Concepts Experimentation Program
Abstract
The Army Concepts Experimentation Program supports current and future concepts and capabilities involving Soldiers and Leaders within live, virtual, and constructive environments by exploring concepts, capability requirements and solutions across Doctrine, Organization, Training, Materiel, Leadership and Education, personnel, and Facilities (DOTMLPF) domains. The purpose of Concepts Experimentation is to clarify and mitigate risk for current and future forces. Experiments and projects inform Army futures concepts and assess high-risk conceptual assumptions in order to focus required capabilities and represent user requirements in the future Army, to field the Army of 2030 and design the Army of 2040. Army experiments use the combined resources of Army Battle Laboratories, operational units, research labs, materiel developers, industry and academia to collaborate in the development, refinement, and assessment of future force concepts. Simulated Experiments (SIMEX) will integrate and assess Army Concepts and Force Design phases with Army-level issues across the breadth of a campaign that highlights validation and integration of MDO capabilities. This Program Element (PE) enhances Joint Capabilities Integration and Development System (JCIDS) development in support of Program Executive Offices (PEOs) and Program Managers (PMs) for acquisition milestone decisions. Funding ensures AFC/FCC serves as the voice of the warfighter and compliments the materiel developer in providing total capability management ensuring the integration of DOTMLPF solutions. This PE resources the Army's Continuous Learning Campaign, currently known as Project Convergence (PC). PC is the Army's campaign of learning based on a continuous, structured series of demonstrations and experiments, designed to aggressively advance and integrate our Army's contributions to Joint Force overmatch. It ensures the Army, as part of the Joint fight, can rapidly and continuously integrate or "converge" effects across all domains to overmatch our adversaries in competition and conflict. PC is part of the Army's intent to achieve a full Multi-Domain Operations (MDO) capability by 2035. Capstone is the periodic, joint, multinational experiment within Project Convergence that pulls together concepts, technology, gaps, and requirements at scale for the Army of 2030 and 2040 and applies them to the Indo-Pacific and European theaters. Capstone experiments on ways to defeat our pacing threat in the Indo-Pacific and the five key functions the Army performs in this theater: building and defending bases, command and control for Combined Joint Force (CJF), sustaining logistical supply lines, defensive fires through long-range precision strikes, and counter-attack forces. In addition, Capstone experiments against near-peer adversaries in the European theater, against which the CJF demonstrates pulsed operations to enable a land-centric exploitation. Capstone focuses on Army 2040 with the immediate need to integrate select technologies into Army 2030 to keep the Army ahead of our peers and on the leading edge of development. This PE provides funding for Defender, Forager, MDO Live. These experiments help the Army evaluate emerging concepts, new formations, integrate new technologies, and promote interoperability between the Army, other services and multinational partners. This PE also provides funding for Joint Warfighter Assessments (JWA) that physically integrate, assess and evaluate networked capability sets and other adaptive capabilities to accelerate the systems acquisition process of providing DOTMLPF recommendations to the Army. JWA is an integrated part of a series of linked Persistent Experiments (Defender, Forager, MDO Live, and Project Convergence) that help the Army evaluate emerging concepts, integrate new technologies, and promote interoperability between the Army, other services and multinational partners. The Soldier-Centered Analysis Future Force Project (33B) will provide early application of human performance and human figure modeling tools in the development of Soldier-focused requirements to shape technology for Future Force development. These efforts include design analyses, constructive simulations, and Soldier-in-the loop assessments to ensure that manpower requirements and workload and skill demands are considered, avoiding information and physical task overloads and taking optimum advantage of aptitudes, individual and collective training, and numbers of Soldiers for an affordable Future Force.
Document Details
- Document Type
- R2 Budgetary Justification
- Publication Date
- Oct 01, 2025
- Source ID
- 0605326A_6_2040_PB_2025
- Change Summary Explanation
- Minor increase in FY25 funding from the previous PB to the current PB due to revised economic assumptions.
- Service Agency Name
- Army
Entities
Organizations
- United States Army
Related Documents
- Child Project: Army/Joint Experimentation
- Child Accomplishment: Experimentation - Project Convergence - High-Fidelity Live-Virtual-Constructive Experiments
- Child Accomplishment: Experimentation - AFWE - High-Fidelity Live-Virtual-Constructive Experiments and Simulation-Based Experiments
- Child Project: Current Force Capability Gaps
- Child Accomplishment: Requirements Determination
- Child Accomplishment: Army Focused Warfighting Experiments (AFWE)
- Child Accomplishment: Battle Lab Experimentation and Support
- Child Accomplishment: Army Capability-based Architecture Development and Integration Environment (ArCADIE)
- Child Accomplishment: System of Systems Enhanced Small Unit (SESU) Focused Assessments
- Child Project: Soldier-Centered Analyses For Future Force
- Child Accomplishment: Manpower and Personnel Integration (MANPRINT)
- Child Project: Project Convergence (PC)
- Child Accomplishment: Project Convergence