This is a really good read:
Aviation Week : Aviation Week & Space Technology
Darpa Pushes To Transition Technology
Aug 15, 2008
By Graham Warwick and Guy Norris
As it enters its sixth decade, the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency faces challenges in seeing ahead at a time when the U.S. military's focus is firmly on the present and on fighting two wars.
Established in February 1958 in response to the Soviet Sputnik launch in October 1957, the Advanced Research Projects Agency, as it was originally known, was chartered with "preventing technological surprise." Its initial task was to reorganize U.S. military space programs, but Darpa was also charged with looking into the future to ensure the U.S. was never again caught off guard.
Fifty years on, Darpa remains a uniquely lean and agile organization. The agency's focus has shifted over time, from space and missile defense to counterinsurgency during the Vietnam War; from negating massed Soviet armor in the Cold War to improving intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance after the Persian Gulf war. Today, many of its projects are focused on irregular warfare, but much of Darpa's work involves anticipating the military's needs for the war after next.
Some of Darpa's ideas can seem crazy, like unmanned aircraft or airships that stay aloft for five or even 10 years, but it's difficult to see 20 years ahead. "If you look at how we use UAVs today in conflict, they are all dreams of Darpa in the mid-1990s," says Stephen Welby, former director of the agency's Tactical Technology Office. "Global Hawk and Predator were born here, but UAVs are still at the Wright brothers' stage. There are new domains and new missions to be explored."
As U.S. operations in Afghanistan and Iraq place heavy demands on military budgets and tight constraints on research and development spending, Darpa's role in funding science and technology (S&T) work is taking on greater importance. This creates tension between those who want Darpa to solve today's problems and those who recognize the agency does its best work when given the freedom to think about the future.
Darpa responds to perceived needs rather than validated requirements, and this creates tensions with the customers. "We are not captured by the services; we hold the status quo at risk," says Welby. He defends Darpa against criticism that its ideas can be too far-fetched. "We get criticized when we engage stovepipes with new ways of doing things that threaten their way of doing things," a process he describes as "creative destruction."
As Darpa's customer, the U.S. Air Force is aware of the tension. "We are always talking about the difference between requirements pull and technology push. Should we be essentially governed by either?" asks Mark Lewis, Air Force chief scientist. "There was never a requirements document for laser, or even the light bulb for that matter. [But] sometimes there is a need for a reality check."
Darpa's role is not to develop and procure systems, but to "take the technology question off the table" through demonstration, so a concept can be an option to meet a requirement. "We don't do the heavy lifting of delivering a system to the field," says Welby. "You can't go out and buy an aircraft by duplicating a Darpa bird, but you will have the database to design one."
Darpa casts a wide net for ideas, talking to "anyone, everywhere" from military operators about missing capabilities to laboratory researchers about emerging technologies. Project ideas can arrive as full-blown proposals or one-page white papers - "the envelope someone has drawn the future on," says Welby.
Many project proposals are rejected because they are not "Darpa hard." In talking to operators and researchers, the agency looks for the core technology that's lacking, but too risky for the service laboratories or industry to take on alone.
If projects can be started quickly, they can be stopped just as quickly when results disappoint or a better idea comes along. "We start a lot of things, but we also ruthlessly kill them," says Welby. "It's acceptable to fail as long as we have learned from it. If it succeeds, we get the data; if it fails, we find out it's a path not to take."
The key word in Darpa's name is "projects," says Welby. "A project is something with a defined start, defined finish and clearly defined objectives. Something that can be written on a single piece of paper." The goal is to "prove the feasibility of a concept and take the specific technology risk off the table."
Darpa's strength as an organization is in its structure, or lack thereof. The agency owns no facilities and has no infrastructure that needs long-term programs for support. Instead, it pursues high-risk, high-payoff research through short-term projects with aggressive technical goals. Project managers stay for only four years.
"They are all temporary hires," says Welby, "They are here to get something done. The clock is ticking, and there is personal pressure to advance the state of the art on very aggressive timelines." Welby left Darpa at the end of July after an unusually long 11 years at the agency - first as program manager, then later as office director.
"You can change rapidly and move quickly when 25% of your people change out every year," he says. "You would never want to run a business this way, but for preventing technological surprise and being the engine of innovation - it's perfect."
Some Darpa-watchers criticize the short-term project-by-project approach for preventing the agency from staging larger-scale demonstrations of integrated systems, as it has in the past. Such demonstrations have helped transition technology to the services - the metric by which Darpa's performance is often measured, particularly by Congress.
The agency's success in transitioning technologies has varied over the years. Successful transitions include stealth technology, precision-guided weapons and unmanned aircraft, but not all followed a direct path to the customer.
Stealth is the success story most often cited. Darpa began studying low-observable technology in 1974, Lockheed's Have Blue demonstrator flew in December 1977, and the F-117 entered service in 1982. Darpa also funded Northrop's Tacit Blue stealth demonstrator, which flew in 1982 and influenced the design of the B-2 bomber.
In 1982, the Assault Breaker program showed that airborne radars could guide ground-launched missiles to rain precision-guided submunitions on to formations of tanks. But the technology did not transition as an integrated system. Instead, separate service efforts produced the Joint Stars airborne radar, Army Tactical Missile System and Sensor Fuzed Weapon.
"How well technologies transition has a tremendous amount to do with what the secretary of Defense and President want from Darpa," says Richard van Atta of the Institute for Defense Analyses. Both Have Blue and Assault Breaker had top-level Pentagon support as responses to the Soviet buildup in Europe, he says, with then-Defense Secretary William Perry overseeing the four-year program to develop the F-117.
The story was different for unmanned aircraft, which had no constituency to champion them. While Darpa had demonstrated by the mid-1970s that small UAVs could be used for reconnaissance and targeting, the Army badly fumbled the transition and canceled its massively overbudget Aquila program, setting back U.S. tactical UAVs by 20 years.
The Darpa-funded Amber medium-altitude endurance UAV flew in 1986, but was not picked up by the military. The design did not evolve into today's Predator until after Desert Storm had highlighted the ISR gap and the Office of the Secretary of Defense had launched an advanced concept technology demonstration program to accelerate the UAV into Air Force service.
The same mechanism successfully transitioned the Global Hawk high-altitude endurance UAV from Darpa to the Air Force. But despite the successful demonstration of the X-45 unmanned combat air vehicle in 2005, the Air Force pulled out of the follow-on Joint Unmanned Combat Air System program, forcing its cancellation.
But flight demonstrators such as Have Blue and Global Hawk are only a small part of the technology Darpa has handed over. "As a measure of merit, transition has been relatively constant," says George Muellner, former president of Boeing's Advanced Systems and Phantom Works units. "A lot of Darpa activity is at a subsystem level, or in the black world, and we are not aware of it."
But Darpa has "had its ups and downs," Muellner acknowledges. Sometimes technologies were not embraced because they were out of step with the need. "Assault Breaker came at the right time, was mature enough, and there were a couple of conflicts it could be applied to," he says. "You have got to have the right environment."
Muellner believes a lot of technologies transition to industry and show up for the first time in a system for which Darpa gets no credit. "I think almost everything we do transitions. Even those that fail leave behind an industrial base or an aerodynamic database that can be used," says Welby.
Advancing S&T work to the next stage is an issue bigger than Darpa. "In the Defense Dept., we have the transition "valley of death" and all the organizations face this issue - how do we transition a useful product?" says Lewis. The valley of death is the 3-5-year funding gap before a capability gets picked up by the services.
Darpa Director Tony Tether has described technology transition as a "contact sport" that requires program managers to build constituencies within the services. "Program managers have to be evangelists," says Welby.
Now Darpa is trying to forge agreements with the services before building a demonstrator. An increasing number of projects are covered by memorandums of understanding that document the transition path. "We'll invest to the point of demonstration if the service will put dollars in its out-year plan to take the technology forward," says Welby. The service laboratories play a key role. "They are the flywheel that keeps us going."
As Darpa looks ahead, "there are lots of opportunities still out there," says Welby. Among them are technologies for the dismounted soldier, precision weapons for UAVs, space architectures, robotics, long-endurance propulsion and environmental power capture. "There is lots of interesting work left for Darpa to do."
. The missile has a range of approx 7000 km so whoever comes to that area will be decimated.
