The Pentagon is planning to work more with Australia on its new rapid technology experimentation campaign, the department’s chief technology officer said Wednesday, with an aim to conduct prototype assessments in the country in 2024 and 2025.
Heidi Shyu, under secretary of defense for research and engineering, told reporters the effort to expand collaboration on the Rapid Defense Experimentation Reserve (RDER) program follows Australia’s involvement in a Technology Readiness Experiment (T-REX) last year.
“Right after that [event], our key leads flew down to Australia to witness their Autonomous Warrior experimentation. We’re in the process of planning integrated experimentation. We’re literally going to do a T-REX in Australia. So this is all the cool stuff we have ongoing and this will eventually lead to one of the RDER experimentations in Australia,” Shyu told the press following her remarks at the Potomac Officers Club’s R&D Summit in Alexandria, Va.
The RDER effort, which Shyu started in the summer of 2021, is an experimentation campaign to bring in promising technologies that could help address joint warfighting capability gaps.
Shyu told reporters the T-REX last year to assess technologies with the National Guard at Camp Atterbury in Indiana included involvement from both Australia and the United Kingdom, with DoD then taking prototypes that showed success for further experimentation during the Northern Edge exercise.
“The RDER process draws upon the strength of iterative feedback loops between warfighters and technologists throughout the testing and experimentation phase,” Shyu said.
Shyu on Wednesday said the RDER experimentation sprints will help accelerate technology prototyping efforts in some cases “by two to four years” compared to the traditional capability development process.
The Pentagon’s Deputy’s Action Management Group (DMAG) — which brings together the four-star leaders of the military services, combatant commands and joint staff and is led by the deputy defense secretary and Joint Chiefs Vice Chairman — met last fall to discuss moving forward on prototypes that showed success and promising military utility during over the previous year (Defense Daily, Aug. 30).
The DMAG was “highly successful,” according to Shyu, who said there is work now to build in funding plans in the services’ five-year budgeting projections and DoD plans to hold another such meeting this fall to consider promising technologies assessed over the next year’s experimentation events.
While details have not been provided on specific prototypes, Shyu noted during her remarks on Wednesday that capability areas RDER has looked to address include Counter-Command, Control, Computing, Communications, Cyber, Intelligence, Surveillance, Reconnaissance and Targeting, or C-C5ISRT, contested logistics, joint fires, command and control and information advantage.
The new AUKUS trilateral security agreement between the U.S., U.K. and Australia includes an initiative, dubbed Pillar 2, focused on increasing cooperation on technologies like artificial intelligence, unmanned systems, cybersecurity and space systems.
In December, the defense ministers of the AUKUS partnership countries committed to several activities and timelines for cooperation on Pillar 2 of the partnership, including a series of experiments for autonomous maritime systems (Defense Daily, Dec. 4, 2023).