Senior Pentagon leaders will convene this fall to consider which projects from the first round of the department’s new rapid experimentation campaign to address joint warfighting capability gaps will receive funding for rapid fielding, a lead official said Tuesday.
Heidi Shyu, the under secretary of defense for research and engineering, said the 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 — will discuss next steps for prototypes in the Rapid Defense Experimentation Reserve (RDER) program that showed success during recent testing.
“We have a list of projects that are mature, that are ready to go to fielding,” Shyu told reporters following her remarks at the National Defense Industrial Association’s (NDIA) Emerging Technologies for Defense conference.
Shyu has spearheaded the RDER initiative, which is an experimentation campaign to bring in promising technologies that could help address joint warfighting capability gaps.
While details have not been provided on specific prototypes, Shyu reiterated RDER is focused on “scenario-specific” capability gaps, with an eye toward the Indo-Pacific, with the services now able to discuss being the lead entity for future fielding and procurement quantities during the DMAG process.
“There is one project…where two services said [they] will be the lead agent. That means there’s interest across the services for that capability, and currently there’s no program office within any of the services for that [capability],” Shyu said.
After establishing priority technology areas for RDER, Shyu noted selected technologies went through testing with the National Guard earlier this year at Camp Atterbury in Indiana and that prototypes that showed success were selected for further experimentation during the recent Northern Edge exercise.
“This seems to work well for RDER, because a lot of planning needs to happen before you can bring all your assets to a location and then you train the users,” Shyu said, when asked if future RDER sprints will follow a similar process leading up to DMAG consideration.
Deputy Defense Secretary Kathleen Hicks has previously said RDER is key to solving the department’s “complicated system” for transitioning promising new technologies into actual programs, emphasizing that the program’s successes will be directly reflected in future funding priorities (Defense Daily, April 12 2022).
“What RDER does is it brings those solutions to me so I can tee up for the secretary [of defense] that these are solutions that are worth us investing some [dollars] against. We decide to do that and then you see it in the budget. There’s no mystery in that,” Hicks told reporters at the time.