The US faces growing global competition in major defense technologies at all levels of deployment. In response, the US Department of Defense will launch new programs to improve the competitive scope and quality of American defense systems.
The success of such programs will be measured by superior innovation accomplished at great speed to outmatch the competition. Toward that end, sophisticated manufacturing resources making hardware systems are of particular importance.
There is rarely a shortage of creative ideas; it’s delivering superior systems within budget that is the challenge. Working within the stringent technological and financial constraints of such programs requires skillful blending of many resources.
And the end results must be sophisticated systems capable of operating across a broad range of environments.
It has, of course, been done before. One prime example is the highly successful NASA Apollo program that landed the first men on the moon. President John Kennedy started the program in response to the Soviet Union’s then-leading satellite technology.
Success derived from an enormous array of talent. And there were no shortcuts. The Apollo program succeeded due to many collaborative programs linking creative research and outstanding industrial development and production.
Such well-managed collaborative programs enabled breakthrough innovations to move from laboratories into practical viability. These were not just routine products; they had to meet the most rigid reliability standards of spaceships carrying astronauts.
The program’s remarkable achievement was the speed with which innovations made the leap from ideas to space-qualified products that could not fail without loss of life.
I was involved in the invention and development of the solid-state microwave device that powered the radio used by the astronauts on the vehicle that landed on the moon to communicate with the spaceship orbiting the moon, to which they had to return and dock after leaving the moon’s surface.
The device in the radio could not fail, and to ensure its reliability, new test and production techniques were developed. The microwave radio performed flawlessly in the moon landing mission. It was all new, and participants rose to the challenge.
This kind of effort was repeated many times with several participants. In this instance, the original innovation was at a RCA laboratory where I worked, but the communication system’s prime contractor did the complete radio design and production.
The point of this story is the importance of bringing unexpected innovators into technology programs because you never know from where new ideas will arise.
What was remarkable about this example is that my invention resulted from a chance conversation with a NASA engineer who informed me of the need for a new device to replace a problematic one.
Funding for my project came practically overnight, and in a short time, NASA knew that a reliable radio could be built. But what ultimately enabled the new radio was the smooth transfer to an outstanding radio product manufacturer. This close linkage is essential.
What are the resources today enabling massive new defense projects? First is the collaborative effort of the most talented people. The Department of Defense has DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency), which funds technology research in leading fields.
The programs funded by DARPA have had remarkable impacts when supported by other organizations—the Internet and artificial intelligence are examples of those successes.
For military projects, the results of DARPA programs are only system enablers which are followed by contractors with the resources to enable weapons and systems production.
Today, there is a big problem. Since the early 1990s, the number of prime US defense contractors has shrunk from 51 to only five. This means fewer resources involved in defense programs, fewer innovators and less competition.
There is also a decline in the number of industrial laboratories working with the DoD. The large corporate laboratories, like those of AT&T, RCA and Xerox, have disappeared. Organizations that once employed the kind of innovators capable of important creative contributions have been greatly reduced in number.
This is a problem that is likely to hinder progress in major new programs calling for the highest quality of innovation. The answer is that more companies must become part of the DoD procurement process while agencies such as DARPA must continue to expand their collaborative efforts. And the best US talent must participate.
I expect that new programs will involve new corporations that value high-performance technology development under DoD contracts and the fact that the spin-offs from such programs will have valuable impacts on commercial products. This was shown over the years and will likely be repeated.
Henry Kressel is a technologist, inventor, author and industrialist. He was responsible for leading the development of many important new electronic devices. He headed electronic research at the RCA Laboratories and is a long term private equity investor in technology companies.