Is the Quest for Rapid Innovation Distracting from Naval Force Design?

By Commander Joshua M.M. Portzer, USN

I recently completed a stint at the Pentagon as the Executive Assistant to the Director for Naval Air Warfare. I had the unique privilege to see the military and financial battlespace from a much higher view than befitted my pay grade. There are many takeaways, but one of particular germaneness today deals with the Department of Defense’s (and Navy’s) quest for rapid innovation. The pressing need for rapid innovation is repeatedly brandished. The Navy stood up the Disruptive Capabilities Office last year. The Department of Defense has its Replicator initiative. These nest (in various relation) beside innovation labs such as NavalX, AFWERX, the Defense Innovation Unit, and a myriad of others. Together, they all sing a similar refrain—the military must learn to rapidly innovate and field capabilities, or it will fail in the next conflict.

Rapid innovation is important. The often-cited Ukrainian unmanned attacks against Russia are remarkable, and there is much to learn from Ukraine’s initiatives. However, it is worth acknowledging that there are caveats to those lessons, and to apply them too vigorously to our own force design process runs the risk of hindering how we evolve our major military platforms.

Ukrainian “drone” attacks are valuable but are a niche capability for focused attacks.

The lessons from Ukraine are unique: It is one country against another, in one sea, in one timeframe. Those facts make Ukraine’s achievements noteworthy but admittedly tailored to their unique situation. The U.S. Navy, in contrast, could not use the same kinds of assets for power projection vis-à-vis transoceanic deployments in the same way. Deterrence and freedom of sea lanes are mainstays in U.S. greater strategy, and it is to those ends that the United States must tailor how its force evolves. While the Navy may not always require the same classes of ships and aircraft, it will almost certainly require endurance, agility, and some semblance of survivability. Rapidly employing innovative weapons is complementary to evolving platforms. They must be scaled accordingly and, furthermore, must not put at risk the continued maturation and evolution of our required legacy military platforms.

Our budget works in multi-year cycles, which introduces obsolescence.

The Navy’s budgeting cycle for the Department of Defense is complicated. There are always four budgets being worked on at any point in time. The Navy is executing the current fiscal year (FY) budget (right now, FY24). The Navy is justifying the FY+1 budget on Capitol Hill, programming the FY+2 budget, and planning the FY+3 budget. Under ideal conditions (no continuing resolution delays, etc.), there can be a three-year delay between the execution year and seeing money for which we are planning (and potentially programming depending on how the money will be used). It is painstakingly slow and laborious. However, it is in part by design. The Department of Defense must provide a balanced budget to Congress and, by extension, the American people—they are our shareholders. To do that, there are numerous service, Office of the Secretary of Defense, and Congressional processes, oversights, and wickets that the budget must pass in the multi-year period that open it to modification from its original input all along the way.

One issue with rapid innovation is that, depending on the innovation tank (e.g., the Disruptive Capabilities Office), innovating may involve the current “execution year” of funding (or FY+1 funding). In a given year, there is a desire to field a given capability, with that year’s or the next year’s money. However, within the government’s budget cycle, there is little space to incorporate a new capability into the finance and budgeting processes. If the Department of Defense fields a new drone in year X, who/how does its software update in year X+2? Who is developing the software updates? What about maintenance, storage, and spare parts? And with which service’s money?

To put money into the new system often means taking money from a different part of the department’s budget. This is a zero-sum proposition in most cases. While money is fungible, what often happens is that the donor services are facing multi-year funding shortfalls, making the allocation of funding from the budget troublesome. The “sick” get sicker and drive further performance deficits into the donor programs. The paper cuts from previous marks against the donor programs’ line items, compounded with new donor wounds (à la rapid innovation funding), can become critical injuries. The outcome is that we now face risk of program cancellations in order to experiment with novel capabilities that we may not know how to effectively manage through the next decade. This “failing forward” can work in Silicon Valley. It brings additional costs in the Pentagon. The two ecosystems are related and relatable, but they are not analogous. Burning up the confidence and good will of industry bears a heftier price tag for the military war machine than the San Francisco area.

Moreover, if one now wishes to support the rapidly innovated capability through the normal budget process, there is potentially a subsequent three-year delay for funding. By that time, the pace of technology has likely outrun the capability that was rapidly fielded in the first place. Sustainment dollars for the innovated capability continue to be sourced from those under-executing programs, without satisfactorily planning for the rapidly innovated program’s lifecycle. The outcome here is potentially a recurring pickup game to keep incompletely planned programs alive at the expense of previously established ones.

Major acquisition programs must persist past the 2020s.

The ability to “fight tonight” with an eye toward the war of tomorrow is always a difficult balance for the Navy and the Department of Defense alike. Today, there is a palpable feeling of urgency in the Pentagon as we approach the later part of this decade, with a desire to ensure that we have all our capability at our disposal should we find ourselves in a short-fused conflict (pick your aggressor state). It is, through this lens, part of how we have arrived at such an emphasis on rapid innovation. We are determined to have our Ukrainian moment, should we be forced to bear arms. But what if we do not have to bear arms? What if deterrence and diplomacy (diplomatic, information, military, economic writ large) work as they are supposed to, and we find ourselves ringing in 2030 without a skirmish? How many programs will we have canceled to pay for rapid capability that was not needed (and is now outdated)? Our missions of force projection and deterrence will ostensibly still exist and must be met.

Undoubtedly, rapid innovation as we race toward the decade’s end is part of hedging our bets against conflict, and yet the other part of the hedge is sustained, stable force design that takes the military into the 2040s. Inherent in that is an orderly maturation of our standing military platforms—the next instantiation of the E-6B TACAMO aircraft, the next-generation fighter to replace the F/A-18, and the replacement for conventional vertical lift aircraft, to name a few. Should we arrive at and go through the 2030s without suitable replacements (which will have taken large sums of money as well as focused and cohesive investment—and time), how much risk have we induced vis-à-vis our mission of deterrence? The issue, of course, is that we only know with certainty when deterrence has failed—not when it is currently working, or what causes it to work. We only know after the day passes that our adversaries have decided not to act contrary to our wishes—for that given day. If we have traded away our established biggest sticks with the longest reach, it is hard to say what impact that will have on our adversaries’ respective calculi.

All of this is not to downplay the place that rapid innovation has in developing military capability. But it should be looked at as a niche complement to the main thrust of recapitalizing and evolving our major platforms. Our military platforms are, by statute, beholden to the leviathan that is the Department of Defense acquisition cycle. Industry is an inseparable partner of this cycle and is ethically beholden to its own shareholders. That ecosystem could also benefit from innovation. And from a financial standpoint, that is the smarter investment in terms of a return. How do we better instill confidence in industry that we will commit to programs through time, rather than changing the financial battlespace budget year to budget year? How do we pursue advanced procurement more efficiently? How do we leverage digital test and evaluation to offset costs and safeguard against prototype obsolescence? These questions do not produce subject materiel as attractive as kamikaze drones, but they would yield much more attractive returns on the dollar in the long term. And if there is nothing else one learns while doing a lap in the Pentagon, it’s that while wars are painted in blood, their outcomes are sketched by the various colors of money. We must be ever vigilant in our investment strategy, because the cost of bouncing checks is much more than materiel.

Rapid innovation should without question have a place in the Department of Defense, but it should be appropriately tempered as niche and in focused areas, rather than transformative devices to use across the services in supplanting how we recapitalize our major programs.

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Commander Josh Portzer graduated from the University of Virginia in 2010 and received his Masters of Public Policy from Princeton University in 2020. He recently completed his tour as the Executive Assistant to the Director of Air Warfare (OPNAV N98) and is currently in the command training pipeline, enroute to Unmanned Patrol Squadron ONE NINE. The thoughts expressed here are his own.