 Chairman McCain, ranking member Reed, distinguished members of the committee, thank you for inviting me to join you here today. It's a deep honor. I'm a defense analyst who has written nonfiction books on various emerging topics of importance to this series, from private military contractors to drones and robotics to cybersecurity, to my new book, Ghostfleet, a novel of the next World War, which combines nonfiction style research with a fictionalized scenario of a 21st century great power conflict to explore the future of war. This choice of scenario is deliberate, as while terrorism and Middle East insurgencies are not going away, we face a return to the most serious kind of national security concern that shaped the geopolitics of the last century. Great power competition, which could spill into actual conflict, either by accident or choice. In turn, the scale of such a challenge demonstrates the stakes at hand, which hopefully we won't have to wait for to drive change. In my written submission, I cover five key areas that distinguish the future of war, most especially in a great power context and needed actions we need to take from recognizing the challenges of new domains of conflict and space and cyberspace to dealing with our pattern of buying what I call the Pontiac Aztecs of war, defense programs that are overpromised, over-engineered and end up overpriced. But in my remarks today, I would like to focus on one important issue, the new technology race at hand. Since 1945, U.S. defense planning has focused on having a qualitative edge to overmatch our adversaries, planning to be a generation ahead in technology and capability. This assumption has become baked into everything, from our overall defense strategy all the way down to small unit tactics. Yet, U.S. forces can't count on that overmatch in the future. Mass campaigns of state-linked intellectual property theft has meant we are paying much of the research and development costs for our adversaries. These challengers are also growing their own cutting-edge technology. China, for example, just overtook the EU and national R&D spending and is on pace to match the U.S. in five years, with new projects ranging from the world's fastest supercomputers to three different long-range drone strike programs. And finally, off-the-shelf technologies can be bought to rival even the most advanced tools in the U.S. arsenal. This is crucial as not just our many of our most long-trusted dominant platforms from warships to warplanes, vulnerable to new classes of weapons, now in more conflict-actors' hands, but an array of potentially game-changing weapons lie just ahead in six key areas. A new generation of unmanned systems, both more diverse in size, shape, and form, but also more autonomous and more capable, meaning they can take on more roles from ISR to strike, flying off of anything from aircraft carriers to soldiers' hands. Weapons that use not just the kinetics of a fist or the chemistry of gunpowder, but energy itself, ranging from electromagnetic railguns able to fire projectile 100 miles to new directed energy systems that potentially reverse the cost equations of offense and defense. Artificial intelligence, ubiquitous sensors, big data, and battle management systems that will redefine the observe, orient, decide, and act the OODA loop. Hypersonics, high-speed rockets and missiles. 3D printing, technologies that threaten to do to the current defense marketplace, what the iPod did to the music industry. And human performance modification technologies that will reshape what is possible and maybe even what is proper and war. The challenge, though, is the comparison that could be drawn between what is now or soon to be possible versus what are we actually buying today or planning to buy tomorrow. Our weapons modernization programs are too often not that modern. For example, if you start at the point of their conception, most of our top 10 programs of record are all old enough to vote for you, with several of them actually older than me. We too often commit to mass buys before a system is truly tested, locking in on a single major programs that are too big to fail and actually aren't all that new. And this dynamic shapes not just what we buy, but extends their development time and ultimately our expectations of how much of it we will buy decades into the future, limiting our present and future flexibility. To abuse a metaphor, the growing per-unit cost of the cart is driving where we steer the horse. At the heart of this is that while disruption is the new buzzword in defense thinking today, part of the Pentagon's new outreach to Silicon Valley, we struggle with the dual meaning of the concept. We claim to aspire for the new, but to be disrupted, the outdated must be discarded. The roadblocks to disruption play at multiple levels, from specific weapons programs to organizational structures to personnel systems and operating concepts. For instance, there is a long record of the government funding, exciting new projects that then wither away in that space between lab and program of record because they can't supplant whatever old gear or program, factory or internal tribe that is in the way. Indeed, there is even a term for it, the Valley of Death. The same goes for all the new and important ideas and proposals you have heard in these hearings over the last several weeks. To be adopted though, something will have to be supplanted. As you program for the future, ultimately what you support and the new game changers have not just programs, but also thinking structures and organizations, what you eliminate in the old, and what you protect and nurture across that Valley will matter more than any single additional plane or tank squeezed into a budget line item or OCO funding. It may even be the difference between the win or loss of a major war tomorrow. I'd like to close by offering two quotes that can serve hopefully as guideposts, one looking back and one forward. The first is from the last interwar period where Churchill may have said it best, quote, want of foresight, unwillingness to act when action would be simple and effective, lack of clear thinking, confusion of counsel until the emergency comes, until self-preservation strikes its jar and gong. These are the features which constitute the endless repetition of history. The second is from a professor at China's National Defense University, arguing in a regime newspaper how his own nation should contemplate the future of war, quote, we must bear a third world war in mind when developing military forces, end quote. We need to be mindful of both the lessons of the past but acknowledge the trends in motion and the real risks that illumine the future. That way we can take the needed steps to maintain deterrence and avoid miscalculation and in so doing, keep the next world war where it belongs in the realm of fiction. Thank you.