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Written by John Harper
The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency has done a good job advancing technology — but the Pentagon and its innovation partners must do better at moving promising capabilities from the lab to the battlefield, Deputy Defense Secretary Kathleen Hicks said Wednesday.
Since its inception, DARPA has played a critical role in game-changing technology such as the Internet, stealth, precision-guided munitions, handheld GPS, and vaccine platforms that use mRNA technology, among others. But some of these innovations have taken longer to provide military service than new capabilities should go forward, Hicks said.
“Think about stealth aircraft. When DARPA launched the first experimental stealth aircraft, Project ‘Have Blue,’ a working F-117 Nighthawk—compare that to a decade. It took another decade for stealth technology to be incorporated into the operational B-2 bomber—and then “It took another decade or two for stealth to spread across most of our fighter jets in the form of the F-22 and F-35,” said 35 stealth fighters in virtual comments at the first “DARPA Forward” series of forums that kicked off this week on the campus of Colorado State University in Fort Collins, Colorado.
“Perhaps this schedule was tolerable during the Cold War, when our main strategic competitor was relatively lumbering and slow. But today, we need to evolve faster than threats,” Hicks continued. “We simply don’t have decades to wait for the latest and greatest concepts and capabilities to spread throughout our military.”
The department needs to reduce the “lab-to-fab” timeline from decades to years or, in some cases, months, Hicks says.
In many cases, promising technologies are never introduced. The Pentagon has been struggling to overcome the so-called “valley of death,” where innovations die on the vine before they make it into mass production.
“Once DARPA has proof-of-concept and defined capability, we need to think ahead about what’s going to happen — who’s going to take the ball forward and how,” Hicks said.
“The work does not stop at prototyping and testing. More than ever, we need to think about what comes next, such as how we can transition our most effective prototypes into mainstream systems in the field. How do we measure innovation in the defense enterprise? It’s not that we can’t do it — we can, and we do — but it has to be easy, and it has to be fast,” she says.
DARPA works on a wide range of technology that could help the US military in future conflicts. FedScoop asked Hicks what her top priorities are for the Defense Department.
“High on my list of challenges right now is making sure we can increase the quality of decision and the speed of decision and action. And to improve that speed of command and control decision making, there are many different technologies, many different organizational innovations and operational concepts coming together,” she replied.
“Obviously in the cloud enterprise, cloud capabilities are a piece of that. Making sure we’re making better use of AI and data, making sure we have quality data; [and] We do all of this in a responsible way – these are some of the technology areas I’ve focused on to get to that practical end-state,” Hicks continued.
These capabilities will be key to DOD’s efforts to achieve the leadership’s vision for joint multi-domain command and control to enable commanders to make better and faster decisions by connecting disparate US military networks and deploying support capabilities such as artificial intelligence. Other things.
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