 Good morning, everyone. Hey, Mike. OK, I think we'll get started. I'm Maaren Leid, senior advisor here at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in the International Security Program and the Harold Brown Chair in Defense Policy Studies. I'm really grateful to all of you for taking the time to spend the day with us today. I assume that almost everybody here to varying degrees of directness is engaged in the S&T Enterprise, the Science and Technology Enterprise, to some extent. And that the greatest satisfaction in being part of that enterprise is in successfully delivering new capabilities to users. That can be a very long and complex process. There's all kinds of long-standing conversations about the trials and tribulations of the path from conception to ideally delivery, from the valleys of funding deaths, depending on how far upstream you want to go, with the STEM workforce issues, et cetera, et cetera. But one crucial element of that is being able to develop and sustain the requisite support. And in the government context, frequently from non-technical policymakers to continue those activities that ultimately result in the delivery of that capability. And so it's that specific element of the process of finding ways to communicate to a whole variety of stakeholders the potential and to do that persuasively and repeatedly and on a sustained basis that we wanted to focus on today. And then so we've brought together a variety of people to offer their perspectives on that front, and then we'd like to involve you all in that continued conversation and breakout sessions this afternoon. And ultimately hopefully leave at the end of the day with some specific ideas that we might collectively take forward to strengthen the overall Science and Technology Enterprise. So we are gonna start with a conversation with Ben Riley from the Office of the Secretary of Defense, and we'll have two panels to get into some more in-depth perspectives and then a lunchtime speaker before we ask you all to go do a little work on your own and then come back and talk again as a group at the end of the day. So we're very much looking forward to, hopefully, what will be a very fruitful discussion that sparks a lot of ideas and exchange and that you'll also walk out of here with potentially new networks and continue this conversation long after today amongst yourselves and with others. So that's the point of the day. We are exceptionally grateful to Dupont that allowed us to pull this all together. And they've been very generous with their support, not only for this or some other things we've done as well. So we're thankful to them. Just a couple of admin notes if people could turn off their ringers, we'd appreciate it. And also for later in the day, I think hopefully while we're told about your secret numbers on your name tags, which we'll have as our little code for where it goes afternoon, we'll get into that later, but with that, I think we'll dive in. Very pleased to be here this morning with Ben Riley, who is the principal deputy to the deputy assistant secretary of defense for emerging capability and prototyping in the undersecretary defense acquisition technology and logistics. This latest iteration of the Phoenix of Ben is the latest in a series of positions that he's held in the, in AT&L to help try to facilitate and foster creative approaches to war fighting challenges by leveraging and understanding trends in commercial markets, in universities, in academia, and in the Defense Department Research and Development Enterprise. He began his career as a flight officer in the P3 community, and he hauled a number of command positions and staff positions before retiring as a captain. And he has been, I think, throughout his career, a strong advocate, not only for applying the hard sciences to military problems, but also social sciences as well and integrating those things to, again, deliver meaningful advances to military personnel over both the long and short term. So he's gonna talk to us a little bit about his perspectives on best practices for building support for those kinds of activities and also potentially some areas where he thinks greater attention in the S&T community might be warranted. So Ben, thanks for coming this morning. We look forward to the conversation. Thanks, Marin. Marin and I, and I see JD McQuarrie from Georgia Tech Research Institute, are all involved in a project right now that I have a meeting on at midday called Dynamic Spectrum Sharing Consortium. And by way of background, we had a couple years ago, and you were on the panel, right, JD? The President's Council on Science and Technology did a study on the future of the electromagnetic spectrum. And one of the things that came out of that was a recommendation to sell 1,000 megahertz of spectrum to stimulate economic development and I believe 500 have been sold to date. And so one of the panel members came to me and he was advocating the development of a spectrum sharing testbed in an urban environment and where we are, we've been able in the past to sort of fund a number of little programs to stimulate an idea, what I call stir the pot. And so he was hitting me up for some money to start the groundwork for this consortium or this testbed and as we talked, I said why don't we think about the idea of a consortium of companies both large and small who do things in the electromagnetic spectrum that DOD could work with so we don't go out and necessarily contract with a single company. We contract with the consortium and thereby therefore we contract with the companies within the consortium. My big objective in recommending this was the question of how do I find those talented companies who are out there in industry who either have no history of doing business with DOD, find it hard to do or we don't know about. And in my experience there are more companies out there like that across a range of disciplines that we can possibly get our hands on. There's not a process you can lay in place. And so we've been working on that idea but it's basically how do we leverage, how do we get our hands on some of this technology? And we've had a number of, and it's gone, the idea of setting up this consortium has gone quite frankly a lot smoother within the bureaucracy than I thought it would go. But we have a number of still issues, you know, well we don't need to worry about this and a lot of people throughout the Pentagon and you talk about the spectrum and where it is and where it's going, really don't see it as an issue yet. So it's kind of been an uphill battle and we have to continue to talk about it but it's also been an interesting process. And actually we're gonna have an industry day what I'm gonna fit next month, so. Marin approached me on talking about this and I thought, first of all I thought it's a really hard problem to talk about because a couple of years ago I asked a professor at a university in the area do you have any way that we can really justify or articulate why it's important for us to spend money on science and technology research and development? And he gave me this answer that was probably 30 pages that probably could not be read by mere mortals. Very, very complex and not the kind of thing you're gonna articulate to an individual who's gonna be a rocker, who says hey I got 10 minutes for this, I need the elevator speech and go on. The other thing is the initial reaction is when people say okay talk about the value of technology. One of the first things people drag out is the DARPA experience with the internet or an experience I have is GPS and those are all kind of after the fact examples of why technology is good. The real challenge is talking about why you need to do this before you build whatever the system is that the technology will spur. I have an article somebody sent me just the other day on the iPhone and all of the DOD investments that related it to the contributed to components in the iPhone and I thought about throwing it up here as an example and decided it's too simplistic but I think and the same with many of these other things certainly I doubt any of the developers of the internet and I know the developers of GPS ever envisioned what those things would become and not only within the military but throughout the world. I've spent roughly 20 years on and off inside the Pentagon big place and you walk down the halls from building office A to office B or whatever and you often hear not eavesdropping but just hear conversations with people in the hallway and more than once many times in fact I come across a group of people they could be military folks they could be government civilians or they could be contractors in the building who obviously have been in giving a pitch to somebody on their idea of some system or capability and some of the words I hear often well they just didn't get it or they don't understand it or if only they had listened than any other number of rationalizations like that so it's not hard, there's a certain set of probably 10 basic kinds of conversations that one can hear in the hallways as you walk around and that frustration after failing to articulate why their program is important or why it should be considered is often the one that we see, I see. As I thought about this one of the takeaways that I have in terms of talking about technology is not just the technology I have a steady stream of people coming in to show me some brand new capability or technology and sometimes they walk in and we'll put it on the table or put a picture of it on the table and say this is a disruptive technology and I told Martin before I look at the technology and the technology looks at me and nothing happens. You're not disrupted. I'm not disrupted. Sorry? Not the technology, what? Somebody will come in and say this is a disruptive technology and they just put it in front of me like this is a disruptive technology and I tell people I look at the technology and the technology looks back at me and nothing happens. Kind of like taking a horse to water and saying drink and you look at the horse and the horse looks at you and nobody drinks any water. So it becomes important to me to put that technology within a context. How might I use this thing? How might I employ it? What would be the potential application and that could either be a piece of hardware or a piece of software or whatever but if I can put whatever the technology is within a context of some sort either for a current issue or I spend a lot of time trying to guess what I think is coming down the road in terms of things that we ought to be focused on. That technology becomes a lot more understandable to me and I can say well here's where it might fit or here's where it might go or it might augment this or wherever it is and I think so the first big thing I'd recommend if you go to the working groups and all is what's the context within this thing lies whatever this technology is not just put it on the table but some understanding of what the military needs some understanding of what the national security needs are some understanding of where you think of the market whichever the sector of that technology comes out of I think is an important thing to think about. The other thing I try to think about is I sort of wrote down decomposition people come in and talk about a technology and decomposition and for me it breaks down to a number of different things first of all it's not only the technology which is probably something you can see sitting on the table such as that glass but also the science behind the technology and I think you need to think of what I'd call a continuum between the science that created that technology and the technology itself it's not just one or the other but it's a continuum of those things and I think the failure to think of that continuum often causes people to talk past each other so the scientific community is talking about one thing the customer community is talking about another and I think they wind up talking past each other and I think to me the continuum then extends from the science research area through the technology prototyping and development through the system development and to an operational capability and then if appropriate refreshing that capability over time it's not just a standalone thing. I think also that most of you I assume are familiar with the discussion of disruptive innovation and sustaining innovation that comes out of the innovator's dilemma and I think the discussion on the value of the technology is much more difficult on the disruptive side than it is on the sustaining side. When you're sustaining you already know what you have you know what it is, you know what you want to improve and so you have a much better context of whatever it is you're after. The disruptive side when you put something in front of a person and say this might do whatever I think is much more difficult to grasp and our knowledge of the value of technology I would assert is a lot better after the fact than it is before the fact on many of these programs and I think a lot of these issues have some degree or often a high degree of risk before you have developed the system which causes me to favor as we do prototyping and experimentation with things lots of little programs where I can take a lot more risk and if I fail I'm not gonna find myself on the front page of a newspaper rather than a big program where I envision the end state before we have ever cut the first piece of metal or whatever we've done to start that program. A couple of anecdotes that might help to serve the afternoon session. One of my prized possessions at home and I tell people I keep it under glass, a glass case and say break in case of GAO audit. It's a 1983 report from the GAO on GPS and as you might guess the program was behind schedule and over cost and it was an Air Force program and the Air Force was arguing, the GPS was built, the system was built primarily for large aircraft flying long distances. The Air Force was also arguing during the GPS audit that the commercial aviation industry, airlines and the like would be interested in this capability and the GPS doubted they would because- A GAO, sorry. A GAO, I'm sorry, the GAO doubted they would because those kind of airplanes flew on established air routes with radio nav aids, tack ends, VORs and the like and therefore they wouldn't need this kind of thing. So look at where we are today with GPS which is anybody here not have a GPS with them somewhere? And so it's very difficult I think to envision not only where the technology goes to solve whatever the purpose was, the original one in this case being large cargo type airplanes but also where it's going to go after that. So I keep that study around, in fact we had a GAO audit once and I mentioned it to the team and they were actually very helpful to us and I said to them to kind of soften the blow, hey you guys got some good ideas, can we sit down and talk to you about it. The second one is a Predator unmanned air vehicle which I was involved in in the 90s. It was an ACTD, my boss at the time was Larry Lynn who went on to be the head of DARPA and as we walked around with that program I probably could in retrospect think of about five or six senior officers in the Pentagon who thought it was a good idea and a lot of reasons why it wouldn't work, a lot of reasons why it was of no value and all of that and it took persistence to get that thing going and frankly a lot of that came I think from the senior leadership in the department. Secretary Perry told us, not me but my boss told us to deploy this thing to Bosnia when we had US forces in Bosnia and the response to the secretary was it's not ready yet. He said deploy it to Bosnia. But the reluctance to embrace this new idea of an unmanned air vehicle was pretty substantial at that time. And other incident involved that we had started the Advanced Concept Technology demonstration program and we were asked to come down and brief the Joint Requirements Oversight Council which is the vice chairman and the joint staff and the vice chiefs of the military services on these programs we were doing which included the predator, the global hawk, a number of precision fires things, some radar that today is in the Navy 2D and some cooperative engagement capability. And so as we're getting ready to talk one of the service vice chiefs is talking to me and he said well the only reason we have a S&T program in our services you guys in OSD make us have one. So you're gonna go talk technology with that guy. Gonna be a real tough, tough road to hoe. One of the favorite programs that we sponsored in our office is one we did with Naval Research Lab. And the genesis of the program was me walking around the Pentagon and seeing lots of people studying fuel cells and the potential of fuel cells. And we studied and we studied and we studied and nothing seemed to me to come out of the studies. So I was over at the chemistry department at NRL across the river from National Airport and I was talking to the deputy of the chemistry department and said you know I'd really like to do something with fuel cells. He said well we have this fuel cell we just got. It's 83 watts, it's from Protonax. And I said well what do you think? And he says well we thought we'd put it in an unmanned air vehicle and see if it would fly. And I said okay what would it take? And so we gave him probably I don't recall it's say $200,000 to do this experiment. They had no fuel tank for the thing so they had to get a paintball gun canister, the fuel tank for this hydrogen. They had no radiator so they got a beer can and fashioned it into a radiator, it was a good beer. And they flew it for 43 minutes and we said geez and we looked at each other and said what do we do? And then a guy from the submarine community came along and he was complaining that submarines have unmanned air vehicles on them now. Many of them are gas powered which means for safety reasons those things are stored outside the hull of the ship. Which means to launch it or recover it. The submarine has to surface which as many of you know or most of you know no self-respecting submarine wants to do. And so we said well if we had a hydrogen fuel cell the ship makes hydrogen as part of its atmospheric control. We could store the UAV inside the hull of the ship and we could use the hydrogen, the ship discharges as fuel. So we started to do it and we never used the fuel part but it was a gent at Naval Research Lab who was their UAV guy who said well I went home and worked the numbers and it should fly. And in the last year the Navy had and it was released the public release on the successful launch of this vehicle from a torpedo tube. The vehicle is extended from the torpedo tube now it's under the sponsorship of naval research and others the vehicle is in a tomahawk a missile canister which is ejected from the tube and it goes out to a point of launch it goes vertical. I'm ready for launch the top flies off, pulls off of this thing and the vehicles pulled out of the canister by an electrical assist the wings pop open it's an X wing kind of thing and the fuel cell lights off in a way it flies and instead of 43 minutes now flies for a number of hours. And that same Cuban weight for that first 83 watt fuel cell is now it was it probably is more now 550 watts of power so it was this iterative thing and when we first started a lot of people kept telling us it'll never work it won't work and many things like that so it was something that we could sort of see but the point was we certainly had no vision of where it was gonna end up we had a clear objective and to look at something like the utility of fuel cells with no real vision of where it would end up. We just did a demo with the Army Research Lab up in the Delphi, Maryland here, a networking of sensors and fires and the idea was we have a number of standalone sensors and this sensor would report something back to an operator and this sensor would report something back to an operator and what this demo did was to network these sensors so this sensor gains contact on something there's an automatic slew of adjacent sensors into the area to confirm the contact it goes to a watch officer who looks at it and can say well those are bad guys take it under fires and whatever happens next. The interesting thing to me is we did this experiment was it built on a whole legacy of earlier experiments it wasn't something we just dreamed up and did there are a whole series of experiments from different areas that have taken place before that gave us the knowledge to move ahead to this next project. Where this fits into the Army doctrine and the Army concept I really don't know if it does at all but we have now a just yesterday we met on a series of small follow on experiments that will focus on specific areas in topics and this to see if we can do the capabilities and I have a feeling we have some specific applications in mind but as it grows and it develops I have a feeling that the applications really come out of this they're very different areas than we initially envisioned. So the characteristics I see are unintended results there's certainly a reticence to accept new concepts such as the predator UAV once again not a flash in the pan and each of these efforts that I mentioned had some element of technical risk in them and frankly in many cases difficulty in explaining to audiences both within the Pentagon on the hill many times in industry what exactly we were trying to get out of it. In my view if somebody comes in with an idea and gives a brief say a PowerPoint presentation on a new concept or a new idea to an audience of 100 people in my view there'll be about two people in the room who will get it and you can usually look at their eyes and see the head shaking of those who get it and the rest of the guys look and say what's this guy talking about. And so I think the value in these small demonstrations that I referenced is you do these iteratively and you get whatever the concept is to a point where people can see it and touch it and smell it and do whatever with it turn knobs on it and once it becomes a tangible thing in my experience once it becomes something that people can really see these ideas start to flow and when the moment if you take one of these like a glass here and say oh could you put water in it once the audience the potential user audience starts making suggestions on applications I think you have them with the technology. If they say go talk to John Smith in this office you probably don't have them or if they say well it'd be better if it had this size weapon on it rather than that size weapon you don't have them but if they ask you well could it also do something else I think they now see the potential and it's a lot more you have a higher probability of success. To divert a little bit a couple about 18 months ago I asked the members on our staff I sent out a question to some of the members on our staff and said are we in a unique era in history here what we're experiencing now with globalization and rise of nations and changing time and migration climate change on and on and I wanted to see what individuals on our staff said there's no right or wrong answer I just wanted to see what people would tell me whether they're thinking about that and some people sent me a note back and said no this is unique we've never experienced this before and others said no it's like this era or that era but my question made it out to the Naval Postgraduate School and a member of the faculty out there named John Arquilla who has authored a lot of books the first one I think that really had traction was a network warfare and John brought together a number of the members of his faculty out at NPS and they spent a couple days discussing this and they sent me back a six or seven, eight page paper on the topic which to me has been extremely helpful and they said with all the changes they said we think the era most common to what we're in today is from the period from 1815 with the fall of Napoleon and the battle of Waterloo to 1914 and the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand and Sarajevo in the start of basically World War I and they said that was a period of the rise of nations you had Germany come out of the middle of nowhere from 150 or so little city states you had other nations that were struggling you had the rise of the United States you had the rise of social movements socialism had great migration from places like Ireland you had globalization and global trade and the global communication with telegraph and undersea cables you certainly had an industrial revolution that took the world from steam engines at the start of that period rudimentary steam engines all the way to automobiles, powered flight, communications, submarines, battleships of all at the end of that period and so if you step back in my view and say yeah it sounds very similar and if you take the phrase industrial revolution out and put the phrase information revolution in what it tells me is we're in for a heck of a ride for the next hundred years or so and I think that both not only technologically but socially and many other things and I think the reason I point that out is I think that the velocity of change in terms of both global issues and security economics integration as well as the velocity of technology is gonna go at a pace that's much much faster than the structures we have now to deal with it both from the development side from many cases in my view the policy side and also from how society reacts to whatever these changes are so I just so I think a lot about the speed that we're going through and how once again it drives me to think about doing things in an iterative kind of fashion and talking about these things in an iterative kind of fashion as your capability and your technology grows I think there's a different level of discussion at each level of maturity for the technology or the capability in which it's embedded. The other thing I'd point out here is in my view many people say well a lot you should do that everything comes from the commercial industry or you know we have people argue for a DOD investment and for me it's a blending of the two together it's not either or it's a blending of the two. As we talk about and how you talk about technology again there's a whole series of different audiences that I think you should consider. We have a uniform military one we have defense senior leadership and civilian leadership we obviously have a congressional one and then there's one to the general public and each of these probably has a different message for me uniform side one facet and there's probably many more one aspect is obviously military utility for senior leadership within the department probably cost including procurement life cycle risk time to field or some of the factors. Congress I think thinks about many of the same things risk cost utility need and then the general public I think value to the taxpayer. And as I said the messages may change over time with the maturity of the capability and every one of these new technology areas has to compete with an existing infrastructure and an existing technology. And I think when I initially thought of this topic I thought talking technology to the greater public but I think and as I've suggested a couple of times I think talking internally to the DOD is equally important the parts within the Pentagon. So just one of the things I like to do and I would recommend perhaps is an exercise that might be accomplished is looking at some of these challenges through a series of case studies. Both present and past probably in keeping with my idea of going back and saying is this a unique era we're in but I think case studies. I suspect I don't have a lot of data on it but I suspect the introduction of nuclear power in the Navy would be a good one. I would guess there was probably a bit of resistance there. I had a book and I read about 10 years ago and I just pulled it out. It was called Monitor and it's about the story of the USS Monitor and the Civil War and how the monitor was built. And John Erickson was a Swede who built it, conceived of it and built it against a lot of resistance in the Navy. His idea of the monitor I think would develop probably, safe to say developed over about a 30 year period was not something that just came out of nowhere. The technology was not necessarily an ironclad vessel they'd been around but it was the propulsion, the propeller, the gun turret. This was a shipman by 58 people with two guns compared to larger ships that had many guns and hundreds of people on the crew and it fought as I'm sure most of you know the battle of Monitor and Merrimack and the Civil War and the day before the battle between these two ships, Merrimack had come out, the Confederate ship and sort of decimated the Navy blockade off of Norfolk, Virginia. It was a time when the British and the French were thinking about coming into the Civil War on the side of the South and blockade was key. One of the things they were looking for was cotton and the next day the monitor showed up and they fought to a standstill, the blockade was sustained and the French and the British backed out of entering the war. But and so I'd read this book about 10 years ago and that's kind of what I focused on was the historic part and the innovations that Erickson put in on the ship. But as I picked it up the other day to prep preparation for this and I kind of went through it and the other thing I saw, there was a whole series of different audiences that they had to work against to do this. Gideon Wells was the secretary of the Navy. He was very concerned with the Confederates building this ironclad vessel off the burned out hull of a former U.S. Navy ship. He felt they had nothing to counter it. He liked Erickson's idea. There probably was not a soul in the Navy who liked it, in a uniform Navy. And so Wells had to work within the President Lincoln's administration to build support. He had to work on the Hill. He had to work within the Navy and he had to work with an industry and he pulled a guy in to do that work for him named Cornelius Bushnell from Connecticut. And Bushnell was an entrepreneur, I guess Wells did not fancy himself to be a good talker so he brought in Bushnell, who was an excellent talker. And the Navy finally relented but they wrote all these requirements for the ship. They'd have to have masks and sails and do this and that and all, all of which Erickson ignored. And when it was launched it had no masks, no nothing. Everybody predicted it would sink when it launched and it floated within I think like four inches of what he had predicted. So it really was a nice case study of the various messages that he needed to convey throughout a variety of different audiences as Secretary Wells needed to convey. The other one is I have, first thing I read in the Washington Sunday Post is the comics. I read Dunesbury and there's a section in there that some of you have probably seen called flashbacks and it's on some historic event that took place in the D.C. area. And there was one a number of years ago on the Wright brothers trying to sell up airplane to the Army. And the Army said oh he tried that in 1997, it didn't work, we don't want to look stupid again. And so finally they relented but they wrote a set of requirements that they would never be able to, he felt, meet. Fly 30 miles an hour for an hour and a half, be drawn by a horse drawn, wag him, things like that. The Wright brothers finally succeeded or succeeded and then they looked at each other and said well maybe we ought to buy one of these. And then the question was well how do we buy it? Not in a budget and so on and so forth. Teddy Roosevelt apparently had a slush fund as president. They bought it from the slush fund. But once again, 50 years later, 60 years later, where we are in aviation and where we started, a lot of reluctance to talk about the potential of this kind of device. So for me, some future case studies, one would be cyber. We all understand cyber, we hear about it every day but I'm not sure that we really understand the magnitude of the world of cyber and what's coming down the road. Another one would be synthetic biology and chemistry. And a third one I think maybe tied to that, what I just mentioned, would be human performance and human performance modification. We're kind of a physics based organization in BOD and so when you start talking about modifying human performance and by that I mean endurance, strength, learning, we kind of tend to go around that. And I think that those are things that are starting to get attention, my view. And we ought to be talking about how do we articulate that and importantly as we articulate it, how do we bring along the policies that go with that? Because there will be policies. So finally in summation, I think the message is very. And when you talk technology, the message is very with organization. Each organization needs it for their level of understanding where they are within the structure they need a different type of message. Talking about technology as a standalone thing is hard. I mean it's a lot more understandable and not more usable if you put it within a context of some sort of application. Next it's not only the technology but the science behind the technology. You don't have the investments in the basic research areas, you're not gonna get the technology. And so it's a continuum from science and research to technology. I favor an iterative strategy that does a lot of different experiments along the way. One of the demonstrations we sponsored about a year ago, a year and a half ago now was a coordinated exercise between an unmanned undersea vehicle and an unmanned air vehicle. And the unmanned undersea vehicle was kind of guarding an entrance to a harbor in the air vehicle and it would get a contact and it would go back to the air vehicle and it would go over here and do this. What I had hoped we would do is do a series of iterative exercises in that area so in five years we could look back at that first experiment we did and say boy was that primitive. But you have to start somewhere and you have to build over time. The other thing I think is a velocity of change in technology and global events that's gonna, I think, challenge our current processes for development and fielding. And then finally, a number of years ago, I was at the Army War College in Carlisle, Pennsylvania and I heard Sir Michael Howard, a British military historian, talk. And he said the only thing harder than putting a new idea in the mind of a military man is taking the old one out. That sounds funny, it's true, but you have to appreciate the fact that those lessons that that military guy has have often been learned the hard way. So it takes a lot of work to do that. And that quote is actually derived from B. H. Hart, Lydell Hart, who was also a British military historian and I think comes from about 1930. So whenever anybody comes in and we talk to them and I tell them, well, we'll talk about a technology and they say it's no good or it won't work or anything, I often think of Sir Michael Howard and Lydell Hart in that quote, so that's it. Thanks very much. We have a few minutes for questions. So if people want to raise their hands, I think we'll be coming around with mics if you could briefly identify yourself and then ask a question. Great, I'll go over here and then over here. Good morning, Tony Bertuca inside the Pentagon. I wanted to ask you a little bit about the renewed emphasis that this area has taken on over at the building. Mr. Work's third offset initiative, Mr. Kendall's long range R&D and investment strategy that's being worked. It seems like this area now is really gonna get a lot more emphasis. I'm wondering if you could talk a little bit about your role in those initiatives and if you think it's going to drive more resources, however large or small they may be to this area in the near future. I don't know if it'll drive resources just because of a broader budgetary things, but I think where we are, our office is in research and engineering and in my view, we did a lot of these JCTDs, joint capability, advanced capability, technology demonstrations. We're shifting more and more toward prototyping and the idea of prototyping. When Mr. Kendall first brought this idea out, he said one of his big objectives was prototyping focused on people in industry and I would add people within the government having in a period of reduced acquisition, having hands-on experience with systems such as prototyping. The other one was my view, but the magic thing he said to me was prototyping not necessarily leading to programs or record and or transition, maybe it was, I don't have the quote exactly right, but in my view, a lot of the previous programs we did, we would always be graded by, okay, how many of these things transitioned or went to operational use and how many went to programs or record and the like and we'd say 75%, everybody writes 75% down and nobody ever stopped to say, well, what does that mean? We would just write 75% down. But my personal view is if you get, if your report card is based on number of things that went to operational use to get a good grade, you're not gonna take a lot of risk. That really becomes kind of mundane. And so when Mr. Kendall said that really, the objective is hands-on experience, looking at new technologies and all, it gives us a chance to take risk and hopefully fail, not hopefully fail and hopefully not be hauled out on the carpet for failing. That's probably what I wanted to say, if that makes sense. And I favor small things, not large things. It's kind of my tendency, I guess, sir. I think we got you in charge, okay. Over here and then, sorry, then we'll go over here and then go here and then it's probably to keep on schedule and we'll have time for, so. For decades, we've been victims of reverse engineering overseas by adversary states. And now once in a while, adversary states come up with some pretty cool stuff of their own. I think of the Chinese missile, coastal missile, which is launched ballistically and becomes a cruise missile, potentially against our aircraft carriers, or the Shkval torpedo in Russia. So how good are we at reverse engineering and how quickly can we field a reverse engineered product? Second, what happens when you're tempted to reverse engineer an allied technology? Technology that's succeeded in an allied state rather than an adversary. Well, I can't tell you how good we are at reverse engineering things. It's certainly not an area of expertise. But I would say that we have made, within our office, a concerted effort to look at what's happening outside of the US and technology area. And we've done a couple that probably are not appropriate for the room. Some of which we have demonstrated and deployed. Others that we have under evaluation right now. And as I'm sure you say, people say quite often, it's foolhardy to not look at technologies in other parts of the world. And we have hands-on experience with that. I'd also say that I think that we have been involved in a lot more active engagement with some of our long-term allies and others. And we're looking for more overseas engagement. Right here, and then over there, and then we'll have to take a break. I thank you for your talk today. I was wondering if you see, or the Department of Defense sees, a interaction between intellectual property and national security. I would say, yeah, sure. Yeah, okay, that's good. Are we aware that the American patent system is under attack right now? It's, I am, but it's beyond the scope of what I do, yeah. Okay, how do you think that's gonna impact our small, private, personal innovators? The people that actually have innovated in the past, the biggest inventions that we've come up with. Is that a question? Well, we have independent inventors. Corporations have rarely come up with breakthrough inventions, if ever. But right now, we are not offering patent protection for those small, independent inventors. And they will not be able to invent because they, and prototype, because they cannot get investment money because they can't get a patent on software. I could, we've worked in that, some of that area. It's not an area we work, but we've worked in it, and frankly, in my part, is to stir the discussion on some of that. We do work with a number of small inventors like that. The idea being helping them develop ways, not with their IP, but more develop ways to protect their product or their idea from mainly cyber theft, in an affordable manner. I could talk to you more about it, but those are things that we're aware of. I've got one last question right here. I've got to try to stay on. I don't want to get totally off base right at the beginning. Sit up to it. Blume of Smith from No Edit Corporation. You've largely answered my question with the two previous ones, but just a tangent on that. Are you seeing any evidence that the need to either protect a technological edge in which the US is investing or alternatively to offset a technological edge that another country might be gaining is actually changing the way in which the US relates to different countries. For example, you've referred to the way you're benchmarking, to some extent, and studying what other people are doing. That obviously works very well within the Five Eyes community at best, but there are many other countries that are coming up with smart ideas. Is the US changing the way it relates to countries or potentially changing the way it relates to countries in order to protect its own technology or to gain access to others? We're looking at, in DOD, looking at particularly cyber protection amongst all contractors. We have, again, an effort in this area, I would call it, again, it's not an area that our office has direct responsibility in, but I'm trying to demonstrate some things to get other parts of the department to look at what we're doing. I think the answer is yes. Okay. Ben, thanks so much for taking the time. We very much appreciate it. Hopefully, I think you've set the stage very well for the next two panels, which are designed to first offer some perspectives on, from some of the audiences that you mentioned, and their observations about things that work well and maybe not so well, and then the flip side of various stakeholders on the producer side of the equation will offer their views on how to do this effectively. So again, thanks for taking the time. I appreciate your experience and continued efforts. And so if people want to go out and grab a cup of coffee before we come back in, we'll continue the march on towards lunch and look forward to seeing you back here shortly.