The U.S. Army is rolling out a new initiative, dubbed Fuze, that leaders say will overhaul how the service invests in technology by borrowing from Silicon Valley’s venture capital playbook.
The service is betting that venture-style risk-taking can shave years off procurement timelines and will determine whether Silicon Valley speed can mesh with Pentagon scale.
“With Fuze, the Army is telling innovators that we’re open for business. Fuze will help us to not only invest but scale promising capabilities — bridging the valley of death,” Army Secretary Dan Driscoll said in a statement to Defense News.
Unlike traditional procurement that starts with an Army-defined problem followed by appointing a company to solve the problem, Fuze flips the approach. The new process allows the service to find technology to bring in “that helps us think about what our problems are differently,” Chris Manning, the Army’s deputy assistant secretary for research and technology, told Defense News in a recent interview.
Venture capitalists make 100 investments and only end up with a few with outsized returns. The Army is accepting that same risk to capture bigger payoffs.
“We’re really taking the approach where we’re going to deliberately make a large number of investments in emerging tech companies,” Matt Willis, the Army’s Fuze program director, said in the interview. “Some tech might not reach the maturity that we want, [but] there’s going to be some companies that are going to have an outsized, revolutionary impact on our soldiers.”
The program aligns four existing fundings streams: XTech prize competitions, small-business funding, tech maturation and manufacturing technology — worth about $750 million in fiscal 2025.
The Army plans to initiate the program by running an XTech Disrupt live pitch competition, in partnership with Y Combinator — a technology startup accelerator and VC firm — at the Association of the U.S. Army’s annual conference next month in Washington.
The competition, according to Willis, will focus on four technology areas important to the Army: electronic warfare, unmanned aircraft systems, counter-UAS and energy resiliency at the edge. The prize pool totals $500,000.
Technologies that win out in the competition will go straight into the hands of soldiers in operational environments for real-world evaluation.
The Army has spent the better part of a decade trying to match its acquisition speed with the rest of the high-tech world, but trying to break down the bureaucracy and change the culture has been a challenging task.
“Continuous transformation is like our once-in-a-generation change for the Army to get at and prepare for the future battlefield,” Brandon Pugh, the Army’s cyber adviser, told Defense News. “But a key part of that is the acquisition process to really make sure that the warfighter and the soldier on the battlefield has the correct technology they need.”
Speed is central to that transformation. “We’re hoping to have a capability to an acquisition pathway in 10 days, and hopefully within 30 to 45 days, for the first prototype to be with an Army unit,” Pugh said. “That is extraordinary.”
The Army has struggled with the pace of past acquisitions, particularly in fast-evolving fields like electronic warfare. “It’s so quickly evolving, you have to be able to acquire this quickly and iterate quickly, or else you’re instantly behind, even if you do successfully acquire it. I think that’s the risk,” Pugh noted.
Army officials stressed that Fuze is not just a bureaucratic reshuffling. “This isn’t just like a rebranding. We’re coalescing these innovation programs from a strategic, operational and execution standpoint… to help companies move through that pipeline more quickly,” Willis said.
“The end outcome we want is having the best technology here quickly,” Pugh said.
Jen Judson is an award-winning journalist covering land warfare for Defense News. She has also worked for Politico and Inside Defense. She holds a Master of Science degree in journalism from Boston University and a Bachelor of Arts degree from Kenyon College.
