Secretary of State Visits DIU for Tour, Roundtable Discussion

Mountain View, CA – January 15, 2020

Secretary Pompeo and his team visited the Defense Innovation Unit (DIU) today for a tour of the facility, followed by a roundtable discussion with company executives and venture capitalists. The visit focused on DIU’s mission of ensuring rapid adoption of commercial technology as one of the DoD tools to address what China and its civil-military fusion strategy.

Secretary Pompeo’s tour of DIU highlighted current projects in autonomy, space, and dual-use hardware, including:

• Current prototyped sUAS hardware
• Peacetime indications and warning project
• Dual-use hardware with defense applications

Secretary Pompeo opened the roundtable discussion by noting the unfair practices pursued by the CCP and stated that he was in Silicon Valley to understand the state of U.S. technology relative to China and how the U.S. government can better support innovation.

Hardware executives and venture capitalists discussed the challenge of competing with China due to the high degree of state support. This support allows Chinese companies to scale domestically and export globally especially through the Belt and Road Initiative. This brute force approach has been successful in hardware but less successful in software.