Date: Feb 26, 2014 Author: JOHN MARKOFFFEB Source: New York Times (
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SAN FRANCISCO — A small group of high-ranking Pentagon officials made a quiet visit to Silicon Valley in December to solicit national security ideas from start-up firms with little or no history of working with the military.
The visit was made as part of an effort to find new ways to maintain a military advantage in an increasingly uncertain world.
In announcing its Defense Innovation Initiative in a speech in California in November, Chuck Hagel, then the defense secretary, mentioned examples of technologies like robotics, unmanned systems, miniaturization and 3-D printing as places to look for "game changing" technologies that would maintain military superiority.
"They've realized that the old model wasn't working anymore," said James Lewis, director of the Strategic Technologies Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington. "They're really worried about America's capacity to innovate."
There is a precedent for the initiative. Startled by the Soviet launch of the Sputnik satellite in 1957, President Dwight D. Eisenhower created the Advanced Research Projects Agency, or ARPA, at the Pentagon to ensure that the United States would not be blindsided by technological advances.
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Chuck Hagel, as secretary of defense, announced an innovation initiative in November. Credit Francois Lenoir/Reuters
Now, the Pentagon has decided that the nation needs more than ARPA, renamed the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or Darpa, if it is to find new technologies to maintain American military superiority.
The Pentagon issued a formal request for new ideas in December. Soon after, out of concern that the call for fresh thinking would not reach past the usual Washington contractors, Stephen Welby, the deputy assistant secretary of defense for systems engineering, visited a dozen Silicon Valley start-ups that are pursuing new technologies that the Pentagon believes might have a national security role beyond the next dozen or so years.
The Pentagon was less interested in hearing near-term ideas because of the difficulty of integrating them into the nation's existing arsenal, Mr. Welby said.
The region has a long history of military work. During the 1960s and '70s, Silicon Valley was dominated by aerospace and military contractors such as Lockheed Missiles and Space Company and FMC Corporation. It was also the center of the nation's electronic warfare industry.
That changed with the explosive growth of the commercial semiconductor industry.
The Pentagon focused on smaller companies during its December visit; it did not, for example, visit Google. Mr. Welby acknowledged that Silicon Valley start-ups were not likely to be focused on the Pentagon as a customer. The military has captive suppliers and a long and complex sales cycle, and it is perceived as being a small market compared with the hundreds of millions of customers for consumer electronics products.
Mr. Welby has worked for three different Darpa directors, but he said that Pentagon officials now believed they had to look beyond their own advanced technology offices.
"The Darpa culture is about trying to understand high-risk technology," he said. "It's about big leaps." Today, however, the Pentagon needs to break out of what can be seen as a "not invented here" culture, he said.
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"We're thinking about what the world is going to look like in 2030 and what tools the department will need in 20 or 30 years," he added.
One of the companies Mr. Welby's group visited was Liquid Robotics, a Sunnyvale, Calif., maker of a novel automated oceangoing surveillance robot that draws its propulsion from the action of waves.
Roger Hine, Liquid Robotics' chief technology officer, said the company had been eager to meet with Pentagon officials. But he was still cautious about the challenges that companies funded by venture capital would face in committing to do research for the military.
"We're not going to rent out James Gosling to the government," Mr. Hine said, referring to the prominent Silicon Valley technologist who is one of the principal designers at Liquid Robotics.
One challenge for small technology companies, Mr. Hine added, is that working for the government would require them to make large bets on uncertain future markets.
In an unusual request for outside ideas, the Pentagon also opened for public comment a long-range research and development plan in December. The comment period was supposed to end in mid-January, but Mr. Welby said he was holding it open for additional input. The Pentagon group preparing the initiative will report its results to Defense Secretary Ashton B. Carter later this year.
A version of this article appears in print on February 27, 2015, on page A3 of the New York edition with the headline: Pentagon Shops in Silicon Valley for Game Changers. Order Reprints| Today's Paper|Subscribe
