Defense officials testify on the current readiness of the joint force during a Senate Armed Services Committee’s Readiness and Management Support subcommittee hearing in Washington, March 12, 2025. Testifying are: Army Gen. James J. Mingus, vice chief of staff of the Army; Navy Adm. James W. Kilby, vice chief of naval operations; Marine Corps Gen. Christopher J. Mahoney, assistant commandant of the Marine Corps; Space Force Gen. Michael A. Guetlein, vice chief of space operations; Air Force Lt. Gen. Adrian L. Spain, deputy chief of staff for operations; and Diana C. Maurer, director of defense capabilities and management for Government Accountability Office.

Transcript

The readiness subcommittee meets today to receive the testimony on the current readiness of the United States Armed Forces. I deeply appreciate our witnesses. Our esteemed witnesses from our military service services, this is an impressive photo right here of all 5 services and our excellent work from the Government Accountability Office by Diana Mora Mauer. Um, this is one of the most important hearings. Certainly this committee undertakes all year. My view is one of the most important. Hearings in the Senate for the year because of very few other issues more important than the the readiness. Of our United States military. I look forward to the valuable testimony of the witnesses as it will pertain to their services readiness. I hope we can have a really good candid discussion. We are living in a very dangerous world. Where our adversaries can and regularly do contest us across the globe, and we must remain vigilant in our pursuit of balancing readiness, modernization and training with our global commitments. In my view, for the last 4 years we have taken a holiday from history. With the Biden administration’s focus on issues in the military that had nothing to do with readiness. The list is long, climate change over ship building, transgender surgery for active duty troops, DEI a lack of focus on war fighting and lethality and defeating our enemies. I appreciate Secretary Heg. Three priorities restoring the warrior ethos, rebuilding our military, and re-establishing. Our deterrent. Many of you know, and I’ve talked to all of you about this. I’m a big fan of the book by TR Ferrenbach, This Kind of War. Which Marines and soldiers all read, and it is about the Korean War. And how in 1945 we had the most. Lethal military in world history and 5 years later in 1950. The United States military had a hard time. Stopping and defeating a peasant army from North Korea, and thousands of American troops died in the process. Because a lack of leadership from our civilian and uniformed military. This must never happen again. There must, there must never be another task force smith. That we saw in the Korean War. My view is we have a moral obligation to prepare for any future conflict. Beginning with the realization that unlike any previous conflict, our service members will be at risk from threats well beyond, well before they reach foreign soil, airspace, or waters. The world has changed dramatically as it pertains to our homeland as well. We can no longer consider ourselves safe based solely on the tyranny of distance from nations and actors that would do us harm. One of the things that we are working on in this Congress and this committee. In conjunction with the president. Is his Iron Dome, now golden dome legislation of mine with Senator Cramer. We hope to make bipartisan in this committee to bolstering our homeland defense. Suffice to say the world is a dangerous place and the facts demand a response from not just the uniformed personnel. Sitting before us, and again I respect the service decades and decades of military service from all of you, but from Congress as well. Let’s look at a few facts. In the last 4 years I’ve done to our militaries provided by the military services and GAO. The army has done an outstanding job working to increase recruiting, but there remain significant operational demands and increasing pressures on an already understrength force. With units being manned at less than 80%. 16 of the Navy’s 32 amphibious warfare ships are in unsatisfactory condition, and the Air Force of today is very different from what we saw during the global war on terror. Yes, we have more capable aircraft, and yet the KC-46 and KC-135 tanker fleets sits at an aircraft availability rate of 52% and 57%. Respectively versus 66%. During the entirety of the global war on terror. While modernization will help improve these figures, at what cost will that come in terms of readiness and training?

These are the key issues that so many of you, as our leaders in the military have been focused on. There are many other issues that GAO has raised and our members here will be raising, but I want to thank the witnesses in advance again for their exceptional service to our country. And for their testimony today, I look forward to that testimony, and now I’d like to turn it over to ranking member Senator Hirono. Thank you, Senator Chairman, Senator Sullivan rather, well, you have. U2. Gentlemen, thank you for your dedicated service to our nation, and I thank the service members and each of your respective branches as well. Ms. Moore, it’s always great to, uh, have you back and to see you. The tireless work that you and your team delivered to Congress every year is an instrumental to each NDAA. In your opening statements, I ask that each of you briefly describe what impacts to readiness a full year continuing resolution CR would have, for example, billions in military construction and. Family housing projects would not occur in a full CR, so please, uh, for, uh, all of, all three of you, I would like you to briefly go over what the impacts of a full CR may be a year CR. So even without a full CR readiness challenges range from retaining a skilled civilian workforce, balancing modernization with legacy platform maintenance. And a training to core missions and yet while Congress provides ample resources to DOD every year, we still see delays in ship maintenance cost overruns in military construction projects and avoidable problems with family housing and barracks. Each of you are doing the best you can. Readiness requires the consumption of dedicated resources, time, training, and equipment, which is why deployments to the southwest border, which are all for show, mind you are stripping precious time, focus and resources away from our service members. In its request for assistance from DOD for fiscal year 25, the Department of Homeland Security DHS acknowledged that tasks at the Southwest border require no specific military training, skill set, or specialty to perform customs and Border Protection CBP duties. Some of the DHS requests include operator level maintenance of CBP civilian vehicles which can be found in the owner’s manual of an SUV. Other requests include changing tires, windshield wipers, light bulbs, oil changes, stocking warehouses, data entry, administrative support, etc. In 2019, DOD discontinued support like this because they found units were not performing core military functions and continuing to do so would adversely impact readiness and morale, yet here we are again. Perhaps having elite war fighters from the 1011 mountain division change oil in Chevy Tahoe or mechanized infantry of a striker brigade combat team overseeing the stocking of civilian warehouses and data entry on the CBP computers are what Secretary Hicks envisions when he talks about lethality. But those non-military roles do not sound like they contribute to restoring the warrior ethics, and they certainly do not rebuild readiness. So these are slogans that Secretary Hick likes to throw out, but the reality is our troops are being deployed to the southwest border to do things which does nothing. To It does nothing to contribute to readiness. DOD has written a blank check, moreover, to DHS for its time, personnel, and resources, and its as it stands now, DOD is electing to do all of this on a non-reimbursable basis in an open ended timeline. Incredible. We’re not even 2 months into this administration yet. Here are some of the opportunity costs to date. Uh, Marines are missing the chance to train in a bilateral exercise with our allies and partners. Army soldiers will miss a combat training center rotation. Air Force aircraft from the immediate response force and the space force are using limited resources to perform tactical surveillance, reconnaissance and tracking programs for DHS and CBP. Where will the readiness of our forces be 60 days from now and beyond?

During the first Trump administration, it took units from the 101st Airborne Division a year. A year to regain their readiness after being deployed to the border, we should learn from that mistake. DADD is slow to respond to the requests for information to this committee yet publishes nearly daily photo ops of troops on the border. In the meantime, immigration and Customs Enforcement agents are dressing up like they’re in the military soldiers are performing data entry in uniform in the same room as CBP agents are processing migrants and airmen are removing their name tags and unit patches when they transport migrants on military aircraft. All of these actions erase the distinction between civilian and military personnel. Removing active duty forces from their units and core missions to perform support functions of law enforcement agencies does not contribute to lethality or war fighting and where is Secretary Hicks’s meritocracy. When DHS and CBP asks DOD to do their jobs for them and foot the bill no less. Not only does this administration prioritize these deployments but claims with a straight face that ordering US service members to cover the jobs of DHS civilians has no impact on military readiness and resources. This is delusional, dishonest, unbelievable. The choice to burn readiness to score imagined political points, dangerous it’s dangerously misguided. It is a massive waste of time, resources, and personnel when border crossings are at an all time low. In closing, Again, I wanted to thank. The vice chiefs and Ms. Morrow for their service, for being here for your hard work, insights and leadership. And I would really appreciate a frank. Discussion with you. Today, Thank you very much. Well, thank you, Senator Hirono. I appreciate your, uh, renewed found focus on readiness. Um, I’m just thrilled about that, and by the way. Uh, we’ve been sending troops to the border for decades. My first deployment as a United States Marine. I came back from a Westpac 31st mute deployment under President Clinton after being in the Taiwan Strait, and half my battalion immediately got sent to the border. So this has been going on for quite some time and um. It’s nothing new, but I appreciate Mr. Chairman, I don’t think it serves our purposes because you and I have worked together for you to personally insult me. I’m not insulting you at all. Thank you. I’m not insulting you. I’m just glad you’re focused on readiness, but my my Democrat colleagues and the Biden administration haven’t always been so focused, but it’s great that you guys are. So with that, I would like to begin our testimony and uh. Gentlemen, I’m gonna have to step out for a minute, but I will be here for the whole hearing. So General Mingus, if you can begin, sir, thank you very much. You’ll have 5 minutes and your uh extended written testimony can be, uh, submitted for the record. Thank you, General. Thank you. Chairman Sullivan, ranking member of Hirono, and distinguished members of the subcommittee, thank you for the opportunity to address you today. The army stands ready to defend our nation right now over 109,000 soldiers are deployed or forward stationed across 140 countries, executing missions that deter, defend, and provide immediate response options. Still, our adversaries are moving faster than we are. That is why we are reorganizing our formations, refining how we fight and modernizing faster than ever, pushing new capabilities into the force in months, not years under Transformation and Contact or TI which I will talk about throughout, we are enhancing our tactical networks, rapidly fueling UAS counter UAS, electronic warfare systems, and increasing mobility across our formations. In the last 9 months, TI delivered 11 new capabilities and technologies to warfighters across the 101st, the 25th, 10th Mountain, and 34th Infantry divisions, and FY 25 and 26 will expand this. To tick 2.0 and it’ll encompass all units within the 101st, 25th, 82nd, Fourth Infantry division, and additionally it will extend to include additional armored and striker brigade combat teams. We will also scale to integrate 3 multi-domain task forces and further integrate Army National Guard units. Central to the Army modernization are our command and control, integrated air missile defense, and long range precision fires. Next generation command and control or NextGen C2 will provide resilient data sharing and real-time situational awareness, enabling war fighters to synchronize combat power across all domains. We are also improving our layered air defenses, expanding Patriot formations, increasing short range air defense battalions, and adding directed energy systems capable of countering most or more sophisticated UAS threats. Additionally, the Army’s long range hypersonic weapon will soon be operational by the end of this year, adding unprecedented speed and range to our arsenal both for us and the navy. At the heart of those efforts is the health and effectiveness of our organic industrial base. We continue to execute our $18 billion.15 year plan to modernize 23 depots, arsenals, and ammunition plants. Newly established facilities in Lake City, Missouri and Mesquite, Texas are expanding 6.8 millimeter and 155 munition productions while for the first time in 40 years, TNT production is being reestablished in the United States to reduce reliance on foreign suppliers. However, weapons and equipment do not define readiness. Soldiers do, and the army is making targeted investments to ensure that they can focus on their mission. New barracks and construction, modernizing efforts and replacing outdated housing. Dining facilities are being updated to provide more flexible, nutritious options, and the holistic health and fitness program, or H2F embeds experts directly into our units to ensure peak human performance. Recruiting remains a priority. The army exceeded its goal in FY 24 with over 55,000 new soldiers, and we’re targeting 61,000 this year, and we are currently 72.7% of that goal for this year. 44,358 as of this morning, which is 50% ahead of where we were this time last year. I’ll end on budget. With no budget increases to offset inflation and reducing buying power, the continual growth in the cost of paying allowances is crowding out the army’s ability to modernize its force or maintain its infrastructure. The army essentially has three levers to address top line shortfalls end strength, readiness, and modernization. Our end strength is approximately 25,000 personnel less than the improved structure resulting in undermanned formations and overtaxed high demand units such as Patriot battalions. Additionally, the army has had to slash its modernization budget by billions over the last few years. As a result, procurement is reduced to minimum sustainable rates, delaying fielding of new material deformations, and research and development has been cut, slowing technological advances. Ultimately, the army can afford a large ready or modern force, but with the current budget it cannot afford all three. Either we provide soldiers the capabilities needed to win or accept greater risks in other areas, but whatever risk we accept now, we will likely pay for it later, not in delayed projects or budget adjustments, but in real world battlefield consequences. We need to invest in the things and training our soldiers need for the next fight, not the last fight. Thank you. Thank you, General, Admiral. Chairman Sullivan, ranking member Hirono, subcommittee members, thank you for the opportunity to testify. Of the United States around the world. Your oversight and funding help us to be ready when the nation calls. In the past year alone, American sailors have defeated hundreds of drones and missiles and carried out dozens of offensive strikes in the Red Sea and the eastern Mediterranean. They have strengthened alliances and deterred aggression in the Western Pacific, and they have used unmanned systems to counter the flow of illegal narcotics across the southern border, in short. Remains postured. Resting and neither will we. To approve with urgency. I’ve spoken to several of you about a sustained focus on adapting the mindset, skill set, and tool set to drive meaningful process improvement. Consistent and predictable funding is foundational to our improvement efforts. The Navy will need to make hard choices this year if we are operating under a full year continuing resolution. In this It’s cute. Will slow our progress to get weapons and equipment we need to modernize our fleet, and we will also slow ship building including our amphibious warships. And with the Navy exceeding recruiting and retention goals last year and on track to do so again we will need additional funding to sustain our momentum. Our priority remains our readiness accounts which are most vulnerable under a CR or sequestration. We are optimistic that Congress will grant us the flexibility to allocate funds to our top priorities. Despite these challenges, your navy will maintain ready platforms, people, and infrastructure. We set a goal to make 80% of our ships, submarines, and aircraft combat surge ready by January 1, 2027. To do that, we are reducing maintenance delays and improving manning, training, modernization, and sustainment. We are seeing progress in the last year. We increased our surface ship depot maintenance from 41% on time completion to 68%. Unfortunately this progress is not consistent across all platforms. I am not satisfied with amphibious ship maintenance. Our Navy and Marine Corps operate as a lethal integrated force, and we have work to do here. To improve, we are procuring spare parts earlier, refining, partnering with planning with industry partners, acquiring diesel engine repair kits, and building steam plant expertise. Our second goal is recruiting and retention. The Navy is committed to attracting and developing Americans who can innovate, solve hard problems, and dominate in combat. Thanks to process improvements, our targeted investments, we contracted over 40,000 sailors last year, the most since 2003, and we are currently on pace to exceed our recruiting goals in 25. We are committed to improving quality of service. We reduced the waitlist for child development centers from 3400, uh, uh, children in 2024 to 2500 as of January, January 31st, 2025. We have reduced poor unaccompanied housing. We have reduced our pool of unaccompanied housing rooms rated as poor from 25% to 21%, and we’ll continue to reduce this through focused and investments. We are focusing on the investment of critical infrastructure in the Indo-Pacific, targeting it to where it has the most impact on our war fighters. The shipyard infrastructure optimization program is a once in a century opportunity for us to improve the effectiveness of our public yards through PIAP we have completed over 40 projects and invested $1 billion in getting ship maintenance completed on time. The budget you are reviewing today includes an additional $6.3 billion for the next 40 projects. I’m proud of the Navy’s accomplishments in the past year. We still have work to do to ensure that we remain the world’s most premier navy for another 250 years. Your leadership and support are critical to Navy readiness on behalf of our sailors, civilians, and families around the world, thank you. I look forward to your questions. Thank you, Admiral General. Good morning, Chairman Sullivan ranking member Hirono, Senator Kaine, uh, thanks for the opportunity to appear this morning. I’m honored to represent the Marine Corps and discuss our current war fighting readiness. Since my testimony last year, your Marine Corps has continued to progress and refine our force design implementation through a campaign of learning. We’re modernizing our force to meet the challenges of the modern battlefield as directed by our commandant, we balance that modernization with our ability to respond to crises. This balance ensures that over 32,000 Marines forward postured and deployed are trained and ready to support the combatant commander’s competition campaign deter global threats and when necessary, fight our nation’s battles. Well they’re acting as the forward eyes and ears in the Southwest Islands. We’re expanding maritime domain awareness in a unified high north and across the Baltic Sea. We’re supporting the defense support of civil authorities by constructing obstacles. In intel analysis on the southern border, your Marines are ready to operate in any climate place as our song says. The main external challenges though to our war fighting readiness, the most acute readiness detractors of the lack of amphibious ship availability which has been brought up already by my shipmate in the absence of organic littoral mobility to marry up with our MLR capabilities. The gap in these capabilities creates significant risk and degrade force readiness across the competition spectrum toward conflict. Yet despite these challenges, your Marine Corps remains ready. Our personnel, our maintenance, supply and training readiness remain high just as all of you would expect. In both recruiting and retention, Marine Corps made mission and exceeded expectations. In fiscal year 2024 and you heard it here first, we’ll make our numbers this year and in fact we’ll be able to push contracts on the order of 1000 into the next fiscal year. I remain completely humbled by the quality of our recruits and the Marines we make fleetwide cannot say enough about the excellence and discipline of our recruiting force. Continue to do what others say is not possible. Making mission without lowering standards, which is something we will never do. That discipline together with consistent funding remained key ingredients for a high state of readiness. Our unprecedented 2nd unmodified audit opinion is evidence of that discipline. Our books are clean. Our books are open. The Marine Corps is appreciative of the continued support from Congress, support for the common House priorities which are creating an enduring total force readiness. With your advocacy, we’ll sustain our current and future force readiness to maintain the honor of being the first to fight when called. With your support for additional resources, we’ll restore the state of our infrastructure readiness in a manner consistent with your expectations as well as the expectations of our common. Thank you for the opportunity to speak, and I look forward to your questions, Sever Filas. Thank you, General. I call on General Gut line. Please proceed. Thank you, Chairman Sullivan ranking member Hirono, and the distinguished members of the subcommittee for allowing me the opportunity to discuss the United States Space Force with you and with the American people today. The space force underpins our nation’s capabilities within the joint force, within our economy, and within the society as a whole. In our 1st 5 years of existence, we validated the importance of the space force as a service and made remarkable progress in building an agile mission focused organization that grasps the magnitude of the space threat. We delivered critical capabilities, developed doctrine, and took significant steps to integrate space power into joint operations. We are now comprised of approximately 15,000 guardians, including officers, enlisted, and civilian personnel, and we are integrated into other DOD components, the intelligence community, our allies, and commercial partners, maintaining maximum readiness and securing our advantages in space. Our military is faster, better connected, more informed, precise, and lethal. Based on our ability to harness space, the world’s use of space is growing at an accelerating rate demonstrated by a significant growth in space launches and an increase in active spacecraft in orbit. As access to and the use of space grows, the strategic landscape in space is becoming increasingly complex and perilous. We were once what were once theoretical threats are now daily occurrences. I have observed our adversaries’ actions, and they are employing new capabilities to counter our advantages. Our competitors are jamming GPS signals, spoofing and disrupting satellite communications, and developing advanced anti-satellite weapons. Unfortunately this behavior has become the norm rather than the exception, creating an increasingly hostile environment and putting at risk our continued freedom in the space domain. To meet these challenges, the space force is accelerating our transformation as a war fighting service through our theory of success called competitive endurance. Competitive endurance is the bedrock of our ability to deter and if necessary defeat our adversaries. It deters them from extending conflict into the space domain and enables the joint force to achieve space super purity while preserving the long term safety, security, and sustainability of space. This approach ensures we avoid operational surprise, deny first mover advantage, and engage in responsible counter space campaigning, all of which result in deterring aggression and if necessary, decisively defeating challenges to our way of life. An essential requirement supporting competitive endurance is guardian development. We are focused on purpose-built training to meet the unique needs of the space force. Our guardians are dedicated war fighters who understand the gravity of the threats that we face. We must ensure that they have the necessary training, resources, and unwavering commitment to continue to face these threats head on. Also essential is our continued integration as a critical component of the joint force and fostering enduring partnerships with the commercial sector and our allies around the world, which will allow us to overcome resource constraints and build a resilient hybrid space architecture forging the space force we need at only 3% of the DOD budget, the space force offers an immense value proposition for the joint force and for our nation. However, it is woefully under-resourced to meet the nation’s demand for space capabilities. We must increase investment to deter the threat and if necessary to decisively defeat challenges to US space security. The strategic choices we make today will determine whether space remains a domain for peace and progress or becomes a contested battlegro battleground for future conflict. The space force is committed to ensuring a future where space remains a source of American strength and a foundation for global security. Achieving this vision requires a shared commitment to providing the space force with the resources, the authorities, and the support necessary to meet the growing challenges of the space war fighting domain. On behalf of all guardians and their families, thank you for your support and commitment to ensuring the United States Space Force remains a cornerstone of the joint force and protecting the American way of life. I look forward to working with all of you and I look forward to taking your questions. Thank you. Thank you, General Lieutenant General Spain. Chairman Sullivan, ranking member of Hirono, and members of the subcommittee, thank you for the opportunity this hearing provides to talk about the elements of readiness for the Air Force, the four primary pillars being parts and supply, people flying and training, and current infrastructure. To these, I would add elements for future readiness, rebuilding acquisitions, long term sustainment and recruiting and retention at a relevant pace and scale, all in a way that reflects our shared purpose. Senators, I can confidently state that your United States Air Force stands ready and able to defend America’s homeland, ensure robust nuclear deterrent via our two legs of the triad, and project power around the world to deter and win as the nation requires. It is our solemn duty and your airmen are ready. It’s also a fact that today’s airmen will do so with the oldest airplanes, the smallest force, and with fewer monthly flying hours than at any point in our history. Airmen have and always will get the job done, but today they do so at elevated risk. Meanwhile, China’s military forces are expanding and modernizing their nuclear modernization, long range missile proliferation, and recent test flights of 2 6-gen aircraft is simply further evidence of the elevated threat in the strategic environment. Conflict is certainly not desirable, nor is it inevitable. It is our responsibility to be prepared should diplomacy or deterrence fail. Often we have focused on the individual elements of readiness and not how they must be synchronized to create a war fighting capability over time even in this hearing we will likely talk about individual programs and individual projects, all of which are very important. But the previous strategic environment, mostly permissive and without a significant challenger allowed us the luxury of segmented attention, priority and risk. Today’s strategic environment does not. Today’s readiness requires a synchronized approach the right parts and the right maintainers and the right support infrastructure and the right qualified air crew and all in the right balance and not or. Many of our past decisions were appropriate given the previous strategic environment but no longer so we’ve taken deliberate steps to see this for what it is and do something about it. We’ve specifically prioritized parts and supply in the flying hour program. We’ve also reconnected our manpower and infrastructure priorities directly to our core readiness outcomes in both our processes and our data. It’s our intent to maintain focus and priority on these pillars to strengthen our readiness and improve our lethality, and we’re moving out. I’m grateful for this committee and the broader Congress’ support and look forward to working with you to deliberately improve our current and future readiness posture and undeniably retain our position as the world’s greatest air force with respect to the CR, uh, without anomalies, the CR clearly has indic uh has impact on our readiness, um. Up to the tune of about $4 billion anomalies without anomalies and with the fiscal responsibility Act kicking in, it’s closer to $14 billion which we cannot afford. Uh, however, we expect and, and, uh, look forward to the final version of this CR if it were to pass with flexibility and agility. And anomalies to spend uh as required to retain readiness to the maximum uh possible level. Thank you and look forward to your questions. Thank you, General, for your very, uh, frank testimony. I very much appreciate that. Um, finally, Ms. Maurer, uh, from GAO, thank you for your great work on many issues. All right, well, good morning, uh, Chairman Sullivan, ranking member Hirono and other members. Be here today to discuss GEO’s recommendations to help the military address long-standing readiness challenges that span several administrations. I’d like to in particular to highlight three cross-cutting challenges that we continue to find across the services. First, DOD faces growing gaps between mission and resources. In many areas, the services assume risk because of imbalances between what they’ve been tasked to do and the people parts and facilities they have. Pentagon needs to focus more on sustainment. Buying new systems is just the beginning. Ensuring combat ready units can operate and sustain those systems is the hard part, and all too often a host of sustainment problems means planes, ships, and vehicles are not available when needed. And third, DoD’s ability to move and support forces lags behind operational needs. The services face potential adversaries who will contest the movement of people, material and information. DOD needs to adapt its decades long reliance on uncontested logistics just in time distribution. My written statement summarizes reports with over 100 recommendations to help address these challenges. So for example, the Navy needs an industrial-based strategy to help get better results from the private companies that repair and build ships. The navy, the army should ensure units have the necessary training facilities and support before fielding new equipment. The space force needs to refine its plans for training and exercising its squadrons. The navy should coordinate with the marines to fix amphibious ships and reach agreement on what it means to make what it means for a ship to be available. DOD should decide when and how various services will assume sustainment responsibilities for missile defense systems and for the F-35 program, DOD needs to reassess the balance of sustainment responsibilities between contractors and services and ensure maintainers have access to the technical data they need to meet operational mission needs. Uh, GEO’s recommendations will help improve military readiness and that’s, that’s the heart of what we do at GAO. We help improve the government. Now we’re currently in the midst of a vigorous national debate about improving the effectiveness and efficiency of the federal government. GAO’s independent nonpartisan role in the legislative branch is as important now as it has ever been. We will continue to provide facts, analysis, and recommendations to this committee and to all 535 members so you can execute your congressional oversight of executive executive branch programs and activities. Thank you for the opportunity to testify this morning, and I look forward to your questions. Thank you, Ms. Mauer, and I agree with you that you guys do excellent work. I, uh, recently. had the opportunity to Uh, highlight your work on the Navy industrial base issues to our incoming secretary of the Navy, and I think that was an excellent report. So I’m gonna begin with just a, a line of questions by the way, it’s great to have our chairman of the full committee here shows the importance of this, uh, subcommittee and the topics we’re tackling today. I will begin my questioning for all 6 witnesses. So please try to be brief. It’s gonna focus on. Bad news, good news, and flexibility. So what do I mean?

You’ve already touched on it, General Spain, you did a good job. The CR. Right, um, uh, I think, uh. From a readiness standpoint, none of us think this is helpful. What would be worse in my view, is a government shutdown. So the impact of the CR and then very importantly and General Mingus you and I had the opportunity to talk about this yesterday, um, flexibilities that you would like us to provide you in the future NDAA’s on budgeting. That’s a topic that when we deal with these CRs. Unfortunately it’s been a way of life for our military for many years. It’s a failure on the part of Congress, but what kind of flexibilities do you need to be more ready that you could uh use and this could be very broad or very specific and then the good news very quickly we’ve had a turn around and. Recruiting I think it has a lot to do with some of the comments I made in my opening statement where the last 4 years our military was not focused on lethality and war fighting and why young men and women joined to fight and defend their country was focused on other stuff, irrelevant stuff, and it hurt recruiting. Why do you think, where are you on recruiting?

And why do you think there’s been such a dramatic turnaround?

So those are the questions I’d like each of you to answer. We’ll start in the lineup here, General Mingus, if you can. I hit on all three of those. Thank you, Chairman. A full year long continuing resolution impact, yes, to the degree and the severity is is unknown as was kind of talked about earlier based on the anomalies that come out of this, the puts and takes in the various lines in the budget, uh, what, what is plussed up and not, uh, we’ll have to take a couple of days to kind of fully. If if it is actually enacted before the end of the week, uh, the, the true impact, but new starts spending limits, uh, spending power and buying power, those are critically the, the ones that always rise to the top, and it, and we’ve never had a year long, uh, continuing resolution. This will be the first for the Department of Defense, so, uh, a lot to be determined in terms of what those impacts are gonna be flexibility, so you and I talked about this last night. We all submitted a J book in a budget, um, almost 18 to 20 months before we actually see an enactment in an appropriation. A lot can happen in that 18 to 20 months. Um, every line of of of accounting, every piece of equipment, every radio has its own individual line within the J books that come back in our budget line items on the back end of appropriations. For high tech things, UAS counter UAS, high tech command and control systems that evolve at a rate faster than our budget cycle, we would like to compress those lines to allow us to move in year of execution those monies to new things that come online in year of execution. If you can work with us, all the services with regard to language on the flex those kind of flexibilities are really important, I think needed and something that we could work on and get the NDAA, sir. Um, and I, um, yield my time to the others because I went pretty deep in recruiting, uh, just for the committee’s sake real quick here, just, I mean we talked about it, but I, uh, just for the, on, on the record, I think it’s important for lessons learned on recruiting. Who you recruit, where you recruit, how we recruit, more professionalization of our recruiting force, expanding the population, all those things that we’ve been working for the last 18 to 24 months we believe are coming to fruition this year. We’ve seen momentum unlike we have seen in probably a decade. We’re at, uh, 50% ahead of where we were last year, uh, 73% of emissions. So as I said in my opening statement, uh, just over 44,000 of a mission of 61,000. Um, I think as you and I talked last night we’re gonna have the opposite problem we did a couple years ago where, uh, come this summer we may have an end strength that’s actually bigger than what we, uh, have an appropriations for well maybe we can work on that, Admiral, uh, and again, um, in, in I’ll yield time back. These are important questions, but, um. Uh, we’ll get through all of them. Go ahead, Admiral. Sir, hey, two bit buckets. One is CR major impact on us. We’ve gotten used to partial CRs as, as, uh, General Mingus says, this is our first full year CR, so we’ll have to figure that out and we’re looking forward to flexibility, anomalies, authorities to address the kind of things that, uh, General Mingus talked about. Let me just use one specific example. Uh, 2 years ago, probably a little more than 2 years ago, we weren’t, we were thinking about counter US, we weren’t thinking about counters from the perspective that we’ve grown to appreciate in the Red Sea, so the ability to turn quickly and use money and have the flexibility to address. Those things as we’re trying to do with the Ford strike group where we’re bolting on systems that are more effective for counter US like Coyote and Roadrunner, those are all appreciated and hard to do in a CR so I, I, I’d give you that piece that the flexibilities and for us to work through it. There’s a, there’s a merge with the next next topic which is recruiting. We’ve made some progress in the Navy as the other services have. We have stormed the problem. We understand and you and I went over and and ranking member uh Harrono and I discussed what we did in the Navy to break down the problem and understand what it takes to make a productive recruiter. So I think there’s renewed focus and clarity on that. We’ve done the things. General Mingus has described where we spread to zip codes to get every available person into the Navy and we’re ahead of goal right now uh we would our our projection was 12,000 contracted we’ve contracted 14,000. We’re supposed to have 12.2,000 shipped. We’ve shipped 12.7. 1000, so we’re ahead of goal. I’m very concerned about the CR and the impact on that machine and slowing it down. So for us we want to maintain course and speed, accelerate, and bring in all the people we need to close down our gaps at sea. CR makes that a little more challenging. Great, I’m gonna, uh, yield back to Senator Hirono. I’ll, I’ll get through this line of questioning. Um, I do wanna do uh a recognition, Admiral, to the sailors. And Marines who have been deploying all over the world and in the Red Sea in particular, you know, remarkable performance in terms of shooting down all the incoming missiles and drones at your ships, uh, my understanding it’s the most combat that the Navy’s undertaken in terms of serious missile threats to our ships since World War II, and you’ve done it incredibly well, so. To all the sailors and marines on those deployed ships for the great job they’ve done, uh, thank you from the entire United States Senate, Senator Hirono. Thank you Mr. Chairman. I, I, I get that a full year CR is uh going to present some very unique challenges for all of our services, including our space force, so we will do what we can to. Help you all, Admiral Kilby, I recognize the need to build a larger fleet. However, I have significant concerns about the Navy’s basically dismal track record of maintaining ships and submarines in the current fleet. We consistently see delays, increased costs, ships without adequate crew, a lack of spare parts, and other issues. General Mahoney, it seems clear that maintaining amphibious ships is not a top Navy priority, and I do understand Ms. Morrow said that the Navy and the Marines need to come to an agreement on how these amphibious ships will be, uh, maintained, but how do, how do delays in the Marine Corps amphibious ship maintenance impact your ability to train and deploy Marines and how would you. Be better supported by and how could you be better supported by the navy?

Senator, thank you for the question. We, we are very concerned with the condition of the amphibious fleet and the availability of the amphibious fleet out this morning. I check it every morning. There were 13 of 32 amphibious ships available in order to get to a goal of 3.0 muse, that is heel to toe muse. Combined with their amphibious shipping off the east coast, one off the east coast, one off the west coast, and one in the FDNF, that number is not going to do it. I look at it in, uh, short, medium, and kind of longer term perhaps solution sets, and we’re working closely with the navy. Of course we have to get to terms of reference. We can’t classify a ship that hasn’t sailed in 10 years and probably never will sail as an available ship of any class, much less. And afib, but what I would say is we need to resource amphibious shipping to make it to their service lives and not decommission them early. Secondly, we have to get ahead of the maintenance curve that means years ahead of port loading of availability sequences, getting the avails in on time, making sure that we have the parts and the maintenance crews to maintain them and get them out of the avails on time more toward the midterm. Uh, we need to make every ship count with service life extensions and midlife upgrades. Thank you. I, uh, you know, I, I’m sorry to interrupt, but, um, I, I think that uh your needs are being clearly articulated and as Ms. Morris just said, we need to have, uh, it sounds like a good suggestion to me that the Navy and the Marine Corps need to get to uh um uh uh an agreement. On what we’re gonna do with the maintenance of these amphibious ships to have only 13 out of 32 available is uh what we say unacceptable. So as we sit here. Can we have a commitment from uh the navy that you are gonna get into an agreement on on this issue with the Marine Corps. Uh, ranking member Hirono, you have my commitment to that. We do brief off the same data, which is an improvement in the Navy and the Marine Corps. We have the same database so we look at the, the things, uh, similarly from big deck amphis to LPDs to LSDs. So to me that’s a start, but we have to do better. Thank you. I, I agree you need to do better. Let me move on to General Mingo. Several of the critical training areas the Army uses in Hawaii, the main one being Pohakaloa on the Big Island, uh, and the leases are set to expire in 2029, and these are, um, vital. These leases are vital to ensure military forces can adequately train in the Pacific. And when we talk about the importance of the Indo Pacific. Area we obviously need our people to be trained and so I would like to ask you, will you commit to continue engaging in good faith with state officials because that’s who you’re negotiating these important leases with and the community to ensure land, uh, retention is renegotiated in a way lease negotiation is done in a way that is fair. To the state, the people of Hawaii, and the military. General Mingus, absolutely ma’am, we are committed to that since 2017 we’ve been working this as you are well aware, over 500 town halls, meetings, various engagements that are out there. 2029 seems like a long ways away, but it’ll be here tomorrow. I, I know that it’s not. And so we will continue to and are committed to to work in this with you and to the extent that a land swap may be in the offing, I do believe that we need to provide the secretary of the army with the authority for that. Is that correct?

Yes ma’am. Mr. Chairman, like you, I have a number of other questions. Could I just go over one minute?

Sure, thanks, thank you. So, um, General Mingusz, last year we spoke at this hearing about the Army’s crumbling infrastructure in the In the Pacific region in Hawaii, 50% of Army facilities are currently classified as failing or failed, and the cost to repair or replace them is over $5 billion. However, The army and other services are not using non DOD funded contracting mechanisms like energy savings performance contracts to upgrade its infrastructure and lock in lower utility bills. What is the Army’s plan to repair or replace infrastructure in Hawaii and the in the in the Pacific?

Ma’am, as we talked last year, there are significant investments in 23, 24. We’re committed to that for uh 25 and beyond. Uh, we know that the water and some of the critical infrastructure under underneath a lot of these locations are failing. Um, we actually think it’s maybe in excess of $5 billion. Uh, we’ve committed over a billion dollars for this next year, so we’re absolutely, uh, wanna work with you on those infrastructure to include the, the leadership that goes with this as well. Quadin is an example where that was largely paid for with RDT and dollars. We’ve actually put a garrison commander there to make sure that the leadership in addition to the resources, is there to fix these problems. I think that the energy projects, for example, are important because the army is the biggest user of the military DOD, uh, army in particular, is the biggest user of energy, and whatever sums you can save on energy costs as well it can go to other needed. Um, necessary projects. So would you commit to clear the logjam on installation of energy projects funded through non DOD contract mechanisms. Absolutely take a look at that, ma’am. Yes, yes, thank you, thank you, Senator Chairman Wicker. Well, Chairman, I surely am glad you gave Senator Hirono, a few extra moments. You offered me, um, an opening statement. And so I may take those few extra moments. You are the chairman of the committee. You can do whatever you want. Thank you, but I, I also want to congratulate, uh, Chairman Sullivan and Senator Hirono for, uh, their leadership in calling this hearing. It, it’s a terrific panel and, uh, and it’s been great so far. Let me say this about the CR. We, we repeatedly say, House and Senate, Republican and Democrat, that we never. Need to do this again and for some reason something comes up uh some group is uh unwilling to compromise and look at the long picture and we find ourselves in in this position. I will say this about the fact that this is the first. A year-long CR for the Department of Defense. I, I guess we could at least admit that it is a hybrid CR in the sense that that um there are the anomalies that our witnesses uh have mentioned and and the numbers have been plussed up just a little bit but but this is a shame on our process and and um and. It is not in keeping with what the founders intended. They intended, uh, for for, um, legislation to be difficult, but they intended for the parties and the houses to compromise and have some give and take and finally get in the right direction. In my view, uh, Mr. Chairman and, uh, Ms. uh, ranking member, the real flaw in the in the CR that we’ll be voting on later this week is that it doesn’t provide enough money, uh, regardless of the anomalies and uh and the the tiny plus ups here and there. Uh, regardless of that, it does not provide adequate support for the, uh, for the military and for the challenges we have from for, uh, uh. Adversary nations uh facing challenges plus Russia uh plus North Korea plus Iran that that like never before have worked together to bring us ill and uh and it is contrary, uh, Mr. Chairman and madam ranking member. Uh, to the voice of the Senate in the National Defense Authorization Act, which plussed up National Defense out of the, um, Armed Services Committee and from a, a bipartisan vote on the floor about $25 billion we, we couldn’t get that done in conference and so uh we are where we are on the authorization, but were it not. Uh, for the, the prospect of a reconciliation bill that, uh, that adds $150 billion for vital national security purposes, uh, I could not vote for the continuing resolution as it is. I’ve, I’ve. Unless something changes I’ll have to to swallow my words again this year and and go ahead and pass it because the alternative is, uh, is so unpalatable and so dangerous, but I will say this based on what we based on what we see and based on um on what is in. This continuing resolution. $150 billion in the reconciliation bill may not be enough and, and I’m hearing uh some comforting words, Mr. Chairman from the administration that they realize that too and I realized they’re they’re the budget hawks, um, in this city and they’re the defense hawks in the city and, and we all want fiscal responsibility. But I’m telling you $150 billion in the reconciliation bill may not be enough based on the way we have treated uh defense over the past few years and based on what we’re about to do this week. So, um, thank you all for doing what you can with uh with the authorities anomalies and little plus ups that we give you, uh, in the time I, I have to ask questions, um, let’s talk about uh. The ability and and um I’ll I’ll direct this to you, General Mingus, the ability of our reserve component. To be ready for potential conflicts with near peer adversaries, um, if a conflict began today, General, is the Army Reserve component man trained and equipped appropriately to be successful. I would say it would depend on the type of organization within the garden and the reserve, um, sir. They we meet our directed readiness tables requirements in terms of the active component, the guard and the reserve in terms of what uh are required inside those uh immediate forces that are needed inside of 10 days, 30 days, and 45 days. Once you get, uh, beyond that, uh, then it, it, uh, is not as pretty as you would see. This last year we did have to bring down um in the up tempo accounts for the Garden Reserve we typically like to keep them at 85% of their training requirements. We had to bring that down a little bit this year because of uh the top line that uh we were we were at um, so there is concern now as a result of that, uh, the secretary and the chief and all of us are taking a look at what is the right balance between the active guard and and the reserve and what mission sets should be in those and there’s an active, uh, look at all of that. Well, don’t you wish you didn’t have to begin your answer with it depends. I wish you didn’t have to, um, begin your answer with depends with, with, with it depends, um. You talked about the the balance. How about the balance between the types of reserve and that’s what I mean, sir. So for example, um, our petroleum capacity is almost all in the reserve component. Um, we know that we’re gonna need some of that capability early on in a fight and so do we need to move some of that from our reserve component into the active components so that’s some of the analysis that that we’re looking at. OK, let’s, uh, let’s go to Admiral Kilby. It seems that we’re picking on that end of the table so far today. Admiral Kilby, the Navy spends billions of dollars each year to operate and maintain its combat surface ships. Um, those surface ships are vital, uh, to, uh, combat, deterrence, defense of the homeland, yet year after year we hear about significant challenges to the readiness of our navy’s surface fleet. How’s the navy changing?

And modernizing in this regard and also in the way they attack ship maintenance to get problems under control. 22 general areas here, sir. Thanks for that question. One was addressed by General Mahoney. Uh, one, locking down that planning in advance of that availability is key. That requires the funding and the contract, uh, closed about 4 months before we start the availability, which allows the contractor to order those long lead parts and develop those teams, in particular for amphibs, steam. Maintainers and diesel maintainers which are a shrinking pool in our nation so lock down the uh lock down that project ahead of time and understand the condition of the ship, which means you have to do inspections and and really understand vice opening things and inspecting them during the avail. So that’s the first part about that. The second part is, uh, this, this, uh, piece I mentioned in my opening statement. Uh, which you didn’t hear, but getting the 80% of combat surge ready ships, aircraft, and submarines. We’ve had some success in the navy doing that with our fighter fleet and our spreading it to all our aircraft. We want to do the same thing with our ships, same thing with our submarines. That’s a bigger challenge because of the complexity of it, but that’s the goal we’re after that requires some focus and some effort to do that, but it also requires looking at processes which may not be helpful now in changing those processes and that’s what we did with aviation, sir. OK, and then let me just ask General Mingus and Admiral Kilby on the recruiting, um. Is is part of uh making this more successful long term a better career path for the people we place in these positions, general. Yes sir, I mean, most come in the military for to serve to make a better way for themselves in terms of um their lifestyle, so it’s uh to get college benefits on a better career path for for the people we put in recruiting position. Oh yes sir, absolutely. I misunderstood the question. Um, that is one of the things we’ve talked about similar to what the Marine Corps have been doing for decades, if we’re gonna put talent out in our recruiting formations, we have to reward that talent on the back end, so absolutely. Same applies for the navy, uh, focus on those recruiters teach it one telling their story to a potential recruit is what sells it identifying with that individual and and connecting with them on a very personal level and having them see their future and that is what we need. So focus on that, uh, that process for us we had uh incentivized structure which was which was not. To get the max people in, it was to recruit a certain number of people per month. We’ve taken those limits off bring everybody in. Don’t save up recruits for next month. Bring them all in as soon as you can, and that will either fill up our delayed entry program or get those sailors to boot camp as soon as possible. That’s been our success, OK, Mr. Chairman, uh, I, I want people in the military. Uh, who are assigned to our recruiting programs to say thank gosh I got this great position. My career path looks bright because I’ve been put on a fast track by being a recruiter. That’s my point. Well, General Mahoney, do you want to comment on that because the Marine Corps has been doing that for decades. Yes, I would. Of the three things that I think are the, uh, pillars of our success in recruiting, the one main one is a professional recruiting force. These people are screened, slated, handpicked, incentivized while they’re in the job. Typically we’ll get meritorious promotions and when they get out, what we find is when they return to the fleet, they are some of our strongest officers and staff NCOs. The commandant was a recruiter. Most ants most ants have been recruiters. Uh, most of our general officers have been recruiters. Among our most successful staff and CEOs, the Sergeant Major of the Marine Corps was a recruiter. So as far as Senator Wicker seeing a path, that’s baked in to how we make our recruiters and their breed apart. Thank you Mr. Chairman. Thank you, Mr. Chairman and Admiral, just real quick, uh, 80% you hit that with naval aviation on maintenance, right, or not on readiness. We, we certainly hit it with fighters. I get a report every week on every type Marvel series of aircraft in the United States Navy. We’re not hitting it in CMV. That’s another story we got it, but that’s our goal is to get there across the board for every type model series. It requires a different level of attention and daily visual management by the air forces and the navy to make that happen. We want to apply that same level of focus to our surface ships and our submarines. Great, good, Senator King. Thank you Mr. Chair and like others, I’m just gonna talk about the uh CR first. You know, I came on this committee in January of 2013, and every year. Y’all and your predecessors sit before us and tell us that the CR is a bad thing and we don’t listen to you. You know, I mean, at some point you gotta measure by the action, not by the words that we say um we’ve we’ve allowed uh a CR to be normal from October 1 to the end of the calendar year. That’s just kind of the norm, but we’ve often gone beyond that into the next calendar year and we stand on the threshold of the first time where we’ve just gone to CR for the entire year. And I agree with what the chairman said earlier, the chairman of the subcommittee, that a CR is better than a shutdown. I do agree with that, but why do we have to accept. You know, half-assed over catastrophic. I mean, the, the, the, the House voted on the CR yesterday and they left town. They’re out they adjourned this this was not and now we’re gonna hear what the Senate has to say and then try to do the right thing for the country they’re gone. Because they’re like, OK, we can jam you to vote for a CR that is bad for the defense of this nation by skipping town on a Tuesday. I mean, This speaks very loudly about the priorities of this nation, and this is all done in public with our adversaries watching. Admiral Kilby, I think you testified in your opening testimony that uh under a CR 15% of our ships will miss their maintenance schedule. Did I hear that right?

11 specifically 11 ships, those maintenance availabilities are at risk. OK, so we wanna get to 80% ready on ships and subs. What, what, where are we now?

Depending on the day, around 67% on both ships and subs kind of riding ships and submarines are a little less. OK, what, what will 1/5 of our ships missing their maintenance schedule under the CR, what, what will that do to the quest to get to 80% readiness for ships and it’ll certainly be a setback. We’ll take a penalty there. We’ll have to bow waive that maintenance to the next year depending on the availability and scheduling of that ship. Worse off, we skip that availability, which means it’s doubled down for the next one, which means we’ll have growth work and a lot of things we didn’t anticipate. All right, so, so we’re being told that this is the public we’re we’re being told in public this is the impact of voting yes on this CR that’s coming to us. That we’re just accepting that the quest to get to 80% is gonna be set back because maintenance availabilities for 1/5 of the ships under CR are not gonna be according to protocol. The only, and I don’t wanna say silver lining in that because I don’t see a lot of silver lining. If we get a flexibility to move money, we may be able to address that, but it’ll pack something else. Yeah, you’ll, you’ll pull it out of something else, of course. But, but, you know, we’re, we’re told, well, it’s better than a shutdown. Hey, it’s Wednesday morning. I mean, we, we on the Senate side, the appropriators basically had a deal at the end of last year. And that deal is still basically on the table. My, my hope is that there will at least be a vote in the Senate to do a short term CR and then actually get an omnibus for the rest of you. I mean, an omnibus is kind of a funny thing word to apply to a budget for less than half of the year, but it would be far preferable to a CR because you’d have new starts, you’d have other authorities within an omnibus that you’re not gonna get in the CR, and we ought to be able to do that. And the House deciding on Tuesday night we’re splitting so we can force the Senate to accept a substandard CR that will hurt the military great week, man, great, great week of work to leave town on Tuesday night feeling good about yourself because you forced the Senate to try to accept a substandard work product. Year after year after year after year. General Mingus, I wanna ask you one question about counter UAS readiness because the Army is the DOD’s executive agent. Talk to me about how you’re ensuring coordination between the services and developing a joint counter small UAS doctrine and solutions to addressing the UAS threat. Thank you sir. as the executive agent, you’re well aware of the joint counter UAS officer, the JCO that is uh run by the but it is a joint entity and everybody that’s sitting at this table, um, there’s probably very few weeks that don’t go by where we don’t come together to talk about this problem set, uh, whether it’s in the venue of what Replicator 2.0 is gonna bring across 100+ sites across the country. Uh, to now what is part of the gonna be part of the golden dome, uh, but this conversation on the counter UAS side is absolutely a joint problem. Yes, we have an army officer in charge of it, but he is in a joint billet, and, uh, he is speaking for and trying to solve this problem for the joint force, and I, I collectively think this team is, uh, trying to get after that. Give, give your effort a grade. That’ll be my last question. Give your, give the, the joint effort a grade right now. Um I would give it a grade in two ways. One, compared to where we were two years ago in the B2B plus category compared to where we need to be, it’s probably in the sea. But given the the rate of technology changes in this space and where our adversaries are going in this space, we cannot go fast enough when it comes to counter UAS. Thank you very much. Thanks. Thank you, Senator King, Senator Scott. So my Democrat colleagues don’t like CRs, but the uh the prior majority leader, a Democrat, wouldn’t even bring up a spending bill, uh, that we could have done last uh last summer to make sure we didn’t ever have to do a CR at all. After 4 years of the Biden administration, peace in our enemies and making our forces lethal, I’m glad President Trump’s back and restoring peace through strength. He’s been clear that he is he takes the threat posed by communist China seriously, ensuring the United States is posed to combat these threats. Uh, I look forward to hearing, hearing how you’re doing with that. But my first question for, uh, General Minguez and Admiral, uh, Kilby, since President Trump was elected, uh, recruitments, uh, numbers are way up. So is that a result of, uh, President Trump’s election?

I think it’s a combination of things, sir. I think it’s, uh, the efforts as I talked about in my opening statement that have been being put into place for the last 18 to 24 months, but we have seen a, uh, momentum over the last couple of months that is, uh, that has been pretty remarkable. I agree with General Mingus. Uh, we really took a round turn on this last year. We had 373 more sailors than we predicted to get it last year, so we had an apparatus that was aligned to try to get after this. I’ll take any win to get sailors in the navy that want to serve our country, so I don’t know that I can map that to uh the election or not, but I’m gonna ride that wave as long as I can. So my background before I got into politics was I ran businesses and you know the expectation was you had to beat your competition by by improving every day. Um, you had to get your cost better. You had to get your quality better. Um, everything you did, you had to get better. So General Mingus and Admiral, can we, can you tell me in the last 12 months, what would you say, uh, for what you’re responsible for?

What would you say is the big improvements?

So I would say our transformation and contact effort we’ve infused the latest and greatest technology when it comes to mobility, firepower our network, our UAS uh counter UAS efforts into multiple formations infuse that technology technology at a rate faster than we typically would do in quantities that is greater than we would typically do because we want to learn from them bottom up uh to refine. The decisions that we’re gonna make programmatically uh down the road so that that’s gonna expand into more formations as part of tick transformation and contact 2.0 this year and next year, but that’s been over the last 12 months what I would say this has been our biggest win. Uh, two things, one, coming from the same type of thinking we’re trying to build in the navy. Uh, focused mindset skill set and tool set to get after that continuous improvement. There are some common themes here that we’ve applied across the board from aviation, so the recruiting is an improvement, and I’d say on time completion of ship availabilities as well as some success in submarine availabilities, but we’ve got a long way to go there, sir, to apply that model consistently every single day. Thanks. And we’ve seen the Pentagon failing to recruit, pass an audit, or deliver ships, equipment, missiles, etc. on time and on budget. On top of that, while the Marine Corps and Air Force are 100% recapitalized on their C-130s, the Navy needs over 30 C-130s and is yet to program for this critical tactical airlift platform. Today the Navy only has one on contract, so can you explain why that is?

Uh, sir, we try to balance our program across the board, all aircraft, all ships, all submarines. I’ll take that question for the record and come back to you with specifics about C-130, but again it’s, it’s building the most lethal program we can afford. J Mahoney, what would you say as far as if you take the last 12 months, how are you in a better position and and individuals you’re responsible for in a better position than you were a year ago?

Senator, two things. First is, uh, the second clean audit opinion two years in a row, and I think we’re in the midst of having a hat trick. Why do I say that?

Uh, one of the things I call it the audit dividend we know exactly what we own, exactly where it is, exactly who takes care of it and what it is worth in that audit we can. Tell the condition of those pieces of equipment so we have an increased visibility into the operational readiness as a result of the audit. The second thing is our 3rd marine littoral regiment has just undergone a Certex. Uh, they’ve been delivered their long range precision fires, their air defense. So the concept of force design has gone forward. I wish we could accelerate it and deepen the magazine, but we’ve seen that success on time. Now we need to marry that capability up with organic litoral maneuver in the form of the light amphibious warship, but those are the two things force design and audit. Thank you, Chairman. Thank you, Senator Scott. Senator Sheehy. Uh, General Mahoney, I, uh, might understand the Marine Corps is the only branch to have passed an audit. That’s correct, Senator. I get really tired of the only, the only DOD branches, sir. I get really tired of Marines lecturing me how much better they are than I am. My wife’s a Marine, so I already get it every day. So I’m glad your wife has wisdom. Well, I was in the Navy, so I had to marry up, right?

Um, how do you ask General Mingus, you brought it up. Um, General Mingus was my boss actually back in the day when I went to Ranger school. Uh, County US, what branch, uh, what, uh, functional branch of the army do you guys place the county US responsibility in?

We have 6 war fighting functions inside the army, so intel command and control, maneuver fires protection is where counter UAS sits right now. But as we think about the future, um, in the army, the land force, the vast majority of casualties that occur on a battlefield is direct fire. I think that future battlefield, the most casualties are gonna occur from the air and so the. The notion of the convergence of offensive and defensive fires taking it out of that protection war fighting function and making it part of that scheme of fires and scheme maneuver, I think is the way of the future. But today to answer your question, it’s in the protection function, uh, Admiral Kilby, where does the navy view. US is a functional area because of our platform center we keep them owned by the resource sponsors, so it’s a division of labor between the N9 which owns all our war fighting platforms and the N4, which owns our shore installations. So there’s a mix between those two. And General Mahoney, where is the Marine Corps placed that?

There are kind of small UAS, uh, two parts operational units with, uh, two programs of record, uh, Mattis and LM Mattis and our installations with installations count of UAS just as a comment. As General Mingus brought up, we are part of Project Convergence, which has a kind of small UAS element to it in R&D and experimentation. We’re a big part of Replicator 2.0, which also invests in kind of small UAS and we’re invested in the program office as well. And uh General Spain and Space Force Air Force, where, where do you guys place um you at counter US as a functional area from a space force perspective it’s very limited. We have very limited involvement. Senator, we put it in the protection function as well. It’s with our defenders, uh, but as was mentioned by one, by the other panelists, uh, we’re in the process of evolving that to the operational function and so it’s a blend of our, uh, both defender force and our operational force as we go forward. Well, uh, I asked that because, um, I, I actually was, was one of the manufacturers of the Mattis program back in, in my former life for came here, so I spent a lot of time on the range with your air defense lab platoon Marines working with that. Um, and, and what I found as we worked with all the branches is each branch understandably had a very different view of where the COAS function fell and how they viewed it, you know, the Air Force was very much looking at it from a security forces perspective, fixed installation defense. Uh, the Navy, of course, was, was focused on it from a shipboard when the boxer had its incident with Iran in 2019. Um, the army, of course, had more of a, uh, EW. They really viewed it kind of an electronic warfare, uh, issue, and what I found was as each branch looked at it through their own lens, uh, the Joint Cape Billy’s office really struggled to coalesce that into an acquisition vision that actually worked, and they ended up just buying any shiny object that was dangled in front of their face, and it led to kind of the schizophrenic approach, uh, to it. Um, it’s not a criticism, it’s just a reality that as that technology was developing quickly. Um, it, it was hard to, to meet all the needs. So, um, I, I think trying to determine whether it’s a specific MOS or actually assigning a functional area within the branch that’s a this, this is a fundamental change in battlefield tactic technology as we see in Ukraine. I mean, every single day whether it’s FPVs or beyond line of sight drones, um, it’s not transforming warfare but it is functionally transforming how maneuver units will behave on the ground. And I think treating it as a as a subspecialty that’s branching off whatever convenient, you know, areas there vice focusing on what it really is a core capability, uh, in my opinion would help coalesce the operational vision for what counter drone looks like, uh, it also help, uh, streamline the acquisition process so we can find that good technology quickly and field it quickly, but then also there’s the offensive aspect where you know we think of all offensive drones as reapers and predators dropping hellfires, um. And that we’re defending against small drones, but we are not, as far as I can tell, adopting small US organic to our maneuver elements just like every infantry squad has an automatic weapon, every infantry squad should have an organic. SUAS offensive capability, a backpack full of FPVs that they can fly at and into the enemy maneuver units and disrupt them just like we’re seeing all over the world in battlefields from Iranian proxy groups to the Russia-Ukraine war. Um, from my old buddy still in uniform, uh, I do not hear that we have an organic offensive small US capability within our maneuver units, and I think that’s gonna be a great disservice to our young men and women when the next conflicts arises, so. you’re back, thank you. Thank you, Senator Sheehy. Um, I’m gonna continue my line of questioning that I started with, uh, General Mahoney to you just again on the we’ve already touched on it a lot but it’s OK to, I, I wanna hear from all the services. The negative impact on the CR, the budget flexibility that you would want or request as part of uh this year’s NDAA, and then, uh, any lessons learned on the good news that we’re all starting to see I think across the services on recruiting and the kind of. You know, um, Um Make sure we’re learning across services on that because. I don’t think you got enough press, but if you have an all volunteer force and we we’re hitting a recruiting crisis of tens of thousands of Americans who we were short, that’s an existential threat to our military. Fortunately it looks like we’re beyond that, but we need to, we need to embed the lessons learned from all the services on how we got out of that danger zone. So general do you on those three questions. Senator, as far as, as far as the CR, we’ve canvassed pretty much all the negative things. I just like to hammer down on one, we talked about anomalies and flexibility in order to move, uh, between appropriations or accounts. We also need to be mindful of what the top line is. If there is only so much top line from which to flex or with them to move, we’re gonna rob, uh, from one account. To pay for another examples might be inflation that outpaces the plus up pay raises that were not planned for or budgeted but are must pay bills that money will come from somewhere and uh non-budgeted contingencies that we pay out of our own primarily OM accounts will have to be accounted for somewhere in the rules of that continuing resolution. um, a knock on effect specific to the Marine Corps is if, and it’s already been touched on by Admiral Kilby. If ship maintenance or ship building or procurement or anything uh that that touches amphibious shipping it will have a knock on effect to the Marine Corps as I spoke with about with. Senator Hirono earlier as far as flexibility goes, I would reference the the Lord Hale study on PPB reform and I’ll just bring up three things that come to mind immediately. I think they have 16 recommendations in there which are all really good. Uh, multi-year availability of one year accounts so that you are not forced into making bad decisions at the end of the year and buying things that you really don’t need but have a period of availability to where you can make better better executive and managerial decisions against that that appropriation, uh, greater transfer authority so that we can move between appropriations or move between subactivity groups in order to solve a problem early so that we don’t have to come. To Congress for an above threshold massive uh reprogramming late in the year that may be late to need or not solve the problem and uh lastly and and I’ll let it go is uh multi-year colorless appropriations to have flexibility within a portfolio to strengthen where you’re weak and move money around to make sure that you can get your objectives attained within an account. So multi-year availability, greater transfer authority, and multi-year call list appropriation and we did the last one and if you think of MRAP and you think of JAO back in the day, uh, that worked pretty well to get things done at an accelerated pace. Uh, and I’m running on here, but recruiting, uh, for us. Three things we have a brand that we will not back off from. We believe that that brand is attractive. We believe it is a magnet to a wide demographic of young Americans who will prove themselves physically, mentally, and morally qualified. We will not back off of the standard and counter counterintuitively. You maintain a standard at a high level that attracts people who want to perform uh to that standard. That’s a great lesson and I think we have to have to always keep that in mind. All the services, no matter what our recruiting challenges are. It is counterintuitive, but it works, so thank you for that. And, and lastly, Senator, I already talked about it in detail and that’s the that is our recruiting force, a breed apart, uh, who are hand screened, selected, incentivized, promoted, and as I said, when they get back in the fleet, as you know, there are some of the best staff NCOs and officers we have, and they become sergeant Major Marine Corps and common on Marines. Uh, real quick, general, uh, gut line, can you, uh, just hit on these, uh, three questions, uh, uh, try to be concise. I’m going over my time here. I wanna be respectful to my colleagues, but I, I do wanna get through this issue of CR budget flexibilities and recruiting. Yes, Chairman, I can go pretty quick from a CR uh it is uh very, it’s a huge challenge. It’s very, very inefficient, um, it does impact us especially because we are the smallest force with the smallest budget, so any churn in our budget is is a huge hit to us as far as what we would ask, uh, for flexibilities. I agree with the the rest of the the staff new starts we are seeing an enormous amount of threats emerging every single year. And it is very hard to get after those threats when you have to wait 2 to 4 years to get the budget to get after those threats. So anything you can do budget flexibility for Newstart Authority, PE consolidation, the ability to to move money between programs would be hugely uh beneficial, uh, and then the multi-year procurement, multi-year, uh, execution authority that, uh, John Mahoney talked about. As far as recruiting and retention, we’ve actually got a much easier problem because we have a much smaller force, but we are seeing two, recruits, 2, volunteers for every recruit that we take into the United States Space Force, so we’re able to be very, very, very selective for high quality 15%, almost nearly 15% of our recruits have some college level of education to include all the way up to master’s and PhDs. Uh, we are recruiting, uh, uh, objectives were met, uh, the last 4 years in a row, 104% for our enlisted, 101% for our officers, uh, and we’re looking at continuing growth in the future, and our retention rate has been in excess of 98%. Wow, great. That’s great news, great job, General Senator Schmidt, uh, thank you, Mr. Chairman, um. And Admiral Kilby, I wanna direct this. I, I question to you. I feel like the fever has broke finally on, um, this obsession that the previous administration had with with DEI. That’s a good, that’s a good thing. Um, the previous administration also treated climate change as a national security priority. I actually had one of the more ridiculous exchanges in my first couple of years here with with Secretary Del Toro who told me Admiral Nimitz, uh, would have cared about climate change too, um, this sort of like the Twilight zone. But we have, we have issues, right, um, in, in ship building now that we’re focused, uh, refocused on war fighting capability, what should Congress do, uh, to prioritize modernizing the fleet as opposed to this political stuff?

22 things, sir, uh, super important for us is to keep our maintenance going. Gotta get our ships available. I’m not gonna build a whole mess of new ships in 2 years, so I’ve got to get the ships I have up to speed and available. The other thing we can do is, uh, continue to invest in munitions. I think the, the lead time for them is shorter than a ship, so we must, uh, renew our magazines so we’re ready to fight if called, OK, um, and then for, uh, sticking with you, Admiral Kilby, and then also for uh General Spain. Um, if we had to fight a pure war. In the next 2 years. What would be our greatest uh capability gap?

And what should Congress do to address that?

Uh, I’ll start first, uh, again, munitions, long range munitions, preferred munitions are an area where we, we need to increase our productivity as a nation and then, uh, from a just a general sense our capabilities are pretty good with the exception of that munitions quantity, but our capacity is a problem so getting those ships and funding available out on time will what will result in in a greater capability overall. Senator, thanks for the question. Uh, uh, to your point, in the next 2 years, the greatest challenge for us is gonna be, uh, regaining the sustainment edge in our current fleet, the lead time required for parts and supply. Uh, over within that time frame required would require an infusion to help us with our aircraft availability, our mission capable rates, and training our, our flying force to be ready within that within that window. In addition, uh, some flexibility on, uh, new opportunities with technology in terms of asymmetric capabilities that would enable us to, uh, uh, to, to, uh, uh, to actually inculcate our force design which calls for both high-end exquisite capability paired. Uh, with low end, low cost per effect, uh, massive capability that can augment the air component commanders who are in the field. Sounds like NAD. The exquisite would be, uh, NAD would be an example of the exquisite, yes sir, um, I, I guess with the time that I have remaining, general, uh, Mingus and uh Mahoney just wanted to ask if sort of the similar theme of flexibility. If, uh, if you had unrestricted funding for readiness, uh, how should that be spent?

Um, first. And um. To in order to get that high end capability, what, what would we be doing like if we’re, if we’re in a if we’re in an era of scarcity right that we have to accept at some level, what is the what is the level of priority or what are the priorities?

For for us I would say, well, the second one would be just what Admiral Kilby talked about our magazine depth, uh, precision gut munitions, long range precision fires, and the ability to scalele rapidly at time of crisis and conflict. So it’s one thing to bring production rates up, but it’s another to have the ability to to rapidly scale at time of crisis and conflict. And the other would be and let me just how would you rate where we’re at right now on that front because I, I’ve, I’ve heard that I agree with that. Where, where do you think we’re at with that?

Well, just using 155 as an example before the Russian-Ukraine conflict we were, um, producing at 14,000 rounds a month. We’re now at, we had a high water mark. In November of 42,000 ramping to 70, uh, by this summer and 1000 a month by this fall, so that’s a two year journey we’ve got to be able to do that in months, not years, and it’s, it’s about automation or robotics. People are hard to, to bring in, let go, bring in, let go, and so the, the key to all this is automating those both organic and defense industrial systems and bases to to be able to do that. And then the, the second, uh, place that I would put that money is in our transformation efforts that I described earlier, uh, our tick 1.0 and 2.0. The, the end result of that infuse of technology into those formations is they’re more lethal, they’re more agile, they’re lighter, they can get to places much faster, um, and they’re just better formations that are designed purpose built for the next fight, not the last fight. Senator, um, if I had a 33 part wish list, uh, the first one would be to accelerate our force design to ensure victory and more killing power in the contact layer. Uh, I agree completely with depth of magazine across people parts programs. There’s several things that we don’t have enough of that we need to build more and deepen that. If anything, what Ukraine, what the Levant, what the Houthis show us is that the short sharp illusion is just that, a short sharp illusion we need to shoot. We need to be able to take a hit. We need to reset and get back in the fight. Secondly. Uh, our force gen platforms are in specifically our barracks for our Marines. If we’re gonna count on them to generate a lethal force, we’ve got to provide them, uh, the quality of life and the and the living conditions that they rate. And thirdly, and we’ve already talked about it extensively, is the ability for us to move, maneuver, and sustain on 73% of the Earth’s surface that’s amphibious shipping and project power from sovereign American soil when we do that as well as organic litoral maneuver in order to move shore to shore in order to maneuver to a position of advantage in order to sustain in the contact layer. Thank you, thank you, Mr. Thank you, Senator Schmidt, Senator Hirono. Thank you Mr. Chairman. I would say that as our services with the exception of Space Force, uh, are facing recruiting challenges, why should we discourage or why would we be discouraging women and minorities from enlisting with all this anti-DEI stuff. Admiral Kilby, the Navy’s Shipyard Infrastructure Optimization Program, or SIOP. Uh, projects were unfortunately not included in Secretary Hecka’s list of protected and prioritized programs following his directive to implement an 8% budget cut across the board at the Pentagon. You testified today on the importance of CIA and of course if we clearly we need to do a better job of uh repair and maintaining our uh. Our ships, so with the flexibility that you are requesting in the CR, even if PIO is not on the Secretary Hicks’s list of priorities, are you planning to prioritize critical pyop projects across the fleet, including, for example, completion of the dry dock and planning and design for a waterfront production facility at Pearl Harbor. Uh, indeed, you know, we need to get on with, um, continue to modernize our four public shipyards so that you will have available ships to do what you need to do. So would you use the flexibility that you request in the CR to prioritize CIO?

We want to continue on our Pyop program, ma’am. Uh, I’ve, I’ve talked about the 40 projects we’ve done. The additional 6.3 billion that are in the budget that we want to continue on and the remaining projects we need to execute so we’re committed to. Good. I’m looking to you for that because of uh of uh what is the point in, uh, enabling us to build more ships if we can maintain the fleet that we currently have. A skilled workforce is uh foundational to military readiness. However, this administration has implemented a DOD hiring freeze and is planning to fire up to 60,000 DOD employees. DOD is eliminating people across the spectrum from firing general and flag officers without cause to removing new and motivated employees. These would be the employees on uh who had just gotten hired. And are being trained and you would think that we would want to keep those folks, but uh the people in probationary status are among the first to go, uh, as happened across the administration. Uh, for example, the VA, which is already strapped with the need to hire people, they just eliminated, uh, some 2400 employees and about to eliminate 83,000 employees, um, going forward. So, uh, gentlemen, and Ms. Moore, how are these personnel actions impacting the hiring, training, and retaining of a skilled national security workforce?

Briefly, You can say it’s not helping. I’m, I’ll, I’ll start, uh, specific to the Marine Corps, we started our leaning out process 6 budget cycles ago, uh, in accordance with force design and talent management. So we’re start game of this exercise for us. We’re pretty lean, so any cut is gonna have some impacts. However, uh, of the 2300 employees that we’ve, uh, identified, we’ve got protection either exemption, um, or exclusion. Down to a number south of 75, uh, not without impact but manageable from the Marine Corps standpoint. What I’m also concerned about is the exclusions or exemptions for a hiring freeze. Um, we lose about 7 to 10% of our civilian workforce just through natural attrition each year, so we have to figure out a way to replenish that or the number would just keep going down. Well, hundreds of thousands of federal employees are being fired. Uh, these songs are not based on any kind of a job performance evaluation. So it’s gonna happen to the DOD I would say and so anybody else wants to I’ll just connect to our last exchange, um, ranking member, uh, the shipyards are exempt from the probationary employees and they’re exempt from the hiring freeze, so we’re trying to shape this in a manner that allows us to continue the, the most important work as we work through, uh, uh, guidance from the administration. Also exempted from the hiring freeze is the military sealift command, an important force for us to maintain our fleet. So I think those are efforts on the services part to manage basically all all three of you are needing to identify some very critical people that you wanna make sure that these, uh, uh, firings do not hit is that what you’re doing?

Yes, Senator. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Thank you, Senator Hirono. I’m gonna um. Finish this line of questioning with you, General Spain on. The CR budget flexibilities and specific if you can get there and then. Air Force, um. Recruiting and lessons learned and then uh Miss Maer I’d like you to answer the. Same question as well, Mr. Chairman, thanks for the question. uh, we talked a little bit in the opening statement about the, the bad, but I echo the the comments from across the table on top line restrictions, uh, flexibility, uh, in my mind really comes down to treating our readiness accounts and quality of life accounts, uh, in terms of Milon, uh, and, and, uh, FSRM. Uh, with the same flexibility as operations, uh, the readiness impacts within those accounts have the same, uh, deleterious effect across the force as, uh, as stopping current operations and so by allowing flexibility across the pillars of those readiness accounts, that’s manpower, infrastructure, flying and training, uh, and parts and supply, uh, we can mitigate some of that risk that comes along with the. The CR, um, from a recruiting standpoint, the Air Force is, uh, above Glide slope on our recruiting, uh, goals for the year. We increased the number, uh, uh, by 20%, and in fact we’re still above the 20% increase, and we have the largest, uh, delayed entry pool that we’ve had in 10 years and the most recruiting that we’ve done at this point in the year, uh, in the last 15 years, so we’re in a good position. Are there lessons learned from what you did to get over that hump?

Yes sir, so we, we have, uh, increased the number of recruiters. We’ve increased the training which reflects some of the things that were said before. I don’t know if I, I was a recruiter when I first started out in the Air Force waiting to go to pilot training. Uh, it is a, it’s a, it’s a tough job and you need, uh, the right people doing that work and we’re bringing the right people in and we’re training them, uh, uh, even better than we had before. Great, um, Ms. Mayer, do you have any views on the. In general, the, the line of questioning that I’ve been going through on CR but in uh in particular we’ve, we’ve heard the challenges that, but in particular what I wanna hear from you is, um, your sense on flexibilities, uh, that I know that we could provide more in the budget to give our services the ability to address some of the challenges that you put in your report but also give them flexibility that if we have to. You know, and certainly I, I wouldn’t advocate for it, but another CR, another kind of budgetary constraint issue that they have more flexibility to direct to address them and then also if GAO’s looked at lessons learned from the recruiting kind of challenge that we had over the last 3 or 4 years and how that’s come about, what are those?

Sure, thank you for the question, uh, Mr. Chairman on the issue of CR um. You know, talking about a full UCR makes me think back to work that we did over a decade ago looking at the impacts on sequestration. Obviously it’s a little bit apples to oranges, but we issued a report 2015ish that looked at how sequestration impacted DOD and at that time we had a recommendation that DOD collect the lessons learned from sequestration and stockpile them in case they needed those lessons later on down the road. 2017 we reached out to the comptroller shop. They said they had taken action to implement that recommendation, so that’s sort of a takeaway item for the department is to look back at what DOD did back in 2017 in terms of lessons learned on sequestration and see what if any of those lessons can be applied to today in terms of flexibilities, um, we’ve heard a lot in in my teams have heard a lot about uh the types of flexibilities uh that the uh that the generals and the admiral talked about today, um. Obviously Geo tries to stay a little bit agnostic in terms of specific flexibilities, but what I will say is that whatever flexibilities are offered should be directed towards ensuring the ability of the services to meet the readiness challenges that they face um I talked about earlier in my opening statement, there is a significant imbalance between resources and mission and so that anything that we’ve done to help bring that into better balance would be very helpful. In terms of recruiting we’re very encouraged to see that the recruiting numbers have come up. We’ve issued a whole series of reports in areas where the services have critical shortfalls in the number of people they need. So for example at the Navy for every 6 sailors that they had that they need for the fleet, they only have 5 assigned. We found deficiencies in the number of air defenders that the space force has a really good uh force generation model, but they don’t have enough guardians to actually. Carry that out much less than the civilian and the contractor side so that the improvements and that the change in the trend line and recruiting can be helpful in that regard and some of our work on recruiting we think it’s important for the different programs, the different services to get an understanding of what is working, what isn’t working. And then double down on the things that are working and then share those lessons with each other that way you’ll get a better outcome. No, I’m gonna submit, OK, great, thank you on that, and, um, I, I still have, uh, a number of questions. Senator, do you wanna, do you wanna do another round or do you wanna submit questions but I, I’m gonna stay for a while since I have all these, uh, very important. Members of our military, I think. I will be submitting I’ll be submitting questions for the record. Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman. Well, let me, let me continue with some additional questions. Um, General Mingus, uh, one of the things that I, I wanna try to nail down is my understanding is the top line number for the end strength of the army was reduced because of the. Recruiting challenges we almost had to do it in a forced way um now that we’ve met these numbers again and you have almost a surplus will you be requesting um from us and you have the flexibility to, to increase your top line to a certain number?

What’s your flexibility on that?

Because I’d like to see it. If you need more funding to get to that higher top line, I think we’d all be certainly willing to provide it. But what kind of authorities do you need to get back to a higher end strength when the reduction in your end strength was actually a resultant function of the recruiting challenges now that you’re. Going in the positive direction we wanna take advantage of that to increase your end strength. What do you need?

Money, authorities, both?

Thank you, Chairman, um. Money, yes, in the Milper’s account, uh, because what we asked for in this year’s budget was an appropriations for an end strength of 442,000. What I believe will happen if the trajectories remain consistent with where they’re at today, we’re gonna end uh this year somewhere between 449,000 and 452,000, so almost. 10,000 over what we believe will be appropriated from a military pay and allowance account standpoint, so there will be a deficit there that we will have to come back and ask for help on the authority. I would strongly encourage you to do that. Nobody wants a smaller army and the fact that you had to shrink. Due to recruiting challenges. Nobody wanted that and now that you’re fixing it, we need to reward you in my view to get back to a higher end strength sir and for authorities, the secretary of the army, all the service secretaries can authorize a 2% deviation from what the NDAs, so that would put you at about 451. So we think unless it goes above that, uh, we will be OK on authorities. OK, great, um, General Mahoney, I wanna, I wanna go to a topic you and I and. Common have discussed a lot. That’s uh where we are in force design and you know, very innovative Marine Corps initiative started with General Berger, um, but not without criticism and anytime you innovate you’re gonna get criticized. There’s no doubt about that. um, I think the Marine Corps has gotten ahead of the curve on a lot of issues relating to drones and loitering munitions and, uh, you know. Light flexible forces that can move with uh weapon systems that can take out Chinese shipping um all very innovative uh however, one of the criticisms was that uh the divest to invest strategy divested too much combat power in the Marine Corps’s primary mission of a 911 force with amphibs to go anywhere in the world. At a moment’s notice, the kick in the door with sufficient combat power was reduced, and a lot of criticisms came from. You know, within the family, retired 4 stars and retired commandants and retired, uh, very well respected Marines, so that’s a difficult balance. I remember. A hearing that we had a couple of years ago on force design where, you know, I asked one of the top Marine Corps officers. Hey, look, you do an amphibious invasion and then you get 3 miles in wherever you are and you have to cross a river. Wait a minute. Marine Corps got rid of all its bridging equipment. How are we gonna cross a river?

The answer I think if I remember was we’re gonna call in the army. Now I love the army, but in the Marine Corps uh tradition calling on the army was not something that we typically have done. So where are we on the balance?

Where are we on things like bridging and route clearing?

Where are we on things like um. Artillery, uh, infantry which we, we cut the Marine Corps cut a lot and do you still think this criticism, which came from some very, very well respected Marines. Um, Is legit. Are we recalibrating a little bit in terms of we want an innovative Marine Corps, but we do not want to get rid of our 911 capability kick in the door anywhere in the world and bring significant combat power to bear. Anywhere and what’s the balance and how are we doing on all those things, general?

Senator, we’ve talked extensively about this and if you remember where uh the the force design. Journey started and that was with the statement that we are not manned, trained or equipped for the future fight that’s something tough for a marine to swallow. That’s what generated the shift in some of the design elements of our force uh we believe that we’re on the right course based on operations Xtan today based on experimentation that we’ve done based on what the COOs, uh, demand that having said, our commandant is very. His top priority in fact is to balance that modernization if we put that in the modernization bin, although force design is modernization, talent management, training, education, and logistics, we’ll put it in the modernization bin with the ability to respond to crises we’ve talked about the dearth of afib shipping that’s significant. I believe it’s strategic to the nation as far as organic combat power goes. We divested of heavy armor. We do not believe in the situations that we were faced that we need organic heavy armor for maneuver or maneuver support. We believe we have enough artillery, both rocket artillery and cannon artillery, for the problems that we will face. We believe that we have enough um enough engineering and engineering support. You brought up bridging what we have found that gap negotiation gap crossing, uh. Is a shortfall and we have divested of bridging equipment, frankly that was too heavy and logistically unsupportable. So can marines cross the river if they uh do an amphibious invasion and find themselves 3 miles inland and have to cross a river?

So there are other ways to negotiate a gap and you, you know that, but as far as bridging goes, we’re looking at more expeditionary solutions, and this circles back to your point of recalibration. One of the things about Forest design, I’ll try to keep this short, was that it immediately admitted to being wrong. We were to challenge all the assumptions along the way if we found an assumption wanting or invalid, then we had to adjust to satisfy uh and verify that assumption. We have looked very closely through what we call the campaign of learning at those assumptions we have adjusted the size of a battalion we have adjusted some of the aviation capabilities we have we have adjusted some of the weapons that we have either bought or not bought, uh, and to your point we’re looking hard at expeditionary solutions to bridging. As far as joint support, I’m frankly, I’m less concerned about the army providing an M1A2, uh, for us as I am about us as a joint force being able to project set a theater and sustain a theater from a joint perspective. Great, thank you, Senator Hirono. Thank you Mr. Chairman. In 2019, the Secretary of Defense discontinued certain tasks at the border after determining that service members were not performing military functions and the continued support would negatively affect military readiness and morale. I think that is an important aspect of, uh, what is happening the impact on morale. General Mingusz and General Mahoney, how is this deployment. The current deployment, uh, any different from 2019 when DHS was asking your units to perform the same non DOD tasks. Thank you ma’am. Um, we’ve been asked to defend and secure the border and we’re gonna, we’re gonna do that. That’s, that’s a priority, uh, for this administration. We’re gonna execute that mission as we’ve been asked to do over time as we build any time you’re asked to defend, it has three critical components a physical, a technical, and a human. And as those physical and technical things come online as our secretary testified, the human resources associated with this mission set will come down. But to answer your specific question that the lessons we learned from 2019 is the troop to task as we like to use was a one for one detection and monitoring POE support, admin support, data entry, etc. And so there was no time to come offline to continue to train and do their mission. So it doesn’t sound much different from what we’re gonna make sure that the troop to task allows for rotations so that the degradation in readiness is not as substantial as what we saw in 2019. That remains to be seen. And center similar but not the same, uh, we’ve been on the border as it’s been stated for a while. The mission has changed with this, uh, recent evolution where we’re primary primarily executing engineering tasks and engineering support tasks think barrier and placement, uh, but we’re also executing intelligence tasks and in both of those, uh, there is training value, especially for the intelligence analysts to collect and analyze what is a very complex situation. But as General Mingus brought up, any time you have 10 essential tasks and you’re only training to one or two of them, you have to figure out a way to either accept risk in the task that you’re not training to or to figure out a training plan and, and maybe unlike the army we even before we had a rotational uh basis where we could, uh, plus up the skills and the tasks that weren’t being performed and we’ll we’ll manage the same way. There’s actually from what you’re testifying, you’re needing you, you are needing to find some tasks that our military people are doing on the border that somehow has more relevance to what they should be doing in the military and that perhaps if you had your druthers, uh, your people would not be in the border at all, especially as border crossings are at an all time low. During the Northcom posture hearing, General Gillo said that uh units deployed to the southwest border get only one dedicated training days per week. General Mingus and General Mahoney and Ms. Moore is one day a week normal for military training?

Depending on which cycle you’re in, ma’am, um, it, it could be normal, but I’ll go back to where I talked about before is it’s the ability to cycle people in and out of their tasks associated with the border mission versus going back in the ability to train on their mission in central task. The the other thing I would offer in this kind of expand on General Mahoney is that at the highest level of our doctrine, uh, the joint force has to be able to execute offense, defense, and stability operations simultaneously. This is a defensive operation and so there is training value associated with that. Is it gonna be the same as if they went to the National Training Center?

Absolutely not, but there’s still value to be had if the leadership takes the right approach to it. And Senator, I’m not, I’m not familiar with exactly what Northcom said, but I, I would maintain that our engineers and our intel analysts have had far more than one day of training to train for this mission, uh, for obstacle and placement for intelligence analysts they undergo a whole battery of training to prepare them for just this support. So you’re saying that that our troops on the border are actually getting equivalent. Uh, something that is equivalent to more than, uh, one day a week in training. So, uh, you, you know what I mean I I would like. I think that you’re doing your best to be very forthcoming in your assessment of your troops being deployed to the border and clearly you can do all you you’re doing your best to enable your uh these people to be getting the kind of some sort of equivalent. Training, but it, it is hard to, uh, frankly it kind of stretches the imagination to think that that that is happening and that they are not losing the kind of training and and and opportunities to train that uh would be the case if they were not, uh, Senator from a from a GAO perspective, um, I’ll say real real briefly that, um, I think back to one of my previous jobs at GAO was at GEO’s Homeland Security justice team and. We obviously that team continues to do oversight of the of the uh of DHS and I think about all the the the capabilities that currently exist within CBP and ICE and and other federal law enforcement agencies on the border. um I think from an oversight perspective it would be interesting to pursue what those agents. are doing and at what point are their capabilities insufficient to meet the mission needs on the southwest border and we’re not, we’re not looking specifically at that topic right now, but I think that’s something valuable to think about from a readiness perspective, one of the trends we’ve seen over the years is there is there can sometimes be a tendency to look to DOD. To perform functions that can also be performed by uh by the domestic and civilian agencies in many cases that’s definitely warranted but DUD comes in with a heavier footprint. It costs bigger dollars and it does have a readiness and a mission and a resource uh trade off for the department as well yeah of course. A flight using military aircraft to take only about 100 people to another country. It costs over $2 million. That is not a very efficient use of military resources. You raise a good point, Ms. Maurer, and you know up to date we have not received information from. Either the Homeland Security or the DOD as to the need asserted for the troops to go to the border and we await that kind of information, but until then highly questionable. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Thank you, Senator. I’m gonna wrap up here uh with just a few more questions again thanks for the patience. This has been really good enlightening hearing and I appreciate all the uh uh witnesses testimony and frank discussion of our readiness challenges. General Spain I’m gonna uh turn to you a little bit on contested logistics. uh Ms. Mauer talked about it. Uh, we all deal with it, all the services, but the Air Force think in particular with its, uh, tanker fleet. Is particularly challenged because tankers are so important, um. Uh, the, the previous secretary of the Air Force committed after the chief of staff of the Air Force and, and many others over the last several years we’re gonna be moving more KC-135s to Iselson, but, um, what is the sense of your tanker fleet, uh, writ large and um how can we be addressing that and can you commit to me to keeping that timeline and getting those uh 4 tankers I think. One has already uh been um moved to Iselson, but we need a. 3 more with um. Over 100 5th gen fighters in Alaska, as you know, our Air Force is doing a fantastic job, real world missions very regularly intercepting Russian Bear bombers and our aid is Chinese and Russian strategic bombers and our aid is, our military, our air force has done a great job up there, but as you know, those intercept missions are not easy and we need tankers. Um, but we need tankers throughout the world, so what’s the situation there?

Thanks, Senator. I appreciate the question. Uh, as you are fully aware, we’re committed to the KC 46 program 89. Aircraft on the ramp today uh and recent deployments have been wildly successful in their ability to offload gas to a multitude of receivers both in theater and around the world uh for the KC-135, uh, obviously we did some reengineing and service life extension in the 80s and the 90s that will keep the platform flying for decades to come, but we are also fully committed to tanker recapitalization post the case. C46 uh program uh right now we’re on track to continue to procure 15 KC 46s a year and we’re continuing to move the tanker recap, uh, uh, acquisition strategy forward, uh, and we’ll continue to do so and, and to your point we are, uh, continuing to move down the path to bringing the remaining 3 KC-135s to Ilson for the reasons that you mentioned we have some work to do with the department. Uh, on some notifications, but beyond that we’ll be able to move relatively great, keep me posted on that. That’s very important. Uh, General Mingus, we talked about the, uh, 11th Airborne Division, Arctic Angels. um, I’d like you just to get an update from your perspective on how that unit’s doing. Um, I, I try to touch base with them a lot, um, from what I can tell they seem to be very motivated and um. Now that that’s a war fighting headquarters, uh, any other additional personnel that we talked about coming to that unit in Alaska and then any other thoughts about, uh, additional multi-domain task force that you’re looking at, um, placing, I know that you’re looking at Alaska for a multi-domain task force at one point, but just to update on really the uh operations and morale of the 11th Airborne Division, uh, who do a great job in my state. Yeah thanks Chairman. I, I know you’re proud of them and we are as well, uh, their trajectory still continues to move in a very positive direction both on, uh, the suicide front and also on the people side that that you and I talked yesterday, but also on the operational side, multiple warfighter exercises, uh, they just demonstrated their ability to, uh, self deploy in-flight rig all the way from Alaska to Hawaii, jump in and participate in a high scale war fighter exercise on island, uh, just a couple months ago. So from an operational perspective they continue to improve and and get better every day. The other fundamental change that we made in Alaska was converting the brigade in Alaska from a striker to an infantry brigade combat team. So that climate, culture and the identity associated with being light fighters, Arctic light fighters, uh, they absolutely have embraced that. Uh, it’s turned the turned the corner in that organization, and they’re often a great start, uh, so very, very proud of where they’re headed. On the multi-domain task forces, uh, we did consider, uh, but in the end, uh, sir, we did not, uh, make a selection to go to Alaska for the, for the 5th uh uh multi domain task force gonna be home ported. Uh, Fort Lewis, Fort Carson, Hawaii, uh, Fort Bragg in Europe. OK, great, thank you, um, Admiral, uh, you and I had a good discussion on ADAC, uh, the other day. That’s, uh, if you look at a map, it’s incredibly strategic base. It’s the gateway to the Arctic. It’s much further west than Hawaii. It’s kind of a dagger in the flank of China, um. Can you give me your sense on the strategic value of ADDAC and any updates since you and I talked about that?

Well, just for, for the record, sir, we went to look at, uh, AAC from kind of a small, medium and large warm basing perspective on what we could do in the future, uh, with your support and uh we’re gonna send up a team to engage with the Corporation and the Department of Transportation from Alaska to really understand that to a greater level. Uh, we sent 14 ships to Dutch Harbor last year, 2 from, uh, the FDNF 12 from San Diego, so there’s a need. I happened to speak to Admiral Paparro last night on a number of issues. This came up. We talked about the increased activity by China and Russia in that area. So to me that lends itself to address, uh, those, those types of activities so we’re not having to sail so far to get there. Well, I appreciate that and again that’s uh it’s not just aircraft, strategic bombers and our aid is that our great air force is doing such a good job of addressing it’s, uh, to your point, it’s, uh, Chinese and Russian joint naval task forces in our EEZ up in Alaska. This is happening on a regular basis. The rest of the country doesn’t uh really notice, but we notice in Alaska we’re on the front lines and we appreciate the great work our service members are doing there, um. And so I wanna, I wanna thank you on that and look forward to working with you on that, um. Can we get to a point, I know it was already discussed in depth, uh, but on the, on the amphibs between the navy and the Marine Corps, you know, General Mahoney, we talked about the Marines kind of 9/11 kick in the door capability, but essentially that goes away if you don’t have a MAG that you can rely on. So, Admiral, can you commit to us to work with us in the Marine Corps on prioritizing amphibs. You know, I’m just being frank here, you don’t get the sense that if it was a Ford class carrier or something like that, that the maintenance numbers that GAO has reported, um, would be so um. Challenge right now the recent GAO report stated roughly 50% of the amphib fleet was in poor condition, poor material condition, including 5 out of the 9 LHA LHD carriers, and 90% of the LSDs. Those are numbers that are shocking and they really undermine the Marine Corps’s ability to do its job and. It’s a team, one team, one fight Navy Marine Corps, but that’s uh that’s a real detriment, sir, thanks for that question. I’m not satisfied with amphibious, uh, maintenance or readiness. Uh, we are committed to the 80% combat surge ready and so that’s gonna be all surface warships, the 80% yes sir, but as a subset, I’ve asked Admiral McLean, who is the swell boss, to really do a deep dive on amphibious ships in particular, and there’s some things I discussed that we can do better there but uh you have my commitment. To meet that uh goal to exceed that goal, and to ensure that we have uh a three shipar ready for the Marine Corps when they embark as a result of the boxer and WASP uh challenges LHDs that you mentioned. I, uh, directed a study in last April and I reviewed that study in November and there’s some actions were taken to get after that splitting up the flag responsibilities of CN C and MRC, which is a maintenance command as of today, and C-21. Admiral Bill Green will give command to Admiral Lanaman. And, and he will be C21 and Admiral Laman will be CNC and RMC. So focusing on that with that effort and leadership, I think will help us there. But as a subset of our perform to plan for surface ships, I’m gonna focus on amphibious ships. You have my commitment. Great, thank you very much for that. And General, how many MAGs did we deploy out of the West Coast last year?

15thm uh was it a full compliment it was not, uh, it, it was, uh, due to the issues with boxer, um. Somerset sailed as a single. Uh, she was joined by Harper’s Ferry boxer had to go back for maintenance and so it was a conga line of 3 ships. I believe they only operated as a 3 ship for less than 2 months. And we need to fix that. Um, my final question, it’s a bit of a complicated one, so, um. Uh General Gutwein, I’m gonna give it to you since it seems to make the most sense, but it’s. It’s an issue that I’m I’m trying to figure out how we work this, and it relates to the president’s vision for a golden dome. Uh, I, as I mentioned, have drafted legislation with Senator Cramer that we’re hoping it’s gonna be bipartisan. It’s very comprehensive in terms of, uh, missile defense for the country, but I think most people would be surprised that missile defense for America really, really strongly entails pretty much every service right here of course there’s a space-based component that’s in my bill. There’s an Army component. General Mingus is, you certainly know the uh 49th Missile Defense Battalion is a US Army battalion at Fort Greely that really protects the whole country right now. I love their motto, the 300 protecting the 300 million, but uh all the ground-based missile interceptors protecting our country at Fort Greely. This bill would dramatically plus that up, uh, Admiral. This bill has a lot of ages ashore, uh, focus in Hawaii, for example, and other places. So and then of course, uh, uh, General Spain, the Air Force plays a huge role in missile defense. So my question is, is we’re working on this, I brief Mike Waltz on our bill. I brief Secretary Hegseth on our bill. I’ve even briefed President Trump. On the legislation that we put together after the executive order came out, so I know the Pentagon’s really getting on this, but how do we, how do we coordinate?

What’s your sense in general I’ll start with you as a space force, uh, uh, service here what’s the best way to try to integrate and work together this committee wants to work with all the services, but it is an integrated effort. It literally is Space Force, Air Force, Army, Navy, the Marine Corps, I’m sure has some tactical element to it, General uh Mahoney, but this is a full service approach. What’s the best way that we can work together legislatively of course with the president’s executive order, but the full Pentagon integrating the different services, all of whom play a important role I think a lot of Americans would be surprised that. You know, the cornerstone of missile defense, which is in Alaska. All the ground-based missile interceptors. Commanded by the army, all the major radar sites, particularly the clear uh Space Force Air Station with the new, uh, long range discrimination radar. How do we integrate that, General, and if anyone else has a thought on that, it’s a really important issue it’s a really good vision that the president has put forward we just need to operationalize it between the Pentagon. The Congress, um, and, uh, we need to get on it and, uh, Ms. Maurer, if you have a view on this as well, I’d welcome that. So General, why don’t we start with you?

Final question, um, I promise, but, uh, it’s an important one. Thank you Senator. It is, uh, let me start with it is a very bold vision that’s gonna have a lot of complexity to it as you said. Good news is we just met with the vice chairman yesterday in the Joint Requirements oversight councils we had all the combatant commands. We had the OSD staffs, we had the service staffs, we had NGA, we had MDA and the Nationalconnaissance Office all present in that room talking about what is it gonna take to get after something of this magnitude. I would compare this the only time that I can think of in the history of the United States where we have gone after something this complex was the Manhattan Project. That’s how complex this this capability is gonna be, but I wanna tell you it’s not complex because the technology is gonna be hard. It’s complex because of the number of organizations and the number of agencies that need to be involved, as you said is where you’re going around through your question. Organizational behavior and culture are gonna be our two biggest challenges. The way to get through organizational behavior and challenges is we got to make sure first and foremost that we have one entity in charge that has the full support of the nation from the president, from the hill, and from the American people on down. That person or that that entity needs to be empowered and resourced to make decisions across organizational boundaries and is that do we have that yet?

We do not have that yet. That is what was in discussion that’s what we talked about yesterday. Uh, with the vice chairman we’re gonna talk about it next week with the deputy secretary of defense and the Secretary of Defense owes an answer back to the president by the end of March and we’re on path to do that but not only is it an organizational challenge between agencies and services but we also need. Need to bring the full blunt of our industrial base into the equation and empower them to be successful, harness their innovation. That means we need to embrace the non-traditional contractors and get their ideas and get their capabilities on the table. By the way, they’re really motivated, those non-traditional contractors to play an important role here. So I’m really glad you’re highlighting that. Yes sir, we’ve had numerous industry days. I’ve taken numerous meetings. The missile defense agency had an industry day. Uh, trying to look at the whole of the US, not just the government, but the whole of the US to get after this problem. We’re also having conversations with our allies. Can the allies bring capabilities to the table?

The Canadians are very interested in in partnering with us on the protection of, of the homeland. They would like it to be the protection of the continent, so we’re having those kind of conversations it would be great to see the Canadians participating and helping fund missile defense right now. It’s my, uh, distinct recollection that they don’t participate. Hardly at all. They don’t do anything on uh NORAD missile defense. They, they do participate in NORAD. They do not participate in missile defense, they need to participate in missile defense if a rogue North Korean missile is shot. In our continent. Defense as a wealthy NATO member and they need to do it on missile defense too. I’ve been pressing the Canadians for years on this. They don’t put any money into missile defense and it’s uh. Not acceptable. The the last element that I would, uh, bring to, to bear on here as we start to look at the authorities and start to look at the accountability we get everything we’ve talked about in this, uh, session today dealing with the, uh, continuing resolution also comes to bear this program to be successful has to have funding stability. They have to know that they’re gonna have that that those resources from year to year to be successful or else they’re gonna be very inefficient. And they’re gonna suffer 1000 death by 1000 cuts through fits and starts and stops. That is an outstanding answer, General. I really appreciate that. Any other comments, Mrs. Mayer, do you have?

Yeah, very quickly, Mr. Chairman, so we issued a report a couple weeks ago looking at sustainment of missile defense in Guam. Which I think could be in a sense sort of a preview of potential coming attractions and the general’s point is, is definitively spot on about the sheer complexity of the number of organizations that report we had probably the most complicated org chart that I’ve ever put in a report that I signed out under my name, um, because there’s so many different organizations that’s just Guam, which is a small island, as you know, um, so getting arms around that challenge is gonna be important. The second point I’d like to make is that. That thinking about sustainment that needs to be part of the conversation from day one that’s been a continuing challenge in the missile defense enterprise. The missile defense agency develops and purchases the technology in theory it’s handed off to one of the services to operate and sustain. Those handoffs have not been happening in the way that they’ve been envisioned. In fact, that’s one of our recommendations in this report on Guam is that DOD needs to spell out specifically who is going to do what and how sustainment is going to work for a Guam defense system. Great. Any other, uh, thoughts, Admiral?

Yeah, I’m just gonna offer one thing I talked about in the JOC. We can do this. In 2008 we shot down a satellite that was deorbiting full of fuel in six weeks. The whole of government got together with agencies, the science community and industry, and we made it happen so we can do this. We just need to do the things that that were outlined and and provide clear lines to see too. And and solid consistent budgeting and and I’m convinced that we can deliver good that’s a great answer. Uh, anyone else on, on, on this topic?

Senator, briefly, uh, agree with, uh, everything that’s been said. The stitching together of the various capabilities will be the key enabler of Iron Dome and Golden Dome, um, obviously the scaffolding of which exists today in, uh, Air Force forces and Space Force forces, uh, along with the Army ground ground-based deterrent. Uh, the integrated PEO that we have in Luke, uh, Major General Luke Cropsey and, and, uh, um. Uh, our ABMS program and the CAT C2 program will be the thing that will allow each of the services to connect the factors, the sensors, and the sense making capability across all services and agencies, uh, that will need to be, uh, a primary focus of this effort along with the capabilities that each of the services will. Good. Well, these are great answers, you know, you do you have a, a strong. Vision from the commander in chief, the president obviously is really focused on this. He mentioned it in his State of the Union last week. We will be in the budget reconciliation bill that we’re working on the DOD component it’s gonna have a lot of funding on this, so I think it’s a sense of urgency, uh, that we all need to work together on the Congress. The executive branch and uh general you you kind of laid out a vision in the importance of some key principles and we look forward to working with all of you and look forward to having uh that that designated individual or agency uh in charge. I think it’s a really important component as well. So with that I wanna thank everybody. This has been a long hearing but a really important hearing. I wanna thank again. All 6 of you for your service, decades of service to our country in uniform and without or not in uniform. GAO does a great job. Uh, if there are additional questions for the record, uh, my Senate colleagues will submit those in the next few days, and we respectfully request that you try to, uh, respond to those within the next 2 to 3 weeks. With that this hearing is adjourned.