The merchandise. This is chriss book. As soon as were finished go get a copy one way or another. I watched the gestation of this book. I remembersh a powerful lecture that christa gave two years ago in aspen where we are virtually, talking about the need for defense modernization. It was a startling wakeup call. I ate it writing a column about it. It began a conversation with chris that was part of his effort to develop this book and the arguments in it. So i want to ask chris take us all on the journey has been on and yet shared some with over the years. The book starts if you have read it yet with a really chilling account of whatth would happen n the first hours and days of a war with china and our maybe thats a good place to start explaining to people why we have a problem with it comes to defense technology. Thank you, david. I preshould you taking the time to do this and appreciate your friendship, guides throughout the sole process. Its been invaluable to me. The story begins for me in the type that is spent on the Senate Armed Services committee better part of a decade supporting the committee and senator mccain looking very closely at the u. S. Military, how we were investing money, how we were not investing money and ultimately how we match up against energy great power competitors first and foremost china. The reason i bought the book was a growing concern that i have been and have now that were losing our military technological advantage, that as result of that our ability to deter conventional conflict isy also eroding, and that is increasingly putting us into a very dangerous perilous position. I tried to make this visceral to people in spelling out what it might look like, god forbid, f the United States military had to fight china. There are a lot of reasons why that might end up happening. Its not a were the United States is looking for obviously but for many reasons we could end up finding ourselves in that type of the situation. The problem we have is that for 30 years our adversaries have gone too school and now the United States builds and operates our military. China in particular has not sought to play the same game we play. They have sought to pledge of again. They have recognized u. S. Military is built around very small numbers of very large exquisite, expensive come heavily manned, hard to replace military systems, vehicles, ships, aircraft, platforms and theyve made a a conscious eff, a deliberate effort, and urgent effort to build military capabilities to call into question how the u. S. Military operates and what it operates with. What i spell in the beginning of the book is the concern that if we ended up in this conflict our Forward Operating bases, our land bases in asia, laces like guam, bases in japan would come under immediate and withering attack from very precise and very large quantities of precision guided weapons, crue missiles, ballistic missiles, increasingly Hypersonic Weapons of all different ranges and types. Our naval forces, rc basis, aircraft carriers would face a similar onslaught of very large quantities of relatively lower cost very precise weapons, and the ship ballistic missiles, cruise missiles, the socalled carrier killer at the ship christmas with a ballistic missile. Our sort of air power would struggle towo get close and struggle to be relevant because of a very dense integrated air Defense Systems the chinese have built and fielded. All of this with an idea towards pushing the u. S. Military farther away making it harder for us to operate and ultimately engaging with the Chinese Military refers assistant destruction warfare which is the fielding of capabilities to rip apart the critical enabling technologies and capabilities that the United States relies upon to operate ourat forces in combat from our satellite networks, our intelligence apparatus, or commit a control enterprise, the ways in which we move information and command threat to our military systems and operate effectively. Again, here to the changes military is feeling very advanced technologies from highpower jammers and cybersex and Electronic Warfare two very consciously after the ways the United States military operates and my bottom line on this is they made a lot more progress than most americans realize. The situation for the United States is a lot more dire the most americans realize. Chris, thats a chilling account, our role in which her character having to move east away from china to escape attack, our beautiful f35 exquisite fighters cant get to the turkish because they cant refuel because refueling planes will get shot down. You said talking with senator mccain years ago, i can only imagine the conversation in the situation room with a choice would be between surrender and lose, or fight and lose. The question obviously is how do we get in this terrible situationw of vulnerability, io the kind of scenario you just described where the chinese have weapon systems doctrine that will render our beautiful weapons, i do want to say useless, but at much less powerful. How did that happen . As ice in the book as you just said no and as i cant say enough condemnatory to suggest that china is ten feet tall and the United States has no effective means of responding. O. And is heading in a worse direction. How did we get here . There is a handful of things. One obvious reason is that for the past two decades we have been very focused on the events that followed 9 11 and the wars we were fighting and global counterterrorism operations. That was an enormous strain on our decisionmakers and resources, but that is not the whole story. The reality is that during that period of time in over the past 25 years, the lions share of our Defense Budget, upwards of three trillions of dollars of the Defense Budget has been going towards modernization efforts that did not have anything to do with the wars that we were fighting. Me, ak that is where, to lot of the failure resides. Ultimately, i think it is an intellectual failure. We have misconceived the nature of military power and what we are building a military to do. We have what we refer to as a platform centric you of the world view of the world. We have optimized our defense enterprise to produce military things, vehicle, ships, and enterprise that are relied upon for many decades, and we have sought to make them incrementally better. We have optimized our Industrial Base to produce those kinds of results. Nothe reality is that is what ultimately wins words peace. Rs or keeps the the outcomes we are trying to achieve our better decisionmaking, better quality action, better understanding of the world, and the ability to do that faster than our competitors regardless of the tools that we use. Part of the problem exists in how we conceive of military power and the fact that we build programs and budgets on an Industrial Base with special interest support complexes all focused on producing more incrementally better versions of the old things we relied upon for a long period of time. At the same time, we have failed to recognize how far emerging technologies have advanced, particularly in the commercial world. Mentioned a lot of those upfront, but just by way of an example, the parking lot outside of the Office Building where i am now has commercial tesla themles that have onboard computer processors and graphic processing units that are hundreds of times more capable and powerful than the supercomputer on the f35 strike fighter, which is referred to as the flying supercomputer. The defense world has simply fallen significantly behind the commercial world in a lot of respects in respect to Artificial Intelligence and emerging technologies. I think the underlying reason if i could point to one is hubris. We came out of the cold war so far ahead of the next competitor and enjoyed the period of military dominance for so long, that we began to believe that the ways we have always operated, and the things we relied upon to deliver our dominance would forever be the things that would achieve that level of military primacy. We failed to recognize that in that time we have been disrupted by our competitors and disrupted by the nature and evolution of event advanced technology. If that mindset does not change, and we do not realize that we have to get out of the way of the way that we conceived david on the question of how did this happen, i want to ask you to talk about on which you advantage, the role of what senator mccain like to call the military congressional complex, the Iron Triangle that keeps existing procurement system ever greater refinement of existing systems, keeps the whole thing rolling forward. Maybe you could talk about that needcle to buying what we from the perspective you had when you are at the committee, the things you saw happen despite your efforts and sometimes efforts by senator mccain to turn the course. It just did not happen. Why is that . Chris that is a great question. You are right to hit upon the idea this is an ecosystem involving the congress and the department of defense, the special Interest Groups outside of government. Certainly the Industrial Base and also the Many Organizations involved with National Defense. The problem i see is not the nature of the system pretty think the nature of the system is not going to change. It is going to be what it is. I think we can wish away elements of it, wish it was going to be otherwise than it is. I really do not think it is realistic to hold out hope that defense reform has to be predicated upon a transformation of the political system. The reality is often the incentive that governs the system are out of whack, and they generate the same outcomes yearoveryear which is as we have been talking about kind of building more intimate incrementally better versions of all things at great cost at great levels of technological sophistication. They are not necessarily the in thewe need to prevail competition that we are now involved in. I think the reason is this is an establishment that is conservative, and there are good reasons. Bureaucracy exists to slow the pace of change. I think the problem that we have is the system has become so optimized in producing the same types of things, manning the same things, wanting to build that same things, it becomes difficult to change the incentives governing the system. To do that you have to affect it all levels. It is not enough to try to make change at the congressional level in the absence of the leadership at the department. This is something that is possible to change. In my time at the senate i certainly saw efforts where congress was involved in the right ways toward making hard investmentsreasing in new technology that the department was not fully aware of. This has happened before. The m q nine reaper and the largely, that aviation began through congressional earmarks. This is something that incentives can be changed, but we have a system often with the pace of change is slow. There are few incentives for people in the government and parts of the ecosystem to make change, to shift the way we do things. It revolves around the systemic failure to understand and seek to compete different ways of achieving that outcome we are seeking rather than producing better versions of the tools we have relied upon. David let me remind the audience that you can join this conversation in a few minutes. What you should do if you have a question is go to your to to onnt to participant the screen and hit the raise your hand button and then we will see it and we will know you are interested in asking a question. Onera thing interesting thing about you have done is the strong belief in the need to modernize our defenses that you have written about in the book, and you have gone out and tried to do it yourself. Chris is the chief strategy industries. Ndel i think it would be interesting to hear about what you are doing now, the new systems that you are trying to build, what you hear about in the technology world, and then we will talk after about why it is difficult for companies to get in the door. Chris we are a technology startup. We are three years old. We have been working since the day we were founded to try to provide more advanced capabilities to the National Defense enterprise so certainly the department of defense, and u. S. Allies and partners overseas. Thesecus is taking emerging technologies like Artificial Intelligence and ,rying to build Solutions Capabilities addressing the problems that military operators and National Security professionals have. Not to kind of meet the requirements laid out 10 years ago, but to try to solve the problems in a and different ways. A lot of the work that we focus on, and this is a broad statement about the nature of these technologies, going back to what we were talking about earlier, what we are really , bringing new technologies into the force, is fundamentally enhance Human Understanding and decisionmaking, the nature of action we can take. I think there is a lot of confusion around what these technologies can and cannot do, misunderstanding and concern thet building skynet or terminator. There are at it, certain things these technologies are going to be good at doing now. There are a lot of things that they are not doing now and they should not be put in the position of doing now. At the basic level, i boil it down to the dod is awash in data, much like the rest of the world. Actuallydy is we are not taking advantage of all of the information we have paid we are making it the job of tens of thousands of people to sift insightst and generate , kinda prepare the military for the dangerous jobs they will have to perform. It is slow and manual and brittle and not very dynamic, and that increases risk to our men and women in uniform. It wastes time. Where these technologies can shine is around making better use of the information that we understandingsg that will protect the force and save innocent lives, but humans in the position to make better decisions about important issues of war and peace in life and death. And ensure that whatever actions are taken are originating from human agency and always have human Accountability Associated with them so you can trace the action back to someone who is accountable. To meet that is the crux of the issue, as long as we can ensure that process is taking place, these technologies will rapidly develop and add value. It has to occur in that operational and ethical framework. David if you read his book, which i hope you will, you will see a detailed discussion of the different unmanned systems, air, land, that for relatively little money can be brought to bear, with cost comparisons between the weapons that we have now and the ones that we could have. Assuming that there are these Great Companies with great ideas out there and know how they could be helping our defense in a costeffective way, they confront a procurement process, that is intimidating and overwhelming. A lot of Companies Give up. Could you talk about that problem, that people with good ideas do not have the scale in terms of ability to do the paperwork to get into this loop. It is National Defense, not a free market. It is significantly defined by the government but it is governed by incentives. That is worth focusing on when you try to unpack this question of how new people can do Better Business with the department of defense. What i have seen in my time in the senate, doing a lot of work for senator mccain to try to reform this process, and then after government in my life, that the timelines are too long for Small Companies. For larger companies, they can ride out the multiyear process from generating requirements to programming, acquisition ,rograms, selecting vendors going through the competition process and then getting money appropriated. , six this is a multiyear or seven years in the case of larger systems, sometimes over 10 years long. The problem is for Small Companies, they need to be able to return investment quickly, be able to show that they are generating traction for the work they are doing. I think too often the problem in the National Defense world has been that when we start a lot of new programs, we have out lot of or prototypes or projects efforts that get going, and its never been easier right now as a result of the reforms from me from recent years and other focused organizations bringing these companies and to do work, the problem has been none of it scales. Hundreds of Companies May come in and have the opportunity to get a small contract and build a small prototype, but there is not a mechanism that takes those companies or programs, the best performers across what is known as the valley of death from a small scale prototype to a largescale program. Establishment the needs to focus on, the next administration, whichever stripe it is, is creating mechanisms to identify who the true performers are among all of those new people coming in and doing small amounts of work for the department of defense and identifying who will be the next companiesthe star capable of critical National Security at scale. That is how you begin to change the Industrial Base, as Small Companies become larger companies, hire more people, it looks like a viable business Business Model for investors, and it is a place where engineers want to go work and investors want to invest. The problem that we have had for 30 years is that as st