Bacon: Maintaining our National Security Means Maintaining the Edge in Next-Gen Technologies

Cyber, Information Technologies, and Innovation Subcommittee Chairman Don Bacon (R-NE) delivered the following opening statement at a hearing on the Science, Technology, and Innovation Posture of the Department of Defense.

Chairman Bacon's Statement as Prepared for Delivery:

Good afternoon and welcome to today’s Cyber, Information Technologies, and Innovation Subcommittee hearing on the science, technology, and innovation posture of the Department of Defense.  Thank you to our witnesses for being here today – we are looking forward to hearing from you.

We live in an era of unprecedented innovation in critical areas like quantum computing, artificial intelligence, autonomy, cyber, and biotechnology. Given this progress, our nation’s adversaries are working tirelessly to undermine American leadership and upset the world’s security and stability. Put simply, the battlefield is changing on a fundamental level, and our opponents are dead set on using this paradigm shift in technology as an opportunity to degrade American dominance.

One of the U.S.’s greatest competitive advantages is our ability to out-think and out-innovate our adversaries. At the Pentagon alone, there is an immense science and technology enterprise dedicated to advancing new ideas and technologies to arm our warfighters with necessary tools to win.

Equally as important as our in-house minds is our ability to coordinate and collaborate with the other brilliant professionals at our nation’s academic institutions, defense industrial base, and other U.S. departments and agencies to ensure we are exploring every innovative path forward.

Earlier this year, the Department rolled out a massive reorganization to its Research and Engineering enterprise, focusing on streamlining decisions, concentrating technology investment areas, and providing clear demand signals to industry. Four months in, I look forward to hearing about how this transition is going and the main lines of effort moving forward.

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