HONOLULU—The defense industry is producing some great gear, but just one prototype isn’t enough to truly test out something new, the commander of Marine Corps Forces Pacific told an audience of tech company representatives.
“What we need is: when you come with it, don’t come with one with the intention to take it home with you, and all the data that was collected while we conducted an exercise together,” Lt. Gen. Jim Glynn said during a keynote speech at AFCEA TechNet Indo-Pacific. “Come with five. Take one or two home and leave three with us, and we’ll continue to work with it. We’ll give you access to all the data that’s coming off of it, and we’ll do everything we can to break it, with the goal of making it better.”
This type of experimentation and immediate feedback is critical because, Glynn said, “in this dynamic moment, we have to be ready to fight tonight. And we are going to fight with what we have, not what the acquisition system can get us five years from now.”
Glynn cited the Joint Fires Network as an example, saying that it has evolved over the past five years from “the amalgamation of some prototypes” to a formal program.
“Nine months ago, I had a colonel tell me, ‘But sir, that’s not a program of record.’ My response? I don’t care. It’s what we’re using. It’s what we’re going to have to use. We have to move at speed.”
In the Indo-Pacific in particular, he said, “we’re working in weeks and months, not years.”
One of the most talked-about technologies in recent years is drones, and Glynn said the Marine Corps as a whole has an “energetic effort to use small unmanned systems.” But right now, he said, Marines are using those systems as one operator to one drone. They need to move to having one Marine able to control entire swarms of drones at once.
“What we seek are, the ability for those unmanned systems to mesh themselves together,” he said.
