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 WASHINGTON - The Navy more than a decade ago decided it
needed a jet ski that military operators could safely take
out to sea for rescue missions and other risky assignments.
It bought several jet skis from a commercial vendor that had
agreed to “militarize” the vehicle so it could survive in
rough ocean waters.
But the supplier eventually
decided that selling to the military was a money-losing
proposition. The orders were too small to justify the cost
of customizing the jet ski, so it discontinued the product.
So for the past six years, engineers at the Navy Surface
Warfare Center in Carderock, Maryland, have been developing
a military-focused jet ski, called “small assault vessel
expeditionary.”
“It's still a work in progress,” said
a Carderock engineer who declined to be identified and was
showing off the custom-designed jet ski at the Pentagon May
14. The NSWC and other military laboratories were there
displaying dozens of technologies for the Defense
Department's first ever “DoD Lab Day” event.
The
Navy's jet ski is just one example of the many pieces of
equipment that the military is designing in-house because
the commercial industry won't do it. “The supplier wanted
orders for hundreds and we were only buying a handful,” said
the Carderock engineer. Commercial vendors are all about
manufacturing volume and low cost, but what about the
performance the military needs? “We were able to build one
from the ground up, it is durable and oceangoing,” he said.
“As an engineer, this has been a fun project.”
The
reality is that “some things we are going to have to
continue to do for ourselves,” said Alan R. Shaffer,
principal deputy assistant secretary of defense for research
and engineering.
The Pentagon soon will be setting up
shop in Silicon Valley in an effort to recruit private
sector innovators. But its massive in-house technology
enterprise is not going away. The Defense Department today
employs more than 100,000 scientists and engineers,
including 38,000 who work at 60 laboratories spread across
22 states.
“The DoD is the largest employer of
engineers in the country,” Shaffer said in an interview at
the Pentagon during the lab day event.
The Pentagon
needs the private sector, but the labs are just as essential
because they bridge the gap between military-unique
requirements and commercial innovation, Shaffer said. “What
we have to do in our defense laboratories is to be flexible
to either build it ourselves or work with industry to put
the special military wrapper around a commercial product.”
The Pentagon's 2016 budget request for technology
research, development and testing is $69.6 billion — $6.1
billion higher than the 2015 funding.
Defense
technology spending might pale in comparison to commercial
R&D investment, but the Pentagon has many specialized needs
that the private sector will not fund. Silicon Valley giants
like Google and Facebook are generating amazing innovation,
but “we can't win a war with that,” Shaffer said. “That's a
lot of money but not a lot of product.”
Defense
laboratories increasingly are teaming up with private firms
so they can inject commercial innovation into military
products. These so-called “cooperative research and
development agreements” are extremely valuable, Shaffer
said. “I think CRADAs are terrific.” DoD currently has more
than 4,000 agreements with private businesses. One of the
private sector's biggest success stories in the space
business, SpaceX, began its inroads into the military market
via a CRADA.
At DoD lab day, Deputy Defense Secretary
Robert Work presented the directors of three military
laboratories with a $45 million prize for their work in
quantum information science — an area of study based on the
idea that information science depends on quantum effects in
physics. There is commercial investment in quantum
information science, Shaffer said. But many applications,
like submarine detection or remotely mapping a tunnel, are
unique to the military.
Work said the Pentagon is
looking for commercial innovations in robotics, analytics,
big data and additive manufacturing. The military labs are
being asked to scour the market for these technologies “so
we understand what's going on, and use that innovative
technology in our products.”
Outside the Defense
Department, company executives and industry analysts have
been hugely skeptical of the Pentagon's outreach to
commercial industries.
The cultural divide between
defense and commercial business is too wide, said Michael
Horowitz, associate professor of political science at the
University of Pennsylvania. “We know the DoD process is too
slow and not nimble. It discourages innovation,” he said May
13 during an online forum hosted by the Atlantic Council.
As long as the U.S. military remains the world's most
technologically advanced, there is little motivation to
change, he said. “It's hard to innovate when you're number
one.”
The Defense Department often does not
understand the pace of play in the private sector, said
retired Army Lt. Gen. Patrick O'Reilly, a non-resident
fellow at the Atlantic Council and senior vice president of
a startup company in Silicon Valley called Alphabet Energy.
The Pentagon, for instance, created a “rapid innovation
fund” in 2011 to quickly transition promising technology
from the private sector to the military. It was a “great
idea,” said O'Reilly, but it's not rapid enough. Proposals
this year are due in June, but contract awards are scheduled
for June 2016. “Small companies can't wait a year for a
decision.”
By Sandra I. Erwin
Assistant Secretary of Defense, Research & Engineering
Provided
through DVIDS
Copyright 2015
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