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| A display showing Altius drones, made by Anduril Industries, at a military convention in National Harbor, Md., last month. New advances in autopilot technology helped inspire a flood of American start-ups.Jason Andrew for The New York Times |
Capella Space, a San Francisco-based start-up, is building a fleet of small, inexpensive satellites that can track enemy troops. Fortem Technologies, a small aerospace company in Utah, wants to supply the Pentagon with a new type of unmanned aircraft that can disable enemy drones. HawkEye 360, a Virginia-based firm, has used private equity funds to launch its own satellites that use radio waves emitted by communications equipment and other electronic devices to detect the presence of enemy troop concentrations. These systems are getting real-world testing in the war in Ukraine, earning praise from top government officials there and validating investors who have been pouring money into the field. However, the Pentagon’s slow-moving, risk-averse military procurement bureaucracy poses a challenge for these start-ups.
The Pentagon has provided small grants and short-term contracts to many start-ups, but those agreements often expire too quickly and are not large enough for young companies to meet their payrolls or grow as rapidly as their venture capital investors expect. As the United States seeks to maintain its national security advantage over China, Russia and other rivals, Industry executives refer to their situation as the “Valley of Death,” where the slow pace of government contracting can lead to them bleed out their funding while they await decisions. One San Francisco-based start-up, Primer Technologies, has struggled to stay afloat as it has waited for major defense contracts. Pentagon officials in charge of buying have also been trained to avoid risk, which is not a good match for technology companies that thrive on innovation, speed and constantly upgrading their products. The war in Ukraine is still largely being fought with 20th-century weapons, but commercial technology has changed the battlefield in important ways, particularly the commercial satellite tools that have given Ukraine much greater surveillance capacity.
For the Pentagon, the task of picking from among emerging companies is complicated by the tendency of certain start-ups to exaggerate the capacity of their technologies and the differing approaches companies take to addressing a military need. Whitney McNamara, a former Pentagon science adviser, suggests picking winners, backing them meaningfully and seeing what they can deliver. SpaceX’s Starlink, the Elon Musk-founded satellite internet service, has been a critical role for frontline Ukrainian troops. Small drones and a denser collection of satellites are also helping to provide the capacity for pervasive surveillance, allowing Ukraine to identify and track threats and targets constantly. A new generation of cheaper and more precise attack drones carrying bombs can loiter in the air autonomously until they find their targets, and artificial intelligence-backed computer systems can fuse this collected data and other feeds to make targeting decisions faster than any human.
The Ukrainians have also innovated a great deal themselves, impressing Pentagon officials as they have converted commercial drones, for example, into mini bombers. These developments represent a “genuine military revolution,” and one that is happening much more quickly than the shift from infantry that traveled by foot in World War I to the motorized and mechanized armies of World War II. A montage of video clips show off a series of successful intercepts by a new type of war-fighting tool: an unmanned vehicle that lifts off when an enemy drone is detected, tracks the incoming weapon.
American-based technology is arriving in Ukraine through a variety of arrangements, including donations, direct acquisition by the Ukrainian government or groups that support it, or purchases by the United States government. The most conventional of these devices are commercial satellites that deliver traditional photographic images of Russian war-fighting equipment and troops. Private-sector players like Capella started to launch smaller, cheaper and faster-to-build units, offering more frequent coverage of the world than even the U.S. government can provide. Small drones manufactured by a growing list of United States-based companies are helping provide Ukraine so-called persistent surveillance needed to identify and track targets and refugee movement, as well as other threats. The U.S. government has had its own much larger attack drones used widely in Iraq and Afghanistan, but the new-generation drones are much smaller, cheaper and easier to build, and could give the military new battlefield options.
Wahid Nawabi, the chief executive at California-based AeroVironment, which makes the Switchblade 300 and 600 attack drones, said the military is moving toward using swarms of small drones in attacks, with perhaps 50 or even several hundred of The American-based military technology companies, such as Dedrone of Virginia and SkySafe of California, have sent products to Ukraine that allow the government there to track incoming enemy drones. The most revolutionary use of American technology in Ukraine has been the application of software that uses artificial intelligence, made by Palantir, to help with targeting efforts. Some experts say that artificial intelligence, which has been used in Ukraine to help sift through the massive loads of data being accumulated from surveillance, will ultimately prove as disruptive to the nature of war-fighting as nuclear weapons. Primer, the small artificial-intelligence firm based in downtown San Francisco, was a breakthrough moment when it used advanced software to clean up the crackly sound, automatically translated the conversations, and isolated moments when Russian soldiers in Ukraine were discussing weapons systems, locations and other tactically important information. The most important details in this text are that Primer, a technology-oriented company, has been able to identify relevant clues in the mass of radio traffic in a matter of minutes, and that the Pentagon is still deciding when to move ahead with major purchases of its technology.
Additionally, Capella Space has raised $250 million in venture capital funds and has used part of that money to launch 10 of its small satellites. The Pentagon has notified Capella that it will continue to purchase services as part of a demonstration project, but it will not likely be ready to give it a full “program of record” contract until 2025. Additionally, Capella Space has recently moved to lay off some employees while waiting for a decision by the Pentagon.
Mr. Roper, the former Air Force procurement boss, said another problem is the Defense Department’s historical insistence on creating its own solutions to problems instead of buying new technologies from commercial firms. He noted that artificial intelligence, for example, still has not been integrated into Air Force flight operations beyond some basic experiments.
“The Pentagon is still in an ‘invention only’ mode that goes all the way back to the Cold War when it now needs to be in a collaboration mode to accelerate private industry,” Mr. Roper said. “And it is failing at that.”
There are some success stories.
The Defense Innovation Unit created a program that evaluated various surveillance drones coming onto the market and set up a contracting tool that allows Pentagon agencies to buy them directly, without a multiyear acquisition process. Mr. Austin, the defense secretary, recently announced that the Defense Innovation Unit will report directly to him, supervised by a new recruit from Apple.
Skydio, one of the companies approved through the program, is now selling a drone that uses artificial intelligence that allows it to be flown remotely while avoiding crashes even if it is being operated by a novice pilot. The A.I.-enhanced drone can fly indoors in very tight spaces, allowing it to look inside a building, for example, before troops might be sent in.
But for each success, there are many other tech start-ups struggling to pay bills as they wait for the Pentagon to make a purchase decision.
“We’re absolutely trying to tackle a lot of these acquisition pain points,” said Ms. Shyu, the Pentagon’s under secretary for research and engineering and chief technology officer. “I’m working on bridging the Valley of Death.
This article is originally published in nytimes.com under the Russia-Ukraine War updates
