Political Quotes

“Mr. Chair, I rise in strong opposition to this amendment. This is a poorly conceived and ill-intentioned attempt to kill the United States' support for the Defence Innovation Accelerator of the North Atlantic program, otherwise known as DIANA, which is a cooperative NATO effort to outsmart and out-innovate our adversaries. The DIANA program was set up by NATO as an effort to spur increased defense research and development funding to rapidly adapt to a new era of strategic competition by bringing key defensive experts together with the NATO alliances, leading entrepreneurs, and academic researchers. The DIANA initiative is specifically designed to leverage breaking developments and critical advances and next-generation defense capabilities such as artificial intelligence, quantum computing, hypersonics, space domain, as well as advanced materials and manufacturing sciences for the benefit of all NATO allies. With U.S. adversaries such as Russia in its brutal, unprovoked war of aggression in Ukraine and our global competition with China where China in its efforts to outpace the United States in technological superiority and undermine international norms and freedoms continue their malign efforts, it is more important than ever that we work closely with our NATO allies to out-innovate and out-compete at the leading edge of defense technology. Eliminating funding from the DIANA program is precisely the opposite of what we should be doing--the opposite.…”