What's the message you want to convey to the committee, and what should they be asking you and the other witnesses about at this hearing? Welcome, Jack.

Yeah, thanks, Francis.

It's been a while, so I'm very happy to be back on with you to talk about this subject.

What they're calling this is an emergency hearing.

A little unusual that Representative Ro Khanna, who is the ranking member of the House Committee on the CCP... is doing this a day before the two presidents meet, President Trump, President Xi, will be meeting as a big state visit on Thursday.

So let's say this is designed to help set the stage for what do we want to come out of this with AI.

So in my take, what Representative Khanna is looking for is an acknowledgement that US and China do need to talk on AI.

Is there some model there potentially for what the two countries might wind up working through?

How does that change anything about your prior, uh, sort of suggestion about what AI governance demands now? Um, how does that kind of inform? And Jack, with this one, I'll start with you.

To ha- uh, this is a conversation Paul Triolo and I were having last night based on watching his podcast last week with Kendra Schaefer on, kinda on this very topic, is to have this governance conversation between the United States and China, which I think is absolutely essential.

Um, can't question that.

Question is what does it look like? But to do that, we have to get our own governance house in order, and China has to get its own governance house in order.

This is not arms control is owned by this one organization in respective countries.

It's AI that brings in everything.

It brings commerce, it brings treasury, it brings in defense, it brings in state.

Uh, have we made success in operating in a trustless or trust-free or, or trust challenge zone before, um, especially when it comes to these types of things?

But tell us, in this behemoth that is the Department of Defense, what was the original intent behind this AI program?

So it starts with Project Maven, and then I then end up leading the joint AI center, and we can talk about the differences between the two, because they were two different organizations.

But the whole point of Project Maven, I go back to a sort of an oxymoron, which is catastrophic success.

We were having intel analysts look at screens of information, mostly full motion video from drones.

Whatever the official term that the military likes to use, they were drones.

And intel analysts would stare at screens for ten hours, eleven hours at a time.

But it wasn't all they were asked to do.

But talk to me about how you found these people or how Drew, I guess, found these people and how this all came to be.

Yeah

... before about what do we really mean when we say air superiority, air supremacy.

The way I look at it is, sure, we have air superiority in localized area, but we clearly do not have air supremacy over the entire country because an airplane got shot down.

You could say, "Well, that was an aberration." I don't accept aberrations.

You either have air supremacy or you don't.

So I, so I think, um, we do what we do extremely well.

Um, we've suffered on the electronic warfare part for about 15 years, thanks to counterterrorism, counterinsurgency.

Is it the Under Secretary of Defense for Research and Engineering, Emil Michael? Is it the Vice President of the United States? Is it David Sacks?

If Maven was not a program of record, what was it when you had it at the JAIC? Welcome.

Yeah, thanks Francis.

It's been a little bit of a while, uh, since we've talked, so really good to see you, and I can't think of a better person to be talking with today on this subject than Trey Whitworth, who lived this as much as I lived it.

So it's a, it's a very, um, important and, I think, very, uh, entertaining discussion to follow.

Um, the best way I could put it is it was not a program of record in our early days, as you would expect, because it, it did not exist until 2017 to 2018.

What, what this will segue into in a minute is why a program of record is so incredibly important, mostly on the funding stability side, and Trey will, will talk about that both a- at NGA as a Maven program of record, and then I think we both could talk about Maven Smart System as a program of record.

But back in those days, we fought for every dollar we could get.

What's the intersection of that with this, and what's the implication, uh, for CJADC2 moving forward?