watch landmark cases tonight at 9:00 p.m. eastern on c-span. join the conversation, our #landmarkcases and follow us at c-span. we have resources on our website for background on each case, the landmark cases companion book, a link to the national constitution center's interactive constitution and the landmark cases podcast at c-span.org/landmarkcases. next on c-span 3, hear defense undersecretary michael griffin talk about how the defense department is working to advance the military's technological capabilities. . this discussion hosted by the hudson institute is an hour.

good morning and welcome to the policy center here at hudson institute. i'm ken weinstein, president and ceo. i would like to welcome our audience here at hudson as well as the c-span viewing audience. hudson institute is dedicated to american leadership and global engagement for a secure, free, and prosperous future. and key to american leadership is continued american technological preeminence. and given that that's the case, i'm delighted to be able to welcome and introduce undersecretary of defense for research and engineering michael griffin here at hudson institute. undersecretary griffin will be speaking today in conversation with senior fellow rebecca heinrichs on precisely this

question of american technological preeminence and how to preempt our great power competitors and rogue actors from exploiting the technologies against us or against u.s. interests. under secretary griffin serves as chief technology officer for the secretary of defense which means he looks at current defense capabilities, looks at how to improve them technologically, defense technology transformation, how to hedge against uncertainty. he's an air row knowledgecle engineer by training, recently taught at the university of alabama at huntsville before returning to the department of defense. he, of course, served as administrator of nasa from 2005 to 2009 prior to service at nasa, he was head of the space department at johns hopkins university applied physics laboratory and also served as president and chief operating officer of incuetell, private non-profit enterprise, funded by the central intelligence agency to identify and invest in

cutting-edge technologies that serve national security interests. as i mentioned undersecretary griffin will be engaged in conversation with hudson fellow rebecca heinrichs. rebecca is well-known in defense circles as both for her work on missile defense and other policy issues. she's frequently called to brief on capitol hill at the white house and the pentagon and she's a former congressional staffer who helped launch the missile defense caucus that writes regularly for the hill, frequent guest on fox news as well. without further ado my pleasure to turn it over to rebecca. >> thank you for being here. what i would like to do this morning is have -- dr. griffin asked i call him mike. my upbringing is telling me i should not do that, but mike is going to -- is -- i've known mike for several years. i am thrilled, as many of you are, that he is where he is at

this time in history because i think he is the man for the job, so thrilled that you're there, thrilled you're here, sir. i will turn the floor over to him and let him talk for a while about his priorities where he sees the current landscape and how he's going to prioritize over the next coming months and years. and then he and i will engage in conversation and then if you have questions, please just go ahead and write those down because i'm going to save time at the end so you can all participate as well. >> thank you. i'll try not to spend too great a length of time pontiff cating. let me maybe set some context. this -- the job i'm in is a new job. it has at significantly lower levels in the organization before, but not since the

goldwater-nicoles of 1986 which created acquisition, technology and logistics as an entity, not since then has the rne organization occupied undersecretary at level stature. since it's been 32 years, since the enactment of goldwater/nichols, since we had a major reorganization of the department, i think we can expect this to remain around for a while as well. so i am the first occupant of the office at the undersecretary level but i think we can expect many more. and my primary purpose is to get things started off right and set the proper tone for what we ought to be doing. so what ought we be doing and why. >> for that, i have to pull on a

little bit of history, some of it recent, some of it of longer standing,. i'm going to start by saying that in the united states, we've been on holiday for 25 years and maybe a little bit more since the fall of the berlin wall and the shortly thereafter the collapse of the soviet union at that time china was not a great power, russia was devolving from great power status into a much more fractioned regime. putin had not risen to the top. at that time it would have been really unimaginable for someone to stand up and say that the dissolution of the soviet union was the greatest tragedy of the 20th century as putin has since

stated. i think that's for you. i'm sorry. yeah. so we'll just turn that off. figure out how to turn it off later. so not in the early 90s envisioned building by china, preemption of international waters or the attempt to preempt international waters with rather bold territorial claims that no other nation in the world would recognize, never mind lay claim to.

we just, you know, didn't see and couldn't have anticipated those things. so for at least a couple decades the united states enjoyed a degree of aloneness at the top of the global power ladder that really we had not seen for a while in history. it had been quite a while since a single great power was so unchallenged and i -- my personal opinion is we kind of went to sleep. i was in the pentagon when the wall came down and i was in the pentagon when the soviet union dissolved. i had not yet gone over to my third incarnation at nasa. so watching those events from a seat in the pentagon, at -- as a deputy at the missile -- at the strategic defense initiative

organization, the ancestor of today's defense missile agency, watching those events occur, i will say and -- not as monday morning quarterbacking -- it bother me a lot. we started talking about the peace dividend as if that was going to be a perpetual entitlement. there is a saying about optimists and pessimists which i love, which is that an optimist is a person who believes we live in the best of all possible worlds and a pessimist is a person who is afraid that might be true. in the early and mid 90s i frankly was quite cynical about the peace dividend. i was quite cynical about a practice that the defense department and other government agencies aided and abetted of

allowing companies to merge from many competitors into a few large super companies. i did not think that -- i did not believe that there would be a peace dividend that would last out the rest of my life and certainly not into my children's and grandchildren's, and i did not believe that reducing our ability to have internal competition among many corporate competitors was in our long-term best interests. so you can chalk that up to premature old age and cynicism because in the early 90s i was in my early to mid 40s. maybe too young to be so cynical, but i was anyway. so if we fast forward in a couple years, couple decades, i think it is now observable in

hindsight that we failed to continue to fund the practices that had gotten us where we were, which was at the very top of the technological heap. the united states, from the time that we entered world war ii until it was ended, was about 3 1/2 years. world war ii lasted for six years. it was our presence and our technological engineering production preeminence that allowed the war to be brought to a close. as regrettable as it may be, that the war ended with, you know, the first use of nuclear weapons, it did end the war and i think there's no historian alive today who would say that more lives were lost because of that than would have been caused by an invasion of the japanese mainland.

so it was america's technological preeminence that brought an end to world war ii that won the cold war, and that got us to the place where we could fall asleep at the switch in terms of maintaining that preeminence. by the time, you know, we looked around and call it 2015, you know, 25 or so years later, it was and remains today observebly true that while in many categories america still leads the world and in company with our allies and partners in the western nations, still leads the world in many areas of technology with regard to certain areas in defense, science and technology, really we just don't anymore. that's a hard thing to say and a

hard thing to hear. but the fact of the matter is, that in area of hypersonics, to pick one, both china and russia are observebly ahead of where our current state of practice is. it's not ahead of where we could be, but it's ahead of our current state of practice and we're playing catch-up ball. in the area of micro electronics in the time of which i spoke of, early '90s, everybody bought american micro electronics because they were the best. they didn't buy them because we were making people buy them. they bought them because we had the best stuff. now 80% of micro electronics if i understand the figure correctly come from taiwan, not that taiwan is not a reliable partner, but they're 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. a world war ii ally which is not an adversary. meanwhile our world war ii adversaries are now allies. i mean this is an unfortunate turn of events, but it's something we must pay attention to. micro electronics undergirds everything we do, in a way today that it did not even 25 years ago and certainly not when i started in the business 25 years before that. today even if -- and this is a big if, which is not even true -- even if our defense industry were not dependent upon or solely dependent upon civilian micro electronics, i often ask, you know, if we are

victims of malware or undesired fierce in t micro electronic features we buy offshore, if another nation can bring about the collapse of the civil economy through such features or through such malware in what sense can the department of defense have been said to defend the nation? i mean, if you think about it, the purpose of our national security community writ large is not only to defend our bricks and mortar, but to defend our economy and our way of life. if we cannot rely upon our software and the controllers that that software implements, if we cannot fully rely and trust on the micro electronics software we purchase and implement, then in what sense can we be sure we have defended

the nation? it's not a comforting thought. so what do we have to do? how do we have to reinvest to get american micro electronics back at the top of its game, to where not because we subsidize it, but because economically it competes with the best in the world and becomes, once again, the first choice. how do we develop hypersonic systems that can hold chinese assets at risk in the way that they can hold our assets at risk? how do we expand and extend our missile defense system to be everywhere, all the time, instead of waiting on the ground in case an adversary re-entry vehicle shows up in the skies overhead. that's the last place, not the first place, i want to start

engagement. so the grounding principles behind the undersecretariat for research and engineering are rooted in the national defense strategy released in january. this is the first national defense strategy in a very long time that, in my opinion, has had real meat to it. and even the unclassified version of the strategy is unmistakably blunt, a characteristic i share. the -- the strategy calls out areas of current practice that need to be addressed, but it also calls out ten or a dozen areas of modernization priority, areas in which the department and the national security community in general must modernize to get ahead and keep ahead of our adversaries. that modernization is exactly -- that set of priorities is what

has been handed to the research and engineering establishment to address. my job is not f-35. my job is what comes after f-35. what are we doing to modernize our way of war and the weapons we bring to it that we don't have today. so those ten or a dozen or so priorities that are called out in the national defense strategy, everything from artificial intelligence to micro electronics to directed energy weapons, to more comprehensive missile defenses, to more comprehensive space, offense and defensive capability, across the board, those are my priorities. and that's why. the history lesson is why they are priorities and why i believe and why the secretary has said that congress was wise to reorganize the department to

address these priorities because the department, frankly, would not have reorganized itself. that's just too hard. so let me stop there. rebecca, i'm happy to answer your questions and happy to engage with the audience as best i might be able to do so. >> wonderful. thank you. i want to start sort of bigger picture policy and then if i could kind of zoom in a little bit and ask you more technical questions. one of the things that has been, i have perceived, as a cause for how we've gotten behind is that there's still sort of a bipartisan consensus that one of the ways to maintain stability is to have parody between peers and this idea, it's very popular in the missile defense community, if we don't want to have an arms race with the chinese and russians we can't go

beyond parody. i know that is not your view. could you speak to that point? >> well, in my view, the concept of attaining parody is intellectually bankrupt. the way to -- look, the united states, after world war ii, through the decisions and actions of some very far-seeing gentlemen, at the top of that group, people like george marshal who was both secretary of state and secretary of defense at different times, as well as chief of staff during world war ii, the united states recognized -- those people recognized that the necessity of a worldwide, rules-based order,

having at its root principles such as the rule of law, the relatively free movement of trade and money and the capitalist enterprise, the sovereignty of nations, that rules-based order, the rule of law, the kinds of things that underlie western principles that are deeply rooted in the american dna, if you will, and in western civilization generally, that american-led and buttressed international order has served us well for over 70 years. we've not had a major global conflict for over 70 years. yes, we've had brush fire wars, we've had times when americans did not fully adhere to our own

best principles, but those are bumps in the world, not the strategic path. when we allow nations who clearly do not believe in a rules-based world order, do not believe in national sovereignty, do not believe in fundamentally capitalist principles of movement of money and people and trade, when we have nations that declare themselves and global powers as russia has declared itself to be an opponent of american influence, china declares itself to be in opposition to american influence, what they're really declaring themselves to be is opponents of a worldwide, rules-based order with international norms along the lines i've spoken in favor of an

autonomy that they direct. that ought to be unacceptable to westerners generally, to those who adhere to western principles, and to americans. that ought to be unacceptable. the only way to discourage and deter such people is to be clearly so much more powerful than they, that they choose not to fight. if we struggle -- if we strive for parody, then we are always leaving room for a slight change on the margin to result in greater capability on an adversary's part than our own and that is a very tempting situation for them. there is always a temptation if a small gain is made that can be decisive in the outcome, to use

that while they have it. so parody is the adversary's friend, not our friend. the way to maintain the relative degree of peace we've had for the last 70 years in contrast to centuries of warfare before that, the way to maintain that degree of relative peace and to extend and increase the degree of that peace is to be so powerful that no one believes, ever, that they could prevail in a conflict. now, is that costly? yes, it is costly. it is very expensive. it has used a substantial portion of, fortunately, a very rich american economy for 70 years. it is expensive. it is trivially cheap compared to the cost of the war that we avoid. the cost of world war ii, i

can't calculate -- i don't have a good figure for the economic cost, but it must have been measured in trillions, and it was, according to the best historical estimates i've been able to find, some, you know, 50 to 60 million people dead. 50 to 60 million people and some estimates are higher, i think there are none that are lower, this is 50 to 60 million individual lives whose -- whose lives were as valuable to them and their families as any of us in this room today. those lives were not less valuable because only 500,000 of them 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. parodi parodies do not achieve that goal. my boss agrees, his words repeated over and over, we need to be in a position of dominance by 2028. his goal is not parody. >> that's great. i think that also really explains well why this characterization -- i often hear, you know, that we're overly worried about china and russia because if you look at the amount of money that the united states spends on defense versus theirs, ours is so much bigger that clearly we have superiority, but -- >> we spend ours so much less efficiently that we don't have that kind of -- we don't have as much of a lead as the monetary comparison would have you believe. >> not only that. but we're trying to do different things. our mission is different and we're trying to do very different things. having said that, you already mentioned specifically in the area of hypersonics.

one thing i tell people who make that argument, you to look and see what the enemy and adversaries are investing in. not just the total money but what it is they're investing in and be what they're trying to hold at risk for the united states and our interests. so you spend a lot of time talking about hypersonics. can you explain to us why that in particular, that threat, to the extent you can in an open, unclassified setting, why is that such a concern of yours and then i'm going to 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? or sensors and shooters? >> let me start with the last question first then, and i'll try to give a more comprehensive and regrettably long-winded answer to the first part. so the hardest part of hypersonics is the sensing, frankly, the shooting is not -- it's, frankly, one of the easier

targeting tasks we would have in the missile intercept world. because attacking hypersonic vehicles themselves are relatively fragile during their phase, long phase of cruise flight. they're fairly easy to destabilize. they're in a very difficult flight regime and their decoys are not possible. they glow brightly in the infrared. if they're going to reach their target they have to be in relatively straight line trajectories. they can maneuver, but they can't maneuver in their cruise phase 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 guise point of view,

the hypersonic intercept during cruise is not the hardest problem we have. now, if you let them get into terminal phase where we've ob be served they can pull many, many gs, that then becomes a hard target. so if you allow an attacking vehicle to get close enough to begin its terminal dive and the terminal dive might be from 100,000 feet on to a carrier battle group, if you let them get that close you're probably dead meat because that's a very hard intercept problem to get it at that point. so the challenge with 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 -- if we were a land mass 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 projection. which centers and has centered since the japanese sunk our battleship fleet at pearl harbor, has centered around carrier battle groups and submarines. and the main way in which we project american tactical power is through the carrier battle group. the hypersonic weapon, because we don't wall paper the surface of the ocean with radars to allow us to know when attacker is coming, largely in the current environment we don't see those things until they're way

too close for comfort. the sensor problem is the critical one. we need and do not yet have global, persistent, timely accurate knowledge of what's going on in space and the upper atmosphere and that's what we have to have. so from my point of view on the defensive side, the sensor challenge is the hardest one. now, why is this such a threat. well, when we talk about our relative level of expenditures in defense between us and, say, china and russia, or any other in some unknown future adversary, you mentioned that we have to spend more because we have to do so much more. well that's exactly right. see, 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, so we can have no areas of vulnerability. an adversary nation only has to win once. we have to win every time across all theaters. that's a serious challenge. the offense can seek out our weakest point and concentrate its efforts there. so at present the united states has actually given -- given adversary capabilities of a relatively impressive missile defense capability. it is my assessment that we have quite a good capability now against re-entry vehicles in their mid-course and terminal

defense with thaad and sm 3 and sm 6, our aegis systems. we have relatively good missile defense capability for a relatively limited attack. i don't think we could withstand an icbm onslaught by russia, but that's not our most immediate threat. we have very good air defense capabilities. but hypersonic systems, the way that they are built and flown and targeted, over fly our air defense systems and under fly our missile defense systems. so china has with -- over the last decade with great care, developed a tactical system capable of reaching out for ranges of several thousand kilometers that over flies air

defense, under flies missile devils, and can hold our assets, whether land or maritime, at risk. nothing i'm saying here is classified. you can find these assessments in open literature, aviation week, for example, or other things. not putting any numbers on anything. i'm just saying that this is the general level of capability. that's critically important because that's a tactical capability that an adversary has developed that is -- that holds what for us are strategic assets, carrier battle groups and forward deployed forces on land at risk. because for us, these are means by which we project strategic power short of nuclear deterrence. so by allowing that nonparody to

continue to exist, and it's nonparody on the adversary side, we allow their tactical systems to leverage our ability to project strategic power, leaving us no option in the case of aggressive behavior on their part, leaving us no option except to accept their behavior or go nuclear. i don't think we want to do that. and so this is an area where we must see their hand and raise them one. we must at least be able to defend against their use of hyper sonic weapons should that come about and we must be able to hold their assets at risk with systems similar to, but better than what they have fielded. that's why this is so important to me. it's the leverage of a tactical asset on our strategic

intentions. >> and on that point then too, so you said sensors, so we got to have -- we got to have better space sensors. >> unfortunately, the only way that i know to be able to in my phrase see them coming is from space. i mean, if i had enough -- if i had enough ships with radar in the right places and enough radars on land masses where we have some control, then you could do it that way. but we don't. that's an impractical solution to the problem. the only way i know to surveil the required area at the tracking level of accuracy is from space. >> and general heighten, commander of strategic command has said the same thing and made the point that having a robust space architecture or even just one better than the one we've

got, that that would also significantly qualitatively squeeze out more capability from our current systems, even against the ballistic missile threat. >> oh, of course, yeah. >> so it's not like it's going to get just at this high-end threat. it also will significantly improve the entire system against the threats that we're seeing now from north korea. so that's expensive. space sensors are expensive. worth the cost. of course i agree with you on that. you talked about how in your job you're looking over the horizon but some of this stuff is not that far over the horizon. it's sort of near horizon. so how do we -- and there was no money for this kind of thing in this latest missile defense agency budget. there was about $11.5 billion per current programs and expand current programs but if we're going to talk about space sensors there's got to be more

money in there. can you talk about that and also just the need to go faster? you're talking about long term, but i would still consider the things you're talking about, because we're behind we have to go faster. general heighten talked about the need to go fast. how do we get the necessary funding for these priorities, get them in the budget, get cracking on them, and then especially not just because of the partisan politics in congress and all that kind of stuff, but the bureaucratic inertia that exists that always seems to be slowing down really good, big picture policy initiatives? >> let me try to get at that then. first of all for budget priorities, there is a -- so the national defense strategy was released in january and until then i think it could be fairly said that the department had not since the last administration laid out new priorities. okay.

that's now been done. those 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 that the united states must recognize that and prevail. we've laid out our technical priorities. if you think we've missed one, drop us a note. there's no pride of authorship there really. we're happy to add priorities, but we have i think a pretty good list. obviously, since the report came out only in january, and the team for this administration, i was -- i was not confirmed until

three weeks after my job officially started, we've been -- it's been difficult to get appointees through in the trump administration. some of that has been because of just the normal churn of doing business as you change administrations and some of it is because, frankly, not everybody accepts the results of the election. but it has been notably more difficult to get appointees on board in the trump administration, but i think most of the last of us are now in place at d.o.d. of course, we have to reshape the budget. okay. the budget that we inherited, the plans that we inherited, are not the plans going forward. we're making new plans and going to reshape the budget. if you look at the fight of today there is exactly zero dollars allocated against any of these new priorities.

i mean how could it be otherwise. so our task, the fiscal 19 budget, is already largely prepared. we will work at modifying it on the margins, but our real task is to reshape present budget 20 and beyond. i have a real sense that not bipartisan, but nonpartisan thoughts, are largely governing this renewed vigor in american defense preparedness. i'm personally getting ac acceptance from both sides of the aisle and nobody is asking who i voted for or why. they just want me to do my job. right after this meeting i'm headed up to the hill and for just those sorts of discussions.

i think we have in our secretary, someone who is absolutely accepted as somebody who doesn't care about any of that stuff. he just wants to move the ball down field. he spent several hours yesterday in testimony to the senate armed services committee and, you know, i thought the level of acceptance of the congress or by the congress of him is extraordinary. so we're going to be reshaping the budget to fit the priorities to say what we have. we're going to do our very best to deliver value for the money that the american taxpayers have given us because we've done very well in the budget this year. an important part of doing well for the taxpayer is to speed things up. i started out the day by saying we've kind of been on holiday for 25 years.

it is always shocking to me to hear myself say this, but i turn 69 this year, so i can -- i don't have to read in history books, i can remember when, i participated in programs which moved at light speed. okay. this country knows how to do things urgently when we're frightened or, you know, when there's a major priority. i had the privilege of speaking with chairman thornberry a couple weeks ago, just in a private meeting, and he was asked, what can you do to make things move faster because, you know, when i hear reports it takes 16 years to go from statement of need to initial operational capability, i don't even care if the number is right. even if it's not exactly wrong, it's so far unacceptable.

what can we do to bring that into a small number of years. i said, sir, my immediate reaction is we can either keep our processes or we can keep our preeminence, but we cannot have both. we've become a process-driven acquisition and development culture where our primary goal seems to be to make sure that we never make a mistake in acquisition, never have a protest, we never make a wrong technical choice, and we spend so much time trying to prevent a mistake that the cost of not making a mistake in the large is bigger than the mistake. i mean at some point try something and see if it works. and that's what i think the congress was going after when they created my position. but i mean i can cite specific figures of things this nation used to do. i believe it is true, i hope i don't misremember the number, that we develop the sr-71 in 22

months from a standing start. i know for a fact that it was 32 months from contract award to first flight of the first f-117 a stealth fighter. a technology we had never done before at all in any field. and we built an airplane with fly by wire control systems and stealth capabilities and it was pivotal in the first gulf war. and we had it on the ramp in 32 months. it would take 32 months today, we would still be arguing about the requirements. that's not a joke. that's not a hyperbolic statement. we would be spending 32 months to argue about what the requirements for the stealth fighter should be. i personally was the chief engineer, project engineer, whatever you would want to call

them, on sdi commission that did the first soviet boosters in powered flight where we watched them come up off the pad, do staging, inject payloads into orbit, the other name for those was targets. if you're going to shoot at a target you need to know what it looked like and we did not have any, we did not have any defense intelligence information on what rockets looked like in powered flight. we put together a mission that would make those measurements in several spectra and we built and flew it in 13 months. from a standing start. you know, in another mission that we did in something like 30 months, i don't -- don't shoot me if i have it wrong by a few weeks, we put together a similar intelligence gathering mission that looked at our own re-entry

vehicles during mid-course flight. what is a re-entry vehicle look like in mid-course flight, the sensors which have to shoot it. we did that in 30 months. i was -- i was for a time until i did something else, i was chief engineer on that one as well. in the early years of sdio i was privileged to be, again, the project engineer on the first space intercept we ever did in this country against a booster in powered flight. from the time that lieutenant general abramson, the first director of missile defense agency said go, which was in may of 1985, seems like a long time ago now, until the intercept which we executed in september of 1986, was 16 months. from nothing. now, no one argues that the systems that we developed were

ready for production. in fact, they were prototypes to demonstrate that you could do what you were trying to do at all, our first interceptor weighed a ton, literally weighed a ton. that's not tactically traceable. that's not the point. the point is to demonstrate that you can do it at all. as p.t. barnum said once famously about waltz bears, the miracle is not how well the bear waltz, but that it can waltz at all. so in developing new systems we have to move at that kind of a pace. you know, think f-117, don't think f-35 when you talk about our development pace. the f-35 is proving to be an incredible weapons platform and war-fighting platform, but no one wants to repeat that acquisition cycle. neither the government nor the contractor want to repeat that

acquisition cycle. so my answer to your -- 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 time frame that our adversaries are now doing. we can do that. we have to allow ourselves and that will be part of my job. >> it's a leadership issue and managing expectations of the congress. i was talking about this the other day, sometimes the congress just expects every intercept test that we have to be a success. they don't understand that sometimes the sm-32a will have a missed intercept and you will lose from that. >> the sm 3-2a miss was the first version of this built by our japanese partners in certain areas, but that was actually not

the cause of the miss. you know, i don't want to at this point go public with the issue, but the miss -- the flaw was in a highly standardized component that's used in other areas and, you know, i'm glad we spotted it because our question will be, you know, is this a fleet issue or not because it's in other fleets, the component in question is used in other areas than just what we do in sm 3-2a. so if you don't test and find flaws, you lead yourself down the garden path. >> and then you made a great point, you talked about the confidence in our current homeland missile defense system, and there's a lot of mischaracterization of that program because people tend to look at the history of the entire testing record and sort

of judge and condemn the system based on the whole testing record which the early prototypes that we use for intercept tests are not the ones that are in the ground today. >> i have shocking news for you, our early interceptors were not as good as the ones we're putting in the ground today. i know that upends your world, but the early intercepters we put in the ground are not as good as the ones we have today. go figure. >> mind blowing. >> anyway. >> and i want to save some time for questions from the audience so if you all have questions, we'll go back here first and then we'll come up to the front row. right behind -- the gentleman with the pin. yes, sir. >> and also i can run a bit over if you need to. because we have a little bit of slack before our next engagement over on the hill. >> okay. >> mr. secretary, i'm jay donnelly, work with huntington industries. we have a vulnerable -- vulnerability today with drones,

drones from iran are flying center line right down our ships in the straits of hormuz, over our nuclear weapons facilities in king's bay and in the not too distant future you can envision swarming drones as being a threat. is there anything in r and e in your priorities that would address that somewhat immediate threat? >> well, yes, although nothing as rapidly as we would like. the swarming drone problem is -- is something that we absolutely see and recognize and are very concerned about. there are two issues there. one is you have to have just enough shooters to take out the number of drones that you have. now, as we look toward the future, you know, frankly i think our de capabilities today

are directed energy capabilities are very close to the point where they are an effective counter measure against swarming drones. the other -- meaning we don't have to necessarily shoot what's at them to get them, although i don't object to that, but the other part of the issue, the really difficult part of the issue is, the acquisition targeting fire control. that's where i'm frankly looking to advances in a.i. for artificial intelligence machine learning solution. the problem there is, you know, i mean if you're a human being or even a crew of human beings and and you're in a b-17 over europe in world war ii and you see half a dozen attacking, your b-17 crew can probably deal with that. they can't deal -- they can

probably deal with six. they can't deal with 106. as stalin famously said, quantity has a quality all of its own. a human crew just can't deal with that many. i don't know what the threshold is, but 100 is going to be beyond it. a swarming drone attack is of concern just because of the mass. but an a.i. system, i hope, can be trained to deal with just such things. i mean in mathematical terms, you know, i like to fall back on the geek that i am, the targeting problem for swarming drones is a version of what's called the traveling salesman problem in linear programming. it's a tough problem and, in fact, you can prove that there is no optimal solution available to you, but there are some pretty good solutions and you can prove that they're pretty good. if we can implement, you know,

some of those kinds of solutions in a.i. scheme, with which appropriately prioritizes the ones which are some combination of the ones which are nearer, ones which are faster, ones which are apparently headed for the more crucial targets, you know, that seems like to me exactly the type of challenge we want to use a.i. to go after. are we there yet? no. do we recognize it as a problem? yes. do we have some thoughts we want to try on it? yes. so with all deliberate speed we're moving out on that one. i'm not going to pick. you pick. >> we'll go here. gentleman in the front here. i'll go back. >> sure. byron callen, analyst at capital alpha partners. i want to pick a little bit at research and development resources. when you look at the spending profile for the department, do you have the right mix between

61, 62, 63, should be more for 64, 65, and then for contractors, how do you incentivize the industry and spend more on r and d. we're still looking at 2% for most companies of their sales. is that adequate in this type of environment? >> well i'll answer the second question first. 2% is not an adequate r and d budget for america writ large whether government or corporate. the historically accepted figure is more like 10%. i'm not here to tell you it needs to be 10. 0, but 2 is wrong. in the old days at nasa, the first time i was at nasa in the early '70s, our r and d budget was like 10%. and we were then a very vital organization. i think you need something like that to be properly funding the future.

our mix between 61 and 2, 3, 4, 5, i don't know. you know, it's easy to say well, it's probably not what we want it to be, but i don't actually yet have enough time on target to know. i know that i want -- i want to return us to an era where prototyping is king before we get into production. and my counterpart in ans wants exactly the same thing. by the time she gets ready to sign off on milestone c for production, you know, she wants to know that we're buying the right thing. the way we've been doing it for some decades now doesn't -- it doesn't allow us to ring out the bugs until too late and costs too much money and takes too much time. >> thank you matt jones with the boeing company. i want to say thanks for coming

back and taking this job. we're really glad you're there. >> i'm glad i have enough money to fund it. some of the examples you gave of when we were successful in going fast, great examples, what came to my mind was that one of the key aspects of that were the right people with the right authorities. do you feel like you have enough leverage to make sure you have people with the right skills, experience, judgment, to get us back to going fast? >> good question. we have the right authorities. the congress has been very generous in the authorities they've given us to hire people, to execute programs quickly. they've given us a rapid innovation fund which i plan to use. i -- i can really only offer praise to the hill for the -- for their recognition of the issue and their rather strong lean forward posture in trying

to give us what we need. getting the right people is, frankly, not that difficult. ma sacrifices to work on these kinds of things if they believe we are for real. it's been a while, you know. the kinds of things we are talking about here were not a priority for the last administration. and the very best people see that returning america to a position of unchallenged preeminence across all the domains we must have it, when they see that is a real priority matched by real money and real programs they will be in my prior experience frankly clamoring at the door to join the team. i mean, that's what people do. and frankly on the other side

i've seen, again, from personal experience that when you crank up the demands for excellence, excellence at speed, people who can't cut it self-select out. they decide to go do something els else. >> here and then we will take the last one over here. >> can you use the microphone? >> the small business innovation research has seen a lot of exchange over the years. it's one of the major sources of fair ideas, development, research. two problems, one of it is process, the process system what it takes for a small company to deal with the department of defense is still very cumbersome. number two, there is a value of

deaths between the sbil program and what follows. if we are going to move fast, this problem has to be solved. i wonder what's your opinion. >> well, i get a lot of questions like that, but it's difficult for companies to deal with the department of defense and frankly i served other places in the u.s. government, it's difficult for companies to deal with any part of the u.s. government. that's a fact. it is in our interest to make it easier for you to deal with us and that relates to the authorities we've been given by congress for different contracting mechanisms. i'm going to throw the first part of your question, i'm going to throw that challenge back at you. when you see an rfp come out or when you are -- if you put in an sbir proposal and what you get back from the department is unnecessarily cumbersome or

bureaucratic, raise the game. okay? identify what you think is nonvalue added and bring it back to our attention. go above sbir. okay? come to our office and -- i own sbir for the department now, so go above sbir and -- try them first, but if they don't agree that your objection is valid, raise it to a higher level and we will look at it. i am on the lookout for nonvalue added processes, but i can't identify them by myself. i could spend all day looking at stuff and i would never get anything else done. [ inaudible ]. >> yes. okay. so 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. well, okay, the reality is that most things that come out of sbir should die. okay? i mean, just because someone has a clever new idea does not mean it's a good idea. the purpose of sbir programs and other innovative ways to try new ideas out is to see if they are good. now, how to get the good ones through the valley of death, and this is a long held problem, you know, i don't -- i don't know that i know yet. i recognize it as a problem. once we like an idea, how do we

find a champion for it to move it into pro toe typing and eventually production. i more than willing to have suggestions on that point. what we can do once something works to move it along. i'm sorry to go limp on you, i just don't -- i don't know. if i thought i knew i wouldn't keep it a secret. one more question. >> hi, justin doubleday with inside defense. yesterday secretary mattis mentioned that you would be setting up joint program offices for hyper sonics and for ai and obviously the first thing you think when you here ijpo is f-35 jpo. i'm wondering what is your version for these new jpos and how they will help you get at the technology. >> i think the secretary was speaking loosely when he used the word joint, okay? i don't -- so if you will pardon

me, joint program office is a specific term of art that relates to, you know, specific legal bureaucratic creation. i don't know -- in fact, i doubt that that is exactly what we're going to do. the secretary did say and if you would allow me to rephrase his words just slightly, we are creating a joint artificial intelligence center. now, the jointness will be -- will include elements of the intelligence committee as well. okay? so it will be cross-cutting across services in the intelligence community. we are -- in fact, my organization is charged with looking at structural alternatives on how we would create it, where we would locate it, who would head it, who would be participating in it.

we owe a report to congress on that by 90 days from some date a couple of weeks in the past. so sometime in mid summer i owe a report to congress on exactly how we are going to go and do that. so that we are going to do it is not in doubt, that it will be joint across not only portions of the department but outside the department is not in doubt. how exactly we're going to set it up still studying when we know -- when we've made a decision we are not going to keep it secret. we will tell you. but i can't tell you that i've got an answer today. i don't think you should be thinking, however, i will say i don't think you should be thinking about a construct that's like the f-35 jpo. that's probably not in the cards. >> i thank you so much. please join me in thanking the undersecretary. >> thank you.

the council on american islamic relations released its 2018 civil rights report outlining anti-muslim bias in the u.s. we will have live coverage at 11:00 a.m. eastern on c-span. and today's white house briefing with press secretary sarah sanders at 1:00 eesh also on c-span. later this afternoon the senate

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