The Pentagon’s rapid prototyping and experimentation office is helping nontraditional tech vendors break through acquisition barriers and quickly test their innovations, the Defense Department’s chief technology officer said today.
“We’ve opened the door for you to come to our test ranges, and we’ve opened the door for rapid acquisition,” Emil Michael, under secretary of defense for research and engineering, said during an event today at the Pentagon highlighting multidomain autonomy solutions.
One such opportunity is the Technology Readiness Experimentation (TREX) initiative, a biannual DOD event that brings together industry participants to test their solutions in simulated operational environments.
That test bed allows a wider application pool for inclusion, so companies can bring prototypes and “get noticed by the department for the success of their inventions” or go back to the drawing board, Michael said.
The innovation, industrial base, and entrepreneurial talent in the United States can equip warfighters with the technology to outpace adversaries, but that potential was previously hindered by “arbitrary” barriers, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said during the Pentagon event.
Hegseth said that was the point of the memo he released last week on unleashing military drone dominance.
“What we continue to do is drastically reduce red tape,” he said.
Regarding drone capabilities, the next TREX event — to be held in August — will be the first time participants play “red versus blue.”
“Their best come after our best defenses,” Alexander Lovett, deputy assistant secretary of defense for prototyping and experimentation, told reporters.
“Counter-UAS and short-range air defense is what the next TREX is set up for. So that is both in the urban setting as well as cross-base,” he said.
Hegseth also told reporters that 18 prototypes on display at the Pentagon today were only a small portion of what is to come, pledging an exponential increase in the number of rapidly fielded solutions as DOD opens its arms to nontraditional vendors.
Michael stressed the importance of having warfighters working with technology developers as they work to mature the solution.
“And that’s critical,” he said. “They’re embedded with these teams and having them embedded means that their ideas and what it’s like to be out downrange and how to use this, and what the problems . . . and opportunities might be, is subsumed into the product design.”
Lovett told reporters troops will be assigned to teams of technology developers and their solutions to conduct assessments in coordination with theater components as the prototypes move through experimentation.
Originally published Inside Defense
