The Office of Naval Research strategy, called "Feed S&T at Speed to the Fleet and Force," is in final production, Chief of Naval Research Rachel Riley said Tuesday at the Defense One Tech Summit in Arlington, Virginia.

"Speed is, of course, the word of the year in our business," she said during a panel discussion that included Jarred Conley, principal director for maritime efforts at the Defense Innovation Unit.

Riley said the document urges closer collaboration with DIU, warfighters, and other stakeholders. She said it also aims to explain "in plain English" what ONR does and what the Navy wants from industry. ONR is working to "de-layer and simplify" its bureaucracy, so that the limiting factor on technology development is "the physical science and not the processes and the policies around it," she added.

"Speed is, of course, the word of the year in our business.”

The strategy also aims to push ONR to identify the problems that only it can solve, so the office can make best use of its roughly $3 billion budget. But Riley said this isn’t as difficult as it may seem.

“I have 1,100 Ph.Ds who work for me, almost all in STEM. They're brilliant Americans who dedicated their lives to serving. And so many of them, when I showed up and asked them, you know, “How do we make sure that what we're investing in isn't duplicative with industry?” They said, “Well, it's just so hard to know what industry will and won't do.” And I said, “no, it's actually quite simple. If there is profit to be made, then it is something where industry capital will flow. Perhaps not perfectly, but eventually.” 

Riley said ONR must focus on technology that’s far from ready, or that no one but the U.S. military needs. 

“My favorite example, because it immediately resonates with everyone, is currently there's really no commercial need for very quiet tubes that move through the water for a very long time”—that is, submarines, she said. ONR must keep investing to keep the submarine force "the most lethal in the world."

Riley said she wants the office to do what it must so it can pass useful technology off to industry. She is pushing her program officers to serve as a “thought partner” to defense contractors—talking about, say, the Sea Hunter medium unmanned surface vessel that ONR has been experimenting with since 2017 and is now deployed with a carrier strike group.

What’s next in maritime automation

The recent rescue of two Army helicopter pilots by an uncrewed boat made it a “great week at the Defense Innovation Unit,” Conley said, referring to the recovery of Apache aircrew using a 24-foot Saronic Corsair unmanned surface vessel—a system he said went "from first splash to success in four months." 

Now, Conley said, DIU’s maritime unit is working on contested logistics, including an autonomous resupply vessel effort, and clearing naval mines of the sort that Iran has used—or possibly just threatened to use—to close the Strait of Hormuz. 

Conley called mine-warfare one of the Navy's most underfunded domains, despite being "a huge problem for the global economy." Neutralizing mines still requires humans, either flying aboard an MH-60 helicopter or deploying in explosive ordnance disposal teams. 

But that may soon become less true. Last month, DIU launched an MCM Modernization Prize Challenge to find ways to increase the role of machines. Candidate systems are to deploy by September, he said.

Riley said another grand challenge in uncrewed systems is moving from one-to-one control by a human to one human controlling many platforms. So far, too many approaches look like "little kids playing soccer," which is "not good enough for our American warfighters," she said.

She also noted that controlling undersea robots is more difficult than aerial ones. 

"Folks think that if you can fly a UAV, you can fly a UUV," but it is "a different game," she said. 

ONR is funding academic research into how insects and birds swarm, she said, to model that coordination mathematically and scale it to unmanned vehicles. 

"Mass matters," Conley said, adding that going from zero to one is achievable, but going from one to 100 is hard. But commanders’ willingness to accept an "80% solution," provide feedback, and help iterate quickly is growing, he said. 

Conley also expressed support for a Capitol Hill proposal to create a combatant command for robots and automation.

Now the alliance is moving away from long, platform-centered modernization cycles and toward faster experimentation, interoperability, and “system-of-systems” approaches, said Maj. Gen. Dominique Luzeaux, NATO’s digital transformation champion and special advisor to the Supreme Allied Commander Transformation. He spoke Tuesday at the Defense One Tech Summit in Arlington, Virginia.

Luzeaux pointed to Ukraine’s ever-increasing use of unmanned ground, air, surface, and undersea systems—and how the main lesson is more than just drones are useful.

“What is important is to have an integrated, multi-domain robotic ecosystem,” Luzeaux said. “Because it’s not just one drone making the difference. It’s all the drones being together, the right number, at the right place, at the right time, making a true difference.”

Another major lesson is that war is about ever-shorter innovation cycles. 

“If we look at Ukraine in the first year,” he said, they were mostly using Soviet weapons and “more or less losing the battle.” But they learned to evolve, and then Russian forces followed suit. “So after two years, the Russians also had changed their own innovation cycles, and then it was innovation cycle against innovation cycle. 

“In order to not lose everything, Ukraine had to go from system-oriented innovation to a much wider innovation—not to innovate [just] on the tactical, or very strict tactical, platform level, but to have a more global [approach] and to be able to do strategic, operational, and tactical levels together.” 

That’s what NATO is now trying to do, Luzeaux said.

“So we used to have very long-term programs,” he said. “And now what we do, we always have some long-term programs, of course, for major investments, but we also have much shorter-term cycles, experimentations, exercises.”

Luzeaux pointed to NATO efforts in layered counter-UAS experimentation, which he said tests different approaches every two or three months.

The shift is also architectural. He said NATO is moving “from a platform-centric to a system-of-systems world,” in which the key problem is not any single weapon, sensor, or vehicle, but how those assets are orchestrated.

“What is important is the orchestration between the different assets,” he said.

That means designing architectures that separate functions from platforms—for example, using 5G antennas not just for communications nodes, but also as sensors.

NATO’s Allied Command Transformation, Luzeaux said, is focused on helping the alliance connect national capabilities into coherent, interoperable forces. NATO must be able to make assets from different countries work together, such as pairing a U.S. drone with a German command-and-control system and a French sensor.

“This is where we put the glue between the different things,” he said. “Our role is to design all the things that help put together the various assets which are brought by all the countries in order to have something coherent.”

Asked whether alliance members are learning the lesson quickly enough, Luzeaux said yes, but added that NATO still must learn faster.

“What we need is a continuous learning and adaptation model,” he said. “Continuous experimentation, continuous learning, which is very important.”

The same pressure is changing NATO’s approach to standards. Luzeaux said the alliance has long been known for having “too many” standards and that they often took too much time to implement.

“Part of the new policy in NATO is to take standards—so international standards and standards from the civilian world, from the commercial world—and use them, adopt them, not adapt them,” he said.

Exercises also matter, he said, because they standardize procedures for forces from different countries to fight together.

Asked how quickly NATO can develop standards for threats such as Shahed drones, Luzeaux said the alliance is pursuing both short-term reactive initiatives and longer-term efforts that can be integrated into broader capability programs.

He cited a Baltic Sea effort, launched last year as an experiment and now used by several northern countries, that uses uncrewed surface vehicles to patrol and detect Russia’s shadow fleet.