At the same time new technological innovations have arisen that transform the economy of the United States and the lives of its citizens, these advances have also created risks, which requires a renewed partnership between the Defense Department and Silicon Valley to find ways to mitigate the risks while preserving the benefits of innovation, Defense Secretary Ashton Carter said on Thursday.
Carter said that “to stay competitive and stay ahead of threats, DoD mush do more. We need to better harness the commercial sector’s vibrancy and innovation, in DoD research and development, and other aspects of our work too.”
Part of this new partnership that Carter wants to harness with America’s technology sector includes the establishment of the Defense Innovation Unit X in Silicon Valley, he said during a speech at Stanford Univ. in the heart well known tech region. This new unit, a “first of its kind,” will include active duty and military reserves, and civilians, to “strengthen existing relationships and build new ones” with Silicon Valley, and “help scout for breakthrough and emerging technologies, and function as a local interface node for the rest of the department.”
Carter’s announcement follows one by Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson this week about DHS plans to open a satellite office in Silicon Valley to strengthen relationships between the department and tech sector.
Carter said that the new X unit–which stands for experimental–may eventually “help startups find new ways to work with DoD, either through technology insertion in modular platforms or open systems, or through matching them with businesses we already work with.”
The Pentagon’s relationship with the technology sector dates back decades to include the atomic bomb making project, the Manhattan Project, and other ground-breaking investments that helped launch the Internet.
In addition to the new DoD innovation office in California, Carter said the Pentagon needs to bring in new talent, and new ways to attract this talent, to meet its expertise needs. Part of this effort includes the establishment of a DoD branch of the U.S. Digital Service, which Carter pointed out grew from the technology team that solved the technical challenges associated with the start of the healthcare.gov website.
The digital team “will help solve some of our most intractable IT and data problems,” Carter said.
Carter also said that DoD will improve its partnerships with the tech sector by doing existing things better, such as employee exchange programs. He said it’s the “exception” when the Pentagon benefits from its Secretary of Defense Corporate Fellows Program that sends more than a dozen people a year to work with tech companies.
The program will be lengthened to two years, one with a company and another in an area of DoD “with comparable business practices” so “That we may have a better chance to bring the private sector’s best practices back into the department,” Carter said.
DoD also needs to find new ways to attract talent for its cyber security workforce, Carter said.
Another step toward stronger ties with the commercial sector by DoD includes “a small investment” with the non-profit start-up venture firm, In-Q-Tel, “to provide innovative solutions to our most challenging problems,” Carter said. In-Q-Tel has a partnership with the intelligence community already.
“In order to regain our competitiveness, we must expand our ways of investing in identifying and implementing new technologies and capabilities, and this new approach may yield a long-term advantage,” Carter said.