In a show of generosity, congressional appropriators on Thursday released a spending bill that would fund the Pentagon’s Defense Innovation Unit (DIU) at nearly $1 billion in fiscal year 2024, about 900 percent above the request, to include $589.4 million to field technologies.
The Defense Department did not request any DIU funds for fielding but the bill, which still must be agreed to by the House and Senate and signed by the president, contains more than a dozen categories for the innovation arm to transition technologies into the field, including $220 million to support combatant commanders, $50 million each for long-endurance unmanned surface vessels to boost multi-domain awareness, and countering small drones, $23 million for autonomous vertical take-off-and-landing logistics aircraft, and $27.8 million for artificial intelligence technology in the areas of intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR) drones, ISR data and analysis, and AI development tools.
The Pentagon’s request for DIU was $104.7 million. Overall, the FY ’24 Defense Appropriations Bill would allocate $946.5 million to the organization.
In addition to the fielding funds, the bill provides $225.2 million for things like onramp hubs and the geographic expansion of these hubs, a hypersonic unmanned wingman, innovation with academia, reusable hypersonic technology, and more.
“As the manufacturer of the only reusable hypersonic engine in America, I’m pretty excited about it,” Joe Laurienti, founder and CEO of Ursa Major, told reporters on Thursday at a media roundtable. That engine is the Hadley, which is fueled by liquid oxygen and kerosene and flew for the first time earlier this month when it successfully powered Stratolaunch’s Talon-A test vehicle to high supersonic speeds (Defense Daily, March 11).
The appropriators also would provide another $131.9 million to DIU within the R&D account for prototyping efforts, none of which was requested. These funds are broken out for quantum, $55 million, advance rocket propulsion, $20 million, accountability bookkeeping dashboard, $18 million, aircraft autonomy, $14.8 million, additive manufacturing of undersea drones, $10 million, and other items.
DIU recently introduced its vision for the third phase of the organization, DIU 3.0, with the driving goal being to scale his organization and DoD’s adoption of commercially-developed technologies that meet warfighting needs.
Congressional appropriators would agree. Within a section of the bill titled “innovation,” the they say “The ultimate objective of the capability development process must remain to field relevant and advanced systems at scale.”