The National Defense Authorization Act with Rep. Don Bacon

ACME General: One note before we dive into this interview with Republican Congressman Don Bacon: we recorded our conversation early last week, before the events of Wednesday, January 6th – so you won’t hear any mention of the insurrection at the Capitol. But you will hear some prescient comments about the dangers of delegitimizing a free and fair election. It should be noted that last Wednesday, mere hours after the assault on the Capitol, Congressman Bacon voted to certify the results of the 2020 presidential election. 

ACME General: Welcome to Accelerate Defense, a podcast from ACME General Corp. I’m Ken Harbaugh, Principal at ACME, and host of this month’s episode. On Accelerate Defense, we’ll hear from political figures, military professionals, and other thought leaders about how innovation shapes our national security landscape.

Today, on our second episode of Accelerate Defense, we’re talking with Congressman Don Bacon, a retired Air Force brigadier general, and representative for Nebraska’s second congressional district. He is co-founder and co-chair of the For Country Caucus, and is a member of the House Armed Services Committee. He has been an outspoken advocate for placing national security interests above partisanship.

Upon passage of the 2021 National Defense Authorization Act, Congressman Bacon said this: “For 60 consecutive years, Congress has passed the NDAA on a bipartisan basis for one simple reason, that politics must never stand between the American people and the security of the United States.”

Congressman Bacon, glad to have you here. Why is the NDAA so special as really the last remaining piece of major legislation that passes in this way?

DB: I’m glad it passed. Without it, we wouldn’t have gotten a pay raise for our service men and women. Hazard duty pay would have been stopped with our folks in the Middle East, but that’s sort of at the tactical level or direct impact level. But frankly, it was important because it allows us to modernize and improve the readiness for all of our services and helps us prepare against China and Russia, near-peer competitors. So this NDAA ensures that we invest in our nuclear deterrents, stealth capabilities, new ships. It basically gives our service men and women the ability to deter China and Russia.

We’ve been so focused on counterterrorism and insurgencies in Afghanistan and Iraq that we have fallen behind in the near-peer competitor fight. So this NDAA was, I think, critical for getting us pointed the right way to deter China and Russia. We never want to fight them, but you got to have the capabilities to deter. So that’s why this NDAA was so important.

There was also other things in the NDAA that I thought moved our country forward on quite a few issues, like for example, I supported renaming the bases that had Confederate generals on them. I don’t think these folks lived up to their oath. They helped lead the Civil War, and it really wasn’t respectful to our minority population that serve at a higher number than the general population in our military. There’s so many better ways we could name these bases, after Medal of Honor recipients.

ACME General: I don’t often get the opportunity to ask questions that really speak to political courage, especially on this show, but since you brought it up, I want to ask you about that piece of the NDAA and in particular, your outspokenness on that issue when it was really a political third rail. You said we are not the party of Jim Crow, and you did that during an election season. I have to imagine that your time in the military not only gave you the courage to speak out on such an important issue, but the empathy to understand why it was so important. Is that a fair assumption about your motivations?

DN: I think it’s half of my motivation. The other half was my roots, but I’ll come back to that. After 30 years in the Air Force, at least on the active duty side, I know some of our guard and reserves from the South may have some different perspectives, but almost every senior officer or senior enlisted person I’ve talked to that were active duty did not like the fact that we were naming bases after individuals who violated their oath, led a civil war that killed 600,000 Americans for a cause that was not good. It was an evil cause for slavery. Folks want to deny that it was for slavery, but if you read the Articles of Secession in the states, it repeatedly time after time in the Article of Secession said this is about slavery. People who led the secession made it clear what this was about. But you got to have an alternative plan, and I think we have Medal of Honor recipients that would be great. So to give an example, Fort Bragg for Special Forces, why couldn’t this be Fort Benavidez, a guy that was a Special Forces guy in Vietnam, shot 31 times in the course of rescuing eight soldiers? There are great heroes out there that we could all get behind.

So I would say my military background did it for me, and most active duty people I know agreed, but I also come from an interesting… I’m a student of the Civil War. My family came from Virginia in the early 1800s, were abolitionists and fought for the North under the flags of Illinois. So I have a little bit of those family roots that also informed me and made me feel that way before I was even in the military, frankly.

ACME General: The NDAA runs to some 5,000 pages. That is one of the pieces that jumps out, but there is a lot packed into it. I want to get into the near-peer deterrents elements. Some of that is the big budget stuff, the upgrading of our nuclear deterrents, but you’ve highlighted some of the more forward-thinking elements, like the investments in hypersonics and AI. What is your assessment of how we are doing right now in absence of these investments, and then we’ll pivot to how we should be doing when it comes to emerging tech?

DB: So we are behind on hypersonics. Russia and China invested before us, put their emphasis there, and the reason is understandable, but it’s not good. It was the fact that we put our attention on Afghanistan and Iraq primarily, and those were tough fights. We had to focus on there, particularly roughly 13, 14 years ago, we were in a tough fight in Iraq. So we pivoted a lot of our investments towards the counterinsurgency fight. That’s how we got 60 remote-piloted aircraft caps flying over Afghanistan and Iraq and that region 24 hours a day. That’s because of those investments. But that investment came out of what we could have put into the near-peer fight and we’re paying for today.

So we’re trying to catch up in the hypersonics, AI, 5G, all these things that are very important, miniaturization, automation, warfare, all these things that are really the next generation warfighting technologies that are coming. So we’re playing some catch-up right now, and this NDAA was needed to get us pointed the right way and to start catching up to what China and Russia’s been doing in these investments.

I’ll give you another example where Iraq and Afghanistan has hurt us today. I’m not decrying- we needed to be there. 9/11 happened and we had to deal with it. And we had a set budget that we decided not to grow, so that pot of money got shifted over to the counterinsurgency fight, and it’s understandable, but we’re paying for it. I’ll give you an example of another impact. Our air-to-air capability, the F-22 is the best air-to-air fighter in the world, but we cut that procurement in half. We were supposed to have 360, but we made the decision back in 2008 and ‘9 roughly, maybe it was 2007, to cut it to 180 aircraft. That is not enough aircraft to counter or really deter China and Russia.

So I could give you example after example where we have fallen behind, but this NDAA I think prioritizes the national strategy in the right way and funds what we need to do to catch up. It was vitally important, and I thought the president, in my humble view, made a mistake on vetoing it, particularly over Section 230, which is not even a defense-related issue.

ACME General: So you bring not just a political perspective to this work, but a tactical and strategic perspective. I’m wondering how rare that is on the hill, how much your colleagues lean on you not just as a vet, but a vet who served in a senior role, a former Brigadier General with a background in ISR and electronic warfare. For context, my time in the Navy was as an electronic warfare mission commander. So we can speak the same language here, but how important is that perspective in your assessment of the efficacy of the NDAA?

DB: I think it’s really important to have a handful of folks that have deep background on military matters and foreign affairs. We do have about 17% of Congress has some kind of veteran experience, but the far majority of that served one tour maybe or something. We don’t have a deep bunch of folks who have spent decades working this. So I really wanted to be on the Armed Services Committee, because I can use my three decades of military experience for good. I think it’s paid off in the NDAA. I’ve also hired- about 33% of my office out of the 18 people we have are veterans. So I’ve been able to put two retired colonels on my team, and we have some very experienced NCOs that have served to help us ensure that we have the right information in the NDAA. So I put an investment on our team to ensure that we are fully engaged in the writing of these bills. If you look at the ranking members and the chairmen, yeah, they have more input into the bills, but I would like to think that I’ve had the most input separate from those that are the ranking members or the chairmen of these subcommittees, because we have a great team working it day and day out.

I appreciate the fact that folks on the committee give me a chance to have influence, and they do. I’m going to miss Mac Thornberry, who I thought gave me a lot of opportunities, I would say the Democrats have also given me opportunity, but I would say beyond just being a retired general, I also work with my Democratic colleagues and try to find areas of agreement, which gives me added capability to input into the NDAA, because I think they know that I’m a straight shooter. I am not a partisan shill that just votes if my party is saying one thing or the Democrats are saying another. I have crossed lines on multiple occasions where I thought it was right. So I think I have credibility with my Democratic colleagues.

I’ll just give you an example. We were able to pass legislation in this last NDAA, and it’s now law, called Safe to Report. A lot of the stuff from my experience as a five-time commander, we would have women come forward and say they were sexually assaulted, but let’s say they’re 19 years old or drinking, junior commanders were coming in and they would do the hearing and the investigation, and the accused would be found innocent for whatever reason, but then the victim would get a strike taken because she was underage drinking. I thought that was egregious in that it tells women that are in that situation, “you can’t come forward if you were violating the underage drinking or whatnot”. I just feel like the only person being punished at that point was the person coming in with the allegation.

So I, as a five-time commander, I never operated that way, but there was issues in the military where that’s happened. Then as a congressman, I come across these instances where it did happen. So we made it policy at the Air Force Academy, I’m on the Air Force Academy Board, that said women are safe to report or any victim is safe to report without getting a secondary charge against them that’s more minor. And the Democrats see that, that I am a straight-shooter, I call balls and strikes the way I see it, and I think it’s given me some avenues to get more done in the NDAA because of it.

ACME General: Is part of the reason the NDAA has been able to maintain that flavor of bipartisanship for 60 years the fact that it does offer something to everybody? It’s almost an argument for restoring earmarks. There has been a concerted effort to make sure that the NDAA passes in a way that everyone is a stakeholder.

DB: There is some of that, but it can be strained at times. I think in the end, we’re trying to do what’s right for the country, and I think two thirds of the time or three quarters of the time, what we have found is that mindset has made it a more centrist bill, because you’ve got to get Republicans and Democrats to get behind it. So I think most of the time, folks are trying to do what’s right for the country, and it’s a unifying thing. I’ll tell you, two years ago, the Democrats loaded the NDAA somewhat in the committee, but even more on the floor. I think one day we voted on 40 Democratic amendments that were what most Republicans would call poison pills on there, and it passed with not a single Republican vote, but then it went into conference. Then we found that the chairman, who I respect, Chairman Smith, had to work with the Republican chairman in the Senate, and that bill then became right back towards the middle. So thankfully, the conference process with the Senate and the House operated as a moderating role, and it has done that twice now. So the process is working, because the end result in the end comes out and it’s a middle of the road, more centrist document, despite some of the variations going into it that we had to evolve out of. I think this year, with the president vetoing primarily because of Section 230, but he also wasn’t happy with the Confederate base naming and a couple other items in there, I think that the majority of that bill was so good that it was able to get an overwhelming override vote because it was a centrist document in the end.

ACME General: One of those areas of broad bipartisan consensus are the investments in emerging tech like AI and cyber. How much of an emphasis was that for you? I know you have commented on the establishment of the National Cyber Director. I would imagine with your background, this is something you weighed in on.

DB: Right. I supported a National Cyber Director, but I was worried about how do you involve the NSA and Cyber Command and all of that? So there’s got to be some clear lanes. But we need a director for the internal protection of our country. Our military establishment has a pretty good cyber policy, I think a pretty good cyber force, but our domestic infrastructure is vulnerable, whether it’s our power grid, our financial sector, say in Manhattan. We saw it just recently, obviously with the Russian hack that impacted dozens and dozens of major organizations. So this is very important. So we got to have a better and a more broader cyber policy. We have the investments there, but it’s going to take a while to… We got to break down these false barriers between the cyber and NSA, which is very important. It’s done very well, but our domestic side’s struggling. We just got to acknowledge that and figure out how do we catch that up and how do we work from what we’re doing with NSA and cyber.

AI is something I don’t know as much about. I had some really, really good friends in the military, Jack Shanahan, who just retired, led the AI efforts for DOD. I know how important it is, so we know we got to invest in it. An area that I know a lot more about, but it’s not a lot of experience in Congress outside of myself, and that is in the electronic warfare realm. Our military really stopped investing in the electronic magnetic spectrum and being able to control it since the mid ’90s. I’ve worked hard the last four years to get that right sized. We are making great strides to have a two-star general at the lead or one-star, depending on if it’s two-star select. In the Joint Staff, we have a strategy and doctrine that’s coming out of the Joint Staff and OSD, and the services are going to plug into that and align themselves with the strategy. We are forcing… I’ll give you an example, in the Air Force now, it has its own funding panel for electronic warfare. All these things are wins that I’ve been able to sort of force through and force the military to accept, which I don’t think they would have without Congress intervening.

ACME General: One of the unmistakable trendlines in investment in national security is the reality that whereas a few decades ago, government led the way. Now it’s the private sector. Increasingly, relevant innovation isn’t just coming out of government labs or traditional primes but also out of non-traditionals like Silicon Valley start-ups. How do we tap into that? How do we break down… I’m going to steal a term from you, those false barriers between the private sector innovators and government users and clients. How does the NDAA address that, and what are the opportunities here?

DB: Well, you’re absolutely right. When it came to technology, decades ago, government was the big brother, and the private sector was the little brother. Now the little brother has outgrown the big brother, and it is the private sector that is growing the technology, developing technology at a much faster pace than the government. So what we have had to do through the NDAA is encourage buying commercial off-the-shelf technology. Also, you have to ensure that – there’s a good term for it, and I’ll always forget the term, but the equipment that we buy cannot, it can’t be parochial in that only one company can plug into that. We have to make sure that these things, you can plug in from multiple different sources. You got to have standards that people are working towards that you can plug in this new technology and you don’t have to just buy from one company or one technology line. So those are kinds of things that we’ve had to force into the NDAA. We’ve had to streamline our procurement process. We have a large bureaucracy that has an outdated procurement mindset, years of testing and development. That’s unacceptable today. We cannot take a decade and a half to build the next F35, which is what we did. If we do that again for the next fighter, we’re going to be behind by the time it comes off the production line.

So I’m really excited about what Dr. Roper is doing in the Air Force to streamline the procurement process for the next, I’ll call it the sixth generation fighter. I’m only going to mention this because it was in the newspapers – we’re already flying a prototype that is the follow-on to the F-22 and F-35. We were able to do it by streamlining a lot of this design process, and that is the wave of the future. We can’t do things like we did for decades and expect to be ahead of the Chinese and Russians.

ACME General: Even Will Roper would acknowledge though that one of the biggest opportunities is also the least tapped, in the non-traditionals, the startups for whom the biggest barrier is that procurement process, that acquisition process that you described. It is too complicated, too bureaucratic, too long to really leverage the best emerging tech out there. How does the NDAA tackle that?

DB: Well, we have to set aside a portion for smaller businesses or startups. It is a challenge for startups, because you have to have a lot of investment capability to put into technology. Then the government takes so long that you have this sunk cost, and you got to still pay a workforce. Now it makes it very hard for new people to get a start and plug in. So we need to be able to have money that we can get to these startups as they develop the stuff. You just can’t do business like old where you’ll get your money once we start buying things off the production line, because by that time, these startups are out of business, right? We have to put money into these smaller companies and the startups as we go along to keep them in business and we need to have a certain cutout for these places. This can’t be all the big business. It can’t just be the top four or five defense firms out there, because there is a place for the innovators, the smaller guys who have a new idea, and we want that energy and that dynamic input that they put into the system, because it becomes a win-win having them in there. It makes everybody better. That’s what we want.

ACME General: So it’s a combination of both a budgetary carve-out to set aside funds for programs like SBIR and SCTR and a quota, if you will, a requirement that a percentage of contracts go to those smaller companies.

DB: You just can’t do the latter though, because if you just have a quota, as you know, so these guys have to have an investment. You put in a proposal. You can’t wait. The F-35 took a decade and a half, roughly. I know that’s an exaggerated example, but imagine being a small company and you have this investment in there and you’re not getting any money back, that leaves it only for the larger companies, which there’s a good place for them too, so don’t get me wrong, but we have to find a way to sustain the startups and the smaller companies and the current DOD process, or I should say the older process, doesn’t facilitate that. That’s not healthy.

ACME General: In the first episode of this program, we spoke with Congressman Moulton about the publication of the Future of Defense Task Force Report, and one of the tensions he highlighted was the urgency of those recommendations balanced against the need for long-term thinking. I’m wondering, as a member of Congress with a strategic view, how do you think about the short-term nature of thinking in Congress and how that can be remedied with the need for really over-the-horizon planning and a strategic vision when it comes to planning for our national defense?

DB: There is no doubt we are a victim of the here and now, passing an annual budget, which if you think about it, an annual budget that changes from year to year really undercuts a long-term game plan and development. Our military, our DOD surely needs to have long-term thinking, just like our state department, other departments. They should be thinking long-term, and they need to be pitching it to Congress. It sort of should be an iterative process here, but this funding from year to year, it takes over the reality. So it makes it hard to develop a long game plan, and especially when a crisis comes, and now we have COVID, right? So we have just spent trillions of dollars, which will have impact at some point on the DOD budget. So those things happen.

But I guess to get to your question, the Congress itself has to have an eye for five or 10 years down the road, and it needs to have that as part of the committee process working with the DOD, knowing what their long-range plans are. They just don’t get everything they want, but we got to be working with our DOD partners on what is that long-range vision? There should be a ramp process, that our spending on an annual basis is working towards that. I don’t know if I answered your question, but it’s a complicated problem.

ACME General: Well, it’s a complicated problem for which I don’t know there is an answer, given that our politics is beholden to the two-year cycle, yet our adversaries think in 30-year cycles. You mentioned China and Russia as the near-peer adversaries. How would you rate their readiness along the areas of competition that most concern you, AI, cyber, hypersonics, etc?

DB: Russia has just modernized their entire nuclear force, maybe outside of some of their bombers, but their ICBMs are new, their submarines are new, and if they use hypersonic nuclear weapons, we’re going to have a 15-minute warning here in our country. Not that they’ll do it, but I think we need to prepare for it. So you got to have the ability to communicate to Russia that no matter what you do, we can survive and still have nuclear command control on our end. That gives you deterrence.

So what Russia’s done to their nuclear inventory is alarming, their hypersonics. They’ve always been very capable cyber-wise. We tend to underrate them, but they’re very good, and they’re more military-oriented versus China in their cyber. They’re there to get military secrets. They’re there to use it for information operations, to undermine us, and they’re very good at it. China, what’s alarming there is maybe not the here and now, but their GDP is equaling ours soon, and their buying power is already there. So it’s just going to be a matter of time that they’re going to have our DOD spending capability, and yet we’re in NATO, we’re in the Middle East, we’re in the Far East. We’re diffused out there. China is largely there within its borders. I think they’re going to, in the short-term, build a tremendous capability that will be hard for us to match in the Far East. So not only in the nuclear area, but the stealth, cyber, AI, you name it. They have the ability to invest like we are, and yet they’re going after industrial secrets, intellectual secrets, and so that plugs right into their capabilities in three, four, five years.

So what comes out of that? They’re going to equal our GDP. Russia is only about 15% of it or so, they have a GDP of Mexico, but they’ve developed an incredible military capability out of that. That takes me to an area that I’ve differed a little bit with the president on this. There’s no way that we can match what China is going to do and what Russia is doing. Then you still have Iran, you still got North Korea and other issues out there. We have to invest not necessarily financially, but emotionally and treaty-wise with our allies. We cannot counter this world of totalitarian thinking of Russia and China, Iran, with America alone. We are indispensable, but it’s going to require us to have close ties with Japan and Australia and New Zealand, hopefully Philippines over time, Indonesia. India is incredibly important. Also, we’ve got to maintain what we’re doing with NATO and our friends in the Middle East, because that’s the only way that the free world’s values can defend itself. America alone means our value system will diminish in the world, and it’s a more dangerous world. So I am focused on how do we build stronger alliances so that our values reign supreme globally, which I think creates a safer world for our kids and grandkids.

ACME General: There’s that old adage about nations who only prepare to fight the last war do so at their peril. I would love your perspective on what the next war will look like, assuming we’re not already in it.

DB: I appreciated our military doctrine and our strategies that we had a few years back that we had to have the full range of capabilities to deter. I still believe that, but it’s going to take allies to help bolster that, because it spreads us thin. So we really do need to work closely with our allies on that. The next fight that we’re going to have, if it’s a near-peer competitor, they’re going to use cyber to attack our energy grid, our financial sector, create chaos in our country. Imagine our country with rolling blackouts for days at a time? Unless we are just in time, inventory of our supermarkets can disappear pretty quick, right? So you’re going to see cyber going after not just our military, but after our domestic infrastructure, and it’s going to create us problems. You’re going to see space used like it has not been attacked before. They’re going to go after our key communication satellites our key intelligence satellites, our GPS capabilities, and America is the best in the world at space, but we’re also the most vulnerable, because we depend on space. So you’re going to see a cyber and a space attack in any phase one of a war with a near-competitor. The next Pearl Harbor is not going to be a Japan-like attack with airplanes and torpedoes coming into Pearl Harbor. No, it’s going to be cyber and space will be the first phase of that.

If you’re talking real near-competitor fight, it could also be EMP, the magnetic pulse that will turn off a lot of our electric capabilities as well. So we have to be thinking along those lines if we want to deter these kinds of fights for our future generations, but yet we can’t take our eyes off of what’s going on with non-nation terror threats. Al Qaeda and other non-traditional threats are out there, and we have to be ready there too. The Al Qaedas of the world don’t necessarily have the capabilities of Russia or China, but they have the will, right? Anywhere they could strike us and create maximum harm, they will do it if they can. So we have to have a bit of that full range of capability.

ACME General: What you’ve just described suggests that we may be experiencing foreshocks of that already with the attacks that we’ve recently experienced. I’ll end with this question. How much faith do you place in our system of government, in the ability of you and your colleagues to adapt to be able to prepare the country for these emerging threats?

DB: I love our country. I love our history. I love studying what our founders did in 1776 and what they did in 1787 in crafting our constitution. Our first elections were in 1788, and we’ve been doing it ever since. We are the country with the… I say the word liberal values, but not the liberal in our political sense today. Ultimately, our values are what makes us the powerful country in the world, and we have a great economy. That’s because of free markets, which is a value that we must continue embracing. So our economy is powerful, and it’s our values that help provide that. But in the end, when I travel all over the world, when I talk to countries, what they like most about us is that we embrace liberty, human rights, human dignity, freedom of speech, freedom of religion, freedom of press, these things that we hold dear, and it’s what makes America special.

Now what I’m worried about right now is I think the worst threat facing our country is not Russia or China or Iran. It’s the internal divisions that we see in our country. We are fellow Americans that are almost at war with each other, and it’s a shame. What happened four years ago was wrong, the saying that the president was colluding with Russia. As you dig that onion back or peel it back, that was not the case. It took Robert Mueller to pretty much dispute that part of the investigation.

But now we’re seeing four years later another de-legitimizing following an election, and it’s scary. I’ve heard from people that I value and I respect that are throwing out the words martial law, Insurrection Act, and it’s wrong. I think that my role, and I think other members I think on both sides of the aisle, we got to step back and quit throwing gas on the fire. We’ve always had partisan fights, and that’s what Congress… We’re a very partisan body, but we can’t treat each other like enemies. Right now, we keep dialing up the intensity and the de-legitimizing of each other, and I don’t know how much our country can take on that. I think we’re going to have to step back and reflect on what we’re doing. I hope that I could be that voice, more healing voice out there, and a reconciling voice. I’m a conservative, but yet there’s got to be some lanes, some boundaries when it comes to how we go after our political adversaries in our own country.

So that’s what concerns me most. I think Congress and those that I want to associate with, we need to step back and be leaders right now and not partisan hacks out there. We’re going to have to be leaders and take some risk within our political base and basically be statesmen versus political types out there. We need more of that right now, and I think it’s needed more than ever right at this moment and tomorrow.

ACME General: Congressman Bacon, thank you so much for joining us. I hope we can have you back.

DB: Thank you. Thank you, sir.

ACME General: Thanks again to Congressman Bacon for joining us on this month’s episode of Accelerate Defense. Join us next month for a conversation with David McCormick, CEO of Bridgewater Associates and an outspoken advocate for defense innovation.

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Accelerate Defense is a monthly podcast from ACME General Corp. Our producer is Isabel Robertson. Audio engineer is Sean Rule-Hoffman. Special thanks to the team at ACME. I’m Ken Harbaugh, and this is Accelerate Defense. Thanks for listening.