Innovations & technologies

The Pentagon’s Third Offset May Be Dead, But No One Knows What Comes Next

In 2012, the Pentagon’s senior leadership secretly established a new office to work on state-of-the-art weapons. For the next four years, officials there labored away quietly on projects ranging from swarming microdrones to hypervelocity projectiles, until the Pentagon finally revealed the organization’s existence.

This shadowy division, called the Strategic Capabilities Office, or SCO, formed part of a larger military strategy to advance technology, known as the Third Offset.

The strategy, first publicly announced in 2014 by then-Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel, was an ambitious plan to do less with more, and “to identify and invest in innovative ways to sustain and advance America’s military dominance for the 21st century.” Hagel promised to “put new resources behind innovation, but also account for today’s fiscal realities — by focusing on investments that will sharpen our military edge even as we contend with fewer resources.”

The Third Offset quickly became the new military buzzword used to justify a variety of new programs and offices, including the SCO and the Defense Innovation Unit Experimental (DIUx), which put a Pentagon office in the heart of Silicon Valley with a mandate to experiment with new technologies.

Both the SCO and DIUx were the brainchild of former President Barack Obama’s final defense secretary, Ash Carter, and operated under the idea that when it comes to developing things like artificial intelligence, space systems, and encrypted communications, the United States was falling behind adversaries like China and Russia in key areas.