The document — called JP 1 Volume 1, Joint Warfighting — appears to have been quietly published on Aug. 27, although it isn’t publicly available.

“We realized Joint Warfighting Concept 3.0 as Joint Publication 1 Volume 1 … This is important because it’s gone from concept to doctrine, and it marks a distinctive paradigm change. It emphasizes our proactive stance in a persistent competitive environment where military advantages aren’t set in stone. We must think expansively beyond conventional operational domains. And it is crucial for us, all of us, to understand that this isn’t a one-time endeavor. Our required joint capabilities are ever-evolving, echoing the fluidity of modern warfare, and they must be informed by the JWC’s tenets,” Adm. Christopher Grady, vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said Wednesday at AFA’s Air, Space and Cyber conference.

“And to truly bring this doctrine online, I need this community’s help. The most consequential thinking decisions and investments we’re making for our future national defense are underway right now. We need to hear the voices of airmen and guardians in the Joint Force forums, exercises and war games. We need your expertise, your skills, your perspectives. We need you to accelerate change within the Joint Force. We must adapt to meet the demands of the future fight and we cannot get this wrong,” he added.

The new publication provides foundational doctrine on the strategic direction of the Joint Force, and the functions of the Department of Defense and its major components, according to the JCS.

DefenseScoop reached out to the Joint Staff to try to obtain a copy but is still waiting to hear back.

Joint doctrine “presents fundamental principles that guide the employment of U.S. military forces in coordinated and integrated action toward a common objective. It promotes a common perspective from which to plan, train, and conduct military operations. It represents what is taught, believed, and advocated as to what is right (i.e., what works best). It provides distilled insights and wisdom gained from employing the military instrument of national power in operations to achieve national objectives,” per the JCS.

Gen. Mark Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, had previously indicated that the new publication would likely come out in July.

“Doctrine is important because it will help clarify and inform all the various levels of the organization on how you plan to fight. And then there’ll be subordinate doctrines that come out of each of the services that support the joint doctrine, etc. So Joint Pub[lication] 1 will come out … and that’ll start us on a journey. It’ll probably take two years or so for all the other documents to catch up so that we clearly establish the doctrine on how to fight,” Milley said June 30 during remarks at the National Press Club.

At the AFA conference, Grady noted that Joint Warfighting Concept 3.0 focuses on information advantage, command and control, joint fires, the ability to win in contested logistics, and expanded maneuver.

To win “key battles for advantage,” U.S. military forces must “sense and make sense” of their operating environments by fusing information from sensors across multiple domains — including space, air and land — and make that information rapidly available for decision-makers. The employment of combinations of crewed and uncrewed systems will be a key component of future operations, he added.

The U.S. military is good at force employment, Grady said. However, he sees room for improvement regarding force design.

“Where I think we can do better as a Joint Force is the future force design aspect. And we have to hold ourselves accountable to the direction that we’ve been given” by the secretary of defense, the National Defense Strategy and Joint Warfighting Concept 3.0, he said, noting that the DOD needs to solve some of its key challenges in upcoming budget cycles.

“One of my major lines of effort as the vice chairman is pushing for more accountability in this process so that we can better realize the future force design imperative, bolstering deterrence, amplifying our global network of allies and partners, driving down risk and fast-tracking the development … [of] innovative capabilities and operational concepts,” he said.

A J-7 cross-functional team within the Joint Staff, led by Maj. Gen. Patrick Gaydon, has already been established to explore options for creating a new “Joint Futures” organization, the shape of which is still being fleshed out.

“That organization will help drive these [doctrinal] concepts, but also the technologies and describing the operational environment that we’re moving into, and so on,” Milley said at the National Press Club.

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The Pentagon recently published its Joint Warfighting Concept 3.0.

“That is now at a mature enough state, we think anyway, to be turned into doctrine,” Gen. Mark Milley, chairman of the Joint Chief of Staff, said Friday during remarks at the National Press Club.

“Doctrine is important because it will help clarify and inform all the various levels of the organization on how you plan to fight. And then there’ll be subordinate doctrines that come out of each of the services that support the joint doctrine, etc. So Joint Pub[lication] 1 will come out next month. And that’ll start us on a journey. It’ll probably take two years or so for all the other documents to catch up so that we clearly establish the doctrine on how to fight,” he said.

But a new organization is also needed to support modernization, he suggested.

A J-7 cross-functional team within the Joint Staff, led by Maj. Gen. Patrick Gaydon, has already been established to explore options for creating a new “Joint Futures” organization.

Milley on Friday described the cross-functional team as the “embryonic beginning of a larger organization.”

“That organization will help drive these [doctrinal] concepts, but also the technologies and describing the operational environment that we’re moving into, and so on. So, it is in the works, it’s happening. It’s a long-term effort. I’m quite confident that whoever replaces me will carry that forward. It has [Defense] Secretary [Lloyd] Austin’s support. And I think it’s the right thing to do. And I think we also have support up on the Hill. So I think that’ll move out,” Milley said.

Air Force Chief of Staff Gen. Charles “CQ” Brown Jr. — a strong advocate for military modernization and taking new cross-service approaches to defense problems — has been nominated by President Biden to succeed Milley as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, but he’s yet to be confirmed by the Senate.

When he was chief of staff of the Army prior to being promoted to his current role as chairman of the JCS, Milley established Army Futures Command to help spearhead the service’s top modernization efforts.

If it’s fully realized, the new “Joint Futures” organization could end up being a unified command, a new agency, a fresh office within the Defense Department, or some other entity, Gaydon told DefenseScoop last month during an interview at the Pentagon to discuss his team’s activities.

“Every option is still on the table,” he said.

Milley emphasized the need to stay ahead of the curve as emerging technologies mature, such as unmanned systems. In the next 10 to 15 years, about one-third of the forces of the world’s most advanced militaries will be robotic, he predicted.

But the biggest changes in warfare could come from the rapid onset of artificial intelligence, and quantum computing, according to Milley.

“We will be able to see ourselves and see the enemy in much more significant ways than we can now. In fact, I would suggest that the combination of those two technologies alone would spell a tremendous change in the character of war,” he said. “Artificial intelligence will be able to process complex information at speeds that no human mind can match. So our task, the United States’ task is for our military … to maintain our current decisive advantage, our lethality, our readiness, our competence, by optimizing these technologies for the conduct of war. And we do this not to conduct war, but to deter great power war.”

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That team launched under Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Mark Milley toward the end of last year to puzzle out complex plans and recommend the right paths forward.

Milley has long been deliberate about helping troops “innovate more like they fight” — meaning, collaboratively — and he was a primary player in the set up of Army Futures Command in 2018 when he was Army chief of staff.

This call for a potentially new entity to unite all the services stems partly from his awareness of the evolving needs — as well as other factors, like a recent direction from the defense secretary to designate a senior advocate for the future joint warfighter.

It’s too early to tell, but if it’s fully realized, “Joint Futures” could end up being a unified command, a new agency, a fresh office within DOD — or something else.

“Every option is still on the table. We’re not predicting or presupposing any single solution other than the argument that we need a senior advocate, and we need an organization focused on the future,” Maj. Gen. Patrick Gaydon, the Joint Futures, J-7 cross-functional team lead, told DefenseScoop in an interview at the Pentagon last week.

The ‘why’

Gaydon served as a battalion commander in an Army Stryker brigade during the war in Afghanistan.

“We were at the cutting edge, I would say, of data. I was responsible for governance development across southern Afghanistan,” he explained.

An expert in geotechnology would “bring data and shape files so that we could overlay them on maps to help make decisions — we started layering information in 2009,” he noted. Most of the data and information captured were not specifically affiliated with the military — but instead was civilian, infrastructure and agricultural information, Gaydon said, “to help quickly be able to make decisions when crises were happening out there.”

“We also used Blue Force Tracker data to create heat maps showing where our combat platforms traveled over time, knowing that the Taliban were watching us. This allowed us to avoid setting patterns and not be easy targets for [improvised explosive devices],” he told DefenseScoop.

It was impactful at the time, “but we were just, like, at the edge of where I think we could go with some of this,” Gaydon said.

Three out of his last four positions in the Defense Department were associated with modernizing the Army. Now, he’s thinking through how to take some of those efforts and implement them on a larger scale across the military. The cross-functional team (CFT) he steers includes five full-time members from the military and DOD, as well as nine part-time subject matter experts.

“The Joint Force of the future has to be able to integrate seamlessly and we’ve got to be able to operate globally. This gets to the ‘why’ of a Joint Futures CFT and the effort — we have to be able to adapt to the changing character of war,” Gaydon said.

“Precision munitions, the speed of hypersonics, artificial intelligence, machine learning, biotech,” he added, “we know that everyone’s going to have access to it. So, it’s really about how do you piece all those together? And it starts with a warfighting concept.”

On that note, the general officer also pointed to “how quickly things are progressing with large language models, neural networks, computer vision, and having machines” to support human decision-making. Commander’s Critical Information Requirements, he noted, inform how military leaders determine choices in operations and potential engagement with enemies. 

“I think as we go to the future, much of that will be data-driven,” he said. 

Gaydon referenced drafts of diagrams and graphics (viewed by DefenseScoop but not yet ready for public release) during the interview to further articulate apparent “organizational disunity” across the DOD’s timelines for the commands and services, and across products, authorities, processes and forums that are threatening joint force modernization — a key priority in the National Defense Strategy.

“The Joint Warfighting Concept 3.0 has been approved, and there’ll be some more information coming out. It is focused on 2027 to 2030 timeframe,” Gaydon noted. 

The DOD’s Joint Requirements Oversight Council (JROC) steers efforts to develop overarching joint operational and integrating concepts. “The JROC looks at requirements. So the idea is that concepts that are validated through experimentation ought to inform requirements, and the JROC validates requirements, really, for about the next 15 years,” he said.

Meanwhile, the services are planning and operating via their own distinct timelines and modernization approaches. “The Army is doing force design out to 2040” and “the Marine Corps is designing the Marine Corps of 2030,” while the “Navy and Air Force are designing out to 2045,” Gaydon noted. He’s also met with members of the Space Force, who he said are “getting all the processes built out — but the budget timelines are shorter.” 

“And I don’t know if it jumps out to you,” Gaydon said, pointing to one of the graphics his team created to show the concepts, doctrines, commands and military branches’ coverage in the years ahead through 2045. “The services are out here [with plans into the 2030s] and the Joint Force is not,” Gaydon noted. 

Much will have to be worked out, but right now he envisions that for the Joint Futures organization “concepts and experimentation would be the focus.”

Officials within it, for example, would develop next-generation concepts for flight — “and I say that in plural because there could be multiple futures that we consider in how we would fight,” he noted. 

Broadly, the current idea is that the organization could first generate concepts and conduct rigorous experimentation to prove that the concepts work for how the joint force could fight in the future. Once validated, the concept would get moved into requirements and fed into JROC. Then, “it gets integrated across all of DOTMLPF-P,” Gaydon said, referring to doctrine, organization, training, materiel, leadership and education, personnel, facilities and policy — which is DOD’s framework for considerations that must be made prior to undertaking new efforts. 

“As part of our planning, I think due diligence says that there could be joint problems that aren’t being solved. And, inherently, joint services are very good at developing lethal weapons and a whole bunch of other things — but are there other problems that you can’t hand to a service to solve? You know, resilient C4, AI, integration-type things that could call for some of this,” Gaydon said.

Further, Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin also recently called for a senior authoritative advocate for the future joint warfighter. 

“We think [that person] would be the leader of this organization, if we stand it up,” Gaydon said. “Part of the argument is that we need a senior leader — we won’t even say what rank that leader would be — but someone that’s solely focused on thinking about how we can do what the [National Defense Strategy] tells us in that deep timeframe.”

“[They] would be the voice for the future joint warfighter, with a seat in Pentagon decision forums. He or she would be positioned to create a ‘unity of effort,’ informing force design and future capability development across the joint force. We see the need for an enduring, unified solution for future joint force design and a permanent and constant advocate for the future joint warfighter,” he also told DefenseScoop.

His team is “digging into the authorities that exist and whether new authorities would be needed.” At this point, “we’re not sure they would,” he added.  

Throughout the interview, Gaydon emphasized repeatedly that the cross-functional team is very early in the planning cycle on this possible new role. 

“Nothing has been decided. Everything I’m giving you is hypotheticals that we’re considering and planning,” he said.

Lots of ‘ifs’

The envisioned organization would help align the Joint Staff,  combatant commands and the services on timelines, products, processes, forums and capabilities far into the future, according to Gaydon.

“It’s kind of hard, because I don’t know exactly what this [potential] organization is going to be. But I know enough to say what it probably isn’t going to be,” he explained. 

Like Army Futures Command, the organization could potentially steer the development and refining of technology experiments and operational concepts for the joint force. 

However, “the Army fully takes the concept into requirements. We don’t know if this organization would write requirements or not — but we’re working through that,” Gaydon said. He also noted that the overarching “idea is this organization would be a small, agile headquarters organization” staffed with up 500 officials, based on the present planning estimates.

If the organization is a command, the official would report to the defense secretary. If it’s “some sort of reform on the Joint Staff,” Gaydon said, “it would definitely report through the chairman.”

“If it is an agency or some other office, there would be different permutations to it,” he noted.

Right now, Gaydon’s team is in the mission analysis phase of planning. Once approved to move into the next phase, the cross-functional team would expand. From there, with approval from the defense secretary, they’d develop those courses of action. When those are then approved by DOD leadership, they would move on to puzzling out stationing decisions, manpower analysis, functional analysis, figuring out the budget — and potentially create a proposal for legislative change.

Eventually, “we will have to talk to Congress — we’ve not updated them up to this point,” Gaydon noted. 

He could not share any details about the timeline the cross-functional team is operating on.

In this very initial planning phase, they’re largely trying to build consensus and garner feedback from DOD leaders, the Joint Staff, combatant commands and other elements across the military. 

“I’ve engaged at a very high level, saying, ‘We need something like this, or we’ll be on the wrong side of history,’” Gaydon noted.

“I welcome skepticism — and I’ve gotten some of that — because it helps us relook things and put more rigor into the planning,” he said.

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The engagement marked the first of two this year that Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, will steer as part of his organization’s semi-annual Strategic Seminar Series. 

“Gen. Milley had all the service chiefs go down the table and talk about their priorities for innovation — really over the next near years and far out,” Col. Dave Butler, Milley’s spokesperson, told DefenseScoop at the Pentagon.

Some elements of the conversation with Bloomberg demonstrated areas where the services and unified combatant commands might be at odds in terms of modern technology deployments.

While the Joint Chiefs must ultimately “train, man and equip” each specific military service, Butler noted, the combatant commands are responsible for carrying out all the military’s regional security operations in defense of the U.S.

“So you have the people, on one side, that are building the force — and you have people, on one side, using the force, right? And there’s an interesting friction there because the services innovate, and they harness new technology, and they build new airplanes and new things on the service timeline as approved by Congress and that long [Defense Department] procurement process. And then the combatant commanders want stuff now because they need it, right? And they need more stuff. The [combatant commander] is asking for more and new and different. And so all the money is with the services and all the execution is with the [commands] — it’s an interesting friction there,” Butler explained.

Later in the conversation with DefenseScoop, Butler noted that “’friction’ is probably a little bit of an overstatement,” when describing the exchange. 

Still, points were made that surprised him.

“The combatant commanders, they were like calling on the services like, ‘Oh, we need this stuff sooner, faster, better.’ I wasn’t really expecting that dynamic — it was interesting,” Butler said.

In the next few months, Milley’s team is getting poised to release a new joint warfighting concept that outlines how the force will fight in future combat. That in-the-works document, Butler suggested, might help address some of the challenges raised by military leaders in that recent meeting.

“When we go to war, we all are side-by-side in all of our different uniforms — interestingly, we don’t innovate enough like that,” Butler said.

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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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