The Protection Innovation Unit focuses on leveraging expertise from six areas: synthetic intelligence/machine studying, autonomy, cyber, vitality, human programs and house.
“Our Protection Innovation Unit is concentrated on figuring out precedence expertise areas utilizing sooner strategies to get that tech into the fingers of our warfighters,” mentioned Secretary of Protection Lloyd J. Austin III on the Reagan Nationwide Protection Discussion board in California in December.
The 2022 National Defense Strategy said that the division should act as a result of market forces are driving new capabilities that might show helpful, notably in a confrontation with China.
“To achieve and preserve operational benefit over rivals, the DOD requires an order of magnitude improve in its adoption of economic applied sciences. To this finish, DOD should act as a quick follower, ” the NDS states.
In 2022, DIU assisted in transitioning 17 business options to Protection Division customers.
At DIU, transitioning means going from when a prototype efficiently completes and leads to a manufacturing or service contract with a DOD or U.S. Authorities companion. This course of that sometimes takes from 12 to 24 months, which is extraordinarily quick on this planet of presidency acquisition. Since 2016, a complete of 52 tasks have transitioned to DOD, mentioned Mike Madsen, appearing DIU director.
In FY22, 86 p.c of our awards had been non-traditional, 73 p.c had been awarded to small companies, with 33 p.c first-time DOD distributors. “It’s critically vital that we’re working to decrease the boundaries to entry in order that we are able to develop and strengthen the nationwide safety innovation base.”
Twin-use business applied sciences play an more and more vital position in how DOD solves issues, he mentioned.
“Particularly, the war in Ukraine has elevated curiosity throughout the nationwide safety group on the worth of commercially obtainable expertise, reminiscent of satellite tv for pc companies, communications and distant sensing,” Madsen mentioned.
Transitioning business applied sciences consists of such improvements as delivering enhanced visibility of cyber threats; utilizing AI to optimize expertise discovery; and creating scalable, resilient and responsive communications infrastructure for floor and house programs, he mentioned.
As a joint group, DIU works with protection companions throughout the companies and combatant instructions — and generally civilian or intelligence businesses — to modernize their efforts by prototyping and scaling this rising expertise, “The rising success of different processes to evaluate, procure, and subject business expertise serves as a harbinger of an progressive 2023 set to additional strengthen the foundations of the protection enterprise,” he mentioned.
Industrial options DIU transitioned to DOD in 2022 embrace:
- AI-based data graphing.
- Automated vulnerability discovery and remediation.
- Autonomous maritime intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance.
- Industrial risk information.
- Cyber risk deception.
- Rework multi-modal datasets from English and international language sources.
- Corridor impact thrusters for small satellites designed to extend navigational agility.
- Transportable threat-hunting platform designed to get rid of adversary actions in communications.
- Clever enterprise automation displays monetary transactions.
- Peacetime indications and warnings utilizing small satellites.
- Pilot simulation coaching.
- Fast evaluation of risk publicity for early detection of virus publicity.
- Safe cloud administration.
- Brief-range reconnaissance utilizing unmanned aerial programs.
A hyperlink to the complete FY22 annual report may be discovered at https://www.diu.mil/fy22-year-in-review.