Defense Secretary Ash Carter, known for sometimes awkwardly “er-ing” and “um-ing” through his public appearances, is in his comfort zone.
He’s in Seattle, at a breakfast hosted by Microsoft, and he’s well into his sales pitch that the tech community needs to enlist in the war on the Islamic State. This is especially true in the realm of cyber warfare, where the U.S. seems always to be playing catch-up.
“Helping to defend your country and make a better world is one of the noblest things that you can spend your time doing,” says Carter, concluding his prepared remarks during the early March trip.
It’s Carter’s third trip to the heart of the tech world as defense secretary, a destination he seems to find more intriguing and more inviting than overseas war zones. For him, Silicon Valley offers innovative solutions to the myriad of problems he wants to solve, from tech innovation to how to treat employees.
Critics, however, say Carter is wasting money on fringe issues when he should be focused on bigger problems overseas, such as Islamic State’s battlefield gains, and ramped-up aggression from Moscow and Beijing.
One of Carter’s goals, he says, is to make the Pentagon an easier entity for the private sector to work with.
“It can be difficult to work for the government as a company, because we can be clunky and we can be bureaucratic and so forth, and we need to get better at that.”
Carter says he’s intent on removing obstacles to working with the Pentagon, and announced during his West Coast jaunt that a new Defense Innovation Board, to be headed by Alphabet’s executive chairman, Eric Schmidt, will help match tech companies with appropriate defense projects, and help the Pentagon, in Carter’s words, “think outside of our five-sided box.”
At every stop on his Silicon Valley tour, Carter made a point of introducing Chris Lynch, head of the newly created Defense Digital Service. Carter describes Lynch as a serial entrepreneur, who has worked, among other places, at Microsoft.
“He’s the only guy in a hoodie in the Pentagon every day,” Carter said as he asked Lynch to stand up at one event.
Lynch’s Pentagon office is described as an island of innovation, with bubble chairs and write-on wall coverings. Standard fare in Silicon Valley, but not in the spit-and-polish hallways of the Pentagon, where the office culture favors traditional mahogany and I-love-me walls.
“When I first saw him come into a meeting, I thought he was there to take out the trash,” one senior Pentagon official confided.
But Carter credits Lynch with cutting red tape, and helping to solve complex problems, such as improving data sharing between the Pentagon and the Veterans Affairs Department to help veterans get easier access to benefits.
And Lynch’s latest project, imported from the private sector, is a “Hack the Pentagon” initiative, which would pay a cash bounty to so-called white hat hackers who can find a way to get past security on a secure, but nonsecret, Defense Department website.
“They do it for free, they do for sport, they do it for the distinction of having done it. I hope they don’t succeed, but if they succeed, we’ll learn something,” Carter said in Seattle.
Carter’s fascination, some say fixation, with the tech sector is part of his larger “Force of the Future” initiative. It’s designed to attract and retain younger workers to military and civilian jobs with benefits and working conditions more in line with Silicon Valley.
The plans including new maternity and paternity leave policies, lactation rooms on military bases, and even a pilot program to cover the cost of freezing sperm or eggs for active-duty troops.
These reforms are “solutions in search of a problem,” and “an outrageous waste of official time and resources during a period of severe fiscal constraints,” according to Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz.
At last month’s Senate confirmation hearing for Brad Carson, the nominee for undersecretary of defense for personnel and readiness, McCain blasted the Carter initiative as illustrative of a bloated and inefficient Pentagon.
“I find it deeply disturbing that you are proposing to add expensive fringe benefits allegedly aimed at retention, during a time when we’re asking 3,000 excellent Army captains to leave the service, who would have otherwise chosen to remain on active duty,” McCain fumed.
There is some low-level grumbling at the Pentagon as well. Some think Carter, a relative short-timer, whose tenure will likely end in January when a new president takes office, is just auditioning for his next job.
Others question whether devoting an entire new department to helping tech companies do business with the Pentagon is more sizzle than steak.
“It’s not like we need another office to help the private sector get more money from the Pentagon,” said one military officer. “They’re pretty good at that already.”
