The Department of Defense launched an experiment in 2015 aimed at making it easier for the government to benefit from commercial technology. It was called the ‘Defense Innovation Unit Experimental’ (DIUX) and three and half years later, it’s no longer an experiment.
Now known only as DIU, (minus the X) the west coast-based unit’s mission is to ‘accelerate commercial technology for national security’ by providing non-dilutive capital to companies that DIU believes may have the technology that can help solve big national security problems. Think AI, IT and Space, for starters. The companies they invest in are backed by well-known investors like Andreessen Horowitz, Founders Fund, In-Q-Tel and Sequoia Capital.
Michael Brown, formerly CEO of Symantec, has been leading the team of about 50 people since last Fall. Brown is a featured speaker at The Cipher Brief’s 2019 Threat Conference, which is focused on public-private partnerships.
We talked with him this week about why he decided to leave the private sector, to take on this new mission.
‘The National Security Threat of Our Generation’
Brown: I came to this work because I had spent the previous two years looking at the technology race with China. I saw that China is not only powerful, but it’s system of government also offers some advantages in terms of mobilizing government, academia, and business quickly, and with big investment. I think we need to be cognizant of that as we think about what our response should be to China, because it's a lot more than what their military is doing. They're really harnessing their entire economy. It poses a very big question. One that's so big, that I'm really calling it the national security threat of our generation. How do we make sure that we're investing in ourselves so that our innovation engine, our economy, is thriving. You've got the foundational technologies like AI, like autonomy, that are going to drive the next 10, 20, 30 years of startups.
A lot of people, when they think about China, focus on competition or the fact that they steal a lot of technology. They have the most well-organized industrial espionage machine on the planet, but we're not going to win the race by what we prevent them from doing. We're going to win the race because we leverage our own capabilities and we're willing to recognize that we are in a race and need to invest in ourselves.
The Cipher Brief: How does your private sector background influence the decisions you make in this role as Director of DIU and what were some of the issues you came into this job to address?
Brown: I wanted to make sure that the mission and objectives for the organization were clear and that's one of the first things that we went to work on. When I met Jim Mattis for the first time, he impressed upon me the need to make sure that DIU, as a small organization, was creating outside impact. It became clear to me that a big part of that was the impact of the projects we decided to invest in. We could do lots of small projects with smaller impact, or we could do a few projects that had very big impact.
We decided that we were going to be more successful overall if we focused our efforts on some of those projects that have larger impact. We’re focused on the projects that will be 'transformative'. Transformative means something that could bring benefit across the services, so not just Army, but Army, Navy, Air Force, where we'd either save lots of money or bring new capability to the department.
That's one of the biggest changes that we’ve made. The other was recognizing that we needed to add to our capacity to do more work and a big part of that was gaining our own contracting capability. So, the first week on the job, I asked my boss, Mike Griffin, the Under Secretary of Defense for Research and Engineering, and his counterpart, the Under Secretary of Defense for Acquisition and Sustainment, Ellen Lord, for contracting authority, and they gave it to me. So, now we have our own authority to pursue contracts up to 100 million dollars.
The Cipher Brief: What are going to do with that money?
Brown: We've set a goal for delivering 5 transformative projects.
Our highest priority right now is predictive maintenance. In other words, how do we use commercially available software that's already powering Delta and Southwest Airlines, and apply that to military aircraft. We've shown that when we do that, and that software uses AI machine learning, that we can reduce unscheduled maintenance by 28-30%. We've piloted that across one aircraft platform right now and we’re working with Army and Navy to bring that to other aircraft.
The second priority would be addressing cyber vulnerabilities. We’re working with a product that automatically detects and remediates cyber vulnerabilities in weapons systems. That’s critically important.
The Cipher Brief: When you came into this role, there had been some pretty public criticisms of DIUX - when it still had the x attached - that it wasn't agile enough. It wasn't the greatest partner. It sounds like you’ve had some success in changing the way DIU does business, but what are of some of the challenges you're still working to address?
Brown: We’re a small organization and I don't think we're that well known. We want to be very well known by entrepreneurial companies and investors where defense might be an interesting market. So that's one challenge. A second would be that we want to be able to move quickly. We know that to be successful we have to be moving at commercial speed. I think we're doing better there and that new contracting capability will be essential for us to be working at commercial speed. Our goal is to be able to have companies with commercial solutions on contract within 60 days.
The third challenge is that this department tends to move more slowly in the budgeting process. It’s well known that the budget has to go to the president and then through Congress. If you have a successful prototype, you don't want to build in that type of delay. You want to be able to move immediately from prototype to production.
The Cipher Brief: You came from a pretty long career at Symantec, spending some thirteen and a half years there. Have there been any eye openers for you or lessons that you brought from the private sector into your current role?
Brown: It's always eye opening to move from commercial to government. Things aren't moving at the same pace. I think one of the large issues that we have in DOD could be solved if we were able to speed things up. I was also very impressed by the dedication and professionalism of the military and the people supporting the military and it's an incredibly worthy cause. But of course, we have a system that doesn't really recognize that we're now in a technology race.
What I mean by that is that a lot of the systems we have, haven’t kept up. We have a budgeting system, for example, that was put in place a long time ago when the U.S. had global dominance, a strong military standpoint, and as the National Defense strategy recognizes, we're going to be challenged in the world in the years ahead, especially by adversaries like Russia and China. We are fighting a different that requires some different capabilities and changes in priorities in how we spend our money and especially in finding more use for commercial technology. The center of what's happening in the AI community is in our innovation hubs like Silicon Valley and Boston and elsewhere. It's not taught in the military, so we've got to access to that if we want competitive capability.
Our budget is going to continue to be under pressure, as it is this year. So, we have to use commercial technology where we can so that we are saving money that can be used to buy things that our military needs, like hypersonic weapons. Our budget will go further the more we're able to leverage commercial technology.
Read also Seeking the Security Flaws in Booming Technologies in The Cipher Brief
And engage with experts like DIU Director Michael Brown at The Cipher Brief's 2019 Threat Conference
