The Army’s top acquisition official says great progress is being made on transformational systems and aiding Ukraine. 

“We’ve had some great successes,” Doug Bush, the Army’s assistant secretary for acquisition, logistics and technology, said at a recent news briefing. “This coming year is going to be even bigger.” 

In 2023, the Army intends to have 24 new systems for fielding or testing, he said. This includes the long-range hypersonic weapon, the Armored Multi-Purpose Vehicle and the Integrated Air and Missile Defense System.  

“There are many reasons why this success is occurring, but chief among them is our people,” Bush said, which includes a workforce of 30,000 uniformed and civilian professionals. “They do great work, but they also work with many thousand more talented professionals at Army Futures Command and Army Materiel Command to actually make all this happen,” Bush said. “It takes the whole Army team to do it, and right now I think the team is working really well.” 

Bush said he expects the fiscal 2024 budget that will be submitted to Congress later this year will include funding to ramp up programs for Army transformation, and that funding for Ukraine could be managed through supplemental budgets. The five-year defense budget, covering 2025 to 2029, will be important for setting future production schedules, he said. 

Long term, it might be wise for the U.S. to retain more production capacity for conventional and precision munitions than has been done in recent years, Bush said.