200600601
    In the 11 May 2006 post Science and Technology Special Report: How Technology Can Win the War on Terror, I made an argument for radical military transformation in an effort to remake the military to face current and future threats by embracing technological innovation as part of that transformation. This post continues that discussion.
    In that post, I made four recommendations for immediate changes that should be made to facilitate the long term goal of the future military. This post addresses the second recommendation, which was to drastically increase the funding of the research and development of unmanned and autonomous systems and information integration technologies.
    In the modern age of rising expenses and shrinking budgets, how any organization spends its money now determines the survival of that organization in the future. This adage is especially true with regard to how organizations spend money on research and development, as these expenditures often define the direction and organization will head for many years after such research and development is completed.
    The modern US Military has benefited from a long standing advantage of technological superiority that has complimented its superior training and organization, allowing it to be consistently the most powerful military forces ever fielded. This superiority of technology has always been built upon the clear vision of those who see the value of technology as part of a strong military force and upon adequate and continuing funding of technological development programs.
    The future superiority of the US Military depends on maintaining that vision and funding, and both that vision and funding must be focused on research and development of unmanned and autonomous systems and information integration technologies. These systems and technologies will be the ones that will help the US Military continue to maintain its current edge, allowing it to be the superior fighting force for decades to come.
    These systems and technologies represent the ability of the US Military to drastically increase the effectiveness of the warfighter by allowing him to concentrate more on the warfighting and less on tasks which, while they contribute to victory, take the warfighter away from the fight. Such technologies will contribute to the gathering, analysis, and sharing of intelligence, will help secure large areas of territory with fewer personnel and less risk, and will increase the ability to locate and interdict enemy forces with less risk to the warfighters involved.
    These systems and technologies will be useless, however, without adequate funding and continuous progress. Such funding and progress can only be assured if the current US Military budget is refocused onto developing these systems and technologies, at lease in some part. Further, the funding for such systems and technologies must be freed from the current tiresome and ponderous research, development, and acquisition systems that currently condemn many military systems to obsolescence well before they are every effectively fielded.
    Instead, an increase in funding for research and development of such systems and technologies should be focused on finding companies that already are already researching and developing such technologies to integrate them into military systems and technologies. This focus can be achieved by creating a robust system of open contracting and competitions that focus on presenting problems that need to be solved and allowing individuals, organizations, companies to provide their solutions to those problems.
    An example of such an initiative is the DARPA Grand Challenge. This model of presenting a problem and allowing the competitors to develop solutions outside preconceived notions of what the solution should look like promises to rapidly increase the availability of advanced technologies and decrease the time needed to take these technologies from concepts to the field.
    Such success cannot, however, be achieved without sufficient funding for such programs. Without money, such competitions and their resulting technological research and development cannot occur because there is no incentive to compete. With funding, a multitude of individuals, organizations, and companies will become interested, if only because of the opportunity to showcase their research and technology to a wider and interested audience.
    This solution to helping the future military come into being will not be easy. Undoubtedly, it will require many people in the government and the military to change the way they think about military research, development, and procurement. Successfully achieving that change, however, will result in another leap in military systems and technology that will allow the modern US Military to remain superior well into the future.
DLH
