The Arms Race of the 21st Century no longer focuses on hardware like missiles and tanks, it’s about algorithms, AI, and the speed of innovation. To gain the edge over our adversaries, the Defense Department is turning to the private sector, and the team making it happen is the Defense Innovation Unit, or DIU.
“When I think about the mission of DIU, it is very, very firmly rooted in the fact that we need to make sure our service members, our warfighters, have the best technology on the battlefield, and whatever that battlefield looks like in the future. And to do that, you have to think outside of the box, you have to think outside of the Pentagon. You have to be able to move with speed,” explained Sarah Pierson, DIU’s Director of Commercial Engagements.
Pierson has a background in both military service and commercial tech development. Sitting down with CBN News, she explained the importance of bringing a “Silicon Valley mentality,” to the Pentagon.
“When we bump into the red-tape of, ‘Oh lets go do this formal thing, this will take three to six months,’ we’re just immediately questioning that. And we just, frankly, we’ve never accepted kind of what those timelines were…We’ve got to bring the best that sits outside of the government right now, and bring it in as quick as possible, because the world is dynamic and you don’t know when you’re going to be forced to really push those, those different capabilities into an operational use case,” said Pierson.
Created nearly a decade ago, this group operates as a “start-up within the Department of Defense.” They focus exclusively on getting this tech into the field and ready to use by the U.S. military at commercial, not government speed.
“The majority of the technology we needed no longer sat within our national labs or within the companies that were continuously supplying the Defense Department. Instead, a lot of that innovation, and the capital that was fueling that innovation, was occurring across our country in spots like Silicon Valley, and Austin, and Boston, and New York,” Pierson told CBN News.
From battlefield drones, to satellite analysis and cyber-security, DIU has launched more than 100 commercial solutions since its founding in 2015. The unique process begins with teams first learning the different needs within the DOD, then taking the issue straight to the private sector.
“We share the problem on the website. We leave it up. We go through a series of down selections. Ultimately, that plays out over about 90 days, some three to four months. At the end of that three to four month period, we put companies on contract to then come deploy their capability…Let’s validate if the capability solves the problem that we have. We’ll do a little bit of extra development in there to really make it a slam dunk, and then if it solves the problem, now let’s go scale it. Let’s go bring other people across the Defense Department to benefit from that capability,” Pierson explained.
Domino Data Lab is one of DIU’s latest partners.
Their mission: help the U.S. Navy find a better way to identify threats underwater.
“What the Navy was looking for was a way to rapidly iterate AI models for underwater target detection. Their current process took almost a year to retrain and redeploy a model. And you can imagine, that is not acceptable…Our platform was the backbone for rebuilding and retraining those models and deploying them more rapidly, and Domino helped dramatically reduce the time required from over six months to under a week, and our target is to get that down to a day in the future,” said Thomas Robinson, Domino’s Chief Operating Officer.
Robinson tells CBN News, although Domino had never worked with the military, the potential became clear when the request came in for the Navy’s “Project Ammo.”
“One of the horror stories you hear many times from startups that try and engage with the Department of Defense is it takes forever. You spend a lot of time, you spend a lot of money, waiting to get to a significant contract. And honestly, when we met the DIU, it seemed like a different way of working,” Robinson said.
Domino’s success on “Project Ammo”, resulted in the opportunity, and funding, to move into other areas within the Pentagon. Robinson sees building trustworthy tools for warriors as their top priority.
“We test extensively. We monitor the systems that are operational so that we make sure that they’re still working within their design parameters…in the same way you wouldn’t want to rely upon a weapon that misfires. You can’t rely on an AI system that doesn’t give you an accurate result,” Robinson explained.
In a world where the pace of warfare can shift by the minute, Pierson says America’s ability to innovate is critical.
“If we want to be able to deter war in the future, which for us at DIU is still the top priority, deterrence, or if we do need to engage, we want to make sure we have the capabilities that ensure we win, if we’re forced to fight,” she said.
As the Defense Innovation Unit continues to break down barriers, the Pentagon is proving it can cut loose from bureaucracy and keep pace with cutting-edge technology.
