What does flexible funding for electronic warfare mean for the Army?

The Army has been on a push to gain what it calls agile or flexible funding for a small portfolio of capabilities as a pilot effort to be more adaptive to the battlefield.

Those initial areas include drones, counter-unmanned aerial systems and electronic warfare. The commercial drone sector is pretty well established, however, what is less clear is how such flexible funding would look for electronic warfare, where to date, most systems have been exquisitely designed and purpose-built for the military.

The thinking is that this agile pot of money, which is really budget line item consolidation, will help the Army be more adaptive on the battlefield in an era where changes are happening in days to weeks as opposed to months and years. In the Ukraine-Russia war, which has spurred the need for a new approach, combatants are discovering that technology, capabilities and tactics are being countered almost as soon as they’re deployed, requiring quick changes and creating an exponentially shorter innovation cycle.

For the U.S. military, programs are set up as specific line items with specific pots of money as opposed to a broad capability portfolio. Currently, the Army can’t take money from one electronic warfare program line item and use those funds for another EW program to adjust to real-world needs if, for example, a certain technology has matured that could be surged to forces on the battlefield to support an urgent requirement.

However, flexible funding, or line item consolidation where all EW programs are housed under the same budget line, could allow the service to move money that traditionally would’ve been allocated to one system to another for forces that may need it sooner — or if a new technology comes along that is ready for primetime and addresses a need.

“Working with the committees on record over on the Hill, how do we consolidate so that we have some flexibility to respond to that operational environment through our budget construct and we are not limited to the bureaucracy inside the building of reprogramming action in order to respond to something?” Lt. Gen. Karl Gingrich, deputy chief of staff, G-8, said in March at the annual McAleese Defense Programs Conference. “We learned some tough lessons over the last two years as we were watching our soldiers in contact and our inability within our budget to actually move some money to address their needs. We lost a couple of months in there. We can no longer afford to do that. And that’s why we’re doing [a push for] agile funding.”

Moreover, that consolidation not only provides greater flexibility, but innovation as well, according to officials.

“The Army’s agile funding proposal will provide increased flexibility. The streamlined budget structure enables rapid innovation, response and fielding of EW capabilities, and enhances the Army’s flexibility and ability to swiftly address relevant threats in real-time by taking advantage of the latest technological advancements,” said a spokesperson from program executive office for intelligence, electronic warfare and sensors.

The Army’s Terrestrial Layer System-Brigade Combat Team capability provides an apt example for what the Army would like such flexible funding to achieve. That program, as initially outlined, would be the service’s first ground-based jammer in decades providing integrated cyber, signals intelligence and electronic warfare capabilities mounted on Strykers and heavy platforms as well as a manpackable dismounted version.

The Army eventually hit pause on the platform-based component of the program as it sought to disaggreigate the signals intelligence and EW aspects. The service ended up awarding the TLS Manpack using a system that had been proven and used by special operations forces.

Despite the engineering challenges the platform side faced, there was an urgent operational need by the Army that General Dynamics responded to with its Tactical Electronic Warfare System-Infantry Brigade Combat Team, or TEWS-I technology, that provides a smaller system designed for infantry vehicles.

However, under the current way Army budgeting works, there was no ability to pivot funding from the TLS-BCT effort to acquire TEWS-I and get that to the field to a wide swath of units.

Moreover, if new software is all of a sudden developed that can improve a system, like the TLS Manpack, against a threat, but there aren’t any funds left in that line, the Army can’t move funds from a less mature program to upgrade the Manpack. A single consolidated electronic warfare budget line would allow the service to do that.

“I do think that the idea here is to give them more flexibility to move money around between different EW programs, because they’ve got … a variety of EW programs in various states of development,” Bryan Clark, senior fellow and director of the Center for Defense Concepts and Technology at the Hudson Institute, said. “I think the Army wants to be able to accelerate the ones that have the most promise, like you saw with the TLS Manpack … that’s an example of the Army realizing that their initial [concept of operations] for the BCT version maybe didn’t make sense, and they needed to pivot to a different design. Whereas the Manpack seems like they’ve got a more straightforward way forward and they’ve got a CONOP that they believe works.”

Traditionally, the military electronic warfare market has required purpose-built, exquisite systems. However, today, technology has advanced to the degree that several commercial companies now have capabilities that are ready to go, a reality the Army is trying to capitalize on.

The way military budgeting works presently, is it hamstrings programs and makes it harder to look at commercial-off-the-shelf solutions. That is still driven by the way the Army and the program office aim to outfit the entire Army with a system, according to a former official.

“If we bought one TLS Manpack, then the entire Army had to get that exact same TLS Manpack and we didn’t revisit upgrades until that was done,” the former official said. “What the flexibility would give us is the ability to pivot in stride.”

When a new program is coming into play, the program office will conduct a bake-off of sorts where different vendors will bring in their technologies for evaluation. Rather than doing the bake-off with a bunch of vendors and going through a longer, drawn out process, flexibility would allow officials to say a COTS solution is ready now, purchase a set of it, get it to the 101st Airborne Division, let them play with it, then buy the second set and give it to 82nd Airborne Division, and then buy the third set and deliver it to the 25th Infantry Division, as an example, according to the former official.

For its part, the Army has noted it wants to get out of the business of so-called pure fleeting where every unit is outfitted with the same equipment. Service officials have talked about tranching capabilities to select units that are deploying or that require it in the background, using those deployments and other exercises to make tweaks and advancements that can be incorporated and outfitted to other units later.

“You can continue to modernize the force and get capability in the hands of soldiers, instead of waiting three to five years from when the real time of need is,” the former official added.

This could lead to the fielding of different capabilities made by different vendors in different theaters, but the key is ensuring they’re all riding on common open, interoperable software architectures.

Such an approach could raise questions of fair and open competition. According to the former official, the iterative process of continuing to build on capability and force vendors into bake-offs means they will constantly be competing to stay ahead.

Clark noted those concerns with a constant rapid prototyping approach.

“By accelerating movement from prototyping into procurement at some kind of scale you naturally forego opportunities for competition,” he said. “I think that’s the tradeoff that DOD is making right now that they’re saying, because of this need for speed, I’m going to give up probably some deliberation that it would otherwise have.”

However, he acknowledged a COTS approach incentivizes companies to constantly be innovating.

For the larger, platform-based, exquisite programs, agile funding affords flexibility to not necessarily be wedded towards dollars that have been allocated across the five-year budget cycle if the prototype matures or doesn’t work well.

Critics in the past have said this type of arrangement means less congressional oversight and a risk of money falling into a type of slush fund. The reason for line item funding based on programs instead of portfolios is so lawmakers have a better understanding for accounting and overseeing exactly how and where the Army and the other services are spending money to avoid potential or perceived malfeasance.

However, Army officials have noted they’ve received positive responses from lawmakers in their engagements about the idea of having more flexibility. Some top congressional members have also voiced support.

Rep. Rob Wittman, R-Va., vice chairman of the House Armed Services Committee and chairman of the panel’s Tactical Air and Land Forces Subcommittee, has previously expressed his backing for the Army’s flexible funding efforts for drones, counter-drone systems and electronic warfare.

“This effort will allow the Army rapidly adopt critical technologies that are shaping the modern battlefield without needlessly wasting time with misaligned dollars. I look forward to working with the administration and our new Secretary of Defense to ensure our warfighters have all the tools they need to keep Americans safe,” he said.

According to Clark, others across the DOD have consolidated lines, such as the Defense Innovation Unit and DARPA. The key is constant feedback and transparency with Congress on how funds are being used to ensure success.

He noted, however, that such a flexible approach could risk having too much focus on prototyping new technologies without fielding systems at scale to soldiers.

“Unlike the Air Force or the Navy, where if you field 10 or 20 of something, that could make a difference, because it could be on 10 or 20 ships or aircraft that are the ones that are forward deployed. Whereas the Army, it operates at such a larger scale that you have to have systems be distributed to many, you have to have hundreds of systems for them to be relevant numbers,” he said. “They need to think about making sure that they don’t make these innovation cycles so short that they’re never fielding a system in a relevant quantity. I think that’s the one challenge they’re riding up against right now.”