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  December 26, 2018 | International, Aerospace, Naval, Land, C4ISR, Security

  ‘Fix-it’ man Shanahan working to streamline defense spending

  By: Lolita C. Baldor, The Associated Press WASHINGTON — The sooner-than-expected departure of Defense Secretary Jim Mattisshifts the focus to President Donald Trump's appointment of an acting Pentagon chief and plans for a permanent replacement. Deputy Defense Secretary Patrick Shanahan will take over as acting secretary on Jan. 1, Trump announced in a tweet Sunday. He had worked for more than three decades at Boeing Co. and was a senior vice president when he became Pentagon deputy in July 2017. In the new year Trump wants to focus on streamlining purchases at the Pentagon, an issue on which Shanahan has already been working, a White House official said. The official asked not to be identified publicly discussing personnel matters. U.S. officials said they didn't know if Shanahan would be Trump's nominee to replace Mattis. During a lunch with conservative lawmakers Saturday at the White House, Trump discussed his options. They were "not all military," said Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., who was among those attending. Shanahan's biography on the Pentagon's website does not list military experience for the longtime Boeing executive. He earned a bachelor's degree in mechanical engineering from the University of Washington, then a master's degree in mechanical engineering as well as an MBA from the Sloan School of Management at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. In addition to work in Boeing's commercial airplanes programs, Shanahan was vice president and general manager of Boeing Missile Defense Systems and of Boeing Rotorcraft Systems. In a March 2016 report, the Puget Sound Business Journal called Shanahan a Boeing "fix-it" man who was central to getting the 787 Dreamliner on track after production problems in the program's early years. An acting defense secretary is highly unusual. Historically when a secretary has resigned, he has stayed on until a successor is confirmed. For example, when Chuck Hagel was told to resign in November 2014, he stayed in office until Ash Carter was confirmed the following February. Mattis, a retired Marine Corps general, had been expected to retain his position as Pentagon chief through February. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, not the president, notified Mattis of Trump's decision to put in place Shanahan, said a senior administration official who insisted on anonymity to discuss personnel issues. The sudden change stripped Mattis of any chance to further frame national security policy or smooth rattled relations with allies over the next two months. But U.S. officials said the reaction to Mattis' decision to leave — it sparked shock and dismay on Capitol Hill — annoyed Trump and likely led to pushing Mattis out. "When President Obama ingloriously fired Jim Mattis, I gave him a second chance. Some thought I shouldn't, I thought I should," Trump tweeted Saturday, foreshadowing his displeasure and the Sunday announcement. He also fumed over the media coverage of his Syria withdrawal order, suggesting he should be popular for bringing troops home. "With me, hit hard instead by the Fake News Media. Crazy!" Trump tweeted. A White House official said Trump decided Mattis should leave the administration earlier than planned to avoid a drawn-out transition when someone on hand whom they consider a qualified deputy capable of running the Pentagon in an acting capacity. The official asked not to be identified publicly discussing personnel matters. While Mattis' resignation followed Trump's announcement that he would soon pull all of the approximately 2,000 U.S. troops out of Syria, officials said that the decision was the result of an accumulation of disagreements. In a stunning resignation letter, Mattis made clear he did not see eye to eye with a president who has expressed disdain for NATO and doubts about keeping troops in Asia. Mattis was also unhappy with Trump's order to develop plans to pull out up to half of the 14,000 U.S. forces in Afghanistan. Earlier Sunday, Trump's acting chief of staff said that Trump had known for "quite some time now" that he and Mattis "did not share some of the same philosophies ... have the same world view." Mick Mulvaney told ABC's "This Week" that the president and his defense chief "just could never get on the same page" on Syria, adding that Trump had said since his presidential campaign that "he wanted to get out of Syria." Mulvaney said the president "is entitled to have a secretary of defense who is committed to that same end." Asked whether Trump wanted a Pentagon leader willing to challenge him or someone in lock step with his views, Mulvaney said "a little bit of both." "I've encouraged him to find people who have some overlap with him but don't see the world in lockstep with him," Mulvaney said. Meanwhile, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., joined leading Republicans on foreign affairs in urging Trump to reconsider his decision to withdraw American forces from Syria and called it "a premature and costly mistake." They asked Trump to withhold a final decision for 90 days to allow time to study the impact of the decision, but Mulvaney told ABC that Trump wouldn't change his mind. Just after tweeting the announcement about Shanahan, Trump said he had had "a long and productive call" with Turkey's president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan. Trump said they discussed IS, "our mutual involvement in Syria, & the slow & highly coordinated pullout of U.S. troops from the area. After many years they are coming home." Associated Press writers Robert Burns, Darlene Superville and Lisa Mascaro contributed to this report. https://www.militarytimes.com/news/your-military/2018/12/24/fix-it-man-shanahan-working-to-streamline-defense-spending

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  July 28, 2020 | International, Aerospace, Naval, Land, C4ISR, Security

  We know why innovation is important. Here’s how to do it.

  Tommy Sowers This month, thousands of units across all branches of the U.S. military will execute a change of command. New commanders will seek to set priorities for their command and leave their mark. However, commanders are asked to do something new: innovate. From the National Defense Strategy to the Army Operating Concept that states innovation “is critical” and defined as “the result of critical and creative thinking and the conversion of new ideas into valued outcomes,” why the military must innovate is doctrine. Yet, there is no playbook for how to innovate. Until now. For the past two years, an Air Force wing built an innovation playbook — leadership, buy-in, experimentation and speed. Leadership In July 2018, Col. Donn Yates took command of the 4th Fighter Wing. An intellectual and warrior, he wanted, and was directed, to be more innovative. He knew that the challenges he and the Air Force would face in the future — from fighting when satellite communications capabilities were down, to using data to predict parts failure, to using social media to communicate during a hurricane — were new, with no available checklist and playbook. He set out to develop one and make innovation a priority. A few weeks after taking command, he hosted me to discuss innovation. As the southeast regional director for the Defense Department's National Security Innovation Network, I helped lead the department's innovation efforts across the region. NSIN's mission is to help commanders innovate by tapping into new networks of innovators in the venture technology and academic space to deliver solutions. As a former Green Beret, venture-backed startup CEO and professor at Duke University, I speak the languages of these three different communities. Buy-in He immediately requested one of our programs — a Design Bootcamp — bringing professors from University of California, Berkley to train his innovation team in design thinking. The concepts are different than military thinking — talk with end users to understand their problems; create minimal viable products, or MVP, to solve their problems; test those MVPs and collect data; and use that data to develop better solutions quickly. Col. Yates had the teams work a problem that bedevils commanders across Air Force bases — the long wait times at the pharmacy. The trainers broke the 28 trainees into four-person teams, who camped out at the pharmacy interviewing pharmacists, staff, airmen and retirees. At the end of the week, the teams proposed solutions, from self-serve kiosks to mobile clinics to text notifications. Six months later, pharmacy wait times were down more than 50 percent and those trained teams could apply the same thinking to other problems. Experimentation with new problem solvers New ways of thinking are just the start. Moving from idea to an actual product that the military can use is difficult. While our military hardware remains the best in the world, the software running our military is woefully inadequate. As the chair of the Defense Innovation Board and former Google CEO Eric Schmidt stated: “The DoD violates pretty much every rule in modern product development.” And with virtually no positions for app developers and data scientists within any Department of Defense operational unit, getting solutions means tapping into new communities of problem solvers. Seymour Johnson Air Force Base sits 35 miles from the Research Triangle, one of the leading startup centers in the nation and host to 50,000 students. Could we tap into these problem solvers for a limited tour of duty to build solutions and serve their country? One of NSIN's programs is a university course called Hacking for Defense, or H4D. Delivered at Duke and universities across the nation, H4D teaches teams of students to build a startup to solve a DoD problem. Col. Yates' wing sponsored multiple H4D problems — from using data to predict F-15 part failure to developing new procedures to allow distributed forces to communicate in a SATCOM-denied environment, to an app for optimizing Reserve drill weekends. Working with new problem solvers takes tolerance and openness to new ideas. These teams, beginning with little knowledge of the military, ask first-principle questions. Yet, after 100-plus end-user interviews and working through multiple prototypes, these students become world experts on the specific problems and the likely solutions. Many go on to join the DoD. NSIN is now putting problems in H4D, tech fellowships called X-Force and courses at universities around the nation. These programs use product teams to craft better social media strategies, data dashboards and apps to fill critical needs. (If you are military and need solutions now, you can submit your problem here.) Speed The most important attribute in a venture-backed startup is speed. So, too, for the modern military. In testimony, a former undersecretary of defense stated: “Innovation will remain important always, but speed becomes the differentiating factor.” Two years of command can fly by. Unless new commanders make innovation not only a priority but also commit to do something now, the deployments, requirements and taskings of running any military unit will subsume any desire to innovate. A month after our first meet, Col. Yates brought 30 airmen to Duke to hear from entrepreneurs and academics. The next month, he sent a half-dozen leaders to learn how to work with university teams and carved out the training time for the Design Bootcamp. The following year, he sponsored two H4D teams and an X-Force fellow. This year, we've seen four H4D teams, more X-Force product teams and another boot camp. None were perfect. All could have been delayed. But the 4th Fighter Wing prioritized speed and innovation. The innovation playbook The military knows why it must innovate. The next conflicts will require not only the best hardware, but also a force that rapidly converts new thinking to outcomes; a force that can tap into the wealth of talent in America that will never wear a uniform but want to apply their entrepreneurial and technical skills to solve national security problems. The how — the things new commanders must do to innovate — has been opaque. Now, with the leadership, buy-in, experimentation and speed of the 4th Fighter Wing as an example, there is an innovation playbook. https://www.c4isrnet.com/opinion/commentary/2020/07/27/we-know-why-innovation-is-important-heres-how-to-do-it/

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  November 17, 2020 | International, Aerospace

  LA LUFTWAFFE RENOUVELLE SES EUROFIGHTER

  Par Caroline Bruneau Les parlementaires allemands ont voté l'achat de 38 Typhoon d'Eurofighter pour remplacer la première génération de l'avion de combat européen. Le remplacement de leurs Tornado vieillissants, par un panachage de Super Hornet américains et d'Eurofighter européens reste en suspens. La commande est passée le 11 novembre. Après plusieurs années d'atermoiements, la commission du budget du Bundestag avait finalement approuvé le 5 novembre l'achat de 38 Eurofighter Typhoon de dernière génération, dont huit en version biplace. La tranche 4 « Quadriga » du programme pourra monter à 93 avions in fine, si une autre commande est passée lors de la prochaine législature, donc après les élections qui auront lieu normalement à l'automne prochain. Ces 55 appareils supplémentaires doivent permettre le remplacement des chasseurs-bombardiers Tornado, hérités de la Guerre froide. Ils seront complétés par un total de 45 F/A-18 Super Hornet et EA-18 Growler de Boeing pour les missions stratégiques nucléaires et de guerre électronique dans le cadre de l'Otan, inaccessibles au Typhoon. Une pré-commande a été notifiée en avril dernier à l'avionneur américain par le ministre de la Défense allemand Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer, coupant court à toute velléité de choisir le F-35 comme successeur au Tornado. À moins d'un an des élections, la coalition gouvernementale allemande est dans la position difficile d'avoir à la fois à ménager son industrie et ses partenaires européens, tout en donnant des gages de fidélité au grand allié américain (cf. encadré). Dans ces conditions, il est tentant de laisser la « patate chaude » du remplacement du Tornado – avec la question connexe des armes nucléaires américaines en Allemagne – à la législature suivante. https://www.aerospatium.info/luftwaffe-renouvelle-ses-eurofighter/