DX25 Defense Tech Summit: Speed Is the Ultimate Defense

Shands Pickett, Senior Vice President, Defense Technology, Booz Allen

Zach Beecher, Partner, Scout Ventures

Jason Schmid, Vice President of Public Policy and Strategy, Vannevar Labs

DOD is calling on industry to provide Silicon Valley innovation. Our panelists discussed three main topics for the way ahead.

•  Industry: New entrants and prime contractors play complementary roles in tech acceleration. Startups have novel tech to solve problems and can solve most fast. Prime contractors can provide the capital to scale these solutions, along with an understanding of DOD missions and processes.
• Government: Panel speakers discussed ideas for incentives—for example, rewarding prime contractors on solicitation responses for integrating new technologies. They applauded progress the government is making in accelerating acquisition and the importance of reducing paperwork and making other small, but vital, changes to streamline requirements and processes.
• History: The speakers emphasized that looking to agile tactics the U.S. used in World War II and the Global War on Terrorism could provide proven ideas on pivoting to flexible contracts, processes, and partners. 

Accelerate decisions and elevate efficiency for defense missions. 

Randy Yamada, Vice President, Defense Technology, Booz Allen

Christian Gutierrez, Vice President of Engineering, Hivemind Solutions, Shield AI​

Kenneth Plaks, Special Assistant to the DARPA Director​, DARPA

Russia and China are making huge investments in autonomy. It’s therefore critical for the U.S. to adopt new technologies that enable autonomy at massive scale, while prioritizing the democratic values of ethical development and safety for the warfighter.

Decoupling hardware from software is helping speed progress. On the challenging side, faster adoption of open interfaces is needed to attain intelligent mass—fleets of inexpensive connected devices that are attritable, or easily replaced.

Booz Allen’s partnership with Shield AI provides an example of accelerating autonomous mass: Uniting Hivemind software with Booz Allen’s secure edge infrastructure is enabling rapid deployment of advanced AI control systems and the ability to infuse autonomy into a wide variety of uncrewed systems, from one-way attack drones to fighter jets.

Shield AI also plays a role in DARPA’s Air Combat Evolution (ACE) program, which updates tens of thousands of lines of code daily in experiments to increase confidence in combat autonomy.

Courtney Crosby, Director, AI Special Missions, Booz Allen

Mark Phillips, Deputy Director for Joint Force Integration, Joint Staff, J-7

CDR Robert Seader, Special Warfare Officer, Acquisition Professional

Joe Carvill, Head of Hadean U.S., Hadean

Advancing Indo-Pacific deterrence makes the Joint Warfighting Concept a priority. How can DOD, which traditionally approached operations sequentially, merge operational capabilities—while accounting for the unpredictability of human behavior across components that include not only adversarial forces and ordinary civilians, but also wild cards like the criminal element? Running multiple and parallel simulations in tandem with games can get to more realistic outcomes.

It allows a virtuous cycle between wargaming and concept development, allowing for rapid testing of concepts and technical experimentation. This allows DOD to isolate technologies to solve key operational problems and therefore guide requirements for future programs. 

Todd Krokowski, Director, Warfighter Technologies, Booz Allen

Chris Leech, Defense Interoperability Lead, Palantir

Michael Bergen, Vice President, DHS and Partnerships, goTenna

A shared partnership success story was center stage here: Panelists told how their technologies connect with Booz Allen’s Sit(x)® and other Tactical Awareness Kit (TAK) solutions to deliver situational awareness for varied missions, whether border control or deterrence at the tactical edge.

Palantir’s Gaia software, which provides a distributed common operating picture, includes TAK-delivered data among its live feeds. And the lightweight, software-defined goTenna radio provides a transport layer to send TAK data from disconnected environments back to a server for analysis.

These are just two examples of how warfighters have increasing access to AI-powered capabilities in remote regions. The faster open-source solutions are fielded, the more rapidly innovators from across the nation can plug in.