The Defense Department under Secretary Ash Carter and his deputy Robert Work has established a menu of research and development efforts from which the new administration can choose technologies that should maintain U.S. military dominance over future adversaries.
In the past two and half years, Work said Carter set his scientific workforce to figuring what technologies are critical to establishing dominance over Chinese and Russian capabilities. He then launched a series of short- and long-range research efforts to develop technology demonstrators ahead of the competition, much as the U.S. did with precision weapons in the 1980s.
“What we have done in the last two and a half years is do a lot of seeding of demonstrations so that the next administration, once they know what their top line will be, will be able to pull however many levers they want,” Work said Dec. 5 at the Brookings Institution in Washington, D.C.
Work specifically mentioned basic research and development of advanced hypersonic weapons, aeronautics, unmanned systems, autonomous weapons and machine learning. In total the Defense Department spends about $70 billion annually on R&D, of which about $20 billion is laid out for various technology demonstration programs, Work said.
It remains to be seen how retired Marine Gen. James Mattis, Trump’s intended Defense Secretary, will approach research and development within the larger defense budget. The lifelong battlefield commander will be succeeding Carter, who is a trained physicist and has made tech development and pursuit of cutting-edge commercial technologies a prime focus.
Realizing the extent of the Third Offset, or where current strategic thinking foresees it going, will require orders of magnitude larger investments. Work said it likely will cost $3 trillion or about $600 billion over a five-year defense plan (FYDP).
“We don’t have the tails in our budget to sustain” all of those tech demonstrations, he said. “We have purposely done it this way because Secretary Carter said ‘Look, in 18 months, what we have to do is provide a basis for a new administration to be able to say these are the priorities we want.”
“I believe the incoming team will be very pleased with the range of options they have to choose from,” he added. “The options they choose will reveal their priorities.”
Publicly, President-elect Donald Trump has focused more on the size of the military than its capabilities. He has called for a 300-ship Navy, more aircraft for the Air Force and to reverse Army and Marine Corps troop reductions.
Work warned about blindly building a larger military before establishing a firm understanding of what that force should be able to accomplish.
“There are a lot of capabilities that I believe we really have to get right and then debate what is our theory of how we will operate in the world,” he said. “The incoming Trump administration will make those decisions and only after that happens would I start saying let’s build up the force. I can’t tell you how, exactly, to build up the force until I know exactly what your theory of what is the U.S. role in world.”
Work has been the most vocal champion of the awkwardly named Third Offset Strategy that is aimed at maintaining conventional military dominance over potential near-peer adversaries like China and Russia. Those nations have achieved “rough parity” with U.S. precision-weapon capabilities, wearing the U.S. military’s conventional advantage to an unacceptably narrow margin, Work said over the weekend at the Reagan National Defense Forum in Simi Valley, Calif.
“At this point in time, I am confident that both Russia and China believe that the United States … has a competitive advantage today,” Work said. “The irony is, that is forcing them to put a lot of money into capabilities. The third offset … this is all about trying to maintain our conventional competitive advantage. Whatever you call it, that is what it is all about.”