Janet Simmon: Don't entangle US national defense with other countries

To The Daily Sun,

The National Defense Authorization Act for fiscal year 2027 that is passing through our Legislature right now contains a section (224) that would integrate Israel’s military with ours. This process will integrate systems listed in (A)(6)1) “Counter-Unmanned Systems including aerial, maritime, and ground platforms” including missile and air defense technologies; artificial intelligence, quantum, and autonomous systems; biotechnology, and medical defense; data fusion, manufacturing and many others.

Once these programs are in place, it would be very difficult to disentangle these technologies and agreements from major defense procurement programs. Integration would mean that it would be nearly impossible to separate ourselves in the future.

Currently we use MOUs covering five or 10 years which provide strong agreements sharing military technology and intelligence.

This act integrates a foreign country into our institutions.

This act would create a singular executive agent with the power to overrule determinations by other Department of Defense agencies such as the Defense Technology Security Administration.

This new proposal is written in a way that would shield foreign technology in the U.S. defense supply chain from the annual appropriations process.

We depend on Sen. Jeanne Shaheen, Sen. Maggie Hassan, Rep. Chris Pappas and Rep. Maggie Goodlander to ensure that no foreign entity is embedded in the government of the United States.

Janet Simmon

Laconia