Quantum computing, too, is often highlighted for its possibilities in both offensive and defensive technology, especially in cryptography. In the defense arena, quantum computing has drawn Intense interest due to concerns that adversaries are carrying out “store now, decrypt later" (SNDL) attacks against the U.S., which involve stealing sensitive data and then decrypting them when quantum computers reach maturity.
BACKGROUND
- The 2022 National Defense Strategy, which the DoD released in October, commits to promoting deep tech R&D, including in directed energy, hypersonics, integrated sensing, and cyber, and seeding opportunities in biotechnology, quantum science, and advanced materials.
- Dual-use deep technology underscores one of the chief attractions of this sector — products and services that can be adapted from the commercial market that also find vital uses in defense. From DoD’s perspective, deep tech attracts new players into national security operations while leveraging the usually more intense and rapid development cycle of the commercial side.
THE EXPERTS
The Cipher Brief asked a range of experts with government and private sector experience for their insights into today's deep tech to include what the future likely holds for commercial and defense/intelligence applications.
Mark Munsell, Deputy Director of the Data and Digital Innovation Directorate at the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA).
Mark Munsell is the Deputy Director of the Data and Digital Innovation Directorate at NGA. Formerly, he was the Chief Technology Officer for the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency and the Deputy Director of the Chief Information Officer — IT Services Directorate. Mark began his career in 1990, with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, where he was awarded the Department of Commerce Bronze Medal for software engineering work that transformed the nation’s nautical charting production system.
Tom Lash, director of Federal Delivery and National Security, Amazon Web Services (AWS)
Tom Lash is director of Federal Delivery and National Security, Amazon Web Services (AWS). His teams support all 18 United States Intelligence Community (IC) agencies to use the latest cloud technology to drive innovation, increase capability, achieve their missions, and create a safer world. Mr. Lash has been supporting the Federal market for 25 years, specializing in innovative Intelligence Systems. He joined Amazon Web Services (AWS) in 2017. Prior to AWS, he was a Senior Vice President at SAIC and later Leidos, a Fortune 500 large systems integrator.
Brett Davis, a Partner in New North Ventures — a Venture Capital firm focused on technological innovation.
Partner, New North Ventures
Brett Davis is a Partner at New North Ventures — a venture capital firm focused on technological innovation. Davis retired as a Senior Executive in the Central Intelligence Agency and serves as a Special Operations Officer in the US Navy. His combined 34 years of government experience include leading complex operations and enterprise-wide programs across the Central Intelligence Agency, National Reconnaissance Office, US Military and other government agencies.
The Cipher Brief: What deep tech areas do you believe hold the greatest promise and payoff for the defense and intelligence communities, and why?
Munsell: It’s both depth and breadth. On breadth, there are still basics that we need to be better at. Building and buying software, delivering better software faster — reusing software and data pipelines instead of building them all over again. Product management should be valued more than program management, too. I mean that product management key focus areas are customer satisfaction (mission accomplishment) as opposed to program execution. While program execution is important, the key measurement should be how functional and useful your software application is to achieve mission. Most program managers don't even have that metric in their reviews.
As far as deep tech areas — our agency in particular knows that with increased intelligence issues, increased sensors, the deluge of incoming data is unmanageable. In our case, a picture is worth a thousand words, but more likely, a thousand GeoJSON files (detection data). How do we increase the accuracy and value of those detections to be just as reliable as a human? Future AI holds promise to handle the volume, but we’ll have to work very hard to integrate with existing human cognition and expertise to increase the quality.
We also look at the promise of using Machine Learning, sifting through vast amounts of big spatial data. We have to make sense of billions of things moving in space and time — modeling our world — and the next generation of ML in Geographic Information Systems is something we’re banking on.
Lash: Quantum computing and networking are two emerging technologies that will have a huge impact across industries and national security. We believe that quantum computing has immense potential and it is an important area of investment. Quantum computers promise to speed up computational tasks that are beyond the reach of conventional computers. They have the potential to transform areas such as energy storage, chemical engineering, material science, drug discovery, process optimization, and machine learning. Building these machines is a grand challenge and designing their algorithms requires a new way of thinking.
Davis: There are several areas where I see rich opportunity for deep tech, particularly in AI and ML-enabled deep data analytics and AI-ML-enabled robotics. They are huge now and they are going to continue to become more and more critical as we go ahead. On the robotics side, I think we've all seen what's happening in Ukraine with drones and how effectively the Ukrainians have been using them, and then the Russians as well bringing them in. They've been using them to direct artillery support, but there is so much more potential. For example, a big concern would include being able to swarm drones on an aircraft carrier to overwhelm defensive systems, or to overwhelm a battle group or a team in the field. Robotics and autonomous systems, including subsea autonomous systems, are going to become more and more critical going forward in connection with great power competition, especially with China.
The Cipher Brief: What are the greatest obstacles and challenges of deep tech development, and the adoption of emerging technologies?
Lash: A lot of the biggest challenges for large organizations to adopt emerging technologies aren't technical, they’re about people and culture. We’ve seen this with organizations as they look to adopt the cloud. The biggest differences between organizations that talk about moving to the cloud, and those that actually do it and are having the most success, often comes down to a few key things:
First, the senior leadership team needs to be aligned and truly committed to adopting the cloud. They need to be setting clear direction and expectations with the rest of the organization to get everyone on the same page and working towards the same thing. It’s easy for others to do nothing or block things if the leadership team isn’t making the move a priority and building a culture for change.
Then, the most successful organizations start with an aggressive top-down goal that forces the organization to move faster than it would have organically.
Third, it’s really important that organizations are trained on the technologies and comfortable with the concepts as part of the whole process.
And last, there is no need to boil the ocean. With cloud adoption, sometimes we find that organizations can get paralyzed if they can't figure out how to move every last workload. So we often work with organizations to do a portfolio analysis to assess each application and build a plan for what to move short term, medium term, and last. This helps organizations get the benefits of the cloud for many of their applications much more quickly, and it really helps inform how they move the rest.
We’ve found these steps really help organizations with their cloud adoption, but they have applicability to adopting emerging technologies as well.
Davis: Attracting talent, what I call the “Wernher von Braun types,” to deep tech enterprises is key, and includes immigrants and refugees from other countries. U.S. government policies and programs to bring in this sort of talent can be very cumbersome. In the last several years, it has become more difficult, but when you're talking about deep tech, there's a process. The government has to be smart in the approach it takes to immigration. Obviously, there are people we don't want in, so better vetting needs to be done. But at the same time, we need to do a better job of being able to get into the country the top tier talent who are going to help launch companies that are working in the national interest.
Munsell: The U.S. has the best tech companies in the world. Bringing those companies in, and exposing them to national security problems is still very difficult. Our best self as a country would be to combine the expertise of our Defense Industrial Base companies with the modern software engineering and culture of U.S. high tech companies. Maybe we should be matchmakers?
The Cipher Brief: What testbeds and innovative approaches to R&D could be employed to advance deep tech applications for U.S. national security?
Munsell: The best incentives for researchers, inventors, builders and makers, is to build something new, useful, and important. While you might think that revenue and profit drive industry, it’s the engineers and developers that drive product — they want to be smart, useful and valued. Companies with that culture build significant product, which in turn, usually brings in revenue. The government has to tap into that software engineering culture, because those folks would love to work on some of the very important problems that our community faces.
Davis: If you look at the space industry right now, the creation of multi-disciplinary teams is happening at scale. SpaceX, Blue Origin, Rocket Labs, HawkEye360 and other companies are where these types of teams are operating. You have private financiers, you have extraordinary entrepreneurs and innovators coming in. You've got great engineering talent. You have the best of government policies and procedures coming together. Over the last several years, the Air Force with AFWERX (a Technology Directorate of the Air Force Research Laboratory) has done an incredible job at looking at how to fast track small companies and pull them into the DoD ecosystem.
In-Q-Tel, under the leadership of Gilman Louie, who is now leading the America's Frontier Fund, is another tremendous example of doing exactly that. The nonprofit American Freedom Fund is looking at raising $2 billion of assets under management to be able to invest in deep tech for the U.S. That effort envisions pulling together all the people we just talked about in different centers of excellence across the country and the manufacturing belt so that the country as a whole is resilient and we're able to lift up the productivity and wealth of people across the country. The concept sees companies being able to really thrive in Ohio, upstate New York, or wherever else where there's a history of having worked in the industrial age centers of excellence for builders that are there.
I think we're turning the corner on this and it's happening. We also see venture capital firms such as New North Ventures, and there's others that are out there also, and there's more coming that are focused on working in the national interest that see that it's not only good to work for national security, but also there's a lot of wealth that can be generated at the same time — the growth of wealth and economic security equals national security.
Lash: I’d like to go back to quantum on this one. Governments around the world are seeding multi-billion-dollar investment vehicles and setting policy agendas designed to accelerate the pace of quantum innovation, such as the AUKUS agreement, the National Quantum Computing Center (NQCC) in the UK, and the May 2022 Biden-Harris Presidential Directives on Quantum. We also know that in quantum networking, for example, the U.S. has started a quantum network test bed with the U.S. Army Combat Capabilities Development Command Army Research Laboratory, Naval Research Laboratory, Naval Observatory, NIST, the National Security Agency, and NASA.
These public sector-led initiatives are helping to incentivize and advance quantum exploration, and their potential outputs could help support national security imperatives. The private sector is similarly investing in the technologies’ advancement and creating opportunities for experimentation. For example, to help our customers understand if and when they should focus on quantum computing, we launched Amazon Braket. Braket enables customers to experiment with different types of quantum hardware. For the first time, Braket made it possible to compare different quantum technologies side by side, and to switch between them by changing only a line of code. It’s not just about access. It’s about envisaging how quantum computing will one day fit into a cloud-based IT infrastructure, working together with other AWS services.
Longer term, to help realize the future potential of quantum computing, we established the AWS Center for Quantum Computing at Caltech, a pioneer in the fields of quantum computation and quantum information. Today’s quantum computers are very sensitive to interference and are error-prone. Researchers at the Center are working to address quantum error rates with the ultimate goal of building our own quantum computer. We want our quantum hardware to be available in the cloud, eventually.
Cipher Brief Senior Editor Ken Hughes contributed to this report.
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