[This article was first published in Army Sustainment Professional Bulletin, which was then called Army Logistician, volume 2, number 2 (March–April 1970), pages 9–13, 28–29.]
From the cradle of science—the laboratory—has come much of the new and revolutionary hardware and equipment for today's battlefield. The U.S. Army Materiel Command's laboratories provide a major portion of the Army’s own capability through basic research and exploratory development in meeting the Army's materiel requirements.
USAMC's five corporate laboratories/centers are: Aberdeen Research and Development Center, Aberdeen, Maryland; Materials and Mechanics Research Center, Watertown, Massachusetts; Harry Diamond Laboratories, Washington, D.C.; Natick Laboratories, Natick, Massachusetts; and Aeronautical Research Laboratory, Moffett Field, California. In addition each subordinate command maintains its own laboratories in support of its assigned mission and commodity category.
Dr. Robert B. Dillaway is the Deputy for Laboratories to the Commanding General, the U.S. Army Materiel Command. In this capacity he exercises command over the in-house central laboratories and technical supervision over the USAMC commodity command laboratories.
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Now that you have your feet on the ground with 10 months on the job, what do you see as visible effects of the laboratory efforts on the logistician in the field?
DR. DILLAWAY: Our efforts very definitely do interact with those of the logistician in the field. However, the type and extent of the interaction vary according to the commodity. For example, the Tank-Automotive Command (TACOM) is intimately involved because much of its laboratory effort is akin to the automotive business. If we can get another 100,000 miles out of a transmission before we have to replace it or if we can keep a radiator from breaking down for another three months, we save "megabucks'' in our total rolling stock. There is a lot of activity in TACOM in product improvement engineering. In an era of shrinking resources I think it makes good business sense for the Army to look for cost and time and other benefits possible through product improvements in every area.
In other areas, such as the Missile Command (MICOM), we have a more sophisticated product system. The missile commodities are not used on a day-to-day basis. You build them and test them. Then you set them up and give them an occasional readiness check. The main laboratory effort is extended to generating the significant technology for the next generation system.
Of course, product field checks sometimes reveal problems. So, the Army laboratories are involved with upgrading materiel and solving problems that come up in the field. The laboratories are called upon for in-house expertise for the short term fixes and product improvements. Each AMC laboratory has top caliber technical personnel in the field in Vietnam who work with specific experimental systems and aid the army in the field with its current equipment. This operation gives our laboratories a firsthand knowledge of the soldier's potential problems now. The laboratories can then provide effective help.
Is there anything special you feel the logistician in the field should know about the operation of the laboratories?
DR. DILLAWAY: Very definitely in many areas. In the area of system improvement, for example, or even in an area like materiel research, awareness of the existence of a problem sparks intuition and thinking in a scientific person as much as anything else. As part of our communicating, the more knowledge and awareness of the problems of the man in the field (the soldier) that we can infuse into the laboratory people—indeed, all our professional people—the better off we are going to be. We must give our professionals a feel of the things with which the soldier has difficulty or finds tough to use, the materials he has or doesn't have and would like to have—all the things that might make him a more efficient fighting man.
This is a prime reason for having a strong in-house professional group. They are a lot closer to the soldier and have a feel for his problems because they are within the Army. This will all help identify and evolve the important new things. There are many ways of evolving new technology, some of it is spontaneous, but a great deal of it is the result of catalyzed thinking. It is strongly influenced by an individual's awareness of and identity with a mission. This is where the logistician and the professional in the laboratory share a responsibility for communication and objectivity.
I think the improvements in our communications may well be the pacing factor in our research and technology improvements. And we know that good communications are the result of individual attitude and intent—in part, good will. By improvements I mean substantive comments which can help us identify voids in our technology or real deficiencies in our materiel—not just subjective opinions or random remarks. The better our communications, the more relevant our research and development (R&D) will become.
What are your top priority systems in engineering development right now?
DR. DILLAWAY: It's really difficult to nail it down to two or three. We are taking cognizance of several new systems which, at the research level, show promise. One of these is the fluidics control system. This has been around a few years, but we are just now beginning to understand and see places where it can be advantageously utilized in systems in place of electrical circuits. Certainly laser systems are still in their infancy. The principle seems to have a great deal of promise in a broad spectrum or utilization. As we learn more about the fundamental physics of laser systems, we keep finding not only new materials that demonstrate these properties but also utilization of the principles in components and systems in the exploratory development stage.
Another area that is still in its infancy, of course, and for which we see wide applications, is composite materials—both the organic matrix and metal matrix composites. These are metal plates with metal filaments of specific strength characteristics bonded into them, similar to woven plastic components. If we can balance out the utilization against the probable higher cost, composites show a great deal of future potential. They give us a lot more flexibility in the tailoring of the properties of the material—changing from homogeneous properties to the inhomogeneous, or changing strength in different directions—and this sort of thing tailored to the utilization.
What kind of a time lag do you place on getting new technology into the field and into the hands of the user?
DR. DILLAWAY: Over the past 20 to 25 years l think we have gotten a pretty good handle on this pattern. Your question assumes the new technology has been developed and is a candidate for application to some piece of hardware. In a fairly sophisticated system it appears to take about four to five years from the time a concept is formulated to the time a product or a system is completely developed and ready for acceptance. Then, it seems to average another couple of years to get the hardware fully qualified and into the field. So, once you have the concept formulated, it appears to take seven to eight years to get the new equipment fielded.
What is the time lag for pure research to show up equipment the soldier can use in the field?
DR. DILLAWAY: You're talking about two kinds of research now. First, you have basic research, which doesn't have an identifiable application. Secondly, you're also talking about what we call exploratory development which seeks to find applications for basic research and technology. When you add the basic research and exploratory development activities of our laboratories to the concept formulation, system development, and production phases, the logistician has about 15 to 20 years of lead time. This lead time depends on how fundamental the research is. For example, if we found a new coating which would improve resistance to abrasion and contamination on ammo clips, we could probably feed this research and development into the system in a couple of years as a product improvement. On the other hand, look at how much time has passed since we first started working on high-powered lasers. If we succeed and we do evolve a system from that research and development, history will probably record a 20-year span.
What is your biggest problem right now? Money?
DR. DILLAWAY: Well, I don't know that there is any one biggest problem. I think that there are three rolling together—operating within the constraints of money, getting the maximum out of professionalism, and developing the optimum mix of programs within our laboratories. If the budget shrinks enough, we are probably going to have to eliminate some programs which either have a low priority or negligible Army relevance in them.
What is your philosophy in this job—how do you equate it from the time you came here? What are some basics on your problem areas?
DR. DILLAWAY: Well, of course there was really a gap in this position of quite a few months between my predecessor and myself. During this time the position was filled by someone with two or three primary responsibilities who sort of "held the fort." This probably had some influence on the way the situation appeared when I came in. Also, you must remember that AMC had just had a change in command. Certainly now my view on the situation is influenced by this period.
From my industrial experience of continually having to fight with tight resources, I feel that we have a twofold job here to nurture and to help evolve as much relevant research and exploratory work as is humanly possible within the existing talents and resources at our disposal.
I see great need for an added ingredient—scientific entrepreneurship—a rather scarce ingredient in the scientific community. We're talking about an essential quality which objectively combines both leadership and management. This leadership, while being an enthusiastic proponent of science and technology, is deeply dedicated to the policy that the science and technology carried out by the military must have some future relevance to ultimately providing a more potent weapon system for the soldier in the field. This leadership also has a sense of the vital role of communication required in the vast geographical dispersion that we have in our technical complex in AMC. It does everything it can to insure a maximum information flow between the professionals within the Army Laboratory System, among the other Department of Defense labs, and throughout our national R&D community itself—we can't afford to have duplication without a purpose. Occasionally, you do want duplication because it speeds the evolution of a technology—aside from that we can't afford it. Required talent as well as other resources is just too scarce.
This is why we form certain corporate, or central, laboratories—such as our Materials and Mechanics Research Center at Watertown, Massachusetts. Material is a basic ingredient to practically every commodity or piece of materiel in which the Army is involved. Our research there must be concentrated in the broad spectrum of meeting future requirements. Therefore, not only should this research be centralized, but it is imperative that the leadership of that laboratory convince the researchers to look outward to the commodity commanders, and indeed to the world, to make sure that they have a total knowledge of what is going on about them. They must make sure that the commodity commands—the people who apply the developments of new materiel—are aware and make use of this new technology.
Our laboratories do not exist as an entity unto themselves, doing their bit for the good of science and hoping somebody stumbles on to the results of their efforts. Increased emphasis will be placed on this aspect of our efforts, not only from these central laboratories, but also from the point of view of interplay between commodity technology expertise. A good example of this was bringing the MICOM people, who have a good inertial guidance group, in to help us on a gun stabilization problem on one of our tanks.
Does your office have any interdisciplinary communication gap with the laboratories in the field?
DR. DILLAWAY: No, I don't think so. I think we are pretty well covered. I propose, as I see ways of doing so, to increase the efficiency of my communications with segments of the laboratories. I think we are doing a better job than was done before, but it can still stand improvement. Communication is the key to our success. There is no question about that. In the next few years having the right people with the right motivations will be essential to our success. We're trying to insure the quality of leadership, management, and programs which will warrant highly motivated laboratory personnel.
Dr. Dillaway, are you leaning away from in-house work or are you putting more emphasis on it?
DR. DILLAWAY: Neither. Again, the laboratories of the Army should be, in my view, regarded as a resource of in-house expertise which, because they staff capable and competent professionals and are working on some areas to keep themselves current with their peers, will evolve new technology. But we can't hope to cover the whole spectrum of required expertise. The value of these Army professionals evolves through spending a certain portion of their collective effort developing a community of technical expertise in the laboratory so that they will be on a current talking basis with their peers throughout the country and the rest of the world.
In that way we still have a better chance of maintaining a grip on the total technical forefront as it moves forward. This also keeps our professionals current so that they are truly our in-house experts—in-house consultants who will take on a difficult portion of a program to prove its feasibility before we go into total development. Perhaps, during development and fielding, they will be the technical experts that the program managers, the logisticians, call on to bail us out of problems as they arise. You can move in on a problem more quickly if you have the expertise available in-house. Also, these in-house experts are intimately involved with the Army's peculiar requirements and its restraints. This gives the Army a community of people who can have a meaningful dialog with the technologist important to the Army.
This in-house expertise also helps the Army to be a more intelligent buyer. During the fulfillment of a contract by an industrial concern, we will have people who can talk to and will understand what the industry people are saying. They will be able to interpret for the nonprofessional so that we know we are on a common ground. I think there have been problems in that area in the past. Whenever people don't have the same culture, the language problem always can be difficult and create barriers.
What are the prospects for success or failure of laboratory programs?
DR. DILLAWAY: Certainly it is not a very envious position that we find ourselves in with regard to new systems programs today. From the reviews that we have been making here, l don't think that I can put my finger on any one thing in any one of them. However, I've been in the R&D business for 25 years now and I have never seen a major program—a sophisticated technical program—in the Air Force, Navy, National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), or anywhere else that did not get into problems along the way. For one thing, it is pretty well recognized in industry that you are lucky if you finish the program with the same program manager or vice president you started it with.
I think, again, a lot of the problems can be laid to lack of communication during the development of the programs. This is lack of communication between laboratory people and the program manager when they see something awry, or the lack of use of the laboratory by the program manager in some cases, or failure to communicate with people creating our qualitative materiel requirements when they found they really had a problem, or in other words, trying to hide it under the rug. It all really boils down to recognizing a problem early, then objectively communicating it to arrive at a solution before it builds to costly and dangerous proportions. We're trying to avoid these kinds of attitude and communication problems by encouraging every one of our laboratory people consistently to practice what is described as a "balanced appraisal" way of thinking. Essentially, balanced appraisal means full and objective disclosure and analysis of all the facts—good and bad—that can possibly be identified. It calls for real maturity.
Looking backward, we have a lot of good hindsight, but our feeling about how we would be finding the world situation and our relation therein has changed a great deal over the last 10 years. As l recall, you probably couldn't sell a tactical program 10 years ago. We thought as long as we could clobber anyone strategically they would leave us alone. Now we've done a complete swing around. Yet we realize we are probably going to be fighting brushfire operations for quite a spell. So our whole philosophy has changed. I don't think we can put a finger on one thing other than this fact of effective communication and early surfacing of problems and really trying to draw on all the talent you've got instead of trying to solve a problem without raising the flag.
Do you see any new changes in the organizational structure of the laboratories?
DR. DILLAWAY: I envision that there will be changes as we go along. They will be evolutionary rather than catastrophic changes.
Where do you go from here with the laboratory program?
DR. DILLAWAY: My predecessor developed a 10-year laboratory plan for evolving laboratory centers around each commodity. He also conceived the corporate centers, I described earlier, around such items as the materials, chemistry, and other things that pervade a particular commodity. As I see it, in the next few months we will be improving this plan and modifying it to fit the realities of today.
In some areas we are building our laboratory organization on the principle of complexing. In establishing a laboratory complex we use strong management to provide effective communications and relationships between laboratories in different geographical locations. These operations are related and are required to provide a critical technical base for a commodity command's responsibilities. Complexes are in existence in some of the commodity commands, and in others, we are working to create similar complexes. For example, we have just made an agreement with the NASA whereby we are going to use jointly some facilities at three of their laboratories that are not in full utilization at the moment to do work for the Army. In this way we are developing an in-house R&D capability that was not in existence before in Army aviation. Most people probably don't know that the Army operates more aircraft—if you include helicopters—than the Air Force. In order to provide the support for this arm in the future, we've just got to have a superlative in-house capability. We are building it this way.
Is one of your primary functions as director of laboratories within AMC to provide a "home'' for the central laboratories?
DR. DILLAWAY: This is not quite right. It is certainly logical that this office in the headquarters should command those professional groups which we call laboratories—again, which cut across and which should supply information to all commodity commands, or more than one. If there were a better way to do it and decentralize it, we would probably do so, but this seems to be the best approach today. Again, I fully support our program of putting the authority with the responsibility as low as you can, and maintaining an efficient operating organization.
How do you correlate with the Director of Research, Development, and Engineering (DRD&E) in AMC?
DR. DILLAWAY: The way we are now operating, I have been charged with the responsibility for the evolution and execution of this laboratory plan, including development, and the improvement of the value and relevance of the research and technology; i.e., the laboratory operation throughout AMC within the restraints imposed by budgets, Government rules and regulations, and other considerations. Specifically, in addition to that, I have direct responsibility for the programing and distribution of our research and exploratory development dollars within the broad guidance provided us by the Director of Defense Research and Engineering and the Department of the Army. This, of course, must be logically coupled with our long-range plans in each commodity area and relates to the rest of the R&D program—advance development through testing as well as with the production and fielding of equipment. This is because the early work is the precursor to the latter phase, and also because the laboratories are brought in as technical in-house experts in those other phases of the program as we have previously discussed.
The way we are working now, I use support help from the DRD&E, AMC, who reports to the Deputy Commanding General for Materiel Acquisition, to help my staff in pulling together the exploratory development program. After I distribute these programs, I use the DRD&E staff to help me monitor them. General Feyereisen, Deputy Commanding General for Materiel Acquisition, and I work together to make sure that our two parts of the total program dovetail and that my laboratories can logically support the other parts of the program as they may be involved.
| Date Taken: | 12.11.2024 |
| Date Posted: | 12.11.2024 13:50 |
| Story ID: | 487225 |
| Location: | US |
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