C4ISR Journal

March 01, 2005

The name of the game for the U.S. office of the deputy undersecretary of defense for advanced systems and concepts, headed by Sue Payton, is technology transition — expediting development and fielding of maturing technologies to meet critical near-term needs of U.S. war fighters. Payton’s office, which falls under the undersecretary of defense for acquisition, technology and logistics, uses a variety of mechanisms to evaluate the potential military utility of new technologies and put promising solutions into the hands of war fighters early to fill capability shortfalls.

The Advanced Concept Technology Demonstration (ACTD) program is the most well-known of these mechanisms. Each year, Payton’s office initiates and initially funds a set of new ACTDs intended to meet war-fighter needs much faster than is possible with the normal acquisition process. Each ACTD runs two to four years and culminates in a prototype demonstration and a utility assessment by war fighters, who develop concepts of operation and tactics along the way to leverage the new technologies.

Among the other technology development mechanisms used by Payton’s office are the Foreign Comparative Testing (FCT) program, which funds evaluations of military technologies already developed by other nations, and the Technology Transition Initiative. The latter funds continued development of advanced technologies from Defense Department science and technology labs to help them make it to acquisition instead of falling by the wayside.

Payton spoke recently with C4ISR Journal about her office’s technology transition efforts.

Q. How do you view your office’s role?

A. We see ourselves as a problem-solver for the war fighters. Our bottom line is to get viable new technologies into the hands of the war fighters as quickly as possible. Our office works with the regional combatant commands to get a good understanding of what their biggest needs are. Then we try to pull together new technologies, concepts of operations and tactics, techniques and procedures to help them meet those needs.

The military services and various Defense Department agencies are our partners and help us fund the development of technology solutions, but the combatant commands are our customers. We also work closely with the Joint Staff to identify war fighters’ technology requirements.

Q. How does the ACTD selection process work?

A. Every year in late January, we hold what we call our “Breakfast Club” meeting, which is attended by representatives of the military services, the combatant commands and Defense Department agencies. ACTD candidates are briefed, and they are later prioritized by the combatant commands and the services. For 2005, 95 candidates were submitted, and 15 of those were ultimately selected for funding.

ACTDs often have run for four years or more, but over the past two years, I’ve issued guidance that ACTDs must be completed within three years, which means having the final demonstration done. We’ve got to move the technologies faster.

Q. Does your office fully fund the ACTDs?

A. The military services also provide ACTD funding, but because of their budgeting cycles, they can provide very little money in the first two years of an ACTD, because they needed to have [budgeted] for it two years earlier in order to have the money in the year of execution. So what [Acting Undersecretary of Defense for Acquisition, Technology and Logistics Michael Wynne] and his predecessor gave me direction to do is to have an ACTD funding profile in which we provide the bulk of the money in the first two years and then the services must supply most of it after that.

We’re pleased that 2005 is actually going to be a banner year in regard to ACTD funding support from the services. For example, the Air Force, which provided little ACTD money in fiscal years 2002, 2003 and 2004, is sponsoring six ACTDs to the tune of $58 million across the FYDP [Future Years Defense Program] from 2005 through 2010. The Navy is sponsoring seven ACTDs with $86 million across the FYDP, and U.S. Special Operations Command has budgeted $87 million.

Q. Do DoD agencies fund any of the ACTDs?

A. Yes. For example, the Missile Defense Agency [MDA] has been a very good partner on the High-Altitude Airship ACTD. They kicked in money early on, and the Army’s money came in a little later, so we have MDA, the Army and my office all providing funding for that ACTD. We were going to design a very small airship, but when MDA recognized its potential to help with ballistic missile defense, they encouraged us to shift to a larger-scale airship so we could have much more than a 500-pound payload. They knew that the sensor suite they wanted to put on the airship would require a greater payload, so with their partnering, we made the airship design larger. The performance goal for the prototype calls for it to fly at 65,000 feet for a month.

We’ve had to delay building and demonstrating the prototype airship. There were nine or 10 technologies that all had to come together, and we’ve had great success in testing the majority of those. However, the biggest challenge was the airship’s fabric. It stretches and won’t break under a lot of pressure, but we found in testing that the high-altitude environment entails a long period of stretching, which causes the fabric to break much faster. That was a surprise to us, so now we’re going to do another risk-reduction phase. We, MDA and the Army all believe that terminating the ACTD at this point would be the wrong thing to do, because we would lose the traction we have generated. So we’re delaying the demonstration to solve the fabric problem.

Q. What has been your success rate with ACTDs?

A. We completed a study in recent months that evaluated how well ACTDs have transitioned. We looked at all the ACTDs we’ve conducted since 1995 and found that 71 percent of the 55 that were completed successfully transitioned at least one product to a program of record or directly to the war fighters.

I have established a new metric: I would like to see 80 percent of ACTDs transition 50 percent of their products to a program of record. For instance, we’ve conducted a search-and-rescue ACTD called Personnel Recovery Extraction Survivability/Smart Sensors in which we demonstrated four different technologies that would improve the success rate of a helicopter that goes in to find and rescue a downed pilot. One of the four technologies was a “dazzler,” or flashing device, on the helicopter to counter the threat of incoming rocket-propelled grenades. The more we experimented with it, the more we realized that it was not going to be worth doing. The other three technologies did transition, however, so that ACTD would have met my new metric.

But I don’t want to ever get to the point where I say that we’re not going to start a new ACTD unless we have a transition path spelled out. Because if that had been our policy in the past, we wouldn’t have the Predator and Global Hawk UAVs today, because there would not have been a program of record to accept them. There are some technologies that are so potentially transformational that we don’t want to rule out starting ACTDs for them because we’re not yet certain of how they will transition.

Q. Can you name an unsuccessful ACTD that was returned to the tech base?

A. That’s what I had to do with the Loitering Electronic Warfare Killer or LEWK ACTD, a lightweight, low-cost UAV. Its airfoils were designed to inflate. Once we had a failure of those wings to inflate, we had to revert to a heavier mechanical wing that unfolded. Going to the heavier wing meant we needed a bigger engine; going to the bigger engine meant we had to carry more fuel; and going to more fuel meant that there wasn’t enough payload for a sensor and a weapon. So it was time to return that effort to the tech base.

Q. What’s an example of a Technology Transition Initiative?

A. A TTI program that’s about to transition and is being used in Iraq came from the Air Force Research Lab. It’s called Terminal Attack Control Earplugs, which are custom-molded and are worn instead of earphones. They are integrated with tactical radios and an external microphone. They provide blast protection, better communications in high-noise environments and enhanced natural hearing in quiet, clandestine settings. The Air Force brought the technology to our TTI program to bridge the gap between lab funding and procurement money in Air Force Special Operations Command’s 2005 budget.

Q. What is your office’s relationship with the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA)?

A. We work closely with their program managers. For example, they developed an airborne payload called the Adaptive Joint C4ISR Node, or AJCN. What it basically does is bring three different radio-frequency sensors together on the same processor, which will allow you to communicate, to collect signals intelligence data and to perform information operations [computer network attack] — all at the same time. To get all three capabilities on a single tactical platform and synchronized to go after a time-sensitive target is quite an accomplishment.

DARPA invested about $100 million in that payload, but then its program managers came to us and said, “We really want to get this into a program of record and gain visibility for it within the Army. We want to put it out in the field and see how it works.”

So we started an ACTD in 2003 and are having tremendous success with the node’s integration into several different platforms. It’s going to be carried on a helicopter as well as on a fixed-wing aircraft, and we’re going to have a network of AJCNs in the air. We’re being asked to figure out how to potentially deploy it as soon as possible, because communications is such an issue in Iraq and we need as much persistent communications as we can get.

There are dozens of other examples of advanced technologies that came to us from DARPA. Something they did brilliantly was to take a water purification technology and fund two small companies called MIOX Corp. and Cascade Designs to commercialize it and miniaturize it down to the size of a felt-tipped pen that it can be used by an individual soldier. It uses the power from two lithium camera batteries to convert two milliliters of saltwater in only about 30 seconds into a chlorine-based disinfectant that can treat up to four liters of water. A single pen can purify up to 300 liters of water, and the disinfected water tastes good.

We funded the water purification pen as a TTI in 2003 and 2004 to bridge the gap between DARPA’s development funding and the product’s scheduled procurement in 2005. The TTI program funded the purchase of 6,500 of the water pens and accelerated their introduction and use throughout the services and Special Operations Command by 18 to 24 months. When the tsunami disaster hit, there were thousands of the MIOX purifiers available that were shipped overseas and a production line was in place.

Q. What are some of your other technology transition mechanisms?

A. The Defense Production Act Title III program helps establish domestic production sources for advanced technologies that are essential to defense. For example, we have funded Rockwell Scientific to produce laser eye-protection sunglasses for pilots using a technology licensed from Thales.

The Defense Acquisition Challenge Program solicits innovations from small domestic companies that believe they have a technology that can improve an existing military system’s performance or affordability. We received 582 candidate proposals for 2005, and will fund those that have the most merit for testing.

One that won a special award from us last year came from a company called Sytronics in Dayton, Ohio, which offered a voice-enabling technology for crews of the Air Force’s AWACS [Airborne Warning and Control System] aircraft. Sytronics said, “We’ve got a better way to help the crew members rapidly control operator workstation functions while keeping eyes on the primary display.” For example, they can call up ground areas and airborne target tracks on their workstation displays by talking into the microphone. They can say, “Show me GTN 148,” and the screen will display that part of the map, and they they can say, “Show tracks,” and the airborne target tracks in that area will be displayed. You can instantly bring up nine or 10 different layers of the software-driven displays as fast as you can say it, instead of doing point-and-click with a mouse to bring up different windows. Sytronics’ technology is now being evaluated and is a candidate for a future software upgrade on 33 Air Force AWACS aircraft.

Our TechLink program takes the intellectual property in the more than 40 Defense Department labs and makes it available to small companies to set up a new business. The government then receives royalties through the commercial licensing of the technologies.

TechLink also has facilitated several new company start-ups to commercialize DoD-developed technologies.

One of the best examples of that is what we call the Hearing Pill. A scientist at the Office of Naval Research developed a unique family of antioxidant compounds that can prevent and reverse hearing loss. Tests by an Army/Navy medical research team showed that if you take it before you go into a high-noise area, it protects your ears. And even if you take it after you suffered a hearing loss, you can regain some of your hearing. A new company called American BioHealth Group was created in San Diego and was licensed to commercialize the technology. It now has the Hearing Pill on the market. It’s been used in Iraq, and we’re getting testimonials from soldiers who say, “An IED [improvised explosive device] detonated near me one time when I’d taken the pill and another time without it, and its effects are truly amazing.”

Q. What is the Joint Capabilities Integration & Development System?

A. JCIDS is a new way of doing business to help bring greater jointness to the Defense Department. What the J8 on the Joint Staff has done is establish a functional capabilities board for each of the joint war-fighting capability areas — battlespace awareness, command and control, network-centric operations, force protection, force application and focused logistics, to name a few — to identify capability gaps that need to be filled. What I have done with my staff is assign a person to go support each of those boards so we can more closely build our ACTDs to fill those gaps. The Joint Staff obtains the regional combatant commands’ integrated priority lists, which show what their most urgent materiel needs are, and consolidates those lists, picking the top needs. Then we try to fund development of technology solutions. So we work very closely with the J8 and the JCIDS people. They reviewed in advance all the ACTD candidates that were presented at our Breakfast Club and were primarily responsible for getting our JROC memorandum signed, which helps us get congressional approval to release funds for 2005 ACTDs.

Another thing they did for us this past year was to help us initiate an ACTD called Joint Force Projection that was stuck due to a lack of funding. That ACTD provides a synchronized supply-chain management approach akin to Federal Express that would help track where equipment is that was shipped from point A to point B or overseas. It was Joint Forces Command’s No. 1 ACTD priority and was voted the No. 6 priority by the combatant commanders. But we couldn’t come up with the $11.1 million over three years needed to fund it. So the JCIDS folks and [Army] Gen. [Kenneth] Hunzeker, the J8 vice director, in particular, helped us get money from the services and from Joint Forces Command to fund that ACTD. We’re going to be working more closely with the JCIDS folks in the future. Following the first military utility assessment of an ACTD, we will come in and say, “This showed great promise. Now with you heading up the functional capabilities boards and having the services sit on those boards, it’s time to start thinking about where we get the money to transition this ACTD.” So we will have the Joint Staff helping us to transition capabilities to the joint war fighters. •

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