Army Shifting Training Priorities, Investments For Multi-Domain Ops.

• Author: Roaten, Meredith

ORLANDO, Fla.--To reach the Army's goal of building a force that excels at multi-domain operations, officials are making some tough decisions about which capabilities to prioritize for soldier training.

In 2018, the service released its doctrine for a modernized future force, "The U.S. Army in Multi-Domain Operations 2028." The plans for MDO cited emerging technologies such as hypersonics and machine learning as well as great power competition with China and Russia as catalysts to update the Army's priorities.

"Should conflict come, [adversaries] will employ multiple layers of stand-off [capabilities] in all domains--land, sea, air, space and cyberspace--to separate U.S. forces and our allies in time, space and function in order to defeat us," then-Army Chief of Staff Gen. Mark Milley wrote in the document. Milley is now chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

Shifting the service's priorities starts with how it trains, officials said. They are working to define the Army's needs for multi-domain operations and identify the capabilities necessary for future fights as soon as possible.

Ivan Martinez, director of the Army's Simulation and Technology Training Center, said reorganizing procurement and acquisition has been a major focus.

Starting in 2020, the office began to realign its programs to become MDO centric and to be in alignment with where the Army wants to go, he said in June at the annual Training and Simulation Industry Symposium in Orlando, Florida, which was hosted by the National Training and Simulation Association. NTSA is an affiliate of the National Defense Industrial Association.

Much of the service's science and technology funding was going toward capabilities that support the Army's near-term goals and not enough on mid- and far-term objectives, Martinez said. Initially, his team was unsure what multi-domain operations would look like and they took what he called "a pause" to assess the state of play.

"We realized that we needed to have a basic program that was very well synced with the user and our stakeholders," he said.

Army officials pulled together a group to develop a new science and technology portfolio for soldier training and included input from the training and simulation industry, he noted.

Joseph Sottilare, technology area manager for Army Combat Capabilities Development Command's Soldier Center, said the team collaborated to discover 59 capability gaps prioritized by the user community. They then laid out 12...