The recently announced cuts in weapon systems, coupled with the announced Quadrennial Defense Review themes of irregular warfare and improved business processes, leave little doubt the U.S. Defense Department is looking to change the way it does business.
At the forefront of these changes is the rise of a technology-enabled 21st century asymmetric warfare threat, an "improvised everything" environment, which is forcing the DoD to rethink modern warfare and take the first steps toward acquisition reform.
This opportunity must be grasped. Today's procurement system, a legacy of the Cold War, lacks the flexibility and responsiveness to optimally meet the challenges of this new environment, directly impacting troops on the ground.
Our adversaries' ability to quickly innovate and rapidly leverage disruptive technologies, including commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) components, has challenged our military forces throughout Iraq and Afghanistan. Whereas our weapon programs can take years or decades before the first roll-out, the enemy's arsenal, such as improvised explosive devices (IEDs), can be rapidly modified.
In an "improvised everything" environment, credible threats can be developed in nearly all traditional military mission areas. Our adversaries summon improvised armies using cell phones, text messages, blogs and networking sites like Twitter. Improvised special forces of suicidal terrorists have attacked in Mumbai, India, and in Afghanistan, leveraging Google Maps and GPS devices, and exploiting the worldwide reach of television.
Hizbollah and Hamas have developed improvised artillery, firing lethal rockets remotely using cheap digital watches as timers. Improvised navies made of speed boats can threaten to swarm U.S. warships or threaten vital shipping lanes through piracy. And increasingly realistic open-source software games enable improvised training.
It is the ability of our asymmetric adversaries to use these emerging technologies to develop new threats and update old ones that stresses the U.S. defense acquisition system. Their developmental agility is a militarily relevant capability in its own right. It puts a premium on our ability to develop flexible, easily upgradeable systems, to "repurpose" existing ones to meet new threats, and to reform training of acquisition personnel as well as that of the war fighter:
Flexibility: The acquisition system needs to ensure that new system designs are fungible against rapidly changing, improvised threat environments. DoD has moved in this direction by embracing modular mission packages, but more needs to be done at the systemic level. Indeed, nothing short of a procurement culture change will suffice, one in which the risk of technology-change-induced obsolescence, irrelevance and wasting assets is pondered as rigorously and prominently as conventional technical performance objectives.
Repurposing: Terrorists are exceptionally talented at using COTS systems for unintended uses. We must exceed their skill to win this war. Nowhere is this repurposing more dramatically evident than in information technology. Indeed, software can be changed more rapidly than hardware, arguably at the speed of light.
Embracing today's new "mash-up" philosophy, where 90 percent of the software is already proven and developed and 10 percent of the code is written to specialize it, can bring results reliably and rapidly. Where possible, in both software and hardware, our development programs should look to truly open standards and interoperability. Then systems developed for Cold War threats can be rapidly transformed into vital, interchangeable and enduring assets for an uncertain and dangerous 21st century.
Training: Our adversaries can often innovate inside of the development cycles for new DoD weapon systems. Enhanced training, however, can deliver operational capabilities much more rapidly.
Already, troops preparing to deploy are leveraging lessons learned in theater, including insights regarding the changing technologies our forces will face. In addition, one could well imagine extending the concept of embedded journalism to embedded acquisition, to enable these lessons to immediately affect procurement staff as well as deploying troops.
To its credit, the Pentagon has already begun to respond to this new asymmetric environment and to speed new capabilities to the war fighter. But more needs to be done.
As the nation considers significant reforms to the defense acquisition process to increase accountability and align to new fiscal realities, we must not forget to consider how to increase responsiveness as well. The "improvised everything" world demands it.
By David Smith, a defense and homeland security consultant for Booz Allen Hamilton, a strategy and technology consulting firm, and Allan Steinhardt, former scientist and program manager at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency and now a principal at Booz Allen Hamilton.
The Army's Future Combat Systems (FCS) program is ready to test a few components that soldiers may have in their hands by 2010.
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