Summer Myatt
The U.S. government’s procurement system can’t keep up with the rapid pace of technological innovation. Intelligence experts are warning that it’s becoming a threat to national security.
“My observation is that government can’t move quickly enough to make use of these capabilities in the national security community at the speed we need in order to actually take full advantage of the extraordinary capabilities coming out of industry,” said Wash100 Award winner Jennifer Ewbank, former CIA deputy director for digital innovation and founder of Andaman Strategic Advisors, during a panel discussion at the 2024 Baird Defense and Government Conference.
The too-slow pace of government acquisition was a major theme at the Baird event, and it’s one of the defining factors of today’s GovCon market, according to Baird Managing Director Jean Stack, a fellow Wash100 awardee. While government procurement’s lack of speed is certainly an annoyance for contractors, the more concerning threat is its impact on America’s position in the great power competition.
“I look at that in a geo-strategic way,” said Ewbank. “I think a lot about the race for AI with China, and government procurement efforts can either lift or frustrate transformation in that regard.”
The Need for Contested Supply Chain Resilience
But federal procurement isn’t the only issue contractors are seeing. In today’s geopolitical environment, there’s a growing need for resilient supply chains, especially in contested environments. Babel Street CEO Michael Southworth asserted that these two issues — supply chain resilience and government procurement — go hand in hand and should be receiving more attention.
“We should be going light years faster than we are today,” said Southworth. “We’ve been focused on non-peer adversaries for the last 25 years with a very resilient supply chain. This decoupling of the supply chain is happening right before our eyes on this, and we need to build in more resiliency around that. And that’s in the procurement process. More of our work is focused on contested supply chain type use cases today than it ever has, and we expect that to continue.”
Facing Compliance Hurdles
While the federal government has a reputation for long and tedious acquisition timelines, industry has its fair share of hindrances to tech innovation too. Flashpoint CEO Josh Lefkowitz said that for many major players in the intelligence space, compliance is standing in the way of rapid tech deployment.
“I’ve been really surprised with the posture that some of the largest Fortune 500 companies in the world have taken in terms of leveraging AI capabilities,” he said. “We have seen numerous instances where Fortune 500 companies have a year plus long waiting list for AI capabilities to be vetted in order to be greenlit and used by their teams. And you have their teams clamoring to get their hands on those capabilities because they see the clear value and efficiencies that those capabilities are driving. But there’s a risk averse overlay where they need to go through all the compliance and procedural check boxes.”
The OSINT Revolution
So where is the intel community excelling? In the open source intelligence field, according to Lefkowitz.
“Where we’ve seen the public-private partnership work most effectively has been in the OSINT space. For those that are tracking what I would characterize as the ‘OSINT revolution,’ it’s been really invigorating to see the number of reports put out by ODNI, by DOD, by State Department in the last couple quarters where the message is explicitly clear: OSINT is the first resort.”
Lefkowitz noted that the Office of the Director of National Intelligence’s OSINT executive Jason Barrett has reinforced that the private sector can execute on the OSINT mission better, faster and cheaper than the government is positioned to do.
“That empowers the government to focus on the exquisite intelligence — whether that’s the human, whether that’s SIGINT, whether that’s GEOINT,” he said. “OSINT can be a massive force multiplier, not only to get 80 percent of the way to the answer that’s needed for decision makers and policy makers, but it can also meaningfully enrich and contextualize that additional 20 percent of the exquisite intelligence.”
Inside Mastercard’s Recorded Future Acquisition
In September, Mastercard announced its $2.65 billion acquisition of threat intelligence company Recorded Future. Intelligence experts see the deal — which is set to close in the first quarter of 2025 — as a major convergence of the intelligence and financial fields, and they think it’s indicative of a growing need for threat intelligence.
“From a macro perspective, I see the MasterCard acquisition of Recorded Future as a really significant validation of threat intelligence as a discipline. We have increasingly seen threat intelligence evolve from a nice to have to a must have that is absolutely mission critical,” Lefkowitz shared.
Lefkowitz said he’s seeing “a lot of excitement as far as the impact that their combined capabilities are going to have when it comes to making a dent in financial fraud.”
“It’s also a reflection of how close these workflows are,” commented Southworth. “We primarily deal with intelligence and DOD based workflows, but if we move over to the commercial environment and we’re looking for a bad actor, whether that’s a company or an individual, the workflows are remarkably the same.”
Get an inside look at the convergence of intelligence and defense at the 2025 Defense R&D Summit hosted by the Potomac Officers Club on Jan. 23. Save your seat for the 2025 Defense R&D Summit today!
