|
Our top story brings an update on how DIU is transforming to version 3.0 under the leadership of new director, Doug Beck, who is now a direct report to the Secretary of Defense.
- Speaking from this week's Fed Supernova conference in Austin, Beck said it's time for DIU to move past prototyping and into scaling up production at the scale needed for strategic effect.
- He also spoke about risk a few times, noting the important distinction between risk and uncertainty. Risk is what happens "when you get it wrong" and young service members have to fight. "Our many layers of risk aversion are really transferring risk to those people."
- Providing clarity on what risk truly is, he said, can be helpful for commercial tech companies who can then apply their expertise to assess, price, and manage that risk.
A related article in War on the Rocks shows optimism for current language in the defense appropriations bill to increase funding for DIU, with the hopes that it will help transition more technologies to fielded capabilities.
In policy world, DoD's authority to use commercial solutions opening is permanent and codified in law. Of course, DIU pioneered the use of this method of solicitation and simplified contracting.
The Office of the Director of National Intelligence has released an RFI asking industry to share details about barriers in providing commercial remote sensing/space-based data and analytic services to DoD and the intelligence community.
Last week the White House released its list of R&D priorities for FY2025. Included are trustworthy AI, other emerging technologies such as microelectronics, biotech, and quantum information sciences, and the need to address the climate crisis.
PPBE reform commission co-chairs Ellen Lord and Bob Hale penned a commentary making the case for the changes they've recommended and those they see on the horizon.
- They suggest changes to documents like the Defense Planning Guidance that clearly link budget to strategy.
In people stories, The New Yorker provides a detailed look at how the U.S. government relies heavily on technologies provided by Elon Musk–from the Starlink communication capabilities crucial to Ukraine's war defense to SpaceX's launch services and Tesla's charging stations.
- It's an uneasy relationship from a national security perspective. Musk notoriously showed support for Russia to claim some Ukrainian territory and depends on Chinese manufacturing ofTeslas.
In NPS news, check out the mind-bending research of professor Frank Narducci applying quantum mechanics to Naval navigation challenges.
This Week's Top Story
Defense Innovation Unit Needs to Support Strategic Deterrence, Director Says
Sean Carberry, National Defense Magazine
The Defense Innovation Unit has demonstrated success in delivering commercial technology to customers in the Defense Department but needs to take the next step and deliver at a speed and scale that can deter adversaries, said the new director of the unit.
Doug Beck, who took charge of DIU in May, said until now the organization “has really been about proving that you could take a real military problem and a commercially derived technology, bring those things together to come up with a solution to that problem, [and] leverage other transaction authority or something else.
“And that has now been done many, many times at DIU and a lot of the other organizations that are represented here today,” he said at the Fed Supernova conference in Austin. “And that is great. And we've seen some real impact from that, including Ukraine.”
However, it’s not enough to meet the strategic challenges facing the United States, he said.
“What we have to do now is take that capability and apply it for strategic effect,” he continued. “And by strategic effect, I mean apply it so that by having done so we are able to help to deter major conflict.” Or if deterrence fails, then to change the metric from just measuring how many things DIU prototyped to “by doing so did we meaningfully change our [operational plans]? Did we meaningfully change our deterrence options? Did we meaningfully change the adversary’s [operational plans]?”
Watch video from Fed Supernova.
|
