By Cheryl Pellerin
DoD News, Defense Media Activity
WASHINGTON, April 23, 2015 – Defense Secretary Ash Carter
announced new partnership initiatives today on the first day of a two-day visit
to California’s Silicon Valley to learn from experts who run some of the
highest-tech companies in one of the nation’s innovation hotspots.
At Stanford University, where he recently served as a
distinguished visiting fellow at the Hoover Institution and a lecturer at the
Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies, Carter delivered the annual
Drell Lecture, titled “Rewiring the Pentagon: Charting a New Path on Innovation
and Cybersecurity.”
The lecture, sponsored by the Stanford Center for
International Security and Cooperation, is named for Dr. Sidney Drell, a
theoretical physicist and arms-control expert who cofounded the center.
When Carter became defense secretary, he told the audience,
one of his top commitments was to the future -- to stay ahead of a changing
world, to remain competitive, to attract new generations to the mission of
serving the country, and to stay abreast of technology.
Commercially Driven Technology
To begin leveraging commercially driven technology, he said,
the Defense Department wants “to partner with businesses on everything from
autonomy to robotics to biomedical engineering and 3-D printing; power, energy,
propulsion to distributed systems, data science [and] the Internet of things.”
Over the years, Carter said, products developed in Silicon Valley
and across the tech community have enabled transformation, progress,
opportunity and prosperity across all economic and social sectors, including
national defense.
“It’s made many things easier, cheaper and safer,” he added.
“But in recent years it’s become clear that these same
advances and technologies also present a degree of risk to the businesses,
governments, militaries and individual[s] who rely on them every day … making
it easier, cheaper and safer to threaten them,” the secretary said.
The same technologies DoD uses to target cruise missiles and
jam enemy air defenses can be used against U.S. and allied forces, and they’re
available to the highest bidders, he noted, asking, “How do we mitigate the
risk that comes with technology while simultaneously unleashing its promise and
potential?”
The answer, he said, is partnership.
Investments by DoD and government agencies have historically
played a role in helping to spur ground-up technological innovation in Silicon
Valley and on the Stanford campus, Carter said. Vint Cerf, father of the
Internet, did that work and more while he was a Stanford assistant professor
and a researcher at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, the
secretary said.
DoD-funded Innovation
The Global Positioning System began as a defense-driven
project, work on Google’s search algorithm was funded by a National Science
Foundation grant, and most technologies used throughout Silicon Valley can be
traced back to government or DoD research and expenditures, Carter said.
“Developers of multitouch [interaction] worked together through a fellowship
funded by the National Science Foundation and the CIA,” he added.
“iOS’s Siri grew out of … decades of DARPA-driven research
on artificial intelligence and voice recognition, [and] a specific DARPA
project funded through [SRI International, formerly the Stanford Research
Institute] to help develop a virtual assistant for military personnel,” the
secretary said. “And Google’s self-driving cars grew out of a DARPA Grand
Challenge.”
DoD, other federal agencies and tech companies helped to
ignite the spark, Carter said, but Silicon Valley companies nurtured the flame
and created unimaginable applications.
But the Defense Department still makes up half of federal
research and development -- about $72 billion this year, he said. And $12
billion in R&D funds support breakthrough science and technology research
at universities, companies and DoD labs across the tech community.
For example, he said, several Stanford scientists have
worked with DARPA, and over the past three years, DARPA has partnered with
nearly 50 different public- and private-sector research entities in Silicon
Valley.
“These relationships are really valuable to us,” Carter
added, “and I intend to continue to nurture them.”
Disaster-response Robots
In June, the results of such partnerships will come together
during the DARPA Robotics Challenge Finals in Pomona, California.
At the competition, work on smaller sensors,
pattern-recognition technology, big-data analysis and autonomous systems with
human decision support will fuel a competition of 25 robots from around the
world. Each human-robot team will try to navigate a simulated disaster area so
that during future disasters such technology may be ready to help without
putting people at risk.
But to stay competitive and stay ahead of threats, DoD must
do even more, Carter said, “and that starts with our people, who are our most
important asset both in Silicon Valley and in the military.”
Who they are and where they are affects the department’s
ability to innovate, the secretary said, and that’s the rationale behind some
initial steps he’s taking starting today to help the department attract new
people with talent and expertise “and who want to contribute to the Force of
the Future, even if only for a time or a project.”
In one such effort, the department is establishing a DoD
branch of the U.S. Digital Service, an outgrowth of the tech team that helped
to rescue healthcare.gov, the secretary said.
The team will help to solve some of DoD’s most intractable
IT and data problems, Carter said, noting that “we have our very first team …
already in the Pentagon working on transferring electronic health records from
DoD to the [Department of Veterans Affairs].”
U.S. Digital Service
Calling the U.S. Digital Service “a wonderful opportunity to
try out public service,” Carter told the audience they can go to
http://whitehouse.gov/usds to learn more.
Another initiative Carter announced today takes advantage of
the elements that make Silicon Valley “a nexus for innovation” -- an experimental
Silicon Valley partnership called the Defense Innovation Unit-X, or DIUX. The
unit will scout emerging and breakthrough technologies and build direct
relationships to DoD.
This is “first-of-a-kind [partnership] for us, staffed by
some of our best active-duty and military personnel, plus key people from the
reserves who live here, who are some our best technical talent,” Carter said.
Building New Relationships
The team will strengthen existing relationships and build
new ones while functioning as a local interface node for the rest of the
department, the secretary said. Down the road, he added, “they can help
startups find new work to do with DoD.”
Next, Carter said, the department will open a door in the
other direction, from our best government technologies to industry and then
back.
An existing program called Secretary of Defense Corporate
Fellows sends about 15 DoD people a year out to commercial companies such as
Oracle, Cisco, FedEx and others, he said.
“Right now we don’t effectively harness what they’ve learned
when they come back, … so we’re going to try expanding that fellows program
into a two-year gig -– one year in a company and one year in a part of DoD with
comparable business practices,” the secretary said. “That way, we have a better
chance to bring the private sector’s best practices back into the department.”
To invest in the most promising emerging technologies,
Carter said, the department needs the creativity and innovation that comes from
startups and small businesses.
“This is particularly important, because startups are the
leading edge of commercial innovation,” he said, “and right now, DoD
researchers don’t have enough promising ways to transition technologies that
they come up with to application. I want to fix that too.”
Borrowing on the success of an intelligence community
partnership with the independent nonprofit startup-backer In-Q-Tel, Carter said
the department has proposed and In-Q-Tel has accepted a pilot project to
provide innovative solutions to DoD’s most challenging problems.
The department will make a small investment with In-Q-Tel to
leverage the nonprofit’s proven relationships and apply its approach to DoD, he
added.
The Best Partners
“As secretary of defense, my mission is to make sure our
military can defend our country … and we’re at our best when we have the best
partners,” Carter said. “Knowing how we’ve worked together in the past and how
critical your work is to our country, strengthening this partnership is very
important to me.
“We have a unique opportunity to build bridges and rebuild
bridges [in the commercial tech sector] and renew trust,” he continued. “That’s
why I’m visiting some other companies here this afternoon and meeting with a
group of tech leaders tomorrow. I want to learn how in the years to come a new
level of partnership can lead to great things. That’s what’s possible through
partnership.”
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