Pentagon Tech Nominees Say They’ll Stress Speed to Service for New Capabilities

Getting new hardware and capabilities much more swiftly into the hands of operators will be the priority of nominees to senior Pentagon technology jobs if they’re confirmed, they told lawmakers Oct. 28.

James Caggy, nominee to fill the newly created position of assistant secretary of defense for mission capabilities, told the Senate Armed Services Committee during his confirmation hearing that there’s plenty of innovation going on within the Pentagon and in the industrial base, but red tape needs to be slashed so the Pentagon can actually translate that into fielded capabilities.

“We often hinder ourselves with our own bureaucracy; with overly burdensome rules and regulations that prevent us from doing experimenting and prototype at a more rapid clip,” he said. He pledged that the new Mission Capabilities Office will partner with the services, their laboratories, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, and the combatant commands “to ensure that we can prototype, task, experiment [and] get validated warfighter feedback back to our industry partners, such that we can develop these capabilities at a much, much faster rate than we are doing today,” he said. The goal is “a successful transition to the services” of the new tech.

Joseph S. Jewell, nominee for assistant secretary of defense for science and technology, echoed Caggy’s focus on speed and operational capability.

“I believe that innovation is not just about discovery; it is about delivery,” Jewell said. “We must shorten the timeline from laboratory breakthroughs to battlefield capabilities. That means effectively leveraging the best of American academia, fostering public-private partnerships, and empowering our defense laboratories to operate with greater flexibility and speed. It also means holding ourselves accountable for results and ensuring that taxpayer dollars are spent wisely and to maximum effect.”

Caggy and Jewell will help oversee a Pentagon research and development enterprise that has grown at a rapid rate in recent years, without a corresponding increase in production. The role and office for which Caggy is nominated was created in part to help with tackling “the Valley of Death,” a reference to promising programs that often die because operators don’t know about them and don’t state requirements for them.

Caggy, who served more than 10 years as an Army infantry officer, previously spent time as an executive at Amazon Web Services and an advisor to the DOD’s Strategic Capabilities Office.

His first priority, if confirmed, will be “accelerating prototyping and delivering new capabilities to our warfighters at speed,” he said. “We must shorten the cycle from idea to impact.”

On that point, he said he will work to ensure the timeline for new capabilities joining the fight is “months, not years.”

“The metric I care about is speed with credibility; how quickly we can prove that a technology works and field it at scale,” he said.

To that end, Caggy pledged to strength the Pentagon’s relationship with tech firms that are still learning to work with the military. Defense-oriented startups “have transformative ideas stuck in our processes. We need to be a better partner,” he said. “We must be clear, fast and predictable.”

He warned that China is “investing aggressively to outpace us,”  and that “cutting edge innovations such as artificial intelligence, directed energy weapons, hypersonics and advanced space systems can transform our military if we can get those innovations out of the lab and into the field quickly. It’s about ensuring we can develop, test and field the tools of our warfighters faster and more effectively than our adversaries.”

Hypersonics

Jewell, a hypersonics expert, said that while many of the test capabilities for hypersonics research are top-rate, the structures that house and support them are “crumbling,” and he pledged to see that the infrastructure supporting the hypersonics enterprise is updated. He also promised that he will make all efforts to “increase the pace” of hypersonics testing.

Sen. Jim Banks (R-Ind.), introducing Jewell to the SASC, said he leads the hypersonic wind tunnel work at the Purdue Applied Research Institute “and has helped make Purdue a national leader in hypersonics research and development.” Jewell has conducted work that “led to patents that advance our hypersonic capabilities,” Banks said, also noting that Jewell did such work for the Air Force Research Laboratory. Jewell also serves on the Defense Science Study Group, Banks noted.

S-Band

Caggy told Sen. Mike Rounds (R-S.D.), a champion of protecting military spectrum from commercial encroachment, that he will aggressively act to preserve military use of the S- and X-bands of the spectrum.  

Jewell also told Rounds that the S-Band “is absolutely critical. It’s sort of the ‘beachfront property’ of spectrum, in that the wavelength of the radar signals are long enough that it passes through most weather effects, and yet short enough in that it can still be used to discriminate targets. So this is really a critical range.” He said he would, if confirmed, “support ways to intelligently leverage and share that spectrum.”

He said Rounds’ comment that “China would love to see us have those particular bands impacted by the sale to commercial operators” is “very, very true.”