leadership. the last program i want to talk about is america's filter. america's guilt trip -- america's field trip is a competition for students three through 12 answering the question what does america mean to me. we launched this as a pilot program last spring and we received thousands of submissions. the beauty of america's field trip is the reward recipients get to choose from backstage experiences with federal agencies, most of which have never been offered to the public before. it is a great win-win across-the-board. i had a chance to participate in the field trips this past summer. it wasn't just a tour of the statue of liberty. we took a private national park service boat from manhattan island to liberty island, got to the ground, we walked the hollow halls of ellis island when no one was there, we got a lunch hosted by the cio of bni mellon, we got to the federal

reserve getting an overview of monetary policy. i had one girl walk up to meet and say that she felt like she had won the golden ticket, that this is better than willy wonka. for many of the students this was the first time out of the state conference on family vacation --out of the state, first time on family vacation. we want to have america explore each other and these parts, these beautiful treasures, all over again. we just launched a whole new round of america's field trip. the next deadline for that is april 16. go to our website at america250 .org and you can get a lot more information, and please share that with your school districtss. we want thousands more summations by april 16. it is a great way for these kids to feel that anything is possible. these programs i have shared are just the beginning. we have many more to come, and we are excited to roll out more initiatives in the months to come. i hope all of you find ways to

engage with us in the months and years ahead get we need your help to engage our youth through educational programming, we need your help to activate service efforts in cities, towns, and communities, and we need her help to --your help to better tell the story of all of us that i know is unique and i know is much more a way to connect us than to divide us. america 250 has great resources in the pipeline including an interactive map of events, funding directory, and much more you can find on the website soon to come. america250.org. if 2026 is going to mean something, in needs to honor all americans, in needs to reflect the same spirit of opportunity that inspired me in 1976 and keeps the memory of my mom going. and with your help, i'm confident we will get there. thank you so much, i want to close with a short video previewing our american story. ♪ >> after 248 years, you could

say i've seen some things. building a democracy from scratch, it is an easy -- it isn't easy. or being home to hundreds of millions from everywhere on earth. fact is, there have been challenges since the very beginning. uphill battles, setbacks, and injustices. but you know, americans, we got grit. we fight for what we need. and what's right. what we want for the next generation, we take care of each other when it gets rough.

we inspire each other. innovate together. and get the job done. and create so much opportunity. heck, that's probably why folks have been inspired to come here for so long. and now we have got a pretty big anniversary coming up, the big 2-5-0. in honor of that, we invite you to add your story to our american story. we're coming to every state, to cities large and small, and even just down the road. we're coming to hear from the people who make our community special, unique, home. the american story is all around

us, and we need your help ot find-- to find the people that make that story come alive, to discover the folks of all walks of life who make us american. so nominate someone you know, and we'll come, record their story, and tell it to the nation. your story is the american story. and together, we'll build our american story. >> woo! [applause] mayor patterson: america 250, tell your story. thank you so much, and that, ladies and gentlemen, concludes

our afternoon session. please go out, enjoy the last workshops, have a great time tonight. i know i will see many of you at events and receptions this evening. if you see me out and about, i will be all over the place, please come up and say hello. let's chat, let's get engaged. in the meantime, our next deep dive workshop will begin promptly at 4:00 p.m. this afternoon, and we will be back here for a final general session -- sad to say -- of the conference tomorrow at 12:$5, so please don't -- 12:45, so please don't miss it. thank you all, and have a great and safe and wonderful evening tonight. thank you. ♪ [captions copyright national cable satellite corp. 2025] [captioning performed by the national captioning institute, which is responsible for its caption content and accuracy. visit ncicap.org]

>> mr. speaker, on this historic day, the house of representatives opens its proceedings for the first time to televised coverage. >> since march 1979, c-span has been your unfiltered window into american democracy, bringing you direct, no-spin coverage of congress, the supreme court, and the white house. >> is this mr. brian lamb? >> yes, it is. >> would you hold one moment please for the president? >> it exists because of c-span founder brian lamb's vision and the cable industry's support, not government funding. but this public service isn't guaranteed. all this month in honor of founder's day, your support is more important than ever. you can keep a democracy unfiltered today and for future generations. >> to the american people, now is the time to tune into c-span.

>> your gift today preserves open access to government and ensures the public stays informed. donate now at c-span.org/donate, or scan the code on your screen. every contribution matters. and thank you. nearly 3500 students participated in this year's c-span studentcam documentary competition, or we asked students to craft a message to the new president, exploring issues important to them for their communities. this wednesday, tune into "washington journal" at 8:00 a.m. eastern where we announce the grand prize winner of this year's competition. >> and our conversation with former speechwriters for president and first lady michelle obama and former house speaker's paul ryan and nancy pelosi. they shared stories and advice for young speechwriters. hosted by the university of chicago institute of politics, it is an hour and 10 minutes. >> hello, everybody, welcome to

today's event. great to see everybody. thank you for braving what i believe shocked all of our speakers today in terms of the temperature. hi to everybody on the livestream. let's dive into this topic. i think speechwriting is so fascinating to people because it is a skill that is so elusive and you don't get credit for it, but it is also so laudatory and everybody is excited about it. you get to use your own skills with the pen, but you have to channel someone else who has the voice that is completely distinct from yours and as a -- and has a very specific public image, and you don't get the credit for any of it. i have a lot of individual questions for all of you about the folks that you did write speeches for, but i want to start with one down the line, maybe starting with you, mike. what is, in your view, both at s a profession and

specifically the folks you wrote for, what do you think is the most important tool in your toolbox for being a speechwriter? >> i think -- well, good evening. thank you all for coming tonight. you gotta have a sense of humility. it's not an easy process. everyone thinks they are a speechwriter or a writer. i could never tell a policy expert how to do policy but they could tell me how to write something or explain the policy. and so you have to accept that you are going to be at the center of a sometimes exhausting sometimes very deliberative process. and so you have to become -- i know you think of it -- we think of it as an art or craft, and it is, but you really have to become good at the process of it and managing. what i enjoyed about it is you are at the center of everything in the office.

yes, you are writing for the pensive pal, but you are in -- principal, but you are involved in all the different things. you are in the thick of the process itself. when i would talk to hill staffers about speechwriting, that is what a lot of them focused on, how you get better at understanding the bosses or the chief of staff's. they would get things back with red pen over them, and how to deal with them, and how it makes you better as a writer. you need to have that humility is how i describe it, but you have to be in it for the long haul. it's not -- you have to commit to it is what i would say. that is why i think it is so rewarding for those who are willing to stick with it and form that kind of relationship with their principal, get the trust of the people around you to be able to contribute, especially in such important historical moments. but you cannot just airdrop into

it is my point. commit to the process. >> i agree with everything you said. humility is key, because when i -- people think this is like being a poet or a novelist and i will sit in my cabin in the woods and opine. no, you won't. speech is due thursday, boss has ideas, so to 500 other people. you're constantly getting fact-check, constantly double checking things. you don't know anything. we are not experts can where the people trying to tell the story with the experts' input, and most of all we are trying to tell the story in our boss's words. what helps to be a speechwriter especially today is to be able to talk like a human being, to have a real sense of what actual human beings talk like. i think so many speechwriters, so many politicians, frankly, live in the 1990's, where they are like "i will yell a soundbite on the evening news

and it will get in the morning newspapers." no, that media environment is utterly gone. today people see their politicians 24-7 on their phones. you are not getting one soundbite on the evening news or the morning newspaper. speechwriters who think speechwriting is about one snazzy line have missed the era, which is more about you are seeing people in their full selves 24-7, for better or for worse. can you help your boss sound like a human being, it sounds like a decent, empathetic, caring human being who knows what is going on? the art of speechwriting is much more human today than it was 30, 20 years ago when i started out, where it was the big soundbite. it is a different vibe today. >> to echo both my colleagues, it is important to be able to suppress your ego even as you are maintaining the stamina to drive a vision of a speech that holds together, that tells a story, that is compelling, and

that is not picked apart by all of the different policy teams or the different interest groups that live within the ecosystem of an office, including sometimes the principal. and holding that altogether in sort of -- and preserving that core of emotion. and so that is a balancing act, because i think particularly a lot of young speechwriters, speechwriters early in their careers, have this idealized version of what a great speech is. and it sort of flows from at least if you are our age probably sounding like "the west wing" or aaron sorkin. i don't know what the of that is now -- [laughter] sarah: we are old. henry: but that has a sameness to it. it is a pitfall for an experienced speechwriter to reach for this idealized but sort of same voice that doesn't

convey personality, that doesn't convey individualism of a member that isn't relatable. it sort of gets lost in generic, lovely sounding words that don't connect, that don't drive, particularly for us in the congressional speechwriting space, your goals are to win elections and win votes. everything has to flow back to whether it moves the needle in some way there. jennifer: i will get back to the audiences for congressional speeches, but sarah, it is unusual to go from the president of the first lady. the route, such as there is one, is usually the other way around. can you talk about how that happened? obviously very different jobs and very different people, self-evident. but what else is really striking about the difference in writing for those two into visuals? -- two individuals? sarah: yeah, i was with hillary clinton in 2007, 2008, and when

she lost i was very lucky to be hired for the obama campaign. maybe a week after i arrived, it was late in the campaign, it was july, i got pulled aside by my boss jon favreau, and he said you have to write michelle obama' convention speech. si got very offended, "oh, because on the girl in writing for the wife? i'm not doing that." he said, "nope, you have to do that." stephanie cutter, this amazing d.c. communications icon, she said "you are doing this." i got shoved into an office with michelle obama and i fell in love with her. i was struck by how smart and thoughtful and totally honest, this incredible authenticity. i really like her. we worked on the speech together, new was an amazing experience. no no no, i'm here for the candidate, not for the wife.

dr. the white house, road for him -- got to the white house, road for him for a year and have, and while i loved him and he was wonderful to work for, i felt more at home with her voice, i was more interested in what she was speaking about. turns out i'm not a political junkie, so the political news didn't interest me, writing a million speeches about the american recovery act, because the economy was crashing so that was all we were talking about. she was out there talking about whatever she wanted because she was the first lady. the president is the commander in chief. the president is the first responder. they are driven by the day's events and by news, so it is very last-minute job, a very hectic job. there is a certain voice of the president that is in the "hey girlfriend" colloquial voice. there is formality to it. when you are the first steps, you have a lot more latitude. --first spouse, you have a lot more latitude.

you are the second or third responder, and you can cultivate a much more informal voice, which is what she did. i realized i liked it better, so i moved over to writing for her, and it was a different schedule, kind of moving more into talking about more personal issues. she spoke a lot to women, she spoke a lot of people who cared about children, she spoke to military families. i just found that really moving, and it was getting dizzy a part of the country i didn't necessarily get to see when i worked for the president, which was much more official. when she does foreign travel, she goes to me with a bunch of girls in a peace corps camp in liberia who are learning about sex ed, or to talk to a bunch of mothers somewhere. he's going to bilateral meetings with the prime minister of whatever. it's a very different experience for i liked it better. . jennifer: did you have an internal struggle with that -- i'm sad i like the girl job? sarah: i did, because when i decided to make a move, a lot of people in the white house were like, what are you doing?

someone said to me, "why are you demoting yourself?" now it seems absurd because michelle obama is this global icon, but back in 2009, 2010, she was still finding her footing. her number one priority was making sure her girls were settled. i did feel the sense of is this a loss of prestige. i look back on that now and roll my eyes at myself, because if there is one piece of advice i give to the students year, you can spend your entire life doing the thing that looks prestigious to others, doing the thing that looks great on the resume. but if it is not the thing that really lights the spark within you, you're going to feel like you are sleepwalking through your life. the truth is you are not going to be that successful. i was, to be totally honest, a mediocre writer for him, kind of a middle of the pack writer for him, but i was really good writer for her. when i went to the place where i was best suited and i felt the spark and joy, i became quite successful.

i got to write speeches i'm proud of and do things that i think were memorable, whereas i think with him i never would have. even if it was the more "procedures" thing to do -- "prestigious" thing to do. jennifer: very washington story in its beginning in conclusion and very good advice. let's talk about nancy pelosi.she's an amazing politician, skillful at everything she does, number one badass, we cannot accept that. locution, public speaking, maybe not a 10, maybe not on par with other things. she is awkward in front of a mic, it seems like. how did that factor into how you would write for her? henry: you know, she has very different priorities and needs. one of the things that is often forgotten about the speaker is where that badassness comes

from, where her ability to lead her caucus to organize, to whip votes, that all flows from the ways that she talks, the relationships that she builds. a lot of what she is doing can sound like an encumbrance on the page, is she is holding a coalition together that she needs to allow her to do those things. an example that comes to mind is we did a foreign trip to dublin. the whole instance of a purpose of the trip was she was going to go to the irish parliament, she was going to deliver a speech to protect the good friday accord, which was then in some jeopardy because of brexit. and she was going to go there and deliver the message that if the good friday accord was harmed, the democratic house would not approve the trade deal

that the u.k. currently wanted. and in the middle of this speech, which it seems like it should be -- it's all oriented around the anniversary of the good friday accords and what this piece agreement means and relationship-- peace agreement means in the relationship between the u.s. and ireland, she takes two, three, four minutes of a 20-minute speech to recognize the members of congress who have come with her on the trip, because it is important that she build those relationships and at the end of the day she needs to make sure that her caucus knows that they are seen, knows that they are heard, that she recognizes their leadership, and that is what lets her show up in miraculous ways to deliver the votes when folks don't think that is possible. jennifer: so you are looking at the speech as a political tool almost more than a moment of

flowery oratory or something like that. henry: yeah, and i would also say the role of a congressional leader, and a congressional leader delivering speeches, is different. it is much more -- it is blunter, it is less that a congressional leader is supposed to speak to the mood of a nation order crystallize a historic event as it is happening in the way that we often see from the presidents. the speeches are political. they're focused on the fight of the day, the fight of the month, the campaign message. that means they are often less memorable, but they serve a different sort of purpose. jennifer: do you agree with that, mike, and do you say there is a difference -- i would be interested to hear you reflect on whether you agree with that. dizzy different when you are in the minority and when you are in the majority -- is it different when you are in the minority and when you are in the majority in

congress? mike: yeah, i think there is -- there is a gallows humor among leadership staff that the minority is more fun. get to throw bombs. i think henry's successors would disagree with that right now. but ideally in the minority -- henry: unencumbered. mike: yeah, you're unencumbered. when i was doing it, that is when the tea party was coming up. it really fell like we were trying to keep pace with the noise from the outside and keep pace with what was going on, as opposed to being able to craft our own proactive narrative. for us when we were in the majority we controlled the calendar -- whereas when we were in the majority we controlled the calendar. when you control the calendar, to the extent that you can know what will happen 1, 2, 3, 4

weeks ahead, you have a sense from a speechwriting perspective where things are going. and you have more ceremonial things and whatnot. minority, for me it was a challenge, and i only did it for a couple of years or so under boehner as the minority leader. it was fun, but obviously the number one goal was when the election. that is when the tea party was -- we were trying to fit ourselves into a mold that i didn't know at the time was really how boehner felt, but it is where the votes were and where the energy was. henry and i were talking about this, it culminated in the spring of 2010 when obamacare came to the floor for a vote and all of these protesters were outside with these signs "kill the bill." it was bizarre. writing in that environment was just -- it was strange and it was the beginning of sort of the

arc that brings us to today. minority, again, it felt like a horse you were trying to stay on and just try to keep up with the activists. jennifer: and i do want to talk about the interplay, the difference between boehner and ryan and pelosi. let me ask you, sarah, going back to president obama, did you ever have a situation were eroded speech and he said "i don't like it"? what you do in that situation? sarah: i did, actually. in 2009 i did his first college commitment speech -- college commencement speech at arizona state university. usually they give the commencement speaker an honorary degree, and they refused to give one to him, which was a little tacky, not great. he's a very classy guy, and he is like, oh, we will work it

into the speech. i don't deserve an honorary degree, i haven't earned it. it was very classy. i thought, we got this. i met with him a few weeks in advance. the economy was crashing -- you guys are probably too young to remember this, but literally the headlines were saying "next great depression," auto industry was crushing, thanks for crashing. the guy had more things to worry about then some commencement speech. but i thought i got the feedback i needed, i wrote the speech, got it to him nine days early, didn't hear anything, and thought i am good, no edits. the morning of the speech i got woken up by our call from the oval office saying the president would like to see you and david axelrod right away. mike: that actually happened? jennifer: was that the -- sarah: i knew he was not inviting me and to be like, "nice job, champion." [laughter]

i throw clothes on and i went to the white house. the white house photographers takes photos of every meeting the president has with staff, so there is a photo of me that day with my here in this crazy, messy bun, all disheveled, and the president is looking very crisp and commanding and holding the speech like this and saying "i don't want to give this speech." jennifer: awesome. sarah: he said very nicely -- "sorry, i didn't get to look at essentially last night, but this is not the speech i want to give." that is unfortunate, the speeches today. "no problem, mr. president, what would you like to say?" he starts dictating an entirely different speech, and i'm thinking, wow, this is bad. i'm writing down on my luck laptop and he's like "you got this." i am writing the speech and my colleagues are trying to help me and it is bedlam. a a few hours later i get him something and he goes "good try.

still too much of the old speech." i'm writing and writing and i'm about to miss the motorcade taking the staff to andrews air force base. i called the schedulers and i am like, i need more time. they say, no problem, we will get you on the helicopter, which is cool. i'm running to the south lawn with my laptop open and my papers everywhere and i get to marine one, which is tiny inside, a small little helicopter. my knees are almost touching the president, but i'm hunched over, editing, and as we fly over the washington mall he is like, "hey, what are you doing?" are you kidding me? he's like, "look out, enjoy the view, you don't get to do this every day." he knew as a mid-level staffer i was never getting others helicopter again. --on this helicopter again. [laughter] the economy is crashing, we have this speech in four hours, and he is like, i want to do this

kind is to this mid-level staffer. finally we get on the plane and i'm writing the speech the computers on air force one and it is very slow, so you press a key and there would be a delay, which was maddening. i'm typing, it's delaying, i'm freaking out. he is editing, i'm editing, it's bizarre. we landed, in the printer is stuck in terrible. our directors like, get off the plane. i run to the cars. we are editing the speech in the motorcade. i'm getting emails on my phone. we get there -- i always tell junior speechwriters i work with, with some speeches it doesn't have to be good, it just has to be done. this is done, as it probably my career. [laughter] we will muscle through this. i remember thinking this is probably going to be a disaster. but barack obama just to strides up to the podium and he delivers that speech as if he has been giving it every day of his life, like flawless, emotional, funny, people are

and i'm like, are you kidding me? i just wrote this in the car. this is wild. he finishes, thunderous applause, and he comes back and his lie, i think it went well -- is like, i think it went well, huh? [laughter] jennifer: i wanted to ask you, i don't know where it's going to go, but i'm just going to roll with it, about gun violence and how often that was the subject of speeches, in the time that all of us were in washington. i'm guessing there were moments in fact when you are messaging come in your own personal way, the principles, and i would be interested to hear your reflection on that. thinking about the key things that ryan said after the

congressional baseball game practice, there's a time when motions can get -- emotions can get the best of us. it's not time to shed our humanity. there's another time when the shooting in dallas, which i believe was after that, right? mike: the year before. jennifer: the year before. he said we are having this debate, let's not lose sight of the values that unite us, let's not lose sight of our common humanity. what is the sign that the speaker felt was important to bring to the house about those moments. mike: henry and i were talking about this last week. when these moments happen, you talked about this, so i read it again. i have no recollection of writing if you remember on a thursday night, there was a

shooting in dallas. you get a text that says, paul wants to speak about this on the floor. normally, that is noon, 2:00, 3:00, but it was a friday, meaning it was 9:00 a.m. so i get in the call, i was probably talking to myself in the car, dictating it to myself or whatever. i get there at 7:30, whatever is on, i wrote it, and then we had an active shooter situation in the capital. so the speaker was getting an intelligence briefing in the bowels of the capital. so he was locked down there with an old printer, and i was at my desk, so i never got to talk to him about it. he made a couple of ad lives, he did it. he said it made him emotional as he was doing it, and you mentioned gun violence, and i think -- that is what i remember the most, just the stress, may

that is why it was so sort of human, because it was raw thoughts as opposed to worrying about what this person in the chamber would think about it. so, you know, you can never really unplug, right? you always have to think about, what is your boss thinking about, what have they been reading? who have they been meeting with? paul was thinking a lot about having conversations in passing, again, not dramatic like me sort of sitting there with a pad, in passing, where i become a father and he would give me a lot of advice about it, and we were having things conversations. -- these conversations. we would use these little things, a lesson, but for me, the first saturday, when john

boehner became speaker, january 20 11, the first saturday, there was a shooting in tucson, arizona, congresswoman gabrielle giffords and members of her staff could we did not know that yet. that just had a profound impact on me, because he had been speaker for, at that point, six or seven days. and so any time a shooting had happened, including congressional baseball game practice, i really drew a straight line from that moment. as speechwriters, when these traumas happen, we have to work, you know, we are human, we are parents, we are sons, we are daughters. a lot of times, you don't process it, i think, until after you get through it. i remember, they would be times, especially the second half of the decade, the staff would be standing around, looking at the tv, and i'm just banging away on something on something, wishing that i could just -- so a lot of

times, that's why i think you could never -- nora ephron, the late, great nora ephron, who did a number of great, romantic comedies, "when harry met sally," "you got mail," she said everything around you is copy. you are drawing on what is going on around you. you have to sit there and think about the structure. in that case, you are just speaking to the chamber of members. sometimes as a speaker, you get to speak to the country, but really you are speaking to the intimate chamber of members, and so it is better in that situation to think of it that way and give the speaker the ability to do that. and feel like he or she is speaking to that audience right in front of you. that is why it is written in that way. jennifer: it is interesting to set with that one more beat,

though, because if you think about the moment we are in the country, personified their what is going on in congress, can you imagine the speaker, any speaker, the current speaker, trying to give the speech about humanity and unifying in some form under that capitol dome at this point? mike: no. [laughter] you know, now, and this began to evolve, to be fair, it was not recent. it was six or seven years. there were protests in the house. there was a sit in on the house floor, you may remember, i think it was over gun violence. henry: gun violence, yeah. mike: so some of the speeches, there was definitely a before and after. my short answer is no. jennifer: does it seem like he was leaning to that, or

warnings, any messages at that time? i think about gun violence, particularly some incidents, some of these big, huge moments, not just the incidents themselves but the resulting debates of legislation, results of the legislation at some point, that we were all watching at the same time. do you feel like you our principals were using the speaker through you to speak to each other, or to address some issues, to specifically counter each other, whether on guns or the economy? do you remember listening to that? henry: i would say, i mean, there were often sort of extemporaneous, because, the funny thing about the house floor is, you know, c-span is sort of reduced to the members who sat on the floor and listen to debate, but often as you are waiting for, you know, the lack of members ahead of, you know,

the speaker, the minority leaders to go, they will hear something that inflames, you know, pelosi would often think of something that inflamed her, something egregious or wrong, and she would break from her prepared remarks to call out something that the other side has said. but on something like, you know, on something like the gun violence, it was increasingly come i think for us, you know, there was more and more feeling that, you know, the pro forma thing to do is say we give thoughts and prayers to the victims, and nothing else. and that became more and more, you know, first it was an undercurrent, then it was a more and more explicit part of what we set around these events, and, you know, the awful bit about gun violence in the context of

this sort of conversation is that we came to expect it. and so, you know, it's not like you keep a boilerplate, you know, a terrible thing happened, say that x, y, z, but it was a muscle you exercise so frequently that there is a little bit less of. with the exception of the shooting is a congressional baseball practice, that was different in a way because it tipped into political violence, and that was a sort of more -- that was new and --, well, new. a horrible and different nature of what we saw increasingly as part of this policy debate, in which these have been so often, we knew more and more about what we needed to say the moment that it happened. jennifer: i want to go back to

michelle obama. i was reading her remarks, political headwinds, her support of hillary clinton, and later support of kamala harris. what is your observation and your reflections in those moments? her tone, her goals, and all those cases, she seems to quickly connect with people. what are your observations about how the role of writing for her involved? sarah: the thing i love about her is her relentless authenticity. i think, you know, in the early days of the white house, people would say, this is how first ladies do this for she would say, thanks for sharing, here's how i'm going to do it. first ladies host various concerts at night in the white house a man fancy people come

and they are rich for she's like ok, i'm going to have the performers come eight hours earlier and spend time with kids in the inner-city who would normally never go to the white house, so that they understand that this is their home is much as anybody else. i think she really did that with her speeches, too. she was always telling a story. i realize she was kind of telling an eight-your story. if you look at her democratic convention speeches, her speech in 2012, she was like you know, the last time we came together, like in conversation, when i came here last, here's what happened since then, here's what we learn them and then again in 2016, she could was kind of continually telling an ongoing story which i think was interesting, and it made people feel like they were part of something, she was just very honest with them. i think you especially saw it this year in the convention speech that she gave at the democratic convention, where she got up and she said, like, my mother had just died, and i was not sure i would be steady enough to come here tonight. this is what i love about her.

she's so incredibly honest, she can't be fake. she's not going to give you a, like, "good morning, the middle class is the middle of my priority is," get the sound, she's never going to do that. she was a here's who i am, here's what we are talking about, here is what is real. she was always that way, but i just saw her becoming more and more that way. her convention speech in 2024, i found it just thrilling. there was a real sense of being, she was not the first lady, she did not have a job, she was a citizen. i loved it. i thought it was electrifying and very hot, and i did not think she was low, by the way, i think she kept it high, but it was fun. jennifer: i wanted to ask you, a fact check, my daughter came home from high school one day during the obama administration and said, you know? why?

he was playing in my high school atrium this morning? is because he was going to the white house, and they were doing a concert. so that was absolutely true. a performer would show it, bizarrely, at people's high schools and beyond. one point during hillary clinton's campaign, kind of during the middle of the #metoo movement, she was talking about -- well, actually it was actually in response to -- sarah: it was in response to the #metoo movement. jennifer: in response to trump's tape, comments on the tape. "it has shaken me to my core in a way i could not have predicted." do you remember that exchange, that line? sarah: yeah. this was october 2016, a time in a presidential campaign you don't want to screw anything up. you just want, no unforced errors. this is after trump had the

"access hollywood" tape, he was bragging about sexually assaulting women. mrs. obama was deeply horrified by that and just really come it was very personal to her, that comment, and she felt like she needed to say something about it. which is not really ideal, weeks before a campaign, you don't really want to get this kind of speech, but she was pretty clear she was going to give this speech. and, you know, it was a speech on behalf of hillary, but for her to go out to get that speech as if nothing had happened would have been a lie, and she was so relentlessly honest. she said no, no, no, we are going to talk about what just happened. so she really did what i think is one of the earliest me to speeches. it is a very raw and vulnerable and tough speech about sexual assault, massage may and how much it hurts not just men, women, all genders, she's pretty blunt about that. i will tell you, the response we offer that was unbelievable, the

number of female letters, people saying yes, thank you, i don't want my son talking like this either. i don't talk like this, my father does not talk like this. it is not just "boys being boys," or people writing in and saying, "i was assaulted, and i'm not going to be ashamed anymore,, because of the way you talked about it." jennifer: the speech young gave in new hampshire in 2016, can you talk about the process about that? the analogous story about process and more memorable speeches, how does that work? in that kind of very personal tone, does she talk and you kind of right, or you write and she responds? how does that work? sarah: yeah. you can have all kinds of processes. you can have a process where the person is like, i don't know what i want, give me something to react to. "i hate it. now i will blow it up the night before the speech!"

i've been there. the obamas know they are and know what they want to say. i had no script with michelle obama. i was said that with her and say, here's what i'm thinking, here's where my head is come and she would just speak, like, paragraphs and paragraphs of ideas, themes, stories, you know, everything she wanted to say come and i would type it verbatim on my laptop, and i would work that into a draft. i would email 70 people in the white house who would give comments and edits, a lot of which i ignored because they were back at him and i could do that because i was actually, i was protecting her voice. somebody mentioned that, you are really protecting the person's voice, then i would give it to her, she would edit, i would edit, she would read it out loud, this line does not work, this is clumsy, and then we give it. that was the best process i've ever had. jennifer: where your principles different in terms of that process? how would you compare and contrast? [laughter]

henry: uh, you know, any speechwriter has the gamut of process between, you know, i will say, for instance, a no-process speech was pelosi was going to announce whether she was going to vote for or against the transpacific trade partnership, and because she was going to vote against the president, it was an incredibly closely held secret, of just which way she was going to go on this huge vote, until she told the president in her office, like, an hour and 15 mins before she walked onto the floor. so we had, you know, i had no idea of, you know, what the sort

of rationale for her decision was, and it was very much a sort of hail mary, you know, put something on the page, and she would go out and say what was going to be. other times, it really flowed from, you know, i found that i was able to have a lot of access with the speaker, and the key, because, you know, we would have these meetings to come in three times a week with the whole democratic caucus, you would see her behind closed doors given just -- giving just extemporaneous speeches to the members, and it looked like the phrases she wanted to highlight some of the arguments she felt like were compelling and connected, so you would draw what you heard in those close-door, behind the scenes moments come and you would distill that and working to the talking points and proof points that you've been working on all along to get the more interesting message on something like aca or this or that.

so, sometimes there was a lot of confidence in what you were going to stay with her, and other times it was just like, hope it works! i don't know. mike: so, among a few facts about john boehner that most people know is that he is an emotional man. there are things that make him tear up, anything involving schools or kids, troops, like, lots of different kinds of foreign policy. so basically the sphere of things you could write about for him was kinda small. so what i would do is i would go to his office and say, hey, we are going to do a speech about x. do you have any stories about x? he was a great storyteller -- he is a great storyteller -- and i would watch his face to see, you know, if he was cracking up a

little bit. because when you go in front of a camera or a podium, it is super magnified here so i would either, you know, ok, i'm not going to do this, and it would be unfortunate, because he would have great stuff, but i will have to discard this or do a very pared down version of this. once in a while, he would try to put something in, i would get a call from his office, and he would point to the paper and say, "i can't do that." i follow this rule all but one time. it was a commencement speech at a catholic university. he had a football coach, and everything with joey was about the virgin mary, and speaker boehner was very religious, prayed every morning, did the rosary. the leader, the house republicans in 2006, he went to

church, prayed as always, and when he walked out of mass, to got a call from the coach them and in smaller circles, he would say, i never got a call from virgin mary, but that was close. he said i thank you. the morning of the speech, i put it in. i put it right in there. there wasn't a prompter, so i just put it in. we were driving, and i see him open a folder, and i'm waiting and i'm waiting. [laughter] and i'm not going to say what he said in mixed company, but he said, you whatever. [laughter] and i had only been with him about a year or two at this point, but he did it, and this is not about me, this is a story that, you know, i had to be discerning, and i always felt like once in a while, each of us has a story like this, you just have to push.

why keep that from people? to this day, he uses it, and i'm glad. it's not on me, it's about, you know, following the process, but once in a while, you know, you've got to color outside the lines a little bit and leave them where they should go. sarah: sounds like there's a message there. there's a microphone here, and people can start lining up with their questions. i'm going to ask you guys one last quick round for the group while folks line up, and that is, did you ever have to write a speech that made you uncomfortable, that you disagree with, in terms of the tone or message that you are being asked to navigate? henry: honestly, i consider myself very fortunate that i was never in a position with speaker pelosi. i've been in that position and other times in my career, you know, earlier in my career, and it was definitely harder than it

should have been. but truly, i count myself very fortunate that that was not something that i had to deal with. sarah: yeah. i've never, people often say, what happens when you disagree with the person you write for? i don't. i'm not writing for people with whom i disagree. that i disagree with how they wanted to say something? sometimes. but i will tell you, with the obama's, like, they were always right, you know, they would get up to the podium and do it their way, and it's like no, they were better. i also consider myself very lucky. mike: yeah. i could not point to any. there were times that people showed a fight. speaker boehner was not a big part warrior. speaker ryan, when i was with speaker ryan, the advice was like -- so we did it. my advice is, there were times it felt like, it's not relentlessly authentic, i will say that, and it showed.

maybe i'm the only person who knew that it was not relentlessly authentic, but there were times that i felt like -- and this happens, you've got to show your members you are fighting, and you've got to pound the podium, literally. so maybe there were times when i just did not agree with the tone that folks from a senior staff wanted to take, but we did it. those are the kinds of things i remember. but never did i disagree or feel uncomfortable. jennifer: ok. awesome. i think we have folks at the microphone. if you could introduce yourselves first please and say your name and your year and your major, and remember, as usual, to end your questions with a question mark. jen: hi, my name is jen. thank you for coming to speak with us. this is a very valuable conversation. thank you so much. my question is for you, ms. sarah.

when you are writing to michelle obama, how did you make sure your writing state true to her values but also addressed a broader audience? sarah: yeah. great question. i think, you know, she always wanted to be authentic, and she was, but she also wanted to be heard, right? i think about her convention speech in 2008, which came at a really fraught the time for her. i feel like you are also young, you are either not born or very young, but there were all these currents of racism and sexism flowing together, leading to this incredibly offensive and absurd message that she was an angry black woman. like really? you can't even come up with a new stereotype? not only are you racist and sexist but you are dumb? but whatever. very frustrating. we knew that was true, right? but anyway, i think the relentless authenticity was how she kind of responded to that message, because she could have gotten up and tried to get some

dome soundbites that kind of address for that, but instead, she was like, that's the story about me, fine. i'm going to be me come relentlessly, authentically meet them and i really think when you do that, whether people like you are not, there is a real respect for you. one of my first speech writing jobs was for a senator from iowa named tom harkin. a very liberal guy. i remember a guy saying, you work for harkin? i disagree with that guy on abortion, health care, he's wrong on this, wrong on that. and it's like whatever, sir. "why?" i know where he leans, i know where he stands with me. that's an extreme example come about for better or worse, the politicians you are, there's nothing hidden about donald trump, right? there is no behind the scenes thing. when compared to the poll- tested, scripted, "i am yelling"

soundbites in your face, it can be pretty fulfilling. jennifer: thank you. >> hi. i'm a graduate student in sociology. we know that trump rejects the teleprompter for unscripted come along form engagement, and the role of the white house speechwriter is not to compose but to navigate the authentic voice. can you imagine, how might the profession be to maintain the historical significance in the trump era, where performative immediacy often overshadows literary? sarah: oh gosh. mike: that's a great question. i would say two things, first, we have seen in the last week or so, jd vance make news for a couple of speeches, and somewhat

encouraging to me in the sense that any kind of speech that makes moves is encouraging, but speechmaking is still relevant and vital. but also i think that if you want to understand, you know, where the future of our party is going, you probably want to be more focused on his speeches than president trump's speeches. jd, whether you agree with him or not, is a broad thinker, and i think a lot of him. so that's my first sort of practical point. there's no question, though, republicans, you know, we have a cabinet that is essentially out of central casting, and i don't mean just because so many of them are on fox news, but because a lot of the way they are communicate right now is putting videos up on social media where there are talking to the camera, they are sitting in their office, talking to the camera, about three or four minutes, and i would say they are very effective.

they go directly to people, they are unfiltered, they obviously repeat their talking points, so to speak, but i think some of the future is there, going direct to people, unfiltered. podcast is obviously one form of that, but i think, you know, we saw that earlier on in some of the earlier crises of this administration. the secretary of transportation on media giving you an update on what is going on with a plane crash. so those are a couple of things i've been thinking about, is sort of this go direct, you know, we sort of saw the beginning of that trend, whereas now you see much more polished, focused wake up and i think you will continue to seek them at least from a republican perspective. the white house will do that somebody then has to try to put on social media. you can see the difference. those are a couple of thoughts i had. >> i'm sorry mic over here, so , a let me go over here. >> hi, my name is autumn rivera,

and i'm a second year in the college studying public policy and history. you guys talked a little bit about your different processes and how a lot of your speech writing is kind of copying their tone and their trying to portray this authentic vision of them. how have you guys noticed your own writing styles being like integrated into the speeches? and also when you're switching who you're speaking or who you're writing for, do you notice like a struggle in trying to switch over to getting this new voice to come through? henry: i would say, i think you know, the best speechwriting relationships, the most productive ones, i think do become intimate relationships where your own sort of internal voice and the principle's voice become increasingly indistinguishable from each other. and so you're sort of -- the practice is you channeling the

way that they think, the way that they express themselves, and that does, you know, that does get into the way that you sort of natively write or natively process things. and so it can be quite a shift when you sort of pull out of that voice and try to parachute into another voice. um, you know, from time to time in the speaker's office, we worked from time to time in the minority leader's office, we would draft a rank and file member's speech for a weekly address, the bane of mike's and i's existence for our time in the minority. and so you would just sort of go from this very intimate connection to the speaker's, you know, the principle's voice into a member who like you didn't really know how they spoke about and it was the given issue, and so that was tricky. there are ways -- you know, there's the way in which like speech writing and professional

speechwriting, you know, on the outside of that sort of deep relationship can become a little bit more of craft. it can become a little bit more of making sure that there's a little piece of gold, you know, a little piece of research, a quote in everybody's speech that sort of makes it sound specific and interesting in boilerplate, and that can be seen as, you know, a good speech, but i think often you sort of lose the fidelity to voice, particularly in the political side, that you really need the relationship to strengthen. >> interesting. over here. >> hello. marrabi. i'm a second-year at the college. i was curious, another question on the future of speechwriting. what do you think the impact of artificial intelligence will be, will look like, especially -- we've only had it in full form for maybe a few years, but how do you see that impacting speechwriting, especially maybe on those short term like chaotic examples that you were discussing? like, do you think it will ever

be good enough to substitute what the art of speechwriting is? sarah: i mean, i really wish we could go back to the 1990's. i think that was the right level of technology. i think we've gone downhill since then, but we are here and i think you're right. i think this is, i will say when chat gpt first came out, one of my obama colleagues, he actually fed it a speechwriting prompt. he said, and i think it was actually -- we were talking about school shootings -- he said there's been a school shooting at this school in this city. president obama needs to give a speech to that community. please write a speech. and what chatgpt generated my colleague sent to us, and he said, you know, this is better than what 90% of american speechwriters would write. it was surprisingly good, and that was, you know, a little bit shocking and a little disheartening. will it really be doing final drafts? i'm not sure. will it be doing drafts, maybe. is that plagiarism that's going to corrode our brains and destroy our souls? i think so. but again, i want to live 30 years ago, so i'm probably the

wrong person to ask. but maybe these guys have more, more insights and less technophobia. mike: i think the challenge is that it contributes to the same problem that we've been talking about, which is it contributes to sort of the sameness of political rhetoric. i don't need ai to tell me that small businesses are the backbone of america. sarah: oh my god. for that health care is a right, -- or that health care is a right, not a privilege. mike: i don't need it to tell me that we need to keep the farm in the farm bill. so mostly -- i obviously teach a class at georgetown, so i use it just to understand, you know, as an advisory tool for certain things, and that's my issue with it. it doesn't, it doesn't give me anything that i -- obviously, yes, it obviously would cut down on the time, but i can't say it's ever like, oh, i wouldn't have thought of that, you know. and so that's my concern is that it will just contribute. like if you go on linkedin now, you can just kind of have ai write your posts. and so now we have all posts that sound the same and a bunch of posts with people saying that

all the posts sound the same. and so that's my concern, to sarah's point about corrosion that it will just, you know, it's just creating this vicious cycle. henry: i think speechwriting is, at the end of the day a person has to say the speech and a person has to hear it. and so somewhere along the line, like, you know, maybe it does, maybe it can do a first draft or it can do better than the green speechwriter, but at some point it has to make that leap into what comes out of a person's mouth, and is it heard? and as mike's saying, the sameness is a huge problem across all political communications. so many folks are trying to -- so many professionals are trying to sort of match an imagined version of what a great political speech should sound like or what a great ad should look like, or what a great

message should seem like, and they sort of hold themselves to you know, is a speech better or worse or an ad better or worse because it looks like the thing that they're already thinking of , and just has less and less effectiveness. and i think in part that's why we see some of the dynamic of how president trump is really disrupting what we think of the sort of value of prepared text because there is, you know, we can't minimize it behind the words. there's something, there's something deeper that is being conveyed. there's something more fundamental, something more elemental and raw that a politician or a political party needs to demonstrate to its voters, to demonstrate to the public, and you are just never going to get that if you keep pretending -- you know, if ai or you know, bad expectations management keeps pushing you towards, you know, well, it's great, you sounded like a politician. you sounded like a good politician. like, does that help?

does does that get you elected these days? like less and less. >> hello, i'm jacob. i'm a fourth year in the college. and you have touched on this already, but i was curious to hear about like what do you think are the biggest mistakes that either you or others in your field have made and like how do you bounce back, or since speechwriting is part of communications more generally, like what do you think are the biggest mistakes that your respective parties are making right now in terms of delivering a message? [laughter] [laughter] sarah: oh god. mike: two parter there. we could really spend some time. sarah: i think a lot of the really uniquely bad speeches out there, they are showing you, they are telling you and not showing you. so like michelle obama could have started her 2016 convention speech by being like, ok everyone, when my girls started, you know, when we got to the white house and my daughters went to their first day of school in the white house, i was anxious and scared and uneasy and worried and afraid and nervous -- it's like, who cares?

or she could have said, which she did say, on my daughter's first day of school, i watched them climb into those big black cars with those large men with guns, and i saw their little faces pressed up against the window and i asked myself, what have we done? ok, if i call you tomorrow morning, are you going to remember the list of adjectives or will you remember the image? you know, so often we are just, there's just this blah blah blah teflon writing. it slips off you. it just doesn't say anything. it's dumb sound bites. it's a bunch of adjectives. but creating an actual -- like, painting an actual picture, when you show people that they don't forget it, right? they take it away. it says, it says all those adjectives are encoded in the picture, so i think that's critical. i'm just -- not to be a broken record, but i just, you know, i look at so many democrats speaking. i traveled the country. with mrs. obama, and every two years she would speak for these democratic candidates for senate, governor, congress, and we'd meet them backstage and they were amazing -- funny, sassy, quirky, tough. like i really liked them.

i was like, oh this person, i can't wait to hear them speak. and they would get up and they'd be like, hardworking american middle class families, the american dream. it's like that's not even -- you would never turn to your roommate and be like, hey bro, i just think hardworking american middle class families are the heart of the american dream. if you wouldn't say something to one person, don't say it to many people. and i think that we are just, i watch these democratic politicians yell talking points and sound bites in my face, and i can't -- i think this is just, it is the bane of my existence as a speechwriter watching speeches. it's insulting. it's offensive. it hasn't worked for 30 years and yet they just keep doing it. i don't, like why are we so bad? i feel like republicans are better at this than we are. am i wrong? is this just my own self-criticism from my own side? mike: i don't know. no, i think that, i think what trump did -- i remember, it sounds silly now, but i remember when build the wall became a thing and every republican was like, man, that's

really smart, and every republican on capitol hill wanted their own build the wall, their own three word solution to every problem. and i swear i sat in meetings where people try to write on a whiteboard like what's our version for healthcare, build the wall. sarah: that makes me feel better, maybe we are not the worst. mike: so i think that trump definitely took a lot of the sort of country club, you know, small businesses backbone thing , got away from that. but now it's just a lot, you know, it's obviously so online and i think what concerns me and -- as somebody who worked in state government, i feel this too, is we're putting a lot of ideology out to people, but sometimes people just, you know, like growth is great, congrats, you know, great, sounds great, but people just want a call back when they call a government agency. they just want their email returned. a lot of times you can get pretty far if your speech is just about solving a problem and being useful to people, and i just, that's what concerns me about both parties, frankly. sarah: i will also say something. there's just power to saying something true, just saying

something awkwardly, uncomfortably, bracingly true, which barack obama did in his 2004 convention speech when the guy got up and he said, let's face it, my presence on this stage is pretty unlikely. it's a weird start to a convention speech. he then went on to tell people about how his father was a kenyan goat herder. again, not a great idea if you have political ambitions to be like, i have foreign roots. but he basically said, i know what y'all are thinking. you want to know why a guy named barack hussein obama is on the stage, and i'm going to call you on it. i know you're thinking it. i'm going to just point the elephant in the room and i'm going to just run right into the elephant. and it was like, wow, he did that. that was -- that was bracing. and i think trump actually does some of that and i think it's, i don't know, it's sort of in a way it shows some respect for people because it's not talking around or talking over. it's just it's talking to what is right there. henry: i think in a way -- and i'll play devil's advocate here for the sake of diversity of what we are telling you. i think to spell out the reason

that you wind up getting that yelling of talking points is the parties, particularly the democratic party members, are desperately trying to get attention and develop a consistency of message. and the rationale, which i think, as we have talked about here, is deteriorating somewhat based off of how folks consume media, is that for the most part , folks are not going to listen to the whole speech. for the most part, people are going to see one sentence pulled out of this five, lovely, well-crafted thing that you have put together, in a quick thing they are skimming through on social media or that appears in a news story. there is so much pressure on

trying to make sure that single sentence distills a complex policy issue. if you are a democrat in particular, you love a laundry list. you love to get stuck explaining. i can't tell you. i've been part of three or four different agenda rollouts that's like, you know, it's supposed to be like the campaign agenda that really sells a message, and they are like this long. sarah: 29 points. henry: here is my -- truly, we have like a 30 point plan for this -- this was a middle class jumpstart. we didn't win the majority that year, if you were wondering. >> i wanted to get to one more question over here. >> on the flip side of the past question, is there a speech from the past few years that each of you wishes you had written, or is there a speech from maybe earlier in your career that really impacted you or your process? mike: that's a good one. sarah: that is a good question.

i feel like, mike, you are probably not going to say jd vance's speech in europe. mike: it's nice to make news. no, i follow a lot of british politics. i just find their politics more interesting than ours, to be honest. but i think if you look at, i've been thinking about when tony blair became leader of the labour party in the 1990's. he had to give a lot of speeches challenging the labour party's socialist orthodoxy and it was just so brave. he just goes up there in front of these hundreds of people. like you would never see this. 2004 is a good analogy too. you just don't see that anymore, like going up in front of a group of people and being like, you're wrong. you've been wrong for 50 years. and he changes the party within three to four years, and it was all started with one speech. and so sometimes i think about, you know, especially when you write speeches in congressional contexts, you're not always sort of speaking to the country, but there are moments where speeches

can be very consequential and sort of like 2004 where you're launching something and you can look back. in moments like this historically, i try to look at analogies for what people should be doing. >> unless you have instant jealousy, i think we are going to have to end here because the time is up. thank you everybody for coming out on such a freezing cold night and especially to our wonderful guests for coming from washington. [captions copyright national cable satellite corp. 2025] [captioning performed by the national captioning institute, which is responsible for its caption content and accuracy. visit ncicap.org] >> there are many ways to listen to c-span radio. in the washington, d.c. radio listen on 90.1 fm, use the free c-span now app, or go online to c-span.org/radio. serious xm radio on channel 455, the tune in apps, and on your smart speaker by saying play c-span radio. here washington journal daily at 7:00 a.m. eastern. listen to house and senate proceedings, committee hearings, news conferences, and other public affairs events live throughout the day.

for the best way to hear what's happening in washington with fast-paced reports, live interviews, and analysis, catch washington today weekdays at 5:00 and 9:00 p.m. eastern. listen to c-span programs on c-span radio anytime, anywhere. c-span, democracy unfiltered. >> looking to contact your members of congress? c-span is making it easy for you with our 2025 congressional directory. get contact information for government officials all in one place. this spiral-bound guide contains bio and contact information for every house and senate member of the 119th congress. contact congressional committees, the president's candidate, federal agencies, and state governors. the congressional directory costs $32.95 plus shipping and handling and every purchase

supports c-span's nonprofit operations. scan the code or go to c-span.org to preorder your copy today. >> mr. speaker, on this historic day, the house of representatives opens its proceedings for the first time to televised coverage. >> since march 1970 nine, c-span has been your unfiltered window into american democracy, bringing you direct, no spin coverage of congress, the supreme court, and white house. >> is this mr. brian lamb? would you hold one moment for the president? [laughter] >> it exists because of c-span founder's brian lamb's vision and support, not government funding. but this support is not guaranteed. all this month in honor of founder's day, your support is more important than ever. you can keep democracy for future generations. >> to the american people, now is the time to tune into c-span. >> your gift preserves open

access to government and ensures the public stays informed. donate at c-span.org/donate or scan the code. every contribution matters. and thank you. >> c-spanshop.org is c-span's online store. browse our collection of c-span products, apparel, books, home decor, and accessories. there is something for every c-span fan and every purchase helps support our nonprofit operations. shop now or anytime at c-spanshop.org. >> next, a number of lawmakers discuss military readiness, technology, and the manufacturing of u.s. defense weapons. these conversations are from a national security summit in washington, d.c. that was hosted by the reagan institute. rachel: thank you so much,

roger, and thanks to all of you for being here as we kick off our 2025 and sib summit. i am thrilled to be here moderating this panel, which will offer some framing context for today's conversations that are anchored in the assessment that comes out in the annual nsib report card that roger mentioned. we started at the reagan institute on this program on the national security innovation base three years ago really to advance the conversation that was already happening around preserving and extending america's military and technological edge. the report card in its third year now, our goal is to really apply this rigorous analytical approach to break down the ecosystem into its component parts and to understand where we are falling behind in specific ways, and where we are doing well and where we should be proud of american distinctiveness and leadership. we hope that's useful to policymakers and decision makers.

we hope it's useful to all of you in your roles respectively in this important ecosystem. and so we will get our discussion started today on the report card and its broader implications with a really esteemed panel. to my right is congressman rob wittman the vice chair of the house armed services committee, dale swarts, a partner at mckinsey and company who roger mentioned as a knowledge partner on this report card project, and dale leads the mckinsey team, of whom many are in the room, who support this product. the chairman who serves on the advisory board for the report card. and finally congressman jason crow who's the ranking member on the house subcommittee on intelligence and special operations. so very glad to start a our conversation today. dale, let me start with you given your work on report card , and if it's all right, we will pull up the grades slide as we

dive in. roger mentioned our important ecosystem didn't exactly get straight a's. dale, why don't you walk us through some of the most important grades that we see here. and especially what we're seeing in our third year of this analysis on trends, on implications, and maybe on some key takeaways that we should have in mind. dale sure, thanks, rachel. : thanks for having us here. congratulations to the team for getting this out and putting on an amazing event. congratulations to all of you for wanting to talk about national security innovation-based grades at 8:30 in the morning. i will answer the question quickly through i think three broad themes that we see. peace one, and this is building on what roger mentioned previously, the national security innovation base is increasingly, as we think about defense modernization and acquisition, is running at two speeds. speed one is acceleration and dynamism in the private sector. if you look at the four grades,

a's are distinctive and b's are also good grades. all of those are driven primarily by private sector related inputs. the great news is that america continues to lead the world in innovation, dynamism, technological leadership, and many key areas. that is always in peril. we have to keep running fast. as we think about capital in the system, that grade continues to be strong. if we think about the broad breadth and scope of the private sector innovator base, which is traditional primes, the startup and disruptor community. i live in silicon valley. many of the folks are trying to provide capabilities to the war fighter. we see increasing breath and depth and partnerships across that, which we will talk about that increasing. there is always work to do but that is something we see positive trend lines. that's speed one. speed of this is the public two sector, customer side, where

as we think about actual outcomes from a defense modernization perspective, we are not where we want to be. we'll spend time going through that. we've got the right folks on the panel who can talk about some of those things happening on the congressional side and the department to push some of that forward. as we think broadly about customer clarity, particularly in an environment where there is a lot of change and discussion about how we want to accelerate program dollars and priorities. that's in flux. we see room for improvement there across the board. i know we will get to that. that's .1. .2 is we have a new indicator. this is manufacturing capacity industrial base. this is an innovation discussion and we are talking about manufacturing what? increasingly this is important to building scale around physical mass and capability. fundamentally most folks when they are talking about innovation in forums like this

five years ago, it was a rights discussion, software. increasingly it's an adams discussion. i know we will talk about this more, but from a capacity perspective, are we doing what we need to? from a supply chain perspective, can we protect what we want and are we doing it efficiently? finally on the talent base side , we see some room on progress but as we think about particularly manufacturing, almost 2 million likely unfilled school trades in these areas by the end of the decade. if we think about 30% of the aerospace and defense work for is nearing retirement, there is a significant vulnerability here. the grade is improving a little bit because we are seeing a lot more, particularly young dynamic talent that is excited about coming into the sector making sure we're activating them in the way we want. rachel: lots on the table for our discussion as we move through it. tara, you served on the advisory board for the project since day

one. govini is a company built around using data to drive solutions. what's the value of measuring things over time and what are we -- and with this report card, what's most important that we are looking at? >> value is huge, huge. thanks for the question and thanks for having me here today. i will echo dale's congratulations on an excellent product this year. two just baseline the group, govini is a defense software company and a critical component of our software is a proprietary data set. our collaboration to the advisory board, i remember talking to you about your vision for this product. part of the reason that was a fun conversation is because govini too puts out an annual scorecard. i will admit we take a shock and awe approach to our scorecard. it is, i don't even -- 200 pages

thick. rachel: 10 times as thick as ours. tara: value is not measured in weight here, but we would win that one. the reason we do that is because we started that scorecard a decade ago where we were trying to get the department and the national security community to just realize there is a tremendous amount of relevant valuable data that could inform decision-making. but we stop at -- and this is why i caught -- call it the shock and awe approach those in -- both in volume of data, but also its a presentation of the data. the point was this exists and it's accessible to you, as the defense and national security policy decision makers. what i love about the national security innovation base scorecard, this version here that, rachel, you lead with this team, is that it takes that data analysis one step further the to policy policy implications. that's what makes this unique.

as you mentioned, it's not just a snapshot in time. because the team has controlled for the variables that it's looking at and assessing, we are starting to see where we're making progress as a community. i think one of the major takeaways from this year is unfortunately a lot of that progress lives in the private sector, but we're not seeing enough progress in the public sector. one of the things i've been saying is that regardless of what you think of the politics happening now, i personally am excited about the fact that there seems to be a moment in time for bold, dramatic change. i know in companies when we need bold and dramatic change, we are not shy about giving teams a kick in the pants if they are underperforming. so i think the department needs a massive kick in the pans in this area and should be held accountable to catching up in progress to match what is

happening among the investor community and among the technology sector. rachel: let's have our members of congress help us zoom out, understand the broader context and, importantly, what we should do about it all. mr. whitman, you've been such a leader in congress on this set of issues and in particular last year around this time launched the house defense modernization caucus. our report card gave it a d for defense modernization. what's your assessment? have we missed something? are we off-base or on-base? more to the point, how do you assess our ability or the ability of this ecosystem and the u.s. government piece in particular to translate the progress we are seen in innovation into deliberative capabilities? rep. wittman: i think the score is deserved, unfortunately, but i think the possibilities are there. what you have heard here is what we have seen through the years, and that is a a dichotomy

between the innovation and creation that is happening in the private sector and what's not getting operationalized in the pentagon. the question is how do we get that done? the pentagon is the ford motor company of the 1950s. the way they operate -- slow, stoic. let's spend years to write a requirement, years to program a record, years to acquire -- by the time we acquire something, guess what? the threat is way ahead of us. a great example i use all the time is f-35. f-35 started 25 years ago as a blank sheet of paper. today as we speak it's getting getting into full scale production. guess we're struggling with? the threat in the indopacom is way ahead of what we are producing today. the question is how do we match what happens in the private sector with innovation and creation and have that operationalized in the pentagon? it takes changes in how the pentagon operates and congress has to be at the forefront of that. last year we made changes to authorities to operate.

we made sure things like the strategic capabilities office, the space development command got some additional authority to be able to do things faster. what we want is to have the pentagon reflect not the ford motor company of the 1950s model , but we want them to reflect the apple of 2025 model, which everybody in the innovation and creation space does. the challenges for a large organization like the pentagon is tough to do because there is an ingrained mentality that we have to take a long time to do things and we can't get things quickly because that's not how we operate. it's process, process, process, not outcomes. we have to get the pentagon to be more of an outcome based organization. we also have to get the pentagon to change its mindset, because we live in a world today where hardware is software defined. and you can take hardware off-the-shelf, but you magic sauce is going to be software. the pentagon's head explodes

when you talk about software. they don't know how to acquire. you say, we want to acquire software at cost-plus. let me tell you, if you are a software company, you are not going to even put a proposal in for a cost-plus contract on software. your product is dynamic. you produce a new version of your software on a regular basis, maybe weekly, maybe monthly. if you say, i have to write a change order to send back to the pentagon to somebody who doesn't know coding and would not know it if it tapped them on the shoulder, they are going to look at your change order and go, i have to go to other people and get you your answer in about three months. we will have a new version in three months. instead of saying no, that realm is firm fixed price. the whole mindset has to be able to change. much of the impediments in what's happening with defense innovation score and why we're not getting that direct flow of innovation and creation from the private sector to the public sector to the pentagon at an operationalized to enhance the war fighter is because we have a pentagon that is still ingrained

in process. congress has to help change that. that's why just yesterday we kicked off this congress's version of the defense modernization caucus. pat ryan and i are chairing but we have lots of other members. we spoke yesterday with secretary hegseth, who is all in. he says, you are right, we got to focus on not just exquisite systems, not just the big prime contracts but we have to enable everyone. we have to make sure we enable expendable systems. we have to make sure we enable everyone that has an idea on the table. how do we leverage capital? there is a lot of capital out there. i have talked to private equity firms and venture capitalists who said we want to invest but we are not going to until we get a demand signal. once the demand signal is there -- listen, there's some cool things happening with scaling. look at what one company has done with the hyper scale facility they are building in ohio. they are bringing on a new generation of thought process about how do you scale

production and how do you make sure you have adaptable, flexible scaling where if you need to next week you can scale up instead of going, gosh, we have this massive tooling line, we are not using adequate manufacturing, so if are going to change something, we have to go back and go through tooling and by the time you sped up the line, guess what? technology past you. there's some good things happen out there. how do we make those things happen relevant? congress has to be able to. rachel: congressman crow, i would love to ask you to speak to the talent base of all of this. dale mentioned our report card possesses some improvement but a lot of room for growth. you launched a caucus of your own a few years ago, the defense workforce innovation and industry caucus. as we think about these challenges toward modernization, toward production at speed and scale, what are the challenges on the workforce side? whether it's high skilled stem

talent, skilled trades on that side of the manufacturing piece that we need to be thinking about. how can we overcome those challenges? rep. wittman: thanks for having me -- rep. crow: thanks for having me, rachel. we are all in heated agreement and i suspect everyone in this room in heated agreement. we all know what the problem is. we are operating off of an innovation cycle right now that used to be a decade, then five years, then used to be three years, and now it's a year or less innovation cycle. in fact, the laboratory for this , which is ukraine, they are actually working off of weeklong innovation cycles. there's a fusion of private sector and government and combat operations where the private sector in ukraine is on the front lines embedded in military units, and they are in real time seeing differences in making -- seeing differences and making changes to systems, sending it back to the factory and within days sometimes tweaking systems. that is the battlefield, and

actually our adversaries, russia and others, are doing the same. we are way behind. we know that and everybody in the room knows that. it simply comes down to the demand signals. the kick in the pants that we need, and a recognition that the pentagon is actually a rational organization. they are responding to the demand signals that congress and others are sent. when we fail to provide multi-year procurement contracts, when we fail to provide any incentive for reform because we keep on upping the top line, but we tell the m you need to be more efficient and change the way you invest in systems, there's simply no demand signals being sent. that requires a real conversation about political will, which is bipartisan right now on this issue, about how we're going to send the massive demand signal shift that has to come from congress. it's not going to change from within d.o.t. that includes workforce. all of these things, all these

legacy things include the way in which we manage our workforce. everything from our lack of comprehensive immigration reform, which is if we know we are going to change this, we need immigration reform because we know all of our talent is not going to come to the united states. we know that. the way we do security clearances. i have a bill i've been working on that would allow you all to start the security clearance process for somebody when they are an intern for you, or when they are in school, so that when they graduate and come to work for you, they are ready to go and not waiting 18 months, 24 months to do it. two, the multiyear procurement contracts because, again, industry, you all are rational actors. you are not going to invest into assembly lines. you are not going to hire new folks if you can only get a one-year contract, or as the case may be, three months or less. we have to give you all that longer on-ramp to do that. those are all the things i think

from workforce but also just a traditional procurement perspective we need to do. and it is political will. this all comes down to political will, and that's why i raised examples of big muscle movements , and i know this is controversial but we have to have this discussion. is there going to be any massive change to the dod system if we continue to up the top line? at the same time as we are telling you all to reform. probably not. i would argue. there might be other ways of doing it, but that's one way. the other is, and this is an idea that's been batted around, start cutting the services out of this and just go right to the cocoms. there is a model we used during the global war on terror where we gave socom direct authority to go right to market and buy what they needed and immediately send it to the war fighter and it worked. it was cheaper, more effective, it was more efficient.

so maybe we start cutting the services out of it and i'm the cochair of the army caucus, i'm definitely going to freaking hear this from the army. but maybe we start cutting them out a bit and give the cocoms and the field commanders more and more authority to come to you all to get what they need. rachel: congressman whitman, i want you to react on this topline question. we have seen the budget. starting with the trump administration, the hegseth memo with reallocation toward certain priorities and away from others. how do you see this playing out? rep. wittman: i think there are bits and pieces which jason points out that have to happen with reform at the pentagon. when secretary hegseth says i want you to identify 8% savings and wants to get those redirected. let's make sure we modernize. he spoke yesterday and he was spot on. he said, we are still in the rut of protecting legacy systems. those things are broken. we all understand what congress has to do. but congress and the pentagon

have to be more in line to say, ok, let's see what the transition is. we understand there are inequities in these districts, but as we change and modernize, how do we talk to folks and say, listen, you have a legacy system but we are going to modernize. as the legacy system gets phased out, what are we doing to make sure the capability on your facility is being utilized? it may be in a different way and there may be a lowell. there has to be a pathway. i think you will get people on board if they look at it and go, this is not all or nothing, this is a proposition about how we make that transition. i think too that we have to look -- as jason said, we have to look even more fundamentally than that. if you look at where we are today, there are three divergent paths that happen in pentagon. you have osd that says, our planning is about national security strategy and national defense strategy. they put that together. by the time that comes out, it's

about three years behind the threat. then you look at the service branches and go, ok, our effort of planning is the poem. if you look at that, it's a future document. by the time the pom comes out, that's about a year behind the threat. jason is right. where is the threat most immediately identified? the unmet needs list in the cocom's. they say, this is what i need today. i agree. how do we push more money down to the cocoms? people up the chains in osd and the service branch go, you can't do that because we have all these things in the planning documents that we have to do. what i argue is the planning process and how we identify the threat and how we operationalize resources towards the threat is just behind the curve. we have to operationalize money and get it quicker in the hands of the war fighter. the operational efforts of what happens to things like radar, with socom acquisition, we talk about how innovative and

creative that is, but the problem is that is the exception rather than the rule. that has to be the rule. that has to be the baseline. this is how we are going to acquire systems, how we are going to do things. it has to be closer to where the threat is seen on a daily basis, because when the cocoms are in theater, there is no one who knows it better than the cocom commander. he sees it, he operationalizes. you ask admiral ardolino. he gets the information every day about what ships are in the indo pacific, how are they operating? that's where the decision-making used to be. i'm in full agreement with you. that's going to take a breaking of the status quo and the current paradigm. rep. crow: that's why i say shifting the focus someplace where the relationship to risk is different. because you all know in the private sector that you have to take risks to win big and to do big things, right?

you might invest in 10 things and three of them work, seven don't, but those three that work are worth it. right now the way in which we invest, there's no incentive to take risks. because they know if they fail on one of those, they are going to be called into congress, taken out to the woodshed, and it's going to be a big deal. so by shifting to the cocom's and the command people in the field where the risk is risk of failure out in the field operationally, that offsets the analysis here. that will i think get us where we need to be. rachel: dale, you previewed at the top of the panel the new indication in the report card this year that looks at manufacturing capacity and industrial base. we have a panel that will dive deeper on that later but unpack that for us a bit. you mentioned the increasing nexus with innovation priorities and traditional industrial base constraints, and there is also

an us versus competitor element with china outpacing us two to one on the manufacturing piece. how do we think about this and how do we compete when we think about delivering at speed and scale? dale: a couple of elements we look at as we built the indicator this year. peace one is truly around, are we building enough, right? for every -- you know, congressman whitman mentioned hyper scale facilities. for every piece like that where there is a lot of excitement and dynamism, you have things like our shipbuilding sector where there is real fragility and we're not living at the pace and scale that we need. that's an aggregate question around total kind of manufacturing capacity but it is driven by supply chain. it is driven by workforce. it is driven by overseas vulnerabilities.

as we look across a number of different sectors, we are saying we need more and we need more faster, that was we thought very important to highlight this year. you can get unmanned aerial systems out relatively quickly and folks are doing a lot around building that up. as we look across the broad set of acquisition programs, this is one piece of the flight. that's as you think on the .1. shipbuilding side, this is one that gets cited, china's dual use shipbuilding capacity is 200 times what the u.s. is able to do internally. that's going to require very creative approaches. the second piece of this is not just are we building enough, but are we building enough quickly? here we spend a lot of time in the report card talking exactly what congressman wittman mentioned on, are we leveraging additive manufacturing? are we leveraging best of breed capabilities and talent for

other high rate production areas in the private sector, for example automotive, which has figured some of these things out. it is not a one to one. there are things very, very different about building defense systems, but are we actually applying those learnings, not just from the u.s. but also from our allies and partners who are by necessity having to do some of the stuff in a different way. rachel: terra, the supply chain piece that dale mentioned is so important. what do we need to be doing to address that risk, that fragility, on the supply chain side? tara: there is a huge opportunity in the supply chain space, because for a long time we've been in this position where in the department, you talk to program offices and have conversations about military readiness, and they will readily admit the operational availability and readiness of our weapons systems and platforms are abysmally low, and they have been trending downward for years.

there is almost a sanguine reaction of we are supposed to be at this percentage but we are way down here, and that's true across entire fleets and different variants of capabilities. these things are effectively off-line at a time when we are talking about prospect of great power war again. and everyone sort of goes, but supply chains. we have to get to a point where there's actual accountability for a program office if those operational availability or readiness metrics are not met. i don't know what that looks like. you divest a force structure. your program gets canceled. you get pulled in front of congress to testify to why , because the reality is in the supply chain space if you go back 10 years, this wasn't true. if you go back five years, this was starting to change. today you can see your suppliers and you can take proactive, mitigating actions to ensure availability of parts and

supply. it's possible. and there are actually some -- one of the phrases you always use that i love is green shoots of progress. there are green shoots of progress in this area. when you look at programs starting to change this dynamic. we support navy customers who have rooted out a year ahead of time, a supplier that then a year later goes bankrupt. these are the kinds of things that allow us to not just go faster in the procurement stage and acquisition stages preceding a capability being fielded, but once it's fielded, making sure it's available. that is strongly what i would encourage. this is an area where if the grade isn't significantly better next year, shame on you, acquisition community. rachel: congressman crow, let's zoom out even a bit more even and think about the way the u.s.

tends to approach these issues versus our competitors. for the audience, i have another question or two and then we would love to come to you for audience questions in the last few minutes. mr. crow, china has a civil military fusion strategy and that top-down approach enables some real strengths in their system in terms of speed, in terms of fielding capabilities. how should we think about our own american advantages, the free and open system that we've got, and what can congress do to kind of lean into those strengths? often we think about opponents ' weaknesses, but how should we think about leaning into our own strengths? rep. crow: clearly one of our biggest strengths is our alliance network and the fact that when we fully leverage that we can have capability and force multiplication and innovation that nobody who is going against us can compete with, right?

export controls is a huge part of that. i used to be a paratrooper, and then i became a lawyer and a member of congress, so clearly there is something wrong with me because i take on the worst gigs ever. having spent years diving into export control and trade sanctions issues, i know that we're shooting ourselves in the foot there, too. people want to buy our stuff, we need to collaborate, and there's great examples of us doing that. we have diana, the defense innovation accelerator for the north atlantic for nato, those are models where we can collaboratively do joint r&d. same thing with israel. we have the future of warfare act for israel where we would do deep collaboration on air defense and emerging tech and drone work and counter drone work. we are not really fully leveraging that. of course i'm deeply concerned that not only are we not fully leveraging that, but we are

actually running away from our alliances and partnerships right now and losing credibility with our closest friends and really hurting ourselves right now. that is a discussion we need to have. so yes, i think what we need to do is understand that take the leap forward, that we have to open up a little bit and we have two be willing to accept a little more risk, not just with the way we contract and take the risk at dod and take risks on contracts and certain programs but also with our alliances. that if we are able to do coproduction and co-r&d that that will benefit all of us and open up the field here in a way that russia and china and iran and others simply will never be able to compete with. rachel: mr. wittman, on the allies went, what can we learn from the progress we have made in that way and what more do we need to be doing with our

partners? rep. wittman: as jason said, what you have is china that through their system makes big bets. they put a lot of chips on the table. they make a big bet. when they hit it they hit it big. when they miss it, they miss it big. our system allows us to make a lot of bets. a lot of those bets hit. the problem is we can't figure out a way to cash in our chips. so we have all this pile of chips and the capacity in the private sector and we have got a lot of great capability, but look at how much it is operationalized. we don't do those things. the challenge, and jason is an expert at this and things like itarr, and what we do that create impediments to doing more with our friends and allies? we cannot do this by ourselves. we will not by ourselves have the financial wherewithal, the strategic wherewithal to counter china just with what we have. where we have our best advantage is with our friends and allies around the world. china sees that and china is

trying to establish the same sort of relationship with russia, with north korea come , and with iran. i would argue it's going to be a transactional relationship there and the trust is not going to be there but we have to create deeper relationships. we have to show we can make things work. a deal like that is conception only really good. it is starting out on a good path. the challenge is it is not going at the pace we need in order for australia to build the submarines they need. my concern is it will be an enterprise where they have little bit of industrial capacity there, we end up building the submarines, they have companies that supplement our industrial base and that's where we are the long-term. we have to change the way we do things and we have to do hard things at the speed of relevance with our friends and we have to say at some point, we are going to trust you. we are going to trust you that that you will protect information, trust you can do those things. if we keep saying you can't do it like we can, you can never

provide a level of protection, then we'll never get to that place. we have to be more trusting. in ronald reagan's words, trust but verify. if we do that we can utilize a tremendous amount of capability that right now is unrealized. rachel: we will go to questions from the audience next. dale, one final question from my chair to you. we have talked today about the pathways we are seeing toward progress on the usg side are kind of exceptions to the rule. they are not the norm. what needs to be done to make these models the standard operating procedure? tara: i will answer -- dale: i will answer in part, then probably defer to my friends in congress who have lots of views on this. the point on exceptions to the rule, green shoots is exactly right. i see some friends in the audience who have been working this problem at diu and other places for a long time. there is a lot of credit to the efforts that have happened

there, but it needs to scale up across the board. it's equal parts that but also we talked about incentives. i think incentives is a critical piece to this on both sides, but also fundamentally we are saying it's a business model question in many ways. the contracting structure pieces we are talking about is really an underlying driver of increased need to take risk in the private sector, invest ahead of the curve. it is, as we talk on the manufacturing side, rachel, we had this discussion in a different form yesterday -- if you scale up manufacturing in the current course and speed, you will have a ton of excess capacity in the system. ronald reagan is a pretty free enterprise place. that sounds like something that can be problematic and inefficient in broader ways. do we need to reimagine the way that our industrial partnerships are structured? should we be thinking about

things more fundamentally fabulous, like you see in other areas like the semiconductor industry, stuff like that. there's a starting point for this conversation. are we aligning right contract structures with right vehicle s over what time? folks on this panel are much smarter on that than i am, but applying those learnings as something -- we are tinkering on the edges. we have different organizations who are pathfinding on this. let's pick some things that we say have worked and actually scale them into the broader system. rachel: we have a few minutes. let's turn to our audience for any questions for the panel. i think we have got microphones. we have a question in the front row. if you could wait, for the benefit of our online audience in particular. if everyone would share your name and affiliation at the top of your question. >> with the new american industrial alliance. i want to tie some things together. congressman, you mentioned outcomes. dale, you mentioned incentives

and tara, you mentioned something about driving acquisition outcomes. in the private sector, defense and tech stocks, you will see high turnover. two to three years, people are moving on. what can we do with the federal workforce to align incentives to get better acquisition all outcomes and define those outcomes and hold people accountable? rep. wittman: i think there are things we have to do to change the paradigm with which folks in the acquisition realm work. it all goes back to an old model. requirements, go to programs of record, new acquisition. the challenge is it used to be years ago where the operators, the war fighters were in the same room as the folks that wrote the requirements and understood what was necessary. they were in the same room as the folks who did acquisition. everyone cross pollinated. today we stovepipe things. the operator is in the field and says, here's what i need, i need an apple. they send that to the program requirement folks and they read it and go, ok, that looks like a pear to me.

they put it together because they are not that intimately knowledgeable. they send it onto the program acquisition folks and they say we want you to acquire an orange. they acquire an orange and give it back to the operator and the operator goes, what the? i will get my knife out, make this orange kind of operate like an apple, but it's not an apple. that's where we are now. we have to find ways to consolidate this, to flatten it to make sure what the war fighter needs -- and it goes right back to the cocoms because they are much closer to the operations. how do we flatten how that acquisition takes place? today it is so fragmented, so stovepipe, it can never operate in a time or speed of relevance way that it needs to. tara: on the program manager side within peo's, i don't believe people are in positions long enough to feel ownership of the program. they come in, they are out in 18 months often. these programs have entire life cycles of generations, so maybe they don't need to dedicate

their entire career, but multiple years. getting back to four plus, four or five, six year term where that's good for your military career to own that program will foster a sense of ownership. that ties into better outcomes. >> i think you are spot on. i >> you need to use the naval reactors model. were there looking girl, hey, this is your highlight of your career, this part you aspire to be. if you have your four stars. he will be here for six years. our executive visions have come there. the reason our nuclear ship program has been so successful is because they had that same idea. we will make sure that the person in that position, has a sole focus of, how do i make this work. instead of saying how do we make sure i'm not endangering myself, not taking risks, make sure i

don't take that ability to pin on that additional star. >> unfortunately we are the time but we will have time for more audience community at future panels. i want to thank the team that particular the reagan incident report card, my colleagues at mckenzie and the institute. thank you all. we will be back in a few moments for a fireside chat. > good morning. for those of you who haven't had the privilege of meeting me, my name is dave and it is my privilege to be the president and ceo of the ronald reagan foundation and institute. we have a great session now. i will start by talking a little bit about senator joni ernst, whose career is defined by public service. after graduating from iowa state, she joined the u.s. army reserves and ultimately retired as lt. col. in the national guard.

in her home county, she served as the montgomery county auditor where she worked to eliminate wasteful government spending and protect taxpayers' hard earned dollars. as a state senator she fought to balance the state budget. very relevant experiences especially in. in november 2014, she was elected as the first woman to serve in federal elected office from the state of iowa and became the first female combat veteran elected to serve in the united states senate. over the past decade she has become one of the most respected , thoughtful, and principled voices on national defense. today she serves in the majority of the senate armed services committee where she chairs the emerging threats and capabilities committee. senator ernst, great to have you back at the ronald reagan presidential instituting foundation. [applause] today we also welcome what are the most influential voices from

the private sector who also brings a unique understanding of the emerging and present capabilities, mr. joe lonsdale. many of you know him as cofounder of palantir technologies and 8vc, among his, many successful endeavors. among these, he has found that over a dozen prominent companies and bid an early investor in several more. here to moderate the discussion amongst these leading national security voices from the public and private sectors is morgan braylen, coanchor of cnbc's "closing bell: overtime." he joined cnbc in 2013 and continues to cover a variety of sectors including manufacturing, defense and space. morgan has interviewed billionaires, heads of state, thought leaders and chief executives of multibillion-dollar corporations. the conversational state certainly promises to be fascinating. so please join me in welcoming

our esteemed guests. [applause] >> dave, thank you. i will just say before we get started here that the last five minutes or so of this conversation will open up to questions. we will make sure to go to the room. yes, so much to get to. and i actually think the last panel discussion was a really great way to set the stage. i know we touched on some of these topics, but it does feel like this, and may i say this as a mature millennial, the first time in my lifetime where the world is opening up, or the country is opening up and away, the intersection of investment and technology and entrepreneurship and the intersection of policy for everything to sort of a line and perhaps see some real meaningful reforms, changes and thoughtful ways in terms of how we are

equipping war fighters and thinking about things like government efficiency. i guess from that sort of big place, maybe we start there and i get both your thoughts. senator ernst, i will start with you. about this moment we are in and what it means for something such as yourself, a policymaker, to see that moment. sen. ernst: thank you, morgan. and joe as well for being of the panel, and to the ronald reagan institute. really appreciate the opportunity to be here and talk about these issues. issues. i just told joe out and hallway, every day on capitol hill is like a new adventure. truly every single day is another opportunity to find ways to excel. this moment in time in particular is very moving for me because i came into the united states senate wanting to make washington d.c. squeal. my first campaign ad was make them squeal. so every month the past ten

years i worked on waste, fraud, and abuse in the federal government and solutions how to correct that. but that was ten years of work on legislation and letters and committee hearings that went really nowhere. finally we have a president right now, president trump, and with doge and elon musk who have given us a platform to execute what we have worked so hard on. it's an extraordinary moment in time and i'm so glad to be part of this movement to right size our federal government, grab a hold of technology, move forward with bright young minds that are focused on innovation, to make the commercial space better as well as our federal government. >> you're working on doge with elon musk. >> i have a lot of friends involved and we appreciate the senators support of what you doing in congress.

15 years ago i started my first nonprofit about all the waste you can find in california which turns out there's a lot here as well in terms of when not spending money very well. it was frustrating in california because everyone would agree and nothing would happen. this week we raised, today we're announcing to what a $50 million raise. last week we nuts six and nine dollars. it's a great time building because really spacex proved outside covers could outperform it could be better and now there's culture people come in and broken a six things. more than all this new technology that's going to change war fighting there's finally like an ability to be confident enough to make the cuts and then when they squeal, like not back down. the way washington d.c. has worked in my lifetime of come

here, i've been coming here for over 20 years, find things around, agrees they are wrong and to make a lot of noise in the getaway was still doing it the wrong way. there are unquestionably hundreds of thousands of civilians extra we don't need in the dod. everyone agrees we don't need everyone there. when we're trying to do test for new technologies as one agrees with the best, literally have 20 civilian with the crazy objections that are like unnecessary. like extra layer of nonsense in bureaucracy and we have lots of leaders in d.c. who have known for a long time they need to change the cabin of the mandate, they've been afraid to push and cat. it's exciting to have a time when you say sorry, i know it's tough what were going to push, could to cut the things that don't make sense. it's exciting to finally see that. >> you're on the doge caucus. do we see this come into law? does he get that into the budget at some point?

>> i certainly hope so. i founded the senate doge caucus, sat down with elon musk and vivek ramaswamy in november following the election. rather all of the proposals we had for them and decide let's bring in our senate members. they started house doge caucus as well. so the thought is that when doge sunsets next july 2026, that it needs to be a lasting movement. therefore, the senate caucus, the house caucus in ways that we can take legislation to continue pushing for these issues, but what we have on the committee, people from the appropriations committee, people from the authorizing committees, the budget committee, they'll serve on doge. they're all interested in this. we recognize were at a tipping point in the federal government. we got to make substantial

change in now and make sure it doesn't lapse in the future. we've got to continue this push. the question is how do we get the legislation enacted? how do we continue with that when we have people that are so adamantly fighting against it? both the on the left, and some on the right. so if you're passing policy change, you have to have 60 votes in the senate. that's always going to be a struggle. the best way is to look at reconciliation, look at the spending bills, how do we talk our efforts into those particular pieces of moving legislatures to make sure that it is more permanent? >> why do think people are finding it so much? >> i find that those are really fighting get those that event feeding at the trough for a very long time. people get really, really comfortable with the way it is. they are afraid of the way it can be.

if we scaled back and we find we don't need all of these extra federal government workers, you've got all these constituents that are really unhappy because they have lost their jobs. if you find you can go to spacex or you can go to volunteer reviewed any number of these private companies and they can be much more efficient than the federal, again you have no need for the state, federal government programs. there is a a fear that surrous that. it's a different way of thinking of got used a different way of thinking. our bureaucracy is bloated right now, we can no longer afford to support a bloated bureaucracy. we've got to downscale. we've got to get back to a more efficient federal government. >> when they get your thoughts on this because you are cofounder -- caustic to defense.

cofounder of palantir which was now senate that had to force its way for others. you find them of companies as well. you closed another fund yesterday. i see as one of the godfather's of the fence attack investing in this new era. you can do more with less arguably with some of these new business models that what does it also me for workforce and what does it also mean for investment in parts of the country? >> well, i mean, the way a lot of things, default the last six years in bureaucracy here, , thy could a lot more about the process and about the results. there's been a lot of frankly a lack of courage and trends affixing things that are broken. i been meeting with friends or running the navy yesterday and going over stuff. it's obvious what happened with all of these things and trumpist

asking what my ships rusty? what is going on? wise it's a mess and so expensive? you had some great firms for example, running the maintenance and working on the ships for very long time and would have just over the years private equity firms, people in the navy did not hold them to the same high standard and kept cutting the cost, making more and more money off of it in order and not the pushback on by the people in charge. you had a lot of stuff that decayed the last 30 years. there's not been the courage to say what is the actual best result? i started this several years ago, the best technology to shoot down the drones. really key for our country for all the stuff are facing. it can turn off that guys miles away. we started the company come when out in the desiccant broke into this, it's like l-3 and raytheon and all the big guys are there because they got billion-dollar

contracts and are laughing at you. we force our wait in and the same size canseco we shot down one-hitter jones, nine at halftime for the weight and by far the best technology. the gasket much larger contracts. i talked to the 4-star running a force of the time and he said obvious you got the best technology, it was written to a nephews go. it would break a lot of class and be bad for me. you guys can probably come in for three years but have but you can't know. people care more about not the right answer, not the what the best technology is but the systems are put in place for the big companies to capture these things. that energy is changing, finally about what is best for america, what is best for the war fighters come what is most efficient, not how to protect the system. >> so what does that mean in terms of acquisition reform? >> this this is a bipartisan. i'm happy to say that.

so many of us are interested in making sure we can get the latest and greatest technology out to the war fighter as fast as possible, and we talk about the war fighter but there's technology is as well that are already proven within the udp is look at artificial intelligence and preventative maintenance moving into predictive maintenance, we can save billions of dollars. the navy has already proven that. so wrapping your technology as quickly as possible into the fold, we are all on board with that. but you will have considerable pushback, , as george's outline there's number of large primes. there's even smaller companies that will really pushback on this. one effort i'm involved in now, i chair the small business committee in the senate, is the reform around the small business

innovation research programs. what we have found with fci is there are all of these applications that come in for this program and the roughly about 20, 25 of the award applicants that make up about .5% of the overall applicants and yet they get 18% of the dollars. ..

that makes stronger and efficient. we've got to break that naturally intend to do introducing this act today reforming and making sure greater acts come to greater minds all across america. >> i appreciate that breaking news.

it with established funds i know about last night but the defense industrial base whether you are established whatever -- however you want raymond, it's hard because we don't necessarily have resilience. with these newer adopting models and would seem

>> so you have all biggest investors in america stapling up. $6 million in the private sector is a large check for all of your story groups like underst and other large firms in my sector.

and the bet is that if this is the best, it's going to be allowed to win. right now i feel that is the case with people coming into run the navy and the air force. they are open to competition. when i come to d.c., i'm not here to lock down my program. i'm coming here to say please allow my new things to compete. and allow them to win. then make it that we compete and we crush the other groups and then we get 5% and then they get 90%. that is our our industrial complex has worked the last 30 years. there is a lot of optimism that now that is going to change. and there's a lot of optimism because of what has happened with ai and what has happened with how america has the best innovation sector in the world. these new companies are way ahead, not just better. because of that we feel that we will be able to do it. and that is bringing investment.

it's not like we need more money, we just need to be allowed to capture the revenue that already exists if we are the best and that is leading to more optimism right now. >> senator, i want to get your thoughts given the fact that we have seen tariffs leveled in the last couple of days and not just canada and mexico but also 10% in china. and we have seen these retaliatory tariffs take place including from china, 25 firms added to the so-called entity list. critical minerals all of a sudden became a mainstream topic last year with what we saw with the meeting with president donald trump and president zelenskyy of ukraine. how does that get to what is needed from the national security standpoint, what can be done to stand up this domestic, homegrown supply chain, and how quickly it can be done? >> that is exactly what we are saying. regardless of how you feel on tariffs, it is a tool in the

toolbox. and president trump has stated unequivocally that he will exercise his use of that particular tool. and what we have seen by him increasing tariffs whether it is canada or mexico, china, he is forcing a discussion amongst friends and adversaries are, how we develop within the united states, our own businesses, our oldest stream of resources necessary to support our national defense. it may be greater reliance on some cases on our friends and allies. but that discussion is being heard. the fact that we have resources available to us today in the united states that have been put on hold because of permitting processes that have taken 10 to 20 years, i mean, for having six, just ask senator dan sullivan of alaska.

i swear, alaska must have everything we need. dan. [laughs] he talks about their minerals, the rare earths that are available in alaska that are yet to be tapped. and another part of this is the fact that even if we are capable of mining, the resources necessary in the united states, we are still shipping all of that to china for refining. it gets shipped over there, refined, and then shipped on back. why are we relying on herd number one adversary to do the refining of everything that we need for technology in the national defense space? so not only do we have to solve the permitting and i'm reigning bama here in the united states, we have to have the capability as well. >> the environmental rules make it so expensive that none of us want to do it. see you either have to use a tariff or both?

>> exactly, a tool or the toolbox. i want to open it up to the room and see if we have any questions. yes, sir. question: [inaudible] sen. ernst: it's greater scrutiny of the programs that we have in place. so department of government efficiency in particular, number 1 is making sure that we get an audit of dod. and i pressed very hard against secretary hegseth during the nominations process. he said he would support an audit and make sure it is a clean audit as required by law, by 2028. so we have to do that. but in order to do that, we have to make sure that we have the technology in place to get that

audit. we can use a new ai technology to add that the dod. that would be very, very helpful. second is eliminating a lot of the dei initiatives -- they've already done that and that will save us billions of dollars out of dod, ongoing every single year. eliminating the programs like the u.s. navy has funded research on poppy personalities. are you kidding me? the air force spend money on research to do like telepathic something -- it's craziness. so instead of spending those dollars on this weird research, let's make sure that we are spending dollars on new and emerging technologies that can benefit the war fighter and those of us that supported the war fighters. so i think there is a lot that

we could do at the dod. so many areas of savings that we can dive into there. but the arctic. we have got to know where the dollars have gone before we can know how to eliminate the unnecessary spending. i see another hand. yes? >> this is a general question for the panel. i appreciate the conversations about bringing the private sector further into washington and into the defense acquisition process. coming from a smaller company that is not funded by these large, expansive fans coming out of the -- in los angeles, it's an exciting place to be, but coming from a smaller company, i'm really curious what you believe we can do to prevent the palantirs and andurils and

spacex, from pushing this out of the market. >> i'll take it. obviously, i am tied into a lot of those companies. are you right now at the revenue that all three make, it is actually a very, very tiny piece of their money. so this is a question more of 200 years from now. if they are successful, will can you do? there is a few things. you have to keep clear competition. when we bought a pistol a year ago, you would choose the best pistol. you buy a pistol today, you have 380 pages and he spent 10 years, 700 -- you know better than me. the processes have to be transparent and open and fair. if anduril and palantir will have the best product and win, that is fair. but if they're gonna have if they're going to win by doing what the primes do which is to make 790 pages that they lobby for and then they hide behind the ball and they do all these

other things, the number one thing is spending efficiently to to deter our enemies but but you have to keep the processes fair . what happened with other big primes, they became an arm of the government. it's really important, and the senator might have other opinions on this, but i don't think you constantly what everyone from these companies going out and running everything. and that is how it works right now. it's not great. you need reform there. i might be in the minority on that one. >> and just as i outlined, with the program, it was trending in that direction. we have to get it back to its original mission set of what it was put into law in 1980 two. ok see if we need to focus on small businesses and give them the opportunity to showcase what they are bringing to the table. i am a girl of the future. i think the future fight will be driven by software. new, emerging technologies are going to be really important and dominate tomorrow's future

fight. i would also say there is still space left for those of us that believe in the basics. i am an old soldier, and i'm a steel sites girl and grew up on a map and compass. i still think we have room for the basics out there, but software and technology will drive us in the future. >> i think we have time for one more? yes. question: -- talking about in the end, even if we do finally get the domestic mining,, we push it back to the refining the processing goes back to adversarial nations. so how do you suppose we incentivize different contct or at least the private sector mobilization on that? >> i think it is just reforming the permitting process.

because i think there is a desire to do that refining process here in the united states. but the environmental standards and so many different areas will be prohibitive of any sort of refining. refining opportunities. there are a lot of companies out there that would love the ability to not only mine in the united states, name xyz state, but have the refining capabilities right there so the transport costs are not added in. so there is opportunity, but we really do have to look at what are the environmental standards, the permitting standards, and how can we make refining and mining safe and acceptable to the american public. and then foster the dollars to support that. there are companies that will do that.

>> if i could just say one thing on that, too, this is an area where i think democrats would agree a tariff is appropriate. we just had our sixth child at home, i want them to live in a world without all of this refining messing up our air and water. if we will have higher standards, we should make them pay for that. this is the exact place where tariffs make a lot of sense. >> i think we will leave the conversation there. senator joni ernst and joe lonsdale, thank you both. [applause] [captions copyright national cable satellite corp. 2025] [captioning performed by the national captioning institute, which is responsible for its caption content and accuracy, visit ncicap.org] [applause] [applause] >> i guess we will get going. >> thanks for having me. we have topics to discuss.

the defense talking about manufacturing for the future in the report card on the screen this morning the manufacturing capacity so it's only fair and it's hard to do worse let's talk about what the problems are. to lay the groundwork, are supply chains from the china they are basically controlled by

adversary. the conflict with china the list goes on. you guys are doing something really interesting, but clinton ohio and rolling out next year. >> i want to hear from the playbook and supposed the shock about with the problems are.

and how we define the military powers. we're not going to lose a lot of systems in combat, we're not going to shoot a lot of weapons, and all of this is going to end in 100 hours. so, when you're then confronted with the inverse opposite of that problem, where you're going to shoot an enormous amount of weapons, you're going to lose an enormous amount of systems, you're going to have to sustain that for months and potentially years, it just completely inverts all of the assumptions that we've built our defense industrial base on, you know, for all of our living memories. so, i think for us, we go back to the very beginning and say we have to get away from a model of military power that is fundamentally unproducible and irreplaceable and actually start thinking about hyperscale production the way the commercial world thinks about it. and when you think about that at the onset in terms of how do i define out a lot of the problems that bedevil us downstream in

terms of defense-unique supply chains and absolutely, you know, overly specialized workforces and critical minerals and all these other dependencies, the goal is actually to get rid of that stuff as much as humanly possible, not to like better manage it because there's not a better version of that. so, for us, i think a lot of the way we are solving this problem is at the level of designdesign for simplicity, design for speed of manufacturing, design to leverage commercial supply chains as much as humanly possible, to eliminate critical minerals, to eliminate overly specialized workforces so that you can tap into actually what is an incredibly robust, you know, kind of and vibrant manufacturing community in the united states. you just have to know where to look, and it's traditionally, or it's outside of the traditional industrial base, where you really see, you know, commercial automotive workforce and, you know, kind of incredibly resilient commercial supply chains where, if you can tap

into that for the purposes of building weapons and autonomous systems and other, you know, other kinds of things that the department is going to need, you can just fundamentally increase by an order of magnitude the number of military systems and weapons that you can produce, which is actually the problem that we need to solve and solve very quickly. >> that's super interesting, and you talked about sort of forgetting about critical minerals, so i want to take another beat on that. how do you do that? i mean, china controls about 60% of the global access to critical minerals, more than that when it comes to processing. and i recently met a startup that just opened in raleigh, north carolina, to produce magnets completely divorced from china for the u.s. industrial base, which is a really cool idea. i think they're the only ones that are totally separate from china doing that, but, you know, it's a really small company. how do they scale? so, can we talk a little bit about how what you're talking about, chris, just kind of working around that, working around the critical minerals challenge, finding alternatives, and then what do we do about scaling the companies that are trying to do what my friend in raleigh, north carolina, is doing with magnets? open to anyone.

>> yeah, i'm happy to start. i think totally agree in terms of the challenge and, you know, making sure we have the right rare earth minerals in, you know, that go into these capabilities as is as important as the actual products that we're making at the end as well. and, you know, listening to the last panel as well, i mean, there's a lot more we have to do, and a lot of it i think is going to come down to different incentives. you know, also thinking about things like price. you know, there's going to have to be broader efforts underway. some of the things that are underway now are starting to be underway that we could look at for inspiration for scaling. our sister innovation organization, the office of strategic capital, i think, is doing a lot of great work, and one of the things they're working on right now is all of the applications they got for their loan guarantee program.

and jason rathje, the director, was telling me that a number of those applications are in critical mineral processing as an example and in advanced manufacturing. so, that shows that there are companies like the one that your friend is doing in north carolina out there, but they need more capital in order to scale. so, that's an example where, you know, i think if we continue to expand what osc is doing and its authorities, that would be one opportunity. osc is also looking at more broadly how do they incentivize this industry. another area i would point to is in batteries, which is another area that we look at a lot. one of the efforts that we have been doing at diu that i have been the most inspired by is our what's called fastbat, and it's a family of standardized batteries. so, the challenge within the dod is not just the minerals, but it's also, as you could imagine, the dod uses lots of different types of batteries in everything it does, and as a result, they're all very expensive, and they can't take advantage of all the r&d and commercialization going on on the commercial side in the united states with regard to batteries. so, we've been working with different mission partners around standardizing what are the different types of batteries

and building up the domestic and friend-shoring, you know, production base for those batteries. the last one we just introduced through an aoi in december was around drone batteries, so just another area because we saw that one as well. so, those are just sort of points of what we can continue to do in scale, but completely agree that we need to spend more time on that problem. >> the critical minerals conversation is a really interesting one, and i can see over your shoulder that you've also written down critical minerals as one of the most important things to talk aboutcritical mineral stockpiles, critical mineral supply chains, making sure that we are independent and using our friends and allies as well for that. i know that the last conversation talked about permitting reform, which is a huge, huge opportunity and something that i think that we might be able to accomplish in this congress, bipartisanly and by camly. there's definitely a lot of appetite for that. i'm intrigued. i always learn more than i contribute.

i'm really intrigued by the concept of not using critical minerals, and the biotechnology commission will be coming out soon with their report if it hasn't already come out. i think biology is our future in a lot of the advanced manufacturing that's going to be happening and ways to separate ourselves from critical minerals reliance. so, there's justand i'm also really intrigued by what you're saying about taking advantage and benefiting from the commercial sector and what they know and how they understand it. and you talked about a generational thing30 years ago, when i was a graduate student, my graduate work was in lean manufacturing, kaizen technology, and trying to figure out how to apply what the japanese were doing well in the car manufacturing industry to the defense manufacturing industry for airframes. fast forward 30 years now, and actually, intriguingly now, people are talking about just-in-time being something of the past. you know, how do we learn that we need to have some amount of inventory of one form or another in stockpiles to try to prevent the kind of stock outages that we're seeing and the shocks to,

you know, our supply chains that we're seeing? so, there's justit's a very fluid environment. innovation really, really matters, and speed to market really matters, and we have to figure out how to work all that together in a place like congress, which doesn't do any of those thingsinnovation and, yeah, go ahead. >> apologies, i didn't mean to step on you. just to add another point, i think we're always at risk of just wildly overthinking these problems and making them way more complicated than they actually are, right? so, your magnet maker friend -- the problem in the traditional industrial base is if you basically spend a generation not really building and buying a large number of weapons and you don't really care as a reason of policy that, like, chinese supply chains are just rippled throughout all of those programs, well, then you're going to get what we get, right? if, on the other hand, you turn it around and say, actually, now the government is going to

create a massive demand signal for different types of programs, different types of weapons, they're going to look beyond the traditional industrial base for who can provide those capabilities, i would submit a crazy thing will happen in a capitalist society, and investment will rush in, right? we're incredibly blessed in this country in terms of capital -- it's not the problem. we have tons of capital that's looking for good things to do. i feel like there's not a month that goes by that some farmer somewhere in america drills a well and finds like the world's largest lithium deposit. so, we have critical minerals; we just have to figure out how to align these amazing incentives or align the incentives to bring together the, you know, vast capability that we do have in this country in terms of people, manufacturing capability, critical minerals supplies, capital, and the like to solve these problems at scale, which fundamentally requires the government to do different things. absolutely. and to echo what tara from gao said earlier, there's really no excuse anymore. we have tools that really show the transparencies in new ways -- the full scale of the supply chains and where you're sourcing from and all the entanglements

there. >> so, it's just the work that needs to be done. congresswoman, i wanted to turn to you to talk a little bit about chips. of course, the chips act has, you know, brought a lot of promise to the domestic semiconductor industry, and my colleagues at the journal this week reported tsmc's plans to invest $100 billion in the u.s. you work -- you represent and know very well some of the maybe lesser-known semiconductor industry companies in pennsylvania. so, i wanted to hear from you a little bit about the promise of the chips act for these companies, these chip companies in pennsylvania, and also concerns that you might have about the trump administration potentially unraveling some of the legislation and its effectiveness, which has started to take place a little bit. >> yeah, i'm really, really concerned about the rhetoric coming out of the trump administration regarding the chips act, the bipartisan chips act. i really think that the investment is appropriate, the opportunity is ripe, and i worry that the signals coming from the white house will suppress the

investments that are happening at every level -- the small and large levels. i actually -- speaking of biology, i kind of keep going back to biology because i'm really intrigued by it as being sort of the next frontier of this. i think if we can't figure out how to do something like the chips act, we will miss the next opportunity, and i believe the next opportunity is going to be in biology and biological technologies. and so, i really do worry. i frankly worry when we're talking about critical minerals as well, where we're signaling to our allies, to our peers, to our friends that we are hostile to relationships with them. and in the case of canada or australia, that has an abundance of critical minerals, the fact that we are being pretty provocative and pretty, you know, difficult -- i don't know why i would be incentivized as another nation to necessarily

bend over backwards to do business with us and have relationships with us on things like processing, things like mining, because to be honest, even though some farmer finds a lithium field, that's still going to take 20 years, you know, for us to be able to figure out and then probably another 10 to be able to pull anything out of the ground. and so, we really need to be able to rely on our friends and allies. and what are you hearing from the chip makers in pennsylvania? >> you talk to them? >> yeah, anxiety. i think a common feeling in the world right now, but yeah, kind of a concern of how -- what are the words coming out of the white house, and what are their implications to people like them and businesses like theirs? there isn't a whole lot of chips manufacturing that are located in one place and aren't global entities. you know, even within the manufacturers and chips organizations in my district, in my community, are global entities. they just happen to be in the sixth congressional district for some aspects of their businesses.

so, i think that it has real implications and repercussions around the country and also around the world. i hope that i see my colleagues defend the work that we did on this important piece of legislation. and the way that we're seeing some pushback on things like ira, those things also are seeing some of my republican colleagues bravely say, "no, this is actually quite good for my community, and this is bringing good business to my community." i hope that i'll see the same thing coming on the chips act as well. >> let's take a beat on ukraine. ukraine, of course, has mastered production at high volume in very short order by the necessity to live to see another day. and i want to sort of ask -- maybe this is for chris and liz, whoever wants to chime in -- what are the lessons we learn from ukraine in terms of manufacturing that we can sort of copy-paste to the united

states? there are some things we can't -- ukraine still relies heavily on chinese components that won't work here -- but they also have managed to produce, for instance, drones at volumes that we don't see anywhere else outside of china. what can we learn, and what can we start to do today that we've learned from ukraine? >> yeah, no, i fully agree. we have to be capturing all the lessons we can. you know, just within our organization alone, we have an embed at sagu, you know, another embed in yom, and are constantly in conversation and trying to learn. i mean, i think if nothing else, ukraine has taught all of us the embrace of the commercial sector, quite frankly, and the embrace of technology and how it is completely changing warfare. and that is no different in terms of how we're manufacturing everything. i feel like there's a number of lessons we have to draw, and then i'll close with the biggest one, but it's already been

talked about today -- just in terms of how we have to decrease the production cycles, you know, and where we are and how quickly that is happening. i think also the demand signal -- i mean, to what chris was saying before -- when you actually say you're going to start buying a lot more things and you start buying a lot more things and you need them in a much quicker time frame than two years or five years, amazing things will just happen. so, you just have to let the commercial sector do, you know, what the commercial sector can do once the government gives that notice. i was in europe a month ago, and i thought it was also interesting -- not just talking to folks from ukraine but also talking to folks from estonia, croatia, etc. -- the same conversations we're having, quite frankly, about building domestic supply chains versus where do you rely on allies. that's an interesting one, but the most important one i think is the urgency, right? you know, i served in the military during the iraq war. i remember the urgency with which the military can change. and going back to the scorecard up front, how do we learn that lesson from ukraine and bring that same urgency that ukraine has taken to evolving what they're doing, and how do we

apply that right now so that we don't have to apply it if and when, god forbid, we're in the same situation that they are? >> thanks. anyone else on ukraine? >> totally foot-stomp the question of urgency, right? it turns out that you can actually produce a lot of things you need when your government has an existential urgency for them and sends that demand signal. i think the other key lesson, which doesn't get focused on enough, is that ukraine isn't gold-plating their requirements, right? they're building things that are good enough to solve the problems that they're facing. and i think that that is a key lesson that we could internalize -- right? don't use an exquisite material if you don't need it. don't go through an abate process if you can avoid it. what are the kinds of systems that we could be building much faster at much greater scales if we weren't overthinking and making way more exquisite, you know, how we're defining

military power? and the final thing -- and i think this is where we shouldn't over-index on ukraine -- is ukraine is building things for their unique purposes, right? they're fighting an incredibly tactical fight. long-range in ukraine is not how i think, you know, admiral paparo would define long-range in the indo-pacific. so, we shouldn't think that we're just going to kind of lift and shift everything that the ukrainians are building and all of a sudden we're going to have like deterrence in a box in the indo-pacific. >> chris, can you give a specific example of what anduril learned from ukraine? electronic warfare, for instance, or manufacturing? >> i mean, i think the key thing that we've learned is just, you know, whatever you think you have that's good today is not going to be good tomorrow or in a week or in a month. so, it's less about, you know, who has a great piece of technology, it's more about is the team capable of adapting and learning and iterating and fielding and sort of drawing those lessons and driving it back into the production cycle and just keeping the velocity of

fielding high because that is actually the problem we're going to face, you know, in god forbid the types of conflicts that the dod is preparing for. it's not like we're going to have things out of the box at work and then they work forever. it's you're going to have to then change things dynamically in flight, and if you don't have a team that is capable of working that way, you're just going to be left behind. and i will leave time for you all to ask your questions, but we'll try to get one or two more in. >> so, let's talk about policy for a moment, and i invite you to be impolite. everyone likes to be polite on panels, but let's remember we're getting a d in this area, so maybe there's not time to be polite. policies -- what policies do we have, regardless of administration, that have helped and that have set us back in manufacturing for current national security threats? we've already talked about the chips act. congresswoman, you mentioned the office of strategic capital. liz, i think you are a lot nicer about it than a lot of other people will be.

and, you know, now we have a reality of new tariffs to consider that will affect producers building all sorts of things that are essential for national security. what's helped, and what has set us back, and what would you call for if you could pass legislation tomorrow? start with you, congresswoman. >> i don't know if it's necessarily policy, but here are some ideas: continuing resolutions -- duh, like that's stupid. it's super stupid. and actually having a functioning government that can fund itself regularly and has more than one year of funding for certain projects and programs, i think, is important. when i was serving in the air force, my job was up at hanscom air force base, and something called advanced plans and programs. so, it was in acquisition and doing strategic ballistic defense, you know, stuff, comms, and it was literally our mission to design things that in 20

years would be in the field. and again, fast forward 30-something years later, i still think that's how our procurement and acquisition system works. so, your point about exquisite requirements and ridiculous, you know, byzantine processes -- i know that the chairman and the ranking member of hasc, that's going to be their focus. and again, like, i don't know that it necessarily takes laws or policies to change to make us more agile, but what you're seeing with ukraine is those guys are magicians. like, those guys are pretzeling themselves into all kinds of stuff to innovate and to move quick, and we need to be better at that. my kind of pace of the job that i used to do cannot still be there, and i'm afraid that it still is in the form that it is. who else? nothing? not going to comment on policy? [laughter] >> i mean, i think that there are pockets where the department is moving faster and where we're pathfinding different ways to do

things, and i'm hopeful that we're going to scale more of those so that we can do that writ large. you know, whether it's agile funding or just different processes like the ato process, where we're able to go from idea to at least a prototype contract in five months -- like, there are examples of that, and then how do we lift those up and do much more of those? the other thing i would just foot-stomp again, going back to what chris said, is there's really no substitute for buying a lot of something. if i look at something like drones with blue uas, where we did, you know, there was a decision to really think about not having things made fully in china and the different rules there, and so that has worked to some degree. but the fact is, we're still not buying a lot of them. and so, we have seen the growth of various uas companies here in the u.s., which is amazing, and we have the processes to certify

them and all of that. but at the end of the day, if we don't just start buying lots more of them, they're not going to be able to scale. so, we have to do that too and make sure that for the critical technologies, the critical things that we know we need to be doing here, you know, how ultimately is there money set aside for that? >> and it's not just volume of drones that are not being bought, but i know some of the programs that are out there testing some of these drone startups, they're talking about fielding them in like 2033, 2035. it's like, okay, you see if that startup is still around in 2033, right? so, that's the problem as well. chris, did you have a point? yeah, yeah. >> at the risk of being impolite, i guess i'd challenge the premise of the question a little bit, and i'm prepared to be challenged on this take. washington is a process-focused city, and whenever there's a problem, we immediately go, "how do we optimize some process?" right? how do we fix the jroc or jids or the ppbe process, the acquisition process, the requirements process, budgeting -- you know, that's where we

spend all of our energy. i would submit there's actually nothing wrong that we can't work through. you know, we've gone through the better part of a decade of just high-velocity acquisition reform, budget reform. you know, we've spent more money on defense. we've watched billions of dollars from private industry, private capital, venture, you know, come into defense. new companies have been created. i would submit actually we have everything that we need. we have policy. we have acquisition policy. we have money. we have technology. we have people. the fundamental problem is, what do we want to do with it? and i think that's the thing that actually scares people because you turn it back around and say, the scarier thought is you actually have everything that you need to be successful. so, what do you want to do? where are the new programs? right? i mean, anduril, it's no secret -- we're competing or we're performing on the air force collaborative combat aircraft program. that program didn't exist three years ago. you know, in three years, they built a requirement in flight,

they realigned 5 to 6 billion in the budget, they held an acquisition competition, they picked two performers to deliver the capability, and they won bipartisan congressional support for doing it. there's 25 programs like that that could be created across the department of defense today, and the sum total of what it would cost to do it is a rounding error in the broader dod budget. so, i would say the actual challenge is, what do people want to build? and i think that's the thing that scares people because they would rather focus on what policy or process thing is standing in my way rather than, "oh, actually, i can do everything that i need, and i can navigate my way through it, and now it's actually entirely on me in terms of what i want to do as a service secretary, secretary of defense, member of congress, member of industry." i think that's the challenge confronting us -- is actually whether we can do all the things that we say we want to do because we have nothing but ability to do it. >> is that a cultural thing? >> i think that the challenge

for a long time is that we have done things a certain way for so long that we've not had to think about doing things differently, and we have yet to actually internalize that we are living in a period of disruption -- you know, geopolitically, technologically, industrially, etc. so, when it turns out you have to go look for the disruptive ideas, you know, they often are hard to find. and i think the challenge of the department is that it is so hierarchical that you find people who have the authority but don't actually understand the ways in which they could use it or, you know, are getting information in a timely way to use those authorities to good purpose. and you have plenty of incredibly well-meaning people in the bureaucracy who absolutely know what the score is and what the problem is, but they don't have the authority to do it. so, how do you actually put people into those positions who have the authority, who have a mandate, and actually have a vision? and that's what, you know, i would submit, secretary kendall got so right -- is he had ideas,

and then he knew how to make the process do what he wanted to enact the ideas that he had. we need a lot more of that, or we're just going to be here in five years talking about the same problems. >> so, i'll close with one question before handing it over to the audience. and thanks, chris, for the pushback. i think we're still talking generally about the same thing. liz, i wanted to ask you about the status of the blue manufacturing program at diu. if you could kind of let us know, what are the technologies that you've discovered through that? what seems to be working in the private sector? we not only can build differently than we did in the past, but we should. and, you know, in addition to 3d printing, what else are you seeing out there? and then i want to ask chris sort of a similar question, but let's hear from you about what you're seeing. >> yeah, thanks. so, blue manufacturing was something that we introduced last summer, and, you know, in the coming days and weeks, we're going to be launching one of our first flagship initiatives out of it, which is a marketplace, which i'm happy to talk a little

bit about. but the broad premise of it, you know, apropos to the panel today, is how can we at diu, who's helped over the last 10 years to bring different commercial technologies into the department, take that same lens to manufacturing? and you have defense tech companies that are building, in particular, the prototypes but are not yet ready and don't have the means to scale. we're seeing all of these different technologies out there -- 3d printing, high-rate production, lots of different types of automation out there as well -- and some of those are already in the defense world, and then there's a renaissance going on in the commercial sector more broadly in terms of how to scale and produce. and how do we connect those different pieces together? you know, some companies will be fortunate to be where anduril is and be able to go the way of anduril or what sonic just announced as well with the port alpha that they're going to

build and build that manufacturing themselves. and they don't necessarily need to. you know, how do we also enable it so that companies can focus on the technology and then think about someone else or others to focus on the production, which will also allow us to scale it even more should we have to in a different situation? so, the idea of the marketplace is that companies -- manufacturing companies -- will be able to apply, and that we will then certify them. we'll look at things like adverse capital, cybersecurity, etc., and then they will be there, and there'll be a matching function so that defense technology companies will be better able to find them and hopefully find different ways that they'll be able to scale their manufacturing. and that will be one more sort of valley of death that we're my will be able to help bridge by being that marketplace and enabling that to happen. there are other enablers as well. i often find it is not necessarily a correlation between the trl of the product and the manufacturing sophistication. a lot of it depends on where you

grew up. you see companies and founders that come in with one vision but companies are further along and have not felt through that. how are we asking companies to think about that as well. so we will be launching more in the coming weeks. we are this will be one more piece. to thes pirit of conversation we need to get going. >> i guess this is the opposite of positive signaling to the industry. i don't know if you wanted to

hop in with anything about additive manufacturing. >> we have been on a manufacturing journey for several years. there are phenomenal technologies at our disposal to eliminate processes or make things cheaper or simpler. we should not over index on that. there are certain things humans do better than robots.

there is a lot of technology at our disposal. it is more about thinking about the right way to solve the problem and optimizing for speed , simplicity and low cost. in many cases you are better off relying on people. it may work great for building your first prototype. >> that is a great reality check. time for a couple questions. wait for the mic and identify yourself. anybody? the back row. >> one thing that i think has happened in all three panels is this thinking of a new mindset. how are we training institutions and individuals on how to think that way? if we are not thinking that way we can come up with all sorts of ideas. but if we don't know the innovator's dna, we don't know

the growth mindset. so where are we heading? >> that is why asked the question about culture and that is why i am also concerned. this afternoon i think i'm having a roundtable or a panel on military personnel subcommittee on recruiting. i think that we are stuck in a weird place where we have a vision of what our warrior looks like, a literal vision of a guy who is six foot five inches who can lift mountains. i am not sure where that is where we need to be. i think we need people who think, differently who have different skill sets. at least in the military we need to question what it is we think

we are looking to recruit, especially as technology becomes increasingly more and more part of our conversations. those are the kind of questions i plan to ask at today's recruiting meeting. i hope that we can be more thoughtful about the way we visualize our war fighting men and women. >> the additional question is are we retaining those people. i would submit we have enormously creative disruptive thinkers in the military and the question is we are not creating the incentives to reward those people and bring them up. washington is littered with captains and colonels who have some of the most interesting thinking and they are doing it at think tanks rather than as admirals and generals and leaders of their institutions. how do we find those people and reward them drumming them out of our institutions? >> who else?

yes, please. >> wondering, i think there is a real discrepancy between these innovative, largely unmanned different types of systems and what is required you think about putting humans in that loop and where they are going to be at the end of the day to take territory you have to roll over human beings and stop them in one way or another. we have an incredible testing apparatus that requires us to make sure those human beings are safe from that technology. that is a place where most of us do not want to compromise but at the same time it really does slow us down. we don't always have the ability to design and manufacture things to protect the human while innovating as quickly as we want. just wondering how we are thinking about that as a critical chewing point in some -- chokepoint in some ways.

>> i couldn't agree more. i think we have built a testing in it which surprised designed around certain types of military systems. they take a long time to build so you take a long time to test them. iron out every edge case it will not be perfect and you're going to keep them in inventory for four years. i think a sickly we need the exact opposite in terms of a testing regime for these systems. the risk to our personnel is going to be lower because they are going to be autonomous. the development cycle will be faster because you are literally just creating drag and then elongating that process through testing. and generally optimizing testing for what are the outcomes we are trying to achieve rather than does this check all the boxes i am used to checking. i just think we have to create a

parallel testing enterprise and i would submit also budgetary link and other things for how we are going to think about and utilize these systems. we are not going to get all the answers before we go. we will have to field a lot of that in flight. >> i think we are out of time unless there is one burning question. thank you all for your time. great discussion. appreciate it. [applause] [captions copyright national cable satellite corp. 2025] [captioning performed by the national captioning institute, which is responsible for its caption content and accuracy. visit ncicap.org] announcer: in the years right before world war ii started in 1939 winston churchill had been out of government. however even though he was far from power, his country home came to her headquarters of his campaign against nazi germany. catherine carter is a curator and historian who has managed the house hand collections. her new book is called churchill's citadel, chartwell

gatherings before the storm. she reveals how churchill used chartwell, which is 35 miles from london, as his base during the prewar years to collect key intelligence about germany's preparation for war. announcer: author catherine carter with her book on this episode of booknotes+ with our host brian lamb. of note plus is avaiblon the c-span now free mobile app or wherever you get your podcasts. announcer: c-span, democracy unfiltered. we are funded by these television companies and more. including midco. >> where are you going? or maybe a better question is, how far do you want to go? and how fast do you want to get there? now we're getting somewhere. so, let's go.

let's go faster. let's go further. let's go beyond. announcer: midco supports c-span as a public service, along with ese other television providers, giving you a front row seat to decracy. >> democracy is always an unfinished creation. >> democracy is worth dying for. >> democracy belongs for us all. >> we are here in the sanctuary of democracy. >> great responsibilities fall once again to the great democracies. >> american democracy is bigger than any one person. >> freedom and democracy must be constantly guarded and protected. >> we are still, at our core, a democracy. >> this is also a massive victory for democracy and for freedom.

>> on this historic to the house of representatives opens his proceedings for the first time to televised coverage. announcer: since march of 1979 c-span has been your unfiltered window into american democracy, bringing you direct no spin coverage of congress, the supreme court, and the white house. >> is this mr. brian lamb? >> yes it is. >> hold one minute for the president. announcer: it exists because of c-span founder brian lamb's vision and cable support, not public funding. -- not private funding. all this month your support is more important than ever. you can keep democracy unfiltered today and for future generations. >> to the american people, now is the time to tune into c-span. announcer: your gift today

preserves open access to government and ensures the public stays informed. donate now at c-span.org/ donate, or scan the code on your screen. every contribution matters, and thank you. announcer: next to the vice chief of the u.s. space force will have an update on the golden dome, the u.s. defense system modeled after israel's iron dome. his remarks are from the reagan institute's national security summit held recently here in washington, d.c. >> i cover space for politico. i am here with vice chief of space operations. i would say it is probably never a more exciting time to start covering space than now. there's a lot going on. our adversaries are increasingly competitive with us. we are making moves as well. i will preface this by saying i am sure there is a lot that is classified or sensitive.

but right off the top on the topic of golden dome, this is going to be a tremendous amount of work. it is a big effort with potentially big rewards. are you able to give us any sort of progress update in terms of where we stand on the planning process, where do you see golden dome going? >> i think from a planning perspective we are in full planning mode. if we don't answer to the white house by the end of the month on what our thoughts are, we are spending a lot of time talking about architectures. the different levels of architecture depending on the threat we want to protect and defend the united states against. we are talking about what organizations need to be involved in iron dome. this will not be one organization to rule all organizations pretty it will have to be in integration of multiple organizations. how do you organize to do that? what is that going to look like?

and what capabilities do you want to bring into that portfolio to start focusing on. >> you raised an interesting point. there are a lot of different players that could have a role. what do you see the responsibility as being her agency? should space take control, should mda lead? >> that has not been decided yet how that is going to work. but it will have to be the integration of all of those organizations because missile defense is extremely good. missile defense agency is really good at systems integration. missile defense is really good at tests. they have a very bus -- robust modeling capability. so they will have a heavy role in what we are doing. the space force will also have a heavy role because we have all the space-based capabilities. we have satellites for communications.

we have sensors to do global awareness of what is going on. we have missile defense sensors on orbit as well. all of that kit has got to come together to be integrated which means you have to bring multiple organizations and agencies, because they also have capabilities they want to bring to bear on the protection of the homeland. all that needs to come together into an integrated fashion. >> as you start that planning on the iron dome, what does it look like in terms of your communication with those agencies to make sure that you are covering ground appropriate for your organization and working to build together, if at all, in the planning process? >> we are all talking, everybody is talking. the good news is space force has already crafted most of these partnerships in the past. we have a very robust partnership with missile defense agency. we share our data with them.

we have a very robust relationship with the national reconnaissance office. they are building a lot of. our buildings resilient radar system, gmti. a mesh network in space. we have already built those relationships. now it is how you connect all these pieces together seamlessly to go after homeland defense. where we may have been collaborating really good in the pacific we now want to bring that relationship to bear. >> another interesting historical factor is we have had a lot of real-life cases of missile-defense across the world in the last couple years. we see it all the time in ukraine, there are the iranian attempted strikes in israel. i imagine more than ever you're working to coordinate lessons learned. when you look at those historical events, what lessons

can you take from that into missile defense for the homeland? >> if you look at the threats we are going against, they are not abstract. these are threats that we have seen happen on a day-to-day basis. if you go back and look at the events in iran in april and october of last year where they launched a barrage of over 300 was at israel, it was our missile warning capability in the united states operating out of colorado that was alerting not only our own forces of the impending missile attack but also of the israelis on her other international partners and handing that data off to the shooters to be could take those missiles out before they caused harm. these are not threats -- these are threats we are seeing every single day. whereas our architecture was originally built for the tragic vision of rejecting the homeland against a nuclear attack they

now have to be used in a very technical manner as we are seeing with iran. so those relationships become absolutely key. i need to exercise together and integrate developments together. we need to be able to make sure i can pass data from a missile warning sensor 22,000 miles away to an aircraft in route to shoot that down seamlessly those of the lessons learned we have been practicing for. >> there are a lot of different parts. there is obviously the muscle memory of getting people trained up. what do you see as the most likely biggest challenge from the perspective of delivering

something quickly and relatively affordably? i am sure it will be expensive. >> without a doubt our biggest challenge will be organizational behavior and culture. we are not accustomed to having to integrate at the level that will be required to integrate to go after iron dome. this is on order of magnitude of the manhattan project. it will take a concerted effort from the very top of our government. it is going to take a national will to bring all this together. it is going to be a heavy lift across all the organizations that will be participating. and what we have got to really push back on the organizational boundaries and cultures that are going to try to slow us down or preventing us from talking about it. >> elaborating on those boundaries, there has been talk of saying we need to push acquisition people to go harder, faster. is that what needs to happen? what are those boundaries? >> no. missile defense agency is good

at the ballistic threat, protection of the homeland from an icbm. they are not good at building space capabilities. he space force is great at building space capabilities but we are not great at doing missile defense, that's not our job. counter uas, that's the air force, navy and the army. how do i bring them to bear? we've got to break down the barriers of title 10 and 50 so the dod and intelligence community, how do i take advantage of those exquisite intelligence sensors and a time relevant manner and get that data to the shooter in a manner of time that can actually deter the attack. >> who do you see as sort of -- i mean, who is the linchpin in terms of leading the effort? to certain degree the services can do it and in cases like iran they're going to have actual real-life example where they're going to be forced into it. how do we leave that without the sort of emergency circumstances of actual combat?

>> it's got to be an all government reporting to the secdef with full presidential support. >> in terms of ways that space force is changing and some of the priorities that the service has laid out, there's more and more talk about space control, space superiority. not just managing space-based assets, but actively interdicting chinese or russian space-based assets. there are some doctrine being worked on that right now. i'm just going to leave the floor to you based on the classification of what can you tell us about that, especially do you imagine lots of kinetic space-based capabilities put in orbit? >> i do not think that's off the table. under the concept of competitive endurance, which the cso talks about a lot, there's three

loe's underneath there. first is operational surprise, which means we cannot be surprised by the adversaries actions. we need to know what's going and what's was coming. the second one is because space is so large and because we don't have a lot of capabilities in space to protect and defend ourselves there's a significant first mover advantage, those those who throw the first punch have significant advantage over the adversaries. we have prevent that. the third one he talks that is responsible counterspace campaigning. that is the overall encompassing for space control. if you go down those three efforts, in order to deny operational surprise, we need more proliferated space awareness to understand what is going on. we have it in every other domain. we'll have enough in space. how do i get more space to meet -- domain awareness? that's going to come to partnership with industry and allies to get more eyes in the sky. the second one is how do i do nine -- i deny first maneuver

advance? i need to have resiliency built into our capabilities. some of the may be on board with lazy but more if it would be through proliferation through redundancy and excess capacity. that again comes through partnerships with commercial, partnerships with our allies because we know we can build enough kit to give us everything we need on orbit simultaneous right of the gate so we have to partner our way through that. that last lane is once i can deny operational surprise and prevent first maneuver advantage i need to have credible capabilities to hold red at risk and credible capabilities to ensure i can deter an attack. that's really where were getting into that counterspace. what does it look like? that's for in and as well as trying to determine. >> obviously because this is a new emerging field, those producers are either just coming online and are often new companies in some cases. how do you evaluate the state of industry for answering those emerging needs? are we where we need to be or is

there a lot more than needs to be done? >> we are nowhere where we need to be, nor have we been in the past. however, there is more innovation coming out of industry today than there has been since the push to the moon. an enormous amount of innovation coming out of industry which has allowed us to expand those partnerships with industry to look at what's in the realm of the possible. there's innovation coming out in the way we communicate, the way we protect and defend, the way we share data, et cetera and try to take avenge of all that. >> are there areas you feel are less advanced or need yet more investment? specifically when it comes to some of those sensors i could imagine being interested in. >> i think where we as a nation need more investment is we have spent the last several decades becoming very efficient in the way we fight and very efficient in our industrial base. meaning i am in many cases one company deep on some level of technology or capability.

we have got to expand our industrial base to be more than just one deep, and we've got to get comfortable with inefficiency in our industrial base which means i may need lights out capacity. i got the same thing with my labor market. i have enough technical labor in the united states to feed all of the innovation this come out of industry today. we've got to grow our workforce and the technical competencies of our workforce to have that excess capacity. but that is against our culture right now because we're all about efficiency, not necessarily about effectiveness. >> there's an interesting point there about acquisition which is a lot of people have talked already at this conference about how to improve acquisition of and push people. to acquisition officer there's a push to get the thing that's cheapest, most efficient, not necessarily something that supports a small company out there to diversify the supply base. how do you change the culture for acquisition professionals

such their incentivize, or is it a top leadership challenge? >> you have to change the incentive structure. having spent 34 years in acquisitions, i will tell you your acquirers are extremely well-trained, very bright. they all have -- most of them have technical degrees. they know how to do their job. but the system or rewards that we have in place culturally across the government as well as in society is to deliver on cost and on schedule at the expense of performance. when you do that, your acquirers do everything they can to reduce the risk on their program. risk to funding instability, risk to technology insertion, risk to oversight. so they spend a lot of time defending their programs to keep good ideas out and we have got to change that. instead of making them responsible for delivering a widget on cost and on schedule, they can responsible for

delivering the capability to the field, that the war fighter can use tonight. you'll get a completely different answer and you will start embracing the innovation walking into your program more than trying to defend innovation out of your program. >> what top-down changes need to have that? is it a matter of you indicating this to acquisition professionals and saying hey, i'm standing behind you, or is there a role for congress or other parts of the government to play? >> i think all of the above. we've got to become more risk tolerant. when a program manager embraces innovation and innovation fails, we cannot fire that individual. we have to reward that individual and say dust them off and try again. bring it to be faster. don't worry about the 100% solution. focus on the 70% solutions. how do i get that capability to the war fighter or to the nation as fast as i possibly can? we've got to reward of that behavior. if it comes from the behavior and the laws we have in place, it comes from the defense

acquisition executive, the service acquisition executives, it comes from the program executive officers. we have got to keep pushing that incentive structure further and further down to allow them to innovate. if you look at the guardians that we're bringing on today, our younger generation, they are chomping at the bit to innovate. they had been exposed to this technology their entire time going up. i had an ipad in her hand at six months old. the want to embrace it. we've got to take advantage of that curiosity and desire early on and not beat it out of them so that when they grew up to be peo's or program managers, they understand how to innovate and we have built the system of rewards and balances to allow them to innovate. >> presumably show that they stay in the force and don't cycle out. on that topic it seems like services are increasingly working with the cocoms to get live -- this is an actual war fighter, you know, a person facing real life geostrategic threat.

can you talk about how what lessons you've you learned or how that interaction has gone? i imagine you doing the same. >> it goes really well, and we try to do as much as we possibly can. because when i close the combatant commands to acquisition problem and anderson -- and they understand how hard it is to implement all the laws put on you, they start to have a different demand signal. but when i take my acquirers and send them into the combatant commands and understand how that kit is going to be used, understand what the war fighter actually needs, to get ingrained into that weird ethos if you will that we have been talking so much about, they come back with a different sense of urgency a different perspective on how the going to deliver capability to the field. getting those communities to talk more is hugely beneficial. within the space force, what we are trying to do is stand up our units integrated from the beginning. i have the operator and the inquirer sitting side-by-side, exchanging leadership roles but the entire unit is a mixture of

acquirers and operators. >> obviously space force is growing, has a lot of needs. at the same type were in a restricted budget environment. when it comes to this 8% reallocation, how will that affect where space force goes? is it you drop some things, or is it perhaps you go more slowly? >> both. i think as you reallocate the 8%, there's going to be 8% things that are going to accelerate and 8% of things that are going to slow down. i will tell you even the space force, and we are only 3% of the do do total, but we are the smallest within the aor and smallest budget. even within that constrained environment, you still have opportunities to optimize where's your spending your money. there's a few studies out there from mckinsey and other organizations that say most organizations have at least 20% to 40% inefficiency built into their structure.

the objective is to try to how to find it. 8% is going to hurt in some places but helping other places. >> where would that 8% help? which types of programs do you feel like would accelerate based on these shifts? >> from the space perspective we are woefully underfunded and protect and defend. that's probably where you're going to see some of it. we are also going to look at legacy systems we can divest. were going to that pecking order as well. to make sure the capabilities we deliver at the end of the day going to be the most effective and optimal capabilities we can. >> on those legacy systems, to what degree do you see increasing commercial availability of space tech? to what degree can those take the place of those legacy systems? >> there is a lot of opportunity there. we have a commercial space strategy that we published last summer.

in that commercial space strategy we have traveled all the peo's and senior program managers to go across their entire portfolio and look for opportunities to offload requirements were currently trying to build and offload them into a capability that already exists either in our commercial or allies. under the construct of what we are trying to do in the space force is exploit anything we have, first and foremost. second thing is by as much as i possibly can. only then, let's go build what we must. so we are trying to look at every requirement we possibly can to shift away from building internally to buy ing externally. >> i imagine like with everything there some challenges there, some things didn't work out. it's a nice idea to buy something commercial but there are instances where things don't work out. have you found any of those instances yet? if so, what have you learned

from either maybe making the requirements process clearer? >> we really haven't found anything that doesn't work that way. we found something that we can do more efficiently and more effectively. we could have wrote the contract a little bit better, et cetera. but for the most part, today satcom is our most robust, we're buying an enormous amount of satcom. the satcom i can afford during times of peace is not a satcom i need during times of crisis or conflict. we stood up the commercial argument spacers are and working with our commercial partners to say how do i put in place a relationship and a contract structure during peacetime to guarantee you additional capacity during times of crisis of conflict without waiting for the crisis or conflict to start that conversation? so satcom is leading the way. i think the second one is space domain awareness. we have what we call the joint commercial operation cell, which we have now in three countries. we have one in the united

states, when in new zealand in one in u.k. and emotive we're sharing data with 15 different allied partners and with all the commercial operators operating on the floor simultaneously giving us exquisite space situational awareness of what's going on in orbit. we are now starting surveillance reconnaissance and tracking which is using commercial to give space domain awareness on the ground, terrestrial what's going on. not intelligence, but just give me situational awareness. who's operating that gulf? where did they come from? where are they headed? time relevant answers to combatant commands. as you go down the list of capabilities, that spectrum changes. satcom can be very heavily commercial, missile warning probably not. that's an inherently government function, no fail mission, we are probably going to own most of that. but there is a spectrum of opportunities for commercial as you go down that path. >> that limited budget

environment is not just systems. there is also some reduction in force that is going to be happening. your acquisition folks personnel are all i assume relatively highly qualified people, right? you don't want to lose to the private sector. are you anticipating those cuts affecting your programs? and what impact would that have? >> there will be impacts. we haven't let anybody go yet, so we haven't felt the impacts, by the will be some impacts. like i said, we are the smallest force. we're 15,000. we have about 9500 in uniform and we have about another 5600 in civilian workforce. so any hit to that small 15,000 workforce is going to be felt. we are just making sure that we are communicating to everybody what the challenges are going to be, the talent we are losing, and then what opportunities we might have to offset that and we are going through it. but we're following the same rules everybody else's following in the federal government.

>> when it comes to encouraging innovation, encouraging acquisition to move quickly, i would point out that like, sta has not had a great year so far. they have had various challenges, right? where do you see the future of sda going? any sort of thoughts on that? >> the space development agency has a very bright future. they are kind of our lightning rod for cultural change in how we look at filling out some of these problems in embracing commercial. they are building out pwsa, which is basically a proliferated leo satcom. they're building out a leo missile warning, missile defense type of capability. looking at alternate pnt. they're looking at air moving to target indicator. the future sta is a very bright. you mentioned they had some stumbling's this year, but when they are pushing the limits of technology and limits of

relationship of the commercial as hard as are pushing, they are also pushing hard on industrial base, we're going to see them stumble a little bit but it's nothing i don't think we can't recover from and their future is extremely bright. >> i'm going to slip in one last more question until we start the q&a. when it comes to the space industrial base, obviously you guys are not an economics agency. you not necessarily trying to make sure every single last bit of america has a slice of the pie. what meaningful decision can space force make when it comes to making sure we have a diversified industrial base? is it pushing it out to the most number of suppliers? encouraging education? what's the role? >> we work really closely with the acquisition executives, both space and air, as well as the defense acquisition, ans, to look at the health of industrial base. we try to identify will call the

pinch points in the industrial base, whether that be connectors, it could be tanks for us, could be icy chips, a whole different array of capabilities. we are also trying to take it the next step further and say it is not just about the space force industrial base, it is the national industrial base and what are the interconnections of all that. and where can we possibly invest or diversify our capabilities to get more capabilities for the nation? so we spend a lot of time within the pentagon having those kind of conversations and then working with our partners on the hill, our stakeholders on the hill to say if we invested in this company and got excess capacity in chips, this is how it would affect our economy, this is how it would affect our ability to defend the nation, this is how it would affect the price of our weapons systems, all that good kind of stuff. >> great. i think i will open it up to questions. if you could state your name and affiliation. there someone with a mic around.

>> thanks. erin logan. curious how you are looking at -- you mentioned the need for multiple entities to work together to make this effective. but for space command you have a distinct mission. we see the services with different missions, different priorities in space where they want to replace a lot of systems with space, which are not the same things you need for your mission. just how you are looking at that balancing act and how industry can support those dual priorities, especially at this time of contraction. >> i am not necessary following your question as far as not our mission. our mission is to provide the joint force with space-based capabilities and to protect and defend those capabilities so that they can count on them during times of crisis or conflict. so we're having conversation on air moving target indicator, moving that from air to space, or actually blending it, not moving it. that is a space force mission that we're taking on to do

moving target indications from space. all those missions are for the joint force, for the nation, provided by the space force and that is kind of the way we are looking at it. i'm not sure that's exactly the question you are asking. >> [inaudible] >> yeah. i would say we have a very robust conversation with the deputy secretary of defense unbalancing across the services and balancing across the domains. and more importantly, how do i integrate that capability across domains. if i'm asked to take on something else i say either i can't do this or i need additional. when we are the smallest force

with the smallest amount of money generally i would come back and say beacon -- we can do it but i need additional authority to deliver that capability. >> right here. >> thanks. part of the potus ask in golden dome, the last part is hey, bring me whatever authorities you might need to accomplish this. so, question to you, what would space force, what would be an authority space force would ask for that you don't already have to make this happen? >> the authority we would ask right out of the gate is to the authority to do on orbit training and testing that we're not capable of doing today. it is a very constrained set of authorities we have to do on orbit test and on orbit training and we would ask that open up so we can increase our readiness of our forces on the frontline to be able to do that protect and defend mission. >> time for one very quick one.

>> i will try to make this concise. wanted to go back to your discussion around inefficiency. how do you square the way you think about inefficiency with, you referenced a culture of a push for efficiency. the administration's focus on efficiency, and are you worried that cuts could affect your need for excess capacity, your need for a cushion in the industrial base? and if i can add to that, as you look at kind of this 8% cut and potentially divesting and things like that, what are the mission areas that have inefficiency built in where you think you could take a risk to pull programs back or cut systems? >> i think the inefficiency is built into all organizations, just fundamentally. i can't necessary say this is my least efficient unit, therefore

i am going to cut the unit or that capability. that doesn't exist. we got to go in and look at where i can optimize better, a lot of the legacy stuff we need to optimize better, and then start buying out new capability. for example, we still operate our old satellites the old way. i have operated sitting at the console flying one satellite 11 operator industry is proven with the new developed systems i come to light out operations, i can fly autonomously. how do i take advantage of that new technology to start getting efficiencies in some of my legacy systems? we are looking at that kind of stuff on the upgrade side going forward. but on inefficiency side, it is -- my conversation is more about efficiency, not inefficiency. we have become very efficient in the way we fight. we have one unit type code that i can send out to solve one problem but that unit type code is only one deep.

if i lose that unit type code, that unit, i don't have a bench behind them to go after, the same thing with my industry partners. i have one sub supplier who can keep up a proposed ssent tank and if they go out of business or get hit by covid or by a tornado or what have you, i don't have a backup. because we have leveled the very efficiently leveled our industry base. we have got to get more comfortable with inefficiency to have redundant capabilities, proliferated capabilities, lights out capabilities, because if we do have to go to conflict with a near peer, we're going to need that bench strength to be there during the really bad day. >> i think that's all we have time for. thank you so much, general. [applause] announcer: looking to contact your members of congress? c-span is making it easy for you with our 2025 congressional directory. get essential contact information for government officials all in one place. this compact spiral-bound guide contains bio and contact

information for every house and senate member of the 119th congress. contact and information on committees, the president's cabinet, agencies, and state governors. it costs $32.95 plus shipping and handling plus every purchase helps support c-span's nonprofit operations. scan the killed on the right or go to cspanshop.org to preorder your copy today. announcer: saturday's watch our 10 week series first 100 days. we explore the early months of presidential administrations with historians and authors, and through the c-span archives. we learn about accomplishments and setbacks, and how events impacted presidential terms and the nation up to present day. saturday, the first 100 days of jimmy carter's presidency in 1977 after defeating president gerald ford in the 1976 election.

he promised to move the country forward after watergate. president carter offered proposals on energy, taxes, welfare and reform of government. jimmy carter passed away in december 2024 at the age of 100. watch our american history tv series first 100 days, saturday at 7:00 p.m. eastern on american history tv on c-span 2. announcer: c-span, democracy unfiltered. we are funded by these television companies and more. including wow. >> the world has changed. today, a fast, reliable internet connection is something no one can live without. so wow is there for our customers, with speed, reliability, value, and choice. now more than ever, it all starts with great internet. wow. announcer: wow supports c-span as a public service, along with these other television provider giving you a front row seat to democracy.

>> mr. speaker, on this historic to the house of representatives opens its proceedings for the first time to televised coverage. announcer: since march of 1979, c-span has been your unfiltered window into american democracy, bringing you direct no-spin coverage of congress, the supreme court, and the white house. >> is this mr. brian lamb? >> yes, it is. >> would you hold one moment please for the president? announcer: it exists because of c-span founder brian lamb's vision and the cable industry's support, not private funding. but this is not guaranteed. all this month, your support is more important than ever. you can keep democracy unfiltered today and for future generations. >> to the american people, now is the time to tune into c-span. announcer: your gift today preserves open access to government and ensures the public stays informed. donate now at c-span.org/donate, or scan the code on your screen.

every contribution matters, and thank you. announcer: now a discussion on cybersecurity and technology innovation with remarks from house armed services subcommittee chair don bacon and former republican congressman mac thornberry, former chair of the house armed services committee. from the reagan summit held recently here in washington. this is about 45 minutes. >> hello. you can hear me. hello. i cover tech and ai for the washington post out in silicon valley. yeah, i just thank you all for being here. thank you guys for being here. we have mac thornberry, very distinguished career in congress, looking at cyber and now general man about tech innovation in town, i guess.

of course rep. don bacon, former air force general. i feel like you have been in the news little bit so i don't necessarily want to put you on the spot. >> he was my chairman. >> of course the representative is on the subcommittee for cyber on harm -- house armed services. he probably has a lot of things he cannot even talk to us about today. talking about cyber and innovation, i was thinking of the previous panels and coming from silicon valley i talked obviously to a lot of startups who are part of this wave of energy that is saying we want to contribute to u.s. defense. we want to work with the pentagon. how do we get in there and what are the challenges and that kind of thing. cyber is interesting because even more so than some of these

other smaller tech companies and -- there has been a longer tradition of cybersecurity companies being involved in national security. there is may be more of a history there, a pedigree that is kind of interesting. so there are a couple things we want to jump in on that with. but i was just kind of reading about salt typhoon, which is the major hack we had last year from a chinese commercial company that was contracted by the chinese government. when we talk about private versus public, it's not just us that are having that conversation and turning to the private sector. in a story some of my colleagues wrote, they were quoting a retired general, a giant in the cyber intel community who is now on the board of openai. he was saying the u.s. is neither keeping up with nor deterring the chinese.

we are facing an adversary whose size, sophistication and speed are outpacing us. he went on to say the trump administration needs a more comprehensive strategy to partner with the private sector and our allies to just move forward and break through some of these barriers and get moving on that mission. i don't know if you want to maybe just give us a bit of a level set about where we are right now when it comes to cyber espionage, cyber warfare. what is the context this room needs to know going into this conversation? >> if you step back, i think it's important to remember that cyber is a domain of warfare in which there is conflict every day. and in which the stakes are getting higher every day. the nakasone comment caugt my attention because as you pointed

out he says were increasingly falling behind. he also said it's bleeding from the digital into the physical. most of us tend to still think of cyber as my computer is not working, we have scammers and so forth. but we are in a place, or rapidly approaching a place, where we might have whole missiles, drones, satellites not work because of cyber. there have been stories that talk about digital bombs, if you will, placed in infrastructure. so, we lose electricity. we have this, that, or the other thing happen with civilian infrastructure because of cyber. so it is not something that you can just put over there on the shelf and say those smart geeks are going to take care of it. it is interconnected to everything. so for our purposes, i think we need to think about innovation within the domain of cyber,

where nakasone says we're falling behind, but also the connectedness of cyber to all the other innovation that goes on. that is where we get into stealing electrical property and a whole variety of things where cyber, or you could just use the word digital, is connected to every part of what we do in our daily lives, much less defend the country. it's all an essential part. >> representative, you are on the front lines seeing what is coming and going. obviously the big story last year was salt typhoon, the chinese hack on major u.s. telecom companies, access to president trump and his staff potentially, kamala harris was also targeted in that. what is the u.s. dealing with right now? what are the biggest threats that you are seeing at the intel committee armed services? >> china has exceeded russia in

being a threat and cyber world. less than a year ago we would've said the russians with the most aggressive and now it's the chinese so that's what i hear from experts. one of the biggest problems we have is were doing almost a year long cr. our military cannot flourish -- first of all, 1% growth from the previous year which was 2% under inflation. so that's a reduction. that has got to affect cyber, nsa and cyber command. now we are doing acr six months in, talking about doing a permanent one. sunday i put out a tweet seeing a year-long cra is bad for the military. you cannot honestly say we are trying to match the chinese into turn china, russia and iran with a year-long cr. i did that before i went to church. while i was at church the white house called me and said we read your tweet. we know we've got to do anomalies within the cr. i guess my whole point is from

the very top we are holding back cyber at all of our military with this dysfunctional budgeting process .i guess my -- process. that's acceptable within norms to do it until december. now return to do when all through. it's broken. congress has to fix this if you want to have a defense that can match that. but to your question, maybe i will be more granular on some stuff. general hawk was a colonel and i was a one star. good man. honest, i trust him. but what is going on is china is into our energy grid, they are into our phones, they are into everything. we are really good on the cyber intelligence but we have roe's that do not want us to do nearly what china or russia does. so how do deter china and russia? i don't think it is by taking

punches to the face and saying can i have another. we have got to be able to allow cyber command to fight fire with fire. i wouldn't even advertise it that much. carry the big stick, and get 'em back. our policies or even holding us back. and the third thing, we want to cure everything in dod ourselves. as chairman thornberry said, and you alluded to in your question, our private industry is way ahead of us on software. so we have got to get the synergy and all forms of our dod, the private sector on software to include cyber command. because it provides synergy. we cannot invent all the software ourselves. a couple additions to what chairman thornberry said. >> josh, you have been on both sides of it. you have been within the

military fighting these cyber wars and now on the private sector. i'm curious, i mean in your time here now in the private sector, what is sort of the appetite or interest amongst private cybersecurity companies to essentially build cyber weapons or to join this conflict? >> yeah, i mean there's a tremendous amount of interest among the private sector in plying all the skills they have on military problems and for the dod. i think the challenge is not one of motivation or will or wanting to contribute. it is the perception, and in some cases reality, that it is a very difficult place to do business. especially if you're a venture-backed startup and you have limited capital and runway, ura calorie preserving animal so you will spend your time on the

incremental sort of projects and things you know that will help grow your business. i see a lot of profound progress in the last 10 years. there is still quite a ways to go. to echo what chairman thornberry said about the transition from purely digital domain into some these spaces of operational operational technology, i spent much of my military career looking at the cybersecurity vulnerabilities of military weapons systems. it is not something we think a lot about, just because you look at an abrams tank and you think it is a 70-ton american freedom machine. there's not much technology on it. but the reality is the relationship between computers and weapon systems is almost deeper than the relationship between consumer technology and digital. the f-14 tomcat which was these

classified a couple years ago, the first microcontroller was for the f-14 tomcat because it is so complicated to fly. the systems have gotten more and more complicated over the past several decades to the point where even the f-35 is generating terabytes of data during flight. if we can't figure out a way to reduce the opacity of these systems, make them more accessible for a broader community to do things like build cyber protections into them, and then also illuminate a path for those folks to be able to do meaningful business with the dod and sustainer companies, it is going to be a hard road ahead and we are going to continue to fall behind adversaries. >> i remember about a year ago i was at the diu and i was in a very interesting side discussion room, and it was essentially drone makers, startups, they were getting pretty upset about

some of the restrictions they had, the sort of standards they need to meet when it came to cybersecurity. they obviously understood why we need those standards, but there was just a lot of frustration. it was one of the few moments in my career where i had seen a real break between the view from the private sector and the view from the defense department people in the room. and i think people were fiercely taking notes and sharing cards, let's try to fix this problem. but there is still, i feel, a significant gap in terms of okay , we get that washington wants the innovation sector and private companies to build for these things. they want to change some policies, but the bar still remains very, very high when it comes to cybersecurity. i think about this lot when we hear conversations like on the previous panel about trying to increase manufacturing here in the u.s. and maybe bringing

supply chains in house. there is a reason why it costs so much to build an f-35 and a big part of that is security to make sure no one along the line can anyone get into that system. i feel like i haven't seen a good answer about how you increase manufacturing times, make it cheaper, use more commercial off-the-shelf parts, but at the same time keep our weapons and secure so that they work when we need them to work. i will kind of -- that's a big question, but i'm of any of you want to jump in on that for what you think about it -- mac: of course there's tension between broadening out her innovation base, bringing in more nontraditional companies, including small companies, and having standards on the other side that say you have to meet the cyber requirements. the whole new cmc standards, for example, are less than you were but still cost some money. we will have to balance that out

somewhat. but if you step back and look at what is happening in ukraine, they got to change the software every couple of weeks or so. it's not like you can fix it and then it's fixed. you've got to keep working at it. that's going to be a cost we have to build into our system. josh: i think -- i think that is exactly right. to echo something that christian said in a previous panel, when you open up these kinds of problems to private company, they are going to innovate and create ergonomics around this. there are a couple of defense tech companies growing up now that massively accelerated the ato process, the authority to operate in getting software shipped to the end-user. i'm encouraged by a lot of the innovation. i think one of the parts of the conversation particularly surrounding the battlefield weapon systems themselves that we may be missing is, look, like

the dod has been trillions of dollars fielding hundreds of amazing weapon systems that have been serviced decades and will continue to be in service for decades. we are focusing a lot on document building autonomy and ai into these new platforms. what i see, though, yes, and we need a software surge on the old stuff. the destroyers that will be in -- the b-52 will be another 30 years, with a very small amount of marginal investment in creating a digital makeover for those platforms. you open up a tremendous amount of how the military does its business to the broader community. if you do it the right way, you can create the ergonomics and safety around how software and autonomy gets deployed to the edge on an osprey or an f-22 while we are also building the new platform. rep. bacon: i was thinking of

the f-35 -- it is best fighter plane in the world. the israelis come back and talk to the fighter pilots, it's exceeding their expectations, how they are using it. the problem is the software, like like intelligence mission data. you gotta take a picture of the tanks of the system can identify -- t-80s, t-90s. they are trying to do that internally, and yet i know companies that have that we could import that data in. i know we can match the hardware, but there's opportunities to bring in more of the software geniuses that are out there -- that's what the f-35 probably needs. gerrit: what's -- like, how do you do that?

that's a bit of a problem -- like two people in three hours could solve that in silicon valley, right? rep. bacon: better in acquisition and how we write the rules. i think we learn from f-35s. you can have sole ownership of software in things like that. there's a culture in the pentagon. if left to their own devices, they would say we will design our suffer on our own and put out in five years after five times the cost the private sector can get. why? because that's all we know how to do. congress once in a while can provide value to force them to do things they would do on their own. josh: i've got to say, in working with a lot of these program offices, they are incredibly talented individuals with a very, very difficult job. with operational pauses and 55 service members have died on a platform because of noncombat

related accidents. the program office is embracing any and all comers to try to fix the problem. to put a finer point on this idea of software surge on the platforms, there's a system installed on the osprey, designed this in the they 1980's, early 1990's. a complicated platform. it's got a bunch of vibration sensors, but it was designed when the five-and-a-half inch floppy disk was the most modern form of storage. because the systems are pretty good, they go through an onerous process of making sure it is reliable, it is safe can works in all these conditions, it hasn't had technologists try to evolve the system for three

decades. we can add to modern technology in the cockpit and heart clutch engagements. it's not fancy ai. it's taking data that's there and putting it in front of eyeballs that will save lives. so many examples of that through line in these platforms designed in the 1970's, 1980's, and 1990's. for very little marginal investment, you can create the infrastructure that allows smart folks to solve incredibly important problems on a platform we have spent billions of dollars on. rep. bacon: -- i know exactly what you're saying. if i could get a handheld and solve all our problems. gerrit: existing programs that have been running for a while, but the software is controlled those platforms and maybe elbowing them a bit to crack that open to the people trying

to solve these problems. josh: i hate to say it is a former army guy, but the air force is out in front on the monetization piece. but the government reference architecture where they're there creating enclaves on the fighter jet that is government-controlled, so they have the ability to get fed data from the aircraft to shift software to the edge and iterate on that very quickly. there is a lot of smart folks that are creating the demand signal on this. bringing it back to cybersecurity, the one thing i will say i am concerned about is when it comes to things that touch mission capability and safety. there's a lot of energy behind that because of a lot of guys think in those terms. not to come off as chicken little, but the thing i most gravely concerned about is cyber vulnerabilities that are latent in the systems that have accrued

so much digital technology. there was a gao report that came out in 2018, weapons system cybersecurity, that called out all this technology and all the different vectors with greater frequency and the dozens of different protocols, access vectors, and compared to an enterprise network where you have a million different cyberspace solutions, multifactor authentication, firewalls, all that kind of stuff, there's nothing on the systems. we can do this all with the same kind of infrastructure and just investing in digitally modernizing the systems, making it hard for an adversary to penetrate, but making it easy for the tech community to benefit. rep. bacon: to your point, ken calvert is a chairman of the appropriations committee for defense. talk about a significant plus-up

for diu and kind of efforts to force the pentagon into doing acquisition now that's off the shelf that's better than what we have. that's when we can help inject ourselves into this. mac: don't underestimate how hard this sort of change is. we put into law in 2016 a requirement that new systems have to have modular open system architecture. but it's not happening. it's not happening. so the kinds of things they are talking about, fixing the vulnerabilities that we know, improving the software on legacy systems, requires an agility and a pace that is countercultural for the pentagon. gerrit: i'm wondering, with the new administration, i would say after president trump was elected there was excitement in silicon valley that we know there's going to be disruption and we like disruption. there was talk of people going into the administration, there are representatives from the tech industry now.

maybe a little less in the dod specifically now. but i'm wondering, now that we've had a few weeks of this administration, what is there, like how are the changing when it comes to some of these questions? do you think there's an opportunity to do things completely differently and solve some of these long-standing problems? or is there not yet a clear indication that that is where they're going to be putting a focus? mac: i would say for me i think there's clearly an opportunity because you have people who come from a world where you have to move fast and get things done, and so there is an opportunity. whether we take advantage of the opportunity or whether we just make everything chaotic is unknown to me at this point. the other factor that's different is we also have adversaries that are working every day against us. it is different from commercial business in that there are

millions of people around the world depending on department of defense to do its job every day, and then you have these adversaries we know about that are working against us. and so too much chaos can be counterproductive. gerrit: representative bacon, i want to ask you specifically about that. there have been reports of the u.s. has scaled back its offensive cyber operations against russia. i don't know if you know anything about that or if you can share anything about it. is that true? rep. bacon: there is a good lesson in life that occurred in this job, i think about it before. first of all, as a five-time commander, i don't like chaos. i like stability and i like people feeling that they don't have to watch their back at all times. i don't really like the atmosphere of instability. i think you still push to make change without the chaos.

i'll say that up front. there's three articles about the united states stop doing cyber ops against russia. the temptation is to say this is dumb, stupid because i know the russians are doing it to us. i had the foresight to call the four-star. it's a false story. so it's not true. i appreciate you asking, because that story is going around, and i was assured by the general without going into a lot of detail because this is a sensitive area that there's been a change in policy in regards to russia on cyber. i think that's an important thing. when it comes to dod, how this is going to pan out, like chairman thornberry said, i'm all for putting a spotlight on how we spend and all for transparency. i think we should make smart decisions. what i don't really care for is a quick trigger of just firing people or just stopping programs without what's the second and third order of the effects here.

when you fire nuclear scientists, you may want to say is that good or bad? like faa, is a good or bad? we should be ready, aim fire, right? not ready, fire, aim. the last couple weeks have been in that category. i talked to the white house, if we see where we broke something we fix it and put it back in. i don't know if that works in all cases and i don't know it the pentagon were like -- you say we have threats looking at us. i'm all about the transparency, but let's be a little more thoughtful. i put the phrase out, measure twice before you cut. i think we got to do that with the dod as well. gerrit: it's a bigger question. i covered elon musk's takeover of twitter very closely and has been a lot of deja vu the last few weeks. that is there justification -- look, like the only way for us to find out what is crucial is by getting rid of everything, and then when we see where the

real five-alarm fires happen, we quickly can fix that. i agree, i think there's probably different opinions on whether that's happening or not. unless we want to talk more about mr. musk, i wanted to talk about the word you also mentioned earlier, representative, which is deterrence. i never feel like i'm pronouncing that right. it's a word i don't say out loud very often. what can this administration do differently? do you think we as the u.s. should be aggressive, more open? i mean, maybe there's things going on we don't know about so it's all fine, but in terms of the posture, how should we be changing? rep. bacon: i think the president does with deterrence, he's a little unpredictable. when it comes to cyber, we've

got to change the rules of engagement. if china is eating our box lunch in the energy area, talking about our cellular phone, infrastructure, it's more than that. they are trying to get our wall street. they are trying to get into agriculture. they're everywhere. and they are not just doing it for collection, they are doing it for malicious intent. i don't think our rules of engagement are appropriate to counter that. we need to have the same -- i think we are trying to use the rule of war. within the rules of war to go after somebody's energy g rid? we can debate that. i have a different interpretation, i studied the wardens targeting three. -- theory. if they go after your energy grid, you have to go after

theirs. that is how you get deterrence. a cr is not a deterrent. we need 4% gdp spending and right now we are 2.9%, the lowest since 1940. 2.9% does not allow you to recap, triad, fighters. that's terrible. we need to go to a spot where we are 4 -- present keeps saying -- present keeps -- president keeps saying 5, i would be happy to get to 4. mac: i think this is such an important point. we spent so much time, effort, and brainpower during the cold war focusing on deterrence in a nuclear sense and that have been

articles saying our lessons learned that we can apply to cyber deterrence. but we haven't put nearly the effort to understanding how deterrence works in a cyber context that i think the importance of the domain demands and just to emphasize what don said, i remember him the obama administration, they wanted to use cyber in some terrorist networks and they had have an interagency meeting and it took forever and it just wasn't effective. the first trump administration delegated more authority to commanders and the effectiveness went up right away. i think that is the sort of rules of engagement chairman is talking about that would make a huge deterrence. he is also right that a dysfunctional government that can't even fund itself is not going to help deterrence. in a domain where there is

conflict every single day -- remember, that is the thing about cyber that makes it different, it is happening now. whether we can get a budget passed will defect how deterred they are going against military targets, josh is talking about civilian targets, in the whole society. gerrit: josh, i'm curious -- i feel like when i think about the private cybersecurity industry, it is a lot about defense, protecting networks, making sure that things aren't hacked. when we look at israel's cybersecurity industry, they have gone on the offense in many ways and they have private companies that will sel toolsl that are offensive to the highest bidder. you can have conversations about whether that is the right approach or not. but i'm wondering, what is the appetite and expertise for offense of cyber capabilities --

offensive cyber capabilities amongst private industry in the u.s.? josh: it's huge. one of the remarkable things about being a cybersecurity professional is there is not really a differentiation between offense and defense. you have to understand want to be good at -- you have to understand one to be good at the other. speaking about cybercrimes specifically, one of the i don't want to say frustrations but we are missing the forest for the trees a little bit is cyber, grew out of the national security agency. one of the best organizations on the planet at offense of and defensive, but it is rooted in foreign intelligence. into such a surprising result that we could have an effect on a centrifuge, as an example. we know there are tremendous capabilities in our weapons systems. for reasons including adversaries stealing i.p. about

our weapons systems and adopting them into our own technologies, as well as what we know about adversary platforms, it always occurred to me as a massively missed opportunity that we are spending considerable energy developing capabilities against enemy weapons systems. you talk about deterrence, it also frankly -- you don't have this sort of collateral damage question on a lot of these sorts of campaigns. i think one of the best deterrents is we get into an elevated state of conflict that the logistics supply chain doesn't work, a sortie doesn't take up because we triggered something we put in place 18 months prior. for relatively little marginal investment in that space, expanding our scope beyond thinking about foreign intelligence from a military context, we could have a tremendous impact on our adversaries' willingness to fight. gerrit: we have about six minutes left.

i don't know if there is questions from the audience, if anyone wants to jump in. rep. bacon: if i could just take and we had a couple of successes, me being chair of the committee. we set up unified command that would organize all of our defense in cyber. we wanted unified effort and coordination so we got that. and we will help fund hack-a-th on. we have got a recruit people like mac thornberry, genius on cyber, different colored hair -- just teasing. [laughter] we want to recruit more, we have gotten that done in the last couple months. gerrit: the reagan institute should do a hack-a-thon of its own. i don't know how many coders are in the room right now. we have chatgpt now. >> is deterrence dysfunctional in cyber?

we are talking about the difference between nuclear and cyber, total different situation. do we have to redefine that language? rep. bacon: if you have people attacking our energy grid and we are not willing to do it ourselves, we are not tutoring. we got to carry--not deterring. we got to carry a bigger stick. mac: there may be lessons from nuclear deterrence that could be applied in a cyber context, but it is a lot more complicated, as don was just saying. we need to put the effort into thinking about how to deter in cyber, where you may not know who's doing what, where there may be consequences you don't see right away. there is all sorts of complications, but the point is cyber is integrated into everything we do in military and society. it is a whole lot better if you can prevent the bad guys from messing things up then to come

clean up after they have already done it. that is deterrence. i think don is exactly on the right track with the subcommittee to focus on what does deterrence mean in cyber, how can we best deter. but it is going to take a lot of effort by a lot of folks. rep. bacon: also a scene on the public and defense side we have got to work through. >> thank you. i was just wondering, we are talking about cyber deterrence, but at the same time, do we have the infrastructure to back it up or build our own capability to the degree we need it? it takes a lot of energy and a lot of cooling power, so where is the infrastructure for that? rep. bacon: is that more your wheelhouse? josh: yeah, i think ironically the infrastructure that needs

the most attention within the dod's sabre capabilities is the people. talent has been, ever since i was in uniform, working at nsa, working in the cyber national mission forces, talent management has been a big topic. i know the report card touches on this. but we got to figure out a way -- there is so many different kinds of directions here. we've got to figure out a way of taking windows of time, super talented men and women want to spend on this mission, and applying this at the highest leverage against the mission, even if they don't want a 20-year career. you get the people part of this right, and everything else will click into place. rep. bacon: i think in our industrial we have some problems with our supply chains on hardware. in the area you are talking about, we are in a better spot. it's the people.

sorry. ♪ [laughter] gerrit: are we getting oscar'd out? [laughter] that's two minutes. one more over there. >> thanks for all the comments. two quick questions. do you think it makes sense to articulate redlines in cyberspace? two, you mentioned we can strengthen deterrence by improving coordination with the private sector but also allies. are there low hanging fruit opportunities to improve intelligence sharing or offensive capabilities for our cyber allies? especially in contested regions like the indo pacific? rep. bacon: cyber command does a great job working with other countries. a partner where they can, but also where countries will allow them, allow them into networks

and help them find the bad guys, and out of that the ability to build a relationship that's a win-win relationship. i think cyber command is pretty good on this. redlines -- i'm more about speaking softly and scaring them. maybe i tell privately, you mess with us, we are going to -- but i think it's better to have the capability and show you are willing to use it in the cyber site. so maybe it is a combination. they are eating our box lunch. mac: i would just say, if there is any place where it is the most obvious that working with our allies is essential, it is cyber, or geography doesn't matter. the only thing i would add to what don mentioned is export controls is a problem. when we work with even our closest allies on things, there

is all sorts of challenges in doing that, updating our export control laws would be helpful. josh: i would just add one open question. something interesting about the domain in terms of deterrence is the separate campaigns don't happen in a microsecond. especially against a hard target come if it is an classified network -- adversary classified network or centrifuge or what have you. you have different parts of your campaign where one part is constantly trying to gain access, stealing credentials, finding vulnerabilities in service, pivoting between systems to hopscotch to the right spot in the network. and then you have got holding that asset at risk. once you get into that network, periodically checking to make sure you have control over it. this is a very unique model over

any other kinds of effects you want from a military context. and so where do you put these redlines? it is a very interesting question. is it we are not ok with you seeking access and trying to compromise the system even if you don't have an effect on it? and the question of how do we do we comply with those norms, or do we ourselves say one thing and do another. these are complicated questions. rep. bacon: a little deception is good. there is two issues we are going to be debating the next year or two. one, are we going to have a cyber service. the general position of most of us is no, but there are some in our committee who wanted. it is a debate like we have with space. i'm personally not convinced that is needed. the second is do you need two four-stars. intelligent people want a fo ur-star for nsi and cyber.

if you had two four-stars, you pull them apart and you have dysfunction. these are issues that are not resolved right now that we are going to be debating. gerrit: thank you all very much, thank you to the panel. [applause] [captions copyright national cable satellite corp. 2025] [captioning performed by the national captioning institute, which is responsible for its caption content and accuracy. visit ncicap.org] >> c-spanshop.org is our online store. browse the latest collection products, apparel, books, home to court, and accessories. there is something for every c-span fan, and every purchase to support our nonprofit operations. shop now or anytime at c-spanshop.org. >> c-span, democracy unfiltered. we are funded by these television companies and more, including comcast. >> you think this is just a community center? it is way more than that.