WASHINGTON — Secretary of Defense Ash Carter will travel to the Boston area Tuesday to formally open the east coast outpost of his Defense Innovation Unit Experimental (DIUx) program.
It is an important step for DIUx as it tries to move past a rocky start and establish itself as part of the Pentagon's structure before Carter leaves office.
DIUx was announced in May of 2015 with the goal of bridging the gap between the Pentagon and Silicon Valley. Based at Moffett Field just outside the valley, that office opened for business in August.
The group seemed to struggle out of the gate, however, with complaints from industry that it was moving too slowly and internal resistance from inside the Pentagon handicapping it.
Carter tacitly acknowledged those issues on May 11, when he relaunched the DIUx initiative, replacing director George Duchak with Raj Shah, a former F-16 pilot and special assistant in the Office of the Secretary of Defense. At that time, they also announced plans to expand into the Boston market.
However, the most important move Carter made in May was announcing that the entire DIUx program would become a direct report to his office. Analysts warn that while this may have short-term gains and help the initiative skip past internal roadblocks inside the Pentagon, it also means that the office is endangered once Carter leaves office under a new administration.
The Boston visit is the first in a three-part trip that will also see Carter stop at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, and to Naval Station Great Lakes in Illinois.
Ben FitzGerald, an analyst with the Center for a New American Security who has studied the DIUx program over the last year, believes the opening of a Boston office is a good idea, both for the technologies it can draw on and for optics.
Optics wise, "it's worth having a Boston location to avoid overemphasis on Silicon Valley," FitzGerald said. "If you only have one location, people will say you're only focused on that one location. Now you can say: 'No, were focused on startups, writ large.' "
In terms of technology, Boston's startup hub — which is largely based in neighboring Cambridge, home to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Harvard University — features a slightly different focus from Silicon Valley, with FitzGerald highlighting the robotics and biotech space as obvious fits for the Pentagon.
Email: amehta@defensenews.com
Twitter: @AaronMehta
Aaron Mehta was deputy editor and senior Pentagon correspondent for Defense News, covering policy, strategy and acquisition at the highest levels of the Defense Department and its international partners.
