Source: United States Senator for Oklahoma James Inhofe
Today, U.S. Sen. Jim Inhofe (R-Okla.), ranking member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, questioned Lieutenant General B. Chance Saltzman, nominee for promotion to General and to be the next Chief of Space Operations.
Click here to view Inhofe’s remarks.
Inhofe: Okay, General Saltzman. Let me get the two required questions out of the way so no one else will have to do it. The two are: What worries you the most and what do you intend to do about it? And secondly, what will be the first challenge that you go after? Two questions.
Saltzman: Yes sir, thank you. The most immediate threat in my opinion is the pace with which our strategic challengers, first and foremost the Chinese, are aggressively pursuing capabilities that can disrupt, degrade and ultimately even destroy our satellite capabilities and disrupt our ground infrastructure. They have watched how we perform joint force
operations. They know how critical the U.S. space capabilities are to the joint force. They’ve learned from that, and they recognize that it is an asymmetric advantage of theirs to go after our space capabilities and deny them to the joint force. They’ve invested heavily in demonstrated capabilities that can deny us this. So, it is one of my earliest priorities to
make sure that we are on track to build and field affective capabilities and then train the guardians to operate in a contested domain, so that we can counter this activity by our strategic competitors.
Inhofe: Thank you, General Saltzman. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.