By Geoff Fein
Realizing the need to look beyond traditional defense companies and open the door to new solutions for warfighters, the Pentagon is embarking on several efforts, including a new Techipedia, to improve coordination, collaboration and transition of technologies.
“There is a lot of improvement we can make in how we serve the warfighter,” John Young, the Pentagon’s acquisition chief, told attendees yesterday at the Emerging Technologies for Defense Applications conference in Arlington, Va.
“We have to be able, as a nation and as an acquisition and technology team supporting the warfighter, to provide the capability to defeat any adversary any time anywhere in the world,” Young said.
Young emphasized that the willingness to open the door to new solutions either from within the Department of Defense (DoD) or from previous unknown sources is critical to the military’s ability to address the challenges in the current environment.
An environment, he added, “Where our adversaries don’t labor under all the traditional ideas, processes and behaviors that we have in our system. They are capable of adapting new methods and technology in days, hours, in some cases, and certainly weeks. Our processes don’t [always] measure themselves in those time lines.”
Young pointed to initiatives and investments DoD has made in a broad range of technologies, from biometrics to armor. “We have made critical investments in armor.”
DoD worked that solution extremely well through the Mine Resistant Ambush Protected vehicle program, he added.
“That process started with agility,” Young said. “Agility on the behalf of the S&T team. The willingness to look at new ideas, the willingness to adopt those new behaviors, new tools that can help the warfighter, new sources outside the DoD and traditional contractors, to get what we need to confront this broad range of emerging threats.”
Greater emphasis also needs to be placed on transitioning technology, Young told attendees. “It’s one of our biggest challenges.”
One dimension of that, he noted, is the lack of early and frequent interaction between the science and technology and acquisition communities needed to accomplish technology transition.
The budget process also limits the military’s flexibility, Young added.
As an example, he told attendees that if they had a great idea today, with the budget nearing completion, DoD would have to wait until the Program Objective Memorandum ’11 to get something in. Maybe DoD could get a congressional appropriation for a significant program effort in October 2010, Young added.
“Frankly it is a negative burden on the enterprise to have no more agility than that for our budget process,” Young said. “The department needs to develop more effective and strategic approaches for technology transition, and some of that is going to have to come down to, inevitably, our budget processes and being able to move money.”
Other areas that need improvement are the communications between industry and DoD, and the time it takes to get a contract within the DoD process.
One effort Young said that should provide assistance is the DoD Techipedia. The new website rolled out Oct. 1 and is modeled after the Internet encyclopedia Wikipedia, and Intellipedia, an online tool used by the intelligence community for collaborative data sharing.
The Techipedia website will contain information about research and development across the DoD, Young said.
Techipedia will help DoD improve coordination, collaboration, communication and transition of technology within the science and technology community, Young said.
DoD spends $10 billion annually on science and technology, Young noted. “We have to leverage those investments more effectively to rapidly respond to the warfighter.”
“It’s amazing to me that we don’t have a better tool set for all of us to look across that $10 billion and understand what’s being done in the department, irrespective of service lines or agency lines. We have to improve that,” he said. “You want to do this so all individuals out there executing some of that $10 billion can look elsewhere in their [DoD] family to see if someone else has tried an idea or is pursuing a similar course of research. Maybe we can get the collaboration and coordination and avoid duplication and avoid learning lessons two or three times in our enterprise.”
DoD will add more capability to the Techipedia site, including an external wiki by next spring to enable industry access, Young said.
It’s Young’s hope that providing the DoD Techipedia will shorten the time to field solutions, as well as improve the confidence of Congress and taxpayers that the Pentagon has a coherent, coordinated, collaborative program.
Another key piece of the Techipedia family of services is a defense solutions portal, Young said.
Defensesolutions.gov will let innovative companies, entrepreneurs, and research organizations submit potential solutions to the DoD, he said. The web portal is based on similar effort, the Defence Enterprise Center, rolled out earlier this year by the United Kingdom’s Ministry of Defence.
The desire is to have a one-stop-shop where companies can bring ideas and then folks in S&T can help the companies find their way through the DoD process, Young said. “The portal gives us exactly that chance.”
Initially, the portal will be limited to a small number of interest areas where DoD is seeking non-traditional solutions from non-traditional companies and applications and technologies than can be demonstrated and fielded within two years, Young said.
Those areas include battlefield forensics, fingerprinting technologies, and DNA management.
Young said these pieces have the feel that DoD is moving into the realm of law enforcement.
“We will use the tool sets of law enforcement because they are powerful on today’s battlefield, especially in the terrorism space,” he said.