target voters. a lot of this is for good reasons. >> the mid-issue for me is how bya is secured and processed the companies in which we engage in our online world in a comprehensive and pervasive way. >> watch the communicators on monday at 8:00 eastern on c-span two. look at defense department technology and how it is competing with countries like china and russia. the featured speaker is michael griffin who serves as defense undersecretary for research and engineering. this is from the hudson institute and it 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 -- and how 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 -- technologically how to hedge , against uncertainty. he's an aeronautical engineer by training. 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 operating officer of incutel a private, nonprofit enterprise funded by the c.i.a. to identify and invest in cutting edge technologies that serve national security interests.

as i mentioned, undersecretary griffin will be engaged in conversation with hudson 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 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. without any further ado it's my , pleasure to turn it over to rebeccah. rebeccah: thank you so much, ken. thank you all for being here. 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. the job i'm in is a new job. it has existed at significantly lower levels in the organization before but not since the goldwater-nichols act of 1988 a tnl as and

entity, not since then has the r&e organization occupied undersecretary level stature. since 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 instantiation to remain around for a while as well. so i'm the first occupant of the office at the undersec retare -- at the undersecretary 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 standing.

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 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 as putin has

since stated. \[phone rings] i think that's for you. i'm sorry. i will just turn that off. figure out how to turn it off later. so we would not, in the early 1990's, have envisioned island building by china. preemption of international waters or the attempt to preempt international waters with rather bold territorial claims that no other nation in the world would recognize, never mind lay claim to. we didn't see, couldn't have anticipated those things. so for at least a couple of

the united states enjoyed a degree of alone time at the top of the global power letter. really we had not seen that for a while in history. it had been quite a while since single great power was so unchallenged in my personal opinion is we went to sleep i was in the pentagon when the wall came down and when the soviet union dissolved i had not yet gone over to my third incarnation nsf. so watching those events from the seats in the pentagon as a deputy at the strategic defense organization watching these events occur, i will say and not as a monday morning quarterback

it bothered me a lot because we started talking about the peace dividend as if that would be a perpetual entitlement. and there is a saying about optimists and pessimists which i love is that the optimist is the person who believes in the best of all possible worlds but the pessimists is the person who feels that might be true. [laughter] in the early and mid- 90s frankly i was quite cynical about the piece dividend and quite cynical about the practice of the defense department and other agencies aiding and abetting for other companies to merge from many competitors into a few large companies.

i did not think that and i do not believe there would be a piece dividend to last the rest of my life let alone my children or grandchildren and i did not believe reducing our ability to have competition among many corporate competitors was in a long-term best interest. so you can chalk that up to premature old age and cynicism in the early '90s i was my earlier mid- 40s may be too young to be so cynical but i was. it is observable in hindsight that we failed to continue to

fund the practices that had gotten us where we were which was the very top of the heap the united states from the time we entered world war ii until it was ended was three and a half years. world war ii lasted six years it was our presence and technological engineering preeminence that allowed the award to be brought to a close. as regrettable as it may be, it ended with the first use of nuclear weapons. it did and the war think there is no historian alive today who would say that more lives were lost because of that and what have been caused by the invasion of the japanese. so it was america's technical

preeminence to win the cold war ending world war ii and got us to a place where we could fall asleep at the switch to maintain that preeminence. at the time we look around and call it 201525 years later, that it does remain today that while in many categories america still leads the world and in company with our allies and partners of the western nations in many areas of technology with regard to certain areas of defense and science and technology we just don't anymore that is a hard thing to say and a hard thing to hear. but the fact of the matter is that the area of hydro sonic to

pick one both china and russia are observably ahead of our current state not of where we could be but our current state of practice that we are playing catch-up in the area of microelectronics from the early '90s everybody bought microelectronics because they were the best. they didn't buy them because we made people buy them but because we have the best stuff. now 80% of microelectronics if i understand it correctly, come from taiwan. not that it isn't a reliable partner but they are not coming from america and taiwan is uncomfortably close to a nation which in many ways has declared

itself to be an adversary of the united states. meanwhile world war ii adversaries are now allies. this is an unfortunate turn of events but something we must pay attention to. microelectronics is everything we do in a way today it did not even do 25 years ago when i started in the business before that 25 years earlier. today, even if our defense industry were not dependent upon civilian microelectronics, i often ask if we are victims of malware or undesired features in those microelectronics offshore if another nation can bring about the civilian collapse through such features or malware than what sense can the department of defense have to

defend the nation? if you think about it the purpose of our national security is it to defend bricks and mortar but our economy and way of life. if we cannot rely on our software that implements and we cannot fully trust the microelectronics and the software that we purchase and implement then in what sense can we be sure we can defend the nation? it isn't a comforting thought. what do we have to do?

how do we have to reinvest to get american microelectronics back at the top of its game not because we subsidize but because economically it competes with the best in the world and once again comes free choice? how do we develop hypersonic systems that they can hold our assets at risk? how do we expand and have a missile defense system be everywhere all the time? instead of waiting on the ground in case an adversary shows up in the skies overhead? that is the last place not the first place to start engagement. the grounding principles behind the undersecretary search and engineering is the national

defense strategy this is the first national defense strategy in a very long time in my opinion has had real meat to it even the unclassified version is unmistakably blunt a characteristic i share. the strategy calls out areas of current practice that need to be addressed but also calls out ten or a dozen areas of modernization priority where the department national security community in general must modernize to get ahead keeping ahead of our adversaries and match set of priorities is what has been handed to research and engineering establishment to address.

my job is what comes afterwards what are we doing to modernize our way of the war and the weapons we bring that we don't have today? in those primaries that are called out in the national defense strategy from artificial intelligence to microelectronics or directed energy weapons or more comprehensiveness of the fence to space offense and defense capability across the board those are my priorities. and that's why they are priorities and why they were wise to address the department because frankly we would not have it is just too hard.

i will stop there. so i am happy to answer your questions and engage with the audience. >> thank you. i do want to start generally and then ask some technical questions. one of the things i have perceived as a cause that we have gotten behind there is that bipartisan consensus that you maintain stability so the idea is that there missile defense community we don't want to have

an arms race so we cannot go beyond parity and i know that is not your view can you speak to that? >> in my view the concept of parity is intellectually bankrupt. united states after world war ii through the decisions and actions of some very farseeing gentlemen at the top of that group, people like george marshall who was both secretary of state and sec. of defense at different times as well as chief of staff during world war ii, the united states recognized those people recognized, the necessity of a worldwide rules -based order having added principles such as the rule of law, the free

movement of trade and money and capitalistic enterprise, the sovereignty of nations. that rules -based order those kinds of things of western principles that are deeply rooted in the american dna and in western civilization generally. that american-led buttress of national order has served us well over 70 years. we have not had a major global conflict yes we have had wars and times when americans did not fully adhere to her own best principles but those are bumps in the road not a strategic

path. when we allow nations clearly do not believe in a rules -based world order or fundamentally capitalistic principles of money and people and trade with nations that declare themselves the global powers as russia has declared itself to be as china declares itself to be what they are really declaring themselves a worldwide rules -based in favor of the autonomy that they direct. and that ought to be

unacceptable to westerners to western principles into americans it should be unacceptable the only way to discourage and deter such people is to be clearly so much more powerful that they choose not to fight. if we strive for parity then we are always leaving room for a slight change in the margin to result in greater capability on an adversary's part over our own that is a tempting situation for them. there is always the temptation of a small gain is made it can be decisive in the outcome to use that while they have it so parity is the adversary's friend. not our friend. the way to maintain the relative

degree of peace we have had over the last 70 years in contrast of warfare before that, the way to maintain that relative peace and extend an increase the degree of that piece is to be so powerful that no one believes that for they could prevail in a conflict. yes it is costly it is very expensive and uses a substantial portion of a very rich american economy for 70 years. it is trivially cheap compared to the cost of a war that we avoid the cost of world war ii which i don't have a good figure for the economic cost but it must be measured in trillions

even in those your dollars best to historical estimates maybe 50 million or 60 million people dead. some estimates are higher i think there are more 50 or 60 million individual lives whose lives were as valuable to them and their families as today. they were not less valuable because only 500,000 were americans they were people's lives. this is the cost of global conflict that we avoid by being so strong that adversaries are not tempted so parity achieves that goal and i do not support it.

fortunately my boss agrees. his words is we need to be in a position of dominance by 2028. not parity. >> that's great. that really explains well why the characterization that i often hear we are overly worried about china and russia because if you look hours a somewhat bigger that clearly we have superiority but. >> we spend so much less. you spent a lot of time talking about hypersonic but can you explain to us why that particular that bret why is that such a concern of yours and then i will ask it now and have you touch on that.

in terms of defending against it is it -- what is the hard part about it? is it sensors or shooters? >> let me start with the last question first and then i will try to give a more comprehensive and regrettably long-winded answer to the first part. the hardest part of hypersonic is the sentencing frankly the shooting is not -- it's one of the easier targeting tasks we would have in the missile intercell world because attacking hypersonic vehicles themselves are relatively

fragile during their long phase of. they are fairly easy to destabilize and they are in a very difficult flight regime and their decoys are not possible and they glow brightly in the infrared and if they reach their target they have to be in relatively straight line trajectory and yes, they can maneuver but they can't maneuver in their crew space as easily as an interceptor can maneuver. if you can see them coming and if you can get them during the vulnerable phase of flight from a guidance point of view and i will say here i used to teach the subject from a guidance guy's point of view hypersonic interceptor increase is not the

hardest problem we have. now, if you let them get into terminal phase where we have observed that they can pull many, many geez that then becomes a hard target. so, if you allow an attacking vehicle to get close enough to begin its terminal dive in the terminal dive might be from 100,000 feet onto a carrier battle group and if you let them get that close you are probably dead meat because that is a very hard interceptor problem to get at that point. the challenge of hypersonic vehicles is to know that they are headed your way from several thousand kilometers out in time to get your defending asset into the battle space. frankly, right now we just don't

have -- there are areas, of course, if we were a landmass nation like russia knowing that an attacking vehicle was coming from several thousand kilometers away would not be so difficult but what we are trying to do is to maintain a certain degree of global order largely through maritime power protection which centers and has centered, you know, since the japanese funk are fantasy pete at pearl harbor and has centered around carrier battle groups in submarines. and the main way in which the project american tactical powers to the carrier battle group and the hypersonic weapon because we don't wallpaper the surface of the ocean with radars to allow us to know when an attacker is coming largely in the current environment we don't see those things until they are way too close for comfort so the sensor

problem is the critical one. we need and do not yet have global persistent timely, accurate knowledge of what is going on in space and the upper atmosphere and that is what we have to have. so, from my point of view on the defensive side the sensor challenges the hardest one. now, why is this such a threat well when we talk about a relative level of expenditures and events between us and say, china or russia, or any other in some unknown future punitive adversary you mentioned that we have to spend more because we have to do so much more. that is exactly right. the defense has to defend against everything all the time. we don't seek to be an attacking nation. we seek to defend and promote a stable world order and so we can

have no areas of ability and an adversary nation can only has to win one. we have to win every time across all theaters. that is a serious challenge. the offense can seek out our weakest point and concentrate its effort there. at present the united states has, actually, given adversary capabilities of a relatively impressive missile defense capability is my assessment that we have quite a good capability now against reentry vehicles in their midcourse and terminal defense with bad and msm three

and ms six systems we have relatively good missile-defense capabilities for a relatively limited attack. i don't think we could stand in icbm onslaught by russia but that is not our most immediate. we have very good air defense capabilities but hypersonic systems, the way they are built and flown and targeted, over by our air defense systems and on-the-fly our missile-defense systems. so, china has with, over the last decade with great care, developed a tactical system capable of reaching after ranges of several thousand kilometers that oversize air defense and underlies missile-defense and

can hold our assets and our based assets whether land or maritime based at risk. nothing i am saying here is classified and you can find these assessments in open literature, aviation week for example and not the numbers on anything but i am just saying this is the general level of capability. but that is critically important because that is a tactical capability that an adversary has developed that holds, but for us, our strategic efforts and carrier battle groups at risk and for us these are means by which we project strategic power sort of nuclear deterrence. so, by allowing that non- parity to continue to exist and it's

non- parity on the adversary side we allow their tactical systems to leverage our ability to project strategic power. it leaves us no option in the case of aggressive behavior on their part leaving us no option except either to accept their behavior or go nuclear. i don't think we want to do that. this is an area where we must see their hand in raise them one and we must at least be able to defend against their use of hypersonic weapons, should that come about, and we must be able to hold their assets at risk similar to what they have fielded and that is why this is so important to me. it's the leverage of a tactical asset on our strategic intentions. >> on that point, you said sensors so we got to have better

spaces -- >> unfortunately the only way i know to see them coming is from space. if i had enough if i had enough ships radar in the right places and enough radars on landmasses where we had control then you could do it that way but we don't and so, you know, that is an impractical solution to the problem and the only way i know to surveilled the required area and the tracking level of accuracy is from space. >> general, commander this digit command has said the same thing and he's made the point that having a robust based architecture or even just one better than we got that that would also significantly

qualitatively even against the ballistic missile that. >> oh, yeah, course. >> it will not get the high input but it will also significantly improve the entire system against that's your scene from korea. that is expensive. but you talk about how in your job you are looking at over the horizon but some of that stuff is not that far of the horizon. it's near horizon so how do we and there was no money for this kind of thing in this latest missile-defense agency budget and there was about 11 at half billion dollars for current programs that were going to talk

about space centers i'd [inaudible] so can you talk about that and also just the need to go faster. you're talking long terms but i consider the things you're talking about because we are behind we got to go faster. general has talked about the need to go fast and how do we get the necessary funding for these priorities and get them in the budget and get cracking on them and then especially not just because of the partisan politics in congress but the >> five budget priorities, the national defense strategy was released in january. until then, i think it can be since the last administration, have they laid out new priorities. those priorities are available for anyone to read.

no one is trying to hide them or keep them from you. the priorities are clear. the national defense strategy openly states we have returned to an area of global competition and that the united states must recognize that and prevail. we have laid out our technical priorities. if you think we have missed one, drop us a note. there's no pride of authorship there. really, we are happy to add priorities, but i think we had a pretty good list. obviously, since the report came out only in january, and the team for this administration, i was not confirmed until three weeks after my job officially started.

we've been, it's been difficult to get appointees through in the trump administration. some of that has been because of just the normal churn of doing business as you change administrations. and some of it is because frankly not everybody accepts the results of the election. but it has been notably more difficult to get appointees on board in the trump administration, but i think most of the last of us are now in place at d.o.d. of course we have to reshape the , budget. 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. if you look at it today there is , zero dollars allocated against any new priorities. how could it be otherwise? so our task, you know, the

fiscal 2019 budget already largely prepared. we will work at modifying it on the margins. but our real task is to reshape pb-20, president budget 2020 and beyond. i have a real sense that not bipartisan but nonpartisan thoughts are, you know, largely governing this renewed vigor in american defense preparedness. i'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

-- that stuff. he just wants to move the ball downfield. he 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 for 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. [laughter] even if it's not exactly right , it is 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 figures of 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 requirements. that's not a joke. that's not a hyperbolic statement. we would be spending 32 months to argue about what the requirements for the stealth fighter should be. i personally was the chief engineer, project engineer, whatever you would want to call them, on an 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 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 me if i -- don't shoot 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

-- prototypes to demonstrate that you could do what you were trying to do at all. our first interceptor weighed a ton. literally weighed a ton. that's not tactically traceable. that's not the point. the point is to demonstrate that you can do it at all. as p.t. 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. 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 that sometimes 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.

i don't want to at this point go public with the issue, but the miss, the flaw was in a highly standardized component that's used in other areas, and you know, i'm glad we spotted it. because our question will be, you know, is this a fleet issue or not? because it's in other fleets. the component in question is used in other areas than just what we do in sm-32-a. if you don't test and find flaws, you lead yourself down the garden path. rebeccah: and then you made a great you talked about the point, 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 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. [laughter] i know that upends your world. the early interceptors we put in the ground at fort greeley and brandenburg 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 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 certainly 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 part of the issue, the really difficult part of the issue, is the acquisition, targeting and control. that's where i am frankly looking to advances in artificial intelligence machine learning for a solution. the problem there is, i mean, if you are a human being and you are even in a crew of human beings, you are in a b-17 over europe in world war ii and attackinglf a dozen fighters, your b-17's could deal with that. they can't -- they could probably deal with six, they can't deal with 106. as stalin, quantity has a

-- as stalin famously said, 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, but 100 would be beyond it. so a swarming drone attack is of concern just because of the mass. but an a.i. system, i hope, could be trained to deal with just such things. terms, i like to fall back on the geek i am, the targeting problem for swarming drones is like the traveling salesman with programming. it's a tough problem and you can prove there is no up civil -- optimal solution available to you, but there is some pretty good solutions and you could prove they are pretty good. if we can implement some of those solutions in an a.i.

scheme, which is a combination of the which are nearer, faster ones, and apparently 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. i'm not going to pick -- rebeccah: gentleman right here. then i will go back. >> byron keller. i am an analyst. i want to look at research development resources. when you look at the spending profile for the department, do between the right mix 61, 62, 6-3?

for contractors, how do you incentivize contractors to spend r&d?on we are looking at 2% of their sales. is that adequate in this type of incentive? budget: 2% is not a good for research. the historically accepted figure is more like 10%. i'm not here to tell you that 10%, but 2% is wrong. in the old days at nasa, the first time i was there 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 the future. our mix, i don't know yet.

it's easy to say it's not where we want it to be, but i don't yet have enough time on target to know. i know that i want to return us to an era where prototyping is king before we get into production. counterpart once 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. the way we have been doing it for some decades now, it doesn't allow us to bring out the bugs until late in the acquisition cycle and costs too much money and takes too much time. >> thank you. matt jones with the boeing company. first of all, i want to say thanks for coming back and taking this job and we're glad you're there.

glad i have enough money to fund it. [laughter] >> some of the examples you gave 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 like you have enough leverage and 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, to execute programs quickly. rapidave given us a innovation fund, which i plan to use. i can really only 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 preeminence across all of the domains we must have it, when , they see it, they will be in my prior experience, frankly, clamoring at 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 it self 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. it is one of the major sources of ideas, development, research. there are two problems. one is process. the process system, what it takes for a small company to deal with the department of defense, is still very cumbersome. number two, there is a volume of deaths between the sbi program

and programs. if we are going to move fast, this problem has to be solved . i wonder what is your opinion. michael: well, i get a lot of questions like that. that it is difficult for companies to deal with the department of defense. frankly, i served other places in the u.s. government. it is difficult for companies to deal with any part of the u.s. government. that's a fact. it is in our interest to make it easier for you to deal with us . that relates to the authorities we have been given by congress for different contracting mechanisms. i will throw the first part of your question, i will throw that challenge back at you. when you see an r.f.p. come out , or if you put in a proposal, and what you get back from the is unnecessarily ,umbersome or bureaucratic

raised the game. identify what you think is bring it added, and back to our attention. go above sbir. for the department now. go above sbir. , and we'll try them 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 am on the lookout for nonvalued processes. but i can't identify them by myself. i could spend all day looking at stuff, and i would never get anything else done. so bring to us what you think is not value added, and we will look at it. we well. the secretary has made exactly that same point to larger

industry. tell us what you think is broken and we will look at it. guaranteed to deciding your favor, but you will get a hearing. the second part of your question, how to do with the valley of death. the reality is, most things that come out of sbir should die. just because someone has a clever new idea does not mean it's a good idea. seedlingse of darpa and sbir programs and other innovative ways is to see if they're good. how to get the good ones through the valley of death, this is a long held problem. i don't know that i know yet. i recognize it as a problem. like an idea, how do we find a champion for it to move it into prototyping and

eventually production? i don't know yet. i would be more than willing to have said justin on that point. what we can do when something works to move it along. i'm sorry to go limp on you. i just don't know. if i thought i knew, i would not keep it a secret. one more question. >> justin doubleday with insight defense. yesterday, secretary mattis mentioned that you would be setting joint program offices for hypersonics and the first thing you hear when you hear that 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 bureaucratic 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 re-create his words slightly, we are building a giant artificial intelligence center. that would include elements of the intelligence community as well. it will be cross cutting across services in the intelligence community. fact, my organization is charged with looking at structural alternatives on how we would create it and where we , who located -- locate it would be participating in it. we owe a report to congress on

from a couples weeks in the past. a couple weeks in mid-summer, i will report to congress on how we can do that. that we are going to do it is not in doubt. not it will be joint across only places of the department but outside the department is not in doubt. how exactly we are going to set are still studying. when we know, when we have made a decision, we will tell you. but i can't tell you that i've got an answer today. i don't think you should be thinking, however, i should say i don't think we should be thinking about a construct like jpo.-35 that is probably not in the cards. rebeccah: please join me in thanking the under secretary. >> thank you. [applause]

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