Copyright Breaking Defense
WASHINGTON — One top general in the Indo-Pacific region had a message for industry: Bring more prototypes to events and exercises. “When you come with it [a prototype], don’t come with one with the intention to take it home with you and all the data that was collected while we conducted an exercise together,” Lt. Gen. James Glynn, commander of Marine Corps Forces Pacific, said Thursday at AFCEA’s TechNet Indo-Pacific in Hawaii. The forces want the opportunity to keep working with a system even after a set delivery or exercise to really run it through its traps. “Come with five. Take one or two home and leave three with us and we’ll continue to work on it,” he added. We’ll give you access to all the data that’s coming off of it and we’ll do everything we can to break it with the goal of making it better.” Glynn said in the future dynamic operating environment, the name of the game is speed. Forces don’t have time to wait for perfect solutions or the acquisition community to take years to develop something. “Partner with us to fail. Got no problem when it doesn’t work,” he said. “If we have the prototypes, prototypes can move very quickly to what we actually operate on.” Glynn cited the Joint Fires Network — a prototyping effort that sought to addresses the immediate needs of combatant commands for battle management and to display real-time, fused, actionable threat information to joint and partner forces — as a perfect example. It started off as an amalgamation of prototypes that had promise and were thrown together to create a capability. It didn’t matter at the time that it wasn’t a program of record, Glynn said. “I don’t care. It’s what we’re using, it’s what we’re going to have to use, we have to move at speed,” he said. “What’s my biggest concern,” he added, “your ability to provide those prototypes, your trust to leave those prototypes, and our ability to continue to turn prototypes into programs of record and program a record to deliver on the timelines that we believe we need. You know the timeline. We’re working in in weeks and months, not years out here in the Indo-Pacific.”
