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Well, folks ... Happy Shutdown Eve. We're all holding our breath to see how much things grind to a halt next week.
Last night, the House passed both the Defense spending bill and a separate Ukraine supplemental funding bill. The Defense bill is still doomed in the Senate and the White House since controversial amendments remain, and even more have been added -- including a provision to reduce the salaries of Secretary Austin and other DoD leaders to $1.
Over the past two weeks, Secretary of the Navy Carlos Del Toro made several big announcements:
- September 14 saw the establishment of the Navy's Science and Technology Board charged to "identify new technologies for rapid adoption throughout our Fleet and our Force" and "collaborate with similar groups across our entire government."
- On Tuesday Del Toro called for a new maritime statecraft suited for the 21st century.
- "Maritime statecraft, in a broad sense, encompasses not only naval diplomacy but a national, whole-of-government effort to build comprehensive U.S. and allied maritime power, both commercial and naval."
- Yesterday he announced the creation of the Navy Disruptive Capabilities Office (DCO).
- "Through rapid experimentation and prototyping, the DCO will work collaboratively with stakeholders from across our department focusing on delivering solutions to our warfighters at a pace and scale to close our Fleet’s most critical capability gaps."
Read more about that effort, which will also consolidate work on unmanned capabilities, in our top story. The Navy is also piloting portfolio management with Program Executive Office for Integrated Warfare Systems in an effort to create more agile budgeting and acquisition processes.
In research news, DoD's Office of Local Defense Community Cooperation released its annual report of Defense spending by state. For the first time, it includes information about grants.
In ARP news, we bring our final video from the symposium, Moving from Innovation to Fielding Capabilities. This panel includes the attention-getting research from Amanda and Alex Bresler on the low numbers of SBIR Phase I and II-winning companies who transition to Phase III awards.
- This research was heavily cited in July's Defense Innovation Board report, Terraforming the Valley of Death. We couldn't be prouder that our annual event remains a forum for this kind of influential research and the conversations that surround it.
This Week's Top Story
Del Toro says Disruptive Capabilities Office to solve Navy challenges
Megan Eckstein, Defense News
Navy Secretary Carlos Del Toro announced initiatives aimed at making the service more responsive to warfighter challenges: the creation of the Disruptive Capabilities Office to quickly apply new technologies to operational problems, and a pilot program that would help programs of record be more agile.
Del Toro said he signed off on the creation of the DCO to carry on the mission of the Unmanned Task Force, a pilot program that had reached the end of its 12- to 18-month planned existence.
The service two years ago established the UTF to scour government and industry inventories for unmanned technologies and rapidly vet them to address specific operational needs.
In contrast to the highly public work of the Navy’s Task Force 59 in the Middle East, the UTF’s work was largely classified — often looking at specific actions Russia or China might take and seeking an unmanned technology that could help prevent or respond to that scenario.
Michael Stewart, who led the UTF, told Defense News he worked with fleet commanders from across the globe to generate a prioritized list of their toughest operational problems that their current toolkit couldn’t solve. The task force’s small staff would then assemble a sprint team of legal, policy, warfighting, technology and regional experts to brainstorm potential solutions to those problems using existing technology only. The team would rapidly toss out the ideas that would take too long to field, were too complex, were not mature, and so on, and then settle on a small number of potential solutions to test and evaluate in the field, he said.
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