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FINDINGS AND CONCLUSIONS OF THE COMMISSION TO ASSESS THE BALLISTIC MISSILE THREATS TO THE UNITED STATES
House of Representatives,
Committee on National Security,
Washington, DC, Thursday, July 16, 1998.
The committee met, pursuant to call, at 9:30 a.m. in room 2118, Rayburn House Office Building, Hon. Floyd Spence [chairman of the committee] presiding.
OPENING STATEMENT OF HON. FLOYD D. SPENCE, A REPRESENTATIVE FROM SOUTH CAROLINA, CHAIRMAN, COMMITTEE ON NATIONAL SECURITY
The CHAIRMAN. The meeting will be please be in order.
Good morning. We still have some members coming in from other meetings, and so we will go ahead and get started.
After six months of intensive effort, the Commission on the Ballistic Missile Threat to the United States yesterday submitted its very sobering report to Congress. In light of assistance of this issue, I wanted to hold this hearing, despite being in the middle of conference with the Senate, to allow the Commissioners to present their conclusions to the committee, the Congress and the American people.
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Having sat in on your classified briefing yesterday, I would hope some or all of you come back perhaps in September to brief the committee in a classified setting. I believe it is safe to say that the conclusions reached by the Commission, conclusions that are unanimous and bipartisan, indicate that the intelligence community and, therefore, policymakers may be seriously underestimating and miscalculating the threat to all Americans posed by ballistic missiles. It has been a long uphill struggle to get to this point where an independent commission of experts is able to report to us with such authority.
In November of 1995, the administration produced a controversial national intelligence estimate, NIE, that concluded that the long-range ballistic missile threat to North America was 15 years away. Although the NIE contained fundamental analytical flaws, not the least of which was its failure to consider Alaska and Hawaii as part of the United States, its key conclusions were declassified and released publicly in the midst of a volatile debate between the House, the Senate and the White House over national missile defense policy.
The President ultimately vetoed the defense authorization bill in December of 1995, based on his opposition to a provision which called for deployment of a national missile defense. In so doing, the President cited the NIE's assertion that Americans were safe from the threat of long-range ballistic missile attack for more than a decade. For months following the veto, I tried unsuccessfully to have a General Accounting Office grant of access to the intelligence U.S. community in an effort to independently verify the methodology and conclusions of the controversial NIE.
The administration refused to grant GAO the necessary access. So the Commission reporting to us today was created in legislation I authored in the fiscal year 1997 defense authorization bill. Consistent with its mandate, the Commission assessed the ballistic missile threat. The report does not recommend any particular solution. As the Speaker indicated on yesterday, this report represents the most serious national security warning the American people have received since the end of the Cold War.
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We all have our personal views on how best to address this threat. But I hope my colleagues today will stay focused on the Commission, what the Commission has reported on. The conclusions reached by the Commission suggest that the ballistic missile threat to the United States is a serious one today, not somewhere in the future, and is rapidly growing. The threat is certainly not 15 years away. The report contains an especially disturbing conclusion that ballistic missile threats will likely manifest themselves sooner than we think, leaving little time or ability for the Nation to respond.
In the world of national security, when a worst case assessment becomes a most likely scenario, taking a business-as-usual approach to policymaking is indefensible. I am also struck by the Commission's finding that the ballistic missile threat to the United States is, ''broader, more mature and evolving more rapidly than it has been reported in estimates and reports by the intelligence community.''
Furthermore, as a longtime critic of this and previous administrations' export control policies, I am not surprised by the Commission's finding that the progressive relaxation of our own United States export control policies has made the United States, ''a major, albeit unintentional contributor'' to the proliferation problem.
I believe the Commission members have performed an invaluable service by speaking forcefully and with one voice about the seriousness of the ballistic missile threats we all face. I continue to believe that the American people have been lulled into a false sense of security since the end of the Cold War and hope that the Commission's report will serve as a wakeup call for all Americans.
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The world is a dangerous place, and America, the world's only superpower, is not adequately prepared. When I was working on the Commission's charter back in 1996, my efforts were repeatedly resisted by the senior administration officials who argued that taking a ''Team B'' approach to this issue of the ballistic missile threat was not needed and would prove unproductive. I am glad that I did not listen, because once again competitive intelligence assessments have proven to be essential to the identification of problems.
Although the Commission's work is formally concluded, I hope this committee will have an opportunity to benefit in the future from your evaluation of how the intelligence community reacted and readjusts to your findings. To this end, the committee has requested in this year's defense authorization bill that the CIA extend your clearances through the end of next year, so that you will have access to up-to-date information in the event that Congress calls upon you to provide updated assessments of the conclusions reached in your report.
With that said, our distinguished panelists today are the chairman of the Commission and former Secretary of Defense Don Rumsfeld; commission member and former science adviser to the President, Dr. William Graham, and the Commission member and former commander in chief of United States Strategic Command, retired General George Lee Butler.
Gentlemen, we all look forward to your testimony. But I would be remiss if I failed to note the presence of a number of the other commissioners who are with us here today. I want to commend all of you for your efforts. What you have done is very important. And, Mr. Secretary, I hope that you will introduce all the other commissioners who are here today before you begin your statement.
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Before turning this over to Secretary Rumsfeld, let me recognize the committee's distinguished ranking member, Mr. Skelton, for any opening remarks he would like to make.
STATEMENT OF HON. IKE SKELTON, A REPRESENTATIVE FROM MISSOURI, RANKING MEMBER, COMMITTEE ON NATIONAL SECURITY
Mr. SKELTON. Mr. Chairman, habit is a funny thing, is it not? Thank you very much. First, Mr. Chairman, I would like to take this opportunity to mention that we have two new members from our side that have just joined this committee, and I wish to introduce them one at this time, if I may.
Ellen Tauscher from California's 10th District is with us today. We welcome her. She was elected to the 105th Congress in November 1996. She will serve on the readiness subcommittee. Prior to being elected to Congress, she worked on Wall Street for 14 years. In 1989, she moved to California and worked on education and child care issues and as a director of the TASA foundation and a mother of a wonderful 6-year-old. We welcome her and hope you enjoy this. I know that you are interested, as all of us are, in our national security.
Mr. Chairman, I join you in welcoming our witnesses today, former Secretary of Defense, Donald Rumsfeld, former presidential science adviser, William Graham, and our old friend, commander in chief, Lee Butler, retired general, former commander in chief of the Strategic Command. We are glad to see you again, sir.
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The present future of ballistic missile threat to our country is complex, it is serious, and it is growing. Three years ago, in November 1995, the intelligence community issued a national intelligence estimate on the emerging missile threats to North America during the next 15 years. That estimate came under criticism by many who felt because it may not have done a good job of assessing the threat, it had been politicized. As a result, the following year, this committee called for the establishment of a bipartisan executive and legislative commission to assess the nature and magnitude of the existing and emerging ballistic missile threat to our country.
As we proceed with today's hearing, I will be interested in the Commission's views on three issues, gentlemen. First, while their views on the 1995 estimate may be interesting, I believe it would be much more useful if our witnesses can tell us where we are today and where we are going. I note that the intelligence community issued its latest estimate on the subject earlier this year, 1998. I ask that the Commission members provide their views on this most recent 1998 estimate. I want to know if they consider the 1998 estimate a better product than the 1995 version, whether or not they believe it was politicized.
Second, I want to know their views on our efforts with regard to the proliferation of nuclear, biological and chemical weapons. Over 20 nations possess or are developing such weapons and more than 20 have theater ballistic missiles. With the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, the proliferation challenge expanded significantly. To meet the challenge from the intelligence point of view the Central Intelligence Agency established its nonproliferation center in 1991. Last year the center underwent a major organization.
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So I ask the panel and I would like to know if the Commission believes that the intelligence community is devoting increased priority and resources to counterproliferation and whether they think that trend line since the end of the Cold War is in the right direction.
Finally, Mr. Chairman, I would wish the panel members to answer this. I want to know the Commission's view about our efforts to counter the various ballistic missile threats, both tactical theater, on the one hand, and strategic national threats. Both of them have been identified. Do members of this commission agree with the present policy to give priority to theater missile defense?
Mr. Chairman, I will stop my opening in order to allow these witnesses to provide us with their views on these highly important matters. I congratulate you, Mr. Chairman, on holding this hearing. And I was with you at the briefing yesterday. I look forward to their unclassified and very important testimony today. Thank you, sir.
The CHAIRMAN. Thank you, Mr. Skelton.
Gentlemen, without objection, your written statements and any supporting documentation will be submitted for the record. And as you requested, Secretary, the report would be submitted for the record, too. So you might proceed as you would like.
[The information referred to can be found in the appendix on page 47.]
STATEMENT OF HON. DONALD RUMSFELD, CHAIRMAN, COMMISSION TO ASSESS THE BALLISTIC MISSILE THREAT TO THE UNITED STATES (FORMER SECRETARY OF DEFENSE)
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Mr. RUMSFELD. Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman, members of the committee. Good morning, we appreciate this opportunity to present the unclassified version of our report. As you mentioned, we submitted the classified version to you and the Congress yesterday. It is a vastly more detailed document of 200-plus pages. And I do hope that members will have an opportunity to review it. Established by the Congress, by statute, at your initiation, this committee's initiation, the charter of this commission was to assess the nature and magnitude of the existing and emerging ballistic missile threat to the United States.
As such, we did not focus on such things as terrorism, cruise missiles, threats to forces overseas, allies, friends. And in answer to you, Mr. Skelton, we did not focus on responses to the threat. As you know, our charter did not include that.
Several of the Commissioners are here today, and I would like to introduce them. In a moment, Dr. Bill Graham, who was Science Adviser to the President, will make some remarks, and General Lee Butler, who was Commander in Chief of STRATCOM, will make some remarks. Behind us are Dr. Bill Snyder here, who is former Under Secretary of the Department of State, and a very distinguished public servant, and also directly behind me is Dr. Richard Garwin, a very knowledgeable and distinguished scientist, and who has been associated with IBM for a good many years.
We do have several others here today, Dr. Paul Wolfowitz, who is head of the Johns Hopkins School, was a Deputy Secretary of Defense. Dr. Barry Blechman, who is the founder of the Henry Stimson Center; Jim Woolsey, former CIA Director, and General Larry Welsh, who was Chief of Staff of the United States Air Force and is now head of IDA. I was amused at your calling me doctor. Except for the generals, and it would have been bad for their careers to be doctors, Jim Woolsey and I are the only ones who aren't doctors.
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But in any event, we have had some six months of work, 42 meetings that generally ran from 8:00 in the morning until 5:00 in the evening, 200 briefings probably from 300 presenters. It has been an intensive study. And in my view, these commissioners deserve certainly my thanks for their intelligence, which was exceptional, their knowledgeable and very valuable insights. It is a truly bipartisan group.
The leadership in the House and Senate who appointed, nominated the members of this commission, selected very well. I could not imagine being associated with a more dedicated or talented group of commissioners. I am very pleased to be able to say that it has been a bipartisan effort, a serious effort, and our conclusions and our recommendations are unanimous. In my experience, that is unusual, indeed, for a subject like this of this complexity, a subject that often elicits emotion and conflicting views.
I would say it is remarkable. The facts have driven our conclusions. And I appreciate your permitting us to insert the executive summary of our report into the record at this point. It is true that our views do diverge somewhat from the estimates and reports of the intelligence community. They differ as to the scope, the maturity and the pace, as you indicated, of the ballistic missile programs of several nations which are overtly or potentially hostile to the United States.
They differ for several reasons. One, we are not intelligence analysts. We are policymakers. On my left and behind me are some truly outstanding technical experts. They are people who have broad experience and expertise in dealing with the intelligence community and with the products of the intelligence community.
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The second reason is that time has passed since the 1995 national intelligence estimate. Mr. Skelton asked whether or not we thought the 1998 annual report to the Congress was a better product than the '95 estimate, and there was no question but that it is a better product. One of the reasons it is different, just as one of the reasons our report is different some six months later, it is a moving target. Things are happening out in that world.
Almost every week since we began this effort, some event of significance relating to ballistic missiles or weapons of mass destruction has occurred and been announced or been revealed. In more recent cases, India and Pakistan surprised us as a country and indeed as a world.
Third, the Director of Central Intelligence Agency provided us unprecedented access to the most sensitive and highly classified information in our intelligence community. We had the benefit of reviewing information across countries and across functions in the intelligence community which provided a perspective that I would submit is broader than available to most intelligence analysts.
The reason for that is, as you know, because of compartmentation. Intelligence information is restricted from most people. It was not restricted from us. And given the enormous amount of technology transfer taking place in the world, being able to look at what is happening with respect to ballistic missiles and weapons of mass destruction across countries and across functions was a significant advantage. Therefore, it should not be surprising when people dealing with a different set of facts come up with a somewhat different set of conclusions.
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A final reason our assessment diverges is because we used a somewhat different approach. And I would like Dr. Graham to comment briefly on that approach, our methodology why it is different. Would you please do that now?
STATEMENT OF HON. WILLIAM R. GRAHAM, MEMBER, COMMISSION TO ASSESS THE BALLISTIC MISSILE THREAT TO THE UNITED STATES (FORMER SCIENCE ADVISOR TO THE PRESIDENT AND DIRECTOR, WHITE HOUSE OFFICE OF SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY POLICY)
Dr. GRAHAM. Yes, Mr. Chairman. Chairman Spence, thank you. We looked at more than one scenario for a future outcome. I have seen reports in the press this morning that indicated some feel our report to the Congress is a worst case scenario, but in fact our report is not a scenario at all, it is many scenarios. One of the myths that we heard in the intelligence community was that policy—senior policymakers and decisionmakers really preferred to have just one scenario, one outcome, one point prediction of what would happen.
But I have had the privilege to work with a number of elected officials and high government officials in my career, and I know that they are masters of dealing with uncertainty. Every time they face election, they face substantial uncertainty to begin with, and then the conduct of their office thereafter, that continues. And so we thought it important to look at a range of outcomes and convey what we knew and what we didn't know about the likely future trends in ballistic missile and weapons of mass destruction development in the world.
One of the first things we did was ask for a history of the comparison between intelligence community estimates or predictions and how things actually came out in the same time frame that they predicted. I was very surprised to discover that no such systematic study existed, and we tried hard to find one. There seems to be no systematic track record that the analysts and the leadership of the intelligence community can refer to to see how they have done over time in making predictions and then seeing those predictions be realized.
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It seems to me, and I believe to the Commissioners, that it is very difficult for the intelligence community to improve its techniques as much as it could, and they are very intelligent people in that community, if they live with no clear understanding of their past successes and their past failures. So it is to us very important that this history be put together, but we did not have access to that.
For example, we did note, though, in our report and more in the classified that the Commission judges that the No Dong missile, a North Korean missile of some 1300 kilometers range, about 800 miles, was operationally deployed long before the U.S. government recognized that fact. And there is ample evidence that North Korea has created a sizable missile production infrastructure and, therefore, it is highly likely that considerable numbers of No Dongs have been produced.
That is one point on the history of this subject that we think is very important in describing the confidence that either a commission or the intelligence community can have in its predictions in the future. So we in methodology, perhaps the most fundamental thing we did was look at a range of outcomes. One way to describe that is testing alternative hypothesis. We addressed what the U.S. knows from its intelligence collection sources and methods. We also gave a lot of thought to what the U.S. doesn't know, because one of the things the U.S. does know is that we don't know everything; there are many things that happen in the world but we don't see, in part because it is a big world.
But more and more today, because countries are gaining in sophistication and concealment, cover and deception, and they don't want us to know many of the activities they are carrying out, particularly in the ballistic missile and weapons of mass destruction area. So we looked at what we knew, looked at the areas where there were gaps and asked ourselves how a reasonable country might conduct its activities to cover those gaps if it wished to develop a longer and longer range of ballistic missile capability with more and more payload and other technical performance properties.
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And we came up with a range of possible future scenarios, and that was the primary outcome of our methodology. So I would strongly object to a characterization of our work as a worst case scenario. It is a range of outcomes that the U.S. should consider and I think in many of the—in the scenarios be concerned over.
Mr. RUMSFELD. Thank you. Mr. Chairman, with your permission I would like to introduce Dr. Paul Wolfowitz, who just came in, who is a member of our commission and, of course, is head of the Johns Hopkins School of International Affairs.
Having mentioned our views that do diverge from some of the intelligence community reports and estimates and explaining why we believe that, I would like to ask General Butler to summarize our conclusions and our recommendations.
STATEMENT OF GEN. GEORGE LEE BUTLER (USAF), RET., MEMBER, COMMISSION TO ASSESS THE BALLISTIC MISSILE THREAT TO THE UNITED STATES (FORMER COMMANDER IN CHIEF, U.S. STRATEGIC COMMAND)
General BUTLER. Good morning, Mr. Chairman. Let me state first of all, with respect to ballistic missiles as a class of weapons, I think it is important for those of who would read our report to understand first of all in this day and age ballistic missiles are ubiquitous in every corner of the Earth. And the Commission took care to examine this broad universe of nations who have this capability, and our first challenge was to focus.
And common sense led us in a particular direction; that is, to look, first of all, at the familiar threats of Russia and China. And our conclusion was while they certainly represent an enduring threat, they are in an operational capability and we can imagine circumstances where the United States and either of these nations might find themselves in confrontation. They are on the other hand familiar. In the case of the former Soviet Union, we had been looking at their methods and their approaches to ballistic missile technology and the production of these systems for decades and similarly with China.
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So we looked at these in detail, we took note of the current state of their forces, and we spent some considerable time on it in our report. But it is clear from the outset that our focus should be on a small, but emerging class of nations with whom we presently have hostile relationships or potentially hostile relationships. In the case of Iraq, for example, we have recently fought a war. In the case of Iran, we have suffered at the hands of this nation across a variety of ways threatening to our vital security. And clearly we have been looking down the gun barrel now from North Korea now for exactly 48 years and 1 month.
So this became the central focus of our report, and in that regard we tried to do the following: One, to be very explicit about our assumptions and caveats as we looked at their emerging capabilities. Secondly, we labored over every word of our report. I have been involved in any number of efforts like this over the course of my life and I have never been engaged in a commission that was more assiduous, more disciplined and more rigorous in how it articulated its findings and its conclusions.
Once having researched those conclusions, however, we have not minced words. We have tried to be faithful to the charter that you have given us and give you the product of our best judgment. The first caveat, you will find in the paragraph of our first conclusion, and that is that we focused on North Korea, Iran and Iraq, and we were immediately concerned about what we saw. We talked about their capabilities with regard to ballistic missile threats, particularly the prospect of long range threats.
We noted at the outset that we did not look at those capabilities, real and emerging, through the set of glasses that we had on during the Cold War period. We did not expect their production methods, their standards for safety and security, or their expectations in terms of reliability and accuracy to meet those that we so carefully developed over the years, or for the Soviet Union for that matter.
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Secondly, we understood at the outset that they did not have to rely on simply indigenous capabilities to develop this ballistic missile infrastructure, testing procedure and operational deployment. They are receiving assistance from a wide range of countries, and that assistance has been central to their capabilities to advance more rapidly.
And so when you come to the first point of difference from our judgment and that of the intelligence community, we saw a shorter timeline for the prospect of operational deployment of ballistic missiles in a variety of launch modes, and I will touch on that in just a second.
Which led to our second conclusion the chairman highlighted at the outset is that you—Mr. Spence that is—and in broad terms we simply assessed, after having looked carefully at the NIE of 1995, the '98 annual report, having looked at all of the data that the intelligence community used in its judgments in those documents, but that the chairman suggested having access across a much broader set of information, because we were given access to every compartment, across every country and across every fundamental area dealing with this information, we came to the conclusion that the threat posed by these particular three emerging and ballistic missile capability countries was broader and more mature and evolving more rapidly.
A third conclusion, I would underscore to this committee, to the Congress, to the administration and to the United States. I would urge you to read the words carefully, and if there are any part of this report I would encourage you to pursue further outside of the committee room in the privacy of the councils of people who have ultimate responsibility for national security, it is our conclusion that the intelligence community's ability to provide timely and accurate estimates of ballistic missile threats to this country is eroding.
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We chose that word very carefully. Eroding. It does not say that it has disappeared, it does not say that we feel that this is an imminent concern with regard to our national survival, but for the United States, which still bears the principal responsibility for the safety and security of a variety of nations around this world, and stability and all of its regions, for the capacity of our intelligence community to be eroding at all in my view is unacceptable. It is in fact intolerable, and it is an issue that is in need of immediate and urgent attention.
We say that it is eroding for reasons both internal and external. The chairman has had long conversations with the Director of Central Intelligence on the question of the internal problems that we saw. We had been very explicit in our report with regard to the factors and the external environment that are eroding the capability of this community to understand and estimate ballistic missile threats.
The two that we would single out here, and I was utterly astonished after being away from this material for 4 years, was the capacity of these nations now to deceive, cover, conceal and deny our intelligence agencies the capacity that we relied on for all of the 37 years that I spent in uniform. And I was a principal customer in intelligence as the Commander of the Strategic Nuclear Forces. And secondly, of course, as the extraordinary acceleration of the transfer of technology. There is virtually no piece of information, no piece of software or hardware relating to ballistic missile technology that is not available to anyone who is willing to pay the price.
Next, the summation of this led naturally in the direction of our principal conclusion. And that is if you believe that the capacity of these nations to leap frog because of technology transfer, the availability of information and the resources that they have internal are made available to them by other supporting nations to develop these ballistic missile capabilities more rapidly, then clearly the warning times that we can expect of a deployed ballistic missile threat is shorter. The question then becomes relative to what?
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In our view, the answer is if they made a decision to test and deploy a ballistic missile with intercontinental range; that is, one that could reach the territory of the United States from their own territory, they could do this within a period of 5 years. From having made that decision, what comfort should we draw from that? Our answer is none, because we don't know when the 5-year clock would begin ticking. Did they make the decision 3 years ago and, if so, then are they 2 years away or are they on the verge? We simply don't know.
But what we stated in our report, which we think is the principal error of the 1995 NIE, and that is to say definitively that no time prior to a date certain would such capabilities emerge. I think all of us as senior policymakers would be immediately suspect of any analyst on any subject who came to us with a conclusion that said definitively anything about any subject over a 15-year period.
I would be curious to know what any analyst would have said definitively 10 years ago about the state of the Soviet Union today. And so as we looked at this data and made our assessment, our conclusion was very straightforward. It was not difficult to reach, but we tried to be very careful in articulating that judgment.
So where does that lead us? We also think that it is a very common sense outcome. If you believe that warning times are shorter and to the extent that we in the United States, based upon our longstanding practices, attitudes, policy propensities have come to believe we will have extended warning time of ballistic missile threats and, therefore, the flexibility to devise alternative responses to it, we should rethink that.
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We should rethink how we analyze ballistic missile threats, the models that we use in our intelligence community, how senior policymakers think about the information that is brought to them, how they challenge it, how they participate in the debate. And to the extent that those policies are found to be ill-advised, that we have programs predicated on expectations of warning time that we can no longer depend upon, then we simply suggested that they be reviewed and appropriately revised.
Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
Mr. RUMSFELD. Thank you, General Butler.
Let me make just a few remarks in concluding our presentation. You have heard why we think our view is different, you have heard what our conclusions and recommendations are. The major reasons in my view for the somber, carefully worded presentation that General Butler has just given is twofold, and I need to underline them. One is technology transfer. We are living in a relaxed post Cold War world. It is a different world. We have seen liberalized export controls, increased international exchanges of students and scientists, hundreds of Russians and Chinese academic people and students in our national laboratories, even seen leaks of classified information from all branches of government. We see active espionage being announced, and it is going on today. We have seen U.S. demarches to country after country attempting to get their cooperation to not transfer certain types of technology. And in short order thereafter, we find that the sources of that information that came to us are closed off rather than the technology transfer being stopped.
The second reason I would mention is what was also mentioned briefly, and that is the deception and the denial. The countries of the world that we are interested in have developed very, very sophisticated ways of denying the United States the kind of information that we had been able to have in the past as technologies leak all across this globe. We can be absolutely certain that that will continue. And we have to learn to live with the world where there will be transfers of technology, it seems to me, and arrange ourselves so the risks are reduced.
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The third reason is that these countries don't need weapons like ours. They don't have to have the safety, they don't have to have the reliability, they don't need to have the accuracy. They don't need to have the high volumes. What we considered and rejected as ways to approach development of ballistic missiles and weapons of mass destruction 15, 20 years ago as being too primitive, and took much better courses, are perfectly adequate for other countries, and a lot of them are available on the Internet.
So this is the kind of world we are going to be living in. The intelligence community has had some wonderful successes. And part of the reason we came to our conclusion is that we had an opportunity to see the intelligence that was gathered. On the other hand, this is a big world, there is a lot we don't know, there is a lot we won't know, there is a lot we can't know. And expectation of perfect knowledge about what is going on in the world is unrealistic, and it can also lead to dangerous assumptions and unnecessary risks and unwise policies.
Certainly we need to strengthen the intelligence community, we can always do better. We know, from visiting with folks in the community, that they have a number of initiatives under way that should help to move our capabilities in the right direction. But we also need to be situated so that the inevitable surprises, and they will be inevitable, they will come, we will experience more, do not impair our national security.
If one thinks about the shock and conclusion and disarray in the wake of the Indian and Pakistani nuclear explosions, picture the concern and confusion if there were an announcement that Iran or North Korea had a ballistic missile that could reach the United States with a nuclear weapon? Therefore, our recommendation is that the U.S. analysis and practices and policies that depend on expectations of extended warning be reviewed and, as appropriate, revised to reflect the reality of an environment in which there is little or no warning.
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As I indicated, we have some commissioners behind us. We are all available to respond to questions. I hope that you will come away with a sense of the deep conviction with which this report is presented and the unanimity it represents.
Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman.
The CHAIRMAN. Thank you very much. And as I said before, I compliment you and all of you on the hard work you have put into this report. It is invaluable to us in the Congress, since we have a duty to properly defend this country. And we don't think that we are being properly defended right now, and that is why we are going to the extent we have gone to to point out the threats we have faced in this country.
I know that your charter doesn't give you the responsibility of proposing to us how to deal with the problem that we have. But I would just like to ask a general question. If we have in this world countries with the capacity, the capability of delivering intercontinental ballistic missiles with nuclear warheads on us and we are targeted by these countries, would you think it would be proper for us to defend against those kinds of threats, to have some kind of a defense against them?
Mr. RUMSFELD. Mr. Chairman, there isn't a single member of the Commission who doesn't have views on that subject. There is, however, no way I could speak as chairman of this commission on behalf of these commissioners, because we didn't invest the kind of time that would have been necessary to be able to give our considered recommendations. Our recommendation is—it certainly goes to your point. We believe that not just the defense, but the intelligence community, the Department of State, the government ought to consider the world we are in, it is a different world.
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There are a variety of threats. I mentioned terrorism, for example. I know one of our commission members, Jim Woolsey, is particularly concerned about that, as I am, having been Middle East envoy to President Reagan, there certainly—when one looks at the possibility of ship launched ballistic missiles, and there is several countries working on this, indeed, there is a situation where you could have a ballistic missile launched from a considerably shorter range than intercontinental. And that is something that we do discuss in our report, but we have not discussed it extensively here.
So I am, with your permission, going to refrain from venting my personal views on that subject, because I really think the subject is broader, in the sense that it is the threat and the totality of what needs to be reviewed and revised as appropriate. And it goes beyond simply that.
The CHAIRMAN. Well, if anyone doesn't feel obligated to—shouldn't feel obligated to answer that. I will ask the rhetorical question and leave it unanswered, that whether or not we as a Nation should refuse to defend ourselves against enemies and potential enemies with the capability of destroying our country. I will let it go at that. I don't know if it needs an answer or not. And certainly I would have to question the credibility.
Mr. RUMSFELD. Certainly, the first responsibility of the Federal Government is to provide for the security of the country.
The CHAIRMAN. That is what we are trying to do is defend our country, and it is not being defended right now and, as a matter of fact, we are refusing to defend ourselves. Seeing the latest response I have heard to this report is that we are working currently on a program to deploy a limited national missile defense program in 2003, if necessary. I think that it speaks for itself, if necessary. If anyone can say after what you have issued in your report that it is not necessary right now, I don't know.
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Mr. Skelton.
Mr. SKELTON. Mr. Chairman, thank you. Let me, Mr. Chairman, take this moment, first, to welcome the newest member to our committee, Robert Brady. Robert Brady was elected to the 105th Congress this past spring to fill the vacancy of our former colleague Tom Foglietta, who as we all know is the Ambassador to Italy. And, Bob, I might mention that for a number of years I sat next to Tom on this committee and enjoyed his friendship, and I welcome you to this committee.
Bob Brady has served, or will serve on the Personnel Subcommittee. His very distinguished career prior to coming to Congress is both in the labor movement and also in the Pennsylvania political arena. So we welcome you and look forward to your contributions, and thank you for joining us.
Mr. Chairman, there is a letter dated July 15, 1998, from the Director of Central Intelligence, George J. Tenet, which I would wish to read part thereof, but at this moment, I ask that it in its entirety be placed in the record.
The CHAIRMAN. Without objection.
[The information referred to can be found in the appendix on page 116.]
Mr. SKELTON. On the second page, Mr. Chairman, there is this wording: Our 1998 report also noted that a country could purchase an ICBM or space-launched vehicle or a turnkey facility to produce either events that could lead to deployments in as little as a few months to a few years. Although our report makes the analytic judgment that such developments were unlikely, this does not mean that we minimize the threat.
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Based upon that verbiage, I wish to ask the panel, and it need not be necessary in consideration of time and other people who wish to answer questions, I ask two very quick questions and as I am prone to do, please answer in 25 words or less, but if you can give us the full answer, I would appreciate it. But only one of you need to answer this.
Many people in Congress, including myself, have concerns about the funding levels in general for intelligence programs. In your view, are there enough resources available to the intelligence community to do an adequate job of collecting and analyzing intelligence information?
The second question is how likely—this is what we have to deal with, and that is why we have to ask experts like you, and I hope you don't think it is an unfair question but it is an important one as far as we are concerned. How likely, gentlemen, do you think it is that foreign assistance in the form of a turnkey system or a turnkey operation would be available to a country trying to develop its own missile capability? Any one of you, please.
Mr. RUMSFELD. Well, let me just respond, first with respect to the resources in the intelligence community. None of us are in a position to respond to that. We did not sit down and look at that issue as to across-the-community resources.
There is no question but that each of us will have opinions about allocation of resources within the intelligence community, and we have concerns about the intelligence community's capabilities. Whether it is a question of more or less resources or whether it is a question of allocation, we are not in a position to say.
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As to the ''unlikely'' word——
Mr. SKELTON. Wait a minute. I am not going to let you off the hook that easy. Give me your best personal judgment.
Mr. RUMSFELD. Well, I value my best personal judgment and I don't have one, and I would be totally unwilling to pretend that I could offer as expert opinion an assessment of the resources in the community because I just have not done—invested time in it. And I am sorry I can't give you a better answer, but that is the honest answer and it would be misleading to give you anything else.
Mr. SKELTON. Thank you.
Mr. RUMSFELD. With respect to the word ''unlikely,'' as you will note in our conclusions we say under some plausible scenarios—and our considered judgment is that they are plausible—including the following: rebasing of missiles, that is to say taking one country's missiles and having them put them on another country's real estate. Let me give you an example. Were Iran to put their missiles on the real estate of Libya on the pretext that they are defending Libya, you would get a number of hundreds of kilometers closer to the United States, and therefore the time line shortens.
A second, transfer of operational missiles, turnkey. It has happened. It has happened. In our world recently one country put an entire ballistic missile system in another country and the United States intelligence community didn't know it until after it happened. It is not theory. It wasn't created. It happened.
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Third, sea launch. I have mentioned there are at least three countries doing it, developing it. It is not complicated. It does not take, if you will excuse the expression, rocket science to do this. It is very plausible. It is not only very plausible, it is being worked on. It is not only being worked on, but it is something we better think about.
Air launched, again not implausible. Another example. Testing of a missile on someone else's real estate so that the test is not known to have been done by the country that is in fact doing it. And we have described in some detail a variety of shortened development programs because of the technology transfer that is taking place.
So we have addressed that point directly. It is our unanimous view that these are plausible, and they are things that ought to be addressed by the United States Government.
Mr. SKELTON. Thank you.
The CHAIRMAN. Mr. Weldon.
Mr. WELDON. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. This is truly an unbelievable day for this committee and for the debate on national security in this country.
I want to first of all thank the commissioners for an outstanding job. They represent a broad, diverse view of feelings and opinions on security but they have come together with some unanimous recommendations.
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Let me put this into a historical perspective for the newer members on this committee. NIE 95–19 was issued to give this committee an assessment about what the emerging threats were that we would then have to buy weapons systems to defend against over the next 15 years. What troubled us when that report was issued was the emphatic statement that was made that I will now quote directly from:
No country other than the major declared nuclear powers will develop or otherwise acquire a ballistic missile in the next 15 years that could threaten the contiguous 48 states and Canada.
In addition to the strong statement that was made there, the report itself was less than 30 pages long. It was quoted widely. Bob Bell, the security advisor to the President, the President himself, leaders in the House and the Senate in all the debate in this institution and the other body around our security as a Nation, this was the document that was quoted. And, in fact, in saying there would be no threat to the U.S. for 15 years, it was also said in NIE 95–19 not to worry. Arms control regimes will control countries from selling off technology one to the other.
That created an outcry in this body. Democrats and Republicans alike said, you know, this does not appear as though it is a serious look at what is happening. Russia is totally destabilized. We are seeing actions in Iran and Iraq.
This report that you have issued to us today takes an entirely different view. You say that, in fact, that is a possibility within 5 years of a decision to acquire a capability, 10 years in the case of Iraq, and during several of those years you maintain we might not even be aware that such a decision was being made. As we saw with the No Dong missile where the intelligence community said don't worry, it will be years, because we will see a flight test program. One test and the system was deployed. It took us by surprise. Just as the cooperation between Russia and Iran last summer took us by surprise because we weren't aware that they were giving the capability for the Shahab-3 or -4 to Iran, which we think they will deploy in a year from now.
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You go into great detail to describe the times and dates of countries like North Korea, Iran and Iraq, and they are all so much shorter than what was so deliberately told us in NIE 95–19. And the added troubling problem with 95–19 was the entire context of the report was issued publicly. There were two other NIEs on the same subject that in 1993, neither of them have yet been issued publicly. Neither of them. Yet 95–19, which was so emphatic in its statement, was made available to the public and became the basis for all of our debate in this body on where we should be going for national security.
In fact, they even said there was no chance of an accidental launch, and you cover that issue also in this report in great detail. And you say with the current movement towards civil unrest and civil strife, there is, in fact, a risk of unauthorized or inadvertent launch of missiles against the United States.
This is an historic document. NIE 95–19 was less than 30 pages long and it became the focus of debate in this country for the past 3 years on these issues. This work by this commission is six volumes. Two volumes you have in the unclassified state before us today. I would encourage every colleague in the Congress to go to 405 in the Capitol and read through four additional volumes that are about that high. Six volumes, versus 30 pages, assessing the security risks of this country from the proliferation of missile technology around the world.
Mr. Chairman, we have a major problem. We have a major problem in three areas. First of all, NIE 95–19 said don't worry America, our arms control regimes will work. I have put into the record repeatedly over the past 6 years 38 violations of arms control agreements by Russia and China where sanctions have been imposed only three times and in each of those three cases they were waived. These were technologies being transferred to Iran, Iraq, India and Pakistan. We wonder why India and Pakistan are sabre rattling. We saw the technology being transferred repeatedly and we did nothing about it. So the assessment in 95–19 that arms control agreements would protect us is totally fallacious and did not work.
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Number two, the money is not there. The current budget for missile defense in this administration's request is $3.6 billion. The planned allocations for the next 5 years take that budget to $2.6 billion. How are we as a committee and this Congress going to take care of the systems necessary as well as the compliance of arms control agreements to fund adequate programs to defend against these threats? You cannot get to there from here.
Thirdly, the technology is not mature. We are going to face a situation when Iran deploys the Shahab–3 which we estimate has a range of 1,300 kilometers where Israel and 35,000 of our troops would be exposed and vulnerable for a period of 6 to 18 months within a year from now. I would say, Mr. Chairman, this better be a wakeup call to us. This committee had better sound a voice to this Congress and this country in the bipartisan way that it does so well, because it has been Democrats and Republicans working together, that this country had better listen to what this commission has said. Because I think the results of the analysis given to us, which is as thorough as I have ever seen in my 12 years in Congress, should set the tone where the debate should begin about how we need to respond as a Nation. Thank you.
The CHAIRMAN. Thank you.
Mr. Sisisky.
Mr. RUMSFELD. Mr. Chairman, could I make one brief comment on that?
The CHAIRMAN. Yes, sir.
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Mr. RUMSFELD. Both Mr. Skelton and Congressman Weldon have mentioned the 1995 NIE. There was one thing in it that I don't believe I mentioned as forcefully as I might have. You know, it is perfectly possible to begin—to establish a set of assumptions and then go ahead and make a set of comments and have it not be inaccurate as long as the assumptions are believed or accepted. To the extent the assumptions are wrong, then the outcome is wrong, even though it is not inaccurate given those assumptions.
The minute the NIE of 1995 said that foreign assistance is a wild card that could alter their assessment, it was like beginning with an illogical premise, proceeding perfectly logically to an illogical conclusion. Foreign assistance is not a wild card. It is a fact. It is pervasive. It is all over this world. And that was a fundamental flaw in my view in that report.
The CHAIRMAN. Mr. Sisisky.
Mr. SISISKY. Thank you, Mr. Chairman, and thank you, gentlemen, for your service on this commission. I am one of those—to be very honest with you, I feel so depressed right now. I have been listening to my friend from Pennsylvania for a good number of years. Some accuse me of voting with the administration because I am sitting on this side of the aisle. I can assure you in national security that is not the case and my colleagues wouldn't do that. I did believe it made common sense to me that the 3 plus 3 was the right thing to do.
I am really—what you are telling me today, and you may deny this, is that there is something fundamentally wrong with our intelligence community. Now, I know you spent a lot of time on this. I don't know if we are supposed to say how many people work for the intelligence community and I won't say. But there are a heck of a lot of people and a heck of a big budget that works in that intelligence community. And I am really concerned now, even more than the missiles, about the quality of our intelligence community.
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Now, I know, Dr. Graham, you talked about the methodology, but I mean they should have that. Obviously, you weren't given any more information than the intelligence community has. I can't believe—you probably couldn't even get as much as they have.
Then I was disappointed, even the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and I have got his statement here: ''Given the substantial intelligence resources being devoted to this issue, I am confident that we will have 3 years' warning in which a strategy is based.'' And that was a recent statement and that is scary.
I mean, you have frightened me and the American public ought to be frightened. And I am willing to do anything, but I can tell you this. We can't do it without money and somehow we have to reappraise our whole defense structure in this country, and intelligence. And my colleague from Pennsylvania is absolutely right. This is a wakeup call. He has been trying to give it now for the last 4 or 5 years, really aggressively. He has been trying to do it and I commend him publicly now for doing it. Maybe enough of us didn't pay attention or we were looking at the wrong information.
Just to phrase a question, obviously you do not share that view of the 3 years and you might explain why you don't.
General BUTLER. I think first of all, Congressman, with regard to the characterization as a wakeup call, perhaps it is that. It was not our intention—if intelligence is working properly, the Nation does not need wakeup calls because it is served by constant reminders with regard not only to real threats but potential threats.
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With regard to what this committee or the Congress or the Nation does, I suppose my concern would be the great human tendency after the wakeup call to hit the snooze button and take another 15 minutes. What we are suggesting is we don't have another 15 minutes. What this requires now is immediate but considered judgments with regard to responses. That is point number one.
Point number two, allocation of resources. I have spent many hours in front of this and other committees arguing for resources for my needs when I was the commander of the strategic nuclear forces, but I tried never to lose sight of the fact that I was preceded by many other commanders and witnesses arguing for resources to support their requirements.
I think that you need to look at this question of response in the context of other threats to our national security and the need to shore up our internal resources for dealing with those threats.
What we have suggested is that there is a threat on the horizon that is closer than had been estimated by the intelligence community. That being said, I think that your work has just begun. I think that it is now your responsibility and your challenge to assess this threat against all the others that come before this committee and all the other needs which are arrayed to you by the services and the Departments of this government and try and understand what its priority is and how you approach it.
It is certainly common sense, given the technological capabilities which have always served as the foundation for our national security because it gives us options to pursue a program that protects those options. With regard to our principal recommendation, however, of assessing current policies and practices that were based on the prospect of extended warning, that needs urgently to be readdressed.
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I would say again, I would underscore the lesson—the principal lesson that I learned as a senior policymaker with regard to single-point, closed-end equations regarding possible outcomes in a very complex and uncertain world. As you imagine what the time line might be and how we prepare for it, I would urge you to do a very sober review of General Welch's assessment of the current state of the program in ballistic missile defense, which I think was succinctly catagorized as a rush to failure. That we do not need. We do not need to repeat that mistake.
So I have, like the Chairman, have no expertise with regard to those programs. I have no suggestions to offer. We did not focus on all of the aspects and capabilities of the intelligence community. But I think all of the commissioners would agree the time has come to do that.
Mr. RUMSFELD. Mr. Chairman, both Dr. Graham and I would like to make just a brief comment.
My comment is this, that the answer is, of course, you are correct. Our information did come from the intelligence community. That is where it came from. The important thing that one learns about intelligence collection, analysis, and the availability of that information, is that it takes—oh, I don't know quite what the word is. It takes users of intelligence who are educated about intelligence and who know what is good intelligence and what isn't good intelligence and who ask for the right questions.
And the real question is—there is a second question. It is not simply how is our intelligence. It is what kind of questions is the policy community in the United States of America asking? Do they want to hear alternative scenarios? Do they want to hear alternative outcomes? Do they want to understand what the risks are?
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And that is terribly important. And unless there is good connection between policymakers, decision makers, users of the intelligence, and the intelligence community, as Dr. Garwin says, it isn't a self-improving process unless there is that interaction. If there is a disconnect, they go off one way and the other goes off the other way.
Mr. SISISKY. How does it fit within the budget is I am afraid how a lot of it happens.
Mr. RUMSFELD. Dr. Graham, you had a quick comment.
Dr. GRAHAM. I would like to add that while many of these comments seem critical of at least the output of the intelligence community, I believe the commission is unanimous in its view that the Director of Central Intelligence, George Tenet, lent his full support to the effort of this commission and put the full resource of the intelligence community at our disposal in a way I found very impressive.
And in his letter of response to the Congress, I also find the strong indication on his part of an intention to continue to make progress with the intelligence community to address some of the shortcomings, difficulties, and problems that we have encountered in our commission's work.
So, while we are critical of some aspects of it, I also would like to lend full credit where it is due and certainly George Tenet and his colleagues deserve a lot of credit as well.
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Mr. RUMSFELD. Indeed, they have some initiatives under way which, as I mentioned, they believe will help move the community in this direction.
The CHAIRMAN. Mr. Saxton.
Mr. SAXTON. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Mr. Chairman, I would like to take a slightly different tack. Your questions and statements, Mr. Sisisky's questions and statements as well as Mr. Weldon's, have pointed up quite graphically, I believe, the concern that we share about the technologies and the capabilities of some of our adversaries or would be adversaries. Let me turn to a slightly different—take a slightly different tack, because regardless of what technologies one adversary or another may have, unless they are motivated to use them, we wouldn't necessarily have to be concerned.
As we evaluated the Cold War during and after the Cold War, we recognized that we had a policy of deterrence later called ''peace through strength.'' And we recognized that we had an adversary that we could deal with in that way. However, you have correctly pointed out, I believe, Mr. Rumsfeld, that today, in your words, we face a different world. And you pointed out three countries which I have found very intriguing, Iraq, North Korea and Iran. And I would like to make three observations, an observation about each of these countries' cultures, cultural ways of thinking to try to elicit your analysis of whether or not there may be a motivation to use the technologies that, in fact, you have already said and demonstrated that these countries have.
First, let me make an observation of mine about Iraq. When we came out of the Cold War about the same time we were getting ready to go to war with Iraq, I concluded that since all people on the globe are human beings that we have all probably kind of the same kind of motivations and that we all kind of thought in the same way. And when Saddam Hussein came down along the border of Kuwait with his troops, we sat here in this room being briefed by Secretary Cheney and I sat here thinking well, there is no way he'll come across the border because he must know that we have the capability to take care of that problem should it occur. And yet he came across the border.
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And then President Bush said if you don't get out of Kuwait, we will make you very sorry. And I thought oh, he will get out of Kuwait. But he didn't. And then finally President Bush said on January 15th if you are not out of Kuwait we are going to bomb your capital city and I thought he would get out. No way. And then finally, as we all know, it took a massive ground invasion for us to deal with the situation. He was willing to lose thousands of troops, a lot of equipment, suffer what to the West would seem a great embarrassment and he thought he won.
Now, with regard to North Korea, is there a motivation there? Well, as we know, the North Koreans are suffering a famine. We know that they live in a cloistered society. We know that they don't have—the people don't have, generally, radios or televisions or access to Western news. And Kim Jong Il knows full well something else, at least he believes he does in my opinion. That is that the Soviet Union suffered its fate, among other reasons, because they lost their focus on the West, and it sowed seeds of dissatisfaction within their society and within their military. And Kim Jong Il I believe believes they failed; that is, the Soviets failed because they took their sights off their target. And I don't believe Kim Jong Il wants to let Korea take its sight off its target, which is South Korea and, of course, our country.
Number 3—with regard to Iran and their mind-set, I have been involved in something that has opened my eyes about this part of the world and how different the mind-set is in dealing with something that happened to have its roots in New Jersey.
This is a picture of a former citizen of New Jersey; her name was Alisa Flatow. She was a student in Israel and one day she got on a bus to visit some friends in another part of the country, and this is what the bus ended up looking like. A terrorist-ladened car drove into the side of the bus. Alisa's family came to see me and told me the story and said that the United States statutes were not adequate for her family to sue the Islamic Republic of Iran, could we change the statute. And we did.
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Subsequently, in U.S. District Court here in Washington, DC, it was proven that the Iranians supported the group that killed Alisa through the terrorist activity. And so here we have a mind-set with regard to Iran that it is okay to kill Westerners, actually use apparently Iranian assets to do it.
In North Korea we have a situation where the technology exists and apparently the will exists to keep their target, the United States and South Korea. And with regard to Iraq, Saddam Hussein has showed us a different mind-set.
My question, I guess, is this. With the technology that exists, with the mind-set that appears to me to exist in the three countries that are identified as problems to us, how does this all mesh in? Is this as serious as it appears to me to be? Or have I overreacted to the combination of technology and a different mind-set?
Mr. RUMSFELD. Well, I think, Mr. Congressman, your point is an important one. It would be a serious mistake to conclude that the likely behavior of people such as those leading North Korea and Iran and Iraq is going to approximate those in the United States or Western Europe or even, during the Cold War, the Soviet Union.
Dr. Wolfowitz, just before he left, he had to take a flight to the West Coast, passed me a note that interestingly touches on this. But if you think about it, North Korea, as you said, has people starving, and yet they are every day demonstrating their appetite for nuclear weapons and weapons of mass destruction and ballistic missiles. They are actively trading and selling and developing and doing these things.
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Paul Wolfowitz's remark was that the likelihood of transfers of these capabilities is not a random probability. He points out properly that the Saudis received from the PRC an entire ballistic missile system.
Now, why? Well, they were concerned about Iran. Concerned about Iraq. The probability he writes of Libya getting something from Iran or Iran from China, for example, increases if there's a crisis between the U.S. and Libya or Iran or China. What makes it unlikely today is that neither Iran or China would want to take the risk. But in a crisis countries do take risks. And, indeed, if one thinks back, even the Cuban missile crisis was partly out of the context of the ongoing crisis over Berlin.
So I think your point is a very good one. It would certainly be a mistake to make assumptions that behavior patterns would be similar.
The CHAIRMAN. General Butler.
General BUTLER. If I could just add a word, Mr. Chairman. I was for many years of my life the Nation's foremost practitioner of deterrence. As the commander of the nuclear forces it was my stock in trade, and I have spent many years during and since that time reflecting on deterrence as the basis of our national security.
And what I concluded was this. It is an extraordinarily risky and uncertain construct. It was that for all of the years of the Cold War. And we know that now increasingly as our dialogue with the former Soviet Union is widened and we have access to archives and know more about what really transpired on both sides in acute crises like the Cuban missile crisis, for example.
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With respect to deterrence as we imagine that it might apply in our security relationships and strategic concepts regarding nations like Iran and Iraq and North Korea, I would say very simply to you, sir, that we must never lose sight of the fact that ultimately deterrence is in the eye of the beholder. We apply deterrence in the belief that we have great insight and understanding into the intentions and motivations of the Nation with whom we have this security dialogue and yet in every case that relationship is one that is characterized by almost total alienation and isolation and therefore is fraught with the prospect of misperception and misunderstanding.
Let me conclude by saying that I was director of strategic plans and policy for the United States Armed Forces in August of 1990. There was any amount of intelligence material available to suggest that Iraq was not only amassing its forces on the border of Kuwait, but was positioning them in such a way that they would be capable of making a lightning strike across the border to which we could make no reply. And yet the assessment of the intelligence community was that they were not going to attack, but this was simply a way of bringing pressure to bear on Kuwait.
So the final thought that I would leave you in this regard is that if you don't want to believe it, there is no body of evidence which cannot be ignored.
The CHAIRMAN. Thank you. Mr. Taylor.
Mr. TAYLOR. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Let me first remind those who heard my friend Mr. Weldon's rather impassioned plea on the administration's not doing enough that I would like to remind those people that this committee actually plussed up the administration's request, that our Senate counterparts on Armed Services plussed up the administration's request. But right here in Congress, the House appropriators and the Senate appropriators both cut the administration's request. I have read the Constitution of the United States. Article I, Section 8 is very clear. That is our job. If the President does not put enough money in, then we should fix it; not blame what ''should be'' on him. Let's do our job.
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Point number two, gentlemen, I do welcome what you have done for us. But I would like to ask you something that continues to haunt me in the back of my mind.
It is obviously very difficult to target a nuclear weapon. But as we know from the people who smuggle cocaine and heroin into this country, it is fairly easy to smuggle something into this country. It is obviously very expensive to acquire missile technology. It is apparently pretty cheap to smuggle things into this country. It is obviously very expensive to have the technology to put a missile on target with any degree of accuracy. But it is pretty cheap to drive a truck somewhere or a barge somewhere or a ship somewhere. And you have to have a great deal of know-how to have a long range, but again as we know from the situation with our drug problem, you can deliver something smuggled into this country anywhere in America and it is done on a daily basis.
My question would be does it make sense to continue to spend $50 billion, for which we could have built 10 additional aircraft carriers, 25 B–2s, 625 F–18–E and Fs, 2,500 M1/A1s, since there is not an unlimited amount of money you spend it here, you spend it there. You don't get all of these things you prioritize.
In your opinion, should we continue to—should we short other programs in order to put more money into ballistic missile defense knowing that we have a static budget? That the budget I voted against, because I felt like it didn't have enough money for defense, is, indeed, frozen for the next few years when it comes to defense?
So my question to you is knowing that a device can be smuggled into this country, that it is a heck of a lot more deniable to smuggle a device into this country than being able to track a missile, that it is cheaper, that it is easier, that it is more accurate, and you have got greater range. I appreciate everything that you told us, but given a limited defense budget, are you saying that we should short other programs to pull more money into missile defense? Are you saying that we are doing—that is the question. Should we short other programs because the budget that the majority voted for does not increase defense spending to give us any new dollars to come up with new programs?
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Mr. RUMSFELD. Well, Mr. Congressman, I would say this. That just as we did not spend time, invest time with respect to the allocation of resources in the intelligence community, nor did we do it with respect to the defense establishment. We are not recommending that anything be shorted or not shorted. We are not ignoring other threats.
As I mentioned in the outset of my remarks, other threats exist. Certainly terrorism, as I mentioned, was something that we were not asked to address, but it is a serious problem.
I would add, though, that ballistic missiles are attractive and they are attractive for several reasons. There are no defenses against them. They tend to arrive at their targets. Second, they are cheap. You say they are not cheap. They are cheap compared to armies.
Mr. TAYLOR. Compared to smuggling a device to its destination.
Mr. RUMSFELD. No question there are cheaper things than ballistic missiles. But ballistic missiles are cheap relative to trying to have an army or a navy or an air force that could deal with the United States. The reason these things are attractive is because regional powers don't want other countries diminishing their influence in the region. To the United States, to the extent we have interests in the world as we do, and to the extent we want to interest ourselves in other parts of the world, countries are going to try to find ways to stop it. One of those is terrorism.
Mr. TAYLOR. In the limited time that I have left, let me get one quick question in and I hope you will answer it. Is a rogue nation more likely or less likely to use a ballistic missile rather than smuggle a weapon of mass destruction into its intended target?
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Mr. RUMSFELD. I think that the short answer to that is that a country that wants to adversely affect the United States will conceivably interest themselves in both. It is not an accident that rogue countries are spending a lot of money and a lot of time and very high priority on these weapons that we are here to talk about.
Dr. Garwin just mentioned one that we haven't mentioned, and that is biological weapons. There is no question that they can be delivered in a variety of methods, including ballistic missiles, and they represent something that is serious.
I am from Chicago and someone told me the story about Al Capone once saying that you can get a lot more with a kind word and a gun than you can with a kind word alone. And some of the folks we are talking about here would have gotten along well with Al Capone, and they have that attitude.
The CHAIRMAN. Mrs. Fowler.
Mrs. FOWLER. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I want to thank Secretary Rumsfeld and the members of this commission for all the time and effort, the excellent work that they have done on this report, because I truly consider the report of your commission as really a critical warning to the American people, to the United States Congress, and hopefully to this administration, about the threat to the future of our national security.
And I hope that we can work with you on getting this information out to our public because, unfortunately, I think the American people right now are fairly complacent about the future of our national security and don't understand the risks that are there and hopefully you can assist us in educating the public to these risks and concerns so that then as we try to take some steps to meet these challenges, we will have some understanding and support around the country because I think the work you have done is very important.
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I would just like to make one comment on what Mr. Taylor was saying. I think the largest loss of life we had in Desert Storm was when Hussein shot a missile over to Saudi Arabia and hit a bunch of our troops. That was a missile that caused that loss of life.
I have two questions that I would like to ask you. One is what impact do you see that the liberalization of U.S. export controls has had on the proliferation of missile technologies to potential adversaries of the United States? And are you aware of any instances where U.S. technology that could help with missiles have been transferred to a second country that is an ally of ours, and then that second country has forwarded this technology on to a third country that is not a friendly country?
Mr. RUMSFELD. I think if Dr. Snyder, who is sitting back here, were at the table and at a microphone—he is the commission's expert on the subject. But there is no question that technologies have gone from a friendly country to unfriendly countries. They have gone from the United States directly to unfriendly countries and then to further unfriendly countries.
I mean, you think of supercomputers. The supercomputers go to Russia, they go to China. They go with a limitation on their use and of course they can be hooked up just like lease time for computers electronically, and we have rules, as I recall, that someone is supposed to go take a look every once in a while to see if it is there and how it is doing. And there aren't enough people to check everywhere and see how it is doing, let alone what happens at the end of the evening when it is hooked up into something else and begins running exercises on nuclear explosions.
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So, I mean, it is extensive. And there is no question that it is going to happen. I cannot say that if we had—let me put it this way. We are living in a relaxed world. We are living in a world where everyone travels all over the world, exchanges, students, and the idea that we can be isolated and not allow technology to be transferred I think needs to be carefully considered.
The fact is that a company—I mean I have been in the pharmaceutical business. We have a research center in France, we have one in the United States, we have one in the UK. How we allocated where the research was done was simply a matter of sitting in my office. This budget went up, that budget went down. And you can—it is that simple a decision in business today. To the extent someone says you can't sell this technology overseas, they just have a subsidiary in another country do it.
What we need to do is to recognize that we cannot stop, in my view, the reality that there is going to be enormous amounts of advanced technologies that are going to end up in the hands of human beings all across there globe. And what we have to do is arrange ourselves to live with those incrementally greater risks that will occur because of that. Because to the extent—this isn't part of our commission and I shouldn't be getting into it, but we are not here to talk about that. But I have given you at least a glimpse of Rumsfeld's view and I don't want to pretend they represent the views of everyone else on the commission.
Mrs. FOWLER. I think that I appreciate that, but this is an area that this committee has been looking into and has been concerned about how do we deal with it. So we would love to maybe talk with you later about it. Thank you.
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Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
The CHAIRMAN. Mr. Allen.
Mr. ALLEN. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I first of all want to commend this commission for what I regard as a major achievement. It seems to me that what you have been able to do is to take a look, fanatically, at the three countries that we have been talking about, North Korea, Iran and Iraq, to look at all of the intelligence information that is out there, and ask us, and ask those in this country and in other forums who have responsibility for this issue, to acknowledge that the time frames that we have been accepting are—need revision. And I think that is a very important achievement. It strikes me as one that has great support and I think that members of this committee respond to.
It is not clear to me, it is not so clear to me what the appropriate response would be to the information that you are providing us. It is not at all clear to me that we should—that the appropriate response is to construct as soon as possible a national missile defense system, and I know that is not what you are saying. That is not in your report, that wasn't within the scope of your undertaking.
But I do want to make a couple of points in reaction to some comments General Butler had and a couple of points made before. I thought that General Butler's comments about the need to assess all of the different threats that are out there, I tend to believe that a weapon of mass destruction is more likely to be delivered in this country by a panel truck than by an intercontinental ballistic missile, but that is just a judgment. There is no way to deal with it. It simply means that we have to deal with the threats that you are describing and we have to deal with the threats of terrorism as best we can.
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I also thought that when you think about these three countries, it is entirely appropriate to say they are not the Soviet Union. We cannot have the same kind of confidence in them that we had in the Soviet Union. On the other hand, the possibility of misperception related to an invasion of Kuwait or a misperception of a U.S. response to a terrorist incident somewhere in the world seems to me is not that likely to be made when the issue is the delivery of a weapon of mass destruction to the continental United States. It seems—or the United States or any territory thereof.
It seems to me that any country that undertook to take or threaten that step would understand a policy of deterrence that that would be the elimination, that that would be the end of that particular regime.
But the question I want to pose to you is this. General Welch was a member of your panel. He also was a chair of the panel on risk reduction and ballistic missile defense, and that panel blamed the high levels of risk in some ballistic missile defense programs on, ''the perceived urgency of the need for these systems.''
And he recommended that we pay attention to the technology and not, in his words, rush to failure with programs that were being pushed for political reasons faster than the technology would allow.
If and when this country ever deploys a national missile defense system, isn't it important that the American people, and all of us, have confidence that it will work? That it will, in fact, be a system that works and not—and that we don't go down a road of giving the American people a false sense of security with a defensive system that is both untested and unreliable?
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Mr. RUMSFELD. Mr. Congressman, those are thoughtful comments and thoughtful questions. And as I have indicated, we really have not gotten into the subject of the response to this. It is a broad question. I personally think it is a very serious question. And it was not in our charter and we did not do it and we don't have any kind of background of having discussed it to the point where we could say we have given a considered view to it. We all have individual opinions. I have written subjects, Bill Graham has been a very vigorous spokesman on this subject. And you have mentioned General Welch's report. But I really think it is beyond our scope.
Mr. ALLEN. Mr. Rumsfeld, I really wasn't asking for a comment on a particular ballistic missile defense program or on, you know, whether or not we should have a national missile defense system and if so, when. But in terms of the general principle, whether whatever we have worked to do the job that we want it to.
Mr. RUMSFELD. The short answer in my view obviously if you spend money on something you want it to work. But my personal view is that we and other countries have often benefited from deploying things and getting familiar with them, exercising them, using them, thinking about them, improving them, and nothing arrives full-blown perfect that I know of.
Dr. GRAHAM. Just on your point about the terrorist threat, I think we all agreed that the terrorist threat is a serious threat to the U.S., our friends and allies today. However, I believe the commission also would think it would be an error to diminish the ballistic missile threat in view of the terrorist threat. In fact, we commissioned a number of white papers. One of them was on just this point and without trying to summarize it all, I would say that ballistic missiles first provide an apparent capability of a country which is in some ways asymmetric. And while a country may not have a military that can overwhelm the U.S. by conventional force they can nonetheless threaten our civilian population in a major way. And in a very visible and known way that would have to be taken into account by the U.S. were there any crisis to occur.
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You mentioned that it might be the end of the country if they did so, but I will remind you that during the Taiwan Straits crisis of 1996, when the mainland Chinese were trying to intimidate the Taiwanese in view of their presidential election, a senior military and government official of mainland China made a statement in the U.S. concerning the willingness—questioning the willingness of the U.S. to trade Los Angeles for Taipei. That is about as close as you can come to threatening the U.S. in a peacetime situation. It has happened and it is probably going to happen again.
Two more points, ballistic missiles don't have to go through customs, they don't get pulled over by the police. They don't defect. And they are very apparent before they are launched. They have characteristics different from terrorist threats.
And second, there is no question that there is massive evidence showing countries, including Iran, Iraq, North Korea and others, are engaged in very large scale programs today to continue to develop and extend the capabilities of their ballistic missiles.
Mr. RUMSFELD. Mr. Chairman, General Butler has to catch a plane and go back to his paying job after 6 months in his nonpaying job, so I hope you will excuse his departure. It is not anything other than a schedule.
The CHAIRMAN. Thank you again, General. Thank you very much.
Mr. ALLEN. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
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Mr. RUMSFELD. Could I ask that Dr. Garwin step up to the table in case we get some tough technical questions? He is the expert.
The CHAIRMAN. Mr. Thornberry.
Mr. THORNBERRY. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I don't think they are tough technical questions but they are questions that concern our ability to detect and deal with changing threats. And let me say first of all I very much appreciate, Mr. Secretary, you and the other members of the commission and the work that you have put into this.
I think it is kind of an interesting and in some ways concerning fact that we increasingly are relying on outside independent commissions to look at and evaluate some of the most serious national security issues that we face. And I don't know all the implications of that. But I do see it happening.
A number of us in 1997 were concerned about the national intelligence estimate because we believed that there were political considerations which were going into it. They may have been overt. They may have been more subtle. But there is a concern that to whatever extent you put blinders because of a political view on an intelligence effort, then obviously you are skewing the outcome.
There is also a concern I have heard expressed, for example, that certain folks in the Pentagon who may stand to lose budget authority if you emphasize one threat and diminish another threat also have a stake in the outcome. And so you get these political, bureaucratic kinds of considerations and that limits our ability to really evaluate what is going on.
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Add that internal limitation to the technology transfer to the limits, or the eroding capability you say, on our ability to figure out what is going on in other places and I noted in the paper today in addition to the example you gave, Dr. Graham, of the No Dong missile. In the paper this morning it says North Korea may have a whole lot more plutonium than we thought they had. It continues to escalate. You add those considerations to our eroding capability to figure out what is going on, on top of what you describe, Mr. Secretary, as a changing world, a changed world. But I guess my key point is it is changing every day. We can study and analyze and talk about how it is different today than it was a year ago or 5 years ago, but it continues to change and the rate of change is even more rapid.
You have an appendix in your report dealing with—in a modest way in the revolution in military affairs that discusses some of the changing technologies that is only going to increase, and all of that is a background for my concern which I would appreciate any comments you have on, my concern on our ability to detect and evaluate and respond to changing threats.
This missile proliferation issue that you all have dealt with is one example. It is a very serious example, but there are lots of other things that are out there. Next year it may be antisatellite technology or it may be a host of other things. And because of your background in policy-making and at high levels in the government, what has some experience taught you about our ability to detect and evaluate and respond to threats which are changing daily?
Mr. RUMSFELD. Well, it is an important set of questions. Let me answer briefly in four or five different ways. First, a short answer on capability. Our observation has been that the technical capabilities in the intelligence community have declined. That is an area that needs to be strengthened.
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Second, I would agree completely that it is a moving target. There is no question about it. That is the challenge for the intelligence community. It was certainly our challenge. It changed during the time we were addressing it.
Third, with respect to outside groups, I believe that it is useful, as you point out, in the Pentagon different program people have stakes in different outcomes. And when you bring in a group of outsiders who don't have any dog in that race, they are simply there because they want to do the best job for the country and don't have any jurisdictional hangups. They don't have any departmental positions to represent.
I think even though it is disturbing that government can't function perfectly without having outside groups come in, I think there are certainly times—and I did it in business and I did it in government—and I think there are right times for people to come in who are in a sense disinterested but knowledgeable.
One of the things you mentioned has to do with this problem of information that isn't quite right. You recall President Clinton, I think, properly indicated to the country that there was a circumstance going on because of sanctions legislation that caused, he used the word fudging, meaning that the automatic sanctions that were facing him was causing not only the President, but senior policymakers to ''fudge'' about what was happening in terms of the things that would trigger sanctions.
Now, if you end up having the President say that, senior policymakers do it, you end up corrupting the process, because down the line people know that they don't want to send up reports to their bosses, their superiors, that are going to put them in uncomfortable positions and cause them to do things, have things done to the country that they think are adverse to the country. It would be like if you are in a trial and the judge said that the penalty for traffic violations is death, no one would ever be convicted of a traffic violation.
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So to the extent there is that problem, we ought to be a little sensitive about the damage it can do if it starts going down the line through an intelligence community. We need the truth. We need facts. We don't need people casting the issue so narrowly with a whole bunch of assumptions that are unrealistic so that the outcome is considered acceptable or satisfactory up the line.
I don't know, possibly, Dr. Garwin, you would want to comment on the technical part.
Dr. GARWIN. I think there is a general tendency to recognize no problem before its time, that is, to—unless we are secure we are not happy, so let's not find out there is a threat until we have a ready-made solution. So what we are trying to do here is present our views, our assessment, and then you should read it, you should test its credibility, as you have been, by asking how it differs from previous assessments and why.
And then we all have to get together. It is your job to ask how you counter this threat, if possible, and the other threats in context. So first we would like to get our hearing, and thank you very much for this opportunity, then we would like to get more grilling and confrontation, and then individually we would be glad to help, I am sure, in the response.
The CHAIRMAN. Ms. Harman.
Ms. HARMAN. Thank you, Mr. Chairman, and thank you for your leadership in setting about to create this commission, which I think has generated some very important information for us to consider. When Mr. Weldon was talking about bipartisan cooperation on this committee on this issue, he was looking at me, I believe, and I have certainly been one who over 6 years has been for buffing up our ballistic missile defense accounts and for doing whatever we can to anticipate and deal effectively with the missile threat. So I am very responsive to what you have to say.
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But I think doing something about it is what the problem is. Recognizing the threat, I think you have confirmed what many of us have suspected over time, but doing something about it is the problem.
Mr. Taylor talked about budget constraints; if you do this, then you can't do something else, assuming the fact that our military budget is not likely to grow, and I assume that fact. Mr. Thornberry and Mr. Allen were talking about technology constraints. It is certainly true or I believe it is certainly true that if we lock in now to existing technology, we may squander the opportunity to use better technology. That is part of the thinking behind the three plus three option, is that we will have better technology in three years. It is not that we want to move slower, but we want to take advantage of better technology which would lead to better protection.
So I think that both in terms of budget and technology issues, there are constraints. But there is an additional point, and I think the Pentagon is guilty of it and I think we on this committee and on other committees of jurisdiction are guilty of it, and it is, you know, the pet rock constraint. We all have some number of pet rocks in our districts. Most of us sought membership on committees like this, because we have districts that have a lot of defense activity.
I certainly have one. I call it the aerospace center of the universe in Los Angeles, where LAX is and most of the major defense companies are, and while we see the big picture, or I hope we do, we also then worry about, as every company in our district, as every constituent interest gets sufficient attention from this committee, and that is why every year at the annual markups we have member adds that are requested.
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And so we get into that and then perhaps we forget again about the bigger picture. My question is—and, Mr. Rumsfeld, I think you are the perfect person to answer this because of all of your experience—how do we help the Pentagon and the Congress get over the pet rock problem so that we can act on the big picture, the big picture for tomorrow, not the big picture for yesterday or for the day we were elected or for—pick something else? How do we do that institutionally; how do we change these institutions enough so that the right problems get the right answers?
Mr. RUMSFELD. Well, that is a big one. That is a big one. I am a free market person, and I believe in incentives and disincentives. And I suppose the first thing that leaps into my mind when you say that is that to the extent a department of government or elements of a department of government behaves in a way that is obviously parochial, that is narrow and is unwilling to look at the breadth of problems facing our country, but only those that are facing the Navy or the Army or the Air Force, or to the extent members of the United States Congress, who have a responsibility to be interested in their own districts and their own states, that is important that they are there as the human link with the Federal Government to provide that connection.
But to the extent they do it to the exclusion of rationality and the best interests of our country, obviously, the American people are the only correction there. There need to be disincentives there, the voters have to say that is what we want. But in the case of the Congress, I think it is not as much of a problem because no one said every single Congressman or Senator was going to come down and necessarily vote the interests of the entire country every minute. They are going to come down and vote the interests of their district and the ultimate product will be in the interest of the entire country.
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In the case of the executive branch I think you have people—have to hold their feet to the fire. I mean you cannot allow elements of a department or a department to be—or a White House or an Office of Management and Budget to behave in ways that create imbalances in the needs of this country, and that is a fundamental task of this institution to help do that. And of course the best corrective is public exposure. When we see egregious examples of Department of Defense doing things or a President or OMB or whatever, I think we have to point a finger at it and talk about it and that is the corrective. That is an imperfect answer. But no one ever said democracy was perfect.
Ms. HARMAN. That is true.
Does anyone else have anything to add to that? I welcome additional answers. Yes?
Dr. GRAHAM. I would.
Ms. HARMAN. Dr. Graham.
Dr. GRAHAM. I would add that I believe the more consistently and coherently we can as a Nation perceive the potential threats to our future, the better the opportunity we have to act in a consistent and coherent fashion on those threats. I think there were few discussions during World War II, when our very existence was immediately threatened, as to whether something would be done in one district or another.
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Everyone was trying to do everything he and she could around the clock. As we go back into perceiving various levels of peace and prosperity, we sometimes lose focus on the fact that, as Chairman Spence said, it is still a dangerous world. And without causing excessive concern, nonetheless having a clear and rational view of the threats that remain and in some cases are growing in the world, I believe will hope focus the debate and in the final analysis allow the United States to make the right decision.
Ms. HARMAN. Well, I see my time up. But just as a one-sentence response, I note with some amusement that some have said we need to reinvent the Cold War to get us to focus, but it is very troubling that we can't seem to get to the next phase in funding a defense budget to give us the flexibility and the foresight to meet future threats.
And I would just note finally that I read with interest that the British have substantially revised their defense budget recently, they have reduced it. They are funding a much more flexible response. And it occurred to me that they may be actually improving their defense capability by spending less money. And I just suggest that with irony, because we may be spending a lot of money the wrong way and funding a worse defense for more money.
Thank you very much.
The CHAIRMAN. Mr. Abercrombie.
Mr. ABERCROMBIE. Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman.
Mr. Rumsfeld, you are in an unenviable position today, because you, despite your protestations that your charge was limited, and I agree that it was. In fact, I think it can be simply stated for those who may be tuning into our hearings and members who may be watching the hearings and not familiar with it, your charge essentially is assess the nature and magnitude of the existing and emerging ballistic missile threats to the United States. And that is it. It is not to be responsible for Wall Street Journal editorial commentaries on the President's response over the past decade, and so on and so forth, right?
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That in essence is what is in front of us here. What is the emerging and existing ballistic missile threat to the United States? Is that a fair premise from which we can continue this little dialogue?
Mr. RUMSFELD. You are exactly right. We have assessed the threat and the report is before you, and we have not assessed responses.
Mr. ABERCROMBIE. So we can't come knocking on your door afterwards for every pundit that gets ahold of this thing and twists it and turns it how he or she will.
Mr. RUMSFELD. Well, I don't think there is a member of the Commission who doesn't have some opinions on that subject.
Mr. ABERCROMBIE. There we go. That is fine. And that includes Members of Congress, too?
Mr. RUMSFELD. You bet.
Mr. ABERCROMBIE. They are going to do whatever they want with this. So it behooves the seriousness of your effort and the motivation of this committee then to try to see where can we go as a result of this analysis. And I would like to concentrate just a moment or two, then, on some of the situations which I think you have summarized for us extremely well. And if I can refer you to your own table of contents, and simply point to these titles on the new—under the section D, I think this is the most important part for us.
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Section D is a new nonproliferation environment and you mentioned several concerns. The U.S. is contributor to proliferation, readier market access to technology, and availability of classified information and export control technology.
Mr. Rumsfeld, a particular concern of mine and this committee has been the question of transfer of technology, the question of whether or not we, sometimes by design, certainly sometimes by default, are contributing to our own difficulties through the transfer of technology, et cetera.
My question is, then, did you, because I have not had sufficient time to go over the report since it arrived yesterday—did your commission examine and assess in the context of existing and potential threats such items as transfer of technology, et cetera, and its role and relation to what the potential threat is to us?
Mr. RUMSFELD. We did. And you will find in both the unclassified and the classified version a great deal of material about the nature of the problem and the magnitude of the problem. For those of us who have been away from it for some period and come back and looked at it again, it is amazing and shocking.
Mr. ABERCROMBIE. It is sobering, is it not?
Mr. RUMSFELD. It is indeed sobering. And I don't know that we can expect to live in a world where it is not going to happen; that is to say, I believe it is happening. And it will happen and having—I don't know, what—I saw in the press the other day that we have sanctions on I don't know how many countries for transferring things and we probably issued more demarches to other countries about their transferring of technologies than all the rest of the nations of the world combined. But the fact is it goes on and on, and I think that is the nature of the world we are living in.
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Mr. ABERCROMBIE. If that is the case, then, at least until we can solve the problems of whether or not sheer expenditure of dollars is going to get us anywhere in actually providing a missile defense, whether it is a national or otherwise, beyond rhetorical, we can, in fact, or would it be fair to say that your commission recommendations does address then the question of what we can do about transfer of technology in terms of policy?
That is something we can handle right at the moment without getting into theoretical discussions about whether or not our missile technology—our missile defense technology is up to the mark after all of these billions and billions and billions of dollars?
Mr. RUMSFELD. The report does in fact make some suggestions in this sense; it describes the nature of the world we are living in. It describes the proliferation of these capabilities, and it describes the magnitude of technology transfer, and by implication, given the effort to stop technology transfer, it suggests that we are living in a world where it very likely is going to occur. Therefore, our recommendation was that the United States Government very seriously sit down and review all of the policies and practices.
And I am talking about the—not just the intelligence community or the Pentagon, but the Department of State and the NSC and the White House, and determine what we need to do given the fact that we are living in that kind of a world, and that means that other countries that do not wish us well are going to have increasingly sophisticated technical capabilities, which means we need as a country to be arranged in a way that those risks are mitigated.
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Mr. ABERCROMBIE. Mr. Chairman, if you will indulge me a minute more to follow up on that. That leads me to the final point I would like to raise, Mr. Rumsfeld, and perhaps others may have a view. Under the erosion of warning section that you have, you comment, and I am just going to quote out of context, but I hope to address the point, precise forecasts of the growth in ballistic missile capabilities over the next two decades, tests by year, production rates, weapons deployed by year, et cetera, cannot be provided with confidence. Deception and denial efforts are intense, often successful, the U.S. collection and analysis assets are limited. Together they create a high risk of continued surprise.
Do you have suggestions in the overall report, including the classified portion, with respect to how we can better configure our intelligence gathering capacity precisely because of the enormous diversity of—and difficulty of actually assessing what is going on, where it is going, how quickly it will arrive? In other words, I don't want to get into an argument about is the intelligence community good, who was right, who was wrong, are you more right than the other contenders, if you will, for our attention. That doesn't seem to me to get us anywhere.
I would much rather concentrate here on figuring out where do we go from here in terms of making our intelligence gathering capacities better able to deal with the circumstances that you have outlined here.
Mr. RUMSFELD. We do have several places in our report where we discuss observations with respect to the intelligence community. We did not do an intensive study of the community, although you can't spend six months living with them and not come away with a few impressions. We have told the DCI and the Intelligence Committees in the House and the Senate that we have a draft paper that we are thinking about providing to the two Intelligence Committees and to the DCI and would be happy to provide one to this committee, if we eventually do in the next week or two manage to pull it together into something that we feel would make a constructive contribution.
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Mr. ABERCROMBIE. I think that might be, in fact, Mr. Chairman, one of the most valuable things that could come out of this, is not so much a grist for column mills in the newspaper, but rather a reassessment of precisely how we can aid and assist the intelligence community across the spectrum in—I won't say modernizing, that is probably the wrong word, but making as contemporary as possible our ability to be able to analyze effectively what it is before us so we in turn can make proper policy and dollar decisions here and in other committees throughout the Congress to address then the consequences of the Commission's report.
Mr. RUMSFELD. We don't want to submit it to anybody, including the DCI, until after we have had a chance to sit down with him, because he does have a number of initiatives under way. And we won't want to be critiquing something that was—he was already working on, if you will. So we are going to go through this exercise over the next week or two or three, we hope, and provide something that we hope will be useful.
Mr. ABERCROMBIE. Many thanks.
The CHAIRMAN. Thank you.
Mr. Snyder.
Mr. SNYDER. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
Thank you, Mr. Rumsfeld, and your group for your good work. I want to refer, if I can, just to maybe a couple of comments and you all can comment, if you would like. This Wall Street Journal piece that Mr. Abercrombie was referring to talks about your commission, is that evidence that—the fact we could have the, quote, first bombardment of American shores since Fort Sumter, and with apologies to Hawaii and Alaska that were bombarded in World War II.
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It seems historically what you all are talking about is kind of this myth that we have in America that our geography protects us, and even this comment about Fort Sumter. I represent Arkansas, but my birth state is Oregon. And in World War II, the Japanese had a submarine off the coast that shelled the coast of Oregon, they had balloons that they sent across that landed, it was actually some Oregonians on a Sunday school picnic, some children were killed, a Sunday school teacher, when they picked up one of these devices, and they launched a small plane from a submarine, and the intent was to fire bomb the forests of Oregon, to cause the workers to go out and fight fires, and they kind of fizzled out. And that was kind of over 50 years ago.
And we continued to live with this myth that somehow our geography protects it, and it seems to be what your report does is point out very dramatically that our geography no longer protects it.
My specific question is, did you look ahead, I know you concentrated in the short run in our intelligence community in what you see, but 25 or 30 years from now, and I plan to be around at that point, I mean did you all think about what is the potential number of countries that would have the technological capability of ballistic missile threat to the United States, not that they would develop it, but the capability?
Mr. RUMSFELD. Well, we did not sit down and do that, but there is no question there is more than 20 already. I have to be a little careful recalling what I want to say in an open session. But there are countries that are that big in the world and as primitive as any place on Earth that have been in negotiations for ballistic missile weapons.
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And I would only add that I—my father was in the Navy, World War II. For a brief moment we were in Seaside, Oregon and I used to go out in the morning and see the Coast Guard walking up and down the beach with German shepherd dogs when I was out looking for Japanese fishing floats in 1942 and 1943.
Dick Garwin had a comment.
Mr. GARWIN. If I might, and on the previous question by Mr. Abercrombie, it is going to get worse because technology advances, and some of this is just absolutely inevitable. I worked on nuclear weaponry with the Los Alamos National Laboratory since 1950, and I worked for 40 years for the IBM company, retiring in 1993. Now, the PC on your desktop has more computing capability than was used in designing any of the nuclear weapons in our inventory.
Mr. SNYDER. Part of technological advance is part of the ability to hide what you are doing; that is much better than it used to be.
Mr. GARWIN. That is true, too. It is not the high end supercomputers in fact which are causing us the problems; it is the commercial capability of desktop computing, and now millions of people know how to use it instead of the thousands who were employed in these programs. It is the obsolete equipment and the excess material that people don't care about, costs a lot of money to dispose of. Old rocket engines, you can sell them, especially if you sell the how-to-use, the know-how as well.
The excess nuclear materials that we have, the Russians have from dismantling nuclear weapons, not much value to us, the plutonium is actually costly to dispose of. Very difficult to keep it from flowing from Russia to these new markets where people are willing to pay a thousand times its original cost. And, finally, there are technologies like bomblet warheads for biological warfare agents that we deployed for chemicals and biologicals before we decided that was not in the interest of our security. That technology is very old, and these are fixed targets, fixed goals to make an ICBM, to make a ship launched ballistic missile. It only needs to do the same job that we could do in the 1950s or the 1960s. And when you have the communication tools, the desktop publishing, the fax machines, all of these things go a lot faster, it is only a fact. It is not, in most cases, anybody's fault, but we have got to recognize what can be a consequence of that.
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Mr. RUMSFELD. One of our commissioners, Paul Wolfowitz, had a way of pointing out if the end point is fixed and it is to have a ballistic missile with a weapon of mass destruction on the end of it that can reach people that you might want to target, and time passes, they are going to get closer to it. And as Dr. Garwin said, all of this technology flushes around the world and more and more countries have those capabilities, and that is where we are going. The end point is not moving.
Mr. SNYDER. Thank you, gentlemen. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
The CHAIRMAN. Thank you. We better break for this vote, and if you can stay with us just for a minute, we will be right back.
Mr. RUMSFELD. Yes, sir.
The CHAIRMAN. Thank you.
[Recess.]
The CHAIRMAN. The meeting will be in order.
Mr. Hunter.
Mr. HUNTER. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. And, Mr. Chairman, I want to thank you as our leader for putting together the legislation that brought about this very important commission on what I consider to be the most urgent issue facing those of us who are interested in national security. Of all the issues that we have, I think this is the primary issue simply because it goes to our primary vulnerability.
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Mr. Rumsfeld, I want to ask you the question that I always ask the Secretary of Defense and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs when they appear before us each time to lead, to open the session, and that is to simply, can we stop today a single intercontinental ballistic missile coming into an American city? Do we have the capability to stop it?
Mr. RUMSFELD. No, sir.
Mr. HUNTER. OK. That is the answer that they have given. You know, one thing that I am interested in is the—even though you can't talk about it now—what you think the response should be, although obviously you have probably thought about it as you have been spending these months with the intelligence community looking at the threat. You were asked to tell us about the threat, and you have become somewhat familiar with the threat, as Mr. Schneider and all the other members of the panel.
Having that background and understanding that the administration's strategy is three plus three; that is, that they feel that they can count on 3 years of warning before there is a missile strike in the United States. And at some point they are going to say the clock starts ticking, we think the 3 years of warning has started and we are going to take 3 years of building a defense.
Having seen what you have seen in terms of the evolution of the missile threat, do you think that the administration's position in counting on 3 years of warning is a prudent strategy?
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Mr. RUMSFELD. I would——
Mr. HUNTER. Your personal opinion.
Mr. RUMSFELD. Sure. Well, I would really like to give the Commission's opinion, because I can, because it is clearly something that we have addressed. And we did not put these words in here lightly or without some sense of what was going on in the world. And our conclusion was that we are in an environment of little or no warning, and that it is not possible to know when decisions are made and it is therefore not possible to conclude precisely that you are going to have any number of years of warning, because a decision can be made and you not know it.
And we believe that with a country with well-developed SCUD technology has the ability to move toward an ICBM capability within 5 years, assuming they have outside assistance, foreign assistance, which they do. Now, that is clearly an answer to your question. As Dr. Garwin or one of the commissioners mentioned, let me—before, Mr. Chairman, I apologize, Dr. Graham asked Dr. Schneider to join the table, since he had not been there, and Dr. Bill Schneider is an economist and former Under Secretary of State. And I should have mentioned that.
But to the extent a country does not need an ICBM to threaten the United States, obviously, that is to say through an air launch or a sea launch or one of the other alternative methods that I have described, a turnkey purchase or placing capabilities on someone else's real estate, you don't even talk about years. The transfer between China and Saudi Arabia happened overnight and we didn't know it.
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Mr. HUNTER. So you don't think betting the country's security on a conclusive presumption that will have 3 years warning time is a prudent strategy?
Mr. RUMSFELD. We have in our unanimous recommendation called on the executive branch and the Congress to review all of those things and adjust them as appropriate.
Mr. HUNTER. OK. Dr. Schneider.
Mr. SCHNEIDER. I would just like to add a footnote to that to underscore the reasons why it is not prudent to depend on a substantial amount of warning, which relates to the ease with which adversary states are encountering the ability to frustrate or deny our ability to monitor what they are doing. The economics of underground construction has changed fundamentally. That is contributing to it, being a cost effective solution to conceal missile development and weapons of mass destruction developments in underground facilities.
There are machines available today that will bore a hole of 50 feet in diameter and traverse 200 feet per day. So very large areas can be caverned out in mountains and a substantial underground construction can take place there that is not accessible by national technical means of verification or other means short of human intelligence. As a consequence, we note that the developments that are proceeding are very intense because of the amount of work that is going on.
The chairman mentioned the Iranians working 7 days a week through Islamic holidays. Similar levels of intensity are under way in Korea and elsewhere on—North Korea. All of this combined with the ability to conceal the activities makes it imprudent to expect that we will have warning before a country is ready to flight test.
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Mr. HUNTER. OK. Just one last question, Mr. Chairman, thank you for indulging me for a few extra seconds. You have mentioned that they are working furiously at this project. I think it is important for the American people to understand what you are talking about. People who are building ballistic missile systems and developing missile systems, period, whether they are fast missiles or slow missiles, appear to be doing it with great enthusiasm and with a sense of national urgency, is that what you are saying?
Mr. SCHNEIDER. That is correct.
Mr. HUNTER. Would you say, in your personal opinion, do you think that we should develop a response with a similar sense of urgency?
Mr. SCHNEIDER. Yes, that is my view.
Mr. HUNTER. Thank you. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
The CHAIRMAN. Ms. Sanchez.
Ms. SANCHEZ. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I want to begin by actually thanking Mr. Weldon, who is not here right now, but he has been discussing this issue obviously even before I even got to Congress, and I would echo Ms. Harman's concerns and comments about the fact that I am also from the southern California area, and obviously this is of importance to our economies and we have large manufacturers and employers who are working on missile defense.
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With that in mind, going back to something that Mr. Rumsfeld said with respect to it is really our constituents who make the final decision about whether we are paying enough attention to this, I would just acknowledge that the knowledge base needed to understand what is going on here is a significant one, in particular when we look at what is classified versus what is really put out there.
And so it really is dependent upon the members of this committee, as well as the Senate counterpart, to try to understand as much as we can what has gone on. So I applaud the efforts of this commission in coming out with some of the information that we do need. And I have not had a chance to read, not just the two volumes that were received this week, but the four that are, of course, classified. I look forward to that.
With that knowledge, would you please talk to me or let me know if those four volumes contain information with respect to a more broader sense and more detailed with respect to how other countries are hiding the technologies that are being employed and used?
Mr. RUMSFELD. There is a section on deception and denial. It has many elements. One is the one that Dr. Schneider mentioned before these dual use pieces of machinery can do tunneling and in countries like North Korea, and Iran and Russia and China and a great many of the countries that we have looked at, they have made extensive use of the underground construction, which enables them to do things such as development and storage and, indeed, even launching from underground hidden silo areas.
Another aspect of it is that the deception occurs because they are doing things when people can't see them do it, and they are doing it in bad weather, they are doing it at night, they are doing it at timing. We have had serious espionage in this country and there have been traitors to our country who have given away information about the timing and capabilities of our satellite surveillance, and that has been very damaging. And so there are a whole host of things that are being done.
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The reality is that we know some very interesting things. We also know that we don't know a lot. There is a lot we don't know, and because of their skills. I am trying to be careful about what I say here. I mean to the extent that advanced technologies become used, like fiberoptics, obviously, it changes the nature of what we are able to know.
Ms. SANCHEZ. I would agree with you, obviously, the more information we know and the easier access people have to it and the faster it is transferred. You know, the reason we don't have as much time as maybe we thought before is because in every industry you don't have as much time as you thought before about as far as the information that is available.
I guess with that in mind, I would ask—I would understand why other states might want to seek to buy these systems from countries, but what is the purpose? You know, what would be the incentive for some of these countries to sell some of the technology they have? In particular, what do you think is—are those technologies that they are willing to sell and what type of a lag time there is to the cutting edge technology that they are actually working on?
Mr. RUMSFELD. It varies from country to country. One reason is economic. Take a country like North Korea, they are selling things all over the world trying to market them, and they do it for money. Take China's assistance to Pakistan; I would characterize that as strategic. They have a long border with India, they have had trouble with India, it is attractive to them to have India uncomfortable on its western border.
Ms. SANCHEZ. But would you say that China would sell cutting edge technology to the Pakistanis or they would sell something that would lag in time?
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Mr. RUMSFELD. They not only would, they have.
Ms. SANCHEZ. OK.
Mr. RUMSFELD. There are other reasons. Countries might do it because they need strategic alliances with respect to oil. So in some cases it is multiple reasons.
Ms. SANCHEZ. If you would indulge me just one question, Mr. Chairman. The question for the panelist is, we have all asked a lot of questions here today, is there a question that you thought we should ask that we didn't, since I am—I think I am batting cleanup here on the committee, and if there is, would you ask that question and answer it, please?
Mr. RUMSFELD. Dr. Garwin, do you have a question you wish had been asked?
Mr. GARWIN. No, I don't.
Mr. RUMSFELD. Dr. Schneider.
Mr. SCHNEIDER. No, I commend the committee membership for the thoroughness of its questioning.
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Mr. RUMSFELD. I thought the questions have been excellent. The one thing I would like to emphasize is my opening comment and that is this: The fact that this report is unanimous is important. These people spent a lot of time and a lot of thought, and they came from very different backgrounds and very different views. And they have been driven by the facts to the conclusions in this report. And I think it ought to be received in that way as a serious bipartisan effort to present the facts.
Ms. SANCHEZ. Well, I think I began by saying that there are members who have obviously focused on this over the years. And we cannot just depend on our constituents to understand the situation thoroughly, because half the information is not available to them. So I think most of the members of this committee are concerned and do welcome the report and will take the opportunity to read in particular the classified documents on it.
I want to thank the commission, and I will yield back the balance of my time.
The CHAIRMAN. You have got a lot of balance of time left. Well, you really aren't wrapping up. Mr. Skelton wants to say a few words and I have a few closing comments, and I think Mr. Rumsfeld has to leave at 12:30. So we are going to have to close with that. Mr. Skelton.
Mr. SKELTON. First, Mr. Chairman, thank you for calling this hearing. It is not only timely, it is important. And, Mr. Rumsfeld, and all the members of your commission, we thank you for your efforts. We hear you, and we appreciate your comments.
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It seems there are, looking down the stream, there are two major questions that need to be answered. One is, when will we experience an event?
Mr. RUMSFELD. Pardon me.
Mr. SKELTON. When will we experience an event, and our friend Mr. Schneider pointed out that all the intelligence showed that sure enough, Iraq went all the way down to the border of Kuwait, but the experts said, no, nothing is going to happen. If you look back further in the history, hindsight being what it is, there were a lot of red flags as to imperial Japan taking some measures against us, and we, hindsight being what it is, we should have been more prepared at various places. The second is, the second question, were we prepared to meet the eventuality and that, of course, was our job?
Let me summarize for a moment what you have said, and I think it is very important that we understand your message to us and to the American people. Number 1, that you have accurately described the threat and, in a word, it is bothersome. Thank you for that effort.
Number 2, the time lines are shorter than predicted, and as you pointed out, we don't know when the time line begins because of the ability to conceal and the inability of intelligence to be thorough and accurate.
Third is that there is an erosion of the intelligence community and its ability to provide timely and accurate estimates. This, of course, can be corrected somewhat by either additional resources on the one hand or a redistribution of the resources we have on the other, as you pointed out earlier.
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The problem that we face is one of difficult choices among competing priorities within the resources that are available. And I feel very strongly, and I know that the chairman does, as well as many on this committee, the others in Congress, that the overall investment in national security is not enough, whether we are speaking about taking care of the troops or whether we speak about the potential threat of ballistic missiles. That of course remains a problem and a priority. Hopefully we can do something about that, but we can't do that today.
There is a need to develop broader consensus, not just within this committee, you have been very helpful in discussing this here, but developing a broader consensus within Congress overall on this issue, as well as in the entire issue of national security, so the Congress will speak with one voice. Though we are the world's great debating concern, we still find that we need to find that consensus for the days ahead.
So with that, I can't thank you enough for the important work that you have done. We hope that you will be available for questions, recommendations in the future, because we will seek them from you and the members of your panel.
Thanks.
Mr. RUMSFELD. Thank you very much, Mr. Skelton.
The CHAIRMAN. Thank you very much. And let me add my final words, too, if I might, Mr. Chairman. We certainly appreciate again what all of you have done. As I have said earlier, you have confirmed what many of us have been saying for a good while about the many and various threats we have facing this country. You haven't said that we are not properly defended, I will say that.
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And I think the only conclusion anyone can draw from what you have told us is that we are not properly defended. As a matter of fact, we aren't defended, period. It is not a matter of being properly defended. We don't have a defense against these things. And that is what we have a difficult time getting through to the American people and to our own administration. The most difficult job we have on this committee in carrying out our responsibility to properly defend this country is to get our own people to recognize that fact that needs to be defended and make the commitment to do it.
All we get back is all these words about three plus three, and we are working on something and we can deploy it, if necessary, in 2003, if necessary. It is necessary right now, this moment, and we are going to wait till 2003 or something to make a decision to decide whether it is necessary or not? What you have done is help us to prove that it is necessary right now. And that is our frustration, enduring frustration, that we have in trying to defend our people. And we appreciate your help in helping us to do that.
And so again, I thank you for what you have done, and what you will continue to do for this country. With that, we will adjourn the committee and let you get on back to doing what you have got to do.
Thank you.
Mr. RUMSFELD. Thank you, Mr. Chairman, gentlemen.
Mr. SCHNEIDER. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
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[Whereupon, at 12:33 p.m., the committee was adjourned.]
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QUESTIONS SUBMITTED BY MR. SPENCE
The CHAIRMAN. With respect to the Administration's ''3-plus-3'' national missile defense strategy, General Hugh Shelton, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, recently stated, ''Given the substantial intelligence resources being devoted to this issue, I am confident that we will have the three years' warning on which our strategy is based.'' Do you share this view? Why or why not? How does General Shelton's statement stand up in light of the recent nuclear tests by India and Pakistan and the intelligence community's failure to provide early warning of India's nuclear detonations?
Mr. RUMSFELD. The assessment given General Shelton did not, in the Commission's view, adequately account for outside assistance to nascent missile powers. The Commission has concluded unanimously that precise forecasts of the growth in ballistic missile capabilities over the next two decades cannot be provided with confidence. Deception and denial efforts are intense and often successful, and U.S. collection and analysis assets are limited. Foreign assistance to emerging ballistic missile powers is extensive. All these factors combined create a high risk of surprise.
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The CHAIRMAN. How urgent is the threat to the United States posed by Russian and Chinese ballistic missiles? Is it more or less of a threat to the United States that the prospect of long-range missiles being acquired by rogue regimes?
Mr. RUMSFELD. Russia and China maintain the capability to strike the United States with ballistic missiles. With regard to Russia, the principal cloud over the future is continuing political uncertainty. With the Cold War ended, the likelihood of a deliberate missile attack on the U.S. from Russia has been greatly lessened but not entirely eliminated. China's future also is clouded by a range of uncertainties. Although the U.S. and China are developing a more cooperative relationship, there is still potential for conflict.
The newer ballistic missile-equipped nations' capabilities will not match those of U.S. or Russian systems in numbers, accuracy or reliability. However, they would have the capability to inflict major destruction on the U.S. within about five years of a decision to acquire such a capability, and within 10 years in the case of Iraq. During several of those years, the U.S. might not be aware that such a decision had been made.
The Commission was not charged with ranking the seriousness of prospective threats posed by Russia and China on one hand, and the developing arsenals or North Korea, Iran, and Iraq, on the other. A nuclear or biological weapon, regardless of its source, landing on U.S. territory would cause destruction of major proportions.
The CHAIRMAN. What role have Russia and China played in the proliferation of ballistic missiles and technologies to other states? What level, if any, of official involvement do you believe exists in the transfer of ballistic missile technologies from Russia or China?
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Mr. RUMSFELD. Russia is a major exporter of enabling technologies, including ballistic missile technologies, to countries hostile to the United States. In particular, Russian assistance has greatly accelerated Iran's ballistic missile program. China is also a significant proliferator of ballistic missiles, weapons of mass destruction and enabling technologies. It has carried out extensive transfers to Iran's solid-fueled ballistic missile program. It has supplied Pakistan with a design for a nuclear weapon and additional nuclear weapons assistance. It has even transferred complete ballistic missile systems to Saudi Arabia (the 3,100-km-range CSS–2) and Pakistan (the 350-km-range M–11).
The behavior thus far of Russia and China makes it appear unlikely, albeit for different reasons—strategic, political, economic or some combination of all three—that either nation will soon effectively reduce its country's sizable transfer of critical technologies, experts or expertise to the emerging ballistic missile powers.
The CHAIRMAN. How accurate and reliable have the intelligence community's assessments of the ballistic missile threat the United States been? Is their methodology sound? Have there been shortfalls in analysis? If so, please identify these shortfalls, explain why they have occurred, and suggest solutions.
Mr. RUMSFELD. The threat to the U.S. posed by emerging ballistic missile capabilities is broader, more mature and evolving more rapidly than has been reported in estimates and reports by the Intelligence Community.
The Intelligence Community's ability to provide timely and accurate estimates of ballistic missile threats to the U.S. is eroding. This erosion has roots both within and beyond the intelligence process itself. The Community's capabilities in this area need to be strengthened in terms of both resources and methodology.
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The CHAIRMAN. Can arms control regimes be effective tools for preventing the proliferation of ballistic missiles to third countries? How effective have the Missile Technology Control Regime and other arms control regimes been in preventing proliferation?
Mr. RUMSFELD. The Commission was not charged with evaluating the effectiveness of arms control regimes in preventing the proliferation of ballistic missiles to third countries, but it is clear that an increasing number of nations are moving closer to their goal of possessing ballistic missiles and weapons of mass destruction.
The CHAIRMAN. Can technologies incorporated in shorter-range ballistic missiles, such as the Scud missiles used during the Gulf War, be upgraded or modified to assist the development of a long-range ballistic missile capability?
Mr. RUMSFELD. With the external help now available, a nation with a well-developed, Scud-based ballistic missile infrastructure would be able to achieve first flight of a long-range missile, up to and including intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) range, definable as a range of 5,500 km or greater, within about five years of deciding to do so, and it is unlikely that the United States would know when such a decision had been made.
The CHAIRMAN. Is it easier or harder for nations to conceal their ballistic missile development activities than it was in the past? Why? Should the United States expect more aggressive efforts on the part of other states to conceal such activities or not? What are the implications for the United States?
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Mr. RUMSFELD. Concealment, denial and deception efforts by key target countries are intended to delay the discovery of strategically significant activities until well after they had been carried out successfully. The fact that some of these secret activities are discovered over time is to the credit of the U.S. Intelligence Community. However, the fact that there are delays in discovery of those activities provides a sharp warning that a great deal of activity goes undetected.
The Intelligence Community's ability to provide timely and accurate estimates of ballistic missile threats to the U.S. is eroding. This erosion has roots both within and beyond the intelligence process itself. The Community's capabilities in this area needs to be strengthened in terms of both resources and methodology.
The CHAIRMAN. What impact, if any, has the liberalization of U.S. export controls on dual-use technology had on the ability of foreign states to develop or acquire ballistic missiles or the technologies needed to produce ballistic missiles?
Mr. RUMSFELD. Expanding world trade and the explosion in information technology have accelerated the global diffusion of scientific, technical and industrial information. The channels—both public and private, legal and illegal—through which technology, components and individual technicians can be moved among nations have increased greatly.
Trends in the commercial sector of a market-driven, global economy have been accompanied, and in many ways accelerated, by an increased availability of classified information as a result of the relaxation and lax enforcement of U.S. and Western export controls; growth in dual-use technologies; economic incentives to sell ballistic missile components and systems; extensive declassification of materials related to ballistic missiles and weapons of mass destruction; continued, intense espionage facilitated by security measures increasingly inadequate for the new environment; and extensive disclosure of classified information, including information compromising intelligence sources and methods. Damaging information appears almost daily in the national and international media and on the Internet.
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The CHAIRMAN. Please offer your assessment of the ballistic missile threat posed to the United States that may emerge from evolving regional rivalries, such as those on the Indian subcontinent.
Mr. RUMSFELD. India and Pakistan are not hostile to the United States. The prospect of U.S. military confrontation with either seems at present to be slight. However, beyond the possibility of nuclear war on the subcontinent, their aggressive, competitive development of ballistic missiles and weapons of mass destruction poses three concerns in particular. First, it enables them to supply relevant technologies to other nations. Second, India and Pakistan may seek additional technical assistance through cooperation with their current major suppliers—India from Russia, Pakistan from North Korea and China—because of the threats they perceive from one another and because of India's anxieties about China, combined with their mounting international isolation. Third, their growing missile and WMD capabilities have direct effects on U.S. policies, both regional and global, and could significantly affect U.S. capability to play a stabilizing role in Asia.
The development of ballistic missile capabilities by regional powers such as India and Pakistan gives these powers the infrastructure and expertise to develop and produce, more rapidly than otherwise, systems capable of reaching the United States should these countries decide to do so.