“At this next T-REX [Technology Readiness Experimentation exercise], we’ll be starting to host TOPGUN school,” said prototyping & experimentation director Alex Lovett. “We’re going to be playing Red versus Blue, their best [offense] coming after our best defense.”
The Rapid Defense Experimentation Reserve, brainchild of Pentagon CTO Heidi Shyu, has funded low-profile but high-value niche technologies the services couldn’t or wouldn’t, from robot boats to a multi-domain targeting node.
Partnerships with outside industry are a cornerstone of the kingdom’s ambitious growth strategy.
Congress needs to stop grilling Pentagon officials about the Pentagon’s plan to bulk-buy cheap unmanned weapons and start actually helping, the Deputy Secretary of Defense said: “We’ve done nearly 40 Hill briefings since last October, averaging almost one a week. …That depth of engagement isn’t scalable for Congress.”
"Every single undersecretary, every single service, every COCOM … they all concurred, thumbs up, on the first four sets of prototypes, that these are mature enough to get into production and rapid fielding," Under Secretary Heidi Shyu told Breaking Defense in an exclusive interview on the progress of her Rapid Defense Experimentation Reserve.
“On an annual basis, we have a CR, half the year’s gone,” the undersecretary for Research & Engineering said. “Our adversary doesn’t have the same constraints."
Although slim on details, Heidi Shyu told reporters today that DoD will conduct a Technology Readiness Experimentation event sometime this year with its Australian counterparts and will conduct a new sprint of RDER with them next year.
On today’s battlefield, mobility isn’t optional - it’s mission-critical.
“So the decision at the DMAG will be, should that be a single service, or [does] every service just buy what they want, right?” Heidi Shyu told reporters about the Rapid Defense Experimentation Reserve.
A portion of the experiment will include opportunities for industry to showcase their technologies through a prototype technology display.
The plan lays out three lines of efforts: accelerating the development of joint warfighting capabilities, fielding capabilities at speed and scale, and ensuring the foundations for research and development through workforce development and upgrading physical and digital infrastructure.
"We're going to be off and running, literally demonstrating these prototypes in a contested environment," Heidi Shyu, under secretary of defense for research and engineering, said. "So it...can't just work in a lab. It's got to work in a real environment. And that's exactly what we're focusing on."
Balancing security and access to data are critical to providing users with trustworthy, reliable data for real-time decisions.
The Defense Department's research, development, test and evaluation budget request represents a 4 percent increase from FY23 levels, according to budget documents.
"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.
"...[W]hen you have a living and breathing threat, you need to think about the things such as a contested and congested environment,” Maj. Gen. Rob Collins, the service’s program executive officer for command, control, communications-tactical (PEO C3T) said.
The Pentagon wants at least $70 million for its Rapid Defense Experimentation Reserve and $76.79 million for its Artificial Intelligence and Data Accelerator, budget documents show.