Experimental defense unit funding new tech but gaining criticism
Obama innovation recruits startups
CAMBRIDGE, Mass. (AP) — An Obama-era effort enlisting startup companies to come up with solutions to the military's toughest technological challenges is funding experimental drones, new cybersecurity technology, and advanced communications systems for soldiers.
But as the Department of Defense's "Defense Innovation Unit Experimental," or DIUx office, approaches the twoyear mark this month, it continues to face questions from Republican leaders in Congress and others who view it as a still-unproven, and possibly unnecessary, venture.
U.S. Rep. Mac Thornberry, a Texas Republican who chairs the House Armed Services Committee, which oversees defense spending, agrees the military needs to better keep abreast of the innovation happening in the commercial sector. But he's not yet con- vinced DIUx is the long-term solution and might overlap with other advanced technology offices.
The Pentagon's Defense Advanced Research Project Agency, or DARPA, for example, dates to the 1950s and the space race, while various armed forces branches also have their own research arms.
"This is a good and important initiative, but we don't want this to grow to be some gigantic bureaucracy," Thornberry said this month. "This question is: What is this office doing that's different from what others are doing?"
The proof that DIUx is working is the significant number of projects it has undertaken in a relatively short amount of time and with minimal taxpayer investment, said Col. Michael McGinley, who heads DIUx's office in Cambridge, near the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Since opening its first office in California's Silicon Valley, DIUx has awarded $100 million in government contracts to 45 pilot projects.
The investments are modest since much of the heavy lifting has come from private investors, who have collectively pumped roughly $2 billion into the companies DIUx is working with, according to McGinley.
Most of the contracts have also gone to startups and smaller firms that aren't among the big, traditional military suppliers, such as Lockheed Martin, Boeing or Raytheon.
That's a major objective of the initiative, which McGinley described as "complementary" to other military research organizations but with a distinctly different mission.
And, under the military's traditional purchasing process, the contracts would have likely taken years longer to reach the point they're at now, by which time the technology would have become obsolete, he added. DIUx, by drastically simplifying the bidding process, is awarding contracts within four months.