When Navy pilot Mike Garcia launched his F/A-18 off the USS Nimitz for dangerous missions over Iraq, he was focused on the mission, but when he was back on the carrier, all too often, he was frustrated by one thing: budget cuts to the military.
“I served in a time where we were told to do more with less,” said Rep. Mike Garcia, a California Republican, who spoke to the Washington Examiner shortly after being sworn in Tuesday following a special election to replace Democrat Katie Hill, who resigned in October.
“It was painful, and we, frankly, we lost lives,” he added.
Garcia said inadequate resources due to Obama-era defense sequestrations led to record low levels of readiness and not enough resources for war fighters during a continuous, 20-year global war on terror.
“Now what we need to focus on is modernizing, improving readiness but also modernizing our forces and giving our troops a break,” he said.
Garcia also blamed the Obama Administration for making the United States weaker compared to global rivals.
“China and Russia are no longer just near-peer threats, they are now-peer threats,” he said. “COVID-19 has manifested a weakness relative to China that maybe many of us didn’t anticipate.”
Garcia cited cybersecurity and the space domain as areas of concern.
As an executive for aerospace manufacturer Raytheon for 11 years after retiring from the military, Garcia also called for modernizing and expanding the air fleet and investing in new hypersonic weapons.
The coronavirus pandemic also showed him that Americans’ dependence on Chinese-made medical equipment is another area of vulnerability.
He said the U.S. needs to double down on domestic-made personal protective equipment: “To make sure that our military is not as susceptible to a dependency on China as what we have seen as a general society is within the COVID-19 crisis.”
Garcia’s experience as a war fighter and aerospace executive have prepared him to dig into the nitty-gritty of the National Defense Authorization Act, he added.
“I’m looking forward to diving in on that,” he said of one of Congress’s most important budget approvals.
The process is sure to be contentious after a group of 29 liberal Democrats wrote to the House Armed Services Committee chairman and ranking member Tuesday calling for defense budget cuts amid heavy coronavirus relief spending.
Garcia said that is a false and dangerous choice.
“What it sounds like is that folks are being distracted and not focusing on the national security implications that this COVID-19 has,” he said. “Cutting the military to fund that right now would only subject us to another risk on a different front.”
He added that Defense Secretary Mark Esper’s call for a 3% to 5% increase to keep pace is fair, and a defense budget in the $740 billion to $750 billion range is “a good number right now.”
“Now’s not the time to be taking the foot off the pedal in terms of investing in our military,” he said.
The 44-year-old, first-generation American, whose father and grandfather hail from Sonora, Mexico, easily switched back and forth between English and Spanish in the interview with the Washington Examiner, underscoring his appeal to Latinos in his growing Democratic district.
The 20-year Navy pilot also intends to work on some of the issues facing veterans, including encouraging the Defense Department to offer them civil-equivalency training and exams before they separate and more mental health facilities when they return home.
Garcia also called on more veterans on both sides of the aisle to consider public service.
“More veterans should look at public service after serving our country in the trenches,” he said, noting a historical low level of veteran representation in the House of Representatives.
“And I think it shows, you know, I think there’s a lack of progress. There’s a lack of civility and cooperation,” he said.
“Veterans on both sides of the aisles — at least you know in that case that you’re going to get someone who’s running for the right reason. Someone who’s looking out for the interests of the nation and the good of their community, and there’s no party agenda or political loyalties before that.”
