Navy unveils new ‘Catapult’ plan to accelerate emerging tech for high-priority problems

Looking to “catapult over the bureaucracy” that’s known to decelerate innovation across Pentagon components, the Navy is getting set to launch a new opportunity designed to accelerate resources to ultimately help deploy and scale emerging technologies that get after some of the greatest challenges warfighters will need to confront in modern conflicts, two senior officials told DefenseScoop.

The sea service plans to launch a new broad agency announcement next month — aptly named Catapult — via which it will invest millions of dollars in strategic financing to support small businesses with existing capabilities that can tackle the Navy’s highest-priority concerns, like digital architecture development and rearming at sea.

During a recent joint interview to preview the upcoming BAA, two senior Navy officials leading Catapult briefed DefenseScoop on its roots and their creative vision to get small businesses involved in traditionally sole-sourced environments to become more disruptive in meeting real-world needs.

“The success would be, we have gotten through the bureaucracy — catapulted over all of the bureaucracy of slow stuff that we’re used to — and we’ve taken a good idea from the small business community and we’ve demonstrated it and we’re transitioning it to the warfighter,” said Jacob Glassman, senior technical advisor to the assistant secretary of the Navy for research, development and acquisition.

This first-of-its-kind, multi-award Catapult challenge will leverage Small Business Innovation Research funding for direct-to-phase-two prototypes already approved in the Navy or other federal agencies, and potentially expedite the transition of those proven capabilities to military personnel.

Catapult’s origins trace back to a study that Glassman’s colleague, Maria Proestou, kicked off for Navy Secretary Carlos Del Toro a little over two years ago to look into the sea service’s R&D enterprise concept. 

“It’s kind of out of this study that had me take a look at that — that the original Catapult idea emerged and it was really very much about, how do we put strategic resources to take great ideas and get them better positioned to scale?” Proestou, who now serves as a strategic acquisition advisor within the Navy’s research, development and acquisition directorate, told DefenseScoop.

Building on the success of the earliest Catapult iteration that subsequently followed that, her and Glassman’s team is now planning to issue the pre-release of its “25.4 Catapult Challenge BAA” the first week of October, with aims to start accepting proposals Oct. 23. 

The opportunity will focus on contemporary “problems that we really want to get some targeted resources against,” Proestou explained.

Smaller-sized companies that have already been approved in any military or government SBIR program will be invited to participate — and potentially be placed on a path to deploy their technologies with specific Navy programs at an accelerated pace.

“We want to have the challenge be about getting these prototypes more mature such that we could demonstrate them and then make the case for scaling. That’s really important to the Catapult challenge is to get us to that point where we can really go straight to phase three and deploy it at scale,” Proestou said.

“And we’ve seen that work with other examples with small businesses and we know we can replicate it. And I use that word deliberately in my answer,” she added — loosely pointing to the Defense Department’s unfolding Replicator initiative.

Though they couldn’t provide many details about all the topics that will be covered in the BAA, the officials confirmed that one of the challenges Catapult will confront encompasses the Navy’s pursuits to re-arm weapons and assets at sea.

“This is something that is really important to the secretary of the Navy and the department. We really want to be able to demonstrate that we can re-arm — we can load missiles on ships while they’re out in theater, right? They don’t have to go back to Guam or Hawaii to load up new missiles. That could be a real game-changer in a fight. And so there’s technologies that could be brought to bear against that challenge,” Proestou said.

“Small businesses are really a goldmine for going faster, and that’s what we are trying to do,” Glassman added. 

Another challenge they intend to get at via Catapult involves creating a new architecture that any small business the Navy partners with in this space will be able to quickly connect into and deploy the existing and emerging capabilities they’re developing.

“One of our biggest challenges — and challenges in the Navy in particular, and why we get a lot of slack, I guess, in the Navy that we’re hard to deal with and so on and so forth — it’s that our systems are really old, and adoption of new technology is really hard. And so getting after this architecture challenge is designed to make adoption for anything that we want to plug in to our systems easier to plug in,” Proestou explained. 

Drawing on his prior experiences as a leading Navy systems engineer, Glassman explained why he’s passionate about enabling more open architectures for the government to seamlessly work with small businesses.

“If you look at our evolving threats that are going on from a mission system, mission capability standpoint — we have two major problems,” he told DefenseScoop.

The first issue, in his view, is that the Navy needs to be able to rapidly adapt and introduce new advanced capabilities in theater — but right now, the foundation and digital architecture to underpin that “are not quite at that point.”

“If you see what’s going on in Ukraine and in the Middle East — it’s neck-breaking, right? You see like, ‘Oh, there’s a countermeasure, a technical countermeasure. It’s been introduced. Oh no, we need to now overcome that.’ Okay, well now it’s going to take a Herculean effort, as opposed to building those architectures knowing that, hey, we’re going to encounter something and we need to be able to deploy a counter to that very, very quickly,” Glassman said. 

His second concern encompasses how America’s contemporary industrial capacity for major weapons systems is optimized only for current demand.

“I mean, it’s down to the penny, right, which is not a warfighting footing. Their factory lines, everything to software development environments, to etc., are optimized right now for our peacetime environment and they have very little surge capacity,” Glassman said. 

One hope is that if this team can help the Navy get the right architecture in place for small businesses with Catapult, it will also make it easier for companies to pivot to meet real-time national security needs.

This is also one element among many initiatives Assistant Secretary of the Navy for Research, Development and Acquisition Nickolas Guertin is leading to help the sea service evolve and shift how it conducts business to better prepare for future threat environments. 

“So the idea is, if we can harness these dollars that we have available to us through Catapult, which has been in place for almost a year — but now we’re taking the Catapult program and generating this challenge to go after these specific things that we think will change the business model and the way we do business,” Proestou said.

Those involved in bringing Catapult to fruition are working hand-in-hand with select Navy program offices that are meant to eventually transition the capabilities to the warfighters who will rely on them.

For example, one of the topics is related to the Navy’s program executive office for integrated warfare systems.

“It involves an architecture framework for hosting certain capabilities on air platforms, surface platforms, undersea platforms and seabed platforms. It’s one architecture that can deploy certain capabilities and all that,” Glassman noted. 

A few weeks ago, the officials unveiled this Catapult plan at a small business conference in California.

“While we were out there, I spoke with some of the SBA representatives that were there. I’ve already talked to them about, if we really like something, that we can go in for an SBIR waiver and go up to a $15 million award with this. So it could be a much more significant investment than sort of what might traditionally be familiar with our phase two program,” Proestou said.

While officials want to scale the technologies that work as fast as possible, the team also hopes that this initial push will springboard additional co-investments from other sources — like the Defense Innovation Unit or the Office of Strategic Capital that’s trying to help DOD components leverage additional private capital funds.

Officials are planning to host “ask me anything” sessions on specific topics for those interested in participating in Catapult. Demonstrations could happen as soon as early next year. 

“I would say my definition of success is a program of record that is funded next budget cycle that was built off the work that we did here on Catapult challenge,” Proestou told DefenseScoop.