▶ 0:39:54Chair Wicker: Meeting comes to order. The senate armed services committee comes together today to hear about the posture of the U.S. army. Thank you to secretary daniel driscoll and general christopher laneve. Today the army is being asked to conduct work defending missions against more capable adversaries than at any time in a generation .
▶ 0:40:21Chair Wicker: Russia's war of choice in ukraine has underscored during times of planned power in high intensity conflict. In that year, U.S. army has played a critical role in helping ukrainians plan for and resource there forces through the is security assistance group in ukraine.
▶ 0:40:41Chair Wicker: Our army has also harvested many lessons from the partnership to inform our modernization and at the same time we are witnessing the army pause essential contributions to ongoing contributions and centcom. U.S. army soldiers like those from the first battalion 43rd air defense artillery are using patriot systems to help defend our service members, partners, and allies against persistent missile and drone threats.
▶ 0:41:12Chair Wicker: Similarly, the 100 and 42nd is deploying ground-based missiles to strike enemy targets deep inside iran. These actions demonstrate what the reach of america's army only five years since president trump rightly chose to build new evidence instead of tolerating vladimir putin's constant violations of the inf treaty.
▶ 0:41:36Chair Wicker: Meanwhile, the challenge posed by china demands that the army be prepared to support joint force operations across vast distances and under persistent threats at a tempo that we have not seen in decades.
▶ 0:41:50Chair Wicker: Many think of the western pacific as solely naval and air theater, but our two witnesses certainly do not agree with that in our ground forces continue to make absolutely crucial contributions to security in the first island chain, including through partnerships with our south korean, japanese, and korean treaty allies, underscoring the importance of sustaining the most advanced and capable systems in the world
▶ 0:42:22Chair Wicker: From missile-defense and long-range strike weapons to resilient command and control systems with new methods of breaching defensive lines. These capabilities are not theoretical, they are being employed today to protect american lives and stability. The army provides the backbone of our global logistics enabling joint operations in delivering the land combat power that it takes to deter aggression and, if necessary, to win decisively.
▶ 0:42:52Chair Wicker: The army must be ready, but our readiness today is frankly, uneven. Modernization efforts have produced promising capabilities, but not at the speed or scale required by the threat. I think our witnesses will agree with that.
▶ 0:43:07Chair Wicker: At the same time, the army continues to struggle with the operational readiness rates of primary equipment, maintenance backlog's, and munitions stockpiles that are all under extreme strain. Undersecretary driscoll, the army has made significant strides to prepare for changing combat conditions. I commend the secretary on that.
▶ 0:43:33Chair Wicker: The army has acted with discipline and foresight on its new generation of weapons, the prescription -- precision strike missile, low-cost munitions, helicopters, tanks, and after 20 years of struggles, the moped -- more coherent command-and-control system. I also appreciate the army's improved approach to modernization of our organic industrial base.
▶ 0:44:00Chair Wicker: The main trouble the pentagon is not moving fast enough or has not been moving fast enough to improve the logistics capability and capacity of the joint force. The secretary will want to talk about that certainly, today. Pre-positioning will be decisive in any future conflict. The army must demonstrate how it will enable the joint force to operate effectively across that theater.
▶ 0:44:29Chair Wicker: This will require additional resources to bring unmanned surface to air vehicles into the force at scale for purchasing next-generation capabilities to sustain U.S. forces in dispersed locations. I also want to commend the army, U.S. army europe, developing new methods of warfare in developing technical and operational lessons learned in ukraine.
▶ 0:44:59Chair Wicker: The deterrence line concept consists of mainly unmanned tripwire combined with layered missile defenses and distributed strike capabilities, exactly the direction that we need to go and we hope the army would distribute those capabilities to european command rapidly and I look forward to hearing from the secretary in the general about how to handle these challenges.
▶ 0:45:25Chair Wicker: We will need clear priorities, disciplined execution, and transparent communication to move forward to secure that the U.S. army remains ready, modern cap -- ready, modern, and capable of meeting the moment. With that, ranking member read.
▶ 0:45:42Sen. Reed: Thank you very much, Mr. chairman. Secretary, general, welcome, thank you both for your service and please convey my appreciation to the soldiers and civilians serving under your command. I want to begin by presenting my deepest condolences to those who have sacrificed in the middle east over the past several months, their sacrifices deserve our respect and gratitude and I want to acknowledge the absence of general randy george.
▶ 0:46:12Sen. Reed: Last month secretary hegseth moved him from the chief of staff without explanation and was one of two dozen general and flag officers fired over the past year not for cause, not for misconduct, but for reasons the secretary of defense has refused to share with the committee.
▶ 0:46:31Sen. Reed: What we do know is this, 6% of those fired -- 60% of those fired are female at bash or black in a field where women and minorities leapt represent 6% of officers, a disturbing fact. These issues are of great importance to the committee and I would ask for forthright answers today. The army has been extensively deployed over the past year.
▶ 0:46:58Sen. Reed: Tactical contributions to the operations in iran, the red sea, and ukraine have been outstanding. The soldiers and commanders executing these missions have done their jobs with great professionalism and skill. I disagree with many of the president possible for an intervention of my concerns are strategic, not with our military forces. Sec.
▶ 0:47:23Sen. Reed: Driscoll, last year you announced an ambitious plan called the army transformation initiative that included major commands restructuring for combat teams, reorganizing of aviation in moving towards the capability-based portfolio acquisition. These are significant changes and I want to understand how the army is balancing this as it conducts operations overseas and maintains its significant role on the southwest border.
▶ 0:47:53Sen. Reed: Secretary driscoll, I would ask for updates on these efforts. The army is also facing a nearly $2 billion readiness shortfall much because dhs has failed to reimburse the army for support missions. The committee will want to understand, we made some progress in the closed session, what it means in concrete terms.
▶ 0:48:16Sen. Reed: Considering these reports about the potential for canceling training rotations, ground and reduced guard and reserve training resources. These are real costs for real units and I would note that rather than addressing the shortfall, in the senate they would send roughly 70 billion more to dhs, the same department that has not paid its bills to the army.
▶ 0:48:42Sen. Reed: At the same time, the army has proposed increased funding for important programs like munitions procurement. That effort is well reasoned. However, even if the production timeline is shortened from three years to two years, the munitions gap we suffered in iran does not close overnight and I would like to know where our munitions stocks stand today and what the realistic timeline looks like given expansions in iran.
▶ 0:49:09Sen. Reed: While I understand that the army is realigning the civilian workforce, the department has been to slow to start surveilling and hiring after last year's reckless cuts. The army has also curbed its smart scholars program that fast tracked civilians into future leadership roles, with disrupted carp -- partnerships between depots in community colleges.
▶ 0:49:34Sen. Reed: Secretary driscoll, it's an asset feeling up the long-term consequences that may not show up this year in the budget, but will absolutely show up in the committee hearings years from now. I want to hear how you are planning to speed up civilian hiring and to make sure that the army is investing in future workforces.
▶ 0:49:54Sen. Reed: Finally, I'm interested in hearing more about the army's modernization priorities, the dawn of next-generation helicopters and tanks, fighting vehicles, you af encounter you af vehicles, offense of in defense of parts and models that are welcoming the efforts, very much so, with a logistics environment where our environment will matter as much as we have on hand and I would appreciate an update and how the
▶ 0:50:24Sen. Reed: Army is balancing these efforts. I look forward to your testimony and thank you, Mr. chairman.
▶ 0:50:30Chair Wicker: Secretary driscoll, you are now recognized for your opening statement.
▶ 0:50:36Sec. Driscoll: It is an absolute privilege to address you today. After one year in this position I am prouder than ever to represent our soldiers and their families. As you all know, our soldiers are the best in the world. They are bold, decisive, and can overcome anything when they are properly enabled. That is why I spent over 130 days on the road across 19 countries and 25 states to hear directly from them.
▶ 0:51:07Sec. Driscoll: I ate with them, I put my hands on their equipment and had candid discussions with soldiers of every single rank. What I heard was clear, the soldiers are ready to innovate and win, but our own bureaucracy is still holding them back. Getting what soldiers need to win and making the army budget actually work for them is definitionally a bipartisan topic and I know you all agree with that. You supported our army for decades and we would not be here without all of you.
▶ 0:51:37Sec. Driscoll: But we know the system that should benefit soldiers remains broken. Quality of life and battlefield advantage are not always the number one budget priority. It's a simple fact and we need your help to continue to change it. We need right to repair legislation, relief from pre-world war ii laws, and significantly more budget flexibility. Thank you so much for last year's progress, but if we are going to win the next fight, we must go even further.
▶ 0:52:09Sec. Driscoll: Technological changes are accelerating, warfare is evolving. Speed is absolutely critical. Your help to lowering barriers to innovation or sticking to the decades long status quo makes all the difference. I invite you all to come see our transformation firsthand.
▶ 0:52:27Sec. Driscoll: We are partnering with private industry to adopt the best tech, talent, and tradecraft, inviting partners onto our bases to unlock dormant resources and offset federal budget delays, blazing a trail for the nation on nuclear energy, counter drone capabilities, and military ai, and despite redtape we are delivering better barracks. Even though it can feel like the deck is stacked against us, the U.S.
▶ 0:52:57Sec. Driscoll: Army is a beacon of transformation. For instance, as we speak, we are hosting the largest hacking marathon in history to retroactively jailbreak our silo equipment. It is named operation jailbreak.
▶ 0:53:14Sec. Driscoll: Last month in europe soldiers showed me how our software systems are compartment live -- compartmentalized, isolated against modern threats, meanwhile the ukraine delta system, the modular open system command-and-control is absolutely incredible. It fully integrates every single drone, every sensor, and every shooting platform into just one single network. Ours does not.
▶ 0:53:42Sec. Driscoll: Unfortunately, for decades our budget process incentivized companies to protect intellectual properties at all costs, creating walled gardens and the architecture. This has been the status quo for too long. It is no longer accessible in an industry's helping us to solve it.
▶ 0:54:02Sec. Driscoll: I contacted nine of our partners who immediately agreed to send thousands of pieces of equipment, engineers, and scientists to fort carlson in together we will force our way through the firewalls, link every system, and achieve it -- a true right to integrate. We will do it again and again until we get it right. I want to be clear, this is a perfect example of the army's potential for speed and innovation.
▶ 0:54:32Sec. Driscoll: Absolutely no one else has the talent, the drive, in the obsessive work ethic to pull this off so quickly. Operation jailbreak is the first of many sprints to bypass bureaucracy. What we are doing in colorado should be sop going forward, it is the iterative process that makes the american tech sector the best in the world, but you would be amazed at the regulatory walls that stood in our way.
▶ 0:54:58Sec. Driscoll: We have extended a simple amount of energy just to do the right thing. You can do if you continue to help us cut those restrictions. We could do more if you helped us balance oversight was speed, partnering with american entrepreneurs. We can move faster if you help us to shed obsolete equipment and invest in the future.
▶ 0:55:23Sec. Driscoll: With your help, we can make sure our army remains the most dominant man fighting force in the next two years. Thank you for having us and I look forward to your questions.
▶ 0:55:35Chair Wicker: Thank you very much. Gen. Laneve, you are recognized.
▶ 0:55:41Gen. Laneve: Thank you both for the opportunity to appear before the committee today. The credibility of our army has been said to not be doing what it intended to do, so we are making our soldiers more lethal and ready to fight and win as the backbone of the joint force, and in the indo pacific we are building a force to deter threats to the U.S. national interests in order to extend the reach of the joint force.
▶ 0:56:10Gen. Laneve: Right now 7000 soldiers are campaigning through the region where the typhoon missile systems have been deployed into the philippines and japan, one in japonica, -- japan, the other in the region. Multi-demand commands are now operational in the region into this fall the command headquarters will stand up at four carson.
▶ 0:56:38Gen. Laneve: Each demand brings together long-range spires, space, and cyber integrated into a single theater level capability. Designed to support each member in the pacific. Everyone of these exists because of the investments supported by this committee. U.S.
▶ 0:57:03Gen. Laneve: Personnel partners sustaining missile defense offering striking sustainability in operational logistics across centcom. At home we have combat training center is where we train our soldiers to fight against an adversary to fight complex problems and test our latest systems. But we cannot field modern kit while sustaining systems that consume time, money, and manpower.
▶ 0:57:29Gen. Laneve: The best platforms reduce the maintenance demand that falls hardest on junior shoulders, freeing resources to advance next-generation systems. That is why we structure how we acquire, design, sustain, and fuel equipment with a focus on speed, modularity.
▶ 0:57:48Gen. Laneve: The thinking is already for reflected in our next generation platforms, like the abrams and 75 cheyenne, providing unprecedented speed, range, and flexibility.
▶ 0:58:02Gen. Laneve: Each system is designed so that the next operation upgrade requires integration, not a new start, but none of it matters if we cannot produce at scale, which is why we continue to modernize through advanced manufacturing depot modernization in partnerships with industry, and click -- including enhanced leases for infrastructure development capability.
▶ 0:58:26Gen. Laneve: While the industrial capacity is important, the strength of our army is only as strong as its ability to retain experienced soldiers and if the force we are building contains the standard we claim to uphold the terms of investments throughout 2026, rolling out campus style dining facilities, scanning across the entire performance, soldiers are seeing the difference in so do american citizens.
▶ 0:58:54Gen. Laneve: Recruitment numbers are soaring and we are on track to hit this year's ahead of schedule because of this, soldiers in the region, your army can do it it does and delivers the intelligence for maneuvering with sustained operations that protect the force, providing command-and-control architecture allowing the joint force in american allies to operate together.
▶ 0:59:17Gen. Laneve: Every component of the fight, the joint fight, depends on the ability of our army to do all those things simultaneously and very well. We will not fail our country, we will defend it. Thank you for your support.
▶ 0:59:32Chair Wicker: Thank you very much and now we begin the round of questioning. Starting with you, secretary driscoll, operation jailbreak involves the right to integrate. How many -- this is brand-new this month, is that right?
▶ 0:59:54Sec. Driscoll: As of about a week ago.
▶ 0:59:57Chair Wicker: How many companies are involved at this point?
▶ 1:00:02Sec. Driscoll: Chairman, we started with the five crimes. They have since been inviting other companies to come out. Estimating, I would guess 30 to 50 companies are involved by day 10.
▶ 1:00:23Sec. Driscoll: We are taking thousands of pieces of equipment that will be all jailbroken, practically meaning they will all be able to share information out of the system and into the system and what so powerful about this is that once you can do that to these pieces of equipment, which we learn from the equator -- ukrainians, you can layer in the generative and models for decision-making.
▶ 1:00:46Chair Wicker: How long have the ukrainians been using this concept?
▶ 1:00:53Sec. Driscoll: I would say their entire war.
▶ 1:00:57Chair Wicker: Ok. Is it frustrating to you that now in the fifth year we are just embracing this concept in may of 2020 six?
▶ 1:01:13Sec. Driscoll: I will look at myself and only myself if you haven't faster not. What we have that they don't have, deep infrastructure expertise. The downside of a bureaucracy can also empower upsides.
▶ 1:01:31Sec. Driscoll: What has been valuable for us, and I don't think respectfully that ukrainians could have done in 10 days, we have the entire defense industrial base signed on, actively shipping equipment with scientists and computer engineers currently in colorado making everything flow, so what I will -- we will be able to do here will be unlike anywhere else.
▶ 1:01:57Chair Wicker: In six weeks he will have tangible results?
▶ 1:02:02Sec. Driscoll: Unequivocally.
▶ 1:02:04Chair Wicker: Most interesting. How fast is the army moving to embrace low-cost munitions across portfolios? And when are we going to start moving faster? Both of you can answer that.
▶ 1:02:26Gen. Laneve: We are moving as fast as we possibly can. The goal is to have a magazine depth that supports low-cost munitions so that we have the proper fit and proper numbers that we think we are going to need in future conflict.
▶ 1:02:47Sec. Driscoll: I would say that under the president and the secretary of war, we spent the last nine months redoing a lot of the bureaucratic structures that exist around how we buy and test things in how we scale things. There are some leading indicators to me that make me believe that we have made strong and lasting changes that will allow us to do this more frequently.
▶ 1:03:11Sec. Driscoll: If you look at day number five of the war where we want to do go get more interceptors for the drones, we were able to contract with 13,000 bumblebees within five days and they showed up in the theater in packages of 1000 or more and we were able to float the soldiers in as training trainer models, a massive success that makes me believe that all of the changes that occur early in the year are actually working and allowing us
▶ 1:03:41Sec. Driscoll: To be able to start to scale these costs lower.
▶ 1:03:44Chair Wicker: In 60 seconds, can you give us a quick overview of what might happen in the indo pacific? With regard to the army?
▶ 1:03:57Sec. Driscoll: What we have seen in centcom of the last couple of months is that we are a huge logistical backbone there and are able to reach out and touch the enemy in ways that the army had historically not been able to. One of our superpowers as an army is that we can disperse quickly, on the air or offense side, the U.S. army will play a huge role in whatever happens.
▶ 1:04:25Chair Wicker: I will yield back. Senator reed?
▶ 1:04:29Sen. Reed: Let me commend you, sec. Driscoll, you sensed of the change and seize the opportunity to through. Welcome. Based on what you've seen in ukraine and the changes that have been taken on, I thought it characterized when I served in the mute -- military a few years ago the mantra was shoot, move, communicate. Today it's communicate so that you can shoot and move. While in.
▶ 1:05:01Sen. Reed: Asking another question, though, the military promotion system is central to the military in every way, shape, and form. The law that we promulgated requires a selection with a comprehensive valuation process that selects officers who are "the best qualified for promotion," based on the collected assessment and judgment of their peers and throughout who their senior
▶ 1:05:31Sen. Reed: Officers are on the board. Can you tell us why secretary hegseth directed that five names be withheld in the most recent army one star list including those who had no misconduct in did you support or recommend the action?
▶ 1:05:50Sec. Driscoll: I will never talk about the private conversations between myself and the secretary of war, but I will say that the U.S. army has always followed those particular rules and regulations.
▶ 1:06:03Sen. Reed: I don't think it's a very clear role for the secretary of defense to take off those individuals. What others have been subject to this review?
▶ 1:06:13Sec. Driscoll: Would you mind repeating that?
▶ 1:06:16Sen. Reed: The secretary of defense removed several names, which is highly unusual, to be diplomatic. What other boards has he recommended to you for removal?
▶ 1:06:37Sec. Driscoll: As far as I know, no other names have been put on a different school.
▶ 1:06:45Sen. Reed: What incentivize the secretary to look at this particular board?
▶ 1:06:50Sec. Driscoll: I don't know, sir.
▶ 1:06:53Sen. Reed: I think that question would be important to ask. If these officers were judged by their peers in their superiors to be best qualified for promotion in future service, they've been denied immediate promotion. With a still be eligible to go before another board?
▶ 1:07:14Sec. Driscoll: As I understand the mechanism, the scroll submitted to the senate did not include the names of these officers on it. Another scroll could be submitted individually or with collectivity to the senate.
▶ 1:07:29Sen. Reed: Are you actively reviewed visual cases so that you can determine yourself if these individuals should be really considered for promotion?
▶ 1:07:40Sec. Driscoll: I can commit to you and the entire committee that gen. Laneve are advocating for them every single day and are constantly working to make sure the army is promoting the best.
▶ 1:07:55Sen. Reed: My fear is that this is not something obscure, but relevant to every officer and person in the army where they see their life's work terminated without explanation by the secretary of defense. Let me raise a subject seldom considered here. As you know, the army is responsible and, I suspect, the sadness theory is terrible.
▶ 1:08:27Sen. Reed: Out of date radars, the major missile test things systems for the defense in the army, can you confirm that the army is still in charge and how we're going to remedy the poor situation?
▶ 1:08:41Gen. Laneve: We are the executive agent and are looking at ways to improve the infrastructure they are. It's a critical component for it us in the pacific and we are not walking away from it.
▶ 1:08:59Sen. Reed: And three seconds, general, based on our experience in ukraine, how are we going to integrate that into the new combat vehicle systems? My sense is that combat vehicles are very much sensitive to drones and other vehicles. Can you respond?
▶ 1:09:21Gen. Laneve: That's one of the key secret sauces and one of our new p.a.d.'s that they've created. Get into the hands of the soldiers, test it, and then get the feedback back into the acquisition. The system continually built -- innovates for future threat. Our lessons are being incorporated into all's across the board.
▶ 1:09:51Sen. Reed: Thank you very much.
▶ 1:09:54Chair Wicker: Thank you very much. Senator ernst? Right here in front of me.
▶ 1:10:00Senator Ernst: Thank you, Mr. chair, and thank you both for coming before the committee today and for your concern -- continued service to our nation. I wanted to start with the army transformation initiative and thanked the member for bringing up the dismissal of general george.
▶ 1:10:26Senator Ernst: Secretary driscoll, when you first came into your position, I remember meeting with you and general george about the army transformation initiative, which was long overdue. This committee has been very clear that we support the goal of a leaner and more lethal army and with this dismissal of randy george we saw the dismissal of general hobby, who is or was the
▶ 1:10:58Senator Ernst: Transformation training command commander. Two very unfortunate dismissals at a time when we need that leaner, more lethal army. As we look at this, we need to achieve electronic dominance and get unmanned systems into every dimension and command and control of the theater for division levels.
▶ 1:11:26Senator Ernst: Secretary driscoll, can you provide an update on what tangible progress we are now making in the army transformation initiative, and can you talk about some of the areas where we did in the past several months achieve greater capabilities within the army because of the ati?
▶ 1:11:48Sec. Driscoll: Absolutely, senator. I'm incredibly optimistic that the groundwork we put into the last 10 to 16 months have allowed us to move more and we've been able to do new starts on the m1e3, the new helicopter has gotten a lot of investment and focus and the nexgen has expanded the number of divisions in which we were able to do it more quickly than originally and a part of that is because of the
▶ 1:12:20Sec. Driscoll: Hard decisions that we made on where to cut spending. It's very hard, once the system gets up, to be able to stop the spending in the future because of all sorts of different reasons that make it where that momentum is pretty difficult. I'm incredibly grateful to all of you for supporting us, we saved about 48 billion, we think, over the five years that we were able to reinvest into our transformation.
▶ 1:12:45Sec. Driscoll: The last bit that I will say is that a lot of it has been systematic changes, so when we look at what we did converting pao into baes, and within those silos you had 15 different stops between when we wanted to buy something and when we could purchase it.
▶ 1:13:06Sec. Driscoll: So, for acquisition decisions, some of the time took between two years in four years in terms of getting what we wanted into the hands of soldiers and by the time we got it there, it was outdated. You will -- we were able to collapse that system and do much more like the commercial sector, putting our engineers and manufacturers, accountants and lawyers all on one team as an example of getting the bumblebee
▶ 1:13:36Sec. Driscoll: To centcom. Day five, without the needed it. Day 10, we had a contract. Day 20, things were flowing into theater.
▶ 1:13:47Sen. Ernst: That's really good and I hope the other service branches take a look at what the army has been able to achieve and find a way forward in their own service branches, because this is pretty exemplary. As we are looking ahead, what are the next major phases in this initiative? Where do you see the, we are assuming, greatest risk as we are executing?
▶ 1:14:14Gen. Laneve: Ma'am, thank you for the question, you touched on it. We spent a lot of time at the beginning of the market transmission looking at the tactical level. You hit it spot on in your question.
▶ 1:14:29Gen. Laneve: We are taking a hard look now at the core army service component commands and what we have to change in those organizations to take on more of a role in our future, that is a lens we are taking a look at right now.
▶ 1:14:49Sen. Ernst: That's wonderful.
▶ 1:14:51Sec. Driscoll: And we are modeling it to be within all of the divisions in five years and I don't think that's sufficient, we need to do it in two or three. It's a pacing item at this point.
▶ 1:15:03Sen. Ernst: Gentlemen, thank you for being here.
▶ 1:15:06Chair Wicker: There is now a vote going on of the floor, actually a series of two boats. We will continue our hearing during about. I will be leaving and I think that senator budd will take the gavel for about five minutes. At this
▶ 1:15:31Sen. Hirono: I want to ask you about your approach to the negotiations surrounding hawaii's military plans consisting of 25,000 acres. I understand the importance of these lands for army readiness.
▶ 1:15:45Sen. Hirono: I also understand the importance of this land, of these negotiations to the people of hawaii and the native hawaiian community and that is why I have engaged with leaders about how these negotiations will proceed, expressing the need for a community input for a number of years. During a confirmation hearing you committed to negotiating in good faith with the state and the community.
▶ 1:16:15Sen. Hirono: So it was concerning that instead of what I would consider open communication and transparency, the army last year pursued unilateral condemnation language as shown by your attempt to add last-minute language to support condemnation and congress responded by reinforcing a continuing need for good faith negotiations.
▶ 1:16:44Sen. Hirono: Unilateral decision would bypass the community, the state government and the commercial delegation -- congressional delegation. The condemnation statute requires the army to exhaust all available options before starting condemnation proceedings so I don't see how the army can meet that requirement when it has not even submitted corrected eiss to
▶ 1:17:15Sen. Hirono: Address the deficiencies which may lead to their disapproval of the army submitted eiss. It has been a year. I hope this is not the case that the army is trying to run the clock and leave unilateral condemnation as the only viable course of action. I want to say for the record that I opposed unilateral condemnation but what we need is a negotiated approach to each of these lands.
▶ 1:17:42Sen. Hirono: I have taken that position for years and we are at the point where the leases are almost up and final negotiations need to occur with meaningful community engagement and input especially from the hawaiian native community. I have a number of questions about your plans going forward. We previously committed to negotiating in good faith. Do you still stand by that commitment?
▶ 1:18:04Mr. Driscoll: Yes.
▶ 1:18:07Sen. Hirono: The army eiss was rejected last summer because of several deficiencies including the failure to adequately address to the cultural and historical impacts of continue training. Can I get your commitment that the army will resubmit their eis to address these deficiencies?
▶ 1:18:34Mr. Driscoll: I mean it very sincerely, when you talk to soldiers and their families who spend their lives on the hawaiian islands, they are grateful to the community. The community has been fantastic to them so we have been wanting to be respectful of the deep relationship that those people have with the land. I commit to following up with your office.
▶ 1:18:55Sen. Hirono: I hope that means that you will be resubmitting your eis because resubmitting is part of what the condemnation statutes require which is to exhaust all avenues. Next question, what is the status of your negotiations with hawaii and can you describe what steps you plan to take in the next 60 days?
▶ 1:19:23Sen. Hirono: Time is running on these leases, to advance a negotiated agreement with the state?
▶ 1:19:27Mr. Driscoll: We have aspired over the years before I was given the seat I think we have had a number of meetings and I can speak more to that. We have engaged with the delegation both to represent here in washington, D.C. but we have also had conversations with state leadership and what we have tried to do is balance out fairness to the local population with this idea and this commitment that the united states army must maintain this land.
▶ 1:19:57Mr. Driscoll: We need it for training, for the indo-pacific and with the timeline you are referencing coming up very soon.
▶ 1:20:06Sen. Hirono: Negotiations must occur with hawaii. That means negotiating with the governor basically. Those need to proceed in good faith. I want to urge you again to resume these good-faith negotiations because that is what is going to take to come to a resolution that is going to be fair to all parties and that certainly includes the input of the native hawaiian community.
▶ 1:20:37Sen. Hirono: Thank you Mr. chairman.
▶ 1:20:39Sen. Budd: Good to see you. Good to see a north carolinian here. Thank you both for your service. General laneve, I was proud to see the army's request for 2200 infantry squad vehicles in the budget request. I think that is the right step two modernize squad vehicles and increase survivability. Very impressive.
▶ 1:21:06Sen. Budd: We saw in western north carolina for hurricane helene, I appreciated their work there. What are your thoughts on multiyear procurement for that platform and also expanding procurement of the isv heavy? >> I support multiyear contracts. It helps us in the bargaining process and full procurement.
▶ 1:21:38Sen. Budd: The heavy version will provide us the ability to generate power on the battlefield that we will need to have two run the command and control centers and advanced weapon systems. It is a critical platform that we are going to need as well. I look forward to having that come to in the next round.
▶ 1:22:00Sen. Budd: Thank you for that. Multi-years are a better advantage of taxpayer dollars. If you are doing one year contracts it is risky to the producer. If it is aircraft or the other branches or yourselves or isv's, it is a smart way to go forward.
▶ 1:22:23Mr. Driscoll: The isv is a success in a lot of different ways particularly in north carolina with a racing company. We were converting over the isv which is 80% chevy colorado into what is now a very powerful beloved military vehicle is the rapid iteration of our soldiers being able to test the versions and this automotive racing company being able to make changes in real time.
▶ 1:22:51Mr. Driscoll: These would cut the vehicle from the drawing board into the hands of soldiers. It is one of the beacons of transformation that we use for all of the rest of the products that we are working on. We say we need you to be more like kendricks automotive.
▶ 1:23:09Sen. Budd: It is a great model. I know you have been laser focused on applying lessons learned from ukraine to the army transformation initiatives. One lesson I have learned is that small drones need to be able to operate and in environments sometimes with its own counter drone technology on board. What is the army doing on this front?
▶ 1:23:33Mr. Driscoll: This is the future of not only warfare but more generally how humans inflict violence on each other. This is our risk in the stadium come at the borders, the ports not just for our nation but every nation as we have the world cup coming up. The president has been focused on partnering with the rest of the federal government to counter these exact problems.
▶ 1:23:57Mr. Driscoll: What we are doing is we have formed the nation's pre-minute drone joint task force and in that we are testing all sorts of drones and all sorts of environments and we are working with federal partners to create training lands where we can do all the things we are talking about with electronic for fair -- electronic warfare. We are not actually in a war environment.
▶ 1:24:26Mr. Driscoll: We don't want to take the same level of risk for training and testing as you might do perhaps in ukraine or in cent comm. We are actively building those out on behalf of the government.
▶ 1:24:37Chair Budd: The 18th airborne corps has uncovered valuable lessons. One of which is the need for a.I. Enabled predictive logistics software. What is the army doing to prioritize contested logistics capabilities specifically for long distance like in the western pacific?
▶ 1:25:00Mr. Driscoll: We were talking about operation jailbreak where we are breaking down these pieces of equipment so that information can flow. Parallel exercises have been going on in our business systems. One year ago we had over 600 business systems and many of them did not exchange information. We have collapsed those down to 200 which any business owners would be glorified.
▶ 1:25:26Mr. Driscoll: We are pushing them down to land in the teens where all of them will exchange information and when we break down those silos, we can wear solutions with helping us go forward.
▶ 1:25:37Chair Budd: I appreciate you working with us in that great direction. I now recognize senator king.
▶ 1:25:44Sen. King: Chairman I thought for a moment we could take over that committee. By appreciate the recognition. Mr. chairman, I want to reiterate a point that is very significant. For the first time in my experience on this committee we are putting 25% of the defense budget out of the bipartisan process. Mr. secretary you mentioned the army budget is a bipartisan project.
▶ 1:26:12Sen. King: 15% of this budget is in so-called mandatory spending, a term that I never seen before in this context which is basically reconciliation which is a partisan project. In terms of the entire defense budget, the golden dome project is in this new category that is outside of the bipartisan process both here in this committee and in the appropriations committee.
▶ 1:26:41Sen. King: I think that is a very dangerous precedent being set because basically it is deciding that a significant part of the defense budget should be off-limits to the minority party, whichever it may be at a particular time. This is a significant change in the budgetary process that we should have a look at. I do not view this as a partisan issue.
▶ 1:27:09Sen. King: It is an institutional issue and we are exceeding 25% of our budgetary authority that is outside of the authority of this committee the appropriations committee. Mr. secretary, I am a little unsure about operation jailbreak. I complement on the impulse for this. I think it is absolutely essential.
▶ 1:27:36Sen. King: But you keep talking about integration and daily silos -- data silos. What are we actually talking about here? Are we talking about getting the eye to will enable us to prepare? I believed for years we should be buying that ip but it sounds like operation jailbreak is more of data sharing than it is the ip to repair these weapons systems.
▶ 1:28:06Mr. Driscoll: You are correct. It is separate and distinct. We are calling it right to integrate. What we are requiring is each system that we use that creates data needs to create an api or software development kit to push information outside of that closed system and we can send it over network to our and we are starting with the latticw
▶ 1:28:40Mr. Driscoll: Starting with the lattice platform but basically what we are requiring, we are retroactively going back and creating these apis and we are proactively requiring a new piece of equipment that we buy to be able to share information.
▶ 1:28:51Sen. King: Right to repair is a separate issue. In my view every army depot, every navy ship, every air force hangar should have a 3d printer. We have a readiness problem as you well know on all of these complicated machines whether it is an airplane, ship or a weapons system. We should not be waiting for a valve from the manufacturer.
▶ 1:29:18Sen. King: I hope that you will push in the procurement process for buying the ip so that we can print our own hearts to get our own parts in the market and not be held up by the proprietary nature of the ip on these complicated weapons systems.
▶ 1:29:37Mr. Driscoll: Yes, senator. Right to repair. There are a couple of reasons that make it more important now than ever. One of the reasons is if our threat is in the indo-pacific and we are worried about logistics. For most of the parts we need to be able to manufacture them on site or nearly on-site. With the increase in advanced manufacturing going on, we are in a place where we can do that.
▶ 1:30:02Mr. Driscoll: What we are doing is to our advantage platform we are scanning in a lot of the parts that break often. We are putting the digital design file and what that is doing for soldiers is allowing them to access nearby manufacturing platform and 3d printer and print the parts. 101st airborne had many e 101st airborne had many of its 777's down.
▶ 1:30:35Sen. King: If delta airlines did this, they would be out of business so I am sure you will talk to your procurement folks to make sure that part of the acquisition process we are buying not only the object but the ip. Cannot stop with integrating the software. Let's keep going on the repair.
▶ 1:30:53Mr. Driscoll: Thank you. >> I would only say that right to repair is easier said than done and it involves intellectual property and I wish everyone the best who is trying to negotiate this because it is sticking. Senator blumenthal.
▶ 1:31:21Sen. Blumenthal: Thank you both for your service. Thank you for being here. To the extent that you can in this setting can you give me your assessment of how the ukrainians are doing against the russians? I think there is a false narrative that the russians are whining. In fact, the contrary seems to be true.
▶ 1:31:44Sen. Blumenthal: In certain parts of the battlefield, certainly the ukrainians are prevailing if they have sufficient support from us. What is your assessment?
▶ 1:31:54Mr. Driscoll: I talk to the ukrainians frequently. The united states army has a presence and ukraine. A lot of our leaders have developed very long-term relationships. It has been a two-way street. We have learned an enormous amount from them.
▶ 1:32:14Mr. Driscoll: When I talk about operation jailbreak, two weeks ago we were in germany running a joint exercise and ukrainians sent some of their most talented people to help us learn how they would do the fight and it was in that instance that we learned this. On our side we are able to help with their intelligence gathering. What we are seeing is the russians loss of star link has set them back meaningfully.
▶ 1:32:43Mr. Driscoll: They have since regathered the momentum. The ukrainians have done an incredible job trying to integrate larger group d rones which is what we are seeing. I think a quick summary would be continue grinding slow success in either direction with neither side likely to break through in the next 18 months.
▶ 1:33:14Gen. Laneve: I concur with the secretary. I ran the training program for a year. Early on it was eye-opening to see how long they could hold on and what they have been able to do up until this point. I concur with the secretary's assessment.
▶ 1:33:36Chair Wicker: Do we have munitions that we can provide that would be useful to them? They are buying them. We don't have to pay for them.
▶ 1:33:49Mr. Driscoll: We prefer to answer that in the closed setting.
▶ 1:33:53Sen. Blumenthal: Let me ask you in terms of our defense industrial base, to the extent that you can talk about it in this setting, I think there is a feeling long-term over years that we have failed to make our defense production as nimble and agile as ukrainians have demonstrated agility and nimbleness.
▶ 1:34:25Sen. Blumenthal: I have seen them on my nine trips to ukraine visiting the drone factories. How they actually make changes to their products on the assembly line in real time as they receive information from the front. We have nothing like that agility or nimbleness. Can you talk about what the department of defense should be doing to make our defense contractors more responsive?
▶ 1:34:56Gen. Laneve: I can speak to the first part about our industrial base. Our 23 plus depots. We have taken a hard look across the board to invest in this for long term whether it is advanced manufacturing, land-use agreements.
▶ 1:35:17Gen. Laneve: It is bringing in private public partnerships in each of the different sites in order to get our industrial base up to a footing that we know we will need them at to produce at scale whether it is parts for drones or parts for equipment both in the fleet that we have now and the fleet that we are going to look to procure in the future.
▶ 1:35:44Gen. Laneve: The secretary has pushed us to ensure that we have the ability to utilize our organic base in the equipment we are going after in the future. I think the department sees the same issues that we all acknowledge in a workforce and sites that have not been fully invested in over decades.
▶ 1:36:12Mr. Driscoll: I would just echo what general laneve was saying. You will have to balance the preferences of your constituents much more than we do. We are narrowly focused on soldiers and their families. We believe the 2027 budget will give us the one time spending to increase a lot of our abilities which would make our country a lot safer.
▶ 1:36:35Sen. Blumenthal: Thank you.
▶ 1:36:39Chair Wicker: Senator scott. Thank you for being here. Three things. The first thing is orlando. We have the army's program that offers simulation for training instrumentation. What is going on? Will you make it a lot bigger? What is happening there? We put a lot of money into the simulation program when I was governor. It is a big opportunity.
▶ 1:37:10Chair Wicker: Our goal is to do whatever we can to grow it. You have to do what is best for the army.
▶ 1:37:15Gen. Laneve: Our simulation center there is incredible. It will continue to be very important as we move forward with our modernization program. We are not stepping away from the incredible capability that we have especially what it provides to our combat training centers, what it provides inside of our war fighting exercises that we execute and all the way
▶ 1:37:47Gen. Laneve: At the core level. It is a critical component that helps us to continue to modernize that program.
▶ 1:37:51Sen. Scott: What I would say is simulation is more important than ever. The ability to take data from the battlefield whether it is cent comm, whatever we can get out of ukraine to feed that into the system to learn and not just from the human learning but to train our counter drone models, to train the drone models as these energetic solutions start to flow. Data and simulation will matter more than ever. If I was guessing as a directional guidance to a space, I would imagine that vertical grows over time.
▶ 1:38:22Sen. Scott: Drones, you have talked about it a little bit. We had a speaker at one of our lectures the other day that said that ukraine is building 5 million drones a year. It was said but it does not mean it is accurate. It is said our military will have 150,000 drones per year. Which do we need? How fast can we get there? Going forward drones will become more significant, right?
▶ 1:38:54Sen. Scott: It is actually safer for our military. Our men and women. Can you talk about how far you want to get and how are we doing?
▶ 1:39:05Mr. Driscoll: Drones are youmr.
▶ 1:39:06Driscoll: Core part of our future combat no matter where you go. We as a nation need to create the mechanisms and the tools to scale when we need to. We don't need 5 million drones per year right now nor would we want them because they will get outdated likely before we need them. But we need to be ready to scale and have a plan and have the resilience in the supply chain and know where we are going in that moment.
▶ 1:39:34Driscoll: What we are doing is starting to slowly flex the muscle. We should have some of the first motors rolling off of the manufacturing lines. We don't expect to supply the entire industry but we think it is so important for future warfare that we need to do that. What we working on now is a more full some plan of how we are looking at the entire drone ecosystem and where we think we need to have redundancy.
▶ 1:40:03Sen. Scott: That makes sense. With the ability to ramp up if we need?
▶ 1:40:07Mr. Driscoll: Yes.
▶ 1:40:09Sen. Scott: You have had the job for a while. What are you most proud of? What do you feel good about being done?
▶ 1:40:16Mr. Driscoll: This sounds like an unnecessarily flattering remark. To all of you and the american soldiers but the majority of people I interact with, they want to innovate. The american soldier having spent time out of uniform at fancy schools and fancy firms, I would bid on them 100% of the time to solve a different -- difficult problem.
▶ 1:40:45Mr. Driscoll: 18 months in I am significantly more optimistic that all of these massive challenges and this inflection point, we are going to win with whatever resources you give us and the american soldier will come out even more lethal and ferocious and less likely needed because every adversary will know that they will lose that fight and 18 months in I can say I am more positive than when I started.
▶ 1:41:09Sen. Scott: Are you confident that you continue to get the best leaders around you to be able to make sure we have the most lethal force?
▶ 1:41:18Gen. Laneve: I am 100% confidence confidenct, sir.
▶ 1:41:26Mr. Driscoll: I would say the army from my 3.5 years in and getting to see it from a different advantage point, it is a super power creates incredible leaders at all levels. I have absolutely no doubt that if you took out 50 at a given point, it could be rolling along like it has for the next 250 years.
▶ 1:41:52Chair Wicker: Secretary -- senator warren.
▶ 1:41:57Sen. Warren: Thank you Mr. chairman. We need a military right to repair law. . An example today. This is blackhawk helicopters. The army could replace them for $15 but because the army does not have right to repair, the whole helicopter goes off-line and the contractor charges $47,000 to repair the entire screen. Let that sink in.
▶ 1:42:29Sen. Warren: $15 or $47,000. Secretary driscoll, you and other military leaders have repeatedly said that congress needs to pass the right to repair law. Last year both the house and the senate passed reforms. The big defense contractors lobbyists killed it behind closed doors. Let's talk out in the open about what those lobbyists are claiming.
▶ 1:43:00Sen. Warren: Number one, they say contractors cannot hand over intellectual property and data because the army would steal it. Secretary driscoll, what do you say to big contractors who claim the army cannot be trusted with sensitive data?
▶ 1:43:14Mr. Driscoll: Senator, I would say one of the most preposterous things I have heard in the last 18 months.
▶ 1:43:20Sen. Warren: But you have heard it?
▶ 1:43:22Mr. Driscoll: I have heard it often that the united states army would take the data and do something nefarious at worst and perhaps at best we would have had to early -- perhaps at best we would haphazardly handle it. The U.S. army and the pentagon in particular are good at handling sensitive data and we have incredible processes in place. My reply has always been we don't want to take any data. We just want to purchase it.
▶ 1:43:51Sen. Warren: Let's do another one. Big contractors claim that d.o.d. Does not need right to repair reforms because you already have all the authority you need to access technical data for repairs. It turns out when you look at that existing legal authority, it explicitly says that technical data does not include computer software. Secretary driscoll, it is 2026. Most weapons run on software.
▶ 1:44:22Sen. Warren: If the army cannot use software to repair its own equipment and weapons, is that a problem for readiness?
▶ 1:44:27Mr. Driscoll: Unequivocally, yes.
▶ 1:44:30Sen. Warren: In fact, for example the army is already unable to repair the avenger air defense system because it does not have the software it needs. So right to repair must include software. Let's do one more. Big contractors have floated the idea of "data as a service," which is code for pay-per-view.
▶ 1:44:55Sen. Warren: It means that the department is metered and build every time the access materials. It is easy to see how costs add up in those circumstances since one contractor is already charging the air force $900 per page for upgrades to the maintenance manuals.
▶ 1:45:17Sen. Warren: Secretary driscoll, aside from the cost of pay-per-view, what happens if the army is trying to repair a piece of broken equipment in a remote area and has to keep messaging the contractor to get access to manuals?
▶ 1:45:34Mr. Driscoll: Senator, this happens frequently. The specifics are true today. Directionally soldiers struggled mightily to keep our equipment online and this is not in a moment of conflict. That could be the decisive point between us being successful 6000 miles away or feeling our mission if we cannot repair our equipment.
▶ 1:45:59Sen. Warren: It is a reminder. We've got to have this access. I just want to say this, it is just one more attempt to gouge the american taxpayers and butter service members that risk. Last question, secretary driscoll. Does the army need congress to pass regular repair reforms in this year's national defense authorization act or should we let the big contractors kill it behind closed doors?
▶ 1:46:30Sen. Warren: What do you think? This is low and slow over the plate.
▶ 1:46:33Mr. Driscoll: Yes. This is one of the most important things. I don't say this to be over the top. I am not intending to play to the set of questions. We the U.S. army and the broader military must maintain the right to take advantage of all the new tools because if we don't, our adversaries will and we are put at a worse position.
▶ 1:46:54Sen. Warren: I very much appreciate the job you are trying to do, general, I am sorry I did not get to ask you the same questions but I have a tough chairman who shuts me down when I go over.
▶ 1:47:04Chair Wicker: She is 15 seconds over and I am hot about it.
▶ 1:47:09Sen. Warren: I can tell. I appreciate all you do. We need to get right to repair.
▶ 1:47:15Chair Wicker: There will be an opportunity for a second round and questions for the record also. Senator sullivan, you are recognized.
▶ 1:47:25Sen. Sullivan: Thank you and I want to commend senator warren for her great work on right to repair. Got that over the goal line. Thank you for your leadership. Mr. secretary, in general, good to see you both. Thanks for your visit to alaska. I heard it went well. I want to talk about some alaska issues. I appreciate that. I'm sorry I was not there to show you around. I don't thank you for stealing one of my top staffers who is sitting behind you.
▶ 1:47:55Sen. Sullivan: I will forgive you. It is for the betterment of america that I had to lose jimmy who has done a great job. I am sure he is doing a great job for you. A couple of things I wanted to talk about, fort greely. The commander was just out there this past weekend, the 49th missile defense battalion does a great job on missile defense for america. What was your assessment when you were out there?
▶ 1:48:28Sen. Sullivan: One thing that frustrates me is we have 20 and b silos out there still -- 20 empty silos out there still. We need more. I'm sure you know the motto of the 49th missile defense battalion. Do you have any sense on when we can accelerate more missile defense at fort greely?
▶ 1:48:53Gen. Laneve: We are tied in with the team looking at that. I cannot give you a sense of how fast they are looking at that. I cannot tell you how critical that site is for defense.
▶ 1:49:13Sen. Sullivan: Maybe if you can give me more details on that, we need to accelerate more ground-based missile interceptors there. It is a no-brainer. I spent the weekend in fairfax -- fairbanks, alaska at the U.S. chamber of commerce at the appreciation dinner. Major general cogbill was there, the division commander.
▶ 1:49:43Sen. Sullivan: The morale there seems very high. They are whipping every other unit in these competitions. They went to the general and his sergeant major went through all of these. There is some good competition going on right now. I am very proud of that unit. One of the first things I did as a brand-new center a couple of weeks into the obama administration was to cut 40,000 additional active-duty troops in 2015.
▶ 1:50:11Sen. Sullivan: They were going to get rid of the 425, the only airborne brigade combat team in the entire indo-pacific. I fought like crazy to stop that, which I did. Hold on to everybody in the army's system until we got them not to relinquish cutting the 425.
▶ 1:50:37Sen. Sullivan: The 17 additional helos are coming to the 11th airborne division. Can you give me an update on that? And then some of the good work that is being done with regard to drones. You may have seen the university of alaska fairbanks just had a partnership with diu on drone capabilities we have at the university.
▶ 1:51:00Sen. Sullivan: If you can give me an update on the helos coming to fort wayne right and the work we want to scale up at the 11th airborne is doing on drawing software and other capabilities. As you answer that, Mr. secretary, one thing I want to make sure we do, there is a memo on the contracting awards that came out.
▶ 1:51:30Sen. Sullivan: It looks like it goes against previous commitments that senior army leadership made with regard to me so I would like offline to talk about that. This memo is causing confusion. I think it is misguided.
▶ 1:51:45Chair Wicker: 45 seconds.
▶ 1:51:47Sen. Sullivan: I will follow up with you Mr. secretary. Can you talk about the 11th airborne and the issues I raised ?
▶ 1:51:56Gen. Laneve: First of all, the support with getting the 11th across the goal line. My daughter served in 125. Bringing both of those units together under one division command brings about the morale that you are seeing in that division right now. We have greater we have greate leadership up there. There is a lot of good going on inside of the division right now especially with drone experimentation.
▶ 1:52:25Gen. Laneve: We will take all those lessons especially what we are learning about surviving in the winter up there. What we have to do across the board, when you look at the batteries. We are going to learn a lot from how quickly the cold takes a battery down. It is the same thing that is going to happen in the heat. We are learning a lot across the board. We are moving the helicopter as part of the aviation transformation.
▶ 1:52:53Gen. Laneve: There are some coming out of further reaches of the pacific and then we are coming back into alaska to fully fill the aviation brigade. We have not walked away from that and that is moving as fast as possible.
▶ 1:53:08Chair Wicker: You can supplement your answer for the record. Appreciate your testimony. Senator peters.
▶ 1:53:17Sen. Peters: Thank you. Welcome to the hearing. Secretary driscoll, as you experience last summer when you were in michigan. Sorry I was not able to join you. I was out of the country during that time. I know you enjoyed seeing some exercises of the northern strike in operation and thousands of troops and servicemembers from over 20 countries at that war fighting center.
▶ 1:53:46Sen. Peters: As you know the center is comprised of 148 thousand acres of training space and 17,000 square miles of special use military airspace at the alpena combat readiness training center. It is an incredible place to do advanced sophisticated training.
▶ 1:54:09Sen. Peters: In recognition of this training environment the department recently designated it as a national range for aerial systems training as well. My question is with this new designation, how it is the army leveraging exercises like northern strike to realistic drone and counter drone warfare and are you exploring greater army involvement at the national all domain warfare center in michigan to leverage these
▶ 1:54:39Sen. Peters: Capabilities for new missions?
▶ 1:54:42Mr. Driscoll: Senator, camp grayling is an incredible asset. The amount of air space that we have there is unmatched in all the places I have gone. What we must do is continue to get a lot of data and we have to get learnings that can be fed into systems. Grayling is at the top of our list to expand our presence there.
▶ 1:55:11Mr. Driscoll: If you think about the manufacturing capabilities of detroit in particular, when we were there what they were capable of doing with drones and creating a corridor for training and testing for commercial companies, it is the exact place where we want to grow our presence because we can never be the cutting edge of these technologies. They just move too fast.
▶ 1:55:33Mr. Driscoll: We want our soldiers colocated with venture backed startups and venture backed founders so they can get the education but also the forward edge of what is possible. We found that at camp grayling. >> I will continue to work with you to expand that. I appreciate your comments.
▶ 1:55:55Mr. Driscoll: This committee has consistently prioritize environmental stewardship through the bipartisan national defense bill by tackling pfas contamination and prioritizing environmental cleanup. To bring back grayling into the discussion I have concerns about conflicting comments by the administration regarding the importance of environmental stewardship despite the strong support from this committee.
▶ 1:56:20Mr. Driscoll: I am troubled about what this means for pfas cleanup at installations like camp grayling which you just mentioned is an amazing facility but clearly has issues we have to deal with particularly with local communities. Do I have your commitment to prioritize environmental programs to include the pfas cleanup at installations like camp grayling in michigan as well as across the country but if you could talk about camp grayling specifically.
▶ 1:56:50Mr. Driscoll: You definitely have the army's commitment to be steward's in the communities where we live. We aspire to be very thoughtful, almost like the boy scouts where we leave the areas better than where we found them. Very broadly you have that commitment and specifically I will follow back up with your office on pfas at camp grayling.
▶ 1:57:12Sen. Peters: I appreciate that. This is early to both of you. The army conducts critical work to design, test and engineer the next generation of ground combat systems in michigan at the detroit optional -- arsenal to include a ground vehicle system center.
▶ 1:57:31Sen. Peters: Despite the critical work they are doing, I am concerned about workforce changes that included reassignment of personnel, the removal of collective bargaining rights of employees at the arsenal. I am troubled that the employees at the arsenal will no longer have the right to bargain for fair wages, job security and for dignified retirement.
▶ 1:57:51Sen. Peters: I hope I have your commitment to look seriously into these issues and ensure that the changes are not going to harm the technical teams that are there and risk overburdening really highly specialized and valuable workforce. Do you want to comment generally about that? I don't know how familiar you are with the detroit arsenal.
▶ 1:58:13Gen. Laneve: I will speak for myself and I speak for the secretary as well, our commitment. As we look at human capital and the key infrastructure that we are doing with dignity and care, as we try to balance where the workforce is across our base.
▶ 1:58:40Sen. Peters: I appreciate that.
▶ 1:58:42Chair Wicker: Senator sheehy.
▶ 1:58:46Sen. Sheehy: Good evening. I would like to talk about how critical it is for our war fighters to be able to repair and maintain their own equipment especially for deployed areas. How important it is for combat commanders, commanders who are closest to the flight -- fight to have the authority and the funding to not just acquire the equipment they need quickly but then sustain, maintain and in some cases modify that equipment for the needs of the battlefield.
▶ 1:59:16Sen. Sheehy: The 21st century battlefield moves quickly. The software and electronic warfare and landscape changes constantly and sometimes the design and the device or the architecture of a software program may look great in a test range or a lab but when it hits reality as a combat it requires modification and sometimes those modifications can take years. What is the department doing to resolve this and what can we do to make sure we are giving them the tools to get that done?
▶ 1:59:47Mr. Driscoll: Senator, you are absolutely right. Warfare has changed so dramatically. One of the few things I can guarantee is when we go into a large-scale conflict, within days, minutes or hours we will know where we need to change our equipment and our tools and we will have to start to act quickly. We the united states army are not ukraine.
▶ 2:00:18Mr. Driscoll: We have more assets, a deeper defense industrial base. We have tools and resources at our disposal but we must be able to adapt quickly. We have redone how we purchase things.
▶ 2:00:35Mr. Driscoll: We changed our acquisition structure to where we are using a model where our soldiers are getting to test in the field the devices in advance and they are helping us work with manufacturers and software developers before they can get the first real purchase to get it closer to where we needed to be.
▶ 2:00:54Mr. Driscoll: The other things we're doing is we are working with you and your colleagues to do things like statutorily required that we always have a right to repair, that we always have a right to integrate. What we mean by that is we must have the design files for the parts and the pieces where when we are 6000 miles from home we must be able to manufacture those pieces ourselves and with a right to integrate, we are requiring every piece of equipment to be open through an api so that we can feed data out
▶ 2:01:26Mr. Driscoll: And in and it will stop us from having to swivel between six to eight systems which is what happens right now. When you see how the army is interacting with the ukrainians, we have six to eight systems we are using. The ukrainians basically have one or two systems at most and that is what we are doing as an army to get ready.
▶ 2:01:48Gen. Laneve: We appreciate your support on right to repair. It is critical for us. Our industrial base cannot keep up with our systems so we need the ability to make our own parts and fix our equipment. It is going to be demonstrably harder to do that in the pacific theater. We have to be able to do this at the edge. Give it to the soldiers, they will fix our stuff fast.
▶ 2:02:17Sen. Sheehy: We will keep working on it. The war, we did not have to worry about air to ground threats from the adversary. As we have learned in the past few years with the drone threat we are seeing it even more so with the threat with iran, our ability to protect ourselves from airborne threats. We have done well at intercepting threats whether they are missiles, drones or otherwise.
▶ 2:02:44Sen. Sheehy: But we also have a legacy air defense model builds on active radar and that can present a serious phone ability for us iwith a peer fight with china or someone else. What is the army doing so that we are not emitting locations for our air defense forces? What does that look like right now for the army.
▶ 2:03:08Gen. Laneve: Yes, across the board it is a layered defense. We are going after everything to be able to protect our soldiers and with the joint force. It is what we do as far as the joint force.
▶ 2:03:30Gen. Laneve: Whether it is no systems that we are pushing as fast as we can and the success they are having there or going after space-based technology to help us defeat what was going to be a much larger scale of these systems in going against a near peer.
▶ 2:03:55Gen. Laneve: Yes to everything you just said, we have to go after layered defense.
▶ 2:04:00Mr. Driscoll: We are kicking off on thursday a defense critical infrastructure meeting at fort bragg and we have been invited to host participants, power companies, utilities, water and we are hoping to build a blueprint for how to defend ourselves. If you look at what is happening with ukraine, they are getting value out of that and we are just under invested right now.
▶ 2:04:24Sen. Sheehy: Thank you.
▶ 2:04:26Chair Wicker: Senator kaine.
▶ 2:04:29Sen. Kaine: Thank you to the witnesses for the closed setting . Really good information. Secretary driscoll, two topics I want to raise with you. Despite a pentagon budget request that would increase the top line by 50% if you include both components and despite the fact that that increase can produce a significant and will merit pay raise for troops, there is no pay raise for the civilian workforce.
▶ 2:04:59Sen. Kaine: There is a bonus but no guaranteed pay rates for the civilian workforce. About one quarter of the army component is civilian. A huge portion of that civilian workforce in the army and the other branches are veterans so they have already served in an active capacity. I am very troubled by the absence of a pay increase proposal in the president's budget. I will not ask you to justify because I know the way budgets get done.
▶ 2:05:29Sen. Kaine: Often we ask for things and somebody else makes the decision. For those who are paying attention to this hearing who are part of the civilian workforce or their families, talk to me about the value add that the w that the y provide to our nation's defense.
▶ 2:05:47Mr. Driscoll: One of our major lessons in the last 18 months is how critical and patriotic the civilian workers are. Many of them are former service members. Even the ones who are not, you don't take that job for the pay. You take that job because in the past majority of instances who care deeply about our country and you want to contribute as an expert.
▶ 2:06:11Mr. Driscoll: What we at the army have oqwed our civilians, we have kept a hiring freeze in place longer than most just to be punitive to a process that had grown large and we did that because we wanted to take the time to thoughtfully match people to our jobs that we needed. We have done that over the last six weeks.
▶ 2:06:39Mr. Driscoll: We are pulling off the hiring freeze in the vast majority of instances. We are cautiously optimistic going forward that what civilians should see is much more controlled management over their career and what we hope that leads to is even if we are not able to give them pay raises today, we should be able to give them paths to grow.
▶ 2:07:01Sen. Kaine: I hope the committee tackles this. Often times civilians are serving side-by-side with soldiers or other troops. I am on the board at west point. You have army props in the system. You have civilian props. When they are serving side-by-side co-teaching classes or serving in any other capacity and one side is getting a pay raise and the other group is not, that creates some internal challenges.
▶ 2:07:31Sen. Kaine: I hope we might deal with that. The other thing I want to ask you is this. Last year I focused on you because it was time critical and tragic. About staying engaged with the families who lost loved ones in the flight 5340 that claimed the lives of civilians, patriotic soldiers of aviators.
▶ 2:07:57Sen. Kaine: I think it is really important that we continue to be transparent but also learn the lessons and improve and we have had some conversations. The army has already done a number of things to respond to ntsb preliminary reports. That is positive. We have an opportunity to do more. But there are three army investigations is pending about that crash.
▶ 2:08:24Sen. Kaine: I was told when the ntsb issued their report in january that the three were likely to come to a resolution sometime soon. My understanding is that is not the case. When will these investigations be done in your best estimation?
▶ 2:08:39Gen. Laneve: 15-6 is one of the ones you are talking about. I just received a brief yesterday. We talked about this on the office call. That moves forward in the process. To be able to get it in front of the army families and to be with the secretary's consent shared.
▶ 2:09:05Gen. Laneve: That process moving on I think the 18th is the date that we are hoping to meet the gates.
▶ 2:09:11Mr. Driscoll: Just to publicly reaffirm the commitment that I made prior to the families that we will be as transparent as the law allows us because we want to learn as much as we can from this so it does not happen again.
▶ 2:09:23Sen. Kaine: Obviously transparent with the army families but I think transparent with all of those who lost their lives that day. There might be some legal restrictions but lawyers usually tell you that there are legal obstacles. There are not. I say that as a lawyer. I would just say we owe it to these families to help them believe we are doing everything possible to minimize the chance this will ever happen again.
▶ 2:09:47Mr. Driscoll: On behalf of the army we wholeheartedly agree and when I say families, I mean all of them.
▶ 2:09:53Chair Wicker: Thank you for that, gentleman.
▶ 2:09:58Sen. Cotton: Thank you for your service to our nation. Arlington national cemetery is hollowed ground not just for the army but the entire nation. General laneve, I first want to thank you army and secretary driscoll for restoring the case on detachment at arlington national cemetery following the unwise decision in 2023 to pause it.
▶ 2:10:21Sen. Cotton: The case on participation in military funerals has been a time honored tradition honoring our nation's heroes and I am glad we are on track to move beyond limited operations and back to four squads performing funerals later this year.
▶ 2:10:36Sen. Cotton: General laneve, can we get your commitment that y commitment that the army will continue to prioritize the detachment for years ahead and can we give you -- get your commitment that you will keep this committee of any delays or additional resources you might need?
▶ 2:10:57Gen. Laneve: Absolutely. >> secretary driscoll, pine bluff arsenal is essential to address our nation's crisis. I want to thank you and the arkansas congressional delegation's joint efforts have been assured that pine bluff will evolve and expand to meet the needs of our military.
▶ 2:11:20Gen. Laneve: The proposed agreement is one example of working with private industry to enhance our industrial base of course addressing the munitions needs has been on our minds today. It is going to require an all of the above strategy.
▶ 2:11:38Gen. Laneve: Given those demands, can you tell us what is next in your thinking about how to ensure that installations like the pine bluff arsenal and other sites receive the government and private investment they need to solve our munitions crisis?
▶ 2:11:54Mr. Driscoll: Yes. The hanwa investment, we are incredibly excited and proud as using that as a pathfinder. The other pathfinder is we went out to private industry to see if it was possible to do data centers.
▶ 2:12:15Mr. Driscoll: We are excited to have two data centers that we are using to build out the model that reflects our might as an army where we have millions of acres of land where we can partner with private industry. Our next step was we basically went out and we said american industry, what would you do on our bases? We had 200 submissions last month. We have narrowed them down to about 110 that we could do.
▶ 2:12:45Mr. Driscoll: I would say of those, 60 are some of the most well-known names in our largest private investors. Last week we met with treasury. They are giving us full-time employees for us to go through these proposals. What we are hoping to do is in a couple of weeks or months to able to announce a lot more partnerships. >> I think that is a very welcome development.
▶ 2:13:10Mr. Driscoll: These sites have languished for seven years and I am glad we are taking full advantage of all of the opportunity they provide. I want to talk briefly about physical fitness standards. I am pleased to see the army leading the way on restoring fitness standards for combat troops. The new field test establishes a single standard that is aligned to the demands of combat ensuring readiness and lethality in soldiers serving in 24 designated combat military occupation specialties.
▶ 2:13:40Mr. Driscoll: Can you explain how high standards across all units of our military contribute to greater lethality?
▶ 2:13:46Mr. Driscoll: I think in your experience in combat certainly when we have spoken about it, when bullets fly it does not matter if you are a male or female. It does not matter where you grew up. It is the perfect egalitarian system of can you be there for your battle buddy. What we have tried to do has been to model out that behavior across all of our different combat arms.
▶ 2:14:16Mr. Driscoll: We are excited to follow president's leadership and secretary hegseth to continue to expand and invest in our soldiers to make them the most lethal in the world.
▶ 2:14:25Sen. Cotton: These uniform standards irrespective of sex are not just uniform standards but a high standards appropriate to the occupation specialties?
▶ 2:14:34Mr. Driscoll: It is a hard test, senator.
▶ 2:14:38Gen. Laneve: I have daughters in the army and a son that is in the army and they both want high standards across the board. For all of our occupation specialties but especially
▶ 2:14:54Sen. Cotton: We have done the research. You are confident the standards are uniform and high. And now you will apply this test and the chips will fall where they may no matter what the results along race, sex, religion, political affiliation or dietary preferences. Thank you.
▶ 2:15:14Chair Wicker: Thank you senator cotton. Senator shaheen.
▶ 2:15:21Sen. Shaheen: Thank you both for being here. It has been a marathon morning. Secretary driscoll, I want to go back to some of the issues we raised, we discussed earlier in the closed session about pre-position stock. This is not classified.
▶ 2:15:39Sen. Shaheen: But my understanding about the army's interest in pre-positioning stocks throughout europe was because it reduces deployment time and ask as a deterrent -- acts as a deterrent and helps provide combat power for any contingency operations.
▶ 2:16:01Sen. Shaheen: I understand general gronk of which was interested in updating the aps before troops were removed from his theater in germany because he is interested in being able to rapidly assemble four brigade combat teams. You raised concerns about the cost earlier. Can we talk about the cost difference between maintaining aps in theater versus urging forces and equipment from the U.S. in the event of a crisis?
▶ 2:16:33Gen. Laneve: Thank you for the question. As we discussed earlier, there is a balance to be able to surge forces on equipment that is ready and compatible with the equipment. Aps is almost an insurance policy. That equipment stays at a level that at times is not compatible with the equipment that we would bring forward.
▶ 2:17:04Gen. Laneve: To have equipment forward always is good for speed to get personnel in place but it is unsustainable at that cost right now.
▶ 2:17:14Sen. Shaheen: The cost of what? Transporting new equipment as the capabilities change or the cost of guarding the equipment? Help us understand what the additional costs are that you are concerned about.
▶ 2:17:30Gen. Laneve: Maintaining equipment sets that just to sit and the cost associated with that is somewhere around $2 billion for that one bct. Another general is looking at different ways to mitigate the cost to help the army be able to meet this requirement.
▶ 2:17:54Gen. Laneve: As was discussed earlier we would like to see some of those equipment be trained so that we can fall in on and utilize the exercises across europe.
▶ 2:18:07Sen. Shaheen: What is the deterrent to doing that?
▶ 2:18:09Gen. Laneve: It is just a different way to look at the equipment and that would have to be a discussion between the team. I know the joint chiefs is looking at this as well and how the posture is across the world.
▶ 2:18:30Sen. Shaheen: So the issue is internal? You all could decide that you are going to use the equipment for training if you decide to do that?
▶ 2:18:38Gen. Laneve: I think it is a different categorization of it and there is a different funding line associated with it.
▶ 2:18:44Sen. Shaheen: But it is still an internal decision. Secretary driscoll, I want to go back to last year when you were helping to negotiate with the administration between russia and ukraine, when the administration offered a plan that looked like it had been written by russia to end the war.
▶ 2:19:11Sen. Shaheen: At that time you suggested that it was important to get a peace deal as quickly as possible because ukraine was facing defeat on the battlefield. I have seen a number of unclassified assessments and open source reports and I am sure you have seen in the last month or so that suggest that not only is ukraine not in danger of losing the war but they are actually, that russia
▶ 2:19:41Sen. Shaheen: Is the one who is in danger of losing the war and if we would put more pressure on russia, that their economy would be in real trouble. Can you tell us, do you think that ukraine is at this point, it seems like it has been defeated and what more should we be thinking about to do in order to pressure russia so that they actually do lose this war?
▶ 2:20:06Mr. Driscoll: Senator, I encourage anybody who has contacts in ukraine to ask about their experience with the broader administration and the U.S. army more broadly has been there from day one supporting ukraine.
▶ 2:20:23Sen. Shaheen: I don't disagree with you on the army. That is not the question I'm asking you. Given that the administration just lifted the sanctions on russian oil so that they are recouping about $4 billion per month because of that oil to help fund the war in ukraine and to help fund, to help the iranians with their targeting of U.S.
▶ 2:20:51Sen. Shaheen: Military sites and servicemembers in the middle east.
▶ 2:20:56Chair Wicker: The time has expanded.
▶ 2:20:59Sen. Shaheen: Why should we not think there is a mismatch between what the army is doing and what the administration is doing with respect to helping the russians to fund their war?
▶ 2:21:09Chair Wicker: The senator's time has expired. I yield myself five minutes. China's most recent defense white paper says that the pla navy is bolstering capabilities for maritime maneuver operations and maritime joint operations. In response to the U.S. army's multi-domain taskforces are becoming key to the army's role in the indo-pacific.
▶ 2:21:36Chair Wicker: How important are mdtf's to deterring aggression in the indo-pacific and what can members of the committee do to help you accelerate the capabilities?
▶ 2:21:49Gen. Laneve: Thank you for your support. The multi-domain taskforces command is a critical theater enabling taskforces to be placed across the pacific at scale and operate. They are a critical component of deterrence. If needed, the ability to bring those effects on any adversary.
▶ 2:22:17Gen. Laneve: The ability to have them forward in theater in positions that have a direct deterrence is critical for us. We are seeking the support and now we are looking at setting the theater for that. >> we want to be supportive. Let us know how we can support the army as we advance that cause. Secretary driscoll, we have talked many times before.
▶ 2:22:47Gen. Laneve: I appreciate your efforts to prepare the army for the future battlefield. How are you balancing the need to modernize the active component while ensuring that the guard and reserve component retained the equipment and capabilities they need for their mission?
▶ 2:23:05Mr. Driscoll: I appreciate the conversations we have had. The guard and reserve components, when we look at cent comm and the missions that the U.S. army has undertaken, the guard and reserve play an incredible role.
▶ 2:23:25Mr. Driscoll: Under both former general george and general lenib, we talk about resourcing everyone at the same time. With budget constraint it is not possible to do that simultaneously but we don't want to model cloud how we roll out new equipment to the force other than this idea that they are anything other then an equal participant.
▶ 2:23:56Mr. Driscoll: We are hoping to upgrade them to things like nexgen c2 and give them new equipment. >> we have talked about this before. Humvees are made in indiana. A lot of really good jobs and workers that make the humvees. It is important indiana but it is also important to the army especially to the reserves. The army transformation initiative transitions the humvees away from the active component.
▶ 2:24:25Mr. Driscoll: At the same time more than half of the generals have asked that congress fund modernize humvees. What role can the humvee play for the army reserve and guard across a wide range of missions like disaster relief and homeland security?
▶ 2:24:42Mr. Driscoll: The humvee has been an incredible asset to the U.S. army decades. What we are not trying to say is that it will no longer have a role. We are trying to balance that with other assets. They are all sorts of things. One of the vehicles we were able to make autonomously was a humvee because it is drive by wire. You can upgrade them very quickly and use them for all sorts of purposes.
▶ 2:25:09Mr. Driscoll: If you were thinking about a non-autonomous vehicle that constraints its use case in a way, when you can do all these things with open architecture systems, the humvee can help us on the border, with natural disasters, it can help us in a lot of theaters where they still have a lot of relevance even if it is not the one-stop solution. >> can you give us a quick update on how the transition is going?
▶ 2:25:34Mr. Driscoll: Which transition? >> overall army transformation initiative. Just give us a progress report.
▶ 2:25:43Mr. Driscoll: We are one you're in right now. It was may of last year when we did it. I tried to look for the leading indicators that it is working. The first one is to actually go talk to soldiers. I really think they would say it feels very different. The army is moving quickly. If you look at what we are doing with our data on our business system side or if you look at what we are doing with operation jailbreak, those are all good.
▶ 2:26:15Mr. Driscoll: The different systems we are procuring are all open architecture. These are the types of platforms and assets that can change in a future in which we have not historically thought about it.
▶ 2:26:25Chair Wicker: Thank you senator banks. Senator kelly.
▶ 2:26:29Sen. Kelly: Thank you. Thank you for being here today. Secretary driscoll, the electronic proving ground near ft. Watchuka provides a unique testing capability because it has very favorable geography, protected airspace surrounded on all sides by terrain.
▶ 2:26:57Sen. Kelly: Because of that we have the ability there to conduct very aggressive electronic warfare with minimal interference that goes beyond the area. This is the kind of testing we need to understand how our systems would perform if we were up against adversaries. That is why I have been frustrated by the army's lack of communication regarding changes that are already underway. We have tried to engage with the army multiple times.
▶ 2:27:30Sen. Kelly: My office has learned about staffing reductions and mission impacts after they have happened even though we are trying to communicate with the leadership. We are trying to proactively engage but we are not getting the response that we would normally expect. It is one of the army's premier facilities for ew and spectrum operations.
▶ 2:27:58Sen. Kelly: When the army reduce capacity without articulating a long-range plan, it raises questions about how these decisions align with the army's stated priorities with regards to modernization. I would like a commitment from you, if we could work with your office to try to figure out what is going on and make sure that the decisions we are making are in the best interest of the army.
▶ 2:28:22Mr. Driscoll: Absolutely. One of the things we have tried to model out in the last 18 months was ultra responsiveness, osha transparency both for the private sector, to the larger defense partners and also to all of you. I apologize that we have not been faster and more clear.
▶ 2:28:47Sen. Kelly: Thank you. I am concerned about the army's direction on aviation this year. You are spending $4 billion. Next year you are requesting half of that. Your request includes zero apaches, and one uh60 black hawk.
▶ 2:29:14Sen. Kelly: While I understand the intent of the transformation initiative, I am concerned that we are divesting in some capabilities that fill a critical requirement. We talked a little bit about this about learning the correct lesson from the former conflict and we have to be really careful. We don't have a validated replacement for these systems. A reasonable path forward would be to sustain army aircraft we have and use their capacity until we integrate new technologies.
▶ 2:29:46Sen. Kelly: Instead we are facing a budget request that leaves congress no assurances that the army and especially the national guard will not suffer from a significant capability gap in its ability to move people and weapons, cargo but also put fire downrange especially with regards to the apache.
▶ 2:30:12Sen. Kelly: I am concerned that we might be repeating a mistake that we saw with the air force where the service spent years arguing it could retire the platform only to realize there is a critical mission need and nothing to fill it and then suddenly with extra costs, extend the life of the aircraft after the industrial capacity and sustainment challenges have gotten worse.
▶ 2:30:35Sen. Kelly: Go on's lines and suppliers and workforce capacity disappear, rebuilding them can be costly and time-consuming. This budget threatens the health of the defense industrial base in that regard. Industry has been very clear that foreign sales on these systems are not enough to sustain their production lines past the early 20 30's. We have also been hearing from some small businesses.
▶ 2:31:03Sen. Kelly: I heard one that says the writing is on the wall and it wants to get out of the business of supporting army helicopters. That could be something you are going to have to deal with. Mr. secretary, you continue to say that the apache, black hawk, chinnok have a role and need to be modernized but the budget does not get us there.
▶ 2:31:30Sen. Kelly: How do we do this and sustain these systems under this existing budget request?
▶ 2:31:39Chair Wicker: You can supplement your accent on the record also.
▶ 2:31:43Mr. Driscoll: Our intent as you rightly pointed out, tried to say on the record a number of times. These systems will be in the army's life for a very long time. What we are trying to do is get out in advance of the number that we will have at total as we start to bring on things like florida, what does that look like so that is what you see reflected in the current budget.
▶ 2:32:11Mr. Driscoll: We are optimistic that fms will make up the case is to keep these lines on.
▶ 2:32:17Sen. Kelly: Still in the budget, one black hawk, zero apaches, zero chinook. The fms thing as my office has looked into this, it does not seem like enough to sustain the helicopter industrial base. I am sorry I am over my time.
▶ 2:32:40Chair Wicker: Thank you for that observation. Senator slotkin, I am sure that you are as delighted as I am that senator rosen has a.. Senator rosen, you are recognized for five minutes.
▶ 2:32:54Sen. Rosen: Thank you chairman for holding this hearing. Thank you secretary driscoll and general laneve for testifying today for the classified briefing which was terrific. Appreciate your service.
▶ 2:33:10Sen. Rosen: I want to talk about duty status reform because as evidenced in recent operations the national guard evolved from a strategic reserve into an operational force who is relied upon at an unprecedented pace for overseas deployment and state emergency activations often with the disparity of entitlements depending on their duty status.
▶ 2:33:33Sen. Rosen: Soldiers experienced a bureaucratic inequities of no fewer than 29 different and cumbersome statuses which prevent them from perceiving the same pay and benefits as their active-duty counterparts performing the same duties. There is a proposal to fix this issue that omb has not cleared for congress to consider and this is really hurting our guard.
▶ 2:34:00Sen. Rosen: In the meantime, what specific initiatives is the army considering to consolidate these duty statuses? Number one you will reduce administrative burden, improve pay and benefits continuity and better support the guard and reserve soldiers. How will you support duty status reform? It is critical for retention, taking care of the guard and retention of the guard and reserve.
▶ 2:34:26Gen. Laneve: Thank you for recognizing the incredible commitment and impact of all of the components but especially for the reserve and the guard right now across the globe. We are taking a look at this with the department as they are looking at this broadly as an entire department, not just the army alone.
▶ 2:34:57Sen. Rosen: It is really critical. Secretary driscoll, I think we have to do it across services but it is really important and it is hurting the guard in nevada and across the country.
▶ 2:35:09Gen. Laneve: It just cleared omb.
▶ 2:35:12Sen. Rosen: There you go. That is how fast I asked the question. Thank you for that. You made my day.
▶ 2:35:20Mr. Driscoll: This is a very important thing we don't reference often. The duty status matters a lot. It is also our businesses systems that are failing our soldiers. This is the back end of how they get paid.
▶ 2:35:36Sen. Rosen: That is why I brought it up as my number one question. I want to talk about the cyber workforce. The ndaa included my bipartisan legislation authorizing the army to create a civilian reserve to provide cybercomm with qualified personnel for surge capacity, ensuring the government has the talent to respond to malicious activity and secure information and systems on the ranking member on cybersecurity
▶ 2:36:07Sen. Rosen: Committee here. Can you provide an update on the army's implementation of the civilian cybersecurity reserve? To the secretary, can you also add given that cyber personnel are often able to earn significantly higher compensation outside of government service, what compensation reforms does the army need from congress to better compete with the private sector for elite cyber talent? How are you measuring that and what can we do to help?
▶ 2:36:35Mr. Driscoll: This is a topic that is near to my heart that we will follow up with your office on a more timely cybersecurity update. More broadly speaking, what authorities we would need.
▶ 2:36:52Mr. Driscoll: When you look at the threat from a near peer, china's ability to tie their cyber talent into their research and private companies, we as a nation do not have something like that. That guarantees that we will not be able to keep up. If you look at a the models from openai, google, all of those are best in class. But we need humans to be able to operate.
▶ 2:37:21Sen. Rosen: We will do the mark in a few weeks. I know senator rounds and I would prefer to have that update from you if you can talk about that. Just a few seconds left, if you want to talk about it. Otherwise I will yield to senator slotkin.
▶ 2:37:38Gen. Laneve: I concur with the secretary. We will follow back up with you.
▶ 2:37:43Sen. Rosen: Thank you. The sooner the better that way we have some good input for mark in less than a few weeks from now.
▶ 2:37:56Sen. Slotkin: You are almost done. You are at the bitter end. I am paying my dues. Two very different questions. Thank you. I know senator peters said this but thank you for coming to michigan last year, coming to see northern strike, the biggest multi-domain exercise east of the mississippi.
▶ 2:38:18Sen. Slotkin: Thank you for coming to detroit as well to see some of the innovation we have going on give our manufacturing base, we really feel we can increase the number of military missions and contracts that we have coming through michigan. You came and talked to a bunch of our defense contractors about the army transformation initiative.
▶ 2:38:42Sen. Slotkin: While we want deeply to modernize, there are certain things since we do land vehicles where we are on the losing end of that experience so we are trying to find other areas. I think where we are poised to break out will become the leader is on drone, r&d and manufacturing. Drones are becoming ubiquitous. I was looking at where we had some deadly tornadoes.
▶ 2:39:09Sen. Slotkin: They did search and rescue via drones. People are looking for their lost pets as a service now you can hire a drone service. We want to be poised but what are the other things and we were very happy just earlier this year the army designated one of our facilities up north as the first drone testing site in the country. We feel like we are really ready to take this to the next level.
▶ 2:39:38Sen. Slotkin: How should we be thinking back home briefly about advanced manufacturing using the capabilities that mission -- michigan has in particular to serving the next generation of army soldiers?
▶ 2:39:51Mr. Driscoll: I think your state in particular with its deep rich manufacturing history can help us solve the problem that globally we are still gapped as a human species but specifically the U.S. army for conflict. These larger drones, when we complement the russians and the ukrainians, what we really mean is they are very good at building the smaller ones.
▶ 2:40:21Mr. Driscoll: The larger ones that will one day be able to supplement the war, things like the apache, much larger, much more difficult to build, require a lot of deep expertise and a lot of investment. That is a place where we look out at the assets that we have as a nation, we think michigan can help us refine what we are working on and expand it.
▶ 2:40:49Sen. Slotkin: We want to be good partners. We are the arsenal of democracy and we have a rich tradition of being there when our country needs us. We would love to talk to you more about that. Separate topic, you were up at camp grayling which is grayling, michigan which has other military communities that had a problem with pfas contamination. I met via zoom with a bunch of local community advocates.
▶ 2:41:18Sen. Slotkin: These are folks who are the be supportive of the military presence -- these are folks who are deeply supportive of the military presence. These are people who believe in the mission but they cannot drink their well water. The lake that camp grayling is on, people cannot drink the water in that area. They cannot let their kids or their dogs touch the foam. It is a real thing.
▶ 2:41:48Sen. Slotkin: The army does have a response ability. There was $20 million set aside by the army to clean that up. Earlier this year we got word that they wanted to do more testing before they engage in any cleanup. I have seen this movie with the air force. I am just asking your commitment. We understand that testing might need to go on for the rest of this calendar year.
▶ 2:42:14Sen. Slotkin: But that has often been used as a way to push off and never take responsibility when people are literally having to buy their own water or get it provided to them. Can I have your commitment that you will look at this particularly and that we will not go beyond 2026 for that additional testing so these people have some remediation, some cleanup of their wells?
▶ 2:42:36Mr. Driscoll: I commit to following up with a very clear answer. I don't know the specifics of the timing of the testing. My experience has been we do not do those things to delay so I will check in.
▶ 2:42:51Sen. Slotkin: There have been generations of folks not just from the army but other services. This is not the beginning of this movie. It might be new to you but it is not new for these communities. I just ask that you follow up. Any of us who have a home on a lake would want our kids to swim and drink the water.
▶ 2:43:09Chair Wicker: Senator slotkin, how long has this been a known problem?
▶ 2:43:16Sen. Slotkin: Both in army communities and former air force base in oscoda, years and years. We have some residents who have more to fast in their blood than any other human being on earth. Again, these are dedicated communities who love the military but cannot send their kids to certain summer camps because there is so much contamination in the local lakes.
▶ 2:43:46Sen. Slotkin: This is an issue I am big on in the house and I continue to be hammering it in the senate. I would love your help.
▶ 2:43:52Chair Wicker: Thank you.
▶ 2:43:56Sen. Duckworth: Thank you. I appreciated meeting you yesterday especially when you committed to providing the families of the dca crash victims to the findings from any investigations without any additional administrative hurdles. I look forward to working with you to make sure our airspace is safe both for the flying public but also for our war fighters as well.
▶ 2:44:24Sen. Duckworth: I do want to turn to the army's organic industrial base. In my state rock island arsenal is home to critical equipment. The command which delivers munitions for the battlefield and the army's sustainment command which drives the enterprise to name only a few of the critical functions of the arsenal. I was very concerned to hear in march that the army was reassigning employees who manage ammunitions and sustainment in the middle of a war.
▶ 2:44:54Sen. Duckworth: Over the past two months I heard from constituents who were thrust into personal turmoil by the army through a hasty personnel campaign. In march as many as 155 civilian workers at rock island many of whom were veterans themselves were told that they were surplus employees and they were left in limbo for weeks worried that they would lose their jobs with many only being told later, weeks later, never mind.
▶ 2:45:23Sen. Duckworth: Some of these so-called surplus employees were given only two days to accept a job out of state and uproot their families or face termination by civil service. Two to five days. That said. Two to five days to make a lifelong career decision. I don't think this is how we should be treating our patriotic civilians. My constituents are worried about the merger of two critical commands and what it means for their jobs.
▶ 2:45:52Sen. Duckworth: Secretary driscoll, do you commit to notifying me and this committee before any additional workforce changes at rock island arsenal including from the merger at jse and asc?
▶ 2:46:06Mr. Driscoll: Senator, it was helpful meeting with you yesterday. Those populations we aspire to do what is right. Two to five days is probably not sufficient in hindsight. After meeting with you, I went back and talked to the team and we will try to have similar conversations to get more time will be more grace for people to make these big decisions.
▶ 2:46:34Mr. Driscoll: To your question, we will do our best to include your office in any sort of hiring that we have to do for rock island.
▶ 2:46:41Sen. Duckworth: Will you contact us before it actually takes place? Especially if you are terminating people?
▶ 2:46:50Mr. Driscoll: I am not intending to pause unnecessarily. I am trying to think of the process if we had to get rid of some individual.
▶ 2:47:00Sen. Duckworth: I mean in terms of an effort.
▶ 2:47:03Mr. Driscoll: Yes.
▶ 2:47:04Sen. Duckworth: The domestic misuse of american military in cities, months ago president trump mobilized 500 national guard men to reduce crime in chicago but they never set foot in chicago. They stayed in bases in illinois because federal courts and the supreme court found their deployment illegal and cost taxpayers $21 million in the process.
▶ 2:47:29Sen. Duckworth: But president trump's obsession with misusing the military on american streets is not over and he often threatens to deploy the guard for political purposes from saying he might send them to airports to lamenting he should have had them seize the ballots in 2020. This is not hypothetical. He said that. Don't forget that thousands of guardsmen were still in washington, D.C. under no valid mission and were doing so at great taxpayer expense.
▶ 2:47:58Sen. Duckworth: In fiscal year 2027 the president is requesting $605 million for deployment of the national guard. Just outside this building guardsmen are being forced away from their families to run around in the city picking up trash or gardening all while the national guard has actual missions to train for like natural disasters or preparing for combat.
▶ 2:48:19Sen. Duckworth: I want to discuss the ways in which the army can better use the $605 million that the president wants to waste on unnecessarily deploying the military to the nation's capital. Do you agree with the call and the initiative to expand pre-positioned stocks in the indo-pacific?
▶ 2:48:36Mr. Driscoll: Yes.
▶ 2:48:38Sen. Duckworth: For $605 million the army could fund 11 times to prepositioned stocks for repair parts and supplies in japan and korea than it had last year. That is what 605 million dollars can pay for. Do you agree that soldiers deserve access to affordable healthcare?
▶ 2:48:56Mr. Driscoll: Yes. The army --
▶ 2:49:03Sen. Duckworth: The army could provide 15,000 families ivf treatments. President trump could keep his campaign promise. He wants to pay for all costs associated with ivf treatments. I urge congress to invest the funds where it really matters. Thank you.
▶ 2:49:21Chair Wicker: Thank you, senator duckworth. I want to thank our witnesses for their testimony. 20 members have been able to ask questions during this open hearing for the information of members. Questions for the record and due to the committee within two business days of the conclusion of this hearing which is right now. We are adjourned. [captioning performed by the national captioning institute, which is responsible for its caption content and accuracy. Visit ncicap.org]