China poses with her cheating et cetera i was wondering, what is the best way speed is we have delete this but you can find senator remarks and the rest of you in America Foundation coverage on our website cspan. Org. We will be live here on cspan2 at the Hudson Institute in washington, d. C. Will get a a look at innovation and technology in the defense sector. Im a senior fellow here at hudson and it is my great privilege to host dr. Griffin at hudson again, a little over a year since we last had a conversation about his priorities as the head of research and engineering at dod, and im not going to give him the long full introduction because you know who he is. The most qualified person in washington to take on the hardest problems at dod, and so what i plan to do today is have dr. Griffin get some opening remarks about his priorities and some things that may or may not have changed since the last time we spoke and had a conversation here at hudson. He and i will engage in some back and forth and dialogue, talk about what he mentioned in his opening remarks and then it is my hope to allow some time for questions from you, the audience here at hudson. Without further ado, dr. Griffin. Thanks rebecca. Its a pleasure to be here. Specifics of the last time is here was in april 2018. So that was two months after i was confirmed as the undersecretary, and it was still three months before i i was the head of an actual Legal Organization within the department of defense. We were still working on establishing a charter and all of the bureaucratic things one does to convert legislation into executive branches institutions. So in the time, in the 15 months since ive been here, we have been busy. We have filled out the senior levels of our organization. I think many of you know the deputy undersecretary, lisa, as well as our director for Defense Research and engineering doctor mitch and mr. James. Of course we also have under Us Missile Defense Agency which has not changed. The director has changed we not vice admiral john hill running the organization, Lieutenant General greaves was in trouble crackdown mode when i took over. Now vice admiral hill is on station for the next several years. Steve walker is director of darpa as he was then and we will expect will continue. So weve got our senior team in place. We have had a number of successful tests and demonstrations, and more to come. Most critically for some of our mutual interests, we had sdg 11 just this past march, if i recall correctly, the date, and very successful missiledefense test, one of our real highlights and many other things as well. We have estimated or are in the middle of incrementing some organizational standouts, the Space Development agency as well as some organizational changes. We are currently working on moving those strategical military officers go under darpa to better align our team. And weve added a lot of cooperative initiatives in science and technology with our allies and partners. Last year when i spoke, hypersonics was possibly, in fact, i stated right out that was my single highest priority. Over the last 15 or so months, i would say we have made an awful lot of progress in getting that in the forefront of our Nations National security priorities. And ive actually elevated other things that are maybe less flashy, but even more important such as microelectronics and 5g to our priority stack. And, of course, space, because without space we really cant do anything. We incorporated an assistant director structure within our organization where for each of our key priorities we have assistant director to be responsible for the strategic shaping of that priority. So, for example, we have, we will shortly be bringing on board an assistant director forr 5g, which i just mention that a similar for all of our other things. Lots of work yet to do. We have we are trying to rationalize how we do inching and prototyping in a world in which it is recognized that we have to do something different, better than dod 5000. We are working those issues. Our focus is on doing the right things and doing things right. That is our motto. I want to give you as much time as you want for questions and for the audience. Hypersonic defense, and the hypersonic threat. It is important to you and what you are doing. My first question before we get into details of those. What informs yours how are those decisions made. And as the new secretary doctor esper has emphasized, the National Defense strategy that was released a year and a half ago that is our guideline. With regard to modernization, research and engineering is all about our modernization plans. That is our touchstone. Everything we are doing can trace its roots back to that. That said, everything is equally important and nothing is important. It is fair to say i am not sorry. Things like hypersonic switch you mentioned, intending, wanting to make a big deal out of that, not just defense, not just coping with chinas defenses or the russian offensives, we want to hold others hostage. That is something in which to deal. Hypersonic capability is the key to that. I came here wanting to push that but at the other end of the spectrum issues like microelectronics and 5g i would say well less sensitive and educated. It is a major initiative, at the secretary of defense level. Our research and engineering was handed that priority and said go do. I mentioned our deputy undersecretary, doctor porter was by name assigned the dod lead for 5g. We are developing initiatives, we have a program plan and put that before congress and goes before the omb this coming year. We are hiring an assistant director for 5g, that is one where others outside ourselves felt this was sufficiently important and it has become a big deal. Explain briefly what it is you are funding for 5g . What is it you are most concerned about . Broadly speaking we are aware telecommunications initiatives far outstripped everything we can do and would want to do in dod we are struggling to become the flea on the tail of the telecoms dog, this is a multibilliondollar worldwide industry. We have National Security needs to the extent to see the competitive environment or encourage it to growing directions relevant to us, we want to do that. How can we help . When we talk about 5g we talk about greatly increased bandwidth and we talk about then enormously expanded number of touch points, the socalled internet of things where everything is connected to the net in one way or another. Dod has cases for that but just abound. Smart ports, smart airports, smart depots, smart factories, all of that, all of those things have commercial applications but also National Security implications. If we can make available in our infrastructure for experimenting and prototyping environments which different competitors can work in different areas that assure their proprietary information is perfected, if we can provide and use local, regional, municipal, state permitting is not required to operate because they are operating at the dod base, all of those things can speed progress in 5g development which the development wont be led by dod, we will be looking to be good customers but if we can help enable that development. There was a news article that came out yesterday saying you had done away with spending justifications for these. Do you want to comment on that . I saw that article this morning. Folks who like to send me bad news lost now opportunity to send me that article this morning. I talked with our acting director, doctor honey, or corresponded, talked by email and also from my own knowledge that article is completely incorrect. The essence of the article is i am now asking our dod budgeteers for a 1 billion blank check to do whatever we want to do and that was the core of the article and not likely. I havent been that stupid since i was in my teens. Some may think it a strategy to ask the comptroller for a blank check to do what you want but you could always ask but i gave up on stupid requests like that a long time ago. Thats not what we were doing. We are scrubbing every program we have carefully, very carefully for the coming budget year and we are going to request money for the programs we deem worthy but im not asking for a blank check. Back to the prioritization question and hypersonic defense, it still is a priority and we havent developed hypersonic defense especially the chinese hypersonic vehicles which are holding our strategic assets at risk and we would like to quickly have not only an offensive answer to that but defense event try to dissuade something bad from happening to begin with. The key to building the defense, was having a missile tracking layer that can track the Hypersonic Missile and donald trump mentioned in his rollout that we are going to have a robust space and there was not in the budget when the budget came out. Can you talk about the degree to which we are still vulnerable, the need to have this and how the tracking sensor layer needs to fit to the larger architecture . I tend to be longwinded and this will be worse. Let me try to take it from the top. As i have said publicly since my confirmation hearing a couple key points. The United States developed not all but almost all of the significant body of Underlying Research in hypersonic flight. It is a difficult domain. We chose not to weapon eyes it. From a policy perspective we didnt think the world needed a new class of weapons which we should defend ourselves and we didnt need a new offensive capability. Now you are seeing articles in the public press that the United States for over a decade has not progressed with hypersonic systems development. That is true, that is a deliberate choice. Our adversaries and the United States never declares anybody to be an adversary. They declare ourselves to be our adversaries which is frustrating as we have to respond. Our adversaries are developing, have developed these systems and they are quite capable. The advantage offered by hypersonic offense is it overflies air defenses as we understand them today and underflies are Missile Defenses so it goes to the gap between air defense and Missile Defense so it is a new class of defense if system that is required to deal with it. It is also extremely high speed. That is the definition of hypersonic threat. That means that it fly fast enough, low enough that by the time we can see its on defense of Radar Systems it is too late to close the kill chain. It would be difficult to close that killed chain for one threat but in a race scenario you just cant get there from here is the expression goes so we have to see them coming from further out. Our longrange radars are as good as they are going to get and so the hypersonic threat out runs for longrange radars, what is your next step . If this were exclusively a land conflict, one option would be to Forward Deployed radars, they would become targets and it is at least a theoretical option but as we look to the future, it is america conflict. There are not enough islands and we dont have enough ships to populate the earth with radars even if we thought that was a viable strategy so what else is available . You have to go to space. We can see what we need from space but because these hypersonic threats 10 to 20 times dimmer, without getting into specific numbers, 10 to 20 times dimmer than Strategic Missile threats. We need to be closer to the action which means lower down which implies that we need a proliferated era so we dont see these from a few spacecraft in geostationary orbit. A proliferated sensor layer in much lower orbit. The Missile Defense review, donald trump enunciated the need for such a layer and yet our budget didnt show it. It can take a little time for bureaucracy to catch up with elected leadership and we will be making a stronger tried to get into the budget. I hope that i captured their questions. We talked a little bit the Space Development, still a part of it. And the totality of it before you get to the missile tracking. The Space Development agency which was chartered by the acting secretary to basically oversee the architecture we are going to deploy and expedite deployment. Slaying for a Resilient NetworkCommunication System in low earth orbit similar to what you see commercial companies talking about for broadband, having different requirements for National Security purposes rather than moneymaking purposes. Why is that the first thing . The sensor layer is critical but if it cant talk among itself it will not be effective and the ability to communicate, if you will forgive the term, underlies every layer we wish to deploy whether it is for space situation or hypersonic Threat Detection and tracking or maritime domain awareness, whatever other functions, they are enabled by the ability to communicate in resilient fashion which we dont have today. That is why it is first. The hbt sf, akron for the hypersonic tracking, there is still money for that in parallel to that. In the budget for hbt hs, i would not be surprised to see us try to get additional funding for that and the draft actually the rfp was sent out. We had responses to that. We are proceeding in parallel off of the sensor layer but the sensor layer has to mesh with the overall architecture. I heard some confusion. If there is urgency developing these things now and especially to get at the missile threat since we are behind in the indo pacific that if we wanted to go faster we would keep it with mda. There is already an agency there. What is the wisdom to moving it over to its own new agency . I dont know that anything is being moved to the Space Development agency, the Missile Defense agency was not charged with or chartered to build a comms layer and i am not is in the interests of Management Efficiency we later consolidate two developments into one, that is a decision for a different place and time and probably not even me. Right now it is under mda, transport layer under sda. In hypersonic defense, going to be a space. Hypersonic defenses touches space, it touches ground stations, it touches detection and tracking algorithms and fire control algorithms. Dealing with hypersonic threat is even more interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary problem than it was. Having spent quite a number of years after i left nasa being closely involved with the Missile Defense agency on ground Missile Defense i got to the point i regarded the ground Missile Defense system as being more complex than the space shuttle. I came to that view and that was saying something. The problem of dealing with the hypersonic threat is even more complex than dealing with gmd because of the requirement for persistent, timely, Global Awareness that the hypersonic threat proposes. That is a great segue. I want to talk about gmd, midcourse Defense System, the primary, the only homeland Defense System we have deployed that provides protection of the us homeland and hawaii against icbm threats from north korea and as iran develops iran as well and the mbr said we are going to continue primarily to defend the homeland against rogue states and icbms. We were developing a new no kill vehicle to increase reliability to handle the threats that continue to progress but there is a stop order on that right now. You want to speak to that and comment on plans for improving gmd, the kill vehicle components and whether or not there is something before we get to the mlk b which is a followon after the rtv. I need to be careful. We never want to get to classified topics and public environment. We had a rejoined Kill Vehicle Program to follow on our successful ek v that is deployed today in alaska and california and we have a followon program to deploy 20 more. That is the Development Program sometimes Development Programs encounter problems so we found some results in testing that were not what we would have wanted them to be and after a certain Due Diligence we decided we were not going down a path of that was going to be fruitful so we issued a stop work on the kill vehicle and i and the team because i have been involved regularly i and the team have spent the last 3 months studying alternatives. We are close to the end of that and when we get to the end we will tell you in a classified mode. We are still pursuing a program and there will be a followon kill Vehicle Development but we had to drop back and hunt in order to get forward progress because we are getting down a path that wasnt going to bear fruit. For claritys sake when we talk about how to improve the system, there was a narrative that developed, in formation that gmd is not a reliable system and it isnt up to where it needs to be to handle what policy dictates against the north korean threat. What is your confidence in the technical ability . We dont want to use all our spare rounds doing testing but the last two highspeed intercept tests that we have done using the deployed system where extraordinarily successful. They were hit to kill in very aggressive scenarios with the deployed hardware. I dont want to go beyond that. They were very successful. I have a great deal of confidence in the technical capabilities of the system. If we want more rounds as i like to say with all of the systems you get to the point you cant buy the parts anymore. You have parts obsolescence issues. If we want more rounds we have to have a redesigned kill vehicle and we are pursui