MAKING INNOVATION HAPPEN


Steinbock said that one reason that defense companies may be spending less on IR&D is to keep expenses down and present more attractive bids for DOD contracts, in line with changes in Pentagon procure- ment policy that give greater emphasis to lower-cost procurement, particularly to source selection concepts such as “lowest price technically acceptable.”


“R&D expenditures in the commercial technology sector can and do lead to significantly increased revenues from growing markets.” In contrast, Steinbock said, “in an era of declining defense pro- curement, R&D expenditures for defense at best let a firm get a slightly larger slice of a smaller pie—hardly a compelling proposition for shareholders.”


“We still are operating in a defense indus- trial world that’s based on the ’50s and the Cold War, where we had one com- mon enemy, and that enemy had one common enemy, and we kind of knew what needed to be done,” Chew said. Since


then, like the U.S. automotive


industry in the 1980s, the defense indus- try has lost its bearings, and “they don’t really know what to invest in.” Mean- while, defense companies “are doing everything that they can to squeeze the last dollar out of their existing product line. [Tey’ve] got to fill [their] assembly lines, at the end of the day.”


“When was the last time the Army or [DOD] really built a new platform? You can pretty much trace when we started running into problems to when we ‘won' the Cold War and we stopped building things,” Chew said. Previously, “Every time you designed a main battle tank, you knew there was another main battle tank on the drawing boards right after that, and the same with the Air Force: Every time you designed a new fighter, you knew there was a new fighter on the drawing boards after that. In the Navy, every time you designed a new surface vessel, you knew there was one after that.


“Tat’s why it’s so important to build stuff. You have to keep people active. Tere’s no such thing as a technology faucet; you just can’t turn it on, and there it is. Tere’s also no such thing as an acquisition or design faucet. Look at what happened when we stopped developing rotary- wing aircraft,” Chew said. With respect to rotary-wing innovation, he explained,


“You see the commercial guys absolutely cleaning the department’s clock.”


Even the development of the Future Ver- tical Lift (FVL) program appears to be a shortsighted solution, Chew said. (See


“A Big Lift,” Page 108.) Te notion that the aircraft will have to be designed to last 30 years with incremental improve- ments because the Army probably won’t build a new rotary aircraft in that time


frame flies in the face of innovation, he said. “Can you imagine if Apple actually had that philosophy on the iPhone? ‘Tis is going to be the last iPhone that people are ever going to want to buy, so it’s got to last 30 years.’ [Apple would] never get anything out.”


In the same vein, DOD should focus on awarding valuable R&D projects to com- panies that can produce something from the R&D, not organizations such as big laboratories or universities that don’t make anything, Chew said. “If you really want to have innovation in the industrial base, then focus on the industrial base.” Awarding contracts to entities that don’t have a manufacturing base is a recipe for


“unbuildable systems that don’t transi- tion,” said Chew.


Overall, Chew is skeptical about the sub- stantive benefits of DOD’s innovation push. “When you start dictating innova- tion, that’s like dictating creativity. If you really have to talk about innovation, you have to ask yourself, what are you really doing?” he said. But he applauded DOD’s push for more prototyping and experimen- tation of emerging capabilities, specifically the Office of the Deputy Assistant Secre- tary of Defense for Emerging Capability & Prototyping, under the ASD(R&E):


“Give me your idea and let’s see what we can do with it,” as Chew put it.


Even with that commitment to inno-


Disruptive technologies, by definition, are not initially welcomed by large institutions like the big defense contractors or the DOD acquisition system.


68 Army AL&T Magazine July-September 2016


vation, Chew said industry is likely to approach warily, “because again, a lot of stuff that you do with the science and technology and advanced concepts in the prototyping world is, frankly, knocking current rice bowls. Nobody likes that.”


He also sees promise in defense-industry exchanges to broaden each side’s under- standing of how the other works and how they could work better together.


Page 1  |  Page 2  |  Page 3  |  Page 4  |  Page 5  |  Page 6  |  Page 7  |  Page 8  |  Page 9  |  Page 10  |  Page 11  |  Page 12  |  Page 13  |  Page 14  |  Page 15  |  Page 16  |  Page 17  |  Page 18  |  Page 19  |  Page 20  |  Page 21  |  Page 22  |  Page 23  |  Page 24  |  Page 25  |  Page 26  |  Page 27  |  Page 28  |  Page 29  |  Page 30  |  Page 31  |  Page 32  |  Page 33  |  Page 34  |  Page 35  |  Page 36  |  Page 37  |  Page 38  |  Page 39  |  Page 40  |  Page 41  |  Page 42  |  Page 43  |  Page 44  |  Page 45  |  Page 46  |  Page 47  |  Page 48  |  Page 49  |  Page 50  |  Page 51  |  Page 52  |  Page 53  |  Page 54  |  Page 55  |  Page 56  |  Page 57  |  Page 58  |  Page 59  |  Page 60  |  Page 61  |  Page 62  |  Page 63  |  Page 64  |  Page 65  |  Page 66  |  Page 67  |  Page 68  |  Page 69  |  Page 70  |  Page 71  |  Page 72  |  Page 73  |  Page 74  |  Page 75  |  Page 76  |  Page 77  |  Page 78  |  Page 79  |  Page 80  |  Page 81  |  Page 82  |  Page 83  |  Page 84  |  Page 85  |  Page 86  |  Page 87  |  Page 88  |  Page 89  |  Page 90  |  Page 91  |  Page 92  |  Page 93  |  Page 94  |  Page 95  |  Page 96  |  Page 97  |  Page 98  |  Page 99  |  Page 100  |  Page 101  |  Page 102  |  Page 103  |  Page 104  |  Page 105  |  Page 106  |  Page 107  |  Page 108  |  Page 109  |  Page 110  |  Page 111  |  Page 112  |  Page 113  |  Page 114  |  Page 115  |  Page 116  |  Page 117  |  Page 118  |  Page 119  |  Page 120  |  Page 121  |  Page 122  |  Page 123  |  Page 124  |  Page 125  |  Page 126  |  Page 127  |  Page 128  |  Page 129  |  Page 130  |  Page 131  |  Page 132  |  Page 133  |  Page 134  |  Page 135  |  Page 136  |  Page 137  |  Page 138  |  Page 139  |  Page 140  |  Page 141  |  Page 142  |  Page 143  |  Page 144  |  Page 145  |  Page 146  |  Page 147  |  Page 148  |  Page 149  |  Page 150  |  Page 151  |  Page 152  |  Page 153  |  Page 154  |  Page 155  |  Page 156  |  Page 157  |  Page 158  |  Page 159  |  Page 160  |  Page 161  |  Page 162  |  Page 163  |  Page 164  |  Page 165  |  Page 166  |  Page 167  |  Page 168  |  Page 169  |  Page 170  |  Page 171  |  Page 172  |  Page 173  |  Page 174  |  Page 175  |  Page 176  |  Page 177  |  Page 178  |  Page 179  |  Page 180  |  Page 181  |  Page 182  |  Page 183  |  Page 184