Land Warfare

Pentagon’s Shyu eyes base defense for third ‘sprint’ of rapid experiment campaign

"I think it's important to understand as long as we have funding, we're always interested, whoever has a great idea that has a prototype you can bring to the table to demo," Heidi Shyu, undersecretary of defense for research and engineering, told reporters.

By Jaspreet Gill on October 11, 2022 1:53 pm
Airmen maintain base security
Coils of concertina wire line the perimeter at Transit Center at Manas, Kyrgyzstan, Dec. 12, 2013. (U.S. Air Force photo/Senior Airman George Goslin)

AUSA 2022 — The Pentagon’s third “sprint” of a relatively new effort aimed at addressing capability gaps and emerging technologies will be focused on base defense, and the Defense Department wants industry’s help, according to the official spearheading the effort. 

Speaking with a small group of reporters at the annual Association of the US Army conference Monday, Heidi Shyu, undersecretary of defense for research and engineering, said her office is waiting to get fiscal 2023 funding for the Rapid Defense Experimentation Reserve (RDER), but meanwhile DoD is holding industry engagements as it plans the next experiment. The Pentagon requested $358 million for the effort in fiscal 2023. 

“Until we get the FY23 money we can’t fund it, right?” Shyu said. “So this year, we had an industry day…in the July timeframe, [to] which almost like 500 people showed up. And it was very good and we’re getting additional white papers from them… So each one of these [sprints are] going to be staggered, but it doesn’t mean our doors closed to new ideas.

“I think it’s important to understand as long as we have funding, we’re always interested, whoever has a great idea that has a prototype you can bring to the table to demo,” she continued.

Shyu has said in the past she wants to hold two RDER “sprints” per year to allow industry to make changes or upgrade their prototypes. The first sprint was held last summer and the second sprint focused on the area of predictive logistics. 

“The third sprint’s…about how do we protect the forward base,” Shyu said. “So that’s a scenario that we will wrap our experimentation around.”

The Pentagon has also seen some success with another effort Shyu is spearheading called the new Accelerate the Procurement and Fielding of Innovation Technologies (APFIT) pilot program, which was established earlier this year to bridge the dreaded “valley of death” where promising technologies fail to shift from the lab into actual operations, Shyu said.

In the first round of funding for APFIT, DoD allocated $100 million to 10 different program offices to procure technologies from vendors. Shyu mentioned that some of the technologies being developed right now include a night vision goggle and a conformable antenna. She added that the Pentagon is requesting another $100 million in FY23. 

“I can tell you the companies are thrilled… All of these companies have a user that’s interested in, whether its special ops, whether its Army, Navy, Air Force, Space Force — there’s a user that’s interested in this particular technology,” Shyu said. “So what we’ve been able to do is utilize that money to help these 10 companies to accelerate getting the capability in the hands of the warfighter two years earlier.”

AUSA 2022

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AUSA 2022

Over at Rheinmetall's booth sat the hefty Lynx OMFV (Optionally Manned Fighting Vehicle). The company, as its competitors, is hoping to make a strong impression as the Army looks for OMFV proposals later this fall -- the early stage of an almost certainly lucrative long-term contract award. (Breaking Defense/Brendon Smith).
All the way from down under, the Australian firm Defendtex presented some of its modular UAVs. Here visitors can see the Drone155, which the company says can be outfitted with ISR payloads or explosives. (Breaking Defense/Brendon Smith).
The MVPP from Globe Tech stands for Modular Vehicle Protection Platform, a vehicle add-on that can take the brunt of improvised explosive device detonations. (Breaking Defense/Brendon Smith).
AUSA was well attended by international officers and officials as well, and by foreign defense firms. The Korean booth, shown here, featured some products hoping to make a splash in the US military. (Breaking Defense/Brendon Smith).
Not your traditional defense contractor, the computing giant IBM has a booth at AUSA showing off its flashy but functional quantum computer. The US government as a whole, and the Pentagon in particular, are heavily invested in the quantum computing race with the likes of China. (Breaking Defense/Brendon Smith).
Among the fleet of vehicles parked throughout the AUSA floor for display was the Flyer 72-U, made by General Dynamics. The company says the vehicle takes a "modular approach" so it can be configured for anything from "light strike assault" to rescue and evacuation. (Breaking Defense/Brendon Smith).
The stuff of counter-UAS nightmares, the Virginia-based BlueHalo firm makes drone swarms that use AI and machine learning to provide battlefield intelligence to soldiers. The Army's Rapid Capabilities and Critical Technologies Office awarded the company $14 million in February to develop the HIVE. (Breaking Defense/Brendon Smith).
It's a .50 caliber Gatling gun, one that Dillon Aero says can fire 1,500 shots per minute, or 25 rounds per second. (Breaking Defense/Brendon Smith).
For this year's show AM General rolled its own Humvee Saber, Blade Edition, onto the floor. The company claims "leap-ahead" technology for a light tactical vehicle. (Breaking Defense/Brendon Smith).
Patria, a defense firm owned jointly by Finland and Norway's Kongsberg Defence & Aerospace, made it's way across the Atlantic for AUSA 2022, bringing along its AMV multi-role vehicle. The AMV was recently purchased by the dozens by Slovakia and its home country of Finland. (Breaking Defense/Brendon Smith).
At the Pratt Miller Defense booth, visitors will see a full-sized Expeditionary Modular Autonomous Vehicle (EMAV) is the "newest and perhaps most mobile and lethal" of the company's autonomous offerings. (Breaking Defense/Brendon Smith).
Marathon's Autonomous Robot Targets are exactly what that sounds like: shooting targets guided by computer code and designed to "look, move, and even behave like people," the company says. The robots were on the move on the AUSA floor -- though no shooting was allowed. (Breaking Defense/Brendon Smith).
The AUSA show floor offered a fresh look at a futuristic version of an old Army standby: the Abrams tank. This one, the Abrams X, is made by General Dynamics Land Systems, manufacturers of the current Abrams M1A1 and M1A2 battle tanks used by the US Army. (Breaking Defense/Brendon Smith).
Attendees may walk by model versions of the famous Iron Dome system, in use for years in Israel, and its sister SkyCeptor system, both made by Rafael. The SkyCeptor, in particular, is meant to "defeat short- to medium-range ballistic and cruise missiles and other advanced air defense threats," the company says. (Breaking Defense/Brendon Smith).
As the need for counter-UAS systems explodes, Epirus is at AUSA repping its counter-electronics system Stryker Leonidas, made with General Dynamics. The system's "counter-swarm" weapon "fills a pressing short range air defense (SHORAD) capability gap," the company says. (Breaking Defense/Brendon Smith).
A new unveiling for AUSA, Rheinmetall announced this week the Mission Master CXT platform, the newest addition to the company's "family" of autonomous ground vehicles. The company says the CXT "combines the power of a diesel engine with a silent electric motor." (Breaking Defense/Brendon Smith).
The GMC Hummer EV Platform, the first vehicle on GM's New Ultium EV Platform, goes on display at AUSA 2022. All-electric offerings are the center of much of the Army's attention these days as it aims to electrify its non-tactical, and eventually tactical, fleet. (Breaking Defense/Brendon Smith)
Two new Armored Multi-Purpose Vehicles (AMPV) sit at the booth by Bae Systems. The vehicles are meant to replace the Army's venerable, but old M113s. (Breaking Defense/Brendon Smith)
Palantir shows off its prototype for the Tactical Intelligence Targeting Access Node (TITAN) vehicle. The company says the TITAN "will be the critical backbone that provides correlation, fusion, and integration of sensor data alongside insights from AI/ML overlaid at the tactical edge." In other words, it's meant to find the signal in the noise. (Breaking Defense/Brendon Smith)
A model of a "modernized" Boeing Apache AH-64E shown Association of US Army Conference in 2022. While the Army is about to choose two new airframes, there's currently no Apache replacement on the horizon. (Breaking Defense/Brendon Smith)
Lockheed Martin teamed up with Sikorsky to produce the Raider X, the team's competitor in the Army's Future Attack Reconnaissance Aircraft (FARA) program, one of two high-profile Army Future Vertical Lift contests currently underway. (Breaking Defense/Brendon Smith)
The Bell 360 Invictus is the other FARA competitor, looking to beat out the Lockheed-Sikorsky team. The Army's expected to make its decision in fiscal 2024. (Breaking Defense/Brendon Smith)
The defense start-up Anduril has expanded its footprint in the defense market in recent years. This product, the Mobile Sentry, "brings autonomous fixed site counter UAS and counter intrusion capabilities into a mobile form factor," the company says. (Breaking Defense/Brendon Smith)
The military's no-so-furry friendly robot dogs are back at AUSA this year. This model, called the Vision 60 Q-UGV from Ghost Robotics, is an "all-weather ground robot for use in a broad range of unstructured urban and natural environments for defense, homeland and enterprise applications," the company says. (Breaking Defense/Brendon Smith).
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