U.S. Sen. Jim Inhofe (R-Okla.), senior member of the Senate Armed Services Committee (SASC), discussed United States Transportation Command with the General Darren W. McDew, United States Air Force, Commander of the United States Transportation Command.

Click to watch Sen. Inhofe’s introduction.

As prepared for delivery:

The Committee meets today to receive testimony from General Darren McDew on the current state of the U.S. Transportation Command.

In the contested environment described within the new National Defense Strategy, TRANSCOM’s capacity to mobilize and deploy forces across the globe becomes ever more crucial to our ability to project power.

The National Defense Strategy provides clear focus on a Great Power Competition with China and Russia. Further, the National Defense Strategy emphasizes the importance of resilient and agile logistics.  The assumptions that U.S. forces will have uncontested access to airspace and sea-lanes is becoming less and less likely.

General McDew, you appear before this committee at a time when these responsibilities are of vital importance to the nation’s security.  Our adversaries are not standing still and continue to advance their military technology and global influence to mitigate U.S. ease of access and military advantages.

TRANSCOM’s job is to ensure that our operational plans contain valid assumptions for how our soldiers, sailors, marines and airmen will get to the fight—and how they will be sustained in a contested, forward environment.

Efforts are currently underway to conduct an overarching mobility study that would articulate how TRANSCOM would operate in a contested environment as well as execute its joint distribution and deployment responsibilities.

Our current approach relies on moving materiel to large air and seaports, which serve as efficient hubs but are also well-known to our adversaries—and would be very hard to defend against a precision weapons attack. The Department must begin to focus on improving resiliency.  Anything less would significantly increase the risk to any of our missions.

We thank you for appearing today and look forward to frank discussion on TRANSCOM’s potential problems and successes.

Watch Sen. Inhofe’s Q&A here.