By Emelie Rutherford
Modular and open-system designs can help the Marine Corps as it looks to build multi-use systems for morphing warfare environments, the executive director of the service’ equipment-buying command said recently.
John Burrow, the executive director of Marine Corps Systems Command (MARCORSYSCOM), said in August at Marine Corps Base Quantico, Va., that one of the main challenges for his acquisition shop is creating “multi-mission, multi-environment” weapon systems.
That means systems “that can operate anywhere in the world, any time of the year, against any threat to meet a mission that could have been planned or could have evolved over the last X number of hours,” he said at a expeditionary-warfare wargame hosted by the National Defense Industrial Association.
“I challenge industry out there to start thinking about not (only) the singular way that we build and design systems, but to start thinking about…the modularity and adaptability, the open-system designs associated with the products you deliver,” he said. “Because they’re going to operate differently. The missions will change. That’s a given. And the environment is 360 (degrees), full volume.”
Burrow told the military and industry crowd that open-systems design is one of the key “enablers” his command sees as it grapples with equipping troops for hybrid-warfare environments.
“I’m talking about standards-based” systems, he said, “whether it’s computer systems, the computing plant itself, or the interfaces associated with it, the power plants associated with it, or physical components, whether it’s something on one of the platforms, one of our ground vehicles, or our sensors, or our weapons.”
Having open-systems designs in place helps the Marine Corps to quickly upgrade those systems with new technologies in a cost-efficient manner.
“That is another major thrust I think that you’re going to see in the Department of Navy,” he said.
Burrow said another such “enabler” for his command is the use of “scalable modular designs” for systems and platforms. He said when he talks about such design arrangements he is referring to platforms, weapons, sensors, and systems with components that can be removed and interchanged.
“If I’m operating today in this environment, I can equip this platform or this system with one set of packages, and tomorrow I can go in another operational warfighting requirement and I can equip it with something else,” he said. “So the operational demand, the environment in which we’re operating, the systems that we have provide the flexibility for you the warfighter to equip it as you see fit in order to go and fight and win.”
Systems scalability, he added, helps equipment buyers affordably field capabilities that meet threshold requirements in the near term and then later evolve the systems to meet longer-term objectives in requirements documents.
“From a design point of view, (MARCORSYSCOM is focused on) open design, modular design, scalable design,” he said, “and making sure from a technical perspective that when we build and we meet our threshold requirements that we can start to evolve these systems to meet our longer-term objective and do that affordable and fast.”