The tech has long been confined to research and development, Undersecretary of Defense for Acquisition and Sustainment William LaPlante noted at the annual Defense News Conference on Wednesday.

“Keep in mind hypersonics has been a weapon of the future for 60 years,” he said when asked by FedScoop if industry will be able to produce the air vehicles and other components in large quantities once the ongoing R&D efforts are ready to come to fruition.

Aside from some prototyping efforts, “we’ve never, ever produced and manufactured hypersonics ever in this country. It’s been entirely S&T,” he said. “So, the real question is … are these companies [that are working on the technology] ready to no-kidding go into production at some degree of rate? And I ask this question, Jon, all the time, and I get reassurance that they’re ready. But the proof will be in the pudding,” he told this FedScoop reporter.

“I wish I could tell you … that absolutely they’re ready for this. They say they are [and] they will. But if you all know anything about hypersonics … you have very difficult materials issues, thermal management issues, aerodynamics issues,” he added.

The cutting-edge weapons are expected to travel faster than Mach 5 and be highly maneuverable against enemy air defenses. The Army, Navy and Air Force are working on them, and the DOD hopes to begin fielding these types of platforms by the end of 2023

LaPlante described the technology as game-changing, noting that adversaries China and Russia are already manufacturing and deploying some of their hypersonic systems.

“If we get — when we get hypersonics into production, we should all pop champagne corks. That will be remarkable because we have never had them in production. Hypersonics has been in the S&T community in this country forever. I love S&T, folks. I am an S&T person. But at some point, you got to let the children out,” he said, urging people to focus less on “shiny” hypersonic S&T projects and focus more on supporting manufacturing.

Despite the challenges involved, LaPlante said he’s hopeful that the weapons will be ready for prime time in the not-too-distant future.

“I am actually optimistic. And without getting into specifics … when I visited some of the companies that will do it — I know people there — they know the challenges that they have,” he said. “But … knock on wood, knock on carpet, they’re about one to two years away from production for some of these hypersonic glide vehicles. And if we get there, hallelujah. That’ll be a landmark” moment.

During the same conference, Undersecretary of the Army Gabe Camarillo said he doesn’t expect any delays in the Army’s plans to equip its first unit with the Long Range Hypersonic Weapon by the end of fiscal 2023.

Air Force Secretary Frank Kendall said his department is interested in boost glide hypersonic weapons as well as scramjet variants. However, he said the Pentagon shouldn’t “blindly” embrace the platforms without considering their cost effectiveness and their return on investment when it comes to attacking various types of targets.

“That’s something we’re still working our way through, but we are definitely interested in both concepts,” Kendall said at the conference.

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There has long been concern about the capacity of the Pentagon and defense industrial base to produce platforms and regenerate other capabilities at a rate that would meet the U.S. military’s equipment needs during a large-scale conventional war against an advanced adversary. The Ukraine-Russia conflict, in which both sides continue to slug it out and sustain heavy losses of personnel and materiel, has heightened those worries as the Defense Department tries to prepare for a potential conflagration with China or Russia.

“It’s absolutely a concern,” Lt. Gen. S. Clinton Hinote, Air Force deputy chief of staff for strategy, integration and requirements, said Tuesday during a virtual event hosted by the Atlantic Council think tank. “As we look and we see where our force design goes in the future, we see an increasing likelihood that the first fait accompli type maneuver is stalled out … And what’s next could be a grinding war of a lukewarm war around the globe between superpowers that would last for years and not necessarily net a whole lot of gain.”

He noted that it would be difficult to quickly ramp up production of many of the U.S. military’s “exquisite” capabilities — not just for high-end aircraft, but also for systems in other domains — to replace losses or grow the force to meet the demands of large-scale combat.

At the top of the list of capabilities that would be challenging to rapidly increase quantities of during a conflict is highly trained and experienced personnel, he noted.

“It’s hard to mass produce great operators. And that includes not only pilots, but it’s special operators, key operators on the ground, at sea, in space. And scaling that in a war of attrition is going to be really, really hard,” Hinote said.

“We have to think about what we can scale” in terms of equipment, he added.

One potential option could be drones that are less expensive and time-consuming to build and don’t require putting human operators at risk.

“It certainly looks like some sort of autonomous aircraft that are using the air littorals seem to be something that might scale. There are several manufacturers that I’m aware of today in the United States — and I’m not counting around the globe with our allies and partners — that can produce these things. We would need all of them to go after that,” Hinote said.

Software is another complementary technology that Air Force officials believe could potentially be rapidly acquired during a conflict and boost military capabilities.

“We’re clearly seeing DevOps scaling in ways we’ve never seen before that. So if you put those two together, you might have autonomous flight plus software, so that if the autonomous vehicle is so flexible, every day you have a different autonomous vehicle because you load new software in it. We could probably scale that,” Hinote said.

The Defense Department needs to lay the technical foundations as well as the doctrinal and organizational foundations to enable the proliferation of those types of capabilities in a modern war of attrition, he noted.

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The important Navy post has not been filled by a Senate-confirmed official since James “Hondo” Geurts stepped down as assistant secretary for research, development and acquisition near the end of the Trump administration. Frederick Stefany has been serving as the acting assistant secretary for RD&A since January 2021.

Guertin is currently the director of operational test and evaluation of U.S. military weapon systems in the Office of the Secretary of Defense. His nomination must be confirmed by the Senate before he can take on the Navy leadership role.

“He has an extensive four-decade combined military and civilian career in submarine operations, ship construction and maintenance, development and testing of weapons, sensors, combat management products including the improvement of systems engineering, and defense acquisition,” the White House said in the Friday announcement.

Notably, Guertin has previously been involved in applied research for government and academia in “software-reliant and cyber-physical systems” at Carnegie Mellon University’s Software Engineering Institute, according to his Defense Department bio.

His nomination comes as the Navy, and the Defense Department writ large, are putting more emphasis on software and cyber capabilities as the Pentagon pursues concepts like Joint All-Domain Command and Control (JADC2), which the Navy is contributing to as part of its secretive Project Overmatch effort.

“Over his career, [Guertin] has been in leadership roles of organizational transformation, improving competition, application of modular open system approaches, as well as prototyping and experimentation. He has also researched and published extensively on software-reliant system design, testing, and acquisition,” the White House said.

He previously served in the Navy Reserve as an engineering duty officer.

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Since its inception, DARPA has played a critical role in ushering in game-changing technology such as the internet, stealth, precision-guided munitions, handheld GPS, and vaccine platforms that use mRNA technology, among others. But some of those innovations took longer for the military to field than new capabilities should going forward, according to Hicks.

“Think about stealth aircraft, for example. If you compare when DARPA initiated the project that led to the first experimental stealth aircraft, ‘Have Blue,’ to when we fielded an operational F-117 Nighthawk — that took nearly a decade. It took another decade for stealth technology to be incorporated into an operational B-2 bomber — and another decade or two after that for stealth to be mainstreamed across much of our combat aircraft fleet, in the form of the F-22 and the F-35 stealth fighters,” she said during virtual remarks at the first “DARPA Forward” series of outreach events, which kicked off this week at the Colorado State University campus in Fort Collins, Colorado.

“Perhaps that timeline was tolerable in the Cold War, when our main strategic competitor was relatively lumbering and slow. But today, we have to evolve faster than the threats evolve,” Hicks continued. “Simply put, we don’t have decades to wait for the latest and greatest concepts and capabilities to proliferate across our military forces.”

The department needs to reduce the “lab-to-fab” timeline from decades to years or, in some cases, months, Hicks said.

In many cases, promising technologies never get fielded. The Pentagon has long struggled to overcome the so-called “valley of death” where innovations die on the vine before they ever make it into large-scale production.

“We’ve got to be thinking early and often about what happens after DARPA proves a concept and prototypes a capability — who carries the ball forward, and how,” Hicks said.

“The job doesn’t stop with prototyping and experimentation. More than ever before, we also have to think about what comes next, like how do we transition our most effective prototypes to become mainstream systems in the field? How do we take pockets of innovation and scale what they’re doing throughout the defense enterprise? It’s not that we can’t do this — we can, and we do — but it’s got to be easier, and it has got to be faster,” she said.

DARPA works on a wide range of technologies that could give the U.S. military a leg up in future conflicts. FedScoop asked Hicks which one was her top priority for the Defense Department.

“At the top of my list of challenges right now is making sure that we can increase speed of decision quality, and speed of decision and action. And there are a lot of different technologies that come together, a lot of different organizational innovations and operational concepts that come together to make that kind of command-and-control speed of decision improve,” she replied.

“Obviously cloud enterprise, cloud capability is a piece of that. AI and making sure we take best advantage of data, ensure we have quality data, [and] we do all of that in a responsible way — those are some of the technology areas I’m focused on to get to that operational end state,” Hicks continued.

Those capabilities will be key to DOD efforts to achieve leadership’s vision for its Joint All-Domain Command and Control initiative, which aims to enable commanders to make better and faster decisions by linking disparate U.S. military networks and deploying supporting capabilities such as artificial intelligence, among other things.

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The EITaaS program is meant to outsource basic IT services so that the Air Force can free up airmen for more specialized, cyber-focused network defense and mission assurance. Wave 1 serves as an upgrade with improved and consolidated service desks as well as a catalog for more than 700,000 users worldwide, according to the Air Force. It also the first effort to expand from the initial EITaaS risk reduction effort.  

Air Force CIO Lauren Knausenberger has said that with Wave 1, the department will for the first time have enterprise IT service management, one platform and one easy way to enter a trouble ticket, as well as a wider variety of end-user devices and an easier way to order them.  

The hope is that it will also allow for the use of analytics and other tools to identify issues in the enterprise and go after those proactively.

CACI NSS is the contractor team lead for EITaaS Wave 1 and will provide services with other team members, which include Bowhead Logistics Management, Cartridge Technologies, InSequence, Cask NX, CDIT, Vision Information Technology Consultants, Oneida Technical Solutions, Enhanced Veterans Solutions, and Expansia Group.

“Work will predominantly be performed in Chantilly, Virginia, with additional locations depending on individual BPA order requirements, and is expected to be completed by Aug. 29, 2032,” the DOD contract award announcement said. “This award is the result of a competitive acquisition with four quotations received.”

The Air Force Life Cycle Management Center is the contracting activity.

As for Wave 2, the scope is still changing as the Air Force moves toward industry days and draft requests for proposals. However, it will include overhauling base infrastructure, and about 30 bases will be prioritized, Knausenberger said last month at a forum hosted by the Potomac Officers Club.

“I suspect that the money will come when one of our industry partners knocks it out of the park and shows us that that next-generation architecture makes a huge impact for unclassified and secret warfighting capabilities as well as a huge impact to our business capability, our ability to fight with our allies and our ability just to be more efficient in our day-to-day business,” she said.

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Introducing unmanned “collaborative combat aircraft” (CCA) as part of a new family of systems for the Next-Generation Air Dominance (NGAD) program is a top operational imperative for Air Force leadership.

“We are definitely heading down the path of [teaming] crewed and uncrewed aircraft. In fact, I was just in a meeting this morning to talk about the aspect of autonomy and how that plays into our collaborative combat aircraft and where we’re headed,” Chief of Staff Gen. Charles “CQ” Brown Jr. said Monday at an event hosted by the American Enterprise Institute think tank. “A lot of our focus is … to be able to bring on these combat collaborative aircraft that can actually, you know, be a sensor, be a shooter, be a weapons carrier and reduce the cost of operations.”

While the Air Force is planning to deploy these systems with the manned NGAD platform — a next-generation stealth fighter that is expected to come online around 2030 — it is also examining other options for pairing robotic jets with other crewed systems to include tankers and airborne early-warning and control platforms.

“What we’re looking at is not necessarily to do it solely within NGAD. How do you do it with the F-35 [joint strike fighter], for example? How do you use it with other platforms? Could you operate it from a ground station? Could you operate it from a seat on an E-7 Wedgetail or a KC-46?” Brown said. “We want to not constrain ourselves just to say it’s only going to be tied to the Next-Generation Air Dominance platform, but you know, how do we look at it from a broader perspective as well.”

Air Force Secretary Frank Kendall has said the manned NGAD fighter could achieve initial operational capability by the end of this decade. The service’s top weapons buyer, Assistant Secretary for Acquisition, Technology and Logistics Andrew Hunter, has said the goal is to have the collaborative combat aircraft ready for fielding by the time that platform comes online.

However, when asked about the timeline by FedScoop on Monday, Brown declined to say whether he expects that goal to be achieved. “That’s a good question,” he replied before talking about other types of systems that CCA could team with.

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The Vehicle-Agnostic Modular Palletized ISR Rocket Equipment (VAMPIRE) technology was part of a broader $3 billion military aid package announced by the Biden administration earlier this week.

However, when the new weapons tranche was first announced Wednesday, it was unclear how long it would take for the VAMPIRE and other systems to be delivered because the technologies will be procured from contractors through the Ukraine Security Assistance Initiative (USAI) fund rather than from a drawdown of Pentagon stocks, which had been the practice for most previous tranches of U.S. military aid to Ukraine since Russia’s invasion in February.

“This announcement represents the beginning of a contracting process to provide additional priority capabilities to Ukraine in the mid- and long-term to ensure Ukraine can continue to defend itself as an independent, sovereign and prosperous state,” Pentagon Press Secretary Air Force Brig. Gen. Pat Ryder explained in a press release.

National Security Council coordinator for strategic communications John Kirby told reporters that the delivery timelines are “going to depend quite frankly on the item that we’re talking about or items and how fast it can be procured. And so not everything will have to necessarily be quote-unquote ‘built’ as of today, but some stuff will probably need some production time to develop.”

During a brief briefing at the Pentagon on Wednesday, Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Colin Kahl said “we’re talking about systems that will take months to get on contract and you know, one, two, three years in some instances to arrive in Ukraine.”

In response to a question about laser-guided rockets, Kahl said “some of those systems and rounds will probably be provided to the Ukrainians within the next nine months, and additional systems and rounds could take a year or two.”

L3Harris later told FedScoop that “once L3Harris is under contract, we expect to deliver [VAMPIRE systems] within the nine-month window.”

It is unclear how long it will take the DOD to put L3Harris under contract. Kahl told reporters that broadly speaking the Pentagon “will endeavor to get the contracts filled out as quickly as possible and get stuff on the road.”

On its product data sheet, L3Harris depicts the system targeting a Group 3 UAS.

The company describes the capability as “a portable kit that can be installed on most vehicles with a cargo bed for launching of the advanced precision kill weapons system (APKWS) or other laser-guided munitions.”

It can attack airborne targets such as drones, or ground targets, and was designed to fit into pickup trucks or other vehicles with a flat surface. The design also allows for fast set-up, and installation can be completed in approximately two hours by two people using common tools, according to L3Harris.

The system “uses small missiles essentially to shoot UAVs out of the sky,” Kahl told reporters.

L3Harris said it has supported the Ukrainian Ministry of Defense with military technology “for several years.”

“From the outset of the current conflict, our advanced tactical radios and robust SATCOM terminals enabled Ukrainian warfighters to communicate crucial information, while our night-vision and electro-optical capabilities allowed the Ukrainian military to track enemy forces and better plan both broad strategies and tactical responses. Our VAMPIRE system will provide the Ukrainian people with even more robust capabilities as they continue to defend their country and democracy in Europe, and we will continue to offer our steadfast support of their mission,” the company said in a statement.

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The highly classified Project Overmatch is the Navy’s contribution to the Pentagon’s vision for Joint All-Domain Command and Control (JADC2).

“We are swimming in data. How do you get the right information to the right decision maker at the right time to put yourself in a position of advantage against your opponent?” Chief of Naval Operations Adm. Michael Gilday said during remarks at the Heritage Foundation think tank.

“What we’re aiming for and we’ve actually had a lot of success with is developing a network of networks that allows us to transfer any data over any network. So it’s a software-defined communication, communication-as-a-service framework, where software actually decides what that prioritized information is and what’s the best path it should take to get to a decision maker,” he said.

Soon, part of the fleet will get to put the technology through its paces during a deployment. If all goes according to plan, it will then be expanded to other parts of the force.

“We’re at the point early next year where we will deploy a carrier strike group with this capability. We’ll see how it goes and then look to scale it after that,” Gilday said.

“We believe that the Navy is on a path to deliver the Navy tactical grid, which we think could easily become the joint tactical grid as part of … JADC2 for the Department of Defense. We feel we’re in a very good path right now in terms of our experimentation,” he added.

The Navy is using a DevOps environment to further the initiative.

“We’re actually leveraging the best technology that we can, but also the best processes that we’ve been able to obtain from industry,” Gilday said. “We’re trying to benchmark against world-class networks and world-class software systems.”

Project Overmatch has been the CNO’s No. 2 priority behind only the Columbia-class ballistic missile submarine program. However, Navy officials have been relatively tight-lipped about their contributions to JADC2 compared to the Army and Air Force, who have been more open about discussing their Project Convergence and Advanced Battle Management System (ABMS) efforts, respectively.

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The new $3 billion package, announced Wednesday by President Biden to mark Ukraine’s Independence Day, will help Kyiv acquire counter-unmanned aerial systems (C-UAS), other air defense systems, artillery systems and munitions, and radars “to ensure it can continue to defend itself over the long term,” Biden said in a statement Wednesday morning.

The VAMPIRE counter-drone capability “uses small missiles essentially to shoot UAVs out of the sky,” Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Colin Kahl said during a press briefing at the Pentagon.

Contractor L3Harris describes its VAMPIRE, or Vehicle-Agnostic Modular Palletized ISR Rocket Equipment, system as “a portable kit that can be installed on most vehicles with a cargo bed for launching of the advanced precision kill weapons system (APKWS) or other laser-guided munitions.”

A defense official confirmed that L3Harris is the maker of the VAMPIRE technology that will be sent to Ukraine.

The tool can attack airborne targets such as drones, or ground targets. It was designed to fit into any pickup or vehicle with a flat surface, and installation can be completed in approximately two hours by two people using common tools, according to an L3Harris product description. It comes with a WESCAM MX-10 RSTA independent stabilized sighting system for target acquisition including electro-optical and infrared sensors.

Both Ukraine and Russia have used a variety of drones against each other’s forces for intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance and to conduct strikes. Pentagon officials say that trend highlights the need for the U.S. to acquire more counter-UAS capabilities.

“What we’re seeing in Ukraine, I think, is bringing more to light of what we already know — that when you scale this [drone] capability from a small quadcopter all the way up to a larger Group 3 [system] and are able to leverage ISR to put other effects of other systems to bear, really shows the importance of having counter-UAS at scale, not just at a fixed site, but all the way down to the operational level,” Maj. Gen. Sean Gainey, director of the Pentagon’s Joint Counter-small Unmanned Aircraft Systems Office (JCO) and the Army’s director for fires, G3/5/7, said during an AUSA webinar broadcast on Tuesday.

According to the Pentagon, the new security assistance package for Ukraine includes:

·         Six additional National Advanced Surface-to-Air Missile Systems (NASAMS) with additional munitions for NASAMS

·         Up to 245,000 rounds of 155mm artillery ammunition

·         Up to 65,000 rounds of 120mm mortar ammunition

·         Up to 24 counter-artillery radars

·         Puma Unmanned Aerial Systems (UAS) and support equipment for Scan Eagle UAS systems

·         VAMPIRE Counter-Unmanned Aerial Systems

·         Laser-guided rocket systems

·         Funding for training, maintenance, and sustainment

The Defense Department announcement did not provide further details about the capabilities of the Vampire counter-drone system in the press release.

Notably, the new batch of weapons and equipment will be procured from contractors through the Ukraine Security Assistance Initiative (USAI) fund rather than from a drawdown of Pentagon stocks, which had been the practice for most previous tranches of U.S. military aid to Ukraine since Russia’s invasion in February.

“Unlike Presidential Drawdown (PDA), which DoD has continued to leverage to deliver equipment to Ukraine from DoD stocks at a historic pace, USAI is an authority under which the United States procures capabilities from industry. This announcement represents the beginning of a contracting process to provide additional priority capabilities to Ukraine in the mid- and long-term to ensure Ukraine can continue to defend itself as an independent, sovereign and prosperous state,” Pentagon Press Secretary Air Force Brig. Gen. Pat Ryder explained in a press release.

“This USAI package, which is being announced on Ukraine Independence Day, underscores the U.S. commitment to supporting Ukraine over the long term — representing a multi-year investments to build the enduring strength of Ukraine’s Armed Forces as it continues to defend its sovereignty in the face of Russian aggression,” he said.

It’s unclear how long it will take for the Vampire system and the other weapons to arrive in Ukraine for use on the battlefield.

“It’s entirely possible than in some cases — for instance with the ammunition — that the defense contractors already have some in their stocks and it may not take very long to procure them and get them on their way. And in other situations where systems are more advanced … in those cases it could take — it could take a little longer for that materiel to get to Ukraine,” National Security Council Coordinator for Strategic Communications John Kirby told reporters Wednesday.

“So, it’s going to depend quite frankly on the item that we’re talking about or items and how fast it can be procured. And so not everything will have to necessarily be quote-unquote ‘built’ as of today, but some stuff will probably need some production time to develop,” he added.

Speaking broadly, Kahl said deliveries of equipment included in the package will begin in the next several months and continue over the coming years.

“We’re talking about systems that will take months to get on contract and you know, one, two, three years in some instances to arrive in Ukraine,” he said.

“We will endeavor to get the contracts filled out as quickly as possible and get stuff on the road, but I think we have to manage people’s expectations,” he added. “The package of capabilities here are really aimed at getting Ukraine what they’re going to need in the medium to long term.”

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