During a House Armed Services Committee markup meeting before the Congressional recess, Rep. Donald Norcross (D-NJ) spoke about Congress oversight over the armed services.
00:00I recognize as a ranking member of the Subcommittee on Tactical Air and Land Forces, the gentleman from New Jersey, Mr. Norcross.
00:06Thank you, Chairman.
00:08As the Chairman just mentioned, this is a bipartisan tradition of this subcommittee for which we work very hard and should take great pride.
00:16The subcommittee printed today before us captures a shared commitment to national security.
00:21We also continued close oversight in the Department's most expensive and complex programs, including Air Force, Navy, Marines, Tactical Strike Fighters, and all the Services Rotary Wing programs to improve program management, reduce operational risk, and remedy performance deficiency to support a sufficient capability and capacity to meet current and future requirements.
00:47The Department's manned and unmanned intelligence, its ISR, and how we are meeting the combatant commander's requirements for all these systems, small unmanned aerial systems, and counter unmanned aerial systems.
01:01We're also closely following force design efforts, including the Marine Corps' force design, the Army Transformation Initiative, or ATI.
01:11Speaking of ATI, and this is extremely concerning to us, we understand conceptually what the Army is trying to accomplish, and in many ways supporting that, but Congress has not received from the Army any detailed analysis or strategy for the programmatic changes that the force structure addresses.
01:31This makes it very hard for us to do our job in an informed decision in the best way to proceed.
01:36We must have more information from the Army so Congress can do its job and have the oversight.
01:44Additionally, there are two critical and important topics our subcommittee addressed this year.
01:49First, the F-35 program, the most expensive weapons program in the history of the Department of Defense.
01:56This year, the subcommittees include language to extend our annual reviewing requirement by the Government Accounting Office, the GAO, for this F-35 program.
02:06The annual reports we received from the past GAOs were invaluable in contemplating how we must or would legislate on this key program.
02:15We'll keep these reports coming until the program demonstrates that it can field capability on time and at the projected cost.
02:24Second issue we addressed this year is a strong investment in our munitions industrial base.
02:30The days of using our munition accounts for bill payers for other programs is over.
02:36I'm proud of the work that we started over five years ago and that we've done to revitalize our munition industry base, irrespective of which party is in the majority.
02:46And I applaud Chairman Whitman for continuing and making this a priority.
02:50Finally, Chairman, I want to thank those who made so much of our work possible, our professional staff members, Jay Valerio, Mike Curlin, Heath Boat, Caroline Carley, Brooke Alvarez, and our research assistant, Andrew Smith.
03:06In just a moment, say thank you to my staff, Robin Brant.
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