The defense secretary’s stop at Wright-Patterson was the last in a three-day swing through New York, Missouri, Nebraska and Ohio. While at Wright-Patterson, he met with Air Force Materiel Command leader Gen. Ellen Pawlikowski and with AFRL researchers who gave briefings on cutting-edge technologies, including an initiative to outfit airmen and Ohio State football athletes with wearable technology to improve performance.
Carter said the Pentagon will open more Defense Innovation Unit-Experimental outposts but he was not prepared to name where they might locate. Since last year, the Pentagon has opened the hubs to link commercial technological innovators with the military in the Silicon Valley of California; Boston, Mass.; and Austin, Texas.
Dayton, he said, “would be a good place to have one.”
“It’s one of the technology hubs and what we’re trying to do is make sure we have as a department a presence in all of America’s technology hubs so that people get to know us and get to know the importance (of the military’s) mission, the importance of contributing to it,” he said.
But, he added, Wright-Patterson is home to AFRL headquarters “so what I will want to do is make sure that we build any additional innovative outposts on top of the Air Force Research Laboratory which is already here.”
AFRL creates future warfighting technologies the Air Force aims to put in the hands of airmen. Four of nine directorates — aerospace systems, materials and manufacturing, sensors and human performance —are at Wright-Patterson. Spending more than $4 billion a year, AFRL has a combined civilian and military workforce of more than 6,300 scientists and engineers.
“Everything here represents how technology is central to our national security team today and also to everything we do in the future,” he told reporters. “This is a place that is doing path-breaking technology which means that it’s doing work on the programs, systems, the new things, even the surprising things we can’t talk about that will continue to make the American military the dominant one on the planet.”
AFRL will have a key role in the nation’s “third offset” strategy, much as the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency did in the previous generation of weapons systems, said Richard Aboulafia, a senior aerospace analyst with the Virginia-based Teal Group.
“You could say that AFRL is the DARPA of the third offset,” he said in a telephone interview.
The strategy represents what military leaders and scholars call the latest wave of “game-changing technologies” —- such as hypersonics and autonomous machines — to defeat enemies with a numerically superior advantage.
Focus on technology
The United States has long relied on technological superiority to face adversaries with more troops and weapons.
In the first offset, for example, the U.S. relied on nuclear weapons as a deterrent to war with the former Soviet Union, which had a larger military force of ships, tanks and planes. The second wave of U.S. technological superiority brought stealth aircraft and satellite- and laser-guided precision bombing.
The third offset, however, has left at least one military observer skeptical, noting similar attempts, such as former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld’s Transformation Initiative, “come and go.”
The Pentagon needs to better define what the strategy is and what capabilities are needed, said Todd Harrison, director of aerospace studies and defense budget analysis at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, D.C.
“The Third Offset Strategy is too ill defined in my mind to know what lasting impact it may have,” he wrote in an email.
Air Force plans to buy up to 100 new B-21 bombers
Carter said he planned to get an update on the future B-21 Raider stealth bomber while at Wright-Patterson. Military strategists envision the stealth bomber as a system of systems that can penetrate the most fearsome anti-aircraft defenses around the globe.
The Air Force plans to buy 80 to 100 of the bombers to replace the decades-old B-52H Stratofortress and the swing-wing B-1B Lancer beginning in the mid-2020s.
Northrop Grumman will build the bomber, and Virginia-based Orbital ATK’s Dayton operations was named as one of seven primary subcontractors.
The Air Force Rapid Capabilities Office in Washington, D.C., has oversight for the creation of the stealth jet. But it was clear from Carter’s visit behind-the-scenes work was quietly under way at Wright-Patterson.
“It is the Air Force center for advancing and developing new technologies and the B-21 will require significant new technology advancements that will come from AFRL,” said Michael Gessel, a long-time Wright-Patterson observer and vice president of federal programs at the Dayton Development Coalition.
Josh Hagen, a 711th Human Performance Wing researcher, also provided Carter an overview of wearable technology the lab has put in place to optimize human performance.
“This is kind of changing the paradigm treating the human body as a weapon system because we put tons and tons of money and effort into keeping our equipment functioning and yet a lot of times, we don’t ignore the human body, but we can do a lot more to take advantage of some of these new technologies,” he said.
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