An airmen with the 24th Air Force works on cyber issues at Port San Antonio.

An airmen with the 24th Air Force works on cyber issues at Port San Antonio. 24th Air Force

Pentagon Sets Up a Silicon Valley Outpost

Can Ash Carter enlist a tech community spooked by spying and allergic to bureaucracy?

The Pentagon will set up a new office in Silicon Valley, aiming to harness the creativity of the world’s most famous technology community, senior Defense Department officials told reporters on Wednesday. The Department is working to build new partnerships, identify “game-changing” emerging technology, and clarify to the technology community what it does online to protect the nation.

On Thursday, Defense Secretary Ashton Carter will announce several new initiatives during a much-anticipated speech at Stanford, then meet with Sheryl Sandberg and other representatives at Facebook. (The department will also roll out its second Cyber Strategy, an update to the 2011 document that outlines plans and uses for offensive and defensive capabilities.) On Friday, Carter will attend a roundtable discussion led by one of the Valley’s most moneyed royals, Ben Horowitz, a founder of Andreessen Horowitz, the superstar venture capital firm behind Twitter, Pinterest, and GitHub.

“Yesterday’s startups focused on semiconductors, internet applications and software. Today’s startups are lobbing microsatellites into space, creating autonomous robotics, defining the biotechnology revolution, pioneering additive manufacturing, and exploring frontiers of big data, all technologies with military applications,” said one senior DOD official.

Carter will unveil several new initiatives meant to reshape how the Pentagon does business with the non-defense technology community.

(RelatedThe Pentagon Isn’t the Only Agency Turning to Silicon Valley)

The first change, and arguably the most significant, is the establishment of a Defense Department cell in Silicon Valley. Likely to be located at Moffett Field, near the NASA Ames research facility, this Defense Innovation Unit Experimental, or DIUX, will mark the DOD’s first permanent outreach presence in the West Coast technology hub. Here’s how the Pentagon is describing it: “Staffed by an elite cadre of active duty and civilian personnel, DIUX will also be complemented by reservists, representing some of the best technical talent in the world. They will focus on scouting emerging and breakthrough technologies and building direct relationships with DOD,” one official said, adding that several of these reservists have already “funded and sold multiple companies.”

DIUX could be up and running in May.

The Department will also establish a pilot program to “tap into the creativity of startup ventures,” the official said. “We will identify promising technologies with defense applications that we have traditionally not developed access to and will foster development of emerging technologies that have the potential for giving long-term advantages to DOD, possibly being game-changers.”

DOD is hunting for “game changers” this year, part of the ever-evolving offset strategy, an effort to identify the breakthrough capabilities that will define military innovation for the next decade and beyond.

The Pentagon will also make a small investment in In-Q-Tel, the CIA’s venture capital outfit, to build out new capabilities in nano-electronics, software and applications. “It’s worked well for the [intelligence community]. If it works for us we’re going to expand it,” said the official.

The Defense Department will also establish a branch of the U.S. Digital Service, a technology initiative former White House Chief Technology Officer Todd Park launched last August to help fix the healthcare.gov website. The Service has been called by NPR an effort to “remake the government’s online image, one website at a time.”

The new DOD branch of the service “will help us surge on some of [the Defense Department’s] most vexing problems” according to the official. The effort initially will focus on transferring electronic healthcare records for troops between the Defense Department and the Department of Veterans Affairs, a sticking point in efforts to forge closer cooperation between the two.

DOD will also upgrade its Corporate Fellows program. Established in 1994, the program sends 15 to 20 officers to top commercial companies every year for a period of about 11 months to learn best practices in the private sector. “The DOD hasn’t fully utilized the expertise that the corporate fellows require. We will expand the program into a two-year assignment,” said the official. Following their year at their assigned company, “fellows will be assigned to a part of DOD where they can implement relevant business practices learned in their experience with industry.”

But can this group of efforts infuse some start-up spirit into the drab goings-on at the Pentagon, let alone close the innovation gap with the private sector?

If there aren't some failures generated from the interaction between DoD and Silicon Valley, then they aren't trying hard enough.
Peter Newell, managing partner at BMNT 

Peter Newell, a managing partner at the Palo Alto-based consultant group BMNT and a former director of the Army’s Rapid Equipping Force, said the efforts were a good start. But if DOD is going to get the most out of its new partnerships with California’s tech crowd, it needs to change its culture, particularly in the ways that it embraces experimentation (or doesn't.)

“The really hard work starts when it comes time to actually transition an idea out of an ‘incubator’ and into the system,” Newell said. “DOD has many of the tools they require to make it work, but they will need to train their people to use them and to expect some level of failure of the effort in the process. I would go so far as to say if there aren't some failures generated from the interaction between DOD and Silicon Valley, then they aren't trying hard enough. The lean start-up lexicon of ‘fail and fail fast’ will not be an easy thing for DOD to put into practice - however it is not impossible.”

Newell says DOD ought to get more troops, not just Pentagon types, interacting with the tech community. “The most ingenious people in the military are those who serve on the front lines and whom have to solve life and death problems with whatever they have on hand at the time,” he said. “DOD's innovation practice must include a means to put those ingenious ‘super-users’ from the front lines in direct contact with the innovators in the Valley to generate a discourse on the problems that need to be solved [instead of] just looking for new technology.”

We Come In Peace

As he meets with tech players and speaks to students, Carter will be spending some of his time wooing Silicon Valley types that might be skeptical about joining with the Department. Carter will be explaining what DOD will and won’t do online for the sake of the nation.

In particular, Carter will be discussing the limited role that the Department plays, or could play, in the nation’s cybersecurity. When it comes cyber attacks on the homeland, DOD’s role is dwarfed by those of the Department of Homeland Security and FBI. The Pentagon’s cyber teams spring into action only when a hostile action “rises to the level of an armed attack,” meaning “an attack of very significant consequence, not a denial of service attack or a mere hack,” said one senior official. These kinds of incidents  constitute less than 2 percent of the cyber attacks launched against the United States, one official estimated.

Carter will also seek to reassure members of the technology community that the Department of Defense comes in peace. “We’ve said this before, but because the secretary believes a lot in transparency, he just wants to make sure that is clear and in particular make sure that some of the people who have concerns about this in Silicon Valley have an opportunity to ask about that and get further insight into that mission,” the official said.

Of course, the primary cultural and political issue that divides the Pentagon and Silicon Valley is NSA activity. That, too, will be a topic of discussion between Carter and the industry types he’ll be visiting with.

“Because of some of the issues associated with NSA in the past, we also thought really clearly about how we want to communicate transparency, openness, the values that are important to the secretary and the department in terms of respecting privacy, respecting the constitution, the values and things that we cherish here in the Department and that we fight for when defending the nation,” said the official.

X
This website uses cookies to enhance user experience and to analyze performance and traffic on our website. We also share information about your use of our site with our social media, advertising and analytics partners. Learn More / Do Not Sell My Personal Information
Accept Cookies
X
Cookie Preferences Cookie List

Do Not Sell My Personal Information

When you visit our website, we store cookies on your browser to collect information. The information collected might relate to you, your preferences or your device, and is mostly used to make the site work as you expect it to and to provide a more personalized web experience. However, you can choose not to allow certain types of cookies, which may impact your experience of the site and the services we are able to offer. Click on the different category headings to find out more and change our default settings according to your preference. You cannot opt-out of our First Party Strictly Necessary Cookies as they are deployed in order to ensure the proper functioning of our website (such as prompting the cookie banner and remembering your settings, to log into your account, to redirect you when you log out, etc.). For more information about the First and Third Party Cookies used please follow this link.

Allow All Cookies

Manage Consent Preferences

Strictly Necessary Cookies - Always Active

We do not allow you to opt-out of our certain cookies, as they are necessary to ensure the proper functioning of our website (such as prompting our cookie banner and remembering your privacy choices) and/or to monitor site performance. These cookies are not used in a way that constitutes a “sale” of your data under the CCPA. You can set your browser to block or alert you about these cookies, but some parts of the site will not work as intended if you do so. You can usually find these settings in the Options or Preferences menu of your browser. Visit www.allaboutcookies.org to learn more.

Sale of Personal Data, Targeting & Social Media Cookies

Under the California Consumer Privacy Act, you have the right to opt-out of the sale of your personal information to third parties. These cookies collect information for analytics and to personalize your experience with targeted ads. You may exercise your right to opt out of the sale of personal information by using this toggle switch. If you opt out we will not be able to offer you personalised ads and will not hand over your personal information to any third parties. Additionally, you may contact our legal department for further clarification about your rights as a California consumer by using this Exercise My Rights link

If you have enabled privacy controls on your browser (such as a plugin), we have to take that as a valid request to opt-out. Therefore we would not be able to track your activity through the web. This may affect our ability to personalize ads according to your preferences.

Targeting cookies may be set through our site by our advertising partners. They may be used by those companies to build a profile of your interests and show you relevant adverts on other sites. They do not store directly personal information, but are based on uniquely identifying your browser and internet device. If you do not allow these cookies, you will experience less targeted advertising.

Social media cookies are set by a range of social media services that we have added to the site to enable you to share our content with your friends and networks. They are capable of tracking your browser across other sites and building up a profile of your interests. This may impact the content and messages you see on other websites you visit. If you do not allow these cookies you may not be able to use or see these sharing tools.

If you want to opt out of all of our lead reports and lists, please submit a privacy request at our Do Not Sell page.

Save Settings
Cookie Preferences Cookie List

Cookie List

A cookie is a small piece of data (text file) that a website – when visited by a user – asks your browser to store on your device in order to remember information about you, such as your language preference or login information. Those cookies are set by us and called first-party cookies. We also use third-party cookies – which are cookies from a domain different than the domain of the website you are visiting – for our advertising and marketing efforts. More specifically, we use cookies and other tracking technologies for the following purposes:

Strictly Necessary Cookies

We do not allow you to opt-out of our certain cookies, as they are necessary to ensure the proper functioning of our website (such as prompting our cookie banner and remembering your privacy choices) and/or to monitor site performance. These cookies are not used in a way that constitutes a “sale” of your data under the CCPA. You can set your browser to block or alert you about these cookies, but some parts of the site will not work as intended if you do so. You can usually find these settings in the Options or Preferences menu of your browser. Visit www.allaboutcookies.org to learn more.

Functional Cookies

We do not allow you to opt-out of our certain cookies, as they are necessary to ensure the proper functioning of our website (such as prompting our cookie banner and remembering your privacy choices) and/or to monitor site performance. These cookies are not used in a way that constitutes a “sale” of your data under the CCPA. You can set your browser to block or alert you about these cookies, but some parts of the site will not work as intended if you do so. You can usually find these settings in the Options or Preferences menu of your browser. Visit www.allaboutcookies.org to learn more.

Performance Cookies

We do not allow you to opt-out of our certain cookies, as they are necessary to ensure the proper functioning of our website (such as prompting our cookie banner and remembering your privacy choices) and/or to monitor site performance. These cookies are not used in a way that constitutes a “sale” of your data under the CCPA. You can set your browser to block or alert you about these cookies, but some parts of the site will not work as intended if you do so. You can usually find these settings in the Options or Preferences menu of your browser. Visit www.allaboutcookies.org to learn more.

Sale of Personal Data

We also use cookies to personalize your experience on our websites, including by determining the most relevant content and advertisements to show you, and to monitor site traffic and performance, so that we may improve our websites and your experience. You may opt out of our use of such cookies (and the associated “sale” of your Personal Information) by using this toggle switch. You will still see some advertising, regardless of your selection. Because we do not track you across different devices, browsers and GEMG properties, your selection will take effect only on this browser, this device and this website.

Social Media Cookies

We also use cookies to personalize your experience on our websites, including by determining the most relevant content and advertisements to show you, and to monitor site traffic and performance, so that we may improve our websites and your experience. You may opt out of our use of such cookies (and the associated “sale” of your Personal Information) by using this toggle switch. You will still see some advertising, regardless of your selection. Because we do not track you across different devices, browsers and GEMG properties, your selection will take effect only on this browser, this device and this website.

Targeting Cookies

We also use cookies to personalize your experience on our websites, including by determining the most relevant content and advertisements to show you, and to monitor site traffic and performance, so that we may improve our websites and your experience. You may opt out of our use of such cookies (and the associated “sale” of your Personal Information) by using this toggle switch. You will still see some advertising, regardless of your selection. Because we do not track you across different devices, browsers and GEMG properties, your selection will take effect only on this browser, this device and this website.