Excuse me, I have to correct you, Mr. Secretary, because the paper's abstract did have that sentence which you excluded from your press release.

this is not a top priority for the President.

I completely agree. As we look at modernizing our four public shipyards, and I have met with many of our workers in our shipyards, they want to have the modern tools.

The primary challenge facing our Nation is the reemergence of long-term strategic competition with Russia and China.

I think if you are a Marine from Vietnam or World War II and you went into watching what the Marines were doing, you would have just been lost at what was going on with the amount of unmanned ground systems, vehicles that were in the air…

So, by the listing that you gave, are you doing enough to address the lethality gap?

Over the course of the past several months, our committee has heard testimony and received briefings detailing the increasing lethality gaps between the U.S. military and our near-peer competitors.

Don't you think there should be a lead agency, maybe the State Department, which has $120 million to do the exact thing we're talking about?

You have certainly kept a laser-beam focus on getting to a 355-ship Navy.

These threats require us to consider how we can ensure that the Navy and Marine Corps have the resources they need.

Earlier this year, Secretary of Defense Mattis announced a new defense strategy that would shift the focus for planning defense capabilities from one focusing on smaller regional contingencies to one focusing on being able to deal with…

In my opening statement, I referred to the Navy's new plan for modernizing the public shipyards, of course, after years of neglect.