By Jaspreet Gill
The director of the Pentagon’s tech hub said that not having a more effective, faster approach to adopting commercial technology is a “glaring weakness” in modernizing DoD, warning the US could fall behind China in technological innovation.
Director of the Defense Innovation Unit, Mike Brown told the Senate Armed Services Committee’s emerging threats and capabilities subcommittee Wednesday that Congress should provide funding to buy commercial products while at the same time eliminating the bureaucratic requirements process if the US wants to outpace its adversaries.
There needs to be more flexibility when it comes to moving money where it’s needed most, Brown said, adding he “realized why those things existed historically.”
“But now we’re in a serious tech competition with China and they’re not waiting for our democratic timeframes,” he said. “I like our system better than theirs, but we have to figure out how to move more quickly and it really, from a technology adoption point of view — whether it’s commercial technology or inventing the next technology — it’s about having the flexibility to move it where it’s needed most in a simpler fashion than we have today. I think that’s the most critical element we need to attack between Congress and the department to improve our defense.”
DIU in fiscal 2021 transitioned eight new technologies to the military services and awarded 72 prototype other transaction contracts, according to its 2021 annual report. The tech hub awarded several contracts for cyber-focused projects, including a cyberspace deception prototype platform that will warn against adversarial activity and a commercial threat data prototype for US Cyber Command.
In total, DIU has introduced 100 new vendors to DoD, but its successes reflect less than 1 per cent of the defense procurement budget, and part of that is because commercial technologies are different from defense technologies, Brown told lawmakers.
“First, they’re supplied in massive unit volumes, sometimes in the millions often led by consumers,” he said. “Second, commercial technologies evolve at faster speeds than defense technologies, refreshed in 12 to 18 month cycles. Third, commercial technologies are not service specific, so we often don’t know where to buy them. Lastly, we do not control the spread of commercial technologies. Dangerously, they are available to our adversaries as soon as they’re available to us. No wonder, then, we need a different way to assess and buy these commercial technologies.”
In a Feb. 1 memo obtained by Breaking Defense, Undersecretary of Research and Engineering Heidi Shyu divided 14 technologies DoD considered critical into three broad categories, including “effective adoption areas,” or technologies that are already available in the commercial sector. Examples in that category include artificial intelligence, advanced computing, microelectronics and software interfaces.
Brown told lawmakers that of those 14 critical technologies, 11 of them are from the commercial sector.
