WASHINGTON, D.C. — Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth instructed the Defense Innovation Unit to improve the Defense Department’s conversion ratio of contract dollars spent to assets deployed on the field. Hegseth also directed the agency to help reverse the dynamic where the military’s weapons cost more than the threats they are targeting.

The agency operates with a stated goal to become the Defense Department’s fastest contracting and fielding agent. Owen West serves as the Director of the Defense Innovation Unit and oversees these operational shifts. West previously deployed as a U.S. Marine before assuming his current leadership role.

West emphasized the necessity of alignment with military branches to achieve the department's financial and operational targets. "In basic terms, to raise our conversion ratio, we have to get closer to the military services and solve operational problems," he said. He added that the unit focuses its efforts on tangible military needs. "Everything we do is in the frame of reference of an operational problem or a military problem that DIU can help solve," he said.

Maj. Gen. Joseph Kunkel serves as the DIU Military Deputy and plays a central role in these coordination efforts. Under former director Doug Beck, the agency began embedding personnel inside U.S. combatant commands and other key directorates.

These DIU embeds remain active and work closely with the military deputy to maintain those connections. Kunkel showed the value of having a senior officer facilitate these high-level relationships. "So, having an active-duty general officer that is able to make the connections at the higher levels in the combatant commands and the services, I think that’s where we’re really paying off," Kunkel said.

Kunkel described the ongoing interactions with combatant command embeds as essential to the agency's current strategy. "The daily business, the daily interactions with those combatant command embeds, it’s critical. And frankly, it’s priceless when you combine that with the new things we’re doing. I think it’s not just additive, but multiplicative," Kunkel said.

This approach reinforces the unit's focus on delivering usable capabilities rather than just developing prototypes. "It doesn’t count until it’s fielded forward," West said.

A DIU team recently visited Space Force personnel for a six-hour working session to review projects. He stated the Space Force meeting identified projects the service was not interested in and areas where the agency should emphasize current projects. Persistent, long-range intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance technologies have emerged as a requirement across at least four of the 11 combatant commands. Multi-domain technologies such as quantum sensors, artificial intelligence and data fusion assets, and tactical uncrewed systems are designed to provide battlefield awareness and improve tactical decision-making.

Kunkel pointed to recent operations as evidence of the demand for these specific capabilities. "You’ve seen how we’ve done in Operation Epic Fury and you’ve seen what we’ve done with the MQ-9 — that ability to do ISR at-range with something that may be more attritable is a need," he said.

The Defense Innovation Unit was launched in 2015 and is headquartered in Mountain View, California, with offices in Austin, Boston, Chicago, and the Pentagon. The agency is staffed by civilian and both active duty and reserve military personnel. In January 2023, the unit was restructured as a Department of Defense Field Activity under Hegseth’s leadership, granting it formal authority to accelerate procurement and technology deployment across military branches. The Director of the Defense Innovation Unit has authority to approve large dollar Other Transaction agreements for prototype projects.

In 2023, the agency launched DIU 3.0 to address systemic scaling challenges, focusing on transitioning commercial technologies to solve critical operational gaps identified in the 2022 National Defense Strategy. The agency’s 2024 initiative to embed staff within combatant commands and the Joint Staff enabled direct coordination with warfighting units. This effort aimed to improve alignment between commercial tech development and operational needs.

In July 2025, Hegseth issued a memo that decentralized drone procurement authority to brigade-level commanders. This action allowed for faster fielding of capabilities by bypassing traditional bureaucratic hurdles.