Hearings to examine the current readiness of the Joint Force.
Senate Subcommittee on Readiness and Management Support
2025-03-12
Source: Congress.gov
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The Readiness Subcommittee meets today to receive the testimony on the current readiness of the United States Armed Forces. I deeply appreciate our witnesses, our esteemed witnesses from our military services. This is an impressive photo right here of all five services and our excellent work from the Government Accountability Office by Diana Maurer. This is one of the most important hearings certainly this committee undertakes all year. My view is one of the most important hearings in the Senate for the year because there's very few other issues more important than the readiness of our United States military. I look forward to the valuable testimony of the witnesses as it will pertain to their services readiness. I hope we can have a really good, candid discussion. We are living in a very dangerous world where our adversaries can and regularly do contest us across the globe. And we must remain vigilant in our pursuit of balancing readiness, modernization, and training with our global commitments. In my view, for the last four years, we have taken a holiday from history with the Biden administration's focus on issues in the military that had nothing to do with readiness. The list is long. Climate change over shipbuilding, transgender surgery for active duty troops, DEI, a lack of focus on warfighting and lethality, and defeating our enemies. I appreciate Secretary Hegseth's three priorities, restoring the warrior ethos, rebuilding our military, and reestablishing our deterrence.
Many of you know, and I've talked to all of you about this, I'm a big fan of the book by T.R. Ferenbach, This Kind of War, which Marines and soldiers all read, and it is about the Korean War and how in 1945 we had the most lethal military in world history, and five years later in 1950, the United States military had a hard time stopping and defeating a peasant army from North Korea. And thousands of American troops died in the process because a lack of leadership from our civilian and uniformed military. This must never happen again. There must never be another Task Force Smith that we saw in the Korean War. My view is we have a moral obligation to prepare for any future conflict, beginning with the realization that unlike any previous conflict, our service members will be at risk from threats well before they reach foreign soil, airspace, or waters. The world has changed dramatically as it pertains to our homeland as well. We can no longer consider ourselves safe based solely on the tyranny of distance from nations and actors that would do us harm. One of the things that we are working on in this Congress and this committee in conjunction with the President is his Iron Dome, now Golden Dome, and legislation of mine with Senator Cramer. We hope to make bipartisan in this committee to bolstering our homeland defense. Suffice to say the world is a dangerous place and the facts demand a response from not just the uniformed personnel,
sitting before us. And again, I respect the service decades and decades of military service from all of you, but from Congress as well. Let's look at a few facts in the last four years have done to our militaries provided by the military services and GAO. The Army has done an outstanding job working to increase recruiting but there remains significant operational demands and increasing pressures on an already understrength force with units being manned at less than 80%. Sixteen of the Navy's 32 amphibious warfare ships are in unsatisfactory condition, and the Air Force of today is very different from what we saw during the global war on terror. Yes, we have more capable aircraft, and yet the KC-46 and KC-135 tanker fleets sits at an aircraft availability rate of 52%. and 57%, respectively, versus 66% during the entirety of the global war on terror. While modernization will help improve these figures, at what cost will that come in terms of readiness and training? These are the key issues that so many of you, as our leaders in the military, have been focused on. There are many other issues that GAO has raised and our members here will be raising, but I want to thank the witnesses in advance, again, for their exceptional service to our country and for their testimony today. I look forward to that testimony, and now I'd like to turn it over to Ranking Member Senator Hirono.
Thank you, Senator Chairman. Senator Sullivan, rather. Well, you have your responsibility. Gentlemen, thank you for your dedicated service to our nation, and I thank the service members in each of your respective branches as well. Ms. Maurer, it's always great to have you back and to see you. The tireless work that you and your team deliver to Congress every year is instrumental to each NDAA. In your opening statements, I asked that each of you briefly describe what impacts to readiness a full year continuing resolution, CR, would have. For example, billions in military construction and family housing projects would not occur in a full CR.
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