Speakers
LTG L. Neil Thurgood, Director of Rapid Capabilities and Critical Technologies Office
Bob Strider
Dr. Craig Robin
Transcript
It’s great to be part of the Army’s modernization strategy, and the things that we need to do for our nation, as we move forward. It’s a unique opportunity, a unique time in our history, and we’re gonna talk a little bit about that today, and the role the we have the opportunity to play, as part of that future. And we talk about hypersonics and we talk about direct energy, pieces of our portfolio, what we’re gonna focus on today. And as was introduced Mr. Strider and Dr. Robin, both literally brilliant, brilliant people on both of these domains. And so we’re lucky to have them. So I thought I’d just kinda refocus some of the words that the Secretary used today in his message at the opening ceremony. Go to the next slide please. The world we’re in today isn’t like the world we’ve been in for the last, almost two decades, right? We’ve been an army at war, across the global community. And we’ve been fighting with our ally and partner nations in the global war on terror. And we’ve developed a series of tools and outcomes to be successful in that battle space. And our soldiers, of all nations, have done a wonderful job in those VEO war fight. Today, our national military strategy has changed, and now it’s the great power competition that you heard the Secretary talk about today. And as we’ve been off fighting the war on terror, the global war on terror, our adversaries have been modernizing. And you can see some of the things that they’re doing to modernize in terms of real expenditures. Right, if you want to modernize an army it takes resources to do that. And so we’ve applying our resources on a global war on terror, and now under the tutelage of our Chief and our Secretary you have General Murray and Honorable Jette in a partnership in the modernization of our army for the future fight. And we get to be a piece of that. So we focus on lasers and hypersonics, as our priority programs. And both of those are strategic outcomes. And then we have other things that we’re working on, that’re really not strategic, but critical technologies that we execute on behalf of our nation to bring a war fighting capability to our soldiers. Go to the next slide. This organization, some of you may not be familiar with this organization, specifically designed for a singular outcome. The purpose of the Rapid Capabilities and Critical Technologies Office is to move stuff from the S&T community into prototypes at the unit of action level, that’s why we exist. Take stuff that is done, or near done, and produce a prototype and give it to a combat unit, so they can try it in the field. Some in business would call that, if you’re gonna fail, fail fast and fail early. Don’t make a program of record, I’m not a program of record guy, I’ve been a PEO, that’s not my job today. My job is to take technologies and bridge them from that brilliant group of S&T people into a prototype. And so, that’s what we do. And we do that across a wide domain of expertise and technologies, and again today we’re gonna focus on hypersonics. We’re lucky in that this command, this organization, this director, is headquartered at Redstone Arsenal in Alabama, that’s where my flag sits. We have a group that sits at Fort Belvoir, and we have a group that sits at Aberdeen Proving Grounds. And you can see that that’s designed to span not only the laser and hypersonic technologies which we kinda use and develop out of Redstone, we do electronic stuff out of APG, we do weapon systems out Fort Belvoir. And so there’s a whole host of things that we do. We bridge between the S&T community, Cedric Wins, General Wins was just up here, the CCDCs, the S&T communities. Miss Christensen has a piece of that at Redstone, a great partner for us at Redstone. And we take that technology and develop it quickly into a war-fighting capability. We’re not trying to build an army’s worth, we’re trying to build a set of prototypes for a unit, normally at the platoon and battery, maybe the company level, to try it, to see if it works. And this organization is designed for three outcomes. Either we tried it and we liked it, let’s turn it over to a Program Executive Officer, depending on what domain it is. We tried it and we didn’t like it, let’s get rid of it, let’s don’t make any more of these things. Or we tried it, we like it, but it’s not quite ready yet, let’s put it back in the oven. Let’s put it back to the S&T community and let them continue to mature that technology a little bit further. And so we have application across all of those domains. The other thing that we do is we try to reach out to industry in this event we call Innovation Days. So we just recently had our first one, where we invite companies to come in that have unique technologies. Most of them are small companies, innovative companies, and we let them come in an present in a “Shark Tank” environment. Literally we have a panel of experts across the army, from the Army Futures Command, from the S&T communities, from the PEOs, from the TRADOCs, from the FCoEs, or the CoEs, Centers of Excellence. And we evaluate that technology, and if it’s something we think we can use then we very quickly award a contract. It’s really a great event because most of these companies have no idea how to work with the government and they have some really innovative ideas to move forward with. So we’re very excited about that. So that’s our purpose, that’s what we live, that’s why we exist, is to produce prototype outcomes for our soldiers. What’s unique about this is, in most cases, there’s not a single company that can do this work.
And it’s not something that’s been worked on in the last few days, you know. What most people don’t know is that it’s been being worked on since, like 1980. But the technology’s matured enough, we’ve proven it out. How many people know what hypersonics means? So most of, yeah, most everybody I recognize as part of the contract team too, that’s good. Anything above Mach five is considered hypersonic speed. And so the physics and the science behind it is very interesting, in that, you know when you fly through the atmosphere at these kind of speeds you’ve got a huge amount of heat you’ve gotta deal with and manage. And so we’ve managed to conquer that hurdle, and really proved, to put a system out there we know that will be capable, and will bring to bear what we need it to. So what is it we’re bringing to bear? So we’re gonna field an experimental prototype with residual combat capability by 2023. Those words are tattooed on every one of us within the Rapid Capability and Critical Technology office, because we’re not a 5,000 series, we’re not an 804, an 806. If we were we wouldn’t be able to get this done at the pace that we’ve got to do that. So General Thurgood has set up a structure for us to do this, and as you notice from the Octagon and also from the Big Six from the Army that we report to, we could not ask for a higher leadership within the Army, that understand this and understand the importance of it. You’ll see General McConville on the picture here, in the middle, he is all behind this. Secretary McCarthy, all in with this. So we could not ask for better cover for this. What is it we’re gonna deliver? So by 2023 we’re gonna deliver a battery. It’s gonna have four launchers, based on an Army trailer, that’s in inventory today. We’ve gotta develop that tail, each tail will have a two-pack on it. So our basic load in our first battery will be eight missiles. So that all up round, that goes onto that tail, it’s in the canister. And one of the key points of this is, the Army and the Navy are in absolute commonality with this. So the booster that we’ll use to launch it, and the front end, the hypersonic glide body that’s at the front end, will be absolutely common with the Navy. So there’s a lot of economy of scale there. In fact there’s an MOA in place, that put the Navy in charge of design and the Army in charge of production. So you’ll also notice up here the Battery Operations Center, which is based on AFATDS, so again we’re taking known Army systems and we’re using those as the baseline to field to. But we’ll get this battery out here in 2023, and we’ll prove this capability out. We’ve got a series of tests, we’ve been testing up to date with OSD as our sponsor. We’ve proven the technology, now we want to get it out in the field by 2023. So, we’ve got a pretty serious task. As General Thurgood mentioned, we’ve got all the contracts in place that we need to do. Sandia National Labs has been, really, the big brain behind this. But they’re good at one-ofs, and good at the science and technology piece, but we’ve gotta move it out of that realm into the production side with industry now. So there’s a lot of challenges built into that, but we know we can get it done, and we’ll get a capability out there. So with that I look forward to your questions, when they come up. I’ll turn it over to Dr. Robin who’ll talk about something that is just a little faster than the hypersonics.
All right, thanks Bob. Go ahead and go to the next slide. So, a year ago I was here and talking about, you heard a little bit on the video there, someone say MMHEL and the Unlimited Magazine. So I was talking about MMHEL and the plan to deliver a 50-kilowatt laser on a Stryker, TRL7 demo in FY21, along with PEO Missiles and Space and the CFT, at that time. And I believe at that same AUSA General Thurgood got the mission to be the director of the RCCTO. So fast forward a few months, in April, General Thurgood gets a memo from the Secretary of the Army that says all of the directed energy efforts in the Army are gonna fall under the RCCTO. I was fortunate enough to be sitting on an airplane next to General Thurgood one night on the way back from Washington, D.C. to Hunstville, and introduced myself, and I was fortunate enough to join that team. And the task at hand, the direction from the Secretary, was transition this technology, accelerate it and get it to the war fighter as soon as possible. And that was the mission that General Thurgood and I undertook. And it meant going out across industry, going out across the other services, and understanding what the landscape of that technology was, and seeing where we could pull it ahead. And I’ve got three areas to talk about here. The one that used to be called MMHEL is called DE MSHORAD now. And so the reality is, is that we’re not doing anything much different than we had planned on doing, we’re accelerating, and then we are investing more in the out-years in order to develop that capability. So where we were developing one 50-kilowatt laser on a Stryker and demoing TRL7 in ’21, what we have now is a competitive environment, through an OTA with Kord as our prime contractor. Northrop Grumman and Raytheon are competing for the laser and beam control sub-systems that will end in a demonstration at Fort Sill, the winner of which the Army will evaluate and has the opportunity to sell three more laser weapons systems, for a total of four, that will field in a platoon no later than FY22. And as Bob said, residual combat capability, same with directed energy, that’s the goal there, to get this into the hands of the war fighter. So there’s two other efforts here to talk about, right. One is high energy laser, indirect fire protection. So we had another effort called High Energy Laser Tactical Vehicle Demonstrator, that was a TRL6 demo in FY22. So, again, we took that on us. We looked at what was out there in industry, what was in the government. What we found was the Office of the Secretary of Defense had a high energy laser scaling initiative, where they were pushing laser power a little bit farther, a little bit higher, right. Giving us the ability to reach out a little bit farther, to engage threats and kill them a little bit faster. More capability for the soldier, more capability for our Army. And so we took that on ourselves, as a planning task in the out-years, to do that demonstration, and then build four additional prototypes and field those in FY24. Well we also noticed, not looking within the Army, but when we went out and visited the Air Force for example, is lasers are great serial killers, right. They look at a thing then, and speed of light right? We talk about speed of light effects. The threat, or the effect gets there at the speed of light, but it takes a little bit of time to kill the thing that you’re trying to kill. So high-power microwaves is a different directed energy technology that engages more threats than one, right. And it’s particularly useful for counter-UAS threats. So, when we visited the Air Force Research Laboratory in Albuquerque, New Mexico we found that they had spent a lot of money, a lot time, investing S&T dollars in high power microwaves. There’s no need for the Army to reinvent the wheel. Just like at OSD, there’s no need for us to all be investing in the same effort. So we leveraged those efforts, and there’s a decision point out there in FY22/23 to field four high power microwave systems for the Army, which we’ll do with residual combat capability no later than FY24 as well. So that’s a quick rundown on what we’re doing in directed energy. Unlike hypersonics, who’s obviously the number one strategic priority, we’re number two, but we do have a host of efforts that we’re working and trying to push that technology out to the soldier. So with that I think I’ll end, and look forward to your questions.
Okay, all right, great, thanks. So you can see that it’s pretty exciting. When I had this job I had a whole full head of hair, but hypersonics is so fast it just wiped it right off my head. So, it’s happening really quick, and we’re in a great place to have lots of support. I wanna also introduce two folks that’re standing right back here, raise your hand. So, Marsha Holmes and Stan Darbro are our deputies, are my deputies. Stan’s here at Fort Belvoir, and Marsha Holmes is our deputy at Redstone. So we’re really glad to have them as part of our team. It was no kidding, when I sat next to Dr. Robins, I said, “Tomorrow you start working for me.” And, so he’s been just a real blessing to do that. We’ve been in, given some great authorities and you should get a sense from this conference, from this great event, sponsored by AUSA, that the Army’s serious about modernization. If you didn’t get that sense from the Secretary this morning we are dead serious about modernizing the Army, and creating the tools we need for the great power competition. The reason we prototype early is, and we have a lot of soldier touchpoints in our plan, we bring soldiers in all the time to come and look at our screens and touch our equipment, is, because sometimes what a great engineer thinks will work a soldier will actually tweak and make it work a little bit better. But it’s not just soldier touchpoints, as you can see up here on this picture, much to the chagrin of some of our engineers, we actually take them to the field with soldiers. So it’s not just bringing soldiers to the labs, it’s taking our engineers to the field with our soldiers. And so this happens to be this summer at Fort Hood, Texas. Lieutenant Colonel Tom Petrini, the battalion commander, allowed us to come out to his unit that was deployed in the field. We took our engineers out there and let them watch, in this case it happened to be a Patriot and THAAD unit, how they operate, what’s the BOC do, how does it, launcher work? And so that our engineers, as they’re designing this, so quickly, we can avoid mistakes in the lab that we then have to come back through the soldier touchpoint. So, it’s not just getting soldiers on the equipment, it’s getting engineers to where the soldiers are, so the engineers can sense, and feel, and smell the battle space that this piece of equipment’s going to be working in. So I’ll pause right there, and ask you two to come back up here, and see if there’s any questions that we can help anybody with. Yes?
[Larry] Given the three technologies—
Wait, hold on for a microphone or somebody will probably yell at me.
[Larry] Larry Wortzel. Given the three technologies that you’ve presented, how effective would they be against an incoming hypersonic glide vehicle, or hypersonic cruise missile?
Yeah, so everything that Dr. Robin’s working on is an offensive hypersonic weapons system. The Missile Defense Agency, where I came from prior to this job, has a defensive mission. And so, Bob mentioned that common hypersonic glide body is common on the Air Force HCSW program, the Army program and the Navy program. It’s also common with the Defense program. So MDA, under a dear friend of mine, Vice Admiral Hill, has responsibility for the defensive mission, and we coordinate that across the OSD level with Mr. Mike White. There’s actually a three-star board of directors under hypersonic specifically for that outcome. And the MOA that Bob talked about governs that piece.
So, Steve Trimble with “Aviation Week”. I was wondering if you could talk about the impact if the House mark on LRHW goes through, and if that impact is a one or two year delay, does that make you look at skipping a generation, going to OpFires with a wing glider, more accuracy and longer range, or what the options would be?
Yeah, so that’s a great question. So I don’t know that it’s more accurate. It’s a different shape, and it flies a little different, doesn’t have the same amount of range. So the OpFires program is designed for an outcome, and these systems are designed for an outcome. At the end of the day, the modernization program the Secretary and the Chief want us to execute has to be resourced by Congress, right? What we do is guided by their resources. So we present those resource applications to Congress, and then Congress has to determine if they’re gonna resource that through the Appropriations. If they don’t, then we have to re-look the course of action and the strategy. And so I can’t tell you today, if I get 50 million less here, what does that mean? Right, what we do is, and we start turning knobs and dials, and try to produce as much of the outcome as we can on the timeline we need it. Right now in hypersonics, whether it’s the conventional Prompt Strike program at OSD, which is the land component, navy, sea component. Or it’s DARPA doing some DARPA work, there’s lots of support for hypersonics, but we’ll see how that plays out, what Congress decides to do. And so we’ll play our role, as the services, present what we believe are the requirements to Congress, and then they have to apply that back to us. Once we get that answer, then we’ll either stay on the path we’re on or adjust the path we’re on. We think we’re in a good place right now. Clearly the money we need to do this is, you know, this is not an inexpensive business. And making prototypes is hard, hard work, so. Yeah.
Hi, good afternoon. Jason Sherman from “Inside Defense”. Bob, I wonder if you could tell us about, describe the program going forward. What’re the key milestones that your office has to oversee between now and delivering that first battery of LRHW?
So you’re saying the Stryker program?
Ah no, the Hypersonic Weapon program.
So where’re we going with that?
What’re the key milestones between now and end of the road?
So key milestones right now are just, we understand the technology, we know what we’re gonna produce, we wanna make it better as we go. But for the path we’re on right now, the key milestone will be fielding in ’23. And we’ve got to get, make sure that we’ve got the resources available to be able to meet that date. So a key milestone.
What’re the key things between now (speaking faintly).
The key things are.
The key events (speaking faintly).
Yeah the key effects will be, like the tail I mentioned, we have to do that design and development, which is not gonna be very hard. We know how to erect missiles, it’s a matter of putting it on an existing Army trailer that we already have in inventory. We’ve got a heavy mover that we’ll move it around with. The canister development that’s gotta be done. The Navy is taking a little bit different launch approach than the Army. So the canister’ll be a little different from that, but the all up round itself, the booster and the glide body that’ll be the front end will be exactly the same. So that canister development’s gotta be done, and then it’s gotta be integrated onto the tail itself. But also, the command and control piece of this, that’ll be based on an Army system, AFATDS, we’ve gotta get those hooks all built into that so that message is coming down from a very high echelon for this type weapon system will be put in place to receive that, process it, and upload it into the missile so it’ll do as designed.
How many flights do need to execute (speaking faintly) between now and then?
So, right now we’re planning for six. So, we’ve got a pretty aggressive flight schedule. In the past we’ve done a test every two, 2.5 years, just because that was the pace of maturing the technology, but we’ve an aggressive test schedule that will actually take this to prove out what we wanna field. And then we will actually hand it over to the soldiers that will field it, for at least two events, so that they will actually go all the way from deployment all the way through setting up, receiving the message, and going through the launch sequence, and hitting, and impacting the target you’re aiming at.
Is that gonna be in the Pacific, or where’re the flights going to be? Are the flight tests in the Pacific, or where do those take place?
So there’s some questions still on that. A lot of our testing, all of our testing before has been in the Pacific Theater. So we have a known test structure there, and the testing, because of monitoring for the flights, the range safety that has to be done, that’s a well known asset that we take full advantage of. So we will look at other ranges as we go. I know the Navy’s looking at some East Coast capability. We’ll be looking across the board to see what makes the most sense for the scenario that we’re trying to exercise.
And are you dual hatted? You’re acting as an executive agent for the other services in some, on the glide body part of the program? And then, can you describe a little bit about how you work that division of labor?
So, yeah, the glide body piece. As we mentioned before, there’s an MOA in place where the Navy has design responsibility, the Army has production responsibility. So we’re working extremely closely with the Navy on this production, on this design capability, and then how we produce it. We’ve got our industry partners onboard now, no secret Dynetics, it was that won the OTA for the production side of that. They’ve got a team built around them now that they’re starting to spin up. They’re at Sandia right now, learning all the processes and procedures to build this very unique system. So, our piece of this, and like I say, with the Army and Navy, we’re very close. With the Air Force on their HCSW program, they’re about 70% common with everything that we’re doing, so that commonality is really gonna help put a lot of confidence in that design and capability, we know it works. You know, OpFires got mentioned earlier, the thing with OpFires is, they’ve still yet to shoot a test. So, what I’m looking for from an engineering perspective, and from an S&T is, once these things mature and they come up, what scenario do they best fit? ‘Cause they do bring different, a little bit different capability. And there are other scenarios that they may be a better fit for that our leadership will see what the best fit for that weapons system is.
[Man] Hello. While testing the offensive side of hypersonics, will there be any opportunities performed for data collections during those testings that might actually inform the counter side? Although they’re separate, but that might help.
Yeah, that’s a good question. All of the testing that we’re doing, one of the things this MOA does that Bob talked about, is everything is shared with all the services. There is no, “Well this is Army data and you can’t have it.” Or, “This is Navy data and you can’t have it.” So the three-stars have all gotten together and go, “Look, everything you’re doing, “if you’re doing a test we’re not gonna duplicate it. “And if we’re doing one, you don’t duplicate it.” Everybody gets 100% of the data. Right, so we can maximize every shot, every test, ground test, flight test, every shot. All the data goes to everybody, offense and defense. Okay. Listen, let me just close with just a couple of thoughts. So first of all, we really appreciate the great work that has come out of the S&T community. Which has set the conditions for all of this to happen. To move forward the rapid prototyping to a unit of action level in this case. It has to be a battery or a platoon level if it’s directed energy. It is time for us and our modernization strategy, in support of the Secretary and the Chief, and our Army and our nation, to move forward as rapidly as we can. To industry’s credit, they have put a lot of intellectual and resources into this outcome. And they’ve come together in a collaborative manner. In hypersonics we have a common set of metrics across six companies. I mean, think about how unusual that is. Six companies come together, share their data with each other about are they on schedule, off schedule, what is their role. So we don’t get to the point in three years where we go, “Oh, we thought you were doing that!” That would be a negative outcome in my world. And so to industry’s credit, when you’re out talking to them about it, they’ve really, really done well. We’re relying on Congress to resource the outcome the Army wants. And with whatever resources they’ll provide we’ll move forward with that. At the end of the day, the reason we exist in this domain, in this mission set, is to provide equipment to our soldiers to win on the battle space. Look, soldiers do two things really good, right? We win wars, and we break things (laughs). That’s what we do. We need great material people in the S&T world, great industry partners to make equipment to give to our soldiers to be successful on the battle space. And so that’s why we exist, to provide them that early look at the technology, to see if it is what we want it to be, to see if it produces the outcome on the battle space we want it to produce, and if it is then we transfer that to a Program of Record, and a PEO for then to be successful. So thanks for what you’re doing here today. Thanks for your interest in what we’re doing across these domains, and God bless you for what you’re doing, and bless our soldiers who’re out there doing really hard jobs. Thanks. (audience clapping)