Defense Secretary Robert Gates briefly grabbed the headlines last month when he challenged the Pentagon to “find more innovative and bold ways to help those whose lives are on the line.”
He might just as well have asked for the moon.
For reasons that are hard to comprehend, these happen to be really tough times for technological innovation at the Defense Department. Even the Pentagon’s own contractors worry that the military is being sidelined from the technology boom that is benefiting so many other sectors of the economy.
Critics are quick to blame a plodding bureaucracy for creating a culture that does not reward smart business decisions. Defense officials also have found fault with the Pentagon’s byzantine accounting regulations, which deter commercial firms from bidding on military contracts because they do not want to turn over their sensitive pricing data to the government.
The litany of excuses for why the Pentagon can’t gain access to the most innovative technologies is vast. But it still does not explain why the military is being left behind by the innovation train.
“There’s no single evil here. There’s a whole bunch of things,” says Steven D. Roemerman, CEO of Lone Star Aerospace, of Dallas. The company does financial analysis and benchmarking for the Defense Department and other agencies.
“The Department of Defense product development community is becoming increasingly disconnected from mainstream technology,” Roemerman tells an industry conference in Springfield, Va. “As an industry, we have stopped driving technology advances. We had hoped to become more connected to commercial technology, but the data suggest that we are becoming less connected.”
This is bad news for a military that, by its own accounts, is facing “thinking enemies” that rapidly turn store-purchased items into successful tools of war. U.S. commanders have been vocal about their difficulties in staying ahead of the enemy’s innovation cycle. But they don’t seem to be getting much help.
The Defense Department, despite Gates’ pleadings, remains quite comfortable with its traditional ways of doing business. The cutting edge technologies that are now being pursued — such as the Future Combat Systems, the Joint Tactical Radio System and the Transformational Communications Satellite — are programs with estimated cycles of 15 to 20 years. By the time these programs reach completion, commercial technologies will have turned over more than 10 times.
“Aerospace and defense are becoming more dependent on non-defense technology, which is changing more rapidly than we can respond,” says Roemerman. At the same time, the defense and aerospace sectors are becoming a relatively unimportant source of marketplace innovation.
“Some people take umbrage at the notion that we are getting slower,” Roemerman says.
But they are just ignoring reality.
It is not unusual for weapon builders to go on eBay to try to find obsolete parts. If it takes 20 years to build a military weapon system, what are the chances that the commercial industry will continue to produce components that most customers no longer buy?
High-tech firms whose primary focus is the commercial market have found in recent years that military programs don’t welcome innovation from outsiders, Roemerman says. “It has gotten harder to insert technology … A defense program takes seven years and the underlying technology turns over every year. It’s very difficult to insert anything.”
One huge misconception among defense buyers is that companies are “waiting in line” to respond to their solicitations, he says. Anecdotal evidence in the space sector, for example, shows that companies have so many business opportunities in commercial space that getting on an airplane and going to talk to “these government guys” means they will lose sales somewhere else.
“By and large we are not a very smart shopper,” Roemerman says, referring to the Defense Department.
The Pentagon’s next-generation satellites and battlefield radio programs are glaring illustrations of how the military is falling behind in the technology race. Much of the commercial industry has been watching the progress of the Joint Tactical Radio System and the Transformational Satellite programs, and have concluded that the government is choosing to “lock in” the requirements, which will make it extremely difficult for new technology to be inserted in the future.
“They don’t want to constantly upgrade like the commercial sector,” says Richard A. Vandermeulen, vice president of government broadband at ViaSat Inc. “The government needs to do a better assessment of what’s in the commercial marketplace,” he says. As a result of not knowing what technologies are available, the military ends up with systems that become obsolete within a few years.
In a speech last month, Gates urged military officers to “reject convention and careerism” in favor of “out of the box” thinking.
Easier said than done.
Please email your comments to SErwin@ndia.org