Mr. Chairman, thank you for convening this timely hearing, and thank you to Undersecretary LaPlante, Undersecretary Shyu, and Director Beck for appearing before us today.
There is an obvious imperative for the Department and our national security apparatus to be agile and innovative. And technology development is a fundamental piece of the puzzle that is addressing the evolution of conflict. We have incredible engines of innovation across this country, from labs to private industry. Our innovation base is an irreplaceable national asset, as is the strength of our relationships with partners and allies across the globe, each of whom offers unique capabilities and strengths.
However, I have concerns about the next step – when appropriate, rapidly procuring technologies, including existing technologies, and fielding them at a strategically relevant scale. This is where a technical problem becomes an institutional and cultural one. And it raises a number of questions that I’d like to examine today.
Is the Department providing consistent, understandable messaging to the private sector that sufficiently allows industry, including nontraditional companies, to invest in and prioritize the development of capabilities that will provide advantage to the country?
Does the Department have the right acquisition professionals, with the right culture and the right training and authorities, to rapidly and dependably bring technologies through to become capabilities? This Committee has expended a tremendous amount of effort in recent years to ensure sufficient authorities exist, but deploying those authorities still seems more of a bespoke art when Congress would like it to be off-the-rack.
Is test and evaluation infrastructure scaled appropriately, with the right capabilities and personnel, to support the rapid innovation cycles and continuous development processes implicated by many evolving technologies? This becomes particularly important when some of these capabilities may implicate or allow for large shifts in tactics, decision-making requirements, and operational concepts, which may require significant investments in testing in order to challenge and refine.
Which then leads to the question of how to maintain agility in doctrine, force design, force development, and above all the people needed to make all of the brilliant ideas work. What the Department asks of a service member in 2030 will likely be quite different than what could have been envisioned for them in 2020. There will be stresses to training, education, manning, and recruitment – is there sufficient agility within the Pentagon to allow for those changes at a pace relevant to technological change?
Is the Department prepared to scale, base, deploy, maintain, sustain, and eventually sunset these rapidly emerging capabilities? Do we have sufficient visibility into and resilience in our industrial base, and the myriad supply chains that support it? Can the intelligence enterprise and the many other supporting mechanisms of the Department and across government support the envisioned force design and employment model?
And finally, are policymaking frameworks agile enough to handle the novel questions raised by systems incorporating capabilities such as AI, autonomy, and directed energy, at the pace and scale of innovation we hope to achieve?
Nothing about these challenges is straightforward, and they are not problems to be solved as much as issues that will require sustained management and attention. I applaud the willingness of the Department and each of our witnesses to confront systemic challenges to innovation through efforts like Replicator, APFIT, and RDER. I hope today that we can hear more about the limits of those efforts, the issues our witnesses are wrestling with, and where there may be opportunities for this Committee to work with each of them to address challenges.