July 19, 2023

Opening Statement

Click here to stream the hearing.

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Thank you, Mr. Chair, and I want to welcome our witnesses today and look forward to your testimony. I also want to thank Vice Admiral Buck for hosting my brief visit to the Naval Academy earlier this week. I hope to visit the rest of the military service academies in the near future.

And during my visit to Annapolis, I had the chance to meet with recent graduates, current midshipmen, members of the faculty. And I’ll be honest, a lot of what I got to see, and the conversations we had, painted a very different picture than the picture that the chairman just went through.

Very oftentimes, when we’re talking about this here in Congress, it makes it seem like every single class, and every single training session, every single element and hour of the day at, whether it’s the military academies, or other colleges and universities, is being spent talking about diversity, talking about DEI, talking about these different issues that we’ll be talking about today. And that just simply isn’t the case, and that was something that I heard point-blank from a lot of the midshipmen, from the current, from the recent graduates, from the faculty. And when it came to admissions as well, talking about the whole person and how we can look at how we develop the leaders for our country going forward, that was the focus. It’s not saying that we’re only looking at the issues of race, only looking at these issues that we’re talking about today. And I just feel like we’ve been in this hearing room several times already, talking about these issues over and over again this year.

And what I will say is that when I went and talked to some of the midshipmen, and they raised other issues that are legitimate for us to focus in on, about how we can improve their leadership training their academics. But we’re not getting to those types of issues and those priorities because we constantly keep coming back to this.

So look, I just want to say it’s important for us to just constantly think about what role Congress plays when it comes to supporting this training and this development of our future leaders.

Yes, we should be thinking about what we can fund, what we can support, but our job here is not to micromanage the faculty, micromanage the admissions process. Be able to give them the tools, that’s what we would be doing, but I think so often, we’re here in this hearing room, trying to say that we know better than those that are living this day in and day out. And I find that to be a characteristic of hubris that I find too often here in Congress. Trying to dictate how some of the most extraordinary leaders, some of them we have in front of us today, are trying to guide our country going forward.

So look, we’re going to have a lot of challenges; getting through this today, I’m sure there will be some tense moments. I just ask us to please, kind of, think through the fact that every single person before us today is sharing the same goal that we have, which is how do we make sure that we have the kind of leadership that we need going forward to keep our country safe, to have a strong national security.

We’re all in it for that same reason, so let’s make sure we keep this civil, we keep this respectful, and recognizing that we have a lot of challenges going forward here in Congress. But, hopefully, we can do this today in a way that doesn’t devolve and doesn’t get out of control.

So with that, I’ll yield back.

 
###