Iowa native Matt Whitaker, the U.S. Ambassador to NATO, says he’s pushing the U.S. military and the defense industry to do as much as possible, as quickly as possible with cutting edge technology.
“One of the things that I keep explaining to our friends in the military is it can’t just be a dependence of exquiste items that are super expensive and they take forever to build,” Whitaker said yesterday in Des Moines during a forum organized by the America First Policy Institute. “We have to get to a layer of ‘good enough’ munitions that can do 80% of what we need.”
Whitaker told the crowd there are a lot of American companies with good ideas, “but because a lot of the new technologies use spectrum, you can’t test this stuff on a lot of the ranges that are available nationally…We keep seeing local restrictions and state restrictions that don’t allow us to do some of the proper and necessary testing.”
Whitaker served as acting U.S. Attorney General during President Trump’s first term. He described his current portfolio in the second Trump Administration as security and defense focused. “I’ve been to Ukraine several times and what I’ve seen there is the battle lab of the future,” Whitaker said. “…It is so important that the United States maintains our technological edge.”
The Wall Street Journal is reporting Ukrainian drone operators participating in a battlefield test in Europe earlier this year easily defeated the array of U.S. troops and vehicles involved in the trial. Whitaker did not mention the report during his remarks.
