Budget cuts have left the technological capability of the “next force” most at risk, with research and engineering funding hard to come by and few places within the Defense Department budget to pull from unless Congress lifts the sequester spending caps, a top Pentagon research and engineering official said Tuesday.
Investments in capability for today’s force have declined somewhat since about 2010 but are overall rising slightly over the Future Years Defense Program, and science and technology funding for the “force after next” is low but stable, Alan Shaffer, principle deputy assistant secretary of defense for research and engineering, told attendees of the Precision Strike Annual Review on Tuesday in Springfield, Va.
But funding for engineering for the “next force” will continue to decline over the next five to 15 years and has dropped significantly since its peak around 2004, he said.
Shaffer said after his presentation that the Defense Department is “in discussions” about finding a way to reverse the decline in funding for technology development for the next force.
“Right now, the ’15 budget is what the ’15 budget is,” he told Defense Daily after his presentation. But he said Frank Kendall, undersecretary of defense for acquisition, technology and logistics, had serious concerns about his ability to preserve design teams amid tight budgets.
“What that means is that as we look forward, if Congress gives us relief, I would look for the department, at Mr. Kendall’s urging, to put some funds back into that space,” Shaffer said. “So is the department going to do anything about it? We would sure love to, but it all comes down to what Congress allocates.”
Asked if the department could funnel money from elsewhere, such as the “force after next” pots of money, if Congress fails to raise the sequestration caps, Shaffer said it would not be wise to raid one research and development account to help another.
“You don’t want to take money out of the force after next because that’s [science and technology], so that needs to be stable,” he said. “That’s been stable at about $11 [million]-$12 million a year. I can take $2 million out of S&T and I would devastate the S&T program but I wouldn’t fix the engineering problem. So at the end of the day it’s going to have to be a much broader trade from a bigger pool of money.”
If the Pentagon can find enough money to properly fund these accounts, Shaffer said the defense strategy clearly outlined what the money would go to. The defense research and engineering strategy lays out three key priorities, he said: mitigating new and emerging threat capabilities, to include counter-space, cyber and counter-weapons of mass destruction technologies; affordably enabling new and extended capabilities in existing military systems by boosting prototyping, modeling and simulation and other efforts early in development; and developing technological surprises through science and engineering.
Shaffer predicted that the next technological surprises, and the biggest revolutions in how the U.S. armed forces fight, would come in autonomy, hypersonic weapons and electromagnetic spectrum control.
Regarding autonomy, Shaffer said Air Force officials like to tell him it takes 100 men on the ground to operate one unmanned aerial system in the air, and those figures need to be swapped for UAVs to be truly useful. In a time of manpower reductions, having a truly autonomous system–one that could better sort through massive amounts of data on its own and only require human input for specific decisions, rather than for making sense of the data–would be a game-changer.
Hypersonic weapons such as scramjets would be cheaper than traditional weapons with gas turbine propulsion, because fewer moving parts mean cheaper construction and cheaper maintenance, Shafer said.
And with the electromagnetic spectrum, advanced electronics and microelectronics have allowed potential adversaries to use new frequencies and waveforms that the U.S. military needs to adapt to for offensive disruptions or to protect itself defensively.
“Simply, this becomes a point-counterpoint game that’s very hard to play,” Shaffer said. “The U.S. used to have dominance in the electromagnetic spectrum. We no longer do.”
Weapons development elsewhere around the globe will soon push American legacy systems to their limits, so investments in next-generation capabilities must take place now, Shaffer said.