Small, Smart, Cheap, and Many (the new approach to rapid innovation)

November 30, 2023

By Mike Dodd, USMC (Ret.)

We’ve all been there. You’re on the road, perhaps late at night, and you start to blink repeatedly. You yawn. Grab the steering wheel and jerk to the left to force your car back into the lane. You fell asleep, if only for a split second. This phenomenon actually has a name. It’s called, “drowsy driving” and, according to a CDC survey, 1 in 25 adults reported having fallen asleep while driving in the previous 30 days.

Our defense establishment is also guilty of nodding off. We were forced to wake up on October 4, 1957, when the Soviet Union launched Sputnik (now referred to as the “Sputnik Moment” to describe the innovation gap between the U.S. and our adversaries). We’re in the midst of another serious wake-up call.

Combating drowsy driving is pretty easy. The CDC’s number one suggestion is to (no surprise here) get more sleep! Similarly, our defense ecosystem is embracing a simple strategy to outpace the People’s Republic of China (PRC), which has embarked on “the largest military buildup in history since World War II,” according to Indo-Pacific Command (INDOPACOM) Commander Adm. John Aquilino.

The Replicator initiative, unveiled at the end of the summer, will field thousands of autonomous systems within the next 18-24 months. "To stay ahead, we're going to create a new state of the art — just as America has before — leveraging attritable, autonomous systems in all domains — which are less expensive, put fewer people in the line of fire, and can be changed, updated or improved with substantially shorter lead times," explained Deputy Secretary of Defense Kathleen Hicks. The Replicator mantra is: small, smart, cheap and many.

More proof of the innovative mindset shift is the fact that the Defense Innovation Unit (DIU), DoD’s organization that focuses on accelerating and adopting commercial and dual-use technologies to solve operational challenges, and its relatively new leader, Doug Beck, now reports directly to the Secretary of Defense. Beck, a Navy reservist and former Apple executive, has called this new phase, “DIU 3.0.”

“It’s about moving from a world where you find great technology solutions to military problems and then serve them up to the organs of scale of the department [with] a combination of hope, and expect that then they will be picked up and scaled from there. It’s shifting from that model to a model that begins from the demand signal for those most critical imperatives from the department — that starts with the combatant command, that works with the services,” said Director Beck.

Right now, those critical imperatives include seeding, sparking and stoking the flames of U.S. innovation to outpace our adversaries. We do all of this to (hopefully) deter major conflict, or ensure we have a technological advantage if forced to fight. In many ways, this is a continuation–and more contemporary take on–the Third Offset strategy, which DoD introduced nearly a decade ago, and what some are now referring to as the Continuous Offset.

"We must ensure the PRC leadership wakes up every day, considers the risks of aggression, and concludes, 'today is not the day' — and not just today, but every day, between now and 2027, 2035, 2049 and beyond," Hicks said.

America is driving with eyes wide open--alert and aware. We need to speed up innovation, we need to do it smartly and cheaply while producing large quantities of quality technologies. We must be up for the challenge because we can never fight a fair fight.