What are they not telling us about Navy experimental exercises?

The Navy and Marine Corps are continuing a series of exercises to understand what technologies and tactics the services need to rapidly develop to fight in high-end future conflicts.

The goal of each Advanced Naval Technology Exercises, or ANTX, is to get potential technologies to prototype and into the hands of the warfighter within 12 to 18 months, officials said.

“We’ve been laser-focused on accelerating the adoption rate of mature, fieldable technologies,” Carly Jackson, director of prototyping for information warfare for Space and Naval Warfare Systems’ (SPAWAR) …

In 2017, an ANTX event focused on ship-to-shore maneuver surveyed 150 emerging technologies, and the Navy incorporated 20 into fleet experimentation events and exercises Bold Alligator and Dawn Blitz, Jackson said. Those 20 technologies, in turn, led to seven prototyping lines of effort – some still ongoing – and informed four programs of record.

That was from US Naval Institute News.

Now, certainly these efforts from the Navy seem to align with good system design principles. A lot of the exercises imply open architecture, standard interfaces, and modular design. It also suggests rapid iterations, mature technologies, and operational testing.

Yet this is just one manifestation of the philosophy of incrementalism in systems design. What will make the Navy ANTX exercises successful when others in the defense acquisition system have failed for the past 75 years?

In the article, ANTX is discussed with almost no reference to all the institutional processes. So it makes me wonder, how are they lining up funds for this stuff? They got 7 prototyping lines of effort. Did that go through the whole PPBS process? Did it get broken out in the President’s Budget JDOCs? Did they have Milestone A decisions, or other 5000 activities? Did they skip the JCIDS process? Did they use OTAs, or other special contract authorities?

Then ANTX “informed” four programs of record. Likely, they were prototyped components that updated the component plans of existing major programs. But it seems that the Navy will still have to “shop” technologies from ANTX around to major programs for their incorporation. Otherwise, they would face the realities of the institutional barriers to new program entry. Still, there seems to be a mismatch between 12-18 month cycle times of these prototypes and the 5 or 10 year development cycle of legacy platforms. Here’s some more:

The exercises serve as an “accelerator” to bring together warfighters with tech developers. “We facilitate them through a series of workshops, evaluation exercises, exploration events and experimentation events that advance warfighting concepts and tactics at high velocities,” she said, adding that industry and academia are involved “very early in this process.”

The irony is that successful prototypes will then have to enter the institutional process, which then makes their success unlikely. So it means experimenting around the edges of legacy platforms. And new firms won’t get excited about that. They want to see scale in the future. And that means it would have to come at the expense of incumbent defense firms.

But how would they win a major development program? The future is already jammed packed with programming that has been cultivated by the incumbents for years.

HT: Mark.