Additional CS 13 capabilities extend new levels of enhanced communications and situational awareness down to the soldier level.
Soldiers from 2nd Platoon, Company A, 1st Battalion, 35th Armor Regiment, 2nd Heavy Brigade Combat Team, 1st Armored Division, storm a makeshift village filled with role-playing enemies during a battalion-sized mission simulating battlefield conditions at White Sands Missile Range, N.M., May 12, 2012. The village exists in the middle of the desert to replicate wartime conditions. Soldiers maneuvered through the village of dozens of buildings, and secured two- and even three-story structures. The mission was a part of Network Integration Evaluation 12.2. U.S. Army photo by Sgt. Edward A. Garibay, 16th Mobile Public Affairs Detachment
One last point made by Dragon involved the fact that the NIE is not just looking at equipment and material solutions. Instead, the process is looking for ways to fill identified gaps across the entire range of DOTMLPF (doctrine, organization, training, materiel, leadership and education, personnel and facilities) issues.
Maj. Gen. Genaro Dellarocco, commander of U.S. Army Test and Evaluation Command, emphasized the quality of data that his evaluators have been able to gather during the NIE process and the many uses for that information well beyond the system evaluation process.
“This last NIE – 12.2 – was kind of a paradigm shift from many perspectives,” he said. “For WIN-T Increment 2, as an example, we did an Initial Operational Test and Evaluation [IOTE] during the NIE. We didn’t collect megabytes of data. We didn’t collect gigabytes of data. We collected terabytes of data. And that’s new territory. We collected terabytes of information and it was high quality.
“Once we’re done with the report we’re going to give that back to TRADOC so that we have mission command driven back into future scenarios; into modeling and simulations; so we can use it again to better our forces,” he noted.
“The simulations that we create out of this process will be higher fidelity, better quality, better usage, and better reflect reality,” he said. “This is one of the hidden benefits of this process.”
As director of System of Systems Integration for the Assistant Secretary of the Army, Acquisition, Logistics and Technology (ASA(ALT)), Brig. Gen. Dan Hughes serves as the materiel integrator for the NIE, the resulting capability set, and the “synchronized fielding” of these sets.
Describing the process as “a sea change from what we have been doing in the past,” Hughes offered, “If you think about the number of pieces of kit and gear that goes into a unit, before we would have 10 PEOs [program executive officers] and maybe 100 PMs [program managers] show up at different times in an unsynchronized manner. But capability set management is all about bringing that as a single capability together.
“The NIE that we just conducted showed us how I could field it better, faster, and not only what my capabilities are but what my limitations were,” he said. “So as we field that capability set, that unit knows what it’s getting and can implement it in a timely manner. ‘Sync fielding’ is really bringing together all of those elements and giving a capability as one element and not multiple programs that were out there. It allows us to save a lot of time by synchronizing pieces of the fielding, the NET, and to find out where our strengths and weaknesses are.
“It really is a comprehensive strategy toward the future – toward Network 2020 – as we field eight brigades in FY 13 and brigades in the future,” he added. “We will get smarter as we go along. And the NIE allows us to do that.”
Hughes also expressed his belief that the Army “was getting incrementally better” with each sequential NIE activity.