Defense community increasing pace of innovation, Hicks says

WASHINGTON — The effects of changes made in Defense Department acquisition processes are finally being felt, and the pace of change and innovation within the department is speeding up, Deputy Secretary of Defense Kathleen Hicks told the National Defense Industrial Association last week.

What’s more, Hicks said the effects show every sign of being sustained and growing.

Change and innovation has been at the heart of efforts under the direction of Secretary of Defense Lloyd J. Austin III and Hicks. Since they took their current jobs, both said the geopolitical environment requires DOD to innovate. The U.S. military cannot take years to get new capabilities to service members.

Hicks spoke of the efforts needed to put processes in place to speed experimentation, innovation, development and acquisition.

“Now, nothing goes from zero-to-60 overnight,” she said. “Change is a progression.”

Hicks said DOD was able to build on earlier efforts in this regard.

“We saw what was done, what needed doing, and what could be done, and we took the next logical steps,” she said.

Accelerating the rate of change 

“Once we had foundational building blocks in place, our rate of change skyrocketed, enabling the kinds of faster, go-big innovations that we’ve pursued since 2021,” the deputy secretary said. These building blocks allowed the department to work better with commercial and nontraditional defense companies, Hicks said, and they also sped up software acquisition while looking at ways to speed research and development and prototyping.

“Today over 200 programs have used middle-tier and software-acquisition pathways, with $57 billion flowing through them since inception — nearly 40% just in fiscal 2024,” she said. “In some cases, they’re shaving up to six years off delivery timelines.”

The deputy defense secretary said working with nontraditional defense companies has also helped with innovation and change, with a big part of that being DOD becoming a better customer and collaborator.

“Four years ago, some were still reticent about working with DOD. Some founders weren’t even thinking about us. Interested founders had no clear way to align with us.”

Hicks said DOD elevated the status of the Defense Innovation Unit to help eliminate the barriers and also created the Office of Strategic Capital to catalyze investment in key technologies for national security. This is helping DOD work with interested parties and helping spur innovation in private industry and the government.

DOD will continue the work “to debug DOD’s innovation ecosystem,” Hicks said, and it will continue to build “more bridges and express lanes over the valleys of death.”

The department will also continue to invest in big data and artificial intelligence, she said.

“We’ve driven those investments forward with real-world operational applications, like Combined Joint All-Domain Command and Control,” she said.

Replicator Initiative 

The Replicator Initiative is the poster child for the changes, the deputy secretary said. The initiative identifies key military capabilities and delivers them to the warfighter at speed and scale.

“Like so many game-changing innovations, Replicator was born because the right ingredients came together: an operational demand; technology ripe enough to scale in time to matter for the warfighter; an atmosphere where you can take a chance on something big; and leaders at all levels relentlessly focused on results,” she said.

Hicks pushed this common vision and identified and validated key operational requirements from combatant commands.

“We selected initial capabilities to meet those needs, from a field of nominees across multiple domains, harnessing the very latest in technology,” she said. “We developed acquisition strategies for each capability to determine which systems to field.”

The department worked with Congress to get the funding in its fiscal 2024 Appropriation Act.

“We also announced some scalable, all-domain, attritable, autonomy capabilities selected for accelerated fielding in the first tranche of Replicator — including Switchblade 600, a loitering munition that can be launched not just from land, but also from ships and aircraft,” she said. “And we continue to incorporate lessons learned from Ukraine and elsewhere.”

DOD has also obligated billions in research and development money and procurement dollars to the full range of industrial partners, the deputy secretary said. “We’ve used both new and preexisting contract award vehicles. In some cases, we made competitive awards just three – to four months after funds were appropriated, that’s about 66% less than the typical DOD contracting time.”

DOD has already taken delivery of Replicator’s first all-domain attritable autonomy capabilities, with more on the way, Hicks said.

“It’s one small piece of how DOD is developing operational design for employment of next-generation systems, including AI, uncrewed vehicles and counter-uncrewed-vehicle systems. We’re going beyond swapping out crewed systems with uncrewed systems — in fact, we’re discovering new ways of warfare that extend America’s edge as a result of these capabilities,” she said. “Although we have lots more work to do, we are on track to meet Replicator’s original goal of ‘multiple thousands in multiple domains in 18-24 months’ — that is, by end of August 2025.

“In so doing, Replicator is demonstrating from the top and across the enterprise how to deliver all kinds of capability at speed and scale.”

Developing these capabilities in the past could “easily take five to ten years for most capabilities to field at scale,” the deputy secretary said.

“To go from start to fielding inside our two-year budget cycle is not normal. It’s disruptive,” she said. “But by leveraging Replicator and our other key initiatives, we are making it more normal, because delivery at speed is essential. In this generational era of strategic competition with the, we cannot tolerate the same old mindsets.

“The Pentagon may be made of Indiana limestone, but our processes were not meant to be calcified for all eternity, nor stuck in concrete blocks.

“I started working at DOD over 30 years ago, and I’ve heard plenty of salty language, but to this day, the most profane and damaging seven words I hear in the Pentagon are: ‘This is how we’ve always done it.’ That’s simply unacceptable today.”

This is a culture change for the department, the deputy secretary said. “We’ve seen Replicator change behavior throughout the defense community.”

The services, private sector officials and allies and partners are seeing the advantages of these technologies and processes and jumping on board, she said.

“When we launched Replicator, a common refrain I heard was: ‘Can it work?’ These days I’m more likely to hear: ‘Will it stick?'” Hicks said.

“At the end of the day, all our efforts are conditioning DOD — and Congress, and increasingly the private sector — for the battlespace of the future, and the pace of change necessary to succeed.”