Otherwise, nuclear war is imminent.

JAMES D. TAICLET: Absolutely. So what the 21st Century concept is meant to do is connect platforms—which are satellites, submarines, ships, tanks, aircraft, et cetera—to tie those platforms together across domains. So that’s space, air, ocean, subsurface ocean, land, et cetera.

So, in the case of hypersonic defense, we need satellite sensing in the early stage of a hypersonic missile launch, and we have sensors that are infrared sensors in space that can see this is happening now. We can do some tracking on the initial phase of the flight. But with the speeds that are going on and the defensive capabilities we have, we need to use these twenty-first-century digital technologies to close the loop, so to speak. So we need artificial intelligence to do the calculations and predictions of how this missile could fly. We need really high-speed connections—network connections—at the 5G level to be able to push enough data from the satellite, for example, to the command-and-control center and the fire-control computer to have the information that it needs to create a tracking solution. And then we have to be able to connect to a THAAD missile battery or a Patriot missile battery, et cetera, to actually hit the thing.

So all these technologies—again, when you look at things as missions like you just pointed out—how do you defend against a hypersonic missile—we do have to develop system, but we would be much more effective much sooner if we tie together the systems we have already and the future systems when they come online. And the way to think about it that I explained to some of our senior officials is, you know, think of a train switching station and there’s twenty tracks going into the station. These are the things we all have today. It’s the F-22, the F-35, the U-2, the F-18, et cetera.

What are the—to get the air dominance mission done, what are the smartest two of those to connect first? And we actually did the F-35 and the F-22 because they’re the fifth-generation stealth fighters and they didn’t have a datalink that connected them. So we connected those. Then we connected it through a U-2, which then could get signals from satellites and ground stations and other places. And so we’re starting to create this network already based on mission.

And so the train tracks all start coming together and, you know, five or ten years down the road you’ve got a lot of connectivity between sensors, command-and-control systems, and then defensive weapons so that you can actually stop attacks coming at you much, much more effectively than you could five or ten years ago.

COURTNEY KUBE: So when you’re talking about all of these additional connections, are you talking about more vulnerability for interference, electronic warfare, cyber intrusion? I mean, it seems like you’re—you’re creating a web of potential vulnerability at the same time.

JAMES D. TAICLET: That’s right. And so you have to take the best concepts out of the commercial Internet of Things and 5G networks and bring them to what we’re trying to create here. And so we’ve partnered—and we’ve got about ten commercial industry leader partners. They’re all US companies. We’ve announced three or four publicly so I can kind of speak to who they are.

So for 5G it’s Verizon, for example. For distributed cloud computing, which is moving, processing, and connecting data in different nodes and different levels, Microsoft’s our partner for that. Nvidia is a partner of ours for simulation and AI, OK? And then we also have Intel as a partner because the chips themselves need to be anti-spoof and anti-hack and able to be customized relatively cheaply because of the numbers we’re going to need, if it’s chips, to get into these systems and be safe. So we’re trying to really accelerate our speed by partnering with the commercial technology industry, which has already invested billions and billions of dollars into this. They’ve got tremendous talent that the defense industry will not ever be able to replicate, and so we’re partnering with them and not just sort of standing aside from them trying to do all this.

And the last thing I’ll say is that this kind of approach, this 21st Century Security strategy, that can be applied to other national issues and national problems. I’ll give you an example. Nvidia is part and parcel of this. So we’re working with Nvidia on twenty-first century firefighting, OK, concept, which is a way to bring together, you know, Newtonian or physical technologies and digital technologies into a much more effective wildfire-fighting capability for the United States. And if you just think about it, we have, again, whether it’s in NOAA or the DOD, we’ve got weather and other satellites that sense infrared heat, could be a missile launch, could be a fire starting, weather patterns. We’ve got all this data up there, and 21st Century Security is really about not just connecting things but connecting and moving data from multiple sources.

So we take those sensing sources; we also have sensors that we could put on, whether it’s ground-based locations in the forest and wilderness lands, or on aircraft flying around when there’s conditions prime for a fire to start. You combine the sensors that are airborne, ground-borne and spaceborne, and we could actually—we’re sitting at a point now, we can actually predict where fires might start and start moving assets there, like helicopters and C-130s and things that we make that actually do fight fires today. We have a FIREHAWK Helicopter, we have C-130s that can drop retardant on fires. But, again, they’re not connected to anything else, really; there’s kind of a clunky system of—there is satellite data available, tends to be about twenty-four hours old by the time it gets to a fire commander; we’re trying to make that an hour. You know, so there’s just a lot of AI, 5G, distributed computing, distributed processing that we can put into that problem—it’s a climate change problem, it’s a safety problem for our citizens, it’s a property issue, it’s an issue around utilities, you know, getting caught up in the fires and no power.

So we can apply this concept of really bringing together the Newtonian world, the technologies that the defense and aerospace industry’s really good at, and this digital world where, you know, companies like Microsoft and Verizon and AT&T and others are really good at that, and let’s bring them together and solve national problems. Defense is one; this is another one in climate. And then the last one I’ll just touch on is space, space exploration. So we’re looking at putting together under these kind of principles a lunar services, a lunar mobility services capability on the moon, where the moon rover, whether you’ve got an astronaut there or not, doesn’t need to be there. We can combine autonomy, battery life extension, and artificial intelligence to have the lunar rover do missions until the next astronauts come, and to do that you need what’s called position, navigation, and timing, so a satellite around the moon that would do that, and then you also need connectivity back to earth to give it commands and control. So we’re actually sort of designing this now and we’re going to—I think we’ve got a chance of really making it happen.

But you have to think about things again; sort of turn it on its side and apply those digital technologies to what we already know we can do. And so one of our partners on that project is General Motors, actually, GM, because they’re our teammate on the lunar rover of the future. So it’s exciting. I think we have a really good approach here, but applying it to situations like Ukraine is pretty immediate, so we’d like to get onto that.

COURTNEY KUBE: I want to take a question from the audience here from Eli Clifton, who writes, the seventy-five billion dollars in Pentagon contracts received by Lockheed Martin in fiscal year 2020 is well over one and a half times the entire budget for the State Department and AID for that year, which was a total of forty-four billion dollars. Does it seem like a reasonable balance of expenditure and is it reflective of US national priorities? And I would also ask, you know, do you have any sense—I would imagine that, going forward, because as we’ve been talking about here, stockpiles of things like Javelins are down, do you anticipate that it’s only going to grow the contracts with—

JAMES D. TAICLET: So the allocation among the departments of the US government is up to the US government, obviously, and, of course. But, you know, we need all instruments of national power—you know, a capable, well-supported State Department. We need a capable and well-supported Commerce Department for trade. We, you know, need, you know, an Agriculture, Interior, and Commerce Department that can get together and address wildfires, because there are three different departments that actually have a piece of that.

So we, as a country, rely on our government to provide all those services through all those departments and it’s, really, only up to us to step to what we’ve been asked to do and we’re just trying to do that in a more effective way, and that’s our role.

COURTNEY KUBE: Another one here from Kenneth Spencer. He asks: What countries have recently decided to procure F-35s instead of competing platforms?

JAMES D. TAICLET: So we’ve had a lot of success with international competitions. So we had Switzerland recently. We had Canada. Poland was about a year and a half ago. So we’ve been very successful with international competitions. And the Swiss, I have to say, because I was part of it, their selection process was as rigorous and objective as anyone can imagine.

You know, the Swiss government was really strict and strong about making it objective. When they put out their final report, basically, said that aircraft was the most capable and the least expensive from a lifecycle perspective.

So that was telling to us and, therefore, we expect that we’re going to get more demand again for the F-35 and the F-16, and one of the most immediate signals there that we’ve just had was from Germany, and Germany had been—you know, we couldn’t tell their interest level in the F-35.

After the Munich Security Conference it became immediately obvious and they chose to take the F-35 because they know that those capabilities, especially the sensing and networking capabilities of the F-35, are head and shoulders above any other aircraft that’s out there.

COURTNEY KUBE: Is that specifically because of the war in Ukraine or—

JAMES D. TAICLET: I think it was because the German government recognized around the time of the potential invasion that things were—things were changing in Europe and that they would need to really refocus on their national defense, and Olaf Scholz made a speech about doing exactly that. And, therefore, they want to—if they’re going to invest, they want to invest, you know, in the most advanced products and systems and the F-35 is that.

COURTNEY KUBE: Mmm hmm. This, you know, event is really about the challenges of US and allied defense innovation. So what are some of the capability gaps that you see for a future war? I mean, it’s strange to say future war because, you know, the US, for all intents and purposes, is supplying a lot in this current war in Ukraine.

But what do you see that the US needs to invest more in for the future war and what do allies need to invest more in?

JAMES D. TAICLET: Yeah. So for the US, we have the most sophisticated systems. We have the largest defense enterprise, and so I think it falls to us to, really, create the space and aerospace domain dominance to prevent—really, again, to have a great deterrent for, really, the entire allied family, so to speak.

It really does hinge on space capability and aerospace or, you know, air dominance capability. That’s being demonstrated in Ukraine right now between the intelligence that Ukraine is able to gather from numerous sources and then apply it and the fact that the Russian air force has not been able to dominate the sky, so to speak.

So just—the Ukraine war so far has heightened the importance of that—those aerospace domains and—you know, and defending yourself, frankly. So I think the US will invest more in those areas. But there’s also, you know, the nuclear side of things where our subsurface nuclear capability, which, I guess, I could argue, is probably the single most important factor to having avoided nuclear war since World War II, is—the US submarine fleet is, essentially, undetectable and it provided a really survivable second strike capability, which may have prevented others from trying the nuclear option.