Today's Battlefield Presents Urgency for Innovation
6/28/2024
By Hon. Heidi Shyu and Dr. William LaPlante
The safety and prosperity of our democracy depends on our ability to innovate and stay ahead of the technological advances of our adversaries. The 2022 National Defense Strategy recognizes this imperative, stating: “To shore up the foundations for integrated deterrence and campaigning, we will act urgently to build enduring advantages across the defense ecosystem — the Department of Defense, the defense industrial base and the array of private sector and academic enterprises that create and sharpen the Joint Force’s technological edge.”
Over the past few years, the need for the Defense Department to quickly field critical technologies at scale has come into even greater focus, with two years of war in Europe as Ukraine resists a prolonged Russian invasion, ongoing fighting between Israel and Hamas and increasingly threatening behavior from China and Iran. Unlike Iraq and Afghanistan, these threats are characterized by growing and sophisticated use of advanced, emerging technologies, including unmanned and autonomous systems in Ukraine, China testing hypersonics at an accelerated pace and AI-enabled technology being used in the Middle East, just to name a few. Each of these conflicts underscores the need for a strong U.S. national defense enabled by a robust, resilient and innovative defense industrial base capable of generating the world’s most advanced weapons systems and having the capacity to produce at speed and scale.
However, recent years have shown that the Defense Department is often challenged to quickly field emerging and critical technologies. From vulnerabilities in defense supply chains exposed by the COVID-19 pandemic, to capacity limitations on the production of munitions to support Ukraine, to government dysfunction slowing the speed of funding for research and production, the obstacles are formidable.
https://www.nationaldefensemagazine.org/articles/2024/6/28/emerging-technology-horizons-todays-battlefield-presents-urgency-for-innovation
