Damn! 8 JDAMS, pair 9Xs, pair of AMRAAMs and AN/ASQ-228.
VFA-213 "Blacklions" embarked on Bush currently operating off Syria coast in eastern Med.
Someone will have a very very bad day!
As lawmakers grilled Defense Secretary Jim Mattis on the gap between President Trump’s defense buildup promises and his 2018 budget, Mattis reassured them the “real growth” begins in 2019.
Mattis told members of the House Armed Services Committee he did not yet have funding projections for the troops, ships and jets Trump has talked about and offered assurances the budget released in May was the first step towards that goal. The military buildup will happen in 2019 to 2023.
“We didn’t get into this situation in one year, and we aren’t going to get out of it in one year,” Mattis said in response to questions about a 355-ship Navy. “We’re going to have to have sustained growth in ’19 to ’23, and this is where you’ll see the biggest growth: Army, Air Force and Navy as we’re digging us out of a readiness and maintenance hole.”
The outing, with Joint Chiefs Chairman Gen. Joseph Dunford and DoD Comptroller David Norquist, was the first in a marathon week of congressional testimony on the president's budget released in May. Lawmakers critical of Trump’s $639 billion budget proposal as insufficient used the hearing to set up the fight to increase military spending as the House crafts its version of the budget in the coming weeks.
At the hearing, Dunford and Mattis, said that to stay competitive, the military needs 3 percent to 5 percent growth above inflation — a tall order for Congress at roughly $19 billion per year. To achieve the military buildup “is going to take sustained growth over time,” Dunford said.
HASC Tactical Air and Land Forces Subcommittee Chair Mike Turner, R-Ohio, took aim at the Office of Management and Budget, run by director Mick Mulvaney, a deficit hawk and former House lawmaker. Turner and HASC Chair Mac Thornberry, R-Texas, have warned that U.S. troop readiness and maintenance are at a critical low-point.
“Do you know you have planes that do not fly, that you have pilots that don’t get flying time, that you have soldiers that are not ready, and that you have shortfalls in ammunition, training and spare parts,” Turner asked. “Because the budget that they gave us doesn’t fix that. What did OMB tell you? Because we want to fix it now, we can’t wait.”
Mattis defended the 2018 budget as an effort to stabilize readiness problems, while “the real growth comes in ’19 to ’23, with a program OMB is keenly aware we need. President Trump is keenly aware, and we have his support on this.”
HASC Seapower Chair Rob Wittman, R-Va., criticized Trump’s budget as aiming toward 308 ships versus Trump’s promised 355, and called the near-term goal of building eight or nine new ships “counterintuitive” in the face of adversaries growing their own capacity.
Rep. Bradley Byrne, R-Ala., the Seapower Subcommittee’s vice-chair, touted estimates it would take another $5 billion per year to reach a 355 Navy, and asked Dunford when the administration would “get to that point.”
Dunford replied he, too, was concerned the ships would be “late to need” and that unstable federal funding would drive up costs.
“If we told a shipbuilder with predictability that we were going to build 10 ships, it would take 10 ships’s worth of steel, 10 ships’ worth of copper piping, wiring and [DoD would know] it could cost ‘X,’” Dunford said. “That fact that we don’t have predictability for shipbuilding means we pay much more.”
In prepared testimony, Mattis leaned on the issue of unpredictable funding, urging Congress to fully fund the president’s budget, to do it in a timely way and eliminate statutory budget caps, known colloquially as sequestration.
Dunford, in his prepared testimony, warned the U.S. is losing its advantage over potential adversaries, and “without sustained, sufficient, and predictable funding, I assess that within five years we will lose our ability to project power.”
Lawmakers have frustrated the Pentagon by failing to pass budgets by the start of the fiscal year, Sept. 30, and failing to repeal budget caps. Pro-defense lawmakers have pressed to lift the caps for the military alone, stalemating with Democrats who have insisted on parity between defense and non-defense spending and deficit hawks who oppose domestic spending.
Mattis had sharp words for Capitol Hill.
“In the past, by failing to pass a budget on time or eliminate the threat of sequestration, Congress sidelined itself from its active constitutional oversight role,” Mattis said. “It has blocked new programs, prevented service growth, stalled industry initiative, and placed troops at greater risk. Despite the tremendous efforts of this committee, Congress as a whole has met the present challenge with lassitude, not leadership.
now Navy Has Picked the First Two Carriers to Fly MQ-25A Stingray Unmanned Aerial Refueling TankersMar 22, 2017
and
Navy Investing More Funds into Risk Reduction for MQ-25 Aerial Refueling UAV
source:
it's USNI NewsUSS Dwight D. Eisenhower (CVN-69) and USS George H.W. Bush (CVN-77) will be the first two carriers to field the Navy’s MQ-25A Stingray unmanned aerial refueling tanker, a spokesperson told USNI News.
The two carriers will receive upgrades to include the control stations and data links needed to control the tanker, Naval Air Systems Command spokeswoman Jamie Cosgrove told USNI News.
Bush was the first carrier to have an unmanned aerial vehicle to perform an arrested landing on its flight deck in 2013 in a test of the Northrop Grumman X-47B UAV.
It’s unclear when the Norfolk-based carriers will be upgraded, but several sources have told USNI News that Chief of Naval Operations Adm. John Richardson intends to accelerate the deployment of the Stingray and get it on carrier decks as early as 2019.
The aircraft is in high-demand because it would help alleviate the burden on the carrier air wing’s current refueling aircraft: the Boeing F/A-18E/F Super Hornet. Anywhere from 25 to 30 percent of Super Hornet sorties are used for refueling missions, USNI News has previously reported.
A Navy spokesperson told USNI News on Monday the program was “too pre-decisional” to comment on the operational introduction of the MQ-25A tanker.
Service leaders have said they wanted the capability by 2020.
The service is set to release the request for proposals (RFP) to the four competitors for the business – General Atomics, Lockheed Martin, Boeing and Northrop Grumman – later this year.
The Fiscal Year 2018 proposed budget included $222 million for research and development of the MQ-25A.
News of the first carriers set for the MQ-25A introduction comes as the Navy decided to reprogram $26.7 million for control systems and data link installation the MQ-25A will need to operate from an aircraft carrier, taking that money from the USS George Washington (CVN-73) during its four-year midlife refueling and complex overhaul (RCOH) in the Fiscal Year 2017 budget.
Most of the attention for the Stingray program has been on the air segment, the data link and control stations make up the other two-thirds of the program and are being developed by the Navy inside NAVAIR.
While the Stingray program cycled through several iterations – the low-observable and heavily armed Unmanned Combat Air System (UCAS) and the subsequently blended light-strike and long-endurance surveillance UCLASS created drastically different concepts for the airframes – the fundamental work of the links and the control stations remained largely unchanged. The data link and control station will also be able to interface with future unmanned airframes as they’re developed for the service.
Through the churn of the requirements for the air segment, the Navy has not outlined its next steps for unmanned carrier aviation beyond the limited goals for the MQ-25A.
However, the UCLASS control system will be able to quickly add new aircraft to capable carriers, USNI News understands.
source:The United States, guarantor of the current world order, will lose the ability to maintain that role in five years unless something fundamental changes on Capitol Hill, , chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told Congress at an extraordinary Monday evening hearing.
Dunford made it personal, saying “…without sustained, sufficient, and predictable funding I assess that within 5 years we will lose our ability to project power; the basis of how we defend the homeland, advance U.S. interests, and meet our alliance commitments.”
Why? It’s simple, really. “has forced the Department of Defense (DoD) to operate with about $450 billion less than planned and required. These reductions have been aggravated by (CR) which hamper long-term investment and often result in increased costs,” Dunford testified before the House Armed Services Committee at the first of the annual budget posture hearings for the 2018 request. “For nine of the last ten years, the Department of Defense has operated under some type of CR, delaying critical new starts, deferring installation and infrastructure modernization, and canceling major training events. A year-long FY18 CR would cut $33 billion from the Department’s request, further exacerbating these problems.”
If you want to be nasty and boil that down, he’s telling Congress that it’s their fault the United States will no longer be the world’s global power because they can’t do their jobs and pass annual appropriations bills or break the agonizingly long impasse over the too honestly-named Budget Control Act, fondly known in shorthand as sequestration. There’s time to fix things, but not much.
told the HASC it will take 3 to 5 percent increases each year to start making a dent in our current situation. is essentially a stabilizing move to make sure things don’t get worse, he told Congress. Later in the hearing, in response to Rep. Mike Turner ripping off a series of questions about what the US cannot do today, Mattis said the “real growth” in Pentagon budgets will come in the out years, 2019-23. He said President Trump knows the Pentagon needs more money. “We have his (the president’s) support on this,” Mattis said.
Still, lawmakers from both parties were skeptical throughout the hearing. Rep. Adam Smith, the tart-tongued ranking Democrat on the HASC, said the House needs a bill on the floor to repeal the BCA and he asked Mattis if he thought a repeal vote was the right thing to do. The Defense Secretary chuckled and agreed.
, who is clearly not a big cheerleader for President Trump’s administration, pressed Mattis and Dunford about a fundamental issue. Does the 2018 budget address President Trump’s pledges to build a 355-ship Navy, increase the size of the Army and Marines, build up the Air Force’s squadrons and, though Thornberry didn’t say it, make America great again? The 2018 budget, Thornberry said, “does not really advance any of those goals, does it?
Later on in the hearing, Mattis offered a good line on the budget, saying “we can’t just put a marker down in one year” to cover the decade of damage wrought by the BCA and the absence of spending bills. So, the answer is — no.
But the larger strategic issue is, do our enemies now think our military is fading and can be challenged? Dunford’s answer to this was to note “the perception of strength” has a lot to do with why wars start. He did say “it’s fair to say” our allies “have concerns about that.”
The round of 2018 budget posture hearings continue at 9:30 a.m. Tuesday morning at the Senate Armed Services Committee. Extend your sympathies to Mattis and Dunford.
with double hangar for B-2That's some heavy iron on the ramp at RAF Fairford !
There's no doubt sequestration has damaged the US military across a wide range of current and future capabilities, and Congress should end it ASAP. The part not talked about often enough is our leaders getting us into wars all over the world. For example, how many of the wars we're currently waging are elective and not necessary? Are the wars we're fighting making Americans safer or less safe? Why haven't Defense Secretary Mattis and the rest of our national leaders talked clearly about those national security topics?
"Why? It’s simple, really. “has forced the Department of Defense (DoD) to operate with about $450 billion less than planned and required. These reductions have been aggravated by (CR) which hamper long-term investment and often result in increased costs,” Dunford testified ..."
source:
now USNI News:2019 headline:
Mattis: Trump military buildup begins in 2020
huh?
Mattis: Trump military buildup begins in 2019
source:Seapower leaders on the House Armed Services Committee pressed Pentagon leaders Monday night to explain why the president’s 2018 budget request does not put the Navy on a path to have a fleet of 355 ships.
Rep. Joe Courtney, (D-Conn.), led the way asking why the $603 billion request didn’t call for 12 ships, rather than nine as part of the Fiscal Year 2018 budget. “We’re living off a legacy fleet” and said that if that level continued the fleet would top out at 308 ships rather than 355.
Defense Secretary James Mattis, testifying at the rare evening hearing, said, “we’ve got to weave” all the services’ requests into one piece in the request and not just shipbuilding. He cited Army manpower shortages, Air Force fighter and naval aviation needs as requiring attention as well.
“As you know ships are expensive” and require long times to build, he said.
Rep. Rob Wittman, (R-Va.) and chairman of the seapower panel, asked in a follow-up question why $1 billion had been cut from the expected shipbuilding request. “We’ve been marking time,” while potential adversaries such as Russia and China modernize their armed forces.
“We need to catch up,” he said.
Mattis said, “I share your sense of urgency [but] we’re not going to get out of this [readiness and modernization challenge] in one year.” As he answered to a series of questions from other members over readiness and modernization shortfalls, Mattis said sustained growth in the defense budget of 5 percent per year, especially between fiscal years 2019 and 2021 was critical to meet new challenges and requirements.
Marine Gen. Joseph Dunford, chairman of the Joint Chiefs, added, “We’re confronted with what’s called a bow wave” of needed modernization from nuclear forces to cyber to ships to aircraft to vehicles. But as he noted in several different ways, “procurement is readiness,” and this budget request and the one for FY 2017 started to get at readiness shortfalls in flight hours, ship building and repair and training ground forces.
Later in answer to another question about the size of the future fleet, Mattis said, ”We’ve got to get the fleet we have now back to sea,” which means addressing immediate readiness.
Likewise, he said buying F/A-18E/F Super Hornets was a short-term fix for naval aviation until more F-35s join the air wings. Repairing older F/A-18s were costly and did not provide the needed bridge to the future.
The overriding concern expressed by committee members and Dunford and Mattis was to really move ahead with Pentagon modernization across-the-board was to repeal the Budget Control Act with its spending caps. The current request for the Defense Department is more than $50 billion above the caps.
Members and the panelists also agreed Congress’ inability to pass regular budgets, instead relying on Continuing Resolutions with strict limitations on how much and where money can be spent to keep the government’s doors open complicates modernizing existing systems and buying new ones.
“We’re not able to give industry [a clear idea] of the right magnitude of resources” they need to have to proceed with long-term programs under continuing resolutions, Dunford said. For defense industry, Dunford said this translates into there is no predictability of what the federal government will be spending in future years. Mattis added it also throws a blanket over possible savings that could be seen by entering multi-year contracts with civilian industry when the government is limited by what it can do under the resolution.
On North Korea’s nuclear and missiles programs, Mattis said existing anti-ballistic missile sites in Alaska and California are capable of meeting the threat now. As for Pyongyang’s pressing forward on intercontinental ballistic missiles capable of carrying nuclear weapons striking the United States, “we don’t have to wait” until they are fielded to respond.
If it were a conventional war on the Korean Peninsula, Mattis said, “It would be a war like nothing we’ve seen since 1953.” Dunofrd said, “I don’t have any doubt [that} we will win,” but casualties in the first few days especially in and around Seoul would be very high.
In opening the hearing, Chairman Mac Thornberry, (R-Texas), said, “2018 is a big decision point” for Congress and the Pentagon. Ranking Member Adam Smith, (D-Wash.) seconded that, adding Capitol Hill for too long “has been putting off choices of what we want to do” with the money that is available.
Oh yeah? And how are we going to pay for that?Today at 7:11 AM
now USNI News:
Congress Presses SECDEF Mattis on U.S. Navy Path to 355 Ships
source:
and now I readreal world Fear of DoD struggles grow, amid vacancy levels not seen for 50 years
... goes on right below due to size limitThere are a lot of around the E-ring, the most prestigious sector of the Pentagon, where top defense officials enjoy the rare privilege of windows. But that’s about to change, a senior aide to Defense Secretary Jim Mattis told me.
“There’s a bow wave of names that are very close to being announced or (already) ,” said Tony DeMartino, a retired Army veteran who serves as deputy chief of staff to Mattis, giving his first and so far only media interview in the job.
Here are the numbers, as supplied by DeMartino. Including both nominees still being vetted and those publicly named or already confirmed, there is someone somewhere in the pipeline for 75 percent of available positions. If you just count people who have been officially named, nominated, or confirmed, he said, there are 19 people named (three of them Obama holdovers) out of 57 Senate-confirmable positions or 33 percent. (For comparison, counts 17 named out of 53 positions; the lists just 14).
Yes, DeMartino acknowledged, there have been delays and missteps, notably the very public withdrawals of three nominees: , for Navy Secretary; and , both for Army Secretary. But, said DeMartino, the nomination team has learned from experience and is picking up the pace.
Yes, there are reports (including by Breaking Defense) of , but in fact they’re working together well, he said.
Yes, public counts of key positions filled lag previous administrations, but behind the scenes, he said, many candidates have been interviewed and approved by the White House. Those names-in-process include some of the Pentagon’s (policy, personnel, comptroller, intelligence, & acquisition), he said, though he wouldn’t divulge which ones.
So, I asked, you’d say you were at a tipping point? Yes, DeMartino said.
At least one senior defense lawmaker was not impressed. “It’s not. And it’s inexcusable,” said top Democrat on the House Armed Services Committee. “(It’s) a symptom of a White House that still doesn’t know how to govern.”
The Critics
“The Defense Department is woefully understaffed in key positions,” Rep. Smith said. “It is a huge problem (for the annual and ). There aren’t a lot of people to talk to, so it definitely has slowed down the process.”
“It’s not just the Defense Department, it’s all over the place. We’ve been trying to get something out of the Department of Homeland Security and basically nobody works there,” Smith added. “I’ve been trying to talk to for about a month now.”
Smith is not the only skeptic. His Republican counterpart, HASC chairman , has repeatedly lamented the slow pace, though we didn’t get any comment from him for this story. In the Senate, Armed Services chairman John McCain last month publicly derided the “” of nominations. More recently, both Democrat Tim Kaine and Republican Lindsey Graham asked Air Force Secretary Heather Wilson about the vacancies during a . Do they create problems for you in doing your job? Graham asked.
“It’s becoming difficult, yes,” Wilson answered. It’s worth noting that she’s the only service secretary so far confirmed because three nominees in a row for Army and Navy Secretary withdrew.
Even non-partisan industry groups are publicly raising concerns. “Gen. Mattis was confirmed on inauguration day. Here we are not quite six months later and we’re just now getting this DepSecDef into the Senate queue,” Dan Stohr, chief spokesman for the powerful , said in an interview. was named for Deputy Secretary of Defense March 16, but he was only formally forward to the Senate on June 7th, and his confirmation hearing is still to come.
For comparison, Deputy Secretary Bill Perry was on the job in the Clinton administration by March 5th, Paul Wolfowitz in the Bush administration by March 2nd, and Bill Lynn in the Obama administration by February 12th.
No undersecretary for policy — traditionally the No. 3 job in the Defense Department — has even been nominated. There’s no one named for the other undersecretary slot of vital concern to AIA, Acquisition, Technology, & Logistics. “ATL is another critical position for us, particularly since that position is,” said Stohr.
True, the aerospace industry is luckier than, say, shipbuilders in that an Air Force Secretary has been confirmed, unlike the Navy and Army Secretaries, but that’s hardly sufficient. “Having SecAf is great but there’s a host of the next tier down positions to get the network of senior leadership that sits between SecDef and the careerists; they’re the ones who really on a day to day basis help drive policy,” Stohr said. “Right now you go straight from SecDef to the careerists, and that’s not the way the system’s designed to work.”
The vacancies will be highly visible at the upcoming , Stohr added, traditionally the year’s major meet-and-greet for the global aerospace industry. “We don’t have the senior political appointees in place that we would expect to meet with at a show of this stature,” he said. Companies can still do business, of course, but the administration contingent may lack the clout to sway their foreign counterparts or the legal authorities to get things done.
It’ll affect budgets and procurement as well, Stohr said: “”When you talk about the appropriations bills going forward, the people who put those contract activities into place need direction, and the direction comes from the senior politicals.”
The Defense Department’s strict chain of command solves that problem, DeMartino argued. It’s the “next man up” rule, he said. Just as first officer of a warship steps up when the captain gets shot, career civil servants will step up and fill the vacant politically-appointed position above them, “performing-the-duties-of or acting-as” their absent superior to get things done.
“There are people in each of those stovepipe organizations doing the work,” DeMartino said. But as anyone who’s spent much time in the Pentagon knows, “actings” rarely feel they have the authority to do much beyond keeping things running as they are.
And they’re not Trump’s people, I pointed out, and nor Mattis’. Who conveys the administration agenda to career bureaucrats who often have agendas of their own? Secretary Mattis, DeMartino said: “He gives broad guidance and the career people will move out.”
I asked Stohr about this thesis. His response? “That’s true to a point — and I think we’ve reached that point.”
...
