WASHINGTON — As part of its larger push to consolidate and modernize its acquisition process, the Army has used an artificial intelligence-enabled tool to find that it could safely cut scores of acquisition requirements, according to new figures provided by the service.
The scrub was done as part of an initiative called CORA, a “tongue-in-cheek” reversal of the service’s old Army Requirement Oversight Council (AROC), with the aim to streamline the way the Army buys weapons, software or just about anything else.
Specifically, Joe Welch, executive deputy to the commanding general of Transformation and Training Command, said CORA is meant to execute reviews of Army requirements with the goal of tossing out inactive ones from its database, getting rid of active ones that no longer serve a purpose and consolidating others into larger requirements.
“The Secretary [of the Army] had given us a challenge back in the summer to see if we could reduce the amount of active requirements by a third, right? So we did that,” Welch told reporters on the sidelines of the AUSA event last week. “Anyone’s understanding of 2,000 active requirements is limited at best, so part of the progress toward potentially invalidating and eliminating is just to tee it up to do that and to see how this system responds.”
An Army Future Concepts Command spokesperson provided Breaking Defense with specifics this week: So far through CORA the Army, using the AI-enabled tool the spokesperson did not identify, has inspected 3,577 requirements and has identified 1,500 as inactive and 2,077 as active. From the 2,077 active requirements, Army senior leaders have identified 516 for inactivation.
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Out of those 516, 215 have been officially deactivated and another 130 are being “reviewed this month,” the spokesperson said. As part of the process to scrap active requirements, Army senior leaders allow “requirement owners,” to make their case if they believe a requirement should stay active. The requirement owners have 30 days to schedule a review and are allocated no more than 180 days to complete and present the review for decision. If a review is not completed, the requirement will be scraped after the initial 30-day window, the spokesperson said.
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“We don’t want to inadvertently cut something that is actually very important that no one really understood, but if we tee it up for inactivation, and there’s not a great response about [why] you can’t do that, that’s a good indicator for us,” Welch said last week.
Further, the deactivation of some active requirements doesn’t mean they will cease to exist. Some of them will be consolidated in accordance with the program of record they are linked to, if possible, Welch said. For example, the Army inactivated several of its individual requirements linked with its Next Generation Command and Control (NGC2) program — the service’s plan to combine intelligence, C2 and fires all in one system so commanders can have information more readily available — and combined them into a greater Characteristics of Need (CoN) document, he said.
For example, he said the Army had an individual requirement just for the fires portfolios of NGC2, but the initiative requires software to execute digital fires, so they scrapped that standalone requirement to be “subsumed” into a “much broader” CoN NGC2 requirement.
“So there’s a lot of that happening as well about things that if they stay stand alone, they’ll drive stovepipes. But if we invalidate them and say there’s this broader problem statement […] that covers that, then we’re not really saying we don’t need that thing anymore; we’re saying we’re not going to buy it that way,” Welch said.