Military must improve acquisition to win future wars, admiral says

HONOLULU—The war in Ukraine shows how the United States must improve its acquisition process if it hopes to maintain military strength, the deputy commander of Pacific Fleet said Tuesday.

Ukraine “provides us a great example of the importance of rapid innovation and lightning-quick transition from the drawing board to the battlefield,” Vice Adm. Blake Converse said during the opening keynote speech at AFCEA TechNet Indo-Pacific here. “Ukrainians have perfected the rapid acquisition of technology for multi-domain combat operations. They have shown us that even without a robust military-industrial complex and infrastructure, we can integrate land, sea, air, space, cyber, and information.”

Ukraine’s success in using unmanned vessels and missiles against the Russian Black Sea fleet is “not just compelling, it’s revolutionary,” Converse said.

Of course, the U.S. is not Ukraine, and the Pentagon’s high-tech weapons “weren’t developed in a makerspace lab in Silicon Valley, they’re the products of our acquisition systems,” he said. “Our imperative as a military must be to work with industry, to partner to foster innovation and to integrate emerging capabilities alongside our acquisition processes that exist today, but as fast as humanly possible.” 

That speed is necessary to be prepared for “a highly contested combat environment in the western Pacific,” Converse said, adding that in addition to “building capabilities, sensors, and weapons,” the joint force must also “massively upgrade our command-and-control systems and processes.”

That potential conflict would also require a highly resilient digital infrastructure in the region that could handle a huge influx in troops and requirements, said Marine Col. Jared Voneida, commander of DISA’s Pacific field office.

“This what we’re trying to build. We are looking for an infrastructure that’s ready to go on day one of the fight, to absorb bandwidth increases from that joint force descending on this theater,” Voneida said at the conference.

Such a fight would be much different than the previous 20 years, Voneida said. 

“Instead of deconflicting between one Marine unit and one Army unit located in the desert of Iraq, we’re deconflicting globally across combatant commands. It’s a global fight,” he said. “ You need a global network. You need to be able to seamlessly move our data across, not just the Indo-Pacific theater, but the globe. Because that’s where the fight is going to happen.

Asked about the speed at which Ukrainians have rebuilt networks there, Voneida said the reason he believes having a “robust, reliable, resilient, all the adjectives” network ready before a conflict is critical is that expert technicians may not be able to physically access the infrastructure to rebuild over and over again during a war with China.

“If we can, great, I think we’ll do exactly what’s happening in Ukraine. If not, I think our goal is to have such a resilient network that we can gracefully degrade it as we go through the conflict,” he said.