Silicon Valley is a popular destination for the feds lately. President Obama’s intelligence team trekked there last month to ask for help defeating Islamic State’s propaganda on social media. Less noticed has been the steady parade of Pentagon leaders heading west. Last summer the Pentagon leased 12,000-square feet of Class A real estate in Sunnyvale for a new office: the Defense Innovation Unit-Experimental. Why? Commanders are worried about the accelerating erosion of the American military’s technological superiority. They believe Silicon Valley’s talent and tech can restore agility and innovation.
Col. Gregory Jones, commander, 129th Rescue Wing, says farewell to Secretary of Defense Ash Carter as Carter departs Moffett Field, Calif., Aug. 29, 2015, following a trip to California. Department of Defense | Flickr
But Defense Secretary Ash Carter faces two challenges. The first is getting Americans and their elected representatives to recognize the technological stagnation.
Today almost none of the new military equipment coming online is revolutionary in design or technology; most is merely an upgraded version of something from the Cold War. A half-century ago, the Pentagon had more than a dozen combat aircraft in development. Last year it had only the late and overbudget F-35 and a new bomber. The American public believes its military is No. 1, but its commanders and its enemies increasingly know differently.
The Pentagon has fallen behind the pace of commercial innovation. During the Cold War, the defense industry created GPS and pioneered computer networking. Today defense companies scramble to learn from businesses that have developed self-driving cars, 3-D printers, biometric scanners and microsatellites. Advances in computer processing and cloud management have been largely driven by commercial firms and university partnerships.
The Air Force uses Xbox controllers to fly drones and Android tablets to call in airstrikes. Marines maneuvering behind enemy lines use a water-purification tool developed for extreme-sports enthusiasts. The CIA contracted out its cloud-based storage to Amazon, and the Pentagon is trying to do the same.
America’s challengers abroad, meanwhile, are catching up and surpassing us. China’s air-to-air missiles outrange those of the U.S. Air Force, and Beijing continues to invest in developing hypersonic missiles, which travel so fast that defending against them would be almost impossible. Russia has taken the lead in electronic warfare, even as the U.S. continues to rely on Russian rocket engines to launch satellites and the Soyuz capsule to transport American astronauts to the international space station. In August the former commander of the Army’s electronic-warfare division said this of the Russians: “We can’t shut them down one-tenth to the degree they can us. We are very unprotected from their attacks on our network.”
Declining technological superiority is felt even more as the U.S. military continues to shrink and is now 36% smaller than at the end of the Cold War. Falling margins of pre-eminence sow doubt in the ranks; the U.S. military isn’t accustomed to fighting fair. Combat without a technological advantage will mean mission failures, higher casualty rates and longer wars.
Losing is no longer unthinkable. Beginning in 2014, former Pentagon force planner David Ochmanek ran war games examining whether the U.S. and NATO could defend the Baltics against an attempted Russian takeover. He ran 16 war games with eight different teams of military personnel; the U.S. lost every time. The exercise disproved the assumption that America’s supposed technological edge would make up for U.S. forces’ being outnumbered in Europe.
Although these facts weigh on military leaders, they are received coolly by Congress. Many lawmakers deny that a problem exists, or think that these claims are made up to justify a bigger military budget.
Secretary Carter’s second challenge is to repair the cultural and regulatory divides between the Pentagon and tech companies. The truth is that the military cannot easily tap into private-industry innovation. Washington’s debates over forcing tech companies to open back doors into encrypted communications systems, along with the leaks about NSA surveillance by Edward Snowden, have fomented enormous distrust. Skilled entrepreneurs and engineers are not interested in working for the government. Worse, structural problems in the Pentagon’s acquisition system deter nontraditional contractors from doing business with the military.
Mr. Carter should set realistic expectations for tech-industry partnerships. The Pentagon should work to identify useful commercial technologies while sending defense professionals to learn how new business processes might rekindle innovation within the Defense Department. It should promote Silicon Valley involvement in military acquisition, an effort that could be profitably linked to Sen. John McCain’s push to reform the acquisition process. The secretary might also weave this effort into his “Force of the Future” initiative, intended to build a flexible, modern personnel-management system.
The Pentagon’s leaders are focused on building relationships with companies in Silicon Valley because they know the U.S. military cannot regain its technological superiority without them. Mr. Carter’s outreach is a start. But it will take a tolerance for risk-taking and years of commitment into the next administration for our combat forces to regain their fighting edge.
Ms. Eaglen is a resident fellow in the Marilyn Ware Center for Security Studies at the American Enterprise Institute.
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