Michael Brown, former director of the Defense Innovation Unit, and Lorin Selby, a retired U.S. Navy rear admiral, said the U.S. should implement a hedge strategy to advance the development and procurement of small, unmanned and smarter weapons systems, enhance the capability of the Joint Force in the next four years and deter China’s potential military action in the Indo-Pacific region.
“The hedge strategy should leverage emerging technologies with an emphasis on adopting these technologies at scale within the next three years,” Brown, who is now a partner at Shield Capital, and Selby, former chief of naval research, wrote in a commentary published Thursday in War on the Rocks, a Texas National Security Review publication.
In this piece, they discussed the four elements of the strategy, including the integration of a multiplicity of small and low-cost, smarter, unmanned systems and adoption of commercial platforms with a sense of urgency.
Selby and Brown offered five recommendations for the hedge strategy’s implementation and the first calls for Congress to create an undersecretary of defense for innovation and commercial technology who will serve as the chief innovation officer at the Department of Defense.
“Second, the department should name organizational homes for these commercial technologies to focus building centers of expertise for assessing these technologies, assign an ongoing budget, better signal demand to private industry, and avoid duplication across the department,” the former DOD officials wrote.
They also called on DOD to “embody a commercially oriented acquisition process that maximizes competition and operates at commercial speed and with commercial terms” and keep pace with commercial product cycles by ensuring a sustained budget for commercial platforms in a “capability of record.”
