Addressing the Directed Energy Summit

Today, in his capacity as the Co-Chair of the Directed Energy Caucus, Congressman Doug Lamborn joined his Co-Chair Congressman Jim Langevin (RI-02), Secretary of the Navy Ray Mabus, and Deputy Secretary of Defense Robert Work in addressing the 2015 Directed Energy Summit.

"Thank you to CSBA and Booz Allen Hamilton for the invitation to participate in this event. Directed Energy is an important, leading-edge capability that is vital to missile defense and could play an important role in deterring and defending our space systems from interference and attack."

- Congressman Doug Lamborn (CO-05)

Text of Address

Thanks so much for that kind introduction, Andrew. There's nowhere I'd rather be at eight o'clock in the morning, on a busy day of votes, hearings, and meetings, and I'll tell you why. We Americans have always led the world in creativity and innovation, and in using our creativity and innovation to defend our country and our allies. I fully support and appreciate what Secretary Chuck Hagel and now Secretary Ash Carter are doing with their calling for a much-needed third offset strategy—something you might hear mentioned once or twice today joke—but I think our ability to fight and win wars creatively as Americans goes back much farther than the 1970's and its revolution in precision-guided weapons, stealth, and ISR, or even our nuclear strategy that began in the 1950's.

American creativity has been our main and best strength since the very beginning, when we used unconventional and innovative tactics and weapons to defeat the British in our fight for independence. Throughout our nation's entire history, the American military has wielded our superior technology to fight tyranny and evil as well as to defend the weak and oppressed.

We have developed some weapons that have ended wars, and others that have ensured wars never even began. As long as any of us in this room can remember, our technological edge has kept our enemies at bay and helped provide a backbone to our foreign policy of peace through strength. It has reassured allies and has caused our enemies fear us. However, as you know, if we do not change course, this superiority will slowly be lost.

Potential adversaries are developing new and sophisticated weapons that can threaten our ability to defend ourselves and our allies. The world is watching: will we rise to the challenge, and continue to be the most powerful military in the world, or not? How do we maintain our technological superiority? What is the next big thing, the next breakthrough in defense capability? How we answer these questions will determine how safe and free our children and grandchildren are, and indeed how safe and free the world is. Ladies and gentlemen, I am not overstating this.

Folks from the Hill, the Department, and industry don't get together enough for events like this one, but when we do, it's amazing what can come from the dialogue and collaboration. I hope that today we can help each other better answer at least two basic questions: Why Directed Energy? And why now?

Since 1960, we have spent more than six billion dollars on directed energy, yet until very recently we have had little to show for it. Now that we are at this exciting transition point, where we can actually meet current COCOM requirements in the near and mid-term, what can we do to push harder and ensure these technologies make it past the tipping point? How do we transition this technology to operational use and get warfighter buy-in?

Several other questions are also very important: what is our strategy, or our plan, for how DE technology can help us tackle some of our hardest current as well as future challenges? How can we look not only at where we are, but also where we need to go?
And how can we do better at what we're not good at in the defense community, which is thinking outside the box?

Today at this Summit we collectively have many of the answers to these questions.

We must continue to get the most talented, creative minds to work on the most innovative technology.

We must rethink everything we've been doing, both the "what" and the "why", and question all of our basic assumptions.

And finally, especially at an event like this, we need to avoid preaching to the choir. Most of us are here because we are already believers in Directed Energy; the uninformed and the skeptics are out there. Some skeptics may still be tempted to argue that we've tried this before, and that this time is no different.

Across the public and private sector, from the senior leaders to the warfighters, we still have a long way to go with raising awareness of how far DE has come, even in the past few years. That's why Congressman Jim Langevin and I Co-Chair the Directed Energy Caucus in Congress: to educate Members of Congress and their staff about this technology, its current benefits, and its amazing potential. Congressman Langevin will talk to you later this morning more about how you can better inform us in Congress on both the maturity of needed technologies and the potential advantages of future weapons.

I don't need to tell you that Congress pays a lot of attention these days to anything that saves money, and rightly so, since the American people care about us trying to get our debt under control. When it comes to defensive uses of directed energy weapons, Admiral Bill Gortney, who currently lives and works in my District in Colorado Springs, talks about how we need to "get on the right side of the cost curve". He talks about that in a missile defense context, but it definitely applies more broadly. DE is one area where we clearly need to invest now in order to save real money in the long-term.

If it's truly possible for a beam of Directed Energy of sufficient intensity to destroy or at least degrade an incoming missile or shell for 50 cents worth of fuel, then we can flip the cost ratio in our favor. With our ally Israel, we've recently seen than its incredible 86% success rate with Iron Dome has to be tempered by the fact that it is spending $100,000 per missile to take out a $500 Hamas rocket. There is a limit to that type of tradeoff.

We have come a long way in the past handful of years, when, for example, in 2007 the Defense Science Board noted a "disappointing lack of progress" in DE technology as well as a "marked decline in interest", yet we still have a long way to go as far as increasing investment to the level where we were in former years. Happily, we can still harvest the benefits of past R&D in DE is actually an important opportunity. For example, Airborne Laser, which was ultimately cancelled thanks to its high cost, taught us a lot about directing a beam through the atmosphere, as well as other critical facets of laser technology. I am personally not dismayed when a technology of such immense potential encounters dead ends or other failures. Setbacks are an inevitable part of the R&D process, and should not be an excuse to stop or limit research on projects with immense potential.

Supporting DE has strong, bipartisan support in Congress, but there is also some opposition. To be fair, opposition might not be against DE per se, but that DE should not be prioritized relative to current programs and capabilities. Every new defense technology was at one time unknown and unproven, and had to compete with already-tested and deployed programs of record. Bureaucratic inertia must be overcome.

Since I also Co-Chair the Space Power Caucus in Congress, I cannot help but also mention an additional important reason to advance DE systems: to ensure that we can protect ourselves in space. Using satellites for communication and surveillance have been critical to our military tactics, operations, and strategy for quite some time now. Protecting these platforms from attacks is a priority that we can no longer ignore. DE systems could play a vital role in deterring and defending our space systems from interference and attack, and they could potentially play a role in ballistic-missile defense as well.

We potential adversaries are working furiously to exploit DE, we can't handcuff ourselves by false and shallow slogans, such as "not weaponizing space". It has been said that if an object in space has mass and can be directed, then it is a potential weapon. We can't let our adversaries steal a march on us.

As Cong. Langevin and I work to educate our colleagues on the Hill and broaden support for DE as well as robust defense R&D in general, we are also working to make our acquisition system more agile, and working to better tap into the strengths of the commercial sector where it makes sense to do so. All of these efforts will better allow defense to keep up with both rapid technological change and rising threats.

You have a great day ahead of you, and I really look forward to seeing the impact today's summit has as we move forward. Remember: never underestimate American creativity or dedication to using that creativity for good. We must not only outspend our rivals but outsmart them as well.

Thank you very much, and I'm happy to take your questions.