During a House Armed Services Committee hearing held before the Congressional recess, Rep. Sarah Elfreth (D-MD) questioned Military officials about domestic ship production.
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00:00Thank you Mr. Chair. Thank you for your service and thank you for being here today in this candid conversation. I'd like to follow up on some questions started by my colleague from Virginia, Ms. Kiggins and Ms. Goodlander here.
00:17I'm really grateful to be on a committee that it has a bipartisan focus particularly on shipbuilding but equally important to shipbuilding in our economy is the workforce that we discussed but also ship maintenance and repair particularly I don't know if you can do your job if we don't have a thoughtful strategy on repair.
00:35So I'd like to I'd like to focus there Admiral you you mentioned earlier today about the defense industrial base and how we need to liberate long lead times of supply chains and I kind of want to dig in to this as we're also talking about acquisition reform here that's much needed.
00:51Can you walk us through how how you are advising Big Navy to better balance the need to have a robust investment stateside in our domestic shipyards while also ensuring that our ships can be maintained in a contested potentially contested environment in Indo-PACOM.
01:08Congresswoman, good morning I think there are four drivers to shipyards not not meeting rate and it is new unpredicted work it's having to rework systems it is the workforce efficiency and the availability of on hand supplies and we have to get better and faster more data centric use AI tools in order to in order to anticipate problems and to do the data analytics to get better and faster.
01:38Number two we need a steady funding flow so the downstream suppliers can lead the long lead times we need a diversification of the downstream suppliers particularly take advantage of the promise of AI enabled additive manufacturing and I've gone to these I've gone to places in Torrance California where I've just seen some cutting edge stuff and we have to we have to quickly certify those systems in order to move faster
02:08So steady funding database orientation to fixing our to fixing our problems in those four fields and diversifying our downrange supply chain and getting faster getting simpler at the technical warrant holders in order to in order to get to that.
02:26That's very helpful I want to talk about prepositioning equipment particularly again since you are far away from most of the any shipyard domestically adjacent so it's my understanding that of late the military has done a better job or made progress on prepositioning equipment
02:44in parts at in parts at bases and depots in your region but across the world but just yesterday and I don't mean to catch you off guard I would just love your genuine feedback here
02:54the army issued a stop work order on efforts to maintain these prepositioned stocks the hard to get supplies for various reasons here
03:02how critical is your ability to have this prepositioned equipment to your ability to operate during a conflict particularly in a high area denial environment
03:12prepositioning is what gains you leverage on the initial deployment of capability and so kind of so the speed of getting capability there to get that head start on that
03:23everything in the 21st century moves much much faster so the more relevant gear that we can get forward the better
03:30you're likely talking about army positioning stock three and on that front I work closely with the department on the army as well about identifying what are the really relevant air missile space maritime capabilities because the army does play in the maritime game that should be prepositioned and how are we gaining the authority to position those in places so that we can respond to that to that change
04:00and so I think it's an ongoing process as we make those calculations I prefer that it was mission reasons why we didn't versus fiscal reasons and I work very closely with the services to advocate that the only that the only reason that we don't position something forward is for reasons of mission and not not to save a buck because I you know Indopaycom is not the place to go for your savings
04:26right and also preparedness will ultimately save us money down the road save us money lives lives lives capability people and time thank you in that order thank you with my remaining seconds uh mr. no I want to follow up on my colleague uh from hawaii's conversation I represent the u.s naval academy in annapolis which is uh going to be underwater in a matter of decades now thankfully uh the navy is preparing for that but I also would would be
04:56remiss if I did not urge this administration to take seriously the rising tides that are coming uh not just for the academy but across our installations and with that mr. chair I yield my time back