on c-span. >> the hudson institute hosted a discussion with defense undersecretary michael griffin -- michael griffin on technology and national security. undersecretary griffin who also served as nasa administrator in the george w. bush administration discusses how the department is working to increase its military edge against rising powers like russia and china. this is just over an hour. kenneth: good morning and welcome. i'm ken weinstein, president and

c.e.o. of hudson institute. i'd like to welcome our audience here at hudson as well as the c-span viewing audience. hudson institute is dedicated to american leadership and global engagement for a secure, free, and prosperous future and key to american leadership is continued american technological pre-eminence. and given that that's the case, i'm delighted to be able to welcome and introduce undersecretary of defense for research and engineering, michael griffin, here to hudson institute. undersecretary griffin will be speaking today in conversation with senior fellow rebeccah heinrichs on precisely this question of technological preeminence and thousand to preempt our enemies from using these against us. undersecretary griffin is chief technology officer for the secretary of defense, meaning he

looks at current defense capabilities, looks at how to improve them technological, how to hedge against uncertainty. he's an aeronautical engineer by train, most recently taught at the university of alabama at huntsville before returning to the department of defense. he of course served as administrator from nasa from 2005 to 2009. prior to service at nasa he was head of the space department at johns hopkins university applied physics laboratory and of course served as president and chief erating officer of incutel a private, nonprofit enterprise funded by the c.i.a. to identify and invest in cutting edge technologies that serb national security interests. as i mentioned, undersecretary griffin will be engaged in conversation with hudson senior fellow rebeccah heinrichs. she's well known in defense circles both for her work on missile defense and other policy issues. she's frequently called to brief

on on capitol hill, at the white house and the pentagon. she's a former congressional staffer who helped launch the missile defense caucus, writes regularly for "the hill" and is a frequent guest on fox news as well. it's my pleasure to turn it over to rebeccah. rebeccah: thank you so much, ken. what i'd like to do this morning is have dr. griffin has asked i call him mike, i'm going to call him mike , my upbringing is telling me i shouldn't do that, but mike is -- i've known mike for several years, i am thrilled as many of you are that he is where he is at this time in history because i think he is the man for the job. so thrilled that you're there. thrilled that you're here, sir. i'm going to turn the floor over to him and let him talk for a while about his priorities, where he sees the current landscape and what -- how he's going to prioritize over the

next coming months an years and then he and i will engage in conversation and then if you have questions, please just go ahead and write those down, i'll save some time at the end so you all can participate as well. michael: thank you. i'll try not to spend too great a length of time pontificating. but let me maybe set some context. isn't a new job. -- is a new job. it has existed at significantly lower levels in the organization before but not since the goldwater-nichols act of 1988 which created a tndyambings l as an entity, not since then has occupied ganization undersecretary level stature. nce it's been 32 years since

the enactment of goldwater-nichols, since we've had a major reorganization of the department, i think we can expect this particular instan shation to remain around for a while as well. so i'm the first occupant of the office at the undersec retare level but i think we can expect many more. and my primary purpose is to get the thing started off right and set the proper tone for what we ought to be doing. so what ought we be doing and why? for that, i have to pull on a little bit of history, some of it recent, some of it of longer tanding. i'm going to start by saying in the united states we've been on holiday for 25 years, maybe late -- a little bit more, since the fall of the berlin wall and

shortly thereafter the collapse of the soviet union. at that time, china was not a great power. russia was devolving from great power status into a much more fraction ated regime. -- fractionated regime. we had not seen, putin had not risen to the top. at that time it would have been really unimaginable for someone to stand up and say that the dissolution of the soviet union was the greatest tragedy of the 20th century as pew tib has since stated. that's fors] i think you. i'm sorry. haurn off.

figure out how to turn it off later. in the early t, 1990's, have envisioned island build big china. preemption of international waters or the attempt to preempt rathertional waters with bold territorial claims that no ther nation in the world would recognize, never mind lay claim to. we didn't see, couldn't have anticipated those things. so for at least a couple of decades, the united states enjoyed a degree of aloneness at the top of the global power ladder. that really we had not seen for

a while in history. it had been quite a while since a single great power was so unchallenged. my personal opinion is we kind of went to sleep. i was in the pentagon when the wall came down and i was in the pentagon when the soviet union dissolved. i had not yet gone over to my third incarnation at nasa. so you know, watching those events from a seat in the ntagon, as a deputy at the missile, at the strategic defense organization, the ancestor of today's missile defense agency, watching those events occur, i will say, and not as monday morning quarterbacking, it bothered me a lot. we started talking about the peace dividend as if that was going to be a perpetual

entitlement. d there's a saying about optimists and pessimists which i love, which is that an optimist is a person who believes we live in the best of all possible worlds and a pessimist is a person who is a afraid that might be true. in the early and mid 1990's i, frankly, was quite cynical about the peace dividend. i was quite cynical about the practice that the defense department and other agencies of overnment aided and abetted of allowing companies to merge from many competitors into a few large super companies. i did not think that -- i did not believe that there would be a peace dividend that would last out the rest of my life,

certainly not into my children's d grandchildrens' -- grandchildren's. i did not believe that reducing our ability to have internal competition among many corporate competitors was in our long-term best interests. so you can chalk that up to premature old age and cynicism because in the early 1990's i was in my early to mid 40's and maybe too young to be so cynical but i was anyway. so if we fast forward a couple of year a couple of decades, i think it is now observable in hindsight that we failed to continue to fund the practices that had gotten us where we were. which was at the very top of the technological heap. the united states, from the time that we entered world war ii

until it was ended was about 3 1/2 years. world war ii lasted for six years. it was our presence and our technological engineering production preeminence that allowed the war to be brought to a close. as regrettable as it may be, that the war ended with, you know, the first use of nuclear weapons, it did end the war. and i think there's no historian alive today who would say that more lives were lost because of that than would have been caused by an invasion of the japanese mainland. so it was america's technological preeminence that brought an end to world war ii that won the cold war, and that got us to the place where we could fall asleep at the switch in term os maintaining that

preeminence. by the time, you know, we looked around and call it 2015, you know, 25 or so years later, it was and remains today observeably true that while in many categories america still leads the world and in company with our allies and partners in the western nations, still leads the world in many areas of technology with regard to certain areas in defense, science and technology, realy we just don't anymore. and that's a hard thing to say and a hard thing to hear. but the fact of the matter is that in area of hyper sonics, to pick one, both china and russia are observeably ahead of where our current state of practice is. it's not ahead of where we could

be, but it's ahead of our current state of practice and we're playing catch-up ball. in the area of microelectronics, in the time of which i spoke of, early 1990's, everybody bought american microelectronics because they were the best. they didn't buy them because we were making people buy them. they bought them because we had the best stuff. now 80% of microelectronics, if i understand the figure correctly, come from taiwan. not that taiwan is not a reliable partner but they're not coming from america. and taiwan is uncomfortably close to a nation which in many ways has declared itself to be an adversary of the united states. a world war ii ally, which is not an adversary. meanwhile, our world war ii

adversaries are now allies. this is an unfortunate turn of events but it's something we must pay attention to. microelectronics undergirds everything we do in a way today that it did not even 25 years ago an not when i started in the business 25 years before that. today even if, and this is a big if, which is not even true, even if our defense industry were not dependent upon or solely dependent upon civilian microelectronics, i often ask, u know, if we are victims of malware or undesired features in the microelectronics we buy from offshore, if another nation can bring about the civilian, the collapse of the civilian economy through such features or through

such malware in with what sense can the department of defense have been said to defend the ation? if you think about it, the purpose of our national security community writ large is not only to defend bricks and mortar but to defend our economy and way of life. we cannot rely upon our software and the controllers that that software implemented, if we cannot fully trust and rely upon the microelectron exs and software we purchase and implement, then in what sense can we be sure we have defended a nation? it's not a comforting thought. so what do we have to do? how do we have to reinvest to get american microelectronics back at the top of its game? to where, not because we subsidize it but because economically it competes with

the best in the world. and becomes once again the first choice. how do we develop hyper sonic systems that can hold chinese assets at risk in the way they can hold our assets at risk. ow to we expand and extend our missile defense system to be everywhere all the time. instead of waiting on the ground in case an adversary re-entry vehicle shows up in the skies overhead. that's the last place, not the first place, i want to start the engagement. we have -- so the grounding principles behind the undersecretariat for research nd i think nearing are the national defense strategy released in january. s the first national defense strategy in a very long time that in my opinion has had real

meat to it. and even the unclassified version of the strategy is unmistakably blunt. characteristic i share. the strategy calls out areas of current practice that need to be addressed, but it also calls out 10 or a dozen areas of modernization priority. areas in which the department and the national security community in general must modernize to get ahead and keep ahead of our adversaries. that modernization is exactly -- that set of priorities is what has been handed to the research and engineering establishment to address. my job is not f-35. you know. my job is what comes after f-35. what are we doing to modernize our way of war and the weapons we bring to it that we don't

have today. and so those 10 or a dozen or so priorities that are called out in the national defense strategy, everything from artificial intelligence to microelectronics to directed energy weapons to more comprehensive missile defenses to more comprehensive space offensive and defensive capability across the board, those are my priorities. so -- and that's why the history lesson is why they are priorities and why i believe and why the secretary has said that congress was wise to reorganize the department to address these priorities because the department frankly would not have reorganized itself. hat's just too hard. so let me stop there. rebeccah, i'm happy to answer your questions, and i'm happy to engage with the audience as best i might be able to do so.

rebeccah: wonderful. thank you. i want to start sort of bigger picture policy and then zoom in a little bit and ask you some more technical questions. one of the things that has been, that i have perceived as a cause for how we've gotten behind is that there's still sort of an even bipartisan consensus that one of the ways to maintain stability is to have parity. between peers. and this idea is very popular in the missile defense community. if we don't want to have an arms race with the chinese and russians we can't go beyond parity. i know that's not your view. could you speak to that point? michael: in my view, the concept of obtaining parity is intellectually bankrupt. the way to -- look, the united ii, s, after world war

through the decisions and r-seeing f some very fa gentlemen at the top of that group people like george marshall, who was both secretary of state and secretary of defense at different times as well as chief of staff during orld war ii, the united states recognized those people -- recognized, those people recognized that the necessity of a worldwide rules based order, having at its root principles such as the rule of law, the relatively free movement of ade and money and capital, a capitalist enterprise. he sovereignty of nations.

that rules-based order, the rule of law, the kinds of things that underlie western principles. that are deeply rooted in the american d.n.a., you will and in estern civilization generally. that american-led and buttressed international order has served us well for over 70 years. we have not had a major global conflict for over 70 years. yes we've had brush fire wars. yes we have had times when americans did not fully adhere to our principles. but those are bumps in the road, hey're not the strategic path. when we allow nations who clearly do not believe in a rules-based world order, do not

believe in national serenity, do not believe in fundamentally capitalist principles of movement of money and people and trade, when we have nations that declare themselves and global powers as russia has declared itself to be an opponent of american influence, china declares itself to be in opposition to american influence. what they're really declaring themselves to be is opponents of a worldwide rules-based order with international form norms along the lines i have spoken. an autonomy that they direct. and that ought to be unacceptable to westerners generally, to those who adhere to western principles. and to americans. that ought to be unacceptable. the only way to discourage and

deter such people is to be clearly so much more powerful than they that they choose not to fight. if we struggle for -- if we strive for parity, then we are always leaving room for a slight change on the margin to result in greater capability on an adversaries part than our own and that is a very tempting situation for them. there's always a temptation if a small gain is made that can be decisive in the outcome to use that while they have it. so parity is the adversary's friend, not our friend. the way to maintain the relative degree of peace we've had for the last 70 years in contrast to centuries of warfare before that

, the way to maintain that degree of relative peace and extend and increase the degree of that peace is to be so powerful that no one believes, ever, that they could prevail in a conflict. now is that costly? yes, it is costly. it is very expensive. it has used a substantial portion of, fortunately a very rich american economy for 70 years. it is expensive. it is trivially cheap compared to the cost of the war that we avoid. the cost of world war ii was, i can't calculate -- i don't have a good figure for the economic cost but it must have been measured in trillions, even in then-year dollars and it was according to the best historical estimates i've been able to find some, you know, 50 to 60 million

people dead. 50 million to 60 million people, some estimates are higher. i think there are none that are lower. this is 50 million to 60 million lives al lives whose were as valuable to them and their families as any of us in this room today. those lives were not less valuable because only 500,000 of them were americans. they were people's lives. this is the cost of global conflict. that we avoid by being so strong that adversaries are not tempted, so parity does not achieve that goal and i do not support it. fortunately, my boss agrees. his words, repeated over and over are, we need to be in a position of dominance by 2028. is goal is not parity.

rebeccah: that's great. i think that also really explains well why this characterization, i often hear you know that we're overly worried about china and russia because if you look at the amount of money the united states spends on defense versus theirs, ours is so much bigger that clearly we have superiority. but -- michael: we spend ours so much less efficiently that we don't have as much lead as the monetary comparison would have you believe. rebeccah: not only that, but our mission is different and we try to do different things. but you mentioned the area of hyper sonic. one thing i tell people who make that argument is you have to see what the adversaries are investing in. the toe -- not just the total money but what it is they're investing in, what they're trying to hold at risk for the united states and our interests. so you spend a lot of time talking about hyper sonics. can you explain to us why that

in particular that threat, as best you can in an open, unclassified setting, why is that such a concern of yours and then, i'm just going to ask it now and you can touch on it, in terms of defending against it, is it -- what is the hard part about it? is it sensors or shooters? michael: i'll start with the last question first, then and i'll try to give a more comprehensive and regrettably long-winded answer to the first part. the hardest part of hyper sonic sthess sensing, frackly. the shooting is not -- it's frankly one of the easier targeting tasks we would have in the missile intercept world. because attacking hyper sonic vehicles themselveses are relatively fragile during their phase, long phase of cruise flight. they're fairly easy to destabilize.

they're in a very difficult flight regime. and they're -- their decoys are not possible. they glow brightly in the infrared. if they're going to reach their target they have to be in relatively straight line fra tra jectries, yes, they can maneuver, but they can't maneuver in their cruise phase as easily as an interceptor can maneuver. if you can see them coming and if you can get them during the ulnerable phase of flight from a guidance guy's point of view, and i'll say this i used to teach the subject, from a guidance guy's point of view, the hyper sonic intercept during cruises is not the hardest problem we have. if you let them get into terminal phase where we've observed they can pull many, many g's, that then becomes a hard target. an attacking lou a

vehicle to get close enough to begin its terminal dive and the terminal dive might be from 100,000 feet onto a carrier battle group if you let them get that close you're probably dead meat. because that is a very hard intercept problem to get it at hat point. so the challenge with hyper sonic vehicles is to know they're headed your way from several thousand kilometers out in time to get your defending asset into the battle space. frankly, right now, we just don't have -- there are areas, of course if we were in land mass nation like russia, knowing that an attacking vehicle was coming from several thousand kilometers away would not be so difficult. but what we are trying to do is to maintain a certain degree of

global order largely through maritime power projection. which centers and has centered, you know, since the japanese sunk our battleship fleet at pearl harbor, centered around carrier battle groups and submarines. and the main way in which we project american tactical power is through the carrier battle group. well, the hyper sonic weapon, buzz we don't wall pain they are surface of the ocean with radars, to allow us to know when an attacker is coming, largely in the current environment we don't see those things until they're way too close for comfort. so the sensor problem is the critical one. e need and do not yet have global, persistent, timely, accurate knowledge of what's going on in space and the upper

atmosphere. and that's what we have to have. so from my point of view on the defensive side, the sensor challenge is the hardest one. now why is this such a threat? well, when we talk about our relative level of expenditures in defense between us and say china or russia, or any other in some unknown future putative adversary, you mentioned that we have to spend more because we have to do so much more. well that's exactly right. the defense has to defend against everything all time. we don't seek to be an attacking nation. we seek to defend and promote a stable world order. so we can have no areas of vulnerability. an adversary nation only has to win once. we have to win every time across

all theaters. that's a serious challenge. the offense can seek out our weakest point and concentrate its efforts there. so at present, the united states has actually, given adversary capabilities of relatively impressive missile defense capability. it is my assessment that we have quite a good capability now against reentry vehicles in their mid course and terminal smense with bad and sm-3 and 6, our aegis systems. we have relatively good missile defense capability for a relatively limited attack. i don't think we could withstand an icbm onslaught by russia but

that's not our most immediate threat. we have very good air defense capabilities. but hyper sonic systems, the way that they are built and flown and targeted, overfly our air defense systems and underfly our missile defense systems. so china has over the last decade work great care, developed a tactical system capable of reaching out for ranges of several thousand kilometers that overflies air defense, underflies missile defense and can hold our iassets, our assets whether land or maritime at risk. nothing i'm saying here is classified, you can find the assessments in open literature,

"aveuation -- "aviation week" among others. i'm not putting you were ins on anything, just saying this is the general level of capability. but that's critically important. because that's a tactical capability that an adversary has developed that is -- that holds what for us are strategic assets, carrier battle groups, and forward deployed forces on land at risk. because for us these are means by which we project strategic power short of nuclear deterrence. so by allowing that nonparity to continue to exist and it's -- and it's nonparity on the adversary side, we allow their tactical systems to leverage our ability to project strategic power. leaving us no option in the case of aggressive behavior on their

part, leaving us no option except either to accept their behavior or go nuclear. i don't think we want to do that. and so this is an area where we must see their hand and raise them one. we must at least be able to defend against their use of hyper sonic weapons should that come about. and we must be able to hold their assets at risk with systems similar to but better than what they have fielded. and that's why this is so important to me. it's the leverage of a tactical asset on our strategic intentions. rebeccah: on that point too, you said sensors, so we've got to have better space sensors. we have -- michael: unfortunately, the only way i know to be able to, in my phrase, see them coming, is from space. i mean, if i had nuffer -- if i

had enough ships with radar in the right places and enough radars on land masses that -- where we have some control, then you could do it that way. but we don't. so -- and so you know that is an impractical collusion to the problem. the only way i know to surveil the required area, you have to -- tracking level of accuracy is from space. rebeccah: and the command over strategic command said the same thing he was also made the point that having a robust space architecture or even just one better than what we've got wulls also significantly qualitatively squeeze out more capability from you are current systems even against the ballistic missile threat. michael: of course, yeah. rebeccah: it's not just going to get at the high end threat, it will significantly improve the entire system against the threats we are seing from north

korea. so that's expensive. is a space sensors are expensive. i agree with you on that, that they're worth the cost. but you talked about how in your job, you're looking at over the horizon. some of this stuff is not that far on the horizon. it's near a horizon. how do we -- and there was no money nor kind of thing in this latest missile defense agency budget. there was about $11.5 billion for current programs and expand the current programs if we're going to talk about space sensors, there's got to be more money in there. can you talk about that? and then also just the need to go faster. so you're talking about long-term but again i would still consider the things you're talking about because we're behind got to go faster. the general talked ability the need to go fast. how do we get necessary funding for the priority, get them in the budget, get cracking on them and then especially not just

because of the partisan politics in congress and all that kind of stuff but the bureaucratic inertia that exists that needs to be slowing down really good big picture policy initiative. michael: let me tell you, get at that, then. so first of all for budget priorities, there is a -- so the national defense strategy was released in january. and until then i think it could be fairly said that the department had not since the last administration laid out new priorities. ok, that's now been done. those priorities are available for anyone to read. no one is trying to hide them or keep them from you. priorities are clear. the national defense strategy openly states that we have returned to an area of global power competition and that the

united states must recognize that and prevail. we've laid out you are technical priorities. if you think we've missed one, drop us a note. there's no pride of authorship there. really. we're happy to add priorities. but we have, i think, a pretty good list. obviously, since the report came t only in january, and the team for this administration, i was con -- i was not confirmed until three weeks after my job officially started. we've been, it's been difficult to get appointees through in the rump administration. some of that has been because of just the normal churn of doing

business as you change administrations. and some of it is because frankly not everybody accepts the results of the election. but it has been notably more difficult to get appointees on board in the trump administration but i think most of the last of us are now in place at d.o.d. so of course we have to reshape the budget. ok. the budget that we inherited, the plans we inherited are not the plans going forward. we're making new plans. we're going to reshape the budget. today, ook at the -- at there is zero dollars allocated against any new priorities. how could it be otherwise? so our task, you know, the fiscal 2019 intudget already largely prepared. we will work at modifying it on the margins. ut our real task is to reshape

pb-20, president budget 2020 and beyond. i have a real sense that not bipartisan but nonpartisan houghts are, you know, largely governing this renewed vigor in american defense preparedness. i'm personally getting acceptance from both sides of the aisle. and nobody is asking who i voted for or why. they just want me to do my job. right after this meeting i'm headed up to the hill. for just those sorts of discussions. i think we have in our secretary someone who is absolutely accepted as somebody who doesn't care about any of that stuff he just wants to move the ball downfield. he spends several -- spent several hours yesterday in testimony to the house armed services committee and you know, i thought the level of

acceptance of the congress, by the congress of him is extraordinary. so we're going to be reshaping the budget to fit the priorities that we say we have. we're going to do our very best to deliver value for the money that the american taxpayers have given us. because we've done very well in the budget this year. now, an important part of doing well for the taxpayer is to speed things up. i started out the day by saying we have kind of been on holiday or 25 years. it is always shocking to me to hear myself say this but you know, i turn 69 this year. so i can -- i don't have to read in history books. i can remember when -- i participated in -- programs which moved at light speed. ok. this country knows how to do

things urgently when we're frightened. or when there's a major priority. i had the privilege of speaking with chairman thornberry a couple of weeks ago, just in a private meeting, and he was asking, what can you do to make things move faster? because you know, when i hear reports that it takes 16 years to go from statement of need to initial operational capability, i don't even care if the number is right. even if it's not exactly right it's so far wrong that it's unacceptable. what can you do to bring that into a small number of years? i said, well, sir, my immediate reaction is you can either, we can either keep our processes, or we can keep our preeminence but we cannot have both. we've become a process-driven acquisition and development culture where our primary goal

seems to be to make sure that we never make a mistake in acquisition, we never have a protest, we never make a wrong technical choice and we spend so much time trying to prevent a mistake that the cost of not making a mistake in the large is bigger than the mistake. i mean, at some point try something and see if it works. and that's what i think the congress was going after when they created my position. but i mean, i can cite specific fig youfers things that this nation used to do. i believe it is true, i hope i don't misremember the number, that we developed the sr-71 in 22 months from a standing start. i know for a fact that it was 32 months from contract award to first flight of the first f-117-a stealth fighter. the technology we had never done before at all in any field. and we built an airplane with

fly by wire control systems and stealth capabilities and it was pivotal in the first gulf war. and we had it on the ramp in 32 months. it would take 32 months today we'd still be arguing about the rirntes. -- about the requirements. that's not a joke. that's not a hyperbolic statement. we would be spending 32 months to argue about what the requirements for the stealth fighter should be. i personally was the chief engineer, project engineer, whatever you would want to call sdio mission, an intelligence gathering mission that did reconnoitering on the first soviet boosters in powered flight where we watched them come up off the pad, do stage, inject payloads into orbit. the other name for those was targets. all right. so you know if you're going to

shoot at a target, you need to know what it looks like -- looked like. we did not have any. we did not have any defense intelligence information on what rockets looked like in powered flight. so we put together a mission that would make those measurements in several spectra and we built and flew it in 13 months. from a standing start. you know, in another mission that we did in something like 3 months, shoot me if -- don't shoot me if i have it wrong by a few weeks, we put together a similar intelligence gathering mission that looked at our own bre re-entry vehicles. during mid course flight. what is a re-entry vehicle look like in mid course flying? to the sensors which have to shoot it? we did that in 30 months. i was for a time until i did something else, i was chief engineer on that one as well.

in the early years of sdio, i was privileged to be again the project engineer on the first space intercept we ever did in this country against a booster in powered flight. from the time lieutenant general abramson, first director of missile defense agency said go, which was in may of 1985, seems like a long time ago now, until the intercept which we executed in september of 1986 was 16 months. from nothing. now, no one argues that those systems that we developed were ready for production. in fact, they were pro to types to demonstrate that you could do what you were trying to do at all. our first interceptor weighed a ton. literally weighed a ton. that's not tactically traceable. that's not the point. the point is to demonstrate that you can do it at all.

as p.t. bar numb said once famously about waltzing bear the miracle is not how well the bear walingtses, but that it can waltz at all. so in developing new systems, we have to move at that kind of pace. you know. think f-117. don't think f-35 when you talk about our development pace. no. the f-35 is proving to be an incredible weapons platform, an incredible war fighting platform. but no one wants to repeat that acquisition cycle. neither the government nor the contractor. want to repeat that acquisition cycle. so my answer to your -- my long-winded answer to your question is, those of us who are nearing the end of our career do not have to read about it in books. we can remember then we participated in programs that developed systems along the time

frame that our adversaries are now doing. we can do that. again. we just have to allow ourselves. and that will be part of my job. rebeccah: it's a leadership issue, it's managing expectations of the congress. i was talking about this the other day, sometimes in congress, they expect every intercept test to be a success. they don't understand stinals the fm-3 is going to have a missed intercept and you learn from that. michael: the sm-32-a miss was the first version of this built by our japanese partners in certain areas. but that was actually not the cause of the miss. you know. i don't want to at this point go public with the issue but the ss, the flaw was in a highly standardized component that's used in other areas, and you know, i'm glad we spotted it.

because our question will be, you know, is this a fleet issue or not? because it's in other fleets. the component in question is used in other areas than just what we do in sm-32-a. if you don't test and find flaws, you lead yourself down the garden path. rebeccah: and then you made a great point you talked about the confidence you have in our current homeland missile defense system, the ground-based mid course defense system. there's a lot of mischaracterization of that program because people tend to look at the history of the entire testing record and sort of judge and condemn the system based on the whole testing record which the early pro toe types used forer -- prototypes used early were not in the ground today. michael: i have shocking news, our early interceptors were not as good as the ones we're

putting in the ground today. i know that up ends your world. the early interceptors we put in are not as good as the ones we have today. go figure. so -- rebeccah: mind-blowing. i want to save some time for questions from the audience so if you all have questions, we'll go back here first and then we'll come up to the front row. the gentleman with the pins. michael: also, i can run a bit over if you need to. we have a little bid of slack before our next engagement. over on the hill. >> mr. secretary, i work with huntington ingalls industry. we have a vulnerability today with drums from iran are -- drones from iran are flying center line down our ships, they're flying over our nuclear weapons facilities in king's bay and bangor. in the not too distant future you can envision swarming drones being a threat. is there anything in r&e that

would address somewhat immediate threat? michael: well, yes, although nothing as rapidly as we would like. so the swarming drone problem is something that we absolutely see and recognize and are very concerned about. there are two issues there. one is of course you have to have just plain enough shooters to take out the number of drones that you have. now as we look toward the future, frankly, i think our d.e. capabilities today are, our directed energy capabilities, are close to the point where they are an effective countermeasure against swarming drones. the other -- meaning we don't have to necessarily shoot bullets at them to get them, although i don't object to that. but the other

the difficult part of the issue is targeting control. and that's where i'm frankly looking to advances in artificial intelligence for a solution. the problem there is, i mean, if you re a human being and in n a b-17 over europe world war ii and attacking fighters, your b-17's could deal with that. they could deal with six but not 106. as stalin, quantity has a quality all its own. a human crew just can't deal with that many. i don't know what the threshold is. so a swarming drone attack is of

concern screws because of the ass. but an a.i. system, i hope, could be trained to deal with just such things. i mean in math terms, i like to fall back on the geek i am, the problem of swarming drones is like the traveling salesman. it's a tough problem and you can prove there is no solution vale to you, but there is some pretty good solutions and you could prove they are pretty good. if we can implement some of ose solutions in an a.i. schemes which is a combination which are nearer, faster and headed for the more crucial targets, that seems like to me the type of challenge we want to

use a.i. to go after. are we there yet? no. do we recognize it as a problem? yes. do we have some thoughts we want to try? yes. so with all deliberate speed, we are moving out on that one. m not going to pick -- rebeccah: gentleman right here. >> by ron keller. i want to look at research development resources. when you look at the spending for the department do you have the right mix and should it be for and then for contractors how do you incentivize to spend more on r&d and we are looking at 2% of their sales. is that adequate in this type of

envimet? chael: 2% is not ar good budget. the figure is more like 10%. i'm not here to tell you that 10% is right but 2% is wrong. the first time i was in nasa in the early 1970's our r&d budget was at 10% and we were a vital organization. i think you need something like that to be properly funding in the future. 4, mix between 6-1 and 2, 3, 5, i don't know yet. it's easy to say it's pollly not what we want it to be, but i don't have enough time on target to know. i want to return us to an era

where pro typeing is king before we get into production. and my counterpart wants exactly the same thing. by the time she gets ready to sign off on milestone c for production, she wants to know we are buying the right thing. and the way we have been doing it for some decades doesn't allow us to pull out the bugs and costs too much money and takes too much time. >> thank you. i'm from the boeing company. thanks for coming back and taking this job and we're glad you're there. some of the examples you give earlier of when we were successful in going fast, what came to my mind, one of the key aspects is the right people with the right authorities.

do you feel enough leverage to make sure you have people with the right skills, judgment and skills to get us going faster? michael: the congress has been generous in the right authorities they have given us to hire people and execute programs quickly and given a rapid innovation fund which i plan to use. i can really offer praise to the hill for their recognition of the issue and their rather strong leaning-forward posture in trying to give us what we need. getting the right people is frankly not that difficult. people will make enormous sacrifices to work on these kinds of things if they believe

we are for real. it's been a while -- you know, the kinds of things we are talking about here were not a priority for the last administration. they just weren't. when the very best people see that returning america to a position of unchallenged free eminence across all of the domains we must have it, when they see it, they will be in my prior experience going to the door to join the team. and that's what people do. and frankly on the other side, i have seen from personal experience when you crank up the demands for excellence, excellence at speed, people who can't cut itself-select out. they decide to go do something else.

rebeccah: here and last one over here. >> can you use the microphone. >> the small business innovation research program has seen a lot of change over the years. and it's one of the major urces of the ideas developed research. two problems. one is process. the process system will dect a small company to deal with the department of defense is still cumbersome. and there are a valley between the sbi program and programs. if we are going to move fast, this problem has to be solved and i wonder what is your opinion. michael: well, i get a lot of questions like that that it's

difficult to deal with the department of defense and i serve other places in the department. it's difficult to deal with any part of the u.s. government. that's a fact. it is in our interest to make it easier for you to deal with us and that relates to the authorities we have been given by congress for different contracting members of the committee nisms. i'm going to throw that challenge back at you. when you an r.f.p. come out or sbir u are or put in an proposal and what you get back from the department is unnecessarily cumbersome or bureaucratic, raise the game. identify what you think is nonvalue-added and bring it back to our attention. go above sbir. ok? i own sbir for the department

now. themove sbir and we'll try first. but if they don't agree that your objection is valid, raise it to a higher level and we'll look at it. i'm looking at nonvalued processes. i could spend all day looking at stuff and wouldn't get anything else done. pardon? yes, ok. so bring to us what you think is not value-added and we'll look at it. we will. the secretary has made exactly that same point to larger industries, tell us what you think is broken and we'll look at it. we won't guarantee to decide in your favor, but you will get a hearing. the second part of your

question, how to do with the value. reality things that come out of sbir should die. i mean someone has a clever new idea doesn't mean it's a good idea. the purpose of darpa siblings and sbir programs and other innovative ways is to see if they're good. how to get them through the valleys of death, i know this is a long-held problem. i don't know that i know yet. i recognize it as a problem. once we like an idea, how do we find a champion for it to move it into prototyping and production, i don't know yet. i would be more than willing to have suggestions. what we can do once something works to move it along. i'm sorry to go limp on you.

i don't know. if i thought i knew, i wouldn't keep it a secret. one more question. >> yesterday, secretary mattis mentioned that you would be setting joint program offices for hypersonics and the first thing you hear when you hear hat is five-35, what is your vision for the jpo's? michael: i think the secretary was speaking loosely. if you will pardon me, it is a specific term of art that relates to specific legal burelcratic creation. i don't know -- in fact, i doubt that is exactly what we are going to do.

the secretary did say and if you would allow me to rephrase his words just slightly, we are creating a joint artificial intelligence center. now the jointness will include intelligence as well. so it will be cross cutting cross scheses and intelligence community. we are -- my organization is , who with looking at would head it, who would be participating in it. we owe a report to congress on that by 90 days by some date a couple weeks in the past. sometime in mid-summer, i will report to congress how we are going to do that. that is not in doubt.

that it will be joint across not only places in the department but outside the department is not in doubt. how exactly we are going to set it up. when we make a decision, we will not keep it a secret and we will tell you, but i can't tell you that i've got an answer today, i don't think you should be thinking aboutal construct like the f-35. that is probably not in the cards. rebeccah: please join me in thanking the under secretary. [applause] sa [captions copyright national satellite corp. 2018] captioning performed by the national captioning institute, which is responsible for its caption content and accuracy. visit ncicap.org

>> c-span's profile interview shah and his beginnings in politics and talks about the relationship between the white house and the media. you you can watch it at 9:30 p.m. eastern. >> this weekend on c-span live

saturday at 5:30 p.m. eastern --

>> help us tell the story of the south made and used by the diverse people who called it home. the south is an absolutely fascinating place because it is