Innovative products and startup business are rapidly emerging in Silicon Valley, but the Pentagon is still trying to figure out how to harness those technologies and professional talent for its own gains, a Defense Department official said May 8.
The Pentagon is too small to drive how commercial businesses spend their money and develop technology, said Alan Shaffer, the Pentagon’s acting assistant secretary for research and engineering, during remarks at the Potomac Institute. However, even companies like Google [GOOG] want to work with the Defense Department in targeted areas because “we have the coolest problems in the world.” 
This can also be a draw for talented young scientists and engineers, said Shaffer, who acknowledged the growing difficultly of retaining such employees when the private sector often can offer more money and perks.
“I don’t think that the structure that we have in place will allow us to compete for the type of person who can get hired at Google or who can get hired at SpaceX,” he said. “If I was a young engineer or scientist, I love what you’ve got in the DoD, but what Elon Musk is doing with SpaceX, it’s a mind breaker. So what does that mean for the Department of Defense? We have to make those companies part of us.”
One way to do that is to increase collaboration with them. Shaffer mentioned one scientist from a military research lab who worked a four-month stint at Google and returned to the Defense Department with new skills. “I don’t know whether we’re going to keep that kid,” he said, noting that Google’s free lunches and flexible hours are benefits that the government cannot match.
The military needs to get better at working with the private sector and leveraging commercial, off-the-shelf systems, he said. One of the biggest hurdles keeping private companies from jumping into the military market is the large amount of upfront investment required, he said.
“This is going to take a leap of faith from Congress, but if there’s a way that we can at least parcel out funding early, then I think more of these companies would want to work with us,” he said.
However, claims that the Pentagon is losing innovation to Silicon Valley are overstated, Shaffer asserted.“We get kicked over innovation,” he said. “You know, the last time I looked, Facebook isn’t going to win a war.”
Even as competitor nations close in on the U.S. military’s technological advantage, the United States continues to field the most advanced systems on the planet and is building sophisticated new weapons, from high energy lasers to pulse microwave systems, he said.
Over the past decade, the Defense Department has gravitated toward exquisite, expensive platforms that are extremely capable, but cost too much for the military to buy more than a few. In the future, it needs to change its trajectory and buy a mix of low- and high-end systems that can work together, Shaffer said. For example, a sophisticated aircraft could fly in tandem with a company of inexpensive, lower-end drones capable of different functions, such as illuminating targets or jamming.
Prototyping and experimentation will be critical for developing a concept of operations for how to creatively and successfully use such capabilities, he said.
The Defense Department also needs to better define what it needs out of open systems, so that it can upgrade its weapons without having to worry about having to make new subsystems interoperable with a proprietary backbone. While that could take away work from large defense contractors that are used to controlling all of a platform’s architecture, software and components, it would open up opportunities for small businesses with interesting plug-and-play technologies, he said.