During a House Armed Services Committee hearing prior to the congressional recess, Rep. Austin Scott (R-GA) questioned Colby Jenkins, performing the duties of Assistant Secretary of Defense for Special Operations and Low Intensity Conflict at the Department of Defense, about modernizing SOF practices.
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00:00But I want to mention this, and you don't have to comment on it, but General Fenton, the 18X program, my experience with it is people that we've tried to help get in.
00:10The Genesis program has pushed out, and I think the Genesis program would be more appropriately named the Exodus program.
00:17Most of the people that we would want in Special Forces are going to have a career in athletics.
00:21That means they're going to have an injury somewhere along the way, and yet the Genesis program seeks through every line of their medical history,
00:30and if they find any little thing, they force them out.
00:34So some way, somehow, we've got to find the balance between getting the right people in the 18X program and getting them around the Genesis program.
00:44With that said, the president, and I believe rightfully so, designated the cartels as foreign terrorist organizations,
00:52and he has directed our military forces to support securing our southern border.
00:57My question gets to your authorities and operations and how they have shifted to address this foreign terrorist threat from the cartels.
01:04I can just start from the general authorities.
01:08As a designation of FTO, that does not grant us any new authorities, but it definitely unlocks our ability to work better with our whole-of-government approach.
01:18Think of terms of counter-threat finance and how we can better, more efficiently pass off those target packets, if you will, to law enforcement.
01:26But at the end of the day, it helps us across the force reinforce that border security is national security,
01:31and we will be ready to defend and provide options to the president if he so chooses.
01:36But that's where we stand in terms of authorities.
01:38Want to add anything to that?
01:39Yeah.
01:39Representative, I'd say I'd double down on border security as national security, and I've mentioned it in my opening statement.
01:46You know, our part to defend the homeland, if I look at it through the lens of counterterrorism first, really starts at our border and goes out across the globe.
01:52I would offer a double down that, you know, we've got no new authorities or directions, as the Secretary Jenkins mentioned.
02:03But priority and focus certainly has changed, and I think in that effort, you've seen an uplift of SOCOM teammates to SOC North, Special Operations Command North,
02:11working with General Guillou and North Count, in order to put together plans, assessments, and various other documents and opportunities that are required by the SECDF and by the Department.
02:23Well, the 2% of the defense budget and how much you're called on has been addressed a lot, so I'll skip over that other than say this.
02:29I think you'll see the members of this subcommittee working to make sure that that is addressed, and I do think that the new secretary will look favorably upon that.
02:38And so you talked a little bit about intelligence, and you've talked a little bit about drones and how drone warfare in Ukraine has changed, really, the face of war.
02:55How are you working with the outside industry to develop how we are going to protect ourselves from drones?
03:04I can just say, just briefly, then talk to the details of, just to reassure or validate what you said, sir.
03:13I hosted a partner leader in my office a few weeks ago that's over there, and he reinforced that if you think you're at the cutting edge of battle and you haven't been to Ukraine, then you're wrong.
03:22And so we are actively taking the lessons that we learned there that require us to innovate daily, if not hourly, to adapt and build solutions on the spot that can be employed the next day instead of weeks and months.
03:35Down the road, we are definitely taking those lessons and applying them to Indo-PACOM and elsewhere.
03:40But in terms of – do you want to talk to the details of that?
03:43Representative, I think the heart of your question, when we look at Ukraine, I think we come away with what I'd call a strategic lesson, symmetry versus asymmetry.
03:50When I think about symmetry, that's the things that all nations have that are military-fighting nations for their worst day – artillery, aircraft carriers, bombers, fighters, and they need it.
04:02Asymmetry, I think, is where, in this conflict, it's showing itself as 10x, 100x, helpful to a cost imposition.
04:10And I think when we look at that, certainly through the lens of Special Operations Command, and put it out figuratively in a ledger, symmetry versus asymmetry, our sense is the asymmetry side of the house is not where we need to be.
04:23In many ways, it's probably missing – drones of any kind, AI, autonomy, added manufacturing.
04:28To your point, that is now the purview in many of those of the commercial and the private sector.
04:34We are absolutely involved with them in many, many different ways, personally going out and meeting them, listening to the things they're seeing, providing some of our observations and lesson loans from Ukraine so that those things can be blended.
04:46We have tech pods, two or three folks that are in New York, Boston Corridor, Austin, Texas, Silicon Valley, and we have all kind of ways for folks to come see us at SOCOM to talk to us about that.
04:58Because we know that we've got to get busy in changing that ledger.
05:02We've got to start filling that thing in with asymmetric anything, hundreds of thousands of air-accrued systems, maritime surface, subsurface.
05:10And I would just offer, as I end this, that also takes money.
05:14And I think as we think modernization, that's one of the things that we're really talking about here.
05:18We're transferring risk into modernization and deterrence, and that risk, in my mind, is winning in the future.
05:25I think that's the challenge right now, and that will be part of winning, those uncrewed systems and AI and certainly autonomy.
05:32Well, I'm glad the lace is off, and I hope that you get some money to get the equipment that you need.
05:39Thank you, Mr. Scott.
05:41Mr. Cicinero.