Under Secretary of Defense for Research and Engineering Mike Griffin speaks with Hudson Senior Fellow Rebeccah Heinrichs.

Griffin on the DOD's Tech Priorities 

Select quotes from Under Secretary Griffin's discussion at Hudson: 

1. DOD and 5G:

   "Commercial telecoms initiatives outstrip anything we can do…We are struggling to become the flea on the tail of the telecoms dog. That said, to the extent that we can help, we want to do that. DOD has use cases that just abound. Smart ports, smart airports, smart depots, smart factories - all of those things have commercial applications, but they absolutely have national security applications." 

   "If we can make available our infrastructure for experimenting, if we can provide venues - all of those things can really speed progress in 5G development, which - again, the development won't be led by DOD. We will be looking to be good customers, but if we can help enable that development, then we want to do that."

2. Protecting against hypersonic weapons:

   "Hypersonic threats are 10 to 20 times dimmer than strategic missile threats. We need to be closer to the action, we need a proliferated layer of sensors because we can't see these things from a few spacecraft in geostationary orbit." 

   "At this year's Missile Defense Review, President Trump quite correctly enunciated the need for such a layer, and yet, our budget didn't show it. Well, it can take a little bit of time for the bureaucracy to catch up with the elected leadership, and I think this year, we're going to be making a stronger try at getting the funding for that space layer into the budget."

3. The new Space Development Agency's top priority:

   "The first task [is] the communications transport layer, a kind of slang for a resilient, highly proliferated mesh network communication system in low Earth orbit. So why is the comms layer the first thing? Well, the sensor layer is critical. The ability to communicate underlays every other layer we wish to deploy, whether it's for space situational awareness, hypersonic threat detection, or maritime domain awareness. Whatever functions we want, they are enabled first by the ability to communicate in a resilient fashion, which we don't have today."

4. Killing the kill vehicle:

   "We had a redesigned kill vehicle program to follow on our Exoatmospheric Kill Vehicle that is deployed today in Alaska and California. Sometimes, development programs encounter problems. We found some results in testing that were not what we would have wanted them to be. After a certain amount of due diligence, we issued a stop work on the kill vehicle. [We] have spent the last three months studying alternatives. So we're still pursuing a GMD program. And there still will be a follow-on kill vehicle development. But we did have to drop back and punt in order to get forward progress because we were going down a path that wasn't going to bear fruit."

5. Untrusted is the new normal:
    

   "We're going to have to learn how to have trusted communications in untrusted networks because we will never be able to certify perfect hardware. The national security community has to go places where people don't want us. We have to be able to operate in an environment where it's not that we suspect it's not trustworthy, we know it's not trustworthy. That's one of our ground rules."

       The above remarks have been edited and condensed for clarity.

Go Deeper: Hudson Experts on Defense Technology

Hudson Institute
1201 Pennsylvania Avenue, N.W. Suite 400
Washington, DC 20004