ANDREW EVERSDEN
WASHINGTON: The Pentagon’s new innovation steering group has taken its first steps toward transitioning innovative technology from prototyping to programs of record, starting with the basics of identifying the number of innovation organizations across the military.
Speaking Tuesday at the Association of Old Crows conference, Undersecretary of Defense for Research and Engineering Heidi Shyu outlined ongoing efforts by the steering group to improve the department’s ability to transition innovative technologies into programs of record. The steering group was created earlier this year by Deputy Secretary of Defense Kathleen Hicks.
“It’s the principal form for us to drive systemic strategy, policy, programmatic, cultural and budgetary changes,” Shyu said.
The group has created a “map” of innovation organizations across the department, she said. That has allowed her to get a better understanding of the goals of the “over 20” organizations on the list, in addition to their missions, budget and types of products procured.
The steering group is planning to create a database that will centrally house information about what these organizations have bought into the Pentagon, which Shyu hopes will provide insight for other entities with similar problems across the military.
“I want to be able to share this into a database. I want to be able to do analysis and be able to do analytics and … extract information from it,” Shyu said.
The group is also reviewing the infrastructure at the department’s large collection of research labs and testing sites across the country to assess what capabilities they have and what they lack. It’s asking questions about the types of investments the labs and test facilities are and aren’t making, and what the implications of those decisions are.
“That is the path that we’re on, trying to get information collected so we have a holistic view across the DoD, across the entire lab infrastructure test enterprise,” Shyu said.
Joint Experimentation
Earlier this year, the Defense Department created the Rapid Defense Experimentation Reserve to fund joint experimentation projects with an eye toward enabling Joint All-Domain Command and Control, the Pentagon’s effort to connect sensors and shooters on the future battlefield. The RDER fund “encourages prototyping and experimentation to solve joint capability gaps,” Shyu said.
Shyu said that officials have worked closely with the Joint Chiefs of Staff to understand joint capability gaps that RDER funds could help solve. Areas identified included all-domain command and control, contested logistics and long-range fires. Shyu said department officials went back to the services and asked what promising technologies they had between technology readiness levels five and seven, essentially the middle of prototype testing.
“Each of the services is clearly working on their own services capability gap so there’s a missing piece in terms of when we fight in a conflict,” Shyu said. “We don’t fight within a single service, we fight jointly.”
Shyu’s team has been working with combatant commands and services to identify experimentation ideas that they want to conduct. The research and engineering staff recently gave the COCOMS and services five weeks to submit white papers for joint experimentation ideas and received 203 responses, which was “far more than we expected,” Shyu said.
Her team presented a list of 32 top projects they wanted to fund to top department officials, including the vice chairman of the joint chiefs, though Shyu didn’t provide specific examples. She added that her team would like to continue to engage the services and combatant commands for experimentation ideas twice per year, with the potential to expand to industry.
“What we would like to do is open it up to industry to see if they have products that [are] TRL five to seven maturity level, to bring it to see if they can fulfill either the capability gap or even a portion of that capability gap,” Shyu said.
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