THE COAST GUARD RDT&E PROGRAM Celebrating 50 years of innovation By J.R. WILSON
One of the most tumultuous years in U.S. history was 1968 – war, assassinations, riots, the lunar landing program, a bitterly fought presidential election. It also was the year the U.S. Coast Guard, the smallest of the uniformed services, then part of the Department of Transportation (DOT), sought to close a perceived gap between existing Coast Guard capabilities and the technological needs of the service. Now celebrating its 50th anniversary, the Coast Guard Research, Development, Technology and Evaluation (RDT&E) program was created to identify fairly high-use technologies, used by the four Department of Defense (DOD) services or part of the growing commercial technology world, and apply them to Coast Guard requirements. Unlike some of the DOD labs, it was not designed to do basic research. “We were established on 1 November 1968. Four years later, the Research and Development Center [RDC] was established with 160 people, the first time we had our own lab. In 1968, we had a fire safety research facility, which today is called the Joint Maritime Test Facility and linked to NRL [Naval Research Lab],” said Wendy Chaves, chief of RDT&E under the Coast Guard Acquisition Directorate. “In November 1981, they decided to close the center and we lost about 34 personnel before they changed their minds in September 1982. We never fully shut down, but once the decision was reversed, we had to hire new people to replace those we lost in those 10 months.” About a decade ago, the Coast Guard was moved from DOT to the new Department of Homeland Security (DHS), where the RDC has formed a close relationship with DHS’ Science and Technology Directorate. Throughout its history, the center has focused on a number of broad areas, with those adjusted periodically depending on the needs of the service. Today, they are working on six such categories: 1. Unmanned systems 2. Arctic operations 3. Intelligence and cyber
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Coast Guard OUTLOOK
4. Waterways management and environmental response 5. Sensor optimization, automation, and visualization 6. Operational performance improvements and modeling Each of those also is broken down into general categories of work. The office also works on some nonR&D efforts. “The program now includes three sets of people – R&D, innovation, and acquisition test and development. As a part of those three functions, there are technical and support elements, the latter including financial, human resources, office management, etc.,” Chaves said. “In 2016, the innovation program was reorganized to fall within the office of RDT&E; prior to that, it was in a separate office that no longer exists. Since that happened, we’ve found a lot to leverage between innovation and R&D. “One thing that has evolved in recent years is [that] emerging technology has become more fast-paced. In our partnership with DHS S&T, we stood up the Science and Technology Innovation Center [STIC] to bring things to the Coast Guard faster. It is jointly funded with DHS S&T. We work on things that have rapid transition, such as doing a limited user evaluation on existing technologies, both military and commercial.” Those changes also have led to new methods to build the RDT&E portfolio for the coming budget year. “Each year, we ask the whole Coast Guard to send us any challenges they want RDT&E to help them with. We then bring in stakeholders from across the service to vote on a prioritization list. We take the highest ranking of those and send them to a flag panel, which helps us ensure our portfolio is linked to the needs of the service,” Chaves explained. “Once something is in the portfolio, we work on all of them – the process ensures those are priorities to the Coast Guard before we start working on them. We don’t have a lot of resources, so we have to make sure what we do will have the most impact for the Coast Guard.”
