Super-strong nanotube body armor, Hi tech sensors. laser weapons, backpack nukes – just the beginning of what coming ahead.
On November 15, 2014 Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel gave a speech at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library, Simi Valley, CA, Saturday, November 15, 2014.
Here is a partial except of that important speech:
“Today I’m announcing a new Defense Innovation Initiative – an initiative that we expect to develop into a game-changing third ‘offset’ strategy.
This new initiative is an ambitious department-wide effort to identify and invest in innovative ways to sustain and advance America’s military dominance for the 21st century. It will put new resources behind innovation, but also account for today’s fiscal realities – by focusing on investments that will sharpen our military edge even as we contend with fewer resources. Continued fiscal pressure will likely limit our military’s ability to respond to long-term challenges by increasing the size of our force or simply outspending potential adversaries on current systems, so to overcome challenges to our military superiority, we must change the way we innovate, operate, and do business.
The new Innovation Initiative will draw on the lessons of previous offset strategies and ensure that America’s power-projection capabilities continue to sustain our competitive advantage over the coming decades. To achieve this, we are pursuing several lines of effort.
Our technology effort will establish a new Long-Range Research and Development Planning Program that will help identify, develop, and field breakthroughs in the most cutting-edge technologies and systems – especially from the fields of robotics, autonomous systems, miniaturization, big data, and advanced manufacturing, including 3D printing. This program will look toward the next decade and beyond.
In the near-term, it will invite some of the brightest minds from inside and outside government to start with a clean sheet of paper, and assess what technologies and systems DoD ought to develop over the next three to five years and beyond.
The Defense Innovation Initiative will explore and develop new operational concepts, including new approaches to warfighting, and how we balance DoD’s investments between platforms and payloads. It will focus on new approaches on war-gaming and professional military education – I know General Dunford talked about training and readiness today, work that has already begun in the area, that our military leaders started, professional military education. And it will focus on our most important asset – our people – by pursuing both time-honored leadership development practices, as well as emerging opportunities to re-imagine how we develop managers and leaders.
I’ve asked secretary – Deputy Secretary of Defense Bob Work to guide the development of this initiative, and he will lead a new Advanced Capability and Deterrent Panel to drive it forward. This panel will integrate DoD’s senior leadership across the entire enterprise: its policies and intelligence communities; the armed services; the Joint Chiefs of Staff; and research, development, and acquisition authorities.
I expect the panel to propose important changes to the way DoD diagnoses and plans for challenges to our military’s competitive edge, and I also expected to break with many of our usual ways of doing business, encouraging fresh thinking that is focused on threats and challenges to our military superiority, not simply adapting what is on the books today.
The panel must also face a new challenge ahead, and that is one of many, but the fiscal [sic] challenge: the fact that many, if not most, of the technologies that we seek to take advantage of today are no longer also in the domain of DoD development pipelines or traditional defense contractors. We all know that DoD no longer has exclusive access to the most cutting-edge technology or the ability to spur or control the development of new technologies the way we once did. So we will actively seek proposals from the private sector, including those firms, and from those firms and academic institutions outside DoD’s traditional orbit.
The Defense Innovation Initiative will shape our programs, plans, and budgets. As the initiative matures over time, I expect its impact on DoD’s budget to scale up in tandem.”
Read entire transcript click here: http://www.defense.gov/Speeches/Speech.aspx?SpeechID=1903