E X P E R I M E N TAT I O N : THE KEY TO
TRANSFORMATION THE KEY TO by Floyd D. Kennedy, Jr.
Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld views experimentation as a means to transform the U.S. military into an effective fighting force for the 21st century, and United States Joint Forces Command spends hundreds of millions of dollars each year on it. Additionally, each service spends tens of millions annually on service experiments. VADM John Grossenbacher, Commander, Naval Submarine Forces (COMNAVSUBFOR), has declared experimentation to be a necessary cost of doing business in today’s armed forces. What is experimentation, and is it something new? What is its scope? Many will argue that experimentation is nothing new for the military. And it’s not, if we define it simply as coming up with new ideas and seeing if they work. Probably the best naval examples of this are the Naval War College war games focused on defeating the Japanese Navy and the Marine Corps development of amphibious doctrine, both accomplished between the World Wars. What is new are the efforts being made to institutionalize an experimentation process, DoD-wide, to keep coming up with new ideas and testing them, and making that process a prerequisite to resource allocation. The least appreciated aspect of today’s experimentation is its scope. That scope is, in a word, comprehensive. It extends from the here and now of tactical development and evaluation (TAC D&E) to the there and then of what used to be called the Revolution in Military Affairs (RMA), so far into the future that nothing is sacred. TAC D&E takes existing or prototype systems and tests concepts for better applying them to today’s warfighting challenges. The RMA takes technologically feasible capabilities and tests concepts for applying them to tomorrow’s projected challenges. The first is the practical application of today’s capabilities to refine both their performance and our ability to employ them. The second borders on science fiction, and facilitates our thinking on
4
F A L L 2 0 0 2 U N D E R S E A WA R FA R E
what we want to be able to do 20, 30, or even 50 years into the future. Most experimentation lies somewhere between these two extremes, focused five to 15 years into the future, on systems that are prototypes; systems that are programmed but not yet available; or systems that are planned – plus the operational concepts to employ them in the nation’s interests. Why Experiment? We experiment to learn. And we learn to transform the force from what it has been, to what it needs to be for the 21st century. If we don’t learn, the experiment is a failure. Often, the imperative to “conduct an experiment” can be so overwhelming that the objective becomes simply having an experimental event. Conducting such an event is not worth the resources expended if we don’t learn from it. And, paradoxically, we often learn the most from a failure. Failure is easier to accept when we’re examining concepts, as opposed to production systems that have enormous resources already sunk into their development. That’s the whole point behind experimentation: we learn through a series of experiments what we really want to do; how generally we should do it; what specific technologies should be operationalized to help us do it; how those technologies should be packaged into systems; how those systems should be operated to maximize their capabilities; and how those capabilities should be integrated with others of the same or different services, or even coalition partners. Experimentation therefore feeds requirements at every step of the process. Production systems will have a minimal probability of failure if they’ve survived rigorous experimentation throughout their development. Conversely, if we wait to experiment with systems until they’re almost ready for fleet introduction, the incentive to distort results to avoid system “failure” can be
