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

It was an honor to host US Deputy Secretary of Defense Dr. Kathleen Hicks at Stanford’s Gordian Knot Center for National Security 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 strategy to nationwide safety and innovation, and the way our curriculum trains the subsequent technology of innovators. The Deputy additionally heard from us how the Department can better partner with and leverage the U.S. innovation ecosystem to resolve nationwide safety challenges.

Our objective for the Secretary’s go to was to provide 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, drawback understanding, MVPs, Pivots), coupled with velocity and urgency, and a tradition the place failure equals fast studying. All of those are achieved with minimal assets to deploy at scale merchandise/providers which might be wanted and needed. We identified that Silicon Valley and Stanford have accomplished 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 focus 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 might remedy issues and ship options at velocity and scale.

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

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

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

1. Hacking for Protection Groups – Vannevar Labs, FLIP, Disinformatix
2. CONOPS Growth
3. Nationwide Safety Schooling – Technology, Innovation and Great Power Competition
4. Protection Innovation Students Program – 25 college students now, 50 by the tip of the 12 months
5. Coverage Impression and Outreach –ONR Hedge Technique, NSC Quad Rising Know-how Observe 1.5 Convention
6. Internships and Skilled Workforce Growth – Innovation Workforce Vignettes

For those who can’t see the slides click on here

All through the over 90 minutes session, Dr. Hicks posed insightful questions for the scholars and instructed our gathering that one in all her key priorities is to accelerate innovation adoption across DoD, together with organizational construction, processes, tradition, and folks.

It was encouraging to listen to the phrases.

Nonetheless, from the place we sit..

1. 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.
2. Our adversaries have exploited the boundaries and borders between our protection and business and financial pursuits.
3. 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/navy innovation relationship is important if we need to maintain abreast of our adversaries. This is able to use DoD funding, personal capital, dual-use startups, current 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 coated 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 autos, shipyards, and so forth. who should not the standard distributors. Do that by choosing winners. Don’t give out door prizes. Contracts needs to be >$100M so high- high quality venture-funded corporations will play.  Till we have now new distributors on the Major Defense Acquisition Program list, all we have now within the DoD is innovation theater – not innovation.

Purchase at Pace. Immediately, the common DoD main acquisition program takes 9-26 years to get a weapon within the fingers of a warfighter. We’d like a necessities, budgeting and acquisition course of that operates at business velocity (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 have interaction warfighters in assessing and prototyping business options.

Combine and incent the Enterprise Capital/Non-public Fairness ecosystem to take a position at scale. Ask funders what it could take to take a position at scale – e.g. create huge 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 satisfy contempory threats and reorganize round this new innovation ecosystem. The DoD has world-class folks and group for a world that in some ways now not exists. The threats, velocity 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. Immediately’s senior DoD leaders should assume and act in another way than their predecessors of a decade in the past. Leaders at each stage should now perceive the business ecosystem and the right way to transfer with the velocity 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 finances is basically fastened, creating new Primes and new nationwide champions of the subsequent technology of protection applied sciences turns into a zero-sum game. It’s a politically unimaginable drawback for the Protection Division to resolve alone. Modifications at this scale would require Congressional motion. Onerous to think about within the polarized political surroundings. However not unimaginable.

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 because they are easy, but because they are hard. because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win.”

Filed underneath: Gordian Knot Middle for Nationwide Safety Innovation |