Prepared Statement Of
REAR ADMIRAL JAY M. COHEN,
UNITED STATES NAVY
CHIEF OF NAVAL RESEARCH
26 June 2001
Mr. Chairman, distinguished members of the subcommittee, thank you for this opportunity to discuss the Department of the Navy's Science and Technology Program.
When Admiral Clark assumed the watch from Admiral Jay Johnson last summer, he said that our people were our first priority. His Marine Corps counterpart, General Jones, is equally committed to doing everything we can for his few and proud Marines.
One of the most important ways we can keep our people and recruit more like them is to give them the best working conditions possible. While the bedrock of our Navy and Marine Corps is good leadership, technology is the foundation that rests on that bedrock. Admiral Clark has directed me, as Chief of Naval Research, to make science and technology work for our people in the Fleet. And since I also wear the hat of Assistant Deputy Commandant (Science and Technology) for the Marine Corps, I answer to the same marching orders from General Jones-make science and technology work for the Marine. So I will couch quite a bit of my testimony today in terms of what we're doing to deliver capabilities for Sailors and Marines. I think we have a great record, a sound process, and a terrific future.
As Chief of Naval Research, I want to protect our warfighters from technological surprises, while giving them the tools to inflict surprises on our adversaries. The business of surprise is especially important today. The threats we face are too variable to yield to the clear responses available during the Cold War. I would like to draw out one fundamental lesson from the Cold War and other more recent situations-as uncertainty increases, options increase in value. My priorities-electric warship, missile defense/space, human factors, environment, and efficiency-will offer "out of the box" capability options; it's my job to give the Secretary, and the CNO, the Commandant, technology options they can exercise at need.
Our science and technology strategy balances long-term interests with short-term needs. The health of our science and technology base-our ability to discharge our national naval responsibilities, to remain a smart buyer of science and technology, and to get capabilities into the hands of the operating forces- ultimately depends upon a balanced portfolio from basic research through advanced technology development and manufacturing technology.
I especially look forward to incorporating Secretary Gordon England's industry perspective on maximizing the Department of the Navy's precious technology investments.
For the next Navy and Marine Corps, we are concentrating our science and technology investment into focused programs designed to provide a critical mass of support that will yield Future Naval Capabilities (FNCs). I recently restructured the program to combine overlapping efforts, and I added two programs-Electric Warship and Combat Vehicles Technology (which will focus on bringing the advantages of electrical technologies to the naval warfighters), and Littoral Combat and Force Projection (which includes both combat and expeditionary logistics capabilities), which will focus on Marine Corps requirements in projecting power from the beach in-land. The other ten FNCs (in no priority order) are:
· Autonomous Operations will focus on dramatically increasing the performance and affordability of Naval organic unmanned vehicle systems;
· Capable Manpower will focus on selection and training to provide fully prepared Sailors and Marines through human-centered hardware and systems;
· Knowledge Superiority and Assurance will focus on issues of connectivity and knowledge superiority for distributed Naval forces to ensure common situation understanding, increased speed of command, interoperability, and dynamic distributed mission planning and execution across all echelons;
· Littoral Antisubmarine Warfare will provide effective capability to detect, track, classify and neutralize anti-access threats imposed by enemy submarines, in support of power projection ashore;
· Missile Defense will focus S&T necessary to detect, control, & engage projected theater ballistic & cruise missiles as well as enemy aircraft threats;
· Organic Mine Countermeasures will focus on an organic MCM capability to shorten the MCM tactical timeline and eliminate the need for manned operations in a minefield;
· Platform Protection strives to win or avoid engagements with evolving threats either in-stride or while engaged in projecting power from the sea;
· Time Critical Strike will focus S&T that provides a substantial reduction in the engagement timeline against time critical mobile targets, theatre ballistic missiles, weapons of mass destruction, C4I centers and armored vehicles;
· Total Ownership Cost Reduction seeks to significantly decrease costs associated with acquisition, operation and support and to develop methods to accurately predict costs and assess return on investment; and,
· Warfighter Protection will focus on protecting Warfighters to reduce casualties in the emerging Expeditionary Maneuver Warfare battlespace.
I have directed my people to get close to the Fleet and the Force, to be alert to their needs and swift to respond to them. We are working to enhance their quality of service. As we connect better with our customers-the operating Fleet and Force-we are undertaking some novel initiatives to reduce the cycle time of our technologies. I have established a program I call "Swamp Works". This takes high-risk, high-payoff technologies, puts the right stakeholders together, and gets a product into the hands of the operators who need it. Swamp Works' efforts are intended to be technically risky-I anticipate a 90% failure rate-because leap-ahead work is always technically risky.
Force protection crosses all technologies. New materials for hull protection, advanced sensors, next generation decision support systems, autonomous platforms, and, ultimately, directed energy weapons-all of these are technological responses to the asymmetric threats our forces encounter as they remain forward deployed.
Another priority I mentioned is human factors and quality of service. Our young people will join and stay with us if we give them meaningful and challenging missions, and if we give them the means to accomplish those missions. The biggest morale-killers on a ship can be those repetitious, labor-intensive, dirty maintenance jobs that have to be done. Naval science and technology offers solutions: coatings that don't have to be scraped and chipped; fault diagnostics that tell you when a bearing is about to fail; condition-based maintenance that saves time and resources. And the smart people we have in the Fleet today deserve to work with systems that are engineered with the human being in mind. Human-centric systems, because the system is made for the Sailor and Marines not vice-versa. These include embedded training that helps Sailors and Marines work smarter, stay proficient, and learn new skills. There is also no greater satisfaction in Sailors' and Marines' working lives than accomplishing their mission and getting home to their loved ones.
Additionally, we are working to field hearing protection systems and vaccines to keep our Sailors and Marines healthy. We are working on more effective firefighting tools and techniques. We continue to work on environmentally friendly technologies such as the active noise cancellation program that may help our fighter jets to coexist with the ever-increasing civilian population around our bases.
Our laboratories are vital for our Nation's development of future, essential warfighting capabilities. The labs perform a variety of related functions associated with the development of new war-fighting systems and the insertion of new technology into legacy systems. The Navy is working with Department of Defense in developing a process to implement the authority for direct hiring that Congress provided for the labs. I support this authority and believe it will improve the workforce and the efficiency of our laboratories. I will be happy to report back to you our progress in this matter. I hope you will visit our world class corporate laboratory, the Naval Research Laboratory, here in Washington, DC.
With the assistance and support of the Vice Chief of Naval Research, Brigadier General William Catto, who is with me here today, I focus on the Navy and Marine Corps of today, tomorrow and "after-next" (the one that will fight and win battles in 2020 and beyond). I have given examples above of initiatives in progress for today and tomorrow. The Navy and Marine Corps after-next will be based on discoveries just being made today. To ensure we get the technology and development concepts right, a robust cycle of innovation, validated by experimentation that leads to transformation, must continue. It is a process without end; new technologies evolve, new ideas are born, new innovations must be experimented with, resulting in further transformation. It is a process as old as the Navy and Marine Corps, and as relevant as the need for a strong national defense today, tomorrow and always.
The United States has a Navy and Marine Corps second to none in the world, thanks to America's investment in science and technology. I have committed to a science and technology program that ensures our technological superiority continues in this new century-and a program that has the Sailor and Marine at its center.
