Biden Nominates Shyu To Lead Weapons Transformation

WASHINGTON: Two longtime Pentagon and technology hands are likely to take over the department’s modernization efforts as Washington rushes to stay ahead of China in the race for new generations of sophisticated weapons and defenses.

Today, Heidi Shyu, a former assistant secretary of the Army, was nominated to be the Pentagon’s undersecretary for research and engineering. Earlier this month, President Joe Biden nominated Mike Brown, director of the Defense Innovation Unit, to serve as undersecretary of defense for acquisition and sustainment. 

Brown served as a White House Presidential Innovation Fellow at DoD from 2016 to 2018, before moving to DIU, which leads the DoD efforts to get innovative Silicon Valley firms to work with the Pentagon.

If confirmed by the Senate, the duo will come into the Pentagon in the midst of what civilian leaders promise will be major shift as the Pentagon divests old, Cold War-era equipment for new generations of AI-enabled weapons, unmanned systems and hypersonic missiles.

Bringing smaller tech firms into that firmament has been a priority for some time, but has met with mixed success. Aside from the work being done by DIU, Brown would also oversee a newer program focused on doing just that, while also trying to keep Chinese investment out of the US-based tech sector.

In January, then-Pentagon acquisition chief Ellen Lord established the Trusted Capital program to marry vetted US investors with small firms focused on areas like artificial intelligence, biotech and other emerging technologies.

The Biden administration has embraced the Trusted Capital marketplace effort, which would fall under Brown’s portfolio.

He has long warned of Chinese influence and its growing domination of the technological race between Beijing and the United States, co-authoring a 2018 study on ways in which Chinese venture capital investments are buying up the “crown jewels” of American technological innovation.

In an interview with Politico last month, he spoke at length about the need to invigorate America’s tech sector  in order to keep pace with China.

“The president has called it strategic competition with China. I think [President Biden] is right. I differentiate that from the Cold War arms race. It really is a tech competition because China sees the value of transforming their economy through high technology to get higher paying jobs, to grow their economy, to be the source of technology for world markets and to set standards,” he said. 

“What we really need to focus on is investing for the technology breakthroughs for the next 20, 30 or 40 years. This requires an increase in federally-funded research, improving our [science, technology, engineering and mathematics] education and growing our talent, and encouraging the private sector to invest for the long term.”

In what might be a hint at some of his focus areas, he singled out several “game-changing technologies” like “AI, biotech, autonomous systems, quantum science, cyber,” while acknowledging that Beijing is already ahead in areas like 5G and small drones. 

Shyu was the Army’s top acquisition official from September 2012, to January 2016, and before that worked for years at Raytheon, where, as vice president of technology strategy for the space and airborne systems business unit, her team focused on space and electronic warfare programs, along with unmanned technologies. 

Defense News reported the forthcoming Shyu nomination Tuesday morning.

Since leaving the Pentagon in 2016, Shyu — an American citizen who was born in Taiwan and came to the United States as a child — has been a member of the board of the federally-funded Aerospace Corp., among others. If confirmed by the Senate, her office will play a critical role in areas that the Biden administration has said it intends to focus on, including new hypersonic weapons.