This week, General Dynamics Information Technology opened a new 5,200 square-foot digital lab called the Mission Emerge Center outside of Fort Belvoir, Va. The goal for the facility is to develop military technology alongside other companies, including cloud providers—and to show the Pentagon what works.

It’s not always possible to show defense officials what new tech can actually do in their offices, so having a separate space could help show the Pentagon what’s possible. 

“I've spent a lot of time in my life in uniform—and not in uniform—in the Pentagon, and there isn't the opportunity in the Pentagon to showcase this…to demonstrably show how it works,” Amy Gilliland, GDIT’s president, told reporters Dec. 2. “We can create solutions that we showcase here that are attached to a sandbox environment that we’re building where the customer can actually see things.”

The project took more than a year, and the company’s strategy of  building a space for government customers to engage with developing technology and provide input, dovetails with the Pentagon’s call for defense contractors to take on more risk. 

“If we are going to prevent and avoid war, which is what we all want, we must prepare now. Our adversaries are not sitting idly by. They're moving fast. They're developing and delivering new capabilities at a rate that should be sobering to every American,” Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said during a Nov. 7 speech. “And frankly, at times, we've been too damn slow to respond.”

“What the customer is telling us now is, you understand the mission, and you understand technology, and you need to anticipate what is coming next. So help us. Help us help ourselves. So that anticipatory piece is part of the investment, because if you don't invest ahead of time, by definition, you'll be late,” Gilliland said. 

GDIT has pivoted in recent years from primarily a “very good executor of enterprise IT” to building products. That shift also marked a change from “one-off partnerships with commercial companies”  to those with “strategic collaboration agreements,” Gilliland said. 

Earlier this year, GDIT gave new leaders in its emerging tech business a clear directive: understand what the Defense Department needs and find new companies with “promising” tech to work with that could potentially fulfill those needs. 

“Those partnerships can ultimately end up being a teaming arrangement. They could be an acquisition in the future. They could be any number of things,” Gilliland said. “Part of the value proposition of an IT services company to a corporation like General Dynamics is very low invested capital. What I am leveraging is the R&D budgets of commercial companies, together with the mission understanding and expertise of this workforce and my technologists to bring forward the best that commercial tech has.” 

And while each arrangement is different, the new facility was designed to encourage co-development. 

“Companies are typically voluntarily contributing their R&D efforts alongside GDIT. We build these relationships to maximize impact, and facility access is part of that,”  Dale Hogan, GDIT’s information systems senior director, said via email. GDIT said it doesn’t charge companies for access to the lab. 

Putting defense companies in close proximity isn’t new, but the idea could become more popular as the Pentagon courts business from smaller, non-traditional companies, which are often backed by private investors. 

Instead of creating a new facility, General Dynamics Land Systems, which builds combat vehicles, plans to join a co-working space that caters to startups and investors in downtown Detroit. 

“We actually just recently signed to become a full member of Newlab,” and start placing employees in the coworking space in the New Year, said Scott Taylor, who leads business development for General Dynamics Land Systems. “Because what we're realizing is—as much as we don't want it to be—the security protocols of the defense company compound that we're in [in Sterling Heights, Mich.] can be daunting at times…It can slow that ability to share emerging capabilities from the commercial sector back into the defense sector.”

General Dynamics Land Systems tested Newlab's potential last week when it hosted an event for military leaders, investors, and drone companies to talk through challenges for ground troops, like battery life and resupply, and how to solve them.

“Senior leaders in the Army—from the secretary to the chief—have been encouraging industry to start self organizing and bring a team of teams together to solve the Army and the Marine Corps’, land forces’, biggest problems, or present solutions” so the military can know what’s doable, Taylor said.

The inaugural event, called the Maneuver Warfighter Industry Symposium, hosted  defense tech companies, such as Anduril, Palantir, Autonodyne, Primordial Labs, investors, and other representatives from General Dynamics entities. The plan is to do more next year, Taylor said.  

“We all have a very similar common goal: We want to support the U.S. military, and our allies' needs,” Taylor said. “How we achieve that collaboration requires a little bit more thought and mature effort.” 

Plus, the sheer competition and potential for billions of contract dollars can mean that working together may be riskier than it sounds—even if there’s a common goal. 

“You fill a room with 24 companies, and some of [them] are competitors with each other. They're not always forthright in being very open…we recognize that that's a part of the risk. But what we thought was valuable is the opportunity to just figure out who had the most promising [proposals] to pursue some of these,” Taylor said. “Frankly, I think there's an opportunity for us to pull in several of our ‘competimates’.” 

But while there seems to be demand, it will take time to find the right mix of companies to create something the Pentagon wants to buy. 

“Do we have the right team put together? Not yet,” he said. “It's still in development right now. How we formalize that consortium remains to be seen.”