Technology. This is about 35 minutes. Good morning. This is a quick turn, so we are going to try to keep it concise. We are here to talk about getting innovation into the field and into the hands of fighters faster. It is a perennial topic. I was tempted to ask why we are still here talking about it but i dont want to get too wordy. It is safe to say the acceleration of innovation into the field is unacceptable to almost everyone except maybe china and russia so i, you guys know who the panel is. You can look at their bios to get more on where they are coming from but i just want to jump into it with you, heidi. I was going to redo something you testified about last year. As seen in ukraine, now all commercial technology paired with conventional weapons changed the nature of conflict. To default the department problem range from collaboration should be updated. To reflect the dynamic landscape of today and anticipate the needs of tomorrow. The nations private sector is the competitive advantage and we must focus on improving how the government and private sector work together. Ukraine offers a lot of lessons and we can talk about them but im wondering if you can just tell us what you are doing to achieve that goal. Great question. Let me give you a broad picture one other thing, i am going to hold two short answers because there are questions from the office from the audience. What i am primarily focused on is the joint mission. We are working very closely with the joint staff, which is focused on the joint were fighting concepts. They have laid out those concepts, the way we would fight in a highly contested conflict. We have taken that conflict and decomposed into the capability we would need to fulfill. We have engaged the services, combat commanders, and the technology ecosystem. From academia all the way to the traditional defense contractor to the Small Companies and nontraditionals and National Defense laboratory, all of them. Because innovation does not come from one place alone. It comes from across the u. S. And in addition we are collaborating very closely with our closest allies and partners because they have innovation on the area we are going to leverage because we are in this fight together and they are very well aligned to where we are going. I can expand more when you give me more time. [laughter] chris wrote a book three years ago, the kill chain. In the book you compare hardware and Software Updates in military system to the slow rate of the updates and for all of us, imagine your iphone not updating for three years. That is what is happening inside the pentagon. Can you give us a sense of how you see that issue today and where it should be going . It is such a pleasure to be able to share the stage with two people who are genuinely doing as much as anyone to make a difference on this problem and i think it is worth taking a step back to ask what the problem is because a lot of times it gets framed as a failure to [indiscernible] but so little innovation moves into real disruption, largescale change on a timeline that matters and i think the blame gets directed at the acquisition system and in reality the problem is bigger. Its an entire process by which the government thinks about when it needs for the future and goes out to get it. No one thought and iphone was possible. It was a surprise. If you asked me 15 years ago what your requirements were for a mobile device, today i would be sitting here with the most amazing flip phone america could produce. Its a problem in the microcosm of government. The threat is evolving and technology is changing and that process exists to build destroyers and bombers and things we wont build many of and the government has to research. So how do you create an alternative process for the capabilities that make a difference in ukraine . Large qualities quantities of smaller systems and software that brings it together . How do you create an incentive where we will get requirements right but cant predict the future . The main challenge is we have a bureaucratic planning process to plan for the future and we need to move to an alternative pathway [inaudible] doug is two months in two di you. Dyu. [indiscernible] your predecessor talked about how dod needs to ditch requirement process for commercial technology and replace it with a rapid validation of needs. He argued that they dont have to spend years developing new technology. Where are we on that issue . It is great to be up here with my teammates. First i guess just to turn around the question you did not ask about why we are still talking about this, i think its related to why im here, the combination of the imperative and opportunity. The imperative is something we have been talking about. We simply must find a way to harness the capability of our commercial tech innovation, one of the birthrights of us as american and our partners around the world in order to meet the challenges represented by china. We will not do it otherwise in the timeframe we need to and one of the reasons we are still up here is because we have not solved it yet and that brings me to the opportunity which is that the sense of shared purpose and trust we have now to get after this is different. Its true we are still appear talking about this. When i first started coming to the meetings i was the only guy from Silicon Valley coming and now look at who is here. Its different. And look at the conversation we are having inside the department. In the tech fluency. There is a commercial tech sector that gets it at least in large part and important ways. Partners in the white house and congress to get it so that provides us with a Tipping Point to make a difference. I spent 26 years in the navy and bringing those things are better so the simplest way to explain where we are headed, back then it was just about building a bridge between the department and the tech sector and if we had a meeting from either side who would they come and we are past that now so then its about proving you can take a real military problem and technology and bring them together to create a solution and get authorities to prototype it [indiscernible]. [indiscernible] the challenge now is about taking the capability we built and applying it to the most strategic needs. It is about focus, speed, scale. Thats a lot harder because its not starting tech out, its doing the work with partners to get the scale to happen. The secretary was elevated to be a direct partner and that is why am honored to come and be part of the team. I want to get specific answers about ukraine. From where you sit, what have you learned from ukraine . We see cheap technology wreaking havoc on the battlefield and it seems like the pentagon is still focused on big platforms that take years to build. The army might how might have sent out solicitation recently for a certain kind of drone. What is ukraine teaching you and what tangible things are being produced out of it . We are taking Lessons Learned from ukraine and incorporating them into our strategy in the next highly contested fight. One thing we have been doing is incorporating what we need to drive in terms of Technology One of the things we have been doing which we dont talk too much publicly is incorporating those in terms of what we need to drive in terms of the technology and how we can leverage the commercial side. And one of the key rings we are doing is a Rapid Defense experimentation research. We are acronym heavy, so we call it rader. We planned out a specific scenario that the secretary of defense chose, is an area of interest, and from that scenario of interest we work closely with joint staff and Combatant Commanders and say, what is the capability needed to fight that particular scenario . Within looked at what are the companies out there designing capability already at the prototype stage that we can experiment, so what we have done is contacted every Single Service, every single Combatant Commander and held in industry date which day and we selected those in may and we leveraged the National Guard to literally conduct a weeklong experimentation and we provided feedback to the small empties. A, this is really great but this is fragile. Can you harden this so if somebody drops this it doesnt break . So simple things provide feedback to the Small Companies. The process you describe sounds like something you hear when you hang around places like the pentagon, which sounds like it could be a process taking years. What is the pentagon doing for the next month . Let me finish. Ok. [laughter] the experiment, what we learned here, literally all the equipment is going to a Northern Edge exercise, ok . From that exercise this fall, we are teeing up, here is our success story. Here is what has worked really well its of the decisionmaker every Single Service with joint staff and all of the Combatant Commanders will say, ok, here is a list of these that work well. How do we rapidly accelerate fielding . That is the key part to get into procurement. I have already worked very closely with my counterpart who is acquisition sustainment who has developed a number of rapid acceleration practices, so once we identify here is a list of stuff we want to accelerate into fielding, we have the mechanism in place, processes in place. I can tell you, very funny story, give me one second, ok . There is one prototype that one marine tested out here he said this is fantastic. I need this. I am going to deploy. Im coming up in my deployment. He did not give back the prototype. He deployed with it. That tells us that is great and there is a demand signal for the product, right . Good. Speaking of bill, he famously referred to the tech bros not doing enough for ukraine. You are a tech bro. Am i . We just certified you. We know your company is doing a lot with ukraine. Talk about that issue. I saw the comment and after he made that and he immediately started apologizing. I said stop, you are right. It is all about production. If youre doing smallscale things youre not making impact at the level we need to come or whether its the old capability we need more of our brandnew capability week need more of them it is all about how you get into production here to your question about ukraine im a to me, toms of lessons but three standout right off the bat. We are a brandnew capability. This technology is here. Were not talking about photon torpedoes and cloaking device that need to be developed. Were talking about things on the battlefield now that need to get developed and fielded in other areas. I think secondly with respect to that process, the things that you are going to field are not going to work initially. Drones will fall out of the sky. Lording munitions will not go where you want them to, so its less about the capability and more about the agile processes you have excuse me working directly with the enduser to improve those capabilities and what is a very dynamic environment where you and the adversary are engaged in this move counter move type process and you have to stay continually one step ahead and the only white dude that is only way you do that is tightly coupled with the enduser and that has been our expense in ukraine. The third thing i will say is, ok, the bad news coming out of the war in ukraine is that power projection is really hard. In the teeth of a well armed and ready defender, power projection is really tough, and i think that is a tough lesson for the United States military to hear, because we have largely built our full around power projection. The good news is if you do the right things, power projection could be hard for everyone, so you talk about a taiwan straitstype contingency of the only thing more difficult is probably doing it, so if you have actually make her partner does your partner ready and equipped with the right kinds of capabilities that are not necessarily going to be no Nuclear Submarines and other things. You gonna look more like the capabilities making a difference in ukraine, smart weapons, large quantities, network together, you actually can create what the effect on the mind of the adversary, this is a problem i do not want to pick off today. We buy time and we push that future risk into the future rather than having it continued to creep left, the way it has been doing them and now were looking at 2027 is the potential date that we need to be ready. Well, to be very clear, right, getting ready for 2027 does not start in 2027. Right . It means anything we do this year and next year is what we will send our men and women into harms way with god forbid they have to engage in that contingency, that there is a sense of urgency getting to scale now, and the decisions we have to make now. I was going to throw something at you, but answer quick. Maybe i dont have time so i cant be quick, but i want to be quick. Sorry for all the talk of quick. So, three quick things i think we have learned that are great and one not yet. One is the value is absolutely clear from commercial technology and were seeing that from commercial space, analysis and the cloud, to secure communications across Different Networks where the networks have been destroyed to crowd sourcing and targeting and everything else. That is great and it is demonstrating that impact and can make a real difference. Second, the ability to move to share those things with partners and move very quickly, and two things here. One, straight up the bat, places for example di use help to prototype some of these things it made it easy to go fast. That is great. And also the fact that frankly because these are commercial technologies, it is easier to get him into the hands of partners then things that party may be on record. They have had to deal with the fact that some stuff they have done has become part of the record and they have to do procedural things, where something that is more quickly tailored on the shelf and go faster. But that is great news. As well as the speed there there is also that that makes it so that training instead of months is weeks instead of days. The third thing we have learned is about embedding our folks with the in this case that in order to solve those problems quickly and help to shape what the needs are and what the imagined problem is coming the requirement because the requirement as soon as you get there youre in the wrong place of those are all great. The thing we have not done is we have not had to scale that and that is what she was getting it quickly get that is what were focused on now and we need that so we can get our strategic impact on the problem but also frankly without that scale, the economics dont work for the people doing this, so at the same time we are putting a lot towards Foreign Military sales in traditional capabilities, there are orders and orders of magnitude more of dollars making that happen and we need to correct that. You had 14 Critical Technologies you identified in 80 are commercial or deemed commercial. Central command has done, has created these taskforces one for water, air, land, and i wonder just briefly if you could say hey if this is a model for others that works . I dont want to overstate its effectiveness but it has buzz because it is cool and offtheshelf stroke, underwater drones, there drones. Does that model work . Back to the scaling, how do you scale not only for his region but for the massive regions . Can i jump on that one . Sure. I think the answer is yes and because 1999, these are great examples that we could stuff out there and start making it real, and you know the navy is now up to 100 unmanned vessels out doing real work making real things happen and that is great. You hit on exactly the point which is taking this to scale which is where we go next. The navy and i will save this as a navy guide this is an area where the navy from not always being the fastest to being one of the fastest and thinking about ways to do this and so it was announced in april about a fleet to do this at scale for maritime domain awareness leveraging ai and sensors to make that happen. That is a great example of getting to scale these things and we have to go a lot faster and a lot bigger in terms of what that scale really means in order to get to solving the problem. Were talking about critically to starting the flywheel spinning in the demonstration that makes it easier for the investment to start from the beginning, something we have not talked about today but is important to a lot of people from the world i just came from who are here today, in order to make that happen at scale. Do you, does the acquisition bureaucracy, what is the extent of the acquisition bureaucracys problem when it comes to this . What is wrong with acquisition . It is a huge rhetorical question, but do you want to talk with about how they get in the with do you want to talk real quick about how they get in the way . Again, the acquisition system and bureaucracy comes in for blame and they deserve their fair share. I guess the point i want to impress upon you is the acquisition system is one part of this broader system the United States government and allied governments used to think about the future and plan for the future and go buy things they are going to need like spend money today to get things tomorrow. That is a difficult problem in the particular in the world of defense where i cant go out in the commercial market and see what people like. How do i get market feedback when im not hopefully, engaged in wars all over the place . So it is a genuinely hard problem. I think the process and system we have in place to do it is something that looks more like china edits were sunamerica at its best, and what we need, you will never have that for aircraft carriers preto have one company that builds them and you would do the best and you can to get the performance in the absence of competition. What you desperately need from the things we are talking about here where youre not going to go by lording musicians offtheshelf, but you can loitering munitions offtheshelf. Those are the kinds of things like a completely alternative pathway of how do i go by capabilities that will make a difference now knowing that im probably going to get my requirements wrong at the outset and somewhere along the way Something Better is going to come along and i will have to switch . That is what the example shows. Like, try, fail, fail, fail again, didnt tweet it. This is back to the systemic problem of the dod. They own mission problems. They did not under the ability to deliver solutions to solve those problems. That is at the behest of the military services and other parts of the department to do the organized training and equipping. You have a supply and demand problem. The question were talking about is how do you adjudicate supply and demand. Hes trying to generate demand but if the institution does not rise to the rescue and say this works, you have three here we will get you 1000 than it is all at that is the problem we have recently. That much of this innovation has been the appearance of reality without delivering real capability at the kind of scale that will matter. Ukraine has been a pickup game. I think we have learned an enormous amount of lessons. They are harvesting that to solve this problem in the future but to be very clear, we are not where we need to be and we are running out of time to get this right. Can i come in . Yes. I want to try to get in one question from you guys. You guys ask better questions of me. Lets get you going and i have one more question. We have two minutes. Ok. One of the things we are doing even though it is not that much money, last year, i had 100 million procurement money and which literally we could help Small Companies that has delivered prototypes that the services want, but because this is a twoyear budgeting cycle, once, so that the service once you to demonstrate capability first before they buy it. Once you demonstrate capability, then they will basically put it in their budget request but it is a twoyour budget cycle so companies have to sit there and wait for that for two years so we literally went through all the services to understand what needs they have. We look at the small company. What product have they produced . In literally we met with all the services to rack and stack how we would put the 100 million so 10 Companies Receive 10 million each, but i can tell you that some of the Small Companies got the 10 million and they were able to push forward integrating the underwater mine sensor. That is incredibly important. They are putting it onto an underwater vehicle, unmanned underwater vehicle, so we help to accelerate delivery by two years, so that was that pot of money. This year we had 150 million and i gave to 11 companies was so its hard to scale that. I can pull them through low Rate Initial Production a lot quicker, right, but with a limited amount of money, that is all you can do. Can i say one thing briefly . This is why it is so important that you see what the congress is doing rightnow in terms of appropriating up to 1 billion to do exactly what were talking about here in terms of pushing things from initial prototype to largescale fielding, like getting over that valley of death. With deference to our audience here, can i get one question the time for one question . So make it very short. No speeches. Go ahead. Sir. Thank you so much. I teach at the u. S. Air force academy. My question for all of you is what are specific policy or regulatory things you would have right now through whatever means to get to scale and actually get to that . What would you change right now . Go ahead. I would say first of all, not every single prototype is going to make it into production, because we depend upon the services to tell us what is your need. They have a finite budget and they have to allocate their needs, that they will go through the rack and stack to say ok, these are really important and this is what i truly want to pull through quickly, ok . So we have to go through this process right now which is called the Defense Management action group annual basis in which every service goes through their portfolio to talk about here is what we want to put our budget against, ok . Very briefly. Im not being flip. I think we are wildly overthinking this problem. I think for a lot of the capabilities we are talking about the Defense Department and the u. S. Government needs to but them by them. Needs to be a better buyer bringing its power to bear to say, munitions, large undersea vehicles or drones, if that is what is important, i will buy them in large quantities. I would not buy one forever and maintain it for 20 years. I will buy these capabilities in a more rapid way so that you connect should begin to create the incentive structure for companies to get to scale and for new companies to see a pathway to rake into a market that is very impenetrable. That is what we dont do right out. That is to my point of market creation. How do we get capitalism back into defense . You will only get it into some places but boy can you, if the government is using his powers a buyer to buy the capabilitys we are saying are important tomorrow that will probably be difference that these are not 20 or programs of record. They have to be largescale laws that get replaced over time. Good answer. First, amen to everything he said. I will take the, and i do think a lot of this is just about getting out of our own way and using the capabilities we have gotten just doing it. 1. Point two, i will take what we ask for, up a notch and slightly different. We have to make it easier for incredible dual capability, dual fluency talent to move in and out of the department. That would be something great for us to figure out how to do. And i would just leave us with the thought that um something, reiterating something i said before which is i believe we are at a Tipping Point now both because the shared sense of purpose and trust around trying to solve this problems, iave never seen it in this place and second, because we have to. So, i am excited about getting after it. Thank you so much. I hear at the orchestra music playing. Join me in thankg our panel for talking with you. [applause] senators chris coons john cornyn, jim rich discussed National Security and Foreign Policy efforts in congress as part of this years aspen security form in colorado your topics include the russiaukraine bore, china and the blockade on military promotions in the senate. Watch friday at 9 00 p. M. Eastern on cspan cspan now are free mobile video app or online at cspan. Org. Sunday night on cspans q a, newsmax chief White House Correspondent james rosen author of skill leah is a rise to greatness 1936 to 1986 talks about the birth of the Late Supreme Court associate justice antonin scalia. The record from the excesses of the student Antiwar Movement of the 1960s, the unrest, taking law into their own hands, silencing debate, and all of that shaped him in ways that made him a better judge and better justice so you can really understand how he got to be Justice Scalia without understanding the elements of his academic career. 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