The University of Arizona has launched its Arizona AETOS Program with the Missile Defense Advocacy Alliance, opening a new eight-month training effort meant to help the United States respond more quickly to technology threats that are changing by the month, and sometimes by the day.
The College of Engineering will bring in 12 to 18 participants from across the country, most of them from the uniformed services, for seven sessions running from July to February. They will work in teams to build policy ideas or prototypes, with the goal of producing defense solutions at a faster and cheaper rate than the system uses now.
David Hahn said Friday at a media event that the university is a strong fit for the work because of its location near the border and its faculty’s knowledge of space, drones and aerodynamics. He said the effort gives the school a chance to help solve “a very real national security problem,” and argued that defense work needs to move away from 10- and 15-year design and prototype cycles for systems expected to last 50 years.
The program comes as military planners struggle with gaps in defense against low-flying drones and near-space operations such as balloons and airships. Riki Ellison said defeating cheap drones at scale is a challenge for the nation and for the world, and said the military should partner with younger officers and technical experts so that both sides can bring problems and technologies into the same room.
That mix is the point of AETOS, which stands for Advanced Education in Terrestrial Operations and Space. The training will start with formal classroom learning, then move into working groups that develop capstones with guest speakers and formal knowledge. Students will also work to improve data and analytic models that can better explain emerging threats and new technologies.
Leaders hope some prototypes can grow into military solutions, while some capstone projects could even lead to congressional law. Hahn said he wants the collaboration to become a steady annual program, not a one-time experiment, because the threats it is aimed at are evolving too quickly for traditional timelines to keep up.
For the University of Arizona, the bet is that its engineers, researchers and its location can help compress years of defense development into months. For the military and its civilian partners, the question is whether those ideas can move far enough, fast enough, to matter before the next threat changes shape.
