Despite SecDef pleas, Pentagon is losing the innovation war.

• Author: Erwin, Sandra I.
• Position: DEFENSE WATCH - Defense Secretary Robert Gates

* Defense Secretary Robert Gates briefly grabbed the headlines last month when he challenged the Pentagon to "find more innovative and bold ways to help those whose lives are on the line."

He might just as well have asked for the moon.

For reasons that are hard to comprehend, these happen to be really tough times for technological innovation at the Defense Department. Even the Pentagon's own contractors worry that the military is being sidelined from the technology boom that is benefiting so many other sectors of the economy.

Critics are quick to blame a plodding bureaucracy for creating a culture that does not reward smart business decisions. Defense officials also have found fault with the Pentagon's byzantine accounting regulations, which deter commercial firms from bidding on military contracts because they do not want to turn over their sensitive pricing data to the government.

The litany of excuses for why the Pentagon can't gain access to the most innovative technologies is vast. But it still does not explain why the military is being left behind by the innovation train.

"There's no single evil here. There's a whole bunch of things," says Steven D. Roemerman, CEO of Lone Star Aerospace, of Dallas. The company does financial analysis and benchmarking for the Defense Department and other agencies.

"The Department of Defense product development community is becoming increasingly disconnected from mainstream technology," Roemerman tells an industry conference in Springfield, Va. "As an industry, we have stopped driving technology advances. We had hoped to become more connected to commercial technology, but the data suggest that we are becoming less connected."

This is bad news for a military that, by its own accounts, is facing "thinking enemies" that rapidly turn store-purchased items into successful tools of war. U.S. commanders have been vocal about their difficulties in staying ahead of the enemy's innovation cycle. But they don't seem to be getting much help.

The Defense Department, despite Gates' pleadings, remains quite comfortable with its traditional ways of doing business. The cutting edge technologies that are now being pursued--such as the Future Combat Systems, the Joint Tactical Radio System and the Transformational Communications Satellite--are programs with estimated cycles of 15 to 20 years. By the time these programs reach completion, commercial technologies will have turned over more than 10 times.

"Aerospace and...