Military soldiers stand guard as the Shenzhou VI spacecraft, sitting atop of the LM-2F carrier rocket, is moved towards the launching pad in Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center on October 7, 2005 in Jiuquan of Gansu Province, northwest China. (Photo by China Photos/Getty Images)
SMD 2024 — The Missile Defense Agency’s new Transformation Task Force is not just a top-down effort to reconsider how the agency does business, but also will be looking for inputs from everyone down to operators in the field, according to the agency’s head.
“Part of it is going to be a grassroots effort as well,” Lt. Gen. Heath Collins told the Space & Missile Symposium in Huntsville, Ala., on Thursday.
“We’re taking inputs from all players at all levels to determine what is the best approach to determine what we’re going to look like going forward. We don’t have the answer today of what the end game looks like. I really need to be fast and agile, and we will continue to grow and change as we need to as we move forward,” he elaborated.
Announced by Collins in June, the new task force, is designed to reshape the agency’s internal processes, technology development approach and future architecture to meet urgent new threats. MDA held an Innovation Summit for industry on July 10 and 11 to solicit input on those issues.
Key areas of interest include proliferating threats, ranging from China’s expanding ballistic missile arsenal to highly sophisticated hypersonic systems being developed and deployed by both China and Russia, to low-end drones being used by the Houthis in the Red Sea.
Further, according to an MDA video Collins presented, enemies are increasingly pursuing a “new kind of warfare that involves an adversary launching an air and missile assault to swarm and overwhelm the defender.” (Though he not identify it, the video described an attack similar to the largely unsuccessful barrage of missiles and drones Iran launched in Israel in April.)
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But the task force’s remit also includes considering internal agency and Defense Department challenges, particularly in integrating responses to these threats that cross domains and service lines of responsibility.
“Missions are ramming into each other, overlapping each other. The integration challenge is large,” Collins said. “[S]ilos exist between services, between entities within the services, between MDA.”
MDA also has launched a sweeping digital transformation initiative, Collins said, covering everything from “digital engineering” to “digital acquisition,” and relying heavily on the use of artificial intelligence and machine learning.
“It’s going to be a very foundational process to get there,” he said.
