“BREAKING DEFENSE”
“Mr. Shanahan, you’re
not making me happy,” the chairman said. “You just ducked basically every
question Sen. Fischer asked you.”
After Nebraska Senator
Deb Fischer tried to elicit the nominee’s position on how to respond to Russian
violations of the Intermediate Nuclear Forces (INF) treaty, McCain stepped in.
McCain’s biggest
objection to Shanahan, however, was the nominee’s 31 years at America’s second
largest defense contractor, Boeing. (Only Lockheed Martin sells more to the
Pentagon. And Sen. McCain, thanks to the long-running scandal over Boeing’s
former tanker deal, is believed to harbor a deep suspicion of Boeing’s
conduct).
“Not a good beginning.
Not a good beginning,” Senate Armed Services chairman John McCain told the
administration’s nominee for deputy secretary of defense this morning. “Do not
do that again, Mr. Shanahan, or I will not take your name up for a vote before
this committee. Am I perfectly clear?”
“Very clear,” said
Patrick Shanahan, enduring a rocky confirmation hearing for the No. 2 position
in the Pentagon, which remains unusually short on senior officials. Other
senators at the hearing asked Shanahan about Pentagon procurement, especially
about nurturing innovation, continuing the Third Off Strategy for high-tech
weapons, and starting the Pentagon’s long-awaited audit this fall. But McCain
repeatedly took the mike to berate the Trump nominee for non-answers on Russia
and for potential conflicts of interest after his 31 years at Boeing.
In that initial
exchange, Shanahan’s specific offense was giving a vague non-answer in his
written testimony to the committee’s question on whether he supported providing
“lethal defensive weapons” to Ukraine. In the hearing, ironically, when McCain
asked Shanahan to clarify, he stated his support for arming the Ukrainians so
swiftly and unequivocally that the irascible but aging senator seemed
momentarily thrown before returning to the attack.
“I want to move forward
as quickly as I can with your nomination,” McCain told Shanahan at the
hearing’s end, “(but) I am concerned. 90 percent of defense spending is in the
hands of five corporations, of which you represent one. I have to have
confidence that the fox is not going to be put back into the henhouse.”
“Mr. Shanahan, I think
you’re a fine man; you have an outstanding record; (but) take a look at your
responses that you sent to this committee,” McCain said. “Some of them were
less than specific, at least one of them (was) almost insulting.”
Citing US casualties in
Afghanistan, Ukrainian casualties against Russian-backed separatists, and the
US shoot-down of a Syrian jet, McCain made it clear he wants clear answers on
administration policy — and if the committee doesn’t get them, it will find
answers of its own as it works on the annual defense policy bill.
“I want some answers, I
want some straightforward answers, (and) if they don’t give us a strategy from
the people that I admire most, we’re going to put a strategy in,” McCain
warned. “I want to work with this administration, I want to work with this
president, I want to work with the new secretary of defense, — who I happen to
be one of the most ardent admirers of — but I have to tell you, in a couple of
weeks, we’re going to mark-up up the defense authorization bill….The president
has two choices: Either give us a strategy or we will put a strategy that we
develop into the defense authorization bill.”
“Somehow over the last
several years, this committee seems to have been treated as sort of a rubber stamp,”
McCain concluded. “That’s not what the Constitution of the United States says.
The Constitution of the United States says that the Senate would provide advice
and consent.”
