This signaled the broad support the office had earned from Pentagon leaders. Three years after Carter launched DIUx, it was renamed the Defense Innovation Unit (DIU), indicating that it was no longer experimental. Carter appointed former Google CEO (and Alphabet board member) Eric Schmidt to chair the DIB, which includes current and former executives from Facebook, Google, and Instagram, among others. In March 2016, Carter organized the Defense Innovation Board (DIB), an elite brain trust of civilians tasked with providing advice and recommendations to the Pentagon’s leadership. invite techies to spend time at Defense.” His long-term goals were even more ambitious: to take career military officers and assign them to work on futuristic projects in Silicon Valley for months at a time, to “expose them to new cultures and ideas they can take back to the Pentagon. “The key is to contract quickly - not to make these people fill out reams of paperwork,” he said.
In the short term, Carter hoped that DIUx would build relationships with local start-ups, recruit top talent, get military reservists involved in projects, and streamline the Pentagon’s notoriously cumbersome procurement processes. Within a year, DIUx opened branch offices in two other places with burgeoning tech sectors: Boston, Massachusetts, and Austin, Texas. Ideally, DIUx would serve as a kind of liaison, negotiating the needs of grizzled four-star generals, the Pentagon’s civilian leaders, and hoodie-clad engineers and entrepreneurs. What the new defense secretary wanted was a nimble, streamlined office that could serve as a kind of broker, channeling tens or even hundreds of millions of dollars from the Defense Department’s massive budget toward up-and-coming firms developing technologies on the verge of completion. The Pentagon has its own research and development agency, DARPA, but its projects tend to pursue objectives that are decades, not months, away. “They feel they too are public servants, and they’d like to have somebody in Washington they can connect to.” Astonishingly, Carter was the first sitting defense secretary to visit Silicon Valley in more than twenty years. “They are inventing new technology, creating prosperity, connectivity, and freedom,” he said. The native Pennsylvanian, who had spent several years at Stanford University prior to his appointment as defense secretary, was deeply impressed with the innovative spirit of the Bay Area and its millionaire magnates. Carter’s premise was that new commercial companies had surpassed the Defense Department’s ability to create cutting-edge technologies. González.Īsh Carter’s plan was simple but ambitious: to harness the best and brightest ideas from the tech industry for Pentagon use. González, published by the University of California Press. Excerpted from War Virtually: The Quest to Automate Conflict, Militarize Data, and Predict the Future by Roberto J.
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