NAWCAD Plans for an Uncertain Future
Posted for The Patuxent Partnership
Pax Leader II
By Jay Friess
Dale Moore
The environment in which the Naval Air Warfare Center Aircraft Division will be operating by 2030 will be an increasingly changing and uncertain one, according to a new operations plan outlined by Dale Moore, director of NAWCAD’s Strategic Cell, at a presentation he made this week for The Patuxent Partnership.
Mr. Moore presented the outlines of NAWCAD’s operational plan, which is designed to carry the division through 2014. It is based on the strategic plan the division outlined in December 2011.
“We’ve done our homework; that’s kind of the bottom line,” Mr. Moore told the audience gathered at the Wyle Conference Center in Lexington Park, Maryland. “The future will be owned by those people who are thinking better.”
While the impending defense cuts scheduled to be triggered by sequestration on Friday weighed heavily on everyone’s minds, Mr. Moore said they would be the “tip of the iceberg” compared to the fiscal challenges that NAWCAD will face “for some time.”
Mr. Moore said other forces, including perpetual change, globalization, technology and population growth, would also shape the future environment as well as the rise of Africa, China and India.
As a result, Mr. Moore said America’s armed forces need to begin to take a “whole of government approach” to solving technological and operational challenges. And they need to learn how to constantly learn and change.
“It’ we’re not learning, by definition, we are falling behind,” Mr. Moore warned. “Are we a learning organization? … We’re trying to set up the enterprise to be adaptive and responsive.”
Mr. Moore stated that “change is the new normal,” but cautioned, “It is about speed, but it’s also about the quality of ideas.”
He encouraged the government and contracting managers in the audience to think of NAWCAD as a global enterprise with transformational technologies and the potential to apply them outside the realm of Naval Aviation, helping other services meet their challenges in rapid response and irregular warfare.
“We’re down here in St. Mary’s County, but we have reach around the globe,” Mr. Moore said. “We’ve been successful at NAWCAD with doing work for people outside the Navy.”
To that end, NAWCAD’s operational plan has three main objectives, Mr. Moore explained. First, it aims to outpace the threat and deliver advanced, fully integrated warfighting capabilities with emphasis on affordability, use of government labs, better test capabilities, increased fleet experimentation and autonomous unmanned aircraft.
Second, it aims to reduce acquisition times and costs by employing lead systems integration and rapid prototyping while revising standard procedures to emphasize speed and savings.
Finally, the plan aims to establish a comprehensive warfare strategy by promoting broad institutional awareness of the chaotic future environment; training and continuing to train the workforce and moving NAWCAD toward becoming a learning organization.
The Patuxent Partnership will present a panel on the Naval Air Systems Command’s operations plan on Wednesday, March 13 at 5 p.m. at the Patuxent River Naval Air Museum. Click here to register.
