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JUST IN: DIU Director Touts Unmanned Sub as Sign of Progress with Commercial Sector
Huntington Ingalls photo
HONOLULU — A free and open international system depends on a free and open Indo-Pacific, and keeping it that way will require the Defense Department to pay more attention to Silicon Valley, the Defense Innovation Unit’s leader said.
“It could not be more clear to me … just how central the imperative is for us to maintain a free and open international system, which is what everything that we do in Silicon Valley depends on, and that in turn depends on maintaining a free and open Indo-Pacific,” Doug Beck, director of the Defense Innovation Unit, said during a fireside chat at the National Defense Industrial Association’s Pacific Operational Science and Technology Conference March 5.
While the imperative is clear, it needs to happen faster, Beck said.
Efforts like the CHIPS and Science Act and the AUKUS trilateral security partnership are underway, but “it takes time to build a whole new industry almost … from scratch, with all the clusters around that, or even the work that major tech companies … are doing in diversifying their supply chains.”
“And we don’t have that time,” he continued. “So, we must leverage the incredible capability that’s represented in the commercial tech sector for that speed, but also for capability.”
Eleven of the 14 areas the Defense Department declared as critical technology areas — such as AI and autonomy, biotechnology, energy and cyber — “in many aspects go faster and will always go faster to meet the relentless demands and billions of consumers around the world and enterprises that serve them,” he said.
The Pentagon needs to take “full advantage” of what the commercial tech sector has figured out in meeting that demand in order to deter conflict, he said. “We have to do that now.”
Beck said he was concerned that “we weren’t making enough progress on that,” but now believes the department has “reached a tipping point, both driven by that imperative [from China]” and leaders across the Defense Department, government and industry that “[get] this challenge,” he said.
The number of both companies and investors in the defense technology space is “a real indication of the kind of progress that DIU and others in this space have made,” he said, giving two examples of projects that illustrate a successful collaboration.
The first is the Lionfish system, a small unmanned undersea vehicle project that DIU started with the Navy in 2019. The project sought to address a need for a small undersea vehicle that could bring autonomy together with cutting-edge sensors.
DIU helped the Navy downselect 30 proposals through a “very rapid, accelerated process,” eventually putting prototypes in the water, Beck said. In 2023, Huntington Ingalls Industries announced it had won a production contract for the Lionfish program — marking the first time the Navy had gone from a prototype Other Transaction contract to a production contract at scale, Beck said.
The $347 million contract covers “somewhere around a couple 100 of those vehicles,” he said. “And that’s a great example of working together as a service and then scaling.”
Beck said the project showcased the ability to move quickly to fill a critical gap with a traditional partner in a non-traditional way. The program also led to an artificial intelligence software set of solutions, “because one of the things that we discovered through that process was that as these unmanned vessels were out there doing what they did, [when] they came back we need to be able to update their software based on what they just learned.”
The process took six months, he said. “That’s not going to work operationally. So, the team then used a set of what in the commercial tech world are pretty standard machine learning ops tools, worked with five extremely innovative artificial intelligence startups … and brought that six months down to one to two weeks.”
Another example is the Tactical Hybridization Project, a project for the Army and Marine Corps that “is basically taking the capability that a lot of you probably have in your hybrid cars and have had for a long time … and it’s taking that capability and graphing it on to the many … tactical vehicles that our ground forces have, thousands and thousands and thousands of vehicles.”
The capability allows a 20 to 30 percent improvement on fuel efficiency, Beck said — which means 20 to 30 percent more range, more time on target and fewer people in combat zones delivering fuel. Beck said the Army is already “rolling this out” and it is in field testing now.
“I wish it was happening even faster, but that’s a big change fast,” he said.
Beck said war is neither imminent nor inevitable, “but we must take Xi Jinping and the [Chinese] leadership at their word, and we must be in a position to credibly deter the challenges represented by China here in the region and maintain that free and open system,” and leveraging the commercial tech sector will help accomplish that, and faster.
Topics: Maritime Security
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