Host Intro (Gene Kim)

Continuing the nautical theme. Two years ago, we had US Navy Captain Andy Biehn present on the modernization of the Aegis missile defense system. And I thought this was one of the most amazing engineering stories I've ever seen.

What made that system such a breakthrough in the 1970s was this incredibly unprecedented, tight coupling between sensors and the missile systems that pushed the frontiers of performance. But 50 years later, it has become one of its largest weaknesses, because it means that in order to change even small parts of the system, you have to change everything around it.

And so he presented on how they decouple the Aegis system — creating independence of action so that components could evolve independently of each other, and innovate. And it was, to me, the ultimate example of: if they can do it, we have very little excuse for why we can't do it.

So this year he'll be presenting on the continuation of that amazing story, and he will be co-presenting with Jim Juster from the Rapid Capability Office on what they are doing beyond just DevOps to address cultural, economic, and organizational challenges to deliver critical capabilities to ships and sailors. Here is Andy and Jim.

CAPT Andrew Biehn

- slide: "It Takes More than Just DevOps — Rapidly Delivering Combat Capability — Captain Andrew Biehn, USN · Commander Jim Juster, USN, Retired"

Hey, good morning everybody. It is absolutely fantastic to be back presenting at ETLS again, and a real pleasure to have spent so much time with all of you this week and learning tons. And it's even better to be up here with my friend and colleague Jim Juster, who's one of my Navy heroes — and you're about to see why.

So let's talk about what we've been doing in the last two years to improve surface ship combat systems. It's really about delivering capability rapidly to our sailors and our ships at sea.

A little bit about us. I'm a professional ship driver, term program manager. I learned tons from this group and started down this DevOps journey about three or four years ago. It's been a life-changing experience for me, and this group has contributed a lot to what we're doing for our sailors now. So thank you. Jim.

- slide: "Andy Biehn — Director of Development and Integration · Career Surface Warfare Officer – 29 years · 5 deployments at sea, 1 on land (Afghanistan) · NOT an engineer or computer scientist · Commanded an AEGIS Destroyer · Led the AEGIS Program" - slide: "Jim Juster — Head, Rapid Capabilities Office · 21 years as a Surface Warfare Officer · 5 sea deployments · Trained as a Mechanical Engineer · Commanded an AEGIS Destroyer (around the same time as Andy) · Total of ~15 years working in Navy requirements, budgets, and programs"

Jim Juster

My background is very similar to Andy's. I got out of the Navy about seven years ago when I retired; I've been a Navy civilian since then. I'll say more about rapid capability later, but to my fellow CTOs — I'm probably the weirdest CTO you've ever met. So, greetings from a radical wing.

CAPT Andrew Biehn

Let's talk a little bit about our organization. Program Executive Office Integrated Warfare Systems (PEO IWS) is the Navy's organization for designing, developing, and delivering combat systems and weapon systems to ships at sea.

Victory at sea really comes down to three simple words: attack effectively first. Which breaks up into two things: find the enemy and put ordnance on him before he can do the same thing to you.

So that breaks us into two capability focus areas. The first is long-range fires — locate and target the enemy and do it as far away from him as possible. And second, defend our ships and sailors — prevent the enemy from locating them, and should he do so, prevent their strikes from hitting our ships and sailors, and ensure that they come home safely.

- slide: "PEO IWS Enables Victory at Sea — Capability Portfolio Focus Areas: Long Range Fires: Locate and target the enemy / Defend our Ships and Sailors (Prevent an enemy from targeting our ships / Defeat any attacks on our ships) → Lethality and Capability at the Speed of Relevance" - slide: "'We will put more players on the field—platforms that are ready with the right capabilities, weapons, and sustainment.' — ADM Lisa Franchetti, Chief of Naval Operations"

Our marching orders from our Chief of Naval Operations, Admiral Lisa Franchetti, are to put more players on the field — platforms that are ready with the right capabilities, weapons, and sustainment. She's seeing the need for our Navy to grow, and to grow in capabilities as well.

But here's the challenge. Justin talked about the Davidson window and our concern in the near term. And outside of just that, we've seen a pretty challenging couple of years geopolitically. The reality is putting more players on the field in terms of just building ships — that takes a long time. You can see here that we're not going to put more players on the field in the next decade, because it takes a long time to build a ship.

- slide: "We Will Not Put More Players on the Field in the Next Decade" — chart showing battle force ship counts 2023→2053 with a 'Period of Concern' shaded 2023–2028; three alternatives all decline before recovering. Source: Congressional Budget Office, An Analysis of the Navy's Fiscal Year 2024 Shipbuilding Plan, October 2023. - slide: "To increase the number of players on the field, we need to improve the combat capability of ships in the fleet now."

So to increase the number of players on the field, we need to improve the combat capability of the ships in the fleet now. Because in that window, the ships that we're going to have to fight with are in our Navy today.

The other challenge we're facing: we have a shrinking defense industrial base. Since the end of the Cold War, the defense industrial base has gone from over 50 companies down to basically five prime contractors. As a result, when you have less competitors, you get less competition. And quite frankly, for the largest dollar value contracts, about 90% of them are sole-source contracts. Less competition equals less affordability and less innovation. So we need to lower barriers for non-traditional companies to participate in the defense ecosystem. That's an economic challenge we're facing as well.

- slide: "Shrinking Defense Industrial Base — Less Competition" — Corporate Mergers and Acquisitions chart 1980–2015 collapsing into Boeing, Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, Raytheon, General Dynamics; competition rate falling from 57.1% (2012) to 52.0% (2021). - slide: "Expanding the industrial base requires lowering barriers for non-traditional companies to participate in the defense ecosystem."

So how do we deliver capability faster to the warfighter? Well, studying DevOps, learning about the three ways, we adapted those three ways for our specific application within PEO IWS. We emphasize:

- A tighter linkage between the warfighter and the developer. Justin talked about how you have a three-year, 300-page requirements document — that is not a tight linkage between warfighter and developer. - A culture of continuous experimentation, looking for better solutions we can push to the warfighter. - And third, and frankly the most challenging: the removal of barriers to allow capability to flow to the warfighter faster.

- slide: "Delivering capability to the warfighter faster requires: A tighter linkage between the warfighter and the developer / A culture of continuous experimentation looking for better solutions we can push to the warfighter / The removal of barriers to allow capability to 'flow' to the warfighter faster. This effort begins with a technical foundation for rapid capability delivery."

But where to start? Where we began was with a technical foundation for rapid capability delivery, because of the unique challenges of supporting weapon systems — cyber-physical systems that shoot missiles and detect things at sea on hundreds of ships.

Gene hit on this in the intro: challenges with our current combat system. Aegis has been around for 50 years and it's been awesome. But it is a platform-based weapon system, meaning it's designed to link up a sensor and a weapon on a particular ship — not necessarily a network of ships. Secondly, it's a tightly coupled architecture — not only the hardware to the software, but also the weapon system to the ship. The ships are literally built around the weapon system.

What does that mean? Superbly effective, but super difficult to evolve. On the right you'll see a destroyer in a dry dock going through Aegis modernization. The traditional methodology for modernizing our Aegis destroyers meant updating all of the hardware on the ship and then putting new software on there. That involves taking the ship out of the water, cutting holes in the side of the ship, and doing it in what is a one-to-two-year modernization period that costs over a hundred million dollars.

Very time-consuming. And in a time when we're trying to put more players on the field, it literally takes a player off the field. It's very difficult to integrate new sensors and weapons in that kind of environment.

So it required a new approach for us: looser linkages between the platform and the combat system, and standard interfaces to allow rapid adaptation.

- slide: "Challenges with Current Combat Systems · Platform-based · Tightly coupled architecture: Weapons system to ship / Software to hardware · Superbly effective, but cannot rapidly evolve · Difficult to integrate new sensors and weapons." - slide: "Rapidly increasing combat capability requires a new approach — looser linkages between platform and combat system and standard interfaces to allow rapid adaptation."

Jim will walk through our technical journey here.

Jim Juster

Thank you. First, a couple of definitions — sometimes I use words and they don't always mean what I think they mean.

When I say rapid capability, I mean building and delivering kit to warfighters that they need now about five to ten times faster than our normal process. Our normal process for new capabilities is on the order of about 10 years. We want to be a lot faster than that. I'll tell you how we did it.

Second — when I say virtualized weapon system, what I mean is the code that is our weapon system running in virtual machines on a COTS computer. That seems also like a pretty humdrum thing to do, except that for 50 years we've been running code bare metal on custom computers. So a little harder than it sounds at first, right?

But with some wonderful industry partners, we started the virtualization work in the early 2010s. In 2019 is the first time we used a virtualized weapon system to shoot a missile. This is from an Aegis ship. This is an 8U Pelican case that we brought onto the ship. We slaved all the ship's weapons and sensors to it. We shot a missile and hit a target. It was awesome — first time we figured out that a portable Aegis could hit a thing. It was great.

But that's not enough. If you look in the upper right, some of our defense department partners generated a real-life Transformer, right? For any of you '80s kids — like, no kidding, Transformers, the way we used to watch them in the cartoon. That is a 40-foot shipping container with a four-cell missile launcher in it. It folds down and it folds up. When it folds down, it looks just like a shipping container; when it folds up, it's pretty lethal.

We took that launcher and the portable version of the weapon system to an offshore support vessel, sent it out to sea, and shot a missile from this offshore support vessel using Aegis — hit a target. So now you don't need a destroyer to do Aegis. You can have Aegis firepower anywhere you can put 40-foot containers. Really big deal for us.

The exciting part of this though is not the test itself — that was a prototype. The exciting part is two years later, this transitioned to an army program — the Mid-Range Capability program. In close partnership with our Army friends, we figured out how to put wheels under that thing and put a generator on it. And that's now a capability in the Army that they're sending to sea for their warfighters, for things that we need to go do in the proper theaters. The normal timeline to generate that thing in the upper right is about 10 years; we did it in two. Astounding, right? It's rapid prototyping, it's digital tools.

- slide: "Virtualized Combat Systems Enable Rapid Delivery" — photo grid: 2019 (land-based virtualized Aegis missile shot) / 2020 (live missile shot) / 2022 (containerized Mid-Range Capability transformer-launcher with radar) / 2024 (USS Winston S. Churchill, DDG 81).

That's cool, but that's not the best part of the story here. The ship on the bottom is USS Winston S. Churchill, DDG 81. She's an East Coast destroyer. This year she is taking to sea as her primary combat system a virtualized computer — virtual machines running her combat code. What that means for the ship is she is the offensive end of a CI/CD pipe.

For the first time in our history in the Aegis program — 50 years of doing this — first time, we can push updates directly to a ship over the air. She has a sandbox to test it out with live kit. And then, with proper authority, ported over — that's her actual combat capability. So if they snap their fingers and say they need something, we can build it, ship it, test it, and deploy it. No kidding. It's kind of amazing.

Okay — so five times sounds fast. Let's see if we can go faster. For all your engineers out there, I put up an architecture slide. I want to make sure you have some boxes and lines to look at. I promise you I'm not gonna explain much about this.

On the left side of the page is a 30-year-old ship with a 20-year-old weapon system. In the middle of the page, that virtual twin I was just gushing about. And on the right side of the page are three brand new missiles that ship has never seen.

We're sending ships to the Red Sea these days to go operate and defeat threats — particularly UAV threats, unmanned aerial vehicles. So counter-UAV, or counter-UAS, is the mission in question here. We want to give them missiles that are more plentiful and frankly cheaper than what we're shooting today, because you can't do expensive stuff against cheap stuff all the time — that balance doesn't work for us.

But it would take us 10 years to put these missiles on the ship — except if you match virtual twins and APIs. We use APIs to pass the data from the old weapon system to the new weapon system. We use the new weapon system — the virtual twin — as a command-and-control node, and as an API host to pass data to new weapon systems on the right side — new missiles.

We're testing this in three days, off the East Coast. This project started in February 2024. So we went from concept in February to test in August. When this is successful, whatever works on this is going to deploy in November. We'll have gone nine months front to back on new capability on a ship — all because of technology.

- slide: "Rapid Combat System Integration: Counter-UAS" — architecture diagram showing SULLIVANS' certified configuration with Enhanced Radar Data Delivery System (ERDDS) on the left, the VTWIN virtual twin in the middle hosting BL 5 / BL 9 C2 / VAWS AEGIS 9.x / SLAMM C2 / FAAD C2 / Lattice (GCS 6), and three counter-UAS effectors (System A, B, C) on the right. Two 'Secret Sauce' callouts: (1) VTWIN — hosts all three CUAS C2 systems and is critical to adjunct CUAS capability; (2) UDAs — Universal Data Adapters (developed by IDT) enable real-time data translation between combat system elements. - slide: "Traditional Weapon Integration: 5 years / C-UAS Integration: 5 months."

And it's all by thinking differently. The key focus here in all of this is taking a critical look at our normal process, throwing out everything that's not law, and revisiting everything else. That's the trick.

CAPT Andrew Biehn

Thanks. Okay, so that was the technical foundation, and we're seeing that come to fruition after a couple years of investment. So that's layer one and layer two work. And then there's all that annoying layer three work that we have to do to deliver that capability quickly.

We talked about tighter linkage with the fleet. The actions in the Red Sea have been an awesome catalyst for us to have a tighter linkage with the fleet. Traditionally we would deliver a combat system baseline, might get some feedback, and then five years later get an update out to the fleet. Now we're getting it after every live-fire engagement — and our ships have been in the longest continuous surface combat for the United States Navy since the Second World War in the Red Sea.

After every live-fire engagement, we're getting data off of the ships — terabytes of data — and conducting analysis. That data is helping us do a couple of things:

- Provide feedback to the crews on their tactics, techniques, and procedures, and the specific performance of their watch standers — things that they can potentially do better or learn from. - Provide training for crews that are deploying to the weapons engagement zone, to the Red Sea and the Gulf of Aden. - Identify things we didn't necessarily anticipate as the radar and the weapon system is working in a very challenging electromagnetic and atmospheric environment. - Provide rapid software updates to those ships, either hand-carrying them, or in one case over-the-air updates to ships in the weapons engagement zone, to make their combat systems perform better.

- slide: "Tighter Linkage with the Fleet — Learning Rapidly from Combat in the Red Sea: Rapid delivery of 3 urgent software updates to missile shooters in the Red Sea / Unprecedented data capture from combat operations with continuous technical and tactical analysis / Provides improved combat system performance."

Literally delivering improved safety for our ships and sailors and for merchant traffic traveling through the Red Sea and the Gulf of Aden. It's pretty awesome to see that team responding to this. This is just one example of how we're working closer and closer with warfighters and delivering real capability. As that highlights particular capability gaps for us, it drives our opportunity to learn. Jim will talk about how we're doing that through experimentation.

Jim Juster

Okay, this is going to be fast because Andy went a little long on the last ones. If you read The Phoenix Project and Erik issues a challenge to figure out how to deploy 10 times a day — this is us trying to figure out how to deploy 10 times a day.

When I say 'experiment,' I mean a rapid prototyping event from concept to prototype — that's about a 12-month cycle for us. We can do these in parallel, but doing a lot of them in parallel is hard. You can see we started pretty modestly. We slowed down a little bit with COVID. We're at seven or eight events this year. We'll be probably nine events next year.

Every one of those experiments on my list is a chance to go generate capability that somebody needs. When someone knocks on the door and says, 'I need something,' I can't spin up an experiment then. What I have to have is effectively the metro schedule of trains that are showing up, so I can pop them into the next one or the one after that. This is what we're doing here. And in fact, that test in two days is the one in the middle of the page on the right. So the constant experimentation is the only way we get this done. It's the muscle memory that enables us to do the rapid integration.

- slide: "Finding Solutions Through Continuous Experimentation" — timeline 2019→2024 showing live-fire and LVC experiments: 2019 Land-Based Tomahawk Shot, USS RALPH JOHNSON (DDG 114) first virtualized AEGIS control; 2020 USS THOMAS HUDNER (DDG 116) first virtualized AEGIS live fire, Painful Closet first expeditionary AEGIS live-fire at sea; 2022 Vanishing Act (red dot — first expeditionary AEGIS live fire from LCS); 2023 Vanishing Act Reloaded, NIM CSG virtualized AEGIS used to validate long-range-fires kill chains; 2024 VIN CSG / RRN CSG virtualized AEGIS, Counter-UAS Experiments, FTP-1 first PAC-3 MSE missile shot using AEGIS Combat System, 7UP virtualized AEGIS BL 9 in BL 7 ship for enhanced SM-6 lethality. - slide: "What's Working — 1) Fleet-centric approach to identifying critical capability gaps · 2) Integration of mature technologies to develop required capabilities · 3) Close relationships with DoD / Industry / Program Office partners · 4) Regular experimentation to validate prototype capabilities · 5) PEO-level leadership to encourage / normalize risk-taking · 6) Fleet willingness to accept an elevated level of technical risk" - slide: "What's Not Working — 1) Typical DoD 5000 acquisition approaches to building & delivering new capabilities rapidly (i.e. within 24 months) · 2) Typical PPBE-centric resourcing processes to fund rapid capability efforts (e.g. POM issue & RDER request both take ~2 yrs to fund) · 3) A consistent / predictable funding model for rapid capability efforts" - slide: "Successful Capability Efforts Inform Future Capability Development"

CAPT Andrew Biehn

The great news about that is that Jim and his team are taking relatively mature technologies, linking them up to specific operational needs from our users (our warfighters), and then providing a very viable path forward to deliver increased capability.

The challenge — under What's Not Working here — is in making that transition to getting that capability out to the fleet at scale. And that involves removing barriers to rapid capability delivery.

The good news is, it's a very simple process working through the Department of Defense bureaucracy for acquisition. As you can probably tell from these charts: on the top left, you've got the requirements process figuring out what it is we want to buy. On the bottom left, you have the budget process — so in case you wonder what they do in the Pentagon, that's basically 25,000 people in the world's second-largest office building producing a budget once a year. And then on the right is, believe it or not, the simplified version of the Department of Defense acquisition process.

So there's some significant cultural and process changes needed to deliver capability faster.

- slide: "Remove Barriers to Rapid Capability Delivery" — three diagrams: JCIDS requirements process (Joint Capabilities Integration and Development System); PPBE (Planning, Programming, Budgeting and Execution) calendar; and the multi-color, acronym-dense Department of Defense Acquisition Life Cycle Compliance with Tailoring chart. - slide: "Significant Cultural and Process Changes Needed to deliver Capability Faster."

Justin hit on a lot of these in his talk, and PEO Digital has been a pathfinder in this. But PEO IWS was also designated as a portfolio PEO. And quite frankly, we're seeing a consensus emerging in Washington DC — thank heavens — that there is a need to change the way we do business. One of the biggest challenges we have is that we have a board of directors of 535 people — your elected representatives. But the good news is, when they see that there's a need to change business, that begins to have a significant impact, both statutorily and in a regulatory fashion. We're getting a lot of support for this.

We began with possibly the most boring thing you can imagine: the accounting structure for defense programs. Because the reality is, my boss is responsible for delivering one integrated warfare system, but he has 169 separate programs. To move any money of any size from one budget line to another requires permission — either from the Pentagon for a relatively modest amount of money, or from Congress for a really large amount of money.

The only way we've been able to do stuff like the counter-UAS stuff very quickly is because Congress passed a specific law called the supplemental budget, which gave us money for that. I can't rely on Congress to pass a law in order to deliver capability to sailors.

So what we've done is we have combined what we call our program elements and our budget line items into portfolios. Instead of having three or four budget lines for different combat systems, we now combine them all into a combat system portfolio. Instead of having three or four lines for different missile research and development, we combine them all into one portfolio. That allows us to first off deal with setbacks along the way — technical, programmatic, et cetera — and put that money somewhere else where it can do good. It also allows us to take advantage of opportunities and jump on new technologies or emerging technologies, and do so without having to go through a two-to-three-year budget and funding process to get permission. So that helps us take it from the standard seven-to-eleven years to deliver our program to the fleet down to two years. That's where we begin talking about getting more capabilities and more players on the field on the Davidson window timeline.

- slide: "Portfolio Management Concept — Current (Program Focused): 169 separate programs with individual cost, schedule and performance objectives / PPBE timeline ~7 years average time to field prototype from program initiation / Traditional Requirements ICD, CDD, CPD / Current PE/BLIs: 27 RDTEN PEs, 29 Procurement BLIs / Waterfall Development / Traditional Delivery Methodology (Randomized CNO Avails). Optimized (Portfolio Focused): Single portfolio aligned to Detect, Control, Engage objectives / Experimentation Timelines ~2 years average time to field prototype from program initiation / Accelerated Requirements TLR, UON, JUON / Consolidated PE/BLIs: 11 RDTEN PEs, 22 Procurement BLIs / Agile Development / Proliferate Delivery of Capability."

So what are the implications for program managers? The average program manager spends three to four years in his or her billet. That program probably takes 11 years to deliver a capability. So they are like a cog in the machine — they're one step on an assembly line. Now, if we're delivering capability in two years, we're asking a program manager to look across the whole cycle and think holistically. It's a different level of leadership.

So: first, you've got to have the technical foundation to enable rapid delivery. Second, you've got to change the way you do business across the acquisition cycle to improve speed. And that involves a lot of engagement at every level — that is all about personal relationships and human dynamics. If you have the technical foundation, that's good, but then there's all this socio-technical stuff that has to happen as well.

Particularly important for us are close relationships with requirements and budget folks. We tend to sometimes think of them as the enemy, but the odds are they're probably not actively working to undermine the defense of the United States. What they are, are people who have different perspectives and different incentives. Understanding their perspectives and their incentives is valuable, because then we can help them help us. And that transparency creates trust. We're working very hard to do data sharing on everything from financial to programmatic stuff — at the dashboard level, the regular meeting level, whatever it takes to drive and build that trust.

And then lastly, we need to grow that industrial base to build more competition. We need to bring in more innovative providers. The vast majority of innovation in the US economy over the last 20 years has not occurred inside the defense industrial base — it's occurred elsewhere. So we need to bring those innovative companies in.

- slide: "Implications — To deliver capability faster, we must: 1. Make required technical improvements to enable faster delivery / 2. Change the way we do business across the acquisition cycle to improve speed / 3. Cultivate close relationships with requirements and budget folks – transparency creates trust / 4. Grow the industrial base to provide more competition, which drives greater innovation and affordability."

So, the help we're looking for: innovative companies who are interested in applying their talents to hard defense problems. We're working to lower the barriers of entry for that — I'd love to talk to you. I'd love to hear about your experiences in changing a bureaucratic and stovepiped organization. And lastly, I would encourage you: talk to and mentor talented young people — and not-so-young people — about considering a career in public service, in uniform or out. We're doing really important work, not just to safeguard the United States but to safeguard the world. Nothing is more rewarding.

And then one last personal note: likely retiring next summer. So if anybody's interested in talking to a crotchety old ship captain, I would love to talk to you about that too. Alright. Thank you.

- slide: "Help We're Looking For — We are looking for innovative companies who are interested in applying their talents to hard defense problems and grow the defense industrial base / We'd love to hear about your experiences in changing a bureaucratic and stovepiped organization to one that is more nimble and responsive / Please talk to and mentor talented young people about considering a career in public service (in uniform or out)."