Army’s autonomy ‘characteristics of need’ guidance ‘basically complete,’ official says

WASHINGTON — The Army’s autonomy characteristics of need (CoN) statement, designed to involve industry early in the requirements process, streamlining the time it takes to get autonomous capabilities in the hands of soldiers, is “basically complete” pending final signatures, an Army Futures Command official said today. 

CoNs are intended to involve vendors from the start so the Army can move at pace with industry, who are typically ahead in technology innovation, David Meyer, director of futures integration for the Futures and Concepts Center within AFC, told reporters on the sidelines of the NDIA Emerging Technologies Conference today.

The idea is for commanders to give constant feedback to industry and acquisition leaders on what is and isn’t working in the field, allowing the CoN to be a “living document” that is updated periodically. For example, the service’s first CoN was for its Next Generation Command and Control (NGC2) initiative, which is updated about every 90 days. 

“The whole idea is [to] simplify the way you describe your problem to industry to allow them to innovate alongside of you,” Meyer said, noting the more traditional way of doing requirements was not only rigid, but also didn’t allow the service to move at speed.

“The complaint about the Army, and it’s appropriate, is we take a long time to figure out what we want. Then we take an even longer time to buy it. By the time we actually deliver it, it’s technologically irrelevant. So how do we acquire at the speed of industry, smaller buys, more often, constantly innovating, constantly iterating with industry?” 

Importantly, Meyer emphasized, the CoN model doesn’t only bring in industry early, but also has the potential to bring in more non-traditional vendors.

“We want industry to see themselves in the problem. So instead of us having to go to a guy and saying, ‘build this for me,’…. We don’t, we don’t know who does what. We can’t know, especially with the amazing number of small businesses that are popping up who do really, really great work in a narrow field. We can never keep track of that,” Meyer said. “So the idea of a characteristics of need statement is that industry can see themselves in it and come to us and say, ‘you’ve never heard of me, but I can help with this.’”

The autonomy CoN will focus on four critical areas: heavy companies operating with tanks, light companies with dismounted infantry soldiers, autonomy capable of breaching minefields and taking out obstacles and lastly autonomy for sustainment, Meyer said. 

“Autonomy itself is sort of an enormous endeavor. So we’ve broken it down in our four big chunks of [what] we think we need, or the four big places we think autonomy will be most relevant,” Meyer said. “Then we’ll start to talk to industry.”  

Though Meyer said the autonomy CoN is “basically complete,” he later added that the service doesn’t want to “rush” putting the document out. 

“We also don’t want to rush to failure and put this document out there too soon, and then realize we made a mistake, we got to pull it right back, and then we just look foolish,” Meyer said. “I would never presume to say when we’ll be ready to hand that out, but the idea of it is really solid, so we’re preparing ourselves so that as soon as it’s approved for release, we’re ready to answer the questions that we know people are going to have.” 

In terms of other CoNs on the horizon, Meyer said the Army is in the midst of determining more areas where they would be appropriate throughout the service. 

“If they’re meant to be broad and overarching, then you probably don’t need 100 of them,” Meyer said. “So a CoN needs to be broad enough to where it can get at a holistic battlefield problem, but still focused enough to where there’s a finite number of problems we’re trying to solve,” Meyer said. 

Meyer’s comments come a day after the Army announced a trio of prototype contracts to see if Infantry Support Vehicles (ISVs) can be turned into autonomous vehicles.