No Choice for DOD in Terms of Leveraging Commercial Technology Advancement in Building the EMS Enterprise

On the final day of the AOC Symposium the discussion turned to "Advanced Technologies for EMS Operations," chaired by Dr. William Conley, Chief Technology Officer, Mercury Systems (Andover, MA). Conley set the stage for the discussion by addressing the differences between spending in defense electronics advanced technologies in the great-power competition of today vs. that of the past. With regard to the question of whether the US is going to "out-innovate" China in a substantial way, Conley pointed out that in terms of total R&D spending, China was effectively matching the US and, looking back to 1960 and total Federal government R&D spending, Conley pointed out that this was twice the level of commercial industry, while today, this is basically three-to-one in the other direction. As a result, Conley said, “Anyone that wants to think through that 1960s Cold-War lens and say that the government can direct what will happen in electronics, the answer is it can’t. We instead need to look at how we can leverage modern commercial microelectronics R&D and drive that into being appropriate and applicable in the defense ecosystem. That is the challenge in advanced technology that all of us really face today.”

Dr. Dan Green, PM for EW at the Office of Naval Research (EW) echoed Conley’s view. “This question is at the heart of what we’re doing at ONR. How do we make a difference with our limited time and budget to provide capabilities to the naval enterprise? A key part of our challenge is how do we upgrade and leverage our current assets for greater effects than we have realized historically. We need to move toward a netted future combining capabilities distributed throughout the fleet for exponential benefits.

Focusing in on the impact of this on EW, Green asked, “What are the hardware implications of what we need to build? This has informed our recent investments in the EW portfolio. When working toward seeing and responding to the entire spectrum, it becomes a huge signal-processing problem. In order to do this you need to take advantage of advances in digital signal processing (DSP) and compute power. The good news is the major advancement of this technology in the commercial sector, but we need to leverage this for our needs.” Going forward, however, as Moore’s Law slows down, Green, emphasized that “the importance of artificial intelligence and compute architectures becomes greater, and right now we’re at an inflection point in terms of deciding what is the best path going forward for our requirements. It’s not necessarily the same path that the commercial sector will pursue. Our job at ONR is to figure out how to best bridge that gap and to bring those capabilities to the edge.”

Col William “Dollar” Young, USAF, Special Assistant to the Commander, Air Warfare Center, reinforced the critical importance of getting the DOD’s AI architectures for the EMS battle right, and in making them adaptable and agile to multi-domain operation mission needs. “In terms of AI, perpetual novelty is not your friend. If you’ve trained your algorithms on established patterns, adversaries will work to turn your functionality against you. That’s scary and a way of imposing costs, but the solution doesn’t really come from the technology, but from the people. It comes from being able to pull together diverse teams with diverse capabilities operating in multi-domains to deliver stuff that has never been seen before. That is where we’re going, and it rides on the commercial advances in software-defined radios (SDRs).” – John Haystead