[Senate Hearing 117-955]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office]
S. Hrg. 117-955
THE DEPARTMENT OF DEFENSE'S POSTURE FOR SUPPORT AND FOSTERING
INNOVATION
=======================================================================
HEARING
before the
SUBCOMMITTEE ON
EMERGING THREATS AND CAPABILITIES
of the
COMMITTEE ON ARMED SERVICES
UNITED STATES SENATE
ONE HUNDRED SEVENTEENTH CONGRESS
SECOND SESSION
__________
APRIL 6, 2022
__________
Printed for the use of the Committee on Armed Services
GRAPHIC(S) NOT AVAILABLE IN TIFF FORMAT
Available via: http://www.govinfo.gov
_______
U.S. GOVERNMENT PUBLISHING OFFICE
59-760 PDF WASHINGTON : 2025
COMMITTEE ON ARMED SERVICES
JACK REED, Rhode Island, Chairman JAMES M. INHOFE, Oklahoma
JEANNE SHAHEEN, New Hampshire ROGER F. WICKER, Mississippi
KIRSTEN E. GILLIBRAND, New York DEB FISCHER, Nebraska
RICHARD BLUMENTHAL, Connecticut TOM COTTON, Arkansas
MAZIE K. HIRONO, Hawaii MIKE ROUNDS, South Dakota
TIM KAINE, Virginia JONI ERNST, Iowa
ANGUS S. KING, Jr., Maine THOM TILLIS, North Carolina
ELIZABETH WARREN, Massachusetts DAN SULLIVAN, Alaska
GARY C. PETERS, Michigan KEVIN CRAMER, North Dakota
JOE MANCHIN III, West Virginia RICK SCOTT, Florida
TAMMY DUCKWORTH, Illinois MARSHA BLACKBURN, Tennessee
JACKY ROSEN, Nevada JOSH HAWLEY,
TOMMY TUBERVILLE, Alabama
MARK KELLY, Arizona
Elizabeth L. King, Staff Director
John D. Wason, Minority Staff Director
Subcommittee on Emerging Threats and Capabilities
MARK KELLY, Arizona, Chairman
JEANNE SHAHEEN, New Hampshire
KIRSTEN E. GILLIBRAND, New York
TIM KAINE, Virginia
ELIZABETH WARREN, Massachusetts
GARY C. PETERS, Michigan JONI ERNST, Iowa, Chairman
DEB FISCHER, Nebraska
KEVIN CRAMER, North Dakota
RICK SCOTT, Florida
MARSHA BLACKBURN, Tennessee
TOMMY TUBERVILLE, Alabama
(ii)
C O N T E N T S
April 6, 2022
Page
The Department of Defense's Posture for Support and Fostering
Innovation 1
Members Statements
Statement of Senator Mark Kelly.................................. 1
Statement of Senator Joni Ernst.................................. 3
Witnesses Statements
Shyu, The Honorable Heidi, Under Secretary of Defense for 3
Research and Engineering.
Tompkins, Dr. Stefanie, Director, Defense Advanced Research 11
Projects Agency.
Brown, Michael, Director, Defense Innovation Unit................ 18
Questions for the Record......................................... 43
(iii)
THE DEPARTMENT OF DEFENSE'S POSTURE FOR SUPPORT AND FOSTERING
INNOVATION
----------
WEDNESDAY, APRIL 6, 2022
United States Senate,
Subcommittee on Emerging
Threats and Capabilities,
Committee on Armed Services,
Washington, DC.
The Committee met, pursuant to notice, at 2:30 p.m. in room
SR-222, Russell Senate Office Building, Senator Mark Kelly
(Chairman of the Subcommittee) presiding.
Committee Members present: Kelly, Kaine, Peters, Ernst,
Fischer, Scott, and Tuberville.
OPENING STATEMENT OF SENATOR MARK KELLY
Senator Kelly. Good afternoon, everyone. The Emerging
Threats Subcommittee meets this afternoon to receive testimony
today, and I would like to welcome our witnesses, Mr. Michael
Brown, Director of the Defense Innovation Unit (DIU); Dr.
Stefanie Tompkins, Director of DARPA, the Defense Advanced
Research Projects Agency; and Ms. Heidi Shyu, the Under
Secretary of Defense for Research and Engineering. Thank you
all for being here today. I really appreciate you taking the
time to do this.
We are going to hear today from leaders who are working to
support defense and national security innovation, to ensure
that the United States retains its technological superiority
and maintains its competitive edge over potential adversaries
like China in the technological market space.
This is also a good opportunity for our witnesses to
discuss how the recently released fiscal year 2023 defense
budget request supports investments that advance the
innovations needed to make the U.S. military more effective,
more lethal, and more capable than those of our potential
adversaries.
I would like to welcome again our witnesses who will help
shed light on these topics today, and I want to take this
opportunity to again thank you, not only for being here but for
your service to our nation. I know all of you share my goal of
leveraging innovation to put the most advanced and effective
technologies in the hands of our servicemembers and creating a
vibrant innovation ecosystem that allows our military to stay
more adaptive and more effective than our adversaries.
It is no secret the United States is in a competition with
China, who seeks to dominate the national security as well as
the commercial technology space. To date, our technological
superiority has been enough to maintain our advantage despite
the ambitions and methodical progress of China.
While the United States continues to enjoy an advantage in
areas like advanced combat aircraft, missiles, nuclear and
space technologies, and land and naval power, it is critical
that we continue to show the Chinese Government and all our
competitors that starting a conflict or challenging us is
simply not in their best interest. Continuing to advance our
technological capability is central to that deterrence, as it
removes any doubt about our ability to prevail in any head-to-
head conflict, if provoked.
It is also important to remember that our national
investments in science and technology research ultimately
benefit not just the Department of Defense but also the broader
American public. Technologies funded by the DOD science and
technology program over the past century have helped produce
the Internet, the Global Positioning System (GPS), smartphones,
advanced materials, and even medical advances that have
improved Americans' prosperity, security, and quality of life.
Most recently, Department of Defense (DOD) investments in
medical research have resulted in the vaccines and therapeutics
being used to address the COVID pandemic today.
I also want to emphasize that the innovation ecosystems
that the Defense Department supports work best when they
leverage state, local, and Federal assets and investments
holistically, in addition to the broader academic and
commercial entities needed to power effective public-private
partnerships. My home state of Arizona is leading on this
front. Our universities are driving innovation in critical
fields, from advanced semiconductors and hypersonics to quantum
computing, and applying advanced data analytics to military
challenges like managing complex supply chains and improving
operational planning. They are working side-by-side with our
military as they do this.
These ties can help us accelerate our defense research
programs. We need to foster them, and we need to ensure that we
are attracting and retaining the talented personnel and
investing in the testing infrastructure, including in Arizona,
that makes all this progress possible.
While innovation is something we have historically done
better than anyone, we now face an immense threat to our
technological superiority. China has been making significant
advancements in cutting-edge technologies, like
microelectronics and hypersonics, as it seeks to erode our
military and economic advantages. They do so through not only
dual-use investments but also through corporate coercion,
espionage, and their connections between government and
industry that would not be conceivable or acceptable in any
democratic country.
That is why we must take a strategic approach across all
technologies as we are doing now with our plan to boost
domestic microchip manufacturing, to bring more of that
capability back to America. That will create jobs, it will
reduce our reliance on foreign sources, and also mean that we
are doing breakthrough research here at home.
So I hope that in this hearing we can examine how DOD,
DARPA, and the Defense Innovation Unit (DIU) are using the
resources and authorities they have been given to help us win
the global technological competition against adversaries like
China, by making advancements in key emerging technology areas,
including artificial intelligence, autonomy, microelectronics,
5G technologies, and hypersonics. I would also like to ask the
witnesses to address any challenges that they are facing in
trying to achieve that goal and give us insights and
recommendations on what this subcommittee can do to best
support them as they embark on writing our annual defense
authorization.
I will now turn to the Ranking Member, Senator Ernst, for
any opening comments that she has.
STATEMENT OF SENATOR JONI ERNST
Senator Ernst. Great. Thank you, Mr. Chair, and good
afternoon to everyone. I want to thank all of our witnesses for
being here today.
Every one of us in this room agree that increased
innovation to deliver lethal capabilities to the warfighter
must be a priority of the Department of Defense. It is not up
for debate. The questions and policy choices I am interested in
deliberating concern the mechanics of identifying, screening,
prototyping, and ultimately delivering technology to the
warfighter.
The President's Budget promises record levels of investment
in research, testing, development, and evaluation. Will the
Department translate those dollars into combat capability more
quickly, or will projects with bigger price tags continue to
die in the valley of death? Barriers like over-classification,
continued embrace of exquisite hardware over agile service
contracts, and risk aversion to using authorities like the
middle tier of acquisition are too high. No budget number can
clear them. China is moving quickly and aggressively to adopt
emerging technology for their warfighters, and we cannot let
the capabilities we provide our soldiers fall behind.
Today I hope you all can help ease my concerns and we can
go forward with a commitment to field all necessary systems
more quickly and effectively.
Thank you very much to our witnesses. Thank you, Mr. Chair.
Senator Kelly. Thank you, Senator Ernst. Now I welcome any
opening remarks from our witnesses, beginning with Secretary
Shyu.
STATEMENT OF THE HONORABLE HEIDI SHYU, UNDER SECRETARY OF
DEFENSE FOR RESEARCH AND ENGINEERING
Ms. Shyu. Chairman Kelly, Ranking Member Ernst, and
Senators of the subcommittee, thank you for inviting us to
represent the Department of Defense at this hearing on
accelerating innovation for the warfighter. I am honored and
proud to be the Under Secretary of Defense for Research and
Engineering and the Department's Chief Technology Officer.
I look forward to this testimony as this is the first time
I have been to the Senate since my confirmation, and I thank
you for your support during that process. It is an honor to be
back working at the Department of Defense.
On behalf of the Secretary, the Under Secretary of Defense
Research and Engineering (R&E) sets the technology and
innovation strategy for the Department. The position oversees
the Defense Advanced Research Project Agency, DARPA, the
Missile Defense Agency, the Space Development Agency, the Test
Resource Management Center, and the Defense Innovation Unit,
DIU. I am pleased to testify with the directors of DARPA and
DIU by my side today.
As the Under Secretary, my responsibility is to ensure an
enduring technological advantage for the United States
military. We will accomplish this goal by building and
implementing the Department's technology strategy. As directed
by Congress and in alignment with the National Defense
Strategy, the forthcoming National Defense Science and
Technology Strategy will provide guidance to the Department on
near-term challenges and ensure that our nation remains the
global leader in technology far into the future. The challenges
are vast, from rising nations to rising sea levels.
In my written testimony I describe the specific critical
technology areas and how the Department is working faster and
more collaboratively across prototyping and experimentation.
Today I want to briefly highlight two areas where the
Department must work closely with Congress to ensure an
enduring advantage, first, building a strong foundation for
science, and secondly, updating how the Department does
business to better reflect today's world.
Every strong structure needs to stand on a solid
foundation. To ensure this country retains our edge and fuels
future technologies as capabilities, we must make a commitment
to science and technology, particularly in the basic research.
We must attract the best people. We must supply the necessary
infrastructure for research and development (R&D). We must
rapidly prototype and perform joint experimentation and
collaborate across the technology ecosystem.
If we expect the Department to attract the world's best and
brightest to produce state-of-the-art technologies, we must
modernize our laboratory and test ranges. The future of the
Department depends on talented people, and we are committed to
developing this talent. The Department has invested in a
variety of workforce educational and research programs, ranging
from K-12 robotic systems to Science, Technology, Engineering
and Mathematics (STEM) scholarship and social science research.
As the strategic competition increases so must our attention to
Science and Technology (S&T).
I know many of you on this subcommittee feel the same way,
and I look forward to working with you to strengthen our S&T,
its supporting infrastructure, and the workforce.
In my remaining time I want to discuss how the Department
must innovate in pace with the technological change and keeping
with the demands of national defense strategy. Historically,
the Department has been a leader in R&D. We still are, but the
growth of private sector R&D has exploded over the last 50
years.
As seen in Ukraine, novel commercial technologies paired
with conventional weapons, can change the nature of conflict.
The Department's processes, ranging from programming to
experimentation to collaboration should be updated to reflect
the dynamic landscape of today and anticipate the needs of
tomorrow. Our Nation's private sector is our competitive
advantage, and we must focus on improving how the government
and private sector work together.
I am committed to working with you to ensure the Department
can move as quickly as possible as it engages with the private
sector and the whole innovation ecosystem to rapidly transition
technology through fieldable capability.
Thank you for having us here today. We will all look
forward to your questions.
[The prepared statement of Ms. Heidi Shyu follows:]
Prepared Statement by The Honorable Heidi Shyu
Chairman Kelly, Ranking Member Ernst, and subcommittee Members
thank you for inviting the Department of Defense to provide testimony
for the Senate Armed Services Committee hearing on accelerating
innovation for the warfighter. I'm honored and proud to be the
Department of Defense's Under Secretary of Defense for Research and
Engineering (USD(R&E)) and Chief Technology Officer (CTO). I am pleased
and appreciate the opportunity to discuss these important topics. I
look forward to this testimony as this is the first time I have been
back to the Senate since my confirmation. Thank you for confirming me
to this role; it is an honor to be back at the Department of Defense.
On behalf of the Secretary of Defense, the USD(R&E) sets the
technology and innovation strategy for the Department of Defense, and
oversees the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), the
Missile Defense Agency (MDA), Space Development Agency (SDA) and
Defense Innovation Unit (DIU). I am pleased to have the Directors of
DARPA and DIU by my side today. The Department's goal is to provide the
United States military with an enduring advantage through our
technology strategy. The long-term strategy will be laid out in the
forthcoming National Defense Science and Technology Strategy, as
directed by the Fiscal Year (FY) 2022 National Defense Authorization
Act (NDAA). In order to be effective, the Department must recognize
both immediate challenges and be prepared to conduct long-term planning
and strategies for an increasingly complex environment.
As can be seen by the Russian invasion of Ukraine, technology
changes the nature of conflict and battle. Alongside the familiar
tanks, ships, and aircraft, there are new hypersonic weapons and
unmanned platforms that must be considered now and in future conflicts.
Strategic competitors to the United States are rapidly developing
state-of-the-art technologies and fielding new emerging threats. Many
of these technologies, such as unmanned aerial systems, are available
in the commercial market and are being proliferated worldwide. As the
character of war continues to evolve, we must anticipate and be able to
defend, fight, and counter any emerging threats and maintain our
overmatch.
The Department performs technology horizon scanning to understand
where strategic competitors are active and to understand what is state-
of-the-art in the commercial sector. This information allows for
better-informed decisions and allows the department to assess
opportunities that can be harvested from our Nation's commercial and
defense innovation ecosystem to accelerate technology adoption, and
collaborate with our Allies and Partners to develop interoperable
systems.
In order to build an enduring advantage for the United States, we
must first build a strong foundation. This includes an expansive basic
and advanced research portfolio, state-of-the-art laboratories, diverse
set of testing facilities and ranges, and the best and brightest
workforce. This foundation is the innovation engine that will allow us
to continually develop and produce the breakthrough next-generation
technology and provide disruptive capabilities expeditiously to our
military. Department efforts to strengthen this foundation also rely on
a strong national technological ecosystem and industrial base.
Congressional efforts to support long-term U.S. leadership in advanced
technologies, in particular the Creating Helpful Incentives for the
Production of Semiconductors (CHIPS) for America Act and the broader
Bipartisan Innovation Act, are inextricably linked to Department's
ability to successfully build enduring United States advantages in
applications of technology for national security. Second, we must make
informed choices about which critical technologies are important to the
Department. To that end, the Department has identified Critical
Technology Areas (CTA) that are essential to supporting the National
Defense Strategy and the mission of the joint force to build an
enduring full-spectrum advantage for the United States.
building a foundation for research and development
The United States' share of international technology innovation (as
measured by patents, public and private sector funding, and number of
students graduating with technical and scientific degrees) is
decreasing, while the Department's need for a strong technical base is
becoming increasingly urgent. We must do all that we can to maintain
our advantage in science and technology (S&T), especially in an era of
strategic competition. The people, processes, and infrastructure that
enable the creation of innovative technologies are essential components
to a strong foundation.
Basic Research
The Department's investments in S&T are underpinned by early-stage
basic research. Investments in basic research will provide us with the
seeds to harvest technology far into the future in ways that we cannot
even imagine today. We have demonstrated time and again that basic
research yields transformational capabilities for warfighters and often
wider commercial use. Many technologies we benefit from today--lasers,
the Internet, GPS, microelectronics, lithium-ion batteries, and
artificial intelligence--all exist thanks to the Department's
investments in basic research.
Take for instance our Vannevar Bush Faculty Fellowship (VBFF), the
Department's most prestigious single-investigator award, supporting
basic research with the potential for transformative impact. Professor
Tresa Pollock, one of our 50 active Fellows, is working on making 3D-
printed materials more resilient for battlefield use. Dr. Pollock's
research team has developed and licensed a 3D-printable, high strength,
defect resistant, superalloy that overcomes the issue of cracking under
stress and could prove useful in hypersonics development. Since 2015,
20 percent of VBFF fellows have started new companies creating new job
opportunities.
The Department's interest in basic research is not limited to only
the STEM fields. The Minerva Research Initiative supports social
science research that can improve the Department's basic understanding
of the social, cultural, behavioral, and political forces that shape
the world. In February, the Department awarded $28.7 million in grants
to 17 research projects, covering everything from team cognition for
space missions to the social impacts of climate change and how best to
combat propaganda distributed by the PRC.
A healthy investment in basic research is one of the Department's
best tools against technological surprise. Strong open research
collaborations between United States DOD funded researchers and the
international science community is one of the best ways to understand
the emerging state of the science. Putting barriers in the way of
international collaboration does us a grave disservice.
Applied Research and Advanced Development
Our Applied Research and Advanced Development is supported by the
Department's robust research and innovation ecosystem. R&E works hand
in glove with the Service labs, DARPA, Federally Funded Research and
Development Centers (FFDRCs), and 14 University Affiliated Research
Centers (UARCs) across the country, defense and commercial companies,
specializing in fields as varied as nanotechnology, AI and autonomy,
electronic warfare, lasers, unmanned platforms, just to name a few. The
Department benefits tremendously from strong partnerships across the
broad technology ecosystem. The weapons systems and platforms that we
have developed from precision strike to UAVs to integrated air and
missile defense are highly sought after worldwide. We must accelerate
the development of critical technologies to enable us to operate in a
denied environment.
Laboratory and Test Infrastructure
The Department's labs and test infrastructure are the proving
grounds of our most important discoveries. They are a foundational
element in our ability to generate new ideas, test innovative new
technologies, and sustain and modernize existing DOD systems. The
Department's S&T laboratories engage in activities ranging from basic
research to defense system acquisition support, to direct operational
support of deployed warfighters. These laboratories are comprised of
dozens of facilities across 22 states and employ tens of thousands of
scientists and engineers, both civilian and military. The Department's
laboratories execute a substantial fraction of the Department's S&T
accounts, particularly in RDT&E Budget Activities (BA) 02 (Applied
Research) and 03 (Advanced Technology Development), also known as BA
6.2 and BA 6.3.
To develop and test new emerging capabilities rapidly, we must
modernize our laboratories and test infrastructures. One of the
Department's Innovation Steering Group's primary lines of effort is to
assess the state of our laboratories and test infrastructures. While
existing systems continue to serve us well in testing legacy hardware,
the Department must anticipate and fund new testing and evaluation
environments to support emerging technology development.
Funding lab and test infrastructure has been a recurring budget
challenge for the Department and thanks are in order to Congress for
the support in this area. The relative plateau of Military Construction
(MILCON) budgets over the past decade has resulted in degraded
facilities and a continual necessity for maintenance and repair work.
This raises significant concerns about the performance, reliability,
and long-term viability of the Department's lab and test
infrastructure. Following congressional direction, the Department has
submitted an infrastructure requirements report coincident with the
President's Budget Request since 2017. The Department has taken
advantage of funds for infrastructure construction, maintenance, and
repair through a variety of sources and authorizations provided by
Congress over the last decade, totaling approximately $890 million. The
Department looks forward to working with Congress through the
development of spend plans for the use of military construction funds
and on ways to address the recurring challenges with lab and test
infrastructure in the future
Education, STEM and Talent Programs
The Department is committed to cultivating the next generation of
top-notch researchers, engineers, and innovators. The Department is
engaged in a number of programs to promote and foster STEM education
from pre-K all the way through to doctoral programs and beyond.
R&E oversees the Science, Mathematics, and Research for
Transformation (SMART) Scholarship-for-Service program. In this
program, undergraduate or graduate school scholars in select STEM
fields receive a full tuition scholarship and internships at DOD
laboratories. Upon graduation, scholars return to their respective
Department facility and work there for a period equal to the amount of
time they received the scholarship. In the past year, 416 SMART
Scholarship recipients started work at Department laboratories or
facilities.
R&E also oversees the Department's STEM Office, which recently
awarded $6 million to Arizona State University (ASU), Boston University
(BU), and the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB) to develop
K-12 biotech programs with teacher support. ASU's online curriculum is
supported by their students and is targeted at reaching under-
represented minorities and rural areas in Arizona. BU's program for
local students includes internships and opportunities at Boston labs.
UCSB is also developing a master's degree biotech program and will
pilot with local minority serving community colleges.
While much of the Department's investments in STEM education are
academic, the Department is also focused on exciting STEM opportunities
outside of the classroom to grow our future pipeline. Since 2009, DOD
STEM has sponsored teams in the For Inspiration and Recognition of
Science and Technology (FIRST) K-12 robotics competition. This season,
Department scientists and engineers are expected to provide more than
300,000 mentorship hours to over a 1,000 teams. The Department also
held ten 5-day STEM-focused summer camps with 1,200 junior high
students at laboratories, engineering centers, and academic and
educational partners. The Army's Educational Outreach Program educates
approximately 3,500 students in grades 5 through 12 through its Gains
in the Education of Math and Science (GEMS) program. GEMS aims to
interest students in STEM who might not otherwise have considered the
career path.
Part of building out a talent pipeline for the next generation is
ensuring that we are tapping into all of the incredible talent our
Nation has to offer. That's why the Department's R&D community has long
made concerted efforts to reach out to under-represented communities.
A key part of these efforts is the Department's long-standing
relationship with Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs)
and Minority Institutions (MIs). The Department has continued to create
and expand partnerships with HBCUs and MIs to stimulate research and
innovation leading to the development of technologies critical to
national security. Specifically, we recently established two new
Centers of Excellence at HBCUs, representing a $15 million investment.
West Virginia's Morgan State University, in partnership with Johns
Hopkins and Development Command (DEVCOM) Army Research Lab,
established a Center for Advanced Electro-Photonics with 2D Materials.
North Carolina A&T, in partnership with Wake Forest, established a
Center for Biotechnology that will develop technology for the detection
and monitoring of chemical and biological threat agents. These new
centers join nine other Department established centers at HBCUs and
MIs.
Thank you for the authorities that allow the Department to focus
efforts and investment in STEM development at HBCUs and MIs.
critical technologies to support the national defense strategy
The Department's CTAs support the National Defense Strategy and
address the needs of the joint force. In February, R&E identified 14
CTAs, grouped into three categories, each of which require a different
approach to develop. These three categories are: Seed Areas of Emerging
Opportunity (biotechnology, quantum science, Future Generation Wireless
Technology (FutureG), and advanced materials), Effective Commercial
Adoption Areas (Trusted AI & autonomy, integrated network systems-of-
systems, microelectronics, space technology, renewable energy
generation and storage, advanced computing and software, human-machine
interfaces), and Defense-Specific Technologies (directed energy,
hypersonics, integrated sensing and cyber). Early pioneering work in
seed areas by our national and international research laboratories and
world-renowned academics can revolutionize our capabilities in future
conflicts. Effective commercial technology adoption areas can be pulled
into the Department to rapidly enhance our capabilities. Defense
Specific Technologies are areas where the DOD must take a lead in the
R&D to ensure leap-ahead capabilities development.
While this testimony will not address all the CTAs in depth, I'd
like to provide some recent updates.
5G and FutureG
To date, 5G has awarded more than 65 contracts to include over 100
companies. We are actively experimenting with seven 5G use cases to
address key warfighting needs in dynamic spectrum sharing, smart
warehouse and logistics, augmented reality for enhanced warfighter
training and distributed command and control. The 5G/FutureG Initiative
demonstrates the benefits of open 5G systems to create smart
warehouses. In May 2021, we prototyped and demonstrated an Open Radio
Access Network (Open RAN) in Arlington, Virginia. Immediately afterward
it was set up as a testbed in a military warehouse in Albany, Georgia
to enable breakthrough warehouses logistics capabilities.
Biotechnology
Through our Tri-Service Biotechnology for a Resilient Supply Chain
(T-BRSC) program we are exploring the potential to generate high-
density, high-performance fuels. Starting this year, T-BRSC will be the
largest technologically advanced non-medical biotechnology program for
the Department. The capability to create novel energy independence, not
derived from fossil fuels, would be revolutionary.
DARPA last year demonstrated a bio-cement helicopter landing pad in
48 hours in Guam. This novel approach, when mature, may result in a
significantly smaller logistics footprint and enable rapid use in
austere environment.
Microelectronics
Seventy percent of the world's microelectronics are manufactured in
Asia contributing to supply chain vulnerabilities like those we have
seen during the COVID-19 pandemic. In keeping with Section 9903(b) of
the FY 2021 NDAA legislation, which directs the Department to establish
a National Network for Microelectronics Research and Development
(NNMRD) and to expand the global leadership in microelectronics, we
have led a cross functional team that has matured the Microelectronics
Commons concept. We are prepared to implement the Commons in three
stages. First, create ``Lab-to-Fab'' testing and prototyping hubs to
build a network focused on maturing microelectronics technologies based
on the latest research ideas. Second, we want to provide broad access
to these prototyping hubs, through augmented academic facilities (i.e.,
a local semiconductor company or a FFRDC). Finally, we want to increase
microelectronics education and training of students at local colleges
and universities, creating a talent pipeline for an engineering
workforce to bolster the domestic semiconductor economy.
We recognize that in order for the Microelectronics Commons to have
an impact, it must be closely coupled and connected to interagency R&D,
education, and workforce efforts and feed into the whole-of-government
microelectronics activities. R&E actively participates in several
interagency coordination efforts and DARPA co-chairs the Subcommittee
for Microelectronics Leadership under the National Science and
Technology Council to ensure the Department's efforts fully leverage
both synergistic and complementary efforts from across the Federal
Government.
Hypersonics
We are accelerating plans for rapid development and transition of
hypersonic weapons to enable fielding of operational prototypes in
quantity from land, sea, and air by the mid-2020s.
My office is engaging directly with the Joint Staff, Combatant
Commands, and Military Services to ensure that the hypersonic
technologies the Department is developing are integrally linked to
enhancing warfighter needs.
Additionally, we are engaging with academia through the Joint
Hypersonics Transition Office (JHTO) that established the University
Consortium of Applied Hypersonics (UCAH) in October 2020. This office
is a new way of leveraging university expertise to support the
Department's most pressing science and technology hypersonics needs.
The JHTO also is developing a pipeline of talented individuals who will
make up the hypersonics workforce of the future.
working faster and increasing collaboration
Innovating in a way that will maintain the Department's technical
advantage depends on increasing our collaboration across the technology
ecosystem and rapidly performing experimentation, testing, and
fielding. Commercial technologies are evolving faster than ever before,
creating potential new asymmetric threats.
In 2021, through the ISG, the Department created the Rapid Defense
Experimentation Reserve (RDER), a continuous campaign of joint
iterative experimentation to close joint warfighting capability gaps.
We have worked closely with the Joint Staff, Combatant Commanders, the
Services, with participation from our Allies and Partners, to formulate
a series of joint experimentation in a highly contested environment
with the intent to rapidly transition the new capabilities.
The ISG is the principal forum that advises Department leadership
and drives DOD-wide strategy, policy, programmatic, cultural, and
budgetary change in the areas of science, technology, technology
transition, and innovation. This year, OUSD(R&E) announced the first of
several sprints with the RDER program.
OUSD(R&E) funds Joint Capability Technology Demonstration (JCTD)
programs that intends to meet a single specific capability shortfall
defined by a Component Commander since a single Service will not
provision funding to solve a joint problem. For example, R&E funded a
National Capital Region's Integrated Air Defense System to extend the
detection range of a specific target that met the NORTHCOM's need.
OUSD(R&E) also develops and fund Rapid Prototype Programs which
demonstrates a specific capability that's not addressed by a single
Service. For example, Southern Cross Integrated Flight Research
Experiment (SCIFIRE) is maturing solid rocket motor for an air-
breathing hypersonic cruise missile.
OUSD(R&E)'s Advanced Capabilities' Defense Modernization &
Prototyping (DM&P) program focuses on funding and transitioning
innovative technologies from small businesses and non-traditional
performers.
Collaboration with the Private Sector
Private sector investment in technology has never been greater than
it is today. However, many critical technology areas are not attractive
to the private sector due to the expensive costs associated with
initial investment. To ensure that the private sector pursues the
technologies needed for national defense, the Department is increasing
its leadership engagement and collaboration with the private sector.
DIU, along with other Innovation Centers across the Department, engage
with commercial industry to accelerate innovative solutions to solve
military problems.
COVID-19 induced supply chain disruptions over the past few years
have laid bare the importance of domestic manufacturing to our national
and economic security. Catching up with manufacturing growth abroad,
however, will depend on our development of leap ahead technologies like
robotics, additive manufacturing, and biotechnology. The Department's
Manufacturing Technology program (ManTech) is working to encourage and
support this sort of innovation in the United States manufacturing
ecosystem.
ManTech oversees 9 Manufacturing Innovation Institutes (MIIs).
These public-private partnerships specialize in exciting fields like
photonics or advanced fabrics and work to create workforce education
pathways. Lightweight Innovations For Tomorrow (LIFT) has an innovative
training and credentialing program that provides a curriculum to Active
Duty soldiers, enabling them to earn credentials in high demand
manufacturing fields. MIIs are transforming how universities and
community colleges educate and how companies identify skills needed for
industries of the future. These curriculum and workforce programs have
helped more than 30,000 learners to date, and we were proud to welcome
President Biden to the Advanced Robotics for Manufacturing (ARM)
Institute in January.
Despite the Department's enormous contribution to the economy and
creation of game changing technologies, it is still a challenge for a
small business or startup to work with the DOD. We are committed to
doing more to help small businesses and making it easier to work with
the DOD and to bridge the valley-of-death.
The Department's Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR)/Small
Business Technology Transfer (STTR) programs allow the DOD to support
innovative small businesses to develop breakthrough technologies and
capabilities that we need.
We have upgraded our SBIR/STTR Innovation Portal, making it easier
to engage and participate with the Department. We are engaging with the
small business community to understand the challenges that they face
and are working to systemically tear down obstacles.
We are also focused on improving how the Department engages with
the private sector to ensure that defense needs will be addressed by
dual-use technologies. Increasing private sector investments in
technology is advantageous for the Department so that we can purchase
that technology commercially as it becomes available, supporting both
defense and commercial needs. The Department is exploring additional
ways to take a more active role in the commercial technology sector to
ensure that defense objectives will be addressed.
collaboration with allies and partners
Collaboration with Allies and Partners may significantly increase
the speed in which we can develop interoperable technologies benefiting
both nations. Many existing multilateral and bilateral agreements serve
as a platform for increased collaboration, such as The Technical
Cooperation Program (TTCP) with our ``Five Eyes'' Allies (Australia,
Canada, New Zealand, United Kingdom, and United States), and the North
Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) Science and Technology
Organization. We are also looking to expand international R&D defense
collaboration with other Allies and Partners based on shared defense
interests and technology priorities.
The Department supports NATO's efforts to leverage centers of
innovation to meet NATO's operational requirements. NATO's Defense
Innovation Accelerator for the North Atlantic (DIANA) seeks to
accelerate the development of dual-use emerging and disruptive
technology through innovation. DIANA's focus on multi-sector
participation will highlight innovative entrepreneurs from small start-
ups, mid-sized companies and academic institutions that can solve
critical defense and security challenges.
The AUKUS (Australia, United Kingdom, United States) defense pact
is a new area of opportunity that is already showing success. Last
year, President Biden, along with Prime Minister Morrison and Prime
Minster Johnson, announced the creation of an enhanced trilateral
security partnership among our three nations. To meet the challenges of
the twenty-first century, AUKUS will fortify longstanding bilateral
ties while strengthening the security and defense interests in the
Indo-Pacific region by evolving advanced capabilities collectively.
Working closely with our Allies and Partners, the Foreign
Comparative Testing (FCT) Program enhances our Nation's military's
capabilities. FCT is locating, assessing, and fielding mature foreign
developed technology products to meet emerging defense requirements.
For example, our soldiers utilize a palm-sized unmanned aerial vehicle
(UAV) from Norway that enables enhanced battlefield surveillance and
reconnaissance, a long-range missile from Israel that's improving
standoff lethality and survivability against enemy air defense systems.
Our sailors will utilize a mobile coastal defense rocket system from
the Republic of Korea, providing a counter swarm capability against
maritime attack craft.
conclusion
In order to provide the United States with the long-term capability
to develop and rapidly field the most innovative technologies to
maintain overmatch, it is essential to have a solid R&D foundation
consisting of a broad base of basic and applied research, rapid
prototyping capability, continuous joint experimentation and testing,
state-of-the-art lab and test infrastructure, rapid ability to
transition to fielding, and a highly-talented workforce. The objective
of increased collaboration across our technology ecosystem is to
accelerate the timeline in which emerging technologies can
revolutionize our warfighting capabilities. Implementing these concepts
through the National Defense Science and Technology strategy will build
a technological enduring advantage for the United States Military.
Thank you for the invitation to testify in your Committee, and I look
forward to the discussion.
Senator Kelly. Thank you, Secretary Shyu. Dr. Tompkins?
STATEMENT OF DR. STEFANIE TOMPKINS, DIRECTOR, DEFENSE ADVANCED
RESEARCH PROJECTS AGENCY
Dr. Tompkins. Thank you, Chairman Kelly and Members of the
Subcommittee. I echo Secretary Shyu's thanks for the
opportunity to testify today, and I thank you very much for the
committee's strong support of DARPA over many years.
It is great to be here with my colleagues. As you know, our
organizations work together constantly to advance national
security, and we are part of a really extraordinary science and
technology ecosystem that extends far beyond just the
Department of Defense.
Within that ecosystem, DARPA has a unique role. Our mission
is to create technological surprise. We do this by making
pivotal investments in technologies that we believe have the
potential to completely transform national security. We have
been delivering on the mission for over 60 years. We brought to
the DOD, and to the Nation, game-changers like precision-guided
munitions, and the Javelin missile, by the way, stealth
aircraft, unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), the internet,
miniaturized GPS receivers, and as you mentioned, Mr. Chairman,
most recently, MRNA vaccines.
We are extraordinarily lucky in that we are able to work
extremely quickly. We do not just tolerate but we embrace risk,
and we constantly seek what we call DARPA-scale impact. One of
our program managers once joked, ``If you didn't invent the
internet, you only get a B.'' Now I should add that that
program manager was working on MRNA vaccines at the time, so I
think in retrospect he probably earned an A.
But that is the past, and so you should ask what we are
working on today. Imagine a world where a soldier's basic
needs, things like food, water, fuel, or medicine are made
right on the spot from waste material, say from plastic, or
even just from the air, completely independent of vulnerable
supply chains. Imagine a world where both our electronics and
our software are completely secure by design and thus
unhackable. Imagine a world in which all of our military
systems, which today have a lot of trouble interoperating, can
seamlessly communicate and work together to provide inherently
joint capabilities to our military commanders. Those are some
of the futures that DARPA seeks to make real.
We are also working to transition technology faster than
ever. It is a very dynamic world, and as we have all discussed
and observed, quite volatile. So we are creating new ways to do
testing, faster than real time and with the assistance of
artificial intelligence (AI), to explore thousands of use cases
and missions.
We are transitioning technology not just through programs
of record but through new commercialization initiatives,
through new partnerships with the Combatant Commands (COCOMs),
or with organizations such as DIU or other parts of the R&E
enterprise, or through rapid DevOp cycles in order to get
software directly into the hands of users.
In addition to the futuristic versions that I shared a
minute ago, we also work closely with the military services to
de-risk nearer-term technology. For example, as has been very
recently reported in the press, DARPA, in partnership with the
U.S. Air Force, recently completed a second successful flight
test of our Hypersonic-Air breathing Concept, known as HAWC.
This test set the U.S. record for scramjet endurance, and we
believe it is an inflection point on a path to reclaiming U.S.
leadership in hypersonic weapons.
In my written testimony you will see many more examples of
DARPA portfolios and programs. I ask you please to remember
that some of those will fail. If they do not, it means we are
not trying hard enough and we are not taking enough risk. But
some of those will succeed, and in doing so may fundamentally
transform our nation and strengthen our national security in
ways that we can only begin to imagine.
I thank you again for your support to DARPA over many, many
years, and I look forward to working with you and others in
Congress to ensure the security and resilience of our great
nation, and as Secretary Shyu mentioned, looking forward to
answering your questions.
[The prepared statement of Dr. Stefanie Tompkins follows:]
Prepared Statement by Dr. Stefanie Tompkins
Chairman Kelly, Ranking Member Ernst 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
colleagues, Ms. Heidi Shyu, from the office of the Undersecretary for
Research and Engineering (USD(R&E)), and Mr. Michael Brown, Director of
the Defense Innovation Unit (DIU). Our organizations work together
every day to advance national security through new technology. DARPA
plays a particular role in both the DOD and 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 capabilities.
For more than 60 years, DARPA has held to a singular and enduring
mission: to create technological surprise. We do this by making pivotal
investments in breakthrough technologies for national security. Working
with innovators inside and outside government, DARPA has repeatedly
delivered on our 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, miniaturized GPS receivers, and,
just a decade ago, mRNA-based vaccines. 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 is
delivering on our most pressing security needs.
DARPA creates and executes programs that rely on and inspire an
innovation ecosystem of academic, industry, and government partners.
Efforts to strengthen the U.S. technological ecosystem as a whole, such
as the Bipartisan Innovation Act, would therefore significantly enable
DARPA's efforts to provide game-changing technical solutions. We work
with national security leaders and the Nation's military services to
understand today's hardest challenges and anticipate tomorrow's, and
demonstrate transformational technology solutions for both.
We work quickly, embrace risk, and seek what we call ``DARPA-scale
impact''. One of our program managers once joked, ``if you didn't
invent the internet, you get a B''. In recent years, with the
democratization and acceleration of technological advances around the
world, we have increased our emphasis on rapid prototyping and on
faster and lower-cost methods of designing, building, and testing
technology not just in controlled settings but in the complex, dynamic,
messy real-world environments in which they must ultimately succeed.
Today, I will focus my testimony on examples of DARPA portfolios and
programs in various stages of development and transition. Please
remember: some of these may fail. But some will succeed, and in doing
so may fundamentally transform our ability to defend the homeland,
deter adversaries, increase global stability, and lay the foundations
for continued technological surprise.
``ai next'' campaign
DARPA has been a leader in artificial intelligence since the 1960s.
The agency 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 pursuing more than 39 programs that are
exploring ways to advance the state-of-the-art in AI, pushing towards
third wave contextual reasoning capabilities. In addition, more than 60
active programs are applying AI in some capacity, from sharing
electromagnetic spectrum bandwidth to detecting and patching cyber
vulnerabilities.
Under the AI Next campaign, key areas being explored include
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 has a quick-turn funding mechanism called Artificial
Intelligence Exploration (AIE) that allows the agency to 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 within 90 days of up to $1 million each for
18-month periods of performance. During these periods of performance,
we investigate very high-risk, high-reward topics to assess feasibility
and clarify whether the area is ready for increased investment. To
date, we have made 244 contract awards for more than 37 AIE topics, and
launched at least 2 significant research investments based on the AIE
research results.
applying ai (example): cbrne detection
A representative example of our AI Next campaign is the SIGMA+
program, which seeks to alert authorities when there is a chemical,
biological, radiological, nuclear, or explosive (CBRNE) attack in a US
city or on a military base. Last year, in collaboration with the
Indianapolis Metropolitan Police Department (IMPD), we concluded a
three-month pilot study focused on early detection and interdiction of
CBRNE threats. For the pilot, researchers integrated highly sensitive
chemical and biological sensors into several IMPD vehicles and
characterized the real-world environmental background data over a large
part of the Indianapolis metropolitan region. Researchers then used AI-
supported algorithms to detect chemical simulants against that
background.
Knowing the naturally occurring chemical and biological backgrounds
in an area allows customization of both sensors and algorithms to
minimize false positives and maximize detections of threats. During the
Indianapolis pilot study, nuisance alarms were suppressed by 75%.
The Indianapolis pilot study and field testing marked the first
time DARPA was able to demonstrate comprehensive SIGMA+ sensor
technology in a law-enforcement vehicle, including air sampling, power,
and a user interface that provided real-time analysis of potential
threats via a tablet. The ultimate goal is to outfit a citywide fleet
of law enforcement and other public service vehicles to enable a
continuously refreshed mobile network that can detect CBRN threats with
low false-alarm rates across a city and region. Next steps for SIGMA+
include testing in other metropolitan regions and developing
operational procedures to integrate sensors into real-world use.
advancing ai (example): machine learning with limited data
Much has been written about how the commercial world has harvested
and created large sets of labeled data for training machine learning
(ML) models. Unfortunately, when we try to use these models on DOD and
Intelligence Community alert problems, they fail. This is because
military-relevant data collections are often degraded and noisy--we are
collecting images and audio non-cooperatively, we are processing
seized/degraded media, or our sensors are different than commercial
sensors. DARPA's Learning With Less Labeling program is developing new
learning algorithms that require much less information to train or
update ML models with increased accuracy.
The approach we take in Learning with Less Labeling (LwLL) is to
generalize the machine learning objective. It turns out that many
machine learning algorithms boil down to an optimization problem. The
research goal is to use a million times fewer images than today's
standard practice to train a system, and require roughly 100 labeled
examples to adapt a system instead of the millions needed today.
In the context of identifying objects in images, LwLL researchers
have already demonstrated and benchmarked, using real-world examples, a
new technique that requires 1000x less labeled data than conventional
ML with only 10% degradation in accuracy. This early breakthrough is
promising and is already being shared with DOD transition partners,
while the program continues to advance towards its ultimate goal of
demonstrating a 1,000,000x reduction in labeled data required.
assault breaker ii
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) initiative seeks to
change fundamentally the way the military thinks about designing,
buying, and deploying future systems.
First, the ABII program addresses several challenges posed by our
strategic 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 for 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 modeling
and simulation environment to support analysis of true cross-domain,
cross-service warfighting constructs. Finally, the program is tying
modeling and simulation 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 both to 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 a technical baseline for multi-domain operations
moving forward.
electronics resurgence initiative
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 every year. 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 is forging 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 benefited
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 is advancing research in
four key areas--3D heterogeneous integration, new materials and
devices, specialized functions, and design and 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 both to 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.
A major component of ERI is the JUMP Initiative. In late December
2021, DARPA announced its participation in a new public-private
partnership with the Semiconductor Research Corporation (SRC) and a
consortium of companies in the commercial semiconductor industry and
the defense industrial base called the Joint University
Microelectronics Program 2.0 (JUMP 2.0). The program supports high-
risk, high-payoff university research that addresses existing and
emerging challenges in information and communication technologies. JUMP
2.0 builds off an earlier iteration of the SRC-led collaboration that
was formed in 2018 to support university research centers focused on
maintaining U.S. microelectronics innovation. The targeted efforts of
ERI play a critical role in the U.S. microelectronics ecosystem and
support the whole-of-government efforts underway to ensure continued
leadership in this important area.
cyber
In addition to addressing threats in the physical world, DARPA is
also intensely focused on threats in the virtual world. To further this
area of research, last year, DARPA conducted its first bug bounty
program--the Finding Exploits to Thwart Tampering (FETT) Bug Bounty--to
evaluate hardware protections in development on the System Security
Integration Through Hardware and firmware (SSITH) program. SSITH
explored hardware security architectures and tools that protect
electronic systems against common classes of hardware vulnerabilities
exploited through software, with the goal of breaking the endless cycle
of software patch-and-pray.
Through FETT, hundreds of cybersecurity researchers and reverse
engineers had virtual access to secure SSITH processors in order to
detect weaknesses and vulnerabilities. Key to this effort was the
development of a scalable, virtualized platform for remotely testing
and evaluating the processor prototypes. The platform is a first-of-
its-kind infrastructure that provides a means of virtually
crowdsourcing the analysis of future processor technologies.
After rigorous testing and evaluation, researchers have proven that
SSITH concepts provide robust hardware safeguards against known common
weakness enumeration (CWE) classes of hardware vulnerabilities. The
program is now focused on transitioning and converting the proven
concepts from lab discoveries to practical application. For instance,
SSITH successfully worked with Arm Ltd to incorporate SSITH protections
into Arm's microcontroller-class and high-performance processor product
lines. Over 20 billion Arm processors are made each year, and are used
widely within DOD weapon systems.
long range effects
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 strategic advantages, especially
for conducting military operations from longer ranges, with shorter
response times, and enhanced effectiveness compared to current military
systems.
Last year, DARPA, in partnership with the U.S. Air Force, completed
a free flight test of its Hypersonic Air-breathing Weapon Concept
(HAWC). The missile was released from an aircraft seconds before its
scramjet (supersonic combustion ramjet) engine kicked on.
The HAWC vehicle operates best in the lower atmosphere, where speed
and maneuverability make it difficult to detect in a timely way. It
could strike targets much more quickly than subsonic missiles and has
significant kinetic energy even without high explosives. The test
brings us one step closer to transitioning HAWC to a program of record
that offers next generation capability to the U.S military.
distributed complex systems
For several years now, DARPA has 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 be rapidly tailored to
accommodate available resources, adapt to dynamic threats, and be
resilient to losses and attrition.
One program resulting from the Mosaic concept is STITCHES, or
System of Systems (SoS) Technology Integration Tool Chain for
Heterogeneous Electronic Systems. STITCHES is an open-source approach
to allowing interoperability between systems that have complimentary
functions but were not designed to be implemented together. Recently,
the DOD evaluated STITCHES, determining it enables Joint All Domain
Command and Control (JADC2) interoperability. By pushing message
translation to the edge, joint interoperability could be achieved via a
federated point-to-point solution that scales linearly vice the
traditional quadratic complexity scaling. As the number of systems and
domains increases, this linear scaling offers a dramatic decrease in
complexity and cost while increasing speed of interpretation and
adaptability. STITCHES enables not just data translation but also in-
line synchronization, and functions that are traditionally achieved by
changing system software or physical gateways.
warfighter protection and performance
Spinal cord injury disrupts the connection between brain and body,
causing devastating loss of physiological function to the wounded
warfighter. In addition to paralysis, servicemembers living with these
injuries exhibit increased long-term morbidity due to factors such as
respiratory and cardiovascular complications. Bridging the Gap Plus
(BG+), a new DARPA program that combines neurotechnology, artificial
intelligence, and biological sensors, opens the possibility of
overcoming the worst effects of spinal cord injuries by promoting
healing at the wound site and interfacing with the nervous system at
points around the body to restore natural functions such as breathing,
bowel and bladder control, movement, touch, and proprioception that can
be lost when the spinal cord is damaged.
BG+ encompasses two research thrusts aimed at developing and
integrating technologies for injury stabilization, regenerative
therapy, and functional restoration to support patients during all
phases of spinal cord injury--acute, sub-acute, and chronic. DARPA's
focus is on improving healing outcomes during the acute and sub-acute
phases of injury (approximately the first 2 days to two weeks after
injury), and on restoring lost function in the chronic phase of injury.
DARPA created BG+ as a five-year program, scheduled to conclude
with clinical demonstrations in human patients. Just this February, BG+
researchers demonstrated a minimally invasive approach to restore bowel
function in cats, which avoids the pitfalls of traditional surgical
approaches that can leave patients with irreversible nerve damage. This
functionality will be incorporated into a user-controlled, integrated
visceral function restoration system to give veterans and others with
paralysis a useable long-term solution.
gray warfare
The U.S. is engaged with its adversaries in an asymmetric,
continual, war of weaponized influence narratives. Adversaries exploit
misinformation delivered via influence messaging: blogs, tweets, and
other online multimedia content. Analysts require effective tools for
continual sensemaking of the vast, noisy, adaptive information
environment to identify geopolitical influence campaigns.
Today, detection and sensemaking of adversary influence campaigns
is largely manual and ad hoc. With current tools, it is difficult to
connect messages over time and across multiple platforms to track
evolving campaigns, and analysts must manually sift through a high
volume of messages to find those with relevant influence agenda and
then gauge which ones are gaining traction and with whom.
The INCAS program began in 2021 to address these challenges. If
successful, INCAS will provide analysts with the ability to detect,
characterize, and track geopolitical influence campaigns across
multiple languages and platforms with confidence. INCAS addresses the
increasingly complex world of information warfare, building upon and
adding to previous DARPA successes with our programs in Media Forensics
and Semantic Forensics, which detect manipulated imagery and
information.
climate and environment
Sea level rise and wave-induced flooding during storm events
threaten sustainability of the more than 1,700 Department of Defense
(DOD) managed military installations in coastal areas worldwide.
Despite previous efforts to implement storm mitigation solutions,
damage due to storm surge and flooding continues to impact military
infrastructure. Current DOD coastal protection measures, including
bulkhead and coastal seawalls, may reflect wave energy, exacerbate
flooding, create downstream sediment loss, and restrict water exchange.
To protect DOD personnel and infrastructure, DARPA has established the
Reefense program, which aims to develop novel hybrid biological and
engineered reef-mimicking structures to mitigate wave and storm damage
and reduce the ecological impact of current coastal protection
measures.
As part of the Reefense program, custom wave-attenuating base
structures will promote coral or oyster settlement and growth, which
will enable the structures to be self-sustaining and address the
infrastructure-related impacts of sea level rise over time. Program
performers are employing recent innovations in materials science,
hydrodynamic modeling, and adaptive biology to optimize these
structures for responding to a changing environment.
Reefense takes the novel approach of integrating structural
engineering, reef health, and adaptive biology to create reef-like
ecological systems. These structures will help significantly reduce
infrastructure maintenance costs, promote ecosystem health, and
strengthen DOD's ability to maintain its infrastructure and military
readiness.
modeling, simulation, and experimentation
Following recent successful experimentation with Marines at Camp
Lejeune, North Carolina, DARPA's Prototype Resilient Operations Testbed
for Expeditionary Urban Scenarios (PROTEUS) program will transition to
the Marine Corps Warfighting Laboratory (MCWL) in Quantico, Virginia.
PROTEUS comprises a suite of visual software training and
experimentation tools that enables Marines from squad to battalion
level to explore and develop novel multidomain fighting concepts. The
tools allow Marines to integrate emerging capabilities and learn how to
effectively employ them in realistic expeditionary combat scenarios.
DARPA launched PROTEUS in 2017 and recently completed a five-day
capstone demonstration with 1st Battalion, 2nd Marines at Camp Lejeune,
where Marines rapidly explored and assessed future infantry battalion
task organizations, force packages, and tactics. PROTEUS provided
unique insights in support of the Marine Corps' Force Design 2030, the
Service's plan for organizing, training, and equipping Marines for
future challenges.
Using the PROTEUS software, Marines were able to visualize and
manipulate their electromagnetic footprint, apply logistics support
automation, and obtain quantitative analytics on the effectiveness of
force packages and tactics in real time. PROTEUS brings the power of
multi-domain force package and CONOPS (concept of operations)
development to the platoon, company, and battalion.
transition and business/countering foreign influence
Over the past two years, DARPA's Embedded Entrepreneurship
Initiative (EEI) has helped more than 50 pre-seed stage research teams
raise over $275 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 early 2021, 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. EEI augments technical research teams with critical
entrepreneurial expertise, top-tier commercialization mentors, and
connections to investors, effectively countering aggressive adversary-
nation investors by building stronger companies that have the ability
to attract U.S. capital.
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 obtaining the full benefit from taxpayer
funded R&D investments.
foundations of technological surprise
One of the classic models of technology development begins with
basic or early-stage applied research that uncovers a new principle or
phenomenon, which innovators then apply and develop into a new
capability. 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.
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 particularly timely and relevant example has to do with quantum
computing. Several DARPA programs explore aspects of quantum
computation to determine which approach offers the most promise for
substantial practical advantage. Of note, the Quantum Benchmarking (QB)
program seeks to bring rigor to the fledgling quantum computing
marketplace with the introduction of insightful benchmarking. There is
much potential that quantum computing may make possible--in diverse
markets such as pharmaceuticals, battery catalysis, and machine
learning--but it is also possible that there is limited value of any
sort in quantum computing beyond the commonly discussed application of
unlocking encrypted data.
QB was started in 2021 with the goal of developing key quantum
computing metrics, making those metrics testable, and estimating the
required quantum and classical resources needed to reach critical
performance thresholds. Coming up with effective metrics for large
quantum computers is no simple task. Current quantum computing research
is heavily siloed in companies and institutions, who often keep their
work confidential, and existing metrics (such as the number of
interacting qubits in a system) may not be relevant to actual computing
performance on many applications. If successful, QB will accelerate the
development of quantum computing across multiple domains, or illuminate
its lack of utility in those same domains.
conclusion
From DARPA's perspective, the technological future is enormously
attractive, bright with opportunities, but also fraught with the
potential for technological surprise from our adversaries. For more
than 60 years, the men and women of DARPA have taken very seriously our
unique mission to prevent such surprises by creating our own.
One year after returning 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 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 Kelly. Thank you, Dr. Tompkins. Mr. Brown.
STATEMENT OF MICHAEL BROWN, DIRECTOR, DEFENSE INNOVATION UNIT
Mr. Brown. Chairman Kelly and Members of this Subcommittee,
thank you for inviting my colleagues and me to speak on behalf
of innovation at the Department. Today I would like to speak to
one of the most urgent challenges to bolster our nation's
defense--speeding the adoption of commercial technology to our
warfighters, which Secretary Shyu talked to.
In an era where the Chinese Government has stolen plans for
our weapons and studied our way of fighting, advances in
commercial technology offer a way to achieve surprise rapidly.
Under Secretary Shyu recently released a list of 14 critical
technologies for national security. Eleven of the 14, 80
percent, are commercial. Not having an effective approach to
adopting commercial technology is a glaring weakness in
modernizing DOD.
Since 2015, DIU has transitioned 43 commercial solutions to
service partners, 8 in the first half of this fiscal year
alone. As one example, DIU successfully prototyped synthetic
aperture radar satellites which can see through clouds and at
night, and provided the world imagery of Russian forces in and
around Ukraine. This enabled us to predict the invasion and
prove undeniably what was happening without revealing
classified sources. Today, the National Reconnaissance Office
(NRO) is providing this capability as part of security
assistance to Ukraine.
These 43 transitions encourage more DOD mission partners to
initiate more modernization projects. In the last fiscal year,
DIU started a record 37 projects, double our historical
average. Additionally, last year companies competing for DIU
contracts increased 40 percent and represented 47 states, the
District of Columbia, and 17 countries. In total, DIU has
introduced 100 new vendors to DOD.
DIU's successes, however, are less than 1 percent of DOD's
procurement budget. In part, this is because commercial
technologies are different than defense technologies. First,
they are supplied in massive unit volumes, sometimes in the
millions, often led by consumers. Second, commercial
technologies evolve at faster speeds than defense technologies,
refreshed in 12- to 18-month cycles. Third, commercial
technologies are not service specific, so we often do not know
where to buy them. Lastly, we do not control the spread of
commercial technologies. Dangerously, they are available
through our adversaries as soon as they are available to us. No
wonder, then, that we need a different way to assess and buy
these commercial technologies.
So DOD must become what I call a fast follower to gain
rapid access to technologies and maintain at least
technological parity with adversaries. For this, DOD requires a
rethink of the three elements of how we bring capabilities to
the Department. Number one, requirements, where commercial
technology negates the need for detailed specifications. Number
two, acquisition, where DIU's use of non-consortium Other
Transaction Authorities (OTAs) in a largely commercial process
we invented called Commercial Solutions Opening (CSO) can be
more broadly applied throughout the Department. Number three,
budgeting, where new commercial solutions enter the market
faster than our 2- to 3-year budget cycle.
Despite acquisition reform there has been almost no reform
of the requirements or budgeting processes. Here are my
recommendations.
First, establish dedicated organizations or homes for each
of the commercial technologies, which can focus our expertise
and which are not and do not need to be service-specific.
Paired with a stable budget, this becomes a capability of
record, not a program of record, where the need for the
capability is ongoing. DOD can then assess vendors on a more
continuous basis and refresh with a frequency that matches
commercial cycles. In doing so, DOD can furnish these
capabilities to warfighters in a year rather than in a decade.
Second, eliminate the requirements process for commercial
technologies, replacing it with a rapid validation of needs. We
do not need to develop detailed requirements for products the
commercial market already builds. In fact, detailed
requirements limit the creative problem-solving of companies
and limit the number of companies competing.
Third, apply the best practices of commercial procurement
that we have learned, more widely apply consortia OTAs and
CSOs, thereby maximizing competition while minimizing
opportunity costs for vendors to participate. Importantly, if a
vendor successfully prototypes a solution there is no required
recompete and DOD can scale the solution immediately,
eliminating one of the valleys of death caused by waiting for
the budget cycle to catch up.
Finally, source commercial technologies from allies, and
sell proven solutions to allied militaries, which present
excellent export opportunities for U.S. companies. The easiest
form of collaboration with allies is with commercial
technology, which is unclassified and enables interoperability.
At DOD we continue in a business-as-usual fashion at our
peril. We must reform requirements and budgeting while more
broadly adopting OTAs to better assess and fuel commercial
technologies. I ask Congress to allow for more flexibility in
the appropriations process beyond programs to budget for
capabilities like small drones or satellite imagery, which we
know we will need for decades to come. Maintaining our
military's technological superiority requires us not only to
develop defense technologies like hypersonics but of equal
importance, fast follow the innovations of our vibrant
commercial technology sector. There is a reason the U.S.
innovation ecosystem is the envy of the world, and we need to
make this the envy of the military.
Senators, thank you very much for your time today, and with
my colleagues I look forward to answering your questions.
[The prepared statement of Mr. Brown follows:]
Prepared Statement by Michael Brown
Chairman Kelly, Ranking Member Ernst, and distinguished Members of
this Subcommittee, thank you for inviting me to testify on behalf of
the Defense Innovation Unit (DIU). I'm Michael Brown, and I have been
Director of DIU since September 2018. I appreciate the opportunity to
speak about the urgent necessity of accelerating innovation--and
specifically commercial technology--for our warfighters.
introduction
The Department now acknowledges the People's Republic of China
(PRC) as a pacing challenge. In previous eras, the United States
maintained decisive military advantage over its adversaries due, in
large part, to superior technology capability. The Department of
Defense (DOD) harnessed technical resources across the spectrum of
American industry, national laboratories, and universities and used its
purchasing power to shape technical specifications and standards for
resulting technologies. This strategy ultimately conferred the U.S.
military with superior advantages in the first offset (nuclear weapons
and nuclear deterrence technology) and second offset (night vision,
laser-guided bombs, stealth and jamming technologies as well as space-
based military communications and navigation).
The threat matrix the United States faces today is significantly
more diverse and acute than in previous eras. While the DOD continues
to develop offensive and defensive capabilities around nuclear weapons
and conventional military platforms, as the NDS highlights, dual-use
emerging technologies will change the character of warfare going
forward. The private sector is pioneering the development of most of
these advanced dual-use technologies by leveraging software, open
source data sets, and advanced processing speed--all primarily for
commercial use. Many technologies that were previously only available
to nation-states have now become democratized and available to any
consumer or adversary.
background
I came to the Defense Innovation Unit (then Defense Innovation Unit
Experimental) nearly 6 years ago as a Presidential Innovation Fellow
charged with understanding the character, quantity, and quality of PRC
investments in the U.S. technology ecosystem. At that time, largely
ungoverned by the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States
(CFIUS) or existing export controls--investments into U.S. startups
were fair game for adversarial nation-states. In fact, we discovered
that the PRC is pursuing a deliberate and robust technology transfer
strategy, which still includes investing in early stage dual-use
technologies, gathering intellectual property, and strategically
identifying and poaching talent from U.S. companies and academic
institutions. The key finding of our work was that PRC-backed
investment firms in 2016 2018 were investing at a level approaching 20
percent of all U.S. venture-backed deals. By sponsoring investments in
emerging technologies--from artificial intelligence and machine
learning to additive manufacturing, biotechnology, and quantum
sciences--the PRC is learning at the same pace, if not faster, than the
U.S. national security apparatus. From an economic competitiveness
perspective, this is obviously worrying; however, there are now well
documented reports \1\ pointing to an even more troubling fact: the
People's Liberation Army (PLA) is rapidly integrating dual-use
technologies developed in the commercial sector into warfighting
concepts to achieve asymmetric advantage over the United States.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
\1\ Military and Security Developments Involving The People's
Republic of China (2020), Office of Secretary of Defense, Department of
Defense, pg. 25; Military and Security Developments Involving The
People's Republic of China (2021), Office of Secretary of Defense,
Department of Defense 24-29.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
In response, the United States' first actions were defensive--to
close loopholes and strengthen our defenses. Congress made that
possible by passing the Foreign Investment Risk Review Modernization
Act (FIRRMA) and the Export Control Reform Act (ECRA) in 2018. Even
implementation of these new authorities has not fully prevented the
illegal transfer of critical technologies. The United States must
continue whole-of-government efforts to protect critical U.S.
technology, know-how, and talent, and to raise awareness regarding the
PRC's lever aging of foreign investment to enable its military
capabilities.
My focus today is to discuss the progress we are making on
offensive in running faster. Overarching and foundational investments,
such as the CHIPS Act as well as the broader Bipartisan Innovation Act,
are necessary to maintain long-term U.S. leadership in the technologies
that will be the drivers of innovation in the coming decades. However,
by themselves these measures will also be insufficient to ensure the
United States can translate technological leadership into national
security advantage. The Department of Defense (DOD) needs to outpace
our adversaries in identifying, integrating, and deploying commercial
technologies into current warfighting concepts and creating new
concepts. In an era where the PRC has stolen plans for our exquisite
weapons platforms and carefully studied our way of fighting, advances
in commercial technology offer a unique opportunity to achieve surprise
rapidly. Despite its importance, DOD does not currently have a
systematic or effective approach to rapidly access and leverage
commercial technologies at scale. My first boss at DIU, Michael
Griffin, the first Under Secretary for Research and Engineering,
developed a list of ten critical technologies for national security:
eight of those ten were commercial. My current boss, Heidi Shyu, just
released her own list of 14 critical technologies for national
security: 11 of the 14 technologies are commercial. Not having an
effective approach to rapidly adopt commercial technology is a glaring
weakness in modernizing DOD. Technologies such as advanced
communications, AI software, small drones, synthetic aperture radar
(SAR) satellite imagery and many others can be rapidly purchased from
credible commercial vendors to deliver novel capabilities at a fraction
of the cost today. However, the Pentagon does not deliver these
capabilities at scale or at the speed of relevance to our warfighters
on the ground today.
diu mission and results
DIU is the singular OSD entity embedded in U.S. innovation hubs
regularly engaging with U.S. technologists, entrepreneurs, academics
and investors. The PRC has already copied us with its own Defense
Innovation Unit and also compels PRC companies to support the PLA
through its military-civil fusion strategy. Rather than compel
suppliers to work with the military, in the United States, DIU must
streamline working with the Pentagon, so we can access more suppliers
than the traditional defense contractors, whose business it is to
accommodate whatever process and timespan DOD dictates. One-third of
the DIU suppliers on contract are first-time vendors, representing 100
new companies that DOD can now access. While DIU has achieved no table
successes, the Department and the Services must allocate orders of
magnitude more of their budgets to non-traditional vendors in the
startup technology ecosystem in order to solidify national security as
a priority for entrepreneurs, technologists and investors.
DIU is a joint DOD organization focused on accelerating the
adoption of commercial technology throughout the Services, Combatant
Commands (CCMDs), defense agencies, and other components and growing
the national security innovation base. DIU partners with organizations
across the DOD and the interagency to rapidly prototype, field, and
scale commercial solutions that can save lives, lead to new operational
concepts, increase efficiencies, and save taxpayer dollars. Through
DIU's core operations and its components--the National Security
Innovation Network (NSIN) and the National Security Innovation Capital
Initiative (NSIC)--DIU cultivates talent, invests in emerging
technology companies, and connects military challenges with existing
commercial solutions. As just one example, DIU's work with SAR
satellites, which can see through clouds and at night, are now
providing commercial imagery of Russian forces on the Ukrainian border.
This capability enabled the United States to predict the invasion,
share with the world what was happening without revealing classified
sources, and expose the Russian lies about de-escalation.
The investment DOD made in DIU 6\1/2\ years ago is bearing fruit.
Since 2015, DIU transitioned 35 successfully-prototyped commercial
solutions to Service partners. A successful transition means the
prototype demonstrated success in a military environment, a production
contract is in place, and a budget exists to scale capability to
warfighters. DIU achieves this through follow-on, multi-year
contracts--Production-Other Transaction (OT), Indefinite Delivery /
Indefinite Quantity (IDIQ), FAR-based contract, and listings on the GSA
schedule.
The 35 transitions represent $3.5 billion in contract ceiling
(8$100 million average contract ceiling per transition) and led to
additional DOD revenue opportunities for these new vendors via
contracts not led by DIU. The largest example is the vendor Anduril
with a $1 billion follow-on contract from U.S. Special Operations
Command (USSOCOM). This momentum in production contracts is
accelerating, with contract ceiling totals growing substantially year-
over-year. In fiscal year 2021 alone, DIU's eight transitions
represented $1.75 billion in contract ceiling--four times more than
fiscal year 2020 and 50 percent of the cumulative total contract
ceiling awarded since 2015. The $218 million average in contract
ceiling per transition in fiscal year 2021 is six times that of the
prior year. In the first five months of fiscal year 2022, DIU
facilitated the successful transition of an additional four
capabilities.
The ability to convert a successful prototype into a production
contract is generating greater demand from DOD mission partners to
initiate more projects. For example, in fiscal year 2021, DIU started
are cord 37 new projects, which is 50 percent of the total projects
underway and double DIU's six-year average. Meaningful revenue outcomes
and an increasing number of projects encourages more private companies
to participate in solicitations--fiscal year 2021 saw a 40 percent
increase in the average number of companies competing for a DIU
contract. DIU has seen companies from 47 states, D.C. and more than a
dozen countries compete for contracts. Growing DIU's capacity to lead
projects will increase successful transitions and open up avenues to
more contracts across DOD--all providing the positive economic
incentive to sustain continued investment from venture capitalists and
other private capital sources.
This past year, NSIN expanded DOD's reach as it integrated 4,566
individuals and 180 early-stage ventures into DOD through programs with
its 71 university partners and directly supported the launch of 20
dual-use ventures from DOD labs.
NSIC, which addresses the shortfall of trusted private capital for
dual-use hardware startups, received its first appropriation from
Congress of $15 million. With those funds, NSIC supported nine
companies including products involving new battery chemistries and form
actors, quantum sensors, and hypersonic engines.
diu challenges and relevance of commercial technologies
DIU's successes represent well less than 1 percent of the overall
DOD procurement budget. To modernize faster, DOD requires an order of
magnitude increase in its adoption of commercial technologies. DOD is
not leveraging the commercial sector broadly enough or fast enough in
its modernization efforts. Commercial technologies have non-trivial
differences from strictly defense-technologies. First, commercial
technologies are supplied in massive unit volumes--sometimes in the
millions--often led by the consumer as is the case with small drones.
Second, in addition to larger volumes, commercial technologies evolve
at a much faster speed than defense technologies with products
refreshed on 12 to 18 month cycles instead of decades. As a result, DOD
needs to move much faster in assessing and fielding these technologies.
Third, commercial technologies such as AI software or commercial
satellite imagery are not Service-specific. We do not need special
versions for the Navy or the Air Force (even though at DOD we often try
to create these) and, in fact, creating special versions by Service
makes it more difficult and costly for commercial suppliers to do
business with DOD. Fourth, since DOD does not control the global
diffusion of these technologies, our lack of adopting these quickly
creates an asymmetric disadvantage if our adversaries adopt them more
rapidly.
These differences are extremely relevant for conflicts we may face
in the next decade where our adversaries effectively employ commercial
technologies. For example, when United States troops were stationed in
Iraq, ISIS sent small drones, which can be purchased on e-commerce
platforms like Amazon, with grenades to kill American soldiers in
Mosul. Countries such as Azerbaijan and Ukraine are quickly adapting
commercial technology in new ways to gain an edge on the battlefield.
Azerbaijan saw significant battlefield success in the 2020 fighting in
and around Nagorno-Karabakh due, in part, to its use of commercial
drones. The DOD must add new capabilities like these in 1 to 2 years
rather than 1 to 2 decades. However, this will not happen if we apply
the same processes designed to cultivate defense-specific technologies
such as hypersonics and directed energy--technologies with no existing
commercial market--to dual-use technologies that are rapidly evolving
in the commercial sector. DOD must reform its sequential requirements,
acquisition and budgeting methods to adapt to an environment where
industry leads technology development and which prioritizes speed. The
current sequential process lags commercial product cycles and delivers
technology several generations behind which would be the equivalent of
supplying flip-phones and fax machines to our warfighters today. While
the Pentagon prides itself on following voluminous and well-specified
DOD processes, the result is that in commercially advanced technologies
such as advanced communications, artificial intelligence and machine
learning, cyber and autonomous systems, we will be placing outdated,
overpriced technology in the hands of our warfighters.
fast follower strategy
For commercial technologies that DOD does not invent, DOD must
become a ``Fast Follower'' to gain rapid access to these technologies
to maintain at least technological parity with adversaries. This
requires are-think of the 3 elements of how DOD operates:
Requirements, where commercial technology negates the
need for the time-consuming process of detailed specification of
solutions;
Acquisition, where some of the new adaptive acquisition
frameworks (for urgent capability or middle tier) can be adapted for
commercial technology and simplify the buying process;
Budgeting, where new commercial solutions enter the
market on a faster cycle than the 2\1/2\ year defense budget cycle and
much faster than the refresh rate of traditional defense technologies,
which can be 40 years or more for major platforms.
There has been so much reform of acquisition practices in the past
few decades but almost no reform of either the requirements or the
budgeting processes; we are encouraged by the establishment of the
Commission on Planning, Programming, Budgeting, and Execution Reform in
the Fiscal Year 2022 NDAA and hope the Commissioners will take on the
requirements and budgeting processes, which are the greatest obstacles
to increased use of commercial technology to modernize DOD. Key tenets
of a Fast Follower Strategy include:
1. Dedicate Organizations for Commercial Capabilities and Supply
Them with a Consistent Budget. DOD needs to establish dedicated
organizations for each of the commercial technologies (e.g., drones and
counter-drones, digital wearables and satellite imagery) which are not
and do not need to be Service-specific. Today, it is not clear where in
DOD these non-Service-specific technologies like small drones should be
assessed and procured. With clarity of where the technology can be
assessed and purchased, these dedicated organizations also need a
stable budget for that capability. This is different from a program of
record, which reflects a rigid requirement and often a single vendor.
This is a ``capability of record'' where the need for the capability is
on going such as for small drones. With that ongoing budget, DOD can
assess capability on a more continuous basis, choose the best vendor at
a point in time and refresh that capability with a frequency that
matches commercial product cycles. Assigning an ongoing capability
budget to these assigned organizations also signals demand to private
industry and avoids duplication across DOD. In fact, this allows DOD to
adapt to rapidly evolving threats and procure solutions that were not
even available when the DOD budget was created more than 2 years
earlier.
2. Eliminate the Requirements Process for these Commercial
Technologies and replace this with a much more rapid validation of
needs. Again, we do not need to develop detailed requirements for
products the commercial market already builds and, in fact, these
requirements limit both creative problem solving from the commercial
sector and the number of competitors.
3. Apply the Best Practices of Commercial Procurement: More widely
apply non-consortia Other Transaction Authority (OTA) through
Commercial Solutions Openings (CSOs), which maximizes competition while
minimizing the opportunity costs of vendors to participate. DIU
exclusively uses this method and experienced an average of 43 vendors
participating in each of 27 competitions last year. Critically, if a
vendor successfully prototypes a solution, there is no required re-
compete at the end of the prototyping period, and DOD can immediately
scale up the solution across the joint force. If Congress approves a
budget supporting ``capabilities of record'' then we eliminate the DOD-
unique valley of death which unfolds when we ask successful vendors to
wait for the POM cycle to catch up--a process that can take up to 2
years and be death for a small company focused on cash flow.
4. Coordination with Allies: Source commercial technology from
allies and sell proven solutions to allied militaries. Prevailing in
the competition with the PRC requires more collaboration with allies
and partners. The easiest form of collaboration is with commercial
technologies which are unclassified and are, therefore, easily
shareable and present excellent export opportunities for vendors.
This Fast Follower Strategy has several key benefits--maximizing
competition through open assessments of solutions from multiple
vendors; reducing costs by leveraging higher volumes of the commercial
market; increasing speed and transparency of the acquisition process;
and minimizing the opportunity cost for vendors which encourages
participation in future competitions.
conclusion
After a career as a high tech executive and CEO of two Silicon
Valley-based companies, I have now had an in-depth immersion into how
the military assesses and fields capability. DIU and similar innovation
offices will not succeed unless DOD scales these efforts. As Eric
Schmidt in his role as the Chair of the Defense Innovation Board said
repeatedly, ``The DOD does not have an innovation problem, it has an
innovation adoption problem.'' DOD has not yet established a
complementary process to the one Secretary McNamara put in place in the
1960s for defense technologies. This means we do not have an effective
process for the adoption of commercial technology, which represents 11
of the 14 critical technologies for national security. The Fast
Follower Strategy is a common sense adaptation of how technology is
adopted in the commercial world.
At DOD, we continue in a ``business as usual'' fashion at our
peril. The PRC and Russia compel their private companies to work
together closely with their militaries to gain experience with new
technologies and concepts. From drone swarming to anti-satellite
weapons programs, Russia and the PRC have studied our capabilities
carefully and are rapidly modernizing its own military capabilities
with a priority both on asymmetry designed to neutralize U.S. overmatch
and accessing innovations in its commercial sector. The PLA is
currently utilizing commercially-derived AI technologies to power drone
swarms and underwater autonomous vehicles; the PLA is drawing from
leading private companies for sophisticated ISR, information and
electronic warfare solutions, and AR/VR for training, among others. \2\
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
\2\ Military and Security Developments Involving The People's
Republic of China (2021), Office of Secretary of Defense, Department of
Defense, pg. 26-27, 148-149.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
The U.S. military will enjoy neither a time nor technology
advantage if the PLA or Russian Armed Forces achieve more agility in
adopting commercial technology. Imagine how well our forces will defend
against PLA swarms of drones if we have not experimented with this
concept. Imagine if we do not support more non-traditional suppliers of
satellites or quantum sensors such that these technologies do not
remain competitive in the U.S. and go the way of solar panels or small
drones--controlled by the PRC.
The industrial base for defense continues to shrink--yet we have
the power to change this. Supporting new dual-use technologies can
create whole new industries based on biotechnology, resilient and
greener energy, or construction of a space superhighway of satellites,
space logistics and manufacturing as well as a multi-orbit
transportation system. Otherwise, we cede to the PRC not only military
advantage but the economic prosperity that comes with these new
industries. The high technology economy of the U.S. is the envy of the
world and based on technologies like the internet or GPS, which DARPA
pioneered decades ago.
In my view, we cannot be complacent and must demand that DOD reform
its Requirements and Budgeting processes--while more broadly adopting
Other Transaction Authority to better assess, procure, and field
commercial technology. I would ask for Congress' support by allowing
for more flexibility in the appropriations process and providing
consistent funding for commercial capabilities we know we need for
decades to come. Maintaining our military's technological superiority
requires us not only to continue to develop defense technologies like
hypersonics or directed energy but equally important to fast follow the
innovations of our vibrant commercial technology sector.
Senator Kelly. Thank you, Mr. Brown, and thank you all for
your testimony. I will begin our first 5-minute round of
questions, and then we will go in, I think, the order of folks
as they arrived. This question will be for all three of you.
Promoting innovation is a critical task for DOD as we look
to outpace countries like China. It is a full contact sport
that requires attention and coordination across many offices
and activities. It also requires considering not just the
technical aspects of innovation like research and development
but also a holistic focus on non-technical aspects, like
workforce shaping, concept development, and wargaming, that are
needed to accept and absorb these technological innovations
into the military.
So starting with Secretary Shyu, what work has R&E been
doing to invest in key emerging technology areas to address our
warfighting needs, and how are those investments being used to
shore up risks within the defense industrial base for emerging
technology areas like hypersonics and microelectronics?
Ms. Shyu. So a couple of things I would like to talk about.
Actually, several things I would like to talk about, and I will
talk fast, is you have heard that we have initiated the RDER
concept, the Rapid Defense Experimentation Reserve. This is a
campaign of joint experimentation focused on solving the
critical joint warfighting capability gaps. This is where we
are going out to the services as well as to industry and the
smaller companies to understand what prototypes do they have,
that they have already developed that they can bring to us, and
we can test in a contested, joint environment, to understand
the utility of the prototype that they have developed.
What we want to do is leverage the opportunity to do these
sprints, twice per year, to close the capability gaps, and have
the Joint Staff as well as the COCOMs and the services to
evaluate how well did these prototypes close the capability
gaps and prove their utility. We want to be able to rapidly go
into rapid fielding, or mid-tier acquisition, or leave behind
the capabilities, or doing a design modification to enable
different capabilities to be added to it, and come to the next
sprint to demonstrate it out.
This could accelerate the capability from innovators all
the way to fielding. This is exactly what we are doing, and
fiscal year 2023 is our very first sprint.
Senator Kelly. Thank you. Dr. Tompkins?
Dr. Tompkins. I will add on a little bit to this, in the
sense that what I will talk about I think dovetails into the
RDER program that Secretary Shyu just mentioned. We are
developing new ways of doing testing and evaluation, which is
not just for testing and evaluating new technologies but also
the concepts themselves. So when we have the ability to use
modeling and simulation in order to go through thousands of
potential cases and different combinations of decisions and
different combinations of circumstances, but at the same time
building in new technological capabilities, it really allows us
to figure out how to prioritize our investments, and then we
take that, combine it with person-in-the-loop actual evaluation
as these technologies are being developed, and live testing, in
real time, feeding back and forth with the modeling and
simulation. I think we dramatically accelerate our ability to
look at specific needs, where the technology gaps might be, and
what needs to be developed to fill those.
That overall capability is something that will be
transitioned to the Test Resource Management Center under Ms.
Shyu's organization, and we anticipate working with RDER funds,
for example, in order to test out very specific subsets of
these concepts.
Senator Kelly. Sometimes some testing is really, really
hard to do, and you can do, through computational fluid
dynamics and other methods, get at least the starting points
you need of a test program. So it is good to see that you are
doubling down on those efforts.
I am going to come back to Mr. Brown here on this question
here in the second round, but for now let me defer to my
colleague, Senator Fischer, for 5 minutes of questions.
Senator Fischer. Thank you, Mr. Chairman, and welcome to
all of you today. It is good to see you.
Secretary Shyu, you were serving as the Assistant Secretary
of the Army for Acquisition, Logistics, and Technology during
the Third Offset Strategy, and many believe that the Third
Offset was unable to really satisfy Congress' questions about
some very basic elements that the strategy had, and also that
it delivered few tangible innovations from it.
Could you tell us, what are some of the relevant lessons
you learned from that process, and are there challenges you
think it revealed about attempting any kind of large-scale
change within the Department?
Ms. Shyu. Senator Fischer, the Third Offset really
highlighted, in a highly contested environment, what are the
things we need to do differently. I can tell you, as an
offshoot of that, was born ABII, Assault Breaker II. This is an
activity that the Defense Science Board initiated, and DARPA
has taken over whole-heartedly. What we need to do is come
brief you in a classified setting to let you know of all the
things we are doing under that particular activity. I think you
would be incredibly impressed. We will be more than happy to
follow up and come brief you.
Senator Fischer. Okay. I know that RAND published a study
on that last year, I think, and was saying that the Department
was alerted to some of the erosion that we were seeing in U.S.
technologies with regard to Russia and China. Is that what you
are referring to?
Ms. Shyu. Let's see. I am trying to talk unclassified.
Senator Fischer. Okay. Well, we will wait then. We will
wait then.
Ms. Shyu. Yes. It basically highlights, in a highly
contested environment, how can we conduct the fight. We will be
more than happy to brief you at a highly classified level.
Senator Fischer. Okay. Thank you.
Mr. Brown, your organization, the DIU, was one of the few
tangible outcomes that saw in Congress from the Third Offset,
and I realize that this does predate your time there with the
organization. But do you have a view on this?
Mr. Brown. To be more specific, a view on----
Senator Fischer. The Third Offset Strategy and results that
you have possibly seen.
Mr. Brown. Well I would just say that as Chairman Kelly
remarked, we are in a state where we are losing our
technological edge, so I think what we are doing to reinvest
everything from basic research, as well as we can do to
stimulate that in the private sector, is exactly the strategy
that we need to have to regain that. We may never gain the same
level of offset or advantage that our adversaries do not have,
but we have to make sure we are investing at the level where at
least technological parity in many areas and exceeding what
China can do in some.
So while Dr. Tompkins is inventing the future----
Senator Fischer. No, that is good. Thank you.
Mr. Brown.--we need to rely on the innovation in the
commercial sector to bring that capability forward more
quickly.
Senator Fischer. Okay. That is good.
Secretary Shyu, Secretary Austin, he has talked about
prioritizing hypersonics, and if watch any discussions on this
committee, on the Senate Armed Services Committee, or in the
Senate itself, you will know that this is an area of interest.
I know that you have stressed the importance of making them
affordable, and Secretary Kendall has also emphasized the
tradeoff between the cost and the capability that is provided
on them.
Is there a consensus view within the Department about what
role hypersonic weapons will play and what technologies we
should be pursuing?
Ms. Shyu. Absolutely. Thank you for bringing this up. This
is certainly one of the critical technologies we are looking
at.
I just want to highlight that the Army is going to be
fielding hypersonic weapons to an entire brigade next year. The
Army and the Navy together develop a common glide body. Navy
will be fielding theirs on the Zumwalt DDG in fiscal year 2025.
Air Force has developed a hypersonic weapon that is flying on
B-52--they are still in testing--but they are initiating a
program that will go on fighter aircraft. In addition, we are
working with the Australians in developing a hypersonic cruise
missile. So there are many activities ongoing, in addition to
what DARPA is doing, pushing the envelope on the next
generation.
I want to add one more thing. I think it is important to
understand that we also have a university consortium of 80
universities working with small companies and large primes in
developing the next-generation technology that we will be able
to insert into our hypersonics programs. So we are progressing
very rapidly.
The other thing that I think is very important to
understand, we are really not in a horse race. You cannot think
about this as a horse race. If you have 10, should I have 11?
That is really not the right way of looking at this
perspective, because we are developing multiple different
strategies. Once again I will be more than happy to come and
brief you at a higher classification level.
Senator Fischer. Thank you very much. Thank you, Mr.
Chairman.
Senator Kelly. Senator Tuberville.
Senator Tuberville. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Thanks for
being here today in this testimony. Talking about that Dr.
Tompkins, I am from Auburn, Alabama. We have a pretty good
university there, and we are proud of it.
You know, we do a lot of research on hypersonics and
assured position navigation timing, cybersecurity. What stands
apart for us is that our Auburn labs are 100 percent U.S.
citizens, and that engineering student can conduct classified
research for all national security. There does not have to be
any hands tied. So we are proud of that.
Do you feel like we are investing enough in academic
research at our universities to help with hypersonics and all
these other basic researches that we are doing? Are we
investing enough in that or are we depending too much on our
technology industry?
Dr. Tompkins. The broader question of investment in the
ecosystem is something I definitely should defer to Secretary
Shyu on. But we work very, very strongly within this entire
ecosystem, and we do not look just, for example, at companies
or at government labs or at universities. We look at how they
are trading off with each other.
I think there are certainly areas in which we could invest
not necessarily more in quantity but think more creative about
how we can connect students, faculty members and others into
these more restricted research ecosystems without penalizing
them in terms of their ability to, say, get their degrees
quickly or their ability to actually publish on research. There
is a lot of opportunity for creativity in that space.
From my perspective, it is less about sort of the volume of
the dollars as to how effective we are able to deploy them, and
I think there are some definite opportunities to be more
creative.
Senator Tuberville. Thank you.
Mr. Brown, I am glad to hear you talk about the commercial
technology industry. I do not think we could survive. That is
what we have over everybody else in the world. In Alabama, we
have over 600 defense contractors. Most of them are on their
own. A lot of them are small. I am very concerned about them
being able to handle cybersecurity with the little money that
they have, compared to the big boys, so to speak. They need to
be protected as well as the others.
You can go from working on the hypersonic missile, you can
go next door to somebody who working on a new tank, and next
door to somebody working on the new lander for National
Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA). You can do it all.
But a lot of them are small industries. How do we protect those
small industries, because a lot of them cannot turn their
computers on without China trying to steal everything that they
have got. It is a tough road for some of them.
Mr. Brown. Senator, I could not agree more. The industry I
came from before being at Defense was cybersecurity, and it is
an escalating problem for us, the soft underbelly, are the
small businesses that cannot afford to invest there. I think we
need some help with some basic tools and hygiene, and I think
Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), at the
Department of Homeland Security, has been moving forward at a
great pace here.
What I think we have to do is make sure that we can provide
some help with the basics for the small businesses, which is
often hygiene, about making sure you have patched your
software, et cetera. That kind of help, which is available both
from the Federal Bureau of Investigations (FBI) as well as the
Department of Homeland Security (DHS), is what we need to make
sure we are doing enough to educate those companies and making
sure they are implemented. That is how we help the small
businesses, I believe.
Senator Tuberville. Yes. You know, I do not know how many
hundreds of thousands we are short on cybersecurity, and I will
invite all three of you to come to Huntsville. They just
started, 2 years ago, a program where they will take you in the
9th grade, full tuition, come live there, go to school, and by
the time you are a 12th-grader, you are far and beyond what is
going on in terms of cyber in our universities. I think that is
the thing of the future, bypassing universities and start
training these kids in high school. It is an amazing thing that
is going on.
Just real quick, the Employee Stock Ownership Plans
(ESOPS), the businesses that are owned by the employees, can
you give a rundown, Mr. Brown, of what you know about those and
how good they are? A lot of them, are they making it? Are they
able to survive with employee-owned companies?
Mr. Brown. So I do not have a strong point of view about
this, because I have not----
Senator Tuberville. Have you dealt with them before?
Mr. Brown. I mean, many companies have implemented that,
and I think the idea of having employees have skin in the game
through incentive is a good one. It has been used in Silicon
Valley, of course, maybe not with an ESOP program but with
stock options, for years. So I think that is a good incentive
system.
Senator Tuberville. Yes. I think it is an edge for us in
defense, especially.
Thank you very much. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
Senator Kelly. Senator Scott will be recognized for 5
minutes.
Senator Scott. Thank you, Chairman. Thanks for being here.
How many people work in each of your units? How many people
work in your area, Secretary Shyu? Do you know?
Ms. Shyu. I do not have that exact number but I can
certainly get back to you.
Ms. Shyu. The Office of the Under Secretary of Defense for
Research and Engineering (OUSD(R&E)) is currently comprised of
1,202 personnel across the entire organization. The specific
personnel categories are broken out in the table below. It is
important to note that the Intergovernmental Personnel
Appointment Act (IPA) appointees, detailees (DTL), and
contractor personnel (CTR) numbers fluctuate regularity based
on mission requirements.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Personnel Category #
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Civilian...................................... 186
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Military...................................... 103
------------------------------------------------------------------------
IPA........................................... 28
------------------------------------------------------------------------
DTL........................................... 84
------------------------------------------------------------------------
CTR/FFRDC..................................... 801
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Total..................................... 1,202
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Senator Scott. Do you know, Dr. Tompkins?
Dr. Tompkins. Within DARPA we have just under about 200
government employees, and we certainly have contractor support.
Senator Scott. Mr. Brown?
Mr. Brown. We are 200 in total, which includes 20 Active
Duty military, about 24 civilians, and the rest are contractors
and reservists.
Senator Scott. Okay. How many projects do each of your
units work on each year?
Dr. Tompkins. We start about 50 new programs a year, but we
also end 50. We end about that many. So it means that we have
about 250, approximately, active programs.
Mr. Brown. We started 37 last year and we have 75 underway.
Senator Scott. Okay. Secretary Shyu?
Ms. Shyu. Yes. I cannot tell you because we cover across
the entire DOD. I know just within AI alone there are more than
700 programs.
Ms. Shyu. The OUSD(R&E) has 49 different program element
lines under its direct purview, and each of funding Program
Element line is able to fund multiple programmatic efforts.
Additionally, as the Chief Technology Officer of the Department
of Defense, I have the core responsibility for advancing
technology and innovation across the entire Department and the
Department's science and technology programs. Considering
artificial intelligence as an example, my organization makes
substantive contributions to over 700 artificial intelligence
related programs within the Department.
Senator Scott. Okay. All right. If you will get back to me
and let me know how many people work there.
Mr. Brown, who, that you deal with in the Defense
Innovation Unit, is the most friendly to your ideas?
Mr. Brown. In the Department of Defense?
Senator Scott. Yes.
Mr. Brown. We are finding that there is tremendous
receptivity, demand for what we do among the services. Everyone
wants to modernize, but I would say the constraints, which are
dictated by our historical way of developing capability again
start with requirements, a budgeting process that takes 2 or 3
years is the biggest inhibitor, which is why you heard my
opening comments, not about technology but what we need to do
to change so we can adapt and adopt commercial technology so
much more quickly. We need Congress' help with that, and we
need to change some things in the Department, so we can go
faster. Speed is a very important competitive dimension in the
race with China.
Senator Scott. In my business life we always had a sort of
business plan. So what is you all's business plan for each of
your units? Like you say, success is tied to what? What would
be success be, starting with you? What is success? What do you
feel like your purpose is?
Ms. Shyu. Success is going to turn a technology into a
military capability and give us an advantage. That is the
success we are looking for. But starting from basic research
all the way to the end, it takes time to actually develop that,
laser being a perfect example. It has taken decades, but now we
are actually demonstrating we can shoot down UAVs--unmanned
airborne vehicles--and we can shoot down cruise missiles. So we
are showing extraordinary capabilities, and now we are in the
process of fielding those capabilities.
Senator Scott. Dr. Tompkins?
Dr. Tompkins. Our mission is a really unusual one but it is
very, very much focused on preventing and creating
technological surprise. So what we try to do is we place many,
many different bets on technology--high risk, high payoff. For
us, success is going to be measured at different points in
time. So at any moment in time we do look at our entire
portfolio of current and recent programs, and we look for
transition, through many different paths, into real-world use.
But we are also always looking back, and what we are often
finding is that something that we invested in one to 2 decades
ago has been truly transformative and completely changed
everything about how the military operates. Those are sort of
the big bets that we are looking to make, and we are very proud
of and we tend to think of as our big successes.
Mr. Brown. So my job is a little easier than my colleagues
in this. We have a crystal-clear focus, and it really builds on
what Secretary Shyu said--getting capability in warfighters'
hands. Because it is commercial technology, we often avoid all
the classification issues that have come up here already, and
we try and get that 1 year if it is software, 2 years if it is
hardware.
So we measure, from a project start, when did we get that
in warfighters' hands, which means successfully prototyped, it
worked technically, production contract in place, and most
importantly, budget lined up so it can start to scale. All
three have to be met for a transition. We have done 43
transitions since we have been around, and that is a 45 percent
transition rate.
Senator Scott. So Communist China has clearly decided to be
an adversary. When you think about your jobs, do you say, ``I
am doing this because it is going to put our military in a
better position, and this country in a better position to
defend?'' and how do you apply that?
Ms. Shyu. One of the things that we do do is we do a net
assessment. Namely, we take a look at what is our capability.
We also take a look at what is the red capability. That informs
us where we need to go. It informs us what we need to invest in
to get ahead of the threat. So that is done in step one. So
investment in a lot of our technology priority areas is
informed by where we need to head, and I think, if I could come
in and chat with you at a classified level I can talk about how
these pieces are literally stitched together to give us an
asymmetric advantage.
Senator Scott. Thank you, Chair.
Senator Kelly. Thank you, Senator Scott.
We will now go into our second round of questions. I want
to get back to Mr. Brown for a second. In the beginning of my
first question we were talking a little bit about non-technical
aspects, like workforce shaping, concept development, and
wargaming. I asked Secretary Shyu and Dr. Tompkins to comment
on investing in key emerging technology areas to address their
warfighting needs. I think for DIU it is a little bit different
with the commercial technology.
But let me ask you this. How often do you see companies out
there and you identify things--like what percentage would you
say are actually emerging technologies, and then do you ever
get to the point where you realize that some company is so far
out in front of maybe our adversaries that have to consider, do
we need to classify their intellectual property? Is that ever a
consideration as DIU identifies commercial activity?
Mr. Brown. Senator Kelly, the model for DIU is not to set
our own priorities. So, you know, the time frame that Dr.
Tompkins has is considerably longer. We are about what can we
field quickly.
So our priorities come from mission partners, the services,
another part of DOD that says, ``We have got an urgent
problem,'' and then we match that with what is available today.
So that ends up being different technologies to work on. It is
a portfolio--one in AI, one in energy, cyber.
Senator Kelly. But as you are doing that you must come
across things unexpectedly.
Mr. Brown. Yes. Most of the times I would say we do not see
things that need to be classified, and, in fact, in my own
personal opinion we overclassify things so it makes it more
difficult to work on. I have not encountered one of those in my
tenure that I feel like we have got to rush to make this
classified.
I think the more innovative it is, it pushes me the
opposite way, to feel that we need to go faster, because our
adversaries have access to commercial technology as well. So we
need to make sure we are including that in warfighting concepts
and funding that so that we can bring that to our warfighters.
I think the constraints we talked about earlier that
inhibit our ability to get the commercial technology more
quickly adopted just put our warfighters behind us, behind in
terms of commercial technology and then certainly versus
adversaries.
Senator Kelly. Thank you. I want to follow up on Senator
Fischer's question about hypersonics with Secretary Shyu. She
was talking a little about cost versus capability, she
referenced Secretary Kendall's comments about hypersonics, and
I am a strong believer that we need to catch up in our
hypersonic missile technology. Secretary Shyu, you talked about
putting all the parts, I think, together. But really what we
are looking at is increasing our Pk, probability of kill, on a
target.
So as you look at hypersonics do you feel that this is the
future to increase the probability of destroying a target, or
do you sometimes consider existing technology, improving that,
that would give us a higher Pk?
Ms. Shyu. That is a great discussion in which we actually
have done analysis in. I think we should come back and brief
you--once again, it is unfortunate--at the classified level.
But we can show you the analysis that has been done at a
campaign level that looks at conventional weapons as well as
hypersonic weapons, to attack against different types of
targets. So we have done that analysis. We will be more than
happy to come and brief you on that. If you can give us an hour
of your time, we will go down to a Sensitive Compartmental
Information Facility (SCF) and have a great dialogue.
Senator Kelly. I will take it, and Senator Ernst, if you
are ready.
Senator Ernst. Yes. Thank you so much, and for everyone,
please, if you identify a technology that is viable for the
warfighter, and if all of the departments' existing authorities
are employed, how quickly could that innovation be fielded for
our warfighters? I would just love to hear from all of you.
Secretary Shyu?
Ms. Shyu. Senator Ernst, I think it depends on the
particular type of technology, because there are some
technologies, potentially, if it is commercial we can leverage
it very quickly. If it is something we need to develop, due to
the type of threat that is demanding us to do that, it may take
a little longer to develop. But it really depends on the type
of technology.
Dr. Tompkins. I have to agree. I can think of examples
where we have seen things, for example, with traumatic brain
injuries with warfighters, where we were able to very quickly
adapt commercial technology. It was not quite what we needed,
and so within a year of adaptation we were able to then work
with the military to get those deployed out for soldiers.
On the other hand, when it is some type of a munition, when
everybody is all in--so as I think we demonstrated in
partnership with the Navy when we were working on the Long-
Range Anti-Ship Missile (LRASM)--you can do in single-digit
numbers of years, but the entire Department has to be working
together in order to remove any kinds of normal process-based
obstacles.
Senator Ernst. Okay. Thank you.
Mr. Brown. If the technology is commercial and we do not
have to go through the development part of that, so our goal,
beyond the goal of getting as many things across the line to
the warfighter as possible is how fast did we do it. With
software, the fastest we have done it, from a concept to
actually implemented by warfighters, it was a piece of software
for United States Northern Command/North American Aerospace
Defense Command (NORTHCOM/NORAD), in under a year. But the
gating time on that is the testing time that we want to take,
because there are big consequences of making mistakes. So we do
not want to compromise on that. So 1 year for software, 2 years
for hardware is the target we are currently trying to beat with
commercial technology.
To make sure the business process is friendly for
commercial companies we try and get them on contract in 90
days. So that is lightning speed for DOD, but it is commercial
terms.
Senator Ernst. Right. No, and thank you. I have spoken with
a number of leaders in Silicon Valley who have made it clear
that they could field technologies and weapons systems ready
for experimentation with DIU in the Nevada Test Bed in the next
90 days. So I do believe the Department of Defense must move
toward the pace of private industry, when at all possible, and
that any steps we can in that direction are very, very
important. However we can move that direction I think we
should. I know there is going to be some differences with the
different types of systems. But we have to be able to field
systems as rapidly as possible, and I am so concerned that
sometimes we get so wrapped up in red tape and the budgetary
cycles, we need to think about innovation and how we field
quickly.
So that is my little rant for this period.
Just in some time that I have remaining, Secretary Shyu, in
your assessment, what is Silicon Valley and the defense small
business enterprises' capacity to field prototypes for weapons
and logistics support equipment if tasked today with, for
example, developing missile or an Intelligence, Surveillance,
and Reconnaissance (ISR) prototype, something like that?
Ms. Shyu. I think there is tremendous capability into
commercial. I will give you an example in the commercial world.
Elroy Aircraft. They are strictly a commercial company but they
have developed a cargo UAV that can fly 300 miles and carry 300
pounds of payload. So for logistics, this would be fantastic.
If the Government literally can just buy something commercial
off the shelf, we do not have to pay for the development. It is
paid commercially.
So absolutely, this is exactly where we are teaming up with
DIU, to look for these types of capabilities that literally we
can just buy rather than trying to reinvent.
Senator Ernst. Right, and I think, Dr. Tompkins, that was
maybe what you were referring to as well, to be able to procure
something and make minor modifications, where necessary, right?
Yes.
Dr. Tompkins. Yes.
Senator Ernst. Thank you. I yield back. Thank you.
Senator Kelly. Thank you, Senator Ernst. Senator Kaine.
Senator Kaine. Thank you, Chair and Ranking. Important
subcommittee. I want to say hi to Mike Brown, who is an old
friend, and I would say if you guys ever want to do a really
good field trip, when you are in Silicon Valley go by DIU,
because you will really see great things. I had a wonderful
visit a few years ago and remember it well.
Secretary Shyu, I want to ask you this question. Now you
have been in your position for almost a year. Do you think that
the split of AT&L [the position of the Undersecretary of
Defense for Acquisition, Technology, and Logistics] into two
divisions had a positive impact on fostering innovation?
Ms. Shyu. There are pros and cons.
Senator Kaine. I am more on the con side myself, I am going
to say, but I am not doing it every day. So those who do it
every day certainly have better-informed view than I do.
Ms. Shyu. I would say on the positive side--I will give you
both perspectives. On the positive side, I can spend more of my
time on the research and development on the S&T side. On the
con side, namely you have got two people that are going to be
sitting in multiple meetings now, and you have to literally
link arm-in-arm. There are all those meetings within the
Pentagon, I have to be linking the arm with A&S. Otherwise, I
am going to create an island of just S&T that never
transitions, which is not what I want to do.
Senator Kaine. Can you give me an example? So how do we
mitigate the downside of that con? So you do it by linking
arms. Can you give me an example of a project or something you
are working where you think it is working well, where you have
got arms linked and something is being delivered or done that
you feel good about?
Ms. Shyu. I am looking forward to Dr. Bill LaPlante's final
confirmation so we can actually link arms to work on a number
of these projects together. I can guarantee you, I cannot wait
until he is on board. There is a whole slew of stuff we want to
do together.
Senator Kaine. I guess that would another con of splitting
them into two is if you get one confirmed and the other is not,
then you have the one function that is ready to go and then you
are kind of waiting around to link arms with your colleague on
the other function.
Sometimes in this Committee we do this, but we probably do
it even more when we are thinking about budgets and
appropriations. We talk about the defense budget and the non-
defense budget, and yet there is so much in the ``non-defense''
budget, whether it is the nuclear programs in the Department of
Energy (DOE) or whether it is National Security Division (NSD)
programs, where I feel like the distinction between defense and
non-defense budget is somewhat artificial. Particularly when
you get into research and science and so many different
agencies where to do your work really, really well you have to
have arms linked not only with your colleagues in the Pentagon
but with the agencies outside the Pentagon.
Talk a little bit, a year in, how good you feel about the
stakeholders being at the table together rather than siloed, as
we are tackling these emerging threats and issues.
Ms. Shyu. I would say one of the things that we are working
very closely in the microelectronics area is with the
Department of Commerce, because we have to. I will tell you on
a lot of the other things, and hypersonics is an example, we
are working very closely with the Department of Energy, because
the common glide body was developed by Sandia, and the
technology is being transitioned to the services. So we do have
close collaboration across the different agencies.
Senator Kaine. That is good, because in this defense versus
non-defense budget, like Department of Energy, a citizen might
think that is all like, you know, promoting American energy
companies. No. Overwhelmingly that is taking care of the basic
nuclear labs and other research and other assets that lead to
the construction of the reactors in Lynchburg that get put on a
train down to Newport News and then put into subs and carriers.
So all these non-defense agencies, many of them have very
direct ties.
Coast Guard is a non-defense agency in the sense that it
comes up through DHS rather than DOD. Many of the law
enforcement agencies that are working on drug interdiction in
the Americas, they come up through the Department of Justice
(DOJ), not through DOD. But we have to really, really, as you
say, link arms if we are going to do a good job.
Those are all the questions that I have for now, but I
really appreciate the chance to come and encourage fewer silos
and more arm-linking.
Senator Kelly. Thank you, Senator Kaine. That is the end of
Round 2. We will go to a third round of questions. I want to
maybe start with Dr. Tompkins here, and to follow up on
something that Senator Ernst mentioned in her opening remarks,
and that is the valley of death for some of these technologies.
A recent Government Accountability Office (GAO) report
highlighted this.
You know, DOD has struggled to transition some early-stage
R&D into real acquisition programs, and if we are going to be
competitive with China and Russia on some of these technologies
we have got to do a better job of getting across that valley.
It is very frustrating for folks out there that want to work on
emerging technologies and get them to DOD, things like
artificial intelligence and space systems and all kinds of
stuff.
Actually, the question is for anybody. Is this a problem
that any of your organizations can actually quantify in any
way? Do you have any statistics on it, or some data or
anecdotes? Do you know how many of the technologies developed
in your organizations, or in the case of Mr. Brown, commercial
off-the-shelf just actually do not get to the warfighter?
Dr. Tompkins. Statistics, as you can imagine, are really
hard to keep track of, because at any moment in time they might
change on you. I think the last numbers I saw, where we tracked
transition across, say, eight different avenues, we were
tracking about, I think, 23 percent that simply did not go
anywhere, in the sense that usually for us that means we failed
because we were trying something really crazy and it did not
work.
Senator Kelly. Sometimes that could be the case, it is just
never going to get there.
Dr. Tompkins. Right. But for everything else things are
moving.
Now, of that, I do not know exactly what percentage
directly reached the warfighter, because some of them might be
in a program of record and it is not quite there yet, or it
might be in another government lab, working through the final
maturation stages.
But it is a topic we are very, very concerned about, and
one of the reasons that we have spent so much more time
focusing on commercial transition support to companies that
start up, based on having developed DARPA-funded technologies.
Mr. Brown. I would like to start by building on what Dr.
Tompkins said. She has a program, the Embedded Entrepreneurship
Initiative, for successful companies that are coming out of
DARPA programs. So she is trying to provide some support there,
and we are trying to also pull there to make that a premier set
of companies that we would look to at DIU.
We have, really, two different arms at DIU. One is an
investment arm that Congress authorized in the McCain National
Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), National Security and
Innovation Capital, to promote private investment in hardware,
because private industry does a great job supporting software,
a little bit less for deep tech, and that is a lot of what Dr.
Tompkins does. So with that we have some money that we can
provide for those vendors. That helps them get across one or
two of the valleys of death, maybe getting a company formed,
maybe scaling up manufacturing. We are going to look to the
successful DARPA companies as one of the sources there.
Then, of course, there is DIU itself, where we provide
revenue for companies who are prototyping or testing with us,
and we want to have them see production revenue. So we are
looking at what is the ongoing, recurring revenue that
stimulates more investment dollars to come in to fund these
companies that are supporting national security.
From a percentage standpoint, I would say that 25 to 30
percent of the projects we work on have some problem getting
the money in place--the right color of money--getting money in
the right time frame. This is the link to the budgeting
process. Because some of the new technologies come up, or
emerging threats come up within a budget cycle, and then, as we
know, it is very difficult to move money around. So that is a
real problem and it frustrates, I would say, 25 to 30 percent
of the efforts we work on, where we get a company that has
successfully prototyped but cannot get to the warfighters' hand
until the budget matches. Frustrating.
Ms. Shyu. I would like to add onto that, if I may. We have
talked about the multitude of different ways to do transition,
from technology. One path is transitioning directly into a
program of record. Another path is if you are transitioning to
commercial. Another path would be you have transition to a
prime contractor who is going to design and develop something
that ultimately the DOD will buy, and then there is also a
transition path of software that went directly into the hands
of the operator.
There is also another different way of transitioning. You
can transition to Tier 2, Tier 3, Tier 4 contractor, who may
design and develop components that go into a prime that
transitions into the DOD. We have no contractual mechanism to
track that, ergo, the difficulty in trying to figure out
exactly which technology you have funded that transition
directly.
The other piece, and I want to give you an example, of
technology takes time to transition. One of the DARPA programs
that funded is a microwave packaging. It was like a $1.5
million microwave packaging contract. It spawned an idea, to
figure out how do I design and develop a very innovative
architecture for active electronically scanned array, which is
critical for the next-generation radar system. It developed
something, you know, a prototype, from internal research and
development. From that particular effort, when I came on board,
I looked at that technology, and I said, ``That is really
innovative.'' It was funded from DARPA, transitioning into
array technology. I took that technology, matured it, developed
it into a prototype, which then ultimately helped Raytheon, at
the time, to win the F-18E/F contract, which it fielded in
production.
So you can see the long time frame. It took a decade to get
there. But ultimately the sealing contract that was provided
from DARPA spawned off an entire product line which resulted in
billions of dollars in terms of profit.
So that is a transition. Nobody probably has a record. I
knew it because I was involved in it.
Senator Kelly. Senator Ernst.
Senator Ernst. Oh, I appreciate it. Secretary, we talked
yesterday a little bit about the RDER program, as well, which I
am fascinated by. Does the program address the speed of
fielding technologies for the warfighter? Do they talk about
time frames and when they want it fielded? Because with the 32
technologies you selected for demonstration, can we expect any
of those technologies to be delivered in 2 years or 5 years?
Maybe if you could walk me through that, and how you determine
how long until fielding.
Ms. Shyu. So the whole intent of RDER is trying to expedite
the capability into the hands of the warfighter as quickly as
possible, by closing the joint warfighting capability gaps. So
we are looking at technology. We can literally demonstrate, in
2023, 2024, and be able to push it out by 2025. So we are
trying to compress the timeline, and not wait a decade to push
the technology out.
So one of the aspects of being able to accelerate
capabilities into the hands of the warfighter is once we
determine, the Joint Staff and the COCOMs determine there is
operational utility of having this particular protype, I need
to have a mechanism, a funding mechanism to rapidly transition
this technology.
One of the things that we are going to ask for is, is there
a pot of money that we can ask to transition to mature this so
I can help the company who produced this, especially if it is a
small company, to ramp up production. Because if they deliver a
few prototypes to you, and all of a sudden you saw the powerful
utility of this and you want to buy 1,000, they cannot flip a
light switch and give you 1,000 tomorrow. But I would love to
be able to help them bridge the valley of death and not wait 2
to 3 years for the Program Objective Memorandum (POM) process,
the Planning, Programming, Budgeting, and Execution (PPBE)
process, to catch up to buy this. This is exactly why small
companies die on the vine.
Senator Ernst. Right. Thank you. I appreciate that very
much.
then, as well, we talked a little bit about special forces
as well. We have some authorities that they utilize. Does the
Special Operations Forces Support Agency have the capacity to
deliver innovation to the warfighter quicker than what we see
with general DOD timelines?
Ms. Shyu. Yes because they take mature technology. They are
not trying to take immature technology and develop very basic
science. They look at what is the stuff that is out there
today, that I can literally rapidly buy and field? So their
timeline is very compressed. They are not trying to develop
next-generation fighter aircraft. They are looking at, hey,
what can I get very quickly? It is more like a DIU model.
Senator Ernst. One thing that we might want to do, too, is
just look at the existing authorities within their programs and
see if some of those could be applied, DOD-wide.
Mr. Brown, did you have some thoughts, as well?
Mr. Brown. For me it is less about authorities. As I talked
about in my opening statement, a lot of the authority already
exists within DOD. We need to change some of our processes. But
the authority that does not exist Secretary Shyu just talked
about, the flexibility of moving money, to get it where it is
needed most. I realize why those things existed historically,
but now we are in a serious tech competition with China, and
they are not waiting for our democratic time frames. I like our
system better than theirs, but we have to figure out how to
move more quickly.
Really, from a technology adoption point of view, whether
it is commercial technology of inventing the next technology,
it is about having the flexibility to move it where it is
needed most, in a simpler fashion than we have today. I think
that is the most critical element we need to attack between
Congress and the Department to improve our defense.
Senator Ernst. Yes, thank you, and I think this is a big
takeaway for me, and I think for a lot of folks as well, is
that maybe not so much about the authorities but maybe more
about flexibility, within parameters, of course, because we do
have to be good stewards of those dollars. But, of course,
greater flexibility so we can keep pace, I think is really
great.
Thank you very much. I appreciate the information.
Senator Kelly. I would like to talk a little bit about
microelectronics with the three of you here for the next 5
minutes. So secure access to microelectronics is a key enabler
for so many of our technologies, not just for DOD but our
defense industrial base. Our market share has shrunk in the
production of these, from upwards of 40 percent to 12 percent
today, and if we do not do something about it, it is going to
get below 10, and that is not good. Also the most sophisticated
foundries for semiconductor chips are now overseas, and this
creates just a dangerous reliance on foreign sources.
That is why I have been part of leading this plan on a $52
billion investment that will support bringing this
manufacturing capability back to the United States, and it also
will establish a dedicated microelectronics network within the
Department that leverages the expertise in our universities and
in industry. I would like to thank Secretary Shyu for working
with me on this effort, and I know it will help us overcome
current challenges in supply chain security and disruptions and
the problems that this creates for the Department of Defense.
So I would like our witnesses to address how the paradigm
for trusted microelectronics needs to change so we can better
leverage commercial practices and economies of scale. Starting
with Secretary Shyu, can you begin with what the Department is
doing to break the outdated, dedicated, trusted foundry model
that has been used since the early 2000s? You know, we do not
do most of the technology work the same way that we did 20
years ago.
Ms. Shyu. First of all, I want to thank Congress for giving
us the $52 billion. I think it is absolutely critical for this
nation to onshore some of these critical capabilities. As we
have seen during the pandemic, we cannot get our hands on the
microelectronics. This is a tremendous impact on our industries
across the board. So thank you very much.
I would say there are several things that we are doing. The
Microelectronics Commons is going to be a critical enabler. The
funding that you have given us is going to fund $400 million
per year for 5 years to build a lab-to-fab facility that is
regional. That is going to help the university to create the
next generation of materials and processing technology, to test
it out in a regional fabrication facility, and have the ability
to transition this technology to a production facility. It is
going to help our entire infrastructure. So that is absolutely
critical.
The other piece that we are funding within the Department
of Defense is the Rapid Assured Microelectronics Prototype
commercial, namely we are focused on providing a leading-edge
capability, less than 3 nanometer wafer foundry. That is
absolutely the state of the art.
We are building that capability in the U.S., and it is also
going to strengthen our domestic industry and establish a
sustainable ecosystem, because we are teaming up with fabulous
companies as well, who can then design within this commercial
foundry. What we are looking at is leveraging the state-of-the-
art commercial processes and putting on top of a layer,
potentially for classified chips that we may need. But
literally, we are absolutely leveraging the commercial state-
of-the-art foundry.
Senator Kelly. I cannot stress how important it is that we
finally get this across the finish line. You mentioned we have
given you the $52 billion, but we still have some key steps to
go here. We are close. This is incredibly important to our
national security. I do not think this can wait months. The
United States Senate and the House should figure this out this
week, and if not this week, as soon as possible. We run the
risk of other countries in Europe making these investments.
There have been proposals that they have made that
substantially, I would say, are above the proposals we have
made here. So time is of the essence on this, and we have to
get this across the finish line.
I do have a couple more questions if everybody has a few
more minutes. I want to talk quickly about some biotechnology
and genetic data. You know, our ability to leverage
biotechnology and decode genetic data has grown by orders of
magnitude over the past three decades. That is why mine and my
twin brother's DNA is available to everybody online, thanks to
my former employer. I did allow it--they did ask--but it is
there.
Much of that ability right now lies in the private sector,
and that means competitors like Russia and China can buy these
and try to exploit sensitive information.
So maybe we start with Dr. Tompkins here. How concerned are
you that nefarious actors or near-peer competitors are using
genetic data for bioweapons or intelligence gathering?
Dr. Tompkins. That kind of question is one of many that
tends to keep us up at night, as you can imagine. Obviously, I
think the kinds of questions you are asking are also very much
more part of the intel community. We use the information from
them, however, to think about safety, security, and defense,
and so what we tend to do is think about how one might very
quickly chase down and erase some type of customized capability
like that, as well for accelerating our own innovative
capabilities, building security from scratch.
Our program Safe Genes is a good example of that, and we
are obviously thinking about other defensive kinds of
capabilities that are less easily discussed in this type of an
environment.
Senator Kelly. Does our growing capability or ability to
decode data offer us any mitigation strategies here against
bioweapons or other intelligence exploitation? This is for
anybody, if anybody has a comment on this.
Dr. Tompkins. One thing I can talk about, it is still a way
away from being ready for prime time, is specifically looking
at the epigenome, so not just at the genetics but at sort of
some of the proteins and things that are hanging off of the
genetic information. We have several programs exploring how you
can use information in the epigenome to tell you whether
somebody has been exposed to weapons of mass terror, weapons of
mass destruction, precursors, things like that, and also
exploring ways in which those things might be triggered to
provide advanced protection.
Senator Kelly. Any other ways we can guard against
potential threats in this area?
Mr. Brown. I will just add a different dimension to this
from the sciences. This is one of the areas of emerging
technology where the government can play a role by really
assisting commercial companies with developing that technology.
What I mean by that is being more forward-leaning in terms of
contracts to develop the capability. A capability that exists
in our commercial sector right now to sequence all pathogens,
and that could be happening globally, but there is no program
to make that happen.
We should be experimenting with these capabilities, funding
some of these companies, so that the U.S. is on the forefront
of this technology. I think that is going to be critical. Just
like it was in the space race in the 1960s versus the Soviets,
the government was very forward-leaning and developed lots of
new technology. This is another area where I think we need to
be forward-learning with the industrial base.
Senator Kelly. Thank you. The GAO and others have recently
highlighted the challenges that DOD faces in attracting and
retaining a highly skilled technical workforce, and I imagine
for all three of you, I mean, that is the whole ball game, you
know, having the workforce to do this work. It does not matter
if it is artificial intelligence or hypersonics or anything,
for that matter.
I have spent some time getting up to speed on what China is
doing here and how we stack up. You know, there is more we need
to do. So, Secretary Shyu, can you share, what is DOD doing to
acquire and retain the talented people that we need to develop
and deploy things like artificial intelligence and other
emerging technologies?
Ms. Shyu. You bet. One of the things that the DOD has done
is create the Smart Scholarship-for-Service Program. Last year
we funded 416 scholars for their undergraduate and graduate
degrees, if your field is in one of the 21 STEM areas that we
are interested in. So these students, their scholarship is
being paid for, and when they graduate they come and work in
one of the 101 DOD laboratories.
We had great success stories so far, and I can tell you,
out of the 416 SMART scholars, 50 percent of them were women,
for which I am thrilled, 20 percent were from underrepresented
minorities. I would say nearly half of these 416 SMART scholars
are pursuing degrees in computer science, in software, in
artificial intelligence, which is fabulous. We are leveraging
those SMART scholarships to support them in growing our bench
strength.
If you look at over the years, in the last 2 years, we have
had 561 scholars that transitioned to their employment after
they finished their degrees, and 70 percent of the SMART
scholars, after they finish their service obligation, decided
to stay with the DOD laboratories. That is a huge success
story.
The other thing that we are doing, and beyond doing just
the scholarship piece, we actually awarded 28 grants, at $82
million, to develop K-20 education. Again, Arizona State
University, their curriculum for biotech is targeting minority
and rural areas in Arizona. You want to increase your bench
strength in the future.
The Department, through the National Defense Education
Program, created 10 STEM summer camps. Literally, we took the
opportunity to pull in 1,200 junior high school students and
gave them a week-long STEM camp. They loved it. It was a highly
successful education program that we have done, getting junior
high school students interested in science and technology, and
we want to grow that next year.
So we are doing a number of things that we can reach down,
not just at the university level but lower levels as well, to
encourage them to go into STEM.
Senator Kelly. Thank you. Dr. Tompkins or Mr. Brown, any
comments? I think is a good question to end on too, because it
is so central to everything all of your organizations do.
Dr. Tompkins. I will offer an example of a type of
initiative that DARPA specializes in, because it allows us to
continue to sort of fund projects as part of what we do, and
that would be the Joint University Microelectronics Program,
called JUMP. That is nearing the end of a 5-year program
lifecycle, and we have just announced the start of the call for
proposals for JUMP 2.0.
But this is a university-government-industry consortium,
and it is a model that universities themselves often use on a
much smaller scale, where you might have a handful of companies
together paying into the support of students and essentially
developing the pipeline and research baseline for the workforce
development.
In our case, we are talking about 35 universities, over
1,300 students in the last 3 to 4 years, hundreds of
researchers across I think about a dozen or two states, where
that pipeline directly connects U.S. university students to
U.S. both defense and commercial and sometimes allied nation
companies in order to significantly build up that workforce.
We are not necessarily targeting government labs
specifically but what we are very much doing is trying to
target that overall U.S. program.
Senator Kelly. Thank you.
Mr. Brown. I am going to be the skunk at the party on this
one. I think what the Department does on fellowships,
internships, is fantastic, and we need more STEM talent for the
competition with China. We should contrast that with how
difficult we make it to bring incredibly qualified people into
the Department.
One quick example. At DIU we are very lucky to attract a
Rhodes Scholar, PhD in computer science from Stanford, who
wanted to work for us at a government salary. Seven months,
once we identified that candidate to get him in the door. I do
not know what we do with that time, and this predates Secretary
Shyu. It is the administrative process that we have at DOD that
are--I cannot even explain why it would take that long, for
what, in the private sector, would have taken seven days, we
would take seven months to do.
We cannot attract the best people if we do not recruit them
and have a better process experience.
Senator Kelly. Could you find out, and go back and find out
who we could talk to? Because if we can identify why it takes
seven months, Senator Ernst and I, we could probably, with some
help, figure out what we need to do to speed that up.
Mr. Brown. We would love to tackle that. I hope Secretary
Shyu will share my enthusiasm for that.
Dr. Tompkins. If I may add, as I have mentioned several
times how grateful we are at DARPA for the authorities and
flexibilities that you have granted to our organizations, we
can typically hire within a week, Mike. So the problems are
solvable.
Senator Kelly. Okay. We need to go to that model.
Ms. Shyu. Sir, one more final thing. I think it important,
because you bring them in at the salary level at which
government pays. You are nowhere competitive against the
commercial industry, who is going to pay them twice as much or
three times as much. So that is a disadvantage that we have.
I can tell you one example. I spoke to an individual with a
PhD from Stanford. He had two very high-paying offers. I
literally spoke to him, ``Look, for the sake of national
defense you need to take a job and work with me, at a much
lower-level salary that I can pay you. But just think of the
perspective in the visibility that you will get working with
me.''
So, literally, I talk him out of an extremely high-paying
job to come work for me, and he is coming on board.
Senator Kelly. Great.
Ms. Shyu. So yes, it is the authority, the flexibility in
pay that we do not have, which makes it very onerous in terms
of trying to attract talent.
Senator Kelly. Well I want to thank all of our witnesses
for participating in today's hearing but also for leading your
agencies and serving our country. I believe, you know, very
strongly in the work you are doing, and it is important that we
continue to not get our eye off the ball here, to focus. I am
convinced, long term, we will out-invent and out-innovate our
competitors as long as we remain focused on it and you have the
tools you need. So please, let us know what you need.
I just look forward to continuing to work with you, and
this hearing is adjourned. Thank you.
[Whereupon, at 4:02 p.m., the Subcommittee adjourned.]
[Questions for the record with answers supplied follow:]
Questions Submitted by Senator Marsha Blackburn
hypersonic development
1. Senator Blackburn. Mr. Brown, what specific challenges do aging
infrastructure pose to testing modernization?
Mr. Brown. Aging infrastructure increases test costs, delays test
schedules, and limits the value of data collected during test events.
The Department of Defense (DOD) Test Resource Management Center (TRMC)
is addressing test infrastructure modernization needs through strategic
planning and targeted investments to deliver both the capabilities
needed to test developing weapon systems and the throughput required to
test at the scale and speed necessary to keep pace with rapidly
advancing technology.
2. Senator Blackburn. Mr. Brown, how does software advancements
impact infrastructure in the short- and long-term?
Mr. Brown. Software advancement enables the Department to more
efficiently evaluate data collected during test events. As an example,
the TRMC is developing software solutions that incorporate big data
analytics to significantly accelerate post-test data analysis.
defense advanced research projects agency (darpa)
3. Senator Blackburn. Dr. Tompkins, what has DARPA learned from the
unmanned UH-60 Black Hawk maiden flight? What challenges arose from the
unmanned UH-60 Black Hawk maiden flight, and how is DARPA addressing
them?
Dr. Tompkins. The successful maiden flight of an uninhabited UH-60
Black Hawk proved the technology is mature for broader use and that
this capability is ready for delivery to the Army for follow on
development. As an Optionally Piloted Vehicle (OPV), a UH-60 Black Hawk
leverages existing assets to provide wide benefits for force
multiplication, sustainment, logistics, and operational effectiveness.
While no significant technical challenges were noted, there is
currently no follow-on funding for UH-60 Black Hawk autonomy.
pathfinder model
4. Senator Blackburn. Ms. Shyu, what challenges have you identified
in reviewing the Pathfinder model, and are we maximizing partnerships
with academia?
Ms. Shyu The Pathfinder program is a model that the Army is
currently evaluating that seeks to create greater connectivity between
the warfighter and academia in order to focus on warfighter challenges.
I view such models as effective ways to engage users with the
innovation ecosystem at much earlier stages and look forward to
understanding and leveraging any lessons learned from the Pathfinder
program throughout the Department via the Innovation Steering Group
that I lead for the Deputy Secretary of Defense.
In addition to programs like Pathfinder, the Department is
maximizing its partnerships with academia through its basic research
programs, its Historically Black Colleges and Universities and Minority
Institution programs, the Small Business Technology Transfer Program,
and through numerous educational partnership agreements and cooperative
research and development agreements (CRADAs) between the DOD and
academic intuitions. The Department values academia both as a hotbed
for invention and innovation and as the source of a talented science,
technology, engineering, and mathematics workforce for the Department
and the nation.
recruiting and retention
5. Senator Blackburn. Dr. Tompkins, what action is necessary to
better develop, recruit, and retain talent within emerging
technological expertise?
Dr. Tompkins. DARPA's mission to engage in high risk research to
prevent strategic surprise rests on a talented workforce with unique
expertise. DARPA is grateful to Congress for the direct hiring
authority that allows us to attract experts in science and engineering
and hire them in a timely manner. Last year, Congress made two
additional changes that have strengthened the authority. The
streamlined pay modification eliminated a burdensome and unnecessary
two-step process that will decrease administrative load and also reduce
paperwork errors. The relocation expense changes to the Joint Travel
Regulations will allow us to provide greater incentives to attract
program managers who would need to temporarily relocate their families
while serving at DARPA. These two changes are working well and there
are no current challenges.
6. Senator Blackburn. Dr. Tompkins, how is DARPA utilizing
innovative workforce development, recruitment, and retention techniques
to collaborate with academia and industries?
Dr. Tompkins. DARPA takes a multifaceted approach to workforce
development and recruitment by participating in outreach events across
the country to reach new performers and program manager candidates.
For example, DARPA has begun planning DARPA Forward, a large
outreach effort aimed at discovering and engaging new communities of
talent and energizing the DARPA innovation ecosystem. DARPA Forward
will include six regionally-based events across the country culminating
in a showcase of technology at the Pentagon and on the Hill. Each of
the events is located on the campus of a public university.
innovation
7. Senator Blackburn. Dr. Tompkins, what is the importance of
Defense Innovation Unit (DIU) throughout combatant commands?
Dr. Tompkins. The DIU is an organization that accelerates
capabilities across the joint force at speed, typically within a two-
year time horizon. As is apparent in the current conflict in Ukraine
and the pacing China threat, it is critically important to deliver
capabilities to the combatant commands (CCMDs) at the speed of
relevance.
Defense-relevant technologies increasingly originate in the
commercial technology base, both in the U.S. and abroad. These dual-use
technologies, including satellite imagery, drones, artificial
intelligence, and communications tools, provide the CCMDs:
Additional real-time tools to enable their missions;
Unclassified opportunities to share information and
ideas, particularly with allies and partners;
Foreign partner modernization;
A strengthened collective defense innovation landscape;
and
More robust interoperability among regional allies and
partners.
8. Senator Blackburn. Dr. Tompkins, how is DARPA collaborating with
academia and industries to provide innovate solutions for Space R&D?
Dr. Tompkins. DARPA is involved with a number of important lines of
effort related to space. One significant one is DARPA's Blackjack
program. The Blackjack program plans to launch a satellite
demonstration of a proliferated low earth orbit (P-LEO) architecture
leveraging commercial space technology. The Blackjack program aims to
enable a cost-effective pivot away from large national space system
satellites to proliferated networked satellites in polar or highly
inclined low earth orbits. The proliferated architecture will enable
critical warfighting strategic capabilities including deterrence (via
numbers), resilience, global constant custody of enemy forces, and,
most critically, the ability to rapidly introduce new warfighting
technology to the space domain.
Additionally, Space-Based Adaptive Communications Node (Space-BACN)
plans to leverage commercial space communication networks and
technologies to enable more robust and efficient space-based
communications. Since proliferated space is nascent, there is no
standardization of communications or optical intersatellite link (OISL)
specifications in this domain. Additionally, there is currently no
means to bridge communications between disparate satellites and network
constellations such as Starlink, OneWeb, and Blackjack. Space-BACN is a
multi-standard optical terminal that can be reconfigured on-orbit to
enable communications across different standards and connect these
otherwise isolated constellations. The goal of Space-BACN is to enable
the Government to easily connect to both Government and commercial
satellites via high speed optical links enabling a ``mega-
constellation'' for space-layer (or space-based) communications.