RECAP: DAY 2: Senator Banks Hosts 5th Annual Northeast Indiana Defense Summit

FORT WAYNE, Ind. - Today, Senator Jim Banks (R-Ind.) hosted the second day of the 5th Annual Northeast Indiana Defense Summit, bringing together military leaders, defense industry executives, and technology innovators to discuss strengthening America's defense industrial base and advancing the technologies needed to keep the nation safe.

Highlights included the announcement that Camp Atterbury and Muscatatuck Range had been added to the Army's test range booking service, the planned installation of Indiana's first advanced nuclear micro modular reactor at Naval Weapons Station Crane, and remarks from Acting Secretary of the Army Adam Telle and Acting Secretary of the Navy Hung Cao.

Sen. Jim Banks Introductory Remarks

Sen. Jim Banks (R-Ind.): "The way to counter this new Axis of Evil is through unprecedented defense industrial collaboration across the western alliance. We need to harness the unique skills, capabilities, and capacities of our closest allies and deploy them in mutually beneficial ways to lift all boats across the western defense enterprise."

Discussion - Technology and the New Arsenal of Democracy

Mike Gallagher, Head of Defense, Palantir Technologies

Sen. Jim Banks (R-Ind.)

Mike Gallagher, Head of Defense, Palantir Technologies: "The partnership between federal officials, state officials, and private industry, which is what this room is, and what you're building with this conference, is the secret sauce. There's no formula, it's just what are the relationships you can build in order to build an ecosystem that is attractive for companies to stay and to ultimately attract the human talent that's necessary to thrive."

"The single most important thing we can do is have an open source, a sovereign AI ecosystem in America, that dominates our Chinese competitors."

Discussion - A Battle Plan to Renew the American DIB

Sen. Dave McCormick (R-PA)

Rodger Zakheim, Director, Ronald Regan Presidential Foundation

Sen. Dave McCormick (R-PA): "We don't hear people talking enough about freedom. The freedom agenda. The thing that makes America distinctive, the thing that makes it exceptional, the thing that's led us to 250 years of incredible prosperity, is that we're free."

Sen. Dave McCormick (R-PA): "Having a robust defense industrial base is great for our economy…By being the leader in AI, by being the leader in drones, by being the leader in robots, all of that capability is great for a robust economy. It's great for our defense industrial base, and it's great for jobs. So, tie this to the economic well being in Indiana, in Pennsylvania, and all these other places…It's good for our economy, it's good for jobs, it's good for wages."

Panel - Bending the Cost Curve

Bryon Hargis, Vibhav Altekar, Shyam Sankar

Moderator: Mo Islam

Shyam Sankar, CTO, Palantir Technologies: "It's really about capability, it's easy to think about how do we make things cheaper, that's part of it, but how do we get effects, it's the cost per effect per day, and we can't ignore the time component of doing that…The only requirement is winning."

Shyam Sankar, CTO, Palantir Technologies: "Not only should it, it always has…There's some weird way in which at the end of the Cold War, we've rewritten history and misunderstood how any of this actually worked in the past. Everytime we've done this historically, it was a deep partnership between private capital, private industry, and the military."

Shyam Sankar, CTO, Palantir Technologies: "More has changed in the last 2 years than the prior 20….When you go back to when we started, there were no front doors….Now there's front doors, there's side doors, there's cracked doors. You couldn't find a more receptive Department to getting started, and they're metabolizing the pain of how we fix these things."

Panel - Freedom's (International) Forge

H.E. Leeana-Kasia Mikkola, Hon. Adam Telle, Tom Anderson, Ryan Flanagan

Moderator: Roger Zakheim

Hon. Adam Telle, Acting Secretary of the Army: I'm excited to announce this morning, under the leadership of Senator Banks, in particular, we added 5 Army test ranges to that booking. com service in the summer: one in Mississippi, one in Michigan, one in Utah, one in Arizona, one in Morocco. We are today as of 11:00AM, just a few minutes ago, if you go to testrange.army.mil, you'll see that Camp Atterbury, Indiana and Muscatatuck Range, Indiana have been added to that white glove test range service. So, we're really excited to announce that today, it's live now."

Hon. Adam Telle, Acting Secretary of the Army: "We're going to do a manufacturing rodeo…What this gets at is this idea we're not going to hand over a 2,000-page requirements document to our partners in industry and let them go into a black box and see what they produce…We're going to use our organic industrial base and then our commercial industrial base, the defense industrial base, and we're going to work together to stress-test these PowerPoint presentations with real manufacturing. We're going to see where the supply chain breaks."

Hon. Adam Telle, Acting Secretary of the Army: "But what we're really trying to get is insight, one more layer of insight between that assembly line and that soldier…we're going to have the ability really to take this manufacturing challenge we have in the United States of America, this lack of urgency that's been talked about, and try to solve it when it's not existential for the United States."

Keynote Remarks and Discussion - Can America Still Build a Navy

Hon. Hung Cao

Moderator: Mackenzie Eaglen

Hon. Hung Cao, Acting Secretary of the Navy: "American industry did not simply produce more of what it always had, it transformed itself. This is the kind of moment we face today: not because history repeats itself, because it seldomly does. But because history has a way of asking every generation the same question, are you ready? That question drives everything we do in the Department of the Navy."

Hon. Hung Cao, Acting Secretary of the Navy: "For generations, Crane has supported the technologies that give our warfighters an advantage, everything from electronic warfare to advanced weapons sensors and strategic systems. And now we're strengthening that mission."

Hon. Hung Cao, Acting Secretary of the Navy: "We are a maritime nation, and 80% of our goods travel through the seas. We need safe clear sea lanes of communications…America is a maritime nation, but we only have 155 flagged U.S. commercial ships right now. Only 155, you know how many Chinas has? 11,000. How can we say we're a maritime nation when we don't even have the fleet, we need to export our goods?"

See here toview today's Defense Summit

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