Here are some moments we hope you didn’t miss at day three of the Defense Communities National Summit:
- “Earmarks are helping” Congress get closer to passing appropriations bills on time, said Sen. Tim Kaine (D-Va.), chair of the Armed Services Seapower Subcommittee. “Congress should be allowed to direct its spending, and it also helps with overall budget responsibility.”
- “In the future, maybe we start looking at where we put missions based on what communities can provide,” said Sen. Tammy Duckworth (D-Ill.). “Let’s put our bases in places that can meet the mission but also ask what the local community can do for families so our military spouses can find jobs and our children have good schools.”
- “Manufacturing jobs are high-tech jobs,” said Halimah Najieb-Locke, deputy assistant secretary of defense for industrial base resilience. “At schools in your communities, you see cutting-edge, fantastic capabilities. When students see that, they see that this manufacturing job is not necessarily the manufacturing job of the past. Manufacturers then have a pool of people with experience in making things.”
- “As we transition from older platforms to new ones that we can use to maintain our tactical and warfare edge, we have to do that with advance systems. We need the communities to help us better transition to those new platforms,” said Paul Cramer, performing the duties of the deputy under secretary of defense for acquisition and sustainment. “It’s not about holding onto the legacies but doing the work to train your workforce to make those transitions.”
- “There’s no one solution that is going to get us the workforce we need today,” Cramer said. “Fortunately, Congress has given us everything that we in this administration have requested to help.”
- “Write that down,” Kaine joked in reply. “We’re going to use that quote.”
ADC photo of Sen. Duckworth by Will Noonan
