Deputy Defense Secretary Bob Work said the Pentagon’s current effort to write a new offset strategy would be shaped by several factors: adversaries have the capability to rapidly steal new technologies and duplicate them, and resources in the Defense Department to develop the new technologies are limited.
As part of Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel’s recently unveiled Defense Innovation Initiative, DoD will develop a new offset strategy to help maintain the U.S. military’s technical superiority. Historically, the first offset strategy was to counter the Soviet Union’s vast conventional army with a nuclear arsenal; when the Soviets caught up and the nuclear arms race could not continue, DoD pursued a second offset strategy that supported conventional weapons with precision guidance and networks for intelligence and communications sharing to support long-range strike.
“Part of the third offset will be to try to identify the key technologies that we think will give us a particular operational advantage,” Work said Wednesday at the Defense One Summit. One aspect of that will be to accept that adversaries have copied American technologies, so DoD needs to develop both defensive systems that can defend against stealthy threats and offensive systems that are stealthier and longer-range.
The second aspect will be to pursue new areas of technology. Work mentioned robotics, saying that perhaps a fleet of very small systems that can deploy distributed effects might have some utility in the military of the future. “The key thing is, what is something that we believe will give us a competitive advantage?” he said.
Given the rise of cyber crime–and in particular, state-sponsored cyber theft from China and others–Work said the Pentagon has to expect that other countries will steal intellectual property and quickly duplicate whatever advances come out of this offset strategy.
“The last offset strategy lasted us for four decades. It is unlikely that the next one will last that long,” he said, noting that this effort will have to continually evolve.
Doing so with tight budgets will be a challenge, Work said.
“Both of the offset strategies succeeded because of top-down leadership,” he said. “Regardless of how hard the budget gets–it’s getting pretty hard right now–Secretary Hagel and I are going to make this a priority in the next two years.”
Work said the Pentagon and the military services would have to free up personnel and funding for more demonstrations, exercises and prototyping to support the offset strategy. With resources scarce, he said the Pentagon would have to develop a conceptual framework to guide these investments, “and that’s what we’ll focus on probably for the next six months.”
Also during his speech, Work discussed the Pentagon’s planning, programming and budgeting process. He said the programming section–which determines how much money the department should invest in research and development, how many of various kinds of squadrons and units the military should have, and so on–“has just kind of blended into the budget phase.” Congress in recent years is setting spending levels for one fiscal year just before the winter holidays, leaving the Pentagon just weeks to finalize its request for the next fiscal year and deliver the request to Congress in February.
Work said congressional staffers had noticed the quality of DoD budget materials declining in recent years, and even though budget uncertainty is the Pentagon’s biggest problem in that regard, Work said DoD is making an effort to do better.
“It’s a hard thing to do, but we’re trying to get all the programmatic decisions done by the early part of December so we can have a good series of time to go get our budget kind of locked down,” he said.