Click here to view Senator Cotton’s Questioning.

Washington, D.C. — Senator Tom Cotton (R-Arkansas) today reaffirmed the importance of the Army’s arsenals, ammunition plants, and depots and questioned Army Secretary Dan Driscoll about the Army’s plans to use its Organic Industrial Base to fix the nation’s munitions crisis.

A video of the exchange may be found here. The full exchange is below.

Senator Cotton: Gentlemen welcome. I was at Fort Myer yesterday as the Old Guard recognized several persons as honorary members of the regiment for their critical work in getting the caisson platoon back up to limited operations and also for their work at the Carter state funeral where the caisson platoon and its horses and horsemen so well represented the army and the nation and I want to thank you both for your work on getting the caisson platoon back in operation and on the path to full operation very soon. Secretary Driscoll, I want to turn to the munitions crisis that our nation faces. President Trump recently said we need to take a long hard look at defense procurement and our defense industrial base because it’s been withering down to nothing, given all the money that we spend on the Pentagon it is unacceptable that we would ever run out of ammunition or be unable to quickly produce the weapons we need. You also acknowledged our munitions crisis at your confirmation hearing, you said one of the greatest problems facing our time is getting our munitions and getting our magazine back up to where they need to be. I assume three months on to the job, you still believe that addressing the nation’s munitions crisis is vital if we are to deter and if necessary fight and win a war against China?

Secretary Dan Driscoll: Absolutely Senator, and I would even update and say it after 100 days of seeing it, it is worse than I thought at my confirmation hearing.

Senator Cotton: Thank you, so do I and most members of the committee. That’s one reason why I was pleased to see that the Army Transformation Initiative focuses on arsenals and munitions plants and depots, your organic industrial base. Secretary Hegseth’s memo about the initiative directs the Army to modernize the organic industrial base to generate the ammunitions stockpiles necessary to sustain national defense during wartime by implementing 21st century production capabilities. Given this and your earlier remarks to Senator Wicker, I think it’s safe to say that we share the Secretary’s belief that the organic industrial base is a crucial element of our broader defense industrial base, do you agree?

Driscoll: Unequivocally.

Senator Cotton: Thank you. We’re not the only ones either, there’s other members of this committee like Senator Mullin and Senator Ernst and Senator Rosen who have long pushed the Army to strengthen its organic industrial base, that includes updating and expanding operations at facilities like Pine Bluff Arsenal in my state, McAllister Army Ammunition Plant in Oklahoma, Hawthorn Army Depot in Nevada, all of these facilities like all of them across the organic industrial base are underused and we have thought for some time that the Army should be expanding them to meet urgent national security needs. And while I agree with you that the commercial industry will play an important role in solving the crisis, I think we all know that the industry alone can’t do it all. First, I’m doubtful that private businesses are going to take up work like smoke grenades or other niche capabilities required by the military. For instance, I’m skeptical that it’s profitable for a new business to stand up production of white phosphorous ammunition, which is only produced in Pine Bluff, when the customer base is limited to the U.S. military and the costs of production are so high. Just some rough back-of-the-envelope calculations that I’ve made suggest it would cost around half a billion dollars to replicate that capacity. And second, I think we’ve all learned pretty definitively over the last three years of the Ukraine war that our commercial industrial base, while vital, simply doesn’t have the capacity to produces all of the munitions that our nation needs and that our allies need. Much less what we would need in a major conflict, so I think expanding munitions production especially for necessary materials like nitrocellulose and RDX that are currently chokepoints in the munitions supply chain will require us to leverage the inherent advantages of the facilities that you own, that the Army owns, those organic industrial base facilities like Pine Bluff Arsenal. All of these places have highly trained workforces, they’ve already gone through onerous environmental permitting, they can handle munitions, they have the infrastructure that would only be replicated at a very high cost over a period of years. Standing up munitions factories from scratch would cost millions and millions of dollars while expanding operations at these existing facilities that we already own is much less costly and more efficient. Giving that, can you commit to all of us as the Chairman suggested that we work together to create a plan to expand and modernize the Army’s organic base including facilities like Pine Bluff Arsenal?

Driscoll: Senator we absolutely want to work with this committee and this is not intended to be a cop out answer, uh um, as we look at our budget one of the fundamental problems that we have is our military is, and I’ll do a parallel and then bring it right back, are 68.5% more expensive than if we just built something right on the other side of our fence line and a lot of that is statutorily driven, there are some inefficiencies from government doing it but generally speaking there are so many constraints on us that when we try to work within our budget to expand our munitions supplies and we look at the math, the math oftentimes says we’re too expensive for ourselves, so in the limited resource world we’re living in when we try to do these tradeoffs it’s hard to justify but we’re working with this committee to try and streamline a lot of that. As for additional allocated resources we are wholeheartedly in agreement that it is one of the most critical things for our country.

Senator Cotton: Thank you. I think we will want to examine the math and we will want to work together to find the path where we can meet the nation’s munitions needs, some of which no doubt will come from expanded private production but some of which is going to have to come from our organic industrial base.