Army Has Solved Requirements Creep, Bush Says
Army Has Solved Requirements Creep, Bush Says

The Army’s top weapons and equipment buyer says the service is on the cusp of completing a major shift in acquisition at speed—and with requirements to support major allies in two global wars in Ukraine and the Middle East and more threats on the horizon in the Indo-Pacific, there’s no time to waste.
Douglas Bush, assistant secretary of the Army for acquisition, logistics and technology, told an audience at the Association of the U.S. Army's Annual Meeting and Exposition Oct. 14 that recent milestones achieved in new programs such as the M10 Booker armored fighting vehicle, M7 next-generation squad weapon replacement and M250 machine gun demonstrate a new norm in which fielding times for high-priority programs will be three to four years, versus the seven to 10 years that has been traditional for the service.
In the case of the weapons, Bush said the time from requirement to fielding was around three years, while the Booker took about four years to go from identified requirement to low-rate production.
"We've gotten actual programs into production and fielded to soldiers in times that were never thought possible before," Bush said.
Bush also said he believes the Army has overcome the longstanding military challenge of "requirements creep," the phenomenon in which more and more qualities and features get added to requirements documents, making acquisition programs more expensive and slowing down development.
"Frankly, I think the Army's got this now," Bush said.
While he acknowledged there would be exceptions, he said a cultural transformation was taking place in which requirements were less rigid and considered in the context of user feedback and industry's ability to execute.
"We now have the ability to adjust the requirements to what's possible and doable within our other resource boundaries, and we've been doing so on a number of programs," Bush said.
He cited the Army's pursuit of launched effects, such as weapons or drones dispatched from aircraft. Officials, he said, had observed that early prototypes didn't meet their high-speed requirements, so they opted to develop a slower project that they'd then follow up with a full-capability program as technology matured.
Big challenges still lie ahead, however, Bush said. He called on the companies providing software to the Army to "work with us" as the service sought to create processes from the ground up to update software faster and more independently. The war in Ukraine, he said, reinforced the value of production at scale, particularly in the realm of unmanned systems and precision weapons.
"In most cases, nobody has better stuff than us, but that exquisite capability does come at a time cost in producing them," Bush said. "Our precision weapons, the really high-end ones, still take two or three years to make one. We've got to work with industry to find a way to make them perform at that level, but also be producible faster than that."
Gen. James Rainey, commanding general of Army Futures Command, said the Army is setting ambitious timelines to solve the biggest challenges ahead, including human-machine teaming and the full integration of unmanned systems, machine learning and robotics into warfare.
Major experimentation and development, he said, will happen in the next two years, with transformations set to be fully realized before 2040.
"The closer you are to getting shot, the better you are at innovating," Rainey said.
—Hope Hodge Seck for AUSA