WASHINGTON – U.S. Senator Tommy Tuberville (R-AL) spoke with Sean O’Keefe, President Trump’s nominee to be Deputy Under Secretary of Defense for Personnel and Readiness, and Michael Obadal, President Trump’s nominee to be Under Secretary of the Army during their Senate Armed Services Committee (SASC) nomination hearing. During the hearing, they spoke about how the Army can integrate and support small defense businesses and different ways to improve the United States’ military service academies.
Read Sen. Tuberville’s remarks below or on YouTube or Rumble.
ON RCCTO AT REDSTONE ARSENAL:
TUBERVILLE: “Thank you for your service, first of all. […] One of our new defense contractors, obviously, has taken a novel approach to supporting the warfighter. You know, newer companies like this have become successful, partly because newer defense contract and authorities and organizations such as the RCCTO, which is headquartered in Redstone Arsenal in my state of Alabama, you know, we’re making progress.
So, how can the Army continue to improve our acquisition systems based on the lessons learned from the RCCTO?”
OBADAL: “Senator, thank you for the question as this is a critical part of Army transformation. And I believe that the RCCTO really showed us that we can rapidly understand the problem, innovate solutions with industry, and then field them rapidly in a number of different ways. My experience in commercial industry, and specifically in the defense technology industry, gave me a wide exposure to a number of different companies dealing with the acquisition corps. And having been on both sides of the table and having overseen acquisitions in my government service, I came to the conclusion that the Army needs to be a better customer. And we need to do that through streamlining our requirements through predictability of requirements and not changing them and moving the goalpost on the defense industry.
With that said, we always have to have agile requirements, which requires modularity, both software and hardware. So, if confirmed, when I look at the entire acquisition corps, I believe the people—we have fantastic people—in our acquisition corps who have given us the world’s strongest Army. It is our processes that we have to fix. So, if confirmed Senator, I would work diligently on that.”
ON SUPPORTING SMALL BUSINESSES IN DEFENSE:
TUBERVILLE: “Yeah. Thank you. As Senator Ernst said earlier, last week, the Army announced the ATI initiative [is] headed in a different direction in some areas. I understand that being an old football coach—you can’t keep doing the same thing over and over, you gotta change along with your adversary, and obviously we need to do that. You know, part of this change last week, canceling multiple programs, you know, one of these contracts, the Future Tactical Uncrewed Aircraft System, was won by a small family business in Alabama, my home state, named Griffin Aerospace. On Friday, they were notified that the thousands of man hours and millions of dollars that they had spent and invested in good faith were basically wasted. It’s hard to understand that from their perspective. I’d like to suggest to you that the Army restore faith with this type of businesses because we need these smaller businesses. That is not Lockheed [Martin], this is not Boeing—who could really absorb this. This is gonna devastate this country. And at the end of the day, they need more than an, ‘oops.’ You know, we wanna change here. Do you agree with that?”
OBADAL: “Senator, I wholeheartedly agree that the Army needs to take care of small business[es] as best it can. And I believe there are a number of different ways that we can do that because small business[es], in my experience, is where most of the innovation comes from. And obviously large companies, like you mentioned, build us exquisite weapon systems and we need them, but we have to make sure that we’re cultivating a robust small and medium sized business ecosystem.”
TUBERVILLE: “Yeah. Thank you. And, you know, in my state, in Huntsville, we have probably 600-800 small defense contractors. We can’t lose them. You know, they get bought out obviously regularly, but we need to make sure that, you know, for future innovation, they’re as important as anybody. So, thank you for that.
ON MILITARY SERVICE ACADEMY OVERSIGHT:
TUBERVILLE: “Mr. O’Keefe, in my role as Chairman of the Subcommittee on Personnel, we held our first hearing, as you well know, with our [superintendents] of our [service] academies in 30 years. [The] first one in 30 years. […] One of the things we illuminated during that hearing is that permanent military professors at the academies require Senate confirmation—which is very understandable—while civilian-tenured faculty are not [Senate confirmed], making them as far as I can tell, the only lifetime government employee [that] is not subject to advice and consent. How do you feel about that?”
O’KEEFE: “Senator, it’s an interesting dynamic when the permanent professors were set up decades ago, the majority of the faculty was all military at the service academies. I suppose the concern anytime you’re discussing whether to make more civilian positions Senate confirmed is perhaps extended vacancies. I do think that there’s some room to evaluate the administrative faculty authority. You know, they have a slightly nuanced statutory scheme that applies to civilian faculty. They didn’t always have tenure for instance. So, I think that is something that should be evaluated, which I think could improve the […] effectiveness of the workforce, of the faculty mix there. Without perhaps causing some of the vacancies that I think might result with Senate confirmation. But I do think that’s an area to take a look at. I know the Secretary has mentioned that that’s something he wants to take a look at as well.”
TUBERVILLE: “Thank you, and when confirmed, I have some suggestions [for what superintendents can] do about transforming, you know, our military academies to make them better. We don’t wanna do something just to do it, but we need to make them better and grow with the times. And so, [I] look forward to visiting with you on that and working with you.”
O’KEEFE: “Absolutely, Senator.”
TUBERVILLE: “Thank you.”
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.
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