Pentagon's CTO pursuing new legislation to bridge 'valley of death'

摘要

The Pentagon's chief technology officer is proposing multiple tranches of Small Business Innovation Research funding to bridge the dreaded valley of death. Heidi Shyu, under secretary for research and engineering, said Tuesday during a virtual Fed Supernova event she will be "requesting legislation on the Hill" to fund multiple phase two tranches of SBIR funding to continue to mature technologies "to basically pave over the valley of death" where promising technologies fail to shift from the lab into operations. "There's SBIR 1, which is usually $500,000, and SBIR 2 [which is] up to $1.5 million," Shyu said. "Usually what happens after that, unless a program office picks up, you fall into the valley of death." Shyu mentioned other priority areas, including the development of a trusted artificial intelligence/machine autonomy, resilient networks and operating at the intersection of signal intelligence, radar and electronic warfare capabilities. "They're all in different stovepipes," she said. "But we need to operate at the intersection of those capabilities to address the advanced threat. You don't have the time or the leisure to say, 'I detect a bad guy, then I'm going to track it and then I'm going to do something against it in terms of electronic warfare.' You've got to do it much quicker."