TAMPA., Fla — The Pentagon is focused on being more straightforward with vendors, especially smaller ones, about the kind of technology it wants and when it wants it, Emil Michael, the Defense Department’s Chief Technology Officer said today.
“The way I’ve approached this — knowing how smaller companies work — is fast yeses and fast nos. The worst thing for a small company is to be dragged through a multi-year process,” Michael, who previously served as a top executive for Uber and a small software company called Klout, told the audience at the annual SOF Week exposition today.
“They knock on 100 doors, and at the end of it, there’s no buyer, right?” he added. “So, how do I create one big front door that they could come in?”
In order to give vendors a “fast” yes or no, Michael said he is bringing in services “very early” to test the technology vendors have to offer and inform the companies right away if it’s something they are interested in.
Though Michael gave no specifics on what this would look like, it could be similar to how the Army is using its Transformation in Contact initiative — which brings companies in to test their tech that isn’t necessarily associated with a program of record or set requirement with the goal of evaluating how it operates in a tactical environment.
Further, Michael said part of being straight forward is having “hard conversations” when the tech isn’t the right match.
“Entrepreneurs, frankly, will appreciate that, because either they’ll double down on something else, or they’ll fix what they’ve got to meet your needs,” he said. “I think that kind of honesty is really important for the industry.”
On the topic of what the Pentagon is looking for from industry, Michael said interoperability is something he’s trying to build into almost all future requirements. He pointed to drone swarms being an exciting end result of interoperability, something he said he wants to achieve as he’s seen adversaries achieve such capabilities.
“When you see the adversary, these great drone swarms they do at concerts, I say, ‘Holy Cow!’ If they’re doing collaborative autonomy, we better be doing it better than them. So I’m pretty motivated to ensure that everyone who participates in this space gets that message, and knows that it is required to do,” he said of interoperability.
Prior to Michael’s remarks today, Acquisition Executive for Special Operations Command (SOCOM) Melissa Johnson told an audience Tuesday that if companies are looking to sell their tech to SOCOM, they need to have interoperability built in and the tech must be enabled by artificial intelligence.
“It should be reducing the cognitive workload on mundane tasks,” Johnson said. “The more complicated that operational scenario is, the more complicated and complex the environment gets to be. That means there’s more software, there’s more tasks for the operator. Those mundane tasks have to be reduced, so that he or she can focus on the most important decisions.”
