“The fact that you can bring relevant capability to the fight, as the Ukrainians and allies have done in the conflict with Russia, that essentially didn't exist at the beginning of the fight,” Joseph Jewell, the Pentagon’s assistant defense secretary for science and technology, said Tuesday at the Defense One Tech Summit.
Joseph Jewell on rapid, emergent capability in Ukraine
At the summit in Arlington, Virginia, Jewell argued that the defining lesson from the Ukraine conflict is the speed at which new weapons, sensors and production methods were invented, produced and fielded. He pointed to Ukraine’s “homegrown drone industry” as an example that “sprung up almost overnight because of urgency,” and credited Ukrainian forces with taking “the Russian Navy out of the fight” despite having little of a conventional navy themselves.
Jewell emphasized two factors behind that success: weapon systems that were “small, relatively undetectable,” and large numbers of them. He said that while there remains “a need for expensive, highly capable weapons,” those exquisite systems can be complemented by “leveraging a hundred or a thousand drones controlled by AI.” He noted the current model in Ukraine involves many operators manually controlling first-person drones, but predicted “the natural evolution of that is AI-controlled or AI-enabled.”
Patent holiday: easing access to Defense Department-held technology
One concrete step the Defense Department has taken to accelerate innovation is making government-held patents easier to use. Jewell recounted that the department, which holds “tens of thousands of patents,” historically generated about $20 million a year from them. In January, Defense Undersecretary for Research and Engineering Emil Michael announced a “patent holiday” allowing private companies to license a subset of those patents—about 500—free of charge.
Jewell reported early uptake metrics: the first no-fee patent license was granted last month; as of mid-June, 14 patents had been “signed out” for commercial use, one patent had been licensed for a fee by a company seeking exclusivity, 36 more licenses were pending, and 145 applications had been submitted.
Biotech and distributed manufacturing: 3D-printed shaped charges from local materials
Jewell highlighted work at the intersection of biotech, materials science and additively manufactured munitions. He cited a bioengineered thermal coating developed through BioMADE, a Defense Department–sponsored Manufacturing Innovation Institute, intended to help drones obscure heat signatures.
He also described a field experiment by Marines in the Pacific who used 3D printers and locally sourced materials—plastic water bottles, crushed volcanic rock, coconut husks, and coffee grounds—to produce shaped charges at point-of-use. “They all detonated, actually; the volcanic rocks were most effective,” Jewell said. He added that the 3D-printed shaped charge demonstrated “25% better focusing characteristics than conventionally manufactured high explosives” and that field production “effectively have 99% reduced the time to point-of-use, because you could make it in the field from materials that are endemic in the Indo-Pacific.”
Jewell painted a vision in which containerized production facilities—CONEX boxes with 3D printers and ingredient stocks—could be dropped into the field to produce items ranging from shaped charges to biodiesel and jet fuel.
AI-enabled massing: from many manual operators to autonomous coordination
Central to Jewell’s framing is the role of artificial intelligence in scaling effects that today often rely on large numbers of human operators. He proposed that the “exquisite effect” supplied by high-end systems can be “helped along by leveraging a hundred or a thousand drones controlled by AI,” converting manual, first-person-drone operations into “AI-controlled or AI-enabled” swarms or coordinated massing.
That evolution, in Jewell’s telling, is not just a change in weapons but a change in the industrial and operational model: rapid design, rapid manufacturing, and rapid deployment of many relatively low-cost systems complemented by advanced capabilities.
What this means for technologists, procurement leaders, and the Marines
- Technologists and security teams: expect accelerated interest in AI-enabled autonomy and bioengineered materials—Jewell cited both as active lines of work, including a BioMADE thermal coating and AI-enabled drone concepts.
- Procurement leaders and defense companies: the patent holiday and early licensing numbers (14 signed out, one fee license, 36 pending, 145 applications) signal new paths to commercialize Defense Department IP and to prototype at speed.
- The Marines and expeditionary forces: field experiments already demonstrate concepts for point-of-use manufacturing—3D-printed shaped charges from endemic materials and containerized production to supply fuels and components—changing logistics and sustainment requirements in theater.
Joseph Jewell closed the loop of his argument by returning to the Ukraine example and issuing a simple charge: “We certainly could do things at that scale and even in a more sophisticated way. And we need to do it.” Whether through policy moves like the patent holiday, investments in BioMADE-style manufacturing innovation, or doctrine that accepts distributed, AI-enabled massing of effects, the Pentagon’s science chief laid out a picture in which speed of innovation and distributed production matter as much as single, high-end systems. How quickly those pieces are integrated into doctrine, procurement and operational planning is the immediate question his remarks leave on the table.
