History, Politics And Current Affairs

Lordroel wrote: ↑Fri Apr 28, 2023 7:42 am The Department of Defense has announced that 3 Pilots were Killed and 1 Injured from the Crash of 2 AH-64 Apache Attack Helicopters in Alaska today; the Helicopters were a part of the U.S. Army’s 1st Attack Reconnaissance Battalion, 25th Aviation Regiment at Fort Wainwright.

Army grounds helicopter fleet for force-wide safety stand down
By Davis Winkie
April 28, 2023

The Army announced Friday evening that its pilots are grounded until they complete a mandatory safety training program in the wake of a series of deadly helicopter crashes.

The service’s top officer, Gen. James McConville, ordered the move after a Thursday evening double Apache helicopter crash in Alaska that claimed the lives of three more soldiers. Nine more died in Kentucky in March when two Black Hawk helicopters collided.

Both crashes occurred during training flights, according to an Army press release, though “there is no indication of any pattern between the two mishaps.” Another two aviators died in February when a Tennessee National Guard Black Hawk helicopter crashed in Alabama.

McConville, an aviator himself, described safety as “our top priority, and this stand down is an important step to make certain we are doing everything possible to prevent accidents and protect our personnel.”

The general added that the training program “will focus on safety and training protocols to ensure our pilots and crews have the knowledge, training and awareness to safely complete their assigned mission.”

According to an Army official who requested anonymity to discuss the stand down, installation commanding generals will lead the training events, which will also invite junior troops to “inform aviation unit leaders on unit-specific actions” they can take to improve safety practices.

Other covered topics will include flight planning, risk assessment, maintenance and aircrew training.

Safe multi-ship operations will also be covered, the Army official specified, in addition to “safety statistics and trends.”

Active duty aviators must complete the 24-hour stand down and training by next Friday, May 5. The National Guard and Army Reserve’s units have until May 31.

The Army official added that commanders can return their troops to flight status once they report they’ve completed the stand down.

Troops participating in critical missions remain authorized to fly but still must complete the training.

The last-known aviation stand down of this scale occurred in December 2015, when three deadly helicopter crashes occurred in a 10-day span.

Top enlisted soldier calls out leaders to ‘show up’ at PT
By Todd South
April 27, 2023

FORT EUSTIS, Va. – The Army’s top enlisted soldier has called for leaders to “show up” at both physical training sessions and their soldiers’ dining facilities.

“What I ask you all as leaders is, are you there?” Sergeant Major of the Army Michael Grinston said to an audience of nearly 800 officers and senior enlisted on April 26 at the service’s annual Holistic Health and Fitness Symposium.

“You don’t have to lead it, you don’t have to be up front, you just have to be present,” Grinston said.

Grinston had good company at the event, as Col. Michael Kloepper, commander of the 173rd Infantry Brigade Combat Team (Airborne) drilled into the core of what the new health and fitness program, also called H2F, means for soldiers during another session. And physical fitness, or PT, may not even be the main point.

“PT isn’t about PT,” Kloepper said. “The Army does not have a pushup problem.”

The daily sweat sessions, which now in the H2F era include an all-around look at nutrition, sleep, mental and spiritual help along with physical exercise, are “about leader development,” he said.

It also wasn’t the first call out from the sergeant major. Army Times reported at the 2022 symposium Grinston tasked leaders to “get creative” with physical training, incorporating yoga and new moves as well as different times of day than early in the morning to better prepare soldiers for the Army Combat Fitness Test and other demands.

Army Times reported recently that early data shows that among the 28 brigades with the new health and fitness program, suicides are down by more than one-third and other behaviors and negative outcomes such as substance abuse and musculoskeletal injuries have also seen steep declines. That comes as the rates of those unhealthy behaviors have continued to rise in similar brigades without the H2F resources, according to Army data.

As he rattled through each of the health program’s domains, the data appeared to align with Grinston’s message — that if done correctly, the health and fitness program can work as a preventative tool.

“In order to do prevention of things, we have to do better with holistic health and fitness,” Grinston said. “And it doesn’t matter what the thing is on the other side.”

Kloepper’s brigade conducted their own, localized health-focused project, he said. They took some of the “intervention” methods used in the Ranger Assessment and Selection Program and applied them to their own formations for better resiliency training and added some of their own pieces.

The aim was to improve unit cohesion and soldier toughness, the colonel said. The initiative centered on team-building exercises and used chaplains and other experts to build a sense of purpose and accountability in unit events.

The colonel pointed directly at excuses he’s heard from fellow commanders, such as not having enough time to do effective physical fitness training and complete all the tactical training and preparation that’s required of their combat-focused jobs.

Kloepper wasn’t having it.

The physical training and health focus is what made the tactical tasks come together, he said.

“As a brigade commander you take a vested interest in developing a warrior culture,” he said.

And in case anyone listening thought only about sweating out a run or banging out some pushups, Grinston double-tapped the leadership challenge.

“Where do your soldiers fuel their bodies?” Grinston said, referring to on-post dining facilities. “Where are you?”

Grinston recalled how throughout his four-year tenure as the service’s top enlisted soldier he often visits dining facilities and rarely sees anyone above the rank of staff sergeant present.

The soon-to-retire soldier said enlisted leaders especially should see the amount of healthy and sufficient food that fuels their soldiers. And if the options are poor, they should speak up and push for improvement.

The H2F program launched with a pilot study in 2018 and has since grown to 28 fielded brigades with a dozen more scheduled to field teams and equipment this year. The Army’s current schedule would continue at a pace of 10 per year until 110 brigades are fielded by 2030.

However, Army Times recently reported that Maj. Gen. John Kline, commanding general of the Center for Initial Military Training, said during the conference he would soon present a plan for a 15-brigade-per-year rollout to senior leaders for review to speed up delivering the program across the Army.

Meet the winners of the Army’s ‘diabolical’ Best Sapper Competition
By James Clark
April 26, 2023

For the winners of this year’s Best Sapper Competition, the toughest part of the annual event between Army combat engineers had little to do with blowing doors off their hinges, identifying ordnance, breaching, or any of the other tasks one thinks of when they hear the words “combat engineer.” Instead, it had to do with watches, or lack thereof.

“[The] toughest part is the mental aspect of it,” said Capt. Joseph Palazini, a company commander with the 21st Brigade Engineer Battalion, 3rd BCT, 101st Airborne Division out of Fort Campbell, Kentucky.

Palazini, along with his teammate, Capt. Matthew Cushing, who serves as the assistant operations officer with the same unit, took first place in the 16th Annual Lt. Gen. Robert B. Flowers Best Sapper Competition that ran from April 21 to 24 at Fort Leonard Wood, Missouri.

A total of 100 sapper-qualified soldiers from across active duty, the Army Reserve and the National Guard took part in the competition, working in two-person teams. The competition spanned 58 hours and a range of nearly 60 miles, during which time soldiers tested their mettle in marksmanship, demolitions, first aid, urban breaching, and a host of physical fitness challenges.

Two of those events — an X-mile ruck march and X-mile run, so named for the fact that the distance was unknown to participants — proved particularly difficult, according to the winners and one of the architects of this year’s competition.

“It may seem kind of trivial, but my little diabolical addition to the competition was taking their watches from them at the X-mile ruck march,” said 1st Sgt. Christopher Hoffman, who helped set up this year’s events. “A lot of people, how they time themselves and track all that, a lot of them have paces and stuff like that and most people try to shoot for 15 minutes per mile. So when I was like ‘hey, if we take their watches and they don’t know how far they’re going, they don’t know how long they’ve been out there, then they can’t do that.’ And it was just that additional little challenge and kind of a mind game to set them back a little bit.”

To make matters worse, the soldiers’ performance on the ruck 18-mile march impacted how much rest they’d get between completing that event and starting on the next. For one unfortunate team, by the time they completed the march they had just 15 minutes to drop their 50 pounds of gear before starting the next challenge.

The mind games — part and parcel of military life — weren’t the only curveballs thrown at the soldiers.

For Cushing, the competition offered a chance to put academic knowledge to the test, which can be an invaluable opportunity for soldiers so that their first real attempt at trying a technique doesn’t take place during a real-world operation.

“We studied a lot, and some of the calculations you study you have to use out here, so the saddle pitch, which is a diamond shape steel-cutting charge made of C-4 explosives, we know the calculation and how to do it based off the diagrams, but we’ve never done it in real life,” Cushing said. “So, having to form it to the shape of the object we were putting it around, that was a little more challenging than we expected. So I guess in the future, it’s not just about going over the demolitions calculations, but in the real world ‘how do you actually mold it onto the object you have to destroy?”

1st Woman to Take Top Enlisted Job at Army Special Ops
28 Apr 2023
Military.com | By Steve Beynon and Drew F. Lawrence

FORT BRAGG, North Carolina -- The Army's Special Operations Command will appoint its first female command sergeant major Monday, a service spokesperson confirmed to Military.com.

Command Sgt. Maj. JoAnn Naumann -- the current senior enlisted adviser for Special Operations-Korea -- has been tapped to lead the organization, which historically has been dominated by men.

Naumann's appointment comes at a time when Army leaders are talking about diversifying the service's leadership. She also broke barriers as the first woman in a command team position with Special Operations Command, according to an Army press release last year.

Naumann entered the Army in 1996 as an Arabic linguist, intending to stay only one enlistment before taking her skills to a different part of the federal government, she said in an interview released by the service earlier this year. Instead, she remained in the Army and has served for 27 years.

"I never felt like there was anything I couldn't do," she said. "If I saw a challenge that I wanted to take on, I took it on."

Her awards include the Legion of Merit, two Bronze Stars and three Army Commendation Medals. She is a graduate of the Army's Instructor Supervisor Course, Joint Special Operations Forces Senior Enlisted Academy and Military Freefall Course.

Naumann will be taking over for Command Sgt. Maj. Michael Weimer, who is set to become the next sergeant major of the Army.

Weimer, who spent his whole career as a Green Beret, is expected to start the transition process to take over as the 17th top enlisted leader for the service soon at the Pentagon, where his new office will be. Sergeant Major of the Army Michael Grinston, who is currently in the role, is set to retire Aug. 3.

In his new role, Weimer will serve as the senior enlisted adviser to the Army chief of staff and Army Secretary Christine Wormuth, and is responsible for advising on matters related to the welfare and training of the rank and file and noncommissioned officers.

In addition to Grinston's exit in August, the Army's top officer, Gen. James McConville, is retiring after hitting a four-year term limit. Gen. Randy George, the current Army vice chief of staff, was nominated last week by President Joe Biden to serve as the next Army chief of staff.

Rocket J Squrriel wrote: ↑Tue May 02, 2023 9:45 pm Been seeing stuff that the National Guard units are out of money so people can't be paid for drill or to go to assigned schools. Also that its hitting some of the active units as well.

Anyone can confirm?

Army projects 2 year delay getting new engine into UH-60 fleet
By Jen Judson
April 28, 2023

NASHVILLE, Tenn. — The U.S. Army is predicting a nearly two-year delay getting its next-generation engine into UH-60 Black Hawk utility helicopters, the first aircraft in the fleet to receive the capability.

GE Aerospace’s T901 engine will replace the 1970s-era T700 in both the Army’s Black Hawk and Apache helicopters, and it is the engine of choice for its Future Attack Reconnaissance Aircraft.

Because of problems with the supply chain during the coronavirus pandemic and issues with advanced manufacturing of new parts, the Improved Turbine Engine Program experienced delays in the process of building the first engines.

Maj. Gen. Robert Barrie, the Program Executive Officer for Army Aviation said at the Army Aviation Association of America’s annual conference that the first engine has completed testing and a second engine is now in a test cell.

“We are making progress,” he said.

Yet the struggles with the developmental engine has set back both the program to install ITEP engines into two competitive FARA prototypes and the plan to swap out the old engines in UH-60s and AH-64 Apache attack helicopters.

According to the Army’s fiscal 2024 budget documents when compared with its FY23 books, the plan to enter low-rate production slipped by almost two years from the first quarter of FY25 to the third quarter of FY26.

The Army plans to enter full-rate production in the third quarter of FY28. Its plans a year ago was to achieve that milestone in the first quarter of FY27. And the Army won’t reach initial operational capability with ITEP in UH-60s until the fourth quarter of FY27.

“Like any new development, there have been challenges,” Barrie said. “The difference on the schedule that we have now, that we have re-baselined, is we now have some margin in that schedule, which would be more applicable to a normal development schedule.”

The service is expecting to receive two engines from GE Aerospace for the FARA prototypes in October and the service is focused on the integration into the future aircraft, according to Barrie.

The Army was expected to receive the ITEP engine by the end of 2022 in order to deliver to the two FARA teams. The delay sets back the flight test program for FARA to the fourth quarter of FY24.

Integration on UH-60 Black Hawk will begin once things get moving with the FARA effort, Barrie said. The Apache integration will begin later.

“You have a developmental program and a developmental engine and we made that decision consciously for all the right reasons,” Maj. Gen. Mac McCurry, the Army Aviation Center of Excellence commander, said during a press briefing with Barrie at AAAA. “Having three aircraft that have commonality in an engine does big things for us.”

Yet, he added, “we knew that was hard … work. We’re still committed to doing it.”

Sikorsky’s president, Paul Lemmo, told Defense News in an interview at AAAA that the company is on time and ready for the Black Hawk to receive the ITEP engine, and said the Army is expected to deliver engines for the aircraft in the middle of next year.

“FARA prototypes for both competitors are the priority,” for ITEP, Lemmo said, “Black Hawk is the second priority and so we’re ready to go. It’s kind of the cornerstone of what we see for Black Hawk modernization.”

Compared to its predecessor, the T901′s 50% power increase will restore aircraft performance, and its 25% improved fuel consumption reduces energy usage and carbon emissions. The engine is also expected to have more durable components, which will lower life-cycle costs.

There is still hope the Army could make up some lost time in the schedule, Barrie added. Previously, “we did not have any slack in our schedule and that is no way to manage a developmental program,” he said. “So the schedule ... does have adequate margin ... acknowledging that it is a developmental program and there will undoubtedly be additional risk.”

Timeline revealed: Army, Bell flying towards FLRAA program of record in 2024
The Army chose the Bell-Textron bird based on a prototype, but an Army official predicted "very little" change for what soldiers will end up flying.
By Ashley Roque
April 28, 2023

AAAA 2023 — Army officials recently revealed their prospective early timeline for getting into the air with the new Future Long-Range Assault Aircraft (FLRAA), shooting for establishing program of record by next year, even if the aircraft might not be ready for fielding by around 2030.

“We’re looking at kicking off this program in a disciplined manner,” the Program Executive Officer for Aviation, Maj. Gen. Robert Barrie, told reporters on Thursday at the annual AAAA conference in Nashville, Tenn. While not as glamorous as the initial selection process, Barrie said the next year-plus will be the “bread and butter” of crafting a successful program, now that the Government Accountability Office has upheld the Army’s choice of the Bell-Textron V-280 Valor tilt-rotor.

The near-term process includes an Army Requirements Oversight Council meeting in July to validate and approve a capability development document that will specify the FLRAA’s requirements, before senior Pentagon officials hold a Joint Requirements Oversight Council meeting later this year.

If all goes as planned, Barrie said service leaders will decide around the April-June 2024 timeframe if they are ready to transition FLRAA into a program of record when they hold a milestone B review that will help solidify the acquisition strategy and include the number of aircraft the service wants to buy.

“Until we are a program of record, we’re going to continue to do things in an event-based way,” Barrie added. “We’re going to continue to work with our industry partner to make sure we have a fair understanding of what we’re doing. That’s the plan.”

Although this process involves a lot of paperwork and sign off, the two-star general said firming up the requirements will change “very little” in terms of Bell’s winning prototype bid. But as the service works through the requirements process, that doesn’t mean the company is sitting idle.

Keith Flail, Bell’s executive vice president for military business, told Breaking Defense today that the company and Army are now working on the integrated baseline review and getting ready for the milestone B review together.

“The next thing, as we move towards milestone B, is a full weapon system preliminary design review that will be required to be completed,” Flail said, adding that that work will be fed into the larger preliminary design review.

As the service and Bell work through paperwork and planning for establishing a formal FLRAA program, the results will trickle down to other aircraft programs including the Black Hawk. Last week, Doug Bush, the service’s head of acquisition, told members of the House Armed Services subcommittee that this process will ultimately help the Army decide what the mix of Black Hawk and FLRAA will be and what steps the service needs to take to ensure the former can be used for decades to come.

Poohbah wrote: ↑Wed May 03, 2023 12:47 am

Rocket J Squrriel wrote: ↑Tue May 02, 2023 9:45 pm Been seeing stuff that the National Guard units are out of money so people can't be paid for drill or to go to assigned schools. Also that its hitting some of the active units as well.

Anyone can confirm?

Terminal CWO has posted the messages he's been forwarded on his Instagram.

Word is they ran out of money because they were paying truly insane bonus multiples to retain critical people.

Poohbah wrote: ↑Wed May 03, 2023 12:47 am

Rocket J Squrriel wrote: ↑Tue May 02, 2023 9:45 pm Been seeing stuff that the National Guard units are out of money so people can't be paid for drill or to go to assigned schools. Also that its hitting some of the active units as well.

Anyone can confirm?

Terminal CWO has posted the messages he's been forwarded on his Instagram.

Word is they ran out of money because they were paying truly insane bonus multiples to retain critical people.

Sooooooo, IPPS-A, the Army’s fancy new system for taking care of everything personnel related, is a Wordpress site. If you’re not familiar with Wordpress, it’s fantastic; fantastic for blogging. I use it myself. What I wouldn’t do is use it to service over a million soldiers and house all of their sensitive information. This is fundamentally insane to me. How many hundreds of millions of dollars was invested in this thing?

Army ‘night court’ returns amid recruiting crisis, looking to trim excess soldier positions
“If we don't turn our recruiting situation around, I can't guarantee you that the Army won't have to make some more substantial potential force structure reductions,” Army Secretary Christine Wormuth told senators.

By Ashley Roque
May 02, 2023

WASHINGTON — Army force structure changes are afoot at a time when the service is grappling with another dour recruiting year and will not hit its targets, Secretary Christine Wormuth told lawmakers today.

“We are seeing improvements in our recruiting situation… [but] the chief and I set a very ambitious goal of 65,000 new recruits this year and we are not going to make that goal,” she testified before a Senate Appropriations subcommittee. “We are doing everything we can to get as close to it as possible, but we are going to fall short of that.”

Wormuth’s prediction comes five months before fiscal 2023 ends on Sept. 30. She did not disclose how far short the Army will likely be at that point or what the final end strength number may be when retainment numbers are factored in. (Service officials had previously aimed to start FY24 with 452,000 active-duty soldiers.)

Given the situation, Army leaders are looking at stopgap measures and harking back to the days when they pared back legacy weapons programs to carve out dollars for new weapon development. Yes, a form of “night court” is back, but this time the leaders are looking at “unit priority” and deciding which positions can be chopped.

“We did sort of what I would call a people night court, where we basically went and looked at all the different types of soldiers in units and said, ‘Do we need to have 60 cooks, or can we use 40 cooks?’” Wormuth explained. “We have looked at what we call unit priority and we’ve looked over the years at the units that we have used very heavily, as opposed to those that we may have used much less frequently, and those are areas where we can probably do some thinning out.”

Wormuth did not provide senators with additional details about positions on the cutting block but said, for now, the aim is not to significantly impact on any of the “major” installations. All bets are off, though, if recruiting problems persist for years to come.

“If we don’t turn our recruiting situation around, I can’t guarantee you that the Army won’t have to make some more substantial potential force structure reductions,” Wormuth warned.

Army Chief of Staff Gen. James McConville was tight-lipped today about the ongoing soldier night court process but stated that fixing the service’s recruitment problem may be the top priority for his successor once he retires in August.

“I feel very good about our senior leadership in the Army… [and] I feel really good right now about our retention,” he told reporters on April 27. “Where we are concerned is recruiting.”

From his vantage point, his successor needs to continue finding ways to expose people to options for serving in the Army and increasing the number of young adults eligible to serve, in part, through initiatives like the newer Future Soldier Prep Course that seeks to boost physical health and up entrance scores.

Army Vice Chief of Staff Gen. Randy George has been tapped by the Biden administration to replace McConville, and he, too, has expressed concern over recruitment.

Army Expects to Miss Its Recruiting Goal Again This Year
2 May 2023
Military.com | By Steve Beynon

The Army does not expect to hit its ambitious recruiting goal of 65,000 new soldiers this year as the pool of young Americans eligible to serve continues to shrink.

"We are not going to make that goal," Army Secretary Christine Wormuth told lawmakers at a congressional hearing Tuesday. "We are doing everything we can to get as close to it as possible; we are going to fall short."

The Army fell some 15,000 active-duty recruits short last year of its goal of 60,000 new troops. The Army National Guard is in a seemingly deeper hole, facing an uphill battle bringing new soldiers in while simultaneously seeing retention issues with part-time soldiers heading for the exits as units struggle to juggle domestic and overseas missions.

Most other military branches are also at risk of missing their recruiting goal, with the exception of the Space Force, the smallest service and one that has largely relied on transfers from the Air Force to build its ranks.

Army leaders say the issues with recruitment are an amalgamation of barriers getting applicants into the ranks, topped by the high percentage of Americans in prime recruiting age simply being unqualified for service. Army planners estimate only about 23% of 17- to 24-year-olds can meet the service's expectations, with many applicants failing the military's SAT-style entrance exam or being too overweight to serve.

In August, to combat the worsening recruiting trends, the Army started the Future Soldier Preparatory Course. There, applicants who came up just shy on body fat or academic standards attend a pre-basic training course for whichever of those two standards they didn't satisfy for enlistment. Army leaders have touted the program as graduating roughly 3,300 out of 4,000 applicants who went onto basic training and who otherwise would not have been allowed to serve. Right now, the course is set to be able to train roughly 12,000 applicants per year. The Navy also started its own pre-basic courses in March.

But that program can help with only one part of the worsening recruiting picture.

Recruiters are reporting an issue with increased scrutiny on applicants' medical and mental health history, with issues such as years-old minor injuries or common prescriptions causing major headaches. Last year, the Pentagon launched Military Health System Genesis, a new electronic health record system, which gave the military unprecedented access to an applicant's medical and mental health background during the recruiting process -- especially for recruits from military families who received prior military medical care.

Previously, minor health issues were largely overlooked during the enlistment process, often by the recruiter, as any snags could delay the recruiting process by months or make an applicant ineligible altogether.

Army leaders, including Wormuth and Gen. James McConville, the service's top officer, have routinely said they will not lower the standards required for enlisting or commissioning. Meanwhile, the Navy has been more welcoming to applicants with low entrance exam test scores, and the Air Force and Space Force have been more forgiving with applicants who test positive for cannabis use during the enlistment process, as every service faces recruiting headwinds.

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 22% of 12- to 19-year-old Americans are obese, and that percentage only climbs with age. SAT and ACT scores have also fallen in recent years, some of that being attributed to the COVID-19 pandemic's disruption of schools and poor access to quality education resources for children from low-income households.

As test scores have plummeted and the obesity crisis has grown only more severe in the last decade, the Army has required soldiers to be more technically savvy. Noncommissioned officers are also increasingly expected to have a college degree and writing skills. And the Army Combat Fitness Test, or ACFT, is widely seen as the most comprehensive and difficult fitness test in the service's history, demanding troops diversify workout routines.

Industry devises plans to keep helicopter fleet capable for decades
By Jen Judson
May 3, 2023

NASHVILLE, Tenn. — Companies that manufacture the U.S. Army’s helicopter fleet are devising plans to modernize the aircraft — now reaching 40 years old — in order to keep them flying for decades more.

The Army plans to develop and field two future vertical lift aircraft by the early 2030s — a Future Long-Range Assault Aircraft and a Future Attack Reconnaissance Aircraft. But officials have acknowledged the current fleet, which took shape in the 1980s, will need to stick around even after the transition is well underway.

“The Apache, the Black Hawk, is going to be around for the next 30 to 40 years,” Army Chief of Staff Gen. James McConville told reporters at the Army Aviation Association of America’s annual conference, which took place in late April.

Army officials also confirmed that the CH-47 Chinook could end up flying for 100 years before retiring around 2060.

Even so, McConville said the current fleet will eventually end up on display stands at Army aviation headquarters, much like the UH-1 Huey, the OH-58 Kiowa Warrior and the AH-1 Cobra attack helicopter.

There’s not much clarity on when the Army will phase out aircraft in the current fleet, how that would happen and what number of new aircraft will replace older ones.

The Army’s program executive officer for aviation, Maj. Gen. Robert Barrie, told Defense News in an interview at the AAAA event that he is hesitant to put timelines on how long the current fleet would continue to be a part of the fighting force.

“I don’t know what the future holds,” he said. “Every day it’s operating, we owe it to our soldiers for it to be relevant and ready to go, and that’s where we’re focused.”

The Army is in the midst of working an aviation force design update, Maj. Gen. Mac McCurry, the Army Aviation Center of Excellence commander, told Defense News in an interview at AAAA. “We’re working on the allocation, the basis of issue, probably not directly one-for-one for a Black Hawk, with an increased capability. You probably don’t need the same amount in each formation. So we’re looking and doing the modeling and how many do you need.”

McCurry said the Army will have more fidelity to make a decision on force structure once the future vertical lift programs get into engineering and manufacturing development phases; that’s when the service can see how the new aircraft perform in developmental and operational testing compared to the roles and missions the Army wants for the systems.

“Then we will probably be able to more readily optimize the fleets and see those kinds of downward curves on the platforms we have today,” he added.

Upgrades for existing aircraft
Some of the current fleet is quite young based on when the last airframes were built along with recent upgrades, McCurry argued. The Apache fleet was an older one, but now it’s considered younger because the most recent variant and upgrade plans are newer, he explained.

The UH-60 fleet is about 16 years old on average, and the Chinook fleet is about 9 years old for a large number of aircraft.

“When I look at the actual flight hours on the platforms, they’re fairly young,” McCurry said.

The Army right now, according to Barrie, is focused on ensuring the current fleet is safe and maintains a baseline capability. Baseline capabilities include making all aircraft in the fleet digital to allow for upgrades, he explained, and increasing the processing power within the aircraft.

And modernizing the current fleet to have the same modular, open-system architecture to continue to import capability and upgrades is going to be key.

The service is also injecting more funding in its fiscal 2024 budget for survivability equipment as adversaries advance capabilities and tactics, Barrie noted.

Radio and communication modifications are also taking place, including improvements to Link 16 technolgoy, which connects aircraft with ground forces.

Furthermore, both the Black Hawk and Apache helicopters are due to receive a new, next-generation engine beginning in the next few years, albeit several years delayed.

Apache Echo-models are receiving the latest upgrade — the V6 — which was first fielded to units in 2021.

Keeping up with the future fleet
At recent trade shows, defense contractor Boeing has begun to showcase what it can do for the Apache beyond its latest version.

“It levels things up, embraces, incorporates new transformation technology, and then you get performance gains,” Jenny Walker, who is in business development for Boeing’s Apache program, told reporters at the AAAA event.

The Apache model on display featured an additional wing pylon, joining the two already there on the current version, to provide additional weapons in a greater variety onboard. The company also showed a concept for a directed-energy capability on one of the pylons.

Adding additional payloads to the aircraft, Walker said, is made possible through the Improved Turbine Engine Program, or ITEP, engine, which will be integrated into Apache helos in the coming years, as well as drivetrain and tail-rotor improvements that will allow the aircraft to fly 135 nautical miles to an objective and stay there for an hour or more and return. The current Apache would likely be able to stay out at the objective for roughly 30 minutes, she added.

Lockheed Martin has also designed a next-generation turret for the Apache’s sensors that help it see and target threats. The turret will enable easier upgrades down the road but also reduces maintenance time and has a faster slew capability for pilots to keep eyes on targets and accurately fire weapons. The turret will go into a yearlong soldier evaluation this month.

Lockheed’s Sikorsky is prioritizing ensuring the Black Hawk’s compatibility to operate alongside the Future Long-Range Assault Aircraft, Paul Lemmo, the subsidiary’s president, said in an interview at AAAA.

The company wants to “ensure they can interoperate — doesn’t mean they have to be the same, but they should be operating on the same open-system standard,” he said.

The company is also looking at the potential application of digital vehicle controls for the aircraft that would enable the insertion of capabilities like Sikorsky’s Matrix, an autonomy system that would not take over for pilots entirely but would offload some of the work so they can focus on the mission. The system will also increase safety by autonomously avoiding accidents like midair collisions and flying through degraded visual environments.

While the Chinook F-model Block II is not yet fielded to the active force, it will provide additional lift capability. The original plan was to swap out the rotor blades with new advanced ones, but trouble with blade stall and vibration in testing led the Army to cancel the effort a year ago.

Barrie said the advanced rotor blade’s technical issues, paired with the cost of the blade, remains “fundamentally unchanged,” but the Army has continued with Block II development and learned that even with the older blades the system is meeting performance requirements.

“I have the paddles out with the U.S. Army trying to keep that patient alive,” Boeing’s vice president and H-47 program manager, Ken Eland, said at AAAA about the advanced rotor blades. “I would like to see that press forward. There’s some challenges we’re working through with them timing-wise, but we’re interested in trying to keep it on life support.”

At least 190 pilots left the Army years early due to admin error
By Davis Winkie
May 4, 2023

Amid an uproar over aviation officer service obligations, Army personnel officials admitted Thursday afternoon that in recent years, at least 190 active duty pilots voluntarily resigned years ahead of schedule due to an error in how Human Resources Command tracked and applied their commitments.

The discovery came during an ongoing audit that the command expects will continue “over the next 30-60 days,” Army personnel directorate spokesperson Maj. Andrea Kelly told Army Times in a statement.

The confusion is over how overlapping contractual and statutory service obligations apply differently to pilots than they do to other officers. Kelly requested “more time to review and provide [a] response” when asked whether the audit’s in-progress findings indicate a systemic failure.

Last week, Army Times reported that the command realized around 600 pilots — each a commissioned officer in the aviation branch’s 2015 to 2020 year groups — had service obligations up to three years longer than previously communicated. An officer’s year group generally refers to the fiscal year that they entered active duty.

All impacted officers signed “branch of choice active duty service obligation” contracts while they were West Point or ROTC cadets in the hopes of securing a flight school seat, not knowing whether the Army would charge them for it or not.

Hundreds of impacted officers have organized in response, claiming that officials fed them inaccurate information about their contract lengths throughout their careers. Army Times obtained a letter to lawmakers that dozens signed, and its enclosures included West Point and Cadet Command briefing materials in addition to messages from branch managers, the Army’s official career advisors, that affirmed a shorter-length interpretation of their obligations.

For all branches except aviation, the three-year branch of choice commitments were served immediately after their commissioning service obligation and simultaneously with any other contractual obligation, such as those incurred for military schooling. In theory — and in the contract language — aviators’ extra three years were to come after finishing a six-year pilot training obligation that began when they graduated flight school.

But for years, the Army allowed many pilots with the branch of choice contract to resign after finishing their six-year flight school obligation, applying the three-year commitment concurrently with the aviation schooling time as it would for any other career field. As a result, the Army lost hundreds of years of service from experienced aviators, in addition to hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of training.

Kelly’s Thursday statement represents the first public acknowledgement of the previous policy’s scope and impact.

During an April 27 media event, Army Times asked the Army’s senior-most personnel officials, Lt. Gen. Douglas Stitt and Maj. Gen. Tom Drew, if they feared that any aviators from previous year groups had voluntarily resigned before finishing their commitments under the service’s now-corrected interpretation of their contracts. The generals said they were aware of “less than 20″ pilots who left the Army early.

Now that has changed, and currently-serving pilots interviewed by Army Times expressed anger over being held to a different standard than their predecessors. All requested anonymity due to fear of reprisal.

“This reinforces our understanding that [Human Resources Command] has misled officers on this program for years, and by now changing their interpretation is holding us to a different standard,” said a Black Hawk pilot who joined in 2016. He indicated that some impacted pilots are considering legal action.

A second Black Hawk pilot from year group 2016 said he was “not surprised” to learn hundreds of his predecessors had resigned years early. “We were told the same thing as them. That’s what we agreed to when we chose [aviation].”

A younger aviator, a Black Hawk pilot commissioned in 2019, said she felt “angry” and “let down” about the news.

She was especially frustrated over how the policy for previous cohorts “was downplayed by a two-star and a three-star general in their first interview with the press,” she added. “This feels wrong, counteractive to the honesty and the competency that I admire and aspire to in the Army.”

The organized pilots, self-styled as “The Future of Army Aviation,” penned a letter to Drew, an aviator who now leads Human Resources Command. They exclusively shared the letter with Army Times ahead of its anticipated hand delivery, and it is published in its entirety below.

BRADSO brouhaha
The branch of choice program (BRADSO) entered the Army’s talent matching system beginning with year group 2008 and operated under a market-based economic model, according to academic research and briefing documents reviewed by Army Times. After top graduates from West Point received their first choice career fields, the lower-ranking grads were prioritized and sorted based on their willingness to accept an extra three years in uniform. For highly-competitive fields like aviation, a smaller proportion of ROTC-commissioned lieutenants received their top choice without incurring the extra time.

Typically, officers who have branch of choice service obligations serve them immediately following their initial service obligation, which varies based on their commissioning source and whether they accepted scholarship money. Aviation officers have different requirements, though, because their initial training obligation is the only one enshrined in federal law among the Army’s entry-level officer fields.

Here’s how the commitments compare when correctly applied.

An engineer officer from West Point with the following commitments can still resign at the end of their eighth year, because their two contractual obligations run simultaneously:
* Five-year statutory commissioning obligation.
* Three-year contractual branch of choice obligation.
* Two-year contractual military course obligation for beginning a specialized development program at the start of year six.

Under Human Resources Command’s corrected application of laws and regulations, an ROTC scholarship aviation officer would not be able to resign until the end of their 11th year if they have the following commitments, assuming they graduate flight school at the end of year two:
* Six-year statutory commissioning obligation.
* Six-year statutory flight school obligation that begins when the officer graduates at the end of their second year of service.
* Three-year contractual branch of choice obligation.

Asked whether the Army will recall the pilots who left early, G-1 spokesperson Kelly said the service “remains committed to the determinations made in individual cases,” but cautioned that some officers may have “an obligatory period” in the inactive ready reserve, or IRR. The IRR only requires its members report (often virtually) one day per year, though they are still subject to involuntary mobilizations in circumstances of extreme need.

Drew, the Human Resources Command leader, on April 27 indicated he would “personally review” resignation requests from officers still in service and consider waiving the branch of choice requirement on a case-by-case basis. But the open letter pointed at previous pilots’ early departures and asked that Drew offer early departure for all impacted pilots and “resolve this issue for good.”

The letter writers expressed regret over going public with their displeasure, but argued that only “media pressure” led the Army to begin communicating with them about the commitment changes. They claimed that the branch of choice obligations were “never...implemented with the current legal understanding,” and they want to see investigation and reform.

“It is clear to us that this is not simply a record-keeping issue,” the letter said. “As a fellow Aviator, we trust your judgment and character. We ask that you investigate this issue and uncover the source of this failure.”

Short-handed Army to miss recruiting goal for second year in a row
By Davis Winkie
May 3, 2023

The Army’s top officials told lawmakers Tuesday morning that the service’s recruiting slump won’t end this year, making fiscal 2023 the second year in a row that the branch won’t meet its recruiting targets.

And while they argue that there’s reason for hope on the recruiting front, they did not sugarcoat the potential impact that a continued personnel shortfall could have on the military’s largest branch.

The service’s top civilian, Army Secretary Christine Wormuth, said the Army won’t make its goal of recruiting around 65,000 new soldiers but claimed numbers look better than they did last year. Yet end strength remains in free fall, with the active duty Army currently at 455,000 troops and losing more soldiers than it’s gaining with less than five months remaining to hit its scheduled target of 452,000 soldiers for fiscal 2023.

“If we don’t turn our recruiting situation around, I can’t guarantee you that the Army won’t have to make some substantial potential force structure reductions,” like reducing the service’s number of combat brigades, Wormuth explained to Senate appropriators during a budget hearing. “We’ve got to make sure that our units — for example, those on the Immediate Response Force — are manned adequately so that they’re ready to go.”

The service is evaluating where it can reduce personnel and “do some thinning out” to avoid such structural cuts, said Wormuth, who added that “at most large installations around the country right now, the number of actual soldiers is fewer than the authorizations that are there.”

She described the process as “people optimization,” akin to the so-called “night courts” of recent years where the Army slashed spending in order to keep its modernization programs on track. This is happening alongside standing practices like manning prioritization, whereby the service sets different strength targets for different units based on need.

The optimization process aims to ask hard questions about what units actually need. “Do we need to have 60 cooks [in a unit]?” Wormuth said. “Or can we use 40 cooks?”

The Army’s top civilian official noted that restructuring was needed anyways to build new units like fires protection formations, to guard against enemy indirect fire threats, and multidomain task forces, which synchronize long-range fires and other capabilities like cyber and electronic warfare, amid the service’s pivot toward future large-scale conflicts.

The general overseeing Army Recruiting Command, Maj. Gen. Johnny Davis, attributed some of the improvement to initiatives like the Future Soldier Prep Course, which allows recruits who don’t yet meet testing or body composition standards attend an improvement camp to make the cut for basic training.

Davis, who spoke at an Association of the U.S. Army event Tuesday, said over 97% of course participants are moving on to basic training.

The Army is also redesigning how it trains and selects recruiters, Davis said, while a Pentagon-level task force continues its work exploring avenues for reforming the service’s recruiting approach.

But Gen. James McConville, the Army’s chief of staff, told lawmakers that there’s one red line he won’t cross.

“One thing that the Secretary and I have done is made a blood oath — we’re not going to lower standards,” he said.

Army Secretary Says She Wouldn't Want Her Daughters Living in Some Army Barracks
19 Apr 2023
Military.com | By Steve Beynon

Army Secretary Christine Wormuth told lawmakers Wednesday that a chunk of the service's barracks are seemingly unlivable as senior leaders grapple with living conditions for the rank and file and a relatively small budget to quickly improve standards.

"I've seen some barracks quite frankly I wouldn't want my daughters to live in," Wormuth said at a House hearing on the Army's budget.

Wormuth has made soldier quality-of-life issues a key component of her tenure, and troops have reported significant gains in areas directly under her control, such as improved parental leave policies that are more generous than those offered by the other services. But the Army has struggled to keep up with renovating its barracks and building new ones to replace living quarters infested with mold and suffering from aging infrastructure.

The Army plans to spend $1 billion per year this decade on construction and renovation. But that is seemingly not enough funding, with a report from the Congressional Budget Office estimating it would cost $11.2 billion to fix up barracks at just two installations: Fort Bragg, North Carolina, and Schofield Barracks, Hawaii. Those two bases have enlisted living quarters that have been the hardest hit with mold issues.

Mold problems have been at the center of the Army's barracks issues. Last month, the service conducted a service-wide inspection, finding 2,100 of its facilities have some degree of mold infestation, mostly concentrated in humid climates such as the South and Hawaii. Many of those barracks were poorly constructed, have shoddy ventilation and have half-century-old air conditioning units that are prone to leaking.

That inspection of active-duty facilities was spurred after Military.com's reporting on moldy barracks at Fort Bragg and Fort Stewart, Georgia. At Fort Bragg, home of the Army's airborne and Special Forces, roughly 1,000 soldiers were moved to different barracks or given a housing allowance to live off base.

Leaders there said they had a hard time tracking the scope of the mold issue, and moving those soldiers came after scrutiny from Army senior leaders and the media. Military.com's investigation at Fort Stewart found barracks walls there coated in black mold and service member's gear sometimes destroyed by mold growth spreading to bags and other equipment.

Base officials said they have no plan to relocate those troops. After Military.com's reporting, plans for new barracks were developed, but construction won't be complete until 2027. Constructing new barracks can take half a decade due to a combination of funding and labor issues, as well as red tape that can cause delays.

Soldiers have told Military.com that maintenance teams from the Department of Public Works are often slow to respond and are poorly trained in mold remediation and mitigation. In some instances, maintenance workers just paint over mold. Wormuth also told lawmakers that the service has had a hard time hiring maintenance workers. Those jobs are relatively low paid, with workers earning between $35,000 and $45,000 per year, according to numerous job postings reviewed by Military.com.

The Army is in the midst of a historic recruiting crisis, coming up 15,000 soldiers short of its goal last year of bringing in 60,000 new troops. The service has an even more ambitious goal this year of 65,000 new soldiers. Army leaders say that most of that uphill battle filling in the ranks is attributable to the general population of young Americans being too overweight to serve or unable to pass the military's academic entrance exam, though senior leaders, including Wormuth, have also suggested that news coverage of issues in the service has put a dent into its pitch to Gen Z.

"I want parents to know that their kids are going to have good accommodations," Wormuth told lawmakers.

Keep moving or die: Army will overhaul network for rapid maneuver in big wars
The Army has nixed future "Capability Set" upgrade packages for brigade networks in favor of smaller, more frequent updates, with the most complex technology reserved for division and corps HQs.
By Sydney J. Freedberg Jr.
May 05, 2023

FORT MYER, Va. — As ceremonial cannons boomed intermittently in the distance, the two two-star generals tasked with modernizing the Army’s combat networks laid out how the lessons of Ukraine are forcing the service to speed up — both in acquisitions and on the battlefield.

“We need to be on the move,” said Maj. Gen. Jeth Rey, head of the Network Cross Functional Team at Army Futures Command. If US Army units, as currently equipped and organized, had to fight a high-intensity conventional conflict like the one ongoing in Iraq, their large and slow-moving headquarters units would be located by enemy drones or electronic sensors and struck by long-range missiles, rockets, or cannon fire in “minutes” of stopping to set up their communications gear.

“We don’t believe that their command posts are going to survive,” Rey said. “We can’t halt” to set up radio antennas and get connected to the network. Instead, the service needs command posts that can stay connected and communicate continuously while on the move.

That kind of mobility may require slimming down the complexity and capability of network equipment in smaller, front-line units like battalions and even brigades, said Rey and Maj. Gen. Tony Potts, the Army’s acquisition Program Executive Officer for tactical communications (PEO-C3T). The generals spoke at a briefing for reporters during a demonstration of Army communications tech.

One big example: classified networks. Today, Potts explained, units as small as front-line battalions — as few as 400 soldiers — are equipped with the Command Post Computing Environment, which requires bulky “tactical servers.” But if you want more mobile battalions, and you’re willing to let them rely on higher headquarters for some functions, “do you really need that level of command post computing inside a battalion formation?” he asked. What if you gave battalions smaller, cheaper systems available on the civilian market, networks not certified to handle classified data but still using robust “commercial standard encryption” — a standard known as “Secure But Unclassified – Encrypted” (SBUE).

Yes, Potts said, going unclassified might increase the risk the enemy decrypts your communication. So what? Tactical data is pretty perishable, he argued, especially if you keep moving. By the time the enemy intercepts, decodes, and analyzes your plans, you’ve already executed them; by the time he’s deciphered your location, you’re no longer there. “Even though there’s data out there, I’m moving so fast that by the time anyone gets through the encryption… it’s not useful to them anymore,” he said.

This kind of high-speed, stripped-down command would be a major change for a generation of officers who grew up in Afghanistan and Iraq, waging guerrilla warfare village by village and block by block under the watchful eye of well-equipped but largely stationary brigade HQs. Decades-long deployments against poorly armed enemies let the US build up elaborate bases with air-conditioned command posts where colonels could watch their subordinates on live drone video. But against an enemy like Russia — let alone China — well-endowed with drones and missiles, such static headquarters would be big, easy targets.

Yet, at the same time, the scale of such a great-power conflict would be so large, with tens of thousands of troops fighting over hundreds of square miles, that even a big brigade HQ would be too small to coordinate effective operations. (It’s even harder if you’re trying to coordinate not just ground troops but also air, sea, space, and cyber efforts, using what the Pentagon calls JADC2 networks.) Instead, the Army is reorganizing its forces to reemphasize larger formations like the division, the corps, and even theater. That means those units’ HQs are getting new capabilities, from long-range artillery to big-data AI analytics to high-frequency radios capable of transmitting messages over 4,800 miles, as tested in the recent Balikatan exercise in the Philippines.

While all HQs will be beefed up, Potts and Rey explained, the network modernization scheme will now be “division-centric.”

That means, the two generals revealed, that the Army must move on from the current system of “Capability Sets,” which are basically brigade-sized packages of hardware and software that are updated every two years.

The service has already rolled out Capability Set 21, which was designed for light infantry brigades; it’s now fielding Capability Set 23, which focuses on Stryker brigades of medium-weight, wheeled armored vehicles. It had been working on Capability Set 25, which emphasized heavy brigades of tracked armor, and even asking industry about a potential Capability Set 27.

But now CS 25 and 27 are going away, Potts said: “You really won’t hear us talk about it that way.” Instead of biennial brigade-sized update packages, he said, the service will issue updates more frequently, with a particular focus on the division level. (This is part of a wider Pentagon push to move from multi-year, rigidly sequenced “waterfall” software development to the rapid update cycles known as “agile” development).

To ease the speedier updates, Potts added, the service is studying new ways of contracting and structuring acquisitions, such as the streamlined Software Pathway. It also wants to move away from complex, tightly integrated systems to a more flexible format, where the Army as a whole uses a single, standardized software foundation but individual units can custom-build specific applications for their unique missions.

Especially for software, this decoupled approach should let units update the individual apps quickly, like updating apps on a smartphone, since each app is relatively simple and, if it crashes, it doesn’t take the whole system with it. “As long as I’m not messing with the core software,” Potts said, “and what I can build is an application or a plug-in that sits on top of it, I don’t have to take it back to testing” every time a new update comes out. It should even be possible to send out updates and patches over a wireless network, the way commercial software companies do, instead of physically bringing in each radio and laptop for a hands-on overhaul.

Speeding updates is another reason to go for Secure But Unclassified – Encrypted, Potts explained. A network rated for classified data has to be tested more rigorously, typically by the National Security Agency, which takes a lot more time.

None of this speed should come at the expense of “acquisition rigor,” however, Potts emphasized. There will still be regular Technical Exchange Meetings with interested companies and biannual systems integration tests, he said, plus independent testing by the Pentagon’s Director of Operational Test & Evaluation and full compliance with the Clinger-Cohen Act.

That’s a lot of tradeoffs to juggle, Potts acknowledged, and a lot of hard choices are still to come. “We’re still in the honeymoon phase,” he said with a laugh. “We’re in the honeymoon phase until something happens that somebody doesn’t like.”

Murdered or Missing: The Army Stands Up a Cold Case Unit to Tackle Unsolved Crimes
5 May 2023
Military.com | By Drew F. Lawrence

The Army labeled Pvt. Gregory Wedel-Morales a deserter when he went missing in 2020. His remains were found a year later, buried in a grassy field near a grocery store outside of Fort Hood, Texas.

When Pvt. Amanda Gonzales was 19 years old, pregnant and serving in Germany as an Army cook in 2001, she failed to show up for work one day. Her fellow soldiers busted into her barracks room and found her dead, asphyxiated and presumed murdered.

Two years later, Pfc. James Nielsen's remains were discovered in a training area on Fort Sill, Oklahoma. His body had decomposed beyond analysis.

Their cases are -- or were -- considered "cold," a designation that means investigators have exhausted all leads. Dozens if not hundreds of other cold cases sit unsolved between the military services, spanning continents and mostly involving junior enlisted troops who have been murdered or missing over the decades.

Until last year, the Army didn't have a formal unit to try to close those kinds of difficult investigations. Now, under the shadow of decades of military cold case history and unyielding pressure from families and Congress, the Army is finally building one.

Other services created specialized cold case groups years ago, but the Army held off until February 2022 when its Criminal Investigation Division established the cold case unit.

And while the Army fought major wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, the cases of those mysteriously lost were left stranded on the CID's Cold Case roster, haunting reminders to families who may never see their loved ones again or find closure in burial.

Those families and Congress pushed, and are pushing, to mold Military Criminal Investigative Organizations, or MCIOs, and their cold case practices into a standardized Defense Department-wide blueprint. They say the Army has failed victims' families due to a combination of the conflicting priorities of uniformed commanders in charge of criminal cases, a lack of resources, and poor coordination with other law enforcement agencies.

Griselda Martinez, the sister of cold case victim Spc. Enrique Roman-Martinez, told Military.com that the struggles her family has encountered in getting justice make her think about their mom, Maria -- and how her life was upended by her son's death.

"She suffered a lot, and all she wanted was a family and to have a nice peaceful life, and she couldn't get that," Martinez said. "She doesn't have that."

Martinez also expects more from the Army.

"I want the truth," she said. "I want to know what happened to my brother. I want more effort for my brother. I want justice for my family."

Last year, Rep. Norma Torres, D-Calif., who represents the district that includes Chino, California, where Roman-Martinez was from, introduced the Enrique Roman-Martinez Military Cold Case Justice Act of 2022. It's meant to not only change the way the military works to solve cold cases, but also how investigators communicate with each other and other law enforcement agencies.

Torres pointed to a lack of coordination between law enforcement agencies as troubling about the Roman-Martinez case, as well as the Army's investigatory efforts generally.

"Everybody's been working in their own silos, investigating and, in some cases, maybe duplicating work and not really sharing in those resources," she said in a recent interview.

The Army, for its part, argues that it has been effectively working these cold cases.

"We understand the frustration of the families, and our agents are dedicated to resolving these cases and bringing closure to the families," a CID spokesperson told Military.com on Tuesday, adding that they have "solid working relationships" with other law enforcement entities. "Our agents will not cease in their pursuit of the truth."

The law that Torres helped craft asked for more stability and continuity for investigators "rotating out of the unit" so that decades-long cases, or information on them, don't get lost between the bureaucratic couch cushions of transitioning personnel.

The Army has just created its cold case unit, but lessons from the other services could kick-start efforts to provide closure for victims' families.

The Navy's cold case unit, which also covers the Marine Corps, was founded in 1995. It is staffed by two full-time headquarters personnel, along with 30 agents and investigative specialists assigned to cold cases part time at field offices around the world.

Much like Roman-Martinez's death pressured the Army to take action, the creation of the Navy's unit stemmed from a murder -- one that could have stayed cold forever had it not been for the words of a dying man and a ragtag group of investigators.

That case started in 1993 on a Caribbean island, when a man pointed a gun at 31-year-old Navy Lt. Dana Bartlett.

The Roots of Military Cold Case Units
It was summer in Charlotte Amalie, the tropical savanna capital of the U.S. Virgin Islands, a city nestled below green hills facing south toward a vast Caribbean vista.

Bartlett heard the tinny pull of a trigger and a hammer drop, but no shot. Was he dead? No, the gun had misfired.

"He rolled over into a fetal position, and the man fired again and hit him in the head," Joe Kennedy, then a young special agent with Naval Criminal Investigative Service, said in a Navy bulletin in 1995.

Bartlett defied the unlikely and remained conscious long enough to recount the assault to police -- how he had skipped liberty to call his wife, Gail; how he sat in the bleachers of a tennis court, waiting while two other sailors made their own calls. He described the black car, and three men approaching.

The men demanded money, maced the other two service members, beat Bartlett to his knees, and shot him. Bartlett lost consciousness on his way to the hospital and never woke up.

His death, a week later, initially caused "a flurry of press coverage" resulting in the Navy canceling port visits to the islands, according to the NCIS bulletin. For more than a year, there were no arrests. No real suspects. No clues other than witness statements and Bartlett's last words.

By 1994, the case had gone cold. The Navy decided to try something different.

Kennedy was 32 years old when the Navy tapped him as leader of Task Force Virgin Islands, or VITF, created to solve Bartlett's murder.

The task force was an "Office Space" meets "Miami Vice" ensemble consisting of 12 men clad in a mix of khakis, braided belts, sleeveless shirts, chain necklaces, polos and horn-rimmed glasses. Five were from the Virgin Island Police Department, six from NCIS, and one U.S. marshal, according to Kennedy. By Jan. 4, 1995, the team had been assembled in the Virgin Islands.

To an outsider, the grouping might have seemed doomed to fail, maybe even comical. Some of the Quantico-type agents seemed captivated with the beachy island aura of the VIPD officers. But the differences, according to Kennedy, were critical to their success, and eventually they melted into one cohesive unit.

The task force paired NCIS agents directly with VIPD officers to "pound the pavement" in teams of two. Somewhere within those three weeks in January, an informant emerged from underfoot.

"We had guys that worked around the clock doing surveillance; we had guys that were really skilled interviewers," Kennedy said in a recent interview with Military.com. "We had learned that the one suspect was actually having nightmares over having done it."

Twenty-seven days after the team assembled, Bartlett's murderer was arrested.

Kennedy, now a retired 28-year veteran of the service's special agent corps and leader in the Carolina Cold Case Coalition, attributes the team's success to its ability to marry local law enforcement with federal muscle on the case.

"That's how you solve cold cases," Kennedy said. "It takes a team, like our team in the Virgin Islands that turned into our cold case squad. It takes a multitude of people working to solve cases."

To the Living We Owe Respect
In 1995, the Navy had 143 unsolved murders dating back over two decades. VITF was a proof of concept for a cold case idea that was brewing 1,500 miles away in Quantico, Virginia, where the NCIS is headquartered. The task force had just proved it could chip away at that number in short order.

By the time the NCIS members of the task force packed their flip-flops, the Navy was ready to etch "Cold Case Squad" on about a dozen doors across roughly 15 field offices around the world, according to Kennedy.

The unit even had a new motto, a quote from the French philosopher Voltaire: "To the living we owe respect. To the dead we owe the truth."

Kennedy realized he wasn't dealing with just one, 32-square-mile island in the Caribbean Sea anymore. The Navy sails around the world, and its cold case watchdog needed to follow.

The new unit put one investigator at each field office, but Kennedy knew that wouldn't be enough.

"What I immediately did was realize we all had to be singing from the same sheet of music," he said.

Kennedy visited more than a dozen police departments across the country and asked: "What makes you successful?" He collected protocols, burgeoning methodologies and techniques that precincts were using to solve cases years and decades old. Then, he shared his research with the investigators scattered across the globe.

Within a year, the cold case team knocked down about 15 cases, according to Kennedy. The team shook aircraft carriers and Marine bases for more cases, and soon they had hundreds of homicides and missing persons assigned to their dockets.

"That cold case unit -- it demonstrated to people not only in the military and law enforcement communities, but throughout our nation, that these guys know what the hell they're doing," Kennedy said.

Nearly 30 years later, another cold case emerged that proved as troubling for the Army as Bartlett's case was for the Navy.

Enrique Roman-Martinez was a specialist with the 82nd Airborne Division at Fort Bragg, North Carolina. On Memorial Day Weekend, 2020, the 21-year-old went camping with seven other soldiers on the Outer Banks on the eastern coast of the state. He would never return. Less than a week later, his decapitated head washed ashore just a few miles away from where the group was camping.

Like Bartlett's case, there have been no arrests directly related to the death, which the Army has labeled a homicide. The seven other soldiers were charged with non-violent offenses related to the camping trip, but no suspects for Roman-Martinez's murder have been named. All of them are no longer in the Army.

A more-than-1,530-page redacted investigation provided by the Army to his family had clues, evidence and timelines, but no smoking gun -- or whatever caused the "chop" injuries to Roman-Martinez's neck and jaw.

So the case went cold. And outside of family, friends and a handful of investigators -- and a congresswoman -- the soldier's murder appeared as small as North Carolina's Onslow Bay was to the Atlantic.

That case would pave the way for Torres to introduce a law that would push the Army to make changes to how it handled cold cases and investigations.

To the Dead We Owe the Truth
The Enrique Roman-Martinez Military Cold Case Justice Act, which made its way into law as one small piece of a massive omnibus bill, noted the "uneven processes" across the services in tackling cold cases. It also ordered the establishment of a cold case unit for the Army's CID, a specific request that addressed the case of the specialist for whom the original bill was named.

It was perplexing, though welcome, to Torres to find that, despite no notification to her staff, the CID had started forming a cold case squad two months before her office submitted the proposal to the House Appropriations and Armed Services Committees for approval.

"I don't know," Torres told Military.com last month when asked about the timeline and the impact of pressure from her and the family to investigate Roman-Martinez's homicide. "When you put pressure on an agency, they will respond to try to protect themselves."

The CID categorized the establishment of the unit as a general obligation in a statement, and said that it was not in response to the proposed legislation.

Jeffrey Castro, a CID spokesperson, told Military.com that the Army began to set up the Cold Case Homicide Unit in February last year, though the law enforcement division announced its creation in June.

The establishment of the Army's cold case unit came a year and a half after the remains of Spc. Vanessa Guillén were discovered dumped about a 30-minute drive from where Wedel-Morales, the soldier who was labeled a deserter by the Army, was also found.

The Guillén case gained broad national attention and led to legislative changes meant to alter how the Army handles some crimes. And while the immediate aftereffects of Guillén's case did not mandate cold case changes, the ripples her death caused opened the door for more reform that Roman-Martinez's case intensified.

The standard for how many personnel occupy a cold case unit appears to depend on several factors. For example, Colorado Springs -- a city with a near-equal population to the active Army -- has billets for two detectives on its cold case squad. Atlanta, a slightly larger city, employs six cold case personnel including a supervisor.

The Army's unit consists of eight personnel, four of whom work full time on cold cases while the others assist the unit. Castro told Military.com that the Army anticipates "civilianizing" the cold case unit for all positions in the future.

Torres' law addresses the fact that not all military cold case units are created equally.

The Air Force Office of Special Investigations had already created its own cold case unit in 2015, staffed by three full-time investigators. The Coast Guard, a branch of the military housed under the Department of Homeland Security, does not have a dedicated cold case unit.

Caseloads, types and public disclosures of investigations vary as well; as of January, the Air Force's OSI is tracking 51 homicide and missing persons cases. The Navy would not disclose its current caseload "out of respective [sic] for the investigative process," according to Division Chief for Media and Congressional Affairs Jeff Houston.

Castro said the Army's cold case unit will not disclose information or examples of cases the unit is part of since its establishment, but he did add that CID agents who are now part of the cold case squad assisted on a case dating back decades -- one that was solved in 2021.

He also said members of the cold case unit collaborated with a task force to solve a 40-year-old case out of California in which a former soldier was charged with the murder of 5-year-old Anne Pham.

In January, the Army said it had more than 20 homicides on its cold case docket, though only five missing or deceased persons cases are listed on the cold case portion of the service's website.

"We have currently identified several dozen cases that meet our definition of a cold case," Castro told Military.com on Tuesday. "The CCU is committed to bring each case to resolution to bring offenders to justice, provide a sense of peace to the families who have lost loved ones, and make the community safer. The length of time required to solve a case can vary significantly depending on the nature and complexity of the case, as well as the resources available to the investigating agency at the time."

Torres told Military.com she visited the newly established Army cold case unit recently and plans to visit again in the next six months.

"I wanted to see for myself," she said. "I truly needed to see that this unit was created, that what they were saying that they were doing, they were actually doing."

She said the cold case team went over their current methods -- tracking credit cards, pinging cell phone companies and banks, DNA analysis, etc.

But the Army's cold cases from before 1987 aren't even digitized, she said, making it hard for investigators to use those new tools.

"It's in a file with just papers," she said. "All of these files need to be in a computer system somewhere so that as DNA and as science continues to improve they are able to investigate and bring some solutions."

The CID pushed back on this claim, stating that "there are pre-1987 cases that have been digitized," adding that the U.S. Army Crime Records Center and the cold case unit are "continually collaborating on getting more cases digitized" as they get prepped for further prodding.

Torres also came armed with a pointed question: "When somebody comes up missing, why do we have to wait?"

What the family considers delays -- that Army special agents weren't notified of Roman-Martinez's missing status until two days after it was reported or how FBI dive teams weren't deployed until months after his head washed ashore, for example -- are the cornerstone of their upcoming civil case against the Army, which Military.com first reported in January.

Griselda Martinez, Enrique's sister, told Military.com she is happy the bill passed, and hopes to see cases like her brother's solved with fervor. But she said the new law is "a long time coming" and doesn't come close to replacing what she and her family lost nearly three years ago.

In November 2022, under mounting scrutiny, two members of the Army's new cold case division sought the blueprint from Kennedy as to how he built that first Navy cold case unit. Army CID confirmed it had sent a couple agents Kennedy's way.

"What cold case work is, is nothing glamorous," Kennedy said, along with other lessons he told the two "kids" who had shown up at his door. "It takes a lot of patience. A lot of tedious work."