At AUSA 2025, Army Secretary Daniel Driscoll took aim at traditional primes, saying the future Army will “break down barriers until we measure acquisitions not in years and billions, but months and thousands."
Gary Steele, currently Cisco’s president for go-to-market, will take the reins at Shield AI to join its board of directors on May 13, the company announced today.
The military space sector is evolving fast. Get the latest from Space Force and industry officials on what’s next for acquisition, policy and training in a new Breaking Defense eBook.
“I'd like to see in a Harris administration, a commitment to the innovation reform agenda at DoD,” said HASC Ranking Member Rep. Adam Smith. “That really has, I think, stalled a little bit."
“I call this the million monkeys at a typewriter,” CIA CTO Nand Mulchandani said. “You can’t pick the specific monkey that is going to crank out Shakespeare."
“We're still looking for the ability to translate and transition those innovation priorities into capabilities, into programs of record, into budget priorities,” said Rachel Hoff, Reagan Institute’s policy director and one of the authors of a new scorecard evaluating progress in defense innovation.
"I can't really imagine a world where something like a Joint Strike Fighter program goes to a privately traded company," Luckey told Breaking Defense. "I can't imagine that ever happening."
Reducing cognitive overload on warfighters while improving “time to trust” for autonomous systems is a matter of design.
"The thing we haven't done... [is] scale... and do it quickly, and that's what we're focused on now," DIU chief Doug Beck said.
"If we are to meet the innovation goals of the NDS, we must incentivize the primes to move beyond the short-term partnership model and encourage them to form more holistic relationships with promising early-stage companies, including investment into operating businesses," writes Chip Walter.
"We're not fighting [in] Ukraine with Silicon Valley right now, even though they're going to try to take credit for it,” said Pentagon acquisition czar Bill LaPlante.
“My view isn't like, I'm going to magically unlock special secret approaches that haven't been touched before,” Deputy Defense Secretary Kath Hicks said Wednesday. “I think it's more about how you start to shift the incentives"
Zero Trust is the Pentagon’s foundation for its modern cybersecurity strategy.
Former Navy acquisition executive Hondo Geurts left government in August after Carlos Del Toro was confirmed as Navy secretary.
“DIU is punching above its weight and having an impact beyond its size,” acquisition guru Bill Greenwalt says. “Still, that will not be enough…. Unless the rest of the Department and Congress learns these lessons, we will continue to fall behind China.”
Victory lies not in the weapons themselves, Nand Mulchandani says, but in AI algorithms that advise commanders on how best to wield them.
Because open-source software lacks the same kind of cyber certification that comes with more sensitive information, it is fertile ground for start-ups looking to work on military data, provided each service makes an open-source library available.