Doug Beck, director of the Defense Innovation Unit, said the recent progress in two DIU-led projects indicates that the Department of Defense is making strides in tapping into the commercial technology sector for new capabilities, National Defense reported Tuesday.
The first of the two projects is the Lionfish small unmanned undersea vehicle systems being developed by HII under a $347 million production contract awarded in 2023.
Beck said the program marks the first time that the Navy transitioned from a prototype other transaction agreement contract to a production contract at scale, setting a “great example of working together as a service and then scaling.”
The program also resulted in the development of artificial intelligence tools designed to automate software updates for the Lionfish unmanned vessels.
According to Beck, the team “used a set of what in the commercial tech world are pretty standard machine learning ops tools, worked with five extremely innovative artificial intelligence startups … and brought that six months down to one to two weeks.”
Beck also highlighted the Tactical Hybridization Project, which aims to hybridize the U.S. military’s fleet of combat ground vehicles to reduce fuel consumption.
