WASHINGTON — The US military is striking alleged drug boats in the Caribbean and massing forces off the coast of Venezuela, but the Pentagon’s Chief Technology Officer is still focused on China.
While the new National Security Strategy released on Thursday prioritizes the Americas, Undersecretary for Research and Engineering Emil Michael told reporters that technology development needed to be driven by higher-tech threats overseas.
“The focus on Western Hemisphere … it’s [about] the homeland and the threats from narco-terrorists that come from our hemisphere,” Michael said. “We have enough capability currently to do anything that’s necessary in that arena. … So I am focused much more on other parts of the world, R&E is focused on more other parts of the world than this hemisphere, because the adversary capabilities are not nearly as close.”
Asked point-blank if that meant China was his pacing threat, Michael responded: “Yes.”
“There are conflicts around the world and potential conflicts with what you all know as a near-peer adversary in China, which has really undergone the most significant military buildup in all of history in the last 10 to 15 years,” Michael had said in his opening remarks to the Defense Writers Group. “That requires a different mindset, and that’s why you see acquisition reform, requirements reform. … The weapons and systems needed are dramatically different than they were for the global war on terror, where the adversary was an irregular army with crude improvised explosive devices and these sorts of things.
“If China wasn’t a threat, you might think differently about the mix that you have to have,” Michael added later. “[Historically], you can project power with carriers, for example. [With] China, trying to project carrier power in Taiwan Straits is not probably advisable.” Instead, he said, his priorities are new technologies like drones, hypersonics, directed energy, and artificial intelligence.
China is racing to catch up even in areas where America and its allies currently hold the lead, he warned, notably in advanced microchips essential to AI. China already dominates the global supply chain for more mundane technologies essential for mass-producing drones and other weapons systems, Michael said, which the Trump administration is trying to bring back to the US.
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“Batteries, fiber optics, brushless motors, seekers, nozzles, we have a whole list of stuff that we’re trying to ensure that we have enough domestic supply,” he said.
That said, Michael argued, the US doesn’t need to replicate the massive swarms of low-cost, short-ranged drones that dominate the skies over Ukraine. Instead he said — repeating his point from Saturday’s Reagan National Defense Forum — the US needs a mix of small drones and larger, longer-ranged unmanned systems more suitable for the vast expanses of the Pacific.
In Ukraine, “you have a robot-on-robot front line now, which we’ve never seen before, and that’s why you see this explosion of drone technology,” he said. “[We] don’t have a territorial battle with Canada or Mexico, like the Russia-Ukraine battle … where you need hundreds of thousands of drones. … The need for as many drones as the Russians or Ukrainians have is not the same for the US.”