| Speaker | Time | Text |
|---|---|---|
|
Modern Warfare Transformation
00:15:23
|
||
| Be constantly guarded and protected. | ||
| We are still at our core a democracy. | ||
| This is also a massive victory for democracy and for freedom. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Army Secretary Daniel Driscoll and Army Chief of Staff General Randy George testified about the Army's readiness, recruitment, and retention efforts. | |
| They also addressed drone warfare and quality of life concerns for military personnel. | ||
| This House Armed Services Committee hearing is 3 hours and 45 minutes. | ||
| The committee will come to order. | ||
| I want to welcome our witnesses and thank them both for their service to our great nation. | ||
| Today we kicked off our review of the Administration's FY26 budget request for the Department of Defense with the United States Army. | ||
| Unfortunately, we still have not received any real information about that budget request, nor have we received any detailed information on the Army's Transformation Initiative, or ATI. | ||
| The Secretary-in-Chief announced over a month ago. | ||
| I believe I speak for most of the members of this committee when I say that we share your goal of developing a more modern, agile, and well-equipped Army. | ||
| And the broad structure of the ATI sounds encouraging, rapidly delivering modern warfare capabilities, organizing force structure, and eliminating waste and obsolete programs. | ||
| But we need to see your homework. | ||
| And overhaul, this significance should be based on a thorough assessment of requirements, and it should include a detailed blueprint of the specific changes being proposed and how the Army plans to implement them. | ||
| We need those assessments and blueprints. | ||
| We also need you to provide us a timeline for implementing ATI. | ||
| These details will help Congress understand, evaluate, and ultimately fund your transformation efforts. | ||
| The Marine Corps did well with Force 29, Force Design 2030, and the Army should follow that model. | ||
| At the end of the day, we want to make sure this overhaul is being driven by battlefield requirements and not by artificial budget constraints. | ||
| I'm pleased to hear both of you are committed to fundamental reform of the Army acquisition processes. | ||
| You will find this committee a willing partner in that effort. | ||
| The battlefield is rapidly changing, but the capabilities we deliver to our warfighters are not keeping pace. | ||
| Next week, we will introduce a piece of bipartisan legislation that will overhaul the acquisition process and refocus it around rapidly equipping our warfighters with modern capabilities. | ||
| I look forward to working with both of you on this legislation. | ||
| I also understand you both hope to use ATI to build a force more relevant to a conflict in the Pacific. | ||
| While I have long supported the pivot to Asia, I urge you not to lose sight of Europe. | ||
| The U.S. Army is the backbone of our presence there, and that presence matters. | ||
| Thanks to President Trump's leadership, our NATO allies are finally investing more in their own defense, but Europe's rearmament won't happen overnight. | ||
| Withdrawing U.S. brigades too soon would risk inviting further Russian aggression and leave our European NATO allies especially vulnerable. | ||
| We cannot let that happen. | ||
| Ultimately, to maintain readiness and achieve peace through strength, we must adequately fund the Army. | ||
| I look forward to working with you both to build the ready, capable and lethal fighting force America needs to deter its adversaries. | ||
| And with that, I yield to my friend and colleague, the Ranking Member, Mr. Smith. | ||
| Thank you, Mr. Chairman. | ||
| Thanks to our witnesses for being here today and for your service. | ||
| And I substantially agree with pretty much everything the Chairman just said. | ||
| Obviously, Army transformation is the headline. | ||
| And right off the bat, I've spoken with both of you about this, but I want to applaud both of you publicly for diving into that very difficult subject. | ||
| It needs to be done. | ||
| Now, the Chairman is right, the details need to be worked out. | ||
| But there is no question that the nature of warfare is changing dramatically. | ||
| How do we adjust our force to meet those challenges? | ||
| Certainly, we have seen what happened with Ukraine in Russia just in the last several days has gotten our attention about the vulnerabilities of existing systems and the capabilities of drones and new systems. | ||
| How does that inform the way we want to build our national defense structure? | ||
| So your efforts in that are broadly supported by this committee, devil's in the details, but you're headed in the right direction. | ||
| And we look forward to working with you to make some of those changes. | ||
| And I agree with the chairman on the budget. | ||
| Budget is a major problem, I think, in two respects. | ||
| One, it is not consistently given. | ||
| This is the latest, in my memory, that a budget has ever come before Congress. | ||
| Well, it's not here yet, so latest, and continuing that record here as we go. | ||
| But even before that, as well documented, we've been passing CRs, we haven't been doing consistent budgeting, and that adds an element of uncertainty to the challenges that we've outlined. | ||
| We need a more consistent budget process. | ||
| I guess the only minor quibble I would have with the Chairman's comments when he said artificial budget constraints. | ||
| I think the budget constraints are real. | ||
| And frankly, one of the things that I would like to see within the Department of Defense, and frankly, throughout government, is a recognition of those budget constraints. | ||
| We don't have an unlimited amount of money as we are $36 trillion in debt. | ||
| We are apparently about to pass a budget reconciliation bill that's going to add another $2 trillion, $3, or $4 trillion to that. | ||
| We have very real budget constraints. | ||
| And one of my worries across DOD, not just with the Army, is we're just sort of keeping doing a whole lot. | ||
| We don't think we have enough ships, we don't have enough nuclear weapons, we don't have enough planes, and so we've got all these plans to fill that that cannot possibly be met by the budget constraints that we face. | ||
| So again, I applaud the Army for taking a little bit more of a realistic look at that. | ||
| And I hope we can build off of that and move forward. | ||
| One other really important issue, obviously, is recruitment and quality of life. | ||
| This committee did a ton of work last cycle to try to make sure that we support our service members and their families so we continue to recruit and retain the best forces we have. | ||
| Also interested in your thoughts about what that force looks like in the modern battlefield. | ||
| Certainly we will always need warfighters, infantry, all of that. | ||
| But technology is becoming so much more important. | ||
| How does that change who we want to recruit and how we do our outreach to make sure that we have the people that we need serving in the Army and throughout the military? | ||
| And lastly, I want to agree with the final point the Chairman made about Europe specifically, but more broadly. | ||
| I have never been a big fan of the whole pivot to Asia idea. | ||
| The idea that China is our primary challenge, I agree with, but that challenge is global. | ||
| It's not just in Asia. | ||
| What happens in Ukraine is going to have a profound impact on how we deal with China as they are now partnering with Russia and North Korea and Iran. | ||
| And also, China is active everywhere in the world. | ||
| This is a global competition, so I don't think we can afford to ignore the rest of the world and thinking that if we focus in Asia, that will focus on the challenges that we meet. | ||
| It needs to be a more comprehensive approach. | ||
| With that, I thank the Chairman for having this hearing, and I look forward to the testimony and the questions. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Thank you. | |
| I yield back. | ||
| Thank the Ranking Member. | ||
| I'd like to now introduce our witnesses. | ||
| The Honorable Dan Driscoll, Secretary of the Army, welcome. | ||
| General Randy George, Chief of Staff of the Army, welcome. | ||
| Secretary Driscoll, we'll start with you. | ||
| You're recognized for five minutes. | ||
| Chairman Rogers, Ranking Member Smith, distinguished members of this committee, it is a privilege to address you today. | ||
| I want to express my sincere gratitude for your unwavering support of our soldiers and their families. | ||
| I'd like to start off this hearing with some good news. | ||
| Yesterday, the United States Army met its fiscal year 2025 recruiting goal four months early, welcoming more than 61,000 new recruits. | ||
| These men and women are stepping up during a time of global uncertainty and complex threats. | ||
| And those threats are real. | ||
| When I went through my confirmation hearings, I pledged to be the soldier's Secretary of the Army. | ||
| That commitment has guided every single step of our approach so far. | ||
| The Army Transformation Initiative has been conceived with this soldier in mind, and your partnership is absolutely critical as General George and I begin implementing this transformation, which is now more urgent than ever. | ||
| This week, we witnessed a stark illustration of modern warfare in Ukraine and Russia. | ||
| Reports indicate a coordinated strike against Russia's strategic bomber force using a swarm of over 100 inexpensive drones. | ||
| At a cost of a mere tens of thousands of dollars, Ukraine inflicted billions in damage, potentially setting back Russia's bomber capabilities for years. | ||
| The world saw in near real time how readily available technology can disrupt established power dynamics. | ||
| And drones are but one example of a broader shift. | ||
| The Army needs to keep pace. | ||
| In my first three months as Secretary, General George and I have been immersed in understanding why the Army has been slow to innovate. | ||
| Our soldiers are not the problem. | ||
| I've met with them in the Middle East, Europe, along our southern border, and at installations across the United States. | ||
| Their strength, dedication, and unwavering commitment to this nation are inspiring. | ||
| We ask a great deal of them, and they consistently deliver. | ||
| Nor is the ingenuity of American industry at fault. | ||
| Our tech sector continues to thrive, driven by innovation, entrepreneurship, and a willingness to embrace risk. | ||
| So, where does the problem lie? | ||
| As Secretary, I have found that the Army has become calcified, having suffered from years of inefficiency, slow-moving processes, and wasteful spending. | ||
| Program lobbyists and bureaucrats have overtaken the Army's ability to prioritize soldiers and warfighting. | ||
| We must all work together to ensure the Army is ready to fight and win. | ||
| The Army Transformation Initiative will make us into an Army that is lean, agile, and relentlessly focused on empowering its soldiers. | ||
| An Army that embraces innovation, collaborates effectively with the private sector, and prioritizes warfighting readiness above all else. | ||
| To achieve this vision, we must streamline our acquisitions process, reclaim our right to repair, and cultivate a culture that rewards innovation and calculated risk-taking. | ||
| We must also empower those closest to the fight to actually make the decisions. | ||
| The Army Transformation Initiative is our first step to achieve this vision. | ||
| But this transformation hinges on your support. | ||
| We are asking this committee to empower us to make these changes while providing your constitutionally mandated oversight. | ||
| We are asking for the flexibility to make decisions that keep pace with the rapid advancements in technology and the evolving nature of warfare. | ||
| We are asking for this committee to work with us to maximize the value of every dollar appropriated to best support our soldiers. | ||
| I ask this because it is my duty, both as Secretary of the Army and as an American citizen, to ensure that every dollar the Army receives contributes to defending this great nation of ours. | ||
| I know we are all committed to our soldiers, to their success, and to providing them with the overwhelming advantage they deserve. | ||
| Thank you, and I welcome your questions. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| General George, you're recognized. | ||
| Chairman Rogers, Ranking Member Smith, distinguished members of the committee, thanks for the opportunity to be here with you today. | ||
| I want to start off by saying just how proud I am of our Army. | ||
| I am proud of our troops in the Indo-Pacific, on the southern border, in the Middle East, in Europe, and of everything our Army has done over the past year to respond to wildfires, floods, and even a bridge collapse. | ||
| We have formations all around the world conducting missions and exercises and innovating with our partners and allies. | ||
| When not deployed, our units are conducting tough, realistic training at their home stations and our combat training centers. | ||
| Our Army is a professional team that remains focused on its warfighting mission, and young Americans want to be a part of it. | ||
| And this is evidenced by our strong recruiting numbers this year. | ||
| And as the Secretary mentioned, we have already met our recruiting mission for the year, and we still have our most productive months ahead of us. | ||
| And while I'm proud of our Army, I also know we have work to do. | ||
| We know the world is changing. | ||
| Commercial technology is rapidly evolving, especially AI and autonomous systems, and this is impacting the character of war. | ||
| We understand that we must transform to stay ahead of our adversaries, and we need to get better by 2026 and 2027, not by 2030. | ||
| Over the last year, using existing FY24 funding, some of our units transformed in contact, which means they experimented with changing how we train, fight, man, and equip while they were deployed or in training environments. | ||
| This was a great proof of concept. | ||
| It confirmed that our formations are capable of rapidly improving their lethality. | ||
| One Transformation and Contact Brigade in Europe was 300 percent more effective in lethal targeting in training. | ||
| Transformation and contact taught us some valuable lessons about what our Army should be buying and how we should be buying it, and we are just getting started. | ||
| We are going to make the changes we can at our level so that we can continue to dominate the modern battlefield. | ||
| For instance, we will cancel programs that are obsolete or not what our warfighters need, develop and adapt war-winning capabilities by modular open architecture designs that can be iteratively updated, cut and consolidate headquarters. | ||
| For instance, we are going to reduce GO structure, cut 1,000 positions from the headquarters Department of the Army staff, and add modern business systems that we know will make us more effective. | ||
| And finally, we will power down authorities and funding so that commanders in our fighting formations have what they need to make their teams and their communities successful. | ||
|
Pentagon's Agile Funding Push
00:11:11
|
||
| What I have learned from being in the seat is that it is our job as leaders to do what we can with the budget that we have. | ||
| I have been talking about the need for agile funding for UAS, counter-UAS, and EW, and we need more flexibility in those areas. | ||
| Technology is changing too rapidly. | ||
| We have got to be able to buy capabilities rather than specific programs so that we can always get our warfighters the best available tech and equipment for the fight. | ||
| This is where we could use your help. | ||
| We are quickly approaching our Army's 250th birthday. | ||
| This Will Defend has been our motto for 250 years, and I am looking forward to celebrating our long legacy of duty. | ||
| More importantly, our soldiers are ready today to defend our country, and we will do our part to ensure what they need to be successful in that enduring mission. | ||
| We appreciate all your support, and we are looking forward to your questions. | ||
| Thank you both. | ||
| I recognize myself for the first set of questions. | ||
| As I mentioned in my statement, the committee is willing to work with you on ATI, but we need to see your math. | ||
| When can we expect the full details of exactly what you are proposing? | ||
| The way that we envision ATI and how we have described it throughout the formations is this will be an iterative process. | ||
| And so there will be no one date where everything with our first batch of ATI will be completed. | ||
| We will be hopefully doing what the best companies in America do and learning as we go. | ||
| The very first batch of cuts that General George has referenced, where we are pushing our soldiers back out to the formations, those are in process. | ||
| When we are looking at the assets that we have and what we are buying and where we don't want it, we have started to work with those companies who are providing things to empower them with the information about what we do want. | ||
| So a lot of that is in process. | ||
| When we are looking at our depots and where we are manufacturing things in our organic industrial base, we have just started that process of putting together the plans for what could be the right solution. | ||
| But our commitment is that we will share it as soon as we have reasonable drafts with this committee to take your feedback to help make it stronger and better. | ||
| So will it be reflected in the President's FY26 budget? | ||
| Many of the cuts and the lack of requests for obsolete equipment will be reflected in that budget. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| Do you expect to cancel any programs for which the money was in the FY25CR? | ||
| We are not doing that right now, Congressman. | ||
| We have been in the process of going back through with businesses things that we are doing right now. | ||
| But as the Secretary mentioned, looking forward, there are several examples, and I know we have been over and we are happy to come over and brief everyone on what we are doing with the Transformation Initiative in detail. | ||
| But these are systems that I think we have long talked about that we know we don't need in our formation and are not going to help us win on the battlefield, and we can go down those in detail. | ||
| But those aren't in the FY25CR then. | ||
| The things that you are thinking about? | ||
| To my knowledge, Chairman, there is nothing that is in there. | ||
| I mean, we just had a conversation. | ||
| Everything that we have, you know, keep I will give you one example. | ||
| We don't want to buy Humvees, you know, and we haven't asked to buy Humvees, but that was in our budget. | ||
| And we are obviously continuing with FY25 because that is what we were directed to do with our budget. | ||
| The only reason I ask these questions, I just worry about you being locked in. | ||
| If whatever you are wanting to do is not in the FY26 budget, then you may have some constraints that are unnecessary. | ||
| Yes, sir. | ||
| And we worked with in this budget creation process. | ||
| We have included the entire Pentagon leadership in this, and so it should be reflected in the 26 budget. | ||
| I know you did mention the desire to have the right to repair. | ||
| We want to be helpful with you on that. | ||
| So do know that you need to be getting with us about exactly how you see that being constructed statutorily, and we will be helpful. | ||
| As you know, the acquisition system that we have now is just antiquated and needs to be modified. | ||
| and the Ranking Member and I are making acquisition reform the number one priority in this year's NDAA. | ||
| What specific authorities or support do you need from Congress to fix it? | ||
| I agree with you, Chairman. | ||
| One of the things that we are looking at, there is a lot of and how we are going to look at restructuring as well as There is a lot of commercial off-the-shelf stuff that we should be adopting. | ||
| And so we should be able to be structured so that we are adopting certain equipment that we know the commercial sector is moving very fast. | ||
| Other stuff we are going to have to modify. | ||
| We talk about the infantry squad vehicle as one example of that. | ||
| We just modify that a little bit. | ||
| It is largely a commercial program. | ||
| And then there is obviously develop. | ||
| I think where we need the most help is in agile funding. | ||
| We know that on drones, autonomous systems, EW, and specifically to the incident in Russia that the Secretary highlighted, counter-UAS, we need to not buy one programmer record. | ||
| I think programmer record is kind of an old term, and we need agile funding to be able to buy in those what's, as the technology changes, buy the best available thing that is on the market. | ||
| Well, I agree. | ||
| And we need to make those things history. | ||
| And it is going to be difficult. | ||
| It is going to require a culture change in the Department. | ||
| We are willing to impose that culture change, but we are going to need you to want to do it, too, to make this system viable in the future. | ||
| With that, I will yield to the Ranking Member. | ||
| Thank you, Mr. Chairman. | ||
| I completely agree on the agile funding piece. | ||
| And within the budget process, it is going to be really important to have close coordination between whatever it is the President's budget winds up being and then how Congress deals with that to reflect those priorities and try to give you that agile funding. | ||
| But, Mr. Secretary, on the Army transformation plan, if you could sort of just quickly explain that. | ||
| What programs are you getting rid of? | ||
| What programs are you adding? | ||
| I mean, we can all sort of get the idea that drones are a problem, survivability is a problem, but how does that translate into what we are going to put money into and what we are not going to put money into going forward? | ||
| I am happy to answer it. | ||
| And so basically, Army Transformation Initiative does four things. | ||
| There are four buckets of actions. | ||
| And then I will circle back to the buckets to answer your specific question. | ||
| The first bucket of actions is the United States Army, as General George has mentioned, has not wanted to buy a number of programs and products for the last couple of decades in some instances, and they keep getting them. | ||
| And so it was basically working with the Pentagon leadership under Secretary of Defense Hegseth and President Trump to say, hey, let's do what's right for soldiers. | ||
| We don't need to buy these assets and resources are limited. | ||
| Let's stop. | ||
| Give us a couple of examples. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Humvee, obviously, Humvee is one. | |
| JLTV is one. | ||
| The Booker tank is an example of kind of a sunk cost fallacy in action. | ||
| We wanted to design a light tank. | ||
| We ended up with something that was medium. | ||
| No one really liked it. | ||
| The manufacturer wasn't particularly happy with it. | ||
| We weren't happy with it. | ||
| What would have historically occurred there is we would have kept buying it. | ||
| And what we said is we went to the leadership and we said, look, we got this one wrong. | ||
| We, the Army, have to own this. | ||
| The wrong answer is not to keep buying it. | ||
| It is instead to stop the spending and go buy the things we want. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Exactly. | |
| So what are the things you want? | ||
| So the things we want are drones, light, attritable, commercially off-the-shelf. | ||
| We want counter-drone technology. | ||
| We want our soldiers to have a data layer. | ||
| So the very basic function of war will require our people to be able to communicate over the horizon with each other with our sensors and our things near instantaneously. | ||
| When we read about things like generative AI, that cannot work in warfare until we have a very good data layer. | ||
| And so we are very optimistic that there are commercial solutions available, and we are working to do that. | ||
| So that would be the second bucket. | ||
| The third bucket would be right to repair. | ||
| As the chairman mentioned, the Army, one of the visits we went on, it was horrifying to me that the soldiers were showing us this exquisite equipment that had been off the line for nearly a year, and they knew how to 3D print a part to it, and the part cost $2. | ||
| And for one year, they couldn't use this equipment, and it is at scale. | ||
| And we, the Army, have been a bad customer to ourselves. | ||
| And so there are some corrections along that. | ||
| And then another thing General George mentioned in his intro is we have done a lot of these things to ourselves. | ||
| We have too many people up in headquarters not wearing helmets, not out in the formations, not doing what they signed up to want to do. | ||
| And so we are going to push those soldiers back out to the formation. | ||
| Just one quick thing on that maintenance question. | ||
| Are you using AI for predictive maintenance to help with that piece of it as well? | ||
| So we want to. | ||
| We are running some experiments. | ||
| So very specifically, I don't know if anyone has seen the meta Ray-Ban glasses that are available. | ||
| They are $400 or $500. | ||
| We have requested, we are purchasing some of those. | ||
| We are going to have our Humvee mechanics wear them and collect 1,000 hours of repair footage. | ||
| And what we believe may happen is we can train a generative model so that when you are wearing those glasses, you may not actually be a Humvee mechanic, but you may be able to do 90 percent of the repair requirements. | ||
| And so we are trying to run experiments as quickly as possible to do that. | ||
|
unidentified
|
And your fourth bucket? | |
| Our fourth bucket is the pushing soldiers back out, getting rid of the bureaucracy in our own formation that we caused. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Okay. | |
| How does long-range fires fit into this? | ||
| I know this is something that the Army has been working on and focusing on for a while. | ||
| Obviously, the further you are from a target, the less vulnerable you are. | ||
| Drones are an example of sort of a long-range fire in its own way. | ||
| Is it just going to be drones, or are there other systems that you think are going to be necessary to be able to deliver from distance? | ||
| Sir, I was going to add there are a couple of other things that we are looking at on the reductions. | ||
| Age 64 deltas is another one. | ||
| It is twice as expensive. | ||
| We know we are moving towards autonomy. | ||
| We had an RCV, which is a big, heavy, autonomous system. | ||
| And again, we should be looking to commercial industry to help us with that. | ||
| It was way too expensive. | ||
| So there are a lot of things that are on that list. | ||
| We are looking at long-range fires. | ||
| And I will tell you, this is another thing where I think we have to get industry involved. | ||
| We are getting ready to do some tests this summer with long-range missiles that are a tenth of the price. | ||
|
Divesting From Expensive Aircraft
00:07:19
|
||
| And when you start talking about magazine depths, and this is back to your initial comments on understanding that you have a budget, I think we have all learned that we have to live within a budget. | ||
| We can get things, invest in things that are much more cost-effective, and I think that is where we need the flexibility to do that. | ||
| And just as I am out of time here, I want to make that point. | ||
| There are a lot of smaller companies that are developing drones, hypersonic missiles, that are so much cheaper than what a lot of the programs of record that we have been working on for a while. | ||
| It is just independent people who have gone out there and developed the technology, and now they have got a really cheap thing to offer. | ||
| We need to really access those things if we are going to be able to deal with our budget constraints and get to where we need to be. | ||
| Thank you, Mr. Chairman. | ||
| I think the Ranking Member Chair now recognizes a gentleman from South Carolina, Mr. Wilson. | ||
| Thank you very much, Chairman Mike Rogers, for your leadership, and thank both of you for your service to our country, which is so appreciated. | ||
| We are in a Cold War that we didn't choose between dictators with rule of gun and baiting democracies with rule of law. | ||
| War Putin began this with the invasion of Ukraine, and the Chinese Communist Party continues to build itself up and expand and modernize with capabilities and rapidly expand while we are actually reacting to the changes in the battle space. | ||
| This is as Iran is developing a nuclear weapon capability to achieve death to Israel, death to America. | ||
| And we have seen change this weekend. | ||
| And the change this weekend was indeed a victory by the people of Ukraine, eliminating Soviet bombers that have been built for the purpose of in the Cold War, the first Cold War, to vaporize the people of America and Europe. | ||
| And now those bombers are gone. | ||
| What an extraordinary achievement. | ||
| So we need to adapt. | ||
| And you are going to find bipartisanship here. | ||
| This is remarkable. | ||
| I agree with Adam Smith that we need to be working together on less expensive but effective drones. | ||
| They might even be produced in Ukraine, but wherever they come from, or then they can license them here, whatever it takes. | ||
| Secretary Driscoll, recently the President signed an executive order assigning the Army as the lead for deploying advanced nuclear reactors at military installations by 2028. | ||
| I see America benefits from President Trump's vision and leadership in this development. | ||
| In South Carolina, with the Savannah River site that I have the opportunity to represent, and I am the only member of Congress who has ever worked at the Savannah River site, nuclear capability is very important. | ||
| And with that in mind, how is the Army prioritizing micro-nuclear reactors as a national security imperative to ensure resilient, uninterrupted power for critical defense infrastructure? | ||
| And over and over again, we can see that small modular reactors, microreactors will be an important opportunity. | ||
| What is the status of development? | ||
| We couldn't agree more. | ||
| So contested logistics is going to be when you look at what just happened in Russia this past weekend and the ability of these cheap drones to contest logistics lines. | ||
| The Army owns that and has historically owned that. | ||
| And what we will need to do is for a lot of the new tools that are coming out, directed energy, they have incredible energy requirements. | ||
| You are going to have to have spikes of energy come through the lines that just are not the current technology is not sufficient for it. | ||
| And we are standing up groups to run the same experiments we were talking about. | ||
| We were trying to do on small nuclear and the micronuclear reactions. | ||
| I wish you well on that. | ||
| Indeed, I know a perfect 310 square mile site on the East Coast, the largest secure East site on the East Coast, and it is not actually in Alabama, it is in South Carolina. | ||
| And so production could be very well there. | ||
| Additionally, Mr. Secretary, to better understand, I am really grateful as a former Army Guard member myself, to understand the impact of the Army Transformation Initiative on the National Guard. | ||
| In particular, the Army National Guard has four AH64 Apache battalions, including the 151st Aviation Regiment in South Carolina. | ||
| What do you see as occurring about the eliminating of such squadrons? | ||
| What about the divestment of the AH-64Ds and the elimination of the squadron? | ||
| And maybe the General should be answering. | ||
| Yeah, I was going to jump in on that one, Congressman. | ||
| So I mentioned previously when Ranking Member Smith asked the question, we are getting rid of the H-64 Deltas, expensive. | ||
| What we are going to do is cask and we are getting rid of those battalions as well, divesting of those battalions inside the active component. | ||
| The National Guard will stay with four Apache battalions. | ||
| What you will notice is that you will get the newest H-64 ECHO aircraft. | ||
| So part of this has been making sure that we divest ourselves of the old, more expensive aircraft and we are going to upgrade our fleet. | ||
| And this is across all of them. | ||
| Same thing with the Guard is going to see Mike models replacing Lima and Victor models on the UH-60s. | ||
| And so that is what we are looking at doing. | ||
| Hey, as you divest yourself of the Apaches, a great ally of America, Jordan, would be happy to accept them. | ||
| And this would actually back up another remarkable achievement, and that is the removal of the dictator, Basar al-Assad, in Syria to be replaced by a government that is working in every way to have a relationship with Israel, possibly the Abraham Accords, to provide stability. | ||
| And one way to do that is for Jordan to be even more enhanced. | ||
| I yield back. | ||
| I appreciate the gentleman from South Carolina raising the issue of nuclear power production. | ||
| You may recall that last week President Trump and Secretary Hickseth talked about not only President Trump's initiative to get more nuclear energy production in the United States, but particularly Secretary Hickseth to do some reforms in the Defense Department to help deal with our need to get off the grid. | ||
| I have asked Representative Harrigan to lead the language in this year's NDA to put some pilot programs where we use SMRs on some of our bases and depots as a proof of concept. | ||
| I would ask you to work with him on fashioning that legislation to make it as broad as possible because we really would like to see this concept proved. | ||
| I know it is something the Department of Energy embraces as well. | ||
| With that, I will now turn to a gentleman from California, Mr. Gare Mindy. | ||
| You are recognized. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Thank you, Mr. Chairman. | |
| And Ranking Member Smith, you laid out the challenge that we have in working with the Army in its transformation. | ||
| And we simply don't have the information that we need, and we look forward to getting that information. | ||
|
Autonomous Systems and Logistics Prep
00:15:42
|
||
|
unidentified
|
We will be doing an NDAA in the next month and a half to two months. | |
| So are you prepared to prepare us? | ||
| I will let that hang out there. | ||
| A couple of things that I want to go into. | ||
| On the readiness subcommittee, we are always concerned about logistics. | ||
| And I want to raise the issue of logistics, particularly in Europe as well as in the Pacific. | ||
| How does your Army transformation initiative deal with the sustainment of material supplies in the Indo-Pacific, specifically the APSs? | ||
| Are they going to continue? | ||
| What is the plan? | ||
| If you don't have it, then we must continue to find out what is going to be. | ||
| I think from a high level, absolutely, ATI, the intent of it in the bucket, too, of what we need to buy. | ||
| We know that we have got to spread out our pre-positioned stocks. | ||
| So it is no longer going to be sufficient to have big warehouses with a lot of American equipment sitting as a target. | ||
| Those will be incredibly targetable by the enemy. | ||
| And what we need to do is continue to invest in and explore drone technology that can do a lot of these micro-movements for us and spread out our stocks. | ||
| And so I think as it specifically relates to the APS, we are trying to think about different ways to have our equipment pre-positioned around the globe and the tools that we can create with micro-movements to get them into the hands of soldiers. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I would assume that micro-movement, if it happens to be in the Pacific, would require the Army's vessels, maritime vessels, which seem to be continually declining in their availability. | |
| So would that be a piece of it? | ||
| Or are you going to give up those ships? | ||
| We are looking at that, Congressman. | ||
| I mean, to your previous question, I wanted to go back. | ||
| There are a lot of things. | ||
| One is autonomy is going to do a lot of things. | ||
| There are autonomous systems right now that are unloading vessels and moving very large things. | ||
| And I think that we should look at that. | ||
| Some of the most dangerous things that I did in Iraq and Afghanistan were resupply operations. | ||
| And so whatever we can do to make sure that we are reducing that, we are looking at hybrid electric when we are out just seeing the ISV, and we had an ISV heavy that actually could that GM Defense makes, it could actually power our TOCs for five or six days. | ||
| And so then you are not bringing fuel forward. | ||
| That will work anywhere in the world. | ||
| It certainly will work in the Pacific. | ||
| And I do think we were down in Austin, and I think some others in here saw what there are systems right now that are being built, autonomous systems. | ||
| The same that are going to be much less expensive, that can still deliver wherever you are at in the world, in the maritime environment, land or air. | ||
| And I think that that is where we need to be investing. | ||
| Again, again, that takes agile funding to make sure that we don't lock ourselves into a program and continue to buy things that maybe we won't need in a couple of years. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Speaking of agile funding, one of the things that the Army brought to our attention in the last three years was the support necessary to upgrade the barracks here within the United States and in other places, Europe as well as the Pacific. | |
| I note that about $1 billion of that money that we put together for upgrading the barracks has been agile funded away from the barracks to be used on the border. | ||
| So what about the barracks? | ||
| Have you forgotten about them or are they not important anymore? | ||
| I would say our barracks, again, having grown up in those environments, are very important to us. | ||
| One of the things that we are working with Congress, I think that right now we are probably overpaying for some of our barracks, and we have passed that on to the MILCON committees in kind of detail in what we are doing. | ||
| When we are talking about agile funding for drones, it is not colorless money. | ||
| We want to be very specific that, hey, this is for drones, this is for EW, and this is for counter-UAS, and that is where we want to make sure that that money is focused. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Final seven seconds of thought on my side is that, yes, we want to support you at your initiative. | |
| Very, very important to do that. | ||
| At the same time, there are ongoing programs that are extremely important for the maintenance of the troops' barracks being built. | ||
| Gentlemen's time has expired. | ||
| I recognize the gentleman from Virginia, Mr. Whitman. | ||
| Thank you, Mr. Chairman. | ||
| Secretary Driscoll, General George, thanks again for joining us. | ||
| I appreciate your leadership. | ||
| I do want to focus on the Army Transformation Initiative. | ||
| Appreciate you all doing that. | ||
| Well past time, this dynamic movement is absolutely needed. | ||
| The challenge for us, though, is to make sure that there is certainty going forward when this does involve people's lives, when it involves uniformed service members and the civilian staffs. | ||
| They deserve to know what is going on. | ||
| And when they don't, it creates a high level of anxiety. | ||
| I have TRADOC headquarters in my district as part of the Transformation Initiative along with Army Futures Command. | ||
| I can tell you that the rumor mill there is running wild. | ||
| There is chaos there at Fort Eustis because there is lack of certainty. | ||
| We owe it to our constituents and the folks that are in our districts to give them certainty, even if it is saying it is still continuing to be under consideration. | ||
| Listen, I understand what you all went through in the transformation and contact efforts there to try to figure out how you are going to organize brigades. | ||
| I understand that. | ||
| That is a good portion of what needs to happen in the transformation of the Army. | ||
| So, first of all, I want to understand, you know, what have you learned from that that you are going to translate to the ATI? | ||
| Second of all, as you're going through the Transforming Contact 2.0, which is ongoing, is it fair to characterize that, that that is going to be at least a foundational aspect of what happens with ATI? | ||
| And are certain ATI decisions still under analysis? | ||
| Because we've got to kind of get a couple of different stories. | ||
| General George, I talked with you and you said, hey, it's definitive. | ||
| It's one commanding general position, a certain number of other positions. | ||
| And then we hear wild speculation about all these other things that are out there. | ||
| And then on the back side, we're being told, oh, it's still under analysis. | ||
| We just got to get the story straight. | ||
| So anyway, so I wanted to get your perspective on where we are going with ATI. | ||
| How is Transforming and Contact 2.0 going to inform that? | ||
| What are we doing as far as creating some certainty as to what this is going to be or what it is going to look like? | ||
| I would rather hold it back and say we are still analyzing it than putting stuff out there and saying this is what it is going to be about. | ||
| So Transformation and Contact, I think at its highest level is taking a practice that a lot of companies in America have done that that has made us an amazing nation, but particularly companies, let's say, that are venture-backed. | ||
| It is part of their model. | ||
| And it's this idea of doing a minimum viable product, getting into the hand of your customer as quickly as humanly possible at a very small scale, and then learning from them. | ||
| And so what Transformation and Contact has done for us is it gave us lessons from the actual soldiers using the equipment that we thought might work. | ||
| Some of it did, some of it didn't. | ||
| We learned lessons when we sent equipment up to Alaska and it's negative 45 degrees that that equipment just didn't work. | ||
| We wouldn't have known that without getting it into the hands of soldiers. | ||
| And so almost all of our Army transformation initiative has been informed by what soldiers have told us. | ||
| And we expect that iterative cycle to continue, ideally long past our time in these roles, because what had happened historically to contrast with that was long procurement documents were created with hundreds and hundreds of requirements that then by the time the document was signed, it was already outdated technology. | ||
| And then by the time it was actually fielded, it was even worse. | ||
| And just what we are seeing on the battlefield, that will no longer work. | ||
| And then just to your question of ATI, we hope has many iterations. | ||
| Within the buckets that I described earlier to your colleague, many and most of those, we have gotten buy-in from Secretary of Defense Hegseth and the President's team to execute on those, no longer purchasing obsolete equipment, buying the new things that we need, to the merging of a lot of the things that we are going to have and pushing people out from headquarters back to the formations. | ||
| That planning, we have given the order to start to make the plans. | ||
| It is currently ongoing. | ||
| And the moment we have it clear enough to share, we intend to. | ||
| Yeah, I just think it's critically important to communicate that in a way. | ||
| I don't have any issue with making the transformation that is necessary, but these are people's lives. | ||
| These are people's families. | ||
| So don't forget that these are people's lives that are impacted by this. | ||
| Both the civilian force and the uniformed services force, they are incredible individuals that want to do everything they can for the nation. | ||
| But putting them through this period of uncertainty is not really fair to them. | ||
| So, General George, I don't know if you have anything that you want to comment on. | ||
| I just was going to add, Congressman, we always talk about lessons. | ||
| If they are really learned, you change how you train and operate. | ||
| You change how you are organized. | ||
| You change how you buy things. | ||
| We have talked a lot about how we buy things. | ||
| How we are organized is something that we have learned. | ||
| You mentioned our mobile brigade combat teams. | ||
| What we also noticed all the way up is that we had redundancy in what we were doing and how we were bringing things to the warfighter. | ||
| That was a problem with the Army Futures Command and TRADOC and challenge in how we are training our people moving forward. | ||
| How quickly can you train FPV drone operators? | ||
| What do you need? | ||
| The other thing that we are looking at is our business systems. | ||
| We are collapsing business systems from probably by 50 percent, and we are going to be much more effective as a program. | ||
| The gentleman's time has expired. | ||
| I recognize the gentleman from Massachusetts, Mr. Milton. | ||
| Mr. Chairman, thank you very much. | ||
| Secretary Driscoll, thank you for being here. | ||
| You have a bipartisan reputation for competence and lack of criminality, which is remarkably rare in this administration. | ||
| So I hope you survive, and I thank you for your service. | ||
| General George, thank you for your continued service as well. | ||
| I want to associate myself with the Chairman's opening comments, namely our bipartisan support for modernization and for using the Marine Corps' force design 2030 as a model. | ||
| General George, you and I last year had an extended conversation in the SCIF where you argued that the Army didn't need to fundamentally change in response to modern threats. | ||
| I cited examples of where the Marine Corps has reduced its reliance on tanks since we have seen $10 million tanks killed by $3,000 drones and replacing traditional artillery with rockets and missiles. | ||
| But you argued against this, maintaining that you need everything you have, both at the geostrategic level and the operational level. | ||
| And now you are saying that you want to make these changes. | ||
| So what has changed over the last 12 months? | ||
| I am remembering back to that conversation, and I think that was very specific to tanks. | ||
| And one of the things I do think we still need tanks on the battlefield, Congressman, I do think that we need to update our tanks to make sure that they are basically software-defined. | ||
| I have talked to a lot of people around the world that know that we are going to need that. | ||
| That is not a capability that the Marines can provide, but that is a capability that the Army will likely need to be able to provide if we are in that kind of situation. | ||
| Do you still think you need exactly the same number of tanks? | ||
| No, well, on ATI and what came out in our announcement is we have actually reducing by three ABCTs and actually converting those units. | ||
| Again, that's in the Guard to mobile brigade combat teams, and we want to do that very quickly. | ||
| Same with striker brigade combat teams. | ||
| But I do think we are going to need armored mobile protection. | ||
| You know, what we are going through, and again, this is, and we are wanting to do this quick. | ||
| This isn't about 2030. | ||
| This is doing this rapidly and making sure that we can change our formations. | ||
| I think since that conversation, we also have been investing in drones, putting them in our formations, investing in autonomous systems that can do breaching. | ||
| I think we are still going to have to do all of those things. | ||
| We are seeing all of that on the modern battlefield right now. | ||
| How does the Army's needs in the Pacific differ from those in Europe? | ||
| What role will tanks play in the Pacific? | ||
| Well, I can tell you that I know that the PLA has tanks. | ||
| People have tanks around the world. | ||
| I think we need to be prepared with it. | ||
| Again, we always talk about that. | ||
|
unidentified
|
It is great that the Army has counted our drones. | |
| The Army is a global Army. | ||
| I think that was brought up here earlier. | ||
| We need to be ready to go where we are. | ||
| The pacing threat is in the Pacific, right, General George? | ||
| Excuse me? | ||
| The pacing threat is in the Pacific. | ||
| No argument on the pacing threat. | ||
| Okay, then let's make sure our forces are designed to aim for the pacing threat and not continue to be calibrated to an old threat in Europe. | ||
| It is great that the PLA has a lot of stuff that we don't have. | ||
| I'd love to kill million-dollar tanks from the PLA with $1,000 drones from the United States. | ||
| Fundamentally, why is the Army five years behind the Marine Corps in this transformation, Secretary Driscoll? | ||
| I think one of the first things General George and I did is we went to the West Coast, we went to JBLM, went to Seattle, talked to Microsoft, went to Silicon Valley and hit OpenAI, Google. | ||
| I'm just asking, why are you so far behind the Marine Corps? | ||
| So what we saw on that visit was I think that the United States Army had done a it had a lot of bureaucracy that had gotten in the way of doing the right thing. | ||
| And I think what we have tried to do is take the best practices from the Marine Corps' transition and try to implement those as quickly as possible. | ||
| Appreciate that. | ||
| General George, on to the birthday parade where you are going to have 24 main battle tanks and 48 armored vehicles rolling down Pennsylvania Avenue as if it were North Korea, Russia, or China. | ||
| What is the total cost to the unit at Fort Caravas of moving these vehicles to and from D.C. for the parade? | ||
| Congressman, I don't know the specific cost of that one movement. | ||
| Well, I guess the total cost is $35 million. | ||
| So would it be safe to say about $10 million just for that movement? | ||
| I would hesitate to give you an exact number of what that movement cost. | ||
| I mean, we have, I think, been very public in what it is that we expect the parade to cost overall. | ||
| We are looking forward to our Army birthday next year to the USA. | ||
| Have you included damage to D.C. roads in that estimate? | ||
| We have included, we have put out an estimate of what we think everything will cost Congress. | ||
| Secretary Driscoll, you said in your opening statement that it is your responsibility to ensure that every dollar the Army receives contributes to defending this nation and for us all. | ||
| How does the parade contribute to defending the nation? | ||
| Congressman, we think it is an incredible once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to expand our recruiting pool and tell the amazing story of the United States Army and the impact that it has had on the lives. | ||
| The gentleman's time has expired. | ||
| Chair now recognizes the gentleman from Georgia, Mr. Scott. | ||
| Thank you, Mr. Chairman. | ||
| Gentlemen, welcome. | ||
| General George, you have heard me talk about this before, Army Special Operations recruiting the 18X-ray program. | ||
|
Inadequate Programs and Waivers
00:02:20
|
||
| I am concerned about a couple of specific instances where D1 athletes that I know were not allowed to participate in the 18X program because they had, in one example, it was a piece of plastic in an ankle. | ||
| These are, I mean, when we are talking about athletes that are playing D1 sports, more oftentimes than not, they are going to have some type of injury. | ||
| And just want to encourage that we have flexibility in that 18X-ray program so that these people that have been able to perform at these high levels are allowed in and that we don't have this, they call it Genesis, I call it Exodus program, kicking the very people out that we need going into our Special Operations Forces. | ||
| Just one comment. | ||
| I think yesterday, Congressman, we got an update on recruiting. | ||
| And again, we can look at this on our dashboard. | ||
| I think we are over 99 percent of 18 x-ray for this year. | ||
| So, again, we expect to get it is a very important population for us. | ||
| It is one of the 16 that the Secretary and I track in detail. | ||
| So, every time we get a recruiting update, I wouldn't argue one of the conversations we also just had was how are we, you know, we can look back into people's past much further to your comment on making sure that people that have been athletes, we have the waiver process and we got that, so we are definitely looking at that. | ||
| And, Congressman, I would just say what we have tried to do is, and this is back to the end of Booker remark, we are trying to hold a mirror up, and when we are inadequate, we want to say it and we want to fix it. | ||
| Our Genesis program is inadequate. | ||
| Our waiver program is adequate, and we are trying to fix it. | ||
| And of all of the comments that you have made, it was refreshing to hear somebody say, hey, the Army made a mistake in buying this system, and we don't need it, and we are going to cancel it. | ||
| Because what I have seen over the last several years that I have been in Congress is we are going to spend whatever it takes to make a system work that in many cases we don't need. | ||
| And I think if you look at the bureaucracy that surrounded the purchase of a 9mm pistol, where it took 10 years to pick a pistol, which is a fine pistol, but the majority of the special forces teams that are able to pick their own weapon pick one that was readily available 10 years ago. | ||
|
Looking to Scale Defense Tech
00:06:30
|
||
| And they blame that on Congress, by the way, when ultimately it was the bureaucracy in the Pentagon and the purchasing requirements that led to that. | ||
| Yes, sir. | ||
| We have been incredibly risk-averse as the United States Army. | ||
| When General George and I talk about it, there is something called the Calabracy paradox, which is basically this idea that humans are willing to take on risk for extra utility or happiness and joy. | ||
| And we, the United States Army, have done the opposite of that, and we have done a very poor job of being more risk-loving than our civilian counterparts. | ||
| I agree with you. | ||
| So let's talk about it from the counter-drone investments. | ||
| We know how to build them. | ||
| We have watched the Ukrainians do what they can do with them. | ||
| We have watched what they can do with the Russians. | ||
| How do you envision the investment in the counter-drone measures moving forward with the private sector? | ||
| So this is one of the things we talk about a lot, and a lot of the technology needs to be scaled to figure out what is the right place on the cost curve in order to shoot something down. | ||
| And back to generative AI, the ability to process all of this data and information really quickly to figure out should you fire a 50-cal round at it or a $4 million exquisite defense tool. | ||
| We, the United States Army, are incredibly wealthy, but that is a hard portion. | ||
| And so what we are trying to do is develop solutions all along the cost curve. | ||
| I am down to about a minute, but my vision on counter-drone doesn't involve taking it down with a projectile as much as it involves spectrum and other things that disrupt its ability to reach its target. | ||
| It is going to be a combination of those things, Congressman. | ||
| I mean, to the Secretary's point, when you are looking at cost curve and you are looking at a bullet, and it is cheap to do that. | ||
| And you may use other systems like we have a laser that can identify where to shoot that one particular bullet. | ||
| So I think it is going to be a combination. | ||
| We are looking at EW. | ||
| There is obviously power challenges with that. | ||
| We are looking at high-power microwave. | ||
| We are looking at EW. | ||
| And just like we're talking about transforming and contact, we're getting it forward, testing it everywhere that we can. | ||
| We have a very big exercise in Europe called Flytrap that's this month and next that we are having industry as being a part of that. | ||
| I'm down to five seconds. | ||
| I respect both of you. | ||
| I do hope we are also looking at the Israeli laser system that they have put in place and the potential to bring that into the U.S. Great. | ||
| I would point out that we help pay for the research and development on that laser research. | ||
| Then we should get a good deal. | ||
| We are going to get a good deal. | ||
| But Israel is doing some phenomenal work on that iron beam technology. | ||
| With that, I will recognize the gentleman from Connecticut, Mr. Courtney. | ||
| Thank you, Mr. Chairman. | ||
| Thank you to both witnesses for being here this morning. | ||
| I just want to, again, follow up briefly about the comments the chair made about the budget process that is here. | ||
| I mean, as we sit here today on June 4th, we are less than four months away from the start of the fiscal year. | ||
| And my staff actually did do some digging. | ||
| And if the budget was submitted today, which it hasn't, then that would still by itself be the latest budget submission in history, and certainly in modern history as far as the budget process. | ||
| The chair, I think, described very well that this committee is straining at the leash to get going in terms of getting a mark for NDAA. | ||
| And I know the appropriators are trying to sort of cobble together some type of appropriation process, but you are kind of shadowboxing at this point without a budget. | ||
| And again, the two of you are not the decision makers in terms of that final release. | ||
| But again, I just think we have to continue to publicly pound away at the fact that the OMB has got to get moving and get that document. | ||
| I mean, we are doomed at this point in terms of avoiding a CR. | ||
| It seems pretty clear at this point. | ||
| And that doesn't help anybody in terms of the mission that you are trying to carry out. | ||
| Again, I just really, Mr. Driscoll, I have just a quick question regarding the FLARA program, which again went through an excruciating process. | ||
| And the decision has been made, and it's time to obviously move out in terms of that helicopter program. | ||
| Again, the optimistic estimates are 2028 for delivery. | ||
| I think some of the more other guarded predictions are 2030. | ||
| In the meantime, I mean, Blackhawks are still carrying out their mission. | ||
| There was in last year's budget requests for about 24, I believe, units in that program. | ||
| And again, I think that at the time FLARA was awarded, it was pretty clear it was going to be a mix of the two in terms of that. | ||
| And I just wanted to get your thoughts in terms of where you see that sort of formula today. | ||
| Yeah, so great question, Congressman. | ||
| So Flora is an incredible example, I think, of the Army getting in its own way. | ||
| The first demo or prototype or exhibitor was flown in 2018. | ||
| Everybody loved it. | ||
| And we're sitting here in 2025 without one. | ||
| There's no other way to describe that than a failure. | ||
| I think from where we sit today, what General George and I have said to the Flora manufacturers is this is an incredible opportunity to show America's strength, our ability to build things quickly. | ||
| We need this asset, and we need it now. | ||
| And so we did a call last week with the CEOs of the vast majority of the subcomponents. | ||
| And what we are trying to do is set a stretch goal to have the first one roll off the line in one year. | ||
| I don't know that we will hit it, but we are going to do our darndest to try to show that we can do things quickly as a nation again. | ||
| I think to your question on Blackhawks, nearly everything we are talking about in ATI and with our purchasing goals is we believe that we are over-indexed on exquisite, slower pieces of equipment. | ||
| And what we have to do is design things that will pull us more towards some balance. | ||
| That balance will have autonomy. | ||
| So Flora could be flown autonomously. | ||
| Blackhawks today cannot. | ||
| We don't know what the right mix is, but we do know that we are just over-indexed on these other things. | ||
|
Fort Drum Installations Different
00:14:21
|
||
| And so I think the work of this committee and us will be to have productive and tension-filled conversations about where that right balance is going forward. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| I yield back. | ||
| Gentleman Lee yields back. | ||
| Chair, and I recognize the gentleman from New York, Ms. Stefanik. | ||
| Thank you, Mr. Chairman. | ||
| Thank you, gentlemen, for being here today. | ||
| Secretary Driscoll, thank you for your service to our country, particularly your service in my district at Fort Drum. | ||
| You know you're well aware of Fort Drum's strategic importance and modernization efforts for the Army and how vital they are for our nation's readiness. | ||
| Nearly every facet of the Wheeler Sack Army airfield has been modernized to support a rapid deployment force, and the airfield's 10,000-foot runway can accommodate any aircraft in the U.S. Air Force inventory, matching DOD's air defense capabilities to threats and deterring our enemies. | ||
| Today, Fort Drum's Wheeler Sack Army Airfield has, unfortunately, a failing electric power system, and it's currently programmed for funding for FY27. | ||
| I reached out to you via a letter about the importance of this issue, and I would just like your commitment to work with us about potentially moving up that critical funding to FY26. | ||
| Congresswoman, I deployed from that runway, so I know it well. | ||
| I commit that we will take a look at it and follow back up with your office. | ||
| Thank you so much. | ||
| Fort Drum has relied on energy from the local power grid since closing its on-post energy facility in 2023. | ||
| This is an issue my office has been engaged in for a number of years. | ||
| The Army Corps of Engineers determined that a small modular reactor would be an optimal option to supply Fort Drum's energy needs. | ||
| This is an issue that I worked with my colleague, Congresswoman Tenney, who shares Jefferson County with me in terms of representation. | ||
| I would just like your commitment today to work with our offices to ensure Fort Drum returns to energy independence and security, including the potential deployment of this small modular reactor to the installation as soon as possible. | ||
| Same answer, Congresswoman. | ||
| I commit we'll look at it and follow up quickly. | ||
| And then lastly, in a previous NDAA, My office worked to secure a provision that required DOD to review their ability to conduct electronic warfare training and leverage this defense ecosystem in upstate New York that we have helped develop between Fort Drum and the Air Force Research Lab in Rome, New York, which I also represent. | ||
| This has been an ideal environment, and it led to the Army's decision to choose Fort Drum to host the 2nd Multi-Domain Task Force in 2025 and the PEO IEWNS's incredible work to partner with AFRL's Future Flag series of limited experimentation, which we strongly supported and has led to great tactical outcomes. | ||
| Can you speak to the importance of placing as much of the second multi-domain task force at Fort Drum as possible to leverage this unique experimentation that will be continued between Rome and all the great work we are doing there? | ||
| Either. | ||
| I will jump in on that one, Congresswoman. | ||
| First, I think you know we did the big exercise last November up there. | ||
| So I'm really proud of what 10th Mountain has been one of our most deployed units anywhere in the Army, and they're doing a phenomenal job right now, General Nauman, down on the border. | ||
| I think what we're looking at is that every installation is going to have to do what we started to do, you know, that you have helped with up at Drum. | ||
| We're going to have to be able to train EW. | ||
| We're going to have to be able to train drones and working through that. | ||
| So we're going to have to expand all of those systems. | ||
| And we're certainly looking on the stationing. | ||
| We can come over and talk to you about that in detail right now. | ||
| I don't know if we've made any changes or finalized any of that, but happy to come over and walk you through that in detail. | ||
| I appreciate that. | ||
| I'm able to do that. | ||
| Yes, I appreciate that. | ||
| This is something my office has advocated for for a number of years, to develop this defense ecosystem, specifically in upstate New York, because of our unique capabilities, because of both Fort Drum, but also the emerging technology research that's being conducted at Rome AFRL. | ||
| I also want to invite you, Secretary Driscoll, to come back to Fort Drum. | ||
| I've hosted the President there, where he signed an NDAA. | ||
| I've hosted previous Secretaries of Defense. | ||
| I've hosted previous Secretaries of the Army, and I would love to host and welcome you back to Fort Drum. | ||
| It would be an absolute honor. | ||
| My ex-O, who was working with me when I got into office, just went up there, and so I would be delighted to visit her with you. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Great. | |
| Thank you. | ||
| I'll take you up on that and yield back. | ||
| Gentlelady yields back. | ||
| Chair, not recognize the gentleman from California, Mr. Carbajal. | ||
| Thank you, Mr. Chairman. | ||
| The Army is fighting an internal battle with trying to balance modernization efforts with current needs. | ||
| It seems that the Army would like to modernize, but the system is slow to change. | ||
| General George, what do you see as the Army's most important asset? | ||
| I would say it's our people, Congressman. | ||
| Without a doubt, number one for us and where we have to consistently focus. | ||
| It's why we're so pleased with what we're doing with recruiting and why we're focused as we are on making sure that we are also adapting them. | ||
| We're proud of what they're doing. | ||
| We're getting a great group in. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| Great answer. | ||
| I agree with you. | ||
| In your testimony, you mentioned that you are investing in installations, including prioritizing barracks. | ||
| It was recently reported that $1 billion of funding meant for barrack renovations is being redirected to the mission at the southern border. | ||
| Will taking funding away from the barracks delay the timeline in which they are upgraded? | ||
| And do you think postponing these types of renovations will have an impact on the morale and retention? | ||
| First, I mean, I just want to mention the retention word kind of triggered me here. | ||
| I think at six months in, we met our retention goals for this year as well. | ||
| So we are doing very well with retention. | ||
| Of course, we want to continue to improve our barracks, and we are going to continue to do that. | ||
| We have talked about that a lot. | ||
| I do think that that is another area we can probably spend our money better in that. | ||
| There's a lot of restrictions that we have as far as how our costs are like 68 percent higher than what you would get outside the gate. | ||
| We are looking at we have done 3D printing, and that's happened down in Texas of barracks. | ||
| I think we can provide great systems. | ||
| Beyond that, I think what we are looking at holistically is that every installation is different, and every installation has different requirements. | ||
| When I was up at Lewis, very different than it is at Bragg. | ||
| And so that's where we are trying to be very sensitive. | ||
| General, I appreciate the extensive response, but will redirecting a billion dollars impact the ability to do the renovations at the barracks. | ||
| It's just a yes or no answer. | ||
| Obviously, redirecting has an impact. | ||
| You have to make choices, Congressman. | ||
|
unidentified
|
So the answer is yes. | |
| If we took a billion dollars out of barracks, we would be able to fix less barracks. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| That's what I was looking for. | ||
| And, Congressman, this is an issue that I. | ||
| It's okay, I'll get to you. | ||
| I got the answer I was looking for. | ||
| Secretary Driscoll, I assume you are aware of a parade coming up celebrating the birthday, which coincides with another interesting birthday. | ||
| The estimated cost of this is $45 million. | ||
| It is an interesting time to spend $45 million on a parade when all the services are subject to an 8 percent budget cut. | ||
| If Congress wrote the Army a $45 million blank check, do you think you could find a better way to spend that money than a parade? | ||
| And could $45 million deliver any quality of life improvements or capabilities that the warfighters need? | ||
| Congressman, very sincerely, I think we as the United States have an amazing opportunity to tell a story of an institution that is older than our country itself. | ||
| It is an institution and I believe very specifically that telling that story will directly lead to a recruiting boom that will fill up our pipeline for the coming years. | ||
| And I believe when we are marketing budget we would spend to recruit those soldiers, I think our team believes that the investment of these dollars to tell that story will directly lead to a good, measurable, quantitative outcome for the Army. | ||
| So you are looking at this as a recruitment tool? | ||
| Yes, Congressman. | ||
| And you think it's better spent there than supporting the quality of life for warfighters? | ||
| Congressman, I think we have to spend on both, as General George said. | ||
| We run our budget. | ||
| We have to make these hard decisions all the time. | ||
| I think it would be a massive tragedy to let this moment pass where we can tell this story and inculcate an entire generation of youth into this amazing story that is the United States Army. | ||
| I find that very interesting, but thank you. | ||
| The Army is counting a total change to the forest via deliberate information, transformation, and acquisition reform. | ||
| General George, are these efforts actually coming to fruition, and can they be scaled to the level that you are expecting without interruptions to the service members? | ||
| Actually, all the feedback that I get, Congressman, everywhere we go is that we need to do this faster, that we need to transform faster. | ||
| I mean, the challenge is, you know, kind of the question back is, you know, can we do this back up here? | ||
| We do need to stop buying obsolete equipment. | ||
| We are going to need to make the changes that we need. | ||
| Gentlemen, you are not recognized, gentlemen from Tennessee, Dr. Desjarley. | ||
| Thank you, Chairman. | ||
| And thank you both for being here today. | ||
| I am going to deviate from my original questions just to touch on drones considering what happened in Ukraine. | ||
| I was just recently at Oak Ridge Y-12 this past week and looking at the facility there and all the other facilities around the country that are critical to protect. | ||
| Has the Army stepped up its posture any in response to the threat from drones? | ||
| I know domestically we have domestic terrorism acts. | ||
| We know abroad we get attacked at our bases in the Middle East. | ||
| What is the rules of engagement on the military bases and high-risk sites such as our nuclear production sites? | ||
| So first, I think you will see, Congressman, that this is an area that we are very focused on, that we need to spend more money on. | ||
| Again, I would describe it as a capability portfolio where we don't need one system. | ||
| I was kind of explaining that earlier. | ||
| It is going to be a broad base of things that we need to do. | ||
| How we are going to do that in a combat zone is very different than how we would do that in the States. | ||
| Obviously, doing that in the States, and we are working, obviously, with NORTHCOM. | ||
| You are talking about FAA, FCC, with everything else that is going on. | ||
| And so we are continually working through that. | ||
| There is legislation on that as far as the 130i, which I am sure you are familiar with, that I think we need to make some changes to. | ||
| And we are working with NORTHCOM, Joint Staff and OSD to get that up. | ||
| But we are very focused on this. | ||
| And as I mentioned, we are doing a very large exercise in this with all kinds of industry and everybody this month and next. | ||
| And you showed us some examples of that when a large group of us visited you in Austin. | ||
| And in your opening statement, I find it striking how focused the Army has been on procurement and adaptability. | ||
| As we have seen, the modern battlefield has undergone rapid changes over the past few years. | ||
| And because of this, the need to procure things better, faster, cheaper, and more reliable has become critically important as we work to keep our warfighters equipped for success. | ||
| This has been something that the committee has been laser focused on under the leadership of Chairman Rogers and Ranking Member Smith for this year's NDAA. | ||
| So, General George, what have been some of the most notable successes or lessons learned from the Transformation and Contract initiative that can help this committee enable our military to become a more lethal and agile force? | ||
| I could go on a long time about this, Congressman. | ||
| I think we have this last rotation that we had had close to 400 drones in it down at the Joint Readiness Training Center. | ||
| So, obviously, infusing them with technology, drones, autonomous systems, counter-UAS, what we are doing to change the network. | ||
| The Secretary mentioned that this is about being data-centric and being able to pass all these systems moving. | ||
| A lot of it, though, we are learning from the modern battlefield is changing how you train and operate, understanding how you can be viewed. | ||
| There is really nowhere to hide. | ||
| And all of our what we are doing right now is changing our organizational construct as well, because we are going to have to be more dispersed, more mobile, and we are working through all of those. | ||
| And we have made a lot of those changes. | ||
| We just now need to scale those changes across the Army, and that is what ATI will help us do. | ||
| And, Congressman, I think the way General George and I talk about this is this paradigm shift between software and hardware. | ||
| We have created hardware that has required software to function. | ||
| We need our new hardware systems to basically be software-led and just the software manifesting in the world as this hardware. | ||
| Because if we can't update these systems in near real time, the enemy is going to be able to disable them. | ||
| And we're taking that into account in every decision we're making. | ||
| And if you can, both in one minute, we've been working with the Army and in the past, General Thurgood, to address the persistent manning shortfall across our Patriot battalions. | ||
|
Bipartisan Success in Soldier Precision
00:15:39
|
||
| While there's been progress, there are still major challenges that remain as we start to stand up Golden Dome and try to figure out what that looks like. | ||
|
unidentified
|
How is that going? | |
| What are you doing to manage that and get us in a better position? | ||
|
unidentified
|
30 seconds. | |
| So we're doing really well on ADA folks that are coming into our formation. | ||
| So we're pleased with that. | ||
| And we're going to continue to keep the gas, you know, or keep the foot on the pedal on that. | ||
| The other thing is that technology is looking at how we can use technology to reduce the manning inside these formations. | ||
| And we put some new equipment out. | ||
| And we're happy to come over and talk to you about that as well. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Okay, I'd love to have an update. | |
| Thank you both. | ||
| Yield. | ||
| The general Yields, Ms. Hulhan, is recognized for five minutes. | ||
| Thank you, Mr. Chair, and thank you. | ||
| It's nice to see you again, General. | ||
| And I really look forward to getting to know you a little bit better and appreciate the idea that you have brought with you a spirit of bipartisanship. | ||
| That's something that's really important here. | ||
| And speaking of bipartisanship, I have a couple of questions that I hope you might be able to help me with. | ||
| Recently, we decided to make sure that there were gender-neutral fitness tests, and we implemented those, and it's something that I have been supportive of since I've been here in Congress. | ||
| I was hoping that I might be able to get you, Secretary and you, General, your opinions on whether or not you can indeed commit that women will continue to be allowed to be Rangers, will continue to be allowed in the infantry, and continue to be allowed to be trained for those particular positions. | ||
| Congresswoman, I'll hand it to General George just so he can confirm what I'm about to say, which is my seven-year-old daughter, Lila, she wants to join the Army since I've been here, and I hope that she gets to try out. | ||
| And if she can maintain the excellent standard to join those types of units and she wants to, I hope she has the opportunity to. | ||
| I have not been part of, and I don't believe General George has, a single conversation that has made me believe that a man or a woman that can meet those standards of excellence, that they wouldn't have those opportunities. | ||
| General. | ||
| And I don't know if you've heard. | ||
| I agree. | ||
| We've not had any discussion about this. | ||
| There's probably a podcast that I can share with you where a lot of our soldiers, female soldiers, were out there talking about the changes in this. | ||
| And that was a lot of the feedback that I got inside this as well. | ||
| So they are very happy with the standards and where they are going. | ||
| And they are doing very well in our units. | ||
| And I would also tell you is that we have also recruited more female soldiers into the Army over this last year as well. | ||
| So effectively, you are both committing that women will continue to be allowed to be trained in those particular positions. | ||
| As far as I know, Congressman, Congresswoman, we have not had any conversation that you have. | ||
| There is actually a reason I'm asking because there are conversations above you that this indeed will end up being at threat. | ||
| And I really want to make sure that I hold you to that commitment because if people meet the standards, they meet the standards. | ||
| My next question has to do with something that Mr. Garimundi touched on. | ||
| I spent a lot of time, as you know, on quality of life issues bipartisanly with Representative Bacon. | ||
| And one of those pieces of legislation that we were able to get through was for barracks improvement to make it possible that we were able to fund and improve the barracks. | ||
| Mr. Garimundi mentioned, and it is true, that a billion dollars for barracks improvement has been moved and moved to the border, which would seem to be counter to the law that we literally just passed. | ||
| When Mr. Garimundi asked it, both of you seem to not be aware of that particular movement. | ||
| Would you be able to check into that for me? | ||
| Because it seems as though this is really, really important and literally counter against the law. | ||
| We can follow back up with you, Congresswoman. | ||
| I just want to echo what General George said earlier. | ||
| These issues matter deeply to us. | ||
| General George is currently a soldier. | ||
| I was. | ||
| My daughter is named after a current soldier's daughter. | ||
| They live in Army and military housing. | ||
| I care deeply about this population, and so we commit to follow that. | ||
| I do as well, having grown up in a military family and served in the military myself. | ||
| I very much think that where you live really, really matters to your quality of life. | ||
| And it is not about, this is about color of money issues, and it seems to me that there is no way that we should be allowed to move a billion dollars worth of money from barracks that we've worked so hard to give you into something like the border. | ||
| I'm going to move on with what's left of my question. | ||
| General George, you talked about recruiting, and as Secretary, you did as well, and that you've met the recruiting goals. | ||
| And I think that's terrific and very much worthy of the applause that I think that you got bipartisanly on this. | ||
| But would you be able to also confirm that this momentum is also attributable to the past years and the past administration in the future soldier preparatory organization and effort that we've had in streamlining entrance processes, in refining waivers, medical waivers, in recruiting and training stronger recruiters? | ||
| Will you be able to confirm that this is a long time coming and not something that just happened over the last several months? | ||
| Congresswoman, I went down and visited the Future Soldier Prep Corps at Fort Jackson. | ||
| Very sincerely, there have been a couple of moments in this job that have just touched my soul. | ||
| Seeing the soldiers and how that is, the soldiers who go to that have a whywall about basically how they need to overcome their challenges to join the Army. | ||
| The outcomes for those soldiers has been great, and that has been a spectacular program. | ||
| That has been conducted over the last couple of years, as well as the medical waivers, as well as getting better recruiters. | ||
| Am I correct? | ||
| Correct. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| I have very little time left, so unfortunately, I will have to ask this last question for the record, which, General, has to do with the 1,000 layoffs that are in the headquarters, and who are they, and how we are going to be accommodating for that. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| I yield. | ||
| The gentleman's time has expired. | ||
| Major General Kelly is now recognized. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Thank you, Mr. Chairman. | |
| I want to start with what is the most important asset that the Army has? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Just one word. | |
| People, there you go. | ||
| Soldiers. | ||
|
unidentified
|
All right. | |
| Esprit de Corps, heraldry, all those things, are they an important part of a unit in incruding and keeping people and retaining? | ||
| It's crucial, Congressman. | ||
| Okay, and we do Twilight Tattoos. | ||
| The Navy does a thing where they have the Marine Corps and ships on the deck out on the American coast. | ||
| Is a parade important for esprit de corps? | ||
| We do a lot of these across the country with the older nights, so I say yes, all of this. | ||
| Yes, I bet we will have an Army birthday celebration next week right here in the Capitol and numerous other places to celebrate our history and heraldry. | ||
| Is that correct? | ||
| That's correct. | ||
| And the planning congressman started years ago. | ||
| And as an ROTC cadet, they did CalFACS exercises to get us to want to be on tanks or fly helicopters or see artillery fire or CA-10s come in. | ||
| Those are an important part of recruiting and retention, right? | ||
| Yes, sir. | ||
| So this parade kind of matters to recruiting and retention and heraldry and all those things, right? | ||
| Yes, sir. | ||
|
unidentified
|
All right. | |
| I want to talk a little bit. | ||
| We talk about diverting the money, but safe neighborhoods matter too, right? | ||
| And not housing people who are not here legally in Army barracks. | ||
| That matters, right? | ||
| A safe border is incredibly important, Congressman. | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
| And not housing people who shouldn't be on Army bases, on Arm Bay bases, and putting at risk our warriors. | ||
|
unidentified
|
That matters too, right? | |
| Everything related to that border, Congressman. | ||
| So I want to talk a bit a little bureaucracy. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Okay? | |
| You got a 3D printer who just built some buildings at Bliss. | ||
| Do you think urinal flows go to the strength and reliability of a building? | ||
| Ural no flows. | ||
| And the answer is no. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Okay. | |
| We literally slowed down production and did extra testing because we had to test urinal flows. | ||
| That would apply to every building, not just 3D printed, right? | ||
| There are a lot of challenges, I think, Congressman, with how we are building buildings compared to outside. | ||
| And we have been over on the Hill trying to explain what those are. | ||
| I would just suggest when people put false things in there to make requirements longer, that we probably find them another job or no job. | ||
| When you want to do hurricane strength testing in the desert, I would suggest that is not the best use of our people or our assets. | ||
| I want to go a little bit, General George, and I'm really concerned about this. | ||
| And, Mr. Secretary, I hear us talking about moving AH-64 Echo models, and I hear that we are going to the Mike model in UH-60s. | ||
| What I want to make sure that we are not doing, though, is that we field one thing on the active component and the lesser alternative, the secondary, the old strategic reserve thing to the National Guard and Reserve. | ||
|
unidentified
|
It matters when we fight. | |
| We do not have a large enough Army to fight. | ||
| We have to all fight at one time or be prepared to. | ||
| Do you all agree with that? | ||
| I agree. | ||
| And I just want to explain on the details. | ||
| Actually, there are some reductions of the 64 deltas in the active component so that we can also have age 64 echoes in the Guard, in Compo II. | ||
| And so that's what the National Guard is going to see from Army Transformation Initiative is the age of their, you know, they'll get much younger, much more capable aircraft out of what we're doing with it. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Thank you, General. | |
| And I want to go real quick. | ||
| One of our members earlier brought up, let me tell you, in World War II, did we fight a very different campaign in the Pacific than we fought in Europe? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| One was intensively sea warfare and air warfare, some ground forces, but it was primarily sea and air. | ||
| Is that correct? | ||
| I would actually tell you that we had 21 divisions and six corps in the Pacific during World War II. | ||
| So I don't see our job to be ready anywhere in the Pacific. | ||
|
unidentified
|
But ground forces, my point is ground forces still matter in Europe. | |
| That was a primarily ground war. | ||
|
unidentified
|
It uses all, both use all. | |
| I think they matter everywhere. | ||
| It is obviously biased, but I think history supports that. | ||
| And infused with the right technology that we would have with drones and counter-U.S. and all those things, I think the Army is critically important. | ||
| Long-range fires. | ||
| We can walk and chew gum at the same time. | ||
| We can be prepared for Europe and the Pacific, is kind of my point. | ||
| The final thing is just I want to make sure you guys continue our commitment. | ||
| I think one of our most valuable tools is our State Partnership programs, and I think we are using it well. | ||
| I think we can use it better to get more return on investment for the Army and the nation as a whole. | ||
| With that, I yield back. | ||
| Joel time has expired. | ||
| Mr. Crow, you're recognized. | ||
| Thank you, Chairman. | ||
| Thank you to both of you for coming in. | ||
| I join with many of my colleagues in sharing some excitement around you thinking big and structurally. | ||
| This Army transformation initiative is the way we need to be thinking. | ||
| But I also join with my colleagues in saying that congressional engagement is extremely important. | ||
| And without information, this committee cannot do its work. | ||
| In addition to this committee, the Army caucus has not had any engagement with the Department. | ||
| I'm the co-chair of the Army caucus. | ||
| We're six months into this year. | ||
| This is a bipartisan caucus. | ||
| This is a group of members of Congress who, many of whom are Army veterans, many of whom have Army facilities in their district. | ||
| They volunteer, and there just hasn't been any engagement. | ||
| We are some of your biggest allies, and we can't do that work unless we engage with you. | ||
| Both of you are combat veterans like me, and I would like to talk about our shared experience in combat. | ||
| Secretary Driscoll, you led a platoon in Iraq, and I'm sure you realized when you were doing that, that engaging with civilian populations was important, correct? | ||
| Absolutely, Congressman. | ||
| And just to your Army caucus, we will remedy that. | ||
| That's shame on me for not having you. | ||
| So I commit to you'll get an invite soon. | ||
| I appreciate it. | ||
| And then, yes. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| So engaging with populations, that's essential to the mission because we're almost always operating near civilians, correct? | ||
| Correct. | ||
| And we can't accomplish military missions, combat missions, unless we effectively interface with civilian populations, correct? | ||
| That is generally true. | ||
| And as part of that, reducing civilian casualties, making sure that civilians are not pulled into or are injured as part of operations is also mission essential, correct? | ||
| The Army, as far as we always aspire to minimize and mitigate that risk. | ||
| It would be mission essential, though, to minimize civilian casualties, right? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| General George, would you share that view? | ||
| I would. | ||
| I would also come back to, you know, with our shared experiences that, you know, we have to really focus on making sure that every soldier is really good at their kinetic mission. | ||
| And before I went to Afghanistan, as a brigade commander of Iraq, as a battalion commander, as a field grade, we are fully part of everything that we do with what we're doing with targeting is making sure that we are very precise in what we're doing. | ||
| And I think, you know, history would show where we are very precise. | ||
| I mean, it's combat. | ||
| Which I agree with, General. | ||
| I mean, the precision is really important, right? | ||
| Because that actually makes us more combat effective to be precise and to make sure we're hitting what we need to hit and not hitting other things, in addition to losing the support of a civilian population, of which we are oftentimes trying to earn their support by reducing casualties. | ||
| Is that accurate? | ||
| I would say in certain situations, if that's a counterinsurgency fight, then I would certainly. | ||
| In fact, the mission analysis tool, MET-TC, you both are familiar with MET-TC, right? | ||
| In fact, you used it, Secretary Driscoll, when you were in the military, right? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| And the C stands for what? | ||
| Civilian? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| It's civil considerations, right? | ||
| So it's actually built into our analysis planning tool that you think about civilian populations. | ||
| So here's my question. | ||
| In fiscal year 2023, this committee, on a bipartisan basis, created the Civilian Protection Center of Excellence for all the reasons we talked about. | ||
| That we understand that we can't effectively conduct our mission, win the support of local populations, reduce civilian casualties, and ensure the effectiveness and the precision of our targeting unless we make it a part of the mission and we focus on it. | ||
| The Department has provided notice to Congress that they are going to defund and get rid of the CPCOE. | ||
| So, why on a bipartisan basis we passed something that will help put our soldiers in a position of being more successful in our mission, more precise in our targeting, that will be better at protecting the civilian populations that we serve in and alongside of. | ||
| Are you going to wind this down? | ||
| I would tell you, Congressman, that what we need to do is make sure that that beyond the center of excellence is embedded in everything we do from top to bottom. | ||
|
Poland and Army Realignment
00:05:46
|
||
| I think you were mentioning Met TC. | ||
| That's a very tactical thing that we're doing at every place all the way up. | ||
| We're doing this when we say. | ||
| I agree with you, General. | ||
| I agree with you. | ||
| Secretary Driscoll, this was the way to focus and prioritize this effort. | ||
| Why wind it down? | ||
| I think we are aligned in your goal, Congressman, and we think there's a more effective way to do it. | ||
| All right. | ||
| Well, I want to hear that more effective way, and I would like answers to that. | ||
| Yes, Congressman. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| The gentleman's time expired. | ||
| I recognize myself for five minutes. | ||
| Thank you both for being here. | ||
| I appreciate your leadership. | ||
| I want to echo some of the concerns that we've heard today, bipartisan concerns on the news reports that the Secretary of Defense has moved over a billion dollars out of barracks and dorms for the border. | ||
| We need a strong border. | ||
| I get that. | ||
| But I spent the last year chairing a subcommittee or a temporary subcommittee, looking at quality of life. | ||
| And in the midst of that, the GAO came out and gave our dorms and our barracks a failing grade, an F, to include the Armies. | ||
| We saw pictures of raw sewage in dorms, rodents, mold, dorms that had, and barracks that had no air conditioning or heat working, and on and on. | ||
| And so we spent the year trying to build a plan to help the services fix this. | ||
| And what we did learn is over a decade, the services were moving money out of their dorms and barracks towards weapon systems. | ||
| I get that. | ||
| We had finite resources. | ||
| But we built a 10-year hole in our dorms and barracks. | ||
| And now, if the news reports are true, it's very troubling. | ||
| We were trying to help with the quality of life. | ||
| And I feel like a decision was made that undermined this whole effort that we spent the last year doing. | ||
| So I wanted to say that for the record. | ||
| General George, I think China is rightfully the pacing threat. | ||
| What is it that you want the Army to bring in a China-U.S. fight? | ||
| What's the main capabilities that you see the Army bringing? | ||
| I think the Army is going to be, Congressman, the backbone for a lot of things that are out in the Pacific. | ||
| You see what right now, what long-range fires is doing, being able to operate in small teams and be able to present those kinds of things out there. | ||
| It's why we're moving away with some of our systems, our other drones that can actually now be employed much simpler and not from airfields. | ||
| So I think long-range fires, Army is going to have a big role to play in integrated air and missile defense. | ||
| And again, this is around the world. | ||
| Command and control, we're used to a lot of moving parts and big formations and controlling a lot of that. | ||
| So I think we're going to do a lot of that counter-UAS. | ||
| I mean, I could go down across all the warfighting functions. | ||
| We always tell everybody that there's no such thing as one maritime air land. | ||
| These are joint theaters, and everybody is going to be important to this fight. | ||
| And so certainly we're going to be an important part of that as well. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| I totally agree. | ||
| Long-range fires. | ||
| I think some criticisms towards the Army about if they put the right priority on air defense, but I think we know we need it now, and we need to really invest in this area, particularly in a Far East conflict. | ||
| And also the counter-drone technology is going to be huge. | ||
| There's a lot of reports of what China is doing with their drone technology, so we will be facing the same threats that we're seeing in Europe right now. | ||
| To you both, sometimes I hear the President or Vice President Secretary of Defense talk about solely China as the primary threat, but I don't hear a lot of talk about Russia. | ||
| And yet, since 1991, Russia has forcibly changed her borders nine times. | ||
| And we're seeing the big one right now with Ukraine. | ||
| Would you agree that Russia is indeed a threat, one? | ||
| And two, do we have any, are we going to maintain our posture in Eastern Europe with the Baltic countries, Poland, Romania? | ||
| I think our presence there is critical for deterrence. | ||
| I think we all agree, and we are following the leadership and guidance of Secretary Hegset that China is the pacing threat. | ||
| But when General George and I talk about the Army that we believe we are responsible to build, one of the things we've referenced is that often most human beings that thought they could predict the future have turned out to be wrong since the beginning of mankind. | ||
| And we want an army that can be effective anywhere that we send it. | ||
| And so in all of our planning, we try to build an army that stands by and stands ready to go anywhere the president sends us. | ||
| But yes. | ||
| So is Russia a threat? | ||
| Russia is a threat. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| General George. | ||
| I would agree with that. | ||
| And I just want to kind of, this gets to some of the earlier questions about what kind of equipment. | ||
| I don't think that we can have an army that can be, that is only good at one thing. | ||
| You know, the army has to be, our country expects it of us. | ||
| And I know we can do that. | ||
| And that's exactly what we're focused on with the transformation initiative. | ||
| Do we plan on keeping our presence in the Baltics and in Poland? | ||
| I'll yield either one of you. | ||
| Yeah, I've not seen any policy decisions on that right now, Congressman. | ||
| I can't think of better allies. | ||
| These folks love our country. | ||
| I've been to the Baltics many times and Poland. | ||
| They love freedom. | ||
| They know what it's like to live under the Soviet Union or Russian control. | ||
| They are investing 4 percent roughly of their GDP, trying to go to 5. | ||
| They're great allies, and I just hope we stick by their side and make it very clear. | ||
| Congressman, I was in Poland and saw how they treat our soldiers. | ||
| It's incredible. | ||
| They are an amazing ally. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| And we support them. | ||
| With that, I yield, and I recognize Mr. Ryan for five minutes. | ||
|
Commendation for Personnel Success
00:05:16
|
||
| Thank you, Mr. Chair. | ||
| Thank you both for being here. | ||
| Thank you also for coming to the finest service academy in the world in my district for commencement two weeks ago. | ||
| It was really an honor to have you both there and I think we can all agree the country should be incredibly proud of those 1,002 young men and women that raised their right hand that day and certainly appreciate both you being there and your leadership to that effect. | ||
| Two areas that I wanted to hit, starting with you, General George, I just want to commend you on the record for from the beginning of you taking this critical role, saying we're going to really take hard critical looks. | ||
| We're going to up our risk tolerance. | ||
| We're going to experiment with the transformation in contact initiative that you undertook and then to see that come to fruition and taking those lessons learned from those, I think it was three brigades that were doing that work across the country to then inform the transformation initiative that we're talking about today. | ||
| I think that that deserves significant praise and credit and is a model that I think all the services should look at. | ||
| Can you just briefly talk about one specific success story? | ||
| And I know you mentioned, for example, that 300 percent increase in lethality of the one brigade. | ||
| But can you share, I think a lot of us are focused on the kind of the macro. | ||
| There's a lot of moving pieces here, but can you bring that to life? | ||
| Is there an anecdote or a story you can share from the transformation and contact that's informed the larger ATI initiative? | ||
| I mean, even before, I'll go back to the people because I've been asked what's our most important asset. | ||
| I think what we're learning is what kind of people also and what kind of people skills we need to have inside of our formation. | ||
| We had a pretty significant meeting earlier this week about deciding how we're going to add electronic warfare operators inside our formation, how they would do that at Echelon. | ||
| It has informed how we need to change our training at all of our centers of excellence, how we're training majors differently, captains above, you know, and all the way up. | ||
| So it's really informing everything we're doing and it's not just the technology. | ||
| Thank you, Yeah, I think that's a very critical point and leads actually to my second question, which is about our greatest resource, our personnel and recruiting specifically. | ||
| Secretary Driscoll, I appreciated your op-ed and the broad recognition of a huge success. | ||
| And I think everybody in the committee should be applauding in a bipartisan way the success of the Army after several years of investment, a strategy change, particularly led by you, General George, and your team, bipartisan work of the Congress under the Chairman's leadership and the ranking members, specifically Rep Poulihan and Congressman Bacon's effort on the Quality of Life Initiative to raise pay and address other critical quality of life issues, | ||
| all of that coming together to actually work to see us hitting our goal not only on time but ahead of time. | ||
| So I commend you all for that. | ||
| I do think it's important that this not be a political analysis of the success. | ||
| And I'm concerned, not actually from either of you, but what I've heard from the Secretary and the President of overly politicizing the takeaways of the recruiting success. | ||
| So I just want to raise a few points and ask a few questions to make sure I'm understanding how we got here correctly so that we can learn the correct lessons and build on this success. | ||
| I know in FY22 and 23 we were challenged, did not hit our numbers. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Is that that's correct, Chief? | |
| That's correct. | ||
| And then in FY24, which to be clear happened in the last administration, we hit our goals. | ||
| We're up 12.5 percent and exceeded the goal and hit 55,150 recruits in FY24. | ||
| Is that right, General George? | ||
| It sounds right, yes, sir. | ||
| And then I think we even went 11,000 over and were able to put 11,000 additional folks into the delayed entry program, which fed into the success we've had in FY25. | ||
| Is that the right way to think about that? | ||
| Everybody that goes into the delayed entry program, and that's exactly what we're going to do, Congressman, you know, from here on out, we expect to get, you know, 20,000, for example, in the delayed entry program moving forward. | ||
| Great. | ||
| And I'm running out of time and we'll submit this for the record. | ||
| But I think it's important to highlight that this all started under your leadership, General George, and the last Secretary in October 2023, when we added 1,200 recruiters to your credit, when we started the Future Soldier Prep course, which 24 percent of the recruits came from that course, when we moved to online job boards, when we went back to the old motto that we all love, be all you can be, and a lot of other smart initiatives that started in 2023. | ||
|
Why Units Decommission?
00:10:52
|
||
| Gentlemen's time has expired. | ||
| Chair, and I recognize the gentleman from Texas, Mr. La True. | ||
| Thank you, Mr. Chairman. | ||
| Good morning, gentlemen. | ||
| Have either one of you heard of the 1st Battalion, 158th Aviation Regiment of the 11th Expeditionary Combat Aviation Brigade? | ||
| I'm familiar with not that specific battalion, but the ECAB. | ||
| Yes, Mr. Secretary? | ||
| Directionally, not specifically. | ||
| That's unfortunate because it's being decommissioned. | ||
| And it's in my district. | ||
| And I want one of you two to tell me why that's happening. | ||
| Because I would hope, since that's being decommissioned, and Mr. Crowe said it very eloquently, we can be your greatest asset or your worst enemy. | ||
| And you've come into my house where I was born and raised in this county, and you're taking something away from me, and I want to know why. | ||
| We did went through and we've done a lot of war games, Congressman, on what we need for aviation structure. | ||
| And so that's what we went down from start to finish on what we were going to do. | ||
| I think we've talked a lot this morning about autonomous systems. | ||
| You did speak about modernization. | ||
| I'm curious why you wouldn't try to modernize that unit instead of decommissioning it. | ||
| I say decommission because I'm a Navy guys. | ||
| There's a different term in the Army. | ||
| Please let me know. | ||
| Well, again, I think when you're overstructured on a specific asset and you're underinvesting in others, you have to make decisions on that. | ||
| That's what we are looking to do with a lot of those pilots that are in Compo 3: We're working right now with them that they would move and they would fly in the Guard. | ||
| We got a lot of talent in there that will go with the Guard or potentially with Compo 1. | ||
| But again, what we have committed ourselves to is that we're not going to keep equipment that we don't need, systems that we don't need when we know we need to invest in the market. | ||
| If we don't need those particular weapon systems or those air assets, why can't we increase the capability by moving more modern aircraft to that location? | ||
| Again, I think we're going to, over the years, going to start to see a reduction in what we're having for some of our rotary wing aircraft. | ||
| And we can talk about how much rotary wing aircraft has been used right on the front lines. | ||
| And some of these, it's less. | ||
| We are moving towards the MV75, which is the flora that the Secretary was talking about in the future here, and we're hoping to move that very quickly. | ||
| But I think that there are other missions, autonomous systems that can do that. | ||
| And again, we had to make a decision. | ||
| We did not. | ||
| We were overstructured on that particular aviation. | ||
| Well, I'd like you guys to take a harder look at this. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Let me tell you why. | |
| Because Conroe, Texas is just right outside of Houston. | ||
| And that area is basically the catcher's mitt for hurricanes in the state, okay, out of the Gulf. | ||
| And the 500 soldiers and the 100 civilians that work at that unit are engaged in our community. | ||
| We see them every day. | ||
| And when Harvey hit and every other storm that followed Harvey, that asset was flying overhead, rescuing my constituents day after day. | ||
| Continue to do so without question. | ||
| And I'm getting the call not from them but from my district. | ||
| And I can assure you, when my district starts chewing on me, guess where I'm coming? | ||
| And I want those answers. | ||
| I want, I respectfully request either one of you come to my office and explain to me in detail why this is happening, why we can't move assets in this place, why can't this particular unit stay, not only because of its deployability and how great they are every time they go overseas, but because of the asset and what they bring when we get hit by a storm every single year. | ||
| Now, if you do take that from us, and I'm going to speak hypothetically here, if you do take this from us and this goes away, and I've heard 12 to 24 months once you pull the trigger, if that happens and we get hit again, which we will, you're going to have to explain to me and, Congressman, we'd be happy to come to your office and explain it. | ||
| The first bucket of ATI, and we are allocating, reallocating $48 billion of spending over the next five years. | ||
| We have had a lot of hard conversations with a lot of Well-intentioned, and the tension in this is at a scale that we would be delighted to show you. | ||
| I would be curious that we had to be able to get to the next step with those folks that you've any of those people that you had those conversations with have been down there. | ||
| I kind of see what I'm talking about. | ||
| Yeah, Congressman, I will also tell you from a lot of experience through the years of supporting, we have done this. | ||
| Most of the time, we have to evacuate all of the aircraft out. | ||
| We still have Cavasos that is right up the road. | ||
| I recognize Representative Basquez from New Mexico. | ||
| Thank you, Mr. Chairman. | ||
| Thank you, Secretary Driscoll, General George, for your time today and for your years of service to our country. | ||
| I represent New Mexico's 2nd District, home to White Sands Missile Range. | ||
| As I am sure you well know, White Sands is the Department's premier research and testing facility where we have spent decades developing cutting-edge technologies and weapon systems. | ||
| I have heard from base leadership during my time here in Congress that they have persistently dealt with drones of unknown origin entering into the airspace without authorization. | ||
| Drones are a relatively cheap weapon system with the capacity to rapidly form swarms and launch attacks on targets of significantly higher value. | ||
| And I am concerned about White Sands' vulnerability. | ||
| They also have the ability to spy on some of our most sensitive technologies while it is being tested at White Sands. | ||
| The base currently has limited radar capacity to detect drone incursions, but more importantly, they lack both the authority and technology to engage these drones, leaving us potentially exposed to our adversaries. | ||
| General George, would you agree that unknown drones entering the airspace of our military bases poses an intelligence and security threat? | ||
| I agree. | ||
| And to go further, Congressman, this is an area that we have been talking about that we, and you will see we are going to invest more in. | ||
| We need to experiment more with. | ||
| We need to have commercial, more folks, developers that are in there doing that. | ||
| And we need to work with you on the 130i to make sure that we also get the right authorities to do that. | ||
| There are areas I know, for example, where we could shoot things down. | ||
| So we have to work through some of that. | ||
| And, Congressman, I would just say this is a topic I think that likely would have bipartisan support. | ||
| And you have our both very public admission and request that we need help to all work together to solve this, because in CONUS, it is difficult. | ||
| There are a lot of different assets nearby. | ||
| There is commercial air traffic, and the answers are not simple. | ||
| And so we as a nation have got to come up with a better solution. | ||
| Thank you, Secretary. | ||
| Thank you, General. | ||
| Does the Army or Department of Defense keep a log of instances in which unauthorized drones have been entering military airspace? | ||
| We do. | ||
| We do keep track of that. | ||
| Have those been increasing over the last five years? | ||
| I would say drones are increasing in general, whether it is commercial. | ||
| And again, this gets back to being able to identify, understand, and what you are doing to categorize it. | ||
| And I think the Secretary has seen that, but it again gets back to how we are going to have to work together to get after the authorities, flexible funding to make sure that we can actually buy the things and not one specific system and continue to evolve in this area rapidly. | ||
| Thank you, Secretary. | ||
| And a lot of that technology is being developed in my district in the State of New Mexico, so I appreciate you lending them a hand to be able to compete for these contracts. | ||
| Secretary Driscoll, given the rising use of drones for military and intelligence purposes, what is the Army doing in FY26 to improve our counterdrone capabilities? | ||
| Congressman, this is top of mind. | ||
| We are testing all sorts of capabilities. | ||
| Directed energy is one that I think we have all read about recently, that it is a very difficult science problem to solve. | ||
| We don't have a scalable solution yet. | ||
| We are working with tech providers from our SAGU that is trying to suck out the best lessons of Ukraine. | ||
| There are a lot of technology providers in Ukraine. | ||
| They are calling it in some ways the Silicon Valley of Ore right now. | ||
| And so what we are trying to do is instead of needing to innovate as a nation ourselves, we can be fast followers on a lot of these tools. | ||
| And the Army is working daily to try to come up with as many solutions as possible. | ||
| Thank you, Secretary. | ||
| And I want to switch topics. | ||
| Could I add one thing on that, Congressman? | ||
| General, I just want to make sure I get to these other questions here. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Excuse me. | |
| I want to switch topics of the troop deployments on the border. | ||
| I represent 180 miles of the U.S.-Mexico border, the entirety of the New Mexico border with Mexico. | ||
| And recently, the troop deployment to the border has created a military zone that has taken over the management of public lands, federal public lands. | ||
| In fact, I have a deer hunt this year in an area where I'm no longer able to hunt, no longer able to enter. | ||
| And it's become unclear where the boundaries of this military zone actually start and where they end. | ||
| And that's unclear not just to hunters or people who enjoy the land, but also to local governments, county commissioners of those counties who represent those border counties. | ||
| How fast can we get the information of where these military border zones actually exist? | ||
| And what can Americans who go into these existing Federal public lands managed by the Bureau of Land Management expect some answers about whether they will be apprehended or arrested within these border zones? | ||
| We can provide very specifically, I'll bifurcate my reply. | ||
| We can provide that information to your office and then to people on that specific land. | ||
| The Army is working incredibly hard with our soldiers to put out signage. | ||
| We have taken it over recently. | ||
| Thank you, Secretary. | ||
| I appreciate that because so far we have not received any response from the Department of Defense or the Army. | ||
|
unidentified
|
So thank you. | |
| I yield. | ||
| Chair now recognizes the gentlelady from Virginia, Ms. Kiggins. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Thank you very much to both of you for being with us today. | |
| And although I represent a big Navy district in Virginia's 2nd District in Hampton Roads, I'm the daughter of a Greenberry who served in Vietnam. | ||
| So I appreciate, again, both of your services. | ||
|
Hawaii's Salesforce Update
00:14:27
|
||
| I wanted to just echo my colleagues' sentiments for prioritizing the quality of life work that we did last Congress. | ||
| We looked at housing, child care, health care, pay and compensation, spouse employment. | ||
| These are really important issues, and we hear it time and time again across the service branches. | ||
| So thank you for continuing to prioritize that. | ||
| I echo their sentiments just about, you know, I know there's a lot of needs and the balance, the budget is confined. | ||
| So just make sure you don't forget about quality of life. | ||
| Along those same lines, we talked a little bit about power grids, and I know Congresswoman Stefanik mentioned Fort Drum. | ||
| And we have similar challenges at Naval Station Norfolk and Naval Air Station O'Shana, again, in my district. | ||
| And we have an offshore wind project that is actually giving the air station a $500 million power grid upgrade, which I appreciate. | ||
| It's a little bit of a creative way to do that. | ||
| But there's also talk about small modular reactors, which you all mentioned, and then just adopting. | ||
| Right now, we're having to adopt the local power grid. | ||
| Which do you prefer? | ||
| Which would work out better for the Army? | ||
| And then what are some of the barriers to implementing that power source? | ||
| Are you talking between SMRs or is it better just to adopt the local power? | ||
| I think it depends, again. | ||
| And, you know, the Army has been designated the executive agent for these. | ||
| And one thing that I think everybody realizes, Secretary mentioned this earlier, power requirements are going to go up. | ||
| What we're also very focused on is resiliency of our installations. | ||
| And, you know, as we refer to them as power projection platforms, making sure that we have resilient energy. | ||
| And so that's what we're focused on. | ||
| So, I mean, we're looking forward to this initiative. | ||
| I think that is one of the things that we have talked about that we need to continually improve with. | ||
| And Congresswoman, I would say the way we're thinking about these is we would prefer in no instance to have an either or to create this resiliency against threats we don't know. | ||
| We think that the right solution is a lot of solutions and that as we learn and as we go about this and as we go into a conflict someday, we may want to scale up one or another solution. | ||
| And so specifically to that, I think it's both. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I agree. | |
| We have all the above energy approach in Virginia, which I think is worth utilizing everywhere. | ||
| I want to talk a little bit about recruitment retention. | ||
| Congratulations on meeting your recruitment goals. | ||
| This is great. | ||
| We're still working on the Navy side. | ||
| I heard you talk about Genesis and the waiver program, and I think Secretary Driscoll, you called it inadequate. | ||
| And we have challenges in our own district. | ||
| It frustrates the heck out of me when I hear from young people who want to serve, especially in the DOD medical board process. | ||
| There's a lot of room for improvement. | ||
| I was just at Virginia Military Institute a couple weeks ago. | ||
| My son graduated, but looking at these young people that want to serve, especially in the Army, that school produces a lot of Army officers. | ||
| I want these kids to be able to serve. | ||
| So I get really frustrated with some of the pediatric diagnosis, some of the nuances of this waiver process. | ||
| So you mentioned, Secretary Driscoll, again, that it was inadequate. | ||
| Can you just speak to me about what changes you are looking at in this waiver process? | ||
| So the Genesis program in and of itself is a classic example. | ||
| I think of the Army building a solution or being part of a solution that is siloed and ineffective and inefficient. | ||
| And it's probably going to be a better solution to go out and grab a tool that is used in areas in the commercial sector. | ||
| So looking at something like Salesforce, our recruiting team has started to onboard to Salesforce as its CRM and seen incredible results with that. | ||
| In a perfect world, we would replace something like Genesis with something like Salesforce, where we could toggle the amount of information we are seeing and weight the different outcomes with a generative AI model being able to say, hey, is this a kid who got an inhaler when they were 12 in two months and never used it versus somebody who when they were 17 and a half actively was using an inhaler? | ||
| Can we take coaches' letters of recommendations and apply it before we output that they even need a waiver? | ||
| And so what we are trying to do is essentially apply logic because we hate those outcomes too. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| Can I mention one thing on the you know we're looking longitudinally as well? | ||
| I mean I think you know again the population is changing a little bit more as far as you know numbers with ADHD or you know different issues. | ||
| So we are studying that as well with how long do soldiers what do we get for retention? | ||
| What kind of things? | ||
| We have pushed the waiver authorities down further so because a lot of the frustration and I enlisted if I would have had to wait two, three, four months, I probably would have chosen to do something else. | ||
| So that's the biggest thing that we are trying to do and I do think that we can get better in our software. | ||
| Gentle time has expired. | ||
| Chair now recognizes the gentlelady from Hawaii, Mr. Kuda. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Thank you, Mr. Chair. | |
| As you both know, the Hawaii Board of Land and Natural Resources just rejected the Army's EIS for the Pohakaloa training area in my district. | ||
| And in the coming weeks, the EIS for Army training areas on Oahu will come before the board for decision. | ||
| Given ATI restructuring efforts, does that change the Army's intended footprint needed in Hawaii? | ||
| Perhaps doing less with more of an emphasis on things like advanced manufacturing, 3D printing, additive manufacturing, all in which were contained in Secretary Hegsett's memo, which prioritize this and are in line, quite frankly, with the work that we are starting to do at Schofield right now. | ||
| I would just start by saying, you know, we have a lot of really important units that are out right now at Schofield Barracks with 25th Infantry Division. | ||
| Obviously, being able to train for their potential warfighting missions is critically important to us, and it's why those training areas are very important to us. | ||
| I think this jointly, and I know we're working very closely with the authorities in Hawaii to kind of move this forward. | ||
| And I'm heading in July, Congresswoman. | ||
| I'm going to Hawaii. | ||
| And one of the things I want to be on behalf of the Army, make sure we tell that community is how grateful we are for the partnership and the community members they've been. | ||
| Our soldiers who return from being stationed there have generally nothing but amazing experiences with that community, and we're grateful. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes, well, we definitely take care of our people. | |
| We'd like to be also taken care of as well as good neighbors. | ||
| And I think that's where, especially if this ATI process is intuitive and learning as you go, given that we need certainty by 2029 when the lease renegotiations are up, you need to really know what kind of footprint and intention you have with our communities in terms of training or whether it's to do a pivot more towards things like additive manufacturing. | ||
| I want to move on to some other questions. | ||
| Mr. Secretary, for over 20 years, the First Information Operations Command was the Army's only active duty unit focused on synchronizing information capabilities and supporting deployed forces to counter adversary influences. | ||
| And its recent shutdown as part of a broader restructuring raises serious concerns about the future of Army information ops, in particular China, Russia, and others that set up disinformation, propaganda, and cyber-enabled influences. | ||
| Allowing our adversaries to control the information and disinformation space only adds to the fog of war, quite frankly. | ||
| Mr. Secretary, how is the Army ensuring that the deactivation of the First IO command does not leave operational gaps or vulnerabilities in our information posture, especially at the tactical and operations level? | ||
| And during this transition, what safeguards and interim measures are you putting in place to ensure the continuity of capability and mission? | ||
| I'm going to jump in on that one first, Congresswoman. | ||
| First, I think we're working that with SOCOM and USASOC. | ||
| And again, I think everybody sometimes gets headquarters caught up with whether or not you're going to do a mission. | ||
| And I think what we've learned is that is going to be a part of every mission that we're doing. | ||
| We are looking at how we're updating. | ||
| I was talking or answering a question earlier from Congressman Ryan and how we talk about our people and train our people differently with information operation, psychological operations, the runs the gamut of this. | ||
| It's also technical and how everybody knew what was happening this weekend instantly because of what was happening on the Internet, and how are you having technical solutions to understand that? | ||
|
unidentified
|
I think what I'm asking though is, when it comes to information operations, we have had a central hub for over 20 years. | |
| We have dismantled other entities within the State Department the Voice OF America to be able to counter and manage information and disinformation. | ||
| You're talking about disaggregating it across all sectors and units and having individuals trained in that. | ||
| We need a centralized source that we can control what information we're putting out and what our adversaries, knowing what our adversaries are putting out there as well. | ||
| Are you concerned At all, that we are lacking in both readiness and capacity in this area as a result of shutting down this Information Operations Command? | ||
| So, you have no concerns that we are at a disadvantage to areas like China that are very much attuned to the need to be able to manage this particular space. | ||
| We will continue on later, but I wanted to ask one question about AI. | ||
| Now, from what we have seen in your May letter to the force on Army ATI, you stated that command and control nodes will integrate AI to accelerate decision-making, and I fully support us moving in that direction. | ||
| But when we have looked at other sectors and how AI is distributed, we need to make sure there are clear ethical boundaries and oversight personnel, or there will be serious risk. | ||
| My question is: can you clarify your vision for AI integration into command and control, what it looks like in practice? | ||
| Are you talking about AI in an advisory capacity or initiating and executing actions autonomously? | ||
| How do we ensure? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Thank you. | |
| I will submit questions for the region, Mr. Chairman. | ||
| Thank you, Mr. Chairman, and thank you for our witnesses for being here today. | ||
| We wouldn't have a country without our military, so really appreciate the service. | ||
| In the 250-year Army parade, I totally agree. | ||
| We live in an incredible country. | ||
| Our U.S. Army has an incredible history, and that must be told. | ||
| And I think, well, I appreciate what you said about meeting the recruitment goals four months early and before the busier, more productive months. | ||
| That's incredible. | ||
| I know it's all about teamwork. | ||
| We've got to make sure that our folks can, God willing, be able to come home and survive a fight if they get in a fight. | ||
| But I believe in peace through strength. | ||
| And if we have peace through strength, we probably won't have to go to war. | ||
| There's a lot of threats at home and abroad, and some people say the enemy is at the gate, and in some ways, the enemy is in the gate. | ||
| And I'd like to make sure, I think we all would, that what happened in Russia with their bombers doesn't happen in the United States. | ||
| There should be, we talk about drones. | ||
| We saw what happened at Langley Air Force Base. | ||
| Even in my district, we have nuclear power plant North Anna. | ||
| The sheriff says, hey, there are drones over our plant, and we're not sure what we can do. | ||
| There was an advisory put out by DOJ in 2020, and I think that caused a lot of confusion with the Department of Defense and SLTT. | ||
| And so I've put in a bill, it's H.R. 3478. | ||
| It's called the Manned Aircraft Clarification Act. | ||
| And based on that advisory, it made generals and other government folks think that a drone was the same thing as a remote control. | ||
| I'm sorry, a 747 jumbo jet with passengers is the same thing as a remote control airplane, which they are not. | ||
| So I would ask you guys to look at that DOJ advisory back in 2020. | ||
| It needs to be rewritten, updated. | ||
| And I'd ask you to check out the H.R. 3478 Manned Aircraft Clarification Act. | ||
| There should be zero restrictions on the ability of government to protect their property and critical infrastructure against drones. | ||
| Every obstacle creates opportunity for adversaries to do what we saw in Russia earlier this week. | ||
| So please check that out. | ||
| Ukraine has a goal of building 4.5 million drones this year. | ||
| And I read a report. | ||
| It said the Army Materials Command demonstrated the ability to produce 10 Group 1 drones per week for training exercises used in 3D printing. | ||
| And AMC's acting commander, Lieutenant General Christopher Mohan, recently stated that they could potentially use advanced manufacturing techniques to expand to 10,000 drones per month. | ||
| You see, that's a far cry from what they're doing in Ukraine. | ||
| What's stopping the U.S. Army from replicating this success across all our material? | ||
| Is it technology challenge, training, or funding? | ||
| I'll start with Secretary Driscoll. | ||
| I think the shortest answer would be all of it, all of the above. | ||
| We as a defense industrial base have decayed and lost our ability to rapidly procure new technology and scale it to the warfighter. | ||
| We are very optimistic that these tools and solutions are able to be made and mimicked by American industry to copy exactly what is occurring in Ukraine. | ||
| We are optimistic that with the bipartisan support of this committee, we are able to get the funding to do this quickly. | ||
| There are tools, and General George and I have visited a number of companies, small and medium-sized, that we think this renaissance of the industrial base that is hopefully unlocked from Army Transformation Initiative will allow us to put into place the things that would be required to scale to something like keeping up with Russia's 1 million drones or Ukraine's 4 million, but we are not there today. | ||
| And I apologize, but I have limited time, so there is one more question I would like to ask. | ||
| And I appreciate your answer, Mr. Secretary, to my colleagues Joe Wilson and Elise Sifonik on the importance of small modular reactors for the Army. | ||
| But I would like to ask about some more details on Executive Order 14299, deploy advanced nuclear reactor technologies for national security. | ||
| So, Mr. Secretary, you mentioned the issue of contested logistics and supply chains. | ||
| Where do you see microreactors in this context? | ||
| And by the way, in my district, we have BWXT, and I think they are going to be the first microreactor that is operational in the world. | ||
|
SOF Forces Enablers Cut
00:15:29
|
||
| I think microreactors can be an incredible asset as we solve against the future energy needs of the United States Army, both in CONUS, OCONUS, and peacetime and wartime. | ||
| And we are excited to lead that effort. | ||
| And this is a question for either one of you, if you wouldn't mind. | ||
| Do you have any idea which services or combatant commands will be receiving these capabilities first or a timeframe for a rollout? | ||
| I don't. | ||
| We can come back to you, Congressman. | ||
| I think a lot of this gets to the technology and how big these systems are. | ||
| How mobile are they? | ||
| And are they going to be on our bases? | ||
| Are they going to be on our installation? | ||
| I think that is going to change over time, and we are going to be working with everybody in the Department to make sure that we are advancing that effort. | ||
| I yield back. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Thank you. | |
| Gentleman yields back. | ||
| Chair Not recognizes Representative Cisneros from California. | ||
| Thank you, Mr. Chairman, and thank you, Secretary Driscoll and General George, for being here today. | ||
| I really appreciate your time. | ||
| Secretary Driscoll, diverting $1 billion away from barracks, like a $34 million parade, you are being forced to make 8 percent cuts for projects, for pet projects that the Secretary and the President wants. | ||
| And this is all happening while we are under a CR. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I am kind of getting the impression that is the Army just flush with cash and got extra money to spend that it can give away? | |
| Are we giving you too much? | ||
| And really, how is this? | ||
| I know it has kind of been answered already a little bit, but just to go more into depth, our service members, how is this affecting the quality of life of our service members if we are moving this money away from the barracks? | ||
| Congressman, just to go on record, you are not giving us too much money. | ||
| Well, you are giving it away. | ||
| We are, as stated earlier, dear colleagues, we are incredibly honored and we take very seriously the duty that we have to the American taxpayer to use those dollars efficiently and effectively for the American soldier. | ||
| For the celebration of our 250th anniversary, the planning has been going on for years. | ||
| The Army believes that this will empower an entire new generation of America's youth to catch the spirit to serve their nation, and we are incredibly honored to be able to tell that story. | ||
| General George and I have reflected how lucky we are to be in these roles in this moment in time and to tell the story of an institution that has impacted our country so greatly since its founding. | ||
|
unidentified
|
You don't think that money could be better well spent on some type of recruiting campaign that would work over a period of time rather than a one-day event that is just going to take place and then it is done. | |
| This parade, I believe, will be seen by Americans across the country. | ||
| And I very sincerely, and we can look at the recruiting numbers, I would hypothesize, and I will come back and justify whether I was right or wrong, that we will see an incredible filling of our pipeline of young Americans who want to join. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Well, one thing that I didn't know for sure, right, the thing that does affect recruiting is an investment in actual recruiting. | |
| But I think with these 8 percent cuts that we are seeing, I am turning share, there is going to be a big chunk that is going to come out of recruiting, and that is probably going to hurt numbers over time. | ||
| But, General George, you know, the Secretary Hegseth has made some comments about wanting to reduce the number of general officers by 20 percent, three-star, four-star officers by 20 percent. | ||
| The Department of Defense just went through an exercise of this not that long ago where a number of officers, senior officers, had to be cut. | ||
| You were part of those discussions. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I heard those discussions about where they were coming and fighting. | |
| So, where are you planning to make these cuts for these three and four-star senior officers? | ||
| So, Congressman, we have actually been making some cuts in general officer billets. | ||
| I would generally agree that, again, we are overstructured on headquarters. | ||
| And, you know, we are trying to move people down into our formations. | ||
| And so I think we are doing that. | ||
| And we had already made some of those as part of Army Transformation Initiative. | ||
| We are going to make some additional cuts. | ||
| I think it is going to make us better. | ||
| Oftentimes, additional headquarters slows down processes and adds bureaucracy that is actually not going to help us. | ||
| I also think that we have updated business systems. | ||
| I call them readiness systems, that we can actually do things much more efficiently. | ||
| I look at a smart board in my office, for example, rather than calling down to somebody else. | ||
| So I do think that we can reduce those numbers. | ||
| That is part of our plan in what we are doing, and I think it is going to make us more efficient. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Well, look, I would love to see that, Cheetah, and what you think and where you think you can cut, because from my experience and what we heard in the conversations where there were a lot of arguments and fights about we need to keep this billet, we need to keep this billet, we can't let this one go. | |
| And I am suspecting that the Army is going to try and fight for its billets. | ||
| But if you are ready to kind of give those up, I guess you can. | ||
| I think the key is, Congressman, is that what we have been focused on, too, is moving people out of our headquarters. | ||
| I mean, I have been out in a couple of places, and we have like a combat division, and we are not filled with the GOs because they are doing other things, you know, that are back on whatever staff they are in at whatever higher headquarter. | ||
| So we need experienced combat leaders in our combat formations. | ||
| That is exactly what we are focused on with this, and how do we right-size to make sure that we are doing that? | ||
|
unidentified
|
No, look, I do not disagree with that at all. | |
| I think they need to be in your formations, right? | ||
| But the gentleman's time has expired. | ||
| Chair now recognizes Dr. Jackson of Texas. | ||
| Thank you, Mr. Chairman. | ||
| I would also like to thank our guests for being here today and updating our committee. | ||
| Since the beginning of the year, the United States Army has had tremendous success by refocusing the force on the needs of the warfighter, attacking inefficiency and elevating war-winning capabilities. | ||
| The American people have recognized this. | ||
| And this focus on readiness and lethality, they are in response. | ||
| They are raising their hands to serve. | ||
| In the first quarter, as mentioned, the Army is killing it on their recruitment and the retention. | ||
| And you guys are doing a great job. | ||
| I want to thank you and Secretary Hegseth and General everybody else on their efforts on this. | ||
| Across the services, we're doing a really good job on recruiting and retention, and that is a big change. | ||
| I personally want to say, thank goodness, we're not wasting money like we did over the last four years, letting DEI and the Biden's woke agenda drive our recruiting efforts. | ||
| That was an absolute waste of time. | ||
| We are past that now. | ||
| To deter and, if necessary, win against our adversaries, whenever, however, and wherever they threaten American interest, it is paramount that we provide essential funding for Army programs and capabilities. | ||
| Special Operations Forces continue to provide critical capabilities in countering violent extremist organizations globally, while also setting the theater, building partner capacity, and conducting other missions to give our adversaries pause. | ||
| The U.S. Special Operations Command operates by five soft truths, one of which is most special operations require non-special operations support. | ||
| That is why I led a provision in the FY25 NDAA that prohibits reducing Army SOF enablers until the Army provides a report on the feasibility of using inherent relationships with general purpose forces. | ||
| It is irresponsible in my mind to cut SOF forces to support for SOF forces when the requests from geographic combatant commanders are increasing and we have been told that they are increasingly being told that special operations cannot meet their needs. | ||
| Secretary Driscoll and General George, would you describe the role you see for SOF in the department as the department focuses on readiness and lethality under the Army Transformation Initiative? | ||
| I can echo the importance of SOF. | ||
| I'm going down to Fort Bragg next week to visit with them and some of those units down there. | ||
| The entire Army Transformation Initiative is premised off agility and learning lessons from the actual soldiers who are out in the field. | ||
| And no group is able to do that as effectively, oftentimes, as our Special Forces soldiers because they are able to deploy quickly into mission sets that are just a little bit irregular. | ||
| And so we are deeply tied in with their learnings, and those learnings are impacting the broader Army. | ||
| Thank you, Mr. Secretary. | ||
| The only thing I would add, and I would agree on the importance, and they're part of our transforming and contact initiatives. | ||
| They're down at our CTCs. | ||
| They're in our exercises. | ||
| And I've deployed alongside those formations for the better part of 20 years. | ||
| And every time I did, we had actually enablers that were helping them. | ||
| So, I mean, I think, again, this is not moving things. | ||
| This is about sizing our formation to make sure that we have the right capabilities for our joint force. | ||
| And that's exactly, you know, kind of what we're doing. | ||
| There's no specific plans to go into that again right now, but I think we have to continue to evolve and we'll continue to work with U.S. Army Special Operations Command as we move forward. | ||
| Yes, sir. | ||
| Thank you, General. | ||
| I've spent not near as much time in the operating theater as you have, obviously, on the operational side of the House. | ||
| I respect your opinion on all of this. | ||
| But I will say I've spent a lot of time with the Special Operations units, and in particular with the Tier 1 units, I think that the enablers that they have are special in the sense that they require lots and lots of additional training once they're assigned to those units. | ||
| And I just don't think they're interchangeable with enablers that may be in other components of the force. | ||
| But I hope that you guys will take that in consideration, take care of our special operators. | ||
| They're on the tip of the spear. | ||
| They're doing a unique job that no one else can or will do. | ||
| Real quickly, I'm just going to ask one more question. | ||
| I'm pleased to hear about the Army Transformation Initiative and the efforts to expedite future long-range assault aircraft. | ||
| Secretary Driscoll and General George, could you describe what steps you're taking in the Department to expedite this urgently needed platform with the newly designated MV-75 from the FLARA program to fill this key gap that's referred to as the airground littoral? | ||
| What are we doing to make sure that we can accelerate this and the fielding of the weapon systems associated with it? | ||
| It's critically important to the fight in the future. | ||
| I think this is a place we as an Army can grow very quickly and take into account some of the lessons learned from being a wartime body. | ||
| Where I think what allowed us to manufacture and scale so quickly in World War I and II is we had soldiers on the manufacturing floor. | ||
| And today, what we're trying to do is work with those manufacturers, have them send us lists of where the federal bureaucracy is getting in their way. | ||
| If they can't find a resource they need, we have said we will do it. | ||
| And then very importantly, we are going to try to General George. | ||
| I'll take yours offline. | ||
| I'm out of time. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| Chair now recognizes Mr. Sorensen of Illinois. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Thank you, Chairman and Ranking Member and soldiers on the manufacturing floor. | |
| You know what I'm going to talk about. | ||
| I want to talk about manufacturing and how important this is to the Rock Island Arsenal and its story to history. | ||
| Good morning. | ||
| Welcome to Secretary Driscoll and General George. | ||
| Like many of my colleagues, I am frustrated by how the Army has decided to roll out this Army transformation initiative. | ||
| You know, it doesn't matter which side of the aisle that we're on here. | ||
| We all want to make sure that the Army is lethal, it is ready to meet the challenges of today and tomorrow. | ||
| However, you chose to give us a plan with few details, with no budgeting, and a failure to answer a lot of our questions. | ||
| And now we're hearing about how this plan will be implemented from my own constituents, not from leadership. | ||
| The Army and Congress have always had a better relationship than that. | ||
| As you both know, I represent the largest government-owned and operated arsenal. | ||
| And today, we need the same commitment from you as Congress got from Abraham Lincoln that the Rock Island Arsenal will be fully funded to make the Army all it can be. | ||
| Rock Island is proud to be home of the Army Sustainment Command and Joint Munitions Command. | ||
| Both commands provide vital but different support to the soldier. | ||
| However, this Army transformation initiative calls for the integration of these two, putting Joint Munitions Command and Army Sustainment Command together. | ||
| Joint Munitions Command has been essential in overseeing Ukraine's defense of their sovereign ground. | ||
| We need to make sure it remains at the ready for the next fight. | ||
| But now, hundreds of jobs are on the line at Rock Island, and for what? | ||
| We can't afford for expertise to be lost, right at the spot where we have always bolstered our munition production. | ||
| JMC is already a lean machine with the smallest number of employees in Army material command while overseeing 18 sites. | ||
| Secretary Driscoll, you spoke in your opening statements today that the Army has been slow to innovate. | ||
| Please explain how merging these two essential missions at Rock Island will help the expertise within the Army, but also help us scale up munitions productions before 2027, as well as our growing organic industrial Industrial base. | ||
| We as a nation are incapable currently with all of the bureaucracy and regulation and overregulation and calcification of our just kind of rational decision-making bodies at creating the munitions that we need. | ||
| What we are trying to do with ATI is get rid of as many headquarters functions that we believe are overlapping and actually slowing it down. | ||
| Where more human beings may seem like it is helpful, I think, in our impression and what we have learned, it is actually harming us. | ||
| And so what we have tried to do is look across all of our headquarters units and say, where can we possibly and where can we streamline things and add a little bit of speed and save some dollars and reinvigorate the spending to things that will actually output more munitions? | ||
|
unidentified
|
So where are things being overlapped from Rock Island? | |
| Where has that occurred? | ||
| I just was going to jump in here. | ||
| I mean, where we have redundant capabilities with two headquarters that are a stone throw away from each other. | ||
| You even look at right now what you could do with modern technology. | ||
| So it was a question before: do we need two GO headquarters a stone throw away from each other that can do some of the same functions? | ||
| We want the same thing you do as far as keeping, and we are very proud of the 3D printing capability that we have at Rock Island. | ||
| We are very proud of the technicians that we have. | ||
| Those are the kinds of capabilities that we need and will continue. | ||
| And I have been out there to see that. | ||
|
Commercial Industry Adoption
00:01:33
|
||
| We have commercial industry actually coming on to use those capabilities. | ||
| So, again, I don't think I just don't want to conflate headquarters with actual capability, especially when they are just a couple of blocks apart. | ||
| And I just want to echo, Rock Island is a gem in the assets and the tools that we have. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Let's get you out there. | |
| But at the end of the day, we need to make sure that the Army Transformation Initiative isn't flawed. | ||
| I worry that this decision has unfortunately more to do with just an arbitrary cutting of Federal workforce than it does strengthening our Army and our national security. | ||
| Secretary Hagsett's one sentence in the memo is absolutely unacceptable when it comes to changing major commands and eliminating hundreds of civilian jobs. | ||
| And, Mr. Chairman, I yield back. | ||
| General Mielsbeck, I would say that I have conveyed the same sentiment, Mr. Sortenson, to General George, and that is, if budget is driving policy, you are going to have a problem by this committee. | ||
| If policy is being driven first and budget is a consequence, then we are going to be open ears. | ||
| But you can't just try to make your policy or your construct fit a number that is arbitrary. | ||
|
Congratulating Early Recruitment Success
00:02:51
|
||
| We need you to let us know what you need and then let us worry about funding it because that is what we are here for. | ||
| So just know that there are other people that see this the same way you do, which is why we need a budget so we can talk about these things. | ||
| But I can't overstate we are not going to be hostile to dramatic changes if it is being driven by the need for change and not just to meet some budget number that somebody has handed to you. | ||
| I will get off my sermon pulpit now and go to Representative Higgins of Louisiana. | ||
| Thank you, Mr. Chairman, and thank you for your passion and your leadership, sir. | ||
| I support the Chairman's description early in this hearing, Mr. Secretary and General, regarding our intention in this committee to have policy drive our narrative and our legislation. | ||
| Budget is part of our larger concern for our country, and we will address that appropriately. | ||
| What we ask of the United States Army, of which I am a proud Army veteran, we ask for you to deliver to this committee what your needs are. | ||
| And then, under the Chairman's leadership, we will drive towards accomplishing that. | ||
| I would like to mention recruiting, Ms. Secretary and General, congratulations for hitting your recruiting goal early this year. | ||
| I expect you are going to get a big bump during the rest of the year. | ||
| And let me say that it was very clear to many of us, because it has been brought up in this hearing, you know, what is the driving factor behind recruiting. | ||
| And to me, it has always been American families are the driving force between successful recruiting or failed recruiting. | ||
| And for several years, we have had families like mine advising their youngsters to refrain from joining the military if they want offense. | ||
| And since November of last year, there has been quite a shift. | ||
| Families are gaining confident in the future of the United States military, and therefore you are seeing the surge of recruitment and congratulations on that, because families are again supporting their children's consideration for service. | ||
| It has never been about money. | ||
| It has always been about what are the principles reflected in the United States Army and the United States Navy and the Air Force, Marine Corps. | ||
|
Shift to Capability Buying
00:13:15
|
||
| Do those principles reflect the core values and principles of traditional American families? | ||
| And if that alignment is solid, then your recruitment will be productive. | ||
| So thank you for that. | ||
| General and Secretary, you just mentioned the expanded capability of buying capability, your quote, General, versus being restricted by, quote, specific programs. | ||
| In order to provide the best available tech, again, your quote, General, would you mind elaborating on that? | ||
| I know you have earlier in this hearing, but please explain to America what shift we are trying to accomplish within this committee to deliver to the United States Army the ability to buy the most effective technology that is available right now or next month or in three months or six months as opposed to being locked into a specific program. | ||
| Will you clarify that, General? | ||
| Yes, Congressman. | ||
| I think, again, I will give a couple of quick examples, but drones are a perfect example that we know that that technology is rapidly advancing. | ||
| And if you bought a drone now, and I had used one in Afghanistan that was still in service, actually, when I became the chief, that was like 20 years old, you know that was old technology. | ||
| So we can't be locked into things. | ||
| We need to just have a capability. | ||
| We can come over here, and that's what we are talking about with agile funding. | ||
| We could lay out exactly what we are buying. | ||
| So, you know, we want the oversight to make sure that we are doing that. | ||
| But to maintain patients. | ||
| And that is what you are calling capabilities, correct? | ||
| That is the capability. | ||
| Drones, autonomous systems would be one. | ||
| Electronic warfare systems are going to change. | ||
| The network is going to adapt. | ||
| I mean, like phones, no one's, you know, everybody adapts their phones, updates, and does things like that. | ||
| Yes, sir. | ||
| So, General, just to clarify in the interest of time here, we want to provide the Army, what you are envisioning here, with the capability to buy, say, showroom. | ||
| If a company produces a new model that fits your capabilities that Congress has authorized and funded, you want the freedom to be able to go to the next showroom over and purchase that model versus the last one you bought. | ||
| Is that correct? | ||
| I think we also need to be responsible enough to that when we build things, we build them modular. | ||
| So the larger systems, we know active protection is going to change. | ||
| We know the network is going to change. | ||
| That you could maybe make modifications on those systems as well. | ||
| So we're not building one integrated system that takes five or six years to come to fruition that we know is going to have to change. | ||
| So we have to change too how we're doing business concerns. | ||
| Understood. | ||
| Thank you, Mr. Chairman. | ||
| Chairdown recognizes a gentlelady from Maryland, Ms. Gilfrith. | ||
| Thank you, Mr. Chair. | ||
| Thank you, gentlemen. | ||
| And General, thank you again for your hospitality and candor when this committee visited in Austin. | ||
| I echo the congratulations from this committee on recruitment numbers. | ||
| And certainly it is years of thoughtful and strategic planning in the making led by your team, General. | ||
| So we greatly appreciate that. | ||
| I'm also, I agree with and I'm relieved to hear that you say our most critical asset in the U.S. Army is our personnel. | ||
| So before I start questions, I do want to just echo my colleague, Congressman Houlihan's concerns about some of the statements that Secretary Hegseth has made as it relates to rolling back the opportunities for fully qualified women who meet every fitness standard to serve in certain roles in the U.S. Army. | ||
| Now, obviously, Secretary Hickseth will answer for himself when he's in front of this committee next week, but I unfortunately didn't hear a commitment from either of you. | ||
| Mr. Secretary, I heard that you hope for these opportunities to remain for your daughter and for others, but I don't want to presume to tell you your responsibilities, but I would hope advocating for personnel, for their hopes, their commitments, their abilities in back rooms where these conversations are being had is a responsibility that you both take to heart. | ||
| So I sincerely hope that commitment is forthcoming. | ||
| Moving on to energy, again, relieved to hear, Mr. Secretary, your thoughtfulness on this issue, representing multiple installations that are vulnerable to sea level rise and severe storms, not to mention just the general antiquated nature of our grid system, including the fact that 99 percent of our base electricity comes from outside the installation, clearly a problem. | ||
| You talked about SMRs, but can you speak a little bit to your planning for other pieces of this puzzle? | ||
| It's not just SMRs, obviously. | ||
| It's also storage. | ||
| It's also grid resilience. | ||
| Can you speak how you are prioritizing installation resilience? | ||
| So we don't talk about this as often, but what we think and what we believe and are kind of one of our core hypotheses to transformation is to go get the best of the civilian sector and create the have the Army be the ingestion point of that on behalf of the Pentagon. | ||
| And we've talked to the leadership up and down on that. | ||
| So what we just did earlier this week is we're trying to get some of the minds at some of our best-funded VC and PE-backed companies to give us insight into what they're working on today to try to figure out how do we actually just take some of their prototypes and get them on our bases so we can learn if it can work. | ||
| And so we're optimistic that we'll have some announcements on that in a couple of quarters. | ||
| That's exciting. | ||
| I think you heard you have a lot of allies on this committee for that priority. | ||
| I want to move on to Fort Dietrich, which is not in my district but in Maryland. | ||
| And as you know, the Army's Medical Research and Development Command, headquartered at Fort Dietrich, has been transitioned to the Defense Health Agency. | ||
| MRDC, when it was under Army control, was a world-class life cycle incubator for research, development, and acquisition, not just for warfighters, but for world health generally on the cutting edge of Ebola and COVID-19 outbreaks and responses. | ||
| However, the DHA contracting authority is managing, now managing that medical R D, which is different from what they've been used to, their capabilities in the past. | ||
| So, Mr. Secretary, I'm curious, how are you working with DHA so that we don't lose all of the research, all of the thought leaders that live at Fort Dietrich? | ||
| How are we going to continue to move this ball forward? | ||
| Just personally, my wife is a physician and a public health physician, no less. | ||
| And this is a topic that is incredibly important in the Army. | ||
| We believe we can continue to be a leader and innovator here. | ||
| We are working with that agency. | ||
| It is complicated that it has been merged, and we are working through some of the issues that come when you merge across a lot of different services. | ||
| But it is important, and we are happy to follow up with more details if helpful. | ||
| I appreciate that. | ||
| It is not just the mergers. | ||
| Well, there are some critical infrastructure challenges, including a new incinerator that is direly needed on that installation. | ||
| So, yes, I would love to follow up with you and your team on that. | ||
| I also share this committee's concerns about the future of the Army. | ||
| And, Mr. Secretary, I hear you say that you want greater flexibility in addressing emerging threats, and I understand that. | ||
| At the same time, that complicates our constitutional obligation to conduct oversight over taxpayer dollars and over the Army. | ||
| So, I'm going to let you set your own game or set your own goals here. | ||
| Will you return to this committee this time next year? | ||
| What measurement of progress should we hold you to? | ||
| I think that constitutional oversight is incredibly important, completely and utterly supportive of it. | ||
| I think what I have learned since being here is we went from directionally 12 funding lines 20 or 30 years ago, and we are now narrowly told over 1,400 different funding lines what we can buy. | ||
| The intent of this is not to allow us to do things with our money that you wouldn't support. | ||
| It is in, General George mentioned, for you to bucket us into appropriate areas, us to provide the receipts, and when we get too close to the line, you to provide that oversight. | ||
| I look forward to that. | ||
| Thank you, Mr. Chair. | ||
| Gentlelady, time has expired. | ||
| Chair, and I recognize the gentleman from Texas, Mr. Gooden. | ||
| Thank you, Mr. Chair. | ||
| General George, the Army says it is cutting bureaucracy and reinvesting in lethality. | ||
| But historically, we have seen so-called cuts in headquarters just result in reshuffled org charts and no real savings. | ||
| Could you show me exactly how much manpower and overhead will be eliminated under ATI and how much of those resources are being redirected to frontline units, specifically those based in Texas like Fort Cavasos and Bliss? | ||
| Yeah, we could come over, Congressman, and walk that to you in detail after the budget comes through. | ||
| And again, what we are trying to do, we have a budget and we are trying to build the very best Army for that. | ||
| And again, we are everything that we have looked at that is on that list. | ||
| We know we can better use that money in different capability, and that is what we are focused on. | ||
| So, I mean, salaries are money. | ||
| The things that we have to do, and if we have duplication and effort or we have inefficiencies, we are all about making those adjustments. | ||
| And, Congressman, just to add the end strength, the actual soldiers, when we talk about these thousand soldiers that are up in headquarters, it is not cutting them from the United States Army. | ||
| It is cutting them from jobs that they hate where they are. | ||
| We, the Army, have forced them to push paper back and forth, and we are returning them to do the job that they love, which is what they signed up to do. | ||
| And so, at least as far as I know, no soldier that is among the group that we have told, hey, we are pushing you from headquarters back out to your units, has been anything other than thrilled. | ||
| The goal is to grow our combat formations, to put people in combat formations. | ||
| Good to hear. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| I also want to thank you for your support for Gray Eagles for the Army National Guard through the appropriations in FY23 and 25. | ||
| And it is my understanding that Army Gray Eagles are now currently helping to protect our borders, and that has significantly increased their operational tempo. | ||
| Patrolling the border seems like a perfect fit for the National Guard to perform. | ||
| And I wonder if the Army is giving any thought to adding Gray Eagle force structure into all eight divisions. | ||
| Not really, Congressman. | ||
| And again, with Gray Eagle, you take Gray Eagle as it is a great platform, has been a great platform for us. | ||
| It is very expensive. | ||
| There are 150 people in a company. | ||
| It requires an airfield. | ||
| And I think there are platforms out there right now that are probably a tenth of the cost, can be operated with three or four people and can fit in the back of a truck. | ||
| And so, you know, that is kind of what we are looking at going, that we could have more of those systems. | ||
| We could have more capability for less money, and they would be updated. | ||
| And moving forward, I think that is where we need to move. | ||
| And, Congressman, for the Gray Eagle in particular, we are grateful as the United States Army for any asset we have been given or the dollars you gave us to go purchase. | ||
| We want to use it in its most effective way. | ||
| There are tools, as General George mentioned, that are significantly cheaper and better. | ||
| That what we are saying is we don't think we should purchase anymore. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| I got one more question for you. | ||
| Talking about AI, the Army, in particular, pays for humans to translate everything and translation services. | ||
| This probably wasn't on your radar today. | ||
| But the definition of government waste is, in essence, what we are doing now. | ||
| And generative AI foreign language translation solutions are being used today by several Army units to drastically increase the efficiency of Army linguists, but more could be done. | ||
| And I am wondering if you could discuss any plans, if you have any, to expand AI language translation technology across all Army divisions and where in your budget you would allocate these resources. | ||
| I can take the first part, which is almost nothing gets me more excited than the use cases of things like generative AI, both for the warfighting function of the Army, but also the Army as a business. | ||
| General George and I reference us as two discrete functions. | ||
| One is a very lethal killing machine, and then the other one is just a large enterprise-scale business that moves people and things around the country and the world. | ||
| AI is going to unlock so much value immediately on the Army as an enterprise business that we are looking actively for every single place that we can possibly take. | ||
| We have over 200 business systems, enterprise-level systems that we use. | ||
| I am picking a number that I think General George would agree with. | ||
| I don't think we need more than 20. | ||
| And AI is going to be incredible for things like language services that helping us achieve that. | ||
| Super. | ||
| Maybe at the next hearing we'll hear what gets you more excited than that. | ||
| So thank you, and I appreciate the work you're doing. | ||
| Yield back. | ||
| Gentleman yields back. | ||
| Chair, and I recognize the gentleman from Missouri, Mr. Bell. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Thank you, Mr. Chair and Ranking Member. | |
| Hello to our witnesses. | ||
| Thank you for being here and for your service as well. | ||
| And one thing that I will say about this committee that is encouraging to me on my short time and my short time here in Congress is that members on both sides of the aisle take our security and our national defense very seriously. | ||
|
Symbolic Displays vs. Real Needs
00:05:03
|
||
| And I think members on both sides of the aisle agree that we have some tough choices to make. | ||
| And we must invest in our national security. | ||
| Everyone understands that. | ||
| We must modernize our armed forces. | ||
| Everyone understands that. | ||
|
unidentified
|
But we also know that money is not infinite and resources are limited. | |
| So at a time when so many across the country, including in my own district in St. Louis, are still recovering from, and in our example, the worst natural disaster since the late 1950s, | ||
| when our adversaries are sparing no expense in investing in AI technologies, cyber warfare, technologies, hypersonic missiles, we have to ask those tough questions because we recognize we have some tough choices to make. | ||
| And so I do have to ask the question, is a parade really the best use of $45 million? | ||
| And as we have heard from many of my colleagues and as the administration has said, military recruitment and enlistment and enlistment are at some of its highest levels. | ||
| I think one of our members said that on the recruiting side, we are killing it in a good way. | ||
|
unidentified
|
And this is the highest levels of recruitment that we have seen in years. | |
| Is this correct? | ||
| Correct. | ||
|
unidentified
|
And highest, if I am not mistaken, since 2021. | |
| Is that not correct? | ||
| I think it goes back farther than that, but correct, very high. | ||
| But good. | ||
| Very. | ||
| And that's an incredible achievement. | ||
| And I think on both sides of the aisle, we all appreciate that, especially at a time when we are facing growing threats from our adversaries, that is something worth celebrating. | ||
| But that is also exactly the point. | ||
| You indicated that recruitment is surging, and that is without a $45 million price tag. | ||
| So why are we now planning to spend that money on a parade with the hopes of spiking recruitment when we are already spiking recruitment? | ||
| Why don't we just do what we are doing? | ||
| And that's not my question. | ||
| Because we are talking about symbolic displays when our real needs lie elsewhere. | ||
| Meanwhile, our adversaries are coming, and we are the measuring stick. | ||
| We are the goals that they are trying to reach and surpass. | ||
| So, in my opinion, we should be investing in what truly strengthens our military, not gestures that come at the expense of more urgent priorities. | ||
| Secretary Driscoll, with the Army investing heavily in advanced tech and modernization, how do you ensure that funds are not diverted away from essential soldier support programs such as mental health, family services, and housing, which are critical for long-term retention and morale? | ||
| I am sorry. | ||
| Would you mind repeating the question? | ||
| I absolutely lost a little in there. | ||
| I shouldn't lose my time for that, Mr. Chair. | ||
| Secretary, with the Army investing heavily in advanced tech and modernization, how do you ensure that funds are not diverted away from essential soldier support programs such as mental health, family services, and housing, which are critical for long-term retention and morale? | ||
| We totally agree, Congressman. | ||
| One of the ways we try to look to see quantitatively if the Army is healthy and with our soldiers is we think of retention as a trailing indicator of success and recruiting as a leading indicator of the success and the healthiness of the Army. | ||
| We are thrilled to say that on the retention piece, so the soldiers that are currently in the Army getting to see are we delivering to them the things that they need to care for their families and care for themselves. | ||
| We hit our annual retention goal six months into this year, and so for us, we take that as a pretty good indicator that we are delivering on our word to them. | ||
|
unidentified
|
And we hope to continue that. | |
| Yes, Congressman. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Thank you. | |
| I think that's my time. | ||
| I yield back. | ||
| Gentlemen yields back. | ||
| Chair now recognizes the gentleman from North Carolina, Mr. Harrigan. | ||
| Thank you, Mr. Chairman. | ||
| And gentlemen, thank you so much for your testimony today. | ||
| And before kind of hopping into this slide that I've got here, I just want to say that since coming to Congress, I've worked to continually educate everyone that I possibly can up here in Washington that we have a very stark choice when it comes to our defense. | ||
|
Investing in Future Warfare Capabilities
00:04:36
|
||
| We can either continue to invest in the military that we have today, or we can invest in the military that we actually need to deter or defeat China. | ||
| They are not the same choice. | ||
| We cannot choose both. | ||
| And you gentlemen have chosen voluntarily something that rarely is seen in this town to take the road of courage, which is to make change. | ||
| That is exactly what the Army Transformation Initiative is and what it does through eliminating legacy assets, force structures, and contracting mechanisms. | ||
| It actually gives us the opportunity to create the Army that we truly need in order to deter and defeat China. | ||
| So you have my sincere thanks for your efforts, and you will have my support. | ||
| Part of the Army Transformation Initiative is making sure that we start winning the economics of conflict. | ||
| And you cannot have a discussion about winning the economics of conflict without having a discussion about SUAS today. | ||
| And I think as we all have seen, as the Ukrainian battlefield has fundamentally changed the rules of modern conflict, where currently drones, FPV drones, are accounting for greater than 80% of the casualties that are inflicted on that battlefield today. | ||
| Small arms only account for 2%. | ||
| Artillery accounts for less than 12%. | ||
| The rules are changing. | ||
| And if we are to win the economics of conflict, we must address SUAS. | ||
| As we saw with Ukraine over the weekend in Operation Spider's Web, 117 different drones at an average cost of $800 per unit, costing Ukraine less than $100,000 worth of investment, inflicted more than $7 billion worth of damage against the Russians. | ||
| This is capability that we need. | ||
| It is also capability we need to defend against, and we have neither at scale right now. | ||
| We know that we are significantly behind both our adversaries and our allies in our ability to produce SUAS at scale. | ||
| Last year, China spent $29.4 billion on drones, with some experts estimating that their production volumes and capacities may exceed 500,000 units per month. | ||
| Last year, the Ukrainians produced 4 million SUAS units and are on track to produce over 5 million units this year. | ||
| The Russians are on track to produce similar numbers. | ||
| And in our current posture, we in this country are only capable of producing 50,000 SUAS per year. | ||
| So, General George, my question for you is given what we are seeing play out in Ukraine and across the globe, do you think that the United States is currently behind in the attributable SUAS space as well as the counter-SUAS space? | ||
| And if so, how do we close the gap? | ||
| I agree with everything you said, Congressman. | ||
| We have to get cost curve is a big part of it, and then we have to be able to produce things at scale. | ||
| And I think that that is one of the things that we are talking about with our industrial base: that we need to be able to produce brushless motors, controllers, all those things that we know go into that. | ||
| That right now, Chinese companies, let's say DJI, is producing 15 million drones a year, and we need to have the ability to do that. | ||
| So, that is where when we talk about scale, and we are doing some of that with 3D printing, that is exactly what we need to be able to do. | ||
| And on the flip side, the same thing with scaling on counter-UAS. | ||
| Thank you, General George. | ||
| And Secretary Driscoll, as you and General George have overhauled Army business processes, how will you deploy AI-driven industrial-based analytics and visibility to flag Chinese choke points in our critical materials, restore U.S. forging and casting capacity, and redesign systems for surge-ready sustainment so that our logisticians and warfighters aren't left waiting for parts in the next fight? | ||
|
Basic Allowance Hike Discussion
00:06:12
|
||
| Congressman, this is an incredibly important topic. | ||
| And much like many of our answers, the solution exists already in the commercial space, and we have done a poor job of integrating that into our systems. | ||
| And we are actively working on it and hoping to be able to announce a solution in the coming weeks or months. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Thank you, gentlemen. | |
| Mr. Chairman, I yield back. | ||
| Gentleman yields back. | ||
| Chair now recognizes the gentlelady from Washington, Ms. Trickland. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Thank you. | |
| Thank you, Chairman Rogers. | ||
| It is nice to see you, Secretary Driscoll, and General George, formerly of 1st Corps at Joint Base Lewis-McCord. | ||
| So glad to see your role in the Army. | ||
| So in our testimony today, you have heard a lot about quality of life. | ||
| And I was appointed to serve on the Quality of Life panel. | ||
| And we know that housing has always been a very, very important factor. | ||
| And I heard one of you say that recruitment is how you actually judge whether we are doing well. | ||
| But I would also say retention is just as important. | ||
| We are thrilled in a bipartisan way to see the recruiting numbers go up. | ||
| That is a multi-year, bipartisan effort that started in 2023. | ||
| And even in August of 2024, we had record numbers of recruiting for Army. | ||
| So kudos to everyone, and let's see those numbers continue to rise. | ||
| But I want to talk about the basic allowance for housing. | ||
| I know that in the reconciliation bill, there is a provision for a one-time infusion of nearly $3 billion into the basic allowance for housing account. | ||
| But there is no further direction on how that money is going to be allocated. | ||
| So let's assume this bill becomes law. | ||
| How does the Army intend to use this money? | ||
| Are you going to, for example, raise a basic allowance for housing up to 100 percent and keep it there? | ||
| Are you going to take it up to 98 percent? | ||
| Can you be more specific about how we plan to use this basic allowance for housing? | ||
| And I'll start with Secretary Driscoll and then General George. | ||
| And just to your point, Congresswoman, first, the retention, we totally agree. | ||
| We are thrilled. | ||
| We told one of your colleagues earlier that we hit our 12-month goal six months into this year, which makes us feel good about the state of the Army. | ||
| And to your point, those mechanisms and that experience that those soldiers had began years and years and years ago to make them want to sign back up to enlist for BAH and for what we do with military construction and for how we provide our soldiers what they deserve, where they deserve to live individually and where they deserve to live with their families. | ||
| One of the fundamental problems we have, and we desperately need your help, is when we build something on the base, like just inside of our gate, we just did a study. | ||
| It is 68.5 percent more expensive than on the other side. | ||
| And as far as we can tell, the vast majority of those inefficiencies are not from us. | ||
| They are legislated to us. | ||
| And so as we think about soldier housing and work together to solve it, we want to work with you to get rid of a lot of those regulations. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I appreciate that. | |
| Now, can you go to my question about the basic allowance for housing? | ||
| $3 billion in the reconciliation bill. | ||
| How do you plan to distribute that money? | ||
| Are you going to raise it to $100 permanently, to 98 percent permanently? | ||
| That is my specific question. | ||
| I would have to follow up. | ||
| I don't remember. | ||
| I know that was the intent, was to fully cover the costs. | ||
| I don't remember if that was a step. | ||
| The challenge when I was out at Lewis was these things go, you know, happen very quickly as far as that. | ||
| What happened out there was a very hot housing market and then put a real strain. | ||
| So I think we also need to just figure out how we are a little bit more dynamic in our process when prices go up. | ||
| Obviously, no one minds getting a little bit more in their checkbook. | ||
| I know I didn't from growing up. | ||
| The problem is when the costs go down and how you adjust some of those things. | ||
| But I do think we need to be a little bit more flexible in how we are figuring some of those things out moving forward so that we are more responsive, which is what was the problem that I experienced up at JBLM. | ||
| We weren't quick enough with our soldiers and getting the money as the prices were going up. | ||
|
unidentified
|
So what do we plan to do with this $3 billion? | |
| Is there a plan? | ||
| It is specifically labeled. | ||
| I would have to come back to you. | ||
| It is specifically labeled for housing and BAH, then that is what we would use it on. | ||
| That is how it has been. | ||
|
unidentified
|
So the basic allowance for housing will go up. | |
| Is that specific to Joint Base Lewis-McChord? | ||
|
unidentified
|
It just says basic allowance for housing, $3 billion in the reconciliation bill. | |
| And my question is, how do you plan to deploy that money? | ||
| Is it going to go up? | ||
| I would go against housing. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Okay. | |
| All right. | ||
| And then one final comment I want to make. | ||
| You have heard a lot about funding for barracks, obviously. | ||
| And I am going to add and pile on to this just to emphasize how important this is to so many members who sit on this committee. | ||
| And it was a little disheartening to hear that you are going to reprogram a billion dollars from barracks housing to put to the southern border. | ||
| And we have people at Camp Humphreys, we have people at JBLM, we have people around the world. | ||
| And if you visited those barracks, as you all know, the condition is deplorable. | ||
| A college parent taking their student to see the quality of those dorms would actually raise holy hell about it or have them disenroll from that school. | ||
| And so I think my question is, you know, please think carefully about restoring that money. | ||
| It is a quality of life. | ||
| Generally, his time has expired. | ||
| Chier now recognizes a gentleman from Kansas, Mr. Schmidt. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Thank you, Mr. Chairman. | |
| General Miss Secretary, thank you for being here, and we appreciate the time you have given to us this morning. | ||
| General, we had a briefing some time ago in which you presented to us, and one of the issues that was discussed briefly, as we look forward kind of toward the horizon and the need to continue to integrate UAS operations into our own land forces operations, we had some discussion about the importance of identifying maneuver space, operation and training space in the continental U.S. where that can occur. | ||
|
Working Local At Fort Riley
00:04:19
|
||
| Can you paint out for us briefly sort of what that thought process looks like? | ||
| Are we trying to identify locations? | ||
| I represent Fort Riley, for example, as one example, but locations other than the NTC in Louisiana where we can do those types of operations. | ||
| What is our thought process? | ||
| Yeah, so there is a very good training area that is very close to Fort Riley that we can train. | ||
| And our challenge has been to every local leader is that we are working at all the local levels, that everybody is getting together just like they have been doing with you out at Fort Riley. | ||
| We know drones are going to be part of our formations. | ||
| We are going to have to start training those kinds of things. | ||
| And so working with the local authorities, and I always give the example when I was a division commander, we sent the paperwork up and then we worked it locally and we had it all figured out before the paperwork came back. | ||
| And so I think a lot of these are going to be local solutions because they have to take local considerations from FAA or FCC that is, for example, in the State of Kansas. | ||
| And so we are talking about that. | ||
| We are going to have leaders together again this month and we will talk about that topic again. | ||
| I think we are going to have to continue to adapt. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Thank you, General. | |
| Well, we want to be supportive generally, not just from a Fort Riley standpoint, but I will assure you from a Fort Riley and 1st Infantry standpoint, we would like to be helpful in making sure that all of the appropriate local players are engaged and are helpful. | ||
| We want to make that happen. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I might also ask, either for you, General, or for you, Mr. Secretary, however you want to take this. | |
| I also represent Fort Leavenworth, the intellectual center of the Army. | ||
| We are obviously following the ATI discussion with great interest, and particularly some of the TRAYDOC changes and the combination with the Futures Command. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Can you tell us what we need to be focused on or what we might expect or what you can share at this point in terms of the role of the Combined Arms Center going forward, the Centers of Excellence? | |
| We want to make sure that Fort Leavenworth and its many intellectual and training assets not only remain but are bolstered in all of this so that we are meeting the needs of the Army going forward. | ||
| CAC Combined Arms Center is critically important to us. | ||
| That is going to remain there. | ||
| How we do business there is, we are talking about how we are training, and we are partnering right now, for example, with Arizona State University and seeing how we might do some distance learning a little bit different. | ||
| We are still going to have majors that are going there, but how can we make other offerings? | ||
| Just like anywhere else, we are looking at what we can do. | ||
| Do we have outdated systems that we have been doing? | ||
| One example is I think we need to update our doctrine much more rapidly in what we are doing. | ||
| And so part of that is going to be upskilling the people that we have there. | ||
| Part of that is going to be changing the systems that we have, the business software, the automation, and the things that we have right there so that skills are going to change. | ||
| So I think we are just getting started with all of that. | ||
| And we just had a big conversation on this yesterday. | ||
| Overall, I don't see much change at Leavenworth, but there will be puts and takes as we move forward to adapt like any business would do. | ||
| And, Congressman, I would just say for TRADOC, we haven't hit that a lot in this hearing yet, but a lot of the tools that exist that COVID pushed forward for learning, we hope that we can use those for our soldiers to train them where they are, train them in the community where their kids are already in school, prevent them from having to travel and uproot their lives for four to six months at a time. | ||
| We are incredibly optimistic, like General George was saying, that those tools already exist. | ||
| We are working with them to pilot programs to see how much military training can be done remotely. | ||
|
North Carolina's Role in Army Partnerships
00:05:48
|
||
| Can we use things like MEDA's glasses to help train and create a layering with artificial reality that will allow it to achieve much of those goals a lot faster and a lot cheaper for the American taxpayer? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Thank you, Mr. Secretary. | |
| Thank you, General. | ||
| I just want to say I know General Beagle's time at Leavenworth is as limited as it always is, and our team wants to be very helpful and supportive of the Army moving forward and do that as we can. | ||
| I yield back. | ||
| Gentleman yields back. | ||
| Chair, I recognize the gentleman from North Carolina, Mr. Davis. | ||
| Thank you so much, Mr. Chair. | ||
| General George, thank you so much for your continued service. | ||
| It's always good to see you. | ||
| Mr. Secretary, I want to first and foremost, with all of my heart, thank you to be out there at the Vietnam Memorial Wall, watching that wall together, preparing for the American people to come out for Memorial Day. | ||
| It meant a lot to see you that day. | ||
| And it was early in the morning, and we still made it after a long day overnight here. | ||
| My question is, starting with the Global Trans Park in Eastern North Carolina, I know you are familiar with North Carolina, which I proudly represent, North Carolina's first congressional district, has tremendous capability in leveraging its intermultimobile functions to partner with the U.S. Army. | ||
| Secretary Driscoll, how do you see the value of partnering with entities such as the Global Trans Park in the East and units like the 18th Airborne Corps at Fort Bragg, given the Global Transpark's unique skill and scope to serve as a mobility platform for the Army's tactical equipment and aircraft? | ||
| I think those partnerships, Congressman, are incredibly important, incredibly valuable. | ||
| A lot of them, we get our best practices from watching and learning how they do it. | ||
| The more soldiers are around civilian counterparts, we are able to strengthen our ability to do transportation in the contested logistics and with the tyranny of distance we are going to face in Indo-Paycom. | ||
| We have got to learn a lot of lessons. | ||
| We have to update the tools we are using and the best practices. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Lieutenant Colonel Hamilton actually came and visited the Global Trans Park and saw the site, you know, the training potential, large-scale nature, logistics exercises. | ||
| And where I would like to get to, I would love to see you in Eastern North Carolina extend an invitation personally to you. | ||
| Now I am going to give you the toughest question you have had today. | ||
| And, Mr. Chair, I am asking for you not to rule me out of order. | ||
| Western Carolina barbecue or Eastern Carolina barbecue? | ||
| I am a Mountains of North Carolina boy, so I am a Western North Carolina. | ||
| But I have learned to appreciate that vinegar flavor. | ||
| Well, I tell you, you have a staff that they seem they have been here all morning. | ||
| We might have to have a taste test and figure that out. | ||
| Shifting back to the East, East Carolina University is the heartbeat of Eastern North Carolina, leading in research, and we are depending and relying so much on Federal assistance in terms of what is going into the research dollars. | ||
| The school has enjoyed long-term successful partnership with the Army already through the Pathfinder Airborne Program, through the NDAA and the defense appropriations process. | ||
| We are working trying to make sure that we can get an additional $8 million in that effort. | ||
| Innovation is the greatest comparative advantage in the U.S. military. | ||
| So, I guess to both, Mr. Secretary and to the General, do you support preserving, broadly speaking, and expanding the mission through Pathfinders airborne program to continue to enhance the value, in particular, of the soldier lethality technology account? | ||
| We certainly support increasing our lethality and our partnerships. | ||
| I mean, again, I think to the Secretary's earlier comment, whatever we can do that's already being done, we can take advantage of that's being done in our universities. | ||
| It's being done commercially. | ||
| That's what we want to do. | ||
| We are, you know, we are just talking, we are going through a process right now, making sure that we review how we spend our ST and what we are doing. | ||
| We are not duplicating our efforts that could be done in other places. | ||
| And I think that that's what we have to constantly review. | ||
| So we appreciate what Eastern Carolina University has done. | ||
| And I would just echo, I think I hope what's coming through in a lot of our remarks is we, the Army, have not done a historically good job sometimes of taking what already exists in the civilian sector, whether it's in education in our institutions or whether it's in for-profit or nonprofit companies. | ||
| But we are trying to get better so that we can save dollars and reallocate them to the things that we need. | ||
| Well, Mr. Secretary, I can say having someone from Boone, North Carolina, serving our country, means a lot, but I'm standing by the East. | ||
| And when you find out in Kinston, North Carolina, the home of the Global Transport, that we hold the world record in the most barbecue sandwiches sold in an eight-hour period. | ||
| I look forward to having one of those. | ||
|
unidentified
|
All right. | |
| I yield back, Mr. Chairman. | ||
| If you want some good barbecue, you can come to Alabama. | ||
|
Pinyon Canyon Maneuver Site
00:10:09
|
||
| General from Colorado, Mr. Crank recognized. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Thank you, Mr. Chairman. | |
| And thank you, Mr. Secretary. | ||
| General George, thank you. | ||
| It's good to see you again. | ||
| I know you have a soft spot, General George, for Fort Carson. | ||
| It's also home, of course, to Pinyon Canyon Maneuver Site. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I want to talk about that for a minute. | |
| That's located 150 miles south of the main base. | ||
| Pinion Canyon, of course, provides the Army with significant strategic and operational value by serving as a critical training ground for large-scale force-on-force maneuver exercises. | ||
| However, as you know, large portions of Pinyon Canyon are restricted from military use because of a natural gas pipeline that runs right through the middle of the site. | ||
| This pipeline is unnecessary and it's redundant to our power needs. | ||
| And I'm glad to have your support in finding a solution to have it removed. | ||
| In the meantime, can you describe for the committee the restrictions that this pipeline places on the Army's ability to train at Pinion Canyon? | ||
| Okay, it's been a couple days since I've been out there. | ||
| But yeah, I think it's privately owned. | ||
| It is. | ||
| And so, you know, it will be up to the, and they're using, as far as when I was out there, they're using a pipeline. | ||
| So, what when we would cross it, I would describe it more as it was an inconvenience when we were training. | ||
| I mean, it's still a great training area that we were able to be down there. | ||
| You had to cross in certain crossing points. | ||
| It's a pretty vast area. | ||
| So, that was a challenge. | ||
| Would it be better if the pipeline wasn't there? | ||
| Yes, it would be helpful. | ||
| Could we do LIFE's fire exercises there if we didn't have that? | ||
| Obviously, not. | ||
| You wouldn't do that. | ||
| I know that we have a sizable impact area down on Fort Carson. | ||
| We could obviously add that. | ||
| But again, when we rack and stack things as far as cost, I'm not sure that that's where I would invest first. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Okay. | |
| I'm also very proud of the work that the 4th Infantry Division from Fort Carson, working with Northern Command, is doing down on the border to stop the flow of illegal immigration. | ||
| We've heard a lot about that. | ||
| I think it's great. | ||
| It's important. | ||
| We've seen what this administration has been able to do to stop the flow of illegal immigration and the military support doing that. | ||
| And some of the folks from 4th Infantry Division in Fort Carson doing that. | ||
| Can you give me an update on their activities down at the border? | ||
| Yeah, I'm sure the Secretary will probably want to jump in too, but 2nd Brigade, 4th ID is down there every report we get, and we probably at least every other week I'm up on the net with the commander that is in charge down there, the division commander that is down there. | ||
| We are also trying to, besides the great job that they are doing with that mission, we are also trying to be very focused on what we can do to update those units. | ||
| And that's, you know, they are doing a lot of the kind of missions that they would do, whether it was reconnaissance or guard missions. | ||
| So we are also looking at how we can update their network, what we can do to provide them additional capabilities. | ||
| So we are also looking at this as an opportunity that we can continually transform those units as well. | ||
| And I would just echo, I have been down to the border twice now, one when 10th Mountain took over the mission there. | ||
| And talking to the law enforcement on the border, my experience from what they have said and what our soldiers have said is the mission is going well. | ||
| They find it an honor to work with the law enforcement and provide support for them as they do their job. | ||
| The Customs and Border Patrol have said the assets the Army has been able to provide have made a big difference, and we are excited that our soldiers are down there and being supported. | ||
| And it is remarkable. | ||
| Within months, we have seen a 97 percent reduction in the number of humans coming across that southern border. | ||
| So thank you for that. | ||
| I won't have really much time on this, but Secretary Driscoll, I wanted to talk to you. | ||
| Fort Carson, home of the 11th Expeditionary Combat Aviation Brigade, and that's one of two aviation brigades the Army is proposing to inactivate. | ||
| And I've heard concerns that the Army Reserve Force structure could be unable to absorb the newly orphaned 11th Brigade personnel, resulting in a loss of technical skills and years of experience if they're forced to reclassify. | ||
| Are you considering integrating these soldiers into training roles to keep them relevant and sharp if we need them for current and future requirements? | ||
| We have not heard of those concerns. | ||
| We can absolutely follow back up with your office. | ||
| And just to the broader point, as we are shuffling and reordering all of this, we realize this is a sacred responsibility to take care of those soldiers and that they provide an incredible asset to our Army, and we are taking that into account. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Great. | |
| Thank you. | ||
| I think I could just jump really quick, Congressman. | ||
| That is the idea. | ||
| One of those units is right there close to 4th Infantry Division and right close to 4th CAB, and we could use those pilots. | ||
| Gentlemen's time has expired. | ||
| Chair now recognizes the gentleman from California, Mr. Tran. | ||
| Thank you, Mr. Chairman. | ||
| General George, good seeing you again. | ||
| Secretary Driscoll, welcome. | ||
| The Army Transformation Initiative has generated more questions than answers in the Department's attempt to deliver critical warfighting capabilities, optimize our force structure, and eliminate waste and obsolete programs. | ||
|
unidentified
|
In particular, I am concerned with how the ATI position positions the Army to better counter a near-peer adversary like the People's Republic of China. | |
| China's ability to rapidly field new capabilities can be attributed to its centralized political and military decision-making, state-directed industrial base, incremental fielding of new systems, and their blatant theft of foreign intellectual property, all with little to no public oversight. | ||
| Secretary Driscoll, what acquisition reforms will help us counter China's ability to rapidly field capabilities compared to our slower system that is bound by checks and balances across the DOD and Congress? | ||
| Reliance on private sector defense contractors, protected IP, and real oversight. | ||
| Congressman, I wouldn't want it to seem as if we don't want the checks and imbalances. | ||
| I think that is an incredibly important part of our system of government. | ||
| So I hope that it is not coming across that we don't want the congressional or the constitutionally mandated oversight function of this or anybody. | ||
| I think what we have reflected on, what I told one of your colleagues earlier, what we think there are a couple of fundamental things that are slowing down our ability to keep up. | ||
| One of them is our own bureaucracy. | ||
| We have nearly 35,000. | ||
| If you define the number of human beings in the United States Army, in our civilian sector, and our soldiers that are helping us buy things, we have like 35,000. | ||
| It is just too many people. | ||
| They are all, many of them are noble and patriotic people, but we have got to, as an Army, streamline a bit. | ||
| When we receive our funding and it is so narrowly focused to 1,400 line items, it prevents us from being able to purchase the modern updated version of a thing. | ||
| And when you look at something like drones that are needing to be updated in Ukraine nearly every 10 days to 14 days, our way of funding as a country just doesn't fundamentally work. | ||
| And so what we are asking is to work with all of you to create buckets of funding to drones, and then we would use those dollars to purchase them, show you our receipts, and you would ask the constitutionally mandated questions to make sure we are doing that accurately. | ||
| That's great. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
|
unidentified
|
General, anything to add? | |
| I mean, I just the agile funding is a big piece of it, and we could, you know, in modern technology, we could come over with a database and show you that every day if you had the appetite for that. | ||
| I think we are trying to also change requirements is a big part of what we are doing. | ||
| And we are trying to describe things, what we need, like we were doing out on the West Coast when we were bringing industry in. | ||
| And they would understand our problems. | ||
| That is part of what we are doing with transforming and contact. | ||
| We have engineers with our users, with our soldiers that understand the problems we are trying to solve, and we don't have these big 300-page documents. | ||
| And then I think we have to start buying, looking at everything we buy as being more modular and open system architecture. | ||
| Again, you go back to the technology that we have in our pocket, and we have to buy a little bit more like that, even for larger systems that we do. | ||
| But getting away from the programmer record is, I think, in a lot of these things is very important for us. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I appreciate those remarks, gentlemen. | |
| Russia's war in Ukraine has also exposed weakness in the U.S. munitions industrial base, providing Ukraine with over 1.5 million 155 millimeter rounds, has pushed the U.S. industrial base to capacity, while China's capacity for peacetime production of artillery shells still outpaces that of the U.S. Secretary Driscoll, can you speak specifically about the investment the Army is making to modernize our munitions industrial base to ensure that we have sufficient stockpiles of munitions and capacity to surge if needed? | ||
| And how does this compare to China's munitions industrial capacity? | ||
| I will answer in reverse order. | ||
| We are worse. | ||
| I was down in Camden, Arkansas at a General Dynamics Load Assemble and PAC facility recently, which is trying to help us with 155s. | ||
| And it was an investment from this committee and your colleagues that I think helped with that. | ||
| And even that is insufficient. | ||
| We are not where we need to be. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Do you know how long it would take us to get to that point where we can be sufficient? | |
| Under our current funding and our current constraints, I would guess it would be 20 years or more. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Jesus. | |
| Great. | ||
| With all that talk of barbecue, I am hungry. | ||
| I yield back, Mr. Chairman. | ||
|
Guam's Clean Audit
00:14:59
|
||
| Well, thank you, Mr. Tran. | ||
| But you raise an issue that is very important, and your answer is dead on the money right and unacceptable. | ||
| We have got to get after this munitions production capability issue, and we have got to do it in World War II fashion of speed. | ||
| So I want ideas thinking out of the box about solutions, and you will find this committee very receptive to being helpful. | ||
| But thank you for raising that, Mr. Tran. | ||
| Chair now recognizes the gentleman from Guam, Mr. Moyland. | ||
| Thank you, Mr. Chairman, Secretary Jasco, and General George. | ||
| Thank you for your service in presenting the Army's FY26 priorities before this committee. | ||
| Secretary, in FY25 cycle, I work to increase the National Guard minor military construction budget so that sufficient funds will be available to the Guam National Guard unfunded priorities, including a new hardened operations center. | ||
| As we move into the FY26 cycle, will your budget prioritize facilities used by the Guam Army National Guard? | ||
| And how can I work with your Department to advance the needs of the Guam Guard in the Indo-Pacific? | ||
| We would love to work with you and hear more about that, and I can follow up with specifics to your office. | ||
| I appreciate that. | ||
| General George, talk to me about the steps the Army is taking to address critical gaps identified in the May 22 GAO report on the Guam Missile Defense System, particularly the lack of long-term installation support strategy, personnel requirements, and basic readiness infrastructure for soldiers and families supporting Guam missile defense mission. | ||
| How are you ensuring the Army does not repeat the same logistical missteps with the deployment of GDS elements that GAO highlighted? | ||
| First, I want to just tell you, Congressman, we are very proud of the Guam Guard. | ||
| You know that from being out there. | ||
| And I think they are part, as you know, part of the part of that unit that we have out there. | ||
| And we are trying to actually make that a better mix, you know, the people that actually live there and defending their Guam right there from the Guam Guard. | ||
| We are working with the Navy. | ||
| As you know, the Navy is in charge of all the installations that are there. | ||
| When I came out to visit, one of our big things was making sure that we understood what our soldiers were, how they were living, what they were doing. | ||
| They are very tough out there in doing that, but I would agree that we need to make some adjustments. | ||
| We have just recently signed an MOU with both the Navy, I think with Admiral Parpero and the Commandant of the Marine Corps. | ||
| There is a base there. | ||
| There is structure there for our soldiers that could actually stay in that structure. | ||
| And that is the plan right now for them to move the folks that we do have. | ||
| So all that we would have as part of that, you know, the missile defense that is out there would be able to stay. | ||
| And I think in facilities that are finished and are very nice. | ||
| And, Congressman, I would just echo that Guam. | ||
| We talk about it often. | ||
| I think next month I am going out there to visit it. | ||
| And so it comes up in conversations, if not daily, at least weekly. | ||
| We have great barbecue in Guam. | ||
| General, what steps are being taken to ensure that the Guam Army National Guard has access to modernized equipment, consistent training resources, and integration of regional exercises under the FY26 budget? | ||
| I think you will see, Congressman, this comes out. | ||
| We talk about the Army. | ||
| Part of what we were just talking about with aviation, what we are doing to change our mobile brigade combat teams, this applies across every component, and we need to update it. | ||
| Every component is going to have to fix their network. | ||
| Every component is going to have to become more mobile and lower signature. | ||
| Every component is going to have to use drones. | ||
| So it is going to be all a part of that. | ||
| And obviously, what that unit is doing out there that is part of that integrated air and missile defense system, they will be a priority for making sure that they can do those things. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| Let's see. | ||
| Mr. Secretary, can you also clarify whether the Army is actively planning any movements of personnel or units from South Korea to Guam? | ||
| I can't provide any sort of confirmation on those specific movements, but I think the Secretary of Defense and President are very actively engaged in the posturing of our troops around the world, and we support them. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Okay. | |
| Finally, just a few more seconds. | ||
| Art that System General, there was an incident raised with serious concern about the infrastructure and surveillance with drones. | ||
| We did have an incident out there, and can you speak of the Army's assessment of the incident and what steps are being taken to strengthen against drones? | ||
| We have been talking a lot about drones. | ||
| I think we need to do a lot. | ||
| I am not familiar with your specific incident that happened out there, but I will call the TAG out there and find out what he did. | ||
| So thank you. | ||
| Thank you, gentlemen. | ||
| Mr. Chair, I yield back. | ||
| Chair recognizes the gentlelady from New Hampshire, Ms. Goodlander. | ||
| Thank you, Mr. Chairman. | ||
| Secretary Discoll, General George, thank you so much for being here today. | ||
| You know, I wanted to be on this committee because it has a long bipartisan tradition, and I am really grateful to you, Mr. Chairman, for your leadership on acquisition reform. | ||
| I kind of talk about this line of effort, which has strong bipartisan support in a slightly different way. | ||
| To me, monopolies and corporate abuses of power in our defense sector have undermined our military readiness. | ||
| They have been a prolific driver of waste, fraud, and abuse for the American taxpayer. | ||
| And they have really hurt American small businesses, which are the beating heart of our economy. | ||
| I am very encouraged that you, Secretary Driscoll, have prioritized one of the most pernicious corporate practices, the monopolization of repair in the Army Transformation Initiative. | ||
| I am encouraged about your commitment to, as I understand it, and I want to be sure I understand it, that you have committed to ensuring that any existing or future contract is going to include a right to repair for our military and our service members. | ||
| Is that right? | ||
| Very explicitly, Congresswoman. | ||
| On a go-forward basis, we have been directed to not sign any contracts that don't give us a right to repair. | ||
| On a go-back basis, we have been directed to go and do what we can to go get that right to repair. | ||
| And I can say on a personal how important I think this is, we hope that anyone listening to us who hopes to pitch us a contract going forward will look back at their previous agreements they've signed with us. | ||
| And if they are unwilling to give us that right to repair, I think we are going to have a hard time negotiating with them. | ||
| So how are you resourcing and executing on this commitment? | ||
| We have directed our staff to, throughout all of contracting, follow through on it. | ||
| And how much do you expect this will save the American taxpayer? | ||
| I would be pulling a number that I think would be hard to defend with math, Congresswoman, but I think as important as the dollars is we were telling your colleagues when we tour bases, you see pieces of equipment that can be upwards of $2,3 million that will be unused for a year at a time because it's something that we can 3D print for a cost of $2 to $20. | ||
| And beyond just the sinfulness of not using that asset, the American soldiers see that and they are not able to use it, and that is incredibly demoralizing. | ||
| And so this is a virtuous cycle that I think benefits us in a lot of ways. | ||
| And can you commit that you will work with this committee on a bipartisan basis to codify a right to repair for our military and service members? | ||
| I can commit that it is an incredibly important topic, and I would do whatever I can personally and in this role to help. | ||
| Well, I hope we can count on you for that. | ||
| I wanted to ask you, I think you do agree that the Army should pass a clean audit. | ||
| I hope you agree. | ||
| The trust, General George and I talk a lot about the responsibility and duty that we have to the American taxpayer. | ||
| And an audit is a trailing indicator of that responsibility. | ||
| I think that the way that most audits functions, as I understand them, the United States Army and how we manage our equipment makes us uniquely difficult to pass audits. | ||
| But it's uniquely important to make sure you're passing the clean audit. | ||
| So are you on track to pass a clean audit in this fiscal year? | ||
| I can tell you that we have had more discussions about audit here in the last couple of weeks. | ||
| So yes, we are completely focused on doing that. | ||
| And are you on track to pass a clean audit in this fiscal year? | ||
| That's our goal. | ||
| I think it would be very hard to do that, but we are trying to do everything that we can in the Congresswoman by December 31st, 2028. | ||
| Oh, I'm well aware of that. | ||
| We are pushing as hard as we can to do it as quickly as possible. | ||
| I am cautious to say yes because of the unknown unknowns. | ||
| I understand. | ||
| We all want to crack down on waste, fraud, and abuse. | ||
| And passing a clean audit is essential to that task. | ||
| It is essential to public trust. | ||
| And I hope we can work together to make sure that we get the Army across the finish line, just like our colleagues in the Marine Corps. | ||
| I want to also put a plug for, I'm on the Small Business Committee. | ||
| We have two important programs. | ||
| Are you familiar with the Small Business Innovation Research and Technology Transfer Programs administered by the Small Business Administration? | ||
| I am not. | ||
| Well, I would love to educate you on these programs. | ||
| They will be expiring on September 30th, and they have done a lot for tens of thousands of small businesses that want to be a part of our defense industrial base, and that could do a lot of good for this country. | ||
| So I hope that we can work together to extend those programs, which have been so important to competition in the defense industrial base. | ||
| With that, I yield back. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| Gentlemen yields back. | ||
| Chair not recognized the gentleman from Texas, Mr. Fallon. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Mr. Chairman, thank you. | |
| And thank you, Mr. Secretary, and thank you, General, for being here. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Okay, on the recruiting. | |
| So, Secretary, you were talking about hitting the recruiting goals, and I was the first one to cheer. | ||
| And that is a huge, because we really, for the last, was it three, four or five years, we weren't hitting those goals, and we are in a crisis. | ||
|
unidentified
|
So, praise the Lord. | |
| One thing I would really like to hear your thoughts on, and General, if you wanted to pipe in as well, is we hit our goals, but I want to know why. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Why? | |
| What happened? | ||
| We were unsuccessful for two, three, four years. | ||
| I mean, I have my own suspicions, but I want to begin with doubts and end uncertainties. | ||
| So, I would really encourage you both to look into what happened. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Why are we succeeding? | |
| Because obviously, we want to replicate that. | ||
| So, I just wanted to hear your thoughts on that, Mr. Chairman. | ||
| I will speak in time and work backwards. | ||
| So, most recently, the focus on a return to warfighting and lethality as far as we can tell qualitatively on these tours, it seems to be resonating with soldiers. | ||
| It seems when I was at the Future Soldier Prep course that the ones who wanted to join and were at the very front edge of their careers were excited to join in a time where they thought they could contribute to the safety of their community by being on the front line of keeping Americans safe. | ||
| I think there are some structural changes that this committee worked hard on over the years before to help with things like the Future Soldier Prep Course. | ||
| Some of these soldiers who were right on the edge of the fitness standards are right on the edge of the testing to get in and just needed a little bit of academic tutoring to get over. | ||
| I think that helped a lot. | ||
| It seems to be a very virtuous cycle where as the momentum has picked up, we've been able to fill all of the gaps that we had in individual specialties. | ||
| We think we are going to go into next year with 25,000 soldiers in the delayed entry program. | ||
| And so what is nice about the momentum that has been built by this committee and the Army in the last six months since President Trump came into office, we hope that that will carry forward into next year as well, and we expect it to. | ||
| You know, in general, I would just like just an honest brokering of why we succeeded, what has changed, and whatever that is. | ||
| And I'm not looking to score political points. | ||
| I just want to know the truth of what that is. | ||
| I will add on to what the Secretary was talking about. | ||
| It is leadership, obviously. | ||
| For us, it has been picking the right recruiters. | ||
| And one of the things, I mean, what we don't want to do is say, hey, we're all good to go, is that we're continuing to look at this. | ||
| One of the things that we're looking at is the tech that we need to update to make it easier for recruiters. | ||
| We've tried to reduce the forms that when you come in, it was something like 670 forms that had to be filled out, and we have reduced that to below 10. | ||
| And it's now going to be in a database. | ||
| So I think this is something that we need to continue. | ||
| I mean, it's a big portion of what we do. | ||
| That is the one thing that we, I think, have consistently taking a brief on that together each and every month. | ||
| And that's going to continue. | ||
| This isn't a, hey, we're good to go now. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Sure. | |
| And I wanted to also thank Chairman Rogers for his leadership on the quality of life. | ||
| I think that will probably, when we ask why they came in, be one of the reasons why we have succeeded. | ||
| We also, as our job, and certainly as the subcommittee chair of military personnel, making sure that your recruiters have the access that they need in those high schools, particularly if they are getting Federal grant money. | ||
| I think that's very important. | ||
| I want to, in my limited time, skip to when I took this job, I promised to do what is in the best interest of the United States and what is in the best interest of the U.S. military on this committee. | ||
| And I'm fully committed to that, because we have people that say that and they say, well, not in my district. | ||
| And I'm not going to be one that says I want to protect my district at the expense of the United States or at the expense of the military in readiness and taxpayer dollars. | ||
| But I think from a policy perspective, when you talk about Red River Army Depot, there is a currency in redundancy to some degree. | ||
| I remember when we asked the Germans after World War II in the post-action report, and they said one of the things they said was if you just kept bombing the ball bearings plants, we would have been belly up. | ||
|
Drones And Skillful Workforce
00:06:10
|
||
|
unidentified
|
But you didn't. | |
| You kept moving. | ||
| And we were like, thank the Lord. | ||
| But that specificity, now, if we learn those lessons, I'm sure the Chinese did too. | ||
| And if they take out certain things that don't have any redundancy, then what are we going to do? | ||
| How are we going to man things? | ||
| And what I'd love to visit with you about very quickly is we have a skilled workforce that can help us with drones. | ||
| I know that drones, unmanned, you're talking UAVs, UUVs, the unmanned surface, are the future, whereas we are moving away from Humvees and JLTVs as well. | ||
| But I just really wanted to make sure that we look at that when we are talking about Red River moving forward from a policy perspective, not from a district perspective. | ||
| I just wanted to quickly praise you for making that comment about from not from a district perspective. | ||
| My commitment to you is, and the healthy tension of this is we should be able to debate the merits of our argument. | ||
| We have not taken one single parochial interest into account in this, and so we'd be happy to dive deeper with you on that. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Thank you, Mr. Chairman. | |
| I yield back. | ||
| Chair now recognized the gentleman from Virginia, Mr. Vindeman. | ||
| Thank you, Mr. Chairman. | ||
| Secretary Juschkel, General George, it's great to see you again, and thank you for your testimony. | ||
| I appreciate the testimony you provided that emphasized transformation in contact and a commitment to continuous adaptation. | ||
| And I couldn't agree more. | ||
| But when it comes to FPV drones, we are still behind. | ||
| As this past weekend demonstrated, Ukraine has really redefined drone warfare using 3D reprinting, commercial parts, and on-the-fly adaptation. | ||
| And frankly, I don't think it's an overstatement to say that this is a revolution in warfare, much like the machine gun was in World War I or the carrier in World War II. | ||
| They treat drones the way artillery treats shells, disposal cheap, fielded in the tens of thousands. | ||
| That's why FV drones currently account for 70 percent of combat casualties between Ukraine and Russia. | ||
| Yet we continue to treat drones as durable assets, centrally managed, selectively deployed, and maintenance intensive. | ||
| I learned on Monday, I was out at Quantico, which is one of the three installations in my district. | ||
| I also have Walker and Dahlgren. | ||
| And this is a rare thing, giving Marines credit. | ||
| They have a drone team, and the Army just stood up a drone team for a competition. | ||
| And I find this encouraging, but we have to do, obviously, a ton more. | ||
| Quantico is also actually using one-way attack drones. | ||
| And I'm not sure if the Army has found yet a test range for that, and I'll get into that in a little bit more detail. | ||
| But I had an opportunity to detonate a one-way attack drone on a range in Quantico. | ||
| We have to have that capability across the force. | ||
| A few questions here. | ||
| I saw a couple of different drones out there, some that were actually built by the Marines and some that were purchased. | ||
| One was an ISR drone that we purchased for $55,000. | ||
| The Ukrainians are manufacturing these, and the Marines are actually building them for $500. | ||
| Shouldn't we be treating these drones more like artillery and ammunition, more disposable and building them rather than spending tons of money on them? | ||
| You couldn't, Congressman, have any two bigger supporters of that argument. | ||
| I think drones is highlighting very specifically at a very important moment in human history and warfare. | ||
| The system that we have that has built up over the last 30 and 40 years of defense spending is not sufficient for this moment. | ||
| And we as a country have got to get to a place where we can create a tradable drones that are at least directionally in the same price point as our enemies, because otherwise, even as wealthy as we are, a $4 million shot against an $800 drone, we can only do that so many times. | ||
| And kind of more importantly, even if we could afford it, creating something so exquisite to take down such a cheap piece of equipment, the time costs are important too. | ||
| Yeah, I was just going to say we need to get you back out into an Army unit, Congressman. | ||
| We were just down at JRTC. | ||
| I mean, that unit, the 1st Brigade 101st, had actually built more than 100 of their own drones. | ||
| I mean, we're doing that really throughout the Army at Innovation Labs. | ||
| This gets back to the earlier comment we were having, though. | ||
| What we need is we need to be able to scale production, and that's parts. | ||
| That gets back to the organic industrial base and what we're doing here. | ||
| And it gets back to agile funding and how we're able to, you know, everybody wants to buy these big, exquisite, you know, one-sided. | ||
| You have supporters here, General, on this committee, certainly. | ||
| And so one of the things I watched, Secretary, you talked about, you know, the Ukrainians are years ahead of us in this regard. | ||
| We don't want to reinvent the wheel. | ||
| I think what we ought to do is if we're going to buy U.S. manufactured drones, certainly at any cost, they ought to be tested in cooperation with our friends in Ukraine in a real combat environment. | ||
| The other thing is, and I don't have a great deal of time, so I'm going to try to move through this pretty quickly, is we actually need to develop the whole DOM LPF around drone warfare, doctrine, organization, training, material, leadership, education, personnel, facilities, the whole kit in Caboodle. | ||
| And we have to do this fast. | ||
| I mean, if we I've got skilled in the game, not just because I'm a retired soldier or a soldier in retired status, but I've got a nephew in the 82nd on the tip of the spear. | ||
| And we have a number of folks in that position. | ||
| So what authorities do you need to get this done when we're looking at base defense and so on? | ||
|
Senior Enlisted Leaders Matter
00:04:35
|
||
| Seven seconds. | ||
| Agile funding. | ||
| We need to figure out how we're going to train locally to do some of this. | ||
| And then we do, this gets back to the organic industrial base. | ||
| I think we need to start making some of these things and inviting industry in to do this so that we're not buying, you know, gentlemen's time. | ||
| Chair now recognizes the gentleman from Wisconsin, Mr. Van Owert. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Thank you, Mr. Chairman. | |
| Earlier, one of my colleagues was mentioning this celebration, the parade for the Army, 250 years, kind of a big deal. | ||
| And I would just like to gently remind him that you cannot put a price tag on patriotism. | ||
| You cannot. | ||
| And celebrating arguably, not even arguably, the best Army that has ever existed in the history of the planet deserves attention. | ||
| So send him an invite, dude. | ||
| You know who he is. | ||
| He sits right over there. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Do it. | |
| Do it. | ||
| General, what percentage of the Army is enlisted? | ||
| You should ask me to throw out a stat. | ||
| I would say 80 percent. | ||
|
unidentified
|
82. | |
| Yeah. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Where are your enlisted people, sir? | |
| Where are they? | ||
| Well, thankfully, there's not a ton of them in the Pentagon. | ||
| It's not where we need them. | ||
| They're the ones leading our formations and out there doing the individual training, and they're the experts on that. | ||
| We do have some that are in the Pentagon to include our wonderful Sergeant Major of the Army and a couple, but not a bunch. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Senior enlisted leaders are just that. | |
| They lead, and the same thing in the Navy. | ||
| And the reason I bring that up is that we're here talking about force postures and budgets and all this everything, right? | ||
| And if 82 percent of your force are enlisted people, which is true, men and women, soldiers, both, I would just say that maybe some of them should be here to hear this at a different level. | ||
| And one of our CONMAF Spec WARCOM guys, Commander of Naval Special Warfare Command, made this habit. | ||
| It was kind of weird. | ||
| We thought it was goofy to begin with, but he just randomly picked SEALs out of different SEAL teams and made them go to WARCOM and work there for like a month. | ||
| Because as enlisted guys, they're always like, you know, what are you guys doing up there, having cocktail parties and stuff? | ||
| No. | ||
| Your force needs to know what you're doing. | ||
| And, Mr. Secretary, please. | ||
| I'm so excited to answer this question, Congressman. | ||
| So some of the first people I brought up onto my staff were the E3, who is my driver and now works in the Pentagon. | ||
| I see him every single day. | ||
| And then the then E5, who's now our Sergeant Major, who my daughter is named after his daughter, is on staff, too. | ||
| And I talk to them every single day. | ||
|
unidentified
|
It's great. | |
| And I've got to tell you, General George, I am so impressed with you. | ||
| I was there in Austin, and the way that you are looking at these, you know, a different way to do things better is just admirable. | ||
| And we are here, and I know Chairman Rogers, we got your back 100%. | ||
| So whatever we can do to, I don't want to say break the primes, but make the primes be more responsive to the American public is something that we will be doing. | ||
| And honest to goodness, if you can give me a list, like please give me a list of the top five dumbest programs that the Army is currently involved with so that we can make sure that when we do these rescission packages that they are included. | ||
| Every single dollar that is spent in a manner that does not focus on killing the enemy is a dollar wasted for the Department of Defense. | ||
| General? | ||
| I think the top five are on our Army transformation initiative, but we'll give you the next five if you want, because I think that's what we're talking about. | ||
| I mean, this is something that we need to constantly look at, and that's part of our everyday discussion, Congressman. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes, sir. | |
| And that support, Congressman and Congresswoman, is incredibly helpful. | ||
| I mean, I think different people look at their jobs very differently, and so there's nothing wrong with advocating for your constituents. | ||
| But you could imagine that over the last three or four weeks, I think we've probably fielded 40 to 60 calls on anywhere we're pulling a dollar. | ||
|
Encouraging Future Warfare Prep
00:11:11
|
||
| We have rightfully been responsible for explaining our logic for pulling that dollar. | ||
| And so having the silent majority also say, hey, this is important, it's valuable. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Well, Mr. Secretary, I happen to know a guy. | |
| His name is Mike Rogers. | ||
|
unidentified
|
And I know that he is deadly serious about making sure that you are the most efficient killing machine. | |
| And that's what we're here to support you in. | ||
| So with that, Mr. Chairman, I yield back. | ||
| I think the gentleman would note that we have been called for votes. | ||
| So we are going to let Dr. McCormick and Mr. Mesmer do their questions, and then we will adjourn. | ||
| So, Dr. McCormick, you are recognized. | ||
| Thank you, Mr. Chair. | ||
| And I'll try to keep this brief because I know we want to have time for everybody. | ||
| But it was interesting talking about the munitions quandary. | ||
| I know that we had a big backlog in that. | ||
| We haven't figured out how to do it, even though we are one of the most innovative countries in the world ever in history. | ||
| But I thought it was also surprising when you gave the answer that that's something that we're still working on. | ||
| According to what I've been observing in Ukraine, 155 rounds really don't get used anymore. | ||
| Why? | ||
| Because triangulation counterfires are basically devastating. | ||
| So what we're using is mobile applications instead of that sort of munitions anymore. | ||
| So why do we even care about that? | ||
| This is exactly the problem. | ||
| We keep on looking backwards instead of looking forward. | ||
| We talk about Futures Command, and I really enjoyed your presentation too. | ||
| And we talked about 30 percent of the Air Force assets, which are obsolete. | ||
| We don't even know why we're funding them building. | ||
| Well, we do know why. | ||
| It's a political reason that we have politicians protecting their own rather than being innovative and look at what's good for the country and for the future of strategy and tactics. | ||
| But once again, let's put aside the 155 rounds, talk about what kind of mobile applications, what kind of drones, high MARS, whatever it is, how we are going to use wire-guided munitions now going back. | ||
| Now, that is a backwards looking forward. | ||
| But I want to talk about that. | ||
| The fact that we even legitimize talking about 155 rounds, it's almost an obsolete platform now. | ||
| When we go out and we look at different platforms into the future, we can't even lament the things we haven't done right in the past. | ||
| I mean, our best asset is the fact that China keeps on trying to copy the things that don't work anymore. | ||
| And I don't want to give away too much in a hearing, but that's what I'm talking about. | ||
| What is the future and how do we streamline what we're going to do as far as countermeasures, too? | ||
| Look at what Ukraine just did in Russia. | ||
| Phenomenal. | ||
| It reminded me of Israel and some of the innovative things they've used. | ||
| Futuristic looking. | ||
| How are we encouraging the Army to look forward rather than back in the way we prepare for the next war? | ||
| And I know you talked about it, General, in Futures Command, but I mean, what, besides you, how are we developing our young officers to not think about past wars, but think in the future in innovation, tactics, strategy, and even manning and weaponizing? | ||
| I think our young leaders are doing a really good job of thinking forward. | ||
| And again, some of the things that you were just talking about, Congressman, when we struggle is stopping doing some of the, you know, hey, somebody still wants us to buy stuff that we necessarily don't need. | ||
| I agree with you that we need to invest more in drones. | ||
| That is our plan to do that. | ||
| Same thing with EW. | ||
| Same thing with long-range fires. | ||
| I think all those things could be done much cheaper, too. | ||
| And that is why we are working with other companies. | ||
| If you want magazine depth, the other way of doing that is to actually bring the cost down. | ||
| And I think that there is innovative companies that can do that. | ||
| And it is the same with what we need on training. | ||
| I would argue that we are still probably going to have indirect fire is still going to be something that is going to happen. | ||
| I think the stat that was given out that it was only 18 percent of the casualties. | ||
| And I can come talk to you about that in a classified setting and kind of go through some of that. | ||
| But I mean, we are going to need some of that, too, because those are not EW is not an issue for some of those things. | ||
| Same with mortars and what you are going to need at the tactical edge. | ||
| They are still using that. | ||
| So I think it is a combination of things, and we are definitely looking to the future. | ||
| And, Congressman, I would just quickly say, anything I think we are saying about our procurement process, our bureaucracy, the shining star in all of this and the gem that we have as a nation is our soldiers. | ||
| So I was down at Fort Jackson a couple of weeks ago, and these are soldiers who have been in the Army for five weeks. | ||
| And what we have started to do is put a drone up while they do their lanes, and then when they do their afteraction review, they see themselves and what the drone can do. | ||
| And this is what is remarkable about it. | ||
| As these drill sergeants have iterated through these classes, they have actually learned lessons from people in the Army for five weeks that have trickled up to the Pentagon and spread to our other units on how we can improve, which is absolutely remarkable. | ||
| And I actually love what the Army is doing in their futuristic thinking for training personnel. | ||
| I was at the University of North Georgia, love their scientific approach to fitness. | ||
| But I also simultaneously see we are still doing a huge, massive airborne training of 12,000 soldiers per year on something that we will probably never use again, which also harms over 100 people per year that we are intending to have to pay disability to for the rest of their lives and really takes them out of the battlefield on something that really is an obsolete tactic, in my opinion. | ||
| So I hope we I don't want to belabor that point because I know we are out of time and I want to give you some time. | ||
| So I am going to yield the rest of my time. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| Gentlemen, you yield. | ||
| Chairman Abrahams, General from Indiana. | ||
| Thank you, Chairman, and thank you, gentlemen, for being here. | ||
| General George, a recent report stated that given multiple successful end-to-end flight tests of hypersonic missiles, the Army intends to field LRHW missiles to the first unit by the end of fiscal 2025. | ||
| Is that still on time? | ||
| Yes, it is, Congressman. | ||
| Do you see any foreseeable setbacks that could delay it any further? | ||
| I think the big thing that we are trying to do with that is look at are there other things that can happen out there where we can actually build those missiles less expensive and more rapidly. | ||
| I think that is the thinking that we are doing on right now. | ||
| But that is on track, and we have been partnering with the Navy with that system, and that is on track. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Okay. | |
| Great to hear. | ||
| All right. | ||
| Secretary Driscoll. | ||
| Our Army National Guard operates for pennies on the dollar compared to active duty units while providing a lot of the same capabilities. | ||
| As the Army moves to implement ATI, is the Guard being considered as an option to keep end strength levels the same while freeing up funds in the budget to modernize and capitalize on cost savings? | ||
| We are having at least that we are a part of a very few conversations where end strength will go down. | ||
| What I have heard the President say is he wants a, and I think he said it at West Point two weeks ago, an even larger Army. | ||
| I think to your point on the National Guard, they are an incredible asset for our Nation. | ||
| They have been around for a very long time. | ||
| And one of the things that General George and I have prided ourselves in Army Transformation Initiative is we have done nothing to the regular Army that was different from the Guard, and we have tried to treat them exactly the same. | ||
| And General George has done an incredible job of working with his peers in the Guard. | ||
| I would just add, and we just talked to like 50 of the TAGs, and this is before all of this came out to tell them kind of what was going on. | ||
| I think the one area that I think we need to adjust inside the Guard is I think we need to have actually more people than we have structure. | ||
| And I know that that is always been a challenge because everybody wants to keep a certain amount of structure, but what you don't have is the flexibility to send people to training that you need to do and send people to school, whatever that is. | ||
| So that is the conversation that we have actually had with them is we are going to have to make some adjustments, just like we are doing in the active component, on different types of things that we need more. | ||
| Like we know we need more cyber. | ||
| We need more counter-UAS. | ||
| We may need different of something else. | ||
| And I think we are going to have to have the flexibility moving forward. | ||
| And we are working with the Director of the Army National Guard and the TAGs to make sure that we are doing that. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| General George, on the Readiness Subcommittee, General Mingus mentioned foreign military sales as a way to sustain Humvees and JLTs moving forward. | ||
| As often highlighted, those familiar with the FMS process, bureaucratic red tape, approval times and delivery delays have plagued that process for years. | ||
| What reforms are needed to the FMS process to better support allies who want to purchase U.S. equipment and our defense enterprises that seek to sustain American defense production lines like the Humvee and JLTV? | ||
| As you know, Congressman, the Army doesn't own that process. | ||
| I agree that there is a lot we need to do to make sure that we are moving that much more quickly. | ||
| I got a call yesterday, actually, from an Army chief. | ||
| I have had a couple of those in the last month about JLTV specifically and looking to buy those. | ||
| And people are just like us. | ||
| When you decide you have a need, you are ready to get this stuff quickly. | ||
| And they also like American equipment because it is good. | ||
| So we can certainly send something over and have our team come over and talk to you about that in detail. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I would appreciate that. | |
| And, Congressman, just to foreign military sales, I think it is even more important than just those two platforms. | ||
| The more we can smooth our demand signal across us and our allies for things like PAC-3s that we need, the more joint ventures could be stood up in places around the world. | ||
| And so when you start to think of things like pre-positioned stock, the best outcome is that people we trust are building the same things we are using. | ||
| So if we go into conflict, they can either send their people or their things. | ||
| And so foreign military sales is an example, I think, of the United States acting in a massively overprotected fashion that is harming us dramatically. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Thank you. | |
| My last one. | ||
| Well, I will yield back the rest of my time so we can all get moving. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Thank you. | |
| Gentleman yields back. | ||
| Gentlemen, you did a great job. | ||
| Thank you very much for your service to our country. | ||
| We are adjourned. | ||
|
Howard Luttnick Testifies
00:01:47
|
||
|
unidentified
|
C-SPAN's Washington Journal, our live forum inviting you to discuss the latest issues in government, politics, and public policy from Washington and across the country. | |
| Coming up this morning, Senior Vice President and Policy Director for the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, Mark Goldwine, discusses the organization's recent analysis of the Republican tax and spending cuts bill. | ||
| Then, Utah Republican Congressman Mike Kennedy on the One Big Beautiful bill and Republicans' efforts to advance President Trump's agenda. | ||
| And Maryland Democratic Congresswoman Sarah Elfrith talks about the GOP tax cuts and spending package and Democrats' strategy going forward. | ||
| C-SPAN's Washington Journal joined the conversation live at 7 Eastern this morning on C-SPAN, C-SPAN Now, our free mobile video app, or online at c-SPAN.org. | ||
| Here's a look at what's coming up live today on the C-SPAN networks. | ||
| First, on C-SPAN at 10 a.m., the House will be back in session to work on legislation related to sanctuary cities and small business lending practices. | ||
| And over on C-SPAN 2 at 10 a.m., the Senate will be back to work on the Trump administration's executive nominations, including that of Deputy Secretary of Health and Human Services. | ||
| And on C-SPAN 3 at 11 a.m., Commerce Secretary Howard Luttnick will be on Capitol Hill to testify on tariffs and on his agency's 2026 budget request before a House Appropriations Subcommittee. | ||
| And later at 2 p.m., Connecticut Democratic Senator Chris Murphy will speak about foreign policy during a conference hosted by the Center for American Progress. | ||