Opening Statement (As Prepared)
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Thank you, Mr. Chairman, and thank you to the witnesses for their time today. I look forward to our discussion.
Chairman Wittman, Chairman Bergman, thank you for holding this joint hearing on such an important topic – modernizing the Army’s portion of our organic industrial base. Our ammunition plants, arsenals, and depots play a critical role in providing capability and capacity to meet the requirements of the combatant commanders. These facilities develop and produce the ammunition, munitions, and weapons that our warfighters rely on, and they repair and overhaul our combat systems. Our country could not sustain large scale combat operations without the support of these facilities, so I am very happy that we are spending time today to discuss the plan to ensure their continued success.
Over the last few years, this committee, and the Tactical Air and Land Forces subcommittee in particular, have paid close attention to the sustainment and modernization of Army’s organic industrial base. Anyone who has visited these facilities knows that some of their spaces are in need of repair, upgrades, or safety improvements. We owe it to the patriotic Americans who work at these facilities to provide the best equipment, and safe working environments. While we have seen improvements over the years, we continue to see accidents. I acknowledge that some of this is dangerous work, but we can and must do better. I know we will discuss the investments that Army has made to increase capability and capacity at our facilities, but I would also like to hear about investments or procedural changes that the Army has made to improve safety at these facilities and drive down mishaps. I recognize that this topic is squarely in the lane of our friends from the Readiness subcommittee, but it is a topic that I have paid close attention to, and I can think of no better forum to discuss it than this hearing.
Second – modernization and expansion. The war in Ukraine helped to identify shortfalls in our organic munitions production facilities. In many ways, this is our own fault by historically using munitions accounts as bill payers for other higher priority accounts. But over the last few years, the Department and Congress have worked collaboratively to reverse course, resulting in billions of dollars of investment into our munitions production facilities. In some cases, these investments resulted in modernization of existing facilities. In other cases, we expanded the Organic Industrial Base by creating entirely new facilities. In a perfect world, these two types of investments would not compete with each other. However, the Army is now forecasting that we may not realize the full expanded capacity, and that we will instead settle at a lower sustained rate. This creates a problem that is especially acute for the 155 millimeter artillery rounds. We are building a new facility in Mesquite, Texas, yet, short of large-scale war or high demand from foreign partners and allies, we will likely never achieve the production rates that would utilize their full capacity. So, I’ll ask the witnesses to address the problem that this presents: how do we utilize new facilities such as Mesquite in such a way that they do not pull work away from our existing facilities? I’ll ask the witnesses today to address this concern, and articulate a coherent plan for these facilities that shows how we will optimally utilize them such that they do not compete with each other.
Lastly, I remain concerned that we may have facilitated ourselves into a boom-bust cycle. The billions of dollars of investments over the last few years are extremely helpful, but the added capacity will go to waste if the demand never materializes through sustained conflict or external demand through Foreign Material Sales. I return to the 155 millimeter artillery shells since it’s such a good example. The Department planned initially to produce 100,000 rounds per month, but now forecasts a rate much lower than that. We modernized and expanded the Organic Industrial Base to achieve this high number, and in some cases our industry partners made internal investments to help. If we never realize this capacity, what happens to all of those investments? What happens to the facilities that expanded, and the companies that hired additional workers to achieve these goals? How are we responsibly investing and signaling to our industry partners what the sustained rate of production will be?
In closing, this hearing focuses on a very important topic, and I very much look forward to the discussion. I again thank Chairman Wittman and Chairman Bergman for holding this important hearing and thank the witnesses for appearing before us today.
Mr. Chairman, I yield back.