“This is our 69th congressional virtual. We’re honored to have a great group of experts coming from— we’ve got Mark in Taiwan, JD’s in Colorado, Shotgun Tom Browning is in D.C., and Dan’s in Sweet Home Alabama. It’s going to be a good discussion that we’re going forward on.
Our title is the Gold Rush, and we know we’re less than 25 days out from the report that’s due by the executive order that’s going. We want to just look at a couple of things, especially the timeline. I know this President , and I think we all know this President and Adminstration want a deliverable in 18 months now.
That seems to be pretty clear and apparent that what’s doable, what’s really doable in 18 months, and what’s not doable in 18 months. There’s a lot of things going on. There’s a lot of interesting but way over the top capabilities being discussed from thousands of kinetic interceptors up in space, up in space missile defense that are $50, $60 billion.
Is that realistic on that? I think it’s important that we just flush out the capabilities that we can produce and deploy in 18 months for the defense of the country and then build off ofthat to where we have to go on that. That’s the discussion today.”
-[Riki Ellison, MDAA Founder and Chairman]
“Let’s take a look at Space Force and Space Comm as an example. They’re responsible for 80% of the kill chain already, for the find, fix, track piece of it. The only thing that they don’thave responsibility for is the intercept and engagement piece of it.
So interceptors and the consummation piece is the most expensive piece thus far for missile defense enterprise. But between those two entities, you’re talking about a core foundation of who should be the one leading this effort. When we talk about the expense of this thing and when we put it in front of our Missile Defense Enterprise Board, which is chaired by the Undersecretary of R&D with MDA as the Executive Secretary, with all the services and all the other MDA missile defense communities as equal partners in recommendations for capability attainment or policy determination.
And so there’s a piece of this where their share and representation of what’s important has been, I’d say, watered down to a collective bargaining agreement. The bureaucracy in place to be able to provide a prioritized list of this is the stuff that’s important. This is where we need to go and pursue things have came down to what service or what equities need to be maintained.”
-[Mr. JD Gainey, MDAA Board of Directors, Former Senior Analyst USINDOPACOM]
“Is it OSD policy? Is it combat commander? Is it somebody else?
I don’t know where it’s at right now, but my opinion is, and I talked about this before, so I will rehash it a little bit, this cannot be done by committee. And it can’t be done from the Pentagon. OSD policy is not the right entity to do this.
And I go back to my example about NC3. Couldn’t be done at the building. Secretary Mattis told General Hyten I want a commander to be able to take this on.
Hyten, I want you to do it. General Hyten got the authorities and he got some resources from OSD to do that, and so that’s why STRATCOM ended up with NC3 in the neck. The same thing has to happen here.
We need to designate a field commander. I think it should be NORTHCOM, probably delegated down to a three-star commander for the operations side of this, and then we should have the acquisition lead on this. Imagine if the government, if the Department of Defense had an agency responsible for missile defense.
They’d probably be a pretty logical choice to do this. Oh, wait, we have the Missile Defense Agency. Maybe they ought to be in charge of the acquisition side of this.”
-[LTG (Ret.) Daniel L. Karbler, Former Commander U.S. Army’s Space and Missile Defense]
“And I said, the next biggest problem we need to approach is homeland defense, specifically air and missile defense, and that was in 2019. And what’s important is we, and I will say this absolutely categorically and people can argue with me, we don’t do joint. We still don’t do joint.
We do a collaboration among services, and the ability to address multi-domain, multi-service problems is an area where the DOD is just abysmally broken. And we found that out in AB2. So we set up AB2.
A couple things that I think were really important. First one was it was hand-picked, purpose-built people. So we picked the absolute best people, put them together, regardless of organization, as a single team, and that was their full-time job.
You’re not going to solve this with once-a-week Pentagon VTCs, and that’s what we’re doing right now. You need people who that is all they do for a living. Number two, it needs to be all-service, all-domain, those are two very different things, and all-security level, meaning no closed doors to those who are part of this.”
And, you know, Riki, I brought this up earlier, but security is a big part of this. We do want to be opaque to our adversaries, so having security is really important. The problem is we’ve taken that to a level where we’re not willing to tell the good guys what we know.”
-[Mr. Thomas Browning, Former Performing the Duties of the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Mission Capabilities]
“I think we have to be very – I think the department is going to have to be very explicit and pointed in its effort to say we’re going to do these things in the short to midterm to get a minimum capability, missile defense capability up in the air and then in the field. And then we’re going to invest in the long term so that the long-term solution is properly fielded. And maybe it’s eight, seven, eight years from now with some of the delays that could – some of the programs that may not evidence themselves for ten years.
But the most important thing – and people go, oh my god, Mark, the president says do it now. Well, my answer is when you ignore a problem for 20 years that watching your enemy develop an increasingly capable conventional strike capability at greater and greater and greater ranges, and then eventually you find that it’s on your front door because between a mix of cruise and hypersonic missiles and they can do this, you cannot fix it in one or two years. It’s going to take time.
So when I look at it, the short to midterm are systems that exist, systems that if I went to a company and said build this, they actually have a proven program that can be either restarted or juiced up to produce more things. And to me, it’s taking – the first thing is acknowledge we do have some space-based centers, whether it’s SDA’s system or MDA’s hypersonic tracking space system. There are existing systems beginning to be populated in space.
And those are going to be important centers, and they’re going to be the backbone of your ten years from now program, but they can be part of your current efforts. And then I would go with – I would recognize I’m going to develop an extremely limited counterforce. When you think about countervalue versus counterforce, counterforce deterrence system.
In other words, I’m going to defend – my defended asset list is going to look a lot like a list of military bases strategic warfighters really care about. And with that, I’m going to protect through legacy systems.”
-[Rear Admiral (Ret.) Mark Montgomery, Board of Directors, MDAA, Senior Fellow, Foundation for Defense of Democracies, Former Director of Operations, U.S. Pacific Command]
“In my visit to NATO last week, there is, you know, concern policy-wise that’s going to become Fortress America and assure deterrence with our Golden Dome. And that narrative needs to be pushed out, because I think when you do space, it’s global. I mean, all that stuff moves around.
And that approach to be able to assure that missile defense, what we’re doing in the Golden Dome, is to assure their deterrence needs to be thought through, and policy needs to follow that. And I honestly think that there’s going to be, the President’s going to do a Reagan speech to justify the money that he’s got to spend on this. Once that architecture is approved, that’s going to come.
But that narrative of what you do when you weaponize space has got to be addressed correctly for the entire world on what we’re doing. And is that a deterrent? Is that part of the deterrent against China and Russia that we’re going to do this?
And it’s not singular. It connects like the offset. It connects to our offensive strike capability.
So we are enhancing our deterrent. And it’s pretty sharp, because the kind of money we’re spending is the same money we’re spending as we redo our ICBMs, as we redo our bombers. It’s that we’ve got to play at this level.
We’re halfway through the executive order, and these thoughts need to be put out so they can understand it.
Because the worst thing that can happen is that this gets rejected because it’s going down a path, as we discussed today, to be able to do so. These recommendations are phenomenal. It’s a great way to get that out so we can do the best we can for the nation and for the world on it.”
-[Riki Ellison, MDAA Founder and Chairman]
Click here to watch the virtual event
Speakers:
[Mr. JD Gainey, MDAA Board of Directors, Former Senior Analyst USINDOPACOM]
[LTG (Ret.) Daniel L. Karbler, Former Commander U.S. Army’s Space and Missile Defense]
[Mr. Thomas Browning, Former Performing the Duties of the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Mission Capabilities]
[Rear Admiral (Ret.) Mark Montgomery, Board of Directors, MDAA, Senior Fellow, Foundation for Defense of Democracies, Former Director of Operations, U.S. Pacific Command]
[Riki Ellison, MDAA Founder and Chairman]
