How can defense effectively innovate?
I wrote the majority of this article more than a year ago. At the time, I was fifteen years into my career as a civil servant, working for the Government in some capacity since I was sixteen. Even though I knew no other way of doing business, I struggled in the ecosystem. There is friction at the interface of industry and Government, and that is the very place I spent nearly all of my career. Most of that time I was fielding complaints from my partners in industry, usually by just turning around and complaining to my colleagues in Government. When I started writing this, I wanted to explore that shared frustration, and fittingly I became frustrated with writing about it. At various times this text has read as angry, smug, forlorn, hopelessly optimistic, or just hopeless. This article ultimately ended up on a shelf, never again to see the light of day.
Or so I thought. Since my first draft, I have departed for a career in industry. Evolving geopolitics – and a fresh perspective – have reminded me of the relevance of this topic. In the past few months, the White House has turned ‘disruption’ into a four letter word, but we cannot forget that for twenty years we in defense were begging for it. For years, people throughout our ecosystem called for defense to be more like Silicon Valley. Do we still want that? If not, what do we want?
This article is a reflection of that fundamental dichotomy in our industry: we fight to defend the world’s greatest democracy, and yet innovation, fundamentally, is autocracy.
Part I: Innovation is Dead
If ChatGPT were to write a speech for a defense and security conference, it would surely be titled “the need for change” and make a three-pointed argument about stovepipes, the unavailability of funding, and somewhere along the line the speaker would get a cheap laugh about that dreaded R word, “requirements”. This same speech has been given a thousand times in a hundred locations over the last year – tens of thousands in the past decade – by CEOs, CTOs, and enough starred officers to make a constellation.
We as defense professionals – industry and government alike – have dedicated our lives to one fundamental pursuit: we want the Warfighter to have the best technology available. Government has the need for solutions, and industry has the solutions. It’s an easy enough relationship, right? And if we’re all aligned on what change is required, surely we should be able to implement that within decades. Western industry is capable of world class technological marvels, and our governments are able to muster and project monumental power like no other time in history. We have technological tools at our disposal that are speeding innovation into the pockets and onto the wrists of the everyday consumer at lightning speed. This lightning-fast commercial development paced by glacial defense modernization begs the question: if the collective conscience of the defense industrial complex agrees on the problem, and even implied solutions, why is it that we aren’t getting better?
Let us speak plainly: Government is slow. By now that oft-spoken truism shouldn’t be controversial, though undeniably painful to hear. In large part, Government response to this external criticism and internal frustration has been to mimic success, which has become synonymous with Silicon Valley. President Obama’s Chief Technology Officer even said the US government needs to “think and move like a start up”. The drive is for Government to be less like Government, but what if I told you the government should be slow?
Democracy – derived from the Greek for power to the people – requires that the preponderance of the relevant population agree on a path forward before embarking upon it. This is a concept taught from birth and reinforced at every stage of development for anyone living in a western democracy: what should we play today? Let’s put it to a vote. What movie should we go see? Three out of five votes wins. Who should lead the country? Majority rules. We do this in all corners of society because it is natural to us, and seemingly the best idea – but democracy is more than a good idea to the defense industry; it is the sacred cornerstone of our society. We are “defense”, and democracy is what we defend. It is an imperative that we are democratic. We spend money allocated to us by the People’s representatives. It is our job to spend it wisely as guardians of their trust. If we fail to do this, our society loses trust in us. That would be catastrophic.
Thus rises a fundamental paradox: how is it possible for everyone to agree on making something that hasn’t existed yet?
According to Steve Jobs:
“Some people say give the customers what they want, but that's not my approach. Our job is to figure out what they're going to want before they do. (…) People don't know what they want until you show it to them.”
What Steve Jobs described is not a democracy, nor is the narrative of innovation. Innovation is an exceptional individual ignoring the critics and following their heart to a future they know is best, even if no one else does. Innovators are bold. They don’t take “no” for an answer, they’re disruptive – if you said the same of a political leader, they’d be a despot (that sentence was unironically written in the spring of 2024). Innovators are heralded as disruptors and risk-takers, but to be those things one must be willing to ignore the cautions of others. Risk-takers ignore their parents who say to take the easy path, they ignore their friends who tell them to go out and have a good time instead of work. Every founder knows this well. You weren’t raised to liquidate your retirement and take out a second mortgage to fund your “idea”, that’s crazy. If a founder put founding to a vote, you wouldn’t found. To found you must follow your own compass, and ignore the naysayers, even if – especially if – they are legion. This is not to say that innovation must be authoritarian or non-egalitarian, but it’s certainly individualistic.
A democratic government, on the other hand, has rules and regulations which make them accountable. Accountability is slow. Without that accountability, Government becomes rouge actors raiding the treasury filled with tax dollars. The old saying goes: “if you want to go fast, go alone; if you want to go far, go together.” Democracy, by definition, is us going together. We leave no one behind, we listen to everyone, and we don’t go fast, or agile, or lean. Everyone on this wagon train needs to make it to Silverado. This is the way of the pioneers. If you’re slower, we slow down; if you can’t walk, we carry you; if you’re tired, we guard you while you sleep. If we did it any other way, we wouldn’t be who we are.
But any wagon train needs its scouts, every army has its rangers. The key isn’t for industry to make do with Government constraints; industry needs to do what Government can’t.
Part II: Waiting for GPS
In 1957, the Department of Defense had a problem: the nuclear arms race was on, and we had a technological edge over the enemy: we could launch nuclear missiles from submarines. State of the art was hard missile launch sites, which one had to presume the enemy had carefully targeted. If we could strike from a sub, the enemy would have no idea where we were. The only problem was that we didn’t have a way of determining where the submarine was, without which it could not hope to fire accurately. To solve the problem, Government scientists and engineers conceived a network of satellites that could geo-locate anything on the face of the planet, anytime, anywhere. It took more than two decades to fully launch the infrastructure for Global Positioning System (GPS), which went live in 1978 – twenty-one years after the original need, and fifty years after the original concept – but no one cared: we had our nuclear submarine arsenal complete, and the enemy knew it. We had the edge.
Perhaps this technology would have remained a niche, secretive asset for our global deterrent, if not for a tragic aviation disaster in 1983. Realizing the need for accurate geolocation, GPS was made available to the civilian market to make airline travel safer. Now in the hands of the industrial base, over the next thirty years, this seemingly obscure technology evolved and expanded rapidly. The first handheld GPS system, weighing 1.5 lbs with a battery life of 3 hours, was released in 1989. 1999 marked the first cell phone with a GPS chip. GPS entered cars via mobile route planners like Tom Tom in 2001. With the release of Google Maps to Android in 2008, millions of civilians suddenly had access to a high-fidelity satellite map of the world that could fit in their pocket and could tell their location anywhere on the planet at any time.
Of course, the military development of GPS systems continued, as well. Miniaturization of receiver technology resulted in “blue force tracking” released in the 1990s, however it was plagued by communication delays and difficulty and expense proliferating the hardware to all Soldiers. After Desert Storm, GPS was used to develop JDAMs, converting conventional “dumb” bombs to all weather “smart bombs”. However, the interfaces for both technologies were notoriously clunky, sometimes resulting in tragic errors. The military had GPS, but a TomTom it was not.
Then something extraordinary happened. As the civilian market progressed, our most elite special operators turned to civilian capabilities to augment their arsenal of GPS equipment. Convenient, handheld, easy user interface – why wouldn’t they? Operators started showing up all over the world with GPS designed for hikers, and called in bombs with them. As this technology proliferated through the ranks, a team of Government scientists developed something called ATAK. To the casual observer, ATAK is Google Maps for defense. Containing an incredible amount of wizardry that enables communication in austere environments, it essentially mimics what the civilian market had already developed, albeit hardened for a tactical environment. The student had become the master; the beneficiary of niche DOD investment had led the way for the future. All DOD had to do was follow what was already working for millions of end users.
It took DOD twenty years to build the satellite network necessary to enable GPS. For thirty more years, DOD developed disliked and even dangerous systems that, while game changing, were far from user friendly. A cynic might say that this is an example of failure, however without DOD putting the satellites in orbit in the first place, none of this could have been possible. Ultimately, the military adopted what was working, what a newly recruited Soldier was already used to. The Government gave the world GPS, the world gave the military a new paradigm.
What can we learn from this? We learn what Government can do – which is massive infrastructure investment to execute a phase shift in possibilities. And what can industry do? Iterate rapidly to mature a 1.5 lb. clunky system into a handheld, ubiquitous piece of technology in less than twenty years. Notably, this isn’t a many to one model, but instead a many to many model. Industry worked with other industry, other sectors, other governments even, to mature the capability to a point in which we could all use it.
Part III: Long Live Innovation
This article pits two parts of myself against one another: on the one side the civil servant defending the status quo, on the other an eager technologist who has been frustrated by the ecosystem for many years. To say that the defense ecosystem should remain unchanged is patently false, but what should change?
“Mate, you’re trying to write about the core issue facing defense.” Stu Taylor is founder and CEO of StuCan Solutions. Like me, Stu was once on the other side, and few have or do work with a bigger cross section of the international industry. “Governments turn slowly, like a tanker,” says Stu. “Innovation is driven by small businesses.”
My conversation with Stu started with the basics: at the intersection of industry and government, what works, and what doesn’t? “Technology is moving at the speed of light,” said Stu, “and the processes are slower than the speed of tech. By the time you reach (full operational capability), it could be so out of date it’s pointless fielding it.”
I sympathize, even if I bristle a little bit. When I was on the other side of this equation, six months was lightning fast to award innovation funding to a start-up no one had ever heard of. I argued to Stu for accountability in defense of my former self. Those six months were not wasted; I had to ensure I wasn’t inadvertently funding adversaries; check and balances exist to ensure companies receiving public monies behaves legally, morally, and ethically; Government assets – public assets – must not be put at undue risk, physically or legally. These things take time, and the Government executes tens of thousands of contract actions a year (if not a month);
“surely you don’t want, oh, say a tech billionaire to come into the White House with a chainsaw?” (that sentence was written ironically in the present day). “No!” Stu laughed. “You can’t bring Silicon Valley into Government. It’s fundamentally different: Silicon Valley’s job is to make money, Governments job is to spend it.”
Thus lies the core thesis of this article: the free world doesn’t need our Governments to innovate, we need our Governments to fuel innovation. “Thousands of (small and medium enterprises) die every day because no one has ever heard of them,” said Stu. When you’re small, you need money coming in, and delays of ‘just months’ are often sink or swim. Worst of all, it’s avoidable. “You can get disqualified from a Government contract because [the response] is in the wrong font.”
This I have seen firsthand, and God forgive me I have perpetrated. “Flat” PDFs that must be printed and hand-filled, documents requiring wet signatures, portals that clear all your data if you get a call and step away in the middle of filling out the 92 mandatory fields – this is the reality of working with the Government. If you think it’s hyperbole, try submitting a proposal next round.
Don’t just take Stu and my word for it. Justin Megawarne, founder and owner of Megaslice, is a true technical renaissance man. To visit his office in Slough is like walking into Doc Brown’s garage. A paintball splattered mannequin looms over a bench lovingly laid with microprocessors. “We must replace form-filling and process with skillful innovation conversations”. Justin is brilliant at breaking down problems to their fundamental blocks. When he and I spoke, I was surprised that his answers immediately went to process. He works with tech startups who don’t have decades of experience working with government. We herald ‘non-traditionals’, but have we paused to ask what a company that’s never been awarded a defense contract thinks when they knock on the front door?
Did you know that there’s a trash can every 30 feet in Disney World? Walt Disney himself put them there. When the park first opened, Disney walked into the park alongside his guests, bought a hot dog, and counted his steps until he’d eaten it and wanted to throw away the wrapper. That was 30 feet, so today in every Disney park around the world, there is a trash can every 30 feet (incidentally, this has also become a de facto industry standard implemented seemingly everywhere but the London Underground).
Defense doesn’t need more technological innovation – government and industry are peerless at creating new tech. Where we need innovation is process. If you want to change defense acquisition, start small: eliminate redundancies, and modernize what exists. Can you change Congress’s budget? No. Can you work with IT to make the PDF fillable? Probably. Can you make the proposal deadline before the holidays instead of after? Absolutely. Buy a hot dog and start walking – put trashcans where you end up.
Similarly, if you are in industry: understand you are interfacing with an organization bigger than yourself, and indeed bigger than the individual civil servant you interface with. “I tell companies they’re on a 5-year cycle,” says Stu. “It takes 5 years, and multiple turns of the crank in that time, to make something meaningful happen in defense.” Whilst this may seem bleak, impossible even, to be forewarned is forearmed. Justin says you must understand the structure, and work expertly within it. “[Establish] low risk, cash milestones so SMEs can recover costs of time”. A timely milestone payment, whilst seemingly banal, may be the very few months of runway which mean the difference. How many companies have found out the intricacies of government contracting too late?
I do not suggest that rearranging the trash cans or restructuring your milestone payment schedule is the difference between a one-person startup in a garage and a billion-dollar company delivering thousands of units to the front line, however I do believe that marginal improvements in these areas could save a nonnegligible number of companies. Furthermore, it’s easier than it sounds. Updating the PDFs in your proposal process may only take a few hours, retooling the portal may be done in a few months. Those kinds of improvements may save companies for less than it costs to stand up a brand new “innovation office”. Sadly, this kind of innovation isn’t sexy; but if I learned one thing working with special operations, it’s that not everyone can be sexy.
Conclusions
I wrote this article hoping to provide a unique perspective. Parts I – III were written by a career civil servant who’d never worked a day in industry; parts IV and V were written by someone in a small defense company. To paraphrase Mr. Churchill, this is not the beginning of this conversation, and it is certainly not the end. Unlike the struggle Mr. Churchill spoke of, ours is an endeavor which shall never end. Government is fundamentally different than industry, this is known and it is true. We can innovate in the space between ourselves, and indeed we must, but what we cannot do is homogenize. The defense ecosystem of industry and Government must exist in tension, yin and yang; the whole of us is greater than the sum of the parts. The friction you feel is in fact there. And I argue, should be. Must be, for at the intersection of pluralism and individualism lies innovation.
Innovation is dead; long live innovation.
