Science, Technology, and Innovation Posture of the Department of Defense

Welcome everyone. We we thank you all for being here. The subcommittee will come to order, I ask unanimous consent that the chair be authorized to declare recess at any time, and without objection so ordered. I also ask unanimous consent that non-committee, subcommittee members be allowed to participate in today's hearing, after all subcommittee members have had an opportunity to ask questions. Is there objection? Without objection, not non-subcommittee members will be recognized at the appropriate time for five minutes. Good afternoon and welcome to today's Cyber Information Technologies and Innovation Subcommittee hearing on science technology and innovation posture, at the Department of Defense. Thank you to our witnesses for being here today. We're looking forward to hearing from you and getting smarter. We live in an era of unprecedented innovation and critical areas like quantum computing. artificial intelligence, autonomy, cyber and biotechnology. Given this progress, our nation's adversaries are working tirelessly to undermine American leadership and upset the world's security and stability. Put simply, the battlefield is changing on a fundamental level and our opponents are dead set on using this paradigm shift in technology as an opportunity to degrade America's dominance. One of the US's greatest competitive advantages is our ability to out-think and out-innovate our adversaries. At the Pentagon alone, there's an immense science and technology enterprise dedicated to advancing new ideas and technologies to arm our warfighters with necessary tools to win. Equally as important as our in-house minds is our ability to coordinate and collaborate with the other brilliant professionals at our national, or our nation's, academic institutions, defense industrial base, and other U. S. departments and agencies to ensure we are exploring every innovative path forward. Earlier this year, the department rolled out a massive reorganization into its research an engineering enterprise focusing on streamlining decisions, concentrating technology investment areas, and providing clear demand signals to our industry. Four months in, I look forward to hearing about how this transition is going and the main lines of effort moving forward. And we're joined today by three DOD leaders who are critical to the advancement of American defense innovation. The Honorable, excuse me, the Honorable L. Michael, the Undersecretary of Defense for Research and Engineering. Mister Owen West, Director of the Defense Innovation Unit, and Mister Cameron Stanley, Chief Data and Artificial Intelligence Officer. Gentlemen, thank you for being here and I look forward to your testimony. And with that, I yield to uh my friend and ranking member, Mister Ro Khanna.

Uh thank you Mister Chairman, thank you for your leadership leadership. I too wanna welcome each of you here for your first public hearing before this committee. I echo the Chairman's comments about the rapid advance of innovation, even having these conversations once a year. seems inadequate to keeping up with the pace and breath of technological change. And that's why your jobs are so important. Of the uh to that end, like the Chairman, I'm interested to hear how the newly reconfigured research and engineering ecosystem is performing. Uh, Mister Michael, you've also used the wide-ranging authorities granted as the department's chief technology officer at a greater scale than they've been leveraged before and I hope to understand how that is going. Mister Stanley, under uh Mister Michael's leadership, CDAO is responsible both for maturing existing enterprise programs and the numerous tasks by the DOD's AOI strategy. I look forward to hearing your approach to prioritizing and balancing these efforts. And, Mister West, I know one of your focus areas is lowering barriers for commercial entry. That's a subject of great interest to many of us. In the interest of time, I'll stop there. I look forward to our discussion this morning. Thank you, Mister Chairman.

So, gentlemen, I yield to you for the order you wanna uh go. And we'll y- yield each five minutes. Thank you.

Uh, thank you, Chairman Bacon, and uh thank you uh ranking member Khanna and the distinguished members of the subcommittee, thank you for the opportunity to testify today. I'm honored to be uh here today alongside my esteemed colleagues, uh Owen West and Cameron Stanley. The three of us are here today representing a fundamental shift in how the War Department approaches innovation. We're moving from a fragmented, siloed innovation ecosystem to a single unified model, designed to transition technol- f- f- to transition technology from the lab, to the warfighter. As Secretary Hegsess, this this direction earlier this year, we officially realigned the innovation efforts bringing DIU, CDAO, and the Strategic Capabilities Office under my purview as the department's Chief Technology Officer. My mandate as the department's CTO is to ensure delivery of tangible, decisive and battlefield-ready technology to our military, and to do it at a velocity and scale that our adversaries cannot hope to match. The urgency stems from the hard truth that if we don't maintain technological overmatch American service members will pay the price in combat. The reality is heightened by the strategic environment we face today. Our adversaries are investing heavily and moving with purpose to surpass us in key technology areas that will define the the course of future. However, the United States possesses a strategic national asset that our adversaries can never replicate, a dynamic innovation ecosystem comprised of unmatched talent and unli unlimited creativity. The advantage is key, disadvantage is key to our deterrence, and it makes the outcome inevitable. My office remains focused on harnessing the full potential of our innovation ecosystem to serve the American warfighter. After being confirmed last May, my first order of business was to restore strategic focus on the technologies that we need to maintain maintain dominance on the battlefield. I inherited a list of fourteen CTAs or critical technology errors areas which really didn't prioritize anything. They were a laundry list, they diluted our resources, and slowed progress. Through rigorous data-driven analysis, and in consultation with the military services and the and our experts in the intelligence community I made the decision to pare that list down to six. The new list of six CTAs provides clarity to industry and to our innovators, in our labs and across the War Department, focusing their efforts and their funding vehicles. The War Department's new critical technology areas are applied artificial intelligence, biomanufacturing, contested logistics technologies, quantum and battlefield inform information dominance, scaled directed energy, and scaled hypersonics. The department is focused on its investments, its talent and its leadership around these areas, while the priv- private sector crowds their uh uh its capital around to supercharge progress in these areas. And let me be clear, other technology areas such as space and microelectronics remain important. R and D will continue to carry our our statutory mandate to provide rigorous oversight of all departmental R and D, but these six areas are the ones that will benefit most from attention, advocacy, and resources at my level. For each of the CTAs, another thing we've changed is we've made uh tangible focus sprints that we can measure our progress against them, to accelerate the technology development cycles and we don't get stuck doing nothing. Each sprint has an accountable leader and they're mandated to deliver with strict timelines and accountability. An example of this is the rollout of GenAI dot mill, which is the War Department's official secure generative AI platform. We've unleashed frontier AI to three million uniformed personnel, contractors and civilians. In just five months, the platform has attracted one point four million of the three million u- uh people we have in the department. Uh, they've generated over sixty nine million prompts. They've built a hundred thousand agents. Prior to that, we'd only had eighty thousand users, uh, using AI in the whole department. But we're not limited, uh, limiting deployment to our unclassified systems alone. along in the last few weeks we signed agreements to with virtually all leading Am- American frontier AI companies and AI infrastructure companies to deploy their capabilities onto our classified systems. We will continue to operate at a speed and scale that ensures AI is readily available to our war fighters. Our efforts have not been limited to the CTAs and just AI. We've also bring uh bringing innovation to the production and acquisition of conventional weapons enabling the return of mass effects through employment of large numbers of less exquisite weapon systems. As you've seen uh yesterday we announced the signing of five contracts with new entrants to build low-cost munitions uh for the first time in the department's history. These uh represent a new era where we can have mass, a treatable, affordable weapons, and we're not doing it on a cost-plus basis, we're doing it on a fixed-price basis, with s- with delivery dates that begin in twenty, twenty seven. Uh lastly on the structure, as uh both the Chairman and Ranking Member have mentioned, uh it allows us to lay out a clear and rapid pathway for new and innovative ideas, to make its way to a work from working prototype to scaling the capability for the joint force. This is directly going after the infamous valley of death. You could start at the beginning with s- or the reauthorization of Sibber Sitter, And then, which by the way, Andrew Castillian started at Sibbersitter program, so it's a good note that that program has produced results. And then we get to DIU for prototypes, APFIT for scaling, and the Office of Strategic Capital to go big.

If you help wrap it up, I'm worried about votes coming up in a little bit, so we gotta get 'em.

Okay. With that, I will pass it off to my uh partners.

Thank you very much.

Good mor- or good afternoon, Chairman Bacon, Ranking Miner Comm. um Ranking Member Khanna and distinguished members of the subcommittee. Thank you for the opportunity to discuss how the Chief Digital and AI Office at the Department of War is arming our nation's most operationally demanding war-fighting organizations from tactical special operations formations to global combatant commands with AI enabled capabilities that redefine the modern battlefield and secure US military dominance for years to come. Since February, CDAO's flagship capability teams, Maven Smart System and WordData platform have re-imagined are or have remained on call around the clock in support of Operation Epic Fury, enabling US forces to strike more than thirteen thousand targets in thirty-eight days. What once took days now takes seconds. What enabled this shift? Historically, the department's approach to technology development siloed war fighters from technology delivery teams, producing a capability cycle where solutions were over budget, late to need, and not fit for purpose. At the height of operations in Iraq and Afghanistan, the tip a typical intelligence analyst was required to spend sixteen hour days reviewing UAV footage for tiny anomalies that might signal major threats. The scale of unstructured data combined with human exhaustion made UAV image analysis one of the clearest operational pain points and a top priority for a solution that brought humans back into the loop in a framework that no longer was manageable with humans alone. In response, in tw- two thousand seventeen, the Algorithmic Warfare Cross-Functional team, also known as Project Maven, was established to apply data and machine learning to the problem. In theory, utilizing world-class computer vision models to detect objects of interest seems seems straightforward. In practice, teams encountered fragmented frameworks, static slides, and an operating environment that was most effective uh where the most effective linkage between systems was a person in a s in a swivel chair. These were not simply data and scale or scale problems, they were human process and information problems that even in the most advanced AI systems could not solve. The Project Maven team realized that real progress requires more than better technology. It required better processes and better teams, achieved by embedding engineers with warfighters to build tools that enhance operational decision-making and human judgment. Over the past nine years, that approach has culminated into Operation Epic Fury's AI-enabled data-centric warfighting system in a real-world conflict. But Operation Epic Fury is one operation. What does it look like to scale the Maven model across combatant commands emission areas? The department's answer is it is its AI acceleration strategy, released on January twelfth. The strategy codifies seven years of operational experience and lessons into a clear executable plan. Today, I will focus on a few of those critical lessons. The first lesson, the department must leverage, not compete with, commercial innovation. In twenty twenty five alone, frontier AI labs raised over one hundred and twenty billion dollars, and the industry capital expenditure on AI- infrastructure exceeded four hundred billion. The department should not outspend our commercial partners. We should harness their technological and economic dynamism for national defense. This approach reshapes how the DOW contracts and recruits. For example, CDAO has reduced timelines for awarding contracts from years to as little as six days, bringing top engineering talent into mission workflows at speed and scale. Critically, Sorry. Second lesson, the United States military is best equipped and trained fighting force in the world, not just because of what it builds, but because of its ability to field and sustain capability at the tactical edge under the most austere conditions. To meet their needs, CDAO embeds with war fighters to enable, iterate, and deliver operationally relevant capabilities. We work on their terms, in their timelines, so they can fight, win, and come home. Next lesson, speed matters, especially in AI. Traditional development programs take years to produce results. Instead, CDAO is executing pace setting projects, rapid, strategically scoped initiatives that address urgent adoption challenges using the maven model of engineer warfighter teams. So far, CDAO has launched seven pace setting projects that are advancing, are driving advances in human-machine teaming, real-time operational learning, and data integration in support of real-world mission. Fourth lesson, today's battlefield requires modernizing the underlying uh software architecture. To that end, CDAO is transforming Advana into the Word data platform and elevating it along with the Maven smart system into department-wide programs. Word data platform serves as a single source of truth for operational formations, while the Maven smart system will centralize its role within the department's CJADSI two uh initiative and accelerate AI enabled applications across the force. In every formation, in every geography, on every mission, the American warfighter operates on CDAO technology. The last lesson, the department must win the AI infrastructure arms race. China has invested upwards of three hundred billion dollars in energy and compute infrastructure to develop sovereign AI. Moreover, in earl- the early days of Operation Epic Fury, the world witnessed deliberate strikes from Iranian drones and missiles targeting commercial data centers in the UAE and Bahrain. They must not they will not win this arms race. As we speak, the department is aligning with its uh partners in the Department of Energy, Intelligence, Community and Interagency to build the AI arsenal, a modular ecosystem with a three-tiered strategy to ensure compute power outmashes our joint capacity needs. You're welcome, I'm up too. It will always be Yes, Mr. Chairman. Mr. Chairman, members of the subcommittee, the modern battlefield is evolving at an pace unmatched in recent history. In an era of heightened du-

Thank you. Chairman Bacon, Ranking Member Khanna, and members of the subcommittee. I appreciate the opportunity to speak with you about how DIU is accelerating the conversion of commercially derived technology into combat power. For thirty years, the Pentagon has favored quality over quantity. The battlefield evidence is clear. While we are winning every engagement, we are losing on the cost exchange too often. Our adversaries have scaled production and reduced costs, forcing us to diversify our portfolio. We require both pricey high technology and low-cost lethal mass. President Trump, Secretary Hegseth, and Congress have directed an urgent rearmament, and Secretary Hegseth has tasked the Defense Innovation Unit with harnessing commercial companies to deliver accelerated combat power. Our determination is to dramatically lower our cost per kill while reducing risk to force. The good news is that America's unrivaled entrepreneurs and private capital markets have foreseen this rebalance. In recent years, over two hundred billion dollars of private capital has flowed into nontraditional and commercial technology companies. As the principal liaison to these commercial and nontraditional companies, DIU is bridging the gap from rapid prototyping to scaled, successful transitions that solve operational problems identified by the joint force. We will be the fastest contracting and fielding agent in the department. We pioneered the competitive commercial solutions opening and other transaction authority to bring high-tech from solicitation to initial fielding, in months, not years. As part of an innovation ecosystem, Coordinated by the Chief Technology Officer to my right, we are tightening our linkages with the military services to deli- to deliver lethality, they can scale. We're further knocking down transition barriers. These include classified infrastructure, authority to operate, testing and evaluation that delay technology delivery. Our basic investment philosophy is to focus at the intersection of speed, scale, and lethality, to ensure the best return for the department and the American taxpayer. We thank you for your leadership from enacting long-needed acquisition reforms in the fiscal year twenty twenty-six NDAA, to the reconciliation funding in the one big beautiful bill. With your support, DIU will leverage the full power of America's markets and entrepreneurs to deliver combat power. Thank you.

Thanks to all three of you. You have a very important mission area. We appreciate your leadership. Listen to Mister Stanley's statement, trigger question to me, so I'd like to ask all three of you. If you could look at what you're doing at your accomplishments, please tell us, but also the all the folks listening, what is that area or two that you've had a direct impact on the combat capabilities of our war fighters? And Mr. Sal, you touched on this a little bit, so we'll start off with you to give you guys a chance to think about it.

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Uh, the the best example of that in CDAO is the deployment of Maven's smart system at scale across the entire uh, uh, global enterprise. Uh, so at every single combatant command in most services, as well as down to some tactical formations, we're actually using an AI-enabled command and control capability uh called Maven Smart System. It's a software as a service uh deliverable, uh but this uh this this capability allows for the integration of multiple different AI tools to accelerate workflows for operational decision making, to greatly reduce the amount of time it takes for operators to make better decisions faster. on the battlefield. Uh, this this tool has been widely used by just about every single, uh, formation that's been engaged in, uh, operations across the globe, uh, and is continuing to develop and build and get better over time. It's the first time in my career where an actual system of record has been used not only in current operations but it's also evolving in real time, with the expertise of our war fighters being inserted into that capability.

Thank you. Mister Michael.

Thank you, Mister Chairman. I'd say that the two things I'm most proud of um were really for the first time we created a pathway for new companies to deliver munitions, uh and we did that by having a cross-functional team evaluate the management team, the technology, and their manufacturing capabilities. And we did that with all the military services and the other components, and we were able to pull them through the process in months, not years. And that means we get combat power in uh one year not five years. The second thing I'm I think I'm most proud of is the innovation ecosystem, which was fractured. Putting it together allows us to reduce duplication, cuz this man on my right and this other man on my right, we could look at each other every day and make sure that we're not spending the taxpayers' money uh in double or triple format. Uh and that that's also allowed the office of strategic capital and some of the other parts of the innovation ecosystem to do things fast like critical minerals deals. uh, rebuilding the defense industrial base, it's because we have a full view as to all the technology investments that we can make in the department.

Thank you. Mister West.

Chairman, I'd first like to acknowledge my predecessors. Um, for decades the department treated, you know, two exquisite pockets of American exceptionalism, the American warfighter and the American entrepreneur as distinct and separate. So DIU exists to bridge that gap, and by and large when I took the seat, uh, seven weeks ago, my predecessors had done that. Now in terms of what to be proud of, the unit has many of these young companies, Emile mentioned a couple of them, I won't mention them by name, they touched DIU first in many cases, so some of the things you're seeing fielded, uh these new entrants first touched DIU. Finally to be specific in what's what Secretary Hegseth has ordered, it is a pivot to unmanned systems, and DIU uh along with TRMC and other elements of the office of the Secretary of War are running a program called drone dominance with a new template. It's an advanced purchase commitment, uh, which brings commerciality to the department, um, that - that they - that the secretary outlined during his acquisition strategy. Thank you.

Thank you. It's ultimately about combat capability and what you're delivering. So I appreciate that feedback. Mister Michael, I understand there was a reorganization you were talking about it that, by direction of the Secretary of Defense or Secretary of War. Could you We understand there's a a significant cut uh to your programs in the FY twenty-seven budget. Can you talk about that and maybe impacts uh to your portfolio?

Uh, I believe we asked for significant increase uh sor- uh, Mister Chairman, across almost all items, particularly what you'll see uh in next year's budget as new big items to something we call AI arsenal, which is building the infrastructure uh t- required to do many, many, many more tasks by AI. We've also asked for increases for the mission engineering integration activity, which is changing the requirements process. So we're not gold plating requirements. We're giving uh vendors a common operational problem that we're trying to solve. And the S and T lines have been largely flat and consistent with sort of the department's budgets.

I think I was To be more specific, the military service science and technology programs, can you talk about the the impacts there?

I th- th- you know, I just got a directive. authority in the uh twenty-sixth NDAA to begin looking at the military services budget, so I haven't been able to impact those for uh for the twenty-seven submission.

Mm-hmm.

But we are uh right now going through uh a I hate to call it an audit, but a review of all the technology spending by the services to make sure that we're spending enough in the right places and not duplicating where we don't have to.

Well, I appreciate your feedback when you get a chance to analyze the cuts and what the impacts are.

Sure. And with that I

Rochelle.

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Mr. Michael, I'm assuming you must be aware of reporting last month at The Guardian highlighting certain aspects of your disclosure to the Office of Government Ethics. The i- article highlights that your initial disclosure in March of last year of a significant amount of stock in Elon Musk's XAI, the company behind Grok. Your subsequent sales of those holdings earlier this year yielded you about what percent gain?

Uh about five X.

So about four hundred percent to forty eight hundred percent?

F- five hundred percent.

Five hundred percent. In between you were serving as the Senate confirmed Under Secretary for Research in Engineering, and Chief Technology Officer. Uh, under your purview, was a two hundred million dollar contract with XAI to embed their grok models on the department's AI systems. Um, I just want you to uh be transparent. Uh, did you have any decision making role in that uh XAI uh contract?

No, that that contract was signed by the previous CDAO and that was done before that office was affiliated with Arnie.

So you uh recu- recused your matters from

It wa- it wasn't in, I didn't have to recuse it. It was in a totally different office.

Did you recuse yourself from any matters related to XAI?

Um. Once the office Ca- the CDAO office which does the contracts with AI companies came under my purview in the fall. After those contracts were signed in the summer, I recused.

Is there any decision making or uh input you've had on XAI while you've been in the role of Under Secretary?

Not until I sold uh my holdings.

So while you had your holdings, you had absolutely no role on any decision making with XAI?

I did not.

And uh do you believe then that you addressed any conflicts of interest and were avoided?

I do.

So uh just to get full of your testimony, you never had any conversation with XAI, you never had uh any uh input on any decision making with XAI, uh and you had zero interaction with them while you were under secretary before while you before you uh you sold your stock.

Yeah, I I recused myself completely from all matters regarding XAI while I held that stock. Um.

While you held that stock?

Yeah, w- while I held that stock I recused myself from all matters regarding uh XAI.

Why not just make the recusal public then?

Uh, I'm not sure I understand, sir.

Have you made it public that you were rec- that you had recused yourself?

Well, what happened, well, because my initial ethics uh submission when I took the role didn't have the chief digital AI office, part of the office. It wasn't my original recusal, but I contacted uh the our government ethics office inside the department as soon as I got the office and recused myself.

But the bottom line is, when you had the stock before you sold it, you had zero contact on any policy matter with XAI.

Correct.

OK, I'm satisfied.

Yeah. Appreciate the direct answers.

Sure.

Yeah.

With that, Mister Finstad.

I'm gonna take a different route here. So, uh, thank you, uh, Chairman Bacon and, uh, Ranking Member Conniff for, uh, having, uh, this hearing today and thank you for the witnesses for being here. Um, I wanna talk a little bit about the DIU's on-ramp hubs and, uh, we are honored in Minnesota to have, uh, one of the newest hubs and I, uh, had the opportunity to attend the ribbon-cutting for that back in December and I've already seen some positive impacts and heard some great things about uh what that is doing to help the Minnesota defense ecosystem so with that being said uh Mister West uh I frequently hear from small businesses with innovative ideas that are uh eager to partner with the Department of War across Minnesota uh however I often hear of uh concerns about the so-called Valley of Death I think Mister Michaels you addressed that a little bit earlier um sounds scary I don't know exactly what it is. think we all should just instinctively avoid the valley of death whenever possible. Uh so when these small businesses are struggling to bring their concepts out of the R and D phase and into the hands of our war fighters, that's tha- that's what I'm hearing. So how is DIU planning to utilize the on-ramp hubs to bring to bridge this valley of death uh by ensuring that these capabilities can be deployed across the department rather than stalling under initial demonstration phases?

Thank you, Congressman. One of our statutory obligations is connectivity. And, you know, we we frankly have to do a better job downstream of connecting with the military services to ensure that our prototypes and the young companies that that you mentioned have a home and some budget behind them. And so, in many ways we're a service organization responding to that demand signal. But we have to be upstream as well, and so well beyond Silicon Valley. the on-ramp hubs, you know, we have to look across the nation at all the great entrepreneurs, many of them veterans, um, in these small communities that do have the ideas, the engineering skill, the entrepreneurship to be harnessed and converted into combat power. Your specific hub, I mean, I think it was opened in December, we've already seen I think sixteen additional responses to our commercial solution openings which are competitions that we run periodically. We've we've run about twenty so far this year. And, you know, candidly to - to - to leave this off, DIU has the obligation to run these competitions as objectively as possible, with - with clarity, and then sometimes to get to know early if - if - if something doesn't fit a military service. But we're certainly doing a disservice to these companies, uh, if we don't communicate well and - and - and create what - what - what you described as the valley of death.

Yeah. Thank you for that. Uh, and I would invite you to Minnesota to to come see the Hub and and to see these, uh, young y- young start-up companies, in some case seasoned mom-and-pop shops. You know, I represent a district that has an amazing amount of welders, tinkers, inventors, thinkers, uh, companies that are starting to, uh, really, uh, tap into this ecosystem, and I think it'd be great to to have your ge- feet on the ground there, eyes on the ground. Uh, Mister Stanley, a question for you, we, uh, in this committee, uh, subcommittee had a hearing so uh long ago about you know really the uh the inventory and logistics and uh some of the uh you know archaic legacy software systems that are being used and it just struck me when I hear uh the department of war using excel spreadsheets and other uh you know tools to to track inventory how are we really uh you know really putting our warfighter warfighter in a you know in a in a

Yes, Congressman, so we're we're actually working quite closely with many

Mm.

aspects of this problem. Underlying all of the technology questions, it's really a fundamental data problem. How is the data stored? How is it collected? How is it managed? How is it curated? And how is it structured? So that you can bring some of those best of breed commercial tools into the department. Uh, as uh the CDO actually reports to me as the CDAO of the department, our Chief Data Officer, uh it's it's our uh it's our duty, it's our responsibility to actually enforce these standards. We have several data decrees that we have insh issued within the department. to get our data story right. Once you have the data story right, then you can start bringing in the tools. Uh, we are also working very closely with members of the defense industrial base to try and improve the data structure and the data story visualization, especially for exquisite munitions, uh, to try and accelerate not only their development and their deployment, uh, increase the capacity of - of our ability to actually produce those munitions, but also be able to track those more effectively, especially for a protracted conflict.

Thank you. Thank you, Mr. Chair.

It's fine.

You're back.

You're recognized.

Uh, thank you, Mr. Chair. Thank you all for being here. Um, Director West, I appreciate your comments specifically about the legacy of DIU and the leaders before you. I think it's one of the things that is one of the greatest success stories. Bipartisan, everybody working together, and I appreciate you saying that, and the rapid progress you've made already in your time in the office. Um, no knock on my friend from Minnesota. Um, But uh in my great state of New York uh we also have a great uh, I think underappreciated actually defense technology, um thriving ecosystem, uh I know many of you have spent time there um recently and in the past, um between capital, start-ups, um a lot of veterans and and military folks, the fact that uh we don't yet have um uh at least a permanent defense tech presence or DIU presence in New York, I think is an opportunity. and appreciate um the the conversations we've had and the work already in that direction. I also wanna highlight um my alma mater of West Point in our great state, that has made a huge investment at the academy um in building out an in- innovation ecosystem that draws on both the cadets there but also the exceptional faculty, the labs and research space um that they have and they're actually standing up uh in off campus commercial public-private, innovation works uh going forward that brings together partnerships with Detachment two O one JADA four O one Army Futures the PAE's two hundred plus industry partnerships gift space um so I just wanted to um ask your your thoughts on that I know you're you're drinking from the fire hose as you come on Director West but any thoughts there in any way we can partner to support that I think would be for the greater good of the nation.

Thanks Congressman, I mean I was I I worked for twenty years in New York City and and was part of the founding group of veterans on Wall Street. Um, there's always been a an entrepreneurial spirit. I'd say the thing that has changed is capital allocation, uh, as you pointed out. You know, defense tech is white hot now, but we don't have to go back, you know, only a decade ago, you had kind of people protesting affiliation with the Department of Defense and capital allocators, uh, were uninterested. So New York, um, you know, we have the requirement to establish criteria to judge where the next on-rent hub will will occur. Y- New York, I think objectively, uh, meets many of these criteria. You mentioned West Point. You know, I don't know what configuration this may take once we wa- run it through our evaluation system. I do know that West Point is also beyond the West Point works you mentioned. Uh, I believe they're starting a drone a drone range. And uh y- y- you know

Yes.

so that the Hudson speaks for itself a- as does the city.

Um I appreciate that and uh if you wanna sand the record that'll be the next hub we'd we'd be excited to hear that here today or you know uh uh all joking aside I know it has to

Little hard of hearing after a

Um again appreciate the partnership um and uh go army beat navy on the record uh Shifting to another topic, I I um commen- commend you under Secretary Michael your comments, specifically seeing the launch of the low low cost munition initiatives yesterday, I believe, or today, whenever that was, um exactly the right direction and it builds on um the drone dominance program that I know, um several of you have worked on, and just getting that high-low mix correct. Anything that we can be continuing to do on that front as a subcommittee, and the whole of the committee, I know that's a uh shared bipartisan um priority. Um I would love to talk more in depth about that, but I wanna ask a specific sort of sub-component to that, building on what we've seen in Ukraine and and other uh uh combat zones across the world. Specifically looking at comms networks and the opportunity for commercial cellular networks being used be- for beyond line of sight C two, around drone swarms. Um I know DIU is moving towards gauntlet two and three director stanley's um you guys are looking at swarm forge are you looking at integrating um commercial and private five g options within that given kind of the complexities and and challenges in the modern battlefield

uh yes congressman thank you for the question um i'm i'm very much an egalitarian when it comes to comms yes as much as we possibly can uh commercial comms in in five g line of sight uh laser comms, you know, smoke signals, I don't care. We're gonna need the bandwidth on the battlefield regardless. And uh if there's a technology out there that enhances our ability to actually operate, especially in an EM contested environment, we're gonna leverage that.

Anything you wanna add with the, I guess we're out of time. All right. Thank you gentlemen, yield back, Mister Chair.

Thank you. Based on who is here, we Nice.

Thank you, Mister Chairman. Uh, Director West, in the FY twenty-five NDAA, Congress established uh the shared commercial classified infrastructure pilot program, and we're now seeing amazing and extraordinary demand for shared commercial skiffs across the country, including in Colorado, where qualified companies and uh and research institutions are ready to support national security, um but they lack access to accredited facilities and classified networks. Under your leadership, I think this program appears to be gaining real momentum with pot- potential sites being actively evaluated, uh prioritized and resourced, uh uh including in my district of Colorado Springs. Can you walk us through how the department is identifying and selecting these locations? What steps you're taking to establish uh centralized DOD sponsorship, accelerate classified network provisioning, uh and cut through the traditional accreditation and their reciprocity reciprocity bottlenecks to deliver these capabilities at at speed and at scale.

Yes, Congressman, I mean, you we we've identified that um producing a prototype is insufficient uh when to hand that over to a military service which has its own bureaucracy. And so as you point out what you're gonna see with DIU, and again this this this started before me, Um, but it is being accelerated and and drastically accelerated. You're gonna see a bundled service that includes skiff access, authority to operate, essentially can you bring software onto DOD networks, and probably some access to boutique ranges or other places where we can test. In other words, we're trying to speed up the whole system. In terms of the evaluation of where these skiffs are s- secure, compartmentalized facilities should be. The first thing we ask is, is this in a skiff desert? In other words, is is there a nearby or proximate skiff? Then we look at capitalization, the number of companies, the number of dual-use companies, essentially usage or demand. Um, and and we we see a lot of demand. And so the list keeps growing, but I I think you're gonna see this happen fairly quickly. As you said, there is wide department interest for many things

Yeah. This is such a barrier, particularly to smaller companies, uh, you know, to to even entry, uh, in into the market. So, anything we could do, and and I appreciate your leadership on that. Uh, Secretary Michael, Last year DARPA terminated the DRACO program, our primary effort to field nuclear thermal propulsion. Um, NTP would be a game-changing technology, um, to give the United States a leg up in the rapidly changing, um, battlefield of on-orbit warfare. At the same time, the Space Force and Space Command continue to tell Congress that they need more tools to support dynamic space operations including in-space mobility. And uh General Saltzman's demand signals are pretty clear. The joint force needs the ability to maneuver satellites without the massive fuel uh penalties inherent to a chemical propulsion. At the same time the uh CCP is aggressively pursuing its plan to field an NTP spacecraft in the next decade. Uh we can't effectively contest the CIS lunar domain if our assets remain sitting ducks in fixed orbits. Understanding all of this, how does OSW, RNE, plan to continue supporting research into NTP and other technologies that support uh high delta V maneuverability?

It's a good technical question uh for me uh but I'll uh the DARPA program, Draco, uh uh served its purpose for in terms of delivering learnings. It's a very hard technical problem. The presidents issued an executive order uh compelling the uh the whole government to figure out nuclear propulsion in space and the lead for that is NASA so we're transferring the learnings from DARPA to NASA and then going to be working with NASA the department of war uh for nuclear propulsion in space, given the importance in the Cis-lunar uh atmosphere.

OK. Uh I I have several other questions but I I would go over my time if I did that, so I'm gonna go ahead and yield back, Mister Chairman, thank you.

Thank you there, Mr. Crank. Based on the order of arrival, Mr. Vindman, you're now recognized.

Thank you, gentlemen. So, uh, since we're all pitching on-ramp hubs, let me just pitch Northern Virginia, which has got hubs of military installations, including Quantico, Dahlgren, um, big R and D bases, uh, great institutional, uh, educational institutions, so, uh, certainly give Northern Virginia a look. Um, now during my twenty-five year career in, uh, the army, I've had a sort of through line. I was a, uh, a land warrior platoon leader, the first in the eighty second back in the late nineties. And then worked on the National Security Council as legal advisor to emerging technologies and then one of my last jobs was, uh, at DEVCOM, uh, Army Research and Development, uh, basically seventy five percent of the army's R and D. So I think the cutting edge, um, technology and, and, um, systems for service members uh the war fighters are absolutely critical. So, let me start by thanking you for your your service to the nation, Director West, uh your leadership in uniform and particularly your tours in Iraq. I'm glad to hear that we're aligned on on the goals to ensure our armed forces have drones that they need to win the next fight, or better yet deter it. Uh last month General Petraeus uh published an article on foreign affairs titled " The Autonomous Battlefield". Not sure if you had an opportunity to review it but uh Ask unanimous consent to enter that article into the record.

Without objection.

Thank you. Um, so I'll read a a quote. Um, " No joint doctrine, um, for autonomous formations yet exists. No major command has been tasked to develop one. Uh, no new unmanned systems force has been established. In essence, the US military is buying more drones without adequately considering how, uh, coordinated, autonomous,

Congressman, I I do, and I believe this is underway.