Exponentially evolving technologies such as artificial intelligence and machine learning have been exhaustively discussed and debated over the winter and spring during Congressional hearings on President Joe Biden’s $860 billion Fiscal Year 2024 (FY24) defense request.
But one stubborn systemic disconnect threatens to disrupt the timely delivery of new systems and programs into weapons and operations systems—the Pentagon’s cumbersome, ponderous procurement and implementation bureaucracy.
To invigorate participation from technology firms in the United States, the Department of Defense (DOD) in 2015 created the Defense Innovation Unit (DIU) to assist in quickly incorporating emerging commercial technologies into military operations.
After its launch as an “experimental” program, in 2016, DIU was reorganized under then-Secretary of Defense Ash Carter and placed directly under the DOD Secretary’s office, elevating the unit as one of “secretary-level” importance.
The presentation was among those organized by SCSP, a Washington-based nonprofit that focuses economic and military competition, as part of the Ash Carter Exchange on Innovation and National Security at the Waldorf Astoria in Washington.
Other speakers during the day-long event included former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, former Secretaries of Defense Robert Gates and Leon Panetta, and former National Security Adviser Lt. Gen. H.R. McMaster.
Among current officials who spoke during the Ash Carter Exchange were Air Force Secretary Frank Kendall, Assistant Secretary of Defense Kathleen Hicks, and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Mark Milley.
DOD Unit Gaining Efficacy
The DIU, which is one of 34 agencies and offices within the DOD, was downgraded during the Trump administration but, earlier this year, Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin realigned the unit to again “report directly to the Secretary of Defense” and be under the authority, direction, and control of the Secretary of Defense.”In April, Austin named Doug Beck, an Apple vice president and naval reserve captain who served in Afghanistan and Iraq, as DIU director.
Beck was among four panelists who participated in the discussion, along with former Air Force Gen. and Istari CEO Will Roper, DARPA Director Dr. Stefanie Tompkins, and Shield Capital Managing Partner Raj Shah, who served as the first DIU director under Carter’s DOD.
Recalling how Carter wrote a 2001 paper at Harvard University about how commercial innovations would be decisive on future battlefields, Shah said that was an urgent emphasis when he was chosen to lead the unit Carter created 15 years later with “seed funding” that “we were able to get from the couch cushion.”
“If I think of DIU as a start-up, [Carter] was the founder,” Shah said.
“When Ash Carter was saying” the military needs to coordinate better with commercial technology companies, “not everybody was saying that,” Beck recalled
Five years ago, he said, “the first iteration of DIU was literally just building a bridge” between the military and technology developers.
“Pentagon and Silicon Valley, you ought to know each other, there might be some things you can do together,” Beck said. “That’s been done and done incredibly well and this room is a reflection of that.”
The second step in developing DIU’s efficacy was “to prove you could take a real military problem and an actual commercial technology and bring them together and find a solution to rapidly prototype that and bring it to a place where it is buildable and scalable in some real way,” he said. “And that has been done some 65–70 times at DIU already.”
Slow Progress on Speed And Scale
Panelists said speed and scale, however, remain elusive in delivering new technologies to the military. The best way to achieve that, they said, is to “scale up” the DIU.“Now [DIU] is scaled and it has grown and in venture speak, I’d say it’s a unicorn now in the building,” Shah said. “it still has a long way to go” but “I’m excited it is going to be elevated back to the secretary level.”
“Now the next step is to take that capability and apply it to our most strategic problems and that is what the challenge is now. It’s all about speed and scale and about picking the right things to go to scale with,” Beck said.
DARPA’s Tompkins said DIU’s collaboration with U.S. technology companies is generating about 40 to 50 projects a year for her office and has resulted in supply chain improvements under the “need to make what you need where you need it.”
DIU has taken “cool things bubbling up more in traditional spaces” and geared them for military applications, she said, teasing a pending breakthrough in software security from its research with commercial partners.
“Seventy-five different passwords and you have to change them every three months [as a] constant reaction to [cyber] attacks. Imagine a world in which you didn’t have to do that,” Tompkins said.
“We’re a bureaucracy. We throw stones at that word, we rail against it but we understand that is what it is. We divide up the powers within our organizations, different organizations,” Roper said. “That’s the way government is structured so that you can’t do volatile, crazy things unless need arises and you get consensus of will. When you get consensus of will, you can do things quickly.”
And that, he said, is “the challenge we have now.”
“We really have kindled a spirit of innovation in government and that is not BS. It is legitimate. People want to innovate, solve problems differently, work with technology.”
As a member of the Defense Innovation Board, Roper said industry and investors see the shift.
“Everyone believes that the will is there but, what the process is not organized to do, is to bring it in at scale, to mechanize it. It’s mechanized to go to war the way we did in past decades but it’s really not mechanized for innovation,” he said.
Roper said “the big litmus test, the needed step to bringing innovation back to defense, is whether or not we start treating this, defending this, the innovation battlefield, as a true mission in the [DOD] and, in doing so, organize, train, and resource for it.”
Shah said he still sees disconnects in how the Pentagon and Congress is working with commercial technology groups, noting although “every senior leader will talk about AI [Artificial Intelligence] and ML [machine learning] and how important it is on the battlefield,” until this year’s roughly $30 billion commitment, only $1 billion to $2 billion was being earmarked for DIU programs.
“If we’re spending less than 1 percent of our budget on what we say is the most important of things, that doesn’t seem to compute,” he said.
But make no mistake, Shah said, Silicon Valley and other U.S. technology companies are intrigued by the competitive challenges of working on military programs.
“I’ve never seen so much interest among engineers and technologists toward military projects,” he said.
“They are tired of doing photo-sharing apps.”
