Opening Statement (As Prepared)

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Good afternoon, Chairman, colleagues, and General Reed. Today, as we assess the posture and readiness of our mobility enterprise, I want to emphasize the critical role of our air, land, and sea mobility capabilities in ensuring our national security. These forces are all too often underappreciated, and I am grateful that we are meeting jointly to address the issues our forces face in “providing transportation, sustainment and distribution to our nation’s warfighters.”
 
To put it plainly, we need to go back to the basics of how we operate and re-focus on maintaining our critical assets and building our workforce to meet our warfighting needs. Too often, we in Congress and in the DoD become overly focused on fancy new technologies without paying attention to the resources we need to sustain and maintain our fighting forces. We are too focused on throwing the long ball, instead of perfecting the basics of blocking and tackling. It’s often underappreciated, but it’s the work of USTRANSCOM that will ultimately win, or lose, us the next conflict.
 
Our underinvestment in the maritime industry illustrates this point. We often talk in this committee about our naval fleet, but as TRANSCOM knows, our mobility forces often rely on more than just military vessels. Our broader commercial partners are crucial enablers for global mobility and the lack of available U.S.-flagged merchant ships poses a severe threat to our sealift capabilities. Without a robust and reliable sealift capacity, our ability to project power and sustain operations globally is at risk.
 
It is my hope that the SHIPS Act, which I proudly worked on with Chairman Kelly, will play a key role in catalyzing investment in our maritime industrial base to ensure we have a robust maritime industry ready and able to support our economic and national security.
 
As we take steps to rebuild our maritime forces, I hope that we will think hard about both the short and long-term steps needed to ensure our nation has the maritime force it needs. When we talk about recapitalization, I think we must ensure that we are sending clear and consistent demand signals to incentivize the construction and operation of U.S.-flagged vessels to restore our maritime readiness.
 
As much as I love talking about ships, I am also concerned about the state of our air mobility fleet. The KC-46A Pegasus, while a promising platform, continues to face significant operational deficiencies, including issues with maintenance, its Remote Vision System and other critical components. These unresolved challenges hinder its ability to perform aerial refueling missions effectively, which is a cornerstone of our global mobility strategy. We must accelerate efforts to address these deficiencies to ensure the KC-46A can meet its intended mission requirements. I recognize that this problem isn’t just a TRANSCOM issue and that we must hold the Department of the Air Force accountable, but I hope that today we will hear more about the impacts of these issues on TRANSCOM missions and solutions to fix this issue.
 
I look forward to hearing from our witnesses today about how we can address these challenges and strengthen the backbone of our mobility enterprise.