Operation Outreach

The Pentagon has a thing for Silicon Valley. Much of the courtship is focused on wooing commercial technology firms to partner with the military on defense projects. But the real attraction for a core group of top defense leaders—some of whom have spent their careers bouncing between government and industry—isn’t the exquisitely marketed
sleek products the firms continually roll out so much as the entrepreneurial culture that produces them.

Both the multibillion-dollar global tech companies and the smaller ones in the Valley are viewed as nimble and flexible, able to quickly change course on projects and free from the bureaucracy that can render even the simplest tasks at the Pentagon far more difficult, time-consuming and costly.

In April, just two months into his tenure as Defense secretary, Ashton Carter told an audience at Stanford University that the Defense Department “must renew the bonds of trust and rebuild the bridge between the Pentagon and Silicon Valley.” Within weeks, military officials stood up an office in Mountain View, Calif., right next door to Google’s headquarters. For the Pentagon, that qualifies as lightning speed.

The department’s Silicon Valley office, called the Defense Innovation Unit Experimental, or DIUx, is just getting off the ground. The office resides inside an aircraft hangar at Moffett Field, a former military base now owned by NASA. The Google brass keep their corporate jets at the same airfield.

“DIUx will hopefully be the point of presence for both [defense] agencies and services as well as the communities that are in there,” Deputy Defense Secretary Robert Work, one of the champions of the outreach effort, said in May. “We’re trying to have a way in which we don’t just do scattershot approaches.”

The idea is for DIUx to connect commercial technology firms—many of which fear the Pentagon will steal their intellectual property—with specific military projects. Carter spent a portion of his address at Stanford trying to ease the minds of corporate executives with such intellectual property worries.

The new unit “is going to be a way to connect people to sources of funding and to operators . . . so that people have a better understanding of what can be done and then we’ll generate interest and we’ll generate funding through that mechanism,” says Frank Kendall, the Pentagon’s acquisition chief.

“I want to enhance communications,” he says. “If there’s more connectivity between the commercial world and [the Defense Department], that’s great.”

Step one is to increase the department’s visibility in tech circles, letting tech firms know the Pentagon has arrived. “We don’t want just our people [to go] out looking for technologies, we want technologies to be coming to us,” Kendall says.

Beyond the office at Moffett Field, Carter has also struck a deal that would allow the Pentagon to leverage work and relationships forged by In-Q-Tel, the venture capital firm that invests in technologies that benefit the CIA and intelligence community. “In order to regain our competitiveness, we have to expand our ways of investing in, identifying and implementing new technologies and capabilities, and this approach may help us yield a long-term advantage,” Carter said at Stanford.

A big question remains: Will the technology industry respond to the Pentagon’s overtures?

“Given that the target audience for these messages is literally thousands of small, innovative firms, there likely won’t be a clear answer to this question for some time,” Andrew Hunter, a former Pentagon acquisition official now at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, wrote in an essay about the department’s Silicon Valley outreach.

Beyond the Valley

If the Pentagon finds that proximity generates productivity in Northern California, it may establish additional regional outposts near other tech hubs. “If that is successful, we may put it in different points of presence, like in Boston where there is all sorts of computing,” Work says. Boston has a history of innovation and technological achievements, many originating with scientists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Harvard University.

The tech push is not just about companies—it’s also about people. Defense leaders want to change the way the department manages personnel, in some cases allowing people who leave the military to return to active duty after working in the private sector for a number of years. Vice Adm. Bill Moran, the head of Navy personnel, first raised this possibility at the Defense One Summit in November 2014. Then in March, Carter championed a “Force of the Future” that would promote people “based on their performance and their talent,” not just time in service.

“We have a personnel system in the department which doesn’t always offer young and talented people the flexibility they need in terms of their careers,” Carter
said in April. “They like choice. They like openness. They like to move around. And therefore the ability to come in and come out, particularly in these highly technical areas, is really important.”

The Army is looking to recruit soldiers who already have skills in information technology specialties, such as cybersecurity. They would start them out in ranks commensurate with their private sector experience, much the way many doctors enter the military as lieutenant colonels or commanders.

To make these changes, though, the Pentagon must first change its bureaucracy, and in some cases that will require congressional approval for changes in the law. To accomplish these things, Defense leaders must move quickly, just like the companies they are trying to emulate. And if they fail, all of this short-term momentum could disappear just as rapidly as it arrived.