Breaking Defense reported last week that HII has established Dark Sea Labs, an office “focused on integrating technologies from across its various business units, with the aim of replicating similar cross-cutting endeavors at the Pentagon.”

The story is based on an exclusive interview with Eric Chewning, HII’s executive vice president of strategy and development, who said Dark Sea Labs is about “how we can take capability across the different portfolios—whether it’s Ingalls, Newport News or Mission Technologies—and then bring that together … to solve a customer problem set that any single division couldn’t solve on its own.”

Chewning cited Dark Sea Labs for several cross-divisional successes, including the modernization of the weapons systems aboard Zumwalt-class destroyers and the launch and recovery of unmanned undersea vehicles from traditional submarines.

He also said successfully demonstrating a new technology through other transaction agreements (OTAs) will be the company’s approach to seeing them turned into programs of record. Mission Technologies’ recent contract to develop a high-energy laser is one example.

“There’s an opportunity here for us to obviously excel in this program for the Army,” Chewning said. “As the technology is validated and proven, [the goal is to demonstrate] that to other services, and given our deep relationship with the Navy, being able to demonstrate that we’re able to ‘marinize’ the capability to address the Navy’s problem sets with the same counter-UAS mission.”

Read the story at breakingdefense.com.