The army reserve responded within 24 hours and had forces moving to the east coast. I provided dewatering units, Aviation Assets to help the National Guard and it worked just fine. Break. Go to d. O. D. , fema, eplows. 100 provided by the army reserve embedded in your fema regions. 50 it shall over 50 of the d. O. D. Are provided by the army reserve which is utilized routinely to defend the homeland in terms of complex catastrophes to support the Guard Brothers and sisters. That all happened in the National Defense act of 2012. Paul, before we go to you, judd, can you talk that from a National Guard angle . Yes, sir. In addition to what general talley mentioned about authorities in place a unique aspect of the air National Guard is our ability to operate under state active duty underneath the funding and control of the governors. The response capability exists. We saw it time and again across the 54. The Additional Authority that general talley mentioned, i might add in terms of contro
Anyone who would like to answer it, did the commission find they the current lack of a Retirement Program similar to that, recommended by the commission, that that is having the absence of a plan like that, right now, is having an impact on recruiting and retention . Currently we dont have a retirement system in place in the military that provides any benefits for those who serve for less than 20 years. Is that impacting recruiting . Senator lee thank you for the question. When we looked, we took a very strategical approach to support an allvolunteer force for the future. And to design that we structured the program for how we might make a recommendation to modernize the current retirement system. The recommendations that we provided within we are absolutely convinced theyre the right set of recommendations here on having a blended retirement plan, and because it does two things. It supports the retention needs by the services, and it also supports the recruiting challenges that the se
Much for the question. Wendy spent a lot of time talking about that very issue that you raised in your question, and as we thought through all the transition assistant kind of challenges that a Service Member faces when theyre transitioning out we took all of that into consideration, and im going to ask commissioner Chris Kearney to talk to the specifics of that. Thank you mr. Chairman. Once again, the colleague to my right, when we took into consideration retirement and we did know harm of one of the mandates given to us. The senator also mentioned something very important that we dont try to balance the banks on the back of the missionary. Some of the programs we could talk about this in further committees later on if you want to, but when we talk about ramp programs programs, we dont transition to something that might cost a little more to retiree or Service Member, that it would be built up over 15 years, for example. One of the things that we thought was vitally important in all t
That i think the point needs to be made here is if you look at where we are, for example, the president s budget which was just submitted, by 2021, what we are paying in interest will exceed the defense budget. As i look at the work that you have done on the Bipartisan Commission and we look at what the biggest drivers in our debt are overall, looking at the bigbudget, mandatory spending, programs that we need to have similar looks at medicare, Social Security, very important programs to people, i appreciate that you have done all this work. We are looking at our military stepping forward first and making many changes. I think we need to look across the entire budget, ytoo. Where we are, we are going in 2016 two defense budget, only 3. 1 of gdp and 14. 3 of federal spending, which is the bottom of historic rates since 1950. The reason i want to put that in perspective in the big picture for everyone, we look at the sacrifices that our men and women in uniform make. This separation from
The undersecretary can do better justice than i can. There are classified and unclassified elements to it. I would say we are talking about pretty far down the road. Not as an alternative to the joint Strike Fighter but what follows the joint Strike Fighter i dont think there is a conflict between it. I was mr. Kendalls battle buddy. You know what he says. It is be on fighter aircraft. It is how to dominate in air combat. There is a whole list of things about driving and developing technology for 15 to 40 years down the future. If we dont do that today, we will not stay ahead of our potential adversaries. Thank you. I have a question about strategy and the challenge posed by emerging china. Can you tell us anything about in this project the strategy . The specific strategy . We dont use a budget exhibit which may be why you asked that describes which items are part of the strategy in which are not. Let me describe some of the major things that have been consistent in our budget. We fir