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C4ISRNET:<\/b><\/i> I keep hearing people say the most significant innovations used to come out of the Defense Department, but they now come out of private sector. Is that fair? <\/b><\/p>\n\n\n\n
WALKER:<\/b><\/i> I don\u2019t think it\u2019s fair, because I think if you look at true, early innovation, the federal government still sponsors most of that at universities and at small companies all over the country. It is true that there is large private sector investment. That has increased, while the government investment has decreased. I love seeing what SpaceX is doing, or other companies. It\u2019s fantastic. DARPA was involved in some of that early-on work with SpaceX and that is a strength of our country.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
We want to foster that, but if you want to look at research that\u2019s being done for 20, 30 years from now, it\u2019s largely funded by the federal government and we\u2019d like to think DARPA funds most of it. A lot of it anyway.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
C4ISRNET: <\/b><\/i>What needs to change to better enable faster cooperation and tech innovation and partnership with the commercial tech community?<\/b><\/p>\n\n\n\n
WALKER:<\/b><\/i> Certainly, we\u2019ve got to look at our own processes within the government. There are lots of people in Silicon Valley and elsewhere that would love to work with the government, they just can\u2019t afford to take the time involved.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
DARPA has always used other transaction authorities. It\u2019s really being talked about now, but actually a lawyer and a contracting officer at DARPA, about 25 years ago, developed it. And we\u2019ve always used them. We will continue to use them. One thing we\u2019ve done recently with our AI initiative is we\u2019ve decided that we would use OTAs to put million-dollar contracts on for 18 months to look at a whole range of AI and how it could be applied in different fields. But we want to do that quickly, so from announcement of a topic to awarding a contract is 90 days or less.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
We\u2019ve got seven topics out there now. We release one a month so we don\u2019t overwhelm the contracting office, but it\u2019s working and all the awards have been 90 days or less. I think that\u2019s pretty fast.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
C4ISRNET: <\/b><\/i>Is that process to transition DARPA innovations to the services working? Do you feel the services have enough of an open mind about what could be done with these technologies? Or do you wish they were a little more involved?<\/b><\/p>\n\n\n\n
WALKER:<\/b><\/i> They\u2019re involved with us. I would say that. They have lots of things to think about. Technology is one of them.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
What we\u2019re trying to do is work with the services to say, \u201cHey, do you really want to keep building large systems that take years to develop and a lot of money to maintain and sustain and that are hard to upgrade when technology changes? Or would you rather go to a different vision, something we call mosaic warfare, where let\u2019s look at putting smaller systems together, more real-time? The idea is, you could upgrade technology easier, you\u2019re not maintaining systems for 40 years, you\u2019re building them to last shorter periods of time, and you can mix and match and the complexity on the enemy.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
We\u2019re working with all the services on this vision, right now, and are trying to figure out, in this era of competition with peer adversaries, how do we use that to build the architectures, new war-fighting constructs, and then what are the technologies to enable that? And that\u2019s the DARPA piece, but we\u2019ve got all four services right with us.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Transition\u2019s hard. It\u2019s always going to be. I don\u2019t see any easy ways around that.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
C4ISRNET: <\/b><\/i>We talk about what the next moonshot\u2019s going to be. What technologies does the Pentagon, and perhaps government at large, need to say, \u201cWe need to invest big and right now.\u201d<\/b><\/p>\n\n\n\n
WALKER:<\/b><\/i> As you know, Mike Griffin, my boss, has laid out nine tech areas, and I believe he\u2019s going to add a tenth, but those would be the technology areas I would start with. But if I could pick one \u2014 and I like them all, especially hypersonics; that\u2019s my background \u2014 I don\u2019t like to predict the future, but the pace of technology is moving so quickly right now in biotech.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
DARPA set up a biotechnologies office five years ago. We\u2019re seeing incredible advances in understanding how the brain works and how to tap into that \u2014 and how to think about brain machine interfaces as we move into this whole area of AI, how do you use AI and a better understanding of the brain, to actually control robotic arms with your thought and build sensing into that arm? We\u2019ve done that already. Where does it go from there? So, that\u2019s one aspect of biotech that I think could change the world.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The other is gene editing and a lot of focus on that. There\u2019s so much potential and so much opportunity for misuse. We have a program called Safe Genes that\u2019s looking at, how would you reverse a gene edit if it went badly? We spend a lot of time thinking about the ethics involved with this technology, but those two things, human-machine symbiosis with sort of understanding the brain better and then gene editing I think are going to change the world, hopefully for the better.<\/i><\/p>\n\n\n\n
C4ISRNET:<\/b><\/i> What about gene editing? How does that translate to the military?<\/b><\/p>\n\n\n\n
WALKER:<\/b><\/i> Right now, it takes two years to develop a vaccine. We\u2019d like to do it in 60 days or less, using gene-editing techniques and being able to actually use the body to develop its own antibodies in response to an unknown virus. And there are gene-editing techniques we\u2019re looking at to do that DNA-encoded and RNA-encoded antibody therapies.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
This is all basic research at this point, but we have a program called P3 that would combine that technology with ways to get into the body and other things, in order to get this thing developed in 60 days or less for protection against an unknown virus.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Steven Walker, the director of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, shares his thoughts on the Defense Department’s relationships with the tech community and the Pentagon\u2019s next moonshot.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":69465,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_yoast_wpseo_meta-robots-noindex":"","_yoast_wpseo_meta-robots-nofollow":"","_yoast_wpseo_canonical":"","_acf":"","_yoast_wpseo_primary_category":16,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","_smg_distribution_targets":{"10":{"categories":["techwatch","industry","interviews","daily-news-roundup","newsletters"],"primary_category":"techwatch"}}},"categories":[106,29,16,32],"tags":[],"coauthors":[2509],"class_list":["post-22925","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-daily-brief","category-home","category-it-networks","category-newsletters"],"acf":{"subheadline":"","legacy_arc_id":"7WQT5CPW5ZC4PJFNMKUV7B3JTM","arc_canonical_url":"\/it-networks\/2019\/04\/17\/darpas-director-on-how-the-pentagon-can-transition-innovation\/","remove_feature_photo":false,"is_sponsored":false,"subtype":"","redirect_url":"","disable_inline_ads":false,"native_logo_pretext":"Presented By:"},"yoast_head":"\n