Key Challenges for Effective Testing and Evaluation Across Department of Defense Ranges Proceedings of a Workshop–in Brief (2021) / Chapter Skim
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Key Challenges for Effective Testing and Evaluation Across Department of Defense Ranges: Proceedings of a Workshop - in Brief
Key Challenges for Effective Testing and Evaluation Across Department of Defense Ranges: Proceedings of a Workshop - in Brief
Pages 1-11
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The DoD has testing ranges that span the globe, where new military technologies are tested based on real threats, tasks, and environments to ensure their combat readiness. These ranges are a vital aspect of the nation's defense, but will they be able to adequately test the increasingly complex military technologies of the future?
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Despite these pressures, it is vitally important that the nation's military forces have the appropriate infrastructure for realistic operational testing. O'Toole said that one of his key priorities is making sure that they have the capabilities and the infrastructure that support thorough testing and evaluation of systems that are currently in the acquisition pipeline and that are expected to be in the acquisition pipeline over the next 10 to 15 years.
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Perhaps the most obvious and most critical gap in the DoD's T&E capabilities, O'Toole said, is the lack of a national space testing and training range. He stated they have no operationally realistic way to test space-based systems or to train the U.S.
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John Garstka, Director of Cyber in the DoD Chief Information Security Office for Acquisition and Sustainment, spoke about one of the chief challenges related to cyber warfare -- understanding the degree to which critical infrastructure underlying defense systems is defensible from a cyberattack. DoD systems rely on a variety of infrastructure, including DoD information technology and networks, DoD critical infrastructure, and commercial critical infrastructure such as water supplies and electrical power distribution, any of which could be the target of a cyberattack.
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For example, John Pearson, the operational test director for the Joint Strike Fighter Operational Test team, spoke about some of the challenges related to threats for the F-35. In 2014–2015, he said, DOT&E worked to get funding for radar signal emulators onto the Nevada Test and Training Range and the Point Mugu sea test range.
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Although the radar altimeter frequencies are theoretically distinct from the 5G bands, there are complex interactions between the frequencies that cause problems for the altimeters. CHALLENGE: INTEGRATION As Cate noted in his presentation, it is critical for operational tests to provide representative test environments.
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The Army tried performing multiple operational tests at the same time at the White Sands Missile Range and observed frustrations from product managers about performance problems with components outside their program, suggesting the need for early integration prior to testing. CHALLENGE: MODELING AND SIMULATION Modeling and simulation will become increasingly important for military testing in the coming years for two basic reasons.
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The data gathered from testing can inform models, the modeling needs guide data collection strategies, and integrating these two aspects of testing effectively can accelerate learning. Offering hypersonics as an example, White said that flight tests are expensive and stress the ranges, so it will never be possible to flight test and demonstrate the full envelope for the operation of hypersonic weapons.
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Google's Marcuse said that if the ranges are to effectively handle the necessary data from testing, planning must start early in the design phase. In observing DoD, he found that too often program officers build systems without a data strategy, so they fail to collect much of the data that should exist to inform operational testing.
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He stated that with less money and better-qualified people, you would have better outcomes than with less-qualified people and twice the budget. A particular problem, he said, is that there seem to be very few data scientists in developmental and operational testing and evaluation.
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Yet DoD plans to spend $100 billion on space assets in coming years, and, O'Toole said, a rule of thumb in the test and evaluation world is that 1 percent of planned acquisition spending should be allocated to test and evaluation. That would mean that the department should invest $1 billion for space-based test capabilities and infrastructure, and so far the plan falls considerably short of that.
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