AUSTIN, Texas – Much like a school kid having too much fun on a playground to head home, Defense Secretary Ash Carter didn’t want to leave the visualization lab at University of Texas at Austin.
One wall of the dimly lit Texas Advanced Computing Center and Visualization Lab was covered in nearly 80 computer screens showing vivid depictions of data ranging from the aftershocks of earthquakes in the Pacific to how pandemic diseases spread to what the impact of a hurricane would be on the Texas coast.
“I’m just having fun here,” Carter told the aide who said it was time to leave.
During his one-day trip to Austin on Thursday, Carter, who has a doctorate in theoretical physics, saw new technology that could help the Defense Department, from exoskeletons designed to help in rehabilitation at a robotics lab at the University of Texas Austin to rockets that can cheaply send small satellites into space.
After taking it all in, Carter promised to make Austin a centerpiece of his broader strategy to make the Pentagon more flexible and innovative to work better with the private sector.
“We are going to increase the presence here in Austin. I don’t know what form that’ll take because we’re experimenting,” Carter told press at the Capital Factory, a start up incubator.
Asked if he’d be open to creating an innovation hub in Austin like the one in California, Carter said he would consider it.
The secretary’s trip to Austin follows several over the past year to Silicon Valley, where he also pitched innovators on working with a federal bureaucracy that is sometimes too cumbersome to be attractive to fast-moving start ups.
“We’re willing to do things differently and change the way the government operates so it can connect more smoothly to innovators,” he said at Capital Factory.
Carter said the Pentagon’s “Hack the Pentagon” initiative shows that the department is willing to adapt. The 20-day pilot program, which allows hackers to search out security vulnerabilities in the department’s public websites, is the first of its kind in the federal government.
The secretary also participated in “Shark Tank”-like sessions where three start-ups pitched how their ideas could help the Defense Department. One was Tom Marcusik from Firefly, an Austin-based tech company launching small satellites more cheaply into space.
This technology won’t wean the U.S. off the Russian-made rocket engines it currently uses since those are still needed to launch larger satellites, Carter said. But the technology could give the military the opportunity to do more launches if they can be done more economically.
Some defense operations that use small satellites include communications and surveillance, Carter said.
While Firefly could present some exciting opportunities for the Defense Department, it also represents one of the military’s greatest challenges.
“I have mixed feelings about you guys for the following reason: you’re taking our people,” Carter told Marcusik.
Asked why the best and brightest in science and technology aren’t flocking to the military, Carter said “what they lack isn’t interest, it’s familiarity.”
To counteract the bleeding of talent into the private sector, Carter is traveling around the country to make innovators more familiar with the Pentagon and its mission. During visits to hotbeds of technological advancements, he has urged them to look for careers in public service to be a part of something larger than themselves, a message he reiterated to more than 250 University of Texas at Austin students and ROTC cadets.
“I hope you ask yourself, ‘What can I do?'” Carter said about students’ reactions following last week’s attacks in Brussels.
Even as he travels to connect with start ups and other small companies that would not be traditional Pentagon partners, Carter stressed that the department’s relationship with defense giants like Boeing or Northrop Grumman are crucial to the military’s success too.
“This isn’t a trade off between one and the other,” he said.
