Enhancing Army 

S&T 

Enhancing Army 

S&T 

Lessons from Project 

Hindsight Revisited

By Richard Chait 

John Lyons 

Duncan Long and 

Albert Sciarretta 

PUBLISHED BY THE CENTER FOR 

TECHNOLOGY AND NATIONAL 

SECURITY POLICY AT THE 

NATIONAL DEFENSE UNIVERSITY 

WASHINGTON, DC 

2007
The views expressed in this report are those of the 

authors and do not reflect the official policy or position 

of the National Defense University, the Department of 

Defense, or the U.S. Government. All information and 

sources for this paper were drawn from unclassified 

materials. 

Portions of this book may be quoted or reprinted 

without permission, provided that a standard source 

credit line is included. 

This book was published by the National Defense University Center for Technology 

and National Security Policy, Fort Lesley J. McNair, Washington, DC. 

CTNSP publications are available online at 

http://www.ndu.edu/ctnsp/publications.html.
v 

Contents 

About the Authors............................. vii 

Acknowledgments.............................. ix 

Foreword............................................ xi 

Executive Summary.......................... xv 

Chapter 1 

Introduction......................................... 3 

Chapter 2 

Hindsight Revisited Findings and 

Analysis............................................. 13 

Chapter 3 

Technology Areas of Broad Impact.. 29 
vi 

Chapter 4 

Ensuring Excellence at the Army’s 

Laboratories ...................................... 59 

Chapter 5 

Concluding Remarks and the Way 

Ahead ................................................ 93 

Afterword.......................................... 99 

OSTP Response to Personnel 

Recommendations of the Federal 

Laboratory Review Panel................ 103 

New Personnel Authorities at the 

NBS/NIST....................................... 107 

The Hindsight Revisited Reports .... 109 

Acronym Glossary .......................... 147 
vii 

About the Authors 

Richard Chait is a Distinguished Research Fellow at the 

Center for Technology and National Security Policy 

(CTNSP) at the National Defense University. He was 

previously Chief Scientist, Army Material Command, and 

Director, Army Research and Laboratory Management. Dr. 

Chait received his PhD in Solid State Science from 

Syracuse University and a BS degree from Rensselaer 

Polytechnic Institute. 

John W. Lyons is a Distinguished Research Fellow at 

CTNSP. He was previously director of the Army Research 

Laboratory and director of the National Institute of 

Standards and Technology. Dr. Lyons received his PhD 

from Washington University. He holds a BA from Harvard. 

Duncan Long is a Research Associate at CTNSP. He holds 

a Master of International Affairs degree from the School of 

International and Public Affairs, Columbia University, and 

a BA from Stanford University. 

Albert A. Sciarretta is president of CNS Technologies, 

Inc. He is a retired Army armor officer, whose service 

included operational assignments, instructing at the U.S. 

Military Academy, acting as technology officer on armored 

vehicle task forces, and serving as Assistant to the Chief 

Scientist, Army Material Command. He has two M.S. 

degrees—Operations Research and Mechanical 

Engineering—from Stanford University and a B.S. degree 

from the U.S. Military Academy. 

Acknowledgments 

he Project Hindsight Revisited series of studies and 

this book would not have been possible without the 

contributions of a great many people. The willing 

assistance of the many technologists, managers, and Army 

officers whom we interviewed and with whom we 

corresponded was absolutely essential to the undertaking. 

We have done our humble best to acknowledge in our 

foregoing reports those who assisted us in our research. 

Here, we would like to re-emphasize our gratitude for the 

efforts of Dr. Thomas Killion, the Army S&T Executive, 

who saw the benefit of looking back at the development of 

key Army weapons systems for insights that would be 

helpful in managing S&T in the current and future 

environment. We would also like to express our 

appreciation to our colleagues at the Center for Technology 

and National Security Policy, especially to CTNSP’s 

director, Dr. Hans Binnendijk, who was unstinting in his 

support. Any errors or shortcomings are, of course, solely 

the authors’ responsibility. 

T 

ix 

Foreword 

n July 1965, the Director, Defense Research and 

Engineering (DDR&E) provided guidance to the 

Assistant Secretaries for Research and Development of 

the military departments to conduct Project Hindsight. The 

two main objectives of the project were to identify those 

management factors that are important in ensuring that 

research and technology programs will be productive and 

program results will be utilized, and to measure the overall 

increase in cost-effectiveness in the current generation of 

weapons systems compared to that of their predecessors 

(when such can be identified) that is assignable to any part 

of the DOD investment in research in science and 

technology (S&T). The Project Hindsight group made an 

historical assessment of the research and development 

“events” that contributed to the development of 20 major 

weapons systems. The results were published in October 

1969. The assessments documented the key role that 

defense S&T played in enabling the generation of weapons 

systems fielded in the 1960s and, more specifically, the 

work defense laboratories and centers, as well as industry, 

performed in realizing those capabilities. 

I 

With this in mind, in 2004 I asked the Center for 

Technology and National Security Policy (CTNSP) at the 

National Defense University to conduct an in-depth, 

follow-on study on Army weapons systems; I informally 

named it “Project Hindsight Revisited.” The study’s goal 

xi 
xii 

was similar to the work DDR&E had charted in the 1960s: 

to examine a number of major weapons systems to assess 

the role of S&T in providing their key capabilities. In the 

1960s, as today, reasonable questions could be asked about 

the relevance and value of any S&T investment—within 

DOD, across the Federal government and in the 

commercial sectors. As found in the original study and 

reinforced in this one, the majority of technology 

investments that contribute to weapons systems capability 

are in fact traceable to DOD. 

At the time of the original study there was a growing 

need to understand the factors contributing to effective 

transition of technology into systems. Then, as today, S&T 

funding was a resource area under challenge to show 

“payoff,” as results of research were primarily forecasts 

about future success. The Hindsight project and this revisit 

validated a major factor influencing the effective transition 

of technology to systems: close collaboration between the 

technologists and the acquisition community is paramount 

to achieving success. Processes can facilitate that linkage, 

but the result really depends on the effectiveness of 

communication among the people who operate within the 

processes. 

The Hindsight Revisited study posed, then tried to 

answer, several of the most relevant—perhaps enduring—

questions on assessing the contribution of S&T to enabling 

major warfighting systems. First, are defense S&T 

investments as critical today as in the 1960s, or is more 

commercial technology relied upon to enable our current 

systems? Second, has the role of our laboratories and 

centers changed significantly in the past 40 years? Are 

there lessons to be learned from recent case studies of 

technology transition to better shape our S&T program and 

its infrastructure for the future? 

The Hindsight Revisited studies covered four major 

Army weapons systems: the Abrams tank, the Apache 
FOREWORD xiii 

helicopter, and the Stinger and Javelin missiles. This book 

highlights and elaborates on several of the many 

illuminating insights that may be gleaned from these 

reports on the S&T efforts that contributed to these 

programs. It may not be surprising to learn from the study 

that some of history’s lessons remain valid, and that today’s 

environment requires its own innovative solutions. One 

major difference in technology development in the past 20 

years, as the information age has matured, is the 

exploitation of, and in fact reliance on, advanced modeling 

and simulation to speed technology development. 

This book also confirms the previous assessment that 

maintaining robust Army S&T investment is critical to 

speeding future capabilities to soldiers. The predominant 

driver in achieving success has two dimensions—sustaining 

commitment of resources to the people who “invent 

change,” and close coupling to rapidly evolving 

warfighting concepts. To maintain the Army’s technology 

edge, nothing is more important than having a cadre of 

Army scientists and engineers who are engaged with the 

combat development community to understand what the 

Army needs and recognize where technology can make a 

significant difference for our soldiers. It is these scientists 

and engineers, and our industry partners, whose patience, 

persistence, and vision we have viewed through the lens of 

history in this study. 

Thomas H. Killion 

Deputy Assistant Secretary of 

the Army 

(Research & Technology) 

/Chief Scientist 

 

Executive Summary 

his book draws on a series of studies known as 

Project Hindsight Revisited conducted by the 

authors at the National Defense University from 

2004–2006. The Hindsight Revisited studies examined, in 

three reports, the development of four current U.S. Army 

weapons systems: the Abrams main battle tank, the Apache 

attack helicopter, the Stinger anti-aircraft missile, and the 

Javelin anti-tank missile. In exploring how these weapons 

systems were taken from conceptual design to full-scale 

production, the studies brought to light crucial factors in 

their successful development. This book pursues significant 

implications of the studies’ findings, with the intention that 

this analysis and commentary will help the Army’s science 

and technology (S&T) leadership manage the Army S&T 

portfolio today and tomorrow. 

T 

The Hindsight Revisited studies addressed the 

development of the weapons systems in question in terms 

of Critical Technology Events (CTEs). CTEs, as further 

explained in Chapters I and II, were those actions and 

advances that were vital to the capabilities with which a 

system was ultimately endowed. As such, they provided a 

way to focus on those factors that were crucial to success, 

including who performed the development work, who 

financed it, and what management practices were 

employed. These CTEs were established after many hours 

of discussion and extensive correspondence with scientists, 

xv 
xvi 

engineers, technicians, and managers who were directly 

involved with the systems’ developments. 

All told, the Hindsight Revisited studies found 135 

CTEs for the four systems. Despite the obvious differences 

in the development stories of such disparate systems as a 

tank, a helicopter, and two missiles, our research showed 

some common ingredients of success. Success depended 

both on having the S&T resources available to conduct the 

work and on the ability of the parties, principally the Army 

laboratories and industry, to team and work together. 

The highly competent technical staffs and specialpurpose equipment and facilities needed for all four 

systems were available because of steady, prolonged 

investment in S&T resources. The Army laboratories 

provided many of the CTEs and were involved in most of 

them. The long history of work in weapons-related 

technologies and the attendant availability of unique 

facilities (ballistic ranges, simulation capabilities, etc.) was 

a major factor contributing to this finding. Similarly, 

industry had amassed facilities and expertise, and provided 

more CTEs in technical areas, such as engines and 

transmissions, where there had been long-standing demand, 

both civilian and military, for private-sector expertise. 

The collaborative use of these assets was vital to the 

successful development of the Hindsight Revisited systems. 

This collaboration took the shape, first and foremost, of 

work conducted jointly by the Army’s in-house laboratories 

and industry. Around 20 percent of the CTEs noted in the 

studies were the result of major contributions by both of 

these parties. Collaboration, though, was also important in 

other facets of development. The Army laboratories 

collaborated with other government laboratories, leveraging 

their expertise and facilities. The in-house laboratories also 

collaborated with the user community (i.e., the warfighters) 

to ensure that the weapons systems would provide the 

needed capabilities. Throughout, the Program Manager’s 
EXECUTIVE SUMMARY xvii 

(PM) offices facilitated this collaboration, providing 

oversight and performing the vital function of integrating 

the various contributions. 

In addition to these findings on resourcing and 

management of Army S&T, the Hindsight Revisited studies 

made an important finding pertaining to the systems’ 

technical content. The studies revealed common technical 

elements among the systems. Though the systems had quite 

different capabilities, certain technologies were important 

to all of them. Modeling and simulation (M&S), ballistics, 

materials sciences, and communications technologies are 

among the chief examples. 

This book explores the future implications of two 

important aspects of the Hindsight Revisited findings: the 

common technologies necessary to the successful 

development of the Hindsight Revisited systems and the 

importance of the Army’s in-house laboratories to weapons 

development. 

Chapter III discusses six families of technologies that 

were used in the development of two or more of the 

Hindsight Revisited systems. Three enabled systems 

development: M&S, high performance computing (HPC), 

and human-systems integration (HSI). Three gave rise to 

fielded capabilities: gun technology, night vision 

technology, and power-source technology. As suggested by 

their prevalence in the Hindsight Revisited studies, these 

six technologies all offer high leverage S&T investment 

possibilities—advances in any one of them is likely to have 

pay-off in more than one, and possibly in many, future 

systems. In some cases, this book focuses on specific, 

illustrative targets for investment. In the broad area of 

power-source technologies, for instance, soldier-portable 

battery technology advances are particularly important. 

Chapter IV focuses on another critically important 

finding of the Hindsight Revisited reports, the importance 

of the Army’s in-house laboratories to successful 
xviii 

technology development. The in-house laboratories 

generated 40 percent of the CTEs we noted, and shared 

responsibility with industry on 20 percent of the others. The 

laboratories have suffered in recent years from significant 

funding cuts and have faced calls for their responsibilities 

to be turned over to the private sector. Though adjustment 

in the laboratories’ roles and practices to capitalize on 

private-sector expertise to greatest extent possible may be 

necessary, it seems clear that in the main in-house 

laboratories will continue to be absolutely essential to the 

successful development of Army technologies. 

Chapter IV, then, addresses the question of how best to 

strengthen the Army’s laboratories to meet the Nation’s 

future needs. We touch on a variety of challenges, 

including the diminished attention paid to basic research 

and constantly varying budgets. Principally, though, we 

focus on one of the Army laboratories’ main problems: 

attracting and retaining talented personnel. Capital 

investments can compensate for equipment and facility 

shortfalls, but a strong staff, the heart of any laboratory, 

cannot be easily assembled. Moreover, technical 

competency and adept management is vital to continuing 

the strong collaboration and teaming with industry that was 

so much a part of the successful development of the four 

Hindsight Revisited systems. With this in mind, we 

describe several studies and legislative actions that have 

addressed these personnel management challenges, from 

the Civil Service Reform Act of 1978, which authorized a 

laboratory demonstration program with simplified 

classification and pay systems, to the 2004 National 

Security Personnel System. We find that giving laboratory 

managers authorities that would improve the laboratories’ 

personnel posture, including the power to make the kind of 

local hiring, classification, and salary decisions needed to 

attract top talent, is of critical importance in maintaining 

the strength of the Army laboratories. 
EXECUTIVE SUMMARY xix 

The book concludes in Chapter V with a charge to the 

Army S&T leadership and to the Defense Department to 

preserve the elements of technical development success 

found in the Hindsight Revisited reports. Collaboration with 

industry, with other DOD partners, with academia—this has 

been, is, and will continue to be vital to Army S&T 

success. The Army has benefited, is benefiting, and will 

continue to benefit from investment in critical technologies 

that serve multiple weapons systems, in basic research, and 

in unique equipment and facilities. The Army laboratories 

have been, are, and will continue to be crucial to technical 

success. 
 
 

 

 

 

 

 

Enhancing Army S&T 
 
 

Chapter 1 

Introduction 

he urge to maintain military superiority over 

potential adversaries has long been a driver of 

technological advancement. This interplay between 

defense strength and technology, so evident in the nature of 

America’s military power, has for decades prompted U.S. 

defense planners to engage in technology forecasting. 

Analysis of emerging technologies was, and is, vital to 

making wise defense investments. 

T 

While it is important to assess the needs and challenges 

of the future, understanding past military technological 

successes can be equally important to Army S&T 

investment and management. By studying past technology 

development for weapons systems, one can see what 

factors were important for success and apply these lessons 

to the management of S&T1

 for future systems. This is an 

especially valuable exercise now, because in recent years 

there has been mounting pressure to transfer much of the 

execution of technical work away from the military’s inhouse S&T laboratories to the private sector. Whatever the 

merits of such a move, it represents a significant change 

from past practices. It would be unwise to undertake any 

3 

 

1

 In this report, we use the term S&T to denote what the Army refers to 

as Basic Research, Applied Research, and Advanced Technology. 

These are also referred to by their budget codes: 6.1, 6.2, and 6.3, 

respectively. 
4 

fundamental shifts without first understanding just what 

was successful about the way the Army S&T program has 

done business in past years. 

This book draws on a series of studies known as Project 

Hindsight Revisited conducted by the authors at the 

National Defense University (NDU) from 2004–2006. The 

Project Hindsight Revisited studies examined, in three 

reports, the development of four current weapons systems 

of the U.S. Army: the Abrams main battle tank,2

 the 

Apache attack helicopter,3

 the Stinger anti-aircraft missile,4

and the Javelin anti-tank missile. In exploring how these 

weapons systems were taken from conceptual design to full 

scale production, the studies brought to light crucial factors 

in their successful development. This book will pursue 

significant implications of the studies’ findings. In 

exploring these findings, we hope to make a contribution to 

answering a question that is of the utmost importance to the 

Army leadership: how are S&T resources best used to 

advance the state-of-the-art capabilities of U.S. Army 

weapons systems? 

The book begins by discussing the findings of Project 

Hindsight Revisited. That series of studies focused on 

Critical Technology Events (CTEs), the significance of 

 

2

 Richard Chait, John Lyons, and Duncan Long, “Critical Technology 

Events in the Development of the Abrams Tank: Project Hindsight 

Revisited,” Defense and Technology Paper 22 (Washington, DC: 

Center for Technology and National Security Policy, National Defense 

University, December 2005). 

3

 Chait, Lyons, and Long, “Critical Technology Events in the 

Development of the Apache Helicopter: Project Hindsight Revisited,” 

Defense and Technology Paper 26 (Washington, DC: Center for 

Technology and National Security Policy, National Defense University, 

February 2006). 

4

 Lyons, Long, and Chait, “Critical Technology Events in the 

Development of the Stinger and the Javelin Missiles: Project Hindsight 

Revisited,” Defense and Technology Paper 33 (Washington, DC: 

Center for Technology and National Security Policy, National Defense 

University, July 2006). 
INTRODUCTION 5 

which are explained below. We used CTEs as a way to 

focus on the factors that gave rise to a successful weapons 

system. These factors, which are discussed along with other 

findings in Chapter II, include where the technical work 

was performed, the source of funding, management style, 

and teaming among Army laboratories and private industry. 

Chapter II pays particular attention to the sources of the 

CTEs. We conclude the chapter by comparing the findings 

of Hindsight Revisited to the results of an earlier DOD 

study, the original Project Hindsight. 

Chapter III expands on an important Hindsight 

Revisited finding. We discovered that certain families of 

technologies played an important role in the development 

of all four systems. We discuss therein some of those 

technologies, focusing on those areas in which S&T 

investment is likely to pay off in capability improvements 

for multiple weapons systems. This includes both 

technologies that enable weapons development, such as 

modeling and simulation (M&S), and technologies in 

fielded systems, such as night vision. We also touch briefly 

on a group of technologies that will impact the entire future 

force: those supporting network-centric operations. 

Chapter IV draws on another important Hindsight 

Revisited finding: Army laboratories were a fundamental 

part of the successful development of the studied systems. 

Despite the obvious differences in the development stories 

of such disparate systems as a tank, a helicopter, and two 

missiles, our research showed some common ingredients of 

success in each case: good Army laboratory facilities and 

skilled staff. Chapter IV focuses in particular on this latter 

ingredient; in addition to a variety of other challenges, the 

Army laboratories face significant problems in attracting 

and retaining talented personnel. 

Finally, with some of the key factors that led to Army 

S&T success in hand, we conclude in Chapter V by looking 

ahead to the future of Army S&T. Drawing on the findings 
6 

of Hindsight Revisited and on the discussion in this book, 

we make recommendations for maintaining a robust Army 

S&T program. With these recommendations, the 

technological prowess that has under-girded American 

military might in the past decades will be maintained and 

enhanced. 

CTEs, Innovation, and the Hindsight 

Revisited Approach 

The CTE was the lynchpin of the Hindsight Revisited

studies. CTEs are ideas, concepts, models, and analyses, 

including key technical and managerial decisions, that had 

a major impact on the development of a specific weapons 

system. CTEs can occur at any point in the system’s life 

cycle, from basic research, to advanced development, to 

testing and evaluation, to product improvements. CTEs can 

even relate to concepts that were developed but ultimately 

not incorporated into the weapons system. Also, they can 

originate in many places: the Army’s in-house laboratories, 

the private sector, academia, and the S&T programs of our 

international partners. The CTEs, as hallmarks of technical 

advances, gave us a way to focus our attention on the 

important factors for success. We did not attempt to capture 

every single technical development in a given system or to 

discuss its development in exhaustive technical detail.5

 

 

5

 Some technologies not discussed nor included in the CTE count 

turned out to be relatively significant advances. An example is the 

Explosive Reactive Armor (ERA), which was considered for the 

Abrams. Though ERA was not initially fielded with the tank, it was 

developed as an add-on kit and has been fielded today. Also worthy of 

note is aluminum oxynitride (ALONTM), a transparent ceramic material 

with high hardness and excellent ballistic properties. This material was 

patented by the Army in the mid-1970s and, with industry effectively 

addressing production and development issues, has become a leading 

candidate for transparent armor in next generation systems. 
INTRODUCTION 7 

 

Given the central importance of the CTE to our reports, 

it is worthwhile to explain the concept in greater detail and 

place it in the broader context of technical innovation. A 

good framework for understanding the innovation process 

and the genesis of operationally useful advances is 

provided by a recent NDU report, “The S&T Innovation 

Conundrum,” by Coffey, Dahlburg, and Zimet.6

 As 

illustrated in Figure 1, the authors hold that S&T 

innovation contains two distinct phases, “prospecting” and 

“mining.” Prospecting is early work that provides a 

fundamental scientific basis for later research. Mining is 

later work to develop specific systems. The prospecting 

phase is often not focused on a particular outcome for a 

particular system. The mining phase draws on knowledge 

gained in the prospecting phase to yield useful capabilities. 

6

 Timothy Coffey, Jill Dahlburg, and Elihu Zimet, “The S&T 

Innovation Conundrum,” Defense and Technology Paper 17 

(Washington, DC: Center for Technology and National Security Policy, 

National Defense University, August 2005). 
8 

Figure 1. Prospecting and mining phases of 

development of radar.7

The majority of our CTEs occurred in the mining 

phase—the later stages of the basic research-to-engineering 

development continuum. This is largely because we elected 

to count as CTEs only those things that bore on significant 

improvements over the predecessor systems. The Abrams 

was compared to the M–60 Patton tank, the Apache to the 

AH–1 Cobra, the Stinger to the Redeye, and the Javelin to 

the Dragon. We could have broadened the time horizon of 

our examination considerably and addressed more basic 

research. For example, to discuss infrared vision systems 

for the Abrams tank we could have looked back to the 

development of the quantum theory in the early 20th

century and the subsequent development of solid state 

physics in mid-century and found CTEs all along the way. 

Doing so would not have shed much light on what was a 

 

7

 Drawn from Coffey, Dahlburg, and Zimet. 
INTRODUCTION 9 

 

critical technology in development of the particular 

weapons systems and would have shifted focus from the 

specific factors that have produced great improvements in 

the performance of the weapons systems studied in 

comparison to those they replaced. 

It is important to note that basic research need not be as 

non-specific and general as the above reference to quantum 

theory would suggest. It can be problem-driven as well as 

curiosity-driven. Though DOD defines basic research as the 

scientific study of phenomena not related to any one 

specific weapons system (that is to say, knowledge-based 

or curiosity-driven),8

 and while there are many examples of 

curiosity-driven research in DOD (most clearly in the work 

sponsored at universities), a majority of DOD basic 

research is problem-driven. It is also vital to emphasize the 

importance of basic research suggested by the 

prospecting/mining concept. Basic research is needed to lay 

the foundations for later advances; someone must do the 

prospecting if there is to be any mining. 

These two points—the need for basic research to tackle 

specific problems and the need for basic research as a 

foundation for future advances—are both illustrated by 

Figure 2, which charts the evolution of the technology 

associated with the M829 series of long-rod penetrators. 

The figure shows the progression from a mix of curiosityand problem-driven basic research through applied research 

and advanced development leading to one version of the 

M829 series—the M829A1. The work done in the research 

phase was the basis for many developments for the long8

 This definition, however, is not followed in practice. Nor should it be, 

according to a recent National Academies study, Assessment of 

Department of Defense Basic Research (Washington, DC: National 

Research Council, 2005). This NRC report recommends a concept of 

basic research that includes both curiosity-driven work (not addressing 

a particular system) and problem-driven work (applied to a particular 

problem or problems in developing a system). 
10 

rod penetrator, such as the use of composite materials for 

the sabot of the M829A3 round (CTE No. 16 in the Abrams 

tank report). These efforts, which demonstrate the 

importance of basic research to providing a stream of new 

ideas on which to base future CTEs, involved contributions 

from various entities, including the Army laboratories, 

industry, Department of Energy (DOE) laboratories, and 

academia. 
INTRODUCTION 11 Figure 2. From basic research to the final product for the M829A1 (Figure from the Office of the Secretary of the Army). 
 

12 

We embarked on the Hindsight Revisited studies, then, 

with the CTE as a clear guide to our efforts. We focused 

these efforts on interviews and correspondence with 

individuals who were personally involved in the 

development of the Abrams, the Apache, the Stinger, and 

the Javelin. In many cases the events described occurred as 

many as 40 years ago, making it somewhat difficult to 

reconstruct the details in every case, yet this rich store of 

first-hand knowledge was indispensable, given the spotty 

availability of relevant documents and books. With the 

assistance of these knowledgeable professionals, we were 

able to map out the CTEs for each of the systems. These 

CTEs and the studies’ broader findings are discussed in the 

following chapter. 
 

Chapter 2 

Hindsight Revisited

Findings and Analysis 

he Hindsight Revisited reports revealed some 

valuable insights into the factors that led to some of 

the Army S&T program’s most important successes. 

This chapter reviews the studies’ results, covering the 

number and source of the CTEs. Our study of the 

development of the Abrams, the Apache, the Stinger, and 

the Javelin yielded 135 total CTEs. The CTEs for each 

system are discussed briefly below (they are listed in full in 

Appendix C). We then move on to three areas of analysis. 

The first is a look at the sources of the CTEs, in which we 

account for what kind of organization—government 

laboratory, private industry, or other entity—was 

responsible for a given advance. The second is a discussion 

of the qualitative findings we obtained after reviewing the 

systems collectively. We then conclude our analysis of the 

Hindsight Revisited reports by comparing our studies’ 

findings to those of the original Project Hindsight, a DODwide review completed in 1969. 

T 

13 
14 

Hindsight Revisited CTEs 

The Abrams Tank 

We identified 55 CTEs in the development of the 

Abrams tank. The majority of these, 31 in total, were 

related to armor and armaments. There were nine CTEs 

related to the power train and 15 related to vehicle 

electronics, fire control, and communications systems. As 

indicated by our definition of a CTE, not all of these CTEs 

were technical developments per se. Some, like the choice 

to use a gas turbine engine rather than a diesel engine in the 

tank, in our opinion were management decisions. Others 

were related to laboratory capabilities, like the use of 

advanced M&S tools to conduct analysis for simulated live 

fire tests. 

The Apache Helicopter 

We identified 44 CTEs in the development of the 

Apache helicopter. Ten of these had to do with the power 

system. Fourteen CTEs were related to crew protection, an 

area on which the Army placed special emphasis, and other 

structural considerations. We found 19 CTEs dealing with 

the helicopter’s avionics, fire control system, and weapons 

suite, and three CTEs related to M&S work and other 

enabling technology factors. 

 

The Stinger and Javelin Missiles 

We identified 36 CTEs for the Stinger and the Javelin 

missiles. For both systems, the seeker and the guidance 

system were important technical areas. We found six CTEs 

for the Stinger’s seeker and three for guidance and control 

systems. For the Javelin’s seeker we found four CTEs, 

guidance and control had two CTEs, and the command 

launch unit had six CTEs. For the propulsion and warhead 

components we found for the Stinger, three CTEs and for 

the Javelin, eight CTEs. In M&S we list two CTEs for 
HINDSIGHT REVISITED FINDINGS & ANALYSIS 15 

 

Stinger and one for Javelin. The Javelin also had two CTEs 

that were based on management decisions. 

Assessing the Contributions of the 

Participants 

The count and distribution of the CTEs for the four 

systems give some indication of technical areas that 

produced significant increases in capability.9 CTEs, 

though, were a means to an end: they were an instrument to 

identify important technical advances so that we could 

examine what factors gave rise to key achievements. One 

indisputably important factor in the creation of a CTE is 

who or what entity was responsible for the crucial 

breakthrough. We therefore analyzed each CTE to assess 

who, in our judgment, was the principal source for the 

event. 

We established four categories of work performers: 

government technical facilities, to include all 

government/in-house laboratories; private industry, to 

include prime contractors and sub-contractors; joint 

government/industry, for any CTE in which both 

government laboratories and industry played a substantial 

role; and other, for the accomplishments of universities and 

foreign governments and for CTEs that were government 

management decisions rather than technical advances. It is 

likely that no CTE represented the exclusive contribution of 

one of these four groups, but except in those cases where 

multiple contributions were substantial enough to warrant 

the label “joint,” we categorized the CTE based on where 

the clear majority of work was performed. 

9

 Please note, though, that the CTE count is an imperfect measure of the 

value of the work done in a given technical area. A single CTE related 

to the Javelin’s seeker, for instance, could add more to the missile’s 

capability than several CTEs related to propulsion. 
16 

Table 1 below contains the results of this CTE source 

analysis. For the Abrams, the in-house laboratories led with 

just over half of the total CTEs. If we add to this the inhouse role in joint work with industry, a little over 60 

percent of the work involved the in-house laboratories. 

Around a quarter came exclusively from outside the 

government. The figures for the Abrams are not surprising 

given the preeminent role of the Army laboratories in the 

fields of armor and armaments. For the Apache, the 

government laboratories played a somewhat lesser but still 

crucial role. Industry played a greater role than for the 

Abrams. For both the Stinger and the Javelin, industry 

made major contributions; the in-house laboratories played 

less of an independent role than they had for the Abrams 

and the Apache, but they were important players in joint 

developmental work. 

System Gov't/InHouse 

Labs 

Joint Industry Other CTE 

Total 

Abrams 55% 18% 13% 14% 55 

Apache 43% 20% 30% 7% 44 

Stinger 

and 

Javelin 

17% 25% 50% 8% 36 

Table 1. CTE Source Analysis. 

This breakdown reinforced for us the vital role played 

by the government laboratories in developing the necessary 

technology and the importance of a strong collaborative 

relationship between the government laboratories, industry, 

and the Program Managers’ (PM) offices. 
HINDSIGHT REVISITED FINDINGS & ANALYSIS 17 

Overarching Findings from Hindsight 

Revisited

We drew findings and conclusions on each of the 

specific weapons systems in our four Hindsight reports. 

While each of the weapons systems is unique, their 

developments had many common elements. We have 

compiled these common elements as overarching findings 

below. 

1. Funding was almost entirely from the Department of 

Defense. 

The work was spread over many different laboratories 

in different DOD agencies. The Defense Advanced 

Research Projects Agency (DARPA) provided some 

funding, especially for the Javelin missile, but the majority 

of the money came from Army S&T accounts. In some 

cases work by contractors was done using Independent 

Research and Development funds, but these too came 

(indirectly) from DOD. In a few areas, investments by our 

international partners produced useful additions to the 

systems. For example, in the case of the Abrams, the 

United Kingdom performed work on composite armor and 

development of the 120mm gun was done by Germany. 

2. In-house laboratories and industry were the primary 

sources of CTEs. 

Although CTEs came from a variety of sources—inhouse laboratories, industry, academia, international 

partners—the in-house laboratories in particular played 

critical roles in the development of each system. Not only 

did the laboratories contribute many of the CTEs 

themselves, but they also were partners in important 

collaborations with industry. The in-house laboratories 

played another critical role as evaluators of performance 

and as technical consultants to the contractors and the PM 
18 

offices. They were able to do this because they had been 

able to maintain continuity of staff expertise in the 

important technical disciplines and had the necessary 

equipment and facilities. These functions helped ensure that 

the Army was a “smart buyer” as well as an able 

collaborator. 

Industry’s technical staffs also made a great many very 

important technical advances. They were also responsible 

for the design, integration, and production of the 

components and final systems. In each case they were 

successful because they had a trained, experienced 

workforce and established facilities. 

3. Collaboration among the several participants was 

critical for success. 

A common characteristic of the CTEs was the ability of 

the participants to work smoothly across organizational 

lines. Cooperation between the in-house laboratories and 

private industry was especially fruitful: note that 20 percent 

of the CTEs were joint efforts. Collaboration with the 

private sector has long been a hallmark of Army S&T, 

much of it at the level of the working technologists “at the 

bench.” The Army laboratories also worked closely with 

other government organizations and with academia. The 

collaboration with the National Aeronautics and Space 

Administration (NASA) on the Apache, for instance, was 

critical to the system’s development. 

4. Systems integration was key to the technology 

transition process.

For a weapons system to succeed each subsystem must 

be physically and functionally compatible with all the 

others. Integration was handled mostly by industry and 

overseen by the PM. We did not set out in our reports to 

study systems integration per se, but the topic kept arising. 

It became clear that system integration is as important as 
HINDSIGHT REVISITED FINDINGS & ANALYSIS 19 

 

the development of the component technologies. 

Integration decisions usually require tradeoffs between 

cost, size and weight, and functionality. Making good 

trades requires intimate knowledge of the needs of the 

ultimate user, the soldier in the field. Integration is based 

on detailed technical knowledge and skills in managing 

people and organizations. In the systems that we studied, 

integration was achieved by very close working 

relationships—sometimes continuing collaborations—

among the participants. We believe these relationships were 

vital to the success of the programs. 

 Recently, the DOD has begun to use Lead Systems 

Integrators (LSIs) from industry to handle very large, 

complex systems programs such as the Future Combat 

Systems (FCS) program. The LSIs appear to play many of 

the roles heretofore associated with the Army PM offices. 

5. The availability of a staff of highly skilled/experienced 

engineers was critically important. 

Development was greatly facilitated by situations in 

which there had been a long history of technical work on 

the subject matter in question so that very skilled personnel 

were available. This was true, for example, at Chrysler for 

armored vehicles, at Hughes and at the NASA research 

centers for rotorcraft, at Raytheon and Lockheed Martin for 

missiles, at Aberdeen Proving Ground (APG) in ballistics, 

and at the Night Vision Laboratory (NVL)10 for IR 

technology for all the systems studied. These groups were 

able to move quickly into new, related programs. 

One of the distinguishing characteristics of government 

laboratories is their ability to sustain efforts over lengthy 

periods without frequent staff turnover, in contrast to the 

turnover in graduate students and post-doctoral fellows at 

10 NVL is now known as the U.S. Army RDECOM CERDEC Night 

Vision and Electronic Sensors Directorate (NVESD). 
20 

universities. This stability at the in-house laboratories 

developed depth of expertise. The potential downside is the 

possibility of laboratory staffs becoming parochial; this is a 

challenge that management must continually address. Also 

necessary is a supportive and patient management 

environment that champions the programs. 

6. Having the right equipment and facilities is essential to 

enable the technical staff to carry out the work effectively 

and efficiently. 

Development of these weapons systems required the 

use of some very sophisticated research equipment, often 

lodged in special-purpose buildings, ranges, and the like. 

For example, the Abrams program called for gun ranges, 

armor testing ranges, special facilities for testing armor and 

munitions containing depleted uranium (DU), test tracks, 

materials laboratories, and visualization techniques for 

measuring the behavior of munitions at very high speeds 

and during penetration of targets. Also, much of the work 

in the four systems we studied relied on advanced 

computers for modeling physical phenomena, such as the 

aeromechanics of the helicopter, finite element analysis of 

the composite sabot for the Abrams’ kinetic energy rounds, 

and firing tests. 

The Army did not conduct its S&T program exclusively 

in its own facilities: NASA and the DOE national 

laboratories also made important contributions. The colocated Army groups at three NASA sites took advantage 

of NASA expertise and special facilities. Most of the basic 

research for helicopters was done by Army staff at these 

NASA sites. The DOE laboratories were particularly 

helpful in developing the use of DU for the Abrams tank. 

Army facilities are used not just by government staff 

but also by the contractors charged with producing a given 

weapons system. In particular, industry uses Army facilities 

for performance tests. It has long been the practice that new 
HINDSIGHT REVISITED FINDINGS & ANALYSIS 21 

ground combat vehicles be tested at APG, for example. 

Also, the test facilities and laboratories at Redstone Arsenal 

in Alabama were used regularly by missile manufacturers. 

The Army had available such special facilities and 

equipment for its and industry’s use because substantial, 

long-term investments had been made and partnerships had 

been established. In some cases the facilities and equipment 

had been established and continually upgraded for 

decades—some dating from before World War II. Many of 

the facilities were and are unique. The skilled staff 

discussed in Finding 5 were an important factor in 

developing and maintaining these resources. Permanent 

Army installations with stable staffing have enabled this 

expertise to build up over time and thus to take maximum 

advantage of the capital investments. 

7. The user communities were intimately involved in 

development of the weapons systems. 

The contributions of Fort Knox in the Abrams program 

and Fort Benning in the Javelin program are clear examples 

of the important role the user played. The user worked with 

the technologists to define requirements; continuing 

discussions during the development phases were useful and 

productive. The ultimate user, the warfighter, also helped 

defend the programs when they were in trouble; when 

difficulties arise that may threaten the continuance of a 

needed weapons program, the full support of the user 

makes a very large difference. 

8. The systems had key technologies in common. 

Our studies found many technologies that are used in 

more than one weapons system. These include both 

technologies that aid in systems development and 

technologies that form actual components of the systems. 

M&S, for instance, was used in the development of each of 

the four Hindsight Revisited systems. M&S enables the 
22 

investigator to study many different experiments on the 

computer thereby expanding the scope, shortening the time, 

and reducing the cost of development work. Infrared (IR) 

technology was similarly ubiquitous. Both the Abrams and 

the Apache made use of IR for night vision, while the 

Stinger and the Javelin both depended on it to seek 

intended targets. 

Hindsight Revisited and the Original 

Project Hindsight

The Hindsight Revisited reports were inspired in part by 

the original Project Hindsight. In 1965, the Director, 

Defense Research & Engineering (DDR&E) Harold Brown 

launched Project Hindsight, a study of the development of 

20 weapons systems from 1945–1963. Project Hindsight

was completed in 1969 (and is referred to hereafter as 

DOD69).11 The two studies have significant differences. 

Nevertheless, DOD69’s purpose was broadly similar to that 

of Hindsight Revisited: to find out who funded the work, 

who carried it out, and what factors in the environment for 

technology development were important for success. A 

comparison reveals that their findings are largely in accord 

on the fundamental issue of what factors promote the 

development and successful utilization of defense S&T. 

The Differences 

Though DOD69 was an inspiration for Hindsight 

Revisited, there are, to be sure, significant differences. 

Whereas the Hindsight Revisited studies were conducted by 

the present authors through one-on-one interviews and 

correspondence and went deeply into the development of 

four Army weapons systems, the DOD69 study reviewed 

 

11 Office of the Director of Defense Research and Engineering, Project 

Hindsight: Final Report (Washington, D.C.: Department of Defense, 

1969). 
HINDSIGHT REVISITED FINDINGS & ANALYSIS 23 

 

20 weapons systems across the Services and was conducted 

by eight teams, each with 5–20 participants. Further, in the 

36 years between the two studies there have been some 

significant changes in the way technology is developed and 

fielded. For instance, the integrated circuit and the 

supercomputer, resources unavailable to technologists in 

the 1945–1963 timeframe, emerged during or before the 

development of the four systems studied in Hindsight 

Revisited. Further, the acquisition process has changed, 

with the roles of Program Executive Officers (PEOs) and 

PMs more formalized and institutionalized in the years 

since 1963. 

Some differences are also worth noting on the two 

studies’ findings related to basic research. In part, these 

stem from a difference in focus. DOD69 was driven in part 

by Congress, which had raised questions about the 

“efficiency of management and the overall payoff from the 

Defense Sciences part of the RDT&E [Research 

Development Test and Evaluation] budget” (what we refer 

to as the basic research or 6.1 category).12 In the 1960s 

there seems to have been some question as to its 

importance to weapons systems development. There was 

also some uncertainty as to whether effective technology 

development came from problem-oriented research or 

somehow arose from less directed work. The role of basic 

research was not well understood and DOD management of 

it was in question. Hindsight Revisited’s brief was more 

limited in this respect. As discussed earlier, our studies 

concentrated on changes in performance brought about by 

technical advances as compared to the technology in the 

immediate predecessor systems. Most of the basic science 

enabling these advances was performed prior to the time 

12 Harold Brown, Letter to the Assistant Secretary of the Army (R&D), 

the Assistant Secretary of the Navy (R&D), and the Assistant Secretary 

of the Air Force (R&D), 6 July 1965 in Project Hindsight: Final 

Report, 135. 
24 

the systems under study began to be developed. Thus we 

did not, for the most part, study details of the role of that 

underlying science. As indicated by the CTE definition and 

as shown in Figure 1, our own reports are largely devoted 

to the later stages of the basic research-to-engineering 

development continuum (6.2 and beyond). 

Yet when Hindsight Revisited did touch on basic 

research, its findings differed somewhat with DOD69 on 

one important point. DOD69 concluded that the most 

useful role of science (as opposed to technology) was to 

explain the basis of the phenomena being studied. 

Hindsight Revisited found that work done in basic research 

does not just provide explanations for phenomena but 

directly supplies the foundations for the systems of interest. 

We also found that the basic research has usually been done 

well before the launch of the weapons program under study 

rather than during the development period (as seen in 

Figure 2). Exceptions are when basic research is necessary 

to remove obstacles that occur during the development 

timeline. For example, in recent years both the Crusader 

howitzer’s liquid propellant gun system and the 

electromagnetic gun returned to 6.1 for additional 

fundamental study. 

The Similarities 

As stated above, DOD69 and Hindsight Revisited had 

broadly similar objectives. DOD69 had as specific goals to: 

• identify management factors that will assure DOD 

“research and technology programs will be 

productive and that program results will be 

utilized”; and 

• measure the overall increase in cost-effectiveness in 

the current generation of weapons systems 

compared to that of their predecessors and 

determine what part of the effectiveness can be 

attributed to DOD S&T investment. 
HINDSIGHT REVISITED FINDINGS & ANALYSIS 25 

Both Hindsight Revisited and DOD69 focused on 

specific technological advances. In DOD69 these were 

called Research or Exploratory Development (RXD) 

Events; in Hindsight Revisited they are called CTEs. A 

RXD Event was limited to the actual technical work, such 

as the conception of an idea, the design of a new 

component, and the initial demonstration of military utility. 

The CTE was the basic unit of analysis for Hindsight 

Revisited—we sought to determine what technical advances 

were important and then examine the factors that led to 

them. Unlike RXD Events, CTEs encompassed key 

technical management decisions as well as some significant 

technical accomplishments that were not adopted for use in 

the weapons system or were in new versions of the system 

not yet fielded. 

Based on their study of CTEs and RXD Events, 

Hindsight Revisited and DOD69 both found that in-house 

laboratories and industry made the greatest contributions to 

defense S&T. DOD69 found in-house laboratories and 

industry each contributed roughly 45 percent of the RXD 

Events, with academia making up the difference. Hindsight 

Revisited’s findings were similar, though we tracked joint 

government/industry CTEs while DOD69 did not consider 

joint RXD Events. As seen earlier, Hindsight Revisited

found that government laboratories and industry together 

contributed about 90 percent of the CTEs. We attributed 

about 40 percent of the CTEs directly to in-house 

laboratories, about 20 percent to joint government/industry 

efforts, and about 30 percent to industry alone. The balance 

fell into the category of managerial decisions or 

contributions from allied nations and academia. Further, we 

found that development of two systems, the Abrams and 

the Apache, was led by in-house contributions; for the two 

missiles, contributions were led by industry. 
26 

Hindsight Revisited’s analysis of CTEs went beyond 

DOD69’s analysis of RXD Events in some areas of 

qualitative analysis. Hindsight Revisited included 

discussions of the in-house laboratory environment in terms 

of management support, funding, technical equipment, 

facilities, and the like. We looked at the value of past 

investments in the technical areas and the extent to which 

maintaining an experienced staff is important. DOD69 did 

not emphasize these areas. 

Both studies found that the DOD funded all, or nearly 

all, of the S&T for the systems under review. The only 

exceptions were some work performed by our international 

partners and transferred to the Army. DOD69 found that 

most new technology (as opposed to science) in the DOD 

S&T program was a result of problem-oriented research, 

either in generic research for a group of like systems or to 

address specific challenges in the development of a specific 

system.13 Today there is no question about this issue: as 

borne out by Hindsight Revisited, some basic research (6.1) 

and all applied research (6.2) and advanced development 

(6.3) in the Army is clearly driven by the weapons 

problems at hand. 

Both studies found that the same technologies were 

used in multiple weapons systems. We will discuss this 

finding at length for Hindsight Revisited in Chapter III. 

This feature of DOD S&T frustrated one of DOD69’s main 

goals: to compute a value-cost index for its RXD events. 

Sometimes single advances, like the development of the 

integrated circuit, were so widely applied that apportioning 

the expenses or benefits to any one system was impossible. 

Both Hindsight Revisited and DOD69 found that the 

effective utilization of new technology in a weapons system 

depends on a close relationship between the user and those 

 

13 It appears that DOD69’s focus on whether research is problemoriented or from random, curiosity-driven research arose in the 1960s 

from external critics of the DOD program. 
HINDSIGHT REVISITED FINDINGS & ANALYSIS 27 

doing the technical work, both in government laboratories 

and in industry. For example, the Hindsight Revisited

studies showed the important roles played by the Armor 

Center/School at Fort Knox, KY, in the development of the 

Abrams tank and the Infantry Center/School at Fort 

Benning, GA, in the development of the Javelin antitank 

missile. These representatives of the warfighter stated their 

needs and then provided strong advocacy for the programs, 

particularly when the programs encountered challenges. 

Both Hindsight Revisited and DOD69 found that a very 

important technology transfer mechanism was informal 

person-to-person contacts. Hindsight Revisited found that 

this is even truer today, as technology has made 

communication faster and more efficient. The internet for 

e-mail and file transfer as well as specialized networks of 

scientific computers enable teams of geographically 

dispersed workers to carry out distributed collaborative 

research. Indeed, Hindsight Revisited placed more 

emphasis than did DOD69 on the general importance of 

teaming among the participants to develop technology as 

well as integrate the many technologies of all the 

components of a system. It is important to note that the 

introduction of the PEO/PM since 1969 had a large impact 

in this area and helped facilitate such additional technology 

collaboration and transfer measures as moving personnel 

with the project from laboratory to laboratory or from 

laboratory to industry and creating integrated project and 

process teams. It should also be noted that today there is 

increased emphasis on formal technology transfer as 

evidenced by Technology Transfer Agreements with the 

PM office. Here, there is a signed agreement that details 

products to be delivered and schedules and metrics to 

demonstrate maturity. 
28 

Beyond the Hindsight Studies 

Project Hindsight and Hindsight Revisited have one 

final commonality: they are not idle exercises. As discussed 

in the introduction to this volume, such retrospective 

studies have a compelling logic—examining and 

understanding past successes can guide the successes of the 

future. What guidance, then, do we take from the Hindsight 

Revisited findings summarized above? Without diminishing 

the importance of the others, we have selected two of these 

findings to expand upon in the coming chapters. First, 

though the Army fields many diverse, complex weapons 

systems, certain groups of technologies apply to many or 

all of them. We saw such common technology elements 

spring up in each of the Hindsight Revisited systems. These 

common technologies are clear areas in which the Army 

S&T program should maintain excellence and in which it 

could hope to see its investment pay off throughout the 

force. In Chapter III, we will discuss some such 

technologies that appeared in the Hindsight Revisited

reports and that will continue to be important to the Army. 

Second, Hindsight Revisited showed us the vital importance 

of a robust Army laboratory system. Chapter IV addresses 

how the Army can ensure that this essential factor for past 

success is available to support the successes the Service 

will demand in the years to come. 
 

Chapter 3 

Technology Areas of 

Broad Impact 

hough the Hindsight Revisited effort detailed in 

Chapter II covered four disparate weapons systems, 

some important technologies were common to all. 

This chapter will take up several of the most significant of 

these common elements and address their importance for 

the development of future weapons systems. 

T 

For convenience we divide these technologies into two 

groups: those that enable the development of weapons 

systems and those that are contained in the products of the 

development process; i.e., weapons systems and 

warfighting equipment and their subsystems and 

components. In the former group, three enabling technical 

factors stood out from the Hindsight Revisited studies as 

especially important to future Army S&T efforts: the use of 

M&S, the use of high performance computers, and the use 

of human-systems integration. In the latter group, we will 

touch briefly on three technical areas—gun technologies, 

infrared sensors, and power sources—that bore fruit for 

more than one of the Hindsight Revisited systems and will 

continue to reward Army S&T investment with payoffs for 

many future platforms. We will then address one particular 

area of great future importance for the Army: those 

technologies bearing on network-centric operations. 

29 
30 

Enabling Technologies 

The Army S&T program has developed or adapted 

many processes and capabilities that were and are essential 

to the development of new military systems. Among them 

are M&S and high performance computing, which now 

play a major role in laboratory operations, and humansystems integration, which is made vital by the increasing 

demands placed on soldiers by modern weapons platforms 

and the ever-greater flood of information generated by 

state-of-the-art sensors and communications networks. The 

Hindsight Revisited systems all benefited in varying 

degrees from these technologies, and all three of these are 

areas in which the Army will continue to reap good returns 

on its S&T investment. 

Modeling and Simulation 

The impact of M&S is difficult to quantify on the 

battlefield, but it is an important S&T capability, one that 

played a key role in the development of the Abrams, the 

Apache, the Stinger, and the Javelin. Use of this technology 

enhances the effectiveness of the Army S&T program, 

allowing researchers to efficiently investigate complex 

problems. M&S will become even more important in the 

future, as the development of ever-more complex systems 

calls for a detailed understanding of physical phenomena 

and of the prospective performance of new systems on the 

battlefield. 

The terms modeling and simulation deserve some 

explanation. Though often used together, there is a distinct 

difference between the two. As defined in the DOD M&S 

Glossary, modeling is the “application of a standard, 

rigorous, structured methodology to create and validate a 

physical, mathematical, or otherwise logical representation 
TECHNOLOGY AREAS OF BROAD IMPACT 31 

of a system, entity, phenomenon, or process.”14 Models of 

both physical systems (e.g., the effect of a given density of 

armor on a penetrating round) and non-physical systems 

(e.g., the effect of a given volume of information on the 

speed of human decision-making) are possible. Models of 

systems of systems may be composed of numerous physical 

and non-physical relationships. 

In the same M&S Glossary, a simulation is defined as 

“a method for implementing a model over time.” Computer 

simulations are based on models or mathematical formulae 

that describe a real system or phenomenon.15 When 

executed, the computer program, or simulation, shows how 

the system works and, by changing variables, it is possible 

to analyze what effect changes might have on the real 

system. 

Electronic displays are critical components of 

simulations, in that they provide a medium for 

viewing representations of simulations as well as data 

arising from computations, sensors, 

telecommunications links, and so on. Displays are 

themselves a technology area with application across 

the force. Displays have proliferated on the 

battlefield—on computer monitors, instrument panels, 

on heads-up displays on helmets, and many other 

devices—and will only become more ubiquitous. 

Thus they can be exploited to integrate simulations 

throughout the battlefield. 

 

14 DoD Modeling and Simulation (M&S) Glossary, DOD 5000.59-M, 

Undersecretary of Defense for Acquisition Technology, January 1998. 

Accessed 7 January 2007 at <http://www.dtic.mil/whs/directives/ 

corres/pdf/500059m_0198/p500059m.pdf>. 

15 NOVA Science in the News Glossary, Australian Academy of 

Sciences. Accessed 7 January 2007 at <http://www.science.org.au/ 

nova/glossary.htm>.
32 

Simulation in the military falls into three categories: 

live, in which real people use live equipment (fielded, 

prototype, or surrogate) in the real world; virtual, where 

real people use mock-ups of equipment (a simulator16) in a 

simulated world; and constructive, where everything is 

simulated, such that simulated people operate simulated 

weapons systems.17 In every case underlying models relate 

cause and effect by “if-then” statements. An example is: “if 

a soldier is illuminated by a laser spot representing a rifle 

shot, then he is a casualty.” Virtual simulations inject 

human motor control skills (e.g., driving a tank), decision 

skills (e.g., committing a unit into action), or 

communication skills (e.g., live commander 

communicating with live, virtual, and constructive 

subordinates) into the simulation. Force-on-force computer 

models that simulate a battlefield with friendly and 

opposing forces are examples of constructive simulations. 

Real people stimulate (make inputs to) constructive 

simulations, but are not involved in determining the 

outcomes. Often, these categories have no clear separation 

between them. Additionally, advances in today’s 

technologies now call for an additional category for 

simulated people to operate real equipment (e.g., simulated 

commanders having control of units that include live smart 

robotic vehicles). 

Each of the Hindsight Revisited systems made use of 

M&S, especially physical modeling. An example from our 

study of the Abrams tank is the M&S of live fire testing. In 

the models, the ballistics of the flight of the incoming 

round, of the penetration of the armor, the spraying of 

fragments in the interior, and the impact of the fragments 

 

16 A simulator is a device that duplicates the essential features of a task 

situation and provides for direct human operation, such as a mock-up of 

an Abrams tank with crew stations, vision blocks projecting simulated 

scenes, speakers projecting vehicle and battlefield sounds, etc. 

17 DoD Modeling and Simulation (M&S) Glossary.
TECHNOLOGY AREAS OF BROAD IMPACT 33 

on the crew and components are all represented by 

mathematical models of the physics. Other variables 

include the angle of attack and the nature of the round 

(high-explosive or kinetic energy). Since many of the 

variables are not single-valued but exhibit a natural 

variation, probabilistic models are used to provide 

probability distributions for these variables. The product is 

a distribution of results—the probability of penetration, the 

probability of hitting an item in the interior, the probability 

of disabling the item hit and the probability of the tank 

being put out of action. These models are used to design 

firing tests and predict their outcomes. By use of the 

models, many tests can be simulated rapidly on the 

computer so that the actual live fire tests can be focused on 

the most significant of the many simulated scenarios. 

Fewer real tests are required thereby speeding up 

development and reducing cost. 

While physical, laboratory-focused M&S has been and 

will continue to be vital to Army S&T efforts, the 

remaining part of this section will focus largely on M&S 

applications that encompass not just weapons development 

but also training and battlefield operations. M&S makes it 

possible for researchers to examine, at a comparatively 

early stage in the development cycle for comparatively 

little money, many of the growing number of variables that 

can impact the performance of a weapons system or even a 

battlefield operational concept. The increasing complexity 

of today’s weapons systems and of the modern battlefield 

puts an especially high premium on such technologies. 

The Army has a long history of using M&S in 

technology development, analytical efforts, acquisition, 

training, and testing. The Army’s first simulator, the Link 

Flight Trainer, was developed in the 1930s and used for 

flight training during WWII. In the 1950s, NASA and the 

U.S. military began developing complex simulators for 

training. The Apollo 13 simulator made headlines for its 
34 

use in saving the Apollo 13 crew in 1970. By the end of the 

1970s, the use of simulators for training was widespread, 

and the use of simulations for analysis and technology 

development was beginning to take hold. 

Early simulators were stand-alone systems designed for 

single task training purposes such as driving a tank. In 

1988, DARPA initiated a program called Simulator 

Networking (SIMNET) that would join multiple tank 

simulators over a network such that each could see each 

other and as a team of tanks they could detect, engage, and 

destroy enemy targets.18 This enabled commanders to focus 

on unit training in addition to individual crew training. 

Prior to SIMNET, computer-generated forces 

demonstrated mostly predictable, robotic behavior. Now, in 

addition to these constructive forces, a limited number of 

friendly and opposing forces alike could reflect the more 

accurate, variable behavior of the live crews manning their 

simulators. With the added use of combat gear and realistic 

simulator interiors, crews increasingly believed the training 

was “real” and not “virtual.” This increased realism was 

cited in Operation Desert Storm after-action reports as 

contributing to U.S. military success.19 These findings 

prompted the Army to continue to develop SIMNETenabled training centers as a means for preparing for war. 

Building on this success, the Army later developed and 

replaced SIMNET systems with an enhanced networked 

simulation-enabled training system called the Combined 

 

18“PC-Based Technology Invades Simulation,” U.S. Army Program 

Executive Office for Simulation, Training, and Instrumentation. 

Accessed 5 November 2006 at <http://www.peostri.army.mil/ 

PRODUCTS/PC_BASED_TECH/ >. 

19 “Operation Desert Storm, War Offers Important Insights Into Army 

and Marine Corps Training Needs,” GAO Report # GAO/NSIAD-92-

240, August 1992. Accessed 5 November 2006 at 

<http://archive.gao.gov/d35t11/147541.pdf>. 
TECHNOLOGY AREAS OF BROAD IMPACT 35 

 

Arms Tactical Trainer.20 This system continues in use 

today. 

SIMNET was the predecessor of the Distributed 

Interactive Simulation (DIS) protocols that linked a wider 

variety of geographically distributed simulations and 

weapons system simulators such as trucks, helicopters, 

fighters, ships, and soldiers to create single virtual 

battlespaces with entity interactions occurring in real time. 

For almost a decade, distributed simulations would remain 

focused on linking constructive models and simulations and 

virtual simulators The rapid development of M&S 

accelerated its use beyond training. For example, in the 

summer of 1990, a computer-based war game called 

Operation Internal Look was used by General Norman 

Schwarzkopf and his staff at the U.S. Central Command to 

run through scenarios of potential conflict in Iraq. 

Immediately after the invasion of Kuwait, the function of 

Internal Look changed from planning to execution; it was 

used to run variations of the real combat scenario.21 

In the 1990s, simulation became a common tool for 

military technology development, analytical efforts, 

acquisition, training, and testing. Army laboratories linked 

their engineering models, or at least close representations 

of their conceptual warfighting systems, to force-on-force 

simulations. This enabled the technical staff to see how 

their new systems would affect the battle space. The use of 

distributed simulators also allowed them to conduct 

experiments with humans-in-the-loop to evaluate individual 

and unit system performance. 

For almost a decade after the inception of SIMNET, 

distributed simulations remained focused on linking 

20 Further information on CATTs is available at 

<http://www.peostri.army.mil/PM-CATT/home.jsp>. 

21 Kevin Kelly, Out of Control (New York: Perseus Books Group, 

1995). Accessed 5 November 2006 at <http://www.kk.org/outofcontrol/ 

ch22-e.html >. 
36 

constructive models and simulations and virtual simulators. 

DIS protocols could also link live simulations, but that 

meant that the constructive and virtual simulations would 

have to operate in real time—to keep up with the 

participating live players—and live players would have to 

be instrumented to be “emulated” within the simulation. 

Prior to 2000, shortcomings in processing power, 

bandwidth rates, and instrumentation for live players kept 

live simulations separate from integrated virtualconstructive simulations. In the past six years, by exploiting 

advances in high performance computing (HPC) and 

infrastructures such as the Defense Research and 

Engineering Network (DREN), technological advances 

have made possible a more transparent integration of live 

forces with models, simulations, and simulators over 

widely distributed networks. The DREN supports the 

linkage of disparate laboratory, training, experimentation, 

and testing facilities, enabling highly complex Service and 

joint live-virtual-constructive (LVC) M&S mission 

environments.22 The environments can present an 

operational battlespace that is as close to war as possible, 

with many of the complexities of joint operations, without 

being inhibited by safety, health, and environmental 

constraints. This is invaluable for accurately assessing 

technologies and evaluating tactics, techniques, and 

procedures. 

Among the things such advanced simulation 

technologies make possible are constructive simulations of 

communications systems. Systems at Fort Monmouth can 

be linked to FCS simulators at Fort Knox, live dismounted 

forces at Fort Benning, a live command and control 

element at Fort Leavenworth, an Air Force Tactical Control 

 

22 Mike Cast, “Army Tests Move to Virtual Proving Ground,” National 

Defense, November 2001. Accessed 5 November 2006 at 

<http://www.nationaldefensemagazine.org/ 

issues/2001/Nov/Army_Tests.htm>. 
TECHNOLOGY AREAS OF BROAD IMPACT 37 

 

Party at Eglin Air Force Base, and an AC-130 simulator at 

Hurlburt Field. With this setup, joint close air support and 

Army tactical communications systems can be assessed, 

among other joint and Army tasks and capabilities. 

Although setting up such distributed simulations is timeand resource- intensive, it is still more cost effective than 

trying to conduct the actual live exercises at a single range 

facility. Looking towards the future, such capabilities 

enable assessments of large FCS forces in joint 

environments well before these forces are in being. 

Another recent advance in M&S that is not time and 

resource intensive is agent-based simulation (ABS). In 

conventional computer simulations, entities (like simulated 

enemy tanks) follow finite rules programmed in by the 

user. Agent-based simulations differ in that agents, or 

intelligent computational entities, can alter their behavior 

within the simulation based on information provided by the 

simulator.23 The range of an agent’s behavior varies during 

the simulation, with its end points being defined by simple 

“if-then” case-based reasoning and very complex machine 

learning algorithms (e.g., genetic algorithms). 

Agent-based simulations can better emulate a very 

complex, dynamic world of learning entities; conventional 

simulations have entities that behave only as the modeler 

has programmed. For example, the U.S. Marine Corps uses 

the ABS Map Aware Non-uniform Automata (MANA) in 

an effort entitled Project Albert. MANA is specifically 

designed to model combat and how soldiers interact and 

has the ability to model information systems that provide 

agents with varying amounts of information and situational 

awareness.

24 These models then produce the desired 

23 Agent Rescue Emergency Simulator Glossary. Accessed 7 January 

2007 at <http://pages.cpsc.ucalgary.ca/~kidney/ARES/7_Glossary/ 

7_Glossary.html>. 24 MAJ Patrick M. Downes, LTC Michael J. Kwinn Jr., and Donald E. 

Brown, “Using Agent-Based Modeling and Human-In-The-Loop 
38 

simulation. Three significant benefits are (1) ease in setting 

up and operating, (2) the semi-automated agents 

themselves, and (3) the ability to model situational 

awareness. System performance parameters can be changed 

to represent future capabilities of developing technologies. 

Setting up and generating usable output from an ABS may 

take weeks; it would take months to do the same for a 

typical Army simulations of this kind.25 ABS is now being 

used by Training and Doctrine Command (TRADOC) in 

their Analysis Centers and Army Battle Laboratories. 

The Army also has moved to tap advances in the 

commercial world, particularly the entertainment industry’s 

increasingly realistic computer games and movie special 

effects. In the past few years, commercial games26 have 

increased tremendously in fidelity and in the ability to 

immerse players in the game environment. Although games 

lack physics-based reality they nonetheless follow on a set 

of rules based on “if-then” sequences. The Army has found 

value in using games for military education (as opposed to 

military training). Recent advances in game fidelity have 

begun to extend their use in experiment and test planning. 

Among the initiatives the Army uses to exploit the 

 

Simulation to Analyze Army Acquisition Programs,” Proceedings of 

the 2004 Winter Simulation Conference, INFORMS Simulation 

Society. Accessed 5 November 2006 at <http://www.informscs.org/wsc04papers/127.pdf>. 25 LTC Thomas Cioppa, briefing slides, Training and Doctrine 

Command Analysis Center, Monterey, CA, 14 January 2005. 

26 The relationship between computer games and simulations is as 

follows: “Whereas a simulation is a serious attempt to accurately 

represent a real phenomenon in another, more malleable form, a game 

is an artistically simplified representation of a phenomenon. The 

simulation designer simplifies reluctantly and only as a concession to 

material and intellectual limitations. The game designer simplifies 

deliberately in order to focus the player’s attention on those factors the 

designer judges to be important.” Chris Crawford, The Art of Computer 

Game Design, online book accessed 5 November 2006 at 

<http://vancouver.wsu.edu/fac/peabody/game-book/Chapter 1.html>. 
TECHNOLOGY AREAS OF BROAD IMPACT 39 

 

expertise of the commercial gaming community is the 

Institute for Creative Technologies at the University of 

Southern California, a 6.1-supported Center of Excellence 

for virtual reality and computer simulation research. 

Despite these decades of steady advances in M&S, 

there is room for improvement. Current computational 

systems and bandwidth rates continue to limit the number 

of player entities and command, control, communication, 

computer, intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance 

(C4ISR)27 nodes that can appear in a distributed LVC 

simulation in real time. Computational power also limits 

the real-time integration of highly complex models into a 

large force-on-force simulation using live players. One 

example is the integration of a very complex engineering 

model of shot-line analysis to evaluate tank damage for 

every engagement in the distributed LVC simulation. As 

computing power and bandwidth rates grow, so will the 

ability of the Army laboratories to link their engineering 

models of advanced technologies and conceptual 

warfighting systems into the distributed simulation 

environment of the Army training, analysis, and acquisition 

communities. 

27 Command, Control, Communications, and Computer systems are 

integrated systems of doctrine, procedures, organizational structures, 

personnel, equipment, facilities, and communications designed to 

support a commander’s exercise of command and control across the 

range of military operations. Intelligence, Surveillance, and 

Reconnaissance are activities that synchronize and integrate the 

planning and operation of sensors, assets, and processing, exploitation, 

and dissemination systems in direct support of current and future 

operations. These are integrated as intelligence and operations 

functions. Department of Defense Dictionary of Military and 

Associated Terms, Joint Publication 1-02, 12 April 2001 (as amended 

through 9 November 2006). Accessed 7 January 2006 at 

<http://www.dtic.mil/doctrine/jel/new_pubs/jp1_02.pdf>. 
40 

High Performance Computing 

High performance computing was important to the 

development of each of the Hindsight Revisited systems, 

not least because it enabled some of the M&S described 

above. As weapons systems become more complex, HPC 

will only grow in importance as an enabling technology in 

weapons development. Researchers use HPC capabilities 

for many purposes. Such computing power makes technical 

work quicker and much more productive and enables 

experiments that cannot be done in the laboratory. Very 

large computer programs for computational fluid dynamics, 

materials by design, and structural mechanics, for example, 

are now replacing much of the experimental work done in 

the past, saving time and money. The Army S&T program 

has and will continue to require HPC to function 

effectively; investment in this tool is likely to aid the 

development of many sorts of weapons systems in the 

future. 

HPC makes use of special hardware (these extremely 

fast machines are referred to as supercomputers) and 

software, plus specialists in writing algorithms and 

software for machines that can handle very large amounts 

of data and a great number of sequential or parallel 

computations. Only a few kinds of demanding problems are 

candidates to use such capabilities. Such endeavors are 

highly specialized. The growth in high performance 

computing was fostered by large investments, mostly from 

the Federal government. The principal thrust initially came 

from the nuclear weapons program, which needed HPC to 

model the effects of nuclear explosions. Subsequently, 

disciplines such as meteorology needed to process vast 

amounts of data from space, atmospheric and ground 

stations to develop forecasts. The number of high 

performance computers is relatively small; they are usually 

in centers specializing in the work. Note, though, that HPC 

capabilities limited to just a few research centers in one 
TECHNOLOGY AREAS OF BROAD IMPACT 41 

generation may be available in basic consumer computers a 

few generations later. For example, the first programmable 

electronic numerical integrator and calculator (ENIAC) was 

regarded as a super calculator by contemporaries then using 

mechanical devices or doing calculations by hand, but its 

capabilities are trivial compared to today’s machines. 

HPC was especially important to enabling M&S for the 

Hindsight Revisited systems. Such computing resources 

were needed, for instance, to analyze the millions of 

variables involved in a model of a projectile striking the 

Abrams’ crew compartment, or of the dynamic interactions 

between the Apache’s rotor wash and its horizontal 

stabilator. The Javelin benefited from the High 

Performance Computing Modernization Program 

(HPCMP), which was initiated in 1992 in response to 

congressional direction to modernize the DOD laboratories' 

HPC capabilities. The thrust of the HPCMP is to provide 

DOD scientists and engineers with state-of-the-art 

computing resources and training. Many military systems 

have benefited from this effort. For the Javelin, HPCMP 

enabled advanced design concepts, improved and faster 

modification programs, higher fidelity simulations, and 

more efficient tests. 

The military’s largest computer programs are now run 

in supercomputer centers such as the Defense High 

Performance Computing Major Shared Resource Centers 

(MSRCs). Four MSRCs in DOD currently operate large 

HPC systems that are available to the entire DOD HPC 

community. Each MSRC provides a complete HPC 

environment, including hardware, software, data storage, 

and computational expertise. In addition to the MSRCs, 

more modest-sized local systems are in place where there is 

a significant need for HPC capability. For analysis efforts 

that require extremely intense computing power, high 

performance computers at the centers are linked together 

using the DREN or the Secure DREN. 
42 

With its MSRC, the Army Research Laboratory (ARL) 

can now interactively visualize enormous data sets from 

calculations consisting of billions of computational cells. 

Previously, calculations of this magnitude would have to be 

run in the batch mode, sometimes for days. Using the 

supercomputer an investigator can not only run the 

calculations in a short time, but he or she can also visualize 

the results in real time. In this way the investigator can 

decide how to pose the next step in the problem without a 

long wait. It is no small task to convert the very large data 

sets of the results into pictures on the screen. Special 

programs are needed for this as well. 

The Army is using and will continue to use such centers 

to meet future weapons development challenges. One 

example is the recent analysis of armor options for Abrams 

side armor and High-Mobility Multipurpose Wheeled 

Vehicle (HMMWV) appliqué add-on armor, developments 

needed in part to respond to threats in Iraq.28 This work is 

similar to the M&S discussed in the Abrams Hindsight 

Revisited report, but significantly enhanced computing 

power and bandwidth rates provide an opportunity for 

developing even more complex models and distributed 

simulations. To simulate the details of live-fire tests on the 

Abrams or other platforms, the Army at APG has built 

models containing as much of the physics and geometry as 

possible for various angles of attack and points of impact. 

In reality, most of the variables are not represented by 

specific discrete values but rather exhibit a probability 

distribution of possible values. There will be variations—

slight but significant—in the velocity, shape, and mass of 

the incoming rounds. Penetration of the vehicle will vary 

depending on variations in the manufacture of the armor. 

Assuming penetration of the armor, the spatial distribution, 

 

28 David Kleponis, “Armor Research Provides Safer Tactical Vehicles,” 

ARL MSRC Link, Fall 2005, 20. 
TECHNOLOGY AREAS OF BROAD IMPACT 43 

 

number, masses, and velocities of the behind-armor 

fragments will vary. These uncertainties translate into a 

distribution of possible results rather than a single result. 

The HPC-run calculations will produce probabilities for 

hitting targets within the vehicle and probabilities as to 

whether the hit results in damage, minor or disabling, and 

whether the vehicle remains in operation or is put out of 

action. The simulation is checked by running a few live 

firings. Then the model is used both in designing live-fire 

tests, predicting results, and changing design features of the 

vehicle. In the early days of this modeling, as in the early 

modeling of the Abrams tank, only a few variables could be 

modeled and these without a probability distribution of 

input and output variables; with more powerful computers 

more detail and greater accuracy can be produced. 

Such HPC activities benefit systems in the field today. 

Future weapons systems also will benefit from HPC. Highend computers can model the use of high power 

microwaves for non-lethal attack of electronics, like those 

used to trigger improvised explosive devices (IEDs).29

Others uses include systems-of-systems simulation, basic 

and applied research in plasma physics, turbulence 

modeling, molecular engineering, and modeling the design 

and reactions of armors and high-energy materials.30 FCS 

in particular will benefit from HPC capabilities. One area in 

particular in which it will do so is the M&S of its C4ISR 

system. The battlefield network for FCS will include tens 

of thousands of nodes. For networks of this size, it is a 

daunting task to analyze message traffic in terms of 

throughput, bandwidth rates, impact of loss of nodes, loss 

of packets, and other criteria. It is extremely inefficient and 

29 Keith Cartwright, “Directed Energy Weapons Subject of Challenge 

Project,” ARL MSRC Link, Fall 2005, 21. 30 “Components of the HPCMP,” Department of Defense High 

Performance Computing Modernization Program. Accessed 5 

November 2006 at <http://www.hpcmo.hpc.mil/>. 
44 

time consuming to conduct detailed analyses of these large 

scale systems of systems on desktop computers, so it is 

imperative to use HPC assets. 

The MSRCs ensure that Army scientists and engineers 

across the country have access to the best HPC and 

expertise available. Utilization of these assets cuts defense 

system cost by reducing the design cycle and dependence 

on expensive live experiments and tests. The Army should 

continue to invest in and leverage HPCMP resources and 

capabilities. 

Human Systems Integration 

In all our Hindsight Revisited studies we found that the 

interface between the soldier and the weapons system had 

to be carefully engineered. The placement, color contrast, 

and symbology of displays; placement of controls and the 

ease with which they are manipulated; methods and levels 

of training demanded by a system—these and other similar 

factors are very important to developing a successful 

weapons system. Issues of this sort are dealt with through 

the discipline of Human Systems Integration (HSI), also 

referred to as Warfighter-Machine Interface (WMI). HSI 

means systematically factoring human considerations into 

the design, acquisition, and support of systems. HSI has 

been important to the Army S&T program in the past, and 

with the introduction of more and more complex 

technology, will continue to be in the future. 

The Army has devoted increasing attention to HSI.31 In 

the 1960s, 70s, and early 80s, the Army introduced into the 

force numerous advanced technology weapons systems, 

designed to increase Army combat power and readiness. 

During this modernization, the Army identified two 

persistent problems: fielded systems did not perform as 

 

31 “MANPRINT History,” U.S. Army MANPRINT Directorate. 

Accessed 5 November 2006 at <http://www.manprint.army.mil/ 

manprint/mp-history.asp>. 
TECHNOLOGY AREAS OF BROAD IMPACT 45 

 

predicted (for example, probabilities of hit were half of 

those seen in laboratory tests) because of poor humansystem design and the new system often required more, and 

more highly skilled, soldiers (operators, maintainers, and 

support personnel) than the system being replaced. The 

Army recognized it could not continue to accept poor 

system performance nor could it recruit sufficient numbers 

of highly skilled personnel or implement longer, costlier 

training programs. In 1980, prompted by high-level 

concern within the Army, a study was done on the effects 

of increases in weapons complexity on mobilization, 

readiness, and sustainability.32 The study concluded that 

human performance assessments were often not made and, 

if made, were too late to influence the design of the system. 

In 1982 the Army leadership directed that a manpower 

and personnel integration program be initiated. The term 

"MANPRINT" (MANpower and PeRsonnel INTegration) 

came to be used to designate the program. The Army's 

MANPRINT program considers both soldier and unit needs 

throughout the system acquisition process and life cycle. 

MANPRINT is the Army's program for improving the 

effectiveness of system performance at minimum costs for 

personnel, maintenance, and repairs. This design objective 

considers seven key areas: manpower, personnel, training, 

human factors engineering, safety, health hazards, and 

soldier survivability. MANPRINT optimizes total system 

performance and minimizes cost. Throughout the design 

and development phases, MANPRINT ensures that: 

• system operation, maintenance, training, and 

support requirements are matched to personnel 

availability; 

• systems become increasingly soldier-centered, 

-trainable, -reliable, and -maintainable; 

32 Ibid. 
46 

• life cycle costs are reduced through minimizing or 

eliminating specialized skills and tools for userlevel maintenance; and 

• total system performance is optimized at minimal 

life cycle costs by proper assignment of functions to 

man or machine.33

The Hindsight Revisited studies touched on several 

important examples of the application of HSI. One such 

was the difference in classification between the Redeye and 

Stinger anti-aircraft missile systems. The Redeye was 

fielded as an “all-arms” weapon, meaning that any soldier 

could fire it with little training. For the Stinger on the other 

hand, after consideration of the weapon’s capabilities and 

the training needed to operate it effectively, the Army 

determined that the missile required gunners who were 

trained Air Defense personnel. Another example of HSI 

contributed significantly to the battlefield effectiveness of 

the Apache. Both crew members’ helmets are fitted with a 

monocle-like heads-up display that gives piloting and target 

information. Using flight simulators, the symbols that 

appear on this display were carefully designed with regard 

to what information was essential and how that information 

should be presented to communicate it as quickly and with 

as little distraction as possible. 

HSI and the MANPRINT program will continue to play 

an important role in the development of future systems. 

Army technologies and systems will continue to become 

more complex and warfighters will have to cope with 

increasing amounts of technology in the field. To cite just 

one broad area as an example, HSI will have an especially 

key role in enabling information-intensive operations. As 

advanced communications devices and situational 

awareness technologies proliferate, the individual soldier is 

 

33 Ibid. 
TECHNOLOGY AREAS OF BROAD IMPACT 47 

expected to provide and react to an ever greater array of 

information. The more that is asked of the soldier, the 

greater the benefit of a development process that early on 

factors in the soldier’s abilities and needs. 

Technologies for Fielded Systems 

M&S, HPC, and HSI all enable the effective 

development of new Army capabilities. Along with these 

common technical enabling elements, Hindsight Revisited

also revealed common areas of technology in the fielded 

systems. We focus on just three: gun technology, night 

vision/infrared technologies, and power sources. These 

technologies have contributed, and will continue to 

contribute, to the success of many weapons systems, and so 

make excellent targets for future Army S&T investment. 

Gun Technology 

That gun technology is important to many systems is 

hardly surprising: the Army is, always has been, and for the 

foreseeable future will continue to be, reliant on guns to 

execute its mission. In the Hindsight Revisited reports, gun 

technology advances gave the Abrams and the Apache 

important new capabilities. It is important, though, that gun 

technology not be taken for granted. The Army has long 

experience with the technologies associated with gun 

development, foremost among them ballistics and materials 

technology. The Army’s long experience and evident 

success with gun technology, however, is not reason to 

assume that the work is done. Developing a more powerful 

gun or a more lethal projectile (or stronger, lighter armor) 

will continue to involve painstaking ballistics and materials 

research. Here, we discuss how investment in just one 

subset of gun technology—using interior ballistics and 

related materials technologies to address barrel wear and 

durability—could have a payoff for the development of 

future systems. 
48 

In order to prevent catastrophic failure and increase gun 

tube life, barrels must be designed with a keen 

understanding of the interior ballistics involved. The act of 

firing any gun is taxing on the barrel and barrel wear is a 

particularly challenging problem. For example, during the 

few milliseconds it takes a tank cannon to fire, the bore of 

the gun will experience a pressure pulse of about 100,000 

pounds per square inch and a thermal pulse in excess of 

2550°F and will be exposed to corrosive chemicals in the 

propellant.34 During the Abrams’ development, 

technologists at Watervliet Arsenal developed test 

procedures, manufacturing methods, and special 

electroplating techniques to improve the 105mm (and later 

120mm) main gun and extend its service life. Despite the 

Army’s efforts, the 120mm gun still fails after between 180 

and 375 rounds due to barrel wear, meaning that it has 

experienced actual firing conditions for only a few seconds 

of its life.35 This number of firings is only a fraction of the 

fatigue life of the barrel, adding significantly to the life 

cycle cost of the weapons system. Barrel wear is also a 

problem for smaller caliber weapons. The barrel of the 

M240, the primary medium machine gun of the Army and 

Marine Corps, can burn out after two minutes of rapid fire. 

This limits the combat effectiveness of the weapon during 

heavy engagements and burdens the machine gun team 

with at least one spare barrel. 

Future weapons programs also face barrel wear issues. 

For example, the FCS program plans propose a Non-Line 

of Sight Cannon (NLOS-C) platform to provide indirect 

fire support. The NLOS-C has an objective sustained rate 

of fire with its 155mm cannon of 10 rounds per minute, 

 

34 Gregory N. Vigilante and Christopher P. Mulligan, “Cylindrical 

Magnetron Sputtering (CMS) of Coatings for Wear Life Extension in 

Large Caliber Cannons,” Materials and Manufacturing Processes, eds. 

William S. de Rosset and Michael Audino, June 2006, 621. 

35 Ibid. 
TECHNOLOGY AREAS OF BROAD IMPACT 49 

 

with the capability of firing four to six rounds so quickly 

and at such trajectories that they arrive on target at roughly 

the same time.36 The 155mm cannon on the Army’s current 

self-propelled howitzer, the M109A6 Paladin, has a 

sustained rate of fire of four rounds per minute.37 This 

means the Army has a clear requirement for substantially 

more durable gun barrels. NLOS-C and other future 

weapons also will take advantage of advances in propellant 

technology that generate greater velocity and range more 

efficiently. These propellants, though, create higher 

temperatures and pressures and may also entail harsher 

chemical environments. Such factors can increase erosion 

of the internal surface of the gun. Increased firing rates and 

harsher internal ballistics environments demand improved 

materials together with innovative processing concepts. 

Two candidate solutions for application to future gun 

systems are ceramic and refractory metal gun barrel liners. 

Ceramic materials offer the promise of excellent 

resistance to elevated temperature environments at higher 

hardness and lower density than steel. The idea of using 

ceramics is not new. A great deal of effort has been 

expended trying to determine the best ceramic for lining 

gun tubes. Silicon carbide and silicon aluminum oxynitride 

materials have been tried in single-shot testing and showed 

little wear or erosion.38 However, when tested in a burstfire mode, the ceramic liners cracked, so continued S&T 

work is needed.39 

36 “NLOS-C Demonstrator Facts,” BAE Systems. Accessed 5 

November 2006 at <http://www.uniteddefense.com/prod/ 

nlos_cannon_faqs.htm>. 

37 “Paladin,” U.S. Army Fact File. Accessed 5 November 2006 at 

<http://www.army.mil/fact_files_site/paladin/index.html>. 

38 William S. de Rosset and Michael J. Audino, “Advanced Gun Barrel 

Materials and Manufacturing Technology Symposium—Overview and 

Perspective.” Materials and Manufacturing Processes, 571. 

39 Additional materials development programs aimed at finding 

solutions to the cracking problem are ongoing. An interesting approach 
50 

Refractory metals are also possible gun liner materials. 

This is a class of metals, including tantalum, tantalum 

alloys, tungsten and rhenium, that is extraordinarily 

resistant to heat and wear. The challenge with these 

refracting metals and alloys, which have very high melting 

points, is how to apply them as liners at temperatures that 

will produce the required metallurgic bond but will not 

adversely affect the beneficial residual compressive stresses 

in the gun tube. Some novel processing technologies to 

address this issue are under evaluation.40 High density 

infrared heating, magnetron sputtering, and explosive 

bonding are all being explored as ways to attach a 

refractory metal liner to a steel gun tube. 

The ubiquity of guns in the Army means that gun 

technology needs close attention for the foreseeable future. 

Advances in the ballistics and materials technologies are 

needed to improve barrel wear characteristics to realize 

potential gun capability improvements. S&T investment in 

these and other gun technology areas will have application 

across the force. 

Night Vision and Infrared Technologies 

Sensors play a vital role in nearly everything the U.S. 

Army does, from navigation to combat. They are prevalent 

both as functional components of other systems and as 

stand-alone systems. Imaging and non-imaging sensors use 

an array of sensing approaches, including optical camera, 

radar, hyperspectral, acoustic, magnetic, infrared, laser, and 

many others. Of these disciplines, infrared technology 

perhaps most clearly illustrates the enduring multi-system 

 

under current evaluation involves a ceramic matrix composite liner 

functionally graded to a metal matrix composite jacket. 

40 John D.K. Rivard, Craig A. Blue, David C. Harper, Jacob J. Stiglich, 

Gautham Ramachandran, and Victor K. Champagne, Jr., “High-Density 

Infrared Cladding of Ta on Steel.” Materials and Manufacturing 

Processes, 612-617. 
TECHNOLOGY AREAS OF BROAD IMPACT 51 

 

importance of sensor technology. Infrared technology, as 

shown in part by the vital role it played in the development 

of all four of the Hindsight Revisited systems, is and will 

continue to be of great importance to the Army S&T 

program. 

The U.S. Army has benefited greatly from long, 

substantial investment in infrared technologies. The 

proliferation of night vision capability has led the Army to 

claim it “owns the night,” and has given U.S. forces an 

important combat advantage. Speaking of the 1990-91 

Persian Gulf conflict one U.S. Army general remarked 

“Our night vision capability provided the single greatest 

mismatch of the war.”41 This capability has altered, rather 

than merely improved, the way the Army operates. Such an 

overwhelming competitive advantage dictates that in many 

circumstances the Army would rather operate at night. 

Some night vision devices, including most of those 

used by individual soldiers, are image intensifiers: they 

amplify ambient light to improve vision in the dark. Other 

devices are thermal imagers: they resolve infrared 

signatures into useable images and targeting information. 

It is this latter group of technologies that was key to the 

development of the Abrams, the Apache, the Stinger, and 

the Javelin. The Abrams and the Apache both used Forward 

Looking Infrared (FLIR) sensors for navigation and 

targeting. These devices generated thermal images that 

enable nighttime operations as well as operations in smoke, 

fog, or other visually challenging circumstances. The 

Abrams has thermal viewers for the driver, gunner, and 

tank commander. The Apache has thermal viewers built 

into the TADS/PNVS sensor suite. To name just one point 

of overlap in the development of the sensors used by the 

Abrams and the Apache, both benefited from the Army’s 

41 “NVESD About Us,” Night Vision and Electronic Sensors 

Directorate. Accessed 5 November 2006 at <http://www.nvl.army.mil/ 

about/index.php>. 
52 

Common Module approach to fielding FLIR systems. 

Based on work done at NVL, the Army used FLIR 

Common Modules to standardize parts for use in the FLIR 

devices on many systems and obviate the need for 

developing platform-specific night vision systems. This 

resulted in substantial cost savings. 

Infrared components are vital to the Stinger and the 

Javelin as well. Both the Stinger and the Javelin rely on IR 

seekers to find their targets. The Stinger seeker locks on to 

the heat signature of the engine exhaust of airplanes. 

Whereas the Stinger’s seeker only distinguishes the target 

as a thermal spot, the Javelin’s seeker, much like the IR 

systems on the Abrams and Apache, resolves the thermal 

signature into an image. The Javelin’s command launch 

unit (CLU) provides a high degree of resolution; the 

operator looks through the CLU to locate the target, and 

must be able to distinguish clearly between enemies and 

friends. The Javelin missile round’s IR system also 

generates an image, but only of sufficient resolution to 

allow the guidance system to continue to pick the target out 

from the small area at which the gunner aimed. 

IR technologies will continue to be important to a wide 

variety of weapons systems. Virtually every U.S. Army 

combat vehicle and aircraft uses IR sensors for night 

operations. Such systems are widely used by individual 

soldiers and in soldier-portable systems like the Stinger and 

the Javelin. As long as the Army intends to “own the 

night,” S&T investments in IR technologies will pay off 

across the force. 

Power Sources 

Sources of power are needed to supply electricity for 

the many electronic devices on the battlefield. While power 

supplies for platforms and fixed installations are and will 

continue to be important areas for Army S&T investment, 

power supplies for the soldier, principally batteries, also 
TECHNOLOGY AREAS OF BROAD IMPACT 53 

 

have high-leverage potential. The Army is preparing itself 

for the kinds of light, often dismounted, operations 

demanded by the kind of irregular warfare found in Iraq 

and Afghanistan, and it is also moving towards a future 

force in which a robust command and control (C2) network 

will extend down to the squad and soldier level. As it does 

so, man-portable technologies, like radios, night vision 

goggles, laser designators, and global positioning system 

(GPS) receivers will continue to proliferate. With these 

technologies, the weight, cost, and efficiency of batteries 

will be of constant and increasing concern to the Army. 

When it comes to equipment for the dismounted 

soldier, size and weight restrictions have always been 

paramount concerns. The Hindsight Revisited studies 

touched on this issue in the development of the Stinger and 

the Javelin: the man-portable systems had to adhere to strict 

weight requirements. This systems engineering challenge 

drove cost and performance trade-offs. In the case of the 

Javelin, the initial weight limit had to be increased to make 

the weapon viable. 

Today, soldiers already carry well above the target 

weight in equipment. The typical soldier load in 

Afghanistan is 92–105 pounds, while the target for the next 

generation soldier is 45–50 pounds.42 Along with all their 

other gear, soldiers must carry enough power to last for the 

duration of the mission—72 hours worth is considered a 

combat load.43 Reducing the weight of each individual 

battery unit is the most obvious way to lighten the battery 

load: the lighter each battery, the less weight a soldier 

42 Transcript, “Special Briefing on Objective Force Warrior and DOD 

Combat Feeding Program,” 23 May 2002. Accessed 5 November 2006 

at <http://www.globalsecurity.org/military/library/news/2002/05/mil020523-dod03.htm>. 

43 MAJ Stuart Meyer, briefing slides, U.S. Army Infantry Center. 

Accessed 5 November 2006 at <www.dtic.mil/ndia/2001smallarms/ 

meyer.pdf>. 
54 

needs to carry. As important, though, is the total number of 

batteries a soldier must carry. The more quickly a battery is 

exhausted and the longer the mission, the more replacement 

batteries are needed. Recent research has produced 

batteries, such as the lithium ion family, that provide longer 

life and diminish soldier loads. 

Large numbers of replacement batteries also mean 

excess cost. Whereas in training rechargeable batteries are 

used, in combat a used battery is most likely discarded. 

During Operation Iraqi Freedom, U.S. forces were at one 

point consuming 180,000 of one common type of 

disposable battery per month, at an acquisition cost (to say 

nothing of logistical burden) of almost $20 million a 

month.44 Batteries that can be recharged in the field are a 

partial solution. Some portable solar panel rechargers are 

available. These rechargers offer weight savings for 

missions lasting longer than 24 hours and become cost 

efficient after 220 operational hours. 

The Army, and the military at large, also suffers from a 

lack of standardization and the inability to cross-use 

batteries. In the 1970s and 1980s, the Army used 350 

different types of 1.5-volt to 30-volt military-unique 

batteries.45 This proliferation was both an operational and a 

logistical burden as well as source of great expense—in 

peacetime, in 1996, the Army spent $100 million on 

batteries.46 By 2001, the number of battery types had been 

 

44 James Whiteker, Jason Hamilton, and Steven Sablan. MBA 

Professional Report: Logistical Impact Study of Photovoltaic Power 

Converter Technology to the United States Army and the United States 

Marine Corps (Monterey, CA: Naval Postgraduate School, December 

2004), 2. The non-rechargeable battery examined in the study is the 

BA-5590, which, among other devices, powers the ground forces’ 

primary tactical radios. 

45 “Army Battery Standardization: Rechargeable Batteries Power the 

Future Force.” Defense Standardization Program Case Study, 2002, 

Accessed 7 January 2007 at <http://www.dsp.dla.mil/cases.htm>. 46 Ibid. 
TECHNOLOGY AREAS OF BROAD IMPACT 55 

cut to 35. The Army’s goal, though, is to get to 25 

standardized battery types. This will lower acquisition costs 

and, through interoperability, bring operational efficiencies. 

These power source-related issues—weight, efficiency, 

and standardization—all deserve continued Army S&T 

focus. As the Army proliferates portable high-technology 

devices throughout the force, and especially as it continues 

to engage in the kinds of conflicts that require extensive 

dismounted operations, S&T investment in improved 

power sources promises to have a pay-off across the force. 

Moving Towards the Future: NetworkCentric Operations Technologies 

In this chapter we have discussed technologies that 

were and will continue to be crucial to the development of 

many weapons systems. These included both technologies 

and technical approaches that supported weapons 

development—M&S, HPC, and HSI—and technologies 

directly tied to fielded capabilities: gun technologies, night 

vision/infrared technologies, and power sources. We have 

noted their impact on the systems studied in the Hindsight 

Revisited reports and made it clear that S&T investment in 

these areas is likely to realize returns in more than one 

future system. Yet, while not diminishing the importance of 

these areas, it is essential to note a group of technologies 

that by their very definition offer even greater leverage on 

the capabilities of the Army and the military as a whole: 

those technologies that support network-centric operations. 

These technologies played only a small role in the 

Hindsight Revisited systems, but they will loom large in the 

development of future systems. M&S, night vision, and the 

like will continue to make important contributions to 

enhancing the capabilities of individual systems; networkcentric operations will use information technologies to 

create a system of systems that will use the capabilities of 
56 

individual platforms more effectively and efficiently than 

previously possible. 

Network-centric operations are the military’s response 

to the information age. Such operations pull together all 

elements of a joint force and through information 

technologies integrate units’ situational awareness, 

knowledge, and capabilities to achieve rapid, decisive 

results. With shared, up-to-date situational awareness (of 

both Blue and Red forces) and the ability to communicate 

to adjacent units as well as to units at higher command 

levels, a netted force is able to increase the speed of 

command, adapt to changing circumstances, and deliver 

effects efficiently. 

The military at large, and the Army in particular, is 

committed to realizing the potential combat benefits of 

operating in a network-centric manner. The concept is 

emphasized in both the 2005 National Defense Strategy and 

the 2005 Capstone Concept for Joint Operations and it is a 

central feature of FCS.47 The FCS system of systems is 

referred to as 18+1+1, for 18 manned and unmanned 

platforms plus the soldier plus the network. FCS is founded 

in part on the idea that information conveyed by the 

network can be a significant force multiplier and can be 

substituted in some circumstances for mass. A netted force 

with an information advantage no longer needs to 

maneuver to contact: it can use remote sensors to find the 

enemy, share the information instantly, and respond before 

the enemy can act. An example illustrates the importance of 

the network to FCS: the Army is designing FCS combat 

vehicles to be lighter than some armored contemporary 

 

47 Capstone Concept for Joint Operations, Department of Defense, 

2005. Accessed 17 January 2007 at <http://www.dtic.mil/ 

futurejointwarfare/concepts/approved_ccjov2.pdf>; National Defense 

Strategy of the United States of America, Department of Defense, 

March 2005. Accessed 17 January 2007 at 

<http://www.defenselink.mil/news/Apr2005/d20050408strategy.pdf>. 
TECHNOLOGY AREAS OF BROAD IMPACT 57 

combat vehicles because (it is hoped) the shared situational 

awareness created by the sensors and network of the FCS 

will allow its vehicles to either avoid sustained enemy fire 

or find and destroy the enemy first. If the Army cannot 

build and operate an effective, secure network, the 

capabilities of FCS will be significantly curtailed. 

Though network-centric operations are enabled as well 

by complementary organizations and processes and highly 

trained people, their reliance on technology is plain. The 

concept will not work if the force cannot rapidly and 

effectively develop and share information. We touched on 

some such technologies in the Hindsight Revisited reports. 

The Abrams, for instance, was equipped with Force XXI 

Battle Command, Brigade and Below (FBCB2) systems 

that enabled vehicle commanders to track Blue forces. 

FBCB2 and a full spectrum of other C4ISR technologies 

will be crucial to enhancing the strength of the Army’s 

weapons systems—strength derived in part from those 

technologies discussed earlier in the chapter—by enabling 

the Army to fight as a netted force and a system of systems. 

This requires technical work at the tactical, operational, and 

strategic level. The military’s Global Information Grid 

(GIG) will allow the ready exchange of the full spectrum of 

defense information at the highest, joint echelons. The 

Army’s piece of the GIG is called LandWarNet; it 

encompasses all elements of the service’s communications 

architecture across all organizations and systems. Sensor 

platforms such as unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) are 

needed to populate the network with Red force information. 

Interoperable tactical radios and Blue force tracking 

systems must proliferate and they must be both vehicle 

borne and soldier-portable. Battle command systems are 

needed to manage and act on the flood of information. 

The network-centric technology areas listed briefly 

above all exist in the force in some form, and even today 

the Army engages in network-centric operations. To realize 
58 

the full potential benefit of the concept, however, further 

technical progress is needed. This is a crucial future 

challenge, if not the crucial future challenge, for the Army 

S&T program. S&T investment in such areas as M&S, 

ballistics, and sources of power can be leveraged for use 

across the Service, and investment in technologies for 

network-centric operations can multiply that leverage, 

enhancing the capabilities of the entire force. 

In pursuing advances in the technical areas discussed in 

this chapter, the Army will make use of many sources. It 

will draw on the expertise of industry, universities and 

research centers, and our international partners. The Army 

will also turn to its in-house laboratory system. The 

Hindsight Revisited reports demonstrated the many 

significant contributions the in-house laboratories made to 

the development of past weapons systems. For the Army 

laboratories to make such a contribution in the future, the 

Army must pay close attention to critical areas of 

laboratory operations. The next chapter suggests some 

actions DOD and the Department of the Army can and 

should take to ensure laboratory excellence. 
 

Chapter 4 

Ensuring Excellence at 

the Army’s Laboratories 

A s n

cri

sys

Hindsight 

oted in Chapter II, the Army laboratories were 

tical to the development of past weapons 

tems. In our studies of four weapons systems in 

Revisited, we found that in-house laboratories 

played an important role, providing, on average, about half 

of the CTEs. We also found that success in weapons 

technology depends on a close partnership between the inhouse Army laboratories and those in the private sector, 

both of which are essential national resources. As noted in 

Chapter III, the need for excellence in Army S&T is as 

strong as ever. The Army has demanded and will continue 

to demand technical advances to meet emerging defense 

needs. In the current conflicts in the Middle East the Army 

laboratories are constantly providing new ways to protect 

our soldiers and enhance their effectiveness through 

technology. The success of the FCS program requires on a 

number of new, very advanced technologies, and the 

private-sector FCS LSIs are depending on the special 

expertise of the Army in-house staff. Both in-house and 

private laboratories must conduct their technical programs 

at the state-of-the-art and be pushing that art wherever 

possible. 

59 
60 

Yet serious challenges confront the Army laboratories, 

and indeed all DOD laboratories. For a number of years 

efforts to reduce the federal budget and the size of the 

government have had a negative impact on the DOD 

laboratories, especially since the end of the Cold War. The 

size of the Army laboratories was reduced in the 1990s by 

almost half. S&T responsibilities have gradually shifted 

away from DOD and to the private sector. In this chapter 

we first discuss the role of the Army laboratories and then 

review the most pressing challenges, focusing primarily on 

personnel management issues since hiring and retaining 

top-flight research and engineering staff are critical for 

success. No amount of money or facilities can produce 

good results without expert personnel. We then examine 

several of the numerous studies of government laboratories

in recent years that have addressed these challenges and 

review government attempts to improve laboratory 

operations. There have been some positive steps but much 

remains to be done. We conclude by discussing the current 

situation and suggesting improvements to the posture of the 

laboratories. 

The Role of the Laboratories in Weapons 

Development 

The Army laboratory system is comprised of those in 

the Army Materiel Command (AMC),48 which were the 

principle laboratories in the Hindsight Revisited reports, the 

Army Corps of Engineers, and the Army Medical 

Command. These laboratories are managed day-to-day by 

their respective line military commands; however, for 

 

48 The Army Materiel Command’s laboratories are: the Army Research 

Laboratory, the Aviation and Missile Research and Development 

Center, the Armaments Research and Development Center, the 

Communications and Electronics Research and Development Center, 

the Edgewood Chemical and Biological Center, the Natick Soldier 

Center, and the Tank-Automotive Research and Development Center.
ENSURING EXCELLENCE 61 

 

program and budget management they come together in the 

office of the Army S&T Executive, under the Assistant 

Secretary of the Army for Acquisition, Logistics, and 

Technology. 

Not everyone is familiar with the broad scope of the 

role that the Army laboratories play in developing and 

fielding weapons systems. A clear summary comes from 

the Federal Commission convened to look at the proposals 

for consolidation and conversion of defense laboratories as 

a part of the Base Realignment and Closure (BRAC) 

program of 1991.49 The Commission, established by the 

Secretary of Defense, was drawn from government 

laboratory managers and senior people from outstanding 

private laboratories (Bell Laboratories and IBM, for 

example). Its report provides a clear, representative 

statement of the 10 main functions the DOD laboratories 

should perform: 

• Infuse the art of the possible into military planning 

• Act as principal agents in maintaining the 

technology base 

• Avoid technological surprise and ensure 

technological innovation. 

• Support the acquisition process 

• Provide special-purpose facilities not practical for 

the private sector. 

• Respond rapidly in time of urgent needs of national 

crisis 

• Be a constructive advisor for Department directions 

and programs based on technical expertise 

• Support the user in the application of emerging 

technology and introduction of new systems. 

49 Federal Advisory Commission on Consolidation and Conversion of 

Defense Research and Development Laboratories, Report to the 

Secretary of Defense, September 1991. 
62 

• Translate user needs into technology requirements 

for industry 

• Serve as an S&T training ground for civilian and 

military acquisition personnel 

To fulfill these functions, the laboratories must be 

active in four major areas: performing a full spectrum of 

research activities, from basic research to advanced 

development; supporting the PM offices; participating in 

the testing and evaluation of new weapons and 

technologies; and interfacing with the user. 

The laboratories conduct basic research to provide 

fundamental understanding of problems related to new 

systems. Some of the work is done in-house and some in 

the private sector via grants and contracts. The Army 

Research Office (ARO) sponsors basic research in 

academia. This academic research is broad in scope and 

explores a wide spectrum of new areas that may be of 

interest to the Army in the long term. This will be discussed 

in more detail in the basic research section of this chapter. 

All the Army laboratories conduct applied research and 

advanced technology development. Much of this is 

engineering work and the laboratories have very strong 

staffs to do this. As we found in the Hindsight Revisited

reports, continuity in staffing at the in-house laboratories 

has led to a depth of expertise that is hard to come by 

elsewhere and would be very hard to recreate should the 

laboratories be shut down. The same applies to equipment 

and facilities. The technical staff works very closely with 

the PMs, industry, and, sometimes, other government 

laboratories, laboratories of our international partners, 

research institutes, and universities. Our studies of weapons 

systems have shown these relationships have been essential 

to the successful development of those four systems. 

The in-house laboratories work closely with PM offices 

and, through them, industry. The laboratories work with the 
ENSURING EXCELLENCE 63 

PM offices in what is called matrix support. This refers to 

staff on the personnel rosters of the laboratories that are 

detailed to the PM. Matrix support positions may be 

temporary or relatively permanent. In some cases staff have 

moved all the way from ARL through an RDEC and a PM 

office and on to the contractor. This occurred in the 

development of the Abrams tank and proved to be a very 

effective method of improving communications as well as 

speeding technology transfer. 

Another important role played by the Army laboratories 

is to support the testing and evaluation (T&E) community. 

The laboratories often perform informal evaluations of new 

ideas developed by contractors. The laboratories also often 

become directly involved in formal T&E and have designed 

and built some of the Army’s test facilities. At APG and 

White Sands Missile Range, for example, ARL conducts 

test firings and other full-scale field evaluations. 

An important advantage of having skilled and 

experienced technical staff at the in-house laboratories is 

that they are available to advise senior Army acquisition 

officials on the merits of technical proposals from outside 

the Army. Officials lacking the specialized knowledge 

required to evaluate the performance claims of such 

proposals can turn to the experts in the laboratories for 

unbiased reviews and recommendations. This has been 

called the “smart buyer” role of the laboratories, and it 

improves the likelihood that the Army will avoid costly 

mistakes. 

As seen in Chapter II, the Army laboratories also 

perform the important function of involving the ultimate 

user—the soldier in the field—in the technology 

development process. The primary way the in-house 

laboratories accomplish this is by working closely with 

TRADOC and its schools and centers to receive definitions 

of Army needs, get advice on the formulation of technical 

programs to respond to these needs, and jointly evaluate the 
64 

proposed solutions from the laboratories. Army S&T 

laboratories maintain user involvement by experimenting 

with their technologies and systems at TRADOC’s 10 

Army Battle Laboratories. The Battle Laboratories offer the 

Army S&T laboratories an opportunity to expose their 

technologies and systems to soldiers in simulated combat, 

combat support, or combat service support operations.50 In 

most cases, the Battle Laboratories have linkages to other 

Services to support joint evaluations. 

In the past, getting early user involvement through 

TRADOC was not an easy task, since the technology or 

system had to actually be built into a useful product for 

user assessment. With advances in M&S, as discussed in 

Chapter III, this has become easier. For example, with 

facilities such as the Fort Knox Unit of Action Maneuver 

Battle Laboratory using virtual simulations (vehicle 

simulators and live crews) to evaluate vehicle and crew 

performance, Army S&T laboratories can get warfighter 

performance data and feedback on FCS systems and 

components that have yet to be built.51 The use of 

distributed, integrated, live, virtual, and constructive 

simulations provides a tremendous assessment capability to 

the laboratories and to TRADOC. 

Army laboratories also have developed early user 

involvement through their Army Technology Objective 

(ATO) approval process. ATOs are established for 

technologies that the Army laboratories identify as key to 

developing a particular system or capability. As part of this 

process, TRADOC reviews the relevancy of ATOs to Army 

needs. The lead TRADOC organization for this process is 

the Army Capabilities Integration Center (ARCIC). 

 

50 John R. Wilson, Jr., “Battle Labs: What Are They, Where Are They 

Going?,” Acquisition Review Quarterly, Winter 1996. Accessed 7 

January 2007 at <http://www.dau.mil/pubs/arq/94arq/wilso.pdf>. 51 Unit of Action Maneuver Battle Laboratory web site. Accessed 5 

November 2006 at <http://www.knox.army.mil/center/uambl/>. 
ENSURING EXCELLENCE 65 

 

An additional path to the user is through the PMs. The 

PM offices work with the TRADOC schools and centers 

and hence provide the Army’s scientists and engineers 

another way of interacting with those charged with 

representing the warfighters. We find that these close 

working relationships are essential to “getting it right” in 

developing new systems for the Army.

We now turn to the problems facing the laboratories 

that challenge their ability to carry out these roles. 

Critical Issues Challenging the S&T 

Laboratories 

The Army laboratories are confronted with significant 

obstacles to optimally performing the missions discussed 

above. In order to perform these functions, the 1991 

Federal Advisory Commission held that an effective 

laboratory should have the following characteristics:52 

• Clear and stable mission 

• Highly competent and dedicated workforce 

• Highly qualified and empowered leadership 

• State-of-the-art equipment and facilities 

• Close relations with the user/customer 

• Strong basic research component 

• Budget stability 

• Champion in senior management above the 

laboratory 

• Strong ties to other laboratories inside and outside 

the government 

Management and budget challenges, however, are 

restricting the laboratories’ abilities to maintain the 

excellence suggested by such characteristics. Issues are 

52 Taken in part from Federal Advisory Commission on Consolidation 

and Conversion of Defense Research and Development Laboratories, 

Report to the Secretary of Defense, September 1991. 
66 

largely in the following categories: hiring and retaining 

scientists and engineers; centralization of support services; 

failure of DOD to delegate to and empower senior 

laboratory managers to make their own decisions in 

managing their technical programs; overly close control of 

the technical work (micromanagement); and tight budgets 

that constrain staffing and reduce needed investment in 

equipment and facilities. We begin with a discussion of 

personnel issues that make hiring and retaining top-flight 

technical people in the laboratories difficult. 

Personnel Issues

The most important factor for excellence in a laboratory 

is a top-flight technical staff. The laboratories should have 

outstanding research scientists and engineers in every 

aspect of the work. They should be supported by the best 

possible administrative and support personnel. The hiring 

and retaining of such outstanding people is difficult in any 

laboratory, but more so in the federal government. There 

are constraints that make hiring a slow process, place tight 

limits on salaries, and control the number of authorized 

positions and the number of high-grade positions. 

Laboratory management has had little authority over the 

hiring process; that has been controlled by the Office of 

Personnel Management (OPM) and DOD personnel offices 

at various levels above the laboratory management. So 

many layers of authority for personnel decisions are 

generally not found in the private sector. Thus privatesector laboratories can move quickly in hiring, sometimes 

making offers on the spot. 

Competition for the best people is keen. The Army 

laboratories have an advantage in having a critical mission 

in defending the Nation and in their generally good to 

excellent equipment and facilities. These advantages are 

offset by lower salaries and salary gaps at the top grades, 

the low enthusiasm that young people have for the federal 
ENSURING EXCELLENCE 67 

 

government, and the appeal of private-sector opportunities. 

Furthermore, the number of U.S. citizens enrolling in S&T 

programs in universities has not kept up with the demand.53

Many students graduating in physical science and 

engineering nonetheless opt for careers in business or 

health. Though plenty of non-citizen graduates are coming 

into the market, the military laboratories normally cannot 

hire non-citizens without encountering a lot of red tape. 

The movement of foreign nationals has been further 

restricted since the September 11 terrorist attacks. Finding 

and hiring strong candidates requires that the laboratories 

have aggressive recruiting efforts that go far beyond the 

simple posting of vacancy announcements. 

Leadership. Excellent leadership of the Army’s 

technical work should ensure that the staff performs as well 

as possible. Poor leadership would likely reduce the staff’s 

ability to perform. Therefore, the laboratories should have, 

at all management levels, people well-qualified in 

management in general and in management of S&T in 

particular. This generally means that managers should have 

a technical education and personal experience in 

performing laboratory work. They also should know how to 

administer the laboratories. Sometimes such leaders are 

found within, and sometimes outside, the laboratories. For 

senior positions such as laboratory director there should be 

a comprehensive search for the best candidates. 

Further, there have been numerous efforts to develop a 

cadre of military scientific officers without noticeable 

success. In years past the laboratories had many young 

officers spending a year or two working technical problems 

and becoming skilled in the art of S&T. Some of these 

soldiers held advanced degrees in science or engineering. 

53 Michael Marshall, Timothy Coffey, Fred Saalfeld, and Rita Colwell, 

“The Science and Engineering Workforce and National Security,” 

Defense Horizons 39 (Washington, DC: Center for Technology and 

National Security Policy, National Defense University, April 2004). 
68 

However, after the end of the Cold War force reductions 

virtually eliminated the possibility of training young 

officers in this way. Today very few uniformed military are 

in the Army laboratories, and very few mid-career officers 

have the necessary technical experience to effectively 

oversee the Army’s technical programs. As a result, most 

senior officers in the Army acquisition process are not 

experienced in R&D. They understand only poorly the need 

for appropriate budgets and staffing. 

Other Management Challenges 

In addition to the aforementioned difficulties in 

handling personnel at the laboratories, there are challenges 

in funding, management practices, capitalizing facilities 

and equipment, and maintaining excellence in basic 

research. These challenges are outlined below. 

Budgets. Federal budgets are noted for their instability. 

They are usually not enacted on time so that the 

government must operate on continuing resolutions. This 

means that proposed programs may not be initiated until, 

often, a full quarter after the start of the fiscal year. The 

laboratories’ budget proposals are altered by the layers of 

management above them in DOD and then reviewed again 

by the four committees (two in authorizations and two in 

appropriations) in Congress. In recent years the budget has 

contained a substantial numbers of “earmarks,” 

designations as to where the funds should go without 

benefit of the usual scrutiny of authorization and 

appropriations hearings. Since the budgets often are not 

increased to accommodate the new projects, existing work 

must be reduced to pay the bill. 

Even more fundamentally, budgets rise and fall with the 

fortunes of the Nation in terms of security and the 

economy, falling when the Nation’s situation seems secure 

and booming when it is threatened. For the laboratories, the 

boom usually does not mean more support for forward-
ENSURING EXCELLENCE 69 

 

looking research but rather funding for using current 

knowledge in support of the warfighters in the field. The 

laboratory staff do not decry this effect; rather the staff feel 

stimulated to be providing such help to those in harm’s 

way. Nonetheless, the programs aimed at long range Army 

goals are constrained. During busts, hiring is either frozen 

or restricted. Travel accounts are reduced so that most staff 

cannot attend scientific meetings. Faced with such 

uncertainty in the support by the Administration and 

Congress, potential recruits to the laboratories often turn 

away. To illustrate, the severe cuts in budget and staffing 

after the end of the Cold War affected the laboratories a 

great deal In the Army laboratories both budgets and staff 

levels were reduced between 40 and 50 percent.54 

Management. In the past 15 years DOD has 

centralized such functions as financial management, 

personnel management, and purchasing and has pressed 

local managers to contract out many other support 

functions. In one recent case DOD proposed that even the 

alteration of individual laboratory space be controlled not 

by the laboratory director but by a central support facility 

not under the laboratory’s control. In such an environment 

it is difficult to maintain a high level of research output. 

These constraints make the position of laboratory director 

frustrating and less appealing to new candidates. It does not 

need to be so. For instance, in a report on the development 

of the sabot for the M829A2 projectile (an advance 

discussed in the Hindsight Revisited Abrams report), 

researchers specifically cited the lack of micromanagement 

54 Edward A. Brown, Reinventing Government Research and 

Development: A Report on Management Initiatives and Reinvention 

Efforts at the Army Research Laboratory, ARL-SR-57, Army Research 

Laboratory, Adelphi, MD, August 1998. 
70 

as important to the success of the program.55 There are 

examples today of federal agencies where laboratories are 

managed extremely well and generally do not face the 

aforementioned difficulties, e.g., the National Institute of 

Standards and Technology. 

Facilities. Partially offsetting the inhibitions on 

attracting talented personnel are the laboratories’ generally 

good equipment and facilities. The present facilities at the 

laboratories were not come by easily. Building up the 

facilities has been done over many years. For example, 

most of the facilities for research in ballistics have been 

constructed, maintained, and upgraded since the 1930s. 

These facilities have received continuing investment so as 

to keep up with advances in the science and engineering of 

ballistics work. A case in point is the special-purpose 

enclosed test firing range for handling armor targets and 

penetrators containing DU. DOD also has invested heavily 

in high end computers and the Army has benefited from 

this. At APG there is the HPC MSRC mentioned in Chapter 

III, and the Corps of Engineers Waterways Experiment 

Station at Vicksburg also has an MSRC. In addition, as 

noted in the Hindsight Revisited reports, the Army has been 

fortunate in being able to share large scale experimental 

facilities at three NASA technical installations: NASA 

Langley, NASA Glenn, and NASA Ames. In all likelihood 

the Army never could have justified building its own wind 

tunnels and the like. 

Ironically, the Army has realized some benefits from 

turmoil surrounding the BRAC process. When a laboratory 

was closed and the staff relocated, new buildings and 

replacement equipment was provided. For example, when 

the Watertown Arsenal was closed in BRACs 1989 and 

1991, the program was transferred to APG. A new, state-of-

 

55 Bruce P. Burns, An Executive Summary of the M829A2 Sabot 

Technology Program, ARL-TR-350, Army Research Laboratory, 

Adelphi, MD, February 1994. 
ENSURING EXCELLENCE 71 

 

the-art building was constructed and furnished with 

appropriate equipment. Similarly, when the electronics 

S&T program at Fort Monmouth was transferred in BRAC 

1991, the Army constructed a new research building at 

Adelphi, MD. It has world-class clean rooms and other upto-date equipment needed for research at the sub-micron 

level. 

Support for Basic Research. Another significant 

challenge is to develop appreciation among military leaders 

for much of the Army’s basic research program. At one 

time it was generally accepted in the technical community 

at large that a strong research laboratory (or a strong 

commercial enterprise depending on technology) needed to 

have a certain amount of basic research—the number often 

cited is 15 percent or so of the base S&T budget. While 

most of that work in the Army has been motivated directly 

by technical challenges in the applied work, some should 

be driven by the desire to expand the technical horizons of 

the laboratory. In the Army of today the majority (~80 

percent) of the 6.1 funds are held by ARL, of which almost 

two thirds goes to universities.56 The Army’s RDECs are 

budgeted to do relatively little basic work; the Army Corps 

of Engineers and the Army Medical Command have a 

modest amount of basic research funding. These groups 

could benefit greatly from an increased basic research 

budget. (See p.88 for more on basic research.) 

Past Studies of Defense Laboratories and 

Responses 

In light of the above challenges, groups within and 

outside the Government have sought corrective actions. In 

this section, we review the most important of these studies, 

the majority of which relate to the key issue of personnel 

56 Emails to authors from the Office of the Deputy Assistant Secretary 

of the Army for Research and Technology, November, 2006. 
72 

management, and indicate the nature of the responses by 

Congress and the Executive branch. 

Past Studies of Defense Laboratories

The laboratories have been studied repeatedly. Coffey 

et al. estimate that about 100 studies of Government 

laboratories have been done since 1962.57 The very fact 

that so many studies have been done underscores the 

importance of the laboratories. The motivation behind these 

studies arose, on the one hand, from a sense that the private 

sector could simply take over the laboratories’ role in 

acquisition. Many in the private sector criticized the 

performance of the in-house laboratories and essentially 

said “we can do it better.” On the other hand, others 

asserted that the in-house laboratories are essential and 

steps should be taken to ensure quality and responsiveness. 

The following review of just a few of the more recent 

studies reveals a clear consensus on both the qualities the 

laboratories should have and steps that should be taken to 

ensure that the laboratories meet those goals. In particular, 

the studies emphasize the importance of changing the 

laboratories’ personnel management system. 

In 1983 the White House Science Council published 

what has become known as the first Packard report.58 This 

report recommended a number of steps to strengthen the 

federal laboratories; among them were peer review of the 

work and empowerment of the laboratory directors in all 

aspects of laboratory management. One of the examples 

cited in the Packard report was the experiment in personnel 

 

57 Timothy Coffey, Kenneth Lackie, and Michael Marshall, 

“Alternative Governance: A Tool for Military Laboratory Reform,”

Defense Horizons 34 (Washington, DC: Center for Technology and 

National Security Policy, National Defense University, November 

2003). 

58 Report of the White House Science Council Federal Laboratory 

Review Panel (Washington DC: The White House, May 1983). 
ENSURING EXCELLENCE 73 

 

management being conducted at the Navy’s Surface 

Weapons Center at China Lake, CA, and the Naval Ocean 

Systems Center at San Diego. Known as the China Lake 

alternative personnel system, this project, set up in 1980, 

was the first DOD personnel demonstration program as 

authorized under the 1978 Civil Service Reform Act. This 

program included a stream-lined classification system (a 

few broad pay bands) and a pay system based on 

performance rather than longevity. 

The Packard report recommended that all federal 

laboratories try something similar. President Reagan 

accepted the report and directed the federal departments to 

implement it. The White House Office of Science and 

Technology Policy (OSTP) drafted model legislation to 

enable the laboratories to proceed (for a synopsis of the 

model legislation see Appendix A).59 However, OPM and 

the personnel offices in the cabinet departments resisted 

and the legislation was not introduced. (The House Science 

Committee, however, became interested and drafted a 

similar authorization for the National Bureau of Standards 

(NBS, now the National Institute of Standards and 

Technology, or NIST). The bill became law and was 

implemented beginning in 1988. Please see Appendix B for 

further details.) 

The Defense Science Board (DSB) has conducted a 

number of studies of the DOD laboratories.60 Its 1987 

study led to the establishment in 1989 of the Laboratory 

59 Progress Report on Implementing the Recommendations of the White 

House Science Council’s Federal Laboratory Review Panel, Vol. 1— 

Summary Report (Washington, DC: Office of Science and Technology 

Policy, Executive Office of the President, July 1984). 60 Report on the 1987 Summer Study on Technology Base Management

(Washington, DC: Department of Defense, December 1987); Defense 

Science Board Task Force on Defense Laboratory Management, 

Interim Report (Washington, DC: Department of Defense, April 1994); 

Defense Science Board Summer Study on Defense Science and 

Technology (Washington, DC: Department of Defense, May 2002). 
74 

Demonstration Program (LDP). (LDP was later succeeded 

by the Laboratory Quality Improvement Program (LQIP), 

which was then folded into Vice President Gore’s National 

Performance Reinvention program.) In his memo 

implementing the 1987 DSB recommendations, Deputy 

Defense Secretary Atwood said; “Recent studies . . . have 

shown that the productivity and effectiveness of the DOD 

laboratories can be significantly improved by implementing 

specific changes in procedures involving personnel 

management, research-related contracting, facilities 

refurbishment, and management authority of technical 

directors.”61 In the personnel management area, the 

laboratories and centers in the LDP sought further 

delegations of authority. The requests included the 

authority to directly hire personnel, set salary rates, approve 

performance-award amounts consistent with the activity’s 

budget, approve recruitment and retention bonuses, and 

eliminate time-in-grade requirements for promotion. 

Unfortunately, most of the personnel-related authorities 

desired by the laboratories and centers under the LDP 

required the formal approval of OPM under the provisions 

of the Civil Service Reform Act of 1978 (CSRA). Despite 

lengthy discussions, OPM remained unwilling to utilize its 

CSRA authority to establish any additional personnel 

demonstrations for Defense laboratories. OPM did not want 

simply to duplicate features tested in "China Lake" and 

LDP, but wanted features that could explore additional 

concepts that might apply across the government. OPM 

insisted on cost neutrality, and wanted extensive 

justification for why any variation from standard personnel 

practices was needed for the laboratories. Without OPM 

action, little progress resulted. 

 

61 Science and Technology Community in Crisis, Naval Research 

Advisory Committee Report (Washington, DC: Office of the Assistant 

Secretary of the Navy (Research, Development, and Acquisition), May 

2002), 18. 
ENSURING EXCELLENCE 75 

 

In Section 913 of the National Defense Authorization 

Act (NDAA) for FY2000 (see Table 3), Congress proposed 

that the DDR&E use university study teams to look at the 

past relevance of defense laboratories and evaluate the 

laboratories’ current work and its utility in the future. The 

historical part of this undertaking was done by two groups 

at George Washington University,62 the current and future 

portion by a team of experienced managers convened by 

NDU.63 The retrospective look at the laboratories contains 

the following remark: “DOD laboratories have been 

carrying out relevant work. The case studies [in the 

retrospective review] also built a cumulative case for the 

value to the country of having a diverse, capable system of 

DOD laboratories, acting as a focused part of the U.S. 

national research enterprise.” The NDU team issued four 

reports on different technical areas and aspects of 

laboratory management. The studies by the NDU team 

found that relevant work is being performed and the 

laboratories are well-focused on the military’s technical 

needs. The team expressed some concern that some 

laboratories may be too relevant; that is, that their work is 

too concentrated on short-term needs and not enough on 

long-term opportunities. They worried about the difficulties 

62 The Contributions of Department of Defense Laboratories to U.S. 

Warfighting Capabilities Case Studies of Twelve Laboratories

(Washington, DC: Center for International Science and Technology 

Policy and Security Policy Studies Program, The George Washington 

University, August 2002). 

63 Report #1: Sensors Science and Technology and the Department of 

Defense Laboratories (Washington, DC: Center for Technology and 

National Security Policy, National Defense University, March 2002); 

Report #2: Information Science and Technology and the Department of 

Defense Laboratories, July 2002; Report #3: Weapons Science and 

Technology and the Department of Defense Laboratories, December 

2002; Report #4: A Study of the Connectivity Between the Defense 

Laboratories, Industry, and Academia in the Area of Information 

Technology, July 2003. 
76 

caused by DOD personnel practices and they urged more 

R&D programs explicitly directed at joint service needs. 

In 2001, the office of the DDR&E requested the Naval 

Research Advisory Committee (NRAC) to conduct a study 

of the health of the three Service “corporate laboratories”—

ARL, the Naval Research Laboratory (NRL), and the Air 

Force Research Laboratory (AFRL). 64 The tri-Service 

panel consisted of high-level persons drawn from nonDOD government laboratories, academia, and industry. It 

concluded that DOD laboratories have an essential future 

role to play, listed characteristics of a world class 

laboratory (similar to those listed by the Federal Advisory 

Commission on Consolidation and Conversion report cited 

earlier65), and wrote that previous studies were “mostly 

well done, but few of their recommendations [have been] 

implemented.” The report’s recommendations were first 

that the DDR&E seek and obtain the commitment of the 

Secretary of Defense and the Service Secretaries as to “the 

need for and the importance and value of the Service 

Corporate Research Laboratories by demonstrating 

continuing support”; second, that the Secretary of Defense 

utilize existing authorities to establish a separate personnel 

system for the scientists and engineers in the Services’ 

corporate laboratories; and third, that the DDR&E “develop 

and propose to Congress additional legislation that would 

enable the Services to experiment with alternative 

governance structures.” The report explicitly identified the 

issues that should be on the list: “salary caps, burdensome 

procedures, inability to renew facilities and equipment, lack 

 

64 Science and Technology Community in Crisis. The NRAC study 

report, prepared with the participation of the Army Science Board and 

the Air Force Scientific Advisory Board, included a detailed summary 

of many of the earlier studies. 

65 Federal Advisory Commission on Consolidation and Conversion of 

Defense Research and Development Laboratories, Report to the 

Secretary of Defense, September 1991. 
ENSURING EXCELLENCE 77 

 

of laboratory director authority, and poor support services.” 

Although focused only on the three Service research 

laboratories, these recommendations could easily apply to 

all of the AMC laboratories (ARL and the RDECs), the 

Corps of Engineers laboratories, and the laboratories of the 

Army Medical Command. 

The material covered in the NRAC report has recently 

been expanded upon and brought up to date in a recent 

report by Kavetsky et al.66 While directed at the Navy, this 

report’s ten recommendations should be considered by the 

Army. Several of the recommendations pertain to 

improving the ability to hire and retain top-flight technical 

staff. The report also recommends an increase in funding 

for Navy S&T in general (to three percent of total 

obligation authority) and of special funding for Navy 

research exploring the frontiers of knowledge. The three 

percent figure has been proposed in many external studies 

and endorsed in both Senate and House committee reports. 

The FY07 Army budget shows S&T (6.1, 6.2, 6.3) at 1.5 

percent of the total of $111.8 billion. An increase to three 

percent would be difficult to obtain at any time but is 

especially hard to achieve now with heavy pressure on the 

budget from the costs of the conflicts in the Middle East. 

Legislative and Executive Branch Actions

Attempts to Strengthen LDP/LQIP. Concerns about 

the Government laboratories, and DOD laboratories in 

particular, are well documented. As discussed above, in the 

years since the creation of LDP, the U.S. Congress has 

addressed the issues surrounding the Defense laboratories a 

number of times, and the executive branch has taken some 

action. In addition to the statutes cited above there have 

been several pieces of legislation that authorized 

66 Robert Kavetsky, Michael Marshall, and Davinder Anand, From 

Science to Seapower (College Park, MD: Center for Energetic 

Concepts Development Series, University of Maryland, 2006). 
78 

laboratory-related reforms or further studies of laboratory 

problems. Progress, however, has been halting. 

In early 1993 the three Service Acquisition Executives 

committed to an intensive joint effort to get LDP back on 

track. This initiative was subsequently chartered as LQIP 

and essentially succeeded the LDP. At about the same time, 

the National Performance Review (NPR) was getting off 

the ground, as a part of the Vice President Al Gore’s 

initiative to “reinvent Government.” (The NPR was 

subsequently renamed the National Partnership for 

Reinventing Government.) Soon after, the DDR&E 

requested that the LQIP laboratories be designated as a 

single “reinvention laboratory” under the aegis of the NPR. 

This request was approved in March 1994; it authorized the 

laboratories and centers to request waivers of Service and 

Office of the Secretary of Defense (OSD) policies and 

regulations in support of DOD's “Installations 2000” 

vision, which called for "Installation commanders 

empowered with the responsibility, authority, flexibility, 

and resources to make the requisite decisions based on 

what is best for client tenants and their respective 

missions." Based on submissions from the Services, 

DDR&E initially included one Defense, two Navy, four 

Army, and four Air Force laboratories in the NPR program. 

Ultimately, the Army extended its participation to all of its 

R&D laboratories. 

One of the basic tenets of the NPR was the 

identification and elimination of barriers to efficiency, 

either through legislative change or by waiving 

burdensome and unnecessary regulations. In fact, during 

the early days of the NPR, the Secretary of Defense 

(SECDEF) required the senior leadership of the 

Department to take action on all waiver requests within 30 

days or see the waiver take effect automatically. 

Disapprovals of waiver requests could only be based on 

statutory or national security considerations. In the end, 
ENSURING EXCELLENCE 79 

 

however, execution of this SECDEF directive was spotty at 

best.67

Numerous reforms were attempted under the new 

LQIP/NPR umbrella. As noted above, the 1987 DSB study 

had recommended expansion of the China Lake 

demonstrations to all DOD laboratories and centers. Such 

an expansion was not possible under the 1978 Civil Service 

Reform Act (CSRA), so new legislative authority was 

required. The LDP/LQIP devoted several years to securing 

acceptance of the concepts in this proposal within the 

Pentagon and OPM, but were never able to get a draft bill 

approved for submission to Congress. Eventually, Congress 

itself took action, citing the DSB and other studies for 

justification. Section 342 of the FY1995 NDAA authorized 

the SECDEF, with the approval of OPM, to carry out 

personnel demonstration projects “generally similar” to the 

China Lake project at DOD laboratories designated by 

SECDEF as S&T reinvention laboratories. 

In August and September 1995, the DDR&E, acting on 

the authority granted to the SECDEF by the FY1995 

NDAA, requested five waivers from the personnel office of 

OSD: 

• the establishment of a definition of a high grade in a 

pay-band system, 

• redefinition of the term, "Full Term Equivalent" 

(FTE), 

• removal of high grade controls, 

• prohibition of hiring freezes, and 

• exemption from the Priority Placement Program for 

internal placements.68 

67 Brown; Science and Technology Community in Crisis; W.C. 

McCorkle, J.R. Houston, J.A. Montgomery, L. McFawn memorandum 

to W.S. Rees, Chair, Laboratory Quality Enhancement Program in the 

Office of the DDR&E, “Authorities Necessary to Effectively Manage 

the Defense In-House Laboratories,” 21 August 2006. 
80 

The Assistant Secretary of Defense for Force 

Management Policy (ASD (FMP)) declined to approve 

them and placed a 60-day hold on a decision, pending 

negotiations to resolve differences. Ten months of difficult 

negotiations between (1) DDR&E and the Services (acting 

for the LQIP) and (2) ASD (FMP), the Office of 

Management and Budget, and OPM (as stake-holders for 

the existing system) followed. Finally, in June 1996, the 

Deputy Secretary of Defense approved a negotiated 

settlement covering: 

• a definition of high grades in pay-banding systems; 

• authorization to exceed FTE authorizations by two 

percent on a temporary basis to cover 

Intergovernmental Personnel Act assignees, experts 

and consultants, students, and faculty working at 

LQIP laboratories and centers; 

• a nine-month grace period to complete staffing 

actions at LQIP laboratories and centers after the 

imposition of a hiring freeze, and 

• a process for resolving qualification determinations 

under the Priority Placement Program. 

Although these presented only marginal changes to the 

system, they were quite simply the best deal that could be 

obtained. In the end, they provided little benefit to the LDP/ 

LQIP laboratories and centers.69 

The National Security Personnel System (NSPS). 

NSPS, a DOD-wide personnel overhaul, is the centerpiece 

of the Pentagon’s most recent efforts to address personnel 

problems across the entire DOD. This new personnel 

system, authorized in the NDAA for FY2004, establishes a 

 

68 Kenneth Lackie, former scientific staff assistant to Technical 

Director, Office of Naval Research, email to authors 12 December 

2006. 

69 Ibid. 
ENSURING EXCELLENCE 81 

 

few wide pay bands in place of the former 15-step General 

Schedule and adopts the principle of pay for performance. 

The authorities offered by NSPS do not approach those 

enjoyed under LDP/ LQIP, much less those additional 

authorities recommended by various studies and requested 

by the DDR&E. The main characteristic of LDP/LQIP is 

the empowerment of the laboratory management; the 

program allows laboratory managers to waive many 

statutes and use provisions of 60 other statutes, powers not 

available in NSPS. NSPS would move most of the decision 

authority to higher levels in the bureaucracy. Table 2 below 

summarizes some of the differences between the 

LDP/LQIP authorities and those under the NSPS. 

Table 270 

Comparison of Elements of LDP/LQIP vs. NSPS 

 LDP NSPS 

Can waive many parts of 

Title 5, the Civil Service 

System 

NSPS cannot waive these 

items 

SECDEF approves changes 

to LDP 

OPM must approve changes 

in NSPS 

May pay starting salaries 

anywhere in a pay band 

Limited to 30 percent above 

minimum 

LDP has a Pay Band V for 

senior positions 

NSPS does not have such a 

band 

Supervisors not 

automatically paid more than 

group members 

Assumes supervisors are 

automatically superior in 

pay 

70 McCorkle et al, “Authorities Necessary to Effectively Manage the 

Defense In-House Laboratories.” 
82 

Promotions from band to 

band without competition 

Crossing pay bands requires 

competition 

Manage most of Human 

Resources (HR) function 

HR functions held at levels 

above the laboratories 

Classification, recruiting, 

qualification, and hiring 

authorities reside with 

laboratory managers 

Classification and related 

authorities are held at levels 

above the laboratories 

In approving the NSPS in NDAA for FY2004, 

Congress exempted the defense laboratories until October 

2008, so that adjustments and changes might be made. 

Congress has revisited the personnel issues in Defense 

authorization measures for both FY2005 and 2006, and 

indicated some concern over problems left unsolved and 

about the impact on the defense laboratories of the new 

one-size-fits-all NSPS. The FY2005 NDAA says, in Sec. 

1107, that the “the Under Secretary of Defense for 

Acquisition, Technology, and Logistics and the Under 

Secretary for Defense for Personnel and Readiness shall 

jointly develop a plan for the effective utilization of the 

personnel management authorities” already enacted for 

increasing the effectiveness of the defense laboratories. 

This internal study was never conducted. In Sec. 1123 of 

NDAA for FY2006 Congress said that “the Secretary of 

Defense shall commission an independent study to identify 

the features of successful personnel management systems 

of the highly technical and scientific workforces of the 

Department of Defense and similar scientific facilities and 

institutions.” The Act asks for “a comparative assessment 

of the effectiveness of the Department of Defense technical 

workforce management authorities and practices with that 

of other similar entities.” Congress also pointed out earlier 

authorities granted in FY1995 and 1999 and sought 

information on the status of the use of these authorities. 
ENSURING EXCELLENCE 83 

 

In response to these expressions of congressional intent 

the DOD pointed to a 2004 study it had sponsored on best 

practices in managing large R&D organizations. The study 

looked at current practices in the private sector and defense 

laboratories and focused on laboratory quality, personnel, 

and management.71 In it, the in-house laboratory managers 

discussed what constitutes quality in the laboratory, 

including the importance of having top quality personnel. 

They also expressed concerns about funding stability, 

priority ranking processes, the trend toward centralizing or 

regionalizing support services at the expense of flexibility 

and performance at the laboratories, the balance in 

investment in-house and contracting out, and the proper 

ratio of basic and applied research vice product 

development. Apart from this study, no other assessment 

has been conducted in response to Sec.1107 of the FY05 

NDAA and Sec.1123 of the FY06 NDAA. 

Table 3 

Some Recent Legislative Actions Regarding DOD 

Personnel 

Legislation Description 

Civil Service Reform Act, 

1978 

Authorized alternate 

personnel systems. 

NDAA for FY1995, Sec. 

342 

Made permanent the Navy’s 

China Lake demonstration 

system 

NDAA for FY2000, Sec. 

913 

Requested studies of 

capabilities of DOD 

laboratories—past and future 

71 Gerald Krueger and Edward Molnar, Exemplary Practices in 

Management of Large Research and Development Laboratories, The 

Wexford Group International, Vienna, VA, September 2004. 
84 

NDAA for FY2001, Sec. 

1114 

Delegated OPM authorities 

to the Sec Def 

NDAA for FY2004, Sec. 

9902 

Authorized the NSPS for 

DOD 

NDAA for FY2004, 

Sec.9902c 

Exempted LDP/LQIP 

laboratories from NSPS until 

2008 

NDAA for FY2005, Sec. 

1107; and for FY2006, Sec. 

1223 

Requested studies of the 

NSPS vs. the DOD 

LDP/LQIP; also a study 

comparing these systems 

with those at the best private 

laboratories 

Areas for Action 

The weight of some 20 years of studies and experience 

strongly suggests that the laboratories need a marked 

increase in their ability to manage their own affairs, 

especially in personnel. Recent legislative and executive 

branch actions have not sufficed. Steps to increase 

flexibility in managing laboratory personnel should be 

taken within the current laboratory governance framework. 

More attention should be paid to ensuring a strong basic 

research component and to opportunities to collaborate 

with other parties. 

Personnel 

As described in most of the major laboratory studies to 

date, personnel-related issues are the foremost problem 

confronting the laboratories. DOD should approve the 

request recently put forward by senior laboratory managers 
ENSURING EXCELLENCE 85 

 

from each of the Services to the DDR&E.72 The Services 

asked that the laboratories should be allowed to manage 

their resources to budget and not face controls on staffing 

levels. The additional ceilings on various categories of 

personnel ought to be eliminated and DOD should restore 

to the laboratories the management of their principal 

support services. If approval for all of the laboratories’ 

personnel management proposals is granted it would 

empower the laboratory directors in much the same fashion 

as in most of the best private and government laboratories. 

Table 4 highlights some of these additional needs in 

personnel management. 

Table 4 

Additional Needs in Personnel Management 

(Features not now in LDP/LQIP and not planned 

for NSPS73) 

• Extend LDP/LQIP features uniformly to all 

LDP/LQIP laboratories 

• Approval for more laboratories to join LDP/LQIP 

• Extend delay of transferring LDP/LQIP into NSPS 

from 2008 to 2014 

• Drop controls of number of positions in Pay Band V 

• Raise pay ceiling to that of Senior Technical and 

top Senior Executive Service positions and in, some 

extraordinary cases, to Executive Level II 

• Establish a Senior Scientific Service under the 

DDR&E 

72 W.C. McCorkle et al, “Authorities Necessary to Effectively Manage 

the Defense In-House Laboratories.”

73 Ibid. 
86 

• Modify Voluntary Early Retirement 

Authority/Voluntary Separation Incentive Pay to 

apply to specific positions and individuals 

• Temporary hiring authority similar to that under the 

Intergovernmental Personnel Exchange Act 

• Use of personal service contracts for clerical and 

secretarial positions 

These items are directed at reducing the amount of toplevel management of areas that the laboratories feel would 

best be delegated to the laboratory directors 

Personnel issues also include the need to pay increased 

attention to the method of selecting people for key 

leadership positions in the laboratories. True national 

searches should be mandated by OSD and conducted at the 

operating levels to locate the very best talent for positions 

such as laboratory director and directors at the next lower 

echelon. Such laboratory senior managers should be, as a 

prerequisite, educated at the graduate level in science or 

engineering and experienced both in conducting S&T 

themselves and in managing complex S&T organizations. 

Governance 

There have been some proposals to change the 

governance structure of the DOD laboratories. The 

alternatives ranged from the current status—the 

government-owned, government-operated (GOGO) 

model—to government-owned, contractor operated 

(GOCO), e.g., the DOE Laboratories; independent 

government-chartered corporation such as the Tennessee 

Valley Authority; and outright privatization. A 2003 study 

by Coffey et al analyzed these alternatives and suggested 

that further consideration be given to a government-
ENSURING EXCELLENCE 87 

 

chartered corporation (GCC) model.74 Among other things, 

it would give laboratory management wide latitude to 

address some of the personnel issues raised elsewhere in 

this chapter. 

In our opinion, however, the current structure (GOGO) 

is still the best option. Despite its faults, it keeps the 

laboratories very much in the mainstream of Army 

activities and assures them of close everyday contact with 

their immediate customers in the acquisition community as 

well as with their ultimate clients, the warfighters. The 

advantage of this positioning is apparent in the efforts of 

the laboratories to solve the special problems arising in Iraq 

and Afghanistan. The rapid transition of new technology 

from the laboratory bench to the warfighter in times of 

crisis has been facilitated by having the laboratories within 

the Army. The idea of moving the laboratories outside the 

normal bureaucracy arises from frustration over the 

inability of the current management structure to support 

and strengthen properly these important resources. 

However, the best solution to this problem is for the current 

leadership to confront the challenges faced by the in-house 

laboratories head-on (and implement the recommendations 

made in this book) rather going down a GOCO or GCC 

path, where the strong coupling with the user would be 

jeopardized. 

Keeping the laboratories inside the Army does not 

mean that the thrust of the S&T portfolio should not 

continually evolve. Change is inherent in the S&T 

enterprise. To illustrate, the Army is now (2007) 

sponsoring a study at the National Research Council on 

how the Service should address network S&T. This study 

was stimulated in part by the important role the subject is 

playing in the FCS program as well as the closing of Fort 

74 Coffey et al, “Alternative Governance: A Tool for Military 

Laboratory Reform.”
88 

Monmouth and the transfer of the Communications and 

Electronics Research, Development, and Engineering 

Center to APG. This transfer presents an opportunity to 

create a focal point on networking capabilities and the 

possibility of hiring new and different staff (it is estimated 

that a majority of the current Fort Monmouth personnel 

will not make the move).75 The NRC study will consider 

the competencies needed and the size of the various 

component programs. The study is also to address the use 

of new partnerships to share resources and expertise with 

industry.76

A Strong Basic Research Component 

Basic research is important to laboratory programs in 

many ways. Such research may be curiosity- or problemdriven; i.e., the investigator may be motivated by a desire 

to expand knowledge in general, or by the needs of a 

particular project or program area. We have pointed out 

earlier that the applied work on particular systems rests on 

prior basic studies often performed many years earlier. 

Most of the basic research pursued by the military is 

problem-driven—either in today’s work or in areas of 

potential interest in the future. In addition, during the 

course of applied and development work serious barriers 

arise that can only be overcome by carrying out additional 

basic research studies. When such problems do arise it is 

usually too late to go out and hire personnel to do the 

needed basic work. 

Thus, basic research is directly involved in weapons 

development. But there are many additional benefits to 

 

75 Estimate based on experience with 1991 BRAC. Michael Marshall, 

email to authors, 27 June 2005. 

76 Statement of Task for the Network Science, Technologies, and 

Experimentation Center, Board on Army Science and Technology, 

National Research Council, The National Academies, Washington, DC, 

2006. 
ENSURING EXCELLENCE 89 

having basic research as an integral part of an S&T 

development program. Having within the laboratory basic 

work at the cutting edge will help ensure that the more 

applied work is also at the frontier. Absent this, the applied 

work may drift away from the frontier and become secondrate. Discussion with colleagues performing basic 

research—at technical conferences and through informal 

everyday contacts in the corridors and lunch rooms—keeps 

all the staff informed of the latest developments in science 

and engineering. Another advantage is the attraction of 

basic work to new graduates. For a new scientist or 

engineer with an advanced degree, basic research more 

nearly resembles the master’s or doctoral thesis work he or 

she has just completed. This eases the transition from the 

university. Recruiting is thus facilitated. Also, the staff 

members performing basic research are likely to be closely 

involved with researchers in universities, National 

Laboratories, and the like, again helping to make sure that 

the laboratory is fully current in its fields of concentration. 

It is often possible to make use of the knowledge developed 

in these external laboratories. 

Collaboration

Finally, as the nature of R&D in the world is changing, 

so too should the laboratories be changing their modes of 

operation. It would especially benefit the Army to adapt its 

S&T program to capitalize on private-sector expertise in 

those research areas in which industry has a substantial 

technical advantage. Information technologies, broadly 

speaking, are an example of a discipline in which the 

commercial market has produced and will continue to 

produce advances at a greater rate than the government can 

hope to match by itself. 

Fortunately, more and more, collaboration among 

entities outside the parent laboratory organization is the 

norm. Researchers team up with colleagues around the 
90 

world, laboratories execute agreements to collaborate with 

research facilities elsewhere, and research is done on 

computers linked over the internet—the more so as M&S 

becomes more prevalent. The laboratory that is not 

collaborating in some fashion with its peers in the public 

and private sectors is more likely to be parochial and, 

ultimately, to become second-rate. For the Army 

laboratories, which have always worked closely with their 

contractors’ laboratories, this trend means that they should 

have working relationships with centers of excellence in 

universities and research institutes both domestic and 

foreign, as well as other government laboratories. 

Recently, with 6.1 monies, the Army has created large 

Centers of Excellence in areas of interest to the Army for 

the purpose of putting more emphasis on certain technology 

areas and promoting collaboration between industry and inhouse laboratories. Some of these Centers are: the Institute 

for Creative Technology at the University of Southern 

California (mentioned in Chapter III), the Institute for 

Collaborative Biotechnologies at the University of 

California at Santa Barbara, and the Institute for Soldier 

Nanotechnologies at the Massachusetts Institute of 

Technology. These Centers are consortia of universities and 

private companies; they are led by universities and funded 

with research grants from ARO. Another set of consortia, 

funded by ARL with 6.1 and 6.2 monies and led by 

industry, are more tightly coupled to the in-house 

laboratories. These are called Collaborative Technology 

Alliances. They are managed by ARL; the programs are 

planned by teams of people from ARL and the alliance 

participants, and personnel are exchanged between the 

ARL and alliance members. These exchanges facilitate 

information flow back and forth and make technology 

transfer into the Army much easier. 

We have detailed in this chapter several areas where the 

Army can and should strengthen its S&T programs. It 
ENSURING EXCELLENCE 91 

seems to us that these actions have already been authorized, 

should be relatively easy to implement, and would greatly 

enhance S&T laboratory operations. It would be a shame 

not to accept these challenges. 
 
 

Chapter 5 

Concluding Remarks and 

the Way Ahead 

he foundation for this book came from the Project 

Hindsight Revisited studies, in-depth retrospective 

looks at four of the Army’s key weapons systems: 

the Abrams main battle tank, the Apache attack helicopter, 

and the Stinger and Javelin man-portable missiles. Our 

approach was based on a 1969 DOD report titled Project 

Hindsight. Our studies focused on establishing CTEs for 

each system. All told we uncovered 135 of these key 

technology events for the four systems and analyzed them 

as to their origin, their funding, the role of management 

both at the laboratory and program managerial level, and 

the extent of public and private-sector collaboration. 

T 

This book has drawn on the Hindsight Revisited

studies’ key findings, and on two of them in particular. 

First, though the four systems had quite different 

capabilities, certain technologies were important to all of 

them. Such technologies, which have the potential for 

broad impact across the force, deserve particular attention 

from the Army S&T program. We have singled out several 

technologies that enhance the S&T program’s capabilities 

and several technologies that enhance the capabilities of 

forces in the field. In the former category, we have focused 

on M&S, HSI, and HPC. In the latter category, we have 

93 
94 

addressed gun technologies, night vision technologies, and 

batteries. Though this book only illustrated a small slice of 

their technical potential, it is clear that Army and DOD 

investment in these (and other such) areas could be 

leveraged across multiple future weapons systems. 

This book has also focused on the health of the Army 

laboratory system. The Hindsight Revisited studies revealed 

that the Army’s in-house laboratories and industry were 

between them responsible for the great majority of the 

CTEs. Collaboration between the two, facilitated by the PM 

offices and sometimes supplemented by contributions from 

other government laboratories, universities, and some of 

our overseas partners, was absolutely essential to the 

successful development of the studied systems. While all 

these parties were important, the Army leadership must 

look to ensure the continued strength of the entities firmly 

under its control, the in-house laboratories. 

While the in-house laboratories face several challenges 

(among them, declining budgets and a diminished focus on 

basic research), perhaps the most important is the difficulty 

in hiring and retaining talented personnel. No amount of 

money or facilities can produce good results without expert 

personnel. Our survey of important personnel-related 

studies and legislation has found that though there is broad 

agreement on the importance of personnel reform and on 

some of the steps that should be taken, the federal 

government has consistently withheld from laboratory 

managers authorities that would improve the laboratories’ 

personnel posture. 

The health of the laboratory system should be of acute 

concern to DOD and the Army. As a starting point, it is 

important to monitor and assess laboratory operations, both 

to ensure that the laboratories are meeting the Nation’s 

needs and to clearly highlight those areas (such as the 

personnel management practices discussed above) that 

would benefit from adjustment. Drawing on published 
CONCLUDING REMARKS AND THE WAY AHEAD 95 

 

studies and their own experiences in both the government 

and private sector in performing and managing R&D, 

Lyons et al. made several proposals on this issue.77 They 

listed means to measure the effectiveness of a laboratory 

and suggested a three-pronged approach: external peer 

review for quality, customer rating of timeliness and 

effectiveness, and review by senior Army stakeholders as 

to the overall S&T approach and priorities. Some progress 

is being made. For example, ARL uses the National 

Research Council to do a peer review, the technical 

directors of the RDECs do the customer ratings, and a 

special team of senior Army managers at the three-star 

level has at one time represented the stakeholders. 

Unfortunately this team of stakeholders has been 

disbanded. We believe something equivalent to this review 

process should be initiated at all S&T laboratories. 

Assessments are only a beginning. Preserving and 

promoting a robust Army capability in weapons 

development will require the combined efforts of many 

people, chief among them the Secretary of Defense, the 

Secretary of the Army, and the congressional committees. 

These parties need not look far for places to begin. We 

recommend three broad steps. First, the Secretary of 

Defense and the Service Secretaries should articulate their 

continued commitment to the importance and value of the 

Service research laboratories. The DOD should start by 

making full use of the authorities already granted it in law, 

such as relaxing personnel ceilings and relying on budget 

controls. The DDR&E should develop and propose to 

Congress legislation to address additional laboratory issues, 

particularly legislation that will enhance the authority of the 

77 John Lyons, Joseph Mait, and Dennis Schmidt, “A Strategy for 

Improving the Army Research and Development Laboratories,”

Defense and Technology Paper 12 (Washington, DC: Center for 

Technology and National Security Policy, National Defense University, 

March 2005). 
96 

laboratory directors. These, in fact, were the 

recommendations of the NRAC report discussed in Chapter 

IV.78 They should apply to all the DOD laboratories, not 

just Army laboratories and not just the corporate 

laboratories (NRL, ARL, and AFRL). 

The Hindsight Revisited reports also showed the value 

of close collaboration between the Army technical staff and 

industry. Whatever future laboratory reforms are 

undertaken, careful attention should be paid to promoting 

such collaboration. The Army should undertake more longterm collaborations with the private sector, especially in 

basic and early applied research in areas where the private 

sector has taken the lead. When using LSIs, efforts should 

be made to ensure that the in-house expertise continues to 

be utilized; reassuringly, this seems to be happening with 

the FCS program. 

Without champions at the very top of the Executive 

Branch it is unlikely that further improvements will be 

made, and it is likely that the posture of the laboratories 

will decline. Indeed, the recent record shows that even 

when Congress has shown its interest in addressing these 

problems and enacted authorization to do so, the Executive 

Branch has resisted changes. An example of another 

approach to laboratory reform is the legislation setting up 

an alternative personnel system at NBS.79 Patterned on the 

model legislation drafted by OSTP, Congress gave the 

authority to create the personnel system directly to the 

Director of NBS, thereby circumventing some levels of the 

Executive branch.80 This legislation outlined in great detail 

the key provisions the new system should contain; it 

enabled the NBS to plan and obtain the system they wanted 

 

78 Science and Technology Community in Crisis. 79 Sec. 10, Public Law 99-574, 28 October, 1986. This was a five year 

demonstration project; it was extended indefinitely in Public Law 104-

113, 7 March, 1996. 

80 See Appendix A. 
CONCLUDING REMARKS AND THE WAY AHEAD 97 

as long as it was consistent with its authorization act. (See 

Appendix B for some details.) Such an approach, in which 

Congress by-passed OPM and other levels of bureaucracy, 

may be necessary for the DOD laboratories.

We believe that the Hindsight Revisited studies of the 

role of technology in weapons development have been 

useful and we suggest that the other Services undertake 

similar retrospective reviews. For the Army (and this very 

likely applies to the other Services) we conclude that for 

future success in developing weapons systems there must 

be a balance of technical competences in the DOD 

laboratories and their counterpart laboratories in industry. 

Neither group can do the job alone. The Army in-house 

laboratories must be supported by sufficient funding, strong 

leadership, and top flight technical staff. They require 

champions at the topmost levels of the Army and of DOD. 

We have offered here suggestions as to the measures 

required to maintain and strengthen the laboratories. We 

believe strongly these steps must be taken to insure the 

effectiveness and the safety of the Nation’s warfighters in 

the future. 
 
 

Afterword 

istorical studies of the impact of DOD laboratories 

on military system development, as exemplified by 

Project Hindsight Revisited, have invariably 

demonstrated essential contributions from the laboratories 

in technology development, responsiveness to military 

crises, and above all, support to the acquisition process. In 

a technologically complex world it is essential that the 

government maintains the expertise to oversee the 

development of complex systems. As this report points out, 

and what I have observed from a Naval perspective, is that 

DOD laboratories have for many years served as a S&T 

training ground for civilian and military personnel and 

many of these personnel have subsequently moved to 

technology management and technology acquisition. 

H 

Despite the outstanding track record of the laboratories 

there is currently a mounting concern that the DOD’s 

laboratory capabilities, particularly in the oversight of very 

large, complex systems development, have been reduced by 

a decades long process of realignments, base closings, and 

the perception that there is more challenging work for 

researchers in the private sector. Other dynamics have also 

conspired to change the roles of the laboratories in military 

99 
100 

system development. These include the break-up of the 

Soviet Union, which left the United States without a 

military technology competitor; the consolidation of the 

military industrial base into a few dominant “system” 

houses or prime contractors; and the shift in developmental 

funding, particularly in information technology, from the 

DOD to industry. 

These trends have led the government to explore the 

concept of the Lead Systems Integrator (LSI) for major 

development projects such as the Army’s Future Combat 

Systems (FCS). The LSI concept has the prime contractor 

assuming many roles in program development, such as 

system architecture development and program 

management, that previously were done by government 

personnel. What is being found is that while the DOD can 

outsource much of its technology capabilities to industry it 

still needs to maintain the expertise essential for program 

oversight and adherence to military requirements. The lack 

of knowledgeable oversight by government personnel has 

recently become of concern to Congress in some major 

LSI-directed programs, including FCS. At the heart of the 

issue is that an LSI is ultimately responsible to its 

shareholders and profit margin while the government alone 

is responsible for the security (including economic 

security) of the Nation. 

The solution to strong government technology oversight 

lies in strong DOD laboratories that serve the government’s 

role in technology development and technology insertion 

but are not technology competitors with the industrial base. 

Fortunately, despite draw-downs, the DOD laboratories 

retain a strong core competency in military-related research 

and development. Furthermore, many of the base 

realignments have tied the laboratories closer to the system 

acquisition commands. It is vital that the essential functions 

of the laboratories be maintained and strengthened so that 

they may continue to provide needed oversight and sound 
AFTERWORD 101 

acquisition analysis for the government in a time of rapidly 

advancing technology and changing national threats. 

Dr. Eli Zimet 

Distinguished Research Fellow 

National Defense University 

Former Head, Expeditionary 

Warfare Department, Office of 

Naval Research 
 
 

Appendix A 

OSTP Response to 

Personnel 

Recommendations of the 

Federal Laboratory 

Review Panel 

he 

rep

rec

Council’s 

following information is from the OSTP progress 

ort81 on implementing, in the personnel area, 

ommendations of the White House Science 

Federal Laboratory Review Panel.82

T 

OSTP proposed draft model personnel legislation. The 

key features are: 

• Permits agencies to establish alternative personnel 

systems; 

• Applies to scientific and technical personnel in the 

Federal laboratories; 

103 

 

• Bases pay on performance rather than on longevity; 

81 Progress Report on Implementing the Recommendations of the White 

House Science Council’s Federal Laboratory Review Panel. 82 Report of the White House Science Council Federal Laboratory 

Review Panel. 
104 

• Creates broad pay bands; 

• Simplifies job classification; 

• Allows the pay cap to be waived for up to five 

percent of the covered positions . . . limited to 

specially qualified scientific and technical 

personnel; 

• Permits the agency head to classify positions and fix 

compensation so as to make positions competitive . 

. . [with] comparable positions outside of the 

Federal government; 

• Allows the inclusion in the alternate personnel 

systems of positions now in the Senior Executive 

Service; and 

• Permits the Naval Weapons Center and Naval 

Ocean Systems Center personnel systems (i.e., 

China Lake) to become permanent. 

In addition to the model legislation, the Progress Report 

goes on to list personnel actions within existing authority to 

improve the laboratories. The interagency group under the 

OSTP Committee on Federal Laboratories recommended 

the following: 

• Exclude laboratories from the current [1983] 

proposal to reduce the number of employees in the 

Civil Service grades 11 through 15; 

• Allocate to the laboratories more positions for 

specially qualified scientific and technical personnel 

under provisions of 5 USC 3104 and allow some 

supervisory responsibility for such positions [these 

are the ST positions]; 

• Provide government-operated laboratories with 

blanket permanent direct hire authority for all 

professional scientific and technical positions in the 

laboratories; 
APPENDIX A 105 

• Provide government-operated laboratories with 

blanket direct hire Excepted Service Appointment 

Authority for research associates; 

• Exempt laboratory summer hires in technical 

positions from manpower ceilings; 

• Include special rate schedules for engineers and 

other manpower shortage occupations in annual cost 

of living adjustments that are applied to other 

Federal pay scales; and 

• Increase the probationary period for scientific and 

technical personnel from one year to a more suitable 

period, such as three years. 
 
 

Appendix B 

New Personnel 

Authorities at the 

NBS/NIST 

he 

per

of t

National I

following are provisions of the authority for a 

sonnel system granted by statute to the director 

he National Bureau of Standards (NBS), now the 

nstitute of Standards and Technology (NIST). 

• Aggressive recruitment based on improved 

authorities. Direct hiring authority at the discretion 

of the NBS director. Flexible entry salaries. 

T 

• Classification into broad pay bands (NBS chose to 

use five, in four career paths: Scientific and 

Engineering; Scientific and Engineering 

Technician; Administrative; and Support). 

Classification and hiring decisions to be done by 

line managers with advice and counsel from NBS 

personnel specialists. 

• Pay comparability. NBS was directed to produce 

studies of pay in comparable positions in the private 

sector. Based on these studies, the NBS was 

directed to make adjustments to the pay of all of its 

employees so as to prevent the differential from 

increasing, and, if funds are available, to raise the 

107 
108 

salary of all employees to reduce the pay gap with 

the private sector. 

• Supervisory and managerial pay differentials are 

included. 

• Pay for performance. There are five levels of 

performance. The amount of pay increase depends 

on the rating; poor performers get no merit increase 

and the lowest (unsatisfactory) performers do not 

receive a cost of living raise. For individuals well 

rated but at the top of the pay band, performance 

bonuses are given. 

• NBS chose to maintain budget neutrality in its 

compensation system; i.e., the total costs should not 

increase over what it would have been under the 

standard Civil Service system. 

• Hiring and retention bonuses. 

• Reduction-in-force. Each career path is a separate 

competitive area; i.e., “bumping rights” no longer 

extend from one career path to another. 

• Senior Executive Service and Senior Technical 

positions are not included in the NBS system. 

• The probation period for new employees may be 

extended to three years for employees on careerconditional appointments. 

Many of the above provisions have since been added to 

other personnel demonstrations. However, some (e.g. pay 

comparability, direct hire authority, supervisory pay 

differentials) have not been approved in DOD. 
 

109 

Appendix C 

The Hindsight Revisited

Reports 

Summary of CTEs in the Development of 

the Abrams Tank 

The following summary provides brief explanations of 

the CTEs discussed in the Abrams Hindsight Revisited

report. Introductory material, conclusions, discussion of 

any advances not dubbed CTEs, and some analysis have 

been omitted. This summary also dispenses with references 

and citations. The full report, with complete footnotes, can 

be found at: <http://www.ndu.edu/ctnsp/Def_Tech/ 

DTP22%20Critical%20Technology%20Developments%20

Abrams%20Tank.pdf >. 

Armament Related CTEs 

Main Gun 

• The Army wanted a larger gun than the 105mm 

with which the Abrams was originally equipped. 

Though the likely candidate, a 120mm smoothbore 

gun under development in the United States and 

West Germany, was deemed not ready at the time, 
110 

the M1 designers were directed to provide a gun 

mount and turret that could handle the larger and 

heavier weapon when it became available [CTE 1]. 

This forethought paid off in 1981, when the Army 

elected to adopt the 120mm smooth bore cannon. 

The Army purchased the gun design and the knowhow and equipment to manufacture it from West 

Germany. Watervliet Arsenal installed a rotary 

forge, worked out the remaining manufacturing 

difficulties, and started production of the gun. 

• Work at the Benet Laboratory improved the 

resistance of large caliber guns like the 120mm to 

unexpected brittle fast fracture. Using linear elastic 

fracture mechanics to assess gun tube failure, 

researchers developed an understanding of the 

fatigue and fracture behavior of the tubes [CTE 2]. 

This work developed a new fracture toughness test 

specimen from a thick-walled gun barrel and a new 

test procedure that made use of the specimen. With 

these developments, both resistance to fast fracture 

and the fatigue crack growth rate could be measured 

using a cost-effective test methodology. This design 

information was used in conjunction with a 

manufacturing process known as autofrettage to 

increase gun tube life [CTE 3]. Around 1970, 

Watervliet Arsenal developed swage autofrettage, in 

which pressure applied by a mandrel replaces the 

hydraulic pressure. This process, now used worldwide, was first used on the M68 105mm gun and 

subsequently on all 120mm guns. 

Gun Accuracy 

• Errors in aiming that were tolerable for close-in 

combat were unacceptable for long-range firing. In 
APPENDIX C – ABRAMS CTES 111 

the 1960s, researchers at Frankford Arsenal put 

together an error budget (an analysis of the sources 

and size of the errors) for tank guns [CTE 4]. Their 

report was the basis for early fire-control systems 

fabricated at the Arsenal. 

• The first step in addressing these errors was to find 

a way to measure the effects. Researchers at the 

Ballistics Research Laboratory (BRL) were able to 

develop experimental, computational, analytical, 

and statistical models that could determine the 

relative magnitude of each component of error 

[CTE 5]. This resulted in the development of a 

multi-disciplinary approach that created integrated 

high-level physics-based models of the system. 

• Analysis showed that lack of straightness of the gun 

barrel was one of the key sources of error. A special 

machine press was designed at Watervliet Arsenal 

to address tube straightness and profile after 

manufacture and to correct tubes brought in from 

the fleet for overhaul [CTE 6]. 

Penetrators 

• In developing the 120mm gun, the Army made the 

key technical decision that it should be optimized 

for long-rod penetrators [CTE 7]. The Army funded 

a large research effort at BRL to perfect an armorpiercing, fin-stabilized, discarding sabot (APFSDS) 

round for the 120mm gun [CTE 8]. This was 

important in the development of one of the 

mainstays of the Abrams’ armament, the M829 

series of APFSDS long-rod penetrators. 
112 

• Modeling work was done at BRL on the structure of 

the penetrator in an effort to craft a long rod with 

the highest possible ratios of length to diameter and 

also with the highest possible density [CTE 9]. 

BRL did systems analysis of interior, exterior, and 

terminal ballistics for the rods. Based on this 

modeling, researchers determined the optimal 

materials for use in the round. 

• Depleted uranium (DU) replaced tungsten as the 

main penetrator material in the mid 1970s [CTE 

10]. DU has superior ballistic qualities: the tip of a 

DU penetrator shears such that it remains sharp as it 

passes through armor, so that even with diminished 

velocity a DU round can defeat a target’s armor. 

Battelle Northwest Laboratory suggested a new 

process to improve the compressive strength of the 

DU rod [CTE 11]. The Oak Ridge Y12 plant helped 

out as well by supplying tungsten and DU for the 

program. 

• Research work on penetrators drew on unique and 

vital Army resources [CTE 12]. Supercomputers 

enabled ballisticians to run very complex models on 

penetrator-target interactions. Another facility, 

Experimental Facility 9 at Aberdeen Proving 

Ground (APG), was constructed to handle DU in 

bullets and armor. 

Sabots 

• Modern kinetic energy tank ammunition is normally 

composed of a narrow long-rod penetrator 

surrounded by a sabot, which expands the diameter 

of the round to the full barrel diameter of the gun. A 

slipping obturator was developed at Picatinny 
APPENDIX C – ABRAMS CTES 113 

Arsenal and used to make APFSDS ammunition 

compatible with the rifled 105mm gun [CTE 13]. 

The slipping made it possible for the sabot to 

engage the rifling of the barrel while the round itself 

turned at fewer revolutions per second than does the 

obturator. 

• A tipping ring was designed for the rear of the sabot 

that pivoted the sabot segments so that they were in 

a position to fly cleanly away from the penetrator 

[CTE 14]. R&D work at Picatinny Arsenal and 

BRL also produced a series of designs for the sabot 

focusing on exact shape of the scoops or ramps. The 

final double ramp sabot shape used on the M829 

was the result of computer modeling by BRL. 

• Sabots were first made of steel, then of aluminum 

and magnesium alloys, and today are made of 

composite materials. Staff at BRL used finite 

element stress analysis to establish the proper 

geometric design of optimized, minimum-mass, 

aluminum sabots for both the 120mm M829 and 

M829A1 [CTE 15]. The next step was the 

incorporation of composite materials. Careful 

experimentation defined the lay-up of the fibers in 

the composite. Investigators at BRL—teamed with 

composite material specialists at the Lawrence 

Livermore National Laboratory and with industry—

developed the means to design the architecture and 

processing for the first composite sabot used for the 

M829A2 round [CTE 16]. 
114 

Propellants 

• Among the most important aspects of developing 

better propellants was modeling. Efforts at BRL 

resulted in an improved computer code called the 

XKTC [CTE 17]. XKTC has been widely 

distributed among America’s allies. Studies with a 

scanning electron microscope revealed the micromechanisms of the behavior of the propellant in the 

M829 and other 120mm rounds. These studies led 

BRL to develop a new propellant design that 

incorporated partial transverse cuts at regular 

longitudinal distances in the sticks instead of a 

lengthwise slot, thus allowing multiple perforations 

in long, large-diameter sticks that both packed well 

and provided highly progressive gas generation 

rates with time [CTE 18]. This combination of 

features provided an increase in interior ballistic 

performance. 

Armor and Other Survivability Related 

CTEs 

Armor 

• Through the use of M&S at the U.S. Army TankAutomotive Research and Development Center, and 

other system engineering tools, the designs of the 

M1 series tanks optimized the vehicle silhouette, the 

location and type of armor, the location of the crew 

and vulnerable components, and many other 

survivability factors [CTE 19]. A new hull 

configuration demanded innovations in the 

production process. In-house engineers from several 

laboratories and arsenals established joint design 
APPENDIX C – ABRAMS CTES 115 

and welding techniques to be used in fabricating the 

hull [CTE 20]. 

• The M1 program started with the intent to use what 

the Army called “Special Armor” developed 

through exchanges with the United Kingdom and 

through U.S. indigenous advances. The British 

concept, also known as Chobham armor, 

complemented parallel work in U.S. Army 

laboratories [CTE 21]. Details of the Abrams’ 

armor design and composition are classified, but 

this much can be said: instead of using a single 

material—steel—the Chobham concept uses steel 

over one or more layers of different materials, each 

layer designed to perform a different function 

against incoming munitions [CTE 22]. The armor is 

therefore a layered composite. Developers made 

heavy use of experiments and early computer 

models to develop ever more complex and effective 

composite armor. 

• BRL researchers developed new armor concepts, 

the most notable being one that incorporated DU 

[CTE 23]. Selected for its high density and special 

performance in high-shear fracture, DU makes an 

ideal armor component. This upgrade was fielded 

on the M1A1 and M1A2 models. 

• Staff at BRL designed a separate compartment to 

stow ammunition; the compartment makes use of 

automatic doors [CTE 24]. The compartment 

design also provided sufficient venting for any 

explosion by installing blow-out panels that would 

direct energy from the blast away from the crew. 
116 

• Controlling the interaction of stowed high explosive 

warheads was critically important to an ammunition 

compartment concept. BRL developed less shockand crush-sensitive warheads and included plastic 

shields between stowed rounds [CTE 25]. 

Researchers also developed a new test rig, a three 

ton pendulum that quantifies the response of 

ammunition components to impact [CTE 26]. 

• When the 120mm gun technology was purchased 

from Germany, a design was included for 

combustible sidewalls in the casings. However, 

Army tests revealed some deficiencies, such as 

incomplete combustion, low strength, and trouble 

with surface coatings. A team from Picatinny 

Arsenal and two contractors—Honeywell and 

Armtec Defense Products (now Esterline Armtec)—

resolved these difficulties [CTE 27].

• Infrared sensors in the Abrams’ crew compartment 

can detect a fire in a few milliseconds and (if it is a 

petroleum fire) extinguish it within tenths of a 

second using Halon agent [CTE 28]. This upgraded 

fire suppression capability grew out of a TACOM 

program that funded efforts in the private sector and 

academia that significantly advanced the state of the 

art in key areas such as sensor technology and flow 

of the suppression agent. 

• Another area of crew protection for the Abrams was 

defense against nuclear, biological, or chemical 

(NBC) attack. The Army’s Edgewood Chemical 

Biological Center (ECBC) was tasked with 

analyzing the feasibility of a hybrid collective 

protection system that would make use of both 

individual gear and compartment-wide filtration and 
APPENDIX C – ABRAMS CTES 117 

overpressure. ECBC awarded a contract to develop 

Hybrid Collective Protection Equipment (HCPE). 

This HCPE effort included the development of the 

NBC filter currently being used on the Abrams 

[CTE 29]. 

System Testing, Modeling, and Analysis 

• BRL began developing models and computer codes 

to predict the vulnerability of combat vehicles (both 

aircraft and ground vehicles) shortly after WWII 

[CTE 30]. Until 1984, these models were 

deterministic, meaning that they could not account 

for the stochastic nature of the interaction between 

an attacking munition and the target vehicle. 

• Beginning in 1984, BRL developed computer 

models to predict the outcome of specific live-fire 

test shots [CTE 31]. These new models characterize 

behind-armor debris by the spatial distribution, 

mass, and velocity of all fragments and predict 

which components or crew members will be hit by 

the behind-armor fragments. The models take into 

account the probabalistic nature of the input 

variables and produce probability distributions for 

the output variables. 

Engine and Drive System CTEs 

Engine 

• Though some felt that the Abrams should have a 

diesel engine (an existing program had generated a 

possible model), a gas turbine engine was chosen 

for the tank. The AGT1500 gas turbine engine was 
118 

part of the Chrysler design that won the XM1 

competition [CTE 32]. A viable gas turbine engine 

was available in part because TACOM initiated an 

R&D program around 1960 in gas turbine engine 

technology for ground vehicle applications [CTE 

33]. 

• Engine designers had to find a way to provide 

sufficient air cleaner volume to allow the vehicle to 

operate for a reasonable period without cleaning the 

air filters. The upgraded M1A2 filtration system, 

developed and supplied by Donaldson Company, 

uses a pulse jet air cleaner that removes the need for 

the crew to manually clean the filter [CTE 34]. 

Transmission 

• Allison Transmission, a division of General Motors, 

created a hybrid hydrostatic-mechanical 

transmission [CTE 35]. Allison ultimately 

recommended that the hydromechanical technology 

not be pursued for the XM1 effort. 

• Allison developed a transmission based on the 

Allison on-highway commercial transmission 

design. The new transmission, the X1100, is a 35-

cubic-inch, radial displacement, hydrostatic steering 

mechanism that remains unique in the world. [CTE 

36]. The X1100 also incorporated power-assisted 

service brakes that allowed maximum-effort brake 

stops with minimal brake pedal force. Continued 

development of the X1100 multi-plate, wet disk 

brake system has resulted in an extremely durable, 

reliable, high-performance brake system [CTE 37]. 
APPENDIX C – ABRAMS CTES 119 

Track and Suspension System 

• With the increased speed and weight of the Abrams, 

the suspension system needed attention, especially 

if the tank was to perform well on rough terrain. 

The suspension system for the Abrams M1A2 has 

larger torsion bars and larger shock absorbers, 

which double the damping capacity [CTE 38]. To 

produce a robust torsion bar it was necessary to use 

steel in heavy section processed to high strength 

levels. This required the use of advanced heattreating methods available in the private sector. 

• The T–156 track system initially installed on the 

M1 had integral rubber track pads that exhibited far 

less track life than designers had hoped. A 

TACOM-sponsored re-engineering effort resulted in 

the T–158 track system, which had replaceable pads 

that met the initial track-life goals [CTE 39]. T–158 

track system was later optimized for weight 

reduction to produce the T–158LL track system, 

which was installed on the M1A2. 

• Research was performed in academia to analyze a 

problem with the drive sprocket on the M1A2. The 

result of this effort was a new sprocket better suited 

to the high tension. This resulted in a 20-percent 

improvement in track end connector wear and a 

reduced acoustic signature [CTE 40]. 
120 

Vetronics, C4ISR, and Fire-Control CTEs 

Vetronics 

• TACOM envisioned a significant change to the 

electronic integration of the Abrams using a digital 

architecture approach, dubbed vetronics, similar to 

the integrated avionics used in aircraft. General 

Dynamics Land Systems, working under a 

DARPA/TACOM contract, generated important 

algorithms that were applied to vetronics. This 

formed the basis of the M1A2’s digital intravehicle 

architecture. The vetronics architecture supports 

almost instantaneous, push-button selection on the 

gunner’s controls, provides connections to 

significantly more inputs from a variety of sensors 

(range, cant, wind, etc.), and allows more rapid 

adjustment of the position of the main gun [CTE 

41]. 

C4ISR 

• An early-1980s concept put forth by the Army 

Science Board was aimed at tying together the 

various pieces of information generated during the 

course of ground vehicle operations to give tank 

crews the ability to know where they are, to see 

what other tanks see, and to exchange information 

between vehicles [CTE 42]. The Army laboratories 

at TACOM, Picatinny Arsenal, and CECOM moved 

forward using digital capability to make enhanced 

battlefield communication a reality. The concept of 

an overarching Battlefield Management System was 

first manifest in the Intervehicular Information 

System (IVIS) [CTE 43]. Communications 

networking architecture and protocols were 
APPENDIX C – ABRAMS CTES 121 

developed by CECOM for IVIS in the late 1980s 

and early 1990s. 

• A key enabler of this battlefield communication 

concept is the M1A2’s Position/Navigation 

(PosNav) system [CTE 44]. PosNav is a nuclearhardened, autonomous navigation system with a 

GPS component backed up by an inertial navigation 

system. When connected to IVIS using the 

protocols described above, the system enables the 

creation, sharing, and constant updating of the 

battlefield picture. 

• C4 capability was further enhanced by the Vehicle 

Intercommunication System [CTE 45]. This system 

included the capability to reduce ambient vehicle 

noise significantly by using an electronic Active 

Noise Reduction unit. 

• The idea of extending C4 capabilities across all 

battlefield elements was expanded upon in FBCB2 

packages that were developed by CECOM in the 

late 1980s and early 1990s [CTE 46]. These 

packages were appliquéd on the M1A1 and 

embedded into the M1A2SEP. FBCB2 significantly 

enhanced situational awareness as well as command 

and control to the lowest echelons. 

Thermal Imagery 

• Non-standardized components meant that the Army 

bore the cost of outfitting and maintaining a variety 

of thermal-imaging systems for individual weapons 

platforms. A common sensor module approach, 

pioneered by the Night Vision Laboratory (NVL) in 

the early 1970s, reduced the skyrocketing cost of 
122 

custom imaging systems [CTE 47]. These Common 

Modules were the basis for a whole generation of 

thermal imagers that the Army used not only in the 

Abrams, but also in missile systems and helicopters. 

As a result of these efforts, the Army and the other 

Services were able to achieve parts standardization 

and significantly reduce costs. This approach 

became accepted production practice by industry 

and has led to affordable first and second generation 

FLIR thermal imaging systems on the Abrams. 

• An NVL researcher and an industry researcher 

quantified recognition performance in terms of 

performance related to a minimum resolvable 

temperature difference [CTE 48]. This 

measurement technique was subsequently 

standardized at NVL and has become an industry 

standard for performance evaluation of infrared 

systems. 

• The M1A2 added a commander’s independent 

thermal imaging system, which also was fabricated 

using the common modules approach [CTE 49]. 

This system gave the tank commander a sighting 

system completely independent of the gunner, thus 

allowing the commander and the gunner to identify 

and track separate targets simultaneously. 

Fire-Control System and Related Sensors 

• The Abrams’ lethality is distinguished by its digital 

fire-control system, which integrates data collected 

by sensors that gather any information that might 

affect the flight of the round and processes it with a 

digital ballistic computer [CTE 50]. 
APPENDIX C – ABRAMS CTES 123 

• The ruby laser, the first successful optical laser, was 

the basis for the first type-classified, man-portable 

rangefinder in the mid-1960s. In the 1970s, Army 

researchers first developed laser rangefinders based 

on Neodymium: Yttrium Aluminum Garnet (Nd: 

YAG) lasers [CTE 51]. Additional efforts yielded 

an industry-developed eyesafe Erbium laser 

rangefinder, which replaced the Nd: YAG laser on 

the Abrams [CTE 52]. 

• The muzzle reference system (MRS) measures the 

deviation of the muzzle with respect to a fixed point 

on the turret [CTE 53]. This design was modified 

when Benet technologists discovered severe 

resonances that greatly amplify local strains and 

accelerations in the tube—enough to cause damage 

to the MRS [CTE 54]. 

• Information from the laser rangefinder, the muzzle 

reference system, and other sensors are collected 

and provided to the other primary component of the 

fire-control system, the Abrams’ digital ballistic 

computer. In the 1970s, engineers at Frankford 

Arsenal were able to develop a digitized fire 

computer with greatly improved speed and accuracy 

[CTE 55]. It represents a major leap forward from 

the analog system used by the M60A1. 
 

124 

Summary of CTEs in the Development of 

the Apache Helicopter

The following summary provides brief explanations of 

the CTEs discussed in the Apache Hindsight Revisited

report. Introductory material, conclusions, discussion of 

any advances not dubbed CTEs, and some analysis have 

been omitted. This summary also dispenses with references 

and citations. The full report, with complete footnotes, can 

be found at: <http://www.ndu.edu/ctnsp/Def_Tech/ 

DTP%2026%20Apache%20Helicopter.pdf>. 

Engine and Powertrain 

T700 Engine 

• Problems with insufficient power, poor reliability, 

high maintenance needs, and poor specific fuel 

consumption in existing helicopter engines led the 

Army to develop a new engine for its next 

generation of helicopters. The Aviation Applied 

Technology Directorate (AATD) was tasked to set 

requirements for these engines, with special 

emphasis on maintainability [CTE 1]. Their 

approach, drawing on their “1500 Demonstrator 

Engine” program, was to estimate the outer limits of 

the existing technology and incorporate challenging 

goals in the request for proposals. 

• General Electric’s (GE’s) design for a 1500-1600 

horsepower engine was selected to power the 

Army’s new generation of helicopters, including 

both the Apache and the Black Hawk. GE 
APPENDIX C – APACHE CTES 125 

simplified the combustor by going to a machinedring configuration that was made in one piece, 

improving performance and life [CTE 2]. GE also 

developed a scheme for removing particles from the 

incoming air, using cyclonic effects (swirl vanes) in 

the front of the compressor together with an air 

pump to eject the separated particles [CTE 3]. 

• GE engineers also overcame several initial 

challenges. Forced vibration of compressor blades 

required some engine redesign [CTE 4]. Also, the 

unusually high rotational speed of the compressor 

shaft and the power shaft called for improvements 

in the properties and design of the disks and blades. 

In one of the first applications of powder 

metallurgy, GE learned how to manufacture these 

assemblies in one piece that they termed “blisks,” 

using powder metallurgy with a nickel-based alloy 

[CTE 5]. 

• The Army engineers co-located at NASA Glenn in 

Cleveland developed a process, now standard in the 

industry, for applying ceramic coatings to line the 

combustor and the blades in the hot section of the 

engine [CTE 6]. Ceramic coating allows higher 

operating temperatures and hence greater 

efficiencies. 

• The Army funded 6.1 basic research at universities 

on rare-earth magnets that enabled significant 

weight and size reductions for starters and 

generators for the Apache [CTE 7]. 

• A significant DOD program paralleling and 

reinforcing the Apache work is the Joint Turbine 

Advanced Gas Generator program [CTE 8]. It is a 
126 

three-phase program with ambitious goals to 

produce a 120 percent increase in the ratio of shaft 

horsepower to engine weight and a decrease in 

specific fuel consumption of 40 percent. 

Transmission 

• Among other key features, the Army required that 

the transmission be protected against sudden loss of 

oil so that the Apache could sustain significant 

damage and still fly home. The resulting run-dry 

design enables the transmission to operate for up to 

30 minutes after losing oil [CTE 9]. 

• For gears and bearings, the Army/NASA work 

overcame barriers to higher transmission 

performance in terms of speed, loading, and 

operating temperatures. Work on double-vacuum 

melted, high hot-hardness bearing steel and on gear 

alloys “doubled the power density compared to 

previous engines and vastly improved reliability” 

and removed a major barrier to progress in engine 

and transmission technology [CTE 10]. 

Survivability and Structural Advances 

Vulnerability and Susceptibility Reduction 

• Important strides were made in ballistic protection. 

The Army Materials Laboratory at Watertown 

developed the concept of using a transparent 

laminate armor material to separate front and rear 

cockpits [CTE 11]. The material, a 

glass/polycarbonate laminate, was patented used 

above the seat line. 
APPENDIX C – APACHE CTES 127 

• The development of ceramic composite materials by 

industry and the Army laboratory at Watertown led 

to additional ballistic protection for Apache crew 

members [CTE 12]. Boron carbide was 

demonstrated to be the most effective ceramic 

material; when coupled with glass-reinforced 

composite back-up material, it was able to defeat 

small arms threats. Later, the use of Kevlar was 

proposed by Watertown as a material for the rear of 

the boron carbide armor. This combination provided 

even better weight efficiency and was chosen for 

use in the Apache for the helicopter crew seats. 

• Another flight-safety effort addressed the hazards 

presented by communication and power lines. A 

cooperative AATD/Canadian effort developed a 

system for wire strike protection [CTE 13]. The 

design was very basic: a cutter/deflector system 

consisting of an upper and lower cutter that would 

sever steel, copper and aluminum wires. The 

resulting system was retrofitted to the Apaches in 

the mid-1980s and built into most Army helicopters. 

• The Army placed great emphasis on protecting the 

Apache’s crew during a hard landing [CTE 14]. 

This emphasis was especially prudent considering 

that the Army required the Advanced Attack 

Helicopter (AAH) to execute nap-of-earth (NOE) 

operations; low-speed, ground-hugging flying, 

sometimes at night, increases the probability of 

having an accident. An AATD helicopter crash 

research program involving subject matter experts 

from private-sector safety groups was initiated in 

the late 1950s and continued into the 1980s. Data 

from the program led to the first ever crash-survival 

design guide for light fixed- and rotary-wing 
128 

aircraft [CTE 15]. As a result of this significant step 

forward, the Apache crew has a 95 percent chance 

of surviving a crash with no spinal or thermal injury 

when the helicopter approaches the ground at rates 

of up to 42 feet per second. 

• The Army’s development of sound design criteria 

for crashworthy fuel systems produced the largest 

payoff in the endeavor to improve rotorcraft 

(including Apache) crash safety. Changes were 

made in both fuel system materials and design 

[CTE 16]. Self-sealing and tear-resistant polymers 

enhanced protection of the fuel tank. Changes were 

also made in the breakaway, self-sealing valves; 

fuel lines; filling system; and vents. 

• The Apache also incorporated several advances 

designed to prevent the aircraft from being targeted 

at all [CTE 17]. In-house laboratories such as 

AATD and CECOM, working closely with industry, 

provided advances in the following areas: engine 

exhaust IR suppressor design; the ALQ-144 IR 

countermeasure system, a device designed to jam 

incoming heat-seeking missiles; low-signature paint 

and windshield concepts; and radar and laser 

warning systems. 

Structural Advances 

• During the Apache’s development, the idea of using 

integral armor for structural load-carrying purposes 

as well as for ballistic protection was advanced by 

Hughes Helicopter during discussions with Army 

materials scientists. Hughes utilized this innovative 

approach to realize significant weight savings [CTE 

18]. 
APPENDIX C – APACHE CTES 129 

• Among the next major structural challenges for 

ongoing Apache development work was the design 

of an all-composite rotor blade for the aircraft. 

Efforts by Hughes, Kaman Aircraft, and AATD 

have paved the way for the eventual addition of an 

all-composite rotor blade to the Apache [CTE 19]. 

When the Apache was first fielded, composite 

materials were not yet available that could meet the 

AAH program ballistic requirement at an acceptable 

weight. Research done after initial fielding of the 

Apache by AATD, combined with experience 

gained by Boeing in developing composite blades 

for other aircraft, resulted in new materials and 

analytical tools for blade spar sizing. This allowed 

the design of a new single spar, all-composite main 

rotor blade for the Apache, which is planned for 

fielding in 2008 [CTE 20]. 

• A group of Army researchers co-located at NASA 

Langley has been among the leaders in quantifying 

the delamination process in composite materials. In 

the 1990s, this work led to accepted test methods 

and guidelines for determination of delamination, 

which is highly important to the ability to predict 

failure in composite materials [CTE 21]. 

Avionics, Fire Control, and Weapons 

TADS/PNVS 

• The Target Acquisition and Designation Sight and 

the Pilot Night Vision Sensor (TADS/PNVS) are 

key to the Apache’s ability to operate at all times, 

especially in all conditions, to find, track, and fire 

upon targets. Designed by Martin Marietta, 
130 

TADS/PNVS is an integrated system that pulled 

together for the first time thermal imaging devices, 

laser range finders and laser designators [CTE 22]. 

The sensors for both units are located in a rotating 

turret mounted on the Apache’s nose. 

• Critical to the TADS/PNVS is the FLIR sensor. 

With work done for the Abrams tank program on a 

minimum resolvable temperature metrics as a 

foundation, NVL produced a mathematical model 

that could be used to evaluate the performance of IR 

devices [CTE 23]. 

• The Apache required significantly longer 

operational target engagement ranges than existing 

systems; it demanded a FLIR with more than twice 

the resolution of the one used by the Abrams. The 

Apache initially had a non-standard high line rate 

imaging system that was enabled by significant 

improvements in detector and optics quality 

sponsored by NVL and Frankford Arsenal [CTE 

24]. The FLIR in PNVS also had special needs 

night piloting and NOE flying. The different tradeoffs in FLIR system design compared to those for 

targeting systems were pursued to optimize sensor 

design for piloting parameters, such as field-of-view 

and sensitivity sufficient for background 

discrimination [CTE 25]. 

• The Apache crew uses the Integrated Helmet and 

Display Sight System, better known as IHADSS, to 

slave the helmet to the TADS/PNVS sensor turret 

so that the pilot views the terrain and target area 

through the PNVS [CTE 26]. Similarly, TADS is 

slaved to the co-pilot/gunner’s helmet, as is the 

chain gun. Infrared linkages developed by industry 
APPENDIX C – APACHE CTES 131 

and Frankford Arsenal make this possible. With 

IHADSS, symbols representing such important 

information as aircraft heading, air speed, altitude, 

and target cueing are superimposed on displays that 

fit in front of the pilot’s and gunner’s right eyes 

[CTE 27]. This enables the crew to fly and fight 

without having to look at the panel-mounted 

displays in the cockpit. The Army laboratory colocated at NASA Ames played a key role in 

optimizing symbology for the Apache. Design 

standards were established and transitioned to 

industry to ensure that the proposed symbols and 

the pilot’s feel for the motion of the helicopter were 

matched [CTE 28]. 

Fire Control 

• Important work on fire control for Army rotorcraft 

was done at BRL during the 1970s and early 1980s. 

BRL research provided a general 6-degree of 

freedom model for ballistic weapons, namely gun 

ammunition and rockets, which could compensate 

for helicopter downwash, projectile drag, aircraft 

motion, atmospheric conditions, etc [CTE 29]. This 

model was integrated with Apache’s on-board fire 

control computer. 

 

• The software controls and integrates multiple 

complex target acquisition systems. This capability 

to manage these systems evolved from fundamental 

work done at Frankford Arsenal in the mid-1970s in 

software algorithms. Fire control computer 

performance was enabled by these innovative 

algorithms coupled with equally innovative 

boresighting aids and procedures [CTE 30]. 
132 

• The Military Standard 1553 databus concept was a 

key technology required to enable the high degree 

of integration used by the Apache’s onboard 

processing and sensor systems to display relevant 

piloting and targeting information to the crew [CTE 

31]. The 1553 databus technology was derived 

primarily from work done on the Air Force’s B-1 

bomber program. Among the things it integrated 

into the fire control system was the radar frequency 

interferometer (RFI) [CTE 32]. Industry led 

development of the RFI. The system, which is 

integrated with the Longbow MMW, passively 

detects and analyzes radar emissions from potential 

targets. 

• The Improved Data Modem (IDM) permits the 

Apache to digitally communicate crucial threat, 

targeting, and other operational information with 

other aircraft and with ground units so that the force 

has a unified picture of the battlefield [CTE 33]. 

This could be considered one of the first elements 

of network-centric warfare for Army aviation. 

Industry was heavily involved with development of 

the IDM, as was the Army’s in-house avionics 

program. 

Longbow Millimeter Wave Radar 

• The AH-64D version of the Apache incorporated 

upgrades in several areas, but the most notable of 

these was the Longbow Millimeter Wave (MMW) 

fire control radar. Two early programs were 

important to advancing MMW radar applications to 

armed helicopters [CTE 34]. The first was the 

Frankford Arsenal/Emerson Electric Moving Target 

Radar System Program. The second helicopter radar 
APPENDIX C – APACHE CTES 133 

of note was a Texas Instruments system that used a 

transmitter in the leading edge of the UH-1 Huey 

rotor blades and a receiver on the nose of the 

helicopter to detect targets. This system never left 

the R&D stage, but served as exploratory 

technology that helped to lead to the Longbow 

radar. 

• In the 1980s, Martin Marietta defined the 

advantages of using a higher frequency MMW radar 

to detect, classify, and recognize the target and 

transfer the information for use by a radar seeker 

missile weapons system. This stimulated an Army 

program that (which is classified, thus limiting 

information on the R&D effort) yielded the 

Longbow [CTE 35]. 

• Important to the MMW radar was the very fast 

analog circuitry provided by gallium arsenide 

(GaAs) semiconductors. A DOD program 

administered through DARPA established the 

industrial base to supply GaAs to the military [CTE 

36]. This program, known as the MIMIC 

(microwave monolithic integrated circuits) 

program, provided the basis for product, process, 

and applications technologies. 

• Another key innovation associated with the 

Longbow radar is its location on the mast [CTE 

37]. A mast-mounted sight allowed the helicopter to 

remain concealed. Aerodynamic studies conducted 

at Army-NASA sites were key to the location of the 

Longbow radar [CTE 38]. 
134 

Weapons Suite 

• The Apache was designed primarily as an antitank 

weapons system, and its main armament for that 

mission is the Hellfire (HELicopter Launched 

FIRE-and-forget) missile. The Hellfire with which 

the Apache was initially equipped was guided by a 

semi-active laser (SAL) seeker [CTE 39]. A new 

type of radar-guided Hellfire was designed for use 

with the Longbow [CTE 40]. It provided a true 

autonomous fire-and-forget capability. 

• Below the nose of the Apache is a rapid-fire, 

turreted 30mm chain gun. Engineers at Hughes 

Helicopter came up with a new single-barreled 

chain gun design for the Apache that could fire 11 

rounds per second, was highly reliable, resistant to 

dirt and wear, and could continue to fire when 

rounds failed [CTE 41]. 

Modeling and Simulation and Other Enabling 

Technologies 

Co-Located Army-NASA Research Sites 

• Much of the modeling work related to helicopter 

development stemmed from co-location of Army 

engineers and scientists at NASA research facilities. 

For instance, interaction between the rotor and the 

airframe of the AH-64, particularly in the tail, 

caused potentially catastrophic vibrations [CTE 

42]. Applying advanced structural dynamics 

analysis and comprehensive aeromechanics 

analysis, researchers worked with industry in a 

major configuration redesign of the tail, relocating 
APPENDIX C – APACHE CTES 135 

the horizontal stabilizer and converting it to a 

movable stabilator. 

• Significant advances in rotorcraft computer codes 

used to simulate complex helicopter aerodynamics 

and helicopter flight control laws resulted in 

development of an Engineering Design Simulator 

for Apache at Boeing Mesa [CTE 43]. This 

significantly reduced the time required to complete 

qualification and testing of the AH-64D model, and 

put this weapons system in the hands of the user 

much sooner than would have otherwise been 

possible. 

Other Collaborative Efforts 

• A recent collaborative effort that could have a farreaching impact on many future DOD systems is the 

effort known as the Rotorcraft Pilot Associate 

(RPA) program, developed and tested by Boeing 

and AATD [CTE 44]. The RPA program developed 

very robust Cognitive Decision Aiding System 

software intended to reduce the workload of the 

Apache’s crew in the highly complex, low altitude 

combat environment. 
 

136 

Summary of CTEs in the Development of 

the Stinger and Javelin Missiles 

The following summary provides brief explanations of 

the CTEs discussed in the Stinger and Javelin Hindsight 

Revisited report. Introductory material, conclusions, 

discussion of any advances not dubbed CTEs, and some 

analysis have been omitted. This summary also dispenses 

with references and citations. The full report, with complete 

footnotes, can be found at: <http://www.ndu.edu/ctnsp/ 

Def_Tech/ DTP%2033%20Missiles.pdf>. 

Stinger 

Seeker 

• The Stinger is a fire-and-forget missile, meaning 

that its onboard systems must be able to engage the 

target without further assistance from the gunner or 

any other external source. Stinger Basic improved 

upon earlier seekers by using a technique called 

conical scanning developed by General Dynamics 

[CTE 1]. 

• The next version of Stinger, Stinger–POST (for 

Passive Optical Seeker Technique), made three 

major improvements to the seeker. The reticle 

seeker was replaced with a rosette scan seeker, 

patented by General Dynamics, which provided 

more accurate target discrimination [CTE 2]. 

Stinger–POST was equipped with a dual wave 

length detector assembly: one detector that operated 

at the mid-infrared and another detector that 

operated at the near ultraviolet (UV) [CTE 3]. This 

improved Stinger’s all-aspect engagement 

capability—the missile was no longer as dependent 
APPENDIX C – STINGER CTES 137 

on picking up engine heat, which would always be 

strongest at the rear of an aircraft. The third major 

improvement in Stinger–POST was the 

incorporation of integrated digital circuits to 

perform the seeker signal processing functions 

[CTE 4]. Conceived, developed, and demonstrated 

by Missile Research, Development and Engineering 

Center (MRDEC), the concept was embraced and 

incorporated by the prime contractor, General 

Dynamics. 

• Stinger RMP introduced another major 

improvement. This design (as the name 

Reprogrammable Microprocessor indicates) enabled 

the onboard microprocessor to be updated with new 

software as new information on threats and 

countermeasures became available [CTE 5]. The 

reprogrammable circuitry, conceived and developed 

by General Dynamics, made it possible to add 

capability to the missile without fully redesigning it. 

• The missile has an onboard battery to power the 

systems after launch. Based on PM-funded work at 

Sandia National Laboratory, a lithium-based battery 

was developed in the mid-1990s for use in Stinger 

Block I as a replacement for the initial chromate 

battery [CTE 6]. 

Guidance and Control 

• Though the computation necessary to track a target 

is straightforward, the instrumentation necessary to 

make it possible is complex. The Stinger is a rolling 

airframe missile, so the guidance system needs to 

know where in its roll the missile is and must angle 

its canards many times a second in order to achieve 
138 

a consistent direction. The principle rolling 

airframe-related improvement over Redeye 

introduced with Stinger Basic was a better 

servomechanism to drive these canards [CTE 7]. 

The servomechanism was developed by General 

Dynamics. The latest version of the Stinger—Block 

I—has a roll frequency sensor that uses laser ring 

gyros to measure the roll rate [CTE 8]. The roll 

frequency sensor was developed in a collaborative 

effort between the PM, Raytheon, and Honeywell. 

• The missile makes an adjustment in the last 

moments before it impacts the target, turning from 

the focus on the high-temperature plume of the 

target aircraft to the airframe itself. This is done 

using a Target Adaptive Guidance circuit, which 

was perfected for the Stinger by a collaborative 

effort between the contractor and MRDEC [CTE 

9]. 

Propulsion and Warhead 

• Stinger propulsion performance was enhanced over 

earlier systems by advances in propellant 

technology. These were achieved principally 

through improvements to the propellant binder. 

Researchers at the Propulsion Directorate at 

Redstone Arsenal developed a binder polymer 

system based on liquid hydroxyl-terminated 

polybutadiene (HTPB) that enables a wider range of 

burn characteristics and structural capabilities than 

earlier binders for composite propellants [CTE 10]. 

Atlantic Research Corporation (ARC) used HTPB 

when it tailored the specific propellant formulations 

(one each for the boost and sustain phases) for 

Stinger. The capabilities of HTPB propellant 
APPENDIX C – STINGER CTES 139 

allowed ARC to design a flight motor for Stinger in 

which both the boost and sustain propellant grains 

are bonded to the motor case [CTE 11]. Casebonded propellants are cheaper, more efficient, and 

more reliable than earlier cartridge-loaded grain. 

Modeling and Simulation 

• The Stinger program was the first missile 

development program to utilize computer-based 

simulation from design through production. For 

Stinger, full-up simulations were developed by a 

community consisting of MRDEC, the prime 

contractor, the Army Materiel Systems Analysis 

Activity, the user community, and the PM office 

[CTE 12]. They simulated the results of live-fire 

shots and performed sensitivity experiments on the 

seeker on the computer. Use of the computer 

models saved an estimated $100M for the Stinger 

program. 

• Between the prime contractor and MRDEC, two 

hardware-in-the-loop simulators were used in the 

Stinger’s development. Basic Stinger was the first 

Army missile system to use a validated hardwarein-the-loop (HWIL) simulation to perform many of 

the system evaluation tasks previously done by 

extensive (and expensive) hardware testing [CTE 

13]. 
 

140 

Javelin 

Background 

• In 1981 DARPA undertook a research program to 

develop an antitank missile that would make use of 

an imaging IR guidance system and employ a topattack strategy, that is, the round had to be able to 

strike the top of a tank, where its armor is thinnest. 

This program was known as “Tankbreaker.” The 

Tankbreaker program resulted in important 

advances in imaging IR seekers that laid the 

groundwork for the Javelin program [CTE 14]. 

• A Joint Venture (JV) composed of Texas 

Instruments (TI) and Martin Marietta won the 

contract to produce the Advanced Antitank 

Weapons System—Medium (AAWS–M), This 

missile was later dubbed the Javelin. The Army 

decision to use a JV approach for the Javelin was an 

important part of the program’s success [CTE 15]. 

This JV entity manages the Javelin program, but the 

technical work and much of the manufacturing is 

done by the two participating companies on the 

basis of a workshare agreement. 

Command Launch Unit 

• The imaging IR is the most vital part of the CLU. 

The CLU’s scanning IR array is where the target 

recognition capability resides. The CLU developed 

by TI had a 240x1—later 240x2 and 240x4—focal 

plane array (FPA) of mercury cadmium telluride 

detectors, operating in the long-wave IR region of 

8–12 microns [CTE 16]. The detectors were 

scanned at 30Hz in a bi-directional, interleaved 
APPENDIX C – JAVELIN CTES 141 

fashion [CTE 17]. Moving from right to left the odd 

pixels (1, 3, 5, etc.) are sampled, then moving from 

left to right the even pixels are sampled. The bidirectional scan developed for the Javelin was 

unique and allowed a significant power savings. 

This scanner motor approach was later transitioned 

to several other TI programs. 

• The CLU used a new method to normalize the 

detector chips. TI developed a Thermal Reference 

Assembly, a passive optical assembly that provides 

two temperature points against which each detector 

pixel is calibrated [CTE 18]. This approach was 

passive, requiring no additional power or control 

circuitry. That allowed the system designers to 

calibrate using existing imaging circuitry as well 

reduce power and save space. 

• The Javelin CLU’s IR detectors require cooling to a 

very low temperature to increase the signal-to-noise 

ratio. Cooling is provided by a closed-cycle Stirling 

engine with a cold finger projecting into a Dewar 

flask and up against the back of the detector [CTE 

19]. The cooler, developed by TI with DARPA 

support, consumes only 1/5 watt of power yet 

delivers the cooling capacity required to cool the 

FPA in a two-and-a-half-minute period. 

• Since the original design of the CLU’s IR imager, 

progress has been made on improving the system’s 

performance [CTE 20]. A DARPA-funded program 

in the early 1990s helped to make detectors more 

producible. TI also moved from four separate 

“through hole” circuit boards to two surface 

mounted boards, using advances in semi-conductor 

technology to save space and weight. 
142 

• The CLU’s housing was originally made of 

aluminum. In 1999, the aluminum was replaced 

with a 17–layer carbon resin fiber composite [CTE 

21]. This saved some weight but mostly made the 

housing stronger. 

Seeker 

• The Javelin is a fire-and-forget missile. This fireand-forget capability came from the Joint 

Army/Marine Corps Source Selection Board’s 

decision to select the JV AAWS–M design, which 

coupled an imaging IR system with a state-of-theart onboard tracking system [CTE 22]. 

• The missile seeker for the Javelin is a twodimensional (2D) staring FPA of 64x64 detector 

elements [CTE 23]. The detectors are made of an 

alloy of cadmium-tellurium and mercury-tellurium 

(termed mercury cadmium telluride or HgCdTe). 

Development of the 2D staring array turned out to 

be very difficult. TI had a manufacturing problem 

that risked doubling the development cost of the 

program and causing its cancellation. Hughes’s 

Santa Barbara Research Center, working under a 

DARPA contract, developed another design for a 

focal plane array that could be manufactured more 

efficiently [CTE 24]. 

• The Javelin’s seeker is calibrated using a “chopper” 

wheel [CTE 25]. The FPA is continually provided 

with points of reference in addition to viewing the 

scene. These reference points allow the FPA to 

reduce fixed pattern noise. 
APPENDIX C – JAVELIN CTES 143 

Guidance and Control 

• The Javelin’s tracker is the essential element of the 

missile’s guidance and control capability [CTE 26]. 

The signals from each of the seeker’s over 4,000 

detector elements are passed to the FPA’s readout 

chip. To guide the missile, the tracker locates the 

target in the current frame and compares this 

position with the aim point. If this position is off 

center the tracker computes a correction and passes 

it to the guidance system, which makes the 

appropriate adjustments to the control surfaces. 

Development of the Javelin’s tracker was done by 

both industry and Redstone Arsenal. Texas 

Instruments designed and built prototypes, and 

Redstone provided both upgrades and an 

independent assessment of the tracker’s capabilities. 

Extensive captive flight testing of the AAWS–M 

seekers and trackers enabled the tracker teams to 

test, refine, and update algorithms prior to missile 

firings [CTE 27]. 

Propulsion and Warhead 

• The Javelin’s motor was developed by ARC, now 

Aerojet. ARC had adapted the design from one 

developed by Alliant Technology. The Javelin has 

an integrated launch and flight rocket motor [CTE 

28]. Among other advantages, this integrated design 

kept system weight as low as possible. 

• Gunner safety was a key consideration. The Javelin 

is equipped with a pressure release system to ensure 

that a malfunctioning launch motor does not cause 

an explosion [CTE 29]. The launch motor has shear 

pins, developed jointly by government and industry, 
144 

that fracture in the event of launch motor 

overpressure and allow the motor to be pushed out 

the back of the launch tube. 

• Another important propulsion design element is the 

burst disc that separates the launch motor and the 

flight motor [CTE 30]. This feature, developed by 

ARC, protects the flight motor from the ignition of 

the launch motor, yet, when sufficient pressure 

develops, lets the flight motor rupture the disc and 

send flight motor gases past it and down through the 

launch motor chamber. 

• The Javelin missile’s tandem warhead is a high 

explosive antitank (HEAT) round. Advances in the 

lethality of shaped charge rounds were made to 

counter the advent of explosive reactive armor 

(ERA). To defeat ERA, the Javelin uses two shaped 

charge warheads in tandem [CTE 31]. The 

precursor charge sets off the ERA and clears it from 

the path of the main charge; the main charge 

penetrates the target’s primary armor. This concept, 

first applied in the Tube-launched, Opticallytracked, Wire-guided (TOW) missile, was based on 

work done at BRL and Picatinny Arsenal. The 

Javelin’s designers initially struggled to make the 

tandem warhead work. Conventional Munitions 

Systems Inc. eventually contributed a successful 

precursor design using a two-layered molybdenum 

liner [CTE 32]. 

• The main charge had to be protected as much as 

possible from the explosive blast, shock, and debris 

caused by the impact of the front of the missile and 

the detonation of the precursor charge. To limit 

interference, a composite blast shield was 
APPENDIX C – JAVELIN CTES 145 

developed at Redstone Arsenal and placed between 

the main charge and the precursor charge [CTE 33]. 

• With the multiple warheads, variable time delay 

requirements, and weight and volume constraints of 

the Javelin and other missiles, and with safety 

requirements becoming more stringent, existing 

mechanical fusing technology was inadequate. As a 

result, an electronic arming and fusing effort was 

initiated for missile systems and applied to Javelin 

[CTE 34]. This concept, based on work done for 

nuclear warheads at Sandia and Los Alamos, came 

from engineers at Redstone Arsenal in the mid 

1980s. It was given the acronym ESAF, for 

Electronic Safe Arming and Fire. 

Modeling and Simulation 

• Many of the technical achievements associated with 

the Javelin’s development were enabled by 

modeling and simulation. Perhaps most importantly, 

the Javelin team developed an all-software 

simulation called the Integrated Flight Simulation 

(IFS) [CTE 35]. IFS, created by TI, does sensitivity 

analyses, simulates behavior of the focal plane 

arrays and the tracker, shows the voltages sent to 

the guidance unit, etc. While developed for the 

Javelin, the model is now also used on other missile 

systems. 
 
 

147 

Acronym Glossary 

6.1 Basic Research 

6.2 Applied Research 

6.3 Advanced Development 

2D Two-Dimensional 

AAH Advanced Attack Helicopter 

AATD Aviation Applied Technology Directorate 

AAWS-M Advanced Antitank Weapons System—

Medium 

ABS Agent Based Simulation 

AFRL Air Force Research Laboratory 

AMC Army Material Command 

APFSDS Armor-Piercing, Fin-Stabilized, 

Discarding Sabot 

APG Aberdeen Proving Ground 

ARC Atlantic Research Corporation 

ARCIC Army Capabilities Integration Center 

ARL Army Research Laboratory 

ARO Army Research Office 

ASD (FMP) Assistant Secretary of Defense Force 

Management Policy 

ATO Army Technology Objective 

BRAC Base Realignment and Closure 

BRL Ballistics Research Laboratory 

C2 Command and Control 
148 

C4 Command, Control, Communications, 

and Computers 

C4ISR Command, Control, Communications, 

Computers, Intelligence, Surveillance, 

and Reconnaissance 

CECOM Communications and Electronics 

Command 

CLU Command Launch Unit 

CSRA Civil Service Reform Act (1979) 

CTE Critical Technology Event 

CTNSP Center for Technology and National 

Security Policy 

DARPA Defense Advanced Research Projects 

Agency 

DDR&E Director, Defense Research and 

Engineering 

DIS Distributed Interactive Simulation 

DOD Department of Defense 

DOD69 Original Project Hindsight report, 

produced by DOD in 1969. 

DOE Department of Energy 

DREN Defense Research and Engineering 

Network 

DSB Defense Science Board 

DU Depleted Uranium 

ECBC Edgewood Chemical Biological Center 

ENIAC Electronic Numerical Integrator And 

Calculator 

ERA Explosive Reactive Armor 

ESAF Electronic Safe Arming and Fire 

FBCB2 Force XXI Battle Command, Brigade and 

Below 

FCS Future Combat Systems 

FLIR Forward Looking Infrared 
ACRONYM GLOSSARY 149 

FPA Focal Plane Array 

FTE Full Term Equivalent 

GaAs Gallium Arsenide 

GE General Electric 

GIG Global Information Grid 

GPS Global Positioning System 

HCPC Hybrid Collective Protection Equipment 

HEAT High Explosive Antitank 

Hellfire HELicopter Launched FIRE-and-forget 

HgCdTe Mercury Cadmium Telluride 

HMMWV High-Mobility Multipurpose Wheeled 

Vehicle 

HPC High Performance Computing 

HPCMP High Performance Computing 

Modernization Program 

HR Human Resources 

HSI Human-Systems Integration 

HTPB Hydroxyl-Terminated Polybutadiene 

HWIL Hardware-In-The-Loop 

IDM Improved Data Modem 

IED Improvised Explosive Devices 

IFS Integrated Flight Simulation 

IHADSS Integrated Helmet and Display Sight 

System 

IR Infrared 

IVIS Intervehicular Information System 

JV Joint Venture 

LDP Laboratory Demonstration Program 

LQIP Laboratory Quality Improvement 

Program 

LSI Lead Systems Integrator 

LVC Live-Virtual-Constructive 
150 

M&S Modeling and Simulation 

MANA Map Aware Non-uniform Automata 

MANPRINT Manpower and Personnel Integration 

MIMIC Microwave Monolithic Integrated Circuit 

MMW Millimeter Wave 

MRDEC Missile Research, Development and 

Engineering Center 

MRS Muzzle Reference System 

MSRC Major Shared Resource Center 

NASA National Aeronautics and Space 

Administration 

NBC Nuclear, Biological, or Chemical 

NBS National Bureau of Standards 

Nd: YAG Neodymium: Yttrium Aluminum Garnet 

NDAA National Defense Authorization Act 

NDU National Defense University 

NIST National Institute of Standards and 

Technology 

NLOS-C Non-Line of Sight Cannon 

NOE Nap-of-Earth 

NPR National Performance Review 

NRAC Naval Research Advisory Committee 

NRL Naval Research Laboratory 

NSPS National Security Personnel System 

NVL Night Vision Laboratory 

OMB Office of Management and Budget 

OPM Office of Personnel Management 

OSD Office of the Secretary of Defense 

OSTP Office of Science and Technology Policy 

PM Program Manager 

PosNav Position/Navigation 

POST Passive Optical Seeker Technique 
ACRONYM GLOSSARY 151 

RDEC Research, Development and Engineering 

Center 

RDT&E Research Development Test and 

Evaluation 

RFI Radar Frequency Interferometer 

RMP Reprogrammable Microprocessor 

RPA Rotorcraft Pilot Associate 

RXD Research or Exploratory Development 

S&T Science and Technology 

SAL Semi-Active Laser 

SECDEF Secretary of Defense 

SIMNET Simulator Networking 

T&E Testing and Evaluation 

TACOM Tank-Automotive Command 

TADS/PNVS Target Acquisition and Designation Sight 

and the Pilot Night Vision Sensor 

TI Texas Instruments 

TOW Tube-launched, Optically-tracked, Wireguided 

TRADOC Training and Doctrine Command 

UAV Unmanned Aerial Vehicle 

UV Ultraviolet 

WMI Warfighter-Machine Interface