As reported by our friend Chris Cavas, at an American Society of Naval Engineers symposium this week, we heard an interesting series of statements from those who are responsible for providing the tools we give our Sailors to take to sea.
In the background we could also see an enlightening contrast between the tinkerer and the warfighter.
First, the tinkerer;
“How do we deliver the capabilities going forward, what does it take to do that?” John Burrow, the Navy’s top civilian official for research, test and evaluation, asked a professional audience in Washington on Tuesday. “It takes investment, a willingness to take on risk, a willingness to fail.”
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“From an engineering point of view — a science point of view — if we don’t push the envelope, take it to the outer edge, we’re not going to achieve the capabilities we need.”Without pointing to specific entities, Burrow decried critics who focus on defects.
“We need to be willing to go off road, to change direction,” he said, noting that it’s not always apparent at the beginning of a program what eventually will be needed.
“I don’t think we can get a group of people to deliver a requirements package that’s perfect,” he said, “and then at the end we have trouble with cost and schedule. I submit that with that linear process, we shouldn’t be surprised that we have problems at the end.”
Is he really speaking of two different things here, experimentation vs. the need for functional systems at sea? Is his problem that two different goals have been welded together and as a result, produces an inferior product?
We’ve often discussed the compounding nature of technology risk and the danger that places programs run under concurrency. It is the secondary effect of concurrency that I believe he is complaining about.
The first part of his quote is spot on about basic research and development. You test a lot of things expecting a lot of failures. That way we know what doesn’t work, and can refine the refinable to get something of use, an improvement, or perhaps even a breakthrough.
The second part is the classic requirements battle of change and disconnect. When you look at the dog’s breakfast of DDG-1000 and LCS in particular, you can see where we have a forced pairing of technology development & concept evaluation with a very real need to get warships in to the fleet; concurrency. As a result, we really haven’t done either very well or in an acceptable timeframe.
Now for the warfighter;
Read the comments from Rear Admiral Pete Fanta, USN, Director Surface Warfare (N96). He threw out some good thick slices of USDA-Prime red meat. I had to back up and re-read it to see if he actually said what I thought he said. Salamander, on balance, approves.
We have been floundering since the end of the Cold War when it comes to our ability to advance the fight from our warships. “Build a little, test a little, learn a lot” has morphed in to “Spend a lot, testify in front of Congress a lot, learn new ways to make PPT slides.”
The desire of the revolutionary transformationalists to meld “if we don’t push the envelope, take it to the outer edge,” to “build aircraft and ships now” has left the decades and centuries of evolutionary development behind. Results speak for themselves, and while rolling in that froth we have failed to execute the fundamentals.
Why don’t we have better weapons at sea? Simple, they have not been a priority. The technology is there, while the perfect is on PPT; the good is on the shelf, as an unfunded requirement.
“We still have a requirement for a Tomahawk cruise missile to attack surface ships sitting on the books. In fact it’s been reiterated for the past 15 years,” Fanta noted.
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“We know what Tomahawk is capable of,”…“We’re talking about evolving the capabilities that we have,” he said. “I got a great truck” — the Tomahawk. “It’s a big missile, it’s sitting inside my [vertical launch system] cells right now. What other things can we put on it or make it do, whether with a seeker, without a seeker, dumb seekers, smart sensors? We’re looking at all of that.
“This missile is going to be around until the mid-2040s,” Fanta noted. “I think I better figure out more things to do with it than just hit a spot on the beach.”
Like Harpoon, it is a bit dated, but it is better than nothing – and is a good capability bridging weapon until we get focused and get something better.
That was not the most interesting thing he said. RADM Fanta has put down a marker, and BZ to him for doing it deftly;
Rear Adm. Pete Fanta, the director of surface warfare at the Pentagon, was blunt in responding to a question about why the US can’t seem to field similar capabilities in a timely manner.
“We can get there, but get the hell out of my way,” Fanta declared, speaking to the bureaucratic obstacles. “I can get there fast, I can get with the same capability, I can get it on the ships, but I can’t do it in a risk-averse, fear-centric organization.
“That’s not you folks,” he said to the civilians in the room, “that’s us wearing the uniform. I’m willing to go be the chew toy for Congress if I fail. You let me go try it, I’ll go do it. You let me bolt it on, I’ll take the risk. I’ll find a [commanding officer] out there that’s willing to point it in a direction and fire it” and understand the risks.
“I can’t do it in an organization that spends three times as much on proving it might or might not work perfectly every single time, as I can if I just go do it. Every success we’ve had we just went and did. Every major failure we’ve had has been an opinion on the level of failure by someone else.
That may be a little too blunt, but it’s the truth,” Fanta said. “We need to get out of this risk-averse culture.”
There is your elephant. He is speaking about leadership. Our senior leadership. I don’t know if he just put his boss on report, in a fashion, but who cares if someone tries to construe that he did? He is a Flag Officer in the world’s greatest navy. Speaking blunt truths is what he is paid the big-bucks for. It is a serious job when your orders determine how many men and women return from going in to harm’s way.
Everything begins and ends with leadership. All else is simply decoration.
More of this. Much more of this. This is the clear, direct, and blunt talk among professionals we need. In areas such as this, in public is a great place to do it. It encourages junior leaders by example.
At the same event, USNI’s own Megan Eckstein picked up a few other items that should encourage navalists even more that we have good people in hard jobs who are thinking right.
“There are systems that we’re using that we’re moving from defensive capability into a very aggressive offensive capability,” Program Executive Officer for Integrated Warfare Systems (PEO IWS) Rear Adm. Jon Hill said during the panel discussion, referring to the SM-6.
Surface Ship Weapons Office Program Manager Capt. Michael Ladner told USNI News in November that he was pursuing software-only upgrades to the missile that would allow it to take on other missions, which he said he could not discuss. But he said the new missions “focus on distributed lethality and shifting to an offensive capability to counter our adversaries’ [anti-access/area-denial] capabilities.”
The SM-1 had a great anti-surface combat record, let’s give SM-6 that same capability and perhaps a few other fun ones as well. Give CO’s a toolbox to do their job, not just a bag of hammers. This is all very good. Megan also snagged another good RADM Fanta point,
… the Navy needed a way to better protect its four Ballistic Missile Defense (BMD) destroyers forward stationed in the Mediterranean Sea. Since the ships are so focused upward on searching for missile threats, they became vulnerable themselves to cruise missiles and other incoming munitions, Hill told USNI News in September. Rather than station another ship nearby to protect the BMD destroyer, Navy engineers realized they could install Raytheon’s Sea Rolling Airframe Missile (SeaRAM) anti-ship missile defense system onto the ships – even though SeaRAM had never been integrated with a destroyer or its Aegis Combat System before.
Without naming the specific new threat, Fanta said during the discussion that “a new threat pops up in the Eastern Mediterranean, we have a very low probability of kill against that new threat. Within six months, we had moved over $50 million. Jon Hill had found a contractor that was building a new asset. We redirected new mounts and new systems out to those destroyers. His testing folks decided how it could actually be done better, faster, cheaper and smarter. We shipped the mounts to the Mediterranean – never been done to do an install in the Mediterranean. And now we’re testing it in the Mediterranean in the Spanish ranges.
“We went from a probability of kill of very low to a probability of kill of pretty damn high,” Fanta continued.
The advantages of extra deckspace and freeboard.
Are we making up for some lost time? Perhaps. The talk is right, and some action is moving. Watch the money and follow-through … but the needle is twitching and drifting in the right direction.