During a House Armed Services Committee hearing on Wednesday, Rep. George Whitesides (D-CA) questioned Lieutenant General Collins, Director of Missile Defense Agency, about improving the speed of missile defense production.
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00:00The gentleman yields back. The chair now recognizes the gentleman from California, Mr. Whitesides.
00:05Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Thanks for your service and for being here today.
00:10General Ganey, I was struck by your comments about the challenges on the deployed folks.
00:18And I recently got back from the Middle East from a trip.
00:21We went to Iraq and various Gulf nations and met with troops who are working on some of these missile defense.
00:30Things over there. They're doing heroic work.
00:32What could Congress do to help this challenge for these deployed folks?
00:38You referred to one program in your testimony, but I just wanted to give you the chance to elaborate a little bit further on this issue.
00:43Yes, sir. Thanks for asking that question.
00:47The Air Missile Defense Force is a very resilient force, and we've asked a lot of our force,
00:53and they continue to respond, as you saw, in the Middle East.
00:56Where Congress can support us, continue to support the funding of our AM missile defense modernization.
01:03Our modernization is going to allow us to not completely rely on our Patriot system as the system of choice,
01:11but also field out our integrated battle command system, which will integrate our counter-cruise missile capability
01:18into our common C2 construct, and so therefore the Patriot system is not the only system that we'll have to rely on for the range of threats.
01:27It will give us the portfolio to have the appropriate shooter for the appropriate threat set.
01:34Okay. Thanks.
01:34So actually, building on that, you know, one of the things that we heard throughout the Middle East was that everybody is just super eager to get more of our missile defense equipment,
01:47you know, and they're frustrated, honestly, by how long it takes for our American industrial base to produce that stuff.
01:54This is a question for maybe General Collins, or I don't know if you may, General Guido, you may have comments as well.
01:59What's going on? How could we improve that?
02:02You know, we're talking about folks taking 10 years to get systems that they've, you know, ordered, or, you know, 5 to 10 years.
02:11What's the underlying challenges? How could Congress help?
02:14What does American industry need to do to do better in that production side?
02:20Thank you, Congressman, for that question.
02:22It is certainly a challenge that we continue to face with especially new developments,
02:26developments of capability that starts from scratch that does not exist,
02:30and some of those do take a considerable amount of time.
02:34There are certainly activities to focus on more mature technologies as you start the program,
02:39to focus on more open systems and modular systems so that the solution,
02:44the first solution may not be the perfect solution.
02:46It's capability to bring to bear and then evolve it and grow it over time.
02:52What I'd call more of an agile approach to bringing capability to bear.
02:58I think that's really important.
02:59I think some of the delays in, like, the interceptor production lines and the munitions production lines,
03:05one, I think there's improvements we could make to stabilize the funding and the demand signal on the munition line.
03:13I bought munitions for the Air Force.
03:16I buy munitions now.
03:18And the yank up and yank back, invest to expand lines, then don't fund production on those lines.
03:24I think a stabilization of that could actually help us to increase the cadence and the availability of the needed weapons that we require going forward.
03:33I think that's probably a very key item where we could look at, and potentially even how we procure munitions.
03:39We procure munitions with a lot of the same rule sets that we do from larger weapon systems.
03:45There may be a more agile way to get after how we produce the, buy the parts,
03:49and set up the production lines to support more agile weapons development and delivery.
03:55Thanks so much.
03:56Mr. Yaffe, last question.
03:59I've got about a minute here.
04:00I'm the new guy here, so what I don't really get is, you know, we were doing missile defense before,
04:05and now we have this Golden Dome thing.
04:07What were we not working on before that we now are working on?
04:12Or is Golden Dome sort of like a rebranding of what we had before under a new executive order?
04:19Like, is there some requirement that we didn't do before that we now have?
04:22And we have about 45 seconds.
04:24Sir, thank you for the question.
04:25The basic answer is that until now, missile defense has been focused on rogue state ICBM threats,
04:30so truly North Korea.
04:32The direction in the Golden Dome executive order is to focus on the whole range of missile threats,
04:38the ballistic hypersonic cruise missile advanced aerial threats from all nations,
04:42and that's the significant shift in both policy and direction.
04:44So we were doing that before, but you're talking about, like, maybe numbers,
04:49like we're now going to be able to intercept hundreds or thousands of things that are heading towards us or something?
04:55Sir, I can't comment on what the architecture will be and what it will be,
04:58the kinds of numbers that will be set up against,
05:00but ultimately the Homeland Missile Defense was focused on leveraging the GBI interceptors
05:05for the North Korea threat, which was, of course, much smaller in number.
05:09Thanks.
05:10Yield back.