The committee will come to order. I want to thank you all for joining us here today as we consider the fiscal year 2015 budget request for the department of the air force. I appreciate our witnesses testimony and their support for our airmen. Joining us today are the honorable Deborah Lee James secretary of the air force and general mark sub to chief of staff of the air force and he has brightened up the room a little bit by inviting his wife that betty and his daughter lives to be with us. Thank you for joining us. I want to especially welcome secretary james the 23rd secretary of the air force as this is her first Posture Hearing before a committee. We are also delighted that she is the former house staff member and in fact we were talking before we came in here and she pointed out to us where one of her offices was in her tenure on the staff. We are happy to have you back. Welcome back. This committee and you general welsh have warned about the consequences of the cuts to our Defense Budget. I dont think policymakers in washington or the American People really understand how much has been cut and what it means. For the air force what it means is although the budget request highlights were investments in readiness the air force still cannot meet its readiness needs until 2023. Let me read that again. 2023, 10 years almost from now. That is how big the readiness deficit is. The cuts we made over the last couple of years or so deep and the budget forecast into the future with what do we have . What is our problem . Sequestration. How soon we forget. But that has basically flattened out into the future so to try to refill the whole with the limited resources in the future, 10 years just to get us back where we need to be in readiness. Second the air force is faced with making difficult force structure tradeoffs. In this years budget alone the air force is retiring to pretty good aircraft. Just because we dont have the resources to maintain them. These aircraft have unique capabilities that Combatant Commanders that we are de had in the hearing process up to this point need that aircraft. Its interesting people before you general have said that you were an atf pilot and kind of indicated that you suggested getting rid of the a10. Its amazing how things work but i think the ones that we should probably be asking about the a10s for the Ground Forces that have their lives saved because of the a10 and the pilots that have flown them. I understand the dilemma we are facing. General welsh you said it tests when we pose the question do we want a ready force today or a modern force tomorrow . I now the air force is trying to make the best of a bad situation as all of the services are but i fear that the way we are heading will our nation expects her air force is to be superior and to be ready. We dont want to go into any unfair fights. Whether to deploy to reassure Eastern European allies to monitor missile launches around the world, to provide Close Air Support and intelligence to our troops in afghanistan, which of those missions would we like to eliminate . There are technological superiority is eroding the air space and cyberspace. Our forces are restrained and just meeting the daytoday work diamonds much less crisis or conflict. I said this on wednesday to the navy and marine corps and i will say it again today. Is this the air force we want for our nation. Lastly while we continue to debate funding and force structure we cannot forget the values and standards to which we hold our military. Integrity matters, leadership matters. The vast majority of our servicemembers embody those values daily. Unfortunately we have read too many stories recently that reveal behavioral cultural problems that have permeated the nuclear enterprise. Manning our Nations Nuclear deterrent is an immense responsibility and i know there are many airmen who do this with the utmost skill and professionalism. However a few bad eggs put at risk the mission and retain the record of the rest of the air force. That cannot be allowed to happen. I hope these sobering remarks remind us not to lose sight of our vital importance of reversing the dangerous budget trajectory. I look forward to your testimony here today. Ms. Sanchez. Thank you mr. Chairman and both to the secretary and to the general its a pleasure to have you before us today. General, i often use your speech at usaf to my leadership classes back home so im grateful to have you here today. I will be submitting Ranking Member smiths Opening Statement for the record. Without objection, so ordered before we have the witnesses give their testimonies i just want to let you know that im looking forward to cover two areas today in our discussion. The first, continue to be extremely concerned with respect to the leadership and personnel within the icbm, nuclear cases of misconduct, low morale, cheating on tests air commanders not conducting themselves in a manner that lives up to the standards of the air force. This is totally acceptable in this issue needs to be addressed so i would like to hear what you are doing with respect to that in the second ,com,com ma then closely monitoring the lack of competition in the air force Space Launch Programs and unfortunately i just learned of the last day that the air force has made a decision to continue this trend by reducing the competitive opportunities by 50 and i think thats a very unfortunate outcome because i believe competition drives down prices so those are two areas that i would like you to address as you move forward. Thank you mr. Chairman and i look forward to the testimony. Thank you. Madam secretary. Thank you so much mr. Chairman and members of the committee congresswoman sanchez. It truly is an honor for me to be here this morning and thank you mr. Chairman for your kind opening. Like you said this is kind of like coming home for me and i will admit that i had more experience sitting in the chairs in the back of this room than sitting on the chairs on the side of the table but its great to be back here and particularly apropos as a graduate of the military personnel compensation subcommittee to have this be my first Posture Hearing. General welsh and i do have prepared remarks which i would ask the submitted for the record and we will just summarize with your concurrence. I also want to take a moment. Without objection, your written statements will be totally injured in the record. Thank you. I would also just like to take a moment to say that a lot of people who are mourning right now at the pentagon mr. Chairman due to your announcement that he will be retiring from the congress, so i just want to say i dont think its too late to reverse that decision in case youre interested read i dont know that you will but we are grateful for all the work you have done over the years for men and women in uniform and we will surely miss you a great deal. The biggest honor and privilege for me in this new job and i am 11 weeks old in this job now is to be a part of this terrific very best air force on the entire planet and that is 690,000 more or less activeduty National Guard reserve and civilian air men and women as well as their families. That is the total team and im part of that team now and its a huge honor and a privilege. During my first 11 weeks i have been very busy not only studying up on all of the budgetary matters and all of our programs and trying to get on top of that as best as possible, but i have tried to hit the ground running and ive been out and about to see are air force in action. 18 bases in 13 states, that is where it been so far. In a nutshell here is three things that i have noted. First of all i have noted leaders at all levels in these are our officer leaders and enlisted leaders are taking on tough issues and tough budgetary environment but they are doing with a spirit and getting things done despite difficulties. Secondly i have seen superb total force teamwork and here im talking particularly with our national regarding reserve forces operating with their activeduty air force. This is from headquarters right on down to the unit level. Ive seen them get the job done and number three acrosstheboard amazing airmen who are enthusiastic about what they are doing in service to our nation. Everywhere i go i do town Hall Meetings but with that enthusiasm they also are looking to us, they are looking to you and looking to our nations leaders for decisions in greater stability if we can give it to them and leadership in these very challenging times. Indeed these are very challenging times both in terms of our security environment and the decline in budgets that you talked about mr. Chairman and its omission be we have before you we have done our best to tackle these challenges headon in a thoughtful and deliberate and very inclusive way. In the fy15 budget we do have a strategy driven budget but lets face facts. We are severely severely limited by the fiscal choices that are contained in the budget control act and the bipartisan budget act. For 2015 as you know we do hit the dollar targets that are in the vba but we also have contained therein what we call the opportunity growth and security initiative. This is a 26 billiondollar initiative across dod for us in the air force. Its about 7 billion if we are granted these additional funds and principally on readiness and other key investments to get us back closer to where we want and need to be. I hope we will get a chance to talk more about that during q a. So thats fy15. For 16 and beyond we similarly have difficult choices to make and we will talk a bit more about that as we get further into it. The key thing is that this is a budget in which we are rebalancing and mr. Chairman you said its readiness and its the future and its really not an either or because very much we need to have both. Im pretty sure is we get into this we are not going to make everybody happy and as a matter fact i think theres going to be a fair amount of unhappiness. When we get into q a are preamble in many answers to your questions will be faced with difficult choices in the budgetary situation we made these choices. I dont mean to sound like a broken record on that but it really is the truth and there are elements of lowhanging fruit in this budget. Just a few words on strategy. There are strategy impaired as for today. Secdef has laid out where we are beginning to transition we need to defend the homeland against all strategic threats. We need to build security globally by protecting u. S. Influence and deterring aggression and we need to remain prepared to work decisively against any adversary it should deterrence fail. Our air force is critically important to all those elements and that is today but theres also tomorrow. Theres a strategy imperative for tomorrow. New technologies new centers of power particularly the pacific a more volatile and unpredictable world, a world in which we can no longer accept that american dominance of the skies in that space will be preeminent. We have to get ready. We have to have abilities to operate in an environment. Again our air force is critical as well in the future so we have to have both the today and tomorrow peace. If you turn to the budget budget realities we are we are very grateful for the greater stability and the additional lump up in fy14 additional and it doesnt solve all of the ills but it was a great help so we are grateful to the vba, the fy14 appropriations and the many decisions contained in the ndaa but again even with as lump ups there were difficult tradeoffs that have to be made because the 2015 topline and beyond is a whole lot less than we ever thought possible just a few short years ago. So i have been in and around this business as an observer i would say for more than 30 years and i think you all will agree with me that there is always the strategy and there is always budgets and they never match exactly. There is always a certain degree of mismatch and when that happens that is when we have to make the decisions and the decisions are based on the best military judgment and what we think are prudent risks where we can assume those risks. That is the story this year as well. Albeit i think its a more complex and difficult year than most and as i said there is no lowhanging fruit as best as i can tell. In general our decisions reduce capacity in order to gain capability so that means we chose when necessary reductions in manpower and force structure to sustain readiness and guarantee technological superiority. We slowed the growth in military compensation in order to free up money to plow back into todays readiness as well as recapitalization. We chose to delay or terminate some programs and to protect higher priority programs. And we the soft cost savings in a number of ways reducing headquarters, putting us on a glide path to greater reliance on the guard and reserve. We sought reductions in the number of ways in order to try to balance all of this out as best we could. Now i would like to give you some of the key decisions but give it to you within the context of the three priorities that ive laid out for the air force and those three priorities are taking care of people, balancing todays readiness with tomorrows readiness and number three insuring that we have the very best air force that we possibly can have at the best value to the taxpayer so everything i work on i try to work on the prism of those three priorities. So taking care of people. That means a lot to me. Everything comes down to people as as far as im concerned and its a multifaceted area so taking care of people means recruiting the right people, retaining that the us people in developing them having diversity of thought in background at the table as we make our decisions, protecting the most important family programs. It means dignity and respect for all and making sure that everybody is on top of and leading and living our core values as you talked about the importance of integrity mr. Chairman. It means fair compensation Going Forward. Its a lot of things. Its all about taking care people. Let me zero in on two very set in particular which have some controversy associated with them. First of all based on where we believe we are going we are going to be a smaller air force in the future. We will be coming down on all of our components active guard reserve and civilian. We will get smaller and rely more on our guard and reserve but as we get smaller we need to shape our air force particular in the activeduty side but we have right now are certain imbalances. If certain categories in specialty areas where we have too many people and then we have other categories in specialty areas where we have too few people so in addition to bringing numbers down somewhat we need to rebalance and get into sync so we have a series of programs that we are offering to retrain people into other categories. Some are voluntary and then if we can get the numbers into balance their involuntary programs as well. This is very much on the minds of our airmen and i wanted to bring it to your attention as well. Another area of controversy as compensation, slowing the growth in military compensation. This was one of those hard decisions that nobody is totally happy with what we felt given the fact that military compensation has risen quite a bit particular in the last decade as we look at comparability with the civilian sector we felt that somewhat slowing that growth was a reasonable approach in the next several years as we attempt to plow money back into readiness. Again our decisions. Those are two particular areas that are on the minds of our people quite a bit now. This brings me to my second priority and that is balancing the readiness of today with the readiness of tomorrow. As you point out its going to take us a while to get back to readiness levels, quite a while where we can do a full range of capabilities. We took a big hit with sequestration last year so for fy15 we need to get back on the glide path to get it out. We need to fully fund the flying hours which we have done in other High Priorities readiness issues and we will see gradual improvements if we can secure these resources. But i have to also say there is the readiness of tomorrow. There is today and tomorrow so in addition to the readiness of today we remain committed to our programs of tomorrow. The three are the joint Strike Fighter f35, the new Tanker Program and the longrange Strike Bomber. We are also remaining committed to the Nuclear Triad the icbm and the bombers for the air force and i look forward to talking about the icbms as we get into q a. I spent a fair amount of time in my first 11 weeks on that issue and there are other things in the budget as well. Starting to rebuild our combat Helicopter Force and nextgeneration jstars aircraft in replacement for aging 230 a. Training for aircraft. Theres a billion dollars for new Energy Technology and also critical advances in our space capability so these are all the things that we chose to invest in in some cases doubling down in our vestments. Of course in order to do the readiness of todays key investments for tomorrow that is what we came down to. Where can we take what we think are the most prudent risks. Here are some of the highlights of some of the reductions that we are proposing to take. First of all the retirement of the a10 fleet. That is unknown extremely controversial area. We will talk about that as we get into the q a but i wanted to want you to know we are absolute committed to the air support mission and we will not let it drop. I too have tried to talk to commanders on the ground in the Ground Forces. General welsh knows far more than i do about it but we are going to cover it and we can cover with other aircraft and i commit that we will. Retirement is the youtube and we will keep the Global Hawk Block 30. Its not affordable that we feel under the circumstances and there are requirements which when you add those two together we are above validated requirements for highaltitude recognizance so once again a tough budget environment this is the choice we felt we could assume some risk. We will have limited growth in our combat air control. This is the reapers and the predators so we originally set a couple of years back we would go to 65 with the socalled caps. Under our proposal we will go to 55 and by the way today we are at 50. We are still growing b