The Defense Innovation Unit is accelerating programs like counter unmanned aerial systems the services and combatant commanders need quickly and looking ahead to new partnerships with strategic impact, its deputy director explaining the office’s role said last week.
Aditi Kumar said one of the first lessons learned from Replicator 1.0, the planned rapid delivery of thousands of attritable systems to counter a Chinese amphibious invasion of Taiwan such as adopting and adapting commercial or dual-use technology.
Speaking earlier this month at the Reagan National Security Forum in Simi, Calif., Doug Beck, Kumar’s boss, said, “focus, speed and scale” is the unit’s goal. With 13 years of experience at Apple before heading DIU, he added that “a bridge has been built” between different industry sectors and inside the Pentagon with the services and combatant commanders. “We need to deliver.”
“Massive competition from around the world forces innovation,” Beck said. China has largely junked the “five-year plan” approach the Soviets used for its domestic and defense spending but that remains in the Pentagon budgeting process.
That rigid five-year system of spending on identified programs “doesn’t work” in a rapidly changing work, Beck added. “We have to have enough budget flexibility” to drive competition among traditional defense contractors and start-ups in areas like cyber, artificial intelligence autonomy, biotechnology and space.
The flexibility, Kumar said during the Hudson Institute discussion, comes in DIU’s ability to move a project from research, development, testing and evaluation to procurement before it becomes a budget line item.
For non-traditional defense contractors and start-ups, this allows them to move ahead rather than waiting for two years for congressional approval of their project.
At the Reagan forum, Beck added this flexibility and approach provides “a huge opportunity for the new administration” when it takes office in January.
Established slightly more than eight years ago by Defense Secretary Ash Carter, “DIU is not a program office” inside the department or services, said Kumar For the services, “we want to make sure we have transition partners.” For the combatant commanders, it means DIU’s “distributed presence” is in their theater from the start.
“At every step of the way, they are partnering with us” to resolve an operational problem.
Now, DIU “is starting early on different problems,” such as command and control in different domains and theaters.
“This is really a collaboration,” Kumar said.
For the commercial sector, Kumar said DIU offers “on-ramps” to enter defense work. Later in the discussion, she cited the Pentagon’s need for extended battery life as an area that needed an “on ramp.” In those areas, the commercial sector already may have the solution “or components of solutions exist” that can meet DoD’s need.
Using Ukraine as an example of how quickly technology can change, Kumar said at the Hudson Institute event software upgrades are needed every three to four weeks to meet Russian countermoves. That requires flexible spending. “We’re thinking about this [rapid change] from the start.”
Kumar added, DIU also is “thinking about decoupling hardware and software in contracting.” That would allow the government to “have control of data,” but contractors would still have intellectual proprietary rights in the amended process.
“We’re on track” for capability delivery within the 18- to 24-month window for the attritable unmanned systems’ target set by Kathleen Hicks, deputy secretary of defense in August 2023, Kumar said. She added the unit has been “very transparent” in its counter-unmanned systems strategy in Replicator 1.
Replicator 2.0 will be “protecting our installations” and that “will be the biggest one we have to tackle. Kumar said DIU will start with small sample sets that can then be proliferated globally.
In its mission statement, DIU puts that step in proving the model. DIU’s 3.0 is to “deliver strategic impact” to deter conflict but if forced to fight, win.
Ever since it was stood up, Kuman said the innovation unit has been in “early and frequent communication with the Hill.” This has paid dividends in the flexibility that Congress has granted it in budgeting by broad category. “I can’t underscore the importance of Congress [in this process] and the trust they put in us.
To improve coordination with industry and work in synch with the services’ innovation offices, Beck heads the Defense Innovation Working Group. Kumar said it “clarifies the demand signal.” The group “makes sure we are shining a light on operational needs.”
At the Reagan forum Beck said part of the innovation unit’s mission “is making DoD a better customer that attracts the spread of the commercial sector’s skills. DIU maintains offices in Silicon Valley, Boston, Austin, Chicago and the Pentagon.
Picking up on that at the forum, Chris Calio, RTX’s chief executive officer, said for the private sector that means “design for manufacturability” which means “you can ramp up” faster to meet the DoD’s operational needs. RTX’s business concentration is aerospace and defense.
