Power & Security, Technology, United States No Time to Waste: The Pentagon Needs an Innovation Overhaul

For more than a decade, the Department of Defense (DoD) has emphasized the need to field innovative commercial capabilities on the battlefield. But its efforts to do so have yet to yield many concrete results. Increasingly, officials across the DoD are attributing these failures to the so-called “valley of death,” or the gap between when a technology is developed and when it is deployed at scale. Deputy Secretary of Defense Kathleen Hicks recently called the valley of death “one of our biggest problems,” and countless industry and government leaders have called on the DoD to do a better job of shepherding companies through this transition.

But doing away with the valley of death will not magically produce technological superiority. Rather than treating it as an obstacle to conquer, the department should embrace the valley of death and wield it as an intentional tool for weeding out mediocre ideas.

Read more in The National Interest >>