Rep. Martha McSally: ‘We’ve got a more dangerous world than I’ve seen in my whole lifetime’

A Republican, McSally narrowly beat Democratic incumbent Ron Barber in the southern Arizona district that had been represented by Gabrielle Giffords, who was badly wounded in a 2011 assassination attempt. The race was so close that a victor wasn’t declared until Dec. 17, when a recount showed McSally with a 167-vote margin out of more than 200,000 votes cast.

McSally, 48, graduated from the Air Force Academy in 1988 and retired in 2010 as a colonel. She has flown the A-10 Thunderbolt II attack jet in combat in both Iraq and Afghanistan and later commanded a squadron of the aircraft, making her a formidable opponent of efforts by the Air Force to retire it.

She also successfully sued the Pentagon in 2001 over its requirement that female service members in Saudi Arabia wear head coverings.

The conversation was edited for space.

Washington Examiner: What made you want to be in Congress?

Martha McSally: I served in uniform for 26 years. … When I see things are broken, I want to do something about them — it’s just part of our culture in the military, you know, not walk by a problem.

So I was feeling very frustrated with the scene going on in Washington, D.C. I’m concerned about the future of our country and I just felt a conviction, and call to duty. I’m not going to complain about it without doing my part to fix it.

I’ve never been politically active before, except I guess when I was a kid; my Dad ran for school committee, so I was canvassing neighborhoods with him. I was really young.

Examiner: You’re serving in a district once represented by Gabrielle Giffords. Given what happened to her, has it been difficult to come out of the shadow of that?

McSally: We’ve been through a lot as a community, and that tragedy certainly impacted us deeply, including the people who lost their lives and those who were injured — so any community is going to be rocked by that, right? Congresswoman Giffords has been an example of courage and strength in the aftermath and the recovery, and what she’s had to go through personally. … She’s been a great example, I think, of perseverance. …

It’s deeply ingrained in Tucson, what happened, so that’s certainly a factor, but I’ve been out on the campaign trail for three years, and people are not focused on a person, per se, but more moving forward, moving the country and the community in the right direction. Still, Gabby being in our thoughts and prayers, but it’s time to move forward to have somebody there in D.C. to fight for them, get our economy growing and protect the things that matter.

Examiner: You’re a rarity among members of your generation, compared to previous generations, in that you have combat experience and you’re on the House Armed Services Committee. How do you think that experience is going to color your work in Congress, especially on national security?

McSally: We’ve got a more dangerous world than I’ve seen in my whole lifetime, and we’ve got a military that is atrophying and in a very difficult position to keep readiness up to address the threats that are going on.

I’m really concerned about a hollow force. We’ve lived through that before in the early ’90s, or the beginnings of that, and I’ve still got a lot of friends in the military, so I’m getting firsthand information on how it’s impacting units.

So that experience as a veteran, as somebody who has led in combat … you just understand the context of what we’re dealing with much easier, I think, because you’ve been there. And we can speak I think with credibility, those of us who are veterans, on the implications of things like sequestration and short-term decisions and continuing resolutions, and things that seem to be reasonable decisions up here, and how at the end of the whip, when you’re the squadron commander in a unit that’s supposed to deploy anywhere on 24 hours’ notice, how that impacts you and not being able to train your troops and make sure they’re ready to do the mission. So I don’t have to read up about that. I understand it firsthand.

I think it’s important also when we’re making decisions regarding armed conflict and how we’re going to deal with the threats around the world that we have people who have been the ones deployed, so when we’re having debates as to whether we should send men and women into harm’s way we take great care to not just think that’s a debate going on in a room here in Washington, D.C., but it’s impacting people’s lives who have raised their right hands to defend their country. …

So we need to have those debates. I believe the country needs to be more engaged when it comes to what our military is doing and the use of military force. So I think we can also be a voice to our communities as to what the military is dealing with.

Examiner: Can I ask you about a couple of specific issues? First of all, sequestration and military readiness.

McSally: It’s been devastating, first of all. …

There’s ways for us to gain efficiencies in our military spending but it’s not by these salami-slice, across-the-board cuts that don’t provide any sort of flexibility to figure out how to be more efficient and effective.

To just give an example, the squadron I commanded, the 354th Fighter Squadron, when it came back from combat in Afghanistan last year, it was grounded. … This was back, I think, in April. And they were not going to get airborne for one sortie until the end of the fiscal year, end of September. Can you imagine that? I mean, an entire squadron which is one of a very few that’s responsible to deploy anywhere in the world on 24 hours’ notice, and we ground them completely because we don’t have the money for the flying hours.

Now, eventually they moved some things around and got them flying again, but not at the rate that they should to be combat-ready, and the implications of that down in the long run are sometimes totally misunderstood. It’s not just a stop and a start. When you take an entire squadron of pilots and you say you’re not getting any training or qualifications or upgrades or experience for months, then that impacts — you’ve got now captains who have less flying hours than they should when they’re promoted to major, and people that are being delayed being upgraded to instructor pilot. Eventually you have squadron commanders who have less experience, so there’s a second order of consequences there.

You might save money in the short run, but it takes far more money to get back up to the readiness level that you just lost, and so being able to explain in layman’s terms how the shortsightedness of the way we’re doing business actually costs more in the long run is something that I can speak to firsthand, obviously, because I’ve seen it and I’m watching it happen right now.

Examiner: How about the pay and benefits issue?

McSally: I took that survey [from the Military Compensation and Retirement Modernization Commission] so I’ve got a little bit of “undercover boss” perspectives on how the questions were asked. I look forward to seeing what they think they gleaned from that because I’ve got my own very strong opinions of it, having taken the survey myself.

When people put the uniform on and they raise their right hand to say they’re going to defend America, and put their lives on the line for that, and then move their families around and their spouse can’t have a stable job and then the kids are having to be uprooted all the time, and the constant deployments … that’s just not where we should be gaining our savings.

We’ve got to make sure that we can recruit the best and brightest, and that those that we’ve recruited and those who are serving that we keep the promises we had to them of how they’re going to be compensated and what sort of benefits they’re going to have for the risks they take.

This is a covenant between the country and those in the military, and as we’re looking for ways to get our budget in order, from my perspective this is not a way for us to try and do this on the cheap — especially, we’ll see, after 14-plus years of combat deployments … we’re going to have a retention problem, especially if the economy starts to get better and we’re going to lose our most precious resource, which is human capital.

Examiner: How about the A-10? You saw the comment from the general about “treasonous” comments to Congress, but of course you probably don’t need anybody to tell you —

McSally: Yeah, no I don’t. And I talked to his boss. He’s been counseled.

The A-10 brings a capability to America’s military that no other airframe brings. Right now there’s nothing that provides the lethality, the loiter time, the survivability to do close air support, forward air controlling and combat search and rescue mission commander. …

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This is not about, “Oh, I don’t want anyone to retire the airplane that I flew.” … There’s nothing that brings the capability that the A-10 brings. We just invested over a billion dollars into the airplane to rebuild its wings, upgrade it to the A-10C model — it’s new avionics, it’s datalink-capable, glass cockpit, GPS munitions. So we just invested all this money into it to keep it flying up to 2028 and beyond.

It’s one of the lowest-cost airplanes to operate, and this is a reckless decision. I see that probably the president’s budget will be trying to mothball it again, and I can promise you I’m going to be leading the effort to save it. … It’s a cheap airplane, it’s a powerful airplane and it is not where we should be cutting our budget right now.

Examiner: You’ve had a track record of breaking barriers and advancing opportunities for women in the military. How does that affect the way you approach your job in Congress in dealing with those issues?

McSally: I am very passionate about making sure that we have the best military capable and that we pick the best man for the job, even if it’s a woman. I’ve dealt with the cultural and structural biases against our women in uniform, at many different levels and throughout two-and-a-half decades.

So we’ve come a long way, but we still have a long way to go. I do intend to be a leader in advocating for these issues that are impacting women in the military, whether that’s making sure all positions are open to them and they’re not just stereotyped based on their gender, and also to stop the scourge of sexual harassment and sexual assault going on in our military.

This is a readiness issue. This is a criminal issue. This is about protecting those who have come forward to say, “I want to serve in uniform and I’m going to put my life on the line,” yet they’re being raped by a squadron-mate?

This is something that the leadership has screwed up for too long, and I’ve been watching them talk about it — new training programs, more Powerpoint briefs — but there are some underlying cultural issues that are still deeply ingrained that are more the root causes, that I intend to be leading on to address those.

Because it doesn’t take another Powerpoint brief. It takes changing the environment so that women are truly valued as equal warriors alongside the men and not as second-class support people who then are dealing with all sorts of dynamics that happen to include sexual harassment and, worse, sexual assault. …

I’ve been a woman in the military, I’ve dealt with these dynamics, and as a commander I’ve had to also be in the position where I’m having to address these issues with the authorities you have as a commander. So I think I can speak with credibility and I intend to do that.