Op-Ed by The Hon. Leon Panetta and Congressman Mike Gallagher
“To prevent cold-war competition from devolving into a hot war, it’s time to innovate as if the free world depended on it.”
Secretary Leon Panetta and Congressman Mike Gallagher call on senior defense leaders and policymakers to hasten the shift toward a culture of innovation and risk-taking by investing in projects like the Naval Innovation Center (NIC) at the Naval Postgraduate School. The NIC offers "a unique national resource: a center for the military’s brightest minds, tasked with removing barriers to innovation and accelerating the Pentagon’s adoption of commercial technology."
Panetta and Gallagher highlight the requirement for the Department of Defense to "make the rapid adoption of new technologies a priority, particularly in the commercial sector," and to "build a defense innovation ecosystem in which the brightest minds in technology, strategy and defense can collaborate without constraint."
“The path forward must be paved with investments in technology and undergirded by infrastructure built for innovative national-security research and education. Failure risks not only our current strategic position; it threatens our future stability and influence on the world stage.”
The second annual Naval Space Summit was held July 9 - 11 at the Naval Postgraduate School, with senior leaders from throughout the Department of Defense convening in Monterey to discuss the latest issues and opportunities facing the Navy, Marine Corps and DOD in the space domain.
Sponsored by Secretary of the Navy Carlos Del Toro, the Naval Space Summit provides a venue for top DOD and Department of the Navy officials to discuss the state of space operations within the services. In addition to Thomas, opening-day speakers included retired Vice Adm. Ann Rondeau, President of NPS, as well as NPS Acting Provost Dr. Jim Newman, representatives from NASA and the Defense Innovation Unit, and current NPS faculty and students.
“Bringing the Naval Space Summit back to NPS reinforces the importance of our institution as a center of space education, research and innovation for the Navy and Marine Corps,” said Rondeau.
The Navy and Marine Corps – the only all-domain warfighting force, from seabed to space, in the Department of Defense – must remain innovative and agile to compete and prevail in the maritime domain. The Naval Postgraduate School remains at the forefront in helping to meet the sea services needs in space, developing talent and technological solutions for decisive U.S. seapower and national defense. Decades of hands-on, student-faculty research in small satellites and CubeSats has put several pieces of NPS-developed hardware in space - the latest took place last March, with the next launching this fall.
WATCH: U.S. Marine Corps Maj. Dillon Pierce, PhD candidate in Space Systems Engineering, conducts test launch of his low-cost rocket design
“NPS continues to contribute to the Naval space enterpriseby working hard to stay relevant in the ever-changing realm of crowded low-earth orbits and contested cislunar space. Graduates from across NPS conduct thesis and capstone research of immediate and future impact and, even more importantly, are ready to contribute their updated critical thinking skills and space-related knowledge to the benefit of the country’s defense program.” – Dr. James Newman, Acting Provost of NPS and former Space Shuttle astronaut
At this year’s Exercise Rim of the Pacific, the U.S.military is putting a major emphasis on logistics and new technology as it looks at operations across the Pacific. As the military looks at vulnerable supply chains and struggling manufacturing hubs, 3D printers are an appealing tool to commanders. The 3D printing aspect of RIMPAC is being put together in part by FleetWerx, a technology and strategy initiative associated with the Naval Postgraduate School. For the exercise, a series of 3D printers are both on land and at sea, with a printer aboard the warship USS Somerset. Military planners envision a “network of printers ” put in key locations to help troops and commanders more quickly get critical parts in the field. Pine said senior leaders at NPS told him that they “want to see how big we can go and how fast.”
Follow the Consortium for Additive Manufacturing Research and Education (CAMRE) at NPS on LinkedIn to learn more about the research and experimentation being conducted at RIMPAC and beyond.
The Naval Postgraduate School conducted its spring Joint Interagency Field Experimentation (JIFX) event in May, with a technological focus on command, control, communications, computers, cyber, intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance (C5ISR) and countermeasures. Held quarterly at the California Army National Guard’s Camp Roberts, JIFX offers unparalleled opportunities to conduct applied research for NPS students, faculty and staff, industry technologists, and stakeholders. This latest iteration drew 170 participants, with field experiments utilizing 18 unique technologies, and a total of 52 sorties were flown by uncrewed aerial systems (UAS).
“The Navy sees JIFX as an invaluable tool for technology discovery,” said retired U.S. Navy Capt. Marco Romani, director of the NavalX Central Coast Tech Bridge at NPS. “The NPS JIFX offers the lowest barrier to collaboration with DOD for any size company, from a one-person start-up to the major defense primes. JIFX is all about learning and everyone embraces the mantra ‘fail fast to succeed sooner’ in a shared learning environment.”
The Naval Postgraduate School welcomed professionals from the operations research and analytics communities at the 92nd MilitaryOperations Research Society (MORS) Symposium, June 24-27. The event brought together more than 900 attendees from the military, government, industry and academic sectors – mainly from the operations research (OR) field – to exchange information, examine research and discuss critical national security issues. For retired Navy Cmdr. Nicholas Ulmer, a 2014 NPS graduate who was elected to serve as the next president of MORS, the selection of NPS to host this year’s MORS Symposium couldn’t have been more appropriate.
“NPS is a critical component of the operations community,” Ulmer said, “because it brings together warfighters and professors with extremely amazing technical abilities in the field, and helps them teach those operators – as well as the operators providing feedback, those warfighters providing real-world problems and real-world experience to the problems that we get to work on at the Naval Postgraduate School.”
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