主题：【原创】美航母的攻击阵位 -- 拿不准

The Navy does not lack drone demos and prototypes, but it has failed to deploy Horizon 2 innovations with speed and urgency. Failure to act aggressively here will impact the Navy’s ability to carry out its mission of sea control and power projection. Along these lines, the Hudson Institute’s report on the future of the carrier is worth a read and a RAND report on the same topic comes out in October.

If you think Horizon 2 innovation is hard in the Navy, wait until you get to Horizon 3. This is where disruption happens. It’s how the aircraft carrier disrupted the battleship, how nuclear-powered ballistic missile submarines changed the nature of strategic deterrence, and how the DF-21/26 and artificial islands in the South China sea changed decades of assumptions. And it’s why, in most organizations, innovation dies.

For the Navy, a Horizon 3 conversation would not be about better carriers and aircraft. Instead it would focus on the core reasons the Navy deploys a carrier strike group: to show the flag for deterrence, to project offensive airpower from the sea, sea control, or to protect a Marine amphibious force.

A Horizon 3 solution for the Navy would start with basic need of these missions, the logistical requirements that come with them, and the hurdles to their success, like A2/AD. Lots of people have been talking and writing about this, and lots of Horizon 3 concepts have been proposed, such as distributed lethality, arsenal ships, underwater drone platforms, etc.

Focusing on these goals — not building or commanding carriers, or building and flying planes — is really, really hard. It’s hard to get existing operational organizations to think about disruption because it means they have to be thinking about obsoleting a job, function, or skill they’ve spent their lives perfecting. It’s hard because any large organization is led by people who succeeded as Horizon 1 and 2 managers and operators (not researchers). Their whole focus, career, incentives, etc. has been about building and make the current platforms work. And the Navy has excelled in doing so.

The problem is that Horizon 3 solutions take different people, different portfolio, different process, and different politics.

People: In Horizon 1 and 2 programs, people who fail don’t get promoted because, in a known process, failure to execute is a failure of individual performance. However, applying the same rules to Horizon 3 programs — no failures tolerated — means we’ll have no learning and no disruptive innovations. What spooks leadership is that in Horizon 3, most of the projects will fail. But using lean innovation, they’ll fail quickly and cheaply.

In Horizon 3 the initial program is run by mavericks — the crazy innovators. In the Navy, these are the people you want to court martial or pass over for promotion for not getting with current program. (In a startup they’d be the founding CEO.) These are the fearless innovators you want to create new and potentially disruptive mission models. Failure to support their potential disruptive talent means it will go elsewhere.

Portfolio: In Horizon 3, the Navy is essentially incubating a startup. And not just one. The Navy needs a portfolio of Horizon 3 bets, for the same reason venture capital and large companies have a portfolio of Horizon 3 bets, not just one.

Process: A critical difference between a Horizon 3 bet and a Horizon 1 or 2 bet is that you don’t build large, expensive, multi-year programs to test radically new concepts (think of the Zumwalt class destroyers). You use “lean” techniques to build minimal viable products (MVPs). MVPs are whatever it takes to get you the most learning in the shortest period of time.

Horizon 3 groups operate with speed and urgency. They need to be physically separate from operating divisions in an incubator or their own facility. And they need their own plans, procedures, policies, incentives, and key performance indicators (KPIs) different from those in Horizon 1.

The watchwords in Horizon 3 are “If everything seems under control, you’re just not going fast enough.”

Politics: In Silicon Valley most startups fail. That’s why we invest in a portfolio of new ideas, not just one. We embrace failure as an integral part of learning. We do so by realizing that in Horizon 3 we are testing hypotheses — a series of unknowns — not executing knowns. Yet failure/learning is a dirty word in the world of promotions and the “gotcha game” of politics. To survive in this environment Horizon 3 leaders must learn how to communicate up/down and sideways that they are not running Horizon 1 and 2 projects.

Failure to make a portfolio of Horizon 3 bets means that the Navy is exposed to disruption by new entrants unencumbered by decades of success, fueled by their own version of manifest destiny.

Lessons Learned

?Our carriers are a work of art run and manned by professionals.?Threats that can degrade or negate a carrier strike group exist in multiple areas.

?However, carriers are still a significant asset in almost all other combat scenarios.

?Speed and urgency rather than institutional inertia should be the watchwords for Horizon 2 innovation.

?Horizon 3 innovation is about a clean sheet of paper thinking.

?It requires different people, portfolio, process and politics.

?The Navy (and DOD) must manage innovation across all three Horizons.?Allocating dollars and resources for each.

?Remembering that todays Horizon 3 crazy idea is tomorrow Horizon 1 platform.

Entrepreneur-turned-educator Steve Blank is credited with launching the Lean Startup movement. He’s changed how startups are built; how entrepreneurship is taught; how science is commercialized, and how companies and the government innovate. Steve is the author of The Four Steps to the Epiphany, The Startup Owner’s Manual — and his May 2013 Harvard Business Review cover story defined the Lean Startup movement. He teaches at Stanford, Columbia, Berkeley and NYU; and created the National Science Foundation Innovation Corps — now the standard for science commercialization in the United States. His Hacking for Defense class at Stanford is revolutionizing how the U.S. defense and intelligence community can deploy innovation with speed and urgency.

Image: U.S. Navy, Mass Communication Specialist 2nd Class Patrick W. Menah