The U.S. Department of Defense launches a sounding rocket from NASA's launch range at Wallops Flight Facility on Wallops Island, Va., on Oct. 26, 2022. (Evelyn Hockstein/Reuters)
Posted on 04/16/2023 10:45:26 AM PDT by SeekAndFind
President Joe Biden’s $886.3 billion Fiscal Year 2024 (FY24) defense budget request includes $145 billion for research and development into emerging technologies to create new weapons systems using Artificial Intelligence (AI), hypersonic munitions, and electromagnetic swarms.
The U.S. Department of Defense launches a sounding rocket from NASA's launch range at Wallops Flight Facility on Wallops Island, Va., on Oct. 26, 2022. (Evelyn Hockstein/Reuters)
The Department of Defense (DOD) and its subsidiary military branch technology laboratories, working in tandem with universities and high-tech contractors that increasingly include small businesses, have produced such big-ticket splashes as newly deployed directed-energy weapons systems and hypersonic/ballistic sensors.
Among prospective products and systems seeking funding in the FY24 spending request is a ‘Rocket Cargo’ transport that can move 100 tons of cargo anywhere on Earth within an hour; a counter-swarm electromagnetic weapon that can disable drones and be powered from a wall plug; a rotating detonation engine without moving parts; a “pop-up hide” that can make Marines disappear in plain sight; a Predictive Vehicle Activity for Identification and Location (PreVAIL) program that “will bring a novel approach to automated target detection and recognition.”
There are also less sexy utilitarian products being tested in the budget, such as a Portable Fluid Analyzer, a ship-to-ship system that converts Morse code into text messages, and an assembly line of bigger, faster, better-armed unmanned aircraft, from micro-drones to the latest Unmanned Long-endurance Tactical Reconnaissance Aircraft (ULTRA.)
All have survived, or must soon traverse, “The Valley of Death.”
Unlike notable valleys in American military history—Valley Forge, the Chosin, Khe Sanh, the Korengal—this “Valley of Death” is not a place on a map but that dreaded moment of realization on a military product development timeline when a cutting-edge weapon that will deliver a decisive battlefield advantage cannot advance out of prototype to production and get onto the battlefield in time.
Integrating new, still-maturing technologies into existing programs and platforms without “radical disruption” to multi-year procurement and acquisitions systems is among the most tweaky of challenges confronting the military, Pentagon officials said during a two-hour April 13 webinar presented by the National Defense Industrial Association (NDIA).
The DOD’s Under Secretary of Defense for Research & Engineering Heidi Shyu and the DOD’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) Director, Dr. Stefanie Tompkins, noted the proposed $145 billion Research, Development, Test, and Evaluation (RDT&E) budget is up 12 percent from this year with the Air Force receiving one-third of the requested outlay.
Shyu said the Science and Technology component of the RDT&E budget request is $17.8 billion, up 8.3 percent over this year’s $16.5 billion budget.
The annually updated National Defense Science & Technology Strategy is on Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin’s desk, she said.
Shyu said the strategy will focus on joint mission; creation and deployment of capabilities at speed and scale; establishment of an enduring advantage in talent, infrastructure, research, and collaboration; directed energy weapons; and hypersonic/ballistic sensors.
Technology leaders for three military branches—Army Deputy Assistant Secretary for Research & Technology William Nelson, Naval Research Chief Rear Adm. Lorin Selby, Air Force Research Laboratory Commander Maj. Gen. Heather Pringle—outlined cooperative ventures with industry and workforce development plans, especially in currying bids and participation in projects by small businesses.
The $886.3 billion FY24 defense request includes $842 billion for the Pentagon with emphasis on the “growing multi-domain threat posed by the People’s Republic of China (PRC),” which the DOD has again named the nation’s most pressing “pacing challenge.”
March and April is typically when DOD and military command officers testify before congressional panels about their spending requests during the annual budget cycle leading up to Oct. 1, the official start of the federal fiscal year.
All five of the panelists at the NDIA webinar have been making the rounds on Capitol Hill to meet with congressional bean-counters to discuss funding for new whiz-bang weapons, such as fusion-based target recognition systems, to such relatively mundane innovations as snow tires for Humbles, since February.
But on April 13 before the NDIA, a Washington-based nonprofit that represents 1,800 corporations and nearly 60,000 individuals working in the defense manufacturing industry, it was all about “The Valley of Death.”
The USS Ponce conducts an operational demonstration of the Laser Weapon System while deployed to the Arabian Gulf. (U.S. Navy photo by John F. Williams/Released)
Delivering new technologies developed in the commercial sector under DOD contract into the field in a seamless transition, especially when so many weapons systems are interrelated, is a daunting challenge, the officials said.
In fact, in June 2022, Deputy Secretary of Defense Kathleen Hicks called transition discord “one of our biggest problems—the so-called ‘Valley of Death,’ scaling up to full-scale production and fielding” new weapons systems.
Selby said there isn’t just one “Valley of Death” but at least three, which he described as “moats of despair.”
“The first ‘Valley of Death’” is the stage where “the first identified prototype” is manufactured and tested and “it didn’t pan out or we failed internally” to properly build and test it, he said.
“That ‘Valley of Death’ is within my control” at that point, Selby said.
The next “Valley of Death” is moving a product from prototype to production, he said, which is when other factors come into play, such as costs and manufacturing capabilities, which can make further development unfeasible. “This is a deep valley,” where many projects go to die, he said.
The final ‘Valley of Death” is “getting that production to scale,” Selby said. “You got something, something that is ready to go onto a platform, as part of a modernization package” but you don’t control production schedules especially for an item that was previously manufactured at a “low rate production.”
“The warfighter is screaming, ‘I need that and need that tomorrow’—that is [a problem] we have to solve. We have not solved it,” he said. “How do I rapidly go to scale? That’s the question. That’s how you win.”
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Mr. Musk to the White Courtesy Phone. Paging Mr. Musk.
“Wait, this is the future. Where are the ray guns?”
Hamburger?
They’ll need laser weapons - multiples - to counter a swarm of incoming cruise missiles traveling at Mach 2 or better
Better be a lot of capacitors to store up that much energy
Wunderwaffe.
Elon Musk has been sounding alarms about AI. I think he's going to discuss it with his Tucker Carlson interview on Monday.
I think the article mentioned this potential technology. Instead of Ray or Laser Guns to shoot down hypersonic missiles, etc...an electronic shield, sort of like the force fields in Star Trek, sounds crazy but AI and some other technologies being talked about are SciFi as well.
Imagine a force field that fries anything electronic that passes thru, regardless of fast it’s going, the electronics will be fried and self-destruct or fly off course.
And anything that relies on satellites....just know in the event of a World War, the first thing that will go is all the satellites.
This is a faulty assumption.
GPS satellites are difficult targets as one will need a substantial liquid fuel missile to get up to their orbits.
Nobody has tested such a powerful antisatellite system yet.
"Or so the Germans would have us believe."
These hucksters have promised all kinds of weapons for more than a century.
Such launches are impossible to hide.
An interception test to mid-high orbit would be obvious, and would set off all alarms.
Arousing! Get on with it. Tell them when the project or step needs to be done, and let them try to meet the challenge. Then do it again.
Sounds like Skynet to me.
Sounds cool. They can leave it behind when they lose another war.
The first part of the war will consist of these types of weapons, the latter part these weapons will be in short supply because the infrastructure and components to make them will be unavailable. I hope that our government is considering this.
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