[Senate Hearing 117-]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office]
DEPARTMENT OF DEFENSE APPROPRIATIONS FOR FISCAL YEAR 2022
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TUESDAY, APRIL 13, 2021
U.S. Senate,
Subcommittee of the Committee on Appropriations,
Washington, DC.
The subcommittee met at 10:02 a.m. in room SD-192, Dirksen
Office Building, Hon. Jon Tester (chairman) presiding.
Present: Senators Tester, Durbin, Baldwin, Shaheen, Shelby,
Moran, and Hoeven.
DEPARTMENT OF DEFENSE
Defense Innovation and Research
STATEMENT OF Ms. BARBARA McQUISTON, PERFORMING THE
DUTIES OF THE UNDER SECRETARY OF DEFENSE
FOR RESEARCH AND ENGINEERING
opening statement of senator jon tester
Senator Tester. We'll call this committee to order.
I want to start by telling everybody here what an honor it
is to serve as chairman of this committee and with Senator
Shelby, a true gentleman, and I also want to thank Dick Durbin
for his long-time leadership on this committee, something that
I have appreciated as a member and I have continued
appreciation for his role as Whip and the chairman in the
caucus, and so thank you, Senator Durbin.
Today, we have Ms. McQuiston, and Dr. Tompkins virtually.
Thank you all for being here today, and I want to thank you for
your ongoing hard work to lead and shape the Department of
Defense Innovation and Modernization efforts.
When it comes to Federal funding priorities, few things are
more important than innovation and research, and it is critical
for Congress to continue to make strong research investments
across the board.
America is facing many difficult and evolving national
security challenges right now. We have heard from combatant
commands in recent weeks about the daily threats they face,
particularly from Admiral Davidson, the Commander of the Indo-
Pacific Command.
In this subcommittee, it is critical that we do our best to
ensure our service members continue to have access to the
world's most sophisticated and advanced technologies. So I hope
to hear the witnesses' perspective on the global race for
innovation, particularly as we compete with China and Russia,
and I look forward to learning more about ongoing and future
DOD (Department of Defense) technology innovation efforts and
whether it has the tools and resources it needs to work with
various partners across the country and that includes taking
advantage of the incredible innovations happening across this
country, including those at small businesses who can often
bring fresh ideas, nimble operations, and cutting edge
inventions to the table.
With that, I will turn to Ranking Member Shelby for his
comments.
Senator Shelby.
statement of senator richard c. shelby
Senator Shelby. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Thank you for this
hearing. I think it's very important to have a hearing with
DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency). Welcome.
This committee has approved billions of dollars, Mr.
Chairman, for basic research, applied research, and advanced
technology development to support efforts that would allow our
military to maintain a competitive advantage and strategic
advantage over our adversaries.
Our technological and industrial progress remains a
constant target from China and Russia and other nation states
that are actively working to undermine and surpass our
military's advancements. I believe we need a ready and lethal
force equipped with modernized systems capable of providing
strong national security and, importantly, deterring war. Our
investments in innovative research are critical in guaranteeing
success here.
Over the last 4 years, this committee has supported the
necessary budget increases in cutting edge research areas, such
as hypersonics, artificial intelligence, unmanned systems, and
microelectronics to address warfighter needs and capability
gaps, and with the top-line budget recommendations unveiled by
the current Administration last week, I'm currently concerned
about our ability to continue to make those essential strategic
investments that will allow us to keep pace.
I look forward to hearing from the witnesses today about
the progress being made in innovation and technology within the
Department of Defense and how resource constraints may impact
the department's ability to field cutting edge technology in
the future.
I also recognize that we're significantly constrained from
getting into many of the details here today that would provide
for a comprehensive discussion in an open hearing setting.
Perhaps, Mr. Chairman, I've suggested that we consider a
classified discussion with DARPA at a later date when you can
have it because what DARPA is doing is important to all of us
and especially to our Armed Forces.
Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
Senator Tester. Absolutely, Senator Shelby, and we will
take that up. We'll make that happen.
I would recognize Ms. McQuiston for a statement. You have 5
minutes. There is a Memorial Service at 11. So I'd ask you to
try to keep your comments to 5 minutes and so we can get some
questions. The rest of your statement for sure, your full
statement will be a part of the record. So you have the floor.
summary statement of ms. barbara mcquiston
Ms. McQuiston. Chairman Tester, Ranking Member Shelby, and
Members of the Subcommittee, thank you for providing this
opportunity to testify----
Senator Tester. You need to turn your mike on, please.
Ms. McQuiston. I apologize. Is it on?
Senator Tester. Bring it closer to your mouth. It might
help.
Ms. McQuiston. It's not lighting up. Okay. I apologize.
Chairman Tester, Ranking Member Shelby, and Members of the
Committee, thank you for providing this opportunity to testify
before you today. It's an honor to be here alongside my friend
and colleague, Dr. Stefanie Tompkins, Director of DARPA.
I'm truly honored to represent the Research and Engineering
Workforce. I'm also excited to return to public service. I
began my first government tour in 2006 at DARPA and today I
return to public service performing the duties of Under
Secretary overseeing DARPA as well as DIU MDA Space Development
Agency Service Labs, Direct Prototyping and Experimentation.
R&E serves as the chief technology officer for the
Department of Defense, strengthening national security and
boosting economic security. Investments in science, technology,
and innovation today can pay dividends tomorrow.
When I first started at DARPA, scientists were conducting
research in vaccine technology. Today, those discoveries have
contributed to the success of the COVID-19 vaccines. I'm quite
excited and proud that we are all benefiting from past
investments as we address the global pandemic. This is just one
example of the tremendous impact DOD investments have not just
for our military but for our Nation as a whole.
To continue this track record of success, we must reaffirm
our commitment to science, technology, and innovation today to
guarantee a strong tomorrow. This strategy for the future is
critical because our competitors are moving quickly.
The use of drones in the recent conflict between Azerbaijan
and Armenia may foreshadow things to come as others move more
quickly to adopt cheap emerging technology.
As both Secretary Austin and Deputy Secretary Hicks have
stated, the People's Republic of China is a pacing challenge to
the U.S. military. Bringing new technology and innovations will
be central to meeting that challenge. Presenting a credible
deterrent to potential adversaries requires us to develop and
field emerging technologies.
We must innovate at speeds and scale. Success requires more
than a go-it-alone approach. We must explore more flexible
partnerships with the private sector and academia, with small
businesses and HBCUs (Historically Black Colleges and
Universities). We must reinvigorate our Federal research
capabilities, elevate science, promote technology, and expand
partnerships with our allies.
R&E is committed to overcoming the value of death. We've
shown that innovation and modernization can be done faster with
more flexibility and commercial opportunities. From low-cost
expendable drones to safer ion batteries, we must strive to
eliminate gaps in planning or funding that can leave a project
sitting on the shelf for years. We must do more to engage the
services from day one.
Our competitors and potential adversaries will not wait for
our planning and budget cycles. We must balance oversight with
the need to move quickly in order to maintain our advantages.
This last year has demonstrated the importance of supply
chains. The President and Congress have made it clear that
onshoring the supply chain for microelectronics is critical to
our national and economic security. The department has been
taking actions to make microelectronics trustworthy, available,
and sustainable.
When I joined the government labs, our labs are the premier
place to work. Although we employ some of the best and
brightest minds, we are losing talent to the private sector and
competitors. The hiring flexibility Congress has recently given
to the department are helping, but we need to do more.
One bright spot I want to highlight is DOD Bush Faculty
Member John Rogers who pioneered the new field of
bioelectronics. Rogers' research was the foundation of a new
class of stretchable electronic devices. This research led to
the 2020 release of a new flexible skin patch that can track a
person's health through sweat. It allows for wearable devices
to detect whether someone has COVID-19. His company is award-
winning and moving to commercialize the sensors based on this
research.
While I'm optimistic about R&E's ability to be successful,
we have significant work ahead. Having an under secretary
solely focused on innovation could not be more important than
it is today.
I look forward to partnering with Congress to advance our
mission, to lead in technology dominance across the DOD, and
ensure the unquestioned superiority of the Joint Force while
strengthening the American economy.
Thank you. And I look forward to your questions.
Senator Tester. Ms. McQuiston, thank you for your
testimony, and there will be questions.
[The statement follows:]
Prepared Statement of Ms. Barbara McQuiston
Chairman Tester, Ranking Member Shelby and Members of the
Subcommittee, thank you for the opportunity to testify before you
today. It is an honor to be here alongside my friend and colleague Dr.
Stefanie Tompkins, the Director of the Defense Advanced Research
Projects Agency, DARPA. And more importantly, I am honored to represent
the men and women of the Office of the Under Secretary of Defense for
Research and Engineering (OUSD(R&E)). In addition to DARPA, OUSD(R&E)
is home to diverse group of engineers, scientists, researchers, and
staff officers who work in three separate agencies and in offices,
laboratories, and universities across our nation. OUSD(R&E)'s mission
is to maintain DoD's technological edge and to lead technological
change and innovation throughout the DoD.
In the three years since Congress directed the creation of
OUSD(R&E), and gave the office a mandate to advance technology and
innovation across the Department, OUSD(R&E) has developed and begun
implementing modernization roadmaps in key technology areas. OUSD(R&E)
has also strengthened lab and university partnerships for basic
research and worked closely with the services to improve prototyping
efforts in order to bridge the ``valley of death'' from prototype to
program of record.
Recently, Deputy Secretary Hicks assigned OUSD(R&E) the additional
role of chairing a new Innovation Steering Group (ISG). This group will
provide OUSD(R&E) with a mechanism for collaborating with leaders
across the Department, for synchronizing innovation efforts and sharing
lessons learned, and for driving initiatives to innovate at speed and
scale. We convened this group for the first time last week, and the
Deputy Secretary will hold her first Defense Management Action Group
meeting on the subject of innovation and joint experimentation later
this week. By creating the ISG, Sec. Hicks has signaled the importance
of innovation and the attention it deserves. Simply put, it is a good
time to be an innovator in the Department of Defense.
OUSD(R&E) consists of three core organizations and a number of
subordinate agencies and activities. The office of Research and
Technology (R&T) is responsible for overseeing DoD's labs, Federally
Funded Research and Development Centers (FFRDCs), University Affiliated
Research Centers (UARCs), academic and basic research, manufacturing
institutes, and Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR). R&T's
support for basic science provides the fuel that will power DoD's
innovation and modernization efforts well into the future.
OUSD(R&E)'s Modernization office (MOD) connects technologies
developed in laboratories with future warfighting capabilities. MOD has
developed roadmaps for DoD's 11 modernization priorities--that will be
addressed later in detail-to guide these key technologies from early-
stage science through capability fielding.
The office of Advanced Capabilities (AC) focuses on technology
transition. By conducting war games, mission engineering analysis,
prototyping, and demonstrations, AC converts technologies into
warfighting capabilities and gets those capabilities ready to field.
In addition to these headquarters organizations, OUSD(R&E) also
houses the Missile Defense Agency (MDA), the Space Development Agency
(SDA), the Defense Innovation Unit (DIU), and DARPA. DIU connects DoD
with private sector innovators who use commercial technology to address
some of the Department's hardest problems. MDA develops and fields
advanced capabilities to defend against rogue regime missile threats.
SDA is rapidly developing a new space architecture that is capable of
tracking advanced missile threats. Finally, of course, I am honored to
have the DARPA director speaking alongside me today.
facilitating transitions
The ``valley of death'' is the chasm between a technology and
warfighting capability. Countless technologies fail to transition into
warfighting capabilities and fall victim to this valley of death. To
shepherd new technologies across the valley of death instead,
OUSD(R&E)'s Advanced Capabilities (AC) directorate executes nine
programs that are dedicated to technology transition. By focusing on
different sources of innovation, technology readiness levels (TRLs),
and customer groups, these programs form a balanced portfolio that
transitions capabilities to the Services, Combatant Commands, or other
operational user groups, at an average rate of approximately 80%. This
80% ``sweet spot'' offers a responsible balance between using taxpayer
dollars wisely, while also taking measured risks to maintain DoD's
competitive edge.
Transition rate is an important measure of success because the
Joint Staff, Services, Combatant Commands, and warfighters will not
accept capabilities that do not meet their mission needs. By working
closely with these partners early in the prototyping process, AC
maximizes its transition rate by ensuring that partners are ready to
accept and field new capabilities when prototyping completes. Beginning
this year, AC added Mission Engineering to its toolbox; this process
rigorously evaluates Joint Staff and Combatant Command priority
missions and identifies new opportunities to transition capabilities
and deliver even greater impact to the Department.
prototyping pathways to deliver innovation to users
Results from OUSD(R&E)'s prototyping programs illustrate how, when
combined with experiments and demonstrations, prototyping is an
effective tool for bridging the valley of death. For example, the Quick
Reaction Special Projects (QRSP) program seeks out prototyping ideas
from across the innovation space, including small businesses, non-
traditional performers, and academia. By discovering innovative but raw
ideas and creating prototyping programs to further their development,
QRSP serves as a vehicle for ``technology push'' and offers the
warfighter capabilities that they did not realize were possible.
To ensure that DoD quickly transitions these new capabilities, QRSP
awards contracts throughout the budget year of execution. For example,
QRSP awarded a contract to the start-up Adronos which enabled it to
compete in a ``shoot off'' demonstration. During this demonstration,
Adranos achieved 15% better performance than other solid fuel
formulations: a potential game-changer for hypersonics and long-range
precision fires. QRSP's near real-time award enabled this small
business to quickly refine their novel fuel and to demonstrate its
utility to DoD.
Speed is a critical enabler of technology transition, especially
for emerging technologies. For this reason, the Emerging Capabilities
Technology Development (ECTD) program identifies promising technologies
when they first appear on the horizon. ECTD then quickly assesses the
potential utility of these technologies and creates a prototype for a
Service partner to rapidly evaluate. For example, in 2017, ECTD
initiated a multi-Service project to prototype a cognitive software-
defined radar capable of operating in congested and contested
electromagnetic environments. In less than three years, the SDRadar
prototype transitioned to U.S. Army and U.S. Air Force programs of
record.
Finally, OUSD(R&E) maintains low-cost demonstration and
experimentation venues to specifically support small business and non-
traditional performers. These venues enable DoD to access cutting edge
capabilities and ideas from across the innovation base. They also
enable small businesses and non-traditional performers to interact with
DoD users, to learn about DoD's mission, to gain experience that can be
leveraged to meet future DoD needs. Two such venues, Thunderstorm and
Stiletto, demonstrated technologies from 60 small businesses in FY20.
technology transitioned by ousd(r&e) that is making a difference for
the warfighter
Not only do OUSD(R&E)'s prototyping programs enjoy an 80%
transition rate, they also deliver cutting-edge capabilities that make
a different for the warfighter. For example:
--Low Cost ``Attritable'' Strike Demonstration (LCASD) or XQ-58A
Valkyrie, Joint Capability Technology Demonstration (JCTD):
Facing potential adversaries with increasingly complex air
defenses, INDOPACOM issued a call for an ultra-low cost, long-
range aircraft to conduct strike or reconnaissance missions.
OUSD(R&E) answered the call with the LCASD JCTD. This aircraft,
also known as the USAF XQ-58A Valkyrie, allows the United
States to avoid placing our pilots and high value aircraft at
risk during the early stages of a confrontation. The project
also demonstrated agile automated manufacturing processes,
gathered performance data (e.g., weight, strength, stiffness),
evaluated cost model data (e.g., cost, schedule lead time), and
developed in-house prototyping capability for low cost
attritable aircraft technology. LCASD also proved that it is
possible to rapidly manufacture a low cost, combat relevant
aircraft. This accomplishment has tremendous implications for a
future fleet of loss tolerant aircraft which could change the
nature and conduct of warfare itself. These capabilities
transitioned to the USAF Skyborg program and would not have
been possible without the strong support of Congress.
--More Situational Awareness for Industrial Control Systems (MOSAICS)
Joint Capability Technology Demonstration (JCTD): MOSAICS
demonstrated a semi-autonomous solution to enhance the cyber
defenses of industrial control systems associated with DoD
critical infrastructure (e.g., fuel depots and electric grids).
MOSAICS provides warfighters with tools to quickly identify,
respond, and recover from cyber-enabled attacks on critical
power, water, communication, and transportation systems. Naval
Facilities Engineering Command is already planning to
transition and sustain the first MOSAICS leave-behind prototype
at Naval Base San Diego and is evaluating other opportunities
to deploy MOSAICS capabilities at facilities in the INDOPACOM
area of responsibility. Additionally, the Department is looking
to use of MOSAICS to improve the cybersecurity of other
critical DoD systems, including offensive cyber, long-range
strike, and nuclear deterrent systems.
--Hack-A-Sat: Borrowing a common practice for testing system security
in the commercial sector, the Hack-A-Sat project invited
hackers from around the world to attempt to hack actual DoD
satellites. By watching the world's best hackers at work, DoD
identified new, cutting-edge hacking strategies and is
developing new offensive and defensive approaches for space and
cyber protection. In Q2FY21, space and cyber experts from
across DoD met to apply lessons learned from Hack-A-Sat to
develop new concepts for space and cyber operations. I welcome
the opportunity to share additional details about this effort
in an appropriate setting.
defense innovation unit transitions commercial technologies to the
warfighter
In addition to prototyping to bridge the valley of death, DoD's
investments must cultivate new workforce talent, attract first-time DoD
vendors, and identify novel solutions from across the national security
innovation base: together, the Defense Innovation Unit (DIU), the
National Security Innovation Network (NSIN), and National Security
Innovation Capital (NSIC) partner with industry and academia to do just
that. As Chinese investments aim to compete with U.S.'s technological
lead in key sectors, DoD's investments can play an important role
laying the foundation for a successful startup ecosystem and for
ensuring national and economic security.
DIU, for example, rapidly prototypes, fields, and scales state-of-
the-art commercial solutions. Leveraging the innovation, cost-savings,
and economies of scale of the commercial sector, DIU has awarded
contracts to 189 unique companies, of which 143 are small businesses
and 61 are first-time vendors to DoD. DIU has transitioned 19 solutions
to the warfighter, including small drones, automated cyber
vulnerability detection and remediation, mobile endpoint security,
advanced data management and analytics, air threat response, predictive
mission configuration, rapid analysis of threat exposure, and space
situational awareness. DIU's predictive maintenance solution scaled
from one aircraft to fielding across the Air Force and Army and its
small drone solutions scaled from the Army to all levels of the U.S.
government. At DIU, there is also an opportunity for larger defense
contractors to integrate the innovative commercial technology of
smaller firms to provide ready-made solutions to the warfighter.
Like DIU, NSIN works to redefine what national security service
means for academics, technologists, and entrepreneurs. NSIN runs
problem-solving programs such as Hacking for Defense (H4D) to produce
new concepts and capabilities for DoD end users. NSIN also works to
commercialize dual-use technology developed at DoD laboratories and to
support company formation and the scale-up of dual-use hardware
manufacturing capabilities, including those in autonomy,
communications, power, sensors, and space. NSIN partners with 66
universities in 46 states and has placed 175 people in DoD STEM
positions, of which 47% were women or minorities.
mission engineering
Mission Engineering (ME) is an analytical approach for evaluating
potential capabilities in the context of real-world missions and
threats. Rigorous and data-driven, ME can help inform DoD's
requirements definition and technology investment processes and can
support the development of government reference architectures. In
December 2020, OUSD(R&E), in collaboration with the Services, Joint
Staff and the OSD engineering community, codified the ME process by
releasing the first edition of the Mission Engineering Guide. This
guide disseminates best practices, invokes critical thinking, and
provides a consistent methodology for practitioners to use when
performing ME analysis.
In FY21, OUSD(R&E)'s Mission Engineering team initiated four
analyses to answer priority questions for the Department; analysis
topics include: high energy lasers for base defense, position,
navigation, and timing in highly contested environments,
electromagnetic spectrum maneuver and mission data integration, and
rapid precision strike-next. These topics were identified through a
OUSD(R&E)-led workshop which included participants from the Joint
Staff, Combatant Commands, and other OSD organizations. The topics were
subsequently approved by the Vice Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of
Staff.
To perform these and other analyses, ME requires a technical
database capable of managing a large amount of data and models.
OUSD(R&E)'s new Mission Engineering Digital Environment (MEDE) serves
as one such database, providing analysts with a collaborative, agile,
secure, interoperable, and responsive digital environment in which to
conduct ME activities. OUSD(R&E) is also standing up a mission
integration/mission engineering war room to facilitate collaboration
across all classification levels and to meet the technical demands of
multiple concurrent analyses.
To further analyze the potential mission impacts of emerging
technologies, OUSD(R&E)'s Strategic Intelligence and Analysis Cell
(SIAC) established an Emerging Disruptive Technology (EDT) wargame
series. Wargaming is an analytical approach that enables DoD to jump-
start the innovation process by grappling with the implications of
emerging technologies well in advance of their maturation. EDT wargames
holistically examine emerging technologies' technical capabilities and
policy considerations, as well as their potential impact on operational
requirements and threats. EDT wargames have examined topics such as:
autonomy in undersea warfare, AI's applications to command and control,
directed energy weapons, and emerging technology considerations for the
Joint Warfighting Concept (JWC). Wargame outputs help inform future
concept and capability development, mission engineering studies,
prototyping and experimentation, threat forecasting, and S&T
investments.
EDT wargames also provide a unique opportunity to integrate a
diverse set of subject matter experts across program office,
technology, and Service stovepipes. EDT wargames include members of the
technology, operational, and intelligence communities from OSD, the
Joint Staff, the Services, Combatant Commands, and intelligence
agencies. This inclusive approach creates a mutually beneficial
feedback loop among the organizations and individual participants. For
instance, the operational community gains a better understanding of the
opportunities and risks of emerging technology and the technology
community gains an appreciation for future concepts and capability
requirements. Both communities further benefit by learning from the
intelligence community's depiction of future threats.
These feedback loops were readily apparent in 2020, during EDT
Wargame 4. By assessing the 2030 technology landscape and identifying
technical opportunities for the S&T community to align with the JWC,
EDT 4 informed JWC's Supporting Concept capability requirements.
Additionally, within OUSD(R&E), wargames are designed to inform
prototyping activities, to shape modernization roadmaps, and to
integrate across technology portfolios, thus enabling OUSD(R&E) to
deliver the next generation of integrated capabilities to the
warfighter.
trmc delivers capability for test and evaluation
The Test Resource Management Center (TRMC) ensures the readiness of
the test and evaluation (T&E) infrastructure and workforce. TRMC also
supports DoD modernization by forecasting future test infrastructure
needs, assessing current test ranges and facilities, and developing
critical test technologies and capabilities for use across the DoD T&E
enterprise. TRMC, of course, also supports DoD-wide modernization by
facilitating testing of key capabilities. Recent examples include:
--Improved aeroshell testing by developing an arc heater that more
accurately produces hypersonic flight conditions and can
evaluate thermal protection system materials;
--Upgraded a wind tunnel by developing a nozzle that provides air
flow up to Mach 18 and that enables the measurement of
hypersonic aerodynamics and weapon system stability;
--Enhanced the realism of nuclear survivability testing by
prototyping a test capability that produces ultra-short, pulsed
neutron radiation and can be used to assess the survivability
of microelectronics and critical control circuits; and
--Improved 5th/6th generation aircraft testing against modern air
defense systems by fielding sixteen threat-representative radar
signal to assess detectability, survivability, and system
performance.
In addition to strategic modernization investments, TRMC also makes
foundational investments to improve test capabilities and lower the
cost of testing across the Department. For instance, TRMC fielded a
common range instrumentation system at eight open-air ranges. This
system tracks aircraft under test with sub-meter accuracy and securely
transmits highly classified flight test data down to the ground at four
times the rate of previous systems.
where innovation research and technology begins
The Deputy Director for Research and Technology champions the
Department's relationships with academia, is piloting efforts to
attract a new and more diverse talent pool to the Department's science,
technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) workforce, is promoting
the use of new hiring authorities and flexibilities, and through the
Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) and Small Business Technology
Transfer (STTR) is working to bring small and innovative businesses
into the Department.
growing the pipeline of science, technology, engineering, and
mathematics (stem) talent
The Science, Mathematics, and Research for Transformation (SMART)
Scholarship Program provides scholarships to U.S. citizens to pursue
bachelors, masters, or doctoral degrees, and in doing so, helps build a
future workforce capable of addressing the Department's most
challenging problems.
Upon graduation, recipients work in a civilian position in a lab or
agency of the Army, Navy, Air Force, or other DoD entity and have a
one-year service requirement for each tuition year. In 2019, DoD
targeted scholars with academic backgrounds that aligned with DoD's
modernization priorities, including: quantum science, microelectronics,
biotechnology, and artificial intelligence. Continuing to recruit
stellar candidates into the SMART program will enable DoD to build a
workforce that is capable of addressing even the most challenging
science and technology problems in the future.
our commitment to diversity
To attract and advance an inclusive DoD STEM workforce, the
Department's STEM Education and Outreach efforts are working to
increase women's and other underrepresented groups' involvement. For
example, OUSD(R&E) conducts SMART Scholarship program outreach at
Historically Black Colleges and Universities and Minority-Serving
Institutions (HBCU/MI). DoD's long-standing partnership with HBCUs/MIs
not only contributes to a diverse STEM workforce, it also focuses
research grants on core DoD modernization priorities. Furthermore,
although the DoD's HBCU/MI program research focuses specifically on
defense, program investments also contribute to commercial innovation.
The HBCU/MI Program also manages nine centers of excellence that
provide leadership, research, and education in DoD priority areas. The
newest centers focus on quantum sensing, artificial intelligence/
machine learning, networks, aerospace education, research, and
innovation. The program is also working to establish to new centers
focused on biotechnology and materials science. Finally, two other
centers of excellence have a STEM workforce focus, and are cultivating
a cohort of students through an education program that is coupled with
exposure to the DoD's research and development enterprise. Many of
these students also participate in DoD internships; after completing
internships, 57 STEM scholars who also participated in the DoD HBCU/MI
Program have accepted job placements with defense laboratories since FY
2018.
leveraging international talent
To stay ahead of our competitors, both economically and militarily,
the U.S. must continue developing and attracting world-class scientists
and engineers. The Department employs more than 130,000 scientists and
engineers, and nearly half of this number work in one of the
Department's laboratories or engineering centers. Despite challenges in
recruiting and retaining technical talent, the Department maintains an
exceptional workforce. Many of the U.S.'s top researchers and
entrepreneurs have come here from other countries. To take advantage of
this fact, in just the last year, OUSD(R&E) re-invigorated the
Department's J-1 Visa waiver program. This effort will reduce barriers
for foreign nationals who want to stay in the country to work in STEM
fields.
Today's U.S. universities welcome a high percentage of
international students, scientists, professors, and industry
collaborators, and our adversaries compete with the U.S. to recruit
from this same talent pool. Immigrants have been awarded 38% of the
Nobel Prizes won by Americans in Chemistry, Medicine, and Physics since
2000 and immigrants or their children founded 45% of the 2019 Fortune
500 companies. We want these individuals to come here, stay here, and
choose to work with us no matter where they were born. It is our
strategic imperative to continue recruiting the best, highly-skilled
individuals-regardless of national origin-to work within the U.S.
research enterprise.
utilizing hiring flexibilities
The Department continues to make extensive use of recruitment and
retention authorities to enhance its science and technology workforce.
These authorities give Service laboratories the ability to conduct
direct hiring in particular fields, such as cybersecurity, to support
continuing education, provide recruitment bonuses, and reward employees
with performance-based pay.
These tools allow DoD laboratories to recruit and retain top S&T
talent and remain competitive with the private sector. For instance,
the Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL) has used the Enhanced Pay
Authority to hire subject matter experts in the areas of autonomous
systems, data analytics, and communications and networking, which
directly enhances their ability to support the Department's
modernization priorities.
the role of small business
The Department invests nearly $2 billion annually in innovative
small businesses, entrepreneurs, and academic research institutions
through the Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR)/Small Business
Technology Transfer (STTR) programs. These programs provide the DoD
access to the small business community, reaching experts and academics
that may not otherwise be engaged.
Small businesses that begin working with DoD through the SBIR/STTR
programs have the option of partnering with existing contractors or
larger businesses that may already be working on Programs of Record or
fielded services. For many small businesses this is a ``foot in the
door'' providing experience working with the DoD and providing DoD with
access to new perspective and talent from the small business community.
Moreover, SBIR/STTR projects are often dual-use, and are both
transitioned to the military and commercialized for private-sector
benefit. The Department facilitates both military transition and
private sector commercialization opportunities through Component SBIR/
STTR Commercialization Readiness Programs (CRP) and the OSD Transitions
SBIR/STTR Technologies (OTST) Program. The Department also held its
first Virtual Symposium on transition in October 2020 with over 1,000
participants from small businesses, primes, and academia.
DoD has focused the SBIR and STTR investment programs on the
Department's modernization priorities. Additionally, DoD has
streamlined and modernized the SBIR and STTR proposal submission
process, with the goal of making these programs more accessible to
small, domestic firms.
In order to promote small business within the defense contracting
space, the DoD facilitates licensing opportunities through our national
partnership intermediary, TechLink. Partnership with TechLink offers
licensing support to small businesses working with the DoD, which is
mutually beneficial, delivering value to the small business and
enabling further innovation.
Additionally, the Department encourages larger defense contractors
to work with small businesses, including SBIR/STTR performers, through
specific subcontracting requirements and through the Mentor Protege
program managed by the Office of Small Business Programs within the
Office of the Under Secretary of Defense for Acquisition and
Sustainment. These mechanisms further assist small businesses to
contribute to Defense innovation, while also making it easier to do
business with the DoD.
how small business innovation in dod helps america broadly
DoD reaps tremendous benefits from partnering with small
businesses. A recent study of the SBIR/STTR programs found the
Department achieved a 22-to-1 return on investment in small business
research and development over the past 23 years, resulting in $347
billion in total economic output. An economic impact study conducted in
2018 on the DoD license agreements active during the 2000-2017 period
revealed $27 billion in sales of new products and services, including
at least $5 billion in confirmed sales to the U.S. military. Overall,
these agreements generated over $58 billion in total economic impact
and created approximately 215,000 jobs. In this study, small businesses
accounted for approximately 80% of the licenses.
the defense manufacturing base
Manufacturing is critical to the advancement of our technology
modernization objectives. The DoD Manufacturing Technology program
(ManTech) executes a portfolio of project investments across OSD, the
Services, and Agencies, focusing on advanced manufacturing
technologies. The ManTech program also serves as a lead Federal
strategic investment partner to 9 of the 16 Manufacturing USA
innovation institutes (MIIs).
These MIIs promote domain-focused manufacturing ecosystems in areas
of value to the Department and identify emerging areas of importance to
the U.S. manufacturing base. The MIIs employ pre-competitive technology
advancement and investment, and facilitate community building and
workforce development. They bring together industry, academia, and
federal partners to increase U.S. manufacturing competitiveness and
promote a robust and sustainable national manufacturing R&D
infrastructure.
For example, the Manufacturing times Digital (MxD) Institute
recently welcomed 5G on its Future Factory Floor to serve as a testbed
for demonstrating the opportunities 5G, artificial intelligence, and
machine learning bring to manufacturing. The ManTech team has also
begun to accelerate advanced manufacturing technologies through public-
private partnerships in cybersecurity, photonics, and regenerative
medicine.
Solar power and our most advanced medical diagnostic machines both
depend on advanced photonics. The American Institute for Manufacturing
Integrated Photonics (AIM Photonics) is an engineering technology
consortium that has established a U.S.-based Photonic Integrated Chip
(PIC) manufacturing ecosystem. This ecosystem is leading efforts in the
prototyping, validation, and final packaging of advanced node
microelectronics and photonic chip fabrication, and the development of
test, assembly, and packaging facilities.
Last year the Department established its ninth DoD-lead
Manufacturing Innovation Institute--BIOMADE, to specifically focus on
bio-industrial manufacturing. This institute leverages emerging
biotechnologies, including modern engineering biology techniques, to
foster domestic leadership in bio-manufacturing. BIOMADE is already
building partnerships across the U.S. bio-economy and strengthening
linkages between defense needs and industry and academic partners.
Hypersonic weapons depend on the manufacturability of carbon-carbon
materials. Working to address this need, ManTech is sponsoring the
manufacture of carbon-carbon composite for the Hypersonics Applications
(MOC3HA) initiative. This effort works directly with domestic
manufacturers of carbon-carbon material to streamline processes and
improve quality and reliability volume and size, reduce cost and cycle
time, and increase yield.
The department has convened a DoD-wide Manufacturing Council to
coordinate activities addressing defense-wide challenges as well as
human capital investments and strategies, and to serve as a touchpoint
for industry. Through this Council, we align the funds in the ManTech
program, Industrial Base Analysis and Sustainment effort, and Defense
Production Act Title III authorities to achieve our modernization goals
and to maintain our technical advantage.
supporting dod's miis response to the covid-19 pandemic
America Makes, the DoD-sponsored institute for additive
manufacturing, rapidly partnered with the Food and Drug Administration
(FDA), HHS/Assistant Secretary for Preparedness and Response (ASPR),
National Institutes of Health (NIH), and Veterans Affairs (VA) to
efficiently and safely match health care provider needs for PPE. This
project also developed a rapid method for design submission and
approval of 3D PPE designs under DoD funding.
As of February 25, 2021, more than 624 published designs were
available on the Exchange, with 34 designs optimized for clinical use
and 28 designs optimized for community use. These designs have been
downloaded over 200,000 times with more than 2.5 million views. Through
the effort, America Makes assisted front line workers in obtaining
hundreds of thousands of pieces of critical PPE supplies from qualified
manufacturing across the U.S.
The NextFlex Manufacturing Innovation Institute facilitated a
project that uses novel RNA sequencing technology to prove the
environmental contamination and transmission pathway, then refined and
expanded production capacity of antimicrobial mats called ``clean
surfaces'' to address surface contact infections. Virus and bacteria
surface contact infections are frequent, and pathogens often remain
viable and contagious between surface cleanings even if proper episodic
procedures are followed.
For this novel ``clean surface'' technology, any time microbes
contact the mat surface, an embedded circuit board sends a micro-
electric impulse along printed conductive traces to that location to
activate antimicrobial silver and copper ions that quickly eradicate
the contaminants. The flexibility of these mats allows them to be
placed around the side rails of hospital beds, on tables, or doorknobs.
The application of this innovation to public, medical and retail
infrastructure in the long-term could impact how future viral outbreaks
are controlled, especially during flu seasons. The mats went through
validation testing throughout the University of Pittsburgh Medical
Center hospital system and are now being installed in six hospital ICUs
for a six-month experiment to measure pre- and post-infection rates.
The Advanced Functional Fabrics of America (AFFOA) is a DoD-
sponsored advanced fabrics institute and was selected to participate on
the Commonwealth of Massachusetts' Manufacturing Emergency Response
Team. Alongside the Massachusetts Technology Collaborative, AFFOA
helped administer $5.6 million in funds for PPE through the
Massachusetts MII program for domestic manufacturers pivoting to
manufacture PPE, identified opportunities to rapidly optimize the PPE
supply chain, matched PPE manufacturers with producers of raw
materials, and connected hospitals to manufacturers to quickly produce
needed products. AFFOA also built a distributed PPE material-testing
network to assist hospitals, state emergency management agencies, first
responder organizations, and domestic manufacturers to test their
materials and PPE products and ensure product performance and
regulatory compliance.
strengthening our defense research base
Scientific discoveries occurring at universities and laboratories
supported by the DoD, have led to dramatic commercial and national
security advances and have significantly improved citizens' lives
around the world. DoD's relationship with academia is an incredibly
valuable force multiplier for the basic research enterprise.
In addition to our Defense Laboratories, the Department's FFRDCs
and UARCs are a critical element of our innovation base, providing the
independent and objective scientific and technical expertise that the
Department relies on to create technical superiority. Last year, we
undertook a concerted effort to ensure the Department employs our
FFRDCs for maximum strategic impact.
In FY19, the FFRDCs and UARCs made numerous contributions to
enhance the capabilities of the Joint Force. For example, the Aerospace
Corporation was an integral part of the Government and contractor team
that successfully launched a GPS III on a Falcon 9 rocket. This was the
first flight of a competitively awarded National Security Space Launch
mission in nearly 20 years. In another instance, the Johns Hopkins
Applied Physics Laboratory developed a technically rigorous ``space
game'' that enabled participants to grapple with realistic and
technically informed timelines, authorities, questions, and rules of
engagement, and the operational implications of pursuing different
space architectures. Playing out these scenarios has informed the
department's investment decisions.
international partnerships
Our Allies are essential to our national security. This is true in
research as it is in warfighting. We continue to develop our
international partnerships through the SMART program. Two examples from
the SMART program to highlight are the Alan Turing Institute in the
U.K., where SMART scholars can perform research on artificial
intelligence and machine learning, and the von Karman Institute for
Fluid Dynamics in Belgium, where SMART scholars can perform research on
hypersonics. Through these efforts, scholars work with their peers
overseas improving our S&T community and contributing to the
Department's international partnerships.
technology protection
Our military's technological edge is at risk. Competitor nations
are acquiring intellectual property and sensitive technologies from our
academic research system and industry through illicit and legal means.
The department is taking a multipronged approach to address this issue.
We are applying protections for critical technologies and programs that
prevent technologies from falling into the wrong hands. We are
establishing procedures to reinforce the integrity of our research
enterprise. We are also engaging the broader S&T community and our
stakeholders to provide improved threat awareness, inform necessary
controls, and develop best practices that can be institutionalized
across the DoD S&T enterprise.
We continue to look for new methods to secure our technology.
Technology Area Protections Plans (TAPPS) are new initiatives we are
using to provide a common understanding of what needs to be protected
and a strategy to establish protections. TAPPs will help S&T
organizations get information regarding emerging and disruptive
research that can be used to apply safeguards through Program Plans.
The TAPPs in development align with the 2019 DoD list of critical
programs and technologies mandated by Section 1049 of the FY2019 NDAA.
We have also taken other steps to protect open research at U.S.
institutions. R&E is currently working with other federal research
funding agencies to develop common standards for identifying and
adjudicating conflicts of interest and conflicts of commitment. We are
fully engaged with the White House Office of Science and Technology
Policy to develop Federal guidance for Research Security and Integrity.
In March 2019, we issued instructions to our partners in academia,
requiring that key research personnel funded by DoD grants, cooperative
agreements, Technology Investment Agreements, and other non-procurement
transactions disclose all current and pending projects and funding
sources. We are also revising research grant and cooperative agreement
procedures to exclude research funding for individuals posing an
unacceptable risk to national security or participating in foreign
talent recruitment programs. Moreover, DoD encourages academic
institutions, associations, and councils to develop training modules
for faculty to clearly explain the landscape of threats to research
integrity.
Technology protection requires a nuanced and multifaceted approach
as well as partnerships with other government agencies, industry,
academia, and allies. An uncoordinated, broad-brush approach to
technology protection can result in damaging consequences that inhibit
leading-edge research. At the same time as we work to protect our
technological edge, we recognize that the free exchange of ideas and
collaboration are critical to our continued success. We must preserve
the long-standing norms that have benefited our research institutions
while at the same time punishing bad actors who break the law. While we
must guard against espionage and the theft of intellectual property, we
must also nurture an open, pioneering and collaborative culture that
has historically served our country so well.
creating and promoting new technologies
The office of the Director of Defense Research and Engineering for
Modernization develops and coordinates Department-wide science and
technology strategies to guide and drive technology development and
inform requirements. By developing S&T roadmaps, we prioritize
resourcing, support future technology insertion, and provide
opportunities for investments to accelerate development efforts. Our
current efforts are focused on 11 modernization areas; 5G, Hypersonics,
Directed Energy, AI, Biotechnology, Microelectronics, Cyber, Quantum
Science, Autonomous Systems, Fully Networked Command and Control, and
Space.
Microelectronics
Microelectronics is a critical focus area for DoD Modernization.
Advanced capability microelectronics technology development directly
influences success in fielding disruptive technologies, including
Artificial Intelligence, Hypersonics, and 5G. The US is struggling to
maintain global competitiveness in leading edge fabrication and design
innovation, despite supporting a diverse infrastructure of research,
design, intellectual property (IP) rights, and physical plants that
should enable the US to be an attractive market for the semiconductor
industry. Additionally, aggressive investments and actions by peer
competitor nations threaten U.S. leadership. Russia and China have
publicly stated that advanced microelectronics and AI are the keys to
economic and military dominance. Nearly 90 percent of the world's
semiconductor foundry market share belongs to companies with foundries
in Taiwan, South Korea and China. This imbalance is prompting calls to
boost domestic capacity.
R&E's Trusted and Assured Microelectronics (T&AM) Program is
executing the development of key technologies in accordance with the
DoD Microelectronics roadmap. The broad goals of the T&AM program are
to secure U.S. microelectronics interests, reverse the erosion of
domestic innovation and supply, and establish a strong leadership
foundation for the next-generation of microelectronics technology for
DoD applications. We are involved in three lines of effort to reach
these goals:
1. Assurance of the integrity of microelectronic products as they
move through the supply chain through the development and
application of enhanced assurance technologies, services, and
standards.
2. Availability of critical and common IP, manufacturing
capabilities, and assurance tools and services required for DoD
research, development and acquisition programs.
3. Access to design modules, design capabilities, manufacturing,
and verification and validation services at commercial sources
with lowered barriers and integrity/confidentiality protection
measures.
We plan to continue investing in advanced capability
microelectronics, ensuring access to State of the Art microelectronics,
advanced packaging and test, and to radiation hardened
microelectronics. We are also moving forward with the establishment of
the Joint Federated Assurance Center, and continuing to investment in
the DARPA led Electronics Resurgence Initiative (ERI). ERI is intended
to ensure U.S. microelectronics technology leadership well into the
21st century. ERI will pursue electronics performance advancements by
leveraging circuit specialization, to include materials, architectures
and designs.
artificial intelligence
We are in a global arms race in artificial intelligence technology
and applications, most notably with China, who has set a goal to lead
in AI technology by 2030. To maintain US dominance in AI, we will:
1. Continue to invest in cutting-edge AI research through
organizations such as DARPA and Office of Naval Research (ONR).
2. Democratize DoD AI innovation by developing modern data and
software development processes providing end-users and
warfighters the ability to engage with AI development directly.
3. Accelerate AI adoption by supporting a rapid development
pipeline, from research to our engineering centers to the
service software factories and program offices.
This three-prong approach will lead to: trusted AI capability that
has high utility to the warfighter, decreased development timelines,
lowered cost-structures and reduced maintenance; increased
understanding and availability of DoD data which is so vital to AI
development; and improved talent development and retention within the
civilian and service member community. Although this revolution is in
its early phase, the capability is currently being tested in such areas
as predictive maintenance, business operations, and automated target
recognition. More generally, AI will enable a myriad of capabilities
across the force, including intelligence fusion and analysis, planning
and prediction, and longer-term autonomy.
Just as the second wave of AI research performed within the
Department 20 years ago led to the explosion of commercial activity in
the US today, R&E is heavily involved in a third wave of advanced AI
techniques and capability that will further strengthen the American AI
ecosystem and have future commercial impacts.
cyber
Our adversaries are engaged in wide-ranging and highly impactful
malicious activities in cyberspace, often with near-impunity.
Fortunately, through the implementation of the 2018 DoD Cyber Strategy,
which embraces a defend-forward and persistent engagement approach, US
Cyber Command and the Service Cyber Components are now blunting and
disrupting many of our adversaries' malicious cyberspace activities.
Through this approach, and by leveraging new capabilities made possible
through significant and long-term DoD S&T investments, our cyber forces
are now exacting far greater costs on our adversaries.
To build on this momentum and ensure increasing dominance, our
cyber strategy calls for increased investments to accelerate the
development and rapid transition of technologies that provide the basis
for 1) vastly enhanced resilience of DoD systems and critical
infrastructure 2) substantially increased capacity and unrivaled
capabilities for the conduct of cyber and cyber-enabled operations, 3)
overmatching skills and expertise within the Cyber Mission Forces, and
the Cybersecurity and Cyber S&T workforces.
Further, thanks to Congress' support of FY20 and FY21
appropriations totaling $20M, OUSD(R&E) is awarding the first three
academic Cyber Institute consortiums in April 2021. Known as VICEROY
(Virtual Institutes for Cyber and Electromagnetic Research and Employ),
they will prepare future ROTC and DoD-minded civilians for challenging
cyber and electromagnetic spectrum operations and research careers
through experiential learning. These increased investments in both
technology and human capital will compound the dividends of the now
decade-long increased focus, by DARPA and the Services, on the
development of innovative and increasingly sophisticated cyber
technologies.
5G
Technology to secure 5G communications is paramount to leveraging
5G for operations and communications superiority. As an investor in and
significant consumer of technological innovation, the Department drives
a cycle that parallels civilian industry and leads to new capabilities
and services that would otherwise not be available. The technologies
being developed and tested in the 5G Initiative will drive U.S.
technology and innovation. Further, the dual-use applications being
developed will help U.S. industry get 5G-enabled products to the
commercial market more quickly while also providing DoD with new
operational capabilities.
Security is often ``bolted on'' after a system has been developed.
5G networks, prototypes, and operating procedures are being developed
now, and the 5G Initiative is actively working with industry to address
security early by engaging both large integrators and non-traditional
performers in experiments at over a dozen DoD facilities around the
country. Examples include new 5G techniques for device authentication,
using network slices (virtual networks on top of the underlying
network) for threat detection and protection, and using multiple
network paths for added resilience. We are working with industry and
the standards community to build security into the design from the
start, so security is viewed as a key metric, comparable to factors
like network speed and latency.
Our 5G Initiative emphasizes Zero Trust principles, that is, moving
away from defenses based on perimeters to defense in depth. Perimeter-
based defenses are ineffective in dynamic environments that include
multiple mobile devices, potentially untrusted supply chain components,
and massive scale--all of which are anticipated under 5G. A perimeter
defense is like a castle and moat defense; one builds a moat and wall
around the protected center to keep the threat outside the castle and
moat. In dynamic 5G environments, there is no castle. Instead, we need
to think in terms of an in-depth defense strategy that assumes an
adversary may be anywhere in the 5G environment. Continuous monitoring
and rapid detection of unintentional faults and malicious attacks allow
us to adapt in real time.
The 5G Initiative is developing multiple 5G testbeds across the
country to demonstrate the efficiency and capability that 5G will
enable for the Department of Defense. The testbeds provide the Services
the ability to develop and test novel capabilities in at-scale
environments that would otherwise not exist. The testbeds represent 10
different projects spanning 14 military locations and representing over
seven tactical and operational mission areas/use cases. At Hill AFB,
the 5G Initiative develops technology to enable 5G networks to share
spectrum with airborne radars dynamically. At Naval Base Coronado and
Marine Corps Logistics Base Albany, the 5G Initiative is developing
smart warehouse technology enabled by 5G. The technology will enable
more efficient, accurate, and timely delivery of warfighting material.
At Joint Base Lewis-McChord, the 5G Initiative develops Augmented
Reality/Virtual Reality for the training environment.
Finally, ongoing dialogues with Service Programs of Record (PORs)
ensure that the research projects address service requirements and that
PORs are making plans to transition and incorporate successful 5G
developments.
Autonomous Systems
DARPA's ``Grand Challenges'' on autonomous vehicles served as the
primary catalyst for significant interest--and investment--by academia,
industry, and government in autonomous systems. Building on this
legacy, DoD application of intelligent, autonomous behaviors to robotic
and unmanned systems (across all warfighting domains) is poised to
allow humans and machines to team and achieve an overwhelming
warfighting advantage not possible by humans or machines acting alone.
These behaviors increase efficiency by reducing the physical and/or
cognitive loads on the warfighter; reduce risk to warfighters by
reducing manned operation in harsh and unpredictable environments; and
provide the potential to generate cost-effective combat mass. Moving
beyond today's current limited fielding of intelligent autonomous
systems that primarily support intelligence, surveillance, and
reconnaissance activities with platform-level autonomous navigation,
future capabilities will be applied across the spectrum of warfighting
functions.
In the near-to-mid-term, autonomy efforts within research and
engineering will result in advances in a number of areas, including;
responsive fires support based for both manned and unmanned sensor and
weapon systems; effective, resilient resupply using autonomous systems
from point of manufacture to delivery; and joint all-domain and control
enabled by autonomous systems increasing reconnaissance and
surveillance ability.
To speed the development of these effective, appropriate, and safe
intelligent autonomous systems, the DoD will continue to develop the
digital engineering infrastructure necessary to design, fabricate, and
test these systems throughout the entire Robotics and Autonomous System
lifecycle. Successful fielding of these systems will leverage ongoing
efforts to develop and implement a comprehensive Joint all domain
command and control system as well as efforts to develop a secure cloud
environment including a cloud-to-edge strategy suitable for contested
environments. In concert, we must conduct virtual and live
experimentation to fully explore future operational concepts as well as
continue to develop sound, thoughtful, and ethical principles for the
employment of Robotics and Autonomous Systems.
biotechnology
Biotechnology will fundamentally change the future battlefield, and
US adversaries (most notably China) are aggressively pursuing related
capabilities. Furthermore, China has signaled willingness to use this
and other emerging technologies against their opposition without
respect for protocols, conventions, or human rights. Biotechnologies
hold potential to broadly impact defense capabilities; however, until
recently, DoD investments have almost exclusively focused on medicine
and chem-bio defense missions.
A key application of biotechnology to national security is the
ability of bioindustrial manufacturing to generate novel, domestic,
safe, and sustainable sources of critical supply chain components. For
example, a project executed by ONR and NAVAIR China Lake demonstrated
the use of engineered bacteria to produce linalool, which can be
efficiently converted to jet fuel, diesel, gasoline, and high density
missile fuels. Other DoD efforts, such as DARPA's Living Foundries
program, have illuminated the potential for more than 1,000 DoD-
relevant molecules to be produced using biology.
The Department is prioritizing partnerships with Industry, to
include BIOMADE--the newly awarded Bioindustrial Manufacturing
Innovation Institute (MII)--and in collaboration with the Services, is
focusing biotechnology modernization on: (1) building a common
foundation of physical and digital infrastructure to create a rapid
prototyping pipeline, (2) identifying and prioritizing use cases for
prototyping and demonstration, and (3) enhancing workforce development
opportunities. Investing in a pipeline for advanced development of
bioindustrially-sourced products will not only provide critical
materials and capabilities for our warfighters and maintain our
competitive advantage in the field, a robust industrial base will also
ensure that the future global bioeconomy is made in America.
directed energy
Directed Energy Weapons can provide US forces with a high rate of
fire weapon with a reduced logistical burden. This capability will be
especially important as potential adversaries continue to develop
advanced missile capabilities. We are working with the Services to
accelerate operational weapon system development and operational
experimentation, to build the industrial base, to develop the needed
science and technology, and to carry out the capability development and
demonstrations leading into programs of record.
Through our Laser Scaling Program, we are using industry to build
300 kW high-energy lasers by the end of 2022, and then we are
increasing power to 500 kW by the end of 2025, and to 1000 kW by the
end of 2028, all while reducing the size, weight, power, and thermal
needs of these systems. Through our Rapid Prototyping Fund, the Navy
will operationally test new laser and high-power microwave weapon
prototypes at sea in 2020 and beyond. Further, we have partnered with
the Special Operations Command to accelerate programs for airborne and
land-based laser strike weapons. We have partnered with the Army
Futures Command and the Navy to accelerate land- and sea-based laser
and high-power microwave weapons for integrated air-and-missile
defense, with initial demonstrations in 2022, key decisions in 2023,
and initial capability in 2025.
In anticipation of new and more lethal directed energy weapons
transitioning to programs of record, we are upgrading our test and
evaluation capabilities with new infrastructure at the test ranges.
Along with all this effort there is a tightly coupled science and
technology effort aimed at lethality, beam control, propagation, power,
and thermal management. Multi-domain mission analysis is being carried
out to expand the range of missions and to enable directed energy
weapons integration into the Joint Force.
fully networked command, control & communications (fnc3)
To improve command, control and communications (C3) the department
is focused on providing the capability to evolve rapidly and
independently between systems, equipment and users. This effort
involves integrating stove-piped C3 systems into a layered
architecture. The FNC3 effort is closely tied to Joint All Domain
Command and Control (JADC2) and together these efforts are
synchronizing investments across the DoD to ensure that the Joint
Force's C3 are interoperable, resilient and capable.
By breaking-up the current stovepipes, we can increase resilience
and improve Quality of Service (QoS--data rate and latency).
We are also making rapid developments in software defined radios
and investing digital active electronically scanned antennas and
optical communications systems. This will strengthen the resilience of
individual links, grow capacity, improve interoperability and enable
rapid fielding of better waveforms and algorithms. DoD is already
transitioning and taking advantage of these new capabilities, such as
the upgrades to the Multifunctional Information Distribution System
(MIDS), which includes Link-16, and the Warrior Robust Enhanced Network
(WREN).
We are leveraging recent concepts in Software Defined Networking
(SDN) such as network slicing, to manage all the available diversity
and deliver the much needed resilience with the necessary Quality of
Service. Our investments are targeted at optimizing SDN concepts to our
DoD tactical and strategic networks, as they are different from the
commercial networks where SDN has been implemented to date. The US
Navy's Tactical Data Dissemination Initiative (TDDi) is an early
transition of these SDN technologies. To improve interoperability
between applications in the short term, machine-to-machine
interoperability technologies (e.g. efficient translators) such as
DARPA's STITCHES program are ready for transition.
In the medium and long-term the Department (led by the DoD CIO's
Office) is moving towards a federated data-centric architecture to
reduce the overhead associated with current approaches to
interoperability. In support, we are investing in a data-centric
approach to C2 messaging (known as Universal Command and Control--UC2)
that takes advantage of a recent encoding innovation, variable format
binary (e.g. ProtoBuf and EXI), to produce a C2 messaging standard that
is simultaneously efficient, evolvable and broadly applicable. An
initial demonstration of the data-centric C2 techniques applied to the
Counter Unmanned Ariel Systems mission is planned for the end of this
year. Improving our C2 applications ability to better infer relevant
information from the available data and provide decision support is
also key to better C2 with investments coordinated across multiple
modernization portfolios including AI, Autonomy and FNC3.
hypersonics
Hypersonic systems take advantage of speed, maneuverability and
sustained flight in the altitude gap between air defenses and ballistic
missile defenses to provide transformational capability for survivable,
long-range, lethal, time-critical strike of heavily defended and high
value targets.
Hypersonic systems are enabled by innovations in highly integrated
aerodynamic configurations, high temperature materials and structures,
high speed propulsion, and advanced guidance, navigation and control.
Over the past decade, focused research, development, test and
evaluation has created the opportunity to rapidly transition
developmental system concepts to weapon system prototypes and to
operational weapon systems. We are working in close coordination with
the Services to accelerate development and fielding of multiple air,
land and sea launched conventional hypersonic strike weapons to defeat
targets of critical importance.
Our potential adversaries are rapidly evolving high-end offensive
and defensive systems creating highly contested anti-access/area denial
(A2/AD) environments that challenge our tactical battlefield dominance
and necessitate the development of hypersonic strike capabilities.
Additionally, our potential adversaries are aggressively pursuing,
and now fielding a variety of hypersonic systems. This compresses the
timescale on the tactical battlefield, creating asymmetry, which we are
working to address. We will continue to implement our integrated
strategy to enable fielding of operational prototypes in quantity from
land, sea and air by the mid-2020s.
We are also working with the Missile Defense Agency to accelerate a
comprehensive layered defeat capability against adversary tactical
hypersonic weapons including kinetic defense in the terminal and glide
phases of flight, as well as left-of-launch strike of missile launch
complexes. The DoD hypersonics capability fielding strategy is being
implemented through a highly coordinated set of programs across the
services and agencies, to include a joint service memorandum of
agreement and middle tier acquisition programs to effectively
accelerate capability to the warfighter. Critical investments in our
industrial base, our workforce, applied technology, and test
infrastructure are being made to enable this acceleration and to pave
the way for technical superiority for decades to come.
The Joint Hypersonics Transition Office (JHTO), which resides in
our Advanced Capabilities directorate, works in close coordination with
our Principal Director for Hypersonics to accelerate the development
and transition of hypersonic technology to the warfighter. As the
engineering and execution arm for hypersonics in the Office of the
Secretary of Defense, the JHTO works closely with the Principal
Director for Hypersonics to identify and address critical science and
technology and workforce gaps and opportunities to ensure the success
of the Hypersonics Strategy. In a resource-constrained environment with
an adversary operating with more resources and faster development
timelines, the JHTO addresses the need to accelerate and more
efficiently develop hypersonic technologies by tying S&T investments
directly to identified military needs, providing mechanisms for closer
collaboration and coordination across the government, and identifying
opportunities to tap into non-traditional performers such as
universities and foreign allies.
The JHTO has five lines of effort aimed at increasing the speed of
innovation in the U.S. and allied hypersonics enterprise:
1. the JHTO develops capability-based S&T roadmaps covering basic
and applied research to guide the hypersonics S&T enterprise
and funded $48M in FY2020 in 28 projects to accelerate
technologies that address the most critical S&T gaps.
2. the JHTO is sponsoring an effort with Boeing and Aerojet and
the AFRL to mature a propulsion design to enable a hypersonic
cruise missile option for aircraft carrier-based F/A-18s and a
joint USAF/USN missile.
3. the JHTO in November 2020 stood up a university consortium of
applied hypersonics at the Texas A&M Engineering Experiment
Station (TEES) that enables nearly 100 universities to work on
applied hypersonics research, provide expertise to the
government, and to address workforce gaps. The JHTO is funding
$20 million a year in university research through the
consortium and has made this research ecosystem available to
the rest of the government to access applied hypersonics
research.
4. As the lead for allied engagements in hypersonics, the JHTO is
the co-chair of the Australia-US Hypersonics Working Group
(HWG) formed in August 2020 to develop a bi-lateral strategy
and coordinate S&T and activities in hypersonics.
5. the JHTO in October 2020 stood up the JHTO Systems Engineering
Field Activity at NSWC Crane in Indiana to provide the systems
engineering rigor to JHTO-funded S&T efforts to ensure that
they can transition into our programs.
quantum science
Successes in the area of quantum science research at DoD
demonstrates how early-stage research can have a multiplier effect in
other areas important to national security. A clear line can be drawn
to the 20+ years of basic research funding within the DoD, and the
major successes we are now seeing in U.S. commercial industry related
to atomic clocks, quantum computing, the growing importance of quantum
sensors, and quantum networks. These quantum technologies have
significant economic and national security impact, made possible as a
result of long-term, dedicated basic research funding.
Recent increases in federal funding through the National Quantum
Initiative Act have led to increased levels of coordination with
government partners. Increased commercial investments in quantum
computing and quantum sensors are leading to new opportunities for DoD
to engage and look towards transitioning this technology for military
advantage. DoD is focused on the long-term opportunities of this
technology for both military and civil applications.
Advances in quantum science are only beginning, and there is much
more potential to discover through research. As quantum technologies
develop, their importance to our economy and to national defense are
likely to increase.
space
The US cannot cede its dominance in space. Space related work will
enable the US economy, diplomacy, and the military.
The dominance of the US in space is being challenged. Potential
adversaries are showing their ability to rapidly deploy space
capabilities, they are extending their reach to the Moon, the area
between the Moon and the Earth, and they are innovating with
technologies that challenge norms of behavior and provide asymmetric
advantages threatening both terrestrial and space capabilities.
We are exploring numerous game-changing technologies with the labs
and international partners such as advanced quantum encryption,
artificial intelligence and smaller satellites that provide more
capabilities, and austere on-demand responsive launch systems. Most
notably, we have just initiated a new space research consortium program
to mine the best and brightest researchers from universities and the
tech base to focus on the hardest of space challenges identified
collaboratively through a Board of Directors consisting of R&E, US
Space Force, DARPA, DIU, Department of Energy, NASA and others. In
addition to speeding the deployment of new space technologies through
efforts like SpaceWerx and the space software factories, we are
exploring cis lunar architectures and technologies such as space domain
awareness, rapid maneuver and long-duration station keeping, through
collaborative efforts in nuclear power and propulsion with the
Department of Energy.
missile defense and space development agencies
The Missile Defense Agency (MDA), the Defense Innovation Unit
(DIU), and the Space Development Agency (SDA) fall under the R&E
umbrella. MDA and SDA are working on programs providing our nation with
defense against some of the most advanced threats in the world. DIU
plays an essential role in providing an entry point for innovators in
the private sector to engage with needs of the DoD.
missile defense agency
The Missile Defense Agency (MDA) is developing capability and
technologies that address the evolving missile threat. MDA will develop
a Next Generation Interceptor (NGI), which improves homeland missile-
defense performance and survivability against the assessed rogue nation
threats as part of the Missile Defense System (MDS). In FY 2021, MDA
will award the design and development activities for two competitive
NGI development contracts. The initiation of the NGI program and the
continued Ground-based Midcourse Defense Service Life Extension Program
will extend the existing Fort Greely, Alaska, and Vandenberg Air Force
Base, California, capability to defend the homeland from ballistic
missiles beyond 2030.
The Department is investing in technologies and studying
capabilities to defeat regional offensive hypersonic weapons, the first
element of which is to detect and track incoming missile threats. MDA
delivered a capability for USINDOPACOM for real-time sensing and
display of hypersonic and maneuvering vehicle tracks. This capability
is operational now in support of the Missile Warning and Missile
Defense missions. In collaboration with industry partners, US Space
Force, USNORTHCOM, USSTRATCOM, USSPACECOM, and the Space Development
Agency, MDA is pursuing a Hypersonic and Ballistic Tracking Space
Sensor (HBTSS). Once deployed, HBTSS will become a key element of the
MDS in hypersonic defense by providing a persistent, layered capability
to detect and track dim boosting ballistic missiles, hypersonic glide
vehicles, and raids in all phases of flight. MDA awarded two agreements
earlier this year to industry to build an on-orbit prototype-
demonstration space vehicle for a planned launch in 2023.
With the achievement of Initial Fielding in fourth quarter FY 2021
and operational acceptance in first quarter FY 2023, MDA will add the
Long Range Discrimination Radar in Alaska into the MDS architecture to
provide a persistent capability to defend the United States homeland
against IRBMs and ICBMs. This past year the Department demonstrated the
ability of the Patriot missile defense system to intercept a short-
range ballistic missile target using THAAD/AN/TPY-2 track and
discrimination data. MDA also is continuing to mature an integrated air
and missile defense capability for regional defense.
MDA, in cooperation with the U.S. Navy, demonstrated early
capability against maneuvering threats during flight-testing of the
Standard Missile (SM)-6 Sea-Based Terminal (SBT) defense, and it will
further demonstrate this capability against an advanced maneuvering
threat-representative target later this year. We will continue to
advance our SBT capability to address the regional hypersonic threat
and will test that capability in the FY 2024 timeframe. MDA plans to
accelerate the hypersonic missile defense program under a newly
designated Glide Phase Intercept initiative to develop a capability to
defeat a regional hypersonic threat. The eventual goal is providing
greater depth of fire in a regional layered defense architecture. MDA
is also pursuing advances in joint all-domain and global command and
control to support USNORTHCOM in countering very long-range cruise
missiles.
The Department's previous missile defense technology innovations
have transitioned into weapon systems and vastly improved interceptor
seeker capability, increased the speed and range of intercept with
advances in propulsion, and increased the probability of single-shot
kill using multifaceted tracking and discrimination algorithms. As an
example, the technologies developed as part of the Multiple Object Kill
Vehicle effort were presented to NGI bidders, and may be included in
the proposals. Additionally, MDA invested in directed energy kill
mechanisms, including multiple laser types, high-powered microwave, and
component technologies to support development of sensors and
interceptors, such as beam control and lethality. These investments
allow the country to outpace the missile threat. We must continue to
sustain, modernize, and expand the MDS by pursuing rapid, yet measured,
development of advanced missile defense concepts and technologies for
homeland and regional defense.
MDA is continually assessing emerging and disruptive technology for
potential applications to missile defense utilization. Investments are
being made in Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, Nanosat
technology, Left-through-Right integration, Cybersecurity, and Quantum
Science. Key to understanding the potential of technology has been the
development of testbeds that allow MDA to exercise and demonstrate
capabilities and test new concepts, algorithms, simulations, and
software. MDA works extensively with partners, leveraging and expanding
technology opportunities through cooperative, collaborative engagements
with DoD partners, DoE labs, academia and U.S. allies and international
partners.
MDA continues to drive for the inclusion of small businesses and
universities through outreach, such as their Industry Innovation Summit
and University Innovation Summit. These events present MDA's greatest
technology challenges and offer one-on-one sessions for the Nation's
most innovative minds to present their capabilities and solutions. MDA
is committed to ensuring the use of small business to the maximum
extent practicable, monitoring prime contractor performance to ensure
contractors are achieving their proposed small business goals and
objectives and have a mitigation plan in place to do so. MDA actively
supports the DoD Mentor Protege Program (MPP), currently overseeing
five active DoD MPP agreements.
The MDA Small Business Advocacy Council (MDASBAC) consists of MDA
large prime contractors dedicated to fostering and showcasing a
superior collaborative environment to develop and promote successful
small business relationships to achieve common goals. MDA has a robust
outreach program and takes full advantage of the outreach resources
administered by Procurement Technical Resource Centers/Small Business
Development Centers to connect large defense contractors with viable
small businesses to support the agency's mission.
space development agency
The Space Development Agency (SDA) was established in March 2019 to
develop and field an alternative National Defense Space Architecture
and accelerate the deployment of next-generation space capabilities to
the warfighter. SDA is developing capabilities to address a wide range
of national security space needs identified in the DoD Space Enterprise
Vision of August 2018. To address current near-peer threats, SDA is
focused on the most urgent of these needs by delivering a mesh network
that will provide low-latency data transport in space to enable
advanced missile tracking and beyond-line-of-sight targeting of land
and maritime targets.
At its second anniversary in the Department, SDA has shown itself
to be a ``constructive disruptor'' in national security space. Its
model is tied to two main pillars: proliferation of satellites in Low-
Earth Orbit (LEO) and spiral development, delivering new capabilities
on-orbit every two years, starting in FY22. SDA's mission begins and
ends with the warfighter, guiding SDA to stick to schedule so that
needed capabilities are available for end users to address the threat
at or ahead of need. The Agency has established a Warfighter Council to
ensure the needs of the Combatant Commands, Services, Joint Staff, and
Intelligence Community determine the minimum viable product for each
tranche, or generation of satellites.
SDA is hitting its milestones and forming partnerships with the
Services, Combatant Commands, and other DoD agencies to reduce risks
and gain user insight. The agency delivered two satellites for launch
nine months after receiving funding, was designated by the Department
of Defense as the lead for the proliferated LEO Joint All-Domain
Command and Control (JADC2) backbone, and awarded contracts for all
four segments of its initial tranche. SDA is preparing to launch
several capability demonstrations and risk-reduction experiments this
year, in partnership with others from across the space enterprise,
including DARPA, the Air Force Research Lab, Missile Defense Agency,
and several small businesses developing state-of-the-art space
technologies.
SDA actively seeks ways to leverage commercial advances in
technology to enable its space architecture. New space companies are
supplying satellites for the first generation of the architecture as
well as the launch vehicle for that tranche. To kick off 2021, SDA
published an update to the National Defense Space Architecture (NDSA)
Systems, Technologies, and Emerging Capabilities (STEC) Broad Agency
Announcement (BAA) seeking studies, technologies, and prototypes that
enable Real-Time Global Awareness and Connectivity; Comprehensive
Space-Based Sensing; and Omniscient Command, Control, and Execution.
This BAA is in place to establish an ``intellectual pipeline'' to
access ideas from across the community to inform the future
architecture, enable leap-ahead improvements for future tranches, and
enable new capability layers that address emerging warfighter needs.
SDA is also focusing on maturing and transitioning technologies from
America's small businesses, start-ups, and research institutions
through a series of SBIR/STTR opportunities this spring.
In FY22, SDA will launch and operate the first tranche of
satellites to demonstrate the Transport layer, the mesh network of
communications satellites, and the Tracking layer, Overhead Persistent
Infrared (OPIR) sensing satellites that provide missile warning,
detection, and tracking capabilities. Tranche 1, the next generation of
these capabilities, is slated for delivery in FY 2024, followed by
future generations every two years that will incorporate battle
management command and control and other layers of capability needed to
provide persistent global access to protect national security. In FY23,
the SDA will transition to the Space Force in accordance with the
direction of the National Defense Authorization Act for FY 2020.
conclusion
Our mission is to foster technological dominance across the
Department of Defense, ensuring the unquestioned superiority of the
American joint force. We are dedicated to ensuring that the
technological edge remains in our favor. This statement while
comprehensive, is not exhaustive in capturing all the activities being
undertaken to maintain technological dominance in the present and
future. The projects and programs contained in this statement do
provide important examples of how crucial innovation is to the national
security of the United States. I thank you for your time and I look
forward to your questions.
Senator Tester. Now we'll go to Dr. Tompkins for her
statement.
STATEMENT OF DR. STEFANIE TOMPKINS, DIRECTOR, DEFENSE
ADVANCED RESEARCH PROJECTS AGENCY
Dr. Tompkins. Chairman Tester, Ranking Member Shelby, and
Members of the Subcommittee, thank you for the opportunity to
testify today and for your strong support of DARPA over the
years.
My name is Stefanie Tompkins, and I serve as the Director
of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency or DARPA.
It's a real pleasure to be here with my friend and
colleague Ms. Barbara McQuiston from the Office of the Under
Secretary of Defense for Research and Engineering.
While we work closely with Ms. McQuiston's organization,
DARPA has a unique mission in both the DOD community and the
broader U.S. technology ecosystem. That mission is to prevent
strategic surprise by making investments in breakthrough
technologies for national security.
What that means is we anticipate, create, and demonstrate
technologies that are nowhere on technology roadmaps and often
outside most people's imaginations.
For over 60 years now, in partnership with innovators,
inside and outside government, DARPA has repeatedly delivered
on our mission. We've transformed revolutionary concepts and
seemingly impossibilities into practical capabilities.
Examples of those capabilities include stealth technology,
precision-guided weapons, unmanned aero-vehicles, as well as
many icons in modern society, such as the Internet, automated
voice recognition and language translation, and GPS receivers
small enough to embed in nearly any consumer device.
Technologies like these provide more options for our
Nation's leaders and the military services and today, with
increasingly complex challenges and a rapidly-changing world,
DARPA's role has never been more vital.
At DARPA, we think not just about scientific and
engineering innovation now but also about the innovation
ecosystem. That ecosystem includes many overlapping and
adjacent communities from academia, industry, and government.
It includes everything from fundamental research to global
scale systems of systems. It includes innovation not only in
technology but in processes and transition strategies, as well,
and, most importantly, it includes a rotating cast of DARPA
program managers who come from and will return to that
ecosystem and who seek to solve not just today's problems but
tomorrow's, as well.
One of the best illustrations of how DARPA works is related
to the COVID-19 pandemic. So about 5 years ago, when I was
serving in a different role at DARPA, I spent a lot of time on
the road trying to expand and diversify our pro forma base.
One of the programs I talked about the most involved heavy
investment into something called mRNA vaccines. So mRNA
vaccines are pretty much a household word today, but at the
time they were much, much more obscure and DARPA's investments
were based on the insight of individual program managers who
anticipated their need for both military and public health
missions.
The research that DARPA first initiated more than a decade
ago is now playing a leading and catalytic role in today's
fight against COVID-19. In typical DARPA fashion, we made
significant investments in the technology years before it was
known to be needed, leading to high-impact capabilities related
to prevention, diagnostics, and treatment that have helped to
mitigate the current crisis.
From vaccines and diagnostics to defensive and offensive
hypersonic technologies, state of the art artificial
intelligence, quantum systems, micro-electronic solutions, and
much, much more, DARPA has forged new paths and continues to
deliver on our mission.
I look forward to working with the members of this
subcommittee and others in Congress to ensure the security and
resilience of our Nation, and I would be most pleased to answer
your questions.
[The statement follows:]
Prepared Statement of Dr. Stefanie Tompkins
Chairman Tester, Ranking Member Shelby and Members of the
Subcommittee, thank you for the opportunity to testify before you
today. I am Stefanie Tompkins, Director of the Defense Advanced
Research Projects Agency, DARPA. It is a pleasure to be here with my
colleague, Ms. Barbara McQuiston, from the office of the Undersecretary
for Research and Engineering (USD(R&E)) in the Department of Defense.
Our organizations work together every day to advance our Nation's
defense technologies. DARPA plays a particular role in this community
and in the broader U.S. technology ecosystem. That role is to
anticipate, create, and demonstrate breakthrough technologies that are
outside and beyond conventional approaches--technologies that hold the
potential for extraordinary advances in national security capability.
For more than 60 years, DARPA has held to a singular and enduring
mission: to make pivotal investments in breakthrough technologies for
national security. Working with innovators inside and outside
government, DARPA has repeatedly delivered on that mission,
transforming revolutionary concepts and seeming impossibilities into
practical capabilities. The results have included game-changing
military capabilities like precision weapons, stealth technology, and
unmanned aerial vehicles, as well as icons of modern civilian society
such as the internet, automated voice recognition and language
translation, and Global Positioning System receivers small enough to
embed in myriad consumer devices.
DARPA creates and executes programs that rely on and inspire an
innovation ecosystem of academic, corporate, and government partners.
We focus on developing capabilities for national security leaders and
the nation's military services, who work with us to create new
strategic opportunities and novel tactical options. For decades, this
interlocking ecosystem of collaborators has proven to nurture intense
creativity. Today, DARPA's role has never been more vital. From being
front and center in our nation's fight against the COVID-19 virus, to
defensive as well as offensive hypersonics technologies, state of-the-
art artificial intelligence, quantum technologies, and directed energy
solutions, DARPA today is delivering on our most pressing security
needs.
DARPA pursues game-changing technologies and capabilities in a way
that provides surprising advantage for U.S. and Allied warfighters and
at a much faster pace than the state of the art. DARPA's work with the
Services and other agencies aims to meet not just known but as-yet
unrecognized needs and move swiftly to deployment. That includes an
increased emphasis on prototyping and joint projects--and, especially,
a tighter emphasis on designing, building, and testing aspects of
technology. Today, I will focus my testimony on how DARPA seeks to: 1)
counter near-peer adversaries, 2) extend DARPA innovation to the
warfighter and beyond, and 3) promote continued American innovation
throughout the broader S&T ecosystem of university and industry
partners.
1. Countering Near-Peer Adversaries
We seek to present adversaries with surprising warfighting
scenarios that create dilemmas or completely disrupt their decision
calculus. To do so, we must disrupt our own warfighting enterprises and
provide decisive advantage across air, land, and sea, as well as space,
cyberspace, and the electromagnetic spectrum. Big, monolithic platforms
designed, built, and procured to do everything cost too much, take too
long to field, and are usually technologically outdated by the time
they are available. DARPA seeks a new asymmetric advantage--one that
imposes complexity on adversaries by harnessing the power of dynamic,
coordinated, highly autonomous, and flexible architectures.
A. New Warfighting Constructs
Modern warfare is becoming less about singular platform and weapon
capabilities, and more about combinations of systems that can be
rapidly developed and composed into more effective warfighting
constructs. DARPA's Assault Breaker II (ABII) and Mosaic initiatives,
along with their resulting technologies, seek to fundamentally change
the way the military thinks about designing, buying, and deploying
future systems.
First, the ABII program addresses several challenges posed by our
near-peer competitors. Patterned after the original Assault Breaker
program in the late 1970's, a memorandum of agreement was signed by
DARPA and the vice chiefs of all five Services to establish a joint
service team creating technology solutions to these critical
challenges. Interacting closely with the intelligence, military
operator, and technology communities, the team's first objective is to
design warfighting operational constructs based on new and emerging
technologies and capabilities.
The program's second objective is to develop an advanced modelling
and simulation environment to support analysis of true cross-domain
(seafloor to space) cross-service warfighting constructs. Finally, the
program is tying the advanced modelling and simulation environment into
an interactive experiment environment to support exploration of highly
complex, interdependent approaches that characterize the future of
warfighting.
ABII seeks to organize this evolution in warfighting and act as a
conduit to both communicate technology solutions to the services as
well as articulate critical challenges to the technology development
community in a manner where they can appreciate the larger picture.
ABII will serve as the technical baseline for multi- domain operations
moving forward.
In addition to ABII, DARPA has also been spearheading the
``Mosaic'' construct of future warfare. The Mosaic concept posits that
using less expensive systems brought together on demand as the conflict
unfolds, could facilitate the creation of ``effects webs,'' enabling
diverse, agile applications--from a kinetic engagement in a remote
desert setting, to multiple small strike teams operating in a bustling
megacity, or an information operation to counter an adversary spreading
false information in a population threatening friendly forces and
strategic objectives. Mosaics, therefore, can rapidly be tailored to
accommodate available resources, adapt to dynamic threats, and be
resilient to losses and attrition. Two Mosaic-related technologies--a
novel decision aid for mission commanders and a rapid software
integration tool--played a critical role in the recent Air Force
demonstration of the Advanced Battle Management System (ABMS).
The Adapting Cross-domain Kill-webs (ACK) program and the System-
of-systems Technology Integration Tool Chain for Heterogeneous
Electronic Systems (STITCHES) were among a number of technologies
employed late last summer in the ABMS on-ramp demonstration, which
involved attacks using live aircraft, ships, air defense batteries, and
other assets. ACK is developing a decision aid for mission commanders
to assist them with rapidly identifying and selecting options for
tasking--and re-tasking--assets within and across organizational
boundaries. Specifically, ACK assists users with selecting sensors,
effectors, and support elements across military domains (space, air,
land, surface, subsurface, and cyber) that span the different military
services to deliver desired effects on targets. Instead of limited,
monolithic, pre-defined kill chains, these more disaggregated forces
can be used to formulate adaptive ``kill webs'' based on all of the
options available.
ACK was used in an air defense scenario during the ABMS
demonstration, where an air commander faced incoming aerial threats and
needed to quickly decide the best way to counter them. In the demo, the
ACK decision aid software analyzed thousands of options to form cross-
domain kill-webs and recommended assets and the best command-and-
control ``play'' to the mission commander.
The machine-to-machine communications to enable this distributed
fire control was performed by the STITCHES integration toolchain.
STITCHES is a software-only and fully government owned (non-
proprietary) toolchain specifically designed to rapidly integrate
heterogeneous systems across any domain. STITCHES innovation is in
auto-generating middleware between systems without needing to upgrade
hardware or breaking into existing system software. The toolchain does
not force a common interface standard; rather it rapidly creates the
needed connections based on existing fielded capabilities obviating the
need to upgrade in order to interoperate.
B. Responsive and Flexible Space Operations
The Department of Defense has prioritized rapid acquisition of
small satellite and launch capabilities. Through leveraging commercial
acquisition practices, DARPA has been able to streamline a number of
militarily-relevant missions in the last year from conception through
services acquisition and launch. These missions are validating emerging
concepts for resilient capabilities that would reside in low Earth
orbit--a capability which will revolutionize communications,
intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance.
Right now, satellites critical to our national security and
warfighting capabilities traditionally are custom designed. In the
increasingly contested space environment, these exquisite yet costly
and monolithic systems have become vulnerable targets that would take
years to replace if degraded or destroyed.
Meanwhile, the evolution of commercial space has led to the design
and manufacturing of LEO constellations intended for broadband internet
service, which could offer previously unavailable economies of scale.
DARPA is interested in leveraging these advances through our Blackjack
program and driving them forward in order to demonstrate military
utility.
Blackjack aims to develop and demonstrate the critical technical
elements for building a global high-speed network backbone in low Earth
orbit. That would enable highly networked, resilient, and persistent
DoD payloads that provide over-the-horizon sensing, signals, and
communication, and hold the ground, surface, and air domains in
constant global custody. To do that, researchers are investigating
innovative vehicle delivery approaches that enable revolutionary
advances in payload size, weight, power, and cost.
For Blackjack, we are targeting a series of risk reduction
rideshare flights that will continue through this year. With these
flights, the goal is to develop and validate the technologies necessary
for the Blackjack constellation.
C. Attribution of Malicious Cyber Actors
DARPA researchers are identifying and addressing critical cyber
vulnerabilities that threaten global stability and security. Malicious
actors in cyberspace currently operate with little fear of being caught
due to the fact that it is extremely difficult, in some cases perhaps
even impossible, to attribute malicious actions in cyberspace to
specific individuals. The reason cyber attribution is difficult stems
at least in part from a lack of end-to-end accountability in the
current internet infrastructure.
To address this problem, DARPA launched the Enhanced Attribution
(EA) program. EA is making currently opaque malicious cyber adversary
actions and individual cyber operator attribution transparent by
providing high-fidelity visibility into all aspects of malicious cyber
operator actions. Furthermore, if successful, EA will increase the
government's ability to publicly reveal the actions of individual
malicious cyber operators without damaging sources and methods. Over
the last three years the program has developed techniques and tools for
generating operationally and tactically relevant information about
multiple concurrent independent malicious cyber campaigns, each
involving several operators, and the means to share such information
with U.S. law enforcement, intelligence, and Allied partners.
Late last year, DARPA EA researchers used their data analytics to
develop timely, accurate threat information regarding Russian-
attributed malicious cyber infrastructure and associated actor
personas. EA shared this information with close partners at the FBI
Atlanta and Pittsburgh field offices, contributing to the October 2020
indictment of six GRU personnel associated with a worldwide destructive
malware campaign and the remediation of that malware campaign in U.S.
and Allied critical infrastructure.
D. Hypersonics
The ability to field hypersonic systems ranks high on the DoD's
list of priority technologies, due in part to the pace of research by
peer adversaries. Hypersonic flight at velocities of more than five
times the speed of sound offers major advantages on the tactical
battlefield, especially for conducting military operations from longer
ranges, with shorter response times, and enhanced effectiveness
compared to current military systems.
DARPA is developing technology demonstrations in 2021 for a number
of operational capabilities. For example, the Hypersonic Air-breathing
Weapon Concept (HAWC) program is a joint effort with the U.S. Air Force
(USAF) seeking to develop and demonstrate critical technologies to
enable an effective and affordable air-launched hypersonic cruise
missile. The program emphasizes efficient, rapid, and affordable flight
tests to validate key technologies. HAWC is pursuing flight
demonstrations to address three vital technology challenge areas: air
vehicle feasibility, effectiveness, and affordability.
The Tactical Boost Glide (TBG) program is another joint DARPA/USAF
undertaking, striving to develop and demonstrate technologies to enable
future air-launched, tactical-range hypersonic boost glide systems. In
such systems, a rocket accelerates its payload to high speeds, the
payload then separates from the rocket, and glides unpowered to its
destination. TBG plans to include ground and flight-testing in 2021 to
mature critical technologies and demonstrate system performance.
2. Innovations for the Warfighter and Beyond
A. Stopping Pandemics
A primary aim of the DARPA Biological Technologies Office (BTO) is
to improve total force health protection and readiness. One of the
biggest vulnerabilities to deployed military personnel and civilians is
a lack of protection against many endemic and emerging bio-threats
(e.g., the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, or mosquito-borne viruses such as
Chikungunya and Dengue).
DARPA's approach to pandemic prevention advanced the current state
of the art by enabling antibody discovery in days to weeks rather than
months to years. Additionally, DARPA investments in new diagnostic
platforms allowed researchers to pivot rapidly to emergent viruses such
as COVID-19. In 2011, DARPA began investing in gene-encoded vaccines
based on DNA or RNA. Unlike traditional vaccines, which nearly all
require laborious, expensive, and lengthy development times to counter
each new threat, gene-based vaccines have the advantage of directly
delivering coded genetic instructions to the body on how to produce its
own protective antibodies against a specific threat. This means gene-
encoded vaccines can be easily manufactured at scale using largely
synthetic processes, versus being cultured in eggs; transported and
stored without many of the cold-chain logistics required by traditional
medical countermeasures; delivered with near-immediate efficacy; and
safely expressed in the body for only a limited duration, causing no
permanent alteration to the genome. This approach has shown great
promise as a means to provide safe, reproducible, long-term immune
protection. However, vaccines often require more than one dose and
weeks to months before protected status is achieved, creating
vulnerability either directly to warfighters if they are deployed
before immunity has been established or to the mission due to the
delayed deployment of personnel until they achieve immune protection.
DARPA's fundamental research and development (R&D) investments,
fortunately, have resulted in discovery of several gene-encoded
monoclonal antibody platforms, and has greatly de-risked the gene-
based medical countermeasure (MCM) field. DARPA R&D investments have
catalyzed significant commercial and transition interest. Several
companies (including Moderna, AstraZeneca, and Inovio) have made major
investments in the budding field of gene-encoded MCMs and have released
vaccines to curb the spread of COVID-19. DARPA investments also spurred
spin-out companies such as RenBio, which is optimizing the delivery of
gene-based MCMs for increased efficacy and tolerability.
Early in 2020, DARPA allied closely with department medical and
chem/bio defense organizations as well as Health and Human Services
(HHS) components to join the fight against COVID-19. Many of these
intergovernmental allies--including the DoD's Joint Program Executive
Office for Chemical and Biologic Defense (JPEO CBD), the HHS Biomedical
Advanced Research and Development Authority (BARDA), and the HHS
National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease (NIAID)--partner
with DARPA to perform advanced development after our initial
investments, ensuring the scale-up and distribution of novel medical
countermeasures.
Building on existing DARPA investments to accelerate the discovery
of novel countermeasures, DARPA-funded researchers were responsible for
discovering therapeutics--antibodies--from blood samples of recovered
coronavirus patients. DARPA also partnered with advanced developers
(public and private) to manufacture at scale using DNA/RNA techniques
in addition to traditional cell-based bio-manufacturing.
B. Extending the ``Golden Hour"
When a Service member suffers a traumatic injury or acute
infection, the time from event to first medical treatment is usually
the single most significant factor in determining the outcome between
life and death. First responders must act as quickly as possible, first
to ensure a patient's survival and then to prevent permanent
disability. The Department of Defense refers to this critical, initial
window of time as the ``golden hour,'' but in many cases the
opportunity to successfully intervene may be less than sixty minutes,
which is why the military invests so heavily in moving casualties as
rapidly as possible from the battlefield to suitable medical
facilities. However, due to the realities of combat, there are often
hard limits to the availability of rapid medical transport and
emergency care.
DARPA created the Biostasis program in 2018 to develop new
possibilities for extending the golden hour, not by improving logistics
or battlefield care, but by going after time itself, at least how the
body manages it. Biostasis is attempting to address the need for
additional time in continuously operating biological systems faced with
catastrophic, life-threatening events. The program leverages molecular
biology to control temporarily the speed at which living systems
operate, and thus extend the window of time following a damaging event
before a system collapses. Essentially, the concept aims to slow life
to save life.
C. Serving Wounded Veterans
With a focus on wounded warriors and facilitating their return to
military service, the Hand Proprioception and Touch Interfaces (HAPTIX)
program is pursuing key technologies to enable precision control of and
sensory feedback from sensor-equipped upper-limb prosthetic devices. If
successful, the resulting system would provide users near-natural
control of prosthetic hands and arms via bi-directional peripheral
nerve implants. The program has a strong focus on technology transition
and aims to create clinically relevant technology in support of wounded
warriors suffering from single or multiple limb loss.
HAPTIX builds on prior DARPA investments in the Reliable Neural-
Interface Technology (RE-NET) program, which created novel neural
interface systems that overcame previous sensor reliability issues
(sensors now last for the lifetime of the patient). A key focus of
HAPTIX is on creating new technologies to interface permanently and
continuously with the peripheral nerves in humans. HAPTIX researchers
are designing technologies to tap into the motor and sensory signals of
the arm to allow users to control and sense the prosthesis via the same
neural signaling pathways used for intact limbs. Direct access to these
natural control signals will, if successful, enable more natural,
intuitive control of complex hand movements, and the addition of
sensory feedback will further improve prosthetic hand functionality by
enabling users to sense grip force and hand posture. Sensory feedback
may also provide important psychological benefits such as improving
prosthesis ``embodiment'' and reducing the phantom limb pain that is
suffered by approximately 80 percent of amputees.
In addition to seeking to return sensation to amputees, DARPA is
also aggressively investigating technical solutions to spinal cord
injury (SCI), which is of significant concern to the Department of
Defense. Of the 337,000 Americans with serious SCIs, approximately
44,000 are veterans, with 11,000 new injuries occurring each year. SCI
is a complex condition--the injured often face lifelong paralysis and
increased long-term morbidity due to factors such as sepsis and
autonomic nervous system dysfunction. While considerable research
efforts have been devoted toward restorative and therapeutic
technologies to SCIs, significant challenges remain.
DARPA's Bridging the Gap Plus (BG+) program aims to develop new
approaches to treating SCI by integrating injury stabilization,
regenerative therapy, and functional restoration. Last year, DARPA
announced the award of contracts to a handful of university researchers
to advance this crucial work. Multidisciplinary teams at each of these
universities are tasked with developing systems of implantable,
adaptive devices that aim to reduce injury effects during early phases
of SCI, and potentially restore function during the later chronic
phase.
3. Promoting American Innovation
One of the classic models of technology development begins with
basic research that uncovers a new principle or phenomenon, which
innovators then apply and develop into a new capability that enables
people to do more than they could before. This model cannot account for
the origin of all of the technologies DARPA has had a hand in, but it
applies to many of them. Indeed, DARPA's job is to change what's
possible--to do the fundamental research, the proof of principle, and
the early stages of technology development that take ``impossible''
ideas through ``implausible'' and then to, surprisingly, ``possible''
or even ``likely.'' No other DoD agency has the mission of working on
projects with such a high possibility of producing truly revolutionary
new capabilities--or such a high possibility of failure. A big part of
DARPA's expertise is seeking high pay off capabilities by managing risk
in ways that help keep the innovation pipeline flowing. The following
are examples of the kinds of foundational efforts that promise to
impact national security just like other DARPA ``firsts,'' including
the ARPAnet, miniaturized GPS, stealth aircraft, UAVs, and monoclonal
antibody therapeutics.
A. Artificial Intelligence
DARPA has been a leader in artificial intelligence since the 1960s.
We played key roles in realizing the first and second waves of AI
(first rule-based, then statistical-learning-based), and now we are
working to realize the third wave, which can be described as contextual
adaptation. To better define a path forward, DARPA announced in
September 2018 a multi-year investment of over $2 billion in new and
existing programs called the ``AI Next'' campaign.
Currently, DARPA is pursing more than 30 programs that are
exploring ways to advance the state-of-the-art in AI, pushing beyond
second-wave machine learning techniques towards contextual reasoning
capabilities. In addition, more than 60 active programs are applying AI
in some capacity, from agents collaborating to share electromagnetic
spectrum bandwidth to detecting and patching cyber vulnerabilities.
Under the AI Next campaign, key areas being explored include
automating critical DoD business processes; improving the robustness
and reliability of AI systems; enhancing the security and resiliency of
machine learning and AI technologies; reducing power, data, and
performance inefficiencies; and pioneering the next generation of AI
algorithms and applications, such as ``explainability'' and commonsense
reasoning.
DARPA also announced a quick-turn funding mechanism called
Artificial Intelligence Exploration (AIE) that allows us to quickly
test the feasibility of AI concepts by rapidly developing prototypes.
AIE Opportunities are released on a rolling basis from across DARPA's
portfolio, providing awards in as little as 90 days of up to $1 million
each for 18-month periods of performance. During these periods of
performance, very high-risk, high-reward topics will be investigated
with the goal of determining feasibility and clarifying whether the
area is ready for increased investment. The ultimate goal of each AIE
Opportunity is to invest in research that leads to prototype
development that may result in new, game-changing AI technologies for
U.S. national security. To date, we have made 141 contract awards for
more than 20 AIE topics.
A representative example of DARPA's AI Next campaign is the Assured
Autonomy program, which is working to provide continual assurance of a
learning enabled cyber physical system's (LE-CPS) safety and functional
correctness. The program is developing mathematically verifiable
approaches and tools that can be applied to different types and
applications of data-driven machine learning algorithms in an LE-CPS to
enhance their autonomy and assure they are achieving an acceptable
level of safety. To help ground the research objectives, the program is
prioritizing challenge problems in the defense-relevant autonomous
vehicle space, specifically related to air, land, and underwater
platforms.
To assess the technologies in development, research teams
integrated them into a small number of autonomous demonstration systems
and evaluated each against various defense-relevant challenges. After
18 months of research and development on the assurance methods, tools,
and learning enabled capabilities (LECs), the program is exhibiting
early signs of progress.
During a recent demonstration, DARPA researchers integrated tools
with an Iron Bird X-Plane simulation and a small test bed aircraft, and
tested them against challenge problems relevant to ground operations,
specifically assuring taxi operations on an airfield or aircraft
carrier deck.
During the live aircraft exercise, the assurance methods were able
to detect the presence of an obstacle during taxi, which triggered a
safety that identified and executed a response route around the
obstacle. The assurance methods also detected when the camera feed was
being noised or obscured, kicking-in a safety method that identified
and executed what it deemed the safest response--stopping the aircraft
until it could safely resume operations. Additionally, the tools were
able to detect anomalies that could cause their LEC to misbehave, and
allowed the system to maintain safe operations despite those anomalies.
Further, the use of formal models and specifications provided
assurances about the system's safety both at design and run time.
B. Microelectronics
In June 2017, DARPA announced the Electronics Resurgence Initiative
(ERI) as a bold response to several technical and economic trends in
the microelectronics sector. Among these trends, the rapid increase in
the cost and complexity of advanced microelectronics design and
manufacture is challenging a half-century of progress under Moore's
Law, which holds that the number of transistors per silicon chip
doubles about every two years. Meanwhile, non-market foreign forces are
working to shift the electronics innovation engine overseas, while
cost-driven foundry consolidation has limited DoD access to leading-
edge electronics, challenging U.S. economic and security advantages.
Moreover, highly publicized challenges to the nation's digital backbone
are fostering a new appreciation for electronics security--a longtime
defense concern.
Building on the tradition of other successful government-industry
partnerships, ERI aims to forge forward-looking collaborations among
the commercial electronics community, defense industrial base,
university researchers, and the DoD to address these challenges. There
is significant historical precedent to suggest the viability of this
approach, as each wave of modern electronics development has benefitted
from the combination of defense-funded academic research and commercial
sector investment.
Given today's cost, complexity, and security challenges, it is
critical that the nation collaboratively innovate on the next
generation of electronics advancement. DARPA envisions four key areas
of development--3D heterogeneous integration, new materials & devices,
specialized functions, and design & security--each of which have been
central to ERI since its inception. Leveraging 3D heterogeneous
integration, the next wave should support continuing electronics
progress despite challenges to traditional silicon scaling. This
integration will enable innovators to both add new materials and
devices to the silicon foundation and create specialized functions
precisely designed to meet the diverse needs of the commercial and
defense sectors. To manage the complexity of working in three
dimensions, the next wave will also demand new architectures and design
tools that address rising design costs, enable rapid system upgrades,
and make security integration a primary design concern. Several
technological advancements developed in the DARPA CHIPS, PIPES, and HI3
programs are in transition leveraging SOTA commercial manufacturers in
the OUSD(R&E) the State-of-the-art (SOTA) Heterogeneous Integrated
Packaging (SHIP) program. This is a critical microelectronics
performance enabler for DoD modernization priorities, including
hypersonics, Artificial Intelligence, 5G, Cyber, and Space.
C. 5G Networks
Emerging 5G mobile wireless networking technologies are slated to
dramatically increase in both scale and speed, enabling much faster
access to data collected from billions of connected devices (60 billion
nodes by 2023). This supercharged information highway is envisioned to
play an important role across many industries, ranging from medicine to
manufacturing. Major advances in 5G will make it easier to customize
the network at a wide variety of locations. This new flexibility offers
many benefits, but at the same time introduces novel security
challenges. Today's proprietary 5G technologies make it difficult to
achieve the transparency necessary for security-related risk analysis
and mitigation. This lack of security assurance makes it harder to
deploy these technologies for defense capabilities.
In 2020, DARPA created the Open, Programmable, Secure 5G (OPS-5G)
program to tackle many of the security challenges facing future
wireless networks. OPS-5G is exploring the development of a portable,
standards-compliant network stack for 5G mobile networks that is open
source, and secure by design. The program seeks to enable a ``plug-and-
play'' approach to various network software and hardware components,
which reduces reliance on untrusted technology sources. OPS-5G will
also explore the development of cost-effective SWaP-conscious
cryptography with scalable security protocols. Overall, the goal of
OPS-5G is to enable more secure 5G as well as future generations of
networks beyond 5G.
D. Quantum Information Science
Quantum information science (QIS) includes computation,
communication, and sensing technologies that exploit our understanding
of quantum mechanics. Theory promises significant advances over the
state of the art, with some practical successes, but much of the QIS
field remains technically nascent. The successes are largely related to
sensors that deliver exquisite sensitive measurements in small
packages. For the DoD, this supports RF devices for radar and
communications, it also enables precise stable measurement of time--
useful for communication and for navigation. Much has been published on
the use of quantum technology for secure communications, a technical
area that saw successful DARPA investments over a decade ago. The
capabilities promised by theorists for quantum computation have been
more elusive. The notion of a quantum computer that can outperform
conventional computers to solve useful problems is attractive, but in
practice has not been possible to achieve.
DARPA is currently pursuing basic and applied QIS research. One
program aims to produce small portable devices that maintain GPS-
quality time and position for weeks--in the absence of GPS signals.
Another program seeks to understand what may be the limits of
electromagnetic sensing using clouds of atoms. Several programs explore
aspects of quantum computation to determine which approach offers the
most promise for substantial practical advantage. These computation
efforts include two of note: how to use a moderate number of imperfect
quantum bits, while another seeks to bring rigor to the fledgling
quantum computing marketplace with the introduction of insightful
benchmarking. There is much valuable science that quantum-based
computation may make possible in diverse fields including material
science, machine learning, and biology, but it remains a DARPA-hard
field in which to work.
E. Nurturing the Innovation Base
Over the past two years, DARPA's Embedded Entrepreneurship
Initiative (EEI) pilot program has helped 30 pre-seed research teams
raise over $100 million in U.S. investment, spin out a dozen new
companies, establish numerous joint development agreements with
corporate partners, and commission multiple manufacturing facilities.
In February of this year, DARPA launched an expansion of EEI with the
goal of accelerating 150 DARPA-backed technologies out of the lab and
into products that promise to fundamentally change the way we live,
work, and fight. The initiative augments technical research teams with
critical entrepreneurial expertise, top-tier commercialization mentors,
and provides connections to investors. This important work delivers an
effective counter to aggressive foreign investors by building stronger
companies that have the ability to attract U.S. capital.
In this effort, DARPA is teaming with IQT Emerge, a new
organization within In-Q-Tel (IQT) that provides entrepreneurial
expertise as well as connections to early-stage U.S. investors. IQT
Emerge leverages IQT's unique place at the intersection of venture
capital, government, and the startup community to keep the national
security community at the forefront of technology innovation.
EEI provides catalytic funding, mentorship, and investor and
corporate connections for select DARPA researchers. Resources include:
an average of $250,000 in non-dilutive funding to hire a seasoned
entrepreneur or business executive for one to two years with the goal
of developing a robust go-to-market strategy for both defense and
commercial markets; dedicated commercialization mentors with extensive
private sector experience; and engagement with DARPA's private sector
Transition Working Group comprising over 100 top-tier U.S. investors
and corporations key to scaling and supply chain development.
DARPA-funded scientists and engineers are an invaluable resource
for national competitiveness. Supporting these researchers with
tailored business expertise to advance their innovations for public and
military use is critical to obtain the full benefit from taxpayer
funded R&D investments.
Since 2018, roughly the same time frame from the inception of EEI,
DARPA has also stepped up its outreach to university researchers.
Security concerns in recent years have significantly increased the
barriers to university research for the DoD, and better communication
of opportunities and expectations is critical to minimizing those
barriers. DARPA's academic outreach initiative began in earnest with
visits to a handful of public universities. During the pandemic,
however, the agency was forced to change tactics and hosted a large
virtual event in September 2020 called the ``DARPA Vice Presidents and
Chancellors of Research Summit.'' The Summit attracted 223
representatives from 126 schools across the nation; twenty percent of
the schools had never done business with the agency. During the three-
hour summit, participants learned about the agency's near-term
investment priorities and how to pursue funding opportunities through
existing contract vehicles.
In addition to small business and university outreach efforts
currently underway, DARPA also has three formal programs aimed at
supporting the next generation of researchers. The first effort is the
Joint University Microelectronics Program (JUMP). JUMP is a major
public/private initiative that includes several leading companies from
the semiconductor and defense industries such as Intel, IBM, Micron,
Analog Devices, EMD Performance Materials, ARM, Samsung, TSMC,
Raytheon, Northrop Grumman, and Lockheed Martin who have tasked six
research centers to undertake high-risk, high-payoff research that
addresses existing and emerging challenges in microelectronic
technologies. JUMP comes at an inflection point in the history of the
semiconductor industry where application and system research are
critical to enabling the development of superior electronic systems to
meet DoD and commercial needs.
Under JUMP, the challenges of the ``application-centric'' research
centers focus on accomplishing application-oriented goals and spurring
the development of complex systems with capabilities well beyond those
available today. Diving deep into cognitive computing, intelligent
memory and storage, distributed computing and networking, and radio
frequency (RF) to terahertz (THz) sensor and communications systems,
among other areas, these research centers are developing systems that
will be transferable to military and industry in a five year timeframe
and ready for field deployment in ten years.
Also, earlier this year, DARPA announced a post-doctoral fellowship
program for talented young scientists, engineers, and mathematicians in
the field of computer science with grants sized to support each fellow
for up to two years. Participation in DARPA's new program is open to
current U.S. citizens and permanent residents who have received a Ph.D.
degree no earlier than June 2019 or who will have received a Ph.D.
prior to the date of award, and who will be appointed to a postdoctoral
position at a U.S. institution of higher education during the 2021-22
academic year.
The longest running program that DARPA has supporting university
researchers is the Young Faculty Awards (YFA), which has been providing
funding opportunities since 2006 as a forward-looking way to
familiarize rising researchers in junior positions with national-
security-relevant work within the DoD. The YFA program provides
funding, mentoring, as well as industry and DoD contacts to awardees
early in their careers with the long-term goal of developing the next
generation of academic scientists, engineers, and mathematicians who
will focus a significant portion of their career on national security
issues. To date, 447 researchers from 40 states have participated in
the YFA program.
conclusion
From DARPA's perspective, the technological future--the endless
frontier--is enormously attractive, bright with opportunities, but also
fraught with unanticipated risks. For more than 60 years, the men and
women of DARPA have taken very seriously their unique mission to serve
the Nation by preventing--and when necessary fomenting--technological
surprise.
Although I have just recently returned to DARPA, it is clear to me
that we are stronger and more committed to that mission than ever. I
look forward to working with the members of this subcommittee and
others in the Legislative and Executive branches to ensure that the
United States maintains its historic lead in the investigation and
development of powerful technologies, in addition to their safe and
responsible application in support of a more stable, secure, and
sustainable world.
Senator Tester. Thank you, Dr. Tompkins, for your
testimony.
Because Senator Durbin has a commitment for the Memorial
Service, I'm going to recognize him first.
Senator Durbin: Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman, and
thank you to the witnesses who have joined us today.
I guess my opening question is not going to be specific to
any area of innovation but just very generic.
If you ask the Department of Defense and previous
Administrations and I'll bet in this one, as well, who are our
hard targets, who are our major adversaries in the world, they
would usually report four pretty obvious ones, China, Russia,
North Korea, and Iran, and then if you'd ask a follow-up
question, how much do each of these major adversaries spend in
their annual budget for their military, you would find numbers
that range from very small to still very modest in comparison
to the United States.
The reason I raise this question regularly is we spend more
than all of the other nations in the world on defense and
security. We certainly want to be safe as a Nation, but it's
our job here in this committee to ask a question, are we
getting our money's worth out of this, and when it comes to
innovation, I noticed, Ms. McQuiston, in your statement, as
well as the statement by Dr. Tompkins, there was reference to
competition with adversaries.
You would think when you consider the hundreds of billions
of dollars that we spend each year, that that would hardly ever
be the case. It's like a high school team regularly beating the
New York Yankees. You just don't expect that to happen when you
compare the resources that are being dedicated.
Can you put innovation in that context and ask whether or
not our investment in innovation gives us a natural lead, an
acquired lead in this competition that the budget figures
belie?
Ms. McQuiston. I will take that answer. We're very lucky.
We just started the Innovation Steering Group under Deputy
Secretary Hicks, and what we're doing in innovation is looking
across the DOD as transforming a lot of the processes in order
to be better adaptors of technology and to more efficiently and
rapidly modernize.
Our services have the burden sometimes of having the legacy
systems and the newer technologies and disruptive technologies
coming onboard. We're moving modernization ahead, but we can
always do it better and more innovatively.
When I think of innovation, I think of two things:
efficiency and effectiveness. So efficiency is doing things
right and effectiveness is doing the right thing. So with the
range of new technologies that can be adopted at a greater
speed for us, I believe that we can come up to par and actually
exceed the market and our competitors.
Senator Durbin. So I've read some histories of DARPA,
Pentagon's Brain, and books like that, very impressive, and I
notice that time and again there was disruptive thinking and
planning and some of it fell flat on its face but that's to be
expected.
So I guess my question is as we fund things already
discovered with massive amounts of taxpayers' dollars, how do
you combat the fighting the last war syndrome and establishment
syndrome that says we've got to keep doing more of what we've
done before, and how do you get into asymmetrical thinking in
an establishment as large as the Department of Defense?
Ms. McQuiston. The Disruptive Innovation Unit that we have
under Research and Engineering has that mission entirely
because they're working with the National Security Innovation
Network, the National Security Capital, and bringing in market
innovations and commercialized technologies. With the
activities to date, they have a 189 companies now on contract.
75 percent are small business, 32 percent are first-time
vendors, and 10 percent have already transitioned into military
use, and that's the key, to be flexible and to work at speed,
at commercial speed in order to integrate the technology
rapidly into the service.
At the same time, we need to understand what the disruptive
technology can mean for our advantage and also for the needs
within the military, so war gaming and putting together
exercises and demonstration to show what could be capable.
As DARPA can show you, a lot of times we put the needs and
the requirements forward but oftentimes the newer technology is
a capability that no one even concede would have been possible.
So it's the merging of the future with the needs of today that
actually will keep technology in the leading edge and keep us
competitive with the national security and the economic
security of our country.
Senator Durbin. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
Senator Tester. Senator Shelby.
Senator Shelby. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Thank you for this
hearing. I think it's very important.
As I said earlier, I don't know what we can get into that's
sensitive in this open hearing today, but the Chairman has
indicated that we will have a closed hearing and hope to get
you back and so forth.
In the area of quantum and artificial intelligence, China
and Russia, you know, we all know, are advancing their military
technologies always, and increasing their defense budgets at
alarming rates.
How is the department continuing to reform its processes
and investment decisions to ensure that the U.S. will maintain
the technical dominance necessary to deter our adversaries, and
what can you speak to in this area? I don't know.
Ms. McQuiston. Well, there's a few things I can speak to.
We have been looking at quantum from the scientific side
probably at least 20 years or more, but we've had success----
Senator Shelby. Touch on how important quantum computing is
if we can ever work it all out, and it's also important to our
adversaries, is it not?
Ms. McQuiston. Yes, actually, the future of network
technology and security will greatly rely on quantum
technology, and DARPA, I know, has had initiatives in this
area.
I'm happy to say that a lot of them are starting to see
commercialization, as well. So I think our investment in that
area is starting to pay off. So I think you will actually see
more activity on there.
Some of the technologies we can brief you in another venue.
Senator Shelby. What trade-offs in the area of hypersonics
are we having to make as it relates to weapon development and
fielding which would come with it due to resource constraints?
Are you getting what you need at DARPA for this sensitive, very
important research?
Dr. Tompkins. Yes, sir. To the extent that I can----
Senator Shelby. Go ahead.
Dr. Tompkins [continuing]. Discuss this in this hearing,
the support that we have on our hypersonics program, both
offensive and defensive, is adequate and we can go into more
details on trade-offs in a different venue.
Senator Shelby. Okay. In the area of space development, 2
years ago the Space Development Agency was created to
accelerate the development and fielding of the next generation
space capabilities.
Where we are there today and where are our adversaries?
Ms. McQuiston. Well, I'm happy to say for what the Space
Development Agency has put together is rapidly developing new
space architectures and commercial development processes in
alignment with capabilities and speed.
We're integrating ground stations for advanced data links
at Fort Greely, Alaska. We're working with putting forward
constructive disruptors for operations at LEO (Low Earth
Orbit). The first satellite demonstrations for communication
are scheduled for fiscal year 2022, and working on what I would
call commercial speeds, commercial launch speeds and setting up
satellite operations at Grand Forks and at Redstone Arsenal.
I really do believe that speed and adaptation of spiral
development and what we already see in commercial launch
processes is where we need to step up in timing for being able
to put our capability up in space. So, again, if we want to
talk specifics on where we are tactically in another venue, we
would be happy to go into that.
Senator Shelby. Thank you. Dr. Tompkins, in the area of
cyber technology, how important is quantum computing and
hopefully good research coming out of there? What will that do
for us, hopefully do for us?
Dr. Tompkins. So in cyber technology, quantum computing
offers a few different opportunity spaces.
One obviously is in the area of quantum encryption which I
think has been most broadly discussed. The other, I think, is
in the area of quantum computing and simulation, which then
allows us to solve different kinds of optimization and sort of
complexity-type problems, which would allow us to focus on
analyzing, understanding, modeling, and predicting a much wider
range of potential cyber behaviors and activities, and then,
similarly, defending against them.
Senator Shelby. Dr. Tompkins, one more question, if I
could. In the area of hypersonics, we all know that we've got a
challenge there as far as developing the hypersonic offensive
weapon and also defending against it.
Where are we today, and what kind of timeframe do you think
we have before we can really field what we need for the
security of the country?
Dr. Tompkins. So DARPA has two initiatives in the defensive
hypersonics arena. Details of both obviously, as you had
mentioned, are going to have to go into a different session.
There is one very specifically, the Program Glide Breaker,
in which we're working closely with NDA to derisk certain key
aspects of the overall technology space. The timing of exactly
when the transition of those technologies would go into a
broader end-to-end system.
I think it's both a conversation that goes beyond just
DARPA but also does require the ability to talk in a closed
setting.
Senator Shelby. Thank you. Mr. Chairman, thank you for your
indulgence.
Senator Tester. Yes. Thank you, Senator Shelby.
Ms. McQuiston, I want to touch on a couple things. I want
to touch on, Number 1, our competitiveness compared to where we
were 5 or 10 years ago and how you assess our success. I know
you talked about war gaming, I want to get into that a little
more, but let's start with our competitiveness compared to
where we were. Are we ahead, behind?
Ms. McQuiston. I think the United States is one of the best
innovators of technology overall. I think that we have some of
the brightest people, the determination, the freedom, the
flexible financial systems, and the determination to really
succeed.
To match that with the Department of Defense, we need to
have the same innovative culture as we have in our commercial
industry. That's why adoption of commercial technology at the
speed of which activities occur in the commercial world will be
critical to more rapidly be able to gain the capabilities that
the new technology and modernization will give to the military.
We are in a good position but we can always be in a much
better one.
Senator Tester. So is it fair to say, by what you've just
said, that we are more competitive today than we were 5 or 10
years ago?
Ms. McQuiston. I believe we are, and I believe it's because
we are modernizing.
Senator Tester. Okay. And then how do you assess that
competitiveness? How do you assess, you know, defining where
we're at?
Ms. McQuiston. Well, you know, in an open session along
this line, I would actually point to the vaccine technology.
We've been thinking a lot about new frontiers, about challenges
that the world is facing right now, and we've been thinking
about them and doing things for awhile, and so surprises never
come--disruptive technology never comes out of the blue.
DARPA has been our great jewel in being able to anticipate
these things and start the technology ecosystem in new
capabilities that have really been transformational for the
United States.
Senator Tester. Okay. So one more, and that is, innovative
technologies cover a wide range, how are we prioritizing those
investments, and could you give me a preview of the
Administration's priorities? They may be the same answer for
both questions.
Ms. McQuiston. At Research and Engineering, the Office of
Modernization currently has 11 priorities. They fold into a lot
of what is going on relative to being able to add capabilities,
such as in AI (Artificial Intelligence), hypersonics, other
areas of the 11 modernization techniques. Some of them will be
more mature and able to have rapid adaptation. Other
technologies will need more time, based on its development.
That said, I do believe we can move faster to adopt those
technologies.
With regards to where they stand with the Administration,
the Secretary of Defense and the prioritizations, I would defer
to the agency overall.
Senator Tester. Okay. Dr. Tompkins, DARPA invented the
Internet for the Department of Defense. It was adopted
worldwide.
You talked about the mRNA vaccines. Are you working on any
other technologies that have broader appeal beyond the
Department of Defense, Dr. Tompkins?
Dr. Tompkins. Certainly. One example would be work that
we're doing in 5G technologies for communications. So, you
know, 5G is one of those areas which suffers a little bit from
siloed, proprietary, vendor-driven capabilities, and so DARPA
has a program called Open Co-fundable and Secure 5G, which
basically seeks to create an open source 5G capability which
would open up both from military perspectives and also
ultimately from commercial/economic perspectives the power of
5G for a wide range of sort of dual-use capabilities.
Senator Tester. All right. I'm going to go to Senator
Moran.
Senator Moran. Mr. Chairman, thank you very much. Thank
both of our witnesses for joining us.
Let me begin by asking a question of Dr. Tompkins about
cybersecurity. This has been a priority of mine and we have
lots of reasons for that to be the case. It's important, but
could you describe for me how mosaics and other related cyber
initiatives will not only support the department's cyber
defense but the industrial partners that are critical to our
Nation's security?
Dr. Tompkins. Certainly. So DARPA has a fairly large number
of different programs focusing on cybersecurity with priorities
in the areas of prevention, so things like network operations
analytics, but as well as looking at topics in the area of
attack attribution and graceful degradation and recovery
because we do understand that as long as we are in defense, we
also have to be prepared for the attack that does get through.
In those cases, they are looking not only at military
systems but they translate very naturally to corporate systems.
They translate to infrastructure systems, such as, you know,
the power grid, water supply security, and many others.
Senator Moran. Are those programs receiving the support
they need to deploy new capabilities from the lab to the force?
Dr. Tompkins. Yes, sir, I do believe they are. One of the
really nice things about cyber technologies, especially if they
are mainly for system software, is that they transition much
more naturally and much more quickly than a lot of hardware-
focused technologies.
So some of these again are things we would have to discuss
in a different venue, but we have excellent collaboration,
particularly with organizations, like Cyber Command, where we
often go into demonstrate and experimental capability and can
very quickly turn it into something that transitions to their
operational use in the course of a program.
Senator Moran. Doctor, thank you very much.
Ms. McQuiston, let me follow up with what Senator Shelby
was conversing with you about, hypersonics. Can you please
provide an update on the industrial base partnerships that DOD
has entered into to support carbon-carbon manufacturing
initiatives?
Ms. McQuiston. Additive manufacturing for hypersonics has
been key. In fact, it's been a real enabler in commercial
technologies, as well. It's not only sort of the breakthrough
technology for hypersonics, but it's also being used in the
automotive industry to really dramatically change fuel
efficiency.
I personally have not had the time to go through other
agreements that we may have within the industry, but I would
welcome that opportunity to come back to you with the details
on that.
Senator Moran. I'd welcome further conversations with you.
As our hypersonic batteries come online and we begin to
manufacture hypersonic missiles to scale, do we have the
industrial base capacity to manufacture at scale?
Ms. McQuiston. I believe we do. I believe that we are up
for the challenge and can meet it.
Senator Moran. So what are the challenges that we have in
ramping up our production?
Ms. McQuiston. Well, right now, we have a roadmap as to
where we're moving it for fielding and production use. It is
moving ahead and I'm unaware of any specific challenge that we
might have right now.
Senator Moran. I'd appreciate additional conversation with
you. Maybe we can have a meeting or----
Ms. McQuiston. I think in another venue we could actually
get into more detail, exactly.
Senator Moran. Thank you. Let me ask a final question, this
one about space. I now co-chair the Senate's Space Force
Caucus, and I'm the Ranking Member of the CJS (Commerce,
Justice, Science), the NASA (National Aeronautics and Space
Administration) Appropriations Subcommittee, along with Senator
Shaheen.
How is your office working with commercial and government
partners to make certain that satellite constellations remain
secure from cyber and kinetic attacks?
Ms. McQuiston. That's very important to us in looking at
that. In fact, recently we had used adopted commercial
processes which often in the past financial institutes would
use to basically open up a satellite opportunity to hack-a-sat,
we called it. So you could have hackers try to break in and
disrupt options of the satellite.
This has actually been a very good learning platform and to
strengthen our own security within our satellite systems. So,
again, adopting both commercial and putting together new
technologies for defensive security operations within LEO and
our satellite operations is going to be a very high priority
for the Department of Defense.
Senator Moran. Thank you. Mr. Chairman, thank you.
Senator Tester. Thank you, Senator Moran.
Senator Baldwin.
Senator Baldwin. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
Our military is reliant on lithium ion batteries to power
critical systems, including plant energy-intensive
applications, like advanced radars and sensors. Unfortunately,
we are also reliant on foreign companies, including in China,
for components that go into these batteries.
We have really struggled to stand up domestic R&D
capability to discover and validate new battery chemistries and
technologies that would improve performance and safety and
reduce costs for both military and commercial applications.
Currently, most of our innovation and resulting
intellectual properties have been in Asia. On this latter
point, I believe the U.S. needs to build a robust independent
commercial cell development and testing capability to support
advanced battery technologies needed for our military systems
and commercial applications, like electric vehicles and
electric grid storage.
Ms. McQuiston, I would like to hear your thoughts on how
DOD can make investments to address these challenges and
support next generation battery technology.
Ms. McQuiston. Safe uses of lithium batteries actually has
been a priority for the science and the university work that
we've been doing.
That said, battery technology has quite a range within the
military, from the amount of batteries that need to be in the
field to moving forward with high-power weapon systems.
I would say that battery technology is going to be key for
micro grids that we would need at basing and forward sites. I
think batteries are a priority. The science and the materials
can actually move forward, I think, if we focus our energies.
DARPA is always good at looking at materials and batteries
have always been a capability that they've had at modernizing
and perhaps inventing new technologies and safer approaches at
higher density, energy density.
Senator Baldwin. Thank you. I've been advocating for
strengthening our Buy America policies, including extending
domestic content requirements down the supply chain to support
the U.S. industrial base. Those efforts are critical but more
focused on the acquisition side of DOD investment policy.
I also believe that we need to do more on the research,
development, and innovation side, those areas, Ms. McQuiston,
over which you have responsibility.
If we look at the pacing threat of China, let's say in the
shipbuilding sector, DOD has reported that it has become the
top ship-producing nation in the world and produces most of its
critical components, like engines, weapons, and electronic
systems.
The Chinese Government is investing massive sums to ensure
that those components are high-performing and manufacturable at
scale.
I believe that the DOD using existing authorities should
provide funding to our domestic shipbuilding industrial base,
particularly small- and medium-size businesses, to increase
their technical capability, grow their capacity, and improve
their manufacturing technology, design, and engineering
processes.
Across the DOD research and engineering enterprise, what
are your priorities for supporting the industrial base and what
programs and investments will you make to support the
technological competitiveness in manufacturing capacity of our
critical defense suppliers?
Ms. McQuiston. Manufacturing is key to a number of
technologies across the board and being able to modernize and
work with manufacturing and make investments is also key to our
economic security.
When you look at manufacturing, it's not only for perhaps
DOD enabling capability and scale, but it's also to derisk some
of the newer technologies that are required, and we have a
number of manufacturing programs in this area that we're moving
forward, but we are working with aspects of this from 5G and
the micro electronics side straight through to materials,
battery technology, as we just discussed, and moving into a
program that we have at a university that's working in
materials that would be supported for difficult marine
environments.
So I concur with you on the need for manufacturing.
Senator Baldwin. Thank you. Mr. Chairman, I yield back.
Senator Tester. Thank you, Senator Baldwin.
Senator Shaheen.
Senator Shaheen. Thank you, Mr. Chairman, and to Ms.
McQuiston and Dr. Tompkins, thank you both very much for your
work and for testifying today.
I appreciate the importance of DARPA and of our investing
public dollars in innovation and research for our national
security, but you alluded to this, I think, earlier, Ms.
McQuiston, when you talked about the private sector, and the
fact is much of the innovation that we benefit from comes from
the private sector, is that correct?
Ms. McQuiston. I would say that it's quite an engine for us
in innovation, absolutely.
Senator Shaheen. And one of the programs that has been
really successful in promoting small businesses to do that kind
of research is the SBIR (Small Business Innovation Research)
Program. Can you speak to how important you think that is?
Ms. McQuiston. I think it's very important. You know, SBIRs
and STTRs (Small Business Technology Transfer) have been quite
an engine for us economically and moving investments forward in
this area can have a great net gain in the economy, as well.
Small businesses from the investment side are 22:1 return
on the DOD investment. So anything we can do to encourage and
bridge the gap, so to speak, between defense needs and small
business capabilities will be critical. We have a protege
program going forward with large companies so that the smaller
companies can sort of be able to contribute in a way that's
more meaningful to the DOD mission.
We are also looking through DIU (Defense Innovation Unit)
to bring on more small businesses and non-traditional
performers, to bring capability to the warfighter' mission. So
I think that's a huge focus.
We have to be able to work at the speed of commercial
flexibility because we don't want to just be able to understand
what their technology is, we need to be able to capitalize on
it and field these systems for the warfighter. So that's going
to mean that we have to move at speeds that are within a
commercial timeframe. So that's going to be critical in not
only encouraging small business but actually being able to
retain fielded systems and the support of growing our economy
with small businesses.
Senator Shaheen. Well, thank you very much. We extended the
SBIR Program or reauthorized it for 5 years back in 2017, but
that means it's going to expire again in 2022.
So, Mr. Chairman, I would just say based on what we've
heard and what we know is significant about the SBIR Program,
we should start from now to extend/reauthorize that, and I
would argue we should reauthorize it permanently. So thank you.
Can you speak to what happens when we develop innovative
technologies that are then adopted by our adversaries and used
to undermine the United States? How do we prevent that? What
can we do to better make sure that what we're doing in
innovation doesn't get pirated by our adversaries?
Ms. McQuiston. Well, I think securing our technology is
key. WE have the TAPS (Transition Assistance Program) Program,
which is working to make sure that our research and development
dollars are secure, looking at university funding and having
transparency in an area of research that we think is critical,
so that we understand other areas of funding that are coming
in.
We also want to carefully work with scientists and
researchers who we do not feel that there's an individual that
could be a risk to the performance there, but I do believe we
need to be smart and strategic about what we need to protect
and keep the pace of surprise moving forward. That's the great
thing about DARPA because there's always a new frontier and
there'll always be, you know, people adopting and catching up,
but if we're always moving ahead, we make the process of
catching up that much more difficult, though security, I think,
especially at the rate of cybersecurity and really protecting
our own investments, has got to be in the forefront as we move
forward, but to do it smartly.
Senator Shaheen. Thank you. I only have a few seconds left,
but I did want to ask you because you were talking about the
challenge of legacy systems and innovation and how to balance
phasing one out or addressing new innovative technology.
When we do that, is it usual that contracts are awarded
when we've got a technology that has not been proven or tested
or fielded in any way? Can you answer that?
Ms. McQuiston. Off the top of my head, I would say that we
definitely need to make sure that we have trust in the system
before it's fielded which is why we've stood up three offices
between the Systems Engineering Office at SCO (Strategic
Capabilities Office), DIU, with the Experimentation and
Fielding, and then Emergent Technology Capability and working
with that to demonstrate its capability.
But in some technologies, it can move quite rapidly. So if
we're looking at evolving technologies, such as in
cybersecurity, we should have a rapid pace at being able to
develop, test, and field this capability rather quickly.
Obviously other technologies would take more time and
testing, but we have to be flexible in how we approach the
technology, which goes back to innovation, and it goes back to
what I was saying in the beginning. You have to be doing the
right thing and doing it correctly, but you have to adopt the
flexibility in the program to account for the type of
technology you're managing with the goal of fielding it as
rapidly as you can.
Senator Shaheen. Thank you. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
Senator Tester. Thank you, Senator Shaheen.
Senator Hoeven.
Senator Hoeven. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Appreciate it. And
thank you for the opportunity to meet with you today.
Secretary McQuiston, earlier you mentioned SDA, the Space
Development Agency, working with Grand Forks Air Force Base. We
appreciate that very much. As you know, we've worked very
diligently to develop all things unmanned aviation there and
obviously that whole link and the development with the
satellites is incredibly important. We think we have an
absolutely unique resource there. So we appreciate it and we
appreciate the working relationship we have with the Space
Development Agency.
We think that SDA needs to continue, to accelerate the
development of technology for the warfighter. We think that's
incredibly important.
So tell me, how will you ensure that SDA can provide
innovative and independent support for our warfighters, even as
you transition to Space Force in October of 2022, and obviously
we're very concerned about supporting that effort because we
think it's very worthwhile but also because we think it's
important. Grand Forks Air Force Base is part of that.
Ms. McQuiston. Yes, I believe keeping in place the spiral
development process that they've put in to work at commercial
speeds and to very quickly be able to field capability will be
the best way to work with this development of technology for
space.
I think it's already a proven pace that you see with
commercial entities and I believe that what we have started
right now with the Space Development Agency will prove itself
by their 2-year cycle time for being able to update
capabilities that we're bringing to the warfighter.
Senator Hoeven. Good. And we appreciate very much the
working relationship that we've had with you.
Is there anything that we can do at this time that you
think is particularly helpful to make sure that we continue to
advance this initiative?
Ms. McQuiston. Well, we appreciate your support for this
effort and that is invaluable in itself. So thank you.
Senator Hoeven. And same questions for Dr. Tompkins. Did
you have anything that you would add?
Dr. Tompkins. I agree with Ms. McQuiston regarding the
support and appreciation for all the support you've provided,
and DARPA works very closely with the SDA specifically in
developing new technologies which then derisk, you know,
elements of the technology for them to deploy and we look
forward to seeing the fruition of some of those efforts in the
near future.
Senator Hoeven. Good. And again we want to make sure that
we continue to offer any and all assistance so that that
development continues as it is. We think it's incredibly
important.
Back to Ms. McQuiston. Now talk to me in terms of the next
step, which is not just that communication with the satellites,
but then also the communication between satellites and unmanned
aviation, and again that's one of the things that we've
developed in a way like no other, and obviously that's going to
be an incredibly important part of this whole effort.
So talk to me about development on that second step, as
well.
Ms. McQuiston. Yes. Looking at being able to have the
battle space information, backbone in place, we have JADC2 as a
program, and we also have AB2 moving forward, and looking at
the information moving within the network and able to be used
between ground and space will be critical. So the network and
the data availability will actually be quite a platform for
innovation and being able to constantly grow our capabilities
at a rapid speed for the warfighter.
Senator Hoeven. Yes. And tell me a little bit more about
that interagency cooperation because one of the things we've
done is we've broken down barriers. I mean, we're working with
everybody. It's not just at the State and local level but all
the different agencies, including NASA, Department of Defense,
FAA, and everybody else.
How are you working to make sure that you're integrating
all of the agencies in there, as well, in this effort?
Ms. McQuiston. We are working with all the agencies, and I
believe the relationships are very good because everybody wants
to move forward in this area. So I would say right now, we keep
the pace moving forward.
Senator Hoeven. Great. Thank you so much. And, Dr.
Tompkins, anything else that you might want to add on that
issue?
Dr. Tompkins. I completely agree with everything Ms.
McQuiston has said. I think in the interest of time, I'll leave
it there just with our thanks and our excitement about the
future.
Senator Hoeven. I just want to thank both of you for your
innovation and your creativity and your strong leadership. We
truly appreciate the working relationship. Thanks so much, and
we'll continue to support your efforts in this very important
area.
Ms. McQuiston. Thank you.
Senator Tester. Thank you, Senator Hoeven.
Just one more question from me and then we'll close out.
This is for both of the testifiers and it's been talked about
with previous questions. I think it's important that we add
value by tapping into academia and private sector, small
business and large business.
From your guys' perspective, has there been greater
participation by folks outside your agencies over the last
years, has it been pretty static, or less?
Ms. McQuiston. I think there's been larger participation
and mostly because of the outreach programs that we've put
together, especially through the Defense Innovation Unit,
because we're seeing a lot of non-traditional companies coming
in, and we're seeing an increase of small business that are
excited to work with the Defense Department and able to
demonstrate their capabilities, but more is required.
Senator Tester. Okay. Dr. Tompkins?
Dr. Tompkins. Yes, similarly. Of course, DARPS's funding
goes entirely to those external partners. So what we would be
tracking is sort of the diversification of that pro forma space
and what we've looked for are organizations that have never
worked with DARPA before, have never worked with the DOD, and
through those kinds of outreach activities that Ms. McQuiston
just mentioned, we are seeing that increase and we hope to see
it even more.
To get the best ideas and to get the best capabilities we
need to be reaching the broadest possible and most diverse pro
forma pool possible.
Senator Tester. Do either of you see any existing barriers
to working with your particular agencies and if you do, are
those barriers things that you can break down or do you need
congressional help?
Ms. McQuiston. Well, right now at R&E, launching the
Innovation Steering Group, I'm looking for areas of continual
improvement and I think that we will be able to articulate sort
of changes that need to take place internally in order to
become more rapid in an adaptation of technology and to be more
flexible in being able to do that.
Senator Tester. So no barriers?
Ms. McQuiston. At this time, I would say it's a matter of
rolling up our sleeves.
Senator Tester. Okay. Dr. Tompkins?
Dr. Tompkins. The one thing I would suggest is that we're
going to be taking a hard look at some of the sort of potential
barriers for organizations that have traditionally worked with
the Department of Defense, looking at the cost of compliance,
and looking at sort of the murkiness of how organizations can
successfully comply.
I think this is particularly tough on smaller businesses,
commercial organizations that haven't worked with Defense
before, and many different classes of universities where the
amount of overhead that they can afford to put in to being able
to be sufficiently compliant can be really challenging and so
we would be looking for ways to sort of meet them in the middle
and find ways to make it easier for them to participate while
still being fully compliant with our requirements.
Senator Tester. Okay. Thank you.
Senator Shelby, do you have anything you wanted?
Senator Shelby. I have nothing else.
Senator Tester. Okay.
Senator Shelby. We do look forward to some classified
hearings with this group because I think it's very important.
Senator Tester. We will make sure that our staffs together
and make that happen.
I just want to express my appreciation for the testimony
that was presented here today.
ADDITIONAL COMMITTEE QUESTIONS
Senators need to know that they may submit additional
written questions and we would ask you to respond to them in a
reasonable period of time.
[The following questions were not asked at the hearing, but
were submitted to the Department for response subsequent to the
hearing:]
Questions Submitted to Ms. Barbara McQuiston
Questions Submitted by Senator Jeanne Shaheen
Question. Ms. McQuiston, the Department has been working to improve
domestic manufacturing for semiconductors and ``microelectronics''
through a number of initiatives, including through the National
Security Technology Accelerator. At the same time, the Department has
stated that is aware of the threats posed by overseas control of
printed circuit board manufacturing.
Does the Department consider Printed Circuit Boards (PCBs) to be
microelectronics'' within the scope of existing funding authorities?
Answer. Yes, the Department considers printed circuit boards to be
critical for higher level assemblies for microelectronics, but they are
not addressed by the effort ``access to State of the Art (SOTA)
Microelectronics'' in the Trusted and Assured Microelectronics program.
The issues surrounding Printed Circuit Boards are industrial base
related, and are being addressed by the Under Secretary for Acquisition
and Sustainment in coordination with the DoD PrCB Executive Agent.
Question. How does the Department intend to encourage the reshoring
of PCB manufacturing capabilities?
Answer. The Department is developing strategies for re-shoring
critical microelectronics, including printed circuit board technology
products with the help of the DoD Executive Agent for Printed Circuit
Boards. Partnership with the interagency, especially the Department of
Commerce with respect to infrastructure funding associated with the
CHIPS Act, will ensure DoD unique requirements and demand are included
in any execution plan.
Question. Ms. McQuiston, I understand that the Army recently
awarded a fixed price Production Agreement for the Integrated Visual
Augmentation System (IVAS) using Other Transaction Authority (OTA).
However, this technology has not completed full testing or fielding for
its night vision capabilities.
Could you describe the importance of testing and fielding for night
vision technology in particular?
Answer. Fundamentally, the purpose of Test & Evaluation (T&E) is to
enable the DoD to acquire systems that support the warfighter in
accomplishing their mission. To that end, T&E provides engineers and
decision makers with knowledge to assist in managing risks; to measure
technical progress; and to characterize operational effectiveness,
operational suitability, interoperability, survivability (including
cybersecurity), and lethality. This is true for all technology
acquisitions including for night vision technologies.
Question. How might fielding equipment that has not gone through
rigorous operational testing impact the end user?
Answer. Fielding technology prior to operational testing introduces
risk and potentially compromises the reliability and value of the
technology fielded. Integrated testing, and the sharing of information
across Developmental Test and Operational Test provides necessary data
for the operational test agency to evaluate operational effectiveness,
operational suitability, and overall mission capability. While IVAS did
not conduct an initial operational test and evaluation (IOT&E), they
did undergo an Operational Assessment. In this instance, the IVAS
system milestones and fielding decisions are made by the Service
Acquisition Executive, and therefore R&E would need to defer to the
Army on their programmatic decisions.
______
Questions Submitted by Senator Jerry Moran
Question. In order to achieve a multi-band/multi-orbit resilient
and redundant enterprise architecture, leveraging non-LEO SATCOM assets
is essential.
What are your plans, if any, to leverage Medium Earth Orbit SATCOM
capabilities?
Answer. Medium Earth Orbit (MEO) SATCOM capabilities are actively
leveraged from the commercial space sector via the procurement
activities of the Commercial Satellite Communications Office (CSCO), at
the direction of the Chief of Space Operations, United States Space
Force (USSF), and in accordance with public law. USSF CSCO is the sole
authority for procurement of said services for the Department of
Defense (DoD) and satisfies COMSATCOM requirements on behalf of the
Combatant Commands, the Services, other DoD and Federal agencies, as
well as NATO and FVEY partner nations. Currently, USSF CSCO has
approximately 18 MEO-based task orders awarded to the commercial space
sector on behalf of DoD and others, providing SATCOM services in
various geographic Areas of Responsibility.
Question. The research, development, and production of hypersonic
missiles will continue to be a major strategic priority for the
Department of Defense.
Can you please provide an update on the industrial base
partnerships that the DoD has entered into to support carbon-carbon
manufacturing initiatives?
Answer. The Department of Defense Manufacturing Technology program
has engaged the carbon-carbon industrial base through multiple
investment mechanisms. The Manufacturing of Carbon-Carbon Composites
for Hypersonic Applications Initiative has ongoing projects to improve
the automation of 2D and 3D processing of carbon-carbon materials. The
Manufacturing Innovation Institute network has issued two Manufacturing
Challenges to their respective networks to address additive
manufacturing techniques for Hypersonic applications, high-temperature
Composites, integrated computational materials engineering tools, and
advanced manufacturing methods specifically for Hypersonic
applications.
Additionally, the Department's Defense Production Act Title III
authorities allow opportunities to invest in industrial capabilities
such as carbon-carbon manufacturing. In particular, there is a request
for proposals for Ultra-High and High Temperature Composite materials
open now, which allows our industrial partners to be considered for
funding for manufacturing initiatives.
Question. As our hypersonic batteries come online and we begin to
manufacture hypersonic missiles to scale, do we have the industrial
base capacity to manufacture at scale?
Answer. The Department is working with industry to rise to the
challenge of producing hypersonic missiles at scale. R&E has partnered
with A&S on a deep dive effort to assess the state of the current and
future industrial base. This will help address current Service program
needs, and pave the way to have a responsive industrial base to meet
future requirements. The Department is using the results of this deep
dive to inform the decisions necessary to build at scale, but a number
of challenges still remain, particularly relating to supply chain
management and supplier capacity. Providing a clear demand signal to
our industry partners, in the form of validated requirements and steady
procurement, will provide them with the confidence and business case to
invest in their sub-tier suppliers and internally build capacity
necessary for full scale hypersonic production.
Question. What are the challenges to ramping up production?
Answer. The challenges to ramping up hypersonic production are not
unique--workforce and talent, data management, long lead production,
and capacity and testing bottlenecks. However, they are exacerbated by
the increased complexity of the technology and systems necessary to
enable these game changing weapons that provide the Department with
transformational capability. As these programs are still in
development, their configuration and manufacturing processes are new
competencies for industry. Some of the manufacturing processes are
highly manual and labor intensive, and require specialized skills. Many
need to be transitioned to industrial partners with sufficient
throughput, automation, facilities, and technical understanding to
produce reliably at scale.
______
Questions Submitted to Dr. Stefanie Tompkins
Questions Submitted by Senator Richard J. Durbin
Question. Climate change is one of the top issues facing our
nation, and both President Biden and Secretary Austin have made clear
that we must address climate change as a national security issue--one
that impacts the resilience of DoD facilities and operations. We must
also invest in power and energy R&D to improve performance at our
installations and optimize military capability. And this past year, the
COVID-19 pandemic has made clear that we must also support research and
development when it comes to public health and public agriculture, and
the intersection of climate change, pests and diseases, food security,
and more.
Please provide an overview of DARPA's public health and public
agriculture research that can help ensure we are better prepared
against a future pandemic.
Answer. DARPA is currently funding several public health and
agriculture research efforts that tackle current limitations in
preparation against a future pandemic. Through the Defend Against Crop
System Attack program, technologies are being developed to protect
staple crops, especially mature plants, that are particularly
vulnerable to the most severe threats relevant to disease and climate
change. The Pandemic Prevention \1\ program is focusing on novel
methods to accelerate medical countermeasure discovery, pre-clinical
testing, and manufacturing. Pandemic Prevention will enable an
integrated therapeutic development platform that leverages state-of-
the-art technologies to prevent disease outbreaks. The Deployable
Medical Countermeasures for Warfighter Readiness program will make
nucleic acid-based medical countermeasures available to the warfighter
where and when they are needed. The Preventing the Emergence of Disease
(PED) program is investigating how animal pathogens are transmitted to
humans and exploring novel approaches to prevent these events. The
Expanding Human Resiliency program aims to maximize warfighter
resiliency by leveraging the signals of the human microbiome to improve
physiology. This program will develop new technologies to control and
manipulate the microbiome and reduce attraction and feeding of insect
vectors, such as mosquitoes, that carry disease.
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\1\ All programs named/cited refer to the Research and Development
Descriptive Summaries (RDDS) from the Department of Defense fiscal year
2021 Budget Estimates.
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DARPA received and has obligated $113 million in CARES Act funding.
These funds have been used to accelerate the development and deployment
of technologies for the prevention, diagnosis and treatment of COVID-
19. Activities and impacts include the following:
--Diagnostics ($18.0M): DARPA research is producing tests that offer
earlier, more sensitive, and widely distributable diagnosis of
SARS-CoV-2-infected patients.
--Novel Prevention and Treatment Approaches ($64.0M): DARPA is
rapidly screening previously approved drugs using methods such
as organ-on-a-chip systems and using AI and machine learning
methods.
--Pharmaceutical Supply Chain ($29 million): DARPA researchers are
developing and commercializing technology that directly
addresses supply chain vulnerabilities to enable an end-to-end,
deployable, and scalable capability for the production of
medicines made from readily available ingredients that can be
sourced within the U.S.
--Environmental Monitoring ($2 million): DARPA is developing and
enabling a persistent, broad-scale screening system to detect
the presence of the SARS-CoV-2 virus.
Question. We lack robust surveillance systems to identify new pests
and diseases and track where they are moving. How can DARPA fix that?
Answer. DARPA focuses on developing technologies to rapidly detect
and characterize threats, prevent surprise, and maintain force
readiness. Several programs at DARPA focus on creating novel detection
platforms for rapid identification of potential pathogens and
biosurveillance of animal disease transmission. The Preventing the
Emergence of Disease (PED) program is investigating how animal
pathogens are transmitted to humans and exploring novel approaches to
model, predict, and prevent these events. Promising intervention
approaches will be developed to prevent viral species jumps from animal
reservoirs to humans. Predicting such jumps is a key capability to
mitigating outbreaks in human populations. The Forensic Indicators of
Threat Exposure (FITE) program is developing a field-deployable
resource for indicators of an individual's exposure history. This
program has already supported COVID-19 Health Action Response for
Marines (CHARM) by providing rapid delivery of accurate diagnostic
results for Marine recruits to ensure training continuity at Parris
Island. The Biology for Security (BIOSEC) program seeks to investigate
novel approaches to address the DoD need for rapid detection of unknown
and/or emerging biological threats by identifying pathogens based on
specific behaviors, such as how they interact with and are toxic to
host cells. Advances in this area will produce a completely new
capability to assess the emergence of pathogens and to detect pathogens
that can evade detection by traditional methods. The Gene Editing
Enabled Diagnostics & Biosurveillance program will develop fieldable,
low-cost gene editing based diagnostics for rapid, specific, sensitive,
and multiplexed detection of biological threats in military and public
health scenarios. The distributed biosurveillance device will deliver
the strategic awareness needed to prevent outbreaks of known diseases,
while having the flexibility to quickly detect new emergent bio-
threats, thereby serving as a firebreak and significantly contributing
to DoD humanitarian and stabilization efforts.
______
Questions Submitted by Senator Jerry Moran
Question. Many experts are concerned about future animal pandemics
threatening U.S. agricultural systems, affecting trade, jobs and rural
communities. Many areas of the world are currently facing African Swine
Fever--it has now spread from Africa, to Asia and Europe. There is a
strong likelihood that the virus will eventually arrive in the US,
which could be devastating to pork producers and processors, as well as
to corn and soybean growers who provide feed. Just as in the COVID
response, we will need coordinated public private partnerships (PPP) to
drive vaccine development and affordable diagnostics. We will also need
to increase our surveillance capabilities including platforms to track
disease threats. These tools will not only help us protect our
agriculture and food producers, but will also create systems to prepare
us for future biological threats that could materialize in the coming
years.
For big challenges in agriculture that require urgent responses,
such as protecting our agricultural and food systems from the impacts
of climate change and bioterrorism, do you see the need for increased
investments in agricultural research and a role for PPPs in prepare us
for future pandemics?
Answer. DARPA is currently pursuing research investments that offer
the ability to stabilize vulnerable coastal areas from erosion and
flood-related disasters as well as identify, track, and respond to
emerging agricultural threats expected to develop on faster timescales.
This research should lead to developments that assist the Department of
Defense in risk and vulnerability mitigation strategies related to
vulnerabilities that reside in the global food system. The development
of capabilities that provide early detection and identification of
emerging threats and/or disruptions to the global food system will
likely benefit from coordinated public private partnerships that ensure
broadest dissemination and sharing of data related to global food
system security.
Question. Your office is focusing heavily on technology transition
projects to improve cyber defenses for the Department and its
industrial partners.
Can you please describe how MOSAICS and other related cyber
initiatives will not only support the Department's cyber defense, but
the industrial partners that are critical to our national security?
Answer. DARPA's cyber initiatives support both the Department's
cyber defense and the industrial partners that are critical to our
national security.
DARPA is developing the computing, networking, and cyber security
technologies required to protect and enhance systems that are essential
to DoD, USG, and U.S. civil infrastructure.
Information technologies are a focus of intense computation with
both peer and non-peer adversaries, and this competition will be
ongoing.
Systems. DARPA programs are developing the technologies to enhance
the security, resiliency, and adaptability of complex software systems.
Enhanced security and resiliency are essential to meet increasingly
sophisticated cyber threats. Adaptability is needed to rapidly
assimilate new capabilities in an evolving operational environment.
Systems with rich supply chains pose particular challenges. Our work
includes not just techniques for the development of new systems, but
also, importantly, techniques that can enhance security and
adaptability for a wide range of existing systems.
Operations. DARPA programs explore data-intensive analytics for
enterprise cyber defense, including fusion to support attribution of
attacks for targeted response, new confidentiality techniques based on
applied cryptography applicable to privacy and Internet Freedom,
resiliency techniques to enable resilient recovery from attacks, and
social engineering defense for phishing attacks. Programs also enhance
the capability of cyber operators through improved data sourcing and
analytics, tools and frameworks, and operator experience design,
including environments for command centers.
In addition to developing information technologies, DARPA works to
transition the results of its R&D to operations through applications
such as the following:
--Critical Infrastructure Cybersecurity: With regard to cyber-defense
of the power grid, DARPA-developed cyber tools and a test bed
were transitioned to the Department of Energy and commercial
utilities under a MOA between 16th Air Force, U.S. Cyber
Command, and DARPA that establishes a Joint Electric Power
Range (JEPR) at Fort Carson. The JEPR will be an enduring
national resource for power grid cyber resilience
experimentation and development.
--Cyber Attribution: DARPA-developed cyber analytics were used to
generate timely, accurate threat information regarding
malicious Russian cyber activities. This information was shared
with partners at the FBI Atlanta and Pittsburgh field offices,
contributing to the indictment of six GRU personnel associated
with a worldwide destructive malware campaign and the
remediation of that malware campaign in U.S. and allied
critical infrastructure.
--Cyber Protection for Combat Vehicles: DARPA-developed technology
has been selected by the Army Combat Capabilities Development
Command Ground Systems Vehicle Development Center to provide
cyber protection to their Next Generation Combat Vehicle. The
technology will be matured to TRL-6 for Army ground vehicle
environments under this transition.
--Cyber Command and Control: DARPA initiated the Plan X program in
2013 to develop a command and control platform for military
cyber operations. Plan X technology was transitioned to the
Strategic Capabilities Office in July 2019, where it was
further developed under Project Ike, and has now been
transitioned again, this time to the Joint Cyber Command and
Control (JCC2) program management office.
SUBCOMMITTEE RECESS
Senator Tester. The Defense Subcommittee will reconvene on
Tuesday, April 20, at 9:30, for a hearing on the Defense Health
Program.
With that, this subcommittee stands in recess.
Ms. McQuiston. Thank you.
[Whereupon, at 10:55 a.m., Tuesday, April 13, the
subcommittee was recessed, to reconvene at 9:30 a.m., Tuesday,
April 20.]