Missing Synergy: How Defense, Commercial Sectors Can Benefit Each Other.

• Author: Acox, Pat

There are very few emerging dual-use technologies where the Defense Department and the commercial sector can not only equally benefit from cutting-edge research and development but do so simultaneously.

The commercial sector is outpacing defense in both scaling and internal R&D spending. Areas like hypersonics and autonomous vehicles have gained significant investment from the private sector yet are not ready for widespread commercial adoption.

However, the commercial production of these technologies is significantly more advanced than government-led science-and-technology projects. Never mind that the Defense Department is obligated by law to not build technologies that it can procure commercially.

In the ground autonomy market, funding for the entire industry is estimated to be more than $100 billion since 2010, significantly outpacing U.S. defense ground autonomy funding of roughly $3 billion by an order of magnitude. Yet despite the relatively limited budget--the department's investments over the next five years are focused on deploying 1,800 autonomous vehicles on a path to more than 40,000--resulting in cutting-edge technology making its way to warfighters on a massive scale.

This playbook should sound all too familiar. After all, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency and defense funding are why we have GPS, the internet and the computer mouse. Defense funds early investments--and eventually commercial companies invest and advance technology to improve lives, gain efficiencies and reduce cost. The fact is that ground autonomy should already be mentioned alongside GPS and the internet, but it's not. Why not?

One reason stems from the commercial sector no longer believing that defense dollars can help drive growth as they once did. The other relates to the department failing to make its projects more commercially attractive. For example, its method of acquiring commercial products and services is complicated. The department typically wants to adapt a commercial product into a military one, and commercial companies are reluctant to agree to intellectual property contractual clauses. The synergy that once was is now missing.

The Common Tactical Truck provides a useful case study for how commercial and defense sectors can reap the benefits of partnering with each other in ways not seen since the Pentagon's technological breakthroughs of the 1960s and 1970s.

The Army is asking for up to 30,000 trucks. That kind of scale is exactly...