Army Futures Command on Wednesday began equipping the first of two combat brigades, selected so far, to receive the Enhanced Night Vision Goggle-Binocular (ENVG-B), a capability that modernization officials promise will improve marksmanship, day and night.
The ENVG-B is a wireless, dual-tubed technology with a built-in thermal imager that is part of a capability set modernization officials started fielding to soldiers from 2nd Brigade Combat Team, 1st Infantry Division, at Fort Riley, Kansas.
The Army has also selected 2nd Brigade Combat Team, 25th Infantry Division, at Schofield Barracks, Hawaii, as the next unit to receive the new capability in March, Bridgett Siter, spokeswoman for the Soldier Lethality Cross-Functional Team, told Military.com. The service plans to buy as many as 108,251 ENVG-Bs to issue to infantry and other close-combat units.
Sergeant Major of the Army Michael Grinston and senior modernization officials celebrated the fielding as the first major achievement of Army Futures Command.
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"This is a historic event; I am really proud to be here," Grinston said during a discussion with reporters at Riley. "So, we can say we stood up the Army's Futures Command, and then today we are delivering a product in two years."
The service announced its plan to create the command in 2017, but didn't activate it until August 2018.
During the process, the Army has conducted 11 user evaluations, known as Soldier Touchpoints, in which soldiers and Marines have field-tested the prototypes of ENVG-B and "helped us get this right," said Brig. Gen. Dave Hodne, director of the Soldier Lethality Cross Functional Team and chief of infantry at Fort Benning, Georgia.
In addition to the creation of Army Futures Command, officials credited the work of the cross-functional teams -- made up of requirements experts, materiel developers and test officials -- that make it possible to field equipment much faster than in the past.
The structure "really enables us to move faster as an enterprise than we have ever been able to move before, in being able to derive and deliver capabilities for our soldiers," said Brig. Gen. Anthony Potts, commander of Program Executive Office Soldier.
The binocular function of the ENVG-B gives soldiers more depth perception, and the thermal image intensifier allows soldiers to see enemy heat signatures at night and in the daylight through smoke, fog and other battlefield obscurants, Army officials say.
But when the system is teamed with the Family of Weapon Sights-Individual (FWS-I), which is being fielded with the ENVG-B, soldiers can view their sight reticle as it's transmitted wirelessly into the goggle.
"Now we are able to move that targeting data straight from that weapon, without wires, up in front of a soldier's eyes," Potts said, adding that the process is much faster and "makes a soldier far more lethal."
"What you are seeing today is the first iteration of a capability fielding ... and we are going to continue to grow this capability out so that we really treat the soldier as an integrated weapon platform," he said.
-- Matthew Cox can be reached at matthew.cox@military.com.
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