Navy seeks to hurry technology to fleet: researchers focus their attention on development of Future Naval Capabilities.

• Author: Kennedy, Harold

When U.S. combat troops in Afghanistan needed a weapon to reach deep down into caves and tunnels to destroy al Qaeda hideouts, Navy researchers speeded up their efforts to develop thermobaric explosives.

Thermobarics are fuel-rich explosives that quickly burn oxygen from the target, essentially sucking the air from confined caves and tunnels.

The Navy had "been working on that technology for years," said Navy Capt. Richard V. Kikla, deputy director for industrial and corporate programs for the Office of Naval Research, in Arlington, Va. But 9/1l added a new sense of urgency to the project, he told National Defense.

In response to the attacks, the Navy joined with the Air Force, Defense Threat Reduction Agency and Energy Department to develop and test a laser-guided, 2,000-pound bomb thermobaric explosive within 60 days. They delivered it, in mid-December, to the Afghan theater, where it was used to devastating effect in Operation Anaconda, according to Rear Adm. Jay M. Cohen, chief of naval research.

"Such speed was possible because the science was done before the need became urgent," he told a Senate hearing.

All too often, however, even though the research is completed successfully, the Navy is not ready yet to deploy the project, Kikla said. Instead, he said, it falls into "the valley of death," the gap between the time when a project is finished and the fleet agrees to acquire it. Many projects, Kikla noted, never make their way through that valley.

To help worthwhile projects bridge the gap, the Navy has instituted a process to develop what it calls "Future Naval capabilities." Launched in 1999, the FNC process is designed specifically to take maturing technologies, as the research laboratories complete work on them, and deliver them directly to acquisition program managers for rapid deployment to the fleet, Kikla explained.

FNCs are aimed at the "Next Navy," acquisition programs planned for delivery in the next three to seven years, he said. By comparison, he said, conventional research projects can take 15 to 20 years to work their way to the fleet.

ONR has made a financial commitment to the FNC process, Kikla said. In fiscal year 2002--the first full year of operation--ONR invested $577.6 million in FNCs, he noted. In 2003, it plans to spend more than $600 million on them. That amount, he said, includes approximately two thirds of ONR's funding for advanced technology development and about two fifths of the amount it spends on applied research.

The Navy...