FEATURE ARTICLE

November 2006

Technology Roadmap Calls For No-Nonsense Research

By Sandra I. Erwin

Navy researchers insist that they no longer live in ivory towers.

Far from being disconnected from the practical concerns of deployed forces, Navy scientists are making it their business to be attuned to the demands of sailors and Marines, says Rear Adm. William E. Landay III, who heads the Office of Naval Research.

Landay oversees an annual budget of about $1.5 billion — plus a few hundred million dollars in congressional add-ons.

About 40 percent goes into “discovery and invention” projects, which involve basic research. Approximately 10 percent is for “innovative naval prototypes” described by Landay as “high payoff, high risk programs.” More than 30 percent of the budget is allocated to “future naval capabilities,” which are specific equipment gaps identified by the Navy and Marine Corps for the next 10 to 15 years. The remaining funds are assigned to various projects that vary from year to year, many of which are part of the Defense Department’s small business innovative research program, or SBIR.

“Funding should remain steady for the next few years,” Landay says. But he does not discount future cutbacks. “There are lots of demands on the money” at the Defense Department today. “There is an understanding that budgets will flatten out or decrease over time.”

To ensure that successful technologies make it to the fleet, money alone is not enough. Research projects also need to get more in synch with procurement programs, so technologies can be “inserted” into weapons systems.

Acquisition programs have to deliver a product on a timeline. Science projects may or may not be tied to a schedule. That is a problem, Landay says. “We develop our S&T on a schedule that is independent from our acquisition. One of my priorities is to better align and better understand where the opportunities are for technology insertion. We need to think about the timeline or we miss the opportunities when the budgets are planned for programs of record.”

In projects involving critical technologies that tactical forces have requested, he says, “transition agreements” are signed between the Office of Naval Research and the acquisition managers.

In 2005, out of 30 “future naval capabilities” projects, 22 became successful acquisition programs, he adds. “In the next few years, we expect those things showing up in the fleet.”

Under the category of “innovative naval prototypes,” the Navy is developing an electromagnetic rail gun that could one day be deployed on warships and provide fire support from 200 miles away. “If we are successful, we’ll turn it into a real system. We have a partnership with the program manager, so he can influence the S&T investments.”

Landay, who was in charge of one of the Navy’s major acquisition offices before he became chief of naval research, is being credited with trying to bridge the gap among scientists, developers and budget planners. “We have to understand the acquisition demands. Working that transition piece is very hard.”

A costly example of why scientists can’t work in isolation from procurement programs was the Navy’s “affordable weapon.” The Office of Naval Research developed a low-cost missile, using commercial technologies, in the hopes that it would be adopted across the fleet.

“ONR and the contractor proved it could be done. But as we looked at transitioning, the Navy asked what it would take to produce it,” he says. “The Navy spent money to study the manufacturing, and there were real challenges.”

That was the end of the affordable weapon. “That’s how we used to do business,” Landay says. “In retrospect, we would have done things differently if we had involved the acquisition people upfront. It was a good concept.” Even if a technology proves successful in the lab, it is of little use if it can’t be produced, he adds. “Decisions you make upfront have impact down the line in the production process. We want to make that integration earlier in the process.”

Landay’s background as a procurement officer could prove valuable in projects that are aimed at reducing the cost of building ships.

“We are taking a broader ‘lower the cost of shipbuilding’ look,” he says. Much of the cost savings could be attained in the early phases of ship design by testing the mockups in digital simulations. Typically, when the Navy builds a new ship class, he says, “We take the first ship and do big shock trials, to make sure it can withstand the combat environment. We spend a lot of money on this. We have to do that because we can’t adequately simulate that environment and the effect of that environment on the ship.”

The Navy ends up spending millions of dollars evaluating and correcting problems found during tests. What the Navy needs, says Landay, is to “build better models of the ships and also find a way to tie those to the programs the shipyards use to design their ships.”

The Navy labs are not going to tell shipbuilders how to build ships better, he cautions, “but we can give them tools to allow them to design ships more efficiently and not have to do so much testing.”

The Office of Naval Research will be seeking to apply new modeling technology to the Navy’s new attack submarine.

Landay also wants to boost spending on software development. “Historically, we have not invested science and technology dollars on software because we assumed the commercial industry is where all the R&D should be done,” he says. “We’ve come to realize that there’s not a lot of people who do the kind of complex work we do.” That means the Navy will have to fill those needs.

Another area that has drawn more attention and funding in recent years is unmanned vehicles — of the aerial, surface and underwater varieties. Although these technologies have matured significantly, the Navy still hasn’t been able to integrate different vehicles into a single network. “Autonomy and networking of those systems in adverse conditions is critical,” says Landay.

Undersea autonomous vehicles are central to the Navy’s plan to deploy advanced sensors in coastal areas to detect enemy diesel submarines.

Anti-submarine warfare technologies currently command more research dollars — $256 million — than any other project that Landay oversees.

A significant shortcoming in unmanned vehicles is the power source. “Almost every roadblock we face in capability today has to do with power,” he laments. “We have unmanned undersea vehicles today we can’t use the way we’d like to because they can’t go far enough, fast enough and stay in the water long enough.”

Networks of distributed waterborne sensors, or sonobuoys, also are limited by poor performing batteries. “We spend more time replenishing the buoy fields than analyzing the data from the buoys because we can’t get the buoys to last long enough.”

The Office of Naval Research currently spends $70 million a year on technologies to improve energy efficiency.

Approximately $1.5 million goes to solar-energy research and to develop an unmanned underwater vehicle powered by hydrogen, according to an ONR spokeswoman.

About $2 million is allocated to converting thermal energy into electricity — using a vehicle engine as a primary heat source.

Under so-called small business innovative research contracts, the Office of Naval Research funded a buoy in Hawaii that harvests energy from ocean waves, and has studied the possibility of building an ocean thermal energy conversion facility.

In years past, decisions to fund science and technology projects were based on lengthy assessments that were written by analysts at Navy headquarters. “We would use that to make investments,” Landay explains. “But sometimes we get that right and sometimes we don’t get it as right as we’d like to.”

And the analysis often has been far from comprehensive. “Parts of the Navy and Marine Corps are not engaged,” says Landay. The Navy always has been organized by “communities” — each representing the surface fleet, the submarine force and the aviators.

“The head resource person from each community would tell me what they need,” Landay says. That process worked reasonably well during the Cold War and during peacetime, but is not a good fit today, when forces from all U.S. military services fight jointly and the enemies are non-traditional combatants, in the form of insurgents, pirates and paramilitary forces.

To tie the science and technology investments more closely to the needs of the fleet, the Navy leadership is trying to get the service to view itself as a collection of “enterprises” that should share resources and work collaboratively, rather than in isolation from one another. “We’ve recognized that as an issue and there’s enormous emphasis and drumbeating on enterprise,” Landay says.

According to the recently published commanders’ guidance to sailors and Marines, “cross fleet standardization” is the desired modus operandi. “The changing operational environment requires that we eliminate redundancies and forge greater interdependence between us,” wrote Chief of Naval Operations Adm. Michael G. Mullen and Marine Corps Commandant Gen. Michael Hagee.

For researchers this also means turning more of their attention to technologies that meet the needs of the Marine Corps.

The Marine Corps drafted a science and technology strategy two years ago that was “very valuable” to naval researchers, says Landay. “This year, we have gotten an S&T strategy input from the naval enterprises,” he says. “We worry about training, logistics, maintenance … We put more focus on war fighting needs. The enterprises for the first time have gotten us coherent input.”

Please email your comments to SErwin@ndia.org

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