WASHINGTON (defensenews): Two top Defense Department nominees cruised through a Tuesday confirmation hearing in front of the Senate Armed Services Committee, setting the stage for a quick path towards the Pentagon.
Ronald Moultrie, the nominee for undersecretary for intelligence and security, and Mike McCord, who is seeking a second term as undersecretary-comptroller, faced little opposition during the hearing. Both Sen. Jim Inhofe, R-Okla., the top Republican on the committee, and Sen. Joni Ernst, R-Ia., said they would support the nominees, while Sen. Tom Cotton, R-Ark., expressed support for McCord.
That support likely locks the nominees in for an easy path forward, at a time when SASC chairman Sen. Jack Reed, D-RI, has said his focus is on getting a wave of nominees installed in the department.
A group on Pentagon nominees have experience dealing with the Pentagon’s acquisition system and extensive knowledge from industry, but they also have the scars from programs gone wrong and occasionally tense relationships with lawmakers.
For Moultrie, a large number of questions focused on cyber security, particularly in light of the hack of a major U.S. oil pipeline over the weekend. Moultire acknowledged concerns about defending the defense industrial supply chain from future digital attacks, calling it “inherently vulnerable” and warning that adversaries, particularly China, “understand” the industrial base and know how to target it.
To counter that, Moultrie said, a push towards greater communication between the government and industry on vulnerabilities and risks is needed.
“I think we have to ensure that we continue to identify what our vulnerabilities are in those key areas, in those key industries, in those key organizations,” Moultire said in response to one question about supply chain dangers. “We have to make them aware, Senator, of what the challenges really are and what the threat actually is. And that means we have to — I talked about public private partnerships — to be able to go out and talk to them, make sure that they understand this. And if confirmed I would work vigorously to ensure that we’re doing all we can to support the mitigation of risks in our supply chain as it exists today.”
With McCord, questions largely centered on two issues — the Pentagon’s ongoing audit, and whether he supports annual defense budget growth of 3-5 percent, a requirement defense officials first claimed during the Trump administration.
House Armed Services Committee Republicans have laid down a new marker in what’s expected to be a testy budget cycle.
The nominee threaded the needle, noting that while that dollar amount may have been correct for what was laid out in the previous National Defense Strategy, the new administration will write its own document that would require different financial resourcing.
As to the audit, McCord called it a “priority” should he be confirmed, but did attempt to level set what the effort can achieve.
“It is not the answer to every question, certainly. An audit doesn’t tell — won’t tell you whether the particular airplane you bought was the writer playing for the mission, for example, or whether the whether the contractor overcharged you. Those are those are all different aspects of control that are above and beyond the financial audit,” McCord said.
“But that said it does help identify where resources may be being wasted or improperly used, or inefficiently used. And the controls that are one of the big hurdles between where the department stands today and achieving that audit, getting all the controls in place, I think takes on new meaning in this era of cyber intrusions. So I think that they’re the business process reforms that are necessary for an audit are things that department needs to be doing anyway, and the audit is a good forcing function for the direction that department needs to go.”
McCord said that while defense officials have previously said they expect a clean audit in 2027 or 2028, if confirmed he would make it an early priority to talk with staff and see if it is possible to speed that up.
