WASHINGTON – Today, U.S. Senator Tommy Tuberville (R-AL) questioned President Trump’s nominee for Secretary of the Army, Daniel Driscoll, in his Senate Armed Services Committee (SASC) confirmation hearing. Sen. Tuberville and Mr. Driscoll discussed delays in military construction at Redstone Arsenal. Sen. Tuberville also discussed the need to better incentivize new military recruits, following the announcement of his new Chairmanship of the SASC Subcommittee on Personnel.
Read excerpts from Sen. Tuberville’s remarks below or watch on YouTube or Rumble.
ON ARMY PILOT TRAINING PROGRAMS:
TUBERVILLE: “Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Mr. Driscoll, thanks for being here. Thanks for your service. I wanna echo the thoughts about what’s happened last night here [in] our home territory is devastating. […] Fort Novosel in my state of Alabama, you know, we train all the vertical lift Army pilots, as you well know. […] I wanna get your thoughts on what you think about the new curriculum for a flight school that the Army has proposed. This affects all the pilots in the Army. And I wanna get your commitment continuing an open dialogue about the Army’s intent on how best to leverage existing resources. We’re cutting back on sorties. We’re not putting money in training like we used to—like we need to do. We’re undertrained in some areas. So, I’d like to get your thoughts on the curriculum and your thoughts about the future of vertical lift, especially with the new vertical lift that the Army is purchasing for the future fights that we might have.”
DRISCOLL: “Senator, to your comment on what occurred last night, I think we’re all collectively gonna have to take a deep dive and figure out what occurred there. The early indicators from what I’ve seen on television—I have no other access to information—is that it might have been a training exercise gone wrong that had catastrophic outcomes. And so, we’re going to have to work together to make sure that never occurs again or at least to mitigate the odds that it could ever occur again. And then specifically the future of vertical flight—if you look at the contested airspace with our peer China and what we will have to do. Our vertical assets are going to have to be able to get further and faster with lower signature than they do today. That being said, if you look at FARA, the current push for the Army, it is early in its development, it is incredibly expensive, and we are likely going to have to work with the Black Hawk’s and the Chinook’s and the assets that we have today. And so, if confirmed, I would wanna get briefed on this and do a deep dive with the team to figure out how are we going to position ourselves and what training do we need for the next one day to five years until we can get to a better state.”
ON MILCON DELAYS:
TUBERVILLE: “Thank you. I want to discuss an issue that affects many of our installations, including mine in Huntsville, [Alabama] at Redstone, Arsenal. The issue is military construction—MILCON as we know it—we need to move fast, and the traditional military construction process is far too slow. Back at Redstone Arsenal, there are two warehouses as we speak being constructed, one for military by the [Army] Corps of Engineers and one by the FBI. These warehouses are roughly the same […], but the FBI has got a huge amount of bells and whistles, more than the military warehouse. The military warehouse is going to cost almost $56 million and it’s going to take 48 months—four years—to build this. Where the FBI facility is going to cost $40 million and [should take] take only basically a year and a half. We [have] got a problem. Okay? How on earth does this make any sense? The Army is currently running a repair by replacement pilot program that is being tested at a couple of installations to demolish older barracks and replace them with new modern facilities. The key part of this program is that it is using operations and maintenance dollars versus traditional MILCON dollars. Are you familiar with this?”
DRISCOLL: “Senator, I had the opportunity to talk with you about in your office. Yeah—and this is the type of thing that makes my blood boil on behalf of soldiers. The Army has a limited budget to begin with. We have to be good stewards of the American taxpayer’s dollars. And when we are not, it is both the taxpayer and the soldier—and these soldiers are my friends—it is my friends that live in these barracks and raise their families there. And we need to stretch these dollars as far as we can.”
ON MILITARY RECRUITING:
TUBERVILLE: “Yeah. And the other small point I want to bring up, we’ve talked about recruiting. I won’t get into that. The new recruit in the army makes $25,000 a year before taxes. We just gave [them] a raise, but we can’t expect to attract the best and the brightest young men and women in the military unless we do something else […]. I know we give them a lot of perks at the end of the day, but we have got to understand [that] $25,000 [is not enough]. I mean, most of them can make that in two months’ time in some kind of big tech [job] or whatever. So, just keep that in mind as you get into recruiting. We have got to start taking care of these young men and women if we’re gonna build the fighting force that we need. Thank you.”
DRISCOLL: “Yes, Sir.”
Senator Tommy Tuberville represents Alabama in the United States Senate and is a member of the Senate Armed Services, Agriculture, Veterans’ Affairs, HELP, and Aging Committees.
###
