Until recently, Gen. Frank Donovan ran the Defense Autonomous Warfare Group, the white-hot center of the Pentagon’s drive for affordable mass and battlefield robots. Now he’s in charge of U.S. Southern Command, which is working hard to put the DAWG’s products to use. Defense One sat down with Donovan during SOF Week in Tampa. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Q: You’re an expert in autonomous warfare, as a former leader of the DAWG—for which a nearly unimaginable $50 billion has been requested in the next fiscal year. How do you want to develop and use it at SOUTHCOM?
A: It’s embarrassing to think that I’m an expert on autonomous warfare, because there are folks here that know so much more about the tech and the science and how it all works. I don’t know all those things. I’ve learned a lot about it, but I’ve really focused on how you actually synchronize those things and bring it to bear, because I think my concern is right now, what I’m sensing—and you know, three years as vice commander of SOCOM, I got to be in the building watching three [program objective memorandum] cycles build. I come up here as a Marine infantry officer, reconnaissance, special operations, but I’m going to talk about what matters. It’s budget and resource, and applying those resources to what we actually really need.
And so, what I started seeing is that even though Ukraine is going on, we’re learning some lessons—and that’s a whole side topic, which lessons we’re learning from Ukraine—but we’re seeing things in the South Red Sea, we’re seeing things in the operational SOF environment, things I’ve faced, and I’m like, there’s something different here, but how does it compete in the [Pentagon] with the services that hold most of the strengths? They hold the relationship with the defense industrial base, they hold a relationship with Congress. That’s just how our government works, and it’s healthy, and it’s good, but are we going to be able to embrace autonomy? And they then embrace autonomy, not autonomy platforms, because I think we get caught in this a little bit, you know. I don’t really care about platforms, I care about autonomous warfare, and are we really willing to take a step forward and embrace autonomous warfare. I think there’s definitions, and so three years as vice commander at SOCOM, I saw this tension between what the joint force needs out front— and I’m going to say the joint force, not what our Army, Navy, Air Force components need out front, it’s what the joint force needs to fight—and how those autonomous needs actually enter back into the Pentagon, and then get built into a service to actually come out and end up back with the war fighters. That’s a misconnect.
I call it the two Olympic rings. Those two Olympic rings don’t touch. When we had it as a very short window, nine months with the Defense Autonomous Warfare Group, I worked for Gen. [Bryan] Fenton [and] Adm. [Frank] Bradley was my boss for SOCOM, but I was working for [Deputy Defense Secretary Stephen] Feinberg. He held the resources. And that’s what gets everyone’s attention in the Pentagon: who holds the resources? So we could take the needs that came out of Replicator tranche one and two, and then quickly turn and say, ‘What can we bring to bear quickly with what’s out there?’
And so we started to see if you match the actual true joint autonomous requirements, your actual needs, with service acquisition, there’s something there, there’s another ring in the Olympic rings that could be added there, and so what we saw in the DAWG formulating, we then said, well, if we come into SOUTHCOM, how do we actually create the SOUTHCOM Autonomous Warfare Command to address that gap, to address that need, and drive those requirements back up into the DAWG? So that’s where we’re planning on, and that’s the journey we’re on with SOCOM.
Q: You’ve talked about how battlefield networks will enable autonomous-warfare concepts like distributed swarming. And when I talk to Ukrainians, they wish they had such networks. But, of course, Russian electronic-warfare forces work hard to prevent that. How are you approaching this problem?
A: I think the operational data enterprise—operational data environment, whatever term we want to use—that we have to kind of encapsulate, and that’s—the Marine colonel we’re bringing in for the SOUTHCOM Autonomous Warfare Command, we talk about this. We don’t talk about robots, we talk about the data environment with the different data layers that we need at the very forward edge, so our SOF and our conventional force teammates with an ATAK or a cell phone, that they can actually plug into that data network, and whatever robot shows up with the capability, they can leverage it instantaneously. It doesn’t come with a priority stack or a company that we vendor-locked on. It is truly a fully capable system that we can use in selecting the needs, whether it’s kinetic, when it’s non-kinetic.
I think for us in SOUTHCOM, most of the systems we’re looking at primarily are domain awareness systems. And for us it just magnifies—because if our partners, who have the access and placement where they live, where they operate, the environments that they have to work in, in the rough terrain, the jungle, over the horizon, thousands of miles at sea— we’re working with our partners, going after these [Designated Terrorist Organizations], we have to enhance their domain awareness, but they have to also be able to plug into this environment in a cheap, easy, and very fluid way. And I think if we think about the data layers, the data environment, that’s the first thing that we are focused on right now, is setting the environment. Because we can match the robots to the environment, I mean, whether it swims, it flies, it has feet, whatever it does, we have to make it do what we want it to do when we want it to do it without someone telling us, ‘Yeah, it’s great only if you use it this way, only if you use my service stack, and only if you connect it to that.’ Unacceptable across the board.
Q: Are vendors still bringing proprietary systems, or has the open-architecture push actually taken hold?
A: I think we’re starting to see improvements in that. And I would say two years ago, not at all. Everything was solely focused. And the concern is that you get a vendor with well-meaning folks, and a lot of them are retired folks, they got out, they moved on, they want to pitch a piece of kit to a commander, and they get all excited about it. And the problem is: it’s great for a specific event or an exercise, but it doesn’t have a path forward.
The more we, as military leaders, demand open architecture, we have to make sure our demand is clean: “Hey, this is what I need this thing to do for me.” And that’s not always clear either, because I think part of it is: folks my age, we’re not sure how to embrace autonomy and what this means, and to really give freedom down to the lower edge, that tactical edge, all the way up to lethal effects, without, you know, always a human in, on, next to the loop, but we’ll always have that, because there’s nothing truly autonomous, there’s always someone involved. But we have to think about delegation and empowering ways that autonomy makes people nervous. I mean, if you have a one-way attack, lethal one-way attack system, it’s not that we’re going to—that’s why I’m little concerned that we get over infatuated with FPV.
Actually, I’d like to move away from FPV entirely, but every time we do, we have someone saying, “Well, what about collateral damage, what about the final go, no-go?” We’ve got to start thinking very differently. The approval to launch the system, or even put it in place, is lethal.
What happens often is that we don’t come with a clear signal to our tech industry and our vendor partners with what we really want. We just compound it and ask for different things, and all of a sudden, “explosive boat” turns into an ISR platform turns into something else, and we kind of lost track of what we asked industry to do for us. So, I think it’s, we both have to learn here for open architecture, but a very clean demand also.
Q: Commanders don’t like to delegate lethal authority to a robot they can’t court-martial. How do you build trust in autonomous systems?
A: I think that starts at my level. We have to create environments to develop that trust, and there’s some habits we have to break from the last 25, almost 30 years now.
Because we had such clarity and the never-blinking eye, and we had ISR everywhere. We could hang over the target without any threat at all, we could just dominate the environment. We could control every factor, minus weather. If the weather is bad, we just wait and go tomorrow. That’s a whole different environment. So, we as leaders cannot set conditions in our training and our mindset and our educational process to set that up again, as that’s how it’s going to be.
I think what we owe is to really understand how to delegate and maximize autonomy. How do you empower those digital natives at the lowest levels in set conditions? We don’t have training ranges right now that allow us to use these systems to any level of their capability. I think of a certain base, I know that there’s a civilian road in between, and anytime we want to fly like a drone across the civilian road to the other training area, that’s like, shut traffic down. We’ve got to get special approval. We’re just struggling with that, especially when we want to train in that comms-denied environment, electronic attack. We want to do all those things. So I think part of this is changing the mindset that leaders who grew up at my level, and kind of probably down to the one-star and O-6 level that grew up in a time where we could control all the features and factors, and I didn’t have to delegate, because I could see. I could be in the ear of the lead squad and say, ‘What are you doing, move faster, you know, get back on the road.’
Now think about a comms-denied environment where we’re not going to be able to talk to them. So are we training the leaders the right way to think? And I come back to being a U.S. Marine, heart and soul of what I’ve done for 38 years, the delegation down to that NCO level, that non-commissioned officer level at the forward edge, and really let them run in training, make mistakes, and then when it’s time, delegate it and just let it go, and that’s it, that’s something that is different.
Q: How can the Pentagon help small, innovative companies increase production to useful levels?
A: It’s a great question, and I think my time with Deputy Secretary of Defense Feinberg, and watching him bring a bit of a business-model approach to this process connected to the DAWG, and the scaling is what we talk about all the time. “Great product, looks great. Can you scale?” But it’s not a fair question to ask, because the company is like, “Well, I can, but what’s the order?” And we’re like, “Well, we’re not sure yet, you know, it depends if you scale.”
One of the best practices we had [at the DAWG] is we took over the Replicator portfolio. The downselects we did, where we went out and visited the operators, the forward commanders. What do you need? Tell us what you need. Brought that knowledge back, brought the companies in, brought the acquisition executives in, and slimmed down the list almost by a third—these folks can’t scale, or they can’t be open architecture. But once we kind of found the big bets, then we went out to that company, some were small companies. “OK, we’re going to help you scale, because we believe your product’s what we’re looking for.” It’s our job to match and really accelerate you to scale, to meet us on the X with these numbers, and that is what the DepSecWar is pushing us to kind of think through. So I think your DAWG mechanism, and right now there’s a discussion, which direction it’s going to go, what it’ll become, but that’s what we want to plug into. So a best of breed. I want to get less away from a piece of tech or a vendor, go to the DAWG and say I’m looking for this capability, let them work in speed. We had sprint development centers where we had operators right next to vendors, right next to tech dev, and right next to the acquisition experts spinning fast, knocking people off the pedestal, putting new people on, and then once we found the bet, we’re ready to come with the cash to help them scale.
So it has to be a very collaborative way forward, I think, if we want to get some of these incredible companies coming up now to really be able to accelerate to scale. But the question of scale is, “We’re going to buy X number and then we’re moving on.” This is where, I don’t think everyone’s fully grasping, I think while the defense industrial base kind of struggles with this. I think they struggle with one-way attack systems, because my favorite words are “one way; it ain’t coming back.” OK, so if it’s not coming back, guess what: it’s not coming back to the airfield. You get 20 more years of contract services on this and make lots of money. So, I think that’s not good for our current defense industrial base model. We want to use two or three years. If that platform’s still viable, upgrade its brains and continue to dev, or get rid of it and go new, and I think that’s a scaling discussion that’s different than we’re used to in the past.
Q: Are defense companies getting the message that they have to play more like a startup?
A: Well, it’s so complex, because to build a nuclear submarine that shoots a nuclear missile…that is a certain amount of talent and capability, industrial baseline that cannot—we have to increase that, right? I think that some of the smaller things we’re seeing, the smaller classes of one-way attack system or drones, they’re still paving the way for heavy conventional systems to break through and get the target, so I think there’s room for both.
Q: Yeah, but you still have a lot of big programs of record that it sounds like we can get rid of.
A: I think you could. I mean, if you think high-wing ISR: do we want to keep making MQ-9-type approaches, or do we want really proliferated, and then you get up into space, P-LEO stuff, but then right below it. How can we do ISR differently? There is a lot of growth there, I think, great opportunity, too. And I think we should really be pushing to set the conditions to have those engagements. That’s why I go back to why I think the DAWG is important. It can operate at that DepSecWar level, work with the service acquisition authority, set conditions for those kind of competitions and drawdowns that accelerate once we find the folks that fit in this time window and be able to move on quickly.
Q: What is your biggest concern?
A: I’ll give you an answer you probably aren’t expecting. What keeps me up at night is attracting quality young Americans to come join the military, because we have to have these young folks replenished in our ranks. Less than 1% serve. We know that. That’s good. That’s how democracy should be. But are you attracting the right folks for the right reasons? Because they’re the ones that are coming in with a lot of those digital-native skills that we need. And then that grit we need also, because in any conflict we’re ever going to come into, that is truly the American advantage. It’s the young Americans that have solved so many hard problems on the battlefield in the past, and that’s how our nation will survive.
Q: Are there policies we could change to boost recruiting and retention?
A: I would look at our pay scale for our E-7s to E-8s and E-9s and quadruple it right now.
For those folks that stick around or a senior list of leaders, we put so much weight on their shoulders, and you’ve got to think of the sergeant major of the Marine Corps with almost 30 years’ experience, gets paid as much as a senior major or lieutenant colonel. I think that’s the talent we cannot afford to bleed off at the apex of their career paths.
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