Does the Navy have any efforts in place or planned supporting the President’s goal of having 100,000 new STEM teachers in place by 2020, including community outreach or internship programs to increase student interest and demand?

We are a part of that and plan to increase our investment. We had about $83 million in FY11 and last year reached more than 85,000 students and 8,000 teachers. In some cases, that was our engineers advising teachers who were helping students with STEM-related projects.

For example, one is SeaPerch, which is a teaching approach and project to develop an underwater vehicle. Navy scientists are working with students and teachers in competitions. We’ve also got a partnership with the Sally Ride Science Organization, where we have some teacher training and professional development courses being made available to teachers.

 

How important – and in what ways – is it for defense-related R&D to continue pushing the envelope on “DARPA-hard” research?

I believe we need to have scientists at our government labs who can take advantage of DARPA-hard investments and tackle really hard issues. But that does not get you to being able to engineer that into a system DoD can buy. So we need people who are smart enough to work with DARPA-hard scientists and translate that.

Do we need a large percentage of our workforce focused on that? No. We do need some because you need people with the bona fides and credentials to even get entry into those communities. But I don’t think every government lab or activity needs that.

In the defense industrial sector and DoD labs, we are seeing trends toward more diversity in the workforce. On the academia side, however, there is an increasing foreign population in the STEM career fields. So even though the country is producing STEM graduates at increasing or level rates, a smaller number of them are eligible to work in defense industry or government laboratories.

There are people who operate at different parts of the acquisition spectrum. So parts of the government workforce, along that entire continuum, need that, but not every organization needs to have all parts of it. In the Navy, we maintain a cadre of scientists and engineers who are very much in that community, but we also have some who work a little S&T, mostly in R&D and early acquisition. We also have our big acquisition and big service engineering organizations, such as NAVSEA [Naval Sea Systems Command] and SPAWAR [Space and Naval Warfare Systems Command].

We also need to remind ourselves that S&T and R&D are not linear, you need people who work in zones. Sometimes you have breakthroughs, sometimes you have setbacks and you need to be able to cycle things back through and tweak and change them before you introduce them into acquisition. We do that in the Navy with our in-house workforce.

We need to understand the tactical nature of the military problem, especially those things that are Navy-unique challenges. For example, putting a nuclear reactor in a tube that moves deep through the water is a lot different from putting a nuclear reactor on land.

Where we can get S&T or R&D from our industrial or academic partners, we take every advantage we possibly can through acquisition or partnering; there is no need to create a Navy infrastructure to do what they do best. But where there is a void – and there are numerous voids – we step in to ensure the capacity exists in the country for the Navy to get what it needs.