National Harbor, Md. – The Navy’s program executive officer (PEO) for unmanned aviation and strike weapons told a conference here about the specific challenge his office has in providing unmanned assets and highlighted the importance of a new initiative to add new capabilities faster than normal.
Rear Adm. Mark Darrah, PEO, Unmanned Aviation and Strike Weapons (U&W), said his office is still learning some of the challenges and opportunities of unmanned systems in various domains. They provide attributes like persistence, expendability, precision, and scalability.
The challenges and opportunities include autonomy, interoperability standards, manned-unmanned teaming, open architecture/modularity, collision avoidance, miniaturization, and cyber vulnerability.
He was speaking at a conference put on by the Association for Unmanned Vehicle Systems International (AUVSI)).
Darrah said while there has been a lot of attention on artificial intelligence (AI), “we should be thinking about that, but we’re in the early stages of that. Where we should be focusing our attention there is on the observe and orient elements of the OODA loop.”
The OODA loop is a decision cycle of observe, orient, decide, and act, originally applied to combat operations process
Darrah said it will take using machine-speed to go through all of the data, but decision-making must remain with a human being, leveraging machine speed to work through the massive amount of information new sensors and platforms are adding,
He also said cyber security will remain an issue in unmanned systems. Darrah noted his PEO also includes weapons like the Harpoon and Tomahawk, which all rely on networks. Cyber vulnerability is a big deal and “we all need to be focusing out attention on how we can build resilient capabilities and architectures to defend against that.”
Separately, Darrah highlighted a new initiative, IMPAX, to get contracts to small businesses quicker to add the newest technologies. First activated in September, IMAPX aims to circumvent how the Defense Department is not designed to rapidly assess new technologies, with contracts taking 6-24 months to be awarded.
He said PEO U&W used a provision in the 1998 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) that said the government can utilize a non-government entity to create partnerships, a Partnership Intermediary Agreement (PIA). This allows a non-government entity to act as an agent for the government to do prototyping and generate opportunities for small businesses to get access to government programs faster than other methods.
Darrah said the Navy examined what attributes other Defense Department offices use to more quickly test and add capabilities. This included looking at the Defense Innovation Experimentation Unit (DIUx), the SOFWERX partnership intermediary supporting Special Operations Command (SOCOM), and the Naval Air Warfare Center’s (NAWC) AIRWorks program that allows rapid prototyping, experimentation, and low volume production.
His office then added their “best of breed” attributes to IMPAX like assist in defining the need, coordinate combining needs and ideas, identify potential solutions, integrate best solutions, prototyping, tech n experimentation with range demonstrations, flight tests, and assisting in contract transition.
Darrah said IMPAX allows for demonstrations on government ranges and currently has several commercial airport leases through the contractor PIA. This also allows IMPAX technologies to be transferred to and from government labs.
The first IMPAX awardee was the Georgia Tech Research Institute (GTRI), which focuses on integrating unmanned aircraft into the national airspace.
Under this setup, once the joint team chooses optimal solutions, they will test the concepts within the IMPAX structure. This can let the programs more quickly transition into a program of record or into a traditional science and technology (S&T) processes currently in place.
Darrah compared the growth in new unmanned systems to mushrooms growing quickly after rain and that he is determined to use resources like IMPAX to “go fast” under the direction of Chief of Naval Operations Adm. John Richardson and new assistant secretary of the Navy for Research, Development, and Acquisition James Geurts.
Going fast refers to the leaders’ push to advance new Navy capabilities and weapons faster than in the past to meet new challenges and grow the strength of the Navy in coming decades.