US special operations forces have an answer to the army weapons problem

• The special operations forces have a process of acquiring rapid and flexible weapons.
• It is essential to keep operators in advance on the curve on the necessary capacities.
• There are lessons for the greatest joint force and the Pentagon, said officials.

The forces of American special operations know how to quickly bring new technologies and weapons to the Warfighter, and there are potential lessons in their approach for the wider army.

In a recent symposium in Washington, DC, the speakers argued that the Pentagon had to move more quickly.

“The most important thing we must do is really changing the cultivation of Pentagon and Congress,” said representative Adam Smith, Democrat of Washington and member of the United States Armed Services Committee last month at the Symposium of US Special US Operations at the National Defense Industrial Association.

“We have to speed up the pace of innovation,” he said.

The special operational forces have flexible acquisition processes which not only bring together operators and industry partners, but also encourage real -time adaptations.

During the recent symposium, leadership of special operations, other military officials and industry partners talked about what works and what does not work in the acquisition of new weapons and capacities.

SOF’s agile acquisition process means that it is able to work with industry partners to get their hands and adjust both hardware and software than others. Officials said his approach was a model to solve wider problems in the Pentagon.

Melissa Johnson, a Member of the main executive service And the acquisition of the command of special operations (SOCOM), said that the strength of the process is that decision -making on the systems to be acquired and when is made by close coordination with the operator, creating a stronger relationship between what the individual operator considers as necessary and what industry partners can provide.

“I think the recipe is really simple,” said Johnson during the symposium, adding that “it is the state of mind and the culture of being able to take the magic that occurs in Socom, the way we do business, and how are we expanding and traveling through the department.”

What slows down the acquisition of the DOD? There are a range of different factors.

As officials have recently declared, many problems are due to the way funding is appropriate and on the functioning of the contraction through services and congress. The other complication is the part of requirements and if some are too complicated and arbitrary for certain systems. Smith has referred to long and sometimes useless requirements for certain things, such as painting on the coastal combat ship.

It is not as if the US special operations forces are not without their own acquisition problems. For example, special operations commanders told the House Armed Services Committee last week that American opponents would be modeled more quickly than they could, telling Congress leaders that sometimes technology is already obsolete when he is aligned.

Lieutenant-general Michael Conley, the command of the Air Force special operations, said “it is this constant loop to try to catch up with the enemy threat”.

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However, special operations forces tend to move faster than the rest of the army, which feels the pressure to modernize for a high -end conflict in the middle of the emergence of new combat technologies as unrelated systems and artificial intelligence and the emphasis on high power competition with China and Russia.

There are lessons to learn, said Socom officials, the Ukraine War, where drone manufacturers create hardware and software solutions to the battlefields even when countermeasures arise.

Chris Brose, the director of strategy of Andundil Industries, said that one of the advantages of working with Socom is that his work with industry partners is managed differently from the requirements to build the next attack or destructive submarine.

Brose underlined Anduril’s work with Socom on counter-ground systems, noting that the feedback of operators on threats that go beyond new technologies were essential to adapt in real time.

Others have tried this approach with industry, such as US Army Futures Command, which was based on immersive tests and contact points for soldiers. However, there is room for improving innovation and acquisition within the DOD.

The adoption of the way of doing socom comes down to greater flexibility in the budget. But there is distrust of the appropriars, said Smith, and this was a great battle against questions about surveillance. All the solutions presented, said officials, will not apply to all soldiers, because the special operations forces buy smaller amounts of advanced technology with a smaller and flexible budget. But a general emphasis on problem solving that is closer to industry could be beneficial.