Transcripts For CSPAN2 Armed Services Officials Brief On FY

[inaudible] this breathing will be 40 minutes in duration and on the record. Well start off with opening comments with both gentlemen and the will open the 44 questions. Good morning, good afternoon. It is good to see you all. Im not going to do a dramatic reading of the book. I promise it is there for reference in case i have to go to a. We walked your presentation of the budget here between the general and myself we will try to answer questions as best we can. Today president johnson to congress his proposed budget requests. What will do is outline the request for the Defense Department. And so go to the first light please and so the messages on the first slide is the intent is that fy 18 budget request be the next step in the armed forces. Secretary mattis from virtually the first day he was in the building he talked in terms of a threestep process on how to get there in terms of getting ready, getting balanced and getting bigger and more lethal. Her request in fiscal year 2017 for Additional Resources and culminating it in the fy 17 appropriations act was intended to address nearterm readiness. With Additional Resources we get any fy 17 budget. Were in the process of implementing that as we speak. With this budget request we will build on the readiness improvements for the remainder of this fiscal year and add resources to balance the force. I will walk through the examples where will do that. Ultimately thats not the end of the journey. Our goal is that 2019 we will sustain the gains were able to make an 2017 and 2018. By that time informed by the new Defense Strategy will build further to achieve a bigger more lethal and ready force. The base budget request is 574. 5 billion. The overseas Contingency Operation budget is 64. 6 billion for a total of 639. 1 billion. This request is 52 billion above the Defense Departments share of the fy 2018 budget cap in the current law. The budget and control act. Its essential for us to achieve the goals and meet the strategy, we must increase the Defense Budget cap. We have to reverse sequestration in order to adequately protect National Security. Since enactment of the control act in 2011 the world is becoming a more dangerous place with rising terrorism and more aggressive adversaries. Under the budget control act the military has during the same time become smaller, readiness has eroded a modernization has to for. That is not a good place to be. This budget begins to balance the Defense Program and establishes a foundation for rebuilding the u. S. Military into that more capable lethal and ready force. Here are some of the major themes from a budget perspective that informed the building of this budget. Again as i continue to emphasize improving readiness has been priority one for secretary mattis, what is that mean . What will result in . More aircraft in the air, more ships at sea, more troops in the field the more munitions on hand to rebuild the current force. This also addresses the National Security challenges we need to retain our counterterrorism and counterinsurgency competencies. We want to seek to preserve our advantages and our capability for new war fighter concepts. One of the highest priorities to recapitalize an enterprise we prioritize key investment in cyberspace capabilities. We continue to focus on innovation as a way to maintain advantage and we seek to sustain a fighting force in the world. Sensitive to the fact that were asking a lot of money we look to continue to identify pursue reforms to achieve cost savings. Like any good budgets i have a couple of graphs. What this slide is is a picture of the Defense Budget since 911. The base budget i draw your attention to the most important thing of the last two bars on the right ever fiscal year 17. Again, theyre the numbers i alluded to. The 574 billion. In addition theres also a significant increase in the enacted fy 17 level which was 523 billion. The overseas budget is a distorted picture. I caution you as the appropriations act was finalized the congressional committees put all of the Additional Resources we requested all into the overseas operation budget. So that makes your comparisons from 17 to 18 a little difficult. It offers me a chance to apologize for a difficult comparison between any fy 17 numbers and fy 18 numbers. It has to do with what was happening and when we had to lock this 18 budget and when it had not concluded yet. So depending on which book you have, or were providing for you today and overview book and the like, the numbers you see there for the fy 17 column by the request number. Thats because we didnt have those numbers available to us. As we look at the budget documentation all the books they had virtually all of their fy 17 numbers are mathematical calculation of a yearlong continuing resolution. Its a mathematical number that doesnt have any particular basis. So that distorts the comparisons between 17 and 18. The selectively i did pick up the enacted numbers. But be aware that weve been playing catchup since we block the budget. And then we are making our final decisions on fy 18. Its unfortunately the nature of the timing to put the two processes through the paces. Basically a bit of an expansion on the previous slide to show you the plus 52 billion. We sit on the right the calculated budget and control act, the dod cap will be around 522 billion. Our request is 52 billion above that. The capacity to and capability and Mission Preparedness of our units. This supports Combatant Commander exercises and engagement to increase during training capability and investing critical aviation munitions and isr and support of Combatant Commander theater activities. Next chart. This chart describes the service that highlights Service Specific increases or investments intended to increase readiness and so you see here under each of these Service Entries areas that we will invest in regarding training, equipping maintaining the force at higher levels than we had been under previous years where decisions were made to ensure that the force is always ready to accomplish the mission to deploy to the theaters of operation that we are engaged in today while in some way sacrificing the longterm readiness of the force in the modernization of the force. Fiscal year 18 as we say fills those holes and allows them to recover the readiness in the aspect in the full spectrum readiness, readiness to operate in different theaters against different adversaries over different periods of time. This budget allows us to be able to recover that readiness and establish a baseline for which to move forward from as we look to the future. Next slide a very busy slide with lots of numbers mostly to provide that information. The only Important Message on that slide is the righthand column in the bumper sticker. With this budget does it sustains essentially an increase in end strength over 56,000 from what the team column in fy17 budget was. To some extent predicted the army was inherent in fy17 authorization act. The pickup and continue to fund that paid there were minor increases you see in the middle column in the Navy Marine Corps and air force. For the most part this continues the momentum to building the force as we go forward. As i alluded to the National Defense Defense Strategy and we will figure out what is the appropriate force structure to execute the Defense Strategy when thats done in fy19 budget. Next slide please. This gives you Market Basket of some of the major Acquisition Programs. Its not allinclusive. The big ticket drivers if you will. The dollars you see on the slider combination of procurement and r d dollars in the base budget. You will see in terms of aircraft you see the biggest Acquisition Program we continue to have the f35 joint strike letter program. We are requesting 70 aircraft and fiscal year 17. Those aircraft are broken down into 46 aircraft for the air force. Which is the f. 45 00 a. M. Asking for 20 aircraft for the marine craft variant in for aircraft for the navy variants. You can see we are asking for four, f18s another aircraft as well. To be 21 are purely r d. We have essentially a combat ships we are requesting an athlete teen. A rescue ship ata gf as well so we are asking for eight ships. These are the ships in terms of two submarines to destroyers and lcs. You see the continued investment Space Programs three launches finance an athlete teen opry will be procured under competitive acquisition process. I want to stop this particular slide. As we close out this budget over the last two or three weeks particularly great deal of concern was raised for current inventory levels and particularly given some of the expenditures in the centcom area of operations as we have talked so the secretary mandated and assisted that we fully fund as maxim to the extent possible for full production capability things like the and the multiple launch rocket system. This is only half the story. There was another billion dollars of deferred emissions overseas Contingency Operations. You see there is like the brown system for the amphibious combat and the marine corps and the multipurpose vehicle. This is the first year determined for both of those programs. The total missile Defense Program and athlete teen is 10 billion in these are the two major programs in that portfolio. Please. This again is a select if set of examples. They were unclassified and i will give you some some examples of some of the things we have done in past years in terms of opus on transparency and innovation. Amar mind we have funded a robust Science Technology program 13. 2 billion and then we offer you a couple of examples in terms of alternate Navigation Technology directed energy kinds of efforts highspeed strike weapons lowcost Unmanned Systems and in particular on the bottom reacting to current changes in the threat in the field we are investing across dod to counter the Unmanned Aerial Systems that we are countering even today. This is a Market Basket of our continued concern with investing in new innovations in technology. Next slide, please. We are pretty please with their situation with facilities investments. This is an area where when you get constrained budgets and you have lower toplines you tend to take risks and tend to divert or you want to wait to fix that window until the next year as long as the ref is not leaking or Something Like that. This era faksa. 5 increase in military construction budget going from 7. 8 ilion dollars to 9. 8 billion. Theres a readiness nexus as well. We are investing in operating and Training Facilities and maintenance and production facilities in particular. As far as overseas we invest in infrastructure to support the relocation of marines from japan to guam and we are seeking the authority to commence a realignment close around in 2021. In order to get around in 2021 you have to begin the analysis in the process here. Its been over 10 years since we have had eight 2005 was the last year. The sum total of the four firebrands we have had since the 1990s and 2005 has resulted in approximately 12 billion a year in savings by having done that that is a gift that keeps giving. All we are asking for is the authority. We can even do the Detailed Analysis under current law. What we have is a parametric estimate that tells us we have about 20 excess capacity. If the numbers anywhere near correct we estimate we can save about 2 billion a year that we can reinvest into readiness and modernization kinds of requests so we are foregoing a very significant opportunity. Saberi structured systematic rigorous process that ultimately congress has the final say on. We are asking for the authority. We think we are getting signals from a couple of committees that are more amenable to it so we will be pushing that pretty hard please. We are also again as i noted we continue to look at our business process. The secretary when he came in as well said he had of rebuilding and reform agenda that he has in mind. Theres a number of ongoing activities that we continue to pursue and continue to look at the major headquarters to reduce them by 25 . We continue with acquisition reforms particularly the better buying power of 3. 0. We continue to look, take a hard look at our Service Support contracts to make sure they are appropriate and particularly for us in the Financial Management world 2018 is an extremely important year. We are going to move from getting ready for an audit to beginning the audits so thats an extraordinarily important year. We learned a lot from it. Therell be winds and losses that come out of that process but what i described spring training is over and we need to get on to actually doing the audits and we will learn an awful lot in getting us to where we need to be. It, please. Similar here some of the reforms that came out of the 2017 authorization act. Many as many of you are where we are we urbanizing the Acquisition Committee breaking into two undersecretaries one in charge of acquisition and sustainment. In the process of standing up the chief management officer. We are going to update the Cyber Command to a standalone combatant command and we are going to develop and implement a plan to reform the administrations Defense Health agency and the military treatment facilities. Again smart things to do in terms a rear organizing the department and hopefully we will elicit a fair amount of savings. Next slide these. We have seen relatively modest set of compensation reforms this year mostly tweeting things at the margins. The goal here throughout this in terms of our compensation packages is to maintain the health of the force through a competitive compensation package that reflects the unique demands and sacrifices of our servicemembers. Our senses this budget does that. This budget is going to us for 2. 1 pay raise for military members and a 1. 9 pay raise for civilians which is the government for all civilians. We will see modification is a military Health Care System we continue to look at efforts for example to rely on telehealth for additional nurses i slide in those kind of things to try to improve the beneficiaries experience with the process. We would like to exempt from many car share increase the medically retired family members of those who died on that duty. We did get from last year the fy 1617 we did get a fair amount of the revised some vocation of the Fee Structure the military Health Care System they grandfather the provision for anybody comes in a january 1, 2018 and that wiped out any of the nearterm savings and created what we think is an awkward twotier system those under one system verses those will be entered in other soil as the congress that they would consider eliminating the grandfathering. We are very pleased with where we are with the blended retirement system. There is a widespread education and Training Program that is going on as we speak in order to educate the members in terms of the kinds of choices they now have which are similar to some of the choices many civilians have. We are going to ask congress if they would basically end up matching for the military members that 20 years of service and ask at least for members they be allowed to have matching be on the 26 year service. Next slide. There is nothing particularly new on the slide that i want to emphasize we continue to have what we think is a very healthy and robust family of System Program and family at benefits that you see there. We are investing 8 million in this range of Services Everything from Spouse Education Career Assistance for all recreation and welfare and things like the schools and the commissaries and the like. To emphasize continued support to members and their families. Thanks a lot. As far as the overseas Contingency Operations request 64. 6 billion. Basically supports the level of Ongoing Operations in afghanistan and iraq and syria. It also includes additional Security Cooperation money for looking at the counterterrorism Crisis Response and other things throughout the globe. It reflects a force level structure in afghanistan of 8448 a four structure in iraq a 5765. In particular there is a major commitment to the european reassurance initiative. That goes up from 3. 4 billion in fy17 to 4. 8 billion dollars in athlete team paid the only thing i would caution is theres a number of plans in terms of change of plans that are under consideration by the building in the white house right now that are going through the vetting process in this discussion stage. This particular request is not request approval of those plans so once those plans are approved we will have to take a look and reassess whether the Resource Requirements would have