Wanna Save the World?
WMMM #034 - This week I share another edition of Mastering Useless Information that should help you “Be Interesting.”
Jeff Keplar Newsletter September 16, 2023 10 min read
How Technology is Poised to Disrupt the Defense Industry
I found a recent podcast on NPR's Fresh Air fascinating and thought you would, too. The U.S. military has been testing new weapons with remarkable capabilities using cutting-edge digital technology, including artificial intelligence.
But the process has been held up by tradition, politics, lobbyists, the procurement bureaucracy, disagreements within the military, and profound ethical questions surrounding the use of autonomous deadly weapon systems.
Meanwhile, the limitations of the military's current weapon systems are being tested by the war in Ukraine, the current conflict with Iran over access to the Strait of Hormuz, and the preparations for a possible armed conflict with China.
Disruptive technology, creative use of large amounts of data, tech startups having difficulty penetrating legacy enterprises (the U.S. military), and meaningful value propositions (multi-billion dollar savings and world peace) make this a perfect candidate for Mastering Useless Information in this edition of Win More, Make More.
Mastering "Useless Information" is an antiphrasis for "being interesting" as a sales skill, in addition to "being interested."
Eric Lipton, an investigative reporter for the N.Y. Times has been investigating the military's struggles to modernize and the obstacles that have been standing in the way.
Lipton was the guest for Terry Gross on the podcast.
H/T: The Military's Struggle to Modernize, NPR's Fresh Air, September 13, 2023
Transforming to "Distributed Maritime Operations"
The Navy is testing new weapons, and that includes unmanned vessels. Bahrain in the Middle East is a small island nation in the Persian Gulf in really contested waters because the Strait of Hormuz is not very far away, and Iran has been intercepting oil tankers that have been passing through the Strait of Hormuz.
"So one of the things - the Navy only has a very small number of ships in that part of the world because it's moving a lot of its ships over to Asia because of the perceived threat from China. But they want to be able to cover something like 2 million square miles worth of water that the Fifth Fleet, which is based in Bahrain, covers. And they can't do it with the number of destroyers and even Coast Guard Cutters that they have there."
"So they want to basically proliferate the waters of that part of the world with these small drones that can operate for months or even a year at a time, and that can be constantly doing surveillance.
And they have infrared cameras. They can see at night.
They can dip underwater and be completely impossible to see. And so these drones essentially expand out the kind of - the range that the Navy can patrol. And it allows them to use their military-manned ships more efficiently. And that's what they've been experimenting with.
The Pentagon calls it distributed maritime operations. That's their typical, you know, acronym-heavy terminology for it. But what it really means is matching up drones with traditional platforms to expand the reach of the Navy in a much cheaper way than building more manned ships."
AI Software
These small drones primarily function on their own.
"They just - they - you give them a general area that you want them to patrol, and then there's a command center in Bahrain that I visited, the robot operations center, where the feeds from these drones are being, you know, sent back.
And then if you have an artificial intelligence software that's looking at their feeds, you know, they can find and identify, you know, potential targets that they want to go inspect or targets that they perceive to be threats.
And so the drones are sending in constant information feeds. And then the feeds are going into this central area where they're analyzing them and looking for threats."
Air, Land, and Sea
What is meant by a drone is an unmanned or uncrewed vessel that operates autonomously. The U.S. military has aerial, surface, and subsurface drones that they use in Bahrain in the Fifth Fleet of the Navy.
"And that - this particular piece of the Navy has been the most forward-leaning in terms of trying to integrate this - these new technologies.
Very Inexpensive
These things are very cheap. They're easy to build.
They're disposable because they're so inexpensive. If they get, you know, sunk or even stolen, it's not the worst thing in the world.
And most of them are not armed. Some of them can carry weapons on them, but for the most part, they're what they call ISR, which is, you know, intelligence gathering - information gathering devices and not weapons."
In Bahrain, they're also testing solar-powered vessels that don't need to be refueled for three months.
Ocean Air is one of the manufacturers. Another is Saildrone. And these things go - you put them in the water, and they can be there for up to a year.
"And they're just - they're out there. You know, it's having another set of eyes on the water that is watching for threats. And they are largely autonomous, and they, you know, are self-sustaining, and they create their own energy and, you know, they just cruise around, and they are sending information back to the command center."
Domain Awareness
The Navy does not think it will replace the need for its destroyers or aircraft carriers, but it can multiply their effectiveness if each of these groups of ships could have a set of these surface vessels, uncrewed, and they were deployed internationally with these things.
They could cover much more territory - domain awareness is the terminology they like to use - of a much more significant part of the world's oceans.
And so they're trying to figure out a way to get this kind of equipment out there.
But they've had trouble executing on that.
The Legacy Technology - "The Workhorse of the Navy"
In Pascagoula, Miss. big, traditional battleships are produced by HII, Huntington Ingalls Industries.
It's one of their largest shipyards, and they build destroyers and amphibious ships and cutters there.
There are 7,000 shipbuilders there coming in. These ships are so massive, and the amount of labor involved in fabricating them, taking them from individual pieces of steel into these huge vessels with such power, is so impressive.
This is a platform that carries all kinds of weapons. It's the workhorse of the Navy. They nicknamed it the DDG, and they're the most critical vessel.
We always hear about aircraft carriers, which are hugely important as well.
But the destroyers are the core asset that the Navy relies upon to project force and fight when it comes to that.
Comparing those Big Battleships with the Smaller Uncrewed Vessels
Each of those destroyers costs $2 billion to build, and thousands of people are involved with making it, and it takes multiple years to construct them.
"And it's not that we don't need the destroyers, but the pace at which the Navy is moving to multiply the effectiveness of those destroyers by matching them up with these unmanned surface vessels - that they're only giving a tiny sliver of money so far to the unmanned surface vessels.
And the consensus is that they need to, you know, they need to shift some of the funding to the unmanned surface vessels to make the destroyers even more effective."
Money and Politics
But why is there such an imbalance between these old and newer weapons that the military considers essential for the future?
"...a lot of it comes down to the power of lobbyists and the power of lawmakers that come from the shipbuilding states and the jobs - you know, the Huntington Ingalls - HII - shipyard is the largest manufacturing employer in Mississippi. It is so massively important in that state.
And in that part of the South, it just sucks in people from Florida, from Alabama who work there."
"And there are lawmakers from Connecticut, from Maine, from Wisconsin - you know, these are all states where either submarines or ships are built - that have incredible clout in Congress. They are the chairwomen or the chairmen of the appropriations and authorization committees.
And they just keep driving, you know, billions and billions of dollars of extra funds to shipbuilding or submarine building. Now, again, these are important vessels for the U.S. interest, but the amount of money - Congress keeps allocating billions of dollars more than the Navy even asks for because there's such an intense lobby to drive more money to that cause because it's such an employment, you know, boom for those states.
And those lawmakers, you know, are looking to get reelected, and they can issue their press releases about how, you know, we provided funding for an additional destroyer. That's $2 billion worth of additional money going to Pascagoula, basically. And that's been driving a lot of the investment."
The U.S. Navy Must Modernize - An Imminent Threat
The Navy has the results of these war games, which are pretty clear.
If they were to send destroyers or aircraft carriers or aircraft carrier groups anywhere near China should a conflict occur with China, then China would sink those things because China has loaded up its shores and the islands it's built in the South China Sea with missile systems. Our ships would be knocked out.
And it means that the Navy, in its traditional platforms, can't get very close to China in a Taiwan Strait scenario.
So, it limits its effectiveness.
Even the aircraft carriers would have to be so far away. They'd have to send out four planes to refuel each other to get close enough to strike.
If you have armed and unarmed drones matched up with surface vessels, you could send in waves of drones first.
They could take fire from those missiles. The missiles could be depleted on those drones.
This is the future of the way the Navy now realizes it has to go, but it is moving slowly.
Drone Startups Attempting to Sell to the Pentagon - A Parallel to Enterprise Tech Sales
The Bahrain effort called Task Force 59, in which they had several dozen of these uncrewed vessels on - in the Persian Gulf and area waters - had a total annual cost that was less than the fuel for one of the destroyers.
It was such a minuscule amount. The companies have only been able to sell in the dozens of these devices to the Department of Defense - very few have been purchased.
They are quite frustrated with their inability to see more significant purchases because they've been using private capital to keep their companies afloat while waiting for the Defense Department to buy from them more significantly. The companies behind the new, more digital drones at sea are basically like tech startups.
They're not the old Defense Department contractors. The Pentagon has not worked with these companies before, and it's used to these enormous defense contractors with long histories with the Pentagon.
Sound familiar?
You also have these much smaller, scrappy startups that are saying, we've already got this thing. We're ready to sell it to you. Not only that, we'll lease you the data. You don't even have to buy the device.
Saildrone says you can buy the surveillance data from us, and you don't have to take the risk of purchasing the device itself.
"And the Pentagon isn't really sure how to deal with these companies because it usually works in three, four-year schedules where it's got to do what they call a POM.
They have to build the budget plan, and they have to go to Congress to get money appropriated. Then they have to write the requirements. Then they have to bid the contract.
Then they have to build the thing to their specific specifications. It could take five years.
These companies are saying, OK, here it is. We're ready to sell it to you. And they just don't even know how to deal with it."
And so it's slowing things down.
The Pentagon is now racing to figure out how to bring on this type of commercial technology rapidly.
The deputy secretary of defense has this thing she's calling the replicator initiative. She wants to buy thousands of these units within 18 to 24 months.
She will use some new acquisition strategy to bring thousands of them on because she recognizes that the United States is moving too slowly.
But part of the problem is that the acquisition process takes years, and they must break it and be willing to take more risks.
And that's what they realize: they have no choice but to do that now.
China, China, China
At an Air Force conference, the Air Force secretary, Frank Kendall, opened the speech with the words China, China, China.
"The Department of Defense is obsessed with China right now. It's just - that's all you hear people talking about.
We are transitioning from a kind of, you know, post-9/11, anti-terrorism posture and also to an Afghanistan and Iraq, you know, land war against a kind of rogue state posture to a stance that we have not, you know, sort of contemplated since the end of the Cold War, which is a pure nation threat.
And it's - the military builds itself differently for a rogue nation, anti-terrorism posture than a pure nation threat.
And so we are now transitioning back to a pure nation threat.
And that's a - that requires different weapons, you know, different, you know, ships and planes and DOD is obsessed with this right now.
It's all they're talking about. And it's requiring a lot of rethinking of their whole - the whole structure of the military."
Taiwan
China considers Taiwan part of China. Taiwan considers itself an independent nation.
Did you know that 90% of the world's supply of high-end semiconductor chips is manufactured in Taiwan?
That's right.
Anything that disrupts the supply chain of those chips to the U.S. impacts our consumption of smartphones, P.C.s, automobiles, and data centers.
"The U.S. military is preparing to potentially be asked to defend Taiwan against the Chinese invasion, and it's a scenario that they don't like because of - the position of Taiwan is so close to China, and the number of ships and planes and missile systems that China has, it creates a lot of trepidation on the part of the Navy and the Air Force.
And similarly in the South China Sea and potential conflict in the South China Sea over some of the islands and just through - you know, passageway through the South China Sea - that's another scenario that has them quite concerned.
So those are the two primary scenarios that they're worried about and that they're trying to anticipate "what would we need to have ready to go if we were to suddenly be told this is a conflict, you need to be ready to fight?"
China has advantages over the U.S. in such a scenario
"The missile defense systems that China has built in the South China Sea - they built islands down there, and they have positioned missiles on those islands, and they have - along the coast of China, they've also put missiles.
And so it's just getting close to that area. It's a denied area, is what - the terminology that the Navy and the Air Force uses.
It just would be extremely difficult to even get close.
So, China could stage an invasion of Taiwan, and it would be challenging for the U.S. to immediately get in there to help defend Taiwan.
That's the struggle.
And so, by the time the U.S. was properly positioned, China could already have occupied Taiwan.
So that's one of the reasons that the United States is trying to see if it can, you know, distribute more weapons to Taiwan to allow it to defend itself better."
An All-To-Common Scenario
So it's often the case that it's new tech companies creating the latest technologies in weaponry as opposed to the old defense contractors.
And because they can move a lot quicker than the Pentagon can in going through the whole bureaucracy to pay them and order more weapons, these new tech companies on the cutting edge of creating these new weapons are starting to run into financial trouble.
Contracts need to come through faster, and they're laying off people.
Wanna Save the World?
Start by helping one of these tech startups.
They must find a way to help the Pentagon buy their technology quicker.
They need access to talent with the right skills to solve this problem.
Where should they look to find such talent?
Thank you for reading,
Jeff
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