Ashton Carter: The Pentagon Must Think Outside of Its Five-Sided Box

Ashton B. Carter

Security, Americas

"The U.S. military's excellence is not a birthright. It must be earned again and again in this changing and fiercely competitive world."

Teenager David Dworkin does not wear a uniform or earn a government paycheck, but earlier this year he made America’s military stronger and the country safer. In May, he participated in Hack the Pentagon, the first-ever bug bounty conducted by a federal department or agency. Its aim was to test for vulnerabilities in the Defense Department’s public websites by crowd-sourcing the effort to 1,400 registered white-hat hackers, with cash prizes for those who succeeded.

Within 13 minutes of the program’s start, the first bug was found. By the end of day one, 138 were discovered, including several by Dworkin. He performed the work between studies for his high school Advanced Placement exams. Incentive programs like this one are common in the private sector. Dworkin says he has found and reported vulnerabilities for Netflix and Uber, among other well-known companies, during similar bug bounties. Usually he does it for the chance for some money or a t-shirt. With Hack the Pentagon, he said he did it more out of a sense of duty and patriotism.

The pilot cost the Department of Defense a total of $150,000, no small sum, but hiring an outside firm to conduct a comparable security audit and vulnerability assessment would have cost a multiple of this amount. In addition, it freed the Defense Department’s talented in-house cyber specialists to spend more time fixing problems than finding them, and showed us how to streamline our efforts to defend our networks and quickly correct vulnerabilities. Perhaps most importantly, it underscored how solutions to even the Pentagon’s trickiest technology problems can come from anyone and anywhere among America’s tremendous human, corporate, and institutional resources. 

I am exceptionally proud of the innovative culture of the U.S. military, and as Secretary of Defense, I have had the benefit of innovations begun in the past. One of my primary commitments as Secretary of Defense has been to the U.S. military’s innovations for the future, to ensure we stay ahead of a rapidly changing world, keep the edge against determined competitors, employ the latest technology, and understand the needs and tastes of new generations and attract them to serving the country. As a result, I have been pushing the Pentagon to think outside of our five-sided box, to move more nimbly in the face of a real-time world and to rekindle the pioneering spirit that has been America’s trademark for more than two centuries.