Since World War II, the United States’ technological dominance has defended American citizens and military forces alike. But Russian and Chinese advancements in hypersonic missiles—which in turn upgrade the arsenals of rogue regimes like Iran and North Korea—threaten to surpass US capabilities and to hold American citizens at risk.

Join Hudson for a workshop with congressional, government, and industry officials to discuss the future of the American hypersonic missile program. Space Foundation CEO Heather Pringle will introduce a keynote address from Congressman Doug Lamborn (R-CO). Then expert panels will discuss the future of hypersonic missile offense and defense and how members of Congress can build a bipartisan consensus about the vital US hypersonic missile program.

Agenda

9:30 a.m. | Introductory Remarks

• Rebeccah Heinrichs, Senior Fellow and Director, Keystone Defense Initiative, Hudson Institute
• Major General Heather Pringle, USAF (Ret.), PhD, CEO, Space Foundation

9:35 a.m. | Keynote Address

• Congressman Doug Lamborn, United States Representative, Fifth District of Colorado

10:00 a.m. | Fireside Chat and Audience Q&A

• Congressman Doug Lamborn, United States Representative, Fifth District of Colorado

Moderator

• Rebeccah Heinrichs, Senior Fellow and Director, Keystone Defense Initiative, Hudson Institute

11:00 a.m. | Panel 1: The Progress and Challenges of American Hypersonic Capabilities

• Admiral James A. Winnefeld Jr., Ninth Vice Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
• Mike White, Former Principal Director for Hypersonics, Office of the Secretary of Defense
• John Plumb, Former Assistant Secretary of Defense for Space Policy

Moderator

• William Chou, Deputy Director, Japan Chair, Hudson Institute

12:00 p.m. | Break 

12:30 p.m. | IN-PERSON ONLY | Working Lunch: The State of the Industry

2:00 p.m. | Panel 2: The Hill Perspective on Building Bipartisan Consensus

• Congressman Don Bacon, United States Representative, Second District of Nebraska
• Congressman Donald Norcross, United States Representative, First District of New Jersey
• Congressman Vince Fong, United States Representative, Twentieth District of California

Moderator

• Daniel McKivergan, Vice President, Government Relations, Hudson Institute

3:00 p.m. | Event Concludes

Event Transcript

This transcription is automatically generated and edited lightly for accuracy. Please excuse any errors.

Rebeccah Heinrichs:

It’s a privilege to welcome you all here, physically here at Hudson Institute, and for those watching online at home, thank you so much for joining us. I know many of you, but for those of you whom I haven’t had the pleasure of meeting, I’m Rebeccah Heinrichs. I’m a senior fellow here at Hudson Institute. I’m also the director of our Keystone Defense Initiative. Years ago, I had a boss who urged me to keep a record of even small wins in the course of our work. Why? Well, because sometimes we can fail to see that we have made progress and then we rob ourselves of a bit of encouragement we need to keep digging in and pressing on.

So, this workshop is really to serve two purposes. One, to keep stock, take stock of the wins on hypersonic work, both offense and defense, and then also assess what we need to do to build on this and yes, to go faster. I’m thrilled to be co-hosting this event with the Space Foundation who has been an excellent partner and more on that in just a minute, but there is no better person to kick off the morning than the man who has been a standout leader in the Congress on this issue. Congressman Doug Lamborn came to Congress 18 years ago when I was a house staffer for another member of Congress, Congressman Trent Franks, and who was also on the Health Armed Services Committee.

I had the honor of giving Congressman Lamborn as a freshman, I think, one of his first briefings on missile defense. So, it’s just an honor to do this with him today, and it’s just been such a joy to see how effective he has led the Congress on coming up with real solutions for US missile defense among other things. His leadership has been focused, effective, and truly indispensable. But before a proper introduction of the Congressman, we have another leader here, Major General Heather Pringle is the CEO of the Space Foundation, the world’s premier nonprofit organization for the global space ecosystem.

Prior to joining the Space Foundation, General Pringle served for 30 years in the US Air Force, where she served as commander and technology executive officer of the Air Force Academy. She has a Bachelor of Science in Human Factors from the US Air Force Academy and both an MA and PhD in engineering psychology. General Pringle, we are thrilled to have you here. The floor is yours.

Heather Pringle:

Thank you. All right. Good morning. How’s everybody doing? All right. Congressman, you’re thrilled about this topic and it’s great to have you here. So, good morning and welcome to everyone. Yes, I am Heather Pringle, CEO of Space Foundation. We are a nonprofit dedicated to advancing space, both for national security as well as economic prosperity. So, through this lens, it’s no surprise that we are partnered with the Hudson Institute on this very important discussion that we’re going to have today. So, thank you so much, Rebeccah, to you and your team for allowing us the privilege of partnering with you. We’re involved because hypersonics, when applied to space, is a critical element of both defense and technological leadership.

From a defense perspective, of course, hypersonics could enhance our ability to deter adversaries in space and ensure our space superiority in a domain where without a doubt it is a contested environment. Moreover, the dual-use aspects of hypersonics technology contributes to our technological leadership as a nation, innovation, and collaborative space missions with allies. But above all, hypersonics is far from a mainstream topic. We can lean on very few individuals in this nation who could contribute to an authoritative to discussion. So, it’s an honor to be with each and every one of you here today, a cross-disciplinary and distinguished group of individuals. Your expertise ranges from technological development to production, as well as commercial and governmental interests.

So, I’m really looking forward to delving into the details and the nuances here shortly, but first, I want to thank Representative Lamborn for his leadership, your foresight, and selflessness in ensuring that this topic, one that matters so much to our nation but far from mainstream would get the attention that it deserves. It’s thanks to you that we are all here today. So, let me tell you a little about the congressman’s record. Since 2007, Congressman Lamborn served on the House Armed Services Committee and focused heavily on building up our military space and missile defense missions.

He is the co-chair of the Congressional Hypersonics Caucus, and in his role as the chairman of the Strategic Forces Subcommittee, Congressman Lamborn chaired the first and every subsequent hearing on hypersonic capabilities, setting precedent for all future subcommittee chairs. Congressman Lamborn is steeped in various hypersonics programs across the Army, Navy, Air Force, Missile Defense Agency, and DARPA. He has a deep appreciation for the national laboratories, near and dear to my heart. So, I’m actually from the Air Force Research Lab. That was my last job, but he believes that they consistently provide the foundation for industry who are represented here as well today to scale cutting-edge technologies into fieldable systems.

Moreover, the congressman was instrumental in numerous legislative initiatives that comprehensive build our nation’s capacity, including research, development, and testing of hypersonic capabilities, offense and defensive, concepts and strategies, partnerships across industry, academia, and military. Importantly, he advocated for full funding of programs. Thank you very much. Though he is retiring after 18 years of loyal, selfless service to our nation, your impact, Congressman, extends well beyond your tenure. So, on behalf of all of us in this room, thank you so much for your leadership and your vision. The floor is yours. Please join me in a round of applause for the congressman.

Doug Lamborn:

Thank you so much.

Heather Pringle:

Thank you.

Doug Lamborn:

Heather, thank you so much for those kind words. I really am touched by that and appreciate what you shared. Thank you so much. Your leadership at the Space Foundation is just amazing and will have worldwide impact, not just national impact. So, thank you all for being here. What a distinguished group of people. This is really amazing. I’m really honored to be here. For all of you who are watching the streaming version of this, thank you for joining in as well. I want to thank everyone for making this possible. There are a lot of folks, a lot of organizations that came together for this. First of all, I want to thank the Hudson Institute for hosting this event, whose building we’re in at this moment.

They share my sense of urgency over hypersonics development and other important issues of national defense. They’ve added this issue to the many other conversations that they are influencing and stimulating. They have become a leading player in the think tank community. They have an amazing brain trust. Some of their fellows are here today, some of their staff are here today, of course, Ryan Tolley, who used to be on the Strategic Forces Subcommittee until recently as professional staff, and others, Rebeccah, yourself. I know there are others here today in that same category. It’s very impressive what you bring to the table. Major General Heather Pringle, I thank you. I thank the Space Foundation for co-sponsoring this event.

As we know, she was the commander at AFREL and did amazing work down there. I was down there one time when you were building a hypersonic vehicle or maybe that was before your command, but that’s the kind of work that AFREL has done and is so amazing. The Space Foundation, as you may know, it hosts and puts on the biggest space event in the world each year, the Space Symposium in Colorado Springs every April. This last April, 12,000 people attended and 47 countries were represented there, so that’s an amazing thing that they do every single year. I also want to thank the other panelists in our panels later this morning. Rebeccah, yourself, you’re one of these folks. You’re going to be moderating and quizzing me during the fireside chat.

Eighteen years ago, I think you must’ve been in high school or something. You were a child prodigy or something like that, but I do remember and fondly many times we’ve gotten together and spoken about missile defense and other critical issues for national security. Also, you were a trusted voice on the Commission on the Strategic Posture of the United States and you’re on US STRATCOM’s Advisory Board. So, we really appreciate that. We have other panelists who have worked tirelessly and who bring an incredible expertise to the table. My thanks to Admiral Sandy Winnefeld, a former Vice Chairman of the Joint Chief of Staff and US Northern Commander. You bring a unique and vital perspective to the need for hypersonics and the defense of hypersonics that might be used against us.

Thank you also to Mr. Mike White, the former Principal Director of Hypersonics in the Office of the Secretary of Defense, and Dr. John Plumb, former Assistant Secretary of Defense for Space. Both have graciously agreed to come out of their retirement for today to be part of this important symposium and they’ll provide their in-depth analysis for both offensive and defensive systems and the test infrastructure needed to make that happen. In Congress whenever they testified in front of our committee or subcommittee, I always listen very carefully to their testimony because they provided simply the best testimony available. Later this afternoon, I’ll be pleased to be joined by Representatives Don Bacon, Don Norcross, and Vince Fong, a bipartisan group of my colleagues from the house.

These are people who are leaders and are becoming leaders in the field of national security. So, they will add a great perspective also. Also, just thanks to all of the various staffers at the Hudson Institute and Space Foundation and my personal staffers like Michael Curcio and others who are my national security advisor and all the others who are providing such an amazing background. As Rebeccah mentioned or Heather mentioned, I am retiring at the end of this year after nine terms in Congress, and it was my highest honor to be the Chairman of the House Armed Services Strategic Forces Subcommittee. That committee oversees our nuclear missile defense, hypersonic, and military space programs.

This has given me a unique perspective to some of our nation’s most pressing threats. We hear things in different closed and open hearings that keep you awake at night, but it’s important to be aware of these threats. Part of my job in Congress is to take this message to other members of Congress who don’t get the almost daily threat briefings or other briefings that we need to have. So, sometimes there’s a gap that we have to fill in and educate our fellow colleagues in Congress, but I have fought hard to ensure that the US stays at the forefront of advances in warfare. I and others will sound the alarm when we’re falling behind. Of course, that’s why we’re doing this hypersonic symposium today because we are behind, a little bit more about that in a minute.

Also, we have other pressing issues like nuclear modernization and the increasingly contested space domain, but hypersonic weapons is something that’s of particular concern to me and why I’ve jumped into this in recent years. China is fielding massive amounts of hypersonics. They want to have multitudes of these by the end of the decade, but they already have a lot fielded. Russia has some hypersonic capability. We’ve seen that in Ukraine unfortunately, where it’s led to the loss of a lot of life. They’re behind China, but they’re still way ahead of us. Russia has been researching hypersonic technology for the past 40 years and it’s things like the air-launched Kinzhal have been seen to be used in Ukraine.

The Chinese have demonstrated a high pace of flight testing, resulting in the rapid advancement of its conventional and even nuclear-armed hypersonic missile technology. Both countries, as I stated, have operational capabilities. The Chinese Communist Party will stop at nothing to show its dominance if it can do so, and we have to pay attention to that. We were at one time the leader in hypersonic technology, and some would even say that we invented it. Back in the early ‘60s, Neil Armstrong achieved hypersonic speeds in the X-15. Even years before, he was the first person to walk on the moon.

Two decades later in his State of the Union Address on February 4th, 1986, Ronald Reagan declared that the nation would embark on developing a hypersonic aircraft capable of flying from Washington to Tokyo in two hours. We all know what he did with SDI, but he was also wanting to be on the forefront and the US to be on the forefront of hypersonics. Ultimately, these and other hypersonic programs did not survive years of hollowed out defense budgets, and unfortunately, we were needing to focus on counterterrorism operations. These divided our attention and kept us from focusing primarily on great power competition. As a result, technology such as scramjet engines or thermal protection engines that we could have developed have yet to come to fruition.

So, we must correct this trajectory now. Since taking over as chairman of the subcommittee, we’ve made many strides in progressing both our offensive capabilities and our sensing capabilities and we’re beginning work on defensive capabilities. However much more needs to be done. We have brought the army to the point where LRHW is transitioning from RCCTO to PEO missile systems. Earlier this year, the Navy completed a successful stool test of conventional prompt strike. The Air Force successfully tested Arrow in China’s backyard. However, I believe it is a short-sighted decision that the Air Force has not yet moved the system into production, and I would urge Secretary Kendall to do so. We must also continue to invest in fueling the HACM and HALO systems.

My motivation to call attention to these issues is not just because China and Russia have these systems. Some people have accused us of just being copycats that they have it, we have to have it. No, it’s not that at all. Our military commanders tell us that they will need potentially to strike a specific set of highly important targets that are at a great distance early in a conflict with a high degree of confidence. Right now, we only have slow cruise missiles with limited range or ballistic missiles with unpredictable trajectories. These weapons will not get the job done when the enemy has a full magazine of missile defense interceptors. We need something that can go fast, go far, and evade defenses. That’s also why we need to modernize our own air defenses to neutralize the threat of an attack by hypersonic missiles against our homeland.

Fundamental to our defense is developing sensors that can provide quality fire control data to our effectors. I was pleased to see HBTSS launched earlier this year, but we must build on that capability by fully transitioning these sensors and the fire control quality data they provide to the proliferated warfighting space architecture. Investing in these kinds of sensors would be futile without effectors that can close the kill chain faster and at a greater distance. Patriot and SM-6 successfully engaging hypersonic missiles in the terminal phase are too close for comfort. That is why I push to accelerate the development of the Glide Phase Interceptor in the National Defense Authorization Act. The law directs the Department of Defense to field this system by 2029.

Fielding the system later, like such as 2035, will be as Vice Admiral Hill has said in recent testimony, irrelevant. That’s simply too late. I firmly believe that directed energy and microwave systems are critical for the future of missile defense and not only against slower and less exquisite threats such as we’re seeing in the Middle East, but also against hypersonics. To follow through on this, we must chart a solid way forward and it begins with effective testing. Let me be clear. We do not test enough and we don’t test in the right way. Earlier this year, my subcommittee heard from George Rumford, the Director of the Test Resource Management Center or TRMC. He testified that he would like to do a flight test every week to mature our hypersonics program. I agree with him. This is vital.

But right now, we hardly test every quarter. We need to start flying more often and get comfortable with incurring risks that are associated with a higher test cadence. One of my top priorities in this year’s NDAA was to bolster the mock TB program. I believe the Pentagon needs to fully resource this as a program of record next year. If it does not, Congress should mandate it in the NDAA to include forcing the DOD to provide a full resource portfolio for it. We also need to start testing over land. Overwater testing is severely limited by range resources, instrumentation, and time. That is why DOD must follow Congress’s mandate to designate an overland corridor for hypersonic testing, and we must leverage partnerships such as AUKUS agreement.

Admiral, you said you just came from overseas and I will bet AUKUS was part of your discussion there. We can increase the technological readiness levels of key partners and allies by doing this kind of partnering, and we must incorporate hypersonic defense into UCOM and INDOPACOM training and exercises. This effort must also include the individual services in the role of organizing, training, and equipping our forces. One example would be the Navy’s exercise gray flag. Another idea is to include offensive and defensive hypersonic scenarios into the various pre-deployment exercises our battle groups and formations go through. The first time a sailor sees a hypersonic threat on an Aegis fire control system should not be in combat.

Most importantly, Congress must consistently pass predictable and sustained funding. Some argue that our defense budget is too bloating. I disagree with this. While I believe we must constantly strive for efficiencies in all facets of government spending, it is a fact that defense budget as a percentage of GDP is approaching historic lows at a time when the world is experiencing destabilizing forces not seen in generations. Look at the Middle East. Look at Eastern Europe. Look at what’s being threatened in the Pacific. Lastly, I think most of you in this room would agree that we can no longer afford continuing resolutions that greatly disrupt program development and highly discourage industry from making the capital investments necessary to execute them.

It’s been months since the house passed over to the Senate the National Defense Authorization Act and the defense appropriation bills and the Senate has simply sat on those and done almost nothing. So, this is one of the things that has to change. Now, I realize the points I’ve laid out here today are ambitious, but we must not lose our focus again. Ronald Reagan set a vision for our nation 38 years ago to lead in hypersonic technology and it’s time that we as a nation follow through. To that end, I believe we have gathered the right people from government, industry, and academia to reinvigorate Reagan’s initiative. Many of you are here in this room today.

I hope this event is the first of many that gathers the right people together to discuss the progress we’ve made and to chart a path forward to ensure that our nation does not fall behind again. While I may be leaving Congress in three months, I fully intend to stay engaged and working with all of you in the future. I know that we are in good hands with the kind of talent that we have today and once again that I see represented here in this room. Thank you all for being here and everything you do to advance this critical capability, and thank you for everything you do to support our national defense.

Rebeccah Heinrichs:

Thank you, Congressman. So, the plan is I’m going to engage in a little conversation with the Congressman and then we’ll leave some time for you all for questions that you may have for him as well and then we’ll wrap up about 10:50, a little bit of time for a comfort break before we move on to the next panel discussion. Congressman, I want to start with the threat because that’s really what’s driving this. It feels like the threat is getting worse very quickly, just even the last four or five years. So, let’s start there. China, Russia, North Korea, and Iran, are you of the minds that these countries are developing something like an axis of coordinated efforts to undermine the United States and our allies?

Doug Lamborn:

I absolutely do, and you should also add North Korea to that list. These folks are working together. We’ve seen that more, and by working together, they have a synergy that they do not have just working separately. Now, the US is doing, I think, a good job. Think of AUKUS. Think of NATO. We have some great partners and allies. We work with Israel in the Middle East. So, we have some great partnerships. Maybe they’re learning from us. Maybe they’re learning how important partnerships are and they’re forming their own group and collaboration.

We see when Russian manufacturing is being knocked out, I think if I’m not mistaken, one of their two factories for making artillery tubes has been destroyed by the Ukrainians, but they’re turning to North Korea and Iran to fill in the gap and those countries are doing so. Yeah, absolutely, Rebeccah.

Rebeccah Heinrichs:

Yeah. One of the things that we concluded on the Strategic Posture Commission is when I went back through and read the report, even after we were done with it, different things even become clearer, even after you read your own report. It’s that this axis, their theory of victory is to undermine US alliances because US alliances are most concretely our military center of gravity. Our alliances are good in of themselves because that’s what enables the US-led order to function.

Doug Lamborn:

If I could add one more thing, we are also seeing Russia supply nuclear technology to China because Russia has been a leader in some forms of nuclear power along with the US, the two most advanced countries in the world in that area. They’re sharing that with China.

Rebeccah Heinrichs:

Something that we couldn’t conceive of or had a lot of skeptics say even just a few years ago that would never happen. So, they keep crossing these lines, this limitless partnership. Well, on the technology side, you mentioned hypersonics really are not new. So, this is something that you’re trying to get people to pay attention to now, but it’s really because the United States took our eye off the ball. You said that some people would say, “We invented this technology.”

We really did, but we stopped and we focused more on low-intensity conflict in the Middle East, rather than preparing for great power competition and to deter major power war. So, China and Russia never stopped. Do you see a risk of us getting to a point where we think, “Okay, we’ve stabilized the situation and stopping again”, or do you see this as something that the United States is going to invest in this technology and be in this great power competition for some time?

Doug Lamborn:

In the field of hypersonics-

Rebeccah Heinrichs:

Hypersonics, yup.

Doug Lamborn:

. . . in particular? Absolutely, we need to press forward and we don’t even have the luxury of thinking we can stabilize. We’re so far behind having not fielded a single hypersonic vehicle yet, although we’re close, but we haven’t fielded a single one. So, we can’t even have the luxury of thinking we can stabilize.

Rebeccah Heinrichs:

On the stabilizing question, it seems like the debate has shifted. In part, the debate in Congress has shifted on these issues because the threat is just pressing down so hard on us. But at a time, there was this thought that if we invest in hypersonics, there’s going to be this action-reaction and that we are going to precipitate an arms race if we invest in this technology. It’ll be creating more destabilizing dynamic. I assume that’s not your view, but if you want to expound upon on that.

Doug Lamborn:

I have actually the opposite view. I think it’s destabilizing to let a significant capability be in the hands of adversaries and us not to have that same capability. That’s what’s destabilizing.

Rebeccah Heinrichs:

Right, you could look at across the board on other kinds, the strategic breakout of the Chinese nuclear program, et cetera. It’s this same idea. At this point, in order to stabilize the situation, the United States needs to continue to invest in and modernize.

Doug Lamborn:

I think it’s really important, and Admiral Winnefeld may even touch on this later, but it’s important for the combatant commanders to have as many options as possible. That’s one reason why many of us are pushing for SLCM-N, sea-launched cruise missiles that are nuclear capable, if necessary, to give another capability to our triad or to offensive actions to meet certain needs that otherwise could only be addressed by something much more impactful or much smaller. There’s nothing in the middle there. So, that’s something that we have to do. We have as many options and as many arrows in the quiver as possible.

Rebeccah Heinrichs:

Well, I think what you just mentioned is very important as a matter of strategy that we’re just now catching up to. STRATCOM has been working on this, but the rest of our combatant commands got to get this too, which is that where there’s the greatest risk of deterrence failure versus a major power, it’s going to be regionally and it’ll probably start with a conventional conflict that may have the effect of crossing the nuclear threshold. So, the area where the United States really needs to bolster its credibility of its deterrent effects is these other rungs, if you will, for lack of a better word.

Doug Lamborn:

I agree 100 percent.

Rebeccah Heinrichs:

So it’s the conventional hypersonic capabilities, and then it’s also, as you mentioned, SLCM-N, a regional variable yield capability.

Doug Lamborn:

Exactly, exactly.

Rebeccah Heinrichs:

You wrote an op-ed about getting our hypersonic test schedule up and faster. So, talk about that and you did talk about this a little bit. It’s range, so there’s some really technical issues that we have to get in place first, but then how much of this is a mentality shift or a culture shift in order to get the United States to get our testing cadence up to where it needs to be?

Doug Lamborn:

Well, some of it is a mentality shift, and that’s why me and some others are really pushing in this area to get everyone on the same page. Also, funding has to match that as well, and we’re pushing for funding for testing and to try to open up some of the current bottlenecks. I see some good things happening in academia, like Purdue is doing some great work for testing. We have wind tunnels that are developing. Those can be good for testing components, but testing full range, full bodies of vehicles. We have some creative approaches. Stratolaunch has some really key capabilities that it’s working on.

We’re doing some good things with testing, and I mentioned over land as opposed to over water. This is something where a partner like Australia might even be able to help. In the US, we really need to have a corridor that can be used for testing and that’s cleared with all the proper government agencies and so on for safety reasons. But we do have to have all kinds of testing, whether it’s wind tunnels, whether it’s full vehicle, whether it’s over land. All of these things are necessary. I’ve worked really hard for funding and we’re making progress there, but we have more to do.

Rebeccah Heinrichs:

And don’t you think? When I try to explain to people too about the changes that the country needs to make now that we are, really I think, in the beginning of a new Cold War with two major nuclear powers. And then, these rogue actors that are collaborating with these two nuclear powers. Well, North Korea is nuclear, and then, Iran near threshold state.

You mentioned the need to get the investments in DoD up to a higher percentage of GDP, closer to where we’ve been in similar situations in history.

But it’s not even just a money problem. It is a mentality shift. We do not test. . . In other words, too risk-averse in our testing, which that’s a luxury. It’s a luxury to be as risk-adverse in our testing as we have. That’s really a peacetime I think phenomenon that. . . And that there is some deterrent effect, there should be, you would think there would be, to our adversaries to see us rapidly testing and getting serious about that. Would you agree that there’s some value . . .? Even if the tests fail, there’s good kinds of failure too, which is that you’re learning from those failures and you’re still dedicated to the capabilities so you keep going.

Doug Lamborn:

Absolutely. And I think you’ve put your finger on something that unfortunately we see at the Pentagon sometimes. Risk-adverseness. People don’t want to see money spent on a failure, and I understand the impulse to save money and make everything as successful as possible, but we learn from failures.

Elon Musk is well known for pushing forward and some of the advances people thought would never happen are because SpaceX was willing to endure failures at times. And that’s expensive, but you learn so much. So, we have to have that same kind of rapid deployment, rapid research and R&D mentality and impulse that we see in the private sector.

Rebeccah Heinrichs:

And that reminds me when Musk had. . . There was an unsuccessful launch and he sent out pictures of it on X, and was just like, “The lose was great.” He said it was great because, to your point sir, he was pointing out that they learned. They learned from that failure and he actually didn’t even view the thing on net as a failure. And so, I think that there’s something that we’ve got to get in the business.

Doug Lamborn:

And we see this now. Obviously, the Chinese and Russian have a different command economy than we have here in the US, and they can tell people to do it, and the companies fall in line.

But we have to have that same kind of willingness to make mistakes and in our bureaucracy at the Pentagon. We have to have that willingness to learn from mistakes. And Congress needs to not react by saying, “Oh, we’re going to pull funding because there was a mistake.” Congress has to do its job too and support testing in something so critical.

Rebeccah Heinrichs:

So, let’s stick with Congress there to begin. And I think this really fundamentally gets to what. . . China I think is the leader of this axis just because it has the most economic might and military capability to do the most damage. Although, Russia obviously is an acute and chronic threat, and seeking to subjugate Ukraine, but fundamentally break up NATO.

But what do you see though in. . . Part of what China, the point that they’re trying to make among others, is that because United States is an open society and a democracy that we’re unable to go as fast as they are. That they have a system of government that is better and more efficient. So, I think you hit the nail on the head. Part of our responsibility at this point is convincing one another and getting consensus, which brings us to Congress.

And I’m thrilled that we’re going to have a bipartisan panel here this afternoon I think which is a testament to your leadership. So, how is Congress doing on this? I mean lots of disagreements inside Congress right now, but do you get the sense that we’re getting on T . . . We’ve had two major commissions. The National Defense Strategy Commission, the commission that I had the privilege of serving on, the Strategic Posture Commission, bipartisan unanimous reports that both came out and said we’re in the most dangerous time since World War II and through the Cold War as well. Is that having an effect? Is it driving some bipartisan understanding or agreement or collaboration that we can be hopeful for?

Doug Lamborn:

Rebeccah, there is. And we are growing in our consensus that we need to address this particular threat. And I think the funding will be better as a result. And Congress needs to send a strong demand signal to industry that there will be constant streams of funding and it won’t go back and forth, up and down. It’ll be strong. It’ll be there consistently.

I’d like to see multi-year procurement contracts for this. In so many things, I’d like to see more multi-year contracts and appropriations.

So yeah, but there is an awareness that the threat is increasing and there’s a bipartisan agreement and consensus forming that we need to do whatever we can to address this. And some of us have been pounding the drums on this and I think it’s having a good effect.

Rebeccah Heinrichs:

All right, I’m going to borrow your optimism and hope that we get some consistent funding on some of these things.

And you’ve mentioned now AUKUS a couple of different times. If we can just talk about AUKUS for just a minute because. . . and I think you would agree with this. To me, AUKUS was never just only about submarines, but AUKUS was much bigger and better than that. And it was really that pillar two of AUKUS, the tech sharing. I mean that’s another I think change in this new Cold War that I assess that we’re in now is that the United States is going to have to get more comfortable sharing technology with our allies. That that’s just it must happen and that we’ve been part of the problem at going too slow on that front.

Doug Lamborn:

Yeah, well I think in general the US is expanding the traditional Five Eyes, which includes Australia, Canada, UK and New Zealand and ourselves. I think we’re going to see more and more work with Germany and France for instance, and other NATO partners. That’s a good thing, this kind of relationship.

Also, I see great potential with Japan and South Korea. I mean those are two very highly advanced in technology countries and they have amazing manufacturing capability, work ethic and so on. And they see the threat closer even maybe than we do being neighbors with some of these countries.

Rebeccah Heinrichs:

And so we need to not only lean on our allies for, yes, buying American weapons systems, which are the best in the world and they are, but then also taking advantage of their own industrial might in capacity that they have.

Doug Lamborn:

Yeah, Rebeccah also, we as a country need to do better. It’s well intended, but we have export controls that are too cumbersome when it comes to key allies, like within AUKUS. I know what the intention was behind them. I agree with that. We’ve got to be careful about exporting critical and sensitive technology, but we have to be able to work with these countries in a way that they have unfettered access to what they need to have to be a real partner with us and do the technological development that they can do.

Rebeccah Heinrichs:

Yeah, I agree. And so, I think sometimes, especially in the NATO context, they’re focusing on getting 2 percent. I think actually probably now 3 percent of their GDP on defense. It is important for as a benchmark, but it doesn’t tell the whole story. There’s a lot more that our allies can contribute and need to contribute.

Doug Lamborn:

And if I could say one more thing that’s similar and related and that is we need to do a better job of declassifying things, so that the public can be aware of what the threats really are out there. I think a couple of years ago when General Hayden talked about what some of our adversary’s capabilities in space were and it really got people’s attention. What can happen to our assets in space with new developments by Russia and China. That got people’s attention, but that’s not easy to do sometimes because of the classification of things. So, we need to do a better job of declassifying things where appropriate, so that the public can be aware as well as working with allies.

Rebeccah Heinrichs:

I think that that’s right and that’s another kind of growing pain that the United States has to get over. And General Hayden has been making that point for years. And he also served on the Strategic Posture Commission and that was one of the points that he continued to make throughout the course of that work. In part on the education point of getting democratic societies to understand how bad the threat is, so they can support public officials to do the right thing. But also across allies, so that we can get baseline about what our adversaries are doing to us and to our allies, so that we can have attribution, and then, I think get a better deterrent effect.

Doug Lamborn:

Absolutely. That’s part of it also. Yeah.

Rebeccah Heinrichs:

Well, Congressman, that’s great. I would love to kick this over to you all since we have such an informed audience in person. Take advantage of some of the questions that you might have for the Congressman as well. So, if you do have a question, if you could just state your name and affiliation. And then right over here in the corner.

Doug Lamborn:

And while the microphone is traveling in that direction, I’m going to warn Michael Curcio and even Ryan Tully that if it’s really technical, I’m going to ask them to help me answer.

Rebeccah Heinrichs:

We have so much technical expertise in the room. This is going to be a group project in effort. So, if somebody else has the answer, please feel free to raise your hand. That’s why we’re here. Jerry?

Jerry Hendricks:

Yes sir. Jerry Hendricks, Sagamore Institute. My question goes to the point of the regulatory oversight on procurement. If we look at the growth of the number of regulations that are in place on the procurement of advanced capabilities. Looking essentially since we started into IBM or IRBMs, ICBMs during the 1950s. We’re seeing almost an eight-fold increase. And much of this comes from the Congress trying to make sure that there’s a free, flat, open market and yet the number of hoops have driven development times and costs longer and longer.

We developed Atlas in five and a half years and it was the hardest thing in the world to do. Today, it takes between 15 to 18 years to get a major program up and running. So, the dot comes back in many ways to the Congress on the level of oversight that it’s placed on this to try and ensure a level playing field. Your comments on that?

Doug Lamborn:

I have to agree with you a 100 percent. And Congress needs to play its part in allowing the flattening out of all these top-down impositions on working with allies with critical technology.

I mean, we know that Iran and other countries, Russia, are good at evading sanctions. They’re good at finding false fronts to buy the technology and then it ends up in their hands. So, we know it’s a problem. We know what the intention is on this technology, but we just have to do a better job. I mean, this is one reason, as alluded to earlier, that China has the potential to go faster than we do. We really have to make up for that. We need a Manhattan Project, I think, for hypersonics. An all-of-government approach where everyone really makes it the priority that it should be so that we get through these hoops and red tapes.

Jerry Hendricks:

Sir, just as a quick follow up on the allies thing. As part of looking at the initial ICBM case study, we were sharing Polaris with the Brits as we were developing it, so that Lord Mountbatten was essentially getting our designs as it was being done, so they could incorporate that into their submarine design at the time. Why we walked away from that type of sharing with close allies, it just doesn’t make sense historically over time.

Rebeccah Heinrichs:

Great comments. Appreciate that Jerry. Somebody else? Question for the congressman.

Audience Member:

[Question inaudible.]

Doug Lamborn:

And Mike, maybe that’s a point you can elaborate on in the panel later that you’re going to be a participant in.

Rebeccah Heinrichs:

It’s a great point

Dave McFarland:

And good morning, Congressman. Dave McFarland, Northrop Grumman. Question I have is I’m a retired sailor, so we focus a lot on talent in the Navy, and growing talent, finding talent.

I heard a tidbit recently that China was graduating more PhDs than we graduate, young engineers. And a lot of those PhDs are educated in the United States. Can you comment on that sort of issue that we struggle with as a nation to find technical talent, bring them into the service, bring them into corporations to do some great work?

Doug Lamborn:

Excellent question. And that is a perennial challenge, and we need to put our shoulder to the wheel constantly, and not let up on that.

You talked about people coming here from overseas and getting advanced degrees. Many of them . . . Now, we have to have security background checks and everything else really in place. But many of these people from all countries of the world, not just China but other countries, would love to stay here in the US. They like our way of life. They would like to contribute to an economy, get a good paying job. And yet our immigration policies don’t always allow for the most highly trained to have a place at the table like I think they should.

So, as long as we’re doing the proper security background checks, I would love to see people with advanced degrees from other countries stay here if they want to and contribute to the US, and make successful companies, and contribute to our national defense if that’s what they would like to do, instead of exporting that back to some other place in the world.

Rebeccah Heinrichs:

Congressman, I know there’s a lot of effort looking at workforce development in the US too and STEM programs.

Doug Lamborn:

Absolutely. That’s another component.

Rebeccah Heinrichs:

It’s another component, and that’s what I looked at after COVID. I kept looking at the test scores, even in primary school and math and science, and it’s not good. And so, we really have to develop and cultivate these young Americans from the early age to get into hard sciences so that they can be best prepared to serve in a patriotic workforce. Yeah. Question in the back here.

Robie Samanta Roy:

Congressman Lambert. Robie Samanta Roy with Cerberus, a private equity firm. So, on the topic of acquisition reform and education, the Congress has been working with the department to ensure that the acquisition workforce is trained, educated on things like OTAs. All the various acquisition acceleration pathways that Congress has put forward.

But here’s an interesting question, speaking as a former SASCA PSM. What’s the educational pathway for our Congressional staffers to really understand the latest in acquisition, the latest that’s happening on the commercial sector? Is just a kind of a thought. Is there sort of, if you will, an executive course that Congressional staffers to really understand the implications of what they’re doing? Have a short course on acquisition reform.

Just a thought because at the end of the day, we all are about lifelong learning, and the department has very institutional ways of doing that. But from a Congressional staffer perspective, there really isn’t something like that. Just a thought.

Doug Lamborn:

Well, let me take that comment as a great suggestion. I think there’s a lot to be said for that. There’s no formal program like that currently in place. The same as when you were there some time ago. So, I would like that. I think that would be good, especially on certain committees or certain subcommittees. That’s an excellent idea.

James Winnefeld Jr.:

Congressman Sandy Winnefeld here. I look forward to chatting a little bit later on. But first of all, thank you for the immense amount of personal time you have given to this whole array of issues, not just hypersonics, but the whole strategic forces piece. We all know that there’s a tremendous pull on politicians to go do either get reelected or other things for their constituents, and it’s remarkable. You’ve been able to . . . Without that kind of advocacy, we wouldn’t be where we are today.

Also, really appreciate the fact that you’ve picked up on the testing side of this thing because the sexy part is the offense and the defense, but the testing is so terribly important.

And I wanted to ask you sort of a side question here. And the truth in advertising. I’m an advisor at Stratolaunch, which you mentioned a minute ago. They would be launching, I think today or tomorrow, one of their Talon vehicles if it weren’t for the almost impossibility of getting anything through the FAA. And I think they’re having to push that off until later next month. And Hendrix talked about friction in the system. Well, that’s part of the friction. Has that crossed your radar scope at all that inside our own inter-agency, we can’t get these kind of things, simple things, done?

Doug Lamborn:

Admiral, it has crossed my mind and it’s been a frustration to me. I know that they have a mission that they’re serious about protecting public safety and that’s a vital mission. We don’t want any failures there obviously, but I think there is a lot of bureaucracy and a lot of foot dragging. And even occasionally, I’m suspicious that there might be some politics involved when they go after a target that’s not in favor of the current administration. And that would be a really abuse, I think, of the power that they wield if they go in that direction.

So, I’ve tried at different times to write letters to help accelerate some of the things where they’ve, in my view anyway, been dragging their feet. And yeah, this is a challenge to us. And when I say an all-of-Government approach, they have to be part of it. They have to have the same urgency and nimbleness and flexibility to get the job done.

Rebeccah Heinrichs:

If I can piggyback on that too, then because I think it’s an important distinction. So, we had a question about acquisition. There’s definitely acquisition challenges and reforms that need to be made that are just there. But then it’s also this is just individual decision making. It’s individual decision making that can slow down the whole thing. So, it’s regulations, but it’s individual people making those decisions about how to implement those regulations.

And so, I get frustrated because sometimes there isn’t . . . You can’t legislate the solution to this. This is going to have to be driven from the top down across these different agencies to get on the same page about what a national imperative this is.

And it’s not just FAA. I mean you can EPA. I mean, I would love to see an administration do an audit of just the regulations, some of which as you said, sir, they’re reasonable. We didn’t put these safety measures in there because people were being foolish about it, but it was a different time. And so, just as the United States made different investments in our weapons systems, we let the defense industrial base atrophy. We also let regulations pile up. So, we’re at a different time where we need pretty serious audit and get individuals kind of working in the same direction.

Doug Lamborn:

And Rebeccah, it’s been refreshing to me when we have people of the caliber of Mike White and John Plumb, who you’ll be hearing more from later today. From different administrations, different backgrounds, but they’re very keenly attuned to the threat, and very much wanting to cut through the red tape, and get the job done, and accelerate our progress as much as possible.

Rebeccah Heinrichs:

Great. Another question. Oh no? One more question. Yeah.

Audience Member:

I would like to thank you for taking time. So you have focused on testing of the hypersonic missiles, but I am interested in the mass production capability of the United States. And someone had already mentioned. The cooperation among the allies could be for delivering or lending some missiles to the allies, but it has to have mass production capability to support this. So, do we have intention to invest into the capability of the industry as well?

Doug Lamborn:

Boy, what an excellent question. Investing into the capability. And we do have some key allies that have tremendous and amazing savvy when it comes to manufacturing capability.

There are bottlenecks in our manufacturing here in the US. Carbon on carbon, the most exquisite manufacturing is one place in Maine that they can really do this. And we need to broaden that out or make them expand. And if they have the proper demand signal from Congress with funding assured in the future, they’d be able to do that. So, some of it is Congress does have to have the right incentives to make the US, as well as the allies that are so good, do the kind of expansions necessary.

I mean, we see this happening with some of the supplies for Ukraine. Like 155 millimeter artillery shells. The US is really ramping up its production and other NATO countries are as well.

So, we can do that. But the US when it sets its mind to it, can really be at the leading and cutting edge of this because we have some great technology. And Winston Churchill said democracy is the worst possible system except for all of the others. Sometimes I think part of what that means is we’re slow to come around to really stepping up to the plate when there’s a crisis, but when we do, we really jump in with both feet and get the job done. And that’s what we need to do in this area in particular, including the manufacturing.

Rebeccah Heinrichs:

Yeah. One more point on that, sir. Another example. You talked about how a lot of people have complained that the United States isn’t able to move faster on weapons, producing the weapons we need at the scale we need to get to the Ukrainians for their defensive war against the Russians. But there have been good news stories, which is remarkable at how fast we have gone. And part of that was the direct acquisition authority that we gave from LaPlante to particular companies to be able to even adapt. There was one system converting, like the JDAM system, to be a ground launch system that the Ukrainians could use. And it was produced and fielded within just months back into the field into the Ukrainians. So, there are good news stories, but we had to do workarounds around our own system that we set up for ourselves.

And so, the challenge then is, especially in hypersonics we’re talking about today, how do we get those exceptions to become the rule, so that this country can move faster.

Please join me now in thanking Congressman Lamborn for his leadership and for the time he’s spent already today. Thank you.

Doug Lamborn:

Thank you.

Rebeccah Heinrichs:

We’re going to take about a 15-minute comfort break and then we’ll come back here and have our next panel.

It’s a real privilege to introduce this next panel. But before I do that, I did want to give you just sort of an order of events here.

So after this, we’ll take a little bit of break while they set us up for lunch. And then, the lunch period for those watching at home, this is your time to go put on some gym shoes and go for a jog. We will just have a Chatham house conversation just with those in the room. General Pringle is going to lead us in just provocative thoughts or questions so that we can start to have a conversation.

And then we also have a questionnaire that we’re going to pass out, so that you can take notes, add some thoughts. It’ll be anonymous. We will collect those, try to put some analytical rigor to it a little bit, and then have a little after action report to send out to all of us so that we have some homework to do and some lessons learned from our conversation today.

But for now, we are going to turn to a panel that I’m really excited about because these are the gentlemen who have all the answers.

And so, it’s a privilege to introduce Admiral James A. Winnefeld. Sandy Winnefeld. He is currently a distinguished professor at Georgia Tech’s Sam Nunn School of International Affairs, and he currently chairs the President’s Intelligence Advisory Board. Admiral Winnefeld previously served as the ninth Vice Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, where he was the nation’s second-highest ranking military officer. His 37-year career in the US Navy also included stints as Commander of the US Sixth Fleet, the US Northern Command, and the North American Aerospace Defense Command, NORAD. He received a Bachelor of Science in aerospace engineering from Georgia Tech.

Dr. Mike White served from 2018 to 2023 as the inaugural principal director for hypersonics in the office of the Undersecretary of Defense for Research and Engineering. In that capacity, Mr. White led the nation’s vision and strategy for developing offensive and defensive war-fighting capability enabled by hypersonic systems. Prior to joining DoD, Mike spent 37 years at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory, at which his most recent role was as Head of its air and missile defense sector.

Mike has both Bachelors of Science degrees and Masters of Science degrees in aerospace engineering from the University of Maryland, College Park.

And then, Dr. John Plumb served as the inaugural Assistant Secretary of Defense for the space policy where he was responsible for the overall supervision of space war-fighting policy for the Department of Defense. I was just talking about this yesterday, so I’m very excited to hear from you today.

Dr. Plumb has served since 2000 as an officer in the US Navy Reserve, and he served for seven years as an active duty officer in the US Navy and civilian life. Dr. Plumb served in various roles in the US Senate, Department of Defense, national Security Council, Iran Corporation, Aerospace Corporation prior to his appointment as Assistant Secretary of Defense for space policy.

And then our own Dr. William Chou here at Hudson. He’s the Deputy Director of Hudson Institute’s Japan Chair. Will’s work focuses on US-Japan relationships in the Indo-Pacific with an emphasis on regional partnerships, defense, innovation, trade and technology. Prior to joining us here at Hudson, Will held positions at the Ronald Reagan Institute, the American and the World Consortium, the US Army Center for Military History in the Institute for Defense Analysis. Dr. Chou holds a BA in History from Yale University and an MA and a PhD from the Ohio State University. How did I not know that until just now? That is one of the best things on this panel, credential wise.

William Chou:

Oh, boy.

Rebeccah Heinrichs:

Well please, please welcome this distinguished panel and we look forward to their conversation.

William Chou:

Great. Thanks so much Rebeccah and thank you and the Space Foundation for holding such an important event and perpetuating some of these wonderful conversations. And obviously thanks to the Congressman for kicking off this conference today with his thoughtful remarks and looking forward to the conversation I’m going to have with our distinguished panelists.

So, I’d like to kick it off first with some strategic context, and I’d like to sort of talk to Admiral Winnefeld about this question, which is we’ve heard folks like Vice Admiral Wolfe testify about the need to hit certain targets early in the conflict and have a high degree of confidence that our munitions will make it to their hard target. Can you provide a little more color on this? Why is it important to a combat commander and can you think about what some of these targets might be? If you can speak a little bit about this?

James Winnefeld Jr.:

Sure. So we actually came at this a little bit later than you might’ve expected for a couple of reasons. One, if you look at why China and Russia started to develop hypersonic weapons, it was really because they were worried about our ballistic missile defenses. And that is why they’ve done other things like this crazy underwater weapon and that kind of thing. We did not have that same problem. And meanwhile, we were fighting this twenty-year war in Iraq and Afghanistan and it sort of took our eye off that ball and came to it late.

But we actually need these weapons for different reasons than what the Russians and Chinese caused them to develop it. And that is if your adversary has developed the capability to keep you at arm’s length, which the Chinese have been developing for 20 years while we were fighting those other wars, and you have targets that you need to hit quickly, you’ve got to have a really, really fast weapon to do it.

And I would point out a couple of situations that actually call for the different types of hypersonic weapons we have. And I can’t get into exact targets or anything like that, even if I knew what they were, I wouldn’t want to speculate on them. But I can give you two broad categories.

If there’s a target early on in a conflict that is sort of a disproportional capability, that’s a point target that you really want to take out as quickly as you possibly can, as early in the conflict as you possibly can, and you need to do it from a distance, you pretty much need to have a hypersonic capability that is probably a boost-glide system because your forces may not have closed yet, and you may be trying to take these things out while your forces are closing, which really argues for systems like Conventional Prompt Strike, for ARRW, things like that.

And then once you actually get into this conflict, whether it’s with Russia or China, it’s probably going to be a long slog of a war. And you need to have scale and you need to be able to have aircraft, F-15s, F-18s, what have you, carry weapons that can fly. Maybe not as far as a Conventional Prompt Strike or an ARRW, but can go really, really fast for emergent targets, for targets that are heavily defended. So, you have that penetration capability. And that’s where the air breathers, I think, come in. And those have to be produced at massive scale. Whereas maybe the boost-glide weapons, you may not need as many of those because you’re going to be using them at a particular phase of the conflict.

So, definitely a combatant commander needs these things. We didn’t realize it until late, which is why we’re late to the game of developing them.

And then I would point out, Congressman Lamborn mentioned defense. I can tell you as a former NORTHCOM commander, I was stunned by how much more we spend on offense than we do on defense. And I always looked at things through the lens of protecting our most vital national security interests and our most vital national security interests are frankly, survival of the nation as a free market democracy, and prevention of what I would call catastrophic attacks on the nation. And I was really surprised at the lack of capacity we have for that. So not only is hypersonic missile defense important in the theater, defending aircraft carriers, land bases, what have you, it’s going to be important for defending the homeland. And I hope we get a chance to talk about that a little bit later on. But it’s important to that particular combatant, Commander, NORTHCOM and NORAD as well.

William Chou:

Yeah, and we’ll certainly talk more about the defensive aspects of hypersonics as well, certainly with the other gentlemen on the panel. But just to follow that up again on the strategic context, can you talk a little bit about what kind of deterrence values do these systems provide from the perspective of either our enemies as well as our allies?

James Winnefeld Jr.:

Sure. So I would say that when Xi Jinping or Vladimir Putin wakes up in the morning and thinks about, “Okay, I’m going to make my big move today.” You want them to say, “Well, maybe not today.” And a big component, there are a lot of components of the, “Not today,” but one of the major components is, “I’m going to lose the battle of what Captain Wayne Hughes, former Navy strategist used to call attack effectively first.” If I’m going to lose that battle, then maybe I’m not going to go today. And so hypersonics, in that regard, present a very special element of deterrence that I think is really important. And that goes for our allies as well, I mean, we’re all in this together and they either need to know we’ve got the capability or they need to develop it themselves or better co-develop it, so we can get that deterrent value from these systems.

William Chou:

Terrific. So I’d like to sort of shift a little bit more to the technical side and turn to some of our other guests here, in terms of folks who have worked on the programmatic level. I’d like to ask, Mike, you’ve seen the fits and starts in our hypersonic programs over the years. Is the US going to field the hypersonic system at this time?

Mike White:

I think the answer to that is yes. We’ve done a lot of work over the last five years to get over the gap between doing R&D and fielding weapon system capability. So our real focus over the last five years or so has been to develop the weapons system capabilities that will then immediately transition to the warfighter. I’m going to field explanation as to why is succinct and perfect as I’ve heard. So I think we need to deliver that capability as quickly as possible. And we have a number of programs between ARRW, LRHW, CPS and HACM and HALO to do that. So we’re moving towards capability versus just technology. So that’s the difference this time.

William Chou:

Okay. Well thanks for mentioning some of the systems that you just talked about right there. If you don’t mind, I mean, can you actually walk us through some of the nuanced capabilities that these various systems provide? So for instance, the Air Launch Rapid Response Weapon, the AARW versus the Long Range Hypersonic Weapon, the LRHW, as well as conventional prompt strikes, CPS versus Hypersonic Attack Cruise Missile, HACMs.

Mike White:

Yeah. So there’s basically two kinds of systems that the Admiral referred to; boost-glide systems and cruise missiles. LRHW and Navy CPS are boost-glide systems, which mean they have relatively large rocket motors that boost a very high hypersonic Mach numbers. Then the hypersonic vehicle separates and glides to a target, and those systems can be very long range.

So ARRW is the air launched version of a boost-glide system. LRHW and CPS are the land and sea launched versions respectively. Those two systems are using a common all up round. So we are building one missile to be launched from land and from sea. And so those boost-glide systems give us a very early capability to reach deep in country and go after high value targets.

The cruise missile, on the other hand, used as an air-breathing engine. Rocket motor is just big enough to boost to a Mach number of around Mach five, and then the air-breathing engine takes over for sustained a long range flight. While nominally not quite as long range in the way we’re developing as the boost-glide systems, the reason is because we’re developing those systems to fit on fighters versus bombers for the air launched version. So we are size constrained by the fighters, but we still get significant ranges at very high speeds. So we can travel hundreds miles in minutes, be highly survivable and deliver effects that we need to in a timely manner, and we can develop them in mass because they’re smaller, they’re they’re more affordable and we can build more of them and we just have to make the commitment to develop them en masse.

William Chou:

Well, I’m really glad that you mentioned the mass production and the affordability side, because that really addresses some. . . One quick follow-up that I was going to ask you, which is do we need both types of systems, both the boost-glide as well as the air-breathers, and obviously I think you’ve really differentiate why, how they serve different purposes. So I’d like to turn to John at this point, in the Ukraine, we’ve seen Patriots with the capabilities to intercept hypersonic missiles, SM-6’s also have the capability in the terminal phase.

We’re developing the glide phase interceptor, and all of this is really relevant to me, particularly as someone who works on Japan, because a lot of these programs are the ones that we’re also working with our Japanese allies on. I guess my question for you is can you explain the need to target hypersonic missiles in both the glide and terminal phases and how does making the hypersonic maneuver in the glide phase also enable much more likely intercept in the terminal? If you can walk us through this.

John Plumb:

Sure, thanks Will. So as far as terminal plus glide phase, just like you want to go after ballistic missiles in terminal and midcourse phase and boost, if you can get them right, more shot opportunities is better defense. Glide phase intercept concept pushes that kind of defense range out farther, so you have more shot opportunities, you can increase your defense range. So I think the need for both is relatively straightforward. As far as the idea of using glide phase intercept to force maneuvers on an incoming weapon, we have to be very careful blanket statements. You’ve got to be very careful about the idea that the threat that exists right now will be the same as the threat in a year or two years, five years. But generally speaking, if a missile’s maneuvering, it’s increasing its drag, increasing its thermal load, and so then maybe it reduces its ability to maneuver an end game. Its speed and end game makes a terminal shot more likely for success.

William Chou:

Okay.

James Winnefeld Jr.:

Can I ask to just add really quickly, I was really encouraged that Congressman Lamborn kind of hinted at directed energy as well. I’m not talking lasers here because lasers don’t like clouds, you have to dwell and that sort of thing, but there’s I think a lot of potential there for what I would call ultra-high powered microwaves, not the kinds of things they’re shooting down little drones or anything like that. And it’s been proven, and I could say this at an unclassified level, it’s significant ranges, you can do some significant damage. And when you consider the cost of some of these weapons, we’re going to have to explore that as well.

William Chou:

Yeah, and thank you for chiming with that, Admiral Winnefeld. I think just as a general rule, these questions are direct at individuals, but obviously given the incredible expertise on this panel, please feel free to jump in at any time.

Mike White:

I will take advantage of that.

William Chou:

Let’s do that. Let’s go with that, Mike.

Mike White:

And thank you Rebecca for my honorary doctorate degree, I appreciate that. But before I took the job at the Pentagon, I was at APL doing air missile defense. And when we step back and look at the problem of air missile defense, especially against an adversary with large numbers, you absolutely need layers in your kinetic defense, but even that can’t be enough. And so we worked on a concept that I brought to the Pentagon called a comprehensive layer defeat. That means you have to understand your threat, understand the quantity and capability of that threat, and you have to look at a four quadrant approach to look left of launch and right of launch, and then kinetic and non-kinetic effects and all that domain and make sure that you defeat the adversary kill chain at every possible opportunity using those effects in an integrated, comprehensive strategy.

William Chou:

That’s excellent. So gents, I’m going to shift a little bit more to the programming side now. And again, this question is for John, but please feel free to jump in. So John, you were in the administration when Hypersonic and Ballistic Tracking Space Center HBTSS was launched by the Missile Defense Agency. Do you have confidence that the Space Defense Agency and Space Systems Command will pick up where MDA left it off?

John Plumb:

So the department and this administration are deeply invested in a proliferated resilient missile warning missile threat system. There’s billions of dollars going into it in the budget. So HBTSS, I like to call it Hobbits, if someone from MDA is here, no offense. Kind of an exquisite concept, MDA has great engineers, they often develop very exquisite and expensive things, and of course you want to do something at scale at MEO, then you’re going to need something that’s more affordable. I do believe we’ll be on track for that, it’s built into the requirements, it’s built into the approach. My understanding is that tranche for SDA is probably towards the end of this decade is the plan, and making sure that we can get there. I think it’s going to be a combination of using the efficiency of the commercial market plus the exquisite sensors that might be able to develop.

William Chou:

Interesting. Okay. And I actually do want to follow up on that sort of the cost side in a later question. But I guess at this point I’d like to sort of pull back a little bit back to Admiral Winnefeld, and would you mind talking a little bit about the state of the Defense Industrial Base, the DIB to design, test, and build these systems? How does a decision to not build Air-launch Rapid Response Weapons, ARRWs, reverberate across a DIB?

James Winnefeld Jr.:

Yeah, so this is where my colleagues definitely should weigh in, because they’ve been more recently in government and working these problems.

Mike White:

You start, I’ll be happy to weigh in.

James Winnefeld Jr.:

As I mentioned, the Chinese and the Russians started developing as Congressman Lamborn mentioned, hypersonics has been out there for many, many decades kind of languishing, and China and Russia went after them because of our ballistic missile defenses. We didn’t go after them until we woke up here in the last few years and said, “Ooh, we got to go back into the high-end game here,” and started to attack it. And I think it’s been a remarkable, when you really look at how quickly we’ve attacked this thing, even though we’re not as fast as we’d like to be and we don’t have what we need yet, it’s been a pretty good partnership I think between government and industry to push forward on this thing, and including industry partners working together.

I would tell you we have a fantastic relationship at RTX with General Dynamics for the, or Northrop Grumman for the rocket, the engine on that HACM missile. And we couldn’t have done it, neither one of us could have done this alone. But the industrial base is hindered a little bit right now in terms of our velocity in getting these done by a number of impediments. One, the services, candidly, the service chiefs have as their identity metrics, I like to call them numbers of platforms, whether it’s soldiers, aircraft, ships, and when they’re forced to choose their legacy is, “How many soldiers did we have when you retired there, chief? How many ships did we have when you retired there, chief?” And Congress is a willing participant in that frankly, because I like to joke that the congressman doesn’t care whether the F-15s in his or her district are actually flying, they just got to be there because they’re spending money every single day.

Whereas if a weapon that’s sitting in a magazine was made, it just sits there and doesn’t spend any money. So that’s maybe a little cynical view, but there are a lot of financial budget impediments here, and a host of other challenges that we’ve experienced in developing them. But the industrial base is coming along. I think that the next test, I think, and Mike and John can weigh in on this, is actually getting scaled production capability and we just are not going fast enough on that. You look at how many HACMs and how many CPS we’re going to be building, it is just way too slow. And industry is only going to do what you tell it to do, it’s not going to out of the good of its own heart build a massive production line counting on funding to come in the future somewhere. So we’ve got to really give industry confidence that this is really going to happen so they can invest CAPEX and people and other investments they’ve got to make in order to start doing this at scale.

William Chou:

And we heard a lot of the same things back in March when we had a roundtable on Japanese defense innovation and a lot of the same calls before, government needs to give better signals to industry so that they can make the necessary investments.

James Winnefeld Jr.:

And it was brought up earlier, the tremendous potential for having our partners, who have wonderful manufacturing capability, weigh in on this. But it’s not a sort of nice linear function. It’s sort of a step function. You’ve got to have a large influx of money to make it work if you’re going to be producing, let’s say AMRAAMs or whatever it’s you want to do here and then have a partner nation step up and do that, it’s not just a, “Oh, we’ll build 20 more a year, so they’re going to start their own manufacturing capability.” So it is a very difficult financial problem, but there’s certainly tremendous potential there. And we should share that technology and we should use that opportunity to build at scale.

William Chou:

And Mike, John, the state of the DIB?

Mike White:

All great comments and very relevant. ARRW was the first weapon that we were developing in the Air Force, leaned forward early on in the 2017 timeframe, made a decision to work closely with DARPA and put a weapon system development program in place in parallel with the technology development program of TBG at DARPA. And the idea was we can’t do things sequentially if we’re going to accelerate it, so we’re going to lean forward and take risks. And it turns out DARPA actually never had a successful, fully successful flight test of the TBG Glide body. ARRW actually had the first successful flight test, but DARPA did some things, flew a couple times, learned lessons that fed ARRW that enabled ARRW to be successful. And so the arguments I used to have in the building with ARRW, with Will Roper when he was there was he wanted to go faster than I was saying I needed him to go.

He was aggressively driving towards a December ‘22 delivery of ARRW and he was very, we’d have arguments because my strategy would say ‘23, and he’d say, “I want you to put ‘22 on there because we’re delivering at ‘22,” and so at the time the Air Force was very, very strongly behind it. Now getting back to the Defense Industrial Base, there were some initial challenges and most of those challenges, I would say all of those challenges had to do with bringing up the systems engineering rigor and the competencies in the industrial base to do the simple stuff, right, okay? And we were focused on the high end. It turns out all of our flight test issues, none of them have been hypersonic related. It’s all been, “This pin wasn’t plugged into this pin,” or, “My electrical system wasn’t properly grounded,” and all that sort of thing.

So the industrial base needs to get back to good solid systems engineering rigor for new complex systems. But when we flew ARRW the first time, it worked like a charm. And as it was in the most recent testimony with Dr. Weber and the other leaders to Congress and Congressman Lamborn’s subcommittee, the Air Force said< “It worked as designed completely,” very successful. But then by that time, we’d already made the decision not to procure. We had leaned forward, put money in the budget in the procurement line to buy ARRW, sent a strong demand signal to industry and the first opportunity we had to change that demand signal, and when ARRW got pulled out of the acquisition budget, we completely undermined our message. So whether or not you really thought you needed ARRW or exactly in its form, it was the first of its kind weapon block upgrades, we could have done great things with it, we still can do great things with it if we changed that decision. But it sent the wrong demand signal to industry, it really undermined the credibility of that demand signal. And that’s an issue.

John Plumb:

Let me just, on this issue of scale and reproducibility and frankly cost-effectiveness, which a lot of times panels end up cost-free and we can’t have a cost-free discussion, as they say. I think one of the things that would be worth hammering and pursuing, which is a change in generally the department’s approach to procurement, is can you design these systems so that the parts are separable? So if the rocket motor is separable from the glide body and if parts of the electronics are. . . Now, systems can be built so complex that all the parts have to talk to each other at a time.

But if you could figure out standard interface, so now you can reduce the cost of individual components and to Mike and Sandy’s point, test individual components so you can accelerate your testing timeline, that would be I think a much better way to move faster and allow for things to break as you move faster without having the whole system have to be built, or the whole system has to be designed again and again and retested. And I think that would get to some of the producibility of the electronics pieces, but that’s hard. It’s not really the way we work with Primes right now, but Primes is true integrators with components being bid out, I think it could really help move faster. Hypersonics will be kind of an exquisite version of that, but maybe a test, kind of a lead example.

William Chou:

So Mike, I’d like to sort of go back to what Congressman Lamborn talked earlier about testing and training. And so turning to you about test infrastructure, can we talk a little bit about the importance of MACH-TB and increasing flight test cadence? Do we need to do a flight test a week and can we get there then? And what would work best in your opinion? And turning to Admiral Winnefeld, you commanded at sea before, can you describe the importance of incorporating hypersonic defense into training, say before a carrier strike group goes to sea or during an exercise?

James Winnefeld Jr.:

You first?

Mike White:

Sure. MACH-TB really is the instantiation of a strategy element that really kind of demanded that we change the capability of our nation to accelerate learning through accelerated testing and move away from this once a quarter or once every six months testing cadence to something that would allow us to test once a week. And it wasn’t driven by a specific demand signal, “We have to test this fast to do this thing,” it was, “We need to create the infrastructure that allows our Defense Industrial Base and our national laboratories to learn faster to accelerate capability and tend to the fleet.” So the idea is create that infrastructure and if you create that infrastructure that allows that rapid testing and that rapid learning, then it will automatically accelerate the pace of capability into the future.

James Winnefeld Jr.:

And on the training side, I think Congressman Lamborn said it perfectly, and I think I may have even written this, “The first time, one of our troopers, whether Air Force, Navy, Marine, Corps, Space Force, you name it, sees a hypersonic weapon cannot be in combat.” And the example I would give you is as a young mid-grade F-14 pilot, I lucked into this situation where I was able to track, attempt to track and simulate an engagement on an SR-71 off the coast of California, it was on a test flight or a training flight or something.

Mike White:

Cool.

James Winnefeld Jr.:

I mean I was just happened to be there. I was like, “Holy cow, what’s not up there? Like it’s 70,000 feet.” And it was an order of magnitude more difficult than anything I’d ever done in terms of intercepting something or trying to intercept something. And that was only going Mach 3, okay, so talk about hypersonics. And yes, you can use the simulator for that, but there’s absolutely nothing like doing it in real life and actually either simulating engagement or having an actual engagement against a hypersonic target.

Now, one of the things that is being done, and again, truth in advertising, I’m an advisor to Stratolaunch, is they’ve got this Talon vehicle that gets launched off a great big airplane off of the coast of Vandenberg flies a hypersonic profile, and then lands at Vandenberg. It’s great you can bring things you’re testing back down and actually touch them. But as an adjunct to that, we’ve offered up to the Navy’s third fleet, “Hey, if you happen to have an Aegis cruiser out there, or you happen to have an E2D that’s floating around and has nothing to do, or you’ve got some F-18s or F-35s, stick them out there and we’ll tell you when this is going to happen. Watch it and you’ll be able to real time show your deploying strike group people what it’s like to try to intercept something like this,” and actually had a meeting with them yesterday.

Hopefully the Navy will capitalize on that, and we really appreciate the support from TRMC in this and MACH-TB and being able to include these folks. It’s another use case to amplify the importance of each one of those flights. So terribly important, got to get the training done, and it’s not just for the Navy, Air Force needs and Army needs as well.

William Chou:

Brilliant. And actually on sort of the tracking bit, actually, I’d like to turn to John to follow up on this. How do you view the state of the DIB for producing overhead assets to track and intercept hypersonics?

John Plumb:

Yeah, so I think I touched a little bit on that, but roughly, I think my thought on this is DIB plus, which is I spend a lot of time pushing the value of the commercial space market and the efficiencies they can produce. And so if you think about a constellation, I think there are many companies could probably produce efficient buses if you told them what the power requirements were, right?

And the design for MEO, then for sensors that are going to be sensitive enough to track a hypersonic body against the background of the earth, I mean, that’s a technically challenging problem from any orbit. And so perhaps there’s a marriage there between how much efficiency and cost-effectiveness can I wring out of the commercial side, and then where do I need to bring in more exquisite pieces with the idea of refreshing them at a refresh rate so you don’t have to wait to get the perfect twenty-year solution. If you have a solution that’s good enough right now, start with that and then refresh that technology over time.

James Winnefeld Jr.:

Fair enough. And then train to it.

John Plumb:

And train to it. Yes. Yes, sir.

James Winnefeld Jr.:

That’s great.

Mike White:

We uncovered a picture of a NASA hangar in the sixties, and there’s a line of X-15s and some X-24s, and you think about what NASA did back then working with the Air Force to fly hypersonically on a regular drum beat, manned hypersonic vehicles in the X-15, 199 flights over 10 years, the X-24, I think the A version flew like 24 times in two years, and then they were down for two years, completely modified the outer mold line of that vehicle in two years and then flew 36 times in the next two years. That’s the kind of mindset we’re talking about needing to get to for both the offensive capability as well as the defensive systems and the space systems that need to work with the capability.

William Chou:

So I guess I would like to move on to allies and cooperation. I know we have a lot of American representatives from American allies and partners in this room right now. So turning to Admiral Winnefeld, fortunate to have in-person the participation of all of these folks. Can you explain why US allies are investing so heavily in hypersonics?

James Winnefeld Jr.:

Yeah, so we all know how important allies are. This nation has more allies than any other nation in history, and there’s a reason for that. And we’re all in this together, and it’s really exciting to me to see allies like Australia, the UK, and Japan coming into this game. And clearly it’s in their self-interest to do it, particularly Japan and Australia out there in the theater in the Pacific are staring down the barrel of a gun and they don’t want to be left behind. They realize the utility of these weapons and they want to participate fully if they can.

And I just rattle a few things off, the UK’s got a great program. We developed HACM actually in conjunction with Australia. We have a tremendous partnership with Japan on the defensive side with the SM-3 Block 2 and other systems. So that sort of knits us all together, and it’s not just the production side, which has tremendous potential there to amplify our capacity, but it’s also the R&D side and the funding side co-developing these things. So it’s not as appreciated as much as it should be, I think, in the halls of Congress or in DOD, but it’s just absolutely essential to have these kind of partners in this game. And I would turn to my colleagues here to see if they have anything to add on that.

Mike White:

Yeah, I would agree a hundred percent. AUKUS has been a real sea-change in our focus on allied partnerships and working with the Australians and the Brits has gained quite the momentum. I think some of the challenges were alluded to earlier relative to ITAR restrictions and classification issues, and we were trying to get to the point, and I don’t know if we’ve made progress, James, in this ability to basically share by default and protect by with permission as opposed to the other way around. I think we need to get to that sort of a framework in order to fully leverage our allied relationships.

William Chou:

So John, I kind of want to sort of ask you this question then. So Hudson Japan chair recently held an event on AUKUS Pillar 2 in a conversation between Japan and Australia and the United States. And so I’d like to ask this question to you about AUKUS Pillar 2, in terms of are there ways to use AUKUS to advance our hypersonic defenses? So we’re already partnering with the Japanese on the glide phase interceptor. Is there a way to do something similar with the UK and Australia, even if it’s just hypersonic defense exercises or sensing exercises or whatnot?

John Plumb:

So a couple things. So first of all, absolutely, and the reason the answer is absolutely is this combination of AUKUS plus kind of the falling of this ITAR barrier for most technology is a sea change, and I don’t think anyone in this room has even wrapped their head totally around it yet, although if you have, good for you, come talk to me. But the idea that you can now, you don’t have to go to the State Department for permission to show a pitch deck slide, a potential capability should make everyone pretty happy.

But it also should accelerate our ability to cooperate and collaborate with what we need, which is this coalition of partners to combat this growing challenge of China closer with Russia, closer with DPRK, closer with Russia. It’s a huge opportunity across all defense spectrum and hypersonic’s just one piece of that. Now, whether that’s the first thing that’s leading the charge out of the gate, I don’t think it is, but there’s absolutely no reason it can’t be added to that mix, especially as particularly these three countries, US, UK and Australia understand better and better how this collaboration is going to benefit us both for speed, cost-effectiveness, and frankly, resilience of the DIB and trying to collaborate, so we don’t all have to build the same thing over and over.

William Chou:

Great. And then sort of a question for all of you guys again, still some allies in terms of. . . I guess just to sort of wrap up this portion about allies. What are the role of allies in the area of hypersonics, whether it’s concept, whether programming, procurement, operational development, or coordination, where are we exactly in terms of cooperation with allies on hypersonics? And what still needs to be done? What are the biggest gaps between us and our allies in this regard?

John Plumb:

Go ahead, Mike. It’s a very simple question. Yeah.

Mike White:

Yeah. So one really important allied cooperation initiative needs to be where do we base some of our systems? I mean, the reality of it is we’re a long way from either theater and we need to work with our allies to be able to base capabilities. And then beyond that, the allies recognize the attributes of hypersonic weapons. And we oftentimes get kind of diverted into this notion that the hypersonic is a thing, right? Do I need this hypersonic or that hypersonic?

And really hypersonics is an attribute of a weapon capability that you’re flying very fast, very survivable, very high and you’re delivering lethal effects from long range. And that compresses the timescale of the battle, on the battlefield, and the adversary has spoken and they have the field of capability that compresses that battlefield timescale. And if we don’t match that, the department likes to say, “We’re not in an arms race,” which means, “We’re not going to build 10 hypersonic weapons just because the Chinese have 10 hypersonic weapons.”

But we are in a capability race in my mind, and that is we are facing a very aggressive A2/AD strategy, and we have to have the capability to defeat that defensive posture. And so we are in a capability race to field capability that defeats the defenses of the adversary that hold out our traditional systems. And that’s the criticality of what we need and why we need it from that perspective. And bringing our allies on board to accelerate the maturation of the capability and then work with us to accelerate the fielding in numbers is going to be critical.

James Winnefeld Jr.:

I would say for our ally Japan in particular, the defensive piece is terribly important. And the current hypersonic defenses, Patriot, SM-6, even THAAD, are great systems, but they’re very point defense. And so you can only defend certain targets. You can’t defend the whole country necessarily, depending on, and the fact that a hypersonic weapon can come from all kinds of different axes is a tough one. So really focusing on that with-alongside them, bringing it back to the homeland, hopefully I think is going to be something we can’t. . . We’ve got to get the glide phase interceptor done, fast.

Mike White:

And MDA has announced that they are cooperating with Japan to build glide phase interceptor.

William Chou:

Back in May, I think. Right. And John, if you want to chime in on this, or-

John Plumb:

No, I think that’s all right. I think covered the spectrum.

William Chou:

All right. So last question before we throw it to the audience for general questions. What should be the priorities on hypersonic missiles in the next administration? We are in election. And what should be the sequencing of priorities on hypersonic missiles?

Mike White:

So I’ll go first. I think the priority needs to be to field capability now. We’ve invested a tremendous amount of resource in developing the first, and I’ll emphasize first block, first instantiation of hypersonic weapons. We need to field those capabilities and get them into the hands of the warfighter as quickly as possible. Across the spectrum the boost-glide systems for Army, Navy, the air launch systems for Air Force. We need to then focus on affordability and affordable capacity, and building those systems in numbers by evolving the designs to the point where we can build them affordably. And then we need to figure out what’s the next generation of capability through a block upgrade strategy or new capabilities we need to work on. So field capability we’ve already invested in, focus on affordability and look at our next generation capabilities and block upgrades.

James Winnefeld Jr.:

I would say we can’t take our eye off the ball on our boost-glide systems, but I think they’re pretty far along. In my humble opinion, they’re going to be okay. Maybe go a little faster. I think on the defensive side and on the air breathing side, we have to go a lot faster. On the air breathing side, we’ve got to get to the point where we actually stand up a production line that is able to produce these things very, very quickly at scale, because we’re going to need a lot of them, and we may need them sooner than we think. So that’s just going to be sheer funding. And if we can break the code or crack the code of for structure versus platforms versus payloads. And Bob Ork and I started working this back in 2013, 2014, 2015, of, it’s the payloads, dummy. The platforms are mattering less and less. You’ve got to have great payloads and you got to have a lot of them. That I think would be a priority that I would set for any next administration.

Mike White:

Agree 100 percent.

John Plumb:

I guess I’d say on top of that one thing to not lose the eyes. The range matters. Long range fires isn’t a long range of 50 years ago. Long range, long range to be able to get through that A to AD shit. And on the testing things-

Audience Member:

Technical term.

John Plumb:

Yeah. On the testing piece underlying all of this, and Congressman Lamborn spoke to that in his discussion with Rebecca. But I think this issue of allowing failure, having an aggressive test cycle, but also understanding and making sure the PEOs understand yes, if it fails, come back, report what happened, but just keep going and building that in so that Congress understands it, so the Pentagon understands it. You have to keep going, you have to test, and we can’t be in this, everything has to be perfect, you have to full up round just to test the next iteration. That puts you on a test cycle that never gets to the threat.

Mike White:

I will agree with you 100 percent John, but I will also offer to industry is accepting failure and moving fast is not an excuse to fail, because you’re doing bad engineering. So you have to fail for the right-

John Plumb:

If that needs to be said, then yes.

Mike White:

Right, right, right, right, right, right, yeah.

John Plumb:

You have to fail for the right reasons, and the failure ought to be an opportunity to learn. And what you ought to learn is not the fact that you did poor engineering. Right? So focus on systems engineering rigor, deliver capability, and test quickly and incrementally to advance the state of knowledge.

William Chou:

Well, wonderful. Thank you so much for your comments here. I’d like to sort of open up to the audience for questions. Can we have a gentleman in the back?

Charlie Carroll:

Hi, Charlie Carroll with Epirus. We’ve talked a lot today about the generational change that AUKUS pillar 2 is going to bring. And kudos to Congress for passing a massive ITAR reform. But I still think work needs to be done. And from the industry standpoint, there’s a lot of obscurity. On the side of hypersonics, but on the side of all four pillars with pillar 2 of advanced technology, the ETL, the Excluded technology list provides a huge obstacle for industry certainty if they can use the exemption. And then the MTCR, the missile technology control regime, I think cuts off all access if not most of them, for cooperation on hypersonics. What do you think the US government and industry need to do to work collaboratively to get over those obstacles? And what’s the likelihood in the next couple of years we can. . . I think one of the concerns is this goes the route of the defense trade control Treaties, and becomes unusable. But we do have a moment to change that. So how do you see us doing that?

John Plumb:

Me? No. Look, I think this is a pivotal moment. And the fact that all of this just happened, it just happened, it’s like yesterday, this just happened, right? And the fact that this just happened is going to take some shaking out. And of course there’s going to be yet another problem set past where it is now, but it is immediately better than it has been. ITAR is a problem, it’s a problem probably for all of you, it’s a problem for the department. This needs to get reformed on a larger level than this. But for those technologies that may still acquire additional permissions have to keep pushing.

I mean, nothing is ever solved with one felt swoop. So I think bringing that to your members, bringing that to the department, and just keep that pressure on that this is a good thing, it’s in the right direction. What else do we need to solve a problem? I think if you have specific problem sets instead the generic ones, I think my experience is both the congress and the department react better to specific use cases where this problem is causing us to be unable to fully develop this weapon system.

James Winnefeld Jr.:

And like the MTCR moves with the speed of bureaucracy. There’s nothing in there that prevents you from actually doing something other than bureaucracy. So I think you have to have smart bureaucrats at the top of that food chain that can make things happen. And I wouldn’t call myself a smart bureaucrat, but one of the things I did as a vice chairman, is any package that had to go through 20 different inboxes to get back to me, that was normally given a 60-day suspense, I’d give a 15-day suspense and I would use NATO silence rules. Which meant if you didn’t answer like you’re trying to slow roll me, concurrence is assumed. And boy talk about speeding things up. So I think chopping away at that would be very helpful inside the bureaucracy.

Mike White:

Yeah, I’m not smart enough to know the specifics on what ought to be done, but someone ought to take it on as a problem. And I think within AUKUS they haven’t solved the problem. But I think I alluded to it earlier, we need to get to a mindset and a state where you share by default and you protect by exception. And whatever it takes to do that, I think we need to figure out how to get there.

Audience Member:

Next question.

Jerry Hendricks:

My question is for Admiral Winnefeld. Sir, you mentioned earlier the importance of investing in defense. One of my concerns is we look at some of these key technologies that we’re identifying as being essential to the next-generational leap ahead. AI, quantum computing, hypersonics, we sort of treat them as individual topics. But last year at the Reagan Forum, Jim Taiclet made the point that quantum computing was going to be essential to hypersonic defense, for being able to anticipate and get ahead. Could you talk about the importance of the all-the-above approach on some of these new things that are coming, and how they become integrated, specifically in the very complex defensive world?

James Winnefeld Jr.:

I don’t know that I’m convinced that quantum computing is going to be the magic solution to hypersonic defense. I mean, we got a long way to go. Quantum computers are good at doing one thing really well. But in terms of the comprehensive piece. . . But you mentioned artificial intelligence, and I think in DOD, we really haven’t figured this out yet. There are two main themes of artificial intelligence that I think about. One is just basic machine learning, which is incredibly useful. I think we’ve done more in DOD with machine learning than anything else. But there are these more advanced. . . You know? Whether it’s. . . I call them expert systems. But that, aiding a human in making decisions very, very quickly is essential in that world. Not only to anticipate what’s coming at you, but to manage it as it’s happening. And the Aegis Combat System was sort of an early version of that, but this is a much more complex problem than what it was designed to solve.

So there’s that, but I think there are other advanced technologies as well that have to be folded into this. And I constantly tell my friends at Raytheon, where truth and advertising sit on the board, is we’ve got to push harder against the government on ultra high-powered microwaves. And there’s an understandable reluctance there. You think about Kodak, when the digital camera came out, Kodak resisted doing that. Not because they were stupid or anything like that, they just were worried about getting rid of their wet film franchise. They were making all their money on wet film, not on cameras. And they didn’t really come to grips with the fact that somebody was going to disrupt them. Well, I think that at a large defense prime, it’s like, well, if we have something that just fires electrons, that’s going to affect our kinetic missile defense enterprise.

Well actually no, because you’re going to have to have both of those things if you’re going to survive in this world. One of them is not enough. So I think pushing on those technologies harder, and the government is not putting enough of a demand signal out on directed energy. It’s just not. And I think industry, if it got that demand signal, would respond Handily and quickly. But again, the defense industry, most of them are public companies, not all of them. But they’re going to do what they’re told to do, because they’ve got to protect their margins, they’ve got to protect their shareholders, and they’re not going to just out of the goodness of their heart, develop something and then present it to the government and say, “Hey, how about this?” Now the private companies sometimes will do that. But some of these advanced technology, we just got to, as you point out, integrate them better. But I’m not convinced that quantum computing itself is necessarily the key that unlocks that door. I think it’s artificial intelligence writ large.

Mike White:

I think the point on high-powered microwaves that Sandy makes and has made a couple times, is really important from a defensive perspective. I don’t like doing math in public, but this is pretty high-level math. If the bad guy’s got a thousand strike weapons and you’ve got a few hundred interceptors, and you’re launching four at every one that they shoot, that math doesn’t work out in your favor. So you got to do things to look at their kill chain more comprehensively, and our ability to have defensive effects put in place more comprehensively. And high-powered microwaves is a critical element I think, of being able to do active defense against an adversary that has large numbers of weapons they can throw at you.

William Chou:

Next question, anyone?

Dave McFarland:

Dave McFarland, Northrop Grumman. Wanted to pick your brain on what you said about homeland defense. As I look in the budgets and I kind of see the whipsaw of where NORAD NORTHCOM winds up with when they need capabilities to defend the homeland against critical infrastructure, with potential just below the threshold kind of strikes with adversary hypersonic weapons. As you struggled through all that to convince Congress and convince DOD that the homeland matters, what keeps you up at night on that type of stuff?

James Winnefeld Jr.:

Well, there are a lot of things that kept me up awake at night in that regard. For one is our ability to detect and track weapons that are coming in at us. So for example, if you’re in a rush in a cool submarine and you’re going to launch a little cruise missile at Washington DC from a couple hundred miles off the coast under a cloudy overcast, it’s incredibly hard to detect. You’ve got to have some kind of elevated sensor if you’re going to see that. And then you got to have a defensive system that can shoot it down. And it’s probably going to be a point defense system. So I often asked myself, I used to kind of jokingly, and this actually played out, was why are most of the Army’s know Patriots based in Fort Bliss, Texas? Why, are we defending against Mexican cruise missiles coming in or something?

Why not base them other places where they can still train, and the like, but they’re actually defending something in the process. And we instantiated this, I was surprised how we actually pulled this off. And he’s like, “We have THAAD batteries there. Why don’t we put a THAAD battery in Guam?” Because if it needs to deploy to the Middle East, it can deploy from Guam just as easily as it can deploy from Fort Bliss, Texas. And it happened. And this was years ago now, we had a THAAD battery. So that was the availability of systems to actually do kinetic defense, the ability to detect these things, and I felt so bad, what was the elevated. . . the balloon we had or whatever?

Audience Member:

JLENS.

James Winnefeld Jr.:

JLENS. I actually, that’s North Comp Commander said, “We got to get that thing up off the east coast of the United States, because we’re really vulnerable to this thing.” And I said to the army, “Are you absolutely certain that this thing isn’t going to break away?” And they went, “Yes.” Two weeks after we put it up, it broke away. So I felt like really stupid. But you’ve got to be able to do that. Now we have sort of a cultural issue here, in that in the last hundred years, this country’s been attacked at scale twice. Pearl Harbor and 9/11. And we are very complacent about the potential for this to happen in the future. Because it’s not going to be long before China can threaten us. And I’m not talking about strategic strikes, that’s a completely different environment. I’m talking about basically tactical type stuff that can hold at risk, things that matter to us. Wall Street, national capital, you name it. And we just are not paying enough attention to that, frankly. And it could be hypersonic weapons that are the big problem there.

William Chou:

This will be the last question. Yeah.

Audience Member:

It’s been mentioned a few times during the two panels, the need for testing and training. And I’m just curious, your perspectives associated with our test and training range infrastructure, to allow for hypersonic testing and exercises in the future.

James Winnefeld Jr.:

I’m going to step in real quick and say this is where allies are so important. I mean, I would love to see us testing in Australia. What a wonderful place to do hypersonic defense and offensive testing. RIMPAC is an awesome opportunity, and the next RIMPAC is in 2026. We ought to have testing stuff out there, where you’re actually not only testing a system, but you’ve got all those arrayed allied forces out there looking at this thing and able to see what it’s like to try to engage a target. So I’ll pass it over.

Mike White:

Oh, great, great comments. And TRMC has done, I think a really good job under George Remford’s leadership, and Jeff Wilson in particular for the hypersonic activities, at trying to put together a comprehensive strategy to enhance our test infrastructure. Going from the Sea of Pearls and ships that have to sail for two weeks to go sit on the station for long-range hypersonic flights, to Sky Range, where we have global Hawks now that can support flight tests, and ultimately space range, and developing systems that allow us to kind of decouple from the constraints of the current capabilities. And they’ve got a good strategy in place. We just need to get it moving faster and get it funded aggressively through programs like Mock TB and other TRMC infrastructure investment strategies to continue to move in the right direction.

John Plumb:

Just echo both of those, I think Australia, it looks very attractive to all of us on a map, for all sorts of reasons, including raising that deterrence level by deeper engagement with Australia on even just development of offensive systems. It would just be, I think a lot of value at the strategic level as well as at the tactical level for development systems. And Mike’s point about trying to free up the Navy in particular from having to station ships in order to conduct a test, I mean, my submarine, we were out to sea, we went for two weeks, and we stayed out for two months to try to conduct a test of a particular system. And that’s an incredible operational demand that if you can free up, in that case would’ve freed up a submarine for two months, right? Or at least freed up me, which also would’ve been nice, but yeah.

Audience Member:

It matters.

William Chou:

So in that vein, we’re going to free up this wonderful panel of excellent conversation that we’ve had. Please join me in thanking everyone here.

Rebeccah Heinrichs:

. . . every panel is the panel that’s going to solve the problems. So I think we’ve all heard so much today and have had a lot of great ideas. And the most important one here, at Hudson, we work really, really hard to come up with assessing the threats accurately, and then coming up with solutions, and then really trying to drive these solutions to become implemented. And so this piece of the puzzle is vital. And so we’re thrilled to end this hypersonic workshop with these members of Congress. So if I may just, I’m going to quickly introduce them, and then turn it over to my colleague, Dan to have a moderated discussion, and then please get ready with your questions for a generous Q&A at the end. Congressman Vince Fong represents the 20th district of California and the US House Representatives. Prior to his congressional service, Congressman Fong served for over seven years in California’s State Assembly as district director for Congressman Kevin McCarthy, and with Congressman Bill Thomas, then chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, on International Trade Policy.

Congressman Fong received a bachelor’s degree from the University of California, Los Angeles, and a master’s degree from Princeton. Congressman Donald Norcross represents the first district of New Jersey in the United States House of Representatives where he served since 2014. In the house, the Congressman serves on the House Armed Services Committee where he’s the ranking member of the Subcommittee on Tactical Air and Land Forces. Prior to his congressional service, Congressman Norcross was an electrician by trade, and he was a leader in the international Brotherhood of Electrical workers. Congressman Norcross received an associate degree in criminal justice from Camden County College.

And then my colleague, Dan McKivergan is the vice president of government relations here at Hudson. Previously, Dan held positions at Baron Public Affairs, the Philanthropy Roundtable and the Weekly Standard. He also served as legislative director for US Senator John McCain and US representative Dan Miller, Daniel Miller. Dan served in US Coast Guard Reserve and he was founding member of the board of directors for the Wounded Warrior project. He’s a graduate of the College of the Holy Cross in Johns Hopkins University. It’s my real privilege to introduce this panel, and I look forward to learning from them now. Thanks.

Daniel McKivergan:

Excellent. Well thank you Rebecca, and thank you for staying in a Friday afternoon. It was sunny, but now the clouds have come. I hope it’s not any commentary on the conversation. But I wanted to start off that, much of the hypersonics discussion is usually held in classified setting, but at the same time, maintaining support for these programs over the long term really does need public support. So with our partners the Space Foundation, we’re trying to bridge the gap to better educate people on the connection between hypersonics and US national security. And with that, I wanted to start off with the title of this panel, which is Building Bipartisan Consensus on Hypersonics.

And we certainly had bipartisan consensus going back many years. We’ve increased funding there in the Trump administration and the Congress did also. The Biden administration has largely continued the programs, and the president recently invoked the Defense Production Act on hypersonics. So the question for both our guests, what is it in particular about hypersonics that has spurred such bipartisan cooperation? Because you really see it in Washington, but on this issue, it has really shown. So if you could give your thoughts on that.

Donald Norcross:

First of all, Dan, thank you for hosting us in Hudson Institute, and my friend and colleague, Doug Lamborn who helped put this all together. The good news is he’s here, the bad news, this is his last couple months after a great career in public service. So Doug, thank you for what you’ve done for all of us. I want to get to your question, but I should probably start before that and talk about bipartisanship when it comes to the Armed Services Committee. I like to say to people, given the complexity of everything that’s going on, and 47 days to the election, not that we’re counting, it’s hypersensitive even more than normal. What works in Congress and what quite frankly keeps me in Congress, is the work we do in the Armed Services Committee. We’ve traveled extensively with Republicans, Democrats, both. And generally, you can never tell the difference.

We will occasionally have a fight, but it’s usually on policy, it’s not on the politics. And it’s something that we all should be proud of, and quite frankly, that we all should be doing more of, particularly outside of it. And as I said, as we’re going to a CR, at some point. If HASC ran appropriations, we would have no problems. So I say that just as a precursor. The NDAA this year was 57 to one. We were close to having unanimous, I couldn’t get them over the line. But the point I’m trying to make here, is with little or few exceptions, we always work together. You’ll have more problems on where a particular program is made, and the politics of what goes on there.

But when it comes to working together, this, like many of our systems, has always been bipartisan. The one thing that we really are coming together, hypersonics, is after leading much of the world in hypersonics, we kind of. . . We didn’t kind of, we took our foot off the gas and turned the engine off. And we saw what happened there with China and Russia literally flying by us. And now we are in many ways playing catch-up. And seeing what’s happened not only recently in Ukraine, and the limited use of that, it puts most people in the committee very concerned. And I think those issues bringing together, really says the concern, but how we do it together.

Vince Fong:

I certainly would just echo that. I mean, I’m the new guy. I’ve 16 weeks in Congress, but in terms of coming in, I specifically asked to be on transportation infrastructure and SST, because of their known work to be workhorse committees and their bipartisan nature, just like probably as in Armed services. And Doug’s been amazing as a mentor in kind of fostering that. But the great Powers competition is real. And so when it comes to hypersonics, when it comes to space, when it comes to the need to be a leader in technology, that’s not a partisan issue. We have to maintain our global leadership. My district is very active in hypersonics. When you look at the aerospace valley that we have, with China Lake and Edwards Air Force Base, and going out to Vandenberg. So this is an area that I’ve been working on for at least a little bit in the state side, and now get the opportunity to work on the federal side.

Daniel McKivergan:

Thank you. Maybe for the benefit of our audience looking in on their computer, could you just briefly discuss what the difference is between a hypersonic weapon and let’s just say a ballistic missile? Why it’s different? So someone who’s maybe not familiar of how it’s qualitatively different than what they’re used to seeing with ICBMs and seeing on the news, why in particular this weapon system is different in the way we approach both the defense of it, but also the development on our end.

Donald Norcross:

So hypersonics is not a particular weapon. Certainly has to do with the speed, how it gets there, how it is launched. And we have a variety of ways of doing that. The maneuverability of it. We do have a glide path for much of that in one sector. But the idea that the velocity of it is incredibly fast. Ballistic missiles are very fast, but it’s also the trajectory that they take versus most hypersonics, which are delivered in a very different way. I will defer to the PhDs in the room to give you the technical version of this. I know it is something that there’s great concern over the speed of development. And I think when we look at what it means to the defense of our nation, and to deter others, this is just another arrow in our quiver that will keep those who want to do us harm, at bay. Yeah.

Vince Fong:

And having some of that work being done at China Lake and Edwards Air Force Base, certainly the speed gives us somewhat of an advantage. Though I will also add on addition to the defense applications, there are commercial science applications as well. If you look at a mature hypersonics platform, what that means to commercial travel, what it means to our ability to operate in space, there are military applications, and there are tremendous commercial applications as well. And I think that’s why there’s not only bipartisan interest, but interest beyond just the military.

Daniel McKivergan:

Well Congressman, along those lines, you serve on the Science, Space, and Technology Committee. And it’s the committee that literally was created right after the Sputnik launch, and was the committee that I believe authorized NASA in the first place. You had recently got legislation into the NASA Reauthorization bill called the Mock Act. Can you explain what the Act is and how it fits into our overall effort to keep America on the leading edge of technology?

Vince Fong:

So the Mock Act, we want to authorize it and codify it into NASA’s operations and agency mission. Certainly it is built off the flight opportunities model that NASA used to develop commercial space, so to allow commercial space entities to develop the technologies. But then of course further the mission of NASA. So Virgin, Galactic and other commercial space entities, they’ve been able to develop the platforms and then NASA gets to hitch a ride onto into orbit. And so the Mock Act is modeled off of that. So allow, we don’t have STAR launch and BOOM and some other folks who are trying to start launch is probably the most mature, but other folks are entering into the market.

So how can we allow NASA to develop a private-public partnership to allow these research and development evaluation opportunities to flourish, but then have NASA benefit from it as well. And so that’s the whole key. And in essence, we’re trying to get some real-world environmental information. So you can do some stuff in simulation, but the mock act in its maturity, if NASA gets to develop this partnership and have it mature, will give us more partners in the commercial side.

Donald Norcross:

If I could just echo some of the statements. Because if you go back a decade, the idea of what occurred from the Department of Defense versus private sector and space, very different dynamics. Now, SST and strategic. I’ve served on both those committees. And what was remarkable is not how much they worked together, it’s how much they didn’t really focus on what they were doing. The commercial versus the defense is remarkable. It’s Department of Commerce versus Department of Defense. And in any of these, and we had a number of discussions, and I looked to see who was in the room today, some of the challenges when you’re dealing with NASA Department of Defense, we don’t have to deal with the FAA.

Particularly when you’re doing it on a private side, FAA now have their foot in the door, and actually is creating some difficulties, not by the nature of what they’re doing, just by slowing things down. They are not accustomed to dealing with these issues, and it has put a real time stamp on some of the launches that need to occur over the course of next two years. So we’re looking at a couple ways to try to address giving the resources needed to actually do this in real time, that it’s needed.

Vince Fong:

And that’s the understatement probably of the afternoon. I mean, the FAA, when you talk about the commercial space, I mean, we have to learn some hard lessons in terms of how we apply it to hypersonics. Now that SpaceX is one of the partners that helps us launch DOD and other sensitive missions into space, space is going to be the next frontier for us. And so having the commercial DOD, public-private partnership, that’s critical for us, especially with we need to increase our cadence and launches.

Daniel McKivergan:

Well, that actually segues nicely into my next question, and you had both brought up the industrial base. As Russia’s war in Ukraine exposed the deficiencies in our ability to produce weapons at scale and quickly. And everyone knows the problems we’re having with our shipbuilding capacity and the long delays and many both in the fleet but also in the merchant marine. So even with a strong bipartisan political will, once we decide to go into fielding hypersonics on whatever scale we decide, is the defense industrial base ready to meet that demand? And if so, what else do we need to do to make sure we don’t have a long delay between the ask and then the delivery?

Donald Norcross:

Here’s a good one. Yes, no, maybe. Perfect political answer to this. The fact that the president invoked the Defense Production Act gives you small clue of some of the challenges we’re facing, new emerging technology. But I’ll drop back a little bit and talk about the defense industrial base. We saw what happened during the pandemic. Obviously it challenged it for a number of reasons. Things within the control and domestically produced was one challenge. Those from overseas even becomes more difficult. But the idea, and this is the point for those in the defense industry and certainly those in healthcare, they weren’t able to do their job on Zoom. And I want to say thank you for the defense industrial base who continued to work. You’re working on a fighter craft or hypersonics, there’s no six feet apart and they had to do it. So they were very much at risk and they answered the call.

So thank you on behalf of a grateful nation. But when we look at the defense industrial base, and it really happened and it was magnified during the pandemic, is we all conducted things on Zoom where we could. Now we have a generation who lives through that, is looking like, you know what? Everybody says you got to go to college to make it in this country. We hear that time after time. Well, you know what? That might be true. I want my doctors to make sure they have great education and occasionally a lawyer, we need one of those. But the idea is we need everyone. You talked about our industrial base when it comes to sea power and our submarines. We’re going to spend close to a billion dollars to develop what they need for the workforce. Obviously engineers, designers, but those welders, those electricians, and quite frankly that starts at home with parents.

When you tell your kid the only way to make it is to go to college, that’s great if they pursue that. But you know what? We need those welders. And as I say, I’ve got three kids, you’ll love this one, a doctor, a lawyer, an electrician. Only one of them has his house paid for, has no college debt and has a retirement fund we all would love. You can take care of your family. So when we as a nation start talking about making it as only with college or forgiving college debt only, we’re losing the entire industrial base who builds things. And we need to change those dynamics because we talk about how long it takes to get certain items. The longest lead item is your employee.

Vince Fong:

Let me just piggyback off of that. Workforce and supply chain are critical, right? And so Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumman have a partnership with Antelope Valley College out in Lancaster, Palmdale, and the East current area. And they develop the curriculum specifically so you can get a technician. The moment you graduate from AVC, you can enter into the workforce. And so you’re almost guaranteed, well, actually you are guaranteed a job assuming you can clear, make the clearance and enter into the program and go into the workforce. Certainly you need more commercial partners. And so this is the whole idea. If you look at the ability to, like X-Bow and the Air Force Research Lab, they’re doing some things on a small scale to procure and make things faster, but can you do that to scale, right, in terms of a massive platform or a large amount of missiles or whatnot?

And so we have got some folks in California that are trying to start up shipbuilding in Long Beach, start up a lot of these massive industrial projects. But workforce, as my colleague says, I mean that’s the key to it all. And supply chain. You look at what’s going on at the end of the month potentially with a strike that’s going to affect the Gulf coast up through the Eastern Seaboard, 64 percent of our containers coming to the United States could be completely shut down by that strike. So if you’re not talking about supply chain now, you’re going to talk about the supply chain at the end of the month, if this strike happens and whether it continues and how long it continues.

Daniel McKivergan:

Following up on the supply chains, do you have concerns at all with regard to critical minerals and other materials that are needed for hypersonics, particularly with Russia and China, very active in the mining industry in Africa, in South America?

Vince Fong:

Yes. You mean we do. As my colleague said, we learned anything from the pandemic, we are too reliant on China and other countries for the things that we need. And so this conversation about on shoring, bringing manufacturing back to the United States, or at least the countries that like us is critically important for us. And then we talk about the minerals and chips and everything else. We have to be able to develop that here in America or with our allied partners that actually care about the values that we share as a country.

Donald Norcross:

You go, there’s just a list. During the last Congress, Representative Slotkin led a panel that looked at those supply chains issues. And we’ve identified, and there’s no question in anybody’s mind and the China panel has also looked at this, is there has been a distinct effort to try to capture those minerals that are so difficult. And the refining, which is either side of that coin, goes to the same place. Titanium, some of the raw product and for those of you involved with Ukraine, they now know that two years prior to the invasion of Ukraine, Russia had doubled and tripled the influx of raw material for titanium. It was a good way of knowing that something’s going to happen. So when that supply line shut down during the war, they have enough to get through it. But even with that, Russia was still the premier for titanium and we use a lot of titanium. So the list is extensive and we’re trying to get ahead of that. But from Africa through Australia, you’ve seen story after story where China has stuck their foot in the door and control much of that.

Daniel McKivergan:

You had mentioned Ukraine, so I want to kind of jump over to our NATO allies. Earlier this year I was in Poland. And the question and the issue of hypersonics came up quite often. Obviously Russia’s use of them in Ukraine. Congressman Norcross, I know you’re a member of the NATO Parliamentary Assembly. What are you hearing from your colleagues over in NATO, both on hypersonics, missile defense, and do you see areas of collaboration? And Congressman, if you want to weigh in too.

Donald Norcross:

I hear envy. We just had a CODEL to Alaska and down to Washington state to look at some of our assets that we have in missile defense, particularly in Alaska because if you were to ask most people, and this came up, we probably have representatives from about 12 nations. When it comes to missile defense, many Americans think that we’re fully covered. Well sure we are depending on how you look at it. But the people who aren’t our NATO allies with very few exceptions. So they were looking at what we have up in Alaska, some of the things that are going on down here or in Washington state and what the future looks like.

And then we took them to the air base and literally the envy. I said, with this and a little bit of money, you two can be a part of it. But the most important thing is what they see their public, those that they represent back in their home countries don’t fully understand that they don’t have the protections that much we do. And our protections, as you know very well, it’s good. But as my father-in-law used to say, there’s a lot better we can get to.

Vince Fong:

I’ll just add on just on a different flavor. I’ve certainly agree. There’s bipartisan concern. I actually traveled to Tokyo and Okinawa over August in talking to our four deployed personnel there. And then of course we went through Alaska as well. So when we talk about what’s going on in Europe and of course what’s going on, what happens in Taiwan and the relationship we have with Japan and South Korea and what happens there, all these conversations are all linked in some ways.

Daniel McKivergan:

You’re making my job easier because I was just going to go to the Indo-Pacific and then you brought it up, so.

Vince Fong:

I teed it up for you.

Daniel McKivergan:

I appreciate that. It’s always. . . Congressman Norcross, you and your colleague, Congressman Whitman on the arm services committee wrote a letter to Secretary of Army on the urgent need to close the cruise missile defense gap on Guam. So the broader question for both of you is on Guam, why is the defense of Guam important and how does it fit into our overall Indo-Pacific security strategy? And we could expand it into some of the other countries out there.

Donald Norcross:

Well, first of all, it’s our country.

Daniel McKivergan:

Right.

Donald Norcross:

First and foremost.

Daniel McKivergan:

Right.

Donald Norcross:

And you shouldn’t ask kids in elementary school because they won’t know that. But the fact of the matter is it our country and that above all else. But when we look at what we have on Guam and have had since second World War, it is now probably more strategic at any time other than the second World War from the Marines and what is going on between Okinawa and some of the redeployments there. But we have much of the infrastructure for what we will need takes place on Guam. Now, at the same time, we look at the Philippines and Japan as two of those island chains that are sitting in the backyard, quite frankly, to Taiwan and what we can do there.

So extremely important, but particularly with Guam, and what we said is, and back when we sent that letter a couple of years ago, the cruise missile, we’re talking about a layered defense and what will take place in the defense of Guam. We’re playing an away game, quite frankly, and the tyranny of distance in the Pacific never gets old, particularly when you fly over there, you just realize to do anything, it is a long way. So having partner countries, Japan, Philippines, Australia, Japan, North Korea, incredibly important when we’re trying to forward deploy many of the things that we would need if there was conflict to break out. But first and foremost is to protect Americans and American assets. And it starts with Guam.

Vince Fong:

You say location, location, location. In terms of if something were to happen, where would we go? Where would we come from? And so you look at the Indo-Pacific region economically, the population of the sea lanes and trade, I mean, that’s a lot of things going on in a very important region. And so our ability to deter conflict and to maintain stability means that we have to be able to respond and where do we put our assets and Guam’s critically important, Okinawa, Tokyo, Philippines, Japan, Korea. It’s critical.

Daniel McKivergan:

Well, before I go to questions, I just want to ask one kind of 10,000 foot question to both of you. And I have a colleague of mine at Hudson, and he likes to describe the US government as a lumbering giant, but once you get it stabilized and pointed in the right direction, it deals very effectively with threats to our national security. When it comes to hypersonics, do you see this lumbering giant now squarely pointed in the right direction, almost there or do we have a ways to go?

Donald Norcross:

My friends in the room, you’ve done some great work. We are a much better place than we were even six months ago. We’re starting some of the deployment, but we have quite a way to go in order to get the quantities and the locations that we need. But we’ve come quite far. We hit a number of rocks in the water, and I’m not saying anything here. It’s tough. This is a tough one to handle. And just because the Chinese and the Russians have it, they also have vulnerabilities in what they did very quickly. And I believe the ones that we are deploying now are going to be able to change the dynamics, particularly in the South Pacific with what the Chinese have to deal with. That is just one of many of those arrows in our quiver because the long-range fires is quite frankly, on a daily basis changing the dynamics not only in China, but Ukraine, particularly with them being able to self-produce some of the newer long-range fires.

Vince Fong:

And I would just say more needs to be done. Certainly a lot has been put in, but at least the Mock Act and NASA’s role and the DOD’s role, we need more partners. We need more commercial investment, we need more federal investment. I’ve talked to some folks earlier today. We need hypersonic corridors to do testing. I like to do that in the Antelope Valley, maybe going out to Utah. We probably need, as my colleague says, we need to do more in launches when again, the commercial space side, can we do that on land as well as off the coast of Florida and off Vandenberg. So how does that tie together? The R-2508 aerospace in my neck of the woods is critically important. That’s how we did a lot of commercial space research. The Air Force Rocket Lab developed a lot of the engine technology that’s now being used by SpaceX and Blue Origin and all our commercial space partners.

So why not be able to use the aerospace and to create a hypersonics corridor and then also launch to space as well so that we actually have more platforms. If you look at our two astronauts stranded right now in space, I mean, what if we didn’t have our commercial space partners right now? And so just think about it. And so that’s at least the commercial side that actually ties into the defense side as well. And we have to think longer term. So for us in Congress, maybe we think too short term, every two to four years, but what assets and what platforms we need 30 years from now in space, and quantum, and AI and all those things are going to be, and hypersonics are going to be the critical components of not only our national security strategy, but our ability to do travel and to be cutting edge as a global leader. Then we actually have to put those investments, put the structure in, not only on the DOD side, but on the NASA side as well, and maybe restructure a little bit the FAA, so.

Donald Norcross:

So we did a pretty decent size plus up on the testing infrastructure for hypersonics, and this is where I put my plugs in for my friends in the Senate, that we might want to get that done a little sooner than later. Without even getting into the appropriation side is the NDAA is certainly incredibly important. And I think we’re going to get there shortly, but I guess we have to get past the next 46 days, the election to get anybody moving.

Daniel McKivergan:

Well, I’m sure the Senate colleagues are listening in now, so they’ll be ready.

Vince Fong:

Love you guys.

Daniel McKivergan:

Yeah. I think we’re about ready for questions. If anyone has one, please wait for the microphone and we can go from there. None. None.

Donald Norcross:

It’s Friday afternoon at 2:30.

Daniel McKivergan:

Oh, there we go.

Meghan Allen:

Well, first of all, I just want to say thank you for bringing up the workforce issue with, oh, I talk pretty loud. Thank you for bringing up the workforce issue. I’m with Space Foundation, Meghan Allen. We’re a nonprofit organization and one of our main missions is to inspire the next generation of our workforce. And so you are absolutely right. A lot of people focus on STEM when they talk about that, but the workforce trades are equally as important. So both of you, thank you for bringing that up and thank you for sitting on this table together. You brought up NASA and so much of your conversation. Back in the day, people thought of SS&T as solely NASA and there wasn’t a lot of committee collaboration, so you wouldn’t be hearing that you’re going to be tying NASA to anything that related to DOD. So the more that we can collaborate not only with our industry partners on public-private relationships, but also within committees and have jurisdictions that can cross over one another, I think can just help issues such as hypersonics.

Vince Fong:

Chuck Yeager’s breaking the sound barrier was a partnership between NASA and the Air Force. I will also add too, not only to the workforce piece, but also the quality of life piece. For someone who represents very remote LTER installations that do tremendous research development and evaluation of technology and platforms, we have to attract the best and brightest to live in those areas. And so that also means that we need hospitals and schools and all of the quality of life things that get the best and brightest to go to those areas.

Donald Norcross:

It’s interesting, you talk about NASA. You’re a little bit younger, but when I grew up, it was about Mercury and Gemini and Apollo and everybody watching TV. If that wasn’t an incentive enough to really get involved in it. The NASA tech briefs, if you ever remember those. Here I am ordering them from Pueblo, Colorado, getting these things of this high-tech because NASA had to produce this for the public, and that isn’t the same way it was when we were growing up. The challenges are very different, and we talk about this in workforce, but it’s also, bleeds over into who we are recruiting our services because the idea of serving your country is not always put in the forefront.

Quite frankly, if every high school graduation, they give out all the scholarships and awards to those for their academic achievements, which is great, but when was the last time you said thank you to the half dozen people who are joining the services to protect our country? We started a new program to give red, white, and blue ropes and to specifically point out those who are joining our service. Without them, we don’t exist and there’s not enough coming there. So public service, I bring that into workforce. The idea of you have to go to college bleeds right into our ability to recruit for our services.

Vince Fong:

The STEM piece is critical. I mean, look, let me just add this one point. We had the first private spacewalk ever. You would think that that would be on every single news outlet, that we achieved that as a country. And what happened? If we want to talk about inspiring the next generation, what better way to inspire the next generation than that? And so that’s just my cathartic I guess statement right now for that, so.

Rebeccah Heinrichs:

Thank you Congressman for your time here and your leadership on these issues and your bipartisan sentiment to do what is necessary. One of the ongoing themes that we’ve had here today is that there still seems to be kind of back to the metaphor that Dan presented of the lumbering giant. In my view, we haven’t stood up yet. We’re still kind of kneeling and kind of even maybe even looking the wrong way. First, I guess I’ll just put the question because I don’t want to presume, are we in a new Cold War? Here at Hudson we talk a lot about the axis of China, Russia, North Korea, Iran, and that the threat should be driving us to move faster.

It seems like we haven’t quite made the political decision as a country to do the kinds of things that you all are talking about, to mobilize a workforce the way we need, to get commercial to work with DOD, to have the strategic communications to let our adversaries know what we’re doing. I mean, these are the kinds of things we did during the Cold War when we understood that we’re staring down the Soviets. So is it your view that we are, and then how do you, and if you do agree with that, how do you communicate that to your constituents in a way that makes sense without being alarmist in an unhelpful way?

Donald Norcross:

Did you watch the HASC hearing yesterday? The National Defense Strategy report on that in the conversation and this was a very issue that was brought up as one of the recommendation, is to make sure that we educate the public and the Reagan Forum, each year they do a survey that they start out with is the public’s view on the military, the trust factor. But first thing that we talk about is trying to educate the forum, or I’m sorry, the public. So let’s talk about China. The China committee that we have as part of HASC that Rep Gallagher was running until he left, was a way of educating them on some of the complexities of China. Because look at what we buy each and every day, comes from there. And if you were to ask the same elementary school or middle school, where’s Taiwan? I think they’d be challenge.

But then let’s talk about the mixed message. Ukraine. Ukraine. If you had a sense of Congress in terms of the defense of Ukraine and what we’re doing now, if you were to go back two years ago, it’d be hands down, we’re all in. Well, if you looked at the last vote we had it passed in a bipartisan fashion, but it would not have passed if it just had to rely on one party. And I will tell you, this is where information changes. This was not a ground-up approach. It is very much an issue. Jimmy Panetta, myself and one of your newest colleagues from Utah were over in Ukraine for a week earlier this year where we had a chance to have the discussion. And she was sharing with us the very real issue. She had a primary that people were coming up asking her about Ukraine specifically.

That’s pretty unusual in our day and age. Nobody’s coming up and asking me on a daily basis about China, but because it was put out there that we shouldn’t be in Ukraine, I’m calling it disinformation, but it’s certainly a difference of opinion. And when we talk about the spending we have to do as a country and trying to get that industrial base up and running, it’s a real challenge. It is a real challenge to not so much in my side of the aisle, but the others because those on HASC, they’re all there with the Ukraine issue.

So I just want to bring up, we are not at full force where we need to be. The 155s. We spent 1.7 billion over the course of the last two and a half years trying to get the production up. 1.3 in the last 12 months. We have a brand new factory down in Texas, Scranton’s up and running. And so we were going from maybe 20,000 a month, and by the end of next year, we should be up to 100,000. I think we’re around 40,000 shells a month. But that’s just one small sliver of what’s going on. They need the demand signals from industry. I understand that, but there’s a difference between a demand signal and a guarantee. And I think we have a long way to go. And yes, we’re absolutely in a Cold War 2025.

Vince Fong:

I think that we need to act with a sense of urgency. I think as I’ve traveled, I mean, I got foreign military installations in my district. And so when we talk about the great powers competition, I mean, it’s not an academic term, but I think to the general public that may be, and we have to connect all the dots. And so not only do we have to be militarily prepared and invest in current systems, whether it’s submarines and destroyers and carriers, but we also have to be investing in hypersonics and what the next platforms are in the future. And then you tie in, we were talking to some of the military officials that are working in the INDOPACOM area, and they’re talking about, is space and they’re talking about cyber. So then what do we do there? And then you add in AI, and now you add quantum. And quantum now is a piece that people talk about in the scientific community, but quantum and AI combined together would be tremendous.

Now, how that has military applications and how that has commercial applications? In Edwards Air Force Base, they’re testing out, I think the secretary of the Air Force just flew a plane that was AI configured. So that’s the first. You’ve got swarm technology, you’ve got now the pilot being the quarterback and controlling unmanned assets. All of those things are all connected together. Now people though, they’re siloed. It’s like, oh, quantum is this and AI is this, and cyber is this, and we need to be satellites and LEO and GEO and all those things. And then all of a sudden it’s like, wait, they’re all connected because we as a country have to have those capabilities.

But why do we have to have those capabilities? Because other countries are trying to develop those capabilities and we are in competition with them. And oh, by the way, if they threaten Taiwan or if they threaten other places, it’ll disrupt, not only will it have conflict and serious ramifications, but it also disrupts our supply chain, our chips or everything else. I mean, we have to be ahead of everybody. And I think that would be my argument in terms of why we need to act with urgency, but putting it together and articulating it to the average American, that’s what’s critical for us. And time is of the essence.

Donald Norcross:

So a CR. Now Russia, the relationship with Iran, the relationship that they have with North Korea, the ability to get over a million shells should strike fear in every American’s heart, throw in China into that excess of evil. I know that’s a very 80s term, but it is as true today. And if we are not concerned today for what is going on, I’m not sure what would wake somebody up other than a full scale war that puts American youth on the front lines. I think we are in incredibly difficult time in our country’s history, and this is what, get politics out of the Department of Defense. It has no place in there. What we’ve gone through over the course of the last few years has just changed the dynamics. And if you saw the Reagan Forum survey, you’ve seen that change over the last three years and it is not good for America and the strength that we have.

Daniel McKivergan:

Well, I think we’re, thank you very much for joining us. You’re very generous with your time. And I do have one last question. Will you promise to come back and join us again next year to continue the conversation on this or some other.-

Donald Norcross:

As long as we do okay in 47 days.

Daniel McKivergan:

Right. Thank you everyone for joining us.

Donald Norcross:

No, thank you. Appreciate your time.

Rebeccah Heinrichs:

Thank you, Congressman. Thank you, Dan and. . .