WASHINGTON - The U.S. military is in danger of losing its technological advantage unless it invests in research and finds ways to build innovative weapons much faster, top officials said Thursday.
The Pentagon unveiled an initiative to streamline its bureaucracy and tap into technological breakthroughs in the private sector amid growing anxiety that American forces' longtime high-tech edge is slipping away.
The measures reflected "an overriding concern that our technological superiority is at risk," Frank Kendall, the Pentagon's chief weapons buyer, wrote in a report.
"Potential adversaries are challenging the U.S. lead in conventional military capability in ways not seen since the Cold War," wrote Kendall, who has dubbed the initiative "Better Buying Power 3.0."
The challenge stemmed from the nature of new technologies such as drones or micro-computing, which are much more accessible and available to other countries than in the past, officials said.
Officials this week described a future battlefield in which potential adversaries could counter America's traditional advantages in air or sea power.
Although the reform initiative will help, Kendall said the key to maintaining the U.S. military's dominance was spending more money on research and development and attracting talented workers to oversee weapons programs.
"But at the end of the day, the fundamental driver on how fast we can modernize is how much money we spend and on the quality of the people out there doing the work . . .," he said.
And if the government failed to adequately fund research and development, "you will not have a future weapons system."
Potential automatic budget cuts, which Congress has imposed on the entire federal budget, could severely undermine vital research and the time lost carried its own cost, Kendall said.
In the meantime, adversaries were investing in new weapons.
"Time is not recoverable. And if I don't do research, I have to do it later and take the time to do it," he said.
Copyright Agence France-Presse, 2015
