In unmanned maritime systems, the Navy’s learning curve and operational experience is rapidly accelerating… For example, Task Force 59 is challenging the process in which a Fleet Commander can identify game changing, largely commercially developed technologies; develop and test new CONOPs; conduct exercises, and provide operationally informed recommendations to the Navy’s Unmanned Task Force for funding. But that is not how the process actually works. The Unmanned Task Force cannot immediately move to fund a capability (> $10M) that is not already a previously funded requirement. The Navy would need to develop a new requirement and secure new funding before the task force could move to quickly fund promising technologies to help close current gaps in the kill chain.
That’s from the excellent director of unmanned systems in DASN ships, Dorothy Engelhardt, writing in the Navy’s unmanned systems newsletter The Disruptor. Be sure to read the whole thing, interesting throughout — including an article on Task Force 59 and its IMX 22 at-sea exercise.
I’d imagine there are limited opportunities for $10M below-threshold-reprogrammings. Each program element can only reprogram 20% or $10M, whichever is less. To do unmanned prototyping/development, you’d have to find all the program elements that include USV/UUV activities in their budget justification — which isn’t likely more than a handful — and then have that funding prioritized over all other requests. Internal approvals could still take months.
Acquisition theory is that all the great stuff from the labs, industry IRAD, and commercial sector can be experimented with at scale, which informs the concepts of operations, that in turns outlines the requirements to be funded and executed. Not only is that market research experimentation often underfunded, it would still take years to feed the results into the programming of the budget. This can kill the benefits of quick feedback loops between building, testing, and resource allocation.
Here’s more from Dorothy:
It will take at least two years, and possibly longer, before any of the potential game-changing ideas or technologies identified in IMX 22 could receive initial funding beyond service-related efforts. Once the funding is secured it will ostensibly be 2025 or 2026 before a single prototype hits the water to begin testing.
Congress recognized the need to evaluate and potentially modernize our current budgeting processes by forming the PPBE Commission. Defense budgeting is the final frontier in re-creating a Department that can be more adaptive to respond to changes unfolding across the unmanned battlefield today. We no longer have the time to be hobbled by outdated policies or restrictions that were first put into place during the Cold War.
The future of warfare at sea is not only filled with programs forged from “steel” but is now being fought by digitally intelligent warfighters who can maneuver, adapt, and change the calculus instantaneously if they are equipped with a modern set of unmanned systems built from the ground up to fight in this increasingly autonomous world. The opportunity is here to build both a requirements and budgetary processes that keep pace with emerging technologies trajectory.
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