AFA: Preston Dunlap, chief architect of the Department of the Air Force, is discovering just how hard it can be to change how the Air Force buys software and IT — and develops weapons with them — moving from the painfully slow pace of a decade or more to the pace required by the pacing threat of China and Moore’s Law.
“So, a year ago I was very focused on making sure we didn’t miss the train on these advancing technologies; they didn’t bypass the national security community before we could grab it and partner, which is really important,” Dunlap, blessed with one of the coolest titles in the Pentagon, told a panel on innovation at the Air Force Association’s annual conference.
But what he learned over the last year, Dunlap said, is that “you can’t just build the bridge to commercial technology, but you also have to build all the structural apparatus to make that innovation pipeline work into transitioning to the Defense Department, the national security community. And that means you’ve got to have an ecosystem of innovation on the outside, you’ve got to have budget and programming in program executive offices and Major Commands with requirements, all lining up to each other.”
The same is true for space technology as it is for the more terrestrial capabilities being sought by the service.
“We’ve been able to pull in data from six or seven different new space companies that hadn’t yet worked with the Defense Department, integrated that data to align with our national security and defense space information systems, and [been] able to provide that through federated data environments to be able to get greater access to both commercial open source, to work with others around the globe, as well as our specialized capabilities,” he said. “And that’s only the tip of the iceberg of opportunities that we have.”
Dunlap’s key work has been on building ABMS and other contributions to All Domain Operations, the Pentagon’s ambitious and crucial effort to greatly improve the availability of intelligence, the ability to use it and the speed at which all this can be done.
All this work is “just starting to change the game here,” Dunlap said.
But if you take a step back and look at the economic and technologic big picture, the specific problems of the Defense Department come more sharply into view, as Jeffrey DeGraff, a professor at the University of Michigan’s Ross School of Business, described the environment.
“Now I want to give you some facts. This is the sobering up part — 60 of the top 100 research universities in the world are in what country? They’re in this one, right? Interesting. What percentage of the capitalized value of the tech companies is in this country? It’s 82%. It’s more than the entire European bourse. When we look at research funding, we look at the Air Force, you’re among the top 10 in research funding,” the professor told the audience.
“The notion is, you have an embarrassment of riches, and you’re falling behind on speed and magnitude. This is what is sometimes called Schumpeter’s Gale. The notion is, it’s not about the competition — it’s about you.”
DeGraff said he’s heard “a lot” of the kind of thinking that traps such organizations at the AFA conference. “The pervasive thinking is, what we need is more planning, right? Big organizations love the plan. They get stuck in the planning cycle. It’s the classic problem. ‘Oh, I’m going to the meeting about the meeting. I’ve got to make sure that phase one is all wrapped up so phase three works beautifully.'”
That syndrome, he said, was “General Motors in 1980.”
The US, not China, has the technology, the best academics, the best students, DeGraff argued.
“The issue is, we are not effectively synchronizing it. We’re not effectively motivating it, or we’re not effectively engaging it, and that becomes the issue,” DeGraff said.
Dunlap is a very motivated and intelligent man, as are Air Force Secretary Frank Kendall and Air Force Chief of Staff CQ Brown. Can they drive their way through Schumpeter’s Gale?