During a Senate Armed Services Committee hearing last week, Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY) spoke about a 10% reduction in the Space Force's civilian workforce.
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00:00Yeah, the environmental controls at the back of a 135 are not awesome.
00:03Yeah.
00:05General Alvin, don't sell yourself short at age 63.
00:10Senator Gillibrand.
00:12Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
00:13Dr. Mink, the Space Force, NRO, NGA are working to establish the policies and procedures that will guide the DOD's use of space-based tactical ISRT.
00:24Now that you are secretary, what is your assessment of this progress?
00:27And do you believe, what do you believe must still be resolved?
00:34I think at a high level, the agreement on how we're going to allocate resources and allow for commanders to task and get what they need, I'm talking about commanders, I think that's all laid flat.
00:52Now, I think the devil's in the details of how you actually do that, right?
00:55We're just starting to field capability now and starting to do experimentation with that now and fielding tools to allow that to happen.
01:04There's obviously still a lot of work to go, but I think there's been great progress made.
01:08And the fact that we already have systems that we can start doing testing with and start doing exercising, support Indo-PACOM and other theaters will be critically important.
01:18I guess I'd leave the general salesman if he has any additional comments.
01:22The TAC SRT is an important capability that we've offered to the combatant commands.
01:27It fills a niche where you have unclassified capabilities that can get quickly into the planners' hands.
01:34It's intended to complement what the intelligence community, NRO and NGA, provide to combatant commanders writ large.
01:40Admiral Whitworth and I have been working very closely.
01:42We have working group level discussions.
01:45We're refining the procedures and policies to make sure there's not overlap, there's not too much redundancy.
01:50We don't want to pay for imagery twice, for example.
01:53And I hope later this week to be able to sign a Memorandum of Understanding that outlines those procedures and we'll be in a much better place.
01:59Thank you, General Salzman.
02:01Last week in the testimony before the House Armed Services Committee, it was revealed that Space Force will lose about 10% of its civilian workforce.
02:09For the service that is already lean and by many accounts should be growing,
02:13how will this loss of these civilian professionals impact Guardians and the Space Force's mission?
02:18Thank you, Senator.
02:19We rely heavily on our civilian workforce.
02:21They bring expertise that we don't have in the active duty.
02:24They bring corporate continuity across all of our processes and procedures.
02:2910%, although the raw numbers might be kind of small, 10% is a large hit.
02:33And obviously we use a lot of our civilian workforce in the acquisition of our systems,
02:37which is a critical capability that we bring.
02:40So I'm worried about replacing that level of expertise in the near term as we try to resolve it
02:46and make sure we have a good workforce doing that acquisition work.
02:50And General Salzman, you and I have talked about the Cyber Academy and how important it is to train young people
02:55to do some of these civilian jobs and to make sure that they can aspire to be in the Space Force
03:01and aspire to be in the DOD in different capacities as civilians.
03:06We've heard recent reports that because of the hiring freeze that these young service,
03:12these young graduates from the Cyber Academy aren't able to get the jobs that they need to enter into Space Force,
03:21NRO, NGA, not NGA, that's the National Governors Association, yeah, NGA, are unable to do that.
03:29Do you have any insight into what we can do to unstick that pipeline that we're so desperate to try to grow?
03:36Well, we were in a period of managed growth.
03:39The civilian workforce by the end of 25 was supposed to be almost 1,000 larger than it's going to end up being.
03:45That's a part of not just the incentives that we've given for people to resign or retire early.
03:51We've also kind of stopped the growth that we had planned to accomplish these missions.
03:56And Cyber Defense is a perfect example of one of those missions that we've suspended hiring
04:01until we figure out exactly what the size of the civilian workforce is going to be,
04:05and then we will rebalance the force.
04:08Cyber is not going to go away.
04:10We need to make sure we're recruiting those people because that's a skill set we desperately need.
04:13And, General, do you know how long it will take to finish the assessment of the numbers of who you have
04:20and what you have and rebalancing the force?
04:22How long might that take?
04:23Because, again, one of the challenges that we created the Cyber Academy to address
04:28is that onboarding took so long for organizations like NRO or CIA or other capacities that rely on cyber-heavy skill sets
04:38that we would lose these extraordinarily gifted young people to the private sector.
04:44We've created the Cyber Academy specifically to ramp them on to public service.
04:49So there's an urgency.
04:51And if you have any estimate in times or any ways that you would suggest to the administration
04:55that we could maybe surge resources to get this done sooner than later.
04:59I was really proud at how fast we were able to onboard our civilian hires.
05:03I thought the Space Force had done a nice job of reducing that timeline.
05:08You know, the DOD is really looking at what the size of the civilian workforce is.
05:12And so as those incentives to reshape the workforce affect the Space Force,
05:16I'm not sure exactly where we're going to end up, what our final size is going to be.
05:20As soon as I understand what that size is, then we will redistribute
05:23and reallocate the civilian workforce as necessary.
05:26Thank you all for your service.
05:28Thank you, Senator.