[Senate Hearing 115-847]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office]
S. Hrg. 115-847
ACCELERATING NEW TECHNOLOGIES TO
MEET EMERGING THREATS
=======================================================================
HEARING
before the
SUBCOMMITTEE ON
EMERGING THREATS AND CAPABILITIES
of the
COMMITTEE ON ARMED SERVICES
UNITED STATES SENATE
ONE HUNDRED FIFTEENTH CONGRESS
SECOND SESSION
__________
APRIL 18, 2018
__________
Printed for the use of the Committee on Armed Services
[GRAPHIC(S) NOT AVAILABLE IN TIFF FORMAT]
Available via http://www.govinfo.gov
______
U.S. GOVERNMENT PUBLISHING OFFICE
41-257 PDF WASHINGTON : 2020
COMMITTEE ON ARMED SERVICES
JOHN McCAIN, Arizona, Chairman JACK REED, Rhode Island
JAMES M. INHOFE, Oklahoma BILL NELSON, Florida
ROGER F. WICKER, Mississippi CLAIRE McCASKILL, Missouri
DEB FISCHER, Nebraska JEANNE SHAHEEN, New Hampshire
TOM COTTON, Arkansas KIRSTEN E. GILLIBRAND, New York
MIKE ROUNDS, South Dakota RICHARD BLUMENTHAL, Connecticut
JONI ERNST, Iowa JOE DONNELLY, Indiana
THOM TILLIS, North Carolina MAZIE K. HIRONO, Hawaii
DAN SULLIVAN, Alaska TIM KAINE, Virginia
DAVID PERDUE, Georgia ANGUS S. KING, JR., Maine
TED CRUZ, Texas MARTIN HEINRICH, New Mexico
LINDSEY GRAHAM, South Carolina ELIZABETH WARREN, Massachusetts
BEN SASSE, Nebraska GARY C. PETERS, Michigan
TIM SCOTT, South Carolina
Christian D. Brose, Staff Director
Elizabeth L. King, Minority Staff
Director
Subcommittee on Emerging Threats and Capabilities
JONI ERNST, Iowa, Chairman MARTIN HEINRICH, New Mexico
ROGER F. WICKER, Mississippi BILL NELSON, Florida
DEB FISCHER, Nebraska JEANNE SHAHEEN, New Hampshire
DAVID PERDUE, Georgia GARY C. PETERS, Michigan
TED CRUZ, Texas
TIM SCOTT, South Carolina
(ii)
C O N T E N T S
April 18, 2018
Page
Accelerating New Technologies to Meet Emerging Threats........... 1
Griffin, Hon. Michael D., Under Secretary of Defense for Research 2
and Engineering.
Questions for the Record......................................... 16
(iii)
ACCELERATING NEW TECHNOLOGIES TO MEET EMERGING THREATS
----------
WEDNESDAY, APRIL 18, 2018
United States Senate,
Subcommittee on Emerging
Threats and Capabilities,
Committee on Armed Services,
Washington, DC.
The subcommittee met, pursuant to notice, at 2:32 p.m. in
Room SR-232A, Russell Senate Office Building, Senator Joni
Ernst (chairman of the subcommittee) presiding.
Committee members present: Senators Ernst, Fischer, Perdue,
Heinrich, and Peters.
OPENING STATEMENT OF SENATOR JONI ERNST
Senator Ernst. Good afternoon. The Subcommittee on Emerging
Threats and Capabilities meets today to receive testimony from
Dr. Michael Griffin, Under Secretary of Defense for Research
and Engineering, on accelerating new technologies to meet
emerging threats.
Welcome, Secretary. It is good to have you here.
The National Defense Strategy [NDS] acknowledges that our
increasingly complex security environment is defined by rapid
technological advancements, which have the potential to change
the very character of war. These technologies include advanced
computing, Big Data analytics, artificial intelligence,
autonomy, robotics, directed energy, hypersonics, and
biotechnology.
Moreover, their development is increasingly dispersed,
expanding both to near-peer competitors and other actors with
the means to use these technologies against our warfighters.
These technologies also represent major opportunities for
our own forces, and innovation has always been a major strength
of the Department of Defense's [DOD] research and engineering
enterprise, which includes the DOD laboratories and
organizations like DARPA and the Strategic Capabilities Office.
However, getting these technologies in the hands of our
warfighters can sometimes be challenging for the Department of
Defense, which has struggled to bridge the so-called ``valley
of death'' for new technologies. This valley refers to the
space between the research and engineering community and the
acquisition community, which are responsible for fielding
operational systems.
In his confirmation hearing, Secretary Griffin testified
that this transition is the ``hardest problem we have.'' I will
look to Secretary Griffin to understand how he will use his own
newly established position to help bridge this gap.
The fielding of these critical new technologies contained
within the National Defense Strategy demands urgent attention
and new approaches to ensure that our forces are postured to
fight and win. Broadly, I look to Secretary Griffin to see how
he plans to fulfill his charge as chief technology officer for
the Department of Defense to sustain and expand U.S.
technological superiority in the future.
Specifically, I hope to understand specific examples of
research and technology efforts aimed at ensuring our forces
are organized, trained, and equipped to succeed in our
increasingly complex environment.
Opening comments, Senator Heinrich?
STATEMENT OF SENATOR MARTIN HEINRICH
Senator Heinrich. Let me start by thanking Senator Ernst
for holding this important hearing on technology transfer and
the ways that we can move technologies and systems more rapidly
into the hands of our operational forces.
Welcome, Secretary. It has been almost 2 months since you
were confirmed for this job, so you may not have fixed
everything yet, but we hope that you are making good progress.
I hope that today's hearing will help us better understand
the barriers to the smooth transition of next-generation
technologies, whether they are from the funding point of view,
legal, regulatory, cultural, or other things that we have not
thought about.
We know that we are in a race to build future technologies
and systems that our military will need to execute its missions
against peer threats as well as emerging threats. We also know
that the United States is still home to the world's most
innovative companies, small businesses, research universities,
and government labs.
The State of New Mexico alone is proud to host two national
security laboratories, the Air Force Research Laboratory, White
Sands Missile Range, and a number of high-tech small
businesses, each employing some of the best and brightest minds
in the country.
Yet, one of our Nation's biggest challenges remains in
determining how we can best connect those innovators to the
real current and future challenges facing our military, and how
to move the best new technologies into the hands of our
warfighters as quickly and effectively as possible.
All of the members of this committee have heard frustrating
stories of companies with great ideas or universities and
government labs performing cutting-edge research that cannot
seem to get traction and fight through the Pentagon's arcane
and bureaucratic procurement and funding processes, only to get
stuck in that valley of death that Senator Ernst spoke about.
This committee has taken a number of steps to help
transition technologies, including strengthening science and
technology prototyping efforts; emphasizing weapons of the
future, like directed energy; supporting the Small Business
Innovation Research program; and trying to cut back on the red
tape and bureaucracy that slows this process. But I certainly
believe we can do more.
Tackling the issues that prevent the transition of
technologies is a key emphasis of your work, Dr. Griffin, and
you have an excellent opportunity to do so as our Nation's
Under Secretary for Research and Engineering.
Dr. Griffin, I hope we can hear today your early estimate
of the biggest challenges to effectively transition technology
and learn what steps you are beginning to take to address them
and how we can help. I also look forward to hearing what
hurdles you are encountering in terms of setting up your
organization and staffing in the Pentagon, and deconflicting
authorities with the services and other parts of the Pentagon.
Finally, I hope to learn what steps this committee and
other committees in Congress can take to assist in these
efforts. Our military's technological edge may not depend
solely on your success, but your success can greatly alter the
ability of our military to stay ahead of our adversaries.
I look forward to your testimony and learning more about
how we can help.
Senator Ernst. Go ahead, Secretary. Thank you.
STATEMENT OF HON. MICHAEL D. GRIFFIN, UNDER SECRETARY OF
DEFENSE FOR RESEARCH AND ENGINEERING
Dr. Griffin. Chairwoman Ernst, Ranking Member Heinrich,
Senator Peters, Senator Fischer, Senator Perdue, thank you for
being here. I really appreciate this opportunity to talk to you
about these issues. I am going to offer a very brief opening
statement and ask that you submit my written testimony for the
record.
Senator Ernst. Without objection.
Dr. Griffin. So the recognition of the erosion of U.S.
technological superiority, which was once unquestioned in the
world, is what led the Congress to establish the position that
I now hold, the Under Secretary of Defense for Research and
Engineering. Our mission is to ensure that we, if necessary,
reestablish and then maintain our technical advantage. I am
honored to be here today.
Now, frankly, my involvement with the national security
community is of long standing, and so I feel that I come to
this position reasonably well-versed in the threats that we
face, and I am, therefore, concerned.
We are in constant competition, and the pace of that
competition is increasing. In a world where everyone pretty
much today has equal access to technology, innovation is
important, and it will always be important, but speed becomes
the differentiating factor. How quickly we can translate
technology into fielded capability is where we can achieve and
maintain our technological edge. It is not just about speed of
discovery. It is about speed of delivery to the field.
So this is a key tenet of my mission as Under Secretary. My
organization will focus on closing the gap on current and
emerging threats, on driving the disruptive innovation that
provides the technical dominance on the scale and timeline
called for in the National Defense Strategy.
In this role, I fully intend to establish the technical
direction for the Department of Defense. This is more than just
recommending the path forward. My organization must ensure that
the future force has what it needs by working with warfighters
to develop new concepts of operation through mission analysis
and experimentation.
I believe that it is critically important for the DOD to
utilize intelligence products, technology forecasting, and our
own analysis to inform decisions on where we will invest, what
we will prototype, what experiments we will do, and what
emerging capabilities and concepts of operation will help us to
succeed. To this end, we have established a strategic
intelligence analysis cell within the organization that will
help us do that.
I will focus on establishing processes and methods to drive
effectiveness and affordability by examining our acquisition,
testing, and sustainment processes in the system design phase
by setting and adhering to open architectures and interface
standards while implementing good system engineering and cyber
resiliency. Ultimately, I plan to establish and embrace a
collaborative culture focused on piloting new acquisition
pathways for speed and providing capability to the future
force.
The department continues to push research into new
technologies such as autonomous and unmanned systems,
artificial intelligence, biotechnology, microelectronics, and
cyber warfare, both offense and defense. These technology areas
are not just important to the Department of Defense. They are,
in fact, the focus of global industry, something we must learn
to leverage.
The department is not short of innovators. We are short of
time, and we lack expertise in adapting commercial market
advances to military needs. We need to strike a balance between
bringing in new technology and getting current technology out
to the field. We need to deal with conquering Senator Ernst's
valley of death between innovation and real applications.
One crucial step in this is a comment that the Deputy
Secretary made recently. He said, and I am quoting, ``Everyone
wants innovation, but innovation is messy. If the department is
really going to succeed at innovating, we are going to have to
get comfortable with people making mistakes.''
Increasing the use of prototyping, demonstration, and
experimentation will help the department more rapidly mature
technology to assess the impact that innovative technologies
can have on the future force. Building prototypes and testing
them with operators allows the department to speed innovation
by driving down technical and integration risk. It also enables
us to refine requirements, evaluate new concepts, and get
warfighter feedback before we commit to a major program.
Those are the obvious benefits. The less obvious benefits
include stimulating industry design teams with new challenges,
contributing to new methods of manufacturing, and increasing
the likelihood of a successful program by ensuring that we
better understand what the requirements are to deliver a real
system.
While our adversaries are presenting us with the challenge
of a sophisticated, evolving threat, we are prepared to meet
this challenge and restore the technical overmatch of the
United States Armed Forces through focus, innovation, and rapid
delivery to the field.
Thanks again for this opportunity to testify before you on
these important issues. I do look forward to your questions.
[The prepared statement of Dr. Griffin follows:]
Prepared Statement by Dr. Mike Griffin
Chairwoman Ernst, Ranking Member Heinrich, and distinguished
members of the Subcommittee, thank you for the opportunity to discuss
technology transition and what the Department of Defense can do to
mitigate the infamous ``Valley of Death''.
The Department of Defense faces a continued challenge--balancing
force structure, operational readiness and modernization in an
increasingly complex environment. DOD needs to develop new ways to
achieve innovation at what Secretary Mattis refers to as ``the speed of
relevance.'' This requires a need to move fast to wring out problems
through experimentation and prototyping with a willingness to learn
from failure rather than design to perfection.
In addition to an increased emphasis on prototyping and
experimentation to both identify innovative solutions to our
warfighting dilemmas and facilitate their development and transition to
a fielded operational capability, we are developing tools that will
identify promising, emerging technologies and capabilities to integrate
current Department owned models and simulation environments to evaluate
their potential, in conjunction with the Services, in Joint simulation
environments. Our global technology watch/horizon scanning effort uses
data analytics from a wide range of academic, research, and private and
public investment data to identify current promising technologies, and
forecast emerging technologies that the Department must be aware of to
support innovative solutions to regain/maintain our technological edge
in a highly competitive global environment. Additionally we are
developing a capability to integrate validated Service and threat
models into a Joint simulation environment so that we can conduct high
fidelity evaluations of these potential capabilities in a mission level
scenario so that the Department can gain a better understanding of how
these capabilities will work in support of and improve the warfighting
capability of existing service programs and force structure.
We are grateful to the members of this Committee for your sustained
support of our warfighters, your support of our laboratories and
research, development and engineering centers and your continued
commitment to ensure that funding is available to provide our current
and future warfighters with the technology that enables them to defend
America's interests and those of our allies around the world.
strategic landscape
The United States still faces a complex and growing array of
security challenges across the globe as described in the National
Defense Strategy.
Many factors determine whether or not a technology transitions from
the laboratory to the ultimate consumer--the warfighter. These factors
include technology maturation, performance, affordability (of the
technology and/or the system), manufacturability, available funding,
schedule, continued need and/or support from program managers and
perhaps most importantly, sustained priority for the technology/system
for the Department.
The future force will be smaller, yet must remain capable of
conducting the full range of operations on land, including prompt and
sustained land combat as part of large, multi-phase joint and
multinational operations. The future operational environment is likely
to have several characteristics that will have a significant impact on
land force operations in the future, including increased momentum of
human interaction and events, potential for overmatch, proliferation of
weapons of mass destruction, increasing importance of the space and
cyberspace domains, and demographics and operations among populations
in complex terrains. While the future force will become smaller and
leaner, its great strength will lie in its increased agility,
flexibility and ability to deploy quickly, while remaining
technologically advanced.
While adversaries continue to invest in technology to counter or
evade our strengths, insufficient resources and force modernization
place at risk our ability to overmatch opponents. To mitigate these
risks, the Department must maintain high levels of readiness while also
investing in future force modernization. To maintain a decisive
advantage over our enemies, the DOD emphasizes the integration of
advanced technologies with skilled warfighters.
Despite these great pressures, the Department continues to protect
its S&T investments critical to identifying, developing and
demonstrating technology options that inform and enable affordable
capabilities for the warfighter.
a balanced approach to modernization
It is the Department's responsibility to address both current and
emerging threats to ensure every warfighter deployed is equipped to
achieve decisive overmatch regardless of the situation. As is often
stated, we never want to send our Soldiers, sailors, airmen, or Marines
into a fair fight. To ensure a balanced modernization strategy is
paramount, even under these austere fiscal conditions, to ensure we
create long-term investment road maps across all our investment
portfolios.
We must focus investments and develop concepts and technology to
become more lethal, expeditionary, and agile, with greater capability
to conduct decentralized, distributed, and integrated operations. The
Department also focuses on decisions and priorities regarding current
technology to maintain overmatch, while driving critical capability and
technology needed for the future.
Innovation and technology continue to reshape the strategic
environment, multiplying and intensifying the effects that even minor
actors are able to achieve. Rapidly advancing technologies in many
fields may become critical to military effectiveness; examples include
autonomous systems, disruptive energetics, immersive training
environments, quantum computing, synthetic biology, alternative power
and energy solutions and unprecedented levels of networking
capabilities. The Department will continue to develop countermeasures
to future threat capabilities and pursue technological opportunities.
However, enemies and adversaries will counter U.S. technological
advantages through cover, concealment, camouflage, denial, deception,
emulation, adaptation or evasion. Finally, understanding how humans
apply technology to gain capabilities and train will become as
important as the technologies themselves.
The technology playing field is changing. Important technology
breakthroughs in many fields are now driven by commercial and
international concerns. Our strategy acknowledges the imperative of a
global, networked and full-spectrum joint force. It responds to the new
fiscal environment and emphasizes new ways of operating and partnering.
In a world where all have nearly equal access to open technology,
innovation is a critical discriminator in assuring technology
superiority.
The Department has identified enduring capability challenges that
are necessary to conduct future operations to prevent, shape, and win
conflicts, and are used to frame modernization.
The nature of research and engineering (R&E) is such that
continuity and stability have great importance. Starting and stopping
programs prevents momentum in research and lengthens the timelines for
discovery and innovation. While the R&E enterprise gains valuable
insight from the intelligence community, this only represents one input
to the enterprise and likely describes the most probable future. To
have a balanced outlook across all the possible futures requires that
the portfolio also address the ``possible'' and ``unthinkable.''
solving current problems
As noted before, it is the expertise resident within our R&E
enterprise that enables our ability to respond to warfighter urgent
needs in a timely and effective manner. The familiarity of our
workforce to the operational environment helps them to quickly assess
the ability for commercial solutions to meet the need (either with or
without modifications) and/or identify developing capability that could
address the immediate needs of the warfighter.
A strong organic research and engineering as well as technical
workforce is critical to the Department's effort to retain the U.S.'s
technical advantage over our adversaries. A major challenge facing the
Department, as well as industry in general, is identification and
recruitment of technical professionals with specific skills,
experience, and knowledge in advanced technologies. In order to address
technical workforce challenges and continue to close our capability
gaps, we are leading many initiatives to enable the Department to hire
people with critically needed technical skills as well as equip our
current workforce with these skills.
Furthermore, DOD must build a human capital development program
incorporating both traditional and non-traditional STEM careers paths
that put the right technical talent and innovative talent in touch with
the warfighter. This requires building tailored programs that create
the necessary skills and social networks, develop the right risk taking
culture and marries it with the opportunities to experiment. This is as
simple as linking recipients of DOD STEM scholarship funding starting
with undergraduate education to research laboratories and academic
institutions through postdoctoral fellowships. To that end DOD
increased STEM education funding beginning in fiscal year 2019 to
support DOD initiatives in Artificial Intelligence, Microelectronics,
Hypersonics, and Biotechnology.
driving down technical risk
In this time of decreased modernization funds, it is incumbent upon
the R&E enterprise to drive down the technical risks associated with
developing new capabilities.
Congress has supported the Department over the last few years. One
such way is by passing legislation in the fiscal year 2017 NDAA,
section 901 establishing the USD(R&E) with a focus on maintaining
technology superiority. The USD(R&E) focus will drive down technical
and integration risk through the extensive use of prototyping and
experimentation, gain warfighter feedback to better inform
requirements; to ensure that concepts going forward into acquisition
not only provide the needed capability, but are timely and affordable.
Another was fiscal year 2017 NDAA language to ensure that all major
defense acquisition programs have a modular open design, to the maximum
extent practicable, and a technology refresh strategy built in, prior
to them being permitted to move forward into development. In response
to the Acquisition Agility Act, the DOD employed a cross-functional
team that developed policy changes, started establishing a body of
practice, and began training acquisition program staff to assist the
workforce in implementing more rapid/agile acquisition of capability
for the warfighter. Program-specific examples include:
Blue Guardian (Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL)-led
program). Due to the adoption of Modular Open Systems Approach (MOSA)
in the USAF Open Mission Systems (OMS) architecture, the Air Force was
able to support the rapid acquisition of advanced C4ISR capabilities
faster and cheaper than existing methods.
Army Common Operating Environment (COE). The Army has
adopted MOSA for its mission command systems, COE, to provide a common
foundation of shared components and standards across key systems,
allowing the Army to design, develop and deliver capabilities more
effectively than the previous method (of using three different systems
having different designs and standards).
Navy Submarine Warfare Federated Tactical Systems
(SWFTS). Due to the adoption of modularity and open business practices,
Navy common submarine combat system programs, collectively known as
SWFTS, were able to speed the delivery of advanced technologies and
capabilities while driving down integration risks and life-cycle costs
across multiple submarine classes.
By moving toward modular, open designs for architectures in this
and other areas, we are creating systems that are easily upgradeable as
new threats emerge. We are also making it easier for small, innovative
businesses to contribute their technologies.
identifying and mitigating system vulnerabilities
New theaters present new challenges--we anticipate facing future
operations against technically savvy opponents who will challenge our
military superiority. This effort looks at vulnerabilities in both
individual technologies and systems, providing timely feedback to
technology and materiel developers in order to increase awareness of
potential risks (in context of future scenarios and threats) and to
identify opportunities for technology and/or employment improvements.
These efforts have the potential for significant cost savings, as
vulnerabilities are mitigated before system designs are finalized and/
or systems are fielded. A key aspect of this initiative is red teaming,
challenging the systems with an emulated enemy--one who can use
innovative and adaptive methods to disrupt the planned capability. This
has proven to be an effective method to tease out inadvertent seams
that result from the introduction of new technologies and systems into
operational use.
One way we are accomplishing this is through Red Teaming
activities, in which we provide technologists and systems developers
with realistic and challenging scenarios where they can employ and
assess their solutions prior to acquisition. These activities are
envisioned to take emerging systems and prototypes out of the lab and
into ``messy'' environments, incorporating varied operational and
increasingly complex scenarios against capable adversaries, as well as
experienced warfighters and security forces that provide real-time user
feedback on design and performance. In these settings, technology
solutions are examined from multiple perspectives--including systems
integration, logistics, training and adaptability risks--in order to
expose potential employment vulnerabilities and identify needed
improvements early on.
understanding the global technology environment
Understanding the current and projected threat environment is
essential as we develop future capabilities. To foster greater
innovation within the R&E enterprise, we are identifying concepts and
conducting technology-based assessments about what S&T will look like
in the deep future (the 2030-2040 timeframe) and how this will affect
both the Department and our adversaries. We are taking a multipronged
approach that includes brainstorming from government, industry and
academia, and red teaming of potential technology concepts. At the
heart of this initiative lies a commitment to solid analysis and a
focus on bringing fresh ideas from a wide community, including
innovative thinkers who haven't traditionally been a part of the
planning process.
Our red teaming/vulnerability analysis activities are fostering
closer ties between S&T and the intelligence community, a partnership
that is increasingly important as we look beyond the recent wartime
period into a more complex and unknown future.
conclusion
As the Department's R&E enterprise continues to identify and
harvest technologies suitable for transition to our force, we aim to
remain ever vigilant of potential and emerging threats. We are
implementing a strategic approach to modernization that includes an
awareness of existing and potential gaps; an understanding of emerging
threats; knowledge of state-of-the-art commercial, academic, and
government research; as well as a clear understanding of competing
needs for limited resources. The Department will sharpen its research
efforts to focus upon those core capabilities it needs to sustain while
identifying promising or disruptive technologies able to change the
existing paradigms of understanding. Ultimately, the focus remains upon
our warfighters; we consistently seeks new avenues to increase the
warfighter's capability and ensure their technological superiority
today, tomorrow, and decades from now. Our mission is not complete
until the right technologies provide superior, yet affordable,
overmatch capability for our Soldiers, sailors, airmen, and Marines.
All of the efforts described above would of course be impossible
without the continued support of our partners in Congress. I would
again like to thank the subcommittee for your long-standing support of
the incredibly important work of the Department's R&E enterprise. I am
extremely proud to represent the men and women who have dedicated their
lives to provide our warfighters with the capabilities to operate in
any environment and situation. Thank you. I would be pleased to answer
any questions you have.
Senator Ernst. Wonderful. Thank you very much, Mr.
Secretary.
We will go ahead and get started with the questions, and,
hopefully, we will get a couple rounds in.
We were just talking a minute ago about the National
Defense Strategy. It was recently released by Secretary Mattis,
and it focused on competition with near-peer adversaries.
Dr. Griffin, how do you envision your position helping DOD
to address the technical shortfalls in specific fields like A2/
AD [Anti-Access/Area Denial] and other high-end capabilities
being developed by our near-peer challengers, like China and
Russia? What can we do there, in your position?
Dr. Griffin. Our adversaries have taken advantage of what I
have referred to as a holiday for the United States. It has not
been exactly that, but with the fall of the Berlin Wall in
1989--I was in the Pentagon when the wall came down and when
the Soviet Union broke up. We had won the Cold War, and we had
no major adversary in the world. We declared a peace dividend,
and we felt we had won.
The winners never learn anything, and the losers always do.
So over the course of the 25 years since that has happened,
China has understood fully how to be a superpower. We gave them
the playbook, and they are executing. Russia, after a period of
very difficult times for them, is now resurgent in the world of
global and great power competition. These are the things that
our National Defense Strategy calls out.
We have been occupied for 15 years in the Middle East
dealing with the urgent problem of terrorism and nonstate
warfare, and other very, very difficult problems, but problems
which are not existential for the United States. They are
difficult, important and concerning, but they are not
existential.
Our global power adversaries are existential threats, and
this is what the National Defense Strategy is saying. I am
tremendously pleased with that strategy. I regret to say I did
not offer a contribution to it, but I am delighted with what
they have put forth, and I think that should be our bible.
Senator Ernst. Then in your position, how do we use the
expertise that you have to catch up to those near-peer
adversaries?
Dr. Griffin. Well, in certain areas, like you mentioned,
anti-access/area [A2/AD] denial, China has fielded or can
field, is close to fielding, hypersonic delivery systems for
conventional prompt strike that can reach out thousands of
kilometers from the Chinese shore and hold our carrier battle
groups or our forward-deployed forces on land that we have
bases, can hold those power groups at-risk. We, today, do not
have systems that can hold them at-risk in a corresponding
manner, and we do not have defenses against those systems.
Should they choose to employ them, we would be, today, at a
disadvantage. It is among my very highest priorities to erase
that disadvantage, creating our own systems to hold them at-
risk and to provide defense.
We will never win a man-to-man conflict with the Chinese,
should that come about. We can only win by employing technical
overmatch.
So, for example, in the areas of missile defense or air
defense, or even with our ground forces, in order to deal with
things like swarming drone attacks, we have to finish the
development of directed energy weapons, which started and some
years ago decided we did not really need. Well, we need to
decide that we really do need them and fund them to completion.
We need to have 100-kilowatt class weapons on Army theater
vehicles. We need to have 300-kilowatt class weapons on Air
Force tankers. We need to have megawatt class directed energy
weapons in space for space defense. These are things that we
can do over the next decade if we can maintain our focus.
Senator Ernst. I appreciate that. We do need to maintain
our focus.
With that, we will go to Senator Heinrich.
Senator Heinrich. Secretary, yesterday, you testified
before the House Armed Services Committee, and I saw a little
bit of that. I believe you said that the powers afforded to you
in this new position are more like ``broad and sweeping powers
to offer advice.''
Can you tell me a little bit more about exactly what you
meant by that? And what do you think should be your authority
and relationship with service research and engineering programs
and activities?
Dr. Griffin. Well, that is a leading question, sir, but I
will take a swing at it.
Senator Heinrich. It was meant to be.
[Laughter.]
Dr. Griffin. Yes, sir. The authorities that the USD (R&E)
[Under Secretary of Defense for Research and Engineering] has
do not include the ability to direct funding. They do not
include the ability to direct programs or program direction.
So, therefore, the office is persuasive or advisory in nature,
and I think that is what I said yesterday. If not, it is what I
should have said.
So, let me be clear. I think that in the NDAA 2017 and 2018
legislation that was passed, I personally believe it was a very
good idea to delegate programs back to the services to run on a
day-to-day basis, except for those few programs that the
Secretary has determined should be held at the OSD [Office of
the Secretary of Defense] level. I am an unabashed supporter of
that plan. OSD, generally speaking, is not the place you want
to run programs.
However, the industry analogy, which I have used, might be
that OSD is what you might call in industry the vice president
for programs, for all programs. You are not running the
program, but if a given program or a given program manager gets
off track, in industry, there is no fuzz on this. There is a
vice president somewhere who will say, ``What you are doing is
not okay. I am not replacing you. You still have the program,
but you cannot do what you are doing, and you are going to do
this other thing instead, and the reason is because I am the
boss and I said so.''
In industry, one's very existence depends upon being able
to do that. The wrong decisions can put you out of business. I
have run two companies, and we did not run them on the
committee system.
That situation, I think, gives you a flavor of the kind of
authority that we need to have. We do not in OSD, in my
opinion, need to be running programs. But we need to be able to
control the funding and the overall direction of those programs
in a way that is collaborative, but in the end, when a decision
is made, the decision is made.
Senator Heinrich. I think we agree that you should not be
meddling in the day-to-day management, but we want to make sure
that the strategic direction that you set is how these programs
execute.
I am also concerned that the services have not always
prioritized the modernization of the testing infrastructure,
which is incredibly important if we are going to maintain our
position in the world.
If you just look at one example that I am familiar with,
White Sands Missile Range went 18 years straight without
receiving a single milcon [military construction] project. It
is not unusual--White Sands is not alone in seeing that sort of
dynamic among our test ranges.
So I am curious, how can you help to ensure that Test
Resource Management Center is not only planning for testing but
planning to make sure that we are maintaining our test ranges,
that we are investing milcon in them, and that we are not
ignoring the center's imprtance and standing?
Dr. Griffin. Senator Heinrich, you have hit one of my hot
buttons. I was just speaking about conventional prompt strike
and hypersonics and the need to develop both offensive and
defensive capabilities.
I would tell you right now that DARPA [Defense Advanced
Research Projects Agency], which reports to me and has done
some of the most significant hypersonics work in the country,
has basically one wind tunnel that they can use for hypersonic
research today. It is at NASA Langley Research Center in
Virginia. This is an unacceptable situation.
Regarding your example of the test range at White Sands
that has not received milcon funding in 18 years, I could tell
that same story for about 20 other test ranges and test
facilities, and 20 is an undercount.
The Nation must invest in renovating our test facilities,
our research facilities, and bring them up-to-date. We must do
that.
Now, it is not glamorous. But when I come to you with a
budget that asks for money to renovate our test facilities, I
really want you to take me seriously. It is not nice to have
bad conditions at test facilities. We really need to bring
these things up-to-date.
Senator Heinrich. These are fundamentals.
My time is up, but I look forward to continuing----
Dr. Griffin. I am sorry. I was possibly too long-winded,
but you asked me things that I am passionate about.
Senator Heinrich. We are going to have a couple rounds, I
hope.
Senator Ernst. Yes, absolutely. Thank you.
Senator Perdue?
Senator Perdue. Thank you, Dr. Griffin. I appreciate you
being willing to take on this job.
Dr. Eric Schmidt yesterday testified that, if there were
one variable to solve for, it would be speed. You mentioned
speed this morning several times. I just got back from a trip
to China, and I saw firsthand how they are leapfrogging entire
industries.
The Chinese Government put $152 billion into creating a
chip industry. They bypassed their entire telecom industry.
There are no hardwired cables, et cetera. It is all moving to
5G.
We saw corporate businesses and their research aligned with
defense research all under one umbrella inside the Chinese
structure.
The way they are set up is entirely different from ours.
They are able to build things and move more quickly than we are
in a democratic society.
Secretary Mattis said constrained budgets and acquisition
regulations have limited our ability to keep pace with rapid
changes that sustain our competitive advantage.
Combine that with the Defense Innovation Unit-Experimental
[DIUx] releasing its report recently, it really concerns me
because of having seen the Chinese ability to move very
rapidly, and our ability to build a 2-foot tall set of
requirements to buy a new pistol for the Army.
So the question I have for you is, within our DOD
procurement system, our DOD requirements system, and the
ability to innovate within a system that has been choked up by
all the things that you are talking about--China is buying
technology from us; they are stealing technology from us; and
they are innovating on their own today at a level that we have
not seen.
When you look at the two domains, in space and in cyber,
particularly, I am worried about whatever advantage we might
have dreamed we had may have dissipated already.
So my question is, in that environment, how do we develop,
from your point of view in R&D--I hear infrastructure first. I
get that. What are the ways, in integrating with business--you
read the Defense Innovation Board report. What ways can we
accelerate the innovation that we obviously need to be able to
defend our country in this new technical world that we live in?
Dr. Griffin. That is a great question. Of course, I
testified yesterday with Dr. Schmidt, and we did not pre-
coordinate our views, but he and I are about as closely aligned
as I think two people from very different backgrounds could be
about what is needed.
So one of the things that we have both said is that, and I
will use my words, we cannot punish people who take risks and
break something. We should reward them.
I will offer the view, which may not be popular, that it is
not actually, generally speaking, our laws and regulations that
restrain us from moving more quickly. It is the cultural view
of our--and it is not even just within the Department of
Defense. I saw many of these same things at NASA, and I worked
in the intelligence community.
It is the view that we have taken in recent decades that
any mistake is made in the course of a new development is a
punishable offense. So, therefore, any rational program
manager, whether wearing colonel's eagles or SES civilian, will
do everything possible not to allow any step of the development
to turn out wrong because they will be punished.
Senator Perdue. Do you think the new generation of military
leadership at the top recognize that?
Dr. Griffin. I think they do. The people that I work with
every day recognize the cultural barrier that avoidance of risk
has created for us. But I need your help as legislators to make
sure that our people understand that failure is not okay, but
failure is failure to reach the end goal.
If I fail to give you a 100-kilowatt laser weapon for an
MRAP within a few years, you should ding me for that. You
should not ding me if we go out into the desert and try a
couple laser concepts, and one of them does not work, and we
have to back up and try another. That is not failure. Failure
is if I do not get to the goal.
All too often, we punish program managers because they take
something out to the desert and they flight test it and it
breaks.
Until I was 40, I was closely involved with hardware
development. I will tell you, it is really hard to get it right
the first time.
You have to have that freedom to take on new challenges,
take new risks, let things break, figure out why, and move on
to the next step without punishing the young folks who want to
learn all those lessons.
There is no more critical step than that to me, sir. That
is how we can establish a new culture of speed and innovation.
Senator Perdue. Is that inside DOD? It is also in the
procurement area as well, right?
Dr. Griffin. It is in the procurement area. It is inside
DOD. It is really all across government. It really is.
You have given us a lot of new legislative permissions. And
you know what? As Eric Schmidt said yesterday, you should ask
us to keep count of the number of times we are using other
transaction authorities instead of the regular FAR [Federal
Acquisition Regulation]. You gave us permission to use them.
You should require us to do so. You should not allow us to fall
back on what we are culturally familiar with.
Another point that I will make, and I realize I am over
time, another point that I will make is that the whole purpose
of carving out or separating R&E [Research and Engineering] and
A&S [Acquisition and Sustainment] from the former acquisition,
technology, and logistics was to provide an organization which
could do advanced development before it got into the major
production cycle.
So let us make our mistakes. Let us learn our developmental
lessons when it does not cost much. Let's not learn it when the
carrier is already in production. I am not picking on carriers.
You pick your system. Let's not learn it when the system is in
production. Let's learn it while people are still
experimenting.
That is a critical step. I am sorry I have overstayed.
Senator Ernst. That is okay. Good discussion. I appreciate
it.
Senator Perdue. Thank you, Madam Chair.
Senator Ernst. Senator Peters?
Senator Peters. Thank you, Madam Chair.
Thank you, Dr. Griffin, for being here. Your discussion
about failure as part of the process, as you are talking, I am
just reminded of Thomas Edison. I cannot remember the exact
quote, but I think he said that he spent most of his career
with failed experiments. But the ones that worked were pretty
big and changed the world.
Dr. Griffin. Well, the knowledge that a particular approach
does not work is every bit as valuable a piece of knowledge as
the knowledge that something does work.
Senator Peters. Absolutely, yes.
Dr. Griffin. I am not suggesting that we embrace stupid
decisions. I am not going to that place at all.
What I always tell my people is, every mistake you make, I
want it to be a new mistake. Make a new mistake. Just do not
repeat the old one, and we are good.
Senator Peters. Right. As long as you are learning from it.
I wanted to pick up on your comments related to speed as
well. I think the other thing that I think was significant was
where you said that everybody has access to this technology,
which has changed so dramatically. The area that I have spent a
lot of time on, being a Senator from Michigan, is self-driving
vehicles and autonomy, which is moving I think a whole lot
quicker than people realize as well. The race with the Chinese,
Senator Perdue comments, I know they are at full speed on this
as well.
What people have told me about the power of the self-
driving cars is that, in order for it to work, you need to have
further advances in artificial intelligence and machine
learning that is able to process the massive amount of data
that is coming in. In fact, it was described to me, in some
ways, self-driving cars is the moonshot for AI [artificial
intelligence]. When AI can pilot that car through a street here
in Washington or New York City safely with all of those inputs,
that means AI is ready for prime time in every single industry
and will likely change everything about our world. That also
means the future of warfare as well. I know the Chinese are
working on that at a feverish pace as well.
So I wanted to ask you about reports I have seen about the
DOD and the intelligence community working to create a Joint
Artificial Intelligence Center that will hopefully move us
along quicker with some of these kinds of developments.
I am currently working on some language for the NDAA
provision that will create some flexibility so that we can move
forward with AI and incorporate all that we are seeing on the
commercial side into applications that will change the face of
warfare in ways that I do not know that we can fully appreciate
at this time.
So my two questions are, first, can you speak to the
reports of this joint AI center, and how we can help here on
the committee to make that kind of effort a reality where we
are coordinating our activities and taking advantage of what is
available commercially?
Dr. Griffin. In answer, sir, to that question, yes, the
Secretary in his testimony, I believe just last week, committed
to the development of a joint AI center, meaning across the
services.
Really, there will be elements of it across government. I
think the DOD will take the lead. The organization of all that
has not been finally decided, as you might appreciate. But the
Secretary and the Deputy, I believe, had made the decision that
there will be such a center. I am working right now with folks
on my staff to answer questions, like who should lead it, where
should it be, what projects should it do, and, most
importantly, how does such a center fit into the overall AI
strategy for the department and the Nation, because there are
592 projects, I was told, in the department, which have AI as
some piece of them. They do not all belong in the new AI center
that we will create, but some of them do.
We have things all the way from foundational research to
practical applications to put in theater tomorrow. So we have
to parse all that.
We owe the Congress a report, I think about 2 months from
now, on what our AI strategy will be. The JAIC, the Joint
Artificial Intelligence Center, will be a part of that overall
strategy.
I better asked than answered your question.
Senator Peters. No, it is good. Is there anything that we
should be doing here in Congress to move this along?
Dr. Griffin. No, I think we can do this with the
authorities that we have. If we stumble across a regulatory
issue where we need your help, I will be back on your doorstep
in a heartbeat, because I agree, this is a critical area of
research. If there is going to be a leader, we need to be that
leader. We are not going to let this slip through the cracks.
Senator Peters. Like most technologies, being first is a
significant competitive advantage. But I understand, with
artificial intelligence, it is beyond a significant competitive
advantage. It may be everything, in a lot of ways.
Dr. Griffin. Yes, I do not want to be in danger of getting
overly occupied with the new shiny object. I think AI is
critical.
I think, frankly, we are going to have self-driving
vehicles in theater for the Army before we will have self-
driving cars on the streets. But the core technologies will be
the same. We in the DOD absolutely must leverage, I do not want
to get into corporate names, but what the various companies are
doing in developing self-driving cars.
I will give you an example that I have heard the Secretary
use, and I will put numbers on it. In theater, 52 percent of
our casualties have been from soldiers basically delivering the
mail, not literally the mail, but food, fuel, logistics, things
like that. You are in a very vulnerable position when you are
doing that kind of activity. If that can be done by an
automated, unmanned vehicle with a relatively simple AI driving
algorithm where I do not have to worry about pedestrians and
road signs and all that, why wouldn't I do that? Well, I will.
We do not have that capability yet, but that is the kind of
thing that we could bring to bear fairly easily. And if you
will forgive the expression, we do not have to solve world
hunger with AI to be able to deliver a system that can deliver
fuel.
So that might be an early win for us. That is just one
example.
Senator Peters. Thank you. I appreciate it.
Dr. Griffin. Thank you, sir. I thought that was a great
question. Thank you, sir.
Senator Ernst. That was very good.
And thank you, Senator Peters.
While we are talking about commercial technology as well,
this is a nice segue. During World War II, as well, we saw that
the United States needed to rapidly leverage the commercial
industry to meet its wartime needs, and we were able to do that
in World War II. The phrase ``battle of production''
encapsulated our ability to outproduce many of our adversaries.
That was critical in securing our Allied victory.
In future conflicts, the ability to out-innovate those
adversaries--we have named Russia; we talked about China--they
will be just as important. And we still do have a world-class
tech sector. We really do.
So what we would like to see is that we are able to take
full advantage of that world-class tech sector. But
unfortunately, there seem to be some gaps there where we are
not able to tap into some of those technologies.
So the department is starting to make an effort to engage
the commercial sector and get into that innovation coming from
places like Silicon Valley. We will not name any names out
there. But they are trying to do that through organizations
like the Defense Innovation Unit-Experimental, DIUx--you
mentioned them earlier--and the department's Silicon Valley
outreach office.
So as we are trying to do that, what are the biggest
barriers that you see with being able to reach that goal of
utilizing those technologies that have been commercially
developed?
Dr. Griffin. One of the barriers that we have is that,
whether in AI or any other kind of information technology type
of thing, or whether in fundamental material science or
microelectronics, most of the innovators are innovators in
small companies. Most of those companies fail.
I used to run In-Q-Tel. I would split time between
Washington, D.C., and Silicon Valley. I had it an office on
Sand Hill Road. In-Q-Tel, of course, is the CIA's venture
capital company, if you want to put it that way.
Nine out of 10 of these entrepreneurial companies fail, and
that is a real statistic. They should fail. They were
experiments that tried and did not work. But the ones that
succeed become things like Google Earth or other huge successes
that become household names.
Well, the benefit for the department and for the U.S.
Government more broadly is to be able to tie in on the front
end of some of these things, because several of us have talked
about how technology today is instantly available everywhere.
Well, we do not want to be behind our adversaries in adopting
the technology that we, this Nation, create.
So the earlier we can get into the tech cycle in whatever
field and work with those people and bring them into department
utility, the quicker we will transition to the field. Well, how
do we do that with young companies?
You asked what the barriers were. The barriers are they are
small, young companies. They cannot possibly afford the
overhead of dealing with the DCAA [Defense Contract Audit
Agency] accounting system. They cannot possibly afford the
barriers of dealing with the DCMA [Defense Contract Management
Agency] for contracts. I mean, it takes a full-time staff of a
good-sized company to deal with that.
So we have to have ways of interfacing with them that
recognize where they are in the corporate lifecycle. They are
not a large prime. If we want to take advantage of what we can
bring, we have to work with them on their terms. That is what,
for example, DIUx strives to do, but DIUx is a few tens of
millions of dollars a year.
This is really a cultural issue. We need, across the
department, to learn how to become user-friendly in our
contracting and financing, so that any piece of our department
can work effectively with a new high-tech provider.
Now U.S. Special Operations Command is an artist at this.
SOCOM absolutely knows how to do this. DIUx is an excellent
idea. I am fully supportive of it. But they are not the only
place in the U.S. Government or even in the department that
knows how to do this.
These are the kinds of lessons that we need to promulgate.
Senator Ernst. Very good. Thank you. My time is expiring,
so, Senator Heinrich?
Senator Heinrich. Secretary, I really appreciate your
awareness that so many of these challenges are baked into
culture as much as anything else.
I want to give you an opportunity to talk a little bit
about directed energy. I know you are passionate about it, as
am I. I have a bunch of questions, but at the front end, I just
want to provide you an open opportunity to tell me what you are
excited about right now, where you think things are going, and
how we are going to finally make that transition from R&D into
procurement.
Dr. Griffin. Thank you, Senator. I do appreciate the
opportunity. So let me answer the last part first.
The way to get from experiments into procurement of real
live weapons systems is to say that is what we are going to do,
appoint people to run those programs, and hold them accountable
for delivery, and ask them every day, ``What is in your way
that I can clear out?''
The technology is there or almost there. I used an example
earlier: Let me have 300-kilowatts on an Air Force tanker so
that the tanker can defend itself, because that is a critical
function in our maintenance of air superiority.
And there are others. I am neither picking on the Air Force
nor otherwise. It is just an example.
I do not have a 300-kilowatt laser today. I have been in
the directed energy community, at least on its periphery, for 3
decades. The people that I talk to who are domain experts
today, and from my own background, I can tell you that if we
can persist for 5 or 6 years, we can have that laser. If we can
persist for 10 years and maintain our focus, we can have the
megawatt class space laser that I want. If I can persist for
just a few years, I can have the laser that goes on an Army
combat vehicle.
You will notice that the key word there is ``persist.'' We
have to set our goals and move toward them and weed out the
funding for interesting ideas but which are not on the mainline
of development and have people stick.
So that is what it takes. That is the cultural behavior
that it takes to get things to the field.
I have already alluded to what level of performance we can
have. Today, we have two very promising approaches, diode-
pumped alkali laser that are being developed at Lawrence
Livermore lab by the DOE [Department of Energy]. I keep talking
about across government. It is not just the department. The DOE
is our ally in this. And we have fiber combined lasers being
developed both by industry and by government laboratories. In
particular, Lincoln labs has demonstrated 35 kilowatts of
controlled power.
You are getting very close there to something that will
allow us to defend our forces.
So we have good technology paths. We have good
laboratories. We have a good industrial base. And you have
somebody with me who wants to bring that to our troops.
When I interviewed for this job with the Secretary, there
was a comment he made that, until I either die or get
Alzheimer's, I will not forget. He said to me, when I was in
theater, I never had to have a fair fight. And he said, you are
in charge of making sure that the future force never has to
have a fair fight.
To me, directed energy weapons are one of those ways that
we do not have to have our guys, our partners, our allies have
a fair fight.
Senator Heinrich. That is right. This is the third offset,
in terms of technology.
As you identify those obstacles in the way, make sure that
we know, so that we can help remove those obstacles.
Dr. Griffin. You can count on it, Senator. Thank you.
Senator Heinrich. In a related question, I want to ask you
about the role of requirement setting.
To put it simply, I think that the current requirements
process is not designed for new ideas or new weapons systems.
It is almost designed to impede the movement from well-
established systems to the next step. So talk to me about that
a little bit.
I guess I am running out of time.
Senator Ernst. Go ahead.
Senator Heinrich. How do you think the current process
actually works? To me, it seems like it slows down our progress
into these new systems. How do we fix that?
Dr. Griffin. Well, from an engineer's point of view, we
have requirements and capabilities backwards.
If you are in the DOD acquisition cycle, the DOD Directive
5000, et cetera, you have to have requirements before you can
put out an RFP [request for proposal], before you can, before
you can, before you can, move down the road. But the reality is
that engineers really do not know what the requirements ought
to be until they have built and tested something.
Frankly, whether it is a piece of software or a new combat
vehicle or a new pistol or whatever, you have to build it and
try it out and fool around with it a little. I am sorry to be
so colloquial, but that is how engineers really work in the
real world.
You [Senator Heinrich] are an engineer by training. I know
you know what I mean.
When I know about what the capabilities are that the
current generation of technology will allow me to have, and
when I have tried it out with a real operator, then I can sit
down for you and write some requirements. But if I have to
write the requirements first--despite what some think, I am not
actually stupid. I am never, ever going to write a requirement
for something that I do not already know I can do. Why would I
do that? I am going to write a requirement for something I
cannot get? That is just insane.
So the requirements before capabilities process, what that
does to you is it constrains your ability to innovate, to get
anything that you do not already have, because you must be so
conservative in your process. That is at the root of our
difficulties.
Senator Ernst. Mr. Secretary, we will do one more round. We
have a couple more questions.
We have talked about some of our adversaries, near-peer
adversaries, and the technology that they have developed over
the course of the last several decades. What can we as the
United States be doing to make sure that we are tracking the
advancements in technology that they have, as well as
developing our own?
What we really need to see is that the United States is,
again, staying ahead of our near-peer adversaries. You just
stated that we do not want to see our warfighters in a fair
fight. So what can we do to make sure that we are outpacing our
adversaries?
Dr. Griffin. Well, certainly, our intelligence-gathering
apparatus is critical to that. I met yesterday with some of my
Title 50 colleagues. We need to take a whole-of-government
approach on this.
Within the USD(R&E), we have a group who are focused on
protecting our own technology, making sure that foreign
acquisitions are appropriately vetted against strategic
considerations. We have to protect what we have while not
impeding our ability to have our companies compete in the real
world, because we cannot wall ourselves off and stay inside. We
have to be prepared to compete. At the same time, we have to
protect ourselves, and we have to do that in balance.
But if you ask what we need to do to regain and maintain a
technological advantage on our adversaries, frankly, we have to
work harder; we have to run faster; we have to have more focus
on what we want to do.
No adversary of ours at present has directed energy systems
of the type of which I was just speaking. We should be the
first. We should be putting them in a position to catch up with
us.
I have mentioned you can find in public literature many
references to the Chinese hypersonics capability development.
Frankly, we were the leaders in that 10 and 15 years ago, and
we just let it drop. We need to get started again.
We need to shorten our test cycle timelines. I referred
yesterday to an experiment called Flight Experiment-1 [FE-1]
that the Navy did, a long-range conventional prompt strike
experiment. It was, frankly, an experiment. It is not a weapons
system yet. They did a brilliant job with it. I mean, I will
not quote numbers, but I will just say that the impact accuracy
was quite impressive.
So in chatting with my colleagues at the senior levels of
the Navy, I said, well, when can I have FE-2? When can I have
FE-3? Why not next August? Why not this August?
I mean, we need to finish the development of these systems,
and it cannot be done at a leisurely pace, because our
adversaries are not working at a leisurely pace. As much as
anything else, it is the sense of urgency, Senator, that we
really must get to this.
Senator Ernst. Very good. I will just make a brief comment.
I think we have talked a little bit about some of the issues,
and what we have described as the Valley of death, actually
taking that technology and getting it fielded for our
warfighters. It seems like the overarching theme seems to be
the persistence and funding.
Would you state that that is accurate?
Dr. Griffin. Senator, absolutely. Persistence in reaching
the goals, knowable funding to reach the goals.
I can deal with budget cuts. What I cannot deal with is
surprises. Or I can, but the surprises become very expensive
for you and insert delays for me.
The other thing that I guess I would offer is we have to
regain a cultural awareness that we have, as the National
Defense Strategy states, global superpower competition again.
I was once labeled by a political adversary as an
unreconstructed cold warrior. I took that as a compliment,
actually, though it was not meant that way. Much of my early
career was in the Cold War. We understood for decades that we
had an existential threat from a peer competitor, and
Democrats, Republicans, did not matter, did not matter which
presidential administration, we had for decades a united policy
across government that we were going to contain the Soviet
Union and we were going to win. And if we can restore that kind
of thinking to a renewed global power competition, then we will
actually never have to fight, because our adversaries will not
want to take us on.
So that is the kind of culture, those are the kinds of
comments that I hear coming out of my leadership, which I would
like to promulgate as well.
Senator Ernst. Thank you. I appreciate it.
Senator Heinrich?
Senator Heinrich. Thank you for bringing a sense of urgency
to all of this, because I very much agree that has oftentimes
been the missing piece to all of this.
I wanted to follow on to the question that Senator Perdue
asked you. You did a really good job of articulating why
testing is so important, and why you want to do testing very
early in the process and not after you have a product that is
supposed to work perfectly for folks in the field.
Can you talk a little bit, too, just about how early and
effective developmental testing also speeds up acquisition by
discovering challenges early in the lifecycle and not after the
fact?
Dr. Griffin. Sir, I think you have pretty much done it for
me. The truth of the matter is--Senator Ernst was just asking
about persistence and funding, and how to get through the
valley of death. My quick answer to that is, take your
prototypes up to the level of being operational prototypes, not
something I am going to produce but something a real operator
can work with and help wring out the bugs so that I know what I
want to produce.
The more quickly that I can do that, and I will say outside
the acquisition cycle--although, of course, it still is Federal
acquisition of stuff with taxpayer money, but it is not in the
production cycle. The quicker I can do that and figure out what
I really want, then the speedier the whole acquisition process
will be.
The most expensive and time-consuming place to discover a
mistake is after I have delivered a weapons system to the
field.
So when someone has spent the most enjoyable part of one's
life as an actual engineer, you become humbled by the fact that
you almost never do anything right the first time. It is a bit
embarrassing because there are very few stupid engineers
around, and all of us have advanced education, and you would
like to believe that you can get something right the first
time. You just cannot.
Senator Heinrich. Experience does not support that.
Dr. Griffin. Yes. So wring the mistakes out as early as
possible. Work with us. Talk with us. Call us up to the Hill
frequently and say, ``Hey, how are you doing on that Flight
Experiment-2 that you just talked about with the Navy? How is
that coming along?''
Senator Heinrich. You mentioned a laser that DOE is
developing. Before we let you go, is it easy enough to work
across government? If DOE or the NNSA, the national security
labs, are developing something that has direct application in
DOD, do the authorities and the current ways of interfacing, do
they support being able to work together? Or are there things
that we need to change in the NDAA to make it easier to do that
kind of work?
Dr. Griffin. Senator, if I come across something that
should go in the NDAA, that would enhance our ability to work
across government, I and the department will come to you with a
legislative proposal. I have spent decades in various agencies
working with other agencies, to include at various times in
various places NASA, National Reconnaissance Office, DOE, CIA
[Central Intelligence Agency], DOD, of course, working in and
with these various components of the government. When you get
below the very political level and you start dealing with
people whose focus is on the mission, I have never had any
trouble at all.
Senator Heinrich. That is good to hear.
Dr. Griffin. It works well. I am not saying there are not
stumbling blocks. It is always difficult for people to work
together. But my experiences have been good ones, I will just
say that, over the years.
Senator Ernst. Thank you so much, Mr. Secretary. It has
been a pleasure to have you in front of the committee. We
appreciate you taking on these challenges for our men and
women, whether they are on the frontlines or working in various
places around the globe.
We look forward to utilizing your expertise in the upcoming
years, and I am anxious to see some of the great developments
that will come through your work.
Dr. Griffin. Well, you have given us a wonderful budget,
and you have given us good regulatory authorities, and we have
a great team. It is on us, and we hope to deliver.
Senator Ernst. Outstanding. Thank you. This concludes the
Emerging Threats and Capabilities Subcommittee.
[Whereupon, at 3:30 p.m., the subcommittee adjourned.]
[Questions for the record with answers supplied follow:]
Questions Submitted by Senator David Perdue
leveraging the cybersecurity expertise in the academic community
1. Senator Perdue. Dr. Griffin, cybersecurity is a rapidly evolving
field, as the number of threats from nation states, terrorist
organizations, and individual hackers increase daily. These threats
include proliferation of Internet of Things technologies, converged
systems, and the vulnerabilities of machine learning applications.
There is cutting-edge work in the academic community to understand
state of the art cybersecurity capabilities and deliver new products to
the Department. For example, in my state, Georgia Tech's Institute for
Information Security and Privacy brings together computer scientists,
electrical engineers, policy and international relations experts, and
business professionals to gain a holistic understanding of
cybersecurity challenges and develop technologies and policies to
appropriately address these issues. How is the DOD, as well as each of
the Services, leveraging the cybersecurity expertise in the academic
community to prepare for both near- and long-term threats?
Dr. Griffin Cybersecurity is one of my top 10 priorities for
research and engineering. There are a variety of mechanisms we use to
engage academia on this topic. A number of our University Affiliated
Research Centers (UARCs) are engaged in cybersecurity activities with
DOD and the Military Departments. Through the Systems Engineering
Research Center (SERC) UARC, Georgia Tech Research Institute (GTRI) has
collaborated with the University of Virginia to prototype system
sensing technologies that monitor system operations for cyber threats.
GTRI is also supporting an effort to shape future university
engineering curriculum strategies to address engineering of cyber
resilient weapon systems. The Department also engages universities
using Broad Area Announcements. For example, Defense Advanced Research
Projects Agency (DARPA), funded a four year project as part of the
agency's Harnessing Autonomy for Countering Cyber-adversary Systems
(HACCS) program. Finally, the Army Research Office, the Office of Naval
Research and the Air Force Office of Scientific Research execute $46
million in basic research related to cybersecurity through individual
investigator and Multidisciplinary University Research Initiative
awards at multiple universities.
importance of maintaining basic research and applied research
2. Senator Perdue. Dr. Griffin, while accelerating development of
new technologies is often framed in terms of prototyping and
demonstrations of mature capabilities, it is also important for the
U.S. to continue to invest in long-term scientific research, DOD's 6.1
basic research and 6.2 applied research, in order to be prepared for
future threats and continue to maintain our high-skilled scientific
workforce. What is the importance of maintaining a balance and ensuring
continued support for 6.1 basic research and 6.2 applied research?
Dr. Griffin I will support continued robust funding for basic and
applied research in our 6.1 and 6.2 budget portfolios. The Department's
past investment in basic research has been the foundation for many of
the disruptive technologies utilized by our military and civilians
today. While basic research attracts the brightest scientific minds to
the fundamental questions in the Department's fields of interest,
applied research allows those minds to begin to utilize that
fundamental knowledge to address particular national security
challenges. Additionally, early-stage research projects are a means to
train students in fields essential to maintaining our future Defense
workforce. Robust applied research funding helps to more quickly
prototype and provide options to programs of record to meet defense
needs. While the Department places a strong emphasis on delivering new
technologies in the near term, we must also not lose sight of longer
term challenges that basic and applied research address.
__________
Questions Submitted by Senator Ted Cruz
small launch
3. Senator Cruz. Dr. Griffin, as you know, much of our warfighting
advantage resides in the strength and capability of our space-based
satellite assets. However, our adversaries are quickly catching up in
terms of both their own satellite constellations and their ability to
threaten and degrade our own space capabilities. The need for new
responsive access to space and diffuse constellations to improve
resiliency has been noted by many experts both inside and outside
government. However, until very recently, the United States has not had
many options to efficiently and affordably put such small sat
constellations into space, not to mention in the case of need of rapid
re-constitution in the face of conflict. Over the last several years,
new U.S. small launch systems have been developed, including companies
like Firefly Aerospace in Texas.
Can you describe for us how small launch fits into DOD's list of
needed next generation capabilities and how is DOD supporting the
emerging U.S. small launch providers? What more can be done to support
and perhaps accelerate the development and fielding of this technology?
And how can we on-ramp these capabilities more quickly and tap into new
innovations from small launch providers?
Dr. Griffin DOD space access capability is provided through Evolved
Expendable Launch Vehicle. Alternative small launch capability would be
procured through the private sector. FMR 7000.14-R, Vol 11A, Ch 13
allows U.S. private sector use of DOD space related facilities,
including Major Range and Test Facility Base, at direct costs accrued
in supporting the commercial space activity. ``Direct costs'' are the
actual costs that are directly attributable to the use of the facility,
over and above the indirect costs. This enables small launch providers
access to an existing broad range of space related facilities and range
infrastructure.
__________
Questions Submitted by Senator Jeanne Shaheen
cold weather conflict research
4. Senator Jeanne Shaheen. Dr. Griffin, the personnel at the U.S.
Army Cold Regions Research and Engineering Laboratory (CRREL) in
Hanover, New Hampshire conduct valuable research with the goal of
improving the readiness of the U.S. military by enhancing its ability
to effectively operate in cold weather environments. What is the status
of DOD cold weather-related research, as well as your assessment of its
importance in preparing our forces to operate in such an environment?
Dr. Griffin The U.S. Army Cold Regions Research and Engineering
Laboratory (CRREL) conducts research on cold region dynamics to provide
both on-site engineering solutions and strategic problem-solving for
the future. CRREL focuses particularly in the areas of terrain
composition (with a focus on permafrost), infrastructure stability and
resiliency, and testing for equipment and platforms intended for cold
weather use. They conduct their work in partnership with other DOD
stakeholders such as the Office of Naval Research, the U.S. Army
Institute for Environmental Medicine, and the Navy's Experimental
Diving Unit. This is a joint effort to further DOD's cold-weather
capabilities. Recently, my office and USNORTHCOM hosted a workshop with
researchers, service members, and Arctic professionals, where they
discussed priority requirements, current S&T investments, and gap
areas. This workshop underscored how existing investments are critical
enablers for military training, exercises, and operations that could
occur in high-altitude environments, the Arctic, and other areas
characterized by extreme cold or winter weather.
small business
5. Senator Jeanne Shaheen. Dr. Griffin, as you know, small
businesses in this country are the engines of innovation and job
growth. The Senate Armed Services Committee has routinely heard that
the Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) program is an essential
mechanism for DOD to develop new technologies that help the warfighter
and support our national defense. One of the criticisms that is often
made of the defense research enterprise is that new technologies do not
transition in an effective or efficient manner. There does not seem to
be an effective mechanism to transition a program of record or transfer
to a private sector firm. How does the SBIR program help to transition
technologies to, ultimately, get them to our warfighters--and do you
agree that SBIR should be made permanent?
Dr. Griffin The SBIR program seeds and grows technology options for
consideration by Programs of Record and our Prime Contractors. The SBIR
program seeks to mature technologies and reduce the development risk as
much as possible. However, SBIR is a Research & Development program and
by that nature, many technologies never mature to a level that enables
them to be transitioned.
Yes, SBIR should be made permanent.
Making these programs permanent would allow for consistency and
remove uncertainty about the long-term support for this critical driver
of innovation for DOD and job growth for the country. Permanency also
improves the ability for the DOD consumers of SBIR/STTR technology
solutions (programs of record, PEOs prime contractors and others) to
plan for technology integration and insertion.
technology transition speed
6. Senator Jeanne Shaheen. Dr. Griffin, I am a member of the Senate
Appropriations Committee. Are there changes to the appropriations
rules, as well as other budgeting and financial management tools, which
could be used to speed up technology transition?
Dr. Griffin Part of maintaining our technological advantage is not
only promoting aggressive technology investments but also transition
them into capabilities at a speed of relevance. Adequate funding
flexibilities for these types of efforts remains a challenge.
The new statutory authorities associated with ``middle-tier
acquisition pathways'' (Fiscal Year 2016 NDAA Section 804 Rapid
Prototyping and Rapid Fielding) and the Acquisition Agility Act (AAA)
(fiscal year 2017 NDAA sections 805-809) will help technology and
prototype transition, however, dedicated funding for these new rapid
prototyping/rapid fielding authorities has not been appropriated to
date. A flexible funding account for integration, experimentation, and
testing in support of transitioning successful technologies and
prototypes into major acquisition programs would also assist.
Another challenge associated with transition of successful
technologies into a program is the impact on the program baseline.
Rapid response to unexpected threats or game-changing technology can in
some cases drive costs that may breach the initial acquisition program
baseline. Although the intelligence, requirements, and acquisition
communities cooperate to identify and address threats, it is impossible
to be fully predictive. Amending Nunn-McCurdy breach language could
avoid penalizing programs trying to incorporating new technologies.
Exempting major acquisition programs that successfully incorporate a
modular, open systems approach (fiscal year 2017 NDAA section 805) will
enable these programs to incorporate new technology without additional
administrative overhead.
__________
Questions Submitted by Senator Kirsten Gillibrand
use of defense production act for scaling up production of defense
technologies
7. Senator Gillibrand. Dr. Griffin, far too many American start-ups
working on cutting-edge technologies with applications important to our
defense mission are having a difficult time accessing investment to
scale their research to production. This financing gap has led some of
our most innovative firms to turn to foreign investors, which offshores
production and undermines our ability to protect military technologies.
What role do you think the Department of Defense might play in
addressing this national security challenge?
Dr. Griffin A healthy manufacturing and defense industrial base is
essential to the economic strength and national security of the United
States. DOD will continue to seek to capture and transition innovative
ideas into military capabilities. In addition to the Defense Innovation
Unit Experimental (DIUx), which seeks to bridge the gap with start-ups,
DARPA is providing its Program Managers with mentoring and support to
help them navigate the venture capital world and increase the
likelihood of transitioning ideas into commercially viable product. I
will seek to increase DOD's engagement with all sources of innovation,
as these software and hardware start-ups underpin our modernization
priorities.
8. Senator Gillibrand. Dr. Griffin, could the Defense Production
Act's Title III financing authorities be put to greater use for helping
scale up production of defense technologies?
Dr. Griffin The Under Secretary of Defense for Acquisition and
Sustainment (USD(A&S) provides oversight on behalf of the Secretary of
Defense for the Defense Production Act Title III. I support her efforts
to expand the program by utilizing the full breadth of the authorities,
including loans and purchase commitments, and make the program nimble
by leveraging military services or field agencies in the execution
Title III projects that address their identified critical technology
needs. Further, I strongly support her efforts to remove the $50
million cap on each Title III project and the $133 million/yr limit on
DPA Title III appropriations as it allows DPA Title III to address
capital intensive follow-on commercialization projects to Research and
Engineering efforts like strategic radiation hardened microelectronics
and hardware integrity and security projects that can total well over
$50 million.
9. Senator Gillibrand. Dr. Griffin, will you commit to looking with
my staff at the issue of the potential role of the Defense Production
Act's Title III financing authorities in scaling up production of
defense technologies?
Dr. Griffin I will work with your staff as appropriate to identify
the Department's opportunities to scale up production of defense
technologies.
manufacturing usa's role in defense production
10. Senator Gillibrand. Dr. Griffin, I believe the Manufacturing
USA Network is critical to ensuring the United States remains a global
leader in manufacturing the cutting-edge technologies needed for our
national defense. Part of this bipartisan program's mission is to use
these public-private partnerships to develop and commercialize new
defense technologies that are critical to our men and women in uniform,
like 3D printing and smart sensors. As you know, the Defense Department
is leading 8 of the 14 current institutes within the network, including
one focused on integrated photonics located in Rochester, NY. Now that
you have been on the job for two months, what plans do you have in mind
for how the Manufacturing USA network can be used to strengthen our
defense production capacity, including preparing our workforce with in-
demand skills for advanced manufacturing, accelerating technology
transition, and assisting our startup companies and small manufacturers
in scaling up production?
Dr. Griffin The Manufacturing USA Network of 14 innovation
institutes is in the midst of a successful initial operating phase,
developing capability of importance to the Department. Continued DOD
involvement in the Manufacturing USA Network protects are equities and
enables further development of defense critical technologies into
affordable, domestic defense products across fourteen broad technology
areas, eight of which we have co-sponsored. To date, the DOD has
invested over $600 million to establish key innovation hubs for
additive manufacturing; digital manufacturing, design and
cybersecurity; lightweight and modern metals; integrated photonics;
flexible hybrid electronics; revolutionary fibers and textiles;
regenerative tissue manufacturing; and advanced robotics. The state-of-
the-art integrated photonics test, assembly and packaging facility is
opening soon in Rochester, NY and is a great example of the
collaborative manufacturing innovation ecosystems the DOD and in this
case, the New York state government which is also investing to
strengthen both commercial and defense production capabilities. Long
term engagement with the Manufacturing USA Network will allow DOD to
reap the benefits of these substantial investments in pre-competitive,
applied R&D. Manufacturing USA constitutes a key component of the
SECDEF's vision of a National Technology Innovation Base. The advanced
manufacturing ecosystem development and collaboration that these
institutes foster helps ensure that key advanced technologies that are
invented here are manufactured here. Together with our agency partners
at DOE, DOC (NIST), NASA, USDA, DOL, and DoEd, we will continue to
engage with small and medium sized manufacturers, identify scale-up
opportunities important to DOD needs, accelerate technology transition
domestically, and help train the advanced manufacturing workforce of
the future.
technology accelerator and transfer programs
11. Senator Gillibrand. Dr. Griffin, the Department of Defense's
MD5 National Security Technology Accelerator located at New York
University is building a national network of civil-military
partnerships in technology R&D to support entrepreneurs both within and
outside of DOD in successfully developing, commercializing, and
applying technology relevant to the military. Do you see an expanded
role for MD5 in addressing the ``valley of death'' concerns faced by
our military?
Dr. Griffin Like most of our innovation program offices, MD5/NSTA
is providing real value, both to the Department and the broad array of
non-traditional partners with whom it interacts. Although I believe the
Department needs to evaluate MD5/NSTA as part of a broader, holistic
discussion related to program priorities and attendant resources, I
believe MD5/NTSA is a key player in addressing, and hopefully
eliminating, the ``valley of death'' and delivering crucial new
technology to the warfighter. I plan to ensure that MD5/NSTA is
organized with mutually supporting innovation programs as I finalize
the organizational structure of the new Office of the Under Secretary
of Defense for Research and Engineering (OUSD(R&E)) to enhance the
scope, capabilities and mutually supporting efforts of MD5/NSTA and
other defense innovation entities.
12. Senator Gillibrand. Dr. Griffin, recently the Advisory Panel on
Streamlining and Codifying Acquisition Regulations, otherwise known as
the section 809 Panel, made a series of recommendations for how to
strengthen the Small Business Innovation Research and Small Business
Technology Transfer (SBIR-STTR) and the Rapid Innovation Fund (RIF)
Programs that are vital to technology research, development, and
commercialization. Do you believe the Defense Department is making full
use of the SBIR-STTR and RIF programs to leverage small businesses in
advancing the development and production of technologies?
Dr. Griffin I think the Department is making full use of the SBIR/
STTR and RIF programs within the current limitations of the law.
However, three changes would certainly allow the Department to make
better use of the SBIR and STTR programs: (1) make the SBIR and STTR
programs permanent; (2) remove the restriction against using SBIR or
STTR funds for administrative purposes and (3) restore and make
permanent the Phase Flexibility (also known as `Direct to Phase II')
provision, which provides the ability to shorten the development cycle
for critical technology solutions.
I will continue to review the current programs to identify
opportunities for improvement to ensure we utilize these programs
effectively to advance the development and production of technologies.
13. Senator Gillibrand. Dr. Griffin, what reforms do you believe
are needed to strengthen the SBIR-STTR and RIF programs to help small
companies and entrepreneurs commercialize technologies and get them
into the Defense Department's acquisition pipeline?
Dr. Griffin The SBIR and STTR programs support our ability to work
with small business across the nation to develop cutting edge solutions
for difficult problems facing our warfighters. As stated earlier,
restoring the Phase Flexibility, or Direct to Phase II, authority would
help small companies and entrepreneurs step into the process closer to
commercialization. This authority did shorten the development time for
technologies to transition to Phase III funding and encourages
companies with more mature technologies to participate in the program,
further enhancing the technical solutions available to DOD. As an
example, the Air Force used this authority to develop new technologies
to leverage commercial satellite imagery and to develop new hand-held
devices for dismounted navigation in a GPS-degraded environment.
Another change would be to allow DOD Components to award additional
Phase II efforts, beyond the current limit of two per topic per small
business, on topics developed by other Federal Agencies or DOD
Components. Components have become effective taking technologies
developed by others and adapting them for their own requirements to
reduce costs, time and risks. This change would allow DOD Components to
make better use of limited budgets to support their customers.
__________
Questions Submitted by Senator Martin Heinrich
directed energy
14. Senator Heinrich. Dr. Griffin, thank you for your comments at
the hearing on the need for the Department to ``persist'' with regards
to directed energy weapons in order to cross the threshold from R&D to
procurement. I agree, and I want to restate the following points I made
at this year's 2018 Directed Energy Summit, which I believe are
critical for transitioning these technologies.
We need senior level officials at the Pentagon to identify
capability gaps and know where directed energy can be a solution. We
need senior officials at the Pentagon to help push the Joint
Requirements Oversight Council and the military services to recognize
the benefit of directed energy weapon systems when they write military
requirements. We need senior level officials at the Pentagon to take
ownership of directed energy in budget deliberations and program
funding battles. And we need senior level officials to speak up for
directed energy when Analysis of Alternatives are occurring.
As the DOD Senior official for directed energy, what near-term
actions will you take to potentially increase investment and speed
transition of directed energy weapon systems?
Dr. Griffin The Department is making every possible effort to field
DE capabilities; however, we cannot field these capabilities before
they are ready, which includes having a mission, or a range of
missions, where DE provides the competitive advantage to our
warfighter. Over the past year, AT&L and CAPE jointly went through an
assessment of current state of the art in High Energy Lasers (HEL) as a
capability to do a variety of missions. We continue to reassure all the
stakeholders that DOD has a pretty good understanding of where we stand
in both the technology and the mission space. As a result of our
analyses, we are initiating new efforts to scale up electrically
powered lasers to levels that do not currently exist. In standing up
the Office of USD(R&E), we are having productive engagements with all
stakeholders, and looking to a future where DE weapons including High
Power Microwaves are a reality that supports the missions that provide
competitive advantage to DOD. We must be partners in building an
industrial base capable of building and delivering critical components
affordably and timely to accelerate the fielding of these systems.
15. Senator Heinrich. Dr. Griffin, as you know, this committee
recently designated the Joint Directed Energy Transition Office and
established a new prototyping and demonstration program at the
pentagon, of which you will be in charge, to accelerate the transition
of directed energy weapons. As the Senior Official with responsibility
for transitioning directed energy weapon systems, who in your
organization will handle the directed energy testing and transition?
Dr. Griffin As we fully implement the reorganization plans, I will
have oversight of the entire spectrum for research and development. The
Joint Directed Energy (DE) Transition Office will continue to focus on
basic and applied research to develop fundamental technologies
necessary for our DE systems. The components will perform the
prototyping and experimentation with support from my office to validate
we are building the capabilities we need, at the costs we can afford,
and with the agility and speed necessary to meet the warfighter
requirements. As part of the directed designation, the transition
office will assist the components in transitioning those validated
capabilities.
16. Senator Heinrich. Dr. Griffin, what role does the newly
designated Joint Directed Energy Transition Office play within your
portfolio and how will you resource that office?
Dr. Griffin As I described earlier, the Joint DE Transition Office
will provide oversight and synchronization of the fundamental
technologies needed to build our systems, provide support to the
Components in the prototyping and experimentation efforts, and support
the transition of capabilities that demonstrate their readiness to
transition into programs of record. I would like to emphasize,
transitioning these systems also require support from the industrial
base. We must be partners in building and delivering critical
components affordably and timely to accelerate the fielding of these
systems.
17. Senator Heinrich. Dr. Griffin, this year's budget request
refreshed a heritage PE for High Energy Laser Advanced Development,
requesting $69.53 million for PE 0603924D8Z. Who within the DOD would
be the executing agent for this line?
Dr. Griffin This PE will be managed and executed out of my office
starting in fiscal year 2019. There is a proposed fiscal year 2018
Enhancement in response to the Bipartisan Budget Act of 2018 for $36
million. This program complements, and is closely coordinated with,
other DOD HEL efforts directed at specific Service and Agency missions.
This effort will scale the output power of HELs to reach operationally
effective power levels applicable to broad mission areas across the DOD
and pursue improvements in common HEL system components, such as
efficient laser pump diodes for increased electrical-optical
efficiencies and efficient light-weight thermal management approaches
and/or power supplies.
18. Senator Heinrich. Dr. Griffin, what are your plans for the
position of Assistant Secretary of Defense for Research and
Engineering?
Dr. Griffin The Secretary of Defense will soon make the final
decisions on the detailed implementation plan for the reorganization of
the office of the Secretary of Defense, and specifically the split of
the USD(AT&L). I would like to avoid getting ahead of the Secretary and
his communication with this committee and other members of Congress on
the specifics of that plan, but I can share that the responsibilities
of the ASD(R&E) will transition to the new offices we are establishing.
Our emphasis on separating research and technology, and advanced
capabilities will focus the efforts across the spectrum from science
and technology, to prototyping and experimentation.
19. Senator Heinrich. Dr. Griffin, what is the status of the Joint
Directed Energy Test Center report?
Dr. Griffin The report has been completed by the Test Resource
Management Center and is under review. Upon review completion, it will
be submitted to the Senate Armed Services Committee.
role of defense labs
20. Senator Heinrich. Dr. Griffin, the 2017 Defense Science Board
study on the Defense Research Enterprise noted that ``The DOD Labs
contain the bulk of technology and engineering expertise of the
Department, almost 40,000 scientists and engineers. This is the core
muscle the Department has to create, transition, and deploy technology
to the warfighter.''
How do you plan to use the Labs to lay a bigger role in rapid
technology transition of both defense-unique and commercially available
technologies into defense acquisition programs or operational use?
Dr. Griffin The DOD laboratory enterprise and our scientists and
engineers are the core of our research and development programs. The
work they are doing for our warfighters is having an impact on
capability development. We must continue to enable rapid technology
transition by focusing on prototyping, experimentation, and
demonstration processes to ensure effective dialogue between the
research and development enterprise and the acquisition programs of
record. Recent authorities in fiscal year 2016 and 2017 NDAAs provide
pathways to prototyping technologies outside programs of record, which
enable much more rapid assessment of viability and a greater
opportunity to leverage the expertise of the DOD Labs. Close dialogue
and coordination by our laboratories, acquisition community, and
private sector is necessary for expeditious deployment of new
technologies in the face of an ever-changing battlefield environment
for our Warfighters.
role of funding and budgeting processes
21. Senator Heinrich. Dr. Griffin, in terms of the defense budget
and Congress, the way we appropriate funds is no way reflective of the
speed at which threats and technologies move. Too many good ideas die
on the vine while waiting for DOD to get the right money into the right
account, with the right rules according to various financial management
and appropriations laws and regulations.
What changes would you recommend both to slow-moving DOD budgetary
processes and to congressional procedures that might help speed up
technology transition processes, while still preserving accountability
and transparency that taxpayers deserve?
Dr. Griffin The two-year planning and programming budget cycle does
not lend itself to support rapid transition of successful technology
into capabilities because of the inherent uncertainty. Results of an
S&T effort are unpredictable; therefore, budgeting for a transition
pathway is difficult. An efficient, flexible, and expedient means to
re-align funds within an organization would alleviate this issue.
To enable the Department to take advantage of innovative
technologies and effectively transition them to the warfighter in a
timely manner, flexible funding accounts for rapid prototyping,
experimentation, integration, and testing should to be appropriated at
both the Department and Service levels. This will enable the Department
to bypass the slow-moving DOD budgetary processes. Flexible funding
accounts could speed up the transition and fielding of successful and
promising technologies.
Below threshold reprogramming (BTR) limits are also barriers for
technology transition. Current BTR limits restrict Service program
sponsors ability to test, integrate, and procure new major components
for a program of record. Modifying the current BTR language to increase
the limits would allow the restructuring of the program to integrate,
test, and field improved performance upgrades much sooner. Conversely,
waiting for formal Congressional reprogramming or traditional budgeting
procedures could delay these upgrades by up to two years. Additional
reporting mechanisms in Fiscal Year 2017 NDAA Acquisition Agility Act
which will ensure Congress and the Department leadership are aware of
impending program changes.
In addition, my organization is completing an assessment in support
of the fiscal year 2018 NDAA section 232 ``Review of Barriers to
Innovation in Research and Engineering Activities of the Department of
Defense.'' We may have additional recommendations to financial
management and budget barriers to technology transition.
national math & science initiative's college readiness program
22. Senator Heinrich. Dr. Griffin, I recently visited Cannon Air
Force Base where I heard about the National Math & Science Initiative's
College Readiness Program. This program aims to improve the quality of
school districts that serve military installations by training teachers
to teach STEM AP exams. The program increases the number of students
taking those classes and more than doubles the rate of qualifying
scores. This helps military installations retain their personnel by
making sure local schools are serving military families well. The
communities benefit because by focusing on teacher training, the
program benefits all students, not just DOD dependents. While the
program has been implemented in one thousand schools, only one such
program has run in NM, at Alamogordo High School. I am excited to see
this program come to qualifying schools that serve White Sands Missile
Range and Cannon High School. What will your office do to increase the
number of students this program can reach?
Dr. Griffin The Department of Defense partnered with the National
Math and Science Initiative (NMSI) since 2009 to reach military-
connected high schools to enhance the preparation of military children
for careers in STEM through AP math and science courses. NMSI's College
Readiness Program (CRP) has been implemented in 217 military-connected
schools serving 93 military installations to date. In the 2018-19
academic year, DOD will support the implementation of the CRP in 19 new
military-connected high schools across the Nation. The Department
continues to consider the viability of the NMSI program in addition to
other efforts supporting military children to maximize their impact.
Although the 2018-2019 cohort does not include any qualified schools
serving White Sands Missile Range or Cannon High School they could be
considered as part of a future implementation of the program.
basic research
23. Senator Heinrich. Dr. Griffin, what is the role of university
research and investment in basic science in supporting our
technological superiority? What areas of basic research are you worried
about in terms of underfunding within the U.S.?
Dr. Griffin Basic research investments answer fundamental
scientific questions which can lead to groundbreaking discoveries,
providing the foundation for future defense-related technologies. The
Department recognizes that much of this discovery is made by the
academic community. In fact, the Department is now the third largest
investor of basic science funding at universities. I believe it is
critical to engage with the academic community to build on this
partnership so that universities better understand the Department's
needs and to leverage these groundbreaking research findings. While I
believe that robust funding for basic research is needed across the
scientific disciplines, I particularly support basic research funding
in areas that provide the foundations for the Department's
technological priority areas including but not limited to artificial
intelligence, quantum information science, research setting the
foundations for hypersonics, future computing capabilities, materials
science, synthetic biology, oceanography, and social science. Research
programs in these areas are critical to supporting the Department's
superiority.
developmental test & evaluation and test resource management center
24. Senator Heinrich. Dr. Griffin, what are your plans to support
your office's Development T&E staff and the TRMC to support your
efforts in maintaining our ability to deliver operational capabilities
as quickly as possible?
Dr. Griffin I strongly agree we need to deliver operational
capabilities quickly. Both the Developmental T&E staff and the TRMC are
dedicated to this goal. Here are some of the specifics of my plan to
accomplish this.
The Developmental T&E Staff is committed to a ``Shift Left'' test
approach concentrating on collecting and evaluating test data as early
as possible in the acquisition process to reduce late discovery of
deficiencies and the costly need for re-design. Key to this effort is
the development and approval of the Test and Evaluation Master Plan
(TEMP), which DT&E and DOT&E work in collaboration with the program
offices to build. The TEMP lays out the strategy for testing weapon
systems and identifies the test infrastructure and capabilities
necessary to achieve that goal. The DT&E staff work closely with the
programs to ensure: 1) test activities are integrated into the schedule
as early as possible, 2) contractor and other test data is used where
possible to reduce duplicative testing, 3) joint DT/OT events are
maximized to further reduce duplication and test costs, and 4) test
feedback is shared with the program offices as early as possible. DT&E
also works closely with counterparts in the TRMC to ensure any test
infrastructure limitations or test needs are identified clearly in the
TEMP.
The Test Resource Management Center is an important organization
for ensuring the DOD's T&E workforce and infrastructure are modernized
and ready to support the testing of our weapon systems. TRMC
continually anticipates T&E infrastructure needs early in the
acquisition process through its collaborative strategic planning
process with the Services and OSD components and develops test
infrastructure roadmaps to highlight key deficiencies that need to be
addressed to support upcoming programs of record. Previous roadmaps
have been key to the early resourcing of T&E capability gaps in
electronic warfare testing, hypersonic ground testing, and threat
models. New roadmaps will address further T&E shortfalls in Hypersonic
open air testing, Cyber effects testing, EW threat integrated air
defenses, big data concepts, and others.
In addition to planning, the TRMC also manages 3 key programs to
ensure the test infrastructure is ready to support testing of our most
advanced weapons systems. TRMC's Test and Evaluation/Science and
Technology (T&E/S&T) Program matures test technologies from TRL 3 to
TRL 6 so they can be transitioned into T&E capabilities in our test
ranges around the country. The T&E/S&T program looks forward at the
advancement of the Department's acquisition programs and technology
demonstrators to anticipate technologies needed to test our next
generation weapon systems. Technology transition rates for the program
are well in excess of 50 percent due to the tight coupling of the
technology maturation efforts and the work that is done to ensure test
infrastructure projects are aligned to integrate them. A particularly
relevant example is the $100 million plus of investments T&E/S&T made
over the past decade to prototype test capabilities key to advancing
DOD hypersonic programs. T&E/S&T was the forerunner in developing a
hypersonic test roadmap and it was due to these efforts and investments
the TRMC was able to secure $350 million via a Resource Management
Decision (RMD) to implement these technologies on our test ranges. The
technologies matured by the T&E/S&T program are now being inserted and
implemented at Arnold Engineering Development Center to produce ground-
based test capabilities absolutely critical to fielding hypersonic
weapon systems. Due to the forward looking nature of the TRMC and the
timeliness of these key investments, the Department will save billions
of dollars and years of schedule in developing hypersonic weapon
systems.
The TRMC fields major test instrumentation to the Services' test
ranges via the Central Test and Evaluation Investment Program (CTEIP)
which focuses on developing high priority multi-service T&E
capabilities. As technologies are matured via the T&E/S&T program,
CTEIP adopts those technologies to field needed test capabilities. As
the Department looks for ways to accelerate the acquisition of weapon
systems, the TRMC also seeks to accelerate the process by which test
capabilities are fielded as the T&E community must constantly keep pace
and, in many cases, lead the development cycle. Over the past several
years, CTEIP has begun using more streamlined acquisition approaches
such as those offered under the Defense Ordnance Technology Consortium
(DOTC) and Other Transaction Authorities (OTAs) to speed contracting
and development processes. These approaches have worked well for CTEIP
and have enabled the TRMC to field test capabilities to the Services as
much as three times faster than traditional contracting approaches.
Additionally, these strategies have enabled TRMC to be much more
responsive to the fast moving world of cyber threats and have provided
a much quicker reaction time for responding to unanticipated critical
operational test shortfalls identified by DOT&E. Under my leadership,
the TRMC will continue to pursue streamlined acquisition approaches
like these as a ready and adequate test infrastructure is absolutely
critical for testing and fielding DOD weapon systems.
Lastly, the use of distributed testing has proved to save both time
and money for the Department and avoids the Services from building
duplicative capabilities across the country. The TRMC operates a third
program, the Joint Mission Environment Test Capability (JMETC), to
maximize distributed testing capabilities by connecting existing
laboratories, hardware in the loop facilities, installed system test
facilities, and open air range capabilities around the country. JMETC
and the TRMC establish standards and develops common interfaces,
promoting interoperability and enabling maximum re-use of the
Department's key test facilities. Test resource dollars are limited and
the TRMC maximizes those resources by encouraging the development and
adherence to those standards which ultimately avoids duplication,
reduces test time, and makes test capabilities more sustainable.
foreign students
25. Senator Heinrich. Dr. Griffin, many foreign students study in
STEM fields in this country and could potentially contribute to
national goals, but they often are forced to return to their home
country because of visas or because of an increasing number of good
employment options overseas and in their home countries. In fact, many
of these students are funded by DOD grants and research programs. How
can DOD appropriately make better use of the foreign STEM talent that
is studying and working in the U.S.?
Dr. Griffin The Department has long benefitted from the talents of
foreign students and some of the best minds in the world that come to
the U.S. to work with other top scientists. Foreign graduate students
contribute to our economy, teach our undergraduates, and make
impressive research discoveries here in the United States. The
Department should continue to identify and hire the best and brightest
minds from around the world to address fundamental research challenges
of interest to our national security. Maintaining strong, stable
funding for defense research is part and parcel to our success in this
mission. We need to work with the State Department, the academic
community and other stakeholders to identify ways we can take advantage
of the tremendous talent educated in the U.S. while maintaining a
reasonable balance to avoid unintended transfer of research and
knowledge on critical technology areas important to the Department.