The Office of Naval Research wants to be a “one-stop shopping”
destination for innovative companies that have state-of-the-art
technology, said Navy Rear Adm. Jay Cohen, chief of ONR.
The business opportunities for those companies come in the form
of “future naval capabilities, or FNCs,” Cohen explained.
The FNCs represent 12 priority areas that military commanders consider
critical for the future of warfare, he said.
Cohen noted that the FNCs mark a drastic change from previous approaches
to technological innovation. In the past, the Navy, together with
the other services, used advanced technology demonstrations (ATDs).
Those generally lasted for about three years and cost approximately
$3 million each. The ATDs, however, often failed to produce tangible
products that were useful to the fleet.
The president’s budget for fiscal year 2002 requested $1.7
billion for ONR. Approximately $550 million will be assigned to
the FNCs.
The FNCs are expected to materialize over a seven-year period.
They have to be 20 percent mature and delivered to the Navy program
executive officers in the first two years, 60 percent in the middle
three years and 20 percent in the final two, said Cohen. “We
are constantly renewing what we are doing.”
In order to make it a credible program, Cohen explained, ONR required
the Navy sponsor agencies to sign a memorandum of understanding
that they would provide the transition funds. If they fail to deliver,
ONR cancels the program and reassigns the money to other programs.
Cohen said he expects a 5 to 10 percent dropout rate.
To make the FNCs accessible to the commercial industry, ONR has
established two offices, the Navy Technology Transition Officer
(NTTO) and the Commercial Technology Transition Officer (CTTO).
Ron DeMarco, the head of NTTO, is responsible for half of the Navy’s
science and technology budget. He said his office relies on the
small business innovation and research program (SBIR) to bring more
companies into the process.
“We want to live in a real world,” said Jim DeCorpo,
the head of CTTO. “We want to know what is out there and capitalize
it.” The CTTO, he said, is the principal gateway for commercial
businesses to work with ONR and develop new technologies. “The
CTTO is an advocate for commercial technologies,” he said.
The current FNCs were approved in May 2001.
The Electric Warship and Combat Vehicles FNC is one of the top
priorities, said Cohen. He stressed that the Navy wants to increase
the use of electric propulsion. It expects to have the first electric
Virginia-class submarine by 2008. “Going electric is revolutionary,”
he said. “It’s the same as sail to steam, oil to nuclear
and guns to missiles.”
To make the electric warship and combat vehicle a reality, the
Navy still has to improve the technologies in power generation and
distribution, energy storage, power control and conditioning and
propulsors.
Another FNC, called “Total Ownership Cost Reduction,”
focuses on reducing the maintenance and support costs of Navy systems.
Among the most critical FNCs, said Cohen, is “Missile Defense.”
The goal is to deploy a ship-based missile defense which should
provide 360 degrees overland surveillance, fire control quality
tracks, a single integrated air picture, composite combat identification
distributed weapon system control and precise target data.
This FNC exploits various ONR programs, such as advanced mathematical
techniques, multicolor focal plane arrays, solid-state radar components,
photonics and advanced warhead materials.
“Ships are ideal platforms, especially with the new wide
band-gap electronics to provide a missile defense umbrella,”
said Cohen.
Space-based technology is another hot-button FNC for the Navy.
“I tell people that space is the deepest ocean,” said
Cohen. Unlike the Army and Air Force, which rely on fiber optic
cables, the Navy needs wireless systems at sea, Cohen explained.
“Space is critical to do that,” he said. ONR has its
own space science and technology program funded at $50 million to
$100 million a year. ONR is partnering with NASA, the Air Force
and other agencies.
The “Autonomous Operations” FNC deals with advances
in robotic systems to increase the autonomy, performance and affordability
of unmanned air, sea, land and underwater vehicles. By 2004, ONR
wants to develop technologies for unmanned underwater vehicles that
include integrated motor propulsor, high-density energy storage,
intelligence-surveillance-reconnaissance sensor suite and autonomous
operations.
“Capable Manpower” is also a focus of the FNCs. The
goal is to use information technologies to help humans make better
decisions and operate more efficiently.
Another FNC is “Knowledge Superiority and Assurance,”
which focuses on seamless communications networks and the need to
protect those networks from intrusion. The goal is for commanders
be able to get “inside an adversary’s decision cycle.”
Small, quiet, conventional boats have been identified as a threat
to naval forces near the shore. Thus, the “Littoral Antisubmarine
Warfare” FNC aims to develop technologies that can classify,
locate and engage threats before they can harm Navy ships and crews.
These technologies include active sensing algorithms, lightweight
multi-static active systems deployable by helicopter and an airborne
non-acoustic sensing system.
The “Littoral Combat and Power Projection” FNC is working
on developing the capability to deploy, reconstitute and supply
the forces from the sea, without building up a large logistical
infrastructure ashore.
The “Organic Mine Countermeasures” FNC will focus on
systems to help sailors and Marines clear mines from their operating
areas using their own equipment, without relying on dedicated mine-sweeping
vessels.
“We have business plans for the FNCs, and we’ll keep
overhead to the absolute minimum,” he said.
The Defense Department plans to allocate 3 percent of its entire
budget to science and technology, said Navy Secretary Gordon R.
England. That money should be spent solely on future capabilities
and not to fix current problems, England told a gathering of industry
and Navy representatives at a recent conference in Washington, D.C.,
sponsored by the National Defense Industrial Association.
“A lot of that money today is spent to fix problems to the
other budget shortcomings,” he said.
The Defense Department and the Navy work on a system “more
attuned to the failed Soviet model,” he said. “It’s
centrally planned, and consists of a myriad of rules and regulations
that govern this behavior,” He said the Navy erected walls
between the service and commercial industry and those walls hamper
the Navy’s ability adopt modern technologies.
“The challenge we have in the Navy is to decide where to
spend our scarce resources to augment the far greater resources
being spent in the commercial sector,” England said. He emphasized
that the Navy wants to devote resources to areas not covered in
the commercial sector, so that efforts are not duplicated.
The budgeting process, said England, must ensure that money goes
directly to the people who do the research. “I suspect, but
I cannot prove-[I]will be able to shortly, because there is work
underway—that a lot of these funds never make it to the people
actually doing the work,” England said. “They get siphoned
off to support a lot of other activities in particular the overhead
of lots and lots of institutions.”