January 22, 2020 | International, Aerospace, Naval, Land, C4ISR, Security
By: Susanna V. Blume and Molly Parrish
It's no secret that the military services fight hard to protect their shares of the defense budget. Just last week, Chief of Naval Operations Adm. Michael Gilday made his case for a greater share of the defense budget. Army Secretary Ryan McCarthy quickly answered, making the same claim on behalf of his service. What if the Department of Defense were able to use these rivalries as a force for good? The secretary of defense should pit the services against each other in a healthy competition for solutions to real operational challenges. The reward? More funding in their budgets to implement the best solutions.
It is by now old news that the 2018 National Defense Strategy solidified a shift in priorities from long-term counterinsurgency and stabilization operations in the Middle East to strategic competition with China and Russia. This shift represents a significant change in what the country will require of the joint force in the future. As a result, to fully embrace this shift in priorities, it follows that the services must accept additional risk in some areas in order to invest in the capabilities required to sustain U.S. military advantage over aspiring great powers. In other words, in order to implement the NDS, the DoD must shift resources.
But shifting resource around with the defense budget is really hard. For the most part, defense budgets are built from the bottom up, with each program having strong institutional champions, regardless of how relevant that program is to the current strategy. In this environment, it's difficult to take money away from something to give it to something else. The result is budgets that largely reflect the status quo.
While the DoD should of course avoid capricious and destabilizing swings in funding for defense programs, there are times when deliberate, strategy-driven shifts in resources are necessary. To make it a little easier to move money around the DoD in these cases, we recommend in our latest report that the secretary of defense harness interservice rivalry as a force for good. The secretary should give the services specific operational challenges to solve at the outset of the budget cycle, and reward the service or services with the best solutions at the end of the cycle with the funds to implement them.
The DoD competition would start at the beginning of the budget cycle, with the operational challenge given alongside the usual strategic, planning and fiscal guidance. Over the course of the budget cycle, the services would each work to come up with solutions to the operational challenges posed by the secretary.
During program review, the services would present their solutions to defense leadership. The service or services with the best solution to the secretary's challenges would then receive the funds to implement them.
To fund this competition, the secretary would have to hold back some resources at the start of the process, effectively giving less to each of the services to begin with. This decision will be extremely unpopular with the services, but it will also ensure that the secretary has easily accessible funding available to him or her at the end of program review with which to ensure that the services are implementing his or her top priorities.
The idea of spurring innovation through competition is not new. The DoD already uses competitions to drive innovative solutions to a wide variety of technical challenges. Take the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency's Launch Challenge, which aims to improve resiliency in space by tasking participants to “launch payloads to orbit on extremely short notice.” DARPA will give the team who is able to complete both launches a prize of $10 million to continue their work.
In addition, this past September, the DoD's Joint Artificial intelligence Center, along with the National Security Innovation Network, hosted a Hackathon at the University of Michigan. Participants came from both academia and the commercial industry to find artificial intelligence-enabled solutions. The hackers were given a specific problem and then tasked with finding a solution. The winners of the Hackathon are rewarded with — surprise — money!
The services like money just as much as the average citizen, and the Department of Defense needs to take this concept and use these persistent and unavoidable interservice rivalries as a force for good. A healthy competition between the services, incentivized by funding, could be the next step toward implementing and addressing the challenges inherent in implementing the National Defense Strategy.
https://www.defensenews.com/opinion/commentary/2020/01/21/interservice-rivalries-a-force-for-good/
August 5, 2024 | International, C4ISR, Security
This contract award includes production and delivery between August 2025 and July 2026.
January 19, 2023 | International, Land
With today’s announced order, Oshkosh Defense has received orders for 1,412 FMTV A2s and 800 FMTV trailers for a total order value of $627 Million to date
April 1, 2020 | International, Naval
March 30, 2020 - Teledyne Defense Electronics, doing business as Teledyne Microwave Solutions, has been awarded a $34,963,200 firm-fixed-price requirements contract by the U.S. Navy. The contract is for the repair of travelling wave tubes (TWTs) in support of the Advanced Electronic Guidance and Instrumentation System/Combat System. Work on the model 10 kW TWTs will be performed at the Teledyne MEC 160,000 square foot production facility in Rancho Cordova, California, and is expected to be complete by March 2025. This contract includes a five-year base period with no options. Annual working capital funds (Navy) will be obligated as individual task orders as issued, and funds will not expire at the end of the current fiscal year. One company was solicited for this sole-source requirement pursuant to the authority set forth in 10 U.S. Code 2304 (c)(1), with one offer received. Naval Supply Systems Command Weapon Systems Support, Mechanicsburg, Pennsylvania, is the contracting activity (N00104-20-D-V001). Teledyne manufactures a broad range of traveling wave tube technologies and applications for use in diverse markets. Teledyne TWTs are found on many major Electronic Warfare, Radar, and Communication platforms of the U.S. and its allies throughout the world. Our various product lines also include TWTs used for instrumentation, satellite communications, missile, and other mission critical applications. ABOUT TELEDYNE DEFENSE ELECTRONICS Serving Defense, Space and Commercial sectors worldwide, Teledyne Defense Electronics offers a comprehensive portfolio of highly engineered solutions that meet your most demanding requirements in the harshest environments. Manufacturing both custom and off-the-shelf product offerings, our diverse product lines meet emerging needs for key applications for avionics, energetics, electronic warfare, missiles, radar, satcom, space, and test and measurement. www.teledynedefelec.com. TDE is a business unit of Teledyne Technologies, Inc. ABOUT TELEDYNE TECHNOLOGIES, INC. Teledyne Technologies is a leading provider of sophisticated instrumentation, digital imaging products and software, aerospace and defense electronics, and engineered systems. Teledyne Technologies' operations are primarily located in the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, and Western and Northern Europe. For more information, visit Teledyne Technologies' website at www.teledyne.com. View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20200330005023/en/