{"database": "press", "table": "releases", "rows": [["https://www.mccain.senate.gov/public/index.cfm/floor-statements?ContentRecord_id=fb3e2669-187a-4bee-a244-127e7f32e158", "OPENING STATEMENT BY SASC CHAIRMAN JOHN McCAIN AT HEARING ON SUPPORTING THE WARFIGHTER OF TODAY & TOMORROW", "2015-12-03", "2015", "2015-12", "Republican", "House", "AZ", "John McCain", "M000303", "www.mccain.senate.gov", null, null, "legacy", "Washington, D.C.  U.S. Senator John McCain (R-AZ), Chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, delivered the following opening statement today at a hearing on supporting the warfighter of today and tomorrow:\r\nThe Senate Armed Services Committee meets to continue our series of hearing on defense reform. In our three previous hearings, we have reviewed the effects of the Goldwater-Nichols reforms on our defense acquisition, management, and personnel systems. In todays hearing, and the two that will follow it, we will consider what most view as the essence of Goldwater-Nichols: the roles and responsibilities of the Secretary of Defense, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the service secretaries and service chiefs, and the combatant commanders. This morning we seek to understand whether these civilian and military leadership organizations can function better to support the warfighters of today and tomorrow.\r\nWe are fortunate to welcome a distinguished panel of witnesses who have grappled with these challenging issues over their many years of service to our nation:\r\n \r\nThe Honorable Michael B. Donley, former Secretary of the Air Force;\r\n \r\n \r\nLieutenant General Michael T. Flynn, former Director of the Defense Intelligence Agency; and\r\n \r\n \r\nGeneral James Jones, former National Security Advisor; Supreme Allied Commander and Commander of U.S. European Command; and Commandant of the Marine Corps.\r\n \r\nWe welcome all of you here this morning.\r\nThirty years ago, Congress passed Goldwater-Nichols in response to serious concerns about the effectiveness of our military. The failure of the Iranian hostage rescue mission in 1980 and poor coordination between the services during the invasion of Grenada in 1983 were clear signs that something was wrong. Congress and others concluded that these failures were driven by a number of factors, including the absence of unity of command and an inability to operate jointly.\r\nGoldwater-Nichols sought to address these problems by making the unified commanders explicitly responsible to the President and the Secretary of Defense for the performance of missions and preparedness of their commands. Combatant commanders were given the ability to issue authoritative direction on all aspects of operations, joint training, logistics, internal chains of command, and personnel within their assigned areas of responsibility. Goldwater-Nichols also removed the Joint Chiefs of Staff from the operational chain of command and prevented the services from moving forces in and out of regional commands without approval.\r\nJust five years after the passage of Goldwater-Nichols, Americas rapid and stunning victory in the 1991 Gulf War seemed to suggest that these reforms had worked. However, more recent experience on the battlefield has led to renewed concern about the respective roles and responsibilities of the service chiefs and the combatant commanders as conceived in Goldwater-Nichols.\r\nA decade and a half of war in Afghanistan and Iraq suggests that the Department of Defense is not optimally organized for protracted conflicts. As Secretary Gates recently testified to this committee, his experience as a wartime secretary led him to conclude that the Department of Defense is designed to plan for war but not to wage war  at least for the long term. Indeed, whatever one thinks about the circumstances by which we went to war in Iraq 12 years ago, it should be deeply concerning to all of us that our nation was losing that war for three years, and the strategy that ultimately turned things around did not emerge from the system, but rather from a small group of internal insurgents and outside experts working around the system. That is a compelling indictment of our defense organization.\r\nFor some, including Secretary Gates, Goldwater-Nichols succeeded all too well by turning the services into force providers that are perhaps too walled off from operational responsibilities. With a confined focus on the train and equip mission, the services have overwhelmingly concentrated more on delivering long-term programs of record than urgently-needed capabilities in current conflicts.\r\nWhile this problem raises serious questions, we must be cautious of the other extreme. If combatant commanders were fully resourced with everything they believe is necessary for their theater, the Department of Defense would be totally sapped of resources to invest in critical technologies needed to counter future adversaries. I look forward to our witnesses views on whether the Department could strike a better balance between supporting both the warfighters of today and tomorrowand if so, how.\r\nAt the same time, we must also ensure that the operational organization of our military accurately reflects and responds to our present and future national security challenges. Our nation confronts the most diverse and complex array of crises since the end of World War II  from ISIL and al-Qaeda, to North Korea and Iran, to Russia and China. What all of these threats have in common is that they are not confined to single regions of the world. They span multiple regions and domains of military activity. And yet, our combatant commands are still predominantly geographically. We must ensure that our defense organization has the regional and functional flexibility and agility to address cross-cutting national security missions.\r\nMany of our prior witnesses have observed that combatant commands no longer directly fight wars, as Goldwater-Nichols originally envisioned. Instead, that is done by joint task forces, established on an ad hoc basis and tailored to a given contingency operation. This makes the dramatic growth of the headquarters staffs at the combatant commands all the more difficult to justify. I would be eager to hear from our witnesses whether, 30 years after Goldwater-Nichols, we should consider re-imagining, re-organizing, or consolidating our combatant commands\r\nI thank our witnesses and look forward to their testimony.\r\n###", 1, "2026-03-30T12:14:52Z", "2026-03-30T12:14:52Z"]], "columns": ["url", "title", "date", "year", "month", "party", "chamber", "state", "member_name", "bioguide_id", "domain", "scraper", "source", "date_source", "text", "has_text", "collected_at", "updated_at"], "primary_keys": ["url"], "primary_key_values": ["https://www.mccain.senate.gov/public/index.cfm/floor-statements?ContentRecord_id=fb3e2669-187a-4bee-a244-127e7f32e158"], "units": {}, "query_ms": 1.9683889113366604, "source": "dwillis/congress-press", "source_url": "https://github.com/dwillis/congress-press", "license": "MIT", "license_url": "https://github.com/dwillis/congress-press/blob/main/LICENSE"}