Deputy Defense Secretary Kathleen Hicks

WASHINGTON: The Pentagon needs to create a unified “innovation ecosystem” from the services’ experiments, Deputy Secretary Kathleen Hicks said today. So it will create a Rapid Defense Experimentation Reserve – RDER, pronounced “Raider.”

Organizations across the Defense Department can propose experiments and compete for RDER funding, with winners determined based on how well they bring in multiple services and entities to work on joint concepts.

“We’re building out some experimentation funding and incentives that we can start using right away,” Hicks told the Defense One Tech Summit this afternoon.

“There’s lots of experimentation going on across the department, there’s lots of innovation going on across the department,” she said. “[But] we are really not quite at a point that we have an ecosystem that’s institutionalized and that’s truly strategic.”

Competition among ideas is necessary but not sufficient, Hicks argued. There also needs to be some kind of overarching common criteria to encourage coming up with ideas that work well together.

“There’s a huge value in a competitive marketplace of ideas, and the services can provide that by bringing their different perspectives, their different core competencies, to bear,” Hicks said, “but it can’t be just… disparate efforts that never tie together.” Service-led experimentation efforts like the Air Force’s Advanced Battle Management System, Army’s Project Convergence, and Navy’s Project Overmatch should feed into the overarching joint effort to think through future warfare.

“In many cases [they already] do,” she emphasized, “and where they do, that’s where I’m bringing RDER to the table.”

“To compete for the RDER [funding], you’ve got to have multiple components involved, you’ve got to be tied in to where we’re heading on our joint concepts,” Hicks explained.

“I think this is a great idea,” said Bryan Clark, a retired Navy strategist now with the Hudson Institute. “DoD now has numerous service-led rapid prototyping and experimentation efforts underway, in addition to software factories and rapid capability acquisition or modification organizations like Big Safari, Space Safari, and the Rapid Capabilities Office in the Air Force, or the Maritime Accelerated Capabilities Office in the Navy. The challenge is very few are focused on integrating joint forces together, as highlighted by the prominence of multi-service initiatives like Project Convergence. RDER would provide a mechanism to fund more efforts like Project Convergence.”

Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin has approved a DoD-wide strategy for Joint All-Domain Command & Control (JADC2), a meta-network intended to link the services across land, sea, air, space, and cyberspace. He and Hicks are also pushing artificial intelligence and data-sharing initiatives that help create the technical backbone for JADC2.