The House Armed Services Committee has launched an ambitious new task force to prepare the United States for potential conflicts with China and Russia.
Two veterans, Democratic Rep. Seth Moulton and Republican Rep. Jim Banks, lead the recently formed Future of Defense Task Force.
“Seth and I come from a fresh perspective. Both of us are post 9/11 veterans. We’ve both been downrange, we’ve both deployed recently,” Banks told the Washington Examiner. “It does give us a different perspective where we can lead an effort like this.”
The co-chairmen told reporters on Tuesday that they hope a new generation of leaders will shake things up in a defense environment that is accustomed to doing business as usual.
“The idea here is that America is at a crossroads where we face an extraordinary number of threats around the globe,” Moulton said. “And a lot of us feel like we’re not asking enough of the big strategic questions — not just about where we need to be in the next five years or 10 years, but 30 years from now against global competitors like China, Russia, the ongoing threat of transnational terrorism.”
Moulton, a Marine Corps veteran, will run the task force with Banks, who served in the Navy. They expect to address an array of topics including the influence of biotechnology, hypersonic missiles, and artificial intelligence. The Task Force will hear from a number of voices in both open and closed-door briefings during its six-month mandate, after which it will produce a report for the committee.
The long-term outlook is different from the House Armed Services Committee’s typical year-to-year focus on the defense budget, but Moulton and Banks hope younger voices will help drive the conversation in a new direction. Democratic Rep. Chrissy Houlahan, a former Air Force officer, also is on the panel, as is Republican Rep. Michael Waltz, who previously served as a senior Pentagon official.
The Department of Defense can expect some tough questions about what it is doing to prepare for the future, but the defense and tech industries will be brought into the conversation, Moulton said.
“There’s no question that the model has changed, and innovation is no longer coming from big government contracts,” Moulton said. “The United States has to be smarter about adapting to this world. There’s a joke inside the Pentagon, if only the Chinese would hack our acquisition rules and copy them, we’d be more competitive. That’s a reality.”
It’s a significant undertaking for such a short-term period, and Moulton and Banks are aware that their report could have limited effect. But the two chairmen expect to continue to drive the conversation beyond the task force’s mandate.
“The task force’s work will complete in six months, but that doesn’t mean that Seth and I’s work ends at that point,” Banks said.
The first hearing, on Theories of Victory, is set for Oct. 29.
