Quantico, VA -- MARINE CORPS BASE QUANTICO, Va.–The Marine Corps continues to streamline the acquisition process to ensure Marines receive the lethal, resilient, and highly capable ground weapons and equipment they need in the fastest time possible. To support this initiative, Program Executive Officer Land Systems recently released their Strategic Plan for fiscal year 2024 through 2025, providing lines of effort that will drive their commitment to delivering dominant warfighting capabilities to the Marine Corps.
From November 29th through December 1st, 2023, Mr. Stephen Bowdren, Program Executive Officer Land Systems, held a Strategic Planning for Execution: Assessment & Risk (SPEAR) Workshop with PEO LS leadership to analyze areas of strength and weakness, discuss ideas, and build the framework, and lines of effort of the plan. The offsite included a message from Lt. Gen. Matthew Glavy, Deputy Commandant for Information, where he spoke on the rapid change in warfare and how acquisition must adapt and change to maintain overmatch over our adversaries.
“We leveraged a study on one of our programs [Ground Based Air Defense] that included senior leadership interviews and discussion on how well we were engaging with them on the program,” Bowdren said on the development of the plan. “We updated our Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats from a previous strategic analysis effort that all Assistant PEOs contributed to and reviewed the strategy documents and Force Design documents.”
The strategy provides an outline to how PEO LS plans to transform its processes, experimentation, fielding, onboarding, and portfolio management over the next two years. It focuses on four lines of effort – streamlining processes; building people and teams; learning, sharing, and collaborating; and effectively focusing resources to accelerate capability delivery.
The plan seeks to build and foster an innovative culture at PEO LS, one dedicated to learning and sharing knowledge and comparing best practices across all programs, as well as emphasizing the importance of building a trusted team of professionals who can rapidly develop and acquire dominant capabilities while understanding risk. PEO LS is focusing on fostering an environment that encourages collaboration and engagement from the start.
“Culture – our beliefs and our behaviors – is foundational to program success,” said Bowdren. “There is a famous phrase ‘culture eats strategy for breakfast’ which highlights that strategy execution is meaningless if the culture does not support it.”
This comes at an important time for PEO LS, as the organization will assume oversight of existing Marine Corps Systems Command programs as part of an upcoming reorganization to support modernization efforts associated with Force Design.
“Onboarding our teammates transitioning from MCSC oversight to PEO LS and ensuring minimal impact to program execution is our most critical near-term effort… and this change should be transparent to our stakeholders as it occurs.”
Execution of the objectives outlined in the plan will be essential in supporting Force Design, which outlines the need to leverage efficiencies in acquisition processes to deliver mature technology to the Service at the speed of relevance. As programs execute in support of this initiative, PEO LS intends to identify and exploit additional opportunities to continue the acceleration of technology adoption and optimize the delivery of capabilities.
“We will assess our progress periodically and know that these lines of effort are enduring in support of the USMC’s Force Design effort.”