Despite being heavily committed in the Middle East, Defense Department
officials argue that long-range investment decisions must begin
now if the military is to have crucial capabilities 20 years down
the road.
Officials believe the paramount obstacle to developing critical
defense technologies is the shortage of specialists who are educated
across the sciences. Both Pentagon leaders and industry representatives,
who lament the dearth of domestic scientists and engineers, have
emphasized this point.
Ron Sega, director of defense research and engineering, “fought
quite a battle over the past six months to put into effect a national
defense education program,” recounted Sue Payton, acting deputy
director in Sega’s office. “It outlines seven critical
areas of education with a funding profile over $155 million across
the future-years defense plan.”
The hot areas in need of expertise—ranging from associate
degrees to PhDs—are chemistry, physics, applied mathematics,
biology, computer science, all facets of engineering, project and
program management, cognitive and human-factors science, and language,
Payton said. “We must invest in the future and we must invest
today,” she urged at a conference organized by the American
Institute of Astronomics and Aeronautics.
Counting off the critical investments, Payton considers the improvement
of intelligence analysis the second-most important factor after
education.
The military will need ground- and foliage-penetrating radars,
she said, as well as technology to enable soldiers to detect color
and chemical changes in the environment.
“Achieving persistence in surveillance is part of that, and
that enters into the whole area of ubiquitous unmanned systems,”
she said. In order to maximize intelligence gathering, the Pentagon
is working with Singapore on the idea of an unmanned surface vehicle
with a sensor-to-shooter capability “to be used in conjunction
with our coalition partners.”
The software industry, meanwhile, has to develop high-speed processing
for all kinds of surveillance methods and information gathering,
she said.
The department also has to invest in anti-jamming capabilities,
because the enemy’s technology will become “tougher”
and able to jam navigation systems, Payton explained.
Ranking high on the list of investments are biometrics and the
ability to mine databases that contain such information, Payton
said. In the same vein, “the whole area of biomedical investment
is going to skyrocket,” she added.
“One of the most exciting demonstrations that we are involved
in today is an epidemic outbreak surveillance [advance concept technology
development.]” The ACTD boils down to having all the information
stored about epidemic outbreaks and the necessary ways to respond
to them in a timely manner.
Full-spectrum tagging, tracking and locating capabilities also
are critical, Payton said. For example, the Defense Advanced Research
Projects Agency is working on imaging through walls and odor signatures,
so that “you can actually track people in high-value areas,”
she noted.
Payton said the department will continue to invest in hypersonic
technology, power and energy. She considers the electromagnetic
motors the Navy is trying to develop, as well as the rail gun for
the Army and Navy, as “revolutionary” breakthroughs
that can “really improve velocity, speed and distance.”
A long-standing development within the department—directed
energy—will come into play during stability operations in
following years. “It is very important to have options out
there,” when it comes to deciding whether to use lethal or
non-lethal weapons, she said.
Although not a new investment, the so-called “network centric”
enterprise is slated to receive $20 billion between 2004 and 2008.
Among the flagship programs—which are encountering some challenges—are
the Joint Tactical Radio System, the transformational satellite
and the Global Information Grid Bandwidth Extension.
Investments that the Pentagon will make during the next 15 to 20
years also will shape the defense industrial base. “I actually
think that we’ll have a completely different set of actors
…in terms of corporations that we will draw on,” said
Suzanne Patrick, deputy undersecretary of defense for industrial
policy.
The Pentagon will resort to the companies that have the most important
technology for the war fighters at the time, she said. “Of
the current companies that exist, there may be a modest subset of
the major primes that still will be recognizable,” she said.
Two or three of these companies “will go belly up,”
while three to five companies “may change quite dramatically,
getting into other activities and tasks” that suit the soldiers’
needs, she explained.
Today, there is a fixed set of major prime contractors, most prominently
Lockheed Martin, Boeing, Northrop Grumman and Raytheon. In 15 to
20 years, Patrick projects a dozen companies that “will be
comparable in terms of revenue, as well as impact.” In her
opinion, the biotechnology industry will grow and the companies
“will be meaningful in size and scale.”
Advances in miniaturization and modularization, as well as electrical
manufacturing, will make location of defense companies a completely
different concept, she said. Raytheon for example, at the behest
of the Pentagon, moved its missile production facilities and consolidated
them in Arizona “over night,” she says. Production will
be able to change quickly and move from place to place.
Pentagon concepts, such as sea basing, will change the way the
military will look at capabilities provided by industry. Sea basing
is the notion that ground forces can be launched, supported and
sustained solely from ships at sea.
“The whole concept of sea basing will change how we consider
and think about things that are surface warfare assets as to whether
they are focused logistics assets, force application assets, that
are easily moved from place to place,” she said. Also a lot
of emphasis will be placed on vertical lift, something “we
haven’t seen in the past.”
Meanwhile, unmanned systems will be ubiquitous in 20 years, Patrick
predicted. By then, the military will have moved on from the man-in-the-loop
operation to systems working without much human interventions, Patrick
said.
In light of all the investments the Pentagon will need to make,
this year’s Quadrennial Defense Review has a “good chance
of coming up with a different diagnosis of what [investments] are
going to be desired,” said Andrew Krepinevich, executive director
of the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments in Washington,
D.C.
The QDR is the Pentagon’s sweeping review of strategy and
programs. If Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld “doesn’t
know where he wants to go right now, he never will,” Krepinevich
said.