Incremental Progress

The first increment of the Army's brigade combat team modernization effort is slated to face a Defense Acquisition Board interim review Friday (April 2), program executive office integration spokesman Paul Mehney confirmed Tuesday.

The review is the first of two required by Pentagon acquisition chief Ashton Carter in a Dec. 24 acquisition decision memorandum signed last year. According to the memo, the review will address the network, including a maturity plan through fiscal year 2017; the Army’s plan for an open, scalable architecture; and a network technology readiness assessment to be prepared by the director of defense research and engineering. Additionally, the meeting is to provide an update on reliability growth plans, a reevaluation of the threshold and objective reliability requirements for the program and an update on the Non-Line-of-Sight Launch System flight limited user test.

The memo also says the review will include a “comprehensive precision mix cost-effectiveness analysis for the BCT” intended to “demonstrate the cost-effectiveness of the NLOS-LS, in EIBCT relevant scenarios, with appropriate augmentation by other Army and joint platforms.”

Meanwhile, Mehney said the Army has identified all of the fixes needed for Increment 1 based on last year's LUT and will implement the corrections by the next LUT, slated for the fourth quarter of FY-10. At a March 10 hearing, an Army official said the service had identified 94 percent of the required fixes.