 The U.S. Army Research Laboratory hosted its program formulation meeting March 20th to the 23rd at the Millette Training Facility at Aberdeen Proving Ground, Maryland, in hopes of building bridges with stakeholders and gathering feedback to influence the future of Army research. And if we don't as a community come together at the beginning to get after how we're going to engineer complex systems, I think we're missing it. Acting ARL director Dr. Philip Percanti unveiled the nine essential research areas that he said the laboratory must address to support the Army of 2050. I don't think it should be any surprise to anybody really about some of the things that we're considering to be essential research areas. The areas cover a broad spectrum of future technology challenges. The director said the future of research depends on collaboration. Major General Cedric T. Wins, commanding general of the U.S. Army Research Development and Engineering Command, told the gathering that the Army chief of staff has set the priorities for the future of the force as number one, readiness, number two, readiness of the future force, and number three, taking care of the troops. We have to be focused on what it is that the Army has set forward as the priority areas in material development and development of future capabilities to give our soldiers the technological advantage that they need in the event that they are called upon and warned. The annual meeting brings together Army engineers, researchers, and scientists with military and civilian representatives from organizations like the program executive offices, the training and doctrine command, and various research development and engineering partners. Basically the mission of S&T and the Army is to really look at you know the current force as well as the future force and there's a balance here in how we actually place resources to meet the existing challenges we're seeing in theater and then how do we really focus on the future and what emerging opportunities might be occurring so we can actually help the Army with defining what its future force is. The director thanked the attendees for helping to shape future research. Your help in this is is vitally important to really critique what we're doing, what our plans are, and where we're going to go together in the future hopefully to address these essential research areas. For ARL TV, I'm David McNally.