DOD officials defend rapid experimentation projects at key tech demo

By Theresa Maher  / August 29, 2024

EDINBURGH, IN -- The Rapid Defense Experimentation Reserve may not appear to reflect the first word in its acronym to Senate appropriators who have criticized RDER for failing to transition more weapon systems to the battlefield, but senior Pentagon officials suggest that lawmakers looking to cut the program don’t fully appreciate RDER’s challenges given the slowness of the traditional acquisition and budgeting cycle.

“Each RDER class is planned two years in advance, to align with the department’s budget process. The projects that you’ll see today were actually selected in ‘22, and if successful, they will transition in ‘25,” Marcia Holmes, principal deputy to assistant secretary of defense for mission capabilities, told reporters and other guests at Camp Atterbury, IN, on Tuesday.

The base serves as home to the Technology Readiness Experimentation initiative, RDER’s demonstration arm.

“I don’t know how many of you follow the traditional acquisition process, probably many of you in industry follow the traditional acquisition process. But that timeline is remarkable,” Holmes said.

RDER is the Pentagon’s process for the rapid experimentation and prototyping of technologies to fulfill joint warfighting needs and share collected data to streamline integration across the military services.

Holmes’s remarks come nearly a month after the Senate Appropriations Committee criticized RDER in a report accompanying its fiscal year 2025 defense spending bill, saying it is “unaware of significant operational improvements derived from the RDER funding construct to date.”

Budget processes take the ‘rapid’ out of RDER

Defense officials defending the program’s record of technology transition point out that stopgap funding via annual continuing resolutions predictably throws a wrench in most DOD activities, and RDER is no exception.

“It happened in ‘23, it happened in ’24 -- there’s been a continuing resolution. Each one of those has a scheduling impact,” Alex Lovett, deputy assistant secretary of defense for prototyping and experimentation, told reporters at Atterbury.

“We could have gotten through -- perhaps all the class of ‘23 experimentation -- earlier in the year, by June,” he added. “If they’ve appropriated in October, we can’t start until April, which means I go until October.”

These delays stall the transition of projects that have graduated from experimentation into services beyond the budgeting cycle, according to Lovett.

The department is requesting $450 million for RDER-related projects in FY-25 but Senate appropriators also recommended making potential cuts.

RDER has two portions, Lovett told reporters. The Office of the Under Secretary of Defense for Research and Engineering oversees the first portion, which centers on experimentation through events like TREX. That portion has seen level funding across FY-23 and FY-24, and the trend is expected to continue through FY-25.

“What has been marked is the service prototypes,” Lovett said.

Meaning, if the military services have less RDER-related funding there will be fewer prototypes in the pipeline.

“So, if they continue to reduce the prototyping, there will be less technical solutions coming out the other end,” he said.

The proposed budget cut, which is not clearly laid out in the Senate appropriators’ report, would further delay the progress appropriators lamented they have not yet seen, according to Under Secretary of Defense for Research and Engineering Heidi Shyu.

“By cutting the RDER, what you’re doing is just delaying the capability, just stretching the products out longer and longer. You’re basically squeezing the funnel, right? And narrowing the number of projects we literally can test going through the pipe,” Shyu told reporters at the National Defense Industrial Association’s annual emerging technologies conference in early August.

Falling through the cracks

RDER is meant to identify technologies with the potential to close gaps in joint warfighting capabilities or needs, but candidate technologies can be tagged as RDER projects in various ways.

“Often those technologies are maturing down in the service labs, and they slowly make their way up the technology readiness scale. They’re waiting their turn. They’re awaiting available resources,” Holmes said.

Via the traditional acquisition process, though, these technologies “all too often” fall through the cracks, according to Holmes.

“Competing service priorities align what limited resources they have against those near-term needs and those near-term demands,” she said. “RDER reaches down into development, and it pulls out those capabilities that show promise to the joint fight to accelerate.”

This was the main reason RDER was established, Shyu told reporters at the early August conference.

“We created RDER to involve the Joint Staff and the COCOMS [combatant commands] -- so they now have a voice and they can voice their needs and their needs are being met, rather than, ‘I got a need -- service, are you willing to help me out?’ ‘Seriously? Well, let’s see -- where do you stack on my list of priorities? You’re number 55, take a number,’” Shyu said.

Some projects go through RDER to identify concepts and capabilities that may graduate into scaling programs such as the Replicator initiative, the department’s classified plan to field thousands of drones across multiple domains by August 2025 to counter China’s military mass.

“The [deputy defense secretary] has structured RDER so that we are identifying the concepts, taking them to a capability, and then we can feed our graduates into scaling programs like [Accelerate the Procurement and Fielding of Innovative Technologies] or Replicator. And we have had some successful partnerships with them so far,” Lovett said.

Other projects may come back to RDER for consideration after collaborating with another team at the previous experimentation event.

“So, we have had single vendors who have come in and they have 80% of the solution,” Lovett said. “They might have a vehicle, but they don’t have any seeker technology or they don’t know how to do the rest. They’ve met other people here who are in the seeker business, now they’re teaming up. That happened last time, and then they come back, now as a team effort.”

Some may come at the request of individual services, either directly or following the service’s experimentation event.

The Swiftships Swift-Sea-Stalker (S3), Fleet 4, is a small unmanned surface vessel built using commercial off-the-shelf material. After a recent experimentation event, the team was referred to undergo a TREX demonstration for RDER, according to Swiftships Executive Director Eric Geibel.

Altaeros’s ST-FLEX, an autonomous and remote operation-capable aerostat, meanwhile, was specifically requested to go through TREX demonstration for Army acquisition via RDER, Lovett told reporters.

Some TREX participants not tied to RDER

Some technologies at TREX don’t fit RDER’s needs or requirements but can still use the event as an experimentation vehicle. While most technologies at TREX are at Technology Readiness Level (TRL) 5 or higher, those not being considered for RDER aren’t held to that standard. Teams bringing these technologies will arrive at TREX on their own dime.

“An immature technology wants to come and just get some user field experience,” Lovett said. “And some of them need that. They don’t know how to work with the military.”

Those teams may not know what an environment on a forward operating base [FOB] looks like, which TREX provides.

“This is set up to be representative of a combat outpost or a [forward operation base] that is forward deployed. This is where soldiers train on the same kind of thing. And so we’re putting them in the same environment. You can see the logistics,” Lovett added.

Some technologies had gone through testing for RDER at TREX but came back for experimentation without the promise of RDER funding.

“If it’s something we passed on because it wasn’t technically mature and they still want to come out -- if they want to come on their dime, we will allow them. We’ll cover the range fees, we’ll cover the rest of the stuff, and help them get there,” Lovett said.

TREX year-round, with biannual large events

The TREX demonstration, during which reporters were invited to Camp Atterbury, is one of two large annual events aimed at bringing together individual technologies, according to Lovett.

TREX testing takes place continuously throughout the year, but normally “there’s about five technologies that are in some point of experimentation here,” he said.

“So, this is the only -- at least major events are -- the only time we’d have 80 technologies at the same time in one place,” Lovett said.

Small business collabs cutting costs

Other partnerships, aside from those born of the need to add or integrate new capabilities, are also formed at TREX, according to Lovett.

“We’ve seen two or three small businesses join together to find a common solution,” he said. “Small UAS --some of what you see out here -- is part of that, and small business is drastically reducing the prices. We’re seeing that the average cost of the price has gone down almost a factor of five from what we were paying three years ago.”

Companies are aligning to accomplish a common goal via partnerships formed at TREX on their own, but TREX enables these collaborations, according to Lovett.

“I don’t know of any other event or program that does the merger, the Match.com of the technologies,” he said.

Replicator alignment

In its criticism of RDER, the Senate Appropriations Committee suggested redirecting some funds requested for the program toward Replicator tranche two systems, but the RDER and Replicator teams are already in sync, according to Lovett.

“We’re closely connected. In fact, [Mission Capabilities] is the lead for Replicator experimentation,” he said.

As the Defense Innovation Unit selects products, Lovett’s team works with the organization to coordinate experimentation, “to make sure that their projects are going through the same phases, and some of those are at our events,” he said.

Lovett’s team is also tied with the Joint Staff and has a member embedded in the DIU office.

“We’re working closely with them on all of their requirements and identifying all the technologies that we have that meet the [U.S. Indo-Pacific Command’s] requirements,” he said.