Five members of the joint chiefs of staff — including Gen. Mark Milley, the chairman — are required statutorily to leave their posts within the coming months, starting in July. Meanwhile, most of the vice chiefs — many of whom are the nominees or favorites to replace the chiefs — are preparing to assume leadership of the services amid the Senate impasse.

Sen. Tommy Tuberville, R-Ala., is doubling down on his blockade of military confirmations. He told Defense News that the looming vacancies will not prompt him to back down from his ongoing hold on hundreds of military promotions, including the joint chiefs.

“If they’re worried about readiness, they need to go back to their old policy and we’ll get it done,” Tuberville said on Wednesday. “But they’re more worried about social programs than they are about military readiness.”

The senator imposed his blockade in February to protest the Pentagon’s new policy that provides leave time for troops to travel to receive abortion services if they’re stationed in states where it’s now illegal.

The first service chief vacancy will occur when Marine Corps Commandant Gen. David Berger steps down on July 10, commencing a steady stream of exits from the joint chiefs through October. Army Chief of Staff Gen. James McConville must step down next on August 8, followed by Chief of Naval Operations Admiral Mike Gilday shortly after on August 21.

President Joe Biden nominated Air Force Chief of Staff Gen. CQ Brown as the next joint chiefs chairman, replacing Milley, who must depart by early October, and creating another opening at the top of the Air Force.

“There’s no playbook for this,” Arnold Punaro, a former staff director on the Senate Armed Services Committee, said in an interview with Defense News. “This is really a time for regular order, and not the chaos and uncertainty that we see in the system right now.”

The tumult sends a terrible message about the seriousness with which the United States takes its military promotion process, he said.

“It sends a sign of weakness to the rest of the world, that we can’t get our work done on time, and that we’re involved in political chaos,” Punaro said. “This has nothing to do with the individuals involved. We want the young officers, and up-and-coming commanders to see that the military promotion system is based on merit and [who is] best qualified.”

The Senate typically confirms noncontroversial military nominees, including the joint chiefs, using expedited floor procedures via unanimous consent. But any individual senator can block a unanimous consent request, allowing Tuberville to force the Senate to move through numerous procedural votes on each individual nominee.

“All they’ve got to do is put it on the floor and vote for it,” Tuberville told Defense News. “I’ll vote for it.”

Tuberville’s hold would require several weeks of limited Senate floor time to confirm the five joint chiefs nominees alone. Tuberville’s blockade is also holding up more than 220 flag and general officer promotions, which would take an additional several months of scarce floor time if the Senate did nothing but confirm military nominees. The Senate expects to receive hundreds more military nominees in the coming months.

Democratic leaders appear reluctant to use valuable floor time to confirm otherwise noncontroversial nominees and worry that doing so will encourage other senators to block military promotions in order to extract policy concessions.

“The Senate cannot encourage this behavior by handing out rewards for holding up hundreds of nominees,” Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., who chairs the military personnel panel, told Defense News.

Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., repeatedly declined to commit to scheduling floor votes for the joint chiefs nominees when pressed by reporters at a Wednesday press conference.

“What Sen. Tuberville has done is just awful,” Schumer told Defense News. “We believe that Republican senators, if they care about national security, should be putting pressure on him to release the holds.”

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., said last month that he disagrees with Tuberville’s military holds.

And Sen. John Cornyn, R-Texas, told Defense News he hoped the issue could be resolved with a vote on the Pentagon’s abortion policy in the fiscal 2024 National Defense Authorization Act– a suggestion that Tuberville shot down.

“I don’t want to put it in the NDAA and then hold it up because you’re going to have people that will be against it,” Tuberville told Defense News. “I’d rather have the Defense Department draw something up, send it over here and let’s vote on it, stand-alone.”

What happens next?

The fact that the same nominees tapped to lead the services will fill in for the vacancies in their capacity as the number two officer provides the Senate with little immediate incentive to resolve the impasse.

Punaro said vice chiefs would step in and perform those duties to keep the services running on a day-to-day basis. Similarly, Vice Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Adm. Christopher Grady would temporarily perform the duties of chairman if Brown is not confirmed by the beginning of October.

Delaying the start of new chiefs’ tenures hinders their ability to start making their desired changes to their services, he said.

Gen. Eric Smith, the Marines’ No. 2 officer and Biden’s nominee for commandant, is scheduled for a confirmation hearing on Tuesday. Given Smith’s current role as assistant commandant, the Marines are preparing for Smith to perform the commandant’s duties when Berger leaves on July 10 even if the Senate has not confirmed him by then.

The confirmation hearings for the other joint chiefs nominees, including Brown, are slated for July.

That includes Army vice chief Gen. Randy George to replace McConville. Biden has yet to nominate a new Chief of Naval Operations, but Navy vice chief Admiral Lisa Franchetti is widely considered the favorite for the position.

And of course, Biden will have to nominate a new Air Force chief of staff to replace Brown, with current Air Force vice chief Gen. David Allvin considered the frontrunner.

Senate Armed Services Chairman Jack Reed, D-R.I., told Defense News “It would be absolutely irresponsible” not to have a congressionally confirmed service chief.

Senators have held up votes on noncontroversial nominees more frequently in recent years. For instance, Sen. Josh Hawley, R-Mo., imposed a blanket hold on all Defense Department civilian nominations for more than a year.

They target military nominees less frequently. Sen. Tammy Duckworth, D-Ill., was the last senator to do so in 2020. Her hold lasted less than two weeks before she lifted it. By contrast, Tuberville’s hold has lasted more than three months with no end in sight.

“What goes around comes around,” Reed told Defense News. “If basically this succeeds, then the next two years from now someone who wants an assault weapons ban will say ‘gee, I’ll just hold up all the generals.”

Jen Judson contributed to this report.

Given the grave rhetoric, reports of possible 10% to 20% cuts to Army special operations forces — a prime force for competing in the “gray zone” to achieve U.S. aims short of armed conflict — seem misaligned with U.S. goals. While it is important to weigh the potential strategic ramifications of these reductions, it is as critical to recognize that they are just the latest manifestation of a misalignment between U.S. defense strategy and resources. This misalignment compels the Army to make short-term decisions to meet budgetary constraints that harm the joint force’s ability to execute the U.S. defense strategy.

The 2022 National Defense Strategy describes the most complex strategic environment the United States has faced in decades. The joint force must outpace the People’s Republic of China, deter Russia’s “acute threat,” and remain vigilant of the “persistent threats” of North Korea, Iran and global violent extremist organizations. The 2018 National Defense Strategy Commission assessed that to execute the 2018 NDS — the core tenets of which the 2022 NDS maintains — U.S. defense funding required 3% to 5% of real annual growth.

But between 2019 and 2023, the defense budget was more than $200 billion below what was necessary to have achieved 5% real growth. The fiscal 2024 defense budget request is a 0.8% increase in real terms, but it will be a decrease if inflation remains above 2.4%.

The Army has faced the most severe budgetary challenges of the joint force. Assumptions that the United States will likely fight short, high-tech wars predominantly in the air and sea, instead of protracted ground wars, have resulted in budgets that accept excessive risk to U.S. land power and the joint force. Between FY19 and FY23, the Army lost nearly $40 billion in buying power, and the FY24 request represents a 3.3% decrease in real terms from the previous year.

The Army’s end strength has fallen to its lowest level since 1940 to satisfy budgetary constraints while maintaining fight-tonight readiness and keeping modernization on track. Army Secretary Christine Wormuth has indicated that, in part driven by current recruiting shortfalls, more force structure cuts are on the horizon.

These trends would be less alarming if the historical data of all major U.S. wars in the past eight decades were not so definitive about the Army’s central role in combat. Across WWII, the Korean War, the Vietnam War, and the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, the Army has averaged approximately 60% of forces deployed to the combat theater and about 70% of wartime fatalities.

Counter to the conventional wisdom that ground forces play a minimal role in the Indo-Pacific region, the Army’s share of combat deployments and casualties in the United States’ three major ground wars in the theater has been consistent with wars fought elsewhere. The war in Ukraine demonstrates that while the character of warfare is constantly evolving, there is no substitute for land forces in imposing political will.

Even in times of relative peace, the Army accounts for about two-thirds of global U.S. combatant commander requirements. As an example, after Russia invaded Ukraine, the Army provided about three-fourths of the additional U.S. forces deployed to reinforce Eastern European NATO allies. Additionally, the Army National Guard and the U.S. Army Reserve have been instrumental in training U.S. partners and allies, enabling global operations with logistics support, and responding to crises at home, whether COVID-19 or natural disasters.

Former U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell is quoted as saying: “Show me your budget and I’ll tell you your strategy.” A budget that disproportionately decrements the service that routinely faces the heaviest demands both in times of peace and war is divorced from the aims of the ambitious National Defense Strategy. One temptation might be to drastically reduce U.S. commitments — in the Middle East, Africa or even Europe — to close the resource gap. But this ignores the increasingly interconnected nature of geopolitics, forfeits the strategic competitive space and discounts the potential for security deterioration that later requires a more significant U.S. commitment once vital interests are threatened. There are few risk-free reductions in either budget or global force posture.

To safeguard American security, Congress should ensure that the Army’s budget receives 3% to 5% real annual growth, matched by the necessary investments in U.S. air, sea, space and cyber power. If this is truly a “decisive decade,” the military’s budget must reflect this urgency. A joint force capable of converging each service’s capabilities across warfighting domains is one that potential adversaries will not seek to fight. To quote Milley: “The only thing more expensive than deterrence is actually fighting a war, and the only thing more expensive than fighting a war is fighting one and losing one.”

Retired U.S. Army Gen. Robert Brown is the president and CEO of the Association of the United States Army. He previously served as the commander of U.S. Army Pacific.

Sen. Sherrod Brown, D-Ohio, led five other House Democrats and two House Republicans from his state in a letter asking the Biden administration to place the headquarters at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base.

The letter, addressed to President Joe Biden, Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin, Air Force Secretary Frank Kendall and Chief of Space Operations Gen. Chance Saltzman, touted the Air Force and NASA installations that Ohio already hosts. These include the National Air and Space Intelligence Center, the National Space Intelligence Center, and the Air Force Research Laboratory.

“These facilities support key space-related operations, including innovation in space components and technology,” the lawmakers wrote in the letter, which Brown highlighted on Twitter. “Co-locating the U.S. Space Command headquarters with these assets will generate incredible potential for cross-functional collaboration that will greatly enhance the efficiency and the effectiveness of the organization.”

The letter’s other signatories are Ohio’s Democratic Reps. Marcy Kaptur, Joyce Beatty, Shontel Brown, Emilia Sykes and Greg Landsman as well as Republican Reps. David Joyce and Max Miller. The nine other Republicans in Ohio’s congressional delegation did not sign the letter.

Two years ago, during the final days of the Trump administration, the Air Force announced Huntsville, Alabama — the site of the Army’s Redstone Arsenal and home to the Missile Defense Agency — would serve as the new location for Space Command headquarters, moving it from Colorado Springs.

The decision infuriated Colorado’s congressional delegation, who asked the Air Force to review the decision. Several Colorado Democrats argued it was an act of political retaliation because Biden won the swing state in the 2020 election.

A May 2022 report by the Defense Department’s Office of Inspector General found the Air Force followed all relevant laws and policies when selecting Huntsville. But the report also found the rules themselves may have been flawed, resulting in a less than optimal decision.

A separate June 2022 report from the Government Accountability Office found the Air Force did not follow best practices when making the basing decision.

Kendall is reviewing both reports’ findings, but the final basing decision for Space Command headquarters is long overdue.

NBC News reported last month that the Biden administration may halt plans to move the headquarters to Alabama in part because of the state’s new law making abortion a felony punishable up to 99 years in prison for physicians.

Further complicating matters, Sen. Tommy Tuberville, R-Ala., has placed a blanket hold on Senate confirmations for hundreds of military promotions over the Pentagon’s policy providing leave time and stipends for troops and their family members to travel across state lines in order to receive abortion services.

The Defense Department enacted the policy in February after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade last year, thereby allowing states to enact anti-abortion laws.

So senators are organizing educational briefings. Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, a New York Democrat, on June 6 announced three such planned get-togethers this summer, including a classified session dedicated to AI employment by the U.S. Department of Defense and the intelligence community, as well as AI developments among “our adversaries” such as China and Russia.

“The Senate must deepen our expertise in this pressing topic,” reads the announcement, backed by fellow Democratic Sen. Martin Heinrich of New Mexico and Republican Sens. Mike Rounds of South Dakota and Todd Young of Indiana.

“AI is already changing our world,” it continues, “and experts have repeatedly told us that it will have a profound impact on everything from our national security to our classrooms to our workforce, including potentially significant job displacement.”

Q&A: Maxar execs discuss US Army simulation, Project Maven

The Defense Department is pouring billions of dollars into AI advancement and adoption, including a proposed $1.8 billion for fiscal 2024 alone. China and Russia, considered top national security threats, have significantly invested in AI for military applications, as well.

U.S. officials consider AI an invaluable tool to improve performance on the battlefield and in the boardroom. With it, they say, tides of information can be parsed more effectively, digital networks can be monitored around the clock, targeting aboard combat vehicles can be enhanced, maintenance needs can be identified before things fall apart and decisions can be made quicker than ever before.

But a lack of general understanding — what, for example, is the difference between AI, ML, autonomy, bots, large language models and more — can hinder policymaking on the Hill, spending decisions from there and deployment further downstream.

“I’ve been doing this stuff long enough that I feel like, to a certain degree, AI has become the buzzword of what cyber was maybe 15 or 20 years ago, where everybody on a government program says, ‘I’m going to add this buzz term and see if I can get a little more money on whatever program I have,’” Sen. Mark Warner, a Virginia Democrat at the head of the intelligence committee, said Tuesday at the Scale Gov AI Summit, blocks from the White House.

“What we’re all trying to work on,” he added, “is how do we get ourselves educated as quickly as possible.”

Public attention paid to AI and its offshoots skyrocketed following the November rollout of OpenAI’s ChatGPT, which is capable of carrying a convincing conversation or crafting computer code with little prompting. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman testified before the Senate in May. He previously expressed worries about AI being used for misinformation campaigns or cyberattacks.

The study of AI and its consequences by lawmakers must remain fluid and free from political jockeying, according to Rounds, who sits on the armed services committee.

“We’re trying to combine, and to put together a process, where members of the U.S. Senate can actually come to a common understanding of just exactly what we mean when we talk about ‘machine learning’ or ‘AI,’ what it really is in terms of its current status, what it looks like today,” he said at the summit where Warner spoke.

“And we’re trying to do this as a group in a bipartisan basis,” he said, “so that folks can bring in their ideas and can be a host for other parts of the industry to come to different members and say, ‘These are the concerns we’ve got.’”

The U.S. government created the A-10 in the 1970s to provide close-air support to American ground troops. At the time it was an effective counterweight to the threat of Soviet tanks, and in the decades since it has served the military faithfully.

The A-10 proved especially useful in the Gulf War, when it flew 8,100 sorties and destroyed thousands of Soviet-era combat vehicles and equipment. Later, it helped the U.S. destroy hardened enemy positions in the war on terrorism.

But major military operations in the Middle East have ceased. Today, our greatest adversary is communist China, whose tanks and emplacements are much more advanced than those used by the Soviets or Islamic terrorists.

To prepare to counter Beijing in a future conflict, we must make the best possible use of our limited hangar space and procurement dollars. To do that, we must retire the A-10, as senior military leaders have called for. This will make room for aircraft like the F-35 Lightning II, and free funds for the development and construction of next-generation missiles and missile defense systems, which will be invaluable in any future Indo-Pacific conflict, whether that’s in Taiwan, the South China Sea or the Korean Peninsula.

However, the A-10 can still do a lot of good if transferred to allies and partners in need of it. The most obvious example is Ukraine, which is preparing to mount a counteroffensive against Soviet-era tanks and entrenched Russian positions.

At the recent G7 summit, President Joe Biden stated he supports training Ukrainian forces to operate F-16 Fighting Falcons, a first step to allies providing the planes to Ukraine. But even if we accept the president’s position, there is good reason to wonder if an air-to-air fighter makes the most sense. Ukraine’s defense intelligence chief, for one, believes Ukraine would fare better with A-10s. Moreover, F-16s require 6,000 feet of tarmac — increasingly rare in bombed-out Ukraine — to take off and land, while A-10s only require 4,000 feet of dirt runway.

Beyond Ukraine, potential beneficiaries of an A-10 transfer program include African countries in the Sahel fighting ISIS and Boko Haram, or even Latin American nations combating paramilitary rebels and drug cartels in the jungle.

Such a program would be neither unprecedented nor unusual. The U.S. manufactures and sells vehicles and platforms the U.S. military no longer uses on a semi-regular basis. For instance, production of the A-29 Super Tucano employs hundreds of Floridians in Jacksonville and supports counterterrorism operations in Africa and Colombia.

Simply put, phasing out the A-10 by transferring it to allies and partners is the smart thing to do. Not only would it help America adapt to the challenges of the 21st century, it would also help our friends confront their own challenges without deep U.S. intervention. That’s killing two birds with one stone — the best kind of public policy.

Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., is vice chairman of the Select Committee on Intelligence, and services on the Foreign Relations Committee.

The proposition from Rep. Mike Rogers, R-Ala., comes amid a flurry of proposals from defense hawks on Capitol Hill to bypass the $886 billion military spending top line laid out in the debt ceiling deal that President Joe Biden signed into law over the weekend. But House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., appeared to throw cold water on additional defense spending bills on Monday.

Rogers said once Congress completes work on the fiscal 2024 National Defense Authorization Act and defense appropriations bill, “then it’s time for us to look and see if we actually address China. If we did, fine. If we didn’t, we’ll go ahead and drop more funding. It’s all about China for me.”

The House was initially slated to mark up the FY24 defense authorization bill in May, but Republican leaders asked Rogers to postpone it amid the debt ceiling negotiations. That markup is now scheduled for later this month.

For his part, McCarthy resisted efforts to circumvent military spending caps in the debt ceiling bill, which locks in Biden’s proposed defense budget — a 3.3% increase over this fiscal year.

“What we really need to do, we need to get the efficiencies in the Pentagon,” McCarthy said, according to CNN. “Think about it, $886 billion. You don’t think there’s waste? They failed the last five audits. I consider myself a hawk, but I don’t want to waste money. So I think we’ve got to find efficiencies.”

In response, Rogers said McCarthy is “right.”

“It is premature to be talking about a supplemental right now, but we will need a supplemental later this year — for China specifically,” Rogers said.

Rogers, who previously hammered the Biden administration for refusing to deliver Ukraine certain weapons like long-range missiles, also struck a less bullish note on aid to the country currently fighting a Russian invasion.

“Based on how effective the counteroffensive is this summer, and if there is a ceasefire or some resolution by the end of September, I’ll probably have to revisit Ukraine then, at a much smaller level than anything we’ve done before,” Rogers told Defense News.

The Pentagon did not include additional Ukraine aid in its FY24 budget request, noting that it would request future aid packages through supplemental spending that Congress would have to approve. The Defense Department expects to run out of Ukraine aid funds by the end of the fiscal year in September.

Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman Jack Reed, D-R.I., last week floated the idea of adding additional Pentagon spending in the next Ukraine aid supplemental. Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., endorsed additional supplemental spending packages Thursday on the Senate floor in order to ease concerns over the debt ceiling deal from defense hawks, primarily Republicans who argued the defense top line increase falls below the rate of inflation.

Further complicating matters, Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin has testified that the Pentagon is preparing a package to transfer weapons to Taiwan, but that he would require congressional appropriations to backfill U.S. military stockpiles.

However, the appetite for additional defense supplemental spending in the House — be that to counter China or to support Ukraine or Taiwan — remains unclear.

“Unless there is a willingness to increase domestic spending at the same time, we have a law that is a guide,” Rep. Rosa DeLauro of Connecticut, the top Democrat on the Appropriations Committee, told reporters Tuesday.

Still, DeLauro did not rule out additional Ukraine aid spending, noting she funded four supplementals for Kyiv last year as the top appropriator.

“I will wait to hear from [the Defense Department] about what we need for Ukraine,” DeLauro told Defense News.

Total defense spending for FY23 — which ends Sept. 30 — will come to $893 billion after accounting for $35.4 billion in emergency Ukraine aid. Total FY22 defense spending came to $794 billion after Congress allocated an additional $26 billion in Ukraine aid.

Rep. Betty McCollum of Minnesota, the top Democrat on the Appropriations Committee’s defense panel, has also supported Ukraine aid but voiced concern about whether the House could pass it given opposition from a vocal minority of Republican lawmakers.

“It’s a chaos caucus, so I don’t know if they’ll be able to bring it to the floor,” McCollum told Defense News.

WASHINGTON — Dissatisfied with the $886 billion military budget laid out in the debt ceiling bill, defense hawks are looking to channel additional funds to the Pentagon through supplemental spending packages.

Six Republican senators took to the floor on Thursday to demand an emergency defense spending bill after Senate Armed Services Chairman Jack Reed, D-R.I., floated the idea of attaching other Pentagon priorities to a Ukraine aid supplemental that Congress will likely need to take up later this year.

“The first problem of an inadequate defense budget could be addressed and remedied by having an emergency defense supplemental,” said Sen. Susan Collins of Maine, the top Republican on the Appropriations Committee. “This is what I would ask the [Biden] administration and my colleagues on the other side of the aisle to commit to because we know that this budget is not adequate to the global threats we face.”

Five other Republican defense hawks joined Collins on the floor: Roger Wicker of Mississippi – the Armed Services Committee ranking member – Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, Tom Cotton of Arkansas, Dan Sullivan of Alaska and Mike Rounds of South Dakota.

Their remarks came hours before the Senate passed compromise legislation needed to avoid a potential U.S. debt default by a 63-36 vote. The House passed the bipartisan bill 314-117 on Wednesday following weeks of negotiations between Speaker Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., and President Joe Biden. If Congress had not raised the debt ceiling, the government would have had to suspend payments to troops, veterans and defense contractors.

The bill locks in Biden’s proposed fiscal 2024 defense budget, a 3.3% increase over this year, while cutting non-defense discretionary spending down to $704 billion. It would allow for 1% growth to both defense and non-defense discretionary spending the year after, for a military top line of $895 billion in FY25.

“This debt ceiling deal does nothing to limit the Senate’s ability to appropriate emergency supplemental funds to ensure our military capabilities are sufficient to deter China, Russia and our other adversaries,” Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., said ahead of the vote late Thursday. “A strong bipartisan majority of senators stands ready to receive and process emergency funding requests from the administration.”

While numerous Republican defense hawks in the House passed the compromise bill to avoid a catastrophic default, the senators seeking to surpass the military budget caps point out that the 3.3% growth falls below the rate of inflation. They regularly seek 3% to 5% annual defense budget growth above inflation.

“It’s basically a cut when you consider inflation,” Sen. John Cornyn, R-Texas, told Defense News.

But the Senate’s No. 2 Democrat, Dick Durbin of Illinois, argued Wednesday on the Senate floor that the U.S. already spends more on defense than the next 10 countries in the world combined and that “Pentagon spending keeps increasing” because of price gouging from defense contractors in addition to inflation.

Packing the Ukraine supplemental?

The Biden administration expects that it will run out of Ukraine aid authorities by the end of the fiscal year and intends to ask Congress for an additional supplemental spending package for Kyiv within the next few months. Reed floated putting other Pentagon spending priorities in that Ukraine bill.

“They’ve built this incredible mouse trap that we have to figure out,” said Reed, according to Punchbowl News and Politico. “I think with Ukraine, you’re going to have to have a supplemental. We might put some other stuff in, too.”

Additionally, Graham told reporters he’s “hoping” the Senate will use a forthcoming Ukraine supplemental “as an opportunity to repair the damage done by this budget deal.”

Collins also endorsed adding other Pentagon funding measures to the next Ukraine supplemental, telling Defense News it “would be one way to deal with the inadequate top line for the Department of Defense.”

Congress started using emergency spending in the early 2000s to help fund the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq outside of the base budget through an overseas contingency operations account. From 2013 to 2021, Congress routinely used OCO funds to circumvent the defense spending caps imposed by sequestration, even as non-defense spending remained subject to spending limits. This averaged about $119 billion per year, according to the Congressional Budget Office.

Total defense spending for FY23 — which ends Sept. 30 — will come to $893 billion after accounting for $35.4 billion in emergency Ukraine aid. Total FY22 defense spending came to $794 billion after Congress allocated an additional $26 billion in Ukraine aid.

Meanwhile, House Republicans who voted for the compromise debt ceiling bill are preparing to begin marking up the defense authorization and appropriations bills under the $886 billion cap.

“We’ll make it work,” House defense appropriations Chairman Ken Calvert, R-Calif., told Defense News on Wednesday before voting for the bill.

House Armed Services Committee Chairman Mike Rogers, R-Ala., also voted for the bill despite panning Biden’s defense budget request as too low. He had planned to mark up the FY24 National Defense Authorization Act in May but postponed the bill at the last minute following a request from Republican leaders engaged in the debt ceiling negotiations.

Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., also voted for the debt ceiling compromise while deriding the defense spending cap, stating Thursday on the Senate floor that “we cannot neglect our fundamental obligation to address the nation’s most pressing national security challenges.”

It would also cut non-defense spending to $704 billion. The compromise legislation comes after weeks of negotiations between the Biden administration and House Republicans, who demanded non-defense spending cuts and several other concessions in order to raise the debt ceiling and avoid a U.S. default.

“We cut spending year-over-year for the first time in over a decade while fully funding national defense and veterans’ health benefits,” House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., said in a statement upon introducing the compromise bill Sunday.

While the agreement grows the defense topline to Biden’s proposed $886 billion, numerous Republican defense hawks in Congress have already lambasted that proposal as “inadequate” for not keeping pace with inflation. In March, when the budget request was released, they pushed for a 3% to 5% increase over inflation.

Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., speaking on Fox News on Sunday after details first emerged, said the deal “increases defense spending below inflation.”

“The Biden defense budget was a joke before, and if we adopt it as Republicans, we will be doing a big disservice to the party of Ronald Reagan,” said Graham. “I like Kevin [McCarthy] a lot, but don’t tell me that the Biden defense budget fully funds the military.”

The bill also authorizes a 1% increase for both defense and non-defense spending in FY25. That would put the FY25 defense spending topline at $895 billion.

If Congress does not pass all 12 appropriations bills by the end of December, the debt deal mandates a full-year continuing resolution to fund the government with a 1% budget cut that would apply to defense and non-defense spending alike.

The House and Senate are expected to vote on the legislation later this week. The Treasury Department has said it expects to run out of money to pay its bills by June 5. If Congress does not raise the debt ceiling by that date, the government may have to suspend payments to troops, veterans and defense contractors.

Biden announced that he would seek legislation to designate Australia as a “domestic source” under Title III of the Defense Production Act – a privilege currently only enjoyed by Canada – when he met with Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese at the G7 summit in Japan on Saturday.

His remarks came after the Pentagon submitted an April 28 legislative proposal to Congress that would amend the law to add both Australia and the U.K. to Title III, which would allow the president to direct grants and loans to companies in each country as if they were U.S. companies.

“Doing so would streamline technological and industrial base collaboration, accelerate and strengthen AUKUS implementation and build new opportunities for United States investment in the production and purchase of Australian critical minerals, critical technologies and other strategic sectors,” noted a joint U.S.-Australia statement released after Biden’s meeting with Albanese.

Assistant Secretary of Defense for Strategies, Plans and Capabilities Mara Karlin told the House Foreign Affairs Committee on Wednesday that using Defense Production Act grants for the Australian and British industry would help implement the technology-sharing components of AUKUS, known as Pillar II. These capabilities stand apart from the plan to help Australia develop its own nuclear-powered submarine fleet. They include joint development on hypersonic weapons, quantum technologies and artificial intelligence.

“Pillar II – the scope, the scale, the complexity of it – it’s really unlike anything that we have ever done,” said Karlin. “We’re still looking, of course, at what it would mean for specific AUKUS projects.”

“This is a two-way street,” added Karlin. “Given of course the security environment, given the rapidly evolving technological environment, we need to be able to work with one another as much as possible.”

When the House passed its version of the National Defense Authorization Act last year, it included an amendment from Rep. Joe Courtney, D-Conn., that would have put Australia and the U.K within the purview of the Defense Production Act. However, Congress dropped the provision in the final bill after negotiations with the Senate.

Courtney said he hopes that Biden’s endorsement at the G7 would spur Congress to pass his legislation into law this year.

Defense Production Act

“Under current law, the [Defense Production Act] allows the president to stimulate investments in technology in both U.S. and Canadian companies to allow our nations to tackle pressing national priorities in partnership with private companies, as we saw during the COVID-19 pandemic,” Courtney told Defense News in a statement. “By expanding the definition of a ‘domestic source’ to include both Australia and the United Kingdom, we can accelerate innovation in critical technologies to fulfill the goals of the AUKUS security agreement.”

Both Biden and former president Donald Trump used the Defense Production Act to procure vital medical supplies amid significant supply chain disruptions during the pandemic. The White House also invoked the Defense Production Act in March in the hopes of speeding up hypersonic weapons development. Adding Australia and the U.K. to Title III could allow defense contractors in both countries to take advantage of U.S. grants and loans for their own hypersonics programs.

Biden also used the Defense Production Act last year to unlock $43 million in funding to address critical mineral shortfalls in large-capacity batteries. China largely controls the global supply chain for critical minerals like cobalt needed to produce these batteries.

Putting Canberra within the purview of the Defense Production Act could stimulate U.S. investment in Australian mines. The Australian government’s geoscience agency notes that Australia remained the world’s largest lithium producer in 2021, controlling 53% of the global market. It is also among the world’s top five producers of cobalt and antimony, an alloy largely controlled by China that is needed to make bullets and ammunition.

Congress allocated $600 million in Defense Production Act funding as part of a Ukraine aid package last year, in part to shore up critical mineral supply chains that were further disrupted after Russia’s invasion. The State Department also developed a minerals security partnership to bolster these supply chains with 10 other allies, including Australia.

The committee agreed by voice vote to advance the Taiwan proposals, drafted as a response to April table top war games led by the Center for a New American Security. Rep. Andy Kim, D-N.J., was the only lawmaker to vote no.

“At the select committee’s Taiwan war game, we saw the terrifying result of deterrence failure,” Gallagher said in advance of the vote. “If we want to have a hope of stopping World War III, we need to arm Taiwan to the teeth right now. We must clear the embarrassment that is the $19 billion [foreign military sale] backlog.”

The 10 recommendations include establishing a war reserve stockpile of weapons in Taiwan, prioritizing weapons delivery for Taipei and authorizing multiyear munitions procurement contracts. The proposals also call for hardening and distributing American forces throughout the Indo-Pacific region and expanding training and coordination between the U.S. and Taiwanese militaries.

The war games illustrated the difficulty the U.S. would have arming Taiwan in the event of a China crisis, the same way it has for Ukraine given the lack of a land border. To preposition critical weapons on the island, the China Committee wants the Pentagon to establish a war reserve stockpile for Taiwan and other Pacific allies akin to U.S. Central Command’s stockpile in Israel.

The FY23 National Defense Authorization Act authorized $500 million in funding through 2025 for a “regional contingency stockpile” in the Pacific. The Pentagon is using a separate authority in that bill to prepare a package of weapons for Taiwan from U.S. stockpiles.

Another recommendation is quarterly updates on the Biden administration’s efforts to address the foreign military sales backlog, especially for Taiwan. The report calls on congressional appropriations to provide “grant assistance” for Taiwan to buy more U.S. equipment.

The FY23 NDAA authorized up to $2 billion in Taiwanese military aid, but congressional appropriators decided to fund that as loans instead of grants amid concerns it would eat away at other State Department budget priorities.

The war games found the U.S. would run out of precision-guided missiles within a week in the event of a conflict with China, and Gallagher is leading a push to get appropriators on board with funding multiyear munitions procurement authorities.

Hoping to send a strong demand signal for the defense industry to ramp up munitions production, the China Committee wants the FY24 NDAA to authorize up to five years of munitions procurement contracts for long-range anti-ship missiles, naval strike missiles, precision strike missiles, MK-48 torpedoes and Harpoon anti-ship missiles.

Multiyear procurement authorities historically have been used for big-ticket items like ships and aircraft, but the Pentagon and some lawmakers have recently expressed interest in using them for munitions acquisition to encourage defense companies to ramp up production amid concern about insufficient U.S. stockpiles.

The FY23 NDAA sought to jump-start high-priority U.S. munitions production by authorizing multiyear procurement contracts for thousands of critical munitions, but congressional appropriators for the most part did not provide the needed funding. Gallagher told Defense News in an April interview he’s lobbying appropriators to fund multiyear munitions procurement this year.

The panel also recommends expanded base access with allies and partners throughout the region, and says “Congress should direct the U.S. military to invest in passive defenses, such as hardened fuel depots and other logistics facilities, and reserve supplies and direct the U.S. Air Force to increase resourcing for fielding deployable airbase sets at U.S. bases in theater.”

The remaining recommendations are:

• Building upon an FY23 NDAA provision to “establish or expand a comprehensive training program with Taiwan”
• Establishing a U.S.-Taiwan combined planning group
• Establishing a standing joint force headquarters or joint task force in the Pacific
• Bolstering U.S. cybersecurity
• Passing Gallagher’s bill to help bolster Taiwan’s cybersecurity
• Planning with U.S. allies to impose diplomatic and economic costs on China in the event of a Taiwan attack and including India in NATO Plus, an organization that currently allows South Korea, Japan, Australia, New Zealand and Israel to closely coordinate with the alliance

Gallagher and seven other lawmakers on the 24-member China Committee also sit on the Armed Services Committee, putting them in position to advance many of these bipartisan proposals as amendments to the FY24 NDAA. Gallagher chairs the Armed Services Committee’s cyber panel and fellow China Committee member Rep. Ro Khanna of California serves as the top Democrat on that same panel. Rep. Rob Wittman, R-Va., and Seth Moulton, D-Mass., also sit on the China Committee while respectively serving as chair and ranking member on other Armed Services subcommittees.

The Armed Services Committee was initially set to mark up the FY24 authorization bill this month, but Republican leaders postponed it at the last minute amid gridlocked debt ceiling negotiations.

Kim, who sits on both committees, said he voted against the Taiwan recommendations because all but one focused on military deterrence.

“You have to look at that across a comprehensive approach that includes what we can be doing to build a global coalition, what diplomatic and economic tools are at our disposal, and I don’t think that was reflected in that document,” Kim told Defense News.

While Pacific fleet commander Adm. Samuel Papro briefed the China Committee after the Taiwan war games, State Department officials have yet to accept the panel’s invitation to testify.

Jacquelyn Schneider, who leads the wargaming and crisis initiative at the right-leaning Hoover Institution, stressed the difficulty of conducting campaign war games like the committee did with Taiwan, as they don’t account for classified capabilities.

“The biggest difficulty in campaign war games, and where campaign war games did not reveal what happened between Ukraine and Russia, is it’s very difficult to model public will and that really does affect how wars transpire,” Schneider told Defense News.

She noted the outcomes highlighted issues like munitions shortages that the military and defense policy analysts are already aware of. Nonetheless, Schneider called them “an incredibly evocative experience,” adding that “if you want to convince people who have never really thought about this problem that there’s significant difficulties awaiting if you don’t preposition munitions there, then war games are extremely compelling.”

The exact effects of a breach are hard to predict because it is “such uncharted territory,” Andrew Hunter said at a discussion in Arlington, Virginia, hosted by George Mason University’s Greg and Camille Baroni Center for Government Contracting.

But Hunter said it would have “profound implications for the [defense] industrial base.”

President Joe Biden and House Republicans are now engaged in a standoff over the nation’s debt ceiling, which limits how much the United States can borrow to cover its debts and has been nearly reached. Biden and Democrats are pushing Republicans to raise the debt ceiling without preconditions by passing a “clean” bill, which happened under President Donald Trump’s administration.

In April, Republican lawmakers, who hold the majority in the House of Representatives, passed a bill to raise the debt ceiling while cutting non-defense discretionary spending by $130 billion, along with other concessions.

If the debt limit is breached, the Treasury Department’s ability to pay the government’s bills would be severely limited, if not curtailed entirely. This would mean the Pentagon might not be able to pay its contractors on schedule.

With the United States’ ability to pay its debts suddenly thrown into question, he said, credit markets could seize up.

And with credit frozen, Hunter said, the Defense Department’s suppliers might not be able to get financing they need to stay afloat while waiting for the government’s payments — perhaps forcing them to suspend operations and not pay their own workforce.

“They can’t get the short-term financing needed to make payroll, while they’re waiting for the reimbursements from the government — which also, by the way, may be delayed,” Hunter said. “So they’re going to need that short-term financing even more to cover their expenses.”

Under a debt ceiling breach, Hunter said, appropriations would still be in place, meaning the department would not have to shut down and employees would not be furloughed. But because the Treasury Department would not have the money to fund the government’s payments, Hunter said, service members and civilian employees might not be paid on time.

This could ripple through the military’s entire force structure, Hunter said. Since many service members don’t earn high salaries and may be living paycheck to paycheck, a missed payday — or several — could deal a severe blow to their personal finances.

“For a lot of service members, that’s a huge issue, because that can then reflect on your eligibility for [a] security clearance — really everything it takes to do your job,” Hunter said. Such a breach would have “huge impacts on families, huge impacts on the workforce, and a lot of consequences that could ripple for quite a long time.”

Hunter also warned of the national security consequences of a theoretical deal to raise the debt ceiling that rolls back all federal spending to fiscal 2022 levels — particularly for the still-young Space Force.

Pentagon Comptroller Mike McCord said in a March 17 letter to Capitol Hill that lowering defense spending to 2022 levels would amount to a $100 billion, or nearly 12%, budget cut from the Biden administration’s $842 billion request for fiscal 2024.

Republicans want to exempt the Defense Department from spending caps, and even further raise military spending.

Hunter said Thursday a budget rollback to 2022 levels “would come upon us with absolutely no warning, no notice,” and compared such a deal to the “painful” sequestration caps that occurred during the Obama administration.

Sequestration led to furloughs and a sudden scale back of defense spending, Hunter said — particularly in vital research and development efforts.

“You would see a huge hit to our research and development, which is right now one of [the Department of the Air Force’s] priority areas of pursuit,” Hunter said.

Congress approved $18 billion for the Space Force in 2022 and $26.3 billion in 2023. The Biden administration requested $30 billion in 2024 funding for the Space Force, which was formally stood up as its own service in December 2019.

“Because the Space Force is relatively new … much of its budget is growing to reflect the fact that they’re doing things that have just never been done before, because they hadn’t previously been budgeted,” Hunter said. “The Space Force would be absolutely devastated by a rollback to FY22 [funding], but for the Air Force, it would be devastating as well.”

Three legislative proposals, submitted on May 2 and first posted online Tuesday, would greenlight the sale of two Virginia-class submarines to Australia, permit the training of Australian nationals for submarine work and allow Canberra to invest in the U.S. submarine industrial base.

Rep. Joe Courtney of Connecticut, the top Democrat on the Armed Services Committee’s sea power panel, praised the proposals in a statement to Defense News, saying “I look forward to working with all my colleagues in Congress to fulfill these goals.”

“The Department of Defense’s legislative proposals are the latest example of President [Joe] Biden’s commitment to fulfilling the AUKUS agreement,” said Courtney. “Importantly, the proposals spell out a clear path forward to facilitate the transfer of Virginia-class submarines to Australia while ensuring we have the necessary authorities to accept the Australian Government’s investments to enhance our submarine industrial base capacity and provide training for Australian personnel.”

AUKUS stipulates that Australia will buy at least three and as many as five Virginia-class submarines in the 2030s as part of phase two of the agreement, giving Congress more than a decade to authorize the sale. This year’s proposal, which the Pentagon hopes will become part of the fiscal 2024 National Defense Authorization Act, asks that Congress approve just two of those submarines “without a deadline to consummate the transfers and without specifying the specific vessels to be transferred.”

The proposal argues that this “small amount of flexibility is necessary” since the transfers depend on Australian readiness to operate the submarines, which will involve developing Australia’s submarine industrial base through training and appropriate shipyard infrastructure.

To that end, a second legislative proposal would authorize U.S. defense service exports directly to Australia’s private sector in order to train its own submarine workers.

“This development must begin as soon as possible for Australia to become ready to own and safely operate these submarines in a manner that both maintains the highest non-proliferation standards and strengthens the global non-proliferation regime,” the Pentagon argues in the proposal.

Finally, the Pentagon is also asking Congress for permission to accept Australian payments to bolster the U.S. submarine industrial base. Australia has offered to make an undisclosed sum of investments in the U.S. submarine industrial base as part of AUKUS.

The Pentagon states in the legislative proposal that those funds would be used to “add a significant number of trade workers” that will help address “the significant overhaul backlog” for the Virginia-class submarine. Australian monies would also be used for “advance purchasing of components and materials that are known to be replacement items for submarine overhauls” and “outsourcing less complex sustainment work to local contractors.”

Congress is also making its own investments to expand the U.S. submarine industrial base as the Navy ultimately aims to build two Virginia-class and one Columbia-class submarines per year. Courtney helped secure $541 million in submarine supplier development and $207 million in workforce development initiatives as part of the FY 23 government funding bill.

Austal USA, the American subsidiary of Australia-based Austal, plans to open a new facility at its shipyard in Mobile, Alabama to begin construction on nuclear submarine modules for General Dynamics’ Electric Boat shipyard in Connecticut, which produces both Virginia and Columbia-class submarines. Austal expects it will need 1,000 new hires in Mobile to staff that facility.

At Electric Boat, the prime contractor for the Virginia- and Columbia-class submarine programs, the hiring need will be even greater. The company currently employs more than 19,000 people, after hiring 3,700 new workers in 2022, according to local newspaper The Day. But the company needs to hire 5,750 new workers this year, to manage attrition and to help grow the workforce to about 22,000 to handle the increased workload.

The legislative proposal notes that Australian funds “would be applied to recruitment, training, incentivizing, and retention of key skilled trades, engineering and planning personnel in both nuclear and non-nuclear disciplines that are required by the additional AUKUS workload.”

The Autonomous Systems Adoption & Policy Act would nest a so-called Joint Autonomy Office within the relatively new Chief Digital and Artificial Intelligence Office, or CDAO, according to Rep. Rob Wittman, R-Va., one of the lawmakers involved, and would shake up a status quo that is “not going to do it.”

The Defense Department is leaning into AI as a means to buttress abilities on the battlefield and in the back office. Army, Air Force and Navy leaders have all produced plans banking on the technology to augment human decision-making and firepower. Wittman and co-sponsor Rep. Dutch Ruppersberger, D-Md., say particular attention is needed on autonomy.

“We want to make sure that the technology that is out there is not just being applied in a spot, quick way,” Wittman said May 17 at the Nexus 23 defense conference, hosted by Applied Intuition and the Atlantic Council at the National Press Club in Washington. “Autonomy holds great promise in many different systems, and we don’t want it limited by how one service branch sees autonomy. We want to make sure that it’s looked at from a broad perspective.”

More than 600 AI projects were underway at the Pentagon as of early 2021, according to a public tally. The joint office envisioned by Wittman and Ruppersberger would provide a single point of accountability for the incorporation of autonomy across the military, among other responsibilities.

“We’ve seen in the Pentagon where there has been movement towards autonomy at a faster pace than has happened in the past,” Wittman said. “If we’re going to have unity of purpose, it needs to be in a single place. It needs to be resourced from a single perspective.”

Wittman serves on the House Armed Services Committee and leads its tactical air and land forces panel. Ruppersberger co-chairs the House Army Caucus and is a member of a defense appropriations subcommittee.

The CDAO was established in December 2021 and hit its first full strides months later. Billed as an overseer and expeditor of all things AI and analytics, it subsumed what were the Joint Artificial Intelligence Center, the Defense Digital Service, the Advana data platform and the chief data officer’s role.

Asked if he or Ruppersberger have spoken with CDAO boss Craig Martell about the legislation, Wittman said there have been “some preliminary conversations with folks” to shape it. Defense Department officials, he said, are “situationally aware of the things we’re trying to do.”

The competitively awarded Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) and Small Business Technology Transfer (STTR) programs, signed into law by President Ronald Reagan in 1982 and recently reauthorized by Congress, can play a greater role in bridging that gap.

As the Pentagon’s recently published Small Business Strategy makes clear, small companies are key to helping the U.S. ensure its technological superiority over China and other potential adversaries.

“Despite their significance to the defense mission, the Department of Defense has yet to utilize the full potential of small businesses,” Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin wrote. The document singles out the SBIR and STTR programs as key entry points for small businesses into the broader defense-industrial base.

The DoD’s own review of the economic impacts of the SBIR program reported a 22-to-1 return on its investment and $28 billion in sales of new technology to the military. In her testimony to Congress in support of reauthorization of the program, the undersecretary for research and engineering, Heidi Shyu, said the “SBIR/STTR programs play a vital role in enabling the U.S. to maintain technological dominance and provide the innovation to allow the U.S. to remain ahead of our adversaries.”

At our company, Physical Sciences, SBIR-funded research and development has enabled us to provide advanced technology to a range of DoD programs. Key SBIR-developed technology, for instance, has allowed us to domestically produce specialized battery systems meant to improve the safety and performance of unmanned underwater vehicles.

This is one example of technology needed for national defense, but so focused it has very limited markets. These kinds of technologies take a long time to mature and face multiple barriers to entry in the cumbersome DoD acquisition processes — what Austin called “a complex web of entry points and intricate regulations.”

Earlier reauthorizations of the SBIR/STTR programs have increased technology transition success by creating pathways to provide the additional funding necessary to successful mature technologies, including the Commercialization Readiness Program and the Rapid Innovation Fund. Acquisition authorities are becoming more adept at recognizing and applying additional SBIR funds to technologies with merit. Congress in September reauthorized the programs for three years, including with some welcome reforms to ensure oversight.

Now, they can be strengthened even further by the Biden administration and Congress.

One of the most persistent questions we get from prime contractors is about our ability to scale production to become a reliable supplier of our own technology. The production of many of these items is capital-intensive, and subject to extensive and expensive qualification requirements without parallel in the commercial world.

The Pentagon has sought a variety of novel ways to encourage sufficient investment to make the leap from prototype to production and supply chain viability — most recently setting up the Office of Strategic Capital to help small businesses secure venture capital and loans. But the lack of venture interest in many of these markets limits the impact of that approach. Any small business contemplating borrowing to fund expansion, at levels approaching its entity value, would be very reluctant to do so considering the high degree of uncertainty in the budgets of its sole customer.

There are some immediate ways the Biden administration and Congress can double down on success. In Executive Order 14017, the president directed the DoD to deploy incentives through the Defense Production Act “to support sustainably-produced strategic and critical materials, including scaling proven research and development (R&D) concepts and emerging technologies from other programs such as the Small Business Innovation Research awardees.”

Congress can provide more effective pathways to implement that policy. It can appropriate additional funding for the Defense Production Act as well as for the Industrial Base Analysis and Sustainment Program, intended in part to cultivate emerging defense sectors and invest in greater partnerships across the industrial base. As it considers these programs, Congress should directly fund and improve access to these funds for SBIR-developed technologies.

Finally, Congress needs to provide additional stability to the SBIR/STTR programs. Its recent reauthorization came down to the wire, delayed key awards, had the potential to exclude many successful performers from the program, and in the end was only for three years. Few would risk making investment decisions supporting acquisition cycles that last over a decade in that climate. It is time to permanently authorize the program.

The Department of Defense is rightly pursuing a host of investment strategies and incentives to help ensure next-generation technologies reach our troops. But while building new bridges, it should also strengthen those that exist. The alternative is squandering investments across the entire defense R&D spectrum and relinquishing technology leadership to our adversaries.

Bill Marinelli is chief executive of Physical Sciences, a U.S.-based company that develops electro-optical/infrared sensing systems and technologies for the defense, homeland security, medical and energy sectors.

Military paychecks could be delayed or stopped altogether. Veterans benefits checks would similarly be delivered erratically. Equipment purchases could be canceled. Contractors and civilian workers could face the choice of furloughs or working without any guarantee of stable pay.

“Unlike the government shutdowns of the past, there is no scripted playbook for how this all goes,” said Rachel Snyderman, senior associate director of economic policy for the Bipartisan Policy Center. “We have never been in such a scenario before. But we know whatever happens, it could quickly become very chaotic.”

On Tuesday, President Joe Biden was scheduled to meet with senior congressional officials in the latest attempt to broker a deal raising the country’s debt ceiling. The Treasury is expected to reach the current limit sometime around June 1 absent congressional action to raise it.

Without a solution, the country could for the first time in history default on its debts, creating a cascade of financial problems across the economy.

Defense Department leaders have already warned those financial complications would have severe consequences for the military and other federal agencies.

At a Senate hearing on May 2, Air Force Secretary Frank Kendall said a spike in U.S. interest rates would have an “absolutely devastating impact” because of skyrocketing interest rates, which he noted are “already roughly at the level of the defense budget.” Just a few days later, at a separate Senate event, Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin warned that defaulting on the U.S. debt would result in “a substantial risk to our reputation” with allies and security partners across the globe amid questions “as to whether or not we will be able to execute programs.”

But a debt default will also have tangible effects on troops, veterans and their families, even if the timing of that impact is not clear.

“Because there is no precedent for a default, it is difficult to know the precise impacts on specific federal programs,” Veterans Affairs press secretary Terrence Hayes said in a statement.

“But what is clear is that, without the ability for the federal government to borrow funds, there is a very real potential that any government program or payment would be halted or severely delayed.

According to the Bipartisan Policy Center, the Defense Department has about $12 billion in payments to military and civilian retirees due on June 1.

Roughly $7 billion is owed to defense vendors between June 5 and June 17. Another $4 billion in military salary checks are set to be sent out on June 15. Snyderman said if the debt limit is not raised, that schedule of payouts gets thrown into disarray.

“The Treasury could prioritize some payments over others, but they also may just have to wait for other money to come in,” she said. “Now this becomes a cash flow crisis for the country.”

Austin in his Senate testimony warned that “we won’t, in some cases, be able to pay our troops with any degree of predictability.” That means money families need for rent, groceries and other basic expenses could be delayed.

Similarly, about $25 billion in veterans benefits set to be paid out in June could be delayed by days or weeks, causing problems for millions of families that depend on that support for their monthly income.

If Treasury officials prioritize those payments, veterans and service members might not see any disruptions. But that would mean delays to other government payouts instead, things like Medicare support, non-defense federal salaries and interest payments on the national debt (failing to pay that would downgrade the country’s credit rating, creating even more debt).

Todd Harrison, the managing director of the national security consulting firm Metrea Strategic Insights, noted that payment delays would also affect defense contractors.

“They could continue to do work and [the Defense Department] could continue to award contracts and obligate money, but the payment of invoices would be delayed,” said Harrison. “The administration could elect to stop all new contract awards and obligations during this period, but that would make the impact even worse,” while possibly violating the law.

“If they were to halt all new contract obligations, that would have a significant and immediate impact on [Defense Department] programs and activities,” he added.

The damage only gets worse if the crisis drags on well into the summer. Another $14 billion in defense vendor payouts are due before July 15, when another $3 billion in military paychecks and bonuses are scheduled to be paid out.

Failing to pay contractors could result in a host of lawsuits and long-term delays to procurement programs. Hayes said officials worry that vendors could “decide to reduce or completely cease providing goods and services to VA if payment was uncertain.”

Failing to pay troops — and requiring them to keep working anyway — could become a political nightmare for both parties.

Lawmakers in the past have passed legislation to blunt the impact of government shutdowns on military and veterans families, ensuring that some Department of Veterans Affairs appropriations are awarded a year in advance and ensuring that military members receive pay even during an appropriations lapse.

Those protections don’t exist if the money to cut checks isn’t there for the country.

Harrison noted that the Treasury could “continue borrowing and paying bills as usual” if Biden opts to invoke a clause in the 14th amendment. But doing so would likely mean court challenges and other complications, Biden said in a press conference earlier this month.

In March, Virginia Democratic Sens. Mark Warner and Tim Kaine introduced legislation that would have enabled all government employees and contractors to postpone paying any bills during a shutdown or debt default. The proposal has not moved forward in recent weeks.

Defense leaders said the real legislative solution is simply passing a measure to increase the debt limit, as lawmakers have done 13 times since 2009.

Earlier this month, after another meeting with congressional leaders, Biden said that he was “absolutely certain” a deal could be reached and that default “is not an option.” But in the days since, no real path ahead on the issue has emerged.

The last several years have shown us concerning developments in our adversaries’ approach to cybercrime. While reported cyber incidents decreased last year, our adversaries have grown more sophisticated in their approach. As we evolve our defenses, our adversaries evolve their tactics.

This is a game of one-upmanship and we’re losing.

For example, multi-extortion tactics—where an attacker exfiltrates data to extort a victim before their data is locked in a ransomware attack—occurred in about 70% of ransomware cases, compared to only 40% in mid-2021. Our adversaries’ ability to exploit the very technology Americans rely on day in and day out is extremely concerning.

Cyber criminals and malicious nation states do not distinguish between industries, business size, or geographical location. These attackers use domestic-based infrastructure to launch attacks on U.S. soil. Leveraging domestic cloud infrastructure, email providers, and other services, bad actors disguise themselves as legitimate network traffic to evade detection.

Preventing and disrupting these attacks will require enhanced public-private partnerships. In the 2018 National Cyber Strategy, the Trump administration called out this challenge and the need to address it. Meanwhile, the Biden administration continues to grapple with a response to this growing threat trend in its 2023 National Cybersecurity Strategy. This is a time for decisive leadership, not hesitation.

While cyber criminals take advantage of gaps in our visibility over domestic infrastructure, foreign nation states, such as Russia, give them safe harbor and shelter them from prosecution. In April 2021, the Biden administration levied sanctions on Russia in part for cultivating and shielding cyber criminals. These sanctions, while necessary, have clearly not been enough to deter Russian-based attacks.

To mitigate the risk of the increasingly complex cyber threat landscape and to deter the harboring of cyber criminals by nations, the U.S. must take a strong, cross-sector, and whole-of-government approach.

Serving as Chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee and on the House Foreign Affairs Committee, I see the immense value of our government agencies working together to address the threat both from home and abroad. Unfortunately, cyber defense is often siloed within each government agency, leaving gaps in communication and interagency cooperation.

The creation of the State Department’s new Bureau of Cyberspace and Digital Policy gives us a tremendous opportunity to improve this interagency cooperation. To make the best of this opportunity, the State Department must prioritize efforts to engage the international community in addressing the growing threat from cybercrime as well as cyber aggression from nation states like China. This should be done in close coordination with the Office of the National Cyber Director, which Congress created to streamline efforts across the government, including with our international partners. Doing this will improve our collective cybersecurity.

As Chairman of the Homeland Security Committee, I have oversight responsibility over the Department of Homeland Security, including the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency. CISA plays a vital role in protecting our domestic infrastructure, but over 80% of critical infrastructure is privately owned and operated. This means success is dependent on a voluntary relationship framework, not duplicative bureaucratic red-tape. CISA must build trust and establish close partnerships with the private sector and other government stakeholders, like the State Department and ONCD, to share timely, actionable, and contextualized information to stop cyber-attacks in their tracks.

The need for increased information sharing between the federal government and private industry is not new; it has been a foundational dilemma in cybersecurity for years. CISA’s recent efforts, such as the Joint Cyber Defense Collaborative, are steps in the right direction. But it’s clear that this effort is a work in progress, and Congress must play a role in refining the process.

This is just a small facet of a complicated threat picture. However, an overarching strategy to guide individual agency and sector efforts across government and industry will help combat cyber threats. The Biden administration’s National Cybersecurity Strategy has the potential to be that strategic guide, as long as a strong and clear implementation plan follows.

When it comes to our nation’s cyber defenses, time is of the essence. Every minute our networks are not properly defended and prepared to meet new threats gives our foreign adversaries the upper hand.

Cybercriminals and nation states do not consider the agencies involved or the boundaries between sectors when they plot and carry out attacks, so it is imperative that our government agencies and the private sector work together to defeat them before it’s too late.

Rep. Mark Green, a Republican, is a physician and combat veteran of Afghanistan and Iraq, where he served three tours. He is chair of the House Homeland Security Committee and serves on the House Armed Services and Foreign Affairs Committees.

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To become that accelerator, Congress could give the Pentagon’s Defense Innovation Unit a slice of security assistance funds bound for Ukraine in coming aid packages.

In announcing the creation of DIU in 2015, late-Defense Secretary Ash Carter noted that the organization would “strengthen existing relationships and build new ones; help scout for new technologies; and help function as a local interface for the department. Down the road, they could help startups find new work to do with [the Department of Defense].”

Eight years has since passed since its founding, and it’s safe to say that DIU has met each of these aims, but maybe not at the scale needed to change the Pentagon. Consistent with the organization’s most basic objective in bringing commercial technologies into the hands of our warfighters, DIU has transitioned 52 technologies and platforms into Department of Defense contracts since 2016. Those 52 projects, spanning capabilities in unmanned aircraft systems, predictive maintenance and a variety of other areas, come from 48 different companies and have a combined contract ceiling of $4.9 billion.

While $4.9 billion may be a drop in the bucket for a department that annually receives hundreds of billions of dollars in appropriations, partially accounting for that relatively low cost to the department is private capital. According to DIU, its 52 successfully transitioned projects are supported by more than $18 billion in private investment.

As an additional sign of the organization’s success, the rate at which DIU is transitioning technologies is increasing. The transition contracts awarded for commercial tech more than doubled between fiscal 2021 and fiscal 2022, increasing from 8 to 17.

In successfully helping commercial technologies enter the hands of our warfighters, DIU has brought a much-needed shakeup to an acquisition system that’s overly bureaucratic and, by and large, favors large prime contractors over innovative startups. Despite its success, the administration is considering cutting the organization’s budget in the coming fiscal year.

As described by our colleague at the American Enterprise Institute, Elaine McCusker, the administration appears to be slashing DIU’s budget by 6.3% in FY24, and even as much as 26% if funding for capital budgets and for its sister organization, the National Security Innovation Network, are taken into account. Congress should resist such a damaging cut and consider adding more funds to DIU in the near term through the Ukraine Security Assistance Initiative.

One of the major impediments to the DoD’s adoption of commercial technologies — and why it continues to fall behind — is its fear of and rigid restrictions on allowing systems and software to operate on the DoD network. Only the large defense primes and well-funded startups can withstand the timeline and cost of getting the authority to operate. The Ukrainians have no such restriction, and as such can and are becoming the perfect laboratory for cutting-edge technologies and software.

Giving DIU even a small percentage of the money dedicated to Ukraine could make a real difference. If Congress were to provide DIU 4% of the funds obligated to Ukraine during the last fiscal year, DIU would receive around $252 million — well over the $203 million DIU awarded in prototype contracts that year. Doing so would accelerate existing prototyping efforts, bringing needed technologies to scale on a faster timeline.

In addition, such funds would allow DIU to facilitate contracts for some of its already transitioned technologies. That would put money toward startups that routinely cannot make it through the DoD valley of death. In particular, DIU could focus its investments in software, artificial intelligence and networked devices, all of which have extreme difficulty getting traction in the DoD ecosystem.

While the specifics of this proposal would certainly have to be worked out between Congress and the Pentagon, there is no doubt that it’s needed for the Ukrainians but also for the tech startups in the United States. The Ukrainians have enthusiastically adopted commercial technologies on the battlefield, from the Starlink satellite constellation to the use of cheap drones, and used them to great effect. However, many tech startups cannot afford to bankroll their products onto the battlefield, but DIU could. Adding more to the mix would be a welcome addition for a force that is constantly tinkering and MacGyver-ing its weapons and tech.

Retired U.S. Army Maj. Gen. John Ferrari is a senior nonresident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute think tank. Ferrari previously served as a director of program analysis and evaluation for the Army. Charles Rahr is a research assistant at AEI.

The group, led by Sen. Mark Warner, D-VA, announced two bills on May 10 designed to centralize classification decisions, impose disincentives for overclassification and protect against insider threats.

In a May 11 briefing on Capitol Hill, Warner said that while achieving true reform may be “a bit of a slog,” he’s working to make progress on some of the recommendations during this legislative session.

“We’ve not done a major socialization with the House yet, but we know there are a lot of people who are interested in this issue,” he said. “Whether it got in-total attached or whether we have pieces of this that went into the [National Defense Authorization Act] or the Intelligence Authorization Act, we’re actively working that.”

Secrecy within the defense and intelligence communities is not a new obstacle. Officials have for years warned that overclassification hinders work with allies and industry and makes it harder to communicate with the public. At the same time, several recent events — including alleged misuse of classified documents by the Trump and Biden administrations and the leak of classified Pentagon documents by a member of the Massachusetts Air National Guard — renew concerns by some that access and handling of secret information is not subject to enough oversight.

Warner said those incidents have brought a new urgency to the reform discussion.

“All of that coalesced a bipartisan group of us on the Intelligence Committee to say it’s time to actually put up a piece of legislation, or a couple of pieces of legislation,” he said.

The first bill, the Classification Reform Act, targets the classification process itself, setting accountability and governance measures to ensure that secrecy levels are being applied appropriately. The bill would designate the director of national intelligence as the executive agent for classification and declassification, creating a single authority overseeing the system.

Right to know

The bill would also require that before designating a program as classified, agencies must validate that the national security risk to revealing that information is more compelling than the public’s right to know. Further, it would also establish a fund to upgrade the outdated systems that support declassification. Agencies would allocate a portion of their annual budgets to the fund and those with the highest rates of classified information would be required to contribute more.

To get after insider threat concerns, the bill would set minimum standards for what information can leave government buildings. It would also require most documents to be stripped of classification protections after 25 years.

The second bill, the Sensible Declassification Act, focuses on streamlining the declassification process, improving training programs to ensure “sensible classification” and modernizing the system that manages these issues.

It would also require federal agencies to access the need for “number and types of security clearances.”

Warner said he expects several of the provisions to be unpopular — particularly those focused on weighing security risks against the public interest, charging fees to agencies that overclassify and setting limits on how long certain documents can remain secret.

“That’s going to stir up some controversy — we’re aware,” he said. “Any administration would probably push back on some of this just because they don’t want Congress messing with this.”

WASHINGTON — The Navy’s top officer for the Pacific region plans to appear before the House China Committee in a closed session Thursday about a potential Chinese invasion of Taiwan, sources told Defense News.

Adm. Samuel Paparo, the commander of the Navy’s Pacific fleet will brief bipartisan, 24-member committee, which the House established in January in part as a way to help Taiwan defend itself from a potential attack. Paparo is expected to tell lawmakers about what’s needed to defend Taiwan, including resource requirements and shortages, capability shortfalls, modernization efforts as well as logistics and coordination with allies and partners, the committee’s staff said.

“Even though we’ve gotten this massive wake-up call in Ukraine, we haven’t yet done what is necessary to start replenishing new stockpiles and building them at a rapid rate to surge and pre-position them to the [Pacific] theater,” Rep. Mike Gallagher, R-Wis., the chairman of the committee, told Defense News in a Wednesday statement. “Given the geography, we can only fight with what we have there.”

Paparo’s appearance before the committee had not been previously reported.

For months, the China Committee has been preparing a bipartisan series of policy recommendations for possible inclusion in the fiscal 2024 National Defense Authorization Act. The House Armed Services Committee was set to begin work on the defense policy bill this week, but Republican leaders postponed it at the last minute amid a partisan debate over raising the debt ceiling and discretionary spending levels.

The proposals are expected to include specific measures aimed at deterring China from invading or blockading Taiwan. China views Taiwan as a breakaway province and has vowed to retake the island by force if necessary.

In April, the China Committee also held a tabletop war game over Taiwan and Gallagher told Defense News in a subsequent interview that the war game highlighted the need to ramp up production of high-priority munitions, help clear the $19 billion arms sale backlog to Taipei and bolster Pentagon cybersecurity cooperation with the island nation.

“It’s naïve to assume that we could somehow surge hard power to the Pacific,” Gallagher said Wednesday. “The proceedings accentuated this point and I believe surging stockpiles is something we could fix in a bipartisan fashion.”

The war games illustrated that the U.S. would need between 1,000 to 1,200 long-range anti-ship missiles in a conflict with China over Taiwan, and currently the U.S. has less than 250 in its inventory. Other high-priority munitions Gallagher identified are the Naval Strike Missiles, which U.S. Marines are fielding in Japan and the Philippines as part of an expeditionary ship interdiction system; Joint Strike Missiles; Joint Direct Attack Munitions; and SM-6 missiles.

Gallagher reiterated his call for congressional appropriations to fund multi-year munitions procurement as authorized in this year’s defense policy bill. But the fiscal year 2023 government funding bill allocated $687 million for the Army for two years to accelerate production “of critical munitions to replace defense articles” provided to Ukraine and its backers, far less than what he said is sufficient.

“We need to take action to deter [Chinese Communist Part] aggression and arm Taiwan to the teeth before any crisis begins,” said Gallagher in his statement. “The United States needs to deliver on our promises to clear the $19 billion weapons backlog to Taiwan, conduct enhanced joint military training and reinforce our military posture throughout the region.”

The Pentagon is also preparing to transfer weapons from existing U.S. stockpiles to Taiwan using presidential drawdown authority, the same mechanism President Joe Biden has used to arm Ukraine against Russia’s invasion. The Senate has also started work on a large China bill that will include components to bolster U.S. allies and partners in the Pacific.

Air Force Gen. Glen VanHerck noted he’d already recommended to the Pentagon a plan to change overall policy for homeland defense. But in addition to that, “I’m also in the middle of developing what I call ‘Homeland Defense Design 2035,’ ” he said, “which gets after … a new way of defending the homeland, and that’s vastly different than the way we do it today with fighters, tankers, [airborne warning and control systems aircraft], those kinds of things.”

NORTHCOM is responsible for guarding the continental United States. North American Aerospace Defense Command, which is housed with NORTHCOM, combines U.S. and Canadian efforts to monitor and protect North American airspace.

Part of NORTHCOM’s design will come up with a modernization plan for the North Warning System, a joint early-warning radar system with Canada that provides air surveillance for North America across the polar region and was built in the 1980s to replace the Distant Early Warning Line system.

“The department hasn’t made a decision on the modernization of the North Warning System or further replacement of the radars associated with the North Warning System,” VanHerck said, but that will be “part of the relook at homeland defense and the policy study ongoing right now.”

U.S. adversaries’ rapidly maturing technologies and capabilities are threatening the homeland in new ways, including hypersonic weapons and cruise missiles. In February, a Chinese surveillance balloon floated across the United States. As a result of these growing threats, the U.S. is rethinking its approach for detection and response to possible threats on the homeland.

NORTHCOM and NORAD must embrace “future types of systems” that in the past may have sounded like science fiction, VanHerck said earlier this year at a congressional hearing on the fiscal 2024 budget request.

“I think the future of homeland defense is vastly different than what we see today,” he said at the time. “It’s likely including autonomous platforms, airborne, maritime platforms, unmanned platforms with domain awareness sensors, and effectors that are kinetic and non-kinetic.”

Autonomous and uncrewed systems could linger and observe for extended periods of time, providing a steady feed of information that can then be evaluated for threats. They could also park in places considered too risky or complicated for troops to be in-person, he described.

The command is also heavily involved in discussions on over-the-horizon radar with Canada, VanHerck said at the May 9 hearing, which will enhance situational awareness in defense of the homeland.

VanHerck stressed that over-the-horizon radar is not “the end-all, be-all solution that will give me domain awareness further away from the homeland.”

While he is “still confident” in the military’s ability to detect balloons like the one from China, VanHerck said there must be a link between over-the-horizon radars, and that data needs to channel properly to an “endgame effector.”

This requires additional domain awareness, a well-built infrastructure of radars and sensors, and the ability to pass data across an integrated air and missile defense system that can lead to neutralizing threats, he explained.

“I’m not focused on an endgame kinetic kill,” VanHerck said. “I’m focused primarily on the policy for what we must have, [an] endgame kinetic kill, but more broadly for developing capabilities such as the use of electromagnetic spectrum, non-kinetic effectors to deny and deceive, and limited-area or wide-area defense capabilities to include the use of autonomous unmanned platforms with domain awareness capabilities that could be maritime and airborne.”

Colin Demarest contributed to this report.

WASHINGTON — The partisan fight over raising the debt ceiling has temporarily derailed Congress’ work on the annual defense authorization bill.

The House’s markup of the fiscal 2024 National Defense Authorization Act — initially scheduled to begin this Thursday — is now postponed until Republicans and Democrats can reach a spending agreement as part of the gridlocked debt ceiling negotiations, Majority Leader Steve Scalise, R-La., told Defense News on Wednesday.

“I’m hopeful that as the speaker [of the House] meets with the president and the other congressional leaders on Friday that they can get some real specifics that get us closer to an agreement,” Scalise said at a news conference after the weekly Republican caucus meeting. “For now, we’re going to wait and see how that process plays out before starting the NDAA. But we’ve already been doing work on what those policies would look like on a national defense authorization.”

House Armed Services Committee Chairman Mike Rogers, R-Ala., announced in a last-minute statement on Tuesday that the NDAA markup would be postponed until “the near future.”

House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., met with President Joe Biden and other congressional leaders at the White House on Tuesday to discuss the debt ceiling, but the parties involved noted no progress was made on the issue.

Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen has told Congress that the U.S. will default on its debts by June 1 absent congressional action to raise the ceiling.

House Republicans passed a bill last month along party lines that would raise the debt ceiling in exchange for several concessions, including $130 billion in discretionary spending cuts. The defense budget accounts for roughly half of annual discretionary spending.

Democrats are arguing Congress should pass a clean debt ceiling bill as congressional Republicans did under former President Donald Trump.

After Scalise noted the delay was due to the debt ceiling fight, Rep. Mikie Sherrill of New Jersey became the first Democrat on the House Armed Services Committee to come out swinging against the postponement. She accused Republican leaders of “putting partisan politics and a right-wing agenda above our national security, military readiness and the wellbeing of our servicemembers” as part of their “irresponsible attitude toward the debt ceiling.”

“This bill is the legislative linchpin of our national security,” Sherrill said in a statement. “It’s how Congress sets our national security policy, exercises oversight of the Department of Defense, and invests in military research and innovation. It’s also the legislation that raises servicemember salaries and provides for childcare and healthcare for military families.”

Rep. Adam Smith of Washington, the top Democrat on the same committee, blamed McCarthy for the markup delay “because reality has come crashing in on this ridiculous, hypocritical fantasy.”

“Republican leadership has been arguing both that President Biden’s very substantial defense budget proposal is somehow billions of dollars less than it must be to meet our defense needs, and that we must make massive cuts to our discretionary budget to meet their idea of what fiscal responsibility would look like,” Smith said in a statement.

The Senate has not officially scheduled a markup for its version of the FY24 NDAA. Politico first reported on Tuesday that the House delayed the NDAA markup.

“We will be prepared to pass a robust NDAA,” said Rep. Elise Stefanik, R-N.Y., the chair of the House Republican Conference and a member of the House Armed Services Committee. “The NDAA is the one bill that every single year we’ve been able to deliver and pass, certainly since I’ve been in Congress, but for decades.”

While raising the debt limit is an urgent task, Congress is also discussing the readiness and safety of American forces as it prepares annual defense authorization and appropriations measures to fulfill its fundamental duty.

Maintaining and sustaining equipment and facilities, and persistently training in joint and coalition exercises, may not be as exciting as buying shiny new ships, planes, tanks and missiles, but it is crucial to a combat-credible operational fighting force and to the safety of those who populate that force.

According to the Defense Department’s fiscal 2024 budget overview: “Strategic readiness is the ability to build, maintain, and balance warfighting capabilities and competitive advantages that ensure the DoD can achieve strategic objectives across threats and time horizons.” The strategic framework used to develop the budget “expands the Department’s view of how it thinks about readiness” and “leverages tools and assessments to inform a broader understanding of the cumulative and cascading impact of decisions on readiness.”

The department is right: Useful data for decision-making is important. But while readiness can be a difficult thing to measure — particularly in understanding and balancing risk to force, to mission and to strategy — money is important, too.

Yet budgets for the operations and maintenance accounts that fund training and readiness have declined by close to 17% over the last 12 years. The cut is 50% for the Army. While some of this decrease can be attributed to a reduction in contingency funding for combat operations, the trend remains troubling and is further evidenced by the submission of $3 billion in unfunded priorities for these accounts. The Army’s unfunded list is notable in that it lacks a request for readiness and training funds, despite the fact it recently halted flight operations due to the accidents noted above.

Further emphasizing the damage of continued underinvestment in readiness efforts, the General Accountability Office recently reported that the Navy’s ship maintenance backlog has grown to nearly $1.8 billion, while maintenance and supply issues limit the availability of aging aircraft.

Shortfalls in funding for sustainment and modernization of facilities also directly contributes to readiness challenges. The military departments and combatant commands have reported a combined $3.4 billion infrastructure gap, and GAO reports continued backlogs in deferred facility maintenance of at least $137 billion.

In addition to the overall downward trend in funding, the operations and maintenance accounts are negatively affected by the impacts of continuing resolutions, which have been used by Congress to extend funding and priorities into the new fiscal year in all but three of the last 47 years.

The use of continuing resolutions, or CR, to keep the government running when annual appropriations are not passed on time results in lost time and billons in lost buying power each year. In the last 13 years, military competitiveness and readiness have been delayed for 1,600 days. Lost time can’t be recovered.

During testimony on the current readiness of the joint force before the House and Senate Armed Services committees this year, senior leaders of the military services all noted the importance of on-time budgets. Air Force Vice Chief of Staff Gen. David Allvin summed it up well, saying that “this Congress can make the most positive impact on our readiness through a timely budget appropriation. ... A CR will essentially rob us of something both critical and irreversible as we face growing threats to our nation. And that is time.”

Marine Corps Assistant Commandant Gen. Eric Smith added: “During any CR we are unable to improve as we otherwise would have done. Our adversaries don’t have that problem.”

While the DoD has also emphasized the importance of on-time budgets to enable the military services to properly plan training events and exercises, the current budget request does not adequately fund these activities.

The safety and readiness of the force is too important to get lost in clever language about decision frameworks, assessment tools, and balancing current and future needs.

Time is short: Only 37 joint legislative days are currently planned between May 12 and the start of the new fiscal year on Oct. 1, 2023. As congressional defense committees prepare to complete drafts of the FY24 authorization and appropriations bills in the coming weeks, it is crucial that they apply their knowledge and influence to support the current force by reversing the trend of declining operations and facilities funding, and that they provide these funds on time.

Elaine McCusker is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute think tank. She is a former acting undersecretary of defense (comptroller).

The unclassified version of the strategy, released May 9, highlights two forces that are driving the Defense Department’s push for more partnerships among the services and the rapid fielding of new capabilities: a threat environment that’s growing in complexity, and a commercial marketplace “infused with private investment” that the department can leverage.

“The DoD must be more proactive with its engagements with the private sector to make the right investments to capitalize on emerging technologies, as well as to preempt adversary attempts to do the same by protecting critical and emerging technologies early in the development cycle,” the document states. “We must also solve increasingly complex security challenges that involve science and technology.”

Heidi Shyu, who serves as the undersecretary of defense for research and engineering, and her team developed the strategy over the last year, which Congress required in the fiscal 2022 National Defense Authorization Act.

The 11-page document outlines how the department will harness emerging technology to counter threats from Russia and China. Those threats include cyberattacks on the DoD’s supply chain, biological warfare and advances in offensive space capabilities — all areas that correspond with “critical technology areas” the Pentagon has prioritized in recent years.

Nina Kollars, an adviser to Shyu, told reporters in a May 8 briefing the department will deliver an implementation plan to Congress in the next three months.

In the area of collaborative warfighting, the strategy notes that funding for emerging technology must be part of a “carefully crafted” plan that’s coordinated among the military services to avoid duplication or waste.

Kollars said that along with supporting more joint demonstrations through programs like the Rapid Defense Experimentation Reserve, the strategy highlights a need for more “rigorous, threat-informed analysis” to underpin those experiments and help determine which projects should transition to the field.

“What is particularly important to the building at this point is ensuring we have investments in modeling and simulation and rigorous analysis,” she said. “All of those elements ... will help us identify what it is exactly that we should be getting after in terms of budgetary investment.”

The document also emphasizes the role international partnerships play in strengthening science and technology development. It calls for an expansion of existing multilateral agreements in order to increase production capacity among allies and strengthen overall deterrence.

Asked whether the strategy supports the easing of export controls and other international technology-sharing policies, Kollars declined to offer specifics, but said those details would likely be “hashed out” as part of the implementation plan.

The document doesn’t recommend specific infrastructure investments, but does link the DoD’s technological superiority to the quality of its lab and test environments. The department last year identified a $5 billion funding shortfall for key infrastructure modernization projects.

Kollars said infrastructure — both physical labs as well as digital modeling and simulation capabilities — is “on the forefront of the minds of everyone in the DoD.”

“We cannot make a 21st century force with 20th century infrastructure,” she said.

After years of experimenting with airborne delivery drones, the service believes it has a winner.

In its fiscal 2024 budget request, the Marine Corps is asking to buy 41 tactical resupply unmanned aircraft systems, or TRUAS, for a total investment of more than $13 million.

With the service set to take delivery of previous orders of the drones this spring and expecting to declare initial operational capability on the system later this fall, it will be a big year, not only for tactical resupply unmanned aircraft systems, but also for the concept of unmanned aerial resupply.

Marines eye tactical resupply drone prototypes

Built like large quadcopters, the systems are designed to carry payloads of up to 150 pounds over distances of up to nine miles in containers secured underneath. The unit cost of about $325,000 per drone is certainly steep, but Marine officials say it’s substantially more sophisticated than the remote-controlled commercial drones it resembles.

Rather than being manually flown, tactical resupply unmanned aircraft systems are programmed with waypoints that determine itinerary and flight pattern, meaning it requires less hands-on attention from Marine operators than most of the Corps’ quadcopters.

It takes just two Marines to monitor and maintain one in the field, and those Marines can learn everything they need to know about taking care of it in just five training days, according to Master Sgt. Chris Genualdi, an airborne and air delivery specialist with Combat Development and Integration, who discussed the system in an April news release.

The tactical resupply unmanned aircraft systems concept is closely aligned with the Marine Corps’ all-consuming vision for future warfare, which involves small, independent units operating from great distances from austere outposts ― perhaps on islands in the vast Indo-Pacific.

While the system isn’t designed to cross the ocean with supplies, it might be dispatched from a ship to a landing zone in hostile conditions ashore that might preclude a helicopter or V-22 Osprey delivery.

“As system technology advances in future years, [Unmanned Expeditionary Systems] will … include emerging technologies to include autonomous distribution capabilities for elements across the MAGTF and [Marine Littoral Regiments], enabling more diversified distribution and the sustainment of Marine Corps forces across future operating environments,” officials wrote in fiscal 2024 budget justification documents.

Tactical resupply unmanned aircraft systems provide “an organic battlefield logistics capability to distribute critical supplies via an unmanned platform while conducting” expeditionary advanced base operations safely within a weapons engagement zone, “where the risk to manned aircraft would deny manned aviation resupply operations.”

Marine leaders plan to scale the technology as it proves itself, according to the April news release, eventually building larger and higher-capacity platforms according to the same model that might further advance the objectives of the Corps’ expeditionary advanced base operations.

To this end, the service is also planning to launch a new military occupational specialty, or military job, focused on operating resupply drones. That job will be called small unmanned logistics system — air specialist. The timing of its rollout has not been announced.

In April, defense contractor Leidos announced a contract with the Marine Corps to build a larger autonomous drone prototype ― similar to a helicopter with a double stack of rotors ― that would be able to travel up to 100 nautical miles and carry up to 600 pounds.

“The utility of the TRUAS reaches beyond combat,” the recent Marine Corps release states, with its capabilities being highly effective in humanitarian assistance and disaster relief efforts.

“In disaster areas that may not be accessible by conventional means, the TRUAS could be used to transport much needed supplies.”

The Corps contracted for 35 tactical resupply unmanned aircraft systems drones in August 2022 and 30 more in March 2023, according to Marine Corps budget documents, but all are set for delivery in the first half of this year from SURVICE Engineering, out of Aberdeen, Maryland.

The effort to develop the tactical resupply unmanned aircraft systems began in earnest with a Department of the Navy “fly-off” prize challenge launched in 2020 at Yuma Proving Ground, Arizona, to build a rugged and reliable small cargo-carrying drone. SURVICE took the $100,000 first-place prize in that effort.

While tactical resupply unmanned aircraft systems only have been employed in field user evaluations and training and not proven in combat, the Marine Corps has moved relatively quickly to make its delivery-drone requirement a reality.

It’s far from the only entity seeking to capitalize on reliable unmanned aerial logistics. In 2013, online retail giant Amazon made headlines when then-CEO Jeff Bezos announced that it would be delivering packages via aerial drone by 2018.

A decade later, Amazon has launched a very limited regional version of the service, and the company says it’s still working on developing its vision for “Amazon Prime Air.”

Republicans on Capitol Hill are pushing back against the Pentagon’s climate goals by invoking China’s dominance over the raw materials necessary to manufacture the electric vehicles and solar panels that the Defense Department needs to meet its emissions-reductions targets.

Sen. Joni Ernst, R-Iowa, took aim at the Pentagon’s goal of transitioning its roughly 170,000 non-tactical vehicle fleet to electricity or alternative fuels by 2030 in an April Senate Armed Services Committee hearing. She accused Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm of “putting the climate crusade ahead of the [Defense] Department’s lethality,” an exchange the Republican National Committee spotlighted on Twitter.

“Right now, China controls the [electric vehicle] supply chain,” Ernst said in a subsequent floor speech. “The communist regime produces about 75% of all lithium-ion batteries that power those electric vehicles.”

Those batteries are also needed for military assets such as surveillance drones, and the Pentagon is trying to capitalize on recent spending Congress approved to help ease the defense industrial base’s reliance on the China-dominated critical minerals supply chain.

Late last month, Deputy Defense Secretary Kathleen Hicks discussed supply chain diversification with executives from lithium-ion battery and mineral companies Bren-Tronics, EaglePicher, Enersys, Forge Nano, General Motors Defense and Our Next Energy.

“Today, batteries are critical for powering our defense systems—from vehicles and aircraft, to munitions and platforms, to our unmanned systems and satellite systems and more,” Pentagon Spokesman Eric Pahon said in a readout of the April 28 meeting. “Deputy Secretary Hicks emphasized that increasing lethality and maintaining the United States’ asymmetric military edge will depend on advancing battery technology and ensuring a more resilient domestic supply chain.”

Undersecretary of Defense for Acquisition and Sustainment Bill LaPlante released a non-public, lithium-ion battery strategy in February, aimed at increasing the mining and production needed to produce them within the U.S. and friendly countries.

President Joe Biden last year also authorized defense production act authorities to address critical mineral shortfalls in large-capacity batteries. The Pentagon plans to spend $43 million on the effort in fiscal year 2023, which ends Sept. 30. It’s also collaborating with the Energy Department’s Federal Consortium for Advanced Batteries to improve supply chain resilience.

An Energy Department fact sheet issued on Thursday touted more than $95 billion private sector investment in domestic battery production since 2021 alongside 160 new or expanded minerals, processing and manufacturing facilities. The 2021 bipartisan infrastructure law and Democrats’ 2022 budget reconciliation bill included several subsidies for domestic electric vehicle and solar panel manufacturing.

‘Significant risk of disruption’

Rep. Mike Waltz, R-Fla., who chairs the House Armed Services Readiness subcommittee, suggested at an April 19 hearing that he may insert language in this year’s defense authorization bill requiring the Pentagon to certify that these solar panel and electric vehicle materials do not come from China.

“China controls over 80% of solar panel production and 95% of elements needed to produce such product,” Waltz wrote in a letter this week to Army Secretary Christie Wormuth.

Last year, Ernst inserted a provision in the fiscal 2023 defense authorization bill to slow the non-tactical vehicle fleet electric transition by requiring the Pentagon to first supply Congress with a report requiring the Pentagon to identify any components of the vehicles sourced from China.

Democrats counter that the green technology push increases military readiness while reducing emissions.

Sen. Tammy Duckworth, D-Ill., introduced a bill on Wednesday that would require the Pentagon to work with allies and partners to reduce “reliance on fossil fuels and employing more diverse and renewable operation energy sources.”

A factsheet accompanying her bill states “half of the U.S. combat-related casualties in Iraq and Afghanistan were directly tied to fuel and water resupply convoy operations,” citing a RAND Corporation study.

The frequent attacks on these convoys prompted the Defense Department to reduce fuel demand in both countries. For instance, the Marines deployed hybrid generators while relying on battery backups and solar power.

A February 2022 Energy Department report on solar panel supply chains noted that China produces 97% of the world’s silicon wafers need to make solar panels and that Chinese subsidiaries make 75% of the solar cells for modules imported into the U.S.

“The concentration of the [crystalline silicon] supply chain in companies with close ties to China, a country with documented human rights violations and an unpredictable trade relationship with the United States, poses a significant risk of disruption,” states the report.

Wormuth told Waltz at the House Armed Services Committee hearing that “We do need to work to get control of our supply chain so that the critical components we have, we control.”

Waltz pressed her on the origins of components for the new floating solar farm at Fort Bragg.

Ironically, an Army spokesperson told Defense News on Friday that the modules for the Fort Bragg solar farm were manufactured in South Korea before final assembly in Alabama.

A February 2022 Defense Department report on critical supply chain highlights the challenge of addressing China’s hold on solar panels and lithium batteries alike.

“Even materials and components manufactured domestically often have reliance on China-produced precursors or are fragile suppliers and single point failures within the supply chain,” it states. “As electrification is expected to accelerate dramatically by 2030, reliance on China will grow and China’s relative cell dominance is projected to remain stable.”

For instance, China has a majority ownership of 70% of the cobalt – an essential component of lithium-ion batteries – mined in the Democratic Republic of Congo, the world’s largest supplier of the metal.

China’s critical mineral dominance gives it significant leverage over other crucial defense supply chains, including the antimony alloy needed to produce ammunition.