[House Hearing, 117 Congress]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office]
[H.A.S.C. No. 117-11]
INVESTING IN AN
ORGANIC INDUSTRIAL BASE
TO SUPPORT
SERVICE MODERNIZATION PLANS
__________
HEARING
BEFORE THE
SUBCOMMITTEE ON READINESS
OF THE
COMMITTEE ON ARMED SERVICES
HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES
ONE HUNDRED SEVENTEENTH CONGRESS
FIRST SESSION
__________
HEARING HELD
MARCH 19, 2021
[GRAPHIC NOT AVAILABLE IN TIFF FORMAT]
__________
U.S. GOVERNMENT PUBLISHING OFFICE
48-483 WASHINGTON : 2023
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SUBCOMMITTEE ON READINESS
JOHN GARAMENDI, California, Chairman
JOE COURTNEY, Connecticut DOUG LAMBORN, Colorado
JACKIE SPEIER, California JOE WILSON, South Carolina
JASON CROW, Colorado AUSTIN SCOTT, Georgia
ELISSA SLOTKIN, Michigan, Vice JACK BERGMAN, Michigan
Chair MIKE JOHNSON, Louisiana
JARED F. GOLDEN, Maine MARK E. GREEN, Tennessee
ELAINE G. LURIA, Virginia LISA C. McCLAIN, Michigan
KAIALI'I KAHELE, Hawaii BLAKE D. MOORE, Utah
MARILYN STRICKLAND, Washington
Melanie Harris, Professional Staff Member
Ian Bennitt, Professional Staff Member
Sean Falvey, Clerk
C O N T E N T S
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Page
STATEMENTS PRESENTED BY MEMBERS OF CONGRESS
Garamendi, Hon. John, a Representative from California, Chairman,
Subcommittee on Readiness...................................... 1
Lamborn, Hon. Doug, a Representative from Colorado, Ranking
Member, Subcommittee on Readiness.............................. 3
WITNESSES
Galinis, VADM William J., USN, Commander, Navy Sea Systems
Command........................................................ 7
Gamble, LTG Duane A., USA, Deputy Chief of Staff................. 4
Kirkland, Lt Gen Donald E., USAF, Commander, Air Force
Sustainment Center............................................. 10
Peters, VADM G. Dean, USN, Commander, Naval Air Systems Command.. 8
Shrader, MajGen Joseph F., USMC, Commanding General, Marine Corps
Logistics Command.............................................. 12
APPENDIX
Prepared Statements:
Galinis, VADM William J., joint with VADM G. Dean Peters..... 50
Gamble, LTG Duane A.......................................... 43
Kirkland, Lt Gen Donald E.................................... 61
Lamborn, Hon. Doug........................................... 41
Shrader, MajGen Joseph F..................................... 72
Documents Submitted for the Record:
[There were no Documents submitted.]
Witness Responses to Questions Asked During the Hearing:
[The information was not available at the time of printing.]
Questions Submitted by Members Post Hearing:
Ms. Strickland............................................... 83
.
INVESTING IN AN ORGANIC INDUSTRIAL BASE
TO SUPPORT SERVICE MODERNIZATION PLANS
----------
House of Representatives,
Committee on Armed Services,
Washington, DC, Friday, March 19, 2021.
The subcommittee met, pursuant to call, at 11:02 a.m., via
Webex, Hon. John Garamendi (chairman of the subcommittee)
presiding.
OPENING STATEMENT OF HON. JOHN GARAMENDI, A REPRESENTATIVE FROM
CALIFORNIA, CHAIRMAN, SUBCOMMITTEE ON READINESS
Mr. Garamendi. Good morning, all. Ladies and gentlemen, I
call to order this hearing of the Readiness Subcommittee of the
House Armed Services Committee.
First, let's get the administrative details out of the way.
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Now, I think all of us have heard that, not with my
annotated version. But with that out of the way, a couple of
other administrative things. I was telling our participants
that we do have votes this morning, a series of votes, three of
them. I am going to recess this hearing at 11:45 and recommence
at 12:15. That allows all of the members to stay with us until
11:45, go to the floor, cast the vote, wait around a few
moments, cast a vote on the final bill, and then return to the
hearing.
So at 11:45, we will break, recess, and then return at
12:15. The members can then carry on their responsibilities on
the floor and return to their responsibilities with the
hearing.
So with that said, so with those instructions out of the
way, I will read my opening statement.
The Department of Defense organic industrial base, which
includes military services' depots, arsenals, shipyards, is a
critical part of our national defense security enterprise.
These facilities are essential for maintaining the complex
ships, aircraft, and land systems of the joint force. The
organic industrial base must be postured to support today's
requirements, while remaining agile enough to respond to
mobilization, national emergencies, and ever-changing
platforms.
I have significant concerns about the organic industrial
base's aging infrastructure and the capacity of these
facilities to sustain the next generation of weapon systems and
support surge requirements.
The Government Accountability Office [GAO] has found that
more than half of the DOD's [Department of Defense's]
industrial base facilities are in poor conditions, including
all four public shipyards. While the Navy has developed an
ambitious Shipyard Infrastructure Optimization Program [SIOP],
which I understand they are about to change the name of, which
would recapitalize the public shipyards over 20 years at a cost
of some $21 billion, I am concerned that the Navy will not
dedicate the necessary resources to prioritize this effort and
that the 20-year time horizon is very long and probably too
long to support a very changing fleet.
The other services' infrastructure modernization plans are
in various stages of maturity, and I look forward to hearing
about the status of these plans. As with the Navy's shipyards
plan, these will require senior leadership commitment and
sustained resources, resources meaning money and attention, to
reach completion.
Even as we look towards modernizing our facilities and
equipment to support the next generation of weapon systems, we
continue to rely on legacy platforms that will be serving well
past their intended life cycles. I am concerned that overly
optimistic timelines for fielding new platforms leaves the
organic industrial base insufficiently prepared to service
these legacy systems. As a result, the services pay a premium
for old technology that is less capable, not fuel efficient,
dependent on limited network of suppliers, and rely on obsolete
manufacturing processes.
Amidst all of our modernization efforts, we cannot neglect
to plan, resource, and implement the solutions needed to ensure
our legacy equipment is available and safe for use.
I am going to just add to the statement here. I am very,
very concerned that when we bring new equipment and platforms
on, we are not planning properly for their ongoing maintenance.
Finally, a strong workforce is also essential to the
success or failure of the depot enterprise. The Federal civil
servants working on these facilities across the globe
contribute unique skill sets that we cannot afford to lose. We
must ensure that we can hire, train the next generation in a
timely fashion, give them protection and rights they deserve
for their services.
Congress has granted various flexibilities to permit more
timely hiring of qualified personnel and to better compete with
the private sector. We must continue our oversight of these
authorities to ensure that they are efficient, effective, and
they uphold the competitive and merit-based principles that are
a function and foundation of the civil service.
Finally, the past year has revealed unforeseen challenges
for the organic industrial base, from pandemic preparedness to
supply chains' fragility. I look forward to hearing from our
panel about how the organic industrial base is adapting to
solve these and other questions.
George Washington said that to be prepared for war is one
of the most effective means of preserving the peace. And
credible deterrence is indeed a central focus of the Readiness
Subcommittee. A healthy organic industrial base is essential to
our preparedness. I look forward to discussing how we can
strengthen this key pillar of readiness today.
So, with that, I looked at the screen a moment ago, and
there is my friend Doug Lamborn. I turn it over to you, Doug.
Doug, your staff has instructions about the break that we will
be taking at 12:15.
So go ahead, Doug.
STATEMENT OF HON. DOUG LAMBORN, A REPRESENTATIVE FROM COLORADO,
RANKING MEMBER, SUBCOMMITTEE ON READINESS
Mr. Lamborn. Very good. Okay. Well, thank you, Chairman
Garamendi. I want to thank all of our witnesses for being here
today and for their testimony and service.
The organic industrial base is a vital and important part
of our readiness and, ultimately, our national security. The
talented men and women who work in our Nation's depots,
arsenals, shipyards, and logistics complexes ensure that our
warfighters have the equipment that they need when they need it
and that it works as designed, equipment that is more often
than not well beyond its service life but still performing
vital missions.
As our Nation started to feel the impacts of COVID-19
[coronavirus disease 2019] this time last year, the organic
industrial base also began tackling how to fulfill their
mission while protecting the workforce. Each of the services
dealt differently with the problem of touch labor that couldn't
be conducted from home. And I look forward to hearing from each
of our witnesses what they learned and how they are
incorporating these lessons into their planning going forward.
COVID also highlighted that this workforce is aging. These
are highly skilled artisans with years of experience. I would
like to hear both--from both of you how you are using your
authorities to help hire and train the next--excuse me--I would
like to hear both how you are using your authorities to help
hire and train the next generation and also what we can do to
help you be innovative in this area.
We need to explore different ways to increase the supply of
young people joining the skilled labor market to meet these
growing demands. Not everyone needs a 4-year college degree,
but the Nation needs more men and women working in skilled
trades.
Another issue we see across the services is infrastructure
that is not being invested in to maintain the current workload
or prepare for modern systems or modern practices. Too often
these are areas that the services have taken budget risks,
leaving us with facilities and utilities that were built over
50 years ago.
The Navy has a particularly acute problem in this area. The
GAO has assessed that all four public shipyards are in poor or
failing condition, with too few functional dry docks. Just last
year, the Navy decided to scrap the fire-ravaged Bonhomme
Richard, at least partially, due to the lack of dry dock space
needed to repair it. That we have so little trade space when it
comes to the schedule should be concerning to us all.
In response to these concerns, the Navy has put forward the
Shipyard Infrastructure Optimization Program, or S-I-O-P, SIOP,
to invest $21 billion into the public shipyards' aging dry
docks, equipment, and infrastructure. I look forward to seeing
this year's budget and the resources that the Navy is
committing to this area, because without real dollars, we can't
make the progress needed.
Finally, I would like to hear from the witnesses how you
are managing your sustainment planning. While this committee
has certainly talked about how it impacts carryover, and that
is something we are still interested in, it also touches
everything from training to budgets to hiring. Unfortunately,
there aren't many easy answers here, but I know the chairman
and I are both committed to working with you all to ensure that
the organic industrial base has what it needs to continue to
support our men and women in uniform.
With that, Mr. Chairman, I yield back.
Mr. Garamendi. Thank you, Mr. Lamborn.
I will now turn to our witnesses. Your written testimony is
available to all the members and, without objection, will be
part of the record. So ordered.
We will now start with Lieutenant General Duane Gamble,
Deputy Chief of Staff, G-4, United States Army.
General.
STATEMENT OF LTG DUANE A. GAMBLE, USA, DEPUTY CHIEF OF STAFF,
G-4, UNITED STATES ARMY
General Gamble. Chairman Garamendi, Ranking Member Lamborn,
and distinguished members of the subcommittee, thank you for
the opportunity to testify today on the Army's organic
industrial base. Your support of our OIB [organic industrial
base], of Army regiments, and all Army initiatives is
absolutely critical to our success.
As we described last May in my virtual update to your
subcommittee, we have stayed on track with all our initiatives
despite the COVID-19 operating environment. As we continue to
operate in this environment, the execution of our mission and
the safety of our workforce has been our top two priorities.
At the outset of COVID, we immediately implemented CDC
[Centers for Disease Control and Prevention] guidelines for all
our facilities. We maximized the use of personal protective
equipment, and we placed high-risk personnel on administrative
or weather and safety leave. These actions helped our workforce
stay safe but, as importantly, helped our depots and arsenals
continue to produce readiness for our Army and our Nation. At
no time during the pandemic did any of our facilities shut
down.
In fiscal year 2021, our OIB plans to execute over $8
billion of work to sustain and modernize weapon systems across
our Army and across the other services, as well as to support
Foreign Military Sales [FMS]. And to complete that work, our
facilities will work approximately 14 million direct labor
hours this year.
I would just like to compare that 14 million to the
workload levels of 2002 and 2003, which were the front end of
our war on terror. That [inaudible] direct labor hours that we
plan this year is down from a wartime peak of 30 million direct
labor hours.
And so my point there is just to tell you that it is
cyclical, the workload in our depots, but every direct labor
hour is very important to maintain in the skills we need and
our artisan workforce and the readiness our Army and our
country needs. We believe this workload will preserve current
fleet readiness and help modernize our weapon systems to get
modern equipment to our units today.
As you know, the work that is funded but not executed at
the end of the fiscal year is defined as carryover. And since I
first briefed this subcommittee in November of 2019, we have
worked with the Office of the Secretary of Defense [OSD] and
the other services to deliver--to develop and hopefully deliver
a carryover calculation pilot program which is pending final
approval from the Office of the Secretary of Defense, that
would allow us, the Army, to exclude material from our
calculation.
The simple reason for that is the Army's enterprise
resource planning system, our ERP, employs generally accepted
accounting principles [inaudible], but, unfortunately, that
same ERP artificially inflates the Army's carryover by
including the value of the repair parts that we have invested
in to produce the readiness in our depots. The other services
do not have that challenge.
Excluding repair parts, today, the Army has 6.22 months of
carryover, right above the OSD threshold of 6 months of
carryover. That, for comparison, is down from just a year ago
when it was 10 months of carryover. But if we were to look
through the lens of the current calculation, it would be
interpreted as 8 to 9 months of carryover. But, again, if we
were to put apples-to-apples comparison with the other
services, we would have of 6.22 months of carryover.
Carryover is absolutely paramount to bridging
appropriations, to help and smooth workflow, and to keep our
artisans hard at work building readiness across our Army.
At the same time we execute our workload, the Army and our
OIB must modernize for the future. And, chairman and ranking
member, you both talked about the importance of the
modernization of our OIB. And as I testified to this committee
before, we have World War II era facilities, and many of them
are outdated for today's requirement, let alone the needs of
the future forces you described, chairman.
We spent more than $3 billion since 2009 to upgrade our
facilities and infrastructure and operating environment, to
include building a new nitrocellulose facility in Radford Army
Ammunition Plant, one of our single points of success or
failure, depending on how we look at that. We are also working
a new nitric acid facility at Holston Army Ammunition Plant.
Both create a safer and more productive environment for our
employees and for readiness.
In fiscal year 2021 alone, we are executing $800 million to
make essential improvements and upgrades to our depots,
arsenals, and ammo plants. The OIB has a long road, however, to
becoming fully modernized, a fully modernized industrial base,
but we are actively working to that end state, and we are
executing the plan that I briefed this committee on in November
2019.
While we execute that plan, we continue to update the plan
to keep pace with modern technology. And as we modernize our
Army, we must ensure we modernize the OIB and the workforce,
and that the workforce is highly trained and on the cutting
edge of technology.
Ranking Member Lamborn, you mentioned in your opening
comments about the average age of the OIB workforce across the
Department of Defense. I am happy to report the average age in
the Army is now 46 years old across our whole industrial base.
That is a rejuvenated workforce, just in the last few years,
and the authority we used to do that was granted by this
committee. It is the direct hiring authority that we put to
good use, bringing the average age of the workforce down. Those
22,000 skilled employees operating across our depots, arsenals,
and ammo plants are absolutely the backbone of our country's
readiness for the next war and our OIB.
As you know, the Army's OIB is [inaudible] COVID-19. I
believe that is a testament to the dedication of our workforce
and their commitment to our Army and our country.
Key pieces of our workforce modernization plan are our
partnerships with private corporations, our partnerships with
universities, and our partnerships with technical colleges and
technical programs in our high schools to provide skills and
technological training and to connect with a talent pool to
help us recruit the future workforce.
In closing, I would like to thank you and all the
distinguished members of this committee, not only for your
support to our OIB, your continued oversight of our execution,
but for your service to our country. Our Army continues to
execute workload, improve our infrastructure facilities, and
develop and employ a highly talented workforce. We seek your
continued support and partnership in each of these areas to
achieve the modernized OIB that the future of our Army and the
future of our country depends upon. And I look forward to your
questions.
[The prepared statement of General Gamble can be found in
the Appendix on page ?.]
Mr. Garamendi. Thank you very much, General.
I will now turn to Vice Admiral William Galinis, Commander,
Navy Sea Systems Command.
Admiral, your turn.
STATEMENT OF VADM WILLIAM J. GALINIS, USN, COMMANDER, NAVAL SEA
SYSTEMS COMMAND, DEPARTMENT OF THE NAVY
Admiral Galinis. Chairman Garamendi, Ranking Member
Lamborn, distinguished lawmakers, thank you for the opportunity
to appear before you today to discuss our organic industrial
base within the Navy.
As this committee knows, the Navy has been executing the
Shipyard Infrastructure Optimization Program since 2018. The
SIOP will deliver the shipyards our Navy and our Nation needs
by upgrading and expanding principally our dry dock capacity,
but also optimizing and improving our infrastructure and
workflow within the shipyards, as well as recapitalizing
obsolete equipment. When completed, our shipyards will be ready
to service our fleet for generations to come.
Our written testimony provides a glimpse and some detail
into the SIOP highlights and the ongoing work. And overall,
while I am generally pleased with the progress we have made to
date, I will tell you we have much to do. And I, along with you
and many of your colleagues, want us and need us to move
faster.
To that end, I have challenged the SIOP Program Office to
find ways to accelerate this execution timeline, and I look
forward to sharing that information with the committee in the
future as we come through this effort.
While SIOP addresses the needed physical changes required
in our public yards to keep our submarines and aircraft
carriers in the fight, more work is required. We need to become
more accurate and more efficient at our planning and the
execution of our depot level availabilities for our submarines
and aircraft carriers.
Finally, we need to continue to build on our talented and
dedicated workforce that we have within our public shipyards.
I will tell you in no uncertain terms, we need now to
expand the productive capacity of our naval shipyards or we run
the risk of not being able to perform the required maintenance
or repair work for our nuclear power fleet, principally our
submarines and aircraft carriers, a decade from now. To do
this, we have taken a page out of the NAVAIR [Naval Air Systems
Command] playbook and their successful execution of the Naval
Sustainment System-Aviation in an effort to support our naval
aviation enterprise.
Leveraging the Navy's Performance-to-Plan effort that you
have heard about led by our chief of naval operations and our
vice chief, we have stood up our own Naval Sustainment System-
Shipyard [NSS-SY]. And like NSS-Aviation, NSS-Shipyard combines
the extensive use of data and data analytics. It targets areas
of opportunity with transparency to highlight key problems to
improve our outcomes. We are committed to doing this with a
sense of urgency across our enterprise.
The NSS-Shipyard is a significant departure from our
previous practices. Leveraging the best commercial practices,
we are incorporating these into our shipyards and embracing a
new culture built on honest assessments, informed by data, and
coupled with a bias toward action and a sense of urgency to
drive process improvements.
NSS-Shipyard is still in its formative phase, but when you
combine it with SIOP and a talented and trained workforce, our
Navy will have the organic maintenance and repair capability
capacity now and in the future to support our submarine and
aircraft carrier fleet to fight and to win in this area of
great power competition.
And while the work we are doing in our shipyards is a key
effort, there is much more we are doing to prove our ability to
generate readiness and sustain our force, including approving
our planning and execution process, addressing material
availability issues, expanding our use of condition-based
maintenance, working to improve access to critical technical
data.
I look forward to discussing this and many other topics
with you. And, again, I thank you for this opportunity to
appear before the committee, and I look forward to your
questions.
Thank you, sir.
[The joint prepared statement of Admiral Galinis and
Admiral Peters can be found in the Appendix on page ?.]
Mr. Garamendi. Thank you very much, Admiral.
We will now turn to Vice Admiral Dean Peters, Commander of
the Naval Air Systems Command.
So, Admiral Peters.
STATEMENT OF VADM G. DEAN PETERS, USN, COMMANDER, NAVAL AIR
SYSTEMS COMMAND, DEPARTMENT OF THE NAVY
Admiral Peters. Good morning, Mr. Chairman, Ranking Member
Lamborn, distinguished members. Thank you for the opportunity
to discuss naval aviation and the health of our organic
industrial base.
Since day one in command, the NAVAIR industrial workforce
and infrastructure have been my top priority, and I look
forward to updating you on our progress.
In conjunction with the Air Boss, Vice Admiral Whitesell,
and the Deputy Commandant for Aviation, Lieutenant General
Wise, we are systematically stabilizing naval aviation
readiness for both the present and long term. And we have made
significant progress in fiscal year 2019 and fiscal year 2020,
increasing fleet mission capable rates by over 14 percent. That
is an additional 330 mission capable aircraft for air crew
training and operations.
A critical component, of course, is our organic maintenance
capability, both intermediate level and depot level
maintenance. This organic industrial base, typically called
aviation depots, are known as Fleet Readiness Centers, or FRCs,
in naval aviation, which I think is a more apt description.
During a virtual roundtable with this subcommittee last
May, I described a recovery plan for production impacts due to
COVID-19, which had temporarily reduced our workforce, and it
also resulted in numerous material shortfalls. I am pleased to
report that through the efforts of Commander, Fleet Readiness
Centers, NAVSUP [Naval Supply Systems Command], DLA [Defense
Logistics Agency], and, most importantly, each of the FRCs, we
were able to exceed production requirements for aircraft and
components and came within 1 percent on engines. This was done
while adding capabilities, like the F-5 heavy line, and while
expanding capacity, such as on our T-6 line.
Financially, we exceeded revenue targets for fiscal year
2020, and made a very positive contribution to the Navy Working
Capital Fund. Our allocation of CARES [Coronavirus Aid, Relief,
and Economic Security Act] funding that associated with COVID-
19-related costs was critical, and we thank this committee for
their support.
In short, in spite of unprecedented challenges, fiscal year
2020 was one of our best production years in recent memory.
Most importantly, all fleet aircraft components and engine
depot requirements were met, and all in-service repairs were
expeditiously completed around the globe as the Navy and the
Marine Corps maintained a very high operational tempo. I could
not be more proud of our FRCs and the resilience of our
workforce.
Speaking of our people, we continue to invest in their
quality of life and training. First, in their working
conditions, we are at historically low safety incidents. Next,
in their digital competence, as we transform our production
flow to electronic work packages. We are also continuing the
National Apprenticeship Program, with 270 apprentices currently
onboard.
In general, the Department of the Navy continues to
prioritize investments in our industrial capabilities and
capacity. This is informed by the FRC Infrastructure
Optimization Report, or FIOP, and that identifies sustainment
requirements, it identifies capital investments for machinery
and equipment, and military construction needs.
These investments are especially critical for repair of
newer aircraft, such as E-2D, H-53K, and F-35, as they require
specialized paint, composite repair, advanced propulsion
repair, and enhanced security.
On the shop floors and production lines, we are building on
the reforms that began for Super Hornet in fiscal year 2019. We
are replicating those across all type/model/series, including
E-2D, H-60, P-8, and V-22 this year.
We are also making progress on quality, significantly
reducing quality escapes.
In addition, we are establishing a data environment to
connect all aspects of sustainment, including reliability,
product integrity, and maintenance. In this regard, our repair
capabilities and our supply chain effectiveness would be
greatly enhanced by better access to technical data commonly
available to commercial aviation operators and repair
facilities.
To close, naval aviation leadership looks forward to
working with this subcommittee and the larger Congress to
strengthen our organic infrastructure. We very much appreciate
your continued support of our sailors and Marines. And I look
forward to your questions.
Thank you, sir.
Mr. Garamendi. Thank you very much, Admiral.
I see several of my colleagues from the committee are on
now. We are going to break in 15 minutes with a recess and then
return at 12:15 so that we could cast a vote on the current
vote and vote on the last vote while we are still at the
Chamber. So heads up, 15 minutes from now, we will break for
half an hour.
Okay. Let's turn now to Lieutenant General Kirkland,
Commander, Air Force Sustainment Center.
General Kirkland.
STATEMENT OF LT GEN DONALD E. KIRKLAND, USAF, COMMANDER, AIR
FORCE SUSTAINMENT CENTER, DEPARTMENT OF THE AIR FORCE
General Kirkland. Chairman Garamendi, Ranking Member
Lamborn, distinguished members of the subcommittee, I
appreciate the opportunity to update you on the Air Force's
organic industrial base.
On behalf of our Acting Secretary, the Honorable John P.
Roth, and our Chief of Staff, General Charles Q. Brown, thank
you for your continued support and demonstrated commitment to
our military and civilian airmen, families, and veterans.
As you will attest in my written statement, the United
States Air Force relies upon a strong organic industrial base
to deliver air power in support of the National Defense
Strategy. We are proud of the capabilities our Air Force brings
to the OIB. Our logistics enterprise effectively uses existing
infrastructure across our three depots and two supply chain
wings to provide cost-effective readiness for a range of weapon
systems.
Since my last update to the subcommittee in 2019, we
accepted the first KC-46 Pegasus refueling aircraft for its
initial depot maintenance at Tinker Air Force Base. We continue
to expand F-35 Joint Strike Fighter aircraft depot maintenance
at our Ogden Logistics Complex, and F-35 avionic repair at
Warner Robins in Middle Georgia.
Looking ahead, our team is preparing for depot support to
the B-21 Raider and Ground Based Strategic Deterrent [GBSD]
weapon system.
We continue to address readiness and sustainment challenges
driven by legacy weapon systems and aging infrastructure
footprint and a Federal workforce hiring process that is
improving but not yet conducive to supporting today's
environment. As detailed in our organic industrial base report,
we are structuring our optimization plan over the next 20
years, along with a three-pronged investment strategy: Keep Up,
Catch Up, and Leap Ahead.
Through a combination of our capital investment program and
new mission military construction, the Air Force has invested
more than $2 billion during the previous 4 fiscal years to
maintain and improve depot infrastructure and equipment. These
service investments exceeded the minimum 6 percent threshold
and were focused on the Keep Up requirements, while targeting
specific advanced technologies and concepts to modernize depot
capacity and capability.
We will continue to collaborate within the sustainment
enterprise to incorporate, expand, and involve use of advanced
manufacturing processes and tools across our organic depots and
benefit from predictive analytics.
Responding to COVID-19 challenges highlighted the
importance of understanding supply chain risks to depot
operations and mission readiness. Over the past year, we have
relied on our supply chain management lead's ability to detect
and forecast supplier impacts, allowing us to pursue alternate
sources and make risk-informed depot prioritization decisions.
Our initial response to COVID is a combination of intense
safety mitigations, targeted telework, and placing high-risk
personnel on weather and safety administrative leave. To meet
production requirements, however, we began a return to full
capacity of mission central employees in May and completed that
by July.
We see a positive trend in our workforce demographics. The
current age of the Air Force Sustainment Center workforce is
44.5 years. This is down 1 year in age from 2018 and is a solid
3 years lower than the overall Air Force civilian employee
average.
Looking at STEM [science, technology, engineering, and
mathematics] workforce, our software enterprise, which now
comprises 4,600 personnel, ranges from 39 years old to 42 years
old average across our 3 air logistics complexes.
As we continue to respond to the ongoing pandemic, our top
priority remains the health and safety of our workforce, while
balancing mission readiness. Unsurprisingly, COVID aggravated a
variety of ongoing challenges with depot production across our
enterprise. We continue to institutionalize new workplace
arrangements to protect our workforce. Our union teammates have
been a strong partner on this journey.
Regarding civilian workforce hiring and development, we
greatly benefit from the tools provided by direct and expedited
hiring authorities to stay competitive with our defense
industry peers. Thank you for providing these authorities and
your consideration to make them permanent.
In every instance of crisis, the defense organic industrial
base provides solutions to anticipated demands. The Air Force
will continue to need Congress' help with investments to
posture for increasingly sophisticated and contested battle
space. Our chief of staff has made clear, we either accelerate
change or lose. Consistent, reliable, and predictable funding
is key to sustaining Air Force readiness and safety and to
guarantee our service's ability to fly, fight, and win.
Thank you, chairman and ranking member. I look forward to
your questions.
[The prepared statement of General Kirkland can be found in
the Appendix on page ?.]
Mr. Garamendi. Thank you very much, General Kirkland.
We now turn to Major General Joseph Shrader, Commanding
General, Marine Corps Logistics Command.
General Shrader.
STATEMENT OF MAJGEN JOSEPH F. SHRADER, USMC, COMMANDING
GENERAL, MARINE CORPS LOGISTICS COMMAND, UNITED STATES MARINE
CORPS
General Shrader. Good morning. Chairman Garamendi, Ranking
Member Lamborn, and distinguished members of this subcommittee,
I appreciate the opportunity to provide you an update on our
efforts to modernize the Marine Corps' organic industrial base.
In November 2019, I shared with this subcommittee the
Marine Corps' plan to modernize its organic industrial base.
The plan is comprised of three phases and is executed over a
25-year period. It calls for a combination of improvements to
the existing manufacturing processes, introduces new
technologies, and adds new facilities and infrastructure.
To date, we have completed three of the first phase major
military construction projects. These state-of-the-art
facilities provide much needed combat vehicle storage and
capacity, which is critical OIB infrastructure.
Another critical component of our modernization effort is
naval logistics integration. Initiatives such as our ongoing
migration of our Navy Working Capital Fund activities to the
Navy Enterprise Resource Planning system and industrial supply
integration with the Defense Logistics Agency are examples of
such joint force enabling efforts.
Also, as a DOD-selected 5G test site, we are working with
OSD to develop 5G-enabled smart warehouse technologies, such as
hand-held scanners, optical character recognition, passive RFID
[radio-frequency identification], and robotics. This state-of-
the-art technology vastly improves our supply chain efficiency,
auditability, and support to the Fleet Marine Force.
Underpinning these efforts is our smart application of
operations and maintenance funding. Logistics Command optimizes
the Marine Corps' return on these funds by deliberately
planning against known and forecasted Fleet Marine Force ground
equipment readiness requirements. We identify the most
efficient and effective depot sources of repair, while also
closely managing our title 10 core logistics and depot 50/50
requirements.
Your support in funding these projects, as well as our
equipment maintenance priorities, is much appreciated and
brings us closer to accomplishing our modernization goals.
On the energy front, I want to briefly share with the
subcommittee that the Marine Corps logistics base here in
Albany has made great strides in its plan to become the first
installation in Marine Corps history to achieve net zero
renewable versus traditional energy usage. Through innovative
technology applications, such as geothermal heat pumps, bore
hole thermal technologies, and converting landfill methane gas
to energy, the base's roadmap to net zero and energy resiliency
program is nearly completed. As a result, we expect to save
over $4 million per year beginning next year and become less
dependent on the commercial power grid.
Looking forward, we have begun a study aimed specifically
at aligning all of these current modernization efforts with our
Commandant's Planning Guidance priorities, and our Force Design
2030 efforts. This study is on pace to inform our fiscal year
2023 and 2024 budget cycles, and we anticipate it will lead us
to refine the OIB's key lines of effort to better support the
Fleet Marine Force well into the 2lst century.
Regarding our workforce, the 2018 National Defense Strategy
[NDS] rightly identifies recruiting, development, and retention
of a highly qualified workforce as essential for warfighting
success. Accordingly, we have implemented a strategic plan with
six goals. These goals are hiring the right people, providing
the best training, talent management, improving communications,
maintaining a professional work environment, and retention.
Also, I mentioned in the past, we are very grateful to the
Congress for the direct hiring authorities. These authorities
have enabled us to compete on par with the private sector to
quickly hire the most talented people our community have to
offer.
With respect to COVID-19, we continue to ensure mission
accomplishment while protecting our people from the virus.
Although we are still seeing reports of new cases within our
surrounding communities, the overall number of cases continues
on a downward trend. We continue to maximize remote and
telework arrangements and enforce strict adherence to
guidelines set forth by the CDC and our headquarters. We are
actively also working with and are very thankful for the great
support we have received from the naval and community hospitals
across our regions.
In conclusion, sir, I want to thank you again. I want to
thank the subcommittee for its continued support and for the
opportunity to testify on this important topic. And I look
forward to your questions.
[The prepared statement of General Shrader can be found in
the Appendix on page ?.]
Mr. Garamendi. Thank you very much, General.
As promised, in about 5 minutes, we are going to recess for
half an hour. That will allow the members to catch the current
vote, the end of the current vote, and the beginning of the
last vote. We will return no later than 12:15 to recommence the
hearing.
I am going to take just a few moments to lay out a couple
of questions. I don't expect to get a response because we won't
have time.
First of all, I want to thank all of the services and
particularly the leadership for staying on these issues. This
committee is very, very concerned about the organic industrial
base that, over the years, it has been allowed to atrophy, to
age out, and they do the very best they could with old
facilities, old capital equipment and, in many cases, old
technologies, to maintain the equipment that the services
needed.
We are now in a modernization program for all of the
services. And as our colleagues on the other subcommittees go
about the business of acquiring the new equipment, I want to
make sure that this subcommittee is fully aware and that the
services are prepared to service that new equipment.
I see Joe Courtney just stepped off for a few moments, but
he likes to be called Two- or Four-Sub Joe, fine. Let's see
what you are going to do. How is the Navy going to repair and
maintain those new Columbia-class submarines?
Similarly, with the Air Force and the Army and the Marine
Corps, substantial changes are in place. I want to make sure
that all of you, in each of your responsibilities, are
preparing for the future.
And so as we go forward, our professional staff will be
querying you on how you will be addressing the new pieces of
equipment, the repair and maintenance of that equipment.
Secondly, I want to make sure that you are utilizing big
data in anticipation of what needs to be repaired. So the
analysis of past data of repairs that have been made, using
that information, and then continuing to gather information
ahead of the equipment coming into the depot so that you know
what is going to be repaired. I am calling this the big data AI
[artificial intelligence] initiative. I have talked to all of
you about this. Hopefully, that will allow you to be more
efficient.
Thirdly, we need to know well ahead of time--you have
talked about 20-year plans, 30-year plans in the case of one of
you. That is all well and good. I am operating--well, all of
the members on this committee operate on a 2-year cycle, and I
guarantee you, we are already thinking about the next 18 months
and planning for the next 18 months. We will give you a little
longer than that.
So I really would like to know what you are going to do
over the next 5 years so that we can look at the MILCON
[Military Construction], as well as the O&M [operations and
maintenance] operations. It is our intent that you have the
resources necessary to move out the old equipment that is no
longer effective or efficient. The new facilities, I remember 2
years ago going to Tinker and observing a whole lot of blue
tarps inside the building, presumably either to catch flies or
rain. I suspect it was about rain. And that is not only an Air
Force issue, I am sure it is across the board.
So I want those facilities modernized, and I want to know
how you are going to do it, when you are going to do it, and
how much money you need to do it. I am here to fight for you,
but I need to know what you need so that we can take on the
rest of the subcommittees and the Appropriations Committee and
make sure that you have the money you need to modernize and to
make sure your facilities are in place.
So these are the issues that are out there. I don't expect
an answer now, but I can assure you that the professional staff
and me and my colleagues will be querying you on a rather
regular basis as to the outcome and where you are headed with
that.
So we are now at 11:46. I am going to adjourn--excuse me,
recess. I am going to recess for 30 minutes, time for the
members to vote and to come back. And we will restart at
precisely 12:15.
And so this meeting is now in recess.
Gentlemen, you can get your answers together, members get
your questions together, get your votes in. We will recommence
in one half hour.
Thank you very much.
[Recess.]
Mr. Garamendi. So the committee will reconvene. The
committee is in order. We will now proceed.
I'm going to give everybody about another, I don't know, a
couple of minutes to get their video on, take a deep breath,
get yourself organized, and we will take up Mr. Lamborn in
about 120 seconds.
Start counting, Doug. We will be good to go.
So, I don't know, I thought that worked out pretty well. I
am kind of pleased with the prior planning.
So the first question to all the generals is, what do the
three--what do the five Ps stand for? Prior planning prevents--
okay--blank, performance. We will keep in mind that we have a
good audience here.
Okay. We are going to go ahead. I am watching my clock. I
am anxious to get going here, but I am going to wait the full
other--one more minute, Doug.
Mr. Scott just got up. I had a question for you.
Mr. Scott. Yes, sir.
Mr. Garamendi. Mr. Scott, is that you? Is that your dad,
your son, or----
Mr. Scott [interrupting]. No, it is not me. It is
absolutely me.
Mr. Garamendi. I got it.
Mr. Scott. It can be someone else if you want.
Mr. Garamendi. We will settle with you. We know you. We
know all the good and all the bad, so we will just stay with
you, Austin.
Doug, your turn.
Okay. The committee is back in order. Doug Lamborn has the
next set of questions.
Mr. Lamborn. All right, Mr. Chairman. And thank you for
each of the panelists for being here today.
As I mentioned in my statement, I believe that we need to
develop more ways to increase the supply of young people
joining the skilled labor market to meet these future demands.
Not everybody needs a 4-year college degree, but our Nation
needs more men and women who are working in skilled trades.
So what are your services doing on this front?
And, General Gamble, I believe you mentioned an
apprenticeship program. We will start with you.
General Gamble. Congressman, thanks for your question. I
think one of our best examples is at Anniston Army Depot. I
called it an apprenticeship program. I think they officially
call it the internship program. It is the Anniston Army Depot
high school internship program. I personally visited it. I
believe you have as well. It is where they take high school
students and help them gain skill trades and feed our
knowledgeable workforce. They are recruited from high schools,
not only immediately, but from a 55-mile radius of Anniston
Army Depot. So, you know, a pretty broad program there, focused
on allied trades, things that you said, skills that they can
use for a career.
They also have something called the Pathways Program. It is
a three-phase program that helps interns move from high school
to technical college with tuition assistance. So, again,
extracurricular for the depot, but providing a pathway for high
school students to get advanced training in the public sector
and then move noncompetitively to a position working for the
government, and that conversion is based on space availability.
It is not--the program falls short of guaranteeing them a slot.
Frankly, I am not sure we need to--a permanent assured position
is a positive thing because, like many of other programs that
the Army runs, it feeds local community as well as feeding our
workforce.
And the last thing that Anniston does, the third of three,
is educational community partnership. It is an agreement that
is based on development opportunities with local colleges,
provide for integration of the students' academic studies and
provide on-the-job experience. That repeats itself all the way
from Kaiserslautern, Germany, in one of our industrial
facilities in Germany, all the way to Rock Island, Illinois,
but I just illuminated Anniston. We can provide details in a
more comprehensive paper if you would like, sir.
Mr. Lamborn. Okay. And I would like to hear from the Navy,
Air Force, and Marines on this same issue.
Admiral Galinis. Sir, I will jump in on this. And so at the
four public shipyards, you know, we have a very active
apprenticeship program. It is a 4-year program that we recruit
people into from the local communities. We have got
partnerships in place generally with the local community
colleges, so it is an opportunity for the apprenticeships to
earn an associate's degree along the way. You know, and then
once we get them in the shipyard, each shipyard has their own
learning center established.
And, you know, I will use Portsmouth as an example, where
they actually have a mockup of a compartment on board a
submarine that they would take, whether it be a pipe fitter or
maybe an insulator, an electrician, in to allow them to
essentially kind of work through a work package, if you will,
before they actually go and do that, you know, transmit and go
down to the submarine.
We also--each yard also has its own--you know, within those
learning centers, their own skills areas where we train on
welding or electrical or shipfitting metal work and whatnot, so
we do a lot of that.
The other thing that we have also recently done is we have
executed an interagency agreement to the pilot with the new OPM
[Office of Personnel Management] USALearning tool, which, as
you know, is the--you know, kind of a modern IT [information
technology] platform for training that really allows us to kind
of open up and make it available to even more people inside the
shipyard, these training opportunities. So that is available to
folks that are going through that 4-year apprentice program
that I talked to, as well as others.
And then the other thing that we have got within the
shipyard is a kind of an assessment process where, you know,
the supervisors can--you know, if they identify, you know, a
shipmate that maybe, you know, needs a little bit more work in
a particular area or whatever, there is a process to kind of
send them back through maybe just a particular part of the
training that allows them to kind of refresh that skill set
that maybe they might be maybe a little bit lacking on.
So those are some of the things that we are doing, but, you
know, the apprenticeship program that we have, there are all,
four shipyards and the learning center, are absolutely key and
foundational to the way we train our workforce.
Thank you for the opportunity.
Mr. Lamborn. Sure. And Air Force and Marines, do you have
similar options, or Navy Air?
Admiral Peters. Sir, naval aviation has a similar
apprenticeship program; 270 currently in that apprenticeship
program, and we are using it to try to build loyalty to the
depot, so once we train these folks, they don't get pulled away
by someone else. Over.
Mr. Lamborn. Air Force, Marines, anything to add?
General Kirkland. Mr. Lamborn, this is Air Force. Similar
to the other services, we continue to bolster and expand our
vocational partnership with the States and the regions that use
our forecasts to prioritize their training. We have internships
and apprenticeships which bring them in. And similar to the
vice admiral, we--it does build loyalty and we tend to hire
those as well.
Sir, we are also expanding our educational partnership
agreements with higher education. We have got those in Utah,
Oklahoma, and Georgia now. They are very effective to get that
STEM workforce we need for our engineering workforce.
And the third component would be innovation centers at each
of our locations. Let me give you one example here. I am in
Middle Georgia this week at Robins Air Force Base. And on
Monday, with Congressman Scott's help, we are going to cut the
ribbon on a new facility for our software team, but it has a
dedicated classroom for local high school students to come into
to get mentored and instructed. And, sir, we see those folks as
future employees. Over.
General Shrader. Sir, on the Marine Corps front, very same
thing. I would just second the Pathways Program. We use that
extensively, especially in the depot for welders, painters, and
heavy mechanics, heavy vehicle mechanics.
Looking to the future, though, we have to make sure that we
are zeroing in on C4I [command, control, communications,
computers, and intelligence] type equipment--electronics,
coders, those types of things. We work closely with high
schools on internship programs through Pathways, and then also
our community colleges, namely, Albany Tech here within
southwest Georgia. I think that is it, sir, for me.
Mr. Lamborn. Okay. Very good. Well, I am glad to hear from
each of you that you are making concrete steps to accomplish
that goal.
This is a question for the Army. Both the Air Force and the
Navy received CARES Act funding to increase cash balances last
year to offset the impact of COVID. Since the Army didn't get
those cash funds, how is the Army dealing with that funding
need?
General Gamble. Thank you, sir. Thank you for your
question. So there are really two components. First is our Army
Working Capital Fund [AWCF]. And, at the time, we honestly
didn't think we needed a cash infusion into the working capital
fund to offset the health and safety leave, the increased cost
of health and safety leave, because while we put some on leave,
as you know, others worked overtime and longer hours to keep
the production running.
The state of the AWCF today is we have significant concerns
out of the Army about the cash balance in our Army Working
Capital Fund. And General Daly, our AMC [Army Materiel Command]
Commanding General, and our Assistant Secretary of the Army for
Financial Management and Comptroller, are working at pulled--we
call it pulling levers, right. We are taking action to restore
our cash balance.
We do believe the Army will need a cash infusion into the
working capital fund later this year, and we estimate that to
be between $600 million and $900 million. We are working that
inside the Army and with OSD. But there is almost no doubt in
our mind that in the next 6 to 8 months, we will need a cash
infusion to keep the Army Working Capital Fund solvent to the
level where it can continue to produce the remedies it produces
today. So, today, we are not in bad shape, but we are
concerned, and we are watching it closely.
Mr. Lamborn. All right. Thank you.
Mr. Chairman, back to you.
Mr. Garamendi. Thank you very much, Doug.
Heads up to everybody, the next two will be Courtney,
Wilson, Luria, and Moore. I think that is four. So Courtney,
Wilson, Luria, Moore, in that order.
Joe, your turn, go.
Mr. Courtney. Great. Thank you, John, and thank you, Doug,
for holding this hearing and to all the witnesses for, you
know, their testimony on a very important issue.
Admiral Galinis, it is good to see you. The last time in
person was up in Maine, minus zero temperatures. And I want to
again zero in on, you know, one aspect of your testimony, which
again, first of all, there is universal agreement about the
need to recapitalize all the public yards and, frankly, that
has been the case on task for a number of years. And, you know,
the SIOP program, I think, sort of is somewhat evidence of
that. And anything we can do, you know, to enhance authorities
to, you know, accelerate that process and, you know, ensure
that the turnaround for subs and ships is going to improve. I
mean, again, there is just across-the-board help.
Having said that, I mean, it is pretty clear that we are
not going to be there for a while. And, you know, a number of
years ago, we had the Congressional Budget Office [CBO] take a
look at the question of whether private yards would sometimes
get utilized, you know, for overflow work, costs that much more
in terms of per unit cost versus public yards, and CBO came
back with a pretty strong report that, in fact, there is no
disparity in terms of cost, in terms of using private yards,
whether it is Newport News, EB [Electric Boat], Pascagoula, or
whatever.
And so, you know, first of all, you know, I just want to,
first of all, get your take in terms of whether or not you
still regard sort of the one shipyard concept, which your
predecessor a couple times removed, Admiral McCoy articulated,
and really did try to plug in work when, again, there was an
overflow as a way of, you know, dealing with backlog and also
just obviously stabilizing the industrial base, or whether or
not you think that, you know, at this point, you just want to
go to an exclusively public yard approach in terms of dealing
with repair and maintenance.
Admiral Galinis. Yes, sir. Representative Courtney, thank
you for that question. So what I would say, one of the things
that we are doing as part of the--I mentioned the naval
shipyard sustainment effort. But one of the key elements of
that is the development of the 15-year public sector
maintenance plans. But this is all of the work that we are
doing inside the public shipyards, and we are getting close to
finishing that up here within the next month or so and briefing
that up [inaudible] the Navy.
But I would tell you, just my preliminary indications is,
and as I mentioned in my opening statement, you know, the SIOP
program is fundamental to what we are doing to build that
productive capacity that we need inside our public shipyards to
do the nuclear maintenance. Even with that being said, I
believe, you know, given the--what we see as an increasing
force structure, especially in the submarine force, toward the
end of the 2020s and into the early 2030s, we are going to need
capacity in the private sector to do submarine repair work. And
that is kind of just kind of an initial take on what I see in
that--coming out of that study.
That being said, to your point on the one-shipyard concept,
that is absolutely true. And we typically--you know, every day
we are moving resources, you know, from one yard to another to
kind of balance the workload as we need to do so. We have got--
we are taking a hard look at the work that we are doing inside
the shipyards. And as I said, you know, that productive
capacity that we are trying to build, when we are doing work
inside of a public shipyard that maybe we could outsource to
industry, so not an entire availability. But as you know, we do
a lot of work on rotatable pools and reparable items. You know,
is that work--would that be more efficient to do that work, you
know, outside in private industry. So, you know, maybe not at
another private shipyard, but there is a lot of good machine
shops and, you know, smaller businesses that could probably use
some of that work. So that is also part of our strategy to
increase that capacity.
So those are a couple of things that we are looking at.
That 15-year plan, we have got to get that. I think that is
fundamental to what we are doing, and then looking for
opportunities where we don't maybe necessarily outsource an
entire availability, but some of the--what we refer to as other
productive work, as you know, inside the shipyards that we can
outsource, and then just to keep the focus on the SIOP.
And to the first part of your question on authorities, sir,
I think I have all the authorities I need right now to go and
execute that SIOP program. So thank you for that question, sir.
Mr. Courtney. Great. Well, John, when that 15-year plan
becomes available, I hope--you know, again, our subcommittee
will jump on that. Because in some ways, it is almost as
important as the 30-year shipbuilding plan, and I applaud the
fact that NAVSEA [Naval Sea Systems Command] is going that
route.
I will yield back.
Admiral Galinis. Yes, sir.
Mr. Garamendi. Thank you very much, Mr. Courtney.
We now turn to Mr. Wilson.
Mr. Wilson. Thank you, Chairman Garamendi and Ranking
Member Lamborn. And I just--also, I am so impressed and
appreciative of our panel today, what dedicated individuals you
are and how impressive it is and inspiring to know that we have
such capable persons serving in our military.
With General Kirkland, a question. I recently toured the
McEntire Joint Air Base here in South Carolina, which is a
leading candidate for the upcoming F-35 basing selection. In
addition to the extraordinary trained personnel at McEntire,
the unique qualifications of the site include virtually no
encroachment. It just simply could not be recreated anywhere in
the continental United States.
I would like to know, what is your depot posture to support
the critical weapon systems such as F-35 while maintaining your
other priorities?
General Kirkland. Congressman Wilson, thank you for the
question, sir. With respect to McEntire, I would just like to
address the question fleetwide, sir. I think you are aware that
70 percent of the F-35 costs are related to sustainment and,
therefore, we pay particular attention to that when working
with the Joint Program Office [JPO] and our Navy-Marine Corps
teammates. We continue to partner with the JPO to drive down
sustainment costs, because, sir, the Air Force is fully
committed to the F-35 and it is fifth-gen capabilities.
Sir, I will speak to--we currently maintain, do a depot
modification on the aircraft that are at our Ogden ALC [Air
Logistics Complex]. We are on path to continue to expand that.
This year alone, our forecast has increased from 47 to 52
aircraft output. Sir, we own the F-135 engine maintenance. It
is the only heavy maintenance center in the enterprise right
now, and that has our full attention to drive down costs and
increase the output.
But, sir, perhaps the low-hanging fruit and where we can
really save money is the software. You are familiar with the
ALIS [Autonomic Logistics Information System] program being
replaced by the ODIN, the Operational Data Integrated Network.
We are proud the sustainment center will be part of that
solution as we migrate from ALIS to ODIN, and we believe we
will do it with our organic software team in a very cost-
effective manner.
Mr. Wilson. Thank you very much.
And, Admiral Galinis, as a very grateful Navy dad, I
appreciate your service. And a question I have for you is,
how--with the impressive technician pipeline program that you
have for virtual learning tools of hands-on and practical
exercise, how has the pandemic impacted your ability to
continue the necessary hands-on training required to
maintaining your workforce?
Admiral Galinis. Yes, sir. Thank you for that question. So,
you know, we have been very fortunate that, you know, say
with--you know, since the pandemic started roughly a year ago,
we have not closed any of our shipyards for a single day, and
that is both in the public and the private sector, and I give a
lot of credit for that to the shipyard leadership and certainly
the workforce inside the shipyard.
So we have been able to continue both our recruitment, our
hiring, and our training efforts over the last year. And we
have been able to maintain a pretty, you know, steady flow of
folks into the shipyard, continuing to get them through the
pipeline.
The other thing, sir, that I am sure you are aware of is,
you know, when we went into the pandemic and we looked at the
potential impacts on the yards, we activated our SURGEMAIN
[surge maintenance] force. And so that is a group, we brought
on Active Duty about 1,300 Reserve sailors that are aligned to
the 4 public shipyards, and their Reserve time is to train, you
know, with the shipyards. Okay.
So when we have kind of a shortfall like this with the
workforce caused by the pandemic, we have been able to bring
these Reserve sailors on. And they actually made a significant
impact in helping us, you know, work through what would have
been work that we would have pushed off. And so we have been
able to not totally eliminate that, but certainly mitigate a
lot of that impact.
So I guess the short answer to your question is we have
been able to continue that and, you know, the distance
learning, the IT certainly played a big part of that. But even
getting folks through the learning centers that I mentioned and
everything, we have been able to continue that effort. Yes,
sir.
Mr. Wilson. Admiral, thank you very much.
And my time is up, but, again, I want to thank Chairman
Garamendi for getting this panel together. Everyone is
outstanding. Thank you very much.
I yield back.
Mrs. Luria. Chairman Garamendi, I believe you are muted.
Are you calling on me?
Mr. Garamendi. I am calling on you, yes. It is your turn.
Mrs. Luria. Well, thank you.
Mr. Garamendi. Five minutes.
Mrs. Luria. Well, thank you.
Well, thank you, gentlemen, for being here to talk about
these very important issues. I just wanted to start by saying
that I think we can't wait any longer to make the investments
that we need to in our ship maintenance infrastructure.
Investing in both our public and our private yards has the
effect of adding increased capacity to our fleet in the near
term.
If you listened to Admiral Davidson's testimony last week,
commander of the USINDOPACOM [U.S. Indo-Pacific Command], we
need that capacity sooner rather than later. So I just want to
say that I think that we need to act now, and I concur with
Representative Courtney's comments that the shipyard
optimization plan is incredibly critical, and I think we need
to speed it up.
And I am sort of surprised to hear that you don't feel,
Admiral Galinis, that you need any additional authorities or
any additional resources to do that. But, you know, I would
really like to be a very strong advocate from this committee
and this subcommittee to make sure that you have those
resources, because I think the ship maintenance resources are
absolutely critical to getting our ships out deployed,
providing that forward presence that we need to counter the
Chinese in the Western Pacific. And I really feel like we need
to shift from that mantra that I feel like we have today where
maintenance is driving operations rather than maintenance is
supporting and enabling operations.
So I just wanted to ask you again. I mean, do you need any
additional authorities, resources? I mean, ideally, like, what
could we do to speed this up to get that increased capacity?
And I will just quickly give the other example of recently
in Norfolk Naval Shipyard, you know, we had the CVN 77 in dry
dock and in a docking availability that was going to last 27
months, and a Nimitz-class, you know, first docking
availability in their life cycle, that should have been about
10\1/2\ months. And the domino effect of that and the dual
deployments of the carriers we have seen over the last year,
you know, are all impacted by that maintenance backlog.
So can you just comment again on anything else that this
committee or Congress can do to help speed up your building of
your capacity and modernization of the shipyards?
Admiral Galinis. Yes, ma'am. Thank you for that question,
Representative Luria. So let me--just to be clear, you know, at
this point, I don't believe I need any additional authorities.
I did not say we may not need additional resources, because we
are working through that right now and there is a potential we
may need additional resources. Okay.
One of the things that I have asked the team to look at is,
you know, we kind of initially rolled out, I will say, a 20-
year plan. I asked them to go back and look at what it would
take, you know, to do this capitalization in 10 years, in 15
years, and so we are working through that right now. As you
well know, one of the things to doing that is being able to
integrate the recapitalization work along with the ship repair
work that we need to do.
And to your point on, you know, maintenance driving fleet
operations, I agree with you on that. It is an area we
certainly need to get better. Personally, I think it starts
with our planning efforts, okay, as we build that work package
for the ships and the carriers and the submarines going into
our public yards. And then once we get them in there, it is all
about, you know, execution, and we just need to be relentless
in that. There are things we are doing to strengthen that.
We talked--and I will just give you three quick examples.
One is, you know, the amount of unplanned work that we push
into availabilities once the availability starts. And as you
well know, you know, once that happens, especially if it comes
in later in the availability, that is absolutely going to
impact your ability to get that submarine or that aircraft
carrier out of the yard on time. And so, you know, whether it
is rework, whether it is growth work, or new, you know, work
that you don't plan to do once you get in there is very
impactful in a negative way.
The second item that we are looking at is just what I will
call shop efficiencies. And, you know, we are finding, you
know, some real opportunities within all four of our shipyards,
quite frankly, you know, to improve the efficiency of our shops
to kind of push, you know, work from the shop areas down to the
waterfront on board the submarine.
A key piece of this, and we have had some of these
discussions previously, is the availability of parts, whether
those are, you know, parts coming from the supply system, those
depot level reparable or rotatable pool items that I talked
about, you know, just having that available to the mechanic
when they need it to get that work done and to continue that
process moving.
And then, you know, the third part of this is really just--
I will just say it is availability management. And I mentioned
the naval ship sustainment effort shipyard that we are working
right now, we brought in, as you know, a group, the Boston
Consulting Group to kind of, you know, kind of a world-class,
you know, process improvement company that really, you know,
brings some best practices from the commercial enterprise that
we can look to leverage and to incorporate into our shipyards.
And just the way we kind of think about when you come up as you
work through an availability and you come up with, you know,
unplanned work, or you have an efficiency item or something
that may cause additional time in there, how do we work our way
through that in a very expeditious and efficient manner. And
frankly, we have kind of lost, I will say, our edge in that
area a little bit.
So those are just three areas that we are getting after,
ma'am, on that area.
Mrs. Luria. Well, thank you for those comments. And I know
that my time has expired. And, you know, I think that those are
critical areas that do need improvement. And, you know, we are
asking as the committee, what do you need from us, what do you
need from Congress to implement this. Because it is not just
about building ships in the Seapower Subcommittee; it is about
maintaining and using the ships that we have as most
efficiently as possible, and a big piece of that is maintenance
and getting that maintenance done on time. So thank you again
for your comments.
And I also wanted to thank Rear Admiral Ver Hage at the
NAVSEA war room. I was able to spend a couple of hours with him
a few weeks ago and got some insights on the surface fleet side
into some of the process improvements that you are making and
really want to be supportive of those. So thank you.
And I yield back.
Mr. Garamendi. Thank you very much, Elaine.
We now turn to--let me give you the next four members in
order: Moore, Speier, Bergman, Scott. Moore, Speier, Bergman,
Scott.
Mr. Moore, your turn.
Mr. Moore. Thank you, Chairman. Sincerely, thank you all
for being here today. My questions will primarily be directed
towards General Kirkland.
General Kirkland, it is great to get a chance to interact
again. And, again, I appreciate your opening statements as
well, especially bringing up the importance of STEM and some of
those hiring needs. I hope to get a chance to chat with you
about that.
The organic industrial base is essential to the repair and
maintenance of the Nation's complex array of weapon systems,
and minimum investment requirements designed to only sustain
depot performance have left a majority of depots in poor
condition, relying on equipment far past its service life. And
a course of action to reinvigorate our organic industrial bases
requires educating Members of Congress on why these facilities
are needed, uniting mutual interests across service branches,
holding DOD accountable to modernizing efforts and to improve
readiness and reduce costs.
I am thrilled to be the co-chair of the bipartisan group
for the House Depot Caucus. Ogden Air Logistics Complex is in
my district, and I know that optimization plans and investment
strategy recently just mentioned about the results-oriented
management approach with even some consulting firms that will
help us fortify existing optimization plans and maintain that
superiority.
General Kirkland, one of the first questions I will ask you
is, the Air Force depots employ predominantly civilian
personnel. How can we--how can this committee best help the
services where hiring challenges are concerned? How can we best
help, in your opinion?
General Kirkland. Congressman Moore, thank you for that
question. And I look forward to working with, advising, and
informing your leadership on the Depot Caucus.
Sir, with respect to your question about civilian
personnel, correct, 99 percent or more of our depot workforce
are patriotic civilian employees, Air Force civilians. And,
sir, as I mentioned in my opening comment about how we use DHA
[direct-hire authority] and EHA [expedited hiring authority],
the direct hiring authority, it is a tremendous tool for us for
both recruiting and hiring. It allows us to be more creative,
agile, strategic, and candidly, also allows us to lever social
media and outlying databases to attract and recruit employees.
So with that, sir, 4 years ago, in calendar year 2017, our
traditional hires for external for our organization averaged
more than 180 days. Last year, using DHA, we got that into the
low 60s. And so that is just treating our employees with a lot
more respect and makes us more efficient when we have a
vacancy.
Over those same 4 years, sir, we have gone from 700 or so
hires using DHA to over 3,000, so this is a tool that continues
to expand in its use. Our Air Force added this to the fiscal
year 2022 personnel legislative review, and we are going to
resubmit for 2023 as well. Our nondepot workforce, sir, many of
them at our installations support the depot or related
activities, 68 percent of those hired are still using
traditional methodologies. So there is a lot of upside if we
could expand and use DHA and EHA more.
Congressman, I would add to that an appeal to consider a
clean repeal of the 180-day waiting period for retired military
members. We are disadvantaged against our commercial industry
peers to retain that talent and experience and specialized
skills and security clearances as they leave Active Duty Air
Force and retire. Many of them come back to us eventually, but
there is a large group that we do not have access to as they
immediately seek employment after retirement.
Thank you, Congressman.
Mr. Moore. Thank you. I appreciate that perspective.
Let me switch gears quickly to the optimization program. So
the shipyard, the Navy--the Naval Sea Systems Command shipyard
infrastructure program is a 20-year, $21 billion effort to
modernize infrastructure at shipyard facilities. Do you see a
need for comprehensive plans to recapitalize and modernize the
entirety of the organic industrial base?
That is also to General Kirkland.
General Kirkland. Congressman, absolutely. As we lay out
our organic industrial base plans, and to Chairman Garamendi's
point, even though it is a 20-year plan, we are focused
primarily on the first 5 years of that. Our three alternatives
go 5, 5, and 10 across it. So, sir, our targeted use of the 6
percent investment, which the Air Force is averaging at 8
percent right now, are taking care of much of those immediate
needs to restructure our depots, build dedicated functional
campuses and the like to make us more effective and optimize
for the future.
Mr. Moore. Excellent. And then as I enter my first quarter
in politics and in these committees, I am realizing how fast 5
minutes goes, so I will yield back. Thank you very much for
your time.
I yield back, Chairman.
Mr. Garamendi. Thank you very much, Mr. Moore.
One of the things, that I want to just take a moment here,
is that all of the forces have a plan. We usually see that plan
after it has been scrubbed by every other part of the
Department of Defense, and it comes to us in an abbreviated or
slow implementation, basically meaning that the depots often
are of a lower priority for the entire Department than some
other activity--the purchase of a new aerial platform, a new
set of ships, or whatever. And it is the work of this committee
to push the depot, the maintenance to a higher priority.
To do that, we need to know, before all the scrubbing and
all the elimination, what is necessary. And so, we are going to
pursue that. And so heads up, Admirals and Generals, we are
coming at you, looking for what you initially needed, not what
finally came out in the President's budget, so you know where
we are going. If you care to help us, there are ways of getting
us information formally, and we would expect that.
We are now going to Ms. Speier.
Jackie, you are up. Hello, Jackie.
She may not have come back from the various offices. We
will go to Mr. Bergman.
Jackie, your final try here.
Okay. Mr. Bergman.
Mr. Bergman. Well, Chairman, thank you. You got close. You
traded--when I grew up, my name was Jacky, so I will just
substitute one Jackie for another for this, okay.
Mr. Garamendi. I will take that up with the other Jackie,
but in the meantime----
Mr. Bergman [interrupting]. Well, mine was with a Y. I did
the same thing with Jacky Rosen when we got here our first
term.
But anyway, the point is, thanks for the hearing. Thanks
for the education. I believe that in listening to my colleagues
who have already spoken, I am really not going to ask any more,
because sometimes we re-ask the same questions.
All I would suggest to you, those of you in uniform who are
dialoguing with us today, is that, at best, you know, in your
business, you have got to have at least an 80 percent solution
out the door. And then as it moves forward, you have got to, if
you will, adjust the other 20 percent to make sure that that
ship is deployable to the site.
And what we look for, I believe, on our side of the aisle
is that solid, if you will, to be alliterative here, pragmatic,
proactive, professional, prioritization of your efforts so that
we can provide the funding necessary and that you can show us
where the exceptions need to be as soon as you see the need for
exception. That helps us do our work.
So, with that, Mr. Chairman, in the spirit of things, I
will yield back the rest of my time and look forward to the
next event as an update.
Mr. Garamendi. I am going to go back to Jackie Speier, if
she is on. We will take her now.
Apparently not. Ms. Speier, your turn.
Very good. We are going to go to Mr. Scott, then. And then
we may start a second round of questions, depending on where we
are. Good.
Austin.
Mr. Scott. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
General Kirkland, glad to have you at Robins Air Force
Base. Look forward to seeing you next week.
I know that you have spoken to a lot of the issues with the
software. One of the things that is happening at Robins Air
Force Base is the advanced Air Force--or the Air Force Advanced
Technology and Training Center, where they are using
technologies like 3D printing and other new advanced
technologies for manufacturing parts that, in some cases, have
been obsolete and, in other cases, we are simply being charged
significantly more than we should be charged for those parts.
What efficiencies are you seeing from investments in these
new technologies like 3D printing, robotics, and artificial
intelligence? How are you continuing to foster innovation in
the sustainment enterprise? And as much as we are happy to have
the Air Force Advanced Technology and Training Center at Robins
Air Force Base, do you have the intent of doing similar
facilities in other locations?
General Kirkland. Congressman Scott, thank you, sir, for
the question. Let me respond to two points real quickly.
First, sir, you mentioned robotics at Warner Robins Air
Logistics Complex. I am happy to report the investments of the
last 4 years have really--the advantages are we removed 60
personnel from a hazardous environment, we saved $5 million in
automation savings, and we reduced our hazardous material
stream, all part of that, sir, while getting more aircraft
components out the door at a better cost.
We are partnered with the Rapid Sustainment Office and Life
Cycle Management Center, which actually, sir, operates the ATTC
[Advanced Technology and Training Center] you mentioned. We are
partnered with them across a wide spectrum of advanced
technologies and conditions-based maintenance [CBM]. Plus,
alone, sir, we have collaborated on our asks to--our formal POM
[Program Objective Memorandum] ask to the Air Force will be
$160 million now over the FYDP [Future Years Defense Program],
and that is necessary for us to expand CBM at the rate we need
to and have its advantages.
Sir, with respect to ATTCs, there is, I believe, one being
put in in Ogden outside--in Utah, and I will also say there is
one in Pittsburgh. But I will have to take for the record, sir,
their entire plans to expand those units.
[The information referred to was not available at the time
of printing.]
Thank you.
Mr. Scott. Well, Chairman Garamendi, one, I would like to
invite you and the other members of the committee down to
Robins Air Force Base to look at what is happening, not just at
Robins as a whole, but at the Advanced Technology and Training
Center. Obviously, while our private sector partners are an
integral part of our national security, there are certain
things that they do sometimes that very much irritate me with
regard to how much they charge for certain parts that should
cost small amounts.
General, when we get into the software-related issues, you
mentioned this briefly, but one of the frustrations I think of
the committee and of myself is that as we have paid the private
sector to develop software, then they have turned around and
said, well, now we own it, even though we paid the original
cost of developing it.
The new software, the Synergy Innovation Complex and other
things, will we be developing our own software or will we be
predominantly updating the software that we have in our current
platforms?
General Kirkland. Congressman Scott, thank you for that
question. The answer is both, sir. We have expanded our
historic software maintenance mission now at a left into the
cycle into an awful lot of software development in support of
our military weapon system program offices.
And, sir, you mentioned--you were referring to intellectual
property, I believe, that is often a boundary for us that we
cannot get past. And so we work with the support program
offices for legacy platforms because there are sustainment
opportunities that we are missing. The better news, sir, is
that for newer weapon systems in acquisition, like B-21 and
GBSD, those programs are being very innovative and doing the
right things contractually now so that we will benefit with IP
[intellectual property] access for the life cycle of that
weapon systems.
Thank you.
Mr. Scott. General, my time is up, but you summed up one of
the things, doing the right things contractually. And that is
an error that we have made as a country in the past that I am
glad that we are not continuing to make those errors. I look
forward to seeing you on Monday.
And, gentlemen, appreciate everything you do for the
country.
I yield back.
Mr. Garamendi. Thank you very much.
You are on a series of questions there on the data and the
availability of it. We are going to work--this committee is
going to work very closely with the acquisition committees,
including the appropriations, to deal with the ongoing problem
of who owns the rights to the software, to the intellectual,
and actually to the data itself. So we are going to go at that
in full on.
I see Ms. Speier has returned.
Jackie, you have 5 minutes.
Ms. Speier. Mr. Chairman, can you hear me? I can barely
hear you.
Mr. Garamendi. Yes, we can. You are good to go.
Ms. Speier. Hold on one second.
Mr. Garamendi. You are good to go, Jackie.
Ms. Speier. Can you hear me?
Mr. Garamendi. Yes, we can.
Ms. Speier. Okay. I have a question for General Kirkland
and Vice Admiral Peters. At the oversight hearing last year, I
think, we focused on the problems with the F-35 logistics
system, ALIS, which has never worked well and is very
burdensome to personnel. Lockheed keeps saying they are fixing
it. I am curious as to whether or not it has been replaced. At
one point, they were talking about replacing it. And have you
seen any improvements?
General Kirkland. Ma'am, this--Congresswoman, thank you for
your question. I guess I will go first.
Ma'am, I will need to take for the record what our Air
Force has seen in terms of improvement. Because it is both
operational and supply chain, I would not want to hazard or get
outside my lane there. But, ma'am, I can tell you that we are
working to control our future with respect to F-35 software
through hands-on ownership of the transition from ALIS to the
new ODIN system. It is currently being led by our Kessel Run
software factory in the northeast, and they will soon
transition and expand to the Air Force Sustainment Center
Enterprise mostly centered at our Ogden ALC out in Utah.
[The information referred to was not available at the time
of printing.]
Thank you.
Ms. Speier. Vice Admiral.
Admiral Peters. Ma'am, I will follow that discussion by
just mentioning that we do continue to work very closely with
the F-35 Joint Program Office to make sure that ALIS is
functional for the F-35C and its first deployment with the VFA
[Strike Fighter Squadron] 147 on USS Vinson coming up here in
the fall. And as to date, that is working.
They are many, many problems associated with ALIS, as you
mentioned. The overall plan is to transition that system to
ODIN, and I think a key, as General Kirkland mentioned, is to
make sure that the Navy and the Marine Corps and the Air Force
are participating in that development so that we are not
completely dependent on the prime contractor. We pay exorbitant
fees for the administration and the maintenance of ALIS, and so
this is all part of the Joint Program Office's plan to reduce
costs and to make that system more effective. I agree with you
completely that it is a difficult system. Over.
Ms. Speier. How do we hold them accountable? As you pointed
out, it has been very expensive. They were supposed to provide
us with a system that works. It has never worked, and we keep
paying for the fact that it doesn't work and paying all the
maintenance costs. It just seems like, you know, stupid is as
stupid does. Why are we doing the same thing over and over
again?
Admiral Peters. I think we are completely invested now in
ALIS and completely dependent on that system for the
operations. Without it, we can only go a few days of flying. So
we have to work with the prime contractor to make sure that we
can get to the next segment here to first maintain what we have
and then to upgrade it.
And similar to what General Kirkland said, this is probably
a better question for the Joint Program Office and, you know,
OSD, but we are in full cooperation with the Joint Program
Office to make that happen, ma'am.
Ms. Speier. All right. Then let me ask this. Do any of the
parts for the F-35 come from China? Does anyone know?
Admiral Peters. I will take a stab at that just to say that
we track, you know, the main components very closely, and I
don't know of any main components on the aircraft that come
from China. As you go down into the supply chain at the third
or fourth tier, it is very likely that there are some
electronic parts that come from China, but we will have to take
that one for the record to get you a more detailed response,
ma'am.
[The information referred to was not available at the time
of printing.]
Ms. Speier. All right. Thank you.
Mr. Chairman, I know my time has almost expired. Let me
just suggest that, as we think about readiness in the future
and the maintenance of our equipment, we have got to be very
careful about any parts coming from China and the potential for
malware to be embedded into any of that equipment or parts. So
I would just like to put that front and center and make sure
that we are all operating with our eyes wide open. And, with
that, I yield back.
Mr. Garamendi. Ms. Speier, thank you very much. Indeed, it
is a major concern. The entire F-35 system is of enormous
concern to the committee. The chairman has weighed in on this
in a very big and important way this last week. There are
numerous meetings going on. I will make sure that all of my
subcommittee members know of those meetings.
The F-35 is a huge problem, and one of the principal
problems is that we buy more planes. We are not able to
maintain the older ones. So the more we buy, the worse the
overall performance has been. That is going to stop. There is a
very deep concern in this committee about the F-35 overall,
including the issue you raised, Jackie.
And for General Kirkland, the hearing yesterday in the
strategic arms subcommittee was extraordinarily troublesome to
the question that Ms. Speier raised about, by the way, where is
all that stuff coming from as you put together all these new
platforms and particularly the electronics and the software and
the like. It is an enormous concern across all of this, and
ultimately, it comes down to the folks that are here in
uniform. You are going to be left with, okay, how do you fix
it, and I don't know that we have an answer. So we have got to
start where Ms. Speier is, and that is you start by doing it
right in the first place.
And so, Jackie, stay on the issue. It is an important one.
We are formally past the time of the hearing. We were
supposed to end about now. We took a half hour break in
between. If the presenters are willing to stick around, I know
that there is another round of questions from Mr. Lamborn. I
know Mrs. Luria has one. I certainly have about another 5 hours
of questions that I am not going to ask.
Doug, you are shaking your head. Was that a yes, you are
finished?
You are finished. Okay. I read your lips. Didn't hear your
sound.
Mrs. Luria. Another round of questions?
Mrs. Luria. Yes. Well, thank you, Chairman Garamendi. And
thank you to the witnesses for being willing to stay a little
bit longer and answer some additional questions.
Our primary focus, I think, should be what we are going to
do to increase our presence in the Western Pacific in counter
to the Chinese threat. And, you know, in the Seapower
Subcommittee, we can talk about building more ships. But the
other part is--there are three parts to this: Building more
ships as quickly as we can; operating the ships that we have as
efficiently as possible, which, you know, maintenance fits into
that; and then not divesting of the ships we have that still
have usable life.
So I want to touch on those last two things, and I think we
already talked about, you know, the maintenance and whether
maintenance drives operations or getting back to maintenance
supporting operations. But, you know, the last piece of that is
that the Battle Force 2045, the plan that the last
administration put out, I feel like we didn't get a lot of good
background information on what the assumptions were made that
helped to build that plan.
Some of those assumptions are driven by the potential
adversary and how we would respond to that, but some of those
assumptions are driven by our capacity, our capacity to get
industrial base to build ships, our capacity of our, you know,
repair communities to repair those ships and get them back out
on deployment as quickly as possible. But the other piece is we
can't decommission ships faster than we can build them.
So that plan does have us decommissioning, I think, 10
cruisers in a very short period of time. And, you know, I
lived--I served as the XO [executive officer] on a cruiser, the
USS Anzio. We had a 14-foot crack in the hangar bay. We had a
lot of issues, and we had not had any of the HM&E [hull,
mechanical, and electrical] upgrades that some of the other
ships had had.
But knowing that the combat system upgrades are possible
due to the architecture of the Aegis system, and knowing that
we invested a sizable amount of money in several of our
cruisers, I would really like to know, Admiral Galinis, some
perspective on, you know, hull by hull. Can you provide us
information on those cruisers that still have remaining life?
I think we need them as air defense platforms. We can't
build Flight III DDGs [guided missile destroyer] faster than we
are planning on decommissioning the cruisers. And so I would
really like to--and you might not be able to provide the
granular information at this hearing today--but have that
information hull by hull on what upgrades have been done to the
cruisers and what the estimated cost would be to extend their
lifetime.
Admiral Galinis. Yes, ma'am. That is a great question. So,
yes, I will take for the record to get back with you on a hull-
by-hull assessment. We can certainly provide that to you.
[The information referred to was not available at the time
of printing.]
Admiral Galinis. What I will tell you, you know, on the
decommissioning of ships, and we did take a hard look at that.
And it really, you know, in some cases were, I will say,
divesting of legacy capability that, in some cases, it really
is costing us a lot to maintain, and we are just not getting, I
will say, the return on investment from a warfighting
capability standpoint.
So, you know, we make those trades, but it is also an
opportunity to kind of, you know, reinvest that money into new
capabilities. And we have got a number of, as you well know,
new ship designs. You know, either in the shipyard in the case
of the frigate program up at Marinette, you know, we are
looking closely now at the DDG(X) [Next-Generation Guided-
Missile Destroyer] program, and that is quickly starting to
evolve. The light amphibious warship is coming along. We are
also looking to recapitalize the logistic ships as well as a
lot of the work that we are doing in the unmanned system.
So I think from a--and then not to mention what we are
doing on the submarine side as well with some early design work
on the SSN(X) [Next-Generation Attack Submarine], right.
So, you know, I think we are kind of, I will say, at a
little bit of a kind of a transformational moment here, kind of
on ship design, especially with the--you know, with the
unmanned platforms. And I know there is a lot----
Mrs. Luria. I am sorry to cut you off, Admiral. I know you
could talk at length about this, and we can probably have a
separate conversation, but my time is limited.
You know, I really just wanted to point out that, from our
perspective as lawmakers, I feel like there isn't a clear
strategy, a clear maritime strategy. What is the goal? Do we
need to have more presence there today? And if that is the
case, I feel like you would have clear direction to say, I am
focusing all my efforts on getting that, getting everything we
have out of the ships that we already have because we have them
and we know their capabilities and their limitations, but we
can put them there today and make them part of this complex
battle problem.
But, you know, without a clear vision like that, you know,
it seems like we are all over the place. We are focused on new
capabilities. I am all for, you know, research and development
and developing new capabilities. We have had a bad track record
on development of several of our last classes of ships and not
reaching the full operational capability that we wanted, LCS
[littoral combat ship] and the mission modules, DDG 1000.
And we can talk about those things separately, but, you
know, and it is just--it is kind of clear in the comments as
well that you just made on the previous questions that I asked.
I mean, you said we just--we just sort of notionally came up
with the 20-year plan for the shipyard optimization. But if you
had more clear guidance, you might be saying, darn, I need to
get this done in 5 years, and what do we need for that.
You know, I am just kind of putting all of this into the
perspective of, and perhaps you agree or disagree, that there
just isn't a clear vision of, like, what our priority is and
what the urgency is. Do you feel like more guidance and vision
on that would be helpful for you to prioritize these issues?
Admiral Galinis. Yes, ma'am. No. I feel like we have the
right guidance and the right strategy out there.
Mrs. Luria. So what is this guidance? Is it the Battle
Force 2045? Is it previous 30-year shipbuilding plans? Like,
none of the guidance that I see is very granular, and it really
doesn't say, like, this is our number one priority.
Admiral Galinis. Okay. Yeah. I can see, you know, maybe
with where we stand with the 30-year shipbuilding plan, but,
you know, the force structure work has been done, I will say,
over the last, you know, year or so. I think that provides some
pretty good indications in terms of the capabilities required,
with a couple of different options on how to, you know, equip
that force with that capability. So that----
Mrs. Luria. So how much input did you have into that plan?
Mr. Garamendi. Elaine----
Mrs. Luria. Okay. Sorry, Chairman Garamendi. I know my time
is expired.
Mr. Garamendi. We are going to try to pay a little bit of
attention to the clock. The questions are always good, and they
are provocative, and you are headed down a path that we need to
pay attention to. Some of that path is over in the Seapower
Subcommittee, and I know that you do sit on that. But all of
this tends to come back to this committee.
Whatever those ships are, if we are going to maintain, if
we are going to hang on to the cruisers, somebody is going to
maintain them, and this committee is going to be responsible
for that maintenance. So there is an interoperability here
between this.
One of the things that goes beyond this committee, and I
know all of us sit on multiple subcommittees, is the new
administration is going to look at its strategies. And sometime
probably towards the end of this year, maybe early next year,
there will be a new military strategy laid out--China, Russia,
whatever, and Space Force and all the rest.
Ultimately, this committee must pay attention to that
because all of that will require continued maintenance and its
operational capabilities. And so we will be engaged in
observing what that strategy is, looking at the new equipment
platforms, satellites, et cetera, and then, okay, how is it
going to get maintained? What are the resources necessary? What
are the facilities necessary? So a lot of what is going on here
is in flux. And, Mrs. Luria, your question is provocative and
necessary.
I am going to--I think all the other members have left. If
that is not the case, let me know, and you have----
Mr. Wilson, you are still here. You have got another round
of questions. Mr. Wilson.
Mr. Wilson. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
I do have a final question for General Gamble, and that is,
I am very grateful to represent Fort Jackson, and General
Milford Beagle has just been a super leader at the post. We
will miss him.
But always a problem that has to be addressed, and the word
``flux'' comes to mind that the chairman just used, and that is
when we have sequestration. And so how is the Army handling the
indecisiveness of sequestration, and are we back on track,
maintaining our capabilities despite the sequestration?
General Gamble. Congressman, thanks for your question. For
Fort Jackson in particular, you know, that is where we bring in
new soldiers and train our future soldiers. It is absolutely
decisive to the long-term health of our Army, the flow of young
men and women committed to the defense of our Nation going
through there.
The Chief of Staff of the Army has prioritized people first
and all investments associated with that. One of the
investments is the predictability of the flow of new recruits
coming through our pipeline. During COVID, we thought we would
be challenged in recruiting, and we met and exceeded our goals.
So I believe, despite, you know, flux, as you rightly
described it, fluctuations in many things, our economy, you
know, our level of funding, wherever those fluctuations come
from, our Army Recruiting Command and the leadership of our
leaders at Fort Jackson and Fort Benning and other places where
we train our new soldiers has been absolutely, you know,
phenomenal to smooth that out.
But leadership of our chief, the support your committee
gives us, has been absolutely critical to that. So thank you.
Mr. Wilson. Well, and it is so inspiring, when I am at
Columbia Airport, to see the young recruits coming in with
their brown manila envelopes, you know exactly who they are and
where they are going, and greeted by the USO [United Service
Organizations], and then to see the very warm welcome by drill
sergeants.
And so, again, thank you for your service. And I know that
my military service 31 years ago, I have 3 sons who have served
in the Guard in Iraq, each of them in Afghanistan, and my
youngest son, a good friend of Chairman Garamendi, is an
engineer. Military service is so important.
Thank you. And I yield back.
Mr. Garamendi. Thank you very much, Mr. Wilson.
I believe all of the members that are still on have had at
least one additional round of questioning, so we are going to
move to the end of this hearing.
A couple of things. I am going to put a couple of things on
the line.
General Kirkland, in the most recent hearings, strategic
arms and other hearings, the Air Force is going to have a large
number of new platforms, extremely sophisticated platforms.
Some of this is still classified; some is out there publicly.
We need to know, this committee needs to know how--what are
your maintenance plans for those new platforms. I don't want to
have another F-35 fiasco. So let's start, we need to know so--
and that goes all the way down, from the GBSD to a lot of other
things.
So I want to have a briefing from you within the next 3 or
4 months about the integration of your maintenance plans with
the new platforms. Okay?
Some of the others of--the Navy, similarly, have some new
things coming on, so how are you going to maintain those.
The Marine Corps, you have got a whole new strategy in the
Marine Corps. So what does that mean to this committee? We
haven't heard yet. We do know that you are about to--I guess
you are having all of your slightly used Abrams, you are
sending them over to the Army, and the Army is going, What the
hell did you do to maintain these things? So you guys work that
out, but let us know, okay, what might be going on here.
So what I am looking at here is looking at these things
from the beginning all the way to the end. And Mrs. Luria was
talking about the end. Are the cruisers really going to
disappear? Well, there is this whole new China strategy. Hmm.
How does that fit into all of this. So I want to be clear with
all of that.
Also, we are going to go back at this--at yesterday's
hearing, there was--it was classified. I won't take it up now.
I will get to you, General Kirkland, on this in a different
format.
I have talked a lot about data. I want to hear from all of
you about data mining. Somewhere in your records are paper
forms of platforms that you are still operating and
maintaining, probably going back a decade, maybe two or three
decades. That data may be very useful in determining what you
need to repair tomorrow, what is going to break tomorrow, what
is going to be required.
The Air Force has a good program underway on this. It is
going to need to be supported, General Kirkland, with some
additional personnel and some additional money, but it is data
mining, a lot of historic data. I think it is, as I recall, the
C-5--the C-17 specifically, and I believe there is one other
platform that you are using as an example. And then with using
that analytical--using that data for analytical analysis of
what you need in terms of parts and what is going to break
next. Predictive maintenance, I believe, is the word that we
decided to settle on.
I am bringing that to your attention. I think it is
important enough to really force the money to be made
available, and I think it is a small amount of money.
For the rest of you that are here, watch closely this best
practice, which may be a best practice. If it turns out--I
think you are going to know within the next 6 months whether it
is or not. If it is, share that best practice across the forces
and get ready to do some data mining.
Finally, there are two elements that the President is
pushing, and the Congress, and that is called equity. That is
equity in hiring. The minority communities, we haven't dealt--
we have dealt a lot with hiring thus far in the various
questions asked by the members. I was going to add early on
that that equity issue needs to be part of that hiring
equation. So keep that in mind. We will come back and ask you
specific questions. If I don't, I guarantee you there are about
200 other Democrats are going to ask and, quite possibly, the
President, or at least the Vice President.
Another one that I know all of us are interested in, and
that is the small businesses that was discussed earlier today,
more in passing than in specificity. There are these small
business opportunities that exist--I think it was Mr. Scott
brought this up--around all of the depots. Some of that has to
do with new technologies and the integration of the new
technologies. So the small businesses are also an issue that I
know the Congress is interested in, both Democrat and
Republican side, and they are going to bang on me, and I am
going to bang on you. So pay attention to the small business
opportunities that exist around your depots and maintenance
facilities.
So, with that, I have not run my entire string of questions
but probably enough for the hour and plus. Thank you for the
willingness to stick around through our 30-minute recess.
And, with that, I formally adjourn this hearing. Thank you
all for your participation.
[Whereupon, at 1:25 p.m., the subcommittee was adjourned.]
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A P P E N D I X
March 19, 2021
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PREPARED STATEMENTS SUBMITTED FOR THE RECORD
March 19, 2021
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[GRAPHICS NOT AVAILABLE IN TIFF FORMAT]
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QUESTIONS SUBMITTED BY MEMBERS POST HEARING
March 19, 2021
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QUESTIONS SUBMITTED BY MS. STRICKLAND
Ms. Strickland. Approximately 2,000 businesses in Washington State
provide support to the military and defense sector including suppliers
for depots like Puget Sound Naval Shipyard. The state's deep water
ports, strategically located airports, proximity to the Pacific Rim and
integrated rail and road system, allow the various branches to meet
their mission needs with tremendous flexibility and collaboration. As
the Department continues to focus on the Indo-Pacific, I know that
Washington State will become increasingly important. To that end, we
must focus on building an equitable labor force to support this
important work.
When I was Mayor of Tacoma, I created the Tideflats Certification
Program to prepare students for high-wage jobs with good benefits in
the maritime industry. I understand that many of the facilities,
including Puget Sound Naval Shipyard, in my home state of Washington,
have worked to develop apprenticeship programs. I understand that
approximately 10,000 people have been hired at the Puget Sound Naval
Shipyard since 2010, and approximately 44% of the shipyard workforce
has been hired in the last five years.
How many vacancies do you have right now? How are apprenticeship
programs working to fill labor shortages and how are you working with
technical colleges? Do you need resources from Congress to expand these
programs? Can you also provide me metrics about how these programs
recruit from and support underserved communities including veterans,
women, people of color, and indigenous communities? For those who are
trained in these programs, how many are retained over the long term?
What issues exist in retaining these employees?
Admiral Galinis. [No answer was available at the time of printing.]
Ms. Strickland. The apprenticeship program at Puget Sound Naval
Shipyard is coordinated with Olympic College which we are very proud
of, however, I am curious if you could talk to me about developing
programs for high school students for trades that don't need a college
degree?
Admiral Galinis. [No answer was available at the time of printing.]
[all]