Committee will come to order. Today the House Armed Services Committee Meets to discuss the ongoing conflict in afghanistanful we have been engaged military information afghanistan for 14 years. The predictions this would be a long conflict have proven accurate. While there have been setbacks in recent years, theres also cause for cautious optimism. United states and its allies especially the Afghan Forces, have made some meaningful gains. A counterinsurgency is one of the toughest types of war a academicracy can fight. Its been difficult but not impossible and both our future security and the future of the Afghanistan Afghan people depends on our success. People in afghanistan have niksch my opinion the best opportunity for a stable relatively peaceful country. Together with the cooperation of our allies and the kabul government we bail 352,000 strong Afghan National Security Force. Building a capable Security Force takes time. The nsf is growing in ability and capabilities. Now is a
Screeria nigeria. Discussion on the Defense Budget. This is about 90 minutes. Good morning. Welcome. My name is chris griffin. Im the executive director at the Foreign Policy initiative. It is my privilege to welcome you today to this event jointly hosted by the Foreign Policy initiative and the American Action forum. Titled will congress provide for the common defense . This is the second in a series of public briefings on how congress and the president can Work Together to provide our armed forces with the resources and authorities they require to keep our nation safe at a time of growing threats across the world. This morning well hear from senator tom cotton and following his keynotes i will hand off to rachel hoff with the American Action forum who will introduce and moderate a discussion by a panel of experts featuring the kinsey American Enterprise institute, david adesnic of the Foreign Policy initiative, and aaf president Douglas Holtz eken. Its my pleasure to welcome senator
Which only applies to your voice, the universal service fee youll be paying a fee on broadband and that will happen i imagine in the next several weeks or months. Secondly and critically there are all sorts of other fees that are going to be assessed. For example, currently a lot of broadband providers that had not been classified as Telecom Providers paid a lower rate for the equipment that they attach to the utility poles known as pole attachments. They paid a rate under section 224d. Now because theyre all Telecom Providers they will have to pie a much higher rate under section 224e and smaller providers in particular will have to pay 150 to 200 Million Dollars a year just for those higher pole attachment rates. Then you add on top of that the higher state and local property taxes that a lot of these companies will have to pay because theyre now Telecom Providers. All of these costs have to come out of somewhere. And its going to be the consumers wallet. And that is one of the reaso
Actually come to the course. So thats a key part of that piece, and then when it comes to the communications, clearly a communications is a big part of our trust. We need to explain why the gender neutral standards, how were going to ensure that everybody meets those standards, both men and women, why theyre necessary for the occupation in the first place because theres some question as to is it really the right task that should be done in these standards, in these different moss, and then that by communicating that a little more effectively than we have, this is going to help us build the trust for both men and women to want to continue down that pipeline for those different areas. Thats an important part of the implementation plan. Thank you. Thank you. Yes, please. Sue fulton, im the chair of the u. S. Military board of visitors. Former signal officer. Obviously, we are dealing with a question of Critical Mass too and i want to go back to that because i want to follow up a little bi
Try to keep any kind of evaluation out of this. So the marine corps has done a bunch of different studies and research. They began with a actually, they began with the infantry officer course which they opened to women in 2012 and asked for volunteers. Women, if you want to come to try out the infantry officer course, youre invited to attend. At the same time that they were doing that, they also began developing a set of combat proxy tests. The combat proxy test, they were six largely upper body based i should say Upper Body Strength based proxy tests that they evaluated the performance of 409 women and 379 female marines against and what they found from this combat proxy test was that about well not about, but 66 of the very good performers were men and 34 were women, and then the highest performing categories, it was 92 were men and 8 were women. So this initial Screening Test that they developed showed that there was certainly a percentage of women that fell into the good and the ve