Secretary of Defense Ash Carter is vowing to continue growing his high-tech outreach initiative to include more offices that place military personnel among private-sector innovators.
Carter cut the ribbon on a new Defense Innovation Unit-Experimental (DIUx) last week in Austin, Texas. It was the third such innovation hub to follow the East Coast iteration in Boston and the initial pilot program office in Silicon Valley, California.
“We’re going to keep going because there are lots of good technology hubs in the United States,” Carter said Monday during an appearance at the Hoover Institution in Washington, D.C. “It is a cyber world and we can all talk to each other over Skype and so forth, but animal proximity matters. Having somebody in the neighborhood, who is from us and of us and reaching out and trying to meet people on their physical and mental territory, matters.”
The DIUx program so far has signed five agreements worth a total $3.5 million. At least 22 more projects are in the pipeline, for an additional $65 million of upcoming investment.
The tech hubs operate on a co-investment model where it pools funds with military services and other elements of the Defense Department and invests in development of innovative technologies with foreseen practical applications. The model allow DIUx to in some cases triple its initial investment with additional funding from services that will eventually field the emerging technologies.
The Austin branch will sprout within the Austin technology incubator Capital Factory. The Austin DIUx will be led by Christy Abizaid, formerly deputy assistant secretary of defense for Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Central Asia as well as a member of the National Security Council staff. Abizaid will report to DIUx Managing Partner Raj Shah. The remainder of the staff will mostly be filled by local reservists and National Guard members already working in the Austin tech community.
Carter did not speculate where other future DIUx sites could be located, but elaborated on his desire to establish a cooperative relationship with tech companies that have no traditional association with the military but develop technologies with practical applications in national defense. The Pentagon must reach out to the commercial sector because it no longer corners the market on cutting edge innovation and technology.
“It has always been our relationship with private industry that has been the channel through which we got the best technology,” Carter said. “That has to be different in today’s world. … In those days, the technology of consequence in our world mostly was American and much of it government sponsored. Those two things … are not to be taken for granted any more. We have to have a new relationship with the dynamic, innovative culture of the United States.”
William Perry, who served as secretary and deputy secretary of defense during the Clinton administration, applauded Carter’s outreach to the tech industry. Perry said U.S. industry writ large was traditionally on board with helping the military develop technologies like stealth and smart munitions but has become more insular as innovation has passed from government to private control.
“People then understood the importance of assisting the Defense Department in what they were doing,” Perry said. “When I was undersecretary it was easy to go out to industry and get people to do the things I was asking them to do. It’s not so easy for Ash.”
Silicon Valley is inundated with a deep, undefined distrust of the government, its authority and its motives, Perry said. Young tech entrepreneurs fear the government wants to leash their creative reach, prevent them from dealing with certain countries and is “reading their mail,” he said.
“All of these things annoy people to a very great extent and you don’t have anything to balance that,” Perry said. “You don’t have the feeling on their part that yes, maybe this is bad, but it is worth doing because of the dangers that we face. He’s having a hard time, I think, getting support from these high-tech companies.”
“If anyone can do it, he can,” Perry added. “He’s trying hard to overcome them, but the barriers are very great.”
The next test will come when a new administration takes office in 2017, Perry said. Had the Reagan administration declined to continued research and development of stealth technology that began during President Jimmy Carter’s term, the military would not have had the F-117 stealth fighter during the First Gulf War, he said.
“The F-117 stealth airplane, the smart weapon, all these things made a tremendous difference in the outcome of that war and I felt some sense of pride for that,” Perry said of his involvement with stealth technology as undersecretary of defense for research and engineering beginning in 1977. “I also understood that if my successor … and his boss – ultimately the president – hadn’t supported that, the whole thing would have gone down in a heap of cards.”
“We have to hope that what Ash is doing now will be sustained by his successor,” Perry added. “There is no guarantee of that.”