Christine Wormuth testifies to the Senate Armed Services Committee during her confirmation hearing
WASHINGTON: President Biden’s nominee for Army Secretary, Pentagon veteran Christine Wormuth, sailed through a bipartisan lovefest of a Senate Armed Services Committee confirmation hearing this morning. Unlike most nominees, she actually made some substantive statements – starting with a strong commitment to fight for Army funding within the Pentagon.
It’s widely presumed that the Army will bear the brunt of post-COVID budget cuts, facing what the Joint Chiefs Chairman called a fiscal “bloodletting” to boost Air Force and Navy programs to better counter China. Army personnel endstrength is a particularly tempting target for budget-cutters.
Asked about that by former Army captain Sen. Tom Cotton, Wormuth took on the question directly.
“I don’t think anyone would be well served by looking at the Army as … just a bill payer,” she told Cotton, the powerful ranking member of the SASC’s air land power subcommittee. “If confirmed… I would look very carefully and be quite skeptical of proposals to make major cuts to force structure. I would not want to see us return to the days of 15 month long deployments and regular use of stop loss.”
“I will be the strongest possible advocate for the Army inside the Pentagon and out,” Wormuth said.
SASC chairman Jack Reed raised a more nuanced issue. In its urgency to accelerate acquisition and reform its organization, the Army has “created tensions between civilian and military acquisition officials.” Specifically, that’s the civilians in the traditional acquisition office, the staff of the Assistant Secretary of the Army for Acquisition, Technology, & Logistics (aka ASAALT), and the uniformed military officers running the two-year-old Army Futures Command and its subordinate Cross Functional Teams, which attempt to bridge the divides between bureaucratic fiefdoms.
“The stand up of Army Futures Command …as you said… put a lot of energy around the Army’s modernization programs,” Wormuth told Sen. Reed. “But… to try to make sure that we keep our programs on schedule and at the cost that we have been planning for, I’ll want to look carefully at the work of the cross-functional teams.”
“I would in particular like to see the Assistant Secretary of the Army for [Acquisition], Logistics, and Technology…work very, very closely with Army Futures Command,” she went on. “I think there has been some friction there, and I’d like to try to do everything possible to make sure the whole team is working together, given the challenges in the program.
“I’d like to see the strongest possible collaboration between Army Futures Command and the acquisition staff in the Department of the Army,” she reiterated later in the hearing.
Of the services’ six modernization priorities – artillery, armored vehicles, aircraft, battlefield networks, missile defense, and soldier gear — the Army has made artillery its No. 1 priority. But some of those “Long-Range Precision Fires” have sparked controversy among the services, because they’re developing missiles so long-ranged that they can strike targets traditionally reserved for airpower, even in the vastness of the Western Pacific. In a tightening budget, critics say, the Pentagon can’t afford land-based missiles that do the same mission as strategic bombers, and the Pacific is naturally the province of the Navy and Air Force. So Reed’s Republican ranking member, Sen. James Inhofe, and Cotton both pressed Wormuth on whether she was committed to Long-Range Precision Fires remaining the first priority.
“I think the long-range precision fires portfolio is a very important one in the Army’s overall modernization program and is particularly important in the Indo-Pacific, although it’s also relevant vis-a-vis Russia as well,” she said. “It’s the highest priority, in my view, because of the need to address the Anti-Access/Area Denial challenges that we face in both Europe and the Indo-Pacific… Given the quite sophisticated integrated air defenses that will likely be facing, I think it behooves us to develop capabilities that allow us to strike targets from very long distances.”
In other words, if adversaries can shoot down our strike aircraft or keep them at bay – which is the main point of Russia and Chinese Anti-Access/Area Denial defenses – the Army needs a way to strike distant targets itself, from land. That’s the essence of the Army’s argument for the capability, and one Wormuth thoroughly committed to this morning.
“I generally share the Army’s current assessment that the long-range precision fires priority is the top priority, but there’s also a lot of interdependence among the six big categories,” Wormuth cautioned. “So, if there is a requirement to make hard choices, I’ll want to look very carefully across the entire modernization program.
“I think it’s worth reflecting on the fact that the Army has not comprehensively modernized itself in over 40 years,” she said. Faced with a choice between more personnel and more technology, she said, “a larger army that is equipped with old equipment is not going to serve us well in the future.”
