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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.

While the Budget Control Act of 2011 resolves the debt ceiling issue through 2012, it leaves many budget issues unresolved. The future of the defense budget remains uncertain

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

For the first time in more than a decade, both the base budget and war budget are declining, but a smaller, less costly force does not necessarily equate to a less effective or less capable military

In 1992, the Office of Net Assessment (ONA), Office of the Secretary of Defense, began circulating an assessment of a prospective late-twentieth-century military-technical revolution (MTR). Soviet military theorists had been discussing the possibility of a third twentieth-century revolution in military affairs (RMA) since the mid-1970s. Written by (then Army Lieutenant Colonel) Andrew F. Krepinevich, ONA’s MTR assessment sought to explore the hypothesis that Soviet theorists were right in predicting that advances in precision munitions, wide-area sensors, and computerized command and control (C2) would bring about fundamental changes in the conduct of war. As Marshal Nikolai Ogarkov, then chief of the Soviet General Staff, observed in 1984, these developments in nonnuclear means of destruction promise to “make it possible to sharply increase (by at least an order of magnitude) the destructive potential of conventional weapons, bringing them closer, so to speak, to weapons of mass destruction in terms of effectiveness.” The Soviets introduced the term “reconnaissance-strike complex” (or “RUK” from the Russian pекогносцировочно-yдарный комплекс) to describe the integration of missiles with precision-guided sub-munitions, area sensors such as the airborne Pave Mover SAR/MTI (synthetic-aperture radar/ moving-target-indicator) radar, and automated C2.

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.