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Soldiers test the ruggedized version of the IVAS goggles at Fort Pickett in October 2020.

WASHINGTON: “I don’t know if ‘inordinate’ is the right word, but we spend a lot of time with our professional staffers from the four defense committees, keeping them completely abreast of what’s going on in these signature programs,” said Maj. Gen. Tony Potts, who as Program Executive Officer – Soldier heads acquisition of soldier gear. “And we do that because we’re moving so fast, faster than the cycles they are used to being updated on.”

Army photo

Maj. Gen. Anthony Potts

If there’s a plaintive note in Potts’ declaration to AUSA’s online Global Force Next conference Thursday morning, it’s understandable: Soldier equipment and virtual reality training – which are closely linked – have undergone intense technical scrutiny and some sharp cuts. There’s intense skepticism among key staffers on the Hill about many of the Army’s new high-tech programs. But that’s especially true for items like the IVAS goggles – the Integrated Visual Augmentation System – which aim to combine night vision with targeting cross-hairs to shoot real foes and virtual-reality enemies for training.

Soldier tech is different, Potts told the AUSA conference. In part because so much of it nowadays is small electronic gadgets and software, it can and should evolve much more rapidly – sometimes surprising Potts himself – than, say, a helicopter or combat vehicle, a much larger system that requires rigorous engineering and safety testing. The traditional exhaustive, labor-intensive, highly bureaucratic acquisition process was made for such major programs (with very mixed results), but it includes things you can’t afford to do “when we’re running at this pace” on soldier gear, Potts said.

So when you’re gathering information to brief the Congress and top Army decision-makers, “you may not have everything that you want, but you get what you need to make a smart and informed decision,” Potts said.

In that context, “we have to recognize the fact that Congress has a really tough job to do,” he said. “Particularly, you’ve got your authorizers” – from the House and Senate Armed Services Committees – “who are looking at providing us authorities that truly allow us to do things and take more risk than we’ve taken in the past, and ‘risk’ is always a scary word.” Meanwhile the House and Senate Appropriations Committees must approve the actual dollars that the Treasury pays out.

On the Army side, he said, that means that “you have to be exceptionally responsible in the way you utilize the authorities you’ve been given.”

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The latest, fully ruggedized and militarized version of IVAS (Army grapic)

“So much of what we do really centers around …trust, [especially] over on the Hill,” Potts said. “Not only do we go over and see them, we spend a lot of time now in this environment on [Microsoft] Teams and other venues to talk to them. We do it more frequently than we’ve done it — I’ve been in the acquisition world for 25 years, this is the most I’ve ever had.”

What’s more, “we are bringing them out to the field with us,” Potts said, so they can see the new technologies “in the hands of the soldiers” and hear feedback directly from those soldiers.

Perhaps the next big opportunity for the Hill? An experimental exercise called EDGE21, when for the first time soldiers wearing IVAS goggles will conduct an air assault out of UH-60 helicopters. The ability to keep IVAS connected during long-range, high-speed flight should be a particularly challenging and interesting test to watch.