Pentagon R&E Chief Focuses on Hiring High-Quality Talent

Defense Undersecretary Heidi Shyu, who leads the Pentagon’s research and engineering arm, said her current priority is on becoming more mission-focused, leveraging people and teamwork to maintain America’s technological edge. She has established a policy of trying to put to good use the “incredible amount of technology innovation that is across the nation” to be able to solve difficult operational challenges, the Department of Defense said Friday.

Shyu said that under her leadership, the DOD’s R&D arm has taken a human resource management approach to keep the United States’ technological superiority. “We have to attract talent,” she said about her plans of building the future technical workforce.

Speaking before the defense press on Thursday, Shyu, said that complementing the hiring of a highly capable workforce, the DOD must also build laboratories, test areas, facilities and infrastructure needed to enable their work.

Shyu, like other DOD technology chiefs, wants the department to leap across its so-called “valley of death,” which is the gap between capability development and its addition to a program. She noted that the gap is still an issue and she is hoping that outreach will allow that to happen.

Recently, the undersecretary said that she has been actively engaging small companies, where the valley of death phenomenon is prevalent. She revealed that she has been holding roundtables with the companies in an effort to learn what is holding them back.

Shyu noted that the problem seems to emanate partially from gaps in payment strategies and vowed to devise a way to harness venture capital funds to help spur innovation.