New science and innovation board comes as Pentagon cuts science research elsewhere

The Pentagon’s new science and innovation board, announced last week, merges the Defense Innovation Board with the Defense Science Board to “streamline” how the department addresses the hardest technological and scientific national security challenges. But it comes on the heels of cuts that could undermine future scientific and innovation progress for the Defense Department, creating new opportunities and new hurdles to long-standing Pentagon goals.

Streamlining is a persistent target for the Pentagon. But it’s one that it has had trouble achieving in previous years, according to GAO reports, lawmakers, and military leaders across administrations. It is one reason why the so-called “valley of death,” as in the chasm between a cutting-edge research program and an actual weapon getting into the hands of soldiers, remains a common complaint—and one of the key reasons the Defense Innovation Board was created in the first place.

The late former Defense Secretary Ash Carter established the Defense Innovation Board, a civilian body that has historically featured tech and finance leaders like Eric Schmidt, Michael Bloomberg, and Neil deGrasse Tyson, in 2016, to bring thought leadership from top business leaders into the Pentagon. The board produced a wide variety of key recommendations that the Pentagon later adopted, such as moving to large-scale enterprise cloud computing and adopting a long list of ethics principles for the development, testing, deployment, and operation of artificial intelligence across the military.

Read more at Defense One