Hearing of the Senate Armed Services Committee - Opening Statement of Sen. John McCain, Hearing on Reshaping the U.S. Military

Hearing

The Senate Armed Services Committee meets this morning to receive testimony on
reshaping the U.S. military. I would like to thank our witnesses for appearing
today:

 David Ochmanek, Senior Defense Research Analyst at the RAND
Corporation;

 James Thomas, Principal at the Telemus Group;

 Thomas Donnelly, Resident Fellow and Co-Director of the Marilyn Ware
Center for Security Studies at the American Enterprise Institute; and

 Bryan Clark, Senior Fellow at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary
Assessments.

For the last twenty five years, Americans have taken our nation's military
superiority for granted. We watched as the Cold War ended with the collapse of
our only superpower rival and the so-called "end of history." We quickly grew
accustomed to military dominance. After all, no U.S. Navy ship has been sunk in
an active conflict since 1952. No member of American ground forces has been
killed by an enemy airstrike since 1953. No American fighter aircraft has been shot
down in an air-to-air engagement since 1991. And every one of our nation's recent
military conflicts resulted in a lopsided conventional military victory from the Gulf
War, to Bosnia and Kosovo, to the early phases of the wars in Afghanistan and
Iraq.

This confidence in our military is reflected in the rhetoric of many our nation's
civilian and military leaders who reassure us that ours is the most capable fighting
force on the face of the earth, or that our defense budget is so much larger than our
competitors. These statements are undoubtedly true. And to be very clear, any
adversary that chooses the path of aggression against the United States or its allies
would, indeed, pay a terrible price.

But ultimately, such statements shed little light on the most important question:
whether our military can achieve the mission assigned to it--to deter and, if
necessary, defeat aggression--and at what cost. The testimony of our military
leaders and the work of some of our foremost defense experts leads me to believe
there is real reason for concern.

For the last twenty five years, our adversaries have gone to school on the American
way of war. And with focused determination, they have invested in, developed,
and/or fielded the capabilities to counter it:

 Long-range, accurate ballistic and cruise missiles that can target our ground
forces, ships, military installations, and critical infrastructure;

 Dense, integrated air defenses that pose a threat to even our most advanced
aircraft;

 Large numbers of modern fighter aircraft, including some fifth-generation
platforms, armed with capable air-to-air missiles that in some cases outrange
our own;

 More advanced surveillance and reconnaissance systems, resilient command
and control networks, electronic warfare capabilities, and anti-satellite and
cyber weapons that, taken together, threaten our ability to achieve
information dominance.

By expanding contested battlespace and exacerbating the tyranny of distance, our
adversaries are threatening our military's ability to project power, upon which rests
the credibility of American deterrence. As they grow more capable, our adversaries
are increasingly emboldened to engage in acts of provocation, coercion, and
aggression that threaten our interests and our allies.

Here at home, we have only exacerbated the problem. In recent years--
preoccupied with the fight against terrorism, hampered by a broken acquisition
system, and shackled by budget cuts and fiscal uncertainty--our military has
prioritized near-term readiness at the expense of future modernization, giving our
adversaries a chance to close the gap. Our military leaders have described this as
"mortgaging the future." But it appears few realized how soon the future would
arrive.

What all these developments mean is that America's military advantage is eroding,
and eroding fast. The wide margin for error we once enjoyed is gone. And in some
of the most difficult scenarios our military may someday confront, we can no
longer take victory for granted. In short, as we will hear from some of our
witnesses today, the risk is growing that our nation's military could lose the next
war it is called upon to fight. If it does prevail, as I surely hope it does, success
could very well come at a cost in blood and treasure we as a nation have not paid
since the Vietnam War.

The question now is what we must do to reverse these trends and to sustain and
advance America's military advantage for the 21st century.

Yes, we need to rebuild military capacity deliberately and sustainably, particularly
in areas like undersea warfare where our nation still maintains an advantage over
our adversaries. There is still a lot of truth in the old adage that quantity has a
quality all its own. But adding capacity alone is not the answer. "More of the
same" is not just a bad investment--against increasingly advanced adversaries, it's
downright dangerous.

That means we have to reshape our military by investing in the modern capabilities
necessary for the new realities of deterring conflict and competing with great
powers that possess advanced military forces: longer-range, more survivable
platforms and munitions; more autonomous systems; greater cyber and space
capabilities; among other new technologies.

It is not enough, however, just to acquire these new technologies. We must also
devise entirely new ways to employ them. It would be a failure of imagination
merely to conform emerging defense technologies to how we operate and fight
today. And doing so would simply play into our adversaries' hands. Ultimately, we
must shape new ways of operating and fighting around these new technologies.
The good news is that our civilian and military leaders at the Department of
Defense see this challenge clearly, and are developing solutions to address these
issues. But the progress they have made remains limited because of budget cuts
and fiscal uncertainty that prevent effective, long-term strategic planning and
investment. This is just one more reason why we have to remove the shackles of
the Budget Control Act from the Department of Defense, and we have to do so
immediately. Rebuilding and reshaping our military will not happen quickly. But
the decisions we need to make to realize those goals are upon us. The future is
now.

In short, to sustain and advance America's military advantage for the 21st century,
we must not only rebuild our military, we must rethink, reimagine, and reshape it.
This will entail tough choices. But these are the choices we must make to ensure
that our military will be ready to deter and, if necessary, fight and win our future
wars.

I look forward to the testimony of our witnesses.

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