The nomination was submitted to the Senate last week and has been referred to the Armed Services Committee for consideration, according to a notice posted on Congress.gov.

A White House announcement and the congressional notice said Caggy was tapped for a “new” ASD position, without providing additional information. A senior congressional official on Tuesday confirmed that Caggy has been nominated to be ASD for mission capabilities. Although the role was created during the Biden administration, it’s still considered “new” in bureaucratic parlance because it’s never been filled by a Senate-confirmed official.

Marcia Holmes was recently performing the duties of ASD for mission capabilities, according to a Defense Department org chart.

If confirmed, Caggy would oversee efforts to develop and support future warfighting concepts and “integrated architectures,” close capability gaps in support of defense modernization, and regularly engage with the joint force and combatant commanders, among other duties, according to a DOD description of the mission capabilities portfolio. The office is tasked with helping execute joint and interagency prototyping and experiments; identifying, developing and demonstrating “multi-domain” concepts and technology; and leveraging multiple prototyping pathways to address “operational gaps” and accelerate capabilities to warfighters.

According to DOD, a key goal for the ASD position is to help get capabilities across the so-called “Valley of Death,” a term used by members of the Pentagon’s acquisition community that refers to challenges in transitioning promising technologies from research and development into production and fielding.

“ASD(MC) serves as a transition partner through innovative and efficient experimentation strategies with the end goal of not just prototyping and fielding, but operational sustainment via scalability, producibility, and training,” according to the Defense Department.

Caggy highlighted his nomination in a LinkedIn post over the holiday weekend.

“If confirmed, I’ll bring the same mission first, bureaucracy last mindset that’s driven me my entire career. Collaborating with all to deliver the best American capabilities for the Joint Force. Working with a team of Doers grounded in humility, egos set aside in favor of doing what’s right for Warfighters and, ultimately, the country,” he wrote.

Caggy recently served as an advisor to the Strategic Capabilities Office in the Office of the Secretary of Defense. From 2013 to 2023, he held executive roles at Amazon Web Services (AWS), including general manager and director (L8) for secure connection services, and senior manager for DOD solutions. He also has military experience, having previously served as an Army infantry officer in the active duty and Reserve components for about 20 years, according to his LinkedIn profile.

The Defense Department’s research and engineering directorate is led by former Uber executive Emil Michael, who took the helm as undersecretary for R&E and chief technology officer in May.

Other Trump nominees for senior positions in the directorate are still going through the Senate confirmation process.

Last month, the Senate Armed Services Committee held a confirmation hearing for Michael Dodd, also known as “The DoddFather,” who was tapped to be assistant secretary of defense for critical technologies. The Senate has yet to vote on his confirmation.

In late March, Trump nominated Joseph Jewell, a hypersonics expert, to serve as assistant secretary of defense for science and technology. His confirmation hearing hasn’t been scheduled.

Last week, the president also nominated James Mazol to be deputy undersecretary of defense for R&E. Mazol had been performing the duties of that position in the months leading up to his nomination. Prior to joining the Trump administration, he was Republican policy director for the Senate Armed Services Committee and had responsibility for science and technology policy and programs, according to his DOD bio.

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In that position, Michael will serve as the primary advisor to the secretary of defense and other Defense Department leaders on tech development and transition, prototyping, experimentation, and management of testing ranges and activities. He’ll also be in charge of synchronizing science and technology efforts across the DOD.

Michael comes to the job from the private sector, where he’s been a business executive, advisor and investor. He told members of the Senate Armed Services Committee that he’s been involved with more than 50 different tech companies during his career. Perhaps most notable, from 2013 to 2017, he was chief business officer at Uber.

In government, he previously served as special assistant to the secretary of defense when Robert Gates was Pentagon chief.

Michael was born in Egypt and his family moved to the United States when he was a child to escape what he described as hostility to Christians.

“Emil has lived the American Dream by building several successful Tech companies, including Uber,” then President-elect Donald Trump said in a statement in December when he announced his pick for Pentagon R&E chief, adding that Michael will “ensure that our Military has the most technologically sophisticated weapons in the World, while saving A LOT of money for our Taxpayers.”

Michael touted his business background during his confirmation hearing in March and in responses to written questions from senators. He noted that he previously served on the Defense Business Board, which provides independent advice to Pentagon leaders on business management issues.

“I am a firm believer that bringing best practices from the private sector into the Department is a top priority because, if adopted effectively, they will streamline operation and allocate resources more appropriately,” Michael told lawmakers.

He suggested that some research and development programs could end up on the chopping block under his watch, saying Pentagon officials need to have the discipline to “stop projects that are failing” and focus S&T investments on “only those things that are aligned on our ‘peace through strength’ mission.”

“Time must be a factor in all of our decisions as we confront an increasingly sophisticated adversary in China, which not only has lower labor costs, but is notorious for intellectual property theft, making its research and development … even faster and less expensive than we could have imagined only a decade ago,” he said.

Michael also told senators that he would work to “recast” the relationship between the Defense Department and the emerging tech sector.

“The DOD needs to foster a more robust and competitive defense industrial base by providing more realistic requirements, inviting smaller and innovative companies with less burdensome processes, becoming more agile in how and when we grant contracts. The private sector too should bear some more responsibility for the risks of their own failure. A healthy ecosystem will provide for weapons that are better, cheaper and faster,” he said at his confirmation hearing.

He suggested venture capitalists could play an even larger role in supporting the defense industrial base, particularly for small businesses that need additional funding to thrive in that marketplace. For example, he told lawmakers that, if confirmed, he would look for opportunities under Small Business Innovation Research and Small Business Technology Transfer (SBIR/STTR) programs for small businesses to leverage VC investment.

The Pentagon’s R&E chief plays a key role in fostering next-generation military capabilities and overseeing work on the “critical technology areas” that the Pentagon has identified. Those areas currently include trusted AI and autonomy; space; integrated sensing and cyber; integrated network systems of systems; microelectronics; human-machine interfaces; advanced materials; directed energy; advanced computing and software; hypersonics; biotech; quantum; FutureG wireless tech; and “energy resilience.”

“If confirmed, I look forward to reviewing the work being done in all 14 Critical Technology Areas and ensuring the Department’s resources are focused on our most critical challenges with the right amount of weight behind each area,” Michael told lawmakers.

He highlighted AI, autonomous systems, quantum computing, directed energy and hypersonics as some of his top priorities, if confirmed.

The R&E directorate is also expected to play a major role in Trump’s Golden Dome missile defense initiative.

Michael noted that Golden Dome will require systems engineers across the DOD to collaborate on architecture and software, in partnership with the development and acquisition communities.

After he’s sworn in, Michael will take over for James Mazol, who has been performing the duties of undersecretary for R&E during the early months of the second Trump administration. Heidi Shyu was the last person to hold the role in a Senate-confirmed capacity during the Biden administration.

Updated on May 15, 2025, at 4:15 PM: A previous version of this story stated that “renewable energy generation and storage” was one of DOD’s 14 “critical technology areas.” While that was the case during the Biden administration, the Trump administration has changed the focus to “energy resilience.” This story has been updated to reflect that change.

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During their open meeting on Wednesday, members of the panel agreed upon those and other recommendations, based on a study they were tasked with delivering, called Optimizing Innovation Cooperation with Allies and Partners.

“Today, the DoD does not have a central standing mechanism for interfacing with allies, partners, and international organizations, resulting in a state of considerable fragmentation, duplication, and lack of coordination across workstreams. Moreover, we observed that DoD senior leaders are stretched thin by the many duties pressed upon them, and that international defense industrial cooperation is often relegated in the face of competing priorities. The Department’s principals responsible for international cooperation accordingly struggle to devote an adequate level of attention, care, and focus to addressing the barriers and risks facing the international industrial base,” the report stated.

At Wednesday’s meeting, board member Charles Phillips said: “We talked to a lot of different organizations to get a sense of how it’s working today. Other countries [like] Norway, the U.K., Ukraine, even our allies, and … some startups trying to work with the DOD from outside of the U.S. and want to find out how to work with us. So, the number one issue we found is that there’s no pathway for working with the DOD if you’re coming from another country. No one knows how it works. It’s too fragmented and there’s a lot of different certifications and requirements.”

To help tackle these problems, the DIB recommends that the Pentagon create an Undersecretary of Defense for International Industrial Cooperation, or USD(IIC), and designate a senior political executive to serve as the department’s primary point of contact and report as the principal staff assistant to defense leadership for all matters pertaining to international defense industrial cooperation.

Two assistant secretaries of defense for combined requirements development and international integration and interoperability should serve under the new undersecretary’s purview, the study suggests.

In early 2018, Congress mandated that the department reshuffle the Undersecretary of Defense for Acquisition, Technology and Logistics (AT&L) into undersecretary-level positions focused on acquisition and sustainment (A&S) and research and engineering (R&E). That move was controversial at the time — and in their study, DIB experts said it “left the international defense industrial cooperation portfolio disjointed.”

As part of their proposed reshuffle, board members recommend that the new ICC office “incorporate and elevate the international defense industrial base portfolio” from A&S. Oversight of all domestic defense industrial base policy would remain under the acquisition and sustainment directorate.

Similarly, under the new structure IIC would adopt the research and engineering directorate’s international outreach and policy portfolio “with primary oversight of implementation of the DOD’s international science and technology engagement efforts.”

The panelists also recommend that other DOD components that engage in international industrial cooperation activities — and in particular the Defense Innovation Unit and Chief Digital and Artificial Intelligence Office — “should be nested with the priorities dictated by the USD(IIC).”

Presenting an alternative option, the researchers wrote that “in place of a new undersecretary, Congress may consider reconsolidating the USD(A&S) and USD(R&E) into an Undersecretary for the Industrial Base focusing on innovation research and development, supply chains, production capacity, and access to technologies both domestically and globally.”

Ultimately, the Pentagon won’t be able to shift its structure based on these recommendations without new directions from congressional lawmakers, which likely wouldn’t come without some debate.

“I participated in that decision [regarding the 2018 restructure] and I’ve got qualms on going back — because I know the arguments back and forth and [we] came to a different conclusion. Having said that, I think the study is absolutely on the right track [and] in all other areas should be supported. And again, it highlights a very important issue that not a lot of other studies have,” DIB member and former congressman William “Mac” Thornberry said during Wednesday’s meeting.

The panelists who conducted the study reflected on why they recommended the reorganization within the Office of the Secretary of Defense.

Based on his experiences in the Marines and now as a technology investment executive, Phillips said the U.S. military’s allies and partners need one single point of contact within DOD, as well as integrated designs and manufacturing capacity. 

“This is all in the report as well — in 37 of the 44 critical technologies identified by a third-party research organization, China is leading. If you look at high-end systems adoption, they’re moving 6x faster. They’re now coordinating with Russia, North Korea, and the three of them, collectively, [are] at 1.6 billion citizens. So, the rate and scale of their investment has just changed. And so one way to respond to that is we could collectively work with our partners. We can recreate that scale in a different way. So what does that mean? It means shared systems and equipment, but also shared data,” Phillips explained.

During Wednesday’s meeting, Navy Capt. Colin Kane also discussed his team’s ongoing work in DOD’s Joint Rapid Acquisition Cell.

The cell’s responsibilities include the department’s joint urgent operational needs, which are essentially critical requirements identified by combatant commanders.

“I think one of the challenges there is that innovation is also slow, and so we’re supposed to field solutions within two years to those environments, but it’s an extremely challenging thing to achieve there,” Kane said.

In his own experiences as a DOD acquisition professional, Kane said he’s also seeing challenges around industry cooperation with the research and engineering directorate “to be able to field urgent needs for the counter-uncrewed system threat.” 

“In that environment, we’re seeing extremely quick innovation and in partnership with the research and engineering directorate, there isn’t the — since we separated A&S from R&E, we aren’t seeing the ability to or effective means of communication to move in that effort,” Kane said. “In combining those two organizations, there would be benefits.”

At the meeting, NATO’s Acting Assistant Secretary General, Innovation, Hybrid, and Cyber James Appathurai also spotlighted the need for the U.S. and its allies to collectively speed up the adoption of emerging and disruptive technologies.

He noted that there’s now “a two-week innovation cycle for software in Ukraine.” 

“They’re putting a certain amount of software into drones. It’s being neutralized by the Russians in two weeks, and then they have to come up with a new innovation and new technology. So that’s the speed of the war, and we certainly need to accelerate that at NATO. So, we are now turning our attention to that,” Appathurai said.

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This request comes shortly after Rep. Mike Gallagher, R-Wis., chairman of the Select Committee on the Strategic Competition between the U.S. and the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), penned separate letters to Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin and Alfred University President Mark Zupan earlier this month.

In both, Gallagher expressed “deep concern” about Alfred University hosting an official, China-affiliated Confucius Institute while conducting military research worth millions in grants from the Department of Defense over the next few years.

“To put it plainly, DOD is funding advanced, hypersonic weapons-related research at an American university that actively partners with a Chinese university that performs similar research for the [People’s Liberation Army],” Gallagher wrote to Austin.

The first U.S.-based Confucius Institute was established in 2004 as part of a broad program reportedly associated with China’s Ministry of Education that was originally billed as a mechanism to promote Chinese language and culture in foreign nations. According to a 2019 Government Accountability Office report, there were approximately 525 institutes operating worldwide in September 2018. Confucius Institutes offered services at roughly 100 U.S. universities. 

The 2019 GAO report reviewed 10 universities and found “their institute directors were all U.S. university employees who reported they — not China — had full control,” and that some of those organizations held events on controversial topics like Tibet or Taiwan.

But over the years since the program’s launch, concerns have continued to escalate about potential undue influence in connection to the Chinese government.

Partially resulting from those wider concerns, Section 1062 of the 2021 National Defense Authorization Act included a ban on DOD funding for any institution of higher education that hosts a Confucius Institute, effective Oct. 1, 2023.

“Despite this looming deadline, Alfred University was awarded a 5-year contract worth $13.5 million, to ‘improve the performance of ceramic materials used in weapons (i.e., cruise weapons).’ The grant does not end until 2027, so unless Alfred University closes its Confucius Institute or receives a waiver, this grant will be in violation of the law” as of October, Gallagher wrote in the letters he sent to Alfred University and Pentagon leadership earlier this month.

“On top of its affiliation with a Confucius Institute,” he added, “Alfred University has entered into a research agreement with China University of Geosciences in Wuhan, which maintains a research program in advanced materials science — a research area closely related to” the DOD-funded research at the American school.

In March, the Pentagon’s Office of the Under Secretary of Defense for Research and Engineering released guidance on its Confucius Institute Waiver Program (CIWP). 

Personnel in that program are responsible for reviewing — then, approving or denying — waiver applications from any U.S. institution of higher education that aims to be exempted.

Gallagher posed multiple questions to both the defense secretary and Alfred University president in the letters. He also asked the Pentagon for all correspondence, documents and communications “related to the creation and planned enforcement of” the CIWP — and requested that the university provide all letters, emails, and electronic documents through which it has communicated with “China’s Office of Chinese Language Council International (Confucius Institute Headquarters) regarding the establishment” of its institute. 

“Last week, we submitted our application for a waiver in full compliance with the instructions provided by the Department of Defense. We are told that we will be given a response to the application by September,” a senior communications official from Alfred University told DefenseScoop on Tuesday. 

“In the meantime, we are in communication with the office of Chairman Gallagher and will submit all the materials his staff has requested by the deadline of June 14, 2023. We are operating with full transparency and cooperation with all parties involved,” they said.

That official — as well as other spokespersons from Congress and DOD — did not provide answers to repeated requests from DefenseScoop this week for more information about the university’s waiver request, the broader compliance process, other Confucius Institutes open in the U.S., or the path forward. 

“Thanks for reaching out. As with all congressional correspondence, DOD will respond as appropriate. We have nothing additional to provide at this time,” a department spokesperson told DefenseScoop.

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The online portal was launched earlier this year to serve as a “one-stop-shop” for external, tech-focused entities to find DOD organizations that align with their interests.

“One of the refrains we always hear from industry is we don’t know where the right touchpoints are, we’re not sure how to enter this ecosystem — particularly those non-traditionals, those small businesses that we’re really eager to work with,” Jen Bird, director of the department’s Innovation Steering Group, said in an interview with DefenseScoop on Thursday.

The Innovation Pathways website, which came about after the steering group was tasked with mapping the Pentagon’s innovation ecosystem, is intended to serve as “an entree point into the department so that external stakeholders can try to figure out the best [DOD] organizations, offices, opportunities for what they have to offer,” she said.

The online tool first went live in April, but an enhanced version was implemented this week as the Pentagon aims to improve functionality and user experience.

“The matchmaking tool is an upgrade. A lot of the interface is an upgrade. The ‘For the Warfighter’ section has been additionally populated and more expansive. And then the map [showing DOD’s innovation-related offices located throughout the United States] is also a new feature as well,” Bird said.

There are three main sections on the Innovation Pathways website: one for business and industry, one for academia and students, and one for warfighters.

Companies can filter their search based on whether they provide hardware, software, data, or something else. They can then select how they would like to collaborate with DOD, such as selling an existing technology or product, collaborating on R&D, or presenting a prototype or technical demo. They are also asked to select which of the Pentagon’s 14 critical technology areas apply to their product. They may also disclose the technology readiness level of their product.

Based on those inputs, an algorithm lists the top matches for the company among more than 200 DOD agencies, offices and other entities that are part of the department’s innovation ecosystem.

“Our algorithm is such that … the closer a match, the higher the organization will appear on the list,” Bird explained.

The tool also provides information about each match and includes links to those DOD organizations’ websites where users can find more information about how to get involved.

“This is our sort of most robust tool again, because of that desire to help engage with industry and help point industry in the right direction. What we developed here, we’re calling a matchmaking tool. And our desire was to allow the user to enter some information about the value that that organization has to bring to the Defense Department in hopes that we can help point them in the right direction,” Bird said.

“There’s just so much on here that we think the average non-traditional vendor probably won’t be aware of. And so it’s possible there will be items of interest or organizations of interest that they might not even know are of interest. And so we really kind of have a long list here,” she added.

Students, faculty and other members of academia can also use the website to search for internships, fellowships, grants, scholarships and research opportunities.  

Warfighters, meanwhile, can look for opportunities related to problem-solving; workshops, training and credentialing; broadening opportunities, internships and fellowships; science, technology, acquisition and scouting; cloud, data, analytics and software tools; and collaboration tools.

“There’s a lot available to the warfighter. I think this is where we probably have the most room to run in terms of adding resources and making sure that we’re being as inclusive and expansive as possible, because there’s so much available. But this is our initial concept. And again, this really came from the desire from all the folks — both uniformed and DOD civilians — that we talked to about kind of figuring out what else they could do, where can they be looking for resourcing,” Bird said.

Future additions

The plan is to continue improving the Innovation Pathways website over time.

“I think the next step for us is just trying to drive users because we know that through that user base, we’re going to be able to continue to iterate and make it better,” Bird said.

The website has a feedback form to get users’ input.

“We’re checking this daily, you know, we’re very up to speed on kind of what we’re seeing. And so this is really what we want users to use to get their thoughts back to us,” she said.

Users of the website aren’t required to create a profile or account. But in the future, DOD officials would like to give them that option.

“One thing we really want to do is understand the user and what they have to offer so that we can, you know, leverage a database for all the services. So let’s say you have a user from a software company that has something really great to offer, they look for the right office and maybe they find success, maybe they don’t. But we want to make sure that we capture that user, their contact information, their specialty, their value-add to the department so that if three months from now, hey, the Navy has a need for X, Y or Z, we’re able to make sure that they can peruse a database and see, ‘Hey, is there a user that might have exactly what it is I’m looking for?’” Bird said.

“I think in a perfect world, every month, we go through and we send, you know, the PEOs the relevant users, and we say, ‘Hey, FYI, these folks are out there, just so you know.’ And we hope that that can be another way to kind of generate interest,” she added.

Another element that officials want to include in the next tranche of improvements is a more expansive News & Events page that will include events — such as industry days — from across the department.

“We’re going to add a calendar to that. And we’re going to allow the different DOD organizations to send us events so that I can again be sort of a one-stop-shop for folks interested in attending these sorts of things. At that point, you know, we’d love to be able to send reminders to folks and calendar invites and those sorts of things,” she said.

Bird also foresees adding a section devoted specifically to open solicitations.

DefenseScoop asked Bird if there were any plans to link the Innovation Pathways website with solicitations on Sam.gov.

“We talked about that and I think it’s still on the horizon. I think the technical questions to doing something like that are more challenging than I think what we’ve done over the last six months, but it’s certainly something that we think could be real value-add to the user,” she replied.

While the Innovation Pathways website currently includes sections for industry, academia and warfighters, DOD officials are contemplating adding another component specifically for international allies and partners.

Enhancing international cooperation on research and development has been a high priority for Undersecretary of Defense for Research and Engineering Heidi Shyu.

“Certainly, we have had discussions … with our partners about how difficult to navigate the U.S. system is, and this has come up as sort of a step in the right direction,” Bird said. “I can envision different formulations of that, but it might be a portal for our partners and allies, it might be a portal to help guide, you know, within the innovation ecosystems of our partners and allies. There are different ways we could do it. But that’s sort of where I think this page is moving.”

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Based on an “understanding that there’s a lack of just testing standards — or even more open, flexible testing, evaluation, verification, validation — available for intelligent autonomous systems,” these in-the-making AI hubs and the overarching ecosystem will provide Defense Department teams with “one common testing and evaluation capability” for the emerging technology, Kim Sablon, principal director for trusted AI and autonomy in the Pentagon’s R&E directorate, told DefenseScoop in an interview on Monday.

Sablon previously steered Army Futures Command’s science and technology efforts before taking on her new role.

“Coming into this position, there’s been a lot of discussions on some of the challenges with accelerating development of AI-enabled capabilities for the department. What we’ve found is that each R&D lab is often conducting AI research and developing their own AI research portfolios consisting of AI operations, AI models, AI datasets and software development tools — with very little to no reuse across the laboratories,” she said. “So, with the limited AI R&D compute and storage [capabilities] it just makes sense to look across and say, ‘Okay, what do we need to do to accelerate things?’”

Her team is now working closely with the DOD’s Testing Resource Management Center to stand up the new hubs — as well as the nascent Chief Digital and AI Office to confront duplication or deficiencies spotted in the broad enterprise along the way that could impact deployments down the line. 

Hubs and sub-hubs

Once fully realized, officials envision an AI-driving ecosystem that unites the Pentagon’s operational and R&D communities to more seamlessly share data and experiment in common model repositories. It’s ultimately meant to “empower collaboration,” Sablon said, between “the many service-level AI projects that are not connected, that are often disjointed, and where there’s overlap.”

“It’s truly a collaborative activity that pulls together those individual programs from across” all the service branches, she noted.

Officials have chosen three major AI hubs to each focus on specific areas: image processing, signal processing, and modeling and reasoning.

The image processing hub looks at electro-optical/infrared, lidar types of images, while the hub that hones in on signal processing combines sonar, radio frequency and associated technologies.

For modeling and reasoning “we’re pulling all the information within these specific data domains across the image processing and signal processing, and thinking through how we generate … several different courses of action where efforts across the enterprise can be integrated into a single [modeling and simulation] environment to encourage common testing and evaluation,” Sablon said. 

There are also sub-hubs under those larger umbrellas that organize more niche and nuanced pursuits. Sablon added that “there might be sub-hub areas that we may expand towards, but that’s under discussion right now as we’re looking at future budgetary plans.”

In her view, multimodal sensing and multimodal perception are vital to DOD as it continues “to push forward across AI and autonomy.” Part of the challenge, though, is that it requires data collection and model development across specific — and typically siloed — domains.

“Considering the growing needs here, we’ve decided that these were the [three] areas where we could really have an impact,” Sablon said, by bringing together top techies from across the military to confront obstacles around how the military captures, organizes and shares data for AI.

“There’s a lot that can be done in improving just the data-labeling efficiency and quality — especially when we’re talking about sonar, like for underwater situational awareness. So, really targeting some of the gaps, but areas also where there are pockets of activities across the enterprise that can be brought together, can really again bolster our capability in that space, especially as we drive towards multimodal perception,” she told DefenseScoop.

‘By the spring we’ll be well on our way’

The DOD R&E directorate started forming these new AI hubs towards the end of fiscal year 2022, and is now in the process of deeply assessing the shared tools needed across all of the different topic areas. 

Simultaneously, Sablon said, they are also engaging closely with the CDAO to ensure there’s a clear grasp across components of what that data architecture to support collaboration needs to look like. 

“There’s a lot of work right now, ongoing, to just level-set capabilities across the hubs. And I anticipate by the spring we’ll be well on our way,” she said. “And in the meanwhile, the teams across the services are collaborating in this space more than we’ve ever seen before and really building upon similar or even previous research that’s been conducted elsewhere.” 

Officials involved have not yet determined which commercial cloud capabilities — if any — might be tapped to underpin this planned data-sharing and AI-enabling infrastructure. They’re evaluating a variety of relevant capabilities that DOD already has access to at this point, but Sablon didn’t delve into the possibility of solicitations associated with this work in the future.

Officials have ambitious goals for the artificial intelligence hubs.

“In the case of signal processing, what we want to ultimately have is the ability to show more of a common cross-service data generation,” as well as testing and evaluation tools with common data networks and “common data wrangling and labeling tools to be shared across the AI sonar efforts,” Sablon explained. 

The modeling and reasoning hub will pave the way for a “multi-service course of action, AI leaderboard,” to supply a common modeling picture that “can certainly encourage or support JADC2 interoperability,” she added — referring to the Pentagon’s ambitious plan for next generation Joint All-Domain Command and Control. 

“So, there will certainly be a transition of various Army and even Navy maneuver data to that common network and development environment there,” Sablon said. 

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Undersecretary of Defense for Research and Engineering Heidi Shyu unveiled her 14 highest-priority tech categories in February, as part of a broader vision to accelerate cutting-edge military assets. Those areas where the Defense Department is now sharply focusing its efforts and investments include: biotechnology; quantum science; future generation wireless technology; advanced materials; trusted artificial intelligence and autonomy; integrated network system-of-systems; microelectronics; space technology; renewable energy generation and storage; advanced computing and software; human-machine interfaces; directed energy; hypersonics and integrated sensing and cyber.

But the Pentagon is dependent on industry to help bring new capabilities to fruition.

“All these emerging technologies, though, can’t move forward if we can’t build it, we can’t buy it, we can’t use it. So, we care a lot about the technology industrial base. Understanding how we can invest in these emerging technologies and more rapidly move them forward into the industrial base is significantly important for us now and in the future,” the DOD’s Deputy Chief Technology Officer for Science and Technology Barbara McQuiston said Wednesday at a virtual event hosted by FCW. “To do that, we must be able to de-risk manufacturability — and in some cases scale up the manufacturing, or in other cases scale out what we need to do.”

McQuiston, who reports to Shyu, noted that she and her colleagues are funding studies and gathering information about “the health, maturity and stability of the defense industrial base” along all of those 14 critical technology areas.

While she didn’t provide much further details, McQuiston said these studies “highlight some of the needs for modern warfare” including hypersonics. Officials have already “looked at the industrial base challenges in engineering, manufacturing and testing,” she noted. 

In collaboration with partners at the National Defense Industry Association, the team has worked to identify and address risks, issues and opportunities to reduce the time and cost it takes for the military to field and mature advanced capabilities.

“Every time we remove a speed bump, the industrial base is stronger and resilient and can work more quickly,” McQuiston said.

The DOD has manufacturing innovation institutes that support this work. The hubs are designed to help overcome manufacturability challenges for specific technology ecosystems. McQuiston said each is like a little community made up of professionals from the government, universities, startups, larger companies and more. Since the institutes’ launch over the last decade, the Pentagon has created a network of more than 1,500 organizational partners and committed almost $1.2 billion to support the hubs, McQuiston said.

These institutes are “advancing research and development to promote American innovation,” growing the nation’s manufacturing pipeline for defense technologies, and providing education, workforce development and training in manufacturing realms where manufacturability gaps exist, she added.

In collaboration with Boeing, the manufacturing institute that focuses on hybrid electronics — NextFlex — assessed funding, skills and talent issues hindering the development of the workforce of the future.

“With public-private investment being able to move this forward, we were able to expand education in 14 states, 35 different community colleges, 43 industrial partners and 7,240 participants to date,” McQuiston said. “And we’re looking to expand that over the next few years.”

Officials from NextFlex additionally put together a physiological status-monitoring capability for detecting oxygen, volatile organics, and humidity levels to improve the health and safety of Air Force personnel in real-time.

“They actually looked at challenges for people that go into the fuel tanks to do repairs, so that they had continuous monitoring of their safety vitals as well as all the volatile materials that could be in the environment to make sure that people could be safe in the work that they have,” McQuiston said.

Another manufacturing innovation institute, which is focused on making integrated photonics — used for sensing or manipulating light — used Cares Act funding to develop an optical chip on a disposable card that could detect exposure for multiple viruses including COVID-19 within a minute, from a single drop of blood.

“AIM Photonics also established the first test-and-assembly packaging for state-of-the-art 3 millimeters-based silicon wafers to help reduce costs and accelerate the speed of development, again, to accelerate prototyping, and transition and be able to concentrate on some of the important manufacturability challenges,” McQuiston said.

An official with AIM Photonics later clarified to FedScoop that the test-and-assembly packaging is based on 300 millimeter silicon wafers.

She also noted the recent passage of the CHIPS and Science Act, which President Biden signed into law on Tuesday. Aimed at revitalizing domestic capabilities to produce microelectronics, the legislation provides a roughly $52 billion investment and incentives to boost semiconductor manufacturing in the U.S., particularly as the world grapples with a chips shortage exacerbated by the pandemic.

“It’s really key to everything around us and our day-to-day dependency,” McQuiston said.

Many provisions in the recently passed law are also aimed at bolstering the nation’s science and research infrastructure.

McQuiston noted that it includes a large investment in “a national research and development center, advanced packaging manufacturing program, and up to three manufacturing USA institutes for semiconductor-related manufacturing.”

The legislation also provides $2 billion over five years for microelectronics. Government officials intend for it to generate a new national network of onshore prototyping and laboratory-to-fabrication transitioning of semiconductor technologies — including those needed by the DOD.

“As we move these technologies forward, they can move our own mission forward,” McQuiston said.

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Defense Department platforms that underpin multi-domain operations rely on sensors that capture huge volumes of data about equipment and their operating environments. While edge computing solutions enable real-time sensor data processing near the source and the ability to generate insights from what’s captured at various connectivity levels, fog computing assets mediate between data and the cloud where it is processed for different purposes, like for data filtering or management. 

Both types of computing capabilities are of particular interest to the DOD — especially as the department moves to implement its nascent concept for Joint All-Domain Command and Control (JADC2), which aims to better connect the U.S. military’s sensors, shooters and networks to enable faster and more effective decision-making.

“The DOD needs transformational computing technologies to increase on-board data analytics, limit communications latency and cost, increase human situational awareness and enable adaptive decisions, and provide energy efficient computing and architectures for data collection and processing,” officials wrote in a recently published Fog and Edge Computing Needs Statement. “Additionally, the DOD needs collaborative computing and cutting-edge networking for fusion of multi-spatial, multi-signal, and multi-reports.”

This fall, the Undersecretary of Defense for Research and Engineering Capability Prototypes Office and Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL) Transformational Capabilities Office will jointly host a virtual meeting explicitly focused on fog and edge computing, officials announced in the document. Representatives from select companies will get a chance to make short technical presentations during that meeting to inform DOD officials about existing or in-development products that could bolster defense computing efforts or fill existing gaps. 

“There is a potential for companies to be selected for pilot projects or experimentation if their technology [matches] DOD’s needs,” according to the needs statement.

Businesses interested in participating in the meeting must submit applications digitally to the Pentagon by Aug. 10 for consideration.

In the needs statement, Defense officials offered details about the specific areas they are investigating to potentially apply fog and edge computing in new ways. 

They noted that fog and edge technologies present both “opportunities and challenges” to Human Computer Interface, a category of interest that focuses on the design of computer technology to facilitate interaction between computers and human users — in ways that result in enhanced performance. Officials are eyeing solutions that “sense and adapt” to users’ cognitive, physiological and physical states, tasks and local environments. Among other features, officials want to look into assets that can provide automatic and interpretable explanations of certain data.

Other capabilities highlighted in the needs statement include “energy efficient computing and architectures for data collection/processing,” and “collaborative computing, fusion and networking” that “focuses on combining signals, features, data, and information across the network to enable decision-making across all echelons at the speed of conflict.”

Additionally, officials want to explore advances in networking, approaches, equipment, artificial intelligence and machine learning to drive “sensing and sense-making at the edge.”

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Quantum information science (QIS) involves the investigation and application of bizarre phenomena that occur at atomic and subatomic levels to process and move information. Experts predict it will enable transformational science, engineering and communication applications in the future — like an unhackable internet, or GPS in remote environments.

The Defense Department has been pursuing QIS-aligned initiatives since at least the early 1990s, John Burke, principal director for quantum science in the Office of the Undersecretary of Defense for Research and Engineering, noted Thursday during the ExecutiveBiz Quantum Technologies Forum.

A lot of progress has been made, but in his view, there are many unknowns to tackle before a scalable quantum system can be fully realized.

While there is a great deal of hype surrounding the technology, many components that will make up the ultramodern systems are still in their infancy. Enabling quantum success will also rely a lot on public-private partnerships, as different hubs develop specialized platforms that may need to work together as the tech evolves. Burke pointed to uncertainties around funding both in the near term and down the line. 

“Today, it’s just my observation that a lot of the funding for quantum technology has been around a particular application and maybe a particular component for that application. There’s not much larger ecosystem related-funding — and I think that’s something that needs to change,” he said, adding, “even if quantum computing takes off as we all hope, it’ll still be a very low-volume demand compared to, say, consumer electronics. So, there’s always going to be a question mark.”

“I have more questions than I have answers,” he also noted.

One realm of QIS involves next-generation quantum computing. While classical computers are made up of basic units called bits that each represent a one or a zero, quantum computers would be based on quantum bits — or qubits —  which can exist in multiple states at any one given time.

Burke noted that, right now, the sharpest focus from the government and industry is on two types of quantum technologies.

“There’s sort of a set of qubits that require cryogenic dilution refrigerators, mostly — and microwave links, oftentimes, but not exclusively. There’s another set of devices and ideas that use photons as sort of carrier qubits and often require a vacuum, or a potentially ultra-high vacuum to operate,” he explained.

The Pentagon currently has a “little bias towards” photonic systems, Burke said, due partly to how they align better with quantum sensor-related efforts the department has been investing in over the years.

“You could debate about how many qubits we need for any particular application, but sources kind of point to 1 million to 10 million, or maybe even more qubits,” Burke said. He added that right now, the DOD is still “figuring things out like what is the layout of these, and how would you use a small number of qubits effectively?” 

Questions also remain around associated topics like thermal management to keep such systems cool, interconnecting complex networks, intellectual property, fabricating and scaling the many intricate system components — and more.

“In order to kind of realize all of these dreams, and especially on the photonics side of things, we need a lot of breakthroughs. We need breakthroughs in photonics and cryogenics, breakthroughs in dilution refrigerators and vacuum equipment, and all those things,” Burke said.

He and his colleagues are also “trying to figure out where utility might come from” once quantum machines are fully operational. Presently a lot is up in the air in terms of where QIS can offer the most advantages.

“There are heuristics out there that are, by their very nature, not predictable. We’ll have to build a computer to see how well that’ll turn out, I think. So, it could be that there’ll be a lot of applications that we just don’t have the capability to predict right now,” he noted.

“The good news is there are going to be breakthroughs, because a lot of really bright people are working on this,” he added. 

Burke said that, at DOD, his door is always open for recommendations on how to proceed with confronting these many unknowns. 

“If you have an idea — even if it’s not very good — that’s a starting point. So, all ideas are welcome,” he said.

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