Mazie Hirono Presses Army General On Deployment Of Troops To Border To Conduct 'Non-DoD Tasks'

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During a Senate Armed Services Committee hearing last week, Sen. Mazie Hirono (D-HI) spoke about the deployment of military forces to to the border.

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Transcript

00:00Senator Hirono. Thank you Mr. Chairman. In 2019 the Secretary of Defense discontinued certain tasks

00:07at the border after determining that service members were not performing military functions

00:13and the continued support would negatively affect military readiness and morale. I think that is an

00:20important aspect of what is happening, the impact on morale. General Mingus and General Mahoney,

00:27how is this deployment, the current deployment, any different from 2019

00:35when DHS was asking your units to perform the same non-DOD tasks?

00:41Thank you ma'am. We've been asked to defend and secure the border and we're gonna do that. That's

00:47a priority for this administration. We're gonna execute that mission as we've been asked to do.

00:53Over time, as we build, anytime you're asked to defend, it has three critical components,

00:59a physical, a technical, and a human. And as those physical and technical things come online,

01:04as our Secretary testified, the human resources associated with this mission set will come down.

01:10But to answer your specific question that the lessons we learned from 2019 is the troop to

01:16task, as we like to use, was a one for one. Detection and monitoring, POE support, admin

01:22support, data entry, et cetera. And so there was no time to come offline to continue to train and

01:29do their mission. So it doesn't sound much different from what was going on in 2019?

01:32No, this time we're gonna make sure that the troop to task allows for rotations so that the

01:36degradation in readiness is not as substantial as what we saw in 2019. That remains to be seen.

01:43And Senator- Do you have something to add?

01:46Senator, similar but not the same. We've been on the border, as it's been stated, for a while.

01:52The mission has changed with this recent evolution where we're primarily executing

01:58engineering tasks and engineering support tasks, think barrier and placement. But we're also

02:03executing intelligence tasks. And in both of those, there is training value, especially for the

02:10intelligence analysts to collect and analyze, which is a very complex situation. But as General

02:16Mingus brought up, anytime you have 10 essential tasks and you're only training to one or two of

02:22them, you have to figure out a way to either accept risk in the tasks that you're not training to,

02:27or to figure out a training plan. And maybe unlike the Army, even before we had a rotational

02:33basis where we could plus up the skills and the tasks that weren't being performed,

02:38we'll manage the same way.

02:42From what you're testifying, you are needing to find some tasks that our military people are

02:50doing on the border that somehow has more relevance to what they should be doing in the military. And

02:56that perhaps if you had your druthers, your people would not be in the border at all,

03:01especially as border crossings are at an all-time low.

03:08During the NORTHCOM posture hearing, General Gillow said that units deployed to the southwest

03:15border get only one dedicated training days per week. General Mingus and General Mahoney

03:20and Ms. Moore, is one day a week normal for military training?

03:25Depending on which cycle you're in, ma'am, it could be normal. But I'll go back to where I

03:30talked about before, is it's the ability to cycle people in and out of their tasks associated with

03:36the border mission versus going back and the ability to train on their mission essential tasks.

03:41The other thing I would offer, and this is going to expand on General Mahoney,

03:44is that at the highest level of our doctrine, the joint force has to be able to execute offense,

03:48defense, and stability operations simultaneously. This is a defensive operation,

03:53and so there is training value associated with that. Is it going to be the same as if they went

03:57to the National Training Center? Absolutely not. But there's still value to be had if the

04:02leadership takes the right approach to it. Senator, I'm not familiar with exactly what

04:08NORTHCOM said, but I would maintain that our engineers and our intel analysts have had far

04:14more than one day of training to train for this mission. For obstacle and placement,

04:20for intelligence analysts, they undergo a whole battery of training to prepare them for just

04:28this support. So you're saying that our troops on the border are actually getting

04:35something that is equivalent to more than one day a week in training.

04:42I think that you're doing your best to be very forthcoming in your assessment of your troops

04:55being deployed to the border. Clearly, you're doing your best to enable these people to be

05:08getting some sort of equivalent training, but frankly, it kind of stretches the imagination

05:17to think that that is happening and that they are not losing the kind of training and opportunities

05:24to train that would be the case if they were not deployed. Senator, from a GAO perspective,

05:31I'll just say real briefly that I think back to one of my previous jobs at GAO,

05:37GAO's Homeland Security and Justice team, and that team continues to do oversight of DHS.

05:45I think about all the capabilities that currently exist within CBP and ICE and other federal

05:52law enforcement agencies on the border. I think from an oversight perspective,

05:57it would be interesting to pursue what those agencies are doing and at what point are their

06:02capabilities insufficient to meet the mission needs on the southwest border. We're not looking

06:07specifically at that topic right now, but I think that's something valuable to think about.

06:12From a readiness perspective, one of the trends we've seen over the years is there can sometimes

06:17be a tendency to look to DOD to perform functions that can also be performed by the domestic and

06:25civilian agencies. In many cases, that's definitely warranted, but DOD comes in with a heavier

06:31footprint. It costs bigger dollars, and it does have a readiness and a mission and a resource

06:37tradeoff for the department as well. Of course, a flight using military aircraft

06:43to take only about 100 people to another country costs over $2 million. That is not

06:50a very efficient use of military resources. You raise a good point, Ms. Maurer. Up to today,

06:56we have not received information from either the Homeland Security or the DOD as to the need

07:05asserted for the troops to go to the border. We await that kind of information, but until then,

07:12highly questionable. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

Mazie Hirono Presses Army General On Deployment Of Troops To Border To Conduct 'Non-DoD Tasks'

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