By Geoff Fein
Unmanned systems are an area the Navy should continue to invest in, from a technological point of view, as the service learns just what those platforms are capable of doing, said the Navy’s top civilian leader.
“I think we are just starting to learn with unmanned systems, in a variety of ways,” Navy Secretary Donald Winter told Defense Daily in a recent interview.
“I think that is an area where we [should] continue to invest from the technological point of view…develop new systems, employ those systems, and then learn, not only from the technological point of view of how to better control communicate and things of that nature, but from a real CONOPS point of view. There are many aspects. To me it’s like one of the problems we have with the implementation of a lot of the IT infrastructure,” he added.
Winter’s last day as Navy secretary was March 13.
In broad spectrum business there is a natural tendency…to use information technology (IT) to modernize and facilitate existing processes, Winter said.
“But in many cases that is a very bad way to do things, because IT permits you to totally reengineer those processes in the first place, and the most effective implementation of that type of an IT is when you work together and you reengineer the process and take advantage of the IT capabilities that exist,” he said. “If you do it the other way around, if you just implement what you have been doing for many many years, now you have an additional investment in an old business process which makes it even more difficult to change.”
Winter believes the Navy is still in that early phase of unmanned systems, where the service is using the intelligent systems to replace what a man or woman operator would do on a platform, as opposed to taking a whole new look at what could be done. “I think we are just starting to scratch at that.”
“As we learn, and have a different view of how operations can be conducted in a totally different way, we may make some very significant breakthroughs. I think that the technology, both from an intelligent processing perspective–the software and communications systems…there is stuff coming out right now that is just incredible. How do we take advantage of all of that? Most of this is being developed for totally different uses. How do you apply it here?”
And what does it that mean about the Navy’s ability to do things differently…fundamentally differently, Winter said.
“It’s kind of interesting. I have a different perspective on this coming from a space business, because in the space business it started out unmanned, and when we got into putting a man into space, and for time immemorial, those have been almost two separate communities with a different thought process and a different set of concepts,” Winter said. “If we had ever started out on an Apollo program, shuttle program, something like that, and said can we work a shuttle so that it doesn’t have a pilot in it, [we would have] been in a very different place today in terms of communications satellites and things of that nature.”
Unmanned systems have a lot of future potential, a lot of opportunities for innovation, Winter noted. “I just hope we don’t get so focused on a few very good items that are coming out that we stop exploring in the future.”