Chairman McConnell Opening Statement at FY26 Defense Appropriations Markup

Thank you very much, Madam Chair. My colleague Senator Coons and I work closely together and have similar views about the condition the country faces with the rest of the world. Before giving my prepared remarks, let me just say again, I think not only the prior administration, but this administration as well, have underestimated the level of challenge that we have. You've got authoritarian regimes coordinating with each other, the North Koreans, the Russians, the Chinese, the Iranians, Iranian proxies, all communicating. And the one thing they have in common, they hate us. And they want to replace the role that America plays. And so we've tried as much as we can underneath the top line to do what the two of us felt was a better job of trying to deal with the reality of the situation. So I want to thank all the members of our subcommittee, this is a very, very complicated effort to try to get beyond where we have been under this administration and the previous one. Year after year, we've failed in many ways to provide for the common defense. This bill recognizes the administration's intention to restore peace through strength, the Department of Defense's desire to achieve drone dominance, and the President's interest in having more missiles than any other country. It reflects the need to build more ships for a Navy that must compete with China. It acknowledges that America's adversaries are increasingly aligned and investing more heavily in undermining our interests, and that America must take the risk of simultaneous conflict in multiple theories seriously. But ultimately, our top line allocation of $852.5 billion, which sits higher than either the President's budget request or the House Mark, underscores that we cannot seriously address these challenges while artificially constraining our resources. We can't build a Golden Dome, or restock our munitions, or bring back American shipbuilding without sustained increased investments in all of our national defense. And we can't treat reconciliation like a cure-all. I was glad to vote for the one big, beautiful bill, but let's not kid ourselves. It was not the additive defense spending some of us had hoped for. Moving must-pay bills for major long-standing programs, from base to reconciliation, still makes little sense to me. And somehow, the process seems to have also allowed important programs to slip through the cracks. In fact, senior Pentagon officials have already come to me and my colleague Senator Coons to report that there's still billions of dollars short on programs that we were told reconciliation would address. So the point is, there's no substitute for robust, full-year defense appropriation. And this is a strong, bipartisan bill that proves we can do our job and keep our commitments to the men and women of the U.S. military. They deserve no less. Here are a few of the items we address. First, recent operations in the Middle East illustrate how quickly modern warfare can exhaust our arsenal of critical munitions. The administration's request did not fully maximize production capacity for certain critical munitions. So we added $5.2 billion to buy larger quantities of air defense interceptors, long-range fires, and other key munitions. We also added $2.1 billion to expand production capacity of munitions and included some important initial investments in restoring America's organic industrial base. Second, we also added $4.6 billion to addressing growing demand for more extensive air and missile defenses. But developing a more layered missile defense shield that can protect the homeland and our forces abroad from growing threats is going to take years of sustained funding. Third, we've tried to help the Department meet requirements that the final Reconciliation Bill and the fiscal year 26 budget request left unfunded, including advanced procurement for Virginia and Columbia-class submarines, costs to complete surface vessels, major renovations to dilapidated Marine Corps barracks, and ship operation costs for our Navy. We also included more funding for destroyer construction, shipyard infrastructure, and workforce development to help fix our ailing shipbuilding industry and get production back on track. Fourth, we invest in ally and partner militaries. We know that confronting Chinese aggression will require collective deterrence, help and grow our friends' capacity to defend themselves in the Indo-Pacific, as in Europe or the Middle East, actually enhances deterrence and helps our allies share more of the burden. It also means more investment in interoperable U.S.-made systems and lower risks for U.S. service members. These are investments that pay dividends, and I'm not just talking about treaty allies. Secretary of the Army rightly calls Ukraine the Silicon Valley of warfare. The Navy considers the maritime fight between Russia and Ukraine as the Black Sea battle lab and recognizes the need for rapid innovation. So we added $216 million on top of the administration's request for drone and counter-drone capabilities consistent with the intention of achieving drone dominance. But abandoning the foremost experts of drone warfare would be strategic self-harm. Shutting off engagement with Ukraine would undermine our military's efforts to prepare for the modern battlefield. So like our friends on the Armed Services Committee, we are restoring funding for the Ukraine Security Assistance Initiative and other security assistance programs that make America safer. So Madam Chair, I'm proud of the work of the Defense Subcommittee in producing this bill for our colleagues' consideration, and I hope it'll earn the support of the entire committee. Allow me to close with just one more note. None of the challenges we're facing today can be solved by a single bill over the course of a single budget cycle. Readiness is not a box to be checked, it's a state to achieve and to maintain. In this era of major power competition, security for future generations of Americans means the following – steady, consistent, predictable, increasing investments in our common defense year after year after year. If we're tempted to treat successful fiscal year 26 appropriations like a finish line, we're thinking about our obligations all wrong.