 Okay, we'll go ahead and get started. Good afternoon, my name is Emily Harman and I'm the Director of the Department of Navy's Office of Small Business Programs and I'll be the moderator for today's panel on Innovation for Operational Excellence. So operational warfighting success requires our warfighters and our forces to be ready to prevail in an environment that is constantly changing and becoming more and more complex. And when I was selected to be the moderator for this panel, I started to do some research and reading and then what I did is I read the bios of everyone that was on the panel and I thought, you don't want to hear me speak about anything, I'm going to cut right to the chase and introduce our speakers because they have a lot of great experience, a lot of good things to say and I'm sure that you'll have questions for them. So the way we're going to run this panel is I'll introduce each of the speakers all up front at once and then we'll go ahead and start and the speakers will speak for about 10 minutes and then we can open the floor up to questions. So the first speaker is Vice Admiral Jonathan Woodcock and he is the Second Sea Lord and Deputy Chief of the Naval Staff. He's responsible for all areas of the Naval Services capability, requirements, procurement and in-service support as well as personnel, training and infrastructure. And we also have Lieutenant General Walsh. Lieutenant General Walsh became the commanding general, Marine Corps Combat Development Command and the commander of Marine Corps Forces Strategic Command and the deputy commandant for combat development and integration in August of 2015. And Rear Admiral Joseph Vovodic is currently the U.S. Coast Guard's Assistant Commandant for Acquisition and the Chief Acquisition Officer. And he directs all efforts across the Coast Guard Acquisition programs, acquisition support, personnel, finance and research and development activities. And next we have Rear Admiral David Hahn. And he is the, he became in November of 2016 the 26th Chief of Naval Research with concurrent flag responsibilities as the Director of Innovation Technology, Requirements, Tests and Evaluation or OPNAV N94. He's also my classmate so I have to say that. 85. 85. And Vice Admiral Colem is the Deputy Chief of Naval Operations for Fleet Readiness and Logistics. So please give a warm welcome to our speakers and we'll go ahead and get started. It's a great privilege to have been invited to this illustrious panel to contribute perhaps, can everyone hear me all right? Is that working? Can everyone hear? Great, okay. Perhaps offer a different perspective. So a challenge and opportunity that is faced I think by all navies of all sizes around the world and a subject for which I have a particular passion and that being innovation. Now for the Royal Navy this is an incredibly exciting period as we begin the renewal of our strategic nuclear deterrent, commission the Queen Elizabeth class carriers and modernize each of our fighting arms. In the longer term our government has made up a commitment to increase the size of our fleet with the introduction of a new class of general purpose frigates from the early 2020s which is of course great news. But in truth even with a growing navy we will never have enough resources to meet the demands placed upon us especially when you look at instability in the world today. Added to this is the proliferation of anti-access area denial capabilities together with the changing demographics within the UK and much of the West. So constraints are inevitable but demand is growing and for these reasons the Royal Navy looks to innovation as a means of retaining fighting advantage. Now a big part of this is obviously about novel and disruptive technology. The Royal Navy is currently exploring the potential of directed energy weapons, additive manufacture and autonomous systems. Indeed our new class type 26 frigate class is designed with the power and space requirements precisely for this kind of kit. But let's be really clear innovation isn't just a matter of equipment. It also concerns people and process. It is about changing the way we do business as an organization and about the way we fight as a navy. And there are three elements I really want to briefly highlight with you today. The first of these is the need for much closer partnership with industry. Like all navies the Royal Navy relies on industry and academia to develop high-end weapons and systems that keep us ahead of the threat. In turn this demand can help drive the UK government's wider prosperity agenda by supporting growth and exports and creating jobs and apprenticeships. But in order for it to succeed it is vital we forge a new way of working together. Honestly and openly pooling ideas and resources for mutual benefit. We know that within the Royal Navy we have the ability to play an active role in creating the opportunity to do just this. And last October for example we used our convening power to bring together 50 unmanned systems from more than 40 partners for an exercise called Unmanned Warrior and I'm just going to ask the team to play a short DVD for you. I think it's going to happen any moment. No longer are the militaries of the world the only people who in some way owned technology development. How do we continue to operate in a 21st century maritime battle space in order to maintain a warfighting cutting edge? In October 2016 over 40 organisations came together with Joint Warrior the largest military training exercise in Europe to explore and understand the potential of unmanned systems. Unmanned Warrior brought industry, academia and military together collaborating as never before, sharing knowledge and working to accelerate progress in the adoption of maritime autonomous systems. Over 100 missions were delivered in response to tasking by Joint Warrior and over 50 systems took part with the majority outputting directly into ASA the Integrated Command and Control. This was the first time so many unmanned systems had been integrated together. Participants were tasked to understand the environment, locate threats and counter potential risks demonstrating credible capability options. We set out a couple of years ago to challenge ourselves it's been hugely exciting and is actually posing for us now a number of questions about where we want to take this next. Innovation has always been something that has helped our armed forces stay at the cutting edge so an exercise like this is going to be so valuable in informing the kind of decisions that the Royal Navy and the rest of the armed forces are going to have to make in the years to come. The reason the event was so successful was because it was designed to be collaborative from the outset and we drew on the ideas and ingenuity of non-traditional partners particularly small and medium-sized companies and start-up firms who do not normally play at the top of the equipment supply chain of prime contractors. So we're looking for ideas and technology to allow rapid and automated integration of new sensors to free up personnel by innovative use of machine learning algorithms and artificial intelligence and to find new ways to access, use and exploit information. Many of these same ideas are now being put to test as we speak in another exercise we're running currently called Information Warrior where once again we draw together numerous partners from around the world to challenge and stimulate one another to develop mutual gain. So closely related to this industry is my second point which is the importance of cooperation with partner navies. Today the UK's most significant military operations are conducted in coalition either through formal frameworks like NATO or through LUSA coalitions and bilateral partnerships. Given the timescales of research and development and procurement it is crucial that we develop the open architecture and modularity in equipment whilst it's on the drawing board and there are undoubtedly benefits, mutual benefits of sharing that with other nations. But there is much more we can do together and once again it's much more than just kit. It's about developing the common protocols, shared instincts and mutual confidence necessary to operate with one another quickly and effectively. And the third and final point I want to make and is perhaps the most important of all is about people and skills. It falls to our young sailors and marines to marshal these distinct technologies and capabilities together into a single, credible, battle-winning force. The pace and complexity is relentless. We will only keep up and keep ahead by learning and adapting. Now of course the nature of warfare demands discipline and hierarchy but we cannot let it get in the way of accessing the skills and talent that are crucial and critical to operational effectiveness. Ultimately this may mean looking to recruit different kinds of people even if they don't fit the usual military mould and this is already the case as we look for cyber operations and managing those people with those skills is very different in career management terms today than was perhaps the norm in the past. Within this also there's a greater role for the use of reserves and a very significantly important question about the role of contractors in supporting frontline operations. Meanwhile the demand for STEM skills will grow ever more critical in the years ahead. In the past the armed forces were in competition with industry for these people but that is finally beginning to change and increasingly we in the Royal Navy are working with colleges and universities to steer more young people towards careers in technology and engineering at an early age and whether they end up serving in uniform or working in industry we still gain because the success of the Navy is so tightly bound to that of industry. So in drawing to a close the Royal Navy is looking for ways in which we can help accelerate the development and application of technology to ensure we remain at the forefront of fighting capability. Doing so requires us to draw on both our industrial and international partnerships but the benefits are shared and there is much we can learn from one another. Thank you. Okay well I think exactly what the Admiral was hitting on is where I'd like to start off is the war fighting superiority that we are looking for depends on innovation and that's exactly where we're trying to come from and how do we innovate faster and just as an unmanned warrior integrating the fleet or operating forces is so critical to the innovation we do and that's key to all the experimentation and all the learning we're doing is trying to get our operating forces involved. You know vignette I would use from past days to learn from our history was what the Marine Corps and the Navy did as partners in the interwar years back between World War I and World War II. We did a series of fleet exercises back then down in Calibra exercises that we were doing in amphibious warfare and back in those days this was post-Gallipoli there was a lot of people that thought we would never conduct amphibious landings in fact those amphibious landings actually started from looking at how we would defend against an amphibious landing and then during those interwar years we did a lot in those fleet exercises to try to figure out how Marines would innovate, change, adapt to be able to conduct that type of warfare. The first ones were an absolute disaster between command and control, trying to get our tanks ashore, coxsons not fine in landing sites, naval gunfire not hitting where it was supposed to hit. You would have thought we would have quit after that. We kept at it in between the 20s and 30s. We learned a lot and a lot of that was the success that we saw throughout World War II. I think that's the innovation for operational accidents that we see today and we follow in the footsteps of those Marines and sailors that did that. A lot of that was force on force training and part of our innovation is looking at force on force training and I think as we start to look at higher end threats today and how we operate against higher end threats we're doing a lot more when it comes to force on force training. Training against a thinking operating enemy and so the Commandant's got us pushing much harder into that area of how we conduct that type of training. One of the things I think that helps us with our innovation is our Marine Corps Warfighting Lab, our laboratory. The Warfighting Laboratory's role is to connect operators to our capability developers, our experimenters, our technologists, our science and technology areas. That Warfighting Lab was stood up in 1995 by then the Commandant General Charles Krulak. It was stood up down at Quantico and they stood it up as the conduit for innovation and operations. It was really one of those things that became the test bed for all of our integration back in those days post-Cold War. We had a thing called Sea Dragon and Sea Dragon coming Marines coming from the sea and really harnessing the dragon of change was what we did back in those days. We recently just re-invigorated our Sea Dragon series of experimentation and innovation down at the Warfighting Lab and as we look at it I could talk about harnessing those operators across the fleet and the operating forces. We've got about 170 Marines and civilian Marines down there at the Warfighting Lab but we feel like they harness the entire Marine Corps of 184,000 Marines with the innovation and ideas that they have throughout the operating forces. Today Sea Dragon is really a 10-year campaign of learning with lots of exercises, deployments, experiments that are going on across the Marine Corps that we harvest to move forward. So those fleet exercises that were conducted back in the 20s and 30s when it came to amphibious operations were trying to harness the same type of innovation today in our Marines and Sailors today. At the Warfighting Lab we've got advanced warfighting exercises that are going on constantly that we're doing some large, some small, some very limited objective some I'll talk about in a second. We also have the Commodance Innovation Symposium Every year in May we put together the symposium where we bring in operators from across the Marine Corps along with our technologists, industry to conduct the symposium and try to help us with where we should be innovating and move forward. Last year we also had a science fiction forum. We brought together science fiction writers to help our young Marines to come up with ideas on what the future operating environment should be and what type of capabilities we should be looking for both technology and operational constructs that we should do to move forward. And then finally the Commodant had us put together an innovation portal which has really been a crowdsourcing portal for innovation across the Marine Corps kind of the Marine Mail of today to bring in new ideas. And we're on to our second quarterly innovation, Commodance Innovation objective or task that we've done and that's been tremendous of getting ideas from across the Marine Corps in different functional areas that we're trying to tackle. And what we do is we take those innovation ideas if they're selected by the Commodant, we take that and put it in our rapid capabilities office, try to drive that into a science and technology program and try to move that idea forward and take those award winners to kind of take that from the cradle to move those ideas forward with our combat developers and experimenters. Another area that we stood up in part of the Sea Dragon series is our experimentation force which is a third battalion, fifth Marines which is moving forward with the Commodance idea of generating a fifth generation Marine Corps. How do we take those technologies and capabilities that many of you are developing and get them into the hands of our Marines and move the Marine Corps forward with the F-35, moving the F-35 in a fifth generation? We want the entire Marine Corps down to our squad level operating as a fifth generation Marine Air Ground Task Force. So that's a key part of that and that task force that's being overseen by the Marine Corps Warfighting Lab but is run by an operational unit, third battalion, fifth Marines that is going to deploy, forward deploy later this summer into the Pacific and eventually part of 31st View on USS Wasp. And when they're on Wasp, they'll be partnered with our first F-35 squad and it's operational. So they've worked with them before they deploy and we're looking for a lot of great innovation coming between our ground forces and the F-35 as they go forward in that area. The Rapid Capabilities Office that we stood up within the Warfighting Lab trying to take commercial off-the-shelf capabilities government off-the-shelf capabilities and learn as fast as we can along with non-developmental programs. That's been a great success so far. In fact, just this last week we awarded our first contract which was a decision war room that was really bottom up in this case where we had a battalion of Marines down at Camp Lejeune that took an idea forward of taking a lot of technology that we have helping us with Admiral Hans folks down at ONR pulling us together and having a capability down at the lowest levels down at those battalions to be able to do wargaming, mission planning and also mission rehearsal and then debriefing with capabilities that they brought together and we put that on contract and we're going to put that across 24 different battalions in the Marine Corps. Another one that's larger than that is our ship to shore maneuver advanced naval technology experiment. That technology experiment is going to go on at the end of this month at Camp Pendleton and bring together lots of different capabilities across industry our warfare centers our universities our federal research and development centers when we started this project we brought in a lot of different technologies industry to help us go how are we going to get assured differently in the future? Through that experiment very much like what the Admiral was talking about with Unmanned Warrior we're going to demonstrate over 100 different capabilities out at Camp Pendleton and how we're going to get assured differently in the future and it wasn't all about trying to get an amphibious combat vehicle going faster we're looking across the spectrum of warfighting and leveraging both industry and our government warfare centers on new capabilities that can help us in that area and we're very excited that it's going to be really the modernization not looking at old ways to do things but how technology can lead us in new directions so we've got another number of capabilities that are going to do that and we already have four different projects that we've got planned for this year and we've got four additional in 18 that we're looking forward to do where we can need help as we move these ideas forward I think the pace we've talked about of moving faster is kind of tied up as the CNO said this morning and kind of a Byzantine acquisition process and that's where we've got to move much faster as we go forward we've got kind of a capitalistic way of entrepreneurship in this country but a lot of the ways we do it are slow to move forward and that's where we need help is I look in my own palm development process to be able to go through the requirements process and the budget process the command on a Marine Corps kicks me in the rear all the time when he comes up with an idea that we want to do and I go well I just missed palm 19 maybe I can get it into 20 if we can get things moving that's not fast enough in today's technology and that's where we've got to go much quicker so rapidly prototyping I think there's a lot been done at Congress to help us move forward the NDAA in 16 with section 804 and NDAA in 17 in section 806 have done an awful lot to help us move faster with rapid prototyping but now working through the bureaucracy and how quickly we can actually get this done and how we can move faster in this rapid prototyping area like that example I talked about the ship to shore maneuver advanced technology exercise how can we take things we learn in this exercise and rapidly move them into bold alligator this fall and then finally into procurement of programs that we want to learn from very quickly and then find the right way ahead a lot of work being done at Congress a lot of work being done across DOD but I'm not as confident that we're actually going to get this done in the way we need to in the way the threats out there are innovating and moving faster so I think a lot of good work going on and again I'll go back to the Marine Corps war fighting lab there's not many services that have the capability that can bring operators together like we do at that lab and bring them together with a lot of the capabilities many of you have got together and see how we can go forward so after this panel I know at 3.30 they've got another panel that the lab is going to be able to talk to you about some of the great things we're doing so with that again thank you for being here and having a chance to talk to you today good afternoon everyone real honor to be here with such esteemed group of leaders to be able to talk about innovation perhaps the most important quality that we're asking of our forces when Admiral Zumkov came in common he charged us to be continuous innovators and learners so how do we do that how do we make innovation a mission imperative one of Google's most famous management philosophy is something called 20% time where they encourage employees to spend 20% of their time working on things that they think will most benefit Google now that would definitely invite innovation that might not be able to implement such a policy in the Coast Guard but we are looking for and finding ways to tap our workforce's ability to find develop and share solutions to all kind of organizational challenges slide so why do we need to innovate sometimes it's pretty simple do you want to be blockbuster or do you want to be Netflix who here is going to be swinging by blockbuster on the way home you might be watching Netflix tonight well you're either in a cycle of renewal or trudging along toward irrelevance continuous innovation is how organizations remain relevant so how do we get the voice of our incredibly rich and diverse workforce to be heard how might the E2 have the unequal voice with the 08 well we tried one particular topic we rolled out the crowd sourcing platform and response so far has been incredible we've issued a number of challenges from narrow technical ones to sweeping policy changes and as a benchmark here at 5% well 5% of the workforce is about what NASA gets when it does its internal crowd sourcing campaigns and NASA has been doing crowd sourcing research for some time now and successful at it so we have folks logging on on the weekends and at night this growth and participation has been very rewarding slide so here's one of the first innovation challenge that we launched our new ships pier side electric bills were bigger than we like so we asked how do we drive down the bills we got a lot what you expect install solar panels install LED lights stuff like that but one electrician stopped us in our tracks he noticed that when ships were underway gone on deployment their huge electrical transformer on the pier was on humming along hot burning electricity when the ships were underway then he asked why don't we just turn them off when the ships get underway it reminded me of the modern day fable of the young child telling the frustrated adult how to get a stuck truck out of the tunnel after exhausting attempts just let some air out of the tire when we were like why hasn't anyone thought of this before well maybe someone has but the idea had no means to get to a decision maker slide this is our 47 foot motor lifeboat it's an asset that's very near and dear to our hearts it's the boat that's designed to roll all the way over into crashing surf and be survivable we're proud of it as it has saved many many lives over the years well the boat's 20 years old and it's time to tear it down and rebuild it it's going to be a major project for us 107 of those assets hundreds of millions of dollars and when we started this process our innovation team and our human factors office said hey time out let's reach out to the two decades of accumulated boat operators and engineers and ask them give them the opportunity to get on our work list so we invite them to a private section of the crowdsourcing platform and we receive almost 50 ideas all of them very thoughtful slide a lot of words up there but this is an example of ownership that you'll find when you tap a vein of passion the person who submitted this idea works on these boats every day and he knows them inside and out the give-dank factor of this engineer to take the time to make this post is off the charts slide when we sent our human factors folks to ride these boats to validate some of the things that we were hearing and submitted by the users we found a few interesting things remember this is the boat that's designed to be survivable if it's rolled completely over by surf well the team found out that the helm isn't lined up with this chair and the driver is seated in an uncomfortable semi-crouched position to reach the helm now that's bad enough at your desk in your office but we're expecting these boat drivers to sit here for hours on end in high sea state so of course after seeing this we're looking for a much more ergonomical design of the cockpit the result of all this engagement is a much more optimized, safer search and rescue asset to achieve a higher degree of operational excellence slide ok so here's our head of contracting activity deciding to take a look at one of the most important procurement functions the contracting officers represented program now I know riding policy isn't as exciting or glamorous as optimizing a surf boat but it's work that touches every single mission every coast guard function so we sent it out all to the contracting specialist program managers course over 3,000 people and we got tremendous amount of response to the question of how do you make the program better so through this discussion we're going to totally revamp the core policy and the department is eagerly waiting for us to finish so they can implement it department wide slide when we're talking about creating a culture of innovation the most important thing must be recognizing and fostering creative problem solving in the fleet we want our folks to know that innovation is part of their job and that they need that we need their creativity and their initiative now zoom comp talks about our greatest qualities of the service on scene initiative well innovation is all about on scene initiative for problem solving as well so look at the picture on the left imagine all that creativity all that brain power we're leaving on the table if we treat that group of young people as cogs in the machine rather than our original intuitive thinkers you heard earlier from the Admiral zoom comp talked about folks in our boot camp well over 25% have a free entering boot camp in at least one if not many of them have master's degrees that picture on the right is a buoy deck crew from one of our ships that maintains aids navigation working on buoys is hard honest work it could be punishing but the crew loves it of course maintaining those aids navigation is vitally important for the trillions of dollars in commerce that move on our waters slide working the buoy deck requires two primary tools simple tools that go all the way back to the dawn of human history a big hook the drag thousand pounds of chain around and a mall or sledgehammer to get your point across well the problem with needing two big hand tools is that you can't use them together you can't hold them at the same time and you're cluttering up your workspace with two tools safety might be compromised when you got to take your eye off the job pull down and pick up the other one we've been doing this job for almost a hundred years and then one of our first-class petty officers gave us this the hammer hook seems kind of obvious right well if it's obvious somebody would have thought of it a hundred years ago folks in charge of training our buoy deck crews were blown away and we're working to get this innovation out to the fleet as quick as possible now in the Marine Corps every Marine is a rifleman that is part of what makes the Marine Corps so lethal if we do this right with help every Coast Guard men will be an innovator and that's what will make the Coast Guard so relevant for the next 226 years thank you well good afternoon my name is David Hahn I'm the Chief of Naval Research first of all Emily thank you for hosting this panel or moderating the panel the Navy League thanks for hosting to the fellow panelists up here thanks for your thoughts I'm gonna take a couple themes that you've heard and add some reinforcing fires the Office of Naval Research was stood up back in 1946 and we had learned some pretty hard lessons in the run-up and execution the conduct of World War II I come from a submarine background and we spent the first two years of that war not realizing we did not take advantage of the interwar period as we should have so like our amphibious experience in the Pacific our submarine experience was not quite as successful right off the bat we did not want to repeat those mistakes and so in 1946 the Congress stood up this Office of Naval Research to do one thing plan, foster and encourage scientific research so that we could maintain a competitive advantage in the maritime domain for our naval forces the Navy and Marine Corps that's our job so we took the magic of the people who had been operating in this space during that wartime period and we formed a network and that network is made up of academia industry and government and that network over the intervening 70 plus years since the completion of World War II has done a tremendous job of innovating and that network has turned over a couple of times so as I took this job a couple of months ago I mainly looked at where are the areas where our network is operating well and our network is not operating as well as it needs to operate to get the job done and if you step back and look at the landscape that we're operating in it is accelerating and it continues to accelerate and it's moving exponentially in many areas of technology so you'd expect the Chief of Naval Research to spend a little time up here talking about technology not going to do that I'm going to talk about process because like the second sea lord pointed out that process will either help us or it'll hurt us and my hypothesis today would be that process is in our way and many of the pathways by which we get this wonderful innovation from that secret sauce that we've got this network of people across industry, academia and government into the hands of sailors and marines those pathways are at worst broken at best they're inefficient in either case it's not the result that we are after there is an innovation being left on the table for us to have to establish a website in a conversation to come up with the hook hammer after 100 years of doing it I think that tells us something about the systems that we are in charge of the processes that we are in charge of and that we all participate in everybody in this room we've got to rethink the way we're doing this because the old ways are not going to solve the problem going forward this is where the Naval Research Enterprise has an advantage as you look at this continuum of what historically has been looked at as science and technology investments and projects and then you do a handoff to the research and development side of the business and then they do a handoff to some program office to deliver the product that continuum has turned very Byzantine very cumbersome and not effective this is where we can help and we can help in a very simple way in advance of the requirement that most of our program managers and program officers work to today in advance of that requirement we can do all the exploration that we need to do in terms of technology feasibility does it fit the environment can the Marines use it the way they need to use it can the sailors use it the way they need to use it if we put a dollar against a big R requirement we can do all the exploration we need we've just chosen not to do it that way why? because it's been easy that way and it's been okay so that pace does not work today that process does not work today those old methods don't work today the contracting the requirements establishments the resourcing fits with today's environment so we are embarking inside of myspace in the naval research enterprise on different ways to do that innovation in this sense is not about technology it's about process and it's about putting into evidence the methods that can work for tomorrow because my specific charge as the chief of naval research is not to worry necessarily about today's navy though I have to worry about that it's not about tomorrow's navy it's to worry about the navy after next so if we're going to get to a place where a directed energy or a hypervelocity projectile or some other thing is going to help solve our problem and it's going to be merged into the on ramp of this huge capital investment that we have in ships and airplanes and people we've got to figure ourselves out otherwise we're going to find that that our broken processes don't allow us to even get there so that's where we come in and we're going to be continuing to work with you to take a look at how we're doing work inside of our own house how we communicate with you what are the ways you communicate with us and then what I'd like to see is you communicating with each other in a different way there's too many times that we're forced to deal in a one-on-one conversation with you because you are looking for the answer what do you need Admiral what do you need General what is the requirement that you want us to go satisfy well the one thing I will guarantee you is that we will get the articulation of that exactly wrong alright and that puts us in a bad position it puts you in a bad position because we're both going to be disappointed when we're at the end of that long that's cost the taxpayers a lot of money so what I'd like to see is this conversation about what we're doing how we're doing it and why we're doing it get a lot more robust on the left-hand side of the problem and there's some great vehicles to do that and great methods that you've heard about today I think what the Marine Corps does across the board is they stitch together this opportunity to innovate by listening to their war fighters to put it into practice in an experiment to get the 3-5 out and deploy with gear and with con-ops and with TTP to explore that's exactly the kind of thing that we ought to be doing we need your help in figuring out how do we populate those experiments those deployments those opportunities with the right stuff and if we do it in the each's then we're going to miss a great opportunity unmanned warrior in 2016 which the admiral put in evidence on the video there earlier that was an exceptional opportunity for industry and war fighters to come together and I will tell you that O&R participated robustly in that event and it was wonderful to see industry sitting next to each other plugging their gear into an operational network providing real-time data from their individual vehicles and populating a common operating picture that those folks under the auspices of an operational exercise were acting upon I don't think anybody sitting in any of those any of those rooms, command centers worksites not one of them was worried about hey how is my IP getting treated today hey what's my fee look like today none of that happened those people were working together and put all of that in evidence and they got those things wet and we learned a lot that's the kind of behavior that we need to have across all of the teammates that are in this room and that's not just here in the United States that's across all of our allies and partners and if we do that there's nobody who can stand in our way our challenge is how do we do that enough times so that our muscle memory changes and we're not doing the things we do today the way we do them today so that's my challenge to you I am your teammate in this my organization at the office of naval research and through the naval research lab and across the whole extended NR and DE that's the naval research and development enterprise all the warfare centers we're all in this with you we're not in competition with you we're on the same team so if you want to reach out to us if we're not paying attention take the hook hammer and beat us over the head with it until we pay attention to you because you have the answers we're just not communicating well enough with you and I do look forward to your questions and thank you very much as the hook for this panel I want to once again just thank Emily and the Navy League for hosting this great opportunity for us all to talk about innovation innovation sometimes means different things to different people and you may have heard a little bit of nuance and difference about that as we all talk but I hope one of the common themes that you heard in this a little bit of it you may have heard that word the business team process whatever but I hope you didn't concentrate too much on that and concentrated more on the opportunities and I would recast the opportunities as a simple phrase catch the wave and I hope that's what everyone is sensing from this that there is a lot of inertia in this lane and we are moving and we want you on board with the wave and to me that's what this is very much really all about I think we're on an exciting transformational journey and it's beyond merely enabling the warfighter to want to providing new capabilities to warfighting commanders and I think the Navy and I'd say the Navy Marine Corps the maritime team teams I classify that as all the folks that are working together as partners here that we are well on the way to offering a secure logistics now I'm going to talk a little bit about the logistics piece of innovation because that is part of what I do but I'm not going to exclusively talk about that it's really in three areas you kind of see it up there on the slide I think that the three aspects are people, ideas actualization I should kind of have picked up through everyone else talking about it everyone else is kind of centering on much of the same three big areas on it so let me first focus on the people piece and that's kind of you see two of the pictures off to the left I think there's no good monopoly or there's no monopoly on good ideas everyone has an inherent responsibility in all of the sea services to and that's government industry and academia all the way down to the deck plate and the hammer hook is a great example of that has to go all the way down to those who are on the deck plate because in maritime nautical terms if you're closest to the problem closest to the deck plate you're also closest to the solution so we do need to listen to those things in fact actually that picture that's up there at the top and you see everybody in civilian clothes up there but that was actually a high velocity learning event we just ran 10 days ago up in Boston it was focused on reinventing the shipyards and we brought together a team of 32 different participants we call it high velocity learning event you might call it shark tank because at the end of the day what we did is those four teams that they put together we had a competition and a runoff of that competition to see who had the best ideas and I can tell you that there were thousands of ideas that were created during a two day event two and a half day event and only the best from each of the teams was presented to the judges as we had to do this rapid fire final presentation and then judging of that it was pretty neat and exciting that what I thought came out of that is that we have the potential to have a new era and I'll kind of paraphrase this to the way Tom Friedman talks about innovation he talks about innovation from the top down as orderly but not very smart he talks about innovation from below as being chaotic but actually pretty smart so if you meet in the middle you end up having smart and orderly and you can move forward pretty dramatically I think that is in essence what we kind of saw with that I'm going to brag a little bit actually about Admiral Hans one of his folks at the Naval Research Labs who has done some absolutely great work she's a research chemist and what did she do? she actually figured out how to take hydrogens out of seawater carbon out of the atmosphere put those things together and actually you can see those two little vials there these are the vials seawater into jet fuel it's like all community seawater into jet fuel now we're still working on it but just think about how that changes for us and for the Navy and to me that is a perfect example of what we call the purple line of effort about partnerships for the Navy Navy Marine Corps team where that purple line of effort is about the partnerships whether it's about academia whether it's about our labs whether it's about our sister services and or with our friends and partner navies that we work with every single day so let me shift gears a little bit to ideas the second big thing the picture on the top up there it's the artist formerly known as the joint high speed vessel now called EPF a ship that the way I would describe it is it has a tremendous amount of cube cube is volumetric volume that actually isn't necessarily filled with anything but it can be it can transport goods from one place to another and it certainly helps us out from a logistics standpoint but just imagine if you could be able to put a hospital inside of that or you could be able to put all sorts of different adaptive force packages inside think about how that changes our agility maneuverability and potentially lethality so in some measure that kind of short cycles that that whole thing that we were talking about Byzantine process because we can be able to experiment with those different adaptive force packages as we have and you can see on the bottom there that's another example of it that's the ESD-1 the Montford Point and initially that ship was designed to just be a part of the preposition force now it has a mission to do with regard to preposition and we will always do that mission but think about what else it might be able to do you can see LCACs there going off the deck of it so what does that do for the potential future of sea basin I would suggest that it kind of changes the nature of the game so let me shift gears and go over to that final category over there on actualization and right now I'm going to do a very shameless advertisement for our booth down there 1453 go to your brochures and everything and go take a look at what we're talking about in terms of the actualization because remember what I said about catching the wave it's got to go beyond all the ideas into actualized advancements and I'm not waiting for the Byzantine process we are not waiting for the Byzantine process and I think you can see across all the services represented here nobody is the Royal Navy is not waiting we're not waiting and that allows us to actually I think move pretty fast in areas like 3D printing commonly known more broadly as additive manufacturing and we're doing a number of things there that I think are exciting they're exciting because it puts us on a journey potentially towards a much more self-sustaining ship and to me that's part of a quantum leap forward and I think that kind of unleashes logistics operations in a very different way it rewrites our supply chain management and we've actually as you can see in the bottom right there and this is part of the partnership between the Royal Navy and the United States for those that were the naval audience here I see a number from the fellow Navy's that we work with and I know a number of you probably saw up at the International Sea Power Symposium we flew some unmanned aerial vehicles up there that was a great partnership not just a partnership between the Royal Navy and the United States Navy it was but oh by the way between universities universities in England in Great Britain and universities in the United States of America working together working with sailors working with trying to be able to have unmanned aerial vehicles that were partly produced with U.S. and partly produced with Royal Navy parts all put together and voila we were able to fly so that's a step forward into the future that you can you can potentially imagine on things so I hope what you see in this kind of enclosing is that we need to foster three things good ideas innovation and collaboration I think those are the things that through whether it's the public sector private sector academia or international partnerships that will get us to that new ground that new land I don't think we need to fear failure now obviously failure shouldn't be our objective sometimes when you do do prototyping things like that doesn't always turn out but we must be tolerant when a well thought out plan doesn't meet our prediction and frankly that's what learning is all about that's what high velocity learning is and we must be willing to try our cycle of learning must be rapid enough and tight enough that we don't have to say we're locked into a Byzantine process because we're not so early failures are on the road to success it's true that you're that that you won't fail if you don't try but it's equally true that you can never be a successful positive disruptor if you don't try at all so I'll leave you with one more quote that I often cite it's actually from Mark Twain and he said history doesn't repeat itself but it sure does rhyme and we should all be good students of history being mindful of the mistakes and successes of our ancestors you know you go back to when we were on the deck of the Constitution up there in Boston that's where we did our presentations for that learning event I was struck with the fact that when we had an extraordinarily nascent Navy we did not fear we did not fear to dare we were daring well we're still a very young nation we're only 200 years old a lot of Navy is a lot older than us and I think that daring still is in our character to be able to do and with that I think that we if we are don't place too much confidence in the constancy of the lessons of history but look to the potential that we have out there and what changes we can make and I think you saw some from the deck plate that hook hammer incredible but let's unlock and unleash that and I think we are and we're on that journey and catch the way thank you just make sure my mic's on okay so while we wait for some folks I know that you have questions so while we wait for someone to come up to the microphone we have microphones on the size of the aisles there I just wanted to let you know that sometimes I know when you hear senior leaders talking about how we need innovation and some of the challenges we have sometimes it's hard especially for small businesses to figure out okay well how do I get my foot in the door I've got a great idea how do I get to them how do I tell them small business professionals for the department of the Navy are your foot in the door that's how we can help and there's a small business professional at each of the department of Navy's 10 buying commands and you can come in and talk to us and we can help match you up with a with a customer that we you know or help get you into to see the right folks and help make sure that you're ready for that presentation because you know you typically have your first the first impression is that you want to create as a good one and we can help you with with doing that so if you're especially if you're a small business go see your small business professional and the way to find us is just Google department of Navy small business and our website will come up and I'll also leave some cards here at the table at the end of this so first question Hi Sydney Friedberg breaking defense a question wide open although I think logistics aspect is probably a very fertile one distributed operations has been a you know a theme that's emerged in Naval thinking generally but at this conference what are some of the sort of you know the hammer hooks of distributed operations the you know sort of slow hanging fruit things that you guys are looking at that could make it substantially easier for you know a small unit to communicate to move to keep itself sustained in these new concepts tax a lot of our current systems I'll take a first stab at that one so at the end of the day I think that when you look at the responsibilities of the forces represented up here the Navy Marine Corps Coast Guard and our allies we've got a global responsibility there's not enough ship to go around so the notion that we're going to be distributed across an interoperable across all these stewards of those vessels that's not a new one the specific methods by which we exercise that I think is we need to spend a little more time maybe 80% of the time not 20% of the time thinking about it and doing it and not talking about it because every time we turn around if you know how a spider web constructs their web it's a lot easier for you to cut it down so I would say just leave it at the fact that we are going to be distributed we are going to be lethal and how we do that we'll keep that inside the family thanks Zach Biggs with James so a couple years ago when Al Shaffer was still OSD's R&D head he cut funding to the service labs and instead gave it to DARPA and his explanation was until the service labs learn how to take more risks I'm going to give it to DARPA a lot of what you're talking about is acceptance of risk accepting some of the potential for failure do you think there is a broader cultural need to change the thought process within the institution do you think you're already there do you think that change has already occurred or do you think there's something else that needs to come from top down to cause an adjustment I'll jump at that one my sense is it's already here so catch the wave we don't suffer from lack of imagination and lack of innovation it's here it's pent up we have a pent up supply of this stuff and our ability to get it out there is what's hurting us so I think some of the 806 and 804 authorities that the congress has provided as the general indicated earlier that provides some of the pathways it's up to us to go exercise that so it's behaviors and we just need to get at those behaviors and put in evidence the fact that there's another 100 hammer hoax standing by we just got to figure out how we get them out there so that's up to us but thanks for the question there's an intellectual thing an introvert organization which is to begat itself so it's all about doing itself the challenge for us is to set behaviors and therefore processes and reward that which operates differently if we do today what we did yesterday tomorrow today will arrive we've got to change the loop and to do that we have to remember that we can't always be an introvert organization history is a great thing as long as it's not an anchor it's a great thing as long as it doesn't determine what you will do so things like branch structures for instance are things which are innate in our organizations we have fixed branch structures that go back forever change those the system collapses don't change those and the system will collapse you have to change we have to have engineers now we used to have sailing masters it changes gunners missile techs it all changes we have to understand that so I think the important bit in terms of delivering innovation truly delivering it is to remember that we're a system which likes to reinvent itself and therefore put in things which stop it inventing itself and you will start to change innovative process I would add the history doesn't repeat itself but it rhymes so that Mark Twain is saying but I'll tell you I think from the there is a responsibility of senior leaders to inspire but along with the inspiration that the senior leaders provide we have to provide opportunities and venues for those who are out there with great ideas at the deck plate to be able to bring those to the fore so again that's how you meet in the middle and I'll tell you there's a lot of pent up ideas that really can I think take us to the next level and it's just a matter of finding the opportunities and then help guiding the people to be able to then have that hammer hook or or something else like a true clip that was invented by a second class petty officer digital thread and that solves a problem with walkie talkies this is the actual one but nobody can see it so I have a big one but this actually saves $2,000 every single time that a radio doesn't break because the antenna breaks off invented by a second class petty officer needless to say her idea is working its way around the fleet Hello Matthew Cole Naval Service Worker Center Port Wynimi Division talking about innovation operational excellence a lot of the systems that you're talking about are wind up talking about our software systems and when you start using innovative software systems a lot of times you're relying on large aggregated data sets which in turn presents major information security problems and things like that so my question is to the panelists what do you think or to what extent will our traditional notions of data security have to change or give away in order to unleash some of that innovation that you're talking about I think we need to be really careful we have to understand the volume of data that can be processed is almost infinite so the more the less security you have in understanding that data the more risk you take so we have to be really careful that we understand precisely that where the data is and who manages that data and therefore you can then start to focus on delivering from that data which you have available to you what you need to know but you should be harvesting others data it's a harvesting of other people's data from the operational edge so we should be very tight on our securities we should be really clear on what information we give we should work less in the open domain and more in closed domains don't tell it why would we tell people the answer to the question we should not tell the answer to the question but the answer to the question exists if you want to know when the Russian Navy is deploying go to Facebook it tells you if you want to know why we're doing go to Facebook it tells us so we need to get off Facebook ourselves and go to Facebook and look at everyone else what we're doing data is amazing if we can start to analyze it and then apply machine learning to data information that flows we should be able to answer our risk questions and we should be able to understand our opponent's risk questions it's all in data anyone else want to comment? who could top that? yes sir thanks Patrick Tucker with defense one for Admiral Hahn I wonder if you could discuss very briefly what I wonder if you could tell us what area of technology you'd really like to focus on now at O&R where you see the most potential for beneficial disruption and Lieutenant General Walsh on that what area of technology do you see as potentially the most disruptive to war fighting years ahead as you get together folks to actually war game out how they interact with things where's the biggest minus sign where's the biggest plus sign thanks so great question thanks I think there is certainly much to be gained from big data analytics both offensively and defensively so those things that can unlock our own data for our purposes and then create advantage for us those are areas worth exploring and worth dedicating some of our at least our 20% to go back to Joe's point directed energy has also been a focus and I think that as you look to the future and I look to the Navy after next there's some significant advantages there for us to be able to achieve that as a reality with our capital intensive investments that we have in ships we need to go at the enabling capabilities which revolve around how do you create the right kind of cube space how do you create the right kind of power requirements and then the distribution of those of that power around ships and then if we're trying to do stuff in single domains we're probably doing it wrong so our ability to work cross domain and across a series of partnerships so that on day one we show up and our stuff all works together and we don't have to think real hard about it then we know we've focused on the right things so those are some areas that we're going to be driving some investment I think from our side I think the Marine Corps coming from the sea being a lighter force than say the United States Army that we don't always bring all the fire power with us in large scale like the Army can bring so we always kind of think more expeditionary and maneuver warfare one of the things that maneuver warfare we've got to do and you look at the Navy's concept of distributed maritime operations is to be able to move fast and hit where the enemy's not find the gaps and seams that's always been who we've been all about what I find I think is our advantage today is today's and always comes back to people today's young sailors and Marines that know how to think and act in that environment today they grow up completely different than my generation thinking and acting on their own I tell sorry when I go to the airport and I get stuck in the airport and we're delayed for a few hours and with my daughter I go to the newspaper machine put a quarter in and get a newspaper out and sit down and start to read she disappears and she's with six or eight of her friends at a coffee shop that they've got together with in just a matter of minutes on social media so to me the advantage is getting that information down before we had to have large combined operation centers to get that information in and process it and pass it to the colonel down at the end of the line now we're trying to get that information down to the lowest level so when we really talk about distributed operations we're talking about getting it down to the squad leader level so they can make decisions keep the tempo up on the battlefield and move fast and put the enemy at a disadvantage the technology that we have today we're talking about is an advantage to us because of this free thinking society our youth grow up in you can give that same technology to authoritarian armies and navies they're not going to use it the same way we are so the ability to get things smaller and push that down to lower levels I think is where we have to keep pushing Hi Jeff Schogel with Marine Corps Times this question is for Vice Admiral Woodcock yes you had mentioned the Royal Navy was making some changes in how it recruits cyber operators I'm interested in if the Royal Navy has had to waive weight requirements tattoos, drug convictions and other things and based on those results what would you recommend to your American cousins when it comes to finding cyber operators okay yeah absolutely so we we've waived pretty much all of the all of the classic military requirements we don't expect them to wear uniform we don't require them to cut their hairs we don't mind thick glasses what we need is cyber operators I need people who can do cyber warfare now we're predominantly recruiting to the reserve the reserve forces where we place most of our cyber operators but we are we are not constrained by we are refusing to be constrained by the standard requirements in order that we do this and I think my advice would be you have to it depends how big the pool of available labor is but if you want the best people you've got to employ the best people don't employ the worst people because they fit your mould don't be an introvert organization be an extrovert organization my questions for Admiral Cullen really I was just hoping you could expand further on some of the things you were saying about these sea basing platforms like the EPF and the MLP and ways that they could be used in the future that medical use for the EPF what does that take what are the next steps to making that a reality well let me answer your question probably with a broader answer and what I would say is that basically there is no limit if you think about that cube that open cube in the back of any of those kinds of ships or below the main deck of those ships there is no limitation as to what we can potentially do with those so it's open to the creativity of lots of folks as long as we make sure we understand what those ships also have to do in terms of being able to have those auxiliary ships be able to add much more profoundly than they have in the past to the total solution of what the Navy and Navy Marine Corps and Coast Guard team can do so a little bit of an oblique answer but it's much more a much broader to say we're experimenting with anything and everything and different options of things that we can put in it and we have a full plate of different things to go experiment with and I think Admiral the application of that as a medical facility that's already been put in evidence right we actually already did that in a smaller scale the EPF is a relatively small so she's not a hospital ship but that certainly gives you an idea of a kind of ambulance if you will capability but then just think about what else we can do with some of the larger auxiliary ships that we have as we call them the Black Hulled Navy USNS type of ships and can you expand that of course are there any other questions for the audience from the audience would any of the panel members like to make any closing remarks I think that we had a really good panel and I'm very optimistic for our future thank you all for coming thank you to the Navy League for putting this panel on I want to highlight one more thing for those of you may not know the Department of Navy is having a forum for small business innovation research and we have several 99 actually small businesses that are in SBIR Phase 2 that are exhibiting and they're exhibiting at the Woodrow Wilson Ballroom which is just down the hall they're showcasing their technology so that's a great opportunity to walk through see the kinds of technology that the Navy is sponsoring and also they're putting on tech talks and this afternoon there's a couple of tech talks technology talks that are related to operation and maintenance cost savings and platform life cycle improvements one on antennas RF technologies and another one on energy technology so I encourage everybody to go through and take a look at those exhibits those are in addition to the the sea airspace exhibit so thank you everybody thank you to our panel members thank you for coming today