XR team helps ID, grow technologies while reducing risk

  • Published
  • By Chuck Paone
  • 66th Air Base Wing Public Affairs
HANSCOM AIR FORCE BASE, Mass. --  Developmental planning is what lies in the nebulous territory between a good idea and a formal program, according to officials from the organization leading such efforts for the Electronic Systems Center.

"There's plenty of good technology being developed out there by Air Force Research Laboratory and others, but there isn't enough money to mature and develop it all," said Dr. Charlie Kelley, director of Capabilities Integration, better known by its two-letter designation, XR.

This means some hard decisions have to be made, which in turn requires a combination of sound planning, engineering and analysis.

That's where XR comes in. But they don't come in alone. The XR team brings together AFRL, small businesses doing innovative research and development, program officials and the user community.

"And by users, we don't just mean the ones who control the money, but the actual hands-on operators who know what they need," Dr. Kelley said.

The key in all of this is to work at maturing - or prioritizing the maturation of - the most promising and most required technologies. Even within ESC, it's important to determine which technology gaps program managers are most desperately looking to fill.

"We go out and survey them and ask them to come back to us with their needs," Dr. Kelley said. "The first time we did it, we kind of got the solve-world-hunger type responses, but since then, we've asked them to drill down and get more specific, and now I think we've really got a good list to work from."

That's a good starting point, but only that. From there, officials must search for the best potential solution, and wring out as much risk as possible. In program management, people talk about risk reduction all the time, but doing it early makes a lot more sense than waiting till substantial investments have been made, according to Scott Hardiman, the XR deputy.

"Good systems engineering is all about asking the tough questions early," he said. "It requires more intellectual rigor up front. You need to do more trade analyses and develop a higher degree of confidence in the technology."

Dr. Kelley's team, and their wing partners, will soon be taking on a lot more early systems engineering work, with $12.4 million out of an Air Force Materiel Command allocation of $30 million coming to the center through XR. This money will be used to comprehensively examine 13 or 14 promising initiatives, each of which "has the potential to become an ACAT (Acquisition Category) program," Dr. Kelley said.

Some of them most likely will not, however, because early analysis often leads officials to conclude that a technology just isn't ready for development, that despite its promise, the risk of failure is too high.

"But that's goodness, too," Dr. Kelley said, emphasizing the value of redirecting time and money to safer, albeit sometimes slightly less promising, alternatives.
The XR leaders emphasize that those decisions are not made in a vacuum, re-stating their reliance on teaming concepts.

"We want and need to build partnerships with all the wings and with others," Dr. Kelley said. "This isn't about XR telling people what to do, but about us helping determine what we all need to do to get the best tools in warfighters' hands."

Toward that end, they've created technology collaborative forums, including a new one focusing specifically on intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance, which give all players a chance to participate.

Beyond developmental planning and early systems engineering, the XR team helps program mangers incorporate the most recently collected intelligence into system planning, engineering and development. They also work on various real-time initiatives.
Improvised Explosive Device, or IED, defeat is perhaps the most notable. More than $85 million worth of counter-IED work has come to the center through XR from the Defense Department's Joint IED Defeat Office, JIEDDO.

"Most of JIEDDO's work was being done by green suiters before our guys came knocking on their door," Dr. Kelley said. "But once they saw that we had the ability to quickly bring in and test technologies for rapid fielding, they really started turning to our team."

Dr. Kelley said such rapid initiatives and longer-term technology identification and maturation efforts both have their place in system acquisition. And he noted that XR officials remain poised to help with either.

"We live by three simple rules here," he said. The first they call 'The White Zinfandel Rule.'

"It isn't white; it's pink," Dr. Kelley said. "Why don't they call it what it is? So that's what we require our people to do. Don't call something one thing, if it's really something else."

The second rule is that XR staff has to make technical information clear and understandable, delivering it free of techno-jargon. And the third is that everything they do must add value.

"If we're not adding value, then no one's going to buy into what we're trying to do," Dr. Kelley said. "We need to show people that we can help them meet their needs."