Hagel: US needs game-changing military innovation

SIMI VALLEY, California - Wary of a more muscular Russia and China, Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel said Saturday the Pentagon will make a new push for fresh thinking and creative ideas about how the US can keep and extend its military superiority despite tighter budgets and 13 years of war.

Hagel announced a "defense innovation initiative" that he likened to historic and successful campaigns during the Cold War to offset military advantages of US adversaries.

"We must change the way we innovate, operate and do business," he said in remarks prepared for a defense forum.

In a memo to Pentagon leaders in which be outlined the initiative, Hagel said the US must not lose its commanding edge in military technology.

"While we have been engaged in two large land-mass wars over the last 13 years, potential adversaries have been modernizing their militaries, developing and proliferating disruptive capabilities across the spectrum of conflict. This represents a clear and growing challenge to our military power," he wrote.

Hagel said the US cannot afford to relax or assume that the military superiority it developed during the Cold War will automatically persist.

Hagel said he is launching a long-range research and development program to find and field breakthroughs in key technologies, including robotics, miniaturization and advanced manufacturing techniques such as 3-D printing. He said the Pentagon will call on the private sector and academia for help.

"This program will look toward the next decade and beyond," he said. "In the near-term, it will invite some of the brightest minds from inside and outside government to start with a clean sheet of paper and assess what technologies and systems DoD ought to develop over the next three to five years."

Hagel likened the program to the Eisenhower administration's "New Look" program in the 1950s, which sought to rapidly expand the US nuclear weapon arsenal to offset superior Soviet conventional military power in Europe. He also compared it to the 1970s push by the Pentagon to emphasize long-range research into technologies that yielded such significant breakthroughs as stealth aircraft, Patriot air defense weapons, precision-guided bombs and missiles and more sophisticated surveillance systems.