Defense Board Calls for Incentives to Faster Tech Adoption, Innovation

Members of the Defense Innovation Board unanimously voted in favor of recommendations aimed at driving innovation through personnel and collaboration during the group’s July 17 public meeting.

The first group of suggestions came from a study on aligning incentives to drive faster tech adoption. According to member Adm. Mike Mullen, also former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the Defense Department needs to embrace risk to move forward at the right pace.

“The [Defense Department] is very risk averse, and the requirement is to move very rapidly, which is going to require a significant increase in the appetite for risk,” Mullen said.

One way DOD can excel is by managing talent differently, said Mullen. He highlighted that the department sometimes rewards mediocrity and that it needs to focus its attention on those most passionate about making a difference.

“Innovators often can’t get promoted, can’t get the good jobs, and in that frustration, they oftentimes leave,” Mullen said. “Leaders have to provide top cover for innovators. We do that as mentors and leaders notionally. But for the ‘mavericks’ that are amongst us, those that can really bring innovation, we’ve got to find a place for them, promote them and make sure they have a future to eventually get into positions of leadership themselves.”

Changing a Risk-Averse Culture

Air Force National Laboratory CIO Alexis Bonnell testified before the board about the study, saying that DOD does not always value risk and time properly. She said that naysayers often dominate the conversations in DOD culture.

“When we have a low relationship with risk, we make people do more things to ensure less risk. … Quite frankly, it disincentivizes the spirit to actually go on that journey and be in a discovery or curiosity state,” Bonnell said.

“I truly believe that time is a weapons platform. It’s our most important weapons platform,” she added. “If we don’t treat a minute as important as a missile, then we waste them and we invest them in the wrong places.”

Maj. Michael Kanaan, the military deputy CIO of the Pentagon’s Chief Digital and Artificial Intelligence Office (CDAO), said the culture of the department can impede innovation and personnel seeking new solutions to old problems.

“The question is not whether we are risk-averse,” Kanaan said. “But rather is that a euphemism for risk blind?”

Using AI in the Right Places

During his testimony, Kanaan outlined better ways to use artificial intelligence to assist department operations. Kanaan noted that “a prevailing human bias for action and novelty” is usually spurred on “by the overestimation of AI capabilities” at the department. He suggested that AI could better be used for administrative functions sooner than warfighting ones.

“The most profound AI impacts will inevitably be — whether professionals from all walks of business learn it sooner or later — in the back-office functions, at least in the short term. But it’s an area overlooked for its lack of glamour compared to warfighting applications,” Kanaan said.

Bonnell said some DOD workers need to have their hands on AI before they can find it useful to their jobs. Experiential work can help only when “they start to change how they feel or how they think” by using emerging technology.

“When we think about something like artificial intelligence, one of the things I focus on is having people have their relational progress, meaning their ‘ta-da’ moment working through the ‘uh ohs’ that they’re concerned about,” Bonnell said. “[Then they have an] ‘aha!’ moment where they realize that it’s relevant to them.”

Leveraging Partnerships

The board also discussed recommendations from a second study focusing on optimizing innovation between the U.S. and international partners.

“The No. 1 issue we found is that there’s no pathway for working with the DOD,” said board member Charles Phillips, the co-founder and managing partner of technology investment firm Recognize. “If you’re coming from another country, no one knows how it works; it’s been fragmented.”

According to Phillips, working with partners can allow DOD to change its rate and scale of investment, allowing for shared equipment and data.

“We need more private companies and vendors to view this market as something worth investing in building capacity,” he said. “The adjustable market gets changed if you have common equipment.”

The study also calls for reconnecting the offices of the Under Secretary of Defense for Acquisition & Sustainment and Research & Engineering.

“We need integrated designs,” said Phillips. “We need integrated manufacturing capacity around the world. It’s hard to do that in separate organizations.”