On Dod

A little over three years ago, when the forerunner to what’s now called the Defense Innovation Unit was still in its infancy, one of the first projects the Pentagon asked its new Silicon Valley outpost to tackle was the emerging problem of threats from small drones. That’s partly because several well-funded startups had already started to emerge to help companies and other non-Defense customers, like stadium and critical infrastructure operators, deal with the problem of countering unmanned aerial systems (UAS). So DIU was tasked with trying to bring those commercial technologies into the Defense fold – exactly the sort of thing it was designed for. On this week's show, Lt. Col. David Willard, DIU's counter-UAS program manager joins us to talk about how things have progressed since 2016, up to the point where DoD now has five commercial companies on contract to build prototypes.