Seizing the High Ground - United States Army Futures Command
Seizing the High Ground - United States Army Futures Command
As the 2018 National Defense Strategy states, the U.S. faces a return to great power competition in addition to threats from terrorism and regional adversaries. Over the last two decades, the Army had to make difficult choices to defer modernization and instead support the demand for a steady rotation of forces optimized for counterinsurgency in the Middle East. Coupled with budgetary instability and several unsuccessful high-profile acquisition programs, this hampered Army modernization efforts. Simultaneously, U.S. adversaries made intellectual, organizational and materiel investments to gain advantage and increasingly challenge U.S. warfighting dominance. The U.S. Army needs to modernize critical core capabilities now to regain overmatch for MDO against near-peer adversaries in the future.
To address this challenge, the Army requires a unified, responsive, efficient modernization enterprise; a clear modernization strategy; and aggressive implementation. AFC is the vehicle that the Army will use to break free of its Industrial Age business model to move at the speed of the Information Age. Transforming the Army’s approach to modernization will enable it to adapt, innovate and integrate technology at speed and scale, regaining assured battlefield dominance.