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Chairman Shuster, Mr. Larsen, and Members of the Defense Business Panel, thank you for inviting me to testify at today’s hearing on the imperative to preserve essential elements of U.S. defense industrial base.

Chairman McKeon, Ranking Member Smith, and Members of the Committee, thank you for inviting me to testify today. On September 11, 2001, I was working in the Pentagon as part of a small team drafting the 2001 Quadrennial Defense Review. The 9/11 attacks were a watershed event for me personally and for the Department of Defense. The attacks immediately reduced the peacetime bureaucratic processes of the day, including the QDR, to trivialities, as the Department – and the Nation – unified in their intent to vanquish the Islamist terrorists who perpetrated the attacks and to prevent future attacks on the United States.

In my testimony today, I will describe some of major security challenges the United States is likely to face in the next two decades. I will then outline potential discontinuities in future warfare that should be considered when making future investment decisions. Building on those discontinuities, I will discuss their broad implications for U.S. defense planning. Finally, I will suggest capability areas that appear to be potential growth opportunities for investment given these discontinuities and their implications

Mr. Chairman and Members of the Commission, thank you for inviting me to testify at today’s hearing. I will confine my comments to the Commission’s questions on the overall context of the People’s Republic of China’s (PRC’s) emerging use of orbital systems to support military modernization efforts such as the country’s emerging anti-access/area denial (A2/AD) capabilities in the western Pacific, including the impact of the PRC’s space program on the Chinese concept of Comprehensive National Power (CNP). Regarding the role that the PRC’s space assets might play in U.S.-China conflict scenarios in the 2012-2020 timeframe, I will assess the likelihood of such conflicts occurring and argue that China’s own growing military use of space may constrain their counterspace options in the long run to a greater extent than some of our war gaming has suggested.

Thank you, Mr. Chairman, for the opportunity to appear before you today, and to share my views on this important issue. My testimony is intended to provide a context within which one might assess Joint Forces Command’s (JFCOM’s) mission for joint concept development and experimentation in the wake of the command’s disestablishment.

The South China Sea is a region of growing strategic interest for many countries in the world, including the United States. More than one-third of the world’s seaborne trade flows through its contested waters.