WASHINGTON— As commercial and small technology firms move ever faster to develop next-generation software, communications and hardware solutions to push into a tech-hungry marketplace, governments find themselves struggling to keep pace.

The issue was highlighted earlier this month when an inebriated government employee inadvertently crashed a small, commercially available drone onto the White House grounds, calling into question the ability of the Secret Service to protect the president and his family against such small — but real — threats.

While the White House issue makes a good punchline, government officials are worried, and they say that they're trying to reach out to the commercial tech sector to do something about it.

"The explosion of research and development in the non-defense sector means DoD must devise new means of pulling in commercial technology," Deputy Defense Secretary of defense Bob Work told a Center for a New American Security conference in Washington on Jan. 28.

This all falls in line with Work's so-called "third offset" strategy that is taking its place alongside other urgent reform initiatives percolating in the Pentagon, including "Better Buying Power 3.0," a plan by the Pentagon's chief weapons buyer, Frank Kendall, 's"Better Buying Power 3.0" plan that in part pushes for more commercial and dual-use technologies in DoD weapon competitions.

The two projects themselves fall broadly under the Defense Innovation Initiative, which that is urging pushing the building to revamp its entire training, education, development and acquisition enterprise in order to stay ahead of the advances being made by peer competitors like China and Russia, while also holding the line against in countering the vast amounts of advanced commercial technologies now available to non-state actors for little cost.

Seated alongside Work at the CNAS event, Gen. Jean-Paul Paloméros, NATO's Supreme Allied Commander Transformation, agreed that the alliance "can no longer contend that we maintain the advantage" in the realm of cyber or even some forms of tactical communication or the exploitation of and exploiting social media for tactically relevant information.

Speaking across town on Jan. 28 at a special operations conference, Matthew Freedman, senior adviser at the Defense Intelligence Agency, said that while the exploitation of social media is something that needs to be studied, the US military "needs to rethink its acquisition strategy from requirement of things to an acquisition of capabilities" when it comes to other communications and surveillance technologies.

He said that this doesn't shouldn't mean the Pentagon should fall back on doing what it has always done: launching a slew of expensive and time-consuming programs to develop new technologies out of whole cloth.

"Sometimes allocating resources means retrofitting existing systems at much lower costs instead of building new systems," he said.

Except for Outside of several wartime rapid acquisition programs that some in the Pentagon are fighting to keep as a be made a more permanent part of the building's bureaucratic infrastructure, the DoD's acquisition system isn't built for speed. Freedman said that a different model needs to take hold, since "sometimes we need to get software developments to the war fighters within 90 days," and the system as its currently structured just can't handle that.

Robert Newberry, director of the Combating Terrorism Technical Support Office, added that targeting terrorists via social media is an area in which where the US intelligence agencies — and especially the military — is still struggling. with. "We're studying it to death," he said, "but I'm not sure coming up with any grand solutions."

These issues are no less prevalent with larger, more traditional systems, many of which, like the US Air Force's fighter and bomber fleets, have been in the inventory since the 1980s or earlier.

"We came out of the Cold War with a very dominant military," the Pentagon's chief weapons buyer Frank Kendall told the House Armed Services Committee on Jan. 28. "And no one observed more carefully the dominance we displayed in 1991 more closely than the Chinese."

As such, the Beijing government, among others, has been busily developing a suite of capabilities that are quite explicitly intended "to defeat the American way of doing power projection [and the] American way of warfare when we fight in an expeditionary manner far from the United States."

Testifying with Kendall was Lt. Gen. Mark Ramsay, the Joint Staff director for fForce sStructure, rResources and aAssessment, who promised the House committee that "we're looking at the whole soup and nuts" of the rapid advancements being made by potential US foes, and how best to offset them.

In particular when it comes to US expeditionary operations, Pentagon planners are concerned about the strength and security of their communications and satellite backbone. And there, the military expects to lean on private industry even more in the future.

"The big issue is there's certain things we have to do that are very protected, very secure, that may not have the bandwidth commercial satellites do," Ramsay said. "But we really are very much wedded to the commercial backbone, and I do see that increasing over time. But it's finding that right balance in the future."

Email: pmcleary@defensenews.com.

Twitter: @paulmcleary

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