As part of a larger effort to modernize and consolidate its acquisition process, the Army has leveraged an artificial intelligence-enabled tool to identify and safely eliminate a significant number of acquisition requirements, according to new figures released by the service.
CORA: Reversing Course on Acquisition
This initiative, known as CORA (a „tongue-in-cheek” reversal of the Army Requirement Oversight Council – AROC), aims to streamline the way the Army procures weapons, software, and other essential items.
Joe Welch, executive deputy to the commanding general of Transformation and Training Command, explained that CORA’s primary goal is to review Army requirements, discard inactive ones, eliminate active ones that no longer serve a purpose, and consolidate others into broader, more encompassing requirements.
Exceeding Reduction Goals
„The Secretary [of the Army] had given us a challenge back in the summer to see if we could reduce the amount of active requirements by a third, right? So we did that,” Welch told reporters at the AUSA event last week. He emphasized that even a basic understanding of 2,000 active requirements is limited, making the identification and elimination process crucial.
Key Findings and Process
An Army Future Concepts Command spokesperson provided Breaking Defense with specific data: Through CORA, the Army has examined 3,577 requirements, identifying 1,500 as inactive and 2,077 as active. Of the 2,077 active requirements, senior leaders have designated 516 for inactivation.
Out of those 516, 215 have been officially deactivated and another 130 are currently „reviewed this month,” according to the spokesperson. The Army also allows „requirement owners” to advocate for their requirements if they believe they should remain active, granting them 30 days to schedule a review and up to 180 days to complete and present their case. If a review is not completed within the initial 30-day period, the requirement is automatically scrapped.
Preventing Inadvertent Cuts
„We don’t want to inadvertently cut something that is actually very important that no one really understood, but if we tee it up for inactivation, and there’s not a great response about [why] you can’t do that, that’s a good indicator for us,” Welch stated.
Consolidation and Streamlining
The deactivation of certain active requirements does not necessarily mean they will be eliminated entirely. Instead, many of them will be consolidated in accordance with their associated program of record, if feasible, Welch explained.
For example, the Army inactivated several individual requirements linked to its Next Generation Command and Control (NGC2) program – which aims to combine intelligence, C2, and fires into a single system for enhanced commander awareness – and consolidated them into a broader Characteristics of Need (CoN) document.
Welch highlighted that the Army previously had a separate requirement specifically for the fires portfolio of NGC2. However, given that the initiative requires software to execute digital fires, the standalone requirement was scrapped and „subsumed” into a „much broader” CoN NGC2 requirement.
Avoiding Stovepipes
„So there’s a lot of that happening as well about things that if they stay stand alone, they’ll drive stovepipes. But if we invalidate them and say there’s this broader problem statement […] that covers that, then we’re not really saying we don’t need that thing anymore; we’re saying we’re not going to buy it that way,” Welch concluded.
