SPEAKERS CONTENTS INSERTS
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??–???
2002
[H.A.S.C. No. 107–29]
HEARINGS
ON
NATIONAL DEFENSE AUTHORIZATION ACT
FOR FISCAL YEAR 2003—H.R. 2586
AND
OVERSIGHT OF PREVIOUSLY AUTHORIZED PROGRAMS
BEFORE THE
COMMITTEE ON ARMED SERVICES
HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES
ONE HUNDRED SEVENTH CONGRESS
SECOND SESSION
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MILITARY PROCUREMENT SUBCOMMITTEE
MEETING JOINTLY WITH
MILITARY RESEARCH AND DEVELOPMENT SUBCOMMITTEE
ON
TITLE I—PROCUREMENT
TITLE II—RESEARCH, DEVELOPMENT, TEST, AND EVALUATION
HEARINGS HELD
FEBRUARY 20, 21, 27, MARCH 6, 12, and 21, 2002
MILITARY PROCUREMENT SUBCOMMITTEE
WELDON, CURT, Pennsylvania, Chairman
JAMES V. HANSEN, Utah
JOEL HEFLEY, Colorado
TERRY EVERETT, Alabama
HOWARD P. ''BUCK'' McKEON, California
J.C. WATTS, Jr., Oklahoma
MAC THORNBERRY, Texas
LINDSEY GRAHAM, South Carolina, Vice Chairman
JIM RYUN, Kansas
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JIM GIBBONS, Nevada
HEATHER WILSON, New Mexico
ROB SIMMONS, Connecticut
MARK STEVEN KIRK, Illinois
JO ANN DAVIS, Virginia
EDWARD L. SCHROCK, Virginia
GENE TAYLOR, Mississippi, Ranking Member
IKE SKELTON, Missouri
JOHN SPRATT, South Carolina
LANE EVANS, Illinois
ROD R. BLAGOJEVICH, Illinois
THOMAS H. ALLEN, Maine
JIM TURNER, Texas
ADAM SMITH, Washington
JAMES H. MALONEY, Connecticut
MIKE McINTYRE, North Carolina
CYNTHIA A. McKINNEY, Georgia
ELLEN O. TAUSCHER, California
ROBERT A. BRADY, Pennsylvania
Steve Thompson, Professional Staff Member
John Sullivan, Professional Staff Member
J.J. Gertler, Professional Staff Member
Steve Ansley, Professional Staff Member
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Jesse Tolleson, Staff Assistant
MILITARY RESEARCH AND DEVELOPMENT SUBCOMMITTEE
DUNCAN HUNTER, California, Chairman
VAN HILLEARY, Tennessee
W. TODD AKIN, Missouri
JIM SAXTON, New Jersey
ROSCOE G. BARTLETT, Maryland
JOHN N. HOSTETTLER, Indiana
SAXBY CHAMBLISS, Georgia
WALTER B. JONES, North Carolina
BOB RILEY, Alabama
ROBIN HAYES, North Carolina
KEN CALVERT, California
ANDER CRENSHAW, Florida
RANDY J. FORBES, Virginia
JEFF MILLER, Florida
JOE WIILSON, South Carolina (SC)
MARTY MEEHAN, Massachusetts, Ranking Member
JOHN SPRATT, South Carolina
NEIL ABERCROMBIE, Hawaii
ROD R. BLAGOJEVICH, Illinois
SILVESTRE REYES, Texas
THOMAS H. ALLEN, Maine
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JIM TURNER, Texas
ADAM SMITH, Washington
LORETTA SANCHEZ, California
ROBERT E. ANDREWS, New Jersey
MIKE THOMPSON, California
JOHN B. LARSON, Connecticut (CT)
JAMES R. LANGEVIN, Rhode Island
STEPHEN ANSLEY, Professional Staff Member
JEAN D. REED, Professional Staff Member
ROBERT LAUTRUP, Professional Staff Member
HARRY CARTLAND, Professional Staff Member
KATHERINE GORDON, Staff Assistant
C O N T E N T S
CHRONOLOGICAL LIST OF HEARINGS
2002
HEARING:
Wednesday, February 20, 2002, Fiscal Year 2003 National Defense Authorization Act—Ballistic Missile Defense
APPENDIX:
Wednesday, February 20, 2002
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WEDNESDAY, FEBRUARY 20, 2002
FISCAL YEAR 2003 NATIONAL DEFENSE AUTHORIZATION ACT—BALLISTIC MISSILE DEFENSE
STATEMENTS PRESENTED BY MEMBERS OF CONGRESS
Hunter, Hon. Duncan, a Representative from California, Chairman, Military Research and Development Subcommittee
Kadish, Lt. Gen. Ronald T., Director, Missile Defense Agency, U.S. Air Force
WITNESSES
TBD, Department of Defense
Kadish, Lt. Gen. Ronald T., Director, Missile Defense Agency, U.S. Air Force
APPENDIX
PREPARED STATEMENTS:
Hunter, Hon. Duncan
Kadish, Lt. Gen. Ronald T.
DOCUMENTS SUBMITTED FOR THE RECORD:
[There were no Documents submitted for the Record.]
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QUESTIONS AND ANSWERS SUBMITTED FOR THE RECORD:
[There were no Questions and Answers submitted for the Record.]
FISCAL YEAR 2003 BALLISTIC MISSILE DEFENSE
House of Representatives,
Committee on Armed Services,
Military Procurement Subcommittee Meeting Jointly with Military Research and Development Subcommittee,
Washington, DC, Wednesday, February 27, 2002
The subcommittees met jointly, pursuant to call, at 10:05 a.m., in room 2118, Rayburn House Office Building, Hon. Duncan Hunter (Chairman of the Military Research and Development Subcommittee] presiding.
OPENING STATEMENT HON. DUNCAN HUNTER, A REPRESENTATIVE FROM CALIFORNIA, CHAIRMAN, MILITARY RESEARCH AND DEVELOPMENT SUBCOMMITTEE
Mr. HUNTER. Okay. The hearing will come to order.
And I have been informed that we are probably going to have a vote very quickly, so we will try to get our opening statements out of the way, General Kadish, and we may break before you go on, but let's see what we can do here.
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This morning, the Military R&D Subcommittee and the Military Procurement Subcommittee meet in joint session to receive testimony from Lieutenant General Kadish, director of our Missile Defense Agency.
General Kadish will review for us the status of our missile defense programs, discuss recent changes to his organization—now a separate agency—explain his agency's incremental development strategy, commonly referred to as spiral development, and present the president's fiscal year 2003 budget request for the Missile Defense Agency.
The focus of our hearings last year was shortcomings in our missile defense test programs. I look forward to General Kadish sharing with us today some positive developments in this area.
The Missile Defense Agency does many tests, some more visible than others, but all of them important. In the more visible category, the ground-based, mid-course element has been successful in two intercepts since last July.
And just last month, our AEGIS LEAP flight demonstration program achieved a hit-to-kill intercept at our Pacific Missile Range Facility in Hawaii, testing a new propulsion technology along the way, and striking an encouraging note for our sea-based efforts.
Perhaps more importantly, though, these programs appear to be gaining the momentum to attain and sustain a test rate of three or more tests per year, a rather dramatic improvement over past performance.
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To be sure, there have been some tests, such as the recent PAC–3 operational test, that have met with less success, but we have learned from them also, and we can expect future failures if our testing is challenging, as it should be, bearing in mind that no single test is indicative of the eventual outcome of a program.
As I know my colleagues are aware, there have been other changes as well. In January, the secretary of defense re-established the Ballistic Missile Defense Organization as the Missile Defense Agency, highlighting the priority placed by the administration on missile defense.
The secretary also directed the adoption of a department-wide incremental development and acquisition process—spiral development—to field militarily useful capabilities as they become available, and he has instructed General Kadish to also utilize this developmental approach to speed up the fielding of effective missile defense capabilities as soon as they are ready for fielding.
Some of our members are more enthusiastic than others about these recent organizational and policy developments. I believe that all of us will be well served by becoming better informed on these and other issues after today's hearing.
On the matter of the budget, the president's request for missile defense of $7.8 billion is essentially flat compared to the fiscal year 2002 appropriation. Of the total, $6.7 billion falls within the agency's budget, with most of the remainder having been transferred to Army R&D and procurement accounts. We look forward to hearing what changes, if any, the administration intends to make in its programmatic objectives and funding priorities.
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At this point, I want to turn to my good friend and chairman of the Military Procurement Subcommittee, Mr. Weldon, for any remarks he would like to make.
[The prepared statement of Mr. Hunter can be found in the Appendix on page ?.]
Mr. Weldon.
Mr. WELDON. I thank you, Mr. Chairman.
And, General Kadish, we are very pleased to have you here today, and I am pleased as chairman of the Procurement Subcommittee to join with my friend for this joint hearing.
We are continuing a process that we have had in previous sessions where we have co-chaired hearings on issues that in this case primarily come under the jurisdiction of the R&D Subcommittee but which we on the Procurement Committee have also strong interest.
In fact, next week, we will be doing another joint hearing that I will chair with my good friend sitting alongside of me with Secretary Aldridge and the service acquisition executives.
And the goal here is to have the R&D and Procurement Subcommittee come together to ask the appropriate questions and to listen to you explain to us the activities that you are undertaking.
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I am especially looking forward to hearing your appraisal of the benefits of the flexibility that we gave to you by our actions over the last series of defense bills. So you can tell us what impact that has had on your ability to oversee this program.
I want to tell you that we are very pleased with your leadership. You know, a year ago at this point in time, we had a lot of naysayers out there who were attempting to poke holes, making wild accusations. There was one lawsuit filed and an attempt to go to the FBI because there was supposedly lying and cheating. And, actually, members of Congress signed a letter alleging that perhaps you had done things.
All of us knew that was bunk, and while it didn't receive much press, as you know, the FBI has totally ended that and said there was no basis whatsoever for any of the allegations made. And there are others who claim to be the scientists who know that perhaps the work we have been doing is not, in fact, valid.
I want to let you know that working with you we had a press conference of six major scientists, independent, who have come out now with a document answering the facts behind missile defense to refute some of those that are being proposed by some other scientists who claim to be the experts on why missile defense won't work and hasn't worked.
We will continue to work with you. We understand the challenges are still great, that they are engineering challenges as opposed to technology challenges, and we want to pledge to you our full cooperation.
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It doesn't mean that we won't have questions from time to time and, in some cases, maybe serious concerns, as we have raised in the past, but, by and large, I think you will find this committee will be supportive of your efforts, and we are looking forward to a thorough examination as to where we are going with missile defense.
And I will be asking you specifically about cooperative programs with our allies as well, in particular our work with the Israelis. And I want to specifically talk to you in the questioning period about a proposal I raised last year to look at the possibility of a joint boost phase intercept project with the Russians, the Israelis, and the Turks.
So, with that in mind, I thank you for being here, and I thank my distinguished colleague for chairing this subcommittee and look forward to your testimony.
Mr. HUNTER. I thank my colleague and thank him for all of his great contribution in this important area.
And now I would like to turn to our ranking members, Mr. Meehan for Research and Development and Mr. Taylor for Procurement, for any remarks they would like to make.
Mr. Meehan.
Mr. MEEHAN. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
And, General Kadish, it is always great to have you before the committee.
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After September 11th, the Congress, especially Democrats, decided to defer a number of contentious debates for the good of national unity. Many of them related to missile defense, and they include the size of the missile defense budget, which was raised last year beyond any reasonable justification, the change in the organization that saw the old BMDO raised to agency status, the unprecedented removal of missile defense activities from the normal budgetary oversight and performance standards, adoption of the old Soviet Union's buy-first-think-later acquisition policy that develops anything imaginable without regard for utility, which is to say no real acquisition policy at all, and this administration's decision to withdraw from the ABM Treaty.
It would be a mistake to interpret the silence in the wake of September 11th as a sign of approval by all in the Congress of these unprecedented actions. The administration's proposals raise very serious questions in the minds of many members on our side, and let me speak to two of them.
The first concerns the structure of the Missile Defense Agency and its oversight. The new Missile Defense Agency, by my reading, will essentially function as a new military service, but a military service with essentially no oversight, no accountability, and a budget that is growing by leaps and bounds. Such an agreement has never existed in any agency before, let alone a program that is a controversial program.
I have real concerns that the proposed Missile Defense Agency and its revised operating guidelines provide fertile ground for malignant growth, potential waste, and abuse.
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For example, the MDA is using requirements that are not built on a threat. They are using the so-called capability-based requirements. Now it is my understanding that capability-based requirements were used when we don't know what the threat was; for example, in a peacekeeping mission or when we undertake a humanitarian relief operation.
I am concerned that without a threat to work against and with no accountability in place that we are freeing the MDA to embark on a Rube Goldberg, multimillion-dollar, gold-plated, science-fiction project, not to mention that we invest hundreds of billions of dollars into our intelligence agencies to develop a missile threat assessment.
It makes no sense to throw that investment away in favor of an MDA-developed threat that we don't know what it is going to be from month to month.
Moreover, the MDA, much like the Department of Defense, is espousing this use that the chairman referred to of spiral acquisition in order to field a limited capability earlier than would be the case under the traditional acquisition process.
Now it is my understanding that spiral acquisition is a process that succeeds by fielding the first deployable technology and then building on it. But, as far as I know, the last significant use of spiral acquisition was in the Soviet Union, and the result of that was national bankruptcy and a field full of barely functional weapons that posed more of a threat to their users than they did the enemy.
So I don't it makes any sense to use this model.
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My second concern is the significant resource commitment to national defense at the expense of other pressing defense needs. We have what appears to be a very large increase in the defense budget this year, but, in reality, it is rather small. As the secretary of defense and others have testified, the vast majority of the $48 billion increase in the budget is essentially already spent.
We have a real immediate need in the war against terrorism. We need to replenish our spent stockpiles with SMART munitions. The administration is proposing buying only five ships when the immediate need is for eight ships, and we are purchasing far less aircraft than our aging fleet demands.
So I am concerned that we are shortchanging the war on terrorism to pay for this golden tribute to the national missile defense.
NMD is a valid and worthwhile defensive measure upon which this country needs to embark, and we have already placed billions and billions of dollars into it. But we are also engaged in a war where the stakes are very high for our men and women in uniform and for the citizens of the country, as September 11th, I think, so dramatically demonstrated. and our success in that war is certain to make serious inroads into quashing the threat that NMD seeks to address.
So, as the committee moves forward, I hope that we will make sure that our funding priorities are properly aligned with the harsh realities that we are all living with in a post-September 11th world.
Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
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Mr. HUNTER. I thank the gentleman.
And for a second strong endorsement on missile defense, Mr. Taylor.
Mr. TAYLOR. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. And I do appreciate you having this hearing today.
I would hope that in the course of this hearing that the real question that is answered is not whether or not people are for or against coming up with a system to save American lives in the event of a missile attack. Everyone in America is for a missile defense system. The real rebate, though, has to be at what expense to other programs because missile defense doesn't come out of welfare. It doesn't come out of foreign aid. It doesn't come out of highway funds. It doesn't come at the expense of airports. It comes at the expense of other defense needs.
And I can assure you in my conversations with folks in Mr. Kadish's own service, the C–130 pilots, when I tell them that $60 billion has come at the expense of other C–130s or aging 141s, or my friends in the Army who are flying 30-year-old UH1s, or friends in the special operations forces, my friends in the Naval Construction Battalion.
That is the real debate, is could we have spent the $60 billion better on other programs.
Mr. Meehan correctly points out that the Navy right now is the smallest it has been since 1933. This year's defense budget asks for five ships. The typical life of a ship is 30 years. That means the legacy of this year's defense request is a 150-ship Navy, while missile defense gets approximately $8 billion.
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For the same $60 billion—the real debate that the American people ought to be aware of—we could have replaced every single aircraft carrier in the fleet, and those of you who follow this issue know that at least two of our carriers are over 35 years old.
For the same $60 billion, we could have built 60 Aegis-class destroyers. This year's budget request is two.
For the same $60 billion, we could have replaced every one of the thousand Huey helicopters in the inventory. Any one who follows this knows that the newest of those were built in 1972.
I would hope one question that General Kadish would answer today, in fairness to the American people who are footing this bill, is that after $60 billion, if the North Koreans told us a week ahead of time that they were going to fire one missile with no decoys, no chaff, they told us a week ahead of time the city that they were going to launch the missile from and gave us the exact time of day that they were going to launch this missile, what are the chances that after $60 billion of American tax money being spent that you could shoot it down, because we are never going to tell you how to take a hill, we are never going to tell the ship drivers how to drive the ships, we are not going to tell the guys in the special operating forces how to take a target, but what we are responsible for the taxpayers for is to see that that money is well spent.
So, General Kadish, I would hope you would tell this committee and the American public that after $60 billion if the North Koreans told us exactly where and exactly when they were going to fire one missile with no decoys, what are the chances you can shoot that one missile down today.
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That is the real debate. It is not what the talk-show host wants you to air because they want to break it down into you are for missile defense, you are against it. It doesn't come out of welfare. It doesn't come out of roads. It doesn't come out of our salaries.
It is coming at the expense of other defense needs, a flat procurement budget. Even though the president's budget has grown fairly significantly, our procurement budget has not grown but one dime. That is the real debate, and I hope the general can tell us that somehow what we are doing is really worthwhile for the American taxpayer.
Mr. HUNTER. I thank the gentleman.
I would like to ask the ranking member, Mr. Skelton, if he has any questions he would like to ask or any statement he would like to make.
If not, we are going to break for 10 minutes, and when we get back, we are going to see a movie. So we are going to show that movie in exactly 10 minutes, and I would ask all the members of the subcommittees to come on back.
And, General Kadish, you can be mulling over your opening statement in light of our strong endorsements of your program.
[Laughter.]
[Recess.]
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Mr. HUNTER. The subcommittees will resume.
And, General Kadish, thank you for being with us today.
And let me just say on a personal note that one of the great traditions in this country is giving the ball to an outstanding player and letting him carry that ball and hold him accountable for the results, and you have been a great ball carrier. You have moved this program into a rigorous testing stage. It is very much appreciated.
And whether you like missile defense or don't like missile defense, we should all agree that the key to finding the answers is rigorous testing, and you have embarked on that. So thank you for what you have done for our country and for your personal service.
And I understand now you have a hit movie that you want to play for us.
STATEMENT OF LIEUTENANT GENERAL RONALD KADISH, DIRECTOR, MISSILE DEFENSE AGENCY
General KADISH. Well, yes, Mr. Chairman. And good morning. It is a pleasure to appear before the committee today and talk about the fiscal 2003 budget. To allow more time, I have a longer statement. I would appreciate it if we put it in the record.
Mr. HUNTER. Without objection, we will put it in the record.
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General KADISH. We have made substantial progress in our program since I last testified, and we spent the past year testing key technologies and their integration and restructuring our program to better face the challenges that we have in front of us.
I would like to show a video today, and I know that it is a little bit awkward in a forum like this, but we have some significant testing results that I think were best portrayed through a video format report card.
And then if I might, take a few minutes after the video to talk about the two challenges that were mentioned, our technical challenges and our management challenges, and what we are doing about them.
The basic objective of missile defense has not changed in many years. It is to develop missile defense that is effective to protect our country, our deployed forces, our friends, and our allies. And the budget we have submitted for fiscal year 2003 is substantial, but it continues in the same range of last year to provide us the stability we need in the development program, and, in so doing, it supports our program priorities.
Now I am going to start the videotape. What I am going to show you is all different types of tests we have been doing from ground-based testing to non-intercept testing of different elements and then to the intercept tests themselves. We have almost been doing a test a month since we last meet in this forum, and we expect to continue that in fiscal year 2003 in a very aggressive way.
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Now, in the opening section of this film, what you will see is just a reminder of what the missile trajectory is and how we intend to intercept during this trajectory through layer defenses.
Trying to gauge a ballistic missile and its trajectory early is always better, but it is tough technologically to do, and this depicts the boost phase here. And we improve our chances of kill and compound our adversary's difficulties when we attack in each element in mid-course and in the terminal phases.
In addition, we have short-, medium-and long-range missiles to deal with. I would like to start out with a mid-course phase of a Patriot 3 that was successful. Here is the target launch.
Mr. HUNTER. And this is theater-wide, General.
General KADISH. We actually might have the wrong film here.
Mr. HUNTER. That one missed. It went back down into the water, General.
General KADISH. As a matter of fact, this one was the first Navy test that we had that was a fly-by, and it actually flew by, so it was a success. The logistics here we don't quite have right. But we will get this right here pretty soon.
All right. This is the right film. This is the last year. I apologize for the misstep here.
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Layer defenses. And you will see this approach used during the film itself. We got boost intercept activities, mid-course intercepts, and terminal intercepts, and it is, again, short-, medium-, and long-range missiles. And we are developing and testing in all these areas.
All right. The first one is the airborne laser. This is a ground test, and it is something called first light. It is not a spectacular video, but I will tell you it was very successful on the ground, and it is the first step of making laser light work, and this is just an indication of the types of things that we see with lasers. You are not going to see an intercept here because it is still on the ground, but it is a significant step forward.
Patriot. We have a test in March. This is in the terminal phase against short-and medium-range missiles. Very complex test. Two PAC–3s and one PAC–2 under Central Control. You can see this as a hit to kill. Very close up.
And, again, we are hitting very close on the missile body in a spot about this big. So we had a number of missiles in flight during this time period. Patriots 2 and 3 as well as two targets. Very successful.
However, in a subsequent test in June or July of this year, we missed. It was the first time we missed in the process. So we still have a little bit more work to do, but that was the complex test.
Now I would like to talk about Arrow, even though it is not a part of the U.S. total test activity. But we had a test in August of this year. It was conducted off the coast of Israel, and the target was launched from an airplane. The Arrow is not hit-to-kill, it is a blast frag, but it is very accurate, and you will see here the tracking of the Arrow interceptor and the target coming in from the right. And, again, a very accurate hit. We invested heavily in that program, and it is progressing very well.
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Now I would like to talk about the boosters that we intend to use through our ground-based program.
The first booster test we did in August of this year for our ground-based program was not an intercept test. It was just testing the basic booster that we have to develop, and it was designed for pretty high performance, and it was successful. It was just a normal rocket launch, as you see here.
The second one, however, that we did in December of this year was a failure, and in the interest of full disclosure of what we are doing in our test program, I would like to show you visually what a failure looks like in this area.
This is, again, the booster test for our mid-course system. It was unsuccessful, to our chagrin. But this is what it looked like. It was the same launch as I showed you previously. After about 13 seconds, it destroyed itself. Somewhat spectacularly.
We have some work to do here, but we have a method to hedge this risk, and I believe we are on track to do that.
Now I would like to show you the two mid-course ground-based tests that we have done this year one in July and one in December, both of which were successful intercept tests, and this makes our scorecard three out of five attempts in this particular difficult regime.
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This is intercepted taking off from Kwajalein in July. A Minuteman II target was launched 4,800 miles away, and the intercept was achieved more than a 140 miles up in space, and this is what the seeker saw in the last seconds or microseconds prior to intercept, and this is an external view of that intercept and then the radar track of what that looked like.
So we are getting to the point where we are proving more and more to ourselves that we have a reliable, hit-to-kill approach across a broad range.
In December, we did it again. Same test. It, too, was successful. And it launched from Kwajalein. Here is the target from Vandenberg. Very complex test in a lot of ways. And you can see the interceptor rising to meet the threat.
Right now, we are scheduling our next test for the 15th of March, and I believe it will occur in that timeframe. You can see what the seeker saw and then what our external sensor saw of that intercept. Very encouraging to our approacher.
Now the Standard Missile-3. This is the first test we did a year ago where it was just a fly-by, and you will see this rising, but there was no intercept attempt. This gave us confidence to almost a year to the day later to do an actual intercept.
This is off an Aegis cruiser, and it worked pretty well and got pretty close to the target, but it wasn't an intended intercept. Now, again, on the 25th of January of this year, we took the same approach, but we actually set it up so there was a probability of intercept but not an objective of the test, and we actually hit it.
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Here is a target coming out of the island of Kauai in the Hawaiian Islands. It is a medium-range target. The Aegis cruiser was about 500 kilometers down range, launched the Standard-3 missile, and it rose to meet the target in outer space. And what you will see is the seeker view and then the final microseconds prior to intercept. That is how accurate we are getting.
Now that is all the film I have to show you, but I thought it was important not to assert that we are making progress but to show you the visual proof that we are making progress. That is not to say that we haven't had our failures, and it is not to say that we don't have a long way to go.
But we have the pace and complexity of our testing picking up in 2003. We have 12 more flight tests scheduled for the remainder of this fiscal year, together with 14 grounds tests and 13 system-wide tests. So it is a very aggressive program that has been enabled by the good graces of the Congress to approve our program last year and the year prior to that.
Now let me talk about the technical development challenge that faces us. That video demonstrates our progress, especially in the hit-to-kill regime, and we have learned that our technologies are sound, but we face major technical challenges ahead to make sure that we have the right technologies and can engineer them into the single integrative system and evolve to stay ahead of the changing threat.
As a result, we have changed our approach to development and are moving more to a capabilities-based approach rather than a requirements-based approach for this acquisition. Some have interpreted this as doing away with requirements or doing away with discipline in general. That is not the case. We are not doing away with requirements.
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We are, however, changing how we derive and define and deal with them. For the missile defense program, we no longer start with the development process with specific military requirements generated by a user and formalized in the customary operational requirements document or ORD.
This traditional ORD approach has generally served us very well, especially in procurements involving well-known technologies, proven systems, sizable production runs, and established operational experience, none of which we have in missile defense today.
The process has not worked as well, however, for our efforts in missile defense. Because many of our technologies are cutting edge, our elements have not yet been fully tested, despite what I just showed you, nor can some ever be.
However, the production of many elements will be limited to only a few items, and our operational experience to date has been quite limited in operating missile defenses. Our program, in short, has no precedent.
For us, the strengths of the traditional requirements-generation process are also its weaknesses. It is rigorous, but that very rigor translates to a lack of flexibility needed in what we face in missile defense.
Requirements defined in ORDs are typically set many years before actual system development and can often lead to less than optimum capability against the threat that has gone beyond the specified requirement.
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Furthermore, at this moment, we don't yet know all the technical approaches that will work best. Five years ago, we could not have foreseen, let alone written all the uses defining today's Internet. We always face the risk of being surprised by changes in the threat, but a capabilities-based approach allows us to adjust to those changes in a way that traditional requirements-based approach does not.
We do not want to alter our baseline every time we recognize a change in the threat, but such changes could ripple through this program and likely incur significant delay and cost if we do it the traditional way. So we are setting a wider range of boundaries in defining our capabilities so as to cope with unforeseen changes in the threat. Baseline is deal with surprises.
While we are moving away from some of the rigidities of the past, we are not abandoning the rigor in development; far from it. A capabilities-based approach provides for significant discipline if done correctly. It is just guided by different mileposts.
Instead of a traditional process where users define the requirement in great detail and then the developers in sequence interpret the requirements and specifications, we intend to do it at the same time.
Together, users and developers, including war-fighters, the services, the industry, under our agency's lead, will have a more continuous and constructive role in establishing the missile requirements for missile defenses than they did under the old process. They won't fire and forget, if you will.
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All are with us throughout the development process, and I believe this focused continuous interaction will allow us to reduce cycle time, to reduce schedule risk and reduce cost risk, and we can make the capability trades and we can upgrade our capabilities to keep them current as a major goal of this activity.
These developmental goals are periodically reassessed until they are captured and fixed in the defining characteristics of a two-year block deployment capability, and that is our plan, to be able to deploy a solid capability proven through rigorous testing in two-year blocks and to upgrade it incrementally and continually as the need arises.
Our capabilities-based approach to acquisition provides for continuous war-fighter involvement, discipline development, and early capability. It stays relevant to the threat and remains technologically current and can be enhanced over time. That is our vision, and that is our intention with capabilities-based approach.
I would also point out that this is not new. Our nation has used it successfully in undertaking previously unprecedented technological endeavors.
Among other programs, we used this approach in making tradeoffs to develop a Polaris missile submarine launch ballistic missile in the SR–71 reconnaissance aircraft. And we are certainly familiar with upgrading systems over time. The B52s that flew over Afghanistan this last fall were far different aircraft than first rolled off the production line five decades before.
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Now let me talk about the program management challenge briefly. As we have changed our approach to development, we found also we had to change our approach to management.
Our program is now entering a new phase, moving from technology development to systems engineering, and what we face is a very significant challenge of integrating many diverse elements. This management challenge is at least equal to our technical ones at this point in time of the program and, in my view, is no less urgent.
The challenge is unprecedented because we have thousands of individuals involved in hundreds of efforts at dozens of locations, and we are dealing with cutting-edge technologies at varying levels of maturity. We are involving all services and their doctrines, and we are investigating four basing modes: ground, see, air and space.
The management structure we have created has several dimensions to deal with these issues within our agency, with the services, with the rest of the department, and with industry. We have flattened the agency structure to make it more responsive, and we have taken more day-to-day control of program activities.
The department's Senior Executive Council conducts formal reviews of our programs at least annually; more frequently and more comprehensive than the current department practice. The council will make many recommendations to the secretary on fielding elements of the system when they are ready.
Its decisions and mine are supported a new missile defense support group, which reports to the under secretary of defense for acquisition, technology, and logistics, who remains my boss.
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And our relationship with industry has become more complex. To help us in this regard, we looked at how other unprecedented programs had been managed in their day, and these include such diverse and pioneering efforts as the Manhattan Project, our Mercury, Apollo, and ICBM programs, and our experience in the space shuttle.
In each case, the government maintained total program responsibility, but what became clear was that the government too often did not have a detailed enough understanding of either what exactly to buy because of the unprecedented nature of the technology or what industry could actually offer.
The solution lies in forging a much closer relationship between government and industry, and this approach is what we are taking to obtain the best and brightest from the government, academia, and industry, to ensure that we can in a timely and effective way develop and deploy missile defenses.
As we do this, our approach to many managing resources is clearly an important element of our approach to missile defense in general. This committee's support for the president's Freedom to Manage initiative will reduce statutory requirements that can restrict management flexibility, allowing us to more efficiently and effectively execute the missile defense program with which we have been entrusted.
Chairman Hunter, Chairman Weldon, over the past year, we have made significant progress and strides in our development program, as some of these major test events have shown. Yet we also have some significant challenges ahead. With your continued support and that of the American people, I believe we have every confidence that we can do it.
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Thank you for listening at this point.
[The prepared statement of General Kadish can be found in the Appendix on page ?.]
Mr. HUNTER. Thank you very much, General. And, again, thank you for your service to our country.
And I think it is clear to all of us that we live in an age of missiles and we also have an old adage in Washington, D.C., that you don't do anything until you can do everything so you do nothing.
Recalling the deaths of the Americans on the battlefield over 10 years ago now in the first gulf war, I think, is a reminder to all of us that doing nothing in terms of fielding systems, that is not having effective systems in the field, is a very dangerous thing.
So I personally applaud your decision to spiral develop. I think it is prudent, and it looks to me like your schedules are prudent.
Let me ask you a couple of questions first, one in that area. The Israelis have had remarkable success with ARROW. That is at least what I gather from the thrust of your remarks. They are deploying very quickly, are they not?
General KADISH. I believe they have already deployed. Yes, sir.
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Mr. HUNTER. So they started theater missile defense about the same time we did, and the ARROW missile is the centerpiece of our co-development programs with Israel, and yet they, being practical, being a nation which is situated close to neighbors who have deployed Soviet-made ballistic missiles, know that they have to have a defense and have been under the threat, in fact under the impact of ballistic missiles in the past.
So they have already deployed theater missiles. So it appears to me that they believe in the idea of spiral development, that is getting systems out there and then improving these systems. Is that, in fact, the path that they have taken?
General KADISH. I believe they still have an ORD approach, but the intention is to improve based on what they have fielded today a better ARROW missile. That is correct.
Mr. HUNTER. Give the subcommittees just, kind of, a general picture of what we can expect this year in terms of testing. What have you got coming up?
General KADISH. Well, as I said, on the 15th of March, we are hoping, if everything stays on track, to launch our next ground-based mid-course program activity. This time, we will be taking a little bit more risk by adding some decoys to the overall approach. The last test was in, I think, December, and now we are going to do in March another test, so we are starting to get on three-or four-month centers, which is a great process improvement.
Let me just summarize for you. In the remainder of 2002, we have 12 element flight tests, 14 element ground tests, and 13 system-wide tests, and that means we are going to have at least two ground-based mid-course test program tests, three sea-based tests, and one ARROW and three PAC–3.
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So, with the ground tests and system-wide tests, we have a pretty aggressive program ongoing.
Mr. HUNTER. That is a bigger array of tests than we have ever experienced, is it not?
General KADISH. To my knowledge, yes, sir. And the PAC–3 is in an operational test at this point, so it is very close to our procurement goals, and with the ground-based system moving into a more stable test environment, that is a major accomplishment.
And I was very pleased to add to our videotape at this time in testimony the first mid-course intercept of a Navy AEGIS LEAP intercept, and we have two more scheduled this year.
Now some of those tests, I believe, Mr. Chairman, are going to be adjusted based on whether we succeed or fail. That is our program today, but as we look at the results and decide what they mean, given the tests that we set out to accomplish, we may either accelerate something or delay our activities to do more risk reduction.
So I don't want to give you the impression that that is in concrete, but that is our plan.
Mr. HUNTER. And, General, I am glad it is not in concrete because I think one of the values of this functional-based budget that you have given us, where you have boost phase, mid-course, and terminal phase, gives you the discretion to throw out the losers and put more money against the winners.
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And I think part of our plan in terms of holding you accountable and giving you a lot of discretion but going forward with a vigorous program requires that, and so I think that this idea of having a functional-based approach is very, very important.
You are probably going to disappoint a few of us when programs that we support that we think are good don't pan out, but you have to call them like you see them, and so I think it is good that you are able to move some resources around.
Otherwise, you are going to have tests that need to be done awaiting funding, which, as you know, moves on a fairly slow schedule around here. So I am glad that you are going to have some discretion.
Do you think you have about the right amount of discretion, or do you want more?
General KADISH. Mr. Chairman, I always like to have more, but we are doing very well under what we have today, and I want to continue to improve on that.
Mr. HUNTER. Thank you.
Mr. Meehan.
Mr. MEEHAN. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
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General, if our goal is to put available technology into the field as soon as possible and since we are apparently no longer threat based, what area of the globe or which end of the axis of evil do you envision defending against and why?
General KADISH. I wouldn't characterize this as not being threat based in the way we are approaching this. When we talk about capabilities-based, Congressman Meehan, we pay a lot of attention to the threat, and where we know the threat, we will make sure our systems are able to deal with it through the traditional intelligence methods.
Our problem—and I think the secretary of defense describes this very well—with the proliferation of ballistic missiles and potential weapons of mass destruction, we could be surprised as to what the threat really is.
So this idea of capabilities-based approach is to take into account where we might be surprised. So this issue is not about the Russian and Chinese traditional threat of the Cold War. This is about the threats that emerge in the states that we are concerned about today, from the Middle East to North Korea.
Mr. MEEHAN. Well, General, let me ask you. Do you anticipate when we put our initial weapons into the field as part of the spiral acquisition programs, do you anticipate that our enemies will learn from those technologies and then try to develop countermeasures to them, and if we are not threat based, how do we take into account those countermeasures? How would that work?
General KADISH. Well, as a part of my responsibility, I will do everything I can to prevent them to find out what is in our system so that it works as advertised. But the approach that we would like to take and that we are embarked on very heavily right now in our development program against countermeasures, in particular, is something that we are calling physics-based approach to the countermeasure problem and the missile defense hit-to-kill problem in general, whereas in the threat-based approach, you want to define an exquisitely well-defined threat in technical terms, how long it is, how light it is, what it looks like to different sensors. And the only way you can be sure that you have that right is through a rather rigorous analysis of the threat you are going against—and hope you get it right—through intelligence methods and other activities. I would rather not go into that in any more detail than what I just said.
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In a capabilities-based approach, where we can rely on the basic physics of a particular countermeasure or set of countermeasures on how they behave in general, we can then set parameters for our systems that, based on what those sensors see in the physical world, they can interpolate and decide and discriminate the proper warhead to hit. And that is the way we intend to deal with this uncertainty of the threat-based approach. But I can assure you also that where we do have very reliable information on the threat, we will incorporate that into our system as well.
Mr. MEEHAN. Well, General, let me ask you, since we are going to a capability-based system, how much capability do you see at the top end down the road? That is, how many missiles do you think that we will be able to defend against if launched at us from any of our enemies or the axis-of-evil countries? I mean, would it be 10, 20, 100? Do you see the budget ever topping out, or do you just envision this sort of continuous growth?
General KADISH. I think that is a decision yet to be taken, Congressman, and the nature of the program that we have structured is that we want to get to a point where we can, from an RDT&E perspective, tell you very specifically how effective a particular configuration of a missile defense would be. And then it becomes a matter of force structure, of how many missiles you want to defend against, and that is a separate debate that we need to have, based on affordability and the threat perception.
So if we decide as a country we need to defend only against a handful of missiles, that is one force structure size, one quantity of bullets, if you will. If we decide as a country we want to go against a higher number of threats, that will be very different and will have to be judged accordingly.
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So I can't answer that question today very specifically, because we have not reached that point. However, I will say that against long-range missiles, our basic approach is to do a very limited defense in limited numbers in the beginning of this capability-based approach, and subsequent decisions will have to be taken on how much force structure we really want to buy.
Mr. MEEHAN. And, finally, General, the chairman had mentioned, would you want more discretion, and you said, well, we have enough, but we could always use more. You are an acquisition expert, and I have worked with you in the past and have enormous respect for you.
But if you were sitting in our seats as members of the Armed Services Committee, what information would you want to have from our perspective to make sure that the NMD acquisition plan and the NDA is an effective steward of the limited defense dollars that we have? You know, it is our responsibility to ensure that money that is poured into specific defense programs is being spent wisely.
In your position, obviously, you would want as much discretion as you could get. But what would you want, specifically, if you were in our position?
General KADISH. I believe very strongly that whatever we do, whether it is missile defense or any other major program, oversight is absolutely essential in the human nature of doing programs. So the information required would be the things we give you in our budget documentation, the visits that you and your staff provide on a regular basis, and the other normal processes that both the Congress and the department use for oversight.
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What I talk about in terms of discretion is one of the chief problems that we face every day is, to the best of our ability, we try to plan and see ahead a year to 18 months, or even three to five years, and lay out a budget plan to execute something that we think is going to happen. And the frustration we have, however, is that, given the unprecedented nature of this type of technology, our plans don't turn out right, exactly the way we planned them, to a large degree.
Therefore, decision cycle times that help us adjust properly are important to us. So that is the kind of flexibility that I am talking about in terms of where oversight plays a very proper role, even in that process, in making sure that we are doing the best that we can do under the plans that we have stated for it.
Where we get into a problem is when oversight becomes a replacement for the management and the decisions internal to the program. That is what we are trying to avoid.
So I guess the answer to your question is that we have been providing and will provide the insight into our budget process as we put out our documents for the R–2s and different documentations to the committee and to the Congress. We have, I think, over 20 hours now of staffer briefings across the Congress in great detail. We will certainly entertain more of those, and we will be responsive to the questions and the interests that come up, because we don't have all the knowledge we need sometimes to do this. So the oversight plays an important part of the process, and I believe we are giving the information required for that.
Mr. MEEHAN. Thank you, General.
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Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
Mr. HUNTER. I thank the gentleman.
Mr. Taylor?
Mr. TAYLOR. General, in my opening statement, I reiterated the conversations that I have had with a number of pilots of old C–130s, old C–141s, who fly old Hueys, guys who serve in other branches of the service and who realize, unlike most Americans, that the real cost of the missile defense system doesn't come out of welfare, doesn't come out of congressional salaries and doesn't come out of highways. It has come at the expense of procurement of other conventional weapons. That is a fact.
The president's budget request is for five ships. That leads to a 150-ship Navy, not a 600-ship Navy that President Reagan talked about. The fleet is the smallest it has been since 1933.
As I also pointed out, we don't tell you how to drop bombs. We don't tell you how to steer ships. That is your job. But we are the citizens' representatives, who are responsible to see to it that the money that you get is well spent. That is what we do.
With that in mind, I would like to know, after $60 billion, if the North Koreans were to launch one missile, after giving you a week's notice of where they were going to launch that one missile from, and telling you the exact time of day that they were going to launch it, and also informing you that there would be no decoys, no chaff, just one missile, and they told you where they were going to target it—filled in the blank with the name of the American city—after $60 billion, what is the probability that you could shoot that one missile down?
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General KADISH. Zero as of today. However, if I might expand on that—
Mr. TAYLOR. Sure, because that is why you are here, sir.
General KADISH.—if we go according to our current plan, by the year 2004, it would be very much higher than zero to do it, because that is when we will have a capability in our test bed, if we so desire to use it. But let me
talk about the $60 billion investment.
Mr. TAYLOR. Sure.
General KADISH. I have looked at this for many years now. What I see in the investment this country has made, certainly since 1984, I guess, in missile defense, it has gotten us to the point where we are today, and in the films that I just showed you. That is, we now have real live confidence that the mechanisms that we are using to do missile defense or will use to do missile defense, we can have confidence in. Now, that is expensive to prove, but it is a technology that is unprecedented.
So it has gotten us to the point where we are today. And I guess what I would say, if I can count right, there are at least four presidents and Congresses since 1991 that have been asking us to move aggressively in this way. So I think we have spent the resources as best we can to get us to the point where we are today.
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I believe missile defense is at a crossroads from a technological point of view. And that crossroads will get us into a very effective system or we won't deploy it.
Mr. TAYLOR. General, if I may, I say these things not to give you a hard time. I want you to know that. But after 12 years on this committee, there are times when I feel like some of our defense contractors feel like it is more profitable for them to develop weapons than to actually manufacture them. There is not much money in making something. They get a lot of money to do research.
We are accountable to the American citizens to deliver a product that will defend them. And I, for one, am asking you to stay after them to actually deliver a product as opposed to just having a jobs program for scientists. That is my request to you.
General KADISH. I couldn't agree with you more, Congressman Taylor. The issue here is that I would be very uncomfortable over the next five years if we continue to spend at the levels that we are and are not able to make the transition to effective fielding of the defenses.
Mr. TAYLOR. Thank you, General.
Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
Mr. HUNTER. I thank the gentleman.
Mr. Weldon, my co-chairman.
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Mr. WELDON. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
It is a pleasure to have you here, General Kadish, and I appreciate your leadership and your testimony. First of all, I have to disagree with one of my colleagues who said that our efforts are not threat-based. I would encourage all of my colleagues to get a copy. And I am sure, General, you have looked at this document, which is the updated NIE relative to foreign missile development dated December of 2001. Are you familiar with this, General?
General KADISH. Very familiar.
Mr. WELDON. I would ask my colleagues to get the classified, but this is the unclassified version. I might read the first paragraph for those who say that we are not basing this on threat.
This is from all of our intelligence community in this country. ''Most intelligence community agencies project that before 2015, the United States most likely will face ICBM threats from North Korea and Iran and possibly from Iraq.''
General, the North Koreans, we are being told, are stopping their flight testing of their Taepo Dong program. But isn't it true that they are still testing the engines for Taepo Dong-2 and still proceeding with the plans to have that rocket capable of being launched?
General KADISH. I believe so, Congressman.
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Mr. WELDON. General, isn't it true that Iran is still working on the Shahab-4 and Shahab-5 and eventually the Shahab-6? And isn't it their goal to develop a long-range missile as soon as possible?
General KADISH. I couldn't speak for their goal, but they are heading in that direction, yes, sir.
Mr. WELDON. And isn't it true the Iraqis are also in a robust program to upgrade the SCUD as they have done several times?
General KADISH. I believe so.
Mr. WELDON. So the key question is—and it was just asked—what if a North Korean missile were launched today? Isn't it also true, General, that under a treaty that finally this president announced we would no longer limit ourselves by, it would have been illegal for an American president to attempt to shoot down a North Korean missile, because the ABM treaty says we can't have missile defense? Hasn't that been our basic over-riding philosophy for the past 25 years?
General KADISH. Yes, Congressman, that would have been a major barrier to deploying the type of system for North Korea.
Mr. WELDON. So for the past 10 years, as we have aggressively pursued missile defense, it has been with the realization that you have been limited, because the treaty that oversees our relations with, in this case, the former Soviet Union basically says we can't deploy a national missile defense system because of the limitations in that treaty.
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General KADISH. As we went through the debates on the previous national missile defense program, those issues were very clear, and it was a problem.
Mr. WELDON. I want you to respond to a response that I got from a Russian friend when I was over there just recently. I asked him, you know, when the ABM treaty was negotiated in 1972, the Soviet Union was a communist dominated society, where the leadership of that country could do whatever it wanted.
So it was easy for the leadership of the Soviet Union to select one city to protect, which happened, by the way, to contain 75 percent of the population of the then Soviet Union.
The difficulty President Bush had with that treaty is in a democracy, you can't pick one city. So my friend in Russia, when I said, ''What would happen today if President Putin had to abide by the ABM treaty as the leader of a democratic nation? Do you think it would be easy for him to again pick just Moscow, or would the people in Vladivostok or Nizhni Novgorod or Saint Petersburg or Rostov-on-Don say, 'Wait a minute. Why aren't you protecting our city?''' In your personal opinion, don't you think that Putin would perhaps have difficulty as the leader of a free democratic nation in just protecting one city with a missile defense system?
General KADISH. I am not an expert on Russian affairs, but the nature of defenses are to protect as many people as possible. So I think it would be a major debate if at all an issue.
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Mr. WELDON. General, there are others who raise the issue of countermeasures, and I find that a little disingenuous, because the same people that maintain that we are not prepared to deal with countermeasures are the same people who say North Korea and Iran and Iraq are not a threat because they can't build missiles. Well, if they can't build missiles, wouldn't that come before they actually developed the technology to build countermeasures? I mean, if they don't have the technology to build legitimate missile systems, which some of the opponents of missile defense allege, then don't you agree they probably couldn't build countermeasures either at this point in time?
General KADISH. I think that logic holds a lot of merit. But the fact of the matter is that we see them building the missiles at this point.
We can always have a debate about how many countermeasures or how mature these things could be. But I think that in the initial stages of any threat from a world nation, if you will, we can take some risks on countermeasures that we couldn't maybe three or four or five years beyond our first iteration.
Mr. WELDON. General, I want to discuss the issue of cost, because it is a major issue. And I share the concern of my colleagues on both sides of the aisle and I will be coming out with a recommendation shortly to increase our shipbuilding account funds for this year. I will be coming out with recommendations to deal with the shortfalls in readiness, base maintenance accounts, and the other shortfalls that we know are there.
But I cannot, for the life of me, understand how we can take 28 families—in this case, half of them from my state—and say that their loved ones weren't worth us putting the money into defending them against a missile attack. Now, isn't it true, General, that that $60 billion that we have spent over the past several years that has been cited has actually allowed us to develop a capability to defend those families, those 28, or the future families, like we lost in that 1991 attack with that SCUD missile in Saudi Arabia? Isn't that what that $60 billion has accomplished for us?
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General KADISH. I believe we are on the verge of making that investment pay off, yes, sir.
Mr. WELDON. And I believe that those families and those young people who paid the ultimate price are worth us defending. And so that $60 billion wasn't thrown down a rat hole. In fact, I would ask my Israeli friends—and Mr. Hunter has already asked this—the Israelis are already deploying the ARROW system to protect those families in Israel. Wasn't that funded with part of that $60 billion, General?
General KADISH. Yes, sir. I don't have the exact number, but it is somewhere between $800 million and $1 billion that we have invested in that.
Mr. WELDON. And hasn't it also been the case that part of that money went for the MEADS program with Italy and with Germany that we are now cooperating with Europe on?
General KADISH. That is correct.
Mr. WELDON. So to say that that $60 billion was just thrown down a rat hole, I think, is, in fact, not correct, and I think it is disingenuous.
My final point, General, is last year in the defense bill—because I want to build a cooperative relationship with Russia on these issues. I propose that with the Israelis, we go beyond the ARROW program, because it has now been successfully developed and deployed, into a boost phase initiative, with Israel and the U.S. in the lead, and as a follow-on, perhaps include Turkey and possibly Russia. What is your position, and what is the status of looking at that kind of a possibility?
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General KADISH. I believe there has been some discussion at higher levels in the DOD over the boost phase cooperation activity. At this point, I don't have a position on it, because we in the NDA are focused primarily on the after-launch to terminal impact part of this. But I think that those discussions are ongoing, and I am sure there will be answers that will come out of that shortly.
However, we do have a proposal in the 2003 budget to continue the ARROW upgrade program, and we are going to pursue that aggressively.
Mr. WELDON. Are you also involved in the discussions ongoing with the Russians about joint cooperation?
General KADISH. Yes, I am. And I can't tell you at this point in time where they are going, but they are ongoing. How they are going to end up is a matter to be determined.
But we still have the RAMOS program in our budget. We have not gotten from the Russian government a clear statement of whether or not they are going to continue to be cooperative in that particular program, and any of the other activities that we are discussing, we don't have a clear statement, either.
So I am actually kind of disappointed that we are not moving as quickly as we can on RAMOS with the Russians, and I am hoping that sooner or later, we get a yes or a no that is clear, and we can proceed from there. But we are heavily engaged and predisposed for cooperation.
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Mr. WELDON. Thank you, General.
Mr. HUNTER. I thank the gentleman, and the distinguished ranking member from Missouri, Mr. Skelton, is recognized.
Mr. SKELTON. Mr. Chairman, thank you very much.
General, I would like to follow up on the hypothetical question Mr. Taylor put to you, if I understand it correctly. Today, we, as America, would not be able to shoot down an incoming missile as described by Mr. Taylor. Is that correct?
General KADISH. That is correct.
Mr. SKELTON. And then you said in the year 2004, you would have a higher degree of confidence. Would you be able to say in 2004 that you would be able to shoot it down 10 percent of the time?
General KADISH. I don't know.
Mr. SKELTON. Twenty percent of the time?
General KADISH. I don't—
Mr. SKELTON. Well, give me the degree of confidence that you would have in the year 2004, in your professional opinion, please.
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General KADISH. Very high confidence.
Mr. SKELTON. Well, would that be 70 percent of the time?
General KADISH. I wouldn't want to put a number on it, Congressman, at this point.
Mr. SKELTON. It is not quite fair to us to not give us some sense of what we would be able to do in the year 2004.
General KADISH. I think that I have given you that statement with a high confidence for a very, very limited scenario, as you described.
Mr. SKELTON. As Mr. Taylor described.
General KADISH. That is correct. But I would also point out that if we knew what time, what date, and where the target was, I wouldn't even use missile defense against that issue.
Mr. SKELTON. You would probably use a B–2 from Whiteman Air Force Base to bomb it before it is shot.
General KADISH. It would be, at that point, a lot more effective.
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Mr. SKELTON. Let me compliment you, General, on your career. You have done enormously effective work on the F–15, the F–16, the C–17, and the B1B. Am I correct?
General KADISH. I have certainly worked on those programs.
Mr. SKELTON. And I compliment you and thank you for your outstanding efforts.
General KADISH. I appreciate that.
Mr. SKELTON. In each of those programs, however, there were certain requirements as set for by acquisition law. Is that correct?
General KADISH. The acquisition system, yes, sir.
Mr. SKELTON. And each of those requirements had to be approved by the Joint Requirements Oversight Council (JROC). Is that correct?
General KADISH. Let's be precise about this. The operational requirements documents are not a matter of law, as I understand it. They are requirements that are given to us by the services. And we certainly did try to meet those requirements. That is correct.
Mr. SKELTON. And they also had to meet certain specific performance standards. Is that correct?
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General KADISH. That is correct.
Mr. SKELTON. In the Missile Defense Agency, as I understand it, contrary to the previous programs in which you operated so well, the Missile Defense Agency sets its own requirements. Is that correct?
General KADISH. At this point in our concept of capabilities-based, we will do it together with the war fighter, yes, sir, not totally in isolation.
Mr. SKELTON. And you design your own tests.
General KADISH. Yes, sir.
Mr. SKELTON. And you exercise some of your own authority. Is that correct?
General KADISH. That is correct.
Mr. SKELTON. Unlike any other program you have been with. Is that correct?
General KADISH. I guess I would have to answer yes.
Mr. SKELTON. And you can reprogram your own money. Is that correct?
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General KADISH. We can only do it up to a $10 million limit. That is up from $4 million, which was granted to us by the last Congress. So it is a $10 million reprogramming limit.
Mr. SKELTON. And you do have a broad category within which to reprogram. Am I correct?
General KADISH. We have major restrictions on that reprogramming authority. So with the language that came out of last year's appropriations bill, we are restricted very tightly from reprogramming much more than $10 million without coming back to the Congress.
Mr. SKELTON. To make a long story short, in any of the programs that you have worked on so effectively and so well, did you have anything like the lack of guidance like you have today that is not self-imposed? In other words, did you have self-imposed guidance on any of those systems, the F–15, F–16, C–17, or the B1B?
General KADISH. I had an awful lot of authority within those programs to do what I am asking to do in the Missile Defense Agency.
Mr. SKELTON. Unlike what you have today, however.
General KADISH. Well, it is a little bit larger, but, for instance, in the F–15 and F–16, as well as the C–17, we set our own specification requirements within a larger framework of the user's operational requirements document. We set our own testing milestones and set up our own test program in regard to that activity. So it is not unlike what we are asking for in this particular case. It is a little bit broader, however.
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Mr. SKELTON. But it is broader.
General KADISH. It is broader, and the whole idea there is to help us with the cycle time decision making. We will have 100 years of flight technology behind us as of the year 2003. And in the F–15, F–16, C–17, B–1, we were advancing the state of the art of over 80 or 90 years of development activity in aircraft development.
In the case of missile defense, we have been at this about 15 or 20 years. So we are still very early in that process, and the management required from a technical and acquisition standpoint for that maturity level for a national priority program, in my view, is different than when you are trying to push the state of the art in a technology that is 100 years old.
Mr. SKELTON. One last question, General. Using Mr. Taylor's hypothetical, you would have a high expectation of success in the year 2004. Am I correct?
General KADISH. If we go according to plan.
Mr. SKELTON. Going according to plan, at what date or approximate date will you have a high degree of confidence in a successful hit or strike with an unannounced North Korean missile coming into an unannounced target within the continental United States; in what year?
General KADISH. 2004.
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Mr. SKELTON. 2004. Thank you.
General KADISH. Again, that is a test bed capability, you know. I tried to articulate this in the last testimony. Should we choose to put it on alert, and it works as we think it will, based on our tests to date, I would have a high confidence that we could be successful, again, against a very, very limited, though unannounced, as you pointed out, activity.
Mr. SKELTON. What is they fire two, three, four, five simultaneously? At what point would you say we have a high sense of confidence of knocking them down?
General KADISH. I would rather not answer that question.
Mr. SKELTON. I understand that.
General KADISH. I would be perfectly happy to talk to you about it in a closed session on that activity. But, again, when you start talking about quantities of warheads coming in, our test bed currently has a plan to have five interceptors. And I would certainly want to increase the number of bullets, if you will, in that magazine if we are going to worry about more than just one or two.
Mr. SKELTON. Do you understand that we need such information?
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General KADISH. Absolutely, Congressman.
Mr. SKELTON. Thank you.
General KADISH. I would be happy to talk to you about it in other forums.
Mr. SKELTON. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
Mr. HUNTER. I thank the gentleman, and let me just remind our members, too, that we are going to have another joint session next week with Pete Aldridge, Undersecretary of Defense for Acquisition, and we can talk to him also about the programmatic aspects of missile defense, including the spiral development issue. That is going to be available.
And tomorrow, we have a meeting with DARPA, in which we are going to have an opportunity to talk about this issue, also, one of our 8:00 in the morning breakfast briefings. So maybe we will even have a movie at that briefing. That seems to be highly popular.
And just one question, General, before we move on. Mr. Skelton asked if we could stop the single incoming ballistic missile, which is a question I have always asked SecDef, because a lot of American people think we have a missile defense. We don't have one yet. That is why we are developing it.
But in terms of the missiles that killed our soldiers in the Gulf War in the early 1990s, do we have now a much better chance of knocking down a high percentage of those missiles than we had at that time?
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General KADISH. Yes, we do. With the Patriot-3 initial capability that we had declared last September, we are working on our first 16 missiles for that capability. And we have a great capability against the short-range threat represented by the Persian Gulf War.
Now, the question here is how fast and how affordable do we want to make that production rate, because it becomes a function of how many missiles we have as to how effective we are going to be.
Mr. HUNTER. Thank you.
Mr. Saxton?
Mr. SAXTON. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
General Kadish, thank you for being with us today, and we appreciate the dedication that you have exhibited in this area. Let me just ask two questions.
Let me just pose this question this way. It is fairly obvious to me that other people in other governments around the world share the vulnerability that we do in terms of missile defense, because they don't have one, either.
The question, I guess, is kind of a general one. What is the potential for cooperation with other countries? And if you care to be specific, which other countries might you look to as being the most interested in a cooperative program?
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The second question is more of a technical one. Each time that we have discussed the development of a missile defense system, the radar component has been discussed, and you and I have discussed it both publicly as well as privately on a number of occasions. Can you talk for just a minute about the progress that has been made in coordinating various radar bands in the program and where we are and where you see that element of the program going?
Thank you.
General KADISH. Well, sir, if I might take the second question first on the radars, we have had an investment program in different bands of radar frequencies, X-band, S-band for the Aegis cruisers, and we are looking at other radar bands. They all offer very specific advantages for discrimination capability in the mid-course.
I have to confess, however, that as I have looked at the problem of how we do the investment in the radars, certainly over the past year and the recent months, I think we need to do a better job when we actually put in decision points to decide which route we want to go in terms of these radars. And I think you are going to see us be more aggressive in that regard over the next six or eight months, certainly for the next budget.
Let me give you an example of what we are struggling with. If we are going to use a ground-based radar like we have at Kwajalein here at the Capitol, we could detect the motion of a golf ball over Seattle. So these are very, very accurate radars.
The S-band radar gives us a whole set of different capabilities. And what we are struggling with now is that some of the rules of missile defense are such that you want the radars as far forward as you can get them to handle the threat. That is where mobility of sea-based radars are very important. Sorting that all out is a very complex problem.
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So I guess the bottom line is I don't know exactly at this point how this decision process is going to turn out. But I can assure you we are going to have a better one than we have today in the next six or eight months.
Now, let me turn to the idea of cooperation. I think the secretary has made it clear, certainly to me, that the allies and friends around the world who face the same problem that we have with missile defense need to be in our equation on developing this program. We are on the verge of proposing to the department some ideas on how to do that and to do it in a way that makes sense with what we are facing today in the development program.
Those ideas are not yet vetted, and I would rather testify to those at a later time when we do have them vetted. But I can assure you we are thinking very hard about that problem.
And in regard to which countries, we have very good relations across a broad range, starting with Israel and the U.K. and Germany and Italy in the MEADS program and Japan in a cooperative program on the Aegis side. And what we need to do now is make sure that those relationships, as well as others who might want to join us, can be accommodated, and we are certainly looking very hard at that. But we are not ready to talk in detail about it.
Mr. HUNTER. I thank the gentleman.
Mr. Spratt?
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Mr. SPRATT. General Kadish, I have followed this program for almost 20 years now. I have known every director of it, and I want to commend you, because you have brought to the program a steady hand and a straightforward manner and a very practical attitude.
But I have to tell you that as I read the briefing book last night, I was sort of swept away by what you are embracing here compared to what we have been doing over the last few years. I even had the feeling that I could see the reincarnation of SDI rising from the pages of that briefing book, even the resurrection of brilliant pebbles, which I thought was dead and not to be exhumed.
I have often said that the problem with ballistic missile defense, in my opinion, has not been a lack of funding as much as a lack of focus. In terms of funding, since March of 1983, we have spent about $60 billion in today's money. Even before that, on Sentinel and Safeguard and Nike-Zeus, we probably spent $100 billion, a substantial sum of money. And still, we are not there yet. We don't have a system fielded.
Part of the problem, in my opinion, having followed this system, is that we have gone off frequently in pursuit of red herrings and multiple systems, to the detriment of those systems that had some near-term potential. As you know, I have been a strong supporter of the ground-based interceptor, because I thought it had—having watched all of the other systems, sort of, fall by the way with SDI—the nearest potential for giving us a limited but effective ballistic missile defense.
As I looked through here, I kept looking for the X-band radar. It would seem to me to make the mid-course intercept system achieve its potential, you have to have SBIRS Low, if for no other reason than to put that pencil beam X-band radar in the right box. It can't volume search the sky looking for the incoming objects. It has to be directed to approximately the right location. You have to have SBIRS Low and, for that matter, SBIRS High to queue up SBIRS Low for that to work.
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I don't quite understand why we aren't moving forward with the X-band radar if we are going to have some kind of a deployment, some kind of a test band at Shemya. And I think you are underestimating the scope of your problem with SBIRS Low in the Congress. As you know, I am a strong supporter of it, too.
Where do we stand with that, because wouldn't you agree they are essential components of a ground-based intercept system?
General KADISH. The SBIRS Low and what it represents as a complement and integral part of a missile defense system in conjunction with an X-band radar are extremely important elements of any architecture that I could foresee that is practical at this point.
Mr. SPRATT. But it is slipping on the schedule. It is still technically suspect. It has problems. You are probably going to put it through a redesign before you down select it and go with the final system. How much slippage are we looking at here before we will have deployed a SBIRS Low, which is a critical component of making a credible ground-based intercept system, which is bound to be the first thing you deploy and call a missile defense system?
General KADISH. That is an excellent question, Mr. Spratt, and I know you follow this very closely, and you have seen us struggle with SBIRS Low for many years, I believe, from the time it was realized and that type of thing until where we are today. We are working very hard in this restructure of SBIRS Low to maintain a focus not too far off of what we originally thought would be a deployment capability.
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What enables us to think that way, given the fact that we have had turbulence in the program in the last budget, is the idea that we are going to build a less integrated satellite than what we originally intended to do that was driven in large part by the requirements in the operational requirements documents by the using community. Now, that doesn't mean we are not going to pay attention to those and do it eventually in this capability-based approach. But we are going to take a much harder look at making sure that we can do what the promise SBIRS Low was for missile defense very quickly.
Mr. SPRATT. Let me ask you, because time is ticking away, about sea-based mid-course intercept. Here, as I understand it from your testimony and from the charts you put up there, we are not talking about an ICBM. We are talking about something that is theater or intermediate range, because an ICBM RB would be coming in at too fast a velocity, would it not be, to take out with what we have now designed as a standard three booster?
General KADISH. That is correct. However, given that we are looking much broader, because of the treaty restrictions being lifted, I will not rule out the possibility that with other sensor queues that were prohibited in the past that we may be able to do a little bit better than what we have been.
Mr. SPRATT. Even if you do that, you are probably going to have to look at the LEAP. It has a one-color seeker.
General KADISH. Yes.
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Mr. SPRATT. It is a very lightweight system. You have a limited velocity in the standard booster, and once you start changing the dimensions of those things, you are probably going to have to redesign the magazine on the bow of the Aegis cruiser, aren't you?
General KADISH. All of the above are correct.
Mr. SPRATT. Big bucks.
General KADISH. What you might be seeing when you look at the budget book is that I believe we have focus. We have focus on the near term, and the dollars are on the things we think we can do, like the ground-based system, early on. And then the investment dollars later on in the stream are to look at sea-based against long-range missiles, concepts that we can invest in to build on the technology we have today that includes SBIRS and other activities.
Mr. SPRATT. Let me ask you about boost phase intercept. I take it, there, we are talking about an ICBM or some other system, but it would include taking out an ICBM rising from a silo.
General KADISH. In most cases, the boost phase is indifferent as to whether or not it is short range or long range, because it is still in boost. And, therefore, it tends to cover a lot of the ranges of missiles.
Mr. SPRATT. Once, the conclusion that SDI reached was that if the adversary had a boost phase system that burned out as quickly as 180 seconds, three minutes, it was probably futile to even try to design a system that could intercept it. Do you still think that that is a limiting factor?
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General KADISH. That is true, but that is why we want layered defenses. And I cannot foresee that the nations that threaten us the most right now with ballistic missiles will have that capability in the timeframes we are talking about.
Mr. SPRATT. But that is another aspect of it, too, because boost phase is ideal. You can put a ship out in the Sea of Japan and show how it is applicable to North Korea. But large land mass countries—you wouldn't have nearly enough proximity to the likely missile in order to take it out in the boost phase.
General KADISH. Not unless you go to space. That, again, is a valid argument for a layered missile defense.
Mr. SPRATT. You have changed the name, it seems to me, from theater missile defense to terminal defense. Is there a reason for this? It used to be we had kind of a clean categorization, and the Congress was of one mind, pretty near consensus on theater missile defense. We were all committed to that.
As you cross the line into ballistic missile defense, you got different levels of support and opposition. But is there some reason we aren't calling it theater defense and you are calling it terminal defense now?
General KADISH. I think the distinction between theater and national missile defense has gone away, because we are looking at this problem a lot differently. The fact that you could protect Japan might be theater for us, but national for them. The fact that you can protect Israel is theater for us, national for them, and so on and so forth.
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At some point in time, a short-range missile, in my view, can threaten us in this country, in the homeland, just as well as an ICBM launched from the sea. So as we look at this problem, especially post-September 11th, from my point of view, we want to make sure we are effective against all ranges of threats, and then it becomes a national decision as to where we deploy these against what ranges.
Mr. SPRATT. Well, let's take the airborne laser system. That was sold to most of us as an answer to the boost phase take-out for tactical theater missile systems, particularly. And now we have moved it from that role or mission up to an ICBM take-out mission, boost phase take-out mission. Is this because you are worried about the problems of propagating the beam inside the atmosphere and would rather shoot it through the thinner, upper exo-atmosphere?
General KADISH. No, Congressman. I think the first test we intend to do as of right now are against those very short-range missiles. And we are looking very hard at the ABL to include longer-range missiles in there, because it will have an inherent capability to do so.
So as we step up the capability of the ABL, I believe we can reach the ICBM. And, in fact, given the fact that the ICBMs would necessarily have to burn longer than short-range missiles, we may have an inherent capability that exists in that weapon system. But we are not ignoring the short-range at all in ABL.
Mr. HUNTER. Let me interrupt for one minute just to let the committee know that we are going to continue the hearing. Mr. Weldon has left to vote, and he is going to come back and run it while I vote. But we are going to continue, so if members want to leave and vote and come back, it is not a bad idea. And I think we are going to have to do that to be able to make sure we get through.
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Go ahead, John.
Mr. SPRATT. General Kadish, the Congressional Budget Office did a study dated January, 2002, in which they tried to do a takeoff on the likely cost of a likely layered system, a two to three-site ground-based system, a standalone sea-based mid-course system, and a space-based laser system. I don't know how they have any idea what a space-based laser system's going to cost, but they took a stab at it anyway, and the numbers are pretty sobering.
One of the concerns we have, picking up on what Mr. Taylor was saying earlier, is if this all comes to fruition at the same time, how do we accommodate it without major tradeoffs in other weapon systems that are equally important to the defense of this country. What they are projecting is that a double-site system, a two-site system—which I would think we would end up with—one on each coast, for a ground-based intercept system with 250 interceptors, would cost about $58 billion to $60 billion. Three ships, three locations, each ship with 35 missiles would cost about $55 billion, and 24 lasers in orbit would cost about $68 billion. Add it all together and you get $150 billion, $160 billion, $170 billion.
But that is just the beginning, because what I see is as countermeasures develop, we will have a lot of incremental changes to all of these systems, gradual improvements, to make them more robust. In addition, of course, you have life cycle operating costs to add to it. Are you concerned about starting all of this as to whether or not you can finish what you have begun?
General KADISH. I am always concerned about affordability issues. I might point out, as I understand that report, that is a life cycle cost estimate for those activities over maybe 15 or 20 years. And there are a lot of problems with the estimate, as you pointed out. I am not sure anybody knows how to estimate what an SBL would cost, if we did such a thing.
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But I believe that whatever we do in the missile defense deployment arena will be expensive. There is no doubt about it. The question is whether or not the country wants to afford that protection when we can state as clearly as we can what it will afford us in effectiveness. Now, that is a to-go type of thing on this.
Mr. SPRATT. The chair has indulged me the opportunity to ask you these questions. I don't even see a clock down there, so I don't guess I am running past a red light.
But a couple of last questions, on the old space-based interceptors. They originally were to be satellites which would garage a number of interceptors, and then we came up with this idea from Livermore of having a single, autonomous, brilliant pebble, multiple brilliant pebbles coursing around the world. What do you have in mind for your design of a space-based interceptor?
General KADISH. To be frank, I don't know. What we have laid out in the program is that we took stock of where we thought the technology was for this type of thing in space, and we put out in January of this year a broad area announcement to the entire community. Given where we are in technology today, how would you do a kinetic energy intercept from space, given that that basing mode gives us a lot more coverage of area than a ground-based or terrestrial-based would be?
To date, we have 50 responses to that broad area announcement that we are analyzing very carefully in this regard. And some of them are very interesting and promising for us to go and experiment with. That is our intention, to pick some that we can experiment with and gain the confidence in very short order that this is feasible, and then we can come to you with a program that we believe makes sense, as a complement to anything we do in a layered defense activity.
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Mr. SPRATT. And I commend you for your history of management ability throughout the acquisition years that you have had. But I am really concerned about the extent to which we are dispensing with the rules that have proven to be worthy of enforcement over the years, ORDS, milestones, DAB meetings, SARs: all of this stuff is basically being dispensed.
I worked in DOD some years ago, and my boss was the first program manager of the Polaris. One of the things that the Polaris system did, even though they did get a broad dispensation from most of the procurement rules as they invented even stricter rules for internal management. They really were the first to get that fully effective.
They designed the variance cost baseline that became sort of the predecessor of the SAR. They stressed value engineering. And I hope as you dispense with all of these other external reviews, you strengthen internal reviews to make up for it, and I really think that some of these rules ought to be reapplied to your system.
General KADISH. Congressman Spratt, I have to tell you that I worry about this a lot, because people, even at the agency, kind of see the rhetoric that we are using at this early phase and think that they won't have to do certain things. Quite the contrary.
In order for us to be successful in this kind of management complexity that faces us, in my view, it requires tougher discipline than the department would ever impose on us, using the normal views. And our challenge ahead of us, and, particularly, my challenge, is to make sure that we do exactly what you say.
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We are not going to give up value management. We are going to strengthen it. We are not going to give up the baselining process. We are going to strengthen it. What will be different is that I hope we will be able to make decisions quicker as a result of seeing those trends under those restrictions than we have.
Mr. SPRATT. You will have your internal reporting devices and oversight devices, but it is going to be all the harder for us. This is a lot of money. As I said, it has huge tradeoff implications as well.
Thank you for your testimony.
General KADISH. Thank you, sir.
Mr. HUNTER. I thank the gentleman, and we have about three minutes left for the vote, so we are going to suspend here briefly, even though you are having a lot of fun, General.
Mr. ABERCROMBIE. Mr. Chairman?
Mr. HUNTER. Yes.
Mr. ABERCROMBIE. When we come back, do you suppose that General Kadish can consider the idea of just buying North Korea?
[Laughter.]
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Mr. HUNTER. Well, I understand it might make a nice adjunct to Hawaii.
We will be back in a few minutes, General. Thank you.
[Recess.]
Mr. HUNTER. The subcommittee will reconvene.
General, we appreciate your bearing with us. We know you have been a little bit under the weather, and we appreciate you hanging in there. We expect members to come back for questioning, and to keep the process moving, I will get started as soon as Mr. Allen is ready to ask his questions.
Mr. Allen, I will yield to you.
Mr. ALLEN. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
If I can just catch my breath here a moment, General Kadish, I appreciate very much your being here. I do have just a few things I have to find, if you will hold on one moment.
General Kadish, you have appeared before this committee now for a number of years, and I have always had and continue to have great respect for your integrity. You are a straight shooter, and that was demonstrated in the video, when you showed failures as well as successes. And I have always appreciated your candor and your integrity when it comes to describing what it is you are trying to do.
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Now, it is not clear to me that your civilian superiors are doing you any favors right now. And I say that because you have been asked to implement a new and, in many ways, unprecedented acquisition approach, one where your agency is able to establish its own requirements, review its own programs against criteria that it creates, shift money from program to program at will, and initiate and cancel programs without external review.
Now, I have heard what you said earlier about the importance of discretion, and I don't fault you for wanting that discretion. But I do worry about what happens a few years from now, when probably someone else is seated in your chair to defend the future Missile Defense Agency budget.
I am worried about credibility. I really am. The lack of oversight, the sense that, you know, when we are relying on one agency to do the requirements, to oversee the testing, to be both the agency that is carrying out the program and the agency that is evaluating the program, it seems to me that we are likely to wind up with more skepticism, more cynicism, than would be the case with a different approach.
I guess I would like your reaction to that. I mean, do you see potential pitfalls in the future for an acquisition program as broad as this with as much flexibility as this? Do you agree with me that there is at least a risk of losing public credibility as you go forward?
General KADISH. Well, Congressman, I think we can always make serious mistakes, not intentionally, but just by virtue of making mistakes. But, if you will, I would challenge the fundamental assumptions that you articulated about us being, almost at will, able to do some of the things that you postulated.
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As we look at the way we are implementing those new authorities, they are basically departmental authorities to begin with. We are not asking for any relief from specific statutes. And it is the way in which the oversight will be carried out, as opposed to whether it will be carried out.
There will be oversight on this process. I work for Mr. Aldridge, and we will be accountable to the secretary of defense through a very tough group of folks, which are the SEC members, the secretaries of each service plus the undersecretary and Mr. Aldridge. And I can assure you in my dealings in that environment, the standards are very high in terms of accountability for the decisions.
And, in fact, even in this year's budget, we are taking some action in SBIRS Low. So I don't think that there is a track record here that is building that we are going to in one agency make unilateral decisions that will increase the risk of losing credibility because we are off doing something that nobody knows about.
Mr. ALLEN. Let me ask a more specific question. Entities that are normally central to the DOD weapons acquisition process, like Operational Test and Evaluation, the Joint Requirements Oversight Committee, and the Cost Analysis Improvement Committee, have not been given formal seats on the senior executive council. They have an indirect and advisory role only. Can you explain why they don't have positions on the senior executive council?
General KADISH. Well, to the best of my knowledge, the senior executive council, as the secretary has outlined it, doesn't have seats for those people on anything that they do, not only missile defense, and they are invited in as the case may be. That is the way the process is working right now, to the best of my knowledge.
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OT&E, the JROC and the Cost Analysis Improvement Group will have seats on the missile defense support group that is being formed. And I am as interested in making sure that we take advantage of what OT&E has to say, as well as the CAIG and the JROC, as anybody. It is the way in which we do it.
And the cycle time here I can't overemphasize. If we went through the normal departmental processes, the reviews that we would get would be episodic in terms of program events. And there could be years in between those events unless there is a big breach problem.
What we are trying to do here is to get a focus as a minimum every year, if not every quarter, on the program, to get more involvement on a real-time basis to have cycle time decision processes in place. So I am confident that we can always make mistakes in implementation, but I am confident that we have a track where we are going to have the proper oversight, and we are going to do a better job of management under this process. As I said to Mr. Spratt, I believe that we will hold ourselves accountable more internally than we have in the past.
And I think it is important to understand why we are doing some of this, in terms of authorities. We are facing two major problems from a management standpoint, and they are a fact of life.
The first major problem is we are dealing with an unprecedented technology. As much progress as we have made, it is still unprecedented, and it demands a different kind of management flexibility at this crossroads.
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The second point that I would like to make is we are dealing with three services plus the OSD, in terms of the operational nature of who is actually going to operate these things. When you are talking about complex programs like F–22 or DDG–21 or Challenger tanks, they are complex systems, and the oversight processes designed are single service, and very seldom do we cross the boundaries between the services.
What we are being asked to do is look at all these different basing modes, where no one service has the monopoly on the operation of a layered defense of the type we are talking about. So we have to look at the oversight and management processes from a Missile Defense Agency point of view—why we were created to begin with—that match the challenge of dealing with those three services. The processes were invented for single service activities, and I believe they need to be modified to some degree to handle the multi-service issues that we are talking about. And I think we are taking a pretty good step with the secretary's letter of the 2nd of January.
Mr. ALLEN. I have just one more question at the request of the chairman. Can you break out what is now called the long-range missile defense component of this budget? We used to call it national missile defense, and we used to be able to tell a little more easily how much money was going where. At least, I would appreciate it if you could get that information for me if you don't have it today, if you could somehow break out how much of the $7.8 billion is spent on programs that are primarily connected to what is now called long-range missile defense.
General KADISH. I would certainly be able to do that. And I would like to make sure we do it for the record to get to the specific figures, but a rule of thumb in the budget is out of the over $7 billion that we are asking for, departmental wide, about $3.1 billion or so is against long-range missiles.
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[The information referred to can be found in the Appendix beginning on page ?.]
Mr. ALLEN. That is helpful.
Mr. Chairman, I wanted to make a pitch for having Deputy Secretary Wolfowitz here at some future hearing. It seems to me this is maybe the most significant policy change in an acquisition area of this administration, and yet we don't have the deputy secretary here. And I would hope before the bill is marked up that we had have a chance to have him here to answer questions about the changes in policy, with all due respect to General Kadish.
Thank you very much.
Mr. HUNTER. I thank the gentleman for his questions and for his acknowledgement of the need for Mr. Wolfowitz. I agree with my colleague and friend, and he was invited here, but because of, I guess, the protocol that they have at the Pentagon, he said he would come to a full committee hearing, but not necessarily this one.
But I agree with you. I think we need to have him here, and we will do that.
General, the other question I have relative to Mr. Allen's question, which I think is a valid one, is, now, how do we define a long-range missile? Is 6,000 kilometers a long-range missile, or 7,000?
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So I think to answer that question, there is a range of missile capability that you had have to give us. Is that correct?
General KADISH. That is exactly the reason why we are talking about this, in layered defenses against all ranges.
Mr. HUNTER. It is not clearly just this system versus another, because as the Iranians develop Shahab-4, –5, and-6, they are going to continually have longer-range missiles.
General KADISH. That is right.
Mr. HUNTER. In your summary of the costs, I hope you could layer that in, depending upon the length of the missile that we are trying to defend against, since that is the way the Iranians are developing their system, in particular.
General KADISH. It would be great if we had a technology that could do all of missile defense, all ranges, against all threats in one specific technical system. It would be like F–22. You would be able to parse it out, and you could decide exactly what is affordable and how you want to do it.
Unfortunately, we are going to be dealing with this for years, because it is not going to be that way. And if we could ever get it that way from a technical point of view, it would be a huge breakthrough, but I don't see it right now.
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Mr. HUNTER. Thank you.
Ms. Davis from Virginia?
Mrs. JO ANN DAVIS OF VIRGINIA Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
General, it is good to see you again. I want to talk a little bit about Nunn-McCurdy. I think you alluded to it a moment ago by saying that you can't fold the Navy Area Wide missile defense. What effect is this going to have on future Nunn-McCurdy reviews, and do you foresee future Nunn-McCurdy notifications coming out of the MDA?
General KADISH. I think, given the fact that even last year, we structured this program for an RDT&E focus without procurement, I don't see that Nunn-McCurdy is going to be totally relevant as we understood it to the new program structure, because we don't have procurement. The way Nunn-McCurdy is structured, we have RDT&E and procurement, and you have different breach criteria for the program in terms of cost. We will have a Nunn-McCurdy like baseline for RDT&E, but not for procurement.
In the case of the Navy area program, we are still in the midst of transition with that. And the fact that it had a Nunn-McCurdy breach, and it resulted in the cancellation, I think was a confluence of events that were very unusual. I think I am right in saying this, but the Navy area program was the first program since 1981 and the institution of Nunn-McCurdy that was actually cancelled because of the breach.
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Mrs. JO ANN DAVIS OF VIRGINIA That is my understanding. That work was being done in my district, and that is why I was asking about it.
General KADISH. But I think, from an overall perspective, the Nunn-McCurdy breach was the manifestations of the fundamental problems we had in the program, because we basically had three different breaches achieving the flight test arrangement in almost a four-year period. So we were struggling with the program, and the decision of the department was taken using Nunn-McCurdy as the instant problem to terminate that effort.
Now, as we go into the future, this program is constructed such that we could make those decisions when program elements get in trouble without Nunn-McCurdy, because that is what we intend to do. We can't afford to keep all our activities going that we have ongoing right now.
Mrs. JO ANN DAVIS OF VIRGINIA I still remain concerned about the future development of the sea-based mid-course defense. I was wondering if you could expand at all on where we are going to go with that. I mean, I would assume we are not going to be left high and dry with nothing.
General KADISH. I can't overemphasize I have been here a few years now and haven't been able to put a Navy hit-to-kill on the table as a success, and we have been able to do that. It was a very limited test, but a success nonetheless, in terms of hitting the target. So that is very encouraging.
The sea-based component to missile defense, certainly for intermediate-range and short-range missiles, is extremely important to us. That is primarily because of the mobility that sea-based offers us. And we are going to look very hard. We are going to pursue those aggressively. I can assure you of that. How it will turn out, I am not sure.
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But I think that, given the success we are having against long-range missiles in the ground-based program, using similar technology in the mid-course with Navy, but with different propulsion activities, I think we are going to be able to work that out. And when we do, we are going to have a very powerful sea-based component of this layered system.
Mrs. JO ANN DAVIS OF VIRGINIA Thank you, General. I appreciate you being here today.
Mr. HUNTER. I thank the gentlelady for her questions and will now yield time to Mr. Abercrombie from Hawaii.
Mr. ABERCROMBIE. Thanks very much, Mr. Chairman. I just want to comment before I get into my remarks that I see we have microphones up here for C-SPAN that will come up, because I guess they think there will be more interest in the ongoing military activities right now. But it is a shame that they didn't broadcast this hearing. It is a real disservice that they didn't.
Maybe we ought to think about getting a congressional broadcast system in here that operates 24 hours a day and let people pick up on what they want, because I will tell you, General Kadish, you have been receiving all kinds of compliments this morning. There were compliments, by the way. I know you had to filter your way through to this—but getting a lot of compliments this morning.
But I want to tell you—and I am going to use Mr. Hunter as my foil on this—the conversations between Mr. Weldon and yourself and Mr. Spratt and yourself are something that, among other things, I am going to get a transcript of, so I can go back over it, because I couldn't keep up with all of it. And I pride myself on doing a little bit of homework, but I can't begin to match the knowledge that is in this committee and the knowledge that you have and your staff has with respect to the genuine issues to be discussed here and for resolutions to be made legislatively and so on. These issues are complicated and difficult and detailed, and the command that Mr. Weldon and Mr. Spratt have over them and the illumination that thus occurs for the other members of the committee trying to follow it is extraordinary.
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I said to Mr. Spratt when he came into the anteroom over here, ''You know, why don't we just take the money that we are talking about here and buy North Korea,'' and I said that to you, you know, before we left. We might as well make an offer when we are thinking of an annuity program of some kind, because
of the expenses involved.
The issues are real, the expenses are extraordinary, and the amount of knowledge out in the general public is virtually nil. So I am going to ask these questions, some of which you don't necessarily have to answer. But the money part of it. You don't have to answer right now, but I would appreciate an answer.
If you look on page eight of your testimony—I am going to quote it at some length, because this is what really bothers me here. ''There will be annual decision points at which time assessments will be made on the basis of effectiveness and synergy within the system, technical risks, deployment schedule, cost and threat. This assessment of progress will determine whether a given developmental activity will be accelerated, modified, or terminated.''
These are points you have sort of addressed in general, General Kadish. But I think they are going to need a lot more specificity, even though you have stated within your testimony so far to both Mr. Weldon and Mr. Spratt, in particular, that you, personally, want to see some of these questions addressed. But I don't think we can base legislation on personalities, and I am sure you agree. This is an institutional question.
So my question is against what requirements will these measurements be taken? With no structure to the missile defense program—you, yourself, have used the word ''architecture'' in this regard—there is no envisioned end product, and I am still not quite sure what spiraled development is as a concept. How will we know when an element is performing? In other words, don't you think we, as the Congress, have to set up for you, regardless of what happened last year in legislation, some kind of requirement specific measurements and some accountability in terms of end product and making judgments as to how things are performing, so that we can try to make a better decision about how to do funding?
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General KADISH. Well, Congressman Abercrombie, let me try to answer your question this way, and then maybe I could do a better job if I took it for the record—
Mr. ABERCROMBIE. Yes.
General KADISH. —for amplification. But let me oversimplify this approach we are taking with these requirements by talking about getting a grade of A, B, C or D in some college course. In the requirements approach, it is akin to shooting for an A in order to get a B, because you have a very tough course.
Instead of coming to the point where we come to you saying we either met a requirement or we didn't, we want to come to you and say we shot for this level of performance, but we have this level of performance.
Mr. ABERCROMBIE. Excuse me, General Kadish. I agree with that. But you are saying a course. That is part of my point here. The better analogy to what you are saying to me is that we are taking 10 courses all at once. I would prefer it if it was just on a course. I would like to see some discernment.
General KADISH. Well, I am trying to oversimplify and I am not doing a very good job of it. But the point is we do have requirements. We will have requirements. You have to have them to build something.
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What we are doing a little bit differently is we are not setting a requirements bar in a sequential manner with the traditional military requirements process, where somebody invents the requirement, and then some time later, we develop specifications, and then we develop the test program to do it. What we are trying to do—and I think we will be successful at this—is to do it together, because we don't have experiences with missile defenses like we do with airplanes and ships and tanks.
Mr. ABERCROMBIE. Well, I won't pursue it further, because my time is going to run out. But I will tell you, as an old-time sociologist—which I did in my real life before this—in, say, small group dynamics, where you are asking an awful lot of people not to sit there and say, ''Well, look, these guys don't really have any oversight over us anymore. We can go where we want'' you are going to have a tough time.
Part of the reason you had those specifics and part of the reason it is so damn tough to get something through in the hierarchy that you just outlined there is because there is good reason for establishing it in the first place. It made people do things in certain ways and in certain times that other people could oversee and get some knowledge of what was going on.
The problem with the way you are organized here is it is so amorphous right now that people are going to be able to skate all over the place without accountability.
General KADISH. I would disagree with that. But it is for us to prove to you that we don't have that situation.
Mr. ABERCROMBIE. Okay, fair enough. And may I submit for the record, so I don't take up more time, that you can get back to me in writing, or someone can call me, about the Pacific missile range.
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[The information referred to can be found in the Appendix beginning on page ?.]
General KADISH. Sure.
Mr. ABERCROMBIE. There are some environmental questions, testing questions and infrastructure questions that are parochial to me, obviously, being out in the Pacific. But they are fundamental to the mission, particularly with testing, that you will be doing.
General KADISH. The Pacific missile test range has become extremely important to us in this.
Mr. ABERCROMBIE. We want to do the right thing.
General KADISH. That is right.
Mr. ABERCROMBIE. So may I submit that, Mr. Chairman?
And perhaps, General, you or someone can get back to me with some of the specifics?
General KADISH. I would be happy to.
Mr. ABERCROMBIE. Thank you very much.
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Mr. HUNTER. Without objection, the distinguished sociologist from Hawaii will have all of his requests met. And, as always, he provides new insights into issues that we deal with, and I respect him immensely for the contribution he makes to this committee and to the Congress.
General, I have some additional questions. I know you are not necessarily feeling that well, so I will give mine for the record. I don't know whether Mr. Hunter has any or Mr. Spratt, but I will turn to them and see what their feelings are.
[The information referred to can be found in the Appendix beginning on page ?.]
Mr. HUNTER. I am fine, Mr. Chairman. I just want to thank you for co-chairing this hearing with me.
General, thank you for the excellent testimony. I think your format of illustrating these tests, showing us the tests, what you have done, and then reviewing what you are going to do this year, has been very constructive and instructive. Thanks a lot.
Mr. HUNTER. Mr. Spratt, do you have any additional—
Mr. SPRATT. No, I don't.
Mr. HUNTER. Thank you again, General, for your testimony and for your outstanding service to America.
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General KADISH. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
[Whereupon, at 12:42 p.m., the subcommittee was adjourned.]