EXCLUSIVE: Pentagon R&D chief defends RDER experimentation initiative after Senate broadside

WASHINGTON — Hours after the Senate Appropriations Committee issued a blistering critique of the Pentagon’s Rapid Defense Experimentation Reserve, the chief architect of the initiative defended it as having already delivered “critical” military capabilities that no one else is working on.

“We’re doing things because the services are not,” under secretary for research and engineering Heidu Shyu told Breaking Defense Thursday evening. And in the process, she said, RDER is teeing up additional options for the higher-profile Replicator program to pick up and run with.

“Everything we’re doing is pre-Replicator,” she said, not duplicative of it.

RDER — pronounced “rider” — is Shyu’s personal brainchild, intended to find “critical” technologies that no one else is funding, test them to see if they’re technologically ready and militarily useful, and speed them into service. But in an in-depth report [PDF] on the annual defense appropriations bill, made available to reporters Thursday, Senate appropriators included a detailed critique of the Pentagon’s multiple and not always well-coordinated “innovation” efforts, with a particularly skeptical take on RDER.

“The Department of Defense [DOD] remains rightly focused on driving innovation into its acquisition programs and internal processes,” the passage begins, “[but] innovation should not create additional layers of bureaucratic review” or duplicate work that is already being done or that would be better done elsewhere, especially in the military services.

“In particular, the Committee believes that the DOD’s RDER initiative could be better positioned,” the report says. “[L]ess than one-third of RDER programs funded in fiscal year 2023 have ‘graduated’ from the program and formally transitioned into the Services. Additionally, the majority of these projects will lack dedicated Service funding.”

So, the report recommends, some or all of RDER’s funding should be transferred to “alternative innovation concepts” — perhaps an otherwise undefined “Rapid Defense Innovation Reserve,” perhaps to the Replicator initiative.

But, Shyu argued, that critique misconstrues how RDER works, how it complements Replicator rather than duplicating it, and how it had to scramble to get started last year after years of delay created by Congress and the Pentagon’s own interminable budget processes.

“The whole idea was started three years ago when I first walked into the Pentagon,” Shyu told Breaking Defense. “Our budgeting process is a two-year cycle; that means I didn’t even get any money for RDER until last year, after the CR [Continuing Resolution]. Then we were sprinting to do the actual experimentation to prove out the technologies we had identified, to make sure that the prototypes were mature enough [to] go into an exercise.”

Shyu: Fielding Capabilities, Saving Years

Despite the need for speed, basic due diligence required a two-step process, Shyu argued. Step one was to test promising prototypes in field conditions to confirm the technology actually worked. Step two was to give the “mature” technology to military units so they could use it in an exercise and see if it actually helped perform their missions — a “military utility assessment.”

“What we did last summer at Camp Atterbury was test out a bunch of prototypes, from solar-powered stratospheric UAVs, to very low-cost UAVs, to loitering munitions, to unmanned surface vehicles, to decoys,  to systems that gave us ability to tie together all these domains, [i.e.] multi-domain command and control,” Shyu said. “Once they demonstrated they were mature enough technologically, we pushed over to the Northern Edge exercise for a military utility assessment. [Later,] another set of prototypes went to Valiant Shield. Maybe it’s mature enough in terms of technology, but does the military consider it has military utility, rather than yet another shiny object?”

Each step was necessary, and necessarily separate, Shyu said. She didn’t want to waste troops’ time during an exercise with tech that hadn’t already been proven to work, and she didn’t want to waste taxpayer dollars on tech, however neat, that didn’t make a difference militarily. Only prototypes that proved themselves both technologically and militarily then went to the senior officials of the DMAG to get approval for “production and rapid fielding.”

Four such programs have received approval from the powerful Deputy’s Management Action Group.

“We brought it to the DMAG, in which every single undersecretary, every single service, every COCOM is represented,” Shyu said. “They all concurred, thumbs up, on the first four sets of prototypes, that these are mature enough to get into production and rapid fielding.”

Two of those four systems “are highly, highly classified, for good reason,” Shyu said. The other two fill important but neglected niches in future conflict.

Of the projects she could discuss, Shyu said one is building ultra-high-altitude balloons — similar to the Chinese one shot down off South Carolina last year — to carry surveillance systems or communications relays, acting as a backup to satellites and aircraft.

“None of the services wanted to develop this capability, so it’s a gap. But once we developed the capability and tested it, both the Air Force and the Army said, ‘Hey, we want this,’” Shyu said. “These balloons are cheap, hard to shoot down, and provide a very, very low-cost way of giving you sensing capabilities and communications.”

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The second publicly discussable DMAG-approved project “helped the Marines to integrate a bunch of sensors,” Shyu said. “The Marines told us RDER helped them to reduce the [delivery time] by four years — four years!”

Other RDER projects earlier in the pipeline include ultra-high-altitude, ultra-long-endurance drones, nicknamed “Vanilla,” which uses solar power to stay aloft for over a week at a time, and upgrades for a Navy unmanned surface vessel that Shyu said quadruples the range at which the drone-boat could communicate.

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Yet more projects are on the horizon as well, Shyu said, and others are helping boost the Australia-United Kingdom-US pact: “We’re shipping some of the systems as we’re speaking to Australia, because as a part of AUKUS we wanted to demonstrate interoperability.”

Once technologies are approved for production, they could also become candidates for the Replicator program — the brainchild of Shyu’s boss, Deputy Secretary of Defense Kathleen Hicks. Unlike RDER, Replicator is not about testing unproven technologies. Its raison d’etre is to find proven tech and provide the funding to get it into mass production, fast, so the military can swiftly field the hundreds or thousands of systems needed for a major war.

“You can’t Replicate stuff that isn’t mature,” Shyu said. “They’re taking the stuff that has proved technological maturity and military utility and ramping production up. We’re not doing the same thing.”

From here the Senate appropriators’ proposals will move to the floor for amendments and a vote by the full Senate sometime after the August recess. Then it has to survive conference with the Republican-run House, which has passed a dramatically different and less expensive appropriations plan. Whether any specific provisions on RDER make it through that fight over the topline is hard to guess.