In the days after Hamas’s October 2023 attack on Israel, U.S. troops in the Middle East began to endure near-daily drone attacks. It took six weeks to get upgraded counter-drone weapons to those far-flung outposts, the Army’s vice chief of staff said Tuesday—and the service’s procurement folks thought that was a win.
To make it happen, Gen. James Mingus said, the service had to reprogram funds destined for the Raytheon Coyote Block 2+ to the Block C variant because each of those variants was a different line of funding in the defense budget.
“It took 45 days, and everybody was patting themselves on the back…because normally that’s a multi-month kind of process,” Mingus told an audience at the AUSA annual meeting in Washington, D.C. “If you’re a kid at Tower 22, you’re looking at your watch. Back here, we’re looking at calendars.”
The story illustrated a larger point the Army leaders have been trying to make in their acquisition-reform push: so-called “agile funding” would allow them not only to more rapidly buy new technologies, but immediately get them downrange to protect troops in imminent danger.
“Had that been a single line of accounting, a single program element, we could have immediately…had those Coyote Block 2C’s in the hands of those soldiers in days, instead of a multi-month period,” Mingus said.
As it stands now, if the Defense Department wants to shift more than $10 million slated to procure one weapon to buy another one, it needs approval from Congress. What the Army would like is a big pot of general counter-UAS money that it can use to buy new technology as it’s developed.
It’s up to the Army, then, to assure Congress that they won’t be recklessly spending that pot of money without oversight.
The challenge “is getting them to understand that they will maintain the visibility on this, because at the end of the day, that’s a big concern,” Army Undersecretary Mike Obadal said. “They’re responsible for overseeing the budget, and we can’t ignore that.”
Every new weapon fielded is going to have a tactical response from the enemy, Obadal said, often requiring yet another new piece of technology for the Army to keep an advantage.
“With exquisite weapon systems, that cycle may take years. With other things that may take months,” he said. “But with some of the things that our soldiers are going to face on the battlefield, it has to be days, or—to the vice’s point—even hours.”
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