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. 4546
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, 20, 21, and April 11, 2002
MILITARY PROCUREMENT SUBCOMMITTEE
CURT WELDON, 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
Doug Roach, Professional Staff Member
Steve Ansley, Professional Staff Member
Roger Smith, Professional Staff Member
John Sullivan, Professional Staff Member
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Bob Lautrup, Professional Staff Member
Jean Reed, Professional Staff Member
Bill Natter, Professional Staff Member
J.J. Gertler, Professional Staff Member
Jesse Tolleson, Research Assistant
Daniel Hilton, 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 WILSON, South Carolina (SC)
MARTY MEEHAN, Massachusetts, Ranking Member
JOHN SPRATT, South Carolina
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NEIL ABERCROMBIE, Hawaii
ROD R. BLAGOJEVICH, Illinois
SILVESTRE REYES, Texas
THOMAS H. ALLEN, Maine
JIM TURNER, Texas
ADAM SMITH, Washington
LORETTA SANCHEZ, California
ROBERT E. ANDREWS, New Jersey
MIKE THOMPSON, California
JOHN B. LARSON, Connecticut
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:
Tuesday, April 11, 2002, Ground Force Modernization Programs
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APPENDIX:
Tuesday, April 11, 2002
TUESDAY, APRIL 11, 2002
GROUND FORCE MODERNIZATION PROGRAMS
STATEMENTS PRESENTED BY MEMBERS OF CONGRESS
Weldon, Hon. Curt, a Representative from Pennsylvania, Chairman, Military Procurement Subcommittee
Hunter, Hon. Duncan, a Representative from California, Chairman, Military Research and Development Subcommittee
WITNESSES
Hanlon, Lt. Gen. Edward, Jr., Commanding General, Marine Corps Combat Development Command United States Marine Corps
Riggs, Lt. Gen. John M., Director, Objective Force-Task Force United States Army
APPENDIX
PREPARED STATEMENTS:
Hanlon, Lt. Gen. Edward, Jr.
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Riggs, Lt. Gen. John M.
DOCUMENTS SUBMITTED FOR THE RECORD:
[There were no Documents submitted for the Record.]
QUESTIONS AND ANSWERS SUBMITTED FOR THE RECORD:
[There were no Questions and Answers submitted for the Record.]
GROUND FORCE MODERNIZATION PROGRAMS
House of Representatives,
Committee on Armed Services,
Military Procurement Subcommittee Meeting Jointly with Military Research and Development Subcommittee,
Washington, DC, Tuesday, April 11, 2002.
The joint subcommittee met, pursuant to notice, at 10:09 a.m., in room 2118, Rayburn House Office Building, Hon. Curt Weldon [chairman of the Subcommittee on Military Procurement] presiding.
OPENING STATEMENT HON. CURT WELDON, A REPRESENTATIVE FROM PENNSYLVANIA, CHAIRMAN, MILITARY PROCUREMENT SUBCOMMITTEE
Mr. WELDON. The subcommittees will come to order.
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This morning the Military Procurement and Research and Development Subcommittees meet to receive testimony on both the Army and Marine Corps fiscal year 2003 budget request.
We will receive an assessment of the current state of our ground forces and address future requirements to meet the challenges of land combat as we continue the war on terrorism. We will also hear how the Army and Marine Corps intend to meet force requirements and provide weapon systems and equipment to not only fight and win the war on terrorism but to enable our ground forces to be ready to meet current and future requirements, across the spectrum of potential threats.
Our Army and Marine Corps ground forces and equipment deployed in Afghanistan as part of Operation Enduring Freedom are being severely stressed, both physically and environmentally. The threat to our people from remaining Taliban and al Qaeda elements is real and ever present. Reports of leaflets appearing in Eastern Afghanistan offering a bounty for U.S. Military service members is of particular concern.
Our military members have met every challenge. Their performance has been and in every way continues to be exemplary. We can't say enough about the sacrifice our troops continue to make, and we want them to know how strongly we support them and their families.
In the fiscal year 2003 budget request, the Army has 17 existing programs that it plans to recapitalize in order to sustain and reduce the costs of legacy systems in its current force structure and maintain its warfighting capability. Some of the major systems are the AH–64 Apache, UH–60 Black Hawk, and the CH–47 Chinook helicopters; the M1 Abrams tank; and the M2 Bradley fighting vehicle.
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The Marine Corps is also extending the life of several of its major weapons systems to maintain its expeditionary warfare fighting capability until programs that have been delayed in the development phase can be fielded.
Several programs in both services have experienced excessive cost growth in the fiscal year 2003 budget request over estimates provided in the fiscal year 2002 budget, resulting in Nunn-McCurdy cost breaches greater than 25 percent.
Of major concern to me are the growing problems with some of the services' helicopter upgrade programs and our helicopter industrial base. Both the Army's CH–47F upgrade program, which has experienced a 95 percent cost growth breach, and the Marine Corps AH–1 Super Cobra/UH–1 Huey helicopter upgrade initiative, which is estimated to have as much as a 63 percent cost breach, have yet to be certified by the Secretary of Defense as essential programs, with no cheaper program option available.
The Army's RAH–66 Comanche is another development program where costs have been excessive. Due to congressional concerns in cost increases evident last year, the fiscal year 2002 National Defense Authorization Act required that a report of the Comanche restructuring plan and accurate cost estimates be submitted with the fiscal year 2003 budget request. This report has yet to be provided, in spite of media attention, in fact, media articles in this very area. We understand from media reports that the Comanche program may now cost as much as $3.5 billion to complete engineering and manufacturing development and that the initial operational capability date will be delayed from fiscal year 2006 until late in fiscal year 2009. This represents a 109 percent increase in program cost from estimates only 1 year ago.
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The unending cost increases and estimated dates for fielding the Comanche, along with the unwillingness of the Department of the Army to provide basic program information, are of considerable concern to these two subcommittees.
We have seen the essential role that rotary wing aircraft play in supporting soldiers in ground offenses, most recently in Afghanistan. It appears, however, that senior leaders have neither focused the adequate management attention on these programs nor allocated resources proportionately in the services modernization accounts to maintain and upgrade their helicopter fleets.
Today we have witnesses from the Army and Marine Corps to discuss their respective services current and future program requirements. On our panel today we have Lieutenant General John Riggs, United States Army, Director of the Army Objective Task Force; and Lieutenant General Edward Hanlon, Jr., United States Marine Corps Commanding General, Marine Corps Combat Development Command.
I would like now like to recognize the gentleman from California, the Chairman of the Military Research and Development (R&D) Subcommittee, Mr. Hunter, to offer any comment or remarks he would like to make.
Mr. HUNTER. Thank you, Chairman Weldon; and, General Riggs and General Hanlon, it is a pleasure to have you here today to tell us what you are going to do to modernize our ground forces.
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Our present conflict has again demonstrated I think how essential ground forces are to our overall military capability. I can recall a couple of years ago when the Chief of Staff of the Army, General Shinseki, and the Commandant of the Marine Corps, General Jones, said that the Army and Marine Corps were working shoulder to shoulder to transform ground warfighting; and I am pleased today to see that evidence of just that is occurring as reflected in the common use of the lightweight 155mm howitzer and the Shadow Tactical Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (TUAV).
General Riggs, I know the Army has just awarded a Lead Systems Integrator contract for development of its center piece of transformation, the Future Combat System (FCS). This is an innovative management approach. I look forward to learning how this is going to work and what benefits this approach brings to the FCS development.
General Hanlon, I know the Marine Corps is also busy at innovating for the future of the Marine Warfighting Lab. Additionally, the Advanced Amphibious Assault Vehicle (AAAV) is nearing fielding; and I know that you are evaluating other new systems such as the 120mm millimeter mortar. I am also very interested to learn more about your programs.
So, Chairman Weldon, thank you for letting the R&D Subcommittee participate in this hearing. I think the fighting in Afghanistan, as you have commented, reflects that we have the very finest people in uniform serving this country, our finest citizens; and we owe it to them that we, in a cost-effective manner, equip them with the finest equipment possible.
I share your concerns about some of the figures that I have seen coming out of the helicopter program recently. Of course, that is going to take a lot of focus I think on our part and on the uniform services part.
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So, gentlemen, thank you for being with us today; and thank you for your service to our country. I look forward to your testimony.
Mr. WELDON. I thank the gentleman.
Now I would like to recognize the gentleman from Mississippi, the ranking member of the Military Procurement Subcommittee, Mr. Taylor, to offer any remarks he would like to make.
Mr. TAYLOR. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
I do want to welcome Lieutenant General Riggs and Lieutenant General Hanlon here today.
In a town where speeches are more common than water, I actually heard one that I thought was worth remembering last night. That involved the gentleman from Virginia, Senator Warner, talking, after returning from Afghanistan, he gave Bill Cohen a call. Of course, with all the accolades of the forces in Afghanistan, the troops he visited, he thought it important to call Bill Cohen and congratulate him on the job he did. Because that force in Afghanistan is really the legacy force of Bill Cohen and those who went before us, and it really did strike me, that is, what we do in here. We don't affect day-to-day operations right now. We affect what the force is going to look like 5 years from now, 10 years from now, 15 years ago.
So I hope you gentlemen will make it perfectly clear to this committee what you need so that we can be a well-equipped force 5 years from now, 10 years from now, 15 years from now. I hope you won't mince any words; and if there are some things in the President's request that are lacking, I hope you will tell us what they are so we can try to put those things into the budget. And if there are things that are in there that you think you don't need, I would like to hear that, too.
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But I do welcome you, and I hope you won't mince any words in telling us what you need and what you don't need. Thank you again for being here.
Mr. WELDON. I thank the gentleman from Mississippi.
I would like to now recognize the gentleman from Massachusetts, the ranking member of the Military Research and Development Subcommittee, Mr. Meehan.
Mr. MEEHAN. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
Again, welcome, General Riggs and General Hanlon. It is great to have you both here.
I just had the privilege of returning from Afghanistan where I had the distinct privilege of observing and meeting with our brave soldiers and Marines who are putting their lives on the line day in and day out.
As both of you men well know, what is going on over there is unlike anything this country or our military has ever experienced. The innovative approach and ingenuity that I saw about this trip really gave me confidence that we are developing forces that are being taught to think as well as being taught to carry out orders. I think you gentlemen are representative of our commitment to provide those troops with the tactics, the training, and the technology that they need to be able to prevail in unscripted environments like Afghanistan and to make sure that our future forces are ready for tomorrow's challenges.
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General Riggs, I think that General Shinseki has done this country a great service in producing a vision of the objective force; and that force—I believe General Shinseki has made a very honest and heartfelt assessment when he became Chief of Staff that the Army was not headed in a direction that would allow it to really dominate the battlefield of the future. Well, it certainly is not true now. The interim and objective force goals laid out by the General are as bold a vision for military transformation as certainly I have never had the pleasure to see as a member of this committee.
So, General Riggs, as you strive to make a reality of that vision I want you to know that you have the full support and backing of both sides of the aisle on this committee.
General Hanlon, the Marines has seemingly always been the force of the future—light, fast, very lethal. I am interested in what lessons that we are learning in Afghanistan and how we are going to incorporate those lessons in future combat doctrine and requirements.
So I thank you for your service and look forward to having both of you here.
Mr. WELDON. I thank the gentleman and the ranking member.
As is always the case, we are extremely pleased whenever the Ranking Member and Chairman of the full committee come to our hearing. We welcome him as the Ranking Member of the full committee. I would now like to turn to him for whatever comments he would like to make.
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Mr. SKELTON. Thank you very much.
I wish to welcome both General Riggs and General Hanlon. My only suggestion in presenting your testimony is not to confuse transformation with modernization, as so many of us tend to do. So in the case of true transformation, so state; and if it is really a modernization and upgrading, tell us that, too. It would be a great deal of help to us.
With that, Mr. Chairman, thank you.
Mr. WELDON. Thank you for joining us and for your statement.
General Riggs and General Hanlon, your statements will be entered into the record in their entirety. Feel free to make whatever comments you would like to make, and then we will open it up for questions from the Members.
We do have one series of votes coming at I believe 11:30—11:15 we will expect the journal vote. So you can gauge yourself in terms of how much time you want to take.
Mr. WELDON. General Riggs, the floor is yours.
STATEMENT OF LIEUTENANT GENERAL JOHN M. RIGGS, DIRECTOR, OBJECTIVE FORCE TASK FORCE, UNITED STATES ARMY
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General RIGGS. Sir, if I could, please, I would like to make a short oral statement.
Let me say that we are thankful for the congressional support received from this committee for the transformation of our Army and foresight of our leaders Mr. Skelton and others have spoken to in recognizing this need to change. I am extremely proud to be a soldier serving this Nation, representing the U.S. Army here today with my marine comrade-in-arms Ed Hanlon. I think we collectively represent the most powerful land force in the world.
We are blessed to have inherited this great force that we serve in as a result of the selfless service and dedication of those that have gone before us. Much of what we speak of today is to ensure that those who follow in our footsteps can make the same statement in the decades to come.
Accompanying me today are two outstanding soldiers, Major General Bill Bond, the Director of Force Development and Major General Bob Armbruster who is the Deputy for Systems Management and Horizontal Integration.
I would say, sir, that nothing speaks to the values of America more than soldiers on the ground providing stability at home and abroad. The Army, as part of a joint multinational military team, provides a wide range of options to our Nation's leaders. As we have repeatedly seen, we cannot truly resolve conflicts without ''boots on the ground.'' In the final analysis, it is soldiers and marines who demonstrate the resilience of America's commitment and who provide the needed flexibility to decisively defeat our adversaries.
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Sir, I think our fiscal year 2003 budget request that was presented represents the culmination of some very hard choices we continue to make in striking the right balance between selective modernization and recapitalization of our current force, what with the investments in our future Army, the objective force, while providing the resources to bridge the gap and required capabilities with the interim force. This balancing act of required capabilities against available resources will continue, and it will require your continued support.
In our fiscal year 2003 modernization counts, they represent 21 percent of our total budget request for research, development and acquisition, $19.1 billion. In broad categories this represents $15 billion for the legacy force, which includes recapitalization spoken to by Mr. Weldon. We got $1 billion for the Third Interim Brigade Combat Team, which is 332 strykers; and we have got about $3 billion for objective force systems, which includes Future Combat Systems, or FCS, Comanche and objective force systems in technology.
FCS is the basic maneuver formation in the objective force. It represents about one third of our Science & Technology (S&T) funding for this year, but we are also dedicating 97 percent of our total science and technology dollars to the objective force, which is our future Army. The objective force will encompass the entire Army, with new doctrine, training, leader development, organizations, material and installations. The FCS program itself will be a network system of systems equivalent in scope to the post-Vietnam era when the U.S. Congress and the Army fielded the big five.
Our future Army will be a full spectrum force and, together with the Marine Corps, we will continue to pursue new ways to leverage the work we are both doing in ground forces modernization while investigating new avenues of approach.
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We owe this Nation the most relevant and powerful Army that we can provide. The transformation of our Army is the legacy we leave to the future. Mr. Chairman, from Bunker Hill to Anaconda, when we were called, we were there.
I am prepared to take your questions.
Mr. WELDON. Thank you, General, for your outstanding statement.
[The prepared statement of General Riggs can be found in the Appendix on page ?.]
Mr. WELDON. General Hanlon, the floor is yours.
STATEMENT OF LIEUTENANT GENERAL EDWARD HANLON, JR., USMC, COMMANDING GENERAL, MARINE CORPS COMBAT DEVELOPMENT COMMAND
General HANLON. Chairman Weldon, Chairman Hunter, lady and gentlemen of the committee, it is a pleasure to be here today with General Riggs to discuss the future and the modernization of our Nation's ground forces, the Army and Marine Corps.
Mr. Chairman, in the statement you are entering for the record, going to Mr. Taylor's comments and Mr. Hunter's comments, I think we have identified those modernization issues very succinctly in that statement, sir, on behalf of our commandant; and I thank you for the support as we transform our Corps of Marines to meet current and future challenges. At the end of the day, as General Riggs said, it is support of the Congress that will enable us to ensure that the Marines and the Army will remain unique yet complementary combat forces for the Nation.
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Combat can be described in many ways, and each service plays a vital role in the Nation's defense. But combat as seen and experienced from the viewpoint of a soldier or a marine often engaged in close proximity to the enemy is very serious business. That is why there can never be a substitute for superbly trained, superbly equipped, superbly led, and superbly motivated marines and soldiers.
Our job is very simple. It is to win in any conflict, anytime, anywhere. ''send in the Marines'' is part of America's folklore; and as the Nation's full deployed crisis response force, it is a mission that defines our very culture as a corps.
I am here today, as the Chairman said, as Commanding General of the Marine Corps Combat Development Command. We are tasked for the commandant with developing operational concepts, the doctrine, the training and education, the requirements validation, the joint inoperability and the experimentation for our Marine Corps.
I am joined today by Major General Mike Hough, who is Assistant Deputy Commandant for Aviation; by Brigadier General Jim Figley, who commands our Systems Command at Quantico; and by Brigadier General Rich Natonski, who is our Director of Operations within our headquarters. They are here to assist me as subject matter experts in any specific questions you might have in their areas.
On a personal note, ladies and gentlemen, I need to tell you I am an artillery man in the Marine Corps. At least I once was. It has been a while since I have been around the guns. And I have had the distinct privilege of having been trained in my trade at the U.S. Army Field Artillery School at Fort Sill, Oklahoma. That is the facility that has trained all Army and Marine Corps field artillery men, officers and enlisted, for decades. In fact, I have had four different tours at Fort Sill as a student, which shows just how much our two services come together for the common good.
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Again, I thank you for the invitation to be here today; and I look forward with my colleagues to answer any questions you may have. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
[The prepared statement of General Hanlon can be found in the Appendix on page ?.]
Mr. WELDON. Thank you, General Hanlon; and we thank all of your colleagues and for being available for questions.
Most importantly, we thank you for your service to the country. Because the men and women who are serving America today are the best. We are extremely proud—and I agree with the comments from my friend, Gene Taylor—of the support for the forces that has come over the years; and I would also acknowledge the support of this committee that plussed up the funding for the support of those troops by over $43 billion more than what the Secretary of Defense and the President asked for over the past 6 years.
So, yes, we can all take credit for the capability of our troops in the field today and this committee for its strong bipartisan votes to buck the system and go beyond what was asked for to give you what we knew you needed. Unfortunately, even that wasn't enough to do the modernization that many of us feel is still required, but we thank you for your service.
As you know, we don't always necessarily believe what we read in the media, but I have to respond when media reports are issued; and, General, I talked to you about this.
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There is an article that has been running in one of the international media that says that our new Apache cannot quite do what it is supposedly designed to do and that we may have a problem with the Hellfire antitank missile.
In the one press account that I saw, which also quoted an editor of Jane's World Armies, they said there were serious problems with sand and dust getting into the engines and that perhaps when we were expecting to have a 90 percent serviceability for the aircraft, it was actually in Afghanistan as low as 60 percent. Can you comment about that and reassure us that you have things under control, or is there a problem that really needs to be given a fresh look?
General RIGGS. Sir, regarding the Hellfire missile system, which is employed off of both the H–64 Alpha as well as the Delta Longbow, different types of missiles, we did run across incidents of where the motor within the missile itself was blowing black debris on some of the missiles that were being fired out of our aircraft. So it was not at the point where we thought it would be catastrophic, but it was just an area of concern, and we got into it.
We found out what the problem actually was. It dealt, I believe, with a ring, if I am not mistaken, that had to do with the motor itself; and we have cut into the production line to make sure that we have corrected the problem as well as we are looking at how many of these older missiles that we might need to retrofit.
I think the problem is under control. I don't think it was ever catastrophic to begin with. The missile was cleared for fire and can be used in combat as well as for training.
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As far as the availabilities of the Apaches, I haven't specifically looked at their availability, but I did call the 101st last night on another piece of business. I was talking to them, and the subject of the Apaches came up, and it was my understanding that our availability rates were phenomenally high in Afghanistan.
So I will go back and run a recheck and get the specifics, but what usually happens is, whenever we exercise these aircraft even heavily and we wind up having the dedicated maintenance crew on the ground there, we wind up maintaining higher availability rates than what we maintained as normal. So I will get you a more definitive answer.
Mr. WELDON. Thank you, General.
I have one other question before I return to my colleagues, and this is in regard to the concerns I raised relative to the Comanche which I can remember my first term in Congress going over with Bill Dickinson and meeting with the Army. This is going back a few years, General. There was concern then about which direction we were going to with the Comanche, and here I am 16 years later still kind of concerned about are we changing direction with the Comanche.
In the concern I focused on the Comanche in the past, it was as Chairman of the R&D Subcommittee. Now Chairman Hunter and I have switched. As Chairman of Military Procurement, I approach from a different point of view; and that is the program management point of view, the cost of development and what at least appears to be a lack of adequate funding for all development programs, in this case helicopter programs.
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We are moving ahead with three major fixed-wing Tactical Aircraft (TACAIR) programs—the F–22, the F–18E and F—and the Joint Strike Fighter (JSF) to the tune of $12.2 billion in fiscal year 2003. That is 10 percent of all R&D and acquisition funds in fiscal 2003 for these programs. The engineering and manufacturing development (EMD) costs alone of the F–22, F–18E and F and the joint strike fighter totals $56.7 billion.
The magnitude of R&D investment has been consistently defended on the basis that at least two of these programs are extremely complex, state-of-the-art technology aircraft and replace fleets of 14s, 15s, 16s, F–18Cs and Ds, and they are also the first aircraft developed in 30 years.
It appears to me that the Comanche helicopter also fits a similar description: The first new helicopter since the Apache and Black Hawks developed in the 1970's—state-of-the-art, fully digital, fly by-wire, night-capable weapons and sensor platform with more lines of software code than the F–22.
So the question is you must have major concerns, as we do, since the program is undergoing another restructuring. With Department of Defense (DOD's) new emphasis on more realistic cost estimating our major programs, do you really believe that the Comanche can complete its EMD phase for an additional $3.5 billion? Is the amount of completion for EMD supported by the cost-analysis improvement group, and does the EMD funding profile include all the required transition-to-production operational testing costs?
General RIGGS. Sir, regarding the Comanche, I helped write the requirements document for the Comanche as a major. I will give you my thoughts very briefly first, and then I will answer the specific question regarding the program in the future.
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What you have stated is correct. The Comanche is part of the potential for a network centric system of systems force on the battlefield of the future. The Comanche is, in fact, a joint system in terms of its capability to do reconnaissance, bring information into the fight, and be very specific about the application of forces.
We have not done well at all on the Comanche for a multitude of reasons through the years, but it is ironic that we are now, it seems to me, at the point where the true value of the Comanche is actually recognized by the Army as well as the other services. I think part of its woes have to do with management, poor management on the part of the government, the Army as well as industry in the past; and it has also suffered through a lack of consistent funding commensurate with the amount of work that had to be done. Those inconsistencies have caused this program to be plagued for years, and I think this is the fourth or fifth restructure that I have actually been aware of.
We are at the point now with the Comanche in which we have gone back, we have redefined the requirements or rebaselined them to be commensurate with objective force network centric requirements. We have gone back and restructured the program on a blocked approach to make sure that we have got by blocks those features that would be required on the battlefield of the future, and we have recommended we place sufficient resources inside the program in order to carry it through EMD.
The figure is approximately $3.4 billion that would be adjusted from within the program to get it to where we want to go. But it is going to take consistent oversight of this program in order to bring it to fruition, because it is a very complex, complicated program that has the greatest potential of paying high dividends in the objective force. But we are not so convinced that, without continued close supervision through the years, that we will get to fielding in the timeframes that we have specified for it. But, for the first time in a long time through many of the restructures, I do honestly think we have the proper foundation established for the Comanche to field it, and we will need it as a reconnaissance and attack platform in the future for our soldiers.
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Mr. WELDON. Does the cost-analysis improvement group (CAIG) agree with the EMD—.
General RIGGS. Sir, the CAIG has not reviewed those figures and provided the CAIG analysis. That is scheduled to be done prior to June, I want to say, in which we are going to carry this to a defense acquisition board review with Mr. Aldridge, followed by our bringing a report to Congress, as you have asked us to do.
Mr. WELDON. General, in my opening statement I kind of tweaked the Army because there was a requirement in the defense bill that the Congress be notified. I try not and I think my colleagues all agree not to burden you down, but we have an oversight responsibility in terms of dollars. Can you tell us why there has not been a compliance here?
General RIGGS. Sir, what I would like to say is we knew we were going to have to go through this restructure, we knew we were going to have to carry it through the CAIG, we knew we were going to have to go before Mr. Aldridge and the Defense Acquisition Board, and we wanted to get it right before we sent the report over here.
Mr. WELDON. I understand that. It is just a little disconcerting for members to read about the details of what you are doing in the press before we get it. So there has been leakage out to media on where you are going, and I want to enlighten you to that. I have had colleagues of mine ask me, and that is why I had to tweak the Army in the opening statement.
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General RIGGS. We will get the report over here after we are through with the June—.
Mr. WELDON. We asked for this as supporters of both the program and the Army. We are not the enemy. We are supporters.
General RIGGS. I understand.
Mr. WELDON. Chairman Hunter.
Mr. HUNTER. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. We have got quite a few folks here today; so I am going to retain my questions to the end here.
Mr. WELDON. Thank you, Mr. Hunter.
Mr. Taylor.
Mr. TAYLOR. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
General Riggs, I appreciate your coming by yesterday; and I particularly appreciate your being a straight shooter on how you feel about the Guard and Reserve. You also know how I feel toward that line since we do set policy in this room, and I do think that there will be a continued presence of the Guard and Reserve, and I think they are going to be called up for every contingency. I would hope at some point you would tell us what your plans are for modernization of the Guard and Reserve for the next five years.
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General Hanlon, if you would, please, I would like to hear your thoughts on the procurement decision being made within the Marine Corps between the—going to the one end version of the Huey or the Black Hawks until the V–22 gets settled. I am pleased to see that you are doing something other than waiting for the V–22 to come along, but I would like to hear your thoughts on the point, counterpoint of the one end versus the Black Hawks, particularly when I am told that the cost of the one end gets very, very close to the cost of a new Black Hawk. Of course, it is a little bit smaller helicopter, but I would like to hear your thoughts on it.
General HANLON. Yes, sir, Mr. Taylor.
First of all, let me take a crack at your question, but I want to point out that the way we are set up in the Marine Corps, one of the areas that I tend not to cover and I don't cover are the aviation programs. That is handled through our aviation branch, and that is why I asked General Hough to come with me.
But I will say this. I am responsible for the requirements aspect of the Marine Corps, and my understanding is that, years ago, when we were looking at how we were going to deal with the aging Cobra and Huey force, that there were studies that were done to take a look as to whether or not we should go to a different helicopter, the Apache or Black Hawk, or would we be better off to modernize the Huey and Cobra. The studies came back saying that, cost-wise, it made sense to do that, as opposed to going out and buying the Black Hawk. And I will let Mike talk about that in a second.
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But the thing about the Black Hawk and that particular Huey is they are marinized platforms. They were designed from the very beginning to operate off ships. They have the protection against salt corrosion. They have the folding blades and all the things that enable us to operate off ships. And the thought was that it was better for us to go ahead and modernize that by glass cockpits and making better engines and better weapons systems, that in the long run that would be a better cost alternative to us than buying a new helicopter. My understanding is that that is still our position; and, Mike, would you like to add anything on that please?
General HOUGH. Good morning. It is good to be back.
Yes, sir. Your question is specifically SH–60 versus the UH–1, why?
Mr. TAYLOR. The UH–1 end version versus the 60. The point that was brought home to me by some of the staff is that, by the time you do all those things, you are getting within a couple of million of the cost of a new Black Hawk; and their point was, even though it is a substantial platform, that is going to carry fewer people. So I am giving you your opportunity to come back—.
General HOUGH. You are right on the money. In fact, the argument was, years ago in 1996 we did—after a series of four or five studies, we said, hey, our helicopters are old, the Huey is old, the Cobra is old. We had no strategy at that point to combine them. So we went out and looked at a proposal of having SH–60's at that time replace the Huey or would that be more reasonable to go and have Bell build us a new Huey, glass cockpit, integrated avionics, same power system, the whole works, of the Cobra.
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Mr. TAYLOR. New frame?
General HOUGH. It looks the same, but it is a new frame. It is more substantial, more rigorous all across the board. More lethal, more supportability, et cetera.
It came back very clear that, with the 84 percent commonality between the Cobra and the Huey and the way we deploy—of course, we deploy with Hueys and Cobras together in its composite outfits, in these Marine Expeditionary Units (MEUs). It was very clear that just in the procurement cost alone, it would be approximately $2.6 billion if we did anything to lose the commonality and about $3.5 billion over a 20-year life-cycle cost to have separate trainers, separate maintainers, separate the works.
So even though the cost is close where we would pay a tremendous bill and where we did not have the assets, it would take between, over these four or five studies, about 244 to as much as 500 extra marines to support any kind of platform that was uncommon, and the SH–60 came the closest.
On top of that, although it meets the requirements, the footprint is exceptionally larger by about 50 percent, and the platform on the MEUs is larger by about 48 percent. In other words, it is just too big. It is too much, costs too much; and even though it is a great performer, does a great job, we can't maintain it the way we go to sea because of the commonality. We do not have the manpower.
So when you added it all up in the aggregate, the bottom line was the most cost-effective, efficient and effective combination was the UH–1 with the Cobra.
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Mr. TAYLOR. Mr. Chairman, could General Riggs—.
General RIGGS. Sir, regarding the modernization of our Reserve components, let me just say that, coming from a commander of First United States Army, I had the responsibility for the training and readiness of the Guard and Reserve units that were east of the Mississippi River, all of them that were east of the Mississippi River, and that entailed a lot of deployments to contingency operations and other operations from Central and South America to Bosnia to Southwest Asia. So I would say to you our appreciation of the contribution of the Army National Guard and the United States Army Reserve cannot be overstated. They are intricately linked to everything that the United States Army does. We truly have Army Reserve organizations that deploy right with the United States Army in all contingencies.
So it has been worked up that way. Those forces are very early deployers, and they are very much on our mind.
We are principally cascading weapons systems to the Army National Guard and the Army Reserve in a very robust manner. We are looking at things like the Interim Brigade Combat Team (IBCT), which will be fielding with the 28th Division in the Pennsylvania Army National Guard I will just say, to be brief, as we go through the objective force work where the Reserve components are very much of our conceptualization and the work to lay out the future, very much a part of the future.
Mr. TAYLOR. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
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Mr. WELDON. Thank the gentleman.
Mr. Meehan.
Mr. MEEHAN. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
General Riggs, weight seems to be a tough issue—I guess it is a tough issue with all of us, but with the Army I read recently that some of your interim combat vehicles are overweight, and certainly it could be a primary concern with the Future Combat System. My question, General, is what are we doing regarding investment in alternative materials, light armors? Have we sufficiently invested in really the basic scientific research that could generate the materials we need to field light, effective armors or does more need to be done?
General RIGGS. Well, more could always be done, but I have had the great opportunity as we have gone through this to look into our science and technology programs very deeply.
We have about $1.6 billion invested in S&T for this particular budget; and, of that, as I said earlier, greater than 90 percent of it is oriented toward objective force systems. So as we get through into the locality, the survivability and the mobility features, I have found that we do have a multitude of programs that are working toward not only composites in terms of armor, future lightweight armor that takes the weight off the program, but we also have to put that survivability factor in there also.
So we do have sufficiently robust programs going that I could honestly say, if we just started today and we said let us just build a one-to-one replacement for the Abrams tank, which is about 68 ton, and make it as lethal and survivability and all the features that it has, it must be equal to or greater than, in all candor I could say to you that, because of the work we are doing with some of the composites and other things, it would be significantly lighter just in its basic design, perhaps half again as light as the current Abrams is today.
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So we are going to continue to push the technological edge, but, yes, there is a lot of work going on not only within the Army but also throughout the industrial base, too.
Mr. MEEHAN. As a follow-up, General, in Somalia and Afghanistan and Operation Anaconda, it seems again and again the vulnerabilities of helicopters to rocket-propelled grenades—is that a problem that we could possibly solve through science or through R&D or do you think just the law of physics is never going to let that happen and that even the objective force will still have that vulnerability? Is there anything we could do in terms of R&D?
General RIGGS. Rocket Propelled Grenades (RPGs) are like small arms that are optically fired at you; and that is basically a tactics, techniques and procedures type of a drill that keeps you away from RPGs or keeps you out of the vulnerable threat.
What is beautiful about this whole thing is the helicopters that I flew in Vietnam were helicopters that obviously could not take an RPG hit. When we were hit with RPGs, it was catastrophic. The helicopters that we have put out today are redundant engine. There is greater armament on the helicopters with HEI as well as just fragmentation capability. They have a run dry capability as far as the transmissions are concerned and the engines.
One of the helicopters that was hit was an RPG in Afghanistan. They brought the helicopter back to a forward area rearm and refueling site, dumped more oil into it because it had run out completely out in the transmission and then flew it back to the base camp and part of that was empty.
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So we built those features as far as survivability is concerned, but when you get into some of the things that are IR or RF, yes, there are things we can do about that with the aircraft survivability equipment, but it is always going to be an inherently risky business.
Mr. MEEHAN. Sure.
General Hanlon, I have a list of the unfunded requirements for the Marine Corps, but I was wondering if you could tell me from a science and technology perspective what the Marine Corps' most important S&T shortfalls would be and, if additional funds were made available, what sort of R&D would you invest in and what capability would that give you down the road that potentially you don't have now?
General HANLON. Yes, sir. Great question.
One of the areas that we continue to be concerned about as we look at the future for the Marine Corps are fire support systems. The good news is, along with the Army, we will have the lightweight 155 that will be coming on board soon both for our forces and for the light forces. But as we look beyond the 155, we are looking at things such as a High Mobility Artillery Rocket System (HIMARS), which is an Multiple-Launch Rocket System (MLRS) type system that is very good for us because it operates off a truck, but we are also looking for a weapons system that will be more mobile, something that we could use.
You were talking, sir, about the Afghanistan problem; and one of the things that was interesting, and probably you saw this in your journeys over there, was that there was not a preponderance of the artillery out there either for the Army or for the Marine Corps. Part of the problem was the distances were so great, the altitudes were such that just getting 198s or anything else in there would have been very time-consuming and difficult to do. So we are looking at what we refer to as an expeditionary fire support system, something that would be conceptually between an 81 millimeter mortar, a 120 millimeter mortar, something like that where we would be able to move rapidly by helicopter, by MV–22, by CH–53, that we could move very quickly with front-line units to give them fire support that they would need.
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This is one of the things the commandant has asked us to look at in terms of R&D, S&T type dollars, but also there are other components of that, looking at a new type of ground target locating radar, things that will enable us to do better target acquisition so we can bring our systems to bear on it.So these are the kinds of things, to answer your question in a very generic term, areas that we are very interested in putting our S&T moneys into.
One other area that I will just dovetail on because I have a personal interest in it, and that is Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs). It was mentioned by the Chairman that we have a warfighting lab at Quantico, and one of the things that we have been working very hard on over the last few years, have been looking at tactical unmanned aerial vehicles, particularly something that can be used at the company level or at the battalion level. We have been able to take some of our S&T moneys and vector it into those areas, and we have a couple of systems right now that have great promise.
In fact, the little Dragon Eye—in fact, we were able to send it over and let the Army use it over in Europe recently. We have another thing called the Dragon Warrior which will be flown for the first time at Quantico coming out of the Naval Research Lab.
These are smaller end UAVs, but that is what we need right now. We need something that will enable the company commander or the battalion commander to look on the hill on the other side and see quickly what is over there. We have great capabilities in Global Hawk and Predator, but sometimes those systems are not available to the guy that is out there on the front line.
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So that is one area, sir, in which we would put our S&T money.
Mr. MEEHAN. Thanks, General.
Just by way of comment, General Riggs, we were briefed on that situation with the helicopter and RPGs and, like so many things when you go over there and see what is happening, it is very impressive the way everyone performed. Thank you.
General RIGGS. Thank you.
General HANLON. May I dovetail one comment? Talking about interoperability, I was very interested to note that there was one phase in Anaconda where the Apaches got into a pretty significant fire fight there and they needed additional help and we were able to bring in some of our Cobras off our ships to come in and help the 101st and the 10th Mountain, which I thought was a tremendous example of interoperability.
Mr. MEEHAN. Thank you.
Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
Mr. WELDON. Thank you.
Mr. Saxton.
Mr. SAXTON. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
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General Riggs, General Hanlon, thank you for being here.
General Hanlon, I was in Europe recently and saw General Fields. He drove an hour and a half to see us one day and two hours the next to brief us. He is a great Marine. I really appreciate the extra effort that he went through to accommodate us.
Let me ask you a question in a different vein than has been asked so far. We are talking about transformation of our forces and to meet the new threat. If you look back through the evolution of our forces through history, the changes that we needed to make, for example, between World War I and World War II were probably significant in terms of technological increases, et cetera, et cetera, but basically World War I was a lot like World War II in many ways, a conventional way.
Of course, then we went off to Korea, and jet airplanes were used for the first time, and new technology helped us a lot in Korea, but it was still a conventional war.
Then we went to Vietnam, and we found ourselves fighting a war that we weren't used to, and we had a difficult time.
Then we came back to the Gulf, and we fought a conventional war, and we were very successful, and we went to Serbia and Kosovo and other places and were quite successful.
Now it seems to me that we are needing to do this transition because, as Dick Cheney said in this room 10 years ago, the Soviet Union is going to go away, and the threat is going to change. And the threat sure has changed.
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Mr. SAXTON. We are now facing a group of folks who think a whole lot different than we do and fight wars differently than we are used to fighting them. It concerns me a lot because President Bush says over and over this threat is not going to go away.
And, as a matter of fact, I could not agree with him more based on—incidentally, one of the things I do here is I am Chairman of the Oversight Panel on Terrorism, and we spent a lot of time listening to folks who know a lot more about this subject than I do, and I have got to tell you that I am very concerned that we transition in a way that will allow us to focus on and meet this new threat which is so different.
And I guess my question then is, how do you see the transition of our forces and our capabilities to deal with what is going on in many parts of the world today?
General HANLON. Yes, sir. I would like to go back for a second to the very beginning part of your question and go back to the piece about Vietnam, that we were talking about a different kind of war. I find it interesting because, like John, I, too, am a veteran of that campaign. And we collectively, all of the services, including the Navy and the Air Force, I think we all learned a lot of things from that experience.
One example, talking about transformation, this is a kind of a buzzword in Washington now. But transformation began even then, because back in Vietnam days, and John remembers this, We preferred to not fight at night. We tended to operate off our fire bases and usually it was the other guy that had the advantage at night.
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When we came out of Vietnam, I think all of us said we will never let that happen again. We are going to own the night. And if you take a look at how we operated in combat in Desert Storm, we tended to prefer to operate at night, whether it was our ground forces, Marine or Army, whether it was the Air Forces, whether it was our Naval forces, because with the equipment that we had gone out and purchased, the training that we gave our service members, we had great confidence in our ability to fight at night and put the other guy at a great disadvantage. And I think we certainly saw that in Afghanistan as well. I mean, the fact is that you take a look at the way our forces operated when the Rangers went into that air field, they went in at night, and the assault forces went in at night, the Marines went in at night.
I think we have learned a lot over the years in terms of how to enhance our combat capability and improve our force protection. But I think one of the things that—I mean, certainly 9/11 changed our lives in many ways. But I think the very fact that we were able to put special operation forces, soldiers and marines in Afghanistan and do the job for General Franks as quickly and as well as we were able to do speaks very, very highly to the fact that we never got away from the basics, that is, you got to have—you have to, as I said in my statement, superbly equipped, superbly led, superbly motivated and equipped soldiers, marines, airmen and sailors.
And I really—that is so important because I really think that there will be other—something after Afghanistan, I mean, and nobody in this room really knows what it will be. There will be something else that will occur. But, yet, I will tell you, I think our soldiers and marines will step up to the plate and they will do very, very well, because they are well trained and well equipped. And they will adapt.
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I will tell you that one of the things that we spend a lot of time doing, sir, through our warfighting lab and through our concept branch at Quantico is trying to divine what the future is going to look like so we can develop those tactics, techniques and procedures that we need for the future.
Like you, I turn on the television at night and watch what is going on in the Middle East and see what is happening in the West Bank and the urban warfare, and it runs chills on my spine just thinking about the difficulties of fighting in that kind of environment. But our laboratories look at that kind of stuff. We spend time looking if our Marines have to go into an urban environment in the future, what will they need to give them the cutting edge, whatever they will need to fight and win.
I will say one thing, that as a result of the events of 9/11 that what we did do generally in the Marines Corps, I know you are aware of this, we did stand up the 4th Marine Expeditionary Brigade (MEB)—antiterrorism which was specifically designed to be able to do—to deal with antiterrorism threats for the various unified commanders. That outfit has now been up and operational for what, 5 months. We are continuing our reliance on it.
Does that answer your question, sir?
General RIGGS. If I may—.
Mr. ABERCROMBIE. Could you yield a moment to me?
Mr. SAXTON. Sure. I am out of time here.
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Mr. ABERCROMBIE. Just 1 minute. When you say you have got something up and running, what are you referring to, the Northern Command? What have you got up and running against terrorism?
General HANLON. What I was referring to, sir, is the standing—we stood up the 4th MEB antiterrorism, the brigade that we stood up back in October or November.
Mr. ABERCROMBIE. No. You said in relation to the other commands. You weren't referring to the Commander-in-Chief (CINCs)?
General HANLON. What I am saying, sir, excuse me, the 4th MEB antiterrorism is an outfit that could be made available to any of the unified commanders to use if they request it, sir.
Mr. ABERCROMBIE. Okay. Thank you.
General HANLON. Yes, sir. I am sorry if I was confusing on that.
General RIGGS. If I may respond, please, sir. I would just say that it is that uncertain world and all of that that entails that has put the Army and all of the services for that matter on the journey that we are to make sure that we do have the full spectrum of capabilities.
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I would say that we realize and we believe that there are not any silver bullets to solving this problem. I grant you unmanned aerial vehicles and precision weapons, and we can go on and on, I think they all have utility. But they are not in and of themselves the solution to the problem.
What we have come to the conclusion is, is that if your intent is to punish, you can do that by a set means of capabilities that we have. If your intent is to resolve issues, which is more difficult and takes longer, than there is yet again another force mixture capability required to do that.
So what we are focusing on is no longer just a single system, a new tank or a new Bradley or infantry carrier, but we are focused on a system of systems. We very much believe that this system of systems can be made greater by the power of information technology. Joint C4—Intelligence, Surveillance & Reconnaissance (ISR) tied together is what is going to give us an edge in many of the environments that we are going to be finding ourselves operating in in the future.
Mr. WELDON. Thank you. The gentleman from Texas, Mr. Reyes.
Mr. REYES. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I appreciate the opportunity. And, Generals, thank you for being here and for your service. I, along with several Members of this committee, just visited in Afghanistan, and I could not agree with you more in terms of the caliber and quality of our young men and women in uniform over there. So I appreciate what you are saying, having just returned from there.
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I will make an observation, because 30 some odd years ago, when I was sent to Vietnam, I happened to get sent to I-Corps, Marble Mountain, right outside of Denang. And what we were—we went to a helicopter unit that had the Hueys. And to my amazement, the Marines all had CH–34s, the big radial engine lumbering helicopters that were very slow, and were very vulnerable to not just RPGs but just about anything that you could throw at them. But the Marines were using them. And I mention that because I have had the opportunity to be on the Saturday mid-morning looking at the UAV feedback from Afghanistan when we saw the Chinooks taking our special forces, special ops people in Operation Anaconda. And I could not help—and believe me, I have a lot of love for Chinooks, because they are the same helicopters that we saw going into the rice paddies 30 some odd years ago.
And so when we saw those RPGs hitting them, I thought to myself, you know, we have got to do better by our men and women in uniform. And last week when I was talking to a group of young men and women, one of them was telling me that he took two direct hits in his chest from an AK–47 in the battle of Anaconda, but because he was wearing body armor, other than bruising and the impact that it made on him having had that experience, he was fine.
So there is definitely some things that we are doing right. There are some things that I think we need to do better. And, you know, I understand the survivability of the CH–47, you know, the high carbon blades and the duper engines and all. But I will tell you, they still went into those Landing Zones (LZs) at 80 miles an hour, making them big fat targets at an altitude of whatever it was, 10,000, 12,000 feet.
So when we talk about transforming our military, I hope we continue to do it as quickly as possible so that this week when I am talking to the parents and the wives and the loved ones of those from my state that I sat and visited with, because I promised them that I would do that, I always worry about somebody asking me, Congressman, how come we are still using 35-year-old helicopters going into an operation in an area that clearly those helicopters are big targets as we have seen.
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So I mention that so that we get focused on what we are trying to do, and the fact that we—a lot more than those young men that are absolutely the finest. I cannot say enough about their can-do attitude. I cannot say enough about your leadership of those troops.
And I look back and think about 30 some odd years ago in Denang, seeing the same outstanding Marines flying the CH–34s and getting shot right out of the sky because we went in and pulled out a number of the air crews that flew in. But they kept doing it and they kept doing it. Because that is all they had. And it was going to be a while before they started getting the Hueys themselves.
So we certainly have a responsibility, all of us, collectively, to give them the best equipment possible. Having made that comment, there are currently, as I understand it, again from my visit last week to Afghanistan, there are currently only two companies that we have, one active and one reserve, that deal with chemical and biological. One of them is currently stationed at K–2 and has been extended repeatedly because we only have that one company that is able to do that. It is a morale issue because they are there indefinitely. What kind of plans do we have in a world that we are obviously talking about the threat of chemical and biological—what plans do we have to stand up additional companies so that this burden does not fall on the shoulders of just a small group of individuals that find themselves in a situation where they cannot get out because they are the only ones that we have available other than that Reserve component?
General RIGGS. Yes, sir. The helicopter issue, if I may, first. You know, there is no secret to any of us that the modernization accounts, and to some degree, I think, the installation base operation accounts have been paying the bills within the Army for quite a period of time here. And I acknowledge that, and I understand that that is the reality.
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But as we are dealing with the helicopters specifically, we have not let those helicopters stand still since the days you and I were operating with these helicopters in Vietnam. The Alpha model, Bravo Model CH–47s, the Little Charlie, the Super C, we have gone to the Delta. We field an improved version also for the special operations, and we are again going to a Foxtrot Model CH–47.
So is it like new? No. I am not trying to say it is like new. But it is taking the resources that are available and making sure that we shrewdly put the features in those helicopters that again keep them operable, keep them functional, and try to keep them supportable and maintainable.
In the case of the Apache, we are up to the Delta model which is an overhaul of the aircraft, because we were making some mistakes at some point. We were going through with those aircraft and we were just doing the selective upgrades on them. We have now gone back and we are modernizing the air frame. We are stripping them down to the skin and bones, the stringers and formers, reskinning them, adding survivability features to them, adding additional operational features, digitizing the cockpits and making them more functional.
We are up to a Mike model on the UH–60 Blackhawk. So we have not stood still. Could we do more? Yes, sir. That is accepted. But we are going to—with the resources that we have available, we are going to shrewdly make sure that our soldiers are having the survivability edge today as well as in the future.
I think also, if I may. The Comanche is a step in the direction to make sure that we have got a weapons platform that is in the third dimension that extends the battle space for the ground commander which calls us to be able to do a better job of detecting threats and eliminating threats through that type of a reconnaissance capability mixed with UAVs and overhead and other central systems so we know that we want to eliminate all of the hazards of combat. We will be able to do it, enter combat at the time and place of our choosing and where we have the advantage.
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So I think that we are working in that direction, but I would agree with you we can do more.
Mr. REYES. What about the biological-chemical company?
General RIGGS. I have to get back to you. I know what the status of those are and I just cannot recall right now whether or not we are intending to field additional forces to help with that effort.
As you know, in the National Guard we are doing quite a bit of work with the civil support teams, the operation that is associated with that. We are up to quite a few that have been appropriated and authorized by Congress. And that is helping with the homeland piece of it, with early detection, with all of the other transitioning that is going along. But from a warfighting capability, I will have to come back to you on that, sir.
[The information referred to can be found in the Appendix beginning on page ?.]
General HANLON. Sir, the only thing that I would add is that when you were at Marble Mountain, the 34s were replaced by CH–46s, which we were very happy to get them, because I saw them come in as a new helicopter. But I have been in the Marine Corps now for 34 years and we still have the 46s. And it, too, has gone through a series of service life extension programs (SLEPs). I think we are on the Echo model right now.
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But we have probably pushed that helicopter as far as it can go in terms of capability. That is why we are so excited about the MV–22, because I think it goes to the—your opening comments about what technology like the MV–22 is so important because of its speed and its ability to go to altitude and its ability to take and put marines or soft assault forces into to an LZ quickly and get out,and that will be a very big combat enhancer.
Mr. WELDON. Mr. Hayes is recognized for 5 minutes.
Mr. HAYES. If you had the Crusader in Afghanistan, and I have been there as well, how would you have used it?
General RIGGS. Well, regarding artillery, which Ed may be able to lecture me on there a little bit when he gets his chance, you know we are never going to be able to put all of the fires in our basic maneuver organizations that we are actually going to need. So we are always going to need multiple reachback capability for additional fires at specific points and specific times.
Whether that comes from an elevated platform or whether it comes from our own direct support, general support or general support reinforcing fires, we are always going to need this kind of capability. So the weapons systems of Crusader that will replace our Paladin systems will certainly enhance our capability. But it also, I believe, has legs into the types of operations that we are doing today in Afghanistan and other places. First of all, because although it has a weight issue associated with it, that has been really looked at by the press and commented by everyone, the fact of the matter is you do need artillery fires to be brought in, which we always will, this type of weapons system, because of its efficiency and because of the way it is set up, actually would probably replace about three of the older versions.
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And if you added the weight up on the older version, you started cubing that, you are actually coming in with probably a lighter load with the Crusader than you would be the equivalent amount of current-day artillery. So I think that feature is there.
The other part of it is where it really works out for us is its range and its preciseness for targeting, we are up to about 40 kilometers with it. Its rate of fire is sustained somewhere in the area of 10 rounds per minute, I think, as opposed to one round per current system. And because of the computation capabilities with that weapons system, its accuracy is also very good. As we put the Excalibur round in it, we will have precision be out to ranges of 50 or—between 40 and 50 kilometers. And so that would give us the capability to stand off out of range, have the sensor connective with our soldiers on the ground who are still the best sensors on the battlefield today and put accurate fire in that area to help with not only suppression but destruction in some of the fights that they have been in with Anaconda.
Mr. HAYES. General Hanlon, if you would go a little bit more into detail on that, looking specifically in your memory of the battlefield there, the Whale, Shah-i-Kot specifically, how could we have used the Crusader? I am not saying we could not, I am just asking you to use that in a real time example as to how it would be a great asset to our folks and also expand that to how would the MV–22 Osprey, could the Osprey have prevented some of the incursion problems that we had with the CH–47, just make that thing real for us using those two examples, if you could.
General HANLON. Well, on the MV–22, one of the things that I—that would have been wonderful in a place like Afghanistan in particular was that our Marines were coming off their ships at sea. They were operating off a couple of amphibious ready groups. And in order for the 46s, the helicopters they were using to get into Afghanistan, they had to do multiple refueling stops along the way to be able to get in, whereas a helicopter or tilt rotor technology of the MV–22 would allow us to be able to go a lot greater distance without having to refuel. In other words, to go from our platforms at sea to our objectives without having to go to those forward operating bases, refueling bases.
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The other thing that I think was very important about the MV–22, and I saw this in another way when I was operating in Bosnia a few years ago when we had to work some evacuation plans over there using the 46s, when you get in to winter weather, high altitude, you know, that is when helicopters like the 46 get very limited on you. And an aircraft like the MV–22 with its speed and its ability to go high would really have helped us in that regard.
In the case of the Crusader, sir, the Marine Corps, as you know, is not buying the Crusader so I cannot comment about it. I will talk to you as an artilleryman and I will tell you that any time you are on the ground and you have got the enemy out there and you have got the capability of having a system like Crusader that is behind you that can bring fire support in, I mean that is—you cannot say enough about it.
I mean, I am sure it is going to be a terrific system. You know, in the Marine Corps, the reason we have not gone to a system like the Crusader, we used to have self-propelled artillery in the Marine Corps. In fact, when I came in as a young guy, we had 8-inch and 175s and 155s. We got away from that and went to a complete towed light artillery force because we use our aviation assets to go ahead and bring our close air support in for us, both our gunships and our jet aircraft and also Naval surface fire support.
So our utilization of fire support is probably a little bit different in that regard than the way the Army does it because they had the advantage of having so much more of their organic heavy artillery with their forces. Does that help, sir?
Mr. HAYES. It does. One more follow-up and then my time is out. I think you gave a good analogy speaking about punishing with airpower, but resolve ground troops have to be there, using again the scenario we are developing. If those MV–22s had been available, could we have got our marines and soldiers in and out more safely? Obviously we could do this more quickly. If we would have had them there, would it have helped our situation? It seems to me it would.
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General HANLON. I think Ed Hanlon's answer to that question would be yes, sir. I do not think there is any question that we could have gotten them in there safely and more faster, yes, sir.
Mr. WELDON. I thank the gentleman. Ms. Sanchez from California is recognized for 5 minutes.
Ms. SANCHEZ. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
And thank you both, Generals, for being here today. I have a question with respect to our helicopters, all of the ones that you all use, ranging all of the way back there, Vietnam, to the Cobra, the Apache, but there seems to be a lot of cost overruns going on most—many of those programs, the modifications, the upgrades.
I was at the V–22 out in Dallas a little bit over a year ago. That one has substantial design and reengineering problems going on with it.
The Comanche program, $3– 1/2 billion increase, slippage from 206 to 209. Do you think that this is just each one of these helicopter programs has an individual problem with it? Is it just something inherent to helicopters? Why are we seeing these types of overruns and increases going on with almost everything that we have?
General RIGGS. In the particular case of the Army, I think that there are certainly issues there that have to be addressed. But as it relates to the larger issue, is the industry shaped right, in order to—the helicopter industry shaped right, that would probably take a further review and a further study.
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I know in each of the cases that the Army has for its overruns, you know, it has been a multitude of things. As I said earlier, it has been—in our case, it has been less than adequate management on the part of both the Army as well as industry. It has been some fairly inaccurate cost projecting, because, you know, when you—when you do not have the resources that you always need, but you want very much to do as we were talking about, about getting proper weapons into the hands of the soldiers at the right place at the right time, then you take some risks that you might not otherwise have taken.
So I guess I would say to you I just think it is a multitude of issues of which each one of them has to be addressed individually. And in the case of the CH–47 Foxtrot program, a lot of that was quite candidly when we brought the airplanes in, in order to do the modification and modernization of the airplanes, they were older and more tired than what we had projected. And there was just more work that had to be done.
Ms. SANCHEZ. General, do you think maybe it could be the helicopter industry is not structured correctly?
General RIGGS. Perhaps.
Ms. SANCHEZ. Considering that we continue to see such major problems in this arena?
General RIGGS. Perhaps. I do not know that for sure. My experience with the helicopter industry over the years is they have done some downsizing and have tried to scope it, whether they have got it right or not, I personally do not know. It is an area that we will be looking at on a program-to-program basis.
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General HANLON. As you can see, he wears aviator wings. He answered that very well. I really have nothing else to add on that particular question, ma'am.
Ms. SANCHEZ. Do you think it might be something Congress might have a report on or take a look at? Are you taking a look at it? Is it just a program-by-program basis that you intend to analyze the situation? Do you think there is something that Congress is doing wrong or they have multiple year, you know, procurement or—.
General RIGGS. I certainly—yes, ma'am. I certainly think that it is an area which Congress would have an interest, along with all of us, to make sure that our industrial base is capable, not only today but tomorrow also. So very much so I would say yes. We will continue to also work it on a program-per-program basis.
Ms. SANCHEZ. Thank you.
Mr. WELDON. I remind Members—a note to Members. We have three votes. One 15, two 5-minute votes. We will continue for a period of time yet to give Members a chance. So, Mr. Langevin, you are recognized for 5 minutes.
Mr. LANGEVIN. Thank you. Welcome. I want to thank you also for your service to the country. If I could, I would like to turn our attention right now, continuing on the issue of transformation and also, as you mentioned, reducing the hazards of combat. I would like to just turn our attention, if I could, to the land mine issue.
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I am very concerned about the continued use of land mines, though I recognize the military's concern about need for force protection. Can you tell me—first of all, my question for General Riggs. Can you tell me approximately how many land mines we currently have deployed and how many, and in how many countries, and are all of those land mines considered to be low or no-technology land mines?
General RIGGS. I would have to give you a more definitive answer. I will tell you that the only place that I am aware of right now that we have mines currently employed in quantity is along the demilitarized zone in Korea, and that is the area that separates the military demarcation line between North Korea and South Korea. And I am not aware of any other areas in which we have land mines employed. And those have been in place for quite some time. Is the issue, would we employ mines in the future in order to shape and work military situations to our advantage? I think the answer is yes. But I would have to get you a definitive answer on how many mines we have out. We generally are having to work around other peoples' mines, which are proliferated around the world.
[The information referred to can be found in the Appendix beginning on page ?.]
Mr. LANGEVIN. Well, if I could just continue. I understand that alternative weapons accomplish the same mission of force protection and security and in a way that significantly is more effective and more reliably can be used and are more humane to non-combatants and it has existed for more than two years, and I understand that these devices do not leave a legacy of unexploded ordnance. I want to know what your thoughts are on those alternatives. Why has not the Army begun to use them? Certainly this committee is constantly informed of DOD's transformation plans. And I speak for my colleagues, I am sure, in saying that we are impressed. But here we have a better weapon for the battlefield. It is not only technologically more advanced with target control capabilities, but would preserve such unnecessary accidents as what happened on March 28th when we had a U.S. Navy SEAL that was killed and another wounded later in a land mine blast in Kandahar.
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As you may know, Her Majesty Queen Noor is on the Hill this week briefing Congress on these very issues and land mines, and I guess I am not alone in wanting to—wondering why the Army has refused to transform in this critical area and avoid the cruel and senseless loss of human lives that occur because of those outdated weapons.
General RIGGS. Yes, sir. Thank you. I would say that as I take a look at the way we approach this issue of mines, I think our first intent is to make sure that we always want to ensure that our soldiers have the edge that we can give them in one or two fights and survive under the conditions on the battlefield.
As we look at the issue that is associated with mining in general, you know, I have to almost say that we are approaching it with our self-defense strip mine capability. Once we lay them out, over a period of time, they destroy themselves as opposed to be allowed to lay around, you know, for years and years that we are having to deal with.
You know, I think our approach is, given that mines will be used and will need to be used, the human approach toward this issue of mining.
It is the proliferation all around the world that we are dealing with that are not self-destruct strip mines that are causing the problems.
And in Bosnia, as you very well know, I agree with you, it is—it is inhumane to see mines sowed the way that they were seeded along paths where children were going back and forth to school. I could not agree with you more. But that is so far from our approach to this issue of using a weapon that it is not even in our lexicon. I mean, we have worked hard not to have it that way.
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Mr. LANGEVIN. I appreciate those comments. My point is that we have a technology now that is called a land mine alternative, or it is a smart technology that would allow us to have land mines that use smart technology that allows them only to be activated if in fact someone turns a button. They are activated. Therefore, if we are not producing the old types of land mines, no one can get their hands on them.
General RIGGS. We are not producing the old type of land mines. The land mines that we are producing today are enhanced with the type of technology that you are talking about. They are activated for a specific purpose and they even have a self-destruct capability if we do not intend to use them.
Mr. LANGEVIN. Thank you, General. Do you have anything to add, General?
General HANLON. I have nothing else to add other than kind of another way of answering your question. Both the Army and the Marine Corps together are working this out as part of a joint countermine office, to come up with the kinds of equipment that we will need to protect our own marines and soldiers when they go into places like Afghanistan, and where there has been this indiscriminate mining by folks, so that we can—you were mentioning the SEAL that was injured in Kandahar. We had a marine that was also injured at Kandahar with a mine. And we have got to come up with better ways of being able to sweep and de-mine areas because much of our technology—the stuff that has been around for 50 or 60 years, we need to come up with better ways of being—to allow our front line troops to go in and sanitize it quickly and have the confidence that they can operate out there. And we are working that right now for the Army.
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Mr. LANGEVIN. Certainly you have our support in those efforts. Thank you.
Mr. WELDON. I thank the gentleman. We recognize Mr. Bartlett. We are going to continue on. Mr. Hunter went over to vote. When he comes back I will try to wait for him. If not, he will start the hearing up and ask questions until I get back. But Mr. Bartlett.
Mr. BARTLETT. Thank you very much. Let me ask two questions. I will ask for an answer in writing because I suspect that you cannot here answer those two questions definitively. The first has to do with the funding.
Chairman Weldon mentioned that during eight years of the Clinton administration we plussed up your funding by $43 billion. That was not still enough because we were not really at the level of readiness we would like to be at the end of that administration.
We now have given you a meaningful increase in money. But my concern is that I am not sure it is even enough to fight the war with. And if we do not give you additional moneys, the tip of the spear clearly is very sharp. My concern is that the depth is not there.
My question is: How much money do we need to make you whole? And how much money do we need to provide for the transformation and modernization that we really need to do? If you could provide us with those numbers, we would be very appreciative of that.
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[The information referred to can be found in the Appendix beginning on page ?.]
Mr. BARTLETT. My second question is, how many of your weapons systems, or how many of your weapons systems are you still waiving electro-magnetic pulse (EMP) and chemical hardening and why? If you could answer those two questions in writing, I would appreciate it. Thank you.
[The information referred to can be found in the Appendix beginning on page ?.]
Mr. WELDON. I thank the gentleman. We will stand in recess until Mr. Hunter arrives and then will proceed with his questions. Thank you.
[Recess.]
Mr. HUNTER. [Presiding] We will come back to order. And when Chairman Weldon gets back we will go back to his regular order of business here.
Gentlemen, thanks for being with us. Thanks for enduring these very important votes, especially this last one on the journal. We had to do it, somebody had to do it. Let me go over a couple of things. Maybe Mike Hough can jump in on this too, here, because you answered these questions about the—the comparison of upgrading the Hueys, as opposed to buying new Blackhawks.
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If you look at this thing off of the top, just looking at some of the costs—and I forget which Member brought this up initially. But if you look at this thing off the top, it looked like you are going to spend as much money to upgrade a Huey—almost enough money to buy two Blackhawks.
Is that an exaggeration, Mike?
General HOUGH. Yes, sir, it is.
Mr. HUNTER. What is the dollar figure?
General HOUGH. These are 1996 dollars, most recent I have at my fingers, is the Cobra is about $14.2 million, and the Huey is $15.1 million. I bought one Blackhawk—same thing. It is $17 million.
Mr. HUNTER. I got the last Blackhawk buy we have got there for the Army, it averages out to about 12 or 13 million.
General HOUGH. This is unit procurement cost.
Mr. HUNTER. But it is not much less than buying new.
General HOUGH. It is not. In fact, as I said, procurementwise, because we are only buying a hundred Hueys, and you look and say hey, there has been 2,300 Blackhawks, you say, boy, that thing—you just ought to buy those. Why wouldn't I? That is what I said.
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Mr. HUNTER. Let me explore that a little bit, though. I heard your answer. The answer was partly that you get commonality with the Cobras. And if you lost that commonality you are going to spend a lot of money and you are going to have 500 marines dedicated—.
General HOUGH. Across that platform.
Mr. HUNTER [continuing]. To that logistics tail. But, on the other hand, if you are sharing production of the units and spare parts with the Army, isn't that a cost-reducing factor that mitigates this expense?
General HOUGH. Sir, the MH–60's in many ways have some new features. As I say, there are many configurations of the airplane. And this is the airplane, of course, the Navy has that is marinized and so forth. So if you look at the avionics suite, yes, there are some similarities within the power plant. It didn't add up. In fact, the CAIG did a very comprehensive look at that, and they said at the old level, you save nothing. In fact, it costs you. The only place you save is at the depot and that is where the—.
Mr. HUNTER. How much do you save at the depot?
General HOUGH. Well, not enough because the aggregate, the overarching bill would be about $3– 1/2 billion difference.
Mr. HUNTER. Okay. Per bird?
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General HOUGH. No. Over 20 years, sir. Life cycle costs over 20 years.
Mr. HUNTER. But that is per bird, right? Three and a half billion. Okay.
General HOUGH. Yes, sir. In the big picture of things, what would it cost me, manpower, spare parts, training, all things that where lack of commonality is entered into? It adds up to about $3– 1/2 billion.
Mr. HUNTER. What is the lift difference here, Mike, the capacity difference? It is pretty substantial, isn't it?
General HOUGH. No. In fact, the UH—when they put those four blades on it and that motor, phenomenal capability. In fact—.
Mr. HUNTER. You are going to sell this thing. General Riggs is going to want to trade his Blackhawks in on these used Hueys.
General HOUGH. This machine is somebody. The old Huey, only 107 knots and had a thousand pounds payload. The new one will lift 3,100 pounds.
Mr. HUNTER. As you say, that—it was 107 knots at what?
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General HOUGH. 107 knots with a thousand pounds.
Mr. HUNTER. Okay.
General HOUGH. The range, the range is about—the radius is 25 miles.
Mr. HUNTER. Okay. That is the old one.
General HOUGH. The old one. Here is what we did. We put the same power plant in there as the Cobra. Same cockpit. Same avionics suite. It goes 116 miles radius versus 25. And it goes 153 miles an hour true air speed, versus 107. And it carries as a payload 3,100 pounds.
Mr. HUNTER. That is remarkable. So you triple the payload, you increase the speed by 50 percent, and you increase your legs by 400 percent.
General HOUGH. Absolutely right.
Mr. HUNTER. Are you taking this down now, General Riggs? You may want some of these.
General HOUGH. The more you buy, the cheaper it is.
General RIGGS. Well, actually now that I have been introduced on it—that is a good topic. I believe that both services should work together. We should look at each other's capabilities and so on. We are very satisfied with the Blackhawk. We cruise with the Blackhawk around 130 knots. We have got 11 to 14 combat troops until we start taking—.
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Mr. HUNTER. Now, the Hueys will handle how many combat troops?
General HOUGH. This airplane will take 10.
Mr. HUNTER. Now what did the old Huey take, Mike?
General HOUGH. It could accommodate 10, but because—.
Mr. HUNTER. Like seven, right?
General HOUGH. It couldn't lift it. If you put gas—you know, the payload is a thousand pounds. That is gas and people.
Mr. HUNTER. Yes.
General HOUGH. It is very limited. And then if you—the war we are fighting today, say anything like 8,000 feet, 10,000 feet where we are over there in Kandahar, the only thing that would work for us over there with authority besides the Cobra is the 53 Echo. Simply because everything was getting old.
Mr. HUNTER. Okay. I am just giving—Roger just gave me this thing that says Army Blackhawk was 10.4, but the marinization is what pulled the Navy/Marine Blackhawk up.
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General HOUGH. The Army airplane and the Navy airplane. They look the same, but they are different. One is marinized, And the cost of marinization is substantial.
Mr. HUNTER. Let me ask a question. Mr. Gibbons asked me to ask on—with respect to V–22. He had to go to another thing, but he thought this was important. On the search-and-rescue mission. The V–22, what he had heard was that you did not have good hover capability at 9,000 feet or so. Is that right? You could not stabilize and just hover for a bit at 9,000 feet?
General HOUGH. No, sir. It can hover at 9,000 feet. It can do all those sorts of things. The difference is, if you say in respect to a 53 or whatever, you would have to do some things different because of the characteristics of the airplane. But it can do that safely. It is just stabilized hover.
Mr. HUNTER. Maybe, General Hanlon, you might want to respond to this, too. But the other—one other complaint that Mr. Gibbons wanted us to air here was that you had a huge downdraft coming off of those blades that would—in search-and-rescue mission, you are going to be knocking down anybody you are trying to search and rescue for, that you have got a lot of turbulence coming down on them. Is that accurate?
General HOUGH. Absolutely you do. The CH–53 has a hundred knot downdraft. So what I am saying is, any airplane that weighs 20 or 30,000 pounds—.
Mr. HUNTER. What is Blackhawk?
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General HOUGH. I don't know. That is probably straight hover like that underneath it about a hundred feet picking someone up, you have got probably 50-knot-plus downdrafts.
Mr. HUNTER. They all have got some downdraft. But you are saying that the V–22 has got about 125?
General HOUGH. No, sir. The V–22 is similar to the Echo, about a hundred knots. But what is the difference? It is in a different spot. So the way you do business in a 53 Echo, you come out this hole or that hole off the tail. You do it different, tactics, techniques and procedures will dictate. You can do the same thing, you just do it in a different way because it is a different airplane.
Mr. HUNTER. Okay. But you can still—you still think that that downdraft that—which is roughly double, if it is a hundred miles an hour versus an Echo which is—.
General HOUGH. No, sir. An Echo is a hundred knots also.
Mr. HUNTER. A Blackhawk is 50?
General HOUGH. Sure. Smaller airplane. Much smaller. CH–53 Echo, three motors, lots of power. But you can do it very safely. You just have to know where to stand. That is the key.
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Mr. HUNTER. Okay. What do you think—do you vouch for this guy, General Hanlon? You know, we have had a lot of hearings over the years with Mike. Mike has never been at a loss for an answer. One of our most exciting times is when we have had Mike toe to toe with General Accounting Office (GAO). It has been a good 10-round contest.
General HOUGH. I am still in therapy.
General HANLON. Now you know why I brought him along, sir.
Mr. HUNTER. Let me go to a couple of other things here since we have an opportunity. General Riggs, we have—Army ammunition has been a big deal for this committee, for both subcommittees.
We had a $3 billion shortfall that General Shinsheki testified to in December. He basically said the shortfall is about the same. What do you think? Because I looked at the figures this year. You are not going to do much new with respect to ammunition.
General RIGGS. I think the way we have of approaching it—and I looked at the ammunition very hard. We, in fact, do have some unfunded requirements (UFRs), unfinanced requirements for our ammunition, it is in the area of the specifics. I want to say we addressed it, most of our training ammunition, but there are still some shortages that we do have. They include some 25 millimeter, 105 millimeter, Dual-Purpose Improved Conventional Munitions (DPICM), right on down to some 120 millimeter alum and mortar that we have used as a UFR.
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But I think, you know, much of our ammunition is the war reserve issue, keeping the war reserve stocks up.
Mr. HUNTER. We think that is important. And what you gave us last time, even using—substituting with nonpreferred ammo, you were 3 billion short as of December. I mean General Shinsheki's testimony was you were down—.
General RIGGS. It reads something like this. When you get right to it, our shortages in munitions total is about $28 billion. $16 billion for ammunition, and $12 billion for missiles. But this includes a $9 billion UFR that is associated with the increasing ammo industrial base.
A portion of the UFR is addressable with substitutes. And we can substitute about $6 billion worth of ammunition, $7 billion worth of missiles. And I think this leaves a critical UFR of about 14.3 billion. That is 9 for ammo and 4 for missiles.
General RIGGS. The critical UFR in munitions, only about 1.6 billion would actually be executable in the fiscal year 2003 without increasing our industrial capacity.
Mr. HUNTER. Now, that is how much?
General RIGGS. A total of about $1.6 billion would be executable in fiscal year 2003 in all categories of this UFR without increasing industrial base significantly.
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Mr. HUNTER. If we did that, we could knock back the shortage pretty significantly, couldn't we?
General RIGGS. I know the estimated UFR to get the industrial base would be right around $500 million.
Mr. HUNTER. Since we have got a couple of great aviators here, let me ask you a question with respect to the helicopters, too. Did you know Colonel Walker, who was our Army liaison here for a while? I think he just left last year. Jim Walker.
General RIGGS. No, sir, I don't.
Mr. HUNTER. His dad, also Colonel Walker, was a Vietnam helicopter pilot, who I believe, and my experiences with Colonel Walker, who is now running a first class hunting preserve in Tennessee, he is a heck of a guy. In Vietnam I think he was shot down 13 times, and I think on the Marine Corps side, I forget how many times General McCorkle went down but he went down a number of times. There was a lesson there, and the lesson was that helicopters are highly survivable not necessarily in the sense of being difficult to hit because they are not difficult to hit with small arms fire, but in being difficult to kill decisively; that is, you can bring them down and your pilots and your crew can walk away. At least if you have gone down 13 times in your chopper, that means choppers can go down soft. They can go down hard, too.
One aspect that I think has been troubling with V–22s, the V–22s that have gone down in our testing programs and in what some folks think was a premature operations with personnel on board, was they went down real hard. The one that went down in Yuma, when the pilot brought that thing in too steeply and got way past the envelope—I mean the crew chief looked back from the lead chopper and he was gone instantly, and to a layman what that suggests at least is in looking at it simply with the standard of helicopter that has got a center pull with your blade, is that even if part of that blade gets shot off or loses power, whatever you have got left can bring the thing down in a centered or balanced way and you can whirlybird down kind of like those maple pods coming off a tree and you can land in such a way that people can walk away. But if you have a problem with V–22 because you have got a vector on each wing, even though they are hard wired so both engines can drive them both, but if something goes wrong with a pitched variation or you get a piece of blade shot off on one side you could have a tipping effect, which means it is lights out instantly.
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What do you think about that? That is just kind of a practical view that may or may not be an erroneous view. Mike, what do you think?
General HOUGH. It is of concern. I will try to put this in perspective, and I appreciate your concern for this. If you have a helicopter 53, you knock one of those blades off, that critter is going to come down. Huey, the same way. In fact we had a rash of them, oh, six, seven years ago, and it scared us, what the heck is going on here? We fixed them and found it was simply vibration but it knocked that rotor off.
In a fixed wing airplane right now, whether it is propeller or jet driven, as long as you can glide and keep your speed up, you can land straight ahead. Whether it is unimproved or improved, you can land straight ahead with ejection being an option. That is not an option obviously in a helicopter.
In a V–22 model it is interesting. Normally simulation in simulators will take care of it but, because frankly, speaking to you in the past, we knew it wasn't a helicopter and it wasn't a fixed wing. What is it? We entered into an area that maybe in hindsight we should have done a hell of a lot more modeling in sim and understanding of the environment.
So when you were talking about when they came down, I can't really speak about the accidents but in general when he lost his lift, basically he stalled it out and he got that ring vortex. We know today that all he had to do was push those props, those mosels forward and he was instantly out of it. We didn't know that then. Shame on us. Shame on us for his not knowing it, the pilot.
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When the pilot got killed with his co-pilot down in North Carolina, we had a problem. Do you know what it was? It was software. As you know, everything we have is driven by software, including your automobile.
Mr. HUNTER. Not my automobile, Mike. I have a $600 ex-taxi. No software there.
General HOUGH. Mine, too. But the point is, as I explained to you many times in testimony before, software is in control of everything and if you don't wash the software off your aggression testing so the unknowns are gone, there are no surprises, even though you have triple redundancy, if that thing is driving your airplane, it will kill you, and I said many times in a Volvo it is driven by software and so is the fuel pump. But I said if the software fouls up and the fuel pump stops, you can pull it over to the side of the road. In an airplane your motor is going to stop working. That is essentially what happened.
Mr. HUNTER. I understand that in the software problem and we went through that, the fact that the guy kept pushing that god button and getting the opposite reaction from that that had been projected through procedure, but I am still concerned about this. If you have this symmetric lift, that is, you got two wings, you have got a lift off each wing, if you lose a lift on one wing, you have an instant tip. If you have a center blade chopper, half the blade gets shot off or a piece of it gets shot off, you are going to be able to cripple down in a relatively stable way because your pull is center plane. Your pull is not center plane on an Osprey. It is on each wing. And that means if you lose a piece of one blade, I would think you are going to have a pretty fast tip action unless you have a perfect balancing.
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So everything we do here is supposed to be geared to the practical. So you talk to these old helicopter pilots like Colonel Walker, who went down 13 times with some damage done to his helicopter in Vietnam, and you realize that the helicopters we had, well, they could be shot up, have some degree of survivability, that is, in the ability to get them down a little slower than falling like a rock, and thereby allowing your personnel to walk away and live to fly another day, and the V–22s that went down, all went down from my understanding, basically like rocks.
So my concern was this. You have that imbalance and I don't know if you would call it a nonsymmetrical lift or whatever. I call it the ability to tip if something goes wrong with one of those blades or maybe you get a pitch imbalance. Now, isn't that still kind of a concern?
General HOUGH. No, sir. Airplanes that did go down weren't caused by imbalance. They stalled.
Mr. HUNTER. I understand. That was one that stalled, but several of them went down. But my point was that once you have a problem that is going to take them out of the sky, whether it is small arms fire or a missile blast or whatever, the helicopter with the center pull on it has the ability to cripple down. Do you have that same ability on a V–22 that has, for example, part of one rotor shot off?
General HOUGH. I can't answer you what the torsional or the vibrational limits are on the airplane, but I do know that the blue ribbon panel looked at that and made it very clear that there was an ability to auto-rotate with the airplane with a malfunction. Now, whether a half a blade can be gone or whatever, but the beauty of it is if you are flying along and you are going to, say, transition at 110, 120 knots to the helicopter mode and you have a half blade shot off, what would be your options? Your options go from the range of fall auto-rotation that doesn't exceed the vibrational limit or put those things forward and fly like an airplane—.
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Mr. HUNTER. What if you are after-transition and you are bringing it down and basically in chopper mode and you have a problem with one side? Do you have that tipping or can you balance that out?
General HOUGH. That is going to be explored when we start flying the airplane, that sort of thing, but I have to get back to you for the record to say exactly what are the physics of this and the limits, and I know that was looked at, but I can also tell you when the airplane starts flying here within a month that for about a year and a half they are going to be looking at all those kinds of things. Mr. Aldridge said, hey, I want to know about the safety of that issue, ring vortex—.
[The information referred to can be found in the Appendix beginning on page ?.]
Mr. HUNTER. The other thing that just occurred, as kind of a layman, is this. You have a certain downwash on helicopters when they come in, a certain lift that is a function of the ground effect and your blades turn. If you are coming into a ship to land and on your wing you have one blade over the ship and the other blade is off the ship so it is washing into a surface that is maybe 40, 50 feet below, does that have an effect on the stability of that platform?
General HOUGH. It has an effect. Whether it has an effect on the stability I can't comment, but that is also one of the things they are going to most certainly explore to the infinite detail, as directed by Mr. Aldridge, shipboard compatibility. Now, they went aboard ship and they said, hey, it is pretty good; however, someone brought up what about that very issue in a ground effect, one is in ground effect, one is out. They are going to look at that for a full year and a half, intensive program.
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Mr. HUNTER. Okay. We will be following that, and thanks as usual for your good candid information that you bring to these hearings. And, gentlemen, I would like to ask a question of each of you before we wind up here, and that is this. I think we are getting smart enough to know that what we do in terms of R&D when we do it right it necessarily is linked to a practical requirement that you got in the field, and that is the reason you now have warfighters participating more in the procurement and acquisition process than you did in the past, I think.
General Riggs, looking at your operational requirements, in what area do you think you need to have more money spent in R&D or in acquisition? What areas do you think are your most pressing that you need to really put some focus on and perhaps some extra dollars? I would ask you to give us that, and I also want to hear from the Marines on that, too.
General RIGGS. Well, sir, as you know, we took a look and submitted a fairly extensive unfinanced requirement over here. It was actually in the area of about $9.4 billion which gives an indication of the state of play of things in many of the areas in which assistance could be provided potentially. I would say to you that this issue with available resources, making sure that we balance the legacy and the interim and our objective efforts, is very important to us because I think we have a rather delicate balance right now with the amount of money that we are putting into each effort and our recapitalization programs plus our modernization programs that we have on the books. I would make a plea that we work hard to maintain that delicate balance.
Mr. HUNTER. Let me rephrase it just a little bit. I understand you have got to have a balance because you don't have as much money as you probably need here. So you have got to keep the Legacy stuff going and you have got to do some new stuff, but just in terms of operations where do you see—looking at the operation, for example, in Afghanistan and then the operations that have taken place 4, 5 and 6 years before that, are there any particular operational areas where if you juxtapose yourself into one of the CINC positions who had a major ground operation on his hands, what areas do you think we need work on? What does the Army need to be able to do that it can't do as well as it would like to right now?
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General RIGGS. I think the subject that we were just talking about is an area that has to do with survivability, and it is not only of helicopters but I think that is an area in which it is more than just small arms fire, and I think we will be relooking probably battlefield survivability issues, our countermeasures and other issues associated with battlefield survivability. So I think that is one area which we will be looking into.
I think the next area is that since we have worked toward accelerating the FCS program because of indications that we have had regarding the future, as we have worked toward that piece of acceleration, some of that was done after we actually submitted the President's budget and so there are some areas there in both research and development as well as testing and evaluation that we could use some assistance to about the tune of about $400 million.
Mr. HUNTER. Good. And if you could send us any more documentation on that, we would appreciate that.
General RIGGS. Be glad to.
[The information referred to can be found in the Appendix beginning on page ?.]
Mr. HUNTER. General Hanlon, you have had a chance to listen to this question. Operationally what would you like to be doing better than you are doing right now?
General HANLON. Sir, as I mentioned earlier in the hearing, I still feel very strongly that the area we would like to put more money in is in our fire support capabilities. Again, the lightweight 155 is the right step forward for us, no question about it. But we still have a need for more fire support in the Marine Corps.
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And if I may just make another little comment to you, sir, in partnership with the Navy, also working with them to be able to solve the naval surface fire support problem, I know they are working that with their DDX program and everything else. But that is very important to our Communications Operations Summary (COMOPS) to be able to get naval surface fire support for us. We are looking at things such as the HIMARS, the expeditionary fire support, better radars, things of that sort.
In fact, in anticipation of this question I spoke to the Commandant about this a couple days ago and I said, sir, if I am asked the question where would you like to put more money, he said clearly in the fire support area, and we would be happy to give you more information on that, sir, if you would like.
Mr. HUNTER. One area office of naval research is developing an initiative is this small ship, this lateral ship.
General HANLON. Yes, sir, lateral combat ship.
Mr. HUNTER. It is a little one they have been putting together for a while and they have been paralleling that with a program with a $30,000 600-mile missile, about 1/30th the cost of a Tomahawk. If you stack a lot of those tubes on the small fast ship that can get in the laterals, got about a 600-mile range, that could give the Marines—and I have talked to the Commandant briefly about that, with the Chief of Naval Operations (CNO) and the Secretary—you could give the Marines a lot of fire power and bring it from the sea.
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General HANLON. Yes, sir. I believe you are referring to—I think they call it the affordable round.
Mr. HUNTER. Affordable missile. Competitors don't like that name.
General HANLON. I have seen the videotape of it. Operational Requirements (O&R) came over and showed it to us.
Mr. HUNTER. And it has been very successful so far.
General HANLON. Sir, it is very exciting. Its range and its loiter capability has great potential and you are right, sir. Particularly in a platform like that it would be great.
Mr. HUNTER. Gentlemen, thank you very much, and we really appreciate your service to the country and we are going to have to work together as a team, I think, to get the dollars that we need to allow you both to balance this need to move ahead but at the same time to maintain the foundation, the legacy foundation that makes this effective.
Everybody talks about transformation. We transformed our military after World War II. We transformed it into a less lethal, smaller and worse trained force. The theory was we had this new whiz bang thing called an atomic weapon that would keep anybody from messing with us. In fact, we had a monopoly on that in 1950 and yet it didn't keep the Koreans from coming south and it didn't keep a million Chinese from coming into the war either.
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So we learned that you lose a lot of people because you don't do very basic things, like our bazookas I think bounced off those newly Russian made tanks at the Osan Pass and we had lots of shortages in cold weather gear and lots other stuff. I think what we really want to do is just win, and sometimes you need a lot of the traditional stuff to win with because it is necessary and you have to have heavy stuff. You have got to have the ability to kill armor, and I think what we have in our country because, while all these deep breathers are trying to figure out how we are going to be attacked the next time, they forget the fundamental fact, which is they don't get to vote on how we get attacked, and we usually get attacked in ways that we didn't anticipate.
So we have got to have real broad capability and you guys have to maintain that with shrinking resources. So thanks for your service, and let us work together to try to make this stuff work.
And Mike, obviously we are really interested in getting as much information as we can as we walk down through the V–22 exercises and operations, and maybe we will just hold you fully accountable for this whole program even though you have nothing to do with it.
General HOUGH. There is nothing new there, sir. I appreciate that, but I talked to Mr. Christie the other day and, as you well know, the airplane is going to fly here pretty quick. I said when Mr. Aldridge wants to know how it is going to ask me. So Tom Christie, OPTEV IV, HMX, they are the ones who are going to be in control of the testing and the evaluation plan and the Marines are going to supply the manpower, and absolutely this Congress and you will be kept abreast of how we go each step of the way.
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Mr. HUNTER. Thank you very much. And, General Hanlon, our respect for your service to the country and, General Riggs, our great respect to you also, sir.
General RIGGS. Thank you very much.
[Whereupon, at 12:40 p.m., the subcommittee was adjourned.]