By Cheryl Pellerin
American Forces Press Service
WASHINGTON, May 14, 2014 – Despite a year of workforce
furloughs and dwindling budgets, the Defense Department’s science and
technology enterprise reports advances ranging from a full hypersonic weapon
system and high-energy lasers to light-based brain treatments and new core
capabilities in cyber warfare, senior DOD officials told a Senate panel today.
Alan Shaffer, acting assistant secretary of defense for
research and engineering, and Dr. Arati Prabhakar, director of the Defense
Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA, testified on defense research and
innovation before the Senate Appropriations subcommittee on defense.
Shaffer told the panel the DOD workforce has produced
remarkable achievements but now shows signs of stress due to downsizing-furlough-shutdown
challenges of the past year.
“These affected the health of our workforce and the programs
they execute in ways we are just beginning to understand,” he said. “We have
begun to address the challenges but they remain a concern to us.”
The fiscal 2015 science and technology budget request is
down about 5 percent, to $11.5 billion compared to fiscal 2014’s $12 billion
request, Shaffer added.
“DOD tries to balance our program [but] there are factors
that led Defense Secretary [Chuck] Hagel to conclude in his Feb. 24 budget
rollout that we are entering an era where American dominance on the seas, in
the skies and in space can no longer be taken for granted,” Shaffer said.
DOD is in its third year of a protracted budget drawdown, he
added, and Hagel has described three major areas that make up the budget --
force size, readiness and modernization.
The current budget drives force reduction but this reduction
will take several years to yield savings, Shaffer said. In the fiscal 2015
budget, readiness and or modernization will pay a larger percentage of the
overall department bill.
“To address the challenges,” he added, “we needed to examine
the strategy we’re using to focus the S&T investment on high-priority areas
[and] from that review emerged a strategy for investment.”
DOD invests in science and technology for three reasons,
Shaffer said.
- To mitigate new and emerging threat capabilities, “and we
see a significant need in the areas of electronic warfare, cyber,
counter-weapons of mass destruction, and preserving space capabilities.”
- To affordably enable new or extended capabilities in
military systems and future systems, “and there is a significant need to grow
department systems’ engineering, modeling, and simulation and prototyping.”
- To develop technology surprise, and “we see significant
need in areas such as autonomy, human systems, quantum sensing and big data.”
Shaffer said despite the challenges, the department
continues to perform, including in areas such as understanding and treating
traumatic brain injury.
“In addition to the DARPA Brain Initiative, the department
has developed successful technologies in this area in the medical research
program and in our Army's research program,” he told the panel.
“The combination of DARPA's small blast gauge to measure the
[amount of blast exposure] to the head, coupled with the Defense Health
Program's advances in therapeutics in photonic[, or light,] medicine will allow
us to treat traumatic brain injury] more quickly and effectively,” Shaffer
said.
From that program, researchers have discovered that intense
light outside the skull prevents brain tissue decay after a TBI-inducing event.
The treatment is in clinical trials, Shaffer said.
In another program, the Air Force X-51 Waverider hypersonic
demonstration was the second successful demo of powered scramjet technology, he
added.
A scramjet, according to technical descriptions, is a
variant of a ramjet air-breathing engine but one in which combustion takes place
in the craft’s supersonic airflow.
This demonstrates “that we are getting close to developing a
full hypersonic system,” Shaffer said. “No one else in the world has done
this.”
The Navy is making dramatic progress on high-energy laser
systems and deploying a 30-kilowatt electric laser on the USS Ponce, an
Austin-class amphibious transport dock, this summer.
If successful, Shaffer said, “this will be the first
operational deployment of a directed-energy system.”
The Army is forging next-generation helicopters with their
joint multirole technology demonstrator, he told the panel, a program now in
the design phase with four vendors.
“These successes highlight that, in spite of a difficult
year and in spite of difficult budget pressures,” Shaffer said, “the DOD
S&T program continues to produce capability for our future force.”
In her testimony, Prabhakar explained that DARPA is part of
the DOD S&T community but also part of the larger national research and
development cosystem.
Within these communities, she said, DARPA’s role is “to make
the pivotal early investments that change what's possible so we can take big
strides forward in our national security capabilities.”
The agency itself was created to prevent the kind of
technological surprise the United States and others experienced in 1956 when
the Soviets launched Sputnik, she told the panel, “and we've delivered on our
mission for 56 years by creating a few surprises of our own.”
DARPA’s output is technology, she added, “but we count our
successes when our technologies change outcomes. Every time a stealth aircraft
evades an air defense system, every time a soldier on the ground can place
himself precisely using GPS so he can call for fires, every time a radar tells
a carrier strike group about a threat that's out there long before it sees
[them] -- that's when we've succeeded in our mission.”
In each case, she said, DARPA made the early investments,
showed what was possible, and then the larger community turned the ideas into
real capabilities.
“It took our partners that we work with very closely across
the services in science and technology. It also took the services’ further
development work and acquisition efforts. Every one of these technologies
traces back to research often conducted in universities or other labs, every
advance relied on defense and commercial industry, large companies and small,”
Prabhakar said. “And at the end of the day it took warfighters to turn those
technologies into real military capabilities.”
That’s how the ecosystem works, she said.
For the DARPA portion of it, Prabhakar observed, “the
mission we had of breakthrough technologies for national security has not
changed over 56 years. The world in which we work continues to change but that
core mission is still why our people charge through the front doors every
single morning.”
One surprise being created today at DARPA involves the
classic approach to major military systems, which has become so costly and
inflexible, she said, “that it's really not going to be effective for the
challenges that we'll face in the future.”
Several DARPA investments focus on rethinking complex
military systems, Prabhakar added, and agency scientists and engineers are
coming up with powerful approaches for new radars and weapons, new ways to do
navigation and communications, and new ways to create space systems.
In a very different arena, the director said, “we can see
the massive scale of information changing every aspect of national security.
We're creating a new breed of cybersecurity technology so we can actually trust
the information we've become so reliant on.”
DARPA scientists are inventing new tools to keep up with and
to begin using this explosion of data, she added. One example is a new program
that tackles networks involved in human trafficking.
Such trafficking networks easily can hide in vast online
data, so finding ways to see bad actors in these volumes of data is part of the
objective of DARPA’s program, the director said.
Another program, called Plan X, is a foundational cyber
warfare program that DARPA is building to create the visibility and
understanding of cyberspace, Prabhakar said, “so we can start to deal with
cyber warfare as it is happening today and where it will be in the future.”
Cybersecurity is one of the core foundations as people
become increasingly reliant on information, the director said.
“I think we're all familiar with the challenges that our
businesses and our national security enterprise face because of cyberattacks
that are happening on a constant basis,” she added, “some driven by nation
states, some by organizations, and some just by individuals because so many
individuals around the world have at their fingertips now the ability to
participate in this domain for better or for worse.”
Prabhakar added, “We think that cyber environment, in which
we are in a conflict today, that's going to continue to escalate.
Much of the conversation about cybersecurity has been about
computers and networks and they are important to keep secure, she said, but all
embedded systems are highly vulnerable.
“One of our researchers a couple of years ago showed that
they could hack the speedometer on a car,” the director told the panel. “If a
speedometer on a car is vulnerable, then it's a good thing to realize that all
of our embedded military systems are also vulnerable. Everything has a computer
in it today.”
At DARPA, the director added, “we think Plan X is going to
become integral to kinetic warfighting of the future.”
Plan X core capabilities, she said, will give senior
decision makers the ability to see what's happening in cyberspace, to plan
actions, to predict collateral effects, to avoid certain effects and to do
battle damage assessments.
Across the DARPA portfolio, Prabhakar said, improving
information systems security is one of the agency’s highest priorities.
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