In order to remain technically relevant in an age when most innovation happens outside the government, the military must become an “educated consumer” of technologies that emerge in the commercial sector without any initial combat application, according to Vice Chairman of the Joint Chief of Staff.
A number of efforts have been launched to help the Pentagon, which is very comfortable interacting with large, relatively slow-moving defense contracting giants, make overtures to the tech sector without scaring off its smaller and more innovative firms.
“That is a much different partnership than exists today because it is a much broader partnership,” Air Force Gen. Paul Selva said Aug. 25 at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. “I would suggest to you that with all of our large defense companies, that is the very natural relationship. But if I went into a company that has no relationship with the military and said ‘Your technology look interesting to me and I think it has military utility,’ many of those companies would initially stand back and say…‘I can’t absorb a contract on the scale that the Defense Department might bring to me,’ or ‘I’m not really interested in being associated with the military.’”
(Photo: U.S. Air Force)
Pentagon officials and personnel in charge of innovation within the services need to develop an understanding of the “broad trajectory” of technology that they no longer direct. Where a generation ago the government drove technological development for itself and the commercial world, now the government must look outward for innovation, Selva said.
“In 1996 we spent almost 10 times the amount that the civilian community spent on this kind of research,” Selva said. “Today those numbers are almost flipped. IT companies around the world are so rich in capital relatively speaking to what they looked like in 1996 that they have flipped that equation on its head.”
The most compelling example of commercial technology that has practical military application is human-machine interface and using robotics and autonomy to speed decision making, he said. But the government is not willing to place large bets on technologies with little promise of creating influential capabilities.
“We are not venture capitalists. I am not placing bets I don’t think are going to pay off,” Selva said. “In a sense we are a little bit like venture capitalists in this innovation space, because we are literally trying to triage and figure out where the highest payoff might be and place that bet and determine if that technology or that concept will pay off.”
He called for small investments of capital in reasonably proven technologies that won’t break the bank if they fail. The process can “come unglued” if innovators lose the reins and end up with nothing to show Congress for large investments of capital, he said.
“As long as we keep the number small, on both the amount invested and magnitude of failure, we are likely going to continue to have willing partners,” he said.