Pentagon’s special ops office hosts first Shark Tank-style Accelerator Event

WASHINGTON — Select members of industry gathered on Friday in a scenic conference venue overlooking the Potomac River and the Washington skyline to pitch capabilities in a Shark Tank-type exercise to solve some of the toughest problems for the special operations world.

The first-ever Accelerator Event, sponsored by the office of the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Special Operations and Low-Intensity Conflict (SO/LIC), billed itself as “a different kind of industry day,” according to SO/LIC Assistant Secretary Derrick Anderson.

“It’s the direct manifestation of acquisition reform and our priority of pioneering for SOF and serving as a pathfinder for the department,” Anderson said in opening remarks to attendees. “Advances in technology reinforce the simple, hard truth: The time for action is now. We cannot afford to wait. We cannot afford to let legacy bureaucratic acquisition process dictate our readiness.”

Officials explained that, like with accelerators elsewhere in the Pentagon, the goal is to break down the bureaucratic barriers that are often derided in the acquisition world, seeking to prove that the acquisition system doesn’t have to take 10-plus years to deliver what SOF operators need today.

“We have to break away from the tradition of grading our success on our ability to follow a process that we created and to grading our success on the outcomes that we generate,” Cara Teeter, deputy assistant secretary of Defense for Special Operations Analysis, Resources, and Capabilities, told attendees.

SO/LIC officials said they solicited responses from industry for problems drawn directly from operational commands, like the need for surveillance payloads on Group 3 medium-sized drones or beyond-line-of-site comms that don’t use low Earth orbit satellites. They whittled down around 700 proposals to 15 capabilities to pitch their solutions in Shark-Tank like presentations. (Reporters were not allowed to stay to see the pitches.)

“We talk a lot from the Pentagon saying we need to be better partners, we need to be better customers, we need to be better collaborators with industry, yet we go lock ourselves in the Pentagon. So the point of this was to iterate more,” Anderson told reporters. “The idea was to be more face to face with industry, so that it’s not once a year we have a touch point with senior leaders that see the cool idea that could potentially be obsolete within six months.”

One of the key differentiators here, according to officials, is it is a live, challenge based event with the potential for on the spot contract awards.

“The piece of paper that the companies, if they are selected today as winning this challenge, they can invoice against that tomorrow. That is a legitimate, it is not a dressed up fake check and all this. This is the contracting folks on site creating the actual legal no crap document right there,” Teeter told reporters.

The accelerator can also be a pathfinder for the broader military, helping to identify technologies that can be adopted by other organizations.

“This is the beginning of an enduring, rapid, on-ramp into the defense innovation ecosystem. If we can prove today that we can rapidly resource, integrate, and scale technologies to solve these nine operational challenge areas, we are establishing a new blueprint that the Army, Navy, Air Force, and Marine Corps can readily adopt,” Anderson said.