Silicon Valley businesses may be discouraged by the Pentagon’s byzantine acquisition process despite the potential for major contracts, the executive vice president of Palantir, a data analytics firm, said Monday.
Testifying at a field hearing of the House Armed Services Committee, Shyam Sankar said the Defense Department’s requirements and budgeting process have “pushed out the crazy founders and innovative engineers” that drove military innovation from World War II into the stealth era.
Four other executives joined Sankar in expressing their frustration, especially over the two-year “valley of death” when a proven technology waits to become a budget line item. Their combined message, often citing Ukraine, was “software wins,” scalability is critical and allow technology to get to the user faster to discover what works and what fails.
“We need the freedom to do what industry does best: Build,” Sankar added in his written testimony.
No longer are there a few powerful players – the result of companies absorbing each other. Instead, the department needs“heretics and heroes,” like Adm. Hyman Rickover inside the department, who are celebrated for innovation.
Sankar also praised former Secretary of Defense William Perry for his vigorous pushing of stealth and GPS into the Pentagon’s arsenal “by going around the PPBE [Planning, Programming, Budgeting, Execution] process” by turning to technology companies.
The Pentagon also needs people who can write autonomy requirements, said Brandon Tseng, co-founder of Shield AI. He estimated that across the department only about $100 million is being spent on autonomy now. When asked for a possible solution, he said 25 percent of DoD’s spending needs to be put into “problem-based systems” where ones that succeed are kept.
The Pentagon needs to give industry all the minutia so that industry can develop a novel solution, Tseung said in his prepared testimony.
The executives reiterated that the war in Ukraine underscores the need for rapidly changing software; the value of artificial intelligence and autonomy on the battlefield when GPS and communications are lost; and having available large numbers of attritable unmanned systems on the ground, air and water.
Yet the Pentagon’s buying system and Congress don’t go far enough in taking advantage of what private enterprise offers, the panel said at the hearing at the University of California Santa Cruz.
“Ukraine goes through 10,000 [unmanned systems] a month,” Mark Valentine, president of global government business at Skydio, said in discussing scalability. He added the Pentagon has 5,000 of these systems in its inventory now despite the launching of its Replicator initiative a year ago to counter China’s anti-access/ area-denial technology advances.
DoD needs to adopt a “portfolio-based” buying approach and closely examine commercial off-the-shelf technologies for solutions to immediate battlefield problems, Valentine, noting that Skydio is the largest manufacturer of unmanned systems outside of China, said in oral and written testimony.
“If something works well and serves key operational needs within the portfolio, DoD would buy more. If it doesn’t work well or no longer meets a need, DoD could easily cancel it. This is not to suggest there is no place for programs of record. They can play a valuable role, but need not govern every mission requirement and technology area,” he said.
In praising the Defense Innovation Unit for moving technology projects forward quickly, Richard Jenkins, founder of Saildrone, Inc., offered a “bridge fund” option to cross the “valley of death.” With the money, the DoD could “immediately scale those solutions that are deemed effective and they must be able to do that ahead of dedicated appropriations arriving years later. Critically, this fund would not be intended for research and development (R&D) or expanding funding for existing programs,” he said.
In effect, the money would go into test and evaluation rather than additional research before becoming a budget item, he said.
