“THE BUNKER” (Project On Government Oversight) By Mark Thompson
“ In speeds rarely seen around the Pentagon, DIU solicited and scrubbed 16 candidates over the past four months, from which it chose the four contract winners.”
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“The Pentagon is often rightly accused of wasting billions of dollars getting ready to fight the last war. But it has just declared it is preparing to fight future wars by gleaning lessons from Ukraine’s current conflict with Russia. That can only be good news for a military that for too long has been wedded to too costly and obsolete ways of combat.
The Defense Department’s Defense Innovation Unit (DIU) announced March 14 that it has awarded contracts to four companies for Project Artemis. Its goal: to develop one-way kamikaze drones, like those that Ukraine has built to hit strategic targets, including air bases and fuels depots, deep inside Russia. Two of the companies are U.S. software firms, paired with Ukrainian companies in hopes of bring some of Kyiv’s krafty kinetic kombat to the U.S. military. The Pentagon declined to release the amount of the contracts (although Congress has earmarked $35 million for such efforts), or the names of the Ukrainian companies involved (reportedly over safety concerns).
U.S.-based drone makers AeroVironment and Dragoon, and software concerns Auterion and Swan, each teamed with a Ukrainian drone firm. Depending on their size and complexity, the drones could cost between $20,000 and $70,000 each. That’s a bargain for the Pentagon and would let it buy enough of them for “mass deployment” (which should come as no surprise, given their kamikaze mission).
Designed for use where GPS and other navigation aids are jammed, the unmanned aerial systems would carry a variety of payloads — including weapons and sensors — at low altitudes anywhere from 60 to 600 miles. DIU hopes to have prototypes ready for production by October 1.
But then the fun begins. As they say about the Pentagon, rice bowls have to be broken if the U.S. military is going to get back on track when it comes to innovation, lethality, and speed. DIU is a nine-year old Pentagon agency not rooted in any military service (it speaks volumes that the Pentagon’s top civilian found the services’ hidebound arms development efforts so lacking in innovation that he had to create a separate shop expressly designed to rush commercial technologies to the battlefield). The services, for all the normal stupid reasons — turf, bureaucratic pride, not-invented-here-syndrome — tend to frown upon such independent efforts.
“We have to prove we can do it, and if we can’t do it, then I don’t blame people for not signing up,” DIU program chief Trent Emeneker told Defense News. “But when we prove we can do it — I’m confident we will — we have to get that message out of, ‘Hey, this solution works today. It’s at the right price point, it is ready, it’s combat proven.”
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Mark Thompson has been covering U.S. national security for four decades, including from 1994 to 2016 as senior correspondent and deputy Washington bureau chief at TIME Magazine.Mark worked at TIME from 1994 to 2016. Before that, he covered military affairs for the late Knight-Ridder Newspapers (including the Detroit Free Press, the Miami Herald, the Philadelphia Inquirer, and the San Jose Mercury-News) for eight years.Prior to Knight-Ridder, Mark reported from Washington for the Fort Worth Star-Telegram for seven years. During that time, he and his paper were awarded the 1985 Pulitzer Prize for Public Service for a series of articles on an uncorrected design flaw aboard Fort Worth-built Bell helicopters that had killed nearly 250 U.S. servicemen.
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