Utah Senator Mitt Romney Speaks at Zero Gravity Summit
47G hosted its first Zero Gravity Summit on October 24, 2024 at The Gateway. Senator Mitt Romney was one of the final speakers at the over-subscribed event.
Ecosystem
Utah Senator Mitt Romney was the concluding speaker at the Zero Gravity Summit yesterday. Zero Gravity Summit was sponsored by 47G, and convened over 700 attendees to interact with Aerospace, Intelligence and Defense speakers from across the US. Sen. Romney spoke about the current state of the US political climate, and ways he believes things can be improved within the US.
In a pre-recorded interview with 47G's CEO and President, Aaron Starks, Sen. Romney touched on the nearing presidential election; he stated that the race for presidency has become less about the people, and more about simply running a successful campaign. Sen. Romney said, “Winning elections has become more important than doing what's right for the country in many respects. And that doesn’t improve our ability to lead the world at all.”
He also spoke about how he’s disappointed with the US’s immigration system, stating, “It's been around 25-30 years since we've been able to put in place any kind of meaningful immigration policy.”
He continued:
“We know we need legal immigration in the country. We have a lot of employers—particularly in agriculture—that need people to come here and work either temporarily or permanently. But it's a mess. We allow people to come into the country illegally, they're then in the shadows and not able to contribute to our society in the same way as if we had a legal system at work.”
Romney explained that if there were agreement between the two major parties in the US, a solution for these types of issues would be quickly resolved. He stated, “If there was an effort by Republicans and Democrats this year to resolve this issue of immigration, it would get solved.”
Romney then moved to speak on the US’s military presence, which he believes isn’t strong enough:
“The authoritarians have been doing pretty well and have been gaining strength, and—in my opinion—we're not keeping up. Currently, I don't see us taking action that will return us to a position of strength."
According to Romney, the US’s military is falling behind China and other countries. He explained:
“I don't know exactly what the number is, but of our roughly a trillion dollars that we spend on our military, only about 15% is on procurement of weapons. China’s cost of building a ship—according to one study—is 1/20 what our cost is.”
Romney then conveyed his reasoning behind why the US is falling behind China and other countries. He stated:
“We aren’t doing anything about it because it’s much more politically attractive to focus on our large military budget. However, that military budget is large because we have additional things such as veterans benefits, housing, and health care that goes into that. These aren’t bad things, but they aren’t specifically working on the procurement of weapons and technology within our military, this is where we’re not keeping up.”
Romney shifted to speaking more about how the military views software, stating, “The CEO of Palantir—one of the enterprises which provides technology to our Department of Defense—said they’re spending less than 1% of our military budget on software.”
He continued:
“I believe that software is how the wars of the future are going to be considered, hopefully not fought, but at least considered. We should be spending multiples of that, in my opinion.”
Romney explained how he believes these problems could be solved:
“We should allow the DoD to make investments in projects that they deem will provide a long term military advantage.”
He continued, explaining the difficulty of getting military funding in the private sector:
“There's this valley of doom where enterprises in the private sector get a new technology started with some promise, but then find it very difficult to get additional funding to create something which will have a real impact down the road. Allowing the military to help provide equity financing, or to encourage the private sector to provide equity financing to businesses in that valley would be one way to improve these things.”
Romney wrapped up by speaking about the two paths he believes the US will take in the future:
“There’s two paths we can take. One is a crisis that wakes us up. I hope that's not it, because sometimes the crisis kills you. The other is a leader that stands up and gets us on the right path. That was Churchill in England during the commencement of the Second World War. It was Ronald Reagan when the US was going into a period of malaise, and he overcame the Soviet Union."
While he isn’t optimistic about the second option occurring anytime soon, he encourages people to rally behind someone who might help fix the issues he spoke about:
“I don't see it coming in the immediate future, but we can hope it will. I encourage people to get behind folks who think they can make that happen.”