The White House’s pick to lead the Pentagon’s weapons testing wants “automation everywhere” —but not at the expense of live testing.
“I will press for speed and automation everywhere I possibly can caution whenever necessary, and clarity always,” Amy Henninger, who is nominated to be the Pentagon’s director of operational test and evaluation, told senators Thursday.
At the Senate Armed Services Committee hearing, senators also grilled Michael Powers, the White House’s pick to be defense comptroller.
Henniger suggested using more automation, “more digital methods, digital modeling to speed and facilitate our test and evaluation processes.”
“The T&E oversight portfolio now is software-centric. The systems on it are software-enabled and software-defined and there’s only five to 10 percent that is only hardware. We have been evolving an old process trying to make it work,” Henninger said. “We can only surge with more manpower. And I would suggest that using more software to automate software testing is where we need to go.”
But that won’t replace live testing,
“It makes sense to model or simulate the things that we know and live test the things that we don’t know. And with that as a baseline heuristic, I don’t ever foresee a day where we will have no live testing,” she said.
Live testing would be part of a suite of options—including digital modeling and simulation—to test weapons systems and complicated initiatives like the Pentagon’s combined all domain command and control, or CJADC2, effort, which aims to seamlessly connect the military services’ networks.
“CJADC2 capabilities are being developed over time by multiple services and organizations within the DOD, making it a complex initiative to test. For example, the Joint Fires Network, a key component of CJADC2, supports USINDOPACOM and involves a wide variety of systems that need to be available simultaneously over a large geographic area,” Henninger wrote in response to prepared questions. “To adequately conduct OT&E for such capabilities, a combination of live test events and modeling and simulation will be necessary.”
Henninger’s testimony comes just two months after Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth halved the staff of the office she is to run: the Office of the Director, Operational Test and Evaluation, which serves as an independent watchdog over DOD’s weapons programs.
Henninger also pushed for OT&E to be “integral from the beginning” of programs; it should help shape requirements, especially with respect to cybersecurity, to address challenges earlier.
And as the Pentagon embraces AI, its testing office will need to accommodate that, particularly when it comes to testing AI models’ performance and shelf-life.
“It is crucial to develop strategies for monitoring AI performance over time, including periodic recalibration, assessment, and eventual retirement or replacement of AI models. This requires a comprehensive sustainment plan that addresses the long-term viability of AI systems,” she wrote about the challenges of testing systems and applications that use artificial intelligence. “The OT&E community must be vigilant about testing for adversarial and counter AI scenarios, beyond traditional cybersecurity measures, where adversaries can take advantage of overly brittle AI algorithms to evade, out-maneuver, or deceive our warfighting systems and concepts or operations.”
Clean audit by 2028?
Senators also grilled the White House’s pick for defense comptroller, Michael Powers, on passing an audit in the next three years. His response: get leadership on board.
“I think one of the things we absolutely have to do, and all of this is contingent on confirmation, of course, is get senior leadership very actively involved in the process of setting milestones and holding the departments and defense agencies to those milestones,” Powers said. “And that goes on top of getting rid of a bunch of legacy systems, leveraging technology—AI robotics, machine learning, a lot of things we can do to make it easier, to audit the department, more [efficiently], quicker and at less cost.”
The 2024 National Defense Authorization Act requires the defense secretary to achieve a clean audit or “an unqualified opinion on the financial statements of the Department” by December 31, 2028, according to the legislation.
If confirmed, Powers plans to start etching out those milestones just weeks into the job with a full, executable picture by the New Year.
“In weeks, we should be able to make a cut at what those milestones are. It’s easy to see what the milestones would be,” he said. “The work is underneath: how do we get to a common or a couple of common financial systems.”
The Pentagon’s financial management systems “don’t really talk to each other” and that data is managed differently across the department.
“We don’t acquire information the same way, we don’t store it,” he said. “We can’t analyze it in a way that allows us to leverage what we need to do for financial processes and the data that’s required to do the analytics to get us the numbers that we need to have on the financial statement.”
When pressed on when Congress could expect to see results, Powers said he expects to know “what those benchmarks and milestones are and when we expect to get those checked off” by January.
But Powers said that senior Pentagon leaders must agree that passing an audit is just as important as the department’s overall mission.
“I think it needs to be important,” he said. “It’s not just one person, it’s the entire organization. But if confirmed, I would like to put together a plan that involves senior leadership, [deputy secretary of defense], managing monthly meetings, holding people accountable—the secretaries and financial managers and comptrollers for the departments and agencies.”
Read the full article here