NAWCAD Forecasts Needs

By Jay Friess
Editor

Civilian leadership from the Naval Air Warfare Center Aircraft Division introduced their new Strategic Plan Tuesday morning with a presentation, hosted by the Patuxent Partnership at the L-3 offices in Lexington Park, Maryland, that was heavy on ideals and philosophy.

Gary Kessler, executive director of NAWCAD, introduced Dale Moore, director of NAWCAD’s Strategic Cell, to explain the plan. Kessler said the plan is aimed to prevent NAWCAD from becoming an inefficient and irrelevant organization in the age of automated flight and rapid prototyping.

“That’s not what we want to be,” Kessler said. “We’re probably behind the power curve on some of these things.”

Those things? Unmanned aircraft, energy security, nanotechnology, 3D visualization, systems integration, weapons proliferation, electronic warfare topped the list of things that NAWCAD is concerned about, according to Moore. Moore walked the audience through the high points of the plan, which lays out NAWCAD’s strategy to until 2025.

“The rate of change in the world is happening a lot faster,” Moore said. “We cannot be slow. We must be fast. … We are in competition. The money is going to be tight. … It’s not a linear world. It’s very disruptive. … Clearly, innovation is key.”

In response, NAWCAD is aiming to focus on better integrating its complex weapons systems development, rapidly acquiring new technologies, increasing unmanned aircraft autonomy, developing directed energy weapons, developing its workforce and exploiting new materials from the nanotechnology field.

Moore said he wants to see the leads of pre-Milestone B programs working together to share technologies and information.

“We have to be lean and mean, but we also have to adapt and change,” Moore said. “That’s a tough mix.”

Moore predicted that computer simulation would be a great asset to the speed future capabilities development if supercomputing power can be made available to a broader range of engineers and small developers.

“We must outpace the threat; that’s not trivial,” Moore said. “Think of the challenges of simulating swarming UAVs.”

During that question and answer session that followed Kessler and Moore’s presentation, an audience member pointed out that the federal budget structure encourages stovepiping of programs, rather than collaboration. He predicted that NAWCAD’s plan would fall victim to the federal government’s risk-averse culture.

“I give them more credit than that,” Moore said, but he acknowledged that risk aversion is hurting innovation. “We’re looking to change that, sir.”

Kessler said NAWCAD hopes to have the plan posted on its web site by Tuesday.

“I hope this is just a teaser for you to download out strategic plan,” Kessler said, noting that NAWCAD will be hosting another event in January 2012 to gather feedback on the document.

Moore said, “It certainly isn’t set in stone, but I think we got a great start.”