A new plan to advance the mission of the lead Defense Department unit charged with accelerating the adoption of commercial technologies is being well received by outside experts who like that the Defense Innovation Unit is working to bulk up and integrate more closely with other elements of the department.
The DIU 3.0 plan released last Wednesday lays out how the organization hopes to better tune its adoption of commercial solutions for critical DoD needs and acquire these technologies at scale.
“Having DIU as a secretary of defense direct report and deeply embedded in the various deputy secretary of defense-led innovation initiatives and at the combatant commands is really important in that regard,” Jerry McGinn, executive director George Mason Univ.’s Baroni Center for Government Contracting, told Defense Daily last week. “It is also critical that the secretary is approving some billets to staff DIU because that has been a barrier in the past.”
The new DIU plan was put forth by the unit’s director, Doug Beck, who outlined eight lines of effort that include extending partnerships through the Defense Department where there is demand for commercial solutions, strengthening coordination with other innovation entities across DoD, add more staff to the unit that are comfortable at the intersection of commercial technology and national security, and to continue to make it easier for the private sector to engage with DoD with new structures that include physical, digital, and procedural.
Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin’s approval of additional “billets to staff DIU” is important because that “has been a barrier in the past” to properly scaling the organization, McGinn said.
Jacob Helberg, an adviser to Palantir Technologies [PLTR] and Stanford Univ.’s Center on Geopolitics & Technology, would like for DIU to target venture capital firms more directly as part of its outreach to the commercial technology sector.
The VC firms have good insights into the “most promising” startups that are developing technologies of interest to DoD, Helberg told Defense Daily last week. It can be difficult for the government to make sense of one startup versus another when “they are bombarded with tons of different companies” who all say their technology is the best, he said.
Venture capitalists have years of experience dealing with these startups and are skilled at taking the measure of the founders and which of them possess that “founder gene that’s capable of building, you know, a $10 billion plus company,” Helberg said.
Using the expertise of the VC firms would help “inform” any decisions DIU makes about a company, he said. There are concerns within government that the VC investors would only be self-serving in their recommendations, but Helberg said this “tension” inhibits many conversations from ever taking place.
Helberg, McGinn, and James Lewis, who directs the Strategic Technologies Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, all agree that DIU is heading in the right direction with its evolution since its founding in 2015, with Beck’s plan to find ways to turbocharge DoD’s use of commercial innovation.
Lewis said credit is also due to Austin and Deputy Defense Secretary Kathleen Hicks for realizing the importance of increasingly adopting commercial solutions and doing more than any previous administration in integrating these capabilities into defense.
Hicks last summer launched the Replicator Initiative, which initially is aimed at acquiring thousands of autonomous and attritable drones that would be used for any future fight with China. DIU is managing the initiative.
DoD has already begun to make selections for Replicator, although little is known in this regard currently, but whether in the first iteration or future ones, commercially-developed solutions are expected to feature prominently in the initiative.
The defense technology ecosystem is “looking at how DIU approaches the Replicator program as a potential bellwether on DIU’s ability to execute on DIU 3.0,” Helberg said. “So, I do think that getting the Replicator program right is going to be really important.”
One thing that McGinn feels DIU 3.0 lacks are details about the unit’s resources to fund its various innovation efforts in partnership with the military services. If the unit is “robustly funded, that will go a long way to implementing it,” he said.
House appropriators have proposed providing $1 billion in fiscal year 2024 for a “hedge portfolio” that DIU would manage to field capabilities in areas such as multi-domain drones, satellites, munitions, communications, and artificial intelligence. Senate defense appropriators are recommending $107.2 million for the agency, $2.5 million above the request.
Lewis believes that ultimately, if an FY ’24 defense budget is agreed to, DIU will get at least $600 million in funding.
Helberg said he is not concerned the DIU 3.0 plan does not prescribe resource allocations. DIU should have flexibility and be “relatively opportunistic” in where it spends its funds, he said.
DIU is focused on leveraging technology in six areas, including artificial intelligence and machine learning, autonomy, cyber, energy, human systems, and space. Helberg said these priorities are important because they show the technology areas of interest where DIU is “actively keeping an eye out for” but they are not stuck in spending a certain amount of their funds in each area.