Four Essential Rules for Developing Revolutionary Networked Capabilities.

• Author: Maddux, Tom
• Position: Viewpoint

* The Defense Department is undertaking a challenging mission to prepare for both limited conflicts and emerging near-peer threats.

This mission will require operating in hostile environments full of cheap commercially produced systems that utilize artificial intelligence, machine learning, data analytics and internetof-things technological breakthroughs. These revolutionary advances will allow enemy forces to make lightning-fast operational decisions based on sensor cognition and allow for realtime data driven force synchronization to supplement human observation and decision making.

These capabilities will allow traditionally weaker forces to seize the initiative and execute the chain of decisions and actions required to neutralize capabilities before the U.S. military can even project force into the operational environments. Weapon systems that cost less than $1 million to procure will effectively eliminate the effectiveness of multibillion-dollar weapon systems like naval carrier groups, manned fighter aircraft and integrated missile defense systems.

The U.S defense acquisition process must improve the transfer of new technologies and end user feedback between development steps, implement proven early stage development design processes, and better incentivize commercial developer participation in defense capability development to compete in this new operating environment.

The Defense Department is recognizing that some of the legacy franchise systems that are pillars of its budgets will become liabilities in the future operating environment. For example, the Pentagon is phasing out the JSTARS air surveillance franchise and the Marine Corps made the decision to discontinue vulnerable amphibious ships.

These efforts are encouraging and will prevent the earmarking of billions of dollars that could be used to develop more effective solutions. But the department cannot just rely on cutting programs. The existing procurement process is not designed to develop the new solutions needed to compete in the future operational environment or integrate them into existing defense capabilities. The process needs to reform its new product development principles and refine its organizational structure to attract the commercial developers and talent necessary to create overmatch capabilities against these new threats.

To counter these threats, it is essential to not just focus on integrating the latest available technology into existing platforms. Simply adding new technology to existing platforms that are designed for an increasingly obsolete operational environment has been shown to fail in previous defense and commercial...