SPEAKERS CONTENTS INSERTS
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2001
[H.A.S.C. No. 107–22]
U.S. NATIONAL SECURITY STRATEGY AND THE QUADRENNIAL DEFENSE REVIEW
HEARING
BEFORE THE
COMMITTEE ON ARMED SERVICES
HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES
ONE HUNDRED SEVENTH CONGRESS
FIRST SESSION
HEARING HELD
JUNE 21, 2001
For sale by the Superintendent of Documents, U.S. Government Printing Office
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Internet: bookstore.gpo.gov Phone: (202) 512-1800 Fax: (202) 512-2250
Mail: Stop SSOP, Washington, DC 20402-0001
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
Laura Truesdell, Staff Assistant
Jarrod Tisdell, Research Assistant
(ii)
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C O N T E N T S
HEARING:
Thursday, June 21, 2001, U.S. National Security Strategy and the Quadrennial Defense Review Secretary of Defense, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
APPENDIX:
Thursday, June 21, 2001
THURSDAY, JUNE 21, 2001
U.S. NATIONAL SECURITY STRATEGY AND THE QUADRENNIAL DEFENSE REVIEW SECRETARY OF DEFENSE, CHAIRMAN OF THE JOINT CHIEFS OF STAFF
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
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Rumsfeld, Hon. Donald, Secretary,Department of Defense
Shelton, Gen. Henry H., Chairman, Joint Chiefs of Staff
APPENDIX
PREPARED STATEMENTS:
Rumsfeld, Hon. Donald
Shelton, Gen. Henry H.
Skelton, Hon. Ike
Stump, Hon. Bob
DOCUMENTS SUBMITTED FOR THE RECORD:
[There were no Documents submitted for the Record.]
QUESTIONS AND ANSWERS SUBMITTED FOR THE RECORD:
[The Questions and Answers can be viewed in the hard copy.]
Mr. Hefley
Mr. McKeon
Mr. Ryun
Mr. Snyder
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U.S. NATIONAL SECURITY STRATEGY AND THE QUADRENNIAL DEFENSE REVIEW
SECRETARY OF DEFENSE, CHAIRMAN OF THE JOINT CHIEFS OF STAFF
House of Representatives,
Committee on Armed Services,
Washington, DC, Thursday, June 21, 2001.
The committee met, pursuant to call, at 2:00 p.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. We are pleased to have the Secretary with us today. I am, in the interest of time, going to just abbreviate my remarks, put my remarks in the journal. I hope others will follow suit.
Mr. Secretary, we welcome you here today. We know this is hopefully the—I just had a conversation with the Secretary, and I was pretty assured that he will be here and he will testify a week from today with the budget figures. With that in mind, perhaps we can stick to the Quadrennial Defense Review (QDR) today and get well through that.
Now, I know the Secretary wanted to leave at 4 o'clock. If there are still some here that have to be heard—he was trying to work on rearranging his schedule, but—.
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Secretary RUMSFELD. I have taken care of that and canceled the meeting, yes, sir.
The CHAIRMAN. All right. But while I have had a conversation with Mr. Skelton this morning and we came to an agreement that we would ask the members today to hold their remarks to three minutes. That will give us time to get down to both levels. And if you could make your statement and your question in three minutes, we all will appreciate it, and I will not rap the gavel. How is that?
Mr. Secretary, welcome. I know this is your first formal appearance before this committee and I guess the first appearance really since January 1976 as Secretary of Defense. We welcome you here, as well as General Shelton, and we look forward to your remarks. We look forward to working with you.
Let me first turn to Mr. Skelton, before we get started, the Ranking Member, for any remarks he may choose to make.
[The prepared statement of Mr. Stump can be found in the Appendix.]
STATEMENT OF HON. IKE SKELTON, A REPRESENTATIVE FROM MISSOURI, RANKING MEMBER, COMMITTEE ON ARMED SERVICES
Mr. SKELTON. Thank you so much. Mr. Secretary, we do appreciate you and General Shelton being with us today and we do look forward to hearing your testimony. I am, as we have expressed to you, concerned about the recommendations coming forward to us, and I hope June the 24th is a good date. Am I still correct on that, that the budget recommendations will come forward to us?
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Secretary RUMSFELD. I think it is the 27th or 8th.
Mr. SKELTON. Twenty-seventh. Thank you.
And we did send a letter, Mr. Stump and I, together with Mr. Warner and Mr. Levin from the other body, regarding the proposed recommendations. And since we didn't get a response to that, I suppose that the 27th is still a good date, and we look forward to your testimony regarding that the day after. Am I correct on that, sir?
Secretary RUMSFELD. Yes, sir.
Mr. SKELTON. We will look forward to that.
Mr. Secretary, let me say that you are absolutely correct in indicating that the Asian Pacific region is very important to our American security, and I think that is the right thing to do. There are three things that we need to do in that particular region. The first is to understand the culture and languages. The second is having a military presence. And the third is having a policy of engagement with those—in those governments in the military.
And as you consider a new strategy, it is important to keep in mind, both with our friends and potential enemies, that they are watching us today and you are making history today, Mr. Secretary, in what you say and in response to our questions. And I would like to point out, being an amateur historian, that back in 1948 when President Truman air-lifted supplies to the people of Berlin when they were blockaded, he got it right. When John Foster Dulles, back in the 1950s, built and strengthened the groups of states seeking to prevent Communist expansion, he got it right. Ronald Reagan got it right, too. He restored the strength of America's military posture.
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And on the negative side, we can look at—back in November 1941, this body, the Congress of the United States, in a roll call vote, voted not to fortify the island of Guam, the naval harbor there, and that of course sent a message to the Japanese. A decade later, Dean Acheson failed to explicitly guarantee the security of North Korea in 1949. As you know, in 1950, June, Korea took advantage of that, feeling that America would not secure South Korea.
So what we are saying today is sending a message, and I hope that we can work with you and get it right.
We, of course—and I will reiterate that we would like to get started—we will have possibly two, maybe three weeks altogether before the August recess comes, and I know that we wish to get along with our business. So I thank you very much for your testimony today. And we look forward to the 27th. Thank you.
[The prepared statement of Mr. Skelton can be found in the Appendix.]
The CHAIRMAN. Let me say to those members before we get started that we have agreed that there will be a three-minute time limit today. The Secretary has committed to be before us a week from today on the budget. So if you want to hold your questions and statements to the QDR, it would help us move right along.
Mr. Secretary, your statement will be in the record in its entirety and the floor is yours, sir. If you care to summarize, we would appreciate it.
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STATEMENT OF HON. DONALD H. RUMSFELD, SECRETARY, DEPARTMENT OF DEFENSE
Secretary RUMSFELD. Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman. I appreciate the invitation to discuss the Defense Strategy Review. Mr. Skelton, I certainly agree with you that that review of history is instructive, and we should all keep it in mind.
Since coming into office five months ago, I have been asking a great many questions, discussing a number of key issues regarding how our Armed Forces might best be arranged to meet the new security challenges of the 21st century. I do appreciate this opportunity to report on our progress. As I indicated, later this month, we will be prepared to discuss the budget for 2002, the amendment.
As you know, we have conducted a number of studies, most of which have been briefed to you and to your staff, including missile defense, space transformation, conventional forces, morale, quality of life. We have just completed a month of consultations with our friends and allies around the world on the threats we face.
We have also recently in the Department of Defense begun a very notable process. Over the past several weeks, the Chairman, the Vice Chairman, the Joint Chiefs, the senior civilian officials, have been meeting three or four days a week for two or three hours, for the past three or four weeks, to fashion a defense strategy and terms of reference for the congressionally mandated Quadrennial Defense Review. We completed that work. The terms of reference are now with the people working on the Quadrennial Defense Review and it is that that we are interested in discussing.
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We have agreed on some ideas that we are considering as a new strategy and a force-sizing approach. And over the next six to eight weeks, we have asked the QDR process to test those models and discuss—we will then discuss our findings with the committee and with the President and make a judgment as to what we may want to propose.
We are not today recommending a new strategy. I want that clearly understood. What we are doing is raising to this important committee the subject for discussion, and it will be six, eight weeks before I personally will have come to any conclusions. And I can assure you when I do, it will be after a similar process with the Chairman, the Vice Chairman and the Chiefs, and that what we recommend to the President will have our uniform support.
In approaching these discussions, we began with the fact that at present we are enjoying the benefits of a healthy global economy. We really can't have a prosperous world unless we have first a peaceful world, a stable world. And the security and stability that the United States Armed Forces provide our world is indeed the critical underpinning of that peace and prosperity.
If we are to extend this period of peace and prosperity, we need to prepare now for the new and different threats that we will face in the decades ahead, and not wait for them to more fully emerge.
Our challenge in doing so is complicated by the fact that we can't know precisely who will threaten us in the decades ahead. The only thing we know for certain is that it is unlikely that any of us here know what is likely. And I offer the following for your consideration: I was born in 1932, the Great Depression, for example, was underway. The defense planning assumption in the mid-thirties was no war for 10 years. By '39, the war was on in Europe, and in 1941, the fleet that the United States constructed to deter war became the first target of naval warfare and aggression in the Pacific. Airplanes didn't exist at the start of the century, but by World War II, they were decisive and affected the outcome of the war. Soon thereafter, the Atomic Age shocked the world. By the 1950s, our World War II ally, the Soviet Union, had become a Cold War adversary. With little warning, we were taken by surprise in the war in Korea.
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In the early sixties, very few people had focused on Vietnam. By the end of the decade, the U.S. was embroiled in a long and costly war there. By the mid-seventies, Iran was our key ally and a regional power. A few years later, Iran was in the throes of an antiwestern revolution, the champion of Islamic fundamentalism.
In March of 1989 when Vice President Cheney appeared before the Senate committee for his confirmation hearings as Secretary of Defense, not one person in the room mentioned the word Iraq. Less than a year later, we were engaged in a war in Iraq.
That history ought to make us humble about our ability to predict the future. It certainly tells me that the world of 2015 will almost certainly be little like today and, without doubt, notably different from what today's experts are constantly forecasting.
But while it is difficult to know precisely who will threaten, or where or when, it is less difficult to anticipate how we will be threatened. We know, for example, that open borders and open societies make it easy for inviting terrorists to strike at our people where they live and work. Our dependence on computer-based information networks makes those networks attractive targets for new forms of cyberattack. Our lack of defenses against ballistic missiles creates incentives for missile proliferation, which combined with the development of nuclear and chemical, and particularly biological weapons of mass destruction, could give future adversaries the incentive to try to hold populations hostage to terror and blackmail.
There are some important facts that I consider not debatable. The number of countries that are developing nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons of mass destruction is growing. The number of ballistic missiles on the face of the earth is growing significantly, and the number of countries possessing them is growing.
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Consider this: In 1972, the number of countries pursuing biological weapons was unknown. Today we know there are at least 13, and they are of increasing sophistication and lethality.
In 1972, 10 countries had chemical programs that we knew of. Today there are 16. Four countries ended their programs and 10 more jumped in.
In 1972, we knew of only five countries that had nuclear weapons. Today we know of 12.
In 1972, we assessed a total of nine countries as having ballistic missiles. Today we know of 28.
And note that these are only the cases we know of. We know something else. We know that dangerous capabilities are being developed at this moment that we do not know about, and that has been the pattern in the last 20 years. Important things have happened in important countries that we were not aware of for long periods, three, five, seven, eight, in one case 12 or 13 years, until we became aware of it.
What all this means is that soon, for the first time in history, individuals who have no structure around them to serve as a buffer on their decision-making will possess nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons and the means to deliver them.
This presents a very different challenge from the Cold War. Even in the old Soviet Union, the Secretary General or General Secretary of the Communist Party, dictator though he was, had a Politburo to provide some checks and balances that might have kept him from using those weapons at his whim. But what checks and balances are there for Saddam Hussein or Kim Jong II or others like them? None that I know of, and certainly none that we can influence.
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Future adversaries may use advanced conventional capabilities to deny us access to distant theaters of operation. And as they gain access to a range of new weapons that allow them to expand the deadly zone to include our territory, infrastructure, space assets, population, friends and allies, we may find future conflicts are no longer restricted to their regions of origin. For all these reasons, we believe a new approach to deterrence is needed.
We are living in a unique period in history, when the Cold War threats have receded, but the dangerous new threats have not yet fully emerged. We need to take advantage of this period to ensure that we are prepared for the challenges we will certainly face. And with the speed of change today, where technology is advancing not in decades, but in months and years, we can't afford to wait until those threats have emerged to begin to prepare to meet them.
With this security situation in mind, our team at the Pentagon has been working to develop the appropriate defense strategy for the coming decades. Our goal was to provide clear, strategic guidance and ideas for the congressionally mandated QDR or Quadrennial Defense Review process.
Working with the Chairman, the Vice Chairman, and the Chiefs, we had extensive discussions, worked through a series of complex issues. We have now provided guidance to test some preliminary conclusions over the next two months before making recommendations to the President or to Congress.
One of the key questions before us is whether to keep the two nearly simultaneous ''major theater war'' (MTW) force-sizing construct. This approach was an innovation at the end of the Cold War. It was based on the proposition that the U.S. should prepare for the possibility that two near simultaneous regional conflicts could arise at the same time.
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The two-MTW approach identifies both southwest Asia and northeast Asia as areas of high national interest to the U.S. In both regions, regimes hostile to the U.S. and its allies and friends possessed the capability and had exhibited the intent to gain their objectives by the threat or use of force. The approach identified the force packages that would be needed for the U.S. to achieve its wartime objectives, should two conflicts erupt. These force packages were based on an assessment of the combat capabilities and likely operation of an adversary on the one hand, and the capabilities and doctrine of U.S. forces so recently displayed in Desert Storm on the other.
This approach served well in that period. It provided a guidepost for shaping and resizing the force from one oriented to global war with a single nuclear power, the Soviet Union, to a smaller force, focused on smaller regional contingencies.
But when one examines the approach today, several things stand out:
First, because we have underfunded and overused our forces, we find that to meet acceptable levels of risk, we are short a division, we are short airlift, we have been underfunding aged infrastructure and facilities. We are short high-demand, low-density assets. The aircraft fleet is aging at a considerable and growing cost to maintain. The Navy is declining in numbers and heading towards a steady state of 220 ships.
I have no doubt that should two nearly simultaneous conflicts occur today, that the United States would prevail in both, let there be no doubt. But the erosion in the capability of the force means that the risks we would face today and tomorrow are notably higher than they would have been when the two-MTW standard was established roughly a decade ago.
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Without the ability to attract and retain the best men and women, the United States Armed Forces will not be able to do their job. So we have a people risk, if you will.
Third, we have underinvested in dealing with future risks. We failed to invest adequately in the advanced military technologies we will need to meet the emerging threats of the new century. And given the long lead times in development and deployment of new capabilities, waiting further to invest in 21st century capabilities would pose a risk.
Fourth, we have not appropriately, in my view, addressed the growing institutional risk, if you will—the waste, the inefficiency, the difficulties—as the way the Department functions and the way the Department interacts with the Congress and the way it interacts with the contractor community. If we fail to address that, if we fail to get substantially greater efficiencies, we run the risk over time of eroding public support to the detriment of the Armed Forces and the Department and the country.
And fifth, an approach that prepares for two major wars, focuses military planning—tends to focus military planning more on the near term to the detriment of preparing for the longer-term threats. Too much of today's military planning is dominated by what one scholar of Pearl Harbor called a ''poverty of expectations, a routine obsession with a few dangers that may be familiar rather than likely.'' but the likely dangers of this new century may be quite different from the familiar dangers of the past century.
All of this led our team to the conclusion that we owed it to the President and to the country to ask the question whether the two nearly simultaneous major theater war approach remains the best for the period ahead.
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We set in motion a process that had not been tried before to see if we could fashion something we believe might be better. And I fully understand, Mr. Chairman, that if you are going to tear down what is, you have to have something better, and I am not suggesting at the moment that we do. I am suggesting only that we have unanimously concluded that we have found something we think needs to be tested and modeled in the QDR process, and which may be better.
The approach we will test will balance the current risks to the men and women in the Armed forces, the risk to meeting current operational requirements, and the risks of failing to invest for the future by using this period of distinct U.S. advantage to set us on a path to recover from the investment shortfalls so we can attract and retain the people we need to invest in future capabilities that will be critical for the future.
While doing so, the U.S. must assure its ability to do the following things:
First, to defend the United States of America. Second, to maintain deployed forces forward, to reassure friends and allies, to pursue security cooperation, to deter conflict and be capable of defeating the efforts of any adversary to achieve its objectives by force or coercion, repelling attacks in a number of critical areas, and also be capable of conducting a limited number of small-scale contingencies. And, last, assuring the capability to win decisively against an adversary threatening U.S. vital interests anywhere in the world.
This approach takes into account the following: The threat to the U.S. has increased. Terrorism attacks, including the use of weapons of mass destruction, is a growing concern to everybody. Cyber-attacks are increasing. The threat of ballistic missile or cruise missile attacks is growing. Allied and friendly nations are also at increased risk. Within the areas of critical concern to the U.S., the threat is evolving as well. Nations are arming themselves with a variety of advanced technology systems, from quiet submarines armed with high-speed torpedoes and cruise missiles, to air defense radars, to satellite jamming capabilities that are designed to counter those military capabilities which the U.S. has as its current military advantage.
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Moreover, warfare is now conducted on shorter time lines. Adversaries understand that their success may turn on their ability to achieve their objectives before the U.S. and its allies and friends can react.
Given these developments, we believe there is reason to explore enhancing the capabilities of our forward-deployed forces in different regions to defeat an adversary's military efforts with only minimal reinforcement. We believe this would pose a stronger deterrent in peacetime, allow us to tailor our forces for each region, and provide capability to engage and defeat an adversary's military objectives wherever and whenever they might challenge the interests of the U.S.
In the end, however, we have to have the capacity to impose terms on an adversary that assure regional peace and stability, including, if necessary, the occupation of an adversary's territory and the change of its regime.
Because contending with uncertainty must be the centerpiece of U.S. defense planning, this strategy would combine both the typical threat-based and capabilities-based planning, using a threat-based planning to address nearer-term threats, while turning increasingly to a capability-based approach to make certain we develop forces prepared for longer-term threats that are less easily understood.
Under such an approach, we would work to select, develop, and sustain a portfolio of U.S. military capabilities that could not only help us prevail against current threats but, because we possess them, dissuade potential adversaries from developing those capabilities. Some of the investment options we have discussed and are considering involve, obviously, people, experimentation, intelligence, space, missile defense, information operations, preconflict management tools which are imperfect at best today, precision strikes, rapidly deployable standing joint forces, unmanned systems, command control, communications and information management, strategic mobility, research and development base, infrastructure and logistics.
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This portfolio of capabilities in combination with a new strategy could help us meet four important defense policy goals:
First, to assure our friends and allies that we can respond to unexpected dangers and the emergence of new threats; that we will meet our commitments to them, and that it is both safe and beneficial to cooperate with the United States.
Second, to the extent possible, dissuade potential adversaries from developing threatening capabilities by developing and deploying capability; that is, reduce their incentives to compete.
Third, to deter potential adversaries from hostile acts and counter coercion against the U.S., its forces, its friends, and allies.
And, fourth, should deterrence and dissuasion fail, defend the United States, our forces abroad, and our friends and allies against any adversary; and, if so instructed, decisively win at a time, place, and manner of our choosing.
These are some of the issues that we have put to the QDR process to examine. As it moves forward, we will continue to work with this committee and with Congress, and we expect that by late summer, we will be in a position to make some recommendations to the President.
Let me underscore that we have not decided on a new strategy. We are considering and testing this different strategy and some variants of it against the current one, but I must add that the current strategy is not working.
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So we do owe it to ourselves to ask the question: What might be better? Preparing for the new century will not require immediately transforming the entire force, just a portion, a fraction. The Blitzkrieg was an enormous success, but it was established by only a 10 to 15 percent transformed German army.
Change is difficult. But the greatest threat to our position, it seems to me, is complacency. And we need to have the wisdom and the sense of history to recognize that while America has capabilities, we are not invulnerable, and our current situation is not a permanent condition. If we don't act now when we have this period of opportunity, new threats will emerge to surprise us, as they have so often in the past. The difference is that today the weapons are vastly more powerful than ever before in the history of mankind.
My hope is to work with you, Mr. Chairman, and the members of the committee. That is why I am here today. That is why we have undertaken these consultations and these studies. I hope we can begin with an understanding that the task is certainly important and that the opportunity is open to us, that the world is changing, and unless we change we will find ourselves facing new and daunting threats we did not expect and which we will be unprepared to meet.
Thank you very much.
The CHAIRMAN. Thank you, Mr. Secretary.
[The prepared statement of Secretary Rumsfeld can be found in the Appendix.]
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The CHAIRMAN. General, we will include your statement in the record. Did you have any comments you want to make at this time?
STATEMENT OF GEN. HENRY H. SHELTON, CHAIRMAN, JOINT CHIEFS OF STAFF
General SHELTON. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Again, it is an honor to be before this committee, but in the interest of time I will submit what was going to be my oral statement for the record, if that is okay with you.
The CHAIRMAN. That is fine with us. Thank you, sir.
[The prepared statement of General Shelton can be found in the Appendix.]
The CHAIRMAN. The Chair recognizes the Ranking Member, Mr. Skelton.
Mr. SKELTON. Mr. Chairman, I will be brief. Mr. Secretary, since 1980, the Iran hostage crisis and the unsuccessful attempt to rescue them, there have been some 12 military actions by our country, ranging all the way from the Achille Lauro hijacker incident to Desert Storm, as you know, and they range—I venture to say that none of them were predictable.
Secretary RUMSFELD. None were what?
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Mr. SKELTON. None of them were predictable. None of them could have been anticipated. I think that is what we need to look forward to in the days ahead.
So I understand it—I am sorry to keep going back to it, but I feel that I must. As I understand it, we will have your recommendations on the 27th—am I correct—for the budget.
Secretary RUMSFELD. Mr. Congressman, I cannot make that promise. I can tell you the following. I met with the President last night. I met with the President this morning. He has made a decision, I believe, and it now needs to be sorted through. What next has to happen is the Department of Defense has to take that number, allocate it, work with the services so it is a rational allocation, get it back over to the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) tomorrow. They then have to prepare paperwork and get it up to you, the Good Lord willing, by the 27th, in which case I could testify on the 28th, but it is out of my control.
Mr. SKELTON. I understand. To go on, then, the new approach to deterrence that will constitute the new strategy will then follow in six to eight weeks. Am I correct?
Secretary RUMSFELD. The what, that will constitute the new strategy?
Mr. SKELTON. The new strategy that you will put forward will be some six to eight weeks thereafter. Am I correct?
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Secretary RUMSFELD. The QDR process is started. It should end in September, and out of it will come the bill for the 2003 budget which will be presented in January.
Mr. SKELTON. Got it. Thank you.
I only have one further comment or question. In your prepared testimony, you state that we are short a division. I am sure that you mean an Army division. To bolster that, in 1995 before all of our forces were deployed in the Balkans or even in Kosovo, there was testimony here that the Army should have been at 520,000. So I think that you may very well be on solid ground in that case.
I have no further questions. Thank you.
The CHAIRMAN. Thank you. The Chair recognizes the gentleman from South Carolina for three minutes.
Mr. SPENCE. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. And thank both of you for being here today.
Mr. Secretary, I read your complete statement. It is a very good statement.
Secretary RUMSFELD. Thank you.
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Mr. SPENCE. I want to commend you on it. You are very realistic in what you say, and relative to the QDR, I don't have a question because we haven't decided anything, as you have said.
I would just like to have a comment. The QDR is supposed to look at the future threats that we face and recommend a strategy and—a force to meet that threat—those threats. Sometimes in the past, it has been budget driven. They have assumed a certain budget we think we can afford, and they have built the force to meet the budget rather than the threat.
The two-MTW war strategy, as you have pointed out, we have not had a very good track record in predicting threats and wars. And you named a few of them: Korea, Vietnam and Iraq. In predicting the future, who can say, with that track record?
I would suggest that Korea and Iraq, around the Persian Gulf, are still the two preeminent threats we face in the world today. There is no question about it.
I think that from the standpoint of changing the strategy, the message to the world—our friends and allies especially—would not be good. To them, anything less than the two major theater war strategy is a no-war strategy.
To the people in southeast Asia, are they going to think that you are going to concentrate on somewhere else? The people in Europe are going to think the same thing. Our friends and allies will not gain any comfort from that, I can imagine. No matter how you word it or anything else, that is the message.
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Right now the two-war strategy means we are a superpower. As someone said, we are the big man on the block. If we change it, we confuse a lot of people, our friends and allies. Can you just respond?
Secretary RUMSFELD. Congressman, I hear what you say, and let me see if I can put some balance into how we are looking at it. The deterrent is critically important, as your comments suggested. It is important to balance the risks of the current strategy against the importance of preparing for the future, and to the extent we fail to do the latter because we are driven by the present, there is a risk that we will weaken the deterrent and become vulnerable to emerging threats that would in that instance weaken the deterrent from the standpoint of those emerging threats.
It is not an easy question. I should say that the strategy and the force-sizing approach or construct has been changed on any number of occasions since World War II. This would only be one incrementally different adjustment to the construct, and yet I certainly agree we have to be very careful that what we substitute is better than what we have. Thank you, sir.
The CHAIRMAN. The Chair recognizes Mr. Spratt for three minutes.
Mr. SPRATT. Mr. Secretary, I have twice before, once in this session and yesterday morning at breakfast when you kindly accommodated us, expressed my concern, and sincere concern, about whether or not we can accommodate in the budget that Congress has passed the spending level that I think you are likely to recommend, because I take it your process right now really isn't looking at the budget. You primarily and almost exclusively are looking at defense, what is needed. Then you will be concerned with how it gets fit in the budget. But right now you are looking at defense and defense alone.
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Just to repeat what I have said before—and it is a big concern—there is a bottom line next year, but it is only because of an artificial shift of tax payment on the 15th has been shifted to October the 1st. After that, there is hardly any bottom line between now and 2007 at all in the near term, hardly anything at all left under the budget we have passed, unless you want to dig into the lockbox—Social Security and Medicare, which we have sort of sanctified over the last several years and said we would not use in the future to fund spending, we would use it only for debt reduction.
How do we get ourselves around this problem?
Secretary RUMSFELD. Mr. Congressman, that is—needless to say—is above my pay grade. You are right. The Congress and the executive branch have arrived at a point where there is a tension on spending, and the fact is that the tax bill was accelerated and its effective date changed the numbers, not in a nontrivial way; quite significantly, as I recall.
The second thing we have is, of course, a periodic forecast as to what revenues are going to be, and that changes the picture. All I can do and all we can do in the Pentagon is to do our best to look out, make a judgment on strategy, make a recommendation to the President and the Congress, and then at some point get a number from the Congress and the President as to what we have to work with, and then sit down and balance the risks and make the best possible judgments we can make.
There is one other thing we can do, and that is to try to find ways to save money and have a healthy respect for the taxpayers' dollars. There is no question but that if we could be freed up of a lot of the restrictions and inhibitions and prohibitions that are in this gigantic piece of legislation that comes out of the Congress every year—from when I was here before, it was 50, 60 pages, now it is up to 900 pages. And if we could fashion some way to come to agreement with the Congress on a Freedom to Manage Act, if you will, an ability to give us a crack at trying to run the place, like you would in the normal order of things, and make some decisions about combining things that are duplicated and closing things that need to be closed and not wasting money, and privatizing some things that could be better run in the private sector, I think we could save some real money.
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Mr. SPRATT. Will you make these recommendations?
Secretary RUMSFELD. You bet.
Mr. SPRATT. As part of the QDR?
Secretary RUMSFELD. Probably not part of the QDR, but probably in connection with—later this year, certainly.
The CHAIRMAN. The gentleman from California, Mr. Hunter, is recognized for three minutes.
Mr. HUNTER. Mr. Chairman, I will defer to the end.
The CHAIRMAN. Thank you.
Mr. Reyes—oh, no; pardon me. The gentleman from Texas, Mr. Ortiz, is recognized for three minutes.
Mr. ORTIZ. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. And we certainly want to welcome our witnesses today.
Mr. Secretary, at the end of your statement, you say that the current strategy is not working, yet the United States is at peace and more countries are choosing to follow our democratic example. And we have no true peer competitor, and I think that was proven in the Persian Gulf War. In what way do you believe that the strategy is not working? Maybe you can explain it a little bit more than—.
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Secretary RUMSFELD. Yes—yes, sir. You are right. I mean, we are so fortunate to be living in a relatively peaceful world, a relatively stable world where people increasingly are living in freer political and economic systems, and the underpinning of that is, importantly, the contribution that the United States Armed Forces make to peace and stability in the world. It is critically important.
Now, why do I say it is not working? Not because it has not effectively deterred; it has. It hasn't deterred in Kosovo. It hasn't deterred a lot of things, but it has created a basic deterrent that has been generally good.
The reason it is not working, I would say, is because we have not funded it adequately. We have a very stressful set of requirements. We have the two major regional conflicts, and then we layer on top of it opposed interventions, coercive campaigns, humanitarian interventions, peace accord implementations, follow-on peace operations, interpositional peacekeepings, foreign humanitarian assistance, domestic disaster relief, consequence management, no-fly zones, maritime intercept operations, counterdrugs, noncombatant evacuations, shows of force, strikes; so many things, that we end up today our infrastructure, best practices, and business 67 years recapitalization.
The Armed Forces today, housing all types of facilities, hangers, buildings, everything, we are recapitalizing at the rate of 198 years. We are so far off best practices, it is like having a leak in this roof and not fixing it year after year after year, and pretty soon you have got to fix the benches and the chairs and the floor and the carpet.
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We are way off. We have not done, in my view—we don't have adequate airlift, General Shelton can speak to this, to meet the two major regional conflicts.
We see readiness declining because of the stressfulness. We end up with troops in Bosnia, which is the decision of the United States Government, and then we turn around and call the Third Infantry Division not ready for the major regional conflict because they are one day short of training. They have got 28 days of training instead of 29 days, because they were doing exactly what the United States of America asked them to do.
We need to get balance back into the personnel tempo and the operational tempo, and I think be able to size our forces, not just for major regional conflict, but for some lesser conflicts and for the kinds of things we are actually engaged in; but, in addition, make investments for the future.
Mr. ORTIZ. That is it.
The CHAIRMAN. That is your time.
Mr. ORTIZ. Thank you. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
The CHAIRMAN. The gentleman from Pennsylvania, Mr. Weldon, is recognized for three minutes.
Mr. WELDON. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Mr. Secretary, General, thank you for being here. I was very pleased with the recent Bush-Putin summit and the direction that we are taking with Russia, but I think it is time to set the record straight relative to Russia on missile defense.
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Mr. Secretary, a year ago I went with Secretary Cohen to Moscow to meet with the Russian Defense Ministry, and in those meetings they were very excited about the possibility of working with us. Then the fall came, and I think President Putin saw a chance that he thought could divide a wedge between us and Europe by claiming that America didn't want to cooperate with Russia.
When I went to Moscow three months ago, I talked to you before I went on Air Force One and asked you, what could I tell the Russians, and you said to me, Congressman, tell them we are still waiting for their response to our question to work together on missile defense. I called General Kadis the next day and asked him the same question. He said exactly the same thing that you did: Tell them we are still waiting, Congressman, for their answer that we have offered to them to work together.
Here we are in June. Is it not still the policy of the United States that we are waiting for the Russians to respond to our offer to work together with them on missile defense?
Secretary RUMSFELD. I think how I would phrase it today is that as a result of President Bush's meeting with President Putin, they discussed and agreed that they would put together some working groups, Secretary Powell and his counterpart, Defense Minister Ivanov, me and probably Secretary O'Neil and his counterpart, and get a process going.
In the case of the defense side, you are quite right. It is to find a framework that will enable us to get beyond the treaty in a way that we can do the kind of testing that we need to do and discuss a range of issues, including missile defense. And we are in the process of thinking through how we might get from where we are today, with the meeting just having ended, to where we think we want to go.
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Mr. WELDON. But it is clearly not our policy to go it alone. We have reached out to Russia.
Secretary RUMSFELD. There is no question. In fact, there used to be, as you point out, working groups that met frequently and were discontinued for some reason.
Mr. WELDON. When they were stopped in 1993.
Thank you, Mr. Secretary; that is all.
The CHAIRMAN. The gentleman from Arkansas, Dr. Snyder.
Mr. SNYDER. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I just want to touch on three quick points, if I might, Mr. Secretary and General Shelton, and maybe ask a more formal question.
First of all, I didn't see anything in your report— I assumed it is going to be coming in your six- to eight-week framework—about base closings. But a few weeks ago I did file a bill to deal with base closure that I hope you all are looking at. It does have as part of the Commission's responsibility to reach a threshold decision about do they think, for military necessity reasons, there needs to be another round of base closure, which may help the politics of getting a base closure to the Congress. Have you reached a conclusion yet about—that we need another round of base closure?
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Secretary RUMSFELD. Well, there is no question but that the President of the United States favors a base closure approach. Most people you talk to who are knowledgeable about it believe we are carrying something like 20 to 25 percent more base structure than we need for our force structure. Do you want to comment on that, General Shelton?
General SHELTON. I would just add, Mr. Secretary, that since the 1990-1991 time frame, we have taken the force structure down about 40 percent but only about 26 percent on the facilities. We think it is time to go back and look at all of our installations, our facilities, and try to identify where we have got excess capacity, which we know we have in various and sundry places. That is money that can be turned in to help pay some of the bills that the Secretary has just mentioned, in terms of recapitalization of the force, fixing the infrastructure, et cetera.
The last figure I saw said that—in the previous Base Realignment and Closure Commission (BRACC) rounds—today we have saved about $15 billion; and that the return per year now, based on our previous BRACC rounds, was about $6 billion. So whatever we want to call it, it appears to become more efficient; and not carrying the excess structure would help us with our modernization, recapitalization program.
Mr. SNYDER. Mr. Secretary, another conversation, when you met with some of the committee members, you had mentioned the problem of having 905 reports that the Department of Defense (DOD) and the military have to make to this Congress. We have verbally requested to get a list of those 905 reports. My guess is that every member of the committee would like to have a list of that. If you could provide that to us, maybe we could help clean up some of that.
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[The information referred to can be found in the Appendix.]
Secretary RUMSFELD. Good. We will do it.
Mr. SNYDER. The third point I wanted to make is through your report and the comments that you make, I hope we don't lose sight of the importance of the Diplomatic Corps and a well-funded State Department as part of our national security.
I had experience in Sierra Leone when I was there in April, you know, which we have troops there helping with training. Well, at the same time that we are trying to stabilize that government—and consider Charles Taylor in Liberia, one of the pariahs in the world—the Taiwanese leadership is talking about how he is a model for democracy in Africa. Well, we do a lot for the Taiwanese Government, and I hope that we are communicating enough that we don't lose sight of the potential for our military and Diplomatic Corps working together on solving some of these problems.
Thank you for being here.
Secretary RUMSFELD. Thank you, sir.
The CHAIRMAN. The gentleman from Colorado, Mr. Hefley, is recognized for three minutes, please.
Mr. HEFLEY. Thank you, and thank you both for being here. Mr. Secretary, the Air Force, it seems, is moving from a bomber-centric to a fighter-centric force. What are your thoughts on these competing strategies? Will your review call for an air superiority strategy to include more fighters, a return to the bomber role more?
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And in light of that, you know, I hate, as you have indicated—you do, too, I would think—unnecessary duplication in government. I mean, it is a waste, and you don't want to do it. So I raise the question. In 1947, the Army gave up its air force, except for—its fixed-wing air force. But the Navy didn't give up its fixed wing air force. The Marine Corps didn't give up its fixed wing air force. So I raise the question: Do we need so many air forces in our defense structure, or would a single Air Force work better? So if you would speak to that, I would appreciate it.
Secretary RUMSFELD. Well, with respect to the bomber-centric, fighter-centric question, that is something that the QDR will be addressing. We have been dealing at the strategy level. It now is engaging that subject. I don't know that I would characterize it as a switch from bomber-centric to fighter-centric myself, and I haven't seen anything to suggest that. But with—wow, this is exciting in here.
General SHELTON. Sir, if I could just add, from a joint warfighting perspective, I think the key force—the key force is to achieve balance. In the fighter force, we want to make sure that we maintain our air-to-air superiority. We haven't had troops attack in over 50 years now from other air forces whenever our troops have been on the ground. We, of course, need to have the capability to deliver in world class minor close-air support.
The bombers, on the other hand, are critical elements for us, as we saw during Allied Force, even those that took off down in the great State of Missouri and flew directly into the combat zone and came back recovered. So maintaining the proper balance that matches up with our warfighting capabilities that allows us to carry out the strategy is what is important to us. And so all of that, as the Secretary said, will be a part of what is looked at as a part of the Quadrennial Defense Review.
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Mr. HEFLEY. But are you looking at all at the idea of maybe—are you looking at all at the possibility of merging some of those air forces, or is that too sacred ground for us even to talk about?
General SHELTON. I believe that some of the panels that—that one of the panels at least took a look at that, and that will feed into the QDR. Whether or not that is going to be a focus of the group, I can't tell you at this time. I will get back to you for the record.
[The information referred to can be found in the Appendix.]
Mr. HEFLEY. All right. Thank you, sir.
The CHAIRMAN. Let me say to the members that this is a 15-minute Sanders' amendment vote. There will be two more 5-minute votes. It is the intention of the Chair to take two more members, and we will have to take a break for about 15, 20 minutes, 25 minutes probably.
The Chair recognizes Mr. Andrews.
Mr. ANDREWS. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Thank you, General. Thank you, Secretary, for your time. Mr. Secretary, I want to follow up on your dialogue with Mr. Spratt. And if I understand it correctly, your testimony is the QDR is strategy driven and not budget driven. Is that correct?
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Secretary RUMSFELD. We haven't even had a budget number for the QDR.
Mr. ANDREWS. And after the QDR is made public and justified and discussed, we will have something to compare it against. Specifically the—we do, as you know, operate under the confines of budget resolution. The House enacted a budget—the Senate enacted a budget resolution, which is now guiding us, that for the next 10 years contemplates spending $3.65 trillion in the defense category, which for the record, by the way, is $32 billion less than the placeholder number that you sent over earlier this year.
Here is what I am interested in. Will you make available to us an analysis of the difference between the needs which are compelled by the QDR and that 10-year number that we are presently constrained under after the QDR is made available? Will you do that for us?
Secretary RUMSFELD. I don't know. I think that characterizing the QDR as producing needs is debatable in this sense: Let us say you have a major regional conflict and you are sizing your force to it, and therefore you need requirements to do it. You have options with respect to that conflict. One option is to defeat the aggression at the line, if you will. Another is to defeat the aggression and then go to the capital and have a regime change, a vastly more stressing and more expensive scenario that requires quite different capabilities, and therefore the requirements are much greater. There are so many of those factors, that I think it is unlikely that you would find the QDR kicking out some sort of a simple set of predictable requirements because of the variables that are there.
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Mr. ANDREWS. But I am assuming, Mr. Secretary, there are certain building blocks—.
Secretary RUMSFELD. There are.
Mr. ANDREWS. —of achieving the QDR that we can identify and we can tie some numbers to those. Wouldn't that be right?
Secretary RUMSFELD. There are.
Mr. ANDREWS. Could you commit to giving us some kind of range of price of those building blocks after the QDR is published and justified?
Secretary RUMSFELD. Let me tell you the difficulty. Let us say you have a major regional conflict and you can size for that and you can do what you just asked. And let us say you have something less than that, where you repel it but don't go for a regime change until their major regional conflict here is over, for example. And let us say simultaneously you are still in Bosnia.
Mr. ANDREWS. Yeah.
Secretary RUMSFELD. And then you have a humanitarian excursion; there is a hurricane in some country. And then there is a noncombatant evacuation in another country. And the question is, what are those lesser contingencies? How many of them are there? You can't give a total number, but you could say if this was going on, you might be able to do two of those and one of these. But if less than that is going on, you can do three of those and four of these. And, therefore, I think getting to what you want is probably next to impossible, because of the number of variables.
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Mr. ANDREWS. My time is up. I thank you, Mr. Secretary.
Secretary RUMSFELD. But I would be glad to try to size those pieces for you.
Mr. Andrews. We would look forward to that. And I thank you.
The CHAIRMAN. We will recess in a moment, after Mr. McHugh. When we get back, it will be Mr. Saxton, Mr. Hill, Mr. Bartlett and then Mrs. Davis.
Mr. MCHUGH. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
Gentlemen, like all others, I appreciate your being here. Let me just, under the heading of unsolicited advice, speak as someone who has had grave concerns about future BRACC rounds. Without getting into the details of those concerns, I would say respectfully that if indeed we are overcapacity in structures and in infrastructure, then it would be very important to persuade someone such as myself to have a BRACC proposal that identifies true excess; that we don't go through the crapshoot of previous BRACC rounds, where decisions are being made by folks who often have absolutely no exposure to military experience as to, well, two Training and Doctrine Commands (TRADOCs) equal a maneuver base; how many dollars can we squeeze out of saving the closing of four depots versus three other facilities? That should not be the core focus of a BRACC round.
If we have excess infrastructure, it should be identified and made a part of that proposal so that whatever facilities we have that are essential are not put onto the list, and that is what we have experienced in the past. Just a word of friendly advice.
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With respect to the two-MTW, I think it has been a valuable policy, and I think not just because of the likelihood of those occurring but, frankly, for the deterrent effect of saying to those who might wish us ill if we are involved somewhere, don't try your little act, because we are fully prepared and capable of reacting to it.
But, Mr. Secretary, I have read your statement very carefully, and I agree with the Chairman emeritus. It is a good statement, and I commend you—.
Secretary RUMSFELD. Thank you.
Mr. MCHUGH. —for the breadth and the depth of it, and I can find very little that I would even begin to disagree with as an exercise that I think is necessary. And I am anxiously looking forward to the results.
But I would also say about the two-MTW, frankly, it is great on paper, but it doesn't work today, for the simple fact that we are not resourced to carry it out.
Speaking only as a member of this committee, and having visited the regions and talked to others who were part of that process, I am not so sure we could do a Desert Storm today, let alone a real two-MTW. I think eventually because of the courage of the men and women in American uniform, we would prevail, but we would be hard-pressed to do it.
I am concerned about force and end strength. Mr. Secretary, you mentioned the C–4 (readiness) rating. Also the Tenth Mountain Division received a C–4 rating because they were deployed in Bosnia and because of that very fact, were unable to meet their training requirements. Personnel tempo (PERSTEMPO), operational tempo (OPTEMPO) that you referred to, Mr. Secretary, all comes down to one thing, and that is having enough men and women in the Armed Forces, and I will say particularly the United States Army, to carry out the many, many, many things we are asking them increasingly to do.
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So, just because we do have to go vote, I would again respectfully encourage you to keep that force structure and end strength reality in mind as you go forward. The talk persists about two more divisions out of the end strength of the Army. That is a very troubling perspective. You tried to reassure us before, Mr. Secretary, I thank you for that. I did sleep better the night after, and I would like to sleep comfortably a few nights in the future. So I wish you well in the exercise. I think it is a very, very worthy one, and like all others, I look forward to working with you, sir.
Secretary RUMSFELD. Thank you very much.
Mr. MCHUGH. And you, too, General.
The CHAIRMAN. Six minutes left on this vote. Mr. Secretary, it is going to be necessary we stand in recess for hopefully no longer than 20 minutes.
Secretary RUMSFELD. I will be here. Thank you, sir.
The CHAIRMAN. The meeting will please come to order. The Chair recognizes the gentleman from Indiana, Mr. Hill, for three minutes.
Mr. HILL. Thank you, Mr. Chairman and Mr. Secretary, thank you for being here today. It was nice to get to know you here for the last couple of minutes.
During the campaign, President Bush talked a great deal about nuclear materials that can't be found in Russia and that he was going to press for an accurate inventory. There has recently a been task force led by Howard Baker and Lloyd Cutler that published a report on the need to secure weapons, materials and knowhow, declaring it the most urgent unmet national security threat to the United States. But I didn't hear you talking too much about it. Is this a priority of the administration?
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Secretary RUMSFELD. It is. It has not been a priority for me in my particular post. Just to answer very directly, I have been spending a lot of time on the nuclear issue. I have probably had six or seven meetings, lasting four or five hours each, over the last few weeks on the subject of our nuclear offensive forces and also on the subject of the safety and reliability of our stockpile. I am going to assume that the subject that you raise is one that the State Department has been working on, and I suppose it relates to the Nunn-Luger legislation. And that has not been something, to my knowledge—and maybe you know, General—but not to my knowledge—the Pentagon—I have not been personally involved. Do you know?
General SHELTON. No, sir. We have been, of course, very much in favor of the Nunn-Lugar funds and the program that is ongoing there. I also know that the Energy Department has made several visits and looked at the status of the weapons you are referring to. We have had the commander in chief of Strategic Command that has visited there and taken a look also at many of their key facilities. It is an area of concern.
Mr. HILL. The reason why I raise it is because this issue of national missile defense seems to take a priority in terms of message development when there is a significant threat here that an accident could happen. And I guess the only thing I would want to say is that I hope the administration—if you are that person, fine; if the State, fine, too—but I hope the administration would emphasize how important this issue is more.
Secretary RUMSFELD. Well, thank you, Congressman Hill. I think you are right that there is no question that Russia today is a threat—is not a threat of a tank war in northern Europe. It is not a threat of a nuclear exchange with the United States. It is a threat as a proliferator of loose technologies, loose materials. And it is a serious one.
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Mr. HILL. Thank you. And I also appreciate your candor in your answer, too, Mr. Secretary.
The CHAIRMAN. The gentleman from New Jersey, Mr. Saxton, is recognized.
Mr. SAXTON. Mr. Secretary, thank you for being with us. Mr. Secretary we have read press accounts of the force structure change that may be your recommendation six or eight weeks from now. And obviously it has gotten our attention and we certainly want to work with you and work through those really important issues.
I am reminded that during the first Bush administration—I was actually reminded yesterday that during the first Bush administration, then-Secretary Cheney said words to this effect: He said, strategy must not be based on managing the next crisis. Our force structure should be a deterrent in nature and thereby help us shape history. I assume we all still agree with that. The important thing is that strategy, whatever our strategy is and whatever our force structure looks like, that it is resourced properly. And if, as you say, our current strategy is not working, we might not pin the blame totally on the structure of having the ability to face two regional conflicts at the same time but, rather we might suggest instead that lack of resources might be the primary reason. Would you agree with that?
Secretary RUMSFELD. There is no question but that you could make the case that a lack of resources for that strategy is part of the difficulty. Maybe I shouldn't have said it is not working. That suggests that the force-sizing construct is not doing what it is supposed to do. The reason I said it—and on reflection I probably ought to find a better way to say it—the reality is we are doing all of these things that I mentioned, the noncombative evacuations, the Kosovos, the Bosnias. We are training people right now in Senegal and Ghana for—Nigerian troops for work in Sierra Leone. We were in Haiti. We have done Panama and so many different things.
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I think the question is we need to have a much better understanding of the stress that puts on the forces. We need to have a much better understanding that if we are going to do those things, some or all, that we have got to find a way to properly characterize the readiness of the forces that are supposed to be ready to fight a major regional conflict, and not simply say that their readiness is down in the dumps when, in fact, they are perfectly ready to do what they are doing in Bosnia.
And so ''not working'' is not a good phrase. I think a better way to say it is the way I said it earlier, is that we simply need to look and see if we can find a better way to characterize how we want to structure our force and we have to find a way to elevate the risks that need to compete with each other, the current operational risk to meet war plans, the risks about not investing in the future.
Mr. SAXTON. Mr. Chairman, if I may, your intent is not necessarily to recommend a smaller force, but rather to reconfigure the current force in a way that makes it more effective operationally.
Secretary RUMSFELD. Exactly. We have not addressed the force structure size, the size of the force. At least not in any of our meetings we haven't.
General SHELTON. No, sir; no, we have not.
Secretary RUMSFELD. So what you are reading in the newspapers is speculation.
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The CHAIRMAN. The gentleman from Texas, Mr. Reyes, is recognized for three minutes.
Mr. REYES. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I was interested in the response you gave to Mr. Spratt that you have indicated that you intend to pay for increasing the DOD budget by contracting out more. It has been my experience in my previous career that contracting out doesn't always pan out.In the case of the border problem, as one example, an oil change went from $4 to about $20. And that was if we did not use after-hours services from the contractor.
I am curious, Mr. Secretary. How can you assure us that you will ensure that you are not, number one, going to contract out inherently the kind of things that the government is obligated to do, that you know, given the national defense of the country? And second, it has been our experience that when you factor in with the A-76 program a savings of 20 percent, that does not always materialize. We have had testimony, we have had evidence here where even when you factor in a 20 percent savings, those savings never materialize. In some cases, they are less than 10 percent. That is a real concern for a number of us on the committee.
Secretary RUMSFELD. Mr. Congressman, there are so many different elements to this that it is not possible for me to give you an overall answer. Let me say this. My impression, and I am always available to get better educated, but my impression at the moment is that this committee and the committee in the Senate have encouraged, and in fact the Pentagon has benefited from the privatization of some military housing, and that the result has been they have been able to get more units, better units, more modern units, faster for the men and women of the armed services than had been the case previously.
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The Marines. If I am not mistaken, General Shelton, have now contracted out an awful lot of their mess work.
General SHELTON. Yes, sir, they have.
Secretary RUMSFELD. And I know, for example, in Bosnia they contracted out the mess responsibility, and we haven't been using men and women in the Armed Forces to do it.
Now, someone can say, can I guarantee you that it is cheaper or better? All we can do is to in each instance ask that question and try to do the best job possible. Take check writing. I don't consider check writing, if you have got hundreds and hundreds of thousands of human beings who are going to get a check, I don't consider that a core competence of the Army, Navy, Air Force or Marines. And we have got a choice. We can have that done internally or we can say, wait a minute, there are people who know how to do this a lot better than we do. Let's let them write the checks.
So we do not have the answers to all of these things. What we are going to do is proceed down the road and see if we can find things that do not require men and women in uniform.
Mr. REYES. But you do agree that not everything can be contracted out.
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Secretary RUMSFELD. Of course not, absolutely not. There are certain things that you simply must have if you are going to have an armed services.
General SHELTON. One of the key criteria, Congressman, when we look at what can be contracted out, is to make sure we preserve the Cold War fighting capability. If it has got to be deployable, if it has got to be warfighters that do it, or if it has to go into a hostile environment, that is one of the key considerations before you contract it out. But, like the Secretary said, and I have had personal experience as an installation commander, there are tremendous things there that can save us in Defense a lot of money, that can provide just as good or better service in some cases, and that is what we ought to be shooting for, to save the taxpayers' dollars in those areas where a core warfighting competency is not required.
The CHAIRMAN. Mr. Bartlett is recognized for three minutes.
Mr. BARTLETT. Thank you very much. Mr. Secretary, we are glad you are on board. Thank you very much for volunteering for a second tour. Thank you.
Let me read from the American Legion magazine of January 2000. The question is to George W. Bush, a candidate for the Presidency.
Question: What are your views on gender-integrated basic training?
The answer: The experts tell me that we ought to have separate basic training facilities. I think women in the military have an important and good role, that the people who study the issue tell me that the most effective training would be to have the genders separated.
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Then, nine months later, in an article by Bill Gertz and Rowan Scarborough in The Washington Times on September 8 of 2000, there is the following:
''Look for George W. Bush, should he win the White House, to roll back the practice of training men and women recruits in the same units and barracks. One of Mr. Bush's closest national security advisors is telling associates that as Commander in Chief, Mr. Bush will likely overrule the top brass and order them to separate the sexes, at least in the initial weeks of basic training. His advisors are frequently citing the 11-to-nothing recommendations of a commission lead by former Senator Nancy Kassebaum Baker.
''The panel, appointed by Defense Secretary William Cohen, unanimously urged the Pentagon to separate the sexes at the small unit level and at different barracks. His advisors point out that the commission's membership was politically diverse, comprised of men, women, academics, bureaucrats, and ex-military people.''
I want to commend the President for his wisdom in choosing the right advisors and listening to his counsel. On February 22 I wrote you a letter addressing this subject, and you very kindly responded in six short days, on February 28, saying that you would ask the staff to address this request and would get back to us as soon as possible. Rather, sir, than ask you for your answer in this forum, can I have your commitment that we can meet shortly to discuss this issue personally?
Secretary RUMSFELD. You bet. We recently—I have been flying solo at the Department of Defense for the first three or four months and finally we got Paul Wolfowitz down there. Tomorrow I swear in the new Under Secretary for Personnel and Readiness, David Chu. That is the individual who would be addressing that. Although, I would just say, my recollection is that that issue is very much a service issue, and each of the services does it in their own way, and there is not a uniform policy for the Department. But, notwithstanding that response, I would be delighted to visit, and I will bring David Chu along.
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Mr. BARTLETT. Thank you very much.
The CHAIRMAN. The Secretary has agreed to say here until 4:45. Mr. Armey is going to try to roll the votes for us so we should get to everyone.
The gentlelady from California, Mrs. Davis.
Mrs. DAVIS OF CALIFORNIA. Thank you, Mr. Secretary. You mention people as an investment. Often, in fact, people are listed first on that particular list, and so I am wondering how you will address the quality-of-life issues and their associated costs within the QDR process.
I think we all recognize that many quality-of-life issues involve infrastructure, so I would be very interested in knowing specifically if you can, with some specifics, how you are going to do that.
Secretary RUMSFELD. If you go to the infrastructure issue, which is one of the serious ones that affect the quality of life for the men and women in the armed services, and if you recall my earlier comment that the best practices is about recapitalization in 67 years and we're up at 192 and 198 or something, it is clear that we are not investing as we should. That would certainly be one of the things we need to do, is to get on a trajectory so that at least within some period of time we will be able to do a responsible job.
I mean, I went down to the Third Infantry Division and looked at the curled lead paint on the building, and the asbestos buildings, and all of the torturous rules and regulations about whether or not you could bulldoze it or whether or not you could renovate it, or whether or not you could build a new one. Everyone is all tangled up as to what they can do, and when. We need to clear up the lines of responsibility and get ourselves on a path of fixing that.
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Mrs. DAVIS OF CALIFORNIA. May I, Mr. Chairman, just follow up? In setting the priorities, then, and I understand how important these issues are to you, do you think there is going to be a discussion about how we are balancing those against other needs?
Secretary RUMSFELD. That is exactly what we think happens in the Quadrennial Defense Review which Congress has required is the balancing of these, those. And then we will make a recommendation coming out of that in the buildup for the 2003 budget. We will go to the Office of Management and Budget, we will argue with them—correction—we will discuss with them, we will have a very measured discussion, and then we will go to the President and get a decision, and then we will go up to the Congress, and the Congress will dispose.
Mrs. DAVIS OF CALIFORNIA. Thank you. If you could help run us through that process after you make it that would be very helpful. Thank you.
Secretary RUMSFELD. Thank you.
The CHAIRMAN. The Chair recognizes the gentleman from Texas, Mr. Thornberry.
Mr. THORNBERRY. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Mr. Secretary, I just want to say at the beginning that I appreciate the time and effort that you have devoted to taking a little time to stop, study, and think about the world. The incentive on both sides of the river is to hurry through, tinker a little bit on the edges, but get something done, keep the process going.
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I think the world is changing, has changed enough that taking a little time to think about and study where we are makes some sense. And I am very struck by your fifth major conclusion there about ''By its very nature, military planning focuses on the short term.''
I would like to ask you to comment on three elements that help us focus not on the short term, but on the longer term. One is innovative thinking about tactics and doctrine. You mention Blitzkrieg. A lot of writers think the French tanks were better than the German tanks when the war broke out. The difference was how you use them. And encouraging innovation in a military culture which does not necessarily make innovation easy, it seems to me to be a key thing to strive for but easy to achieve.
Second, experimentation. It seems to me experimentation has been the critical element for every period of major military innovation, yet experimentation these days is primarily just testing systems. It is not really finding new information. And I am interested in joint experimentation, which has received a paltry amount of funding over the past few years.
Third, is how do we have a voice for the future in resource decisions, because you sit around a table and each of the services advocates their service budgets. You have the Commander in Chiefs (CINCs) that are interested in the immediate warfighting needs that they have. Who is the voice, the CINC, if you will, for the future as we try to implement a strategy. It is good to have a strategy down on paper, but where the rubber meets the road it is the resource decisions to really put into it.
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How do we accomplish that?
Secretary RUMSFELD. Congressman, I wish I knew the answer. You are exactly on the mark. The General and I have talked about this weekly for the last five months. We are determined to have the QDR process look at some models of, for example joint task forces, experimentation, exercises, how we ought to be doing exercises. And there is no question about that if you do that, if you spend money on experimentation, if you spend money on exercises, if you spend money to stand up a joint task force for some purpose, that money isn't being spent on something else; and that is the tension.
So when you say where is the voice for innovation and experimentation, it has been in some of the war colleges. You correct me if I am wrong now. I would say the General has been one the of voices. The Joint Forces Command has been one of the voices down in Norfolk. Andy Marshal in the Net Assessment Office has been one of the voices. And there is, as you suggest, natural resistance to it.
If I were a CINC and you told me to come up with war plans for all of these five possible eventualities in my area of responsibility, I would be doing exactly the same thing that they're doing. I would be saying I need the money for this, I need the money for that. I want to get belts and suspenders, and I am darned if I am going to not be able to execute my war plan. And you start bothering me with innovation, and tomorrow and the next day—these fellows are in their jobs for what, 24 months, 36 at the most?
General SHELTON. Thirty-six.
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Secretary RUMSFELD. Thirty-six. That is a long time. They are not looking 5 years out or 10 years out, and they shouldn't be. They're the ones we have to lean on. It takes someone like General Shelton and the Chairman and the Chiefs and the Secretary of Defense and the senior people and someone who is off on the side like Andy Marshall to force attention and be that voice. And we have got to do it.
The CHAIRMAN. Mrs. Davis of Virginia.
Mrs. DAVIS OF VIRGINIA. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. And thank you, Mr. Secretary and General Shelton, for being here today to answer questions.
I was wondering, Mr. Secretary, if you have any specific concern with regard to the needs of our shipbuilding industrial base and do you think that the QDR will take this into consideration in the important component in right-sizing our force?
Secretary RUMSFELD. The defense industrial base generally has difficulties. The number of companies has shrunk. The return on investment is modest. The sixth largest U.S. defense contractor is a foreign company. The amount of money they have and are reserving for innovative research and development is modest.
With respect to the shipbuilding, the QDR I suppose will address it. Maybe you know, General Shelton, but we are having a separate study on shipbuilding that Pete Aldridge, the Under Secretary for Acquisition, is chairing and it includes civilian and military personnel. He has advised me and the Navy, and the Navy knew it, that under the current shipbuilding level we are headed down to 220 ships. In other words, at a steady state if we keep building at the current level, we will be dropping down to 220. I don't know what the right number is. I don't know what the right mix is. That is what the Aldridge group is going to be looking at. I do know that 220 sounds wrong. And that is why we have asked Under Secretary Aldridge to do that.
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Do you want to say something on that, General. You keep a close watch on that.
General SHELTON. Sir, I think you have covered that aspect of it very well. That is an area of concern in many areas.
The Secretary commented on a couple places, other armies such as the ability to manufacture precision weapons. The length of time required is cause for concern for some of us, particularly in the warfighting business. But most of these areas are being addressed as part of the longer-range QDR process.
Mrs. DAVIS OF VIRGINIA. Let me ask real quick, will the shipbuilding study also include aircraft carriers?
Secretary RUMSFELD. All ships, sizes, and shapes.
The CHAIRMAN. The gentleman from Virginia, Mr. Schrock, is recognized.
Mr. SCHROCK. General, Secretary, thank you for being with us. I like very much what I read here. I have not read it in detail, but I can tell you I will. I hope if I have questions I can come to you folks with my thoughts on that and get some things answered.
I think of all the things I have heard here today, and I think we probably have asked you everything you could possibly be asked, of the comments made to you, I think what Mr. Thornberry said probably hits the nail on the head better than anything I have heard.
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Let me make a couple of observations that I noticed. I underlined a couple things here, things you want to do. You said, set us on a path to recover the investment shortfalls in people, morale, infrastructure, equipment and OPTEMPO sensors so we are able to attract and retain the talents needed for our modern force. This did not happen overnight. It will not be corrected overnight. We are an impatient people. We want things to happen now. Of course the longer we wait, the better off things will be when we finally get it, contrary to what we may read in the media. So I think we have to be patient.
Your last paragraph hit me more than anything else. You said, the greatest threat to our position today is complacency. Thankfully, Americans no longer wake up each morning and fret about the possibility of a thermonuclear exchange with the old Soviet Union. They look at the world and see peace, prosperity, and opportunity ahead of them. They are living in a dream if they think that is the case, because with rogue nations and terrorists out there and the leadership in China saying that war with the United States is inevitable, we better pay attention.
Sixty years ago this December, an incident happened in Hawaii that I pray to God will never happen again, because I think we were pretty much asleep. And I think what you are trying to do in a methodical way is probably the best way to do it.
I am as impatient as any human being on Earth and if you don't think so, ask my staff. But we have got to wait and make sure when we do this, we do it correctly. I look forward to you—I am really excited to come back here in a week or so, or two weeks, whenever you are ready, to see what you have to present at that time. Thank you.
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Secretary RUMSFELD. Good. Thank you very much.
The CHAIRMAN. The gentlelady from California, Mrs. Tauscher is recognized.
Mrs. TAUSCHER. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Mr. Secretary, General, how are you?
Mr. Secretary, can we shift to the nuclear weapons arsenal for a moment? What do you think is the appropriate number of active nuclear warheads?
Secretary RUMSFELD. I wish I knew. I had no idea when I started this process at the President's request several months ago that I would still be in it. And it is on a separate track. I have been meeting with the commander in chief at Strategic Command (STRATCOM) and with the members of joint staff and either the Chairman or the Vice Chairman or some civilian advisors, some folks who are interested from the National Security Council, as I say, for almost every Saturday morning for probably six, eight weeks, for three hours.
And I am a conservative person, and when I get ready to make a recommendation I am going to want to base it on having looked at every aspect of it and satisfied myself that the recommendation I make to the President is something that I can live with. And he is interested, he says, anxious for me to complete this. And I am, as well. Needless to say, personally, I am. But also because he is anxious, I am anxious. But I am simply not going to finish it until I have finished it.
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Mrs. TAUSCHER. Have you formed an opinion about the ratio or the numbers of weapons that we would have on high alert status? Is that part of this downloading that is happening?
Secretary RUMSFELD. Sure. We are looking at numbers, we are looking at types. We are looking at how we are arranged with respect to them. We are looking at what we think we might want to do with them. And we are looking at the present, and we have to look at the future because you have to deal not only with what you see today but what you might see down the road, which is a somewhat more complex set of problems, potential problems. You also have to anticipate possible combinations of countries.
Mrs. TAUSCHER. Right. I like your characterization of a portfolio of national security investments that come from Wall Street, too. Is part of this effort that you are embarked on, does it also include a look at where counter and nonproliferation investments fit into this portfolio, and how balanced it is and all how they tie together and all of that?
Secretary RUMSFELD. It has to. If you think about what we are doing, we are doing a Defense Strategy Review. Excuse me—at that point fits into a National Security Review, which Condoleeza Rice is working on and will be. There is a statute for that, too. I forget why she's required to do that. But we all feel like gerbils we get on the track every day and meet requirements. But she has a National Strategy Review which she has to produce, and this backs into it, and we have been staying closely connected because of that.
And it is in that context that, one, quite properly, you must look not at just the defense thing, but you have to look at the diplomatic side and the problems of proliferation and sanctions and how well they are working and how long they will work and what kinds of things they will and won't work on and will they work unilaterally as opposed to multilaterally, and the answer is not very well.
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Mrs. TAUSCHER. I am interested in making sure we have a balance especially in the research and development (R&D) for the counter and nonproliferation opportunities that we have, which is in a significant sense, a lot of stuff done at the national nuclear labs, two of which are in my district, by the way.
The CHAIRMAN. The gentleman from Maine, Mr. Allen, is recognized.
Mr. ALLEN. Thank you, Mr. Chairman, and thank you, Mr. Secretary and General Shelton, for being here. I have a comment and then, depending on time, one or two questions.
I take your point made by your recitation of history about the fact that we can be surprised at any time as events unfold. None of us have a working crystal ball. That said, I am not quite sure how alarmed I should be about future threats we cannot describe, from future adversaries we cannot name, and even how we deal with these kind of problems.
But I really want to talk for a moment about national missile defense. It strikes me that even the Pentagon, in an analysis, suggests that a weapon of mass destruction is more likely to be delivered to the United States by some means other than an inter-continental ballistic missile (ICBM). And last September, President Clinton decided to defer deployment of national missile defense because he concluded that considerations related to the threat and the state of technology and international security did not warrant it. Press reports suggest that you are seeking options for accelerated development by 2004, which is earlier than the existing Ballistic Missile Defense Organization (BMDO) objective.
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Now, since last September, North Korea has voluntarily agreed to extend their missile test moratorium through 2003, and now we have talks going on again between the North Koreans and the administration. Iran has reelected—will, by a large margin, a reformist president who is trying to move them in the direction of the West, or at least to have closer ties.
And my question is, in the last nine months, what evidence do you have that the threat either from Iran, North Korea, or some other country has changed enough to warrant an acceleration of national missile defense deployment?
Secretary RUMSFELD. First let me say that with respect to the administration's program on missile defense, we have concluded that there needs to be a spread, a range of research and development activities that look at a spectrum of possibilities for missile defense. If that is an acceleration, then it is an acceleration. I don't know. We have not talked about accelerating deployment because what we are doing is accelerating research and development so we can hopefully find some way that we can be comfortable with a system that merits deployment in as early a time frame as possible. That is not suggesting that we are, you know, tripping all over ourselves trying to do something before it is possible, which was kind of what the implication of that was.
The question you pose is a good one. And let me put it this way: The numbers I gave you in my testimony about the number of countries in 1972 to today who now have ballistic missiles—what did I say—it has gone from 6 to 28. The numbers that now have nuclear power capability, the ones in germ warfare, the ones in chemical warfare, the numbers of total ballistic missiles in the last period of five or six years in the world has gone up something like—I forget what is classified and what is not—but let's say in excess of 1,000 ballistic missiles in the world that now exist in countries that never had them before.
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Now what does all that say? It says that we are in a relaxed environment. There is proliferation. If somebody wanted these things, they can get them. It also says there are criminals that are trading with each other and selling them: selling technologies, selling systems integration, people selling actual entire missiles, selling the capability of developing and weaponizing germs.
Now, you are quite right. We could wake up tomorrow, just like we woke up and found that Iran went from the Shah of Iran to the Ayatollah, and wake up tomorrow and find out threat country X has suddenly become benign. They have decided to be nonmilitary and given away all of their weapons and merged with their neighbor, for the sake of argument. But that does not alter the threat at all. The numbers of countries being added are greater than the number of countries having these epiphanies that could conceivebly happen.
What does that mean? Am I saying to you that the threat is greater today than it was five years ago? You bet. There are many more countries that have these weapons, and there is also another characteristic. I hate to take so long because I know you are short on time. But democracies tend not to make war on each other. We say okay, nuclear powers in democracies, maybe we do not have to worry about them. So we do not worry about them. Then there are some that are not democracies. They have expansionist attitudes like the Soviet Union did, and we figure out a way to deal with that.
Now, the Soviet Union was run by a General Secretary of the Communist Party who was a dictator in effect. But he had a Politboro, he had a lot of constraints. He had a lot of things that buffered his decision-making. He was unlikely to act on a whim. Saddam Hussein is likely to act on a whim. Kim Jong-ll is more likely—they don't have Politboros, Congresses, free press, buffers, things that inhibit them. Saddam Hussein every year kills a few people just to remind everybody else that they should behave. He used gas on his own people.His sensibilities are not offended by the use of these things.
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Now, the comment somebody made is correct. It is entirely possible that a weapon of mass destruction can be delivered by a different method. And I agree and I am worried about it, and that is why the United States Government is spending more money on the terrorist issue than they are on the ballistic missile issue. Anyone who knows that they can not compete with us on armies, navies, air forces, is going to look for a way to compete that is assymetrical. Because there are multiple ways they can deal with us assymetrically does not mean we should not try to dissuade them from doing so across that spectrum, in my view.
Mr. ALLEN. Thank you.
The CHAIRMAN. The gentleman from Mississippi, Mr. Taylor, is recognized for three minutes.
Mr. TAYLOR. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
Mr. Secretary, thank you for coming over. And I want to apologize up front for my statement because you are probably not going to like it, because you are a nice guy, you really are. But I think I have got to get this off my chest.
Secretary RUMSFELD. Fair enough.
Mr. TAYLOR. On page 14, to quote the other gentleman, you say the greatest threat to our position today is complacency. If I was a potential foe of the United States out there looking, trying to build a case for my military and saying America is vulnerable, I would say they have over 900 30-year-old UH–1 Hueys in their inventory, and the President is saying tax cuts are more important than defense. The newest of their C–141s was built in 1972. The President is saying a tax cut is more important than defense. It is almost July and they haven't submitted the defense budget. The Chinese ram one of our airplanes, and we apologize and take it home in a crate.
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And then just last week—and I realize my colleagues last year voted on this, and I was in the minority, I thought they were wrong to call for the referendum—but the action last week saying we are going to shut down our only bombing range in the Atlantic I think is crazy. I have driven from the gate at Vieques to the impact area. It is eight miles. Last summer, the Puerto Rican National Guard dropped bombs in my district one mile from where some of my constituents live. For them to say we are somehow unfairly singling them out, Mr. Secretary, is crazy.
And I will take it a step further. I think the whole thing on Vieques, certainly there are some fishermen who would like to fish there. They have not been able to do so for the past 60 years. I understand that. I have a lot of fishermen, too. There are some folks who sold their property at 1940s prices that would like to get year 2000 prices for it. I understand that. But more than anything else, I think this is being driven by developers who want to get their hands on that 16 miles of beautiful waterfront property. I have nothing against developers but not at the sake of national defense. We are absolutely kidding ourselves if we think that we can go anywhere else and just start bombing a site without the environmentalists going crazy. I don't know of any other nation or state that is offering us an island to bomb. It is not a perfect situation, but it is the situation that exists, and I really think the President sent a horrible message on top of those other things that are happening, when he said we will shut down our only bombing range in the Atlantic.
Secretary RUMSFELD. It is critically important that the men and women in the Armed Forces get the proper training before they deploy into a war zone. And Vieques has been a place for many many years where that has taken place. It has the advantage of being basically unoccupied, as you point out, for that whole section of the island. It has the advantage of being out of air corridors, so that you can do air as well as ship and land efforts. The prior administration made an arrangement for a referendum, and they made it with the prior government of Puerto Rico. There are very strong feelings on this subject. The decision has been made by the Secretary of the Navy, and I support him in it.
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Our task is, between now and the time we leave in 2003, assuming the Congress agrees that there will not be a referendum, if there is a referendum and we win it, then obviously we would not leave; if there is a referendum and we lose it, which is the deal the government made, then we would leave. But in any event, we are looking very hard for an alternative site. It is a serious matter, and I can assure you that we give very high priority to the training that is needed.
General Shelton, you have been involved in this a lot longer than I have. Do you want to comment on it?
General SHELTON. Mr. Secretary, I would just say that it is, as we all know, it is a concern for the Navy. They have, in fact, been looking for alternative sites. It is, as you point out, Congressman Taylor, it is a premier site that allows you to do the total combined arms training, from being able to put troops on the ground, to artillery fire , to Naval gunfire, to close air support.
Having said that, they are also looking for other areas where they could potentially do the same type of training, maybe at a different level or maybe at the same level. But at any rate, we have a requirement, an inherent responsibility, to make sure when we sail troops into the CINC's area, that they are trained and ready to go. So we are looking, have been looking at some alternative sites, and will continue to do that, to try to find an another place as an alternative to Vieques.
The CHAIRMAN. The gentleman from Guam, Mr. Underwood, is recognized.
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Mr. UNDERWOOD. Thank you, Mr. Secretary, and thank you for your testimony. And if your intent is to shake us out of our complacency, I think you have done a good job of that.
To some extent, the use of items from history and constantly talking about not being able to understand where future conflict is going to come from is a little too open-ended for me. Even as you outline that we are trying to respond to the possibilities of threats by 28 nations from ballistic missile capability, 12 nations have nuclear capability. In analyzing what kind of force structure we need, I would assume that we still have to do some—contemplate some scenarios, some conflict scenarios. Which of these 28 nations are likely to use the weapons, the missiles? Which of these 12 nations is likely to pose a threat to us? And in line with that thinking, I have heard it stated, assumed, that in this process of reviewing our strategy that there will be increased attention drawn to Asia and the way we place our assets in the Asian Pacific region over other areas, as opposed to how we have done it in the past. Could you comment on that kind of specific geopolitical point that has been made about the role of the Pacific and the role of Asia in this emerging QDR?
Secretary RUMSFELD. Yes, sir. There have been pieces of the review that have characterized Asia as important. The impression has gotten out that it means that it is a zero sum game, and if Asia is important then the rest of the world is less important. That would be an inaccurate impression. What the papers have suggested is that Asia is different, geopolitically, geostrategically; that the distances are different; that the nations are different; that the capabilities are different; that the allied arrangements are different; and that what the United States needs to do as a global Nation is to reflect that in our force sizing and in our capability.
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To go back to the first part of your question, you mentioned that it is a little too open-ended for you. It is hard, but for the nearer-term threats it is easier to look at and say yes, I see that North Korea is a potential problem, Iran is a potential problem, Iraq is a potential problem, any other place is a potential problem. And you can look at that and say okay, that is my area of responsibility, and I may get asked to do something there, and I want to create a deterrent that keeps people peaceful, then I can size my force to do that.
The farther-term threats, you can't do that. You know not who is going to do it, or when they are going to do it, or where they are going to do it, because things change. But you can do a capability-based analysis and say, I don't know exactly what or when or where, but I do know the kind of capabilities that are evolving and what I as a country need to have if we are going to provide the kind of deterrent and dissuasion that will prevent people from thinking they can advantage themselves over their neighbors by having those capabilities.
And so in the nearer term, we are looking at a threat-based strategy. In the mid- to longer-term, we are looking at more a capability-based strategy. That is to say, what capability do we need to dissuade people, to reassure our allies, and to dissuade others from thinking they can advantage themselves with those capabilities.
Mr. UNDERWOOD. Thank you.
The CHAIRMAN. The gentleman from Illinois, Mr. Kirk.
Mr. KIRK. Mr. Secretary, good to see you.
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Secretary RUMSFELD. Thank you, sir. My own congressional district.
Mr. KIRK. That's right, and we miss you.
I just wanted to take up on the missile threats, 6 to 28 countries. I know the North Koreans. I work with them. They're not friends of ours. We have gone from—as an intelligence officer, I saw us going from No Dong to Taepo Dong I to Taepo Dong II. But talk of this agreement with the North Koreans is horribly naive. The American people do not recognize that well over 90 percent of the Iranian Shahab-3 missile is a North Korean missile. So this is a threat that has spread far and wide because of training and trading.
Missile defense is also very important, and I hope in your public statement you highlight how important it is in the medium term for the U.S. defense, but in the short term for the defense of our key allies like Israel, because I think the Shahab-3 is pointed directly at Jerusalem, and the Arrow program with the the Israel Theater High Altitude Air Defense (THAAD) helps deal with that.
I want to take you out of the box and talk about a second issue, though. We have such a procurement bow wave looking at our defense budget. And the DOD is sitting on an enormous asset, the spectrum that it holds. Would you be open to looking at models that we could see, where the spectrum, at your discretion, is given to the private sector as long as you receive the entire benefit? The estimate is to migrate DOD to other parts of the spectrum would cost somewhere between $4 and $12 billion. That includes the intelligence systems. But the estimated value of the spectrum is $45 billion. It could potentially generate $30 billion in revenue to support our military modernization. But I throw the issue out to you. I know you have got Jim Schlesinger looking at it.
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Secretary RUMSFELD. I do. I am not expert on it. Former Secretary of Defense Jim Schlesinger has been looking at it at my request, and he has been—we have been waiting to get somebody confirmed in the Command, Control, Communications and Intelligence (C3I) office at the Pentagon to assist him. How do I put this? I think it was General Chuck Horner who told me that in Kosovo we had one-tenth of the people that we have used in the Gulf War, and we have used 100 times as much bandwidth. That is breathtaking.
Until I really get my head wrapped around that and think I understand what the demands are—and the demands are enormous for spectrum—what those demands are from a national security standpoint, even greed could not get me to consider how we might do it. But it is certainly something we want to talk about and think about.
General, do you want to comment on that? You are much more knowledgeable than I.
General SHELTON. Sir, I think you have covered it very well. Let me just add that one of—the 1755 to 1850 megahertz bandwidth, spectrum if you will, is of particular concern to us. I know that is very popular and is one of those areas that from a commercial standpoint is very attractive in terms of having a lot of value. But for example, all of our air combat training ranges, our satellite command and control systems for the Air Force, for the Navy, our tactical control links for our precision-guided munitions for Air Force and Navy, all of our tactical radio nets, Army, Navy, Air Force, in addition to 100-plus other systems, ride on that one frequency range. And so it is a great concern, not so much—it sounds like it would be pretty simple. If we can sell it for $30 billion and it only costs $5 to $6 billion to change those, that would be one thing. But the problem is it is so interrelated, and the length of time it takes to accomplish that change is measured in decades, not just something we could run out and change in the next couple of years. So we must work our way through this very carefully and make sure that we don't lose these types of combat capability.
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As you can tell from that list I went through, this would have a significant and very detrimental impact on our warfighting capability unless we did it properly.
Mr. KIRK. Mr. Chairman. I have hope we will look at— I would like to go to a model where we are migrating, at the Secretary's discretion. And the other key point is that the revenues we are generating all go to the Defense Department. And I think that can be a win-win.
The CHAIRMAN. We have four people to go. Mr. Simmons from Connecticut is recognized for three minutes.
Mr. SIMMONS. Thank you, Mr. Chairman, Mr. Secretary, General Shelton. Mr. Secretary, in an article published last week in the New London Day titled, ''Submarine Conversion Proposal Gaining Speed,'' the President was quoted as saying at Annapolis, in the future we may stand here and describe a modified Trident submarine carrying hundreds of next-generation smart conventional cruise missiles. Admiral Beaumont subsequently referred to this as a very healthy endorsement of the Trident conversion concept.
Do you agree with the President? Isn't that how I am supposed to phrase it?
Secretary RUMSFELD. I am plucky but I am not stupid.
Mr. SIMMONS. Do you agree with the President that the Trident conversion may be on the way?
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Secretary RUMSFELD. I am trying to think—do you recall, Hugh, if we put something into the 2001 supplemental on that or is it in the 2002.
General SHELTON. Sir, in the 2001—let me check right quick.
Secretary RUMSFELD. I am trying to think. There is no question but that the subject of looking at converting a submarine—or more to a cruise missile role is under serious consideration.
Mr. SIMMONS. Thank you, Mr. Secretary.
Second question, on a very different subject. You mention in your testimony that we have skimped on our people.
Secretary RUMSFELD. I would like to revise and extend that.
Mr. SIMMONS. Okay.
Secretary RUMSFELD. I shouldn't have used that phrase because the Congress has done a lot.
Mr. SIMMONS. Yes, that is okay. I understand what you are saying. And you go on to say, I think very correctly, people will always be the backbone of our defense. Smart weapons require smart soldiers. And I agree with that, very much so. And sailors and airmen—and so on and so forth, not to leave anybody out.
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But I am concerned that smart soldiers do not work for organizations that do not pay them enough to feed their families. And so I will once again ask on the question of military families on food stamps, will you work with us, work with the Congress so that we can get military families off food stamps?
Secretary RUMSFELD. Yes.
Mr. SIMMONS. Thank you.
The CHAIRMAN. The gentleman from Hawaii is recognized for three minutes.
Mr. ABERCROMBIE. Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman. I had not intended to go into this, Mr. Rumsfeld, but on this last question, having served with Mr. Buyer as his Ranking Member on the Personnel Committee when this food stamp business came up, I would like to put to rest once and for all the demagogueing that is going on about it. The Armed Services has not been remiss in addressing this question. This has more to do—and I am just going to end with this statement by asking you to look into it. Before you go charging off and have a whole lot of personnel take a whole lot of time to take a look at food stamps, take a look at the circumstances under which it is taking place. First of all, the definitions are all wrong. When you have a 19- or 20-year-old with three or four kids, naturally, in terms of the definitions that are presently being used, it would make it appear as if the services have been remiss there. This is a political evaluation that has very little basis in fact when you get down to the actual numbers, and it has more to do with the question of who you recruit into the service.
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Now, maybe you are just going to have to set a rule, if you want to deal with food stamps, that says you can't take people into the service when they are 19 or 20 years old and have four kids. Put that down for a rule and watch how fast your food stamps disappear. In the civilian sector we have been chopping people off the welfare roles just as fast as we could make it, whether they were ready or not, whether they had training or not.
Now, this is not an accusation to you, but I am saying when people bring this up, if the idea is to have the Army or any of other services be a repository for young couples that have too many children and they need a place to rest up, so they come into the service, then we can do it that way. But I don't want to see the services continue to get blasted, particularly—this is not a reflection on the question that was just raised, because I take you at your word that you want to get rid of food stamp question. There are lots of ways to get at it. Maybe the first way to do it is to get the Washington Post and the New York Times and every damn reporter in the country who quotes this crap as if it is gospel to look, to actually take a look at the circumstances under which it is occurring and maybe we can get rid of the question.
Secretary RUMSFELD. They rarely consult me for editorial advice.
Mr. ABERCROMBIE. And to think you were interested in a clean get-away on this one. As you know, I am one of the few people in here who always says I think you are doing a great job in all this stuff, which I know has caused you to rethink your position over and over. But the editorial comment—you don't have to do your own editorializing because you have your good friend like William Kristol, your pal. He has already pasted you for your testimony today.
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Secretary RUMSFELD. Is that right?
Mr. ABERCROMBIE. Yes. I mean the rest of us—I am reading it as I go along—but this guy, of course, being brighter than both of us, by his own—all he has to do is look in the mirror and he sees wisdom.
The CHAIRMAN. Does the gentleman have a short question?
Mr. ABERCROMBIE. I do. That is my editorial comment. Unfortunately, this is his conclusion. By the way, this is in a memorandum to opinion leaders. I don't know if he sent this to you yet.
Secretary RUMSFELD. I doubt it.
Mr. ABERCROMBIE. From William Kristol on the subject of defense, and this is on your testimony. This is his conclusion. I am quoting: ''Unfortunately, it appears increasingly that this is the devil's bargain that the Bush administration is willing to accept,'' and then he underlines it, in case us lesser mortals do not understand the full meaning, because it cannot or will not pay the cost of an adequate defense. This is what he says your testimony is all about. Now I don't believe it for a second. We can have disagreements but to make that kind of an accusation it seems to me is the worst kind of demagoguery.
You stated earlier the reason the strategy you believe is not working, and I am quoting in part, is we have not funded it adequately. That is a lot different from saying you do not want to fund it at all or that you are unwilling to fund it. And you cited the 67 years of recapitalization of 198. And so on, and you cited readiness.
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All I say—and you do not have to respond at this point because we have had this discussion, and I have been lucky enough to travel with Mr. Moore, who by the way if you have not got all of your staff on board right now, you have him on board which makes up for probably about 10 or 15 of these other folks. Capital budgeting. I think we have got to think about how—he is thinking about getting rid of you now.
And that is what I just want to conclude with, Mr. Secretary, is when we are talking about the various programs and how to fund them, we have to think about how we finance the Department of Defense. I know you are open on the question, and I think in the weeks to come, the question of whether we can move to a different way of financing, perhaps a capital budget and an operating budget, and trying to figure out how to do that on a businesslike basis, given the businesses of the Pentagon, perhaps we can come to a bipartisan conclusion that will take us away from rhetorical excesses and get us down to the hard work of figuring out how we do our financing in a way that reflects the best interests of both the Congress the taxpayers and the defense of the Nation.
Thank you.
Secretary RUMSFELD. Thank you very much.
The CHAIRMAN. The gentleman from North Carolina, Mr. Hayes, is recognized.
Mr. HAYES. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Welcome Mr. Secretary and thank you for being here. I too would like to say that people whom you have—one of whom has been named already is very great credit to the military and what we are trying to do here. First and foremost the training, hours, health care. I hope that you will aggressively pursue the assets and the funding that are required. Can we count on you to be here, aggressively looking for those assets for our men and women in uniform?
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Secretary RUMSFELD. There is no question but that in balancing the risks, one of the first ones we have to look at is to assure that we treat the men and women in the Armed Forces in a way that we can attract and retain the people that we need.
Mr. HAYES. I appreciate that. Now, a selfish interest, Fort Bragg, 18th Airborne corridor, the epicenter of the universe, Pope Air Force Base. Make sure that they get special attention when you are doing these things. But everywhere I travel, Quantico recently, we have some serious gaps in housing, force protection, and things like that that we can improve. But having said all that, I continue to be impressed at every location with the quality, the commitment, the dedication, the ability and the morale, and the ''can do'' spirit of the men and women whom you are here—and General Shelton—representing.
Thank you very much.
Secretary RUMSFELD. Thank you.
The CHAIRMAN. The gentleman from Rhode Island, Mr. Langevin.
Mr. LANGEVIN. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
Welcome, Mr. Secretary and General. Pleased to have you here today.
Before I actually get to my question, I just wanted to mention, Mr. Secretary, as you know, I was out at the Pentagon on Tuesday with you and the President, and I just want to commend you on the work that you are doing with adaptive equipment.
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Secretary RUMSFELD. Thank you very much. That was an important day, and we were pleased you were there.
Mr. LANGEVIN. Well, thank you very much.
General, Mr. Secretary, I am from Rhode Island, and, as you may guess, submarines are very important to my district. Basically, my question is, if you would just enlighten us a little bit on how big a role you think submarines will be playing as you go through the quadrennial review process.
Secretary RUMSFELD. We have not gotten down to particular weapon systems or platforms. That process is just starting within the last week.
In the Quadrennial Defense Review we have been dealing in the broader aspects of it, but certainly there is no question but that there is an important role for submarines, and I have certainly seen nothing in any of the higher altitude viewing that we have had thus far that would suggest that there would be any de-emphasis in submarines.
I don't know. Do you want to comment on it, General?
General SHELTON. Mr. Secretary, I agree fully.
Submarines, of course, play a very important role for us, not only in their nuclear mission but also in their ability to contribute to the conventional war fight with their nonnuclear capabilities, specifically the Tomahawk land-attack missile (TLAMs), and also for an insertion platform for our Special Operations Forces. So they cover the entire gamut and I think will get—be reviewed like every other system that we have. But certainly nothing to indicate that they are less important today than they have been in the past.
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Mr. LANGEVIN. Thank you.
The CHAIRMAN. The gentleman from California, Mr. Hunter, is recognized. You yielded the first time around. We thank you for the newer members.
Mr. HUNTER. My pleasure, Mr. Chairman. Thank you. And thanks for being with us, gentleman.
Mr. Secretary, I like your opening remarks, because it indicates that, as you have gone through this reorganization that you have now inherited from the last administration, you see some shortfalls and you understand the underfunding and operations, equipment, training and people, and you also understand this—you have got a lot of—spent a lot of money to close those gaps. And I would hope that you would—you laid out the history of America's downsizing dramatically after wars typically and finding ourselves vulnerable when the next crises occurred and also the fact that most of those crises were not predicted. So you have come to the conclusion, I think—at least what I gathered in your early remarks—that you think we should have broad capability, broad military capabilities, with lots of flex built in so we can do lots of things, we can project power in lots of different areas and in different ways.
That takes money, and you are now locked in a—whether you like it or not—in a battle for money. So I would just urge you to—because you are going to have—this is not a—this is going to be, I think, a very stiff contest over the next—both in the administration and with respect to interests in this body and in the Senate over the next several years, and you are going to have to fight like hell to get enough money to do a good job for the national security. It is going to be an intense competition. But let me just say that I am going to be on your side, and I think a lot of members here will be on your side, also.
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With respect to missile defense, which I think is the biggest vulnerability we have right now, my recommendation is that we leave this program we have had in the past, where tests have been essentially political events, where people have been reluctant to test, reluctant to fail, to move into what I would call a robust testing program across the board, starting with theater systems and right up to national missile defense, have lots of tests, lots of failures but keep testing, get the best and brightest, dedicated, try to bring in the national laboratories, if you can, to do simulation, use their ranges, have teams to try to drive as many efficiencies as you can in the testing programs. But get at least the theater systems in the field as quickly as possible and the national missile defense close on the heels.
I can just tell you from my position on the Research and Development Subcommittee (R&D), my feeling is that we need to put—if we put money anywhere in this difficult time, extra dollars in, it should be with respect to a robust testing program that drives this program up to the stage where we can start fielding this technology fairly rapidly. And I hope you folks will reflect that in your budgets.
Secretary RUMSFELD. Thank you, sir.
The CHAIRMAN. Mr. Secretary, I think we are going to make your time. We have two more second round, if you would, sir. The ranking member, Mr. Skelton.
Mr. SKELTON. Thank you.
Again, we thank you for coming over, Mr. Secretary. I think we should, however, look to the past, and I realize your comment—and I hope I quote you correctly—that we don't have the strategy right or it is not working. I don't know. One or the two. But we have done a lot, thanks to this committee and thanks to the young men and women in uniform, a lot of things right.
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Since Desert One, which, as you know, was not a good day for the United States of America, we got the Achille Lauro right. We did well in Granada, Panama, Haiti, Bosnia, Kosovo, the Gulf War, Somalia, Libya. We have done well. Of course, we have learned lessons from each one of them, and I hope we can pay tribute to those successes of the past, some better than others, and build on where we go from here.
In your prepared statement, we must have assurance of our ability to defend the United States, maintain the point forces forward to reassure friends, allies, to pursue security, cooperation, to deter conflict and be capable of defeating the efforts of any adversary to achieve its objectives by force, coercion, repelling attacks in a number of critical areas and also be capable of conducting a limited number of smaller-scale contingencies, while assuring the capability to win decisively against an adversary threatening U.S. vital interests anywhere in the world.
It appears to me, in reading that statement, that it is much larger than the standard or test of the two major regional conflict challenge. So I hope we can work together and build upon the successes of the past, pay tribute to those in uniform who have done so well and allow them to deter and, heaven forbid, win in the future.
I thank you again for being with us.
Secretary RUMSFELD. Thank you, sir.
The CHAIRMAN. Dr. Snyder, did you have a comment you wanted to—.
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Mr. SNYDER. Yes.
The CHAIRMAN. The gentleman is recognized.
Mr. SNYDER. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
Mr. Secretary, we appreciate your patience here today. You have been asked a lot of extensive questions today.
You know, everything that gets brought up is going to cost a ton of money, billions of dollars it seems like. Going back to Mr. Spratt's question that he asked earlier or very early this afternoon, we had a panel of three witnesses this week, think tank people, and two of them brought up the issue of—one of the reasons they are concerned about the two MTW strategy is that—because of the tax cut. They brought those up voluntarily. And I want to ask them that we not continue to fund things like we are funding.
When you think about the cost of the military retiree health care changes we made last year, which the military retirees love—I mean, it is a great improvement. You talk about the increased needs of our veterans health care, all these kind of things.
I would like to see us adopt the Principi Commission Ground Infantry (GI) bill plan where we go back to the original GI bill, where the only limit is a person's ability, whether they could go to Harvard or Yale, and if they put in four years in the military, that we would pay tuition fees and they get a stipend. Our GI bill, even with the bill we passed out of the House a few days ago, is nowhere near that.
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One of the problems I have, Mr. Secretary, is that—you know, this is a partisan town sometimes, but those of us who voted against the tax cut have to go back home, and we have leadership on the other side that are encouraging their members to attack folks like me as being defenders of Washington priorities and not the taxpayers of America.
Well, everything you all are talking about is I think a Washington priority. Veterans health care is a Washington priority. We can go into Social Security and Medicare and all these other things.
Earlier today you said that—in response to Mr. Spratt—that all that you can do is make a recommendation to the President. Mr. Secretary, I think we may see other opportunities this year to hurt the ability of funding the kinds of programs that you are talking about, and you may need to do more than just make a recommendation. You may need to raise hell. Because we are talking about potential losses of revenue that we are going to be living with for decades that is—and you are talking about a program of transformation that is a decades-long program.
Mr. Hunter referred to the fighting for these dollars. It is going to be a very, very difficult fight that our think tank people yesterday think that you already have lost, that the money is not there to do the kinds of things that you are talking about. So I encourage you to get involved in these revenue stream fights, because they are going to impact on the work that you do and the people that come after you.
Thank you, Mr. Chair.
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The CHAIRMAN. Thank you.
Mr. Secretary, we thank you very much for the extra 45 minutes you gave us today. We appreciate that, and we eagerly look forward to next Thursday, hopefully to hear your budget numbers.
Secretary RUMSFELD. Thank you, sir.
The CHAIRMAN. No other questions.
Thank you. Thank you, General Shelton.
The meeting is adjourned.
[Whereupon, at 4:45 p.m., the committee was adjourned.]