Deputy Secretary of Defense Bob Work spoke at the Aerospace Industries Association's 70th Annual Spring Board of Governors & Membership Meeting in Williamsburg, Virginia, today.
Work talked to roughly 160 defense industry representatives about U.S. technological superiority, partnerships, and budgetary challenges.
Work highlighted the department's ongoing efforts to reverse the erosion of our military's technological superiority, to include: the Defense Innovation Initiative, Third Offset Strategy, Long-Range Research & Development Planning Program, Better Buying Power 3.0 and Defense Innovation Unit Experimental.
He noted the importance of industry and how their companies and employees provide the capabilities, technologies, and services that underpin America's global military power. Second only to our men and women in uniform, what makes our military the strongest in the world is our defense industry.
On the budget, he explained that a return to sequestration funding levels would be an unmitigated disaster and that lower funding levels are harmful to national security. The department needs a long-term budget approach that dispels sequester, once and for all, and provides the department flexibility in making needed cost saving reforms. He repeated Secretary of Defense Ash Carter's criticism of the Overseas Contingency Operations (OCO) mechanism for circumventing spending caps as a gimmick that fails to resolve the funding crisis facing the department. He asked industry to continue to work together, and with Congress, to address the negative effects of both sequestration and relying on an OCO mechanism to fund the base budget.
Work explained the department will get through this time of declining budgets and increased demands, by working together with industry and keeping our minds on the men and women who serve.
The deputy secretary ended remarks by thanking the defense industry for all of their contributions to our nation's defense.