercially … how do we pivot from the next Cap Set to be able to capture and rapidly integrate?” Col. Shane Taylor, project manager for tactical network at PEO C3T, said. “Near peers — they have the same technologies we have. Our advantage is speed and training. How fast can we inject that into a formation?”

Taylor added that it is a more integrated process of learning, which has increased speed.

“It’s what we learned together. The units are involved. We could go slower, more deliberate and give them a very mature solution five years later that would be three years old, or we could go fast and we learned together,” he said. “That’s been the change in paradigm in the approaches.”

The paradigm shift has also brought more entities together in a more holistic manner, Daiyaan said, noting it “made us start to see inefficiencies.”

“In the past, I would deliver my capability on my schedule, according to where my window was,” he said. “But now when we’re looking at a capability set we have someone in [project manager for interoperability, integration and services] that’s just thinking about making sure it all works together. You get a package. It’s almost like walking into the house and the electric is wired together, everything’s WiFi is already turned on, everything is delivered to you as a package.”

Officials described the capability set process as akin to building roads, but for tactical communications and data transmission.

“As we’re going down the capability set execution between 21, 23, 25, I liken it to building that highway. These capability sets are laying the infrastructure foundation,” Nicholaus Saacks, deputy PEO C3T, said. “We’re improving the tactical network infrastructure in order to give commanders a better way to traverse.”

The capability set process allows the Army to keep improving this infrastructure as big ideas, investments or technologies become available.

“We’re doing it a way that’s open so that when we need to add interchanges or … insert new technology and new capabilities, we’re doing it in a way that we can plug those in, so that it’s open and that we can keep competing [with industry] so that down the road whenever that new technology that’s either nascent right now or we haven’t even thought of yet is available and ready to use,” Saacks added. “We can plug it in. Or as the threat evolves, we can we can react and plug in whether it’s a software or hardware solution that counters that directly can get inserted into the network architecture to make it work.”

Industry buy-in

Almost as necessary as getting senior leadership to buy into this new approach is getting industry – which essentially provides the technology — to buy in as well.

Officials described continued responsiveness from industry with the paradigm shift and pushing their innovation efforts based upon signals the Army is sending.

Despite the fact the Army won’t be awarding a single vendor a large program of record in this space for multiple years as was typical previously and favorable for a particular company that came out on top, this incremental and ongoing developmental approach of continual capability insertion allows for more opportunities for contractors.

“What I talk about with industry and it seems to resonate is when you do the 15 year one-and-done competition, it’s great if you win, not great if you lose,” Saacks said. However, “If we are doing these iterations, we keep doing a pulse check on competition. If you are unfortunate and lost that first competition, you have a chance a couple of years down the road … It’s more bites at the apple.”

Taylor noted that this approach forces industry to innovate and iterate because if companies lose, they’re going to have to come back next time with a better design.

The Army has been clear that it won’t always invest its research and development funds into industry’s products. Industry has to bring technologies that have a good deal of maturity because so they don’t need to go through a five- to 10-year iteration.

However, the Army will help industry along. One such way is through the biannual technical exchange meetings, or TEMs. These events, which started around four years ago, gather members of industry, the Army acquisition community, Army Futures Command and the operational community to outline priorities and capabilities to modernize the tactical network.

They differ from the traditional industry days in that they feature panels with acquisition leaders articulating priorities as well as operators explaining what types of capabilities they need to be successful. They are less prescriptive and more descriptive — creating a more collaborative conversation where the Army is acknowledging where they don’t have solutions and imploring industry to innovate to solve problems. While sometimes the Army might be asking for things, industry is also telling the government they should be looking at certain capabilities, which results in more of a two-way discussion.

About half of the TEMs ask for prototype solicitations while the others are intended to help industry shape internal research and development and offer technology roadmaps for future capability sets. 

On average, most TEMs have brought together around 200 companies with a third of those being small business. Moreover, there are more Silicon Valley tech companies and small startups in niche markets participating — creating a greater cross-pollination between commercial firms and traditional defense contractors.

Several companies have spoken favorably of this shift in approach.

“The collective perspectives of senior leaders, operational users and product managers are things that would not be easily understood were it not for these TEMs,” Portia Crowe, Accenture Federal Services’ chief data strategist, said in an email. “The level of transparency and presence of the government folks participating should be the model for industry and government interactions.”

Contractors welcomed this change in doing business, highlighting both the frequency of these events as well as how they’re able to get all the relevant players and stakeholders in one place.

“Prior to the TEMs, occasionally you would attend some different types of events, whether they be trade shows and you might get little snippets of information out of trade shows, or obviously constant engagement with the customer,” Tom Kirkland, vice president and general manager of U.S Army and SOCOM broadband communications systems at L3Harris, told DefenseScoop.

In the past, companies were “having these one-off conversations, if you will, between PEOs and ASAALT and PM shops, so you’re trying to piece the puzzle together … just a little bit as you’re trying to inform your technology roadmaps,” Kirkland said.”Now with the TEMs, you have everybody in one place every six months. It’s streamlined how we engage with our customers and made it a little bit easier for us to make decisions.”

The events have also differed from industry days in that they’re more collaborative and provide more forward-looking insights to give industry a better idea of where to invest, participants say.

“One of the big things for industry is where do we invest,” Greg Catherine, who is part of General Dynamics’ business development team, told DefenseScoop. “We don’t want to invest in something that’s already done and we don’t want to invest so far out in the future that the problem will change before the Army ever gets there. The TEMs give me a good balance in terms of targeting where … I should be spending money on R&D.”

Another unique aspect to these events is perspectives from the actual operators during panels.

Crowe noted that while senior leader perspectives are important, nothing beats hearing from the operators talk about the issues they face.

“This helps us think about problems differently, gives us inspiration to find ways to action on their pain points, and gives us information on how to provide solutions that won’t waste everyone’s time,” she said.

For Catherine, it’s important to hear how the operators are currently solving the problem in the interim and what they need longer term. It provides an opportunity to get ahead of the requirements and better understand what the Army’s words mean versus trying to interpret them without any user input.

The events aren’t perfect, however, and contractors noted they’d like to see more agile ways to obtain contracting funding faster, more joint input on panels and more time allotted so industry can attend all the sessions.

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The program for the Terrestrial Layer System-Echelons Above Brigade is designed for signals intelligence, electronic warfare and cyber operations and will be used by the Army’s Multi-Domain Task Force. It comes as advanced adversaries are forcing the Army to operate at greater distances, and therefore, the service needs to be able to sense farther and at higher echelons, such as divisions and corps.  

There are no procurement dollars budgeted for the system, as it is still being developed, but the Army is asking for $29.6 million in research and development funds in 2023 and $85.7 million across the future years defense program, which would go towards continued prototyping and integration.

“What we’ve asked the industry is: ‘OK, how would you approach this problem – with these types of threats?’” Mark Kitz, program executive officer for intelligence, electronic warfare and sensors, told FedScoop in an interview at the AFCEA TechNet Augusta conference. “We’ve awarded to two contractors to go through a design phase to show us what they believe is in the art of the possible and we’ll use that to make decisions about building a prototype for that long-range sense and effect on the ground from those echelons.”

As part of the other transaction agreement awards, which were issued within the last month, the contractors will also look to design for the specific vehicle TLS-EAB will be mounted to.

“Right now, I think it’s [Family of Medium Tactical Vehicles] is what we said would be available to you,” Kitz said. “We’ve left it sort of open for proposers to say, ‘OK, would I need a tethered drone? Would I need an untethered [drone]? What is the art of the possible here from and not necessarily constraining it by platform?’”

Lockheed Martin was awarded for the next phase of TLS-Brigade Combat Team in July, which will pave the way for it to be delivered to soldiers. TLS-BCT will be the first brigade-organic cyber, electronic warfare and signals intelligence platform and is expected to field to units in fiscal 2022.

General Dynamics also designed one of the primary risk reduction platforms for TLS-BCT, the Tactical Electronic Warfare System.

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