Army Reserve leader boosts readiness through ‘decision advantage’

JOINT BASE MCGUIRE-DIX-LAKEHURST, N.J. – “We need to provide decision advantage to our leaders,” said Chief Warrant Officer 4 Daniel Fuhrman, command chief warrant officer of the U.S. Army Reserve’s 99th Readiness Division, during Army Vantage Training here.

“Decision advantage is the ability to out-process, out-decide, and out-act adversaries by using superior situational awareness, advanced analytics, and AI to make faster, more accurate decisions,” Fuhrman explained.

With decision advantage, raw data is transformed into actionable intelligence, allowing leaders to move from reactive to proactive, ensuring a decisive edge in complex, time-sensitive environments using four core components: situational understanding, speed and agility, secure information flow, and human-machine teaming.

“During steady state operations, this means improving the Army Reserve’s readiness to be prepared to deploy at short notice,” shared Fuhrman, who is leading the Vantage charge for the Army Reserve.

The push for more efficiencies in data management began nearly a decade ago – the U.S. Army was rich in data, but critical data points regarding troop availability, weapons inventory, global supply chains, and financial accounts were segregated in more than 160 legacy, siloed databases.

“We receive more data than is humanly possible to process into information or analyze into knowledge,” Fuhrman said.

The solution began as a prototype called the Army Leader Dashboard, recognizing that senior leaders needed a single, integrated window into the entire force.

“Closing the gap optimizes the solutions developed to improve the Army's data culture to enable decision-making,” Fuhrman said.

By 2020, under the direction of the Program Executive Office Enterprise Information Systems, the platform officially evolved and was chartered into its own product office: Army Vantage.

To learn more about Army Vantage, visit https://www.palantir.com/army-vantage/