With demand for Army experimentation rising, the Army’s Operational Experimentation Course had its largest cohort of students yet when it took the course to Germany to support U.S. Army Europe and Africa experimentation objectives.
The U.S. Army Joint Modernization Command, under the direction of the Futures and Concepts Command and the Transformation and Training Command, designed the OEC for Joint and multinational planners and teams to learn how to plan, manage and execute high-level Army experimentation and innovation events.
Brig. Gen. Brendan Raymond, deputy chief of staff G-3, USAREUR-AF, gave opening comments to the 48 personnel in the course, emphasizing the importance of innovative and rigorous experimentation across the European Command. In addition to personnel from USAREUR-AF, the 7th Army Training Command and subordinate units, several NATO partners sent their country’s experimentation leads to the course. Their participation brought to the forefront a growing interest in a class focused on NATO partners’ experimentation goals.
Lt. Col. Dwain Hinman, chief of the training branch of Mobilization and Reserve Affairs in USAREUR-AF, said he wanted to take the course to help understand the best practices and friction points for implementing experimentation into Reserve exercise planning.
“The course provided a structured framework of how to craft clear problem statements and hypotheses, design and plan experiments that deliberately balance training objectives with experimentation objectives, while effectively communicating results into actionable decisions for senior leaders,” Hinman said. “This disciplined approach to experimentation strengthens our ability to deliver newer, valid, and operationally relevant capabilities to the warfighter before they are urgently required in combat.”
Maj. Lindsay McCue, chief of acquisition and sustainment at the 7th ATC’s Innovation Modernization Experimentation Consortium, said the course was very relevant to the work her team is doing at the Consortium.
“The OEC lays out the process of deliberate planning, testing and assessing new technologies and TTPs for continuous process improvement,” McCue said.
Across USAREUR-AF, there are a number of organizations and units that are interested in conducting experimentation and small-scale assessments, and JMC’s OEC Mobile Training Team is prepared to meet the demand for learning. In addition to numerous OECs conducted at Fort Bliss, Texas, the MTT has now traveled to Germany and Hawaii, with a course planned for Korea.