Bryan Clark, a retired Navy captain and a senior fellow for the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, said "because N99 was added to the staff without a clear role in the capability development process, it never gained much traction." The directorate was supposed to sponsor unmanned systems programs through development to milestone B, the point in the acquisition process when initial production begins. The systems would then be handed off to other resource sponsors. But Clark pointed out that the platform sponsors provided unmanned systems by N99 needed a role in developing the system, since they eventually own the system and the associated concepts of operations. Meanwhile, the Office of Naval Research was already handling early development of unmanned systems, as ONR oversees all Navy science and technology projects. "In the end, the role of N99 ended up being only the very small portfolio of unmanned systems that were out of S&T and not yet ready for CONOPs development," Clark wrote in a Feb. 9 email. "It didn't merit a whole directorate."
In the News