Opening Statement (As Prepared)
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Thank you, Chairman Bergman, and thank you to the witnesses for your service and participation today.
This hearing is one of the most important hearings this subcommittee holds ever year. While it is preferable to have it after the budget is released, I am confident that we can still have a robust conversation about the chronic readiness issues facing your departments. What is unique about this year is that if the reconciliation bill we marked up last week becomes law, you, the Department of Defense, will have an unprecedented amount of money to spend, in the vicinity of $1 trillion. Even corrected for inflation, that is a hell of a lot of money, and I will have no patience for a narrative that tells me that you simply don’t have enough money to fund weapons maintenance, training, fuel, resiliency, housing, and infrastructure sustainment. No matter how much money you get at the end of this process, there will never be enough to do everything, certainly not with the cost of the major weapons programs currently in the pipeline. But, if we keep sacrificing sustainment on the altar of the new and shiny, it is our servicemembers who pay the price.
But that is a discussion for next year at this time. Today, I want to talk about what readiness means. We are in a moment where each of you is being asked to balance our past, present, and future sustainment needs. These witnesses know more than most that we are sustaining buildings and weapons platforms far beyond their service lives, and we must ensure that we have the parts, people, and equipment to do so. Earlier in the year we heard from GAO that you are still struggling to meet your own sustainment goals in almost every platform whether its ground, air, or naval vessel. When I travel abroad, I hear about the challenges our warfighters have in getting the parts they need to keep these platforms flying. We euphemistically call these systems “legacy” systems, but these are the platforms that our soldiers, sailors, airman and marines will use if we “fight tonight,” and it is our duty to ensure that we continue to sustain them while they remain in service.
When we talk about sustainment in the present, I think about my “favorite” platform, the F-35. We, as Congress, need to work with you to ensure that we have the data rights, parts, and infrastructure to allow your maintainers to fix this incredibly expensive and underperforming platform. We cannot afford to fall behind on holding contractors accountable to this nation’s national security needs just to make a pretty penny.
That brings me to the need to focus on sustainment in the future. The army made a big announcement last week about its efforts to modernize and transform. While I am sure we will argue about the details, I applaud the effort to adapt the lessons we’ve learned in Ukraine and to modernize, innovate, and free ourselves from a burdensome procurement process that has too often brought new weapons systems that are too expensive, too hard to sustain, and late to need. As the readiness ranking member, I would be remiss if I didn’t counsel you to not forget about the sustainment tail on these systems. It does us no good to procure something quickly, only to find that its useless to us because we haven’t budgeted to maintain it. I like the Army’s concept of adopting an agile funding structure to be able to respond more quickly to threats and rapidly changing technology. But where does this leave us with sustainment?
For far too long, we have not built in sustainment costs or plans into contracts with the big defense contractors. In addition to incorporating additive manufacturing, data packages for maintenance, and predictive maintenance into these contracts, I want to hear from you about how you are thinking about sustainability in the future and in a contested environment. While we are modernizing the way we fight, we must modernize how we think about sustainment and how to get parts, people, and fuel to the point of need. It is important that we consider sustainment in every decision that is made across the Pentagon. I will be looking to see if we’re modernizing our viewpoint on the lifecycle of a weapons system and expect to see a budget that prioritizes sustainment in its plans, funding, and personnel.
I will now shift gears to something I know is at the top of all your minds. Resiliency. I’m told the word “resiliency” is now on the list of forbidden words along with climate change and diversity. This confuses me. The definition of resilience is the ability to withstand and quickly recover from difficulty. The Department can and must plan for such disruptions in energy and water availability, or those due to cyber or kinetic attack, and the destructive force of natural disasters. If this is not a core readiness enabler, I don’t know what is. Resiliency is central to mission assurance and accomplishment. Anyone who fails to understand that does not understand readiness.
Another area that has been corrupted by ideology is operational energy. Derided as the greening of our military, some would ignore the obvious. Anything that keeps our forces in the fight longer is key to lethality. Every dollar we save can be put to higher use. Every gallon of gas our service members use actually costs the taxpayer the equivalent of 2.7 gallons to get it to the point of need. This doesn’t even factor in the risk to human life caused by fuel convoys or the vulnerabilities caused by aircraft and warships coming off station to refuel. In previous hearings we’ve heard about the contested logistics challenges of keeping our forces supplied in the Pacific, yet when we receive the budget, I fully expect the accounts that fund the initiatives to extend on-station time and lower fuel consumption to be slashed.
I also expect we’ll see cuts to initiatives that fund advanced battery research, that would allow drones to operate longer in winter conditions, or initiatives that lower thermal signatures in ground vehicles, making our forces harder to find. All in the name of efficiency. I fear this will be the most expensive money we’ve ever saved.
Despite the lessons we’ve observed in Iraq and Afghanistan, have watched play out on the battlefield in Ukraine, and the logistics challenges we know we face in the Pacific, the Department continually undervalues energy initiatives as a readiness enabler, and it does so to the detriment of our lethality.
That is why, while it doesn’t surprise me, I am still disappointed by the current narrative decrying anything that happens to have any beneficial impact on greenhouse gas emissions as “wasteful climate change projects.” Some of my colleagues may welcome this mark on ideological grounds but they are ignoring the benefits to the warfighter in exchange for a soundbite. I assume that my colleagues would support the avoidance of unnecessary cost, increasing on-station time for combatants, and the ability for our installations to perform critical missions uninterrupted, but will nonetheless support these cuts if they happen to have an ancillary climate benefit. The short-term political win will only create losses to readiness. I hope that all of you are and will fight for these items in your budgets.
With that, I look forward to your testimonies and working with the four of you on the important work ahead. I yield back Chairman.