[Senate Hearing 114-658, Part 5]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office]
S. Hrg. 114-658, Pt. 5
DEPARTMENT OF DEFENSE AUTHORIZATION FOR APPROPRIATIONS FOR FISCAL YEAR
2017 AND THE FUTURE YEARS DEFENSE PROGRAM
=======================================================================
HEARING
before the
SUBCOMMITTEE ON EMERGING THREATS AND CAPABILITIES
of the
COMMITTEE ON ARMED SERVICES
UNITED STATES SENATE
ONE HUNDRED FOURTEENTH CONGRESS
SECOND SESSION
ON
S. 2943
TO AUTHORIZE APPROPRIATIONS FOR FISCAL YEAR 2017 FOR MILITARY
ACTIVITIES OF THE DEPARTMENT OF DEFENSE, FOR MILITARY CONSTRUCTION, AND
FOR DEFENSE ACTIVITIES OF THE DEPARTMENT OF ENERGY, TO PRESCRIBE
MILITARY PERSONNEL STRENGTHS FOR SUCH FISCAL YEAR, AND FOR OTHER
PURPOSES
----------
PART 5
EMERGING THREATS AND CAPABILITIES
----------
APRIL 12, 2016
Printed for the use of the Committee on Armed Services
DEPARTMENT OF DEFENSE AUTHORIZATION FOR APPROPRIATIONS FOR FISCAL YEAR
2017 AND THE FUTURE YEARS DEFENSE PROGRAM--Part 5 EMERGING THREATS AND
CAPABILITIES
S. Hrg. 114-658, Pt. 5
DEPARTMENT OF DEFENSE AUTHORIZATION FOR APPROPRIATIONS FOR FISCAL YEAR
2017 AND THE FUTURE YEARS DEFENSE PROGRAM
=======================================================================
HEARINGS
before the
COMMITTEE ON ARMED SERVICES
UNITED STATES SENATE
ONE HUNDRED FOURTEENTH CONGRESS
SECOND SESSION
ON
S. 2943
TO AUTHORIZE APPROPRIATIONS FOR FISCAL YEAR 2017 FOR MILITARY
ACTIVITIES OF THE DEPARTMENT OF DEFENSE, FOR MILITARY CONSTRUCTION, AND
FOR DEFENSE ACTIVITIES OF THE DEPARTMENT OF ENERGY, TO PRESCRIBE
MILITARY PERSONNEL STRENGTHS FOR SUCH FISCAL YEAR, AND FOR OTHER
PURPOSES
__________
PART 5
EMERGING THREATS AND CAPABILITIES
__________
APRIL 12, 2016
__________
Printed for the use of the Committee on Armed Services
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COMMITTEE ON ARMED SERVICES
JOHN McCAIN, Arizona, Chairman JACK REED, Rhode Island
JAMES M. INHOFE, Oklahoma BILL NELSON, Florida
JEFF SESSIONS, Alabama CLAIRE McCASKILL, Missouri
ROGER F. WICKER, Mississippi JOE MANCHIN III, West Virginia
KELLY AYOTTE, New Hampshire JEANNE SHAHEEN, New Hampshire
DEB FISCHER, Nebraska KIRSTEN E. GILLIBRAND, New York
TOM COTTON, Arkansas RICHARD BLUMENTHAL, Connecticut
MIKE ROUNDS, South Dakota JOE DONNELLY, Indiana
JONI ERNST, Iowa MAZIE K. HIRONO, Hawaii
THOM TILLIS, North Carolina TIM KAINE, Virginia
DAN SULLIVAN, Alaska ANGUS S. KING, JR., Maine
MIKE LEE, Utah MARTIN HEINRICH, New Mexico
LINDSEY GRAHAM, South Carolina
TED CRUZ, Texas
Christian D. Brose, Staff Director
Elizabeth L. King, Minority Staff Director
_____________
Subcommittee on Emerging Threats and Capabilities
JOE WILSON, South Carolina, Chairman
JOHN KLINE, Minnesota JAMES LANGEVIN, Rhode Island
BILL SHUSTER, Pennsylvania JIM COOPER, Tennessee
DUNCAN HUNTER, California JOHN GARAMENDI, California
RICHARD NUGENT, Florida MARC VEASEY, Texas
RYAN ZINKE, Montana DONALD NORCROSS, New Jersey
TRENT FRANKS, Arizona BRAD ASHFORD, Nebraska
DOUG LAMBORN, Colorado PETE AGUILAR, California
MO BROOKS, Alabama
BRADLEY BYRNE, Alabama
ELISE STEFANIK, New York
(ii)
C O N T E N T S
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April 12, 2016
Page
The Strategy and Implementation of the Department of Defense's 1
Technology Offsets Initiative.
Welby, Honorable Stephen P., Assistant Secretary of Defense for 2
Research and Engineering.
Prabhakar, Arati, Director, Defense Advanced Research Projects 11
Agency.
Roper, William B., JR., Director, Strategic Capabilities Office.. 22
Questions for the Record......................................... 50
(iii)
DEPARTMENT OF DEFENSE AUTHORIZATION FOR APPROPRIATIONS FOR FISCAL YEAR
2017 AND THE FUTURE YEARS DEFENSE PROGRAM
----------
TUESDAY, APRIL 12, 2016
U.S. Senate,
Subcommittee on Emerging
Threats and Capabilities,
Committee on Armed Services,
Washington, DC.
THE STRATEGY AND IMPLEMENTATION OF THE DEPARTMENT OF DEFENSE'S
TECHNOLOGY OFFSETS INITIATIVE
The subcommittee met, pursuant to notice, at 2:36 p.m. in
Room SR-222, Russell Senate Office Building, Senator Deb
Fischer (chairwoman of the subcommittee) presiding.
Members present: Senators Fischer, Cotton, Tillis, Nelson,
Manchin, Kaine, and Heinrich.
OPENING STATEMENT OF SENATOR DEB FISCHER, CHAIRWOMAN
Senator Fischer. Good afternoon. The Subcommittee on
Emerging Threats and Capabilities meets today to receive
testimony on the Department of Defense's third offset strategy.
In 2014, Under Secretary Kendall provided this subcommittee
with a classified briefing on U.S. technological superiority.
In November of that year, then-Secretary of Defense Hagel
announced the start of what he referred to as, quote, ``a game-
changing third offset strategy,'' end quote.
Since this announcement, many senior leaders in the
Department of Defense, including Secretary and Deputy
Secretary, have spoken at length about our military's eroding
technological edge and the significance of the third offset
strategy. However, these discussions tend to broadly focus on
abstract ideas and the general importance of innovation. The
purpose of today's hearing is to explore the concrete details
beneath the notional concepts.
I look forward to hearing from our witnesses today about
what activities make up the third offset strategy and the
extent to which it represents a change from past practice.
Appearing before the subcommittee today, we have Dr. Roper,
Director of the Strategic Capabilities Office; Dr. Prabhakar,
Director of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or
DARPA; and Secretary Stephen Welby, the Assistant Secretary of
Defense for Research and Engineering.
I'd like to welcome and thank you all for being here today.
I would turn to my Ranking Member for any opening comments
he would like to make.
STATEMENT OF SENATOR BILL NELSON
Senator Nelson. Madam Chairman, thank you.
I simply am a big fan of what these folks do. I think we
need to support the President's request, and then double it.
[Laughter.]
Senator Nelson. That's my opening statement.
Senator Fischer. Thank you, Senator Nelson.
We will now turn to our witnesses. Your full statements
will be made part of the record, and I would ask that you
provide us with some brief opening comments, after which we
will proceed to 7-minute rounds in our questioning.
Secretary Welby.
STATEMENT OF HONORABLE STEPHEN P. WELBY, ASSISTANT SECRETARY OF
DEFENSE FOR RESEARCH AND ENGINEERING
Mr. Welby. Chairman Fischer, Ranking Member Nelson, members
of the committee, Senator Heinrich, thank you. I'm pleased to
have the opportunity to provide testimony on the technological
underpinnings of the Department of Defense's third offset
strategy. I join my colleagues from DARPA and the Strategic
Capabilities Office in doing so.
In my role as Assistant Secretary of Defense for Research
and Engineering, I serve as the Chief Technology Officer for
the Department of Defense, and I'm responsible for the
Department's strategies and supporting plans to develop and
leverage technology needed to support continued U.S.
technological superiority.
For the last 30 years, the U.S. and our allies have had--
been able to count on a set of unique capabilities in combat
that no regional adversary could bring to bear. We're now at a
pivotal moment in history, where the advanced technical
capability and capacity that the Nation has relied upon on the
battlefield is now being challenged by military technology
investments being made by increasingly capable and assertive
powers. As Secretary Carter said during his budget rollout
testimony, Russia and China are our most stressing competitors.
They have developed and continue to advance military systems
that threaten our advantages in specific areas. In some cases,
they're developing new weapons and ways of war that seek to
achieve their objectives rapidly before they hope we can
respond.
Our Nation has long pursued strategies that leverage U.S.
technological advantage as a force multiplier. We need to
continue to leverage those advances in technology and in new
operational concepts to provide sustained advantage to U.S.
forces, shifting the landscape of future national security
competition to our advantage by seeking asymmetric
opportunities in technological and operational innovation.
Merriam-Webster defines an ``offset'' as something that
serves to counterbalance or compensate for something else. An
offset strategy is an approach to military competition that
seeks to provide an asymmetric advantage to the United States
rather than competing head-to-head or tank-for-tank or plane-
for-plane in an area where a potential adversary may also
possess potential strength. Instead, an offset strategy seeks
to shift the axis of competition through the introduction of
new operational concepts and technologies towards one in which
the U.S. has a significant and sustainable advantage.
The U.S. was successful in pursuing two distinct offset
strategies during the Cold War:
The first of these offset strategies occurred in the 1950s,
when President Eisenhower sought to overcome the Warsaw Pact's
numerical advantage by leveraging U.S. nuclear superiority to
introduce battlefield nuclear weapons, which shifted the axis
of competition from competing on conventional force numbers to
competing in an area where the U.S. had an advantage.
A second offset strategy occurred in the 1980s, with the
recognition that the Soviet Union had achieved nuclear power--
the United States. The second offset strategy sought to create
an enduring advantage by pursuing a brand new approach to joint
operations, leveraging the combined effects of near-zero-miss
distance weapons, realtime targeting, and joint battle networks
to create a new era of conventional precision engagement.
This combined suite of technologies gave the U.S. a
fundamental advantage that we have sustained for the last 30
years, capabilities that provided the U.S. and its allies with
an asymmetrical advantage in every fight. Today, we see the
emergence of increasing technological symmetry, and that's why
the Department is discussing the need for a new offset
strategy.
Today, the third offset strategy is not a document that you
can go find in a drawer somewhere in the Pentagon. Instead,
it--the term really describes the broad nature of capabilities
that the Department expects to realize over the coming years by
pursuing developments in advanced technologies, by conducting
experimentation with prototype systems, through increased
emphasis on war-gaming to help us understand new concepts, and
by emphasizing the need to innovate across the entire DOD
enterprise.
In the fiscal 2017 defense budget request, Secretary Carter
identified more than $3.6 billion of investment in fiscal year-
2017 and 18 billion in specific investment over the Future Year
Defense Plan, focused on spurring research, development, and
procurement of advanced capabilities that our military will
need to fight and win in high-end conflicts in the future.
These investments and others directly support and enable a
third offset strategy.
The investments in the fiscal 2017 defense budget request
include new capabilities that can be fielded rapidly through
modifying and upgrading existing systems--and we'll be happy to
talk about some of those here today; material concepts that
could enter accelerated development; and, again, something I'd
like to talk about, our technology-driven concepts that could
have a significant impact on the joint force over a longer
term. They--the investments also emphasized the critical
importance of focusing on the cost of weapon systems so that--
to be able to introduce these kind of disruptive capabilities
into the joint force at real scale.
Deputy Secretary of Defense Work has emphasized, in his
remarks, the importance of advanced software-enabled
capabilities for a third offset. Emerging capabilities in
advanced algorithms and software intelligence offer a
significant potential advantage to a joint force, enabling
systems to process large quantities of data at a high speed to
identify emergent patterns and trends, speeding decision making
and enabling faster-than-human reaction time in new and
emerging areas of conflicts, such as cyber and electronic
warfare, and supporting new models of manned-unmanned combat
teaming; and finally, permitting new weapons concepts that can
operate in critically challenging cyber and electronic warfare-
constrained environments.
The Department's goal to sustain and advance our Nation's
technological superiority for the 21st century national
security environment requires a sound research-and-development
investment strategy. The DOD's research and engineering
community works to create options for the Department and serves
as a novel and agile innovation engine for the Department. The
core science and technology efforts of ASDR&E, the service
laboratories of DARPA and SCO are focused on creating long-
range opportunities for the Department's future material
options.
As DOD develops the third offset strategy, the Department's
research and engineering enterprise is well prepared to
develop, shape, and create technology options to inform future
operational concepts. Our goal must always be to ensure that
our soldiers, sailors, airmen, and marines always have the
scientific knowledge, the decisive technology, the advanced
systems and tools, and the materiel edge to succeed when called
upon. Our research and engineering enterprise measures its
success in the security of the Nation and the success of our
warfighters.
Let me close by thanking the committee for its strong
interest in and support of the Department's research and
engineering efforts as we work to discover, design, and deliver
the technology capabilities our warfighters will need in the
future.
Thank you.
[The prepared statement of Mr. Welby follows:]
Prepared Statement by Mr. Stephen Welby
introduction
Chairman Fischer, Ranking Member Nelson, and Members of the
Subcommittee, I am pleased to have the opportunity to provide testimony
on the Department of Defense's Third Offset Strategy and to join my
colleagues from Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) and
Strategic Capabilities Office (SCO). In my role as the Assistant
Secretary of Defense for Research and Engineering (ASD(R&E)), the Chief
Technology Officer of the Department of Defense, I am responsible for
the Department's strategies and supporting plans to develop and
leverage the technologies needed to ensure continued US technological
superiority.
We are at a pivotal moment in history where the advanced technical
capability and capacity that the Nation has relied upon to provide us
with unmatched technological superiority on the battlefield (including
capabilities in precision weapons, long-range ISR, space systems and
stealth) are now being challenged by the military technology
investments being made by increasingly capable and assertive powers.
Other nations are increasing their investments in advanced
capabilities, including anti-access/area-denial capabilities, which are
intended to counter US technological strengths and deter the US from
projecting power abroad to defend our national interests, maintaining
international norms, and supporting our allies and partners.
Our nation has long pursued strategies that leveraged US
technological advantage as a force multiplier. We continue to leverage
advances in technology and new operational concepts to provide
sustained advantage to US forces--shifting the landscape of future
national security competition to our advantage by seeking asymmetric
opportunities in technological and operational innovation.
a focus on the future
As the Department looks to the future, significant global
challenges are on the horizon that will require renewed emphasis on
sustaining US technological superiority. For the last 30 years the US
and our allies have been able to count on a set of unique capabilities
in combat that no regional adversary could bring to bear: long range
precision weapons, airborne ISR for real time targeting, network
centric integration of command and control, low observable systems, and
integrated use of space assets. These technological capabilities
enabled a US strategy of power projection--leveraging a limited forward
presence with the ability to respond to provocation with follow-on
forces that could be moved to theater and deployed with confidence in
an opposed environment. Today, we are seeing a return to a more
competitive environment--one where regional actors have studied US
strengths and are capable of making the investments required to develop
advanced systems designed to directly counter US technological
strengths in a power projection environment. This evolution in our
competitive technological posture will require the DOD to invest in the
technological and operational innovations required to sustain our
decisive conventional overmatch against regional adversaries.
As Secretary Carter has said, ``Russia and China are our most
stressing competitors. They have developed and are continuing to
advance military systems that seek to threaten our advantages in
specific areas. In some case, they are developing weapons and ways of
wars that seek to achieve their objectives rapidly, before they hope,
we can respond.'' \1\ Given our constrained budget resources, we must
pursue a technological strategy to ensure our conventional deterrence
remains as strong in the future as it is today. Accomplishing this goal
is one of the most important strategic tasks facing the Department.
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\1\ Remarks by Secretary Carter on the Budget at the Economic Club
of Washington, DC, February 2, 2016
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As it has been in the past, technological and operational
innovation will be the key to future strategy. Maintaining and
extending our competitive, technological, and operational advantages is
not a purely quantitative contest with other nations. Rather, the US
must seek asymmetric advantages--particularly those that take advantage
of US strengths in military and commercial technological innovation. We
must accelerate our approaches to identifying promising technological
differentiators, our processes for mapping technological capability to
operational advantage, and our methods of moving new capabilities from
laboratory to field.
Future capabilities will be increasingly joint in nature;
leveraging the ability to synchronize simultaneous operations in the
space, air, sea, undersea, ground, and cyber domains. Emerging tools
based on breakthroughs in computer science, advanced electronics, novel
communications and sensors, and human-machine interfaces will enable
new operational concepts that will enable faster and better decision
making, coordinated operations at range and across the battlespace by
manned, unmanned, and cyber operations.
toward a third offset strategy
Merriam-Webster defines an Offset as ``something that serves to
counterbalance or to compensate for something else.'' \2\ An offset
strategy is an approach to military competition that seeks to
asymmetrically compensate for a disadvantaged position. Rather than
competing head to head in an area where a potential adversary may also
possess significant strength, an offset strategy seeks to shift the
axis of competition, through the introduction of new operational
concepts and technologies, toward one in which the US has a significant
and sustainable advantage. A successful offset strategy devalues an
adversary's current advantages and imposes costs to react to US efforts
and help establish a long-term competitive advantage for US forces.
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\2\ http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/offset
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The US was successful in pursuing two distinct offset strategies
during the Cold War. These strategies enabled the US to ``offset'' the
Soviet Union's numerical advantage in conventional forces without
pursuing the enormous investments in forward deployed forces that would
have been required to provide overmatch soldier for soldier and tank
for tank. These offset strategies relied on fundamental innovation in
technology, operational approaches, and organizational structure to
compensate for Soviet advantage in time, space, and force size.
The first of these offset strategies occurred in the 1950's, when
President Eisenhower sought to overcome Warsaw Pact's numerical
advantage by leveraging US nuclear superiority to introduce battlefield
nuclear weapons--thus shifting the axis of competition from
conventional force numbers to an arena where the US possessed an
asymmetrical advantage. This approach provided stability and offered
the foundation for deterrence.
The second of these offset strategies arose in the late 1970's and
1980's with the recognition that the Soviet Union had achieved nuclear
parity. The Second Offset Strategy, informed by studies such as the
1973 Long Range Research and Development Planning Program, sought to
create an enduring advantage by pursuing a new approach to joint
operations--leveraging the combined effects of conventional precision
weapons, real-time long-range ISR sensor capabilities capable of
supporting real time precision targeting, and the joint battle networks
that permitted these capabilities to be synchronized and executed over
the full breadth of the battlespace. These integrated systems-of-
systems provided a significant force multiplier by improving the
efficiency and effectiveness of conventional strike systems, creating
opportunities for synergistic effects across warfighting domains, and
permitting US forces to more effectively and rapidly project
conventional power globally with reduced forward presence. These
conventional targeting and strike capabilities built on US advantages
in weapons technology, sensor technology, aviation systems, software
and computer architecture, and space-based capabilities (particularly
space based communications and the global positioning system) to
provide the ability to service targets with unprecedented accuracy.
This combined suite of technologies reflected unique US technical
capabilities at the time--capabilities that provided the US and its
allies with an asymmetric advantage over Soviet forces.
It is important to note that neither of these two original offset
strategies was solely about technological advantage. In each case, it
was the right combination of technology-enabled operational and
organizational innovation that provided decisive strategic and
operational advantage and therefore bolstered conventional deterrence.
The capabilities of the Second Offset Strategy provided the US with
decisive conventional overmatch against regional adversaries. As a
result, the asymmetric advantage provided by these capabilities has
been a central feature of the US doctrine for over three decades.
what has changed?
At the time of the introduction of the Second Offset Strategy in
the early 1980's, the US was the only nation with the knowledge and
capacity to develop, deploy, and successfully execute the intelligence,
surveillance and reconnaissance capabilities, the space-based systems,
and the precision weapons that supported this approach. Today,
competitors such as Russia and
China (and countries to which these nations proliferate advanced
capabilities) are pursuing and deploying advanced weapons and
capabilities that demonstrate many of the same technological strengths
that provide the technological basis for US advantage. This growing
symmetry between US technical capabilities and near-peer potential
competitors is particularly seen in the capabilities demonstrated
during Russian power-projection operations in Syria.
There has been significant public discussion about anti-access/area
denial (A2/AD) capabilities. These advanced capabilities include anti-
air and anti-surface sensors and weapons systems designed to make it
more difficult for the US to project power and operate at extended
range. Potential adversaries have had over two decades to study the
tools and operational concepts that underpin the US technology-enabled
conventional strategy and have learned from our operational successes.
With the globalization of technology and technological talent and with
growing resources being applied to military modernization, potential
competitors are seeking similar technological capabilities to those the
US has deployed, and are optimizing them to blunt US advantage. The
emergence of A2/AD capabilities, which leverage similar precision
guidance and seeker/sensor technologies to those that underpinned the
Second Offset Strategy, again demonstrate the recent emergence of
increased symmetry in military technical capabilities. Potential
competitors are beginning to catch up, potentially eroding the margin
of conventional advantage enjoyed by US forces since the end of the
Cold War.
toward a third offset strategy
The emergence of increasing symmetry in national security
environment suggests that it is again time to begin considering the mix
of technologies, system concepts, military organizations, and
operational concepts that might shift the nature of the competition to
US advantage. Such a set of capabilities would provide the basis for a
Third Offset Strategy. As was true of previous offset strategies, a
Third Offset Strategy would seek, in a budget constrained environment,
to maintain and extend US competitive technological and operational
advantage by identifying asymmetric advantages that are enabled by
unique US strengths and capabilities. A Third Offset Strategy would
ensure that our conventional deterrence posture remains as strong in
the future as it is today and would establish the conditions to extend
that advantage into the future.
Today, the Third Offset Strategy is not a formal document that lays
out a single course for future capabilities. Instead the term describes
the broad nature of capabilities the Department expects to realize over
the coming years by pursuing developments in advanced technologies by
conducting experimentation with prototype systems to inform future
options, through an increased emphasis on war gaming to help understand
how new concepts can provide enduring advantage, and by emphasizing the
need to innovate across the entire DOD enterprise, and through an
emphasis on delivering new and enhanced capability to the warfighter in
the coming years.
The Department anticipates that that the capabilities delivered
through a Third Offset Strategy will:
Enable the Joint Force to fight and deliver effects from
a distributed posture at extended ranges
Enable the Joint Force to leverage range, precision and
speed to seize and maintain the initiative
Enable the Joint Force to leverage dispersal and new
forms of operational sanctuary to increase survivability
Enable the Joint Force to achieve mass in the form of
ensembles of many low-cost, collaborating ``effectors''
Enable the Joint Force to develop new forms of
distributed maneuver and close combat techniques that combine kinetic,
electronic warfare and cyber-enabled operations
Enable the Joint force to operate battle networks much
less vulnerable to cyber and electronic attack
Under a Third Offset Strategy, a combination of these capabilities,
combined with the continued maturation of current US capabilities and
strengths, will extend and enable US capability to project power and
deliver dominant overmatch if called upon--rendering ineffective
potential adversary investments in A2/AD capabilities and advanced
weapons systems. These envisioned third offset capabilities will
provide the underpinnings for future conventional deterrence and will
provide the basis for support to US partners and Allies into the
future.
Deputy Secretary of Defense Work has emphasized the importance of
advanced software-enabled capabilities to any Third Offset Strategy.
\3\ Emerging capabilities in artificial intelligence and autonomy offer
significant advantage to the Joint Force--enabling the future force to
develop and operate advanced joint, collaborative human-machine battle
networks that synchronize simultaneous operations in space, air, sea,
undersea, ground, and cyber domains. Artificial intelligence will allow
new levels of autonomy--the limited delegation of decision-making
authority--within joint battle networks, leading to entirely new
opportunities for human-machine collaboration and combat teaming.
\3\ Deputy Secretary Work's interview with David Ignatius at
``Securing Tomorrow'' forum at the Washington Post Conference Center in
Washington, DC, March 30, 2016
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With the goal of achieving future operational advantage, the
Department is pursuing developments in five distinct areas enabled by
recent developments in advanced algorithms and software intelligence:
Autonomous Learning Systems--systems capable of
processing large data sets to identify emergent patterns and models in
near real time and/or that have the delegated authority to recommend or
make decisions based on analysis of these data sets, especially in
applications that require faster than human reaction times (e.g., cyber
defense, electronic warfare, missile defense, and active vehicle
protection systems
Human-Machine Collaboration--new capabilities that team
human decision makers with software-enabled support systems to exploit
the advantages of both for better and faster decisions
Assisted Human Operations--using software enabled systems
to enhance human perform in combat (e.g., wearable electronics and
combat ``apps'')
Manned-Unmanned Combat Teaming--advanced system-of-
systems that employ innovative cooperative activities between manned
and unmanned systems to provide new operational capabilities
Cyber and Electronic Warfare (EW) Hardened and Networked-
Enabled Semi-Autonomous Weapons--weapon systems that can locally
communicate and coordinate their behavior for improved effectiveness in
communications denied environments
Recent advances in advanced algorithms and software intelligence
are expected to have significant impact in education, health care, and
many commercial sectors in the coming decade. We anticipate US
leadership in these areas to offer potential benefit in national
security capabilities as well. We anticipate these emerging
capabilities to ultimately support specific Service and Joint combat
tasks and manifest themselves uniquely in domain-specific ways in
support of new operational and organizational constructs.
As the Department develops a Third Offset Strategy, it is critical
to prepare for a future security environment of continuous
technological competition--one that will require sustained emphasis on
the US maintaining its ability to out-innovate our competitors. This
focus on innovation will require the Department to be open to all
potential sources of technical advantage--leveraging our traditional
industrial base, academia, and non-traditional suppliers to achieve
competitive advantage. Speed of delivery from concept to fielding will
be critical in this environment and will likely create a demand for new
flexible architectures, more agile capability delivery models, and
improved mechanisms for incremental capability and technology
insertion. These factors will create a significant demand for a highly
skilled defense science and technology workforce with an increased
emphasis on ensuring the Department can attract and retain highly
sought after talent.
fiscal year 2017 investment in third offset strategy capabilities
In testimony \4\ supporting the Fiscal Year 2017 Defense Budget
Request, Secretary Carter identified more than $3.6 billion of
investment in fiscal year 2017 and $18 billion in investment across the
Future Year Defense Plan (FYDP) to help spur research, development,
test and evaluation, and procurement of advanced capabilities our
military will need to deter and if necessary fight and win high-end
conflicts in the future. These investments directly support the
objectives of a Third Offset Strategy.
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\4\ Secretary of Defense's written statement before the Senate
Armed Services Committee on March 17, 2016
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While relatively modest compared to the Department's overall
program, these investments will enable the development of leading-edge,
asymmetric capabilities and help spur development of operational
concepts to counter advanced adversaries. This approach is similar to
the development and implementation of the Second Offset Strategy in the
early 1980's--the initial Second Offset Strategy investments were a
fraction of DOD's budget, but they ultimately led to the development of
the joint guided munitions capabilities that have been used in every
American conflict since Desert Storm.
The investments in the fiscal year 2017 Defense Budget Request
include new capabilities that can be fielded rapidly through modifying
and upgrading existing systems, material concepts that could
immediately enter accelerated development, and technology-driven
concepts that could have a significant impact on the Joint Force's
conventional capabilities over the longer term. They also emphasize the
critical importance of focusing on cost so that we will be able to
introduce disruptive capabilities into the Joint Force at scale.
Many of the capabilities being developed to support a Third Offset
Strategy remain classified, and therefore it is only possible to break
down the $18 billion dollar investment publicly in six broad
categories:
First, to address the dual challenges of getting into
theater (or the anti-access challenge) and operating under guided
munitions threat (or the area-denial problem), the Department proposes
investing more than $3 billion over the FYDP in weapons and concepts
for surface-strike and air-to-air combat to negate competitor
investments in these areas. These include upgrades to a number of
existing weapons and enhancements to on-going efforts to develop new
weapons.
Second, to insure our ability to prevail in future guided
munitions salvo competition, the Department proposes investing nearly
$500 million over the FYDP for improvements in cost-effective
approaches to defend, disperse, and protect key operational
capabilities and operational locations.
Third, the Department proposes investing more than $3
billion over the FYDP to ensure we will continue to have the most
lethal submarine and undersea force in the world. These investments
will leverage new payloads, better sensors, and new undersea systems to
enhance deterrence and ensure we continue to own this domain.
Fourth, the Department proposes nearly $3 billion over
the FYDP to advance the development of human-machine teaming,
collaborative decision making, and efforts to disaggregate complex
systems into many, lower-cost systems operating together to enable
cooperative ensemble operations. When demonstrated, these capabilities
will create radically new options for delivering combat power from
disaggregated systems and will create significant operational and
strategic dilemmas for potential adversaries.
Fifth, we are investing more than $1.7 billion over the
FYDP in cyber and EW capabilities including advances in cognitive
systems that can sense, learn, and react automatically, and generate
effective countermeasures against new or unknown threats in real time,
ensuring our ability to operate within the cyber and EW domains while
denying them to the adversary.
Sixth, we are investing more than $500 million over the
FYDP to expand war gaming, test new operational concepts, tactics,
techniques and procedures, and fund demonstrations of advanced
capabilities. A major focus will be exploring new operational concepts
and capabilities for ground combat.
These summary investments include only the scope of programs that
are supporting prototyping, experimentation, and operational
demonstration and do not include the significant investments being made
across the Department's Research and Engineering enterprise. Within the
Service laboratories and DARPA, critical supporting technologies are
being developed that will extend and enhance our ability to address
future military challenges, shift the cost curve to improve
affordability, or anticipate and create technological surprise. These
core S&T investments maintain and extend the underlying foundational
technical advantage on which current and future system innovations are
based.
the role of the research and engineering enterprise
The Department's goal to sustain and advance our Nation's
technological superiority for the 21st Century's national security
environment requires sound research and development investments. The
enhanced use of prototyping, demonstration, and experimentation will
help the Department to more rapidly mature and assess the impact these
technologies can have on our future force. Our investments focus on
protecting essential US advantages in design, development, and
manufacturing capabilities that would be very difficult to reconstitute
if lost. These investments deliver the knowledge and tools necessary to
preserve our advantage in a future global environment and provide the
Department with the ability to make a strategic choice in the future to
shape the nature of military competition.
The DOD Research and Engineering community works to create options
for how the Department will meet our Nation's future national security
needs and serve as an agile innovation engine for the Department. We
must continue to focus on speeding the development and application of
technology to meet acquisition program needs and must leverage ideas
from inside and outside the Department; adapting and shaping them to
solve military problems.
The ASD(R&E) serves as the Chief Technology Officer of the
Department and provides oversight, guidance and direction to Service
and Defense Agency science and technology investments. Through the
Reliance 21 process, we coordinate the efforts of the Services to
maximize return on investment and avoid unnecessary duplication of
effort. Research and Development areas coordinated through the Reliance
21 process include efforts in Counter-Improvised Explosive Devices;
Counter-Weapons of Mass Destruction; Biomedical; Command Control
Communications; Computers and Intelligence; Human Systems;
Cybersecurity; Autonomy; Engineered Resilient Systems; Electronic
Warfare; Sensors; Air Platforms; Ground and Sea Platforms; Weapons
Technologies; Space; Advanced Electronics; Energy and Power Technology;
and Materials and Manufacturing Processes. Core work in each of these
areas offers potential to impact and influence thinking relevant to a
Third Offset Strategy, and the Department continues to mature and
update roadmaps for critical technology maturation across the Services
in each of these areas.
The core science and technology efforts of ASD(R&E) and the service
laboratories are principally focused on creating and enabling long-
range opportunities for the Department's future materiel options. While
these organizations also support the current fight and provide near-
term support to ongoing operations, acquisitions, upgrades and support
programs, their principal focus is on the mid- and long-range needs of
the Department--creating the supporting technology and concepts to
shape the Department's future.
In 2015, DOD conducted a classified ASD(R&E)-led long range
research and development planning program (LRRDPP) to identify critical
technologies and future system concepts that the Department should
consider to inform material options for the future force. This study
engaged experts from across the Department to identify novel system
concepts and emerging technical capabilities that could have
significant impact on DOD's posture relative to emerging near-peer
competitors in the 2030 timeframe. This long-range study reviewed
hundreds of inputs received from the commercial, not-for-profit, and
academic sectors through a broad public request for information. The
LRRDPP study also reviewed ongoing R&D efforts across Service
laboratories, DARPA, and Department of Energy labs. The study delivered
detailed recommendations for acceleration and shaping of new and
existing DOD investments with the goal of providing technology options
for demonstration in the 2020 timeframe. The Department's Fiscal Year
2017 Budget Request was informed by the LRRDPP study and other
associated analytical efforts. The LRRDPP study was an effective means
of injecting potentially technologically enabled disruptive concepts
into the Department's budget deliberations--both to challenge current
thinking and to provide long-range options for accelerated technology
maturation for cutting-edge, asymmetric capabilities with the potential
to enable new operational concepts.
DARPA similarly has an eye toward shaping the nation's future
technology and technical options, but the DARPA portfolio is
differentiated from the Service S&T portfolios by a distinctive focus
on high-risk, high-payoff opportunities. Because DARPA's core mission
is to make pivotal early investments in breakthrough technologies for
national security, the Agency is always looking beyond the challenges
of the moment to anticipate and create options for the future. The
interaction between Service S&T community and DARPA is robust--with
direct Service participation in DARPA programs and Service transition
of DARPA-led efforts into the operational fleet. Through these
interactions, the unique innovative culture of DARPA serves to catalyze
and accelerate advanced capability adoption within the Services.
SCO was created in 2012 by Dr. Carter during his tenure as Deputy
Secretary of Defense. SCO reports directly to the Deputy Secretary of
Defense and is engaged in identifying and prototyping near-term
solutions to counter the threat of near-peer competitors. SCO executes
this mission by engaging directly with the COCOMS and Service leaders
to identify opportunities to re-purpose, modify, or enhance existing
Service capabilities to perform new missions. SCO efforts often cross
service boundaries and mission areas--rethinking how tools procured by
a Service for one mission might be repurposed and extended to provide
alternatives and options in a fundamentally different mission area--
often within a different Service. SCO's focus on demonstrating ``good
enough'' and ``sometimes game-changing in the near-term'' solutions
provide options to fill critical gaps and offer a rapid response to
emerging threats--creating ``breathing room'' in which the Service S&T
community and DARPA initiatives can deliver more fundamental, long-term
solutions to provide sustained advantage.
As the Department pursues technology enablers for a Third Offset
Strategy, each of these groups plays an important role. SCO is
principally focused on the near-term--prototyping capabilities that, if
successful, could be procured and implemented within the time horizon
covered by the current President's budget submission. DARPA and the
Department's core S&T enterprise are focused on concepts and enablers
that, if successful, will have more fundamental shaping influence in
the mid- to long-term. DARPA's portfolio consists of a selected set of
fundamentally disruptive technology options, while the Services' S&T
portfolios cover the full space of sustaining and emerging military
relevant technologies.
conclusion
As DOD develops a Third Offset Strategy, the Department's Research
and Engineering enterprise is well prepared to develop, shape, and
create technology options to inform future operational concepts. The
core mission of the Research and Engineering community is to study
emerging threat capabilities, develop, shape, and evaluate emerging
technological opportunities and to think creatively about alternative
future capabilities. At each of our laboratories, engineering centers,
and test facilities our best and brightest researchers come to work
each day thinking about how to ensure that our military preserves its
technological edge well into the future.
Our goal must always be to ensure that our soldiers, sailors,
airman, and marines always have the scientific knowledge, the right
technology, the advanced systems and tools, the decisive technology,
and the material edge to succeed when called upon. Our Research and
Engineering enterprise measures its success in the security of our
Nation and the success of our warfighters.
The fiscal year 2017 President's Budget request will enable us to
drive a culture of technical innovation across the Department, will
help us prepare for an increasingly competitive global National
Security environment, and will foster a whole-of-department coordinated
effort across Army, Navy, Air Force, DARPA, and other DOD research and
engineering organizations.
Let me close by thanking the committee for its strong interest in
and support of the Department's research and engineering efforts as we
work to discover, design, and deliver the technological capabilities
our warfighters will need to shape the future.
Senator Fischer. Thank you very much.
Dr. Prabhakar, please.
STATEMENT OF ARATI PRABHAKAR, DIRECTOR, DEFENSE ADVANCED
RESEARCH PROJECTS AGENCY
Dr. Prabhakar. Thank you. Chairwoman Fischer and Senator
Nelson, members of the subcommittee, it's a great pleasure to
be here with my colleagues today.
DARPA [The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency] is
part of the Defense Department, and we also work with defense
companies and commercial companies, with universities and labs
of all sorts, so we are very much part of a very large
ecosystem. Within that ecosystem, DARPA has one particular
mission, and that is to make the pivotal early investments in
breakthrough technologies for national security. We do this
work to change what's possible so that the Department can
revolutionize our military capabilities.
Now, today's hearing is about the third offset strategy,
and I want to just spend a little bit of time to tell you what
it means for DARPA.
You know, DARPA's work is always--has always focused ono
technologies to offset our adversaries' capabilities, so the
third offset strategy hasn't significantly changed the way we
start our programs, which range from radically new military
systems to artificial intelligence to biological technologies.
What is starting to shift, I think, in a very productive way is
the kind of pull that we're getting from the Department to
transition those technologies. I'll contrast what's going on
today to the environment we were in 5 or 10 years ago. If you
look in that period of time, most of DARPA's significant
transition successes were direct to theater. We were tracking
insurgents' pickup trucks from the air. We were helping to
analyze data so that we could help commanders in the field
understand the effectiveness of stability operations. We're
very proud of the contributions that we were able to make in
that environment. But, in that period of--and in a really
intense focus, of course, on the ground war on
counterinsurgency--in that period of time, we found that there
was a very limited appetite in the Department to move ahead
with the kinds of technologies that are going to be necessary
to deter and defeat a very sophisticated nation-state
adversary. That's what I think has really shifted today.
Today, when you look at what's happening across the
Department, fresh thinking in many ways across the Department,
including, of course, the third offset strategy. What that
means today for DARPA is that many more of our transitions are
working directly with the services in partnerships where we're
exploring and experimenting and demonstrating what our
technologies can do to counter, again, a very sophisticated
adversary, a very capable opponent.
Just to give you one simple example, last week we had the
great pleasure of christening a new ship. It's called the Sea
Hunter. This ship will be the first--the world's first ship
that's able to leave the pier to navigate thousands of miles
across open seas without a single sailor onboard. What that
means is that it'll be able to do some maritime missions for a
tiny fraction of today's operating costs, which is good, but,
even beyond that, this is the kind of new capability--this kind
of unmanned ship now allows us to invent whole new ways to
exercise influence across the vastness of the oceans. That's
exactly what we're now doing with the Navy, a series of
experiments that we're launching on--launching into with them.
That's a partnership that I deeply value in this particular
project with the Navy. It's a partnership I don't take for
granted, however, because, when we started that program,
originally called the Active Program, many years ago now at
DARPA, starting in the early part of this decade, at that time
we were going it alone, for a couple of reasons. Obviously,
because, at that time, the technology was very new and
unproven, but also partly because the Navy's priority at that
time, as was the whole Department's--their focus was on the
battle at hand.
Today, very much in contrast to that, the Sea Hunter
Project is actually only one of a growing set of partnerships
that we have, transition relationships that we're building with
the services. Those cover every kind of operational domain. I
mentioned maritime, but also work in the air, space, and ground
domains, also work to control the electromagnetic spectrum in
cyber, and in the information domain. At DARPA, we see these
partnerships as absolutely essential if we're going to get
these DARPA technologies from wild new idea to robust
operational capability.
Let me just conclude this afternoon by touching on two
pillars of your support that make it possible for DARPA to do
this work:
One is, of course, the budget. Your support in--of the
budget over the last few years has been vital in the relative
stability that we've enjoyed. I'll ask you again for your full
support of the President's budget request.
The second is people. I want to give a special thanks to
this committee for, first, creating and then many--over many
years, supporting a special hiring authority, the 1101 hiring
authority. This is one of the big reasons that DARPA is able to
move fast and to hire exceptional people.
Those are the two elements: great people and the trust that
you place in us. This is why DARPA is able to create
breakthrough technologies for national security.
Thank you. I'll look forward to your questions.
[The prepared statement of Dr. Prabhakar follows:]
Prepared Statement by Arati Prabhakar
Chairman Fischer, Ranking Member Nelson and Members of the
Subcommittee, thank you for the opportunity to testify before you
today. I am Arati Prabhakar, Director of the Defense Advanced Research
Projects Agency, better known as DARPA. It is a pleasure to be here
with my colleagues from the Department of Defense (DOD) research and
development community to discuss DARPA's investments in breakthrough
technologies for national security and in particular our contributions
to the Department's Third Offset Strategy.
For nearly six decades, DARPA has played a particular role in this
community of government innovators, and in the larger U.S. technology
ecosystem: to pursue extremely challenging but potentially paradigm-
shifting technologies in support of national security. Today I will
focus my remarks on DARPA's role in the development of technologies to
offset the advanced threats that our military and our Nation will face
in the years ahead, and on the next generation of advanced military
capabilities to deter and if necessary defeat highly sophisticated
adversaries.
a changing world
Our senior military and civilian leaders face a world of
kaleidoscopic uncertainty today and into any foreseeable future. The
daily fare includes a noxious stew of violent extremism, terrorism, and
cross-border criminal activity. At the same time, the actions and
intentions of nation states in every region are increasingly demanding
DOD's focus and attention. Arsenals in some of these nations have grown
substantially in the past decade, and recent provocative actions by
nations around the world have made clear that their capabilities have
grown as well. Moreover, several U.S. peer adversaries today boast
first-rate scientists, engineers, laboratories and industries, raising
the stakes for future capabilities considerably. Our challenge at DARPA
and for DOD is to maintain a significant advantage for military and
national security purposes against this competitive and shifting
backdrop.
To achieve this advantage, the Department has embarked on an
important shift in recent years to reenergize its ability to invent,
experiment with and operationalize advanced military capabilities that
will be critical to deter and if necessary defeat the emerging great
powers of this century. DOD's Third Offset Strategy and its Long Range
Research and Development Plan (LRRDP) embody this important shift.
Technological capabilities are only one dimension in these
strategies. This is where DARPA makes it contribution. Because DARPA's
core mission is to make pivotal early investments in breakthrough
technologies for national security, the Agency is always looking beyond
the challenges of the moment to anticipate and create options for the
future. As a consequence, DARPA plays two roles in the Department's
Third Offset Strategy and the LLRDP. The first role is the obvious one:
developing and demonstrating critical core technologies for these new
strategies through the execution of a wide portfolio of DARPA programs.
A second role that DARPA plays is sharing its expertise and
perspectives on future technologies to inform how these Departmental
strategies are shaped.
These two roles are reflected in twin principles that guide our
thinking at DARPA. One principle is that in the years ahead, the most
powerful defense systems will come from the tight integration of
leading-edge commercial technologies and highly specialized military
technologies. You will see this approach in many of our programs, from
tablets with added encryption for close air support to state-of-the-art
digital electronics with added DOD-unique radio chips for leapfrog
radio frequency (RF) systems. The second key principle is that future
U.S. military success will lie in building systems that are designed to
evolve, grow and adapt.
This second principle is critical in light of a significant
difference between the Third Offset and previous offsets. While
previous offsets had as their goal bursts of accelerated technological
progress to provide comfortable, multi-decadal leads over our
adversaries, it is unlikely the United States will again enjoy such
monopolies on advanced technologies. Unlike the decades following the
Second World War, global connectedness and the democratization of
sophisticated scientific and engineering skills and capabilities make
the maintenance of such steep technological gradients all but
impossible today. That means that rather than striving for a temporary,
static advantage for a period of years, the Third Offset must deliver
immediate advantages with built-in evolutionary capacities and a
portfolio of more fundamental, enabling technologies that can support a
long-term succession of iterative advances and assurance of ongoing
momentum and pace. In short, we must design not just a new point of
capability, but new curves of expanding capability over time.
In similar fashion, my testimony today will focus on two
collections of DARPA research programs relevant to the Department's
Third Offset Strategy. The first collection includes examples of
efforts that are focused on the development of next-generation
technologies to counter next-generation adversaries. The second
collection includes examples of efforts that are more fundamental in
nature and are laying the foundation for advances even further in the
future. Within each of these two categories, I have organized our
efforts into three groups, representing three degrees of technological
maturity: technologies already being piloted or used (``Adoption and
Impact''), those currently in development (``Technical Progress'') and
those that are inspiring new investments but that have hallmarks of
longer-term, outsized potential (``New Opportunities'').
darpa's investment portfolio
Next-generation Technologies to Counter Next-generation Adversaries
DARPA aggressively pursues technologies with the potential to
expand DOD's range of tactical and strategic options and impose
technological surprise on our adversaries. Our work spans every
traditional domain of conflict, including maritime, ground, air and
space, as well as the cyber and biological domains. It embraces not
only traditional military hardware but also core mission systems such
as communications, radar, electronic warfare, and position, navigation
and timing systems. At DARPA, a crosscutting theme across all of these
areas is the need to escape from reliance on today's highly capable but
monolithic and expensive platforms in favor of a more diversified array
of platform architectures that are smaller and heterogeneous and thus
harder to target, less expensive and more easily upgraded, and can
ultimately produce more powerful effects than any single platform by
itself. DARPA's challenge is to imagine, design and develop the
separate but networked components of this new paradigm and demonstrate
the power of complex but seamless systems of systems.
adoption and impact
Communications Under Extreme RF Spectrum Conditions (CommEx)
DARPA's CommEx program is developing technologies that can
characterize the jamming environment and then actively suppress enemy
jamming, so aircraft can still communicate with each other in a highly
contested RF environment. Initial components of CommEx technology are
part of a planned upgrade to the widely used Link 16 air-to-air data
network.
Cognitive Electronic Warfare (EW)
DARPA's Advanced RF Countermeasures (ARC) and Behavioral Learning
for Adaptive Electronic Warfare (BLADE) programs are investing in the
technologies needed to rapidly react to dynamic electromagnetic
spectrum signals from adversary radar and communications systems. These
programs are applying machine learning--computer algorithms that can
learn from and make predictions from data--to react in real time and
jam signals, including new signals that have not yet been cataloged.
DARPA is working with the Services to transition technologies derived
from the field of cognitive electronic warfare into the F-18, F-35,
Army Multi-Function EW program, and Next Generation Jammer.
Power Efficiency Revolution for Embedded Computing Technologies
(PERFECT)
DARPA's PERFECT program is developing revolutionary approaches to
improving the energy efficiency of DOD computational systems, an
improvement that will embed significantly increased computing
capabilities including modern learning algorithms on power-limited
platforms such as UAVs. Resulting technologies are transitioning to
both commercial and government users, with the National Reconnaissance
Office adopting them for new, radiation-hardened circuit architectures
that enable extremely high data-throughput next-generation space
systems. A consortium of companies including Google, HP and Oracle, is
pursuing power-efficient open-source hardware, such as RISC-V open-
source cores developed in part with PERFECT funding.
Long Range Anti-Ship Missile (LRASM)
DARPA and the Office of Naval Research (ONR) collaborated to
develop the Long Range Anti-Ship Missile (LRASM), an advanced anti-ship
missile capable of operating at extended ranges with reduced dependency
on intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance (ISR). The
collaboration began as a technology demonstration effort in early 2009.
The first two flight tests were conducted in the fall of 2013, during
which all demonstration objectives were met. To ensure speedy and
seamless development and deployment of this new capability, DARPA
created and at first led a LRASM Deployment Office (LDO) with the Navy
and Air Force, as LRASM transitioned to a Navy Program of Record. A
third flight test, conducted in February 2015, further assessed
technical maturity. This past December the Navy took over the LDO
directorship, marking the successful transition of a model
collaborative effort to address a pressing strategic need.
Research on Fresh Approaches for Computer Security
DARPA's Clean-slate design of Resilient, Adaptive, Secure Hosts
(CRASH) program was a basic research effort that designed new computer
systems that are highly resistant to cyber attack. The technology
development has recently concluded, and CRASH-developed software is now
being incorporated in the commercial and military arenas. One
university performer started a company based on CRASH research; this
led to an announcement from HP in September 2015 that its new line of
printers would feature this software to enhance their security. DARPA
is coordinating transitions to the Navy and the Defense Information
Systems Agency (DISA). For example, the aforementioned software is now
being transitioned to the Naval Surface Warfare Center to protect
shipboard control systems from cyber attack, and other CRASH software
is being transitioned to offer similar protection for DOD command and
control servers. Additionally, the Department of Homeland Security and
the Air Force Research Laboratory have been working together to test
and evaluate CRASH technology in multiple devices. Because the cyber-
attack surface is vast and diverse, each of these transitions makes a
contribution to the Nation's cybersecurity by taking a class of threats
off the table.
Active Authentication
Passwords are cumbersome and imperfect authentication systems for
use on information systems, and most systems have no way of verifying
that the user who was originally authenticated is the user still in
control of the keyboard. DARPA's Active Authentication program is
addressing this problem by developing novel ways of validating
identity--ways that focus on unique aspects of the individual through
the use of software-based biometrics, including behavioral traits such
as subtleties in keystroke style or screen-swipe patterns. Although
these biometrics may never completely replace passwords, they can
provide an added layer of assurance of a user's identity--and DARPA-
developed systems have begun to make their way into commercial
products, where they are already in use by millions of users. One
version, for example, has been incorporated into Google's new Android
behavioral authentication system announced last June; others are being
piloted by several banks in the United States and Europe, where they
have helped secure more than 1.5 million transactions; and yet others
are being explored by the National Institute of Standards and
Technology for possible use within the National Strategy for Trusted
Identities in Cyberspace (NSTIC).
technical progress
Unmanned Surface Vessel for Long-Duration Missions
The Anti-Submarine Warfare (ASW) Continuous Trail Unmanned Vessel
(ACTUV) program has designed, developed and constructed an entirely new
class of ocean-going vessel--one able to traverse the open seas for
months and over thousands of kilometers without a single crew member
aboard. The 130-foot ship is designed to robustly track quiet diesel
electric submarines. But of broader technical significance, it embodies
breakthroughs in autonomous navigational capabilities with the
potential to change the nature of U.S. maritime operations.
Specifically, ACTUV is endowed with advanced software and hardware that
enables full compliance with maritime laws and conventions for safe
navigation--including international regulations for preventing
collisions at sea, or COLREGS--while operating at a fraction of the
cost of manned vessels that are today deployed for similar missions.
ACTUV was recently transferred to water at its construction site in
Portland, Ore. It is scheduled to be christened on April 7, with open-
water testing to begin this summer off the California coast.
XS-1
The objective of the Experimental Spaceplane XS-1 program is to
demonstrate the technology needed to fabricate and fly a reusable
aircraft to the edge of space--and be able to do so 10 times in 10
days, to demonstrate ``aircraft-like'' operability, cost efficiency and
reliability. Success would radically alter the current space-access
equation in which launches must be arranged years in advance. That
bottleneck not only adds to the cost of placing national security
payloads on orbit but also forces an increase in the complexity of the
payloads themselves. In an era of declining budgets and proliferating
foreign threats to U.S. air and space assets, routine, affordable and
responsive access to space is essential to enabling new military space
capabilities and rapid reconstitution of space systems during crisis.
Specific goals of XS-1 include an ability to deploy a small expendable
upper stage to launch a 3,000-pound spacecraft to low-Earth orbit at a
cost of $5M, ten times less than today's launch systems.
System of Systems for Air Superiority
In recent years, DARPA has started a collection of programs that
aims to develop and demonstrate technologies that together can
dramatically advance air combat capabilities against sophisticated
adversaries by coordinated deployment of distributed assets with
diverse capabilities rather than reliance on densely consolidated
capabilities on large, expensive and unwieldy platforms. Key to these
efforts is the approach of integrating new capabilities with existing
systems to achieve cost leverage against near-peer adversaries and to
continuously progress faster and at lower cost than traditional
monolithic platform-based approaches.
DARPA's System of Systems (SoS) Integration Technology and
Experimentation (SoSITE) program is developing novel architectures--
combinations of different types of aircraft, weapons, sensors and
mission systems--that distribute air warfare capabilities across a
large number of interoperable manned and unmanned platforms. In the
last year, we developed an analytical capability to compare the mission
performance and cost leverage of alternative architectures and found
several promising approaches to achieving air dominance in highly
contested environments. The technical and operational risks associated
with these approaches are being analyzed this year to provide the basis
for our flight experimentation program in the next phase of the
program.
The Distributed Battle Management (DBM) program is one key
component of the Agency's system-of-systems vision. Current battle
management systems offer only limited automated aids to help
warfighters comprehend and adapt to dynamic situations. Adding more
elements to the SoS architecture--more unmanned aircraft, missiles and
mission systems--will exacerbate the battle management challenge, as
will the degraded communications of a highly contested environment. The
DBM program seeks to develop appropriately automated decision aids to
assist airborne battle managers and pilots manage air-to-air and air-
to-ground combat. In the initial phase of the program, we developed
algorithms to disseminate hostile track data using limited
communications across tactical data links. These algorithms achieved
high accuracy while requiring less communications capacity then
standard approaches. We also developed algorithms for automatic control
of UAVs in conducting air-to-air and air-to-surface engagements. In the
next phase of the program, these algorithms will be integrated with
appropriate human-computer interfaces. The resulting capability will be
evaluated by pilots and operators in a virtual simulation environment.
High-Assurance Cyber Military Systems (HACMS)
Embedded processors are the ubiquitous computational brains in DOD
systems, but along with their valuable capabilities comes an ever-
growing attack surface for cyber malfeasance. DARPA's HACMS program is
developing tools and methods for the design and construction of high-
assurance cyber-physical systems--scaling the mathematics of formal
methods to create devices effectively ``unhackable'' for specified
properties. DARPA has applied these techniques initially to a Little
Bird helicopter, using a HACMS microkernel to give the mission computer
a cyber retrofit. In a flight test, a red team was unable to attack the
helicopter's controls, despite the fact that the team was given access
to the platform and its software, including its source code.
Cyber Grand Challenge (CGC)
It typically takes months or years for a software bug to be
identified and patched--a period of time increasingly being taken
advantage of by digital miscreants, and a vulnerability window not
likely to shrink as long as the process for identifying and repairing
such flaws remains mostly manual and artisanal as it is today. CGC is a
DARPA-sponsored competition that aims to accelerate the development of
automatic defensive systems capable of reasoning about flaws,
formulating patches and deploying them on a network in real time. By
acting at machine speed and scale, these technologies may someday
overturn today's attacker-dominated status quo. Seven teams from across
the United States qualified last year to compete in the CGC final
event, which will take place August 4, 2016, live on stage, co-located
with the DEF CON 24 conference in Las Vegas.
Mining and Understanding Software Enclaves (MUSE)
DARPA's MUSE program seeks a radical rethinking of the way we
conceive and maintain software, by integrating foundational ideas from
formal methods and machine learning to an ever-growing corpus of open-
source software. The techniques being developed under MUSE are intended
to discover deep semantic properties from the programs found in its
corpus. These properties drive two distinct analytic tasks. The first
enables automatic identification and repair of software bugs by
recognizing anomalous structure based on properties found in similar
previously analyzed programs; the second synthesizes new software
behavior from existing corpus elements based on formal specifications.
To date, DARPA has assembled a software corpus of more than 20
terabytes and has successfully applied its technologies to
automatically synthesize a provably correct implementation of
sophisticated cryptographic protocols such as Advanced Encryption
Standard (AES), and repair well-known security vulnerabilities such as
Heartbleed.
new opportunities
Maritime System of Systems
DARPA has made important technical progress towards future air
dominance through the development of a systems-of-systems approach.
Now, through its Cross Domain Maritime Surveillance and Targeting
(CDMaST) program, DARPA is extending this model into the maritime
domain. The program will be developing technologies to disaggregate
various functions across multiple lower cost, upgradable and in many
cases unmanned platforms on the sea surface and underwater. By
distributing the functions of position, navigation and timing;
communications; command and control; and networking and logistics
across large expanses, this architecture will force the adversary to
defend a very wide area at high cost, inverting the cost curve for
securing the maritime environment.
Leading-edge Electronics with Built-in Trust
Under the hood of every military system are the electronic
components that are its brains, eyes and ears, but DOD has struggled
for decades with contradictory demands in designing, sourcing and
maintaining these vital components. Military systems need the most
capable integrated circuit (IC) technology to do their phenomenally
difficult computational or signal-processing tasks with the limited
power available on a missile or aircraft. Yet designing custom ICs
continues to grow more complex, and fewer teams are able to commit the
time and money for custom design, even in the commercial world. At the
same time, security is essential for military applications but
semiconductor production has globalized, with diminishing U.S.-owned,
U.S.-sited production capacity at the leading edge of technology, and
supply chains now crossing multiple national borders. While IC
technology progresses at a pace set by the commercial sector, DOD needs
access to components for decades. To address this group of challenges,
DARPA is building a cluster of programs aimed at creating new options
for DOD.
DARPA's Trusted Integrated Circuits (TRUST) program is developing
technologies that will ensure the trustworthiness of ICs used in
military systems, even when those components have been designed and
fabricated under untrusted conditions. TRUST makes a radical departure
from conventional verification approaches, using advanced metrics to
identify with increasing efficiency ICs that have been maliciously
attacked while reducing the incidence of declaring good circuits to be
bad.
The Supply Chain Hardware Integrity of Electronics Defense (SHIELD)
program aims to eliminate counterfeit ICs from the electronics supply
chain by inserting into the packaging of these components minuscule
``dielets''--chips tinier than a grain of salt, with embedded
encryption, sensors, near-field power and communications capabilities--
to detect any attempt to tamper with the relevant electronics. Dielets
are being designed to incorporate passive, unpowered sensors capable of
capturing attempts to image, de-solder, de-lid or image the IC;
mechanical processes that make the dielet fragile and prevent intact
removal from its package; and a full encryption engine and advanced
near-field technology to power the dielet and provide communications,
to make counterfeiting too complex and time-consuming to be cost
effective.
DARPA's Integrity and Reliability of Integrated Circuits (IRIS)
program is developing techniques to provide system developers the
ability to derive the function of digital, analog and mixed-signal ICs
non-destructively, given limited operational specifications. These
techniques include advanced imaging and device recognition of deep-sub-
micron circuits, as well as computational methods to determine device
connectivity. The program is also working to better understand circuit
aging systems and to produce innovative methods of device modeling and
analytic processes to determine the reliability of integrated circuits
by testing a limited number of samples. Resulting technologies will
help ensure that DOD microelectronics reliably perform as expected and
only as expected by revealing potential compromises due to
manufacturing defects, counterfeiting or the addition of malicious
components.
The Circuit Realization at Faster Timescales (CRAFT) program seeks
to develop new fast-track circuit-design methods, multiple sources for
IC fabrication and a technology repository that will facilitate reuse
of proven solutions. To achieve its goals, CRAFT seeks to shorten the
design cycle for custom integrated circuits by a factor of 10 (on the
order of months rather than years); devise design frameworks that can
be readily recast when next-generation fabrication plants come on line;
and create a repository so that methods, documentation and intellectual
property need not be reinvented with each design and fabrication cycle.
Cybersecurity for the Grid
Embraced by two vast oceans and sharing borders with only two
nations--both of them allies--the United States has long enjoyed a
degree of insular security. But our critical infrastructure's growing
dependence upon cyber systems inherently accessible even from long
distances means that the prospect of attacks against the homeland must
now be taken very seriously. Indeed, with cost pressures having driven
the integration of conventional information technologies into the
nation's dispersed industrial control systems, today'sgrid is
increasingly vulnerable to cyber attack, either through direct
connection to the Internet or via interfaces to utility information
technology systems. DARPA's recently launched Rapid Attack Detection,
Isolation and Characterization Systems (RADICS) was created to develop
automated systems that would help cyber and utilities engineers restore
power within seven days of an attack that overwhelms the recovery
capabilities of power providers. RADICS's goals include the development
of advanced anomaly-detection systems with high sensitivity and low
false-positive rates, based on analyses of the power grid's dynamics;
the development of systems that can localize and characterize malicious
software that has gained access to critical utility systems; and the
design of a secure emergency network that could connect power suppliers
in the critical period after an attack.
Foundational Technologies to Support Long-term, Successive Advances
In addition to pursuing the kinds of game-changing technologies
described above, DARPA has the responsibility for investigating
research areas that are so new and unformed as to exist more as
inklings than disciplines. This is the part of our portfolio that
anticipates and prepares for varieties of threats that are still poorly
understood but have the potential to wreak entirely new kinds of
havoc--including the fast-evolving field of biology, which has outsized
potential for strategic surprise but has not traditionally been at the
core of the Nation's national security framework. It is in this part of
DARPA's portfolio that the seeds of future offsets are being discovered
and cultivated. While the outcomes of these efforts are inherently less
predictable than those of other programs, these efforts also have the
most dramatic long-term potential to generate truly revolutionary
capabilities that can counter categories of risk hardly imaginable
today.
adoption and impact
Additive Manufacturing for Performance Applications
Despite its revolutionary promise, additive manufacturing is still
in its infancy when it comes to understanding the impact of subtle
differences in manufacturing methods on the properties and capabilities
of resulting materials. Those uncertainties have slowed the reliable
mass production of additively manufactured structures with demanding
specification requirements, such as structural components for aircraft
and other military systems. To overcome this problem, DARPA's Open
Manufacturing (OM) program is building and demonstrating rapid
qualification technologies that comprehensively capture, analyze and
control variability in the manufacturing process to predict the
properties of resulting products. Success could help unleash the
potential time- and cost-saving benefits of advanced manufacturing
methods for a broad range of defense and national security needs.
DARPA's OM framework and data schema are already being used by the
Navy in their efforts to produce flight-critical metallic components
with an additive-manufacturing-certified Technical Data Package, with
plans to field a set of flight-critical metallic components for the V-
22, H-1, and CH-53K platforms by 2017. Manufacturing pedigree
considerations, such as a baseline set of standards and schema for
additive manufacturing data collection, are being provided by the OM
Manufacturing Demonstration facilities at Penn State and the Army
Research Laboratory. In another application, advanced manufacturing
approaches for bonded composites could enable aircraft wings and
fuselages, for example, to be built and joined together without the
thousands of rivets and fasteners currently required, significantly
reducing manufacturing costs and time and lowering operating costs by
making aircraft lighter.
Accurate, Specific Disease Diagnostics on the Spot
The challenge of tracking the spread of infectious disease is
exacerbated by the fact that the only way to know precisely which
pathogen ails a patient is to draw blood, send it to a lab, and often
wait days to hear the result. The Mobile Analysis Platform (MAP) point-
of-care diagnostic device is a simple, rugged, handheld, battery-
operated instrument that rapidly identifies a range of infectious
diseases. Developed under DARPA's Prophecy program, it enables low-cost
and robust molecular diagnostics within 30-45 minutes in areas where
neither a laboratory nor a secure cold chain is available. Because the
device provides instant wireless transmission of test results and
location data, it can provide invaluable real-time epidemiological data
during outbreaks of fast-moving diseases such as Ebola. DARPA is
already engaged in clinical testing of the device with the Naval Health
Research Center and the U.S. Military HIV Research Program, and will
conduct testing with the Marine Corps Warfighting Laboratory this year
during military exercises in the United States and West Africa. In
addition, DARPA recently initiated development of a MAP assay for Zika
virus.
Biologists, Start Your Startups!
For many of the technologies driven by DARPA's Biological
Technologies Office, the path to impact runs through commercialization.
Several recent examples point to early progress in this regard.
DARPA's Autonomous Diagnostics to Enable Prevention and
Therapeutics (ADEPT) program is creating a new technology base to
outpace the spread of natural or engineered diseases and toxins through
the development of rapid diagnostics, novel vaccines, new methods for
drug delivery and entirely new approaches to providing populations with
antibody-derived immunity. Among other technology and business
successes resulting from ADEPT are a DARPA-enabled spin-off that has
since received more than $25 million in venture funding for further
development of a novel diagnostic platform and another small biotech
company for which DARPA provided the initial research funding that went
on to receive venture funding to continue development of tissue-
integrated biocompatible sensors.
DARPA's Microphysiological Systems (MPS) program--better known as
the Agency's foray into ``organs-on-a-chip'' technology--is developing
a platform that uses engineered human tissue to mimic human
physiological systems as a means of testing the safety and
effectiveness of candidate drugs, vaccines or other biomedical
countermeasures. In one of many applications, two DARPA performers are
collaborating to understand the liver toxicity that can be caused by
biological therapeutics--a common reason why otherwise promising drug
candidates fail in clinical trials. Among the program's business
successes are a start-up microfluidics company spun off from the
research that DARPA had funded, which has since gone on to raise more
than $10 million in venture funding.
technical progress
Harnessing Extreme Physics
Through a number of ambitious basic science programs, DARPA is
pushing the limits of the physical sciences, opening new possibilities
for ultra-precise measurements and unprecedented control over
fundamental phenomena. Among them:
The science of quantum communications--in which single photons from
entangled photon pairs are transmitted over a distance--offers the
possibility of unconditionally secure communication because the act of
measuring a quantum object necessarily changes it. For quantum
communications to be practical, however, several technological barriers
must be overcome. DARPA created the Quiness program to investigate
novel technologies capable of high-rate, long-distance quantum
communications. Recent demonstrations through Quiness of technologies
to capture, manipulate and re-transmit photons without in effect
measuring them are truly significant. This is because theorists in
Quiness were able to prove from fundamental quantum principles that
such ``quantum repeater'' technologies are the only way to achieve
quantum communications over trans-continental distances.
Many defense-critical applications--the Global Positioning System
(GPS) and the Internet, for example--demand exceptionally precise time
and frequency standards. Today's systems, however, rely on 1950s atomic
physics technologies. Recent advances in optical atomic systems give
promise to a new generation of optical atomic clocks and quantum
metrology that stands to transform numerous DOD applications. The
Quantum-Assisted Sensing and Readout (QuASAR) program is developing new
quantum control and readout techniques to provide a suite of
measurement tools that will be broadly applicable across disciplines,
with likely applications relating to biological imaging, inertial
navigation and robust global positioning systems. Recently the program
demonstrated the world's most accurate clock with a total uncertainty
of 2 parts in 1018, or about 10,000 times better than GPS clocks. This
means that if the clock began ticking at the Big Bang nearly 14 billion
years ago it would be accurate to better than one second today. Clocks
of this caliber could lead to improved positioning and navigation, and
enable novel imaging and geological sensing techniques.
DARPA's Ultrafast Laser Science and Engineering (PULSE) program is
developing the technological means for engineering improved spectral
sources, such as ultra-fast optical lasers--advances that in turn could
facilitate more efficient and agile use of the entire electromagnetic
spectrum and generate improvements in existing capabilities such as
geolocation, navigation, communication, coherent imaging and radar, and
perhaps give rise to entirely new spectrum-dependent capabilities.
Recent PULSE demonstrations include synchronization of clocks with
femtosecond precision across kilometers of turbulent atmosphere,
corresponding to a 1,000-fold improvement over what is possible using
conventional radio-frequency techniques.
new opportunities
Changing the Security-Privacy Trade-off
DARPA's Brandeis program will explore technologies that could help
break the tension between maintaining privacy and being able to tap
into the huge value of data. Rather than having to trade off between
these important goals, Brandeis aims to build a third option, enabling
safe and predictable sharing of data while reliably preserving privacy.
Assured data privacy could help open the doors to a number of security-
relevant goals, from collections of publicly available data that can
help predict military movements or emergency situations to early
evidence of cyber attacks on shared networks--applications that in some
environments could be difficult to fully implement without assurances
of privacy.
Communicating with Computers
A new and powerful wave of artificial intelligence (AI) is sweeping
commercial and military applications today. Based on recent major
advances in machine learning--research that was sponsored in part by
DARPA--this generation of AI is fueling fields as disparate as search,
self-driving cars and financial trading in the commercial world and
battle management, electronic warfare, cybersecurity and information
operations in the national security realm. I have touched on some of
these examples in my testimony today.
Despite this significant technical progress, however, the ways in
which we humans interact with machine systems are still quite limited
compared to human-to-human interactions. DARPA's Communicating with
Computers (CwC) program is a basic research effort to explore how to
facilitate faster, more seamless and intuitive communication between
people and computers--including how computers endowed with visual or
other sensory systems might learn to take better advantage of the
myriad ways in which humans use contextual knowledge (gestures and
facial expressions or other syntactical clues, for example) to enrich
communication. Ultimately, advances from this program could allow
warfighters, analysts, logistics personnel and others in the national
security community to take fuller advantage of the enormous
opportunities for human-machine collaboration that are emerging today.
All the Light We Cannot See
Light that enters the eye or the lens of a camera carries much more
information than is typically retrieved by viewers, including numerous
details about where it has been and what it has experienced. DARPA's
Revolutionary Enhancement of Visibility by Exploiting Active Light-
fields (REVEAL) program seeks to unlock information in photons that
current imaging systems discard. The program is first developing a
comprehensive theoretical framework to enable maximum information
extraction from complex scenes by using all the photon pathways of
captured light and leveraging light's multiple degrees of freedom. This
framework will then be used to guide the development of new imaging
hardware and software technologies. Those technologies will be tested
against a challenge problem that calls for full 3D scene reconstruction
from a single viewpoint--a rendering that today requires inputs from
multiple viewpoints. Such an ability could enhance situational
awareness for troops, potentially allowing them to reconstruct, from a
single vantage point, a complex scene including objects or people not
visible by line-of-sight viewing.
Designing Complex, Dynamic Systems
DARPA's Complex Adaptive System Composition and Design Environment
(CASCADE) program has a seemingly esoteric but ultimately practical
goal: to advance and exploit novel mathematical techniques to gain a
deeper understanding of system component interactions, a unified view
of system behaviors and a formal language for composing and designing
complex adaptive systems. Conventional modeling and design tools invoke
static `playbook' concepts that do not adequately represent the
complexity of, say, an airborne system of systems with its constantly
changing variables, such as enemy jamming, bad weather or loss of one
or more aircraft. CASCADE aims to fundamentally change how systems are
designed to enable real-time resilient response within dynamic,
unexpected environments.
keeping darpa vigorous
The programs described above are a sampling of what engages DARPA
every day, but of course DARPA is much more than a collection of
programs. It is a team of about 200 extraordinary government employees
whose collective energy not only propels the Agency but also
invigorates scientists, engineers, mathematicians and others across the
wide community with which we work--defense companies large and small,
commercial startups and major firms, universities, government agencies
and labs, and our close partners across DOD. It is a team that revels
in the opportunity to attack pressing, nearly intractable problems--all
in the context of public service.
DARPA's leadership takes seriously its responsibility to encourage
the Agency's culture of high-risk, high-reward innovation and its
ability to execute rapidly and effectively. Toward that end, we
continue to experiment with better ways to reach new performers
through, for example, the ``EZ BAA'' process launched by our Biological
Technologies Office last year, which greatly simplifies the process by
which performers can get on contract with DARPA for efforts of up to
$750,000. The EZ BAA is especially helpful in reaching those unfamiliar
with defense procurement.
We also continue to use our prize authorities, for which we are
grateful. Prize authorities were crucial to the success of the DARPA
Robotics Challenge, our three-year push to accelerate progress in
ground robotics for humanitarian assistance and disaster relief, which
held its finals in California last summer. We are also using our prize
authorities to run DARPA's Cyber Grand Challenge, which has been
working to speed the development of automated cyber defense
capabilities and will hold its final competition in August, when seven
extremely talented teams will have their computers face off against one
another at an event that is expected to draw thousands of spectators.
In addition, we continue to use the prize mechanism for smaller
efforts, such as last year's competition to model the spread of
Chikungunya, a mosquito-borne infectious disease.
Of course, at the center of DARPA's success is an abiding
commitment to identify, recruit and support excellent program
managers--extraordinary individuals who are at the top of their fields
and who are hungry for the opportunity to push the limits of their
disciplines during their limited terms at DARPA. I am most grateful for
the critical support this Subcommittee provided in authorizing the 1101
hiring mechanism, extending it, and in fiscal year 2015 expanding
DARPA's ability to use it. That authority has proven invaluable to our
ability to attract some of the finest scientists, engineers and
mathematicians to the important work of public service and national
security. The 1101 experiment has now been running since 1999 and has
clearly proven its benefits to DARPA and the Nation. After 16 years of
annual uncertainty about its ongoing availability, we would appreciate
your support to make this authority permanent.
darpa's budget
The President's fiscal year 2017 budget request for DARPA is $2.973
billion. This amount is the same as that requested for fiscal year 2016
and $105 million more than the $2.868 billion appropriated for fiscal
year 2016. To put these numbers in context, from fiscal year 2009 to
fiscal year 2013 DARPA's budget eroded significantly through a series
of reductions, including the 8 percent across-the-board sequestration
cut in fiscal year 2013. The total reduction to DARPA's budget from
fiscal year 2009 to fiscal year 2013 was 20 percent in real terms. With
modest increases in fiscal year 2014 and 2015 and a slight decrease for
fiscal year 2016, DARPA's budget has not fully recovered, but it has
been more stable. I ask for your full support of the President's budget
request for fiscal year 2017 so that DARPA can continue to deliver on
its vital mission.
conclusion
As the programs I have highlighted today illustrate, DARPA's
commitment to bolstering national security encompasses an extraordinary
range of technologies and scientific domains, spanning dimensional
scales from the atomic to the celestial, time scales from attoseconds
to decades, spectral scales from radio waves to infrared to gamma rays,
andbiological scales from genes and proteins to neurons and organs to
infectious diseases and global health. Every day, the people of DARPA
come to work to probe and push on those various frontiers. Despite the
daunting security challenges around the globe that spur our work, the
atmosphere within our agency is persistently one of excitement and even
joy--a reflection of the fact that DARPA is obsessed not with problems
but with solutions.
A highly functional, effective and spirited organization does not
happen by accident. We within DARPA work at it constantly, drawing our
inspiration from the amazing, ever-evolving world of technology and
from a deep desire to serve our Nation. I and my colleagues at DARPA
appreciate the ongoing support and trust this committee and
subcommittee have bestowed upon DARPA. I am fully committed to ensuring
that, just as past investments in DARPA helped secure our Nation by
repeatedly bending the arc of technological history, so today's
investments will give rise to capabilities that will protect our Nation
and project our interests for many decades to come.
With that, I will be pleased to respond to your questions.
Senator Fischer. Thank you.
Dr. Roper.
STATEMENT OF WILLIAM B. ROPER, JR., DIRECTOR, STRATEGIC
CAPABILITIES OFFICE
Dr. Roper. Chairman Fischer, Ranking Member Nelson, and
members of the committee, thank you for your interest in the
third offset. Thank you for your interest in the Department's
return to great-power competition. Thank you for your interest
in the Strategic Capabilities Office, or SCO. It's an honor to
be here with colleagues from the research-and-development arm
of the Department who are striving to maintain our technology
edge against a world of threats.
As mentioned earlier, these threats now span a space from
nonstate terrorism all the way up through great-power
competition. The third offset is really trying to return a
greater focus of our Department's effort, including the budget,
to those highly sophisticated adversaries. In 2012, the SCO was
created by Secretary Carter as one piece of this broader
strategy; specifically, a near-term piece that is focused on
trying to regain advantage. I would like to discuss the way
that we frame immediate challenges, our process for prototyping
solutions, and how we're working to do these prototypes in a
partnership with the services. This will be the focus of my
remarks today.
Though daunting in many respects, we interpret our
immediate challenges via a fairly simple analogy, but an
instructive one, that the U.S. military is akin to a football
team that has run a very successful playbook, but for a bit too
long. As in football, where opponents watch film to try to find
weaknesses to exploit them, 20 years of operations in the
Middle East have given great powers a lot of valuable game film
to roll right into their weapons development. SCO's response to
this is to do what football teams do. Great teams often find
themselves overanalyzed and exploited, but they don't throw
away their playbooks. They use this vulnerability and turn it
into opportunity by creating trick plays. They start running in
their pass formations, passing in their run formations. They
reimagine their strengths rather than playing to their
opponents. Like fashion, we can rejuvenate our military
playbook if we can reimagine its strengths: ships, aircraft,
submarines, things we're familiar with. If we start using them
in unforeseen and unexpected ways, we can hope to buy back some
of the competitive edge that we're losing to great powers. SCO
was created to do precisely this.
Though our strategy often has advantages of lower cost and
rapidity, its core tenet, which is our need to change, is
anchored in our greatest advantage of all: experienced
operators who can do the unparalleled with today's systems and
can rapidly master any unconventional tactic we throw at them.
This strategy also will provide healthy connective tissue
between our past and future efforts; the past, by keeping
taxpayer investments for as viable--viable for as long as
possible; and the future, by trying to buy time for these
future technologies, future systems, the leap-aheads, to field.
Because of this, we were tapped to be a near-term component of
the broader offset strategy, and our goal is a simple one: to
try to enhance our current deterrence, backed by an arsenal of
surprises, using systems that we have today.
Our process for achieving this is, itself, innovative,
because it flows in reverse from the normal one, from
operational needs to systems--actually, from systems to
operational needs, rather than vice versa. Living within the
constraints of existing hardware and software focuses ideas
early on. It encourages cost domain thinking, and necessitates
close partnerships with the services to pull off these high-
risk prototypes. In 3 and a half years of practice, we've done
23 capabilities, working with the services. Six of them will
transition by the end of this year. None have failed to
transition, thus far.
These projects, which are really our versions of trick
plays, take on one of three forms: repurposing a system for a
new mission it wasn't designed to do; integrating systems into
a team that can perform the function together, but not
separately; and including or incorporating enabling commercial
technology. I'm sure we'll cover some examples today, but let
me highlight three of them:
Unconventional weapons. Standard Missile 6 was originally
designed to defend our ships. We've partnered with the Navy to
give it an offensive antiship role. You can also do
unconventional defense. Army howitzers, Navy projectiles, Air
Force radars weren't designed to be a defensive system, but
we're partnering to Frankenstein these into a low-cost
supersonic missile defense shield.
Could also do unconventional teams, or kill chains. Stealth
fighters were originally designed to use their organic weapons.
We're partnering with the Air Force to team them with large
standoff arsenal planes so that they don't have to go land and
resupply during a fight.
Our third i-program is taking this even further, connecting
disparate sensors and shooters from across the joint force.
The rest and best of our details necessarily remain
classified, but I hope these few examples give you a sense of
how broad the applications could be. We should really let no
facet of future conflict be predictable or be as it seems.
As one of the bellwethers for the return to great-power
competition, I'm pleased say that SCO is making significant
progress in making current systems count towards a future
that's shaped by us, and not for us. I really appreciate your
interest in this topic, appreciate this hearing today. I look
forward to any questions you might have.
[The prepared statement of Dr. Roper follows:]
Prepared Statement by Dr. William B. Roper. Jr.
Chairman Fischer, Ranking Member Nelson, and Members of the
Subcommittee, thank you for the opportunity to testify before you today
on this important topic. I am Will Roper, Director of the Strategic
Capabilities Office, also known as SCO. It is an honor to be here with
esteemed colleagues from the research and development arm of the
Department who strive each day to maintain our technology edge against
a world of threats. As these threats fill the vast space between non-
state terrorism and great power competition, the Department's Third
Offset Strategy is returning greater focus to highly-sophisticated
adversaries. Recently created in 2012, SCO is the near-term component
of this broader strategy, so I would like to share our framing of
immediate challenges; process for prototyping solutions; partnerships
with the Services, Agencies, and Intelligence Community; and examples
of our ongoing work. This will be the focus of my remarks today.
understanding the challenge: an instructive analogy
Our national security environment is one of complexity--the
problems we face are intricate, interconnected, and difficult to
simplify. In addition to the all-too-familiar threats of violent
extremism, nuclear proliferation, and malign influences in the Middle
East, the United States now faces a rising China and revanchist Russia,
both challenging international laws and national sovereignty. These
concerns span a world that is changing rapidly due to commercial
technologies connecting us-- and the things in our lives--more quickly
and inextricably than ever before. Though challenges themselves are not
new to the Defense Department, this rate of change is. It will affect
all aspects of our national security, including our return to great
power competition.
Though daunting in many respects, we interpret our immediate
challenge via a simple, but instructive, analogy: that the U.S.
military is akin to a football team running a successful playbook, but
for too long. As in football where opponents watch film to find
weaknesses, our decades of operations in the Middle East have provided
valuable ``game film'' for rising powers to study and exploit in their
weapons and strategy development. Though we still have the most
dominant military of earth, we will not remain so if we continue
running our 20th-century playbook indefinitely. We must change; the
question is: ``How?''.
SCO's answer is to do what football teams do: great teams often
find themselves over-analyzed and exploited, but they do not throw out
their old playbooks. They turn this vulnerability into opportunity by
creating trick plays: running in pass formations, passing in run
formations, reimagining their strengths rather than playing to
opponents'. In like fashion, we can rejuvenate our military playbook by
reimagining its strengths--ships, subs, aircraft, vehicles, etc.--using
them in unforeseen, and hopefully uncontested, ways. The SCO was
created over three years ago by Secretary Carter to do precisely this.
Since then, we have developed capability partnerships with every
Service, four Combatant Commands, and the Intelligence Community--
opportunities for implementation are everywhere. Though this strategy
often has advantages of lower cost and rapidity, its core tenet--our
Department's need for change--is anchored in a greater advantage: our
experienced operators, who can do the unparalleled with today's systems
and rapidly master unconventional tactics. As in football, it is
people--not plays--that ultimately win the game. This strategy also
provides healthy connective tissue between our past and future efforts:
the past, by keeping taxpayer investments viable for as long as
possible; the future, by buying additional time for new technologies to
field. Because of this, SCO is the near-term element of the broader
Third Offset; our goal, to enhance deterrence backed by an arsenal of
surprises and sleights of war using systems we have today.
Striking the balance between deterrence and warfighting is the one
place our football analogy breaks down. There is no deterrence in
football; teams show up to play regardless of skill differential.
Because of this, surprises are never revealed prior to games, but the
military must fulfill two competing roles: war reserves to win conflict
and deterrence reserves to avoid it altogether. These latter
``psychological salvos''--where capabilities are unveiled to change
calculus and deter aggression--must be carefully and strategically
analyzed to maintain a balanced stockpile for peace and war. Aiding
this is SCO's second mission, and to that end, most of our capability
details remain classified. However, I look forward to sharing some
selected examples today, as well as our process for creating them.
sco innovation process
Our innovation process is, itself, innovative because it flows in
reverse: from existing systems to operational needs rather than
operational needs to future systems. Living within the constraints of
existing hardware and software focuses ideas, encourages joint cross-
domain thinking, and necessitates partnerships between SCO and system
owners--namely Services, Agencies, and the Intelligence Community--to
prototype and prove out concepts before buying them in bulk. In three
and half years of practice, SCO has produced 15 projects containing 23
capabilities, with a total of six transitioning by the end of this
year, and none failing transition thus far. Our fiscal year 2017 Budget
of $902 million includes 36 percent for Navy projects, 24 percent for
Air Force, 18 percent for Army, and 22 percent for other institutions.
As I will discuss momentarily, we partner with these organizations to
execute projects, but several other process attributes are worth
highlighting:
Creative Imperative: We strive for five to six strategic
capability alternatives in each budget cycle. This maintains our
healthy sense of near-term creative urgency as we tackle long-term
problems.
Creativity Constraints: Constraints imposed by existing
government and commercial hardware and software (e.g. size, weight,
power) structure our innovation and provide clear termination criteria.
This prevents endless meandering of projects and maximizes the chance
of successful transition to programs of record.
Cross-Cutting, Good-Enough Solutions: Squeezing the full
potential out of current systems forces us to look orthogonally across
Service, Mission, Classification, and Title divides; many of our
projects integrate disparate capabilities into hybridized joint
solutions. Because speed of response is a key metric, we also explore
partial solutions that provide earlier or cheaper alternatives to
Department leadership.
Rapid Prototyping: Because SCO repurposes systems for new
missions, our concepts are high risk until demonstrated, even though
the systems, themselves, may be mature. By funding two- to four-year
prototyping efforts inside existing Service program offices, we prepare
for future transition without prematurely creating programs before cost
and performance are understood. Executing inside existing program
offices is a significant force multiplier for our staff, allowing a
small, agile team to kick-start many simultaneous projects.
Strategic Partnerships: Our partnerships with Services
and Defense Agencies, Combatant Commands, and the Intelligence
Community are the true secret to our success; we are simply a hub that
allows these important spokes to turn differently.
Services and Defense Agencies: All of the systems we
reinvent are owned by Services and Agencies; as such, we cannot explore
new concepts without their unique engineering and programmatic
expertise. SCO partnerships now span the Air Force, Army, Navy, Marine
Corp, and the Missile Defense Agency.
Combatant Commands: Because our solution process is
rapid, U.S. Pacific Command and U.S. European Command created local SCO
teams to be our theater umbilicals, ensuring our ideas target their
most-difficult challenges. This partnership is essential to our
success, and we are excited to initiate new efforts with U.S. Strategic
Command and U.S. Special Operations Command this year.
Intelligence Community: SCO is a voracious consumer of
intelligence; it is vital to our understanding of adversaries and
opportunities associated with them. Because the information we covet
must be synthesized across multiple topics and disciplines, we have
forged close bonds with the Intelligence Community, turning their
insights into new concepts.
When applied to the broad U.S. catalog of systems, this process is
evolving our immediate power projection playbook via three mechanisms:
(i) repurposing systems for new missions, (ii) integrating systems into
synergistic teams, and (iii) incorporating enabling commercial
technology.
i. repurposing systems for new missions
Modifying systems for new missions, a practice likely to become
easier as designs become open and payloads, modular, has potential
benefits of lower cost and faster development, but it also provides an
additional bonus--rapid force structure-- whenever modifications can be
retrofit to current inventories en masse. Because inventory numbers are
an important component of peacetime posture, achieving them rapidly
makes this approach highly appealing whenever possible. Some examples
of ongoing SCO projects include:
Anti-Ship Standard Missile-6 (SM-6): SM-6 was developed
in the early 2000s for air and missile defense of ships. By modifying
its software, SCO and the Navy successfully demonstrated its anti-ship
ability, giving the Navy the option of switch-hitting the 600+ missiles
in its fiscal year 2017 Budget between offense and defense.
Maritime Tomahawk: Tomahawk has been a perennial ship and
submarine weapon since the 1980s, but primarily for land targets.
Partnering with the Navy on advanced maritime targeting as part of our
Strike-Ex project, we transitioned another dual-threat weapon option
into the Navy's fiscal year 2017 Budget.
Army Tactical Missile Systems (ATACMS) Upgrades: Options
to upgrade the Army's ATACMS missile are also part of our Strike-Ex
program. Because the modifications are higher risk than Maritime
Tomahawk's, we will team with the Army to build and demonstrate an
operational prototype, giving the Army multiple options for next-
generation fires.
Hypervelocity Guns: The Army's 155mm Paladin and Navy's
Five-inch guns are relatively unchanged since their development in the
1990s. By leveraging projectiles from the electromagnetic railgun
program and incorporating advanced composite materials, our joint team
is prototyping a ``supersonic shield'' potentially capable of low-cost
missile defense and long-range fires. In fact, a record-breaking, high-
speed shot from a howitzer was conducted earlier this year.
Ground-Based Fighter Radars: The Air Force's F-15 Eagle
radar was designed in the 1970s and continually modernized into the
2000s. Partnering with the Missile Defense Agency, SCO is prototyping a
ground-based variant to protect forward operating bases from dense
missile raids, providing a mobile sensor counterpart to hypervelocity
guns.
Advanced MK-48 Torpedo: The MK-48 was designed in the
1960s as the Navy's heavyweight torpedo and has been successively
upgraded ever since. As the torpedo reenters production, we are
partnering with the Navy to build a higher-risk, higher-payoff variant
with advanced propulsion, modular payloads, and classified
capabilities, enabling this undersea workhorse to go further and do
more.
ii. integrating systems into synergistic teams
Teams of systems can survive--and even thrive--in contested
environments where individuals, alone, would fail. This is simply due
to separating, and then specializing, responsibilities amongst multiple
team members as opposed to relying solely on super-star systems. Some
of our most successful teams are architected across Service and Agency
lines, as well as the Department's classified programs. Some examples
include:
Arsenal Plane: Stealth fighters are designed for enemy
penetration but at the expense of weapons capacity. By teaming them
with standoff Arsenal Planes, these forward scouts can continue to put
lethal eyes on target without landing to resupply their weapons.
Partnering with the Air Force, SCO will build and test an operational
prototype by fiscal year 2020, giving the Air Force a completely new
way to extend air power.
Third Eye: Kill chains--the series of steps between
finding and finishing targets--can be defeated by denying a single
link. Our Third Eye program is working with multiple Services to create
resilient ``kill webs'' where sensors and shooters are increasingly
interconnected. Having already teamed disparate assets in live-fire
demonstrations, this program should increase the difficulty of denying
joint operations.
Sea Mob: Navy ships are designed to carry high-value
sensors and weapons-- as well our sailors--making them critical to
protect during combat. By also making them motherships for small
swarming boats, the resulting team can surveil dangerous areas without
putting sailors in harm's way. Partnering with the Navy, SCO is
building commercially-based kits to convert existing boats into
autonomous ``sea mobs.'' In fact, we recently conducted a successful
800km transit using an 11-m Rigid Hull Inflatable Boat.
iii. incorporating enabling commercial technology
The commercial revolution in smart technologies is rapidly changing
most facets of the world. This revolution is taking the ordinary things
in our lives--refrigerators, thermostats, phones, to name a few;
infusing them with compact sensors and processors; and wrapping them in
high-speed networks and cloud-based services. The net result is new,
transformational applications, even though most of the underlying
hardware--compressors, thermometers, and antennae--do not radically
change. Its spillover into national security is accelerating. In a
departure from the past decade, the Department must become a fast
adopter of external technology to stay on the cutting edge. Though
evolving commercial products may not meet all traditional DoD
requirements, failure to move at their speed risks our entanglement in
the global web of things, but not on our terms. We must envision and
embrace smart military systems in order to thrive on this web, and
using commercial technology and agile manufacturing to upgrade legacy
assets is one way to begin. Some of our examples include:
Advanced Navigation: Legacy air-to-ground weapons--like
Small Diameter Bomb and the Joint Direct Attack Munition--use GPS to
navigate, making them effective for strikes against terrorists but less
so in regions where GPS is denied. Partnering with the Air Force, SCO
is prototyping an upgrade kit leveraging commercial, smartphone-class
sensors, giving the more than 37,000 weapons in the Air Force's fiscal
year 2017 Budget the option for retrofitting smart navigation.
Information Common Operating Picture (iCOP): Commanders
use air, ground, and maritime common operating pictures, or COPs, to
understand and respond to changing environments. In our ubiquitously-
networked world, understanding the information environment--changing
sentiment, perspectives, trends, legitimate news, and manufactured
propaganda--is increasingly important. Thanks to commercial advances in
big data, analytics, and deep learning, barrages of open-source data
are now understandable in real time but relatively unexploited by
operational commands. Partnering with U.S. Pacific Command and the
Marine Corps, SCO has built and tested a prototype information COP--or
iCOP--allowing operators to understand the effects of U.S. actions as
well as foreign attempts to undermine them. In fact, just last week, we
released the first beta test version to support the ongoing U.S.-
Philippines Balikatan exercise.
Perdix: Fighters are designed for speed and
maneuverability, not loitering over hostile territory. By equipping
them with 3D-printed swarming micro-drones, our fighters can now
efficiently search hazardous areas without risk to pilots. Partnering
with the Air Force, SCO has tested five generations of ``swarmbots''
out of F-16s and F-18s, including 150 at the Northern Edge exercise in
Alaska last year.
The rest and best of our project details must remain classified,
but I hope these examples illustrate how widespread applications can
be--no facet of future conflict should be as it seems.
conclusion
In conclusion, both our great power challenges and opportunities
are great: our challenges, because they require Department-wide change;
our opportunities, because they involve some of our greatest
strengths--ingenuity, technology, and operational prowess. If we
leverage these strengths in concert, a new U.S. power projection
playbook--one that undercuts attempts to exploit our predictability--
can commence with systems we have today and continue as advanced
systems field in future. Sustaining momentum on this playbook will
require taking the long view while maintaining a sense of urgency
today. As one of the bellwethers for the return to great power
competition, I am pleased to say that SCO is making significant
progress in making today count towards a future shaped by us, not for
us. I hope you will support the President's 2017 Budget as we seek to
sustain momentum inside the broader, Department-wide Third Offset.
Thank you, again, for the opportunity to testify today. I am happy
to respond to any questions.
Senator Fischer. Thank you very much.
Again, welcome to all of you. I think this is going to be a
fascinating hearing.
Secretary Welby, if I could begin, a factsheet that was
provided by the OSD [Office of the Secretary of Defense] states
that realizing the third offset strategy will require the right
combination of bottom-up innovation and experimentation to push
the technical and operational envelope and senior-leader top-
down direction to initiate major programmatic, operational, and
organizational change. I'd like to ask you about that last
part. What the major programmatic, operational, and
organization changes are being made as part of that offset
strategy or--basically, what's the Department proposing to do
differently in this budget request with regards to the offset
strategy?
Mr. Welby. Chairman, the--if I--if you look to the
investments that are in the 2017 budget, there are some very
significant muscle movements that you can see in that budget.
I'll point to a couple of key technology areas first: a major
reinvestment in hypersonic capabilities, an increase in the
number of systems that we're carrying to the range in the
hypersonics weapon regime by 50 percent, an increase in the
investment in our ranges to increase our hypersonic
capabilities, and investments in our laboratories in industry
to take those systems from being technology demonstrators to
being no-kidding weapons that we could actually think about
deploying with our force.
In the undersea arena, you see a significant reinvestment
in unmanned undersea vehicles as an augment to our manned
undersea force as a significant force multiplier, as a key
experimental asset for the future of the Navy. You can see
within that budget significant investments looking at a variety
of novel weapons concepts that might have significant
application to the future force.
Over the last year, you've seen the Department really open
its aperture to all sources of potential innovation, to include
engaging the defense industrial base, in terms of ensuring
transparency on their IRAD investments so we can work forward--
march forward together collectively against these kind of
challenges, understanding what they're investing in,
understanding what we're investing in. You've seen the
Department engaging the innovative commercial sector through
outreach efforts like--EWACS on the West Coast and the
Secretary's continuous engagement with the commercial sector,
trying to find ways to bring both people and ideas back into--
reinvigorate our activities.
We are reemphasizing the importance of the DOD laboratories
to this initiative. The laboratories in the individual services
and our engagement with partner laboratories in DOE, as well as
innovation engines that can help drive the future of the
Department. We are emphasizing the need for speed from
laboratory to fleet. The recognition that there's enormous
innovation that has continued within the laboratories even
while the Department may have reduced its focus on fielding
that capability, but that store of novel ideas needs to be
taken to the test ranges and experimented with.
Finally, I want to point to the focus on prototyping and
experimentation. When you look to the second offset that
occurred in the 1980s, the ideas for that--for those
technologies emerged in the mid-1970s. In 1979 and 1980, the
Department conducted a series of major experiments on the
western ranges, where we put together precision weapons, long-
range ISR platforms, the first flights of what became Joint
STARS, the first systems of what became the Army ATACAMS, early
flights of Apache Longbow, and many other capabilities. Across
the range, in the classified portfolio at that time, we were
flying the F-117 and experimenting with the emergence of real
stealth capabilities. That incredible innovative energy that
occurred at the operational level, not simply doing laboratory
experiments, but putting it into the hands of operators and
letting them understand how they might fight those
capabilities, is what enabled the set of capabilities that in
the 1980s, as the Reagan defense buildup, we didn't buy the
same things; we bought an entire new generation of
capabilities. But, we didn't buy it blind. We bought it with
the knowledge that came from those exercises. The Department is
now preparing for another series of investments in prototyping
and experimentation. We want to get our ranges busy again. We
want to get new systems out on those ranges. Whether we procure
them all, or not, we want to learn from those systems and
inform what we need in the future.
Senator Fischer. Right.
Mr. Welby.--making the Department smart for its future
choices.
Senator Fischer. In the budget's 3.6 billion, funding
specifically related to the offset strategy, can you provide
the committee with a breakdown of this funding? Will you get
that information to us, please, by programs?
Mr. Welby. I'd be happy to provide you detail. Some of
those remain classified.
Senator Fischer. You've mentioned a lot of them, but can
you get us the detail, by program, for that----
Mr. Welby. I'd be happy to do that.
Senator Fischer.--for that spending? Thank you.
[The information referred to follows:]
Within the Secretary of Defense's written statement before the
Senate Armed Services Committee, Secretary Carter discussed the Third
Offset Strategy for investing in and operationalizing our security by
leveraging advances in cyber, space, electronic warfare, biotechnology,
artificial intelligence and other areas. A classified list representing
the Department's investment in the Third Offset Strategy will be sent
separately.
Senator Fischer. Also, we're going to have a change of
administration in January, and what sort of things do you want
to have accomplished by that time to demonstrate that this
effort is on the right path?
Mr. Welby. I'm sure that any transition team that--for any
administration to come is going to face the same set of
challenges that we face today. The pull here is the recognition
of the need to address U.S. strengths in a future competitive
national security environment. That's an external pull. This is
not--while this is Dr. Carter's initiative, it's the Deputy's
initiative, while I'm trying to drive this, it's not driven by
personality; it's driven by the Nation's need to refresh our
technology----
Senator Fischer. Right. How--and what are you going to
point to that you've accomplished? I think you have a lot of
support on this committee. We understand the importance of
where we're headed with technology in order to change
warfighting so that we continue to defend this country. How are
we going to make sure this moves forward?
Mr. Welby. We're not going to stop for the next 9 months of
running to make sure that the next administration has a running
start to these problems. We've completed, recently, the Long-
Range Research and Development Planning Program, an 18-month
study that looked at details and laid out a series of
opportunities for the Nation, going forward. All that material,
we're trying to harness across the laboratory complex today to
make sure we're ready for what comes next. I think that we--
that this budget and the initiatives we have ongoing prepare
for that future in an important way and lay ground for the next
administration.
Senator Fischer. Okay. Thank you very much.
Senator Nelson.
Senator Nelson. Thank you, Madam Chairman.
Mr. Secretary, thank you for your public service.
Dr. Prabhakar and Dr. Roper, given the fact that I've
already spent a great deal of time with both of you, asking a
lot of questions, and given the fact that our enemies' spies
are listening to what you say today, I really don't want to ask
you any questions in an open session. I would invite the
members of this subcommittee to get in a classified setting to
figure out some of the gee-whiz stuff that these folks are
doing. But, since it's an open setting, I'm just going to leave
it to you. Say whatever you'd like. That's all I'm going to
say.
Dr. Prabhakar. Well, it's hard to resist an invitation like
that. Thank you very much, Senator Nelson.
You know, I think, absolutely, the details of the programs
that we think can be very impactful here do need to remain
classified. We're happy to provide classified briefing to any
of you who would like to come do that. We'd be very pleased to
do it.
I actually think the most interesting aspect of what we're
all working on in the third offset strategy and these
technologies--really, the question, as a technologist, that I
see is--in a world in which we no longer get to have all the
toys and nobody else gets to have any technology capability--
that was an unusual period, after the second World War, when we
had that enormous technological advantage over the rest of the
world--that's not the world anymore, and we all know that
technology, wherever it originates, it flows. We know that many
other countries now have amazing engineers and scientists and
laboratory facilities. All of that is really good for the
world. It's actually--it's elevated living standards. It's
connected us in new ways. Most of that is good news.
The challenge, of course, that this is all about is the
fact that we still have to come up with a technological edge
for national security, despite a more and more level playing
field of initial technologies. I actually think the success
here is going to come from something that's a deeply American
way of approaching the problem. I--you know, a lot of what we
do at DARPA is about this idea that we're going to--we're
willing to take risk to reach for high payoff, and we are
willing to try things that might fail. But, in combining these
commercial technologies, accessing leading-edge commercial
technology and then combining it with places where we do have
an edge and where we can protect the technology, at least for
some period of time, if we can learn to do that and move faster
than anyone else around the planet, I'm actually quite
confident that we are still going to be able to win in this
competition.
Dr. Roper. Senator Nelson, I think it's an important point
that you raise, is that a lot of the technology edges that
we're going to develop are developing, and will be moving to
testing very soon, are surprises. They're things that are
intended to deal us back into the game. They're intended to
project power in different ways that we haven't before. There's
going to be a very difficult calculus that we're starting to
begin as part of the third offset effort, which is, Is it a
surprise that we want to tuck behind our locked doors and save
to be able to win a war? We have to be able to so that. That's
our job, as the Department. But, if we were to put every
surprise that we develop behind the door, we would be biasing
our portfolio towards a go-to-war posture, as opposed to a
deterrent posture.
One of the challenges we're going to have is, we're back
into a deterrent mode, as the Department. But, as opposed to
the Cold War, it's not a monopolar deterrent posture. We've got
to do it in a bipolar way. Must be able to think about China
and Russia while we continue to focus on the Middle East,
continue to focus on North Korea.
There's no easy math for deciding whether or not to show a
capability, or not. We've started putting some of our
capabilities public now from Strategic Capabilities Office. We
have had almost no public face for 3 and a half years. As you
were able to see yesterday, quite a lot of our portfolio is
behind the door, and deeply so. But, if we put everything
there, we'll be doing the country a disservice, in the long
run.
Senator Nelson. Thanks.
Thanks, Madam Chair. That's it.
Senator Fischer. Thank you.
Senator Tillis.
Senator Tillis. Thank you, Madam Chair.
Thank you all for being here. I look forward to future
briefings in a classified setting. I appreciate the work that
you all have done.
I'm going to go to the more, maybe, boring side of the
equation, and it has to do with actually getting good ideas
fielded and in use. That gets to procurement, acquisition,
specification, partnering with the private sector, where it's
appropriate. Can you give me some idea of where you all think
we are and where we need to focus, perhaps even as a matter of
public policy changes to remove constraints and try and
compress idea-to-fielding timelines over what we have today?
We'll start with the Secretary.
Mr. Welby. Senator, I--we're emphasizing, in every
engagement, speed. In--as we enter a more competitive future,
where we're all drawing off a globally accessible technology
base, we're going to need to close our acquisition OODA
[Observe, Orient, Diode and Act] loop, if you will, faster than
our adversaries. We have to turn quickly. We need to think
about time to market, like folks do in the commercial sector.
We've been engaging our laboratories in a discussion about how
quickly we can move ideas from our tech base to the field.
There's no way to rush discovery. I mean, science takes the
time it takes. But, we ought to be thinking, even as we're
exploring new areas, about that application and how we can
prime the pump for that application.
On the acquisition side, we've been challenging ourselves
to be able to move faster, especially at that cutting edge of
new technologies. We've been looking for ways to be able to
engage new partners in timelines that might be measured in
weeks, rather than months and often a year, to contract.
Especially since we're dealing with fast-moving technology
areas, people aren't willing to wait for a year for the
Department to get involved. It--there's no return on that.
They'd rather focus on commercial-sector engagements.
We've been exploring new means to much more rapidly get--
bring folks on to contract, to use competitive vehicles in
commercial acquisition, and to think about new ways to bring
technology into platforms and systems, leveraging modular
architecture approaches, for or persistent architecture
approaches for example, be able to plug-and-play technologies
into our existing systems to speed the upgrade cycle.
I think that, through the S&T initiatives, through the
formal acquisition initiatives, the Department's better buying
power, 3.0 activities, which have a large focus on modularity
and tech insertion, I think that we are trying to move much
faster as we go forward.
I think, in the future, we won't see 30-year development
programs in anything. Adversaries will have countermeasures
prepared for a decade before we field something, if that's the
case. We need to up our game, in terms of speed.
I don't know if anybody else has anything you want to add.
Dr. Prabhakar. I would just add, first of all, that, in the
work that we do at DARPA, of course, we live in the science and
technology part of the portfolio. I want to be very clear that
our task in developing technologies is not as onerous as
procuring systems that our warfighters, you know, need to be
confident in and they can trust under extreme circumstances.
Having said that, we've had the opportunity, over the last
many decades now at DARPA, to experiment with some novel
procurement mechanisms that your committee invented and
authorized over numbers of years. One example is other
transactions authority. That's an example of a capability that
we and others in the Department have. We've used it to great
effect, essentially to do business with companies on commercial
terms. It--we comply with the law, but we are able, under other
transactions authority, to set aside the Federal acquisition
regulations along--and part of that, of course, means that we--
we're not forcing companies to do government accounting systems
and to have that burden. Especially for commercial companies,
it's a particularly good way to be able to move faster, and
sometimes it just enables them to be willing to do business
with us in the first place.
I think there are some practices like that, that I think
we've been able to pilot that we hope can be expanded.
Senator Tillis. Dr. Roper?
Dr. Roper. Senator, I think, you know, our piece within SCO
is really trying to complete the circle on the acquisition
process. We currently flow from an operational need to a future
system that we field. As Secretary Welby pointed out, there are
lots of efforts underway to try to speed that cycle up. But,
wherever we can find ways to take things that have come out of
that pipeline and bring them back to the beginning, solve
additional operational needs, whether they're within that
service or outside of it, then we're producing lower-cost
options that will allow that service to build budgets, where
there's more innovation in them.
The biggest issue that service programmers bring up to me
is that they want to innovate. I can attest, from the programs
we do with them, there is incredible innovation potential in
the services. It's resident in every partnership we build with
them. When they build a budget, if their readiness, the fight-
tonight capability, is put at risk, the first thing that has to
go is the innovation side of it. Wherever we can buy them
flexibility and breathing room to keep that innovation in play,
we're doing a good thing, not just for them, but for the
country. We've got to make stuff that our taxpayers have
already invested in do more and stay viable longer if we're
going to free up funds to go for the big-win technology leap-
aheads.
Senator Tillis. Yeah. I think your point about turning
defensive weapons into--transforming them into offensive
capabilities, and vice versa, is very good. The--because I'm
assuming that the time to field that capability is far less
than an all-new platform, and that's why it's important that we
squeeze everything we can.
In my remaining time--you touched on something, Dr. Roper,
that I was going to ask. I know that Secretary Carter has
announced a program engaging--trying to expand our engagement
with Silicon Valley in partnering with some of the major tech
firms. But, in my experience--I'm from North Carolina, and down
in and around Fort Bragg, there's a lot of small businesses
that come from people who have battlefield experience. They're
coming out, they're perfecting things that have extraordinary
potential, more often than not because they had to put the
first iteration together with duct tape and Super Glue, they
had to use commercially available products.
To what extent does your area of focus focus on sometimes--
you know, sometimes you need $100 saddle because you've got
$100 horse. But, sometimes you've got a $10-horse problem you
want solve, which is what I've seen a lot of these folks doing
down here. It seems like every once in a while, DOD wants to
put $100 saddle even on a $10 horse. How are we getting some of
that applied small-business feedback into the mix as a key part
of the innovation loop?
Mr. Welby. Maybe two quick responses.
First is that I'm frustrated that a lot of the discussion
around engaging the innovation ecosystem has used Silicon
Valley as the term of art, but, quite frankly, there is
remarkable work going on from Boston to Austin to Silicon
Valley, Research Triangle--I've gotten right back to that one--
--
[Laughter.]
Mr. Welby. But--and I'll touch everybody in the room--but,
look, it's--and I think that there's really interesting things
going on in the small-business side. The Direct to Phase II
piece, for example, on our civil work, is now--we've now
identified new mechanisms by which we can reach out and touch
small businesses, not just at the hey-do-a-study-for-us scale,
but the no-kidding-rapidly-moving-to-a-prototype-so-we-can-try-
it--to get at those folks who have near-immediate solutions and
put them into test and evaluation.
I--as the Secretary has pointed out, the Department needs
to focus on porosity, our openness to ideas, wherever they
come. We need to take the blinders off and not just to be--look
to the defense industrial base as the only source. It's an
important source, but it's not the only source of ideas. We're
trying to reach out anywhere we can.
Senator Fischer. Thank you, Senator Tillis.
Senator Heinrich.
Senator Heinrich. Secretary Welby, this committee, last
year, showed really strong bipartisan support for directed
energy weapon systems in the NDAA, and we asked that the
Department look at that as part of the third offset approach.
How much of the 100 million provided by Congress last year
within this effort has gone towards directed energy?
Mr. Welby. Thank you, Senator. We have not--the language in
the report last year for the offset technology initiative
requested that we go out and survey the services, looking for
competitive ideas, survey the COCOMs, looking for ideas. We
have completed that. I have--we have a stack of proposals that
we're going through now, and we're allocating resources against
them, expect to be able to provide the details of what we fund
from that list here in the next week or two. I am certain that,
in that stack of proposals, there will be directed energy. They
are at--they are near the top of the list of things we want to
do. I'm expecting that, of the list of things, order of 20
percent would be focused on directed energy. But, we're still
trying to finalize both the list and ensuring we've got the
right budgets for those projects. We want to make sure that the
things we do fund with that activity are robust and are not
underfunded.
Senator Heinrich. I agree wholeheartedly with that
approach. Just to sort of follow up on that, I'm curious
about--it seems to me that this technology--directed energy, in
particular--could be one of those places where we really do
provide an offset. It's--doesn't have a peer-relatable
equivalent in other military spaces. I actually introduced
legislation this morning with Senator Inhofe to look at
granting rapid acquisition authorities for directed-energy
weapon systems. I'm curious--and this could be for any of you,
actually--in your opinions, is this an area where the
Department is moving fast enough to transition the technology,
or are we sort of stuck in an endless R&D [research and
development] loop, where it's always easier to chase the
perfect instead of field what is quite applicable today?
Mr. Welby. Senator, I participated in the Directed Energy
Professional Society Symposium at the Pentagon today. We have
over----
Senator Heinrich. Good timing.
Mr. Welby.--we have 20 folks sitting in the courtyard of
the Pentagon today, demonstrating next-generation laser
capabilities and high-power microwave capabilities. As you
know, I've spent a good portion of my career working in this
space. I remain convinced that we are now at the point where
we're moving out of the labs and into application space with
those kind of systems. I saw some remarkable technology on
display today. We're encouraging folks to think about how we
can accelerate those into real applications.
I think that directed energy has suffered from being--from
always being just 25 years off. I think we're now not 25 years
off. I think there are real applications in the near term, and
opportunities to grow those applications in the mid-term. I'm
excited about the space.
Senator Heinrich. I appreciate you mentioning microwaves to
somebody who used to work at Air Force Research Labs on
microwaves as well as lasers. Sometimes we forget that
application. When you look at things like CHAMP and other
applications, it is substantial.
For, really, any of you, one of the things I'm concerned
about--with the possible exception of DARPA, actually--I think
there's been a real risk averseness, generally, within the R&D
approach of the Department of Defense, at times. In looking at
our nuclear labs, one of the things that has worked there to
get around an obvious--you know, it's easy to be risk-inverse
in this environment. You've seen huge advances, for example,
on--in energy, with things like solar technology, prices
plummeting, but one Solyndra can become a political issue. It's
easy to accept that same sort of mindset within defense
research.
LDRD, laboratory-directed research and development, has
been one of the places where, within the nuclear labs, it
really has seemed to be a high-risk but high-reward endeavor
that is incredibly valuable, for one, in attracting the right
talent into the pool in the first place.
I'm curious how the Department views that balance between
risk and reward, and what steps are needed to ensure that
researchers have the leeway and the flexibility to pursue
something that is truly innovative.
Mr. Welby. Senator, across the laboratory complex, we have
to recognize that there's a number of constituents we try to
service.
Senator Heinrich. Sure.
Mr. Welby. There are near-term transitions into programs of
record. There are those medium-term capabilities that seek to
be able to demonstrate capability to drive the next program of
record. Then there are activities that are further to the left
that are really trying to be disruptive. We have been focusing
the laboratories, over the last year, on trying to be explicit
about how we manage those three portfolios, how we think about
those things that are near-term and in service of programs of
record, how we think about those things that are shaping, kind
of, the next program, and those things that are much more
foundational.
Just a couple of examples of things that we're doing. We--
in--across laboratories, we've now created resources available
to the laboratories out of the OSD-level budgets, where we've
asked the laboratories to compete--to compete on ideas for who
has the greatest game-changer. We've offered to amplify service
budgets in areas where we can see that real impact. Internal
competitions, right? But, to get teams challenged and thinking
about competing with each other, kind of, across laboratory
complexes.
The trick is, of course, at the end, we tend to team those
folks together to get all the best and brightest of the ideas
across, because we're really in one game, but it's encouraged
folks to think differently.
Within the services, as well, each of the services has been
trying to drive more innovation through their own long-term S&T
pools. I'm very excited about how that's taking place.
Senator Heinrich. Doctor?
Dr. Prabhakar. Maybe just to tag onto that. DARPA's very
much in the high-risk, high-payoff business.
Senator Heinrich. Sure.
Dr. Prabhakar. I never take for granted the room that we
get to do that, starting with our bosses, starting with Steve,
but all the way up to the Secretary, and definitely from
Congress. That--you know, I think--I feel very privileged to
lead an organization that has delivered on that mission for
long enough that you all give us rope. All we have to do is
come up with the next revolutionary capability.
But, within the agency, as well, I don't take for granted
how we nurture that. Steve's exactly right that, you know, you
do need to manage a high-risk organization in a very different
way.
Senator Heinrich. Right.
Dr. Prabhakar. But, continually nurturing that culture,
making sure that our business processes reflect the mission and
that culture, it's everything from the conversations I have
with my program managers when I walk by their offices to the
way that they work to get their programs approved. I think it's
something that needs concerted focus, but----
Senator Heinrich. Yeah.
Dr. Prabhakar.--I think we know how to do it, and I think
it's a--it is an essential ingredient in the mix.
Senator Heinrich. Great.
Senator Fischer. Thank you, Senator Heinrich.
Senator Manchin.
Senator Manchin. Thank you, Madam Chairman.
Thank you all.
I'd like to ask--I think this is to Mr. Welby, if I may,
Secretary. Secretary Carter recently announced a major
initiative for outreach to high-tech companies in Silicon
Valley, as you know. DOD has--also has a small business
innovation research program that taps into technology
innovations from all around the country. The SBIR program helps
small business compete to bring value-added products and
services to our military. This program is extremely helpful for
the economy of West Virginia, because we have a corridor which
really participates in that. I'd like to ask, How are we
coordinating efforts of engaging these small companies to work
with DOE? My reason for saying that, some of them get into the
procurement process, they have to tag along with a large major
in order to get any pittance of a little bit of work and become
subservient to that. Is there any method of getting them
directly into the flow, if you will?
Mr. Welby. Senator, I also highly value the small business
innovative research activities. I think that my experience
working with companies in the small business innovative
research area has allowed them to grow rapidly and actually
contribute in important ways to major----
Senator Manchin. Right.
Mr. Welby.--defense acquisition programs.
I mentioned earlier the Direct to Phase II activities,
which all us to make initial grants to companies at a much
larger scale than simply, ``Here's 100K to kind of--to go
develop a proposal,'' the very early study grants that SBIR has
typically worked through to cut a year off the time to get
people up to scale and to be really playing with real--at real
working levels, up to a million dollars for an initial grant,
which is a lot for a small company, initial space.
The--one thing I should--I want to point out about the kind
of engagements we have with this Defense Innovation Unit
Experimental [DIUX], for example, is, again, it's not
geographically tied. We want them to be engaged over a broader
portion of the country. We've not given them acquisition
authority. That organization is really intended to help
shepherd small companies through the process, make
introductions to help them understand the process, to, if you
will, act as a shepherd to kind of help them work their way
through the system. We're experimenting with that idea that
getting small companies, getting the kind of core innovation
drivers that we see in small business through our system is a
contact sport and requires significant help, folks who speak
their language, who understand the innovation ecosystem,
understand companies' commercial ambitions, as well, and can
still talk DOD to them. We're trying to understand how that
works. That's the experimental portion of DIUX. It really is an
experiment to see how we can gauge better.
But, we are trying to find new opportunities to introduce
small-business work throughout our enterprise. We're
continuously reinforcing our small-business participation
objectives in all of our programs.
Senator Manchin. You all go out and solicit this? I mean,
go talk to some of the areas, where they're--not just Silicon
Valley, but, I mean, other----
Mr. Welby. I do. Our team does. We are thinking hard
about----
Senator Manchin. Can we get you down to West Virginia? Can
I get you down?
Mr. Welby. Sir, I'd love the opportunity to come visit.
I'd----
Senator Manchin. Hey, Rick, sign him up.
[Laughter.]
Senator Manchin. We'll get you down there. It's not that
far away.
To Dr. Prabhakar, one of the joys of being a Senator is
being able to nominate some of the best and brightest to our
military academies. It's really, really something special, when
you see these young, bright people coming from all over the
country and getting this opportunity. I would ask--DARPA
regularly engages with civilian universities, which we're very
appreciative of that, too, for the advanced research efforts.
How--what's the percentage of how you all engage with our
military academies versus the private? Because we know it's
going to be used--and I'm understanding that, basically, they
do a senior project, all the military academies, to participate
in cutting-edge defense research. These are people not only
that are participating, but going to be fulfilling them. Do you
put more of an emphasis on academies than you do private?
Dr. Prabhakar. Senator, our starting point with everything
that we do at DARPA is to go out and find the technical talents
that are going to have the ideas and the ability to go execute
on them. Through that, we work with universities of all sorts,
but also, of course, a lot with companies of all----
Senator Manchin. You all pay----
Dr. Prabhakar.--sizes.
Senator Manchin. You pay, right?
Dr. Prabhakar. Our--we fund those projects and those
companies. We're actually only----
Senator Manchin. You're already funding--we already fund
the military academies. We already paid once.
Dr. Prabhakar. I think it's a great question you've raised,
because I think about the people who are attending those
military academies----
Senator Manchin. Yeah.
Dr. Prabhakar.--frequently. They are going to be the
warfighters who use the----
Senator Manchin. That's exactly right.
Dr. Prabhakar.--technologies that we are brewing. We reach
out to them in a variety of ways. In recent years, as an
example, we conducted a competition among the academies in the
cyber arena. That's one, in particular, where the--you know,
there's a lot of interest, but also a great need to continue to
educate warfighters that are going to be adept in the cyber
environment.
Senator Manchin. Could I----
Dr. Prabhakar.--they are very much part of our community.
Senator Manchin. Would it be possible to get a report,
basically, on the amount of money that you all do put out in
doing these--engaging in these research----
Dr. Prabhakar. Yeah, I'd be happy to look into that.
Senator Manchin.--versus----
Dr. Prabhakar. Just to set your----
Senator Manchin.--versus the academies.
Dr. Prabhakar. I just--I'd be happy to get you that data.
Just to set your expectation, the amount of research that's
done of the sort that we typically fund at the academies is
fairly limited, because their focus, of course, is educating
these young folks who are going to become our future
warfighters. I would be happy to get you that data.
Senator Manchin. But, what you're going----
Dr. Prabhakar. But, that's now where the research----
Senator Manchin.--you're going to----
Dr. Prabhakar.--is typically done.
Senator Manchin. You're telling me right now, you don't put
much in the academies.
Dr. Prabhakar. I don't think you'll find a significant
amount of money flowing there. But, again----
Senator Manchin. Let me ask you this----
Dr. Prabhakar.--their role is different----
Senator Manchin. Cadets and----
Dr. Prabhakar.--from what we do.
Senator Manchin.--midshipmen start their senior project,
they have--they have to have a senior project.
Dr. Prabhakar. Yup.
Senator Manchin. Okay? Do they know there is a pathway that
they could take something of high cutting-edge, such as what
you all are looking for? I mean, to me, I--maybe I'm wrong, I
don't know. I just believe that we've got some outstanding--you
know, I'm not saying universities--I mean, we have research, WV
and all of them.
Dr. Prabhakar. Yup.
Senator Manchin. But, I'm saying, we already own this. We--
this belongs to us. Those are 4- to 5-year employments
afterwards, so we know they're going to be the ones who are
going to be implementing everything we're doing.
Dr. Prabhakar. Yes, I agree that they are an important
part. But, again, DARPA'S role----
Senator Manchin. I know.
Dr. Prabhakar.--is about research; it's not really the
education of that part of--you know, that critical part of our
workforce.
Senator Manchin. I gotcha.
That's--no further questions,
Senator Fischer. Thank you, Senator Manchin.
I think it's safe to say that the goal of this initiative
is to preserve and enhance our technology-based military
superiority. That's part of the meaning of the term ``offset.''
We're not going to be fighting our adversaries tank-to-tank
anymore. Technology does provide us that advantage and the
offset to--with capabilities for others.
Dr. Roper, you know, I'm concerned that we become so
reliant upon technology that that reliance can be exploited,
and it can be exploited very cheaply, in some instances. I
think space is a good example for us to look at in that regard.
Our adversaries can jeopardize our constellation for a lot less
money than developing new technology for us to build here and
take advantage of that. How do you ensure that the greater
incorporation of technology doesn't turn into a dependence? How
do you ensure that we don't allow our adversaries this
opportunity to be able to undermine what we're trying to do in
a really--basically, a cheap way?
Dr. Prabhakar, I'd like to ask you that, as well.
Dr. Roper. Thank you, Senator. It's a great question. I'll
address the space component of it, but I'd like to then broaden
to the bigger question----
Senator Fischer. Yes.
Dr. Roper.--of, you know, where is--where does technology
end and other advantages begin?
I think, as indicated by a lot of the discussion this
morning, we're moving into a regime where relative technology
advantage is going to be lowering amongst the great powers in
the world. The United States, China, Russia----
Senator Fischer. Our adversaries are catching up to us.
Dr. Roper. Catching up. We're also living in a world where
technology is speeding up, so the impact of commercially
available technologies is going to be large. It's also going to
be available to everyone. This is going to force the
Department, as well as our adversaries and competitors--it's
going to force us to become fast adapters. When we look at
areas where the environment's going to be contested--and space
is one of those--there's obviously the disadvantage of not
having the legacy way that we've projected power be something
that can be continued into the future, but we'll be moving into
a future where there is hope for us. It's very likely that
we'll start having distributed space architectures and future
where maybe individual satellites are contestable, but the
architecture, as a whole, isn't. That'll force us to start
using statistics as a metric, where you're not--you can't
calculate the reliability of a single thing, but you're doing
it in aggregate. That's something very common for many
industries. The cellular companies that sell to us are used to
having a statistical approach to their availability, as opposed
to a singular one.
What I think this means is that warfighting is going to be
messy. We're not going to be able to go in and have very simple
mathematics and physics help us calculate the margin of battle.
Things are going to be constantly changing. Satellites that are
available won't be. Networks that are available won't be. If
we're wise, we'll have architectures in place where we hop
between different assets that are available.
I think that's where we actually get off the stage with our
biggest advantage. That's a messy environment. Not every
country is going to be able to get their operators ready to
deal with it. The greatest advantage we have, and the reason I
think we'll pull this offset off, is that we're coming out of
20 years of operational experience that no one in the world can
match. We're saying to the world, we're going to change, we're
going to go into this messy environment with our eyes open, and
we're going to dominate in it. That's based on giving
operators, one, the technology to be able to adapt in that
environment, but trusting them to be able to use it and master
it.
I think the biggest ill that we could do, as a Department,
is to have all the shiny bells and whistles in the technology
world, which are important, override what's underwriting it,
which is our human operator foundation.
Senator Fischer. Thank you.
Dr. Prabhakar.
Dr. Prabhakar. Yeah, I think Will's completely correct with
what his--especially his concluding point. I often think about
how reliant, even in our civilian lives, we've all become on
GPS, where I only will just follow that blue dot or listen to
those instructions. That's a great example of needing to
remember that technology is a very powerful tool, but it
doesn't allow you to suspend judgment. We're seeing some
examples where that's really gone wrong.
Technology is, of course, only going to be one component in
the solutions that we're talking about here. We very much see
part of our job, of course, driving the technology, but also
thinking in terms of, How do we make it secure and reliable?
Cybersecurity is a very big part of that. We have a significant
portfolio that focuses on that.
But, at the end of the day, it really is about how humans
use the technology. I think, as we have moved from more of a
gadget focus to, ``How do you think about winning the war?'' it
has really driven our thinking to rarely think about the whole
system of how humans and machines are going to interact
together. That's a much harder problem and a much richer
problem, but I think it's going to be important to getting to
solutions that really do work.
Senator Fischer. Mr. Welby, I've seen a factsheet that was
put out by the Department, and it discusses those investments
that I believe the Doctor was just talking about, with the
human and the machine collaboration that's going on. It states
all of these components will be connected to a cyber-hardened
human-machine command-and-control network. You know, we're not
really good at keeping adversaries out of our networks. Let me
rephrase that. We are good at it, at keeping them out, but they
still get in. How are we going to have confidence that we have
the ability to build this cyber-hardened network? Do you think
that the network should come before we think about the pieces
that rely upon it? Should we make sure we have the security
there before we get the bells and the whistles that depend upon
it?
Mr. Welby. Senator, I believe that there's a real
opportunity here to codesign these capabilities in ways we have
not in the past. One of the really interesting things that's
going on is this notion of autonomous systems, systems that I
can give direction to, and that I can have confidence that
they're going to have certain behavior and then check back in
with me at some future point. That offers a way to think about
how systems can actually operate on--even on unreliable
networks. By reducing the bandwidth required to, for example,
tell the operate system; by having the ability to have systems
interact with humans by exception, just as I would with--send a
soldier up a hill, call me if you see something that you need
assistance with--I can start to think about machines that might
be able to do that.
We--we're talking about manned-unmanned teaming and trying
to understand how that works, what kind of bandwidth is
required, where and when systems need to interact. I think it's
very important in scoping the networks required to support
those.
We did some recent studies, where we looked at just how
little bandwidth was required to ensure control over--in a
simulated environment or some notional unmanned-manned system
concepts. We were very enthusiastic about the ability to shrink
that amount of bandwidth required in very interesting ways.
It--the smaller the pipe, the easier it is to protect. We're
thinking about very novel ideas in that space.
Senator Fischer. There's a discussion going on in the
Commerce Committee about spectrum, since you're talking about
bandwidth. You said you're shrinking bandwidth that's necessary
for the Department of Defense. Would you say you don't need all
that you have? Put you on the spot here.
Mr. Welby. Today, I think we need all we have, and more.
Senator Fischer. You need it all.
Mr. Welby. We need it all. Particularly for radar is really
one of the critical things. Our large-bandwidth sensors are
really a challenge. Spectrum auction has caused the Department
to have to shift in very complex ways, and we're continuing to
work through that. Comma, with my technology hat on, I am very
excited about agile spectral use in the future and ways we can
start to think about the technologies that will help shift, not
just the military sector, but maybe in--on someday, the
commercial sector to be much more efficient users of spectrum.
I am enormously excited about the initiatives that DARPA has
started here in the last 2 weeks to set up prizes associated
with very novel use of the spectrum, an arena to challenge
folks to come in with entirely new concepts for agile radio
development, and to think about new ways that we can architect
our commercial and military systems to be really efficient
users locally, regionally, and globally to make the most use of
the spectrum we have. The demand for spectrum is only going in
one direction. Wide bandwidth applications on the commercial
side, wide width applications on the military side are going to
grow. But, in the fight, which is what we were talking about a
moment ago, we're going to want to be able to--if we lose that
spectrum, to still be able to fight through. We think there's
very interesting ways we can do that.
If, Arati, you want to say a word about the spectrum
challenge.
Dr. Prabhakar. You can tell Steve is a DARPA alum, because
he summarized our new DARPA program perfectly.
Senator Fischer. I was going to say, because we have such a
truly limited amount--a finite amount of spectrum that's out
there, and to find a more efficient way to use it would be
beneficial, Of course, for our national security, but also for
our businesses that are out there, as well.
Thank you.
Senator Kaine.
Senator Kaine. Thank you, Madam Chair.
I apologize for being late. Was at another subcommittee
hearing, so I may ask questions that you've already covered.
But, it's good to be with you, and thank you for your service.
I'm interested in the interface between the DOD
requirements and commercial requirements in a very--you know,
complex commercial environments. Generally, the security
requirements of the DOD exceed the commercial space, or will--
or, in many ways, is the commercial sector market develop the
industry and some of the security ahead of the DOD mean?
Dr. Prabhakar. I'll take a stab at that. You know, if you
peel apart what DOD needs, in terms of information security,
cyber security in particular, we need everything that the
commercial sector needs, because we use commercial networks and
computers and systems for all of our operations, and we have
cybersecurity needs for our very sophisticated electronics and
computing that's embedded in every--you know, every missile,
every aircraft, every ship, et cetera. I--across DOD, I think
we have the challenge of adopting, as quickly as we can, the
leading edge of commercial cybertechnologies, and we continue
to press--you know, the Department continues to press forward
on that. Conversely, in some areas where we are able to drive
cybersecurity research because of DOD's embedded computing
needs, I think there are places where--and, for example, in
some of the DARPA programs, we have focused on this question
of, Can you build a cyber retrofit, for example----
Senator Kaine. Yeah.
Dr. Prabhakar.--for a system that goes on an unmanned
aircraft? We've just had some very good research success in
that area. That's an example of research that I think at this
point is leading-edge around the world. Eventually, I think it
will become an important part of a better foundation of
cybersecurity for DOD systems. But, it's the same technology
that will also provide a secure way for the Internet of Things
to grow. The Internet of Things is either going to be awesome,
if we can figure out security, or it's going to be a nightmare.
I think--you know, I think that's an example of a technology
area driven for DOD that we can also actually contribute to the
broader set of----
Senator Kaine. Sort of--it's a good segue to the follow up
question I wanted to ask. If some of the particular
requirements we have in the DOD space will really be driven by
our own research, then we obviously need to be robust in
funding research. But, to the extent that some of it is going
to be commercial capacity that we purchased, then that says
something about acquisition and the acquisition workforce. As I
deal with folks in the, kind of, private sector, they are quite
concerned about, Is the acquisition workforce up to the job?
They actually really kind of sympathize with an acquisition
workforce. They feel like the DOD, and maybe the Federal,
generally, acquisition workforce got hammered pretty hard by
furloughs, sequesters, layoffs, and that that may have hurt the
acquisition workforce expertise pretty significantly. If we're
talking about really cutting-edge, you know, technology to help
us with this third offset strategy, and some of it we're going
to be acquiring, that's going to put a lot on the shoulders of
the acquisition workforce to make wise decisions. Do we have--
you know, DOD-wide, do we have the workforce we need to make
the sophisticated acquisition decisions as we purchase these
technologies?
Mr. Welby. Senator, across the--enterprise, working for
Under Secretary Kendall, we review, kind of, our workforce
metrics continuously. We have a senior steering group that
meets monthly, and we review it at the senior level quarterly,
to ensure that we have--that we are--understand what's
happening to the health of that workforce--hiring, retention,
departures, the overall shape of the workforce. But,
increasingly, the thing that concerns me is not numbers, but
talent. Specific talent in areas like cybersecurity in areas
like robotics----
Senator Kaine. Where competition is pretty tough----
Mr. Welby. Where----
Senator King.--so other opportunities are out there.
Mr. Welby. I note that last week Google announced--and I
believe the number was 20-percent raise across the board for
everybody at Google who had ``cyber'' in their title. Not that
they were being recruited, but just as a preemptive retention
bonus. You know, our folks haven't seen, kind of, a 20-percent
number, you know, ever, right? I don't think folks fully
appreciate that, in some of the areas that were focused on--
artificial intelligence, the cutting-edge computer-science work
in cyber, in synthetic biology, in a number of other areas--we
are getting great people because they love our mission, they
love our capability. But, really, they're often giving up, kind
of, integer multiples on compensation. Certainly over the
course of their career, it becomes harder and harder, as folks
try to get families, to think through how they can make that
work.
I'm very appreciative for the great people who are working
for us every day, but I worry about our ability to compete for
talent in the future. It suggests we may have to think about
other models for how we can recruit, retain, or engage those
folks. If the government can't have them internal to our
organization, how do we engage them outside? How do we ensure
that we've got the right set of knowledge on our side of the
table on the acquisition process? How do we have the right set
of folks in our lab, thinking about the future for us? I think
we're going to be in competition, not only for national
security, but in the competition for talent, as our--as the
commercial opportunities grow, as our Nation's vibrant
innovation sector on the commercial side competes with the
Department of Defense for talent. We're now mining the same
spaces, and we're going to have to be creative as we go
forward.
Senator Kaine. Let me ask a question. It kind of goes in a
different direction on the third offset strategy. It's really
doctrinal or conceptual. Earlier defense strategies--it's been
easier for me to conceptualize how we integrate our allies into
our strategies, you know, dealing with the Truman doctrine of
the Cold War or even some of what we're doing right now, vis-a-
vis engagements in Iraq and Syria. As we think about a third
offset strategy that's heavily focused on novel technologies
that are unique, swarm capacities, et cetera, how do we
conceive of alliances and sharing of information? Or is the
sharing of information, by definition, going to jeopardize your
edge in a way that we can't do it? I mean, and that's a pretty
broad question, but I've been wondering how we think about
alliances and partners in connection with a third offset
strategy.
Mr. Welby. Just very quickly, for the sake of time. Allies
and partners are going to be enormously important in almost
everything we do. As we think about how we go to war, we always
go with partners. We do not see that changing in the future.
Much of what we're doing is thinking about how we have the
right kind of discussions so that they can contribute and help
shape that future. Today we're also looking at our allies and
partners as partners, no kidding, in terms of the technology
development itself, and how we start to begin to engage early
on in capturing their benefit, as well.
I want to give Will a second to this--on this.
Dr. Roper. I'll be very brief. It's very important, in the
near-term response in the offset, to realize that we have two
advantages that go back to more of the human side of the
equation. One, we've been a preferred partner in the world. A
lot of our allies and partners use the same equipment that we
currently train with. We train with them on a routine yearly
basis. It's a huge part of our readiness posture. As we start
reimagining how we use our systems, there's a great potential
to bring in allies and partners, and have that cross-pollinate
so that adversaries aren't just facing a U.S.--a, you know,
U.S. adversary, but they're facing a whole coalition approach.
Two is what you mentioned before. There's going to be
commercial technology that's going to be cut into the mix
alongside traditional military technology. Because it's
commercially-based, it would be much more readily available to
work on with allies and partners if we don't let exquisite
requirements start pushing up what we try to get out of it,
from a military capability. Cost is going to be a very
important metric in the offset. It's not just red cost, it's
going to be blue cost, as well. What are we spending, what are
they spending? Then what do we think the refresh rate of that
technology will be? If we're wise, we will try to find
capabilities in the commercial world where we're getting good
bang for the buck, and keep an eye, Is it something we can
share with allies and partners? If we can, then our coalitions
that we build up play for us and not against us.
Senator Tillis. Thank you, Madam Chair.
Dr. Prabhakar, I just--I was going to comment, if Senator
Manchin had been here. I think probably the biggest distinction
that you're dealing with between, say, the service academies
and some of the other institutions is the nature of their
research and investments that are being made by the Federal
Government in the private sector. They create a different group
of people that I assume you're collaborating with. I think I
understand why there would be, necessarily, a different focus
and different relationship with the service academies.
Dr. Prabhakar. Just a comment on that. If you look at all
academic institutions broadly, of course there are many that
focus on teaching and some that focus on research. Our natural
partners for the research funding that we--especially the basic
research work that we're doing, tend to be those research
universities rather than----
Senator Tillis. Yeah.
Dr. Prabhakar.--those focused on----
Senator Tillis. Yeah.
Dr. Prabhakar.--education, which is more where the
academies have been. That doesn't preclude--there are, in fact,
some very good things that we've done there. I just didn't want
to leave the impression that that was a major focus----
Senator Tillis. Yeah.
Dr. Prabhakar.--for us.
Senator Tillis. Yeah. I under--so, I just--and I think--I
understood it; I just wanted to make that point.
Dr. Roper, and really for anyone on the panel, the--and
it--when the Chair talked about ``We're not really fighting
tank-to-tank anymore,'' that's completely true. You know, our
Air Force, our air capabilities will need to continue to
evolve. I think we can build and iterate on our offensive and
defensive capabilities. Probably the same is true for the Navy.
But, for the people on the ground, like the folks I have at
Fort Bragg and Camp Lejeune, they're being deployed in very
different ways. I think Dr. Welby talked a little bit about the
way that we will equip them, the way that they and the
equipment and materials they're using could be semi-autonomous,
tethered or loosely tethered, or untethered. I kind of
understand how that would operate. But, at the end of the day,
it's because we're going to have a dispersed group of smaller
units on the field. The question then becomes, the--some of--
many of your innovations are likely not to be these big, shiny
ships and new missile systems that are going to be deployed on
the battlefield, but they're going to be things that are very
much connected to the humans and in the environments that we
find ourselves fighting now. Could you talk a little bit about
that, and also talk about the research that you're doing that
has less to do with offensive and defensive capabilities, but
just pure-play force protection for the operators on the field?
Dr. Roper. Sure. Thanks, Senator Tillis.
It's--there's going to be some, I think, amazing things
that we'll be able to do with ground forces, given the
commercial technology revolution that's going around us.
Interpersonalwise, we're all carrying around fairly
sophisticated high-processing, low-weight electronics that are
massively networked and are completely enabled by cloud-based
services. The military analog of this is obvious. If we can
smartly find a way to transition this over and be able to do
secure processing, and not have cyber vulnerabilities be a
bigger headache than they are, the enabling capability from the
technology themselves. We are working very closely this year
with the Army and with SOCOM, some of the folks in your neck of
the woods at Fort Bragg, on trying to find the balance between
using commercial technology on the battlefront. I think there's
a lot of promise there. One example that I'd like to highlight
is work that we're doing with the Marine Corps on big data and
analytics. You can imagine that all of these distributed
systems that are going to be spread out over the battlefield
are going to be producing data. That data is going to be pooled
in a disaggregated way, but eventually pooled centrally.
Understanding it, being able to give commanders that leading
edge of decision authority is going to be important.
The Marine Corps right now is doing experiments with us
currently, today, in the Philippines at the Balikatan Exercise,
pulling in lots of information that supports that exercise, and
synthesizing it using commercially-based big-data tools,
something very new for us, and it's new for them. But, taking
advantage, as Secretary Welby mentioned, of experimentation and
prototyping, especially when the core of the systems we're
using are commercially based, is going to be a very prudent way
for us to get out and get the human side of the technology
alongside, you know, the technology side. I see a lot of
promise, but we're going to have to move into more of a rapid
test-it, modify-it, retest-it in order to stay on top.
Mr. Welby. Quickly. We often focus on those flashy pieces.
We talk about tanks and missiles and aircraft. But, just last
week, the Secretary announced the new Manufacturing Innovation
Institute for Revolutionary Fibers and Textiles, a major
initiative that's--crosses five State initiatives, that
incorporates work going on around the country, thinking about
fibers in a fundamentally different way. As an Active component
in fabrics that might have woven-in electronics, might be able
to serve, not just as protective gear, but as part of an
ensemble--an active part of an ensemble to support warfighters,
a kit, and with enormous applications to first responders and
to medicare care and to an enormous number--another set of
capabilities. We're not just thinking about how, you know,
robots and new weapons kind of enable this future, but also
thinking about how we make the individual warfighter more
effective. I think there's a lot happening in that space, be it
augmented reality kind of capabilities, be it soldier-borne
compute, be it novel textiles and rethinking what a uniform
means, thinking about how folks can be more effective,
distributed for survivability, and then massing for effect,
even if they don't actually come together, but to be able to
mass their effects. These are real opportunities to rethink the
future of land combat. We're encouraging the Army and Marine
Corps to help us think through that future in new ways.
Senator Tillis. Thank you.
Dr. Prabhakar. May I just tag onto these excellent
comments?
The nature of ground conflict, of course, continues to
change. If you look at what's happening today and into the
future, that environment is one in which we see--if you watch
the Russians, if you watch what's happening on the ground with
ISIL, you see this mix of kinetic effects, but, of course, also
cyber effects. You see the use of the information domain. That
used to mean dropping pamphlets or saying things on the radio.
Of course, now it's social media. You see a different kind of
use of the electromagnetic spectrum and jamming that we've not
seen before. The integrated ability to bring all of that to
bear is what our ground troops now will need to be able to deal
with. A lot of our work is really thinking about how--for
example, how do you enable a squad to not only survive in that
environment, but actually exercise greater influence and have a
larger footprint than it does today by leaping ahead of the
kinds of things that are coming at us?
Dr. Roper. One last point, Senator. That goes back to where
we've--what we've touched on several times. The military that
will be able to push the most amount of trust to the edge,
assuming the enabling technology is there, is likely to win.
It's an area where we have a significant advantage.
Senator Tillis. Thank you.
Senator Fischer. Thank you, Senator Tillis.
Senator Kaine, did you have other questions?
Senator Kaine. Just one.
Can you explain that last point you just made?
Dr. Roper. It's a important point. I think we envision----
Senator Kaine. Repeat it. It--about the edge. Repeat that
point.
Dr. Roper. As we push, you know, where--there's always a
desire, where you can, to do things in a centralized fashion. I
want to have all the data flowing to the brain in the center,
and then the commands will push out to the edge. As we
discussed today, we're living in a complicated world. We're
going to face cyber, we're going to face spectrum denial, we're
going to face information operations, as Dr. Prabhakar
mentioned. All of that is going to contest various nodes in
that network. Data is not going to flow the way we want it to.
The military that is able to have the most trust to interpret
commanders' intent and the technology to allow them to back it
up at the edge is going to have a significant advantage in the
rapidity of their response. If we can move and enable that, we
have an advantage over militaries who can't.
Well, when I go around and talk about with our operators,
which is my great privilege to do so, and I contrast that with
what I see in the rest of the world, I think we have an
advantage in the level of trust in our chain of command. If we
put the technology in the hands of soldiers that have our
trust, then we're already a step ahead of the game. A lot of
the technologies that you've heard discussed today are about
trying to flow that enabling capability out to the edge of
conflict, to the edge of the battlefront.
Senator Kaine. Great. Thank you very much.
Thanks, Madam Chair.
Senator Cotton. Sorry. I was coming over from an
Intelligence Committee meeting. But, I know it's been an
interesting hearing, just based on the written testimony that
was submitted.
Secretary Welby, I want to talk about DCGS-A [Distributed
Common Ground System-Army]. In your testimony, one of the areas
you highlight are technologies and concepts that enable faster
and better decisionmaking and coordinated operations at range
and across the battlespace. Do you think the Department or the
services should continue to develop major automated information
systems?
Mr. Welby. Senator, I believe that major automated
information systems, there are places where the Department
needs to be developing military-unique capabilities that don't
exist anywhere else. I think where the Department is leveraging
capabilities that are available from the commercial sector, we
should not be in the business, and should be leveraging
commercial innovation to the greatest extent possible. We see
this in areas such as electronic health records, where we've
shifted our focus to leverage commercial to the greatest
degree. We see it in some of our log systems, where we had
those kind of capabilities. I think we're seeing it
increasingly in intelligence and data-fusion systems, where we
can leverage commercial to a greater degree.
Senator Cotton. DCGS-A has been developed since the late
1990s, and it's been beset by cost overruns and schedule
delays. Do you think this is one of those areas where we should
perhaps move to commercial or private-sector solutions?
Mr. Welby. Senator, I'm not fully fluent in the Army's
current approach to that. I know they are reconsidering their
strategy, in terms of that program.
Senator Cotton. Dr. Roper, do you have a opinion on this
matter?
Dr. Roper. On the DCGS-A, as a whole, no, Senator. I will
say that, for the information tools that we're developing to
leverage big data and analytics, we're relying heavily upon
commercial tools, as well as those developed by our government
DOD laboratories, as well as those developed by DARPA. I think
developing architectures that enable as much of a rapid refresh
of commercially-based tools would be wise, given the pace of
development in the world.
Senator Cotton. An 80 or 85-percent solution would be
acceptable today?
Dr. Roper. It is for our operators, sir.
Senator Cotton. I think it was Patton, maybe MacArthur, who
said, in a--something that was quoted in Infantry Field Manual
7-8, that a good plan today is better than a perfect plan
tomorrow.
Dr. Roper. To your point, Senator, the marines who are
using our tools right now--and I'm getting feedback from them
each day--we've never had this ability to coordinate on the
information front, so they're learning, they're writing the
training manual as we go. If we strive for exquisite solutions
ahead of the operators' ability to use them to their fullest
intent, we may have 100-percent solution that's actually
clocking at 80 percent on the battlefield. We have to balance
the technology leap as well as the operator leap.
Senator Cotton. Do you think it make--would make sense to
develop a program that had 120 different apps?
Dr. Roper. It's appealing, given how enabling that is for
us in our personal lives. That's very similar to how the tool I
referenced works. It's called a--an Information Common
Operation Picture, or ICOP, and it does work based on an app-
based approach, where no one single piece of software
developed, in most cases, by small businesses, provides
operators precisely what they want. On the government side, we
developed the integrating architecture and a display so that
you can change out things behind the hood, but it looks the
same way to operators on their screen. Now, that's for one
particular application for looking at large amounts of publicly
available information and making sense of it. How well those
extrapolate to bigger architectures, including warfighting
architectures, is a question I'm not able to comment on well.
Senator Cotton. Would it surprise you that the project
manager found that, of the 120 apps, commanders and soldiers
used, on average, 5 of them?
Dr. Roper. I think it would, Senator.
Senator Cotton. Why is that?
Dr. Roper. Well, just seeing how many apps I use in my own
life, we tend to find--if it's useful, we tend to apply them
personally. The reason for that is not one that I can comment
on, but it does surprise me.
Senator Cotton. I mean, I'm sure, if we put a video game
and an ESPN app on there, that soldiers would find a way to use
those. But, if it's just the mission in front of them, I have
to say I'm not terribly surprised that they're going for the
simple route, since that's usually the best way to success in
the Army.
I'm reminded of a story I heard once about Booker T.
Washington when he was building his university. It may be
apocryphal, but it's one of those stories that's too good to
check, because it has an important lesson. That he built the
buildings, everything was ready to go, students were ready to
report, and someone pointed out to him they didn't have
sidewalks. They said, ``Are you going to build the sidewalks?''
He said, ``One day I might.'' About 6 weeks in, he took the
engineers and the designers out and pointed out where all the
grass was dead, and said, ``Build the sidewalks there'' rather
than trying to force the students and the faculty to walk on
sidewalks where he thought they should be designed and placed.
I think that that probably could carry a good lesson for when
we're designing this kind of system.
Thank you all for your testimony. Thank you for your
answers to these questions. They're an important matter, and
I'm sure the committee is going to be taking it up.
Senator Fischer. Thank you, Senator Cotton.
I'd like to once again thank the panel. This was a
fascinating discussion. I thank you for your work. It's
important work. As I said earlier, we've always given you good
support with this committee because of the support that you
give our warfighters.
Thank you.
We are adjourned.
[Whereupon, at 4:02 p.m., the hearing was adjourned.]
[Questions for the record with answers supplied follow:]
Questions Submitted by Senator Joe Manchin
darpa research funding at federal degree granting institutions (fdgi)
1. Senator Manchin. Your agency funds research at universities
throughout the US. What percentage of DARPA's fiscal year 2015 total
research budget went to academic institutions?
Dr. Prabhakar. The total DARPA fiscal year 2015 funding sent to
academic institutions was 13.4 percent.
2. Senator Manchin. The FDGIs include the service academies, so
what portion of DARPA's fiscal year 2015 academic institution research
funding went to the service academies?
Dr. Prabhakar. The total DARPA fiscal year 2015 funding sent to the
Service academies was $2.0 million.
3. Senator Manchin. What portion of DARPA's fiscal year 2015
academic institution research funding went to other FDGIs (e.g., Naval
Postgraduate School, Air Force Institute of Technology, etc.)?
Dr. Prabhakar. In fiscal year 2015, total DARPA funding sent to the
Naval Postgraduate School was $1.6 million and to the Air Force
Institute of Technology was $50.0 thousand.
4. Senator Manchin. I understand that research typically conducted
at service academies and other FDGIs may not fully align with DARPA's
preference for pivotal research investments in breakthrough
technologies for national security. However, technology transition is
critical for DARPA research success. The FDGIs have robust networks
with their respective services for enabling technology transition and
integrating faculty, cadets, and midshipmen into user evaluations. Do
you assess that DARPA can feasibly pair its research performers with an
FDGI to help enable technology transition?
Dr. Prabhakar. DARPA's unique role in DOD is to drive early
investments to achieve breakthrough technologies for national security.
As a result, the majority of DARPA programs do not transition straight
into Service programs of record but are handed off to Service and
industry partners for further research and development and prototyping.
In some cases, we do work with the Services and other FDGIs to
demonstrate the operational utility of emerging technologies, and we
have found that working directly with the eventual end-user communities
is most effective. FDGI faculty and students are generally not current
and future end-users. Working through the FDGIs for end-user
evaluations would add another layer of complexity and effort between
DARPA and our warfighting customers.
The Service Academies and FDGIs have typically not been key
contributors to DARPA technology transition. There are a number of
other Service entities and numerous other avenues that have proven to
be far more effective in transitioning DARPA technology into warfighter
capabilities. For example, the Service Academies have proven to be
valuable on the early end of technology efforts to help shape emerging
programs and provide a source of fresh ideas and perspectives on
innovation. The DARPA technical offices have sponsored a variety of
interactions and ongoing activities with the faculty and students of
the Service Academies as well as the military post-graduate educational
institutions, such as Naval PG School and AFIT to include them in user
evaluations, solicit feedback and percolate new ideas.
5. Senator Manchin. Mid-career servicemembers selected for service
academy instructor duty often enroll in civilian graduate schools that
receive DARPA research funding. Do you assess that your agency could
incentivize these schools to integrate servicemember graduate students
into their DARPA research as a way to help enable technology
transition?
Dr. Prabhakar. The services are responsible for determining
research priorities for service academy instructors while studying in
civilian graduate schools. They may consider several criteria including
the technical needs of their future teaching duties as well as
alignment with service priorities and funded research. In turn, DARPA
does not attempt to influence the service-sponsored students' research
topics or incentivize civilian graduate schools to integrate these
students in our research. We have found the approach that aligns best
with our mission is to fund institutions competitively and without
incentives, based on the their ability to meet the technical objectives
of the proposed research using the best possible cadre of graduate
students and faculty suited to the task. We also aggressively pursue
technology transition working directly with the services to coordinate
operationally focused evaluations by end user communities. In our best
judgment, any effort to identify and incentivize individuals and
institutions during our technical source selection could have adverse
effects on choosing the best performers and would have very little
impact on eventual transition.
DARPA does have several on-going programs to help connect mid-
career officers with DARPA programs. These are designed to enhance
their professional education and understanding of DARPA and the R&D
enterprise at-large, as well as assist with technology transition. The
DARPA Service Chief Fellows (SCF) Program provides for10-12 mid-career
officers quarterly to attend a DARPA sponsored and funded 90-day
fellowship at DARPA. While assigned to DARPA the SCF officers are
exposed to the breadth of DARPA technology, experience some of its
performer base first hand and help to provide insights to shape on-
going programs and assist in transition. The insights and experience of
the SCFs is of significant value to DARPA PMs on the potential military
utility of various technological pursuits. The agency also has an
established USAF Fellowship where it sponsors two mid-career officers
for a longer term 10-12 month Fellowship to allow more prolonged
exposure to DARPA and the R&D process as well as allow a more in depth
interaction and integration for the Fellows with the DARPA Staff. DARPA
is in the process of finalizing a similar long term Fellowship program
with the U.S. Army.
__________
Questions Submitted by Senator Kirsten Gillibrand
technology transfer authorities
6. Senator Gillibrand. In several of the last Defense
Authorizations, Congress has given the Department extended technology
transfer authorities, including enhanced tech transfer capabilities to
DOD Labs and expanding the partnerships that labs can develop for tech
transfer. Can you tell us whether these authorities are being used? If
so, how? If not, why not?
Secretary Welby. The various technology transfer authorities given
to the Department of Defense by Congress are being used. Examples of
their utilization are included below.
Section 213 of the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) for
Fiscal Year (FY) 2016, Public Law 114-92, expands the scope of
Educational Partnership Agreements (EPAs) to support technology
transfer and transition. EPAs provide Defense laboratories the means to
assist universities in extending their research capabilities in areas
relevant to Defense needs and provide an opportunity for students to
work on degrees in programs of interest to the Defense laboratory
enterprise. Benefits to the Department are two-fold. One, the
university develops scientific and engineering expertise applicable to
future Defense needs. Secondly, students working on Defense-sponsored
research receive early exposure to Defense labs thereby expanding the
possible talent pool for future recruitment. One promising mechanism in
which the Defense Department currently utilizes EPAs as a tool is the
Open Campus Initiative. The Army Research Laboratory's (ARL) Open
Campus business model envisions the creation of a dynamic, cooperative
science and technology ecosystem that links government assets with the
global research community. Open Campus partners work side-by-side with
ARL research scientists and engineers, share ARL's specialized research
facilities, bring ARL researchers to their institutions to communicate
a perspective on research conducted in federal laboratories, and become
part of the broader DOD network. ARL currently has an Open Campus
presence at the Adelphi Laboratory Center, Aberdeen Proving Grounds,
and the University of Southern California's (USC) Institute for
Creative Technologies. The USC facility officially opened on April 13,
2016.
Section 252 of the NDAA for fiscal year 2013, Public Law 112-239,
allows the Department to utilize the DOD R&E network to support
regional advanced technology clusters to encourage the development of
innovative advanced technologies and the commercialization of the same.
As a result of this authority, the DOD established an on-going
initiative with Arizona State and three DOD laboratories--the Air Force
Research Laboratory Information Directorate in Rome, NY; the Space and
Naval Warfare Systems Command in San Diego, CA; and the Army Natick
Soldier Systems Center in Natick, MA. This pilot program pairs
technology transfer professionals from Arizona State University and DOD
Laboratories, and introduces venture capitalist and business
accelerators to DOD technologies with commercial or private sector
applicability. Local businesses, university students, and mentors from
larger businesses (such as Honeywell, General Dynamics, and Boeing)
collaborate in introducing viable DOD technologies to the commercial
sector.
7. Senator Gillibrand. What are the barriers to technology transfer
from DOD Labs, DARPA as well as from defense contractors and what can
we do to help remove these barriers?
Secretary Welby, Dr. Prabhakar, and Dr. Roper. Much has been
written in Academia, DOD and by the GAO regarding the traditional
challenges and barriers to successful technology transition, including
the specific challenges associated with DARPA's unique role in DOD to
provide early investments to achieve breakthrough technologies for
national security. As a result of DARPA's focus on early-stage
research, the majority of DARPA programs do not transition straight
into Service programs of record but are handed off to Service and
industry partners for further development. However, given the unique
nature of the advanced research conducted by DARPA, there are a variety
of alternative ways in which DARPA technology transitions into future
warfighting capabilities.
DARPA has a number of processes and resources available to Program
Managers (PMs) to help navigate transition barriers. That starts with
engagement with the Services and combatant commanders early in a
program to help understand operational needs, elicit potential handoff
partners, and build advocacy among operational users and resource
sponsors. In recent years, DARPA has increased the resources available
to support engagement and transition. IT established the Adaptive
Execution Office (AEO) as a mission support element solely focused to
help PMs by facilitating technical demonstrations, supporting
incremental advances in technical maturation where appropriate and
enhancing the handoff of DARPA technology to operational users and the
Services. AEO works very closely with DARPA's four Active Duty
operational liaisons to help PMs navigate the various barriers to
transition and maintain connection with the Services and the COCOMs
throughout the lifecycle of DARPA programs.