One senator on Wednesday called for the U.S. to boost its spending on defense research and development as competitors like China invest to edge out America as the most technologically superior in the world.
Sen. Dick Durbin, D-Ill., and ranking member of the Senate Appropriations Defense Subcommittee, said he is “very concerned” about the shrinking federal investment in research and development.
“What are we thinking?” Durbin asked during a subcommittee hearing on the fiscal 2017 research and technology budget request. “While investments are on the decline in the United States, other nations are surging ahead.”
Frank Kendall, undersecretary of defense for acquisition, technology and logistics, talked about the Pentagon’s focus on innovation, including a Defense Department hub in Silicon Valley to build better relationships with tech companies.
“The reason is the growing recognition that the United States’ long standing military superiority is being challenged by peer or near peer competitors in a way we haven’t seen since the Cold War,” he said.
Durbin urged Kendall and other witnesses from the Defense Department to convince other lawmakers to increase research and development spending, which dropped from a high-water mark of 17 percent of the discretionary budget to just 9 percent today.
“You need to tell us a story. A story we can share with everyone about how this investment of taxpayer dollars makes us a better nation, keeps us safer, and keeps America in the lead,” he said.
Arati Prabhakar, the leader of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, gave a specific example. When military aircraft today head out on a mission, they sometimes encounter radar that’s transmitting a signal that isn’t in its jamming profiles, leaving the aircraft and pilot dangerously unprotected. With today’s technology, Prabhakar said it can take years to update all systems.
“That really just reflects the simple fact that when those systems were built, we were in a world in which the adversary just didn’t change that often,” Prabhakar said. “Today, that slow moving world is gone.”
As a result, DARPA is looking at ways for planes to scan for unrecognized radar and come up immediately with a new jamming profile to protect troops immediately.
