The Defense Innovation Unit-Experimental (DIUx) will not be a year old when a new administration takes office in January. Pentagon officials hope bridges built by the nascent office between the Defense Department and Silicon Valley survive the transition.
DIUx Director Raj Shah and others in Defense Secretary Ash Carter’s circle of technologically minded acolytes are confident that issues of technological advancement, modernization and acquisition agility are paramount to the nation’s success and transcend party politics.
“Innovation is not a partisan issue,” Shah said Nov. 16 at the CyberCon conference hosted by Federal Times in Washington, D.C. “We know that innovation is going to be critical to our success and critical to stay ahead of our near-peer adversaries. The speed of change and the speed of being able to try new things is what will underpin that.”
“Having the opportunity to try new things and make mistakes .. is what will be critical for us within a rapidly changing threat environment where the adversaries are not restricted by regulations and policy and they are taking these new technologies, from open-source cyber offensive tools to low-cost drones and using them against us today,” he added.
Carter, Shah and company have allies elsewhere in government. Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee (SASC), voiced support for the endeavor Wednesday on Capitol Hill.
Asked if DIUx is a worthy effort that should transition into the next administration, McCain simply replied, “I hope so.”
DIUx is based on a co-investment model in which the unit fronts some cash but also requires the interested service or agency to fund a substantial portion of the project they want to back. Shah said that model puts fewer financial constraints on DIUx to continue its activities.
Now in its second “iteration,” DIUx was launched as a tech outreach hub in Silicon Valley, Calif., earlier this year. It since has opened outposts in Boston and Austin, Texas. Carter said this week he would like to see more offices opened before his tenure is up, but did not say when or where.
Shah praised the unit’s charter to engage with a variety of companies to achieve its goals. It has paired a traditional defense firm that manufactures sensors with a young startup that produces innovative software for the device. It has seen startups prioritize defense-related product development that would perhaps not have taken precedence if the DIUx door was not opened to them, he said.
“There is a third category of a whole slew of younger companies that never even considered the department, never thought ‘My software or my technology would be valuable to them,’” Shah said.
Instead of beginning with a list of requirements that a technology or system must have for the government to buy it, DIUx publishes problem sets for which the Defense Department needs solutions, Shah said. That way the government is not pigeonholed into considering only technologies it anticipates.
DIUx is focused on investing in technologies that provide specific capabilities in five areas: autonomy and robotics, machine learning and artificial intelligence, networks and cyber, commercial space and biotechnology, Shah said.
Those are key technology areas “we think the commercial sector is on their own invested and on their own focused on going after the big $1.5 trillion consumer market,” he said.
In half a year, DIUx has launched a dozen contracts worth about $36 million total. Another 15 or so contracts worth $60 million or more are in the pipeline and should be announced in “coming weeks and months,” Shah said.
“We’re six months old,” Shah said. “We are still doing a lot of learning. … I wouldn’t argue that we’ve got the model down perfect. That is sort of the ethos of the innovation world: You try a number of things. Some of them will fail. That is software development at its core. That’s the path that we will continue on.”