(Washington, D.C.) The Army is aggressively embracing a key strategic imperative to closely link research, scientific discovery, prototyping and promising innovation with the procurement chain or production apparatus necessary to fast-track promising new systems to war.
The interest, long on the radar for Army leaders and modernization experts, is grounded in a need to ensure the Science and Technology community and the Research and Development community are aligned, if not interwoven with urgent demands coming from soldiers at war and fast-emerging great power threats.
While there has for years been successful research and innovation within the Army, some promising programs related to air defense never fully saw the light of day, a circumstance which some believe left the Army with a troubling air-defense gap.
Medium Range Air Defense “Atrophied”
Medium range air defense was a Cold War priority which, service senior leaders say “atrophied” during the war on terror. As a result, the Army was confronted with a massive need for next-generation air defense weaponry.
“We have to build capacity. We don’t have enough. There is a reason why the Patriot force has the highest op tempo .. combatant commanders want it,” Maj. Gen. Robert Rasch, Program Executive Officer, Missiles & Space, told an audience at the Space and Missile Defense Symposium Aug 11 in Huntsville, Ala.
Army-funded Research, Development, Test & Evaluation Systems “Stalled”
Rasch explained that he did research going back nearly 20 years to determine the extent to which Army-funded Research, Development, Test & Evaluation (RDT&E) translated into deployed weapons systems.
What he found was that there was indeed a strong, rich history of Army innovators developing and fast-tracking promising new weapons programs, yet many key air-defense systems were cut, cancelled or ultimately not brought to production and deployment.
