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Why the Army picked Austin for Futures Command

Rogue Valley

Rogue Valley

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Why the Army picked Austin for Futures Command

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7/13/18
After whittling down a list of more than 150 cities to five, the U.S. Army has decided on Austin, Texas, for its new four-star command designed to tackle modernization priorities that will help it fight the next wars. Questions on the distance from the Pentagon and other major four-star commands have cropped up overnight as well as whether or not the Army will struggle to fit in and be accepted by hip, anti-establishment entrepreneurs with whom it hopes to collaborate to gain a vast technological edge against peer adversaries. The Army Futures Command was stood up in October at the Association of the U.S. Army’s annual conference in Washington. The plan is to realign the Army’s modernization priorities under a new organization that will implement cross-functional teams that correspond with the service’s top six modernization efforts: Long-Range Precision Fires, Next-Generation Combat Vehicle, Future Vertical Lift, the network, air and missile defense, and soldier lethality. These priorities address gaps the Army found — as it looked toward fighting complex, hybrid wars against near-peer adversaries — as the result of a focus on asymmetric warfare and counterinsurgency operations over the past 15 years. “We are in the midst of a change in the very character of war,” Army Chief of Staff Gen. Mark Milley said at a July 13 Pentagon press briefing. “And we don’t, and didn’t, have the organization solely dedicated to that.”

Austin beat out a short list of Boston, Massachusetts; Minneapolis, Minnesota; Raleigh, North Carolina; and Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. “The choice was very difficult, but we ultimately had to make a choice that was best for the U.S. Army,” Army Under Secretary Ryan McCarthy told reporters during the briefing. While the service will have a headquarters established in an office building in downtown Austin for leadership, it will also embed personnel within incubator hubs already well established in the city, places where entrepreneurs sit in a “sea of laptops” collaborating on big problems and ideas, McCarthy described. Milley noted that the establishment of Army Futures Command in Austin is only beginning — its initial operational capability — but it will reach a full operational capability in one year from now. “It will take one year,” he said, “to stand this command up, have all of its processes fleshed out, have all of the people assigned and to start seeing some initial results.” Army Secretary Mark Esper added that much is likely to change over time. “We have to be comfortable operating in the gray over time. There may be things that we pull into the organization and move them back out as we evolve and learn. … That is part of the culture that we are trying to build, is flexibility to adapt your organization, your processes to the needs of the time.”
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My understanding is that the Austin HQ will initially begin with a staff of 500 and grow from there. May success be their constant companion.
 
WCH said:
Educated and high tech savvy population.
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yes; that also

I knew one of the original Dellionaires before he was killed, with his own hand gun ................ RIP Billy ...........
 
Texas has more electoral votes than any of the other top contenders. California is out for being too liberal.
 
JONRID said:
Texas has more electoral votes than any of the other top contenders. California is out for being too liberal.
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That's just crap. And your bold text is getting tiresome.
 
Rogue Valley said:
Why the Army picked Austin for Futures Command

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My understanding is that the Austin HQ will initially begin with a staff of 500 and grow from there. May success be their constant companion.
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There is a massive tech hub in austin, one of if not the largest in the nation, plus austin is nearby fort hood the largest army base in the country, and austin is also home to the hq of texas national guard and texas state guard, while fort hood has army resrerves and even air force stationed there, this gives them access to testing on almost all levels of military from enlisted and officer down to reserves and even state militia, for a testing grounds to develope new doctrine, everything in austin was perfect and only a fool would not choose it, it is the perfect storm for military commanders needing test people and number crunchers.
 
Lord Tammerlain said:
I expect the pay requirements will be a big shock to the army. Having 25 year old's making $100 000 per year, more than I expect some Majors and Colonels
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That is not a shock to the army, they pay that now to many people, it becomes cost to benefit, if 100k+ a year yields good results it is worth it, if that same pay yields no more than what enisted soldiers and offivrs can profuce the program would be quickly scrapped.

But the army already pays it guys high dollar to run things like security and encryption, let's face it, even com soldiers are not going to design systems from the ground up to be secure, those systems are usually made by civilians, with secret and top secret clearances.
 
Rogue Valley said:
Why the Army picked Austin for Futures Command

Na%CC%88ytto%CC%88kuva-2017-03-13-kello-20.05.10.png




My understanding is that the Austin HQ will initially begin with a staff of 500 and grow from there. May success be their constant companion.
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Good move.Austin is in the heart of Texas, has plenty of technical talent and is an hour or less from the largest US Military​ base in the US, Ft Hood. Plus there is little worry from protestors like they would get in some hardcore Blue States. Smart move all around.
 
Hawkeye10 said:
Boston, Philadelphia, Minneapolis, Raleigh, and Austin were the final five.....Most likely reasons it was Austin is that it is Blue State and because there is military infrastructure nearby.
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The last one is much more likely.

Fort Hood, Fort Sill, Fort Bliss, White Sands, there are a great many large training facilities within a relatively short drive of Austin. It only makes sense that if you are going to be testing "futures", you want it to be reasonably close to the testing facilities you would be using.

And one of the precursors for this was Future Combat Systems, which was based out of Fort Bliss. And many of the civilians that worked on that project are still in the White Sands area.

It simply makes no sense to base something like this in a large city with no military infrastructure around. I would bet that Austin was always the choice, the others were thrown out mostly to make those other locations think they had a chance. Other than Raleigh, none of the others have any kind of military infrastructure nearby at all.

A California city I might have thought possible 30 years ago, for the same reason as Austin. But in the 1990's a large number of military bases in that state were gutted and closed. So what might have made it attractive in the 1980's no longer exists in the 2010's.
 
Oozlefinch said:
The last one is much more likely.

Fort Hood, Fort Sill, Fort Bliss, White Sands, there are a great many large training facilities within a relatively short drive of Austin. It only makes sense that if you are going to be testing "futures", you want it to be reasonably close to the testing facilities you would be using.

And one of the precursors for this was Future Combat Systems, which was based out of Fort Bliss. And many of the civilians that worked on that project are still in the White Sands area.

It simply makes no sense to base something like this in a large city with no military infrastructure around. I would bet that Austin was always the choice, the others were thrown out mostly to make those other locations think they had a chance. Other than Raleigh, none of the others have any kind of military infrastructure nearby at all.

A California city I might have thought possible 30 years ago, for the same reason as Austin. But in the 1990's a large number of military bases in that state were gutted and closed. So what might have made it attractive in the 1980's no longer exists in the 2010's.
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I dont disagree however I point out that the military is getting a bit frantic about how America is dividing and the further fact that the support of the Military in Blue State America is soft, I have been listening to them talk about this general problem for two decades now....this setting up of a new command was clearly an invitation to place a new beach head in Blue State....and Austin accomplishes that even though it is in Texas.
 
Hawkeye10 said:
I dont disagree however I point out that the military is getting a bit frantic about how America is dividing and the further fact that the support of the Military in Blue State America is soft, I have been listening to them talk about this general problem for two decades now....this setting up of a new command was clearly an invitation to place a new beach head in Blue State....and Austin accomplishes that even though it is in Texas.
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Oh nonsense.

First off, things like this are really just R&D units. Essentially they are roughly equivalent to a Regimental-Brigade size when it comes to the command staff, but in reality the actual "force" they command is at most a Battalion (at most - eventually). And at that, generally some seasoned officers and NCOs, and a large pool of newly trained recruits. This is not any kind of "fighting unit", it is a large test unit.

Not unlike how they have been "testing" THAAD for the last decade. I was there when they did that, over a decade ago. What we have is Alpha Company, 4th ADA Regiment and Alpha Battery, 2nd ADA Regiment. Quite literally, these are Regiments that consist of only a single Battery each. With the idea that whenever the Army decides to fully implement the system, they can then be expanded and filled up with the rest of the Batteries to make up actual Battalions.

But it has been a decade already, and that still has not happened. And likely it never will. They will likely remain as such, until the Army finally decides to just scrap 2nd and 4th ADA, and simply make them Batteries inside of an existing ADA or AMD Battalion.

There is no beachhead. This really is just a replacement for the old FCS, which was at Fort Bliss before it was killed during the Obama Administration. And much of that program is still going on there, as small individual projects.

As for the place, it makes sense. If not for the program sitting idle for so long (9 years) and much of the facilities once used for it being taken by other units (1st Armored Division), it likely would have gone back to Fort Bliss.

Conspiracies about future civil wars and Red Vs. Blue does not apply in any way.
 
Oozlefinch said:
Oh nonsense.

First off, things like this are really just R&D units. Essentially they are roughly equivalent to a Regimental-Brigade size when it comes to the command staff, but in reality the actual "force" they command is at most a Battalion (at most - eventually). And at that, generally some seasoned officers and NCOs, and a large pool of newly trained recruits. This is not any kind of "fighting unit", it is a large test unit.

Not unlike how they have been "testing" THAAD for the last decade. I was there when they did that, over a decade ago. What we have is Alpha Company, 4th ADA Regiment and Alpha Battery, 2nd ADA Regiment. Quite literally, these are Regiments that consist of only a single Battery each. With the idea that whenever the Army decides to fully implement the system, they can then be expanded and filled up with the rest of the Batteries to make up actual Battalions.

But it has been a decade already, and that still has not happened. And likely it never will. They will likely remain as such, until the Army finally decides to just scrap 2nd and 4th ADA, and simply make them Batteries inside of an existing ADA or AMD Battalion.

There is no beachhead. This really is just a replacement for the old FCS, which was at Fort Bliss before it was killed during the Obama Administration. And much of that program is still going on there, as small individual projects.

As for the place, it makes sense. If not for the program sitting idle for so long (9 years) and much of the facilities once used for it being taken by other units (1st Armored Division), it likely would have gone back to Fort Bliss.

Conspiracies about future civil wars and Red Vs. Blue does not apply in any way.
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The dissolving of America and the risk that posses for the military and our Officer Corps being aware of that risk is not a conspiracy theory, it is fact.
 
This quote is really quite sad:

“A lot of technology’s whiz kids aren’t as interested in going through all the security gates and parameters of a place like Fort Hood,” said Col. Patrick Seiber, a spokesman for the Army task force mapping out the new command.

“But if you had a downtown office next to Reunion Tower that was not far from SMU or some of these other places, you might have more folks saying, ‘Hey, I want to give this a shot,’” Seiber said.
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15 Cities Are on the Army?s Radar for a Future-Focused HQ
 
American said:
Liberals despise the military.
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No one asked you for your pronouncement on liberals and the military.
Seeing as how you're not a liberal, you have neither the right nor invitation to speak for them, and your constant campaign to impugn the patriotism of liberals is disgusting and despicable.
 
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