By Courtney E. Howard
SAN DIEGO, 11 March 2008. A thought-provoking presentation, "COTS Integration Challenges," Dr. Stephen M. Jarrett, Office of Research and Technology Applications (ORTA)/chief technologist, Intelligence and Information Warfare, followed the keynote that kicked off the Military & Aerospace Electronics Forum, which has the overall theme of "Under the COTS Umbrella."
"I have been working COTS my entire military career," Jarrett says. "It sounds like a misnomer, but it's not." He was a submarine captain for the U.S. Navy when he was 37, and served on the submarine force for 25 years.
"In the past, we thought we could submit a request for proposal and the technology would beat a path to our door," Jarrett recalls. Today in the mil-aero industry, we have to go aggressively after it. He calls it aggressive technology engagement. "We cannot have a wait and see attitude," he says. "We need to go forward and look at what tech is coming out of the labs and how can we adapt it and use it. We need to leverage massive amounts of commercial R&D; the commercial market is investing more than we are in R&D."
If we as an industry do not take advantage of commercial technology off the shelf, we won't keep pace in technology with other industries and other countries.
Middle Eastern forces are using the Internet to exchange plans and various other information, as well as employing cell phones, handheld GPS devices, and commercial laser rangefinders. "Some of the commercial technologies today are better than the systems I used to launch missiles," Jarrett admits. "If they integrate COTS faster than we do, we're at a serious disadvantage.
"People coming out of college know more about current technology than our senior engineers do," Jarrett acknowledges. He recommends fostering innovation within each organization. In doing so, emerging technologies have to be evaluated. "We have to see what is emerging and determine how we can input those technologies early," he says.
"We have to engage industry, and be aggressive," Jarrett continues. "A lot of technology is going to be coming from commercial sources. We need to adopt it and adapt it."
