WWW.SEAPOWERMAGAZINE.ORG 14 SEAPOWER / MAY 2016
a mission-assessment process to look at each of the
bases and installations and assuring the mission can
continue no matter what.
As we do that, we’ve actually put some pilots in place
that we’ve tested over the last couple of years — one in
the Pacific Northwest, another one here in Naval District
Washington. We’re at the cusp of being able to roll out
what we call the new Smart Grid Program, [which] will
start in Norfolk, Va. It will be able to show us how we
can make our bases and installations more secure.
The bases are elemental to fleet support and our
ability to ensure that we are perpetually training and
preparing the next units that will deploy. Increasingly,
operations begin and end at those shore installations, whether they support communications centers,
Maritime Operation Centers, or, for that matter,
the operation of unmanned vehicles being employed
halfway around the world. The bases are becoming increasingly more important in terms of energy
security.
What would you like to see
from industry as you foster
your own innovative efforts?
CULLOM: Energy is where we cut
our teeth when it came to innova-
tion. Along the way, there are tre-
mendous things going on in indus-
try. I think we’ve made pretty effec-
tive use of that by partnering with
industry on a number of different
things in the energy realm. …
Many of these ideas existed out
in the commercial sector for some
period of time, like hybrid elec-
tric drive. We certainly see a lot
of hybrid cars on the street every
day today that are hybrid electric.
To be able to convert a destroyer
into a hybrid electric-drive ship,
to have an energy dashboard that
is up in the pilot house to make
the best use of the energy we can,
requires us to have a very good
cross-fertilization of those partner-
ships with industry.
The learning we’ve done there,
we are in the process of trying to
do high-velocity learning in other
realms, all across other aspects. …
I think to get somewhere in terms
of high-velocity learning, you have
to fail. Fail small. Fail early. Fail
often. But get somewhere with it.
That’s how can you iterate to something much, much better.
This is a V- 22 fuel manifold [pic-tured at left on the facing page] that
was 3-D printed in titanium. What
we have found is that it is significantly stronger than its stainless
steel equivalent simply because all
of the structural elements you generally have when you machine and
