Increasing the speed at which the Defense Department develops and fields emerging technologies is a primary cause for reorganizing the Pentagon’s acquisition structure.
Pat Shanahan, the newly installed deputy secretary of defense overseeing the reorganization of the former chief weapon buyer into two new positions, said speed and rapid enhancement of existing systems with emerging technologies is a personal goal.
He will be pushing from the top of the acquisition structure for requiring that new weapons and systems be capable of accepting “rapid enhancement,” Shanahan told defense reporters during an Aug. 2 roundtable at the Pentagon.
“I think about the guys who have a Tesla and overnight while you’re sleeping a software upgrade comes along and the car gets smarter or fixes a quality problem,” he said. “Not everything is about a software update. How can we be more modular? Can we do plug-and-play?”
Rapid enhancement is a concept that has been batted around as a solution to the military’s inability to keep pace with modern technology development. It is also referred to as “technology refresh” and “rapid prototyping.” The concept is enabled by requirements and standards for modular, open-systems architectures (MOSA) into which emerging technologies can plug and operate seamlessly.
Just about everyone involved in Defense Department acquisition agrees that future, software defined systems should have open architectures, but industry and the Pentagon do not see eye-to-eye on how to implement the concept. Shanahan intends to find a way through the logjam. He said “there is increased interest” in enabling rapid enhancement of weapons systems during and after the development process.
Future weapon systems, especially those that are software-driven, must accept upgrades on the fly to keep pace with both the state of the art and enemy capabilities, Shanahan said. That mandates that open architectures be required in development of platforms and a culture-shift away from an acquisition bureaucracy that infamously takes years to field new systems, Shanahan said.
“To me, it’s great if you have technology, but if adding functionality and capability takes a really long time, it’s a big opportunity,” he said. “If you have something already baselines, how can you insert [technology] more rapidly.”
Figuring out how to implement rapid technology insertion, on new and legacy platforms, falls to the newly created undersecretary of research and engineering (R&E). Fielding the technologies that pass muster and keeping them relevent is the responsibility of the counterpart USD for acquisition and sustainment (A&S). Even the new structure of the Pentagon’s acquisition civilian leadership will be enhanced as it is implemented, he said.
“Its first form will not be its final form,” he said. “Let’s dive into each of the little boxes right now and talk about what it’s going to do and three months from now we’ll have more definition and in six months, we won’t be talking about definition, we’ll be talking about things we’ve accomplished.”
The lengthy process and bloated bureaucracy to which Defense Department acquisition programs are legally bound has become an anchor slowing technological progress compared with potential adversaries, according to the congressionally-mandated report outlining the acquisition restructure.
“To outpace the threat and sieze on technological opportunities, the development of advanced capabilities must be a top strategic objective for the DoD,” the report says. “A culture of innovation that is rooted at the highest levels of DoD is required and each echelon of the department must be structured to rapidly adapt and field capabilities that leverage the advances that are occurring at an ever-increasing pace in the commercial and defense technology sectors.”
The two new undersecretaries will drive that culture of innovation under Shanahan’s direction. The USD R&E is tasked to “develop and promulgate policy that implements alternate pathways to innovate, develop, exploit and transition technology, to include commercial technology,” the report says. In parallel, the USD A&S will “develop joint weapon system sustainment policy for addressing standard and rapid capability development efforts.”
“The department must increasingly leverage prototyping, experimentation and other developmental activities in order to retire technical risk before either weighing down the research and engineering phase with costly procurement decisions or weighing down a procurement program with costly technical risk,” the report says.
A former Boeing [BA] executive, Shanahan has firsthand experience with government acquisition. He said industry is on board with providing rapid upgrades to new and existing military systems, but is often hamstrung by the existing Byzantine acquisition process.
“Coming from industry, we wanted to do that,” Shanahan said. “But we created a system where that wasn’t part of the design and when upgrades would come it was this fairly long, very technical, disciplined processed.”
“In the areas where we can do a clean sheet, [rapid enahcements] become more of the requirements,” he said. “With systems that weren’t designed to do it that fast, we’ve got to get creative.”