The Pentagon’s Defense Innovation Unit (DIU) said in a report released this week that it’s taking steps toward its next iteration – dubbed DIU 3.0 – that involves shifts in focus, action, and resourcing to accelerate the development and deployment of military technology.
“Against a backdrop of international challenges and with the world’s most capable technology sector, we can and must do more to identify and adopt impactful commercial technologies at speed and scale,” the agency said in the report released Feb. 7.
DIU — then called “DIUx,” with the x standing for experimental — was founded in 2015 as part of a broader strategic initiative to maintain U.S. technological superiority in the face of a shifting threat landscape.
During its initial phase – DIU 1.0 – the primary focus was to build a bridge between the Defense Department (DoD) and the commercial technology sector. The second phase – DIU 2.0 – focused on demonstrating concretely that real military problems can be solved by rapidly delivering commercial capabilities to the warfighter.
Today, that mission imperative is much the same, but the need is greater, the agency said.
“The challenge now is to take the capabilities developed during DIU 2.0 and apply them with the focus, scale, and speed necessary to deliver the strategic effect required,” the report states. “This is what DIU 3.0 is all about.”
DIU 3.0 outlines DIU’s expanding role and lays out eight line of efforts the organization is taking to ensure that DoD is taking full advantage of commercially derived capabilities to counter growing threats from adversaries:
- Focus on critical capability gaps.
- Partner with the Department of Defense’s (DoD) “engines of scale.”
- Catalyze DoD’s innovation entities into a community of impact.
- Take commercial tech partnerships to a new level.
- Make tech partnership with international allies and partners.
- Build the trust and momentum required for speed and scale.
- Retool DIU.
- Provide the Secretary and Deputy Secretary with world class “dual fluency” advice.
Operational Shifts
During DIU 2.0 the agency targeted a broad range of situations where a legitimate military customer and matching technology provider could be identified. But today DIU said it must reorient efforts “through a relentless focus on the most critical capability gaps that are central to the U.S. ability to deter and win wars, and to their scale adoption by [military forces.]”
DIU — with backing from leaders in the Pentagon and in Congress — is making a deliberate shift toward helping DoD field the most military-relevant commercial technologies at a larger scale.
Additionally, recent changes and support from DoD leadership better positions DIU “to help partners across the department, interagency, commercial tech sector and allied and partner nations meet these goals,” the report says.
Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin recently elevated DIU Director Douglas Beck to directly report as a senior advisor to both him and the deputy secretary to provide them “depth of insight” into the commercial tech sector.
This new role also gives DIU an opportunity to better take advantage of the capability resident throughout its organization “to bring similar depth of insight to the leverage of the commercial tech sector, and a similar level of expertise in partnering with its companies and talent base,” the report reads.
“DIU 3.0 can and must capitalize on that unique position at the intersection of two worlds to help the Department and the broader U.S. government achieve a renewed level of collaboration with the private sector,” the report states.
Reinforcing Partnerships
Partnerships — private, public, at home, and abroad — are a key factor to DIU 3.0.
As the Defense Department’s bridge to commercial tech companies, DIU is uniquely positioned to help clarify the department’s demand for innovative solutions. Despite a lot of progress in DoD’s deployment of commercial tech, it’s “demand signal” remains muddled and exceedingly difficult for even the most capable of commercial technology companies to decipher, the report says.
DIU 3.0 plans to leverage its role to “relentlessly help knock down barriers to success faced by commercial tech innovators, large and small,” it says.
DIU 3.0 also plans to focus on its partnerships within DoD.
“Partnerships with both Secretariat and uniformed service leadership will help DIU ensure that the demand is there to scale successful prototypes aligned with the services’ operational imperatives — and that DIU does not work on anything where that agreement is not in place,” the report reads.
Previously, prototypes delivered by DIU and transitioned to the mission forces were rarely adopted with the scale and integration necessary to have a material impact on the most pivotal operational plans and deterrence options, according to the report.
DIU 3.0 will dramatically deepen the partnership with the Department’s true “engines of scale”— the services — and with the Joint Staff and the Office of the Secretary of Defense.
DIU also explained that while innovation teams within the services delivered results, the constructive interaction among them is a “vast underutilized area of potential value.”
Therefore, DIU will also work with partners across the Department’s community of defense innovation entities “to generate impact through shared best practices, talent management, shared systems and processes, and enhanced teamwork,” the report states.
Addressing Staffing Shortages
Staffers with the skills necessary to help realize DIU 3.0 are highly in demand, but the number of applicants falls short.
“DIU’s historical personnel process … has been unable to execute at the speed and scale necessary. DIU’s mission rests on the ability to attract, develop, deploy, and retain that talent, both for the direct application to DIU’s own mission and for the development of a cadre of technology talent available to deploy throughout the department,” the report said.
The report explains that part of the staff shortage problem involves the competing nature of private versus public careers.
“The men and women who make up this talent are also highly in demand and, while many are willing to forgo lucrative private sector careers or take enormous pay cuts to leave those careers behind in support of the mission, most are unwilling to wait for many months or even years to find out if a job that pays a fraction of their current income will materialize,” the report states.
The agency has made plans to appoint critical staff to work towards DIU 3.0.
Recently, Secretary Austin approved a plan for DIU 3.0 to increase staffing, including the addition of two senior executive Deputy Directors based in the Pentagon, both of whom are now in place.
