Soldiers of the 41st Field Artillery lay out their equipment for a visual inventory in Grafenwoehr, Germany, in 2019. Such readiness audits are notoriously time-consuming and prone to error. (Army photo)
AUSA 2023 — “If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles,” Sun Tzu said two millennia ago. But how does the Army “know itself” when it has almost half a million active-duty personnel, organized into thousands of units, located at hundreds of bases around the world?
Today, officials say, assessing readiness is a laborious process that requires a lot of manually reentering information from one database into another. That’s because the Army alone uses at least 43 separate and largely incompatible systems to track different types of readiness data. Such data includes how many troops a unit is supposed to have, how many are actually assigned, how many are available for duty as opposed to out sick or on leave, what their ranks and specialties should be and what they actually are, who’s trained or certified in what skills from foreign languages to tank gunnery, what equipment they have on hand and in what condition, what kind of supplies are in stock where, and on and on and on.
The result has been decades of laborious workarounds that burn the time of over 170,000 users across the Army, contractors and civil service. Much of this work is what’s sarcastically known as “swivel chair integration,” because the least-bad solution is often to read a number off one screen linked to one system, then turn your chair and manually type the number into another computer linked to another, incompatible system. Many times the only place that related information from separate systems gets pulled together is in an Excel spreadsheet or on a PowerPoint slide. And in the worst cases, staff may just end up scribbling vital data on sticky notes.
Even if everything ends up correctly entered in all the proper places, finding the right data and putting together an update for commanders — let alone generating user-friendly graphs and charts — can be so time-consuming that some figures are out of date before decision-maker gets to see them. The opportunities for error and wasted effort are immense.
“The end-to-end business process was 55 percent swivel chair, so we weren’t able to visualize all that data,” said Lori Mongold, a veteran civil servant with over three decades’ experience navigating the Army bureaucracy who now works for the planning division at the Army’s Pentagon headquarters, known as staff section G-3/5/7. “Our intent is to automate as much of that swivel chair activity as we can… so the first time somebody generates that authoritative data, it’s usable throughout that [digital] workflow, which we can’t do today.”
In brief, chuckled Peter Bechtel, the assistant deputy chief of staff for G-3/5/7, the goal is “no more sticky notes.” If the new software succeeds, he added, it will aid the Army in everything from assessing unit readiness to finally passing regular financial audits.
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The Army aims to solve the problem with a technological one-two punch, Mongold and Bechtel told reporters at the annual Association of the US Army conference. Consolidating all 43 systems into one would “set us up for failure,” Mongold said. “Training is massive in and of itself,” she added, with “the swivel chair [problem] and the associated record-keeping” especially complex. So the Army is going down from 43 readiness systems to two.
The bigger and more ambitious project with the longer timelines is the Army Training Information System. “ATIS will subsume 28 [existing] systems [and] be the authoritative data source for all training data,” according to a follow-up email from service officials to Breaking Defense.
The Army has chosen longtime Pentagon contractor LMI as “lead systems integrator” for ATIS. The company referred Breaking Defense’s questions to the Army, which stated that LMI is “conducting market research, holding Industry Days, and exploring the award of multiple OTAs [Other Transaction Authority contracts]” for various aspects of the program. ATIS is not expected to be operational until fiscal 2027, Mongold said. (An earlier ATIS contract was terminated, but neither the Army nor available public sources provided any details, including what company held that contract.)
The slightly less overwhelming, nearer-term program will combine 15 systems into the Global Force Integrated Management — Operational Environment. GFIM-OE will handle, in essence, every aspect of readiness except for training — from equipment status and supplies to unit manning levels and detailed org charts (what the military calls TOEs, or Tables of Organization & Equipment). Artificial intelligence firm BigBear.ai is on contract to deliver the system, which will run on the cArmy secure cloud hosted by Amazon, in fiscal 2025.
Together, the two programs will cover every aspect of the Army process formally known as “Deploy to Redeploy and Retrograde of Materiel,” which covers a unit’s lifecycle from training up before a deployment to the final return, or write-off, of the last item of equipment from abroad.
Mongold, who oversees both programs for the Army staff, said the aim is to move both to the new and streamlined acquisition process for software, known as the Software Pathway. The Army’s also taking the opportunity to streamline its staff procedures. “We’ve never updated business processes that are 30 years old,” she said.
So, as with any time the Army is replacing a set of legacy systems, there will be a bit of a “culture change” for the users of those systems. Building GFIM includes “business process reengineering” to improve the current processes, said Ryan Legge, who as president of Integrated Defense Solutions oversees the GFIM program for lead contractor BigBear.ai.
Such a complex project requires close and constant coordination between the team at BigBear, Mongold’s staff at Army HQ and Army acquisition officials at the Program Executive Office for Enterprise Information Systems (PEO-EIS), Legge told Breaking Defense in an interview.
“There is a lot of sharing and collaboration going on with both the PEO, which is the program acquisition office, and the functional community, which is G-3,” Legge said. “We are following an agile development process with constant meetings such as PI [Program Increment] planning sessions, daily standups, etc. … It’s key to have the users’ buy-in and have them believe in what we’re doing and the direction the program is going.”
“We’re here to implement a system to make the process better and more efficient for them; we’re not trying to redo everything they’ve ever done,” emphasized Legge, who’s spent two decades at various contractors working for the Army staff. “The development starts with a deep understanding of the details and complexity of the current ‘deploy to redeploy to retrograde’ process and the data associated with that process.”
The first layer of the new architecture is simply making sure that all the “legacy” data scattered throughout the existing systems is preserved and accessible in the new one, translated from the old cacophony of incompatible formats into a harmonious “data mesh.”
The second layer applies commercial “workflow automation” software — for GFIM specifically, the choice was Appian — to turn the complex Army processes into interactive flowcharts, walking users through the steps, data and regulations for a given task.
Then the third and final layer uses that data and those workflows to generate analytics, including up-to-date and easily readable graphics for decisionmakers. It will also output updates to other Army and Defense Department data systems such as Advana.
When the system is fully operational, Legge said, it will enable the Army to identify and remove any bottlenecks in the complex “D2RR” process, helping streamline decision-making.
“We’re pretty excited,” said G-3/5/7’s Bechtel, a retired Army officer himself who’s suffered through years of staff work “I’ve done my share of flipping through flat files and Excel spreadsheets. [With the new systems], it’s all in a seamless architecture.”
