The Pentagon’s head of research and engineering is focused on the most advanced threats facing the United States, rather than those closest to America’s shores.
Emil Michael, the undersecretary of war for research and engineering and the department’s chief technology officer, told reporters at a Defense Writers Group event on Monday that China’s military modernization and expansion over the past 15 years requires “a different mindset.”
Michael, who is responsible for overseeing the Pentagon’s entire research, development, and prototype enterprise, said China is the primary possible threat to the U.S. on the global stage, while President Donald Trump and Secretary of War Pete Hegseth have publicly emphasized threats emanating from the western hemisphere, particularly mass migration and cartel activity recently.
The undersecretary noted that the military has the equipment and technology it needs to continue its current operations in the Caribbean, whereas there are threats further from the U.S. homeland that the U.S. does not yet have the capabilities for.
“We have enough capability currently to do anything that’s necessary in that arena. So I am focused much more on other parts of the world … than this hemisphere, because the adversary capabilities are not nearly as close,” he said.
The Trump administration has prioritized homeland defense in its military and foreign policy strategies throughout its first year. It has deployed U.S. troops to the southern border to help crack down on illegal immigration and drug smuggling coming through the U.S.-Mexico border, is trying to build a massive multi-layered air defense system known as the Golden Dome, and U.S. Southern Command has begun carrying out lethal strikes on vessels accused of carrying drugs on board, purportedly headed for the U.S.
The military, since the start of September, has targeted 22 vessels, killing more than 80 people. The Navy has surged capabilities and resources to the region, which now accounts for the largest buildup of U.S. military power in the Western Hemisphere in decades.
The Trump administration released its National Security Strategy last week, highlighting its prioritization of defending the homeland: “We want to ensure that the Western Hemisphere remains reasonably stable and well-governed enough to prevent and discourage mass migration to the United States; we want a Hemisphere whose governments cooperate with us against narco-terrorists, cartels, and other transnational criminal organizations.”
The NSS outlines broad threats in the Pacific region, but it did not characterize China as the “pacing challenge,” as the Biden administration’s NSS did. Michael agreed that the Chinese Communist Party remains the U.S. “pacing challenge,” despite the absence of the phrase in the NSS.
The Pentagon is aggressively trying to pivot away from expensive and sophisticated systems and weapons that were primarily used during the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, as low-tech, cheap, and mass-producible weapons have become more common.
Russia’s war in Ukraine has been a real-life testing ground for the development of offensive and defensive autonomous systems, more commonly known as drones, combined with the rapidly spreading use of artificial intelligence. Both sides have been able to mass-produce countless drones of various sizes with different primary functions, such as attack drones, surveillance drones, and defensive drones.
“You’re seeing the notion of mass attritable, low-cost weapons being used in conflicts in a way that we haven’t seen before, as opposed to exquisite weapons we’ve seen before. So those changes … combined with the rise of AI and how AI is going to be used for vision superiority or extending human capability beyond what a human analyst can do in any one capacity,” Michael said.
NSS EMPHASIZES TRUMP’S ‘AMERICA FIRST’ PRIORITIZATION OF US’S BACKYARD
The undersecretary noted that the U.S.’s threat environment is vastly different from Ukraine, given Kyiv’s primary adversary is its larger neighbor, and the U.S. has not gone to war with either of its neighbors in over a hundred years.
“The notion of having as many drones as the Russians or Ukrainians so that we can push battle lines is not as important as it is in that conflict,” Michael said.
