What Is the Army’s Characteristics of Need Process for New Intelligence Tools in 2026?

According to GSA guidelines, contractors must treat the Army’s ‘characteristics of need’ language as an invitation to solve the mission problem, not to repeat a product brochure. In FAR Part 11, agencies may describe needs in terms of functions to be performed, performance required, or essential physical characteristics, and that is exactly where the Army is heading with new intelligence tools. For contractors, the practical question is not ‘What features does the Army want?’ but ‘What outcome must the tool produce for a soldier, analyst, or commander on the timeline the mission requires?’ That means your proposal should translate technical claims into operational effects: how quickly analysts can fuse data, how accurately the system can classify signals, how well the tool works at the tactical edge, and how securely it can move data through classified or coalition networks. It also means acquisition teams can compare multiple solutions on the same mission outcomes, which is why the Army’s reform effort matters to every offeror, from large prime integrators to 8(a), HUBZone, SDVOSB, and WOSB firms competing through GSA schedules, other transaction pathways, or direct Army buys.

Per FAR 11.002, the Army can avoid overprescribing hardware by defining what success looks like and letting industry propose how to achieve it. According to the Army acquisition transformation update from USAASC, service leaders are using faster acquisition pathways and more iterative requirements development to cut the time between field experimentation and award. That shift shows up in the Army’s work on Next-Generation Command and Control, Project Convergence, and the broader push to gather industry ideas for electronic warfare, SIGINT, and intelligence tools. In practical terms, the ‘characteristics of need’ process is a pre-solicitation filter: the Army is drafting a guiding document, testing it against experiments, and using the language to shape future competitions. Contractors should read that as a signal that the government wants evidence, not adjectives. If your deck says ‘AI-enabled,’ ‘modular,’ or ‘low latency’ but does not define millisecond thresholds, false positive rates, deployment weight, uptime, or data rights, your answer will look weaker than a competitor who can quantify all five.

Under OMB M-25-21, agencies will keep pushing for decision-ready requirements that can support faster procurement cycles, and the Army’s new intelligence-tool approach fits that pattern. According to the Army’s experimentation model in Project Convergence and other field events, the service is not waiting for a perfect capability document before it engages industry; it is using demonstrations, user feedback, and rapid iteration to refine what ‘good enough to buy’ means. That matters because the characteristics-of-need process is not a vague strategy session. It is a scoring framework in disguise. The Army can take a need like ‘better intelligence fusion’ and turn it into a list of observable characteristics: time to ingest data, time to exploit it, number of sources fused, false-positive rate, resilience in denied communications, and the ability to export to Army data environments. The contractors who win will be the ones who can prove those characteristics with live demonstrations, independent test results, and clear source-to-output traceability, not just architecture diagrams or glossy product sheets.

Per FAR 19.502 and SBA’s small-business rules, the Army’s new framing can actually help smaller firms compete, because a characteristics-based requirement is easier to team against than a detailed specification locked to a legacy platform. A HUBZone, SDVOSB, or WOSB firm does not need to own every layer of the stack if it can credibly deliver one measurable characteristic, such as signal processing speed, data labeling accuracy, or secure integration at the tactical edge. The key is to package that capability in a way a contracting officer can evaluate under FAR Part 11 and FAR 15.305: what will the government receive, how will it verify success, and what is the risk if the solution underperforms by 10% or 20%? For proposal writers, that means building a short set of testable statements, a compliance matrix, and a demonstration plan. It also means accounting for CMMC and, where relevant, FedRAMP if the intelligence tool touches cloud services or controlled unclassified information.

DoD’s CMMC framework requires contractors handling sensitive information to prove security maturity, and that requirement now sits beside the Army’s need-definition reform instead of behind it. According to the Army’s intelligence and spectrum warfare call for solutions, vendors should expect the service to ask for mission-relevant proof early: how the tool ingests data, how it behaves under jamming or latency, how fast it can be deployed, and how it protects classified workflows. That raises the bar for proposal strategy. You cannot wait until the final RFP to decide which metrics matter. You need them now, because the Army is drafting the language that will shape the competition. For small businesses, that is both risk and opportunity. The risk is that a weak, feature-heavy response will be downgraded. The opportunity is that a narrow capability, well proven, can beat a larger integrator if it directly matches the Army’s stated characteristics. That is why proposal teams should build one storyline around mission impact, one around verification, and one around security, then keep all three aligned across the technical volume, past performance, and pricing narrative.

According to GSA guidelines, contractors must keep the narrative short and the proof dense when the government is evaluating an outcomes-based need. That means screenshots, field-test metrics, operator feedback, interface logs, and cyber artifacts should carry more weight than adjectives. The SBA’s small-business contracting channels can help, but only if the vendor knows how to frame its one strongest characteristic and not overpromise on the rest. For example, a firm that excels at sensor fusion should say so, prove it, and show how it integrates with Army workflows under the right security controls. Do not bury the offer under a dozen unverified claims. The Army’s reform environment rewards clarity: one need, one proof point, one result. If you can explain in plain language how your tool reduces analyst time by 30%, improves classification accuracy by 15%, or cuts deployment time from 10 days to 3, you are already speaking the Army’s language. If you cannot, the characteristics-of-need process will expose that gap quickly.