While most folks were at the beach or on family road trips in the run up to Labor Day, the U.S. Army was activating its Army Futures Command (AFC) in Austin, Texas. The new Army headquarters will lead the service’s multi-billion dollar modernization effort, pulling together the various Army elements traditionally involved in the acquisition process in order to link “operational concepts to requirements to acquisition to fielding.”

The AFC’s initial focus will be ensuring that the Army’s top six modernization efforts—long-range precision fires, next generation combat vehicles, future vehicle lift (helicopters), command and control networks, air and missile defense, and soldier lethality—come to fruition and do so as quickly as possible. Each of the six is seen as necessary to address a potential tactical overmatch in the case of a conflict with the Russian military. Extremely tight budgets and a focus on the wars in the Middle East and Afghanistan have left the Army in the precarious position vis-a-vis near-peer conventional military competitors. The AFC, not unreasonably, is the Army’s bureaucratic answer to an existing acquisition system that is seen as too unwieldy and bureaucratic.