Marine Corps

Overhauls
Recon Mission
PAGE 22

India, U.S. Strengthen

Defense Tech Ties
PAGE 20

NATIONALDEFENSEMAGAZINE.ORG

Aviation
Revolution
Air Force, Army Plug into
Electric Aircraft Market PAGE 28
SEPTEMBER 2023

NDIA’S BUSINESS &

TECHNOLOGY MAGA ZINE
 CONTENTS
September 2023 | Volume CVIII, Number 838 | NationalDefenseMagazine.org
NDIA’S
BUSINESS &
TECHNOLOGY
MAGA ZINE

MARINE CORPS 22
• The Marine Corps is retooling
its reconnaissance and counter-
reconnaissance operations for
potential combat in a contested
maritime environment
where Marines will AVIATION 28
need to provide intel- • The Wright Brothers
ligence across mul- launched the aviation
tiple domains for the revolution off the beaches
entire Joint Force. of Kitty Hawk, with the
first successful flight of a
motor-powered airplane.
The jet engine ushered in
its second age, revolution-
izing both air travel and
military aviation follow-
ing World War II. Today,
electric propulsion is
powering the third revolu-
tion, and the U.S. military
is paying attention.

LOOK FOR
AUGMENTED
REALITY
CONTENT
ON:
PAGE 31
PAGE 35

U.S.-INDIA 20
• The United States has
entered into a new strategic EXPERIENCE
technology partnership with THE MAGAZINE
IN AUGMENTED
India, but it isn’t the first time. REALITY
Similar U.S.-India agreements
DOWNLOAD THE FREE NDIA AR APP
floundered. Will regulatory
COVER: Joby Aviation

If previously installed, please update

hurdles limit the near-term to the latest version by checking
impact of the agreement the App Store or Google Play.

as they have in the past?

National Defense (ISSN 0092–1491) is published monthly by the National Defense Industrial Association (NDIA), 2101 Wilson Blvd., Suite 700, Arlington, VA 22201–3060. TEL (703)
522–1820; FAX (703) 522–1885. ADVERTISING SALES: Kathleen Kenney, 2101 Wilson Blvd., Suite 700, Arlington, VA 22201–3060. TEL (703) 247–2576; FAX (703) 522–4602. The views
expressed are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect those of NDIA. Membership rates in the association are $40 annually; $15.00 is allocated to National Defense for a one-
year association basic subscription and is non-deductible from dues. Annual rates for NDIA members: $40 U.S. and possessions; District of Columbia add 6 percent sales tax; $45 foreign. A six-week notice
is required for change of address. Periodical postage paid at Arlington, VA and at additional mailing office. POSTMASTER: Send address changes to National Defense, 2101 Wilson Blvd, Suite 700, Arlington,
VA 22201–3060. The title National Defense is registered with the Library of Congress. Copyright 2023, NDIA

N AT I O N A L D E F E N S E | S E P T E M B E R 2 0 2 3 1
 CONTENTS

STAFF
3 4 5 6 12 13 EDITOR IN CHIEF
Stew Magnuson
(703) 247-2545
SMagnuson@NDIA.org

3 NDIA PERSPECTIVE 26 SPACE CREATIVE DIRECTOR

Views from the association's leadership Defense Innovation Unit Spinning Brian Taylor
Space Web for JADC2 (703) 247-2546
4 EDITOR’S NOTES BY SEAN CARBERRY BTaylor@NDIA.org
From the desk of the editor in chief
BY STEW MAGNUSON 28 COVER STORY MANAGING EDITOR
Sean Carberry
Electric Engines Propelling Military (703) 247-2542
5 EMERGING TECHNOLOGY HORIZONS Into New Age of Aviation SCarberry@NDIA.org
Looking toward the tech of the future BY LAURA HECKMANN

6 DISPATCHES 30 Army Quietly Exploring Electric Aircraft SENIOR EDITOR

Josh Luckenbaugh
News from the U.S. and around the world 32 Air Mobility: The Buzz in Paris (703) 247-2585
COMPILED BY STEW MAGNUSON JLuckenbaugh@NDIA.org
34 AIR & MISSILE DEFENSE
12 ALGORITHMIC WARFARE Russian Aggression Fuels European Air
STAFF WRITER
Laura Heckmann
What’s coming in artificial intelligence, big Defense Market BY STEW MAGNUSON (703) 247-2543
data and cybersecurity BY JOSH LUCKENBAUGH LHeckmann@NDIA.org
36 ENERGETICS
13 BUDGET MATTERS Congress Adds Energetics, Critical EDITORIAL ASSISTANT
Who’s funding what in Washington Chemical Provisions to Defense Bill Allyson Park
BY SEAN CARBERRY BY SEAN CARBERRY (703) 247-9469
APark@NDIA.org
14 VIEWPOINT 38 BOMB DISPOSAL
Early F-35 Program Challenges Provide INTERN
Q&A: Capt. Steven Beall, Commanding Cambrie Eckert
Lessons For Future Leaders Officer, U.S. Naval School Explosive
BY TOM BURBAGE Ordnance Disposal BY JAN TEGLER
16 INDUSTRY PERSPECTIVE 40 NDIA POLICY POINTS
Data Cleansing Improves Federal Views from the association's policy division ADVERTISING
Government Outcomes BY PATRICK SWEENEY
41 GOVERNMENT CONTRACTING INSIGHTS SVP, MEETINGS, DIVISIONS
18 INDUSTRY PERSPECTIVE Analysis of the newest rules and regulations & PARTNERSHIPS
Missing Synergy: How Defense, CONTRIBUTED BY COVINGTON & BURLING Christine M. Klein
Commercial Sectors Can Benefit Each Other (703) 247-2593
BY PAT ACOX AND ADI RAVAL 42 NDIA NEWS CKlein@NDIA.org

Happenings at the association

20 GLOBAL MARKET
Will U.S., India Pact Boost Defense
Innovation? BY JOSH LUCKENBAUGH
22 MARINE CORPS
Marine Corps Scouting New
Reconnaissance Capabilities
BY JOSH LUCKENBAUGH
24 TACTICAL VEHICLES
Marine Corps Seeking Intel on
Reconnaissance Vehicle BY ALLYSON PARK
14
SALES DIRECTOR
Kathleen Kenney
43 NDIA BOARD OF DIRECTORS (703) 247-2576
KKenney@NDIA.org
44 NDIA CALENDAR
A complete guide to NDIA events National Defense
2101 Wilson Blvd.
48 NEXT MONTH Suite 700
Arlington, VA 22201
Preview of our next issue
48 INDEX OF ADVERTISERS
Connect with our sponsors
NDIA MEMBERSHIP: The
National Defense Industrial
Association (NDIA) is the pre-
mier association representing
all facets of the defense and
technology industrial base and
serving all military services.
16 18 34 36 38 For more information please
call our membership depart-
ment at 703-522-1820 or visit
us on the web at NDIA.org/
Membership

2 N AT I O N A L D E F E N S E | S E P T E M B E R 2 0 2 3 WWW.NATIONALDEFENSEMAGAZINE.ORG
 NDIA PERSPECTIVE BY MICHAEL J. BAYER
Special Operators Essential for National Strategy
A
s we head into a very busy
fall season, please pause
for a moment to turn your
thoughts to our military and their
families, especially those deployed
around the world protecting our
freedom, values and way of life.
Both directly and through our
alliances and partnerships around
the world, they are deterring tyr-
anny and aggression, and your
team at the National Defense Indus-
trial Association remains awed
by their committed service.
This month, Congress returns to
complete a very full legislative agenda,
and NDIA is focused on support-
ing timely completion of on-time
appropriations for the entire federal
government. The stakes are high for
the Defense Department. Under the
recently passed Fiscal Responsibility
Act, colloquially referred to as the debt
ceiling deal, all appropriations bills
must be completed before Jan. 1, or
all federal departments and agencies
will lose one percent of their funding.
Budget instability, including con-
tinuing resolutions, continue to wreak
havoc on warfighters and member
companies working so hard to support
them, and we are committed to educat-
ing government stakeholders and the
public about the challenges caused by
this dysfunction. Service members and
their families deserve better, as do the
companies in the defense industrial
base that are investing and working
to ensure the armed forces have the
capabilities, platforms and services
they need to effectively defer aggres-
sion and to protect the homeland.
The House and Senate will also start
negotiating the final Fiscal Year 2024
National Defense Authorization Act,
or NDAA. Among the many important
provisions, the association is focused
on the resolution of extending waivers
for streamlined acquisition of defense
stocks related to Ukraine and authori-
zations of additional munitions eligible
for multi-year procurement contracts.
These provisions are important,
because the illegal and unjust invasion
of Ukraine has illuminated production
limitations and supply chain chal-
Defense Dept. photo
lenges that prevent companies in the
defense industrial base from quickly
accelerating the manufacturing of
weapons systems and munitions.
Since the end of the Cold
War, the Defense Department
has shifted — along with the
rest of the U.S. economy —
to a “just in time” mindset
which has resulted in indus-
trial production capacity that can-
not surge quickly during a crisis.
William LaPlante, undersecretary
of defense for acquisition and sus-
tainment, is focused on this very
challenge. We strongly support his
three priority lines of effort for the
acquisition and sustainment com-
munity: increase U.S. capabilities
and production; renew emphasis
on allies and partners, especially in
the areas of co-production and co-
development; and focus development
of acquisition strategies and asym-
metric technological capabilities to
effectively deter near-peer competitors.
In addition, based on the lessons
learned from the conflict being waged
in Ukraine, he is also emphasizing
the importance of realistic train-
ing and sustainment requirements
during the development phase of
systems and platforms. He is chal-
lenging the acquisition community to
ensure these systems and platforms
are both deployable and sustainable
during deployments and conflicts.
In addition, earlier this year he
established the Joint Production Accel-
eration Cell as a direct report. He
has charged it with building endur-
ing industrial production capacity,
resiliency and surge capability for key
defense weapon systems and supplies.
The purpose is to shift the department
from a crisis-management, reactive
posture, to one that proactively and
continuously analyzes and identifies
opportunities to optimize production
capacity, resiliency and surge ability.
While the cell is initially focused on
munitions, the intention is to expand
to weapons systems and suppliers.
Another area of congressional focus
regarding the conflict in Ukraine is
the role of irregular warfare. Peer and
near-peer competitors are avoiding
direct confrontation with the United
States and instead are focusing on con-
ducting sophisticated proxy conflicts
and accelerating disinformation and
propaganda campaigns. During this
decisive decade of global competition,
the strategic environment is rapidly
shifting to overcome these evolv-
ing geopolitical, technological
and operational challenges.
A successful and sustained
U.S. irregular warfare strat-
egy will be an essential ele-
ment of an effective response.
Therefore, Congress is considering a
provision to authorize the secretary
of defense to provide support to for-
eign forces, irregular forces, groups,
or individuals engaged in supporting
or facilitating ongoing and autho-
rized irregular warfare operations
by U.S. Special Operations Forces.
In the larger context, the assistant
secretary of defense for special opera-
tions and low intensity conflict and
the leader of U.S. Special Operations
Command are focused on ensuring
operators are well-prepared for cur-
rent and future challenges, and they
have coalesced the community around
three shared priorities: strengthen
our force and families; succeed for the
nation; and modernize for the future
— or “People. Win. Transform.”
To do so, Special Operations Forces
will need to rapidly develop and
scale new capabilities relevant to
today’s strategic competition just as
they quickly scaled counterterrorism
and counter-insurgency capabili-
ties over the preceding decades.
Special Operations Forces are a
strategic competitive advantage for
the nation, and we are grateful for
their service and sacrifices, which
have been significant and sustained.
I therefore strongly encourage you
to join us for the 34th Annual SO/
LIC Symposium on Oct. 30-31, at
the JW Marriott Washington, D.C.
The focus of the symposium is
on special operations priorities and
capability requirements in an era
of great power competition. Our
service members and their fami-
lies need you. Our member com-
panies welcome you. Join us! ND
Michael Bayer is NDIA board
chair and president and CEO
of Dumbarton Strategies.
N AT I O N A L D E F E N S E | S E P T E M B E R 2 0 2 3 3
EDITOR’S NOTES BY STEW MAGNUSON
Explosive Disposal Sector to Need
A Lot of Funds, Innovative Tech
W
hen it comes to landmines,
unexploded ordnance and
the deadly debris that
wars and conflict leave behind, it
looks like the world is taking one
step forward, and two steps back.
From the jungles of Colombia to
the arid lands of Yemen to the once
productive wheat and sunflower fields
in Ukraine, there are probably more
landmines and unexploded bomb-
lets in the Earth’s soil than ever.
Three decades after Princess Diana
helped bring the world’s attention
to the topic and the International
Campaign to Ban Landmines won the
Nobel Peace Prize, Russia is seeding
Ukraine with landmines every day and
dropping cluster munitions. These are
bombs that explode and spread small-
er bomblets, often with high dud rates.
Ukraine, deciding that it needed
every tool available to kick out the
Russians, asked the United States
for — and received — its own cluster
munitions.
And the Biden administration
— one would think after vigorous
internal debate — agreed. The cold
hard calculus: kill Russian soldiers
today, bring a quicker end to the war
— worry about the cleanup later.
But there will come a “later” and a
big bill to pay.
Russia was already using cluster
munitions in Ukraine and now the
U.S.-made bomblets will be added to
the mix.
But the decision has been made.
So, going forward, what now?
It will take a lot of funding to
clean up the messes in Ukraine and
Yemen — and to continue clear-
ance operations in Afghanistan,
Cambodia and Colombia — and the
defense research and development
community should be called upon
to invent new, innovative ways to
detect, dismantle or destroy unex-
ploded ordnance and landmines.
Developing more advanced robotics,
sensors and protective gear to help the
brave men and women tasked with
clearing fields needs to begin now.
There are three streams that
need to be funded: demining, or
the cleanup; advanced technologies
to detect, defeat and protect; and
4 N AT I O N A L D E F E N S E | S E P T E M B E R 2 0 2 3
money to help victims.
It was depressing to listen
in on a recent NPR report on
a clinic in Yemen that is try-
ing to fit bomb victims from
its civil war with prosthetic limbs.
Like many nongovernmental organi-
zations, the nonprofit needs funds.
Sad. There’s always enough mon-
ey to drop bombs on people, but
when it comes to helping the vic-
tims, the NGOs have to go around
with their hats in their hands.
The three main players in the
Yemen conflict — Saudi Arabia, Iran
and the United States — are oil-rich
countries and need to do what’s right.
If you can spend $400 million to
bring a soccer player to your nation,
you can spend a little to buy an
eight-year-old girl a prosthetic leg.
I ran all these thoughts by my
friend Ken Rutherford, one of the
world’s foremost experts on the
history of landmines. I’ve known
Rutherford since 1985, but we lost
touch for a few years. During that
time, he lost both his legs to a land-
mine in Somalia — and as a result
— became deeply involved in the
issue. He now teaches at James
Madison University in Virginia.
Yes, the victims of landmines
in Somalia will need help, and
lots of it, but these nations need
a modicum of stability before the
real work can begin, he noted.
As for Colombia, when he first
Soldiers prepare to
dispose of landmines,
mortars and rockets
in Baghdad, Iraq.
began being active in the land-
mine topic, that country was not
even on the top 10 list of places of
concern. Now, due to internal con-
flict, it’s one of the most infested
countries in the world, he said.
But the bigger issue
is Ukraine.
The Biden administra-
tion made several points
after the decision was made
to supply cluster munitions to
the country’s military, he said.
One is that the dud rate for
U.S.-made munitions is low, at
around 2.3 percent. That’s still a
lot, Rutherford noted, but it pales to
Russian cluster bombs that have a
dud rate between 30 to 40 percent.
These duds are volatile and deadly,
and some legal experts believe they
should fall under landmine treaties,
Rutherford said. Cluster munitions
do have their own accords, though.
Some 160 nations have banned them,
including most NATO nations.
Another valid point Rutherford
mentioned is that the United States
— by orders of magnitude — spends
more on landmine and ordnance
cleanup than any nation in the world.
“The United States will be provid-
ing — and they already are provid-
ing — huge amounts of financial aid
for clearance. So, these are the kind
of arguments [the Biden administra-
tion] is using to defang the accusations
that they are breaking interna-
tional humanitarian law,” he said.
A few things have to happen going
forward, he said.
One, the United States has to contin-
ue showing leadership in conventional
weapon destruction.
As soon as the Ukraine conflict
ends, it needs to start activities to
clear farms ASAP. The best way to
do this is to shore up local capacity
to deal with the problem, he said.
As for research and development,
there is a schism in the community
between those who said money is
needed for clearance and humanitari-
an relief, and those who want to invest
in advanced technologies, Rutherford
noted.
In the future, there should be no
such false dichotomy.
Wealthy nations such as the United
States, Saudi Arabia, — and hopefully
one day — free and democratic Russia
Defense Dept. photo
and Iran have enough resources to do
both.
But the time to start the R&D and
advanced planning is now. ND
 EMERGING TECHNOLOGY HORIZONS
BY TOM DRIGGERS AND LAUREN MUHS
Learning Lessons from
MRAP, Operation Warp Speed
W
hen it comes to procuring
defense weapon systems,
there seems to be the same
discussion: the defense acquisition
process, even with all its reform
efforts, is filled with inefficiencies.
Due to its protracted timelines,
bureaucracy and other barriers, the
process is frequently criticized for its
inability to deliver critical technologies
to the warfighter in a timely manner.
The current process is hindering the
Defense Department’s ability to keep
pace with technological advancements
and outpace near-peer competitors.
Yet, when faced with a crisis,
it seems to get all the resources
aligned in support of delivering
emergent capabilities more rapidly.
The National Defense Industrial
Association’s Emerging Technologies
Institute set out to identify what
attributes and barriers lead to these
inefficiencies and determine what
lessons learned can be adopted
from crisis-time efforts that might
be replicable in peacetime.
To do so, ETI is examining efforts
like Operation Warp Speed, the Mine
Resistant Ambush Protected, or
MRAP, vehicle program and other key
acquisition success stories to identify
any repeatable attributes and provide
recommendations to create a sustain-
able framework for consistent, swift
and successful adoption of new tech-
nologies.
Acquisition reform is not new to the
department, with repeated attempts
made over the decades. The multi-
tude of episodic reform efforts have
pointed out the potential value of
continual and flexible reform, rather
than broad overhauls. These initia-
tives have often produced ineffective
solutions to address the longstand-
ing inability to develop key tech-
nologies and capabilities and rapidly
Defense Dept. photo
deliver them to the warfighter.
While several of these reform ini-
tiatives have successfully reduced
program costs and shortened program
schedules, they failed in their main
goal: developing repeatable processes
allowing for programs to acquire
and deliver capabilities with speed.
Both Operation Warp Speed and
the MRAP program proved extremely
successful across all phases of the
acquisition process from develop-
ment to deployment, but can their
models be applied across other non-
crisis acquisition efforts, especially
when trying to deliver new, emerg-
ing capabilities to the warfighter?
Operation Warp Speed was a joint
effort between the Department of
Health and Human Services and the
Defense Department — along with
several other partners — which sup-
ported the safe development and
delivery of 300 million vaccines in
less than a year. A vital component
of its success was a well-developed
acquisition strategy, highly experi-
enced and supportive leadership, a
highly experienced workforce, and
its ability to leverage existing net-
works both internal and external to
defense. Due to these factors, the
operation applied the right fund-
ing and resources to expedite its
clinical trials, the manufacturing
processes and distribution plans in
support of its rapid delivery goal.
The Mine Resistant Ambush
Protected program aimed to rapidly
develop and deploy heavily armored
vehicles to protect military personnel
from the threat of roadside bombs
and ambushes in conflict zones
such as Iraq and Afghanistan. The
program’s success in rapid capabil-
ity delivery has led to calls for it to
be used as a model for delivering
emergent capabilities quickly and
efficiently. Much like Operation
Warp Speed, emergency conditions
made it easier for MRAP to form and
execute critical public-private part-
nerships that contributed to rapid
development and delivery schedules.
When theses two case studies are
considered, even with the urgent
nature of these programs, there are
repeatable attributes within both that
can be applied to further streamline
the acquisition process. ETI found
that it was necessary to revise the
role of governance in the acquisition
process, including the establish-
ment of a common understanding
of exactly what governance means
and how involved Congress and
other oversight organizations need
to be in the acquisition process.
ETI also identified that effec-
tive program leadership leads to
streamlined governance, which
allows the bureaucratic process to
be navigated more rapidly. If lead-
ers are willing to act, take risks
and support their programs, then
the culture of inefficient acquisi-
tion will begin to change. There will
therefore be less oversight focus on
the details of project execution and
more on agreed metrics of success.
While the acquisition process faces
challenges, it is important to learn
from the programs that have over-
come these challenges and delivered
critical technologies on an agile
timeline. In addition to policy recom-
mendations, ETI’s final report will
identify several candidate areas in
which accelerated acquisition could
be effectively employed, especially
leveraging existing or emerging com-
mercial capabilities and investments
that align with current priorities.
In conjunction with these proposed
efforts, ETI will be proposing a new
pathway be added to the Adaptive
Acquisition Framework to priori-
tize an agile approach for the rapid
adoption of critical capabilities. ND
Tom Driggers is a participant
in the Public-Private Partnership
Talent Exchange Program work-
ing as a research fellow with the
Emerging Technologies Institute.
Lauren Muhs is a research intern at
ETI. This work is executed in part-
nership with Schmidt Futures.
N AT I O N A L D E F E N S E | S E P T E M B E R 2 0 2 3 5

DISPATCHES
NEWS FROM THE U.S. AND AROUND THE WORLD COMPILED BY STEW MAGNUSON
Rising Global
Temperatures
Could Affect
Military Sensors,
Comms Systems
BY CAMBRIE ECKERT
A
RLINGTON, Virginia — Cli-
mate change isn’t just contrib-
uting to unprecedented flooding
in New England and record tempera-
tures experienced around the world
this summer, it could also degrade
critical defense technologies, accord-
ing to the findings of a research team.
Scientists at John Hopkins Applied
Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Mary-
land, studied the effects of climate
change on radio wave propagation,
including how rising temperatures
can degrade other defense technolo-
gies across various marine climates.
The changes could be significant
enough to affect next-generation com-
munication systems, navigation and
6 N AT I O N A L D E F E N S E | S E P T E M B E R 2 0 2 3
surveillance radars, Jonathan Gehman,
lead researcher and applied physi-
cist at the lab, said in an interview.
The team discovered that higher
temperatures and increased humid-
ity would likely affect the way radio
waves travel, degrading certain
infrared bands, like X-band, by 10 to
20 percent. This means engineers
might need to consider the environ-
ment as an “evolving design fac-
tor” when outlining future defense
technologies and systems, he said.
“Today, when you’re designing
these systems, one of the choices you
often have to make is between S- and
X-band, which are around three and
10 gigahertz, respectively. The trade-
off is that with S-band, you can see
farther through the atmosphere, but
with X-band and other high-frequency
bands, you get better resolution,
more bandwidth and a less crowded
spectrum,” he said in a release.
Global temperatures will likely
rise 2 to 4 degrees Celsius higher
than current levels in the next 50 to
100 years if carbon emissions con-
tinue to rise, the APL study stated.
“What we found was that, over
the next 50 years, in the severe
scenario, differentiation is likely
to become more pronounced. The
longer-range advantage of S-band
will improve, and X-band and higher
frequencies will degrade as a result
of increasing moisture in the atmo-
sphere,” he said in the release.
Gehman said the team conducted
the study by extrapolating each
location across two future climate
scenarios, moderate and severe,
after downloading and analyz-
ing data from the World Climate
Research Programme’s Coupled
Model Intercomparison Project. The
data was used to help predict how
rising moisture in the atmosphere
and warmer seas from increas-
ing carbon emissions could poten-
tially impact communications and
remote sensing systems, like radar.
This impact might require more
power for the systems, Gehman
said. As a signal transmits through
more water molecules or pollut-
ants in the atmosphere, energy
is lost. To use more power, costs
will increase, he added.
It is yet to be determined what
kind of impact other aspects of cli-
mate change — changing rainfall,
cloud cover and aerosols — could
have on sensor and missile defense
systems, Gehman said. “If you only
use what we now know about today’s
environment for that part of the
budget, and then you go into the real
world, the real world might be tak-
ing up more of that. So, you want
to add some margin to that part of
your power budget,” he continued.
Aerosols are an important piece
of the puzzle, since they make it
hard to have a clear view, inter-
fering with infrared and optics,
Gehman said. “It’s very hard to
predict what the future aerosol con-
iStock photo-illustration
tents would look like. That has as
much to do with technology devel-
opments and policy and emissions
as it does with scientific equations
that you can code up and solve.” ND
 IN BRIEF
Building the
JADC2 House
• While the services are develop-
ing innovative technologies for
the Defense Department’s joint
all-domain command and control
initiative, the proverbial JADC2
house lacks a firm foundation,
said Special Assistant to the Secre-
tary of the Air Force for mission-
centered analysis and operational
imperatives Dr. Tim Grayson.
Grayson recalled his boss, Air
Force Secretary Frank Kendall, once
describing the concept as “like this
beautiful palace that everyone keeps
admiring and talking about, but no
one really has a design for the palace.
“So instead, everyone’s running
around making bricks, and they
come forward and say, ‘Look at this
great brick I have for the palace,’”
Grayson said during NDIA’s JADC2:
All Domain Warfare Symposium.
“And [Kendall] goes, ‘With that
mindset, what you end up with is
not a palace, but a dusty brickyard.’”
Kendall’s message to Air Force
leadership is clear, Grayson
said: “Just build me a house.”
“Define the house, build me the
house, but build it in such a way that
we can add wings to the house, and
we can add an extra room … you can
change out the wiring, you can add
another floor, but build me a house,”
he said. “And that’s really been the
approach we’re taking is, how do
we start with something tangible,
but yet at the same time not make
it as a stovepipe?” ND (For more on
JADC2, see stories on pages 13 & 26)
Reading Russia’s
Playbook
• A conflict with China is
iStock photo, Defense Dept. photos
“neither imminent [nor]
inevitable,” said Assis-
tant Secretary of Defense
for Strategies, Plans and KARLIN
Capabilities Mara Karlin.
The National Defense Strategy is
“pretty clear” in the urgent need to
Reporting by Laura Heckmann, Josh Luckenbaugh and Allyson Park
sustain and strengthen deterrence
regarding the People’s Republic of
China, but it’s “not a challenge folks
are anchoring towards a specific
timeframe,” she told reporters.
“No one has a crystal ball
along those lines,” she added.
While the strategy’s focus on China
is “really clear,” it also diagnoses the
Russia problem correctly, she said.
“We were helped, frankly, by
the fact that as we were develop-
ing this national defense strategy,
we had Russia’s playbook,” she
said. “We had months and months
of knowing exactly what Russia
was going to be doing,” referring
to Russia’s preparations for an
unprovoked invasion of Ukraine.
“And so, we could account
for that in the strategy devel-
opment,” Karlin said. ND
No
No
No
NAKASONE
Short Answer? No.
• National Security Agency direc-
tor Army Gen. Paul Nakasone was
asked by former NSA general counsel
Glenn Gerstell if China is ahead
of or equal to the United States in
cyber and surveillance. Nakasone
quickly cut off his ex-colleague
and responded: “No, no, no.”
Nakasone acknowledged that
“there is a scope, scale, sophisti-
cation that we ascribe to
what China’s doing today.
Are they getting better? Yes.
But … as we think about
this, how do we address
it? And what are our com-
petitive advantages against
a nation that has so much
scope, so much scale, and
increasing sophistication?”
he said at a Center for Strategic
and International Studies talk.
The first advantage is the ability
to “understand what our adver-
sary’s doing,” he said, noting how
in May the NSA and other agencies
detected a China state-sponsored
cyber actor targeting critical infra-
structure networks. “Why are they
doing that? Why are they in our
critical infrastructure? So, that’s the
thing that we are addressing today.”
The other U.S. advantage is part-
nerships, both with commercial
industry and allied nations, he said.
Working with the private sec-
tor “is tremendously important,”
he said. “And the other piece is we
have a global set of partnerships …
that allow us a look throughout the
world” and give the United States
“a series of like-minded nations to
be able to address” cyberattacks.
“This is something that is truly a
competitive advantage for us.” ND
(For more on cyber see page 12)
More on China…
• Chinese investments in criti-
cal infrastructure could indicate
interest in constructing a mili-
tary base in Latin America, said
Army Gen. Laura Richardson,
who leads Southern Command.
“There is no Chinese base yet in
this hemisphere, but I see, especially
with all of this critical infrastruc-
ture investment and these [Belt
and Road Initiative] projects, that
there could possibly be one some-
day,” she said at a CSIS panel.
China’s first overseas military base
was built in Djibouti in 2017, and
this past spring, China announced
construction of a base in Cambodia
as well, according to media reports.
Richardson called Chinese interest
in Latin America and the Western
Hemisphere “cause for concern.”
“What I worry about is being
able to use [bases] for dual use
— not just civilian use but flip-
ping it around and using it for
military application,” she said.
The command is keeping an eye
on Chinese interest in the Panama
Canal and the Strait of Magellan.
“I am absolutely concerned about
the Strait of Magellan. The PRC has
been building capability in these
waterways and along the opening.
I worry about [China] flipping and
using it for military application.” ND
N AT I O N A L D E F E N S E | S E P T E M B E R 2 0 2 3 7
Innovation Nation ernments,” Biercuk
said. “We’re not just
U.S. Quantum Tech Firm duplicating what they
have in America or in
Teams with Australia to the U.K. We’re build-
ing a completely new
Develop GPS Alternative version of quantum-
BY ALLYSON PARK assured navigation that
leverages our unique

A
RLINGTON, Vir- Quantum technology hardware and then deploy capabilities in software
ginia — Quantum facilitates navigation in countermeasures,” he said. ruggedization,” he said.
technology com- “hostile or GPS-denied “We reduce errors in Biercuk is confident that
pany Q-CTRL announced environments … almost as quantum systems, [par- Q-CTRL’s quantum navi-
a partnership with the if you had GPS,” Biercuk ticularly] in quantum gation technology will be
Australian Department said in an interview. “Now, sensors,” he added. “We able to liberate the military
of Defence to advance in the battlefield, if you also automate the opera- from relying on vulner-
quantum-assured naviga- have quantum-assured nav- tion of the hardware, able GPS technology for
tion capabilities for military igation, even if your GPS taking the human ele- operational navigation.
and security applications. signal is gone, you’re able ment and manual tun- “Can our unique take
Quantum-enhanced to navigate accurately even ing out of the process.” on this technology really
navigation will allow if your adversaries can’t. The partnership is part deliver benefits that make
users to position accu- That’s a huge advantage.” of the military relation- these systems useful in the
rately over long periods Q-CTRL utilizes AI- ship between the United field, instead of in labora-
when GPS is unavail- enhanced infrastructure States, the United Kingdom tories? We answered that
able or untrustworthy. software to improve the and Australia, otherwise with a pretty resound-
Michael Biercuk, CEO performance of quantum known as AUKUS, he said. ing yes,” he added.
and founder of Q-CTRL, hardware, Biercuk said. Advancing quantum tech- Q-CTRL’s contract with
said navigating without GPS “We built our own AI nology is one of the pillars Australia marks the first
or operating in an environ- engine completely from of the trilateral agreement. step in a multi-year effort
ment where it is not trusted scratch. It was designed “The kinds of things that to deploy and validate min-
is one of the biggest chal- to figure out what was we’re doing are of public iaturized systems into the
lenges in the defense sector. going wrong in quantum interest to all three gov- defense field, he said. ND

New ‘Scalable’ Hand large caliber systems business unit,

said a tactical dilemma confronting
Grenades on Way to troops is whether their heavy personal
loads should include fragmentation or
Army BY SCOTT R. GOURLEY different sized overpressure grenades.
With the Scalable Offensive Hand
design features a “fragmentation
sleeve” that slides on the modules “to
add some steel in the air,” he noted.
Following completion of field accep-
tance testing in March and lot accep-
tance testing in June 2023, the program

G
JØVIK, Norway — The U.S.
Army recently completed first
article testing and conducted
lot acceptance testing in preparation
for fielding a new Scalable Offensive
Hand Grenade produced in Norway.
Olli Harju, product director for hand
grenades in Nammo Defense Systems’
Grenade, “you need only one product
basically for the offensive environ-
ment,” he said in an interview at a test
range near the company’s headquar-
ters.
The design features standard thread-
ed modules that can be used in “base,”
“base plus 1,” or “base plus 2 configura-
tions,” he said. The warfighter
can connect up to three of
the bases depending on how
big of a charge they think is
needed. Each base contains
115 grams of explosives. They
measure 85 millimeters tall
with a 53-millimeter diameter.
is on track to meet the first two deliv-
eries in October and February 2024,
the company said. Under an August
28, 2022 contract award, the Army will
receive 76,935 of the scalable grenades.
The scalable design reflects lessons
and experiences from the company’s
manufacture of one million grenades
over the past 50 years, Harju said.
The company’s “modern era” of
offensive hand grenades started with
the Fragmentation Hand Grenade
165, a “black ball” design featuring
165 grams of Comp B or PBXN110
explosive in a pre-fragmented
steel body that provides nearly
iStock illustration, Scott Gourley photo

“The same hand grenade 360-degree distribution of 2,500 to

with identical modules
can be used in different
situations, and the user can
scale the effect during
the mission,” he said.
In addition to scaling the
amount of explosives, the
3,000 equal sized lethal fragments.
For other scenarios such as door
breaching and clearing improvised
explosive devices that call for over-
pressure effects, the company’s more
powerful HGO225 explodes with a
limited number of fragments. ND

8 N AT I O N A L D E F E N S E | S E P T E M B E R 2 0 2 3
 Aviation Goggles Protect Against
Multiple Laser Threats BY STEW MAGNUSON
P
ARIS — A German com-
pany has developed goggles
that can protect pilots’ eyes
from six different kinds of lasers.
The Federal Aviation Administration
in 2021 reported some 9,700 incidents
in the United States alone when some-
one aimed a laser at military
or commercial pilots in their
cockpits. That can not only
temporarily disorient a pilot,
it can cause permanent dam-
age to their eyes and end their
careers, said Christoph Brun-
ner, a former helicopter pilot
and now a researcher with
ESG Elektroniksystem based
in Furstenfeldbruck, Germany.
“In a laboratory, you may
have a specific laser that
you want to protect against.
You know the wavelength and the
strength and power of the laser. But
pilots don’t know what’s coming.”
They can’t take six pairs of protec-
tive goggles with them, he noted.
The company over several years
developed the visAIRion Laser Pro-
Laser incidents (in thousands)
Stew Magnuson photo
Source: FAA/Government Accountability Office
tection Glasses that have six ultra-
thin layers of protective film, he
said in an interview at the German
Pavilion at the Paris Air Show.
The problem was finding the sweet
spot between protection and the
colors a pilot needs to see, he said.
visAIRion Laser
Protection Glasses
Red-colored lasers may damage or
disorient pilots, but they may also
need to see the color red on their
viewscreens. Too much protection
could result in them not being able
to read their instruments, he noted.
The company also had to make
BY THE NUMBERS
Laser Incidents Reported to Federal Aviation
Administration by Pilots and Crewmembers,
2010 through 2021
DISPATCHES
sure the goggles were not too
bulky, could fit many different
types of faces, accommodate pilots
wearing glasses and could oper-
ate with night-vision goggles and
other helmet-mounted displays.
There are 96 different shapes
to accommodate all the differ-
ent needs, he added.
“If they are not comfort-
able and bothering the
pilot after 20 minutes,
then the pilot is not per-
forming well,” he said.
The first batches of
goggles are being deliv-
ered to the pilots of NH-90
military helicopters, flown
by the German army and
navy. Brunner said the
company will continue to
improve upon the goggles
and add layers as new threats emerge.
The work was funded by the Ger-
man Institute of Aerospace Medi-
cine, the Bundeswehr Technical
Center for Aircraft and Aeronauti-
cal Equipment and the Center for
Operationability, he said. ND
N AT I O N A L D E F E N S E | S E P T E M B E R 2 0 2 3 9
 DISPATCHES decreases overall program costs,”
Christopher Whetstone, direc-
tor of product line management
New Tactical and STUB program manager at
Xentris, said in an interview.
Batteries Could The Defense Department is cur- technology found in your smartphone
Improve Mission rently working to standardize batteries
and improve the battery supply chain
or laptop computer,” he said. “This will
allow the warfighter to charge their
Readiness BY ALLYSON PARK to “ensure America’s clean energy
future,” which is essential for “military
batteries at a faster rate for mission
readiness and the advantage of using

A
RLINGTON, Virginia — Xen-
tris Wireless recently intro-
duced a tactical universal
battery series that allows warfighters
to have one type of battery that can
power a variety of handheld devices.
The Small Tactical Universal Bat-
tery series, or STUB, is the first
military battery with a built-in USB-C
connector and USB Power Delivery
fast charging technology, designed
to solve the problem of too many
device-specific batteries carried by
troops, a company official said.
“Having one type of battery that is
common amongst the handheld elec-
tronic devices improves mission readi-
ness, improves the logistical tail and
capabilities and national security,” a
June department news article stated.
The batteries are available in eight
sizes, all with a common mechani-
cal and electrical connection inter-
face for “unmatched scalability and
interoperability,” and are intended
for applications such as GPS systems,
night vision devices, powered weapon
rails, radios, surveillance systems
and sensors, ranging and targeting
systems and mine detectors, accord-
ing to a Xentris product brief.
Another key feature of STUB is
the electronics, Whetstone said.
“STUB was designed with the latest
in fast-charge technology called USB
Power Delivery, which is the same
any commercial-off-the-shelf certi-
fied USB-C charger to charge STUB.”
STUB can reduce soldiers’ work-
load as well as reduce the “erosion of
physical and cognitive performance
caused by such weight, plus bring-
ing something familiar in the way of
USB-C charging,” Whetstone said.
“STUB is ready to be fielded now,”
he said. “Throughout the development
of STUB, we have been working with
device [original equipment manu-
facturers] to integrate as their power
source, and one of those devices will be
fielded in [fiscal year] 2024,” he said.
The company did not have any con-
tracts with the military at press time.
ND

Hello, Goodbye Navy veteran Todd Holtz

• Maj. Gen. Antho-
ny Potts passed
away on July 25
in an airplane
accident. Potts
completed more
than 36 years of
distinguished ser- POTTS
vice, most recently
serving as Program Execu-
tive Officer, Command,
Control and Communica-
tion (Tactical), Aberdeen
Proving Ground, Maryland.
James Smith has
resigned as Special Opera-
tions Command’s acquisi-
tion executive. His deputy
Bill Innes takes his place
in an acting capacity.
The Office of Naval
Research Global, the orga-
nization’s international
arm, welcomed Capt. Andy
as the company’s new
Bohemia Interactive
Simulations, a subsid-
director of product iary of BAE Systems Inc.,
and innovation. named Rahul Thakkar as
Holtz will play a its new president. Thak-
role in develop- kar will be responsible for
ing new under- the overall strategic direc-
water robotic tion and day-to-day busi-
systems, expand- ness operations as well as
ing payloads, assessing key domestic and
enhancing testing and international markets.
quality control processes Concurrent Technolo-
and optimizing new tech- gies Corp. expanded its
nologies for production. senior executive team by
Strider Technologies naming three new vice
announced that former presidents and company
Defense Innovation Unit officers, all promoted from
Deputy Director Mike within the organization.
Madsen is joining the The three new vice presi-
company as vice president dents are John Klein, Bob
of national security solu- Kubler and Tim Tibbits.
tions. Madsen will oversee Hudson Institute
Strider’s global portfolio announced that Kenneth
of public sector clients. Weinstein, former Hud-
The Chertoff Group, a son president and CEO
security advisory firm, and current Walter P.
heed Martin and German
officials for a groundbreak-
ing ceremony in Weeze,
Germany, to establish a
second F-35 center fuse-
lage Integrated Assembly
Line with Rheinmetall
AG. The facility will help
meet increased demands
for the fifth-generation
fighter aircraft while
bolstering defense capa-
bilities with allied nations
throughout Europe.
Thales announced an
agreement with Thoma
Bravo, a major software
investment firm, for the
acquisition of 100 per-
cent of Imperva, a lead-
ing U.S.-based data and
application cybersecurity
company, for an enter-
prise value of $3.6 billion.
The Marine Corps
Wargaming and Analysis
Xentris Wireless photo, Defense Dept. photo

“Big Tuna” Berner as the
new ONR Global com-
manding officer during a
ceremony at Naval Air Sta-
tion Patuxent River, Mary-
land. Berner takes over
from Capt. Matthew Farr.
Submersible manufac-
turer VideoRay named
announced the addition of Stern Distinguished Fel- Center will be named after
two senior advisors to its low, will be its next Japan Gen. Robert B. Neller,
team, Douglas Fears and chair. Retired Lt. Gen. H.R. 37th Commandant of the
Sir Chris Tickell. Fears McMaster, the previous Marine Corps and will be
will focus on federal busi- Japan chair, will now lead called the “General Rob-
ness development growth the initiative’s newly estab- ert B. Neller Center for
for clients and Tickell will lished Advisory Board. Wargaming and Analysis.”
focus on business devel- Northrop Grumman The short name will be
opment and growth. joined Rheinmetall, Lock- the Neller Center. ND

10 N AT I O N A L D E F E N S E | S E P T E M B E R 2 0 2 3
 Best of the Web Read NationalDefenseMagazine.org for daily updates and news
Ukraine War Exposing NATO Interoperability Gaps BY SEAN CARBERRY

A
LEXANDRIA,
Virginia — NATO
nations have provid-
ed billions of dollars’ worth
of military equipment and
systems to Ukraine, and
while that support has
been critical to the coun-
try’s defense against Rus-
sia’s invasion, it has also
shown that NATO systems
aren’t as interoperable
as allies had expected.
That’s led to a doubling
down within the alliance
on interoperability, said
U.K. Royal Navy Vice
Adm. Guy Robinson,
chief of staff to NATO’s
Supreme Allied Com-
mander Transformation,
at the National Defense
Industrial Association’s
JADC2: All Domain War-
fare Symposium July 18.
NATO has been clear
enough in setting and
communicating standards
and objectives to alli-
ance members, he said.
“So, why aren’t we as
interoperable as we’d
want to be? The answer
then becomes, ‘Well, hav-
ing a standard is one
thing, meeting a standard
is something altogether
different,’” he said.
“Allies will be able to
meet those interoper-
ability standards at differ-
ent paces,” he continued.
“There’s an investment
to be made to meet those
standards. And for some
allies, they’re trying to
determine which standards
they should be meeting.
NATO standards are one
thing, but sometimes
they’re pursuing interoper-
ability goals with a certain
partner, which may be dif-
ferent from the NATO one.”
NATO is in the midst
of a transition to Multi-
Domain Operations, which
is similar to the U.S.
Defense Department’s joint
all-domain command and
control, or JADC2, initia-
tive. The multi-domain
effort, which makes space
and cyber warfight-
ing domains rather than
enablers and requires
building out the command
and control, is another level
of complexity that requires
additional standards for
interoperability, he said.
“The complexity of get-
ting everyone interoperable
obviously goes up every
time you have an ally com-
ing to join the alliance,” he
said. “And it’s great we’ve
got more allies, but they
all have to work through
and be able to adopt these
standards and adjust their
capabilities as they acquire
them to make sure that
they are interoperable.”
The U.S. Mission Part-
ner Environment, which
facilitates command and
control among allies,
provides a seam from
JADC2 into the NATO
environment, he said.
There is also NATO’s
Federated Mission Net-
working environment,
“which allows standards
to be developed and
nations to follow those
across the capability areas
as well. And that’s well
established,” he said.
Ideally, the alliance will
adopt open systems to the
greatest extent possible
rather than resorting to
exquisite solutions, he said.
In terms of technol-
ogy development, NATO
is focusing on “things
that glue the NATO com-
mand structure, the C2
structure, together,” he
said. That could be com-
mand and control, logistics,
medical infrastructure
or other systems.
“We invest in those pro-
grams, and we use our
operational colleagues
to define the opera-
tional requirement, we
turn those into capabil-
ity requirements, we give
them to a host nation to
provide that,” he said.
Going forward, much
of that work will be done
through the Defence
Innovation Accelerator
for the North Atlantic, or
DIANA, which was recently
stood up, he said, to bring
together innovation cen-
ters across the alliance.
“[It’s] particularly impor-
tant for those smaller allies
who don’t have a large
innovation capacity them-
selves to be able to invest in
a common pot of money,”
he said. Those coun-
tries can “maybe acquire
capabilities that they can
use — some more novel
emerging, disruptive tech-
nologies can be exploited
... across the alliance.
“So, that’s new. It’s
only just started,” he said.
The first batch of chal-
lenges have gone out to
industry to find solutions,
and “they’ll be delivering
them next year. So, very
excited about DIANA.”
He described the funding
for DIANA as “substantial,”
adding “a lot of energy has
gone in through the alliance
to build this, to ensure that
we can be more innovative
and get at the cutting edge.”
While the war in Ukraine
has shown interoper-
ability gaps, it has also
shown allies the need
to adopt technology
more quickly, he said.
“Often those capabilities
that have been provided
by smaller players, the
way targeting has been
achieved within Ukraine
and the way that data has
been provided down to
almost the lowest tactical
unit there for them to be
able to call joint fires in is
extraordinary,” he said.
“I think that the tempo
that’s been achieved to
give those capabilities to
do a sort of trial in the
field, where the risk appe-
tite is very high. I think
many allies look on envi-
ously how quickly that can
be done in comparison
to more traditional pro-
cesses,” he said. ND
— Posted July 18 at
NationalDefenseMagazine.org

COMING IN Forces Association’s annual confab in Huntsville, Alabama. Three

SEPTEMBER at National Harbor, Maryland, Sept.
11-13. Magazine correspondents will
co-located conferences are hosted
by the association’s Armaments,
• After a brief summer lull, the fall be covering both events to bring read- Robotics, Munitions Technology
Defense Dept. photo

trade show season gets underway ers the most vital breaking news. Divisions and the Global Demilitar-
with two big ones the second full week NDIA presents the 3rd Annual ization and Fuzing communities.
of the month with DSEI in London, Future Force Capabilities Confer- The final day of the conference fea-
Sept. 12-15 and the Air and Space ence and Exhibition, Sept. 25–28, tures a live fire demonstration. ND

N AT I O N A L D E F E N S E | S E P T E M B E R 2 0 2 3 11
ALGORITHMIC WARFARE BY JOSH LUCKENBAUGH
NATO Ponders Using Article Five for Cyber Attacks
T
he North Atlantic
Treaty Organization
in July announced
its endorsement of a
“new concept” for cyber
defense to counter a rise
in threats to member nations
and the alliance as a whole.
Threat actors are increasingly
seeking “to destabilize the alliance
by employing malicious cyber activi-
ties and campaigns,” according to a
NATO communiqué issued during
the organization’s recent summit in
Vilnius, Lithuania. “We are counter-
ing the substantial, continuous and
increasing cyber threats, includ-
ing to our democratic systems and
our critical infrastructure, as well
as where they are part of hybrid
campaigns,” the release said.
In response to these threats, the
new security measures will “enhance
the contribution of cyber defence to
our overall deterrence and defence
posture,” the release said. The con-
cept “will further integrate NATO’s
three cyber defence levels — politi-
cal, military and technical — ensur-
ing civil-military cooperation at all
times through peacetime, crisis and
conflict, as well as engagement with
the private sector, as appropriate.”
Marta Kepe, a senior defense analyst
at the RAND Corp., said the concept
represents the next step in NATO’s
gradual buildup of its cybersecurity
capabilities since the organization
recognized cyberspace as a domain of
operations in 2016.
NATO is seek-
ing to give itself and
“its member states
more tools or instru-
ments that they can
use in case they are
needed” to deter or
defend and mitigate
against cyber attacks,
Kepe said in an interview.
While the concept itself is clas-
sified, it is clear “NATO is trying
to find a way how it could shape
the cyber environment better,”
similar to how it tries to shape other
operational environments like the
land or air domains, she said.
“NATO is moving towards hav-
ing a bigger role, doing more in
terms of building resilience [through]
12 N AT I O N A L D E F E N S E | S E P T E M B E R 2 0 2 3
peacetime activities, but also
building response capabili-
ties,” she said. “So, response,
mitigation, helping member
states that have been affected
by cyber attacks to recover.”
Kepe said much of the activity for
building resilience has fallen under
NATO’s 2016 Cyber Defence Pledge.
The communiqué from Vilnius said
the organization is enhancing the
pledge, along with committing “to
ambitious new national goals to fur-
ther strengthen our national cyber
defences as a matter of priority,
including critical infrastructures.”
To counter active threats, NATO
has introduced its Virtual Cyber
Incident Support Capability to
boost “national mitigation efforts
in response to significant malicious
cyber activities,” the release said.
Announced during NATO’s summit
in Madrid last June, the capability was
“piloted” during the Vilnius summit
with 11 countries participating, Kepe
said. The United States and the United
Kingdom were not among the partici-
pants in the pilot program, she added.
The capability is a “voluntary mech-
anism, where a member state — and
only member states — can reach out
and ask for assistance … in case they
are having a cyber attack, and they
can ask for assistance without invok-
ing Article Five” of the Washington
Treaty, which requires all NATO
member states to provide assistance if
one of the members is the victim of an
armed attack, Kepe said.
She described the
capability as an addition-
al tool in NATO’s cyber-
security toolbox that
“member states can use
if there’s a cyber attack
that nationally they’re
maybe not able to deal
with very effectively.”
An example of such an attack was
when Iranian state cyber actors tar-
geted Albania last year, she said. In
July 2022, the state actors “launched
a destructive cyber attack against the
government of Albania which ren-
dered websites and services unavail-
able,” followed by another wave of
attacks that September, according to a
joint cybersecurity advisory released
by the FBI and the Cybersecurity
and Infrastructure Security Agency.
Following the attacks, Prime
Minister of Albania Edi Rama said
in an interview with Politico that he
considered invoking Article Five.
Albania did not do so, but the inci-
dent is “just one example where …
a country may be overwhelmed or
may be seeking the assistance of
other countries when it needs to
mitigate cyber attacks,” Kepe said.
In the release from Vilnius, NATO
said: “A single or cumulative set of
malicious cyber activities could reach
the level of armed attack and could
lead the North Atlantic Council to
invoke Article Five of the Washington
Treaty, on a case-by-case basis.”
While Kepe said it’s difficult to
pinpoint exactly what it would take
for Article Five to be invoked based
on a cyber attack, it is “telling” that
NATO noted a cumulative set of activi-
ties could reach that level “when you
think about potential scenarios.”
“I think probably the effects of these
cyber attacks are specifically impor-
tant” to the potential application of
Article Five, she said. Other factors
will include how easy it is to attribute
the attacks to someone, and “what
the affected countries and what the
alliance also thinks would be the best
mitigation response,” she added.
The organization announced it will
be holding its “first comprehensive
NATO Cyber Defence Conference
in Berlin this November, bringing
together decision-makers across the
political, military and technical levels.”
The conference could be a window
into learning more about the new
cyber defense concept and how “NATO
as an organization looks at cooperat-
ing with the civilian sector,” from large
cyber-based companies to medium
and small businesses, Kepe said.
“Based on some of the statements
from NATO officials, I would expect
that there will be more structured
and targeted cooperation specifically
between NATO as such and key civil-
ian actors in cyberspace,” she said.
“We’re talking about large compa-
nies like Microsoft, for example, or any
other players, and I would expect that
there will be perhaps more structured
cooperation,” similar to how NATO
NATO photo
has revamped its partnership with the
defense industrial base, she said. ND
 BUDGET MATTERS BY SEAN CARBERRY
Congress Seeks Clarity on JADC2 Spending
T
he Defense Department’s joint
all-domain command and con-
trol initiative, or JADC2, is eye-
ing an increase in funding in the 2024
budget, and both the House and Senate
are largely on board, but the latter has
raised concerns about the difficulty
of tracking the range of programs,
projects and spending on the concept.
Kathleen Miller, deputy under-
secretary of defense (comptroller),
said the Pentagon requested $1.4
billion in JADC2 funding for 2024,
all of which falls under the Office
of the Undersecretary of Defense
for Research and Engineering.
It belongs in research, develop-
ment, testing and evaluation budgets
currently because the services are
going through a series of analyses,
she said at the National Defense
Industrial Association’s recent JADC2:
All Domain Warfare Symposium.
“We’ll do the analysis, we change
some things, we experiment, we
look at the outcomes of those
experiments, we go ahead and
make some more adjustments, and
we experiment again,” she said.
“And so, while we’re in this cycle
of learning through experimentation
with JADC2, it’s most appropriate
for many of the major and unique
programs to reside in our RDT&E
budget, but it’s in many different
parts of that element,” she added.
There are five main buckets for the
2024 JADC2 funding request, Miller
said: the Army’s Project Convergence,
$66 million; the Navy’s Project
Overmatch, $192 million; the Air
Force’s Advanced Battle Management
System, $500 million; the defense-
wide Joint Staff work to oversee
Cross Functional Team efforts, $28
million; and the Chief Digital and
Artificial Intelligence Office, which
is responsible for the JADC2 data
layer, mission command applica-
tions and the Global Information
Dominance Experiments, $615 million.
Congress generally agreed with the
request, but both chambers made
some adjustments that will have
to be ironed out in conference.
Because JADC2 is an initiative and
not a program, there are other expen-
iStock illustration
ditures across the department that
further JADC2 goals, Miller said.
“There is some $385 million going
to things like artificial intel-
ligence and machine learn-
ing that will benefit JADC2,
but those efforts are broader
than JADC2,” she said.
Also, the $1.4 billion does
not include a lot of hardware
— sensors, radars or communica-
tions systems — that would con-
nect through JADC2, she noted.
“It doesn’t include any of the fund-
ing that wraps around all of the
other ways we communicate in the
department, the aspects that are
overseen by the [chief information
officer], data networks, anything that
[the Defense Information Systems
Agency] does to support us,” she said.
“All of those elements that move data
from place to place are still in their
normal accounts where they always
are,” she added. “And they’re not
included in this sort of $1.4 billion that
we’ve tried to neck down by tagging the
data to give us something to talk about
JADC2 from a funding perspective.”
And this highlights the challenge
of JADC2 being a concept rather than
a program with discrete and track-
able elements. Miller said feedback
from the Hill has shown concerns
about how the department is mea-
suring the progress of JADC2 and
that there isn’t enough cross-service
coordination on JADC2 efforts.
“I think the department doesn’t
always have a really good rep for tak-
ing three things that are born in dif-
ferent services and bringing it to a
joint life in a quick fashion,” she said.
The Cross Functional Team is impor-
tant in that regard, and the Global
Information Dominance Experiments
are critical to measuring progress
and direction of JADC2, she said.
However, that might not be enough
to placate the Senate Appropriations
Committee, which came out swing-
ing in its committee report attached to
the 2024 defense appropriations bill.
“The committee finds the current
funding structure for defense-wide
JADC2-related investments to be dif-
fuse, limiting oversight entities’ ability
to clearly identify what discrete activi-
ties comprise JADC2-related
work, and which officials
are responsible for achiev-
ing the goals outlined in
the department’s JADC2
strategy,” the report stated
in its preamble to a new recom-
mendation: “centralizing all defense-
wide JADC2 resources and Joint Fires
Network resources into a consolidated
program element to increase unity of
effort, traceability and accountability.”
Thus, the Senate, at least, wants
a program code for JADC2 to
facilitate better tracking of spend-
ing. But creating a program ele-
ment, or PE, is no small task, as
Miller noted during her talk.
“We’ve thought about what hap-
pens if you have a PE for JADC2,”
she said. “Well, part of the problem
is you only have one PE. So, if you
carve out a PE for JADC2, what hap-
pens when that’s a part of a larger
or better or bigger program?”
Thus, she said to her knowl-
edge, “there’s no effort underway
to have a separate PE for JADC2.”
However, that doesn’t mean
the department isn’t trying
to come up with ways to bet-
ter track the costs, she said.
“Where we’d like to go with many
things that we do in budgeting and
programming is to be able to more
accurately and publicly tag data, bud-
get data,” she said. “So that when it
is helping with a function or war-
fighting function like this, we could
tag it to JADC2 but allow it to rest
natively inside the program ele-
ment and the budget line item for
the program that it is part of.”
The Senate Appropriations
Committee had another recommenda-
tion for JADC2 — the identification of
“a single acquisition executive respon-
sible and accountable for the develop-
ment and implementation of JADC2.”
That executive would provide a
resourcing and programming strat-
egy for JADC2 investment across the
future years defense program and
would establish “a framework for
prioritizing near-term versus long-
term capability developments.”
The Pentagon didn’t respond
to National Defense’s inquiry
about the provision. Perhaps it
wasn’t tagged properly. ND
N AT I O N A L D E F E N S E | S E P T E M B E R 2 0 2 3 13

VIEWPOINT
Early F-35 Program
Challenges Provide Lessons
For Future Leaders BY TOM BURBAGE
T
hink about the chal-
lenge that was handed
to the F-35 Joint
Strike Fighter team:
design, develop,
test, field and sustain a family
of highly common first line fight-
ers to fully incorporate the unique
requirements of Air Force opera-
tions, expeditionary operations off
small ships and unprepared fields
and projecting power from the sea
from large-deck aircraft carriers.
While you’re at it, make that
platform stealthy and supersonic,
embed the most sophisticated suite
of multi-spectral sensors ever
employed in a fighter and make
sure you capture economies of com-
monality and scale. And make sure
our closest allies can participate
with the goal of true interoperability
and burden-sharing in future com-
bat and peacekeeping operations.
In addition, revitalize a global indus-
trial base that has atrophied over the
years. Implement revolutionary new
manufacturing capability based on
very high precision, automation and
motion-based production systems.
Transfer technology that enables the
industries of allied partner nations
to compete on a global world stage
with the best of the best. And do it
during a generational change in the
work force where impatience is the
14 N AT I O N A L D E F E N S E | S E P T E M B E R 2 0 2 3
overarching personality trait.
As daunting as it may
sound, the F-35 offers
an exceptional leader-
ship and learning expe-
rience to understand
the challenges of manag-
ing very complex programs.
The first leadership challenge
was the critical need to establish
a unique “F-35 culture” capable of
truly integrating a multi-corporate,
multi-national industry team into a
seamless, high-performance opera-
tion. Achieving consensus that the
current culture was probably not
capable of dealing with the new lev-
els of complexity that were inherent
in the F-35 program was a challenge.
Specific steps to develop a unique
F-35 common culture were required
and it had to cross corporate, geo-
graphic and national boundaries.
While many of these concepts
have been widely discussed in aca-
demic textbooks, few programs
have taken specific steps on a large
scale to implement them. The F-35
would be different. The manage-
ment objective was to overemphasize
a high-performance culture that was
self-sustaining over the long term.
First, harvest lessons from similar
challenges. We invited the program
managers and chief engineers of every
modern tactical development pro-
gram to join us to discuss les-
sons learned. Surprisingly, all
responded and the F-16, F-18,
F-22, B-2, Eurofighter, Har-
rier, F-117 and Tornado were
represented. The request was,
“If you were sitting here where
we are sitting, knowing the
challenges you faced and that
we are about to be awarded the
most challenging fighter devel-
opment program in history,
what would you make sure
you took into consideration?”
The next dimension was to
envision the future. The first
step in establishing a common
language, common expecta-
tions and common objectives
across a widely distributed
team is to build and socialize a
common vision of the future.
To facilitate the first of
several visioning exercises,
the magazine Fast Company
agreed to let us use their for-
mat and logo to construct a
mock cover dated 10 years
in the future. The early
F-35 management team gathered
in a local restaurant in Fort Worth,
Texas, and put the oversized cover
on an easel and debated the content
of the magazine articles, both good
and bad, that might be written about
the F-35 program in the future.
The exercise began to focus
the team on the process of shap-
ing future outcomes that would
be critical to program success.
The next step was to align objectives.
Early program relationships between
the contractor and government teams
were, by necessity, a partnership.
Organizational structures were care-
fully crafted to establish clear counter-
part relationships and unambiguous
responsibilities. Program objectives,
both short term and long term, were
mutually constructed and agreed
upon. Once established, the objec-
tives were discussed across the entire
government and contractor teams
and posted in highly visible areas in
every participating organization.
Next, it was necessary to establish
norms and expectations, which is the
core of creating a unique culture. This
is especially critical in senior manage-
ment and first line supervisors, even
more so in a high-stress environ-
ment typical of the F-35 program. To
Air Force photo
address this, the team established a
living set of F-35 “Behavioral Norms
and Expectations” that would evolve
as program focus, complexity and
challenges evolved over time. Like the
common objectives, the list was docu-
mented and displayed in all the pro-
gram conference rooms and reviewed
as part of the opening remarks in
every weekly collaborative meeting.
Next, the program accelerated
employee effectiveness during a steep
hiring phase. One of the great chal-
lenges of a major program startup
with a very steep hiring ramp is to
accelerate employee effectiveness.
Immediately following contract award,
the No. 1 risk to the program in the
eyes of the government customer
was the ability to staff up in time
to meet early program objectives.
This challenge was further com-
plicated by a corporate objective to
ensure that at least 50 percent of
new hires were new college gradu-
ates with no industry experience.
Two innovative but non-traditional
concepts were introduced on F-35.
The first was “on boarding,” a pro-
cess where new employees would go
through a three-day introduction and
indoctrination into the world of F-35.
The second was the selection of
three very experienced developmental
engineers and leaders to be “coaches
without portfolio.” These seasoned
vets would have no direct reports
but would be tasked to move among
the team providing guidance and
coaching to the integrated product
teams as the organization scaled up
from a small proposal team to a very
large multi-corporate, global team.
Next, communication channels had
to be opened across the geographi-
cally dispersed team. Fundamental to
achieving all the F-35 cultural devel-
opment objectives was to ensure that
communication channels across the
team were healthy and transparent.
To do this, a wide variety of tech-
niques were implemented across the
team. Periodic all-hands meetings
connected the principal operating
sites so employees could all partici-
pate. An employee-driven workforce
vitality team developed innovative
activities focused on work-life bal-
ance in the high stress environ-
ment of F-35. JSF Voice allowed any
employee to register issues or con-
cerns, anonymously if necessary.
Weekly breakfast with management
events and emphasis on “manage-
ment by walking around” were all
employed to a much larger extent on
F-35 than any other previous program.
VIEWPOINT
Next, the team turned corporate
and national diversity into an asset.
During the initial startup phase of the
program the F-35 onboarding pro-
cess was introducing 80 to 100 new
employees each week. The diversity
factor was unique as employees from
other companies — both U.S. and
international — personnel from the
government and new college gradu-
ates all joined the team. To celebrate
this unique opportunity to learn
from other cultures and truly merge
company, the workforce vitality team
sponsored cultural appreciation
events which allowed us to leverage
the diversity factor rather than deal
with it as a necessary distraction.
Building teams through competi-
tion was another dimension. National
identities are often best observed
through the lens of sports competi-
tions and F-35 was no different.
Engineers on site in Fort Worth
from the United Kingdom, the Neth-
erlands, Italy and Denmark fully
embraced the competition. Soccer
matches were particularly intense.
One of the U.K. stalwarts was an

Connect With Darley at

Need a Contract Vehicle?

NGAUS, Booth 1975

Our pre-competed DLA contracts allow

us to rapidly deliver your products and
services to your Federal customers.

Partner With Us
Audrey Darley
Vice President, Defense
4th Generation Darley
audreydarley@darley.com
Through supplier partnerships, we ensure
government customers have rapid access
to commercial-off-the-shelf solutions
and navigate straight through the federal
procurement process. Contact us to see
how we can work together.
darley.com/defense-partner-program

630.735.3500 | Trusted Worldwide Since 1908 You Serve Others. We Serve You.™
engineer named Ian McDonald
who embodied all the parameters
of a true teammate. Ian’s family
remained in the United King-
dom while he was assigned to
the F-35 in Fort Worth and, very
sadly, he died of a heart attack
while working on the project.
The annual soccer tournament
then became the Ian McDonald
tournament. His widow joined
us to present the winning trophy
the following year. The power
of competition is often underes-
timated but it can be leveraged
as a major factor in develop-
ing high-performing teams.
Finally, it was necessary to
reinforce the difference between
leadership and management,
which was critical to achiev-
ing the new F-35 culture.
Management is a function of
the past and future. If I can ana-
lyze past performance data, and
I correlate that data with other
models to generate an action
plan to do better in the future,
I can manage a program. Too
often, managers are consumed
INDUSTRY PERSPECTIVE
by their data. Leadership, on
the other hand, is a require- Data Cleansing Improves
Federal Government
ment to motivate and inspire
people that are under incred-
ible pressure to perform.
The challenge goes through
every strata of the program. Outcomes BY PATRICK SWEENEY

T
The greatest challenge of a
real leader is time allocation he 2024
and the hierarchy of needs. fiscal year
It is a very large balancing budget
act with many dimensions. released by
The reality of leadership is that the Defense
the only resource you really Department has $145
have are the hours in a day, billion earmarked for
and you need to constantly research, develop-
assess whether or not you are ment, test and evalua-
expending that resource in the tion funding, including
most productive manner. ND $1.8 billion for artificial
intelligence and $1.4
Tom Burbage was Lockheed’s billion for systems like
general manager of the F-35 pro- joint all-domain com-
gram from 2000 until 2013. Prior mand and control, also
to leading the F-35 program, he known as JADC2.
was the general manager for the The budget clearly
F-22 and president of Lockheed prioritizes the continued
Martin Aeronautical Systems investment in modern-
Company. He is izing and innovating the
the co-author with department’s operations.
Betsy Clark, Adrian Investments of this
Pitman, and David scale in AI, machine
poor data hygiene.
Even when info-tech
systems are capable data being collected
of processing enor- across various chan-
mous amounts of data, nels, agencies will need
the adage of “garbage to determine what kind
in, garbage out” still of clean-up is required
applies. Without accu- to fully take advantage
rate, reliable and sort- of advanced analytics.
able data, systems like With messy data,
the Federal Procure- agencies risk relying
ment Data System will on incorrect analyses
only provide limited that can lead to poor
insight and diminished decision-making. By
return on investment. cleansing data, agencies
Data quality cannot be can ensure that they
achieved without stra- are working with accu-
tegic data cleansing. rate, complete and rel-
Data cleansing — the evant information that
process of identify- will actually improve
ing and correcting or operational efficiency.
removing inaccurate, With a cleansed
incomplete or irrelevant data set, agencies can
iStock illustration

Poyer of the new learning, data analyt- data from a dataset — is supercharge their IT
book, F-35: The ics and other emerg- not a one-size-fits-all system’s capabilities in
Inside Story of ing technologies can approach. Depending several ways, includ-
the Lightning II. be undermined by on the different types of ing increased accuracy

16 N AT I O N A L D E F E N S E | S E P T E M B E R 2 0 2 3
and efficiency. Data cleans-
ing can help agencies save
time and resources by
automating the process
of identifying and cor-
recting errors, reducing
the need for manual data
entry and validation.
It can also facilitate bet-
ter data integration. Data
cleansing can help agencies
integrate data from multiple
sources more effectively,
ensuring that they are
working with a complete
and accurate dataset.
It can also improve analy-
sis quality. By investing in
data cleansing, agencies
can ensure that they are
working with high-quality
data that is reliable and
trustworthy, which can help
them build better models
and make better decisions.
The ramifications of
poor data hygiene for agen-
cies can manifest in sev-
eral areas, including audits.
Consider the Defense
Department’s financial
audit process, for example.
The department has
faced significant chal-
lenges in consolidating
its financial management
systems. Migrating billions
of transactional records
and associated dormant
balances from legacy sys-
tems to a new platform is a
daunting task that requires
rigorous data cleansing. If
inaccurate and unreliable
financial data is propagated
during the migration, the
department risks com-
pounding extant problems
by continuing to use data
in its previous form.
With proper data
cleansing, including the
implementation of auto-
mation solutions, the
department was able to
achieve rapid and power-
ful results, including pro-
ducing auditable financial
statements, executing
effective and transpar-
ent budgets and comply-
ing with financial laws,
regulations and policies.
Failing an audit is one
negative consequence of
N AT I O N A L D E F E N S E | S E P T E M B E R 2 0 2 3
poor data management, INDUSTRY PERSPECTIVE
but the stakes can often be
much higher. Uncleansed
data being analyzed from set, validate accounting save agencies time in the
multiple sources to iden- information and fix errors long run but will bolster the
tify patterns and trends through data cleansing. level of insights agencies
in military activity may By embarking on the can draw from their col-
contain errors or inconsis- process of data cleansing lected data. This approach
tencies, such as duplicate before each migration step, leads to auditable financial
records, misspelled names the Navy is actively simpli- statements, transparent
or missing information. fying the process and will budgets and compliance
Consider the possibility require fewer resources with financial laws.
that an AI-powered plat- once data is moved. Accu- To make the most of
form is fed unclean data, rate financial data helps it the advanced tools at their
such as inaccurate satellite produce auditable financial disposal, government agen-
images, incomplete infor- statements and budgets, cies must prioritize data
mation on enemy units, not just abiding by legal cleansing when develop-
outdated troop locations requirements, but building ing IT systems designed
and inconsistent threat a knowledge base that can to achieve government
classifications. As a result, inform better decisions. transparency, efficiency
the AI system may make Committing to strong and compliance. ND
incorrect predictions about data cleansing efforts at
enemy force strategies that an early stage is crucial in Patrick Sweeney is the
result in the military misal- boosting the accuracy and vice president for the Finan-
locating resources and per- effectiveness of the Navy’s cial Systems Integration
sonnel, wasting resources financial management Practice for Aeyon, where
and time at best or causing processes and ensuring he focuses on the strategic
undue casualties at worst. responsible stewardship direction and growth of the
Defense decisions of taxpayer dollars. firm’s financial systems
are ultimately made by Investing in data cleans- community of practice. He
humans, but these deci- ing solutions early in an has 36 years of Defense
sions are only as intelligent agency’s digital transfor- Department financial
as the information supplied mation journey won’t just management experience.
to military leaders. If lead-
ers are unaware that the
projections and assump-
tions provided by their
tools rely on unclean or
incomplete data, they may
inadvertently make choices Mission success is our baseline.
that compromise the
nation’s defense posture.
The challenge of system Strategic UAS capabilities in a
migration is substantial, single multi-mission platform.
but the Department of the
Navy provides an instruc-
tive example of how data
cleansing can reduce
this kind of burden.
It needed to migrate bil-
lions of financial records,
including unwieldy aged
or dormant unliquidated
orders, unmatched trans-
actions and abnormal
accounts payable transac-
tions, from old systems
to the Navy Enterprise
Resource Planning plat-
form. To make sure the
new system worked prop-
erly, the Navy needed
to pare down the sheer
amount of data to a more
useful and effective data sales@pdw.ai
17
 ing of roughly $3 billion by an order
of magnitude. Yet despite the rela-
tively limited budget — the depart-
ment’s investments over the next five
years are focused on deploying 1,800
autonomous vehicles on a path to
more than 40,000 — resulting in cut-
ting-edge technology making its way
to warfighters on a massive scale.
This playbook should sound all
too familiar. After all, the Defense
Advanced Research Projects Agency
and defense funding are why we have
GPS, the internet and the computer
mouse. Defense funds early invest-
ments — and eventually commercial
companies invest and advance tech-
nology to improve lives, gain efficien-
cies and reduce cost. The fact is that
ground autonomy should already
be mentioned alongside GPS and
the internet, but it’s not. Why not?
One reason stems from the com-
mercial sector no longer believing
that defense dollars can help drive
growth as they once did. The other
relates to the department failing to
make its projects more commercially
attractive. For example, its method
of acquiring commercial products
and services is complicated. The
department typically wants to adapt
a commercial product into a military
one, and commercial companies are
reluctant to agree to intellectual prop-
erty contractual clauses. The syn-
ergy that once was is now missing.
The Common Tactical Truck pro-
INDUSTRY PERSPECTIVE vides a useful case study for how
commercial and defense sectors can

Missing Synergy: How reap the benefits of partnering with

each other in ways not seen since

Defense, Commercial
the Pentagon’s technological break-
throughs of the 1960s and 1970s.
The Army is asking for up to

Sectors Can Benefit

30,000 trucks. That kind of scale is
exactly what private sector companies

Each Other BY PAT ACOX AND ADI RAVAL

require to justify the time and invest-
ment needed to pursue a highly com-
petitive contract. Building at scale

T
has oftentimes been lacking in the
here are very few emerg- for widespread commercial adoption. Defense Department’s contract award
ing dual-use technolo- However, the commercial pro- process, therefore limiting involve-
gies where the Defense duction of these technologies is ment from the commercial sector.
Department and the significantly more advanced than Another common lament from
commercial sector government-led science-and-tech- the private sector is a sense that the
can not only equally benefit from nology projects. Never mind that product will never actually make it
cutting-edge research and develop- the Defense Department is obligated out of the science-and-technology
ment but do so simultaneously. by law to not build technologies space and into full-scale production,
The commercial sector is outpacing that it can procure commercially. hence the reluctance to participate or
defense in both scaling and internal In the ground autonomy market, invest. The truck contract pathway
iStock illustration

R&D spending. Areas like hyperson- funding for the entire industry is esti- addresses this issue by laying out
ics and autonomous vehicles have mated to be more than $100 billion specific timelines from the process
gained significant investment from since 2010, significantly outpacing for evaluation to a rapid prototyp-
the private sector yet are not ready U.S. defense ground autonomy fund- ing phase and then ultimately to a

18 N AT I O N A L D E F E N S E | S E P T E M B E R 2 0 2 3
production contract, all within an
accelerated four-year timespan.
As is the case with the Com-
mon Tactical Truck, the depart-
ment should put a preponderance
of these activities within the pro-
gram executive offices versus in
the science-and-technology com-
munity, which is not to say that its
role should be minimized. Far from
it. S&T has an incredibly important
function — they are effectively the
“Google X” of the country — and
should remain focused on moonshot
technologies that define our com-
petitive advantage in the world.
However, they often are incentiv-
ized to ward off transition efforts,
as budgets are inflexible and limited
by bureaucratic inefficiencies. Pri-
vate sector companies know this and
therefore are reluctant to invest in a
technology that will never transition
from early development. A glance
through the 2023 Budget Justification
Books shows just how much money
goes to studying problems that have
been solved in the commercial world.
What the Army is looking for in the
new fleet of Common Tactical Trucks
is based largely upon common com-
mercial standards that don’t require
private sector partners to reinvent the
WHERE DO YOU STAND
IN THE M&S COMMUNITY?
Get accredited today!
EARNING THE CMSP DESIGNATION PROVIDES:
• RECOGNITION from the M&S community as a leader in the profession
• VALIDATION of your skills, knowledge, experience, and expertise
• OPPORTUNITIES for professional advancement and career growth
NSTA.org/CMSP
Requirements include meeting the education and work experience criteria, professional letters of recommendation, and successful completion of an online examination.
wheel. The Army should be commend-
ed for establishing a baseline vehicle
specification that private sector part-
ners should already be familiar with.
Of course, it will be a bespoke
autonomous vehicle for the Army, but
it will be based upon a platform like
vehicles on the commercial side. The
program will also use proven off-the-
shelf autonomy kits as opposed to
potentially experiencing unnecessary
delays and cost overruns by devel-
oping such technology in house.
Similarly, the Defense Depart-
ment requires new vehicles to
meet military-grade specifications,
which some in the commercial sec-
tor have inferred as meaning that
their vehicles won’t be able to meet
the military’s rigorous standards.
This assumption is incorrect,
as the stringent requirements
and specifications for both can be
quite similar and therefore lead to
economies of scale for both defense
and the commercial sector.
The Common Tactical Truck pro-
gram addresses the delta between
defense and commercial as the pro-
totyping agreements note “whether
commercially based variants can
meet military requirements.”
The key takeaway for the private
LinkedIn.com/showcase/CMSP-certification
INDUSTRY PERSPECTIVE
sector is not to shy away from bid-
ding on contracts with military-grade
specifications, as the case might
very well be that their commercial
off-the-shelf products already meet
or exceed such requirements.
In addition, commercial and
defense have a shared interest in
developing vehicles with a safety-first
mindset, while also both needing to
design platforms for similar types of
rugged terrain, such as logistical sup-
ply runs for the military, and logging
and mining roads for commercial.
Contract awards like the Com-
mon Tactical Truck should be the
model going forward to boost com-
mercial sector growth from the
Defense Department while also meet-
ing commercial’s requirements. But
for such benefits to flourish, both
entities must also operate with an
open mindset and without precon-
ceived notions. By doing so, a new
synergy can be formed between
defense and commercial. ND
Pat Acox is Robotic Research Autono-
mous Industries’ head of defense and
Adi Raval is head of communications.
Tech
Team-Up
Will U.S., India Pact Boost
Defense Innovation?
BY JOSH LUCKENBAUGH
D
riven in part by the
need to pull power-
ful countries from the
orbit of its peer com-
petitors, the United
States has entered into a new strategic
technology partnership with India,
but regulatory hurdles could limit the
near-term impact of the agreement.
Announced on June 21 during a visit
to the United States by Indian Prime
Minister Narendra Modi, the India-
U.S. Defense Acceleration Ecosystem,
or INDUS-X, is meant to “vitalize our
defense industrial cooperation and
unlock new innovations in technology
and manufacturing … and help equip
both countries’ armed forces with
the capabilities they need to defend a
free and open Indo-Pacific,” accord-
ing to a Defense Department release.
An INDUS-X collaboration agenda
released the same day outlined sev-
eral “prospective actions” for stake-
holders in the initiative to pursue,
including mentor-protégé partner-
ships and an accelerator program
for start-ups; joint challenges “that
leverage common dual-use cases for
both countries” and an Indo-U.S.
Joint Innovation Fund that will seek
private investment for defense tech.
“With support from our govern-
ments, closer cooperation between
our private sectors and research
institutions will catalyze innova-
tion within our defense industrial
bases,” a Defense Department fact
sheet on INDUS-X said. “Through
INDUS-X, we will strengthen ties
between our defense industrial eco-
systems to make them more inno-
vative, accessible and resilient.”
The Defense Department two weeks
before the announcement released
a “Roadmap for U.S.-India Defense
Industrial Cooperation,” which iden-
tified several “priority areas with
[the] most cooperation potential,”
including: intelligence, surveil-
20 N AT I O N A L D E F E N S E | S E P T E M B E R 2 0 2 3
lance and reconnaissance; undersea
domain awareness; air combat and
support, including aero engines;
munitions systems; and mobility.
Other potential technology areas for
INDUS-X could also include space,
manned and unmanned aircraft, arti-
ficial intelligence, quantum sciences
and communications, as well as “other
critical and emerging technologies,”
Rajiv Kumar Narang, senior fellow
at the Manohar Parrikar Institute
for Defence Studies and Analyses,
said in an email. In particular, the
Defense Department collaboration
with Indian unmanned aircraft sys-
tems and space technology start-ups
indicate an expanding scope of inno-
vation collaborations, he added.
Kenneth Juster, a distinguished fel-
low at the Council on Foreign Rela-
tions and former ambassador to India,
said in an interview that while there is
a broad range of capabilities of inter-
est to INDUS-X stakeholders, he is
“not aware of a specific target list of
projects. Rather, the notion is that the
technology and defense ecosystems
in [the] two countries should work
together and develop products jointly.”
Narang said the “U.S. technologi-
cal ecosystem coupled with Indian
innovation [and] ingenuity … can
[provide] Indian and U.S. defense
forces high technology solutions at
lower cost.” The hope is that India and
the United States’ industrial bases
“complementing each other and mak-
ing … innovative and niche technology
products at competitive cost” becomes
“a habit” going forward, he said.
Ultimately, linking its defense eco-
system with India’s could play a key
role in the U.S. strategic competition
with China, said Sameer Lalwani, a
senior expert on South Asia programs
at the United States Institute of Peace.
There is an “astonishing amount
of innovation talent originating from
India already in our respective deep
tech ecosystems,” Lalwani said in an
interview. “As the United States tries
to out-compete and out-innovate
China, finding partners with the
desire and capacity to flow talent
with us is going to be at a premium,
and India provides this opportunity
for us to pool and scale our research
and engineering talent pool.
“There’s this long-term play, I think,
at stake, and INDUS-X is maybe the
opening move in that long-term play
of the linkage in our science-and-
technology ecosystems,” he said.
From the Indian point of view,
INDUS-X is not “targeted at China”
as much as something that fits “the
need of the hour” for both the United
States and India, said Konark Bhan-
dari, a fellow with Carnegie India.
The war in Ukraine has rapidly
depleted the U.S. munitions stock-
pile, while India is trying to “indi-
genize” its defense industry and
modernize its military, Bhandari
said in an interview. “INDUS-X fits
perfectly in this particular case.
“If it works out, it will demon-
strate how co-development and co-
production of defense systems with
countries like India could go a long
way to replenish these munitions”
for the United States, “and in the
process, India could become a more”
modernized military power, he said.
However, based on past Indo-U.S.
agreements, there are many questions
about what INDUS-X might deliver. In
2005, the two nations signed the “New
Framework for the India-U.S. Defense
Relationship,” which “laid the founda-
tion for defense cooperation,” Narang
said. And in 2012, India and the Unit-
ed States launched the Defense Tech-
nology and Trade Initiative, or DTTI,
which was meant to “to simplify trans-
fer, co-development and co-production
of defense technologies,” he added.
Lalwani said that while both the
new framework and DTTI “were
steps in the right direction … I
think there [were] still maybe mis-
matched expectations as to what”
the partnership should entail.
“I think the Indians fundamentally
wanted to be able to get access to
technologies so that they could build
things themselves and iterate their
own designs for themselves and to
maintain and sustain platforms on
their own,” he said. India’s priorities
iStock illustration
“might have been understood in some
pockets of the U.S. government and
Defense Department, but … if it was
understood at the top, it was not being
 driven in that way by the U.S. side.”
Narang noted that U.S. defense
equipment exports to India rose
from near zero in 2008 to $20 bil-
lion in 2020, but “co-develop-
ment and co-production with
India made little progress.”
INDUS-X “is an appreciation of
what India is seeking, and the United
States believing that it is in the U.S.
strategic interest to take on a larger
coordinating role to help India get
access to technologies, develop them
on their own and co-develop and co-
innovate technologies that will be a
part of the U.S. and Indian defense
supply chains,” Lalwani said. “So, I
think it’s another level of partnership,
if you will, and willingness to share.”
Bhandari said: “Unlike the previ-
ous initiatives, where there [were] a
lot of expectations, the two sides now
are sort of realistic. They’re realiz-
ing that probably we should provide
some modest capital and then see
how we can work with other think
tanks and incubators and engage
with the other [venture capital]
firms to secure further resources.
“So, I think for
starters, there is a
tempering of expecta-
tions and the realiza-
tion that, let’s not
start with some really
ambitious targets
which we might not be
able to meet,” he said.
Private companies
and academia will be
the “key drivers” of
INDUS-X, Narang
said. Industry will
lead “technology
development while
academic institutions U.S. Secretary of
and start-up accel- Defense Lloyd Austin
erators [will] support (left) and Indian
Defence Minister
them in technology Rajnath Singh (right)
development and scal-
ing up production.”
Juster agreed the private sec-
tor stakeholders from industry and
academia will drive the innovation,
while the two governments “will
be facilitators, trying to stimu-
late and guide the private sector.
“This initiative is an effort to work
from the bottom up with the tech-
nology and defense ecosystems of
the two countries to see if they can
Defense Dept. photo
develop greater synergies,” he said.
To ensure successful collaboration, a
senior advisor group will assess prog-
ress and make recommendations to
the defense establishments and other
stakeholders, the Defense Department
fact sheet said. The United States
Institute of Peace, Carnegie India, the
U.S.-India Business Council, the U.S.-
India Strategic Partnership Forum and
the Society of Indian Defence Manu-
facturers “will convene follow-on pro-
gramming to drive implementation of
the collaboration agenda and identify
barriers to implementation” for the
senior advisor group’s consideration.
Identifying potential roadblocks
is the likely first step for INDUS-X
partners “before we see some big
successes” on the technology and
innovation front, Bhandari said.
One potential stumbling block —
and an area where both nations’ gov-
ernments can play a key role — is
policy. India “struggled to establish
joint technology development and
innovation partnerships with the Unit-
ed States due to its legislative, policy
and other challenges” following the
2012 launch of the Defense Technol-
ogy and Trade Initiative, Narang said.
The United States has a “well-estab-
lished defense innovation ecosystem
for international collaboration,” but
it must ensure that its government
agencies “are on one page for inno-
vation collaboration and technology
co-development with India,” he said.
Meanwhile, India “has to create poli-
cies and structures for joint develop-
ment” to ensure there is sufficient
funding, testing, certification and
procurement of the technologies and
systems developed through INDUS-X.
The public-private partnerships
planned for INDUS-X include eas-
ing regulations for cross-border
INTERNATIONAL
development and trade, and stan-
dardizing Indo-U.S. certifications
for technology start-ups, the Defense
Department fact sheet stated.
“Government has a major role
to play in the regulatory environ-
ment,” Lalwani said. “Some of this
is about lowering some of the bar-
riers to business-to-business trans-
actions — even if they’re between
large, established defense primes
and emerging, aspiring small [or]
medium enterprises — and some of
that is just the market signals” that
show the government is “invested in
the partnership between these two
countries and these two countries’
defense innovation ecosystems.”
While export controls such as the
International Traffic in Arms Regula-
tions can’t be removed completely,
there are ways to adjust policies to
reduce “friction,” such as speeding up
the approval process for licenses and
technical assistance agreements, he
said.
“If things move
faster, that means it’s
costing companies
less time to wait for
these cross-national
collaborations to bear
some fruit, less time
for them to be burning
capital when they could
be moving quickly in
terms of their innova-
tion cycle and their
product develop-
ments and moving
to commercializa-
tion,” Lalwani said.
INDUS-X is “try-
ing to reduce maybe
some of the timelines
that would otherwise
deter a U.S. defense
prime from even ven-
turing to try to find an Indian partner
to source a sensor system or the tar-
geting pod or something like that.”
If U.S. companies know the regu-
latory processes are moving faster
and that “there might be some cost
savings on the other end, plus some
extra juice from working with a desig-
nated strategic partner of the United
States, they might be willing to invest
that time and … submit through
that licensing process,” he said. “So,
I think that’s where you might see
immediate improvement.” ND
N AT I O N A L D E F E N S E | S E P T E M B E R 2 0 2 3 21
Recon Revamp
Force, the mobile reconnaissance bat-
talions will require “some combina-
tion of vessels, aircraft and vehicles.”
“That’s what we have to sort out
over the next couple of
Marine Corps Scouting New years,” he said. “But it’s
not just one of them. It’s
Reconnaissance Capabilities clear to us that capability
has to be all three: aviation,
BY JOSH LUCKENBAUGH ground and some kind of

W
vessels, some kind of craft
hen the Marines and the associate — probably a hybrid of
deployed to Afghani- director of RAND manned and unmanned.”
stan’s Helmand Arroyo Center’s The Force Design 2023
province in 2009, Strategy, Doctrine update stated that no later
they were fight- and Resources pro- than Sept. 1, the deputy
ing in a desert environment against gram, noted that a commandant for combat
a low-tech, but deeply entrenched major component of development and integra-
Taliban insurgency. The force’s recon- Force Design 2030 tion will provide the assis-
naissance assets and tactics were has been building tant commandant of the
narrowly tailored for that fight. an understanding Marine Corps “a plan for
With the U.S. strategic pivot to of the battlefield, the establishment of a pro-
the Indo-Pacific, the Marine Corps and mobile recon- gram manager for mobile
is retooling its reconnaissance and naissance battalions reconnaissance to exe-
A Marine
counter-reconnaissance opera- will play a key role catches a small
cute acquisition activities
tions for potential combat in a con- in that effort. unmanned in support of the transi-
tested maritime environment where “We kind of aircraft system tion of” light armored
during a recon-
Marines will need to provide key took it for granted naissance and reconnaissance battal-
operational insights across multiple in the last like 20 surveillance ions to mobile recon-
domains for the entire Joint Force. years that we could build an opera- field exercise. naissance battalions.
The Marine Corps’ reconnaissance tional picture very easily, and so that The program manager
capabilities are currently “ground emphasis on understanding what the “will be responsible for executing a
vehicle-centric,” according to the battlefield … looks like, understand synchronized sun-down of the fam-
2022 annual update on the service- the operational environment, has ily of light armored vehicles, while
wide Force Design 2030 modern- always been in Force Design 2030,” simultaneously developing, integrat-
ization campaign. As the service Wong said in an interview. “And so, ing and fielding new ground, surface
shifts its focus to the Indo-Pacific, when I see what the Marine Corps is and aerial systems,” the update said.
“sole reliance on armored ground doing as they’re sketching out these Brig. Gen. Stephen Lightfoot, direc-
vehicles for reconnaissance is too [mobile reconnaissance battalions], tor of the Marine Corps’ Capabilities
limiting, especially in complex litto- that makes sense. … It is going to Development Directorate, said during
ral environments,” the update said. be, I think, a centerpiece — if not a panel discussion at the conference:
During keynote remarks at the Mod- the centerpiece effort — to add that “Wherever our units go, they’ve got
ern Day Marine conference in June, understanding of the battlefield.” to be able to do reconnaissance. And
then-Marine Corps Commandant And the goal is to provide an where is that? It’s below the surface,
Gen. David Berger, who retired in July, understanding of the battlefield it’s on the surface and it’s in the air.
said: “The traditional ground recon- not just to fellow Marines, but the “So, we’re looking closely at those
naissance, which I grew up in — and entire Joint Force, he added. and saying, ‘What is the right bal-
airborne reconnaissance and recon- Marine Corps reconnaissance ance?’” he continued. “That is a high
naissance over the water or under has traditionally been “inwardly priority for us is moving forward
the water — can’t be three separate focused,” he said. Light armored with defining those requirements,
units, not to do what we have to do.” reconnaissance battalions would then figuring out what do we think
The 2023 annual update to Force conduct screening missions “for are the right vessels, vehicles, loiter-
Design 2030 said going forward, the Marine forces … and there was less ing munitions, small [unmanned
Marine Corps requires “littoral, multi- contribution to the Joint Force and aircraft systems] that we’re going
domain reconnaissance capabilities the overall operational picture. to have in the mobile reconnais-
that our light armored reconnaissance “I think the biggest change — at sance battalion, but it’s going to be a
battalions do not currently provide.” least from what I understand about combination of all of those things.”
The final result will be the transition the mobile reconnaissance battalions On the ground side, the Marine
to what the service is calling “mobile — is that they’re meant to provide Corps is already in the midst of
reconnaissance battalions,” which will a more outward-facing operational evaluating prototypes for its Advanced
consist of maritime reconnaissance picture for the Joint Force, particu- Reconnaissance Vehicle program.
Marine Corps photos

companies, light mobile companies larly for naval forces,” he said. Berger said it is “too early to tell” what
and light armored companies, “all Berger said to accomplish this new the new reconnaissance strategy will
with greater reach and lethality.” multi-domain mission that enables mean for the program. (See page 24)
Jonathan Wong, a former Marine decision-making across the Joint While many are interested in the

22 N AT I O N A L D E F E N S E | S E P T E M B E R 2 0 2 3
future of the Advanced Reconnais- he said. That is technologically compli- MARINE CORPS
sance Vehicle and the potential of cated, and there is growing awareness
aircraft as showcased in the conflict that a more streamlined architecture
in Ukraine, Wong said he is “most that “channels or funnels informa- force on new reconnaissance systems
curious about … what the mari- tion to the right echelon, to the right and procedures could be a poten-
time platforms might look like.” decision maker and to the right tial stumbling block, Wong said.
Wong, who served in a boat com- shooter is the way to go. And so that, “I think the experimentation, the
pany, said according to his sources, to me, is the most critical bit of the material side of things, that will
the service is basing the maritime technology, and the least tangible.” hum along — whether it’s the ARV,
experiment on its small boat experi- The data fabric is not a platform that whether it’s some sort of mari-
ence. He questioned using something someone can see at a defense exhibi- time [or] some sort of air domain
like the service’s Combat Rubber tion, but rather “it’s a network that’s platform,” he said. “Setting those
Reconnaissance Craft as a base- kind of ephemeral,” he said. “I think aside, I think building the people,
line, saying the platform is bulky, in my mind that’s the most important the human talent behind that, is
heavy and has limited range. piece of the puzzle for the Marine going to be the biggest challenge.”
“I would be really interested to Corps to solve … how to knit all this The Marine Corps is not only
see what kind of uncrewed vehicles together in a coherent architecture.” sundowning legacy platforms, but
that they’re thinking about,” par- In March, the service established is also shifting its entire mindset
ticularly subsurface platforms, the Marine Corps Software Fac- of “who are you doing reconnais-
he said. “My instinct is that tory in Austin, Texas, to “provide sance for, and what is the picture
that’s probably the way to go. viable capabilities to enhance mis- that you’re building? That will be
“Maybe the experimentation begins sion readiness through the power a huge challenge,” Wong said, but
with what they know in terms of small of information,” deputy comman- noted he is “cautiously optimistic.”
craft and small boats that they have dant for information Lt. Gen. Mat- “I was actually at the change of com-
now,” he said. “But my sense is that thew Glavy said in a statement. mand ceremony for [the] Advanced
it won’t look like the kind of riverine Berger said: “I think it’s becom- Infantry Training Battalion … and
force that the Marine Corps had in ing more apparent that there will I was just really impressed at the
Western Iraq, it won’t look like boat probably be a need to … code at the caliber of the training that they
companies out in the Western Pacific. edge. I think that’s becoming more have now,” he said. “What they’re
It’ll be much smaller
than that … it just
Marines ride in LAV-25 light
seems like a huge armored vehicles during a zone
logistics footprint and reconnaissance exercise.
a maintenance foot-
print for very little
gain if it’s going to
be a crewed system.”
The makeup of
platforms in the
mobile reconnais-
sance battalions will
also “depend on the
operational context
that you’re in,” he
said. “I can imagine
a ratio that skews
more heavily toward
maritime and air
domain platforms
for these sensors to
sit on in the Indo-
Pacific, and then
more of a ground-air
mixture in Europe.”
And just as
important as the
right mix of plat-
forms and sensors will be “the and more likely. There will be reach- doing today makes the stuff that
architecture that’s behind it that back capability, but I think to do our they were doing back 20 years ago
pulls all that data in and then gets reconnaissance, counter-reconnais- look absolutely junior varsity.”
it to the right place,” Wong said. sance effort, it will very likely mean There is “enormous potential” to
The “initial vision” of the Defense that we have to code forward.” train and educate Marines “in the
Department’s joint all-domain com- While the Marine Corps has shown way that they want to take advantage
mand and control concept was “link- an ability to develop and field tech- of this kind of new way of thinking
ing up every sensor to every shooter,” nologies and capabilities, training the about reconnaissance,” he said. ND

N AT I O N A L D E F E N S E | S E P T E M B E R 2 0 2 3 23
Rolling Recon
Marine Corps
Seeking Intel on
Reconnaissance
Vehicle BY ALLYSON PARK
T
he latest update to the
Marine Corps Force
Design 2030 moderniza-
tion plan highlights the
service’s transition of
light armored reconnaissance bat-
talions to mobile reconnaissance
battalions, which will require a mix
of aerial, sea and land systems.
One potential system is the
Advanced Reconnaissance Vehicle,
which is currently in the evalu-
ation process as the service con-
templates its requirements.
Originally conceived as a replace-
ment for the Light Armored Vehicle,
or LAV — which has been in service
since the 1980s and is slated for retire-
ment by the mid-2030s — the ARV
isn’t mentioned in the 2023 Force
Design 2030 update, raising ques-
tions about the role it might play
in multi-domain reconnaissance.
Lt. Gen. Karsten Heckl, deputy
commandant for combat develop-
ment and integration, said, “There
is a requirement for some type of
LAV replacement, we know that for
sure. The solution is probably going
to be different for different [areas
of operations], will be different for
different” Marine Expeditionary
Forces, he told reporters in June.
For example, a ground vehicle would
be of use to Marine units in Europe,
Africa and the Middle East, but less
so in the Indo-Pacific, he said.
“Right now, we have several
preliminary designs going for-
ward,” he said. “We’re in competi-
tion with three vendors. And we
will downselect based on what the
operational need is for the fleet.”
Brig. Gen. Stephen Lightfoot, direc-
tor of the service’s Capabilities Devel-
opment Directorate, noted that the
service is looking at a combination of
systems to meet reconnaissance needs.
“We’re looking at ultralight vehi-
cles; we’re looking at light vehicles;
we’re looking at potentially light
24 N AT I O N A L D E F E N S E | S E P T E M B E R 2 0 2 3
armored vehicles, and that’s where
the ARV comes in,” he said in a Force
Design 2030 update media call.
“Small [unmanned aerial systems]
and loitering munitions would be
able to come off of some of these
vehicles, and we’d have the abil-
ity to do” command and control, he
added. “So, I think that it’s certainly
not just simply an LAV replacement,
it’s a family of systems to give us
a much greater capability forward,
particularly in the littorals.”
Heckl said: “Whatever this thing
ends up being, whichever one we
end up selecting … it’s going to be
another node in the sense/make
sense ecosystem all the way to the
tactical edge. And it’s going to be
an important component of that.”
The Corps is currently experi-
menting with multiple ARV variants,
referred to as a family of vehicles.
The first variant is the Command,
Control, Communications and
Computers/Unmanned Aircraft
Systems, or C4/UAS, version.
In 2021, the Marine Corps selected
Textron Systems and General Dynam-
ics Land Systems to design and devel-
op ARV prototypes, both of which were
delivered to the service in December
2022, marking the beginning of the
“formal government evaluation pro-
cess,” a Congressional Research Ser-
vice report on the ARV program said.
BAE Systems delivered a third ARV
prototype to the Marine Corps in Janu-
ary for testing, a company release said.
The ARV prototypes developed
by Textron, General Dynamics and
BAE vary in specific capabilities
and design while simultaneously
meeting Marine Corps require-
ments, according to spokespeople
from the three contractors.
Textron released its Alpha ARV pro-
totype in 2021. Since then, it has been
tested, modified and redesigned, lead-
ing to Textron’s current “lower risk”
C4/UAS variant, the Cottonmouth
ARV, according to a company release.
“We didn’t take something that
currently existed. We knew what the
Marine Corps’ requirements were
at that time, and we spent our own
money and developed a prototype,”
David Phillips, senior vice president
of Textron’s Land and Sea Systems
businesses, said in an interview.
“We took it out to the Nevada Auto-
motive Test Center, and we tested it
against the same operational profiles
that the Marines were going to test in
this phase of the program,” Phillips
said. “We did all that before we got the
contract, and then learned and then
put all that into our second-generation
prototype, which is what we delivered
to the Marines in December of 2022.”
Phillips said one of the most impor-
tant parts of designing the ARV was
the development of a systems inte-
gration lab, which “replicates the
vehicle and acts like another vehicle
Textron’s
Cottonmouth
ARV
communicating with the vehicle.
“The Marines refer to [the ARV] as
their battlefield quarterback,” he said.
“It has got to be able to take sensor
Textron Systems photo, BAE Systems photo
data from other vehicles within the
battalion, but also other assets that
the Marines have on the battlefield
— like unmanned aircraft systems,
boats — anything that’s collecting
information has to come back through
that vehicle, which then dissemi-
nates information to other vehicles,
as well as their tactical operations
command, back to the mothership
 and then to higher headquarters.”
Textron’s Cottonmouth ARV pro-
totype was specifically designed
to meet the Corps’ requirements,
focusing on swim speed, dura-
bility and weight, he added.
The most notable thing about
Textron’s prototype is its “clean
sheet design,” meaning that it
was designed and developed from
scratch as opposed to modifying an
already existing vehicle, he said.
“We determined that the only
way [to meet the highest of the
Marine Corps’ requirements] was to
develop a vehicle from the ground
up that would be focused on swim
speed, stopping distance in the
water [and] durability,” he said.
General Dynamics Land Sys-
tems’ ARV prototype emphasizes
the importance of integrating next-
generation capabilities and technol-
ogy into more conventional vehicles,
according to the company’s director
of business development for Marine
Corps and Navy programs Phil
Skuta. The prototype offers enhanced
mobility and communications sys-
tems, he said in an interview.
“The ARV connects to an array of
on-board and off-board sensors, plus
uncrewed aerial systems, and in the
BAE Systems’
ACV-R
future we think it can also connect to
our ground robotic systems,” Skuta
said. “It is highly mobile on land and
in water. It allows Marines to sense
and communicate like never before.”
General Dynamics Land Systems photo
General Dynamics’ ARV was
designed to integrate sensors into a
sensing network, allowing it to be a
part of what the Marine Corps calls
the overall kill web, “to be able to
sense, communicate, find the enemy
and then be able to address the
enemy, whether it’s with a weapon
or some type of additional asset,”
Skuta said. “We assimilate that
information, fuse it together, and
then we enable the Marines — not
only on the ARV, but in their recon-
naissance formations — to make
decisions and act in a very timely
manner against the enemy.”
General Dynamics can rapidly
deliver their ARV through its “state-
of-the-art manufacturing facility. We
have hot production lines right now.
We have capacity to expand those pro-
duction lines when the Marines want
to start producing this vehicle. … We
continue to invest in that all-important
infrastructure, so you have a very
modern, efficient production facility
which will enable you to produce a
very high-quality product,” Skuta said.
As the prototype phase approaches
completion, General Dynamics has
already begun to develop a digital
training program for the ARV, inspired
by the modern gaming environment.
This digital training system, or DTS,
provides vehicle operators, mainte-
nance instructors and students “an
immersive, gaming-type teaching/
learning solution. Users have the abil-
ity to virtually explore systems’ model-
based, simulated digital twins through
any device, such as a tablet, phone or
computer,” Skuta said in an email.
General
Dynamics Land
Systems’ ARV
“DTS is in use and will be deployed
to support the ARV as an instructor-
led training solution, connecting to all
variant platforms to create a fully con-
nected, live digital twin,” he continued.
The system is also designed to align
with the Marine Corps’ Project Tripoli
live, virtual, constructive training
environment. Marines will eventu-
ally “be able to train on a real or vir-
tual ARV and be connected to other
ARV operators globally,” Skuta said.
BAE Systems has taken a different
approach. Instead of starting from
MARINE CORPS
scratch, the company developed a
prototype based off its already-in-
service Amphibious Combat Vehicle by
integrating the electronics and drone
capabilities into a modified recon-
naissance design, called the ACV-R.
Garrett Lacaillade, vice president
and general manager of amphibi-
ous vehicles at BAE, said the ACV-
R offers a wide range of modern
capabilities designed specifically
to support the needs of the Marine
Corps, both current and future.
“We believe the ACV is a fundamen-
tally sound, survivable, highly mobile
and full ship-to-shore capable plat-
form,” he said in an interview. “Any-
thing you could think of putting on it
from a mission package standpoint,
BAE Systems believes this is the vehi-
cle to do it all for the Marine Corps.”
The ACV-R was designed to show-
case all the different types of tech-
nological capabilities that can be
integrated into the vehicle, Lacaillade
said.
“We have given the Marine Corps
what we like to think of as the Swiss
Army knife of amphibious warfare,”
he said. “And so, this is all about
figuring out what other technology
we can put on the platform. Most
of this technology right now is all
around the ARV requirements set,
and we are demonstrating and test-
ing the integration and usage of
each one of those technologies.”
Still, questions remain about the
service’s requirement for an ARV and
how many vehicles would be called
for under the latest iteration of Force
Design 2030, which required the
establishment of a program man-
ager for mobile reconnaissance to
synchronize the “sun-down of the
family of light armored vehicles”
and the fielding of new systems. (For
more on the Marine Corps’ new recon-
naissance strategy, see page 22)
Stephen Bowdren, program execu-
tive officer for land systems at Marine
Corps Systems Command, said during
a panel discussion at the Modern Day
Marine conference in June that there
are still many questions to answer
before a decision is made on the ARV.
“The Marine Corps will use the
test results from our competitive
prototyping efforts along with the
ACV study to determine the way
ahead for Marine Corps recon-
naissance capability,” he said. ND
N AT I O N A L D E F E N S E | S E P T E M B E R 2 0 2 3 25
Orbital
Internet
Defense Innovation Unit
Spinning Space Web for JADC2
BY SEAN CARBERRY
O
n paper, the Defense
Department’s joint
all-domain command
and control initiative
is clear: deploy sensors
by land, sea, space and air; transmit
sensor data to command centers for
fusion, analysis and decision-making;
then transmit data out to forces and
weapons systems to act on a target.
For it all to work, enormous
amounts of data need to move quickly.
However, legacy communications
networks lack the bandwidth.
Enter the Defense Innovation
Unit’s Hybrid Space Architecture
program, which “seeks to provide
global, ubiquitous and secure internet
connectivity throughout the space
domain for commercial, civil and
military users, including interna-
tional allies and partners,” accord-
ing to a July 2022 press release.
While the program could provide
an array of uses and benefits, it would
be critical to enabling JADC2, Hybrid
Space Architecture Program Manager
Rogan Shimmin said in an interview.
“There’s a lot of different efforts
within the government trying to fig-
ure out what the JADC2 puzzle is,” he
said. “I would interpret that they’re
26 N AT I O N A L D E F E N S E | S E P T E M B E R 2 0 2 3
still designing the puzzle. They’re
figuring out what picture they want
the puzzle to present, whereas we’re
actually starting to build the pieces.”
Regardless of what the puzzle
looks like, there is consensus about
some of the pieces needed. There
will need to be some sort of dynamic
mesh network to interconnect nodes
and platforms that don’t currently
talk to each other. And space will
be the critical domain for collect-
ing and transporting data, he said.
The original motivation behind
the Hybrid Space Architecture pro-
gram, Shimmin added, was that
current systems could not transmit
all the data being generated by intel-
ligence, surveillance and reconnais-
sance constellations — there are
limited numbers of ground stations
and narrow windows when satel-
lites pass over and can transmit.
“And it can be hours before it’s back
over ground station,” he said. “And
you’ve only got a three-to-five-minute
window as the satellite passes over-
head to download all your data. Some
vendors said they were only able to
download about 2 percent of data.”
The duty cycle of satellites is only
increasing, which generates even
more data to transmit, he said.
The commercial sector has been
making giant leaps in space-based
communications with systems like
Starlink, Telesat and OneWeb, he
said. “The commercial space indus-
try is making this reality something
that had been considered impossible
even in military circles,” he said.
The government has been trying to
catch up with efforts like the Space
Development Agency’s Proliferated
Warfighter Space Architecture, he said.
“But that is going to be military
owned, military operated, military
sustained,” he added. “It’s going
to end up as basically like another
GPS program office with decades
of sustainment ahead of it.”
Given how much open-source
commercial ISR data there is now,
it made sense to pursue commercial
communications solutions, he said.
DIU identified four domains for
hybrid space. First is the transport
layer, which includes physical links
and software-defined routing. Next
is data capture, “which will be ISR
constellations, and how that raw
data can then be fused into useful …
remote sensing products,” he said.
The third domain is cloud, “because
some of these cloud providers now
are looking at the space industry and
the amount of growth that’s going
on and pushing some of the store
and compute to the edge, which
sometimes means wearables for the
tactical warfighter. And sometimes
that means storing compute on sat-
ellites in orbit,” Shimmin said.
The fourth domain is cybersecurity,
which is a growing concern as much
of the communications technologies
are moving from hardware defined
to software defined, he added.
DIU issued its initial Hybrid Space
Architecture solicitation in October
2021.
“We had 136 submissions, which
was an unusually big number for DIU,”
he said. “But what was even more
unusual about it is that 135 of them
were really good submissions. Indus-
try had clearly been doing a lot more
thinking about this new paradigm of
space communications than most of
the Department of Defense [had] done.
So, the evaluations took a little longer
than usual, but we got the first tranche
of four awards out in May 2022.”
iStock illustration
The first tranche of contracts
went to Aalyria for software-defined
networking, Anduril for endpoint
tactical networking, Enveil for homo-
 morphic encryption and Atlas for
federated ground stations, he said.
“And the second tranche of awards
focused pretty heavily on cloud
providers,” he continued. “We’ve
got Microsoft Azure, [Amazon Web
Services], Amazon Kuiper, and Spi-
derOak was the outlier there who
have a blockchain solution both for
identity management on the net-
work but also data provenance.”
At the time of the interview, DIU
had just brought on the first ven-
dor of a third tranche of awards
“focusing mostly on demonstra-
tion hardware and actual satellite
vehicles that we can demonstrate
the networking [on],” he said.
That brought the expenditure to
about $8 million out of a planned
$17 million ceiling, but the scope
and budget of the program could
continue to grow, he added.
Still, it’s a relatively modest bud-
get, he noted. “That’s one of the cool
things is for relatively little investment
— because this technology already
exists — we’re just field testing it
basically for the prototype. We don’t
really need anything new to be built.”
DIU was pleasantly surprised by the
maturity of the technical solutions, he
said. “It has been really exciting seeing
how much of the technology already
exists, and 98 percent of this project
is just going to be convincing people
to actually start using it,” he added.
“So, our ambition has been to bring
these disparate providers together,
figure out how their products can
plug into each other and also be scal-
able and interoperable for future
technologies we want to pull in. So,
we’ve strongly encouraged all of
them to utilize open standards.”
That will be a challenge, especially
for the cloud providers, he noted.
“Microsoft and Amazon have their
own software-defined networks,
and they’re not going to be will-
ing to let somebody else control
their cloud environment,” he said.
“So, we have to figure out what
the interface is going to be,” he con-
tinued. “Aalyria has done a lot of
thinking about that problem” and
is working on an “east-west inter-
face” to pass data between the net-
works. “And they’re working with
the Microsoft team and the Amazon
team to try and get to a place that
everyone agrees is what is needed.”
Aalyria image
Aalyria’s Spacetime software was
originally developed by Google, but
the internet giant sold it in 2022. The
simplest description of Spacetime is
that it is a digital twin of space, air, sea
and land communications nodes and
networks.
“They have created [Spacetime] as a
standalone software, which … if you’ve
got graceful failure of a network, each
of the nodes on the network ends up
voting for the most capable node, and
that’s where the Spacetime instance is
going to be run from,” Shimmin said.
“They’re working on it being fully
distributed,” he added, but the chal-
lenge will be getting network provid-
ers to be comfortable with having
Spacetime ride on their interfaces.
“It’s obviously quite a large risk for
them to trust some other software,”
he said. “The authority is on the sat-
ellites themselves, the network, but
if they’re trusting this third-party
software to tell them where to point
their satellites and what data to send
between nodes, [that] does represent
a pretty significant operational risk.
“So, we’re going to have to slowly
approach each partner that we
want to bring into the network
one by one and issue a bit of an
incentive for them to test this out
[and] to prototype it,” he said.
It will start with a first-generation
standard, he said. “And as the archi-
tecture becomes more complex, there
may be things that were missed in
generation one of the standard, which
will be updated as we go along.”
Shimmin noted that the process of
fielding HSA capabilities will be itera-
tive and move out in generations to get
new capabilities to warfighters quickly
because technology is moving quickly.
“There’ve been a few approaches
to standards in the past,” but the
traditional methodologies involve “a
JADC2
lot of sitting around, overanalyzing
what the standard should be. But the
era that we’re in now is technology
is updated so quickly that if you sit
around and talk about a standard for
five years, it’s already out of date.”
Alex Miller, also a program manager
for HSA, described the effort as build-
ing the plane as it’s flying, and getting
technology in the hands of warfight-
ers and getting feedback is essential.
“We’re really just reaching out to
a lot of the tactical warfighter and
[combatant command] communi-
ties, exercises like Northern Edge and
some others, to kind of basically talk
to their organizers and their points
of contact to be like, ‘Hey, what right
now can you give us access to?’”
Getting into war games is nec-
essary for both DIU and the
users to understand each other’s
needs and capabilities, he said.
“What I’ve noticed in the past
when it comes to exercises is it’s
better to start early and often,”
he continued. “We’re starting to
socialize with the warfighter at the
grassroots level with exposure to a
lot of the capabilities and technolo-
gies we have, even though some of
them may be at its infantile level.”
Once things are in the hands of
users and awareness spreads about
what capabilities exist, it fuels a
change in mindset around using new
tools in warfare and provides impor-
tant user feedback to DIU, he said.
“And the best part about it is we can
kind of do some soft breaks of some
of the technologies and capabilities
that we’re trying out,” he added. ND
N AT I O N A L D E F E N S E | S E P T E M B E R 2 0 2 3 27
 COVER STORY

MOTORS
AND
ROTORS
 ELECTRIC
O
ne hundred twenty years ago,
Orville and Wilbur Wright
launched the aviation revolu-

ENGINES
tion off the beaches of Kitty
Hawk, North Carolina, with
the first successful flight of

PROPELLING
a motor-powered airplane.
Decades later, the jet engine
ushered in its second age, revolutionizing both air

MILITARY
travel and military aviation following World War II.
Today, electric propulsion is powering the third
revolution, and the U.S. military is paying attention.
The next revolution is full of futuristic, spidery-

INTO NEW looking vehicles called electric vertical takeoff and

landing, or eVTOL, aircraft. The drone-like vehicles
use electric power to takeoff, hover and land verti-

AGE OF cally, relying on electric propulsion motors where

the power source can either be fully electric — using
solely batteries — or hybrid electric — a combina-

AVIATION tion of batteries, fuel-powered engines and gen-

erators. The motors are quieter, lighter and more
environmentally friendly than the conventional
BY LAURA HECKMANN Joby Aviation’s eVTOL
Joby Aviation

N AT I O N A L D E F E N S E | S E P T E M B E R 2 0 2 3 29
 COVER STORY
turbo engines used by helicopters.
The concept has taken the com-
mercial sector by storm, with more
than 800 designs and counting tracked
by the Vertical Flight Society’s World
eVTOL Aircraft Directory. The designs
and operating methods are as varied
as their intended uses, from air taxis
alleviating traffic congestion to deliv-
ery services gliding across the ocean.
The Defense Department not only
has its eye on the technology but
formed an entire program around it.
The AFWERX Agility Prime
program is a vertical lift program
launched by the Air Force in 2020.
Designed as a collaborative initiative,
the program was built to work along-
side industry to swap resources and
talent with the intent of accelerating
testing, experimentation and ulti-
mately “rapid and affordable fielding”
of electric vertical takeoff and landing
aircraft, an AFWERX fact sheet stated.
The Defense Department’s inter-
est in eVTOL began with a simple
explanation: everyone else was.
The Defense Department needs
to be involved early on in the lat-
est and greatest technology, “to not
only build up additional capabil-
ity, but have it to leverage,” Lt. Col.
Thomas Meagher, AFWERX Prime
division chief, said in an interview.
“We want to make sure that
from a long-term look, we establish
really good, strong leadership in
the global market for this technol-
ogy so that we can utilize it across
the DoD … as it matures and as the
concepts move on throughout the
next couple of years,” he said.
So, what can eVTOL aircraft do for
the military?
Exploring what that utilization
looks like is the whole point of the
Agility Prime program, with potential
military applications ranging from
logistics and reconnaissance capa-
bilities to low noise levels and afford-
ability. For Meagher, it begins with
the versatile design possibilities.
“If you look at the different vehicles
that are out there on the market … you
can have different aircraft designs,
different types of platforms,” Mea-
gher said. Once the electric propul-
sion factor is in place, the power
sources are flexible as well, he added.
Quiet motors have been a loud sell-
ing point in the commercial sector,
largely concerned with maintaining
harmony in populated areas. To the
Defense Department, quiet motors
could mean dropping troops closer to
a target without alerting adversaries.
“The other thing that’s really of
interest on the [electric motor] side is
the simplicity,” Meagher said. From
a long-term operations and mainte-
nance perspective, fewer gear compo-
nents mean they are not only simpler
to maintain, but less expensive.
A full spectrum of potential uses is
being explored within Agility Prime’s
fluctuating number of use cases — as
high as 66 last year, Meagher said.
One example explores the vehicle’s
logistics capabilities, such as deliver-
ing parts for an aircraft operating
away from maintenance facilities.
In such a scenario, an aircraft
with lower operating costs like an
electric vertical takeoff and landing
vehicle can “meet those needs for
just-in-time delivery,” Meagher said.
“That can be something where we
don’t necessarily use a larger, more
expensive platform to go move that
central part to go fix that jet. But
maybe we can do something that’s
a little bit smaller and cheaper to
operate between those locations.”
Not surprisingly, the use cases
“that made sense, based on how the
vehicles will be developed commer-

Army Quietly Exploring cerns about safety, reli-

ability, battery weight
Electric Aircraft BY LAURA HECKMANN and thermal manage-
ment of electric sys-

T
he Air Force has what Friedmann called a tems, Friedmann said.
been the driv- comprehensive look at the Air worthiness is another
ing force of the technology. The Army’s “big lingering question,”
military’s electric vertical approach to eVTOL has said Army pilot Lt. Col. Wes
takeoff and landing efforts been one of cautious inves- Ogden. “How is the [Federal
since piloting the vertical tigation, largely focused Aviation Administration]
lift-focused Agility Prime on asking and answer- going to treat electrical pro-
program in 2020. But the ing the right questions. pulsion and electrical ener-
Army is also keeping an “We’re still in early days,” gy storage for all of these with policy guidelines such
eye on the technology. Friedmann said. Initial eVTOL providers? … Is it as government climate
The Army has had “pock- efforts involved building safe? Is it reliable enough goals and opportunities
ets of activity in this tech- a knowledge base of the to be able to allow it to fly with industry partners,
nology area for quite some right people, the right com- in the national airspace?” “really came together at
time,” David Friedmann, panies and lots of data. Ultimately, Friedmann the same time,” he said.
an aerospace engineer “We’ve started a lot of said all questions need to “There’s always a need
with the Army Combat internal analysis to give answer one big one: what in aviation for better
Capabilities Development it a hard look, figure out is the best technology for speed, more payload, more
Command Aviation and where does it fit, [and] acquiring a capability? range, better efficiency,
Missile Center’s Technol- where can [it] actually ben- The Army’s constant lower cost,” he said. “But
ogy Development Director- efit us?” he said. “I don’t pursuit of state-of-the- there’s the opportunity as
ate, said in an interview. think we have a lot of art technology is one of well with the emerging
It wasn’t until about two answers yet. We have lots three things that led it to industry. There’s all this
Army photo

years ago, however, that and lots of questions.” eVTOL, Friedmann said. money being poured into
the service began to take Among them are con- The other two, alignment it in the private sector,”

30 N AT I O N A L D E F E N S E | S E P T E M B E R 2 0 2 3
 cially, aligned with what their com- so our program being involved early Small Business Technol-
mercial interests are,” Meagher said. with industry helps not only inform ogy Transfer programs. SCAN
Partnering with the commercial them on future business opportunities Rather than gener- THIS
IMAGE
industry is “critical” to the Agility or design considerations for military ating specific thresh-
Prime program, he said. It is working usage, but also helps us provide lots of old requirements, the
with 15 companies and “close to 30 lessons learned and … resources, test- approach involves what
contracts,” with “several more” being ing expertise, airspace, you name it.” Meagher called “areas
brought on board, Meagher said. Agility Prime uses what is called an of interest,” or a general
Defense Dept. photo

“Long-term market share for Initial Capabilities Opening solicita- spectrum of capabili-
[electric vertical takeoff and land- tion process, leveraging transactional ties. The less stringent SEE JOBY
AVIATION’S
ing aircraft] will be largely driven on authorities and funding from Small framework allows EVTOL IN
the commercial side,” he said. “And Business Innovation Research and industry more flexibility ACTION

Friedmann said. In July 2022, Ogden transition quickly to elec-

Army pilot Lt. Col. Wes Ogden (left)
conducts his initial evaluation flight
of the BETA ALIA 250C, an eVTOL
aircraft (right) developed by BETA
Technologies.
and with further support
from partners, “[it] seemed
like we ought to take a look
at the technology and see
what it can do for us.”
Partnerships with NASA,
the FAA and Agility Prime
BETA Technologies photo
Ogden said
working with
AFWERX, a tech-
nology director-
ate of the Air
Force Research
Laboratory and the
program behind
Agility Prime, has
allowed the Army
to “take advantage
of a lot of their knowledge
base … as well as their abil-
ity to set up some of these
larger scale demonstra-
tions that they have going
on between several eVTOL
providers and in Air Force
units.” The partnership has
also ensured the Army’s
specific requirements are
heard and considered dur-
became the first Army avia-
tor to fly an electric aircraft.
Flying BETA Technologies’
ALIA 250C, the approxi-
mately 90 minute flight
was intended to evalu-
ate the aircraft’s potential
for personnel and cargo
transportation missions,
an Army article stated.
While piloting the ALIA,
Ogden wasn’t thinking
about the weight of history
— he said he was think-
ing about how similar it
was to flying an airplane.
“What struck me is that
it was very, very simple,”
he said. “The electrical sys-
tems were very simple and
very easy to understand.”
His experience “trans-
tric operations, he said.
Other perks of the tech-
nology the Army has recog-
nized include its potential
for reduced operational
energy, lower costs and
simplified maintenance.
“So, at first blush it looks
like there’s a lot of potential
to reduce the maintenance
requirements on some
of these aircrafts as we
transition,” Ogden said.
Freidmann said that
as an engineer, he has
approached eVTOL with
a healthy dose of realism.
Further understanding of
how it will be used and
integrated is needed, but
it’s also “a very interest-
ing, new technology set,”

have lent “needed support,
because none of us indi-
vidually has the resources
to stand up a whole new
type of technology field,”
ing development, he added.
While the Army may
not be leading the eVTOL
effort, they’re not just sit-
ting in the passenger seat.
lated very, very well,” a
positive for eVTOL that
could allow the military to
leverage experience from a
current pool of pilots and
he said. “It’s really about
finding answers, asking the
right questions, and mak-
ing sure we do the right
thing as the Army.” ND

N AT I O N A L D E F E N S E | S E P T E M B E R 2 0 2 3 31
 COVER STORY
to develop “along their lines, what
made sense from their perspective.”
The program has marked a number
of milestones with industry partners
since its inception three years ago,
most recently announcing a contract
expansion with Archer Aviation for the
delivery of up to six of the company’s
Midnight aircraft to the Air Force.
Joby Aviation, a partner with the
program from its onset, announced
in late June the company had received
a Special Airworthiness Certificate
from the Federal Aviation Admin-
istration, allowing flight testing of
its first production prototype.
Joby’s contract with the Air Force
has reached $131 million, after a $55
million extension in April that includ-
ed provision of up to nine Joby air-
craft, with delivery of the first two to
Edwards Air Force Base in early 2024.
They are expected to be the
first electric air taxis stationed
at a U.S. military base, a com-
pany press release said.
One feature of note on Joby’s
six-propeller electric aircraft is its
65 decibel noise level. A record-
ing of the aircraft registered as a
barely-audible hum against the roar
of a 90 decibel helicopter takeoff.
“It’s pretty wild when people come
watch us fly,” said Greg Bowles, head
of government affairs at Joby Avia-
tion. “They kind of whisper. And it’s
pretty weird to whisper when you’re
around an aircraft. So, you can
see why this is kind of exciting.”
“We’re at the birth of the elec-
tric age of aviation. That’s what’s
happening,” he said. “This early
stage of electric propulsion is going
to transform DoD, and they’ve
been really paying attention.”
Bowles said the North Star between
industry and the Defense Depart-
ment is “getting aircraft into the
hands of the Air Force so they can
start to fly and validate the analysis
that they have done to show how
powerful these technologies can be.”
In addition to industry, partner-
ships with agencies such as the Fed-
eral Aviation Administration have
allowed knowledge gleaned from
the Defense Department to inform
the new technology’s certifica-
tion requirements, Meagher said.
With new technology comes
trial and error — a tedious
proposition Meagher called both
32 N AT I O N A L D E F E N S E | S E P T E M B E R 2 0 2 3
the program’s greatest chal-
lenge and biggest area of value.
“We’ve had to break down a lot of
barriers, and learning to go out and
say, ‘Alright, here’s how we’re going to
operate them and test them and then
build up on that body of knowledge.’
“A lot of stuff we’re having to
generate and learn as we go,” he
said. “We need to start to craft
ways of not only how we pilot these
systems,” but reconsider both test-
ing and engineering, he said.
Scalability will also be something
to consider, and it is the key test for
the electric vertical takeoff and land-
ing industry, Meagher said. “Can
they get their production processes
and capabilities down to actually
scale these out into commercially
viable and viable for government use,
and that comes with production.”
The future of the vehicles
within the military is an evolv-
ing experiment, but Meagher said
delivery of the two Joby aircraft
to Edwards Air Force Base early
next year will be a guiding force
in the program’s progression.
“Getting the initial aircraft to
Edwards and operating will inform
not only the Air Force, but then also
the other services” in what near-term
operational use could be, he said.
Looking out five, 10, or even
20 years, Meagher said he sees
the technology’s biggest impact
coming from operating costs.
“I think if you can get to a place
where you do have a large number of
lower cost-to-operate platforms, they
can complement existing platforms
where it makes sense,” he said.
Electric vertical takeoff and landing
aircraft are not meant to be a one-
for-one replacement for vehicles like
helicopters and large cargo planes,
he said. He’s hoping for a mindset
shift, where a mix of capabilities and
lower operating costs will allow the
Defense Department to use vehicles
for what they’re optimized to do.
Meagher said one of his great-
est excitements with the Agility
Prime program has been witness-
ing “all the different approaches
that industry is taking.”
“We want to foster that com-
petition. We want to create the
environment that the industry can
kind of grow up in and flourish,”
he said. “I’m excited to see what
the commercial market and the
rest of the users expand this out to
in the next couple of years.” ND
Air Mobility:
The Buzz in Paris
BY LAURA HECKMANN
P
ARIS — After four years
away, the Paris Air Show
returned to Le Bourget
Airport in June with its usual
showcase of aerospace prowess
from across the globe, but one
corner of the sprawling exhibi-
tion space looked a little different.
Making its debut at the show
was Paris Air Mobility, a three-
day event featuring an entire
suite dedicated to air mobil-
ity programming and a stage for
demonstrations and discussions
about the rapidly emerging sec-
tor of the aerospace industry.
Advanced air mobility is a col-
lection of new and emerging tech-
nologies in aviation transportation,
or “anything that’s relatively non-
conventionally powered,” such as
electric, hybrid electric or hydro-
gen, said Daniel Williams, senior
manager of commercial fleet, flight
and forecast data for Aviation
Week, during a pre-show webinar.
Paris Air Mobility focused on
electric vertical takeoff and land-
ing, or eVTOL, vehicles, which
were not confined to the stage.
Prototypes of all shapes and
sizes lined the Paris exhibition
halls — sometimes even hover-
ing overhead. Companies from
around the world displayed
their eye-catching designs,
mostly selling them as quiet,
low-pollution transport methods
that will revolutionize travel.
While bussing travelers high
above congested traffic was a
dominant topic, air taxis weren’t
the only direction companies
were taking the electric vehicles.
Blue Spirit Aero’s Dragonfly, a
four-seat, zero-emission, hydro-
gen-fueled electric vertical takeoff
and landing system, could be used
as a training vehicle for flight
schools, said a company official.
The France-based company uses
what is called distributed electric
propulsion, with 12 electric pro-
pulsion units mounted across two
wings, integrating its own hydro-
gen electric propulsion chain.
“As you can imagine, hydro-
gen is extremely powerful,”

Blue Spirit Aero displays its Dragonfly electric vertical
takeoff and landing vehicle at the Paris Air Show in June.
Speeder Systems’ S30 electric vertical takeoff and
landing vehicle on display at the Paris Air Show.
Harsh Singhal, an aerodynamics The design uses a principle
engineer for Blue Spirit Aero, said called “ground effect,” in which
in an interview on the sidelines of the vehicle flies low — skimming
the air show. “[We’ve] found the the water — trapping air between
right solution to extract the power, the wing and the surface creat-
that energy, from hydrogen … ing more pressure, “and pressure
and make it go 700 kilometers.” means more lift,” Kazakli said.
Down the aisle, a Netherlands- More efficient lift means the
based company demonstrated a pro- vehicle can deliver cargo 40 percent
totype aimed at maritime logistics. farther than a small aircraft carrying
The Speeder Systems S30 model, a the same cargo without the ground
brightly painted red and white proto- effect, he said. The aircraft’s use cases
Laura Heckmann photos
something, Kazakli said: boat or heli-
copter. The S30’s goal is to replace
helicopters. The vehicle can land on
water, does not require a helipad
and eliminates the need for expen-
sive infrastructure, he added.
One Japanese company advertised
making reservations and checking in
for its SkyDrive air taxi from a smart-
phone. SkyDrive plans to debut its
three-seat eVTOL aircraft in 2025, with
a goal of supporting autonomous pilot-
ing by 2031, company executives stat-
ed at a press briefing at the air show.
As numerous and lofty as the
visions for the electric vehicles, so
were the questions grounding them.
Briefings at the Paris Air Mobil-
ity suite included discussions about
noise levels, funding and certifica-
tion, and just how likely these con-
cepts are to take off — and when.
“The reality is, as clever as these
machines are, they’re still going
to have to jump through some
of the aviation regulation hoops
to get there,” Williams said.
Andrea Cornell, associate part-
ner at McKinsey and Company,
identified six areas to keep an eye
on for the remainder of the year.
First — funding. She called 2021
a “banner year,” with numbers slip-
ping in 2022, but on pace for growth
in 2023. “A good first half of this year,
but to be seen how the rest of the
year shakes out … and who actually
gets the funding to survive,” she said
during a briefing at the air show.
Other areas to watch include sup-
ply chain and industrialization, what
design elements will be sacrificed
for timelines, infrastructure needs,
certification uncertainties and what
she called value proposition — or
convenience factor for the end user.
Time will tell how many flashy pro-
totypes make it outside the exhibition
halls. A March report from the Inter-
national Forum for Aviation Research
titled “Scientific Assessment for Urban
Air Mobility” estimated the first round
of aircraft could see entry into service
as early as next year — but not many.
“The [original equipment manufac-
turers] and regulators are advertising
potential certification and commer-
cial operations as early as 2024, but

type about the size of a small rowboat,
was designed to deliver cargo long
distances over water, Erdem Kazakli,
the company’s managing director and
co-founder, said in an interview.
include ship inspections, surveillance,
resupplying ships, medical delivery
and search and rescue operations.
“In the offshore environment,
you have two options” to deliver
only a handful of [urban air mobil-
ity] aircraft could potentially achieve
this ... goal,” the report stated. ND
— Additional reporting by
Stew Magnuson

N AT I O N A L D E F E N S E | S E P T E M B E R 2 0 2 3 33
Shields Up
Russian Aggression Fuels European
Air Defense Market BY STEW MAGNUSON
P
ARIS — Like many con-
tractors at this year’s
Paris Air Show, Israel’s
Rafael Advanced Defense
Systems Ltd. brought
its latest air and missile defense con-
cept to sell to potential customers.
The advanced interceptor Sky Sonic
is intended to take down hypersonic
missiles, which travel at speeds of
more than Mach 5 and are highly
maneuverable, making them difficult
to defeat.
Russia claims to have fired mul-
tiple hypersonic Kinzhal missiles at
Ukraine, but such weapons are still
considered an “emerging technology,”
as are the systems being developed to
defeat them.
Ori Eyal, marketing and business
development manager at Rafael’s
lower-tier air and missile defense
directorate, admitted that the pic-
ture in the company’s booth had little
to do with what the system might
look like. It has a lot of development
remaining, including the seeker
and maneuvering technology.
“But some of these ideas are start-
ing to get an audience because of
the events in Ukraine,” he said.
Israel is adept at developing air and
missile defense technology because
it faces threats daily, he noted in an
interview on the sideline of the air
show.
But European nations — with a
couple of notable exceptions — had
not prioritized deploying or upgrading
their systems until the Russian inva-
sion of Ukraine changed their think-
ing, he said.
Europe was “asleep,” he said. “They
knew that they were facing a problem,
but they kept ignoring it. Now, they
want it fast. They want it right away.
But in this business when you order
something, it’s not that fast,” he said. It
can take two to five years to build and
deliver an air defense system, he noted.
From systems designed to protect
ground forces from small drones
to high-altitude ballistic intercep-
tors, the market for air and mis-
sile defense technologies in Europe
is burgeoning, said Dan Darling,
34 N AT I O N A L D E F E N S E | S E P T E M B E R 2 0 2 3
director of military and defense
markets at the business intelligence
company Forecast International.
Poland, as NATO’s eastern van-
guard, started the trend when it kicked
off its Shield of Poland program in
2014. It has historical fears of Russia
that played into its decision to bol-
ster its air and missile defense. The
Ukraine invasion has only served to
stoke the market further, he said.
“Where you’re going to see the
next frontier is up in the Nordics,
the Scandinavia Peninsula — Nor-
way, Sweden, Finland,” he said in
an interview at the air show.
Russia can attack them from
any angle, from the East and with
its navy operating in the Arctic
and the North Sea, he added.
“When you look across the Euro-
pean landscape, you have obviously
the Brits and the French. ... They’ve
always invested heavily in air defense
systems,” he said. They also share the
multinational MBDA defense contrac-
tor, a leader in missile defense that was
formed out of the merger of U.K., Ger-
man, French and Italian companies.
As far as the nations that have MBDA
subsidiaries, they are going to be pro-
tective of their labor markets and keep
GhostEye radar at the 2023 Paris Air Show
work on major air and missile defense
upgrades in their borders, he predicted.
The Scandinavian countries, plus
a few former Warsaw Pact coun-
tries from Central Europe — the
Czech Republic, Slovakia, Hun-
gary and Poland — constitute the
major European air and missile
defense market up for grabs to out-
side companies, Darling said.
“They’re a mixed bag because they
have legacy systems. So, what you look
for in procurement is something near-
ing the end of its lifecycle — and if it
is — is there a new generational leap
in air defense systems that they might
want to purchase?” Darling said.
“The Israelis really are fantas-
tic on missile defense,” he noted.
U.S. defense contractor Ray-
theon Technologies, meanwhile,
has eight European customers for
its Patriot surface-to-air defense
system, with Switzerland joining
in the coming years as the ninth.
As far as leap-ahead technology,
Raytheon, which recently rebranded
as RTX, brought its GhostEye radar
to the air show to make its interna-
tional debut. The technology grew
out of the Lower Tier Air and Mis-
sile Defense Sensor developed for the
U.S. Army, also known as the Patriot
replacement radar, said Joseph DeAn-
tona, executive director of business
development — defense capabili-
ties and solutions at Raytheon.
“As we were developing it, one
of the things we wanted to keep in
mind was the ability to modular-
ize this technology so we could apply
it to a host of different situations,”
he said in an interview at the com-
pany’s pavilion at the air show.
The overall market for such systems
has exploded, he said. “I think there
Raytheon Technologies photo
are a lot of industry folks that saw
and anticipated the demand signal for
air and missile defense, and whether
they were in it for a long period of
time or not, they realized that they
probably needed to get into that.”
 The GhostEye employs the lower-
tier system’s gallium nitride active
electronically scanned array radar,
which is easy to use and main-
tain and has better performance
than traditional radars, he said.
The lower-tier system has one
large stationary array in front and
two smaller arrays in back to give it
a wide view. Raytheon took the gal-
lium nitride radar from one of the
back arrays — which has already
been tested and certified — and
put it on a rotating platform to give
it a 360-degree view, he said.
It is used in tandem with the
National Advanced Surface-to-Air
Missile System, or NASAMS, a
short-to-medium-range missile pro-
duced in partnership with Norway’s
Kongsberg Defense and Aerospace.
“The GhostEye is going to be
our pathway to take our cur-
rent NASAMS customers well into
the 21st century,” he added.
The war in Ukraine has brought
the need for more robust air
and missile defense systems in
Europe to the fore, but the new
radar had been in the works for
almost a decade, DeAntona said.
The most high-profile NASAMS
customer is Ukraine, which now has
two of the systems it is using in its
fight against Russia. The complete
system is 100 percent NATO compli-
ant, he added. Five other European
nations are NASAMS customers.
Rafael rendering
“We started [development] well
over 10 years ago anticipating that
these threats were on their way
… we used the last decade to our
advantage to develop this,” he said.
“You just don’t develop something
like this in a year or 18 months.”
The company has a built-in market
for the new radar, as 13 nations in
Europe, the Middle East and the Indo-
Pacific use NASAMS already, he noted.
The company decided the Paris Air
Show was the best venue to make its
debut. “We’re not only talking about it
from a PowerPoint or from a cool video
perspective, we are here to say, ‘This
is real.’ We are experimenting with it.
We are taking it to ranges, we’re show-
ing it to customers,” DeAntona said.
Darling said certain types of coun-
tries need help from U.S., Israeli or
Western European manufacturers.
“It’s really a dynamic, dis-
parate market,” he said.
The countries that need the most
help are the ones with smaller, less
robust defense industries such as the
former Warsaw Pact nations, he said.
Poland does, however, have an active,
growing defense industry, so it is look-
ing at tech transfer deals that tie up
with its local vendors to transfer know-
how, he said.
These nations could join and tap
into money provided by the European
Defence Agency’s Permanent Struc-
tured Cooperation pooled fund, but
often don’t so they can protect local
jobs, he added.
Germany has big plans and a big
pot of money to spend on air and mis-
sile defense with its new $107 billion
defense fund, Darling noted. It’s look-
ing at a new ground-based air defense
Artist’s
rendering
of Rafael’s
Sky Sonic
interceptor
MISSILE DEFENSE
system. They are also fielding the
new IRIS-T SLM for medium-range
threats and Israel’s Arrow 3 missile
defense system to intercept high tar-
gets outside the Earth’s atmosphere.
These are big ticket programs, but
not to be ignored is the accelerating
market for air defense systems capable
of protecting ground forces from low-
end threats such as small drones,
loitering munitions, incoming mortar
rounds and small rockets, Darling said.
“Right now, it’s really about pro-
tecting ground troops to counter
UAS wherever they are. That’s a
developing area of air defense … and
what a lot of the European coun-
tries are looking at,” he said.
During the air show, the French
MBDA subsidiary announced that
Belgium, Cyprus, Hungary and Esto-
nia would be joining its Mistral 3
ground-based air defense program, a
short-range system that can be fired by
dismounted troops and can detect low-
signature threats such as small drones.
Darling said despite the success of
MBDA subsidiaries and the Israeli
companies, Europe is rife with oppor-
tunities for American contractors. The
cache of a system being used by the
U.S. military is important. A coun-
try like Romania will want to have a
U.S. system as it comes with some
degree of interoperability, he said.
“They want to stay with someone
that’s a partner. They’re not going to be
looking at an air defense system from
Singapore or South
Korea. They want a
SCAN European solution or a
THIS U.S. solution,” he said.
IMAGE “That’s where the
United States by
default has an oppor-
tunity to pick up busi-
ness in every single
country,” he added.
SEE THE Europe is not the
SKY SONIC only hotspot for air
ANIMATION and missile defense
systems, DeAntona
noted. Business is good in all three
major theaters: Europe, the Middle
East and the Indo-Pacific.
“All three major theatres are — I
don’t want to say singularly focused
— but I would say almost primar-
ily focused on their air and mis-
sile defense capabilities and what
they need and what are the gaps
that they have to fill,” he said. ND
N AT I O N A L D E F E N S E | S E P T E M B E R 2 0 2 3 35
Message
Received
Congress Adds
Energetics, Critical
Chemical Provisions to
Defense Bill BY SEAN CARBERRY

W
hile the Defense
Department con-
tinues to field new
missiles, rockets
and other muni-
tions loaded with precision technolo-
gies, the chemicals that provide the
thrust and explosive punch have
remained the same for decades.
Meanwhile, China has continued
to experiment with more power-
ful energetic materials — chemi-
cals used in explosives, propellants
and pyrotechnics — which experts
claim has led to China having muni-
tions that can travel longer dis-
tances or destroy larger targets.
That’s why the energetics com-
munity has been hammering Con-
gress and the Defense Department
for years to invest in research,
development and production of
advanced energetic materials.
Based on language in the House and
Senate drafts of the 2024 National
Defense Authorization Act, the mes-
sage has finally been received.
“What you see in the legislation
is also a reflection of the fact that
the world marches on, and that
exogenous variables weigh heavily
on legislators’ and staffers’ minds,”
said a senior advisor to the Energet-
ics Technology Center, who spoke
on background due to an affilia-
tion with another organization.
“With what was an awareness
before of China as a pacing, com-
petitive military threat, even in two
years that threat is understood to
be … far more highly developed
and arguably more urgent than
was understood or appreciated
China for energetic chemicals — as
manufacturers scramble to crank
out munitions, the advisor added.
“So, that’s a driving consideration
and what you see in the legislation,
specifically the supply chain related
aspects of it, which are quite explicit
about the importance of isolating
U.S. supply network reliance on
sources other than those which origi-
nated in China,” the advisor said.
Both chambers drafted provisions
that align closely with the May 2023
National Energetics Plan issued by
the Defense Department’s Office of
the Undersecretary of Defense for
Research and Engineering and start
with the creation of a Joint Energet-
ics Transition Office, the head of
which would report directly to the
deputy secretary of defense. The office
would be responsible for evaluating
the current regulatory and acquisi-
tions environment and speeding
the process of developing, prototyp-
ing, demonstrating and transition-
ing advanced energetic materials.
The office would be tasked with pro-
moting the use of artificial intelligence
and machine learning developing
energetics strategies across the future
years defense program and program
objective memorandum processes.
Furthermore, Congress is looking to
invest in the industrial base to make
the production of current chemi-
cals — particularly RDX and HMX,
which have been mainstays since
World War II — more resilient and
efficient while laying groundwork to
produce advanced energetic materials.
Even if some energetics provisions
don’t survive what is expected to be a
A scientist adjusts the flow of argon gas into
a chamber used to make energetics materials.
materials from the lab downstream
into weapon systems will unfold
with greater haste than has been true
for a long time,” the advisor said.
The problem isn’t that U.S. sci-
entists haven’t been able to develop
new chemicals with more explosive
and energetic properties than RDX
and HMX, developed roughly 120
and 90 years ago respectively.
In the 1980s, the United States
developed CL-20, which has far great-
er explosive and propellant properties
than the older materials. However,
it was deemed too costly and risky
to continue working with the pow-
erful chemical. Plus, there was no
requirement pulling the material to
transition across the valley of death.
Yet China took it on and has
developed weapons using CL-20.
In addition to requiring a pilot
program to incorporate CL-20 into
weapons systems, the House ver-
sion of the NDAA includes language
that could help transition energet-
ics across the finish line by making
lethality a munitions requirement.
“The secretary of defense shall
ensure that lethality is considered,
as appropriate, as a key perfor-
mance parameter in the analysis
of alternatives conducted for pur-
poses of procuring any new muni-
tion or modifying an existing
munition,” the House draft stated.
Will Durant, president and COO
of the Energetics Technology Cen-
ter, said: “When you look at lethal-
ity or range, you can’t just have
Defense Dept. photo

two years ago,” the advisor said. contentious conference process on the larger rocket motors every year,
Plus, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine Hill, “I think it’s fair to expect enough you have to really start to address
is putting stress on the U.S. indus- emphasis and attention on the issue what’s going to be the capabilities
trial base — which relies heavily on that new pathways for transitioning that we need, and how can energet-

36 N AT I O N A L D E F E N S E | S E P T E M B E R 2 0 2 3
 ics be a significant component?”
The advisor stated that for too
long lethality has been an implied
characteristic of weapons systems
rather than a holistic concept.
“The inclusion in legislation this
year of lethality … as a key perfor-
mance parameter for evaluating sys-
tems, it’s easy for a lot of people to
overlook, conceivably, how important
that could turn out to be, depending
on how it’s understood and played out
and implemented,” the advisor said.
“Because a holistic understand-
ing underscores a requirement
— the need to look at weapon sys-
tems effects, both narrowly against
targets … but more broadly as con-
sistent with a tactical or operational
concept,” the advisor continued.
Experts have long argued that
advanced energetic materials could
provide a host of tactical advantages:
missiles that can travel longer dis-
tances, which would allow launchers
to stay out of enemy range, or more
powerful bombs, which would require
fewer air assets and sorties to deliver
the same effect as current munitions.
More powerful energetic materials
would change the equations behind
strike planning in a contested environ-
ment, the advisor said, and planners
need to understand the consequences
of improved lethality. “That can have
really extensive implications and
ripple implications throughout the
way defense acquisition understands
how it develops technologies.”
In addition to making lethality a
requirement that will drive develop-
ment of new energetic chemicals,
the proposed legislation should
spark improvements in the pro-
iStock illustration
duction process, Durant said.
“The community seems to be in
alignment for the need to do this,
the need to look for new process-
ing — looking at continuous flow
like they do in pharmaceuticals,” he
said. New processes would improve
safety, agility and resiliency, he said.
“There are technologies and per-
formers that are working toward
doing things like this,” he con-
tinued. “There’s a lot of great
ideas, a lot of great projects.”
That includes bringing mod-
eling and simulation into the
energetics domain, he said.
“There’s a general consensus on
what that modeling and simulation
can be — how do you better model
the overall weapon effects? Or how do
you model a warhead or how do you
model solid rocket motors?” he said.
“It’s not an unknown on the path
forward. Right now, it’s just what’s
the investment priority to push any
of those further along?” he added.
Investments in modeling and
simulation would reduce costs
for qualification testing of ener-
getic materials, he said.
“You have to do less shots, do
less explosions,” he continued. “So,
understanding that is a reduction of
cost in the future, what’s our upfront
tolerance for the investment to estab-
lish those capabilities that support
across all the services or support
a particular weapons system?”
The advisor described test and
evaluation as “the Mount Everest of
the problem,” adding that there are
many inside the Defense Department
and industrial base who understand
the importance of improving the
evaluation and qualification process.
“I think the problem is well appre-
ciated and understood and the
barriers are well understood,” the
advisor continued. “It’s a question
of empowering these people to do
what they know needs to be done.”
Durant said the energetics commu-
ENERGETICS
nity considers the needed advances
“to be a billion-dollar problem, not a
million-dollar problem.” And there are
differences of opinion on the sequence
and focus of investments, he added.
“That’s why we do need this
coordinating body that can really
help take all that information in
and recommend the strategic path
forward as a sort of governing
authority on energetics,” he said.
John Fischer, principal scientist
at ETC, said at a May 2022 energet-
ics conference he left the energetics
field in 1990, and when he returned a
few years ago, the community hadn’t
advanced from RDX and HMX.
A year after that conference, he
expressed optimism about the path
forward for energetic materials.
“I can say, without fear of exag-
geration, that the progress that’s
been made in the past two years has
been nothing short of phenomenal,”
he said. “The fact that we’re actu-
ally having this conversation is proof
that for the first time in my career
that energetics and energetics tech-
nology is now front and center.”
“We’re talking about it, we’re talk-
ing about how much money is going
into it,” he continued. “The fact
that it’s showing up in authoriza-
tion language, that is just huge.”
That said, it will take perseverance
and patience to move the “herd of
elephants” that is the Pentagon in the
right direction on energetics, he said.
However, there are many things
that can be done now, he said.
“For example, investing in ammuni-
tion plants, investing in labs, across
academia, government, industry, etc.,”
he said. “Because one of the things
we want to do is attract workforce.
So, having a state-of-the-art labora-
tory facility … is going to make a very
positive impression on people coming
out of school who are looking for a job
if they see a well-kept, new facility.”
Failing to make those investments
could drive away talent and undermine
the entire energetics endeavor, he said.
In the long run, success will be mea-
sured by looking at the out years of
the future years defense program, or
FYDP, he said, noting his experience
as a former acquisition professional.
“When new lines appear in a
program manager’s FYDP that are
related to energetics, that’s the win,”
he added. “That’s the big win.” ND
N AT I O N A L D E F E N S E | S E P T E M B E R 2 0 2 3 37
 Q&A Right now, we’re programmed
at just shy of 1,100 quotas per
year — 1,096, I think. In terms
apprentice level the appropriate
place to deliver the training? We
have training sites outside of the
of our flow through the school, school that can also deliver training.

Capt.
we are on task to meet all of our
quota requirements for this fis- Q. Where do instructors come
cal year. We’re on the receiving from? And do they help keep the

Steven end of manpower. The respec-

tive services make their deter-
school’s curriculum current by
bringing knowledge of new ideas

Beall
mination on throughput. From or EOD technology with them?
a schoolhouse [perspective]

Commanding
we program in those requests,
and we execute training for those
Officer, U.S. Naval that walk through our front door.
School Explosive Q. New technologies, including
directed energy, multi-domain
Ordnance Disposal drones and expanded use of
BY JAN TEGLER
robotics paired with artificial
intelligence and machine learn-
A. Our instructors are from all four
branches. Instructors are determined
by how many quotas the individual
services request. If the Army deter-
mines that they want 350 quotas,
there’s a formula and they will pro-
vide X-number of instructors. We
have a good mix of instructors here
based on those quota requirements

C
apt. Steven Beall has been com-
mander of the Naval School
Explosive Ordnance Disposal
since August 2021. Located at Eglin
Air Force Base, Florida, the school
conducts common basic training for
Navy, Air Force, Army and Marine
Corps EOD technicians who graduate
from the school at the apprentice level.
Beall spoke with Jan Tegler via
phone about the challenges of keep-
ing the school’s curriculum current
as technology evolves. The article has
been edited for brevity and clarity.
Q. Explosive ordnance disposal is
an inherently risky mission. How
do candidate EOD technicians come
to Naval School Explosive Ordnance
Disposal, and is the school facing
any challenges in recruiting enough
students to satisfy requirements?
A. We are a joint-like school, mean-
ing that we get initial accession Air
Force, Army and Navy personnel [from
boot camp] through their respective
pipelines. Marine Corps personnel
are not initial accession. They have a
requirement to be E-5 or E-6 before
they’re able to come to the program.
Currently the school is 143 train-
ing days. Those training days [apply
to] all four branches of service.
When that is completed, the Navy
will continue on for an additional 63
training days. That is so that they
can pick up the underwater side.
We start a new class here every four
days with both enlisted and officers
mixed together in the same class. We
have about an 80/20 split on that. So,
80 percent will be initial accession
regardless of branch of service. About
20 percent have fleet experience.
ing are in-service or in prototype all coming from operational units.
phases currently. How does the They’ve had the opportunity to
school keep abreast of developing operate in the field. They bring that
technologies relevant to EOD? operational experience back here. The
experience and their ability to talk
A. We have several mechanisms in to students and teach them how it
place that support that. The EOD Pro- applies in real life transcends some of
gram Board has representation from the learning hard spots. Each branch
all four branches of service and really here has a service commander and
kind of keeps us all communicating
and working across one another’s tech-
nology and training and where we’re
driving the community to the future.
Supporting those pieces, you have
two separate groups that convene. You
have the Military Technical Acceptance
Board, commonly referred to as the
MTAB. They focus on all of our tech-
nology. Then you have the Technical
Training Acceptance Board, which
really looks just at training. There’s
a representative from each branch
of service that sits on those boards.
That’s what keeps the EOD commu-
nity cross-talking. That’s that sharing
opportunity as we all look through the
problems from a different lens. How
do we bring those pieces together? they’re also a wealth of knowledge,
Those two groups also communi- all O-5s. They provide guidance and
cate on a routine basis to talk about, oversight to their staffs and students.
‘Hey, here’s my training deficiency Are they a source of informa-
based on this emerging threat, and tion on new technologies and new
I need a technology solution to ideas? Absolutely, we hold working
help me defeat that threat.’ Those groups here amongst the instruc-
groups are in constant communica- tors to coordinate things like that.
tion to work through those pieces. How do we improve our training
Some problems are really long term, processes and what have they seen
and the technology side will work an in the operational environment?
issue and work an issue. That train-
ing piece on what it’s going to look Q. How are emerging tech-
like is why we get way ahead on that. nologies integrated into the
Is this [technology] relevant and is school’s curriculum?
this the right place to teach it?
That’s also a question that gets A. We do a continual training rel-
asked. Is Naval School EOD at the evance review on the curriculum. As

38 N AT I O N A L D E F E N S E | S E P T E M B E R 2 0 2 3
 new technology arrives, the first thing
we want to do is get our instructors
trained on what’s emerging. They will
go through that process and then we’ll
see what the end state looks like.
Through that training relevance
review process, we’ll begin to adjust
the curriculum so that we can make
changes to align with new technol-
ogy and make sure our instructors
are up to speed on what we’re going
to be adding to the curriculum as a
tool and then change the curriculum
to support that flow and that testing.
We develop a plan to evaluate if we’re
imparting the right capabilities to
the students for utilizing a new tool.
The schoolhouse always focuses
on the basics first. We do that
in spite of our technology.
As new technology is fielded, we
plan way ahead because the curricu-
lum changes slowly to make sure we
don’t make mass rudder movements
in what we do. We interlock ourselves
with the Naval Explosive Ordnance
Disposal Technology Division, with
what’s coming online in industry.
We lean into that generally about
two years out to get it in place.
So, while it’s still in production
we’re already having conversations
about how we’re going to imple-
ment it [in the curriculum].
Q. What are some of the new tech-
nologies that have entered the
school’s curriculum recently?
A. Probably the most recent thing
we implemented here was the use of
our [unmanned aerial vehicles]. We
put the UAVs in our advanced train-
Defense Dept. photos
ing site that’s here. We are autho-
rized to fly and operate them and
have incorporated that into a tool.
We’re still incorporating our tac-
tics, techniques and procedures on
how we’re going to employ that.
Students leave the school as
an apprentice. By the time they
become a journeyman they will
come back for advanced train-
ing, and they will get the opportu-
nity to actually use the drones.
One of our newest technologies that
applies to our core training, specifi-
cally to the Navy, would be our under-
water systems that we are beginning
to incorporate. Those are long lead
times as we add those into the cur-
riculum. Sometimes we look at adding
days to our curriculum to support that.
Q. Even as technology advances,
there seems to be a greater demand
for creativity and improvisa-
tion from EOD technicians today
to meet new threats. How does
the instruction reflect this?
A. The key piece for an EOD techni-
cian regardless of branch of service is
critical thinking so that they can holis-
tically look at a situation and evaluate
risk. But they also have to project out
as they kind of play the tape through.
If I do this, this is what will happen.
In terms of technology and how
we look down the road, we look at
what our potential threats are and
we’re playing that tape through. How
does that look? It’s critical thinking
that makes EOD techs successful.
We start with a crawl, walk, run
approach to [training] so that we can
give students the building blocks.
They will start putting the different
divisions of training they go through
together as they go through ground
ordnance and continue to grow into
air ordnance. By the time they get to
[improvised explosive devices] that
critical thinking is switched on.
QUESTIONS & ANSWERS
When you look at a state-sponsored
ground or air ordnance item, once
you can figure out what it is, it’s kind
of a methodical approach. When you
start getting into improvised explosive
devices you really start to expand your
way of looking at a problem and we see
[students] have that “ah ha” moment.
Q. Does the school also empha-
size low technology solutions or
past methods that may become
relevant again in a peer conflict?
A. That is truly the nail on the
head. When I talked about the basic
principles of how we defeat an explo-
sive device, that always applies. The
technology is just a tool. The basic
mechanical tools that they learn, and
their basic understanding is funda-
mental to using the latest technology.
We talk about directed energy sourc-
es for runway clearance. All of those
things are just tools in the bag. That
critical thinking EOD techs learn is
that they will evaluate the whole envi-
ronment, that threat assessment and
decide which tool is appropriate for the
problem they can see at that moment.
Q. What is your biggest challenge
leading the school right now?
A. We recruit very talented, very
well-educated individuals. As we’ve
evolved over time, the students see
life through different lenses. We’ve
found that we have to meet them
where they’re at in terms of how they
digest information, how they’re able
to take it on and teach them to think
critically about an EOD problem.
Our instructors adapt to that. ND
N AT I O N A L D E F E N S E | S E P T E M B E R 2 0 2 3 39
NDIA POLICY POINTS BY JENNIFER STEWART
Shifting Munitions Requirements
For Great Power Competition
T
his fall, the congres-
sional defense com-
mittees will be hard
at work negotiating the
final fiscal year 2024 fund-
ing, policies and authorities
critical to support our warfight-
ers and the defense industrial base.
One important focus area is the
resolution of the president’s request
for multi-year procurement authorities
and funding for specific munitions.
The illegal invasion of Ukraine high-
lighted surge production challenges
with munitions, including supply chain
limitations and vulnerabilities, long
lead times for components and raw
materials, price volatility, the availabili-
ty of skilled workforce, aging industrial
infrastructure and constrained produc-
tion capacity. These challenges inform
the difficulties in meeting immediate
requirements to restock current inven-
tories, let alone addressing emerging
requirements to scale new production.
Government requirements,
budgets and contracts drive both
investment and production levels.
Munitions requirements gener-
ated by the military services are
derived from the National Defense
Strategy, and these requirements
have evolved over the last 30 years.
In the 1990s, the munitions require-
ments for the military services were
tied to operational plans with planning
assumptions for the United States to
prevail in two major theater wars.
Over time, the munitions require-
ments have adjusted to new national
strategies. The first adjustment
was to generate requirements
needed to prevail in one major the-
ater war while maintaining effec-
tive deterrence in a second theater
until resources could be shifted.
The second adjustment occurred as
the United States shifted from plan-
ning for major theater war opera-
tions to executing low-to-medium
intensity conflicts. This second
adjustment also de-prioritized cer-
tain categories of munitions such
as artillery and long-range fires.
In addition, munitions have often
been the bill payers for higher priorities
in the Defense Department budgeting
process. While the military services
40 N AT I O N A L D E F E N S E | S E P T E M B E R 2 0 2 3
and combatant commands reference
requirements-based processes,
the munitions requirements in
the annual budget process are
often softened from “what is
required” to “what we can afford.”
As an example, the services have
resourced buying enough munitions to
meet training requirements rather than
major theater of war requirements. The
services also tend to prioritize a wider
breadth and shallower depth of muni-
tions capabilities rather than complet-
ing the depth of any one capability.
These decisions assumed produc-
tion could be accelerated in the event
of conflict. The services should base-
line budget conversations on the total
inventory requirement for opera-
tional plans for different theaters.
Industry also needs consistent,
steady and sustained funding through
contract vehicles, not press releases,
to ramp up production volume. The
importance of the multi-year procure-
ment authorities, and the associated
advanced procurement and economic
order quantity funding, help compa-
nies and investors make important
decisions regarding investments in
modernizing facilities, infrastructure,
production lines and equipment.
For both the commercial and the
organic industrial base, it is impor-
tant these modernization investments
include improvements to facilities and
infrastructure, not just production lines
and equipment. In addition to increas-
ing production, these investments
also help industry retain and recruit
skilled workers. In a tight labor market,
many companies are stretched manag-
ing the current production demand
signal and need additional support in
expanding capacity, both in terms of
workforce and industrial footprint.
Ramping up production of munitions
A pallet of ammunition and other equipment
will also exacerbate the competition for
component parts, such as electronics
and circuit cards. The competition is
both between munitions categories and
with the civilian economy, including the
automobile and mobile phone sectors.
This competition puts additional
pressure on fluid and unpredictable
supply chains. For multiple munitions,
the lead time for critical components
has nearly doubled, and industry
forecasts supply chain challenges will
not smooth out until late next cal-
endar year in many of these areas.
Therefore, earlier this year the
undersecretary of defense for acquisi-
tion and sustainment established the
Joint Production Acceleration Cell to
shift the department from a crisis-
management, reactive posture to a
proactive posture that can identify
opportunities to optimize production
capacity, resiliency and surge capabili-
ty. Its initial focus will be on munitions.
The Defense Department requested
multi-year procurement authorities as
part of this larger strategic shift. The
purpose is to send a strong demand
signal to both industry and to inves-
tors. For this effort to be successful, the
department will have to also consider
carefully providing Economic Price
Adjustment clauses in contract vehicles,
and Congress will have to be open to
providing the associated funding.
In the past year, suppliers have
emphasized inflation escalation on
long-term contracts as a significant
deterrent to signing multi-year con-
tracts, and they have highlighted price
volatility in raw chemicals and energy
as two specific, but not exclusive, chal-
lenges in locking in cost estimates.
The current industrial posture for
munitions production did not occur in a
vacuum. Thirty years of bipartisan pol-
icy and funding decisions have shaped
budgeting strategy for government and
investment strategy for industry. Each
of the powerhouses of U.S. defense
industrial readiness — stable and
predictable budgets; an experienced
and specialized workforce; diversified
and modern infrastructure; manu-
facturing innovation; and sufficient,
including idle, capacity — required
for scaling munitions production have
all atrophied over the last 30 years.
Approving and funding the requested
multi-year authorities is an impor-
tant step in reversing that trend. ND
Air Force photo
Jennifer Stewart is the National
Defense Industrial Association’s execu-
tive vice president for strategy and policy.
 GOVERNMENT CONTRACTING INSIGHTS BY B.J. ALTVATER, DAVID FAGAN AND JONATHAN WAKELY
CFIUS Transaction Approvals Taking Longer
T
he Committee on Foreign
Investment in the United States,
or CFIUS, recently released
the public version of its annual report
to Congress regarding its review of
certain transactions involving for-
eign investment during 2022.
The report confirms recent trends
that we have observed, including
an overall heightened level of scru-
tiny from CFIUS, with more reviews
proceeding to investigations, more
short-form declarations resulting
in requests for full notices, more
notices being withdrawn and refiled
and more instances of the com-
mittee requiring mitigation agree-
ments as a condition of approval.
The final point is especially note-
worthy: 2022 saw a sharp increase
in the number of transactions being
subject to mitigation agreements,
with 41 out of 286 notices filed result-
ing in mitigation — a rate above the
committee’s historical average.
When considered together with the
data on the home countries of for-
eign investors, the report suggests
that the committee is increasingly
requiring mitigation in transactions
involving investors from friendly
jurisdictions that previously were
unlikely to face mitigation.
The volume of agreements, when
combined with the committee’s
increased focus on overseeing compli-
ance, further underscores that par-
ties need to be able to anticipate and
plan for potential ongoing compliance
obligations, and equally, to preserve
investors’ confidence in CFIUS, it is
imperative that the committee develop
a more mature and accountable struc-
ture for monitoring and enforcing
compliance. We note several key issues.
First, parties have the option of
submitting a short form “declara-
tion” rather than a full notice. At the
conclusion of a 30-day declaration
review, the committee can approve
the transaction based on the declara-
tion; request that the parties file a full
notice subsequent to the declaration;
or inform the parties that it cannot
conclude action on the basis of the
declaration and leave it to the parties
to decide whether to file a full notice
iStock illustration
— the “shoulder shrug” response.
The choice of whether to file a notice
or declaration accordingly requires
transaction parties to make a judg-
ment as to whether CFIUS is likely
to be able to complete its analysis in
the abbreviated 30-day period or is
more likely to request a full notice.
In 2022, the committee reviewed
154 declarations — compared to 164
in 2021. Of these declarations, CFIUS:
approved 90 transactions, compared
to 120 in 2021; requested the parties
to 50 declarations file a full notice,
compared to 30 in 2021; and notified
the parties in 14 transactions that the
committee was unable to conclude
action but did not request a notice,
compared to 12 in 2021, 16 in 2020
and 32 in 2019. The report demon-
strates that CFIUS was less likely to
approve a transaction on the basis of a
declaration, and of those transactions
where the committee did not approve
a transaction on the basis of the decla-
ration, CFIUS increasingly requested
that the parties file a full notice.
The lesson from this data is that
transaction parties should think twice
before filing a declaration and do so
only where there is a strong basis
to conclude that the committee will
be able to complete its analysis and
approve the transaction in 30 days.
This is likely to be the case for inves-
tors from jurisdictions that are allies of
the United States, and where the inves-
tor has received committee approval in
recent years for similar transactions.
If the transaction presents facts
that will require more thorough
investigation by CFIUS, such as large
numbers of government contracts
that it will need to analyze — and
if there is a meaningful possibility
of mitigation — then a declaration
likely will not be the best choice.
Next, there are longer timelines.
CFIUS reviewed 286 notices of covered
transactions filed in 2022, which rep-
resents an increase from the 272 notic-
es reviewed in 2021. The increase in
notices in 2022 — despite significant
drops in global and U.S. mergers and
acquisitions activity from 2021— indi-
cates that transaction parties appear to
be filing notices for a larger percentage
of transactions. For 162 of the notices
filed in 2022, approximately 57 per-
cent, the committee’s review extended
into the second 45-day “investigation”
phase. Of note, there was a meaning-
ful increase in the number of notice
reviews extending to inves-
tigation compared to 2021,
signaling that approvals
at the conclusion of the
initial 45-day review
period are increas-
ingly difficult for
parties to secure.
Finally, there is
a continued focus
on mitigation. The
rate of notices
cleared with mitiga-
tion measures in
2022 — approxi-
mately 14 percent
— increased from
the 2021 rate of
approximately 10
percent. When cal-
culated as distinct
notices — i.e., exclud-
ing transactions that
were withdrawn and
refiled — the number
of transactions where the
committee conditioned
its approval on mitiga-
tion agreements climbed to
approximately 23 percent, indi-
cating that CFIUS is now requir-
ing mitigation for nearly a quarter
of transactions it reviews. This sug-
gests a more fundamental change
compared to the committee’s histori-
cal practice regarding mitigation.
With the additional mitigation agree-
ments from 2022, CFIUS reported
that it was monitoring 214 agreements
in total. As the number of mitigation
agreements increases — especially
given that those agreements more fre-
quently involve investors from friendly
jurisdictions — it is going to be imper-
ative that CFIUS agencies enforce mit-
igation agreements in a coordinated,
principled and fair manner. As we have
previously observed, the mitigation
monitoring and enforcement regime
has been inconsistent in this regard. As
mitigation agreements grow in number
— and potentially in complexity — it
is critical that the committee evolve a
more mature and consistent monitor-
ing and enforcement framework. ND
B.J. Altvater is an associate and
David Fagan and Jonathan Wakely are
partners in the national security prac-
tice of Covington and Burling LLP.
N AT I O N A L D E F E N S E | S E P T E M B E R 2 0 2 3 41
NDIA NEWS COMPILED BY ALLYSON PARK
Stamps: Searching the World
for a War to Call Home,
chronicles Sean’s journey
— journal-
ists, diplomats,
humanitarians
into conflict reporting, — who work
the behind-the-scenes — downrange.
Passport Stamps and sometimes comedic
— challenges of getting
The book is
available through

P
rior to joining National Defense stories in hostile environ- Amazon, Barnes
as managing editor, Sean ments and the mental and Noble, and
Carberry spent a year pen- health toll of spending other online sites.
ning a memoir of his time as a public years covering wars and Links to purchase
radio journalist “parachuting” human suffer- and information
into places like Iraq, Libya ing. The book about signing
and Yemen before settling draws attention events and pub-
in Afghanistan as NPR’s last to the need for lic appearances
Kabul-based correspondent better mental can be found at
from 2012 through 2014. health resources www.passport-
Released in August, Passport for civilians stamps.com. ND

Keep ‘Em Rolling! history in an antique mall To honor the unit’s accom-
in Port Royal, Virginia. plishments, NDIA’s Tactical

N ational Defense
Editor in Chief Stew
Magnuson, who can
be found many weekends at
flea markets, thrift stores
and antique stops search-
ing for old records, NASA
memorabilia and other
assorted items his wife refers
to as “junk,” came across
this piece of World War II
The Red Ball Highway
— also known as the Red
Ball Express — was the
truck convoy system and
unit that carried needed
supplies to troops rushing
across France after D-Day.
This sign may have once
been found alongside the
road in France to help driv-
ers stay on the right path.
Wheeled Vehicles Division
has named its annual Red
Ball Express Award to rec-
ognize individuals or orga-
nizations that have made
notable contributions to
the TWV community.
The sign is now being dis-
played outside Magnuson’s
office at NDIA headquarters
in Arlington, Virginia. ND

NDIA MEMBERSHIP: The National Defense industrial base and serving all military services. For more infor-
Industrial Association (NDIA) is the premier asso- mation please call our membership department at 703-522-1820
ciation representing all facets of the defense and technology or visit us on the web at NDIA.org/Membership

National
Defense
Now Available
At Walmart
And AAFES
NATIONAL NEWSSTAND
PRESENCE
• Walmart SHARE
• Barnes & Noble PHOTOS
D
• Army & Air Force Exchange WHERE YOU FINE
Service (AAFES) THE MAGAZIN
AND TAG US ON
• Books-A-Million SOCIAL MEDIA ENSEMAG
#NATIONALDEF

42 N AT I O N A L D E F E N S E | S E P T E M B E R 2 0 2 3
 Board of Directors

Hon. Michael J. Bayer - Board Chair Paula Edwards Dr. Theresa Mayer
Hon. Lisa S. Disbrow - Board Vice Chair Alan Faver Laura McAleer
Maj Gen Arnold L. Punaro, USMC LTG Richard P. Formica, USA (Ret) Kris McGuire
(Ret) - Immediate Past Board Chair Robert A. Geckle, Jr. Terrance J. McKearney
Dr. Joseph Bravman - Emeritus Bruce Gjovig Andrew McKenna
Edward M. Fortunato - Emeritus Peter D. Green Megan Milam
John D. Illgen - Emeritus LTG David D. Halverson, USA (Ret) Kevin “Morty” Mortensen
Joanna T. Lau - Emeritus Deirdre Hanford Mara A. Motherway
James McAleese, Jr. - Emeritus David Hathaway Jana Weir Murphy
Hon. Michael Wynne - Emeritus Hon. Stephen C. Hedger Michael Niggel
COL William Glenn Yarborough, Jr., USA LTG Thomas A. Horlander, USA (Ret) Fola Ojumu
(Ret) - Emeritus Raanan I. Horowitz Gen Terrence “Shags” O’Shaughnessy,
Harold L. Yoh III - Emeritus VADM Richard W. Hunt, USN (Ret) USAF (Ret)
Angela M. Ambrose Gretchen Larsen Idsinga Brian E. Perry
Maj Gen Thomas Andersen, USAF (Ret) Tamara Jack Hon. Stephen W. Preston
Col John Armellino, USMC (Ret) Logan Jones Col Reginald O. Robinson, USAF (Ret)
Hon. Valerie L. Baldwin Jim Kelly Betsy Schmid
Lt Gen William J. Bender, USAF (Ret) John M. Kelly John D. Schumacher
Lt Gen Chris Bogdan, USAF (Ret) Dr. Richard “Doc” H. Klodnicki Raj Shah
Jeffrey W. Bohling Matthew J. Kuta Edward J. Sheehan, Jr.
John A. Bonsell Brett B. Lambert Lt Gen Jay B. Silveria, USAF (Ret)
Rodney D. Bullard Col Anthony “Lazer” Lazarski, USAF (Ret) Robert Simmons
Maj Gen Timothy Byers, USAF (Ret) Daniel A. Lerner Kraig M. Siracuse
Dr. David Caswell Maj Gen Lee K. Levy II, USAF (Ret) Mary N. Springer
Dale W. Church John Lindsay Dr. J. Mitch Stevison
Christina Cook Meagan S. Linn Dr. Robert H. Sues
Lt Gen John B. Cooper, USAF (Ret) COL Armando “Mandy” Lopez, Jr., Sue Tellier
Col Kenny Cushing, USAFR USA (Ret) MG Omer Clifton Tooley, Jr., ARNG (Ret)
Paul DellaNeve ML Mackey Col Pete Trainer, USAF (Ret)
Dr. Tomás Díaz de la Rubia Leigh Madden Dr. Brett Ulander
Michael P. Dietz William Mahan Maj Gen Martin Whelan, USAF (Ret)
Hon. Matthew Donovan Kenneth Masson Brent Wildasin
Jaymie A. Durnan Anthony L. Mathis

Get More DIGITAL

ISSUE
National • View the
Defense latest issues
EXCLUSIVE online, anytime.
ONLINE WEEKLY INSIDER
CONTENT
• Sign up for our weekly
• Read daily
newsletter highlighting
breaking news AWARD-
WINNING
top stories.
stories as well as full-length
CONTENT
features on our website. PODCAST
• Listen to
@NATIONALDEFENSE @NATIONALDEFENSEMAGAZINE summaries
of top stories
NationalDefenseMagazine.org each month.

N AT I O N A L D E F E N S E | S E P T E M B E R 2 0 2 3 43
NDIA CALENDAR 26
WID National
Conference
Arlington, VA
September 25-28 WomenInDefense.net/NC
Fuze/FFC/Demil
13-14 Co-located Events: October
Fall Integrated • 66th Annual Fuze 16-19
Program Management Conference 26th Annual
Division Meeting • Future Force
Redwood City, CA
Systems & Mission
NDIA.org/IPMDFall
Capabilities Conference Engineering Conference
& Exhibition Norfolk, VA
18-20 • 23rd Global NDIA.org/SME23
Undersea Warfare Demilitarization 30-31
Fall Conference Symposium & Exhibition
Groton, CT
34th Annual
Huntsville, AL
Classified NDIA.org/FFC SO/LIC Symposium
NDIA.org/USW Washington, DC
NDIA.org/SOLIC

31-Nov 2
2023 Aircraft Survivability
Symposium
FOR THE LATEST NDIA CALENDAR: Monterey, CA
NDIA.ORG/EVENTS NDIA.org/AircraftSurvivability

26 TH ANNUAL
SYSTEMS & MISSION
ENGINEERING
CONFERENCE
Register Today!
Join us for this groundbreaking conference where NDIA will
bring the most influential minds in the industry together to zero
in on defense acquisition and system performance. Alongside
leading practitioners including program managers, systems
engineers, and scientists, we will explore systems engineering
from every aspect – pragmatic, practical, and academic – to
achieve a successful and affordable warfighting force. Don’t
miss this incredible opportunity to be a part of the conversation
and help shape the future of systems engineering!

October 16 – 19, 2023 | Norfolk, VA | NDIA.org/SME23

44 N AT I O N A L D E F E N S E | S E P T E M B E R 2 0 2 3
Don’t Miss WID’s Premier Annual Event!
Join NDIA’s Women In Defense for the 2023 WID National
Conference as we convene to discuss Tools and Ideas
for Asymmetric Advantage.

The nation’s leading women and men in defense

will gather to share ideas on how to maximize
professional opportunities and collaborate to
deliver our warfighters decisive competitive
advantage across the spectrum of conflict
in all domains. Senior leaders and young
professionals from industry and
government will share experiences
and participate in panels offering
suggestions and advice. Attendees September 26
will have the opportunity to network
and hone their knowledge, skills, Arlington, VA
and abilities during smaller
Renaissance Arlington
breakout sessions.
Capital View Hotel

Register Today at
WomenInDefense.net/NC
 2023
UNDERSEA WARFARE
FA LL CO NF ER ENC E
The Critical Enabler to Integrated Deterrence
Join us for an enriching experience where you will gain insights into the latest requirements and
developments in undersea warfare, forge valuable connections, and be part of an influential community
shaping the future of this critical domain. Don’t miss this opportunity to broaden your understanding,
enhance your professional network and make a significant impact in the field of undersea warfare.

This event is classified SECRET//NOFORN.

Register Today!
September 18 – 20, 2023 | Groton, CT | NDIA.org/USW

46 N AT I O N A L D E F E N S E | S E P T E M B E R 2 0 2 3
FUZE/FFC/DEMIL
THREE CONFERENCES.
ONE LOCATION.
Armaments • Robotics • Munitions • EOD • Fuze • Demil
Take advantage of NDIA’s unique three-in-one conference opportunity this fall. Three separate
conferences will be held at the Von Braun Center in Huntstville, AL: the 66th Annual Fuze Conference,
Future Force Capabilities Conference & Exhibition, and the 23rd Global Demilitarization Symposium
& Exhibition. Co-locating these conferences will allow attendees to experience a wider variety of
educational and networking opportunities and expose them to the latest innovations across three
sectors. Don’t miss your chance to attend this rare event! See you in September!

Register Now! September 25 – 28, 2023 • Huntsville, AL • NDIA.org/FFC

NEXT
MONTH
MARSOC Tech
• The Marine Forces Special
Operations Command has embarked
on a modernization campaign
and it’s seeking industry’s help to
improve the connectivity, interoper-
ability and lethality of its systems.

Undersea Cables
• The attack on Russia’s Nord Stream
gas pipeline in 2022 also called into
question the security of undersea
cables carrying immense amounts
of communications traffic. There
is concern that subsea cable secu-
ritization could result in increased
regulation, malicious targeting and
legal risk regarding data security.
Contested Logistics
• Pacing challenges from the Indo-
Pacific have brought renewed focus to
contested logistics. National Defense
explores how emerging technolo-
Army Modernization
• The Army has had more than its
share of acquisition failures over the
decades, but has taken steps during
the last few years to turn its reputation
around, such as the creation of Futures
Command. Has it made any progress?
IVAS
• Former Army Chief of Staff Gen.
James McConville in a speech
singled out the Integrated Visual
Army Small Arms
• The Army chose Sig Sauer to manu-
facture its new Next Generation
Squad Weapon in 2022. After one
schedule hiccup, it looks as if soldiers
will have them in their hands soon.
Hypersonics
• The Army’s Long-Range Hypersonic
Weapon has the chance to be the
first U.S.-made maneuverable mis-
sile capable of reaching Mach 5

Marine Corps photo

gies such as additive manufacturing, Augmentation System as a game- to reach the field, helping catch
supersonic mobility and energetics can changing technology. But so far, sol- the nation up to Russia and China
help meet its operational challenges. diers testing the high-tech goggles in the hypersonics realm.
are not liking what they’re seeing.

INDEX OF ADVERTISERS Interact with the companies whose products and services are advertised in National Defense
ADVERTISER INTERACT PAGE NO.

C3 Integrated Solutions ........................c3isit.com................................................................. Inside front cover

Darley Defense .......................................darley.com/defense-partner-program .......................................... 15
Liberty Source PBC ...............................liberty-source.com ............................................................. Back cover
PDW ..........................................................sales@pdw.ai.........................................................................................17
Wilcox.......................................................wilcoxind.com ......................................................... Inside back cover

NDIA MEMBERSHIP:
For information on advertising in National Defense or one of NDIA’s electronic offerings contact: The National Defense
Industrial Association
(NDIA) is the premier
association represent-
ADVERTISING ing all facets of the
defense and technology
NDIA’S industrial base and
SVP, MEETINGS, DIVISIONS & PARTNERSHIPS SALES DIRECTOR serving all military
BUSINESS & Kathleen Kenney services. For more
TECHNOLOGY Christine M. Klein
information please
(703) 247-2593 (703) 247-2576
MAGA ZINE call our membership
CKlein@NDIA.org KKenney@NDIA.org department at 703-
522-1820 or visit us on
the web at NDIA.org/
National Defense | 2101 Wilson Blvd. | Suite 700 | Arlington, VA 22201 | NationalDefenseMagazine.org Membership

48 N AT I O N A L D E F E N S E | S E P T E M B E R 2 0 2 3
UNCOMPROMISING
PERFORMANCE

■ SMALLER, LIGHTER, STRONGER LASER

AIMING DEVICE
■ ULTIMATE BEAM CLARITY & UNIFORMITY
■ OPERATOR DEFINED FUNCTIONALITY
LEARN MORE FOR INCREASED AWARENESS AND EFFECTIVENESS
Hungry
for better
AI results?
Let us show you how to prepare your unstructured data.
If you aren’t able to feed all your data into your AI platform, you’re probably missing the meat
of critical patterns, trends, or knowledge that could enhance the effectiveness and accuracy
of your tool’s output. We help companies get the complete picture and realize the full value of
their AI investment by creating structured data from sensors, PDFs, video, audio and images.
„ USA-only company so your data stays in the USA
„ Workforce is 80%+ veterans and military families

Contact us today to learn how our DataInFormationSM suite of solutions combines human-
in-the-loop data services with state-of-the-art technology so you can use all of your data.
That’s something you can really sink your teeth into.

Liberty Source PBC „ Fort Monroe, Hampton, VA „ 757-214-9643

CAGE Code: 7EWU6
sales@liberty-source.com „ liberty-source.com UEI: JE8WCRU4TGM7