The Pentagon, the headquarters of the U.S. Department of Defense is looking forward to collaborating with the tech pioneer Silicon Valley to develop new weaponry. The move is considered as an attempt to keep up with the military advancements of China.
China has succeeded in the experiments that the nation’s military conducted on small drones to hypersonic missiles which makes the U.S. enter a race to gain back its leadership in the global weapon force and ammunition.
Steve Blank, co-founder of the Gordian Knot Center for National Security Innovation at Stanford University, said that China was organized like Silicon Valley and the Pentagon was organized more like a Detroit automaker which was not a fair fight.
The Biden administration has recently made a request for 115 million US dollars to fund the Office of Strategic Capital, a new Pentagon unit particularly focusing on venture capital (VC) firms, and tech products that have a crucial part in the progress of the military. Currently, the government is spending 6 billion US dollars per year on the defense and airspace industry.
Mike Brown, the former Director of the Pentagon at its Defense Innovation Unit said that the entire military production would have been at risk if the government had not stepped in. He added that it would have definitely created immediate problems in the current supply chain which would have led to the suppliers of the classified programs could have been imperiled.
Bill LaPlante, the Acquisition Chief at the Pentagon USA criticized the traditional defense manufacturers for lagging the production.
He also questioned Silicon Valley area startups, about the relevance of technologies such as artificial intelligence and quantum computing in the midst of an international war happening in Europe Europe. He complained that the tech pros were not helping the nation in the Ukraine crisis.
About the crisis, he said that he was actually referring to the kind of aspirational, often elusive tech capabilities that would not be ready in time to cause an impact on the battlefield in Ukraine.
Nicolas Chaillan, who was the first Chief Software Engineer of the U.S. Air Force resigned from his position in 2021, just after three years after taking office.
At that time he had said that the U.S. has no competing fighting chance against China for about 15 to 20 years, coming ahead. He added that China already has progressed in the field with superior A.I. and cyber capabilities.
Earlier in 2021, Lloyd Austin, the U.S. Defense Secretary had quoted that the U.S. military urgently needs to develop new A.I. technologies and had announced an investment of 1.5 billion US dollars in A.I. research for the next five years.
Experts of a federal-level research firm had mentioned the U.S. will need to act fast if the goal was to keep pace with the tech advancements and weaponry growth on China’s part. They viewed that, currently, the U.S., is slowly following a path that has to be accelerated.
The experts highlighted a 2021 investigation report that suggested that the nation will have to find and invest more than 1.6 million US dollars into the military, per year, exclusively focused on the introduction and utilization of A.I. systems and equipment.
Eric Schmidt, the former CEO of Google had already condemned the military and the government saying that it was taking too much time to adapt to the new-age technologies and this action has been in turn making the army lag behind other nations.
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He described the army as great human beings inside a bad system and that it had always acted slowly when it was about the introduction of new technologies.
Jonathan Cheng, the China Bureau Chief of The Wall Street Journal tweeted on his official Twitter account that the Pentagon was seeking to enlist Silicon Valley startups in its effort to fund and develop new weapons and more nimble suppliers.
He added that this was considered part of the race of the U.S. to keep up with the military advances of China.
The officials at Pentagon are also enquiring about the reason that led to the Boeing Co. employees having to work on the present and upcoming Air Force One planes.
What triggered the agency is the fact that the employees of the airline were assigned duties without making them undergo security credentials required for jets in the highly classified category.
Let’s have a look at what the experts have to say about the collaboration of the Pentagon USA and Silicon Valley.
A few of the experts viewed that the collaboration has the potential to make the U.S. army superior to others and will make it invincible.
While some of the others contradicted that even though both platforms were incredibly powerful the successor of the collaboration can’t be promised. The root cause of such an opinion was the observation that Silicon Valley was a globalization phenomenon, meanwhile the U.S. Defense R&D was not.
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