SPEAKERS       CONTENTS       INSERTS    
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74–041
2001
  
[H.A.S.C. No. 107–24]

U.S. NATIONAL MILITARY STRATEGY OPTIONS

HEARING

BEFORE THE

COMMITTEE ON ARMED SERVICES
HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES

ONE HUNDRED SEVENTH CONGRESS

FIRST SESSION

HEARING HELD
JUNE 20, 2001

  
  

For sale by the Superintendent of Documents, U.S. Government Printing Office
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HOUSE COMMITTEE ON ARMED SERVICES

One Hundred Seventh Congress

BOB STUMP, Arizona, Chairman

FLOYD D. SPENCE, South Carolina
DUNCAN HUNTER, California
JAMES V. HANSEN, Utah
CURT WELDON, Pennsylvania
JOEL HEFLEY, Colorado
JIM SAXTON, New Jersey
JOHN M. McHUGH, New York
TERRY EVERETT, Alabama
ROSCOE G. BARTLETT, Maryland
HOWARD P. ''BUCK'' McKEON, California
J.C. WATTS, Jr., Oklahoma
MAC THORNBERRY, Texas
JOHN N. HOSTETTLER, Indiana
SAXBY CHAMBLISS, Georgia
VAN HILLEARY, Tennessee
JOE SCARBOROUGH, Florida
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WALTER B. JONES, North Carolina
LINDSEY GRAHAM, South Carolina
JIM RYUN, Kansas
BOB RILEY, Alabama
JIM GIBBONS, Nevada
ROBIN HAYES, North Carolina
DON SHERWOOD, Pennsylvania
HEATHER WILSON, New Mexico
KEN CALVERT, California
ROB SIMMONS, Connecticut
ANDER CRENSHAW, Florida
MARK STEVEN KIRK, Illinois
JO ANN DAVIS, Virginia
ED SCHROCK, Virginia
W. TODD AKIN, Missouri

IKE SKELTON, Missouri
JOHN SPRATT, South Carolina
SOLOMON P. ORTIZ, Texas
LANE EVANS, Illinois
GENE TAYLOR, Mississippi
NEIL ABERCROMBIE, Hawaii
MARTY MEEHAN, Massachusetts
ROBERT A. UNDERWOOD, Guam
ROD R. BLAGOJEVICH, Illinois
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SILVESTRE REYES, Texas
THOMAS H. ALLEN, Maine
VIC SNYDER, Arkansas
JIM TURNER, Texas
ADAM SMITH, Washington
LORETTA SANCHEZ, California
JAMES H. MALONEY, Connecticut
MIKE McINTYRE, North Carolina
CIRO D. RODRIGUEZ, Texas
CYNTHIA A. McKINNEY, Georgia
ELLEN O. TAUSCHER, California
ROBERT A. BRADY, Pennsylvania
ROBERT E. ANDREWS, New Jersey
BARON P. HILL, Indiana
MIKE THOMPSON, California
JOHN B. LARSON, Connecticut
SUSAN A. DAVIS, California
JAMES R. LANGEVIN, Rhode Island

Robert S. Rangel, Staff Director
David Trachtenberg, Professional Staff Member
Jarrod Tisdell, Research Assistant
(ii)  

C O N T E N T S
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HEARING:

    Wednesday, June 20, 2001, U.S. National Military Strategy Options

APPENDIX:

    Wednesday, June 20, 2001

WEDNESDAY, JUNE 20, 2001
U.S. NATIONAL MILITARY STRATEGY OPTIONS

STATEMENTS PRESENTED BY MEMBERS OF CONGRESS

    Skelton, Hon. Ike, a Representative from Missouri, Ranking Member, Committee on Armed Services

    Stump, Hon. Bob, a Representative from Arizona, Chairman, Committee on Armed Services

WITNESSES

    Flournoy, Michelle, Senior Advisor, International Security Program, Center for Strategic and International Studies

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    Krepinevich, Dr. Andrew F., Jr., Executive Director, Center for Strategic and Budgetary Analysis

    O'Hanlon, Dr. Michael, Senior Fellow, Foreign Policy Studies, Brookings Institute

APPENDIX
PREPARED STATEMENTS:

Flournoy, Michelle A.

Krepinevich, Dr. Andrew F., Jr.

Skelton, Hon. Ike

Stump, Hon. Bob

O'Hanlon, Dr. Michael

Kagan, Dr. Donald, Hillhouse Professor of History and Classics Yale University

DOCUMENTS SUBMITTED FOR THE RECORD:
[There were no Documents submitted.]

QUESTIONS AND ANSWERS SUBMITTED FOR THE RECORD:
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[There were no Questions and Answers.]

U.S. NATIONAL MILITARY STRATEGY OPTIONS

House of Representatives,
Committee on Armed Services,
Washington, DC, Wednesday, June 20, 2001.

    The committee met, pursuant to call, at 10:02 a.m., in room 2118, Rayburn House Office Building, Hon. Bob Stump (chairman of the committee) presiding.

OPENING STATEMENT OF HON. BOB STUMP, A REPRESENTATIVE FROM ARIZONA, CHAIRMAN, COMMITTEE ON ARMED SERVICES

    The CHAIRMAN. The meeting will please come to order. This week the committee will continue a hearing on the critical question of what our national military strategy should be. Today we will hear from a panel of experts to review the current strategy's requirement to fight two nearly simultaneous major theater wars. Tomorrow the committee will hear from Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and Joint Chief Chairman Hugh Shelton on the upcoming Quadrennial Defense Review (QDR) and how it will shape a revised national military strategy.

    Since the end of the Cold War, the United States has sized and shaped its conventional Armed Forces to meet a requirement to fight and win two major theater wars almost simultaneously. Much of the debate in this committee over the last decade revolved around whether the Armed Forces were adequately funded and ready to meet this requirement at an acceptable level of risk. In recent months there have been significant discussions over whether the two major theater war construct remains a valid force-sizing mechanism in the emerging security environment of the 21st century.
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    Much of the recent debate on this subject has been prompted by the Department of Defense's strategic review and the upcoming Quadrennial Defense Review. With us today to help us explore these issues are Mrs. Michelle Flournoy, Senior Advisor, International Security Program, Center for Strategic and International Studies; Dr. Andrew Krepinevich, Executive Director, Center for Strategic and Budgetary Analysis; and Dr. Michael O'Hanlon, Senior Fellow, Foreign Policy Studies, the Brookings Institution.

    [The prepared statement of Mr. Stump can be found in the Appendix.]

    The CHAIRMAN. Before we begin, I would like to recognize the Ranking Democrat, Mr. Skelton, for any remarks he may wish to make.

STATEMENT OF HON. IKE SKELTON, A REPRESENTATIVE FROM MISSOURI, RANKING MEMBER, COMMITTEE ON ARMED SERVICES

    Mr. SKELTON. Mr. Chairman, first, let me thank you for calling this hearing. I think it is extremely important that we discuss this and have the best advice what we possibly can. At the end of the day, it is the Congress of the United States that makes the final military decisions for raising and maintaining our forces, and I think it is important that we hear these gentlemen and lady today. These are noted experts, and we thank them for being with us.

    Mr. Chairman, let me point out that in today's Washington Times, there is a report that the Secretary of Defense is ready to replace the two major theater war approach with the requirement to fight a single major war and to manage several smaller missions. My quick thought is we will have to have some cooperative adversaries if that comes to be true.
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    Mr. Chairman, may I ask that my entire statement be put into the record, but let me—.

    The CHAIRMAN. Certainly.

    Mr. SKELTON. Let me point out a major caveat based on history. 1939, the Congress of the United States, in particular the House of Representatives, defeated by a roll call vote an appropriation amendment to modernize the Navy harbor at Guam. Imperial Japan read this action by the Congress of the United States as a signal that America would not fight in the Pacific.

    Second, in 1949, 10 years later, Secretary of State Dean Acheson in a speech did not specifically guarantee Korea's security; and failing to state that Korea was within our sphere of security, North Korea took that message and invaded the following year in June of 1950. And, of course, we know the results of the 1939, the Second World War in the Pacific and the results of the Korean War.

    I think what we do in the Congress and the message that is sent might well have a similar effect on potential adversaries, and I would like, Mr. Chairman, the three distinguished witnesses to touch upon that, the message we are sending out from this body today. And I thank you again for calling this hearing.

    The CHAIRMAN. Thank you, Ike.

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    [The prepared statement of Mr. Skelton can be found in the Appendix.]

    The CHAIRMAN. As is customary, all the prepared statements of the witnesses will be printed in the record in their entirety, and if you care to summarize, we would appreciate it, and that would allow for more time for questioning by the members to get them involved.

    Mrs. Flournoy, the floor is yours.

STATEMENT OF MICHELLE FLOURNOY, SENIOR ADVISOR, INTERNATIONAL SECURITY PROGRAM, CENTER FOR STRATEGIC AND INTERNATIONAL STUDIES

    Ms. FLOURNOY. Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman, members of the committee. Thank you for inviting me to testify this morning before this distinguished body. I would like to commend you for holding this hearing and for your willingness to tackle a critical issue, the critical issue of whether Major Theater War (MTW) should remain the primary criteria we use to size and shape the U.S. military. Too often we are driven to focus on what is pressing or immediate, but today you have chosen to focus on something that is truly important, and I applaud your leadership in taking a proactive approach to this central issue.

    Setting the criteria for sizing and shaping the U.S. military is probably among the most critical tasks any administration has in putting forth a defense strategy. As you know, the debate over two MTWs has become increasingly heated in the runup to this Quadrennial Defense Review. Supporters argue that maintaining a credible two-MTW capability is central to deterring opportunistic aggressors and to ensuring that the U.S. military can defeat aggression by any adversary that is more capable than expected.
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    They also argue that maintaining a two-MTW force gives the U.S. Military a depth of capability to enable it to operate effectively across the spectrum of operations, and that this translates into U.S. influence around the globe. Supporters also warn that falling off a two-MTW capability would call into question America's standing as a global power and the credibility of our security commitments to key allies around the globe.

    They are also reluctant to get—let go of a known standard before they know what will take its place, and they are very reluctant to see any change that would result in a free-fall in force structure.

    Critics, on the other hand, argue that the two-MTW standard has become synonymous with two particular MTW cases, namely Iraq and Korea, that do not capture the full range of future challenges that may face the U.S. military. In practice, these two illustrative cases have, in fact, become canonical cases and the focus of the vast majority of U.S. defense planning.

    Critics also contend that the two-MTW standard has lost its credibility with key constituencies, most notably with those who would champion military transformation, because it focuses the defense program too much on known near-term challenges rather than on significant future challenges, essentially putting us at risk of trying to fight—preparing to fight the last war.

    Other critics contend that the force built primarily for two MTWs does not necessarily have the capabilities it needs to handle the full range of contingencies without putting undue strain on the force. Witness the existence of so-called low-density, high-demand assets and persistent reports of overstressed units of personnel in peacetime. These critics advocate greater emphasis on sizing and shaping the force for the full range of priority demands on the U.S. military, including peacetime missions.
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    Now, although I was one of the people responsible for maintaining the two-MTW standard as part of the shape-respond-prepare strategy that came out of the 1997 QDR, I believe that the time has come to articulate a fundamentally new and more compelling rationale for the size and capabilities of the U.S. military. Over the last several years, I have become convinced that what began as a generic and, I would argue, a sensible standard to be able to fight and win two nearly simultaneous wars has over time become too narrowly focused on the ability to wage two particular wars, a war in Southwest Asia and a war on the Korean Peninsula, and that this narrow focus on two particular cases is not a sound basis for U.S. defense planning.

    So what should we look for in a new set of criteria to size and shape the force? I would offer four key elements. First, any new criteria should maintain the ability of the U.S. military to sustain—conduct and sustain major combat operations in more than one theater at a time. As a global power with global interests, the United States needs a military that can be decisively engaged, whenever and wherever our vital or important interests are challenged. We must continue to have a multitheater strategy with multitheater capabilities. To do otherwise would be to forsake U.S. leadership and risk U.S. preeminence.

    The second element is that any new criteria should broaden the set of scenarios that is used to size the—and shape the force to better represent the range in future challenges that the U.S. military is likely to encounter.

    Today's narrow focus on the two particular scenarios of Iraq and North Korea is highly problematic for several reasons. Both scenarios involve large armored divisions on land, but not every plausible MTW would take this form. The requirements of other conceivable scenarios, such as Iranian aggression across the Strait of Hormuz or defense of Taiwan against Chinese aggression, might be vastly different.
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    Relatedly, different MTW scenarios might involve different end-state objectives. Whereas in one case we might seek to restore an international border and impose a sanctions regime, in another case we might seek to actually remove an aggressor from power, change the regime and help restore stability, a much more ambitious undertaking that would require substantially more forces and substantially more time to execute.

    Furthermore, the two canonical cases of Iraq and Korea do not represent the full range of challenges that the U.S. military will likely face in the future, even the near future. For example, more capable regional foes can be expected to employ antiaccess strategies to thwart U.S. power projection. This threat is not some distant prospect in 2025 and beyond. As I like to say, it is coming soon to a theater near you, and it will require the U.S. military to employ very different operational concepts and responses. And such operational concepts could put a premium on combinations of capabilities quite different from those that have been optimized for the current Iraq and Korean scenarios.

    Finally, there are plausible scenarios involving situations other than MTWs that are traditionally defined, but that could require a comparable level of effort from the U.S. military, such as dealing with the collapse of a major state or launching another coercive campaign on the scale of Kosovo. Most importantly, any new standard must shift the focus of U.S. force planning from optimizing the force for two particular cases to building a portfolio of capabilities that is robust across a range of future and emerging threats. If U.S. defense planning is to proceed on a sound footing, we must broaden the set of scenarios in terms of potential threats, end-state objectives, operating constraints and operational concepts.

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    The third of my four key elements for a force-sizing criteria is that it should take into account not only the strategies or fighting requirements, but also its high-priority peacetime demands, including homeland security and transformation requirements. The past decade of experience has made it abundantly clear that forces sized primarily for warfighting cannot meet the full range of peacetime demands without putting undue strains on parts of the force. My own analysis suggests that this will continue to be true, even if our involvement in smaller-scale contingencies becomes somewhat more selective, as the Bush administration has advocated.

    In addition, we must consider the competing demands of homeland security missions, and also we must factor in future capability requirements if we want to ensure that the force that we build in 2003 puts us on the right path to realizing the military of 2020.

    Finally, any force sizing criteria should be explicit—as explicit as possible about where to place emphasis and where to accept or manage a degree of risk. If it is going to provide meaningful guidance for force planning and resource allocation within the Department, it must be clear about relative priorities within the strategy, and those relative priorities should guide trade-offs in the defense program.

    During the campaign and in its first months of office, President Bush and his advisers have expressed various priorities for the U.S. military, accelerating transformation, improving military readiness and increasing investment in homeland defense, especially missile defense, to name a few. The key challenge in today's resource-constrained environment is to be clear about where to spend and where to cut or divest when resources fall short of the ideal. When trade-offs have to be made, what should come first, transformation, readiness, homeland defense? And how much kind of risk can we afford to accept in lower-priority areas?
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    In conclusion, I would like to note that the challenge of developing a compelling alternative to the two-MTW standard will be made even more substantial by the fact that there are multiple and diverse audiences for U.S. defense strategy, and this really gets to Mr. Skelton's point. There is Congress. There is U.S. allies. There are also potential adversaries in every corner of the world. Nor would these words be lost on the men and women who serve in the U.S. military. As you know, what is said in defense strategy has a very real impact on morale and perceptions of those who serve. Are they being deployed to missions that are recognized as legitimate? Have they been given the resources they need to live up to the stated standard? The QDR offers the Bush Administration and the Congress a critical opportunity to rethink our defense strategy and our force sizing criteria and to articulate a new standard that will maintain U.S. military superiority into the future.

    I believe we must replace the two-MTW standard with one that does several things. First, it maintains U.S. ability to project and sustain decisive combat power in more than one theater at a time. It broadens a scenario set to include a more representative range of challenges. It facilitates a shift in U.S. force planning from perfecting the force for two particular cases to ensuring that our military has capabilities that are robust across a broader range of emerging and future threats. It must address priority demands other than more fighting, including forward presence and homeland defense requirements, and finally, it must consider future capability requirements in a way that puts today's military on the right road to becoming the military that we want to see in the longer-term future.

    This challenge is large, the resources are constrained, and the time is short, but the elements of a more compelling standard for sizing and shaping the U.S. military are clear.
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    Thank you for giving me the opportunity to address the committee on this important question. I would be happy to answer questions at the appropriate time and to assist you in any way that I can. Thank you.

    The CHAIRMAN. Thank you.

    [The prepared statement of Ms. Flournoy can be found in the Appendix.]

    The CHAIRMAN. Dr. Krepinevich.

STATEMENT OF DR. ANDREW F. KREPINEVICH, JR., EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR, CENTER FOR STRATEGIC AND BUDGETARY ANALYSIS

    Dr. KREPINEVICH. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. To begin, I think it is important to realize that ultimately force sizing and shaping is, at the end of the day, a subjective enterprise. The Defense Department possesses no secret algorithms, no high-fidelity war games that can give a precise answer as to the optimum size and shape of the forces required to seek the objective of any strategy, which is to minimize the overall risks, near-term and long-term, to our national security. In short, there is no substitute for judgment.

    I think this is especially true today when there is relatively high uncertainty, certainly compared to the Cold War, with respect to the future. What kind of challenges will we confront? Who will pose them? Where will they be posed? You can either assume away these uncertainties and achieve the illusion of precision in terms of your force sizing and structuring, or you can try and take these uncertainties into account and hedge against them.
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    Unfortunately, our two-MTW posture force sizing and shaping construct with its roots still strongly embedded in our Gulf War experience has had the effect of assuming away uncertainty with respect to the changing character of conflict, and thus over time has become progressively less relevant as a construct for dealing with today's major security threats, let alone serving as a guide for preparing to meet tomorrow's challenges.

    In fact, the analytic underpinnings of today's military can be found in a RAND Corporation study undertaken shortly after the Gulf War, titled The New Calculus, that essentially addressed the question, if you had to refight the Gulf War over again in 1992, by virtue of benefit of hindsight, what kind of forces would we require? The answer, 10 army divisions, 20 tactical fighter wings, 10 carrier battle groups, pretty much the same force we have today.

    Yet even today's rogue states present threats that are quite different in scale and form from those that we encountered a decade ago in the Persian Gulf: Iraq's Republican Guard today, hardly a Desert Storm equivalent, a shadow of the force it was 10 years ago. Iran and North Korea, much more focused on access denial strategies than on trying to create a latter-day version of the Republican Guard.

    In short, our two-MTW construct calls for forces that are sized and shaped for an increasingly unlikely contingency, thereby frustrating the effort to apportion various defense resources so as to minimize the overall risk.

    Well, if that is the case, how ought we to think about force sizing and structuring? Well, if we are to size and shape our forces in such a way as to minimize the overall risk, we will need to take a more comprehensive view of our security requirement and our own potential asymmetric advantages as well.
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    In part, this means taking into account how our defense posture supports efforts to dissuade countries from entering into competitions or arms races with us and deterring them from entering or conducting aggressive operations to begin with. It also means, I think, taking into account changes in the location, the scale and the form of emerging challenges to our security.

    With respect to location, I think a strong case can be made that far greater emphasis needs to be placed on the so-called arc of instability that runs from the Persian Gulf through the Indian Ocean, where we have instability on the subcontinent, through Southeast Asia and up into East Asia. Certainly relative to the Cold War era, this is an area of far greater concern. It is far more maritime in nature. The distances and ranges are quite more formidable than those being countered in either Desert Storm or during the Cold War in Europe.

    The second shift in location, as Michelle Flournoy pointed out, is going to be the homeland. I think over the next 10 to 20 years, we are going to come under increased risk of attack on the American homeland, whether it is by missile attack; covert introduction of chemical, biological or radiological agents; and also electronic or information attack. In a sense, we are going to be confronted with paying a homeland defense tax, and the effectiveness with which we do that will affect, to a great extent, the effectiveness with which we can project power overseas, which is really at the heart of the MTW posture.

    Then there is the matter of scale. I think we need to take into account that in Asia certainly we are moving from an era of hostile rogue states to an era of rising regional powers. Maintaining a stable military balance under those conditions that underwrites an enduring peace will likely be a far more demanding and complex enterprise than maintaining forces for a major theater war, for example, on the Korean Peninsula.
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    At the same time, we can't ignore the so-called lower end of the conflict spectrum, although in this case the lower end doesn't look quite so low-intensity in its form. For example, the risk of large state failure cannot be ignored. There is a nontrivial concern about countries today like Indonesia, which sits astride a very important trade route; Pakistan, which is a nuclear power; about the long-term stability of those states. The United States is probably the only country that can conduct large-scale remedial military operations to help remediate the—some of the more pernicious effects of large-scale state failure.

    Perhaps the most important, however, force sizing and shaping construct influence will be a change in the form of military competition away from the Desert Storm model and towards the kind of threats that Michelle Flournoy just discussed: antiaccess; the ability to control the littoral seas that our navy increasingly finds itself operating in; the so-called area of denial threat; new forms of commerce, raiding and blockade; homeland defense; space control; and perhaps the threat of ambiguous aggression as well.

    It is not often cited, but the two-MTW posture seems to assume a flagrant act of aggression. It would seem to me much more likely that in the future adversaries will try and present aggression in as ambiguous a form as possible so as to operate beneath the threshold that would trigger a prompt, large-scale, rapid American response.

    When you bring all this together, you cannot ignore the fact that over the longer term, to the extent that we can include allies in our force sizing and shaping construct, that is going to be an increasingly important factor in an era of scarce resources, changing threats, requirements for transformation and increases in the scale of potential security challenges.
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    While we do this, I think it is important to note that just as the challenges to our security are going to change, which will invalidate—or are invalidating the two-MTW posture, we have an opportunity when we think about sizing and shaping our forces to think about how we might exploit our potential isometric advantages. If there is a military revolution, if there is a revolution in military affairs (RMA) under way, then certainly we should look for opportunities to change the way we operate, change the metrics we use to gauge the effectiveness of our forces.

    For example, the American military today talks about the potential to conduct highly distributed yet highly integrated military operations, network-centric warfare. The Navy talks about a Streetfighter concept. If that is the case, and those kind of capabilities can be brought into being, then we may be able to think and act very differently in terms of our future military operations, with a corresponding change in the way we think about sizing and shaping our forces.

    Extended range engagements, the traditional mission of our army has been to close with and destroy the enemy, and yet today our military talks more and more about seeing deep and shooting deep. Think of a boxing analogy. Why should I fight you in the clinches if I can blindfold you and see you, and if I have a reach advantage over you? You know, this speaks to a dramatic change in the metrics we use to gauge the value of, for example, land combat power. There are new forms of strategic strike in terms of precision weaponry, electronic attack and information warfare that can be brought to bear. That might displace, at least to some extent, the requirements for the nuclear forces that we have. And then there is the potential to exploit space for a variety of purposes.
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    I think Michelle Flournoy made an excellent point when she said that we have to identify a way of coming up with answers to some of these complex questions. One process that Congress has advocated and promoted is the use of service and joint field exercises to experiment with new doctrines, new operational concepts, new capabilities, new systems, new force structures, new sizing and structuring mechanisms. Unfortunately, this effort so far has moved along at a snail's pace. The sooner that effort is accelerated, I think the sooner we will begin to get better answers about what our future military needs to look like.

    So to sum up, I think it is first and foremost important to realize that ultimately force sizing and shaping is a subjective enterprise, and that there is no substitute for good judgment, and that is why hearings like this that bring these issues to the fore, that hopefully provide enlightenment, are so important. It is particularly true today when we are confronted with relatively high uncertainty, both geopolitical and military, technical in nature. Consequently, if we are going to size and shape our force in such a way as to achieve the overall objective of minimizing the overall risk near term and long term to our security, we need to take a more comprehensive view of our security requirements, the challenges to our security, existing and emerging, and also looking to exploit our own potential advantages as we move forward into the future.

    Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman.

    The CHAIRMAN. Thank you, Doctor.

    [The prepared statement of Dr. Krepinevich can be found in the Appendix.]
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    The CHAIRMAN. Dr. O'Hanlon.

STATEMENT OF MICHAEL O'HANLON, SENIOR FELLOW, FOREIGN POLICY STUDIES, BROOKINGS INSTITUTION

    Dr. O'HANLON. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. It is a real honor to be here today, and I am honored to be on this panel as well.

    My colleagues have made a lot of excellent points that I essentially agree with. So instead of repeating many of the same things, let me maybe just take a little different take and illustrate, I think, some of the same arguments by regard to a reference to three specific countries, and what I would identify would be Korea and then the Taiwan/China problem and Pakistan. All of these have been alluded to earlier, but I think these illustrate why we have a dilemma because, as Congressman Skelton pointed out, we really need some form of a two-war capability.

    But I think, as my colleagues have pointed out, we need to think about a different type, and I think Mr. Rumsfeld is moving in the right direction to think about a different type of two-war capability. I just hope he doesn't drop the number two. I think you need to keep saying that you have simultaneous multitheater combatant contact, as Secretary Flournoy just mentioned, but there is now the need to think about a broader set of scenarios, as she also pointed out.

    Let me just start with a cautionary note, and I think this is consistent with what Congressman Skelton said a few moments ago. I was in Korea a few months ago giving a presentation to academicians way out in Seoul. I have never heard more talk about the two-war capability and the two-war issue than I did in this particular forum, because people were very nervous about what might happen to their country if the United States all of a sudden gave the impression that we no longer are quite as focused on a two-war capability. There was a real nervousness, and it was a tangible debate, and it was among political scientists. These were not even defense experts. You don't tend to hear that kind of debate too much in distant cities in the United States these days.
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    So this is a cautionary note. We can't cut too far, in my judgment, and we probably don't want to talk about only having a one-war capability. We don't want to encourage that sort of potential opportunism from aggressors.

    On the other hand, if you then move down towards the Taiwan/China problem, we all know that this is a serious military concern, and we have not been focusing on it analytically or intellectually for the last 10 years; actually for longer than that. Now, I have spent quite a bit of time on this particular scenario in the last year analytically, and I have reached the reassuring conclusion that most of our combat capabilities today are of the right type that I think we would need to help Taiwan defend itself, particularly against a possible Chinese naval blockade, which I consider by far the most pressing and serious threat that China could pose to Taiwan, much more serious, I think, than the invasion threat. But there are some things we are probably not doing well enough, because we are not focusing on this scenario.

    For example, I am not sure we are doing much to harden our electronics against the possible use of high-altitude nuclear explosions that wouldn't even kill anybody, but would fry a lot of modern electronics. China might be very tempted to employ that sort of a tactic if we ever went to war with them. My understanding, even though it is hard to assess this from unclassified sources, which is all I have access to—my understanding is we have really cut funding for hardening electronics in our move to use commercial off-the-shelf technology and in our conviction that we no longer have a superpower nuclear rivalry to worry about. We may want to reassess that particular assumption. We may not be doing enough to protect and harden our satellites.

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    In this regard again, I think Secretary Rumsfeld is articulating some important ideas. I am nervous about using space for offensive purposes, but I think Secretary Rumsfeld is right to think we have to spend more time building redundancy and hardening into our satellite capabilities on which we so depend, because China could potentially threaten these, even if North Korea and Iraq probably could not.

    So as you go down this arc along the Asian littoral, you have a message from Korea, don't cut too much, don't change too much, but you also have a message from Taiwan, we probably need a little more of your attention and a little more of your defense planning time than we have been getting.

    And then finally I will just conclude with one more case, which is Pakistan. Andy Krepinevich mentioned that Pakistan is an unstable state that has nuclear weapons. So whether you like peacekeeping operations or not, whether you like stabilizing operations or not, we may not have much of a choice about staying out of a Pakistani state collapse scenario, if indeed it happens. I am not predicting it. I don't think it is likely, but obviously this is a very troubled part of the world.

    The government in Pakistan is not that stable, and if there were ever any doubt about the security of Pakistan's nuclear weapons in a part of the world right next to the Taliban, right next to Usama bin Laden, and in a country with many Islamic extremist groups, I do not believe even opponents of peacekeeping or peace operations could stand by and watch that country disintegrate without seriously considering major American military intervention, hopefully as part of a multilateral force, hopefully in support of a government that would still be in power but would be losing its control over part of the country.
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    But that is the kind of scenario that again cautions us not to be too drastic, because the China/Taiwan problem points us in the direction of more Navy and Air Force, but the Pakistan scenario reminds us not to cut ground forces too much.

    So in very brief terms, where does this leave me? When I also look at the defense budget constraints that we all recognize to be very real, especially in the aftermath of the tax cut, we don't have that much of a surplus we can really think is going to go towards defense, and even a $20-billion-a-year increase will not be adequate to fund all the needs one could identify. Where does this leave me? It leaves me saying you do need still a two-war capability, but you do not need, and you should not be content with, a two-MTW capability that essentially imagines replays of Desert Storm, with six or seven ground combat divisions in either place, with 10 fighter wings in either place, with the same concept of probably doing large-scale simultaneous counteroffensives using two ground forces to overthrown an enemy government and occupy its territory. We are doing worst-case planning for Iraq and North Korea, and we are not spending enough time on Taiwan, Pakistan, Indonesia, Iran and long-term transformation and homeland defense.

    So I would advocate the following: I would advocate that we recognize that we do not have to, in all likelihood, fight two Desert Storms at the same time against Iraq and North Korea. If we fight one, we may have to have the option of a major two-core, six-, seven-division counteroffensive to overthrow its government. We are probably not going to need to do that in two places at the same time.

    So I would advocate a slight reduction in our ground force capabilities in the Active Duty Army, but I would not push this too far. I think you need a robust deterrent capability for a second war. You need to be able to establish a defensive perimeter and undertake aerial attacks if necessary in the second theater at the same time you are fighting the all-out Desert Storm in the first place, and you have to recognize you are still going to have some forces perhaps in Kosovo, in Bosnia or somewhere else.
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    So when you add it all up and you do the force sizing the way I think is appropriate, you still wind up with an Army at least 90 percent as big as today's. Now, of course, for Army advocates and for the Army itself, they don't find that sort of statement very reassuring because I am essentially implying that one could cut ground forces by 5 or 10 percent, and I think that would be conceivable, but anything more than that I believe would be inappropriate.

    My own preference would be to keep 10 Army divisions, but make them a little bit smaller and reduce some of the support, some of the core level support, in the U.S. Army so that one could still have a rotation base and still portray a robust U.S. Army with 10 full Active Duty divisions. But I think there is room for a modest cut. Perhaps there is room for a cut of one or two fighter wings in the Air Force, if you feel less nervous about this two simultaneous Desert Storm scenario.

    But, again, I don't believe these cuts can go too far. I think you have to look for savings in the modernization account as well, because force structure needs to stay at least 90 percent to 95 percent where it is today, and we are going to need a fairly substantial defense spending increase at the end of the day, because there is just no two ways about it. We need to do a lot of things in a lot of places.

    We have, Mr. Chairman, my final comment, 60 allies or close security partners around the world, 60. Most people don't recognize just how many countries we are sworn to defend or help defend things, and this is a remarkable number of commitments on six different continents. It is going to be tough to remain the world's superpower, but I think it is worth doing. But we have to look for economies all over the place, and I think force structure has to be one, as long as we don't go too far. Thank you very much.
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    The CHAIRMAN. Thank you, Mr. O'Hanlon.

    [The prepared statement of Dr. O'Hanlon can be found in the Appendix.]

    The CHAIRMAN. The Chair recognizes the Ranking Member Mr. Skelton.

    Mr. SKELTON. I have a deep concern. I am looking at where our country was between two great wars of last century. We allowed our military to wither away with one major exception. That one exception was in the field of professional military education, where we did a superb job of recognizing future intellectual battlefields.

    So let me ask you a bottom-line question. We are charged with raising and maintaining the military, and Congress is. Of course we take recommendations from the administration. But let me ask you—each of you to take up the magic wand that is in front of you and describe the force structure that you would have our country have or the scenarios that you have each individually described. We are speaking about finding a strategy that you have described to a force structure that we must glue together. Would each of you do that for us? I won't ask you to do it in 25 words or less, but try.

    Ms. Flournoy.

    Ms. FLOURNOY. I guess on this point I would agree with Michael O'Hanlon that I think cutting force structure—current force structure too dramatically could really be very harmful to the U.S. military and take a great deal of time to recover from. So most of the changes that I would suggest are at the margins. I don't think they are dramatic changes, and I think they are more—less about cutting force structure and more about reorienting some of our areas of emphasis.
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    I am strongly supportive of the view that the U.S. Army needs to transform fundamentally to become a lighter, more expeditionary force, and I think that eventually that would yield some reduction in the number of heavy ground force units and their replacement with probably units that are maybe smaller in number, smaller in size, but pack a much more lethal punch, even though they are lighter and more expeditionary—as lethal punch.

    So I think that I—on the Army side, I would say I would focus on transformation and making maybe the immediate trade-off of trying to transition resources out of maybe a small number of the heavy ground divisions and into experimentation concept development, research and development, procurement of new equipment for a lighter force and so forth.

    Part of my concern about big cuts to the Army is that even though new administrations have a habit of articulating policies of more selective engagement, we have a less impressive track record as a Nation of actually implementing that over time, and I think if we were to cut the Army substantially and then find ourselves still in the Balkans, still in the Sinai, still in these very smaller-scale contingencies, then you really will have some personnel tempo (PERSTEMPO) and operational tempo (OPTEMPO) problems on your hands much more serious than we have today.

    So I—that is my view on the Army. Would you like me to go through the other services as well?

    Again, for the Navy, I wouldn't advocate major force structure cuts, but I would like to see a shift within the Navy from the intense, almost single-minded focus on the carrier battle group and on the number of carriers to ensuring that the Navy adequately resources a range of other capabilities, like missile defense, sea-based missile defense, like antimine capability, like more stealthy undersea platforms that can assist land attack and so forth.
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    So my concern with the Navy is not so much, again, its size, but that it is myopically focused on the carrier battle group when it needs to be investing much more substantially in capabilities that it will need in an access-challenged environment.

    For the Air Force, again, I would agree with Michael that there might be—you might be able to, you know, cut some force structure at the margin if you were able to pull back on peacetime requirements. Currently the Air Force, in shifting to the AEF, Air Expeditionary Force, concept is really sized to meet peacetime demands, and warfighting is a subset of that. But I think with the Air Force, again, what I would be looking for is maybe—sacrifice a little bit of force structure at the margin to ensure that they can really be good custodians of the space mission, to ensure that they can invest in longer-range precision strike, to ensure that they can adequately fund the munitions programs that are maybe even more important than the platform grades that are a part of their program, and also to get into—seriously get into the world of unmanned vehicles as a potential alternative to manned fighter aircraft.

    So I guess I would make some marginal trades to be able to more fully explore some of these areas that I think will be more relevant in the future, but I think any major cuts in force structure could be very problematic.

    The one last thing I will mention is the Reserve and National Guard forces. Here I think we—this is the one part of the force structure, particularly the National Guard ground forces, that I feel needs to be considered for major restructuring, with a greater emphasis on their contribution to homeland defense missions. If I were a sitting Governor, I would much rather have the National Guard unit in my State that was full of people trained in rapid response to deal with weapons of mass destruction (WMD) terrorism, you know, on U.S. soil than to have, you know, a tank division in the armory. So I think the National Guard has an absolutely crucial role to play in homeland defense, and we have only just started down that path of really rethinking their mission and their structure toward that end.
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    I know that is a controversial position that will, I am sure, spark some debate, but I think that is probably where I would target the greatest change in terms of force structure.

    The CHAIRMAN. Doctor.

    Dr. KREPINEVICH. I would tend to agree with Michelle in that I don't think there is huge potential for reductions in the force structure. I do think it is imperative that we need to begin to reorient, or some people say transform, the force.

    Again, when you talk about MTWs, what you are really talking about is can we project power, can we project power overseas on a scale sufficient to win when we need to? The big challenge to power projection, existing and coming, is antiaccess and area denial. Proliferation of access to satellites and missiles means forward bases, ports, airfields are going to come under increased risk of attack and destruction.

    As the Navy moves into the littoral, it finds two things. One, it comes into range of more and more adversaries' military capabilities; and number two, its warning time is progressively reduced. Now, what does that mean in terms of force size and force structure? Well, the critical question and the question that we really need an answer from the military on is how do they plan to deal with these challenges, because how they plan to deal with them, how they plan to fight with the kinds of tools that they want to bring to bear will influence the size and shape and structure of the forces we need.

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    But having said that, let me speculate a bit. It seems to me, for example, that if you are talking about today's Army reinforcing Korea, there will be far greater value in reinforce—with forces that can get there much more quickly. So that aspect of Army transformation, I think, is right on the mark.

    On the other hand, I think they are going to have to not so much seek to get forces to a large base in a hurry, but to try and identify ways that they can insert forces in a distributed way; in other words, not just through a few major ports and airfields that may be at risk of missile attack, but a range of distributed ports and airfields.

    Second, I think that this opens up opportunities for missile defense. If, instead of having to defend a few major ports and airfields 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year, you only have to defend those locations when they are actually being used for reinforcement, then you can practice preferential missile defense, which eases to a great extent the demands on your theater missile defense requirements.

    The other point is that the—in terms of the reinforcing forces themselves, the Army has, I think, an enormous potential—and, again, using the Korea—to see deep and shoot deep that no other army in the world has. It perplexes me why we are not exploiting this more, the use of space assets, the assets of other services, scout helicopters, unmanned aerial vehicles to see enemy formations at a distance, and to use things like rocket artillery, Army Tactical Missile System (ATACMS), unmanned combat aerial vehicles, attack helicopters to strike them at a distance.

    In terms of our maritime forces, do we really want to lead with a carrier battle group if we don't have to? The Navy has talked about the possibility of linking a larger number of smaller ships, the Streetfighter concept, have them lead the way to the coastal areas, have them take on the primary responsibility of dealing with the antiship cruise missile threat, the antisubmarine war threat, the mine threat, so that they essentially screen the way for the carrier battle group, allowing it to operate at much less risk at a far lot higher level of effectiveness.
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    It is not clear to me why we haven't really seized the opportunity to take those four Trident boats that are coming out of nuclear service, convert them to cruise missile carriers, and use them to help take some of the stress off the carrier battle groups as a means of forward presence. These so called Nuclear Powered Cruise Missile Attack Submarine (SSGN) can carry over 150 cruise missiles. They can all be launched in less than six minutes, and the cost of converting these boats is well under a billion dollars. Now, can they do everything a carrier can do and a carrier battle group? No. But they can gap the carriers. They can do it at a cost of about 250 sailors as opposed to 7- or 8,000 in a carrier battle group. They can outrange any of the aircraft on a carrier, and they can get closer without being seen than a carrier.

    In terms of the Air Force, I think, let me just second what Michelle said. I think we are overinvesting in modernizing a tactical Air Force that has to operate out of large, advanced bases that are increasingly going to be at risk. These large, fixed forward bases are going to be the Omaha Beaches of the 21st century. They are going to be the spot where the enemy knows you have to go, and they are going to hit those places with missiles. Unless you assume fantastic improvements in missile defense to the extent that you restrict yourself to a relatively few ports and airfields in theater, that is going to be the scene for the 21st century version of Saving Private Ryan.

    So the Air Force, it seems to me, has to emphasize—rebalance its investments, emphasizing longer-range capabilities, the use of unmanned capabilities whenever it can, not only in terms of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) but unmanned combat aerial vehicles (UCAVs), and to try and move into space and cyberspace to leverage some of the capabilities that we can develop before our adversaries can.
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    The CHAIRMAN. Dr. O'Hanlon.

    Dr. O'HANLON. Mr. Chairman, very briefly, I would again keep 10 Army divisions, but make them a little bit smaller and reduce some of the core support by going down to about a 450,000 end-strength Active Duty Army. I would probably go to 10 carrier battle groups, reducing the emphasis on the Mediterranean Sea. We have already reduced that emphasis somewhat, but I would say we don't really need a permanent presence there or even a 60 percent presence because we don't have a Soviet threat to the North Atlantic Treaty Organization's (NATO) southeastern flank anymore, and we can search carriers for specific purposes like a war against Serbia, if necessary.

    I would have a 300-ship Navy as opposed to the goal of 315 to 320, the reason being I think it is time we figured out how to rotate crews, sometimes by airlift, not just rotating by the traditional means of sailing across the oceans. This is becoming too difficult of a mission for sailors because of the way we do rotation policy.

    It would be nice if we could have and afford a bigger Navy. I don't think we will. So I think we should accept the Navy is going to be about where it is or maybe even a little smaller, but start to fly crews by airlift to occasionally replace those who have done their six months. This idea might sound crazy, but it came from the Center for Naval Analyses. So there are some Navy people who think it is not a bad idea themselves.

    So I would stay with a 10-carrier, 300-ship fleet. I would go to about 18 tactical fighter wings. I would probably not increase the size of the bomber force. I think it is important to improve the munitions for the bomber force and improve the targeting information provided to the bomber force, but I am not one of those who thinks we need more B-2s or any kind of bomber based on my understanding of how many munitions we can profitably employ from these kinds of airplanes. So I would keep the bomber force where it is and cut by two the fighter wings.
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    And finally, I would keep the Marine Corps at three divisions, but I would seriously consider taking the Marines out of fixed-wing aviation. I think we have a lot of tremendously good tactical fighters in this country. It is not clear to me we need three services to be equally strong in the area, and the Marines need to keep doing a lot of what they do well and uniquely. I am not sure that has to include fixed-wing aviation, and, again, we need to find practical ways to save money because we have a big budget problem.

    So I don't enjoy making any of these recommendations. Again, they are primarily at the margin, although for the service in question, and I am sure for the members of this committee, the specific recommendations that I have made are probably—sound pretty painful, but I think we have to look for ways to do these sorts of things.

    The CHAIRMAN. The gentleman from South Carolina Mr. Spence is recognized.

    Mr. SPENCE. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

    First of all, just a comment. We haven't been too good in predicting in the past future wars. As a matter of fact, we have missed it completely—.

    The CHAIRMAN. Can you speak up just a little? They are working on the mike.

    Mr. SPENCE. We have missed it completely in Korea, the agency, nobody predicted Korea. Vietnam. We not only have not predicted these things, but we have not predicted the kind of warfare we will fight in these areas. Now, I think it is relevant to consider the various kinds of adversaries we have, where we will fight them and what their capability is.
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    Aside from that, I have read what all of you had to say, and I have read a lot on this subject of two major theater wars. Most of you give both sides of the question specific points in each, and it gets kind of fuzzy on out from that as to what we should do, accept various scenarios and—but it doesn't answer the bottom-line question.

    We have spent the last few years trying to assess the needs of our military. We have asked our military leadership to go out and fight the wars. They don't theorize about them. Can we fight two major theater wars, not from the standpoint of whether we should change that strategy, but whether or not we have the capability of doing that and at what risk. The answer came back from these folks who are supposed to know, yes, we can fight two major theater wars, it would just take longer. And then we asked the follow-up question, what does take longer mean? And they said, well, it means it would take longer to achieve our objective. And then you ask the follow-up question, well, what does that mean? They say, well, all the things that can happen, if it takes longer to achieve your objective, plus higher rates of casualties. And we follow up the question, then, with what was the risk involved in doing this? And the risk came back high in the final analysis, high.

    That disturbs me not from the standpoint so much as there are major theater wars or two wars or no war and one war and all these kind of things, but if we can't do two without obtaining our objectives and high rates of casualties and the risk being high, tell me what we can do better with another scenario.

    Ms. FLOURNOY. I think—let me try to respond to that question. When I advocate looking across a broader range of scenarios, what I am advocating is an analytic process or a judgment process of sizing our force in a way that we test for a force structure option against lots of different combinations of possibilities. One of the arguments I made in the longer written—the written prepared statement was that you might consider, for example, looking at the two most stressing cases for a particular service and size that service according to those cases.
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    For example, for the Army, it might well be Iraq and Korea from an Army perspective in terms of—of all the scenarios that we have talked about, the ones that would really stress the Army most if they happened simultaneously. But from a Navy perspective, you would come up with a different answer. You look at cross-straits aggression. You would look at, you know, a situation involving a major naval campaign like defense of Taiwan, like dealing with Iranian aggression across the Strait of Hormuz.

    And so one option is to look at what stresses the different elements of the force and to size those elements for the most stressing cases, but in so doing, look across a much broader range of scenarios for the force as a whole.

    Dr. KREPINEVICH. Just to, say, take the—well, as I understand it, the two-MTW posture desires the American military to fight two major theater wars in overlapping time frames and to bring about a quick and decisive victory at relatively low casualties. I think the first thing to realize is that to some extent these objectives are contradictory. The faster you want to achieve victory, probably the more casualties you are going to incur. If you want decisive victory like we had in Desert Storm, you probably can't move quickly. You are going to have to build up military capability so that to some extent, the—you have to make choices, even within the desire for quick, decisive and low casualties.

    Second, the notion that you can do that, I think, over time is going to be increasingly illusionary. When I was over in Korea in 1997 talking to our commander in chief in Korea, we were talking about this base access issue, the antiaccess problem, and he said to me, look, this isn't Desert Storm out here. He said, we don't have the Republican Guard up there. What we have is a lot of guys with missiles, with chemicals, with biological agents. So if there is a war here, I am not going to be seeing lots of tanks come down from the North. What I am going to see coming down from the North are lots of missiles. They are going to be hitting our ports. They are going to be hitting our airfields. He said, I don't have good answer for that.
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    And I think the imperative for us is to begin to find a good answer for that kind of contingency and less and less, as Michelle Flournoy has pointed out, the sort of refight of Desert Storm. And when you look at East Asia in a broader context, I think, for Admiral Blair, for example, it is that broader ranges of contingencies that he ought to be thinking about, what we ought to be thinking about when we think about what kind of forces do we need Commander in Chief, Pacific (CINCPAC) to have access to, because it is that scenario in Korea, it is what Michael O'Hanlon talks about in terms of a Chinese blockade of Taiwan.

    When China launched those two missiles in 1996, they launched them, and they impacted near two ports. Those two ports are the only ports in Taiwan that can handle large-scale imports of oil and liquid natural gas. If you cut those ports off, you cut Taiwan off. If we can't stop them from doing that, then China effectively has a new way of blockading Taiwan, and no matter how quickly and antiseptically and decisively we can win in Korea, that problem, and I think Michael has pointed out, may be a much more important problem for us to focus on in the coming months and years ahead.

    Looking further south in Admiral Blair's responsibility, you have Indonesia. If that country experiences large state failure, we may be stuck with a problem of how you secure those many straits through which passes so much of the world's commerce, so much of East Asia's energy traffic, the energy traffic that goes to countries like Taiwan, like South Korea, like Japan.

    And I think that is—that is my understanding certainly of what Michelle and Michael are talking about, and I would certainly agree with them, a more comprehensive look at the security challenges facing us, which will require, it would seem to me intuitively, a different kind of force sizing and force structure mix than that that is called for in the two-MTW posture.
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    So I would agree with you, Mr. Chairman, that, quite frankly, the problem isn't getting easier, it is getting more difficult.

    Dr. O'HANLON. I would simply say, Congressman Spence, I think the two major theater war construct was somewhat artificial, and we are measuring ourselves against a standard that one could say is either somewhat artificial or just too fixated on threats that I think are less likely to manifest themselves than others. It is another way of saying what Andy said.

    I worry a lot about Korea. I know everyone on this panel does as well, but I simply do not think North Korea has a plausible invasion capability for South Korea anymore. It doesn't mean we can trivialize the scenario, because we would be needed in large numbers to help overthrow the Korean regime, which I would strongly advocate if and when that were to occur.

    So I am not in any way trying to say that that scenario isn't demanding, but I think it is somewhat of a different scenario than the Pentagon officially has been articulating. The Pentagon's official scenario has been North Korea will invade, and it may very well take Seoul. It may very well take part of the peninsula. It may very well decimate a large part of the Republic of Korea (ROK) military in the process. I simply do not agree with that scenario. I think there is a remote possibility that it is applicable, but it is quite remote.

    On the China/Taiwan issue, it is much more plausible not just because China has the military means, but because, of course, we are in this very ambiguous situation where there are down sides to making an explicit U.S. commitment to Taiwan's defense because we are trying to essentially restrain both sides. So a deterrence is more likely to fail. We don't have any American forces on Taiwan. China could convince itself, perhaps, that they could attack and get away with it under certain circumstances.
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    So I think we have to assess where war is likely, as well as how the wars would likely unfold. And I think war is more likely between China and Taiwan at this point than between South Korea and North Korea.

    The CHAIRMAN. Let me say to the Members that your microphones may not be working. Some are; some aren't. They are working on them, but in the meantime, you will have to speak up if it is not on.

    The gentleman from Texas Mr. Reyes.

    Mr. REYES. Well, thank you very much, Mr. Chairman. I
appreciate the testimony here this morning.

    There are a couple of things that really bother me in the context of what we are listening to from the panel. On the one hand, we are talking about globalization, we are talking about we have the Administration, I think, expecting us to give the President fast track authority. When we deal with globalization, we are talking about sending Americans to the places we are talking about—China, perhaps the North Korea area, the Middle East, certainly throughout Europe.

    So when you are making recommendations of reducing the Army to 450,000, 300 naval ship presence, changing the configuration of tried and true methods, I am concerned that there is not—or perhaps we have lost the appreciation of a deterrence factor. You know, if we do not have the ability to send a U.S. presence to two or perhaps more areas, then what is to stop someone from saying okay, they are engaged in the Far East, now it is time for Saddam to get active in the Middle East?
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    All of these things, I think, are important because it is going to be—and I was just telling my colleague here—our young men and women in uniform's butt that is going to be out there hanging. So I hope we are taking into consideration those kinds of issues, in particular the globalization factor, because that only puts more and more Americans in jeopardy. And our ability to be seen as a superpower has to—part of that formula has to be deterrence, which means we have got to be able to say yeah, we are going to go over there and kick your butt if you get out of line. No matter where it is, no matter—perhaps two simultaneous incidents are occurring.

    So my several questions. If we abandon the two major theater war concept and we are talking about reducing the size of our military, how do we deal with the globalization of trade and economies worldwide? Are we talking about reductions or are we talking about restructuring? And although I have heard your testimony in the context of reducing and restructuring, perhaps I would like for you to address it in the context of globalization.

    And I would remind all of us that what we have today is part of a long-term strategy and process that takes into account not just the threat, but our inherent ability to be a deterrent factor worldwide. When we talk about unmanned vehicles and we talk about space assets and all those kinds of things, sitting on the Select Committee on Intelligence, there are limitations to that.

    And you still—and having had the opportunity to be in Bosnia four times over the last four years or so, you still need those troops on the ground. You need the boots on the ground in order to make sure that the American presence is felt and felt as only a superpower can be felt.
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    So I would like for the panelists to comment or perhaps answer some of those questions.

    Ms. FLOURNOY. Congressman Reyes, I think you raise some very important points. And I personally would put much greater emphasis on restructuring and transformation than I would reductions per se.

    Just to reiterate some of the key elements that I think a—my main argument for breaking away from the two-MTW is not to go to something less—I think that would be disastrous—but to not be imprisoned by the two canonical cases that the people equate with that standard. It is to say yes, we need to have a multitheater capability, but let's consider the much broader range of scenarios that we might have to confront.

    The other key element is that I really believe that we make a mistake if we size our forces only for what we would do in high-end warfare. In many parts of the force, the key driver, the thing that strains the force, is what we do in peacetime. It is the deterrence missions, the presence missions, it is the engagement missions. So we need to take a close look at making sure that we are taking those into account as we size and shape the force.

    So I would agree with much of what you said.

    Dr. KREPINEVICH. I would say, I guess, two things. One is for a number of reasons, I don't think it would be wise to abandon the policy of being able to wage two major theater wars. But in the near term, I think if you look at the case in Korea, what you see is in a sense we are overstaffed both there and in the Gulf. South Korea has twice the population and 30-some times the economic wealth of North Korea. I have served along the demilitarized zone in Korea. It is the most heavily fortified terrain in the world. It is mountainous. You can't flank it because there are oceans on both sides. If the South Koreans can't defend that terrain with our help, and certainly I think with the help of less than five divisions, we have got a big problem.
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    Again, in the Gulf, we are still sized and structured for the Republican Guard and the Iraq of 1990. That doesn't exist. And we have improved our forces over the last 10 years. The Navy gives a great briefing on how it has improved its ability to hit targets with a carrier battle group 700 percent since the Gulf War. So not only are they worse, we are better. And I think that provides not an opportunity so much to cut, but to free up the resources needed to begin to transform our force to deal with this broader array of contingencies.

    I think if you want to look for metrics, instead of two MTWs I would say offer two different metrics. One is can we maintain favorable military balances so as to ensure stability in key regions of vital interest to he United States, particularly along that arc of instability? And second, can we maintain an advantage in key existing and emerging military competitions, emerging competitions such as the control of space, the ability to prevail in information warfare?

    If you look at the issue of deterrence, over time, we are going to have to change the way we think about deterrence. Deterrence is not going to be getting to a fixed forward base or sitting on a fixed forward base, because those bases are going to be increasingly at risk. Instead of offering deterrence and reassurance, they are going to be increasingly sources of anxiety both for us and our friends in the region.

    So we have got to begin, to begin how we are going to win that antiaccess competition, that area denial competition. To the extent that we can do that—and Congress has been supportive of the efforts for the services to begin to conduct joint field exercises to get some answers, but we have been lacking in that area. To the extent that we can convince other countries that we have solved those problems, those threats, before they have emerged full-blown, we dissuade military competition. To the extent that we deploy forces that are capable of operating in that threat environment, we deter aggression.
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    So I think transformation is part and parcel of a long-term effort to ensure stability and to ensure deterrence, because the competition is changing. You know, the bad guys of the world have an enormous incentive to try and change the competition, and with the rapid diffusion of military-related technologies over time, they are increasingly going to have the tools to do it.

    Dr. O'HANLON. Congressman. You make good point. I think it is very important to make sure we have strong deterrence. I think we want to emphasize we still have a two-war capability. I agree with what Andy said. But if I were Mr. Rumsfeld, I would say we still have a two-war capability but it is not going to be our only fixation anymore. Broader scenario set, other missions, longer-term problems will be priorities, but it is still a two-war capability.

    But we think we can handle it with slightly fewer forces because, for example, the Korean balance has become so much more advantageous. One more additional point I would make. In regard to Korea in the last 10 years, South Korea now has nearly 1,000 K-1 tanks. These are tanks built largely with the same kind of optics and laser range-finding capability and same kind of precision-firing capability of our M-1 tank.

    South Korea has a good military. We underrate it when we say they would probably lose in the initial battles. As Andy pointed out, and this is a striking fact when you look at the numbers, South Korea has a denser forward defense today than NATO did in Germany during the Cold War. If you measure it by troops per square kilometer, any measure like that, South Korea's defense is stronger and denser than NATO's was in Germany during the Cold War.
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    Historically, if you look at the battles that result when less-well-armed armored forces try to challenge dense, prepared forward defenses, they tend to lose badly and they tend to move very slowly forward. I am not trying to say Korea is not a concern, because we obviously—I think Congressman Skelton has thought a lot about this and others on the committee as well—we want to have the option of overthrowing the North Korean regime if we wound up in a war, and there are going to be many tens of thousands of casualties because of all the nasty things that North Korea can do even if it does not take Seoul.

    So I am not trying to minimize the threat. I would agree with your point, we don't want to cut too much. I would like to keep 10 divisions, because I want to send a message of strength, even as I look for ways to save money. I want to keep 300 ships, and I want to keep presence in the Persian Gulf and East Asia, even if I think there are ways to maintain that presence more efficiently.

    So I talk about cuts, but I should add two caveats. I don't want to cut too far. I want to emphasize what we still need to keep. And I also want to second my colleagues in saying the reason you make the cuts is to improve your capabilities in other areas, and also to recognize that a real defense spending increase of more than 10 percent is just not in the cards. We are going to increase defense spending in this country, I am sure, listening to what members of this committee and others in a position to do so have said. But we are not going to be able to increase it by $50, $60, $70 billion a year that the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) and others have said would be necessary to keep things as they are and keep doing business as we have been doing business. So we need to find ways to cut in order to do things better and take on new initiatives.
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    The CHAIRMAN. The gentleman from California, Mr. Hunter.

    Mr. HUNTER. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Let me just say I disagree totally with your last statement that we need to continue to find ways to cut. I think that the idea that there is some currency in weakness, because historically our cuts and our downsizing and/or reconfiguration and redefining has been an excuse for underfunding, and you have to have some metric by which you measure your war materiel required, so you have the two MTW requirement. And we have analyzed from that base requirement the necessary number of Tomahawk cruise missiles, artillery rounds, everything right down to and including M–16 bullets.

    What we typically do when we move off these metrics is fail to fund what we would have to have, regardless of where the conflict was. And in reality, the two-theater war requirement isn't focused only on Iraq and North Korea. Certainly, the United States Navy is not sized to win a naval war with Iraq. The United States Navy is sized and shaped to do a ton of different missions, and in fact we do a ton of different missions. But if you only have a limited number of scenarios you can postulate, and certainly war with Great Britain probably is less likely than war with Iraq or war with North Korea, so we take that scenario.

    You know, we had 10 Army divisions in Korea in June of 1950, and we had a lot of the same rhetoric to some degree that I have heard here about the need to transform, to be lighter, leaner, meaner. And in the end, when we met up with the T-72 or T-62 tanks, Russian-made tanks at the Osan Pass, our bazookas bounced off of them. We are now much taken with the idea that you run these lighter vehicles. The Army transformation is really centered on moving to wheeled vehicles that can move a little bit faster, go through some narrow bridges, and be airlifted easier than this large armor that has outgrown its airlift capability.
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    But in the end, to have a deterrent you have to have the ability to take and hold ground. Sometimes that ground is heavy mountainous terrain that might be denied to some wheeled vehicles, and sometimes you have to have the ability to take lots of fire and survive.

    So I think the lesson—I remember a number of intelligence chiefs sitting before us, and I asked them, let me see which of the last massive changes in the geopolitical climate did you guys predict? Did you predict the fall of the Soviet Empire? No, none of them. Did you predict the Falklands? None of them. Did you predict the invasion of Kuwait? And one guy actually said, ''Before or after the armor started moving?'' No, before. None of them.

    So what I think we can predict is that the next conflict will probably be unpredictable. And that means we have got to have broad capability. And in the end, you have to pay for that. And the idea that we are going to tweak these Army divisions around when you only have 10 of them and you have already fought these two wars—incidentally, Mr. O'Hanlon, we used eight divisions in Iraq and we used seven in Korea. That is 15. We have got 10. So the idea that we now pare down from the requirement, this two-war requirement, doesn't make a lot of sense.

    Right now we have five divisions less than we had when we fought those two conflicts. When we fought Kosovo, for practical purposes that was a one-major-theater contingency for the Air Force. And we all watched on this committee as we had to forward-move a whole lot of our maintenance capability and our munitions capability, because we all know that our guided munitions, precision-guided munitions are at about 50 percent of loadout of what they need to be. And we are in short supply with regard to spare parts, maintenance, et cetera.

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    So I think to a large degree what we have done is what we did just before Korea, I have got some good quotes from some of the guys. Eisenhower said, in 1949: ''We are repeating our history of decades. We just don't believe we will ever get into a jam.'' He is talking about the reduced defense budgets.

    Ridgeway echoed his words: ''Our Armed Forces have been economized almost into ineffectiveness.''

    Why are we torturing ourselves when we only have got 10 Army divisions left? Why are we torturing ourselves on whether we can cut them more? We are down to two percent of the Gross National Product (GNP) being spent on defense. If we had that same attitude in 1980, we would not have brought down the Soviet Empire.

    The other lesson I think is an important one for America, and especially for people who send their kids into this increasingly dangerous environment, is you want to win overwhelmingly. You don't want to fill all your body bags. And I know Mr. Hefley is waiting for my question, so my question is: What do you think of that?

    The CHAIRMAN. Let me say to the members, we are going to have a series of votes around noon. If you would keep that in mind when answering and asking your questions, please.

    Dr. O'HANLON. Should I start? That was eloquent, and I am glad you said it, because even though it sounded like I didn't agree with it since I was focusing on economies, I don't want to push them too far. We obviously disagree at margin. I am not going to try to poo-poo the difference. But nonetheless we obviously have a much stronger South Korean military than before. We don't have tanks that are unable to take on North Korean armor anymore. So you can push that case too far.
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    But I still think you are right to say another war in Korea would be terribly difficult. There are all the other problems with chemical and biological weapons that we cannot necessarily handle as well as we could handle a Korean tank. And I don't want to cut too far.

    But my assessment of what that war would take is such that I believe we can afford a little bit less armor. If you look at the last 15 years, Army divisions have gotten heavier. I share your concern about going to these light forces and wheeled vehicles, and I am not at all convinced they are going to be effective. But in the last 15 years we are talking about the Army getting lighter; it is actually getting heavier. The actual data shows that it is getting heavier. Now, if M-1 tanks and Bradley vehicles are more accurate and bigger and heavier, maybe we could make the formations that include them a little bit smaller. I am not trying to push this case too far, for all the reasons that you mentioned.

    But I also think Mr. Rumsfeld has a big problem. He has got a budget that really has to go up by $50- or $60- or $70 billion and it is not going to happen in my opinion, if I look at the budget numbers.

    So I am glad that you are making eloquent pitches to remind other Members of Congress and the rest of the country about the need for defense spending to go up. But my own best guess is that it is not going to go up by any more than half of that number. So we are going to have to find ways. And that is the only reason I am arguing for more economies, not because I want them in any absolute sense.

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    Dr. KREPINEVICH. Even if you—again, I tend to agree that it is unlikely that sufficient additional resources are going to be provided to eliminate the program funding mismatch that exists that this administration inherited. There have never been sufficient resources available to any great power to eliminate all the risks to its security. And so it has been confronted with a need to develop strategies. And strategy involves applying limited resources in the best way possible to minimize risk.

    So strategy is about choice, it is about setting priorities. And I think you brought out an excellent point, Congressman, that in a world of great uncertainty, particularly now with the track record we have in the past of having been surprised, I think it is incumbent upon us to do what we can to avoid being surprised by this turbulent world, by these rapidly advancing technologies. One way to avoid that is not to put all your eggs in one basket.

    Now, take the example of the Army. We have got the world's best Army in terms of heavy land combat. We kill tanks better than anybody else. And the Air Force can kill tanks and the Navy. Everybody can kill tanks fabulously well. It is not clear to me that we not are putting too many eggs in that one basket. And I think the Army sees that to some extent.

    Certainly, you don't want to give other militaries the impression that somehow we are getting out of the heavy land warfare business, and so you maintain that capability. But I would say that in an effort to minimize overall risk, to hedge against the concern about surprise, you have to begin to look at what emerging challenges we might confront. And one of the challenges that an Army that is much more expeditionary now confronts is, how do I get there in a hurry if I need to? And I think over and beyond that, one of their concerns is going to have to be how do I get there in a hurry, when increasingly forward large ports and airfields are going to be at risk, when iron mountains are going to be at risk? So how do I get there? What kind of formations do I need to get there in a hurry? And then after I get there, how do I conduct effective combat operations?
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    It is not only how do I get over those 12 bridges in Albania, but how do I defeat the other guy. And if you look at the Army war games, one of the problems they confront is urban warfare. The bad guys don't stay out in the open. They don't want to go up against the American Air Force or Army, so they gravitate toward cities. How is the Army going to deal with that?

    Again, our historical experience, look at Hue, look at the efforts to liberate the Philippines in 1944; enormous casualties suffered because we were not particularly adept at that. Where is the sense of exploiting the potential that our Army has to see deep and shoot deep? That is something only we can do. Wouldn't it be better if we were to rapidly deploy three—call them deep strike brigades—to Korea early in the conflict that can begin to break up the adversary's forces before they begin to hit the South Korean forces and the forward-based forces that we have there?

    So I think it really is a case of rebalancing the force. Not losing certainly the dominant capability that we have, not getting out of the heavy land warfare business, but rebalancing the Army and the other services so that they can deal with emerging challenges and prepare to do that. Because, again, I think adversaries have an enormous incentive not to play to our strong suits, and increasingly they are going to have the ability to do it.

    Ms. FLOURNOY. Thank you. We do have a profound strategy resources mismatch in my view. And I think the iron triangle of this QDR is you have three main options: One is to increase defense spending, but we all know that there are limited—I would really hope that there is a substantial increase, but post tax cut and given other competing priorities, there are real limits to how much that is likely to be increased.
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    A second option is look for trade space, and I share your discomfort with the idea that force structure should be the sole primary bill payer in the defense budget. I think we need to look broadly at the trade space. And by trade space, I mean the things you could do to reduce costs without increasing risks to unacceptable levels. And you have to look not only at force structure, but look at the procurement program. So much of it is emphasizing modernization of large platforms, whereas there are other priorities, like investment in information technologies and networks and munitions and sensors and upgrades and a whole range of things, that maybe give you more capability for your dollar than some of the platform upgrades that we are contemplating.

    You need to look longer term, not so much in the five-year defense program (FYDP), but longer term at how the Department of Defense (DOD) does business. We are in need of fundamental reform as a Department in terms of how we do acquisition, in terms of outsourcing, commercialization, base realignment and closure, all of those issues. That will not give you money in the immediate five-year defense program, but longer term that is a very important part of the equation.

    So I would share the view that before we rush to significant force structure cuts, we need to look at other forms of trade-offs.

    Finally, if you cannot find enough trade-offs and you can't increase defense spending adequately, you are forced into looking at changes to the strategy that would fundamentally reduce the requirements on the U.S. military.

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    Now, some greater selectivity of engagement may be warranted, but if we go too far down that road we risk undermining our own standing as a Nation and our own foreign policy.

    The CHAIRMAN. The gentleman from Arkansas, Dr. Snyder, is recognized.

    Mr. SNYDER. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I haven't heard any of the three of you today implying that you are advocating a shift or a maturing of this two-MTW policy as a way of somehow cutting our defense budget. If you all had your druthers, two or three years from now would you like to see a substantial increase in the defense budget? About the same? Or a decrease in the Defense budget?

    Ms. FLOURNOY. I would like to see a fairly sizable increase, but probably not on the order of the four percent Gross Domestic Product (GDP) that some people have thrown around, but certainly in the neighborhood of $20 to $30 billion a year.

    Dr. KREPINEVICH. I think certainly a significant increase is warranted. My concern is much more how wisely we are investing those monies. I would hate, for example, to reinforce what I think Michelle has called the ''canonical scenario,'' to continue to build capability to fight two Desert Storms that we almost certainly are not going to get the opportunity to fight again. So I hate to spend a large sum of additional money to reduce risk by a very small amount.

    So I think the real imperative is to think through strategically what are the existing emerging challenges to our security, where are the opportunities to leverage our asymmetric strengths, and then come up with a dollar figure to match that and an acceptable level of risk. My feeling is that once you do that, it will call for a significant increase in funding.
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    Mr. SNYDER. Dr. O'Hanlon, I thought you were pretty clear that you thought there should be a substantial increase. I have heard—I guess let me start another way. We like simple things around here and it is easy for us to lock onto this two-MTW. I guess in line with what you are saying, when I think of major theater war, I immediately think about Japan and the European theater from World War II. And we have matured that to say what happened in Korea versus the Iraq war.

    But if I am hearing what you are saying is you are challenging us and our country today because you don't want this—you don't want us to be hung on this two-MTW concept to the detriment of our overall national security.

    Let me put words in your mouth, and then you can respond to it. As I am hearing you, you are not wanting us to repeat where the two-MTW concept becomes like the Maginot Line where we put all of our money, all our resources, thinking that if we put everything into that concept, that we will have an impenetrable defense and it turns out to be the defense.Or, I guess, at the battle of Agincourt, if we put all of our money into horses and lances and swords, no matter how many crossbows the English have, we will never have to worry about a changing technology.

    As I hear what you are saying, it is more complicated and more difficult and perhaps even more expensive; that we better be prepared for a whole lot of potentialities out there, and it may mean having different kinds of tools and different kinds of armaments and different kinds of personnel and different kinds of training.

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    Using Chairman Hunter's talk about, well, he likes that two-MTW concept because you can orient. We need this many Tomahawks and this much of this and this. The problem is for the other scenarios that Ms. Flournoy talked about, perhaps you will need additional tools, except you would have spent all of your money on the Tomahawks for a much lower likelihood scenario.

    Now, that is what I am going to walk out of here with my take-home today. If I am off base, you better speak now or forever hold your peace.

    Dr. KREPINEVICH. I appreciate your use of historical analogies which I am fond of. About a century ago, Great Britain, who was the global power, faced the same kind of problem that you confront today. Back then they had a very easy metric for determining whether the Royal Navy could provide security, and it was the two-power standard. And the measure was do we have a sufficient number of battleships that are equal to the number of battleships possessed by the number two and number three naval powers in the world, which for a long time had been France and Russia.

    Well, around that time, they confronted the fact that there were other powers coming into play, other naval powers. It was getting more complicated than that. The Germans were building a fleet. The Americans were building a fleet. The Japanese were building a fleet. So the scale of the problem changed. The location of some of the challenges changed, and at the same time new technologies were making new forms of naval power possible: submarines; long-range torpedoes; turbine engines that gave ships incredible range; wireless, that means you didn't have to have ships everywhere around the world, you could use radio as a means of strategic warning.
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    The Royal Navy faced a real problem in communicating to Parliament the fact that you couldn't just measure the maritime balance and British security in terms of the number of battleships anymore and you couldn't measure forward presence by fleets, but you could measure them more effectively by consolidating the ships into a smaller number of fleets, using turbine engines and wireless to give you rapid deployment.

    So in a sense, we are replaying a century-old tale of the need that one global power confronted as the world was becoming more complex, to look at a broader range of potential competitors to take into account the impact of new technologies and the fact that emerging competitors were not going to confront the Royal Navy in sort of the preferred way of combat. Which is where you got the French ''guerre du course'', the commerce-raiding tactics; and in World War I, the Germans with the submarine blockade, which was quite a surprise to all the navies in the world, and gets back to Mr. Hunter's comment about the need to hedge against surprise.

    In a sense, ''been there, done that.'' They had a tough problem and we have a tough problem. It doesn't lend itself to simple slogans as a measure of what we really require for our security.

    Ms. FLOURNOY. I think this is a very difficult problem because you have all heard us say that we essentially agree that we need a two-war capability. We need a multitheater capability. But if we use the term ''two MTW,'' people, unfortunately after eight years of this, think Iraq and Korea as currently envisioned. My problem with that is not so much the particular threats of Iraq and Korea; it is that the Iraq and Korea scenarios that we used don't recognize that our adversaries learned something from the Gulf War. Our potential adversaries learned that you better not be stupid enough to take on the U.S. military head-on, with an armored division tank-on-tank. If you want to go after the U.S. military you better adopt asymmetric approaches that undermine their strengths and go after their weaknesses.
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    If Iraq and Korea, if those scenarios reflected antiaxis challenges, use of WMD, use of efforts to bring down our information systems, use of other means to block our access, I wouldn't be complaining. That is the problem. This is a question about where are we going to accept risk. And if we stick with the two-MTW standard as currently defined, we are consciously or unconsciously choosing to accept substantial risks in areas that I think is unwise.

    Dr. O'HANLON. Could I just quickly add as well, very clearly my proposal would be instead of the two-MTW, which is essentially saying we will probably lose the initial battles against Iraq and North Korea, and we will probably have to deploy a half million or more American soldiers to take back and liberate territory and possibly march on the enemy capital and overthrow the regime—that is the current plan, and with very little allied help. We assume basically no British help in the—I think the Brits would supply a division in 95 percent of all scenarios that I could imagine. We assume the South Koreans will be badly hurt by North Korea, even though I think South Korea has a much better military at this point than North Korea, and a very powerful forward defense.

    So that is the current set of assumptions. What I would do instead is say you have got to have one all-out MTW in case things do go as badly as we assume in one of these places, and you have to have a second, very substantial second combat capability, either to break a Chinese blockade of Taiwan or make sure that South Korea can hold a firm line and begin limited counteroffenses against North Korea. I am making the assumption that the Iraq war began first, because you don't just want to do a hold. The win-hold-win concept that we heard about in 1993 I think was not sufficient. You have to in the second war have substantial offensive capability. It may not have to give you every single option for regime overthrow, and it may not have to pack every worst-case assumption into the scenario, but it has to be a substantial not only defensive but offensive capability as well.
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    So that is the way I would do it. It is not a one-and-a-half war. It is not a win-hold-win. It is more than that. It really is a two-war capability, but making slightly different assumptions about the most plausible scenarios and how they would play out. It is probably 95 percent of the force structure that we have today, and that is as far as I would feel comfortable cutting at that point.

    The CHAIRMAN. The gentleman from New Jersey, Mr. Saxton.

    Mr. SAXTON. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Dr. Krepinevich was using history to make the point that we need to be ready for change, and I think we could all agree with that. Dr. Donald Kagan from Yale University was going to be here this morning to defend the notion that we need to maintain a force in anticipation of the two-MTW scenario.

    Let me just quote from some of his testimony, because I find it very interesting. He says: It's important to remember that very challenging wars can be started by states that are not the equal of those they attack or provoke into war. Neither Germany nor Japan was the peer competitor of Great Britain, which was a world power at the time. North Korea was no peer of the United States when it brought us into a long and bloody conflict. Iraq was far from such status when it engaged the U.S. over Kuwait. The absence of an identifiable peer competitor, then, is no reason to imagine there is a strategic pause or justification for reducing a deterrent capacity.

    In 1919, Germany was defeated, isolated, disarmed and strategically contained, but was able to launch a major war in 1941. As late as 1920, the notion that Japan might be a threat to peace seemed absurd. Winston Churchill was quoted as saying: Why should there be a war with Japan? It's ridiculous.
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    Dr. Kagan concludes: I believe that if America's Armed Forces are to deter war and preserve the peace, they must be ready to meet the challenge of at least two major regional aggressors all at the same time with virtually no notice. Failure to prepare in this way would be disastrous, he says.

    Then he goes on to quote a very good friend of ours, Secretary Cheney, when he was in this room identifying what he thought was his strategy: Strategy is no good at all if all it is designed to do is to allow us to respond militarily to the next crisis. It serves an even more important purpose, and that is to allow us to shape the future, to determine the outcome of history, to have an impact on whether or not threats even arise or whether or not we ultimately have to use those forces that we built and deployed over the years.The two-MTW requirement was, and is, central to achieving these goals.

    So, what I am hearing you say is much the same—all three of you, you are saying much the same things. And I am wondering if we are caught up here in some kind of a semantic problem. Some talk about a smaller force. Dr. O'Hanlon talked about a slightly smaller force. He is talking about 95 percent of what we have got, and neither of you other folks are talking about that much of a smaller force. Dr. Kagan is not talking about a smaller force. You are not talking about less people. You are not talking about fewer divisions. You are not talking about reducing fighter wings or any of that.

    You are talking about reconfiguring what we have got to meet the modern threat; is that not correct?

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    Dr. KREPINEVICH. I would say in my case, not quite. I am not talking about reconfiguring what we have. I am talking about making significant changes, as I would see it, in what we have.

    Mr. SAXTON. Are you talking about reducing the force?

    Dr. KREPINEVICH. No, I'm talking more about transforming the force. For example, you cited Professor Kagan about the fact that smaller powers can sometimes take on larger powers and still present fairly formidable threats. Over the next 10 years, I see if there is a conflict in the Persian Gulf, it is much less likely that it would be something analogous to what we saw in Desert Storm. I would say there would be a significantly greater possibility that a country like Iran—and if you look at the Iranian investment patterns they are not trying to create a Republican Guard. They are investing in antiaccess capabilities and weapons of mass destruction. So picturing Iran 10 years from now that has built a large distributed missile force, not an Air Force, and this missile force can hold at risk vital areas of the oil fields along the Persian Gulf. They have invested in submarines. They have invested in advanced antiship mines, short-based antiship cruise missiles, and at some point they deploy those forces—.

    Mr. SAXTON. Excuse me, but none of those are reasons to have a smaller force; right?

    Dr. KREPINEVICH. I am talking about a different force. If they use that force to close the Strait of Hormuz, if they possess several weapons of mass destruction that preclude our striking directly at their homeland for a range of political reasons, both internal to ourselves and our allies in the region, my question is how do we deal with that kind of contingency, which I view as more plausible and much more threatening than a replay of Desert Storm?
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    So what I am interested in is finding out from the military, from our military leaders, how would you deal with that kind of contingency? What kind of—how would you fight that? What kind of forces would you require? And it seems to me astounding that you would come up with five heavy Army divisions, 10 tactical fighter wings, and five carrier battle groups. It would seem to me that, number one, the force would be different; and number two, the potential that we have to exploit advances in technology, as was mentioned by Michelle Flournoy, advances in Command, Control, Communications, and Computers, Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance (C–4 ISR), space, information warfare, precision attack, stealth, and so on, that they would come much more into play in that kind of contingency.

    Mr. SAXTON. I just wanted to establish here that none of you, with the exception of Dr. O'Hanlon, are advocating for a smaller force, and Dr. O'Hanlon is advocating for essentially the same force with—I forget exactly—trimming around the edges or something.

    Dr. KREPINEVICH. Right. Just to make one final point. If, for example, the Navy's street fighter network centric warfare concepts actually work, you might have a significant 10 percent, 15 percent, 20 percent of the Navy efforts being devoted to that kind of capability, which would mean relatively less on the more traditional kinds of Navy capabilities.

    So it wouldn't be a smaller Navy in terms of the human resources, in terms of the budget. You might actually have a greater number of ships in the fleet because you would be moving to a smaller, more distributed combatant force for at least part of the fleet. So, again, what I am talking about is not an overall reduction in resources. What I am talking about is a shift in emphasis in transforming the force.
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    Mr. SAXTON. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

    The CHAIRMAN. The gentleman from New Jersey, Mr. Andrews, is recognized.

    Mr. ANDREWS. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. For me the language that resonates most is when Ms. Flournoy talks about, on page four of her statement, a new standard that would facilitate a shift in the focus of U.S. force planning from perfecting the force for two particular cases to ensuring that the force and its capabilities are robust across the broad range of emerging and future threats.

    What I hear us talking about this morning is really the necessity of a three-world strategy. We have spent a lot of time in the last 20 years, understandably, thinking about the physical world and how many sets of capabilities we need to deal with the real threats of that physical world, be it on the Korean Peninsula or the Persian Gulf or where have you. I am struck by the fact that simultaneously with continuing to think about the physical world and plan for it and live in it, we have got to think about the world of space, and the world of cyberspace, which Dr. Krepinevich mentioned and Dr. O'Hanlon mentioned in their own way.

    I think that it is very important that we not confuse, and none of you has done this, but I think we should not confuse the idea of a sufficient and overwhelming force in the physical world with the necessity of rethinking what that force would look like in the other two.

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    Dr. O'Hanlon mentioned that we have strategic partnerships with 60 nations, and I am intrigued by the idea of building on some or all of those strategic partnerships to build the force that I think we are going to need in the cyberworld and the force that we are going to need in space. If you were to give recommendations to the Secretary of Defense this morning on what the most promising multilateral arrangements are that exist today that might be exploited in these two new worlds of warfare, where might we look? And specifically, if we are looking at a missile defense capability that was space-based at some point in the future, and if we are looking at an information warfare capability that was multilateral, where are the most promising alliances to look to build such capabilities? Any of you?

    Ms. FLOURNOY. I think I would look toward our NATO allies, and second to Japan and Korea, in terms of technology investment and potential for joint development.

    I think that in the future if we are going to be successful in dealing with some of these threats, we have got to bring down some of the barriers to allowing our allies to really be full partners in joint research and development and even procurement in some of these systems. In many cases we don't have the cutting-edge technology, but there are capabilities that they have that are cutting edge as well, or we could certainly benefit from the advantages that they have.

    I would state that as a general principle but I would defer to my colleagues to be more specific.

    Dr. KREPINEVICH. I think that is a very interesting question if you are talking about transforming the American military and you are talking about new missions coming into play. Space control, information warfare, precision attack, those are missions that for most of the Cold War didn't exist, so it never got involved in the division of labor between us and our allies.
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    I think if you compound that and say look, to the extent that we are going to be more concerned about homeland defense and we are going to be concerned about a greater range of contingencies, certainly greater reliance on allies would seem to be in order.

    I think with respect to space, it is hard to envision allies making a major contribution in the near term. Over time, that might change. In terms of information warfare, I would tend to agree with Michelle. Certainly, some of our more technologically advanced allies in Europe, in Asia—certainly India has a major influence in the information technology field, software writing and so on. This is an area, though, of enormous uncertainty. And it seems to me that in some cases the barriers to entry are extraordinarily low.

    Mr. ANDREWS. And getting lower and cheaper as the days go by.

    Dr. KREPINEVICH. Absolutely. And it is not clear whether this warfighting regime is going to be dominated by the offense or the defense. And it is likely, if it is an unstable regime, to be highly time-sensitive, so the ability to put resources to work on a particular threat very quickly and perhaps even approach it from a different cultural orientation might be quite important.

    With respect to theater missile defenses, I tend to think that in Japan might be—perhaps the South Koreans—I tend to think first of Japan as perhaps a most likely partner. If you are talking about, especially in the near term, the threat from North Korea, part of dealing with that threat will be space reconnaissance, part of it will be precision attack to suppress those missile firings like we did in the Gulf War. And given the limitations self-imposed by the Japanese Constitution on what they can do in the near term, missile defense is probably a much more comfortable fit for them politically and more doable in a lot of respects technologically.
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    Dr. O'HANLON. A very tough and important question. Just three points. One, I think Mr. Rumsfeld is right that we have to think a lot about satellite vulnerability. And you have to think about hardening and redundancy. I am less anxious to get into anti-satellite weapon competition. I am not sure that serves our interests in the near term. I think we have to definitely focus on redundancy and hardening and do that with our allies.

    Second, I am not sure that you need missile defense in space in the future. But I do think that you need to think about a global protection scheme or at least an allied protection scheme, and I very much commend the Bush Administration for using that sort of language. I think the promising technologies are primarily land-based or sea-based or boost-based technology that would have to be located near the threat country. I think that is the way that is doable in the next 10 to 15 years and causes us the fewest consequences with the relationship with Russia or China. That is what I support at this point. Over the longer term, space may become more relevant as well.

    Finally, speaking of China, even though I am not anxious to get into an offense-defense relationship with China in the nuclear realm, I do think that we are in a bit of a military competition with China vis-a-vis Taiwan. I think that is an inevitable fact of life. I spend 50 pages assessing China-Taiwan scenarios in my latest book, and I think we have to think about space and electronics vulnerabilities being among our most serious concerns.

    My overall conclusions are that we have the traditional force structure that is needed to handle the most plausible Chinese threats to Taiwan already. But we may have vulnerabilities that China may be able to exploit in the realms of electronics and satellites. So again that brings me back to my first point: We need to think a lot more about redundancy and hardening of satellites in the future.
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    Mr. ANDREWS. Mr. Chairman, I will conclude by saying what I have heard tells me that addressing these threats needs to be in addition to, not in lieu of, the superiority that we want to establish in the physical world. Thank you.

    The CHAIRMAN. The gentlewoman from Virginia, Ms. Davis.

    Mrs. JO ANN DAVIS OF VIRGINIA. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. And thank you gentlemen and lady, and I apologize I had to go to a committee markup, so I hope I am not asking something that is redundant, that has already—but I believe you mentioned that we should consider shifting the emphasis on our naval forces. And I wonder if you could tell me how often President Clinton had to pull our carriers off of their current mission to move to another contingency mission.

    And also we have been hearing that the Navy needs 15 carriers right now just to meet their current real world missions today. And I wonder how reshaping our naval force would influence the naval air strike packages and if you could expand on that, I would appreciate it. Any of you or all of you.

    Ms. FLOURNOY. I would not support any significant reductions in the U.S. Navy. I guess what I have been arguing for is to—I think the administration has to carefully look at overseas presence requirements. And I think there are some areas where they might want to increase emphasis, particularly in Asia, and somewhere they may want to decrease emphasis, like in the Mediterranean. But I think one of the real challenges to think about is, is the carrier battle group the right answer to every presence problem or forward deployment problem? Are there other ways to deploy the U.S. Navy that would suggest some other ways to shape parts of the force?
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    For example, I would suggest to you if the Navy does become a lead player in providing theater missile defense to allies and their land, their territory, they are going to have to fundamentally rethink the concepts for cruisers. Those cruisers are going to get tied down on the coasts of allies. They are not going to be moving around with carrier battle groups. There is going to be a fundamentally new operational concept that may have impact on the Navy's requirements for numbers of Aegis cruisers.

    Similarly if you think about some of the littoral missions in dealing with antiship threats like mines, missiles, et cetera, parts of the Navy probably need to be better shaped for those missions.

    So I wouldn't again advocate any significant change in the size of the Navy, but I would certainly look at—relook at the mix of capabilities in light of emerging and future threats.

    Mrs. JO ANN DAVIS OF VIRGINIA. I would like you two to answer, but would you be in favor of small-deck carriers instead of large-deck carriers?

    Ms. FLOURNOY. I have not made up my mind on that issue. I have not looked at the small-deck carriers in enough detail to be convinced that is an alternative at this point.

    Dr. KREPINEVICH. I think certainly if you look at this so-called arc of instability relative to where we were during the Cold War, you see it is much more of a maritime theater than was the Central Europe that we worried about so much during the Cold War. And I think certainly a case can be made that a relative shift toward greater emphasis of maritime forces would be a logical extension of a strategy that focused more on this arc of instability.
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    I think also, though, that it means that you might be able to take a reduction in the current forward presence requirement that we have in the Mediterranean, given that the next largest navies in the Mediterranean belong to those of our allies. The Soviets are no longer in existence.

    Third, I think an argument for maritime forces in favor of increased reliance, at least in the near term and perhaps over the midterm as well, is this antiaccess threat, the threat to large concentrations of forward land-based air in theater. These aircraft can operate out of a relatively few bases so they are going to be increasingly vulnerable, and unless we come up with a way of dealing with that, I think it is going to be perhaps too costly to operate in that way, at least early in the conflict in the future.

    So the fact that carriers present a mobile air strike platform I think works to their advantage.

    I think, though, as part of this transformation issue, that as carriers move closer and closer to the coast, as I mentioned earlier they come within range of more and more of an adversary's systems, their warning time goes down, and the enemy's search problem goes down. You are not searching a big ocean; you are searching the littoral. So like in the days of old where we had destroyers that sort of led the way and screened the area for the battleships, that it is incumbent upon the Navy to see if this so-called street fighter network centric concept works as a means of having some of these small combatants move into the littoral and screen the advance of the carriers in ways that minimizes their vulnerability and maximizes their effectiveness.
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    I also think that when you talk about strike from the sea, 50 years ago if you wanted to hit a target at a distance with a maritime force, you were talking about carriers and carrier air. The Navy now has an increasingly large number of broader range of ways to accomplish that: surface combatants, submarines, these smaller combatants, the possible conversion of the tridents to SSGNs, cruise missile carriers.

    And so I think when we look at strike requirements, it might be that the Navy can come up with some more innovative force packages, both in terms of the strike mission and in terms of the forward presence mission, that may take a lot of the strain off of its operations, maintenance and personnel budgets to enable to transform and modernize better and keep pace with the need for transformation.

    Dr. O'HANLON. I would simply add, Congresswoman, that I would see certainly places where carriers are absolutely indispensable, especially where you don't have land bases or can't count on large numbers of land bases. And I think the Persian Gulf and east Asia, and certainly my analysis of the Taiwan Strait problem, that carriers would probably be the most important form of air power that we would bring to a major conflict there against China.

    On the other hand, the Mediterranean, just to second this point, I think there is room for rethinking. And I would use as an anecdote the Kosovo experience where we were trying essentially to keep carriers in the Mediterranean, Persian Gulf, and Western Pacific all at the same time, but given the smaller fleet we were not comfortably able to do so. You have two options: You either build up the fleet, which we may not have the money to do, or you think of new ways of doing business.
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    The real problem in the Kosovo case was all through the Rambouillet negotiations in the entire winter before the war began, we had a carrier in the Adriatic. And then about March 15th, we brought it home because our sailors had served their six months on deployment and we didn't want to overtax them. That was precisely the moment we were trying to increase our coercive leverage against Milosevic.

    Dr. O'HANLON. So ironically, by trying too hard to be in the Mediterranean and the Adriatic all the time, we weakened the impact of our presence at just the moment we needed it most, and we pulled that carrier out. And then we weren't able to get a carrier into the Mediterranean again until 10 days into the war, but that was 10 days too late to actually deter the conflict.

    I am not saying one carrier would have made the difference in stopping that war, but it was actually a pretty—a pretty sobering story that we may need to rethink, at least in the Mediterranean, some of the ways we traditionally maintain presence and use carriers for coercive leverage.

    But I think in the Persian Gulf and the western Pacific, we really have no choice, and this really puts a floor underneath any possible cuts in the carrier force. I would stay with 10 or 11 carriers, and definitely not cut below those numbers.

    Mrs. JO ANN DAVIS OF VIRGINIA. Ten or 11, even though we need 15 right now?

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    Dr. O'HANLON. Well, the 15 is based on the Mediterranean deployment, which I don't agree with. So I hear your point, and I am not saying 10 or 11 is fully comfortable. But in an environment of constrained resources, I would be prepared to recommend a minimal presence in the Mediterranean and either 10 or 11 carriers.

    Mrs. JO ANN DAVIS OF VIRGINIA. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

    The CHAIRMAN. Thank you, Mrs. Davis.

    For members curious about the lights, ignore the five lights. We are, in fact, in recess right now, and there is not a vote on.

    Chairman Hefley.

    Mr. HEFLEY. Thank you very much. I—you know, it has been very interesting this morning, and I don't know if we are talking about transformation of the forces or we are talking about tweaking the forces. We don't want to cut it very much, maybe five percent in the Army, and we want to make everybody, everybody faster and smaller and more mobile, lighter. So it raises a question in my mind I would like for you to speak to, and I am treading on sacred ground here. But if we make the Army a faster, lighter, quicker expeditionary—more pedestrian/pedestrian force, why do we need the Marine Corps? Isn't that what the Marine Corps has always been? So if we are talking about transformation, none of you have suggested let's transform the Marine Corps into the Army.

    And second, why do we need a Marine Corps/Air Force to facilitate ground troops when we have an Air Force/Air Force to facilitate ground combat? And why do we need a Marine Corps/Air Force and a Navy/Air Force both if the only—I mean, why do we need a Navy and an Air Force/Air Force? Is it just simply because the Navy learns to land on carriers, and couldn't the Air Force learn to do that, too? So if we are talking about transformation, I am not suggesting all these things, but have you given any thought to this kind of process?
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    And then second, one other quick question is, Guard and Reserve, we have all bought into the total force concept, making the Guard and Reserve an integral part of the active duty forces. And I thought that made a lot of sense for a long time, but that is really becoming a strain on many of our employers across the country, and maybe your concept that you mentioned, that the Guard/Reserve maybe should be the defense of the American homeland, maybe that is—makes more sense than deploying these people all over the world at the rate we have been deploying them. So if you would speak to those two questions, I would appreciate it.

    Ms. FLOURNOY. My impression is that underlying your question, there is some belief that maybe we should have more of a roles-and-mission discussion as part of our strategy review, and I would agree with that.

    I think one of the things that should happen under the guise of transformation is the Secretary of Defense needs to articulate and with the Congress, here are the challenges we are worried about, here are the scenarios I want you to plan for, and here are the capabilities I want the program to produce in a given time frame. And then to essentially host an open competition of good ideas, of, here's the mission, here are the operating constraints, here is the desired capability. Who has—you know, come one, come all. Let us see who has the best idea for meeting this challenge, and maybe it is true that not every service should be in this business of every mission. I mean, it is an overstatement to say that they are, but there is certainly a lot of overlap. Some of that overlap we may well want. Some of that redundancy is absolutely essential insurance, but some of it may just be inefficient. And so I would welcome that kind of open discussion of roles and missions.

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    With regard to your specific question about the Marine Corps, the Marine Corps is today's pedestrian/pedestrian force, ground force. It had a 200-year history of being pedestrian/pedestrian. Army transformation is still a plan. So before I would be comfortable saying we don't have a Marine Corps, I would like to see Army transformation become a reality, because the Marine Corps today is the pedestrian/pedestrian force. It has been that way for its history, and it has proven itself in that domain for a very long time.

    It also has a very unique characteristic of being forward deployed and being there on the scene. It is not just a matter of crisis reaction time. It is a matter of familiarity. It is a matter of engagement with allies and friends. It is a matter of day-to-day deterrence. So I wouldn't rush to question the fundamental rationale of the Marine Corps, at least at this point in time.

    With regard to guard and reserve, you know, I have already stated my case. I do believe that they are more appropriately focused on homeland defense missions and to support the force for a long duration operations. But trying to ensure that the Guard or the Reserve can respond very rapidly or with any regularity in peacetime does, in fact, put great strains on the force.

    Dr. KREPINEVICH. I guess a couple of observations. One, Congressman, transformation doesn't happen fast. It is going to take, I think, quite some time. I think the critical thing for the Rumsfeld review is to put into place a process that enables transformation, and Lord knows, as I mentioned, Congress has been pushing on this issue for about four years now, trying to help the Defense Department put that kind of a process in place through things like joint forces command, joint field exercises, and so on.
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    In terms of the military services, I do think a revisitation of roles and missions, especially if you think you are on the path of transformation, it is important, because what you are talking about is new roles, new missions coming into being, information warfare, space control, precision attack, defeating antiaccess forces and so on. And it also gives an opportunity for us to perhaps divest of some of the capabilities that we have built up over time in mature war-fighting areas that are not only less important in terms of how we view the future, but where we have excess capacity.

    With respect to the military services, I would say there is a difference between the Army and the Marine Corps. The Marine Corps views itself as the kick-down-the-door force, as I recall talking to some of my Marine friends, because the Army is less forward deployed and more pedestrian/pedestrian, it is going to probably play a role in kicking down the door, the way the Army did in the amphibious assaults, for example, during World War II. The difference is, the Army will be the sustained fighting force, the force that will go deep inland, that will sustain a long-term military campaign.

    The Marines don't plan on getting involved in urban operations in a large way, other than peacekeeping. The Army has the potential, as I have mentioned before, to see deep and shoot deep with ground combat forces that the Marines really aren't talking about developing. I do agree with your point about the number of tactical Air Forces. Not only do we have three, but as I mentioned before, 50 years ago, if you wanted to strike a target at a distance, you needed an airplane.

    Now we have airplanes. We have helicopters. We have rocket artillery. We have long-range bombers. We have surface combatants that can fire cruise missiles 1,000 miles away. Lots of ways to do that now. And as Michelle Flournoy mentioned, because of this emphasis on platforms, we are probably underinvesting in things like C4–ISR, especially C4–ISR that we can develop quickly over extended ranges and also precision munitions, which became a bit of a concern during the Balkans War.
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    With respect to the Navy, I think over the long term, what you might see, depending upon how transformation plays out—and the Navy is beginning to move in this direction—is a fleet that is less centered on the carrier as the sole provider of projected combat power and more on a, if I could use the term, distributed capitalship, where you have submarine, surface combatants, a range of combatants that are capable of providing combat power over a distance, something that was impossible 30 or 40 years ago.

    With respect to the Air Force, I think the big transformation there is more emphasis on space, cyberspace and extended range stealth operations. And I agree with you with respect to the Guard. I think the natural traditional mission of the Guard has been homeland defense. I think that is a growth mission for the American military over the next 10 to 20 years, both in terms of missile defense, consequence management and the like. And the Guard might form that hedge they think Congressman Hunter was talking about in terms of where do you have that residual heavy force, that if a war goes longer, if you need to mobilize and get large ground combat forces into a theater, that might be a more logical repository for that capability than the strain we have seen placed on the Guard because of the large number of peacekeeping deployments.

    Dr. O'HANLON. Congressman, I will just take the easy route and make a couple more arguments in favor of the Marine Corps, even though I know you weren't really going after them too much in particular. But one, of course—and I will leave aside the question they have much better ad campaigns, in my opinion. To some extent that reinforces—that is a silly point, but the Marines have a culture and image which is quite appealing, and as a civilian, I am remiss about challenging the service cultures and what they do best. And I think the Marines really create an image of patriotic service that I would be hesitant to mess with. If I had to choose, I would almost rather make the Marines three times as big and get rid of the Army. But that is also a facetious point.
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    But second, though, the Marines have been quite innovative in various military operations over the years. One of my favorite books, which I always assign to my students, is Andy Krepinevich's History of Vietnam, which talks about—I won't put too many words in his mouth, but talks about some of the things the Marines did, which, to some extent, were more innovative than the Army, because perhaps they had less of a reliance on fire power alone. They sometimes think more creatively because they don't have as much weaponry. They don't have as big of a budget.

    And that gets me to another point. The Marines are essentially one-thirtieth of the defense budget, even though they can obviously tag on to certain other capabilities of the other services. But they give us a lot more than one-thirtieth of our military power. They probably give us one-seventh of our manpower or one-eighth, but probably at least that much of our combat capability.

    And I like the way the Marines think about military transformation. The Marines don't just say whatever expensive weapon I want already, I am going to call a transformational technology. And sometimes the other services, in my judgment, play this game. They will say, whatever we wanted to build anyway, we are going to give you six reasons why this is a revolution in military affairs technology, why this is a transformational technology. The Marines know they have only got billions of dollars a year in procurement and only a few hundred million in R&D, but they still are very interested in the military transformation debate and, in my opinion, have made some of the most useful contributions to it.

    So where I would fully agree with you, however—and also with Andy Krepinevich—is the issue of fixed-wing aircraft, where I do not think the Marines necessarily need to stay in that game. And I also think the Marines can rethink their presence on Okinawa, which, in my judgment, is not militarily essential. There are ways to prestation supplies in the western Pacific that allow us to respond just as rapidly.
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    I would keep a smaller number of Marines on Okinawa and use the Marines in a more expeditionary way in some other parts of the world, for example, perhaps to give the Army a break in Kosovo. So I think there are some things worth doing differently within the Marine Corps, but basically, I like the spirit, the entrepreneurial and sort of low budget and broad—broadly-based spirit of the Marines, and I think the other services need to emulate them more than the other way around.

    The CHAIRMAN. The gentleman from Mississippi, Mr. Taylor.

    Mr. TAYLOR. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I want to thank all the witnesses for sticking around so long. Mr. O'Hanlon, I liked very much what you said about the Marines, with one exception. You completely ignored the V-22, which is the total antithesis of everything you said as far as procurement. There is no fallback. We spent all this money. There is no Plan B, and it is basically just saying, well, we are going to do it because we have done it. So I had to make that point.

    There is something that I am seeing this year that I think is the most troubling of the 12 years that I have been here, and it is almost as if the peace dividend that was demanded in the fall of 1989, somehow the Nation says, well, we want it right now. I have heard one joke, how do you turn a hawk into a dove? Offer him a tax break. Well, I think it has happened with y'all. I have got to tell you. I don't hear one of you talking about the shrinking fleet. 313 ships. He can, it was 390 just six years ago. And there is no plan to even stabilize it where we are. It is on a downward slope, with no one either in the defense industrial base or the Navy or yourself. I haven't seen a witness this year hitting the panic button. So I will do it for you.
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    It is almost July. The President hasn't submitted a defense budget. I am going to tell you, I voted to impeach Bill Clinton, but if Bill Clinton had waited till the middle of June to submit a defense budget, I think you people would be down here raising holy hell. Somebody has got to do it. You apparently have chosen not to. No one is mentioning this year that we have become a Nation, not only of civilians but in the military, totally adverse to taking casualties. What if we get in a war with somebody who doesn't mind taking casualties? And they are not going to quit like the Iraqis did. They are not going to quit like the Panamanians did. They want to see it through. I don't hear any witness saying that is a worse case scenario. You get an adversary who just isn't going to quit.

    Dr. Krepinevich, I read your remarks saying how great Kosovo went. Well, did it really? I happen to have been on the floor of the House of Representatives where they voted not to approve air strikes, not to start a war and not to end a war. I think if Milosovich had just a little bit more fortitude, he might have seen us through on that deal. There might have been another vote where they cut off the funds and then he wins. And so I see a lot of scenarios that none of you talk about. And it all comes down to the national will to defend ourselves, and I really do see it eroding. I do see the mistake that was made in America in the late 1930s, where this will never happen again, or maybe America after the Spanish American War, this will never happen again. I see that repeating itself. I saw Colin Powell sit in those same chairs saying, we are going to downsize, but we are going to right-size. I don't think we have.

    Just last week—and I do want to compliment my Chairman on this, because he took a stand contrary to the Chair—leader of his political party. Just last week, President Bush took a bad idea from Congress and President Clinton and made it worse when he says, we are not going to have a referendum on Vieques. We are just going to quit doing it. And I do want to compliment my chairman for standing up and saying, bad idea; we ought to keep Vieques. It is one thing after the other, and I am surprised that that was not a part of your prepared testimony. I didn't hear your remarks, but I read your testimony. Don't any of these things trouble y'all, because they sure as hell trouble me, and I would open it up to your remarks.
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    Ms. FLOURNOY. Congressman, I would respond by saying that I think one of the biggest barriers to closing the strategy resources gap and also to transforming resource for the future is a pretty widespread sense of complacency. We have got preeminence—.

    Mr. TAYLOR. I think you are part of it, Miss. I am going to tell you, I read your testimony.

    Ms. FLOURNOY. Well, I was asked to address the two MTW standard issue, and that is what I addressed. I will be happy to give you our book, that sort of starts off by sounding an alarm bell which says if you continue to live with the strategy resources mismatch on the order of tens of billions of dollars annually, you will see—we are already seeing highly corrosive effects inside the U.S. military, and if we continue to live with those effects and we choose not to address them, they will get much more severe over time, and they will take many, many years to repair. So I—I mean, one of the things that motivated me to do my work in preparing for the QDR was that I had a sense of crisis about where we are in terms of strategy, resources mismatch, and in terms of the slow pace with which we are approaching transformation.

    My concern is that that is not necessarily widely shared inside the Pentagon, and it is not widely shared in the Congress, I would argue. There is not a sense of crisis, and without that sense of crisis, I don't think that we will see fundamental change of the nature that we need.

    Mr. TAYLOR. Maybe I misread your testimony, but I did not see any—I didn't detect any sense of urgency in it. I will go back and read it again.
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    Ms. FLOURNOY. And I am happy to send you a copy of my book where it may be more clear.

    Dr. KREPINEVICH. Congressman, certainly I think most of us would share your concerns about the program fund, mismatch. In terms of the President's four priorities, defense seems to be No. 4 in the queue behind the tax relief, education reform and the entitlement issues, prescription drugs and so on.

    It is not clear that this Defense Department, this defense review is going to be able to avoid the tough choices. I understand that they are negotiating the 2002 amendment with the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) right now, and you raise the issue, well, what does this mean for modernization, and I think—let me just speak for myself. I think transformation has got to be a top priority, that some of this problem can be alleviated, perhaps by increasing funding.

    I think we are going to have to look more seriously at our allies, which is something that is difficult to do, because we don't speak for them, but they, in many respects, are an asset that we need to find ways to bring to bear as we work to provide for our common defense.

    My sense is, though, that the end of the day, if you are going to engage in realistic budgeting, if you are not going to have these—you know, the temptation to assume these magical efficiency savings that never quite come about or come about pennies on the dollar, that you are probably going to have to look at reducing force structure or recasting force structure to come up with the money to sustain the modernization effort.
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    I share your concern about this issue of casualties. It strikes me—and let me link it to Kosovo. Having grown up during the Vietnam era when the American people were acutely sensitive to the casualties we were suffering in Vietnam, it struck me as almost 180 degrees out when you got to Allied Force. I was stunned by the lack of concern on the part of the American public. I guess not concern, but there didn't seem to be that great anxiety.

    Much more anxious, it seemed to me, were the Joint Chiefs, and when I thought about it—and this is just the hypothesis, it seemed to me that, you know, we live in the age of the volunteer force. My son, my daughter doesn't have to go off and serve in the military unless they want to. And those that do know the job environment. You have to risk your life like a fireman or policeman and so on, and we admire these people for that, but it is a choice that our young people make for themselves.

    On the other hand, our Joint Chiefs of Staff have to recruit and retain their force, and when they commit people to combat, when they suffer casualties, that changes the job environment, and can you recruit and retain a force that we are already having trouble recruiting and retaining if this military begins to suffer significant casualties? I think you are right. If I am an enemy of the United States, I want casualties. I want to find some asymmetric strategy that will force you to pay a price in blood to get me, and, you know, that is my goal. That is my objective.

    Sometimes I am concerned that we are building a kind of crystal lattice military, just beautiful to behold, fabulous, but can it take a punch? I am not sure. And when you begin to look at the issue of scale, you know, how—can we scale this military up if we had to double the—say, if we had to increase the force structure by 20 percent or 30 percent, could we do it? Because we are progressively talking about an increasingly high-tech military, an information technology—you know, we are competing in a very tough market. The American defense industry can't even hold on to their information technology (IT) people. So I think that point is well taken.
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    And I would—with respect—one further point on Kosovo. I think—my understanding is that is where one of the main points the Rumsfeld review is taking a look at is this issue of ambiguous aggression, like we saw in Kosovo, where it is not clearcut aggression, where you don't get this trigger response where you get to identify targets very easily, engage them very easily, where you are working as part of a coalition that introduces a lot of friction into what you can do and how soon you can do it.

    And I think that is much more the model of what we are going to see than blatant aggression in a very sort of comfortable way with mechanized forces that plays to our strong suits as opposed to exploits our weak suits.

    So, again, I share your concerns on all these issues.

    Dr. O'HANLON. Thank you for your points, Congressman. Let me respond to them quickly. I guess I agree with you on two, and a slight difference of opinion on the last one. First of all, on the V–22, I think you make a very good point, and I, personally having read the various V–22 safety studies and going back to the 1990 study that the Dick Cheney Commission when he was Secretary, I am skeptical about the benefits of this certainly relative to the safety issue, and I think that there is a real argument for buying the V–22 as a prototype capability for special purposes, experimentation, further technology development, and maybe some long-range insertion of commandos or long-range hostage rescue, but not for the main amphibious vehicle of the U.S. Marine Corps. So that is my own take on that question.

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    On the 300 ship, the Navy point, which of course, you have been one of the most eloquent members of Congress calling attention to, I fully share your concern, but I think, again, there are only two ways to solve this problem and we probably need a little bit of both. One is to make the fleet bigger. But I am not optimistic budgets will permit that in any substantial way, although I am aware that there is an argument that we should.

    The other is to also consider some new ways of doing business. I believe the Navy has resisted some of the ideas of rotating crews by airlift and leaving the ships forward-deployed for a year, year and a half, two years in some cases, because the Navy doesn't want to lose an argument for a larger force structure. I think it is a somewhat understandable and also somewhat cynical strategy. There are some times and some cases where we do rotate crews by airlift, as you know, for minesweepers, other very specialized ships. I think the Navy needs to be a little bit more ambitious about doing this with some frigates and some destroyers, because I don't think the Navy is going to get bigger than about 300 ships, and we have to find a way to make that sustainable on the men and women of the Armed Forces.

    So I certainly admire your efforts to lobby for a bigger Navy, but my own optimism about your prospects for success are modest, and therefore I hope the Navy will look for some ways to be efficient.

    My last point is on casualties, and here I, of course, share the concern that there is a perception we are unwilling to use force in a serious way, in a sustained way, at the risk of American losses, and I do not admire the way the Administration fought the Kosovo conflict and took ground forces off the table. However, I also think that the United States is willing to take casualties if the stakes are significant, and we need to remind potential enemies of that fact.
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    So my—I know that you were a part of the Congressional debate in 1990, 1991 on the Gulf War. Obviously it was a close vote, but we expected 10 to 20,000 Americans killed in action and we still went to war. If Americans were fired upon in Korea, I have no doubt that this body and this country would fully support whatever it took to win that conflict. The China/Taiwan situation is perhaps somewhat mirkier, and perhaps therefore somewhat more dangerous, because China could convince itself we don't have the stomach for a real protracted battle. I think we need to tell China, we are not looking for a fight, but if there is one, we will stand by our friends, whatever it takes and I think we need to send that message out, because a country that pulled out of Somalia after 18 killed and a country that is now unwilling to consider any sort of expanded role in Macedonia—and I am not just going to criticize the Clinton Administration. I will criticize the Bush Administration here too.

    At some modest risk of U.S. casualties, this Administration is unwilling to consider what is necessary to stop the rebel forces in Macedonia from causing yet another potential Balkan War, and I think the Administration is exactly wrong in that view, and it contributes to a perception that we are not willing to stand up for our interests and risk American lives, even in modest numbers and in relatively not so dangerous situations.

    So I share the concern, but I think it is more of a public relations or perceptual problem, because I really think at the end of the day, if we get into a big war, we are prepared to win, whatever the cost, if it is a real serious threat to our interest. But in some cases, adversaries may doubt that, and that is dangerous.

    The CHAIRMAN. The gentleman from Florida, Mr. Scarborough.
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    Mr. SCARBOROUGH. I thank you. And just to follow up on that, I think you are right. If you take the right type of conflicts, Americans are going to be more than willing to make the sacrifices needed. The problem with the last two conflicts we have been engaged in, we have been in Kosovo and Bosnia. You have been talking about a civil war that goes back to, you know, Constantinople in the 13th century or the 14th century, and Americans couldn't grasp that as much as they could grasp the dangers of Saddam Hussein possibly going into Saudi Arabia or making problems across the Middle East and the devastating impact that would have on our economy. So I don't see that as a problem.

    I do want to ask you, though, Dr. O'Hanlon, I have been looking at some of the articles you have been writing and we talked about—and I agree with the gentleman from Mississippi that getting down below a 300-ship Navy is dangerous. Continuing to freeze military spending is dangerous. I saw something in The Washington Post a couple months ago talking about how China was going to be increasing their military budget this year by 19 percent, and it is interesting listening to the discussion today and listening to the discussion really throughout Washington that when we talk about whether we can fight two MTWs, that we don't talk about—we don't focus on China as much, unless it is related to the China/Taiwanese conflict.

    And maybe one of the reasons is—maybe the answer comes in your articles that I have been seeing here. You have got an article for an International Security in fall 2000, why China cannot conquer Taiwan. You have got an article talking about China's hollow military for the National Interest.

    In your ''Prudent or Paranoid'' discussion, you said a U.S. Desert Shield force-like capability, emphasizing naval power and air power should be more than adequate to prevail in a future conflict, should Taiwan require American military assistance. And you say China does not have the key elements for a successful invasion.
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    Now, if you talk, I think, to most people in this committee, most Americans, they would say with the Soviet Union falling apart, obviously China is really one of the great threats facing America over the next 20 years, that they are planning out—we have had testimony that they are planning to be militarily superior to us in 20, 25 years, and maybe this 19 percent increase is a first step in that direction.

    My question is this, are we missing something here? Am I missing something, or are the American people missing something? Is China really a paper tiger? Is it a hollow military force? Should we not be overly-alarmed about this 19 percent increase as far as how we are talking about predicting future conflicts? I mean, are we looking at Germany 1933 right now?

    Dr. O'HANLON. Great question. Yeah, and also very good points on what I have said publicly, and I was not content to have made the—of course this isn't an ongoing debate. Some people say China is 10 feet tall already and responding to that, but I was not very comfortable having that be my last word, and that is why in this recent book I spent a lot of time on not just invasion scenarios where I think China is pretty hollow because of the difficulty of large-scale amphibious assault against a well-prepared vigilant island, but scenarios where China may not have to be in our league to be very effective, and I think that in the latter set of scenarios, we have to be a lot more worried, and in particular, a blockade.

    I do not think that Taiwan necessarily has the naval force to go out and hunt and search for and find and destroy Chinese submarines in a reliable way, especially if China begins this sort of operation with an attack against certain Taiwanese aircraft and ships. Under those circumstances, I think the United States will probably have to be involved to essentially keep Chinese mine and submarines, and to some extent, Chinese aircraft out of Taiwanese water and airspace and because of the geography, that is a very difficult mission.
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    So my answer to your question would be for traditional large-scale ground operations or amphibious operations, China is not nearly as good in the real world as it looks on paper with its 2.8 million active duty force. But it may not need to be that good for other kinds of scenarios, especially the missile or blockade scenarios, and I am spending a lot of time worrying about those.

    Mr. SCARBOROUGH. And let me ask you also to answer that, and also to answer the question of whether you all see China moving in the direction they are moving right now with the massive increases in military spending. Is that simply to project their power on Taiwan or to project their power throughout Asia, or do they have a Soviet-style plan of aggression that goes well beyond just the Asian theater?

    Dr. KREPINEVICH. First, I—it is often difficult to try and gauge just what China military expenditures are. They don't account for it the way that we do. Sometimes inflation is not taken into account. There are all sorts of reasons why it is hard to measure, but certainly Chinese military spending is significant, and it is growing. And I think we also have to take into account the fact that China has several competitive advantages over us. We are a global power, so our budget is, in a sense, spread among forces around the globe. China is a regional power. So they can focus their effort on one region, and they can optimize their force to deal with the security challenges as they see fit in that region.

    I think certainly China has a number of outstanding claims on the international system, if you will. Taiwan being one, the Spratley Islands being another. You know, there are border disputes with India. China is increasingly concerned about what goes on in Central Asia as it becomes more and more of an energy importer. It is negotiating with Pakistan to build a road from China through Pakistan down to the area close to the Persian Gulf. And on the one hand, these are things that give you concern.
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    On the other hand, historically speaking, there are things that rising powers do. You know, you import oil. You do what we—I mean, we have forces in that area as well.

    I think the key for us is to maintain a—and this really gets you away from two MTWs. What do we need to do to maintain a favorable balance of power under this much more complex circumstance so that China neither views us as a threat to engage in an arms race with, but more, is China encouraged to try and realize its ambitions through the use of military force?

    And I think that Michael O'Hanlon is correct. Certainly one of—the issue of Taiwan is important in a much greater sense than just Taiwan itself. Somebody once said that the—if written laws control the seas, the threat wasn't invasion. It was starvation, and I think what is what Taiwan is looking at, not the threat of invasion, but if at some point in time China can convince Taiwan that a—that it can affect some form of maritime blockade. And if I were China, I would focus on those few ports that handle the oil supertankers and the liquid natural gas (LNG) tankers to sort of make the problem more manageable. If they can do that through a combination of submarines, antiship mines, the use of missiles—they are positioning a substantial number of missiles opposite Taiwan on mainland China. If they can hold those targets at risk, then I think what they will try and do is get what they want through coercion. If we—certainly Taiwan is not going to be in a good position to handle that problem alone. If we can't offer assurance to Taiwan that we can deal with that kind of contingency, then I think they are very susceptible to sort of Finland-ization, in east Asian terms.

    The larger significance, it seems to me, is that if you ever get to the point where China could affect that kind of coercion on Taiwan, well, there are two other important islands off of China. One is Japan, and the other is Korea. When you take away the Korea border with China, Korea is effectively an island. And so if you can begin to essentially deny access to the seas in and around these countries, you have the prospect of shifting in a rather dramatic way the fundamental military balance in that part of the world. And it is not clear to me that this is a terribly expensive proposition. In other words, that China would have to build carrier battle groups, large mechanized forces, stealthy aircraft. That there are relatively cheap ways to—remember, they are not talking about sea control. They are talking about sea denial. And typically, that has been a much cheaper proposition.
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    And so we have, I think, our work cut out for us. In fact, as I think both my colleagues here have said today, we need to be looking—taking a broader look at some of the contingencies that could really cause problems for us down the road, as well as the familiar ones we have been looking at these past ten years or so.

    Ms. FLOURNOY. I would like to say three things in response to your question, Congressman. First in my reading, I think China is interested in becoming a great power and the status of that. They are very interested in regional preeminence, if not in regional dominance, but my reading of China and statements in history is that they are not terribly interested in expanding beyond their region.

    Second, in terms of modernization, how do we read that? I mean, part of what is driving modernization is that China has a very large and incredibly outmoded military. They have a desperate need for—you think our need for modernization is desperate, take a look at their military. And they have had such a substantial growth in their economy, that a 19 percent jump in defense spending is easy, given their economic position. I think in the long-term, the question of whether we—how we should view China and whether it will become a long-term threat is an incredibly important one, and I think one that we can effect our—our policies will influence the answer to that question.

    I would advocate that the U.S. military, certainly as a hedge, be sure that we can overmatch a future China, you know, 10, 15, 20 years down the road in any kind of situation of aggression, that we can imagine, most particularly with regard to Taiwan or the Spratley Islands, for example. But paired with that military preparation, very importantly I believe as a foreign policy that emphasizes and gives China incentives to buy into the stable world order that is allowing their economic growth.
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    I mean, China, as much as any country, if not more than any country in Asia, has real incentives not to rock the boat. And our foreign policy needs to be reminding them of that fact and giving them opportunities, helping to push them into buying in to the stable order that is allowing their economy to grow and take off. Because if they choose to go the route of aggression, they will be basically torpedoing their own economic progress and their own economic growth, and that is what our foreign policy should be emphasizing, even as we very quietly, and I think in the background, build a military hedge against a more negative outcome.

    The CHAIRMAN. The gentleman from Hawaii, Mr. Abercrombie.

    Mr. ABERCROMBIE. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I would like to just ask a couple of questions with respect to the dollars. And all of the discussion you had, there is virtually nothing about how to pay for all of this, where the heck the money is supposed to come from. I don't want to get into an argument about satellites and how to use them and missile defense and deployment. For example, Mr. O'Hanlon, about sea-based and land-based and keeping people out there and transferring crews and so on. If we are able to put a missile defense system in, you are talking about incredible amounts of money, enormous amounts of operating dollars, at the least.

    There is—and in speaking about the question of whether or not services were hanging on to military platforms, regardless of whether it was really involved in transformation, you can get into the Crusader question. There appears to be—I see all the ads. I read all these publications, like Roll Call and National Journal and so on, to see where people—where the companies are going with the propaganda, and the Crusader now is out there, and I am being told that if I should vote, against the Crusader, if I could have that opportunity, then I am undermining the stability of the country and all the rest of it. And at the same time, I am focusing on you a little bit, Mr. O'Hanlon, because of your commentary in Okinawa, which is something I shared for years, and nobody wants to address these questions, which is, what is the reality of these things? Are there alternatives available that advance the mission of the country, of the national security interests of the country, but involve really transforming how we think, both in terms of the—of infrastructure, as well as doctrine?
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    I say that by way of preliminary question to you, which is this—and this is also—one other thing on ships. I am a very strong proponent of that. I think we can make a national security argument to the Nation, to the taxpayers to rebuild the Merchant Marine, for example, out of defense funds, and with a charter-and-build system, some kind of a loan system, et cetera, and I think we need to do that.

    My question to all of you is very—is simple, based on some of these preliminary comments that I made, could you or have you considered the question of a capital budget for the Department of Defense, separating operational expenditures from capital expenditures? And thus bringing the—at least this portion of the Federal Government away from cash financing of defense and going to acquisition of capital assets to be based on a capital budgeting system that perhaps would even rival, and maybe even emulate a city in Iowa, a village in Iowa buying a new fire engine?

    There isn't a municipal government or a corporation worthy of the name that does not have the capital budget. I have dealt with it as a finance—a member of the Finance Committee on city councils and the State House of Representatives and the State Senate, and I get to the Congress, and I find that we cash finance the defense system so that the carriers that were mentioned, you know, 10, 15 carriers—you know, we just throw four or five more carriers in with a flash, and that carrier competes with housing for—and day care projects. It competes with equipment and ammunition. It competes with maintenance questions. It competes with deployment budgets. And they are going to lose. So I don't see how we can talk about transformation, unless we talk about transforming literally the way we finance it. And I would be interested in your observations.
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    Dr. O'HANLON. Shall I start?

    Mr. ABERCROMBIE. I am obviously an advocate of it, and I intend to put a bill in shortly, I hope on a bipartisan basis, on capital budgeting .

    Dr. O'HANLON. Well, I will say a brief word on that, Congressman, because I think you are much more an expert in it than I am.

    Mr. ABERCROMBIE. Or it may mean the country is in severe difficulty.

    Dr. O'HANLON. Well, my only reservation would be that looking back at the 1990s, we seem to have done pretty well at funding the operating accounts. I admit, not the base and housing accounts, but the operating accounts did pretty well. The procurement account did relatively poorly. I want to know how the capital budget was going to affect that recent history, because again, in the past, that has been the tendency, but my broader comments are on your other two points, if I could just very briefly.

    On the budget, I fully agree with you. We have got to find ways to reduce expenditures in some areas, and that is why I use the word ''cut'' several times in this hearing, even though it was not a popular word to use today. But I think you have to look for ways to cut certain weapons and certain people, even if it is just at the margin, in order to be able to restrain the necessary growth in the Pentagon's budget. The growth, even by my proposal—.

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    Mr. ABERCROMBIE. Let me interject just a moment, because we don't have much time. Do you consider, for example, paying for the military health care (TRICARE)—for paying for veteran's care that we promised to veterans and retirees, part of the necessary military expenditure?

    Dr. O'HANLON. I was not a major fan of that program, but I have essentially accepted it as a political and budgetary fact of life at this point. So, yes—I mean, if one were to revoke that decision, of course you could theoretically reduce my projected price tag from 30 to 25 or what have you. But I am focusing on the National Defense Budget Function (050) budget and essentially focusing on future policy decisions that I consider more feasible. And I may be wrong about that.

    Mr. ABERCROMBIE. Well, okay. I am just trying to point out to you that when you start talking about cutting budgets and so on, you have personnel. You have got to take into consideration all the consequences of it. We have to pay for veterans—not veterans, per se, but military retirement and health care, for example, has to be paid for. It has got to be put into the equation. That is why I am on the verge of arguing and I don't want to do that. That is why I think we have got to separate a capital budget from an operating budget in order to try and get a handle on some of the things that you are talking about.

    What happens now is—for example, the carrier is funded. Say it is $5 billion. The second the first dollar is spent, the $5 billion comes off the table for budgetary considerations and scoring purposes and so on. It disappears, even though we are not spending $5 billion that year, that minute, that second. I mean, it makes no sense. No other governmental entity operates on this basis of cash financing.
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    Dr. O'HANLON. I don't disagree with—I don't know enough about this proposal, frankly, to voice a strong opinion. I guess all I would say is that I can have debates about V–22, F–22, Joint Strike Fighter (JSF), given the current budgetary definitions that we use, and I would encourage cuts in all of those programs.

    Mr. ABERCROMBIE. Okay. Thank you.

    Dr. O'HANLON. I'll stop there. On Okinawa, I think we have a lot to talk about.

    Mr. ABERCROMBIE. I appreciate it. Sure. Thank you.

    Dr. KREPINEVICH. I am not sure I am going to be any more helpful. I would certainly agree with your diagnosis of the problem, which is if you look back over the last decades, since the end of the Cold War, we have suffered from what some people call operations and management (O&M) migration, that consistently we have seen money flowing out of the procurement accounts to support the so-called readiness accounts. So that is a problem. I don't know whether it is structural or not, but it is certainly the case that we have underestimated in a lot of ways projected operations maintenance and personnel costs. And the billpayer for that has typically been procurement.

    Having said that, it is—I am not—like Michael O'Hanlon, this is not my area of expertise and—.

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    Mr. ABERCROMBIE. Even the way you—that is okay. Even the way that you put forward your remarks right now are indicative of why I think we need to make a change, because, in effect, the maintenance and equipment and training and everything is being accused—and I know you are not doing this deliberately, but the nomenclature and the presentation, in effect, accuses the operational side of the Defense Department of attacking and extracting from the procurement budget its costs. It is because the whole—it all comes out of the same pot. There is no fenced-off version of the budget for procurement.

    Dr. KREPINEVICH. Right.

    Mr. ABERCROMBIE. And so they are not extracting anything out of it. They never had the money provided in the first place. Procurement beats the daylights out of these accounts all the time and within the procurement, it is always the Army that drags up the rear, because it has the smaller costs. This crusader deal is minor league compared to the average expense associated with submarines and aircraft carriers, as well as airplanes.

    The Army is always dragging up their procurement rear. So the whole thing has to be dealt with in some fashion other than one competing with the other. From an accounting point of view, they don't compete. They simply run out of money, and procurement will beat the daylights out of the rest of it all the time, that is why we get accused of pork barrel projects. And the Pentagon knows this. The Pentagon fills up the budget room with procurement items and so on, and on the side comes to us to see us and says, by the way, can you take care of the veterans, can you put that as an add-on, can you put in the health care for retirees and figure out a way to do it? We haven't budgeted a dime for it, but you guys do it and then we will call it pork barrel.

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    The CHAIRMAN. I was wondering, Ms. Flournoy, did you have a comment?

    Ms. FLOURNOY. I would say that I haven't studied any proposal for creating a capital budget for DOD, so I don't feel equipped to really—.

    Mr. ABERCROMBIE. That's all right. Is the idea at least stimulating to you?

    Ms. FLOURNOY. I think it is at least worth looking at. But I think you put your finger on the question, which is where does the money come from, where do we divest, where do we save, and that is the hardest question we are facing. And I would just again advocate that we not only take the sort of short-term fitted perspective of force structure and procurement, although I think the procurement account could use a good scrub, but that we take a longer term perspective that really asks the question of how we are doing business as a department. We are—you know, Planning, Programming and Budget System (PPBS) was invented in the 1960s. We are still, in many ways, the Department of Defense of the market era, but if you look at the American business, the way people do business in the 1990s is a far cry. I mean, there are many who question, why do we have infrastructure that we don't need, why do we think we have to own everything that we want to control, instead of outsourcing and—.

    Mr. ABERCROMBIE. I appreciate that. The reason I want to do this is you will find a competition, and it won't be within the defense budget. The defense budget will have to compete with what you mentioned before, entitlement, Social Security, education, some of the other things that have this priority, the tax cut and so on, and that is what is going to cause the real problem, because people see the defense budget as trying to steal from grandma, as trying to steal from kids in school, as trying to steal from you name it. Fill in the blank, and trying to steal from military retirees.
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    And that is where the big problem is going to be. You won't be able to just stand up and just wave the flag and say that we have got to have forward-deployed sea-based missile defense, and so therefore, elementary school kids are not going to have books. It will not work. We have got to find a way to deal with the internal budgetary structure of the Defense Department in such a way as to bring it into the 21st century. And I will send my bill to you and some of my background to you folks, because I think that your observations and analysis of it would be invaluable to the committee. Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman.

    The CHAIRMAN. Does the gentlelady from Virginia have another question?

    Mrs. JO ANN DAVIS OF VIRGINIA. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I won't make this very long, because I know you have been here a long time, but my question earlier, no one answered it on how often President Clinton had to pull the carriers off their current mission to go to a contingency, but I do want to point out, you mentioned many, many times surface combatants. Could you tell me how many surface combatants it would take to replace one carrier, and how much that would cost versus the cost of one carrier? What would that do to our shipbuilding workforce, and how would we get them back if we do away with or reduce the number of carriers that we have right now? And I guess what concerns me is hearing all this about China increasing their budget 19 percent.

    I hear you, Dr. O'Hanlon, saying our defense budget may increase 10 percent, but if I hear Mr. Abercrombie right, that included keeping the promise we made to our retirees, which I don't think should go against our defense budget. I think it is something that we need to do, and I don't like this arguing against education and so forth. And I think Mr. Abercrombie is quite correct on that, but I guess my question is back to the surface combatants. How much would they cost?
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    Dr. KREPINEVICH. I have no idea how many times President Clinton had to redirect carriers. There is a saying that is, I guess, quite popular that the first question the President asks in a crisis is where are the aircraft carriers, because oftentimes they have been a form of power that is close to the scene and can generate a significant amount of strike capability.

    I think in recent years that has changed somewhat. If you look at, for example, the propensity to use Tomahawk cruise missiles as a way of striking deeper, putting less naval assets at risk, certainly not putting pilots at risk. I think at least half the time now if they are asking the question, presidents might be saying where are the Tomahawk land-attack missile (TLAMs)? And, again, it is not that this makes carriers not valuable or TLAMs infinitely valuable. It is just a different kind of capability, something that is there that wasn't there before and so we have more flexibility.

    I think that in terms of how many surface combatants, and in this case I am talking about users, destroyers, the Navy's land attack destroyer, perhaps the sea ships that the Navy is talking about possibly experimenting with. It is kind of an apples-to-oranges comparison, because the ships in a sense have different functions and they do different things. If you are talking about a ship that has TLAMs, for example, that ship, if it did nothing else, if it were a cruiser or destroyer, might be able to launch 70 or 80 or 90 at targets, and they would have to reload and rearm.

    Similarly, carriers can conduct a fairly high rate of sustained operations for a few days, and then they have to stand out and perform the same function. Again, ships armed with TLAMs can strike deeper inland, but they—arguably they might be able to strike more promptly. They can be operated at less expense.
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    On the other hand, carriers give you sustained combat capability. If you are looking at trade-offs—again, it is kind of an apples/oranges. You could convert—assuming arms control doesn't turn out to be a problem, according to the Navy's estimates, you can convert the four Trident submarines to carry over 600 cruise missiles at a cost of less than half what it would cost you for one carrier. Is that a good trade? I think—I think it is worth having the SSGNs and the carrier. I think the trade should be—quite frankly, the trades base should be quite a bit larger, because as I said before, we are looking at increasingly a range of ways of striking targets over great distances. The Air Force has bombers that can fly halfway around the world. In some cases faster than a carrier can get to the scene of a crime. The Marine Corps has its aviation. Forward-based—if they are forward-based, Army forces today can strike upwards of 100 miles from their land, forward land-based positions. And, again, getting back to Michelle Flournoy's point, think this provides a good opportunity for a real discussion, not only about a shift in geographic focus, a shift in competition, how we can exploit our asymmetric advantages, but what is the new roles and missions mix within and among the services.

    So I am sorry. It seems to me it is quite a complicated issue.

    Mrs. JO ANN DAVIS OF VIRGINIA. Well, I think it is apples and oranges, and I guess that is why I get concerned when I hear surface combatants taking the place of possibly the aircraft carriers.

    Ms. FLOURNOY. If I could, Congressman, just add two points. I don't have a set number in mind, to answer your question of how many times President Clinton had to divert a carrier, but I guess my understanding of the carrier battle group's mission—this was really formed when I was in the Office of the Secretary of Defense—is really that there is a presence mission, but part of that mission is crisis response, and so in many cases when we have asked a carrier to remove their presence in a given region to a different region, they are doing that mission of crisis response.
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    Now, in some subset of those cases, you could make an argument that they might have been leaving—you know, leaving uncovered an important deterrence mission, but in most of the cases that I am aware of, having gotten the briefs from the various carrier battle group tours, in most cases, they were on a routine sort of presence engagement missions and were diverted to a crisis, and that, as I view it, is part of their mission, and they didn't necessarily leave uncovered another need, although there are some exceptions to that.

    The other thing I would just highlight is I think you raise a very important question that the—when we are talking about the size of the Navy's fleet, we have to think about it not only in terms of current requirements or anticipated requirements, but in terms of the industrial base question. And what do we think we ought to have the capacity to build in the 2030 or 40 future, and that is where I get worried about the very low numbers is primarily in terms of the industrial bases.

    The CHAIRMAN. Any other discussion?

    Mrs. JO ANN DAVIS OF VIRGINIA. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

    The CHAIRMAN. I would like to make one statement, not trying to engage you in a conversation, maybe for a later time but I think—I picked up on the same thing that Mrs. Davis did, and that is that I interpreted a remark you made to be that we could do some of these engagements without the carriers, but with the surface combatants and I know circumstances are different now, but I would just remind you that during the Second World War, we suffered our greatest losses in surface combatants when we—neither side, nor us, or the Japanese had air cover. The idea of fighting a war without air protest is I think what she was driving at. But anyway, thank you, ladies and gentlemen. Thank you for your time. It has been a very stimulating and very good briefing, I think.
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    [Whereupon, at 1:05 p.m., the committee was adjourned.]