WASHINGTON – U.S. Senator Roger Wicker, R-Miss., the highest-ranking Republican on the Senate Armed Services Committee, led his colleagues in examining the global threat picture to U.S. forces and interests with a panel of outside experts.

In his opening remarks, Senator Wicker observed the many ways in which American national security suffered in the past year because of unconstrained adversaries.

“2023 was a discouraging year for U.S. national security, and 2024 will be worse without substantial investment in our military forces. This committee recently heard about challenges across maritime, air, and space domains, as well as challenges with insufficient inventories of long-range munitions in the Indo-Pacific theater,” Senator Wicker said. “If we have any hope of deterring threats from China, we need to act immediately to enhance our capabilities.”

Senator Wicker then identified several specific areas for improvement in defense preparedness, including the procurement of critical platforms and a consideration of a higher defense topline in the context of growing defense spending from the Chinese Communist Party.

“Our needs across the combatant commands and within the services are much too long to list here. We need more submarines.We need more amphibious ships. We need to give our service members more visibility through intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance tools. We need more torpedoes,” Senator Wicker said. “We need more of the SM-6 multi-role missiles, more of the Tomahawk strike missiles our ships and submarines carry, and more of the Long-Range Anti-Ship Missiles that allow us to hit enemy ships precisely from a safe distance. And we need all of these things now...We continue to ask our military to do too much with too little, and that needs to change. I hope this committee, Mr. Chairman, on a bipartisan basis, is prepared to act this year to ensure we address this looming national security crisis.”

Read Senator Wicker’s opening statement as delivered below or watch it here.

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Our Chairman has just delivered a rather sobering opening statement.

Today’s witnesses are here to help this committee take stock of changing threats to American interests. They will help us reflect on our progress in mitigating and combating those threats over the past year or so.

The scorecard does not look good.

The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) shows no sign of stopping its military modernization project.In fact, China added 30 ships last year compared to our overall reduction of two.In fact, the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) also continues to improve its force readiness with complex exercises focused on the so-called reunification of China with Taiwan. The CCP also continues its regional aggression on other countries’ sovereign rights. For example, they have repeatedly harassed the Philippines’ resupply ships in the Second Thomas Shoal. Although the San Francisco summit between Presidents Biden and Xi produced some feel-good headlines, Xi concluded the summit by reminding the United States that he intends to control Taiwan, peacefully or not.

A year ago, we all hoped for significant progress in Ukraine’s much-awaited offensive. That progress fell short. We failed to capitalize on temporary Russian weakness, and now face a Vladimir Putin increasingly convinced he can win in Ukraine – or at least outlast us and outlast everyone else. And China, Iran, and North Korea are all contributing to Russia’s war effort.

Much has also changed in the past year with Iran. Tehran has used the chaos following Hamas' October 7th massacre as an opportunity to have its proxies attack U.S. forces more than 160 times, including with deadly consequences in Jordan and in the Red Sea. Iranian-armed Houthis also continue to attack critical global maritime commerce in the Red Sea.

Not to be outdone, North Korea seems to have moved into an offensive war preparation mode. This shift from a long-held defensive posture is a significant development, which further complicates the picture in East Asia.

Worse yet, all four of these adversaries drastically deepened their military and economic cooperation over the past year, even as we implement a National Defense Strategy that largely considers each adversary individually.

And I struggled to use the word ‘implement’ because it seems to me that we have a strategy that is not being fully attempted.

I would like to hear from the witnesses how they assess the current threats from all of these adversaries.

2023 was a discouraging year for U.S. national security, and 2024 will be worse without substantial investment in our military forces. This committee recently heard about challenges across maritime, air, and space domains, as well as challenges with insufficient inventories of long-range munitions in the Indo-Pacific theater. If we have any hope of deterring threats from China, we need to act immediately to enhance our capabilities.

Our needs across the combatant commands and within the services are much too long to list here. We need more submarines.We need more amphibious ships. We need to give our service members more visibility through intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance tools. We need more torpedoes. We need more of the SM-6 multi-role missiles, more of the Tomahawk strike missiles our ships and submarines carry, and more of the Long-Range Anti-Ship Missiles that allow us to hit enemy ships precisely from a safe distance. And we need all of these things now.

I welcome our witnesses’ suggestions on how to improve the Pentagon’s ossified planning, contracting, and budgeting processes, which continue to prevent us from producing cost-effective programs on time and at scale.

I would also be interested in our witnesses’ perspective about the sufficiency of the overall topline defense budget. The budget proposed yesterday by President Biden requests yet another significant cut in defense. He proposed this even as the Chinese Communist Party announced a 7.2 percent defense budget increase just last week. Is it too much to ask that we return to the generous portion of GDP that gave us more than a decade of peace during the Reagan era?

We continue to ask our military to do too much with too little, and that needs to change. I hope this committee, Mr. Chairman, on a bipartisan basis, is prepared to act this year to ensure we address this looming national security crisis.

Thank you, sir.