THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Wednesday, March 29, 1995 TAG: 9503290424
SECTION: BUSINESS PAGE: D1 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: BY BILL SIZEMORE, STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: NORFOLK LENGTH: Medium: 58 lines
The nation's second-highest-ranking military officer came to Hampton Roads on Tuesday talking of revolution.
Adm. William A. Owens, vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, was the keynote speaker at a daylong symposium for defense-related businesses on ``The Changing Face of Government Procurement: How to Hit a Moving Target.''
For people doing business with the Pentagon, his message was: Change is here, so get used to it. And look for opportunities.
The collapse of the Soviet Union has turned the U.S. military's mission on its head. The Pentagon's budget is likely to shrink by 45 percent over the next 10 years, Owens said. That means, for instance, reducing the Navy fleet from 580 to 340 ships in three years and retiring whole classes of ships and aircraft. In some cases, retirement of craft will come 15 years earlier than originally planned.
But amid all the retrenchment will come new opportunities for defense-related businesses, as technological advances prompt revolutionary changes in the way military forces do their jobs, Owens said.
For instance, surveillance and communications technology ``will give us a new vision of the battlefield,'' he said. Data about the combat zone will be so comprehensive that ``we'll know everything that matters about that space.''
The concept is known in military strategists' parlance as ``dominant battle-space awareness.''
``For the first time,'' Owens said, ``we'll see the whole chessboard. We've being playing military chess for hundreds of years. Now, for the first time, we'll be able to see where the enemy's king and queen and pawns are.''
The same technology could be used in nonwar fighting missions as well, he said. Examples would be finding refugees in Rwanda or scanning a building suspected of sheltering a warlord's fighters in Somalia.
More and more, Owens said, the Pentagon will be drawing on commercial research and development, and adapting it to military purposes. Some examples:
Huge floating platforms like those used for oil drilling in the Gulf of Mexico might be adapted by the Navy for use as mobile sea bases.
Sophisticated scanning equipment being developed to find breast cancer tumors might be put to use on the battlefield to identify enemy tanks.
As the pace of change quickens and the realities of a shrinking budget bear down on the Pentagon, Owens said, ``we'd better do something other than evolve. We'd better be revolutionaries.''
As chairman of the Pentagon's Joint Requirements Oversight Council, Owens has a leading role in efforts to streamline the Pentagon's purchasing practices by standardizing the different services' requirements. ILLUSTRATION: Color photo
JIM WALKER/Staff
by CNB