The Defense Department is developing a third “offset” strategy focused on maintaining the United States’ advantage in precision guided munitions (PGM), Deputy Defense Secretary Robert Work said Tuesday.
The third offset, he said, is a two-pronged approach: a jab and punch. Work said the “jab” is winning a precision guided munitions war. DoD, he said, wants industry to offer new and non-kinetic solutions to provide it with the “punch” to knock-out the adversary.
“We have to devise new means of exploiting the commercial sector in more innovative ways than we have been doing in the past,” Work told an audience at the Credit Suisse/McAleese and Associates conference in downtown Washington. “We want to creatively disrupt our defense ecosystem, because we will either creatively disrupt it ourselves, or we will be disrupted by someone else.”
Work said another goal of the third offset strategy is to take existing PGMs and use them differently. He cited how DoD targeted a ship with a Raytheon [RTN] Tomahawk cruise missile and demonstrated the capability to fire at ships over 1,000 nautical mile range. Work said the missile was originally designed as an anti-ship missile with a 300 nautical mile range.
DoD, Work said, is dedicating “real funding” to this effort. While he did not list a specific dollar figure, Work said DoD, over the past several years, was able to invest about $12 billion in science and technology (S&T) accounts and the department would like to increase that. He also said the fiscal year 2016 budget creates a reserve account for these innovative technologies and also invests in technologies DoD believes will provide a “big advantage.”
DoD is also pursuing a broad business processes and system review, Work said, with the goal of freeing up money through productivity improvement to invest in modernization and, ultimately, the third offset strategy. Work said this is a 90-day study focusing on what he called DoD’s six primary business units that it spends $134 billion executing: human resources; acquisition and procurement; logistics and service contract; real estate; health care and financial management. Work said he’d like to get 10 percent productivity improvement out of his business system review.
Though Work said the third offset is still developing, he said he expected these types of technologies to be affiliated: robotics, autonomous operated guidance and control systems, visualization, biotechnology, miniaturization, advanced computing and big data, advanced energetics, additive manufacturing and 3D printing. These are being driven by the commercial sector, he said, unlike the 1970s when technologies like stealth were being driven by the government.
Work said this third offset strategy is not like unsuccessful acquisition reform efforts in the past. He said the third offset is not “defense transformation 2.0,” which he said led to a number of bloated and poorly thought out programs where DoD threw out learned experience in procurement, thinking it would change the rules of the procurement game.
“In almost every case, we gooned it up,” Work said. “We’re still paying for those in a large way.”