During a Senate Armed Services Committee hearing last week, Sen. Jack Reed (D-RI) spoke about the cost of maintaining Air Force facilities that are deemed unnecessary.
00:00We will want to supplement your answer there. But thank you very much. And Senator Reed, you're now recognized.
00:07Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman. Mr. Secretary, the Air Force is one of the most highly technical services and the Space Force together.
00:15And you have a workforce that is very talented and critical.
00:20The proposed reductions in the civilian workforce, the Department of Defense, are you anticipating losses?
00:28And will you be tracking those losses? Because you have people working for you that could walk out the door the next day and get a substantial job.
00:39And all these early retirements, et cetera, are complicating it. Your comments, please.
00:46Yes, Senator. We are watching it. And yes, we do expect to lose personnel. We already are.
00:56And just to reiterate your comments, the technical skill base that the Air Force requires is always competitive.
01:04That is a very competitive skill base. That's why I think recruiting and retention activities,
01:11which I intend to focus quite a bit of my time on, are going to be critical going forward.
01:17Because it is a rapidly involving environment and we have to make sure we're recruiting the right talent.
01:21In the end, it's prioritization over my career. We've gone through a number of these ups and downs with respect to personnel.
01:28We have to prioritize and then make sure how we're doing our recruiting and retention and bringing on the new people are focused on the areas of priority.
01:36Well, thank you. General Salsman, again, you have a highly technical force, particularly with a significant number of civilians.
01:45Have you seen retirements and people leaving because they're uncertain of the climate?
01:51We've certainly seen people leaving. A combination of incentives, deferred retirement program, resignation program, and others.
02:00We also were in a hiring freeze for some time. We were in a period of managed growth.
02:06And so there was a deficit when we were trying to get to a larger civilian workforce and we were asked to stop and then offer some to resign early.
02:15Total reductions have been almost 14% of our civilian workforce inside the Space Force.
02:21Part of that is a result of having smaller numbers. And so, you know, small numbers more drastically affect our percentages.
02:27But we understand the desire to reduce the civilian workforce is just having a little bit of an outsized impact on the Space Force.
02:33Well, I would ask all of you if you, in a particular agency, see a point where the civilian workforce is essentially reached the point of breaking, if you will.
02:46Please, you must alert us to that because, again, we're not going to do all these great scientific and developmental and modernization issues without these critical workers.
02:57General Saltzman, in your publication, United States Space Force Warfighting, A Framework for Plenty, you lay out the very sophisticated offensive and defensive weapons systems that you need in the future.
03:12But do you agree that these systems should be the property of the Space Force, a Title X armed force?
03:20Because there's been some discussion of leasing pieces of equipment and things like that.
03:25So you would have, perhaps, a civilian-owned system in a kill chain, which raises some serious issues.
03:35Yes, sir. We take very seriously our Title X responsibilities to wield military force.
03:40We believe those should be government systems, and we're actively going through an assessment process to determine precisely what are inherently governmental, inherently military functions that we would not want to contract out as commercial services.
03:53There's some fine lines there between the data that you use and how that data is acquired, and then how it's used in terms of targeting, et cetera.
04:00But we're trying to be very precise so that we retain governmental control for those things in the kill chain.
04:06Thank you. General Alvin, could you estimate how much in cost facilities you have that you don't need and that you may have to maintain?
04:18How much is that a year? Do you guess?
04:20Senator Shorty, as far as the volume, we estimate we have at about 23 percent excess vertical infrastructure,
04:28structure, buildings and structure, about 60 percent excess horizontal.
04:31So overall, the dollar value is about 30 percent. Our estimate, our rough estimate, is it costs us an additional maybe 1.5 billion a year just to be able to maintain that.
04:40And so that was sort of the source of my, I guess, ill-delivered issue on that.
04:46I'm not lamenting Senate's very strong interest in making sure our airmen have a place to work and live that makes sense.
04:54It's the excess that we don't need. And it doesn't, I think there's probably some innovative solutions we can work on together.
05:00And I would love to see that at the enterprise level.
05:03Well, thank you very much. I think you're right. I think we have to look at an innovative way to reduce these facilities, lower your costs,
05:10free up 1.5 billion dollars perhaps in the Air Force and put it back into quality of life or into systems. Thank you, General.
05:17Thank you, General. General Alvin, you can allow for that excess and still comply.
