Steve Clean Right here’s What Occurred When Deputy Secretary of Protection Dr. Kathleen Hicks visited Stanford’s Gordian Knot Middle for Nationwide Safety Innovation

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It was an honor to host US Deputy Secretary of Protection Dr. Kathleen Hicks at Stanford’s Gordian Knot Middle for Nationwide Safety Innovation. (Consider the Deputy Secretary of Protection because the Chief Working Officer of an organization – however on this case the corporate has 3 million workers (~1.4 million energetic responsibility, 750,000 civilians, ~800,000 within the Nationwide Guard and Reserves.)

She got here to the Gordian Knot Middle to debate our distinctive method to nationwide safety and innovation, and the way our curriculum trains the following era of innovators. The Deputy additionally heard from us how the Division can higher companion with and leverage the U.S. innovation ecosystem to unravel nationwide safety challenges.

Our aim for the Secretary’s go to was to offer her a snapshot of how we’re supporting the Division of Protection precedence of constructing an innovation workforce. We emphasised the crucial distinction between a technical STEM-trained workforce (which we’d like) and an innovation workforce which we lack at scale.

Innovation incorporates lean methodologies (buyer discovery, downside understanding, MVPs, Pivots), coupled with pace and urgency, and a tradition the place failure equals fast studying. All of those are completed with minimal assets to deploy at scale merchandise/companies which can be wanted and wished. We identified that Silicon Valley and Stanford have executed this for 50 years. And China is outpacing us by adopting the very innovation strategies we invented, integrating business know-how with educational analysis, and delivering it to the Peoples Liberation Military.

Therein lies the main target of our Gordian Knot Middle —join STEM with coverage training and leverage the synergies between the 2 to develop revolutionary leaders who perceive know-how and coverage and may resolve issues and ship options at pace and scale.

What We Introduced
A key part of the Gordian Knot Middle’s mission is to organize and encourage future leaders to contribute meaningfully as a part of the innovation work pressure. We mix the distinctive strengths of Stanford and its location in Silicon Valley to unravel issues throughout the spectrum of actions that create and maintain nationwide energy. The vary of assets and capabilities we deliver to the struggle from the middle’s distinctive place embrace:

The insights and experience of Stanford worldwide and nationwide safety coverage leaders
The know-how insights and experience of Stanford Engineering
Distinctive college students prepared to assist the nation win the Nice Energy Competitors
Silicon Valley’s deep business know-how ecosystem
Our expertise in fast downside understanding, fast iteration and deployment of options with pace and urgency
Entry to danger capital at scale

Within the six months since we based the Gordian Knot Middle we now have centered on six initiatives we wished to share with Secretary Hicks. Quite than Joe Felter and I doing the entire speaking, 25 of our college students, students, mentors and alumni joined us to offer the Secretary a 3-5 minute summary of their work, spanning throughout all six of the Gordian Knot initiatives. Highlights of those shows embrace:

Hacking for Protection Groups – Vannevar Labs, FLIP, Disinformatix
CONOPS Improvement
Nationwide Safety Schooling – Know-how, Innovation and Nice Energy Competitors
Protection Innovation Students Program – 25 college students now, 50 by the top of the 12 months
Coverage Affect and Outreach –ONR Hedge Technique, NSC Quad Rising Know-how Observe 1.5 Convention
Internships and Skilled Workforce Improvement – Innovation Workforce Vignettes

When you can’t see the slides click on right here

All through the over 90 minutes session, Dr. Hicks posed insightful questions for the scholars and informed our gathering that considered one of her key priorities is to speed up innovation adoption throughout DoD, together with organizational construction, processes, tradition, and folks.

It was encouraging to listen to the phrases.

Nevertheless, from the place we sit..

Our nationwide safety is now inexorably intertwined with business know-how and is hindered by our lack of an built-in technique on the highest stage.
Our adversaries have exploited the boundaries and borders between our protection and business and financial pursuits.
Our present approaches – each prior to now and present administration – to innovation throughout the federal government are piecemeal, incremental, more and more much less related and inadequate.

Listening to the secretary’s conversations, I used to be additional reminded of how a lot of a radical reinvention of our civil/army innovation relationship is critical if we need to preserve abreast of our adversaries. This may use DoD funding, non-public capital, dual-use startups, present prime contractors and federal labs in a brand new configuration. It would:

Create a new protection ecosystem encompassing startups, scaleups on the bleeding edge, prime contractors as integrators of superior know-how, federally funded R&D facilities refocused on areas not lined by business tech (nuclear, hypersonics,…). Make it everlasting by creating innovation doctrine/coverage.

Create new nationwide champions in dual-use business tech – AI/ML, Quantum, House, drones, excessive efficiency computing, subsequent gen networking, autonomy, biotech, underwater automobiles, shipyards, and so forth. who are usually not the normal distributors. Do that by selecting winners. Don’t give out door prizes. Contracts needs to be >$100M so high- high quality venture-funded corporations will play. Till we now have new distributors on the Main Protection Acquisition Program record, all we now have within the DoD is innovation theater – not innovation.

Purchase at Velocity. Right this moment, the typical DoD main acquisition program takes 9-26 years to get a weapon within the palms of a warfighter. We want a necessities, budgeting and acquisition course of that operates at business pace (18 months or much less) which is 10x quicker than DoD procurement cycles. As an alternative of writing necessities, DoD ought to quickly assess options and interact warfighters in assessing and prototyping business options.

Combine and incent the Enterprise Capital/Non-public Fairness ecosystem to speculate at scale. Ask funders what it will take to speculate at scale – e.g. create large tax holidays and incentives to get funding {dollars} in know-how areas of nationwide curiosity.

Recruit and develop leaders throughout the Protection Division ready to fulfill contempory threats and reorganize round this new innovation ecosystem. The DoD has world-class folks and group for a world that in some ways not exists. The threats, pace of change and applied sciences we face on this century would require radically totally different mindsets and approaches than these we confronted within the twentieth century. Right this moment’s senior DoD leaders should assume and act otherwise than their predecessors of a decade in the past. Leaders at each stage should now perceive the business ecosystem and the best way to transfer with the pace and urgency that China is setting.

It was clear that Deputy Secretary Hicks understands the necessity for many of if not all these and extra. Sadly, given the DoD price range is basically mounted, creating new Primes and new nationwide champions of the following era of protection applied sciences turns into a zero-sum sport. It’s a politically unattainable downside for the Protection Division to unravel alone. Adjustments at this scale would require Congressional motion. Onerous to think about within the polarized political setting. However not unattainable.

These are our challenges for not simply the Gordian Knot Middle for Nationwide Safety Innovation however for our nation. We’ve taken them on, within the phrases of President John F. Kennedy, “not as a result of they’re simple, however as a result of they’re laborious. as a result of that aim will serve to arrange and measure the most effective of our energies and expertise, as a result of that problem is one which we’re prepared to just accept, one we’re unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win.”