Acting Army Secretary Ryan McCarthy said service leaders have decided to reform the structure by adopting an industry approach to accelerate the deployment of high-priority weapon systems to warfighters at affordable prices, the Army website reported Thursday.
He said that the Army implemented three measures to improve its procurement decisions: identifying six priorities to counter near-peer or peer competitors, divesting legacy systems to fund those priorities and establishing Army Futures Command on Wednesday during the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies’ Center on Military and Political Power in Washington.
“We truncated the buys on 93 programs and terminated 93 others. We made some very big, hard choices,” McCarthy said. He stated that majority of the Army’s budget for science and technology is being diverted to 31 platforms to support the six priorities.
McCarthy said Congress and other authorities will be monitoring the command’s performance in the coming years. “Field testing will be rigorous, followed by low-rate initial production testing in units at larger scale,” he added.
