The air force general in cargestarge of the u. S. Strategic command as well as air force secretary Heather Wilson and congressman mike rogers were part of a discussion of National Security in space from the Reagan NationalDefense Forum and the Reagan Library in simi valley. This was moderated by cbs pentagon correspondent david martin. Mr. Martin the Breakfast Panel which was moderated by our cbs colleague margaret brennan, there you saw the future of cbs news. Im what the militarywould call the legacy ystem. [laughter] the cold war ring and repurposed for the 21st century. A couple years ago, i did a story called the battle above for 60 minutes. It was about u. S. Space command. At the time, the commander was general hyten and he was one of the main characters in our story. To get ready for this panel, i went back and reread the transcript online of that story. I made the mistake of continuing on and reading some of the comments. One of the first comments i came across said, shame on you for putting those you interviewed in awkward positions with the questions you asked them. My time is too valuable to waste with people who have no respect. I wont read you the comments on my appearance and iq. I also want read the one that said general hyten ran circles around me. Now, i get a second shot at him. E has been promoted. He is now the commander of u. S. Strategic command. Which includes in its awesome responsibilities the deterrence of war in space and fighting of war in space. F it ever comes to that. Heather wilson in the center there is the 24th secretary of the air force, a job which requires her to become intimately involved in space. She says she spends about a third of her time on space. Kari bingen, fourth from the end there, is the acting undersecretary of defense for intelligence with a portfolio that includes the National Security agency, National Reconnaissance office, National Geospatial agency all of which live and die by space. Leanne caret is the Vice President of boeing company and here we have congressman mike rogers, republican from alabama but more importantly for purposes of this panel, hes the proponent of a plan to create a separate space corps, an entirely new branch of the military service. Wed have army, navy, air force, marine and space corps. Put another way, it would take away from the air force and needless to say, that is a controversial proposal. I am going to start with questions, but the audience gets to submit questions too. If you go to the rndf app. Www. Rndf2017. Org. The last few minutes we will be taking your questions. I want to ask general hyten, when you were lieutenant colonel, you wrote that war in space is just a matter of time. Now that youve grown all those stars on your shoulders, do you still believe that to be the case . Commander hyten its good to see you again, david. I never expected to grow stars on your shoulders. One thing you think, you dont think you will grow up to be colonel. I still believe any domain that humans move into will be subject to conflict. And when i looked at it 20 years ago it seemed obvious to me and the chinese i was studying at the time conflict was going to move into space. If conflict is going to move into space then our job will be the same as it is in every other domain, to deter that conflict, to make sure that conflicts never happens but if it happens to figure out how to fight it and when. Its just another war fighting problem. But its basically the same way i looked at it 20 years ago. Mr. Martin is the u. S. Prepared to fight today in space . General hyten its prepared to fight but not prepared to fight in the future. The strength we have today is based on the mass and the sheer number of capabilities we put up over the years. It dwarfs any adversary that we face, and because of that it makes it very difficult for an adversary to deny capabilities of the United States. We dont have war fighting capabilities built onto those systems and our adversaries, and you heard it talk this morning, they have been watching us ever since the first gulf war. They watched the enormous conventional power that was enabled by space and when you see that enormous capability, you have to decide, am i going to just ignore that huge advantage or am i going to try to do something about it . The chinese and russians in particular for the last 20plus years have been watching what were doing and developing capabilities and not secret about it. They have been building weapons, testing weapons, building weapons to operate from space, jamming weapons, and they have not kept it secret. They are building those capabilities to challenge the United States of america, to challenge our allies and to change the balance of power in the world. We cannot allow that to happen. Mr. Martin so we would win today but not necessarily in the future . General hyten im worried about the future because i dont know how it happened but somehow this country just lost the ability to go fast. We have adversaries that are going fast. We dont go fast anymore. We take four years to study a problem before we even do anything. We do four years of Risk Reduction for technologies that we built 50 years ago. Why do we take that much time . We take that much time because weve been able to because the advantage we had over adversaries. When you look at the threat and you deal with the threat, we dont have that much time anymore. We have to move right now and we have to move fast and we have to change the way we do business. So we are at a significant advantage today but five years from now that advantage, if we dont do something different, will be gone. 10 years from now we could be behind. That is unacceptable. Mr. Martin congressman rogers, are we about to lose our advantage . Mr. Rogers certainly. One of the things that has really given our committee a sense of urgency when and general hyten has enormous influence over our committee. Particularly me and the ranking member. And the picture he paints to us in both classified and unclassified settings is scary. The chinese and the russians have both put a much larger percentage of their defense spending into this capability than we have. And they have restructured to become able to go faster just like hes talking about. And when you look at the trajectory that they are on with capabilities, they are going to surpass us in the immediate future. Not the near future. Not the distant future. The immediate future. If we dont get after this and selfcorrect. It was interesting. About a year ago was having a conversation with general hyten and he was telling me and few of my Committee Members that those two particular adversaries were are near peers or maybe even our peers and literally within 12 months was saying, along with admiral harris, they are now our peers. That is unacceptable. In my 15 years in the house, we always had as a guiding principle that we did not want was a fair en and w i where te fight. We are about to be in that situation when it comes to that war fighting domain. I think its unacceptable. I think its imperative we have he a sense of urgency, not only as a congress but as a nation that we get after this in a serious way and make sure we regain and maintain the degree of superiority in that theater. Mr. Martin how would a space corps solve that problem . Mr. Rogers well, a host of ways. One is it would segregate the space professionals. Let me back up. When you look at National Security space, 90 of it is in air force. The navy has one weather system. They handle very well. The army has communications but 90 is in the air force. So what we have found is that it has not been able to get the attention that it needed culturally or resourcewise to address these problems. And it has not had the ability to go fast in the acquisition process. This technology is so rapidly evolving and developing that i think it needs a unique and lean and Agile Acquisition system. And we felt like after looking at all the options available that by segregating those space professionals in the air force again, where 90 of them all into a separate organizational construct in the department of the air force. Thats one of the things i want to emphasize when you talk about it taking it away from the air force. We were going to keep it in the department but segregate those space professionals, segregate the resources dedicated to National Security space, and segregate an educational system for those space professionals and develop a culture thats focused on the Number One Mission for those professionals who come to work every day is space dominance. Because the problem that we found as we studied this is that just like we found when with the air function in the army 70 years ago, it was never going to be properly resourced. Our cultured developed around it. In the army when the Number One Mission was terrestrial. In the air force the Number One Mission is culturally indoctrine ated indoctrinated in them. It should be. Theyre the air force. One of the other 11 missions they have is space. Its a subordinate mission. As we have just heard from general hyten and many others who are just as smart of him on this particular issue and much smarter than us, thats no longer acceptable. Have to have a cadre of space professionals who are given the mission that your number one job every day when you come to work is to become superior in space and properly resource them and educate them and value them. We were also and, again, money is fungible. We had to segregate that money. We think the space corps could have done that. But, you know, and the final piece. I felt this was going to be particularly important. We were going to our legislation that came out of the house we designated the secretary of the air force had a clean slate to design the space corps from scratch. It looked like what ever she wanted to look like but most importantly the acquisition system would be unique to her and her organization. She could design it to be as lean and agile as she wanted it to be. And we took Milestone Decision Authority away from the secretary of defense and gave it to the secretary of the air force. Thats a lot of power. Thats a lot of agility. Thats the ability to go fast. We felt like that was the ideal way to get after this in a very urgent fashion but what we also knew going into this is human beings dont like change. Its just natural and bureaucracies thats why it took 26 years for the air force to evolve out of the army. We dont have 26 years for this. Its going to happen. Its inevitable. Its got to happen. We think what we did this year demonstrated that sense of urgency presented what we think is the idea but we are not married to that being the only solution but whatever we are going to do we need to do it soon. Mr. Martin secretary wilson, this would change your life dramatically. What do you think of the idea of a space corps . Secretary wilson well, i wanted to thank the congressman for the National Defense authorization act for the 20 increase for funding in space. Thats what the president requested for this budget. The United States needs a shurd access to space which means the ability to launch and i completely agree with general hyten that we need to move quickly. We need to accelerate acquisition. One of the things that the space and missile command has done this last month is let a 100 Million Contract with Space Consortium to prototype faster. Milestone decisional authority has moved last years Defense Authorization act we milestoned authority out of the secretarys office down to the air force. I moved it to the Service Acquisition authority or assistant secretary and we pushed it down and said we need to go fast. We need to prototype, innovate and with our next steps with respect to replacing spacebased infrared with respect to indications in warning, we are general hyten and i are absolutely determined, stop studying things to death and get capability on orbit for the war fighter. But thats not all we need to do. So its a short access. We need to the United States builds a glass house at a time before the invention of stones. So the shifting of space being a benign environment to a war fighting environment requires different capabilities. First of all, we need near realtime space Situational Awareness. We need to know not just whats in the catalog but whats going on and whats going on near real time. The second thing we need to be able to do is command and control. Which means its not good enough to see whats happening on the traffic cam. You need to be able to do something about it and move forward with near realtime command and control. And the third thing is we need to be able to create effects both offensive and defensive. Both in this years budgets but in the budgets that are being worked now, you will see Significant Movement in all of those areas. But i absolutely agree with general hyten and mr. Rogers there the area where we need the most focus is how do we continue to reform defensewide acquisition processes in order to move quickly to take advantage of the experimentation and prototyping, to push authority down to the lowest level and to tighten up these schedules so that we can move faster than the adversary . I think the other thing i would say, until the 20th of january of this year, it was not possible to say space and war fighting in the same sentence. Thats changed. We need to deter and prevail in space as we do in every other domain of warfare in the future. Mr. Martin would space corps help you or hurt you in those every devers . Secretary wilson i cant think of a military mission that we have that is not enabled by or dependent on space. We need to integrate space and elevate space as part of a joint war fighting force. To me anything that separates space from the joint fight is moving us in the wrong direction. I agree completely with mr. Rogers that the focus has to be on how to move fast, how to innovate and how to get capability to the war fighter. I dont think that creating more seams between a space corps and other Services Helps in that regard. Mr. Martin kari bingen, what are the major threats to all those u. S. Intelligence satellites up there . Ms. Bingen well, if i could go back a step and just reiterate what some of my colleagues on the panel said, space is absolutely vital to providing intelligence to our war fighters, to our policymakers and our weapons developers. We think about what happened earlier this week, we witnessed another north korea Ballistic Missile launch. Its a denied area. Its tough to our area,. Space provides a unique way for us to provide access that we currently cant get. Its the intelligence imagery satellites that we take pictures of the launchers. Missile satellites to detect those launches. Its the analysts on the ground who process and report on that data and the Communications Satellites that relay that data to the users in the field to take action. When i look at that and i pair it with the threat and the threat over the last 10 years in particular, 2007 when the chinese tested that antisatellite, that was a watershed moment for us and they have not sat still over the last 10 years. They have rapidly moved forward in all areas of antisatellite capabilities to reduce our advantage in space. Everything from Kinetic Energy missiles from both the ground and the air, laser weapons, satellite jammers, cyber. We also have to remember threats are not just satellites on orbit but to the communication links, to the ground stations, to the user equipment. They have taken a full spectrum approach to degrading our capabilities. And i think the difference now versus where we were 10 or 15 years ago, weve been focused on iraq and on afghanistan. Incredibly important missions. China, its a very different game. Contested environment operations. Space is critical to that and its forcing us to really think hard in the Intelligence Community how we effectively protect those assets, how we get greater speed he at scale to provide intelligence to our policymakers who dont have the luxury of time and so were focusing across the board not only on resilient measures on architectures but measures on the ground of the speed of processing deluge of data were getting off our imagery satellites and were focusing on scale as well. Mr. Martin so how full nerble today are all vulnerable today are we to those satellites that provide intelligence . Ms. Bingen one of the challenges here is physics. Satellites go in pretty predictable orbit. Any potential adversary with a science or engineering degree will know where those satellites will be and there are many avenues for them to pursue them. They are fragile. They move in predictable orbit. There are there is nothing we can do to protect that. Were leveraging our allies and partners to provide greater intelligence sharing. Were also looking at other nonspace alternatives. So were doing things across the board to try to address some of those vulnerabilities. Mr. Martin general hyten has said he would not support buying any more big satellites hich make juicy targets. Leanne, how do you make smaller tellites without giving up capability . Ms. Caret i want to say thank you for allowing industry to have a role on this panel. Its an extremely important topic. As much as we understand this, i think there are a lot of folks dont understand space is part of the core what we do every day, from the mundane task to National Security. This conversation is larger than any one program or one contract or one company. This is about ensuring we have the assuredness of space to gain access. Boeing is very fortunate that we have a Strong Partnership with th