John Garamendi

Thank you to all of you who supported this long overdue recognition.

Mr. Scott has raised a very, very important question that we need to pay attention to.

If I recall, in previous hearings we had asked for an analysis of the accidents, and what was the cause, and what could have prevented that.

It must have been overheard at some bar late at night and----

Well said. And I will just say, me too.

That supply chain is already interrupted.

Most of which on the generic side, 90-some percent come from China.

This issue of the command and control systems and the integration amongst the various branches is going to be on all of our minds here.

I am eager to figure out what the final Marine force design will look like.

We are looking at how to develop our own domestic production of these key ingredients for that.

We will get started here. The committee will come to order.

I really would urge you to move in that direction, and provide for these periodic upfront costs.

Waiting for reimbursement from FEMA is just an impossible situation, and often they just let it go.

In California, in one of the fires, it was a Tennessee company that came all the way to California to do it at a very, very high cost.

Essentially, building a fleet that is militarily useful, and we can do this.

We either say this plan laid out in these documents is not worth our effort to even think about or it is.

What I am going to do is my last series of questions indicated that there was a path that we ought to explore

What I am--what I basically want to get into a deep discussion on is in this year, in this year's NDAA, build upon what we have--what we already have in place and stretch it further so that we can do two things--leading the national…

We could do this, and in the process reenergize and build in our shipyards and all the things that we have been talking about here.

Why are they doing that? Because they see it as an opportunity to build their merchant fleet, useful for their purposes.

I don't think the Navy is going to be able to afford the sealift capacity necessary to meet the new National Defense Strategy.

But we do have a problem. I am going to shorten this.

Either way, it is coming from the DOD or a strategy that would leverage the commercial side of it with militarily useful ships.

The report does recommend several strategies to develop the cargo, one of which is you use American ships when you are moving military equipment.

And there never will be until the only place you could use it is American ships.