Opening Statement (As Delivered)

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Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I appreciate that. And I'll start with three substantial notes of agreement.

One, we do face an incredibly complex threat environment. We face Russia, China, Iran, North Korea, various other terrorist organizations working together against American interests in a way we have never seen before. With an economy like China’s that we've never seen before, it's going to be very difficult to meet those challenges. 

Second, innovation is incredibly important and crucial to that. The changes in warfare are happening at a more rapid pace than I think we've ever seen before. We have to innovate more quickly. And I appreciate your [the Chairman’s] leadership on getting after acquisition reform. Because what's absolutely true is the Pentagon is not ready for this right now, and certainly that predates this Secretary of Defense in this administration. It's a problem that we need to get after -- to do the acquisition reform so that we can get the materials that we need quickly, innovate more quickly. We've got a lot of good ideas in this committee. I look forward to working with the administration on trying to get that done.

(Third), the budget is a major problem. It is simply unacceptable that we are this late in the year and we do not have a budget. That's the basics of how you plan to do all of that. And this is but the culmination of a series of problems. We had a CR for FY25, largely at the insistence of President Trump, and then by the time we did pass a budget, it was just a CR. And now we're on a path again towards a CR in FY26. There is no budget transparency and no plan that we can see, and what we have seen happening at the Pentagon in the interim is also very disturbing and without explanation. There's been talk about 8 percent cuts across the board. Nobody on this committee knows what that means. Some of it is happening. That has not been made transparent to us. Is it going to make us better? Is it part of a larger strategy? Nobody really knows. We also heard the plan to cut 20 percent of the flag officers. Again, no strategy, no plan. This is why the budget is so important. The budget can inform all of this. Maybe that's a good idea, but we have no idea, because there is no transparency and no follow-through.

Also, quite disturbingly, within the Department of Defense and also across the federal government, the one and only criteria that is consistent is loyalty to Trump, as opposed to loyalty to the law or loyalty to the Constitution. This started with one of the more shameful events in DOD history, and that's when we pulled security details from former members of the Pentagon who face security threats. Why were those security details pulled? They weren't pulled because anything told us that they were safe. Chairman Milley is one great example. He was on the threat list because he carried out an order from President Trump, and rightfully so, to kill Soleimani in the Middle East. He's now on Iran’s hit list, and we pulled his security detail, leaving him and his family vulnerable. Why? Because he had the audacity to say something critical of President Trump. I mean, that's just embarrassing. If you told me, ten years ago on this committee that something like that would have happened, I wouldn't have believed you.

And now we have a dictate from the White House saying that all federal employees will be tested for whether or not they are supportive of President Trump. The New York Times had a great headline on that saying, “Why does an air traffic controller have to be a Trump supporter?” Well, I would ask, “Why does an acquisition professional have to be a Trump supporter?” If you're focused on loyalty, you're not focused on competency, you're not focused on ability, and it is the wrong way to go. 

Even within the budget, we see the influence of the President over the influence of common sense. We've all heard about the Golden Dome. When I first heard about the Golden Dome, it was interesting because it reminded me of a joke I first told about twelve years ago, when we were dealing with a large number of Pentagon programs that were more ambitious than practical. Future combat systems, the Expeditionary Fighting Vehicle—you know—basically they did, “Well, this is what we want.” And we had this joke that, “Well, all I want is sharks with frickin’ laser beams attached to them.” That became the Armed  Services’ thing—I actually have a little plastic shark that my staff made for me with a laser beam attached to it. Making perfect the enemy of the good is a problem. And nobody on this committee knows what Golden Dome is.

And the other thing that's really important about this, contained within that, is one of the most important national security threats that we face, missile defense and counter drone. We have a lot of programs that people are working on in that direction. What happens to those programs when we take $25 billion towards a project that no one can explain, and no one can understand? And again, we don't have a budget, so we're taking it on faith.

That is deeply troubling. 

Equally troubling is the Air Force One airplane that we got from Qatar. There are (sic)all kinds of ethics problems with that, which I'll leave aside for the moment. But that airplane is going to have to be fitted to be Air Force One. It's going to cost hundreds of millions of dollars. Again, no transparency. We're not told what that's going to cost and where it's going to go. 

But because President Trump wanted it, he gets it—hundreds of millions of dollars goes out the window. We don't have the capacity to sort of say, “Sorry, sir, that's not a good idea.” And the last one on this list is one that, frankly, I had a hard time believing when I first heard it. Apparently, the President has decided that the F-35 would be a better plane if it had two engines. And to a certain degree, it's hard to argue with. I guess two engines is better than one, except that you can't just add a second engine to the F-35. This is a program that's taken us over 25 years, and we are, knock on wood, finally to the point where we're going to have the plane. 

Now, I would have thought this would have been dismissed, but I hear defense contractors, the Pentagon, they're looking at this idea. It is okay to tell the boss that he's wrong. We all have dumb ideas. It's good to have people around us who have the capability and the competence to say, “No, we're not going to do that.”

We're walking down the wrong direction. In terms of the global strategy, I substantially agree with the Chairman, except that I fear that “America First” does mean “America Alone.” We've seen that in a number of different issues, certainly placing tariffs in absolutely every country in the world, irrespective of our relationships. Well, sorry, except for Russia. We didn't place tariffs on Russia—that alienates people. But cutting off foreign aid programs, which I realize is not the purview of the Department of Defense. I'll remind you of something that Secretary Gates said before this committee, … “if you're going to cut off the State Department, you'd better give me more ammunition.” The two things are related. We stopped programs that were feeding hungry children in Africa. Literally took food out of the mouths of hungry children. Why? Apparently, because there were a couple of USAID programs that supported LGBTQ programs. Now why we didn't just cut those instead of cutting the ones that were feeding hungry children in Africa, I don't know, but that really sends the wrong message to the rest of the world.

And the last one, and once we get to the Q&As I would be curious to hear what the Secretary has to say about this, threatening to use military … force to invade Greenland and Panama. I don't believe the President has actually threatened military force against Canada just yet. He's just threatened to annex it. So, Denmark, Canada, Panama, three peaceful nations that we are allies with, or were anyway. The message that sends to the rest of the world is one that the US is purely in it for itself and does not care about the rest. And this has implications. We're trying to stop China. We are in a global competition with China. We have built up excellent partnerships across Asia over the course of the last six or seven years. In Australia and Japan and India and the Philippines. Largely that was because China exercised economic coercion. They went ballistic on Australia for daring to suggest that China could be more transparent about COVID, and Australia recalculated. Now, we are the ones using economic coercion on our partners and allies and pushing them away.

And this filters back over to Ukraine, where I am in violent agreement with the Chairman about how important Ukraine is to our national security interests. And I also agree with the Secretary, we need to get peace in Ukraine. The longer that war continues, the more dangerous it is for everybody. But the administration made a crucial mistake at the start, by showing weakness to Vladimir Putin and fundamentally misunderstanding the war, actually putting out quotes that bought into the notion that Ukraine was somehow responsible for the war, even though Russia was the one who invaded. And Putin saw that signal. He saw that big green light, and knew if he just waited a little while, we would abandon our allies, we would abandon our partners, and we’d abandon Ukraine. The President promised to end the war in Ukraine on Day One. Now, admittedly, that was a moronic thing to say, and he wasn't ever going to do it. But well over a hundred days in and the war is going stronger than ever. Putin is attacking more aggressively than he ever has. Because President Trump sent him the message, we're walking away, it's all yours. We need to change that message. Ukraine can defend itself and we can get to peace, but not if we don't make it clear that we're going to keep the 53-nation alliance together and that we're actually going to defend Ukraine going forward.

The other part of this that is deeply disturbing is, apparently, if policy isn't going well, the solution to it is to just act like it is. In the Middle East, and you hear the President, you know, “peace through strength is back and everything's fine. We're all doing well.” But just like in Ukraine, when the President took office, there was a cease fire in Gaza. Now that war is going stronger than ever. The humanitarian crisis is growing. Israel is continuing to attack in Lebanon, in Syria. Yemen is still a problem. Yes, for the moment, they have stopped attacking U.S. ships, but President Biden went through that as well—attacked Yemen from time to time, they stood down and they stood back up. And now we are dangerously close to that conflict spreading to Iran. Do not misunderstand me. I do not blame President Trump for that. But to stand up and say, “It's all solved because I'm President,” and to not be engaged and figure out how to solve it, just to imagine that you can create the factual world that you want, just with your words, is an incredibly, incredibly dangerous thing.

The last issue that I want to talk about is the issue around DEI because I am deeply disturbed about what the Pentagon is doing in this direction. And keep in mind, I say that as someone who didn't love the excesses of the DEI programs put in place. I live with them out in the Seattle, King County area. I think there were a lot of mistakes behind that but instead of addressing that in a sensible way, we've decided to go at it and with a right-wing cultural war. With a sort of right-wing cultural revolution that, frankly, would make Chairman Mao proud. We are banning books, we are pulling images down off of websites, leading to some just sort of ridiculous things. There was of course, the instance when all reference to the Enola Gay disappeared for a few days. Now, that's kind of funny, because in that context, gay means something different. But why do we care if the word gay, that means homosexual, is printed somewhere? Why is that threatening to us? Why are we spending time on that instead of, I don't know, giving us a budget-- that might have been more productive. And then we're pulling books off the shelves, which led to one really amusing outcome where someone said, in one particular, you know, library within the Pentagon, you could not find a copy of Jackie Robinson's biography—that had been pulled—but you could find two copies of Mein Kampf. … Well, you gotta have two, because if one's checked out, somebody needs something to do. Why are we doing that? 

And now we've got the changes to the names, and this changing the names of ships, going back to the original names of the Confederacy for all of our military bases. Lots of different things can be said about this but I just want to close by drawing one particular contrast and that's about Medgar Evers, who's actually a personal hero of mine. I read his wife's book when I was a freshman in college, and it inspired me. My son's middle name is Evers. We are talking about pulling Medgar Evers name off of a ship. That's a man who served in the military, but also, he stood up to Jim Crow, white supremacy, and racism in the South. And I know we're focused on the warrior ethos. If you don't think that it took a warrior ethos to do that in Mississippi in the 1950s and the 1960s, then you're just not paying attention. Why are we having this conversation? 
And, Mr. Secretary, your summary of the problem where you said that basically “the problem with DEI is there just aren't enough trannies from Brooklyn or lesbians from San Francisco who want to join the 82nd Airborne. Not only do the trannies and lesbians not join but those very same ads turn off the young, patriotic, Christian men who have traditionally filled our ranks.” 

We can go after the extremes of DEI without denigrating and insulting people, and, by the way, leaving out the Jews apparently …. Because the thing is, the insulting, you know, belittling language aside, you're right. There aren't enough trannies in Brooklyn or lesbians in San Francisco to fill the military. There also aren't enough, what's the word here? “Young, patriotic, Christian men” who remind us of John Wayne to fill the military either. We are a diverse nation, we need to be inclusive, and we need to not actively insult people who don't happen to fit our preconceived notion of what a member of the military should look like. 

So, we're at a situation now where the military is denigrating Medgar Evers, who died standing up for the values that I think are central to our country. One of the things I love about the military is service above self. I mean, it's such an important message that everyone who serves or says it. No one I can think of personifies that more than Medgar Evers. Instead, we're going to go back to renaming the bases after the Confederates. Now, I know, apparently you spent a lot of time finding other names that applied to people who actually did serve this country honorably. But President Trump just, was it yesterday, two days ago, now, down at Fort Bragg, when he blatantly politicized the United States military, sort of, as they like to say, said the quiet part out loud—that those bases are being renamed for the Confederates. So, we honor white supremacists, slave owning insurrectionists who lost, by the way, they’re losers, instead of Medgar Evers. Can we please just stop and get back to the business of treating everybody equally and with respect? A fear of a left-wing cultural revolution is not solved by launching a right-wing cultural revolution.

Thank you, Mr. Chairman, I yield back.