The Atlantic Council’s Commission on Defense Innovation Adoption released its final report today, providing recommendations and case studies for overcoming the challenges the United States faces in maintaining its technological and military advantage and increasing the pace of innovation adoption.
The think-tank commission – composed of former high-level Defense Department (DoD) officials – released an interim report in April 2023. This final document expands on the 10 policy recommendations made last year and adds eight case studies showcasing successful innovation adoption within the DoD.
“The commission was established with the understanding that the United States does not have an innovation problem, but an innovation adoption problem,” Atlantic Council Executive VP Jenna Ben-Yehuda said during today’s webinar. “Data processes and inflexible bureaucratic barriers have impeded DoD’s ability to embrace technological innovations at the speed and scale necessary to ensure success in future conflict, and the urgency of this challenge has ballooned with growing competition with China and the looming threat posed by Russia.”
The report urges DoD to conduct several internal reforms, such as bypassing and streamlining the notoriously bureaucratic Joint Capabilities Integration and Development System process, which generates many of the official requirements needed to launch new weapons programs. The report also recommends that the Pentagon strengthen the Defense Innovation Unit (DIU).
But the majority of the recommendations require at least some action on Capitol Hill.
For example, the report calls for Congress to accept less detailed budget data in the Pentagon’s annual requests. In return, Congress would get a new digital “dashboard” that lets staffers directly access the latest program information without waiting for defense officials to process a formal request for updates.
Former Defense Secretary Mark Esper, who co-chairs the commission, said that since April the ten recommendations have “achieved notable impact as several of its proposals found their way into defense policy or legislation.”
“This includes, but is not limited to, a number of service Program Executive Offices have begun to study implementation of a portfolio management model” along with expansion of DIU’s authorities and funding, he said, adding that other points of traction including “the reduction of barriers to commercial solutions and the modernization of SBIRs and STTRs [and] the strengthening of engagement with the capital markets through the Office of Strategic Capital.”
The final report released today advances the ten policy recommendations and includes eight cases of success to demonstrate how the DoD and Congress can increase the speed at which technological innovation can be transformed into capabilities in the hands of U.S. warfighters.
“Our commission recognized that real change requires both policy reform and it also requires a cultural shift inside the Pentagon – a change in people’s mindset,” commission co-chair and former U.S. Air Force Secretary Deborah Lee James said. “Whereas the interim report laid out our policy recommendations – our top 10, if you will. The final report also includes a series of case studies, you might call them vignettes, that show how success can be achieved even within the current system. So, we all know the current system makes it too hard, but success can happen.”
One example the report highlights is the Army’s need for an accelerated acquisition process to rapidly identify and field secure, capable drone solutions in 2019. According to the report, the Army bypassed its traditional industry partners and leveraged the DIU to build partnerships with more than thirty nontraditional drone providers to submit solutions.
“This initiative, spearheaded in late 2019, not only generated the Army’s first program of record for a much-needed capability, but also represented a prototype for the delivery of more than one thousand systems in less than three years,” the report reads.
“The final report emphasizes that we need to not only get the right policy, but also the right people and the right mindset to accelerate our adoption of capabilities that could well prove decisive to the United States’ ability to deter conflict in the coming decades,” James said. “We all look forward to the day when the vignettes in this report become the norm and are no longer considered rare as they are today.”
