FORT RUCKER, Ala. — The U.S. Army Aviation Center of Excellence (USAACE) hosted its annual Aviation Industry Days event to provide industry representatives a chance to hear from aviation enterprise leaders and foster innovative idea sharing July 20-22, 2021.
With social distancing and other COVID-19 mitigation measures in place, this year’s event brought in more than 400 attendees and over 50 vendor exhibits at The Landing, and included a two-day lineup of guest speakers featuring Army aviation enterprise leaders at the Post Theater.
Maj. Gen. David J. Francis, USAACE and Fort Rucker commanding general, welcomed participants and provided an aviation branch update.
“It’s absolutely phenomenal bringing in our industry partners with our government partners again, to help communicate our thinking about the future and the assistance and partnership we need as a team moving forward as we modernize the Army and Army aviation into the future. This is an important couple of days here,” Francis said.
“We have not been static during COVID. We are moving out on all fronts across the board,” he said.
Francis spoke about preparing Army aviation to transition from 20 years of counterinsurgency operations to large scale combat operations of the future, as well as progress that has been made not only with materiel solutions, but also across areas like doctrine, training, facilities and policy, and leader development.
“The leaders that we are developing today are the ones that are going to lead us into the future, and we can’t train the same way we’ve done for the last twenty years,” he said.
“We know that we’re going to be operating in very different environments with different leadership attributes that are going to be required, and different technical competencies. As we train those leaders, we’re changing that in anticipation of the receipt of Future Vertical Lift and all of its capabilities so that we’re prepared to employ those things in a higher threat environment,” Francis explained.
Francis said Army aviation will adapt to new constraints in the future operating environment.
“Gone are the days when we’re going to have a combat aviation brigade sitting on an airfield, because the signature is simply too large,” he said.
Army aviation will be required to operate from areas of relative sanctuary in dispersed locations, and be able to converge effects at the time and place of their choosing, to present multiple dilemmas to adversaries.
The future operational environment will require Army aviation to be able to sustain and maintain aircraft at remote locations.
“We won’t be able to do the hub and spoke thing that we’ve been doing for the last 20 years, where we had an aircraft come into a phase window,…
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