 So, Operations Command and U.S. Cyber Command. Witnesses are Assistant Secretary of Defense with Special Operations and Low Intensity Conflict, Christopher Mayer, Commander of U.S. Special Operations Command, General Brian Fenton, and Commander of U.S. Cyber Security Aid, Cyber Command, and Director of the National Security Agency, General Timothy Hawke. I'd like to welcome General Hawke to his first posture hearing. On behalf of the committee, I would ask our witnesses to convey our appreciation to the men and women you represent and their families for their service and professionalism. The elite capabilities of our special operations and cyber forces have never been more important. We live in a complex world most clearly defined by threats from China, Russia, Iran, North Korea, and non-state actors that are working around the clock to find ways to undermine America's interests. Perveiling in this environment will require the tailored and often clandestine capabilities that only our special operations and cyber forces can provide. The United States has been reducing its footprint and conflict zones around the world for several years. As such, the special operations community is evolving to match new threats, the skills, knowledge, and perhaps more importantly, the relationships with foreign partners that our special operations forces have developed over the past 20 years of combat, make them well positioned to contribute significantly to our long-term strategic competition with China and Russia. Our special operations forces have also been learning from our allies and partners, including in Ukraine and Israel. Since the Hamas attack on October 7th, the United States has deployed special operators to the region to provide crisis evacuation options and to work with Israeli partners on hostage recovery operations. These forces have also been critical in countering attacks from Iran's proxies in the region. Assistant Secretary-General Fenton, I would ask for an update on the role of our special operators in advising you as partners in Europe and the Middle East and what lessons you are drawing to help focus and prepare our special operations forces for future challenges. I would also ask that you provide the committee an update on efforts to strengthen the ability of the Office of the Assistant Secretary of Defense for special operations and low-intensity conflict to fulfill its service secretary-like responsibilities for the oversight of the organization and readiness of our special operations forces. Turning to Cyber Command, I would like to commend our Cyber Forces and the Intelligence Community for their performance over the past several years in exposing Russia's activities and helping Ukraine defend itself against both kinetic and cyber assaults. These efforts had made a tremendous difference on the battlefield and in deterring broader conflict. Some of the tools in our toolbox, like the Section 702 authority from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, or FISA, are critical to our ability to counter our adversaries' malign activities. General Hawke, the committee would appreciate your views on the importance of Section 702, which expires next week and why you believe it is essential that we renew the authority immediately. We would also like to know what God rails are in place to give the public confidence that the authority is being used judiciously. Cyber Command has been working to mature the Cyber Force and advance its capabilities to conduct defensive, offensive, and supporting intelligence operations. It is widely recognized that our cyber mission forces are struggling with shortfalls in personnel readiness. We know that addressing this issue is your highest priority and that the private sector has realized the immense value of our cyber operators and is offering them very high compensation to leave the military. The service must adjust accordingly by providing a creative combination of incentives to compete for and retain these personnel. Finally, over the last decade, a recurring debate has been waged over whether to sustain the dual hat arrangement whereby the commander of Cyber Command also serves as the director of the NSA. Last year, an independent panel established by the Director of National Intelligence and the Secretary of Defense and led by former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Joe Dunford, concluded that the dual hat arrangement should be sustained. We would welcome your thoughts on this issue. Thank you again to our witnesses for your service and appearance before us today. I look forward to your testimony. As a reminder to my colleagues, there will be a closed session in SCC 217 immediately following this session. Now let me turn to ranking members, Senator Wicker. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. And let me say, Mr. Chairman, that you and I are shoulder to shoulder on almost all of this concern about the shortfalls that you mentioned renewing section 702 and doing so in a timely manner and the support for the dual hat concept. I want to thank our witnesses for being here today. And let me say, since we met last year, we've seen a troubling rise in cyber attacks, targeting critical infrastructure across the country and in U.S. territories. Foreign adversaries are exploiting vulnerabilities in our networks. They are evading detection while carrying out malicious activities or pre-positioning themselves for future malicious activities and attacks. Today's hearing is an opportunity to discuss cybercom's efforts against these dangers. To tell us areas where we need to bring immediate attention. We'll talk about cybercom's work with federal partners in the U.S. government and in the defense industrial base. We'll talk about their collective endeavors to improve our cyber resilience and to defend against threats to military systems and networks, as well as public and private critical infrastructure. I also look forward to hearing about building cybercom 2.0. The committee recognizes that cyber threats evolve quickly. We therefore need cybercom to be equipped to address new challenges rapidly as adversaries consistently shift tactics and strategies in this domain. As part of this discussion, I hope to learn more about how international cyber cooperation activities, improvements to cyber military personnel readiness and investments in cyber intel can help U.S. cyber forces generate an enduring advantage in this dynamic threat environment. General Hawke has been both the commander of cybercom and the director of the NSA for only a very short period of time. So we hope to hear his early analysis and ideas gained from this early experience with the dual head arrangement and the importance of maintaining leadership over both agencies to meet mission objectives more effectively. And again, the chair and I are in the same place on this issue separate, but no less important are our special ops forces, the men and women serving under General Fenton at U.S. Special Operations Command, SOCOM, are responsible for some of the nation's most sensitive and complex missions and are often the first to respond to urgent and unforeseen emergencies around the world. Yet SOCOM is facing a dawning challenge as being asked to build a force capable of combating state actors like China and Russia simultaneously while remaining fully engaged in the fight against violent Islamic terrorist groups operating from Africa to South Asia. At the same time, special operators must be ready to respond with little to no notice as our nation's preeminent crisis response force. So we need to know what you need to accomplish this mission. The demands on SOCOM are increasing. Meanwhile, it is being asked to accept significant risk because it is undersourced. Its budget has remained flat since 2019. When you adjust that for inflation, this amounts to roughly a 14% budget cut in purchasing power. At the same time, SOCOM is in the midst of implementing two rounds of cuts to its force structure. This committee will want to ensure that General Fenton's command is fully resourced so that it can mitigate risk. I would like to ask Secretary Mayer whether their authorities and resources in the upcoming year are sufficient for mission requirement. Gentlemen, tell us what you need to get the mission done. It is clear to me that the role and importance of special operations command is greater today than at any time since its establishment. Back in 87, the resources we provide should reflect that necessity. So thank you gentlemen and thank you, Mr. Chairman. Thank you, Senator Walker. Now let me recognize Secretary Mayer, Mr. Secretary. Chairman Reed, Ranking Member Wicker and the distinguished members of this committee. Could you bring the microphone as close as possible? Absolutely. Sorry about that. And the light has to come out. That better? Is the light on? The light is on, is it better? You're ready? Good to go. Okay, I'll start again. Chairman Reed, Ranking Member Wicker and other distinguished members of this committee, thank you for the opportunity to testify on the global posture of our nation's special operations forces or SOF. I'm honored to appear alongside General Fenton and General Hock who have dedicated their careers to safeguarding U.S. national security interest against unconventional threats. I thank General Fenton and Command Sergeant Major Shane Shorter for their continued partnership as we posture SOF to address many of our nation's most pressing and complex challenges. I would like to begin by recognizing the dedication, service and sacrifice of the men and women of SOF. There is no starker reminder of the sacrifices of this community than the 15 teammates we have lost in recent months as they prepared for and executed high-risk missions in support of integrated deterrence, crisis response and counterterrorism in Europe, the Middle East and the Pacific. Their service and sacrifice are emblematic of the dedication, professionalism and selflessness of our SOF warriors, many of whom continue to bear visible and invisible wounds from their service. As a direct result of your leadership on the SASC, we provide comprehensive services for our teammates through the preservation of the force and family program and the warrior care program. SOF continues to lead in the development of new strategies and technologies to protect brain health and enhance cognitive performance, including partnering with academia and private entities to prevent and address traumatic brain injury. I would also like to acknowledge this committee's foresight in establishing SOLIC, the organization that I run and US Special Operations Command or US SOCOM and for your continuing strengthening of SOLIC service secretary-like responsibilities. In this role, I remain focused on ensuring SOF's value is accounted for in the department's planning, resourcing and decision processes. In partnership with SOCOM, SOLIC is enhancing our analytic capabilities to ensure the department's war gaming processes are informed by SOF-focused data and insight, especially related to our critical role prior to conflict. I appreciate Congress's authorizing a second principle deputy to help me lead our service-like responsibilities. A recent GAO report noted SOLIC's expanded role in senior leadership fora and our progress in strengthening the secretariat for special operations. Within the secretariat, we have established a director dedicated to SOF's most important asset, our people. In another sign of progress, I'm joined today by SOLIC's first senior enlisted advisor, Navy SEAL Command Master Chief, Brad Rylander, who adds a soft, unique perspective alongside the Pentagon service senior enlisted leaders. Over the past year, we have seen an increase in demand for SOF, including evacuating your US personnel from high threat environments, responding to attacks on our allies, maintaining pressure on ISIS and al-Qaeda, and campaigning in support of integrated deterrence. As we modernize and transform to meet the challenges of our global competitors, we remain vigilant for threats to Americans across the globe, including from ISIS and al-Qaeda. Representing less than 2% of the defense budget, SOF provide an outsized role in the national defense strategy. SOF creates dilemmas for our adversaries, dismantles their proxy and illicit networks, and provides options for the joint force through unique understanding of the operational environment that benefits from generational relationships with allies and partners. We do this in more than 80 countries at any given time, and in all domains and environments. In the Pacific, I've seen firsthand the tangible impact of SOF in strengthening the resilience of our regional partners. As China seeks greater regional and global influence, SOF's unique placement and access provide the foundation of integrated deterrence. Working with natural partners, Cybercom, Spacecom, and Stratcom, SOF is well positioned to operationalize integrated deterrence against the PRC globally. In Europe, SOF draw on generational relationships with Ukraine in aiding its fight against Russian aggression and build resilience in other vulnerable frontline states. We are also deepening integration in the high north with Norway, a founding NATO member, and with Sweden, our newest NATO member, improving interoperability and addressing unique challenges of operating in the Arctic. In addition to my service role, I'm also responsible for a range of policy issues that directly impacts SOF, such as irregular warfare, counter-terrorism, information operations, counter-narcotics, counter-threat finance, and civilian harm mitigation. Of note, SOLIC led the development of the most comprehensive approach to addressing civilian harm by any military in the world. I see SOLIC's roles as mutually reinforcing, allowing for enhanced integration of policy and strategy with the allocation of resources and capabilities. Mr. Chairman, thank you for this committee and your partnership and support. I look forward to your questions. Thank you, Mr. Secretary. General Fenton, please. Chairman Reed, Ranking Member Wicker, and distinguished members of this committee, thank you for the opportunity to testify before you today. Joining me is Command Sergeant Major Shane Shorter, a two-time COCOM command senior enlisted leader with over three decades of service in special operations. He represents our incredible non-commission officer corps that is without equal. Our NCOs stand at the very center of our command, making us the envy of militaries across the world and the object of fear among our foes. Together, CSM and I are honored to represent the 70,000 uniform and civilian members of SOCOM, including 28 international special operations teammates and our inter-agency team at our headquarters. I'm equally honored to testify alongside Secretary Chris Mayer and General Tim Hock. Secretary Mayer's leadership and the SOLEC team's advocacy are vital for the readiness, modernization, and well-being of our special operations forces and families. As Secretary Mayer mentioned, we lost 15 of our special operations teammates over the last five months. They made the ultimate sacrifice and remind us of the utmost devotion to duty present in our formations. Never forgetting our fallen and supporting their families remains our sacred obligation. In this decisive decade, our nation faces autocrats, terrorists that threaten our world from the People's Republic of China to Russia, from Iran to North Korea, and violent extremist organizations, our adversaries seek to divide and weaken the U.S., our allies, and our partners. The PRC's global coercion, debt diplomacy, cyber intrusions are common practice in their pursuit to rewrite the international order. Russia's unprovoked invasion to Ukraine grinds it to its third year with attacks on innocent civilians, abductions, and other crimes fueling their objectives in Europe. All while their disinformation campaign spreads chaos across the globe. The DPRK is increasingly belligerent on the peninsula and complicit in supporting Russia's untoward aggression in Europe. Iran, a longtime malign actor, leverages his proxies, Hamas, the Houthis, Hezbollah, and militias to sow instability in the Middle East. All while Al-Shabaab, Al-Qaeda, and ISIS still seek to threaten our homeland and interest abroad. To combat these threats, your SOCOM team delivers asymmetric and asynchronous advantage for DOD. Through our enterprise priorities of people, when transform? Our people, the competitive and comparative advantage, and your special operations attract the most talented men and women, driven to solve the most complex problems in politically sensitive and contested environments. And with them we win by asymmetrically deterring our adversaries, tearing apart violent extremist organizations, and rapidly responding to crisis. To be clear, DOD's main effort, integrated deterrence is SOCOM's main effort. Since 1942, your SOF have accumulated six decades of strategic competition experience, now combined with over two decades of hard-earned combat experience in the global war on terror. And those eight decades make your special operations tailor-made for this era, providing integrated strategic options to prevent great power war, winning before conflict, simultaneously preparing the environment to ensure that joint force prevails if conflict occurs. Those eight decades highlight that integrated deterrence and strategic competition are in our DNA. Always have been, always will. Added to this, your SOCOM team preserves strategic focus through our sacred duty to maintain exquisite capabilities to degrade violent extremist organizations denying them their goals, while continuing to rescue U.S. citizens and diplomats anywhere in the world. Our final priority is transform, to address the rapidly changing environment and character of war. Here, we start with our people, enhancing warfighter performance and education, then wrapping technology around them, like AI and uncrewed systems to solve problems for the joint force with agile innovation. And with Congress as the architect to special operations command in 1987, we thank you for your foresight, leadership, and continued support. To those listening today considering service to our nation, know the profound sense of calling, purpose, and fulfillment, those serving in uniform share. Because within our formation, you will meet people from every background in every walk of life. And if you wanna serve in jobs like cyber, intelligence, operations, and more, join our ranks. We appreciate being here today. Thank you, and I look forward to taking your questions. Thank you, General Fenton. General Hawke, please. Chairman Reed, ranking member Wicker, and distinguished members of the committee, thank you for the opportunity to testify before you today. I am honored to testify beside the Honorable Chris Mayer and General Brian Fenton. Joining me today is Chief Master Sergeant Kenneth Bruce, the U.S. Cyber Command and National Security Agency Senior Enlisted Leader. We are honored to represent the men and women of U.S. Cyber Command. In an era defined by rapid technological advancement and increasing interconnectedness, cyberspace has emerged as a vital domain for protecting our national security. The People's Republic of China is our greatest strategic competitor and poses unique challenges due to its advanced cyber capabilities, state-sponsored cyber operations around the globe, and a strategic focus on leveraging cyberspace for military, economic, and political purposes. Russia's cyber espionage campaigns prioritize sensitive U.S. government and military infrastructure and information and spread disinformation campaigns, excuse me, and spread disinformation campaigns to influence public opinion and undermine our democratic processes. Iran, North Korea, terrorist organizations, and transnational criminal groups also challenge U.S. interests in cyberspace and are engaged in ongoing efforts to exploit vulnerabilities in U.S. networks, conduct influence operations, and erode our national security interests. With cyber operations becoming more sophisticated and frequent, it is vital to evolve our capabilities against new and novel threats. I am confident Cyber Command is well-postured to meet the ever-evolving challenges we face today, creating advantage for the department and for the nation. Our mission is to direct, synchronize, and coordinate cyberspace planning and operations to defend and advance national interests in collaboration with domestic and international partners. We defend forward by countering cyber threats before they can reach U.S. networks and critical infrastructure. These proactive defensive measures, ranging from network hardening and threat hunting to information sharing, bolster the resilience of our systems and foil potential cyber attacks before they can materialize. We are aligned with the national defense strategy and the DOD cyber strategy to protect Department of Defense information systems, support joint force commanders with cyberspace operations and defend the nation from significant cyber attacks. I'm excited with what 2024 means for the maturation of U.S. Cyber Command. This is a year of opportunity for us. And I'd like to thank Congress for the service-like enhanced budgetary control authorities granted by the 2022 NDAA and enacted in the 2024 appropriation. This authority creates tighter alignment between requirements and acquisition, which results in faster capability and fielding to our cyber mission force. Since Cyber Command's elevation in 2018 to a unified combatant command, Cyber Command has worked hard to make the most of its authorities, resources, and support. Of those authorities, none is as vital to national security in the command as Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which is essential for identifying malicious cyber actors in protection of the nation and the Department of Defense. I am confident we are successful in our mission each and every day thanks to our people, our innovation, and our partnerships. My top three priorities that ensure we deliver outcomes against national priorities in foreign intelligence and cybersecurity. First, our strength lies in our people, skilled cyber warriors who are dedicated to protecting the nation from threats posed by our rivals and adversaries in cyberspace. We win because of our people. Second, Cyber Command remains committed to a relentless approach on innovation to strengthen our military now and into the future. Our investment in technological innovation is key to maintaining our overmatch against our adversaries. Lastly, Cyber Command maintains our competitive vantage through sustained and deliberate partnerships. In addition to the unique partnership with the National Security Agency, Cyber Command further embraces a team approach, working with my fellow combatant commanders and interagency partners, collaborating with academic and industry experts and cooperating with our allies and partners by establishing collective security around the globe. I am extremely proud of what the efforts that Cyber Command has achieved and the direction we are headed. I look forward to answering your questions. Thank you very much, General Hawke. Mr. Secretary and General Fenton, you referred to in your opening statement, a GAO report, and they made several recommendations. One, develop a staffing model for SOLIC, to implement a systematic approach for identifying necessary updates to DOD policy, and third, clarifying the service sector like responsibilities. Could you comment both of you on the progress that has been made in those regards? Yeah, Mr. Chairman, thank you for the question. And again, thank you in particular for your and this committee's continued support of the service secretary-like role that SOLIC has under Section 922. I think the GAO report is on the mark. It highlights a number of what might be seen as more tactical things we need to do in terms of building out the force that works for me, that is indeed the people who go in the room in the Pentagon and talk to the programs and resourcing side. The SOF Enterprise has a great reputation on the operation and policy side. It's much more challenging to characterize the impact of special operations to the elements that are determining priorities of budget, how to fit SOF into war games, how to include SOF in experimentation, and this is particularly important as we developing future war fighting concepts. So I think, as I've said in previous years and testifying in front of you, Mr. Chairman, I think we're moving in a good direction at this point. I think we seek irreversible momentum, but even with the support of Secretary Austin, Deputy Secretary Hicks, I don't think we've achieved that degree of momentum and many of these advances are reversible. So I think I would very much continue to support the advocacy of this committee and your partners on the House Armed Services Committee who continue to, I think, see the value of SOLEC. So we embrace all the comments in the GAO report indeed have moved out on many of those, sir. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Your perspective about the value of the SOLEC, please. Chairman, vital is how I would call it from the SOCOM commander perspective. I think it goes against really two parts. First, the service-like side of SOCOM and SOLEC, which is tied in some ways that really lifts all boats when we think about in the SOCOM enterprise budget, advocacy, the work we're doing in technology and certainly the relationships with not only the department writ large, but the Congress and the American people. Very, very important for us that SOLEC is at the lead. I think on the ops and policy side as well, which we have a huge stake in, as you know, critical to have Secretary Mayer in those discussions, understanding what the SOCOM team has put forward in terms of concepts and operations and leading not only OSD through how SOCOM is thinking about it, but certainly when required with interagency coordination. So I would just call all of that very, very vital or critical for the SOCOM team in the way SOLEC does what it does. Thank you. General Hawke, first, let me commend you for your rather clear support of Section 702. I think also it is critical and hopefully we can get it done. And that's a feeling I think that is shared by everyone on this panel. One of the areas we have to look at is the cyber operations forces to improve their readiness and also enhanced budget control. Is that being used to accelerate that readiness? Senator, enhanced budget control is an absolute, from the authority that you've now given us, it allows us to now control the requirements. What are the things our force needs? How do we allocate the resources from US Cyber Command against that? And then allows us to be able to prioritize how that gets built and used. Things like our persistent cyber training environment, being able to increase that and be able to focus on readiness on the things that matter most to our force. And you feel that you're making progress with the operations forces? We have seen, last year, you required us to do a readiness evaluation. We identified five things that were really around personnel administration policies of the services. We have seen them respond to those particular requests and we've seen a jump in our readiness. And I look forward to being able to talk through and more detail about how each service has been able to respond to our requests. Thank you very much, gentlemen. Senator Wicker, please. General Fenton, you made a great recruiting statement in your opening remarks and I do appreciate that. Let me ask you, though, about the 14% cut and purchasing power. And this will be to both General Fenton and Secretary Mayer. Top line budget has remained flat since 2019. A cut of approximately 14% when adjusted for inflation. This comes on top of multiple rounds of cuts to special operations force, approximately 700 beginning in 23 and another approximately 3000 beginning in FY 25. Agree or disagree and comment with this statement. On the one hand, the rationale for reductions is that SOCOM grew significantly in the aftermath of 9-11 to account for counter-terrorism requirements and now counter-terrorism is no longer a priority. On the other hand, the reality is that SOCOM is responsible for number one, supporting integrated deterrence efforts against China, Russia and Iran. Number two, countering global terrorist groups. Number three, crisis response. So General, you first comment on that and tell us which side you come down on. Senator, I strongly come down aligned with the side that says we have, as SOCOM, three big mission buckets for the Department of Defense given to us by the Secretary of Defense. Integrated deterrence and all that that entails. I'm happy to talk a bit more about that. Countering terrorism because we absolutely know that ISIS, al-Qaeda and al-Shabaab have not gone away to include their ideology, which is still running around unconstrained and we're responsible on a big way with partners to get after that. And then crisis response. What we call a secret obligation to be out the door very quickly as a SOCOM team to either recover diplomats of ours and partners and allies under duress or rescue hostages and we have to do all three of those in a very big way in an environment where those requirements are going up on both spectrums. Well, does that mean that you're able to absorb a 14% cut in purchasing power and in your budget? Senator, I would say probably like all colleagues that have been here before me, a 14% reduced buying power, whether based on inflation, supply chain, many other things absolutely hurts. And it causes us to move as you should expect us to do toward making hard choices. And certainly when those choices are finished and we keep the SOCOM enterprise in equilibrium being more purposeful and impactful with less. And I think at each and every day that's what we remain focused on. Mr. Secretary. So ranking member, this is pretty straightforward. I think if you look at even just the last year we've had a number of crisis response requirements that we've had to meet, I think everybody knows that the counterterrorism mission continues to be a priority. It says in our national fence strategy, you don't have to look much farther than the attack in Moscow in recent weeks to know that ISIS Coruscant is out there. And then we have a mission to help the department and the joint force on the pacing threat of China and the acute threat of Russia. I think fundamentally when you look at the three things that we have to balance missions, we're gonna do the missions. We're gonna carry out these missions, many of them presidentially directed. Readiness, we do everything we can to make sure our forces go out the door exquisitely prepared. That's what makes us so much better than our adversaries. And the third is modernization. That's what gets squeezed when there isn't as much to go around. We know that, we take a risk informed approach to this, but that's the real impact, sir. Okay, and perhaps you wanna supplement that. General Hawk, there's Cybercom 2.0. Is that a specific program or is this just another name for what you're supposed to do anyway? And that's top to bottom review of what you're doing. And also, you've been at this for a short time, but why didn't you ask for any unfunded requirements? I find it hard to believe that there's nothing else important that you need that isn't already being asked for. Senator, I'll take the second question first. So in terms of how we approached our budget, this is the first year that we're gonna execute enhanced budget control. The president submitted a budget for around $2.9 billion for US Cyber Command. We were marked down to around 2.6 in that budget. What we really have heard uniformly from various elements of Congress, from the administration and from the department, they want us to demonstrate that we can successfully execute the dollars that we've received. We're confident that we will. We've got a strong plan and within the department, leveraging the Washington headquarters service to execute the dollars, but we believe the president's budget and what has been submitted for FY25 is what we need. And so a fully funded budget that would allow us to get, that would eliminate those marks for FY25 would really help us close the gap in terms of the dollars we need to execute. Take on the record because I'm way over. Are there any additional tools, resources, or hiring authorities you need to help develop the next iteration of the military cyber forces? Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Thank you, Senator Wilkerson. Senator Manchin, please. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. And General Fenton, I was surprised to learn during our discussion in my office, a few weeks ago that some believe our special forces only perform a counter-terrorism role. Nothing could be further from the truth as we spoke. For the public watching this, hearing our special forces were created out of a need to fight using unconventional tactics that we all call irregular warfare. While the counter-terrorism fight is still ongoing countering our adversaries like Russia, China, Iran, and North Korea, and non-state actors is the bread and butter of irregular warfare concepts which our special forces continually developed. If you would like to expand on that, what we're doing and the need for our special forces in making sure that we have the support to be able to compete on the highest level in the world. Senator, thanks first for the conversation in the office that day. Really helpful for us to be able to discuss with you where we have as a sole commodity incredible capability across the full range of missions. The missions of integrated deterrence, great power competition where you would see us across the world today even with 6,000 special operations teammates in over 80 countries developing relationships, building capability capacity for those partners and allies. Frankly, also getting a great deal of information and understanding themselves about that environment all in an effort to a, prevent any great power conflict by building partners and allies. And certainly if indeed at some point the conflict is on the horizon, prepare. If I could ask you one more question on that because we talked briefly, the cost effectiveness of using the National Guard and their special ops as we have a National Guard, how does that benefit you? Senator, thank you for that as well. I would start with the National Guard across the Department of Defense with state partner programs and many other form factors. It's a blessing. It is a very unique capability. We have more grateful in special ops even more with 19th and 20th special forces group in particular in the Army and National Guard and special force reserves throughout the other components. It's a key part of who we are as a total component, special operations organization. And also we spoke multiple times about the need for an East Coast training venue for special forces instead of these units spending more time than half of their training budgets on transporting themselves to the West Coast to other training venues where they have to jump through hoops for approval on basic training needs to meet their readiness goals. Do you believe an East Coast training venue capable of hosting readiness events would be beneficial, cost-effective and current to the future special operation force? Senator, I know the department, I'll defer to Secretary-General if there's certainly additional comments that's doing a study to look at training events and efforts across the continental United States. I would absolutely align myself with we need all type of training locations and events for multi-domain, interdisciplinary and certainly to see different environments in terrain. Let me just say this for states like myself that don't have a military compound but we are made up of a national guard forces that are very strong and very diligent and I think Secretary-General understands it very well. They are committed to adding value and also readiness and readiness operations and so many of your needs. So I hope that you would look towards that. Yeah, absolutely well, Senator. General Hock, Lock Shields is the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, Cyber Security and Critical Infrastructure Protection exercise that works with four militaries around the world. Last April, the West Virginia National Guard under the leadership of Defense Information Security Agency hosted in Morgantown, West Virginia more than 180 technical cyber experts and supporting representatives from the various federal and state agencies to compete on behalf of the United States, Romanian team and the world's largest international cyber defense exercise run virtually by the NATO Cooperative Cyber Defense Center of Excellence in Talent Estonia. So I didn't know how much you are involved in that, you're aware of that, participating, we want you to come, we want you to take charge of this thing and run with it. Senator tracking this one very closely, I think Lock Shields is a perfect example of what the DOD cyber strategy has asked us to do which is to focus on partners and allies and how do we grow the capacity of those partners and allies with the threats that we face in cyberspace. We did have deep involvement in it, we had our commander of Joint Force Headquarters, Dodin was a part of that, and we see this as a perfect example of what we want to do to grow the capacity of our partners. Thank you, Secretary Meyer, just to finish up, I'm so proud of you being involved in our National Guard in the Martinsburg area, and if there's anything that we can do that you can integrate our expertise that we have in the National Guard, it's not the National Guard of our fathers or our grandfathers, I can assure you. So if you'd want to comment on that, what it's meant to you to be involved. Yeah, Senator, thanks very much. Can you get me at a drill this weekend? Because that would be great. I don't think so. But very much, I appreciate your acknowledging that, and thanks very much to the West Virginia Air National Guard of which I'm a member and continues to support me doing this job and that job. Thank you. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Thank you, Senator Merchant. Senator Fisher, please. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. General Hawke, I appreciated our discussion on the pressing topic of cyber threats to the United States' critical infrastructure. I appreciate the work that Cybercom and NSA have done to share these threats with the public. As you outline in your cyber advisories, cyber organizations linked to China are compromising the communications, energy, transportation, water, and wastewater organization in the United States and its territories. Do you view these attacks as primarily aimed as exfiltering data or as Chinese cyber actors positioning themselves to cause severe disruptions to U.S. critical infrastructure in advance of or during a potential conflict? Senator, thank you very much for the question. I think one of the primary things that we see as opportunity as U.S. Cyber Command is to expose these activities to the broadest audience we can. We do that with all of our partners. The principle to that is the National Security Agency. In this case, I cannot see a reason from a foreign intelligence perspective why anyone would target critical infrastructure. So I am very concerned that these would be a pre-positioning for a potential crisis. And as these attacks continue, how's Cybercom leveraging its expertise and technical capabilities to alert the department and the American public and develop mitigation strategies? Senator, we start really everything that we look at if we're seeing a campaign and how we approach a threatening series of activities. We start with generating insights. How do we understand what is happening and how do we communicate that to the maximum number of organizations possible? How do we enable defense? Whether that's partnering with another combatant command like Stratcom when we think about our strategic capabilities or Transcom for global logistics or Northcom in terms of defense critical infrastructure, how do we enable their defense? And then we also deliver options of how we would impose costs, whether directly or through our inter-agency partners. So we approach that at every step, but really what we see as one of the most impactful things is exposing and then giving the techniques for how to identify these activities so they can be countered by multiple organizations. How is Cybercom working with our allies, with our partners to help them identify these threats as well that they might be facing towards their critical infrastructure? So first, we do the same thing, which is you'll see on many of those cybersecurity advisories, it starts with who do we bring in that'll have information that will help illuminate this threat? In many cases, that's industry and it's also our foreign partners. So on many of those seals across the top of those advisories, you'll see many nations. And that'll include our five eye partners. We've also done them with Japan and you'll see that grow as we continue to expand those partnerships and we share information. Okay, thank you. Over the last few decades, US special operation forces have been used primarily for counter-terrorism operations. A conflict in the Indo-Pacific, however, would likely look much different. General Fenton, can you explain to this committee how you envision special operation forces being used prior to and in a conflict with China? Senator, I absolutely can. And I'll start by saying, in essence, that's what special operations was born for from the earliest of times. And I think for us, we really take it all the way back to the Office of Strategic Services in 1942. It was about giving the allies and at that point, both in the East and in the European and Pacific theater an advantage and giving any adversary dilemmas, being behind enemy lines, developing networks, building partners and allies, that is absolutely transferred to today. And as I like to think about it, with 80 years or eight decades of experience, 20 of those being in combat and the counter-terrorism piece, a bit of a soft renaissance. So what that looks like in many ways today with a changing character and certainly environment, a number. Partners and allies build continues, developing capabilities forward, your special operators sensing the environment and bringing combatant commanders options and advantages they may not otherwise have, in particular with my teammate in Cybercom and in Spacecom as a sort of a nexus that allow us to get synergy and also presenting dilemmas and disadvantage to any adversary. Almost a thousand points of friction before conflict to prevent conflict. And I think also hold the remit as well for crisis response and counter-terrorism because we can never let those drop. Thank you. Secretary Meyer, do you have anything to add to that? I would say, Senator Fischer, what soft brings to especially a large scale combat operation type environment is the ability to extend capabilities of the joint force, cyber, space, others and do it in a precise and risk-managed way and we can do it in very small footprints. And that I think is gonna be incredibly important in the Indo-Pacific where everybody's gonna be looking at their magazine depth and figuring out what is a higher priority target. If you can hide in the noise, you have an advantage, ma'am. Thank you. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Thank you, Senator Fischer, Senator Cain, please. Thank you, Mr. Chair. And thanks to our witnesses today for your service. General Hawke, I wanna start with you. Your predecessor, General Nakasone, was very vocal about the need for FISA reauthorization. And you've also talked about Section 702 and the role it has played, for example, in identifying fentanyl supplies from China. Often FISA discussions, when we have them here, we have them in a classified setting and that doesn't educate the public about how FISA is helpful, recognizing that we are unclassified. Can you talk about examples like identifying fentanyl supply chains and others where FISA 702 is extremely helpful? Senator, thank you for the question. Section 702 is vital and it's indispensable. It is an authority that has been granted by Congress that allows us to collect on foreign intelligence targets outside of the United States. And so the example that we talk about from a fentanyl perspective is our ability to use that authority when a communication is transiting a US service provider that allows us to be very focused on that foreign intelligence target to bring back information. In this case, it allows us to connect dots, connect dots from the precursors as they start in China and all the way through to the potential criminal organization within Mexico in this case, whereas most of that reporting. We have produced significant amounts of reporting that allow law enforcement to now look at that from a targeted perspective, leveraging the data we've created in foreign intelligence outside the United States to be able to then take action to limit risk to the American people. General Hawkeye, I appreciate that answer. I'm glad we could have that in an open discussion. General Fenton, you have closed your opening testimony very strong and one of my colleagues said it was a promoting, joining the ranks. And I think that was the phrase you learned. We want people to join the ranks. It was superb. I've been running in recently as I travel across the Commonwealth with a phenomenon that troubles me a bit and I've been raising it with key military leaders and that's the phenomenon of a young person who really wants to join the military. And it might be special forces, it might be any of the branches of the military and they go far through the process and they're qualified but then they get turned down toward the end of the process over a health issue that seems minor, childhood asthma or a history of allergies. Senator Cotton raised this point yesterday, I think Senator Mullen raised it as well. And my experience in talking to some of these folks is when they get turned down, it's just like a no, with no real explanation and also no encouragement. Because when you say I believe, when you say we need people to join the ranks, the ranks of our military are uniform service personnel and DOD civilians and guard and reservists and our contracting community that provide the supplies and equipment that our military members need. If somebody gets turned down on a health issue that disqualifies them from serving in a particular service branch but they want to serve the country, there's still ways for them to serve the country as a civilian or as a part of one of our contractors. I have shipyards in Virginia that are desperate for workers. We've made a commitment to sell subs to the Australians in the 2030s. How are we gonna meet our own needs much less theirs? But what I find from a manpower standpoint is while we want to attract in the best and the brightest, we often are turning people away who desperately wanna serve the country without giving them the other pass where they can serve. This is not a critique of you. I'm just going off the closing argument that you made that was so powerful that we want people to join the ranks. I sometimes think we don't necessarily send that message that the ranks include the broader ecosystem of those who serve and also those who support those who serve. And I'm just hoping that all of you might take that to heart as you're contemplating carrying out the important missions we entrust to you. Senator Hatt, happy to comment. First, thank you for that. And I think it gets to the heart of why that was in our statement. It really is about service writ large. While in particular, I can speak to service in the military, but you've laid it out. I also work alongside our incredible civilian teammates in the Department of Defense. Incredible teammates across the whole of the inter agency of the US government from intel agencies and great teammates in commerce and treasury. All fantastic and I imagine having a very valuable journey in their own particular way. I think as well, we're out very often as special operations command in the communities, seeing mayors, seeing school board teammates, seeing folks who volunteer even for various clubs and all to make the nation better. So it really is a call to all of that and more, Senator, and I appreciate you noting it. And we absolutely, I align myself with the way you laid it out. And we love to see more folks who would give us an opportunity to have their talents and skills because it goes to the heart of really what we believe in SOCOM. People are number one. It's all about the people. Thank you, General. I appreciate that and I have one more question for you, Secretary Mayer. During the posture hearings last year, you submitted written testimony talking about accelerating SOCOM's wide ranging modernization efforts. Could you briefly describe how you are doing in the modernization side? Senator, so I think we're doing well. We have distinct advantages in the special operations enterprise in particular, SOCOM, with an acquisition executive that sits there and is integrated with the operators. So we're able to modernize at a kind of local level. I think as already addressed in the previous question about budget, that ends up becoming a pacing function. It's increasingly more expensive to do higher end combat, higher end preparation. So we're looking for where we can do more affordable modernization and really in many cases building on what is already in the inventory and making it better. We call it SOF peculiar. We rely on the services for the base and then modernize on top of it for the SOF specific missions, sir. So I think we're moving in a good direction. Everybody wishes it went faster. The adversaries are gonna require that we move faster. So we remain very focused on that, sir. Thank you, Senator Cain. Senator Round, please. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Secretary Meyer, General Fenton, General Hawke, thank you for your service to our nation. You are responsible for stewarding that portion of our nation's military that often operates in a gray zone between peace and war. But the actions those men and women under your command execute every day are extraordinarily effective and can even be decisive. General Fenton, with regard to special operations, they're also very dangerous. And even though we talk about it being between peace and war, when we talk about being left of a conflict, you still have young men and women that are in harm's way as evidenced by the loss of 15 of your teammate members most recently. We sometimes forget that even during those times in which we don't have active and obvious conflict, these young men and women are still in harm's way and they not only should be acknowledged and respected by not just this committee, but by this country for their sacrifice and their service. And I would like to extend our thanks to you and to their families for allowing them to serve when sometimes it looks like it's peacetime, but it's not. And that in a very dangerous world, they stand on the front line. So please extend to your extended family, our thanks for what they offer every single day. Senator, thank you, thank you very much for that. I appreciate any opportunity to talk about how our thoughts and prayers and now added with yours and I absolutely know this whole committee. Go out to the families, immediate extended and certainly the units that suffer those losses while our teammates that you just noted gave their ultimate measure of devotion. I think I add to that that first, as I mentioned in my opening, that is our sacred obligation to watch after those families, stay committed to them in the way that you would absolutely expect of us and we execute and we're incredibly honored to do that. On top of that, it is to continue to always and safely and deliberately do the type of training we know they will see in their activities and combat or overseas and to do that in a way that really gets after being a almost a protective wrapping around them as they go forward. So they're that good that whatever they see downrange pales in comparison. So all that more, thank you very much for that, Senator. Thank you, General. And look at our responsibility here is to provide them with all of the tools and support that they need so that they are never in a fair fight, that they always have at every opportunity, the upper hand wherever possible, but nonetheless, it is a very dangerous world and part of what we sometimes talk about here, we forget this has a real world impact and I'm gonna go right over to General Hawk now because I appreciated your comments about a part of the law that sometimes gets lost in the politics of the day. And that is the reauthorization of 702, which is part of the FISA law that was put in effect in order so that we could fight terrorism and so that our young men and women knew exactly what they were getting into whenever possible when they were in harm's way. General Hawk, you mentioned that it was critical that we reauthorize 702, but I think sometimes in an open setting as the Senator from Virginia indicated, we don't get a chance to talk about how critical this is and I just like you're responsible for cybersecurity and about what happens in terms of our fight. Talk a little bit about what 702 does and what it does not do to the American public. Misinformation is rampant when we start talking about 702 and the fact that some people think that we spy on American citizens. Can you clarify what is legal and what is not legal to be collected under 702 provisions? Yes, Senator. And I think first, I'm really comfortable talking about this in an open setting. This is the most transparent intelligence authority we have. It is built with protections for the American people that only things that are authorized collection is foreign intelligence targets operating outside the United States. This authority cannot be used to collect against Americans. Now say that again, this authority cannot be legally used to collect against American citizens. Is that correct? Correct, Senator. And as we collect information against foreign intelligence targets, we then the way we then operationalize that into intelligence reports is we query that information. So we ask questions of the information structured in a way to ensure that we're not bringing back any information that was about an American that may have been incidentally collected. But there are times when we will do queries about U.S. persons. I'll give you an example from cybersecurity. So if we see that China attempting to hack something in the United States and we wanna really quickly maneuver to stop that threat and we see that there's a U.S. company that is the target in our foreign intelligence collection, we would then query on that company, on their IP address or on specific things we've seen China target. In doing that, that query about that U.S. entity allows us to really quickly understand what is being attacked, how can we rapidly identify it, and then how can we get that information to that U.S. company so that they can mitigate the attack as quickly as possible. So it allows us a set of protection of civil liberties. It allows us to ensure the privacy of Americans and then it has oversight built in from the executive branch, the legislative branch, and from the courts to ensure that we're using it properly. And if there is ever a misuse of that authority, there are specific provisions in the upcoming bills that mandate civil and criminal penalties. We take every incident very seriously, we report it to Congress and we hold individuals accountable if there's misuse. And would you say that those young, and I apologize, I see I'm getting close on my timer, but would you say that 702 is critical in defending and allowing those young men and women who are in harm's way today serving overseas, does 702 help to protect them in their day-to-day operations against our adversaries? Absolutely, Senator. When we go to closed session, I'll give you a very specific example for the last two months that has saved lives. Thank you. Thank you, Mr. Chairman, for your indulgence. Thank you, Senator Rounds, for your thoughtful questioning. Senator Peters, please. Chairman, I'll defer to Senator King and then take the next one. Senator King is recognized. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. There's a human tendency called the recency effect and that is to pay most attention to things that happened recently and then sort of lose track. To put it most bluntly, I'm afraid we're taking our eye off the terrorism ball that because of September 11th is in the 20 years ago and now we're focused on China and Russia, which I think is appropriate, I just worry that we're losing focus on the threat of terrorism. The recent attack in Moscow indicates that ISIS wants to attack in other countries. There's no doubt that they would like to attack here and the technology is developing where they can do so. The thing that keeps me awake at night is nuclear terrorism. If one of these organizations gets their hands on a nuclear weapon, deterrence doesn't work because they don't have a capital city to worry about. They don't care about dying. Mr. Secretary, I just hope that you will advocate strongly that we maintain the attention both in the intelligence community and the Defense Department on the risk of terrorism. It hasn't gone away. Senator, your concerns are ones that I share. I've spent most of my career in the counterterrorism community and I think we have done great things in keeping that threat at a low level but I think you're recognizing some of the, if you will, asymmetric capabilities in the lack of deterrence of different groups if they get capabilities is something we need to remain very focused on. I think we sometimes forget that the National Defense Strategy has five elements to it. We'd like to talk about the PRC in Russia but one of those is counterterrorism and has been across administrations for a long time. So if we're taking our own directions or it says that counterterrorism remains a focus for this country. I just want you to be irritating in the councils of the Defense Department on this issue and I understand that you're very capable of doing that. So please keep pushing because I don't wanna hearing here five years from now or three years that everybody says what happened, how did we miss this? Yes sir, well, I will certainly stay on it. Hopefully I don't have a reputation for being that irritating but on this issue I think it's very important sir. So I take your guidance. Thank you very much. General Hawke, one of the pillars of the cyber strategy is disrupt and dismantle threat actors. My concern is we don't have a deterrent strategy in cyber. We tend to patch, defend, sanction after the fact but we really don't have a deterrent strategy. I hope that you will pursue, defend forward and make it defend aggressively because if an adversary doesn't have any concern that they're gonna pay any price for a cyber attack whether it's misinformation in one of our elections or a cyber attack on our financial system or our electric grid, if they don't feel that they're gonna pay a price, they're gonna go ahead. There's no, it's a low-cost option for them. And I believe that one of the weaknesses of our cyber strategy over the years has been the lack of a credible deterrent which requires an offensive capability and the adversary fearing the use of that offensive capability by cybercom. Senator, I think this is exactly where the department wants us to go. So when we think integrated deterrence and we think about it in cyberspace, it's about how do we come together with a bunch of partners that all can make it more difficult for an adversary to operate and to impose costs as necessary. That can be industry in terms of ensuring that they are a much more difficult target than they are today. It's our international partners. And so in the DOD cyber strategy, which is how do we accelerate our partnerships with those international elements that can be a teammate that assists in the opposing costs? And then it's about how we use the resources we have to generate capabilities that allow us to have the effects that you're discussing. And I think those are the areas that we also view in how we think about Cyber Command 2.0, which is how we use all the authorities you've given us to now have the greatest effect for the best interests of the nation. Well, as I say, I think the heart of deterrence is capacity and will, but another piece of it is that the adversary has to know about the capacity, otherwise it doesn't deter them. Right now we're experiencing a sophisticated, consistent and purposeful misinformation attack from Russia with regard to Ukraine. And it's very reminiscent of the attack of the Nazis in the late 30s in terms of the pro-Nazi propaganda here in the United States, which went up to and included members of Congress. This is an attack. This is an effort to disrupt our political process by a foreign agent. And this is one of the things that the framers of this constitution most feared. And we have to be active and not just say, oh, well, that's just the Russians again. I believe, again, I'm advocating a strong response that will make them think twice before they undertake such an attack. Senator, I understand and I do believe that both the PRC and Russia understand our capabilities and I'd like to be able to walk through with you in the closed session some examples of that. Thank you. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Thank you, Senator Erich, please. Thank you, Mr. Chair. And thanks, gentlemen, for being here today and for your continued service to our nation and for testifying in front of our committee today. I think the discussion has been very helpful. All of you are playing a pivotal role in defending our country and deterring threats abroad and threats to the homeland. They are certainly paramount. So I wanna take just a brief moment and recognize the loss of a true American hero that is special to many people within Special Operations Command earlier this week. We saw the passing of Colonel retired Ralph Puckett, known as the Ranger. And he was an incredible human being and the last surviving Medal of Honor recipient from the Korean War era. So I wanna give my sympathies. I know this committee will extend them as well to Jeannie and the rest of his family. So thank you for that moment. And General Fenton, I am going to start with you. In the current geopolitical landscape, our soft capabilities are absolutely indispensable in countering emerging threats and advancing our national security interests. Now it's my understanding and it's something that I have discussed with the secretary as well that cuts to these forces risk compromising our ability to effectively confront adversaries and their actions and maintain stability in key regions. So General Fenton, can you please speak to the critical role that these forces play in the era of global power competition and how these forces make decisive impacts in strategic engagements? Senator, I absolutely can. And first, thank you for the call out to our hero Colonel Puckett and the family. Thank you for that. And we'll pass that along to the entire SOCOM team. Thank you. I would start with similar to the incredible conversation we had in your office yesterday. And I appreciate your time with us and our Rangers from the Ranger Regiment laying out how they certainly see the world in integrated deterrence. I think it's a far cry from where folks may believe we only do counter-terrorism, but they're intertwined. Being in a location downrange, even if it is in a counter-terrorism capacity or even for crisis response, also very often has great power competition or integrated strategic kind of knock on effects that the world is watching in particularly adversaries and they know we have the most incredible military, the most credible special operations in the world. I think specific to integrated deterrence and I'd be happy to cover just some more details in a closed session. It is about placement and access, partnerships and allies, developing their capabilities and then bringing that back as options and advantages to the Secretary of Defense combatant commands and as disadvantages and dilemmas to any adversaries that opposes. And that is a perfect segue into section 1202. So we saw the section extended in the FY20 NDAA and it will remain in effect until 2025. This has allowed the department to work with our partners and allies in the irregular warfare space to achieve our US objectives. Can you briefly describe for the committee how section 1202 has strengthened our partnerships? Senator, I can and first I do wanna thank this committee for instantiating that in law and we appreciate that very, very much. It is yet another option to partner and for SOCOM in particular and for the Department of Defense, partnerships are the pacing item and that's a very different proposition when we think about what the PRC and Russia do. They have clients and customers, they're parasitic. We like to build partners and allies, friends and family if I might and I think this absolutely helps in that arena along with what this Congress has authorized for counter-terrorism and 127 ECHOs, that authorization, what we do with triple three to build security cooperation capability, all of it adds to a really key piece for us, Senator. That's about the power of partnerships. And General Fenton, do you believe more opportunities and support for provisions like section 1202 will provide us an advantage in an era of great power competition? Senator, I absolutely do and I appreciate that folks are thinking that way along with the flexibility we can build into them and that already certainly exists. SOCOM's got a key part in bringing that type information to this Congress through the department, but we're very grateful for all of them and at some point I think the more of them, the better because the more partners the better when we get down to them. Absolutely, I agree wholeheartedly and thank you gentlemen very much for being in front of us today. Thank you, Mr. Chair. Thank you, Senator Ernst, Senator Peters, please. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. General Hawk, as you know, our federal executive agencies and military units rely on the unique and highly specialized workforce in order to support cyber missions. In response to these unique needs, the National Security Agency launched a hiring surge in 2023 called the Future Ready Workforce Initiative. Its goal was to fill 3,000 positions alongside other efforts to retain our current employees. So my question for you, General, is how effective was this hiring surge and what are your specific plans to retain the current NSA and cybercom workforce which is essential for your mission? Senator, there's no more important topic than our people in both National Security Agency and Cyber Command. So when General Noxoni laid out the goals for Future Ready Workforce, there were a couple of things. One was related to overall the agency's hiring. And the goal was 3,000. We came short of that, but had one of the largest years of hiring in the National Security Agency's history. What Future Ready was also built to do was really start to think about our people. How do we do care for our people, particularly those that are overseas? How do we develop leadership training so that we have the best supervision and create an environment that allows us to be innovative and take care of our people and really use the strengths of how we operate as part of our retention? So I think from those objectives, we've made strides in how we onboard. We've reduced the amount of time for hiring. We've got to continue to advance that. That has to be a priority for the National Security Agency. For Cyber Command, we've been given additional authorities from Congress and now we're starting to leverage those. Whether that's hiring data scientists or it is now within using CES within our partnership with the Army who's now our responsible personnel element to be able to fully leverage those authorities. So we're pretty excited about what we're seeing in the trends for both. Right, right. General Hawke at the start of Russia's invasion of Ukraine, we observed a series of high-profile cyber attacks. In fact, according to reports, nearly 50% of the destructive Russian cyber attacks against Ukrainian networks occurred in the first two months of the war and often in tandem with kinetic military actions. However, now two years later, we haven't seen significant cyber operations being deployed to impact the fighting on the ground. So my question for you, sir, is what specific lessons from the conflict in Ukraine have we learned regarding the Russian employment of cyber operations to support their wider aims in the war? So I think, Senator, what you saw from the initial were two major things. One were the preparations that Ukraine made. So the work that they did to be able to move their data that was into Western clouds made them more resilient. There's a number of lessons that we can learn from that resiliency. The other is that cyber planning looked an awful lot like all of Russian planning, not well thought out, not integrated. And so I think what we have seen is that while Russia is not quick to learn, they are learning. And so I think as we've seen the evolution of how they've applied their cyber force, increasingly that force is focused on collection and not trying to destroy things and is tempting to creating advantage in the information environment. That's an area that we wanna continue to help our Ukrainian partners be able to be as resilient as they can with the best cybersecurity and we'll continue to work closely with you, come to enable that. All right, thank you, General. Assistant Secretary Mayer, we know that UAS operations are rapidly evolving on the battlefield and certainly DOD is well positioned to quickly respond to this changing environment to address these threats. But so, but with this in mind, my question is what internal DOD policy changes to airspace management, operational concepts, rules of engagement or tactics are gonna be required to optimize the use of counter UAS systems and also how are you working with the rest of the department to address some of these acute threats? Yes, Senator, I think it's one of the top issues certainly for the Secretary of Defense and of course me as well. I think it becomes in the first instance, understanding what the threats actually are. They come from a lot of different people, innocent citizens all the way up to malign actors who are actively trying to exploit our defenses here. And I think we have put in place in the department a comprehensive approach to look at the external outside the United States piece. There's a lot more federal partners that we work with here domestically and working out some of that is really where some of the policy fissures are still being worked through. So we have certain areas where we can do things over U.S. military bases that we can't do in areas then surrounding that and the ability to create defense in depth is far more challenging because it brings in law enforcement, other federal entities. So I think in the first instance, we're trying to bring everybody online to understand what the threat is across the entire federal enterprise and then from there really be strategic in figuring out where we do need near-term policy changes, sir. All right, thank you. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Thank you, Senator Peters. Senator Scott, please. Thank you, Chairman. Thanks to each of you for being here. Let me just start with General Hawke. When I go back to Florida, I get a lot, ask a lot of questions about the FBI's violation of 702 and how they surveilled American citizens. I think all of us understand the value of 702, although not many people back home see the value and all they heard is what the FBI did. I think what frustrates people is they don't hope, they don't hear of anybody being held accountable and then what they hear is nobody wants to make a change in the bill. So as the director of the interstate, how are you ensuring the civil liberties and privacy rights of American citizens are not infringed when your agency uses the 702 authorities? And if you discover somebody made a mistake and did violate the rules, how do you hold them accountable? Senator, we think accountability is an important part of the bill that's in front of Congress. It will mandate that the administration identify minimum penalties from both a civil and a criminal perspective for intentional misuse of this intelligence authority. From our perspective in the National Security Agency, we are incredibly proud of our culture of compliance. And that's ingrained. One of the first things I did when I came into the role is I went and I sat with analysts and walked through this process from how they seek the target information, how they query, how we review it, how we audit it and how we report any incidents to Congress and to the FISC court. As we do that, every day we wanna ensure that we're doing it for its intended purpose. It is our American that serve every day in the National Security Agency are about the defense of the American people. And that includes their civil liberties, their privacy, and we will continue to be transparent about how we use this authority to defend Americans every day in collection against China, against Russia, counterterrorism threats and cyber threats that face the nation every single day. Have the governments of China, Russian, Iran decide to be our enemy? So I think each of them are not operating in the interests of the United States. So as a result of that, would you recommend the Americans stop buying products made in those countries? I think when we look at where things are produced, I think from my perspective, that's something I look at every day in terms of who gains benefit. So I think we should definitely be really scrutinizing where those products are coming from. So China, Russia, and Iran, they have highly capable cyber operations. Do you think they're worried about our offensive cyber capabilities? I do, Senator. General Fenton, do you have the wherewithal to get our hostages out of Gaza? Sir, first, for your special operations command with the Central Command, that is our laser-like focus, bringing those American hostages home. And we absolutely have capabilities as have been demonstrated for years in that arena to do just that. And we train very hard to do that each and every day. It's our sacred obligation. And we absolutely have demonstrated those capabilities. No adversary should mistake that we can do that anywhere in the world. But in Gaza, it's in concert with CENTCOM and our Israeli teammates. You think the President knows you have the capability? Senator, I am very sure, having briefed him personally on a number of operations of the variety that we have that capability as does Secretary of Defense and certainly as does Secretary Mayor. So would you characterize the need for your services, special operations increasing or decreasing over the last few years? Senator, I would absolutely, uncategorically categorize it as increasing. And I'll give you a bit of my thoughts on data to prove that on the combatant command requirements that go across their desire to have us either in integrated deterrence or in other form factors prior to conflict. That's gone up by about 35% over the last three years. In the crisis response arena that defined as going out the door very quickly to rescue someone, recover diplomats or keep an intense focus on U.S. hostages for future recovery, that's gone up by 150% in the last three years. So I absolutely see those requirements going up. I don't think that's a blip on the radar screen. I think that's a pattern that will continue. So does it frustrate you when your budget doesn't increase? And I guess what? The Army just recently decided to cut 3,000 people from special operations. How do you deal with all that? Well, Senator, first, it is in conversation with the secretary of mayor and the secretary of defense presenting the information that I had just laid out for you and the team and in concert with other services who have transformed objectives and also recruiting challenges. We all work together to come up with a final decision through a lens of modernization, readiness and operation making hard choices. But I do remind folks, secretary of mayor is a key helper and assistant and all of us with us together. Those requests and requirements are absolutely going up in a budget that is flatter and decreased buying power of 15 to 16% because of inflation. It drives us through those hard choices that we should make. And at some point, we are through a threshold of risk-based approach. We'll have to report that we will do less. Yet at the same time as resources become available, we're able to scale up very quickly. So hard choices drive us to that based on a fiscal and personal environment. Thank you. Thank you, Senator Scott. Senator Kelly, please. Mr. Chairman, I'm gonna yield my time for now to Senator Rosa. Senator Rosa is recognized. Thank you, Chairman Reed. Thank you, Senator Kelly. I appreciate it. We have multiple hearings this morning. I wanna thank secretary mayor, General Hawke and General Fenton for your service for being here today and of course all the conversations we've had in the past. But General Hawke, I wanna talk to you a bit. It's my understanding that when the nation faces a cyber attack, there are two forces under your operational control that respond. The Cyber National Mission Force and the Joint Force Headquarters DoD Information Network. So as you know, in 2022, the Cyber National Mission Force was elevated to be a subunified command. So General Hawke, how has this elevation helped Cybercom's operational readiness to respond to attack? And separately, how would also elevating the DoD Information Network to a subunified command enable Cybercom to be more resilient in future cyber attacks? Senator, thank you for the question. So as we looked to elevate the Cyber National Mission Force, that is our subunified command that allows us to defend the nation. And they're really the mission that is responsible for defending against adversary hackers and also generating options against them. So as we looked at that, we wanted to create that as a unique command that allows it to start to grow its force and also be able to start to drive how they acquire capability and how they train their force for their unique mission. As we look at Joint Force Headquarters DoDn, our element that allows us to set the globe from a defensive perspective across the entire department, that's an area that we're evaluating. So as we look at the studies that will make up our response for Cyber Command 2.0, there are five studies that Congress has asked us to do this summer. And they look at our force, they look at our headquarters, they look at our acquisition team and they look at our architecture. We wanted to bring those back as one to be able to then go to the secretary and say, here's what we see the vision of the future force is. A part of that is evaluating is Joint Force Headquarters DoDn structured appropriately and does it have the right resources to do the mission we've assigned? So it's an area that we're definitely going to look at. Well, thank you. I wanna build on this because in order to do your work, you need that foundational cyber intelligence. That's really what you build everything on. So having accurate actionable threat intelligence, it's really critical for the function of our nation's cybersecurity posture, but simply having the right intelligence, of course, it's not the entire solution. It's important not only to know what the threat is, but also to know how to target our adversary systems. So that's why a dedicated foundational cyber intelligence capability could possibly enable the DoD to more effectively utilize intelligence on cyber threat actors and their capabilities. So do you think that if we could establish the, or the establishment of a cyber specific foundational intelligence center, that it better prepare your forces for these types of operations? Senator, we think that growing the foundational cyber intelligence to the department is benefit, not just you as cyber command. It's all the other combatant commanders that we partner with every day. For us to do multi-domain integration, it starts with our understanding of our adversaries. And with the process normally works for foundational intelligence, that's our start point, particularly in crisis to generate options. Today, that is largely falling on cyber command in NSA. We wanna see that grow across the defense intelligence enterprise and General Cruz as the new director and I are kicking off some pilots together to be able to look at how could we begin to expand within DIA's architecture, the amount of cyber intelligence focused that focus that is out there to meet the need for not just us, but the other combatant commands as well. I'll look forward to those pilots, but in order to do all of this work, what do you need? You need a cyber workforce, right? So last year's NDAA included my bipartisan legislation authorizing a civilian cyber security reserve to provide cybercom with qualified civilian personnel in reserve capabilities to ensure that the US government has the cyber talent it needs to respond to malicious activity, to secure DOD's information, and of course all of our systems. And so I look forward as we've spoken about to reviewing this implementation plan for the new pilot program when it's ready. So at the speed at which a future cyber war might be fought, do you believe that the current traditional reserve models would give you the necessary capabilities, the surge capacity in times of a crisis and help us rapidly scale up? Senator Rosen, thank you for that legislation. I think what we would like to see is to be able to do both. We wanna leverage our traditional reserve and be able to use that as part of our force and we definitely want to examine what's the best way to create a cyber reserve component that allows us to reach in to a broader portion of our nation's talent. We have two components that are interested in executing pilots and it's an area that we're excited to come back with you to what that'll look like. Thank you, I appreciate it. Thank you, Senator Rosen. Senator Tocqueville, please. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Good morning, gentlemen. Thanks for your service. Secretary Mary doing a good job. I'd like to ask you this, will all these new conflicts popping up since you've taken office, how has your approach changed and what metrics do you have in place to oversee possibly new threats getting ready to pop up? Have you done anything looking to the future? Yes, so Senator Tocqueville, thanks for the question. It's really important because I think the world has only become more complex really over the last couple of years and I think we look at in a couple of different perspectives. We look across the three different mission sets that SOCOM has. So General Fenn's already talked to, I've already talked to the uptick in crisis response requirements. So we're going out the door more often for crisis response. Some of that is because we don't have as many forces forward but some of that is because we're relying on this force more. One of the metrics we've taken on board is determining whether this is a blip, as General Fenton said, or a trend. We think this is more likely a trend. So we're taking appropriate action to make sure that we're resourcing it with that idea that the requirement is gonna be high and stay high. I think counter-terrorism because it is something that the Special Operations Enterprise is being looked to carry more of the burden on that, more of the mission space because the services are moving to integrated deterrence. We need to ensure that every time we're doing something in counter-terrorism, we're getting as much benefit for some of the other mission sets. So if we can do something against Russia while we're doing a counter-terrorism mission, if we can do something against China, that's a twofer for us, that counts more. And then I think we've already talked about the value we see in, if you will, competition and the ability to really have an outsized return on investment for limited force deployments, we look at that all the time as a standard metric of are we getting that high return on investment? If we're not, in many cases, we're gonna pivot to a different approach or a different TTP tactics, sir. So those would be the three main areas I'd look across and give you a bit of a sampling of how we're looking at it, sir. Thank you, General Hulk. You're the new kid on the block, new command. We're going to grow, we all know that. It's very, very important. You see yourself and your command privatizing and all with all the competition we have in the private field and in cyber. Senator, we look at our industry partners as teammates. Our domain's unique. It's created by industry that builds out the cyber domain. So how we think about how we leverage it, how we defend it is part of the partnership that we'll have with industry, with our international partners and all of our fellow combatant commanders who leverage cyberspace every day to conduct all the missions of the Department of Defense. So you got all hands on deck. I mean, you're using everybody you possibly can. Is that correct? So is that what I'm hearing? We do, Senator. Yeah, okay, thank you. General Fenton, thank you for your service. We've had special operators deployed everywhere the last 20 years. Have we lost some of our geographic standards across the country in terms of different locations with special ops? Because I know for instance, the 20th command is in Auburn, Alabama and they've been working different areas and they normally work the Southcom area. So are we too spread out? Well, Senator First, thank you for the work that all the National Guard team makes do in the special operations community. And in the case of the 20th group, fantastic. What I would say is there has been, as we've noted, an increasing demand across the COCOMs for special operations. And my sense is absolutely rightly so. In an era where we want to prevent great power conflict, having special operators out there being part of the fabric of any nation, building capability, teaching them to shoot, move, communicate, sustain, medicate, learn how to do staff training you, that starts a relationship, thickens it and all builds towards partners and allies preventing that type of piece. That demand's gone up as has the demand by the world voting for crisis response. So my sense is, A, the demand's gone up and we've adjusted accordingly through a risk informed approach. But at every given day, everybody, all hands, total COMPO and SOCOM, Active National Guard Reserve and civilians are absolutely needed on deck. And each and every time we make that risk informed decision, we're bringing it back to the secretary and then we're moving out because I see those demands continue to grow up. We just passed $60 billion in Ukraine. We're up to 120 billion. And of course, we all hope that they can win. I know you're very involved in that, not physically, but mentally and a lot of your people are in training terms that I wish we could give that 60 billion to you and your people to build what we have. Just one quick question and just get your thoughts. I asked everybody this, can Ukraine win? And what does that look like? I know you're gonna say yes, but so what does that look like? Well, Senator, I absolutely will say yes. Ukraine can absolutely win. As you mentioned, the whole SOCOM team, but the Command Sergeant Major and I in particular have been very involved outside of Ukraine based on policy. But we've had the chance to visit with these Ukrainian special operators in European locations, again, outside of Ukraine, watching them train, watching them get better, watching them teach us, especially lessons learned. And I gotta tell you at each every point, they're incredible, committed, existentially focused teammates and they absolutely can win. They need our help for sure as the secretary and chairman talked yesterday. So I'd say they absolutely can. What does winning look like? First, I'm gonna talk about, in my own perspective, what it looks like losing for Putin. I think it denies him the objectives he wanted in terms of fracture and NATO, stronger than ever. And we will keep it that way. I think it denies him the objectives of being in somebody, aggressing against a smaller democratic nation and covering up that whole territory. And we're working hard to keep it that way. I think it also denies him the objectives that he might've had in the rest of Europe as he's tied down in this losing equipment, generals, artillery pieces, everything else that he was dependent on. I think winning for Ukraine, I'd leave the definition to President Zelensky exactly, but I gotta feel it's a sovereign democratic, independent Ukraine, is able to defend its borders and is still partnered with NATO and with the United States. Thank you. One last thing, not a question, just I'd love to get a report on those five special ops that lost their lives, I think in the Red Sea or the Mediterranean and a helicopter, one of them was an Alabama soldier and I'd love to get a report on that if I could. Whenever you finish it, no hurry on that. Senator, I would first say thank you. Our thoughts and prayers again, go out to those immediate families, extended families, the states of which they come from. Thank you as well for noting that. And our units, we're working as fast as we can to go through the understanding of it, investigation and I'll stop there, but as soon as we have it through the secretary, we'll share with the department in this college. Thank you. Thank you, Senator Targill. Senator Kelly, please. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Thank you to all of our witnesses for being here today. General Hall, good to see you again. This year, Indo-Paycom's number one unfunded priority is the Guam defense system. And this system's gonna protect Guam from kinetic threats like hypersonic and ballistic missiles, but Guam also faces some real non-kinetic threats as well. And I'm concerned there is not enough attention being paid to the cyber defense of critical infrastructure on Guam, both military and civilian. China's made it clear that they wanna hold critical infrastructure at risk. They're not just stealing intellectual property. They are clearly pre-positioning on networks that support infrastructure. And we need to make sure that Guam's military systems have adequate cyber protection, but also need to ensure the systems that support electricity, water, emergency response are adequately protected as well. And we can't let China ferment chaos if there's ever a conflict. And it's important to find where adversaries like China, where they're lurking on our systems, route them out and make sure we fix the vulnerabilities that they take advantage of. So General Hall, can you give us insight into how your cyber mission force works to detect our adversaries who are present on our critical infrastructure networks and how important it is to protect this infrastructure on Guam? Senator, I share your concern and the need for how we think about Guam and how we think about the infrastructure on Guam, both from the critical infrastructure and how it supports the department. From our perspective, really the partnership that exists between NSA and Cyber Command and how we approach these kind of problems. First, we want to generate insights that expose this activity. So you will be able to go on our website and be able to see in great detail exactly how the PRC has approached access on Guam, the techniques they've used, how they've done it, and then it also informs how elements both within our government and within industry can detect those threats so that we can work collaboratively to make it more difficult for the PRC to operate, to pre-position in those infrastructures. I think the other areas then that we think about, enabling defense, how do we help everyone with strategies and support of Indo-Paycom? How do we use our force? Our defensive maneuver force, how do we apply it to ensure that we're protecting the things that are most important in Indo-Paycom? And then finally, we have to impose costs. And that's through our interagency teammates as well. How do we make it more difficult for the PRC and how do we make it that there is a cost for actions like this? Any more authorities or resources that you need to do this? Senator, you've given us a number of authorities in this past year. One of those is enhanced budget control, which now allows me to drive where these investments go. And that is probably the most critical authority we needed. We now have service-like authority and responsibility. We'll now be able to apply that in a way that allows us to be more adaptive to what these changing threats look like. All right, thank you, General Fenton. General, the Air Force Special Ops Command is establishing a new power projection wing at DM in Tucson. The new wing is gonna give SOCOM a powerful wing capable of strike, mobility, ISR. DM's proximity to training ranges in Arizona, specifically the Berry Goldwater Range, is going to ensure that the new wing has access to the training it needs to be lethal and be ready to deploy at any moment. General, can you talk about the importance of these power projection wings and your insight on the status of the standup of the wing at Davis Mothen? Senator, like SOCOM is with the other services, we're closely aligned with their transformation efforts. In this case, the Air Force transformation effort that really hits the heart of the question you mentioned about Air Force Special Operations Command. I think as we've gone along on the journey, the gathering of that type of capability you mentioned in terms of ISR, strike, mobility, and bringing it all together and allowing it to focus on a particular region is at the heart of what we understand the Air Force and AFSOC is doing at Davis Mothen. And we're a key part of it with our AFSOC team. The timelines, I think we're still in some ways along the journey with AFSOC and the particulars might be best answered by the Air Force for it large or maybe even I can get back to you for the record to give you exact, I wouldn't want to get out in front of my skis. But the bottom line is your Special Operations Command team is absolutely interlinked and interwired in what AFSOC and the Air Force is doing on those power projection wings. Well, thank you. And could you also get back to me on what you, in this year's budget request, SOCOM has taken the armed overwatch platform from 75 down to 62 aircraft. If you could just get back to us on what you think the right number of airplanes, if you think it's 62, I think that's a reasonable answer. But if you think it's something different than that, could you please get back to me on it? Senator, we absolutely will. Okay, thank you. Thank you, Senator Kelly. Senator Smith, please. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Senator Hock, having the CCP think twice and before they mess with our critical infrastructure or steal government officials' emails is extremely important given the fact that they're only going to continue to better their cyber operations and capabilities. The Storm 0558 hack, you and I have visited about that and China burrowing into our critical infrastructure I think is a big wake-up call in many ways and that more can be done. So I guess I've got a couple of questions. The first, how are you thinking about strengthening a cybercom's ability to really put fear in the heart of China as you put this, your team together in cybercom 2.0? I think that's a very important aspect of this as sort of a deterrence here. How are you thinking about that? Senator, as we think about Cyber Command 2.0, you've asked us to study a number of things this summer. The most important of that will be our force generation study. How do we generate ready forces within the Department of Defense? And that study requires us to do a number of things. One, it's how do we evaluate our current structure? This structure now has a service-like authorities underneath what you've now given us in the latest NDA or the 2022 NDA and the most recent appropriation, and then evaluating whether we should have a cyber service. We'll come back to you with that. We also are evaluating our overall architecture and our acquisition. Inside that is how can we use our service-like authorities to be more aggressive in the capabilities we have to respond to each of these activities? We have a very solid set of capabilities we use today. We wanna be able to move faster and we wanna be able to be more agile in terms of if a new threat emerges, how can we generate the capability, put it in the hands of our cyber mission force to enable our portion of an interagency response? So, and that's the good segue to the follow-up question is, so obviously this is moving quickly, right? The capabilities change, the technology changes. DoD's not known writ large as adapting quickly, right? Whether it's procurement or whatever, what are you doing in that domain that allows you guys to sort of adopt this cutting-edge technology quicker? Senator, first, the department's now given us a number of authorities for our own acquisition. That was a step that allows us to move faster. When I first took over command, I met with each of the program offices that are providing capability to US Cyber Command. I saw each of them as really having an agile opportunity because we deal in software. We are not building large iron, we're building code. And so we have the right program office structure to move faster. We now needed the resources to do it. You've given us the enhanced budget control and we have to combine it with that acquisition authority. So I think one of the challenges that we have on this side of the diocese, explaining to people in a non-classified setting what the real risk is, what the challenges are, the capabilities that the CCP has save for critical infrastructure. I just, this is new kind of warfare for many people. If you were going back to Missouri or Arkansas or Oklahoma and you were talking to folks back home, how would you explain what the capability is, what we need to be vigilant for, and the best way for us to approach this? Senator, I think the most recent things that we've exposed across the interagency about how China has established access in critical infrastructure is that wake-up call. In terms of pre-positioning in the critical infrastructure of Guam, other areas of the world and in the United States, that really is no other purpose than to pre-position for a crisis. And I think from our perspective, we want to be able to communicate that in as clear of language as possible and also in highly technical language that industry can leverage and be able to then pursue and root them out of that at every step along the way. So you and I have talked about this one-on-one too, but I just think it's absolutely critical that China understands our capability and much like with other sort of platforms that have developed or weapons that have developed over decades, that there's a real deterrence here, that they understand that if they flip that switch, turn it something off, that we have the capability and we're willing to do it, we won't hesitate ourselves. And so that's, I think, a dynamic that's really important as we enter this new world. And I guess I'll just close with this. So clearly this is happening here. We've got a lot of newer partnerships, established partnerships in the Indo-Pacific. As China sort of shows its fangs, many of those allies are coming our way because they understand the ambition that China has. What are you seeing in the Indo-Pacific with, whether it's the Philippines or wherever, that would raise the red flag here? Senator, from our perspective, those partnerships that we're growing in the Indo-Pacific are aligned with Indo-Pacific command. So as we've talked about our Acollino and in the future, Admiral Paparo, the areas, the nations that they are most concerned with is where our partnerships are. What we have seen is a demand signal from many nations in the Indo-Pacific that are looking for assistance to counter the China cyber threat. We're using our forces to defend forward in some of those nations with our allies and partners to expose to them how China is operating in their networks so that we can root them out of their networks, but also then to be able to expose it to a broader audience. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Thank you, Senator Schmidt. Senator Shahini, please. Thank you. Thank you, Assistant Secretary Mayer and General Svinten and Hawk for being here today. General Hawk, speaking to that partnership in the Indo-Pacific, I just returned with a congressional delegation from the Indo-Pacific. We went to the Philippines, Vietnam, the Republic of Korea, and Japan, and everywhere we went, we heard an interest in partnering with the United States concerned about what China's doing in the South China Sea, and real concern about the passage of the National Security Supplemental because that includes support for the Indo-Pacific region and it also sends a very strong message to Xi. So thank you, I totally agree with what you said. Assistant Secretary Mayer, on Monday there was a report that highlighted the scale and methods that Vladimir Putin has been using to so distrust in the US population and to amplify destructive rhetoric that jeopardizes the passage of important legislation like the National Security Supplemental. We also heard from both the Chair of the Intelligence, the House Intelligence Committee and the House Foreign Relations Committee who said that there were members of the Republican caucus who were parroting Russian disinformation. So can you talk about how those tactics, further Russian operations in Ukraine and how they work and to undermine our position in Ukraine? Senator Shaheen, I think the Russians and probably the PRC as well think they have a distinct advantage in the information space and while we can certainly overmatch them conventionally, militarily, they see an asymmetric advantage to themselves. So I think we are very focused on denying them that advantage where possible. Certainly, I think the Russians take a very... We would be much more careful, let's just say. They are very not risk informed when they go about their information operations, be those in Ukraine, be those in the United States, be these elsewhere and they're okay to fail but what concerns me is what gets through and what starts to get traction. I think the Ukrainians have been very adept at pushing back at the Russian malign influence activities because they've been familiar with it for a long time. I think one of the challenges we have is understanding fully where the Russians are attempting these types of malign influence activities. Some of this has been well documented as you've mentioned going back to some of our elections. I think other places though we're only beginning to understand where they can pair activity with information or they can use their information tools in a way that really attempt to break down some of the cohesiveness that we have as a nation and specifically how we approach it in a war fighting capacity. I think the Ukrainians have figured out much of that because they've had to live with it. There's many lessons I think we could take on board Senator to figure out how to approach this from our own perspective. So can you speak more specifically in a classified setting about what we're doing to push back? Yes, Senator, I can. Thank you. General Hock, last week there was also a news investigation on CBS 60 Minutes that pointed to evidence of Russia's responsibility and the directed energy attacks, the anomalous health incidents or Havana syndrome. Our office has worked with a number of victims from the earliest attacks because we had some constituents who were affected and what they have asserted all along is that there was an adversary who was responsible. Can you talk about what you're doing to, if anything, to respond to those reports? And Secretary Austin in his hearing yesterday assured us that the combat support agencies under his oversight are remaining focused on this issue. Can you also assure us the same and what you're doing? Senator, I can definitely assure you that any new evidence that we receive, we will pursue. So as the Director of National Security Agency, I'm committed to that and I'm also committed to the eight employees that we have have been designated as suffering from anomalous health incidents and ensuring their care and ensuring that we maintain our obligations to them and also to continue to pursue and understand any of the potential causes of anomalous health incidents. So can you tell us if you are actively pursuing any of the information that was shared in that news report? Senator, we would look at that information and any other and routinely are looking to see if there's more information that we can garner from any lead that we can get. Thank you, thank you, Mr. Chairman. Thank you, Senator Mohlen, please. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. General Hawke, Mr. Secretary, General Fenton, thank you for taking the time to meet with me individually and thank you for the work you're doing and for being here in front of us too. General Fenton, thank you for taking, bringing those three incredible Rangers by my office yesterday. It was such a pleasure to meet them. Makes you feel pretty secure about the future of the country with young men like that ready to serve. Yes, it does, Senator. With that being said, this is a question for General Fenton, Mr. Secretary, both. I mean, we all know some truths about the soft community and one of them is that, competent of special operation forces cannot be crated after an emergency, correct? And General Fenton, I think you've said something very similar to that in the past. So with funding cuts, are we threatened by the training capability for our soft community, by numbers and by training, to be able to meet the threats that this country may be facing down the road? Senator, you certainly, personally, and again, thank you for that office calls while yesterday, I appreciated your meeting with the Command Sergeant Major and I and Secretary, but mostly with those three incredible Rangers that gave you the update on what they're doing and I know they appreciated that as well. So thank you for taking your time on that. I would say first, our obligation to you and to this whole August body and our nation and department is always to give the best training, most rigorous, most arduous training to our special operations command teams, to better and to ensure that they never see something downrange they have not seen back here. In fact, it should be a lesser task in many ways because of the training we're driving up towards. So you got my commitment on that. As we look forward in terms of the iron triangles, I like to talk about it, modernization, training and readiness in operations. I think personal reductions and a flatter decreasing buying power of the budget, along with certainly continuing resolutions which always hurt all that works together to help us make a risk informed decision on where we go. But you got my commitment on training center. It's always gonna be the toughest, the most arduous. I like how you said risk informed decision. I understand you have to mitigate risk and do the best with it. You know, when we talk down the road again, let's visit more specific about that in a different setting. And Mr. Secretary, same thing. You know, as I said yesterday, I'm here to assist you guys. You're taking care of all of us and we wanna make sure that we're working together. As I'd like to say, we're on the same boat, we're on in the same direction. Now, General Fenton, just because this is something that's very important to me as TBIs, I know you have taken a lead with the SOF community, making sure that there is a lot more knowledge of the TBIs. Can you maybe explain to us a little bit more about any steps of new equipment that may have been issued to SOF to prevent or mitigate some of these TBIs? Senator, I absolutely can. And that question and certainly my answer point right to the heart of our number one priority as you and I and the Secretary discussed yesterday are people, they are competitive advantage and comparative advantage. And everything we do on a health safety and welfare is really pointed toward that. I'd say on TBI and certainly concussive type events that all affect in the brain, we're taking a number of steps. As a trailblazer and pathfinder, I think so come was the first to come out with a brain health policy that certainly has then been adopted by the department and many others. And that's because to my point, we're committed to the focus of our people and being a trailblazer for the department. Thank you. The other thing you'll see us doing is really through a lens we call trying to understand this, both the concussive type event and blast type events, going to any location that'll do research for us. One of those was Massachusetts General Hospital, Command Sergeant Major and I visited, gotten an out brief on that and was really able to determine where we might want to go on a longitudinal study. That was a shorter, probably one year study against 30 of our high-end teammates. But where we take that along with some studies we're doing out of other research locations in North Carolina. I think beyond that, what you see us doing is learning to ID it through baseline assessments similar in some ways to what the NFL may be getting for concussive protocols. We're working closely with the NFL on how they're doing the work they're doing. So we're informed by it, we're sharing ours as well. And then blast sensors as you just may have intimated in terms of what we have for our teammates to wear. I think you'd see us across all that and lastly mitigating it. We recognize a lot of this type of concussive events, specifically the brain, comes in training for our force to be as lethal as they need to be and to win every time, downrange, one called upon. And so you see us in places like our shoothouses or our blast ranges with absorbent material. You also see us doing a lot more senator in the AR VR space. So we can get reps and sets before we have to actually get in the dirt and fire the weapon though we gotta do that in order to stay lethal. You'd see us also looking at the sensors as I mentioned to ID it. And then at some point we're even looking at printing lower blast or pounds per square inch charges, 3D printing charges we can use in the breach. And then lastly, I just add suppressors. We're getting after all that more in order to protect our most incredible investment our people. TBI is something very personal to me. Something I'd love to work with you on recently at Shot Show, which I know a lot of your community is very familiar with that. And I was, I came across some equipment that I thought was extremely interesting. And I'd love to maybe get it across your desk at some point. General Hawke, I do have a question for you but I'm out of time, Mr. Chairman. And so I'll submit it to the record, right? Thank you. Thank you, Senator Mullen. Senator Bloom with ball please. Thanks, Mr. Chairman. Thank you all for being here and thank you for your service. General Fenton, I wanted to ask about Task Force 10, TF 10 and the role that it has played in advising and training Ukrainian forces very, very commendably and ably done, as I've seen on the five trips that I've made to Ukraine in the last couple of years. And I know they've been there continuously. They have been a critical source of advice and training. In your knowledge and perspective on the Ukrainian special operators, have they increased in their abilities over these last couple of years? What have you seen from the standpoint of Task Force 10 in advising and aiding the Ukrainian forces during that time? Senator, thank you for visiting with our teammates out there as many times as you have. I know they really appreciate it. We all do that you get to see it in full motion when you're right next to them in the actual environment. I would tell you, we're very proud of Task Force 10 and the work it's done for almost three years now against the untoward illegal invasion aggression of the Russian Federation. I'd say that as I think about that at its heart, it is about the power of partnerships. The partnership between U.S. special operations while we do it outside of Ukraine with Ukrainian special operations teammates who come out to get training on shooting, moving, communicating, staff and communications and many other things. And that little Task Force is at the heart of all that. I think the partnership extends beyond just the U.S. and Ukrainian special operations. As you saw Senator in there, there is a very robust across the globe bunch of teammates in there from the special ops community in Europe, outside of Europe who all as well are looking to help the Ukrainian special operators. So we're very proud of that. Thank you for giving me an opportunity to talk about it. I think at its heart partnership, but it's partnership for a consequence for Ukrainian soft to win alongside their Ukrainian military. And they absolutely have increased in capability and capacity as you've asked me. Not only since JTF-10 arrived as a part of Sakyur and our theater special operations command request to us to put something out there for them in General Cavoli, but since 1994 because that is the very first time U.S. special operations had an opportunity to meet Ukrainian military. And we've gone on the journey to build their special operators, non-commissioned officers and that entire special ops since 94. And I assume that the failure to approve a supplemental package of aid for Ukraine would affect the special ops aid for those Ukrainian special operators as well just as they would the entire Ukrainian force. Senator did absolutely would. I think I'll start first by as the secretary and others have said, Secretary of Defense, the message it sends across the world about democracy and where we stand. The second thing is if Ukraine ever was just fighting Russia alone, that's not the case now. I think as you and the committee here know, it's Ukraine versus Russia, plus Iran, plus North Korea and tangentially even the PRC. So even the supplementals are woven together because the adversaries are linking themselves and that way laid out. And then lastly, it certainly backfills the stocks that special operations command has spent money on already in order to be a part of the contingency that is all things Ukraine. On another topic, I know that the army recently announced significant reductions across the force to include billets in the cavalry, scout, military police and special ops community. And I believe that no green braids will be cut, but instead the army plans to cut enablers. I also am aware that recruiting efforts obviously are an issue for the army. I wonder, number one, how the cuts in those billets will affect the special operations community. And number two, how are recruiting efforts going for special operation? Senator, I'll make a couple of comments and certainly defer to Secretary Mayer on this. I'd say you rightly pointed the heart of all this ISS, the reductions, specifically against a backdrop of increasing demands that I've laid out previously in crisis response and many others, was the recruiting challenges that the army and many services, but the army acutely facing in a big way, along with fiscal challenges. And I think even at the heart of it, just the desire that all of us have to transform. I think as a result of the Secretary's Secretary of Defense's decision, we're still assessing the impacts. What that looks like across five years as we layer that into the five year defense plan against the skill rates and specialties we've been directed, communications, intelligence, logistics. And I think we're still assessing that. But there is a, as already I'm getting a sense in our theater special operations command that we'll be able to meet less of what they demand. And I think we owe this, certainly the Secretary and the Secretary of Defense our assessment as we go forward. Thank you. I defer to Secretary Mayer. My time has expired. So if there are further responses, perhaps you could provide them in writing. Thank you very much. Thanks, Mr. Chairman. Thank you, Senator Blumenthal. Senator Cotton, please. General Fenton, I want to continue down that line of questioning from Senator Blumenthal about the cuts to Army special operations forces, about the logic behind it in particular, which I think may be faulty. You testified to the House recently that the Army's proposed cuts to special operations forces are occurring. This is your quote, against the backdrop of ever increasing demands from our combatant commands. And then Admiral Acollino from Paycom testified that special operations in Paycom are critically important for training our partners in increasing combat capability. So it sounds like both of you are making the point that special operations forces play a very important role, not just in fighting and winning a war, but in deterring conflict, both in the Pacific and around the world. Is that correct? Senator, that's absolutely correct. We see those demands as not only I, but not even just the Indo-Paycom commander. I think others in testimony throughout the last couple months have made the same. Because one justification for these cuts coming from the Secretary of the Army is that special operators are supposedly the less important right of boom. To put that in English, boom is when shooting war starts, people start returning fire. Left of boom then would be leading up to any kind of conflict. In that space that you just talked about, aren't special operators in contact with US partners? And in some cases, the enemy, almost every day, left of boom, so to speak. And why is that contact important? Could you explain a little bit more? I can't, Senator. I'll start by saying that SOF and SOCOM have a very important part to play for almost eight decades, starting right at World War II and then coming forward in not only in boom, in conflict, high-end operations, but in particular where our value, my estimation is the highest is left of that, preventing it, preventing conflict. There's our NDS and many other documents direct us to do. I think our skill sets are perfectly apportioned for that, Frank is our DNA. If, while we're out there, there is a potential for the rough edges of a conflict, we're also preparing the environment, developing options, different ways of doing business for our combatant commands that present challenges and dilemmas to any adversary. So there's a whole bunch of value left of conflict. SOF has got value in conflict as well and then I would just offer Senator, additionally in a protraction, because you and I both know that no conflict is 30 days or 40 days. Those things protract, and I think SOF's got value there as well. Let's be even more concrete. Let's look at a specific case study with Ukraine after the first invasion of Ukraine in 2014, our Army Special Operations Forces, well, US Special Operators more generally, were in routine contact with Ukraine. Can you explain the payoff that that pre, I guess in this case it was both post-conflict and pre-conflict, post-2014 invasion, pre-2022 invasion, and the dividends it paid when Russia invaded in 2022 for those at that eight year period? I can't, Senator, I'll try to make it quick. I'll wind it back just a tad, our contact with Ukrainian military started in 1994 by Special Operations. Maybe when no one else was looking, but Special Ops was. And our ability to be with the Ukrainian military since 1994, and in particular Bill of SOF, did a couple of things. It built a non-commissioned officer corps. I think you and the committee here know better than anybody, that is the incredible value proposition our whole military brings across the world. They didn't have that. We changed them from a Soviet style anything into a more Western based approach military, specifically in Special Ops. I think all that came together on the second, certainly after 2014, but on the second invasion in 2022, when we knew that the Russian Federation understood how important Ukrainian SOF was when a couple of the first targets during their attacks had Ukrainian SOF implications. I think that continues. And I think that in many ways almost looks like a mutual fund. Small investments over time, with a high payoff when called upon that continue to grow. And I think I don't see that just in Ukraine. I've seen that in Colombia, during planned Colombia when U.S. SOF was there in support of Southcom, doing what we did with Colombian SOF and Colombian military. I've seen it many other places. But I think there's a high value left of conflict that certainly SOF plays part of. Okay. Mr. Meyer, in the time I have Romania, I've got to ask you a question. I'm kind of surprised it hasn't come up frankly in the last two hours. It's a matter of Arion Tabata-Bai, your chief of staff. So she was allegedly part of an Iranian foreign ministry information operation. She used to work for Rob Nally, a well-known Iran sympathizer who's had his security clearance revoked by the State Department as under investigation. That's all we know because the State Department has stonewalled us on this. When we raised concerns about Mr. Tabata-Bai last fall, the Department of Defense assured us that protocols were followed. We don't have any more information about it. I mean, I'm sure protocols were followed for Alder James and Robert Hansen as well. I think it's a basic function of our oversight responsibility for us to have more information about Mr. Tabata-Bai and how someone with these ties to a well-known Iranian influence operation ended up working for you. Now, I almost want to express my regret to you personally because I don't think you hired her. I think she was hired into your office. So I don't think you're the person that made these decisions, but she is working for you in your office and we haven't heard much about it at all since we inquired in the fall. So I have to ask you, what's the status of Mr. Tabata-Bai and how can we be confident that even if protocols were followed, they got the right decision made given Mr. Malley's status of still being suspended and having his clearance revoked? So Senator Cotton, Ms. Tabata-Bai still is employed in my office. She is part like all the other civilians, military contractors in the department subject to continuous vetting that's done by the Defense Counterintelligence and Security Agency. That's about all that I can provide you in this forum and that's what I've been provided by the folks that are really responsible for security in our department, sir. Can you provide us more in another forum, like maybe the closer one we have coming up? I can provide a bit more, sir, yes. All right, I'll see you there. Thank you, Senator Cotton. Senator Warren, please. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. So we know that firing weapons can expose service members to pressure from blasts that can cause traumatic brain injuries and other harms. The New York Times revealed last year that artillery units fighting ISIS in Iraq and Syria suffered from hallucinations, seizures, depression, and suicides after firing more rounds than any artillery unit since the Vietnam War. Special operations forces are one of the communities at greatest risk and SOCOM is now taking steps to protect special operators, including by regularly testing their cognitive health and requiring instructors to stand further away when troops fire certain weapons. But there are gaps on the ground. The New York Times observed as special operations training and quote, none of those safety steps could be seen. One concern is that we may miss operators' suffering injuries because we're only screening their cognitive health every three years. So General Fenton, would service members benefit from annual cognitive health testing to monitor the potential impacts from blast exposure? Senator, I think we would all benefit from an increased periodicity on health screening and testing and we've got many ways to do that. Good, I'm glad to hear that. I am also concerned that these operators may be afraid to ask for help or may not even know that they need help. So these regular screenings are critically important to saving lives. I think there's more that we can do. A commander is trained to know how to guide their team through enemy territory, but it is hard for a commander to take care of their troops if they don't know the risks that the weapons pose to their troops' brain health. So General Fenton, would commanders benefit from having more accurate safety data on weapons systems that their operators use, like the level of blast coming from the weapons? Senator, absolutely. Hits right at the heart of what we're all charged to do, which is number one, the health, safety, and welfare of our soon uniformed service members of everybody in our charge. And SOCOM is moving out on that. But we've got to get this information to the people who are in these on-the-ground leadership roles. And I think we also need to make sure that troops who are suffering from blast exposure, injuries receive the care that they need. I am proud that Massachusetts is home to a nonprofit organization called Home Base that takes care of the invisible wounds of veterans, service members, military families, and families of the fallen. Home Base's comprehensive brain health and trauma program helps get 95% of our service members back into the field and makes it easier for special operators to receive treatment mid-career rather than waiting until they're leaving the service. General Fenton, would special operators benefit for more access to programs like Home Base? Senator, absolutely, if I might. First of all, thank you for the conversation you and I had about this. And our desire to get more access to centers like this and Home Base is incredible. It's a blessing for your special operators as are some of the other centers as well that are out there. And we absolutely would benefit from getting more access to it because we see the results, the incredible outcomes where somebody goes in, has a number of musculoskeletal all the way down to just in the ability to need a new pair of glasses because of some neuro things. And that absolutely, we'd love to take more and leverage more. The work they're doing is truly amazing, both to assess and diagnose the problems and successfully to treat them. And that's the part we have to underline about TBI. This is one of the reasons that I am proud that I along with Senator Ernst and Senators Tillis and King and Kane and Scott and Duckworth and Cardin will be introducing the Blast Overpressure Safety Act to require the DOD to take much needed steps to mitigate service member exposure. There is one more place I wanna say quickly where we need to close the gap between policy and action. Socom said back in 2019 that it would start issuing blast exposure gauges to all of its operators. Despite knowing about this need for over five years, it was not included in your budget and was relegated to your annual unfunded priorities list. When you don't include critical programs like this in the base budget, it sends the message to service members and to their families that it's not a real priority for your command. So I wanna work with DOD and with Socom on these issues, but you need to clearly state in your budget that you take this issue seriously. Budgets are a statement of our values. Senator, if I might, thank you for that. We absolutely will. I would say in this case on this blast sensor system that we put into our unfunded priority list this year, it came in between two budget cycles. When in 2019, as directed by the NDA, we went after in Socom, a number of different blast sensor opportunities and options, they didn't meet our standard. The majority of them were out in a commercial variant. Now we've zeroed in on a blast sensor, I would call it system. And that's why in between two budget cycles, I absolutely wanted this Congress to see it, understand how committed we are to it, but you've got my commitment. That thing will be in our budget going forward next year. It just happened to be a timing and a fact of life change out in the commercial environment. Thank you, I appreciate that. Thank you. Thank you, Senator Warren. Senator Bud, please. Thank you, Chairman. And thank you gentlemen for being here. General Hawke, it's good to see you yesterday, good to see you today. From your perspective in Cybercom, what can you briefly tell us about the nexus between cyber and space and SOF? Senator, I think this is an area we continue to explore, that each of us have the responsibility to be able to deliver capabilities in support of the other combatant commands and also to meet our unique mission requirements. What we're finding is that as we partner, there are things that we can do together that we couldn't do independently. And being driven by things like Indo-Pakum requirements, we've been able to identify a number of those activities and we see increasing opportunity for our collaboration to be able to advance all of our missions and really how we think about integrated deterrence as we campaign together. Thank you for that. Just I'm looking at that as a two-way street, right? I mean, you look at cyber enables SOF and the entire joint force and the physical access that SOF requires, that SOF provides actually, SOF provides the physical access. And that also enables critical cyber operations, did you agree? We do and I look forward to be able to walking through some examples with you in closed session. Thank you. Secretary Meyer and General Fenton, again, thank you both for being here as well. So in your joint testimony, you state that you have, and I quote, you have seen an increase in the combatant commands demand for SOF capabilities and our critical enalers in support of campaigning towards national defense strategy priorities, end quote. So how would you characterize that increase in demand as it is across all combatant commands? Secretary. So Senator, I would start by saying that as we've already testified, we've seen an increase in crisis response requirements because combatant commands are well versed in what SOF brings in protecting American citizens, be those diplomats, be those private citizens and the ability to buy down risk that SOF brings, that if there's a crisis, both combatant commanders are gonna reach for a SOF tool in the first instance. Many of our combatant commanders are still very focused on the counter-terrorism mission. They've still got ISIS, they've still got al-Qaeda. We've seen in some cases a resurgence of ISIS in areas, both in Africa and the SENCOM AOR. So that's another requirement that continues to remain steady if not increase. And then I think in the Indo-Pacific and certainly UCOM, we've seen a lot more requirement for SOF to bring more of that low visibility, more precise capability, often in small, hard to notice formations that combatant commanders have requested. So I think as the world becomes more complex and there's more requirements, it's natural for the combatant commanders to reach for that SOF tool because it brings a lot of different capabilities, sir. General Flynn, I'll just add to that question. You know, when I think of SOF, you used to think about just counter-terrorism, but now I think about great power competition and regular warfare. Something SOCOM has also been doing for the last 20 years and doing more of today. Would you care to elaborate on that, General Flynn? Senator, I'd absolutely agree with you. I think from our founding back really right in and after World War II, great power competition and a great deterrence. It was at the heart of all that. As was strategic raids and rescuing hostages we did in the Pacific Theater, even World War II, that's come forward. So it's really eight decades of integrated deterrence and crisis response and 20 really hard-earned combat of that eight of counter-terrorism experience, making us an incredible force. And we're tailor-made for this error. To both of you again, we've already discussed at length in prior months that the Army proposes to cut almost 3,000 special operations billets over the next five years. So now we see, and we've talked about it today, the increased demand for SOF, but what's the risk to mission and the risk to force for those cuts? And how do you prioritize? What do you do with those requests? Secretary? So Senator, I think fundamentally we have attempted to remain focused on providing the unique capacity that SOF can bring. So we have, in many instances, looked to cut overall ability to provide those forces, but retain aspects of those forces. So said another way, we're keeping capability even as capacity goes down. That's just less to meet some of those requirements. What we remain laser focused on though is that those forces are all prepared to the right levels to go out the door. So we're not gonna take any risk in that regard. We're gonna make sure that they're prepared for the mission they're going out to do. Fundamentally what it means is we've looked in some places to reduce numbers of billets that are hard to fill, but at the end of the day, if that's in psychological operations or civil affairs or some of our key enablers, intel, logistics, communications, that means when we do hopefully have more forces come in through recruiting and other means, we'll have less billets to fill, sir. Thank you, Jennifer. Anything in closing you'd like to add to that? I've just added that we do it all through a risk informed approach, as the secretary mentioned, thinking about modernization, readiness and operations and keeping that in equilibrium. Yet at some point we need to win today and win tomorrow. And every opportunity we get, we take a look at it through that prism and really work forward from there. Thank you all. Thank you, Senator Budd. Senator Hirono, please. Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman. Thank you for your patience. I would ask each of you to speak very directly into your mic so that I can more clearly hear you. General Hawk, we have a growing need to incorporate small businesses and non-traditional vendors to help strengthen our defense industrial base to meet demands in the Indo-Pacific and around the world. Last month, the Department of Defense released its defense industrial base cybersecurity strategy to help protect these industry partners from sabotage and theft. Can you talk about some of the steps you are taking to defend our industry partners from cyber attacks and specifically how your actions will encourage and assist the incorporation of small businesses and other non-traditional vendors to grow the defense industrial base? Thank you, Senator. As we think about the cyber defense of the defense industrial base, we've been given authorities both by Congress and the Department, really through the DOD-CIO, to be able to grow our partnership with the defense industrial base. We have done that through both NSA and Cyber Command. From an NSA perspective, the ability to establish the Cyber Collaboration Center that has direct engagements with over 1,000 companies that make up the key leadership of the defense industrial base and allow us to share information back and forth about cyber threats, provide specific services to the defense industrial base, and now increasingly thinking about small businesses, particularly those that are involved in artificial intelligence. How can we provide them an understanding of threat as it relates to that? Those are key areas, and as a Cyber Command, as we increasingly leverage our acquisition authorities, our ability to move agilely with those small business is one of the areas that we think will give us advantages as we go forward. I think this is an area that needs to be constantly attended to because I serve on the Small Business Committee also, and I have talked with small businesses who would like to be able to work with DOD, but the DOD has all of these, and rightly so, these requirements that need to be updated where these small businesses need to be certified that they are protected from cyber attacks. So I hope that you are paying the appropriate attention to help the small businesses be able to comply with all of these cyber security requirements that do change quite frequently. Understand, Senator, and I think this is, from our perspective, why we have such a close partnership with the DOD-CIO in terms of the work that they do to set those standards, we want to be able to reinforce and partner with those small businesses. Yes, thank you. Secretary Mayor and General Fenton, I was pleased to see you highlight in your testimony and your paper remarks that diversity in our special forces provide us an asymmetric advantage. Can one or both of you speak more about why diversity is so important to solving operational problems our special operations forces deal with on a daily basis? So Senator Hirono, we think diversity is important because it has an operational imperative and indeed continues to provide outsize effects in the strategic environment as well. So I think one of the things that SOF is known for is, as you said, problem solving. If you have people who come at this problem from a different perspective, different backgrounds, different way of looking at it, we're gonna be inherently better across the force in solving these problems. But even if we put in the context of the integrated deterrence mission set, whether that's in the Indo-Pacific, whether that's in Europe, having people from different backgrounds, they speak different languages, maybe different genders can blend in different ways and be more effective in different societies with different partners, that's something that we're asked to do every day. And so we can't all look the same and think the same. And that fundamentally, I think, is something that's been a tenant of the special operations community for decades, ma'am. I very much agree with you that diversity is not something that should be supported because it's the right thing to do, but there are very pragmatic reasons that we should do that and it makes our operation forces that much better. And obviously it's also in the corporate arena that there are studies and analyses that show that the more diverse the corporate sector is with in terms of their hierarchy of employees, the better the outcomes for them. So I think that is very much the case in our DOD. One more question regarding workforce development, General Hock, your predecessor, General Nakasone, who previously testified that one of his highest priorities was maintaining a skilled cyber workforce. What are some of the things that you are doing to encourage these people to get into a cyber training? In particular, I'm interested if you are doing anything special to encourage women and minorities in contemplating these kinds of jobs. Senator, I think from our perspective, where it really starts for us is our academic engagement. How do we partner with universities across the country to be able to draw talent that's gonna allow us to have the most qualified force that's really representative of our nation? We wanna bring them into our force, we want them to come to an environment that allows them to meet their full potential and to develop. So we see those academic partnerships as foundational and we've grown those across both the National Security Agency and US Cyber Command to take advantage of that. Once they're in our force, we also wanna ensure they're very well trained. So one of the things that the authorities that we've been given in US Cyber Command as the joint force trainer of the department, setting the training standards for anybody that does cyberspace operations in the department. We really started with those cybersecurity service providers of our weapons systems and of our service networks. So we wanna keep raising the bar of the training that we're giving to everybody in the department that serves in cyberspace. I hope you're reaching out to women and minorities in your efforts. Yes. Yes, ma'am. Thank you. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Senator Butt is recognized again. Thank you, Chairman Lowen for the follow-up question. General Fenton, I think you were starting on this just a moment ago. And would requiring soft specific guidance that be issued as part of OSD's annual defense planning guidance? Would that help the services better account for soft value proposition as they determine their size, their structure and their posture? And we'll start with you, General Fenton Secretary Meyer, if you have anything to add. Senator, as you stated, I'll make a couple of comments and pass this, Secretary. I'll start by saying we absolutely, as a department, have got to be focused on sizing for conflict. That's in my estimation, that's our worst day when we're at high-end conflict and we've got to absolutely understand the requirements across the services and soft that we need for that. I think what I would offer now since SOCOM is diving into this at our level is that with the changing character in environmental war against the backdrop of primary mission, prevent great power conflict. There's a whole bunch in the left of conflict, before conflict that soft does, that we as SOCOM first, along with Secretary Meyer, need to really go through an analytical rigorous process to say we ought to be able to bring that to the department as part of that construct as well as what happens when you protract, you go beyond maybe a 30 or 40 day scenario that we recognize has been very rare in this world, that it's 30 or 40 days. On top of that, I think we're also exploring how that, plus what we do in the crisis response arena and the counterterrorism arena is all wrapped up into soft value contribution and in support of the nation. Thank you. Senator, I think it would be helpful because I think it would help to continue a process we're already on in the department which is really twofold. It's looking at a very challenging element of trying to measure elements of conflict and what you're preventing, which is very challenging and I think where soft plays. And then I think the second part to your core question is one of the things my office is particularly focused on is being able to articulate to the programs and resourcing side of the department the value of soft. We often say, we want our soft operators to be silent professionals, but we don't want them to be not having a voice when we do exercises, when we experiment, when we build a construct for a future fight. And that's really important. And I think something that continuing to focus whether it's in defense planning guidance, excuse me, or any of the other guiding documents in the department reminding the services, in fact, reminding the entire department to account for that value proposition. It helps me, it helps SOCOM to have that voice so that we can articulate that value proposition, sir. Thank you all, chairman. Thank you, Senator Budd. And gentlemen, thank you for your outstanding testimony. We will reconvene at approximately 1220 or in SVC 217 for the classified portion of this hearing. I will remind my colleagues there's a vote going on now. And they should vote. But until then, I will adjourn the open session of this hearing and thank you very much.