SCO reveals three-part playbook for innovative strike and defense
April 13, 2016
The Defense Department is making public the centerpiece of a new rapid-acquisition system -- developed in secret over nearly four years -- that aims to convert existing combat capabilities into "strategic surprises" for near-peer competitors in hopes of attracting new ideas from across the U.S. military and private sector, while simultaneously bolstering conventional deterrence against China and Russia.
The Strategic Capabilities Office, a Pentagon shop formed in 2012 whose work until recently has largely been kept under wraps, has revealed a three-part playbook for taking the existing U.S. combat inventory -- a force the United States has spent decades and hundreds of billions of dollars acquiring -- and finding news means to strike and defend in never-before-seen ways.
"One of our primary questions in SCO is how do we use these systems that we have this tremendous investment in -- in ways the world has never seen and therefore doesn't know how to counter?" SCO Director Will Roper said in a March 28 interview with reporters. "We found that there is a way to do this and it basically takes three forms."
The first approach is to repurpose existing weapons; the second, link existing capabilities together in new ways; the third is to find novel approaches to integrate commercial technology into the force, according to Roper.
"We put all those three things together and year by year we look at all the systems in the department and we are going to make one of those three factors work to our advantage," Roper said.
This spring, the SCO -- which is seeking $902 million for projects in FY-17, the bulk of which is for prototyping -- plans to publish its first solicitation seeking outside ideas. Last September, the office published a notice previewing areas of interest, including missile defense, command and control, air systems, land systems, naval systems space and communications and information operations.
The SCO has worked with the military services to develop a number of new capabilities recently declassified by the Pentagon.
The new Standard Missile-6 is touted as a textbook example of how the SCO would take an existing weapon, designed for ship defense, and give it an offensive capability to sink another ship.
"There are lots of benefits to taking something that wasn't designed for a mission and pulling it into a different domain," said Roper. Speed is one benefit, he added. The SCO was very quickly able to field this anti-ship capability faster than a traditional development program. The cost is much lower, because the Navy was leveraging a system already developed and relatively early in the planned production run, and the anti-ship capability effort was able to leverage existing contract vehicles and program support.
A key dimension of repurposing SM-6 with an offensive capability is "instant force structure" enhancement, according to Roper.
"If you looked at the FY-17 budget before you might say, 'The department isn't buying a lot of anti-ship weapons.' You'd look at that SM-6 line and see 600-ish weapons and say, 'That's for defense, wow, the U.S. is putting a lot of expense into defending ships in a contested environment; probably on the wrong side of the cost equation,'" Roper said.
The disclosure of the new SM-6 anti-ship capability, Roper said, is expected to change the calculus of anyone who might assume the 125 SM-6 missiles the Navy plans to buy between FY-17 and FY-21 are for defense only.
"Whether you are an adversary or an allied country or partner, we're buying a lot of anti-ship weapons," Roper said. "And they are dual-purpose, they are dual threat. We are going to defend ourselves while taking the fight back forward."
The SCO's second approach to developing new capabilities is to integrate existing capabilities into "teams" exemplified by the Arsenal Plane project, a new concept the Pentagon hopes to prove out in a prototype capable of ferrying huge amounts of ordnance to standoff ranges that waits for strike assignments from advanced fighters close to the action.
Because fifth-generation fighter aircraft, such as the Air Force's F-22A Raptor and the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter are not able to carry weapons in large quantities, there are two ways to try to solve that problem, according to Roper.
"One is you could just accept that you've got to go land and resupply and go back into the fight," he said, an option that invites other challenges about protecting bases where the aircraft are landing as well as refueling and amounts to "a really hard way" to solve the problem of increasing fighter ordnance loads.
"Or you can try to offload all the weapons and keep those forward fighters flying more of a scout role, a forward-observe role, and network them to an airplane that is standing off and doing the job of bringing in weapons and supporting multiple fighters forward," Roper said. "That is not a typical program development -- where you find a fighter isn't doing a job well enough and conclude, 'I need to build a new fighter.' This is a different approach: You say, 'I may not build another fighter, but I may build a team.'"
The third approach is to become fast, innovative adapters of commercial technology. "We're looking for ways to infuse this commercial tech," he said, adding: "We have to move quickly, we have to care about good-enough solutions that don't force us to do difficult things to aircraft or ships or submarines. And we're going to have to keep up with the pace of industry."
A SCO project that falls into this category, he said, is an advanced navigation project that takes micro-cameras and sensors -- widely used on smartphones -- and puts them on satellite-guided weapons to give them targeting capability in GPS-denied environments.
"So we very much value modular, kit-based approaches so that you avoid having to do redesigns for every system," the SCO director said. "It is hard to do that. It takes a lot of emphasis to get the architecture right up front, but it is worth it to us." -- Jason Sherman
I'll start: why not just put the missile capability on a bunch of Virginias and eliminate the complexity?
