besides. [inaudible conversations] [inaudible conversations] >> good morning welcome to the hudson institute i am president and ceo and i would like to welcome our audience here as well as c-span viewing audience dedicated to american leadership and global engagement for secure free prosperous future and key to american leadership to continue american technological preeminence

given that is the case we are delighted to welcome and introduce undersecretary of defense michael griffin are at the hudson institute undersecretary griffin will be speaking and conversation on precisely the question of the preeminence and the great power competitors to exploit those technologies against u.s. interests. undersecretary griffin and his chief technology officer for secretary of defense mean he looks at defense capabilities how to improve them technologically with the transformation and how to hedge against uncertainty and engineer by training most recently from the university of alabama at huntsville before returning to the department of defense serving as administrator of nasa 2005 through ten -- 2009 prior to

their key with head of the space department at john hopkins physics laboratory and served as president and ceo of private nonprofit enterprise funded by the cia to identify and invest in cutting-edge technologies serving national security interests. undersecretary griffin will engage in conversation rebecca is well-known in defense circles with her work on missile defense and other policy issues and a former congressional staffer launching the missile-defense caucus and writes for the hell in a regular guest on fox news so it is a pleasure to turn it over to rebecca. >> thanks for being here. what i would like to do this morning is doctor griffin asks

that i call him mike but may upbringing is to tell him i should not do that. but i have known mike for several years and i am thrilled as you are that he is where he is at this time in history because i think he is the man for the job i am thrilled that you are there and i will turn the floor over to him to let him talk about his priorities currently and what he will prioritize over the next coming months and years and we will engage in conversation if you have questions please write them down so we will have some time with the answer you can participate. >> i will try not to spend too great of time pontificating but this has existed at

significantly lower levels in the organization before but not since goldwater nichols act of 86 which created technology and logistics as an entity not since then has the are and e organization occupied statures since it has been 32 years since the enactment of goldwater nichols and since we have had a major reorganization of the department, i think we can expect this particular substantiation to remain for a while as well. i am the first occupant of the

office at the undersecretary level but i think we could expect more and my primary purpose is to get things started off right. so what ought we to be doing and why? and for that i have to go over some history because with mutual understanding i will start by saying in the united states we have been on holiday 25 years and maybe a little more since the fall of the berlin wall and shortly thereafter the collapse of the soviet union at that time china was not a great power. russia was devolving from a great status into a fractionated regime putin had

not risen to the top and at that time it would have been unimaginable for someone to say the solution to the soviet union as stated. i think it's for you. [laughter] i'm sorry. i will turn that off. i will figure out how to turn it off later. so in the early '90s we would not have envisioned china or preemption of international waters to

preempt with rather bold territorial claims that no other nation in the world would recognize nevermind lay claim to, and did not see that are anticipated or couple of decades the united states enjoyed a degree of alone time at the top of the global power letter. really we had not seen that for a while in history. it had been quite a while since single great power was so unchallenged in my personal opinion is we went to sleep i was in the pentagon when the wall came down and when the soviet union dissolved i had

not yet gone over to my third incarnation nsf. so watching those events from the seats in the pentagon as a deputy at the strategic defense organization watching these events occur, i will say and not as a monday morning quarterback it bothered me a lot because we started talking about the peace dividend as if that would be a perpetual entitlement. and there is a saying about optimists and pessimists which i love is that the optimist is the person who believes in the best of all possible worlds but the pessimists us -- is the person who feels that

might be true. [laughter] in the early and mid- 90s frankly i was quite cynical about the piece dividend and quite cynical about the practice of the defense department and other agencies aiding and abetting for other companies to merge from many competitors into a few large companies. i did not think that and i do not believe there would be a piece dividend to last the rest of my life let alone my children or grandchildren and i did not believe reducing our ability to have competition among many corporate competitors was in a long-term best interest. so you can chalk that up to

premature old age and cynicism in the early '90s i was my earlier mid- 40s may be too young to be so cynical but i was. it is observable in hindsight that we failed to continue to fund the practices that had gotten us where we were which was the very top of the heap the united states from the time we entered world war ii until it was ended was three and a half years. world war ii lasted six years it was our presence and technological engineering preeminence that allowed the award to be brought to a close. as regrettable as it may be,

it ended with the first use of nuclear weapons. it did and the war think there is no historian alive today who would say that more lives were lost because of that and what have been caused by the invasion of the japanese. so it was america's technical preeminence to win the cold war ending world war ii and got us to a place where we could fall asleep at the switch to maintain that preeminence. at the time we look around and call it 201525 years later, that it does remain today that while in many categories america still leads the world

and in company with our allies and partners of the western nations in many areas of technology with regard to certain areas of defense and science and technology we just don't anymore that is a hard thing to say and a hard thing to hear. but the fact of the matter is that the area of hydro sonic to pick one both china and russia are observably ahead of our current state not of where we could be but our current state of practice that we are playing catch-up in the area of microelectronics from the early '90s everybody bought microelectronics because they were the best.

they didn't buy them because we made people buy them but because we have the best stuff. now 80% of microelectronics if i understand it correctly, come from taiwan. not that it isn't a reliable partner but they are not coming from america and taiwan is uncomfortably close to a nation which in many ways has declared itself to be an adversary of the united states. meanwhile world war ii adversaries are now allies. this is an unfortunate turn of events but something we must pay attention to. microelectronics is everything we do in a way today it did not even do 25 years ago when i started in the business before that 25 years earlier.

today, even if our defense industry were not dependent upon civilian microelectronics, i often ask if we are victims of malware or undesired features in those microelectronics offshore if another nation can bring about the civilian collapse through such features or malware than what sense can the department of defense have to defend the nation? if you think about it the purpose of our national security is it to defend bricks and mortar but our economy and way of life.

if we cannot rely on our software that implements and we cannot fully trust the microelectronics and the software that we purchase and implement then in what sense can we be sure we can defend the nation? it isn't a comforting thought. what do we have to do? how do we have to reinvest to get american microelectronics back at the top of its game not because we subsidize but because economically it competes with the best in the world and once again comes free choice? how do we develop hypersonic systems that they can hold our assets at risk? how do we expand and have a missile defense system be everywhere all the time?

instead of waiting on the ground in case an adversary shows up in the skies overhead? that is the last place not the first place to start engagement. the grounding principles behind the undersecretary search and engineering is the national defense strategy this is the first national defense strategy in a very long time in my opinion has had real meat to it even the unclassified version is unmistakably blunt a characteristic i share. the strategy calls out areas of current practice that need to be addressed but also calls out ten or a dozen areas of

modernization priority where the department national security community in general must modernize to get ahead keeping ahead of our adversaries and match set of priorities is what has been handed to research and engineering establishment to address. my job is what comes afterwards what are we doing to modernize our way of the war and the weapons we bring that we don't have today? in those primaries that are called out in the national defense strategy from artificial intelligence to microelectronics or directed energy weapons or more comprehensiveness of the fence to space offense and defense

capability across the board those are my priorities. and that's why they are priorities and why they were wise to address the department because frankly we would not have it is just too hard. i will stop there. so i am happy to answer your questions and engage with the audience. >> thank you. i do want to start generally and then ask some technical questions. one of the things i have perceived as a cause that we have gotten behind there is that bipartisan consensus that

you maintain stability so the idea is that there missile defense community we don't want to have an arms race so we cannot go beyond parity and i know that is not your view can you speak to that? >> in my view the concept of parity is intellectually bankrupt. united states after world war ii through the decisions and actions of some very farseeing gentlemen at the top of that group people like george marshall who was both secretary of state and sec. of

defense at different times as well as chief of staff during world war ii, the united states recognized those people recognized, the necessity of a worldwide rules -based order having added principles such as the rule of law, the free movement of trade and money and capitalistic enterprise, the sovereignty of nations. that rules -based order those kinds of things of western principles that are deeply rooted in the american dna and in western civilization generally.

that american-led buttress of national order has served us well over 70 years. we have not had a major global conflict yes we have had wars and times when americans did not fully adhere to her own best principles but those are bumps in the road not a strategic path. when we allow nations clearly do not believe in a rules -based world order or fundamentally capitalistic principles of money and people and trade with nations that declare themselves the global powers as russia has declared itself to be as china declares

itself to be what they are really declaring themselves a worldwide rules -based in favor of the autonomy that they direct. and that ought to be unacceptable to westerners to western principles into americans it should be unacceptable the only way to discourage and deter such people is to be clearly so much more powerful that they choose not to fight. if we strive for parity then we are always leaving room for a slight change in the margin

to result in greater capability on an adversary's part over our own that is a tempting situation for them. there is always the temptation of a small gain is made it can be decisive in the outcome to use that while they have it so parity is the adversary's friend. not our friend. the way to maintain the relative degree of peace we have had over the last 70 years in contrast of warfare before that, the way to maintain that relative peace and extend an increase the degree of that piece is to be so powerful that no one believes that for they could prevail in a conflict. yes it is costly it is very expensive and uses a

substantial portion of a very rich american economy for 70 years. it is trivially cheap compared to the cost of a war that we avoid the cost of world war ii which i don't have a good figure for the economic cost but it must be measured in trillions even in those your dollars best to historical estimates maybe 50 or 60 million people dead. some estimates are higher i think there are more 50 or 60 million individual lives whose lives were as valuable to them and their families as today.

they were not less valuable because only 500,000 were americans they were people's lives. this is the cost of global conflict that we avoid by being so strong that adversaries are not tempted so parity achieves that goal and i do not support it. fortunately my boss agrees. his words is we need to be in a position of dominance by 2028. not parity. >> that's great. that really explains well why the characterization that i often hear we are overly worried about china and russia because if you look hours a somewhat bigger that clearly we have superiority but.

>> we spend so much less. you spent a lot of time talking about hypersonic but can you explain to us why that particular that bret why is that such a concern of yours and then i will ask it now and have you touch on that. in terms of defending against it is it -- what is the hard part about it? is it sensors or shooters?

>> let me start with the last question first and then i will try to give a more comprehensive and regrettably long-winded answer to the first part. the hardest part of hypersonic is the sentencing frankly the shooting is not -- it's one of the easier targeting tasks we would have in the missile intercell world because attacking hypersonic vehicles themselves are relatively fragile during their long phase of. they are fairly easy to destabilize and they are in a very difficult flight regime and their decoys are not possible and they glow brightly in the infrared and if they reach their target they have to be in relatively straight line trajectory and yes, they can maneuver but they can't maneuver in their crew space as easily as

an interceptor can maneuver. if you can see them coming and if you can get them during the vulnerable phase of flight from a guidance point of view and i will say here i used to teach the subject from a guidance guy's point of view hypersonic interceptor increase is not the hardest problem we have. now, if you let them get into terminal phase where we have observed that they can pull many, many geez that then becomes a hard target. so, if you allow an attacking vehicle to get close enough to begin its terminal dive in the terminal dive might be from 100,000 feet onto a carrier battle group and if you let them get that close you are probably dead meat because that is a very hard interceptor problem to get at that point.

the challenge of hypersonic vehicles is to know that they are headed your way from several thousand kilometers out in time to get your defending asset into the battle space. frankly, right now we just don't have -- there are areas, of course, if we were a landmass nation like russia knowing that an attacking vehicle was coming from several thousand kilometers away would not be so difficult but what we are trying to do is to maintain a certain degree of global order largely through maritime power protection which centers and has centered, you know, since the japanese funk are fantasy pete at pearl harbor and has centered around carrier battle groups in submarines. and the main way in which the

project american tactical powers to the carrier battle group and the hypersonic weapon because we don't wallpaper the surface of the ocean with radars to allow us to know when an attacker is coming largely in the current environment we don't see those things until they are way too close for comfort so the sensor problem is the critical one. we need and do not yet have global persistent timely, accurate knowledge of what is going on in space and the upper atmosphere and that is what we have to have. so, from my point of view on the defensive side the sensor challenges the hardest one. now, why is this such a threat well when we talk about a relative level of expenditures and events between us and say, china or russia, or any other in

some unknown future punitive adversary you mentioned that we have to spend more because we have to do so much more. that is exactly right. the defense has to defend against everything all the time. we don't seek to be an attacking nation. we seek to defend and promote a stable world order and so we can have no areas of ability and an adversary nation can only has to win one. we have to win every time across all theaters. that is a serious challenge. the offense can seek out our weakest point and concentrate its effort there. at present the united states

has, actually, given adversary capabilities of a relatively impressive missile defense capability is my assessment that we have quite a good capability now against reentry vehicles in their midcourse and terminal defense with bad and msm three and ms six systems we have relatively good missile-defense capabilities for a relatively limited attack. i don't think we could stand in icbm onslaught by russia but that is not our most immediate. we have very good air defense capabilities but hypersonic systems, the way they are built and flown and targeted, over by

our air defense systems and on-the-fly our missile-defense systems. so, china has with, over the last decade with great care, developed a tactical system capable of reaching after ranges of several thousand kilometers that oversize air defense and underlies missile-defense and can hold our assets and our based assets whether land or maritime based at risk. nothing i am saying here is classified and you can find these assessments in open literature, aviation week for example and not the numbers on anything but i am just saying this is the general level of capability. but that is critically important because that is a tactical capability that an adversary has developed that holds, but for us, our strategic efforts and

carrier battle groups at risk and for us these are means by which we project strategic power sort of nuclear deterrence. so, by allowing that non- parity to continue to exist and it's non- parity on the adversary side we allow their tactical systems to leverage our ability to project strategic power. it leaves us no option in the case of aggressive behavior on their part leaving us no option except either to accept their behavior or go nuclear. i don't think we want to do that. this is an area where we must see their hand in raise them one and we must at least be able to defend against their use of

hypersonic weapons, should that come about, and we must be able to hold their assets at risk similar to what they have fielded and that is why this is so important to me. it's the leverage of a tactical asset on our strategic intentions. >> on that point, you said sensors so we got to have better spaces -- >> unfortunately the only way i know to see them coming is from space. if i had enough if i had enough ships radar in the right places and enough radars on landmasses where we had control then you could do it that way but we don't and so, you know, that is an impractical solution to the problem and the only way i know

to surveilled the required area and the tracking level of accuracy is from space. >> general, commander this digit command has said the same thing and he's made the point that having a robust based architecture or even just one better than we got that that would also significantly qualitatively even against the ballistic missile that. >> oh, yeah, course. >> it will not get the high input but it will also significantly improve the entire system against that's your scene from korea. that is expensive. but you talk about how in your job you are looking at over the horizon but some of that stuff is not that far of the horizon.

it's near horizon so how do we and there was no money for this kind of thing in this latest missile-defense agency budget and there was about 11 at half billion dollars for current programs that were going to talk about space centers i'd [inaudible] so can you talk about that and also just the need to go faster. you're talking long terms but i consider the things you're talking about because we are behind we got to go faster. general has talked about the need to go fast and how do we get the necessary funding for these priorities and get them in the budget and get cracking on them and then especially not just because of the partisan politics in congress but the bureaucratic inertia that exists that always needs to be flowing big picture policy initiatives? >> let me try to get at that and first of all the budget priorities there is a -- the

national defense strategy was released in january and in until then i think it could be fairly said that the department had not since the last administration laid out new priorities and that has now been done. their priorities are available for anyone to read. no one is trying to hide them or keep them from you. the priorities are clear. the national defense strategy openly states that we have returned to an area of global power competition and the united states must recognize that in prevail. we have laid out our technical priorities and if you think we have missed one, drop us a note. there is no pride of authorship there.

we are happy to have priorities but i think we have a pretty good list. obviously since the report came out only in january and the team for this administration -- i was not confirmed until three weeks after my job officially started and we have been and it has been difficult to get appointees through the trump administrati administration. some of that has been because of just the normal turn of doing business as you change in ministrations and some of it is because frankly, not everybody accepts the results of the election. it has been notably more difficult to get appointees on board in the trump administration but most of the last of us are now in place at dod. of course we have to reshape the

budget. they are the budget we inherited in the plans we inherited are not the plans we had going forward and we're making the plans and going to reshape the budget. if you look at it today there is exactly $0 allocated against any of these priorities. how could it be otherwise? our task and the fiscal 19 budget is already largely spared and we will work at modifying the margins but our real task is to reshape pv 20, the president but it 20 and beyond. i have a real sense that not bipartisan but nonpartisan thoughts are, you know, largely governing this renewed vigor in american defense preparedness.

i am personally getting acceptance from both sides of the aisle and nobody is asking why voted for or why. they just want me to do my job right after this meeting i'm headed up to the hill for discussions. i think we have, in our secretary, someone who is absolutely accepted and someone who doesn't care about any of that stuff and just wants to move the ball down the field. he spent several hours in testimony on the committee and, you know, i thought acceptance of the congress by the congress of him is extraordinary. we will be reshaping the budget priorities that we say we have. i would do our very best to deliver value that the american taxpayers have given us because we have done very well on the budget this year.

now, an important part of doing well to the taxpayer is to speed things up. i started out the day by saying we have been on holiday for 25 years and it is always shocking to me to hear myself say this but i turned 69 this year. i don't have to read in history books but i can remember when and i participated in programs which moved at light speed okay? this country knows how to do things urgently when we are frightened or when there is a major priority. i had at the pledge of speaking with chairman thornberry couple of weeks ago just in a private meeting and he was asked what could he do to make things move faster because when i hear

reports that it takes 16 years to go from statement in need to initial operational capability i don't even care if the number is right. even if it's not exactly right it is so far wrong that it is unacceptable and what can you do to bring that into a small number of years and i said, sir, might immediate reaction is can either keep our processes or we can keep our preeminence but we cannot have both. we have become a process driven acquisition and development culture where our primary goal seems to be to make sure we never make a mistake in acquisition and never have to protest never make a wrong technical choice and we spend so much time trying to rent a mistake but the cost of not making a mistake in the is bigger than a mistake. at some point try something in the works.

that is what i think the congress was going after when they created my position. i can site specific figures of things that this nation used to do. i believe it is true and i hope i don't misremember the number but we developed the sr 71 in 22 months from a standing start and i know for a fact that it was 32 months from contract award to first flight of the stealth fighter. the technology we had that we had never done work at all in any field we build an airplane with a fly by wire self drive and pixel in the first gulf war. we had it on the ramp in 32 months and it would take 32 mistake and we'd still be arguing about the requirements. and that is not a joke. that's not a hyperbolic survey. we would spend 32 months to

argue about what the requirements for the stealth fighter should be. i personally was the chief engineer project engineer, whatever you want to call them on sdio of an intelligence gathering mission that recording on the soviet posters powered flight where we watch them come up off the pad and the staging and check payloads into orbit and the other name for those was targets. if you were going to shoot at a target you need to know what it look like and we did not have any and we did not have any expense intelligence information on what rockets look like powered flight so we put together a mission that would make those measurements and several spectra and we built the fluid in 13 months. from a standing start.

you know, in a another mission we did, we did something in 30 months and don't shoot me if i ever wrong by few weeks but we put together a similar intelligence mission that looked at our own reentry vehicles during midcourse light and what is a reentry vehicle look like an midcourse flight? we did that in 30 months. i was for a time until it is nothing else i was chief engineer on that one as well and in the early years of sdio i was privileged to be a project engineer on the space intercept and against of mr. powered flight. the time that general abramson the first director said go which was in may of 1985 and that

seems like a long time ago now but until the intercept which we executed in september of 1986 was 16 months. from the. now, no one argues that the system that we developed were ready for production and in fact they were prototypes to demonstrate that you could do what you were trying to do at all in our first interceptor weighed a ton. literally, it weighed a ton. that is not technically traceable and that is not. the point is to demonstrate that you can do it at all. as pt barnum once famously said about waltzing bears the miracle is not how well that their waltzes pathetic and waltz at all. in developing new systems have to move at that kind of the piece. think one at 17 not 35 when you

talk about our development is not. the s35 is proving to be an incredible weapons platform and an incredible were fighting. no one wants to repeat that acquisition cycle and neither the government nor the contractor want to repeat that acquisition cycle. my answer and my long-winded answer to your question is those of us who are nearing the end of our career do not have to read about it in books. we can remember when we participated in programs that develop systems along the timeframe that our adversaries are now doing. we can do that again but we just have to allow ourselves and that will be part of my job. >> and that the leadership issue and managing expectations of the congress because practice yesterday the congress expects every intercept test to be a success and they don't understand that sometimes there

will be a miss intercept and you learn from that -- >> the sm three to a miss was the first version of this built by our deputies partners in certain areas. but that was not the cause of the myths. you know, i don't want to at this point go public with the issue but the myths but the floor was in a highly standardized component that is used in other areas and you know i am glad he spotted it because our question will be is this a fleet issue or not because it's and other fleets and the component in question is used in other areas than just what we do in sm3 to a so you don't test and find flaws you leave

yourself down the garden path. >> and you made a great point when you talk to the confidence you have in our current midcourse defense system and there is a lot of mischaracterization of that program because people tend to look at the history of the entire record and judge and condemn the system based on the whole testing record which the early protect the reuse for intercept or not in the ground today. >> i have sucking is for you. our early interceptors were not as good putting in the ground today. [laughter] i know that offends your world but the early interceptors that we put in the ground in brandenburg are not as good as the one we have today. go figure. >> i want to save time for questions from the audience and if you all have questions go back here first and come back to the front row and the gentleman

with -- >> i can run a bit over if we need to. we have a little bit of slack for next engagement over on the hill. >> mr. secretary, i worked with huntington inglis industries and we have a vulnerable drones and drones from iran was appointed to align our ships and plowshares following drones of our nuclear facility and in the not-too-distant future you can envision forming drones as being a threat is there anything in our any in your priorities that would address that somewhat immediate threat? >> well. yes although nothing as rapidly as we would like so those forming drones problem is something that we absolutely see and recognize and are very concerned about.

there are two issues there and one is you have to have just plain enough shooters to take out the number of drones that you have and as we look toward the future frankly i think our d capabilities today are directed energy capabilities are close to the point where they are an effective countermeasure against forming drones. the other meaning we don't necessarily have to shoot bullets to get them and i don't object to that but the other part of the issue and really felt part of the issue is the acquisition targeting control and that is where frankly i'm looking to advance in ai for artificial intelligence she learning for a solution. the problem there is you are a human being or even a crew of

human beings and you are in a b-17 over europe in world war ii and you see half a dozen attacking mr. smith your b-17 crew can do that they can't deal in the probably can deal with six. can't deal with 106. stalin said quality is a problem of its own. a human who can't deal with that many and i don't know what the threshold is but 100 will be beyond it so a swimming drone attack is of concern to us because of the mass but in ai system i hope can be trained to deal with just such things and i mean in mathematical terms, you know, i like to fall back on

the geek that i am the targeting problem's forming drones is a version of a traveling salesman problem in programming. it's a tough problem and in fact you can prove there is no optimal solution available to you but there are some pretty good solutions and you can prove that they are pretty good. if we can implement, you know, some of those kinds of solutions in an ai scheme which properly prioritizes the ones which are some combination of the ones that are nearer and the ones that are faster and the ones which are apparently headed for the more crucial targets that seems to me exactly the type of challenge that we want to use ai to go after -- are we there yet? organize it as a problem? yes and we haven't thought to try on it? you so with all deliberate speed we were moving out on that one. i'm not going to pick will go hear this gentleman.

>> i'm an analyst and i want to pick a little bit at research development resources. we look at the spreading profile for the department to you have the right mix between 61, 62, 63 and it should should it be more? for contractors how do you incentivize the industry to spend more on our indy because you're still looking at 2% in sales for companies and the attitude in this environment? >> i will answer the second question first. 2% is not an adequate r&d budget for america at large whether government or corporate. the historically that figure is more like 10% and i'm not here to tell you that it needs to be 10.0 but two is wrong. in the old days at nasa the first time i was in napa in the

early 70s are r&d budget percent and we were then a very vital organization. i thank you need something like that to be properly funding the future. our mix between the 61 and 62, three, four, five i don't know yet. you know, it's easy to say it's probably not what we wanted to be but i don't actually yet have enough time on target to know. i know that i want to return us to an era where prototyping is keen before we get into production. my counterpart ellen moore in annas was exactly the same thi thing. by the time she gets ready to sign off on milestone for production she wants to know that we are buying the right thing.

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frankly, not that difficult and people will make enormous sacrifices to work on these kinds of things if they believe we are for real. it has been a while and the kinds of things we're talking about here are not a priority for the last administration. they just weren't. when the very best people see that returning america to a

position of unchallenged preeminence across all the domains we must have it. they see that as a real priority matched by real money and real programs they will be, in my prior experience, clamoring at the door to join the team and that is what people do. frankly, on the other side i have seen from personal experience that when you crank up the demands for excellence at speed the people who can't cut it fell out and do something else. >> here and let's take the last over there. >> can you use the microphone? >> small business innovation resource has seen a lot of change over the years and it's one of the major sources of the ideas development and research

but there are two problems. one is process. the process system what it takes for a small company to deal with the department of defense is still very cumbersome and the number two is a volume between the program and what follows. we're going to fast this problem has to be solved and i'm wondering what your opinion o or -- >> well, i get a lot of questions like that that it is difficult for companies to deal with the department of defense and frankly, i served other places in the us government and is difficult companies to deal with any part of the us government and that is a fact. it is in our interest to make it easier for you to deal with us and that relates to the authorities we have been given by congress contracting

mechanisms. i will throw the first part of your question and i will put that challenge back at you. when you see an rfp come out when you are you put in a proposal and what you get back from the department is unnecessarily cumbersome or bureaucratic praise the game, okay? identify what you think is non- value added and bring it back to our attention. go above sp ir. come to our office and i own sbir for the department now. go above sp ir and we will try them first but if they don't agree that your objection is valid raise it to a higher level

and will look at it. i am on the lookout for non- value added processes. but i can't identify them by ourselves and i could spend all day looking at i would never get anything else done. >> bring to us what you think is not value-added and we will look at it. we will. the secretary has made exactly that same point to larger industry. tell us what you think is broken and we will look at it. we won't guarantee to decide in your favor but you will get a hearing. the second part of your question, how to deal with the value of death, the reality is most things that come out of sbir should die. okay? just because someone has a clever, new idea does not mean it is a good idea. the purpose of seedlings and sbir programs and other innovative ways to try to get ideas out is to see if they are

good. how to get the good ones to the valley of death -- this is a long-held problem -- you know, i don't know that i know yet. i recognize it as a problem but once we like an idea how do we champion to move it into prototyping and eventually production. i don't know yet and i would be more than willing to suggestions on that point and what we can do when something works to move along. sorry to go limp on you but i don't know. in fact, i thought i knew i wouldn't keep it a secret. one more question. >> justin with inside events. yesterday defense matus talks about hypersonic for ai and the first thing you hear or think when you hear jay poe is a 35 and so i am wondering what is

your vision for these new [inaudible] and how they'll and -- >> i think the secretary was speaking loosely when he used the word joint. if you will pardon me, joint program office is a specific term of art and relates to specific legal bureaucratic and i don't know and in fact i doubt that is exactly what we will do. the secretary did say and if you would allow me to rephrase his words just slightly we are creating eight joint artificial intelligence. the joint nest will include elements of the intelligence community as well. it will be cross cutting services in the intelligence

community. we are in the back organization discharged and looking at structural alternatives and how we would create it and where we would located and headed in would be participating in it and we owe a report to congress to be 90 days and sometime in mid summer we will report to congress on exactly how will do that. that we are going to do it is not in doubt but that it will be joined across not only the department but outside department is not endowed. how exactly will set it up they will study and when we know when we made a decision will not keep it secret. tell you. i can't tell you that i got an

answer today. i don't thank you should be thinking and i don't thank you should be thinking about the construct that is like the s35 day po. that is probably not in the cards. >> thank you so much. thank you for joining me in thanking the undersecretary. [applause] [inaudible conversations] [inaudible conversations]