Lawmakers Seek Innovation

Two top House authorizers this week called for increased innovation in defense and a move away from the use of legacy systems.

Speaking at the Brookings Institute in Washington, Rep. Jim Langevin (D-RI) and Rep. Randy Forbes (R-VA) said for the United States to continue its global military dominance it must move away from legacy systems.

"The apparatus of the Pentagon is geared to . . . protect our legacy systems -- we are geared to protect the things we've all been trained on for years, we are geared to say 'let's have zero risk and just salute and continue to do things the way they are,'" Forbes said.

Both lawmakers agreed that research and development was one of the most important ways for the United States to stay ahead of its adversaries. "Research and development is something that is always easy to grab and cut because it's normally not just in somebody's backyard. It's kind of floating out there," Forbes said. "I think we have to create a culture at the Pentagon that says we are not going to cut research and development short."

Forbes said Congress must push the Pentagon to conduct more modeling and simulation efforts as well. "I think [modeling and simulation] is a opportunity for us . . . to be able to get a greater utilization in our planning and our capabilities," Forbes said, contending the Pentagon has recently been doing less, not more, in this area.

Forbes also called for a future-looking methodology for testing and evaluation and an emphasis on the Navy's Unmanned Carrier-Launched Airborne Surveillance and Strike platform, an autonomous aircraft capable of precision strike. He said UCLASS will decide the relevance of aircraft carriers 20 years out.

While Forbes and Langevin want the military to rely less on legacy systems, the fiscal year 2015 defense bills passed to date include significant additional funding many of the most prominent. The Senate Appropriations Committee passed a spending bill that increased funding for the Abrams tank by $120 million even though the Army opposed it. Congress has also pushed back against the Air Force's plans to retire the aging A-10 Warthog.

With sequestration looking likely to return in FY-16, the administration faces tough decisions on which programs to cut to stay under the budget cap mandated by the Budget Control Act of 2011.

As for new technologies that have already been developed, Langevin said he wants to make sure DOD uses them. "The capability [of new weapons] may be there, but I sense a real reluctance on the part of the Pentagon to incorporate it because there hasn't been a policy decision on how to use it," Langevin said, pointing to microwave technology as an example.