Speed, agility, and a tolerance for failure are required to enable greater defense innovation adoption for the United States to be successful in this era of great power competition. With Russia’s brazen invasion of Ukraine and China’s increasingly hostile actions in the Indo-Pacific, both bending the international rules-based order to fit their malign interests, confronting innovation challenges in defense will require a fresh approach.
A key element of America’s strategy must be to counter our adversaries’ rapid acquisition and exploitation of leading technologies such as artificial intelligence, robotics, autonomy, and directed energy. To make a major step change when it comes to defense modernization, the Defense Department needs greater flexibility, tools, and a sustained political push from Capitol Hill to use them.
We propose an experiment in budget flexibility and a rethinking of Pentagon program management deep enough to transform the decades-old defense acquisition process. One approach would be to pick a handful of outstanding program executive officers, assign each a capability, and allow them to pursue it with a portfolio of efforts that, unlike today’s programs, can be modified with agility. Enable them to foster an industrial base that can furnish competition and secure supply chains and, if the new portfolio model proves successful, scale the approach across the services.
These are among the recommendations of the Commission for Defense Innovation Adoption, an Atlantic Council project that we are co-chairing. As former Pentagon leaders with experience working in Congress and industry, we assembled an array of former senior government leaders, high-tech industry executives, and national-security-focused investors who are passionate about tackling this critical challenge. We debated the issues and solutions and engaged more than 70 stakeholders from the White House, Congress, the Pentagon and the private sector. The immediate result is an interim report, unanimously supported by the Commissioners, that lays out ten recommendations to foster the rapid adoption of innovative technology by the Pentagon.