Army Officials Hold a Press Briefing on President Biden's Fiscal 2025 Army BudgetOn-Camera Press BriefingComptroller Michael McCord, Joint Staff Director of Force Structure,[...]

LIEUTENANT COLONEL LINDSEY ELDER: Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen. I'm Lieutenant Colonel Lindsey Elder, and thank you for joining us here today to discuss these Army's fiscal year 25 budget request. The Honorable Gabe Camarillo, Undersecretary of the Army, and Major General Mark Bennett, the Director of the Army Budget, will provide you an in-depth overview, then take a few questions.

Attribution is on the record. Please hold all questions until the end and once called upon. For transcription, please state your name and your news organization.

Please limit your questions to one and one follow-on. And tomorrow we will also hold a telephonic media roundtable, March 12th, where you'll have another opportunity to ask additional questions. We have 40 minutes for today's event.

Gentlemen, the floor is yours.

UNDER SECRETARY OF THE ARMY GABE CAMARILLO: Well, good afternoon, everyone. It's so great to be here with you to discuss the Army's FY '25 budget submission. For the third year in a row, I am joined by Major General Mark Bennett by my side, and we look forward to going through a few points.

I think Deputy Secretary Hicks pointed out earlier today that budgets reflect priorities, so we look forward to the opportunity to discuss some of the Army's priorities for the FY '25 submission. Next slide.

I'm going to start by just pointing out that our budget overall is $185.9 billion for FY '25, and it's consistent with Secretary Austin's priorities. It is first about defending the nation, making sure that the Army has a combat-credible and fully ready force. It fully funds all of our readiness, CTC rotations, flying hours, and it also makes significant investments in exercises that build readiness.

His second priority, of course, is taking care of people, and it funds $70.7 billion in military personnel funding to account for increases in basic pay, housing and subsistence, investments in positive command climate, which we'll discuss later, child care, and a significant investment in housing, which I look forward to discussing today.

Also, it continues to fund the transformation of our recruiting enterprise. Third priority for Secretary Austin is, of course, succeeding through teamwork, and I would just note here that the Army is indispensable to the United States' ability to build ties with allies and partners, and you'll see reflected in the '25 submission a significant investment in campaigning exercises, particularly with foreign partners and allies as well.

Next slide.

I'll turn it over to General Bennett.

DIRECTOR OF THE ARMY BUDGET MAJOR GENERAL MARK S. BENNETT: Thank you, sir.

Again, my name is Major General Mark Bennett, and I'm honored to serve as the 32nd Director of the Army Budget. This slide shows a comparison between the FY '23 enacted appropriations, last year's FY '24 President's Budget Request, and this year the current FY '25 President's Budget Request.

I will note the information presented on this chart and throughout does not include supplemental funding unless we annotate otherwise. In the aggregate, you can see our total budget request, again, is 185.9, roughly $429 million more than the FY '24 request, a roughly 0.2% increase. You'll also note that for the third year in a row, all those that are shown there, all in base funding.

Our military personnel accounts grew $821 million from the '24 request level, roughly 1.2%. This was due to primarily rate adjustments to include 4.5% for the basic pay raise, 3.9% for the basic allowance for housing, and 3.4% for subsistence.

The Army's '25 military construction and Army family housing request of $3.9 billion is an increase of roughly $1.1 billion and supports a total of 45 projects across the total Army, including nine barracks projects, three child development centers, and one youth center. These facility investments are focused on the quality of life for our soldiers and their families.

Our operation and maintenance funding request decreased $640 million from the FY '24 request levels, roughly 0.9%. Our O&M accounts fund required unit readiness to meet directed readiness levels and base global force management allocation plan requirements.

The O&M appropriation does account for planning assumptions of recently announced force structure changes. It also funds our recruiting initiatives and our transformation of our recruiting enterprise, which we'll talk about shortly as well.

The RDT&E decreased roughly $1.7 billion, reflects moving into production from RDT&E, as well as reshaping and optimizing our R&D efforts.

And lastly, the procurement request is up 4.5%, roughly $1 billion more than the FY '24 request, as the Army pursues key and essential equipment that supports the Army modernization strategy that's aligned with the National Defense Strategy.

The Army continues investments in long-range fires, air defense, and deep sensing capabilities, along with organic industrial-based investments that include recapitalization projects and production-based support efforts.

I'll now turn it back over to Mr. Camarillo, who will discuss with you our recruiting enterprise transformation.

MR. CAMARILLO: Before we get off this slide, I just want to point out on the decrease in RDT&E from FY '24 to '25, reflects a number of our large programs transitioning from the development phase into production. Two such examples in this budget are AMPV and then, of course, CH-47 Block II, as part of our aviation rebalance, which I'll discuss in a little bit.

Next slide, please.

So I want to talk a little bit about end strength in recruiting, which has been a topic that I've been reporting on in these briefs for the last two years. In our FY '25 submission, we do have an active duty guard and reserve end strength that's reflected on this slide. I'll just read the numbers for the regular Army active component.

The '25 request funds 442,300 soldiers. For the Army National Guard, it's 325 soldiers, and for the Army Reserve, 175,800 soldiers across the board. It obviously reflects that we continue to work our way through the current challenges with recruiting.

I do want to highlight that this budget submission will aid us significantly in our ongoing efforts to transform our recruiting enterprise from one that was really set in the 20th century to one that will actually help us to recruit, identify, and attract the workforce that we're going to need well into the future.

There's a couple of recruiting reforms that Secretary Wormuth and General George had announced previously earlier this year that are reflected in the '25 budget. The first of which, of course, is including the development of a professionalized recruiting and talent acquisition workforce, where we're creating an MOS, a military occupational specialty, for recruiters for the first time.

An expanded focus on the recruiting market beyond recent or immediate high school grads to those who have graduated in the last few years, reflecting the fact that it's very hard for an 18-year-old high school graduate to think about a long-term 20 or 30-year career at that juncture in his or her life.

Often it's best to expand our focus to more students who have recently graduated or come out of high school, maybe even had some college, as they begin thinking about a long-term career. There is ongoing efforts to improve the way we select military recruiters and how we train them. You'll see that reflected in the budget.

And then, of course, taking Army Recruiting Command and elevating it to a three-star command that directly reports to the Secretary of the Army in an effort to definitely reflect the importance of this particular mission.

There are ongoing efforts that are reflected in the '25 submission as well. Continued expansion of the Future Soldier Prep Course, one that we continue to see with a lot of success, 95 percent graduation rate over the history of this program.

And, again, this is helping us work with high school graduates to meet the academic skills and the physical skills that are required to meet our current recruiting standards. And we're having a lot of success with this particular program.

There is also a significant boost in recruiting, marketing, and advertising in the '25 budget submission, $1.1 billion across all three components, active guard and reserve. And then, of course, continued investment to the tune of $675 million for all of our recruiting incentives in this particular budget submission.

And that's, again, across all three components for things like critical skills bonuses, quick ship bonuses, and other incentives to ensure that we can enlist the force that we need.

Next slide.

I do want to shift and talk a little bit about what it takes to ensure that we remain an employer of choice and that we can retain the talented workforce that we need. And Secretary Wormuth and Army leaders have, for the last two years, really emphasized the need to have sustained investment in housing, quality housing for our soldiers, both for families and for individual soldiers in barracks.

And so I think what you'll see here, you know, in this particular budget submission, despite the challenges that we face with the FRA caps, we were able to make a significant investment in soldier housing to the tune that you'll see reflected in the '25 submission.

If you look at what we've invested in this budget, and that's not just in military construction, but that's in sustainment, restoration, and modernization, overall, over the FYDP, the five years, it is $2.1 billion on average that we are investing across all three components, active guard and reserve, to make sure that we're addressing barracks of all types, permanent party, institutional training, and collective training.

As General Bennett has said, there are nine barracks projects in FY '25, which is higher than we had last year to the tune of $935 million. Those are seven active and two Army reserve. And then we have funded Army sustainment funding to 100 percent of the requirement, which is the first time I think we've done that in recent history. And that was with an investment of $680 million.

And again, the value of investing in sustainment dollars is that it avoids more of our current barracks inventory to degrading in quality over time. We think we can avoid more MilCon in the future by investing in the higher sustainment dollars today.

And overall, I'll just say that this is part of our ongoing effort to help address the Army barracks deficit and to ensure that soldiers have quality housing anywhere that they live.

And as part of that, I will just say that one of the investments I want to point out in this budget is the investment in, you know, personnel to serve as barracks managers. It's something we saw in the recent NDAA. These are personnel that are going to be responsible for ensuring that maintenance is done on time, that we can address critical deficiencies in the quality of barracks.

And we are putting money in in this '25 submission to be able to get after that requirement. And I also say that in the NDAA, we're very grateful to Congress for passing new authorities that will allow us to use R&M funding, restoration and modernization dollars, to be able to fully replace failing barracks. And we fully intend in the out years to utilize those authorities to maximum effect to address the need for soldier housing.

Mark, I'll turn to you.

MAJ GEN. BENNETT: Thanks, sir.

I'll just highlight the seven projects on the two that are in the reserves. On the active component side, barracks projects at Fort Johnson, Fort Leonard Wood, Joint Base Myer-Henderson Hall, one at Joint Base Lewis-McChord, and three at Barton's Barracks in Germany.

The two reserve component projects, there's one at Parks Reserve Forces Training Center out in California, and then Fort Buchanan, Puerto Rico, to just list those nine projects. And, again, the 325 percent increase from our FY '24 barracks request of five barracks projects, up to nine this year.

Thanks, sir.

MR. CAMARILLO: All right. Next slide, please.

So I want to next pivot to the Army's role in the Indo-Pacific region. As the National Defense Strategy states, the PRC is our pacing challenge. It is the focus of our National Defense Strategy, and the Army is laser-focused on developing both capabilities and also capacity to be a critical part of the Joint Force in that region.

As I've said before, the Army has three major roles to play in the Pacific. The first is in helping to establish integrated deterrence as part of the Joint Force. So we fund in this budget $461.4 million in FY '25 for Pacific Pathways, which is an increase from the prior year and also reflects our steady commitment to building relationships with partners and allies in the region.

It also includes rotational deployments to the Pacific, utilization of our 5th Security Force Assistance Brigade, and increased use of the JPMRC, which is the first rotational training center that is located in the Pacific.

The second role we play, of course, is development of air and missile defense capabilities and providing long-range fires to the joint fight. We support, for example, the Air Force and its Agile Combat Employment Model, and we're, of course, critically involved in defending the homeland in Guam.

So investment in continued capabilities that will be relevant in that AOR to include $172 million for continued development of Patriot, as well as more funding that General Bennett will go over for procurement of PAC-3 MSE. IFPC, our continued development of that air and missile defense system, with $167.9 million in RDT&E in FY '25 and $657.6 million in procurement.

On the long-range fire side, I will note that we are remain committed to the joint program with the Navy for long-range hypersonic weapon, with investment of $1.2 billion in the FY '25 submission for continued development and testing, as well as $416 million for the mid-range capability and $233 million of which is for procurement for both SM-6 and Tomahawk missiles that enable the Joint Force to engage maritime targets from land.

And our third responsibility, of course, is helping to lead the charge on contested logistics, where you'll see in the FY '25 submission $86.6 million investment in Army watercraft, for both the maneuver support vessel light and heavy, as well as other enablers, as we continue to work through our contested logistics CFT through Army Futures Command to develop options to address and close critical gaps.

General Bennett?

MAJ GEN. BENNETT: Yes, sir. In addition to the Patriot investment you mentioned, Patriot missiles, another $963 million for 230 missiles. And I'd also like to highlight of the 11 exercises that comprise the Pathways exercise this year, for a total of $377 million, that's a 200 percent increase from this year's level of effort for just the nine Pathways exercises.

So, obviously, a lot more soldiers and a lot more participation in those campaigning efforts that's going to go on in the Pacific in Fiscal Year '25. Sir?

MR. CAMARILLO: Next slide, please.

Of course, the Army is a global force. And so, in addition to the Pacific, I did want to point out a couple of areas that we continue to place a significant amount of emphasis. First, we continue to focus on addressing the threat in Europe presented by Russia after its invasion of Ukraine.

We do have in this particular base budget of FY '25 about $625.6 million for continued deployments and support to reassure our NATO partners and allies, $2.1 billion in the European deterrent initiative, and a whole host of other investments in capabilities as well as campaigning activities and exercises that are part of that European theater.

I also want to point out that we remain active in CENTCOM. And here I want to point out the critical investments in counter-UAS capabilities, where in this particular budget, we have enough funding for a grand total of 690 interceptors from Coyote Interceptors to include also procurement of M-LIDS and FS-LIDS programs of record to address the counter-UAS threat.

And I would also point out investment in directed energy to address the small UAS threat, $31.6 million in RDT&E for high-energy lasers through our IFPC HEL program, and a little bit of $4 million of RDT&E to continue maturing prototypes recently received on the IFPC high-powered microwave, which, of course, is a capability that's designed to defeat swarm threats.

General Bennett?

MAJ GEN. BENNETT: Yes, sir. I want to add that the ground readiness line that you see there on the bottom of that UAS capabilities list is to procure and field seven family of counter-UAS systems, or our focus systems.

Additionally, the $395 million provides 103 of those 230 missiles that I mentioned earlier, so that's inclusive of that grand total, but that is specifically resourced through the EDI initiative.

MR. CAMARILLO: All right. Next slide, please.

Of course, as I mentioned earlier, readiness has been our priority, and this is a budget that fully funds our readiness requirements. I mentioned 22 CTC rotations fully funding our flying hours for aviation, and I would just also note four rotations in the JPMRC in Pacific.

I would also say that as we have recently revised Army force structure, we have accommodated that and reflected that in the FY '25 budget submission. So the growth you'll see in the out years include the full build-out of the five multi-domain task forces, four IFPC battalions, nine counter-UAS batteries, and four M-SHORAD battalions.

General Bennett?

MAJ GEN. BENNETT: The investments that he just described represent only a sample of the Army's full capability growth that we've recently announced, but our continuous transformation efforts in FY '25 as well seek to internally fund unit-level experimentation to test new equipment, organizational formations, as well as tactics, techniques, and procedures.

We will seek to experiment with autonomous systems, such as counter-UAS, as well as including some of the human-machine integration systems managed through our Army's Future Command efforts. Sir?

MR. CAMARILLO: Next slide, please. So this slide, I want to focus a little bit about critical munitions and what we've been doing to address this in the FY '25 base budget. But I do want to point out at the outset that to understand how the Army gets healthy, how the United States gets healthy on critical munitions, it is utterly dependent on not only the base appropriation but also the supplemental.

So you'll see, first and foremost, that, you know, we've been able to leverage a significant amount of investment, thanks to the prior support of Congress on supplementals, to expand production capacity in critical munitions. These have been investments both in the organic industrial base and in the defense industrial base to meet expanded demand.

We need that investment in order to be able to build back and buy back our inventories and to accommodate what we see as heightened global demand that's going to be sustained for a long period of time.

This base budget enables us to buy production quantities of things that are required, to include PAC-3 MSC, GMLRS on a multiyear appropriation, both of those systems, continue to buy Javelins and the next generation version of the Stingers that we heard so much about two years ago in this base budget.

But I do want to point out the point of the graph that I illustrated. I know it's a little bit hard to read from the screen for those of you that are in the room, but what's intended to show is in one particular example, and this is 155 artillery, in order for us to reach the top line of that graph, which shows how production capacity increases over time, the x-axis goes from FY '23 to FY '26, you'll see our ability to produce the number of rounds per month of 155 artillery goes up over time.

But the ability to buy the quantities that are needed in order to effectuate that production capacity is from a combination of different sources. First of which you'll see in the blue bar, it is our base appropriations, which are funded quantities for 155 in the FY '24 budget submission, as well as FY '25. And you'll also see in the pink shaded area, those quantities that are funded in the supplemental.

And the reason that this slide is so important is that we can't get to where we want to go without both. And you'll see in that red portion of the top line where the expanded production capacity is not made possible unless we get this current FY '24 supplemental that is currently pending in Congress.

So that top line, you see the production capacity starts to go up, and then it kind of turns into a red line in FY '25. That is because we need to have critical investments in the supplemental. I think there's a total of $1.5 billion in the pending supp. that are absolutely needed for us to make our goal to achieve that top line in terms of capacity. That top line is where we get to 100,000 rounds per month of 155 artillery.

And as I've said in the past, we can't get there without the supplemental and the combination of investment that comes in our base budget.

MAJ GEN. BENNETT: At the top right of the chart, you'll see some of the supplemental investments. The top part is actually the request that's sitting over that Honorable Camarillo just mentioned. And the $2.6 billion that you see listed there is funding that we've already received and some of the locations of where those efforts went to that are currently underway in some of the systems that we have.

I'd also like to highlight a little on the organic industrial-based investments that we've got in our base budget request, totaling over $1.9 billion. I'll just talk to you real quickly.

One is in our ammunition account aimed at $643 million to improve the facilities at Holston, Iowa, Radford, Scranton, and others, as well as another Abrams upgrade recapitalization effort for about $112.8 million that will be at the Lima Joint Systems Manufacturing Center. So two ways we're taking actions in our base budget to get after improving the organic industrial base.

MR. CAMARILLO: All right. Next slide, please.

Continuing on the theme of Army modernization, I do want to take just a moment and highlight our continued momentum that I continue to emphasize in our ability to deliver on the modernization priorities that we've had a few years ago.

There are some significant milestones of note in the FY '25 submission that include significant achievements in FY '25. I know that one of the questions that was asked of Under Secretary McCord just a minute ago was PrSM Inc. 1 missiles, which continue to field in the fourth quarter of FY '25.

And, of course, that's our next-generation ATACMS replacement, which will be continually upgraded as we continue investment beyond that to PrSM Inc. 2 and ultimately PrSM Inc. 4, which gives us a 900 kilometers of range.

We also see that the mid-range capability has first unit equipped in fourth quarter of FY '25, and that's as we deliver the procurement quantities of missiles that we need to be able to fully field that system.

And then integrated air and missile defense, which is our IBCS command and control system, begins fielding in the fourth quarter of FY '25 following testing. And these are efforts that have been underway in recent years and are going to be fully functioning capabilities that soldiers will have in this particular budget submission.

General Bennett?

MAJ GEN. BENNETT: Some other investments you see on the right-hand side, in terms of the HMS radios, that represents 12,604 radios as well as 33,800 radio, the LCTR radios that replace our SINCGARS system. On the ground vehicles, the 505 million there you see listed is for our RDT&E, for our XM-30 effort. Additionally, we plan to buy 33 M10 Bookers, as well as 30 SEP V3 Abrams tanks.

Additionally, we do look forward to the multi-year procurement programs and GMLRS in PAC-3 that you see listed there on the right, to get after the 6,408 missiles you previously saw, as well as the 230 missiles for PAC-3. Sir?

MR. CAMARILLO: Next slide, please.

Of course, there are some shifts in our modernization portfolio, and I did want to take just a minute to discuss the rebalancing of aviation and how it's reflected in the 25 submission. As many of you have already heard, the context for this is twofold.

First, we recognize that there are changes in the battlefield, the development and availability of, you know, lower-cost sensors on UAVs and other platforms like launched effects, and its ability to give the Army more options to achieve its reconnaissance mission.

And secondly, industrial-based concerns. We faced last year, looking forward, the very real possibility of a decline and an end in production of two important lines. One is the UH-60 Black Hawk platform, and the second, of course, is CH-47, which had not yet entered into production on Block II.

So we made some changes, and the shift is approximately $4.5 billion over the FYDP within the aviation portfolio. And what we did in terms of critical decisions is, of course, starting in FY '25, there will not be any further FARA development.

It will not enter into a program of record. We certainly look forward to continuing the FY '24 activities to provide an orderly closeout of that effort. We have delayed the ITEP improved turbine engine program to helpit achieve integration with the Apache and the Black Hawk platforms.

We are divesting the Shadow and Raven UAS systems in favor of developing new, and we are ending the development of the UH-60Vmodel, which was a digital cockpit upgrade that was done within the Army. So the funds are overwhelmingly reinvested in Army aviation.

First, we are funding a new multiyear for UH-60Mmodel production that starts in FY '27 when the current contract for Black Hawk production ends, so there will be no gap. There is $25 million in FY '25 for upgrades in RDT&E for the Black Hawk platform itself to help address emerging needs, and we're going to continue to operate and man that platform for many, many years to come.

We will go into production on CH-47 Block II at approximately six aircraft per year with a path to full rate production. We are accelerating the FTUAS program for future tactical UAS systems. We're investing $128 million in RDT&E and $149 million in procurement.

Some of that is to design and deliver prototypes, but it ranges a whole family of systems to include air launch effects as well as, you know, larger UAV systems, and, of course, even the tactical, more COTS-based UAS systems that we want to provide to units for soldiers to experiment with and buy at the rate that technology changes.

I will also point out on this slide as well that we will continue FLRAA development over this FYDP, and it's fully funded within this program.

Next slide, please.

I want to talk a little bit about what I call accelerating innovation adoption within the Army. There are a number of investments that I continue to keep track of that are significant for us for a variety of reasons.

For example, $755 million in this budget submission to accelerate Zero Trust, which not only improves our ability to have security but also enables audit readiness, cloud migration and secure cloud services to the tune of $244 million, and as well we are funding a number of efforts to change the way that we buy technology that shifts very rapidly over time.

I would note that Secretary Wormuth this last weekend announced the release of a new software development policy comprehensively within the Army, and what this policy now does is it aligns the Army to best practices and supports new buying models on how we deliver and develop software.

For example, it changes our requirements process to focus on iterative development with the user and working very closely in, you know, tightly aligned teams. It does common sense things that you do in the private sector. For example, there are things called authorities to operate.

Your ability to use software on one network is often hampered by where it's employed. We're going to do more reciprocity on that as well as recognizing testing that's done on the private sector side, and we're creating a new contracting center of excellence at Aberdeen in Maryland to leverage expertise, experiment with new buying models, and different alternate contracting approaches.

And I'll lastly point out on this slide, we're never losing sight of the needs of small business. They are the catalyst of a lot of innovation that the department relies on. We have talked before about specific pilot programs to try to get small businesses who have received SBIR-funded grants or other OTAs to have more partnership with established integrators.

We call that Project VISTA, where we would give in source selection on programs of record source selection credit to integrators that teamed with these SBIR-funded or OTA-funded small businesses.

You'll see that there's a number of programs that are going to take advantage of that in FY '25, to include SMET to the tune of $24 million and a couple of others that are listed on the slide.

I'll go to the next slide. Building positive command climates at scale is absolutely critical for us. I would just say that it is one of our top priorities, and people obviously are our top priority. And in this particular budget, there's a couple of highlights. The Office of Special Trial Counsel is fully operational.

We fund pilot programs that are showing a lot of promise at some of our installations, like vignette-based training with regard to particular issues like sexual assault and suicide prevention. And those examples are at Fort Cavazos and Fort Drum. And we continue to place a lot of emphasis on the right type of suicide prevention training, access to behavioral health, and counseling when soldiers need it.

General Bennett?

MAJ GEN. BENNETT: Additionally, I mentioned the three child care development centers and youth centers there. Subsidies for child care continue as well, with focused efforts for our actual child care development staff to allow them to also -- to entice them to come work with us to support our families and our soldiers.

Additionally, we are expanding our holistic health and fitness program by adding a 15 additional brigades for a total of 71 across the army. And lastly, a financial counselor is also important. $24.4 million supporting 187 individuals, FTEs to educate and train our soldiers on individual financial counseling techniques to help them manage their own budgets.

Sir, back to you.

MR. CAMARILLO: Next and last slide. I won't really brief this slide in detail. A number of you have heard me say a lot about this, and I think this is where Deputy Secretary Hicks started her press conference, which is it's very difficult to, project where we need to be or achieve what we want to accomplish when we do not have stable and predictable funding.

We're doing this press conference today without an FY '24 appropriation, and the Army is very much dependent on the current supplemental that is pending before Congress. There are operations costs that are funded in the supplemental that we really need in order to relieve some of the pressures that we currently face under the CR.

And we need the certainty of the ability to fund the procurement, the funding for people and other expenses that we need to cover that we cannot address until we have both the appropriation for '24 and the supplemental.

So, I look forward to your questions.

LT. COL. ELDER: Thank you. And again, please state your name and your organization for the transcript. Ma'am?

Q: Thank you. Tara Copp for the Associated Press. Thanks for doing this.

I wanted to ask, go back to Ukraine, particularly because so much of this is Army systems that are set forward, Army presence. The DOD as a whole is about 10 billion in the hole on Ukraine funding right now. How much of that is impacting the Army and impacting your suppliers you work with, like the Patriot producers and the GMLRS producers?

MR. CAMARILLO: Yeah, I mean, that's why we submitted the current supplemental that's currently pending before the Congress. We need the additional funding for replenishment that's in that submission in order to get where we want to go.

I just gave you one example with 155 artillery. We set a very public goal for ourselves by the end of 2025 to be able to produce 100,000 rounds of 155 artillery. We can't get there unless I get some of the capacity investments like the TNT factory that are that are funded through that supplemental. So it's absolutely critical to us.

Q: I guess it's the 10 billion coming out of the Army's budget right now. Are you guys in the hole because of Ukraine?

MR. CAMARILLO: Well, right now, we're very much dependent on, you know, kind of the need of that supplemental. So, you know, if we do not get the supplemental,I think, as the deputy said earlier today, we would have to address that in some way in future year based budgets.

Q: Hi.

MR. CAMARILLO: Hi, yes.

Q: A lot of new missiles and weapons coming on, PrSM, mid-range capability, maybe a hypersonic weapon. Do you have agreements in place with any foreign countries that you could deploy these weapons to? And then a follow up.

MR. CAMARILLO: Yeah. I mean, I'm not prepared to speak to,specific agreements to host the weapons. I will just say that for many of these capabilities that they come online, they are subject to rotational deployments around the world. You know, some of which is decided, of course, by the Joint Staff and the Secretary of Defense. So we'll work through that as these systems come online.

Q: And then the mid-range capability, you had two in FY '25 that you were hoping to get and then one -- is one already deployed yet and is it in the Indo-Pacific region?

MR. CAMARILLO: So we have one that the equipment and the initial quantities of missiles are already available. But we are -- in order to be fully ready, we need to be able to get the munitions depth, and that's where we need to buy the additional quantities of both SM-6 and Tomahawk that were actually funded going back to the 24 submission.

And I'll ask General Bennett to chime in.

MAJ GEN. BENNETT: Yeah, the 32 missiles that I mentioned, there's a Tomahawk Block 5A, 19 of those, as well as the Block 5, 13 of those. Additionally, in the procurement dollars, fabrication for the -- for Battery 5 ground support equipment is all in that request.

Q: So in order to field it, you need to have FY '24 dollars to get the magazine depth in order to field it.

MR. CAMARILLO: In order to be where we want to be and call it fully fielded.

Q: Long range hypersonic weapons question. Last year you had a couple of test failures that delayed the FOU on it. What investments have you made in this budget to address the testing and potential to get a -- just beef up testing?

And on the ERCA program, could you talk about the way forward given that apparently the prototypes have not met muster?

MR. CAMARILLO: Sure. I'll deal with LRHW first. So it's a joint program, as we always say with the Navy, and we've been working very closely with them to deal with some of the root cause analysis and to develop a test plan that will hopefully get us back to, you know, a test launch this later this summer.

We remain guardedly optimistic thatwe'll be able to do that. And, you know, the rest of the funding that's in the '25 submission is for continued development and ultimately procurement of that system.

Q: I see you slowed it down a little bit and put more money into testing and evaluations.

MR. CAMARILLO: There was somekind of additional testing that we needed to do that was more sequential leading up to this summer. So, obviously, it backs the program up a little bit. And so you'll see that the funding that's reflected in the '24 submission is just aligned to where the program is going to execute moving forward.

Q: OK.

MR. CAMARILLO: And on ERCA, you know, obviously, when we set -- we placed a lot of bets when we started all of these modernization priorities. And the vast preponderance of them have gone very, very well and exceeded our expectations, but some have not.

And so the development of the prototypes for the ERCA capability was one example where we've based a number of different technical challenges and engineering issues. So we are now going to pivot and you'll see that reflected in the FY '25 submission.

To do -- really, it's going to start with an April 3rd industry day. We're going to assess what non-developmental capabilities exist out there that might achieve similar amounts of range in terms of our long range fires, and then we'll conduct, you know, some more formal assessments of capabilities and ultimately hope to do a down select of something more non-developmental in the near term.

Q: What is that -- what's the implication of the Paladin howitzer moving foward

MR. CAMARILLO: They're independent of each other.

LT. COL. ELDER: Jen Judson

MR. CAMARILLO: Hi, Jen.

Q: Can you say if you are accelerating PrSM? When I looked at the FY '24 justification books, it shows that the plan was for 190. Now you're looking at 230. So what precipitated that -- what seems to be a ramp up? And how does that affect the procurement numbers across the FYDP? Is this due to replenishment for Ukraine or other factors?

MR. CAMARILLO: Yeah, I mean, I think the main factor there, it's the availability of the system. The need to obviously send a strong signal to the industrial base in terms of a demand signal for production. And I think we do want to accelerate ongoing development of the PrSM capability. Again, I'm focused on Inc. 4, which is where I get to 900 kilometer range.

General Bennett, do you want to add any more on the quantities?

MAJ GEN. BENNETT: Yes, sir. So the 230 cost of $493 million. Additionally, we've got $184 million allocated for RDT&E efforts for engineering and manufacturing development and the Inc. 2 seeker.

Q: And then across the FYDP, do you have any information on whether you're just buying more to begin with and then not doing as many later, or, you know, does the objective remain the same?

MR. CAMARILLO: Yeah, the objective remains the same for now. But we are accelerating our buy. I think what we're also doing, you'll see a healthy level of investment across the portfolio in this space. And it was designed to address what we see as an urgent need.

Q: OK, and then on ERCA, with the cancelation of the prototypes, what does that mean for plans for the, -- there was supposed to be like a long range fires, like, gun tube facility at Watervliet that I think FY '25 had some potential for funding to pay for that building, for that facility. So just curious if there's any other plans for that facility or if that would be scrapped because the ERCA prototype is no more?

MR. CAMARILLO: No. So Watervliet is a national treasure. For those of you who aren't familiar with it, it is the one source of manufacturing gun tubes that exist in the continental United States. And so one of the things that we were able to develop as part of the ERCA prototyping effort, was capability to develop these long gun tubes at Watervliet.

Regardless of what we end up buying as a non-developmental or kind of off-the-shelf solution, there will always be a need to refurbish, sustain and help manufacture some of these gun tubes at Watervliet.

LT. COL. ELDER: Dan?

Q: Dan Schere from Inside Defense. I wanted to go back to the 155 production chart you showed. You talked about how much you need the supplemental to get to the goal of 100,000 a month by FY '25, but you're also dependent on the base budget.

We currently don't have an appropriation for FY '24, and we've had CRs for many years. You could be in the situation where you have a CR in FY '25. So how does that affect the timeline of that production? How does that sort of shift things? And can you just sort of talk about your thinking about schedule wise?

MR. CAMARILLO: Yeah, I mean, I think you made the point perfectly. This is why we're all saying over here that it significantly hampers our national security when we do not have a timely appropriation. You know, we count on the availability of critical munitions to arrive. We contract for it. But we cannot get those production quantities unless we have the funding where we need it.

So the fact that we are still waiting on '24 appropriations. And if we were to be in the same situation a year from now, it would affect critical delays in our ability to receive those munitions like 155 on time.

Q: Do you have an approximation for, like, are we talking months that it would be delayed as far as that 100,000 goal if we're in the same situation? Just maybe an approximation?

MR. CAMARILLO: Yeah. It's really not a very simple formula because it -- as I've shown you on the slide, it depends on a combination of factors. So if I get, you know, the ability in the base budget to fund production quantities, but I don't get the ability to fully fund the capacity increases through the supplemental, then I may have money for production that I can't, you know, actually utilize because the production capacity hasn't increased on time.

So that's why I keep saying there are two parallel efforts that need to go in tandem with each other and ideally for us would have already been enacted.

LT. COL. ELDER: And so for our last question, OK.

Q: Brian Everstine for Aviation Week. As part of the aviation rebalance, we've talked about delaying ITEP. Can you quantify that? What is the new schedule you're looking at for Blackhawks and Apache? What is the funding picture look like for that?

MR. CAMARILLO: I'll let General Bennett give you the numbers and the dates, but I will just say that as we -- you know, we're committed to the ITEP program. It's just a question of it, you know, being able to be integrated in a timely way with the Apache and the Blackhawk platforms. And so I think we can show you where the funding shifts and the schedule shifts are.

MAJ GEN. BENNETT: Yeah, funding in FY '25, roughly 67 million in RDT&E. And we are focused. Sir?

MR. CAMARILLO: What we really did, we delayed the procurement by a couple of years in the FYDP and we can get you back the actual numbers. But we kept the RDT&E line going because there's still continued testing that needs to be done on those engines.

STAFF: All right, ladies and gentlemen, thank you. That's all the time that we have for today. But as a reminder, we do have another media roundtable tomorrow morning. That information and invite should already be in your inbox and we'll send out the dial in information this evening. So thank you for your time.

MR. CAMARILLO:All right. Thanks, everyone.

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