The Air Force Battle Lab wasn’t actually a lab, it was a group of seven mission-specific labs. The battle lab existed [from 1997-2007] to pair adapted mature technology with novel operating concepts to generate new warfighting solutions.
That was from Mike Benitez over at WotR, Bring back the Air Force battle lab. Here’s a little more on that from a nice paper by John McAfee called Acquisition Dominance:
Battlelabs were a concept employed by the Air Force to harness tech push by having operators and engineers collaborate to operationalize off-the-shelf technology addressing not just the technology but the associated doctrine and operating concepts.
Battlelabs generated tremendous capabilities for the warfighter. Unfortunately, despite having a small $5M budget, the Air Force cut the program due to problems with transitioning the technology opportunities, specifically, inability to POM (allocate resources) for a program without an “approved” requirement per the PPBE process. Taking a somewhat niche solution set devised by a warfighter and technologist team at a battlelab into a highly centralized, high-level POM process competing with major programs, macro problems, and core concerns is a challenge few battlelab initiatives could face.
Even after a successful POM, the transition into the formal acquisition process and thus to industry introduces a self-defeating lead-time for delivery of the solutions which are intended to be inherently responsive. Industry may not be interested in picking up a solution if the business case doesn’t support it. The fact that the technology needed to be transitioned to industry at all may have thus been the problem.
As the idea of organic acquisition was apparently never considered, this precluded transition to military units and the force structure allocations necessary to do so. The AF battlelab experience is representative of challenges many research labs face. If you want your technology to succeed outside a lab, you also have to devise a way for industry to profit from it.
The whole paper is interesting and argues for greater government participation in programs, including organic development. In my opinion, this concept of “owning the technical baseline” and reform of the PPBE are inextricably linked.
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