More detailed story from Inside Defense
Carter lifts the veil on classified work of secretive Strategic Capabilities Office
February 02, 2016
Defense Secretary Ash Carter provided surprising new details about work -- until now largely classified -- of a secretive office he established three years ago to fast-track development of promising, cutting-edge concepts and technologies to give U.S. forces new advantages against countries such as China and Russia. During an address to the Economic Council of Washington billed as a preview of the fiscal year 2017 budget, Carter touted the work of the Strategic Capabilities Office, a low-profile shop in the Pentagon's acquisition directorate that has gone from being set up to securing a $1.5 billion stake in military spending plans, including $870 million for projects to date for an expanding portfolio of potentially high-payoff technologies.
Carter directed the creation of the office during the summer of 2012 while deputy defense secretary as part of an effort to address policy issues associated with "pivoting" the U.S. military to the Asia-Pacific region. During his speech, he publicly took credit for the initiative and revealed new details about a number of projects. "SCO is incredibly innovative, but also has the rare virtue of rapid development and even the rarer virtue of keeping current capabilities viable for as long as possible," Carter said during his address.
The SCO -- led since its inception by William Roper who previously worked as the Missile Defense Agency's director for engineering -- was originally nested in the research and engineering directorate of the Pentagon's acquisition shop. Last year, Carter directed "the SCO be permanently established, operate under the authorities of the deputy defense secretary, and be integrated with the Advanced Capabilities and Deterrence Panel," a high-level DOD group focused on increasing U.S. technological advantages, according to a September Pentagon description of the office.
The SCO's budget has grown significantly since being established: $125.8 million in FY-14; $224.7 million in FY-15; and $519.8 million in FY-16 with plans laid out last year to spend another $766 million between FY-17 through FY-20. In addition, Deputy Defense Secretary Bob Work in a December address to a London think tank said he had identified the SCO as the vanguard for Pentagon efforts over the next five years to experiment with new technologies as part of the so-called Third Offset Strategy. Carter, in his remarks, discussed four SCO projects, two of which had not been publicly revealed and provided new details on the other two.
"First is a project focused on advanced navigation," Carter said. Until today, the Pentagon had said only that this project aimed to develop a prototype advanced navigation technique for contested environments, was begun in FY-15 with $15.2 million, and further details were "available at a higher classification level," according to budget justification documents sent to Congress last year. The SCO is "taking the same kinds of micro-cameras and sensors that are littered throughout our smartphones today, and putting them on our Small Diameter Bombs to augment their targeting capabilities," Carter said. "This will eventually be a modular kit that will work with many other payloads -- enabling off-network targeting through commercial components that are small enough to hold in your hand." In FY-16, the Pentagon plans to spend $16.3 million on this project, according to budget documents.
Another previously undisclosed project -- the "arsenal plane" -- takes "one of our oldest aircraft platforms, and turns it into a flying launch pad for all sorts of different conventional payloads," the defense secretary said. "In practice, the arsenal plane will function as a very large airborne magazine, networked to 5th-generation aircraft that act as forward sensor and targeting nodes -- essentially combining different systems already in our inventory to create wholly new capabilities." Based on this description, it is not clear whether the "arsenal plane" is being funded through a budget account dedicated to developing "innovative concepts" -- which would suggest this plane is an idea still on the drawing board -- or funded through the SCO's innovative technologies account, which would permit technology development.
Cater provided new descriptions of SCO projects that have previously only been outlined in broad strokes. The SCO's single biggest project to date is a "land-based rail gun" -- a $498 million effort through FY-16 -- that aims to find a new way to shoot down ballistic missiles that is much less expensive than using guided-missile interceptors.
"We're taking the same hypervelocity smart projectile developed for the electromagnetic rail gun, and using it for point defense by firing it with artillery we already have in our inventory -- including the five-inch guns at the front of every Navy destroyer, and also the hundreds of Army Paladin self-propelled howitzers," Carter said of the SCO project. "This way, instead of spending more money on more expensive interceptors, we can turn past offense into future defense -- defeating incoming missile raids at much lower cost per round, and thereby imposing higher costs on the attacker." Carter said the SCO, for the first time, recently fired a hypervelocity projectile from a Paladin self-propelled howitzer "and we found that it also significantly increases the range." Last June, Deputy Defense Secretary Work said that the SCO -- during a high-profile annual military exercise in Alaska -- demonstrated an innovative use of a large number of small, unmanned aerial vehicles, a precursor to exhibiting micro-UAVs capable of autonomous swarming behaviors and a move designed in part to display military advantage over China and Russia.
Asked at the time for additional details about the use of a "large number of micro UAVs" that Work briefly mentioned in a June 22 address, the SCO though a spokesman declined to provide further details. Today, the defense secretary explained what the SCO is doing with its project to develop swarming, autonomous vehicles of all kinds. "For the air, they've developed micro-drones that are really fast, and really resilient -- they can fly through heavy winds and be kicked out the back of a fighter jet moving at Mach 0.9, like they did during an operational exercise in Alaska last year, or they can be thrown into the air by a soldier in the middle of the Iraqi desert," Carter said. "And for the water, they've developed self-driving boats, which can network together to do all sorts of missions, from fleet defense to close-in surveillance -- including around an island, real or artificial, without putting our sailors at risk."
Each of these, Carter added, "leverages the wider world of technology." The micro-drones, according to the defense secretary, "use a lot of commercial components and 3D printing. And the boats build on some of the same artificial intelligence algorithms that NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory wrote for the Mars lander," Carter added
