Exclusive — Sen. Tim Sheehy Says U.S. Must Reform Defense Acquisition as China Threat Grows: ‘We Gotta Be Ready’

Sen. Tim Sheehy (R-MT) said at a Breitbart News policy discussion event on Wednesday that while Republicans and Democrats do not agree on much, lawmakers from both sides of the aisle support reforming defense acquisition as the threat of communist China grows.

“We are now aligned that we need to rebuild our Navy. We need to modernize and grow our Air Force, and we need to get our recruiting numbers back up. One of the issues though, with — as we hear about our industrial base — where it’s most acute is our aerospace and defense capabilities. We have the most exquisite gear in the world. We have the best air dominance fighters, we have the best ships, best submarines and all of that. The problem is, our Pentagon acquisition processes have focused on processes over outcomes for too long, and we have not prioritized quantity,” Sheehy told Breitbart’s Washington bureau chief Matthew Boyle.

“We’ve always prioritized quality — quality is great. But if we have one A-plus fighter jet, and the enemy has a hundred B-minus fighter jets, eventually the hundred will overwhelm the one,” he added. 

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Sheehy pointed to reports indicating China builds ships “230 times faster than we do.” 

“So, for every one ship we build, they build 230. By the way, our Navy is about 230 ships…So they can build an entire navy in a year of our Navy. They’re not as good, but that quantity does matter, especially when we have to send our ships 7,000 miles around the world to project force into the AO (Area of Operations) that they’re going to try to deny us from,” he said. 

Sheehy said lawmakers want to reduce the “bureaucratic processes” around defense acquisition, and said the “bureaucratic risk” for acquisition, as is, has been “transferred to the war fighters.” 

“A lot of people are upset about my efforts here because the people who are process-oriented, the Pentagon, say, ‘We’ve spent years building these processes, you’re screwing it up.’ A lot of the defense industry doesn’t like it because they say, ‘Listen, we built our businesses around these assumptions. You’re changing it.’ And I say, ‘Listen, I get all that, but I have one obligation, and that’s that 19-year-old Lance Corporal who lands on a beach in some island in the Western Pacific,'” he said. “My wife is a Marine. I was a SEAL. My obligation is to that 19-year-old kid who, when he calls in for air support, he better get it. And when we say, ‘Oh, sorry, we’re out of planes, we’re out of bullets, we’re out of bombs,’ that’s unacceptable to me.”

“I hope another big war doesn’t come,” he continued. “We’re going to do everything we can to avoid it. But history says otherwise — at some point in the relatively near future, we may be facing off against— right now, [China is ] the greatest military player in the world as far as quantity…and we gotta be ready.”