Thank you, Mr. Chairman.  I would like to join you in welcoming our nominee.  General, thank you for your decades of service to our nation.  I also want to recognize and thank your family who are here today – your wife, Laura, your children, Katie and Chris, and your brother, Scott. I know their sacrifice and support have made all the difference.

General Hyten, you have an impressive record of service to our nation and are well-qualified for this nomination. 

The Commander of U.S. Strategic Command serves as the principal military officer who advises the President, the Secretary of Defense, and the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff on our nuclear deterrent, our space and cyber capabilities, and our global missile defense requirements. 

As is often said, our nuclear deterrent must be safe, secure, and effective.  There is one additional facet that you must be able to ensure, and that is it must be ready.  You will be responsible for articulating and managing the readiness of our nuclear triad, and its command and control protocols, to deter threats that are existential to our nation. 

Integral to readiness is the upcoming modernization of our triad, which must be executed in a cost-effective and timely fashion.  And once confirmed, I will want to hear your thoughts on this issue in more detail.

Strategic Command also deploys our space assets and mitigates threats to them.  Given your background, General Hyten, you are superbly qualified for this task.  But there are other areas you will also have to lead that include missile defense, electronic warfare, cyber war, ISR and long-range precision strike.  A daunting responsibility is to integrate the capabilities and systems supporting these complicated missions so that they mutually reinforce each other and to find and fix gaps between them, where they exist.  I look forward to hearing your views on these issues and to working with you in the future.

Thank you, Mr. Chairman.