Q&A: William M. Shepherd
Written by Jeff McKaughan
SOLUTIONS DRIVER:
Leveraging Technology Solutions
to Meet Current Warrior Needs
Interview with
William M. Shepherd
Science & Technology Advisor
U.S. Special Operations Command
Leveraging Technology Solutions
to Meet Current Warrior Needs
Interview with
William M. Shepherd
Science & Technology Advisor
U.S. Special Operations Command
Captain William M. Shepherd, U.S. Navy (Ret.), graduated from the U.S. Naval Academy and was commissioned in the U.S. Navy in 1971. He completed basic underwater demolition team (UDT)/SEAL training in 1972, reported to UDT-11, and deployed to the Western Pacific with the UDT detachment in Subic Bay, Republic of the Philippines. Shepherd was subsequently assigned to SEAL Team One and spent 2 1/2 years as a platoon commander, deploying to Korea, the Philippines and Alaska.
Shepherd attended the Navy’s Naval Construction and Engineering program at MIT, graduating in 1978 with the degrees of ocean engineering and Master of Science in mechanical engineering. He returned to the special warfare community as a platoon commander and operations officer at SEAL Team Two. Between 1981 and 1983 he was assigned to a Navy field unit, where he worked on classified developmental projects. Shepherd assumed command of Special Boat Unit Twenty in 1983, conducting deployments and operations in El Salvador, Honduras, Grenada and Beirut. He applied to NASA for the astronaut program in 1984 and was selected as one of 17 candidates in Astronaut Group 10.
After a year of astronaut training at Johnson Space Center in Houston, Shepherd was assigned to work pad “closeout” operations for space shuttle launches at the Kennedy Space Center. He helped direct the underwater search and salvage of the Space Shuttle Challenger in 1986. He flew three shuttle missions as a mission specialist astronaut and flight engineer—STS 27 in 1988, carrying a DoD payload, STS 41 launching the solar probe Ulysses in 1990 and STS 52 in 1992, which carried the LAGEOS research satellite to orbit.
In 1993, Shepherd was assigned as the program manager for the International Space Station, a 16-nation partnership to build a new orbital “gateway” to space. Shepherd led the 12,000 person government/ industry team in the technical, management and operational details of the new program. Shepherd helped to establish NASA’s unprecedented relationship with Russian government and aerospace leaders and to integrate their equipment, techniques and procedures into this truly international effort.
In 1996, “Shep” was selected to form a flight crew with Russian Cosmonauts Colonel Yuri Gidzenko and Colonel Sergei Krikalev and command the first crew to the new station. After 4 1/2 years of training in Moscow and Houston, the Expedition One crew launched to orbit in October 2000 and began permanent human operations aboard the 100-ton Space Station complex. Expedition One activated the Russian and American modules, supervised three space shuttle and two “progress” vehicle dockings, and carried out assembly, checkout and initial operations of three new station modules. After 141 days in space and a voyage of 58,000,000 miles, the crew returned to Earth aboard the Space Shuttle Discovery in March 2001. I
n July of 2001, Shepherd returned to the SEAL community and completed a 30-year Navy career with an assignment to commander, Naval Special Warfare Command, assisting with the development of new capabilities and programs for the SEALs of tomorrow. He retired from active duty in 2002 to work on private research and development projects in the aerospace and defense sectors. Shepherd is presently onboard USSOCOM as science advisor.
Shepherd’s personal awards include the Defense Superior Service Medal, the Legion of Merit, the National Intelligence Medal, NASA’s Steve Thorne airmanship award, the Komarov Diploma, the Robert H. Goddard Trophy and the Gagarin Gold Medal for achievement in human spaceflight.
In January 2003, Shepherd was awarded the Congressional Space Medal of Honor in Washington, D.C., by President George W. Bush.
Q: Please tell me about your background.
A: I was a Navy guy for a little over 30 years. I started out in the SEAL community in the 1970s, in the post-Vietnam era. I served in West Coast and East Coast SEAL and UDT Teams, then went to NASA in the middle of my career. I trained as an astronaut and flew on four flights—three Shuttle missions and the first Space Station expedition. One of the things that I found while working with NASA was that my experience as a SEAL, having trained and operated with special operators from six or eight other countries, gave me a unique viewpoint. This came in very handy when I worked on my last flight with members of 16 countries—including Russia—on the Space Station.
As far as technical background, I’ve got a good familiarity with aviation, and industry experience in communications and electronics. I studied aeronautical engineering as an undergrad. I went to the Navy’s grad school program at MIT, where I studied mechanical engineering, as well as Naval Architecture. This may not seem to be too relevant to the highly technical things in aerospace, but it turned out that it was very germane. The things we do in space now are much more like traveling on the sea in ships and submarines than flying airplanes.
I’ve been fortunate that much of my career has been operational. In the middle of my NASA days, I was both the deputy program manager and the program manager for the Space Station, a very large program. It was a $2 billion a year effort and had 12,000 people working on it. A real highlight was being able to get out of management and go fly the station with the first expedition.
After I finished my NASA flying, I returned to the special warfare community and served on the NAVSPECWARCOM staff with Admiral [Eric] Olson in Coronado. After that, I retired and went into industry. I wanted to work in technology areas and product sectors different from what I had worked before. I got involved in projects that included UAVs, sensors, telecommunications, optics, advanced chip design, laser radar, and millimeter-wave technologies. It turned out that some of the capabilities are well-aligned to SOF’s technology needs now, such as imaging things with very high resolution, figuring out who’s who, talking over long distances, etc.
This spring, Admiral Olson asked me to come aboard as his science advisor, and I started a transition from industry this summer. I’ve got a pretty diverse operational background. I know technology. I’ve done big programs. I’m familiar with the defense industry, at both the small business and big business levels. I’m not the world’s greatest scientist, but I think what I’ve experienced is unique. I couldn’t be more pleased to be onboard USSOCOM. I think I can do some things here that need to get done.
Q: What is the role of the science and technology advisor here at SOCOM? How is it different than S&T advisors at other COCOMs?
A: It is evolving. Today’s science advisor at various commands actually comes from a historical effort I was familiar with in my early days in the Navy. It was called the Vietnamese Laboratory Assistance Program. This was a DoD effort that started in the 1960s to provide quick technical solutions to warfighter needs in the Vietnam conflict. The Navy, the SEALs and NAVAIR—Bureau of Aeronautics at the time—were all engaged. The relationship between the labs and the SEAL community was very good. At the end of the war, this went away; the remnants of that program are the science advisors.
Today, the classic science advisor position is the lookout for the command leadership on what’s coming up in technology and what investments ought to be made. I will help the command with its long-term strategy—what capabilities are required for the future, what technologies can provide solutions. Some of this will be at the revolutionary level, identifying the game changing technologies that we need to capture. I’ll also be working in the “evolution” of technology—the science and engineering that works in the lab— and how to make it useful to the military needs.
Admiral Olson wants SOCOM to become more agile in getting new capabilities forward quickly. A new part of my science advisor job for SOCOM will be helping to facilitate this. In our present acquisition environment, there is a near-term zone, with a time scale from now to maybe six months in the future, where it is very difficult to change directions quickly. Our new initiative, which we are calling exploitation, will stimulate innovation and manage integration, with not much focus on development. We will capitalize on things we can find off the shelf, do some testing, and move them quickly to the battlefield.
Q: How does your idea of technology exploitation fit into the way SOCOM leverages technology now?
A: I think the grass roots reception for exploitation is going to be very strong. This approach will be quite a change from the way that we do business today. Our present process relies on studied decisions on what our needs are and how we should invest, and requires confidence that the technology is mature and the risks are low. That’s all done to get the best value out of our expenditures. Exploitation is designed to recognize that speed has its own value.
Exploitation will require changes in the way that things get done. It won’t replace the supply system, it’s not logistics, it’s not development, and it’s certainly not acquisition. It is very much the manner of capability insertion that went on in WWII with the OSS and the SOE in Britain. Exploitation will attempt to bring unique technical capability to very clear operational needs. It won’t have big tails to it. The capability may even be a consumable. It will be quick. This is what exploitation is going to be about.
Q: Why is speed so important when exploiting new technologies for use in the field by special operations forces?
A: We are engaged in an enduring campaign with circumstances that are constantly evolving. We are facing very inventive adversaries who leverage technologies well to their advantage. Agility is the key word. In order to keep the strategic and tactical advantages on our side, we’ve got to have a force that is very agile in terms of identifying new capability and implementing it. So that is what exploitation is going to do. We are going to speed up the “time constant” that it takes for warfighters to identify what is bothering them and figure out if we have a technical approach that can meet that need.
Q: You mentioned that Admiral Olson’s vision is to decouple science and technology from the acquisition process. What can you tell us about that change?
A: Admiral Olson wants to have an independent S&T arm that can do several things. He would like a single point of contact in the command, cognizant of all science and technology activities going on. S&T will also have oversight over how command research and development is executed, especially in the run-up to acquisition Phase B milestones, where major program commitments are made.
We’ve talked about another change, exploitation; it’s not an acquisition function. It can really be called technical support to operations. The command’s S&T architecture is still being organized, so stay tuned.
Q: How has SOCOM led the way in leveraging science and technology?
A: Why do we have special operators in the first place? There are several factors. One is that the people are specially selected and obviously have unique training. Second, in historical perspective, special operations forces have been assigned specific missions that require focused efforts, rather than generalist capabilities present in other combat arms. The third component is that special operators have always been given an opportunity to leverage equipment and technologies. Those elements are what make special operations unique. SOF has always been a place where the value of technology on the battlefield has been rated quite high.
Q. What science and technology initiatives will SOF warriors see in the future?
A: Our basic needs in conducting warfare probably haven’t changed for a few thousand years. You need to move people around. You would like to have surprise. You need to identify the enemy and know what he is doing. You need to communicate with people. You need to orient and engage. You need to have offensive power, and you need to protect your troops. You need to care for them if they are wounded.
Most of our technology thrusts—and we have about 20 of them— all stem from these generic, fundamental things that go back to the Greeks and the Romans. They all had the same operational issues. We are still trying to use new materials for structures, sensors, and effects, new forms of shaping and managing energy, new platform configurations. All are approaches to doing these same historical things.
SOF, in a larger view, can be seen as an unofficial R&D arm of the other armed services. A lot of what SOCOM adopts is eventually taken up by the other services. Look at the M4, the SOF SOP Mod, protective body armor, helmets and lots of other items. This crossover is part of why having a specials ops force adds a lot of value.
Q: How does your role as SOCOM’s S&T advisor differ from that of S&T advisors at other COCOMs?
A: It has a lot to do with how SOCOM is structured, because we have Major Force Program-11 [MFP-11] dollars. We have the science and technology advisor who is working for a command that is a one-stop shop. We can train and equip our forces and send them forward. We can combine authorities of a COCOM and a service, which is unique in DoD. We can take a capability all the way from concept to development, to testing, training, deployment, field use, and evaluation, through one path.
I don’t think that science advisors anywhere else in the military have this kind of latitude.
Q: So you are streamlining the process and putting it in the field much more quickly?
A: Well, that remains to be seen. If we can do it, that’s certainly the goal. The fact that we can touch operators here is a very powerful adjunct to what the Science and Technology Directorate is going to be about.
I can remember being a young guy in the Navy. I saw a lot of good ideas generated at the platoon-level that were not acted upon. It wasn’t because they weren’t good ideas. It was because the system couldn’t encourage their maturation. I think there is a lot of intellectual capital at the lowest levels of our operational chains, and I want to engage it.
Q: Does your background of being both a SEAL operator and someone with extensive technology experience help you get that direct feedback from the operators in the field?
A: SOF operators can be a pretty tough crowd to play to. You only get one chance at the plate. You have to be someone whom operators view as helpful and supportive. If you’re not able to do that, then you’re just another guy on the staff, and they could care less. That’s actually one of the things that I like most about the SOF community.
Q: Have you had an opportunity to receive feedback from the SOF operators?
A: I’ve had an opportunity to travel to some of the components, and I’ve been able to talk at the grassroots level about what the S&T is going to be and how we intend to make this work. It has been very strongly received. The challenge now is to put the structure in place and get it operating.
Q: When looking at solutions, are you looking at solutions with both long- and short-term delivery capabilities, or are you more focused on delivering sooner rather than later?
A: I don’t want to focus entirely on the short term. Science is about investing in things. The reason you do it is that you don’t know what the outcome will be. You may think the potential is good, but science and technology is also about failure. If you don’t have a number of things that you investigate that don’t work, then you are not being bold enough.
Some technical approaches with high risk have to be done in a longer-term environment where you expect it is going to take years, maybe many years, to bring capability to the field. Directed energy, new types of stealth, nanotech, artificial intelligence; these are some things in this category.
We are now fielding the first CV-22 aircraft in SOF. It’s a unique tilt rotor technology. I was a junior officer in 1984 when I saw the XV-15 in test at Patuxent River. Now 24 years later, we are starting to operate the full military platform.
Q: So you are trying to shorten that timeline?
A: Yes, as much as possible. But you’ve got to recognize that in addition to the short-term, exploitation things, science sometimes develops on its own schedule. This is not going away.
Q: Everyone is familiar with working toward an 80 percent solution. Recently Secretary of Defense Robert Gates mentioned a 75 percent solution. What goal does SOCOM shoot for when looking at having a solution meet a requirement?
A: I read that comment by the secretary, and I think what he was trying to say was, let’s not put a number on it. If the solution is somewhat less than 80 percent but still value-added, it could be quite useful. The way we approach exploitation of technology is the same. We will look at the operational needs and develop a technical approach. If we are confident that it is good, and if the operators like it, then we will insert it.
Q: Are there any works in progress that you can give SOTECH readers insight into the process these programs are following?
A: The thing on the front of my viewport is how to organize and structure the rapid part of S&T. My current emphasis is to connect with the warfighter forward, and to build a technology network that is going to receive inputs, find a solution and get these capabilities inserted. That’s the next thing you’ll see the science and technology advisor do.
Q: What is the response so far?
A: I’ve received surprising support from headquarters people who don’t seem to have a formal connection with the S&T effort. I have also been contacted by a number of operators in the SOCOM components who want to help—there are still a few “MacGyvers” out there. Energizing and enabling these folks is what makes us SOF. ♦
Shepherd attended the Navy’s Naval Construction and Engineering program at MIT, graduating in 1978 with the degrees of ocean engineering and Master of Science in mechanical engineering. He returned to the special warfare community as a platoon commander and operations officer at SEAL Team Two. Between 1981 and 1983 he was assigned to a Navy field unit, where he worked on classified developmental projects. Shepherd assumed command of Special Boat Unit Twenty in 1983, conducting deployments and operations in El Salvador, Honduras, Grenada and Beirut. He applied to NASA for the astronaut program in 1984 and was selected as one of 17 candidates in Astronaut Group 10.
After a year of astronaut training at Johnson Space Center in Houston, Shepherd was assigned to work pad “closeout” operations for space shuttle launches at the Kennedy Space Center. He helped direct the underwater search and salvage of the Space Shuttle Challenger in 1986. He flew three shuttle missions as a mission specialist astronaut and flight engineer—STS 27 in 1988, carrying a DoD payload, STS 41 launching the solar probe Ulysses in 1990 and STS 52 in 1992, which carried the LAGEOS research satellite to orbit.
In 1993, Shepherd was assigned as the program manager for the International Space Station, a 16-nation partnership to build a new orbital “gateway” to space. Shepherd led the 12,000 person government/ industry team in the technical, management and operational details of the new program. Shepherd helped to establish NASA’s unprecedented relationship with Russian government and aerospace leaders and to integrate their equipment, techniques and procedures into this truly international effort.
In 1996, “Shep” was selected to form a flight crew with Russian Cosmonauts Colonel Yuri Gidzenko and Colonel Sergei Krikalev and command the first crew to the new station. After 4 1/2 years of training in Moscow and Houston, the Expedition One crew launched to orbit in October 2000 and began permanent human operations aboard the 100-ton Space Station complex. Expedition One activated the Russian and American modules, supervised three space shuttle and two “progress” vehicle dockings, and carried out assembly, checkout and initial operations of three new station modules. After 141 days in space and a voyage of 58,000,000 miles, the crew returned to Earth aboard the Space Shuttle Discovery in March 2001. I
n July of 2001, Shepherd returned to the SEAL community and completed a 30-year Navy career with an assignment to commander, Naval Special Warfare Command, assisting with the development of new capabilities and programs for the SEALs of tomorrow. He retired from active duty in 2002 to work on private research and development projects in the aerospace and defense sectors. Shepherd is presently onboard USSOCOM as science advisor.
Shepherd’s personal awards include the Defense Superior Service Medal, the Legion of Merit, the National Intelligence Medal, NASA’s Steve Thorne airmanship award, the Komarov Diploma, the Robert H. Goddard Trophy and the Gagarin Gold Medal for achievement in human spaceflight.
In January 2003, Shepherd was awarded the Congressional Space Medal of Honor in Washington, D.C., by President George W. Bush.
Q: Please tell me about your background.
A: I was a Navy guy for a little over 30 years. I started out in the SEAL community in the 1970s, in the post-Vietnam era. I served in West Coast and East Coast SEAL and UDT Teams, then went to NASA in the middle of my career. I trained as an astronaut and flew on four flights—three Shuttle missions and the first Space Station expedition. One of the things that I found while working with NASA was that my experience as a SEAL, having trained and operated with special operators from six or eight other countries, gave me a unique viewpoint. This came in very handy when I worked on my last flight with members of 16 countries—including Russia—on the Space Station.
As far as technical background, I’ve got a good familiarity with aviation, and industry experience in communications and electronics. I studied aeronautical engineering as an undergrad. I went to the Navy’s grad school program at MIT, where I studied mechanical engineering, as well as Naval Architecture. This may not seem to be too relevant to the highly technical things in aerospace, but it turned out that it was very germane. The things we do in space now are much more like traveling on the sea in ships and submarines than flying airplanes.
I’ve been fortunate that much of my career has been operational. In the middle of my NASA days, I was both the deputy program manager and the program manager for the Space Station, a very large program. It was a $2 billion a year effort and had 12,000 people working on it. A real highlight was being able to get out of management and go fly the station with the first expedition.
After I finished my NASA flying, I returned to the special warfare community and served on the NAVSPECWARCOM staff with Admiral [Eric] Olson in Coronado. After that, I retired and went into industry. I wanted to work in technology areas and product sectors different from what I had worked before. I got involved in projects that included UAVs, sensors, telecommunications, optics, advanced chip design, laser radar, and millimeter-wave technologies. It turned out that some of the capabilities are well-aligned to SOF’s technology needs now, such as imaging things with very high resolution, figuring out who’s who, talking over long distances, etc.
This spring, Admiral Olson asked me to come aboard as his science advisor, and I started a transition from industry this summer. I’ve got a pretty diverse operational background. I know technology. I’ve done big programs. I’m familiar with the defense industry, at both the small business and big business levels. I’m not the world’s greatest scientist, but I think what I’ve experienced is unique. I couldn’t be more pleased to be onboard USSOCOM. I think I can do some things here that need to get done.
Q: What is the role of the science and technology advisor here at SOCOM? How is it different than S&T advisors at other COCOMs?
A: It is evolving. Today’s science advisor at various commands actually comes from a historical effort I was familiar with in my early days in the Navy. It was called the Vietnamese Laboratory Assistance Program. This was a DoD effort that started in the 1960s to provide quick technical solutions to warfighter needs in the Vietnam conflict. The Navy, the SEALs and NAVAIR—Bureau of Aeronautics at the time—were all engaged. The relationship between the labs and the SEAL community was very good. At the end of the war, this went away; the remnants of that program are the science advisors.
Today, the classic science advisor position is the lookout for the command leadership on what’s coming up in technology and what investments ought to be made. I will help the command with its long-term strategy—what capabilities are required for the future, what technologies can provide solutions. Some of this will be at the revolutionary level, identifying the game changing technologies that we need to capture. I’ll also be working in the “evolution” of technology—the science and engineering that works in the lab— and how to make it useful to the military needs.
Admiral Olson wants SOCOM to become more agile in getting new capabilities forward quickly. A new part of my science advisor job for SOCOM will be helping to facilitate this. In our present acquisition environment, there is a near-term zone, with a time scale from now to maybe six months in the future, where it is very difficult to change directions quickly. Our new initiative, which we are calling exploitation, will stimulate innovation and manage integration, with not much focus on development. We will capitalize on things we can find off the shelf, do some testing, and move them quickly to the battlefield.
Q: How does your idea of technology exploitation fit into the way SOCOM leverages technology now?
A: I think the grass roots reception for exploitation is going to be very strong. This approach will be quite a change from the way that we do business today. Our present process relies on studied decisions on what our needs are and how we should invest, and requires confidence that the technology is mature and the risks are low. That’s all done to get the best value out of our expenditures. Exploitation is designed to recognize that speed has its own value.
Exploitation will require changes in the way that things get done. It won’t replace the supply system, it’s not logistics, it’s not development, and it’s certainly not acquisition. It is very much the manner of capability insertion that went on in WWII with the OSS and the SOE in Britain. Exploitation will attempt to bring unique technical capability to very clear operational needs. It won’t have big tails to it. The capability may even be a consumable. It will be quick. This is what exploitation is going to be about.
Q: Why is speed so important when exploiting new technologies for use in the field by special operations forces?
A: We are engaged in an enduring campaign with circumstances that are constantly evolving. We are facing very inventive adversaries who leverage technologies well to their advantage. Agility is the key word. In order to keep the strategic and tactical advantages on our side, we’ve got to have a force that is very agile in terms of identifying new capability and implementing it. So that is what exploitation is going to do. We are going to speed up the “time constant” that it takes for warfighters to identify what is bothering them and figure out if we have a technical approach that can meet that need.
Q: You mentioned that Admiral Olson’s vision is to decouple science and technology from the acquisition process. What can you tell us about that change?
A: Admiral Olson wants to have an independent S&T arm that can do several things. He would like a single point of contact in the command, cognizant of all science and technology activities going on. S&T will also have oversight over how command research and development is executed, especially in the run-up to acquisition Phase B milestones, where major program commitments are made.
We’ve talked about another change, exploitation; it’s not an acquisition function. It can really be called technical support to operations. The command’s S&T architecture is still being organized, so stay tuned.
Q: How has SOCOM led the way in leveraging science and technology?
A: Why do we have special operators in the first place? There are several factors. One is that the people are specially selected and obviously have unique training. Second, in historical perspective, special operations forces have been assigned specific missions that require focused efforts, rather than generalist capabilities present in other combat arms. The third component is that special operators have always been given an opportunity to leverage equipment and technologies. Those elements are what make special operations unique. SOF has always been a place where the value of technology on the battlefield has been rated quite high.
Q. What science and technology initiatives will SOF warriors see in the future?
A: Our basic needs in conducting warfare probably haven’t changed for a few thousand years. You need to move people around. You would like to have surprise. You need to identify the enemy and know what he is doing. You need to communicate with people. You need to orient and engage. You need to have offensive power, and you need to protect your troops. You need to care for them if they are wounded.
Most of our technology thrusts—and we have about 20 of them— all stem from these generic, fundamental things that go back to the Greeks and the Romans. They all had the same operational issues. We are still trying to use new materials for structures, sensors, and effects, new forms of shaping and managing energy, new platform configurations. All are approaches to doing these same historical things.
SOF, in a larger view, can be seen as an unofficial R&D arm of the other armed services. A lot of what SOCOM adopts is eventually taken up by the other services. Look at the M4, the SOF SOP Mod, protective body armor, helmets and lots of other items. This crossover is part of why having a specials ops force adds a lot of value.
Q: How does your role as SOCOM’s S&T advisor differ from that of S&T advisors at other COCOMs?
A: It has a lot to do with how SOCOM is structured, because we have Major Force Program-11 [MFP-11] dollars. We have the science and technology advisor who is working for a command that is a one-stop shop. We can train and equip our forces and send them forward. We can combine authorities of a COCOM and a service, which is unique in DoD. We can take a capability all the way from concept to development, to testing, training, deployment, field use, and evaluation, through one path.
I don’t think that science advisors anywhere else in the military have this kind of latitude.
Q: So you are streamlining the process and putting it in the field much more quickly?
A: Well, that remains to be seen. If we can do it, that’s certainly the goal. The fact that we can touch operators here is a very powerful adjunct to what the Science and Technology Directorate is going to be about.
I can remember being a young guy in the Navy. I saw a lot of good ideas generated at the platoon-level that were not acted upon. It wasn’t because they weren’t good ideas. It was because the system couldn’t encourage their maturation. I think there is a lot of intellectual capital at the lowest levels of our operational chains, and I want to engage it.
Q: Does your background of being both a SEAL operator and someone with extensive technology experience help you get that direct feedback from the operators in the field?
A: SOF operators can be a pretty tough crowd to play to. You only get one chance at the plate. You have to be someone whom operators view as helpful and supportive. If you’re not able to do that, then you’re just another guy on the staff, and they could care less. That’s actually one of the things that I like most about the SOF community.
Q: Have you had an opportunity to receive feedback from the SOF operators?
A: I’ve had an opportunity to travel to some of the components, and I’ve been able to talk at the grassroots level about what the S&T is going to be and how we intend to make this work. It has been very strongly received. The challenge now is to put the structure in place and get it operating.
Q: When looking at solutions, are you looking at solutions with both long- and short-term delivery capabilities, or are you more focused on delivering sooner rather than later?
A: I don’t want to focus entirely on the short term. Science is about investing in things. The reason you do it is that you don’t know what the outcome will be. You may think the potential is good, but science and technology is also about failure. If you don’t have a number of things that you investigate that don’t work, then you are not being bold enough.
Some technical approaches with high risk have to be done in a longer-term environment where you expect it is going to take years, maybe many years, to bring capability to the field. Directed energy, new types of stealth, nanotech, artificial intelligence; these are some things in this category.
We are now fielding the first CV-22 aircraft in SOF. It’s a unique tilt rotor technology. I was a junior officer in 1984 when I saw the XV-15 in test at Patuxent River. Now 24 years later, we are starting to operate the full military platform.
Q: So you are trying to shorten that timeline?
A: Yes, as much as possible. But you’ve got to recognize that in addition to the short-term, exploitation things, science sometimes develops on its own schedule. This is not going away.
Q: Everyone is familiar with working toward an 80 percent solution. Recently Secretary of Defense Robert Gates mentioned a 75 percent solution. What goal does SOCOM shoot for when looking at having a solution meet a requirement?
A: I read that comment by the secretary, and I think what he was trying to say was, let’s not put a number on it. If the solution is somewhat less than 80 percent but still value-added, it could be quite useful. The way we approach exploitation of technology is the same. We will look at the operational needs and develop a technical approach. If we are confident that it is good, and if the operators like it, then we will insert it.
Q: Are there any works in progress that you can give SOTECH readers insight into the process these programs are following?
A: The thing on the front of my viewport is how to organize and structure the rapid part of S&T. My current emphasis is to connect with the warfighter forward, and to build a technology network that is going to receive inputs, find a solution and get these capabilities inserted. That’s the next thing you’ll see the science and technology advisor do.
Q: What is the response so far?
A: I’ve received surprising support from headquarters people who don’t seem to have a formal connection with the S&T effort. I have also been contacted by a number of operators in the SOCOM components who want to help—there are still a few “MacGyvers” out there. Energizing and enabling these folks is what makes us SOF. ♦