Matt MacGregor and I published an article in Defense News outlining five reasons that a bridge fund or prototyping fund won’t solve DoD’s valley of death problem. Read the whole thing.
However, since a bridge fund is better than nothing, if there is the political will to make it happen then that’s great. But no one should be under the illusion that will resolve DoD’s emerging tech problems. It’s a temporary patchwork. Here are our recommendations:
To mitigate these problems, a bridge fund should:
- Target a few high-potential efforts.
- Exist for an extended period.
- Be directly allocated to an acquisition organization, such as the Defense Innovation Unit, Army Futures Command, the Joint Artificial Intelligence Center or a program executive office.
- Measure success using context-specific metrics.
Even then, the fund fails to address the real transformation obstacles. The Pentagon needs a more holistic answer to the technology transition problem, rather than another bridge fund. It needs to adopt portfolio accounts for prototype projects and acquisition programs. This would involve consolidating platform-focused budget line items into logical portfolios where promising commercial technologies could be identified and more easily transitioned without the bureaucracy, uncertainty and time penalties of a bridge fund.
The most important part of this all, of course, is establishing new metrics for oversight. Much more on that to come…
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