During
Information Dissemination’s June 2012 Fifth Anniversary Month, an article by
Megan Eckstein in Inside
the Navy (18 June 2012—behind the firewall) detailed the December 2011
formation of the “Navy Directed Energy Steering Group”, constituted in order to
provide “‘strategic goals, guiding principles, missionary priorities, roles and
responsibilities and overarching objectives regarding the acquisition and
fielding of DEW across the Navy and the Marine Corps,’ said David Stoudt,
senior director of naval capabilities and readiness, and the executive
secretary of the steering group.”.
Stoudt further explains in the Inside the Navy piece: “By bringing in
OPNAV and headquarters [of the] Marine Corps and the warfighters and the fleets
and all that, that’s where you go through the process of identifying what kind
of military gaps are out there, and then we help the technologists identify
where their capabilities could land should they be successful," Stoudt
said. “So that’s kind of the marriage that’s happening right now with the steering
group."
There
appears to be more to this than just a bureaucratic initiative. The integration of disruptive technology is
never easy…hence, the name.
Institutional interests align in order to protect the status quo, the
psychological impact of “sunk costs” seem overwhelming, upgrades of existing
technologies suddenly appear at a fraction of the cost of the emerging
modalities, and timelines become ever-extended as science and
technology/research and development investments chase safer and more easily
fielded technology. Steering Group
Executive Secretary Stoudt put it this way in the Inside the Navy piece, with
my emphasis added: “These capabilities are going to have to earn their way onto
the battlefield, meaning if they don’t bring something new to the warfighters that they
can’t do either more cheaply some other way or by some pre-existing capability,
it’s going to be very difficult to get these things on the battlefield."
There
is in this statement, something of an acknowledgement of the difficulty
Directed Energy and Electric Weapons Systems (DEEWS) face. That is, if one were to survey current validated Navy capability requirements,
it is difficult for DEEWS to displace current approaches to servicing them,
given the development costs necessary to bring DEEWS to the point of maturity. So in this case—there is little reason to
aggressively pursue them. When
requirements officers are then presented with operational capabilities that
current systems cannot possibly achieve—but which are tailor-made for DEEWS,
one often hears, “well, we don’t have a requirement for that.” And so, absent a requirement, the development
costs necessary to mature the disruptive technology are applied to technologies
servicing validated military requirements.
This vicious cycle reinforces the view often heard from DEEWS critics
that “lasers have been just around the corner” for decades.
We
live in austere budgetary times, and the tax-paying American public has a right
to expect its Navy to question expenses and to manage the budget in a way that
provides required current readiness and acceptable future capability. This often drives smart, visionary people to
adopt short term mindsets when faced with tough budgetary questions. After all, a Requirements Officer has a two
or three year tour in the Pentagon, and he/she makes their bones by presenting
leadership with balanced programs. That
balance is at most, a POM measurement, and is more precisely, a next-year’s
budget target.
I
believe the primary value in the new Directed Energy Steering Group will be in
its capacity to think beyond the requirements/cost cycle that frustrates the
both the introduction of DEEWS technologies and the THINKING that invariably must precede their introduction. At an action officer level, the Steering
Group can help break the cycle by gathering a cross-section of the community of
interest—to include CONOPS developers, requirements officers, technologists,
acquisition professionals, and operators, and perhaps generating concepts
enabled by emerging technologies.
Ultimately
it will take leadership at the policy and oversight level to plant flags on the
battlefield and say “We need to get here, and we need to get here by a certain
date. We understand the near-term costs,
but the future capabilities and efficiencies more than justify the short term
pain.” This vision then can begin to
take form through the annual POM process that defines where Navy is going and
the fundamental strategy it will follow to get there. This is the opportunity to express the need
that will eventually become the kind of formal requirement that a future weapon
system development would respond to.
Engaging and overcoming the “requirements gap” is a function the new
Directed Energy Steering Group should consider; it will make all the difference
in the long-run.
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