Of betsy devos. We know at least two republican senators intend to vote against the nominee, meaning that Vice President mike pence would need to come to capitol hill to cast the tiebreaking vote and that would be the first time that Vice President broke a tie in a cabinet confirmation. President trump tweeted about the devos nomination earlier today saying, senate dems protest keep the failed status quo. Betsy devos is a reformer. She will be a great education secretary for our kids. That Senate Confirmation vote will take place at noon eastern time today and you can watch it live on our companion network cspan2. And from here we go to House Armed Services committee with a state on the military. This started just a short time ago. They watched our fighting and theyre preparing their forces. We need to me pair to fight any adversary. Were extremely good today and are ready to fight in the middle east. Against violent extremists but we need to fight against any adversary. We need more flying hours but to get more flying hours we need more bottom. We bottomed out at 311,000 people. Thanks to your help, were up to 317,000. At the end of this past fiscal year. We want to grow to 321,000 people here in the next coming year. If we do that, that brings us to about 90 manning. As anybody knows 90 effective manning, because you have people employed or cant do the job or in training leaves but 75 effective manning. Mr. Kelly let me stop because i have another question that i want to get to. When we talk about b. C. T. s or we talk about muse or we talk about Fighter Wings or the number of ships or carry groups, those things are important and i think a lot of america dont understand, were rotating the fresh equipment out of units to make combat ready units and that by doing that it decreases the future deployments. Have you guys in writing, i would ask each of you let me know how many b. C. T. s you need and what the personnel instrength that the army needs and not only that but the number of m1, new m1 systems so we are not rotating equipment. They used to they wanted a crew on his tank because you get a familiarity with that piece of equipment and were having to hotbed everything we have in the military today. A hotbed means a crew uses another crews equipment because its newer and up to date. So do you guys have an idea what your instrength do you hink we need to be to meet the days mission and equipment, both in modernization and replacing the old stuff and if you could address that and ill start with you, general walters. General walters yes, sir. The number of marines we need in my written statement i said we need a minimum of 194. Its interesting, you hit on the point. Why are we hot in equipment . Why are we moving the equipment around . Because for eight or 10 years we have modernization programs in place. Replace our old equipment. But theyre delivering over a 30year time frame and were buying them at a minimum level. The example for us, the prime ample is we have a 40yearold amphibious vehicle and were putting an upgrade on it on a third of them because we wont deliver the new ones yet. Jltv, i have a need for light tactical vehicles. Were buying it at a shallow rate. It will take us 20 years to get there. Probably the poster child for us is i have a light Armored Vehicle thats 34 years old and because of the fiscal straints we have been under we never even thought about replacing it obsolescense use on there and the marines deserve new equipment for the threat. Mr. Kelly o. C. O. Doesnt allow them to modernize top line funding and i yield back, mr. Chairman. Mr. Thornberry and if others would like to respond to mr. Kellys questions that would be great. We have to stay reasonably on time. As mr. Cooper said, we have lots of folks on this committee. Mr. Cash hal. Mr. Carbajal. Mr. Carbajal thank you for your service to your country. As a former marine, i am very honored to be part of this committee and to address you today. It is quite clear from your tms today and from our previous hearings that our military faces incredibly diverse threats some of which are well prepared for and some of which remain to be a work in progress. There is no question we must continue to maintain a Strong Military force and Congress Must do its part to provide the necessary resources to ensure readiness. However, as all of you will probably agree sequestration is not the answer. It will neither balance our budget nor improve our military readiness. Many, if not all of you, have indicated that the number one risk to readiness is sequestration. I believe the question we must ask ourselves is, what are we trying to protect . As we continue to impose arbitrary cuts to our countrys education and Health Systems and not take steps to protect our environment. I believe we will be left with the hallow nation with nothing more for the most superior armed forces to protect. I believe in order to develop an effective strategy we must decide what our desired end state is for each of the threats and priorities our military leaders identify and then look at what resources are needed to meet those desired goals. Better oversight and accountability systems must be put in place to ensure not only an effective but an efficient military. I believe it is a disservice to our to the American People for congress to be funding cost overruns. To this end, my question to all of you is what steps has each service taken in order to increase oversight and accountability to its various programs and operations in order to eliminate wasteful spending . Can you provide us with some examples of savings your service has identified . And i say this because no surprise to you that on occasion there are many articles in the media that identify this wasteful spending and yet we have so many priorities that we are being asked to consider. Id like to hear from each one of you, if possible. Thank you, congressman, and thank you for your service. Searcher fidelis. We love the United States marine corps too, even the United States army so we appreciate your service. General allyn i would first highlight the fact that you spoke of two significant challenges. First of all, the threats that we face and this uncertain environment we operate and the savings that we must continue to be pursuing as good stewards of the resources that you, the congress, provide to us. On the first piece, the other significant challenge to us in addition to sequestration is continuing resolutions. Continuing resolutions deny us the opportunity to implement new programs like the ability to upgrade our opposing force capability at our combat Training Centers as we identify capabilities our adversaries are using that we are likely to face. We must train against those. We must upgrade our capability to do that. We cannot do that under continuing resolution conditions. So we would also appreciate the passage of an appropriations bill, obviously, in the very near future. In terms of savings, a couple critical initiatives the United States army is under way with, to continue to be good stewards of the resources that you provide, we have a strategic portfolio review process that looks at all of our acquisition domains and ss all identifies the highest Priority Programs and ensures that were moving money away from those that are less important and funding those that we must deliver as fast as possible to ensure that we can equip our forces in the future. The second thing is to ensure we achieve auditability which is a critical requirement that we must deliver to the nation. And that is well under way. We have made progress year over year. We estimate we will probably still have work to do at the end of this year to get to full auditability, but we are progressing as rapidly as we can. One of the programs that allows s to do that is our gfebs Software Program that enables us to see ourselves accurately across all our funding systems. We need to upgrade that Program Based on the findings of prior year audits. We cannot do that in a continuing resolution environment. So, again, a couple of points to your very accurate questions. Mr. Carbajal and i hope the gentleman will work with those in the next two years mr. Thornberry and i hope the gentleman will work with those in the next two years. Thank you for offering this opportunity. Thank you to the witnesses for your Extraordinary Service to our nation and the extraordinary sacrifices you have each made mr. Khanna my question concerns cybersecurity. One of the things i often hear from companies is the burden that they actually have to have cybersecurity. And you never would expect our companies to have private Defense Forces against conventional attacks but a large portion of their budgets are going to defend against cyberattacks. And we know that there are about 240,000 cybersecurity jobs that are unfilled because folks dont have the skills. Many people in the private sector will say the best folks are those whove been trained either pi the military or the government and there are just not enough of them for them to come into the private sector. So my question for all the branches and i dont know which one is most relevant is what can we in congress do to help you better prepare in training folks, equip in cybersecurity, what do you need for the military and what do you think you can do to help get more trained folks who can then go into the private sector . Ill start, congressman. And thank you for that question. Incredibly important area for all of us operating in the cyberdomain each and every day. General allyn i would offer one very important authorization that you could provide to us is increased flexibility in cyberprogram funding. The adversary is moving at light speed in their attacks of our infrastructure and our capabilities and we have to be able to develop counters and offensive capabilities at the speed of light. And our current systems are not designed that way. So authorizing some funding flexibility, specifically for our cyberprograms so we can be more agile, responsive and capable both on offense and defense would be critical. Sir, i would add to those very important points that flexibility is also needed in how we manage the people that we have. Your point about the number of vacancies in the civilian market force, cyberprofessionals and the draw that it takes off of the services who do produce incredible talented folks in this world is there, and so we are looking at every opportunity to allow for our sailors who are trained and experienced in this to have opportunities to work inside and outside the navy. Admiral moran and the flexibility to draw between the active and reserve and civilian and back. I think thats how the nation can solve this problem because we cant keep throwing money at people to try to keep them in. That said, our training and the way were organized has increased significantly. All of the services have invested a substantial amount of money in the past years. But cyberwarfare is like others subject to readiness cuts and the cuts are being able to upgrade from windows x to windows y and we have to take some cuts to those readiness accounts as well as all the other ones as we see a reduced top line. Thanks for the question. I just add, a communication centered focus to a cybersecurities focused. There are some acquisition reforms that i think can help keep up with the speed that the industry is going with as well as we made great progress on our civilian hiring and how we can do that general wilson but i think theres more work to be done there. We are in a competition for talent. We need to bring in the best and brightest. We have fantastic Training Programs and we can help our nation moving forward but theres still work to be done and how we bring on civilians into our work force. General walters sir, im with all my colleagues here. We need to recruit, train and maintain that work force and we are short and i think were short globally. I think its a problem thats not just replicated in the military but its really for the entire country. Mr. Khanna thank you. Thank you, mr. Chairman. Mr. Thornberry thank you. Mr. Wilson. Mr. Wilson thank you for your work with president trump. Secretary mattis, this issue has been raised and what a great team we have here with the vice chiefs, too, to work on the issue of readiness. Its very important for me. I am very grateful to be the chairman of the readiness subcommittee. It gives me an opportunity to work with Ranking MemberMadeleine Bordallo and we will be there to back you up in every way we can to promote our promote our troops, protect our country, protect military families. With that in mind, general wilson, i appreciate in South Carolina we have Joint Base Charleston air force back, mcintyre joint air force base and north auxiliary field. Comments or concerns have been raised by prior persons serving in the military. Secretary james stated, quote, less than half of our combat forces are ready for a highend fight, end of quote. And also air force chief of staff stated, combat operations and reductions in our total force coupled with budgetary instability and lower than planned funding levels have resulted in the smallest, oldest and least ready forces across the full spectrum of operations in our history. These are deeply troubling comments for american families. Two questions. General, have these shortfalls affected the air forces ability to meet Mission Requirements . And secondly, do these shortages still exist and if so, how does the air force plan to address them . General wilson thank you, congressman wilson. The short answer is, yes, these still exists. Today, we find ourselves less than 50 ready across the air force and we have pockets that are below that. In particular, some of the bases that you mentioned in South Carolina between charlotte and mcintyre and others, we find, again, not flying enough with enough hours. We know how to fix this. We did this in the late 1970s as we dug out from there. We can do this again. It starts with as we talked before stapeable, predictable funding that we can in our case we need to increase our manpower to 350,000 airmen. That mans 100 of the of the positions on our books today. And we do that over the next five to seven years. While we bring on the manpower and we make sure we have the training behind the manpower. Then, we can increase our Weapon System support to all of our support and our parts and our supply. On top of that then we can increase our flying hours and then we can bring down our ops tempo and get our readiness back. We also at the same time have to modernize the force and were doing so as we bring on f35s, kc456, we need to keep those programs on track. Today we have 75 less f35 than we planned in 2012. We have 95 less mq9s than we planned because of sequestration. Todays modernization has a readiness impact in the future. We need to focus on that Going Forward in the future. With those steps we can dig out of our Readiness Challenges we have today and bring it up to full Spectrum Readiness of about 80 . Mr. Wilson thank you for your commitment. General walters, im grateful South Carolina has Marine Corps Air station buford and parris island. Were grateful for such extraordinary facilities giving young people extraordinary opportunity to serve our country and achieve to their highest ability. I am concerned that it was reported last year that we have tactical 41 pliable aircraft that additionally we had zpents that have been unprecedented. And from that situation of danger to our pilots and communities, what is the current state of Marine Aviation . Is there a correlation between aviation mishaps and the ability of a ready basic aircraft . And how do you plan to address this . General walters were addressing the aircraft issue. We have been doing it for two years with the help of congress. We need to get up to 589 ready base aircraft. That gives us enough to train with. Were not there yet. Were 439. Were 100some short. But were 50 more than we were two years ago. Thats positive. Your last question about correlation to accidents. There is no direct correlation. I have reviewed every accident we had in the last two years. Those pilots have had the adequate time. But i think its an overall systemic shortfall in readiness in our aviation units. Mr. Wilson thank youal for your service. We appreciate it sow. Thank you. Ms. Bordallo. Ms. Bordallo thank you, mr. Chairman. Thank you for the witnesses being here today. I appreciate the opportunity to continue to highlight the very serious challenges that we face. We have brought ourselves to this point largely by fighting two decadelong wars, paid for with a credit card. While deferring investments in our people, our equipment, and our facilities. This has been further strained by selfimposed fiscal constraints and our National Security apparatus will continue to be hampered without an end to acrosstheboard sequestration. In the meantime, we must continue to focus our resources on individual operations and maintenance accounts. I have a question for you, admiral moran. As we discussed yesterday in my office, there are significant readiness needs facing the navy and our ship maintenance infrastructure has limited apacity. The recent unfunded priorities list indicates as much with ship depot maintenance at the top. However that conflicts the recent unfunded priorities administration that has indicated a desire to focus instead on construction. In an ideal world the navy would be able to modernize while shrinking the readiness deficit, but the reality is that we do not have a blank check. So i my question to you, admiral, is how does the navy intend to prioritize these competing needs . In other words, with Additional Resources, will it focus on immediate actions such as addressing deferred ship main