Mismatched helmets, uniforms and night-vision goggles characterize the Army’s nine-man infantry squads, and the service wants to do something about it—and fast.

“We recognize the squad is the most complex and variable weapon system on the battlefield,” said Brig. Gen. Phillip Kiniery, director of the Soldier Lethality Cross-Functional Team and commandant of the U.S. Army Infantry School.

The Army fights formations, but the problem is the squad was “put together with no thought to how they interact, much less how they integrate,” Kiniery said March 25 at the Association of the U.S. Army's Global Force Symposium and Exposition in Huntsville, Alabama.

“We’ve been focusing our efforts on the individual soldier for so long, we’ve burdened them with redundant capabilities developed in a stovepipe and added extra weight,” said Kiniery, who participated in a panel discussion and later spoke at a Warriors Corner presentation about his efforts to accelerate the architecture to field the squad as a system, not individual soldiers.

Kiniery explained that the “Squad as a System” effort centers on the understanding that soldiers serve in different roles within the squad, and “they work together as one system.”

As chief of infantry, Kiniery noted, he’s responsible for what he described as a “confederation of tribes,” such as airborne, mechanized, Ranger and arctic formations, each with its own infantry culture and equipment. While those formations may have some specialized requirements, Kiniery wants to establish a baseline uniformity for every one of the Army’s 1,800 infantry squads.

To achieve that, a test is being developed with the U.S. Army Combat Capabilities Development Command to evaluate a squad’s shoot, move and communicate functions to come up with metrics that can apply across the infantry. “So, if industry comes back with a piece of equipment and says, ‘Hey, this is more lethal, this will make a squad more lethal,’ instead of us just jumping into it, we're like, ‘OK, well, let’s test it against our system,’ ” Kiniery said.

Reducing soldiers’ load is not a new idea, nor is it novel, he said. “We’ve been talking about it for generations,” Kiniery said. “It’s an extremely hard problem to solve, but we, as Army leaders, would be derelict in our duty if we quit trying to solve it.”

Kiniery asked industry for help. “What we plan to do is establish a common architecture that they can build to,” he said. “We must ensure we are no longer producing things in a vacuum. We must reduce redundancy and increase combat power.”