During Thursday’s Armed Services Committee hearing, Sen. Jeanne Shaheen (D-NH) questioned General Randy A. George, Chief of Staff of the Army, about workforce reductions.
Category
🗞
NewsTranscript
00:00Senator Shaheen.
00:02Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
00:03Mr. Secretary, General George, thank you both for being here.
00:07I want to follow up on Senator Reid's question about the role of the National Guard in dealing with illegal immigrants.
00:18And I'm looking at a memo here from the Executive Secretary at the Department of Defense to from the Department of Homeland Security.
00:30And one of the things they say in this memo is that they're asking the National Guard to up to 3,500 personnel to support field investigative units for high priority fugitive cases,
00:44joint task force operations for absconder fugitive tracking, surveillance and canvassing missions,
00:51data analysis and call center support, and night operations and rural interdiction.
00:56That doesn't sound hypothetical to me, Mr. Secretary.
01:00That sounds like that is a direct request that has already been made to the Department of Defense.
01:05And I assume you might have seen it from the Department of Homeland Security to engage in those operations.
01:11It also says that the Army is not going to be or the Department of Defense is not going to be reimbursed for those operations.
01:20So do you know who's going to pay for those and what account from the Department of Defense that those operations would come from?
01:28Senator, I don't know what account sitting here right now, but we can follow up with your office.
01:32Well, I would hope that if the, first of all, I share Senator Reid's concerns about asking the National Guard to engage in those kinds of operations.
01:45As a former governor, I can tell you that I didn't want our National Guard going off to do something when we needed him at home in New Hampshire.
01:53But I would also be very concerned about who's paying for those, and the Department of Homeland Security, if they're going to engage in these operations, then they ought to be footing the bill, not asking the Department of Defense and the Army or anybody else in the National Guard to do that.
02:09So let me just register my grave concern, Mr. Chairman, about that.
02:13I want to go on to another topic at this point, and that is a lot of the discussion so far has been about the changing role of conflict and war.
02:27And one of the places where I think we're seeing those operations very dramatically is in the information warfare systems arena.
02:37Yeah. And so I'm concerned about the Army's decision last year to reduce nearly 3,000 Special Operation Forces personnel.
02:49Most of those were from military information support operations, MISO.
02:54And this comes at a time when we're looking at expanded operations on the part of Russia, on the part of China, our adversaries.
03:03I sit on the Foreign Relations Committee. We had a hearing earlier this year that pointed out that China's spending over a billion dollars a year on disinformation operations around the world.
03:14And so it feels to me like we're unilaterally disarming in this arena at a time when we should be engaging and thinking about how to do that.
03:25So I wonder, General George, from an operational perspective, does SOCOM have the ability to replace those positions?
03:33And how are you thinking about information warfare?
03:38First, on the information warfare, Senator, I completely agree with you.
03:43I mean, that is something. And I think rather than what we've been talking about looking at specific formations,
03:48we're also looking, you know, we have a bunch of specialties that we have had around for 20 or 30 years.
03:54And like any, I think anybody does in the commercial sector, you have to make, you know,
03:58you have to adapt and change and make sure that you're doing that.
04:01So the cuts were made, and this was, you know, worked with U.S. Army Special Operations Command and SOCOM,
04:09were print media, leaflet drops, you know, people that were doing those kinds of things.
04:14And I would argue that the world has changed and what we're, you know, what we should be doing,
04:19we should be focused on.
04:20And in the meantime, we have grown cyber capability and how we're going to do that, you know,
04:25through technology, I think is important.
04:28And I think the other thing that we've learned is that we're going to have to have this kind of capability
04:32throughout our formation.
04:33It's less about headquarters.
04:35It's about having capabilities at echelon throughout all of our formations.
04:40We're all living.
04:40It's, you know, you're not going to give just a certain people a capability because we're all going to have to operate
04:45on this very complex battlefield, and that's what we're looking at.
04:49So we just had a discussion about this.
04:51I'd love to come over and talk to you about this more in detail on what we're looking at
04:56and how we're going to embed this across our formation.
04:59I would very much enjoy seeing a plan for how that's going to be done
05:02because I think that's one of the most serious disadvantages we have right now.
05:08Thank you, Mr. Chairman.