Third Offset: How can the military take advantage of industry work on plug-and-play systems?

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COVER STORY

THIRD OFFSET:

HOW CAN THE MILITARY TAKE ADVANTAGE OF INDUSTRY WORK ON PLUG-AND-PLAY SYSTEMS? By Rich Tuttle In a perfect world, the U.S. military would have a fleet of plug-and-play unmanned ground vehicles that would be simpler to operate and support than the current fleet of thousands of small and medium-size UGVs, which has a variety of logistics trains and electronic architectures. The current fleet works well, but it was fielded quickly without a long-term plan to meet urgent needs, like countering roadside bombs. In theory, rationalization would allow the services to bring more effective vehicles to the field more quickly, upgrade them more easily, and support them more efficiently. And, the theory goes, it would allow the fleet to be a more effective component of the Third Offset doctrine, which would see the military take constant and rapid advantage of expertise in American private industry in areas like autonomy and artificial intelligence, edging out potential competitors whose technologies presumably would always lag behind. The doctrine has its doubters, who say that global competition in the high-tech arena is stiff and that there’s no guarantee the U.S. could stay ahead for any length of time to blunt a potential enemy’s aggressive intentions. That was true of the First Offset (nuclear weapons) and the Second Offset (stealth and precision). But U.S. preoccupation with fighting terrorism is said to have led to a prolonged reliance on the Second Offset, allowing potential adversaries to begin to match American expertise in stealth and precision, and to move on to more sophisticated technologies.

Planning hurdles One issue is that the military is hampered by a hidebound planning, budgeting and execution cycle that can take years to put products in the field and that lags far behind industry’s first-to-market approach. The answer, at least from the Marine Corps perspective, may involve accepting some of the logistics and architecture drawbacks of the current UGV fleet in order to get the latest and most capable systems, says Col. Jim Jenkins of the Marine Corps Warfighting Lab at Quantico, Va. The way it’s done now, he says in a telephone interview, it takes a long time to buy everybody in the Marine Corps the same thing, so by the time the second half of a buy is fielded it’s already obsolete. Complicating the problem is that private industry in the

The U.S. military seeks to stay ahead in the proliferation of technology, including hardware standards, but better training may be the ultimate key to success.

Third Offset considerations aside, observers say the unmanned ground vehicle fleet should be rationalized anyway and that the path, in fact, does lie through private industry. The question, is how can the military can take advantage of the work industry is doing in things like supply chains, robotics, artificial intelligence, human-machine interface and virtual reality? 34

| Unmanned Systems | january-February 2018

meantime may have moved ahead in things like the processing power and memory speed of the original buy, making it difficult to get replacement parts, and boosting cost. But it may be possible “to find a balance and comfort level” by staying with the current mixture of UGVs and at the same time taking advantage of fast-moving technological progress to get to the goal of plugand-play components and slicker logistics. A way to do this might be through standardized controls. This way, Jenkins says, current and future UGVs would in-

UGVs like this Multi-Utility Tactical Transport (MUTT), being tested at the Marine Corps' Twentynine Palms facility in 2016, might someday use standardized plug-and-play architectures. Photo: USMC


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