A provision in the mark for the fiscal 2024 National Defense Authorization Act by the Cyber, Information Technologies and Innovation subcommittee would rename the position of undersecretary of defense for research and engineering — a post currently held by Heidi Shyu — and change it to “undersecretary of defense for technology integration and innovation.”

In addition to serving as the Pentagon’s CTO, the undersecretary would also be responsible for “establishing policies on, and supervising, all elements of the Department relating to the identification of commercial technology for potential use by the Department and integration of such technology into the armed forces (and the Department),” the legislation states.

Both lawmakers and officials at the Pentagon have long admitted to difficulties in bringing new and innovative commercial tech into the department’s acquisition system. Often, promising capabilities fail to move past prototyping and into production due to the Pentagon’s bureaucratic and slow-moving processes — a phenomenon known as the “valley of death.”

In response, initiatives have been stood up across the DOD to help bridge gaps between the commercial world and the Pentagon.

Under the proposed legislation, the undersecretary of defense for technology integration and innovation would serve as the principal advisor to the secretary of defense on all commercial innovation and integration in the Pentagon, while implementing policies and procedures related to acquiring commercial products, commercial components and commercial services, per the preference under section 3453 of U.S. Code Title 10.

The undersecretary would also be responsible for promoting modular open system architecture approaches in acquisition in order to “encourage increased competition and the more frequent use of commercial technology within the Department,” the legislation states.

It also adds the duty of “providing for an alternate path to integrate commercial technology into the Department that does not include applying the Joint Capabilities Integration and Development System process to the acquisition of technology that readily exists in the commercial sector.” That task would be performed alongside the vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. 

In addition, lawmakers added qualifications to the role to include not only a civilian with a background in technology or science, but also someone with experience in “private or venture capital, commercial innovation or prototype-to-production transition” and “managing complex programs and leveraging public-private capital partnerships.”

At the same time, a separate provision in the subcommittee mark would shake up the organizational and management structure for the Defense Innovation Unit (DIU), which aims to facilitate and accelerate the Pentagon’s adoption of commercial tech for military purposes.

‘‘The Director of the Defense Innovation Unit shall report directly to the Secretary of Defense without intervening authority and may communicate views on matters within the responsibility of the Unit directly to the Secretary without obtaining the approval or concurrence of any other official within the Department of Defense,” the mark states.

The Silicon Valley-based organization currently reports to Shyu’s office. The Pentagon named Doug Beck, a former vice president of Apple, as DIU’s new director in April. 

The provision requires the secretary to conduct an assessment of whether or not DIU is appropriately staffed to conduct its mission, as well as send a report to Congress about plans to address any staffing shortfalls and the funding required to do so.

The legislation did not clarify, however, how DIU’s elevated position within the Office of the Secretary of Defense and the newly defined roles for the proposed undersecretary of defense for technology integration and innovation would be reconciled.

Members of the subcommittee did not immediately respond to DefenseScoop’s request for comment. The Office of the Secretary of Defense would not comment on ongoing legislation. The Defense Innovation Unit also did not respond to requests for comment. 

The subcommittee is scheduled to mark up the policy bill on Tuesday.

The post Legislators call for reorganizing Pentagon’s R&D office, shifting focus to commercial tech integration appeared first on DefenseScoop.

“My term ends on June 9. Well, I think it’s June 11 — but that’s a Sunday — so we’ll back it up to the Friday before [which is June 9],” he explained.

Madsen joined the U.S. military in 1994. He’s a decorated pilot and former legislative liaison who brought a unique perspective to DIU, where he’s served as deputy director and director of strategic engagement, and most recently as acting director.

“It’s been a fantastic five years and I can’t believe how fast it has gone. This honestly is the longest I have been anywhere in my professional life,” Madsen reflected. “And I always like to say that this is the second most fun I’ve had in my professional life — only because it’s hard to compete with flying planes for the Air Force around the world.”

In April, Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin tapped DIU’s new permanent director — Doug Beck, a former vice president at Apple — to steer the unit. Beck was officially sworn in earlier this month.

“That’s an important message that the Secretary of Defense wanted to transmit to the ecosystem that he took time out of his schedule to swear in Doug Beck as the next director and the understanding that we need to leverage commercial technology,” Madsen said. 

He briefed DefenseScoop on what he might do next — and the direction he hopes to see DIU move in as it continues to mature. 

Making it easier

As an Air Force pilot, Madsen flew the C-17 strategic transport aircraft.

Introduced in the early 1990s, around the start of his military career, Madsen remembers back then the C-17 “was the most advanced airlifter in the world.” He recalled “glass cockpit, digital everything, a couple backup dials,” the electronically controlled fuel system engine, electronic backup capabilities, “and then finally an analog backup to that.” 

“So it’s a very advanced airlifter. But there was a condition that was so common that there was a name for it — it’s called an exceptional restart — and what it was is you can be flying along and this advanced airplane [mission computer] would just go completely black. You could be over the North Atlantic, South Pacific, the Midwest, Central Asia — and it would go black,” Madsen said.

Those “exceptional restarts” were a result of the fact that the systems’ chips couldn’t handle the massive, advanced processes.

“Because in the year 2000 — even for the most advanced airlifter that had gone through upgrades — there was no simple way to bring in commercial technology in the form of chips where you could just buy any chip and put it into the system. It had to go through the whole requirements process, which is a very long arduous process. And so in the year 2000, we were still playing around with the best chips that 1986 had to offer, right? Because of that process,” Madsen explained.

DIU was designed to “get to some of those [tech] problems,” he noted. 

Launched by then-Defense Secretary Ash Carter in 2015, DIU was developed to harness the investment and speed of advances in industry-made technologies to accelerate the military’s deployment of cutting-edge systems. Madsen joined in 2018.

“One of the things that I see as a ‘plus’ from my very broad perspective is that not only has DIU leveraged commercial technology, but we now also leverage commercial processes — making it easier to solve some of those problems going forward with rapid acquisition and the ability to use Other Transaction authority to take those best practices … and cycles of refresh from the commercial world and bring it in,” Madsen said.

“As I reflect back on it” and the DIU’s three permanent directors to date, Madsen said “Raj Shah was the first one — a disruptor extraordinaire, he was the right personality at the right time to really get the DIU going.” Then, “Mike Brown was the right one at the right time to focus on transitioning,” as the second in the role, Madsen noted. He now sees Beck, the former Apple exec and a Navy reservist as “a fantastic choice, understanding that defense mission set and the commercial ecosystem” to really enable DIU to “level up.”

In the near term, the unit is hyper focused on boosting transition rates across its tech portfolios and increasing adoption across the entire enterprise at a much larger scale.

“If our initial DOD partner, say, is the Navy for some sort of solution we prototyped, or we proved it out and we transition it via some sort of production mechanism to the Navy into one of their programs, then to take it and go to the Air Force, or the Marines, or the Army, or Space Force and say, ‘Hey, you probably have a very similar problem’ — maybe it’s operational energy, maybe it’s installation energy, maybe it’s unmanned sensing, whatever the case,” Madsen said.

Moving forward, DIU is also exploring how it can incorporate its elements into DOD’s programmatic processes sooner than it is now.

“When the department is doing their acquisition strategies for the services, or when we’re thinking about what are the requirements of the pointy edge of the spear with the combatant commands, how can we get involved earlier to be able to articulate clearly what is the real state-of-the-art of commercial technology?” Madsen said. 

Aims to impact

Madsen was temporarily promoted to serve as DIU’s chief when Mike Brown opted to depart from the post earlier than expected in 2022. 

At the time of his exit, Brown expressed dissatisfaction regarding the unit’s prioritization within the Pentagon, and its future, among other issues. After serving for almost a year as acting director, Madsen said he’s been largely pleased with how some of those issues are being addressed. 

“We had voiced some of those concerns — and through the budgeting process we received a significant increase in our budget through the department. And as you’re aware, the secretary of defense just realigned DIU to be a direct report to the secretary of defense. That right there is a pretty big statement, as far as the importance of DIU and the mission that we execute,” Madsen said.

He considers himself and the organization “very fortunate” that he and Beck are having this current chance to overlap ahead of his departure. Even in this learning and sharing period though, the DIU leaders are continuing their robust, regional outreach.

“We recently had a couple roadshows — one of them in North Carolina, one of them in the Midwest. And in each of those places, we saw an increase by about 600% on submissions from tech companies to our solicitations. Pretty impressive. We have one coming up in Indiana at the end of May, and again, what we’re looking for is the best technology across the country, not just in the tech hubs,” Madsen told DefenseScoop.

As for what’s next for him career-wise, Madsen said he is “very much committed to finding something impactful at the intersection of technology and national security.”

“I want to be somewhere where I have a sense of purpose, where it’s impactful, on a team all focused on the mission. So, I’m not opposed to staying in the government, and I’m not opposed to going out to the commercial sector — it might be a combination of both. We have a duty to make sure that we’re providing the folks that are charged with national security the best technology that America has to offer. And so I’m fully committed to that mission that I’ve been steeped in here at DIU for the last five years,” Madsen said.

Editor’s Note: This story is the first in a series of DefenseScoop’s coverage of Madsen as he prepares to depart DIU.

The post Mike Madsen prepares to depart an elevated DIU appeared first on DefenseScoop.

“Whatever I can do in my last weeks to help the service members — making sure their performance reviews are done, whatever we can do for promotion boards, any assistance I can provide people given my commercial experience my whole career in Silicon Valley before leading DIU with career advice — I will,” Brown told FedScoop in a recent interview.

Formed by then-Defense Secretary Ash Carter in 2015, DIU was designed to leverage the investment and speed of advances in commercial technologies to ultimately help strengthen the military and enable more rapid deployments of cutting-edge capabilities. The unit has expanded since then and established outposts to promote further innovation in a few of the United States’ key technology hubs. 

After steering DIU for the last nearly four years, Brown opted not to extend his term — and recently announced plans to exit in September. 

In a recent conversation with FedScoop, the CEO-turned-federal director reflected on some of what defined his service at DIU — the great, and the not-so-good parts — and also shared new details about his plans for his final days there and what’s to come.

“I want to continue in the same area of national security and technology. I think it’s a nexus that’s going to be increasingly important as we look out over the next couple of decades,” he noted.

Changing the game

DIU has experimented with and helped field dozens of technologies for DOD components under Brown’s leadership. 

“We’ve brought 50 different capabilities to the military, so it’s kind of hard to pick favorites. But I’ll give just a couple of examples, rather than saying they are favorites,” Brown said. “What we’ve done with small drones certainly would be up there.”

Through the unit’s Blue UAS program, officials are helping vet and scale more unmanned aerial systems (UAS), or drones, from U.S. and allied countries for DOD use. It was created with the intention of becoming the most efficient method for government validation of UAS available for commercial systems, though it isn’t the only one. 

“Being able to harmonize some requirements across the military and provide those on a [General Services Administration] schedule so that, across the federal government, other parts of the government can buy these cyber-hardened, qualified drones, and support [American] and allied suppliers is critically important,” Brown noted — particularly “because China has the jump here, with the world’s largest market share of small drones.”

In the director’s view, DIU also has “pioneered the concept that we don’t have to build our own rockets.” Considering the commercialization of space, he said it’s critical for the government to be able to buy payload space and launch small satellites, sensors and other national security devices as-a-service. 

Further, the unit has enabled a number of artificial intelligence-driving projects to bring sensor fusion together — including providing the North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD) and U.S. Northern Command (NORTHCOM) with “a better picture of the airspace over North America and being able to give the president more time should he ever have to make a decision about what’s happening over airspace and whether we need to respond,” Brown said. “We’ve dramatically reduced the amount of time that it takes to understand what’s going on and correlate different sensors.” 

DIU officials have also promoted more use of digital wearables by military personnel and department leadership to improve how they capture and benefit from health indications. 

“So, I’m wearing a commercial digital watch — and, or a ring,” Brown said, pointing to the device on his wrist. 

Working with Philips Healthcare, DIU is combining that data from individuals like Brown and using the heaps of data points collected to detect COVID-19 in the military “up to 72 hours in advance of my ever feeling a symptom,” with 75% accuracy, the director noted.

“So it’s a completely new way to change the game on readiness — not just is the equipment ready and am I trained on the equipment — but am I ready, as a human?” he said. 

Many solicitations for company-built solutions to military problems were posted under the director’s purview. “A lot of them now are focused on our newest portfolio, which is energy,” Brown added.  

The U.S. military is the world’s largest consumer of energy, he said. 

Aligned with the priorities of the current administration, DIU recently launched a few projects associated with energy resilience. Officials involved want to essentially take what the commercial sector is doing to improve energy conservation, like developing new fuels, and incorporate those elements into the military. 

“For example, right now we’re converting a lot of the Army vehicles and trucks to be hybrids, because we found that 80% of the time that they’re in use they’re idling somewhere. They’re not going somewhere, but just keeping someone cool or warm. And that, of course, wastes fuel and creates a signature that adversaries can attack. So we’re busy with that tactical vehicle hybridization,” Brown said. 

Level up

DIU roots trace back to DIUx, the DOD’s original — and experimental — innovative acquisition team. In 2018, it was made a permanent part of the Pentagon, and the “x” in its name was dropped. From his perch leading requests for and releases of commercial technologies for DOD since then, Brown sees a variety of ways DIU can “level up” again, in the near term. 

“One is, we want to make sure that we’re creating a much closer connection between what we’re doing at DIU and mainstream acquisition,” he said.

The unit is now engaging in meetings with all of the program executive officers for each service. As they refine procurement approaches, Brown wants to see each of those PEO leaders turn to the commercial market first, “because most of the problems that we have to solve in the military, except for the very last step — which could be some kinetic action, like blowing something up — are issues that the commercial world is facing.” Problems associated with cybersecurity, fusing sensors, or computer vision, for instance, are “being solved by the commercial world, frankly, in a much bigger volume,” he noted. 

The director added: “We’re participating in industries in some cases that we’ve created, but just as a regular customer. So, we need to make sure that we are connecting what we’re doing in the military to all of that incredible commercial activity that’s happening around us.” 

DIU should also conduct much more outreach to provide U.S. venture capitalists and entrepreneurs with market signals about the capabilities and quantities associated with technology the military urgently requires. 

“And then we need to be reinforcing that with more and larger production volume contracts. Some of what DIU is doing is providing that today. The 100 vendors we’ve introduced through DIU have $3.7 billion of follow-on revenue, but that’s not very much relative to what DOD buys,” Brown said.

One counter-drone technology supplier DIU worked with recently landed a billion-dollar follow-on contract from Special Forces Command. And another vendor the unit collaborated with to provide predictive maintenance for aircraft just won a half-billion-dollar follow-on contract from the Missile Defense Agency, “because their platform can provide synthetic trajectories of hypersonic missiles,” Brown noted, but there should be much more.

The soon-to-exit director added that DIU also needs to work more closely with companies in allied nations, so that “we’re getting the best of technology available globally — not just what’s available in the U.S. — to support our warfighters.”  

Up next

Brown’s government service did involve some frustrations, rough points and controversy. 

In 2021, he formally requested for his name to be withdrawn from consideration by President Joe Biden to become the undersecretary of defense for acquisition and sustainment following an inspector general’s investigation into allegations of nepotism pushing ethical boundaries as director.

The reasoning Brown gave for removing himself as the nominee was that he did not want delays posed by an ongoing inspector general investigation regarding allegations of wrongdoing to hold up the process for that important procurement position.

“The allegations made by one former employee is that we misused our hiring authority. I have complete confidence that those are going to be resolved positively — but unfortunately, the inspector general takes a very long time,” Brown said.

The allegations came from Bob Ingegneri, who was DIU’s Chief Financial Officer from May 2019 to June 2020, and became public shortly after Biden’s nomination of Brown to be the Pentagon’s head of acquisition.

In an official complaint to the DOD’s primary oversight arm, Ingegneri alleged that Brown abused his top role to hire people close to him and also increase payments to certain defense contractors.  

“Those allegations came over a year ago. I still don’t know when the inspector general is going to complete their work, but I’m looking forward to it being completed so that we can put this behind us,” Brown told FedScoop, adding, “I have confidence that we’ve done everything at DIU according to the way we should have and I don’t have any qualms about what they might be finding in their work.” 

Preparing for Brown’s impending departure, the Pentagon last week officially announced that it is accepting applications for a new director until August 15.

“Mike has had a tremendous impact on technology adoption and development these past four years,” Brown’s boss — Under Secretary of Defense for Research and Engineering Heidi Shyu — said in the official statement. “Under his tenure, barriers to entry for commercial companies have been lowered and numerous key technologies have been deployed to the warfighter. I am sure that wherever he next goes, he will be very successful. Our new director will certainly have very large shoes to fill.”

Regarding what’s next for his career, Brown confirmed he will be reflecting on improvements he can help make associated with commercial defense technologies from outside of the department.

“So, I’ve agreed with the Hoover Institute at Stanford University to be a visiting scholar next year,” he said. “I’m looking forward to spending some time doing some thinking and working with some of the great people there, including HR McMaster, Condoleezza Rice and Gen. Jim Mattis.”

Beyond “helping individuals” in his final weeks at DIU, Brown is pressing Pentagon leadership to move defense modernization forward — and ensuring the unit’s insiders have the resources needed to be able to continue to meet the needs of DOD and the expectations of Congress. As for his legacy at DIU, he ultimately wants to be remembered for implementing Ash Carter’s concept about building a better bridge between the commercial world and the military — and effectively scaling it.

“We’re bringing in 100 new vendors with 50 capabilities that have transitioned, meaning they’re in warfighters’ hands. We have 97 projects underway right now. So, we’ve shown that this can scale — it’s not just a concept that you can do as a one-off, we can scale up and really make a difference,” Brown said.

To hear more from FedScoop’s conversation with Brown, listen to the interview on this week’s DefenseScoop podcast.

The post Pentagon’s departing DIU director reflects on his legacy — and what’s next appeared first on DefenseScoop.

Shah and other appointees have been critical of the military’s two-year budgeting cycle, which can delay innovative startups from entering the defense market. Shah’s background, as a startup founder and Air National Guard F-16 pilot, bridges both Silicon Valley and national security.

“Now is the time to supercharge DOD access to innovation,” Shah told law makers in 2020. Nearly two years later to the day, he will have the opportunity to express his opinion again to lawmakers on how to reform the Planning, Programming, Budgeting, and Execution (PPBE) process.

The Commission on PPBE Reform’s charter tasks it with submitting a report to Congress by September 2023 “assessing the effectiveness” of the current process, which requires the department to plan out budgets at least two years in advance — a timeline that often results in money arriving too late to buy the latest tech. The commission also will develop policy recommendations on how to “rapidly field operational capabilities and outpace America’s near-peer competitors.”

Shah joins other former DOD officials on the commission including Ellen Lord, former undersecretary for acquisition and sustainment; Eric Fanning, former secretary of the Army; and Robert Hale, former DOD comptroller.

Shah was chosen by Rep. Mike Rogers of Alabama, the top Republican on the House Armed Services Committee.  The commission will eventually have 14 members and include selections from the secretary of Defense and other congressional leaders that have yet to be announced.

Shah was tapped by then-Defense Secretary Ash Carter in 2016 to be the second leader of the Defense Innovation Unit Experimental (DIUx) and the first to report directly to the secretary. The unit has since dropped the “experimental” moniker and has gone on to issue billions of dollars in prototype contracts to tech-focused start ups.

Resilience Insurance, a cybersecurity company Shah chairs, was also selected as a part of the White House’s ransomware task force.

The post Former DIU leader gets seat on commission examining military budget appeared first on DefenseScoop.