Lt. Gen. David Hodne, previously the deputy commanding general for futures and concepts at AFC, will lead the new T2COM, which will operate mostly out of Austin, Texas, where AFC was.
“The whole idea is [to] simplify the way you describe your problem to industry to allow them to innovate alongside of you,” said David Meyer, director of futures integration for the Futures and Concepts Center within AFC.
Standoff capability means warfighters stay connected and remain remotely located in a safer environment while making it harder for adversaries to target them.
"It would be unnatural actually to leave that the way it is, having significantly changed the requirements as much as we have," Joe Welch, deputy to the commanding general of Army Futures Command (AFC), told Breaking Defense.
"All of these parochial interests and all of these lobbyists that crawl around this building and crawl around Congress, they have succeeded for far too long, and so the first thing is, we are going to start to cut the things we don't want or need," Army Secretary Daniel Driscoll told reporters.
A document outlining one possible scenario reduces the PEO shops from 13 down to 9, merges Army Futures Command with TRADOC.
“The initial focus areas [will be] multi-domain sensor dominance, which is our way of saying, ‘We found ourselves in a situation where we actually don't have a sensing problem, we have a problem doing something with all the sensing that's happening. [It’s a] problem across the joint force,” said Gen. James Rainey.
Onshoring and investment in military-specific semiconductors anchor a cornerstone of the defense industrial base.
After the exercise, the Army plans to leave logistic support equipment, like tanker trucks, inside Australia instead of loading it back onto the Army Prepositioned Stock 3 ships.
Other R&D focus areas next year include software applications and energetic materials, or chemicals found in weapon systems, a key area of value for the Army.
"Whenever we fly in our own territorial waters, we are challenged by the Chinese, challenged because they say we are in their territory, when in fact it is our territory," Lt. Gen. Romeo Browner, commanding general of the Philippine Army said.
Plasan North America says it can help the Army with its ever-increasing struggle to get electricity to the battlefield.
Reducing cognitive overload on warfighters while improving “time to trust” for autonomous systems is a matter of design.