DoD R&E chief says Pentagon will trim ‘critical technology’ list

WASHINGTON — The Defense Department is planning to cut its number of “critical technology” areas down from its current list of more than a dozen, Emil Michael, the Pentagon’s undersecretary for research and engineering, said today. 

“The critical technology areas that my component has published, historically, are statements to the world of what we think the most important things are. And so when you have a situation where everyone who comes to this job and just adds more, but they don’t take away, well, then the criticality gets diluted,” Michael told reporters today at the NDIA Emerging Technologies Conference.

Heidi Shyu, who held Michael’s position during the Biden administration, established the 14 critical technology areas in 2023 — ranging from artificial intelligence and quantum to biotechnology and advanced materials — each led by a “Principal Director.” Michael said the department plans to lower this number, although he did not disclose by how much.

When asked if artificial intelligence, directed energy and hypersonics will still be a part of the list, Michael said “those are a few of them” that will stay, but said to “stay tuned” as his office will have “some more news to make on that in a month.”  

“So the idea is to concentrate back to a number that we really believe is critical. That doesn’t mean the things that are not on that list are not important and are not going to have effort and budget behind that. It just means this is actually important. So it’s a pyramid hierarchy, if you will. These are the most important things I need people to wake up every day thinking about,” he said. 

Of all the technology areas, Michael said, AI is the “biggest opportunity that DoD has to embrace going forward.” 

“You all have ChatGPT or Grok on your phones,” he told the assembled reporters (incorrectly, at least in one reporter’s case). “You learn how to use them for more and more use cases. Now imagine that, times 3 million [DoD military and civilian] employees, times an industrial base that includes 10 million workers in some way or form.” 

Michael also rebutted concerns related to moving the Pentagon’s Chief Digital & AI Office (CDAO) under his perview at R&E, rather than the CDAO directly reporting to the deputy secretary of defense as had been the case until earlier this month. As Breaking Defense has reported, some critics viewed the move as an effective demotion AI.

“Having it be part of R&E means that it’s part of a larger organization that, hopefully, has the muscle and the wherewithal to further develop it and do bigger partnerships, if we need to, with the outside AI LLM [large language models] providers,” said Michael, who as of Monday is also dual-hatted as the acting director of the Defense Innovation Unit. (He told reporters that he plans to exit this role as soon as a replacement is found.)

As for directed energy weapons and hypersonics, Michael said they are “very important technologies that haven’t been scaled yet.” He argued that such capabilities create more opportunities for cost effectiveness, especially when it comes to the air defense mission.

“Are we going to do it cheaply with a directed energy sort of weapon approach? Or are we going to do it with the expensiveness that’ll cost $30 million? We want the cost disadvantage out, like when we have to take an irregular army like the Houthis, we want to take that out. I think that provides both a deterrent effect and just a cost effective sort of defense mechanism,” Michael said.

Further, Michael said he wants to leverage relationships with industry to get tech like AI, hypersonics and directed energy into the hands of warfighters at speed and scale. Having spent years in Silicon Valley while he was an executive with Uber and other companies, Michael said he plans to use this experience to strengthen the defense industrial base. 

“We need more companies, providing more products, hiring more technicians so that we can surge capacity for when we need it. Part of that is, if we have assets in the department that could benefit that and speed that process up, we should try to surface those assets out there,” he said. 

Michael said he’s working to get more suppliers into more steps of the defense supply chain to increase “not only competition” but add capacity.

“There really is a defense industrial base centered problem in that when you’re trying to produce systems, software systems, or hardware systems, particularly hardware systems, you have components that come from all parts of the supply chain to get to the end producer that puts all these together,” he said.

This linkage to the private sector is also critical to DoD’s approach to AI, Michael emphasized. “It’s really trying to use the latent capability that’s primarily been invested in by the private industry,” he said. “They’re putting $2-300 billion per year into AI, whether it be software development, data centers, and so on. So as the DoD, [let’s] leverage that for an endless list of use cases.”