By Emelie Rutherford
A new Pentagon rapid-fielding effort remains a work in progress but has had successes including helicopter-survivability efforts, a senior official said.
Zachary Lemnios, the Pentagon’s director of defense research and engineering (DDR&E), recently told lawmakers the challenge dominating most of his days is figuring out how to get new technologies to troops as fast as possible.
Questioned on Capitol Hill by Rep. Loretta Sanchez (D-Calif.), Lemnios acknowledged his office’s new rapid-fielding directorate is one of multiple Pentagon attempts to rapidly transition technologies to warfighters.
“Studies that we’ve seen and we’ve tracked…have addressed how do we cohere and how do we scale this enterprise, and we are looking at that,” Lemnios told the House Armed Services Terrorism, Unconventional Threats and Capabilities subcommittee on March 23.
“That story is not yet complete,” he testified before the panel Sanchez chairs. “It’s largely driven by individuals that understand the intersection of the warfighter technology and what can be actually resourced through the (Defense) Department and with Congress. Each of these has been a mash up. Each of these has been a handcrafted concept that we’ve had to take through. We are doing that day in day out and we’re working to try to harmonize and scale that to the right level.”
Soon after Lemnios assumed the job as the Pentagon’s top technologist last July, he made one of his top goals accelerating the delivery of technical capabilities to warfighters.
He told the House panel “some significant results” have come to bear in this overarching effort. Still, he noted his people have had to carry these “handcrafted” concepts through the Pentagon.
“It’s just the way it is and we’re trying to find a way to resource this at size,” he said.
Lemnios pointed to the Helicopter Alert and Threat Termination-Acoustic (HALTT-A) anti-sniper program as an example.
“HALTT uses advanced acoustic detection and data processing to exploit the supersonic shock wave produced by a bullet in flight,” according to the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). “The system alerts the crew to an attack and provides shooter location with ‘o’clock’ accuracy.”
The HALTT-A effort was in early-stage development by DARPA. Then Lemnios’ office launched a Helicopter Survivability Task Force last July that worked to identify, demonstrate, and integrate capabilities to counter the threat of small-arms fires and risks to helicopters in Iraq and Afghanistan.
As a result of this task force, for HALTT-A “DDR&E assisted in the resourcing of the follow-on testing, and airworthiness certification of an operationally-representative system configuration for the 16 acoustic sensors, associated computers and pilot displays,” Lemnios said in written testimony. “This fast track integration and testing will shorten the delivery timeline by years.”
The Pentagon plans to deploy several HALTT-A systems to Afghanistan for operational evaluation in the near future.
Also, the Mine Resistant Ambush Protected vehicle (MRAP) and MRAP All-Terrain Vehicle (M-ATV) are two obvious examples of successful quick-turnaround efforts, Lemnios said. The first MRAP was fielded less than six months after a urgent plea from theater, and now 1,000 mine-resistant vehicles are produced each month, he noted.
DDR&E has reduced the time it takes to move a technology from idea to first proof of concept from up to 60 months down to 12 months or less via its Joint Concept Technology Demonstrations process, Lemnios said.