While largely expressing support for the initiative, lawmakers said they need more info.

“Unfortunately, we still have not received any real information on the Army’s budget request, nor have we received any detailed information on the Army’s Transformation Initiative, or ATI, the secretary and the chief announced over a month ago,” Rep. Mike Rogers, R-Ala., chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, said. “I believe I speak for most of the members of this committee when I say that we share the goal of developing a more modern, agile and well-equipped Army.”

At the end of April, the service announced what it dubbed Army Transformation Initiative, seeking to shrink its headquarters elements, become leaner, cut programs that aren’t efficient and change how it spends, following a directive from Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth for sweeping changes to the service.

Rogers told Army Chief of Staff Gen. Randy George and Secretary of the Army Daniel Driscoll at Wednesday’s HASC hearing that the committee wants to see the service’s “homework” given the significance of what leaders are trying to do.

“We need to see your homework. An overhaul this significant should be based on a thorough assessment of requirements. And it should include a detailed blueprint of the specific changes being proposed and how the Army plans to implement them. We need to see those assessments and blueprints,” he said. “We also need you to provide us a timeline for implementing ATI. These details will help Congress understand, evaluate, and ultimately fund, your transformation efforts.”

That concern was shared by other top members of the committee as well.

“I want to applaud both of you publicly for diving into that very difficult subject. It needs to be done. Now, the chairman is right, the details need to be worked out, but there is no question that the nature of warfare is changing dramatically. How do we adjust our force to meet those challenges?” Rep. Adam Smith, D-Wash., the panel’s ranking member, said. “Your efforts in that are broadly supported by this committee. Devil’s in the details, but you’re headed in the right direction and we look forward to working with you to make some of those changes.”

Others expressed dismay regarding how the Army has presented the reform effort and requested more details from leadership.

“Like many of my colleagues, I am frustrated by how the Army has decided to roll out this Army Transformation Initiative. It doesn’t matter which side of the aisle that we’re on here, we all want to make sure that the Army is lethal, it is ready to meet the challenges of today and tomorrow,” Rep. Eric Sorensen, D-Ill., said. “However, you chose to give us a plan with few details, with no budgeting and a failure to answer a lot of our questions. Now we’re hearing about how this plan will be implemented from my own constituents, not from leadership. The Army and Congress have always had a better relationship than that.”

When service leaders announced their intentions for reforms, they stated that they were aimed at better posturing the service to deter China in the Pacific theater. But some on the Hill want them to be more forthcoming.

“The Army Transformation Initiative has generated more questions than answers in the department’s attempt to deliver critical warfighting capabilities, optimize our force structure and eliminate waste and obsolete programs,” Rep. Derek Tran, D-Calif., said. “In particular, I am concerned with how the ATI positions the Army to better counter a near-peer adversary like the People’s Republic of China. China’s ability to rapidly field new capabilities can be attributed to its centralized political and military decision-making, state-directed industrial base, incremental fielding of new systems and their blatant theft of foreign intellectual property, all with little to no public oversight.”

When asked for a timeline for details of what the service is proposing, Army Secretary Dan Driscoll told the committee that the transformation will be an iterative process and that there won’t be a single date for everything in the initial batch of transformation.

“We will be hopefully doing what the best companies in America do and learning as we go,” Driscoll said, noting some efforts are in progress. He promised to share details as soon as “reasonable drafts” are in place.

He said many of the cuts to obsolete programs will be reflected in the forthcoming fiscal 2026 budget.

“We’re obviously continuing with FY25 [spending] because that’s what we were directed to do with our budget,” George said, adding that they’re canceling Humvees and haven’t asked to purchase new ones.

HASC members said they wanted to ensure that the Army was making transformation choices based on real policy decisions that will help the service counter battlefield threats more effectively rather than being purely rooted in budgetary constraints.

“If budget is driving policy, you’re going to have a problem by this committee. If policy is being driven first and budget is a consequence, then we’re going to be open ears,” Rogers said. “But you can’t just try to make your policy or your construct fit a number that’s arbitrary. We need you to let us know what you need and then let us worry about funding it, because that’s what we’re here for. Just know that there’s other people that see this same way you do, which is why we need a budget so we can talk about these things. But I can’t overstate, we are not going to be hostile to dramatic changes if it’s being driven by the need for change and not just to meet some budget number that somebody’s handed to you.”

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Data rights related to weapon systems and other military technologies have long been a point of contention between the Department of Defense and industry. The Pentagon seeks to avoid vendor lock and control costs, while contractors want to protect their intellectual property and maximize profits.

Software and technology are a big focus of HASC Chairman Rep. Adam Smith’s mark of the fiscal 2023 NDAA policy bill, committee staff told reporters last week during a briefing to preview the legislation before its public release.

“This requires the Department [of Defense] to launch a pilot program to test the feasibility of unique approaches to negotiating data rights to improve speed, efficiency and effectiveness of defense acquisitions,” said one staffer on condition of anonymity. “Data rights have obviously been a sticking point on a whole variety of acquisition programs over the years … so finding new [and] unique ways to get after that in the acquisition process is going to provide better results on the back end. That’s a lot of the thinking behind that.”

The staff did not provide additional details about the provision. Information from the briefing was embargoed until Monday.

The pilot program is to be established by the secretary of Defense “not later than 18 months after the establishment of this Act,” according to the text of the chairman’s mark.

The full committee markup of the NDAA, a far-reaching annual defense policy bill, is slated for Wednesday.

The chairman’s mark would authorize $772.5 billion for DOD discretionary funding, $29.5 billion for Department of Energy discretionary funding, and $400 million for other defense-related activities, for an overall NDAA topline of $802.4 billion, according to committee staffers.

The Senate Armed Services Committee’s version of the NDAA, which was passed out of committee last week, would authorize $817.3 billion for the DOD and $29.7 billion for the DOE, for a total NDAA topline of $847 billion, according to a summary of the legislation.

The annual defense policy bill must go through a complex legislative process before it becomes law. The House and Senate must eventually reconcile their respective versions of the NDAA, and the two chambers must pass a compromise bill before it goes to the president’s desk.

It remains to be seen whether Smith’s software data rights pilot program provision will be included in the final version of the fiscal 2023 NDAA that is passed by Congress and signed by President Biden.

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Air Force Secretary Frank Kendall recently told lawmakers that the sixth-gen fighter will likely cost “multiple” hundreds of millions of dollars per plane to procure once it goes into production.

On Wednesday, FedScoop asked Rep. Adam Smith, D-Wash., chair of the House Armed Services Committee, whether he thinks that will be affordable — and if he anticipates Congress will be willing to fully fund the initiative over the long term.

“This is one of the central questions that we have going forward,” Smith replied at a Defense Writers Group event.

He used a gambling analogy to describe the dilemma.

“I’m always like reluctant to put a whole lot of chips in the middle of a table when you don’t know for sure” if the technology is needed or if it will work as advertised, he said. “And the NGAD seems like a whole lot of chips going into the middle of the table.”

“Maybe you’ve got to do it, maybe it’s a technology that, you know, if somebody else gets there first and you haven’t gotten there, then you’re in a really bad place [and] you got to make the investment and you got to try and make it work even if the odds are long,” he continued. “But I prefer a solution that puts you in a position to meet your defense needs without having to make such a large investment on sort of betting on” that type of technology.

Policymakers need to figure out the right force mix for the future, he said, suggesting that a new manned fighter might not be the right system to buy.

“Right now it seems to me that the investments we should be making are in more survivable drone systems, satellites, communications, missiles,” he said. “When you look at the fights that are really going on, the fighter planes haven’t been that big a part of it. It’s been the drones, it’s been the cyber … Can we really afford to make that big of an investment in a plane that may or may not, you know, be part of that? That’s a decision you’ve got to make.”

Survivability is a major concern. The next-gen fighter may be stealthy, for example, but if it has limited range and requires refueling from a tanker that isn’t stealthy, “then you’re kind of screwed,” Smith said.

“We’ve got to really take a hard look at this,” he said. “What is that [sixth-gen] capability? How survivable is it in what situation? That’s what we need to figure out going forward.”

Relying more on less expensive, autonomous drones could be part of the solution. “I think that that’s likely, you know, where things are headed in — to develop those technologies,” he said.

The NGAD program is expected to include a family of systems to complement the new manned fighter, including robotic wingmen and other supporting technologies.

Drones could save money and keep pilots out of harm’s way. However, a robotic version of the NGAD platform might face similar limitations as a similarly designed manned system, Smith noted. Conversely, swarms of smaller drones could be harder to detect and harder to target.

“All of those things need to be calculated as we build those systems,” he said. “I want those questions more thoroughly examined than just [saying], ‘Well, of course we have to build a sixth-generation fighter’ … What’s it going to bring us? We need to ask those questions before we make massive, massive investments in that program.”

The Pentagon plans to spend more than $13 billion on NGAD over the next five years, including $1.7 billion in fiscal 2023, according to budget documents.

The program recently transitioned into the engineering and manufacturing development (EMD) phase, bringing it a step closer to production. Secretary Kendall said he thinks the new jet could reach initial operating capability before the end of the decade.

Procurement costs are expected to be high once the platform goes into full-rate production and gets fielded, although the Air Force has not publicly disclosed how many systems it wants to buy. Sustainment costs — which typically account for 70% of a program’s lifecycle costs — will further raise the price tag.

The fifth-generation F-35 jet fighter program, for example, is projected to cost more than $1 trillion when full lifecycle costs are considered.

Smith indicated that he’s satisfied with the way the NGAD program is structured, including its use of digital engineering techniques for prototypes.

Although the program “definitely worries” him, Smith said he doesn’t necessarily want to kill it.

“I’m not saying we’re not going to do it,” he said. “I’m just saying that we need to understand it [better] before we make that over-the-cliff, you know, investment that we can’t turn back from.”

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Unmanned systems are an example of a capability that the Department of Defense needs more of, said Rep. Adam Smith, D-Wash.

“We need to … modernize our approach to warfare technology. It’s all about information and survivability now. I mean, tanks are not as useful as they used to be. Drones are a lot more useful. Why do we have more tanks than drones?” he said.

Unmanned aerial systems (UAS) have been one of the most effective tools for Ukrainian forces fighting Russian invaders, Smith noted.

The United States and other NATO countries have been supplying Ukraine with a variety of weapons including anti-aircraft systems, anti-armor missiles and tactical drones. UAS are especially critical, he asserted.

“Above all else, to me what is so crucial is drones because … the destruction being rained down upon those [Ukrainian] cities, it’s being rained down some by standoff weapons, but primarily by artillery. The only way to effectively target artillery right now is through missiles,” Smith said.

The Ukrainians have had success employing the systems, he noted.

“We’ve seen the Russians bogged down,” he said. “That’s because their columns have been attacked and attacked by drones. They’ve been attacked by those missiles.”

He continued: “Drones have the ability to get out there and not be seen. They’re survivable, they won’t get shot down and they can deliver a punch. So those are the systems that we have to get to them … as fast as we can.”

Meanwhile, NATO is sending additional forces to Eastern Europe and plans to beef up its defenses to try to deter Russia from attacking the alliance.

“We’ve got to be smart about how we build them up,” Smith said. “We can’t be fighting the last war. We can’t be fighting the wars of the 20th century.”

The DOD and its allies need to improve the survivability of their forces and how they leverage information, he suggested.

HASC members will be pushing for faster modernization, he noted.

“I’m very frustrated by a number of things. The Pentagon is not innovating as fast as they need to. We’re gonna keep putting pressure on them to try to get that done,” he said.

On Monday, the Biden administration released its fiscal 2023 budget request, which included funding for a variety of drones and other unmanned systems, among other modernization priorities.

The White House is asking for $773 billion for the Pentagon in the next fiscal year, $130.1 billion of which would go toward research, development, test and evaluation accounts — the highest-ever level of RDT&E spending in DOD history, according to the Pentagon. That would be a 9.5% boost in RDT&E spending over the amount enacted for 2022.

The request also included $146 billion requested for military procurement.

Speaking at the conference Wednesday, Rep. Mike Rogers, R-Ala., the top Republican on the HASC, said he and other lawmakers will be pushing to authorize military modernization spending levels well above what the White House requested.

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And as the U.S. is figuring out its role and how to brush back revisionist adversaries and competitors, it must be thoughtful about building and investing in its military, Rep. Adam Smith, D-Wash., said in an appearance Thursday at the American Enterprise Institute.

The U.S. cannot afford the types of large military build-ups that occurred during the Cold War against the Soviet Union. As a result, it must be smarter about investments and put more stock into emerging technologies.

“When you’re thinking about how we need to change the force, think about two things: information and survivability,” Smith said. “Those are the two keys. The ability to move information quickly, get it to the person who needs it the most in real-time and to protect that information infrastructure.”

The DOD is currently trying to transform the way it conducts warfare with a new concept dubbed Joint All Domain Command and Control, which seeks to more seamlessly connect sensor information to shooters to allow for faster decision-making.

On the survivability piece, Smith noted that the force cannot be so vulnerable as to be crippled by cyberattacks and anti-satellite strikes that eliminate command and control and the ability to share information.

He noted that in challenging other world powers that seek to upend international order, the military’s crucial role will be deterrence.

“Deterrence matters. I think when you look at Ukraine, if Putin had thought that he couldn’t do what he’s doing right now, if Ukraine had had a more robust military, he wouldn’t be doing it,” Smith said. “As we look at the other nations in Eastern Europe as a starting point, the Baltics, Poland, Romania, shoring up our NATO responsibilities, deterrence is one way to keep peace in the world.”

New technologies, such as artificial intelligence and even drones, can play a huge part in that deterrence. Smith cited how small and inexpensive drones have turned the tide in recent conflicts, pointing specifically to Ethiopia’s civil war in which the government used small drones to gain control back from rebels seeking to overthrow it.

“That type of use of new technology is going to be the key to deterrence,” he said. “If China thinks that we have the ability to protect our systems and to be survivable and to make their systems vulnerable, that’s the best deterrence we can have. It’s not just a matter of building a lot of things, we have to make sure that those things meet the technological challenges of today’s warfare.”

When it comes to an actual number for the 2023 budget, Smith said he hasn’t landed on an exact number yet, but acknowledged it has to be bigger than previously thought.

“The Russian invasion of Ukraine fundamentally altered what our national security posture, what our defense posture needs to be. It made it more complicated and it made it more expensive,” he said.

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