8,834 viewsSep 11, 2019, 10:29am
How To Keep New Technology From Crippling The U.S. Navy
Craig Hooper
The U.S. Navy is in a tough spot. Sailors need cutting-edge technology, but full-scale vessel, propulsion and large system-level prototypes needed to test new technological approaches are often considered too costly for Congress to fund. Instead, vessel innovation too often done on the fly, kludged onto new procurement projects after a bit of ad-hoc computer modeling, some brainstorming at the systems level, or via the savvy guidance of some influential salesperson.
Given that research and development hard to fund these days, Navy innovation aboard ships and subs are now frequently blended into big procurements as immature, untested and poorly thought-out subsystems. This corner-cutting habit of hiding research and development in a big, expensive vessel procurement or forcing new technologies into an ongoing combatant production run has a real cost. And today, after taking too many research and development shortcuts, the U.S. Navy is feeling the pinch as it shifts to confront a rapidly changing maritime threat environment.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/craighooper/2019/09/11/how-to-keep-new-technology-from-crippling-the-us-navy/#620726af7c0a
