The result not only continues the active cooperation with the Army but also with the Office of the Assistant Secretary of Defense Operational Energy Plans and Programs, led by Sharon E. Burke, to better understand policy initiatives and help identify and define Operational Energy applications.

“What we’ve collectively moved towards is taking a more scenario-based or holistic look at how you operationally deploy systems and then looking at operational energy from that context,” Pierson explained. “That’s in contrast to the more ‘platform-dependent view’ that has been examined in the past. The Operational Energy Plans and Programs Office has embraced that new approach and is assisting us with funding to the Army to begin to invest in some of the modeling that will be required to look at this.

“This is another example of how working jointly and collaboratively together with the Army we can garner support from outside stakeholders such as OSD for JCGV initiatives,” he added.

Another area of JCGV community activity highlighted by Pierson involves enterprise architecture. Acknowledging that this area was “a little bit harder” than some others due to the need to get engineers and technologists to focus on single approaches, he noted that the Army and Marine Corps “are in dialogue with a community of engineers working on it and trying to steer to a common framework that we can all hang our hats on.”

Pierson offered modeling and simulation as a fourth example of expanded collaboration emerging from JCGV.

“That’s another area where I think the community is really coming together,” he said. “We started by conducting a modeling and simulation inventory, as best we could, across the Army and Marine Corps. We looked at the tool sets that we are using in the development, testing, and analysis of ground vehicle programs. That effort is designed to ‘benchmark’ the best tools to use in this domain.

“What happened in the past is that program managers would typically invest just in those tools that directly impacted their programs,” he asserted. “But there’s never been a big vision for tools that could be used across the community, which you could build upon and grow. Now, there are some generic tools out there, but they are primarily for force-level analysis. The reality has still been that each PM invested in the specific tools that were best for his specific platform. But now what we are trying to do as a community is to figure out which tool sets make the most sense to invest in as a community. Then let’s invest in them and mature them.

“Now we’re not going to force the PMs to use these tools,” he clarified. “But as a technical community, these are the ones that we are going to stand behind and push to develop and further mature.”

As a subset of the modeling and simulation tool effort, the JCGV has also explored a range of portfolio analysis tools designed to help the PEOs manage the myriad systems under their responsibility.

“The whole JCGV concept started with the Secretary of Defense looking to explore a ‘center of mass’ in the Warren, Mich./TACOM area for the ground vehicle science and technical community,” Pierson continued. “And we have remained true to trying to keep that center of mass and leveraging it as best we can.”

As an example of this leveraging, he highlighted the Army’s April 2012 opening of their Ground Systems Power and Energy Lab at TARDEC.

“We were out there for the grand opening, but more importantly we were involved with the early part of planning that facility as to the type of capabilities that would be required to support Marine Corps programs as well,” he said. “And that’s just another example of the two services coming together and looking at leveraging and not duplicating each other’s capabilities.”

Shifting to where the JCGV will go from here, Pierson offered the analogy of “taking it to the next level” through “recognition by the Congress and OSD that the Joint Center is both a benchmark for how to do business and a tool for them to use in the future.

“For the Joint Center and the Governance Board to reach its full potential we really need Congress and OSD to recognize it,” he said. “They need to know that they have a place to go to for non-biased subject-matter expertise and answers for cross-cutting domain issues on ground vehicles. Typically they would go to a single PEO or a single PM and get an answer that might be very ‘parochial’ as to a specific platform. But now they have an opportunity to go to a community of subject-matter experts and talk about big issues associated with ground vehicles – like survivability and mobility.

“And we would also like to have industry jump on board as well,” he added. “We would like to see them use the Governance Board as a means for them to share good ideas. I am sure that the folks who support both services have ideas for efficiencies and commonalities that we may not be seeing. So I view the Governance Board as a place for them to bring their good ideas to inform an entire community rather than trying to track down people all over the country.”

While pointing to multiple threads of JCGV progress over the past two years, Pierson acknowledged, “We didn’t go too fast into the Pentagon or too fast to Congress because we needed to get our legs under us. We needed to make sure we did have a good vision that we can sustain.

“In order for us to reach our potential and take this idea to the next level we need to engage the community. So I think the time is right. And that’s where we’re heading with this effort – to start engaging senior leaders, specifically those who control the resources, to show them the benefits of what we are trying to do. Because only then will we really get the resources we need to build the initiatives that will bring the benefits of commonality and standard processes to U.S. ground vehicles.”

This article was first published in Marine Corps Outlook: 2012-2013 Edition.