Rebuilding the Workforce
Historically, the contributions of Navy laboratories have allowed the service to get best-cost and acceptable risk in applying emerging technologies and performance improvements to weapon systems. Such in-house capabilities can bring quasi-competitive market forces to bear in sole-source situations. They can also provide stop-gap, limited production products when commercial sources are unavailable, as well as the emerging urgent solutions needed by warfighters. The “in-house” role helps to ensure the preservation of the underlying knowledge of our weapon systems and components. This is extremely important, as industry tends to only maintain such expertise if it is funded to do so; if not, it is deemed a luxury, and important information is lost. Thus, costly lessons must be re-learned in future procurements. Finally, a strong government technical team can provide a safety valve when industry decides to no longer support older weapon systems still in the field. A knowledgeable, skilled, and stable workforce embodies these roles and underpins the balance needed between government and industry, and it is at risk.
For comparable contributions to be made in the future, the long-term health of its technical workforce must be a strategic priority for the Department of Defense. To continue to build its competence, the workforce must be tasked with meaningful hands-on work rather than simply oversee industry. This is a genuine concern for the government team and probably the Naval Air Warfare Center Weapons Division’s (NAWCWD’s) most significant challenge.
All Navy/DOD labs have an aging workforce, and many have demographics similar to the NAWCWD’s. Since the end of the Cold War, not only has there been a general decline in the amount of scientists and engineers in the defense sector, but because DOD did little hiring during the 1990s, their age distribution has become bimodal (see Figure 1 on page 62). If we are not aggressive in hiring efforts over the next decade, the size of the workforce will shrink drastically, and critical skills of experienced employees will be lost.
The peace dividend after winning the Cold War was essentially taken in technically trained people in industry and government. In the industrial-defense sector, the post-Cold War consolidations reduced the workforce and changed the texture of competition. In government, the effects of the latter, along with the increasing complexity of weapon systems, makes it necessary to have a strong technical team to continue performing the roles expected of them by warfighters and taxpayers.
‘Attract and Keep’
As the government workforce is rebuilt, we must find more meaningful work to engage employees. This will help us train the next generation while improving hiring and retention. Implementing aggressive programs would help attract and keep talented professionals. We should hire above the requirement to not only replace projected attrition rates, but to allow the effective transition of knowledge from seasoned professionals to their less-experienced counterparts. Acquiring new personnel is still a challenge for the warfare centers, which have very limited opportunities to directly hire and secure workers with the appropriate skills and experience.
New tools can be used to support this goal, and their application should be expanded. The 2014 National Defense Authorization Act Section 1107, for example, gives DOD labs limited direct-hire authority for scientists and engineers with bachelor degrees, which is especially important for hiring mid-career professionals. These hires address the “dip” in workforce demographics illustrated in Figure 1. Section 1107 also provides a capability to build technical career paths above the GS-15 level and includes a provision to help size the workforce to meet demand without the imposition of arbitrary personnel ceilings.
The challenge of rebuilding the government technical workforce is amplified because industry, especially the weapon-defense sector, has similar demographics. If specific action is not taken during the next decade, we will have a hollow defense-industrial base and government-defense team. Both sectors will become very inexperienced as systems continue to grow in complexity. The U.S. government must once again learn to partner more effectively with industry to build future weapon systems. Industry will not always have the experience or bench strength to “go it alone” as it has done since the 1990s. In fact, many critical suppliers are at risk against decreasing defense budgets today. This will put additional pressure on having a strong government capability.
Meaningful Work
Naval labs and warfare centers must reassess the work they have the opportunity to do. In the Naval Air Systems Command, industry currently executes a significant majority of all acquisition-directed work, while government conducts the remaining small amount. Better Buying Power initiatives have made great strides in reducing the actual costs of that 89 percent by improving contracts, incentivizing efficiencies, reducing supply-chain pass-through, and increasing the use of government-furnished equipment.
But more can and must be done; the government team could be doing much more. Cost-reduction opportunities could be found by giving some of industry’s workload back to the government. The savings of executing the work at lower rates, leveraging government facilities, and reducing proprietary/data rights issues in the future could be substantial. Savings achieved by moving just five to ten percent of the work in-house could be in the billions, far more than the millions “saved” by chasing efficiency improvements within the government teams.
The Intrepid Tiger electronic-warfare pod and presidential helicopter programs are examples of quality work being completed in-house, at lower costs, and with tremendous value to warfighters and the long-term health of the government workforce. This is the only way it can continue to maintain and grow its technical competence; simply managing the supply base and overseeing large contracts is not sufficient. Although these tasks are clearly the government teams’ to execute, these actions alone without meaningful “hands-on” work are not enough. This will leave a hollow technical team void of the talent necessary to execute its most critical task: ensuring the warfighter can effectively and safely execute missions with technically superior and highly reliable weapon systems. If we don’t provide the government technical team with more meaningful work, even the most basic tasks we expect of them will be at risk. The discussions, therefore, should be about which assignments warfare centers and labs should take on to secure an appropriate technical balance with industry.
This is by no means a slight to industry. We need to continue to partner with and rely on the tremendous resources it brings to this business; the government simply could not execute the required work without it. This is about the government workforce needing to be technically relevant, something required by warfighters and taxpayers, and quite frankly what industry also needs.
A clear way to begin to remedy this is in the area of lead systems integrator (LSI). Currently, the government workforce is not positioned to assume the LSI role on a broad scale, but if we engage early in technical development efforts, and whenever else it makes sense, we can build a robust capability. To achieve this rebalancing we must identify where prudent government leadership can and should be exerted. It is also critical for government to take ownership of critical interfaces, standards, and modular/open-architecture designs. These allow enhancements/upgrades to current and future systems at lower cost and risk while establishing clear and consistent interoperability requirements. These are clear tasks the Navy labs/warfare centers must be allowed to take on: It is one of the primary reasons they exist. The discussion therefore needs to change from worrying about reducing “non-Navy” work to how can we assign more meaningful work to the warfare centers—the kind of tasks necessary to develop technical competence.
Risk in the supplier base has already begun to materialize. History has shown that as defense budgets fall, the government squeezes the primes to produce at lower cost. The primes in turn squeeze their suppliers to produce at lower and lower costs. There are already emerging signs that this pressure will cause a further shake-out in the supplier base. Such providers may find commercial markets more attractive and opt to abandon the defense sector completely. Moreover, the ever-increasing difficulty in doing work for the U.S. government and the large degree of capitalization often required will continue to be barriers to entry into the defense sector for many small firms. Critical defense items that require large capital assets and have little commercial value are at the highest risk.
The solid rocket motor industry is just one case in point. Since it was decided not to build a second-generation space shuttle with solid rocket boosters, the industry has struggled. The suppliers of ingredients used in solid propellant have abandoned the market, leaving the propulsion companies to go offshore for key ingredients—often of poorer quality or purity. Further exacerbating the problem are the environmental laws that have caused the remaining U.S. suppliers to change their manufacturing processes, which now yield materials with different chemical makeups. These new ingredients produce propellants that are not performing as desired or expected. The solid rocket motor industry is at risk and directly places some key weapon systems, both tactical and strategic, in jeopardy. The Advanced Medium-Range Air-to-Air Missile rocket-motor has been out of production for more than a year because of such problems. The prime has since abandoned its supplier and gone offshore to Norway to manufacture it. Such uncoordinated decisions can have unintended consequences that can further exacerbate the problem.
Another example is the fuze industry, which includes safe-arm devices and target detectors. Since the end of the Cold War, it has shrunk from a couple of dozen suppliers to fewer than six. The down-budget cycle that produced this consolidation is on the horizon again and we anticipate a further decline in this supply base. In the late 1990s, the sole standard-missile fuze supplier unilaterally walked away from the product line without notification because it believed it would receive better financial returns by investing in emerging commercial electronics technologies rather than its fading fuze business. The U.S. government, specifically NAWCWD, was on the spot to develop an alternative source. At that time, there were options since it owned the technical data and was very familiar with that particular design. NAWCWD could thus train and qualify a new producer. It is clear that the risk of a weakening defense supply base can be partially alleviated with deliberate strategies that include a strong role on the part of the U.S. government technical labs.
In terms of work, the government research and development (R&D) investment strategy is not as coordinated as it could be. Although these investments may hold neutral in the near-term, many are focused on technology transition, which means technology is being matured, not invented. Government R&D investments should be rebalanced to emphasize basic and applied research and technology innovation by government labs in close partnership with industry. The latter should be required to apply their independent R&D funds to support such collaboration. This will spawn the development of partnerships between the government workforce and its counterparts in industry. In addition to resulting in new technologies, it will assist the development of critical new skills and knowledge in both workforces, which will help translate emerging operational requirements into technical solutions. Such R&D investment strategy should underpin the DOD workforce rebuilding strategy.
Infrastructure and Facilities
In many cases, DOD lab infrastructure dates to World War II. Maintenance costs are growing due to an increasing number of catastrophic failures resulting from age and the absence of routine upkeep over the years. DOD must cultivate a deliberate strategy for its labs and facilities that support the R&D sector of defense that includes the development of a government-owned and -maintained modeling and simulation (M&S) environment. The government has a modest capability today, but further investment will be required to enable a fully networked system that establishes the foundation for a future “live, virtual, constructive” (LVC) environment that will greatly reduce both risk and total ownership costs for programs.
Leveraging existing government-owned M&S LVC capabilities can reduce significant duplication and investment at prime contractor facilities. The active use of existing capabilities by current acquisition programs needs to be a strong element of Better Buying Power 3.0, and the contract guidebook being prepared under that initiative should provide contract language to this end. Reinvestment in current lab infrastructure must be the priority before investing in something new, especially at contractor facilities where future use by other programs is inherently limited.
The DOD cannot effectively compete with the private sector for talent because its salaries cannot match those offered by industry, but it is especially unable to compete if it cannot at least provide top-quality facilities and equipment. There are some state-of-the-art facilities, but in many cases they are old and outdated, hinder work getting done, and negatively impact potential candidates’ decisions to join the government. Consequently, a major part of the DOD’s workforce-rebuilding strategy needs to be based in the quality of the labs and facilities it can offer its prospective R&D workforce.
Government labs and warfare centers remain an untapped resource in efforts to improve the acquisition of military goods and services. A focused discussion on work, people, and infrastructure is imperative in these fiscally challenging times, and a small investment here could very well lead to significant long-term savings for the government. The data already on the table from some of the indiscriminate activity taking place today are a great indicator of the real potential out there. We need a deliberate DOD workforce rebuilding strategy that starts with long-term stable hiring authority, increasing amounts of meaningful hands-on work, and a moderate investment in our research, development, test, and evaluation infrastructure.