One of the lessons learned for the Defense Department from the ongoing war in Ukraine is the speed at which commercial technologies can quickly be delivered to the Ukrainians in their fight against Russia than established DoD programs, a senior department official said on Wednesday.
The fact that the Defense Innovation Unit (DIU) had already helped prototype some of these commercial technologies also aided their rapid transfer to Ukraine, Doug Beck, DIU director and a senior advisor to Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin, said during a panel on “Accelerating Capabilities for the DoD” at the Aspen Institute’s Security Forum.
Beck pointed out that Anduril Industries, which is considered a technology disruptor in the defense market, has had to go through “procedural” steps to get their DoD programs of record “shareable” with Ukraine. “Whereas something that’s more quickly tailored off-the-shelf can go even faster,” he said.
The DIU also has “embedded” some of its personnel with European Command that to help solve problems quickly for the Ukrainians “and help shape what the needs are and what the imagined problem is,” Beck said.
Another lesson, which has been highlighted since Russia attacked Ukraine in February 2022, is that commercial technologies have been critical in helping the Ukrainians, he said, citing the use of commercial space sensing assets for imaging and analysis in the cloud, secure communications to fill in for destroyed networks and “crowdsourcing of targeting,” and more.
“It’s demonstrating that impact and it’s demonstrating that it can have leverage to make a real difference,” Beck said of commercial technologies.
What the war in Ukraine has also brought home is the fact that DoD has not acquired commercial technologies rapidly at scale, which is an area that the DIU is “focused on now,” he said. This is important both to make a business case for the commercial entrants in the defense market and to make a difference for the warfighter, he added.
Beck has been leading DIU for two months and he is the first head of the organization to directly report to the secretary of defense. In the past eight years DIU has developed the links between DoD and the technology sector and proven frequently that commercial solutions could be rapidly prototyped to meet mission needs to the point that the current challenges are “focus, speed and scale,” he said.
The good news, at least in Beck’s opinion, is that all the stakeholders—the White House, the DoD, Congress, and the technology sector—understand the need to better leverage commercial technologies, creating a “tipping point to make a difference.”
“Making that happen is what this next phase of DIU is all about and that’s why the secretary elevated it to be a direct report,” he said.
Christian Brose, Anduril’s chief strategy officer who was also on the panel, said there has been too much “overthinking” by DoD on the challenges with purchasing commercial and put it bluntly that “for a lot of the types of capabilities we’re talking about, the Defense Department, the U.S. Government just needs to buy them” and “in large quantities.” DoD needs to be a “better buyer” of everything from “loitering munitions or large autonomous undersea vehicles or drones” if these are what the department needs, he said.
Unlike typical programs of record with a multi-decade life-cycle, a lot of commercially-developed systems need to be purchased quickly to create incentives for suppliers to build at scale and to attract more competitors into the market, Brose said. Rather than programs of record, these commercial technologies would be replaced more frequently, he said.
Brose also said the DoD must have the mindset that some of the commercial systems it buys and deploys will not work right away but will evolve through an “agile process” of working with the end user on improvements “in what is a very dynamic environment where you and the adversary are engaged in this move, counter-move type of process and you have to stay continually one step ahead. And the only way you do that is tightly coupled with the end user and that’s definitely been our experience in Ukraine.”
Heidi Shyu, undersecretary of defense for research and engineering, who was also on the panel, said the department’s year-old Rapid Defense Experimentation Reserve, dubbed RDER, conducted an experiment in May where vendors could showcase their systems and get user feedback. Next, this equipment will be used in this fall’s Northern Edge exercise, she said.
From there, a list will be drawn up for the services, the Joint Staff, and the Combatant Commanders to know what “worked really well” and then decide “How do we rapidly accelerate fielding,” Shyu said. William LaPlante, undersecretary of defense for acquisition and sustainment, has created mechanisms and processes to rapidly acquire equipment, she said.