st Brigade and had planned extensive field tests in 2020. But the Airborne is the Army’s global rapid-response force, and the 1
st Brigade had two unscheduled deployments last year: one to the Mideast after US drones killed Iranian general Qassem Soleimani and sparked a regional crisis, the other to Washington, DC after police killed George Floyd and set of nationwide protests.
Those real-world crises, compounded by the COVID-19 pandemic, forced the Army to postpone some tests and downsize others from a full brigade to just part of one. That’s why the Pentagon’s independent Director of Operational Test & Evaluation (DOT&E) urged the Army to slow down in its annual report for 2020, submitted to Congress on Jan. 13.