Making good on Defense Secretary Ash Carter’s focus on public-private innovation, Pentagon officials this week made a strategic visit to leaders of the military’s new Defense Innovation Unit Experimental, or DIUx.
Deputy Defense Secretary Bob Work and Frank Kendall, under secretary of Defense for acquisition, technology and logistics, on Aug. 4 met with DIUx leaders in Mountain View, California, to discuss core goals of the new office, announced less than five months ago. Namely: technological superiority, rapidly evolving commercial technologies and how to best integrate both into defense operations.
“Innovation in areas such as big data, analytics, autonomy and robotics is going on in [Silicon Valley] and we want to tap into it,” Work said, according to a DoD release.
The idea of DIUx is that its leaders – director George Duchak and military deputy Rear Adm. Brian Hendrickson, who met with Work and Kendall – will serve as a liaison between DoD and industry, and “between ideas and opportunities,” a read-out of the meeting stated. DIUx is part of a broader Defense Innovation Initiative rolled out by Carter earlier this year.
“As Secretary Carter said in April, there are also really great opportunities to be seized through a new level of partnership between the Pentagon and Silicon Valley – opportunities that we can only realize together,” noted the read-out, provided by DoD Spokesperson Lt. Cmdr. Courtney Hillson. “Our engagement through DIUx can be a win-win for all involved; providing opportunities to create avenues for the department, opportunities to create avenues for nontraditional sources, and opportunities to connect and refresh the traditional sources of defense material as well.”
Technologies that easily translate between government and commercial uses are the target of the partnership – such as robotics and cybersecurity tools.
“It’s just that there are more dual-use technologies that are being driven by the commercial sector that we want to tap into,” Work said, according to a Defense One report. “We need to prove to the Valley that we aren’t this big ponderous beast — that we can turn some things certainly a little faster if they are very promising, have good technology behind them and we see a way to get there.”
