ARMY FUTURES COMMAND

Soldier Lethality Cross Functional Team

Fort Benning, Georgia

MEDIA RELEASE SEP 16, 2019

Army Futures Command delivers Enhanced

Night Vision Goggle-Binocular
Fort Benning, GA – When SFC Will Roth joined the Soldier Lethality Cross Functional Team on the first
day of October last year, he was the youngest member of the team at 34 years old, the only NCO and the
only National Guard Soldier on a team comprised of colonels and GS14s and 15s.

“It was overwhelming and humbling at first. They told me I’d be doing things E7s don’t typically do. I
learned really fast that no one here is driven by ego, and nobody cares about your resume, either. They
want to know what you’re doing for Soldiers today,” Roth said, as he looked back on a whirlwind year that
earned him enough Sky Miles to take his wife and two sons on a nice vacation far, far away. If only there
was time for that. Come October 1, Roth leaves Fort Benning, Ga., for Arlington, Va., where he will work
with the National Guard Bureau’s Training and Human Performance.

But he leaves the CFT with a great sense of satisfaction, having seen the concept of the Enhanced Night
Vision Goggle - Binocular become reality. The hard work he invested with the CFT comes to fruition next
week when the goggles are fielded to the 2/1 at Fort Riley, Ks.

The ENVG-B has been Roth’s baby from the start, from the day he was tasked to serve as technical
advisor for the ENVG-B, one of the Soldier Lethality CFT’s portfolio of programs, which also includes Next
Generation Squad Weapons and the Integrated Visual Augmentation System, or IVAS. Roth has
participated in every single aspect of development and testing the ENVG-B, including eight Soldier Touch
Points, which are significant milestones in the CFT’s aggressive process of development and
acquisitions. Soldier Touch Points, or STPs, are training and testing events that put the binoculars in the
hands of Soldiers and Marines - hundreds of them - over and over and over. They use the binoculars in a
field training environment under a variety of conditions and offer feedback on the utility and practicality of
the product. Practicality is important; user acceptance is critical.

“Honestly, first time I saw (the ENVG-B,) I was skeptical,” said Roth, who served in combat with the 2nd
Battalion, 75th Ranger Regiment, early in his career and understands the needs of the combatant to
move swiftly and maintain constant situational awareness. “It has to deliver both, and I couldn’t see that a
year ago, early in the process. I couldn’t envision a time when Soldiers would accept this product and
trust it in the field.”

That all changed when Roth participated in his first STP at Fort Drum, N.Y., where he watched a Marine
lay on his back, fire over his shoulder, and hit targets at 50 and 100 meters using the Family of Weapons
Sights – Individual, which gives the ENVG-B Rapid Target Acquisition capabilities, essentially the ability
to see a target with the goggle wirelessly paired to the optic on the weapon.
“He hit five out of seven. It gave me chill bumps,” Roth said. “I decided this was an insane game changer.
I’m a believer, one hundred percent. Nothing else offers these kinds of capabilities; I’ve seen it for myself,
and I’ve heard it from hundreds of Soldiers and Marines.”

For his part, Roth said he is proud to have been a part of the “team of teams” that saw this capability from
concept to fielding. And it was literally a team of teams. Though Army Futures Command is new, and it
represents a new way of doing business when it comes to developing requirements and producing
capabilities - faster and more efficiently - it absorbed a number of existing Army equities, such as the
Combat Capabilities Development Command and the various Capability Development Integration
Directorates. The list is long, the network is complicated. With the ENVG-B, AFC’s SL CFT inherited the
requirements process early on from the Maneuver CDID and PEO Soldier worked with L3 Harris out of
Londonderry, N.H., to produce the product from prototype to fielding.

“AFC is designed to develop new relationships with academia and industry and capitalize on the
institutional knowledge and the experience of existing organizations that we now call partners,” said COL
Travis Thompson, the Deputy Director of the SL CFT under Brig. Get Dave Hodne. “We all move in the
same direction at the same time, and we move quickly; it’s very effective. But the key to the success of
the whole initiative is the constant engagement with Soldiers, the touch points that allow us to develop
rapidly. That’s Soldier Centric Design, the practice of putting the needs of the Close Combat Force at the
center of everything we do, and to do that, we have to have them touch it, wear it, try it, evaluate it, over
and over and over.”

The iterative process that incorporates STPs, some of them lasting for weeks, also includes other events
designed for the same purpose but different missions: User Studies, Juries, Capabilities Sets, and
Sprints. They all serve to hasten the identification of failures or shortcomings so as not to field a product
that is more trouble than its worth from the Soldier’s perspective. It’s a fail early, fail cheap philosophy that
drives the CFT’s pursuit of efficient and cost effective acquisitions in the quest for combat overmatch.

“It doesn’t do a bit of good to develop a dynamic tool or a weapon that Soldiers finds inconvenient or one
that slows them down or hinders their progress,” Thompson said. “By putting the ENVG-B to the test in
field training exercises under a variety of conditions, we learned what worked and what didn’t, and we
made the changes necessary at every step of the design and development process to ensure the product
we field next week is not a novelty, but a practical tool that will make our Soldiers more lethal, more
survivable and better able to maneuver in challenging conditions.”

Thompson speaks of a familiar concept once commonly called “Soldier as a System.” These days,
proponents call it Adaptive Squad Architecture (ASA), and depending who you ask, it either drives or it’s
driven by the Soldier Centric Design. ASA demands that AFC partners consider not only the need or
problem that drives the development of any piece of the Soldier kit – the sum of everything the Soldier
wears, carries or uses – but the impact it will have on other elements of the kit, the Soldier, and his or her
squad.

“We’ve all heard the story of the body armor that rises up when you shoot from a prone position and
forces your helmet to fall forward over your eyes,” Thompson said. “That’s what happens when you field a
great piece of kit that doesn’t play well with others. That’s simplifies the concept of Adaptive Squad
Architecture to an elementary level - very, very basic – but it sums it up nicely. Everything will work
together so the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.”
Toward that end, Thompson said, the Soldier Lethality CFT will continue to develop programs, rapidly and
efficiently, that work together to enhance the lethality of the Close Combat Force, the roughly 100,000
Soldiers – or 4 percent of the Department of Defense - who close with and engage the enemy. The vast
majority of them are Infantrymen, and historically, they incur 90 percent of casualties on the battlefield.

“The Army’s modernization strategy has one focus: to make Soldiers and units more lethal to win wars
and come home safely. Everything we do is centered on that goal,” Thompson said. “And we’re doing
that successfully by leveraging emerging technologies, science, human potential and all of these
partnerships that keep us moving aggressively toward overmatch.”

The Soldier Lethality CFT continues to test prototypes of the IVAS, with plans to field in 2021, and the
Next Generation Squad Weapon rife and automatic rifle, which will replace the Squad Automatic Weapon
and the M1/M4 Carbine, with plans to start fielding in 2023.

“We move quickly, but with a laser-like focus,” Roth said. “It’s all about the lethality of the Close Combat
Force, the guys who go in first and hit the ground running. That’s why the folks here hit the ground
running every day.”

Media interested in attending the fielding event should email Bridgett.d.siter.civ@mail.mil.

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