In 2021, speaking at the National Defense University, Under Secretary of Defense for Research and Engineering Heidi Shyu said the Defense Department will see more new technology in the next decade than in the past 50 years.1 In 2018, former Google CEO Eric Schmidt testified before Congress that “the Defense Department does not have a technology problem, [it has] a technology adoption problem.”2 They are both right. The services are facing a tsunami of technology and cannot seem to figure out how to get that technology into the hands of operators.
For the Navy, this is not an unfamiliar challenge.
Puzzles Versus Mysteries
Fifty years ago, it was 1973. Los Angeles–class nuclear-powered attack submarines were being built, as were Nimitz-class aircraft carriers and Mk 48 torpedoes. SPY-1 radars were in final development, with Aegis cruisers soon to follow. Gas turbine–powered ships were being built. YF-17s were aspiring to be F/A-18s. Much of today’s fleet was under construction or in final development.
There was a clear adversary to beat. The challenges were less about technology and more about how many, when, and where: how to allocate resources against a set of known, well-understood national defense priorities.3 The Navy had a puzzle to solve, and it built a great puzzle-solving process.
Step back a further 20 years, to 1953. Nuclear power; computers; tactical, ballistic, and cruise missiles; and even spaceships were all laboratory technologies on the cusp of realization. How can they be used? How do they fit into the fleet? Can they be operational? Should they be?
What to do and how to do it were the challenges and opportunities facing the Navy in 1953. It was looking for new knowledge to develop and inform its options, not for how to allocate resources among known options.4 It was looking to solve mysteries, not puzzles.
The undersea warfare community answered the call. From 1954 through 1961, the Navy fielded 11 classes of submarines, including two classes of a new thing called a ballistic-missile submarine. Twenty-nine nuclear-powered boats were launched and 22 commissioned in those eight years. The Navy explored the entire design space: conventional hulls, albacore hulls, twin screws, single screws, one reactor, two reactors, water-cooled reactors, and sodium-cooled reactors. Fast boats and less-fast boats.5
It did all this by designing and building the boats as fast as it could and sending them to the fleet for operational use and assessment. All 22 of those new nuclear-powered submarines were operational platforms. No prototypes, no testbeds. There was no acquisition “valley of death” in the undersea warfare community in the 1950s.6
The sailors of the era—from lieutenants and petty officers to commanders and captains—told the Navy what they thought of those designs and their capabilities, pruning the design space down to “The One:” albacore hull, single reactor, single screw, fast as hell—the Los Angeles class. New knowledge acquired. Mystery solved. The Navy built 62 of these boats.
In barely more than a decade, the Navy also perfected shipboard digital computers, tactical missiles, cruise missiles, antiship missiles, tactical jet fighters, submarine-launched ballistic missiles, phased-array radars, space communications, intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance, and a host of supporting technologies. All by engineers and sailors working together. Again, no valley of death.
Step back another 30 years, to 1923 and the beginnings of naval aviation—another need for new knowledge, another mystery.
In the two decades before the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, the Bureau of Aeronautics procured 62 different type-model-series aircraft. Some were one-offs; most were short-run serial production models; a few were built by the dozens and hundreds. During that time, the Navy bought 22 models of fighters, 20 models of seaplanes, 8 models of transport aircraft, and assorted other types. Dive bombers were not developed until the mid-1930s, but the Navy was able to procure six different models in the six years before Pearl Harbor.
Early on, the Navy did not pay any development costs; aircraft manufacturers were expected to amortize their design and engineering costs across a funded production contract.7 Later, as the mysteries of naval aviation became clearer and the Navy had acquired enough knowledge to have technical preferences and develop fleet-driven requirements, those costs were included in development contracts.8
Bring the Fleet Back In
Today looks a lot like 1953 and 1923. And nothing like 1973.
In 2023, mysteries abound: artificial intelligence, machine learning, quantum computing, uncrewed vehicles, ubiquitous communications, advanced networks, and a host of related and supporting technologies. The Navy has engineers, program managers, and financial systems. It has labs, prototypes, and samples. It is awash in studies and blue-ribbon panels. But not much new knowledge about operational requirements or technical preferences is being created. A 50-year legacy of solving puzzles, not mysteries, has created the valley of death.
Processes from 1973 will not work in the decade ahead. They are missing a key element, the part that creates the new knowledge that enables mysteries to be solved: the fleet. Sailors and Marines, the naval service’s greatest asset, are largely absent from today’s technology innovation process.
What do sailors and Marines do to enhance technology innovation in the maritime environment?
Launch. Interacting with the ocean, in the ocean, is hard. Sailors do that every day, all day.
Integrate. Any process not defined defaults to “wetware.” Sailors and Marines are that wetware. They are great at 52-card pickup when a new system glitches.
Sustain. Can parts be replaced? Batteries recharged? Faults diagnosed? Sailors and Marines are the mothers and fathers of improvisation and recovery.
Operate. Does all that cool technology work? What happens when it doesn’t? How is the system restored after a break? Sailors and Marines are not shy; they will tell you everything about your system that you did not want to know.
The Navy should change its operating model back to what has worked throughout its long and successful history of operational technology dominance, to bring the fleet back into the acquisition process and into a revitalized mystery-solving team. It worked for naval aviation, the modern steel Navy, Civil War monitors and ironclads, steam power, and even back to the first six frigates.
The Navy has been successful at technology innovation when it has gone to the sailors, the Marines, the mariners, the fleet to determine what works and what does not. What to build and what to pass by, based on knowledge created on wet decks, ocean depths, high winds, broken performance promises, and all the challenges and opportunities afforded through real fleet operations. Not scripted scenarios or tightly bounded, artificially created situations.
Task Force 59 in Fifth Fleet is a reminder of this truth. Stood up in 2021, it has evaluated more than 80 small uncrewed surface vessel (USV) designs, culling the field to 15 or so by proliferating them throughout its area of responsibility. Created by industry, delivered to sailors. All immediately became operational platforms, and the new knowledge thus generated informed everyone of what to build and what not to build.9
In just two years, Task Force 59 has advanced the field of small USV operations and their supporting technologies more than the past decade of studies, conferences, wargames, and blue-ribbon panels.
Facing a tsunami of new technology and unsure how to adopt it, the Navy needs the fleet, an entity full of innovators and operational leaders, to find the opportunities and identify and help fix the problems. It needs new knowledge, created by sailors and Marines, to solve the newest suite of mysteries and accelerate the service forward.
The Navy should be doing what works—bringing the operational fleets, Marines, and sailors into the technology innovation process. As it did in 1923, 1953, and many times before.
The operational forces will tell it, “Build this, not that.” It must turn the valley of death into the “zip line of innovation.”
1. Under Secretary of Defense for Research and Engineering Heidi Shyu, speech at the Department of Defense University Consortium for Cyber Security (UC2), National Defense University, Washington, DC, 7 December 2021.
2. Eric Schmidt, Statement before the House Armed Services Committee Hearing on Promoting DoD’s Culture of Innovation, 17 April 2018.
3. Alain C. Enthoven and K. Wayne Smith, How Much Is Enough? Shaping the Defense Program 1961–1969 (Santa Monica, CA: RAND Corporation, 15 October 2005), x, ch. 2.
4. John Kay and Mervyn King, Radical Uncertainty: Decision-Making Beyond the Numbers (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2020), 18–24.
5. Compiled by the author from: Norman Friedman, U.S. Submarines since 1945 (Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 1994), 234–35; and Raymond V. B. Backman, ed., Janes Fighting Ships 1964–1965 (London: Sampson, Low, Marston & Co, 1964), 318, 331.
6. For more on the acquisition “valley of death,” see Col Kevin Murray, USMC, “The Sea Services Must Build a New Acquisition Assembly Line,” U.S. Naval Institute Proceedings 149, no. 3 (March 2023).
7. Brian Johnson, Fly Navy: A History of Naval Aviation (New York: William Morrow & Co, 1981), 144–52.
8. Gordon Swanborough and Peter M. Bowers, United States Navy Aircraft since 1911, 2nd ed. (Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press,1968), compiled by the author.
9. VADM Brad Cooper, USN, and Peter W. Singer, “Tests in Fifth Fleet a Bridge to Future,” U.S. Naval Institute Proceedings 148, no. 6 (June 2022).