Smart Technologies Can Help DoD Save Money

Statement

Given our nation's difficult budget situation, the Department of Defense (DoD) has undertaken a fundamental review of U.S. military missions and capabilities in an effort to find $400 billion in savings over the next 12 years.

To achieve these savings, tough choices must be made among the personnel, operation and maintenance, research, development, test and evaluation, and procurement accounts. Cuts are painful--virtually every program has a champion in Congress or an outside group vested in its success. We also must ensure we don't make penny-wise, pound-foolish decisions that could undermine the United States military's status as the best equipped, most highly trained and motivated fighting force in the world.

One significant opportunity the DoD should look to for cost efficiencies that would actually result in better program outcomes is the adoption of Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) developed technologies. As the Department of the Navy well knows, the flexibility and innovation of SBIR technology has the power to fundamentally change how the DoD buys the tools our soldiers, sailors, airmen, and marines need to fight the conflicts of today and tomorrow.

The Navy's experience with the Acoustic Rapid Commercial Off the Shelf Insertion (A-RCI) program is a great example. An SBIR company, Digital System Resources (DSR) proposed and successfully demonstrated the benefits of using commercial off-the-shelf software to update the submarine fleet's legacy detection systems without having to entirely replace the fleet's expensive hardware. This transition to an open architecture sonar system has allowed the Navy to not only improve the submarine fleet's technical performance by an order of magnitude, it has saved the Navy more than $4 billion over the past decade.

Another exciting SBIR-developed technology taking root in the Navy is automated test and re-rest (ATRT) technology for software-based systems. Today, nearly 50 percent of research and development funding is spent on testing weapons systems, both large and small. The current testing process is labor intensive, constrained by the number of test permutations able to be run, and delayed by the time it takes to produce test evaluations.

Instead, ATRT employs automated computer-based testing that can run 24/7/365, can test unlimited permutations and can often provide test results before the sailors of a sea-borne test even return to shore. Thus far, the Navy's limited adoption of ATRT has demonstrated an average 70 percent reduction of needed manpower and test time. If applied across the Navy's 25 or 30 largest software-based programs, ATRT could save the Navy $3 billion dollars over 5 years.

As the DoD attempts to do more with less, ATRT's success in demonstrating its effectiveness in testing the AEGIS Combat System, our carriers' Ship Self Defense Systems, and the Littoral Combat Ship mission modules shows that we can achieve increases in capabilities and performance while reducing costs in a declining budget environment. This approach must be replicated across the Navy's entire portfolio of programs to save money, improve these programs' performance and reduce the time it takes to deliver capabilities to the fleet.

Further, ATRT's benefits are not limited to the DoD. This testing technology can be replicated for any other government agency that is attempting to procure complex software programs built around the interaction of systems. For example, ATRT could apply to the interoperability of related databases to large financial management systems, information assurance programs, and the verification and validation of time critical data. These opportunities include the Department of Homeland Security's counterterrorism and border security databases and the Federal Aviation Administration's systems.

Employing smart technologies like A-RCI and ATRT are straightforward ways the DoD can begin meeting the twin goals of budget savings and strengthening, rather than undermining, our military's capabilities. We know this approach works. It's time to move forward with implementing it on a larger scale, multiplying the cost savings and department-wide efficiencies that will lead to a leaner, meaner U.S. armed forces.

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