An Airman types on his computer during the Cybersecurity Foundry Course at MacDill Air Force Base, Fla., March 9, 2018. (U.S. Air Force photo by Senior Airman Mariette Adams)
I/ITSEC 2022 — As the Pentagon continues its long quest to build a bridge over the dreaded “valley of death” into which innovative technology falls all too often, a trio of current and former officials offered their advice, starting with streamlining the request process.
“So you can have something that the chief wants that will solve the problem, but if you don’t have a way to sell it in a way that the government can buy it — and then the challenge is not, you know, in many cases the buyer isn’t the customer,” former Navy acquisition executive James Guerts said. Guerts was speaking at a panel here dedicated to overcoming the valley of death, and he zeroed in on cutting out some middlemen.
“And so I think where the services are really working hard is to compress that, so the buyer and the customer are more closely aligned,” he said. “But you’ve got to think about both sides of that. Because here’s why: If you have awesome tech and there’s no budget line for it, you know, it’s going to take you a while to get money for that.”
Guerts added one way of closing that gap is to “get away from transactional requirements guys that hand it to the acquisition girls and they hand it to the, you know, training commands and then the training commands hand it to the user.”
Once the military knows what it wants, Maj. Gen. Heather Pringle, commander of the Air Force Research Lab, said one key to a smooth process is getting involved on the commercial side early.
She noted that a digital test environment at Eglin Air Force Base in Florida, for instance, allows industry to “basically compete different autonomy architectures in a military scenario, get feedback on that, and then go back and make those adaptations and come back again, and see what the results are.”
“It’s a win-win on both sides,” she said. “The government gets to see state of the art…technologies of autonomy, and industry gets feedback and they kind of help learn with each other. So that’s been a really interesting model.”
But even if all goes well, another speaker on the panel, Lt. Gen. Shaun Morris, commander of the Air Force Life Cycle Management Center, said some things are out of their hands. The federal budget process, he said, is a “foundational constraint.”
“If…I see the most brilliant idea, my first opportunity, right, to add that into the air force budget is the [fiscal] 25 [Program Objective Memorandum],” Morris said. “Just think about that. I’m in [FY] 22, okay. Perhaps I could go try to realign money. Well, I can’t do that right now because, once again, we’re in a continuing resolution and we don’t have an appropriation… and that process, right, will realign dollars. It takes almost a year.”
The trio’s comments don’t come in a vacuum. The Pentagon has long recognized the valley of death and has launched efforts to overcome it. In July the Defense Department announced a new pilot program called Accelerate the Procurement and Fielding of Innovative Technologies (APFIT) that would give a total of $100 million to various program offices. The funding, allocated by Congress to 10 DoD program offices, is being used to procure technologies from commercial vendors, like augmented reality tactical assault kits and anti-jam radio links.
Heidi Shyu, undersecretary of defense for research and engineering, told a small group of reporters at this year’s Association of the US Army conference that DoD has already seen some success with APFIT, which her office is spearheading, and those commercial capabilities will be delivered to warfighters up to two years earlier.
