[House Hearing, 116 Congress]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office]
[H.A.S.C. No. 116-72]
HEARING
ON
NATIONAL DEFENSE AUTHORIZATION ACT
FOR FISCAL YEAR 2021
AND
OVERSIGHT OF PREVIOUSLY AUTHORIZED PROGRAMS
BEFORE THE
COMMITTEE ON ARMED SERVICES
HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES
ONE HUNDRED SIXTEENTH CONGRESS
SECOND SESSION
__________
FULL COMMITTEE HEARING
ON
THE FISCAL YEAR 2021
NATIONAL DEFENSE AUTHORIZATION
BUDGET REQUEST FOR THE
DEPARTMENT OF THE AIR FORCE
__________
HEARING HELD
MARCH 4, 2020
[GRAPHIC NOT AVAILABLE IN TIFF FORMAT]
__________
U.S. GOVERNMENT PUBLISHING OFFICE
41-930 WASHINGTON : 2021
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
COMMITTEE ON ARMED SERVICES
One Hundred Sixteenth Congress
ADAM SMITH, Washington, Chairman
SUSAN A. DAVIS, California WILLIAM M. ``MAC'' THORNBERRY,
JAMES R. LANGEVIN, Rhode Island Texas
RICK LARSEN, Washington JOE WILSON, South Carolina
JIM COOPER, Tennessee ROB BISHOP, Utah
JOE COURTNEY, Connecticut MICHAEL R. TURNER, Ohio
JOHN GARAMENDI, California MIKE ROGERS, Alabama
JACKIE SPEIER, California K. MICHAEL CONAWAY, Texas
TULSI GABBARD, Hawaii DOUG LAMBORN, Colorado
DONALD NORCROSS, New Jersey ROBERT J. WITTMAN, Virginia
RUBEN GALLEGO, Arizona VICKY HARTZLER, Missouri
SETH MOULTON, Massachusetts AUSTIN SCOTT, Georgia
SALUD O. CARBAJAL, California MO BROOKS, Alabama
ANTHONY G. BROWN, Maryland, Vice PAUL COOK, California
Chair BRADLEY BYRNE, Alabama
RO KHANNA, California SAM GRAVES, Missouri
WILLIAM R. KEATING, Massachusetts ELISE M. STEFANIK, New York
FILEMON VELA, Texas SCOTT DesJARLAIS, Tennessee
ANDY KIM, New Jersey RALPH LEE ABRAHAM, Louisiana
KENDRA S. HORN, Oklahoma TRENT KELLY, Mississippi
GILBERT RAY CISNEROS, Jr., MIKE GALLAGHER, Wisconsin
California MATT GAETZ, Florida
CHRISSY HOULAHAN, Pennsylvania DON BACON, Nebraska
JASON CROW, Colorado JIM BANKS, Indiana
XOCHITL TORRES SMALL, New Mexico LIZ CHENEY, Wyoming
ELISSA SLOTKIN, Michigan PAUL MITCHELL, Michigan
MIKIE SHERRILL, New Jersey JACK BERGMAN, Michigan
VERONICA ESCOBAR, Texas MICHAEL WALTZ, Florida
DEBRA A. HAALAND, New Mexico
JARED F. GOLDEN, Maine
LORI TRAHAN, Massachusetts
ELAINE G. LURIA, Virginia
ANTHONY BRINDISI, New York
Paul Arcangeli, Staff Director
Katy Quinn, Professional Staff Member
Jesse Tolleson, Professional Staff Member
Emma Morrison, Clerk
C O N T E N T S
----------
Page
STATEMENTS PRESENTED BY MEMBERS OF CONGRESS
Smith, Hon. Adam, a Representative from Washington, Chairman,
Committee on Armed Services.................................... 1
Thornberry, Hon. William M. ``Mac,'' a Representative from Texas,
Ranking Member, Committee on Armed Services.................... 3
WITNESSES
Barrett, Hon. Barbara, Secretary of the Air Force................ 4
Goldfein, Gen David L., USAF, Chief of Staff, United States Air
Force.......................................................... 5
Raymond, Gen John W., USSF, Chief of Space Operations, United
States Space Force............................................. 7
APPENDIX
Prepared Statements:
Barrett, Hon. Barbara, joint with Gen David L. Goldfein and
Gen John W. Raymond........................................ 61
Documents Submitted for the Record:
[There were no Documents submitted.]
Witness Responses to Questions Asked During the Hearing:
Mr. Brown.................................................... 83
Ms. Haaland.................................................. 84
Ms. Speier................................................... 83
Mr. Waltz.................................................... 83
Questions Submitted by Members Post Hearing:
Mr. Cisneros................................................. 91
Mr. Conaway.................................................. 87
Mr. Graves................................................... 87
Mr. Lamborn.................................................. 87
Mr. Mitchell................................................. 91
Mr. Scott.................................................... 92
Mr. Vela..................................................... 89
.
THE FISCAL YEAR 2021 NATIONAL DEFENSE
AUTHORIZATION BUDGET REQUEST FOR THE DEPARTMENT OF THE AIR FORCE
----------
House of Representatives,
Committee on Armed Services,
Washington, DC, Wednesday, March 4, 2020.
The committee met, pursuant to call, at 10:01 a.m., in room
2118, Rayburn House Office Building, Hon. Adam Smith (chairman
of the committee) presiding.
OPENING STATEMENT OF HON. ADAM SMITH, A REPRESENTATIVE FROM
WASHINGTON, CHAIRMAN, COMMITTEE ON ARMED SERVICES
The Chairman. Good morning. We will call the meeting to
order.
We are here this morning to continue our posture hearings
in preparation for the 2021 NDAA [National Defense
Authorization Act]. And this morning, we will hear from the
Department of the Air Force and the Space Force Command on the
budget request for their departments, the President's budget
request from fiscal year 2021.
We are joined by the Honorable Barbara Barrett, Secretary
of the Air Force, and it is her first time before our
committee, so welcome, and I look forward to your testimony.
General David Goldfein, who is the Chief of Staff of the
Air Force, and in all likelihood, this may well be your last
time before the committee. So the beginnings and the endings,
and we certainly appreciate your service and also your
consistent candor before this committee and in working with us
so well over your time as the Chief of Staff. We appreciate
that leadership.
And we are joined by General John Raymond, Chief of Space
Operations for the U.S. Space Force. Not only is this his first
time before the committee, but it is the first time having a
representative from the U.S. Space Force, and the newly created
U.S. Space Force. So we are very anxious to hear from you about
how the setup of that is going.
I thank our witnesses for being here. And I think that the
challenge going forward, which we have talked about a lot in
this committee is, as always happens with us, so you are
consistently asked to do more than you have the resources to
do, and how you manage that, I think, is the great challenge at
the Pentagon right now, in terms of, you know, how do we figure
out maybe to get more resources, how do we figure out to
perhaps change what the strategy is to better match those
resources. But in doing that, there is considerable risk in
terms of how we make sure that we are prepared for what it is
that we do choose to do.
And I was particularly interested in the study that you
did, I think came out, that said, you have roughly 319
squadrons and you would like to have 386. And the trouble with
that is you are highly unlikely to get 386. So I worry about
what that means in terms of what our actual plan is and our
ability to execute it. If we set up and say, well, we have to
have this much, and we don't, then we are sort of scrambling
around, unable to truly be prepared for any mission, since we
are trying to prepare for more missions than we can possibly
do, if that makes sense. I would like to know how we
rationalize that.
And also, something that has come up consistently is, so
that is how many squadrons you want, but just with our
discussion of ships and this mythical number of ships that at
some point in the future we are going to have, the truly
important thing is, how many of our squadrons, or ships for
that matter, are operational. And that seems to have been a
major challenge. We get consistent reports about, you know,
pick an airframe there. We have, you know, 110 of them, but on
any given day, only 60 of them are ready to go. Is there a way
to improve that, and what are you focused on to make sure that
if we have the actual piece of equipment, that it works?
Because that is a frustrating misuse of resources if you have
something and you can't get it to do what it is supposed to do.
Along those lines, one of the ways that we have tried to
rationalize the irrational situation I just described is by
relying excessively on the OCO [Overseas Contingency Operations
fund]. One of my all-time favorite things was the phrase they
came up with last year where they actually eliminated the
subterfuge and came up with something that they called FOCO--
fake OCO. Just being very honest about it. We just--you know,
we want this money. We don't want to put it on the budget
because we, you know, have budget caps to deal with, so we are
going to call it emergency funding so it can be, you know,
quote, off budget, unquote.
And the Air Force relies quite a bit on that. I forget the
statistics off the top of my head. I think it is like $21.6
billion in OCO for the Air Force, and the estimates were, I
think, less than $2 billion that was for actual overseas
contingency operations. So, you know, how you plan to not rely
on that long term is enormously important.
And tied into all of this, as a number of members I am sure
will raise, is the bitter irony that we also get your unfunded
requirements list, while at the same time, we just had the $3.8
billion reprogramming, where money, for instance, was taken out
of the F-35 program, to go to the wall, which as Ms. Davis
helpfully pointed out in an earlier hearing, is not in the
National Defense Strategy at all. We are supposed to build the
Pentagon budget and our strategy based on the National Defense
Strategy. It doesn't say anything in there about money for a
southern border wall, and yet we are going to take the money
out of our programs, put it in there, and then come back to us
and say, oh, it is an unfunded requirement. It is like, no, it
was funded. You took the money and spent it someplace else.
That is an enormous problem, and it is causing problems at the
Department of Defense, and we should not simply let that go by.
And then there is the Space Force. And I will tell you, I
have always been fairly ambivalent about that. At the end of
the day, I trusted Mr. Rogers and Mr. Cooper as the two chairs
of the committee that created it, and I also trust the
fundamental idea behind it, and that is that space is central
to everything we do. It is the center of our command and
control structure. It makes almost everything we do within the
military operate. It deserved to have a special segment to make
sure that we are training the people who work in that arena
properly and for that mission. And I get that, I understand
that, and I think it is a reasonable thing to do.
The concern is, is it just another bureaucracy? Do we get a
better, more focused look at how we take care of our space
needs within national defense? Or do we get a bunch more
generals and a lot more staff doing basically the same thing?
And I think, General Raymond, that is your great challenge, is
to make sure that it works in an efficient and effective way
and isn't just another bureaucracy.
And with that, I will yield to the ranking member, Mr.
Thornberry, for his opening statement.
STATEMENT OF HON. WILLIAM M. ``MAC'' THORNBERRY, A
REPRESENTATIVE FROM TEXAS, RANKING MEMBER, COMMITTEE ON ARMED
SERVICES
Mr. Thornberry. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
And let me join in welcoming each of our witnesses today.
And if this should be General Goldfein's last appearance before
the committee, I also want to thank him and Dawn for both of
your service to the country over a long period. It has been
exceptional and not just in your current position. And we are
very grateful for all that both of you have done.
There is no question this is a challenging time for the Air
Force, not just because much of what we talk about when we say
great power competition falls on y'all's shoulders, but also
because there is this internal change going on at the same
time.
Now, we have dealt with such situations before, such as the
end of World War II, and came out pretty well, but it is a
challenging time for each of you. And like we talked about a
bit last week with the Navy, I think what is most helpful is if
we can have a--not necessarily every detail laid out, but a
plan, an approach going forward.
Now, that is particularly true when it comes to space,
because you are a new organization. We are all beginning to
think of space in different ways, as a warfighting domain, and
we need that sort of vision about where we ought to go, but it
is also true with the Air Force. The controversy over the last
week was somebody saying, we don't need any manned fighters
anymore. And technology is changing. Adversaries are changing.
And so this vision of where we move forward, to me, is just as
important as this particular year's budget request. They need,
obviously, to go together. But as I say, there is a lot on
y'all's plates, but I have full confidence in your ability to
deal with it. Thanks for being here.
I yield back.
The Chairman. Thank you.
Secretary Barrett. Or I am assuming you are going first. Go
ahead.
STATEMENT OF HON. BARBARA BARRETT, SECRETARY OF THE AIR FORCE
Secretary Barrett. Yes, Mr. Chairman.
Chairman Smith, Ranking Member Thornberry, members of the
committee, thank you for inviting us to appear before you
today. I am especially privileged to be joined by two exemplary
chiefs, Chief Goldfein, on what may be his last appearance
before this committee as the Chief of Staff of the United
States Air Force, and the exemplary Chief Jay Raymond, who is
the Chief of Space Operations and leading that in its standup.
The international security environment changes
unpredictably. China and Russia challenge American capabilities
with new technologies and systems. Iran and North Korea
threaten regional and global stability, while violent extremism
remains a global menace. The National Defense Strategy calls on
the Department of the Air Force as a critical component of the
joint force to deter, and if deterrence fails, to defeat these
threats.
This fiscal year's--the 2021 budget request--sets the
course for the Department to accomplish these aims.
Specifically, the Department of the Air Force invests in future
forces that allow us to connect the joint force, dominate
space, generate combat power, and conduct logistics under
attack. We will continue to present ready forces to combatant
commanders as we defend the homeland, build strategic
deterrence, and counter violent extremism.
Finally, we will strengthen the foundation of our forces,
our airmen and space professionals, as we develop and care for
our people and their families.
This budget submission shifts force design to create
irreversible momentum toward achieving the mission of the
National Defense Strategy, while growing strong and resilient
leaders and families.
The top policy priority for the Department is the
successful launch of the United States Space Force. The space
domain is integral to the joint team's success, not just in
space, but in all warfighting domains.
The Department of the Air Force supports a lean, agile
Space Force to preserve access to space for America and our
allies, while deterring and, if necessary, defeating malicious
actors. The success of the United States Space Force will be
measured by how well we protect freedom of access to, through,
and from space.
In space and air, our most important investment is in
connecting the joint force. We are developing the technologies
to connect every sensor, every shooter, and every echelon of
command to enable seamless Joint All-Domain Operations. This
battle network is essential to defeating current and future
threats.
We are also directing pivotal resources to recruit and
retain the best people our Nation has to offer. We are an
inclusive and diverse force and are modernizing our promotion
system, while investing in the professional development of
airmen and space professionals.
The Department is expanding ongoing efforts to support and
care for families. We are tackling privatized housing and PFAS
[per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances] challenges. Along with
our sister services, we encourage State reciprocity for
occupational licensing for spouses and quality schools for our
children. And we are investing in professionally designed and
advised programs to reduce suicides and sexual assaults.
To fund future air and space forces that are capable of
defending the Nation against a peer competitor, we must divest
some aging legacy systems. This budget retires limited numbers
of aircraft, consolidating resources to increase readiness in
remaining aircraft and invest in recapitalization and
modernization. This includes investing in GPS [Global
Positioning System] 3 satellites with signals that are three
times more accurate and up to eight times more antijam
resilient than previous generations.
We thank this committee and the entire Congress for fully
funding the recovery efforts to rebuild Tyndall and Offutt Air
Force Bases. We will seek additional support as our
installations and personnel assist with the ongoing COVID-19
[Coronavirus Disease 2019] quarantine.
Ladies and gentlemen, with your continued support,
America's air and space forces stand ready. We look forward to
your questions.
[The joint prepared statement of Secretary Barrett, General
Goldfein, and General Raymond can be found in the Appendix on
page 61.]
The Chairman. Thank you.
General Goldfein.
STATEMENT OF GEN DAVID L. GOLDFEIN, USAF, CHIEF OF STAFF,
UNITED STATES AIR FORCE
General Goldfein. Chairman Smith, Ranking Member
Thornberry, distinguished members of the committee, it is an
honor to present my last budget submission for the first time
with both Secretary Barbara Barrett, the 25th Secretary of the
Air Force, and General Jay Raymond, the first Chief of Space
Operations. These are indeed historic times. So I will defer
all discussion on space matters to Chief Raymond, but I want
you to know, it is my top priority to make him and his new
service successful.
So my bottom line up front. This budget, building on the
last three, offers the most aggressive package of strategic
trades we have made as a Department in over two decades to
achieve complete alignment with the National Defense Strategy
and secure our Nation's military superiority for the next
decade.
Secretary Esper's guidance for this budget build was
crystal clear. Build an Air Force and a Space Force that can
compete, deter, and win shoulder to shoulder with our joint
teammates and our allies and partners against a nuclear peer in
an era of great power competition.
This budget is designed to achieve this objective, and we
are asking for your support to make the tough but necessary
trades we will discuss today.
In numerous war games against our best assessment of the
threat in 2030 and beyond, as Secretary Barrett stated, we
found that investment in four key areas provided the Air Force
we need to prevail.
First, this budget connects the joint force in ways we are
not today connected in order to truly fight as a joint team.
Under the leadership of our Chairman, General Mark Milley, the
Joint Chiefs and combatant commanders are fully engaged in
developing a new doctrine of warfare called Joint All-Domain
Operations.
Under this new warfighting construct, the Air Force is the
designated lead service to connect platforms, sensors, and
weapons from all domains, all services, and our allies and
partners, so we can truly operate at the speed of relevance. We
call it Joint All-Domain Command and Control, or JADC2 for
short, and we are moving out quickly. Every 4 months, we host a
demonstration and link joint capabilities that are not
currently connected to advance Joint All-Domain Operations to
the next level. I look forward to describing what we have
achieved to date and where we are headed during questioning.
Second, we must dominate space. Chief Raymond will cover
investments in this critical domain of operations.
And our third area of focus is generating combat power,
beginning with our nuclear enterprise. This budget moves us
forward to recapitalize our two legs of the triad and their
critical nuclear command and control that ties it all together.
Fourth, this budget invests in a new way of approaching how
we keep our joint team deployed and sustained in contested
combat environments. We must assume our logistics enterprise
will be under attack.
But the foundation of this budget submission is the
greatest treasure in our Nation's arsenal, our airmen, and
those who will join the Space Force. We look forward to working
with this committee to ensure we keep faith with the airmen
that will defend our Nation and support their families
entrusted to our care.
As this committee is aware of, the 2021 top line is
relatively flat from last year, well short of the 3 to 5
percent growth required to properly support the NDS [National
Defense Strategy]. In a flat-budget environment, if a service
is to move forward, it must do two things. It must make better
use of what it has by connecting all platforms, sensors, and
weapons in a battlefield network, JADC2. And it must find
internal savings to pay for new capabilities.
So Chief Raymond and I held our own ``night court'' and
identified $21 billion across the FYDP [Future Years Defense
Program] by retiring the oldest of our legacy weapon systems
that are either not survivable or do not contribute
significantly to the 2030 peer fight.
Not one of these trades is easy. Every weapon system we are
asking to retire has performed well in the current fight, but
many are at the end of their service life and have no future in
a nuclear peer fight. This is today's hard reality.
Not surprisingly, of the services, the air and space forces
have the largest classified portfolio of investment. This makes
the story harder to tell, since most of what we are retiring is
unclassified and visible, while many of our game-changing
investments are classified and therefore invisible.
And we want to thank many of you for taking our classified
briefing and offer it to any of you or your staff between now
and endgame. When you see what we are trading for, our budget
submission will make perfect sense.
If we are to achieve truly meaningful gains for our
Nation's security through implementing the NDS in a flat-budget
environment, we must work together on these hard trades.
Chairman, I am honored to be the 21st Chief of Staff of the
Air Force. If we go to war this year against a nuclear peer, I
am a hundred percent confident we have what we need to win. And
I can say that because of decisions made by our predecessors,
men like John Jumper and Mike Ryan. Such is the lead time for
building an Air and a Space Force.
I believe it is our job to ensure that when Air Chief 24
sits in front of this committee in 2030, side by side with
Space Chief No. 4, they will be able to state with equal
confidence that our Nation's Air and Space Forces have what
they need to win. And with your support, we can achieve this
goal.
Thank you, sir.
The Chairman. General Raymond.
STATEMENT OF GEN JOHN W. RAYMOND, USSF, CHIEF OF SPACE
OPERATIONS, UNITED STATES SPACE FORCE
General Raymond. Chairman Smith, Ranking Member Thornberry,
distinguished members of the committee, it is an honor to
testify before this committee this morning. And this is my
first appearance in front of the entire committee, and I think
it underscores the significance our Nation has placed in
elevating space to a level commensurate with its importance to
national security.
Since the historic establishment of the United States Space
Force on December 20, 2019, we have been moving out with speed
and focus to meet the requirements of the National Defense
Strategy. As the Air Force's first--as the Space Force's first
Chief of Space Operations, I am humbled by the great
responsibility entrusted to me. And on behalf of the space
professionals that I am privileged to lead, I would like to
personally thank you for your leadership in establishing our
new service.
Under the strong leadership of Secretary Barrett--and I
would note that the Secretary made the establishment of the
United States Space Force the number one priority for the
Department of the Air Force--and shoulder to shoulder with my
partner and fellow service chief, Dave Goldfein, we are
establishing a Space Force that is lean, agile, and mission
focused. You have given us an opportunity to build this service
to enhance the lethality of our joint force, while optimizing
our ability to dominate in space.
I want to also, if you wouldn't--if you would allow me to
take a minute to thank Dave and Dawn Goldfein for their
leadership in the United States Air Force. I have had the
privilege of serving under General Goldfein's leadership for
several years, and I have known him longer. I will tell you,
leadership is a team sport, and there is no better team to
follow than Dave and Dawn Goldfein. So, sir, thank you.
For decades the United States has had the luxury of
operating in a benign space environment, operating the world's
best capabilities to fuel our American way of life and our
American way of war. Today, potential adversaries have taken
notice and are catching up fast. Although we remain the best in
the world, our advantage is eroding as adversaries are building
space capabilities for their own benefit and fielding
counterspace systems to negate our access to space and the
advantage that that access provides to our Nation and those of
our allies.
This budget prioritizes space. It funds it to a level of
$15.4 billion, representing approximately $900 million increase
this fiscal year. Specifically, the budget funds for a strong
pivot toward space superiority and the foundational elements of
space situational awareness, command and control, and training
infrastructure that is required. Our National Defense Strategy
demands it, and I appreciate the support you have provided over
the last couple of years, and I ask for your strong support
once again.
You know, it has been 73 years since the United States
established a separate armed service. That was the Air Force. I
have spent 35\1/2\ years in that service, proudly in that
service, but in December, I transferred over to the Space
Force, and now I am about a little over 2 months in. We have
been given an unprecedented opportunity to build a service
unconstrained by past constraint--constructs and thinking. And
we are taking full advantage of this occasion to do just that,
with a forward-looking, innovative approach that seeks to
optimize manning, flatten organizations, and streamline
processes necessary to move at speed.
When fully established, we may not look like the other
services you have become accustomed to, but we will be equally
proficient at providing space forces ready and willing to
protect the U.S., allied interests, in space, while providing
unequaled capability to the joint force. This is critical given
the warfighting domain that we find ourselves in today.
To that end, I am so proud of the professionals that I am
privileged to lead. They are conducting their mission with an
eager boldness that will ensure America remains the best in the
world at space, and we look forward to your questions. Thank
you for the opportunity.
The Chairman. Thank you all very much.
I have, I will say, many, many questions, but I will narrow
it down to one because I have had the opportunity to speak with
you before. This part of the discussion on the budget about, in
the nuclear area, General Goldfein, the NNSA [National Nuclear
Security Administration] budget was roughly $17.5 billion.
There was concern about that, and at the last minute, there was
$2.5 billion put back in and taken away from some other things,
and those some other things are not happy about it.
But for the moment, focusing on that $2.5 billion, can you
explain to us, what it is, how important it is to the overall
nuclear enterprise, and if it is important, why the President's
original budget didn't have it in it?
General Goldfein. Sir, as you know, there is a balance
between NNSA that gives us the actual warheads and then the
Department of Defense.
The Chairman. Understood.
General Goldfein. And it is always a balancing act between
the two. And as I understand, at endgame, when they took a look
at the investment that we required to get the warheads we need,
balanced with the investment we are making in the enterprise
for the bomb bodies delivery mechanisms, that the Department
made a decision at the OSD [Office of the Secretary of Defense]
level to put money in the NNSA account. So that is about as
much detail as I understand on that.
The Chairman. Okay. Well, you are putting together the
nuclear enterprise here. So you got the $2.5 billion, you don't
got the $2.5 billion. How does that affect your ability to get
our nuclear forces where you think they need to be?
General Goldfein. Sir, right now, the impact has been
minimal on the Air Force based on the fact that what you will
see in our budget is fully funded for our nuclear programs. So
we were able to put the money that is required for the B-21,
the Long-Range Standoff, and the Ground-Based Strategic
Deterrent, those are fully funded in our program. So the 2.5
actually didn't have an impact on the Air Force.
The Chairman. Well, no, I understand that. I am speaking to
you as the person who is--and I also understand that NNSA is in
charge of, you know, giving you the material you need to put
into all these things.
General Goldfein. Yes, sir.
The Chairman. But you are kind of overseeing to make sure
that you don't just have a B-21, you actually have the nuclear
missiles in it----
General Goldfein. Right.
The Chairman [continuing]. To make it useful. So you don't
have an opinion on that $2.5 billion fight?
General Goldfein. Sir, I don't. Only because it was
happening at a much higher level. You know, what we brought
forward was a fully funded program for all of the portions that
the Air Force is responsible for.
The Chairman. Understood.
General Goldfein. One of the areas that is very similar to
what you are describing is nuclear command and control, and
making sure that our portion, which is about 75 percent of what
all comes together--and maybe Chief Raymond may pitch in here,
because so much of what we do in nuclear command and control is
actually done from space. But we also needed to make sure that
that portion was fully funded.
The Chairman. Understood. I will--that is all I have. I
will yield to Mr. Thornberry.
Mr. Thornberry. General Goldfein, you were describing what
is required to keep the Air Force moving forward in a flat
budget. I would respectfully add one more thing to your list,
and that is, get your money on time. Because you can do more if
you have got a whole year to plan versus some of the other
alternatives. And that makes a difference too.
Let me pick up on kind of--part of where the chairman was
going. So the Air Force is responsible for two legs of the
triad, plus a large part of nuclear command and control. There
are some people who suggest, well, it is not that big a deal if
we can delay replacement of the land-based leg of the triad,
or, you know, maybe manned bombers are a thing of the past. Can
you just briefly describe your view on where we are with those
programs that are under the Air Force's responsibility and how
much slack there is or is not in the schedule and funding for
them.
General Goldfein. Yes, sir. Unfortunately, we have actually
delayed this recapitalization point where we really don't have
any slop left in the schedule. The ground bases--you know, the
Minuteman missile is 44 years old. We are getting to a point
where there is time components in that missile that you
actually no longer have vendors that can produce those, so--and
we are, quite frankly, we are behind our adversaries in many
ways. Russia has actually completed its triad recapitalization,
and we are actually just getting started in ours.
So we really have not allowed any slop in the system right
now for us to be able to go forward and do anything but
recapitalize all three legs.
And I would just finish on saying that the Nuclear Posture
Review that we all went through reconfirmed the need for all
three legs of the triad. And I think Admiral Richard confirmed
that as well in his testimony early last week.
Mr. Thornberry. Okay. General Raymond, one of the questions
involving Space Force is, who is responsible for space
acquisition? And I know there is a bit of a tussle maybe--or I
understand there may be a bit of a tussle going on in the
Department and so forth. Can you just give us a few comments on
space acquisition, who decides, and how you see that going
forward?
General Raymond. That is a great question. I think one of
the benefits of standing up a Space Force, near-term benefits,
will be to bring some unity of effort across the Department
towards that end.
One of the homework assignments that was in the NDAA was
for us to come back to Congress with a process for how we
wanted to do acquisition. We are going through that right now.
In my opinion, I think there is a way to do this to, one, keep
the speed up, because we have to move fast. Two, unite efforts
across a group of folks that do this, towards a common
architecture so that we are all growing in the same direction,
and reduce duplication.
I am excited for the prospects, and I think you expect the
Space Force to deliver that to you, and we are working that
hard. We have already got the team putting that together. I am
going to see the draft of that this next week, and it will be
coming to meet the timelines that Congress laid out.
Mr. Thornberry. Thank you.
The Chairman. Mr. Larsen.
Mr. Larsen. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
General Goldfein, I am also the chair of the Aviation
Subcommittee, and so we deal a lot with pilots and pilot
shortages, and so I wanted to ask you about how the U.S. Air
Force is thinking about pilot shortages. And as well, maybe the
bow wave, the idea of the recapitalization and the kind of
platforms we might be flying and where that--where the numbers
of seats and the number of rear ends in the seats meets the
number of platforms that actually need them versus the
transition to unmanned.
General Goldfein. Now, thanks, sir, and thanks for your
leadership on this. You know, we said from the beginning, this
is a national-level issue, not an Air Force-level issue. The
Nation actually is not producing enough pilots to service
military, commercial, and business aviation. From the military
standpoint, as the airlines continue to hire in large numbers,
we are about holding our own, I would describe right now, in
terms of our pilot shortage. We are about 2,000 short. We have
been about 2,000 short. That is against a denominator of about
a 21,000-pilot requirement across the Air Force. We are
starting to see positive trends in terms of retention, but it
is too early to declare any kind of victory.
Congress has been very helpful with the authorization you
have given us for bonuses, but I will tell you that most pilots
are not truly motivated by money. It is very important to them,
but they are motivated by quality of service. And everything we
are doing as an Air Force is ensuring that flying in the United
States Air Force is as rich an experience as we can make it.
And we are making that rich at the squadron level. So I am
seeing positive trends, but right now, we are sort of holding
our own.
Mr. Larsen. Okay. So a couple of things that your Air Force
is doing, one is on using AI [artificial intelligence] and
predictive maintenance to save costs and then the digital
design technology application of that to the T-7. But in your
testimony, especially on the T-7, you talked about how it is
saving money. So given that you have had--you found $21 billion
in savings to reinvest, for those two examples, would we find
that in the budget, where the money has been saved and has been
put back into something else, whether it is because of the
application of a new design, a manufacturing process, or
because of the money you saved on predictive maintenance?
General Goldfein. Sir, in a flat budget with less spending
power, you are not going to see that money--as much of that
money in terms of increased investment. What you are going to
see that is filling the holes we have in weapon system
sustainment.
So you talked about two areas, one which is, how do you use
artificial intelligence when it comes to predictive
maintenance. We have three weapons systems now that we are
taking commercial best practices, C-5 as an example, and using
predictive maintenance to make sure that we decrease the amount
of time in depots, be more predictive about when we need to put
them in depot, and we are actually saving a lot of time and a
significant amount of money, we are reflowing that back into
weapon system sustainment to drive our readiness rates up.
On the T-7, here is, to me, the most exciting thing about
the T-7 when I went out and took a look at it. They engineered
this aircraft through digital design, which is different than
digital manufacturing. They actually designed it through
digital means so that they were able to marry a fuselage with
the wing in some number of hours with like four people. That is
unheard of in the business of aircraft manufacture. So not only
are we designing things well, we are building them more
effectively and more efficiently. That is going to result in
savings.
Mr. Larsen. Okay. General Raymond, I had a question for you
too, but why don't I ask you this, and then you can--and with
the time left, I will be quick. But the question for you is
about space professionals. And given your standing up the Space
Force, how many folks you are moving over, but where are your
gaps in people that you need to develop to fill in those gaps?
General Raymond. We have--so, today, there is one person in
the United States Space Force. That is me. And so----
Mr. Larsen. You are doing a great job.
General Raymond. There is plenty----
Mr. Larsen. Or he or she is doing a great job, whoever that
is.
General Raymond. In a couple weeks, we are going to swear
in No. 2, and that is Chief Master Sergeant Roger Toberman.
There is incredible interest in this. This May, we are going to
direct-commission just shy of 65 cadets from the Air Force
Academy directly commissioned into the United States Space
Force. We just advertised 40 positions, civilian positions, for
the staff at the Pentagon. We had over 5,000 applicants for
those 40 positions.
There is an excitement about space in every single sector.
And so where we are focusing on is not the support part. We are
going to rely for about 80 percent of our--of that work all is
going to be relied upon on the Air Force. What we are doing is
building a mission-focused space expertise with some related
engineering, data, software, cyber, that will be necessary to
fight and win this fight going forward.
Mr. Larsen. All right. And I will come back to you later on
a tech question. Thank you.
The Chairman. Thank you.
Mr. Turner.
Mr. Turner. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
I just want to clarify a few comments by the chairman with
respect to the NNSA budget. There really is only--and I agree
with the chairman on the need for clarification for the NNSA
budget so that we have kind of a debate and, hopefully, a
clarity on the efficiency and effectiveness of what we are
spending there. We just had a hearing in the Strategic Forces
Subcommittee yesterday where the Administrator, Lisa Gordon-
Hagerty, testified.
The only original budget of the President's budget is the
President's budget. There are always documents that are
floating around of requests for different levels. NNSA's
original request by the Administrator was for the 19-plus 7--I
think 19.7, that actually has moved forward in the President's
budget. I know the President was always in support of that full
amount. So we would always hope that as the President puts his
budget together, that there is full discussion as to increase
or decreases.
But, General Goldfein, I want to thank you for your
service. I want to thank you for everything that you got us
through, sequestration, the difficulties of the effects upon
readiness, and seeing the advances that our adversaries have
made in both missiles and fighters and cyber and unmanned
aerial systems, and the need to then fashion a force that can
face that in the future.
I do want to go back to the chairman's issue on the NNSA
budget. I know that you are not in charge of that budget. NNSA
is under DOE [Department of Energy], not DOD [Department of
Defense], so you wouldn't have been part of putting that
together. I can understand your reticence there of wanting to
comment on the elements in their budget. However, Admiral
Richard from USSTRATCOM [U.S. Strategic Command], commander,
testified recently before us that failure to undertake the
NNSA's modernization plan would be the effect of unilateral
disarmament.
General Goldfein, you know what the condition is of our
nuclear forces and what we are facing. Do you agree with
Admiral Richard?
General Goldfein. Sir, I do.
Mr. Turner. Okay. Excellent.
Madam Secretary, as we go forward with Space Force, I agree
with the chairman, we have to make certain that what we are
doing is effective and efficient, that we don't just build new
bureaucracies, that we don't duplicate things.
Secretary of Defense Esper was in front of us, and I raised
the issue of NASIC [National Air and Space Intelligence Center]
with him. And General Raymond was before the Strategic Forces
Subcommittee, and I raised NASIC again with General Raymond.
As you know, the National Air and Space Intelligence Center
actively works to bring together intelligence, both from our
space assets and looking at the threats that we face in the air
and the space. Secretary Esper has been to NASIC. I just spoke
before the McAleese Defense Program Conference, and my first
question was about NASIC, and it wasn't from someone from Ohio,
and it wasn't from someone from Dayton. So even though this is
a parochial issue, it is, I believe, an operational issue for
the Air Force.
Secretary Esper said that we do not want to, as we look to
creating assets that are dedicated to the Space Force, break
anything that works, duplicate existing missions, or--and we,
of course, want to avoid unnecessary redundancies. When you
look to the issue of a National Space Intelligence Center, I
would like if you would comment, because there are a number of
people throughout the Air Force enterprise that are as excited
as General Raymond said about joining the Space Force and
making sure that it is successful, but at the same time, don't
want the things that we currently have broken or diminished. If
you could speak about that for those who are serving at NASIC,
I think it would be very beneficial for them. Madam Secretary.
Secretary Barrett. Representative Turner, the NASIC is a
national treasure. What it provides is very important to the
entire Department of the Air Force. And with the support of the
Secretary of Defense and the intelligence community, we would
intend to continue and to count upon, rely upon, and not break
the expertise that is found at NASIC.
Mr. Turner. Thank you, Secretary Barrett.
General Goldfein, we are all concerned about pilots and the
pilot shortage. In looking to the fiscal year 2021 request,
there are a number of people who are concerned obviously that
it looks like you are decreasing the number of new pilots that
would be in the process through funding. Could you explain that
to us and give us some insights there?
General Goldfein. Sir, actually, we have gone from about a
little over 1,100 pilots that we produced in 2016 to about
1,300 in 2017. We are on track to produce 1,480, that is our
target. And we think if we can get 1,480 a year, we are on
track to doing that in 2024 and no later than, then we will be
able to keep a steady state of what we need to be able to fly.
Part of what is going on with the reduced numbers is a
combination of grounding. This last year we had some issues, as
you remember, with the T-6 and the oxygen system, and so we
lost a number of sorties that we are not going to be able to
make up. So the numbers, we didn't hit our goal last year.
So now what we are doing is trying to look at a combination
of Pilot Training Next, which is using new technology to train
in a different way but to the same or higher standard, to be
able to shorten the course length and increase more pilots.
When I went through----
The Chairman. And I am sorry, if you could wrap up that
point, the gentleman is over time. Want to get to the other
members, but I don't want to interrupt you if you could just
wrap up.
General Goldfein. If there is time later, I can talk about
Pilot Training Next. We are using new technology to train
differently.
Mr. Turner. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
The Chairman. Thank you.
Mr. Garamendi.
Mr. Garamendi. General Goldfein, thank you for all the
years. It has been a pleasure working with you, and I am sure
all of us will miss your competent work.
Several things are on my mind. Just keep in mind that there
is an $8 billion reserve account in the NNSA that apparently is
to be used some day somehow. So what is another $2 billion for?
Good question. We should ask that question. Which brings me to
an accounting issue. So you are moving money back and forth
within the Air Force accounts, weapons sustainment, money
moving here from flight time, and around OCO money moving--I am
not going to get into it, but I am asking my staff to get into
the details of your accounting system so that we can understand
where the money is and for what its purpose is. So not here, it
is far too much detail.
General Raymond, with regard to the Space Force, good.
Eventually, you will have a--the entire force in hand. I would
ask you to keep in mind the role that the National Guard
currently plays in space, not only in California at Beale Air
Force Base, which is significant, how you move that in is going
to be extremely important to maintain the capabilities that you
presently have. I would urge you not to break it up. Bring it
in in whole, and we can go into that in detail, as I did
yesterday at the hearing.
The F-35. Two things about the F-35. One, the ALIS
[Autonomic Logistics Information System] system, I guess we can
solve that problem by giving it a new name. Probably not.
Although that seems to be what would be happening here. Heads
up, we are not going to back off on this. The spurs are on, and
we are going to ride hard until we get this resolved. It is a
readiness issue. It is also an issue for my colleague over
here, Mr. Norcross.
Quick comment on it, Secretary Barrett, Goldfein, either
the two of you or both, can I count on you getting this
resolved?
Secretary Barrett. The F-35 is of urgent importance to us.
We are counting on----
Mr. Garamendi. How will you get it resolved?
Secretary Barrett. And I will ask the hief to address that.
General Goldfein. So I sat down with the CEO [chief
executive officer]--all the CEOs and told them point blank, I
am going to get a question in Congress, and the question is,
why are you buying--why should we buy you more F-35s when you
can't sustain the ones you have and they are too expensive to
fly. And I said, I have got to have a better answer to that
question. They got on it.
I went down to Lockheed, I spent an entire day with them.
ALIS to ODIN [Operational Data Integrated Network] is not just
a name change. We are involved in the requirements for that
system. Our Kessel Run software designers and developers are
deeply involved in this, and we are having a far more mature
discussion about data that we need to have. But, sir, we need
this committee to keep its boot on the throat of this program,
along with us, to make sure that we drive these costs down.
Because right now, it is not affordable.
Here is the good news. I have seen more movement on this in
the program in the last 6 months than I have seen in the last 2
years.
Mr. Garamendi. Well, I think Lockheed Martin is here in the
audience, and they know that they are in deep trouble, and so
are you. This has to be resolved. It cannot continue on, and,
yes, ALIS is only one piece of the problem. There are the
depots, and this cuts across all the departments, and it is a
problem for each and every department. We will start, since you
are here--heads up, we will get into it in detail offline, but
know that this is a major, major concern.
You are moving into this joint-domain issue in a very big
way. You have moved a lot of assets out of the--what I would
call readiness, that is here and now, at least for the next
decade, moving those assets over to the 2030 period of time,
when most of this will come online. There are significant
concerns: KC-10s, KC-35s disappearing. Really? TRANSCOM [U.S.
Transportation Command] says, well, maybe not a good idea.
Could you please comment on this issue? And I understand you
are rethinking this part of the budget.
General Goldfein. Sir, this is the common tension that you
will always see between a combatant commander that has a near-
term requirement and a service chief that is building a force
to win in 2030. And so we could have the same discussion about
tankers, fighters, bombers, command and control, ISR
[intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance].
So in the tanker business, two options, two that I want to
tell you. First of all, if we go to war into a high-end fight,
in terms of mitigation, we have already told the combatant
command and the Secretary of Defense that we would put every
KC-46 into a high-end fight.
Mr. Garamendi. Even though it doesn't work?
General Goldfein. We would not use it for day-to-day
operations, but we would use it for high-end combat operations.
What we are asking for is a 3 percent retirement, representing
3 percent of the KC-135 fleet. And so we are working through
that with the Secretary of Defense now, but it is a reasonable
trade.
The Chairman. Thank you.
Mr. Garamendi. I understand you have a 25 percent failure
rate on the----
The Chairman. Actually, if I could ask this question. The
comment under his breath there that I think you missed was the
notion that the KC-46 fundamentally doesn't work. I think that
is actually an important question to address before we move on.
Does it have problems or does it fundamentally not work?
General Goldfein. Sir, we are having significant issues
with the remote visual system. It is a hardware problem that
requires a hardware fix. I sent a letter to the CEO, Mr.
Calhoun. He came to see me 3 days later. We sat down, he
committed to me that this is his number one priority for
getting this back on track. I have seen a different behavior
from that company since he has taken over. We are on final. So
I want to be careful about negotiations, but we should have a
good fix.
The Chairman. Of the many issues in your portfolio, getting
a clear picture as to how we get the KC-46 to actually function
like it is supposed to is a pretty big one. So we will
definitely--I know Mr. Norcross will definitely be following up
with you on that as well.
Mr. Lamborn.
Mr. Lamborn. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
I want to thank all three of you for your contribution to
our national defense, and, General Goldfein, you will be
missed.
My first question is for Secretary Barrett and General
Raymond. It has been a pleasure working with both of you
throughout the standup of Space Command and the creation of
Space Force. As you know already, I believe that Colorado
Springs is the best option for that permanent location--we have
had this conversation a time or two, actually more than that--
based on many factors, ranging from location, civilian and
military workforce, existing infrastructure and capabilities,
and quality of life for service members and their families. But
I am not going to go into that today.
When it comes, though, to the Guard and Reserve personnel,
one of the four space wings which are in Colorado is an Air
Reserve Component of the Air Force. And there are also 630
National Guardsmen conducting space missions in our State. The
synergy that we see between Active Duty and Reserve Component
in space operations multiplies the capacity of the force, saves
money, and retains talent.
Now, I am aware that there is a proposal to continue to
study the role of the Reserve Component as it relates to the
Space Force, but I believe this delay would create a gap in
continuity for the space operators currently in the National
Guard and jeopardizes the readiness of these unit-trained and
equipped formations.
So my question on this, is there anything holding back the
establishment of a Space National Guard in this coming year?
Secretary Barrett. We were very much--we cannot go to war,
we cannot do our jobs without the Guard and Reserve. They are
very much valued partners in the process. The Space Guard and
Reserve, we are going to spend a little time looking at to
incorporate that workforce in a way that we might be building a
new design, a new paradigm for how that is done. The chief has
given a great deal of thought to it, and I would invite his
comments.
General Raymond. Congressman, I agree with everything you
said. We are reliant on the Guard and Reserve today; the 310th
Space Wing at Schriever, the wing you were talking about, there
is about 1,400 guardsmen between the Army and the Air Force
that provide space capabilities as well. We rely on them today,
and we are going to need that in the future.
We have been directed by law to do a review of this, and so
we are going to follow the law. The National Defense
Authorization Act of 2020 tells us to do this review. We are
going to do this review. We have an opportunity to look at how
would we do this, and are there more efficient ways to do it
for a service that is going to be about 16,000 people that is
custom built for this domain. So we are going to do that. We
will meet the requirements of the law, but I will assure you
that there is going to be no lapse in capability that is
provided today. The Guard and Reserve can fully support what we
are doing today, as they are today, and we are going to move
out diligently with speed to answer Congress with the direction
that we were given in law.
Mr. Lamborn. Okay. Thank you both for that answer.
And, General Raymond, as best as you can in an open
setting, can you share with us some of the characteristics a
permanent national security space command and control center
needs to have to successfully fight and win wars that extend
into space?
General Raymond. We have two really successful C2 [command
and control] centers today. One is in Schriever Air Force Base,
the National Space Defense Center. One is at Colorado Springs.
You have to have the ability to ingest data. You have to have
the right expertise. You have to have relationships and
connections with our allied partners. You have to be able to
communicate broadly with all those that you have to communicate
with, including those that are forward in theater. Those are
some top-level items that I would put at the top of the list.
Mr. Lamborn. Okay, thank you.
And then my last question, General Raymond, I know you had
a space warfighting doctrine conference at Peterson Air Force
Base in January to coordinate and move forward with writing the
document that will dictate how our joint force will fight wars
that extend into space. And I believe it is accurate to say
that your work, that product, will be used to determine the
finalized force organization and equipment requirements for our
space warfighters.
So where are we at? What is the status report on writing
the Department of Defense's space warfighting doctrine, and
when do you think this will be finished, and how is it coming
along?
General Raymond. Thank you for the question. We have had
space doctrine before. It is doctrine that was built largely
for a benign domain. That is not good enough today. And if--on
20 December, when the U.S. Space Force was stood up, one of the
fundamental things, in my opinion, that an independent service
has to do, it has got to develop its own people and it has to
develop its own doctrine. And so we pulled the team together.
We put a first draft of a--what we call a capstone document.
That will continue to get further reviewed here over the next
couple of months, and then we look forward to publishing that.
And then there will be several series, levels of doctrine,
including joint doctrine in my U.S. Space Command hat, that we
will also follow.
Mr. Lamborn. Okay, thank you so much. I appreciate your
service.
Mr. Chairman, I yield back.
Mr. Larsen [presiding]. Thank you, Representative Lamborn.
The chair now recognizes Representative Norcross for 5
minutes.
Mr. Norcross. Thank you.
First of all, General Goldfein, thank you so much for your
service over the years, and we particularly appreciate your
frankness when you address so many of our tough questions. But
I want to follow up on the question of the KC-46s.
Mr. Larsen. Representative Norcross, can you pull the
microphone really close to your mouth? Thanks a lot.
Mr. Norcross. The KC-46s. We are retiring some of the 135s
at a little bit more of an accelerated pace than we expected,
along with KC-10s. But as said, and you mentioned it earlier,
in a high-end fight, we could use the 46s. Describe to us what
a high-end fight looks like.
General Goldfein. Sir, if we would go to a high-end
contingency fight, either a peer fight or one where the
Secretary of Defense asked me whether in high-end combat
operations, whether I would be comfortable using the KC-46, I
would take that risk. We have already done the operational
analysis, and we would do that. We will not take that risk
during day-to-day operations, and it has to do, quite frankly,
with the remote visual system that very quickly the last 10
feet, when the boom operator is trying to plug the receiver,
the system was not designed well in terms of that final focus.
So we are having more out of, you know, contacts around the
airplane.
I would take that risk in combat. I would not take that
risk in day-to-day operations.
Mr. Norcross. That describes it. The stiffness of the boom
is only with the A-10, which may or may not be part of that.
Just want to switch over to the modernization, talking
about the ISR. There is not a combatant commander that we have
a discussion with, there is virtually nobody we deal with, day
to day, who doesn't need more. Yet it appears that we are going
to cut this high and dry, and particularly notable is the
Global Hawk, Block 20 and 30. Would you walk us through that
decisionmaking? Because it appears we are going to have a real
lull here.
General Goldfein. Yes, sir. There is no better example I
can give you of how when we connect sensors and shooters and
weapons together in a networked approach, we actually bring up
capability and capacity because we are taking use--making use
of those that are not connected today. So what I can't describe
for you in an open hearing, and I would love to do in a closed
session, is where we are going on the classified side in terms
of bringing survivable capability together that offsets some of
what we are trying to take down in the--in those that are not
survivable.
But when you tie them together, and you get the sensors
actually comparing and fusing information, you actually
increased your capacity of ISR.
Mr. Norcross. We understand. We were just out at Palmdale
to see some of what we are doing. But for that 4-year period,
there is what they are calling a bathtub effect as we are going
down to zero, in producing those new ones. What you just
described to us is going to take the place of those new planes
that we would have instead of those?
General Goldfein. Not one for one, but there is absolutely
a replacement there. But there is also a factor that we have to
think about which is, you know, everything we produce in all
the services, is a standalone operating computer and sensor.
And when we can tie those computers--think about, you know,
anything that rolls, submerges, floats, flies, or orbits is a
sensor. When we can actually fuse and make use of that
information and not do it independently, you actually get a
much better picture with greater fidelity earlier in the fight
than if you just operate on a standalone basis. And that is
why, as we move from platforms to networks, we actually
increase our capability.
Mr. Norcross. So we would expect to hear from our combatant
commanders that their view is going to change in asking for
this, so that will be a cultural change we will have to deal
with.
For my remaining time, I yield to Mr. Crow.
Mr. Crow. Thank you, Mr. Norcross.
Thank you to all of you for your testimony today.
Secretary Barrett and General Raymond, I have appreciated
your discussions on Space Force. As you know, I represent
Buckley Air Force Base in Aurora, which is about to become
Buckley Space Base next month. Could you provide a quick update
for us on the timing of the basing discussion for U.S. Space
Command and the criteria being used? And I affiliate with Mr.
Lamborn's comments on the importance of Colorado. Of course, I
think Buckley is just slightly better than Colorado Springs on
the basing.
Secretary Barrett. Well, we are all very excited about the
future there. With the standup of the Space Force, much of what
had been operating in Colorado is moving to Washington--or
there will be some that will move to Washington. As we redesign
that system, we are going to reopen the process and put forward
criteria in detail and invite all who think they have a good
shot at it to come and represent their communities for that
possible basing.
Mr. Crow. And when will that reopening occur?
Secretary Barrett. That will be--this spring it will be
announced.
Mr. Crow. Thank you.
Secretary Barrett. So the chief may have further to add.
The Chairman [presiding]. Thank you. Actually, we are out
of time at the moment.
So, Mr. Wilson.
Mr. Wilson. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
I thank each of you for being here today, and I especially
appreciate your service. I am the son of--he was a--he is a
late veteran of the 14th Air Force. He cherished his service
with the people of India and China, and that was always
meaningful to me. And then growing up in the ``Holy City'' of
Charleston, South Carolina, we appreciate the Charleston Air
Force Base and the capabilities, the C-17s, everything there.
Additionally, I am the grateful uncle of a member of the
Air Force, a Citadel graduate, so obviously a very bright
fellow. So thank you for being here.
And, Secretary Barrett, F-35 aircraft provide peace through
strength. There are 11 companies in South Carolina who provide
the equipment for the F-35. We are grateful that the Marine
Corps Air Station Beaufort is home to F-35 pilot training and
will eventually have up to 90 F-35B aircraft, and the people of
Beaufort County love the sound of freedom. We would gladly
welcome also F-35s at McEntire Joint Air Base and Shaw Air
Force Base.
The Air Force 2021 unfunded priority list requests an
additional 12 F-35s. And, Madam Secretary, fifth-generation
striker--strike aircraft capability is a top priority of the
Air Force. What can be done to promote 60 F-35As in your
budget?
Secretary Barrett. Mr. Wilson, we would be delighted to
have those additional aircraft, of course, but we have to live
within the budget proposal put forward, and we, of course, will
comply beyond that. And I would invite the chief to add to
that.
General Goldfein. Sir, we ended the last discussion of the
F-35 on a bit of a negative tone talking about sustainment. I
think it is important for me also to tell you on the record
what I think of it operationally. It is performing brilliantly.
My fellow air chief, the Israeli air chief, called me and said,
hey, Dave, he goes, you know, I am not integrating the F-35
into the Israeli Air Force. I am integrating the Israeli Air
Force into the F-35. I can't give you a better statement of
what fifth gen is all about. This one is a game changer. It is
brilliant in its performance operationally. We have just got to
work on the sustainment piece.
Mr. Wilson. And, General, thank you so much for pointing
that out. And, indeed, to work with our ally Israel and provide
peace through strength, you are doing that, so thank you.
And, General Goldfein, South Carolina is pleased to have
the 20th Fighter Wing at Shaw Air Force Base and the 169th
Fighter Wing at McEntire Joint Air Base. We know that the Air
Force has had success in growing its size of the maintenance
community, although not at the desired 80 percent mark. I am
thankful the F-16 mission-capable rates are improving.
What is the plan and timeline to improve the mission
readiness for F-16s to meet or surpass the 80 percent goal?
General Goldfein. Well, with the support of this committee,
sir, and the money that we have had since 2018--we were in a
downward spiral--we have been able to get upwards of 13 percent
overall readiness rates and 34 percent improvement in our
pacing units. The pacing units are those units we have
identified that will go first into a China or Russia fight, and
so we have been able to improve now just in that short period
of time.
The F-16 is on that track, but I will tell you that we have
got some significant modifications that we are doing that are
going to require us to put the F-16s through depot. And that is
going to lower our overall mission-capable rate, but we
mitigate that as we get it back out of depot at a higher level
of capability.
Mr. Wilson. Thank you very much, General.
And, General Raymond, again, you are a person of history
now to be the first person to be the leader of space
operations. Congratulations.
One of the major focuses of Space Force is ensuring that
space systems can be developed and acquired at the speed of
innovation. What a challenge. What are your perspectives on how
to fix the system space unique acquisition challenges?
General Raymond. Thanks for that question. I think it is
one of the fundamental tenets of the National Defense
Authorization Act, the reason for the Space Force. I think we
have to go at speed. Our adversaries are going fast, and we
need to go faster. I think it begins with requirements. You
have to streamline requirements. I think it begins with having
an architecture that everybody agrees to, and that is why when
the law said that the Space Force will be responsible for the
architectures of--the national security space architectures, I
think that is really important, to get everybody rowing in the
same direction.
I think software, to go back to Mr. Larsen's question, we
are already designing how we want to do software in this force
to be able to go fast, to get--be more software-based rather
than hardware-based.
Mr. Wilson. And America is grateful for each of your
service. Thank you so much for what you do protecting American
families.
I yield back.
The Chairman. Thank you.
Mr. Gallego.
Mr. Gallego. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
Secretary Barrett, what are your thoughts about the right
mix of fifth-generation and fourth-generation aircraft?
Secretary Barrett. Well, we are going to do well to have
the observability that fifth generation allows, but there is a
good role also for the fourth generation. And we are going to
continue to see that as a balance and as a correct mix. I would
invite the Chief of Air Force to add to that.
General Goldfein. Sir, right now, we are about 20/40. We
think by about 2030, we will be right in the 50/50. About the
2040 timeframe, we are projected to be about 60/40. That is
about the right target, I think, going forward.
Mr. Gallego. So you would say a good mix, then?
General Goldfein. A good mix. And I will tell you, at some
point in the future, we are going to be talking about the same
thing in a fifth-/sixth-gen mix.
Mr. Gallego. And, sir, I agree with that. So it is kind of
concerning what you guys just said. If we need proven capable
aircraft, why is the Air Force announcing they intend to retire
44 A-10 Warthogs without giving us more details?
General Goldfein. The A-10 story, I will tell you that, as
I said yesterday, and the witness asked, you know, Senator
McSally and many others have done a great job really saving the
A-10. So the A-10 is going to fly well to the 2030s. We are
putting almost a billion dollars into the A-10, updating its
wings, updating its avionics, updating its radios. There is no
better platform for close air support, and we are going to keep
that into the 2030s.
Mr. Gallego. I get what you are saying, General, so that is
why I am confused. So why is it--why are we planning to retire
them if we are putting this much investment in them?
General Goldfein. Because we are fleet managing, sir,
across the fleet. KC-135s, KC-10s, Global Hawks, A-10s, right.
We are talking the oldest airframes that are unaffordable to
keep flying and then putting that money and that manpower back
in the existing system and buying new technology.
Mr. Gallego. But I also just wanted to point out that we
have been very clear, as in Congress, specifically the House
Armed Services Committee, through the 2017 NDAA, that there is
not to be any reduction of the A-10 until there is a study
between the F-35 and the A-10. And that study is coming out
when?
General Goldfein. Sir, that study is complete. I have
talked to the director of OT&E [Operational Test and
Evaluation]. It is actually--he is prepared to offer that as an
interim report, but he is right now planning on delivering that
in September with the full IOT&E [Initial Operational Test and
Evaluation] report on the F-35.
Mr. Gallego. But the 2017 NDAA says that you do not do any
movement, any decision on the A-10 until you come and deliver
that report. Right now, you have made a decision without
delivering us the report, so in my opinion you are in violation
of the 2017 NDAA. Is that not--what else should I take from
that?
General Goldfein. Well, sir, we had this discussion
yesterday as well with the SASC [Senate Armed Services
Committee]. You know, when we look through it and look at the
language, given that we were going to give you the report on
the first month of the fiscal year, and the timing that was
laid out in the law, there is actual time within--between the
end of the FYDP to conclude this. But I will tell you, we
understand the law, and we will follow it.
Mr. Gallego. Okay. Now, I understand that there has been a
change in the plan from the first initiation--or the first
release of the plan and yesterday when you were talking on the
Senate side that you guys have a new plan for the A-10. So what
is the details of this new plan?
General Goldfein. Sir, the only plan we have right now is
the one that is in the President's budget. I would be happy to
get with you offline about this dialogue that we are having.
Mr. Gallego. Good.
I do want to say for the record, Mr. Chairman, that this is
very, very discouraging, though, and also just to my fellow
witnesses in front, that we are moving in this direction after
we have been very clear as Congress, as the Armed Services
Committee. Certainly in a bipartisan manner, I have been in
support of the A-10 Warthog when I was--when the Obama
administration tried to get rid of it. I have been here, you
know, fighting when the Trump administration wants to get rid
of it, not just because it is based in Arizona, because I do
think it is a capable fighting platform, and it basically saved
my ass in Operation Matador in Al Qaim, you know. And as much
as I love the F-35, I don't want to be using a billion-dollar
platform to support infantrymen. That is not smart, and it is
just not a smart use of our money.
And going into the future, the Air Force may only want to
fight in the air or in the space domain, but no matter what,
there will always be infantrymen, and they will also need close
air combat support. But whatever platforms are out there right
now, the best one, the cheapest one, the strongest one,
certainly if something ever happens, especially in Russia--I am
sorry, with Russia going into--surging into the Eastern
European theater is still the A-10.
So I will make sure--I look forward to that report, but I
think we need to be very, very clear that this Congress, the
Senate, has said that until we see something that is a better
replacement for the A-10, that the A-10 is not going anywhere.
Thank you. I yield back my time.
General Goldfein. Sir, can I have 1 minute?
Mr. Gallego. Yes.
The Chairman. Quickly, sir.
General Goldfein. Sir, if I could just offer that, number
one, we are going to put whatever we need to support soldiers,
sailors, airmen, Marines on the ground, whatever it takes,
regardless of the cost. You are looking at a guy who was shot
down in combat, got up the next night, went in and flew, and I
flew close air support. Let there be no mistake on the
commitment of the United States Air Force. We fly to the sound
of the guns, and we support everybody on the ground, or we die
trying.
Mr. Gallego. Thank you.
The Chairman. Mr. Rogers.
Mr. Rogers. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
I am very pleased to see the Air Force here in its new
structure. It is great for our Nation. I know this is your
first NDAA, Secretary Barrett. You know I am a big fan of
yours, and General Raymond knows how I feel.
But I want, for the record, to thank General Goldfein for
his many years of service. He is an incredibly respected
general officer, and he has done an admirable job. And on
behalf of a thankful Nation, I want to say for the record, I
appreciate you.
General Goldfein, the Space Force has begun a significant
investment in OPIR [Overhead Persistent Infrared] architecture
to replace SBIRS [Space-Based Infrared System]. Can you tell me
what that is going to look like and if we are going to be able
to meet the 2025 timetable?
General Raymond. I think you meant that for me.
Mr. Rogers. Did I not say General Raymond?
General Raymond. Yeah. Okay.
Mr. Rogers. I am sorry. I might not have.
General Raymond. This is a critical capability for our
Nation. It provides the unblinking eye for detecting against
missiles that are coming into our country. Interestingly, it is
also the replacement for the system that provided warning to
our troops in Iraq when Iran launched a missile.
Mr. Rogers. What I am after is how is it going to look
different than SBIRS?
General Raymond. Yeah. So what this program does, it is a
more--and I can go into much more details in a closed hearing,
but it is a more defendable capability than SBIRS. And when we
made that trade a couple years ago to shift from SBIRS 7, 8, to
next-generation OPIR, it was because of that defendability. It
includes a geo segment, a polar segment. It includes the ground
architecture as well. And with the support of this committee,
the 804 authorities that we had, we are, I think, 18 months--we
got an 18-month head start on prototyping, and we just
completed some hardware integration testing that was 4 years
ahead of its predecessor SBIRS.
Mr. Rogers. So you are confident we are going to make 2025?
General Raymond. I am confident we are going to make 2025,
and we are fully funded with this funding to do that.
Mr. Rogers. Okay. You recently signed out a fighting SATCOM
[satellite communications] strategy.
General Raymond. That is right.
Mr. Rogers. Tell me what that is.
General Raymond. Yes, sir, I will be happy to. It is really
important. Our adversaries are developing capabilities or have
capabilities that can jam satellite communications. We have to
be able to fight in a contested domain. When you travel
overseas and you turn your iPhone on, it links up to whatever
network that you go to.
Last year's NDAA provided me the authority to do--procure
commercial SATCOM, and we think there is a great opportunity
here working with the commercial industry to bring commercial
SATCOM and military SATCOM closer together and provide a
resilient hybrid network that says if a warfighter is on this
satellite and it gets jammed or loses contact for whatever
reason, it can automatically switch over to another satellite,
whether it is commercial or military, and that is the gist of
that strategy.
Mr. Rogers. Great.
General Goldfein, the Air Force recently realigned $4.1
billion across the FYDP that, according to the Air Force budget
documents, are being used to invest in four broad categories:
connect the joint force, dominate space, generate combat power,
and conduct logistics under attack. Would you please elaborate
on the specific types of investments being made with this
budget request and address the priority years--priority areas?
General Goldfein. Yes, sir. And Chief Raymond can talk to
the space piece. Let me just focus on the connecting the joint
force. We are on path to do--every 4 months, we connect
portions of the joint team that is not currently connected
through the digital engineering and common data architecture,
and then we solve problems.
So we are all going, all the Joint Chiefs, we are all
headed to Nellis Air Force Base in April. And we have three
supported commanders that we are going to produce all-domain
options for them by connecting capabilities. This is going to
be a live-fly exercise. We are going to have ships off the
Gulf. We are going to have Marines at Yuma. We are going to
have Army at White Sands Missile Range. We are going to be
flying in Nellis, and we are going to do this Joint All-Domain
Command and Control demonstration to pull this all together in
a homeland defense scenario. We learn every time we do it.
A year ago, we were talking about this, and it was mostly
aspirational lightning bolts on PowerPoint charts. There was
not a lot behind it. Today, we are not talking about cloud
architecture. We have one. We contracted it. It is up and
operating, and all the services are connected to it. We are not
talking about common data architecture. We actually have it up
and running.
So what you are seeing is about $2.5 billion that we put
forward to connect this joint team. And I will end with, of all
the things that we are doing, this has the most promise of
producing a joint team that can win in 2030.
Mr. Rogers. Thank you.
General Raymond. If I could pile on----
Mr. Rogers. Certainly.
General Raymond [continuing]. To that for a few seconds as
well. This is absolutely critical for space. We have to operate
at great distances at speed, and the work that we have been
doing in what we used to call Enterprise Space Battle
Management C2 has lashed into that Joint All-Domain C2 and is
providing a lot of the data architecture that it is using.
Mr. Rogers. Great. I would just close by pointing out we
are going to have a new seal on the wall.
General Raymond. Yes, sir. I will deliver it, and we will
hang it together.
Mr. Rogers. Thank you.
I yield back, Mr. Chairman.
The Chairman. Everybody seems to be concerned about that,
and there is a balance issue, because we have three on one
side, three on the other. So we are going to have to figure out
the logistics of that.
Mr. Courtney.
Mr. Courtney. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
And thank you to the witnesses. Again, it was a good
opportunity to talk the other day, appreciate you coming by.
I know the issue of the remote visual system has been
brought up by the other members. I am not going to belabor the
point. I just want to again emphasize that as we get closer to
markup in the Seapower and Projection Forces Subcommittee, you
know, we have to make a decision about building more planes
that we know are going to have to be fairly significantly
retrofitted.
So to the extent that, you know, this comes to a conclusion
in terms of what that retrofit looks like, frankly, it would, I
think, just make for commonsense budgeting so that we know, you
know, what we are paying for. And again, we had a good
discussion on that, and I hope, again, just to, you know, see
that dovetail as we get closer to the timeline for decisions
here.
The other question I just want to touch on is the Air
National Guard C-130s. The Connecticut Air Guard actually just
returned from Afghanistan. They did eye-watering work in terms
of just the tonnage and personnel that they transported in that
part of the world. They are doing a good job. But, you know,
another issue that we have had to kind of wrestle with on the
subcommittee over the last 3 or 4 years is modernization of the
C-130s, the propeller issue in particular. The Air Force had to
ground, obviously, some C-130s back in 2019. The Navy had a
catastrophe because of defective propellers.
A lot of us think that, you know, the NP2000 is a solution
that just will, you know, eliminate, really, the safety issue
that we know, you know, certainly had that impact with the Navy
situation. Maybe just talk about that a little bit in terms of,
you know, another decision that the subcommittee is going to
have to wrestle with very soon.
General Goldfein. Well, thanks, sir. And I echo your
comments on the Guard. We couldn't fight--we couldn't fight
without the Guard.
So particularly on the propeller, so we have replaced all
the pre-1971 C-130H propellers with the NP2000, which I have
been down to the depot, it is a great propeller. We have
modified our depot and our maintenance procedures on the post-
1971s to mitigate safety concerns, so we are not looking
through the safety lens. I will tell you, though, we are in
ongoing discussions on how, if there is more money, we could
actually take that new propeller and make it more broad across
the fleet. So again, thanks to your constituents who produced a
great product.
Mr. Courtney. Well, again, we will look forward to
continuing that conversation.
And with that, I yield back.
The Chairman. Mr. Gallagher.
Mr. Gallagher. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Thank you all for
being here.
General Goldfein, thank you for your service and your
engagement with this committee. It has been very helpful,
particularly for us younger members.
I was wondering, in 2018, we authorized, via the NDAA then,
a series of studies on the Air Force's future aircraft
inventory. One of those was conducted by CSBA [Center for
Strategic and Budgetary Assessment], and we now have that
report, a new CSBA report coming out of that requirement that
found that, quote, the current CAF [combat air forces]
predominantly consists of aging, non-stealth aircraft that are
not suitable for operations in contested and highly contested
threat environments. This force structure is largely the result
of decisions to cancel or prematurely truncate CAF
modernization initiatives to develop and procure new weapon
systems for high-end operations against modern IADS [integrated
air defense system] such as the F-22 and B-2 programs. In
addition to program cost, the primary justification for these
decisions was based on a belief that low-observable aircraft
would not be needed in significant numbers to support
contingency operations against regional aggressors like Iraq or
North Korea. Although reasonable in the immediate aftermath of
the Cold War, this assumption is no longer valid.
I know that is a mouthful, but do you agree with that CSBA
assessment?
General Goldfein. Sir, I would say that it is my
recollection, having been--and many in this room perhaps were
there when the decision was made to cancel and stop the F-22.
At that time, the decision was made to reflow that money into
accelerating the F-35. If we had just completed the program of
record when that decision was made, we would have 1,000 F-35As
on the ramp today. We didn't get there. So therefore, what we
have is a fleet that has continued to age out as we have flown
it downrange, but I would not align with any assessment that
says that low observability is not critical for the future.
Mr. Gallagher. Well, what lessons would you then draw or
suggest to future planners who may be tempted to cut
modernization?
General Goldfein. For sure, for the Air Force, I mean, we
are privy, probably, you know, one of your more technical of
services. So again, when you look into--and we can bring--I
would love to sit down with each of you in the classified
setting. When we bring you what we are investing in in terms of
modernization and the game-changing technology that we are
bringing forward, you will see and understand why we are making
the trades we are with some of the older legacy platforms. An
Air Force that doesn't modernize doesn't win.
Mr. Gallagher. What do you say to those--I mean, you look
at the geography of INDOPACOM [U.S. Indo-Pacific Command],
which I think we would all agree is now the priority theater,
if you follow the logic of the National Defense Strategy. The
geography is challenging. The ranges are long, or there are
questions about the A2/AD [anti-access/area denial]
environment. There are questions about access to allied
airfields as well.
What do you say to those who would suggest we should, given
that geography, be emphasizing our B-21 program, for example,
and seek to grow it and perhaps also correspondingly pull back
on tactical aircraft procurement?
General Goldfein. Sir, I jokingly tell my slide builders
that if I see one more slide with a big red dome over China, I
am going to execute choke con on the slide builder. China can't
put a block of wood red dome over itself. It can put a block of
Swiss cheese. And my job is to know where the hole is in and
get in and hold targets at risk at the time and place of the
Commander in Chief's choosing, and one of the weapons system
that does that is the B-21.
Mr. Gallagher. Point being that, you know, A2/AD poses
challenges, but it is not an impenetrable wall.
General Goldfein. Never.
Mr. Gallagher. The Air Force has committed to standoff
hypersonic weapons, but what are our plans for stand-in
hypersonic weapons associated with the F-35A?
General Goldfein. So you may know that we down-selected
from two hypersonic programs to one.
Mr. Gallagher. This was ARRW [Air-launched Rapid Response
Weapon] and----
General Goldfein. HCSW [Hypersonic Conventional Strike
Weapon].
Mr. Gallagher. HCSW, yeah.
General Goldfein. And we did that based on the fact of a
combination of funding. We had gotten a lot of benefit out of
the competition while it went on. The more flexible of the two
was the ARRW program, so now we are pushing for the full
funding. But I will tell you that the service secretaries
signed an agreement to ensure that we take the best of each
service when it comes to hypersonic technology, under the
leadership, quite frankly, of Dr. Mike Griffin, who is really
steeped in this technologically, to make sure that the Army,
the Navy, the Air Force, the Marine Corps, that we are all
bringing our best technology in our labs forward and making
this complementary as we go forward.
Mr. Gallagher. Appreciate that. I am running out of time
so, General Raymond, all of my detailed questions about the
future of Space Force uniforms will have to wait until the next
hearing.
General Raymond. I will be happy to come by and see you
too.
Mr. Gallagher. Appreciate that very much.
I yield.
The Chairman. Mr. Brown.
Mr. Brown. Thank you. And thank you, Madam Secretary and
Generals, for being here.
General Goldfein, I want to thank you for your service. Had
the privilege of receiving testimony from you in this hearing,
being in the presence of your presence at a variety of forums.
And you are not only a fantastic leader but a real thought
leader, and I hope that as you take off your uniform, you don't
venture too far from the national security conversation that is
happening in this country.
I am also very excited that your successor, who has been
nominated by the President, I am confident will be confirmed by
the Senate, General Charles Brown, the first African-American
Chief of Staff not only for the Air Force but of any service
component. So I am looking forward to working with him as we
ensure that the United States has the air power necessary to
counter our adversaries.
I wanted to talk about the shortfall in the number of
pilots that impacts readiness but take a more narrow approach.
In your joint statement, you say that the first resilient and
ready airmen and space professionals are the bedrock of the
Department's readiness and lethality. You have got a pilot
shortfall, and you have got a problem. You are lacking
diversity and inclusion among your aviators.
In April 3 of 1939, this Congress created and funded the
program that today we know as the Tuskegee Airmen. There were a
thousand pilots in that program. Granted, the core of pilots
was much larger as we were gearing up for World War II, but it
represented .5 percent, a small percentage of the pilots.
Today, there are only 47 African Americans who fly fixed wing
in the Air Force. That is 1.5 percent. And I don't have the
numbers for women, but it is as disturbingly low.
I know that you are doing a number of things to address
that, but the question is, what can we do 81 years later as a
Congress to enable you to achieve the diversity, not just for
the sake of the diversity, but to enable you and our Nation to
meet the readiness needs and the challenges that are faced by a
shortfall in the pilots that we have in uniform? Can you please
address that for me?
Secretary Barrett. Well, as a pilot and someone who worked
ardently to get the 1948 law that prohibited women from flying
fighters, to get that law changed in 1992 and the policies
changed in 1993, it is a topic that matters a great deal to me.
And as the Secretary who recommended C.Q. Brown's appointment,
I feel strongly that we need to occupy the talent in whatever
package that talent is presented.
I have been a friend of a number of Tuskegee Airmen over
the decades and decades and was there when the President pinned
on the General star on now General McGee, a Tuskegee Airman,
who celebrated his 100th birthday not so long ago.
The first thing we have to do is recognize there is a
problem, and the quantification of that problem is what the
RAND report recently identified for us. And then I think one of
the things that will help us is the recent attention brought to
military service when the Space Force was stood up. There is a
new excitement about being a part of the military service.
People want to be a part of the Air Force and Space Force as a
result of that. I would invite my colleagues both to speak to
it as well, or I welcome meeting with you further to discuss
it.
Mr. Brown. I will take that for the record. Because let me
just point out that this is what the report found, and we
cannot be afraid of this. We have to take it head on. It says
that minorities and women--the report found that barriers to
minorities and women included racist and sexist comments from
simulation instructors, race and gender stereotyping, and a
contending with the prevalent culture. This was based on focus
groups from not only students but instructors and leaders. We
have got a cultural problem in the Air Force, and I expressed
this last week in the Navy. So I just implore you to take this
on and ask Congress for your help.
[The information referred to can be found in the Appendix
on page 83.]
Mr. Brown. And in the last 20 seconds I have, let me make a
pitch for this. I visited Dover Air Force Base. They are right
next door to Delaware State University, an historically Black
college and university. They have an aviation program there.
Their ROTC [Reserve Officers' Training Corps] affiliation,
unfortunately, is an hour drive away from Delaware State. Let's
find flexibility to establish an ROTC unit right there at
Delaware State University so they can team up with Dover and
help address this need.
Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I yield back.
The Chairman. Mr. Bacon.
Mr. Bacon. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
I want to thank the Secretary of the Air Force. You are
doing a great job stepping in. We applaud what you are doing.
Congratulations to General Raymond. You have come a long
way since you and I inspected Hurlburt and Nellis Air Force
Base as colonels, but congratulations.
General Raymond. You have come a long way, too.
Mr. Bacon. Thank you.
And, General Goldfein, congratulations on a great job. I
personally believe you will always be known as one of the
greats in our Air Force, and I just want to applaud the great
work you have done.
And, Secretary, I wanted to get your assessment. Do we have
an appropriate budget that can field the B-21 and the GBSD
[Ground-Based Strategic Deterrent] on time? Are we on track to
do that?
Secretary Barrett. We have budget to do that. We have to be
ever vigilant to make sure that it continues and that we keep
those productions going.
Mr. Bacon. Thank you. I think fueling a triad and
recapitalizing all three parts of that is priority number one.
It would be my first top priority and I hope out of this
committee.
Do we have a better name for GBSD? I mean, we have got to
work on something. I have to practice this to get that acronym
right.
Secretary Barrett. We are in, I think, total agreement. It
fails on the moniker test, but the mission is the right
mission.
Mr. Bacon. Okay. Thank you.
And both to our Chiefs here, you know, 3 years ago when I
came in, our readiness level was--I think it was at emergency.
I will just give you one example. In the Army, we have 58
combat brigades. Only three could deploy or fight tonight.
Could you both give me some evidence with 3 years of good
budgets that we have turned this readiness level, at least
point it the right way and making progress? General Goldfein.
General Goldfein. Sir, I will just tell you that when we
started the down--when we came out of the downward spiral in
2018 and really just stopped the bleeding, since that time,
with your help, we have had a 13 percent increase in readiness
and mission-capable rates overall and about 34 percent increase
in our pacing units, which are those that we identify to go
into the first opening days of a China-Russia campaign.
Probably is one of the more exciting parts is we are
getting back in the air again. We are back to the 19 to 20
hours, 21 hours per month that perhaps you and I grew up with
that we were unable to get to, even close. You know, pilots
came into the Air Force to fly. Maintainers came in to
maintain. Air traffic controllers came to control. If they
don't think that we are serious about readiness, they are going
to vote with their feet. You want to find the highest morale in
the United States Air Force? You go find the highest levels of
readiness.
Mr. Bacon. Totally agree.
General Raymond.
General Raymond. I would just add, in the space community,
our readiness levels are always relatively high, but we are
measuring it off of a benign domain without a threat. And so
where we have really focused our efforts is to train our
operators to operate in a contested environment, procure the
training infrastructure required to be able to do that, redo
all of the metrics, if you will, that we grade ourself off of
to add that contested nature, and so we can be prepared to
provide the space capabilities our Nation needs.
Mr. Bacon. Thank you. And one last question. I want to go
to the electronic warfare. We are almost 30 years in that
field, and I think we would agree, in the nineties, we sort of
walked away from that. The electronic magnetic spectrum is a
physical, finite domain, and the other side wants to deny that
for our radios, talking to our satellites, using our radars. I
think we fell behind.
And I heard a great briefing last Friday from the Joint
Staff. I have also heard it from our Air Force one-star. I
think we are making great strides, but I want to get your
sense, General Goldfein. If we turn the corner, are we doing
the right things? What else can we do to help?
General Goldfein. Sir, that muscle atrophied in 19 years of
fighting in this specific kind of campaign. So here is three
things that we are doing to get that muscle, to get back in the
gym. First was to suit up the 16th Air Force, the first
numbered Air Force focused on information warfare, the
combination of cyber, ISR, electronic warfare, and information
operations under one of our most brilliant operational
commanders who just came out of Cyber Command to lead that.
Second, we combined our A2 and our A6, traditionally
intelligence and communications/cyber, into an A2/6, aligned
our phone book with the Navy that has an N2/6, and now we are
focused on intelligence and cyber operations. In the 2021
budget, you will see that we are setting up a spectrum warfare
wing, the first one of its kind, that will focus on nothing but
electronic warfare. So we are back in the gym.
General Raymond. On the space side, in my U.S. Space
Command hat, I am responsible for protecting and defending
space. That requires protecting and defending that spectrum as
well. We just stood up on the Space Force side a space
electronic warfare group as well.
Mr. Bacon. That is fantastic.
What I heard last Friday and I have also heard from General
Gaedecke of [inaudible], if I'm saying his name right, we are
finally at the spot where I think I am starting to feel
comfortable that we are doing the right stuff, so I appreciate
the hard work. Thank you.
Mr. Chairman, I yield back.
The Chairman. Thank you.
Ms. Sherrill.
Ms. Sherrill. Thank you.
Thank you, General Goldfein, for your service. Your
reputation precedes you. And thank you, Secretary Barrett and
General Raymond, for joining us today.
General Raymond, I have heard a lot about the Space Force
uniforms as well. You look remarkably like an Air Force
officer, so we will see. It must be my untrained eye.
General Raymond. We are working it. I will come back and
model.
Ms. Sherrill. We are looking forward to it.
So over the past week and a half, this committee has heard
from the Secretary of Defense and the Chairman of the Joint
Chiefs of Staff, as well as service leadership, and at every
hearing, including this one, members have expressed our concern
about this administration and this Department's willingness to
subvert the judgment of Congress in favor of their own judgment
through reprogramming action. I am personally deeply concerned
that the way this Department of Defense is using its
reprogramming authority damages the trust between this
committee and our DOD. And so in the Air Force example, what I
am concerned about particularly is the F-35 program.
General Goldfein, you testified just last year that the Air
Force needs to procure 60 aircraft per year to modernize the
tactical fleet, meet the optimal production rates, and mitigate
possible gaps. Do you still feel that way, sir?
General Goldfein. Yes, ma'am, but I would say that in terms
of total fighter force, we need 72 a year, and I am on record
for that.
Ms. Sherrill. So despite believing you need 72 a year, you
requested funding for 48 F-35s. Is that correct?
General Goldfein. Yes, ma'am. Flat budget, less buying
power. That is the result.
Ms. Sherrill. But you would not say that the 12 unfunded F-
35s were simply an excess of your current programmatic need or
simply a congressional special interest item?
General Goldfein. No, ma'am. What was taken for the wall on
the F-35 was what we call advance long lead procurement items.
What we do is to reduce the amount of time to bring the
aircraft, there is certain items that we buy the year prior so
that those parts are actually on the line when the airplane
starts coming through. What they diverted was those long lead
items. So it actually doesn't have an impact on the total
number of aircraft we buy; it has an impact on the lead items
for the next year.
Ms. Sherrill. So what we do here in Congress is we look
ahead to what we think our future modernization needs are, and
we fund them at appropriate levels to meet the needs of our
service fleet. So you said earlier that, quote, you know, when
looking at the ALIS problems, why should we buy? We in Congress
might say why should we buy you F-35s if you haven't fixed
those problems? A broader question is why should we buy you F-
35s when you are reprogramming the money we have already sent
you for F-35s?
General Goldfein. You know, ma'am, that is a good question.
You know, the Joint Chiefs were asked, the Chairman
specifically, about how to--you know, the question we were
asked was does the reprogramming have an immediate strategic
impact on our ability to defend the Nation. And so the answer
that the Chairman gave was back was, you know, for the amount
of money that was reprogrammed, no, it doesn't. It does have an
impact. Absolutely.
Ms. Sherrill. And I think as we look towards the new
National Defense Strategy at the challenges that we are all
going to face in the future, at the challenges of modernizing
our fleet, we are balancing very strategically here in Congress
the current needs of our DOD and any future needs as we see
them. And it is very difficult for us to have any confidence
that when we make those choices and we fund certain programs,
that now our DOD is going to put that money toward the programs
we have, in fact, directed them towards.
Thank you. I yield back.
The Chairman. Thank you.
Mr. Banks.
Mr. Banks. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
Last week, I asked Secretary Esper about the Space Force's
opportunity to improve traditional Federal acquisition
regulations. In response to my question, Secretary Esper stated
that, quote, our biggest challenge is culture. We have to
change our culture so it is less risk averse and more willing
to take bets on the small guys, end quote.
General Raymond, what are your perspectives on how to
develop a culture within the Space Force that is willing to
accept risk on startups and the small guys, as the Secretary
referred to them?
General Raymond. So we are a startup company ourselves, and
so we want to build this in a way that capitalizes on that. We
have done a lot of work here over the past couple years with
the Space and Missile Systems Center out in Los Angeles to
expand the number of nontraditional companies that are in
this--in our business.
We have developed open standards so nontraditional
companies can innovate to those standards. We have stood up a
Space Rapid Capabilities Office modeled after the Air Force
Rapid Capabilities Office to not have to fight the bureaucracy,
to have direct access to the two chiefs sitting at this table
and under the leadership of our Secretary.
And I think the other thing is we have delegated authority
for programs down to a lower level. It used to all be held up
at a three-star level. And if you are risk averse, if you grew
up risk averse, and all of a sudden you are unleashed, it takes
a while to feel unleashed and feel empowered. And we have been
working that for the last couple of years.
Mr. Banks. Appreciate that.
Secretary Barrett, last month, I and other members of the
Future of Defense Task Force visited the Air Force Artificial
Intelligence Accelerator at MIT [Massachusetts Institute of
Technology], as well as Kessel Run in Boston. These
organizations, along with AFWERX, have been aggressive at
engaging across the national security innovation base, outside
of traditional defense contractors, and bringing commercial and
academic best practices and new ideas into the defense
ecosystem.
I wonder, are you seeing the efforts of AFWERX and similar
organizations disrupt the acquisition and requirements
workforce, and what more can we do to sustain and scale those
efforts?
Secretary Barrett. Thanks for your support of those. It has
really been transformational. Already just last week, we were
judges on a Spark where, internal to the Air Force, people came
forward with ideas, with inventions they had, or better ways of
doing things, creative solutions to concerns.
So there is the pitch day that is bringing new small
companies forward. And instead of the laborious process that
they associate with the defense contracting, they were able to
make their pitch, and if persuasive, leave that day with a
contract with the Defense Department. It is really disruptive
to the way it has been done. It creates a great enthusiasm by
small companies on the pitch day ideas and internal creativity
and innovation on the part of airmen and space professionals by
having things like the Spark tank.
Mr. Banks. Can Congress do more to support those efforts?
What more can we do?
Secretary Barrett. The authorities that you have granted
are very helpful, and we will be looking in space to come
forward with ideas that might shed more red tape that we find
encumbers----
General Raymond. I think one of the challenges--we actually
canceled a C2 program for space that wasn't going to deliver
what we needed and went to an agile development way of doing
business. I think one of our challenges is we need to make sure
as we do this and we spiral that we give Congress the
appropriate oversight, that balancing, the going fast with
making sure that you have what you need to make sure that we
are doing well.
Mr. Banks. Appreciate that.
Mr. Chairman, I yield the remainder of my time to General
Bacon.
Mr. Bacon. Thank you, Mr. Banks.
One followup on the electronic warfare question. The
Compass Call program. We budgeted 10 replacements for the
Gulfstream. Six are paid for. I understand the Gulfstream
production line is stopping. What is our plan to close out the
last four? Thank you, General Goldfein.
General Goldfein. Thanks, sir. We made a decision in the
business case that said there is some mix of used aircraft and
new aircraft. What is the plan? So we are going to have--I
think that the plan is like six and four in terms of new versus
used. So the shutdown of the line doesn't affect us. We will be
able to get our aircraft we need.
Mr. Bacon. Thank you.
I yield back.
Mr. Kim [presiding]. Great. Thank you. The gentleman yields
back.
I am going to be taking the helm here as I am next up on
the line. So I wanted to just start by echoing my colleagues,
General Goldfein, just of your incredible service. It has been
great getting to work with you on this.
And, Secretary Barrett and General Raymond, it has been
great getting to know you and work alongside both of you.
Secretary Barrett, I wanted to turn to you and just take a
step back here. As you know, in my district, we talked about we
have got Joint Base McGuire-Dix-Lakehurst, and a big part of
the work that I have been trying to do is just really tried to
harmonize the work between the joint base as well as the
surrounding communities. Certainly, a big part of that has been
about the community doing everything we can in New Jersey to
support the joint base, as it is our second largest employer in
the entire State of New Jersey, but another aspect of it is
something about how it is that we can continue to make the
joint base an engine for our economy in the area and continue
to support our local businesses, our local efforts there.
So I wanted to just start off with sort of a broad question
here. I would assume you would join me in thinking that it is
critically important that our Air Force and our DOD understand
that the military installations need to be a vibrant part of
our community. Is that right?
Secretary Barrett. It is very important to us in our
communities that we be good neighbors and we be well integrated
into the communities.
Mr. Kim. It definitely seems like a relationship that we
would always want to continue to be mutually beneficial on that
level. One aspect that I have been looking at is in terms of
military construction and military construction spending. Now,
if I get these numbers right, you can tell me if I am in the
right ballpark, but it looks like we are at about $2 billion in
fiscal year 2018 for DOD as a whole and roughly about $265
million for fiscal year 2018 for the Air Force. Does that sound
in the ballpark?
Secretary Barrett. It sounds in the ballpark.
Mr. Kim. Ish? Yeah.
Secretary Barrett. The ballpark sounds right.
Mr. Kim. Well, you know, for me, as I have been digging
through those numbers, I have been trying to get a sense of
what kind of impact does the military construction resources
and funding provide to businesses in New Jersey and local
businesses, as we have a lot of great workers there who are
trying to help set up the new hangars for the KC-46 and other
things like that, but I really struggle to get further details
about that type of impact. So, you know, I would like to work
with you on this and try to figure out, you know, how do we do
a better job of tracking what kind of investments are being
made, especially when it comes to MILCON [military
construction], into these local businesses? But I just wanted
to get a sense. Does that sound like a reasonable thing that we
can try to move on together here?
Secretary Barrett. I would be happy to work with you to try
to track that.
Mr. Kim. Yeah. Because I think, for me, you know, we
certainly want to make sure that we have, you know, the best
installations, the best construction for our military. And I
think that when I get to know the local workers in our area, it
certainly feels like, you know, that is a place where it can be
a win-win here, that our local workers who are highly skilled,
a lot of them go through apprenticeships and other programs.
But I will be very honest with you, as I have talked with a
number of businesses and workers in our area, they have
struggled to kind of get their foot in the door, whether it is
working for the joint base or other installations.
And I am just trying to figure out how we clarify this, you
know. Some of it comes from helping them understand what the
contracting process is, and I think we can try to find some
steps to add greater transparency on that level. But I also
think that there needs to be just sort of a reassertion of the
importance that we are dealing with from this committee and
from the DOD side on just what role we expect to play within
our local communities.
And so I think from my end, I would love to work with you
on trying to get deeper fidelity and what numbers we
understand, because otherwise, we have trouble quantifying or
articulating exactly what kind of investment we are doing. And
I am hoping that we can work together as well to just make sure
we reassert that importance of the local workers when it comes
to our cooperation with the base. Does that sound right?
Secretary Barrett. Congressman Kim, we would be happy to
work with you on that and to do an assessment, track it, and
determine if there are better ways we can be participants in
the community.
Mr. Kim. Okay. Great. Well, look, I look forward to doing
that with you all.
And I will yield the rest of my time here.
So next up, we are going to turn it over to Mr. Mitchell.
You are now recognized for 5 minutes.
Mr. Mitchell. Thank you, Mr. Chair. Thank you all for being
here today.
First, let me start, as some of my colleagues have
referenced, in particular Kessel Run with the Future of Defense
Task Force. We got to visit there. I spent 35 years in private
business, running a business much smaller than the Pentagon,
trust me, starting new divisions. And I was incredibly
impressed with their ability to solve problems quickly. The
enthusiasm level, the motivation level of both the civilians
and the personnel, the Active Duty personnel there was
extraordinary. I wish I could have spent more time. I would
have spent days there on what they are working on because it
really was impressive. And I want to urge that--I know there
are some questions about funding and all of that. We want to
make sure we keep that type of operation going. It could have
an impact on the problem we talked about with the F-35 with
ALIS, a variety of things that they will tackle in entirely
different ways outside the box. And we are getting deliverables
for the Air Force and for the military.
I also would like to switch gears a little bit. I went on a
CODEL [congressional delegation]. We went to Iwakuni was one of
our stops. F-35, talked to maintainers there about ALIS. We
won't get into that. They had things to say, I am sure you can
understand that. But the other concern that was raised was one
about the ability to train in range. Because of their location,
they are having to come back to the States or other places for
training on the F-35s, which heightens my concerns about the
issues of community oppositions where we bed down. We are
talking about bedding down F-35s now in terms of Ops 5 and 6.
You are smiling, Secretary, yes. Without getting into what
community, there is a significant backlash in the community
that is scheduled to receive those. Literally hundreds--a
couple hundred people last week showed up to protest that. The
Member of Congress in that district, I believe, would chain
himself to the gates to avoid having those F-35s put there.
We can invest a huge amount of money into an airplane that
is obviously--I was out at Nellis and saw the operation of that
Red Flag last year. It is extraordinary, but only if we get
proficiency of the pilots, only if we keep them trained. So my
question for you is, you talked about in the Senate, and I know
Senator Peters raised the question about we are looking at
community interests. Can you be a little more specific about
that? Because I don't want to put aircraft, I don't care where
it is. Yes, Selfridge Air National Guard Base I believe is a
great place to put them, but we cannot put them in a place that
will have issues of night flights being a concern, training
flights, noise. There are other communities in the country
that, you know, believe jet sounds are the sounds of freedom.
How are you going to take that into consideration so you don't
end up with an expense or an investment that is not best?
Secretary Barrett. One of the most important things for
training pilots is range access, and there is great range
access over the lake, so it is really an important topic. There
is a process that we have gone through, and so that is through
measured criteria that have been preannounced and evaluated.
Mr. Mitchell. Let me ask you about that.
Secretary Barrett. Community welcome is one of the
important----
Mr. Mitchell. Let me ask you about that, because I think
range access is critically important. But, however, it appears
to me that you assess range access on a pretty general basis.
And I say that because Selfridge has access directly to the
largest range, both live-fire ranges and terrain, east of the
Mississippi. I don't understand how we rate that even with
other locations that have smaller ranges, less geographic
diversity, less terrain diversity, and less ability for live
fire. And if we are going, again in my opinion, to make the
best investment on F-35s on this high-tech gen 5 aircraft,
let's make the best environment for the training. So how are we
going to put that into the equation so we actually assess that,
in my opinion?
Secretary Barrett. May I invite the chiefs?
Mr. Mitchell. Absolutely. Thank you.
General Goldfein. Sir, first, let me just say thanks for
bringing up Kessel Run and the work that they are doing.
Mr. Mitchell. Great work.
General Goldfein. You know, while General Raymond is
working on his uniform, I am trying to figure out how to bring
hoodies into the United States Air Force so we can bring in
some of the most incredible software coders on the planet.
Mr. Mitchell. They are extraordinary. They are a lot of
fun. I enjoyed those folks.
General Goldfein. Let me tell you, though, that when it
comes to the F-35 sustainment and the ALIS program, the
software, here is why I am more confident today than I would
have been testifying a year ago. Our folks are working now
closely with the contractor and the subcontractors, and we are
having one of the most mature, informed discussions we have had
in this program about data, because data is the currency of
future warfare. And if we don't have access to it, then we are
going to get lapped by the adversary. The fact that we are
having a mature discussion with Kessel Run involved and folks
who understand this business with the company that manufactures
this airplane gives me my greatest optimism I have had in
years.
Mr. Mitchell. We are going to run out of time here, and I
am not going to try to abuse the acting chair who might be less
aggressive than Mr. Smith, but let me just remind you, you have
heard today, Secretary and General, that there are other
communities in this country that will embrace our military
capabilities, the F-35, and provide and ensure that training
opportunities are available, and they are not limited. And we,
I think you have got the sense, will be looking at that very
carefully in terms of what decisions are being made on that and
how they are being made, because it is an extraordinary
investment in the gen 5 aircraft at the future of the Air
Force. So please understand that that oversight is going to
continue.
Thank you.
General Raymond. I know we are over time. Could I have like
10 seconds? I just want to pile on----
Mr. Kim. I have to step in here if----
General Raymond. I just want to pile on to Kobayashi--or
Kessel Run, and we have one in the Space Force called Kobayashi
Maru. And I will tell you, we just went to them and said to
both, the leaders of both, and said design a software
capability for the Space Force, and we are going to implement
that going forward as well.
Mr. Mitchell. Great. Thank you.
Mr. Kim. Thank you. I don't want my colleagues to think I
am going to go soft on them up here.
I am going to turn it over to my colleague, Mrs. Luria, for
5 minutes. Over to you.
Mrs. Luria. Thank you, Madam Secretary, thank you,
Generals, for being here to talk about the Air Force budget
today. And I wanted to single in on a comment that stood out in
General Goldfein's opening remarks.
General, you said, I am a hundred percent confident we have
what it takes to win. But when I go back to 2018, the Air Force
proposed to grow its end strength to 386 operational squadrons,
and in the budget request that we are looking at today doesn't
get us there. And so what I am really trying to get at is
understanding, obviously, that there are limited resources,
but, you know, saying that we have what it takes to win doesn't
display a sense of urgency that we really need to get to 386
squadrons in order to win. And so from our perspective, when we
have to make complicated choices with limited resources, what
are we supposed to take away from that message?
General Goldfein. Ma'am, that is a great question. I think
it is important for the American people to hear a Joint Chief
have the confidence that we can protect this Nation if called
upon. And so make no mistake; it will be a long and bloody
fight. We will lose a lot of airmen, but we have what we need
to win.
Now, the 386 operational squadrons was a discussion that we
began with Congress, which was a conversation that, quite
frankly, we had not been having. The first time you saw us was
when we came over here to tell you the Air Force we could
afford. We actually never put on the table for you the Air
Force we need to win. And so 386 operational squadrons is not a
gold-plated answer.
When I went to war as a young captain, and we kicked a non-
nuclear middleweight power out of Kuwait, we had 412
operational squadrons. We are saying we need 386 to defeat a
nuclear peer. It is not gold plated. The fact that we didn't
actually advance towards 386 is the reality of a flat budget
with 2 percent less spending power.
Mrs. Luria. So another comment that was made, and I
appreciate that, and I understand as the chief of the service,
we have confidence in our forces to execute the mission as
necessary and take on all adversaries, including near-peer
adversaries. But, you know, when we are looking at the budget,
we want to give you the tools that you need to win, so that is
kind of the discussion that we are having here and certainly
believe with full confidence in our forces' ability to fight
with the tools that they currently have, but we want to know
what they need for the future.
And General Raymond, you mentioned in your remarks that to
establish Space Force is the number one priority of the U.S.
Air Force. Just taking a step back, because the Air Force has a
huge part in this, you know, I strongly believe that
modernizing the nuclear deterrent is incredibly important and
that a strong nuclear deterrent is the cornerstone of our
national defense. So, again, somewhat competing priorities if
we are to sit here and make decisions between things that have
very large price tags but are also very fundamental to our
national defense. Can you speak briefly on that?
General Raymond. Yes. So, clearly, the nuclear mission is
the top mission in the United States Air Force. I mean, we have
to absolutely do that right. We are just starting the Space
Force. And so a near-term priority is to get that Space Force
right, because I will tell you, it is equally critical to our
security and the security of our allies. We have had the
luxury, the absolute luxury over the last couple of decades of
operating in a very peaceful, benign domain, and I would
welcome the opportunity to come talk to you in a closed session
about the threats that we are seeing.
Mrs. Luria. I would enjoy that opportunity, and I also see
a great opportunity for developing a service from scratch.
General Raymond. We do.
Mrs. Luria. As someone who served in the Navy for 20 years
myself, when I look back, as soon as we started integrating
women, we were trying to fit a different model into something
that had preexisted. But I think it is huge opportunity, as
Representative Brown said, for women, increasing diversity, and
all of those things to start from scratch with a vision
statement and recruiting that supports a new force with a blank
slate.
General Raymond. Wholeheartedly agree.
Mrs. Luria. And I would love to have that conversation.
And switching to the next topic very quickly, climate
change, sea level rise, recurrent flooding. In Hampton Roads,
we have eight major military installations. One of those is
Langley Air Force Base. And your budget justification for the
project that was listed there for the access control point--
because if people can't get on the base, they can't get to
work, they can't do their jobs--basically said that, in
justifying the land acquisition portion of that, that Langley
is not within the 100-year flood plain. However, it was one of
the 18 installations listed in the 2016 DOD report that were
the most at risk due to flooding and other environmental issues
and sea level rise.
So I would also love to hear more specifically about the
justification for that and what we can do to make sure that our
airmen can get on Langley, and also with NASA [National
Aeronautics and Space Administration] Langley facility enjoying
the same access route, and they are critical to the work that
we are doing on hypersonics as well.
Secretary Barrett. The United States Air Force learned a
great deal after Offutt Air Force Base and Tyndall were damaged
in the past several years, and we have Congress to thank for
funding the repair. As we rebuild, we are building to new
parameters, to new guidance, and to new management, new
construction models which incorporate flooding and wind damage
as elements, revised elements, to build those standards. So we
are, in fact, taking it very seriously that we need to make
sure that our folks can get to work each day.
Mrs. Luria. Thank you. We have run out of time.
Mr. Kim. Thank you.
I am going to turn it over to Mr. Wittman now for 5
minutes.
Mr. Wittman. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
General Goldfein, Secretary Barrett, General Raymond,
thanks again for joining us. General Goldfein, thank you so
much for your extraordinary leadership and service there with
the Air Force. We thank you for all that you have done. We look
forward to working with General Brown. I know that he will have
big, big shoes to fill.
I want to applaud you for all you are doing to prioritize
modernization within the Air Force. We know the big delta that
you have been given with this and where we are today and where
we need to be. And we know that during times in our military,
there are these points where we have to go through pretty big
efforts to be able to modernize. I know all the things that the
Air Force does. In this time of great power competition, the
challenges we face are multifold and in many different areas.
All the things the Air Force has done in research and
development in places like hypersonics, directed energy,
autonomy, cyber, propulsion, mass weapon payload systems, and
advanced space dominance in the future, are all extraordinarily
important. And you talk about multi-domain operations, taking
all those things and integrating them together. And technology
is fantastic. And we are the best innovators and creators in
the world, but in and of itself is not the panacea.
So the question is, is as we are looking at all those
things, how do we take all that great technology and integrate
it into modernization within the Air Force, integrate it into
modernization of the Space Force, and then how do we integrate
that into the joint force? All those different elements are a
lot of different moving pieces. I think that is going to be the
real secret sauce. It has been the secret sauce about how we
have operated previously. That is what our adversaries don't
quite get to, and it is where we are going to maintain our
strategic and tactical advantage in the future.
Give me some of your thoughts about how these technologies
are developed quickly. And the Air Force RCO [Rapid
Capabilities Office] does a great job in really getting
technology, getting it to the forefront, getting it out there.
But how do we make sure that we are doing the right thing in
testing and integrating all this different technology in the
systems that have significance today, tomorrow, next month,
next year, and next decade?
General Goldfein. Thanks, sir. It is a great question. You
know, industry is ahead of us on this. They have learned that
if you want to do artificial intelligence, hypersonics,
quantum, some of these, you know, game changers, you actually
can't skip the steps of common digital architecture and data
architecture. So the Department of Defense, we can't skip the
step. We have got to do it.
Here is what gives me confidence that we are doing this the
right way. Number one, Chairman Milley's guidance to me when he
designated the Air Force as the service lead to work this for
was crystal clear. We are not bringing forward a single service
solution. We are bringing forward a joint solution, and the
Army, the Navy, the Marine Corps, the Coast Guard, the
investments they have made in their own C2 has got to fit into
anything we bring forward. That is number one.
Number two. The Joint Chiefs, I will tell you now, you
know, coming up on my fourth year, it is an interesting
relationship that we have now because we have all grown up
fighting together. I mean, you know, Jim McConville was the
chief--was the commander at Bagram when I was the air component
commander. We fought together. So there is a level of trust
between the Joint Chiefs that I would offer that this is the
way that this committee ought to expect us to operate as Joint
Chiefs, sitting here especially with my fellow Joint Chief.
And the last thing I will tell you is that trust as we
build this out means that I make sure that the investment that
the services have made in their C2 fits into any architecture
that we do. We are all going out to Nellis Air Force Base next
month for a demonstration, and we are on a 4-month cycle where
we are connecting capabilities, and we are solving problems,
and we are doing this the way that industry--and I will finish
with saying that we have brought on 12 pioneers that have done
this successfully in industry. One of the designers of the Uber
app actually now is on the Air Force payroll.
Mr. Wittman. I appreciate all those efforts, and I think
those things are incredibly important as you transition through
this modernization. One of the elements of modernization, and
you point to, with multi-domain operations, is transitioning
from legacy systems, retiring legacy systems. The systems that
we needed yesterday, last month, aren't what we are going to
need next month, next year, as I said, next decade.
But give me your perspective; because it is not just
retiring legacy systems, but it is making sure the transition
is proper. So if we are retiring a legacy system, how do we
make sure that we have in place, operationally proficient, the
replacement system for that? Because I think that is what
concerns all of us, is not necessarily getting rid of those
systems, but making sure we have the proper ones fully
operationally in place before those other ones are taken out.
General Goldfein. Secretary Mattis used to have a
framework. He would force us--if any of us said what he called
the ``R'' word, the risk word, we had to answer three
questions: To who, for how long, what is your mitigation. This
is real risk to the combatant commanders. And I don't want to
understate that, to General Lyons, for me to retire tankers is
real risk. For General McKenzie, for me to retire ISR is real
risk.
How you mitigate is by connecting this force so that you
make use of all the sensors that are now available and the ones
that we are fielding, so we can go forward and do this in a way
that we can do it better than we are today.
Mr. Wittman. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
Mr. Kim. Going to have to cut you off there. We are going
to turn it over to Mr. Brindisi, over to you for 5.
Mr. Brindisi. Thank you, Chairman.
And thank you, Secretary, and both Generals for being here
today. I don't want to belabor the point, General Raymond,
because I know you talked about this earlier, integrating
National Guard units into Space Force. And as you know, Space
National Guard units across eight States are currently working
on space-related missions, including the triple deuce, which is
222nd Command and Control, which is in Rome, New York, in
upstate New York, so I would welcome a further conversation
with you as we discussed earlier to talk about that
integration. Thank you.
General Raymond. Happy to do so.
Mr. Brindisi. Secretary Barrett, the NDS reoriented our
strategy to focus on great power competition, ensuring we stay
ahead in terms of research and development of game-changing
technologies, like quantum science and AI. And as you know, the
Air Force Research Laboratories Information Directorate in
Rome, known as Rome Lab, has been at the forefront of both
quantum research as well as CUAS [countering unmanned aerial
systems]. And I wanted to ask if you could briefly speak on how
you view competition with China regarding these critical
technologies like quantum and AI, and talk about your vision
for how we can use our incredible DOD lab base to ensure we win
this technology competition with China.
Secretary Barrett. Our ability to compete against great
powers, especially against China, with their use of technology
and their trajectory in development, will not be possible
without using quantum capabilities, without AI, and without the
kind of leadership that the Rome Labs have demonstrated. We
will lean upon the outcome, the product of those labs, long
into the future, so that they are quintessentially pivotal to
our future.
Mr. Brindisi. Do you think, just to follow up on that, do
you think we are investing adequate resources fast enough to
keep pace with China?
Secretary Barrett. When it comes to innovation, I always
feel like there isn't enough, we are not doing enough, but it
is a high priority.
Mr. Brindisi. And can you talk a little bit about the Air
Force's efforts to improve public-private partnerships and
research of emerging technologies?
Secretary Barrett. As Chief Goldfein demonstrated in his
comments, we really are experimenting, doing new things, trying
new techniques, working in partnerships that previously didn't
exist. So it is really a great focus of the United States Air
Force, and really throughout the Department of Defense, on
making better use of friends, allies, partners, in the United
States and abroad.
Mr. Brindisi. Thank you. And I know I had the privilege of
welcoming Secretary Wilson to Rome Lab last March. I know she
was very impressed with the innovative groundbreaking work that
they are doing, and I would extend the same offer to you. I
think you certainly would be very impressed by what is
happening there.
Secretary Barrett. Thank you. I look forward to it.
Mr. Brindisi. I want to shift real quick to mental health
and suicide prevention. I also have the privilege of serving on
the House Veterans' Affairs Committee, and I appreciate in your
testimony you recognize that suicide is a, quote, insidious
threat to our force, and it is devastating military families. I
know the Air Force is focusing on suicide prevention and
providing our airmen with resiliency skills, but last year, 137
airmen--Active, Guard, and Reserve--died by suicide. Last year,
the Air Force's number of suicides was the highest level in
three decades.
Can you briefly speak to what the Air Force is doing now to
address this trend and how you plan to change the Air Force's
approach as you move forward here?
Secretary Barrett. This is one of the scourges of our time.
It is something that is devastating to the morale in our
communities, and it has been taken seriously, especially by
Chief Goldfein during this past year as we look to implement
specific things that can help to move the needle on that. And I
would invite his attention to it.
Mr. Brindisi. Yes, General.
General Goldfein. Sir, suicide is killing more airmen than
any adversary on the planet. It is an adversary. And the way we
are attacking it and defending ourselves is through two primary
efforts. First of all, at the institutional level, we are
taking a page out of what Special Operations Command very
successfully instituted called the Preservation of the Force
and Family. And we are spreading that across the Air Force at
Operation True North, and we have money in this budget to
expand that to 14 bases as we continue to expand that out.
But the most important work that we are doing is at the
unit level. So we asked each wing commander--Active, Guard, and
Reserve--to stand down their wing at a time and place of their
choosing to kick off a yearlong campaign to get after this
adversary; make it personal, make it continuous. And so we have
not seen the numbers go down yet, but we are attacking it
aggressively.
Mr. Brindisi. Thank you, General, very much. If there is
things that we can work on as a committee, or even in the House
Veterans' Affairs Committee, I know this is an area that I have
great concern and many Members do. So I appreciate your efforts
in this regard.
I yield back.
Mr. Kim. I agree with my colleague on just the importance
of that issue and what we can do to address suicides in our
services as well as with our veterans.
I am going to turn it over to Mr. Kelly now. You are
recognized.
Mr. Kelly. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
And, General Goldfein, again, thank you for your service.
You have heard that, but it matters. You have made a difference
in your 4 years here, and so have all the--the Joint Staff. I
do ask that we pay attention, and we talked earlier about
diversity. And I think we have got to change not just diversity
in who we are getting to fly, but I think we have to change the
culture.
So, Madam Secretary, you have kind of faced this, so I want
you to say, what are we doing to change the culture in the Air
Force so that minority and women want to be Air Force pilots?
Secretary Barrett. Well, again, I would invite the comments
of the chief as having been in those squadrons through his
career. But, first, getting the law changed was--the irony that
we were, for much of the Air Force's history, excluding women
from the opportunity to fly high-performance aircraft. We could
fly tankers and transports but not fighters and bombers. And
that took a law change, and it took a bipartisan effort to get
that to change. But now that means women can be there, but are
they welcome and how are they included? That has been a longer
challenge and a longer process. And I would invite the chief to
speak to that.
Mr. Kelly. I just wanted--and let me, Chief, I think we
have got to advertise. We have got to make those young ladies
and those minorities, they see that TV commercial, and they
want to go fly fighters for the United States Air Force, or the
United States Navy, which we are not talking about now.
Going back to the Joint Chiefs. You know, it really--it's
probably just me, but it really bothers me that we don't have
Chief of National Guard Bureau sitting at the table at any
point in this process. They represent a huge part of our Air
Force. They represent a huge part of our Army. Yet they are
never in these budgetary hearings, and although there is one
Army, one Air Force, one Nation, they still have differing
things that I think they can add something. So I hope that
people are out there listening, and we will change that so they
are here.
General Goldfein, this is for you. I just hope I can get
your commitment when we talk about modernizing C-17s, when we
talk about modernizing our KC-135 46 fleets to do our strategic
air, the things that we are going to have to continue to do,
the C-130J modernization that has now been turned off. I just--
I hope that we will stay committed to the Air Guard and Air
Reserve to make sure that we don't promise them that we are
going to modernize and then at the last minute, go, well, you
will get the next go-around and we will put you at the end
again. So can you tell me what we are doing to keep that on
pace?
General Goldfein. No, I can, sir. And I will tell you that,
you know, Ranking Member Thornberry brought up a comment in the
beginning about CR [continuing resolution]. And so if I could
take, you know, 30 seconds and tell you, you know, we have to
acknowledge, what a CR does is it keeps me from being able to
do any new starts, hiring civilians. So I pretty much stop.
But we don't talk enough about what it does to industry. If
you are a CEO and I am going to industry partners, and I am
saying, hey, listen, I can't tell you what I am going to buy
you next year, but I need you to keep a sophisticated workforce
working, and then I am not sure exactly when I am going to get
that money, it wreaks havoc. And so much of the modernization
you talk about, we require industry to be partners with us on
this, and the CR affects them as bad as it affects me.
Mr. Kelly. And I agree with that, but I am taking ownership
for our CR part. But they are not the one who just reallocated
and not modernized. And so I think we all have to take our
piece of that, and I just--the other thing I want to go back
to, Secretary Barrett, you know, we have a great female fighter
pilot who trains our pilots in Columbus Air Force Base, which
is in my district, Colonel Samantha Weeks. And so we need more
role models like her. Although I hope she is not listening,
because she is not getting me up in one of those jets and
making me cry.
Secretary Barrett. Well, I would just tell you that you
should be proud of your neighborhood in that it was Judy
Dunaway, a woman from Columbus, that was instrumental in moving
the law, changing the law to allow women to fly fighters and
bombers.
Mr. Kelly. And then just real quick, as ranking member of
the Military Personnel Subcommittee, EFMP [Exceptional Family
Member Program] is very, very important to me. And so I want to
know, Madam Secretary, what we are doing. We are currently
closing Dover Air Force Base or talking about that. So now we
are putting those same families out in the local community, and
we are going to saturate that. What are we doing to make sure
when we close MTFs [military treatment facilities] that we are
continuing to take care of our EFMP families and also just our
regular families of all our service members?
Secretary Barrett. Well, I will tell you that I chaired a
meeting yesterday to talk on exactly that subject, and it is
not being well managed now. We need to figure out if it is too
broad a category, if we are just not--we are just not meeting
the needs as well as we should for our families, and that is an
important topic for us.
Mr. Kelly. And I had one for you, General, but I am out of
time. Thank y'all so much for your service.
Mr. Kim. Thank you.
I am going to turn it over to Ms. Speier. Over to you for 5
minutes.
Ms. Speier. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Thank you all for
being here today.
To you, General Goldfein, if this is indeed your last
visit, extraordinary service to our country. Thank you.
To Secretary Barrett, thank you recently for your phone
call. I also want to alert you to a company in my district
called Zipline that is working with the Army, is providing, by
drones, blood supply, drugs, to various locales around the
world, particularly in Africa right now. But I see a great
resource there in terms of potentially providing spare parts to
the Air Force when we have so many of our aircraft down because
of maintenance issues, which takes me to the F-35 program,
which I think you answered earlier.
I was at the Intel [Intelligence] Committee and I regret I
wasn't here for the response. But how are we going to sustain
two squadrons outside of Fairbanks, Alaska, if the spare parts
issue is not dealt with?
General Goldfein. Ma'am, we have actually made significant
progress on parts. In the last two combat deployments, we have
taken, for us with the F-35A in the Middle East and with the
Marine Corps who went to the Pacific, both of those newer
aircraft were able to establish an 80 to 90 percent mission-
capable rate while they were deployed. That is dependent on
parts.
And where we have been focused with Lockheed Martin is
looking at sustainment and scaling the sustainment enterprise
so we can have the parts that we need going forward.
Ms. Speier. Are we looking at 3D [three-dimensional]
printers?
General Goldfein. We are, as a matter of fact, yes.
Ms. Speier. All right. Maybe you could, for the record,
provide us some additional information of how you are utilizing
that.
General Goldfein. Absolutely.
[The information referred to can be found in the Appendix
on page 83.]
Ms. Speier. Secretary Barrett, the Defense Advisory
Committee on Women in the Services [DACOWITS] have recommended
that all Armed Forces implement significant family planning
education and provide various methods of contraception. There
is a 60 percent higher rate of unplanned pregnancies in the
military than in the regular civilian force, and 95 percent of
all women serving are of reproductive age. So it appears the
Navy and Marines are doing a better job than the Air Force and
Army in this area. For instance, the Navy is promoting long-
acting, reversible contraception and other forms of birth
control at basic training, for those who want it, requiring
recruits to meet individually with medical providers, and
providing access to contraception at sick call or walk-in
clinics to help reduce unintended pregnancy rates. It is, as we
all know, a readiness issue as well.
And so I am wondering, even though DACOWITS has recommended
that the Navy program be implemented in all services, and there
was instructions in May of 2019, what has the Air Force done in
delivering this kind of benefit to its servicewomen?
Secretary Barrett. We had a conversation, again, on that
topic just yesterday, talking about pregnancy and deployability
and a variety of things. As a former member of DACOWITS, I care
about their recommendations. I have not seen the reversible
birth control topic, so it is something I will take a look at.
Ms. Speier. All right. And as the chair of the Military
Personnel Subcommittee, my colleague, Ranking Member Kelly,
referenced the Exceptional Family Member Program. We had a
hearing on this issue just a few weeks ago. We had such an
overflow crowd of families that we had to access a separate
room. So later this month, we are going to actually have a
townhall in which we are going to hear from families. And if
you are inclined to participate, we would welcome your
participation.
I think that one of the issues we are going to have to look
at in the NDAA this year is providing at each installation a
legal representation--representative who can assist these
families in meeting with local school districts and providing
the appropriate independent education plan that they each
deserve.
And, General Raymond, let me conclude with you. I had the
privilege just last week of being at the Space Command and also
at the Air Force Academy. There is so much enthusiasm for the
Space Force that it is a great shot in the arm. At the time I
visited, I understood that there were actually two persons
associated with the Space Force: you and your deputy. Has that
number increased at all?
General Raymond. Well, first of all, thank you for
visiting. The team really enjoyed hosting you. There is
actually one, and that is me.
Ms. Speier. Oh.
General Raymond. We are about to swear in the Senior
Enlisted Advisor, which will be No. 2. And then really
exciting, this May, out of the Air Force Academy, about 65--
don't quote me on the number--63 or----
Ms. Speier. Well, they had told us 60 at the----
General Raymond [continuing]. Will get directly
commissioned into the United States Space Force. And then the
rest of this--throughout the fall, we will start transitioning
more. So there is one person officially on the books. We have
about 16,000 airmen and civilians assigned to the Space Force,
and we will take portions of those and move them over onto the
books of the Space Force.
Ms. Speier. Thank you.
General Raymond. I also want to thank you for your efforts
on EFMP. It is really important. It is really important work.
And I would love to come by and have an office----
Ms. Speier. Oh, would you? If you would like to participate
in the townhall, we would enjoy having you as well.
Thank you. I yield back.
Mr. Kim. Thank you.
We are going to turn it over to Mr. Waltz now.
Mr. Waltz. Thank you. Thank you, Mr. Acting Chairman.
Appreciate it.
General Goldfein, thank you for being in the fight all
these years. And to you and all the airmen, I wouldn't be alive
today and wouldn't be sitting here representing north Florida
if it weren't for the United States Air Force. And I also want
to thank you and commend you, and you as well, Secretary
Barrett, for your work on light attack. We had this
conversation a year ago. I just attended another Green Beret
funeral yesterday from Afghanistan. This capability is, in my
opinion, which we know well, has been long overdue and needed.
I am pleasantly just really grateful and stunned at the
supersonic speed with which you have moved to put the MOU
[memorandum of understanding] in place with SOCOM [U.S. Special
Operations Command], to put the money in the FYDP and in this
year's budget to transfer over to SOCOM to procure those
assets.
I want to be clear on one piece, because I fear there could
be some confusion out there. You have had a lot of questions
and talk about retiring the A-10 airframes, close air support
airframe. Obviously, the light attack is an overwatch,
different function. You agree with me, and I want to get out
there on the record, those are two totally separate, divorced,
independent moves. That is not a--that is not, not, not, a
drawdown of A-10 for light attack; those are completely
separate drivers?
General Goldfein. Completely separate.
Mr. Waltz. Thanks, Chief.
Secretary Barrett, I look forward to seeing you--switching
to space, I look forward to seeing you at the renaming, and you
as well, General, at the renaming of Patrick Air Force Base to
Patrick Space Force Base. I understand--apologies, I wasn't
here with Representative Lamborn, but I understand from your
answer to him on the command issue, you are going to open that
kind of competition, for lack of a better word, but open that
selection process up. I think the Futures Command process that
the Army went through was very fair and reasonable and open and
gave communities a chance to kind of make their case. Is that--
is that my understanding from----
Secretary Barrett. That is right. In fact, we are working
with the Secretary of Defense, who was a part of the Futures
Command process, and that is informing what we will be doing in
opening the Space Command competition.
Mr. Waltz. You still expecting an announcement this year?
Secretary Barrett. Yeah, this year. This year to announce
the process and to get the process going, and a selection by
the end of this year or early next year.
Mr. Waltz. Great. Thank you, Madam Secretary.
General Raymond, thank you for the visit yesterday. I just
want to reinforce my colleagues, we talked about the Guard
issue and where we are on that. I just wanted to give you a
minute to talk about the space threat. There are few briefs
that really make the hair on the back of my neck stand up, like
what our adversaries are doing in space. And I have taken it on
to just help our voters, help Americans understand how
dependent our economy is on space, how dependent every
individual in this room is, how we touch space 20, 30 times a
day without even realizing it, and how our assets have to be
protected. But we have to get to a deterrence model, and we
can't get to a deterrence model with our adversaries in the
world understanding what we are capable of doing unless we can
talk about it. And I just wanted to--over to you, General.
General Raymond. I really appreciate that question.
Clearly, space is a warfighting domain, just like air, land,
and sea. That is why the Space Force and U.S. Space Command are
so critical. We do not want to get into a fight that begins--
excuse me--or extends into space. We want to deter that from
happening. I think it is really important that America
understands--the average American understands, just as you
said, how reliant they are on space capabilities, but also the
growing threat. Everything from reversible jamming of
communication satellites and GPS satellites to directed energy
weapons----
Mr. Waltz. And when we say--just to be clear, when we say,
you know, our modern economy and society is dependent,
agriculture, banking, telecommunications----
General Raymond. Across the board.
Mr. Waltz [continuing]. Weather, disaster, across the
board----
General Raymond. Right. And so----
Mr. Waltz [continuing]. Farming.
General Raymond. Yeah. So not only does it fuel our
American way of life, but it also fuels our American way of
war. And there is nothing that the joint and coalition force
does that isn't enabled by space. Absolutely nothing. And so--
--
Mr. Waltz. Thank you. And just in my remaining time, if you
could submit for the record, I think it is important too, I
also sit on the Science, Space, and Technology Committee, so I
see the civilian side of what we are trying to do with the Moon
and Space Station and others, and how the Space Force and NASA
are working together so that we can still operate in a
challenged space so that NASA can operate in a challenge--if
you could submit that for the record.
General Raymond. I absolutely will. We are working closely
together.
[The information referred to can be found in the Appendix
on page 83.]
Mr. Waltz. Thank you. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
Mr. Kim. Thank you.
We are going to now recognize Mr. Carbajal. Over to you for
5 minutes.
Mr. Carbajal. Thank you, Mr. Chair. And welcome to all of
you, and thank you for your service.
General Goldfein, I am sad to hear that you are going to be
leaving us in the near future. And as my colleague
Representative Brown said, I do hope you stay engaged, because
your perspective and insight and wisdom will be greatly
appreciated in a continued way, so----
Vandenberg Air Force Base is located in my district. Its
mission is to enable space superiority through assured access
to space by providing robust, relevant, and efficient spaceport
and range capabilities for our Nation. I understand in November
2019 the Air Force Space Command held an interagency tabletop
exercise focused on the future of military launch facilities
and how they can also support growth in commercial space.
To any of the witnesses, how did the exercise help the
Department understand what investments and policy changes are
needed to meet the growing demand for space launch resources on
our ranges? What are the next steps?
And, General Raymond, I know you were--you commanded
Vandenberg Air Force Base at one point. So----
General Raymond. Second Lieutenant Jay Raymond showed up at
Vandenberg 36 years ago. Been stationed there four times. It is
an absolutely critical, critical place for national security
and national security space. Assured access to space is a vital
national interest, as laid out in the National Security
Strategy. Vandenberg has a critical part in that, as does Cape
Canaveral and others.
To meet the warfighting demands of this domain and the
strategic environment of this domain, we have to increase the
capacity of our launches. We have to reduce the costs. We have
to lower the barriers of entry into space. We have to
capitalize on a--this is a terrible word to use in the space
business, but an explosion of commercial space capabilities.
And so we are working on a vision for the future, a range of
the future, getting after autonomous operations, being able to
have plug-and-play ranges, being able to have a more resilient
range, being able to increase those launch rates, reduce costs,
and reduce duplication between us and, for example, the FAA
[Federal Aviation Administration] that licenses commercial
launches. So as we put this vision together, this tabletop
exercise helped inform that vision writing.
Mr. Carbajal. Did infrastructure come up at all in terms of
the need to be able to build up----
General Raymond. Absolutely. You know, if you look at--I
mean, I have been in the launch business for years. And,
historically, when we conduct launch operations, because we
have to be able to destroy everything that is launched for
public safety if it were to go astray, we have large amounts of
infrastructure, as you know, to do that launch, to support that
launch. Where industry is going is, that is all autonomous.
That allows us to change the range, reconfigure the range very,
very quickly. It reduces launch costs considerably, and I think
it is what is enabling commercial space competition to come
back to the United States.
Mr. Carbajal. Thank you, General.
General Goldfein or Secretary Barrett, any other comment?
Secretary Barrett. Nothing to add.
Mr. Carbajal. Thank you.
General Raymond, you have called for investments in
infrastructure and changes in how ranges are managed so they
are more responsive to national security and economic demands
for space launch. Can you elaborate on your assessment a little
bit more that we touched on just a little bit? Are you working
with the ranges to identify and then prioritize the necessary
infrastructure investments?
General Raymond. We absolutely are. The big thing--my big
push was to make sure that we have common architectures between
both coasts to help reduce costs and reduce overhead. We also
want to have a plug-and-play capability. Historically, when a
launch vehicle wanted to come to, let's say, Vandenberg to
launch, it would take us years to work through all the
paperwork to be able to get them onto the range and launch them
safely. We need to speed that up. We have to get much quicker
in our ability to launch. I am excited for where we are going.
We have already made significant strides. Vandenberg is a
critical part of that. Already made significant strides, but we
have to get the plug-and-play, data-driven ranges that will
enable us to do what we need to do for national security.
Mr. Carbajal. Thank you, General.
And let me just conclude by saying, the district, the
stakeholders, the communities around Vandenberg are extremely
excited about not only what this means for our national
security, but what it will mean for our area in terms of the
economy and the investments we make. So I want to thank you,
and ask that you please continue to consider the importance of
Vandenberg as it relates to our advantage.
General Raymond. It is a critical, critical, strategic
location and capability. Our major command and control
capability for all DOD space resides on that base. It is hugely
important to us.
Mr. Carbajal. Thank you.
Mr. Chair, I yield back.
Mr. Kim. Thank you.
We are now going to recognize Mr. Scott for 5 minutes.
Mr. Scott. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
General Goldfein, General Raymond, Secretary Barrett, thank
you for being here. I have a couple of concerns that I
mentioned yesterday, that I will just state for the record. And
I know the Air Force is going to give me answers on this. But
moving $8 billion of the weapon system sustainment to OCO, out
of base funding and into OCO, I have serious questions about
that from a long-term strategy, and appreciate the opportunity
to speak with you about that earlier, and look forward to more
detail on that, but that is something that I think we as a
committee will have to work to fix. The base funding is more
stable than OCO funding, as you know. And want to speak further
about that.
I do want to speak briefly on the JSTARS [Joint
Surveillance Target Attack Radar System]. I am concerned that
the money for updating the Common Data Link is not enough to
actually execute the program. Historically, it has been in the
$20 billion level, and my understanding is the request this
year is at the $3 billion level. The fiscal year 2019 NDAA has
said that the Air Force shall provide not fewer than six
dedicated E-8C JSTARS aircraft each fiscal year for allocation
and support to the combatant commands. There is only $11
million requested in fiscal year 2021 for--$11 million total
for all of the upgrades and modernizations, $3 million of
which, as I understand, is for the Common Data Link. I mean, do
you believe this is enough to provide the combatant commanders
with the six that are required in the fiscal year 2019 NDAA?
General Goldfein. Sir, what we funded throughout this is,
as we have discussed this, that when we did the infrastructure
work on the JSTARS to determine that it could fly into the late
twenties, 2027 and beyond, that is what allowed us to bridge
without a gap to Advanced Battle Management System [ABMS].
Mr. Scott. That is right.
General Goldfein. The point on data links that you make, we
are actually levering technology. And I would actually like to
sit down with you in a closed setting and walk you through
where we are going with some unconventional work we are doing
on data links that allow us to actually bridge between systems
using some new technology that actually industry has made
available.
I will just give an example. We were able to use a Valkyrie
drone to actually have F-22s and F-35s communicating through a
universal translator. We are finding that we can do that more
often, which is what you are seeing in some of the budget
numbers.
Mr. Scott. Okay. But we do have the agreement that we are
going to fly the JSTARS until ABMS has proved that it can
handle----
General Goldfein. Yes, sir.
Mr. Scott [continuing]. The GMTI [Ground Moving Target
Indicator] mission and the command and control aspect of war?
General Goldfein. Yes.
Mr. Scott. And my concern is, as somebody who has both ABMS
and JSTARS at their base, if we are talking about it from the
soldiers' standpoint, my concern is that we start--we are
seeing what appears to be the starting of the JSTARS mission,
when we are going to have to depend on that platform at least
into the 2030s, as I think there is broad agreement on. And so,
$11 million in upgrades and modernization, is not much money
when you are starting to talk about a legal requirement to
maintain six aircraft for the combatant commanders.
As you know, and this was brought up yesterday, and this
has been reported widely, Breaking Defense probably had the
toughest article, I think, on it, where the leadership at Army
Futures and Concept Centers expressed concerns about ABMS. Can
you tell me how you are working through that with the Army?
General Goldfein. Yes, sir. And I will tell you that--I
will tell you three things. Number one, Chairman Milley's
guidance to all of us, and certainly to me as the Chief of
Staff of the Air Force, since we are responsible for leading
the effort on command and control of the joint warfighting
concept, his guidance was crystal clear, which is, we are not
to build a single-service solution. What we are to do is to
preserve the investment that each service has made connecting
itself, whether that is IBCS [Integrated Battle Command System]
for the Army or what the Navy and the Marine Corps. Our job is
to figure out, okay, how do we take that investment, preserve
it, and actually connect it so we can fight better as a joint
team.
We are going out in April--we just completed in December
our demonstration No. 1. We are doing our next demonstration
with all the Joint Chiefs there, and we are going to take three
combatant commanders, of which one is at the end of the table,
General Raymond, and he is going to be the supported commander
for the first part of this exercise, this demonstration. And we
are going to connect capabilities, because he is going to need
an all-domain solution for a problem that he is given in this
demonstration.
Then we are going to shift to General O'Shaughnessy for
defense of the homeland, and then we are going to shift to the
STRATCOM commander. All the services are going to be
represented. And we are going to be doing live fly. We are
going to be doing live fly at White Sands Missile Range with
the Army, live fly Yuma at the--with the Marine Corps, live
with the Navy off the Gulf Coast, and live with the Air Force
at Nellis. So this is going to be a big demonstration, and we
are doing this every 4 months to make sure that we bring this
together for the entire joint team.
Mr. Scott. Well, I appreciate your comments, and thank you
for your service. I just--make sure we are moving in that
direction with the integration of all of the--all of the
services as we develop this system.
General Goldfein. Yes, sir.
Mr. Kim. Great. Thank you.
I am going to turn it over to Ms. Haaland for 5 minutes.
Over to you.
Ms. Haaland. Thank you, Chairman.
And, General Goldfein, Secretary Barrett, and General
Raymond, welcome to our committee hearing.
I first want to say that I am appreciative of the
conversation about women and people of color to find success in
the ranks of our Armed Forces, specifically pilots. And as one
of the first Native American women ever elected to Congress in
our country's history, I completely understand when there is no
role models to see in those areas, that it is hard for young
women to believe that they can achieve those goals. So I feel
like once we get it started, it will--it will change the
trajectory of what we are trying to do. So I appreciate your
commitment to seeing that through.
Secretary Barrett, I will start with you. You recently
spoke about flat budgets being a reality the Department must
face and that your OSD leadership have made it a priority to
seek the best value for every dollar in the budget. In my own
district, there are valuable resources not fully used, from
empty ramp space, hangars and ops facilities, to talented
citizen airmen that cannot deploy. There is untapped potential
available to meet Air Force needs.
The New Mexico Air National Guard is currently organized
with no aircraft assigned there. And over 300 airmen currently
do not contribute to service readiness recovery efforts. In
fact, more than a third of the airmen assigned to the 150th
Special Operations Wing are in nondeployable billets with zero
operational requirements. This issue has limited the New Mexico
Air National Guard in developing the future commanders needed
to lead the wing, and forced our State to look to other States
to fill these roles.
Given your role in organizing, supplying, equipping, and
training our brave airmen, what efforts are being made to
identify Guard and Reserve capabilities that are currently
underutilized throughout the Air Force?
Secretary Barrett. Thank you, Ms. Haaland, for that
comment. And let me just say on your first point that I am
flanked by two people who really do care about people's
capability, rather than whether it is what gender or what color
people are. They are very--we happen to have leadership that is
very caring and inclusive. So that is a help.
Ms. Haaland. Yes.
Secretary Barrett. On the topic of Guard utilization, that
is a--I will have to get--take a closer look at it and get back
with you on, especially the New Mexico utilization rates.
[The information referred to can be found in the Appendix
on page 84.]
General Goldfein. And can I just----
Secretary Barrett. May I ask the chief to----
Ms. Haaland. Yes, please.
General Goldfein. Ma'am, I will just tell you that it
should not be lost on you that probably one of the most
important hires that we have made as an Air Force is our
director of Legislative Liaison, who is here, Major General
Select Chris Finerty, who is an Air National Guardsman, who
speaks on behalf of the entire United States Air Force when we
present to you our budget. I have stopped meetings--not many,
because the word got out--I have stopped meetings in the
Pentagon when I looked around and I did not see Lieutenant
General Rice or the director of the Air National Guard or the
commander of the Air Force Reserves in the meeting. We don't
have meetings, especially on budget topics, if they are not in
the room.
And so you have our commitment to ensure that this one Air
Force is going to move forward together.
Ms. Haaland. Thank you. I appreciate that.
And, General Goldfein, I will go next to you. I want to
take a moment to talk about a group of airmen that I know are
near and dear to your heart and your vision for the future of
the Air Force special warfare missions.
As you know, our PJs [Pararescuemen] and combat rescue
officers are elite warriors and the only U.S. force dedicated
to combat search-and-rescue operations. They spend 2 years
completing the rigorous training course after another to earn
the maroon beret and the PJ distinction. They spend the bulk of
that time training at Kirtland Air Force Base, which is also in
my district. We are proud to be the home of the pararescue
school and are eager to see their full campus, including a
suitable range and operations facility, come to fruition.
What is your vision for the future of the special warfare
community and the role of these elite airmen in Joint All-
Domain Operations?
General Goldfein. Well, ma'am, first of all, thanks for
your advocacy for that group. I wouldn't be sitting here today
if it weren't for them. You know, these things they do that
others may live, I am one of them.
So our vision for the future is to ensure them that, quite
frankly, they have what they need to succeed. But not only in
the fight of today and the one we have been in for the last 19
years, but just as importantly, they are doing a lot of
creative thinking right now on what does combat search and
rescue look like in 2030. And it actually brings forward
capabilities that we are doing some exciting work on.
And one of the individuals involved in that is our Chief of
Acquisition, Dr. Will Roper, who is doing some really creative
work building, actually, new industries out there, with
bringing them in for pitch days, and for small business
contracts so we can provide technology very quickly to our
frontline warfighters.
Ms. Haaland. Thank you so much.
And, Chairman, I yield.
Mr. Kim. Thank you.
I am going to turn it over to Mrs. Hartzler. Over to you
for 5 minutes.
Mrs. Hartzler. Great. Thank you very much.
And I want to be the last member of this committee to
certainly wish you well, General Goldfein. It has been an honor
to get to know you, and I appreciate your service, as well as
your wife's and your family's, all this year. So hope that we
will continue to see you and glean from your knowledge into the
future. And I know the men and women and the airmen of Whiteman
Air Force Base have appreciated your support as well.
And, Secretary Barrett and General Raymond, I look forward
to continuing to work with you, and appreciate all of your
service as well.
Wanted to talk about the mix that we discovered last year,
and I supported, of fourth- and fifth-gen aircraft. And I know,
General Goldfein, you had a quote last year, where you said, we
are going to be mixed well in the 2030s of fourth-gen and
fifth-gen fighters, and they complement each other, one plus
one, fourth-gen plus fifth-gen actually equals three fighters,
if they are used correctly, because they each make each other
better. And I certainly agree with that.
However, now that we have seen the new budget, I was
surprised to see a decrease of $300 million and six F-15EX
aircraft that were originally planned to be in this budget. So,
I guess, do you still stand behind last year's comments about
the benefits of both, and could you speak to the justification
for decreasing those aircraft?
General Goldfein. Yes, ma'am, I stand by that a hundred
percent. And we are still committed to--we are committed to the
F-35 program of record, and we are committed to the F-15EX
program as well. A flat budget with 2 percent less spending
capacity requires us to do some trades, and the F-15EX that you
talked about were one of those trades.
Mrs. Hartzler. Okay. Very good. Well, it is not very good,
but I appreciate your explanation.
So one of my other colleagues mentioned a very important
topic, and I know, Secretary Barrett, you weighed in as well,
asked General Goldfein about how important it is that we go
after the suicide problem. And I appreciate your attention to
that. I just wondered if as you are looking at all the
different options, if you are considering faith-based,
nonprofit programs as part of the options for airmen who are in
need of hope and healing. I have been looking at a lot of the
different options to go after this problem, and I have been
very encouraged by a lot of nonprofit organizations out there.
They are doing amazing work with sometimes a hundred percent
success rate for the individuals who go through these programs.
And right now, I don't see those as being integrated into our
military or made available to them. So are you exploring those
options as well?
Secretary Barrett. I will ask the chief to address it.
Mrs. Hartzler. Sure.
General Goldfein. Ma'am, I will tell you what, on this one,
there is no bad idea. We are actually looking--we are looking
everywhere. The Marine Corps has actually had--they have had an
interesting program that we are looking into now as well. And
so as we go after this, and I say it again, suicide is an
adversary, right? It has taken more airmen than any adversary
on the planet.
We are attacking it primarily through engaged leadership at
the unit level. We think that is where it is going to have the
most impact. And so what we are doing with the tools that we
are putting available is making sure at the local level that
they have access to some of these best ideas. I would love to
come by and talk to you about what you are seeing, and see if
we can bring as many of these nonprofits into our businesses as
possible. Because we got to keep it fresh and we got to keep it
personal.
Mrs. Hartzler. Yes, absolutely. And I think holistic, which
these programs encompass, not just the mental and physical
issues, but also the spiritual, or the heart. So, yeah, I look
forward to that discussion.
Wanted to shift a little bit to what I learned last week on
a CODEL out to Beale Air Force Base. And with my colleagues,
Donald Norcross and John Garamendi, we met with the 9th
Reconnaissance Wing and the 12th Reconnaissance Squadron who
fly the Global Hawk, Block 20s and Block 30s. The budget
request this year proposes to divest the entire fleet of Block
20 and Block 30 Global Hawks. So that is 4 and 20 systems,
respectively, as you know. And I am concerned about the ISR
risk that we may be accepting here. Because the Block 20s are
critical communication gateways that are being used
extensively, as you know, in CENTCOM [U.S. Central Command].
The Block 30s are conducting missions in almost every
geographical region of the world.
So would you please elaborate on what is driving this
decision to divest these critical ISR assets, and are there
alternatives that we can use to address this loss in capacity,
and how did you coordinate this decision with the combatant
commands? In 10 seconds.
General Goldfein. Yeah. Thanks, ma'am. So with the
combatant commanders, I will just tell you that this is the
tension that you always see. Combatant command has got about a
2-year problem that they got to fix, and they got real mission.
And I am coming--I am looking at building an Air Force with
Chief Raymond, Air and Space Force for 2030. So that tension is
always there.
We are keeping the U-2 flying. You will see the money in
there to sustain the U-2 flying for high-altitude operations.
It has the size, weight, and power to be able to do even more
things than it is doing today. We are buying capability on the
classified side that I would like to come by and talk to you in
a closed session, that offsets some of the risk.
And perhaps some of the most important work that we are
doing is that every platform, sensor, or weapon that we field
across all the services, not just the Air and Space Force, is a
sensor, is a computer, and if we can connect them together,
with common digital engineering and common data architecture,
we actually get more capacity just by being more--getting more
use out of what we have. All that comes together to be able to
mitigate the risk.
General Raymond. As a combatant commander and a service
chief, I feel that tension every day and I get to write myself
letters and say, why did you do that? Because on the one hat, I
am looking at that near-term risk. On the other hat, we are
looking to build and get to the future faster.
Mrs. Hartzler. Okay. Thank you so much.
Mr. Kim. Great. Thank you.
Well, with no one else lined up for questions, I just
wanted to take this time again to just thank the three of you
for coming out here today. As you can see, a wide range of
issues that we are excited to work with you on. And as someone
who has worked alongside the Air Force for a number of years,
it is just my great honor to continue to do so.
Again, just conclude by saying, General Goldfein, thank you
so much for your service. I know you are going to desperately
miss these types of hearings in your retirement, but I am just
grateful for you coming out one more time and sharing your
knowledge and expertise with us.
With no further business in front of the committee, we are
now adjourned. Thank you.
[Whereupon, at 12:45 p.m., the committee was adjourned.]
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A P P E N D I X
March 4, 2020
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PREPARED STATEMENTS SUBMITTED FOR THE RECORD
March 4, 2020
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[GRAPHICS NOT AVAILABLE IN TIFF FORMAT]
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WITNESS RESPONSES TO QUESTIONS ASKED DURING
THE HEARING
March 4, 2020
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RESPONSE TO QUESTION SUBMITTED BY MS. SPEIER
General Goldfein. The Air Force has and remains committed to
pursuing advanced manufacturing technologies including 3-D printing to
improve readiness and reduce cost. The SecAF stood up the Rapid
Sustainment Office (RSO) July 2018 for this very purpose. We will
continue to push the envelope in 3-D printing during our first Advanced
Manufacturing Olympics virtual event in November 2020, which will focus
on bringing together a broad community from industry, academia, and
government to compete in technical challenges to solve the Air Force's
most significant manufacturing issues, with a heavy focus on 3-D
printing. With specific regard to 3-D printers, the Air Force has 120
large scale printers spread across our depots, flight lines and labs
collectively capable of printing metal, polymer and composite
materials. We leverage these 3-D printers to mitigate spare parts
challenges and to locally manufacture readiness enabling tooling and
fixtures for our depots and flight lines. To date, we have delivered
1,436 parts. In addition, to foster innovation at the level of command
that makes the greatest impact, Squadron Innovation Funds (SIF) are in
place so commanders can tackle their most pressing readiness
challenges. In many cases, Squadron Innovation Funds are being used in
``Spark Cells'' at bases across the Air Force to purchase low lot
production 3-D printers. [See page 45.]
______
RESPONSE TO QUESTION SUBMITTED BY MR. WALTZ
General Raymond. As you correctly assert, our nation's space-based
advantages are at risk. We also recognize it is impossible to
accomplish our space missions alone. Military, civil, and commercial
space cooperation is a critical element of our efforts to organize,
train, equip, and present space forces that will deter adversary action
in space and if necessary, fight and win in that domain. The U.S. Space
Force has a well-established and strong partnership with NASA which
includes routine engagements to establish priorities and areas of
collaboration. NASA's ability to operate in a highly contested
environment is supported by our space domain awareness and assured
access to space efforts. Space domain awareness is the foundation upon
which the Department maintains spaceflight safety, provides indications
and warning, and assesses adversary intentions. The FY21 budget request
continues investment in our new Space Fence radar system which declared
initial operational capability on 27 March 2020. Once fully
operational, Space Fence will improve accuracy and the timely detection
of space threats to assets in space, such as GPS satellites and the
International Space Station. Assured access to space is fundamental to
sustaining our freedom of action in space and the Space Force has taken
the lead in advocating for National Security Space Launch investments
in the FY21 budget request. While our priority remains ensuring the
Nation can launch all national security space payloads, our strategy
includes ensuring this essential element of space power is also
available for civil, commercial, scientific, and exploratory purposes.
An area we see ripe for future collaboration is on developing
responsible norms of behavior for the space domain. Once developed,
these norms will help both NASA and the Space Force operate safely and
effectively in a congested and contested domain. [See page 48.]
______
RESPONSE TO QUESTION SUBMITTED BY MR. BROWN
General Goldfein and General Raymond. Congressman, thank you for
the question. To maintain the Air Force's agility, combat power, and
dominance we must meet hard challenges with creative solutions. A world
of multi-domain operations requires that our rated force (pilots,
combat systems officers, air battle managers, and remotely piloted
aircraft pilots) is diverse and has leaders with a diverse background,
experiences, and thoughts who can see the challenges from different
perspectives. Accessing people from differing backgrounds provides
broader range of tools and knowledge to maintain readiness. The Rated
Diversity Improvement (RDI) Strategy and Action Plan encompass 17
initiatives to improve diversity and inclusion across the rated
lifecycle. The programs tap currently unused resources of potential
recruitment, which could relieve the aircrew manning shortage. Our
accessions team is currently partnering with professional organizations
such as the Organization of Black Aerospace Professionals (OBAP) and
Women in Aviation (WAI) as exclusive partners of the Air Force.
Moreover, we are targeting Historically Black Colleges and Universities
(HBCU) and Hispanic Servicing Institutions (HSI), encouraging students
at these schools to explore aviation programs. ROTC detachments are
emphasizing aviation degrees as well as exposing students to all of the
rated opportunities the Air Force has to offer. The Air Force is
committed to eliminating barriers to rated service for underrepresented
groups (URG). We are assessing the tools we use to select those for
rated service and adjusting these tools in order to eliminate barriers
to rated service. Further, we have developed the Rated Preparation
Program (RPP) which encourages current Air Force officers who have
little or no flying hours the ability to team up with Civil Air Patrol
(CAP) to gain aviation experience with the goal of becoming a rated
officer. These programs, among others (like expanding Junior ROTC and
CAPs outreach to underrepresented groups), helps increase diversity
within the Air Force's rated community, ultimately creating a stronger
force to support national defense needs. We look forward to continuing
to work with you and the committee to build on the success of these
programs. [See page 29.]
______
RESPONSE TO QUESTION SUBMITTED BY MS. HAALAND
Secretary Barrett. The New Mexico Air National Guard's 150th
Special Operations Wing continues to be a vital partner with the Active
Component's 58th Special Operations Wing at Kirtland. The training and
qualification the 150th provides to our Total Force Special Operations
and Rescue aircrews directly impacts the manning and readiness of those
field units. On average, they produce >33% of the combined training
output for three weapons systems with only 20% of the instructor
manning. As we continue to re-design our force to meet the requirements
of the National Defense Strategy, we remain fully committed to
exploring Total Force solutions for any of our operational mission
decisions. [See page 52.]
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QUESTIONS SUBMITTED BY MEMBERS POST HEARING
March 4, 2020
=======================================================================
QUESTIONS SUBMITTED BY MR. CONAWAY
Mr. Conaway. Secretary Barrett, I am concerned about the future of
C-17 Globemaster sustainment. The current sustainment arrangement is a
model program which has delivered 80%+ mission capable rates every year
for more than 20 years, in a true partnership between the contractor
and the air logistics center at Warner Robins. Currently, half or more
of the USAF fleet depot level heavy maintenance is performed by the
depot, with the contractor augmenting and additional heavy maintenance
capabilities in San Antonio, Texas. I understand that the Air Force is
considering a change to the sustainment strategy for C-17 and concluded
a business case analysis last year.
The USAF provided HASC a briefing last year of that analysis that
showed the considered change would have a lower quantitative
performance score than the current sustainment arrangement and why is
USAF contemplating a change they acknowledge will reduce mission
capable rates on a platform that has maintained or exceeded these 80%
rates for more than 20 years. What are the projected mission capable
rates each year for the lifecycle of the aircraft under the
contemplated change? To your knowledge were TRANSCOM and the Guard
meaningfully consulted in the business case analysis? Why does the USAF
believe that moving all USAF fleet depot level heavy maintenance
organic would be cheaper?
Secretary Barrett. In 2019, the Air Force completed a Product
Support Business Case Analysis which suggested that moving more heavy
maintenance from the contractor's maintenance location to the Air
Logistics Complex at Warner Robins could result in $7.2B savings across
the program's life cycle. No changes that would degrade materiel
readiness were considered, as the ground rules for the analysis
required all courses of action must maintain current or improve C-17
virtual fleet performance (USAF and partner fleets). The Air Force's
Air Mobility Command represented the user throughout the Product
Support-Business Case Analysis effort. AMC is the air component of the
U.S. Transportation Command and is responsible for a Total Force effort
to execute Rapid Global Mobility and enable Global Reach missions. The
C-17 program office continues to assess feasibility of implementing any
changes to the system's product support strategy.
______
QUESTIONS SUBMITTED BY MR. LAMBORN
Mr. Lamborn. Space lift is an integral piece of the Space Force's
warfighting architecture. I have a two-part question.
First, understanding the National Security Space Launch Phase 2
program is currently in source selection can you please provide this
committee a status of the acquisition?
Second, do you remain confident this acquisition adequately
provides for the Space Forces launch requirements?
Secretary Barrett and General Raymond. The National Security Space
Launch (NSSL) Phase 2 source selection is scheduled to conclude and
award two requirements contracts in the summer of 2020. We remain
confident this acquisition adequately provides for the Space Force
launch requirements. For the first time in 20 years, the USSF will be
able to meet all NSSL needs through competitively awarded contracts to
commercial launch services.
______
QUESTIONS SUBMITTED BY MR. GRAVES
Mr. Graves. The Air Force is reducing its unmanned capabilities
across the fleet in MQ-9, EQ-4, and RQ-4 assets. These currently
support a great deal of ISR and strike capability, as demonstrated
throughout the last decade and in recent news. These capable assets are
being reduced and removed in apparent favor of manned platforms which
can produce a similar capability across a significantly shorter window.
This shortened window is affected by many human factors--an important
note since approximately 90% of current ISR requests are unmet, and
combatant commanders rely heavily on the current fleet. This intended
plan includes the exposure of human life, which has been evidenced
through the recent EQ-11 crash in Afghanistan; it also incurs greater
costs in flight hour expenses, shutdown of unmanned lines and finality
to any further acquisition, and additional personnel, acquisition,
modernization, lifecycle, engineer, and training costs for replacing
programs.
Given this, I have three questions.
1. How does the Air Force intend to meet the high volume of
requested support from Combatant Commanders with a reduction in the MQ-
9 lines being flown from 70 to 60?
2. How will the MQ-9 continue to fly through the next decade--and
beyond--with no replacement aircraft or support from the industry line,
and what will fill the gap left by mishap aircraft and aircraft
approaching service life limits?
3. How will the department mitigate human factors such as crew day
and the potential for physiological episodes while expanding manned
aviation into areas previously not vulnerable to this factor?
Secretary Barrett and General Raymond. 1. The Air Force decision to
end the 10 Government Owned, Contractor Operated (GOCO) combat lines is
based on reprioritization of capabilities identified in the 2018
National Defense Strategy and Service direction to implement the Next
Generation ISR Dominance Flight Plan. The Next Generation ISR Dominance
Flight Plan ``seeks an integrated, balanced portfolio. To meet the
challenges of a highly contested environment, the future ISR portfolio
will consist of a multi-domain, multi-intelligence, government/
commercial-partnered collaborative sensing grid that utilizes advanced
technology.'' Combatant Command ISR requirements will be addressed
through a mixture of national, airborne, space, OSINT, and other
capabilities in development.
2. The MQ-9A will continue to deliver multi-role capabilities with
the current fleet beyond the FYDP, while the Air Force evaluates how to
deliver the multi-role capabilities for future requirements. At this
time, no platform has been identified to replace the MQ-9A whether
remotely piloted or manned, but the Air Force is exploring options to
replace this capability. Pending Congressional approval, the Air Force
will end MQ-9 aircraft procurement in FY21, with final MQ-9A aircraft
deliveries anticipated in FY24, based on reprioritization of
capabilities identified in the 2018 National Defense Strategy. This
shift in aircraft quantities does not change the Air Force's approach
to addressing the NDS. The FY21 PB maintains a 60 Government-Owned
Government-Operated (GOGO) MQ-9 combat line force structure while it
ends the Government-Owned Contractor-Operated (GOCO) MQ-9 program.
Ending the MQ-9 GOCO program returns those government owned aircraft,
ground stations and support equipment to the MQ-9 Program of Record
(PoR) and reduces MQ-9 PoR out-of-hide maintenance and sustainment
costs.
3. As the USAF looks at replacement capabilities for the MQ-9, the
Next Generation ISR Dominance Flight Plan highlights the ``need to
repurpose and retool traditional ISR capabilities with disruptive
technologies, non-traditional assets, sensors, and a hybrid force of
5th/6th generation capabilities. This will enhance warfighting
capability across the global reach, power and vigilance tenets.'' The
only remotely piloted platform the Air Force is replacing with a manned
platforms in the FY21 budget is outside of the ISR portfolio, where the
Air Force will consolidate the battlefield airborne communications node
(BACN) mixed fleet of EQ-4 and E-11A into a fleet of just E-11A. To do
so, the BACN program is retiring the EQ-4 remotely piloted aircraft in
favor of the E-11A manned platform, which is more suited to the mission
and flies the majority of BACN support today. The typical E-11A sortie
duration is limited to 12 hours or less and they never exceed the 16
hour max crew duty day. To further mitigate the human factor risks
within the BACN program, the USAF outfits the E-11A with cutting-edge
avionics and automation systems to reduce pilot workload. Additionally,
the USAF is emphasizing training to identify and neutralize the human
factor threats. At this time, no platform has been identified to
replace the MQ-9A whether remotely piloted or manned. Furthermore,
there is no planned expansion of manned aviation to replace the RQ-4
Block 30.
Mr. Graves. The Air Force is reducing its unmanned capabilities
across the fleet in MQ-9, EQ-4, and RQ-4 assets. These currently
support a great deal of ISR and strike capability, as demonstrated
throughout the last decade and in recent news. These capable assets are
being reduced and removed in apparent favor of manned platforms which
can produce a similar capability across a significantly shorter window.
This shortened window is affected by many human factors--an important
note since approximately 90% of current ISR requests are unmet, and
combatant commanders rely heavily on the current fleet. This intended
plan includes the exposure of human life, which has been evidenced
through the recent EQ-11 crash in Afghanistan; it also incurs greater
costs in flight hour expenses, shutdown of unmanned lines and finality
to any further acquisition, and additional personnel, acquisition,
modernization, lifecycle, engineer, and training costs for replacing
programs.
a. How does the Air Force intend to meet the high volume of
requested support from Combatant Commanders with a reduction in the MQ-
9 lines being flown from 70 to 60?
b. How will the MQ-9 continue to fly through the next decade--and
beyond--with no replacement aircraft or support from the industry line?
What will fill the gap left by mishap aircraft and aircraft approaching
service life limits?
c. How will the department mitigate human factors such as crew day
and the potential for physiological episodes while expanding manned
aviation into areas previously not vulnerable to this factor?
General Goldfein. 1. The Air Force decision to end the 10
Government Owned, Contractor Operated (GOCO) combat lines is based on
reprioritization of capabilities identified in the 2018 National
Defense Strategy and Service direction to implement the Next Generation
ISR Dominance Flight Plan. The Next Generation ISR Dominance Flight
Plan ``seeks an integrated, balanced portfolio. To meet the challenges
of a highly contested environment, the future ISR portfolio will
consist of a multi-domain, multi-intelligence, government/commercial-
partnered collaborative sensing grid that utilizes advanced
technology.'' Combatant Command ISR requirements will be addressed
through a mixture of national, airborne, space, OSINT, and other
capabilities in development.
2. Pending Congressional approval, the Air Force will end MQ-9
aircraft procurement in FY21, with final MQ-9A aircraft deliveries
anticipated in FY24, based on reprioritization of capabilities
identified in the 2018 National Defense Strategy. At the end of the
FY20 procurement, the Air Force will have on order or in inventory
upward of 350 MQ-9 aircraft to support 60 combat lines, which require
up to 144 aircraft in combat at a time. Based on current requirements
and attrition rates, sufficient aircraft are procured to support
operations through the next decade and into the 2030s. The FY21 PB
reduces 10 combat lines with each requiring 2.4 aircraft. Including
approximately 10 aircraft in reserve, this reduces the Air Force
requirement by 34 aircraft to just below 350 aircraft overall. Despite
the end of aircraft production, we will continue to contract with
industry for sustainment and modification support to ensure sufficient
aircraft availability through the life cycle of the weapon system. The
FY21 PB maintains 60 Government-Owned Government-Operated (GOGO) MQ-9
combat line force structure while it ends the Government-Owned
Contractor-Operated (GOCO) MQ-9 program. Ending the MQ-9 GOCO program
returns those government owned aircraft, ground stations and support
equipment to the MQ-9 Program of Record (PoR) and reduces MQ-9 PoR out-
of-hide maintenance and sustainment costs, supporting a sufficient
fleet size that accounts for aircraft mishaps and aircraft approaching
service life limits.
3. As the USAF looks at replacement capabilities for the MQ-9, the
Next Generation ISR Dominance Flight Plan highlights the ``need to
repurpose and retool traditional ISR capabilities with disruptive
technologies, non-traditional assets, sensors, and a hybrid force of
5th/6th generation capabilities. This will enhance warfighting
capability across the global reach, power and vigilance tenets.'' The
only remotely piloted platform the Air Force is replacing with a manned
platforms in the FY21 budget is outside of the ISR portfolio, where the
Air Force will consolidate the battlefield airborne communications node
(BACN) mixed fleet of EQ-4 and E-11A into a fleet of just E-11A. To do
so, the BACN program is retiring the EQ-4 remotely piloted aircraft in
favor of the E-11A manned platform, which is more suited to the mission
and flies the majority of BACN support today. The typical E-11A sortie
duration is limited to 12 hours or less and they never exceed the 16
hour max crew duty day. To further mitigate the human factor risks
within the BACN program, the USAF outfits the E-11A with cutting-edge
avionics and automation systems to reduce pilot workload. Additionally,
the USAF is emphasizing training to identify and neutralize the human
factor threats. At this time, no platform has been identified to
replace the MQ-9A whether remotely piloted or manned. Furthermore,
there is no planned expansion of manned aviation to replace the RQ-4
Block 30.
______
QUESTIONS SUBMITTED BY MR. VELA
Mr. Vela. The DOD recently reprogrammed $532 million from the Air
Force to the border wall for programs like F-35 Advance Procurement, C-
130J and Light Attack Aircraft. Did the Office of the Secretary of
Defense (OSD) consult with you before the reprogramming, and did you
tell OSD that these funds were in excess of programmatic need? What is
the operation impact to the Air Force as a result?
Secretary Barrett. The Department of the Air Force was consulted
prior to the reprogramming of $532 million from the Air Force in
support of the DHS request for the support along the southern border.
The Department of the Air Force worked with the Department of Defense
to minimize the disruption that would be caused by the reprogramming of
those funds. Providing this support to DHS will not adversely affect
the military preparedness of the Air Force.
Mr. Vela. The DOD recently reprogrammed $532 million from the Air
Force to the border wall for programs like F-35 Advance Procurement, C-
130J and Light Attack Aircraft. Did the Office of the Secretary of
Defense (OSD) consult with you before the reprogramming, and did you
tell OSD that these funds were in excess of programmatic need? What is
the operation impact to the Air Force as a result?
General Goldfein. The Department of the Air Force worked with the
Department of Defense to minimize any potential disruption caused by
the reprogramming of those funds. Providing this support to DHS will
not adversely affect the military preparedness of the Air Force.
Mr. Vela. The Air Force in its 2021 budget cut its Reaper UAV
procurements from 24 last year to zero. This will have a significant
impact on America's UAV industry. Why the drastic change? And what is
your plan to better address combatant commanders' ISR requirements?
General Goldfein. 1. The decision to end MQ-9 aircraft procurement
is based on reprioritization of capabilities identified in the 2018
National Defense Strategy. This shift in aircraft quantities does not
change the Air Force's approach to addressing the NDS. Pending
Congressional approval of the FY21 PB, the MQ-9A production line will
begin shutdown in FY21, with final MQ-9A deliveries expected by FY24.
2. The Air Force continues to pursue our strategy described in the
Next Generation ISR Dominance Flight Plan to better address Combatant
Commander's ISR requirements. This flight plan is our encompassing
strategy about how the service maintains and enhances decisive
advantage amidst the reemergence of great power competition and rapid
technological change in the digital era. Driving the strategy are three
pathways: (1) pursuing disruptive technologies and opportunities; (2)
using multi-role, cross-domain ISR collection capabilities to bolster
readiness and lethality; and (3) investing in the foundational
capabilities of people and partnerships to drive culture change. When
our flight plan was published in Aug 2018, the former Deputy Chief of
Staff for ISR and Cyber Effects Operations, Lt Gen (ret) Jamieson,
clarified that, ``We need to balance our ISR portfolio to meet the
challenges of a highly contested environment. The future will consist
of a multi-domain, multi-intelligence, government/commercial-partnered
collaborative sensing grid. It will be resilient, persistent, and
penetrating to support a range of options across the spectrum of
conflict.''
Mr. Vela. The President recently signed an Executive order
encouraging the Federal Government to be less reliant on GPS. Can you
talk to how Space Force will address this Executive order, specifically
regarding changes in technology? Can you talk to Space Force's current
ability to protect our GPS?
General Raymond. While the Executive Order on Strengthening
National Resilience through Responsible Use of Positioning, Navigation,
and Timing (PNT) Services is specific to the reliance of PNT services
by federal and private sectors, the U.S. Space Force welcomes this
effort to raise the Nation's awareness of the extent to which critical
infrastructure depends on, or is enhanced by, PNT. We support the
Office of Science and Technology Policy's effort to create a national
plan to develop other PNT services independent of GPS while maintaining
our commitment to enable a secure, robust, and resilient PNT
capability. As the U.S. Space Force moves on a path toward building
space combat capability, PNT remains an enduring no-fail mission. We
are engaged in, and the FY21 budget request supports, multiple
modernization efforts that ensure our forces around the globe can
target and defeat threats at ranges that outstrip adversary weapons
while preserving GPS services essential to our economic and American
way of life. These modernized capabilities include new, more powerful
civil and military signals, a cyber-hardened command and control
system, and next generation military GPS user equipment. The U.S. Space
Force also continues to support the Department of Defense in its
defense of GPS's radiofrequency spectrum through appropriate regulatory
bodies and processes. Consistent with the National Security and
National Defense Strategies, the Department of Defense's PNT Strategy
leverages the cornerstone capabilities provided by a modernized GPS,
with diverse additional PNT sources in a modular open-system
integration approach to deliver resilient PNT to the Joint force.
Mr. Vela. How will the Space Force organize to support the
requirements of the combatant commanders? Will Space Force establish
separate component commands, or will Space Force responsibilities fall
under current Air Force component commands?
General Raymond. The U.S. Space Force will present appropriately
organized, trained, and equipped forces to all combatant commands in
accordance with DOD's Global Force Management Implementation Guidance.
Along with members from the other Services, Space Force personnel will
be assigned to U.S. Space Command to ensure critical space capabilities
are integrated and available to all combatant commanders in support of
interoperability and effective Joint operations. Additionally, U.S.
Space Command is developing Integrated Planning Elements (IPEs)
comprised of members from all Armed Forces that will be embedded in
other combatant command staffs. Space Force professionals will be
included in these IPEs allowing our space professionals to be connected
at an operational level to all U.S. warfighting commands, enhancing the
lethality and effectiveness of the Joint Force.
______
QUESTIONS SUBMITTED BY MR. CISNEROS
Mr. Cisneros. The United States created its newest military branch,
the Space Force, in December 2019. The last time the U.S. created a new
military branch was over seven decades ago, the United States Air
Force. Though it is understandable that the organizational construct of
a new military branch will take time to flush out, it is unclear if
there will be a Space Guard and Reserve, separate from the Air Force or
any other existing branch of service. On February 3, 2020, the Air
Force submitted a report to Congress regarding the Space Force
organizational plan, which offered no real clarification on the issue.
My questions are these:
1. Will there be separate Space Guard and Reserve for the newly
created Space Force?
2. If there is to be a Space Guard and Reserve, when can we expect
to see these units chop from their current parent services to the Space
Force?
Secretary Barrett, General Goldfein, and General Raymond. 1. The
Reserve components play a vital role in the Space Total Force team and
remains integral toward providing wartime surge capacity, operational
depth, and seamless support to day-to-day space operations. Air
National Guard and Air Force Reserve units currently conducting space
missions are already aligned and integrated effectively with active
duty units assigned to the Space Force. Over the coming year, the
Department of the Air Force will develop, assess, and propose to
formally integrate capabilities provided by the National Guard and
Reserve into the Space Force. As directed by the FY20 NDAA, we have
assembled a team of Air and Space leaders that includes members of the
Guard, Reserve, active duty, and our civilian experts to look at that
element of our Total Force management strategy. While we have not
presupposed any outcome, we will continue to work with Congress if
changes to existing authorities are required following that analysis by
the Department.
2. As directed by the FY20 NDAA, the Department of the Air Force is
assessing the Total Force construct through a 21st century lens and
developing options for consideration by senior leaders across the
Department of Defense. While we recognize this is a unique opportunity
to consider a clean sheet, it is prudent to provide comprehensive
options for decision-makers, developing and analyzing a Space
organizational structure for the Guard and Reserve. We will inform
Congress once our analysis is complete, and submit a proposal to
Congress no earlier than the FY22 legislative cycle if changes to
existing authorities are required.
______
QUESTIONS SUBMITTED BY MR. MITCHELL
Mr. Mitchell. Secretary Barrett, can you detail the discussions
taking place within the Air Force about community opposition and
support for the Air National Guard F-35 Ops 5 & 6 basing decision? Are
you considering downstream effects on the readiness and training
opportunities for that F-35 squadron?
Secretary Barrett. I am aware of comments received from the public,
both in opposition to, and in support of, the F-35A Ops 5&6 basing
actions. The 30-day ``wait period'' for Final Environmental Impact
Statement (EIS) has ended. I weighed the results of the EIS and public
input, and considered the operational needs of the Air Force and costs
to our service in selecting the appropriate location for these
squadrons. I have decided Truax Field, Wisconsin is Ops 5; Dannelly
Field, Alabama is Ops 6.
Mr. Mitchell. Secretary Barrett, when can the committee expect a
final announcement from the Air Force about the Air National Guard F-35
Ops 5 & 6 basing decision?
Secretary Barrett. The F-35A Ops 5&6 strategic basing final
decisions are complete. Truax Field, Wisconsin is Ops 5; Dannelly
Field, Alabama is Ops 6.
Mr. Mitchell. Secretary Barrett, can you detail how the Air Force
is comparing and contrasting the availability of training airspace in
the Air National Guard F-35 Ops 5 & 6 basing decision? In the Final
Environmental Impact Statement, it appears that the Air Force is simply
ranking the training airspace as adequate or not. Is that an accurate
statement? Alpena Special Use Airspace, for example, offers a
substantially larger area and more diverse conditions for training
compared to other airspaces.
Secretary Barrett. The Air Force Strategic Basing Process assessed,
amongst many factors, the availability and quality of training airspace
utilizing an operational perspective to conduct a detailed analysis on
how well each location could meet the F-35's Ready Aircrew Program
(RAP) training requirements. The training airspaces near each base were
quantified based on size, altitudes, availability, and proximity. Taken
together, this did not result in a single pass/fail grade; rather, it
was a comparative assessment of how well each location could meet the
operational mission. The Final Environmental Impact Statement (EIS) did
not rank training airspace. The EIS assessment is focused on potential
environmental effects from a potential basing decision at each
location. The mission capabilities are assessed and evaluated in the
broader Strategic Basing Process described above.
______
QUESTIONS SUBMITTED BY MR. SCOTT
Mr. Scott. Do you intend to issue a recommended reading list like
some of the other service chiefs?
General Raymond. Yes. Each fall the Chief of Staff of the Air Force
publishes a reading list intended to develop a common frame of
reference among Airmen throughout the Department of the Air Force. The
current list, developed by General David L. Goldfein, includes several
recommendations of particular interest to Space Force professionals
that I intend to build upon. We are currently coordinating our efforts
within the Department to develop a Chief of Space Operations' Reading
List that will coincide with the release of The Air Force Chief of
Staff Reading List in the fall of 2020.
Mr. Scott. As you stand up the United States Space Force, what can
be done now to set it up for success and avoid the Space Force becoming
a ``hollow force'' in the future?
General Raymond. Proper initial resourcing: The Air Force submitted
the first ever separate budget request for space as part of the FY21
President's Budget cycle, identifying approximately $15.4B of
transferred funding from across the DOD to resource the Space Force.
With this budget request, the Air Force transferred all funding
associated with space missions and functions to the Space Force,
ensuring the new Armed Force was resourced to perform its mission.
Future funding tailored to threats: Moving forward, the Space Force
must have stable and consistent funding to enable it to address growing
threats in the space domain. The Space Force is committed to minimizing
cost and bureaucracy, but its end strength and budget should reflect
rising threats from our adversaries. Having an independent budget will
allow us to continue to advocate for DOD resources so we can protect
and defend the space domain. Consolidation of space capabilities from
across DOD: Establishment of the Space Force represents a once-in-a-
generation opportunity to address long-standing challenges associated
with fractured and disparate space architectures and capabilities. The
Secretary of Defense has made it clear his vision is to consolidate the
preponderance of space forces of all armed forces into the Space Force
to address these challenges. To realize his vision, the Office of the
Secretary of Defense is leading a study, with Army, Navy, and Space
Force participation, to identify the missions, functions, and units
that should transfer to the new service from across DOD.
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