The Marine Corps in recent months established a new Fusion Center in Quantico, Va., that seeks to streamline how to push new technology past development toward production.
Marine Corps officials revealed the establishment of the new Fusion Center as the Modern Day Marine conference in Washington on April 30. They said the Marine Corps Rapid Capabilities Office (RCO), established in 2018, is the “progenitor” of this new center.
This center will involve science, technology, requirements and acquisition professionals working together to streamline how the Marine Corps moves from developing new technology to production, a gap the Defense Department acquisition community calls the “valley of death.”
The gap occurs when some useful technology is developed, but the there is a major time and funding resources delay or obstacles before it moves into production.
The acquisition and requirements personnel will also work to better match service-developed technology with requirements and ensure it is using funds to develop technologies that fill the most critical capability gaps.
The aim is to get officials at Quantico to be “able to go into the Fusion Center and to be able to talk through what are those issues that exist…We can sit there and go, ‘what does [science and technology] have in future for us? Okay, how much overlap do we have in some of these capabilities?’ So with a limited number of resources, it helps us figure out which are the ones we need to go after that are going to fill our gaps,” Brig. Gen. Stephen Lightfoot, director of the Capabilities Development Directorate, said during a panel at the conference.
Kevin Murray, Chief Technology Officer at HQMC, added that the service “reimagined the RCO. Instead of really focusing on building new things and adding to the pile, we recognized…we need to build an organization in the middle” that will help the service transition out of capabilities developed by the research and development community.
Brig. Gen. David Walsh, commanding general of Marine Corps Systems Command, told reporters following the panel that he thinks the center is bigger than RCO alone.
“I think the fusion center and a fusion framework is larger than just the RCO. So you bring in elements of the programs of record and the acquisition systems sustainment elements, added onto the back of the RCO and then expanding it even beyond that into our resourcing requirements teams. So it’s the RCO plus a lot of additional stakeholders around that that’ll enable that full, enduring capability.”
He also noted the opening of the Fusion Center came without any official ribbon cutting ceremony, so the Marine Corps has been gradually building it out over the last several months.
Steve Bowdren, program executive officer for land systems at the Marine Corps, noted the fusion center will allow his team to look through the science and technology pipeline and find technology to either add to existing programs through engineering change proposals or in a tech refresh or alternatively where the technology warrants a new program of record.
The officials said the first focus of the Fusion Center will be developing a new counter-drone air defense system that includes sensors, target identification tools and both kinetic and non-kinetic effectors.
Separately, Bowdren said the Marine Corps and Navy are also considering where to apply Marine Corps land-based systems for use in shipboard defense, but he did not disclose what systems they are looking at.
“A lot of this is kind of the same effectors you see other people using…it gets back to…producibility aspect of how many of these things are scalable and available. But yeah, we’re definitely working with them on that.”