The Defense Department’s (DoD) innovation arm has been working hard and fast since 2015 to leverage emerging commercial technologies to better enable warfighters, but the lead of the unit said today that the defense organization is not yet where it needs to be to successfully deter a potential conflict with China.
Doug Beck, director of the Pentagon’s Defense Innovation Unit (DIU), said during today’s Aspen Security Forum in D.C. that the DIU does not yet have the tools and the funding to deter future conflicts with China, but added, “we’re on our way.”
The DIU lead offered several points around where the DIU is now and where it needs to head to be able successfully deter China, but first and foremost, he called on Congress to approve the fiscal year 2024 appropriations package for the department.
“We need there to be a defense appropriations. We need a budget so we can act,” Beck said. “That has an enormous effect across the department in a myriad [of] ways.”
Beck said that the leadership across the Federal government has played a tremendous role in transforming the Pentagon over the last several years to meet China’s tech-fueled challenge.
“I do think that we are at a tipping point right now in the department and as a nation in getting after this,” Beck said. “If you compare where we are to where we were in those early days, back in say 2015, today, we have a secretary of defense who clearly gets this and a deputy secretary who clearly gets this. We have leadership across the department who get it. We have interagency partners from the White House to everywhere that get it. We have a commercial tech sector that gets it.”
“We have a Congress that by and large gets it,” he continued, adding, “So that gives us a tipping point to make change happen.”
Beck explained that the department is taking concrete actions today to be able to beat China should a conflict arise in the future, including initiatives like the Replicator initiative.
DoD’s Replicator initiative aims to quickly roll out thousands of inexpensive autonomous systems to counter China’s military mass. The initiative was unveiled in late August by Deputy Secretary of Defense Kathleen Hicks, who said the goal of the effort is for DoD to field “multiple thousands” of autonomous systems within the next 18 to 24 months. Hicks said the driving force behind the Replicator project is to meet the challenge of China’s military advantage – which she characterized as “more ships, more missiles, more people” – with U.S. weapons that will be “harder to plan for, harder to hit, and harder to beat.”
The DIU announced last week that it plans to post solicitations to the private sector for help with the Replicator initiative this month.
“Even more important than that initiative – which is a first step, and we’ll continue to iterate – that initiative is about both putting real capability in place to meet the challenge … and also to build the muscle in the department as a whole department, which is why all of us are part of this in order to do that quickly and do it again and again and again,” Beck explained.
Finally, the DIU lead explained that the department needs to change its perspective of risk in order to be willing to fail at times in the greater drive for advancement.
“Most of what I’ve thought about as being risk, isn’t – it’s uncertainty. Risk is a different thing,” Beck said. “Risk is risk to mission and risk to force, it’s strategic risk for our nation.”
“And what we have to do now – and why that tipping point and those actions are so important – is we’ve got to be taking risks now that are maybe financial risk, process risk, maybe even reputational risk, and we have to take that kind of risk now so that we aren’t transferring risk to real risk for the soldiers, sailors, airmen, guardians, marines who will have to fight a war if deterrence fails,” he said.
Gen. Bryan Fenton, the commander of the U.S. Special Operations Command, joined Beck on the panel at the Aspen Security Forum and – like many other leaders in the Federal government today – argued that the workforce is the biggest key to transforming the department for future challenges, like China.
“First and foremost, we talk about transformation, it’s really about our people,” Fenton said. “’Humans more important than hardware’ is a longtime, first-off truth and motto for Special Operations Command.”
“The first thing when we think transformation is … the education and the acquiring of talent that really understands where we’re going in this new world. And a lot of that is just the training, the understanding and how you wield either AI or robotics or autonomy, and do it responsibly, ethically, and under policy, certainly framework that are now and will come from the department,” he said. “So, for us the first thing we think transformation is really about our people and are we educating for the future, taking away uncertainty.”
