Assembly Standing Committee on Military and Veterans Affairs

Good afternoon and welcome to the oversight hearing of the Assembly Committee on Military and Veteran Affairs. Our subject today is the California Military Department, with a specific focus on changes that have occurred during the last two years, which happens to line up almost perfectly with the command of the current Adjutant General, Major General Matthew Beevers.

Thank you for being here. The scope of today's hearing is both narrow and broad. Narrow in that we are limiting it to only the last two years, but broad in that we are not restricting this discussion to one or even a few of the military department's programs and policies.

The military department's mission and capabilities vary more than arguably any other in the state, from wildfire suppression to emergency support to educational programs and state cybersecurity. The military Department is the state's swiss army knife.

Something I am particularly interested in learning more about today is how the State of California can help the Military Department with retention and recruitment.

A large part of that is helping guard members strike the right balance and allow them to serve. When the Federal Government calls for the guard members to active duty, where they send them out, out of our hands. But we in the Legislature have some capacity to affect what it's like living and working in this state.

I've asked General Beevers to start with a high-level overview of how the Department is currently tasked to the state and federal missions.

Before he begins, I thought it would be I'd like to properly introduce the Adjutant General, General Beevers, started his military career in 1983 with the Armor Corps and served as a tank platoon leader and armor company commander, among other staff officer roles and commands at the battalion and brigade level later in his career.

General Beevers has deployed to Bosnia and Herzegovina, Hungary, in preparation for Operation Iraqi Freedom and Afghanistan. He's been awarded the Legion of Merit and Bronze Star, among other military awards and decorations.

General Beevers was appointed deputy adjutant General of the California Military Department by Governor Jerry Brown in 2011, and Adjutant General by Governor Gavin Newsom in May of 2023. Some stage direction? No, sorry. It's okay. So some stage direction. We've organized the hearing in three items.

During the first, we're going to hear the general overview in the State of the Department. During the second, we'll be focused on youth programs and programs and proposed expansion of the challenge program in Riverside County. And the third part will be on the Army People First strategy and CMD implementation.

To conclude, we'll hear about recent organizational and uniform changes at the state guard, and after an opening presentation during each section, I will invite the Members of the Committee to follow up and ask questions or explore further discussion. When that is concluded, we'll end discussion, the discussion item and proceed to the next session.

General Beevers welcome, and I believe this is the first time our Committee has had the pleasure of hearing from you. We're eager to hear your report and please proceed.

I think the last time we appeared before this Committee was before COVID So it's been a minute. It's been a minute. So good to see you, Assemblymamber Mathis.

Hey, so I think the first part, my opening pitch, kind of State of the Department, operational, might take a couple of minutes, and the follow on topics I think will take a little bit less time and we'll be able to get to questions. But the bottom line up front for the Military Department is that it's in absolutely good shape.

With very, very few exceptions. All the predictive indicators that we have are all trending up. So very positive outlook for the Department. The Department's headcount, including our civilian employees, both state and federal, is about 20,000. We have 12,700 or so soldiers in our army guard, and that represents about 95% of our authorized end strength in the army guard.

About 4848 Air National Guardsmen in our air guard. That's in excess of 100% of our authorized end. Strengthen the challenge that we have in our army guard right now, given it's 95 of 100%. Recruiting is trending up. We're absolutely doing incredibly well given the current state of play.

Retention is where we have the challenges. And ma'am, you mentioned how this Assembly may be able to help. I'll get to that and ask for some help in that regard. And that's primarily engaging our congressional delegations on improving pay parity and some entitlement issues that we think deserve a better look. Back to recruiting.

We're right now, end of the federal fiscal year will be next month. We're about 90% of our recruiting mission already. So we expect to be probably close to 100, between 95 and 100% of our recruiting mission by the end of September. So we're trending upward.

And I think it's got a lot to do with people first that you mentioned and how we go back and make sure that we're taking care of the service members lives and making their lives better. And we think that's why it's happening.

Talk a little bit about overseas deployments right now that is dramatically lower than it has been in the past, and that's a good thing for us. The kids in our organization deserve a break. They need to get back to their families and their real jobs. And so we're feeling very confident about that.

About 481 service members are currently deployed overseas. It's interesting. I'll just read the countries that these folks are at. It's Germany, Qatar, Romania, Djibouti, Kuwait, Poland, Guam. That's a territory, not a country. Japan, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, the Emirates, Italy, and, of course, Iraq. We also have 142 service Members that serve the Federal Government here in California.

And that's primarily in our attack wing at March Air Reserve base in Riverside. We fly 24/7 combat air patrol line in Iraq and Syria. The aircraft are launched and recovered in theater, but they're flown by air national guardsmen in Riverside. So talked a little bit about federal deployments.

The state deployments are actually kind of increased while the federal deployments have gone down, which, again, a good thing. When those two things occur simultaneously, that obviously becomes a challenge. But as you probably recall, in the last few weeks, we've deployed a significant amount of resources to support Cal Fire in the latest round of wildfires that the state's had.

At the height, we had 11 rotary wing aircraft flying bucket operations for Cal Fire. Water buckets hanging below a helicopter. And then we flew six of the nation's eight modular airborne firefighting system-equipped C-130Js. That's a military air force transport aircraft.

And you slide a modular airborne firefighting system in it and it turns it into an air tanker. We flew every aircraft that was available. The reason we couldn't fly all eight is two out-of-state aircraft were in maintenance. We'd have flown them all.

In addition to that, we currently have today about 278 soldiers that are deployed in support of Cal Fire, operating as type two hand crews, firefighting hand crews. And that's on top of the 300 soldiers that we have assigned to Cal Fire full time to do wildland fire fuels mitigation.

That's clearing brush and debris and enabling access to fire prone areas in support of Cal Fire. So we're heavily invested there. In the preceding years, I think a lot of folks probably recall during the floods that we've had, we deployed hundreds of service members in high-water vehicles to rescue folks that were stranded behind floodwaters.

And we've also done a lot of work on massive debris fields, clearing huge debris fields to ensure that flooding didn't occur. And then, of course, again, with our aircraft being able to rapidly move material into to repair levee breaches. And we did a lot of that work in the last several years.

What I want to talk about now is something that we've done extraordinarily well, in my view. It's our counternarcotics task force, about 500 service members assigned to that program full-time. It's about a $50 million program, 35 million from the Federal Government, 15 million from the state.

I want to say upfront that the 15 million appropriation that we get from the state is exceptional and doesn't occur anywhere else in the country. We are the only state, the only state of the 54 states, territories, and district that gets a state appropriation to go after fentanyl and methamphetamine.

So we applaud the governor's leadership and the Legislature's support on doing that. We believe that that's actually having a material impact on fentanyl. So what do we do in counternarcotics? We're stationed across all four of the state's high-intensity drug trafficking areas. We are at the border supporting customs and border protection with counternarcotics, counter fentanyl operations.

I want to be clear that we are not on the border doing counter immigration. That's not what we do. We do counternarcotics on the border. We're at the secondary vehicle inspection checkpoints. We operate and manage the vehicle x-ray machines at all four ports of entry along our southern border. We're also invested at LAX.

We're at LAX right now doing the same work. We're out of the port of Long Beach supporting CBP as well.

We're also moving now into covering some of the rail ports of entry to enable customs and border protection to push more of their agents out in front of these kiosks and inspection points where they can do the important work of identifying suspect vehicles.

We're kind of doing the background work, which is absolutely appropriate and something we think makes a lot of sense. I'll give you a good new story, another good news story about our counter-narcotics task force. We helped San Francisco develop and implement their counter fentanyl strategy.

The City and County of San Francisco, and I think we're seeing extraordinarily good returns on that further. We imported several extraordinarily capable prosecutors that work for the guard part-time, but their full time jobs are prosecutors in District Attorney's offices across the state.

We brought them in to support Brooke Jenkins, District Attorney in San Francisco, to specifically try fentanyl cases. They stood up a fentanyl grand jury, and these lawyers, now in support of the District Attorney in San Francisco, have a 92% conviction rate. And we're not talking single-use people. This is, you know, international cartel drug trafficking organizations.

We're going after them and we're getting convictions. So back to your Swiss army knife thing. That's kind of out there, but it's something that we have the capacity and capability to do, and we're very proud to do it.

The last thing I'll talk about in our counter-narcotics task force is this is all the supply side that we've dealt with. But we're also heavily invested in the demand side. Heavily invested in the demand side. Last year, we engaged 152,000 students across 100 schools. This year we're about 140,000 students.

And what we do is, and I'm going to be clear, this is not your just say no to drugs program. We use what they call a Thrive curriculum, and this curriculum is trauma-informed.

It really goes after being resilient, teaching these kids skills to be more resilient, to keep them, you know, on the path to a drug free lifestyle. And we see huge success in that.

And I think if we can attack the demand side as well as the supply side, I think we have a fairly decent chance at getting after this extraordinary problem. Last thing I'll talk about is our cybersecurity force.

We have 27 of our cyber warriors that work full time in the California Cybersecurity Integration Center, better known as the Cal CIC, doing great work for them.

We have what we call a computer network defense team, and what they do in conjunction with the California Department of Technology, is they go out and do vulnerability assessments of the state's network. So state agencies were also in other constitutional offices as well, so we don't discriminate on that.

And so while CBP does the governance issue, if you will, we're doing the vulnerability assessments to make sure that their networks are hard enough to sustain a cyber attack. And we'll go as far as to conduct a penetration test to actually attack their network and see if we can get in.

We also will send out phishing emails, and on the bottom of the email it will say, it's a phishing email and folks still sometimes click on it. So here's my, here's my paid political announcement for better network hygiene. So I'll leave it at that. And I'll take your questions on the kind of State of the guard.

Thank you so much. I'll open it up to my colleagues if anyone has questions.

Thank you for your service. First of all, it's a lifetime that you've served, since 1986, 83?

Yeah, it's been a long time, sir.

I thank you and thank you Madam Chair, for putting this together last week, I had a pleasure to meet the Secretary of the Army, I believe, at an event here, and he mentioned that some of the recruiting efforts there is the misconception that recruiting for the armed forces, they seem to believe that it's only to become a soldier, and they don't seem to let people know that this is also an opportunity to have a career.

There's so many other opportunities than just serving. Is there something that you think needs to be addressed as far as getting more recruits? You mentioned that you're at 95% right now. What's the goal? And the number is 10,000 recruits, 5000. What's the 100% goal to get?

Yeah, I appreciate that. And I failed to mention, I appreciate you bringing it up, but the Deputy Undersecretary of the army has established a program called the California Commitment. The army believes, the federal army believes that California has been overlooked as a place to recruit soldiers from.

And I appreciate that. We don't have a lot of large army post camps or stations in our state. So that makes sense. And California has an extraordinarily capable workforce, well-educated, culturally astute. The diversity of our state, I think, is ripe for service. A couple of things on recruiting and how we're going about it.

We have to recruit where they're at. We have to go to where these kids are at. And I think what we've done to improve is, and I give General Jeff Smiley, the commander of our army guardhouse, huge kudos for this. The social media campaigns that he and his team have developed I think are absolutely appropriate.

They go to what you talked about, not, this is, this is not just a good idea. This is service. This is a career. This will build resilience. This will tee you up for a successful career whether you stay in the military or not.

We will teach you how to be resilience, because resilience can be taught, and we will teach you drug and alcohol-free. You're in good physical shape. You understand what it means to be a leader. You also understand what it means to be a follower. So I think those are all huge benefits.

I think civilian employers see that generally. So to your point, we have to go to where these kids are at and we have to engage them. And we can talk a little bit about that on help.

How do we break through some barriers, especially in large, unified school districts in our state, that generally don't have the same view that you and I have? So I think we're in a good spot, but we have to go to where they're at. And we have to explain the unique value Proposition of service. And that takes time.

It takes a lot of repetition. But we're building that back up. I would offer Covid had a devastating effect on recruiting in our state. Without a doubt. It's not an excuse, it's a reason. And we're nothing sitting on our laurels whining about COVID We're going after this and getting it done.

That's why you see our numbers trending up 25% year over year, improving in recruiting. The thing now is to retain the kids that we have and we have to make their lives better for serving. If we don't, they won't stay. Thank you.

Mr. Mathis.

Good to see you, General. Recruiting retention. Good to hear things are going back up. I remember my days trying to see if my soldiers would re-up or not. But I'd like to hear a little bit more. I didn't hear you mention the Cadet Corps and the programs happening there.

And you mentioned cybersecurity but did not mention the Starlink base of which is pretty new and in my hometown. So opportunity to kind of flaunt what we got now because I know there's a lot of work to get that.

Appreciate you teeing that up. I think that's coming up next. So yeah, huge shout out to the folks in Porterville. Just to foreshadow a little bit about my comments. Our latest starbase program, and that's a STEAM program. It's not STEM anymore. It's STEAM. They added architecture, so it's science, technology, engineering, architecture and mathematics.

The latest one we just set up is in Porterville. I was there when we did the grand opening. It's extraordinary in every respect. The kids that are participating in that are getting free STEM programs. It's incredible.

And then the work that we do in our college preparatory military schools across state, one being the Porterville Military Academy, is great. It sets these kids up for success. It gives them the discipline that they need to succeed at the next level. I mean, that's why I went to military school. So.

I'll save my other comments for later for so I have time to be around. But as a National Guard guy, it's interesting. I retire this year, but I leave my Assembly colleagues without any other veterans. And so it'll be interesting.

Yeah, it will be.

Keep recruiting because we need more guys to rush through the ranks to get all the way to here. Because who would have thought years and years ago some knucklehead from Eastad Poros who joined the National Guard would be an Assemblymember.

So I appreciate everything the National Guard does, what it does for the lives of the young men and women, the discipline, you know, I think in today's society, disciplines looked at it as a bad thing, but it's, you know, motivation's great in the moment, but discipline's what gets you through every single day.

And it's good to see that recruiting is coming back and people are looking at this as a way to change their lives but also change the trajectory of their entire family lines. So thank you all for,

We appreciate your service to the California National Guard, sir. Thank you.

And thank you. And certainly my colleague, Mr. Mathis voice has been important, especially around service and issues of being. His experience in the military has been a very powerful voice to hear and to have and to include in the discussion. So we appreciate all of your work here.

I just wanted to clarify, does the recruiting target, does that include the National Guard recruitment for prior service members? Okay.

Our mission is about 1627 soldiers a year. That's a recruiting mission. We'll increase that mission, keep pressing. We're going to grow our recruiting force, which this is. It's just how it is. So we're going to increase that. So we're feeling very, very positive about where we're at relative to recruiting going forward.

Retention is going to be our challenge.

So on the retention issue, can you describe a little bit of the guard's pay parity challenges or what are the challenges in that space or what, what are kind of the areas, you mentioned something. Most areas are in good shape. Is there an area that needs a little help?

Right, exactly. So pay parity. And it's on a couple of fronts. Number one, an entitlement. It's called basic allowance for housing. So if you're in the military and you live in Sacramento, you get a basic allowance for housing in Sacramento. If you live in Muskogee, Oklahoma, you get a basic allowance. Housing for living in Muskogee.

That all makes sense.

The challenge we have is that, and this is if you're, you know, full-time or you're participating in a program or an operation that goes longer than 30 days, which most of ours don't, if you're service to the Federal Government for less than 30 days, you're entitled what they call basic allowance for housing type two.

That is an average of across the country's basic allowance for housing rates. So if you can imagine soldiers in our organization that probably already travel 100 miles to go to drill. They are getting a basic allowance for housing type two rate commensurate with somebody in, I don't know, Mississippi, Louisiana, Oklahoma.

This is a bad term, but I view it as fundamentally wage theft, and we need to fix that. And we've worked with the Congress and our congressional delegation for over a year now trying to get that changed. The challenge is that comes at an extraordinarily high cost for the Department of Defense.

So that's what they will tell you. I think it's the right thing to do. We live in a high-cost state. We represent 15% of the nation's gross domestic products. The soldiers that serve here should get paid commensurate to that, and we're just not there yet.

So whatever the state Legislature can do to garner support to engage our congressional delegation, and we have the largest in the country, to move that ball forward would be hugely, hugely helpful. The kids that are in my organization are the best of us and they deserve everything that we can deliver for them.

So whatever you can do there. And I think the other part of pay parity is what we call specialty pay. Again. So if you're in our special forces company, you're required to do a certain amount of airborne jumps a month to maintain your qualification.

You get paid a fraction of what your active component counterparts do for the same number of jumps. This also applies to specialty pay, hazardous duty pay, explosive ordinance pay. We're just. We're doing the exact same work and getting paid a fraction of it.

And if we were doing a fraction of the work, then I'd recognize then be okay getting paid a fraction of it, but we're executing at the same standard and getting paid a fraction of it. Just unfair. So I'd ask for your help on that.

And ma'am, what we can do is I can have my smart folks sit down with your staff and work on a way ahead to engage in, tell you, Ms. Jacobs down in San Diego, Congressman Jacobs has done it, kind of been the flag bearer on this, and we appreciate her leadership in that regard, but it's going to take everybody to move this ball forward.

There's a lot of challenges in the Pentagon to try and do this, so I'd appreciate that.

Mr. Mathis.

Madam Chair, if I may, the General touches on a great point here, and this is where retention becomes huge.

If you're a young soldier and you're literally going out of your way, this is time away from your family, time away from your civilian job, to go and make sure you're staying up to date, it would be the equivalent of, if you're an attorney, you have to go do special classes.

If you're medical professional, you have to stay up on your skills. What this turns into, the parity of it is you're essentially being punished because you're not getting the same pay as your peers.

And so it gets to, well, why should I stay in the California National Guard if I'm not gonna get paid the same as the guy to my left and my right? And that's just not right, especially for California.

We like to brag that we're a nation-state, but when it comes to our soldiers, they're essentially being treated second-class compared to everybody else, and that's just not right.

Absolutely agree. And we would be happy to work together and I think join together and engage with the congressional delegation around this and see how much movement we can push forward. So, yeah, happy to follow up on that.

So why don't we go ahead and move to the second panel discussion now, which is the youth programs, SB 228, and Riverside County expansion of the youth challenge, if you could. Yeah.

For this. So on top of everything that we do operationally, we're heavily invested in the state's youth. You alluded to it, but we operate three youth challenge academies across the state, one in Stockton, one in San Luis Obispo, and one down in LA, in Los Alamedas.

These are 22 week residential programs where they're delivered, I would characterize it, in kind of a quasi-military environment. They're segregated. Students are segregated by sex. They live in barracks. The format's really about instilling self-discipline, personal accountability and responsibility and really kind of positive motivation.

We run two of these courses at each of our academies per year. We run about a 95% success rate on them. Most of the kids get through and go on to either secure a GED or high school diploma.

Once they complete the program, they have the opportunity to go on to what we call jobs challenge, which is vocational training that we work very closely with the California community colleges on to provide them additional job training to get them placed in a job.

These programs that the one in, down in San Luis Obispo has been going on now 25 years, the one in LA just graduated its 5000th cadet. And our brand new program in Stockton, we're expanding now to increase the capacity by 25%. Stockton is our newest challenge academy.

I would encourage anybody to go to one of these graduations and not cry. I'll just say that it's almost impossible. These are not boot camps, and I'm going to be clear on that. These are not.

But we are literally changing the trajectory of these kids lives and it's amazing in every respect and it's great to be a part of it. And back to an Assemblymember Mathis said about the STEAM programs that we run for.

Those programs are called Starbase and we are kind of already talked about and we'll go into much more detail, but we'll do about 8000 students since after school program this year across the four locations. And a lot of it did rocketry.

There's CAD Cam, a lot of other physics-type and architecture-type programs that we run in those after-school programs. Then I mentioned briefly about the military prep college or high schools. College prep military high schools across the state. Example of that Porterville Military Academy. Another example is Oakland Military Institute started by Governor Brown.

Heavily invested in that as well. Two year comment relative to Riverside. FY 23. Legislature appropriated about $0.5 million to do a study of the former Naval Operations Center on March Air Reserve Base. We completed that study and the low-end cost is probably 85 million, 86 million to turn it into a challenge academy.

That's a large number. I'll give you an example of how large that number is. The President's budget for FY 25 for youth programs nationally is 174 million. I think with congressional ads it'll maybe be up to 200. So you're now talking an entire third of the federal appropriation to make this work.

And granted, these programs do come with a state match, but that's given the extraordinarily challenging economic time the state's having right now. We're going to probably have to put that on the back burner or figure out another way to get that funded. But these programs are wildly oversubscribed and they create good citizens when they come out.

So we recognize the unique value of them and we want to continue to push on those when we can, when it makes sense.

So open it up for my colleagues again for any questions. Mr. Carillo.

Question. Maybe you don't have the statistics with you, but what are the demographics of the recruits coming to these programs? And are you seeing more interest in recruits coming out of high school compared to those coming out or wanting to join with an associate of arts degree or a bachelor's degree?

Again, I realize that you may not have the numbers, but wanted to see what the demographics and are those coming out of high school in higher numbers compared to those that have a bachelor's degree?

So you're talking recruiting into the Army National Guard? So right now we're about 54% Hispanic. Given that we're a majority minority state, that would track with the demographics of the state. But we're about 20% women, which is kind of a low number if you look at it, but it's a bigger number than it used to be.

So I think it goes back to the messaging and engaging these kids on where they're at. So, yeah, it's across the board.

And we've also done some work to make sure that the recruiters that we have in certain parts of our state have the cultural understanding of the places that they're recruiting from so that they can have a relationship and understand the nuances with all the different cultures in our state. And I think that's certainly helped as well.

Mister Mathis, did you want to talk more about Porterville?

Speaks for itself.

Okay. So could you talk a little bit about what conditions need to be in place for a successful program to be established and do what are kind of. Where do you see kids going after they come out of the programs? Are they going to college? Are they going into trades? Are they going into military?

I know there's some, you know, sometimes concerns are raised about is this military recruitment or not? So could you. That's multiple questions.

Okay, I'll take the last one and work our way back. So, yeah, this is, I'm going to be clear. This is not a recruiting program. I can assure you that the numbers would, would speak to that.

That said, we had two cadets that came out of our program down in Los Alamitos and they were awarded two full ride scholarships to my old alma mater. So, that was a good day. But by and large, they don't join the military. We have a program called the Jobs Challenge program.

After these kids conclude our challenge academies, they have the opportunity to participate in career fairs and not so much career fairs, but actual job training that we operate in conjunction with the California community college system. So, there are trades generally, and that's a huge place right now to be, I think, in my view.

So some do go on to college and we have folks at the local military Institute that wind up going on to service academies. But by and large, the number would be, I would offer probably less than three or 4%. Very, very small.

These kids generally go back to the communities from which they came from and it's, we're not in that business. So, I can recruit other places. I wouldn't need to do that. I think it would be kind of weird, in my view, to try to do that.

To get to your question about how do you set conditions for another challenge academy. It's money, number one. So, certain rules that we have to go by, we have to stand these programs up on kind of a quasi-military establishment already. I can't go out and build something out of whole cloth and stand up a challenge academy.

It's got to come off a military installation. Hence the reason that we looked at March to do the work there. Riverside, I think, is ripe for that program. It just takes a lot of money to refurbish the facilities, to make it appropriate. You have to have barracks, you have to have, you know, dining facilities.

You have to have classrooms and converting existing buildings, especially as old as the naval operations center is at March takes a lot of remediation. All the asbestos and all that abatement needs to go on and has to happen. So that's the fundamental challenge is finding a facility. That's the gating limiting factor.

And we think March is the right place to go next. Just given it all makes sense. The challenge is just that the cost is extraordinary.

And what is the timeline there? Or do you know when you might be kind of getting up and running and moving?

I don't know. Yeah. I mean, because there's so many other factors that are outside my span of control, given the appropriations process, both the state and the Federal Government's appropriations process, not in my control. So, I would say when the economic times are better, then we can step off on that.

But I got to tell you, Senator Roth, Senate side, is a huge advocate for that. We appreciate his leadership in trying to stand this thing up. So, these are not easy. Working with joint powers authorities, it becomes very, very challenging.

The fact that we've made it this far, I think, speaks to everybody's great work to at least get it to where we're at today.

And are there other locations where there's been expressed interest to create a challenge academy as well, or?

Every district in the state. So, you know, and I appreciate that. Right. But there's limited resources and limited places that we can do it. So, we just think that Riverside would be a great spot to do it.

And what's the waitlist like for the child?

Every program is oversubscribed. I wouldn't characterize it as a waitlist so much because kids could age out of it, but, no, I wouldn't characterize it as a wait list. I don't think. Yeah. And we lose a few kids, probably maybe three or 4%, because it's all voluntary.

Nobody's compelling them to go, you know, and sometimes it's just not for them. Yeah.

I just want to welcome my colleague, Assembly Member Addis. I don't know. We're talking about the Challenge Program, youth programs. I don't know if you want to jump in on that part of the conversation, we'll go. Okay. Go for it.

And wonderful to see you, General.

Great to see you, ma'am.

Congratulations again. I know we've seen each other a couple times, but just want to say how proud I am of the Challenge Program there at Camp San Luis Grizzly Academy that we came out and got to tour with you and then give certificates to the youth there.

And it's been kind of a shining star, I think, for San Luis Obispo County, the values that you're teaching there and or that you were teaching there that are currently being taught by other members there, other folks there. And the leadership, the confidence, the self-discipline that we saw in students at Grizzly Academy is really unparalleled.

And I might add, because this Committee may or may not know about the community service that Grizzly provides there in San Luis Obispo and comes out and volunteers for numerous events around the community and is so disciplined and well-loved. So, just wanted to say thank you for that.

Yes, ma'am.

Thank you. We'll all have to go visit now. You're intriguing us. Yeah, that is a beautiful area. So, why don't we move on to climate retention and people first?

I know, we've had a little bit of discussions around retention, and I know there's a lot of work around climate, so we'd love to hear more about that.

Yeah. So, it's important, I think, to recognize that I lead an inherently part-time force. So, most of the folks that work in our organization have a family and they have a whole nother job.

And I think after 20 years of continuous conflict and the federal deployments that went on in Iraq and Afghanistan and then the extraordinary work that we've done in the state, wildfire season after wildfire season, civil unrest several times, then Covid I think it just got to be where we might have lost sight of the fact that we were an inherently part-time organization, and that's easy to do.

So, when I took over a couple years ago, I made a very concerted effort to not walk away from it because it's our responsibility to do these things right, and we recognize that. But when we're not doing those things, we need to give our people the time and space to go back to doing what they were doing.

Their lives are already challenging enough. I mean, if you have a family and a job, the predictability in your life becomes challenging. So, if we're going to put something else on top of that, it needs to be predictable, it needs to make sense, and it needs to deliver value, and it has to make their lives better.

That's the only reason they'll stay. So, I took a concept that the army had a few years back called people first. The army walked away from that, by the way. They believed that if they said people first, people would assume that the mission wasn't first. My point is that you can't accomplish your mission without the people.

So, let's just keep people first and it makes sense, and it focuses everybody's energy in that direction. Kind of three pillars to that. I talked about it already. You know, we have to make their lives better for having served.

And going back to what I talked about earlier, jobs, if you need a job and you're in the California National Guard, we will get you a job. If you're underemployed, we will get you not underemployed. I mean, we have stood up a program called Work for Warriors about 2012, 2011. It's a boutique headhunter firm in my organization.

It's pretty awesome. We'll help them with resume writing. I have 1000 plus business partners to get them a job, get them off somebody's couch or out of their parents' basement or whatever. And that's just something that we should do because they joined. Going back to timely pay and incentives. Briefly talked about that.

But it's our responsibility to make sure that they get paid on time every month without fail, and that they are every award that they're deserved, that are deserved. They should get all the incentives and the entitlements that are appropriate that they should have. Sometimes they don't even know what they're entitled to.

And I've sent out our senior enlisted leadership across our formations to evangelize what these kids deserve for serving. To have them recognize that their service is valued.

And because it's valued that you're getting these benefits and then giving folks honest evaluations and making sure that we coached, teached, and mentored them on things that they need to do and how to do it, or how to do it better.

And then really impressing upon the leadership across my organization to ensure that everything that they do is predictable. So, the service members in my organization know what's expected of them, when it's expected of them, and what the expected outcome is.

If the California National Guard is not, for lack of a better term, a fuzzy blanket that they can run to and know that it's going to be the same every time, then we're going to lose them because their lives are already so chaotic. Everybody kind of recognizes that. So, that's how we go about doing it.

And we've started a program. I would offer. It's fundamentally empathetic leadership and strategic empathy, but at very young leadership. So, captains and lieutenants in my organization are going to get this training.

And I think if I can inculcate that at the lower levels, we'll be able to grow that across our formation long after I'm gone and kind of build that in. And I think that's the huge part about it. And then just leaving them alone when they're not on duty. I instituted the don't call people after 6:00 policy.

And, you know, and I got a lot of cross-eyed stares. I'm like, stop. You know, don't bother people at night because you're not very good at maintaining your own stuff. I mean, that's kind of how I characterized it for folks.

You know, we had a lot of senior leaders in the organization that subscribe to bothering people at night. That doesn't happen anymore. Yeah, because if it does, I find out. But anyway, but that's just one example, right? You know, and then we talk about climate.

I think you're talking about climate relative to the organization, not what we're doing for climate. We're doing a boatload of stuff for climate by probably another discussion. And I would tell you we have a very elegant and thoughtful strategic plan. It's top-down, bottom-up. People are bought in. They are absolutely bought in.

The challenge is that culture will trump strategy every time. So, I spend a lot of time on trying to make sure that we get the culture right in our organization and that everybody is focused on the soldiers in. They are the state's most precious natural resource.

They are the only reason that we accomplish the missions that we accomplish, no accomplishment because of me. They accomplish it because the kids that are out there doing the Lord's work every day, it's incredible. And they need to be revered and loved and taken care of.

And I try to press my leadership on that to make sure that they have the same view and reflection of it that I do. And I think we're making progress. I mean, we're up 8% retention year over year. We'll likely hit 10 before the end of the federal fiscal year next month.

And I think folks are generally happy. I walk around my headquarters, and I could feel the temperature kind of came down a little bit. So, you know, and that's qualitative. It's not quantitative, but. But it's a feeling, you know, so that's kind of where we're at on people first.

Thank you. Any questions on that? No. Okay. You know, I appreciate, I come out of the labor movement, so I appreciate the work you're doing to make sure that folks are respected and treated with dignity and support. And, you know, I think it's encouraging to hear that you're seeing results from it.

You know, up 8% in retention is nothing to sneeze at. And there's a lot of places that would like to improve that much.

Absolutely.

So, you know, so hopefully it sounds like you're on a good path and can kind of continue to build upon that and make progress going forward. And then the last area that we wanted to talk about was state guard. So we'd love to hear updates there.

Great. Yeah. So, our state guard, if folks don't know, is made up entirely of volunteers. So, the National Guard is a federally funded, generally and federally recognized part of the Military Department, the State of California, our state guard is solely in service of the state, and they're all volunteers. I characterize these folks fundamentally as new-age patriots.

To be able to serve in such a way and be a volunteer I think is extraordinary in my view. The program is exceptionally well led by a gentleman behind me, Darren Bender. Give him a shout out.

And he took over a year or so ago for us, and we really took a hard look when I took over to go back and look at the state guard from a standpoint of how can it support the National Guard? And we've reorganized our state guard to be able to do that.

So, entities within our state guard are now assigned in National Guard units to support them. And I think it's added a tremendous amount of value to the National Guard writ large, the Military Department at a whole.

But it's also, I think, given folks in our state guard kind of an ownership, and they recognize the value of helping their partner, National Guard units. As I mentioned before, the lawyers that we have working for Brooke Jenkins in the San Francisco DA's office are all state guard lawyers.

So, you know, we're driving extraordinary value from that program at exceptionally low cost. Right? I mean, so it's, it's awesome. 87 folks in the state guard work at our challenge academies, so they're delivering an immense amount of value for us. So, we're very happy. So, I think the reorganization is going extraordinarily well.

It would be a bottom line up front on that. What we did to try to differentiate between the National Guard and the State Guard is we adopted a new State Guard uniform, and it was important to make a differentiation. A lot of federal pressure to do that from the Federal Government.

And I think a lot of that came out from January 6, where folks couldn't tell the difference between the military and the police. And I think that translated down to folks in the National Guard Bureau in DC saying, well, you've got to have your, your State Guard has to look different than your National Guard, which is fair.

I totally, I appreciate that. Their solution I would offer would have been, it would have been just too much, and I think it would have been horrible for folks in our state guard, the uniforms were just impossibly bad. Didn't make a whole lot of sense. I think it would have demonstrated that we didn't care about them.

We didn't treat them with dignity and respect. So we have adopted a new uniform that's similar to what we were, but different. And, you know, we fly the United States flag on our operational combat, or whatever you call the camouflage uniform nowadays.

We wear the United States flag if we're in the national Guard, from the state guard and wear the state flag. We've changed the name tags and name tapes. It's now, if you're in the guard, in the State Guard, it's a black field with white lettering and they have a different patch.

So, it's just a way to to subtly differentiate them without making people feel that they were second stringer somehow, which doesn't help anybody, in my view. I need everybody to do the work. So, whatever it takes to do that, and it makes sense. And our Federal Government partners, I think we're okay with it.

Frankly, I don't care if they were okay with it or not. This is what we're going to do. But anyway, I think it's a good spot. We're in a very good spot with our State Guard right now.

Okay, so the State Guard. So, you said the State Guard recruitment is included in the recruitment discussion.

No, it's not. I'm sorry. Yeah, if I said that I misspoke. No.

Okay. No, sorry. I just wanted to make sure I was clear. So, are there any similar problems or challenges around State Guard recruitment?

I have no idea. Ask Darren.

Okay.

I don't think so. I would offer from a customer standpoint on that, they're delivering every time we ask. I don't see any challenge at all. I would offer that's generally not the case in our Army National Guard. It goes back to why you need to be 100% as opposed to 95.

Because when I have to deploy infantry battalions to Iraq or Syria or Kuwait or someplace like that, if I have to consume the readiness of two battalions to make one deployable, that's a problem. And that's where we're at now. And that's.

And not having to do that is a difference between 95 and 100%, because so many people are not available, they're either at school or they have other commitments. And so. Yeah, but I think the State Guard is fine.

And the, and the reorganization, has there been much resistance to that, it sounds like.

Yeah, I think there probably was a little bit of resistance. Change is always hard for folks you know, and, and we recognize that. But I thought we took an extraordinarily thoughtful approach, and we articulated the reasons in which we were making those changes and the changes that bore fruit.

So, you know, if the changes that we made didn't work, we'd have tried something else. These changes have made a materially positive impact on the Department. So, we're very proud of the changes that we've made.

Wonderful. Well, we are greatly appreciative of you coming here today, your time, your input and educating us, which is part of the point of today. And I don't know if you have any closing thoughts or comments.

No, I just appreciate the chair for bringing this hearing together. I invite you to San Luis Obispo when you have time. I know how busy you are to see camp San Luis and very proud of the work that you're doing that is happening locally in our district but across the state.

And would just kind of concur from what I saw when I toured that folks' hearts are really in this even when they are part-time, or they are carrying on over other things in their lives, and how important it is that we show support as well. And I already expressed my comments about the Challenge programs.

But truly can't say enough about the youth and the way that they spoke up about their experiences and we got to talk with them one on one and kind of see and hear about the changes in their lives. So, really thank you for that. And thank you to the chair for the opportunity.

Thank you. Mister Carrillo, any closing comments you'd like to make?

Thank you.

Just want to thank you, all of you for being here making the time and the chair for putting this hearing together. Again, which is based on those conversations. I would be, army secretary? Curious again. I already asked the question. I appreciate the answers and for my part, whatever we can do to facilitate your challenges.

You did mention that the congressional delegation in California may be somebody that can help in this, particularly in the housing costs. I think I heard that the allocation is based nationwide on average. Obviously, other states are more expensive than others. But if there's something that I personally can do. I'll be happy to do that.

Our Congress representation in my district is Mike Garcia on the Antelope Valley side and Auburn Alti on the Victor Valley side.

That's something that I'll be willing to have those conversations with them for my part and collectively I'm sure that we can also provide some reach out to them to make sure that there's something that they can consider because obviously, some living cost is more in other places than, obviously in California. But thank you for, thank you.

So, I just want to thank you again. Also, thank you to our no-longer chief consultant who's standing in until we find a replacement. Thank you to the speaker's office for loaning Christian to us and all the staff who worked on the hearing, Graciela, as well. And just want to echo the comments of Assembly Member Carrillo.

We're here to support. I think, you know, I imagine everyone on this Committee would be happy to support, especially in this area of nudging our congressional delegation along. Really excited to hear about the changes being fruitful and progress being made and the impact that you're having. And I know, you know, in so many areas making a huge difference for Californians.

And so, we appreciate the work that you all do and your leadership to kind of steer the ship here. And you know, for Assembly Member Mathis, who's here earlier, just want to also, you know, thank him again for his service.

He's been, I think, on this Committee his whole time in the Assembly, an important voice and perspective that we have had here at the Military and Veteran Affairs Committee. And so, he'll be missed for sure. We hope we see more of you. And so, we, with that, I think we'll conclude this hearing. And thank you again.