When an Army commander needs a warfighting capability, he or she now has a place to go to get it fast.
They just have to ask the Global Tactical Edge Acquisition Directorate (G-TEAD). Launched officially in November, G-TEAD’s mission is to fill technology gaps based on soldiers’ needs and therefore relieving commanders of the challenges of the acquisition and funding processes.
G-TEAD already is bringing new and emerging technology to the Army, said Col. Christopher Hill, the director of the organization.
“There are two specific capabilities that have come directly from G-TEAD. The first one you may have heard about is called Merops. It is what was billed as the Shahed killer in Ukraine. Back in September, there was a Russian incursion of one-way attack drones that flew into Polish airspace and Romanian airspace. The very next day, General [Chris] Donahue came into the briefing room and said, ‘I want that capability in the hands of our partners within 21 days.’ We immediately spun up, did an assessment of the system and it ended up taking us somewhere around 27 to 28 days, but we were able to work with the company to physically put that capability on the eastern flank of Europe to be prepared for those one-way drones, if and when they came in,” Hill said on Ask the CIO. “That went from G-TEAD to the Joint Interagency Task Force 401, who has the counter unmanned aircraft systems (UAS) mission, picking up that capability, and they went and they bought 13,000 of them. Of the 13,000 now you see that Merops system at work protecting soldiers from potential Shaheds in Epic Fury.”
A second G-TEAD success story is around FD One, the quadcopter drone killer, that went through the entire development and testing process. Hill said G-TEAD initially purchased about 300 of those systems, and after seeing them in action, will now buy another 500 FD One systems.
“While all of this is going on, we’re working with the Army portfolio acquisition executives (PAEs) to determine whether this is a system that answers a larger Army need, and if it does, it will transition to a program office,” he said. “Merops transitioned all the way from what we talked about in September and it is now with a program office. Our success criteria is not just, hey, how many of a minimum viable product or how many prototypes can we put in the hand of a unit. Are we picking systems that can transition to the Army and scale across the Army? That’s really what we view as success. We are always going to buy a limited number of prototypes, enough that we can actually outfit some size unit to give it an effect on the battlefield.”
Hill said he hopes these two examples show why the Army created G-TEAD under its Pathway for Innovation and Technology (PIT) initiative. PIT includes G-TEAD, FUZE and the Joint Innovation Outpost (JIOP) programs. The Army officially launched G-TEAD in November, but had a soft start in August 2025.
Jailbreak the acquisition process
All three of the efforts are part of the DoD’s acquisition transformation effort. Hill said G-TEAD is meeting Secretary Pete Hegseth’s goals by moving acquisition and innovation to the edge.
“We were given a hard problem to solve, which was we need you to take the acquisition enterprise and move it to the tactical edge, and to give acquisition authority, to give access to research, development, test and evaluation (RDT&E) dollars and to collapse the traditional acquisition cycle into something that is more responsive and more flexible for those warfighting commanders,” Hill said. “We actually were told to jailbreak, for lack of a better term, the acquisition process, and give us something that we can take to the tactical edge, that warfighting commanders are now in control of as opposed to the Army telling them what they need. We are allowing those warfighting commanders to tell the Army what they need in order to execute those missions forward, and that’s really where G-TEAD was born.”
Hill, who also served as the program manager for Integrated Fires Mission Command and led the product management office for Aircraft Survivability Equipment, said he rarely heard directly from commanders about their immediate needs. Instead, he said he dealt the usual guardrails around procurement, budgets and need-based requirements that came from many parts of the service.
G-TEAD now will talk to a commander who may have eight priorities that need to get to the warfighter in the next 18 to 24 months and give them a path to get many of them done.
“We take that, create an acquisition plan around that, so that we can fill that need for the soldiers quickly,” Hill said. “When you start looking at how long it takes to go from a need to a real capability, depending on what you’re talking about, it can take years. What G-TEAD also is doing is we are reaching out to those innovative companies that have been left out. You’ve got companies that just cannot compete with the big five or six when it comes to some of the larger programs. Well, we need programs and companies that are more responsive. So one of the things that we did was put together a plan, a timeline to go from the date that commander says, ‘This is what we need,’ to the date we put that capability in the hands of soldiers. We were able to get that down to 180 days.”
ACE prize competitions
Hill said that 180 days includes procuring the capability, many times through an other transactions agreement (OTA), user feedback and initial delivery of the capability to the field.
At the same time, he said companies must be able to iterate and improve the product or service based on the user feedback, especially because the battlefield dynamics change quickly.
To find those new entrants who are flexible and innovative, G-TEAD is using prize challenges as part of holding an Accelerated Capability Event (ACE).
Hill said ACEs bring together operational demand, innovation and soldier assessments.
“Both of the ACEs that we’ve done, in the initial call there were anywhere from 250 to 275 respondents. Then we have maybe 50 or 60 assessors that will go through all of that and whittle that down to 15 companies. Those 15 companies are then invited to come out and demonstrate their capabilities, and to do that, they’ve got to train soldiers on their system. We do not want systems that only the vendor can operate,” he said. “Soldier assessment is a huge key to determine which of those 15 are the five winners, who then are in line for an OTA.”
Hill said G-TEAD’s next ACE this year will also incorporate the Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) program along with OTAs into the prizes. He said if any of the five winners are small firms, they can directly go into the SBIR program.
“We can still procure those prototype systems, and it now puts that small business on a pathway to more business across the enterprise,” he said. “And for those that are not small businesses, that’s when we will use our OTA authority.”
Hill added the timeline for the next ACE hasn’t been finalized yet, but he’s hopeful to hold on in August. He also hopes to expand G-TEAD’s reach beyond Europe and the Pacific by adding a new G-TEAD in Army Central.
“My staff can now look across three different theaters and see there are synergies because they’re kind of asking for the same thing. So instead of us going to industry partners two different times, we can make the industry partners aware of what’s going on and synchronize our efforts,” Hill said. “That’s why we have that synchronization forum to synchronize across these theaters. So now it gives us the opportunity to raise the level of awareness across the theaters, not only amongst industry but amongst the government, to let the Pacific know there’s something going on in Europe that you might want to pay attention to. Once it’s vetted in Europe, I can take that same FD One to Guam or send them to somewhere in the Pacific.”
Copyright
© 2026 Federal News Network. All rights reserved. This website is not intended for users located within the European Economic Area.
