Jeff Flake: “Well, seeing that I had already agreed to offer it, I thought that had I agreed to pull back now, I would be looked to…”

“Well, seeing that I had already agreed to offer it, I thought that had I agreed to pull back now, I would be looked to favoring one particularly powerful Member of my party. Mr. LaHOOD. The Illinois Technology Transition Center is a public- private collaboration between academia, industry, and government. It collaborates with the Department of Defense, and it has identified innovative technology applications that meet DOD mission requirements and strives to take technology from the laboratory to use by DOD within 12 to 18 months. This is an extraordinary opportunity for the public and the private to come together. The lion's share of the money that funds this is private dollars. It is not Federal dollars. It comes from people who have businesses and people who want to invest in smart people and smart ideas. And the answer to your question about Iraq is that one of the technologies that is being developed is being developed in my hometown of Peoria by a company called Firefly. And they are developing a revolutionary battery that will have the opportunity to withstand huge amounts of heat and not become the kind of traditional batteries that are currently used. Now, this would not have been able to come about if it hadn't been the collaboration of a private business and the Federal Government coming together in a collaboration. So are some of the technologies that are being developed in this center being used in Iraq? The answer is yes, they are.…”