The Navy needs “to think and act differently” to develop and acquire innovative capabilities more quickly and some of the ways this can be done include using digital engineering and modeling tools, open and modular architectures, and better leveraging intellectual property rights, Nickolas Guertin, the nominee to lead the Navy’s development and acquisition efforts, said on Wednesday.
The Navy needs to embrace digital tools such as model-based engineering to build systems faster given a “world now where almost everything is software-defined or controlled,” Guertin told the Senate Armed Services Committee during his confirmation hearing to be the assistant secretary of the Navy for research, development acquisition.
Guertin has been serving as the Defense Department’s Director of Operational Test and Evaluation since December 2020 and told the panel that, if confirmed as the Navy’s acquisition chief, he will draw on his current work to bring automation to technology development to “rapidly field capabilities that work and can also be built to scale.” He pointed to “digital twins and other tools” as “powerful opportunities” to automate testing.
Defense companies are increasingly using digital twins, which are digital models of products and systems they are developing and upgrading, to more affordably and accurately design, test and develop weapons and platforms.
Guertin is an engineer by training and vocation and has spent 40 years serving the Navy and DoD in active and reserve duty and as a civilian. He is also an expert in open architectures for defense systems.
Responding to a question from Sen. Ted Budd (R-N.C.) about what the Navy can do this year to purchase ships to deter a potential Chinese invasion of Taiwan in 2027, Guertin highlighted his past successes and projects around “open architectures and using modularity to focus the efforts necessary for delivering capability and making sure it works excellently.” Executing in these areas and with the adoption of digital tools as soon as possible will allow for systems to be upgraded and improved “as a matter of course instead of something that’s extraordinarily different,” he added.
Budd also asked what Guertin will do to increase the “capacity and resilience” of the defense industrial base at a time when the Navy is “making historic investments in munitions” while often being wed to a single producer for certain weapons.
Guertin, who during his opening statement said he’s in the position “to take on the greatest job I’ve ever dreamt of,” responded “that’s another great topic of mine” and that competition and having multiple vendors will lead to better and more effective outcomes. This can be accomplished by better leveraging existing authorities on intellectual property, he said.
“The best way to do that is to more rigorously apply the government’s rules on intellectual property, so we could share the necessary pieces while preserving industry’s ability to innovate and secure their golden tickets, if you will, but also to use the information coming out of where the government has invested its money so we can get more vendors into the game of building munitions specifically,” Guertin said.
Later in the hearing, Guertin told Sen. Angus King (I/D-Maine) that the government needs to more “aggressively utilize” its rights around intellectual property (IP).
King said the government should be purchasing the IP when it acquires platforms, adding that his “vision” is to have 3-D printing technology on every Navy ship to build things like pipes and valves and other things so that the service has the capacity to do upgrades rather than have a vessel laid up for lengthy refurbishment efforts.
King also noted that the strain on the U.S. defense industrial base from Russia’s ongoing war in Ukraine is one of the lessons of the conflict. Guertin agreed, highlighting “how fast they’re burning through munitions” and that if the U.S. will have to take on an adversary it will need “deep bunkers” of these munitions and “we’re going to have to really ramp up the quantity of weapons that we have available to us.”
Guertin also agreed with King that one of the best “demand signals” the DoD can send to industry is establishing multi-year procurements for munitions. DoD Acquisition Chief William LaPlante is already doing “some excellent work in this area” using existing authorities.