may 2013 national defense magazine
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National Defense Magazine. A BiPartisan magazine dealing with the United States Defense.TRANSCRIPT
W W W . N A T I O N A L D E F E N S E M A G A Z I N E . O R G ■ $ 5 . 0 0
M A Y 2 0 1 3
Industry Investing Millions in STEM
Drone DemandBooming Overseas
New Missions Ahead for Special Operations Forces
M A Y 2 0 1 3 • N A T I O N A L D E F E N S E 1
NDIA’S BUSINESS AND TECHNOLOGY MAGAZINE
VOLUME XCVII, NUMBER 714
WWW.NATIONALDEFENSEMAGAZINE.ORG
News Features
Legal Commentary
18 Agencies Become More Aggressive In Pursuit of Contractor Wrongdoing
Businesses are at increased risk for getting entangled in debarment or suspension pro-ceedings.
BY TODD J. CANNI AND FREDERICK M. LEVY
Acquisition Report
22 Army Developing New Sensors And Lasers for Infantry Troops
Two new programs will give soldiers added visibility and improve the ability to locate targets.
BY COL. MICHAEL SLOANE
Future Workforce
24 Industry, Academia, Government Grapple with Dwindling STEM Workforce
Millions of dollars have been spent trying to increase students’ interest in science, tech-nology, engineering and mathematics careers with little success.
BY YASMIN TADJDEH
Cover Story
26 Special Operations Missions To Require New Doctrine
Special operations forces are making a shift to “soft power” missions that have little in common with the direct-action operations that characterized the last decade.
BY STEW MAGNUSON
STEM 24� Despite growing spending by govern-ment, industry and academia, the number of students working toward degrees in science, technology, engineering and math-ematics is stagnant. Experts worry this shortage of talent will be detrimental to national security.
Cover Story 26� The phrase “special operations” conjures an image of secret, late night missions with low-flying helicopters and troops busting down doors. U.S. special opera-tions forces, however, are facing a new challenge: understanding the cultural and human terrain where they are engaged.
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M A Y 2 0 1 3 • N A T I O N A L D E F E N S E 1
COVER: U.S. Army Rangers conduct battle drills. ARMY
Unmanned Systems 30� While analysts project the United States will remain the largest consumer of unmanned aerial vehicles, interna-tional demand —particularly in Europe and East Asia — will skyrocket. U.S. defense contractors are taking notice, creating unarmed versions of their drones and ramping up exports.
2 N at i o N a l D e f e N s e • M ay 2 0 1 3
May 2013
voluMe xcvii nuMber 714
EditorSandra I. Erwin (703)[email protected]
Managing Editor Stew Magnuson(703)[email protected]
StaFF WritEr Dan Parsons(703)[email protected]
StaFF WritEr Valerie Insinna(703)[email protected]
dESign dirEctor Brian Taylor(703)[email protected]
EditoriaL aSSiStant Yasmin Tadjdeh(703)[email protected]
advErtiSing Dino Pignotti(703)[email protected] additional advertising information, go to the Index of Advertisers on the last page.
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28 Mali Crisis offers Lessons for Special operations Command
Throughoutthelastdecade,specialopera-torstrainedMaliantroopsinthehopesofpreventingaterroriststronghold,butarangeoffactorsthwartedthatgoal.
BYSTEWMAGNUSON
Unmanned Systems
30 Worldwide, Drones are In high Demand
AnalystssayexpandinginternationalsalesofunmannedaerialvehicleswilloffsetaslightdownturnintheU.S.market.
BYDANPARSONS
34 Pentagon Eyes Deals With Satellite Industry to fill Demand for Drone Communications
TheDefenseDepartmentislookingforasecure,low-costsolutiontofillitsneedsformorebandwidth.
BYSANDRAERWIN
38 Booming unmanned aircraft Industry Straining to Break free from regulations
ThedomesticUAVindustrycouldseeahugeinfluxofcashiftheFederalAviationAdministrationreworksitsregulationsby2015.
BYDANPARSONS
40 opportunities for Non-Military robots Increase
Themilitarywilllikelyprocurefewerunmannedgroundvehiclesinthecom-ingyears,butthemarketforcommercialservicerobotsinthefieldsofhealthcare,agricultureandlogisticsisexpanding.
BYVALERIEINSINNA
42 Companies Vie for Chance to update Bomb Disposal robots
Navyofficialshopethenewfamilyofexplosiveordinancedisposalrobotswillbeeasiertoupgrade.
BYVALERIEINSINNA
Departments4 President’s Perspective NewBudgetSpellsMore UncertaintyforDoD by Lawrence P. Farrell Jr.
6 Defense Watch Ruminationsoncurrentevents by Sandra I. Erwin
8 Inside Science + TechnologyTacklingthemilitary’stoughestproblems
by Dan Parsons
10 Ethics Corner
12 Business + Industry NewsWhat’snewandnextfortheindustrialbase
by Valerie Insinna
14 homeland Security News Monitoringthehomefront by Yasmin Tadjdeh
44 NDIa Calendar CompleteguidetoNDIAevents
48 Next Month Previewofournextissue
48 Index of advertisers
Correction: An article in the April edition stated an incorrect location for the Army Aviation Association of America’s Annual Professional Forum and Exposition. The event is held in Fort Worth, Texas.
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4 N AT I O N A L D E F E N S E • M AY 2 0 1 3
President Barack Obama sent to Congress a proposed defense budget of $526.6 billion for fiscal year 2014. That
top line, however, ignores the fact that it would be subject to a $52 billion sequester cut, as Congress mandated in the Budget Control Act of 2011.
Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel acknowledged this reality when he unveiled the budget proposal. “Unfortunately, fiscal year 2014 programs will be significantly and adversely affected by sequester budget cuts in fiscal year 2013. Training cutbacks, civilian furloughs, deferral of equipment and facility maintenance, reductions to energy conservation investments, contract inefficiencies and cur-tailed deployments will inevitably have rippling effects into fiscal year 2014.”
Obama’s recommendation to address this problem is a deficit reduction plan — a combination of tax code reforms and reduc-tions in entitlement programs — to replace and repeal the seques-ter.
Whether sequester will be repealed in a “grand bargain” on taxes and spending remains to be seen. No one anticipated what happened in fis-cal year 2013: a modified continuing resolution, with sequester. The legislation gave the Defense Department some flexibility to adjust account imbalances, but the sequester on a base budget of $518 billion tightened things right back down. Going in, the department was short about $10 billion in operations and maintenance accounts. Coming out, O&M is still insufficient.
Civilian furloughs have been reduced from 22 to 14 days. Pay is still flat for government civilians employees, and the military services are beginning to cut back training. As of this writing, the actual cuts to the vari-ous appropriations accounts and their impacts have not yet been disclosed, but it is expected that programs in the procurement accounts will be seriously affected.
It goes like this. Less money means fewer “eaches,” with less capability per each. The price per item goes up. So for less money, defense gets much less capability at a higher cost per unit. Seques-ter is specific that all accounts, programs, projects and activities get equal hits, there is little flexibility to protect higher priority programs. All is far from well.
Where does this leave defense in terms of its posture to execute national tasking? On March 20 in Jakarta, Deputy Defense Secre-tary Ashton Carter said that the rebalance to the Pacific remains the Defense Department’s top priority, and that sequester will not have a long-term impact on the strategy or on the future of major military modernization efforts, including Navy attack submarines, the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter, the Air Force’s KC-46 tanker and long-range bomber, the Navy’s P-8 manned maritime surveillance aircraft and high-endurance unmanned aircraft, cybersecurity and space technologies.
A March 15 memo from Hagel directed a “strategic choices and management review.” This review is designed to define the major strategic choices and institutional challenges affecting defense posture in the decade ahead. This review is to consider the 2012 defense strategic guidance as the point of departure. In other words, the Pentagon is in the process of changing the direction based on a
modified strategy. The outcome of this review will frame the 2015 budget and the next Quadrennial Defense Review due in February 2014. The review is to conclude by May 31.
The budget uncertainty affects every service. Though it rebal-ances some accounts, flexibility is still lacking. The Army faces a $9.5 billion shortfall in war operations, which is yet unaddressed by the budget, and aircraft procurement is under growing pressure. The Navy does well with carrier procurement funding, but will take hits on its new trainer aircraft, DDG-51 destroyers, F-35 procure-ment, some training and carrier strike group stand-down. The Air force seeks expanded reprogramming authority to keep the KC-46, F-35 and long-range bomber on track at the expense of lower prior-ity programs.
The president’s 2014 budget attempts to square the sequester circle by proposing a kind of “grand bargain” with new revenue — adjustments to the tax code — and some entitlement adjustments, like chained consumer-price index adjustments for Social Security.
There are some poison pills in the new budget as well, like capping individual retirement accounts at $2 million. This and other “surprises” are sure to make the proposal contentious.
One only has to look at the divergence of the 2014 budget resolutions in the House and Senate. They are very far apart. If sequester moves into 2014, as seems likely given the late start on all this, the 2014 budget request will be $60 billion over target. The extended debate on this budget will only postpone and mask eventual program defer-rals and “kills.”
Recall the talk leading up to where we are now. Everyone said that sequester would not happen,
but no one knew how it would not happen. The failure to prepare for this worst-case scenario eventuality left the defense community scrambling, and programs are going to be seriously compromised. We will pay more for the lack of preparation. If Washington contin-ues to debate until October and nothing except sequester happens again, there will be an even worse outcome. We don’t yet know just how programs will be affected by the 2013 budget.
It seems that Congress, words to the contrary, is comfortable right now with sequester, as it is the only way to make a small dent in budget deficits. Keep in mind, too, that the 2013 budget, the 2011 BCA and sequester do not actually reduce spending, they only slow down the increase.
A final thought: Historical defense budget decreases have con-tracted to lower levels than this particular drawdown. What has changed with this particular decrease, however, are the increased operational, personnel and healthcare costs. Projections of this trend to 2021 show that these costs consume the entire defense budget, which leaves little to no room for procurement and research. A report by the Center for Strategic and International Studies estimates that personnel will have to level out to the neighborhood of 600,000 troops to make head room for procure-ment.
We have a budget, but it is not a good one, and the 2014 submis-sion holds scant promise to fix things.
President’s Perspective BY LAWRENCE P. FARRELL JR.
Email your comments to [email protected]
New Budget Spells More Uncertainty for DoD
“We have a budget, but it is not a good one, and the 2014
submission holds scant promise to
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6 N AT I O N A L D E F E N S E • M AY 2 0 1 3
The United States has the most technologically advanced military force. But Pentagon officials worry that the innova-
tion gap is rapidly narrowing. Adversaries learn quickly. Just like they managed to defeat U.S.
armored vehicles in recent wars with relatively unsophisticated bur-ied bombs, they will find other means to counter American tech-nology. Pentagon strategists predict enemies will use nontraditional weapons such as satellite jamming and computer viruses to disable U.S. military hardware.
The Pentagon needs to get creative as it plans the weapons of the future, officials have said, and it needs private-sector help.
Such calls for public-private collaboration to build the nation’s technology future should be music to corporate executives’ ears. But these are unusual times. Companies were happy to benefit from the military budget largesse of the past decade, but they know the gravy train is grinding to a halt. Those companies that are committed to the defense business are now expected to “put their skin in the game,” as was suggested by Air Force Lt. Gen. Christopher C. Bogdan, program executive officer of the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter.
Corporations in the defense sector are a rare breed. Unlike main-stream businesses, they are not truly operating in a free market and depend on the government for most of their revenues. But they are just as bottom-line driven as any other sector of the economy, and they must weigh national security concerns against shareholders’ pressure to deliver profits.
Whether companies are ready to take on more risks in defense projects as research budgets decline is still unclear. The Pentagon has made specific pleas to companies to target their corporate inde-pendent research-and-development investments, known as IR&D, at areas where the military needs the most help. The problem, executives contend, is that the Pentagon doesn’t provide detailed enough forecasts of what technologies it will need, nor does it allow for open lines of communication between government and industry representatives to discuss specifics, one on one.
When the Defense Department does provide seed money for new technologies, it often does not plan to transition from the lab to the marketplace. That puts companies in the position of hav-ing to spend their own money to commercialize a product. When contractors do not have the cash to do that, technologies are left to wither.
During a recent industry meeting in Arlington, Va., Deputy Assis-tant Secretary of Defense for Research Reginald Brothers asked executives to tell him “how we can do a better job telling you what we need.” There is concern in the Pentagon about a lack of innova-tion in military technology programs, he said. “How do we maintain awareness of what the rest of the world is doing? How do we track emerging trends? How do we leverage technology from small busi-nesses?” he asked the audience.
Executives politely told Brothers they welcome opportunities to score Pentagon contracts. But then they proceeded to list a litany of reasons why companies are becoming increasingly frustrated in their dealings with the Defense Department. Whether to invest corporate IR&D funds, they insisted, is a business decision. “I don’t expect war fighters to be concerned about industry being profit-able,” one executive said.
But the Pentagon has to worry that as the defense sector
shrinks, which will create more monopolies, prices will soar. If the Pentagon gave contractors more flexibility to commercialize military-funded technology in the open market, he said, costs could be lowered and more vendors would jump into the defense business.
The Pentagon wants industry to spend IR&D on relevant tech-nologies, but it does not give companies enough insight into what the military specifically needs, another executive argued. Brothers pointed out that the Defense Department publishes “technology roadmaps” and recently set up a “defense innovation marketplace” website, all of which are intended to give vendors that insight.
Companies need more information than what can be provided in an open website, however. Roadmaps and online portals are great, executives agreed, but cannot be substitutes for face-to-face com-munication.
A small business that may only spend a couple million dollars a year on IR&D needs to know that the investment will have legs, another executive said. “There is no way to determine that just by reading the roadmaps or reading PowerPoint briefings that are on the web, or even by talking to a broad network of Defense Department officials. … You really need to get to have a conversation about very specific details.” Such dialogue could never occur online or in a group setting that is populated by competitors.
Even companies that are privately owned and under less pres-sure from Wall Street to generate profits fear that doing business with the Pentagon is driving away top talent. “We hire scientists and engineers, with PhDs from elite universities,” another industry official said. “We compete with Silicon Valley. It’s tough to hold on to that talent.” Corporate leaders try to convince them that there is stability in the defense market. But then came the sequester, and his company in recent weeks had to lay off 10 percent of that skilled workforce after it lost Pentagon contracts. This is one reason to reconsider betting on defense work, he said. “We make decisions based on whether an IR&D investment will give us long-term programs with sponsors that will allow us to hire and retain talent.”
Non-defense companies that the Pentagon would like to lure to the military market have their own qualms about doing business with the military. A former Ford Motor Co. executive who worked on a bid for the Army-Marine Corps joint light tactical vehicle said the company opted to pull out of the competition because it believed the selection criteria would not favor the best truck. “The metrics for evaluating the program weren’t very good,” he said. The way the Pentagon set up the program allowed prime contractors to control every subcomponent and leave out some of the most advanced armor materials that were available in the open market. Instead of allowing a prime contractor to tell the government what the best composite materials are to arm JLTV, the Pentagon should have an opportunity to test armor samples from more vendors, he said. “None of the best work we saw in materials was included in JLTV variants.”
Brothers listened and promised to take these concerns up with his bosses at the Pentagon. The discussion is to be resumed at an upcoming industry meeting.
Defense Watch BY SANDRA I. ERWIN
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8 N at i o N a l D e f e N s e • M ay 2 0 1 3
While on patrol, soldiers in Afghanistan realized they had a problem with their flashlights: A protruding power button
was prone to being accidentally pressed, which at worst could give away their position at night. At any rate, their batteries were wear-ing down without their knowledge.
Ordinarily, the process to replace the flashlight would take months, if not years. The current design would have to be decommissioned, then the search for a new design would begin, resulting in a compe-tition, testing, a contract award and finally a purchase and fielding.
Instead, engineers sitting in a shipping container in Afghanistan devised a solution in a matter of hours. Using 3D printers, scientists deployed with the Army Rapid Equipping Force’s Expeditionary Lab Mobile — ELM for short — produced a plastic guard that clips over the end of the flashlight, preventing accidental activation of the power switch.
While most 3D printing applications have been whimsical rather than practical — enthusiasts have made flutes, animal skeletons, prototypes for engine parts and action figures, among other kitschy items — the Army’s mobile lab is producing real-world objects that are saving lives in war zones.
The industry is maturing, and various manufacturing companies are daily discovering innovative uses for 3D printing technology.
President Obama has launched an initiative to establish “additive manufacturing” centers that will explore 3D printing with govern-ment funding. The effort was featured prominently in his 2013 State of the Union address.
“Last year, we created our first manufacturing innovation insti-tute in Youngstown, Ohio. A once-shuttered warehouse is now a state-of-the art lab where new workers are mastering the 3D print-ing that has the potential to revolutionize the way we make almost everything,” Obama said.
The National Additive Manufacturing Innovation Institute was formed “to accelerate additive manufacturing innovation by bridg-ing that critical gap between basic research and mature develop-ment work,” the institute’s website says.
Already, the technology is being used in surprising — some-times controversial — ways. Functional gun parts and ammunition magazines have been produced with small 3D printers that private citizens can own. There is no indication that the U.S. military plans to explore printing weapons. But NASA astronauts could one day eat 3D printed food in space, according to reports.
Oxford Performance Materials, producer of biomedical raw mate-rials and devices, recently received FDA approval for a process to create artificial skull implants that can be tailored to a patient’s needs.
In combat zones, 3D printers are saving lives in other ways.Westley Brin, a REF civilian product manager, said the technol-
ogy has allowed troops to modify systems with proprietary designs to better fit their needs or make them more efficient in the field.
The Mine Hound, an improvised explosive device detection robot, came to the Army with a proprietary battery, requiring a soldier to carry specific power supplies for it. When the issue was noted, REF engineers at the mobile lab got to work designing a solution. Six hours later, they had a prototype and eventually were able to build 30.
“We put them out in the field and can get constant feedback,” Brin said. “In this case, we found out it almost doubled the battery life of the robot. Then we take that idea and kick it back home.”
The Joint Improvised Explosive Device Defeat Organization has
approved funding for 2,000 refined Mine Hound battery adapters that are based on the REF mobile lab’s design.
The REF deployed the second mobile laboratory to the war zone in Afghanistan on Jan. 7.
A third ELM, scheduled for deployment in June, is specifically equipped for use in humanitarian and disaster-relief missions where logistics disruptions often prevent the rapid fielding of modified or innovative technologies.
Amidst a natural disaster, as in combat, troops regularly find themselves needing new or modified technologies to respond to emerging or unforeseen threats. The ELM system gives them an immediate opportunity to do so, provide feedback and perfect designs in real time.
The REF teamed with Applied Minds Inc. and Exponent, to develop the labs. At 20 feet long, the exterior resembles a metal shipping container and can be transported as such by truck or heli-copter to just about any location.
Inside, each 10-ton, $2.8-million ELM is jam-packed with state of the art manufacturing and communications equipment includ-ing 3D printers, computer numerical control (CNC) mills and machines that use lasers and water to manufacture just about any small part on the spot within hours.
Manned by two specially trained engineers, each lab is a self-sufficient prototype production line in a box.
Engineers can work together inside each mobile lab to use 3D printers and CNC machining mills to create parts from plastic, steel or aluminum.
The 3D printers use rigid plastics that last for a month or two, but the items made with these materials are not meant to be permanent.
Using high-tech satellite communications, lab technicians can see and talk to other scientists and engineers, allowing them to com-pare notes with experts anywhere in the world. Once they arrive at a viable solution to the problem at hand, the part design can be instantaneously transmitted elsewhere in the world for full-scale manufacturing.
CNC mills use a drill bit to remove material from a solid alumi-num or steel block. Metal milled parts are sturdier than 3D printed ones and can last indefinitely.
Mills were used when troops had trouble hitching a ground-pene-trating radar array to their Husky route-clearance vehicles. The GPR aids in the detection of IEDs. Lab technicians were able to design and mill a part that successfully latched the GPR sled to the Husky and is now in production.
When Maj. Shannon McCrory was in Afghanistan, a private came to him with a problem: He and fellow soldiers had myriad electronic gadgets that required USB ports to charge but lacked any such jacks in their battlefield accommodations.
Mere hours later, McCrory’s laboratory had constructed a work-ing prototype of a universal adapter for a standard Army battery that would accept the chord for the private’s laptop, iPod or any-thing that had a USB cable.
“Almost overnight, the [REF scientists] had made 100 of these things and sent them back out to the unit,” McCrory, chief of current operations for the REF, said. “Now there are thousands of them. That was just from some idea a private cooked up.”
Inside Science + Technology by dan parsons
Email your comments to [email protected]
3D Printing Provides Fast, Practical Fixes
10 N AT I O N A L D E F E N S E • M AY 2 0 1 3
Most people know the United States sanctions trade and other business activities with certain countries to advance its
foreign policy and national security goals. However, the details of these sanctions and how to avoid violating them can be somewhat complicated.
For companies that wish to do legitimate business with poten-tially sanctioned countries or corporations, understanding the ins and outs of the U.S. government’s enforcement regime and whether a potential trading partner is under sanction are key.
The Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) administers and enforces economic and trade sanctions against certain countries, their respective governments and a long list of so-called Specially Designated Nationals (SDNs). Most often, sanctions amount to the blocking or freezing of assets and restric-tions on trade.
The list of SDNs includes individuals and companies owned, controlled by, or acting for or on behalf of, targeted countries. It also includes non-state actors such as terrorists, criminals engaged in the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction and international narcotics traffickers.
Generally, OFAC regulations bar “U.S. persons” from dealing with SDNs, or parties of which they own more than 50 percent, even if those parties are not identified on the SDN list. The term “U.S. persons” includes U.S. citizens and U.S. lawful permanent residents, wherever located; entities organized under U.S. law and their foreign branches; and any person present in the United States, regardless of nationality.
U.S. persons working with SDNs can be subject to civil or crimi-nal penalties, including imprisonment. OFAC criminal penalties — which require a showing of willfulness — can include fines of $1 million per violation, asset forfeiture and up to 20 years in prison. Depending on the OFAC sanctions program, civil penalties range from $250,000 per violation or twice the amount of transaction, to more than $1 million. In a narrow set of circumstances, deal-ings with SDNs may be “exempt” from the regulations or can be licensed by OFAC.
OFAC in March released a new screening tool for the public to search for SDNs. This free tool is designed to assist the public in complying with sanctions programs. Using the tool, compa-nies can quickly determine whether an entity or individual with whom they want to conduct business is an SDN and, therefore, off limits.
The tool previously returned results only for exact matches to the search terms used. OFAC’s improvements now provide a
broader set of results beyond exact matches using fuzzy search logic. The fuzzy logic only works on the name field, however.
This key feature reduces the risk that SDNs will be missed due to a non-exact search term or other mistakes. For example, using the improved OFAC screening tool, a search for the “Bank of Iran,” will now return several possible matches including “Bank-e Iran Zamin,” “Joint Iranian-Venezuela Bank” and “National Bank of Iran.”
The search tool only screens against OFAC’s list. It does not capture persons or entities listed on other restricted party lists, such as lists maintained by the State and Commerce departments. The State Department maintains multiple lists that include the List of Debarred Parties and the Nonproliferation Sanctions Lists. The Commerce Department also has restricted lists that include the Denied Persons List, the Entity List and the Unverified List. Links to these various lists can be found at www.bis.doc.gov/compliance-andenforcement/liststocheck.htm.
Complying with OFAC’s growing list of SDNs, which now includes more than 7,000 entries, challenges companies large and small. For years, financial institutions have used sophisticated screening systems to weed out SDNs in transactions. Large com-panies have also relied on powerful but expensive commercial software screening programs. These commercial programs make it much easier for large companies to screen against multiple lists with increased comfort that they will uncover all potential matches, allowing for more informed positive match determinations.
Those unable to afford interdiction software can now use the new and improved SDN-search tool for free. Companies not already relying on a commercial software screening solution should build or enhance compliance programs using OFAC’s new tool.
Screening is important, even for transactions that do not involve embargoed countries — Cuba, Iran, Sudan, Syria or North Korea, for instance — or other high-risk jurisdictions. Companies should screen all parties in a transaction, including suppliers, customers, banks and vessels. The list includes parties worldwide, including those based in Western Europe as well as the United States.
And screening alone may not be enough, as it only picks up listed SDNs. A party of which more than half is owned by an SDN is also off limits, even if it is not on the list. For example, if ABC Company owns 50 percent or more of SDN-listed XYZ Company, ABC Company is considered a de facto SDN, and you may not engage in any dealings with ABC Company.
Companies also should consider keeping records of all searches. A record of the screen should be part of the transaction file. Some sophisticated screening software programs allow users to download screen results directly to spreadsheet applications such as Microsoft Excel.
OFAC’s new and improved SDN tool is a valuable addition to the several useful resources available to help companies more reli-ably meet their obligations and should be added to all comprehen-sive compliance programs.
It can be found at www.treasury.gov/resource-center/sanctions/SDN-List.
Ethics Corner BY CAROL A. CONNOLLY
Companies Must Vet Business Partners
Carol A. Connolly is assistant counsel at Pratt & Whitney. The views expressed are solely those of the author.
Joseph Reeder, ChairmanGreenberg Traurig LLP
Glenn BaerARINC Inc.
William BirkhoferJacobs Engineering Group
J. Kelly BrownEMSolutions Inc.
Beverly ByronByron Butcher Associates
Dale ChurchVentures & Solutions LLC
Vincent Ciccone RASco Inc.
Steven GaffneyDynCorp International, LLC
R. Andrew HoveMistral Group
John IllgenNorthrop Grumman Information Systems
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James McAleeseMcAleese & Associates
Richard McConnM International Inc.
William MooreLMI
Graham ShirleyThe Pegasus Group Inc.
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In the future, troops may be able to use their smartphones to diag-
nose and detect biological pathogens in the field.
Scientists at the Army’s Edgewood Chemical Biological Center have devel-oped two clip-on attachments for an Android phone that can do just that, and they plan to test the devices within the next couple months.
The first attachment is a clip-on micro-scope that fits over the camera and can be used to identify a disease in blood or a pathogen in water, said Peter Emanuel, biosciences division chief at the ECBC.
To use the device, the soldier puts a sample of blood or water on a slide, coats it with special dye and inserts it into a chamber beneath the microscope. When a photo is taken, LED lights surrounding the chamber interact with the dye, caus-ing a specific agent such as salmonella to fluoresce, Emanuel said. Then, an applica-
tion downloaded to the phone determines whether the sample contains that specific agent.
The device currently can test for salmo-nella, anthrax, strep pneumonia and yer-sinia pestis — more commonly known as the bubonic plague — said Patricia Buck-ley, the principal researcher on the project.
The second attachment turns the phone into a handheld assay reader that can upload the data to the cloud and tag it on a map using Google Earth.
In the next few months, Army and National Guard soldiers across all four con-tinental U.S. time zones will test the assay readers and map the results, which will be used by a battlefield commander at 20th Support Command at Aberdeen Proving Ground, Md., to form a common operating picture, Emanuel said.
Outside of military applications, the assay reader could also benefit medical practitioners in isolated areas, he said. For example, the Centers for Disease Control could use it to diagnose diseases such as malaria.
“This is really an effort to show the utility of smartphones as the Swiss Army knife of the 21st century,” he added. “You can clip on device number one … and use it to diagnose disease in blood,
and then you can take it off and then you can clip on peripheral number two, and now that device can read a handheld assay.”
Development of the microscope and assay reader attachments was fully funded by the Defense Threat Reduction Agency’s joint science and technology office and the joint program executive office for chemical and biological defense, respectively. The challenge, now, is proving to the acquisition community at JPEO that the technology is “ready for prime time,” Emanuel said.
ECBC also is bidding to secure funding to develop its own military-specific smart-phone hardware and applications for read-ing and diagnosing chemical agents, he said.
UCLA Professor Aydogan Ozcan devel-oped the hardware and software currently being used in ECBC’s attachments for detecting biological agents.
By Valerie insinnaBusiness + Industry News
biological Defense
■ A United Arab Emirates-based satellite company is pitching a device to the U.S. military that can transform an iPhone 4 into a satellite phone.
The SatSleeve fits onto an iPhone like a protective case and uses an application to link the smartphone to a satellite system owned by Thuraya, a satcom provider that covers most of Europe, Asia, Africa, Austra-lia and the Middle East.
The device is not an option for the nation’s first responder community because of lack of service in North America, but company executives are scheduled to demonstrate the SatSleeve this spring for officials at overseas combatant commands in the Eastern Hemi-sphere, said Bob Demers, the company’s vice president of government services.
Thuraya officials also plan to meet with
the Department of Homeland Security and the Defense Information
Systems Agency — which would ulti-mately decide whether to procure the device for the military, Demers told
National Defense. The company is looking at developing
versions of the SatSleeve for Android and BlackBerry devices, which are more com-monly used by the U.S. military and gov-ernment. Doing so would require creating different software and applications for each operating system, said Sanford Jewett, vice president of marketing.
Another challenge is that the Android operating system runs on several different models of phones, meaning that Thuraya would have to construct a different sleeve to fit each design.
Most commercial satellite communica-tions are purchased through Future COM-SATCOM Services Acquisition contracts sponsored by DISA or the General Services Administration, Demers said. DISA already
has contracts with several Thuraya service partners, including Boeing and US21 Inc., so “this would be a modification of the contract that they already have,” he said.
“It’s a fairly easy process,” he added. Because Thuraya acts as a wholeseller,
prices will be set by their service partners, with the phone’s hardware starting at about $500 and satellite service costing anywhere from $1 to $1.25 a minute.
Current devices can be used to make phone calls or send text messages. The company is also releasing a “SatSleeve Data” version later this year that will allow users to connect to the Internet, send email and upload photos to social media sites.
Both versions are equipped with a back-up battery that can help extend the life of the iPhone.
“We initially bought 5,000 of these just to get our first batch,” Jewett said. “We sold out the entire first batch within the first two days.”
The next batch of about 30,000 devices will be available in August, he said.
satellite communications
army to test assay Reader add-on for smartphones
Device links iPhone into satellite system
SatSleeve Thuraya
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Business + Industry News
M a y 2 0 1 3 • N a t i o N a l D e f e N s e 13
■ The United States is facing a gap in collecting data from polar-orbiting satellites that help predict the weather, according to the Government Accountability Office’s 2013 high risk report.
The GAO projects a 17- to 53-month gap starting as early as 2014 between the time the National Polar-orbiting Operational Environmental Satellite System’s preparatory project satellite stops running and the Joint Polar Satellite System is sent into space.
Executives at PlanetIQ, a joint venture by several space compa-nies, say they can solve the problem by launching a constellation of 12 low-Earth orbit satellites that use a method called GPS radio occultation (GPS-RO) to determine temperature, atmospheric pressure and humidity.
However, they need a first customer to help finance the launch and are eyeing the Air Force and National Oceanic and Atmo-spheric Administration as possible buyers.
The biggest issue is getting government organizations used to the idea that they would be paying for data, said Anne Miglarese, Plan-
etIQ’s president and chief executive officer.
“Space-based atmo-spheric data is collected entirely by governments around the globe who are used to designing, build-ing, flying and owning all of their own systems, and then distributing that data for free around the globe,” she said, adding she was confident that PlanetIQ
would be able to design and operate its own system at equal or below what it would cost the government.
The company is currently meeting with the Air Force, NOAA and national weather prediction centers in Europe. If given the go ahead, Planet IQ could launch its constellation in as little as 28 months, Miglarese said.
GPS-RO is a technique in which a GPS satellite in medium-earth orbit sends out a radio signal to a low-Earth orbit satellite. That signal is bent in the Earth’s atmosphere, and the low-Earth orbit satellite can calculate atmospheric density based on the angle of the bend.
Currently, the United States receives GPS-RO observations through six satellites launched as a joint research mission with Taiwan, called the constellation observing system for meteorology, ionosphere and climate or COSMIC.
Data latencies for COSMIC are anywhere from 15 to 100 min-utes, but PlanetIQ’s system would be able to deliver an observation within three minutes, Miglarese said.
A follow-on mission, COSMIC-2, is planned for launch in 2017, but it would focus on the equatorial belt and not cover the United States, she said. PlanetIQ’s constellation would span the entire globe.
“Should you be relying on a research mission that has no constant programmatic funding for an operational need of the United States Air Force?” she said. “I think that is a risk that is big and unneces-sary.”
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U.S. airport perimeter manufactur-ers — makers of fences, gates, sensors
and cameras — will likely face a steep drop in demand over the next several years, one report found.
In 2012, the Federal Aviation Admin-istration awarded airports $58 million in grants to improve safety, but a decline is expected through 2017, said John Hernan-dez, an aerospace defense senior industry analyst at Frost & Sullivan, a Mountain View, Calif.-based market consulting firm.
Demand for airport perimeter systems and barriers skyrocketed after 9/11, Her-nandez said. Between 2001 and 2011, they garnered nearly $650 million. But funding is expected to taper off as demand weakens, Hernandez said.
“You will see some stagnation and a decline [in the market],” said Hernandez. “It will never go up to the point it went up to after 9/11.”
Hernandez does not foresee any major airports being built soon, and most work needed at existing airports will be limited to small repairs or refurbishing. Contracts
to repair most perimeter control measures will be limited to local vendors.
In 2012, nearly $69 million was invested in airport perimeter-security measures. By 2017, that number will drop to an estimat-ed $47.5 million per year, the study found.
While the outlook for the fencing-and-gate side of the market appears grim, the security enhancement sector — which includes cam-eras and sensors — looks rosier, he said.
Because of inevitable human error and vulnerabilities within the technology, even the most sophisticated systems may not catch everything, Hernandez said.
“You can’t have guys vigilant 24 hours a day,” he said.
He pointed to a major 2012 airport-perim-eter security breach in which a distressed Jet Skier swam three miles from his disabled watercraft in Jamaica Bay and came ashore in front of John F. Kennedy International Airport in New York City. He then climbed a fence and crossed two runways all without the $100 million perimeter intrusion detec-tion system spotting him. He was arrested after flagging down an airport worker.
Hernandez hypothesized that the man may have been wearing a wet suit, which could have masked his heat signature, thus throwing off the expensive system.
Robots may be one way to better detect intruders, Hernandez said. The use of unmanned aerial vehicles and unmanned ground vehicles to patrol the perimeter and identify threats, or at least sense that something is amiss, would be invaluable. UAVs and UGVs don’t get tired and keep going 24 hours a day. But getting airports to pay for this technology is difficult, he said.
“Most airports … would rather redo their tarps [and] their terminals, rather than throw money toward perimeter security,” Hernandez said.
But drops in perimeter-security invest-ments won’t result in less-secure airports, Hernandez said.
Many airports have not only a level of secure fencing and other perimeter-control measures, but also agreements with local police — or even their own security people, depending on the size of the facility — which adds an extra layer of safety, he said.
Furthermore, infiltrating an airfield is likely less attractive to potential terrorists, he said.
“Airport security is fine right now,” said Hernandez, and terrorists will not get the same “bang for their buck” by striking an airfield as they would hijacking an aircraft.
Part of the reason for the declining secu-rity spending is that there has never been a breach of airport perimeters that resulted in tragedy, he said.
“You haven’t seen that, and that’s a good thing,” Hernandez said.
While many perimeter-security companies won’t be snagging domestic orders, prospects overseas look better, Hernandez said.
European countries, such as the United Kingdom, invest more heavily in perim-
14 N AT I O N A L D E F E N S E • M AY 2 0 1 3 14 N AT I O N A L D E F E N S E • M AY 2 0 1 3
U.S. Airport Perimeter Security Market in Decline
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M A Y 2 0 1 3 • N A T I O N A L D E F E N S E 15
� The Department of Homeland Security is increasing its cyberse-curity presence by using continuous monitoring tools and improving verifying measures, said a top department official.
As part of its continuous diagnostics and monitoring program, DHS is tracking activity across its systems for anomalies and viruses, said Richard Spires, the department’s chief information officer.
“We were really moving aggressively as a government into this whole area of continuous monitoring, as we call it,” said Spires.
While the program is being implemented across DHS, it will also cover the entire dot.gov space, which DHS manages, Spires said at the Center for National Policy, a Washington, D.C.-based think-tank.
Continuous monitoring also allows for DHS to better gauge what products and services it needs to purchase. If one section of DHS owns more servers than it needs, continuous monitoring will be able to point that out and funds can be better allocated, Spires said. Tran-sitioning to cloud computing could also assist with the effort, he said.
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DHS Beefs Up Cybersecurity Efforts With Monitoring, Authentication Tools
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eter security because the threat is higher there, he said. Many U.S. perimeter-security companies already do much of their business with international companies, which will buffer many of them from reduced domestic demand.
FLIR Systems, an Oregon-based manufacturer of thermal imag-ing products, sees a healthy market ahead.
FLIR offers ground surveillance radar, high-resolution thermal imaging, day imaging and other measures for its airport perimeter network. It has security installations at a variety of airports domesti-cally and internationally, including Houston International Airport, Greater Orlando Airport and airports in Australia, Canada and the Netherlands, to name a few, said Andrew Saxton, director of airport security at FLIR.
“Our goal is to give security teams complete situational aware-ness while using as few people as possible,” Saxton said.
Because of recent high-profile events, such as the Jet Skier at JFK, Saxton believes airports will continue to invest in perimeter security.
“Airports have to react to public events,” he said.While there may not be a history of terrorist attacks affiliated with
airport perimeter breaches, there have been a number of incidents resulting in major economic loss. Saxton pointed to the recent heist in February at Brussels Airport in Belgium. Armed thieves dressed as guards were able to penetrate the airport’s perimeter fence and get away with an estimated $50 million worth of diamonds.
Events such as these will keep the airport perimeter-security market robust, he said.
Speaking at a 2011 House committee on oversight and govern-ment reform hearing, Rafi Ron, president of New Age Security Solutions, a global security consulting firm based in Virginia, and former director of security at Tel Aviv-Ben Gurion International Airport in Israel, said that one major problem with airport perim-eter security in America is a lack of uniformity.
“Most of our airports today are still not protected by an operating perimeter intrusion detecting system. In other terms, we don’t know when a breach occurs. We get to know that only when it is addressed by somebody or when we end up with a stowaway making his way to the wheel,” said Ron.
Story continues on page 16
16 N AT I O N A L D E F E N S E • M AY 2 0 1 3
� Attempts to create a better system to gauge the effectiveness of border security have not yet come to fruition, said a top Customs and Border Protection official.
Since 2010, the Department of Homeland Security has been working on its Border Condition Index (BCI). The index — which is meant to evaluate the state of border security — will examine data and trends, both quantitatively and qualitatively. The initiative is meant to look past how much money has been spent, or how many personnel DHS has hired as the sole indicators of a safer border.
“It’s not appropriate to measure inputs standing alone as mea-
sures of border security,” said Mark Borkowski, assistant commis-sioner at CBP’s office of technology innovation and acquisition during a House subcommittee on border and maritime security hearing. “It’s not correct to say we just spent a lot of money and therefore we’re better. We need to link that to outcomes.”
Still, Borkowski said that the BCI was never meant to be a com-plete gauge of border security, but rather a tool to use alongside other data.
“It is an indicator; it’s not a perfect number,” he said.Chairman of the subcommittee, Rep. Candice Miller, R-Mich.,
said that if the BCI cannot be ready within the next two years, Congress will need to reevaluate whether it will be a useful tool. A way to formally evaluate border security is needed before compre-hensive immigration reform can take place, she said.
“Without a way to quantify effectiveness there can really be no basis of determining how secure our borders are, let alone justifica-tion for immigration policy decisions,” said Miller.
Miller said that DHS must produce real results in order to win over the trust of Congress and U.S. citizens.
“Congress and the American people must have a great deal of confidence that the nation’s border-security agencies can deter or apprehend the overwhelming majority who cross the border ille-gally,” said Miller. “The department should be held accountable for outcomes and certainly not keep telling us that the border is just more secure than ever because there are a lot of agents or technol-ogy or infrastructure along the border.”
Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee, D-Texas, said that DHS had to “get in the game.”
The number of Border Patrol agents has doubled from 10,000 in 2004 to more than 21,000 today, according to a statement prepared by CBP for the hearing. Additionally, DHS has made “unprecedent-ed investments” in technology, the statement said.
In 2012, Border Patrol apprehensions remained at a historic low, with 364,768 recorded. They were down 78 percent since 2000 — when they peaked — and by 50 percent since 2008, said the statement.
“The decline in apprehensions is a good indicator that the border is more secure,” Borkowski said.
The statement also cited FBI data that found that violent crimes in Southwest border states dropped by 40 percent over the last two decades, while four major cities along the border — San Diego; McAllen, Texas; El Paso, Texas; and Tucson, Ariz. — saw population growth.
you find a lot of them are running at very low utilizations on average. We’ve still got to tackle that problem, and cloud comput-ing helps us do that,” Spires said.
About $200 million was allocated for the program in a fiscal year 2013 budget re-quest that went to Capitol Hill, Spires said.
Better education across the federal gov-ernment is also needed, Spires said.
“With 200,000-plus employees, people are going to make mis-takes. … How you deal with those also becomes a critical issue on cyber prevention,” said Spires. “DHS is taking this issue very, very seriously and really putting more and more resources in how do we better protect the homeland security enterprise and, in particular, critical infrastructure.”
DHS has also been implementing smart card authentication to
obtain access to protected computers and areas, follow-ing instruction from the Homeland Security Presiden-tial Directive 12 initiative. HSPD-12, released in 2004, called for federal employees and contractors to acquire secure, electronic identification.
“We all know that strong authentication — at least two-factor authentication — is a really critical aspect of good security today,” said Spires. “Within DHS, we’ve got nearly 100 percent of us that have these smart cards.”
When it comes to authenticating mobile devices, however, Spires said it is impractical to swipe the HSPD-12 card into a phone or tablet.
“We’re looking at things like derived credentials and how can we still do strong authentication in that particular environment. This is an area that is not yet really mature from an industry perspective,” he said.
Email your comments to [email protected]
DHS Struggles to Find Effective Measures for Border Security
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18 N at i o N a l D e f e N s e • M ay 2 0 1 3
LEGAL COMMENTARYBY TOdd J. CANNi ANd FREdERiC M. LEvY
After years of congressional complaints, federal agencies are responding to con-cerns about how they handle contractor debarments and suspensions. New civilian debarment offices have emerged and are becoming active.
Agencies are becoming more aggressive in their pursuit of cases. In the past, most suspension debarment officials focused on cases supported by some judicial action as an underpinning for a suspension or pro-posed debarment — indictments, pleas, con-victions, deferred prosecution agreements, civil judgments and settlement agreements. It is now more common to see more “fact-based cases” in which ethics issues fall short of criminal conduct, questionable business practices and contract performance issues. Such cases are based on mere allegations of wrongdoing and may be supported only by investigative interviews, contractor disclo-sures or contracting officer decisions.
As agencies become more comfort-able handling fact-based cases, such actions are coming earlier in the investi-gative or judicial process.
This development presents significant issues for contractors. Companies now may face suspension or debarment pro-ceedings before they have had the time to ascertain relevant facts, let alone dis-close them to the government or reme-diate the circumstances that allowed the events to occur. This is especially true for cases involving contracts performed over-seas or in a war zone, where information flow is slow and compliance may not neces-sarily be a top priority.
Contractors are at an increased risk of finding themselves or their personnel before agency debarring officials. This is equally true for small and large contractors.
The consequences can be ineligibility for new awards and collateral reputational harm. Such inquiries can be costly to address. Even a seemingly isolated compliance issue involving no more than a handful of people can lead a suspension debarment official to determine that the issue is emblematic of a broader, systemic problem. To resolve the debarment matter, particularly through an administrative agreement, the SDO may require the contractor to assess compa-nywide ethics and compliance programs. These reviews would be conducted by an
independent expert, and a company would have to agree in advance to implement the expert’s recommendations, and to retain an outside monitor to oversee and verify implementation and compliance. SDOs will insist that such costs be treated as unallow-able under government contracts.
With decreased procurement dollars and many programs at risk of extinction, there is increased pressure to capture new business. Employees feel this pressure even if man-agement does not explicitly exert it. These circumstances will inevitably put individu-als, even the most ethical, in a position where they are confronted with the decision of whether to cross the legal line or, more likely, with having to decide how far to venture into gray areas of ethical and legal behavior. Contractors should take a close look at their business capture approaches, including the use of non-public information and the recruitment of personnel from the government and competitors.
Individuals come into contact with infor-mation from their government custom-
ers, competitors, consultants and colleagues. Contractors must ensure they have pro-grams, training and internal controls in place to ensure personnel are intimately familiar with the restrictions on using sensitive, non-public information, including company proprietary information, competitor propri-etary information, government non-public information, source selection information and bid or proposal information. These pro-grams not only should cover employees, but also consultants.
When provided or confronted with access to such information, employees must understand that they cannot assume it was obtained properly and lawfully, and the organization should install protocols to ensure the origins of sensitive information are identified, recorded and tracked.
The hiring of former government per-sonnel or employees from either competi-tors or the government also presents risks. New hires could be unaware of their new
employer’s compliance practices and eth-ics standards. They may come bearing their former employer’s sensitive proprietary and non-public information, or with connec-tions that provide access to such informa-tion. And regardless of their best intentions, they may have been involved in programs or activities that create a conflict of interest that must be disclosed.
Contractors should fully vet new employ-ees, ensure that new personnel are aware of the ethics and compliance standards of the company, and that both the new employees as well as the employees who will inter-act with them understand the compliance issues and risks.
Agencies are under pressure to detect and address fraud, waste and abuse and to make the most of scarce procurement dollars. Procurement officials increasingly are being trained regarding suspension and debarment and are being encouraged to refer instances of questionable conduct to debarring officials.
Contract disputes — including cases involving alleged poor performance or disputes regarding contract interpreta-tion — regularly are brought to the attention of a suspension debarment official. This should cause contrac-tors to review the way they handle and respond to performance disputes. At a minimum, contractors should assume that agency SDOs are actively evaluating contracts terminated for
default and cause, including delivery and task orders.
Where performance problems are unavoidable, it is recommended that con-tractors advise their customers as soon as possible, and preferably in advance of the issue, so as to avoid compounding the issue by potentially making the customer believe they were misled.
Notably, a number of agencies now require contracting officials to refer termi-nations for default and cause to the agency SDO.
Even the most sophisticated and exten-sive compliance and ethics programs cannot preclude the likelihood that at least one employee in an organization at some time, intentionally or inadvertently, will break the rules. SDOs generally are pragmatic and understand this reality. When contractors were employing best practices in their eth-ics compliance programs, detected the non-compliance and self-disclosed it promptly in
Agencies Becoming More AggressiveIn Pursuit of Contractor Wrongdoing
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a complete and candid manner, SDOs often will determine that the contractor acted responsibly and nothing more will come of the situation. The benefits to contractors of candid and complete disclosures cannot be overstated. Companies should commit appropriate resources to fully investigate such matters and ensure their disclosures are thorough.
Further, it is important that contractors avoid treating as insignificant non-compli-ance issues which, when viewed discretely, have minor financial impact or collateral consequences.
Contractors of all sizes struggle with when and how much to disclose, and to whom. They should always strive to disclose early. For long running investigations, this may necessitate an early initial disclosure with periodic updates.
Ideally, the disclosure would be a self-contained document that would assure the most skeptical reader that the contractor had fully investigated the situation and, if appropriate, taken disciplinary action. The government should come away feeling all of its questions had been answered and there is no need to conduct its own investigation.
Most disclosures are provided to the agency suspension debarment official. If the SDO senses the disclosure was less than candid or complete, there is a significant possibility that rather than asking questions, the SDO will issue an inquiry. To minimize the likelihood of a government investiga-tion, disclosures should include a discussion of the contract or program involved, the nature of the non-compliance, when it hap-pened, the circumstances giving rise to the non-compliance and how it was discovered. The disclosure also should have a descrip-tion of any harm caused to the government, financial or otherwise, and how the contrac-tor addressed or rectified that harm, who was involved, their role with the company, and what relevant training, if any, they were provided before the event.
After identifying a non-compliance event, contractors sometimes try to determine whether the event triggers the mandatory disclosure rule in the Federal Acquisition Regulation. But whether an issue falls out-side the scope of the mandatory disclosure rule should not be the end of the inquiry. The range of conduct that could give rise to a suspension or debarment is much broader than the conduct covered by the mandatory disclosure rule.
If the contractor decides to make a vol-untary disclosure, it need not necessarily be addressed to the inspector general, as is required in almost all circumstances. Careful consideration should be given as to which government officials should be
informed or would appreciate learning of the matter. In some cases, it may be advis-able to share the disclosure with a broader group within the government, including customers and the agency SDO. There is a significant likelihood that these individuals will be apprised of the situation, and the contractor benefits from having brought it to that person’s attention directly.
Contractors are advised against informal or casually-relayed “soft disclosures,” where the disclosing party informs a low-level pro-gram official orally, via voice mail or e-mail. The government ultimately may not view this as a genuine attempt to disclose. Once a contractor has made the determination voluntarily to disclose, it is important that the disclosure be thorough, complete and accurate, just as in the case of a manda-tory disclosure. A less than candid voluntary disclosure itself could be referred to an agency SDO and be the basis for a non-responsibility inquiry.
To date, agency SDOs have not focused on classified programs, and the intelligence agencies have not actively been engaged in suspension and debarment. This stems from a reluctance to expose classified programs to outside scrutiny, and because agency SDOs are not equipped to handle an administra-tive record containing classified informa-tion.
But defense and intelligence agencies have not been immune from criticism for failing to use suspension and debarment in all of their programs, including classified ones.
As federal spending declines, some con-tractors may be tempted to commit few-er resources to their internal governance programs. That would be misguided. The current environment is likely to be one of increased scrutiny and enforcement, of heightened focus on contractor commit-ment to ethics and compliance.
Contractors should ensure that they are implementing programs appropriate to their size and business risks, such as values-based ethics training, a robust internal hotline program, a process fully addressing all com-plaints received in a timely manner, compli-ance processes and training in government contracts and disclosure protocols. ND
Todd J. Canni is counsel in the Wash-ington, D.C., office of McKenna Long & Aldridge LLP and also serves as co-chair of the ABA Public Contract Law Section Debarment and Suspen-sion Committee. Frederic M. Levy is a partner in the same office and serves as co-chair of the ABA Public Contract Law Section Debarment and Suspen-sion Committee.
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22 N AT I O N A L D E F E N S E • M AY 2 0 1 3
ACQUISITION REPORTBY COL. MICHAEL SLOANE
Darkness has fallen. The fog drifts toward a soldier’s position. Smoke from nearby fires blends with the fog. The pall shrouds the soldier and his squad as they move carefully through enemy territory.
The soldier knows the enemy is approaching through the fields despite the dense and obscuring haze that makes it hard to see. He turns on his family of weap-on sights. The reticle appears instantly in his enhanced night vision goggle. Without bringing the weapon to his shoulder, he sees
the outline of enemy combatants appear through the mist and darkness. Thermal signatures reveal enemy personnel no more than 100 meters away. The soldier acquires, engages and destroys the targets.
The squad maneuvers down a dirt road through a hostile urban environment. Ap-proximately 1,500 meters ahead, soldiers see a church on the left and a mosque on the right. The “joint terminal attack con-troller,” or JTAC, takes the “joint effects tar-geting system,” or JETS, from his rucksack. He quickly identifies six enemy combatants placing improvised explosive devices. He
sees the enemy carry weapons between the two buildings. He lazes the target and identifies the combatants’ exact coordi-nates. The JTAC wirelessly calls for a strike. Within moments, a flash and a deafening boom announce the delivery of a precision round. The attack eliminates the threat without damaging the houses of worship.
The family of weapon sights and JETS are two programs that will change the way soldiers fight.
The FWS program includes three vari-ants that combine advanced thermal weap-on-sight technology. The individual variant mounts to the M4, M16, M249 squad automatic weapon, and to the M136 AT4, and M141 bunker defeat munitions. The crew-served variant is for the M240, M2, and MK19 weapons. The sniper variant is compatible with the M24, M110, M107, and the precision sniper rifle.
FWS clips in front of the optic soldiers currently use. It provides visibility in low light, and obscured and adverse weather conditions without removal of the day optic. This gives soldiers aim-point accu-racy without the need to re-zero. All three variants also operate in stand-alone mode without the day optic.
The FWS individual variant has a wire-less rapid target acquisition capability to provide a zeroed weapon aim-point in the soldier’s enhanced night-vision goggle, or ENVG. Soldiers can fire quickly and accu-rately from almost any carry position and with significantly reduced exposure to ene-my fire. This reduces a soldier’s engagement time relative to current shooting tactics. In the passive environment, it eliminates the need for active lasers for target engagement.
Rapid target acquisition uses an ultra-wideband personal area network with standardized data and image transfer pro-tocols for additional sensor data expansion. Soldiers can wirelessly tailor information displays in their ENVG. Soldiers have the decisive advantage in the time it takes to engage the enemy.
The FWS crew-served variant uses ballis-tic equations that provide a dynamic reticle with input from an integrated laser range finding device. Soldiers get a more accu-rate aim-point that automatically adjusts for range, ammunition and vertical angle. The reticle wirelessly transmits to a semi-transparent helmet-mounted display. It also operates during mounted and dismounted operations.
The FWS sniper variant will have a large-format high-definition display with increased pixel density. It will be possible for snipers to engage targets accurately at distances equal to the weapon’s maximum effective range. This will be feasible at all
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light levels and in obscured environments. When fielded, it will be the first thermal weapon sight specifically developed for the sniper community.
JETS improves the ability of dismounted forward observers and JTAC controllers to locate targets accurately. Current hand-held magnetic direction-finding systems are less reliable. They cannot provide the consistent accuracy required to employ GPS-guided precision munitions. These munitions include the XM 1156 precision guidance kit, Excalibur and guided multiple launch rocket system. JETS addresses target location inaccuracies with non-magnetic azimuth-finding technology. It will provide better than 10-meter target location error — compared to 2.5 kilometers that is required before employing precision muni-tions without target measurement.
The JETS system includes technologies that will revolutionize handheld precision
targeting. Improved night optics enable the system to provide almost double the night target acquisition range of existing targeting systems in a less than five-pound package.
JETS will incorporate a selective avail-ability anti-spoofing module (SAASM) GPS for precise self-location. It will use newly developed celestial navigation tech-nology for near-instantaneous precision azimuth solutions in favorable weather conditions. Modular, all-weather, 24-7, pre-cision azimuth and vertical angle module supplement the celestial capability. This gives a precise target location in various operational environments uninhibited by magnetic disturbances. JETS also will pro-vide a pulsed repetition frequency, coded laser marker/ designator for employment of laser guided munitions.
These programs are overseen by the Army’s program executive office soldier’s project manager for soldier sensors and lasers. The majority of all the program manager’s work is focused on two organiza-tions: the Maneuver Center of Excellence at Fort Benning, Ga., and the Fires Center of Excellence at Fort Sill, Okla.
Teamwork between combat developers at the centers of excellence and the materi-al developers at PEO soldier is paramount. The Maneuver Center of Excellence says the infantry soldier’s mission is to “close with the enemy by means of fire and
maneuver in order to destroy or capture him, or to repel his assault with fire, close combat, and counterattack.” The project manager for soldier sensors and lasers sup-ports both centers of excellence with 18 major acquisition programs.
The ENVG is in full-rate production and is being provided to soldiers in accordance with the Army’s fielding plan.
The FWS individual variant is scheduled for a milestone-B procurement decision in the first quarter of fiscal year 2014. A suc-cessful milestone-B review would allow the Army to enter an engineering manufactur-ing development and then a low-rate initial production phase.
The Army decision that indicates pro-gram readiness for production, milestone C, is currently expected in fiscal year 2016.
JETS just completed a successful mile-stone-B. It must satisfy the same rigor-ous Army acquisition criteria as FWS and therefore is likewise expected to be ready for milestone C in fiscal year 2016. ND
Col. Michael Sloane is the Army’s project manager for soldier sensors and lasers. Lt. Col. Chris Schneider, product manager for soldier maneuver sen-sors and Lt. Col. Mike Traxler, product manager for soldier precision targeting devices, contributed to this article.
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24 N at i o N a l D e f e N s e • M ay 2 0 1 3
By yasmin TadjdehJust outside the nation’s capital on
March 15, a furious war was waged against invisible, online foes.
But the U.S. cyber troops toiling away at dozens of computer banks were not in the employ of the Central Intelligence Agency, the Federal Bureau of Investigation or even the military. In fact, none of them had graduated high school.
Fortunately for the students — who were participating in a program that grooms youth for science-related careers — the threat was simulated.
The program, called CyberPatriot, is one of dozens of new initiatives to stop the brain drain that officials worry has taken root in U.S. engineering and science fields.
Competing made an impression on Colin O’Brien, a 17-year-old from Cor-pus Christi, Texas, who had never con-sidered a cyber-related career before engaging in the fictional war.
“This has really kind of introduced me to … the amount of stuff you can do with settings on a computer, and how you can secure it against bad guys,” said O’Brien at CyberPatriot’s national com-petition in National Harbor, Md.
O’Brien is one example of a student taking part in the numerous efforts to teach and excite young people about careers in science, technology, engineer-ing and mathematics, also known as STEM.
While unemployment rates across the nation remain high, many STEM jobs remain vacant, with more positions expect-ed to open as older workers retire in the coming years.
The problems associated with a weak STEM applicant pool can threaten nation-al security, some experts have said. In response, industry, academia and the gov-ernment have funneled millions of dollars into STEM-education initiatives. But the numbers aren’t budging.
“Across the country, the number of young students interested in STEM is decreas-ing. This is causing a growing shortage of science-based talent in our workplaces and universities, and it represents a serious problem for our nation,” Wes Bush, CEO and president of Northrop Grumman Corp. told National Defense in an email.
Science-based expertise is essential to the United States’ economy and society, Bush said. Without a substantial growth in these fields, the country will be unable to sustain its leadership across the globe, he said.
In 2012, Northrop Grumman, along with its charitable arm, the Northrop Grumman Foundation, gave approximately $22.8 mil-lion to STEM-related groups, he said.
Various propositions have been thrown out to stop the talent hemorrhaging, includ-ing engaging potential STEM employees while they are young.
In order to land a high-skilled manufac-turing job after high school, students must be engaged in STEM by the fifth grade, said Ed Swallow, vice president of Northrop Grumman’s Information Systems division.
Fifth grade is “critical” because that is when students and parents begin consid-ering various available educational paths, said Swallow, who is the chairman of the National Defense Industrial Association’s STEM Workforce Division.
If parents do not get their students on a pathway to completing algebra in eighth grade, then it will be difficult to graduate with a bachelor’s degree in a STEM field within four years, Swallow said.
More programs to engage elementary and middle school students are needed, he said, pointing to DoD STARBASE as one example.
“STARBASE was actually started spe-cifically to get fifth graders excited about science and math. That dates back into the 90s, because the DoD saw a critical need for fifth graders to get more science and
math,” Swallow said.The Defense Department program
which engages fifth graders in underrep-resented areas, started in 1991 in Detroit, Mich., and has since been giving students a “hands-on, minds-on” knowledge of STEM, according to its website.
At CyberPatriot — a program established by the Air Force Association and sponsored by Northrop Grumman, among other com-panies — contest organizers aim to steer students toward careers in cyber.
“It’s … [a] way to lure them into STEM because what we have learned is it is not just a matter of generating more curriculum material, [it’s] how do you excite them? How do you motivate them? How do you draw them in,” said Bernie Skoch, commis-sioner of CyberPatriot.
A competition does all those things, he said.
CyberPatriot started in 2009 in Florida with eight teams. The 2013 event boasted 1,226 teams from all 50 states, Canada and Department of Defense Dependent Schools in Europe and Asia, Skoch said.
Skoch considers the program a success.“We have students who come
through our program that had never expressed an interest in cybersecurity, but they find themselves now pursu-ing education in a technical field. We have students through our program that are offered internships from our sponsors,” said Skoch. “We see strong evidence that we are making a differ-ence.”
Besides motivating students, the program also benefits many disenfran-chised participants, said Carey Peck, the director of CyberPatriot at the Los Angeles Unified School District System, where many schools are clas-
sified as Title 1. Schools in this classification have significant populations of low-income students and receive supplemental federal funds to assist in improving the educational environment.
Peck helps run a program called “Beyond the Bell.” The initiative is meant to engage students before and after school to promote learning.
CyberPatriot is one option that students can participate in through Beyond the Bell, he said.
“It engages a lot of students that we wouldn’t catch with other activities. It really immerses them in an activity which is productive [not only] in terms of their academic learning but also their career aspects,” said Peck. “The ladder that they get just by this program and the contacts they make to a career, to college, to a bigger world, all that … is a way out.”
Industry, Academia, Government Grapple With Dwindling STEM Workforce
Students participate in the CyberPatriot national competition. Northrop GrummaN
Peck said his district started this year’s season with 52 teams participating in CyberPatriot. Four made it into the nation-al championships, where 28 teams partici-pated.
Air Force Maj. Gen. Suzanne Vautrinot, who heads the service’s cyber division, attended the competition and said it is essential that students have a sound knowl-edge of the STEM fields.
“This is young people learning the foun-dations early so they can become the future of this nation tomorrow, next year and for the next decades,” said Vautrinot.
Air Force Cyber Command does not have enough workers, she said, which is why it is important that young people begin STEM studies early.
“This is foundational to the future of the nation,” Vautrinot said. “The future of that success is these young people understand-ing the foundations of science, technology and engineering, and being able to apply them.”
In March, Northrop Grumman announced that it would renew sponsorship of CyberPa-triot for another three years with a $4.5 million grant.
But while CyberPatriot targets students at the high school level, reform is also needed at the collegiate level, said Brian Fitzgerald, CEO of Business High-Educa-tion Forum, a coalition of industry CEOs who support education reform.
Colleges are not doing enough to engage students pursuing STEM careers, Fitzger-ald said. During their senior year of high school, only 17 percent of students who are interested in STEM careers and profi-cient in math go on to study such a field in college. Of those, 50 percent switch to a non-STEM major by their junior year, Fitzgerald said.
One reason for these numbers is colleges approach STEM fields more academically, rather than practically, often leading stu-dents to drop the major, Fitzgerald said. Universities must offer more hands-on applications of STEM studies if they want to keep students enrolled, he said.
Swallow said that universities often place difficult classes intentionally in strategic levels of education, hoping to weed stu-dents out of the program because many universities’ facilities cannot handle large numbers of STEM students.
“They’re actually trying to size the class that’s going to the upper class. It’s a con-scious decision on their part to get down to just the people that are the top in that field,” said Swallow.
What is needed is not more researchers, but more students who can create things, Swallow said.
The University of Maryland system is not only drawing students into its program, but also giving them real-world experience.
BHEF, Northrop Grumman and Univer-sity of Maryland, College Park, will launch the Advanced Cybersecurity Experiences for Students (ACES) program in the fall. ACES is meant to create a living-learning environment, where participating students gain practical and applicable knowledge of STEM careers through working in cyber. The program will also be brought to some other Maryland universities.
“This is an opportunity to really build up the cyber capabilities of the University Sys-tem of Maryland and open opportunities for students,” said Fitzgerald. “We think this is a model that can help address one of the most serious challenges that faces [STEM].”
Both Fitzgerald and Swallow emphasized the need for STEM education to take place at local levels.
“Every part of the country is different. The more we try to do one-size-fits-all, the worse that fits anyone,” said Swallow. “It’s all about national strategy [and] local action.”
Still, despite millions of dollars being put into STEM-education initiatives, the numbers aren’t where they should be, Fitzgerald said.
“We see that STEM education is decou-pled from the innovation needs of industry in some fairly fundamental ways,” Fitzger-ald said. “It suggests that the billions of dol-lars of investments … have not really made the kind of progress we may have hoped.”
While progress is being made slowly, Fitzgerald said, it is not keeping pace with the demands of the economy.
To make the situation more dire, Swal-low said the United States will soon face a major problem: STEM professionals retir-ing in droves.
“This is not a matter of a crisis right at this moment. We can see it coming eight years, seven years down the road,” Swallow said.
Over the next decade, nearly 40 percent of workers in the aerospace and defense industries will retire, according to an Avia-tion Week & Space Technology study. As workers retire, industry, government and academia will lose knowledge, Swallow said.
“The biggest challenge will be in the knowledge gap. ... That’s the kind of brain drain that everybody worries about if we don’t have the next generation come in and work on the same kind of projects and learn from the people who did it before,” Swallow said. ND
M a y 2 0 1 3 • N a t i o N a l D e f e N s e 25
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BY STEW MAGNUSONWhether it is called “soft power,” or the latest buzz-word, “the seventh warfighting function,” special opera-tions forces are entering a new chapter in their storied
history, senior SOF leaders said. The “dead of night” direct-action operations will be fewer
in number, while the more touchy-feely missions “by, through and with” partner nations will increase, Navy Adm. William H. McRaven, commander of U.S. Special Operations Command, said recently.
“Their missions are not secretive. They are not sexy. Nor do they involve low flying black helicopters in the dead of night.” Afghani-stan is winding down. This “will give us an opportunity to do more in places we have neglected,” McRaven said at the National Defense Industrial Association’s Special Operations/Low Intensity Conflict conference in Washington, D.C.
The question is whether all of the command’s components are ready to take on these missions that have more to do with break-ing down cultural barriers in a village than breaking down an insurgent’s door. Each of the four services contributes personnel to SOCOM. Each comes with its own skill sets, doctrine and history, said Gordon Potter, president of Practical Defense Training, and a 15-year veteran of Army Special Forces.
For example, Navy Sea, Air, Land (SEAL) teams historically have not conducted foreign internal defense missions, whereas Army special operators have done so for years.
Special operations forces are serving in about 70 countries and very few deployments involve commando missions. Most are sup-porting U.S. embassies, training foreign forces or strengthening bonds with allied militaries.
The ultimate goal is to prevent conflict before it happens or to nip terrorism in the bud before it spreads.
“It is hard, slow and methodical work that does not lend itself to a quick win,” McRaven said.
Potter until 2012 served as a military adviser in Afghanistan, where he worked on socio-cultural, village stability and psychologi-cal operations programs.
He witnessed first hand a SEAL unit’s ham-handed attempt to engage in a village stability operation. Untrained in how to work in the complex cultural environment, the team picked a man whom they believed should be the police chief. The choice caused a great deal of discord in the area, and the man and his brother were assas-sinated, Potter said in an interview.
“It’s not their fault,” he said of the SEAL team. “They should have never been tasked with that because they don’t have the doctrine.
“How many Navy SEALs have worked with [military informa-tion support operations] or psy-ops elements?” he asked. “Not many. Usually they are door-kickers.”
Army Special Forces, meanwhile, have been doing these opera-tions since it was established six decades ago.
“They have a much more comprehensive approach because they have the doctrine to support it,” Potter said. The problem is that there aren’t enough of them. Army Special Forces are spread thin, and the other three services are lagging when it comes to “indirect action” skills, he added.
William Wechsler, deputy assistant secretary of defense for spe-cial operations/low intensity conflict, said there will always be the need for direct activities.
“But by and large as we look forward, it is more likely than not that the geographic places in the world and the types of adversaries that we are going to have to confront are going to require us to use more indirect means than direct means,” he said.
SOCOM is going to have to operate more in the “human terrain,” he added. The command will have to understand the gaps it needs
to fill to effectively operate in that domain, he added.Who is the adversary? “What is the socio-political, economic and
cultural environment that we are going to have to deal with?” he asked.
Rear Adm. Sean A. Pybus, commander of Navy Special Warfare Command, said at the conference that he wanted to change SEAL training and emphasize “brain over bicep.”
“We intend to make more investments in their mental capacity, their ability to focus, their ability to relax, their ability to memorize, to have a better understanding of human and physical terrain,” he said.
“We have for many years now invested in physical fitness and rehabilitation. We’re very strong there. I want to do the same with our mental abilities so we can not only be resilient, but improve our capabilities in that realm.”
At the root of this is the belief among many in the military that the era of state-on-state warfare is coming to an end. Unstable, developing nations will be the battlegrounds of the future and the opponents will more than likely be what Potter described as “thugs” — religious extremists and criminals who are trying to impose their will on a local population.
The January 2012 “Sustaining U.S. Global Leadership: Priorities for 21st Century Defense” strategic guidance document said U.S. forces will no longer be sized to “conduct large-scale, prolonged stability operations.”
They “will nevertheless be ready to conduct limited counterin-surgency and other stability operations if required, operating along-side coalition forces wherever possible,” the paper said.
These “small-footprint” missions are the heart and soul of special operations.
26 N at i o N a l D e f e N s e • M ay 2 0 1 3
Special Operations Missions To Require New Doctrine
M a y 2 0 1 3 • N a t i o N a l D e f e N s e 27
The summer before the new strategic guidance emerged, Army Special Operations Command officials went to Training and Doc-trine Command with a proposal to add SOF as a “seventh war fighting function” to the Army.
It would follow mission command, movement and maneuver, intelligence, fires, sustainment and protection.
The effort was instigated by then-Army Chief of Staff Gen. George Casey, who wanted to see what Army SOF and general-purpose forces learned after serving in Afghanistan and Iraq together for 10 years, wrote Army Lt. Col. Jan Kenneth Gleiman in a monograph that was produced for the School for Advanced Military Studies at Fort Leavenworth, Kan.
A working group comprising members of Special Forc-es, TRADOC, general-purpose and other Army organizations looking at the question ultimately recommended that SOF and its special skill sets be considered as an essential part of the Army core capabilities, he said in the paper, “Opera-tional Art and the Clash of Organizational Cultures: Postmor-tem on Special Operations as a Seventh Warfighting Function.” As the title suggests, when Army Special Forces went to TRADOC with the final proposal, it was shot down.
Potter said the idea was well received, but there was no doctrine to support it.
“They technically couldn’t support it. Doctrine always comes first,” Potter said.
At the heart of the seventh warfighting function concept is the acknowledgement that forces must also engage in a war of ideas with adversaries, he said.
General-purpose forces still have to be prepared to take on conventional and hybrid threats, he said. But the second part of a conflict — stability operations — is where the battle for hearts and
minds are won. If that goes badly, then things go south.
This need “is not foreign to spe-cial ops. This is something they can address very well,” Potter said.
Gleiman wrote that there was broader resistance to the seventh warfighting function concept than simply the lack of doctrine to sup-port it.
It was a true “clash of organiza-tional cultures” between the big Army and SOF, he said. Its failure may have had more to do with this clash “than anyone cared to admit,” he said.
“The sudden death of the idea was puzzling to members of the SOF community who had worked on the proposal and viewed it as a critical first step in ensuring that command-ers and staffs of the Army’s major formations understand and integrate the capabilities of SOF in their plans and operations,” he wrote.
Potter said the will to change Army doctrine that will allow the concept to move forward must come from the top down, rather than bottom up. U.S. Army Central Command will have to drive the
idea, and go to political leaders to get them on board first.“It was technically impossible to do without making wide, sweep-
ing changes to doctrine on how forces were used, how forces were deployed and so forth,” Potter said.
Linda Robinson, a public policy scholar at the Wilson Center in Washington, D.C., noted that Army elements comprise half of SOCOM. The debate over its place in the larger Army is significant.
“If [Army Special Operations Forces] doesn’t get its future right, it will have a great effect for the entire community,” she said.
“There is an argument for institutionalizing some of this so it isn’t lost,” she said, referring to bringing the Army SOF and general-purpose forces closer together.
“You need to have the human domain in doctrine.” The seventh warfighting function concept has one important
proponent outside the special forces community. Army Chief of Staff Gen. Ray Odierno, spoke in favor of it in a speech at Fort Leavenworth, Kan., a year after TRADOC rejected the idea.
“Leaders must consider the second- and third-order effects of their actions ... but they must also appreciate how others interpret, evaluate and understand them,” he said during an Association of the United States Army conference in June 2012.
“In my mind, this may either require a seventh warfighting func-tion to capture the set of tasks related to working with foreign cultures that has become so integral to our current and future fights. Or as a minimum, it demands that we fully reflect the human aspects of this environment within each of our existing six func-tions,” Odierno said.
Army Special Forces have the unique skills and doctrine that allow it to carry out missions that require interaction with indig-enous cultures, Potter said.
Most of these skills are resident in the civil affairs and psycho-logical operations specialties, which are often misunderstood and poorly resourced, Potter said.
Above: U.S. Navy SEALs talk to local Afghans while conducting a mission in the Jaji Mountains. NAVY
Left: U.S. Special Forces soldier sets up his security position. ARMY
28 N at i o N a l D e f e N s e • M ay 2 0 1 3
Indeed, during two-days of panels and keynote speakers at the SO/LIC conference, civil affairs and psy-ops were only mentioned once.
“We pair these two capabilities together like they’re brother and sister. In fact, they are uniquely different capabilities, but both great enablers for us on the ground,” said retired Army Lt. Gen. Frank Kearney, former deputy director of strategic operational planning at the National Counterterrorism Center.
Civil affairs works to build governments and infrastructure. Military information support systems (MISO), the newest term for psy-ops, works on messaging and understanding the human terrain.
Civil affairs can open doors where the regular military are not welcome, he said.
They, and the MISO teams, “are sought after probably more than our operational forces, in a soft way, to assess what is going on and help people do things,” Kearney said.
“I think they’re under resourced. I think they’re under appreci-ated. And I think they are under employed in what they can do
best,” Kearney added.Army Lt. Gen. John F. Mulholland, SOCOM deputy command-
er, said there have been more resources to make the civil affairs and MISO communities more robust. Civil affairs, once staffed mostly by reservists, now has a more permanent presence in the active duty force.
“They are very important tools in our toolkit,” he said.Potter, who specializes in MISO, said that community needs to
adapt as well.One of its important functions is to poll populations to reveal
attitudes toward operations, local governments or extremist ideolo-gies. It normally uses nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) to carry out these surveys.
The MISO community has to change. NGOs can only do surveys where their workers are safe. Then they do one at a time, every six months, he noted.
How do you build data sets in remote, or unsafe locations, where there are no nonprofits? Potter asked.
■ A strategic shift to the Asia-Pacific, along with a hoped for gradual disengagement in the Middle East and South Asia, will usher in a new era for Special Operations Com-mand as it returns to its roots, which is car-rying out foreign internal defense missions.
As the command moves forward, it has examples of what worked and what didn’t to go by.
Two of them, mentioned by SOCOM Commander Navy Adm. William H. McRa-ven in a January speech, are Colombia and the Philippines.
At the time of 9/11, the Philippines’ Muslim south was considered terrorist safe havens. The Abu Sayaeff group kidnapped tourists and set off bombs in public.
“Today largely through the magnificent efforts of our SOF advisory teams and their Filipino counterparts, the threat is contained. Security has greatly improved,” McRaven said. “It is a story that rivals our success in Colombia” where SOF advised the local military on how to tackle the left-ist Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colom-bia — People’s Army, better known by its Spanish acronym, FARC.
Not mentioned until a reporter brought it up was Mali. Throughout the last decade, special operations forces were part of the larger State Department sponsored pro-gram, the Trans-Saharan Counter Terrorism Initiative, which had a stated goal of creat-ing stability in the region in order to prevent terrorist safe havens.
In Mali, SOCOM supplied trainers through joint combined exchange exercises. In these operations, A-teams of about 12 special operators would train local troops and, in return, received knowledge about
fighting in that country. The month-long surges included civil affairs teams that per-formed some engineering tasks, distributed school and medical supplies and held medi-cal and dental clinics.
By the time McRaven spoke in late Janu-ary, French forces were being called in to eradicate an Islamic extremist regime that was entrenched in the nation’s far north.
“What we have learned in working around the world in Colombia, Afghanistan and the Philippines is you’ve got to have that persistent presence. It has been difficult for us in some countries to have a persistent presence, and Mali is a case in point. We had an episodic presence in Mali,” he added.
The key to the indirect approach to preventing conflicts is “patience, persistence and building trust with our partners — a trust that cannot be achieved through episodic deployments, or chance contacts,” McRaven said.
“You can’t surge trust,” he added.McRaven said he didn’t know if a per-
sistent presence would have changed the U.S. military’s relationship with the Malian forces, or whether they would have become better fighters.
William Wechsler, deputy assistant sec-retary of defense for special operations/low intensity conflict, polled the audience with a show of hands on how many could name the major tribal groups in Mali. Few were able to do so.
There isn’t much expertise within the military about places such as Mali, he noted. The crucial knowledge may be resident in other government agencies.
In November 2006, National Defense Magazine traveled to Mali to embed with an A-team that was training Malian para-troopers. At that time, Mali was considered a beacon for democracy in the region, and had experienced peaceful transfers of pow-er through elections since the early 1990s.
Interviews with senior Malian military officers at the time revealed that the train-ing was useful, but the army had no equip-ment to wage an effective war with the al-Qaida affiliated militants operating in the remote north. The Malian paratroop-ers practiced jumps from a U.S. European Command-supplied C-130.
The local air force did not have large air-craft of its own to move troops to the region where terrorist groups were said to be
U.S. Army Special Operations Forces train paratroopers near Bamako, Mali, in November 2006. STEW MAGNUSON
Mali Crisis Offers Lessons for Special Operations Command
In Afghanistan, Potter developed a program called passive gather-ing, where attitudes about local messaging are monitored nonstop.
Taking the pulse of local populations and crafting messages to counter extremist ideologies are not traditional “commando” skills. Nor is learning how to navigate the complicated structure of a local village and learning local languages.
“Those skills sets need to be fully developed and appreciated and they need to be tied into areas of low-developed countries,” Potter said.
Maj. Gen. Mark Clark, commander of Marine Corp Special Operations Command, leads the newest SOF element. MARSOC was activated in 2006.
“When you think of SOF you think of direct action, but it really is a ying and yang of direct action and indirect action. … We want to push that line more to the right where it is more indirect,” he said.
He suggested that MARSOC is still looking for its place in SOCOM.
“What is our best niche without us being duplicative of what the
SOF components provide to our nation?” he asked.Pybus said he wants Naval Special Warfare elements to return to
“serious engagement” with partner nations.“Prior to 9/11 we did this. But we didn’t do it properly enough.
We need persistence,” he said. He has received the authority to allow teams to increase their
normal six-week engagements with host-nation forces to six months in order to gain more in-depth understanding of local cultures, and to strengthen ties. Once that deployment is over, another rotation will come immediately in to replace them. “Then you can persistently engage and properly select partners to improve their game. So they can take care of potential or real threats to the United States,” he said.
Robinson said the SOF community must mature from a largely tactical force to one that really understands what it means to have strategic impact. ND
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operating along with rebellious elements of the Tuaregs, a tribe that had always resisted rule from the south. Once there, the Malian army lacked tactical wheeled vehicles to cover a territory the size of Texas.
Part of the problem, Malian officers said, was that the civilian government, already one of the poorest in the world, put the military last in its funding priorities. Social welfare programs came first.
Al-Qaida affiliated fighters at that time were said to number about 100.
By early 2012, that had all changed with
hardened fighters flooding the region after hostilities ended in Libya. The Malian mili-tary complained to the civilian government that it did not have the resources to fight the resurgent Tuareg rebels and their allies.
The military staged a coup, ending democracy there, and by law, U.S. military engagement with those who had seized power.
The military-led government still couldn’t provide the trained troops and equipment needed to fight the threat. Instability allowed Islamic extremists to take over the north and
create a terrorist safe haven, an expansion the U.S. was attempting to prevent.
Wechsler said the Trans-Sahara Initiative, “clearly proved to be inadequate.”
Yet, the United States is not all-powerful. It is not the single preventive force for bad or positive actions around the world, he added.
“We not only try to understand the les-sons learned, not only in our success, but in things that didn’t work out the way we really wanted [them] to,” he added.
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By DAN PARSONSThe U.S. military may be the most high-profile owner and operator of unmanned aircraft, but it is far from the only customer of the controversial vehicles.
There is no continent on earth, save Antarctica, that is not home to a country that builds or is desperately seeking to buy unmanned aerial vehicles, spurred by the much-publicized success of their use in Iraq and Afghanistan.
There are already 4,000 different unmanned aircraft platforms in circulation on the global market.
There are concerns about that level of proliferation, primarily because UAVs can be used for lethal purposes. But only sophis-ticated models like the Global Hawk and Predator drones, over which the U.S. military and industry holds a virtual monopoly, are capable of such feats. The majority of remotely piloted aircraft will be smaller and perform intelligence, surveillance and reconnais-sance missions, analysts agree.
UAVs have been in service for several decades, but they exploded on the scene over the past decade because of their high-profile use by the U.S. military in Iraq and Afghanistan. In the last five years, demand for unmanned aircraft worldwide has grown by double digits annually with U.S. customers, accounting for two-thirds of the market, said Derrick Maple, principal analyst at IHS Industry Research and Analysis.
Such rapid growth is typical of an economic bubble, especially one on the cusp of bursting, Maple said. But international demand for UAVs will more than offset a downturn in military spending until the U.S. domestic market for unmanned systems grows to fill the gap.
“Typical of a market at this state of its life cycle, this high level of growth is not sustainable, especially as these [U.S. military] campaigns undergo a drawdown,” Maple said at the Association for Unmanned Systems International’s annual program review in March. “However, expanding worldwide opportunities are forecast to offset the reduction and support a growing market over the next 10 years.”
The U.S. unmanned systems market will shrink over the next five years but will eventually regenerate, perhaps expanding beyond its current size, Maple said. Still, the United States will remain the larg-est customer for UAVs, holding on to 45 percent of the global mar-ket. The Air Force’s requirements for high- and medium-altitude platforms will account for half of U.S. demand, Maple said.
Global defense spending on robotics is expected to exceed $13.4 billion at the end of 2013. Department of Defense spending on unmanned systems accounts for nearly half of that figure, at $6.5 billion. North America, Europe and Asia are the largest markets for unmanned systems, particularly aircraft.
Aircraft account for almost 90 percent of total defense spending on unmanned systems, dwarfing both ground and maritime systems, according to an AUVSI study. The global outlay in 2013 for UAVs will top $11 billion, with ground and maritime systems splitting the remaining $2.4 billion.
Fast on the heels of the military market is a nascent commercial industry that is on the verge of a growth spurt.
“As commercial mobile robot use continues to grow, defense spending will increase as commercial systems drive capability, reliability and price points,” Maple said. “Specifically for UAS, as legislation barriers gain definition over the next several years, com-mercial spending will exceed defense spending. Countries that delay airspace integration will lag in technology development, manufacturing, job development and economic stimulus, and will have to rely on imports.”
As with other military aircraft, a downturn in U.S. defense spend-ing has pushed UAV manufacturers to court foreign customers. International air and military expositions are taking notice.
“Concerning sequestration, it has pushed exhibitors to export
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M a y 2 0 1 3 • N a t i o N a l D e f e N s e 31
and increase their participation … as the national defense budget is decreasing,” said Gilles Fournier, managing director of the Paris Air Show.
Emeric D’Arcimoles, CEO of the PAS, listed declining global defense budgets as one of the reasons that the 2013 show booked up in record time, alongside a 4-percent to 5-percent year-over-year growth in the international aviation industry.
“Due to the decreasing of the military budget of the different countries for the exportation of their own production, [aircraft manufacturers] see they have to go to the international playing field more aggressively.”
Demand for UAVs has been just as noticeable at the Paris Inter-national Air Show, one of the world’s largest industry expositions. U.S. and Israeli companies in particular have ramped up their UAV marketing to international customers in recent years.
“Over the last few years, we have seen [the UAV industry] go from being this fledgling group to being a large, regular component,” said Tom Kallman, president and CEO of Kallman Worldwide, which organizes international trade shows.
The U.S. Federal Aviation Administration’s French counterpart, the Directorate General for Civil Aviation, is undergoing an assess-ment similar to the FAA’s of integrating unmanned systems into the country’s civil airspace. When the authorization is given, Fournier said the industry is poised for explosive growth.
“The main question at our air show will be in the next few years [how] to make them fly safely,” Fournier said at a recent pre-show press conference in Washington, D.C. “For the moment, we are not ready, but this industry is growing up very fast.”
Growth in UAV manufacturing and procurement is not lim-
soURCe: iHs iNDUstRy ReseaRCH aND aNalysis
ited to the West. China’s commit-ment to unmanned systems in terms of volume is larger even than the United States. The demand for indus-trial robots is estimated to hit 32,000 units by 2014, making it the world’s largest consumer of robotics technol-ogy, Maple said. Chinese officials have plans to launch unmanned aircraft in 11 provinces to survey and patrol the nation’s coastal borders. The Chinese army is in the process of fielding 100 vertical takeoff and landing UAVs.
“China has ramped up unmanned systems development faster than any other nation and threatens to surpass the West in technology and capability,” Maple said. “China has been operating UAVs for information security missions for some years now.
The future holds more armed capability and export potential.”U.S. allies Japan and South Korea have expressed need for several
UAV designs, especially in the context of the bellicose rhetoric being spewed in recent weeks by their common enemy North Korea. Both are in the market for medium- and high-altitude platforms. South Korea also has its eye on high-altitude aerostats specifically for monitoring the border with its northern neighbor.
Though it is unlikely the isolated nation could develop or pro-cure such aircraft, even North Korea has expressed a desire for a medium tactical UAS and one that can carry bombs.
For the first time in its history, the International Defense Expo-sition in Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates, dedicated an entire exhibition hall to unmanned systems during the show in February.
Between 2012 and 2021, the unmanned aerial vehicle market
for the Middle East is valued at $1 billion, according to information pro-vided at IDEX.
Israel has long dominated UAV pro-duction in the Middle East, though demand is rapidly expanding in the region. Leading that growth are Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Iraq and the UAE, according to IDEX officials.
General Atomics Aeronautical Sys-tems displayed at IDEX the Predator XP, an unarmed export version of its Predator UAV. The aircraft has an automatic takeoff and landing capa-bility and carries a Lynx multimode radar for maritime use.
On the first day of IDEX 2013, General Atomics announced a $197 million deal to provide the XP to the UAE Armed Forces General Headquarters.
Boeing-Insitu announced a similar teaming agreement with Abu Dhabi Autonomous Systems Investments for that company to pro-vide training, support and marketing for the ScanEagle and Integra-tor unmanned aircraft. The deal could expand into the Middle East and North Africa.
The deployment of unmanned aircraft in the Middle East, as elsewhere, expands as tensions escalate, Maple said. Both sides of the powder keg have developed indigenous UAS manufacturing capabilities, Maple said.
While Israel is a world leader in production, use and export of UAVs, Iran has an equally strong commitment to developing a peer capability. Iran has at least two tactical UAS designs in ser-vice: a medium-altitude capability and the Hassem multi-mission unmanned vehicle.
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Meanwhile the United States continues to sell unarmed unmanned surveillance aircraft to the Iraqi navy for protection of oil exports.
In South Asia, India and Pakistan are facing off in a UAV arms race of sorts. India has traditionally leaned on Israel for its supply of UAVs, Maple said, but has recently ramped up development of indigenous manufacturing. It now has a functioning medium-altitude, long-endurance UAV, with several other programs in the pipeline.
To the northwest, Pakistan — whose soil is so frequently the setting for U.S. drone strikes on Islamist extremists — is seeking medium-altitude and tactical UAS and may have partnered with China to develop those capabilities, Maple said.
In the United States, General Atomics — makers of Gray Eagle, Predator and Reaper drones — and Northrop Grumman, which builds the Global Hawk and Fire Scout, dominate half the UAS mar-ket. Other manufacturers that clock in with major U.S. and foreign contracts are Boeing and AAI Textron, which builds the Shadow UAV.
Border security and the proliferation of organized crime and drug trafficking are driving demand for UAVs in North and South America.
Canada is in the market for medium- and high-altitude, long-endurance unmanned systems for its air force and navy. Brazil and several other South American countries have expressed similar needs, Maple said. Brazil has purchased several Hermes 450 UAVs, built by Elbit Systems, for use by its army and navy.
Canada is also in the market for UAVs that can patrol the increas-ingly open Arctic, where its natural boundary of sea ice is receding annually. It is developing the Polar Hawk, a version of the Global Hawk that can withstand harsh Arctic environments to provide long-endurance, high-altitude surveillance there.
Argentina and Bolivia are mulling using UAVs to fight drug traffick-ers, as are U.S. Air Force and Navy officials whose job it is to interdict those drugs on their way north. The Mexican military wants mini and tactical UAVs for its navy and for use in homeland security missions. Venezuela intends to purchase unmanned aircraft to patrol its borders and for environmental monitoring.
Across the Atlantic, strong demand also exists in Europe and Africa. Analysts predict that within the European Union, integrated UAV development and production efforts could eventually contend with the U.S. and Israel.
“I could definitely see wider UAS collaboration among France, Germany, Italy and the [United Kingdom],” Maple said. “Because duplication of production makes no sense.”
NATO already has plans to purchase four Global Hawk Block 40s. Russia dominates the Eastern European market, accounting for three-quarters of demand there. It is also in talks with Israel regarding tech-nical and developmental cooperation for UAVs across all operations environments, Maple said. Russian defense giant Sukhoi is developing UAVs with strike and reconnaissance capabilities.
Nearby Poland and Turkey also have expansive desires for UAV technologies, particularly medium-altitude, high-endurance models.
The only nation in Africa with UAV manufacturing capabilities is South Africa, which builds and operates both tactical and handheld UAVs. Kenya in 2012 received its first Raven unmanned aircraft.
But the entire continent is a hotbed of opportunity for UAVs used in border patrol and ISR missions as well as anti-terrorism activities in countries like Mali, said Maple.
Ten years from now, at least one quarter of global UAV demand will come from outside the United States, which should be a hopeful statistic for companies who have catered primarily to the US. military.
“This [international market] is likely to grow,” Maple said. “Despite defense cutbacks, there is growth out there for suppliers. All unmanned markets are in the very early stages … but there is strong commitment to their future operations and integration.” ND
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BY SANDRA I. ERWINA group of Pentagon officials was giv-
en three months to come up with a plan to boost the supply of satellite bandwidth that is needed to support the military’s growing fleet of unmanned aerial vehicles.
The order came from Undersecretary of Defense for Acquisition, Technology and Logistics Frank Kendall. The challenge he laid out is twofold: Find ways for the Penta-gon to capitalize on lower-cost commercial satellite communications technology. And figure out whether this technology can satisfy unique military demands such as protecting UAV data links from hackers.
“Kendall has given us a 90-day window to come up with a notional framework for how the Defense Department is going to provision satcom into the future,” said Charles Beames, principal deputy assistant secretary of defense for space and intel-ligence.
Worries about soaring bandwidth demand at a time of shrinking budgets have prompted a reexamination of how the Pen-tagon buys satcom hardware and services, Beames said last month at the Satellite 2013
industry trade show in Washington, D.C. The bandwidth crunch caused by UAVs
— which require connectivity for their command and control, and to stream live video — has been a frequent topic of dis-cussion in industry circles for years. The issue gained more urgency in 2009 after then-Defense Secretary Robert Gates ter-minated the “transformational satellite” pro-gram, or TSAT, that was intended to provide encrypted wideband communications. The void left by TSAT has been filled mostly by commercial alternatives. Defense officials had hoped the Pentagon would fund new military satellites to support burgeoning UAV operations, but exorbitant price tags and budget cuts have stalled those efforts.
Most military UAVs currently are oper-ated by commercial satcom links, and their data, too, is transmitted via nonmilitary satellites. Industry experts believe that the cost of retrofitting the entire UAV fleet to military satcom would be prohibitive-ly high. Pentagon officials are considering alternatives that are based on commercial technology, and would allow the aircraft to keep using their existing terminals.
A more commercial approach to secure satcom could open the door for industry to offer suggestions, Beames said. “It’s creating an opportunity for people with great ideas to have them introduced into the conversa-tion and be considered,” he said. “A lot of people have cautioned me that a compre-hensive framework has been attempted many times in the past” but one never mate-rialized. Budget cuts have proved to be the catalyst for taking action, he said.
Satellite providers do not believe the Pentagon has much of a choice. Military spacecraft currently supply 60 percent of the Defense Department’s satcom demand. With no plans to build new constella-tions for at least a decade, the military will become more dependent on commercial bandwidth. The military constellations that are currently being built — the Advanced-Extremely High Frequency, the Wideband Global Satcom and Mobile User Objective System — will not be enough to support future requirements for mobile communi-cations and UAVs, said Charles H. Cyna-mon, a retired Air Force colonel and now senior director of Hughes Network Systems
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LLC. Besides a shortage of military satellite
capacity, the Pentagon has to face the fact that there are no terminals being pro-duced to convert UAVs from commercial to military satellite links, Cynamon said in an interview. The high cost of military satcom terminals also is a problem, he said. A $2 million secure satcom terminal might be justifiable for a $100 million UAV such as the Air Force Global Hawk, but not a $4 million Predator.
Cynamon suggested the Pentagon ought to rethink its bandwidth allocation policies. The Air Force, for instance, buys Predator and Reaper aircraft with Ku-band commer-cial satcom connectivity. But when project managers purchase the platform, they don’t buy the satellite time. That leaves the prob-lem for someone else to solve. During the past decade, the military has not had to include satellite time in its regular budget and shifted it to war funding requests. “Plat-form owners don’t necessarily have a blank check, but they don’t foot the bill,” Cyna-mon said. The Air Force will bring UAVs to the fight, but it is up to war commanders to secure funding for the satcom that will allow the UAVs to fly and broadcast live video.
The way the Defense Department appor-tions bandwidth also makes it difficult to increase capacity, said Richard M. Lober, vice president and general manager of Hughes’ defense and intelligence division.
Commercial suppliers have perfected the efficiency of their networks so more services can be provided with less satellite band-width, he said.
A military WGS satellite, for example, is capable of 4 gigabits of capacity. By com-parison, a commercial high-throughput sat-ellite like Hughes’ Jupiter Echo 17 provides more than 100 gigabits. Hughes expects to sign up 1 million to 2 million users on that satellite. The Defense Department has to satisfy only 10,000 to 20,000 users, but the way it allocates bandwidth is hugely inef-ficient, Lober said. The bandwidth and the power on a military satellite is assigned to one user at a time. A company like Hughes will take a 100-gigabit satellite with a mil-lion users and pack them into time and
frequency slots so they can get high-speed broadband services at low prices. When a military commander requests WGS bandwidth, once it’s assigned to him, he has it around the clock, whether he is using it or not.
Lober said industry executives have for years tried to persuade the Defense Department to adopt modern techniques for allocating
bandwidth. Defense officials recently have become more interested in learning how commercial techniques can help the gov-ernment save money.
The military’s newest satcom constella-tion, the WGS, is regarded as a temporary filler for TSAT. But most WGS users still use outdated terminals that do make optimum use of the available bandwidth, said Cyna-mon. Australia and Canada are buying WGS
capacity but they have invested in new terminals that take a sliver of bandwidth and virtually triple or quadruple it just by managing more efficiently.
In the Defense Department, he said, the “mindset is changing … but old habits are hard to break.” There is still mistrust of commercial satcom in some circles, he said, where the technology is perceived to be insufficiently secure or reliable.
Vendors expect the Pentagon soon will publish a solicitation for industry ideas on how to provide protected communications in “contested environments,” which is mil-itary-speak for areas where enemies could jam U.S. satellite signals.
Cynamon said there is broad consensus that satcom technology such as waveforms and modems could be incorporated into existing Ku-band terminals in UAVs to
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shield them from electronic attacks. Another concern for the Defense Depart-
ment is the massive bandwidth demand of spy drones such as Global Hawk, which are “resource hogs,” Cynamon said. The Air Force two years ago had planned to con-nect Global Hawk with WGS military Ka band. That idea was later scuttled because of concerns that the Global Hawk — with a requirement of 138 to 274 megabits per second — would drain the WGS capacity. “They would need dedicated apertures on WGS,” said Cynamon. “And there are only 10 apertures for military Ka per satellite. You would tie up one or two apertures for each Global Hawk you are trying to support.”
Companies such as Hughes are confident that commercial technology is the answer to the Pentagon’s bandwidth troubles. But executives cautioned that it will not be easy to retrofit military hardware.
Most UAVs are chock full of propri-etary components and software that are incompatible with any outside piece of equipment, said Lober. “What we are see-ing in commercial industry is a variety of modem and radio manufacturers and different antenna manufacturers that can plug and play,” he said. Each military UAV model typically is bought from a single vendor. Breaking apart existing interfaces between radios and antennas could create legal problems for satcom providers because the components are intellectual property that is owned by the UAV manufacturer.
It will be up to the Defense Department to weigh the pros and cons of a commer-cial approach, said Lober. The pressure to boost satellite capacity will intensify in the next several years as more UAVs move to satellite-based links. Many of the cur-rent small UAV fleets rely on line-of-sight ground-based communications. Satellite connectivity is a must when they need to reach longer distances — beyond 100 miles — or when there are mountains that block the line of sight.
Analysts have projected that over the next decade, the Defense Department will pour $37 billion to $40 billion into new UAVs. That compares to $30 billion spent during the past 10 years.
Kensing Quock, chief engineer for the satellite gateway program at the Defense Information Systems Agency, said his agen-cy is pressed to supply satcom around the world. “Africa is becoming a very hot area that we need to support,” he said. “Pacific Command is also becoming a hot area.” The quandary for DISA, he said, is “how do we support all these different users, using different bands, with different communica-tions systems, going to different gateways?”
Whereas the military has been concen-
trated in the Middle East and in Afghanistan during the past decade, it is now expand-ing into other regions, which complicates DISA’s job. “Bandwidth portability is a huge topic of discussion,” said Quock. “How can we buy bandwidth in one area and when we go somewhere else move it around? That’s a challenge with multiple vendors and satel-lite providers.”
DISA is developing a procurement plan to buy bandwidth in the most efficient way, said Quock.
Despite a desire to capture a piece of the Pentagon’s nearly $1 billion in annual purchases of commercial bandwidth, some industry executives remain skeptical about the defense market. One problem is that the Defense Department does not give industry long-term deals that make the investment worthwhile.
“Most of what we do in industry is opti-mized for broadcast TV. We are bloody good at that. … Those are the guys who buy capacity from us for 10 to 15 years. They plan way in advance. They know the requirements,” said Philip Harlow, president and chief operating officer of XTAR LLC. “We don’t have a dialogue like that on UAVs,” he said during a panel discussion at the Satellite 2013 exposition.
The government has for years been aware of the industry’s wish list, he said. It includes multiyear contracts, having the Pentagon as an “anchor customer” and greater use of hosted payloads. A hosted payload is piece of hardware — a sensor or communications receiver — that would be owned by the government but operated from a commer-cial spacecraft. “All these are great things,” said Harlow. “But unless we have the will within the Pentagon, the budget line item and the single point of authority within the Defense Department, we are going to keep doing what we’re doing.”
The UAV debate comes down to a simple point, he said. The aircraft were designed with commercial Ku band on board, and a changeover to military Ka band is going to be expensive and time consuming. Com-mercial satcom cannot be replaced for at least 10 years, he said. “Let’s figure out how to buy commercial bandwidth in the most cost effective manner,” said Harlow. “We are ready to have that conversation.”
William Gattle, vice president of aero-space systems at Harris Corp., said the space industry’s confidence in the govern-ment market was rattled in 2012 when the National Geospatial Intelligence Agency slashed a projected 10-year $7 billion deal to buy satellite imagery from GeoEye and DigitalGlobe. The cutbacks led to the merg-er of the two companies as there was not enough work to support two firms.
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“That was a lesson for industry,” Gattle told National Defense. “They pulled out of that deal. … That sent a pretty strong shock-wave into the marketplace.”
Companies are hesitant to risk huge investments in technology for government customers unless they know there will be long-term work, he said. “We are willing to build it and take the risk, but we do need some level of commitment,” Gattle said. “Somebody has to pay to build the infra-structure.”
Harris is betting on the hosted payload market, and has teamed with a joint venture between Iridium and NAV CANADA to provide air-traffic management services. The project, called Aireon, is the largest hosted payload effort to date, said Gattle. Harris receivers will be hosted on the Iridium NEXT satellite constellation under a five-year contract.
Hosted payloads is one trend in the space industry that has been much talked about but has yet to gain traction, Gattle said. On average, five hosted payloads per year have been launched for the last 20 years worldwide. After Iridium begins to deploy its NEXT constellation, the number will rise to 20 or 30 per year, he said. The mar-ket remains untapped, however. “We aver-age 20 geo-satellite launches per year, and only a quarter of them are getting hosted payloads.”
Adopting new technology is not as easy as people might think, especially in the government sector, said Gattle. There are no contracting mechanisms for hosted pay-loads, and the government is skittish about relinquishing control. “It’s not a panacea but it can work in specific pockets,” Gattle said. He noted the Air Force is expected to begin to solicit industry bids for future hosted-payloads projects.
The cost savings from using hosted pay-loads can be significant, he said. A commu-nications system can be had for $2 million, whereas it costs $2 billion to build a military satellite. “But the government is not used to sharing,” he said. “The government is used to being in charge. They’re the ones everyone relied on to pay for this.”
The space industry, meanwhile, doesn’t need Uncle Sam as much as it did in the past, Gattle said. “Owners and operators look at the defense market and say, ‘It’s too hard … You’re asking me to pay attention to this, and I already have a business.’”
Tip Osterthaler, president and CEO of SES Government Solutions, a provider of global satcom, said the Defense Depart-ment’s contracting and business practices make the military market unattractive for industry.
“The only mechanism that the Defense
Department has to procure commercial sat-ellite infrastructure is through short-term, spot-market purchases — the most costly and inefficient method to fulfill critical needs,” Osterhaler wrote in an article titled, “Seven Ways to Make the Department of Defense a Better Buyer of Commercial Satcom.”
Commercial operators can provide pro-tected military communications, either through dedicated hosted payloads or by investing in protection features while build-ing new satellites, he said. One example is the Civil Reserve Air Fleet, which covers the marginal investment required to add protection features to commercial satellites while not committing to the entire project.
“This could be a highly cost-effective method for expanding the pool of protected communications capability, especially for
supporting UAV operations in the future, without having to procure specialized gov-ernment satellites,” said Osterhaler.
A frequent industry gripe is that two different offices of the Pentagon handle the administration of military and commercial satellite capacity. “The commercial industry needs a single office where commercial and military satellite capabilities come together,” he said. DISA procures most commercial capacity, while the Air Force Space and Mis-sile Systems Center purchases space-related equipment. “Although DISA and SMC are cooperating more now than they ever have in the past,” said Osterhaler, “there is still no way to seamlessly allocate military require-ments between commercial and military assets.” ND
M A Y 2 0 1 3 • N A T I O N A L D E F E N S E 37
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By DAN PARSONSThe advent of unmanned aerial vehicles
taking flight within U.S. national airspace could mean an enormous economic windfall for avia-tion entrepreneurs and the nation’s economy.
But a booming domestic UAV industry is desperately trying to break free of strict rules that will keep their designs grounded until 2015 at the earliest. UAV advocates are find-ing their message difficult to deliver, with widespread assumptions that lethal war machines will buzz their neighborhoods. Other opposition camps view the aircraft as a Big Brother technology that will bring prying eyes into citizen’s homes.
While drones have been proven effective as a weapon of war, they have been used for that purpose predominantly over areas of the world with little or no commercial air traffic. But in less restrictive countries, unmanned aircraft are already an established tool aiding farmers, first responders and fishermen.
By learning from those countries, namely Japan, advocates for UAV integration insist that the technology will pour billions of dollars into the U.S. economy in just a few years. But companies chafing under current Federal Aviation Administration restrictions are uncertain that the agency will work out the kinks by the 2015 deadline set by the Obama administration.
“There is a perception in the industry that the process is moving slowly,” said Chris Mailey, vice president of knowledge resources with the Association of Unmanned Vehicle Systems International. “Certainly we would like to have had it done yesterday, but the FAA must do it safely. In that sense, it is perfectly understandable that they are taking their time.”
AUVSI projects an $82.1 billion infusion into the U.S. economy over the 10 years following 2015, the year the FAA is supposed to have rules in place governing UAVs in national airspace. Agricultural applications of UAVs alone could pump $75.6 billion into the econ-omy over the decade, according to an optimistic report published by AUVSI in March.
Public safety and “other applications,” like natural resource man-agement, will produce $3.2 billion each, the report said.
The industry is projected to create just over 100,000 jobs during the same period, two-thirds of which will spring up in the first three years after integration. Many of those jobs will be manufacturing positions that pay more than $40,000 annually.
Mailey said the study, compiled using several academic reports, was a conservative estimate of the impact UAS integration would have once the FAA opens up the national airspace.
To illustrate their point, Mailey and other advocates for integra-tion point to Japan, where an aging farming population has been using small unmanned helicopters to manage their crops for decades.
When the Japanese government about 20 years ago realized its farming population was at risk of growing too old for the work required, officials approached Yamaha Motor Corp. about develop-ing vehicles that could make farming more efficient.
Four years later, it had the R-MAX unmanned helicopter, which has been in wide use for more than 15 years. The remotely piloted aircraft is nine feet long, with 12-foot rotors and stands four feet tall. Running on a 20-horsepower, two-stroke engine, it can carry up to 61 pounds of seed, fertilizer, pesticide or water.
An autonomous version, which is not used for agriculture, was
used to monitor disaster relief and cleanup efforts at the Fukushima nuclear power plant damaged in last year’s earthquake and tsuna-mi, said Steve Markofski, a corporate planner with Yamaha’s U.S. division.
Markofski oversaw tests of the unmanned helicopter in Lost Hills and Oakville, Calif. in November, where the R-MAX would be ide-ally suited for spraying short-rowed crops.
“For places like these that grow grapes, almonds and pistachios, this system will perform very well, and we are confident the technology will catch on,” he said.
Under current FAA regulations, such flights for agricultural pur-poses are assumed to be legal, though interpretation of the rules remains subjective.
The FAA has allowed limited UAS flights within the national airspace since 1990. The aircraft were given permission to monitor wildfires in California but only in controlled conditions and in areas with low air traffic density, for instance. Unmanned aircraft also aided in the disaster relief effort launched after a massive earthquake rocked Haiti in 2010.
As it stands, non-governmental entities have three options for flying unmanned aircraft within U.S. civil airspace. Companies can obtain an experimental airway certificate if they can document the flights are for research and development, training or flight demon-stration. Another method is to obtain a type-design certification through existing rules that govern the use of manned aircraft.
But owners of small aeronautics firms that design and build small UAVs argue those permitted processes are labyrinthine and prohibi-tively costly in both time and cash. So far, only two companies of the hundreds in the industry are pursuing type-design certification, Williams said.
A third and perhaps even more confounding classification under which remotely piloted aircraft are allowed to fly in domestic airspace is as a modeler. Because the flights are not used for any commercial, for-profit purpose, “hobbyists” are allowed to fly up to 400 feet high as long as they are away from airports and the aircraft remains within line of sight. That they cannot be “operated for profit” is most confusing to UAV entrepreneurs.
“You can’t claim to be a modeler then sell the pictures you took of Beyonce,” Williams joked at AUVSI.
The humor was lost on some executives in the audience who would like to fly their designs for research, just as farmers are allowed to fly them to monitor or dust crops. Tempers flare because the former is considered by the FAA as inherently commercial, while farmers and hobbyists are routinely given the go ahead.
The double standard was not lost on Jeremy Novarra, co-owner of Vanilla Aircraft.
“If a farmer, who hopefully is profit-minded … can fly as a hob-byist, why can’t I, as the owner of an unmanned aircraft company, fly as a hobbyist my own aircraft over property that I own?” Novarra pressed Williams.
Williams demurred, falling back on FAA regulations that disallow commercial UAV flights within U.S. airspace and offering experi-mental certificates as a viable option.
“Everyone knows the experimental certificate process is available, but not actually functional,” Novarra shot back. “It’s not happening any more … especially not [for] the multitude of unmanned aircraft
Booming Unmanned Aircraft Industry Straining to Break Free of Regulations
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companies that are out there.”The FAA has the authority to levy fines against commercial enti-
ties that violate its rules regarding UAV flights. It has done so most notably against real estate agents in Los Angeles using UAVs to sur-vey property, said Mailey. Australia, for instance, already allows real estate inspections with UAV-mounted cameras and sensors.
Williams declined to split hairs over what was and wasn’t “com-mercial activity,” but companies are eager for an explanation, and many have perceived the FAA’s swift action against UAV activity by private companies as heavy handed and unnecessary.
There are some significant hurdles to jump before the 2015 deadline, which Mailey said was an overly optimistic date. The most readily apparent is the issue of safety. Once UAVs are flying over the United States, some of which can fly as high as 50,000 feet, they will be sharing the same air at the same altitudes as private and commercial air traffic. The technology does not yet exist that would allow a UAV to sense and avoid other objects and aircraft, creating an obvious safety concern.
Because of the perceived danger and other considerations, some local jurisdictions and state legislatures have taken up the issue. Charlottesville, Va., is one of several local jurisdictions that have preempted UAS integration with restrictions on their use.
Meanwhile, police in Arlington, Texas, have permission to fly small, four-foot remotely piloted helicopters throughout the city to photograph crime scenes and search for suspects. But the aircraft will be restricted to flying within the FAA’s hobbyist guidelines.
Border state law enforcement agencies are already using quad-rotor aircraft to police illegal migration within the same restrictions.
Similar systems have been tested in Houston and Miami. All of those agencies also operate UAVs under an FAA certificate of autho-rization, of which around 300 have been issued.
Government agencies also are using unmanned aircraft for more than law enforcement and border patrol. NASA has a parallel five-year, $150 million UAS integration program and in early April flew a hand-launched Dragon Eye UAV into a volcanic plume in Costa Rica.
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration has been testing AeroVironment Pumas and Boeing-Insitu ScanEagles for tasks such as monitoring weather and oil spills and is a partner in NASA’s work to use Global Hawks to study hurricanes.
The ScanEagle was originally designed to help fishermen track schools of fish, but is now used heavily by the U.S. military. That most people closely associate UAVs with the military is one of many obstacles to their use in civil airspace.
“When people think about these aircraft, they immediately see a big armed Predator, or an unarmed military aircraft with a very powerful camera,” Mailey said. “But you don’t need to have a big missile to monitor crops or a wildfire. There are already rules about arming civilian aircraft in U.S. airspace.”
Unlike military unmanned aircraft, the systems most likely to be used by public safety agencies are small — most weighing less than five pounds — with limited flight duration.
Anyone flying a UAS outside current hobbyist guidelines will be required to pass the same certification as a pilot of a manned aircraft. When that restriction is inappropriate for a particular aircraft or situ-ation, the FAA “will adapt,” Williams said.
The longstanding prohibition of arming civilian aircraft also will carry over to UAVs, he said.
Another hurdle, and one that could prove to be a more chal-lenging obstacle than technological shortcomings, is one of public perception.
FAA has no authority to enforce privacy violations, but is encour-aging industry to adopt strict and clear regulations against the improper use of UAS technologies, Williams said.
This issue is compounded by a pervasive sense that drones will be used to peer into law-abiding citizens’ homes or gather information on them without their consent.
When ordinary citizens think of drones, they conjure images of Predators firing missiles at insurgents in Afghanistan, or Reapers gathering thermal-imaging footage of a faraway battlefield. Neither are activities that are welcome in the United States, as evidenced by the grilling suffered by Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel and Central Intelligence Agency Director John Brennan during their confirma-tion hearings earlier this year on whether the president would arm military drones over U.S. soil.
Industry officials understand such fears exist, but insist they are unfounded.
“The industry fully understands the technology is new to many Americans, and their opinions are being formed by what they see in the news,” AUVSI President and CEO Michael Tuscano testified before the Senate judiciary committee in March. “As we focus on the use of UAS by law enforcement, it is important to recognize the robust legal framework already in place, rooted in the Fourth Amendment to our Constitution and decades of case law, which regulates how law enforcement uses any technology — whether it is unmanned aircraft, manned aircraft, thermal imaging, GPS or cell phones.”
Ultimately, it is not illegal to fly UAVs in U.S. civil airspace, but potential pilots must meet all the regulations governing manned aircraft, including the ability to sense and avoid other aircraft. Even when the FAA works out a plan for integration, it is impossible to guarantee they are safe.
“It is nearly impossible to collect the amount of data necessary to make a definitive statement that UAVs are safe in the national airspace,” Mailey said. ND
M a y 2 0 1 3 • N a t i o N a l D e f e N s e 39
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By VALERIE INSINNAIn the last decade, the U.S. military
poured money into unmanned ground sys-tems to help protect troops against impro-vised explosive devices, but the Defense Department won’t need all those robots once the war in Afghanistan comes to a close.
Robotics manufacturers may lament the news, but it isn’t too much of a surprise, say industry executives and analysts. Reports indicate the wider market for ground robots is expanding in agriculture, logistics and health care.
During the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the U.S. Army spent more than $730 mil-lion on unmanned ground systems that conducted missions such as bomb disposal and detection, route clearance and recon-naissance.
“There was a very specific need, and now that need is slowly disappearing,” said Chris Mailey, vice president of knowledge resources for the Association for Unmanned Vehicle Systems International.
Army Maj. Gen. Robert Dyess, director of the G-8’s force development directorate, warned that spending on ground robotics systems could be slowing down.
“You will hear me say today that the Army is committed to unmanned ground systems, and then you will also say that your investment should follow your com-mitment,” he said at AUVSI’s annual pro-gram review held in February. The Defense Department’s investments in ground robots during fiscal year 2014 may cause industry to question that commitment, he continued.
Just as troops leave Afghanistan, so will many of the robots that worked alongside them. The Army plans to upgrade 2,700 of its systems for use in training or further deployments, Dyess said. Another 2,469 will be divested and given to Defense Depart-ment partners or other government agencies.
Besides the Navy’s Advanced Explo-sive Ordnance Disposal Robotic System — a program of record to field a fam-ily of three bomb disposal robots — the Defense Department will likely favor fund-ing research-and-development projects over procuring new platforms, Mailey said.
Although the U.S. military’s spending on UGVs could decrease, a 2012 report put out by the International Federation of Robotics (IFR) concluded that the wider market for service robots — robots that assist humans — is growing.
The report, which bases its predictions on sales figures of robots across the globe, estimates industry will buy about 93,800
service robots from 2012 and 2015. U.S. and international defense applications
make up about 28,000 of that number. The report did not take into account lower U.S. procurements of unmanned ground vehicles in its predictions, Gudrun Litzenberger of IFR’s statistics department said in an email. Still, IFR’s estimates are on the conservative side, she noted.
Sales of service robots increased 9 percent from 2010 to 2011, the IFR report said. The value of sales increased by 6 percent to $3.6 billion world-wide in the same period. Defense robots, including unmanned aerial vehicles, made up 40 percent of sales.
For iRobot — a Bed-ford, Mass.–based compa-ny that has found success in both the commercial and defense sectors — the downturn in Defense Department spending resulted in a drop in rev-enue from $465.5 million in 2011 to $436.2 million in 2012, according to financial state-ments.
In the past, defense and security sales made up about 40 percent of iRobot’s revenue, said spokesman Matthew Lloyd. Because of decreased contracts with the military and a 28-percent increase in sales of its home robots such as the Roomba, sales of defense robots are now only 10 percent of the company’s business.
“We still see unmanned ground vehicles as a key component of the modernization of the military and believe that we’re well positioned,” Lloyd told National Defense. “It is clearly just a matter of determining and expanding the applications of these robots.”
IRobot is also trying to market its defense robots to other industries. For instance, its Packbot and Warrior robots were widely used in Iraq and Afghanistan for bomb dis-posal, but also can be used in nuclear facili-ties for standard maintenance. In 2012, one Warrior and two Packbots were purchased for use in Robinson Nuclear Plant near Hartsville, S.C., to help minimize human exposure to radiation.
The company also restructured their engi-neering teams by combining defense and household divisions into one joint group, said Tim Trainer, the company’s vice presi-dent of robotic products for defense and security. This move has resulted in cheaper commercial technologies being integrated into new defense platforms.
“We took some low-tech, lower-cost, high-volume kinds of products and capa-bilities and are able to now incorporate those into defense products, [which] allows us to drive our cost down,” he said.
For example, some of its research plat-forms use Microsoft’s Kinect sensor, which was developed for video gaming, for collision avoidance and visual capabilities, Trainer said.
Like other defense contractors, iRobot is also targeting the international market
and local and state security organizations, Trainer said.
The Army in March awarded a $14.4 million contract for its First Look system, a two-pound, throwable robot equipped with four cameras and a radio. But a police officer or SWAT team member could also use the device to provide situational awareness on a limited budget, Trainer said.
Outside of defense and security, the agri-cultural sector is another booming market for robotics, accounting for about 31 percent of unit sales in 2011, according to the report. Most of these were robotic cow milkers, which are especially popular in Europe, said Mailey.
Many agricultural processes, such as har-vesting wheat and corn, have already been automated, but there are many opportuni-ties for further work in this sector, industry executives said.
When Harvest Automation was founded in 2010, the company wanted to provide a robotic solution for a simple task usu-ally done manually, Chief Executive Officer John Kawola said. The result was the devel-opment of the HV-100, a 90-pound robot for commercial nurseries that can pick up and rearrange potted plants.
Since the HV-100 was released last year, four large commercial nurseries have bought from four to six robots each at $30,000 apiece. A several hundred-acre nursery would need anywhere from 10 to 30 units to fully staff the business, Kawola said.
As the number of migrant laborers from Mexico continues to dwindle, nursery own-ers are concerned with maintaining a con-sistent workforce for a difficult, low-paid job, Kawola said. Using robots might be a way that farmers can ensure they don’t lose profits because of labor shortages.
The nursery industry is also well-suited for robotics because “they’re growing and
Opportunities for Non-Military Robots Increase
HV-100 Harvest automation
40 N at i o N a l D e f e N s e • M ay 2 0 1 3
Opportunities for Non-Military Robots Increase harvesting and shipping plants in some cases all year round, where in a lot of other agri-cultural environments, they’re planting and harvesting once a year,” he added.
The company is planning follow-on prod-ucts that would be able to trim and prune plants, apply chemicals and do “grading” — using sensors to judge a good plant from a bad one, Kawola said.
“We think there’s a whole segment of agriculture that could really benefit from mobile robotics in the area of information gathering, so whether it’s [getting] soil sam-ples or using sensors or infrared tests to be able to judge the quality of crops, we think that could be a pretty interesting portion of the agriculture market that is generally not done today,” he added.
Farmers’ complaints about a shrinking migrant labor force also prompted San Diego–based Vision Robotics to develop a robotic grape pruner that uses stereoscopic vision, said co-founder Tony Koselka.
A prototype recently finished up the vine-cutting season, Koselka said. Depending on funding, which has come primarily from vineyard owners and government grants, production of the robot could begin in as soon as two years.
The base robot will cost from $100,000 to $150,000, Koselka said. The company claims it can do the same work at half the cost of manual labor.
But even in agriculture, where auto-mated solutions are in demand, financing new developments can often be a difficult endeavor. Vision Robotics would like to further develop apple and orange picking robots, but hasn’t been able to secure the funding to do so, Koselka said.
“It’s a chicken and egg thing. If there was a machine, people would buy it … but it’s hard to get people to put money to develop-ment, and those are still relatively expensive development projects,” he said.
Sales of medical robots also increased 13 percent from 2010 to 2011, according to the IFR report. Most of those are used for robot-assisted surgery and therapy, but medical practitioners may soon use robots to remotely consult with patients and hos-pital staff.
Earlier this year, iRobot’s RP-VITA became the first remote presence robot approved by the Food and Drug Administra-tion for use in hospitals.
The robot stands at the height of a human being, with a video monitor at the top that allows doctor and patient to see and talk to each other in real time. An iPad mounted on the device acts as the interface, and modified Kinect sensors enable it to move around the hospital without colliding into people or equipment, Lloyd of iRobot said.
Health care is only one sector where iRo-bot sees an opportunity to develop remote presence robots, Lloyd added. “We’ve talked about applications for telepresence robots in retail, in domestic security applications, as well as in the enterprise and health care [areas].”
Although the IFR reported a 3 percent decline in logistic robot sales for 2011, it contends that the drop is due to having more accurate data than in past years.
AUVSI’s Mailey said that logistics is an area that will see continued innovation and opportunity. He pointed to Kiva Systems, a North Reading, Mass.-based company that created an automated way to help retailers fulfill orders.
In a normal warehouse, items on shelves are stationary, and workers must navigate through aisles in order to move or obtain a
product. Using Kiva’s system, the product moves to the worker instead of the other way around. Software sends robots across the floor, guiding them using a grid of bar-codes attached to the ground. Once the robot reaches the right product, it moves under the shelf, lifts it up and brings it to the worker.
Amazon, once a customer of Kiva Sys-tems, bought the company in 2012 for $775 million.
In the end, business are going to make money in robotics when they have “a really cool business case” that uses robots to simpli-fy a job or make something more efficient, Mailey said. If you look at the robots that Kiva is using, “there’s nothing super crazy, fancy, [or] complicated about them.” ND
M a y 2 0 1 3 • N a t i o N a l D e f e N s e 41
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42 N at i o N a l D e f e N s e • M ay 2 0 1 3
By VALERIE INSINNAWith a chance to build the Navy’s
next bomb-disposal robots at their finger-tips, unmanned systems manufacturers have an opportunity to tap into one of the only fully funded programs in the autonomous vehicle pipeline. Eager industry officials believe a contract award is imminent.
Whichever company lands a contract to become lead systems integrator for the first of the Navy’s three new unmanned ground vehicles will get a leg up on the competi-tion — losing candidates will have to forage for less lucrative opportunities to build components.
The Advanced Explosive Ordnance Dis-posal Robot System, or AEODRS, has been alternately touted by the Navy and blasted by industry for its modular, open-architec-ture requirements, which means one com-pany can’t take the whole cake.
The Defense Department started buying robots in the 1980s by opting for modified commercial-off-the-shelf platforms from different vendors, said Byron Brezina, a technical engineering project manager for the Naval Explosive Ordinance Dispos-
al Technology Division, located in Indian Head, Md. That approach left the military with proprietary systems that are difficult to update and modify.
Upgrading current robots is an “endless cycle” that is further complicated when the military wants to put a sensor or payload from company A onto company B’s robot, he said at the Association for Unmanned Vehicle Systems International’s program review in March. “So you’re seeing those R&D costs, those integration costs being doubled and tripled each time something has to be updated,” he said.
Instead of a single company developing one or all of the bomb-disposal robots, vendors will compete to build one or more of the robot’s components, which will be assembled by the systems integrator of each platform.
The hope is that these robots, which will be the military’s fourth generation of unmanned ground vehicles, will allow the Navy to bring new technology to the field more quickly.
“We’ve learned these lessons … the hard way by having robots in theater and having new threats and requirements come out fast and furiously,” Brezina said. “The open architecture is going to allow us to respond to those quicker, cut down that lead time. It’s also going to help us mitigate technol-ogy obsolescence, which is a problem on all DoD tools.”
The first and smallest robot to be devel-oped is a system for dismounted operations, also called increment 1, which is designed for reconnaissance missions. At 35 pounds, it is small enough to carry in a backpack. It has six hours of battery life, a 330-foot range and a manipulator arm capable of lifting five pounds when fully extended, according to Defense Department documents.
The second increment, the tactical opera-tions system, is a medium-sized robot that can be vehicle transported or carried short distances by two people. It should weigh 164 pounds, have a 3,300-foot range and two manipulator arms. At least one of those arms should grasp, grip and pivot, said docu-ments from the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory, systems inte-grator for the increment-1 prototype.
Increment 3, called the base/infrastruc-ture operations system, should lift up to 300 pounds and would be transported by a large vehicle or trailer.
With the increment-1 prototype in its
engineering and development phase, the Navy is seeking approval to release the request for proposals, said a spokesman for Naval Sea Systems Command. Production and deployment of increment 1 could hap-pen as soon as fiscal year 2015.
Increments 2 and 3, which are being developed simultaneously, could be fielded by fiscal year 2018.
The Johns Hopkins lab was recently awarded contracts for systems integration of the next two prototypes, said Michael Zeher, project manager for the lab.
Remotec, a Clinton, Tenn.–based subsid-iary of Northrop Grumman, is gunning for the prime systems integrator contract for increment 1, said Phil Bryan, the company’s AEODRS program manager.
Netting that contract would be a boon for the company, which produces the MK-3 remote ordnance neutralization system that is currently in use. Increment 1 will replace the iRobot 310 small unmanned ground vehicle. Increment 2 is slated to take the place of iRobot’s MK-1 PackBot and the QinetiQ North America’s MK-2 Talon.
Early on, the program garnered criticism from industry executives who warned that an open architecture process could lead to higher costs, a distressed supply chain and schedule delays.
The loudest detractors were makers of incumbent UGVs who, unsurprisingly, would rather design and produce an entire system, Bryan said.
That opposition is decreasing, he added. “I think you’re seeing people come around to supporting it. We hope that it’s going to result in more systems being sold and bring-ing prices down.”
The system design is driven with interop-erability in mind. A small, lightweight con-troller could be used with all three UGVs, and a separate, larger controller would operate the tactial and base/infrastructure operations systems, making it easier to train operators. Navy officials want vendors to create interchangeable parts so that, for instance, a sensor from increment 2 could be put onto increment 3.
The family of three bomb-disposal robots is the first UGV program of record with an autonomy requirement, Brezina said.
For the dismounted-operations system, the robot should autonomously navigate about 10 feet in an unobstructed environ-ment. The tactical operations system and base/infrastructure system needs to “be able to carry multiple tools downrange, and then have the manipulator automatically go to designated tools and change them out for use without having to come back,” he said.
During his speech, Brezina joked that the Johns Hopkins team simply gathered the
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modules, plugged them in and threw the switch on a working prototype. In reality, developing the robot entailed a long process of making tradeoffs among vendors and repeated revisions of documents.
The increment-1 prototype comprises seven modules such as an electrical power source, vision sensors, a manipulator arm and software that allows autonomy. There is also a communications subsystem linking the UGV with the controller.
Navy bomb-disposal officials and Johns Hopkins scientists defined specifications and detailed the physical, electrical and logical interfaces for each module, Zeher said.
Remotec created the mobility module used in the increment-1 prototype in part-nership with MacroUSA Corp., a small McClellan, Calif.-based company special-izing in small unmanned systems. The com-pany supplied the chassis and body of the vehicle that other modules are attached to.
The end result was a modified version of one of Macro’s existing UGV designs. Because the systems integrator helps select the team of vendors designing the hardware, MacroUSA will have to compete to design the mobility module without Remotec’s help, Bryan said.
The government provided the electrical-power and autonomous-behavior modules and communications system for the pro-totype, Bryan said. While all modules will be openly competed, these government-supplied components may create a wild-card scenario where new competitors might have more luck at scoring a contract.
Chatten Associates, a West Conshohock-en, Pa.-based company focused on remote vision, developed the visual sensors.
Pittsburgh-based RE2 Inc. — which devel-oped the master, manipulator and end-effec-tor modules — did not respond to repeated requests for comment.
Zeher, Bryan and Chatten Associates Pres-ident Martha Jane Chatten agreed that satis-fying the weight requirement was the biggest challenge in creating the prototype.
The UGV and controller were required to weigh 35 pounds or less and have an 18-inch diameter. Each module also had its own weight limit.
During one stage of development, the Johns Hopkins team found that the cabling between the master and power modules was adding extra weight, Zeher said. The team worked with vendors, eventually deciding to use smaller connectors and lighter-weight cables.
“We lived and died within our weight budget,” Bryan said. “There was certainly a discussion anytime there was any kind of change on the table that would create a weight issue for anybody.”
By the end of the process, the Remotec-MacroUSA team had scaled down the mobility module’s weight from 13 pounds to 11 pounds, Bryan estimated.
For Remotec, another difficulty involved attaching the different modules to the plat-form it designed. The company worked with Johns Hopkins during the design phase, trad-ing engineering data and models, said Bryan.
“We were basically trying to put the jigsaw puzzle together that gave the optimum con-figuration of how to put these [components] on here and get the best system perfor-mance,” he said. “We had several iterations, and it wasn’t without challenges.”
Throughout the process, the Johns Hop-kins team and the vendors used software that is called the systems testbed to simulate whether the modules were properly working together.
“You could have a full system testbed up with no hardware in it at all, and then you could disable one component in the simula-tion, say the master module or the manipula-tor … and plug in the real hardware,” Zeher said. “That one hardware component would work with the rest of the system that was simulated.”
Once the vendors delivered their modules, the Johns Hopkins team first would test them individually with the logical, physical and electrical interfaces, and then with the systems testbed, Zeher said. Then it would be integrated with the other hardware.
Using the testbed, Chatten Associates was able to iron out the problems in their visual sensors before bringing it to the applied physics lab to be integrated with other com-ponents, Chatten said.
The system testbed software will be freely available to industry. This means that, in the future, any company can develop a com-ponent according to the Navy’s minimum requirements and “objective” requirements — a wish list intended to push capability, Zeher said. This will give industry a way to demonstrate to the military that it has an improved technology that works.
Zeher said one of the misconceptions of the program is, because the government defined the interfaces, it wants to own the design.
That simply isn’t what’s happening, he said. “All the government is going to do is focus on what’s at the interfaces and then let industry innovate as much as it can.” Intellectual property will stay behind those interfaces, he said.
“So it really should be healthier for indus-try in terms of innovation, developing intel-lectual property and being able to protect it,” he added. ND
M a y 2 0 1 3 • N a t i o N a l D e f e N s e 43
Email your comments to [email protected]
44 N AT I O N A L D E F E N S E • M AY 2 0 1 3
May 1LID Breakfast Series: Military Services Budget DirectorsWashington, DCwww.ndia.org/meetings/3LD4
1-2 Global Explosive Ordnance Disposal Conference & Exhibition Fort Walton Beach, FL www.ndia.org/meetings/3950
32013 NDIA Annual Award Dinner - Hon. Ashton B. Carter, Deputy Secretary Of DefenseTysons Corner, VA www.ndia.org/meetings/3130
7SO/LIC Executive Briefing - Maj. Gen. Kenneth D. Merchant, USAF Arlington, VA www.ndia.org/meetings/388D
7Embassy/Defense Attaché Luncheon Series - ItalyArlington, VA www.ndia.org/meetings/347BSee our ad on p. 46
8Export Administration Regulations - WebinarWebinar
• This program will cover EAR, administered by the Department of Commerce, which governs the export of nearly all items other than defense articles.www.ndia.org/meetings/347I
8LID Breakfast Series:Representative Joe WilsonWashington, DCwww.ndia.org/meetings/3LX1
14-15NDIA Michigan Chapter Michigan Defense Exposition (MDEX) ConferenceWarren, MI www.ndia-mich.org
14-16 2013 SOFIC (Special Operations Forces Industry Conference) Tampa, FL www.sofic.org
15LID Breakfast Series:Representative John GaramendiWashington, DCwww.ndia.org/meetings/3LX2
20NDIA Washington, D.C. Chapter & USO-Metro Annual Golf Outing
Andrews AFB, Suitland, MD• Tee off for the troops!www.usometrondiagolfbenefit2013.eventbrite.com
20-22NDIA/AIA Annual Industrial Security Spring ConferenceScottsdale, AZ
• Government and industry address security topics and explore critically important challenges including balanced security, counterintelligence and cyberprotections against increasing threats.www.ndia.org/meetings/3SEC
22-23NDIA Iowa Illinois Chapter Midwest Small Business Government Contracting SymposiumMoline, ILwww.ndia-ia-il.org
23DI2E Plugfest & Mashup ChallengeGMU, Fairfax, VAwww.afei.org/events/3A07
30ADAPT Open MeetingContracting and Agile MethodsRosslyn, VA www.afei.org/WorkingGroups/ADAPT
June 4-5 STEM Workforce Seminar Dearborn, MI www.ndia.org/meetings/371B
5LID Breakfast Series:Representative Mo BrooksWashington, DCwww.ndia.org/meetings/3LX3
6 C4ISR Breakfast Arlington, VA www.ndia.org/meetings/392E
10-14 Defense Systems Acquisition Management Course Long Beach, CA www.ndia.org/meetings/302D
12-13 Training & Simulation Industry Symposium (TSIS) 2013 Orlando, FL www.trainingsystems.org
For more information and online registration, visit our website: www.ndia.org. Or contact our Operations Department at (703) 247-9464.
NDIA Calendar
M A Y 2 0 1 3 • N A T I O N A L D E F E N S E 45
12-14National Logistics ForumArlington, VA www.ndia.org/meetings/3760 See our ad on p. 46
18-19 NDIA Mastering Business Development Workshop Huntsville, AL www.ndia.org/meetings/307E
19LID Breakfast Series:Senator Kelly AyotteWashington, DCwww.ndia.org/meetings/3LX4
24The Honorable Peter B. Teets Award Dinner Chantilly, VA www.ndia.org/meetings/334C
25-26 National Security Space Policy and Architecture Symposium - ClassifiedChantilly, VAwww.ndia.org/meetings/3340See our ad on p. 47
26-27CSDS: Cloud, Semantics & Data Science SymposiumSpringfield, VAwww.afei.org/events/3A03
27Embassy/Defense AttachéLuncheon Series - GermanyWashington, DCSee our ad on p. 46
July8-9Live Fire Test & Evaluation ConferenceLaurel, MDwww.ndia.org/meetings/3390See our ad on p. 46
10LID Breakfast Series:Representative Martha RobyWashington, DCwww.ndia.org/meetings/3LX7
114th Annual Integrated Air and Missile Defense Symposium Laurel, MD www.ndia.org/meetings/3100See our ad on p. 47
31LID Breakfast Series:Representative John FlemingWashington, DCwww.ndia.org/meetings/3LX6
TBDAgile in Defense Symposium & WorkshopWashington, DCwww.afei.org/events/3A02
August1C4ISR BreakfastArlington, VAwww.ndia.org/meetings/392F
5-82013 Warheads & Ballistics Classified SymposiumMonterey, CAwww.ndia.org/meetings/3480
19-23NDIA Michigan Chapter Annual Ground Vehicle Systems Engineering & Technology Symposium (GVSETS)Troy, MI www.ndia-mich.org
September4-5NDIA Mastering Business Development WorkshopLeesburg, VAwww.ndia.org/meetings/307D
122013 MOAA/NDIA Warrior-Family SymposiumWashington, D.C.ww.ndia.org/meetings/3120
16-20Defense Systems Acquisition Management CourseKansas City, MOwww.ndia.org/meetings/302E
25Embassy/Defense Attaché Luncheon Series - CanadaWashington, DCwww.ndia.org/meetings/347G
October7-10Insensitive Munitions & Energetic Materials Technology SymposiumSan Diego, CAwww.ndia.org/meetings/4550
22-24PSA Precision Strike Technology Symposium (PSTS-13)Laurel, MDwww.ndia.org/meetings/4PST
28-3116th Annual Systems Engineering ConferenceArlington, VAwww.ndia.org/meetings/4870
For more information and online registration, visit our website: www.ndia.org. Or contact our Operations Department at (703) 247-9464.
46 N AT I O N A L D E F E N S E • M AY 2 0 1 3
N D I A F E A T U R E D E V E N T S
Laurel, MD • July 8-9, 2013 • www.ndia.org/meetings/3390
“SECRET/U.S. ONLY CLASSIFICATION”
• Featuring...
- Tutorials- Technical Papers- Panel Discussions- Audience-Presenter Interaction
• Addressing...
- Global threats - strategic, tactical, unconventional- Safety and survivability of military forces - New survivability techniques and approaches - Issues related to lethality of our weapons systems
LIVE FIRE TEST & EVALUATION CONFERENCE
Arlington, VA • June 12-14, 2013 • www.ndia.org/meetings/3760
“Optimizing Support Capabilities in a Resource-Constrained Future”
The National Logistics Forum will assemble…
• Senior Pentagon-based logistics policy officials• Senior government logistics practitioners• Industry leaders and logistics providers
…to share insights and discuss anticipated impacts associated with…
• The daunting challenges presented by the current severe fiscal constraints and future austere budgets
• Declining fiscal resources with which to support the Warfighter• Fiscal uncertainties that hinder sustainment of a viable logistics industrial base
A technology exhibition will spotlight cutting-edge logistics capabilities being developed to support Warfighters in an efficient and effective manner.
NATIONAL LOGISTICS FORUM
Industry will be provided with an opportunity to exchange views with foreign government representatives as attaché staff provide insight into current domestic politics and factors that influence their strategic vision - How does their country perceive itself within NATO, within Western Europe, and globally?
• On May 7, hear from Major General Giovanni Fantuzzi, Defense Cooperation Attaché, Embassy of Italy
• On June 27, hear from Brigadier General Dirk Backen, Military Attaché, Embassy of Germany; and Mr. Malik Kammermann, Minister-Counselor for Defense Cooperation, Embassy of Germany
Italy – May 7 – www.ndia.org/meetings/347B
Germany – June 27 – www.ndia.org/meetings/347C
EMBASSY/DEFENSE ATTACHÉ LUNCHEON SERIES
ITALY & GERMANY
Germany; and Mr. Malik Kammermann, Minister-Counselor
M A Y 2 0 1 3 • N A T I O N A L D E F E N S E 47
N D I A F E A T U R E D E V E N T S
Laurel, MD • July 11, 2013 • www.ndia.org/meetings/3100
“The State of Integrated Air and Missile Defense”
Attend this symposium to get valuable, ‘off the record’ insights and information from key decision makers on:
• The current state of joint integration and interoperability in IAMD;
• Where IAMD stands today and where it is going, with an inside look at the Administration’s highest priorities in the longer term;
• The latest information on the Phased Adaptive Approach and how industry can effectively position itself to support it;
• The latest advances in IAMD capabilities and technologies.
4TH ANNUAL INTEGRATED AIR & MISSILE DEFENSE SYMPOSIUM
Chantilly, VA • June 25-26, 2013 • www.ndia.org/meetings/3340
“Building a Sustainable Enterprise for 2020 and Beyond”Participate in a unique, non-attribution forum, conducted at the TS/SCI level, to explore the future path of National Security Space.
Featuring Presentations and Panel Discussions on…• Policy• Strategy• Space Based Intelligence• Acquisition• Commercial Imagery• Space Industral Issues• Space Launch
NATIONAL SECURITY SPACE POLICY AND ARCHITECTURE SYMPOSIUM
3M Defense . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . www .3mdefense .com/reduceweight . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9
AAI Unmanned Aircraft Systems . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . www .aaicorp .com . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5
AAR Mobility Systems . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . www .aarmobilitysystems .com . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .Cover 2
Alenia Aermacchi . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . www .aleniaaermacchi .it . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Cover 4
ATK Defense Electronic Systems . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . www .atk .com . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Cover 4
Bio Fire Diagnostics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . www .bio-surveillance .com . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .13
Ceradyne . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . www .ceradyne .com/products/defense .aspx . . . . . . . . . . 35
Coorstek . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . www .coorstek .com . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 15
Data Device Corporation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . www .ddc-web .com/sspc/nd . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 23
Deployed Resources . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . www .deployedresources .com . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 14
Drake Associates . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . www .drakeassociates .us . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 43
DynCorp International . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . www .dyn-intl .com . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 21
EADS North America . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . www .ArmedScout .com . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .Cover 3
Esterline Power Systems . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . www .esterline .com/powersystems . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .31
Fischer Connectors . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . www .fischer-minimax .com . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 33
FLIR Systems . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . www .flir .com/ndpt . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 22
FLIR Systems . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . www .flir .com/quarknd . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 41
Fuel-Safe ARM-USA . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . www .arm-usa .com . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2
GATR Technologies . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . www .gatr .com . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 34
Government Liquidators . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . www .sellyoursurplus .net . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 37
GPS Source . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . www .gpssource .com . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 39
IHS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . www .ihs .com . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 25
Jelco Inc . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . www .jelcoinc .com/government . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 16
Klas Telecom . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . www .klastelecom .com . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 32
Lancer Systems . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . www .lancer-systems .com . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 20
Leupold . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . www .leupold .com/tactical . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 36
Merad Path Finder . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . atkaann@gmail .com . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 42
Microsoft . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . www .microsoft .com/dod . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .3
Ruag Ammotec . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . www .ruag .com . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 29
Sheppard Mullin Richter & Hampton LLP . . . . . . . . . www .sheppardmullin .com . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .7
SKB Corporation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . www .skbcases .com/military . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .17
UTC Aerospace Systems . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . www .goodrich .com/gnc . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .11
W .L . Gore . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . www .gorepyrad .com . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 19
48 N at i o N a l D e f e N s e • M ay 2 0 1 3
For information on advertising in National Defense, contact the International Advertising Headquarters or your regional advertising office.
Vice President, AdVertising Dino K. Pignotti(703) 247–2541 Fax: (703) [email protected]
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Military energy Programs■ The U.S. Air Force, the largest user of fuel among the armed services, has over the last few years worked to reduce its consump-tion and drive savings from fuel efficiency. Measures such as cleaner engines, removing excess equipment from aircraft and reduc-ing the amount of paper crew take onboard has yielded significant savings, officials said. National Defense takes a closer look at the service’s initiatives in our next issue.
cybersecurity■ When a military enters a country, it faces a number of obstacles — from blockades to missiles, all must be removed before an army can enter. With cyber-attacks on the rise, the United States can expect to face a
new front of anti-access/area denial warfare on the network side, particularly if battling a near-peer competitor. In our next issue, National Defense examines the current market for A2AD cyber-efforts, from the threat to the challenges, to China and Iran.
cyberwarfare■ Recent studies suggest that a full-spectrum attack from a near-peer adversary could de-bilitate the military’s electronic systems, and that Chinese hackers are turning their focus to critical infrastructure.But even as the Defense Department pre-pares to roll out rules for how the military would engage in cyberwarfare, officials wor-ry they are not moving fast enough to coun-ter the growing threat.
MAy 2013 Index of AdvertisersInteract with the companies whose products and services are advertised in National Defense.
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Next Month
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