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A dod head enlists silicon valley to transform the military...


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A dod head enlists silicon valley to transform the military...
THE “DOOMSDAY PLANE” weighs 800,000 pounds when fully loaded and can withstand the effects of a nuclear bomb or asteroid blast while remaining aloft for 12 hours without refueling. First deployed in 1974, the Boeing E-4B has been the preferred mode of long-range transportation for US secretaries of defense ever since. But when Ashton Carter’s staff discovered the behemoth would literally crush the runway in Sun Valley, Idaho, where he planned to attend the annual gathering of tech elite at the Allen & Co. conference, the SecDef nimbly switched to a sleek Gulfstream V. He jetted in with just a few aides, his wife (the conference is something of a family affair), an overnight bag weighing less than 10 pounds—and the message that the US military has a new spirit of agile entrepreneurialism.
The DOD of course has a long history of jump-starting innovation. Historically, it has taken the megafunding and top-down control structures of the federal government to do the kind of investing required to create important technology for the military. Digital photography, GPS, the Internet itself—all were nourished by defense contracts before being opened up to the private sector, which then turned them into billion-dollar industries.
Now the flow has reversed. Defense has been caught in the throes of the same upheaval that has disrupted legacy industries, unseated politicians, and upended global dynamics. In the digital age, innovation more often comes from smaller entrepreneurs than from the hierarchical structures that were the hallmark of 20th-century government and business. Over the past decade, the cost of computing has plunged, enabling anyone with a laptop to launch globe-spanning enterprises (see: Facebook, Uber, Square). Sure, the Pentagon’s R&D arm, Darpa, continues to incubate forward-thinking ideas, but it’s planning for a distant future; across town at the Pentagon, many computers are still running software that was programmed in the 1980s—long before many of today’s soldiers were born.
More broadly, this disruption has made it a lot harder to protect the world’s biggest superpower. Enemies of the US were once mainly hulking nation-states. But the biggest tech breakthroughs of the past decade—smartphones, social networking, cloud computing, drones—have put the tools of warfare into anyone’s hands, including terrorists, militant groups like the Islamic State, and hacker collectives for hire by authoritarian governments. As Moises Naim wrote in The End of Power, “In the 21st century, power is easier to get, harder to use—and easier to lose.”
The task falls to Carter to pilot the 2.2 million-member armed services—whether the 10,000 soldiers on duty in Afghanistan for the foreseeable future or the 1,000 pros staffing the US Cyber Command—into a world where swift-moving strategy is more important than brute force, and a global military needs both. Carter, who has been in the job for 10 months now, is betting heavily on Silicon Valley. He believes the hardware and software its engineers and entrepreneurs dream up have unlimited potential to help the military do its job. What’s more, he argues, Silicon Valley—and tech entrepreneurs more broadly—can teach Defense a lot about flexibility, speed, and new ways to work.
For its part, the tech sector remains wary. Defense contracting is notorious for bureaucratic lethargy and technological backwardness. And executives are leery of appearing to be too close to the US government while they seek to expand overseas. Put bluntly, they don’t want to alienate potential customers. (Case in point: Execs from Apple, Facebook, and Microsoft met with Chinese president Xi Jinping in late September in Seattle even as the Obama administration considered sanctions against China for cyberespionage.) And more than two years after former contractor Edward Snowden leaked documents revealing the National Security Agency, which is run by Defense, had penetrated Facebook, Google, and other companies, many in Silicon Valley still hold a grudge. The leaks showed that the government had lied to companies, purporting to help protect them from surveillance while at the same time maintaining a backdoor into their software so it could spy at will.
Obama believed Carter could help mend this relationship. Carter had done two stints at the Pentagon earlier in his career, and at the time of his appointment was a lecturer in international studies at Stanford. The Valley is a place where brainpower is its own kind of currency, and Carter, who holds a PhD in theoretical physics from Oxford, made an impression on the locals. “For long airplane flights, he gets a pile of textbooks from the university bookstore, and he’ll read for 12 hours!” says Marc Andreessen, cofounder of the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz. “To have someone who is that curious about the world in a position like secretary of defense is a really special thing.” Andreessen and his cohort have a healthy respect for Carter, forged through their common belief that science, when properly harnessed, can help society make great leaps. Carter, for his part, nurses the quixotic belief that tech’s best and brightest will, if nudged and properly inspired, tap into the same sense of public service that first compelled him to join the government.
And so on this July morning, having swapped out his slacks for blue jeans and removed his tie, he walks briskly across Sun Valley’s mountainous desert resort, his aides hanging back a few feet to avoid the snapshots of the photographers. He joins Charlie Rose for a conversation before a couple of hundred startup founders, CEOs, and public intellectuals. Rose quizzes Carter on everything from the dismal efforts to train soldiers to combat the Islamic State to the legality of encryption. Carter tries to strike a balance between what the government says it needs (no encryption!) and what the tech community says it needs (encryption!). When Rose asks if the government should be allowed a backdoor into private communications, Carter replies, “I don’t always think backdoors are the right answer.” It’s a phrase designed to elicit head nods from the audience, but he also says, “The challenge we all need to work out is how to have that freedom and protection individually while also being able to protect the public from terrorists and criminals.” He may not be saying anything they haven’t heard before, but they seem to be willing to give him a pass. While listening to Carter talk, one CEO emails me, “He’s doing very well!!”
Wooing Silicon Valley may prove easier than the battles Carter faces on his home turf. The Pentagon is a bulging, labyrinthine, inefficient organization with misaligned resources—the military has 25 percent more real estate than it needs, for example, but not enough hackers. And while there’s much to loathe in its procurement process, the basic rules exist to stop no-bid contracts and other abuses of our tax dollars. Yet somehow Carter must instill the seeds of a cultural and logistical overhaul that will make the modern military-industrial complex nimble enough to provide the kind of innovation and support its 21st-century fighting force needs.
Carter wants more mixing: Place career officers in agile private companies for a few months. And invite techies to spend time at the DOD.
On his first day on the job last February, he introduced an initiative he calls Force of the Future, designed to transform the personnel system so that, among other things, people can move in and out of the military more easily. He also plans to reform the procurement process just enough to make it simpler for startups to do business with the DOD. And he has established a beachhead on the West Coast, just 4 miles from Google in Mountain View, California, that will scout for companies, people, and ideas that can help the Pentagon. He calls it the Defense Innovation Unit Experimental.
“I’m a man in a hurry,” he says shortly into our first interview. He says this a lot, and it needs to be true. He has just a year to jump-start this change before a new administration will likely bring in a new SecDef. He can’t fix the military in that time, but he can change it. He can imprint upon it a new, more flexible way to work that will help it fix itself. The stakes are high because the global ecosystem we live in is precarious. And security is like oxygen. When you have it, you don’t notice it. But when it is gone, you do not survive long.
Only a couple of months after taking office, Carter returned to Silicon Valley to deliver a speech at Stanford, the first time in two decades that a secretary of defense had made the pilgrimage. After the talk, his five-car motorcade rolled up in front of the Andreessen Horowitz office. Andreessen was on paternity leave; cofounder Ben Horowitz hosted Carter for a roundtable conversation with entrepreneurs from a dozen companies. The mood was relaxed, and the entrepreneurs spoke freely. “One guy said, ‘We’d love to work with the government, but some of our engineers live a certain lifestyle where they wouldn’t get clearance,’” Horowitz remembers. “He was talking about weed.”
Carter waved off the culture clash. When it comes to security clearances, he explained, the government tries to determine two things: First off, are you a spy? Second, is there something you’re doing for which you could get blackmailed? “Marijuana is like blue laws these days,” Horowitz says Carter told them, insinuating that it wouldn’t be a problem. It’s a position he defends. “We need to be realistic about the world in which we live,” Carter says. “It’s an example of how we need to be flexible with people.”
Flexibility is at the heart of Carter’s plan to reimagine the Pentagon’s workforce, making it easier for tech’s brightest minds to work for, partner with, and sell to the military. Back at the Pentagon is a young staffer who toiled for months from a closet-sized office, a twin air mattress stuffed in a box to the left of his desk so he could crash overnight—startup style—to pull together a 120-page blueprint for rebuilding the personnel system. It’s packed with suggestions plucked from the tech industry, including adjusting compensation so that hard-to-hire categories—like, say, computer engineers—will be entitled to merit-based and incentive pay. It calls for setting up an Office of People Analytics, modeled after Google’s data-driven HR outfit known as People Operations. Keep in mind that the Pentagon’s record-keeping system hasn’t changed much since the 1980s. Personnel data is scattered across several software programs that don’t talk to one another. Carter wants to bring in private industry data crunchers to clean it all up and manage a vast new central computer system. “If you go to a Google or a Facebook or a Bank of America, they have teams of data scientists who will go through all this data and predict when this person is most likely to leave—and why we therefore have to do something extra for retention—or what capabilities this person may have that might match up for this particular job,” says Brad Carson, undersecretary for personnel and readiness who is tasked by Carter to help reinvent the Pentagon’s personnel system. Defense, he believes, should have the same—after all, it is the biggest employer in the US.
Mostly, Carter wants more mixing. Take career officers and place them in agile private companies for several-month stints. Expose them to new cultures and ideas they can bring back to the Pentagon. At the same time, invite techies to spend time at Defense. One of the most promising proposals is a fellowship program that Carter refers to internally as BNKR_75. (As in Bunker 1775, the year George
Washington launched the US military.) Following the model set by the US Digital Service—the White House’s strike team of technology experts—Defense would invite individuals to take time out from their private-sector jobs to work on projects at the Pentagon.
Of course, a blueprint does not a building make. Many of the report’s 80 suggestions will need to be approved by Congress. In total, they could cost up to $1 billion a year. It’s not impossible. Congress has backed other reform efforts, like a significant change to the military retirement system. But even if Congress fails to act, Carter’s ambitious attempt is aimed at instigating a cultural shift that will outlast his term. And it will bring in fresh thinking from the private sector.
For now, he can deliver up some initiatives, like BNKR_75, without congressional backing. He has already made use of the US Digital Service team. The week he moved into his office, he requested that a crew make it easier to transfer medical records from Defense to the Department of Veteran’s Affairs so that retirees could have access to them. DJ Patil, who came to the White House from Silicon Valley earlier this year to serve as the nation’s chief data scientist, helped manage the effort. “Carter put that team’s office in his front office, which is almost unheard of,” Patil says. Within two weeks they had completed their task.
Carter’s office is on the third floor of the Pentagon. It’s a massive building. If you were to walk down every corridor, following the ankle-high glow-in-the-dark arrows that were put in place to denote emergency exits after a plane flew into the building on 9/11, you would clock 17 miles. But nobody, except perhaps Carter, would be allowed to do that, because most of the rooms are classified. To get to Carter, you pass through a dedicated entrance, up two flights of stairs, and down a corridor flanked by the portraits of the 23 men and women who run the military. You turn your smartphone all the way off and place it with the others in a wooden case at the door to a room where you will watch CNN until you are escorted down the hall to his majestic quarters.
His biggest Silicon Valley bet to date: a five-year, $170 million effort to build flexible hybrid electronics in San Jose.
He may invite you to join him at his table, which is the same one General Sherman used during the Civil War. But when I visit, we first peruse the photos on his wall. That’s one of the dogs he sent to Afghanistan to sniff out improvised explosive devices in 2010. There he is shaking the hand of former Russian president Boris Yeltsin. He is most proud of the photo that displays 18 gigantic vehicles lined up in the sand of a Kuwait desert. They’re MRAPs, mine-resistant ambush-protected vehicles. In 2007, secretary of defense Robert Gates fought to get these vehicles to troops being decimated by improvised explosive devices in Iraq and Afghanistan, at a cost of $50 billion. Casualty rates for soldiers in MRAPs were 75 percent lower. As Gates’ undersecretary for acquisitions, technology, and logistics starting in 2009, Carter arranged for the all-terrain vehicle version, which could negotiate the rugged Afghan mountainside.
Carter never envisioned being a technologist or a military leader. The youngest of four kids born to a neurologist and a former schoolteacher, he grew up in a suburb of Philadelphia. He routinely underperformed on the wrestling and lacrosse teams but excelled in the classroom. At Yale, he majored in physics and medieval history.
He planned a career in academia, won a Rhodes scholarship, and pursued his doctorate in theoretical physics at Oxford. Over his career he has coauthored 11 books and more than a hundred papers, including one on “time reversal invariance,” the proposition that the world could run backward according to the same laws by which it turns forward. It’s a topic he still loves to discuss at great length. “So quantum electrodynamics only has positive and negative charge, right? You know that,” he says when I ask him about his thesis. Sure, uh-huh. Everyone knows that.
In 1979, mentors who had been part of the Manhattan Project encouraged Carter to take a year off from academia to join a team of scientists at the Congressional Office of Technology Assessment. “They had it in their blood that there was a public responsibility that went with being a technologist, and that was bred into my generation,” Carter says. This set Carter on a career path that would alternate between academia, as part of the Harvard faculty, and the Pentagon, until 2013, when he was said to have been passed over as the president’s pick for SecDef. That’s when he took the post at Stanford.
The job of secretary of defense isn’t easy to keep filled these days. The guy Obama chose, Chuck Hagel, quit in late 2014, citing disagreements with his boss over how to handle the Islamic State. In theory the SecDef oversees a budget of somewhere around $600 billion, but in reality the funding is a moving target, because the federal government hasn’t had a real budget in years thanks to automatic 10 percent annual spending cuts in place since 2012. And to make any significant changes, you need approval from a dysfunctional Congress. “When I was secretary, there was some semblance of a nonpartisan approach, and that has disappeared,” Carter’s mentor, William Perry, who was SecDef under President Clinton, tells me. “That has made the job more difficult.”
The Path to Defense
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