The Air Force Wants to Give You Its Credit Card

Will Roper, assistant secretary of the Air Force for acquisition, technology and logistics, is something like Q for the Defense Department. He formerly ran the Strategic Capabilities Office, a secretive military skunkworks designed to figure out how to fight future wars. While there, he helped design swarms of tiny unmanned drones; he helped create Project Maven; and he tried to partner the Defense Department with the videogame industry. Now his new job may be even harder: Making the Air Force acquisitions process efficient. He's going to be leading a pitch day for the Air Force this week in New York City, and he spoke with WIRED about that and also where he sees the future of military technology going--from AI to hypersonic weapons to space. Nicholas Thompson: You're launching a new system very soon to help get startups very quickly signed up to Air Force contracts. Tell me how it works and why you are doing it. Will Roper: We've got to be able to work with the entire industry base, and even our fastest agreements still take a couple of months to get nailed down. That's too long for a startup that needs cash flow quickly. And so we really worked hard to hack our system and we've gotten down to where we can do credit-card-based awards on a single day.