By Ann Roosevelt
Raytheon [RTN] sees momentum growing from its company-wide effort to counter improvised explosive devices (IED), according to a company executive.
“We have had success in some of the products and some of the systems that we have provided to the warfighter,” John Costello, vice president of Business Development and Strategic Planning for Raytheon Network Centric Systems based in McKinney, Texas, said in an interview.
Costello leads the Raytheon IED Defeat Task Force. It began in September 2006. The company had pockets of activity on counter-IEDs, but it wasn’t the cohesive focused effort in place now.
The government is very circumspect about what it says about the counter-IED effort, and Raytheon is equally so.
“We on purpose are not publicizing the specific technologies that we’re working, nor are we publicizing what we have in theater, nor the successes that we have. And we have things in all of those categories,” Costello said.
It is a challenging task.
Raytheon CEO William Swanson had said counter-IED work is not a business case and Raytheon doesn’t need to make a dime; we need to solve the problem, Costello said.
Costello volunteered to lead the company effort and has a senior person from every Raytheon business on board.
“We announced a Raytheon task force internally to the company and people were just coming out of the woodwork saying this is the most noble thing that we have done,” he said. “It really is a powerful way to attack the problem.”
He said, “I have $8 million to spend without a business case, which is not an insignificant amount of money.” Those funds are on top of what each business unit is spending on its own on the problem, investment that is in the “upper tens of millions,” he said.
First came the enterprise campaign, he said. “It’s a corporate-wide effort with funding to sort of provide focus to critical aspects of what we’re trying to do. So we’re investing in technology, we’re investing in systems design, we also have established a science and technology task force to harness our scientists but also to form partnerships with small business, academia, the labs, etc., and that’s been ongoing.”
Then there is a web site for small businesses to propose their ideas. “We have a large number of hits every week,” he said. “We take those ideas, and do sort of a scrub on them, and then we pass it to the appropriate business [unit].”
Right now, “We have 57 ideas that we’re still working on,” Costello said.
Raytheon’s businesses have a lot of areas that can apply to the counter-IED effort. The company deals with products, systems and solutions in areas such as intelligence, jamming, radars, communications, networking, and sensors, all of which can be brought to bear on the IED problem.
The Defense Department’s Joint IED Defeat Task Force (JIEDDO) has funded some efforts, he said.
“We go the whole gamut, but we’re trying to focus our investment on left of the boom,” Costello said. “We’re also trying to address the near-term problem of IEDs in theater.”
Other investment aims at solutions that may apply to the homeland defense aspect of IED counter terrorism.
“Our investment is in the integration of intelligence information, so it becomes actionable and focused on this threat,” he said. “Obviously you have to have persistence, you’ve got to have the ability to get data down to the warfighter to do the alerting, the assessment, the detection, the whole nine yards so we’re working very hard with the JIEDDO and the services to assist them in tackling this problem.”
The task force has also done some work for the Department of Homeland Security and the science and technology area.
The enterprise campaign will continue in 2008.
“We have this standing team and we’re operating on all cylinders now,” he said. “And we’re churning out ideas, we’re at Yuma testing ideas, we’re at Aberdeen testing ideas.”
Not everything works, he said. What looks like a good technology has to leave the laboratory and go into the field for rigorous testing to ensure it will do what the troops on the ground need it to do. “I spend a lot of my time on that.”
Additionally, the team has talked with some of the closest U.S. partners, the United Kingdom, Canada and Australia.
“I think we are convinced that this threat is not going to go away when we leave Iraq, Afghanistan,” Costello said. “I think it’s going to be for the foreseeable future a tactic that our enemies will use in one form or another and we just have to be able to respond. And they’re not a dumb enemy.”
Now technologies are being developed that are adaptable on the ground, so ground troops can adapt to a changing threat.
“In industry if you invest in left of the boom, then you are in fact in the system of systems world and applicability is broader,” he said.
One force protection development is not a Raytheon core competency, but could potentially help soldiers who suffer from traumatic brain injury.
“We have partnered with a company that makes a composition that we believe can mitigate the blast effects in a vehicle and in a helmet that would mitigate traumatic brain injury,” he said. “We’re investing in that point solution because we believe it’s so important.”
Initial tests were positive, however, after discussions with independent experts and others, more tests under different conditions are now under way.
“If this works, great,” he said. “If it doesn’t work, maybe there’s another application that will help the youngsters.”
Perhaps there will be success, but it’s too early to tell right now, he said. “But it’s not something you’d think that a Raytheon company would be working with. But we came across this technology as part of our technology search. We had some guys who looked at it and said this could be applied to this type of a problem, and we’re working on it. And we’ve been doing this now for about six months.
Raytheon is working with Walter Reed and other places trying to help develop some type of capability to protect the soldier or Marine at the point of the spear from traumatic brain injury. then we have made a great stride in terms of our ability.
The counter-IED task force continues to move forward.
“We don’t look at it as a business, but it is in fact growing and we are marketing some of the products,” Costello said.